Cold to the Touch

by Fyfield, Frances

  ‘You’ve got work to do first.’

  Celia Hurly woke late and looked at the view through the window. A sky of brilliant blue with scudding clouds, bisected by the window frame. She closed her eyes to blot it out, disliking the invitation of a fine day. Good weather was demanding: it said get up and do something, clear the mind, use energy, you cannot sleep for ever.

  But she wanted to sleep for ever. She had been sleeping for years in a fog of regret.

  Soon everything would go back to normal. She would be a widow living in a village, sleeping as long as she liked, with enough income to live simply and enough mischief to entertain her, forgetting how her daughter had disgraced her and her husband had abandoned her long before he left to die that final time. No one wanted to go out in a boat with him: he had to go far away to fish from a boat. Tried to remember how she had loved it here. Perhaps when the summer came she would be able to love it again. Perhaps she would be able to walk on the cliffs without being mortally afraid of looking down. Perhaps she might be able to put her feet in the sea, because the worst, the very worst had happened, the event she had dreaded, and it might free her from her prison. Perhaps one day the image of her daughter’s body swinging on a butcher’s hook would begin to fade and allow itself to be replaced by the images in photographs and old videos of beautiful Jessica and her father holding a fish caught on a line from the shore. Images she had taken, lovingly, from which the taker was excluded. Perhaps God would help her now because she had been punished.

  She could hear footsteps coming up the stairs, slowly enough for her to turn her head into the pillow, close her eyes and pretend to be asleep. The door opened softly and she heard the steps approach the side of her bed. A hand caressed her shoulder gently and briefly, with the right amount of contact to reassure without intruding. A touch that said it doesn’t matter if you’re asleep, or if you’re pretending, I’m not offended either way. She could hear a cup of tea being placed on her bedside table and smelled the smell of it. Half deaf, only slightly demented Mrs Smith, friend of seagulls, knew how to make a cup of tea.

  ‘There, there,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘Sleep on. I’ll draw these curtains, shall I? Too bright out there. Oh and by the way, I’ve just remembered something. You know I told folk I’d seen Jessie? Well, they thought I meant your Jessica, but I didn’t, and what I meant was that I’d seen that poor wild bitch – Jess, it was called, or was it Jessie – roaming around and playing with that Alsatian from the pub, and then I realised it can’t have been. Ben Byrce shot her, weeks since, ’cos she bit his kid. Oh what a lovely day, just when we need a nasty one. Sometimes I hate fine days.’

  Again, that small caress to the shoulder, which went with the soft voice.

  ‘See you when you’re ready, love. You’ve always been a grand lady to me. Always kind. You just sleep, now.’

  Kind? Had she ever been kind? Yes. Celia waited for the slippered footsteps to go away and then opened her eyes. There was no view of the sea; only white curtains billowing round an open window. She tried to remember when she had last been kind. All she had ever done with old Maggie Smith was fail to yell at her for feeding seagulls, and yet the woman had stepped in with unfailing courtesy, stayed, made food and waited, a half-deaf ideal listener. She was so entirely without malice, as sensitive as a dove landing on a roof. The kindness was humbling. Celia wanted to copy it.

  The information had come as relief. Jessica had never come home alive. She had not come home and failed to knock on the door. Celia had not been denied the last chance to take her in. It had tormented Celia, that her daughter had been so close and not come closer. Celia Hurly cried and cried and cried. She had been kind to no one, and yet kindness had been forthcoming. She had not deserved it, but it had been there. Brutal kindness from Sarah Fortune, kindness of an unquestioning kind from Mrs Smith; flowers from people she did not know she knew, tokens and cards from people she thought despised her. It meant that she was going to have to learn to live.

  She stood on the window side of the bed and leant down to touch her own toes, just. Stretched her arms above her head, lifting her heavy bosom in the process. Lowered her hands and wept again.

  She wept for the child and for the dog.

