Cold to the Touch

by Fyfield, Frances

  For Andrew Sullivan, it was the saddest of all things to see a few of the older village men leading a posse of policemen down into the lee of the cliff to find the places where they had once played hide-and-seek. They were looking for a place where a body might have been slaughtered, hung, bled dry and left undiscovered for two days. It had to be the older ones who led the hunt: it seemed that the younger ones no longer played in the same way and were not encouraged to explore on their own. They sat indoors in front of TV screens, or were taken to places in cars. Only a few volunteers had turned up for the delayed search. They consisted of the historian, and seven others who had once been Boy Scouts. The only upside of the murder had been a record church attendance on Sunday, where the police had used the occasion to plead for further information.

  Andrew followed behind the search, feeling redundant. He was ashamed of his own ignorance of the place. He had never been interested enough in the details, took his mandatory exercise along favourite routes without much deviation or curiosity. Not only did he not know where to look, he had no faith in the search itself.

  Sam Brady was also part of the ragged team. The ice houses had still existed, if only just, when he’d been a boy. He had no faith in this search either, but he had to join it because to refuse to do so would be suspicious and he was not beyond suspicion himself. He thanked his own God for the fact that there were other witnesses to the fact that the body could only have arrived overnight on the night when it did, otherwise, in the absence of Jeremy, there would only have been his word for it. Sam was also grateful for the fact that Sarah had taken away the dog. She was right: the dog would have damned him as a pervert.

  They had searched for three days in what seemed like a desultory fashion. It had been a game at first, but all games must have winners and losers, and here there were only losers, so it became dull. The search went further afield in daylight hours only. After dark, everyone went home, locked their doors and drew their curtains close against the wind. Maybe they prayed.

  They should have been searching at night, if they had either the sense or the courage, Andrew thought. At nighttime the fugitives were as free as birds. The night was their ally. The night would allow them to sabotage whatever was found. They were safe at night. The night was their territory and they had allies.

  Something was found. Namely, a shallow grave, recently dug, containing the half-frozen body of a dog, carefully wrapped in a sheet, buried with respect. Sam Brady kept his mouth firmly shut in public. Then there was disappointment, because this, after all, had nothing to do with anything. It was only a dog and people buried dogs.

  ‘But it has everything to do with it, you see,’ Sam said to Andrew. ‘It proves they’re still around. They’re right in the frame because they were in the flat above the shop the night when Jessica was put in the chiller. They never drove off anywhere, the van was left, they’ve nowhere else to go. They’ve had plenty of time to bury the dog nicely. Look, vicar, let me tell you about the dog. I need to confess.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything on your conscience, Sam, I really don’t.’

  They had taken to sitting in the still half-painted drawing room of the vicarage in the evening. Sam had retreated there, weeping, after the police had removed every ounce of stock from his shop and sealed it. It was like another death. It all felt as if it was his own fault and his wife could not understand how he could have been so clumsy to let such a thing happen.

  Grief, shock and anger combined into a kind of fog through which he struggled to find any kind of view at all. Surprisingly, the vicar helped; Sam had never been a person who’d thought he would consult a pansy vicar, but Andrew was all right, really. Wine and beer eased the passage. They had even laughed about Celia Hurly, confessing to each other that they were afraid of her. Sam did not want to go home and Andrew did not want to do his duty and go downhill and speak to Mrs Hurly again before tomorrow. He would have to do it then: he was under orders. Curtains were drawn. A summer’s evening was a distant dream.

  A reckless fire flickered in the fireplace. The chimney worked after all. Andrew had begun to use some of the hated furniture for kindling. One of the uglier rotting chairs that he had dismembered in a fury burned merrily in the hearth. Sam stretched his legs towards it.

