Primal Cut (9 page)

Dexter sprinted after Ray Garrod, uncertain of what she would do if she caught up with him.

Bartholomew Garrod watched in horror as his brother ran out onto Norlington Road, lumbering in his direction.

‘Bollamew! Bollamew!’ Ray shouted, unaware that his brother was hiding behind an old brown Ford Sierra only eighty yards ahead of him. He staggered on, lurching across the junction of Norlington and Albert Road. Dexter ran out onto the road. Bartholomew watched her running his brother down, powerless to act. A siren wailed somewhere ahead of him. Bartholomew knew that he would have to act; either intervene or run away. At that moment Ray ran out onto Morley Road and was hit by the source of the siren, the reserve squad car that Dexter had requested. Bartholomew watched in horror as his brother was thrown up into the air before crashing head first into the windscreen of the police vehicle. Ray didn’t move. Alison Dexter arrived at the scene a few seconds later. Bartholomew
could
hear her shouting ‘Call a fucking ambulance’ at the bemused driver of the police car.

Bartholomew wanted to rip her into pieces and chew on her gristle. He had to contain his fury, his agony. Blood roared into his head. He struggled desperately to remain calm. His tears stung. More policemen were running out onto the street. It was time to move on or risk capture. Unnoticed in the midst of the chaos, Bartholomew Garrod eventually turned his back on his dead brother and his family home. He walked hurriedly to Leyton Underground and took a Central Line train to Liverpool Street. An hour later he sat down in the smoking compartment of a train destined for Harwich.

Late that night, as Bartholomew Garrod unlocked the padlock to his family caravan near the North Sea coast, Scene of Crime Officers in Leyton found a stockpile of human remains secreted at the back of the Garrods’ refrigerator.

DI Mike Bevan drew up at the edge of the gypsy site. The two uniformed officers he had seconded from Underwood were parked out of sight a few hundred yards behind him. He hoped he would not need them. Bevan counted about twenty caravans.
Children played on an area of open grass next to the vehicles. He had decided to tackle Keith Gwynne on his own: in his experience, going mob-handed into pikey sites was a recipe for unnecessary grief.

As soon as he slammed his car door shut he was confronted by two shaven-headed men.

‘Wha’ d’ya want?’ one asked.

‘I’m from Cambridgeshire Council,’ Bevan replied. ‘I need to speak to someone called er…Keith Gwynne.’ He tried to appear vague; coppers were always aggressively specific.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Look, go and get him,’ said Bevan with a smile he hoped was disarming. ‘Tell him I’m from the council. It’s about the ponies he’s got tethered on the other side of Balehurst. There’s a council issue. It will save him money if he talks to me.’

One of the men turned and walked back into the site. As he disappeared from view, Bevan tried to be friendly with the figure barring his entry to the site. ‘So how many of you live on this site?’

‘If you’re from the council, you should know,’ came the reply.

‘They don’t tell us everything,’ Bevan observed.

‘They told you Gwynney lived here though.’

Bevan shrugged and said nothing: he’d been clumsy there. He was getting sloppy in his old age.
A minute later, Keith Gwynne emerged from a caravan and approached Bevan suspiciously.

‘Who the fuck are you then?’ Gwynne asked.

‘Mike Bevan from the council. I need to talk to you about your ponies.’

‘I sold them ponies last week.’

‘Why don’t we talk in private?’ Bevan replied as a group of youths began to gather, interested in the strange confrontation.

‘You’re a copper!’ Gwynne snorted. ‘Good fucking disguise!’

Bevan leaned forward and whispered menacingly in Gwynne’s ear, ‘Now you listen to me, dickhead. I’ve got a dead body on a railway line and I’ve got your fucking car number plate at a crime scene. I am trying to be delicate. I respect the sensibilities and privacy of your friends here. So here’s a deal for you. Come with me now or I’ll come back here with a squad and rip this shithole apart. Who knows what we’ll find. Your mate over there stinks of pot, for example.’

Gwynne took a step back, surprised and frightened. ‘Danny,’ he said eventually to the lad who had originally intercepted Bevan, ‘I can handle this. You and the boys take off now.’

Alone with his target at last, Bevan relaxed a little. ‘We need to have a serious chat Keith.’

‘You’re wasting your time. I’ve done nothing.’

‘Look, sonny. You are in deep shite. Be straight, be useful and you’ve got a chance. Otherwise you are looking at a stretch. We are going to drive down to New Bolden nick and you are going to sing like Maria Callas.’

‘If I don’t come?’

