The Burning (12 page)

‘I’ve only seen two workers,’ Jenny said, ‘is that all it takes to man this place?’

Annie Preece shifted evasively from one foot to another. ‘Mostly. Depends what work’s on.’

Jenny nodded and left it at that. There was no need to state the obvious. It was plain to see why the boss was spending the afternoon with detectives in Gloucester: if anyone had had the
opportunity to get rid of a body without leaving a trace, it had been Ed Morgan.

‘How long had he worked here?’

‘About twelve years. Two or three shifts a week.’

‘That must be unusual. I imagine you have quite a high turnover in this kind of work.’

Annie Preece answered with another shrug.

‘Did he ever cause any problems?’

‘I never heard about it if he did.’ She seemed keen to bring their encounter to an end. ‘Is that it now? I’ve got a lot to do, with the boss away.’

Jenny turned to see the JCB returning with another load. Ignoring Annie Preece’s edgy glances, she stood and watched the grinding process a second time, wondering what it would do to the
mind of a man, let alone a sensitive one, seeing the remains of living animals reduced to pulp day after day, year after year.

‘It may sound a strange question,’ Jenny said, ‘but have any of your employees suffered mental health problems, or been in trouble with the police?’

Annie Preece turned to her with the dumb, mouth-slightly-open look of someone unexpectedly caught out.

‘You don’t have to answer now,’ Jenny said, heading back the way they had come. ‘If you’d prefer, I can call you as a witness to my inquest.’

‘No . . .’

‘Good. That makes it easier for both of us.’

F
ACED WITH THE PROSPECT OF
being called to give evidence, Annie Preece had found her tongue and come up with quite a list. She had worked at Fairmeadows
Farm for close to five years, and during that time could recall the names of at least half a dozen employees – all male; no women had ever worked on the floor – who had suffered from
depression, alcoholism or both. Of these, two had found their way into prison. One had been convicted of battering his girlfriend in a drunken rage, and the other had pleaded guilty to charges of
extortion, having moonlighted as a collector for a Bristol loan shark. Having blurted out this information, Preece then succumbed to a sudden attack of nervousness and tried to persuade Jenny that
the problems with their staff were nothing to do with the nature of the work – when men could earn the same wage driving a van or stacking shelves, you were left with only the dregs to choose
from.

Jenny had no reason to doubt what Annie Preece had said, but an instinct told her that it wouldn’t be safe to rely on her word alone. Following their conversation, Jenny sought out the
employee she had seen up on the gantry and found him outside the main building, smoking a cigarette. His name was Tomasz, a young Polish man, with soft blue eyes that didn’t seem to belong in
these ugly surroundings. Unlike Annie, on learning that he was talking to a coroner, he decided that the safest course was to cooperate from the outset. He told her that he had held his job for
nearly two years and had been working all the hours he could get in order to send money home to his young family in Krakow. Some of the English workers had a problem with his being Polish, but Ed
Morgan had always been a friend to him. Whenever they found themselves working the same shift, they would spend their break-times talking about football or their kids. Ed was crazy about his boy,
Robbie, Tomasz said, but he was also fond of the girls and mentioned them almost as much. He’d never known him angry – on the contrary, he had always seemed relaxed and content with
what life had dealt him.

When Jenny asked Tomasz about the other workers, he told her that he wasn’t the kind to ask prying questions. If people wanted to talk about themselves, that was their business, but on the
whole they didn’t. It was that kind of place. The one man he did mention was Don Stephens, the foreman of the abattoir and the boss’s brother-in-law. He had also gone to Gloucester with
the police earlier that afternoon. Stephens was the one who hired and fired those workers whose jobs involved getting their hands dirty. The office staff all reported to Mr Johns and didn’t
come downstairs if they could help it. Responding to a hunch that had been growing stronger since she arrived, Jenny asked Tomasz whether all his co-workers were employed legitimately – with
paperwork, and taxes deducted. It was the only question to which he refused to give a straight answer. Instead, he gave her a pointed look as he stamped out his cigarette and headed back to work.
She read it as meaning that there were two sides to Fairmeadows Farm: the one you could see, and the one you couldn’t.

