Come to Harm

by Catriona McPherson

  “Maybe she did both,” said Malcolm.

  “Yeah, but she kept the Byers bit quiet, didn’t she? And if she thinks there’s no cash to spare, that must mean they’ve struck a bargain about my workshop.” He caught hold of Keiko, pulled her close and kissed her on both cheeks, her wet hair forgotten. She tried to smile at him, but she was thinking about him saying this was a bad place for him and that he had to get away.

  “Great,” Malcolm said. “Mum’s rooked herself, the town plans are up the spout, and the homeless can forget their dinner on Christmas Day. Congratulations, Murray.” Before Murray could answer, he lumbered away.

  “Do you want the workshop?” Keiko said.

  “I need it for just a wee while longer,” said Murray. “Wait and see.”

  “Your mother seems very upset,” said Keiko.

  “She’s defied Jimmy and the Traders,” Murray said. “She’s probably terrified. Who wouldn’t be?”

  thirty

  Monday, 25 November

  Mrs. Poole did not look terrified, Keiko thought, as she watched her. She had cracked open the kitchen window to clear the rice steam, and she looked out when she heard the scrape of the slaughterhouse door. She saw Mrs. Poole emerging. The woman looked the same as ever: head down, shoulders slumped, plodding listlessly up the yard with her buckets.

  But something was different. It niggled at Keiko while she sat at her desk trying to concentrate, and it was only minutes before she was back again. There it was! Mrs. Poole hadn’t closed the door this morning when she was finished. It was still was ajar and that wasn’t all. Drifts of steam were curling out. Someone was in there.

  She let herself out and trotted down the stairs. Murray and Malcolm were nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Poole stood behind the counter, unsmiling.

  “What can I get you?” she asked Keiko. “Or if it’s Murray you’re after, he’s at home today.”

  “A hundred grams of lean beef for frying,” Keiko said. She couldn’t quite admit that she had come to ask questions of this woman, with her stony face. “What is Malcolm doing in the slaughterhouse?” she added. “He told me it was never used.”

  “Only on special occasions,” said Mrs. Poole. “The back shop does for most things, but this time of year Malcolm does things we don’t need to see.”

  What could she mean? Keiko thought. Malcolm described cleaning tripe and brought kidneys to trim as though it were a side-show. He played the skin on roasted meat like a snare drum and wanted to tell everyone the different ways of adding fat to a turkey. What worse thing could there possibly be?

  “On the other hand,” said Mrs. Poole, handing her the bag of meat, “you’re interested in food, aren’t you? Why don’t you go and watch? Save him coming up to the flat and trying to persuade you.”

  Keiko took the bag and left but paused outside her own door, then started off again. Up the street, right and right again at the top around the Bridge Hotel, until she was standing at the mouth of a narrow lane, bounded by the brick walls of the shop yards on one side and the stone walls of the big house gardens on the other. It was fringed with weeds at the edges but there was a well-trodden path down the middle that led in a straight line right to Poole’s Butcher, and she could see one lurid pink corner of Mr. Byers’s place at the end of the block. Still swinging the bag and with a fresh, out-for-a-morning-stroll look fixed on her face, she ventured off the pavement and into the shadows.

  The pattern of window and gate, window and gate repeated itself and she looked with interest as each pair passed. The peeling paint and cobweb-choked glass of the Bridge was followed by a wrought-iron gate and a newly glazed window belonging to the Imperiolo’s Chinese take-away, the Dragon Pearl, where a whirling fan blew steam from a funnel on the outbuilding roof, to be snatched away by the wind. She passed McLuskie’s Bakery with the morning wash of hats and oven mitts just visible on a clothesline, and then Mrs. Watson’s grocery, where the window was rubbed shiny even though the building was used only for storing boxes, and finally the back yard of the butcher shop. The spot in the wall where the little window should be was a square of newer bricks, looking faintly grotesque, like a blind eye sewn shut or a mouth taped over. The gate was closed, as she knew it would be—the padlock on the other side was visible from her windows—but she tried the handle anyway. It turned. She let go in surprise and watched as it continued to turn and the gate opened silently on oiled hinges.

