chaotic halt. The couple that managed to get ahead of this tangle only made it a few dozen yards, before the sight of a police troop-carrier blocking the gate and a whole phalanx of TAU men, as well armed and armoured as the divisional lads and yet somehow looking more menacing, more military as they advanced down the dirt track, brought them to a halt. The next thing, doors were being yanked open and burly policemen dragging out the drivers and their passengers.
Lucy lowered her loudhailer as she entered the farmyard.
Arrests were being made on all sides. There was no serious violence, but there were struggles as brutish, swearing men were wrestled to the floor and clapped into cuffs. One was struck across the back of the knee with a baton to help him comply. The dogs would have been a problem, especially as several had got loose and were darting back and forth, but they were all still muzzled, and now, at Lucy’s direction, the RSPCA handlers came forward to take charge of them.
‘Prisoner transports move in,’ Lucy told her radio. ‘We’ve got a large number detained.’
One suspect, a younger guy with longish, fair hair, wearing what looked like a wolf-fur doublet, made a semi-successful break for it, shaking off a lone PC and racing onto the open ground of the pony paddock, veering towards Wellspring Lane – only to stop at the sight of several more police vans pulling up behind the troop-carriers. He didn’t know they were divisional vans coming to take prisoners, and, thinking they were yet more police reinforcements, slowed to a trudging halt before dropping to his knees and raising his hands, allowing the pursuing officers to take him into custody.
Lucy was still in the thick of the action, though it was mostly over. On all sides, cautions were being issued, and the responses, mainly f-words and other more imaginative profanities, being recorded on dictaphone as the jostling, cuffed men were frogmarched to the farm cottage wall and held there, each by his individual arresting officer, while others commenced searching them. One resisted more than the rest, kicking out and spitting, and was given a backhander across the mouth for his trouble. Lucy wasn’t worried. When the evidence was finally presented, she doubted there was a magistrate in the land who’d be swayed by farcical complaints about police brutality.
Quite a bit of that evidence was on display inside the barn itself, when she went in there. The centrepiece was a purpose-built pit, squarish in shape, about ten yards by ten, dug to a depth of five feet and lined with brick, with a steel ladder fixed in one corner and a camera mounted on a tripod overlooking it, alongside an upright chalkboard scribbled with betting information.
Two dogs still occupied the pit. One, an American pit bull, charged crazily back and forth, jumping up to snap and snarl at the officers, despite the excessive blood dabbling its jaws and jowls. The other one, whose breed was uncertain, lay in a quivering, panting heap, gashed and torn and spattered with gore.
‘We need one of the vets in here,’ Lucy said to a PC at her shoulder. ‘And a handler … to control the other one, yeah?’
The PC moved away, just as acting DC Tessa Payne, a young black officer, formerly in uniform but currently on secondment to Crowley CID as a trainee, leaned in through a doorway connecting to another outbuilding. Like Lucy, she only wore light body-armour over her jumper and jeans and was in the process of pulling off her protective gloves and replacing them with latex.
‘Lucy …’ she said. ‘You might want to look in here.’
‘This going to make me throw up?’ Lucy said.
‘More likely make you dance a jig.’
Lucy went through into what was a basically a lean-to shed lit by a single electric bulb, its damp walls lined with shelves groaning beneath the grisly accoutrements of dog-fighting. She saw piles of spare muzzles and harnesses, stacks of grubby second-hand magazines with grotesque images on their covers, homemade DVDs, DIY veterinary kits, including staple-guns and tubes of superglue, and a number of ‘breaking sticks’, thick wooden bars impressed with toothmarks, which would normally be used to pry open a victorious animal’s jaws when it had them locked into its latest victim.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Bloody perfect. All this needs bagging and tagging, Tessa.’
Payne nodded, at which point they were distracted by the sound of more canine whining. The outhouse had its own outer door – again just a frame with no actual door in it. On the other side they found an enclosed yard containing a set of weighing scales, a treadmill and a large glass tank, very grimy and filled to the brim with water so filthy and green that it was almost opaque. There was also a row of grillwork cages with crudely built kennels attached. Each was occupied by a dog, but these were animals of a different ilk to those they’d seen so far. They were highly subdued, lying still with ears flat, each one watching the humans beyond their cages with fearful intensity.
And it was clear why.
They were brutally scarred, in many cases so bitten and ragged that the fur was entirely missing from their faces. Several had lost so much flesh from their jowls that their teeth were exposed. At least a couple were missing an eye, the empty sockets crudely sutured shut. Lucy saw ears hanging in ribbons, paws chewed into lame, leathery stumps. The reason for that was evident in their breeds, for these were mostly mongrels, but those that weren’t were recognisable as Labradors, spaniels and retrievers, suburban pets rather than fighting-dogs.
‘Bait,’ Lucy observed as she walked along the cages.
‘Looks like this is where all the abductees we’ve been hearing about have finished up,’ Payne said, following.
‘Maybe.’
‘No sign of the black van yet, though.’
‘We need to keep looking.’
To Lucy’s mind, the existence of ‘bait dogs’ was one of the most sickening aspects of the whole dog-fighting disgrace. That these trusting, innocent creatures could be thrown into the pit repeatedly as part of a callous training regime for the fighting-dogs, where they’d be attacked mercilessly, again and again, by savage beasts that wanted nothing more than to senselessly kill anything they were faced with, didn’t bear thinking about. But that such a thing could happen to one-time pets, allegedly stolen from loving homes by this mysterious black van that had been reported several times when an animal had vanished, was somehow even more horrible.
‘We need the vets again,’ Lucy said, to which the younger detective nodded and hurried away.
‘At least you’re not going to need them in here,’ a voice said.
She glanced around, and saw Malcolm Peabody leaning out through the entrance to an ugly breezeblock building with no glass in its windows and a sagging tarpaper roof. He’d removed his ballistics helmet and now carried it under one arm. His hair was damp and spiky, his freckled features greased with sweat. Normally an affable young bloke with a great enthusiasm for the job, his expression was grim and angry, his pallor waxen.
Deeply apprehensive, Lucy followed him inside.
Torchlight revealed that it was a basic shell of a room with bare walls and a rugged concrete floor. It was also stained with the blood of ages and strewn with dog carcasses. There were at least ten of them, all relatively recent; Lucy could tell that because flies buzzed everywhere, and a fetid odour thickened the air. She surveyed the heap of twisted forms with what a stranger might have called indifference, but in truth was cold professionalism. It wasn’t that it didn’t affect her, it was simply that, twelve years in, Lucy was a veteran of this kind of ghastliness, and she knew that to get emotional would only cloud her judgement.
Peabody,