Jenny kept an eye on her rear-view mirror as she left the rendering plant behind and turned towards Thornbury. Something in Tomasz’s look and Annie Preece’s prickly,
defensive demeanour had unsettled her. It had been more than just the natural caution of employees scared for their jobs; it was as if they had been in fear of something – or possibly someone
– in particular. She wondered if that person might not be Kenneth Johns, the boss; or perhaps Tomasz was dropping her a hint with his mention of Stephens, the foreman and Johns’s
brother-in-law. The family angle was interesting. A coroner only had to investigate a few deaths connected with family-run businesses to know how toxic they could become when personalities clashed.
She painted herself a picture of Kenneth Johns trying to manage an operation that would bear the scrutiny of officials and inspectors, while Stephens ran the shop floor according to a different set
of rules. It occurred to her that, in a business that was so highly regulated, temptations must present themselves to those prepared to turn a blind eye to the law. An outfit prepared to slaughter
unregistered stock or process unfit carcasses stood to make money, perhaps a lot of money. And as the man who fed the machines, Ed Morgan would surely have known more than most.

The phone rang just in time to stop her imagination running away with itself. The call was from Alison’s mobile number.

‘Would you believe the office phones are buggered? Ice shorting out the connections, or some bloody nonsense. There’s a man who’s been fixing them upstairs. He says he can come
and sort ours out first thing next week.’

‘You’re not still there?’ Jenny said with a hint of rebuke.

‘I’m fine. You don’t have to treat me like a cripple.’

‘It’s half past five on a Friday night before New Year. You’re released.’

‘CID turned up an address for Daniel Burden’s next of kin. A brother in Somerset. We think he might be away on holiday – he’s not answering his phones.’

‘Then leave him a message.’

‘I can’t relax with that hanging over me.’

‘Go home. Have a glass of wine. Forget about it.’

‘I’ve been at home for six months, Mrs Cooper. I’ve drunk France dry.’

‘You won’t mind if I have a weekend? On recent form, I might not see Michael again till Easter.’

‘There’s always DI Ryan. I’m sure he wouldn’t say no.’

‘Call me unadventurous, but one man at a time tends to be enough.’

‘The CCTV footage from the petrol stations,’ Alison said.

Getting used to her non sequiturs, Jenny went with her. ‘What about it?’

‘I phoned round. There are four sets of tapes to collect. I thought I’d start going through the footage over the weekend, to look for Morgan.’

‘Won’t Paul have something to say about that?’ Jenny could only wonder how Alison’s partner had coped with her dramatic change in personality.

‘It doesn’t take much to keep him sweet,’ Alison said suggestively. ‘Leave him to me.’

Jenny decided it was time to close the conversation down before she heard something she wished she hadn’t. ‘Don’t work too hard. See you Tuesday?’

‘Tuesday?’

‘Monday’s a bank holiday, remember – New Year.’

‘Oh.’ Alison sounded lost, as if what Jenny had said made no sense. ‘How did I forget that?’

‘I’d say you were doing pretty well.’

‘You mean not bad for an old bird with a plate in her head.’ She laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh Jenny recognized. It seemed to belong to someone else. ‘I’ll see you
on Tuesday then, Mrs Cooper. If I can remember who I am.’

Alison rang off, leaving Jenny with fresh doubts about the wisdom of letting her return to the office. Come to think of it, she wasn’t entirely sure how she had allowed it to come about.
But every time she thought about putting Alison through the ordeal of an official assessment that she was bound to fail, she was overwhelmed by guilt. This was the woman, after all, to whom she and
Ross owed their lives. It didn’t leave her with a lot of choice.

Jenny listened to the local radio news as she drove gingerly through the Wye Valley along roads coated with a skin of freshly formed ice. In an interview with an exaggeratedly
sombre reporter, the Assistant Chief Constable of Gloucestershire gave assurances that the search for Robbie Morgan wouldn’t cease until he or his body was found. Responding to the suggestion
that the police were also investigating whether Ed Morgan had been responsible for the disappearance of Susie Ashton ten years before, the Assistant Chief Constable insisted that there was no
evidence whatsoever to connect the two incidents. Jenny waited for the reporter to press him on Morgan’s connection with the abattoir, but the follow-up question never came and the announcer
moved seamlessly on to the next story.

