Come to Harm

by Catriona McPherson

  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 Fanc
y 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.

  “The old guy—Marsh, that was his name! Pete Marsh—he was at the other side, cutting out the gut. You cut round and grab it before it drops into the belly and then you keep a hold of it till you’ve opened the underside and strip the whole gut out at once. That’s the trickiest bit, to stop the guts spilling into the meat and spoiling it, but there’s no need for it all to be done so quickly. That’s the thing. There was no need for him to be at it already before Dad was finished at the throat. But I think it must be some kind of a … you know? To get the guts out, get the dirt away from the carcass before it’s hardly dead?”

  He closed his eyes and saw again Murray shrieking, backing away from his father and the fountain of blood.

  “And he got under Marsh’s feet and Marsh let go of the gut end, so then Murray tried to get out of the way of that and put his foot in the blood bucket. By this time he was squealing his head off, and it sounded exactly like the pig when they were lifting it.” Malcolm stopped for a couple of breaths, remembering, and then went on in a harder tone.

  “All I could think about was getting Murray out of there and getting him cleaned up, and maybe if my father had left Marsh and the pig and taken Murray away in to Mum for a cuddle, he might have been okay. But Dad got angry. Mr. Marsh too. I think Dad was mad with himself for not having the sense to know that Murray was too young, but it was Murray he shouted at. Shaking him and shouting at him. And Marsh must have been angry with my father for letting his kids muck everything up—the carcass was completely ruined—and he was shouting too.

  “So they’re both really giving it some and Murray’s screaming and skidding about, covered in blood and pig dirt and bile—it maybe sounds like nothing now, but—”

  “It sounds horrific,” said Keiko. “Poor little boys, both of you.”

  “I was all right,” said Malcolm. “I was eight, not five. I could have done something.”

  “You mustn’t say that. You mustn’t think that way. It was up to your father to—”

  “Well, anyway, Dad took him by the scruff and yanked him upstairs here, and then he starts shouting at Mum saying how she’s turned him into a sissy, and she starts yelling back about the mess traipsed up into the flat. It was the worst row they ever had, and I’m sure Mum must have been against letting us see the slaughter in the first place. That’s why she was so angry and how come Dad was shouting his head off at her. For being right, you know?”

  Keiko nodded.

  “They still weren’t speaking by the time we went to bed that night. We could hear my dad scrubbing away at the slaughterhouse and my mum trying to get the footprints off the hall carpet, so when Murray had a nightmare there was no way I was going to get either of them. I took care of him myself. Tried to anyway.”

  “Just that first night?” said Keiko.

  Malcolm shook his head. “That was my big mistake,” he said. “My pare
nts never mentioned it again, not a word, as if it never happened. And so I never told them how bad it was at nighttime.”

  “They never said sorry to Murray?” Keiko asked him.

  “They never said anything. And anytime they had a wee row about something, Murray would run away and hide, shaking. And I never told them about that either. I just tried to take care of it. Every night, I tried. When he had the bad dreams I used to get into his bed and tell him stories. No animals, no fighting or shouting, or shooting or swords, nothing to do with eating or dying. Nothing with smells.” Malcolm gave a short laugh. “It doesn’t leave much,” he said.

  “I used to tell him stories about Robotland. One about a robot who lived at a junk heap and used to fix up all the old beds and fridges and sell them to the other robots to save up his money and build a space rocket and fly away to the moon.”

  “Ah,” Keiko said.

  “And I know you’re going to tell me he must have been headed the wrong way all along,” Malcolm said. “You’re going to say one day couldn’t cause …”

  “Of course it could,” Keiko said. “That one day and all the silence afterwards.”

  “I know,” said Malcolm. “I should have told them.”

  “I didn’t mean your silence,” Keiko said. “You were eight, Malcolm. You were a child.”

  “I should have told them,” Malcolm said again. “But eventually, the nightmares tailed off. Probably he got used to telling himself his own stories, and when he got his first motorbike and started learning how to fix it up, they stopped altogether. He was too young to get a licence to ride it, and he used to get laughed at, but that didn’t bother him. He had the slaughterhouse and the bikes, and he seemed fine.

  “Anyway, Dad was still determined he would come into the shop and start his apprenticeship, go to college one day a week—meat processing, hygiene, health and safety—same as I had done when I was sixteen. And as far as Mum and Dad were concerned there was no reason why not. I don’t suppose they had thought about that pig for years. And, funnily enough, Murray seemed okay about it too. I tried to bring it up with him one night in the summer when he’d just finished school. I thought if we both went to Mum and Dad together we’d persuade them that Murray could go his own way. But he said he had no problems with it. He had worked it out and he wanted to show me. He invited me in to see.