  Maybe she might be able to be kind again. Maybe she had not lost the instinct. Accept. Forgive and pray to be forgiven. Find a child or a dog to rescue and, this time, honour it. Give up the anger that had sustained her. Let someone know her, if they were brave enough to try.

  Celia Hurly fumbled for the tea and drank it down.

  You have to be sure. You have to have confirmation, whatever kind. You have to eat lunch.

  It was Thursday, towards the end of a long week, when Sarah sat at the table nearest to the door of Das Kalb. She had booked for two, arrived by herself, ordered a glass of wine and a bottle of water while waiting for her companion. She read her newspaper for ten minutes, studied the menu, checked her watch, spoke into her mobile phone like a natural.

  The sommelier of that recent evening was not there: a waiter hovered. She explained that her friend was not turning up, could she order? She was not going to waste the opportunity of eating at DK, even if she had to pay for it herself. A salad to start, eaten slowly and precisely, to be followed by DK’s famous veal.

  Mostly the restaurant’s customers dined in twos, with regular lone diners at lunch, although none of the other loners were female. Definitely worse to be dining alone as a female and far more conspicuous, which was what Sarah intended. The veal arrived: she regarded it with trepidation. Her appetite was robust, diminished by shame that the animal on her plate should not have had a chance to grow up. She had made herself hungry enough to eat anything. Devoted to her food, acting the connoisseur, she watched objectively.

  The customers were decorous pigs at a trough, eating as if food were newly invented. Threading his way between them, elegantly for all his bulk, there was the gracious host, the big man stooping unobtrusively to request of the almost exclusively male diners ‘Is everything to your satisfaction?’ and receiving enthusiastic nods of affirmation. Sarah had the impression that none of them would have said no even if everything had not been to their satisfaction, because the man had such muscular charm. He did not pester his customers, simply offered reassurance. She was confident that he would not recognise her from his fleeting glimpse of a woman with her hair hidden beneath a white helmet in a dark room two nights before. The red-haired woman with the black polo neck and the dramatic piece of jewellery was a different kind of creature. A woman sitting alone in a place like this would always be thought of as pathetic, stood up, or on the make, so he was leaving her until last. She had already paid and was lingering over coffee before he stopped by her table. The restaurant was still full. He approached from the side, the way he did with all the customers, never facing them head on, never intrusive, saving the best for last.

  ‘Has everything been all right for you, madam?’

  Sarah turned to face him and gave him the full-wattage smile. The highly polished silver hook on its silver chain was clearly visible. An S-shaped butcher’s hook, capable of supporting the twenty kilos of meat that he would be capable of lifting. Old, yes, seventy if he was a day, with the well-honed body of one accustomed to disciplined physical labour, a soldier not gone to seed, powerfully attractive. At close quarters it shocked her.

  ‘Terrific, thank you,’ she said. ‘Apart from the fact that I hadn’t planned to eat alone. I was waiting for my friend Jessica Hurly, only she was delayed. Apart from that, it was fine. Is she a regular here? Not exactly a woman’s place, is it? Unless you don’t care about your weight.’

  The force field of the man’s attraction and her sudden weakness in the wake of it made Sarah speak quickly, not as calmly as she had rehearsed. His skin was tanned and his eyes were piercingly blue. The smile was glacial and yet she would have loved to see him laughing. He pulled out the empty chair and sat down, his eyes fixed on the jewellery round her neck. For a moment,
she thought he would touch the hook. Instead, he removed his gaze from the pendant and stared at his own large hands, which looked starkly brown against the cloth.

  ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it. We do our best. Jessica? No, I can’t recall anyone called Jessica dining here. As you said, the place is designed for men. Shall I fetch your coat? Is the S for Sally or Sarah?’

  She had left the local paper prominently displayed on the table and now she allowed him to help her into her coat. Felt his hand touching her neck, feeling the chain, making her shiver.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  She did not want to say goodbye. She wanted to say, Can I come back?

  No one would recover easily from a man like this. Jessica was right. There was a terrible warmth to his touch.

