Butchers and Other Stories of Crime

Butchers

He had passed the weekend in the cold store of Pugh the butcher’s. It was now Monday morning. The door was still shut. He was unconcerned. Quite early on Saturday evening he had given up beating his fists on the door and screaming for help. He had soon tired of jumping and arm-swinging to keep his circulation going. He had become increasingly drowsy as his brain had succumbed to the deprivation of oxygen. He had lain on the tiled floor below the glistening carcases and by Sunday morning he had frozen to death.

On the other side of the door Joe Wilkins filled two mugs with instant coffee. It was still only 8 a.m. and the shop didn’t open until 8.30. He was Mr Pugh’s shop manager, forty-four, a master butcher, dark, good-looking with an old-fashioned Clark Gable moustache and quick, laughing eyes that had a way of involving everyone in the shop each time he passed a joke with a customer.

The second mug was for Frank, the apprentice butcher. Frank was eighteen and useful for heavy work. He earned extra money on Saturday nights as a bouncer in Stacey’s, the disco across the street. When the deliveries came from the slaughterer’s, Frank would take the sides of beef on his back as if they were pieces of polystyrene. The girls from Woolworth’s next door often came into the shop in their lunch-hour and asked Frank for rides on his motorbike. Frank got embarrassed when Joe Wilkins teased him about it.

Frank hung up his leather jacket and put on a clean apron. Joe was already wearing his straw boater. He watched the young man struggle awkwardly with the apron strings, tying a bow so loose that it was sure to fall apart as soon as he stretched up to lift a carcase off its hook.

‘Another heavy weekend, lad?’

‘Not really,’ answered Frank, taking his coffee and slopping some on the chopping block. ‘Same as usual.’

‘That’s good to hear. Looks as if we’ve got a busy morning ahead of us.’

Frank gave a frown.

Joe snapped his fingers. ‘Come on, lad, what’s different this morning, or haven’t you noticed yet?’

Frank looked around the shop. ‘Meat’s not out yet.’

‘Right! And why not?’

‘Percy isn’t in.’

‘Right again. By Jove, I was wrong about you. You ought to be on the telly with a mind as sharp as that. Why spend the rest of your life hacking at pieces of meat when you could earn millions sitting in an armchair answering questions? And now for five hundred and a holiday for two in the Bahamas, Mr Dobson, what do you think has happened to Percy?’

‘Dunno,’ answered Frank.

‘You don’t know? Come on, lad. You’re not trying.’

‘He could have fallen off his bike again.’

‘That’s more like it,’ said Joe as he took his knives and cleavers from the drawer behind the counter and started sharpening them. ‘Get the window ready, will you?’

Frank put down his coffee and looked for the enamel trays that usually stood in the shop window.

Joe said, ‘You’re probably right about Percy. He’s too old to be in charge of a bike. Seven miles is a long way on a morning like this, with ice all the way up Bread and Cheese Hill and the motorists driving like lunatics. He was knocked in the ditch last week, poor old devil.’

‘Where does he put the trays?’ asked Frank.

‘Trays?’

‘For the meat — in the window.’

‘Aren’t they there, then?’ Joe put down his knife and went to look. ‘Well, I never noticed that before. I suppose he puts them away somewhere. By the time I arrive, they’re always here. Have a look behind the deep-freeze cabinet. Got ’em? Good. Blowed if I understand why he bothers to do that.’

‘Dust, I expect,’ said Frank.

‘Quite right. Wipe them over with a cloth, lad. I used to wonder what he did with himself before we arrived in the morning. He’s in by six, you know, regular. How about that? He must be up at five. Could you do that six mornings a week? And it gets no easier as you get older. Percy must be pushing seventy by now.’

‘What does he do before we get in?’ asked Frank.

‘Well, it’s always spotless, isn’t it?’

‘I thought that was because he stays on of a night to clean up after we close.’

