Butcher on the Moor: Gripping crime fiction from Yorkshire (The Yorkshire detective mystery series Book 2) by Ric Brady

Author:Ric Brady [Brady, Ric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE BOOK FOLKS English crime fiction publisher
Published: 2023-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The inside of the cab office was rancid. There were two rooms. One was a small reception room, where a woman sat at a rickety desk, continually answering phone calls on a headset.

The large man led Henry through the reception room, which barely caught the attention of the woman, and into a back office. There was a large desk in the centre of the room, which was so covered in folders, stacks of papers, and empty pizza boxes that Henry struggled to spot the desktop.

Calendars of naked women hung from the green-coloured walls, and some of the images of the women had been bleached by years of daylight and dust. Henry also saw a large whiteboard that had numbers and writing scribbled on it that he couldn’t decipher.

The man seemed to be annoyed that Henry was looking around his office and said, “It’ll be on here.” He sat in his black leather chair and spun it around so he faced a sleek-looking PC.

Henry walked around the back of the desk. The sweet smell of the man’s aftershave got stronger the closer he got to him. He peered over the man’s shoulder as he clicked at windows on his screen.

“Have you got a date?”

“Around 8 p.m. on 21st July.”

The large man opened a program that had lots of CCTV footage on it then he typed on his keyboard. He repeated the date Henry had given him under his breath, then said, “I’ve got it.”

Grainy CCTV footage came up of the cab office’s car park, as seen from higher up, and the street in the distance. It was still daylight, as sunset wasn’t until late in July. There wasn’t much movement, so little in fact that Henry wondered if the footage was even playing.

Then a white van rolled past, away from James Leatherby’s house.

“Pause it!” Henry said. “Go back.”

The large man obliged and replayed the footage of the white Transit driving down the street. He paused it while the van was in the middle of the screen.

“Can you zoom in?”

The man chuckled. “It’s not CSI. Can’t you do that at your station?”

Henry thought that they could. He leant closer to the screen, getting so close to the man’s shoulder that he rolled his leather chair out of his way.

Henry could see a driver in the van, but the footage was too grainy to see much of anything. It was just a group of pixels on a screen. The van was also side-on to the camera. Even if the police could zoom in on the van, they’d never be able to get its number plate.

But there was writing on the side of the van that was clear enough to read: ‘PM Taylor’s Meat Warehouse’.

* * *

Henry got the large man in the taxi company to email the footage to DI Barnes. He also took a picture of the grainy image of the van with his phone in case he needed it later. He thanked the man again before he left, telling him

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