Cold to the Touch (16 page)

He registered the sound of a knock at the door. There was a figure framed in the glass of the window, a face peering in. His instinct was to move towards it and throw himself against it to stop anyone entering, and then he saw who it was. Sarah Fortune, out for an early walk. It had to be her, it had to be fate, that particular woman; a virtual stranger, but the only one he knew who had shown herself willing to tell a lie in a good cause. He had never been so grateful to see anyone in
his life. Someone who would know what to do, just like she had with Mrs Hurly. He beckoned her in, gesturing that the door was open. She did not hesitate, slipped the bolt on the door behind as soon as she was inside. That small action made them conspirators.

Sam suddenly became his usual hearty customer-orientated self, slipping into another mould and amazed to hear the sound of his voice, which brought him down to whatever it was that passed for earth.

‘Well, miss. What are you doing out so early? Fancy seeing you here, gracing my humble premises. Was it breakfast you wanted? Nice to see you, to see you nice.’

Then he burst into noisy sobs.

Sarah let him cry for a minute, then put a hand on his arm, lightly. The touch made him shudder, then made him feel better.

‘What’s the matter, Mr Brady? Shall we go out the back? Make a cup of tea?’

She was handing him a paper handkerchief to wipe his eyes. The gesture touched him with its sheer futility. She wasn’t going to hug him better, she wasn’t going to help. No one could help, but at least someone could share.

‘Come out the back. I’ve gotta show you something.’

The door to the chiller swung open again. Sam could not remember which of them had depressed the handle. He remembered, later, the way she had stood next to him, looking in, standing there impassively like some kind of doctor, analysing what she was seeing rather than reacting. This time he noticed more details, such as the way the slender feet of the corpse were purple with congealed blood, while the clenched hands were pale, the fact that there was varnish on the toenails, as well as on the fingernails, things like that.

They both stared, like an old couple in front of a favourite programme on a TV screen. He heard her sniff, once, and realised that she had started an almost noiseless weeping, whereas his had stopped.

‘Poor cow,’ she said. ‘Poor cow.’ And then, ‘Shut the door, will you? We don’t want her getting warm.’

Her voice was hollow and neutral. Then they faced each other. Sarah smiled at him, tremulously.

‘My word,’ she said. ‘She’s let herself go a bit, hasn’t she? I’ve seen her looking better.’

The bad joke, the graveyard remark, some sick bit of wit introduced them back to the everyday world. No wonder people laughed like hyenas at funerals: it was all part of grief.

‘I hope she had a good enough life,’ Sam said, responding in kind. ‘And I wished she’d asked me before taking up residence here, otherwise I could have got her a room on her own. Either way, she’s certainly going to be the death of me.’

‘I expect she caught a bad cold,’ Sarah said. ‘What am I going to do?’

She stood there with crossed arms, as if considering. She seemed to have taken it all in, as if she had known everything that had gone through Sam’s head in the last ten minutes, when his life and his business had flashed before him, and all he had wanted to do was hide that awful body. She shook her head, her face wet with tears.

‘We dial nine nine nine, Sam. There is absolutely nothing else to do. Anything else will make everything worse. Then we wait.’

He nodded, humbly. She was right. He liked the ‘we’. ‘You do it. I can’t. I want … I wanted to do something else. I wanted to hide her. Cut her up and bury her.’

‘I know you did. I would have, too. Right. I’ll do it.’

‘I could have killed her,’ he said, his voice rising in panic. ‘They’ll think I killed her.’ ‘But you didn’t.’

‘Do you know who she is?’ he burst out.

‘Do you know?’

‘Yes. She’s Jessica Hurly. Mrs Hurly’s daughter. I’ll call them now.’

Them.
The forces of law and order. A mighty force of ineptitude, who would blame the nearest.

Jessica, you silly bitch.

They both conjoined in a minute of hating her.

S
am listened to Sarah on the phone.
A girl has been murdered and her body deposited in the fridge of the butcher’s shop in Pennyvale. You’ll need to send a whole team and someone to control the traffic. There’s no need for sirens – she is definitely dead.

It was the strangest of sensations, sitting there waiting. Sam pulled down the blinds at the windows. He only ever did that to keep the place cool on the sunniest of days. The blinds were stiff from winter disuse and he cursed them. Then they sat by the counter on the two chairs reserved for the less able customers.

‘I can’t work it out,’ Sam said. ‘Why would anyone do that to Jessica Hurly? She was the Pennyvale bicycle, but what was so bad about that? Why bring her back like this?’

‘Perhaps there’s another way of looking at it. Why would anyone do this to you? Were you one of her lovers?’

‘How much do you know? No, I wasn’t one of her lovers, far too old. But she did used to play here, when she was a kid. Maybe she brought them here later.’

‘Here?’

Sarah was surprised.

‘Not here, up there.’ He pointed to the ceiling. ‘There’s a flat up there. You get to it round the back, up some steps outside. It’s all Hurly property. Little wild Jessie had plenty of places to go. The rest of the kids had to make do with cars and the beach. Privilege not always a good thing, is it?’

He laughed, without any mirth, and then groaned aloud.

‘I’ve just thought of something else. There are two Jessicas in that chiller. There’s Jack Dunn’s dog. They’ll think I make a habit of it. Health and Safety’ll kill me for that alone.’

‘Jack Dunn’s dog,’ she echoed.

‘Yes. I found it dead on the road, months ago. I picked it up, shrink-wrapped it, put it in the back of the chiller in the freezer section for him to collect whenever he came back. He’d want to bury it, I thought. Closure, innit? Besides, I couldn’t report it. It was full of shot and with a cut throat. Jerry killed it. I should have buried it for him.’

He was talking to himself rather than to her. It made little sense. Sarah looked at her watch.

‘How big is this dog?’

‘Small.’

She was coldly decisive.

‘I reckon it’ll take them another ten minutes at least to get here. Go and get that dog out of the freezer. The dog’s going to do for you as much as the body. The body’s a bad accident that’s just happened, but no one’s going to understand the dog. The dog’s really going to muddy the waters. Quick, get it.’

‘Don’t leave me.’

‘I’m not leaving you. I’m going to take the dog home and fetch the vicar. Then I’m coming back. I’m your witness. You stand outside and wait.’

S
even-thirty a.m. A woman sauntering home after an early walk, bearing a white carrier bag with the butcher’s distinctive logo. Sam Brady did good strong bags, everyone used them again and again. They were bags for life.

Sarah tried to walk nonchalantly, the way she did when she was walking home from a long stroll on the cliffs, genuinely tired. Tried and failed, so that by the time she turned the corner into her own road she was running, the big bag containing desiccated frozen dog banging against her legs. She felt more than a little mad, but it was often when she felt like this that she knew her instincts were right.

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.’

M
rs 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.

O
ld 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.