  “Keiko,” said Malcolm. He neither advanced nor retreated but stayed planted on well spread feet, blocking the gateway completely. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m being nosy,” she said, thinking rapidly but stumbling over the words a little. “What are you doing? Your mother thinks I won’t want to see.”

  “Making hough,” said Malcolm.

  Keiko blinked at the unfamiliar sound, like a choked-off sneer. “What is hokko?” she said, doing her best with the sound.

  He didn’t answer, just smiled and beckoned her into the slaughterhouse.

  The little room had walls blindingly white, running with condensation, and the scrubbed painted floor was beaded with it too in the corners, slick and shining anywhere that Malcolm’s feet had been. The whole place was filled with steam, a few shapes rising out of it. She breathed out hard and slow and the air shifted, clearing her view, showing her a hulk of a grey metal stove with two rings and a work table of the same scoured plastic as the cutting benches behind the shop counter. Two huge high-sided pots of the same dull grey, as big as barrels, were bubbling on the stove; it was these giving off the lazy vapour. Keiko sniffed and the cocktail of smells made her dizzy. The steam was peppery and sweet, but there was new paint here too and strong soap, chlorine bleach, disinfectant—they mixed into something choking and pungent, unlike anything she had ever smelled before. She opened her mouth and drew the heavy air in that way.

  “Hough,” said Malcolm, with a declamatory sweep of his arm over the stove. “It’s a fair old guddle. Makes sense to use this place for it—keep the mess and heat out of the shop, eh?”

  She stepped up beside him and peered over the rim of one of the pots. Under the curling steam, a thin grey liquor spat up small bubbles to burst on its surface. She looked at him inquiringly.

  “It’s a plain enough dish,” he said. “Only it takes a good six hours, so it’s only worth it if you’re doing a load at once. Maybe that’s why it’s made at New Year’s, when a lot of folk are gathering.”

  “What is it?” Keiko asked.

  “Meat,” said Malcolm. “Beef traditionally, but it doesn’t have to be, boiled in water with a knap bone.”

  “Knap?” said Keiko.

  “Knee,” Malcolm told her. “The bone makes the jelly. You should have shreds of meat in a good clear jelly, set firm, but I’ve seen it made by folk who don’t know what they’re doing and it comes out cloudy, like a mousse.” He was warming to his subject.

  “This would be a very popular dish with the Japanese,” said Keiko, although she could not imagine ever eating a morsel of anything that smelled this way. “We’re not … silly about ‘eat this but don’t eat that.’ And texture’s very important in our cooking. Many of our greatest delicacies have a jellied texture.”

  “Is that right?” said Malcolm, stopping stirring for a moment to take this point in. “Well, the secret of a good jelly is nothing more than standing over it and skimming off the scum.” He swiped a flat, pierced ladle up in one fist and swirled it across the pan just under the bubbling surface. When he lifted it out again, it bore a mound of foam, streaked grey and brown and instantly forming a skin as it cooled. Malcolm tilted the ladle over a jug until the dollop of scum plopped in on top of what he had already gathered.

  Keiko swallowed and returned her attention to the cooking pots.

  “Yep,” said Malcolm, “it doesn’t matter what you make it with.” He peered into first one pot and then the other wi
th a rapt smile on his face. He was pressed hard against the stove, his stomach jutting out and filling the gap between the cooking pots and she could see the damp on his apron front where his chest bulged over their edges into the path of the steam. He turned slightly to include her in his grin. “It makes no odds at all what you make it with. As long as you’re willing to spend the time and skim the scum.”

  “And it’s a feast dish for the New Year?” she said. She was beginning to feel uneasy. Just the heat, probably. And the smell.

  “That’s right.” Then he gave an unhappy laugh that ended as a sigh. “But people are starting to lose the old ways. Getting more—what did you call it?—silly about what they’ll eat and what they won’t. And here’s another thing: sometimes I think they can’t appreciate food unless it’s expensive.”

  “Is hough cheap, then?” asked Keiko. “I would have thought it would be a great delicacy. If it has a whole knee bone in it.”

