'How could you let this happen?' 'I didn't let anything--' 'No? Well you managed to save your own--' 'I ate her mince, OK? That's why.' 'What?' Disgust pulled at Faulds' face. 'Whose mince? What the--' 'There is no Jimmy Souter - he doesn't exist. It's Elizabeth, it's always been Elizabeth. She fed those kids human flesh and they got to live.' Logan turned his back on the cameraman's dangling corpse. 'When she made lunch yesterday, I ate the mince ...' He pushed through the curtain and back into the butchery, feeling sick again. The third curtain - the one beside the chest freezers - was all roses and birdies, faded to a greasy, mottled gray. Logan took a handful and ripped it down. It was another tunnel, stretching away beyond the soulless light of another fluorescent strip. Less than six feet down, two sets of metal doors were sunk into the wall, as if someone had buried a pair of offshore containers. One blue, one red: the paintwork pockmarked with rust. Logan hauled the red doors open on groaning hinges. Definitely a container. The metal box was about the same size as Logan's bathroom, with a set of rusty bars running down the middle, empty except for a mattress, a duvet, a chemical toilet, and a set of pulleys bolted to the ceiling. The blue container was a different story - instead of the pulleys it had an A-frame made up of scaffolding poles. The floor was spattered with dark red droplets that glittered in the gloom. A pile of black clothes were thrown in the corner. The red container smelled of disinfectant, but this one stank of fear and blood. Jackie stepped carefully inside, her black shoes making sticky noises as she worked her way across the floor and picked up a chunk of fabric. 'It's a police uniform.' She went hunting through the trouser pockets, coming out with a small leather warrant card holder. She flipped it open and swore. Logan stood in the doorway. 'It's Munro, isn't it? She was a vegetarian ...' 'Fucking hell!' Jackie kicked the container wall - BOOM - the echo was swallowed by the dirt corridor. 'Fucking, bastarding hell!' Another kick. 'OK, OK. Enough.' He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out into the tunnel. 'How long did it take you to get here? When Alec called? Ten minutes? Fifteen?' 'Something like that. We had to break down the front door.' 'And you didn't see anyone leaving the house?' 'Of course we bloody didn't. Don't you think we would have said something?' Logan nodded, went back into the butchery and picked up his torch. Dead. He shook it a couple of times and a thin light flickered on. Good enough. If the Flesher didn't go out through the house there was only one way she could have gone. Logan lurched past the containers and on into the darkness.