‘Accessory to murder, perverting the course of justice, resisting arrest, violation of the Dangerous Dogs Act – I’m guessing eight, maybe nine years.’

‘That’s bollocks. I didn’t murder anyone.’

‘Get in the car.’

Alison Dexter was too agitated to sit down. Instead, she stood staring out of the window of John Underwood’s office at the square scrap of grass that constituted his horizon.

‘Tell me what you know about this Woollard character,’ she asked Underwood after he had briefly explained the circumstances surrounding the death of Lefty Shaw.

‘He’s a farmer. Wealthy. Mike Bevan has been watching him for weeks. He suspects that Woollard is importing and fighting illegal breeds of dog: pit bulls, that kind of thing. Bevan photographed some faces coming out of Woollard’s a couple of weeks
ago. He suspects they were paying customers for a dog fight.’

‘What about bare knuckle fighting?’ Dexter asked.

‘No idea.’ Underwood considered the notion. ‘Although given the nature of Shaw’s injuries it’s plausible I suppose. Very smart of you. What made you think of that?’

Dexter turned to face him. ‘The bite wound.’

‘What about it?’

‘Remind you of anything?’

‘No.’ Underwood hesitated; something about the wound had unsettled him. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘I’ve asked Leach to run a full DNA profile on the saliva sample.’

Underwood caught an edge in Dexter’s voice. ‘Do you know who did this?’

‘Does “Bartholomew Garrod” ring any bells?’

Underwood frowned for a moment before he remembered, ‘The “Primal Cut” thing? Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m not fucking sure, John,’ Dexter hissed, ‘but I do know that Bartholomew Garrod fought bare knuckle contests across London for twenty years.’

‘That’s tenuous, Alison. Garrod’s been missing for what? Seven or eight years now? He could be dead. He could be out of the country. The chances
of him turning up on your patch are remote.’

‘Maybe.’ Dexter sat down in a chair opposite Underwood. She tried to rub the acid of exhaustion from her eyes. ‘After Ray Garrod was killed, we interviewed a bunch of locals and people that knew them. Two blokes, toerags the both of them, said they’d seen Bartholomew Garrod fight bare knuckle. It used to be quite a big deal in London. Loads of pubs would arrange after hours contests in their cellars and back yards. One of the guys I questioned said he’d seen Garrod take a bite out of someone during a fight and swallow it.’

Underwood tried to allay Dexter’s concern. ‘Look, Garrod isn’t going to come up here, is he? If he’s still alive, he’ll be hiding in a big city. He’d be too conspicuous in a tinpot place like this.’ He had added the derogatory reference to New Bolden to appeal to Dexter’s cockney snobbery about Cambridgeshire. It didn’t work. ‘Why would he come up here?’

‘Me,’ said Dexter quietly. ‘Maybe he’s come for me.’

‘Don’t be daft. He’s not an idiot. I can’t believe he’d risk a life sentence to come looking for you on some revenge trip.’

‘I disagree. In any case, I’ve requisitioned Ray Garrod’s post-mortem file and medical records along with a copy of the Primal Cut case file. I’m
going to get Leach to do a DNA comparison with the saliva found on Shaw.’

‘That’s your prerogative,’ Underwood replied, ‘but I think it’s a waste of time.’

There was a knock at the office door. DS Harrison stood in the doorway.

‘Guv, Bevan is in interview room 3 with someone called Keith Gwynne. He wants you down there.’

Underwood walked around his desk, pulling on his jacket and collecting his notebook as he did so. ‘This guy was at Woollard’s the night Shaw was killed.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Dexter replied.

‘You’re jumping to conclusions, Alison,’ Underwood said as they headed down the stone stairway to the ground floor. ‘Nothing that you’ve said proves that Garrod killed Shaw.’

‘We’ll do the interview together,’ Dexter conceded as she opened the door to interview room 3.

Keith Gwynne sat opposite Mike Bevan, hunched unhappily in his chair. He shifted uncomfortably as Dexter and Underwood entered the room. Bevan leaned towards the obligatory recording equipment. ‘Inspectors Dexter and Underwood have joined the interview,’ he announced into the microphone.

Dexter didn’t waste any time; she stared hard at Gwynne. ‘Tell me what happened at Woollard’s.
Tell me what happened to Leonard Shaw. Tell me everything. Tell me now.’

Bevan looked up at Underwood, their toes trodden on. Underwood shrugged; he was used to Dexter’s dynamism.

‘Fuck me!’ Gwynne exclaimed. ‘What have I done to deserve you lot? You’d think I was a great bleeding train robber.’

