Cold to the Touch

by Fyfield, Frances

  Jessica was dead. Someone she had loved was horribly dead, and there was nothing she could do about that except deal with it in her own time. Better get on and do what she could for the living. She had often mourned her own ice-cold objectivity, the fact that she was at her most clear-sighted when she was manic, the fact that she simply could not fall to pieces.

  There had been enough grief in her life for her to know that, so she put the image of dead Jessica from her mind, knowing that it would return. For the moment, anger and energy was what she had to offer.

  Sarah Fortune had always cared for dogs, but this one was stuffed unceremoniously into the old freezer in the cottage, such a big freezer that it must have come from someone else. A bargain buy, a giveaway, too big for the space. Then she ran back, because this time it did not matter if she was seen running back. She paused in sight of the butcher’s and saw Sam Brady standing outside. No sign of a policeman yet. Traffic was beginning to flow. The great dustbin lorry was coming down the main road, cars building up behind it and a police car in no particular hurry at the rear. They made a small, impatient carnival procession.

  She looked back to the street where she lived. Dream gone, long gone, a nightmare place. Then she looked downhill, saw in the distance, just turning the corner, Mrs Hurly, pushing her baby buggy uphill.

  No.

  Sarah grabbed the mobile phone in her pocket, looked at it. Wrong phone, Jack Dunn’s phone, never mind. She had even charged it up for him, what a kind person she was. She dialled Andrew’s number. He answered.

  ‘Listen, Andrew, Mrs Hurly will be level with your house in about a minute. Get out there, distract her, do anything, but stop her. Just stop her. Just stop her.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mrs Hurly did not stop. She had been reading one of his old books last night. Mr Hurly had owned a library of books devoted to the history of butchery and The Worshipful Company of Butchers who had never let him become a member.

  Before killing of any beast or bird; namely to make it tenderer if it be too old, and how to make the best relish, Petrocles affirmed that a lion being shewed to a strong bull three or four hours before he be killed causeth his flesh to be as tender as the flesh of a steer: fear dissolving his hardest parts and making his very heart to become pulpy . . . perhaps also for this cause, old cocks are forced to fight with their betters before they are killed.

  Old cocks should fight, anyway; old women, too, but they should not pick on weaklings. She was not going to stop. The traffic was piling up behind her and the traffic coming the other way was stalled by the rubbish lorry. Refreshed and belligerent but also humble after a long talk to the priest the day before, her authority was restored and early in the morning, sick of the sight of the view through her window, she was going to Sam Brady’s to have it out with him about the rudeness and violence inflicted on her and also to apologise for causing it. Then she was going to discuss the rumours and ask for help. She was feeling old and tough, tender as pulp beneath. She was going to change: she was full of hope. When Andrew Sullivan came out of the vicarage she waved him aside with a determined smile and ploughed on uphill until she was level with the hairdresser and the butcher’s front next door. Sam saw her first and ran back indoors. She followed him in.

  Sarah waved at Andrew, beckoning him on. Misunderstanding the gesture, he waved cheerfully and went back inside his own gate. The traffic began to unscramble and the sound of a police siren began to predominate above anything else. Sarah darted in front of the rubbish lorry and round the back of the shop. Flat above shop. That’s where she took them.

  So many secret places in this village. There was a small alley at the side, leading to the back door and the garden, a proper overgrown garden with beds for tangled herbs, half cultivated, half wild. Ingredients for sausages, perhaps. There was a growth of fennel and wild garlic here that might have blown in from the beach. There was a set of unsteady wooden steps attached to the side of the building, rising from the rubbish bins and the outside lavatory in the backyard next to the rear exit. Sarah trod carefully. The door at the top of the steps yielded to a shove, although it stuck a little, just like the back door at home. She pushed it open to reveal an attic space with good enough headroom for a six-foot man in the centre, sloping away to the sides where there would be space only for midgets. It could have served as a roomy bedsitter, currently a wreck, with a plastered ceiling adorned with patches of damp around the dormer window in the roof. The window faced back towards the garden behind. The existence of this private space was invisible from the outside, like so much else in this village.