  Malcolm nodded again, very solemn as if weighing her words carefully, and gazed down into his pans, rivulets of what might have been either sweat or condensation running over the swell of his cheeks and dropping from his jaw.

  “It should be, eh? But knap bones are dirt cheap even though there’s only two to a carcass.”

  “Four,” said Keiko, without thinking.

  “No,” said Malcolm, still looking into the pan. “Just two.”

  Hot as she was, Keiko now seemed to feel the cold of the floor in her feet, tiles over stone. “But you said beef,” she said, the cold creeping up her legs, slowly.

  “No,” said Malcolm again. “I said meat. It can be beef.”

  “What—what is that?” The cold was rising farther through her body, washing the thought towards her head.

  He struck one of the pot edges with a dull clank, the sound driving out more of Keiko’s fading steamy stupor, forcing the knowledge up as far as her throat. “That’s beef in there right enough. But this one is a speciality of mine.” He plunged the ladle deep down into the other pot, dug it in under something, and started to lift it with both hands.

  Keiko was at the end of the yard before she heard the splash of it dropping back into the pan. She tried the gate to the yard next door and was into the back of Mrs. Watson’s shop, out through the front, up her own stairs, and crouched at the kitchen windowsill just in time to see Malcolm plod into the back lane. He stood for a minute or two with his hands on his thighs craning one way and then the other, wheezing, before he turned around and ambled back through the slaughterhouse door again.

  thirty-one

  Keiko rubbed at her eyes with bunched fists like a baby, trying to scrub out that picture of Malcolm heaving the weight up from the pot with both hands, barely aware through her sobs of a rhythmic cellophane crackle as she moved and a soft bumping against her chest from outside as well as in. Slowly though, as the stink and steam fell away and she came back to the cool kitchen floor and the quiet sweet air, it dawned on her that she still had the bag of meat she’d bought from Mrs. Poole clutched in her hand. She threw it away with a shriek and it skittered across the floor until it hit a table leg where it rested, letting out quiet rustles as the wet weight inside settled onto the lino with a serious of tiny relaxing shifts.

  A curious thing was happening inside her. While her body sank unstoppably down towards that sickness that had been waiting for her just below the surface all this time, her mind rose up out of itself and began calmly to sort through the jumble. It made her dizzy, this pulling apart of body and mind, but it was refreshing too, like looking up from small print to glance out of a window at a distant view.

  Malcolm had said it didn’t matter what you made it with as long as you took the time to skim off the scum. People here didn’t worry about horsemeat scandals, but they were losing the old ways. People like Pamela Shand were moving in, and Murray, who should have been one of their own, couldn’t be trusted, had to be kept at home and in the shop where his mother could watch him. And he wouldn’t tell Keiko what was wrong because she would never believe him.

  She stood up on shuddering legs and stumbled to the front door to double lock it. Murray was trying to get to the bottom of things, solve the puzzle, and meantime he worked hard every day—and made her work hard too—to stay skinny and safe, while Malcolm fed her suet and Mrs. Ballantyne fed her sausage and it didn’t matter what kind; it was the good big portions that mattered. And Mr. Dessing fed her haggis balls and puff pastry and it didn’t matter what was under the pastry, it was the presentation that mattered. And it made no difference what was in Mr. McLuskie’s bridies as well, since the pepper masked the taste of it. And Rosa Imperiolo knew that it was the batter that counted, no matter what you dipped in it to fry. And all of their wives and husbands on the committee, making the plans, were twisted up in knots with the knowing and waiting and couldn’t hide it. Couldn’t pretend they had no secrets eating away like rot inside them as she sat at their tables and they stuffed her, endlessly stuffed her, tamping the food into her gullet like grain into a goose for foie gras.

  And Mr. Poole knew. And what he knew had killed him. And his body wasn’t up there in the cemetery, in its grave, waiting for visitors. Because—oh God—bodies, once they were taken apart, were just bones and meat.

  And this flat, this flat that no one wanted her to ask about, this flat had never been empty, never been used just for meetings. Who could say how many people had lived here, hardly believing their luck—all the gifts, the friendly faces, the feasting? And now they had an ambitious international project. Something more exotic than Tash for them all.

