Stolen

Thankfully, he hadn’t changed his shoes for slippers yet, so the fact there’d likely be lots of dirty puddles out there wasn’t a problem. He stepped from his gate and, as the rear of the van was nearest, edged in that direction first. For some reason, Milly hung back in the gateway. But Harry barely noticed, his temper continuing to fray as he thought more and more about the Rodwells and their loutish, snot-nosed pals. He noticed that the van wasn’t parked across their gate. When he reached the back of it, its rear doors were both closed, doubtless locked.

Moving to the vehicle’s nearside and finding that the passage on that side was wider by several inches, he sidled along it more quickly, though his feet sloshed through inches of mucky water. When he got to the front, there was nobody inside the cab. Both the front doors were also probably locked, but when Harry put his hand down to the radiator grille, warmth exuded from it. As he’d suspected, the damn thing had only recently arrived.

The more he looked at it now, the more he thought it was dark-blue rather than black, which was a relief in a silly kind of way. But that didn’t stop it being any less of a nuisance.

He was now well positioned to view the rear of the Rodwells’ house. There were no lights on at the back, but there could be at the front. Harry would need to go back through his house to check.

His slid along the vehicle’s nearside, circling its rear end towards his own gate – and there stopped in surprise. The left of the van’s two rear doors now stood open.

Harry was stumped.

Could it have been the wind? No, that was preposterous. There was the odd gust tonight, but nothing like sufficient to open a vehicle door, even if that door had been left ajar, which he was damn sure this one hadn’t.

So – had someone inside this van just climbed out?

He glanced over his shoulder, but the alley dwindled away in a straight line until it joined with the next street. There was no one there.

‘What the bloody hell?’ he muttered.

He leaned forward, poking his nose into the van’s interior. It was too dark to see anything, but now he wondered if that was a faint rustle of cloth he was hearing.

‘Is someone … someone in here …?’

Two hands in black leather gloves shot out of the darkness, gripping him by the cardigan collar.

He was yanked forward with tremendous force, smashing both kneecaps against the van’s rear bumper. The material of his trouser legs hooked on jagged metal, briefly anchoring him in place, allowing him to splay his arms out and grab at the door-frame on one side and the closed door on the other, wedging himself. As his shock ebbed, he began resisting, pushing backward, but those gloved hands were strong, and they dragged at him all the harder. Harry travelled forward again, feet leaving the ground, the material of his trousers ripping, along with the flesh underneath.

As he shouted in pain, one of the hands released his collar and slapped palm-first across his mouth. Then there was a thundering impact on the back of Harry’s head.

His world spun as his hands slipped loose and he slumped forward. Somewhere, there was a frantic yipping – was it Milly?

Whoever had hit Harry from behind now wrapped both arms around Harry’s thighs, and lifted him bodily, feeding him forward into the van’s interior. The person already in there continued to lug him.

The next thing Harry knew, though he was too groggy to make sense of it, he was lying in oily darkness, face-down on corrugated metal. As if that wasn’t enough, someone knelt on the middle of his back, pinning him with their full weight. And still that yipping went on, though it turned into a squeal of fright as a bundle of fur and paws was flung in alongside him. With an echoing CLANG!, the door slammed shut, and blackness descended.

The back of Harry’s head throbbed appallingly; hot fluid leaked through his thinning hair. Milly grizzled and snarled alongside him. When he attempted to speak – absurdly, it was to try and calm the dog – it came out a spittle-clotted burble. His captor responded by shifting one of his knife-like knees from the middle of Harry’s spine to the back of his head, pressing it down sideways, which intensified the raw, stinging pain. The old man yelped aloud, but it was lost as the vehicle rumbled to life and, with a shudder-inducing growl, accelerated away along the Backs.

Chapter 1

The men began arriving shortly after ten o’clock that night. At least, Lucy assumed they would all be men. The intelligence suggested that, and while she wasn’t so naïve as to believe that casual cruelty was solely a male preserve, this particular business, as well as being totally disgusting, just seemed so childishly laddish that she couldn’t picture any of the female offenders she’d arrested over the years participating willingly.

‘All units, we’re on,’ she said into her radio. ‘But sit tight … wait for the order.’

From where she was concealed in the woodland hide, just beyond the cover of the trees, Lucy had a clear view of the rutted track leading to the farm cottage. Over at the point where it joined Wellspring Lane, the gateman was busy admitting a succession of vans and cars, which now passed within seventy yards of her position, travelling slowly in cavalcade. Already she could hear the yipping and yelping of the dogs caged in their boots.

Geraldson, the RSPCA inspector, dabbed with a handkerchief at the sweat glinting on his brow. He was young and nervous.

‘Is there a black van out there?’ His voice was querulous.

‘Even if there is, it won’t necessarily be the one that’s been abducting pets,’ Lucy replied. ‘These are all paying participants. They’ll have their own animals.’

‘So … when do we move?’

‘Not until it gets going.’ Lucy – Detective Constable Lucy Clayburn – continued to watch through her night-vision scope but reached out a hand and squeezed his shoulder with a firm, hopefully reassuring grip. ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got this.’