‘So he does — but there’s always more dust by the morning. Percy wipes all the surfaces clean. He puts out the trays, and the cuts from the cold store, and hangs up the poultry, and opens a tin of liver and checks everything against the price list and puts out the tags and the plastic parsley, and the new-laid eggs and the packets of stuffing and bread sauce. I hope you’re listening, lad, because I want all those jobs done before we open.’

Frank gave another frown. ‘You want me to do all that?’

‘Who else, lad?’ said Joe in a reasonable voice. ‘It’s obvious that Percy isn’t going to make it this morning, and I’ve got the orders to get out.’

‘He hasn’t had a day off since I started last year,’ said Frank, still unable to believe his bad luck.

‘He hasn’t had a day off in the twenty years I’ve been working here. Six in the morning till seven at night, six days a week. And what for? Boy’s work. He does the work you ought to be doing, lad. No one else but Percy would stand for it. Fetching and carrying and sweeping up. Do you know, he’s never once complained to me or Mr Pugh or anyone else. You’ve seen him bent nearly double carrying in the carcases. A man of his age shouldn’t be doing work like that. It’s exploitation, that’s what it is.’

‘Why does he do it, then? He’s old enough to draw his pension.’

Joe shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t be happy with his feet up. He’s spent the best years of his life working in this shop. He was here before Mr Pugh took it over. It was Slater’s in those days. Yes, Percy can tell you some tales about the old days. It means a lot to him, working in this shop.’

Frank gave a shrug and went to the cold store to get out the small joints left over from Saturday. The cold store consisted of two chambers, one for the chilled meat, the other for the frozen. He opened the door of the chiller and started taking out legs of lamb. He needed to hurry to fill the trays in the window by opening time.

Joe was still sharpening knives. He continued telling Frank about the injustices heaped on Percy. ‘He gets no recognition for all the work he puts in. Blind loyalty, I call it, but there are some that would call it plain stupidity. Do you think Mr Pugh appreciates what Percy does? Of course he doesn’t.’

‘He’s never here, is he?’ contributed Frank, who was becoming quite skilful at fuelling Joe’s maledictions against their employer.

‘That’s a fact. To be fair to Mr Pugh, he has to look in at the market and collect the meat from the slaughterhouse, but that shouldn’t take all day. It wouldn’t hurt him to show his face here more often.’

Frank gave a sly grin. ‘It might hurt someone else.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Joe, taking offence.

‘Well, you and me. We don’t want the boss breathing down our necks, do we?’

Joe said in a curt tone, ‘Speak for yourself, boy. I’m not ashamed of my work.’ He put down the knife he was holding and went to the window to rearrange the tray of lamb chops that Frank had just put there. ‘Haven’t you any idea how to put meat on a tray to make it look attractive?’

‘I was trying to be quick.’

‘You can’t hurry a job like this. That’s why Percy starts so early. He’s an artist in his way. His windows are a picture. I wonder what’s happened to him.’

‘He could be dead.’

Joe turned to look at Frank with clear disfavour. ‘That’s a very unpleasant suggestion.’

‘It’s a possibility. He’s always falling off that old bike. Well, he could have been taken to hospital, anyway.’

‘Someone would have phoned by now.’

‘All right, perhaps he died in the night,’ persisted Frank. ‘He could be lying in his bed. He lives alone, doesn’t he?’

‘You’re talking nonsense, lad.’

‘Can you think of anything better?’

‘Any more lip from you, young man, and I’ll see that you get your cards. Get the chickens out. I’ll attend to this.’

‘Do you mean the frozen birds, Mr Wilkins?’

‘The farm birds. I’ll tell you if we need any frozen in a minute or two.’

‘Do you think we ought to phone the hospital, Mr Wilkins, just in case something has happened to Percy?’

‘What good would that do?’

Frank took seven capons from the chiller and hung them on the rail above the window. ‘That’s all there is,’ he told Joe. ‘Shall I get out some frozen ones?’

Joe shook his head. ‘It’s Monday, isn’t it? There isn’t much call for poultry on a Monday.’

