Pumpkin Eater. Jeffrey Round

Cover

      Dedication

      To same-sex parents everywhere

      Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,

      Had a wife but couldn’t keep her;

      He put her in a pumpkin shell

      And there he kept her very well.

      — Nursery Rhyme

      Prologue: Toronto 2008

      This Little Piggy

      Darkness gripped him like a vice. The faint light filtering through from outside made everything black on black, broken here and there by minute variations in grey. Uniform, minimalist. Against a far wall the outline of a girder dipped down from the roof, warped and twisted like a giant DNA strand or a blackened starlit stairway to heaven. The shell of a processing unit stood off to one side, vaguely threatening like some obscure technology on a low-budget sci-fi set, impossible to say what it was if you didn’t know which planet you were on or what series you’d landed in.

      Dan sniffed the air. The scent of smoke lingered, a disquieting odour, though it was more than two years since the fire that gutted the slaughterhouse’s interior. The hush inside the room was as soothing as a hand run over velvet. An eerily hypnotic movie theme ran through his head: The Exorcist. He laughed silently and took a step forward. From off to the right came a curious grinding noise, like a pebble crushed underfoot. Maybe it was just his imagination.

      He froze.

      “Darryl Hillary?” he called out. “My name is Dan Sharp. I’m a missing persons investigator. I’ve been hired by your sister.”

      More silence.

      It was just past 1 a.m. on a hot, humid August morning. Not the best weather for sleeping, though almost any bed would be better than this. Not the best weather for prowling around empty slaughterhouses in the dark, either. Dan’s eyes searched for movement. He felt no fear at being there. It occurred to him that he was more at home in darkness than in light.

      After fifteen years in the business, he was still surprised where he might end up looking for a client.

       During his first week on the job for a previous employer, a lifer with a big mouth informed him of the likelihood that a) he probably wouldn’t last a month, and b) he would never be able to predict where the job might land him on any given day. He’d long since proven the first wrong, but the second prediction had shown itself right time and again.

      As anonymous tips went, this one had seemed routine. A little past midnight, his cellphone buzzed, registering a phone booth. Dan heard what sounded like a fast food outlet in the background — orders being called out over the din of communal eating in a room echoing with restless diners. In the foreground, a voice of indeterminate sexuality — it could have been a young man, pitch notched up by nervousness, or a woman who’d smoked herself into a good baritone — puffed out the details of where he’d find his prey: a man named Darryl Hillary.

      Dan knew better than to ask the caller for personal details. He’d long since learned that the bearer of these messages often had something to hide or to gain by passing along the intelligence. You seldom learned what it was, but the information was usually good, when it wasn’t downright crazy or just implausible. But hey, it took all kinds.

      “That guy you’re looking for? Hillary? He’s hiding out in the old slaughterhouse near Keele and St. Clair. He’s there now.”

      Dan’s mind went into overdrive: something about a suspicious fire, a big investigation into arson, allegations of insurance fraud involving unpaid government loans.

      Play dumb, he told himself. “Didn’t that burn down a couple years ago?”

      “Yeah, North York Pork. That’s the one. But the building’s mostly still there.”

      “What’s he hiding from?”

      There was a pause. He shouldn’t have pushed. That was all he’d get. He’d lost whoever was talking.

      “Don’t you know?”

      “Maybe, but I wondered what you could tell me.”

      “Nothing. That’s it.”

      The line went dead, the food court dying with it.

      In his mind, Dan followed the trail backwards: fast food outlet, supermarket, meat distributor, slaughterhouse, and, finally, the farm. This little piggy goes to market. A curious connection, but ultimately meaningless. He recalled the newspaper photos of the fire engines, hoses turned skyward on a bleak winter day, as well as a humorous sidebar showing the char-blackened

       pork sides prepped for processing, now permanently overdone. If it was arson, then whoever set it at least had the good sense to do it after the slaughter, rather than get the animal activists riled at the thought of an abattoir of live pigs going up in flames.

      Dan’s connections with his sources were obscure almost to the point of being nonexistent. Sometimes the contact of a contact would phone or send him a message — for cash, of course. If there was news to be

       had, there was a price tag to go with it. What you learned after paying your snitch fee was anybody’s guess, and where the tip came from was nobody’s business. That wasn’t Dan’s concern. Finding his client was. As long as the information put him in touch with the right person it was all the same to him. With some, you could never tell. A tip leading to an abandoned slaughterhouse might be just the ticket or it could be a blind lead.

       The only way to know for sure was to follow it.

      Dan waited in the darkness, conscious of the smell of burnt everything. Before entering the grounds he’d checked for guard dogs, tossing a few well-aimed rocks inside the fence. Nothing stirred, growled, or snarled. Nothing that he could see, at least. Burned-out building or not, he was technically trespassing, so better not to get caught by some rabid canine pulling your pants down around your ankles as you hoisted yourself over a fence.

      Just inside the entrance, his nostrils curled at the smell of stale urine. Vagrants then, or at least a few ravers. Maybe even a couple of do-it-yourself journalist types. Cities abounded with the latter. Dan kept a couple on his payroll as occasional providers of obscure but useful information. Astonishing what someone living off the grid might turn up. There was nothing like a gung-ho would-be activist for sniffing out the dirt on your street that everyone else overlooked. One man’s garbage was another’s hot tip.

      Darkness swallowed him again as he slid into a large open space. It was like being gradually submerged in different depths of water. As he moved farther into the room, his eyes grew accustomed to the negligible light. Here was where the meat would have been conveyed along assembly lines, waiting to be packaged and branded. He could just make out the curlicue of hooks overhead. Underfoot, the wire grills set in concrete would have kept the floor drained of blood and guts. He imagined freshly killed carcasses swinging from cutter to cutter, lurching down the line till what started out as a whole pig made the cut from pork loin through bacon on its way to becoming sliced baloney.

      He stopped for a moment to consider the call that had sent him in search of his quarry. When he’d asked what his prey was hiding from, the voice had responded by turning it around on him: Don’t you know? Hard to say what was hidden behind that question in answer to his question. People disappeared for a lot of reasons. Often money was behind it,

       but just as often you could find traces of fear, shame, desperation. It was hard to say.

      The movie theme was running through his head now. That’s when he heard the pebble.

      “Darryl Hillary?” he called out. “My name is Dan Sharp. I’m a missing persons investigator. I’ve been hired by your sister.”

      Dan strained to see, but nothing distinguished