Necrocrip (3 page)

She crossed the Uxbridge Road and mooched along in the sunshine looking idly at the shops. The chippy had just opened, and the smell of frying wafted delightfully down to her, spiced with a whiff of solvents from the dry-cleaners next door. It reminded her she was hungry. Thirty pee’s worth of chips would just last her nicely down Bloemfontein Road, she thought.

The chip shop was in a short row of five shops on the main road between two side turnings. There was the photographic shop (portraits in the back and a fast printing service in the front) which had just opened, called Developing World. Cheryl, who hadn’t got the joke, thought the name was poncey and that the shop wouldn’t last long in that neighbourhood, in which she showed a business judgement beyond her years. Next to it stood the Golden Kebab Take Away, which was run by two devoted Lebanese brothers who shared everything, including
profits and a wife and three children, and allowed themselves to be called Ali quite indiscriminately by the local customers, who all looked alike to them.

Next to the Golden Kebab was the Chinese restaurant which had used to be called the Joy Luck Wonderful Garden, but had recently been redecorated, and rechristened, for inscrutable oriental reasons, Hung Fat. Next door to that was Mr and Mrs Patel’s dry-cleaning emporium, and then Dave’s Fish and Chip Bar – Eat Here or Take Away. On the other side of Dave’s was the alley which gave access to the backs of the shops down the next side-street and, incidentally, to Dave’s own back yard.

These details did not impinge much upon Cheryl’s consciousness as she entered the Fish and Chip Bar, and were even less to the forefront of her mind five minutes later when she shook vinegar over her bag of chips and saw that one of them was a finger – pallid, greasy, but well-fried.

Afterwards when she told the story to her friends – and she was to tell it often – she always said ‘I just stood there and screamed’. But in fact she didn’t scream, or make any sound at all. Instead she demonstrated an extraordinary, atavistic reaction arising from a deeply-hidden race memory of poisonous snakes and spiders: she flung the chip-bag instantly and violently away from her with a two-handed upward and outward jerk, which sent its contents flying across the front shop. They hit the reproduction Coca-Cola mirror and scattered over and under the small metal table-and-seats composite screwed to the wall, which constituted the restaurant and fulfilled the Eat Here part of Dave’s advertised promise.

Dave himself, in the person of one Ronnie Slaughter, made a sound expressive of indignation and annoyance, but one glance at his customer’s dilated eyes and flared nostrils convinced him she was not simply messing about. Naturally enough he didn’t believe her when she said there’d been a finger in her chips, not until a hands-and-knees clear-up of the mess under the table had discovered the offending object nestling along the skirting board. He expressed the opinion that it was just a pencil or a felt-tip
pen or something like that and picked it up boldly, only to demonstrate the same animal instinct of rejection, which because of the confined space in which he was kneeling resulted in his banging his head quite sharply and painfully on the metal underside of the table.

‘I told you so,’ Cheryl moaned, clutching her school blouse tight at the neck as though she feared the finger might scuttle across the floor, spring for her throat and wriggle down inside her clothing. ‘Whose is it?’

‘Well it’s not fucking mine,’ Slaughter shouted, perhaps forgivably in the circumstances, and telephoned for the police.

By the time Slider got there the uniformed constable, Elkins, who had been despatched by the section sergeant, was holding the door of the shop against a knot of idlers who had gathered to see what was going on. On the other side of the plate-glass window, like a depressed goldfish in a bowl, Slaughter was sitting at the table hiding his head in his hands.

Atherton came to meet Slider as he went in.

‘You didn’t waste much time,’ Slider said sternly.

‘I like to keep my hand in,’ Atherton smirked.

‘Oh God, don’t start that. Where’s exhibit A?’

‘On the counter, wrapped in paper.’

‘And the customer who found it?’

‘She seemed to think it was time she had hysterics, so I sent her next door for a cup of tea. Mrs Patel’s making her one in the back room of the dry-cleaner’s. It’s all right,’ he forestalled Slider’s question, ‘Polish is with her, trying to get some sense out of her.’

‘What’s Jablowski doing here?’

‘Well, seeing she didn’t have anything particular to do, and as it’s so near lunchtime—’ Atherton said beguilingly. ‘We weren’t expecting you to come as well, Guv.’

‘So it seems. Well, now you’re here, you’d better make yourself useful. Go and have a look round out the back, and see if there’s anything—’

‘Fishy?’