‘We’ll need them for tomorrow. They need to thaw. We won’t be getting any farm birds this week with Mr Pugh on holiday.’

Joe hesitated in his rearrangement of the window display. ‘You’ve got a point there, lad.’

Frank waited.

‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘We shall want some frozen birds.’

‘Have you got the key?’

‘The key?’

‘There’s a padlock on the freezer door.’

Joe crossed the shop to take a look. It was a heavy padlock. It secured the hasp on the freezer door over an iron staple. He said, ‘Silly old beggar. What does he want to lock it for?’

‘There’s a lot of meat in there,’ said Frank, in Percy’s defence. ‘Have you got the key?’

Joe shook his head. ‘I reckon he takes it home with him.’

Frank swore. ‘What are we going to do? We’ve got to get in there. It’s not just the chickens. It’s the New Zealand. We’re right down on Iamb.’

‘We’d better look for the key, just in case he leaves it somewhere,’ said Joe, opening one of the drawers under the counter.

Their short search did not turn up the key.

‘I think I could force it with that old file of yours,’ suggested Frank.

‘No, lad, you might damage the door. You don’t want to get your marching orders from Mr Pugh. I’ve got one of those small hacksaws in my toolbag in the car. We’ll use that to cut through the padlock.’

A short time later he returned with the saw. He held the padlock firm while Frank started sawing through the staple.

‘All this trouble because of Percy,’ said Frank. ‘I’d like to strangle the old git.’

‘It might not be his fault after all,’ said Joe. ‘Mr Pugh might have given him orders to use a padlock. He’s dead scared of the boss. He does exactly what he’s told, and I don’t blame him. I heard Mr Pugh laying into him on Saturday night after you left to deliver those orders. It was vicious, it really was.’

Frank continued sawing. ‘What was it about?’

‘Well, you were there when Mr Pugh walked in out of nowhere, saying he wanted to see that things were straight before he went off for his week in Majorca. That was before you left with the orders.’

‘Yes, he’d just picked up his tickets from the travel agent.’

‘Right. You’d think he’d be on top of the world, wouldn’t you, just about to push off for a week in the sun? Not Mr Pugh. He happened to catch old Percy putting away the cuts we hadn’t sold.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

‘No, but Percy left the door of the chiller open while he was doing it. We all do it, but Percy got caught. You should have heard Mr Pugh go for him, ranting and raving about the cost of running a cold chamber with employees who are so idle that they let the cold air out when they can’t be bothered to open and close the door a few times. He really laid it on thick. He was quoting things about cubic feet of air and thermal units as if old Percy had done it deliberately.’

‘Almost there,’ said Frank. ‘Mind it doesn’t catch your hand.’

The hacksaw blade cut cleanly through the staple.

Joe said, ‘Good.’ But he was determined to finish his story. ‘He told Percy he was too old for the job and he ought to retire soon. Percy started pleading with him. I tell you, Frank, I was so embarrassed that I didn’t want to hear any more. I left them to it and went home.’

‘I’ll get out those frozen birds,’ said Frank as he slipped the padlock from the hasp.

‘You’d have a job to find a meaner man than Mr Pugh,’ Joe continued as Frank swung back the door of the freezer chamber. ‘Going on like that at an old man who’s worked here all his life — and all for the sake of a few pence more on his electricity bill, when we all know he makes enough profit to have holidays in Spain. What’s the matter, lad?’

Frank had uttered a strange cry as he entered the chamber.

Joe looked in and saw him standing over the huddled, hoar-white figure of a dead man. He went closer and crouched to look at the face. It was glistening with a patina of frost.

It was the face of Mr Pugh.

Joe placed his hand on Frank’s shoulder and said, ‘Come away, lad. There’s nothing we can do.’

From somewhere Joe produced a hipflask and poured some scotch for Frank as they sat in the shop and stared at the door of the freezer.

‘We’ll have to call the police,’ said Frank.

‘I’ll do it presently.’

‘He must have been trapped in there all the weekend.’

