Come to Harm (25 page)

Then came Malcolm's calm voice.
“Come on,” he said. “We can phone from the shop.”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Poole whispered. And before Keiko had time to catch a deep breath against the sight that was coming, the lights were on again.

Murray was sitting propped up by the Bantam with his feet braced on the floor and his hands cradled in his lap, head down, eyes half-open. He was dead. Keiko had never seen a dead person before and could not have said how she knew, but there was no urgency in the steps she took towards him, inching close enough to see the cuts running from the base of his palms to his elbows, thick-edged and gaping, the veins inside ripped, the tendons stretched, and all bleached out to the colour of dirty string. She turned away from him to the spread tarpaulin behind her.

Skin, bones, and flesh were more or less separate, although the seeping blood had carried some of the smaller pieces with it and merged them. The skin was folded in a square-edged pile, topped by something like a nubbly deflated beach-ball that Keiko couldn't identify. She took a step closer. It was a scalp, the hair kinked into crests with blood. She stared at it and took another step, but a movement caught her eye. Mrs. Poole, standing at the opposite edge of the tarpaulin, had raised her hand, telling her not to go any closer. When Keiko looked down, she saw that her feet were less than another pace away from the edge of the spreading.

“Come on, Mum,” said Malcolm again.

Mrs. Poole shook her head. “We don't even know who it is,” she said. “At least let's make sure.”

Keiko looked back at the heaps on the floor, searching for something to tell her that these bundles had been Mr. Byers, and for the first time her stomach threatened to give way in a slow roll forward like a child tumbling over in water.

Mrs. Poole crossed to the bench, to another neat stack, this one only a bundle of clothes, and picked up a wallet from the top of the pile. She opened it gingerly, fingering the contents with great tenderness, as if a small display of respect could make up for the degradation behind her. Keiko felt the urge to laugh but caught herself. Hysteria had no place here.

Mrs. Poole put down the wallet and turned to them with a nod. Then she cast her eyes around the room with a speculative gaze, so unfitting to the moment that if Malcolm had not been there, Keiko would have felt fear at being near her.

“There's tape over the doors,” she said. Keiko looked at her in puzzlement for a moment before turning to the big double doors to the street. They were sealed around their edges and over the keyhole with broad grey tape. She glanced at the small window. It was covered with a square of cardboard cut from a crisp box and taped around the edges.

“Nobody can see that the light's on,” Mrs. Poole said. She nodded and cast her eyes around again with the same calm, thoughtful look.

“It's over, Mum,” said Malcolm. “Come on. It's over now.”

“Wait,” said Mrs. Poole. “Just a minute. We need to decide what to do.”

“What are you talking about?” Malcolm said. He ran one massive hand, dark-looking against his candle-white face, over his mouth.

Mrs. Poole's voice was lighter than Keiko had ever heard it as she answered. “Everything's changed now. Let me think. Stop rushing me.” She looked away from his set face and towards Keiko.

“Are you talking about trying to cover this up?” said Malcolm.

“Trust me,” said his mother. “No good would come of letting it out.”

“Mum, you can't be serious,” said Malcolm, plaintive and wheedling now. “We could never clean this up, never mind explaining where Byers and—” He choked on the name and pressed his hand against his mouth again.

“I think Malcolm's right, Mrs. Poole,” said Keiko. Malcolm held out his arm towards her, displaying her to his mother like evidence. Mrs. Poole watched him for a moment, then Keiko saw a spark of light in her eyes and a suggestion of a smile twitch at her lips.

“What?” Keiko asked her.

“No,
we
couldn't manage it,” she said, “but I can think of someone who'll help us.” She was almost laughing. “Who can you think of who knows how to do everything, or thinks he does, and would do anything in the world for me without turning a hair, would do anything for this town?”

Keiko smiled back at her.

“Jimmy McKendrick?” said Malcolm. “You're going to ask Jimmy McKendrick to cover up murder? Mum, please. You've lost your mind.” His voice was rising.

Keiko looked between one and the other. If Malcolm was beginning to panic, then it was up to her. What she had to do was get Mrs. Poole away from here so her senses would return to her.

“Let's at least ask Mr. McKendrick what to do,” Keiko said. “And whatever he says, we'll be guided by him. We can phone him from my flat.”