‘Out of the ordinary,’ Slider corrected firmly. ‘I’ll have a word with this bloke. What’s his name?’

Atherton told him. ‘He’s a bit nervous, Guv – afraid we’re going to finger him for the crime.’

‘Just go, will you?’ Slider said patiently.

‘Even police work’s gone digital these days,’ Atherton said, going.

Ronnie Slaughter was an overweight, pudgy-faced man in his late twenties who had already gone shiningly bald on the front and top of his head. Perhaps to compensate, he had grown his hair long at the back, and it straggled weakly over his collar, making him look as though his whole scalp was slipping off backwards like an eiderdown in the night. He was dressed, unsurprisingly for the 1990s, in jeans, tee-shirt and the regulation filthy trainers. A bump was rising raffishly on the right side of his forehead, which combined with the single earring – a plain gold sleeper – in his left ear and the rose tattooed on his left forearm made him look like a pudgy pirate.

He was obviously upset by his experience. His meaty face was damp and pale, and he lifted strained and reproachful eyes as Slider addressed him pleasantly.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider. Are you the owner, sir? I’d like to have a little chat with you.’

‘I don’t know nothing about it,’ Slaughter said plaintively. ‘I’ve never had nothing like this happen before. I keep a clean shop, everybody knows that. You ask anyone. I don’t know how that bloody thing got in there, and that’s the truth. I never—’

‘That’s all right,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘Just let’s take it from the beginning. What time did you get in this morning?’

‘Arpast ten, same as usual.’

‘You open at half-past eleven?’

‘That’s right. Tuesday to Sat’day, arpast eleven till two, arpast four till eleven. Closed Sunday and Monday.’ He seemed to find the familiar recital soothing.

‘You come in early to prepare things, I suppose?’

‘S’right.’

‘And where did the chips come from? I suppose you buy
them in from a wholesaler?’

Slaughter looked almost scornful. ‘Nah, only Wimpy Bars and them sort of places buy their chips in. They’re never any good. Fish an’ chip shops always make their own.’

‘You peel the potatoes and cut the chips yourself?’ Slider was mildly surprised.

‘Yeah. O’ course, in the old days there used to be a potato boy come in to do it. That’s how I got started in the trade, as a spud boy, every morning before school. Better than a paper round. Learn the ropes an’ that. But nowadays what with the recession and every think I ‘ave to do’ em myself.’

‘You have some kind of machine, I suppose?’

‘Yeah, a peeler and a cutter. I’ll show you’ He half rose, eager to display his expertise, but Slider checked him gently.

‘Yes, later. Just a few more questions. So you cut up a new lot of chips this morning, did you? How do you suppose that finger got into them?’

‘I dunno,’ he said, shaking his head in perplexity. ‘It couldn’t have been in the new lot. How could it? I haven’t lost a finger.’ That seemed indisputable, but he spread his hands out on the table before him, as though for reassurance. ‘It
has
happened,’ he conceded, ‘with the old style of cutters. They was dangerous. There was a bloke over in Acton a couple o’ years ago with one of them old sort lost two fingers. But with the new rotaries—’ He shrugged, displaying his firmly attached digits again.

‘That’s what you’ve got?’

‘Yeah. An’ they’ve got safety cut-offs.’

Slider shuddered at the choice of words. ‘Who else works here?’

‘No-one. There’s only me, except at weekends for the busy time, then there’s the part-timers, school kids mostly. But they only help serve out front. I’m the one that does all the preparation.’

‘So the chips you cooked this morning were peeled and cut up this morning by you?’ Slider asked.

Slaughter’s frown dissolved suddenly. ‘Wait a minute
I’ve just remembered! I had half a bucket of chips left over from last night. They was what I put in first thing when I opened this morning. It must have been in them.’ He seemed happy to have solved the mystery.

‘And who prepared yesterday’s chips? You?’

‘Yes. I keep telling you, there is only me,’ he said almost crossly.

So they were no further forward. It was a mystery, Slider thought, and not a particularly interesting one, either. Someone must have planted the thing as a joke. ‘Let’s just take it slowly from the beginning,’ he said patiently. ‘When you arrived this morning, did you come in by the front door or the back door?’

‘Through the shop. I let meself in through the shop like I always do.’

‘And did everything seem normal? Was there any sign of disturbance?’