‘He wouldn’t have known much about it,’ said Joe. ‘He must have died inside a few hours.’

‘How could it have happened?’

Joe stared into space and said nothing.

‘There’s a handle on the inside of that door,’ said Frank, speaking his thoughts as they rushed through the implications. ‘Anyone caught in there can open the door and walk out, usually. But he couldn’t get out because the padlock was on the outside. Someone must have put it there. It must have been Percy. Why, Mr Wilkins, why would Percy do a thin like that?’

Joe gave a shrug and still kept silent.

Frank supplied his own answer: ‘He must have panicked when he thought he would lose his job. He’d been in fear of losing it for years. He found some way of persuading Mr Pugh to go into the freeze chamber, and then he locked him inside. I know what he did. He told Mr Pugh the handle on the inside was too stiff to move, and he liked to leave the door open because he was scared of being trapped. Mr Pugh said he was making excuses and stepped inside to show how easy it was to get out.’ Frank began to smile. ‘Mr Wilkins, I think I’m going to laugh.’

The tension relaxed a little.

‘I’ll tell you something funnier than that,’ said Joe. ‘Why do you think Percy hasn’t come in this morning?’

‘Well, it’s obvious. He knew we’d open that door and find the body.’

‘Yes, but where do you think he is?’

Frank frowned and shook his head. ‘At home?’

Joe grinned and said, ‘Majorca.’

‘No!’ Frank rocked with laughter. ‘The crafty old beggar!’

‘When Mr Pugh came in on Saturday, he had a large brown envelope with him containing his travel tickets.’

‘I remember. I saw it. He put it on the counter by the cash register.’

‘Well, it isn’t there now, is it?’

Frank said, ‘You can’t help admiring him. He’s probably sitting on the hotel terrace at this minute ordering his breakfast and thinking of you and me finding Mr Pugh in the freezer.’

‘I’d better phone the police,’ said Joe, getting up.

‘You know, if it wasn’t for that padlock on the door, no one would suspect what happened,’ said Frank. ‘Mr Pugh might have just felt ill and fainted in there. They’d call it misadventure, or something.’

‘And Percy would get away with it,’ said Joe reflectively. ‘It isn’t as if he’s a vicious murderer. He’s no danger to anyone else.’

‘I could get rid of it,’ offered Frank. ‘I could put it in the pannier on my bike and get rid of it lunchtime.’

‘We’d have to stick to the same story,’ said Joe. ‘We just opened the door and found him lying there.’

‘It’s the truth,’ said Frank. ‘We don’t need to say a word about the padlock. Shall we do it? Poor old Percy — he hasn’t had many breaks.’

‘All right,’ confirmed Joe. ‘We’ll do it.’

After they had shaken hands, he picked up the phone and called the police. Frank took the padlock to his motorbike in the yard at the back of the shop, and secreted it under the toolbag in the pannier.

A squad car drew up outside the shop within five minutes of Joe’s call. A bearded sergeant and a constable came in and Joe opened the freeze chamber and showed them Mr Pugh’s body. Frank described how he had found the body. He omitted to mention the padlock. Joe confirmed Frank’s statement.

‘So it looks as if the body’s been lying in there since you closed on Saturday,’ said the sergeant after they had withdrawn to the warmer air of the shop. ‘You say that Mr Pugh looked in late in the afternoon. What did he want?’

‘He was just making sure that everything was in order before he went on holiday,’ said Joe.

‘He was off to Majorca for a week,’ added Frank.

‘Lucky man,’ put in the constable.

The sergeant gave him a withering look. ‘Was Mr Pugh in good health?’ he asked Joe.

‘I thought he looked rather off-colour,’ answered Joe. ‘He drove himself hard, you know.’

‘He needed that holiday,’ said Frank, quick to see the point of what Joe was suggesting.

‘Well, he didn’t get it,’ said the sergeant. ‘He must have collapsed. Heart, I expect. The doctor will tell us. There’s an ambulance on the way. I suggest you keep the shop closed for a couple of hours. I shall want statements from both of you. Was there anyone else working here on Saturday?’