  Daylight stole through the dormer window and another small window in the back wall. A shelf beneath held a kettle, a few dirty mugs in a tiny sink and a packet of Rizla papers. A tap dripped. She could see two mattresses on the floor, a miniature fridge suitable for a caravan, and not much else apart from a plethora of beer cans, ashtrays and other rubbish that filled in the corners of the view. There was a rucksack in one corner, visible beneath a yellow fluorescent jacket, signs of recent occupation, a certain warmth to the place which had nothing to do with spring, and a dank cannabis smell. That was all she noticed, with her feet sounding loud on the thin stained carpet of the floor – until she heard the screams from below.

  Sarah guessed the source, although the sound was still shocking. The place where she stood was immediately above the back of the shop. The sound insulation was nil. The screams went on and on and on. She could decipher nothing but screams, descending and ascending into words; the words no more than word-sounds against the cacophony of screams. I know who did this – where’s Jeremy?There were other sounds, too, such as footsteps below, echoing back up here, announcing the presence of other feet, other presences. Screams muffled into accusatory sobs. She could find it in her heart to feel pity for Celia Hurly, forcing her way in on the one day she should have stayed at home.

  Sarah scuttled back down the steps, shutting the door behind her, then out through the alley and back into the traffic jam.

  A single police car had pulled onto the apron outside the shop. She joined the small crowd that had gathered around it. As they watched, the shop door opened and a man in uniform burst out clutching his throat and vomited onto the road.

  Sarah went to fetch the vicar. Mrs Hurly would need him now.

  PC Chapman was never going to eat meat again. He was remembering the sausages he had eaten from here, wondering what they were made of, what they had touched before he’d eaten them, greedily, with fried eggs and chips while telling his wife about a man and his dog. There had never been a corpse like this, because he felt he might have eaten part of her and because of the colours of her, blue nail varnish, black hair, bloodless, inhuman and still a woman who shamed him with her dead nakedness and left him standing in front of a crowd, wiping vomit from his chin, looking down at his shoes, remembering what he had said when he’d seen her hanging, what he had done. He had walked towards that vision, that corpse. ‘Are you in?’ he had said. ‘Are you in?’

  He ignored the growing crowd and sat in the car to radio in all services, to say no, it was not a practical joke. Doctor, ambulance, forensics, Health and Safety – it’s a meat shop, right? He could feel bile in his throat. A face staring at him through the window made him angrier still. He slammed his way out of the car, got out the incident-scene tape and began to cordon off the area, ignoring everyone and refusing questions. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’, kicking a dog that came to sniff at his heels. The pool of vomit remained as a recrimination containing evidence only of breakfast. He went back into the shop for sawdust, remembered the training that never prepared anyone for reality. Bugger contaminating the crime scene, if that’s what it was; it was contaminated already. The whole bloody place had the plague.

  Once back inside, PC Chapman was aware of a greater dereliction of duty, because others had got inside to further disturb the sawdust on the floor. There was a red-haired woman, standing qui
etly next to Sam Brady, talking softly, and alongside a bloke in a dog collar, wringing his hands, for fuck’s sake. The door of the chiller was closed. Sam Brady turned bloodshot eyes upon him, raised his hands in despair.

  ‘I had to shut her in,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t stop.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’

  PC Chapman tugged at the handle on the door and yanked it open.

  Inside, the old woman stood, embracing the corpse by the waist, dragging it down with her own weight. That was as far as she could reach. He could swear the painted toes of the thing were now curled. The old lady was shivering and crying. He looked up to see if the hook still held.

  It did.

  This time he fainted.

  A thoroughly contaminated crime scene. Everyone had laid hands on that body, even the red-headed woman who detached the old woman from it. Mrs Celia Hurly shrank from any contact with a man, but submitted to the embrace of a small, slender female half her size.