  Tash. Murray kept her safe, but she left him and then she got fat and vanished. But Dina hung around him and got skinny and got away. And Nicole got away too, from the creep across the road. But Tash Turnbull got fat and was gone now, a foster child whom no one would search for.

  How many children had Mrs. McMaster fostered until they were big boys and girls of sixteen? How many of them had disappeared? Was Fancy the only one who had really run away? And why did she come back? How could she bring her baby back, if she kn—

  Keiko stopped pacing so abruptly that she swayed and had to take a steadying step. She was in the living room facing the fireplace, and she smiled at her grey face in the mirror. No. Fancy could not stand the thought that there was anything beneath her own skin, could not bear talk of a pierced navel, could not sit through an anatomy lecture even with her eyes shut. Fancy was no part of this.

  She took the sharpest knife from the rack in the kitchen and put it up her coat sleeve, holding it in place with the tips of two fingers, then she crept downstairs, leaving the door to her flat ajar in case they heard it shutting, steeled herself to get out of the street door and away. Away, away, away. She was passing on the far side of the Green before she let out her breath.

  Fancy’s front shop was empty, but the door to the back was open and she sang out as Keiko approached the counter, “Come through!”

  “It’s only me,” said Keiko.

  Fancy was kneeling at the foot of a tailor’s dummy pinning the hem of a red cloak. “Hiya,” she said, sitting back on her heels and smiling. “What do you think of this? Toxic, eh? It’s for Etta McLuskie to wear to help hand out presents at Christmas. I don’t know who she’s meant to be. Santa’s sister? Santa’s granny? Lady Provost of Lapland? There’s about a million elf costumes but oh no—What’s up?” she said suddenly. “What have I done now?”

  Keiko talked for half an hour to get everything out, her eyes wide and fixed on the floor. Then she raised her gaze to Fancy’s face, which was wooden and unreadable.

  “Do you feel sick?” Keiko asked.

  “Just a bit, yes,” Fancy said, through clenched teeth. “Can’t think why. Keiko, do you think I would have brought Viola back here if this wasn’t a good place?”

  Keiko knew her words were going to hurt, so she said them very quietly. “I see
how much you need to think that, and I’m sorry to take it away from you, but you’re not—after everything you’ve been through, you can’t be—a good judge of this place, these people.”

  Fancy’s jaw firmed again as she clenched her teeth back together. “Okay, I can’t deny that. I’m just a dumb bint that don’t know nothin’. I wondered when you’d realise you were too good for m—”

  But Keiko sprang out of her chair and took hold of Fancy by the elbows, the knife clattering out of her sleeve and falling to the floor, making her jump. “No!” she said. “You are the best, kindest … and the best mother and the best friend …” Both of them were fighting tears, their noses turning red.

  Fancy pushed Keiko back and addressed her again. “Listen to me,” she said. “It’s just not possible, Keeks. It couldn’t happen that so many people could all be bad all at once. Even if it started from one person, like from Malcolm, how could he persuade all those people to do something so disgusting and crazy?”

  “Little by little,” said Keiko. “Like he did with me. He’s easy to talk to and easy to listen to. It is as though he puts a spell on you until you find there’s no disgust and it doesn’t seem crazy anymore. It’s easy and comfortable, and that’s why he’s so dangerous.”

  Fancy pressed her hands to her face and then pulled them out to the sides, stretching her skin. “You’re dead wrong,” she said. “He’s easy because he’s a nice guy. He’s a bit weird about his job and he’s freaky to look at, but basically he’s a really nice person.” She looked at the knife on the floor and then back at Keiko with a lighter kind of exasperation. “Just because Murray’s the pretty one, it doesn’t mean Malcolm has to be a monster.”

  Keiko’s mind eddied back down to somewhere nearer her body where it belonged, but she shook her head, insisting. “Why would Malcolm say the carcass had two knees—I’m sorry!”

  Fancy shuddered, even at the second hearing. “They do have two knees! There’s only one animal in the world that has four knees.”