Mrs. Poole picked her way around the edge of the tarpaulin, moving towards Murray. Keiko watched her bend over, smooth his hair up away from his face. Briefly, she saw the peak on his forehead and the hook of his brows before it fell forward again. Mrs. Poole pushed down his eyelids with the tips of her fingers.

“My bonny baby,” she said. The toe of one shoe was in the blood and Keiko hoped she would notice and not need to be told to wipe it clean before walking out into the lane. “My baby boy.”

As she let go of Murray's face, Mrs. Poole rocked her foot back onto the heel and looked at the blotch. She didn't wipe it, but took her shoe off and cradled it in the crook of her elbow before turning and limping away.

thirty-three

Somewhere between the workshop
and the lighted warmth of her kitchen, Keiko's calm deserted her and she started to shake, unable to stop her teeth from chattering behind her cold lips, unable to make her feet move in anything but a clockwork totter that would have pitched her down the stairs had it not been for Mrs. Poole's strong arm across her back.

Malcolm sat opposite her again, as he had less than ten minutes ago, in that other world where she had lived before here. Mrs. Poole pressed a mug into her hands and cupped them around it, got another for Malcolm, then went into the living room to the telephone.

His face was white now, not grey, only the absence of stubble showing where his lips began, and the thumbprint smudges between his eyes were darker, as though some brutal giant had pinched him there. And when he looked at Keiko, his expression told her that her own face must be just as stricken, just as strange. He slid one arm across the table towards her, and she unlaced her hands from the mug and put a fist into his upturned palm.

Mrs. Poole must have stayed in the living room for some time after she put down the phone, because she had been back with them for only a minute—chafing Keiko's hands, smoothing Malcolm's hair back in a gesture that made all three of them shrink at the memory—when they heard the purposeful clack of Mr. McKendrick's brogues climbing the stairs. He let himself in and came to join them. Despite the late hour, he was dressed in his usual array of coat, waistcoat and tie, pressed trousers, and polished shoes. His hair was neatly combed across his head, but his eyes were wide open without a trace of a wink or twinkle and his mouth hung open too, making his face a foolish egg-shape. He plopped down onto a chair with none of his customary bustle.

“Tea, Jim?” said Mrs. Poole.

He turned to her and stared. “Not just now, Gracie, you're all right,” he said. He wet his lips by pushing the bottom up over the top then the top out over the bottom, before he spoke again. “So. Murray has killed Byers and himself and they are both in the petrol station. You've all seen them.” He put out a hand to Mrs. Poole. “Grace, I'm sorry for your loss.” Keiko was sure that this phrase, from the way he said it, was a stock condolence. There was the answer: Mr. McKendrick would do what was right and proper. “Terrible thing,” he went on. “Feelings running very high about the development. A laddie who's just lost his father and an old troublemaker like Byers stirring everything up. I blame myself for this, Gracie, I do.”

“The thing is,” said Mrs. Poole, “he didn't just knock him over in a brawl, and as soon as the police come they'll know it's more than that.” Mr. McKendrick pursed his mouth and waited. “I had to look at Byers's wallet to be sure who it was.” Her voice had lost its calm and sounded harsh. “He's in pieces. Dismembered.
Butchered
.” She swallowed, squeezing her eyes to help her clear her throat with a dry click.

Malcolm shifted in his seat as though to prepare himself to speak, but Mrs. Poole continued, her voice ragged now. “And the thing is, Jim, the trouble is … it's happened before. Or I think it's happened before. I can't be sure. And it's going to come out now, unless you can help us stop it. It'll all come out and no good of it to anyone.”

Malcolm had squeezed Keiko's hand in a single, tight spasm, but he was not looking at her. He stared at his mother and tried to say something, but what came out was no more than a croak.

“I'm sorry, Malcolm,” said Mrs. Poole. “We should have told you.”

Mr. McKendrick narrowed his eyes in an effort to understand. Squinting at Mrs. Poole with distaste clenching his jaw, he looked at last more like his capable self again, the egg-faced idiot gone.

“You can't be sure?” he echoed. He waited for Mrs. Poole to speak, no inkling in his face of the idea that was forming in Keiko's mind.

“He got rid of the body.”

“How?” said Mr. McKendrick. “Where?”

“Don't make me say it,” said Mrs. Poole. She fixed her eyes on a spot above Mr. McKendrick's head. “It was back when Duncan still did all the work out in the old slaughterhouse.”

