Both officers heard the sounds of cattle coming from behind the building. Not the usual gentle mooing that you hear strolling down a country lane but a frantic, rapid kind. Collins had heard it once before, as a child, when she and her parents had gone to the country for the weekend and stopped off at a farm for some fresh produce. Right before the eyes of the horrified nine-year-old, one of the cows was attacked by some stray dogs. The sound the animal made at that moment was almost identical to what Collins was hearing right now. It was the sound of panic. The sound of terror.

All of a sudden Collins felt herself go slightly weak at the knees. It had been one thing watching the silent video and thinking about how it related to the case; it was quite another being in the midst of it all. Actually experiencing the screams and the smell of the blood and the flesh and the guts made it all too real. If she and the others didn’t manage to find Sophie in time, the horrors that were taking place in the building in front of her would be almost identical to what her daughter would be going through. Seeing it up close and personal might be too much for Collins to bear.

‘You all right, guv?’ said Woods, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re looking a little pale.’

Collins sucked in a silent breath. She needed to be strong. This visit to an abattoir might well provide the missing piece of the puzzle and lead them to Jessica Matthews. It might lead them to Sophie. And as long as there was a chance, she could not back down.

‘I’m fine, Tony. Let’s go.’

The manager of the plant, Ronald Hale, was a tall, affable man with the kind of rounded belly that showed he liked his food and his red meat in particular. To say he was taken aback to be visited by two detectives on a murder inquiry would have been the understatement of the year.

‘I really think you’re barking up the wrong tree if you’re looking for anything like that here. We’re at the upper end of the market. We supply the likes of Tesco and McDonald’s. I don’t think you’ll find so much as a single wellington boot out of place, let alone some psychopathic serial killer on the loose.’

Collins looked around at the pens full of animals on their way to be slaughtered. All she could see was Sophie’s face.

‘This place is guarded round the clock,’ continued Hale. ‘The killing floor has to be washed clean at the end of each session, and that’s a job that takes at least five men to do. There can’t be any blood there first thing in the morning, there just can’t. We’re subject to random inspections every couple of days and the animals are inspected almost constantly. Believe me, if there was any way this place could be used to commit the perfect murder, I’d be a widow by now.’

‘What about cold storage?’

‘We’re in the business of selling meat, not storing it. The longer we keep it here, the more the price goes down. The freezers we have are emptied out at the end of every day. There isn’t room to keep anything here, and nowhere to keep anything where it wouldn’t be seen. This isn’t some Victorian mansion full of hidey holes and secret passages; everything is out in the open. This place is purely functional. Every slaughterhouse in the country is. But how far back do these killings go?’

‘Maybe ten years.’

‘And you think we’ve got a corner of our cold-storage room where no one has been for the best part of a decade? Do me a favour, love. You’re barking mad if you think anything sticks around here for that long.’

Collins could feel the panic starting to rise up within her. Her phone had been in her pocket the whole time, set to maximum volume. If any of the other teams had discovered something at one of the other abattoirs, they would have called her by now.

This had been the strongest lead that they’d had and now it seemed to be coming to nothing. Time was running out, Collins had nowhere to turn. Her little girl was going to die and she was never, ever going to be able to forgive herself.

But, at the same time, the environment she was in just felt so right. The video and now the sights and sounds around her seemed to fit so well with what Matthews had been up to. There had to be some kind of a link, there had to be.

She turned to Hale. ‘If not here, where else? Where else can you similar facilities?’

Hale shrugged. ‘Nowhere. Not within a hundred miles of here anyway. Not any more.’

‘What do you mean not any more?’

‘Well, you’re saying these killings go back at least ten years, right?’

‘Yes, that’s what we believe.’

‘Ten, twenty years ago, there were a hell of a lot more abattoirs operating in the UK than there are today. The whole foot and mouth crisis and Mad Cow scare put paid to all that. There used to be loads of little premises all over the place, but they didn’t have the money or the space for all the upgrades necessary to stay in business. They had to shut down.’

‘How many places are we talking about?’

‘Don’t know off the top of my head, but I remember reading an article about it the other day that said there had been 2,500 slaughterhouses in operation at the start of the eighties and today there are fewer than 300 still around, with most of the big ones consolidations of the smaller ones.

‘In fact, half the staff I’ve got here came from smaller places in the area that shut down in the past couple of decades. It’s a skilled job, you see, but not one that many people want to train up for. It means if you’re involved, you’ve pretty much got a job for life.’

Collins felt a rush of excitement, of hope, rushing through her. ‘And do you think some of these places, the ones that have shut down, might still have their equipment in place?’

‘I guess so,’ said Hale. ‘I don’t think any of them will still be operating, but it’s possible that all the stuff is still there. If you ask me, it would be a lot easier to commit a murder in a place like that than it would be in a place like this.’

Suddenly Collins realized something that had been staring her in the face all along. She headed for the door dialling a number on her phone at the same time.

‘Mr Robertson? It’s Detective Inspector Stacey Collins; I came to see you with my colleague yesterday.’

‘Of course. Do you have any news of Jessica? Have you found her?’

‘Not yet I’m afraid. But you may be able to help. You said something about a small holding you used to own. Can you tell me more about it?’

‘That was years ago. We had to shut it all down. It’s just a set of abandoned buildings now.’

‘What kind of holding was it?’

‘It was a small dairy farm. With an abattoir on the side.’

27

It was just starting to get dark as Woods and Collins pulled up on the outskirts of the farm complex, the buildings that the Robertsons had abandoned years ago and that, it now seemed, Jessica Matthews had bought and refurbished with the money she had inherited at the age of twenty-one.

The rest of the team were scattered around the country but Anderson had promised to get them to the location as quickly as possible, along with an armed team. He warned Collins in no uncertain terms not to make a move until he got there.

Woods switched off his lights the moment he turned up the main path and drove carefully and gingerly, navigating cautiously, until he parked the car close to a clump of trees. Keeping to the shadows, the two officers then made their way towards the main set of buildings on foot.

‘You sure she’s in here?’

‘I’m certain of it. We need to get an idea of the lie of the land.’

‘We’re gonna need that,’ said Woods. ‘CO19 won’t go into a building at this sort of time unless they know exactly what they’re letting themselves in for. They’ll do a raid at dawn if they have the element of surprise but something like this, they’d want to wait a couple of hours at least to scope out the lay of the land. They don’t want to find themselves walking into a UK version of Waco.’