‘Only Percy — Mr Maddox,’ answered Joe. ‘He isn’t in this morning. I believe he was going to ask Mr Pugh for a few days off.’

‘I see. We’ll want a statement from him. Have you got his address?’

‘He told me he was hoping to go away,’ said Joe.

‘We’ll catch up with him later, then. Which of you was the last to leave on Saturday?’

‘That was Percy,’ said Joe.

‘He stays behind to clear up,’ explained Frank.

‘He puts things away, you mean?’ said the sergeant.

‘That’s right,’ said Joe. ‘He’s getting on a bit, you know. Worked here for years. A bit slow now, but he likes to be useful. He puts everything away at the end of the day.’

‘In the freezer?’

Joe shook his head. ‘We don’t re-freeze meat. It has to be put in the chiller at the end of the day.’

‘So he wouldn’t have opened the freezer door?’

‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Joe. ‘If he had, he’d have found Mr Pugh, wouldn’t he?’

They took a statement from Frank. He said nothing to incriminate Percy. He simply explained how he had seen Mr Pugh come into the shop late on Saturday afternoon, shortly before he (Frank) had left to deliver the orders. As for this morning, he had opened the freezer door and found Mr Pugh dead on the floor. The constable read the statement back and Frank signed it. ‘Would you like some coffee and a fresh doughnut?’ he asked the policemen. ‘We always have a doughnut in the morning. It’s my job to collect them from Jonquil’s. I go on my bike, and they’re still warm when I get back.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ said the sergeant, putting his hand in his pocket. ‘How much are they?’

Frank felt an exhilarating sense of release as he wheeled his motorcycle into the street and started the engine. He rode up the hill towards the baker’s, stopping a few yards short, by the place where the front of the delicatessen was being renovated. Outside was a builder’s skip containing old wood and masonry. Frank took the padlock from his pannier and dropped it unobtrusively into the skip. He collected the bag of doughnuts from the baker’s and drove back to the shop.

An ambulance had drawn up outside. As Frank approached, one of the attendants was closing the rear door. The man walked round the side of the vehicle and got in. It moved away. The few bystanders who had collected outside the shop moved on.

When Frank went in, Joe had already made the coffee. He was talking to the police about football.

‘We should have gone by now,’ the sergeant told Frank. ‘We’ve got both your statements and the body’s been collected, but we didn’t want to miss those doughnuts.’

Frank handed them around.

‘Still warm,’ said the sergeant. ‘I hope you observed the speed limit, lad.’

Frank smiled.

The police finished their coffee and doughnuts and left the shop.

Frank heaved a huge breath of relief.

Joe took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. ‘Did you get rid of it?’

Frank nodded.

‘Well done,’ said Joe. ‘Well done, Frank.’

‘I reckon old Percy owes us both a beer after that,’ said Frank.

‘It was worth more than that,’ said Joe.

‘We couldn’t have turned him in,’ said Frank.

They opened the shop. Customers who had seen the shop closed earlier now returned in force. They all wanted to know what the police had been doing there and whether it was a body that the ambulancemen had collected. Joe and Frank explained that they were unable to comment. The enquiries persisted and the queue got longer.

‘If you ask me,’ one woman notorious for voicing her opinions said, ‘it was that old boy who sweeps the floor. He was far too old to be working in a shop.’

‘If you mean Percy Maddox, you’re wrong,’ said the woman next in line. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Percy. He’s coming up the street on his bike.’

Joe dropped the cleaver he was using and went to the window. He was joined by Frank, who gave a long, low whistle of amazement.

‘Crazy old man!’ said Joe angrily. ‘What does he think he’s up to? He ought to be in Spain.’