‘No, it all looked all right. We’ve had break-ins before, mostly after the fruit machine. Nicked the ‘ole bloody machine once, took it out the bloody front door right in the street in broad daylight – well, under the street lamps. No-one saw nothing, o’ course,’ he added bitterly. ‘They never do.’

How true, thought Slider. ‘But this morning everything was all right? And what did you do next?’

‘Went through into the back room to start work.’

‘Did everything seem normal there?’

‘I never noticed anything different.’

‘The back door was shut?’

‘Yeah. I opened it to let some air in. It gets stuffy in there ‘cause I had to brick the window in, ‘cause kids kept breaking in through it.’

‘What sort of lock have you got on the back door?’

‘A Yale lock, and two bolts, top and bottom.’ He seemed to experience some qualms about this, as though realising it was not much of a high-tech response to the modern crime wave. ‘It’s kids mostly,’ he added apologetically. ‘Little bastards.’

‘And was the door locked and bolted when you arrived this morning?’

Slaughter hesitated, and then said, ‘Yeah, it was bolted.’

‘You’re quite sure?’

‘I always bolt it last thing before I go home. I wouldn’t forget that.’

‘All right, Mr Slaughter. What did you do next?’

‘Just what I always do. Get stuff ready.’

‘What stuff is that?’

‘Well, I wash out the batter buckets and mix up the new lot, cut up the fish, peel the spuds and cut the chips.’ The words recalled him to the present mystery. He shook his head dolefully. ‘I dunno how that thing got in there. I cut them chips up yesterday morning. It didn’t half give me a shock when I saw it. Bumped my head on the table.’ He touched the lump gingerly.

‘And were you here alone all day yesterday?’

‘Yeah. I only have helpers on Friday night and Sat’day.’ He looked up suddenly as an idea occurred to him. ‘Maybe that kid put it in herself, for a joke,’ he said hopefully.

But before this possibility could be explored to its conclusion, which admittedly would have taken all of a microsecond, they were interrupted. Atherton appeared in the doorway between the front and the back shop, looking distinctly pale. ‘Guv?’

Slider got up and went to him. Atherton glanced significantly at Slaughter, and then jerked his head towards the back room.

‘Something nasty in the woodshed,’ he murmured.

Across the tiny back room the back door stood open, but Slider caught the smell well before he reached it. The sun had risen high enough to clear the surrounding buildings and shine into the tiny yard, which contained an outside lavatory and a number of bulgingly-full black plastic sacks, neatly stacked round the perimeter, their necks tied with string. The sickly stink of rotting fish was terrible, mitigated only now and then by the chemical odour rolling over the fence from the dry-cleaner’s next door. Cleaning fluid would not normally have been high on Slider’s list of Things to Smell Today, but it was still considerably ahead of rotting fish – if that’s what it was.

Breathing shallowly Slider turned, and found that
Slaughter had wandered after them and was standing in his back shop, staring in a puzzled way at his equipment as if it might speak and obligingly solve the puzzle.

‘Mr Slaughter – does it always smell as bad as this out here?’ Slider asked.

Slaughter started a little, plainly having been far away with his thoughts. ‘Well,’ he said apologetically, ‘it does get a bit – you know – whiffy, especially in the warm weather. It’s the fish trimmings and that. But the dustmen only come twice a week. I tie the sacks up – well you have to with the cats and everything – but the smell still gets out. You get sort of used to it after a while.’

‘You get used to
this
?’ Atherton said disbelievingly.

Slaughter took another step or two to the door and sniffed cautiously. ‘Maybe it is a bit worse than usual,’ he admitted. ‘I dunno. I don’t think I’ve got all that much sense of smell, really. Working with fish all the time – and the frying smell gets in your clothes—’

‘These bags, sir,’ Slider said. He gestured to one at random. ‘That one there, for instance. What’s in that?’

‘Rubbish and that. You know, just the usual. Potato peelings, fish trimmings, left-overs and stuff. Just rubbish.’

‘Is that how you tied it up yourself?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Slaughter cautiously. A certain reluctance was coming into his expression, perhaps as the magnitude of the smell came home to him at last.

‘Would you mind opening it, sir?’

He plainly would mind, but equally plainly didn’t feel he could refuse. He untied the string and parted the neck of the sack, pulling his head back out of the way as the smell rose up. On the top were some broken, soggy chips and several portions of battered fish.