The staged interview left Jenny with the impression that the police were working extremely hard to play down any connection with Fairmeadows Farm. In all probability, the Assistant Chief
Constable would only have agreed to go on air on condition that it wasn’t mentioned. It was possible that his force was motivated simply by a noble desire to prevent an outbreak of panic over
the possibility that human flesh had found its way onto supermarket shelves, but the more probable explanation was that they were trying not to scare off potential witnesses. It was obvious that
they were more than interested in Fairmeadows Farm, if for no other reason than that, if all other lines of inquiry failed, it provided the perfect explanation: Ed Morgan dumped Susie Ashton and
Robbie’s bodies in the plant’s industrial grinders, knowing they would never be traced.

The smell of cooking floated pleasantly through the air as Jenny picked her way up the path to the front door of Melin Bach: spaghetti carbonara, one of only three decent
dishes she had never known Michael cook. Still, it was three more than she was capable of. One of her ex-husband’s most often-repeated complaints had been that her lack of interest in cooking
for her family demonstrated a lack of love. No matter that at the time she was working fourteen-hour days trying to protect the county’s most troubled kids; devotion that wasn’t
channelled directly towards him didn’t count.

Jenny paused on the doorstep and tried to clear those unhappy memories from her mind. It had been seven years since she had finally found the courage to leave her marriage and strike out on her
own. David and his judgements on her failings as a wife and mother belonged to the distant past. It was her time now. Her opportunity to start again.

An unfamiliar and welcoming warmth enfolded her as she entered the hallway and hung up her coat. She unlatched the door to the sitting room and was greeted by a fire leaping in the grate.

Michael called through from the kitchen. ‘Don’t move. I’ll be right with you.’

She did as he asked, noticing that he’d tidied the room and opened out the leaved oak dining table she reserved for the rare occasions when Ross came to stay.

Moments later Michael appeared, dressed in a freshly pressed linen shirt (the one he had worn the first time they had met for a drink), carrying a bottle of champagne and two slender
glasses.

‘I thought the occasion demanded it.’

‘Aren’t we a day early for New Year’s Eve. Hi, by the way—’

‘Not that –
this
.’ He kissed her. ‘
Us
.’ He started to unwrap the foil from around the cork. ‘How was your day?’

‘OK, but I could do with jumping in the shower before starting on the champagne.’

‘Had to visit the morgue again?’

‘I’d rather forget about it.’ She turned to the door.

‘Oh, someone called Dr Hope rang.’

‘Did she leave a message?’

‘She said it could wait till morning. I told her it would have to.’

Jenny smiled. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You.’ Jenny took another sip of her champagne, savouring the last few inches in her glass. It hadn’t taken them long to empty the bottle.

‘What about me?’

‘You seem . . . happy.’

‘That’s so surprising?’

‘No. It’s nice.’ She reached out with her toes and brushed his leg beneath the table.

‘I could always give up flying and keep house for you.’

‘You’d love that.’

‘Maybe I would.’

‘For about three days. Then you’d take off and leave me again.’

‘Come on, Jenny,’ Michael said, ‘I’ve never left you.’

He seemed hurt, and Jenny felt sorry for wounding him.

‘I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t.’ She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘The spaghetti was delicious. Too nice. I could get used to
it.’

Michael was silent for a moment. His eyes dipped from her face to the table.

Jenny waited, sensing his effort to put feelings into words.

‘I missed you,’ he said quietly. ‘I always do when I’m away, but . . . oh God, now I’m sounding like an idiot.’

‘No. Tell me.’

The corners of his mouth curled in an awkward smile. ‘This time it became almost like a physical pain.’ Embarrassed, he started to pull back from the table. ‘I’ll make
some coffee.’

‘No you won’t.’ Jenny tightened her grip on his fingers. ‘Stay. You don’t have to feel ashamed every time you admit to having feelings. And don’t tell me I
sound like your therapist.’

‘Now you mention it . . .’

Jenny frowned in rebuke.