It took me a few minutes to force the door, levering a length of pipe back and forth against the lock, but I could already smell them from the other side: urine and faeces, dank fur, sour blood like old copper coins. When the lock finally gave, and the door sprang wide open, I had to hoist my collar up over my mouth to keep from gagging.
Inside, the animals went berserk.
I entered the building slowly, cutting through shadows with a torch in one hand, brandishing the pipe I’d used to jemmy the door with the other. There were nine dogs, I counted, each bashing itself against the confines of its pen, jaws snapping, desperate to rip and tear at me – the trespasser, the criminal.
I paused, anxiously watching for any buckling in their cages.
These were game dogs. Killers in training. I might’ve been on the hefty side, but up against one of these I didn’t fancy my chances.
The baying was constant, but any chance of alerting a passer-by was slim. This building, a former launderette stripped of all but the bolts of its former mechanical guts, was tucked away on an industrial estate in Croydon, neighbour only to desolate factories and waste-processing plants.
The dogs’ cages were spaced along the back wall in a row, each no larger than three square feet with muck piled in every corner. Five of the nine were American pit bull terriers. They weren’t fully grown, and the stumps of their ears and tails hadn’t healed since being sheared off at the bases, but already they were fearsome enough. Inching further into the building, my torchlight picked up a pair of secateurs on a workbench stained with old blood and the sight redoubled my queasiness.
Alongside the five pit bulls, separated by an empty tenth cage, were four of the dogs I’d come looking for: Dogo Argentinos, each around a hundred pounds of muscle under pure white fur. They butted the steel with lunatic aggression, and my mind couldn’t help but go back to the case I’d worked on months before, which had focused on a similar white aggressor by the name of Billy Barber. He was, in some way, responsible for me coming here.
While serving time on remand, Billy had recommended my services to Isaac Reid, a drug dealer who now wanted me to appeal his own conviction for double murder. Reid’s case had been one of almost mathematical simplicity: business rivals had moved into a house in Margate, quaint seaside town on the Kentish coast and alleged territory of Reid’s criminal organisation; into this equation a so-called zombie knife was introduced, the newcomers were hacked to death, and Isaac Reid was sent down for life.
The key to his appeal was a Dogo Argentino that had belonged to the dead dealers. It was Reid’s argument that, since the dog had been standing guard over the property that night, the actual killer must’ve been known and welcome to the victims, or else he would never have made it past the animal alive. Now, seeing the power of these dogs, I found myself inclined to agree.
I wiped a glove across my face, fighting the urge to race back to the car. First, I wanted photographs. With a bit of luck, I could use them not only to win Reid’s appeal, but to close down this particular branch of a sick trade for good.
I dropped the pipe and rummaged through my coat for my phone. Ignoring the text onscreen, I enabled the flash and photographed the cages from a distance, then the secateurs and the other makeshift apparatus of this cruel animal gymnasium: in one corner a home-made treadmill, its running platform fixed at an uphill angle; across the room, hanging ropes designed to strengthen bites. It was about this time, while I was distracted and deafened by the cacophony of barking, that the tenth dog in the room managed to get near enough to lock its teeth around my right ankle.
The impact sent me to the floor with a strangled cry. It was shock more than pain. Sprawled and frantic, I aimed the light down and braced myself for freshets of blood pouring out from my trousers. But there was no wound. My attacker, a black Staffordshire bull terrier, was strapped by collar and chain to a water pipe in the corner. She was already cowering, and when she opened her mouth to whimper, I saw that her teeth had been manually filed down to blunt stumps.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, getting carefully back onto my feet then crouching at her level. ‘What’ve they done to you, girl?’
What remained of her left ear was tattered. There were 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 the city hears Elliot Rook’s gone soft? Once it gets around that you can’t be trusted to keep a client’s affairs to yourself no more, and all because you’re crying over some lousy animals?’ His gaze danced over my face, evaluating the impact of this gambit, and whatever he saw there satisfied him enough for a bloated smirk. ‘If ever the day comes when you do feel like showing up again, Counsel, then I suggest you stop and think about that first.’
The bulbs overhead made him look even pastier than he had last week in court. The dogs were panting now, desperate for the flesh in his shopping bag, and their collective sound was monstrous.
‘Well,’ I said, trying to sound regretful, ‘if that’s the case, then it appears we’re stuck at this status quo. Pity. I thought I might be able to talk some sense into you.’
I turned for the exit. The rush of adrenaline pulled at my knees, giving me all the good grace of a drunkard as I retrieved the pipe I’d found in the skip outside. Werner followed, cagey enough to maintain a constant distance of six feet or so now that I was armed.
I was almost out when my attention turned back to the quivering little bait dog with the tattered ear and missing lip. I stopped. I couldn’t bring myself to go any further.
‘Ah, fuck it,’ I sighed, and with one huge turn I launched the lead pipe double-handed like a hammer throw into Werner’s gut. He was airborne for about three feet before he went down hard, clutching his vitals and gasping for wind.
I stepped over him, freed the trembling terrier from the pipe as gently as I could, wrapped her into the woollen folds of my overcoat and carried her out in both arms.
Dusk had dropped to full dark outside. I paused in the opening of the broken fire escape and spoke without looking back over my shoulder. ‘Might I suggest that, in future, you seek alternative representation for your defence? I think this puts an end to our business relationship, Mr Werner.’
He managed nothing better than a long, strained groan.
By the time I’d made it back to my car, I could hear the rest of the dogs baying again, but the sound travelled no further than the factories that slumped and crumbled all around this forgotten pocket of the capital.
And that was the last time I saw Jacob Werner alive.