Stolen. Paul Finch

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,