Cold to the Touch (21 page)

‘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.

‘Y
ou 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.’

T
he 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 under 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.

‘Customers,’ Mike whispered. ‘Someone who wants to choose his very own cow. And then say exactly what he wants done with it.’

The two men were distinguished by the fact that they did not wear white overalls. They wore winter coats and scarves. They were beyond regulations. Big customers or influential ones.

Each of them inspected the carcasses. One of the men gave an instruction to the helmeted butcher, who pasted a label on a carcass and listened to further instructions. Sarah could not hear what was said and besides, it could have been in a foreign or technical language. She heard the words ‘nothing too good for Das Kalb.’ Then the second man turned and noticed them. He was half hidden by a carcass. In the dim light, Sarah had an impression of size and authority.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here? Not often we see a woman in here.’

He turned his back to her, spoke to the butcher. ‘You know it’s no place for a woman. Not back here, anyway. Only in extreme circumstances.’

A deep voice, carrying a warning.

‘Research for a magazine,’ Mike said easily. ‘Got a pass. I do the looking, she does the writing-down on account of me not being so good at that. Don’t worry, we aren’t here to criticise. Brilliant place.’

The London accent reassured the man, along with Mike’s shirt collar and tie and the masculinity of him. The man moved away, his demeanour indifferent now. The helmeted man glared at them.

‘No one told me,’ he began, blustering.

Mike held up his hand, placating. ‘’S all right, mate, we’re going now, but can you answer me one thing? How the heck do you tell one of these from another and why does it make any difference? They all look good to me.’

‘You can tell a steer from a cow, can’t you?’

‘Not me, mate, not me. Story of my life,’ Mike said, edging backwards with Sarah in tow, aiming for the dark corridor and with a nothing-to-hide air. His remark provoked a bark of laughter.

‘Get her out of here,’ the man said.

The trio did not watch them go.

They went back down the long corridor to the exit. The huge container lorries had disappeared into the night. Instead there was a proliferation of delivery vans, high-sided one-ton trucks, smaller vans, every variety of white van. Loading was in progress, porters running with joints of meat, packs of chickens, pre-jointed shrink-wrapped parcels and, destined for the high-sided trucks, half-carcasses of beef.

Sarah went towards a high-sided van where the driver was getting back behind the wheel.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Research. Can you tell me where you deliver?’

He looked at his watch and back at her, amazed by the stupidity of a question he had no time to answer. He was looking at a woman full of manic anxiety.

‘Where
don’t
I deliver? Everywhere.’

‘Do you deliver as far as Dover?’

‘Not me, mate. I mean everywhere in London.’

He shut the door of the van and drove off.

‘How do I find out which of these delivers to a particular butcher on the south coast?’ Sarah asked Mike.

‘Needle in a haystack,’ Mike said. ‘You don’t start here, you ask the fucking butcher. What’s the matter, doll? You’re shaking like a leaf.’

‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘I saw him. I recognised him, I’m not sure from where. I recognise him. I need to see him in the light. I might know who he is, why she loved him.’

Sarah wanted to tear out her own hair.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said, almost yelling in frustration. ‘What better place to hide a body and move it on? He can’t drive, but he has the power to make it happen. They were afraid of him. He knew it would work. It was the only way to get her home.’

M
ike said he was going shopping and left Sarah standing outside a caff in sight of the gates into Grand Avenue. She watched him plunge back into the vibrant light of the meat market.

Sarah imagined Jessica standing in the same place, summoning courage to go in there alone. She found herself looking towards the entrance and imagining Jessica being dragged out; remembered her saying
they threw me out quite gently; they make their own laws.