Malcolm relaxed his grip on Keiko as though to allow her to snatch her hand away from him, but she opened her fingers and wrapped them around his thumb, squeezing until he closed his hand on hers again. She could hear Mr. McKendrick's breath coming faster.

“When was this?” he said.

“Just over five years ago,” said Mrs. Poole. “We weren't just thinking of ourselves, James, you've got to believe that. You know Duncan would never have tried to save his own name if it hurt somebody else. We didn't find out until long after. We never found out for sure, to tell the truth.”

“Who was it?” said Mr. McKendrick.

Mrs. Poole bit her lip and said nothing.

“Tash,” Keiko said.

“Who?” said Mr. McKendrick.

“Natasha,” said Mrs. Poole, nodding. “Tash that Pet McMaster had after Fancy went. I found her clothes. That's all. I found her clothes and her watch and the leather bracelets she always wore. And we never found anything else. But there had been other … things before, so we were pretty sure what he'd done.” Mr. McKendrick was gulping repeatedly, but Mrs. Poole went on. “Tell me I was wrong, Jim, if you think I was wrong. Tell me I should have told everyone that had been in our shop, months later when it was too late to do anything but have nightmares for the rest of their lives. Tell me I should have told Pet McMaster, when she was beside herself with the girl taking off and I was round there every night with … with … so she wouldn't need to cook.” Mrs. Poole started to weep silently, holding her bottom lip in her teeth and letting the tears spill and fall.

Mr. McKendrick sat for a long time without speaking, staring unblinking at the tablecloth, until the rise and fall of his chest had begun to slow, then he squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again he looked up and took in all three of them with one gleaming sweep.

“You did the right thing. No question. And we're going to do the right thing now. I love this town.” He paused and struggled for a way to express his next thought. Finding a suitable phrase, he cleared his throat and began again. “Everything I love is in this town, and I will not,” his voice rose, “stand by and let what I love become a freak show. Jesus God, I nearly—But never mind that now. So.” His voice gentled again and he leaned forward to take Mrs. Poole's hands into his. “I used to be a volunteer fireman, Gracie, as you know, and in my capacity as Chairman of the Traders I had occasion to speak to Mr. Byers more than once about his safety provisions. Basically, he doesn't have any. If someone put a match to that place,” said Mr. McKendrick, beginning to pat his pockets with useless busyness, “it would go up like straw. So, I have two things I need to ask you, Grace, and neither one of them is easy. First, could you live with it if Murray went in a fire?” He clasped Mrs. Poole's hands again, waiting until she nodded. “And second—I'm sorry to have ask to ask you to dwell on this—about Willie. Is he—” He turned to Malcolm, out of some chivalrous impulse, and dropped his voice as though letting Keiko and Mrs. Poole not hear him. “Is he somewhere you'd expect him to be?”

The image of the tarpaulin with its leaking bundles blared at Keiko for a moment and she saw a shudder pass through Malcolm, felt another squeeze, on and off again, in his fingers.

“Far from it,” he said, slowly.

“But will I be able to rearrange the—” began Mr. McKendrick.

Malcolm shook his head and looked towards Keiko in desperate appeal.

“It's very thorough,” Keiko said, and even this sounded like a monstrosity.

“We've got a problem then,” said Mr. McKendrick. “It doesn't matter how complete the burning is, there's still going to be remains, identifiable remains. If the petrol station was still on the go, if it was an explosion we were looking at, that would be different. But they'll be able tell if the body wasn't—as it should have been—before it burned.” He clipped this last word off short with a look at Mrs. Poole, but she only closed her eyes and waited.

“Son,” went on Mr. McKendrick, “I don't suppose you would be able to deal with it? No of course not, why should you? I was just thinking with you being a butcher …” Mr. McKendrick's voice died again. He blew out hard and cleared his throat preparing, Keiko assumed, to begin talking them into giving up a bad job. She blurted out what was in her head before she had time to rethink it.

“Fancy!” All three turned to stare at her. “Fancy Clarke. She's done an anatomy course. She would know what to do with the body. How it should … be.”

Mr. McKendrick started wetting his lips again, over and up, over and up. “Fancy Clarke is not a Painchton girl,” he said.

“Yes, she is,” said Keiko. “Whether you like it or not. Everything she loves is here, Mr. McKendrick, just like you.”

“Could she do it?” he said.