‘Answer the question,’ Dexter snapped.

‘I suppose a lawyer is out of the question?’ Gwynne asked.

‘You haven’t been arrested, Keith,’ Bevan said gently. ‘You are helping us out. You haven’t been charged with anything so why do you need a lawyer?’

Dexter was getting increasingly impatient. ‘You were there. Tell us what happened. Or I’ll make sure you will be charged, convicted and eating porridge from a different cock every day for the next ten years.’

Gwynne took a deep breath. ‘All right, all right. Enough already. There were two fights at Bob Woollard’s: a dog fight and a prize fight.’ He looked up at Dexter. ‘That’s a bare knuckle fight,’ he explained.

‘I know what a prize fight is,’ Dexter shouted, ignoring the restraining hand Underwood had placed on her shoulder, ‘just tell me what you saw.’

‘Lefty took a bad beating. The other guy battered him with a steel bucket. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘What happened after the fight?’ Underwood asked.

‘I went home.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Dexter, ‘tell me about the other man. The guy who killed Shaw. Do you know his name?’

Gwynne hesitated; he did not want to incur the wrath of George Norlington. ‘No,’ he replied, his eyes darting left and downwards.

‘Liar. Describe him then,’ Dexter instructed.

Gwynne was sweating now. ‘I don’t know. Maybe three hundred pounds…about six feet tall…fat around his middle but strong as an ox.’

‘Eye colour?’ Underwood asked.

‘God knows, brown maybe.’

‘This is not enough, Keith,’ Bevan said firmly. ‘It’s not enough to help you. You are an accessory to murder looking at eight years in prison. If you don’t start being cooperative, we’ll have no option but to turn over your camp site.’

Dexter found Bevan’s quiet, insistent manner half-irritating, half-impressive. It seemed to work on Gwynne too.

‘The guy’s name is George. He rents a room behind the pub in Heydon; the Dog and Feathers.’

‘That’s better,’ Bevan said with a smile, ‘keep going.’

‘He’s a big, scary bastard,’ Gwynne continued. ‘He had a Tosa dog. One of Woollard’s animals killed it. Maybe he was pissed off by that and wanted revenge on Lefty.’

‘Surname?’ Underwood asked. ‘What’s his surname Keith?’

Gwynne scratched his head as if in admission of defeat. ‘Norlington. George Norlington.’

Dexter’s heart jumped, stopped then jumped again. She turned to Underwood.

‘It’s him,’ she said quietly.

Alison Dexter tried to banish all thoughts of Kelsi Hensy from her mind. Now she had to concentrate.

The first parcel arrived a week after the newspaper story. Dexter and McInally were plastered all over the
Evening Standard
and one or two of the East End local papers. ‘Cannibalism in the East End’ was the most tasteful of the headlines. The articles
told
the story of the Garrods; of how the brothers had abducted, murdered then eaten parts of their victims; of how Alison Dexter had been promoted to Detective Sergeant; of how Ray Garrod had been hit by a police car; of how Bartholomew Garrod was still at large and a danger to the public.

The parcel was enclosed neatly in brown paper, postmarked ‘Edmonton’ and addressed to Detective Sergeant Dexter at Leyton CID. She opened it at 10.00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. Inside, wrapped in cling film, was a kidney. Dexter dropped the parcel in shock. A pathologist subsequently identified it as a human organ but not one belonging to one of the Garrods’ known victims.

A week later, a letter arrived, postmarked ‘Watford’. More alert this time, Dexter put on a pair of white plastic evidence-handling gloves before opening it. She read it carefully.

‘Dear Detective Sergeant, You must be proud of yourself. Killing an innocent man that was no more than a child in his head. You must be proud of your promotion you fucking bitch. I think about you all the time. Your time is coming, bitch. The clock is running down on you. Don’t think I can’t find you before you find me. I know where you work. When I get you, and I will get you, let me tell you what I plan to do. You have small breasts that are hardly worth my effort but I noticed that you have nice hard nipples. I
am
going to eat them first, probably dipped in olive oil. Thinking about it, there’s not much meat on you at all. I saw in the newspapers that you recognised the butcher’s cuts on Patterson and Moran. Well consider this then. After I’ve had your tits off, I’m going to take a silverside and a chuck from you. You’ll still be alive of course, in fact, I might let you join in. You are a stringy little bitch and probably taste like a dried up bit of turkey left over from Christmas. I’ve got some piccalilli here to moisten you up a bit. I’m working on getting your home address. Expect a visit. BG.’