Post Mortem by Gary Bell (inspirational books for students .TXT) 📗

myriad white scars criss-crossed through her dark fur and a portion of her lower lip was missing altogether. She was a bait dog, I realised: more apparatus for the trainee fighters. She backed up to the pipe, quivering, and when her eyes flickered off to one side, revealing their whites in the glare of my torch, I followed her gaze and saw yellow light had appeared under the crack of a closed interior door.

‘Shit.’ I crammed the torch and phone into my coat pockets. ‘Here we go.’

Instead of heading back the way I’d come, I just managed to get into position behind the opening door before a scrawny hand reached through and powered up the stark industrial lamps overhead with the flick of a switch.

The newcomer roared a single word into the room: ‘Obey!’

The caged dogs fell instantly silent, and sat up straight in their pens.

‘What’s got into you lot?’ the man grunted from the other side of the open door. ‘I could hear you all the w—’

His voice went out like a flame in a wind tunnel. He’d spotted the open fire escape, the pipe dropped in the middle of the room. I shouldered my weight into my side of the door, crunching it into his body. By the time he’d hit the concrete I was over him, glaring down at his greasy hair and pallid face as if it were something unpleasant smeared beneath my shoe. From one of his hands, a plastic bag of cheap steaks oozed pink fluid onto the ground.

‘Jacob Werner.’

He blinked in disbelief. ‘Rook?’

‘This can’t be right,’ I noted, still towering above him. ‘You were in court last week on a charge contrary to the Dangerous Dogs Act, and yet here you are now in a supposedly abandoned building, surrounded by illegal animals.’

He grumbled, struggling to get himself upright in the raw, fetid juices. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

I wanted to know who he’d been breeding for, but Jacob Werner had a mouth the size of Greater London; pressing him to roll on his customers would be dangerous for the both of us. ‘You think I don’t look into my clients before we go to trial? It’s your cousin who owns this building, isn’t it? Last week I had you acquitted for breeding dangerous dogs. Two days later I hear about a girl finding a mutilated pit bull on Wandle Park, five minutes away from here. Christ, Werner, even a dog knows not to shit where it eats.’

He finally steadied himself on two feet, sweeping dust from his backside, picked up the bag and shrugged. ‘You were paid enough to defend me. I assume you haven’t come here to give me the money back now you’ve seen how it was made?’ He rubbed his shoulder where the door had smashed into it, and shook his head. ‘You’re a criminal lawyer. You tell lies for money. What’s the issue?’

From the cages beside me, one of the dogs began to whine. ‘Let’s just say I’ve been struggling to abide certain cruelties lately.’

‘Cruelties?’ He giggled nervously, running a hand through his lank, thinning hair. ‘You’re getting on your high horse about some dead mutt?’

‘I convinced those magistrates to let you walk. I thought –’

‘Whatever you thought, Rook, that doesn’t give you the right to break in here.’ His eyes glittered towards the cages and the animals salivating there. ‘What if I opened these crates? What do you reckon would happen to you then?’

I swallowed, ignoring the dull throb in my ankle. ‘Nothing good for either of us, I’d imagine. You know how it ended for Ramsay Bolton, don’t you?’

I could tell from the downward roll of his mouth that he didn’t, but the implication was clear enough. He scratched his stomach, a strange pot on his otherwise scrawny frame, and sniffed. ‘So, instead of leaving me to earn a living, you’ve come to get me nicked and have my dogs destroyed, have you? Very noble.’

‘That’ll be for the courts to decide,’ I told him, and all those watchful eyes, so rabid only moments ago, seemed to lean on me with physical weight.

Werner laughed. ‘Maximum sentence is, what? Six months? I’d be out in three, but you …’ Now his flat eyes moved pointedly between the broken doorway, the pipe on the floor, the gloves on my hands. ‘Queen’s Counsel breaking and entering. You’d be struck off, at least.’

At least, I agreed, but Werner clearly hadn’t realised that my intentions had never been so rational as to involve the police.

‘I won’t be the one to put these dogs to death,’ I told him, ‘but you’re going to put an end to this once and for all. If you don’t, I will be coming back for you.’ I patted the outline of the phone through my pocket. ‘I’ve got proof now, should you decide to keep this sadistic little business of yours afloat.’

‘If these dogs are put to death, Rook, then we’ll both be joining them soon enough. You don’t know what you’re getting involved in. These aren’t just mongrel status dogs. These are quality animals. They’re ordered and paid for before birth. You have them taken away, and you’re nicking from the sorts of people you don’t want to be nicking from.’

‘Like who?’ I gestured to the Argentinos drooling behind bars. ‘Who would want one of these things around?’

‘People with big investments to guard. People like –’ For a second, I believed his big mouth was going to work in my favour; it flapped open wide, ready to boast, and then stopped. ‘Wait. Is that why you came here? You expect me to shop my own customers?’

‘Of course not,’ I lied. ‘As I said, perhaps it’s time you started looking for better ways to make a living, that’s all.’

He licked his lips, catching beads of sweat, and lifted his chin defiantly. ‘We’ll see which one of us keeps earning once this gets out. How much work do you think it’ll cost you after every player in