  ‘You never knew Jack Dunn, did you? Well, no, of course not. Feckless bugger, too much cannabis and no dad, adored Jessica for a while, one of her regulars. He came and went and finally rented one of the Hurly cottages, the one Sarah has, and oh, I wish she’d come back. Anyway, Jack had this bitch mongrel and he called it Jess, out of sentiment, because he liked repeating the name. Loved it and neglected it, you know? The way blokes do with wives. A bloke can be crackers about his woman without having the faintest idea how to treat her. The bitch was demented. He left it alone when he went to work: he got drunk, she got out, didn’t behave, how could she? A cur dog, really, too clever by half. Wrong temperament – I’m telling you, vicar, if you ever get a dog, and you should, by the way, don’t get any kind of sheepdog like that. They need too much, they’re too fucking bright. Pack animal needs a leader. It bit a couple of the kids, but it was a sweet thing really, if you knew what to do. If you let it lick your hand.’

  He coughed in embarrassment. The comparisons between the canine Jess and the human Jessica Hurly were all too real.

  ‘Jack left her with Mrs Hurly when he went away. In lieu of rent or something. Left her tied up on the doorstep, thinking she’d take care of her because of the name. I don’t know if he asked first, but Mrs H. shut her out, and then she went a bit mental. She was roaming around for weeks and no one could catch her, not even Jeremy until he found her.’

  Andrew shuddered and looked towards the closed curtains. Sam took a huge handful of nuts and shoved them down his throat.

  ‘He was after rabbits with his air rifle when he found her. Someone else had shot her with a shotgun – she was full of holes, he told me. She was starving and wounded, dying in pain, so he killed her properly. Kindest thing to do. He finished her off and laid her out on the road in the warm. It’s always warmer on the road in the morning. He wanted it to look as if someone had run her over, because he’d be blamed for the shooting, although he’s not the only one out there hunting rabbits at night, and quite a few people wanted that bitch dead, but he’d be blamed anyway. Only it was me who found her next. I was coming back from the abattoir about five, saw her on the road, stopped in time. I always drive slow when I’ve got a load. I knew who she was, so I took her home, dressed her nicely, shrink-wrapped her and put her in the chiller. She was a lovely thing, really, and I reckoned that if Jack ever came right he’d want to bury her. Jeremy, too. Closure and all that. You got to give an animal respect, even when it’s dead. Part of my code. We always bury animals. I’ve got two of my old dogs out in the garden.’

  Andrew reached for the wine. Sam had a good taste for the stuff and Sam would need a taxi home.

  ‘I don’t get it. He’d be content for the poor bitch to be squished on the road, and then he’d want to bury it?’

  Sam shrugged. He could see nothing inconsistent in that. Andrew shook his head, trying to clear it.

  ‘But where did they get the dead dog from?’

  ‘Sarah’s freezer, I expect. They can do what they want after dark. No one’s watching then.’

  Andrew was still puzzled. He was angry with Sarah for defecting, as he saw it, both from them and from Mrs Hurly with whom she had formed a strange and unlikely liaison in the course of a day. But he appreciated what she was doing insofar as he understood it and he was answering everything she asked by e-mail in a spirit of trust. If she was convinced that Jessica had been killed in London, of course she had to do what she did, because no one else could, but he still had the disappointment of a man half in love and who has been left. Celia Hurly, thank God, wanted little company other than that of the mad, deaf woman who fed the birds outside her house. He went every afternoon, often armed with Sarah�
�s questions. Andrew wished he believed in God’s ultimate deliverance rather than having to believe in the vagaries of human nature. He too found himself wanting to confess.

  ‘I wish Sarah would come back. She reckons she needs a week. Why do I think she knows it all? Why do we listen to her and to no one else?’

  ‘Because she phones us and e-mails us and we do whatever she says? Because no one else makes sense? Because she took away the dog? No, because no one else is making any sense. I don’t believe Jeremy would kill Jessica. Why would he?’

  ‘For fun? To finish off humanely what someone else had begun? For a game? Because she wanted to be killed and they obliged? At the very least, they were in the flat upstairs from the shop when the body arrived, so they must have known.’

  Andrew was not convinced, but he was willing to be persuaded.

  ‘Not if they went out shooting rabbits and not if they were drunk, stoned and dead to the world. They wouldn’t notice a thing.’