  Celia Hurly was back in her white-painted room with the endless view of the sea and the sky. She was very cold, but snuggled in beneath an eiderdown in a white cotton nightdress. Her arms were free, and lay by her sides. The only colour in the room was the red hair of the person who sat on one side of the bed and the hideous shirt of the man on the other. Celia was responding to orders, dictating something, and the red-haired one was writing it down. She had the dim sensation that the people at her bedside were arguing, whilst she remained the centre of attention. One of them was cruel and one of them was kind: they had different agendas and that did not matter much. Celia felt as if she was swimming and talking at the same time. When she had come here first, still half a girl herself, she had loved paddling in the cold sea in summer. Outside, the sky was blacker than black.

  Words came back. Write it all down in your own words, Celia, love. Write your own statement. Makes it easier in the long run, and I need to know.

  What do you want to know?

  Facts. If we write them down now, we can keep the police away from you. Let you tell things in your own words.

  Statement.

  My name is Celia Hurly.

  I was born in 1943. I married Edwin Hurly in 1972, in London. We had one daughter, Jessica, born when I was forty.

  My husband was a wholesale butcher by trade, a rich one by the time I married him. I was a cook. (No, all right, that isn’t strictly true. I did a bit of cooking, and a lot of tarting around, looking for the right man. I wanted the sort you would meet in a boardroom.)

  I did well marrying him, we were in love with one another. He was a magnificent man. I adored him.

  We came here, I don’t know when. He wanted to prove he was king of the village where he grew up as a poor butcher’s boy. He told me he was raised on rabbits and pigeons and fish in the war years and the years of rationing afterwards. He bought half the village and the abattoir in Ripley, prices were nothing then. We became unhappy, he didn’t do happy, he was only happy when he had a project and he went away a lot, but he got his own back, whatever that means, and I played Lady of the Manor, the way you could, and he wanted a son, he wanted a tribe, and it never happened. He had Jeremy. There might have been others: who could resist him? I couldn’t. He had children that were not mine, but Jessica, she was mine, she really was mine, was ours, and we had a purpose, until she grew up. I was too old for a child.

  A woman should work, you know. You have to have some power outside the home.

  Odd, for a man whose fortune came from beef, that he should so prefer fish. Maybe he just loved catching things. He loved the sea.

  That was how he died. He hated this place once he had conquered it. He could never conquer the sea. It would never let him.

  ‘How did he die?’

  Away from home. He died when he was deep-sea fishing in South Africa, he went every year. A storm, an accident, something. They sent back his ashes to be buried in the graveyard here. Jessica was fourteen.

  ‘Enough,’ another voice said. ‘Enough.’

  Celia felt sleepy.

  The second voice asked another question. ‘Is that when Jessica started to go wild?’

  She was always wild. Wilful. She would never believe he was dead. She thought he had gone because of her. Then she blamed the boats, because he loved the boats. She was always trying to burn her boats. Can I have some water?

  ‘Yes, whatever you want. When did she finally leave?’

  She left to go to college, but she came back most weeks to make more mayhem. I got her counselling, she screwed that up, big time, everything. Then she got angry with everyone. She set fire to the boats. Three years ago. I haven’t seen her since.

  She kept her lovely hair, didn’t she? Does your hair keep on growing after you’re dead?

  ‘There, there, you can sleep now.’

  You’re the one who kicked me. Why are you holding my hand? Don’t go away. Don’t go away. I sent her away, God help me.

  Jeremy did it, you know. I told THEM that. Jeremy gave her nits. Jeremy always wanted what she had. Only Jeremy could do this. He knows I hate him. He reminds me of my failure.

  ‘Don’t you think this was very cruel?’ Andrew Sullivan said, looking down at the sleeping figure in the all-white room.

  ‘Necessary.’

  He regarded Sarah with something like distaste.

  ‘You’re such a cold fish, and yet you seem so warm. You’re cold and calculating and manipulative.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Why did you do this?’ he asked angrily. ‘Why did you volunteer to take her home and put her to bed, and hold her hand and then cross-examine her?’