  Sarah did not want to believe it was him. There was her weakness for an ageless, ruthless halfway-beautiful man like that. She did not want it to be him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sarah tried to put aside the treacherous attraction.

  Thought instead that that had been a foolish lie of his. A revelation. A useful exercise. She was putting distance between herself and the kitchen of Das Kalb, sick with rich food, looking for a contrast.

  The meeting had shown the man to be a liar, at the least, and had allowed her to look at him face to face again, to make sure. This man was certainly the love of Jessica Hurly’s life. Her soulmate, her greatest loss.

  Sarah needed to move, felt the same old, new irritation with people on pavements getting in the way, wanted to run away, fast, but you could not run in central London streets except at night so instead she walked demurely through the narrow City back roads, thinking out loud, massaging the ice chip in her heart.

  It had been a silly lie of his to deny that Jessica had ever been to Das Kalb, because it denied a fact, not a supposition. Jessica Hurly had been there several times, might have worked there once; even the sommelier knew of her. They would all have been able to put a name to her, even if they had never known who she was, they would have known she was called Jessica and that Jessica was trouble. The powerfully urbane proprietor might have regretted his own lie by now, just as he would have regretted Sarah’s presence in his restaurant. She had touched him with the blunt finger of suspicion; he would be a clever, cunning, systematic man, checking the bookings, just as he would check every day to see who his customers were, noting that S. Fortune had booked twice – once in the evening, once for lunch – in the space of a week. He would check what she had done on the first occasion, know that she had been backstage: he would work it out, and she would never be able to go back. She was betting with herself that if she phoned to make another reservation she would be told, politely, that they were fully booked. Or perhaps not; perhaps he would invite her back into the kitchen to see what she knew. Perhaps he would hand her Jessica’s missing mobile phone.

  She walked from DK through the narrow streets surrounding it and went into the church of St Bartholomew on the other side of Smithfield market. The very same St Bartholomew had been chosen for the church in Pennyvale; Bartholomew the Apostle, accredited with spreading the gospel in India and Armenia, finally martyred by being flayed alive and then beheaded. She remembered from Andrew Sullivan’s pamphlet that St Bartholomew’s emblem in art was a butcher’s knife.

  This ancient church was a plain building, warm and comforting, the interior an oasis of calm. It was all warm and yellowed stone, without any of the ornate Victorian additions and improvements of the far younger St Bartholomew’s church of Pennyvale, which for all its fussy dark woodwork was still a cold place. This place had an ancient heart, which made it a humbling place to look for her own, to sit down and separate fact from imagination. She sat on a worn pew where hundreds of others might have sat over the centuries while paying as little attention to God as she did now, although wanting his protection without obligation, looking at the light coming through the windows. Built for warmth and protection, a great church once, a centre for the poor, a hospital. Sitting in silence, making scant reference to worship, but grateful to any belief that created such a sanctuary as this, Sarah tried to reconstruct her own version of a story.

  Mr Edwin Hurly, a rich man who had once been a poor man, staged his own death. The details of the where and how did not really matter. He had staged his death carefully, because he could no longer bear to go home. He had had such expectations of home that the reality of his return and the unattainableness of an ideal life became unbearable. Those who had loved him loved him too much: others detested him. He had not proved himself to anyone, had impressed no one: no one admired his success, they only resented it, shunned him and his autocracy. He had reached the end of the line. He hated home.

  The light inside the church was soft and forgiving. Music played, an ambient background sound which could have irritated but soothed instead, like the sound of the sea on a calm day. Sarah could not understand why the place was empty. Everyone needed such sanctuary. Did he come here, this haunted and haunting man? Who had still had power in Smithfield where he had earned his fortune.

  She had the facts. Andrew Sullivan was seducing her with e-mailed facts, earning his spurs.

  Dear S,

  Hurly made habit of going deep-sea fishing. Liked to get away. Reported drowned. Affairs left in good order, always were shipshape. Will filed, no questions. No loose ends. Why do you ask?