‘There’ll be some rough customers.’

‘That’s why we’ve got the Tactical Aid Unit with us. They’re mostly ex-military. They like nothing better than a ruckus.’

Geraldson nodded and smiled, eyes gleaming wetly as more headlights rolled across the hide, shining fleetingly on his face.

By Lucy’s estimation, about fourteen vehicles had now arrived at the cottage. Each one would likely be carrying more than one dog. So that would be twenty-eight animals at least, not counting any that were already being kept on site. The RSPCA were anticipating thirty-two in total, which would provide a straightforward knock-out contest. The members of this ring were clearly anticipating a long night.

As the vehicles pulled up haphazardly in the farmyard, a bulb sprang to life outside the ramshackle building to which it was attached, and a man slouched out. He was heavy-set and bearded, in a ragged green sweater and khaki pants. One by one, the parked vehicles opened, and men disgorged from them: generally at least two, sometimes as many as five. Like the guy from the cottage – whom Lucy had already identified as Les Mahoney – they mostly wore outdoor-type clothing: khaki, camouflage fatigues and such, though there were a few leather jackets among them, and a bit of oily denim.

‘Christ,’ Geraldson breathed. ‘There’s more than I expected.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Lucy replied.

As a rule, when you were facing big numbers, quite a few of them weren’t looking for legal entanglements and would scarper at the first opportunity. That was when they were most vulnerable; all you had to do was pick them off. Though, looking at these guys – and she turned the super-zoom dial on her scope – there might be as many fighters as runners. She saw shaved heads, scarred faces, scuzzy tattoos. For once she was glad the sixty officers from the TAU were parked in a layby in their troop-carriers a little way down Wellspring Lane.

She continued to observe the men as they greeted each other with high fives and bear-hugs, before swaggering over to Mahoney and thrusting at him the wads of banknotes that made up their admission fees.

Another cop came into the hide behind her. It was PC Malcolm Peabody, once Lucy’s probationer when she too had been in uniform. He was still only young, but a tall, rangy lad, with short red hair, a freckled face and jug-handle ears. Currently, he wore heavy-duty body-armour, plus a ballistics helmet with its visor raised and strap tight under his chin.

‘Sergeant Frobisher says everyone’s in position,’ he said quietly.

‘Everyone except you, Malcolm,’ Lucy replied, thinking that if it suddenly kicked off, she didn’t want handy lads like Peabody anywhere other than the front line. ‘There’s not enough space for all of us in here. Go back to your LUP and stay sharp.’

Peabody nodded and stooped back out through the low, narrow entrance.

None of them knew what the hide had originally been constructed for. It might indeed have been a wildlife observation point in the past. But it made a perfect OP for today: a flimsy, flat-roofed wooden hut, partly dug into the ground so it had an earthen floor, its exterior covered with vegetation, which, at the tail-end of summer, partly obscured the horizontal viewing port at the front – partly, but not completely.

Its interior was so restricted that it could only contain two with any comfort. But it gave an excellent view of the farm cottage, some fifty yards beyond the trees, and the open grassland to the east of it, where at this hour nothing stirred save a couple of tethered ponies munching the cud.

An increasingly excited canine yelping drew Lucy’s attention back to the cottage, where the rear doors to vehicles were now being opened and muzzled dogs brought out on chain leashes. Even through the zoom-lens of her scope, and with the whole of the farmyard area lit up, many of them were already so horribly scarred from battles past that their breeds were unidentifiable, but by their lean, squat, muscular frames she reckoned they’d be fighting species of old: pit bulls, Staffies and the like, an impression enhanced by the thick muzzles they wore, and their steel-studded leather harnesses.

Lucy shook her head.

Mahoney now walked across the farmyard, his guests following, though they kept their four-footed charges well apart from each other. As most of these animals, if not all, had been trained through years of brutal abuse to despise other dogs on sight, they were already snarling and rearing, having to be forcibly restrained.

Geraldson watched through a pair of binoculars.

‘Savages,’ he whispered.

‘Yeah, well, don’t worry,’ Lucy replied. ‘Tonight, they’re going to learn what it means to be chained and caged.’

At the other side of the farmyard, perhaps fifty yards from the cottage, there was another clutch of outbuildings, all in a similarly dilapidated condition to the main house. The largest had clearly once been a barn of some sort; it was an ugly brick and concrete structure, but its roof had evidently caved in some time ago, because while the rest of it was rotted and flimsy, that was relatively new, made from sturdy sheets of corrugated steel.

Mustn’t have the guests getting wet if it rains, Lucy thought.

Mahoney went into the barn first, through a side-door. Lights came on within, and then he re-emerged on the east-facing side, pushing open a large pair of timber doors, through which the men and dogs now trooped. It was difficult to be sure what went on after that, because once the majority were in there, all Lucy could see through the open doors was a chaos of bodies milling about, the dogs still grizzling and snarling at each other.

She lifted the radio mic to her lips but refrained from issuing an order, relying on her ears to tell her what was going on. When the snarling and grizzling gave way to full-on barking, that would mean that muzzles had been removed, and when the men also began shouting, the first bout would be in progress.