  Sarah ushered Andrew out of the room and downstairs. He spoke in stage whispers that sounded loud. It was a small and Spartan house, a strange place for the once lady of the manor to live. They moved into the book-lined living room flanking the front door. The wind was up again, disturbing the plush red velvet curtain, drawn half across the door, which moved slightly despite its own weight. An emphatically unmodernised house, low on comfort, albeit beautifully placed for a view of the sea, but a bolt-hole rather than a home and not a place to live alone.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, adoring Sarah and almost disliking her at the same time. She was so at home in here, so much at home everywhere; she knew no barriers. She was moving from the book-filled room to the kitchen at the back, then back again after making more of the endless tea they had drunk, as if it were her own house and she had been here before. It seemed grossly impertinent to him and he was wishing he had not been included. There was food in the fridge, mainly meat, which neither of them wanted.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone else volunteering to take Mrs Hurly home,’ Sarah said. ‘Or wait with her, or get her to take the tranquillisers the doctor gave her. Or sit with her, and stay with her. I merely wished to be useful. I’m happy to stay the night. I know you don’t want to.’

  Andrew shivered. She had nerves of steel.

  ‘But to question her like that, when she’s full of brandy and valium, wasn’t that cruel?’

  ‘Precisely the right moment to do it. I meant it when I said it would save time. She’ll be questioned by the police tomorrow or the next day. If there’s something to present to them in a statement form, however rudimentary, it’ll make it easier. Besides, she can hardly suffer more at the moment. It’ll be far worse tomorrow, or the next day, and all the other days to follow. She’ll start lying again. I wanted to get her when she couldn’t, when she was beyond it.’

  ‘I’m told she was a kind woman, once.’

  ‘She probably was. Bitterness is a disease. There could have been a breakdown.’

  Andrew was looking round the cold room that was full of books and draughts, the distillation of a bigger house into a smaller one, cluttered with stuff. He noticed photos framed in tarnished silver and felt ashamed. They featured a younger Celia Hurly, with an uncanny resemblance to the beauty he had seen in the crumpled photo of yesterday. There were other photos of
a man, holding aloft a large dead fish and looking happy in his achievement. A photo of Mr Successful Hurly outside a subfusc factory building, holding on to a SOLD sign, celebrating the sale of it. The abattoir, perhaps. There were also photos of young Jessica in fancy dress, young Jessica naked, and none whatever of all three of them together. There was a disused fireplace, and a desk with a brand new laptop still wrapped in polythene. Andrew shuddered like a dog shaking off water. At this point in time, he and Sarah did not understand one another. He wanted to go.

  ‘Did you really mean you’ll stay with her? Stay all night, I mean. I was just wondering, why?’

  Sarah was angling one of the photographs, making it straight. Although she was so colourful, she melded in anywhere, like a shadow, taking in the colours of the walls, moving at her own pace, to her own tune, which was sometimes harsh, sometimes musical. She leant forward, examined another of the photographs.

  ‘Because no one else wants to. You don’t, no one else does, I don’t either, but I shall. Your turn in the morning. She mustn’t be left alone – she saw her own daughter dead, recognised her as instantly as I did, and no mother deserves that. So I’ll sleep over. I’ve brought my stuff, so go home and don’t worry. I shan’t be murdering her. I’ll just sit by her side in case she wakes up. Read some of these old books.’

  Andrew hesitated. He was hesitation incarnate, somehow failing in duty, but above all he wanted to go away and pray. He rose to his feet, without grace.

  ‘If you insist,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll insist if it helps. Just for the night. Tomorrow her friends take over.’

  ‘Such as they are,’ he said.

  So the pastor went with relief, leaving someone else to do pastoral care.

  Later Sarah went upstairs and watched her sleeping charge. Wanting to wake her and ask more questions, such as why are there no Hurlys in the graveyard? Her own hands were as cold as ice. She warmed them on the ancient hot-water bottle she had unearthed in the kitchen, before placing it at Celia’s feet and tucking the sheet round the woman’s shoulders to ward off the draught from the window. What was a rich and not yet very old woman doing, living in a small house, sleeping in such a Spartan room with draughty windows? As if the bleak view was her punishment, or an antidote to grief.