Come to Harm

twenty-three

Which was ridiculous, obviously. Mrs. Watson, sending a threatening letter? Mabel Watson, greengrocer, fruitseller, and poison pen? It was… there was only one word for it, that wonderful word, unpronounceable by any Japanese person without decades of immersion in English-speaking circles, but since there was no one to hear her mangling it she could say right out loud, kneeling here on the genkan… it was preposterous.

But what about her niece Dina who used to be so happy here and then suddenly was not? Might she have witnessed it and sent the note? Might Mrs. Watson have found out and sent her niece away?

And besides, what was she imagining it was that was done in the old slaughterhouse? An assignation? An empty building was an obvious trysting place for lovers. Her thoughts flew to Murray, of course, but there was nothing for them to settle upon. Murray-and Malcolm, come to that-were young single men; no affair of theirs would cause a scandal. But what if the woman were married-or what if the “woman” was a man? Keiko could not imagine that any of the Painchtonites would care about that. Mr. Callan of Palmer and Callan (surveyors) was married to-in Mrs. Watson’s own words-a lovely boy called Martin who was a good cook, one of her best customers, and had beautiful sensitive hands. “Not like these old trotters,” she had said, turning her own hands over and back and shaking her head at them. “Only good for rummaging in the tattie sack, these are.”

Anyway, it couldn’t be Murray: he had been alone since the break-up with his beloved girlfriend-whose name she couldn’t bring to mind, if she had ever heard it. And Malcolm? Keiko considered this for a moment and rejected it too.

That left Mrs. Poole. And then it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to puzzle out who the other party might be for her. Keiko smiled to herself, recalling him sitting on the edge of his seat, his bright black eyes fastened on her as he jabbed her with questions. And-this was all conjecture, but to let it run for a moment-if Mr. Poole had found out and if the shock had killed him, wouldn’t that explain his widow’s numb dismay and her hysterical scrubbing in the hated place which had seen, no doubt, the confrontation between all three points of the love triangle?

But would that make sense of Murray? Would his mother’s affair, even if it had felled his father, trap Murray the way he seemed to be trapped here? Would it make him tell her to be careful and wish that he could get her-get both of them-safely away? Would it make him, despite all that, glad that she was here, someone who could help him solve mysteries?

It would not. Nor would it suddenly make three young women leave. Even if one of them tried her hand at blackmail, that still left the other two. And anyway, Mrs. Watson-Keiko was sure now that she thought about it calmly-would have handled Grace Poole’s affair by coming over, laying one of those tattie-sack hands on her friend’s arm, and talking to her.

So if it wasn’t an affair, what was it? What were the facts? Were there any facts when she stripped away all the conjecture?

Keiko was aware of a sick feeling settling not into her stomach but somewhere behind her jaw, like the insidious nausea of a journey in a vehicle with a dirty engine, where the fumes build up so gradually that you just gulped them down. There was only one fact, really, one thing was not preposterous but rather incontrovertible: Mr. Poole was dead. Murray’s father had died, and no one seemed to know what had killed him. And-returning to conjecture again, but with a certainty which made the bend in her jaw flood with saliva and caused to her to swallow hard-she could only too easily combine a death, a certain kind of death, with a neighbour too scared to talk plainly.

Her thoughts were racing along now; Murray hated the shop, but Malcolm loved it. Duncan Poole’s death had ended one son’s ambitions, but it had handed the other all that he desired. And wasn’t it strange that Malcolm alone of the three of them spoke of his father so easily, so soon? Didn’t it hint at a lack of feeling, perhaps a block to proper feeling? How could Malcolm be so contented while his mother stumbled through her days numb with sorrow and his brother fretted and ached? And if it seemed outlandish to think a boy might value a butcher’s shop above his own father, she could pull to mind more instances than she cared to of Malcolm stroking bloody steaks as though they were kittens, delving with glee into a wriggling mass of ground beef or a slithering vat of liver. She could hear Murray’s voice: Malcolm’s a butcher. That more or less sums it up as far as Malcolm goes. And Craig’s voice: That creep across the road.

But even Murray stayed, despite everything. And Craig regretted saying even as much as that, which was nothing. We’ve all been pals since we were wee.

The problem was that everyone in Painchton was loyal to the town. Its ways, Mr. McKendrick had said. Its traditions. If only she could find the missing girls. They would have no loyalty; they would tell her the truth.

She opened the browser on her laptop and sat with her fingers on the keys. But she did not even know their full names. Nicole might be a McKendrick, and Dina might be a Watson, but unless Tash had taken Mrs. McMaster’s name-which was not likely-she could be anyone. Keiko closed the laptop again.

If she couldn’t find the people who had left and those who stayed were too bonded to the place like Fancy or too scared like Murray, then she might as well give up on this tenuous mystery.