  ‘Have the police got on to Sarah yet?’ Andrew said.

  ‘No, but they will. They’ve only just cottoned on to the fact that she knew the dear deceased. And Jeremy. And lived in Jack Dunn’s house. I had to tell them that.’

  ‘What a bloody mess.’

  Sam lumbered to his feet.

  ‘Let’s paint a fucking wall,’ he said.

  ‘You know how you think you know the truth about anything,’ Sarah said, ‘and then you work out that knowledge is never complete unless you apply imagination. It’s imagination that squares the circle. That’s why we need stories.’

  ‘You mean no one knows the whole truth about anything, unless they fill in the gaps by making it up?’

  ‘Yes. You imagine the bits of the jigsaw you can’t see, and you’re very often right. Never dismiss your own imagination.’

  ‘You mean, like you don’t know half the details of my sordid past, but you can imagine the bits I either don’t tell you or tell you wrong. I’ll go along with that. And this Jessica, she told you stuff assuming you’d imagine the rest? Relied on you to imagine the rest? Can’t quite see where you’re coming from, doll – start again.’

  Sarah and Mike were outside Smithfield at two forty-five, inside by three a.m., the early hours of the morning. Mike looked as if he belonged and had been there for ever. He was wearing a hard hat that didn’t fit and an undersized white coat that looked as if it belonged to someone else. Sarah was similarly dressed, only both her helmet and her overall were too big.

  ‘We’re looking for a man. We’re looking for the man who Jessica was looking for when she came here one night about three months ago. A man she was in love with, was obsessed with. A man who owned or ran a restaurant, was a valued customer and who brought her here to Smithfield in the early hours of the morning, showed her off to other men in here. Perhaps he was trying to sell her? No, that’s fanciful. A buyer of meat, anyway, probably rich and powerful, a man who commanded respect in here. A man who could either give orders to or blackmail someone here. The same man who brought her here with pride, once, and then dumped her. A man she came to haunt, stalked him, even. There was one night she did that. I met her afterwards. She went to Smithfield to look for him, because she knew he went there early in the morning. She came to find him and couldn’t. Wrong time. I met her on the way home and she told me all about it, although not everything. I told her she was a fool and she should forget all about it. She said she’d been screaming in Smithfield and the men in white coats chucked her out. Like I said, I picked her up on the way home. She came back for breakfast.’

  Sarah paused. Mike listened intently.

  ‘I think this man hated her and he’s the most likely candidate to have killed her. He’s helped her once and then rejected her. She remained obsessed with him, full of revenge and something else. I believe her existence was a threat to him, or to his business. I know she went back to DK to make a scene.’

  ‘Gettit. You thought the man was the owner of Das Kalb, the posh dump? Simply because you could kill and bleed a person in that spotless kitchen without leaving a trace, because your kitchen was steam-cleaned every night? And you could make your drunken chef help you get rid of a few pints of blood?’

  ‘Sam reckons she was pretty well bled. And I think that’s what might have happened because she kept going back there. She haunted a place where he might be, although at the wrong time of night, and she haunted DK. Very bad for business. She’d gone there again: they made it up, then he left her, stood her up and made her cry, that was the last e-mail. He’d rejected her again. I reckon she went back. She thought about it, maybe, nursed the anger and then went back, because she hurt too much to leave it alone. I think that’s where she died and this could be where she was posted for redelivery.’

  ‘Definitely bad for business. It’d be a bit like screaming in church and telling them they were all going to hell. But the owner’s a bit old to be the demon lover, you said. Still plenty of gaps here.’

  ‘Like you said, Mike, you’re never too old. And he might not have been a Lover, just someone she loved obsessively and someone who was threatened by it; who comes shopping in here around three in the morning. That’s why we’re here. I wanted to see if this place was the way she described it. She called it a big unstoppable machine. A place where he was entirely at home.’