  A grown man with money could get away with staging his own disappearance in however clichéd a manner if he had a little help, if he belonged to a brotherhood, if he planned it. He could get away with death and reinvention as long as the death had a logic to it, was feasible and possible. Death by drowning was hardly original – the method made him a copycat of others who had failed in such a subterfuge – but distance added credibility, made it easier to fudge. People died in pursuit of challenging adventures every year and his was a responsible death, leaving provision for the nearest and dearest. Lies were only discovered when someone went in search of them; rigorous investigation would only follow if the death involved fraud or theft, but this man had died solvent, defrauding no one. Why would anyone question it, especially if it was, in its own way, a relief? It might have left Celia Hurly free to reclaim the love of her daughter. It would have driven the daughter mad with grief.

  It would be the first great betrayal, therefore the worst, and no one would understand it. Jessica went on the rampage, just as she had when she found him again.

  The music stopped, as if giving a signal to leave. A woman came in and walked briskly to the front of the church, carrying a bucket in one hand and a large feather duster in the other. Even a church could not clean itself. The sight of her broke the spell and made Sarah smile. Sanctity and practicality were always good companions, and she thought of practical things and tried to finish the story in her mind.

  What happened next? This was for the imagination. Ten years pass. Then hysterical Jessica, who came to London in search of instant fame and fortune, driven hither, happened upon him by accident because they were in parallel lines of business. Perhaps they fell upon one another, the first love of her life resumed. At first, joy and embracing, tears and explanations. Your mother was to blame. He would take her up, help her, take her into his new world, take pride in her, take her places, be proud of her. They would agree it was their secret, rejoice in it. But Jessica was a hungry, demanding soul; she wanted more and more: she wanted the years she had missed, she wanted to be with him every day. She wanted, above all, to take him home. She wanted him to go back.

  Soon he would not want to see her every day: she got in the way of business. And then she would blackmail him for his lack of attention because she was angry, stuck in childhood, recklessly needy, a girl without boundaries in search of the old exclusive love, ready to threaten his whole new identity. She would cajole, persuade, behave as she did when she was a child. Expose him, above all, make him go home to Mummy, make Mummy happy again, make up for what they both had done. An obsessive i
n pursuit of the perfect life she thought they’d had. A rejected, violent child, her father’s daughter. Tantrums.

  Jessica could ruin business. Jessica could never have enough. Jessica would never see how impossible her plans were.

  The music began again, secular music rather than religious. This church embraced the non-believer. An old folk song, sung softly in the background.

  Last night, she came to me,

  She came softly in.

  So softly she entered, her feet made no din.

  She would not have come softly this time. Soft body, with eyes of steel, a woman scorned. He stood me up. Seeking him out in Das Kalb at night when she knew he would be there, when he was tidying up, when he was preparing, whenever. He was there on a Sunday night. They were closed on Mondays only: Sarah had checked. A fight, an accident. Ending with Jessica suspended by the ankles on a hook in that kitchen after everyone had gone home. A humane killing, a ritual cleansing as in an abattoir. Sanitised, slung over a shoulder when the blood was gone, maybe wrapped in muslin like a side of ham, taken to Smithfield that day or the next, inserted into the line. A brilliant method of disposal. Desperate men took desperate measures and had unreasonable expectations of their allies. When the man she was convinced was Edwin Hurly had set down next to her, Sarah could feel the power radiating from him. He was a disciplined bully with his daughter’s wonderful charisma and, like her, he would never quite gauge the impact he had on others. He would probably overestimate it.

  Sarah left the church, bowing to the simple altar, reverting to a long-forgotten instinct to genuflect and make the sign of the cross, which would either encourage the love of God or ward off the Devil. I have nothing to be ashamed of, she said to St Bartholomew, but I shall have if I don’t find out what happened. It is not about justice, because there is no justice. Truth would do. Truth helps the living far more than not knowing: there is no reconciliation without it. I would like it if I could guess what he might do next. She had been trying to think like him, put herself in his shoes, but she did not want him to be a murderer. Part of her wanted to walk away and just let him live.