Then she remembered Mrs. Poole turning pale at the thought of the questionnaire, forbidding her sons to take it. Keiko turned her head and looked along the passage towards the sideboard in the living room, to where Mrs. Watson’s answer sheet lay. It would show up, wouldn’t it? A sneak, a secret holder, a writer of that horrid little note-a person like that couldn’t have answered all those questions on rumours and gossip and disbelief without something showing.

And so Keiko took the first small steps down a path she had never dreamed she would find herself on, one from which there was no returning. She made herself a cup of tea and, with a very soft pencil that she could rub away almost by breathing, she copied the names from her sign-up sheet onto the answer pages in the order of when people visited, opened her stats software, and began.

An hour later, she stared unblinking at the graph she had made until her eyes started to water. She went to the bathroom, took out her lenses, and came back again, threading the wires of her spectacles around her ears.

Maybe Mrs. Watson had seen something surprising behind Keiko in the street that first day. Or maybe she’d been trying not to sneeze. One thing was for sure: there was nothing in her profile-not in scruples, trust, discretion, anywhere-that marked her out as different from Pet McMaster, Pamela Shand, or Moira Glendinning. They were all as innocent as newborn babes.

They were, but it wasn’t like that for everyone. Hidden in the crowd of forty was a very worried little band. Their names, when she put them together, rang a faint bell somewhere. Imperiolo, McLuskie, Dessing, and Ballantyne. Where had she come across them bunched together before? Murray, she remembered, had told her she’d be better off without the Imperiolos and McLuskies as friends. Except that it wasn’t both Imperiolos that stood out on this graph she was staring at; it was Kenny Imperiolo, him alone. And it wasn’t Andrew McLuskie, Master Baker, but his wife, Provost Etta. Likewise, Alec Dessing and Margaret Ballantyne ran with the herd, and it was only his wife and her husband who had made the anxiety indicators shoot off the top of the scale.

What did these four have in common? She was sure there was something. She could see them as clear as day, as if she was looking down on them from above.

That was it! Of course she had seen them, across the street. She had seen them going into the flat door beside the ironmongers, to Mr. McKendrick’s offices up there. They, along with Jimmy McKendrick himself, were the Painchton Traders committee.

Well, of course they were worried! Her shoulders fell and she let her held breath out with a hiss, almost laughing. They were steering a massive project, involving all kinds of decisions and initiatives-including having her here in the flat doing this project. She heard again Mr. McLuskie’s voice telling her she must be wondering why they’d brought her there. And then she remembered his voice saying it was anyone’s guess what was wrong with Etta. He had said she was up to high doh. And Mrs. Imperiolo had said her husband was stressed to his oxters, and Keiko had had to ask Fancy for translations.

But if they were merely anxious about Traders business, wouldn’t their spouses understand that? Why would Andrew McLuskie and Rosa Imperiolo be puzzled if that was all that was going on?

So what was worrying them? Keiko glanced back at the graph again. She hadn’t asked the right questions; she didn’t know. And she couldn’t ask the right questions-simply couldn’t-because of conscience, ethics, morals… and the small fact that the questions she asked were supposed to help with her PhD and not with Painchton’s secrets, whatever they were.

Unless… Keiko lay back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. The target questions-food fads and health scares; her shitty kale, as Fancy called it-they were sacred and they were harmless. But the filler questions could be anything at all. And if she wrote on the front page that responses to the study questions were anonymous, then possibly, logically, technically, you could say that the filler questions, not actually a part of the study, were…

Well, if she never put a name to this, it would be that much easier to forget once it was done.

She was surprised to find herself wondering what her mother would tell her to do. Let the stream flow past you, was a favourite of her mother, who would not let the slightest trickle flow anywhere without her permission. But sometimes, and more honestly, she would say: Cover your ears, Keko-chan, and steal the bell.

It would be for a good cause-for Murray. No one should have to laugh to keep from screaming. No one should have to know things that were crushing them and be sure that no one else would understand. Another saying of her mother’s popped into her head, the best one yet. She said it aloud to herself.

“The weak are meat. The strong eat.” And she nodded, decided at last.

But would it work? Could she find out Painchton’s secrets this way, through a questionnaire? She gave a dry laugh. Everybody else certainly thought so. As soon as Murray had heard about her work he had thought she could help him. And Mr. McKendrick reckoned she could analyse Mrs. Poole. All of them believed that Keiko’s training, her expertise, her methods, would let her crack open their secrets like eggs against stone.

But that was the mark of a layman. Keiko sat up a little straighter in her chair. A professional always acknowledged the limits as well as the scope of her discipline. So, yes, she would design a study within a study to see where the secret lay. She would also, however, complete her investigation of the committee. If Sandra Dessing’s husband and Iain Ballantyne’s wife were as worried and puzzled about their spouses’ stress as Rosa Imperiolo and Andrew McLuskie were, she would have discovered something.

She turned over a new page on her scribble pad.

Fillers, she wrote.

Snoop spouses

She stood at last, knuckling her back, looking out across the empty street to the dark buildings across the way. She stretched and made her way across the room towards bed. Then she wheeled back and added a third line to her list:

Find the girls.