  The entry was via some old Mike contact, with another friend in the wholesale end. Got them a pass, coats and hats and left them alone. The pretence was a fact-finding mission. Smithfield men were proud of their ancient market. They did not mind visitors as long as they had a pass, wore the uniform and were not amongst the legion of Health and Safety officials who plagued their lives with EU regulations. Benign visitors could come and go, especially customers. They were perfectly capable of keeping their own secrets. Sarah was remembering stall fifty-five, the number on the invoices she had read in the restaurant, one of the numbers on Sam’s invoices, too. Stall fifty-five, suppliers to industrial concerns, large and small, butchers and restaurants, far, near and wide. No order too large or too small. Only the best.

  ‘I want to start on the outside,’ Sarah said. ‘I want to see how it works.’

  They began at the big gates that led into Grand Avenue. She admired these gates with their huge motifs of Tudor roses painted turquoise, pink and purple, strangely frivolous for such a businesslike place. Then they moved round the side. They watched a huge container lorry dock at an entrance, as if it was sealing itself to the building. The noise of engines was deafening: there were yelled instructions. Mike hoisted himself up onto the platform, held out his hand to hoist her up too. No one questioned their presence as long as they kept out of the way and wore their hard hats. They watched as two men unhooked beef carcasses from inside the lorry and then hooked them back onto a moving rail that transferred them down a wide corridor into the body of the building. The men wore gloves: the animal corpses were chilled to almost freezing: raw skin would otherwise stick to skin. Sarah followed the progress of the carcasses, Mike beside her, moving with them at a slow walking pace as they passed a weighing-in point that registered the weight and the number of each on a dial set in the wall. She was thinking that if there had been a human body offloaded and hidden amongst the rest, this would have been the first place it would have been seen. It would have weighed less than the others, but the system was automated and no one would have noticed yet. Walking along with the slightly swaying carcasses was like walking amongst a silent well-behaved crowd. Otherwise the noise was tremendous. The corridor was almost as dark as it was outside, full of echoing mechanical sounds, whirring and banging and shouting ahead. No one noticed them: there was no one to notice.

  The back of the stall was a cavernous room, filling up with the serried ranks of carcasses which followed a prescribed route via the overhead rails and lined themselves up in rows. It was less dark here but still gloomy and cold. Light made heat: judgement of quality was as much by touch as by sight. Workers wore sweaters and fleeces u
nder the white overalls and adjusted to it. Sarah shivered. They stood back and watched as the anteroom filled up, then they moved to the next room.

  It seemed as if there was some kind of race going on. There were men in a hurry, chopping, dismembering, dividing carcasses with practised ease and no time to spare. It all had to be sold, and sold soon. Smithfield had limited hours. Most meat was pre-ordered, needed quick preparation to meet the orders before being sent back, labelled and packed, down the corridor to the waiting delivery vans outside. Whole carcasses would go that way, too, if it was a whole carcass that had been ordered. There were pre-orders and orders arriving via computer and phone from the offices high upstairs. The activity was frantic.

  ‘Not all wholesalers work this way,’ Mike said. ‘They all do it different, but this one’s big business. One thing they’ve got in common is limited time – they keep strict hours. Come and see downstairs.’

  Sarah did not want to see, but she went downstairs with him anyway. Cold dungeons with freezer rooms and chilling rooms the size of garages. Notices announcing what was stored. Ox liver, oxtail, ox heart, lamb plucks, lamb tongues, lamb testicles. Chicken feet, sweetbreads, calf’s liver – words that swam before her eyes. She put her hand inside the neck of her sweater and felt the hook she wore around her neck. For luck.

  They went back upstairs and stood, unnoticed, in the cutting room. She was mesmerised by the skill of the butchers, the speed of work, the urgency, the shouted orders from the front. Meat came in and meat went out. She had an overpowering urge for a cigarette. She felt she had seen enough, but knew this was just the beginning. It was three-twenty in the morning.

  They were back in the room where the untouched carcasses hung silently, like girls in a beauty parade awaiting selection. Delivery was complete. Now it was all process. As they stood there, she with a clipboard in her hand to provide some authenticity, Sarah watched a white-coated man lead two other men into the room. An overhead light came on, illuminating them.