Keiko tried not to think of Fancy putting her head between her knees to stop herself from fainting at the thought of her lessons, tried to see Fancy walking into the workshop. She would surely do it if she could.

“She could do it if she had to,” Keiko said, which was not the same thing at all.

_____

Fancy's voice on the phone was groggy, and she whimpered at Keiko's urgent tone.

“What is it now? It's one o'clock in the morning, Keeks. Tell me tomorrow.”

“Get Viola up and go downstairs to the back lane,” said Keiko. “Mr. McKendrick is coming to get you.”

“Mr. McKen—”

Keiko put down the phone and nodded to Mr. McKendrick, hovering at her elbow.

He was gone and back, with Fancy tiptoeing behind him, wide-eyed over the bundle of blankets, before Keiko had finished closing the bedroom curtains and getting the bed ready. Fancy laid the little girl down, kept her hand on her shoulder until she was back in deep sleep, and then crept out to join the others.

Perhaps it helped that she hadn't been in Painchton at the time, but Fancy stood up to it better than Keiko could ever have hoped. Only her constant glances over her shoulder to the back corner of the house, towards the lane, the pink workshop, and what lay inside it, told them that she was anything but calm. Keiko did not spare any details, simply laid out the facts in a clear voice, like a teacher.

“So,” she said, finally, “we need your help. Because you understand how the bones and muscles fit together and you'll be able to sort out and rearrange the parts of Mr. Byers's body.” She looked straight into Fancy's face as she spoke, thinking that perhaps if Fancy was going to faint, they could make it happen now and get it over with.

“What about fingerprints?” said Fancy in a whisper.

“There's going to be a fire,” Keiko reminded her.

“Oh yeah.”

Mr. Kendrick pulled his watch out of his pocket and looked at it, tapping the back softly with his fingernails, thinking hard. Then he dropped it back and put his arm along the back of Fancy's chair.

“We should aim to get it started by three, get a good couple of hours' burn in the dead of night before anyone raises the alarm if we're lucky.” Fancy didn't move, so Mr. McKendrick cleared his throat and tried again. “We better get started, lovey.” This time she shot to her feet before he had finished speaking.

Mrs. Poole also rose. “I'll get you some things from downstairs,” she said, and when Fancy frowned her misunderstanding, she went on: “Boots and an overall, dear. Gloves.”

Mr. McKendrick guided both of them out of the kitchen with a hand at their elbows, and Keiko and Malcolm sat in silence until they heard the front door open and close, then he took his hand away and rubbed his face slowly, the scrape of stubble against his palms sounding as though he was grinding sand into his skin. When Keiko couldn't stand it any longer, she reached across and pulled his hands away.

“You said you didn't know about Tash,” she said. “But you don't seem shocked.”

“I think I'm just … I'm trying … I thought I understood him.” He paused, scanning the air above her head as though watching a slide show passing there.

“Tell me what you thought you understood,” Keiko said.

“I don't know anything about it, not really,” said Malcolm, “but I don't think anyone starts out bad.”

“Of course they don't. Tell me.”

Malcolm heaved a great, shuddering sigh, deep enough almost to sound like a moan in the back of his throat.

“He's younger than me,” he said. “Three years. And that's a lot. Should have been a lot, anyway, except Murray was so quick, such a bright spark, I think they forgot he was just a baby. And when I was eight and he was five, something happened. It can't explain tonight—no way it could even begin to—but it's just what you said about the pig, you see.”

“What
I
said?” said Keiko.

“It used to be that a family butcher would do all their own pig-killing. That's why there's a slaughterhouse. Somebody would bring in a pig, and we'd see to it for them. Or if a farmer wanted beef for the family, we'd go out to the farm and kill the beast ourselves, bring it back here to dress it. That was before my time, really though. By the time Mum and Dad had us, it was all beginning to stop, but Dad decided we should see a pig-killing, just once before it was too late.”

“What happened?” said Keiko.

“Well, this old boy had a baconer he wanted done. It didn't bother me too much. I mean, I wouldn't get it out on video, you know. But it was interesting. Also me being me, I stood where Dad told me to stand, and Murray being Murray, he was right in there darting about getting in everybody's way, so he was round at the front, in close, when Dad cut its throat.”

Malcolm remembered—had never been able to forget—the pig squealing and twisting and then the sudden silence and the still, hanging weight after the first cut, the split second before the blood gouted out of the neck wound.