A person Lucy hadn’t seen before entered the farmyard, almost certainly Mahoney’s wife, Mandy. She was a slatternly, overweight woman wearing sandals, jeans that were too tight for her, and a baggy, semi-transparent cheesecloth shirt that barely concealed her naked, pendulous breasts. Ratty grey hair hung past her shoulders, and she had a pudgy, porcine face, tinging red as she made cumbersome trips back and forth from the cottage to the barn, hefting crates of beer.

‘Shouldn’t we go now?’ Geraldson asked quietly.

‘No,’ Lucy said firmly. ‘Just wait.’

She leaned forward, almost pushing her head through the greenery curtaining the aperture. But it was pointless. She couldn’t see the woods stretching away to the right of the hide and fringing the open pasture. She’d simply have to trust that Sergeant Frobisher, who was on secondment from Area, would have everyone adequately concealed but also primed for action, so they could jump up and move in the instant she gave the word. There were other lying-up points around the one-time farm: behind the stone walls bordering the eastern end of the pony paddock, sixty yards further away than Lucy’s own position; and in the trees on the west side of the farm buildings, though the lads over there had needed to dig in further back because it was open woodland and there was a risk of their being seen. So Frobisher’s team would be the first into action, and they’d need to make a very rapid approach.

An explosion of barking suddenly sounded from inside the barn. Geraldson gazed at Lucy, white-faced, a globule of fresh sweat trickling down his nose. She raised a hand for calm but leaned closer to her mic. ‘Clayburn to TAU, over?’

Static crackled, before Inspector Rick Crawley, heading up the TAU, responded. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Tine to move, sir. Can you block the gate on Wellspring Lane, over?’

‘Roger, received.’

Lucy glanced at Geraldson, who nodded wordlessly, his mouth clamped shut. And then, inside the old barn, men began shouting, bellowing encouragement, but laughing too, with an angry, raucous delight. The barking took on a new, savage, monstrous overtone.

‘All units,’ Lucy said into the mic. ‘Hit ’em!’

Sergeant Frobisher and Malcolm Peabody’s eight-strong snatch squad broke cover and scampered across the grass, dark and stealthy in the night, the only sound a clack of visors being snapped down and a repeating metallic click as Autolock batons were flicked open.

She turned and stooped out through the small rear entrance of the hide onto the access lane behind. Here, screened by late-summer undergrowth, several RSPCA vans were parked, their personnel standing around in taut silence. Lucy signalled to them and walked around to the front, pushing through the foliage and onto open ground. She wasn’t fully armoured like the snatch squads, but she wore a stab-vest and basic Kevlar padding over her scruffs.

The RSPCA officers followed her out, wearing thick handling gloves, carrying deterrent sprays and poles with slip-leads attached. Well-equipped as they were, they kept a safe distance behind.

From this angle, the pony paddock lay in front of them. More police officers were scurrying across it from its eastern perimeter wall. As Lucy veered towards the farm, Mandy Mahoney had waddled back into view, heaving another crate of beer, apparently unperturbed by the terrible sounds emanating from the barn and seemingly oblivious to the advancing forces. Several pairs of moving headlights also caught Lucy’s attention. Along Wellspring Lane, on the far side of the paddock, three large vehicles – the TAU troop-carriers – were slowing to a halt in front of the farm gate. The gateman was slow to respond, probably because he was stumped by the sight of them. However, half a second later, he was haring back down the farm track, shouting hoarsely and incoherently.

Lucy switched on her loudhailer and raised it to her lips.

‘Leslie Mahoney!’ she called, her voice projected across the darkened meadow. ‘This is Detective Constable Lucy Clayburn of Crowley CID. You and your friends are all being arrested under Section 8 of the Animal Welfare Act. The entire plot is surrounded, Mahoney … so I want you all to come out of that barn right now. Bring your dogs with you and keep them in check. Make sure they’re muzzled and leashed. Anyone resisting will also be arrested for assaulting police officers and assault with intent to resist arrest. Anyone using a dog to resist will be arrested for attempting to cause grievous bodily harm.’

Forty yards ahead, Mandy stood frozen in place as she listened to this message from the darkness. But only when Frobisher’s snatch squad burst into the light, having advanced across the paddock in complete invisibility, did she respond, dropping the crate of beer and running comically towards the barn. Some of the men inside, presumably those closest to the main doors, had also heard. Heads were fleetingly stuck out, and then disappeared again. The wild shouting inside took on notes of panic and then hysteria. Several seconds later, a confused knot of bodies emerged, both human and canine, the animals leaping and whining in confusion, the men hauling on their chains. Those unencumbered by dogs ran every which way, but already there was no escape. The snatch squad from the woods on the west side of the farm surged into view from between the decayed buildings, shouting orders and warnings. Other uniformed cops emerged from around the back of the barn.

The men and dogs scrambled for their cars, and there were gut-thumping collisions as the officers piled into them. Despite this, several vehicles started up, but as they all sought to rev away up the track at the same time, they slid into each other, clunking and shunting, grinding to a 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.