Abattoir Blues Read Free Page B

already her back was aching, and she wanted nothing more than to go home and have a long hot bath with a pile of trashy gossip magazines.
     
    When DS Winsome Jackman arrived at the abandoned airfield, there was already a patrol car parked at the gate and two uniformed officers, one of them enjoying a cigarette, were talking to a man through the chain-link fence. The man was tall and slim, wearing a camouflage jacket, waterproof trousers, sturdy walking boots and a baseball hat, black with a stylised white ‘A’ on the front. He was taller than Winsome, but stooped a little and leaned on a walking stick. Whether it was a rambler’s prop or a genuine need, she couldn’t tell. It was also hard to tell how old he was under the baseball cap, but he seemed too young to be needing a walking stick unless he’d had an accident. A beagle sat quietly by his side, nose twitching as Winsome appeared.
    The uniformed constable introduced herself and dropped her cigarette and trod on it as Winsome approached. Winsome had been told by dispatch that someone had reported seeing what he thought was a bloodstain in a disused hangar near the railway line. It was her job to go over there and assess the situation, weigh up the pros and cons of bringing in an expensive CSI team. The wind tugged at her hair and seemed to permeate the very marrow of her bones. The rain felt like a cold shower.
    ‘What have we got?’ Winsome asked.
    ‘They’re padlocked shut, ma’am,’ said one of the officers, pointing at the gates. ‘There’s nothing urgent, so we thought it best to wait for you.’
    Winsome looked at the man inside. She couldn’t help but see him as a man imprisoned in some sort of prison camp or compound. He had a military air about him, though she would have been hard pushed to put her finger on what made her think that. ‘How did you get in there, Mr . . . ?’
    ‘Gilchrist. Terry Gilchrist. There’s a gap round the side. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. It’s a tight squeeze, and it’s mucky down there.’ He gestured to the mud-stained front of his jacket and knees of his trousers. Winsome was wearing black jeans and a belted winter coat, not exactly her best outfit, but not something she wanted to drag through the mud, either. She guessed that the uniformed officers also hadn’t liked the idea of crawling through a hole in the fence and getting their uniforms dirty. ‘Do you know who owns the place?’
    ‘Government, probably. You coming in?’
    Winsome sighed. ‘A good detective always comes prepared,’ she said, and returned to her car. She opened the boot, took out a torch and a pair of bolt cutters and approached the gates. She handed the torch through the fence to Gilchrist, and with one quick, hard snip of the bolt cutters she snapped open the padlock, which clattered to the concrete. Then, with Gilchrist’s help, she pushed the gates open. They grated as they followed the semicircular grooves already etched in the crumbling concrete. They might not have been opened frequently, Winsome noted, but they had certainly been opened occasionally, and quite recently by the looks of the tracks.
    Gilchrist smiled at her. ‘Thanks for rescuing me,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to feel I’d never get out of here.’
    Winsome smiled back. ‘You won’t. Not for a while yet.’
    Gilchrist turned. ‘Follow me.’
    As he walked towards the hangar entrance, the dog trotting by his side, his stick clicked on the concrete. Winsome could see by the way he limped that the walking stick was no affectation. What had happened, then? An accident? A war wound?
    Winsome paused in the doorway and took in the hangar. She imagined you could fit a few planes in here, at a pinch. She had no idea how many Lancasters or Spitfires there were in a squadron, or even if the hangar had been used during wartime. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had fought in the Second World War, she remembered, and he had been killed somewhere in