They watched through the window as Percy came to a halt outside the shop, dismounted, removed his cycle clips and wheeled his bicycle up the side passage. A moment later he appeared in the shop, a slight, bald-headed, worried-looking man in a faded grey suit. He picked his apron off the hook and started getting into it. ‘Morning, ladies,’ he said to the queue, then turned to Joe and said, ‘Morning, Joe. Shall I tidy up the window? It’s a bit of a mess.’

Joe said, ‘What are you doing, coming in here?’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Percy. ‘The police kept me waiting.’

‘You’ve been to the police?’ said Joe in a shrill voice. ‘What did you tell them?’

Frank said, ‘Listen, I’ve just thought of something. I’d better go and fetch it.’ He started untying his apron.

But he was slower than Joe, who was already out of his. He said, ‘You stay. I’ll go.’

While Frank was saying, ‘But you don’t know where I put it,’ Joe was round the corner and out to the street.

He didn’t get far. Apparently from nowhere, two policemen grabbed him. A squad car drew up and he was bundled into the back. It drove away, its blue light flashing.

‘Who’s next?’ said Percy, who had taken Joe’s place at the counter.

An hour or so later, when there was no queue left and Frank and Percy had the shop to themselves, Frank said, ‘What’s going to happen to Joe?’

‘Plenty of questions, I should think,’ answered Percy. ‘You know about Mr Pugh being found dead, don’t you?’

‘I was the one who found him.’

‘Well, Joe must have murdered him.’

‘Joe? We thought it was you.’

Percy blinked. ‘Me, son?’

‘When you didn’t come in this morning, we thought you must have bunked off to Spain with that ticket Mr Pugh left on the counter.’

‘But why should I want to kill Mr Pugh after all these years?’

‘Well, because of the bad time he gives you, all those long hours without a word of thanks. Exploitation, Joe called it.’

‘Did he, by George?’ said Percy with a smile.

‘He said there was a bit of a scene on Saturday because you left the freezer door open. He said he felt so embarrassed that he cleared off home while Mr Pugh was still laying into you.’

Percy shook his head. ‘Son, that isn’t true. I left before Joe on Friday. Mr Pugh had told me it might be better if I wasn’t around while he did some stocktaking with Joe. We had our suspicions about Joe, you see. The books weren’t right. There were big discrepancies. Mr Pugh and I decided to check things carefully for a week and confront Joe with the evidence on Saturday after we closed.’

Frank’s eyes widened. ‘Mr Pugh and you?’

‘Yes, you weren’t to know this, and nor was Joe, but Mr Pugh made me a partner last year, after I’d done fifty years in the shop. Nice of him, wasn’t it? I told him I wouldn’t ever make a manager, and I certainly didn’t want to upset Joe, so we agreed to keep the partnership a secret, just between Mr Pugh and me, and I carried on the same as ever, with the work I know best. But as things have turned out, with me the surviving partner, I can’t keep it a secret any longer, can I? It’s my shop now. I’m the boss.’

Frank was shaking his head, trying to understand. ‘So did you put the police on to Joe?’

Percy nodded. ‘But I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know what had happened. On Sunday morning Joe drove over to see me. He told me Mr Pugh had changed his mind about going to Spain because the auditors were coming to look at the books. He had asked Joe to offer the ticket to me. I believed him. I thought he wanted me out of the way to spare me any unpleasantness.’

‘When it was really Joe who wanted you out of the way,’ said Frank. He recollected the events of the morning, the way Joe had tricked him into covering up the crime out of sympathy for Percy, when in reality Percy was innocent. The trick had almost succeeded too. The police had gone away convinced that Mr Pugh had died by misadventure. They had not suspected murder, and they certainly had not suspected Joe of committing it. But now he was under arrest. ‘Well, if you weren’t suspicious of Joe,’ Frank said to Percy, ‘why aren’t you in Spain? What made you go to the police?’

Percy picked up Joe’s straw boater. ‘You know how it is with me, son. I haven’t had a holiday in years, let alone a holiday abroad. I haven’t got a passport. I dropped in at the police station to ask where I can get one, and...’ He handed the boater to Frank. ‘I need a new manager now, don’t I?’