‘I can do that, certainly,’ said Hawley. ‘But, if you’re thinking of the Eden Valley, I think I know the one you want. Senior Brothers in Lowbridge.’

Chapter Twenty-one

LEANING BACK IN his office chair, Maurice Gains shook his head at Diane Fry and wagged a long finger. ‘We don’t call it horse meat, as a rule, Sergeant. We prefer “cheval”.’

‘Oh?’ said Fry. ‘Why not call a spade a spade?’

‘Because of the sensitivities of the British consumer.’

Fry didn’t think Maurice Gains looked the sensitive type. Sensitive to the size of his own bank account, maybe. And that was about it. He was the type of businessman she hated most. Supercilious, complacent, obsessed with his own success.

‘We don’t eat cow, do we?’ he said. ‘We eat beef. We don’t eat pig – we eat pork, or ham. You see, it protects the housewife from having to picture the actual living creature when she’s doing her shopping in the supermarket. If we give it a different name, it becomes just another product on the shelf. It’s all about the image.’

Well, it would have to be. The unit occupied by R & G Enterprises was all about image, too. Money had been spent on the entrance and signage, a smart logo that must have been professionally designed. The carpets in reception and in the manager’s office were deeper and more luxurious than anything ever dreamed of at E Division headquarters. Fry had been ushered to a low, modernist lounge chair that Gavin Murfin would have had difficulty getting out of again, if he’d been with her. But this was one interview she’d felt might be better done alone.

‘Who eats this product of yours?’ she said.

‘Well, cheval has always been popular among the French and Belgian working classes, usually in urban areas. You may have seen the specialist butchers’ shops in Paris, the boucheries chevalines, with those wonderful gilded horse-head advertising signs?’

‘I can’t say that I have,’ said Fry. ‘I must be promenading on the wrong boulevards.’

Gains smiled, a condescending smile which got right on her nerves. ‘Well, in recent years, horse meat has become more popular in the fashionable arrondissements. A lot of French consumers began switching from beef to horse when mad cow disease appeared. Cheval is marketed as a healthy, low-fat alternative to British beef.’

‘They started eating horse instead of our beef?’

‘Yes. Ironically, it’s often our horses they’re eating,’ said Gains. ‘And even young people in France have taken to horse meat. I’m told there’s a horse meat dining society known as Le Pony Club. But Italy and Eastern Europe are big markets, too, and parts of Japan and China.’

‘We don’t eat horse meat in this country, though.’

‘Historically, that’s true. Though, actually, people have been eating horse meat for some time, without being aware of it. There was a Food Standards Agency investigation a few years ago which found salami on sale in the UK containing horse and donkey meat, without it being mentioned on the food label. No one died of shock. And times change, you know. We’re living in a much more multi-cultural country.’