Come to Harm

thirty-two

Wednesday, 27 November

After talking with Fancy on Monday, Keiko did not put on her tracksuit and trot over to the workshop at the time set by Murray for their sessions. She sat in the flat listening for him and rewording her explanation until bedtime. The next night she waited again, thinking of all the times she had skipped downstairs to find him, of how he had watched for her passing and come out onto the street to talk to her, of how he only climbed the stairs-all that effort!-when he needed something.

So when the knock finally came at seven o’clock on the third day, as she was standing in the kitchen slicing vegetables for her dinner, she was almost tired enough of thinking about him to feel no triumph at all. She stood aside to let him in and he slouched towards the living room and threw himself down into a chair with a groan. Keiko settled herself on the sofa.

“Have you heard?” he said at last.

“I don’t think so,” said Keiko, almost sure what he meant but refusing to go along with his estimation of its enormity.

“Willie Byers said to McKendrick that the Traders can have his place. He’s going to sell.”

“I see.” Was she trying to provoke him with this performance of calm?

“It must have been right after Mum went to see him. For sheer spite.”

“He is not a kind man,” Keiko said. “But does it matter? Since you want to leave anyway?”

“What?” said Murray. “Who said I want to leave? Why would I want to leave after the work I’ve put in on the place?”

Keiko was speechless for a moment. “You said it,” she said, when she had got her voice back. “You said it over and over again. That Painchton wasn’t right for you. Or for me. That it was dangerous and you wanted to get away.”

“Oh,” he said. “That. Yeah, well, it was just the shop really.”

“But you said there was a secret. You said I was in danger.”

“What secret?” he said. “Yeah, I said you were in danger-of ending up like Malcolm and the rest of them.”

Keiko thought hard. Could that be right? Had Murray really never mentioned a secret? Was that her own imagining? “You said there was a puzzle,” she told him. “You definitely said that to me.”

“Yeah: how to keep my workshop when the Traders were trying to get it,” he said.

Keiko felt the last twist of tension leave her. Fancy had driven most of it away, but there had been wisps left behind. Small questions, small worries. Now she felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

“It might be for the best that Byers is selling,” she said to Murray. “This way you can look for better premises, perhaps in a busier place where you’ll have customers. Start taking on repairs. Get a bank loan, draw up a business plan.” Like Fancy had done when she was only seventeen. “Or,” she softened her tone, “if it’s to be just a hobby, then make it a hobby. Build a shed in your garden.” Get a garden, she thought. Get a house.

Murray shook his head, as if she didn’t understand. “There’s no reason for him to sell to the Traders,” he said. “He doesn’t give a stuff about the town. And he should compensate me. We had an agreement.” His eyes darted to and fro across the pattern on the carpet as though the answer was hidden there in the brown and orange swirls and he could catch it if he was quick enough. “Someone must have nobbled him. He wouldn’t have done this. I know him. I know how he works.”

“Clearly you don’t,” she said. “Unless he’s only toying with the Traders. Has he signed anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So talk to him.” She did not quite manage to hide the exasperation. “If you really think you want the whole redevelopment stalled so that you can have your bikes and your gym where it suits you to have them…”

“Mum won’t-” he began.

“Oh Murray, it doesn’t matter if your mother won’t do it for you. Do it for yourself. At least enforce the contract yourself. Try to get compensation.”

“But he’s made up his mind,” said Murray. “I’m no good with things like that.”

“At least try!” Keiko said, even louder. “Don’t just say you can’t. Change his mind. Unmake his mind.” He was staring into the fire again and his breathing was getting quicker. “People are not lumps of meat, Murray. Take it from me. You can change them and fix them, just like motorbikes. What do you think I spend my time doing?” He was almost panting now listening to her. “Byers is playing you and the Traders off against each other, and you shouldn’t let him.” She was getting to him. She tried to sound like Fancy, who made all things seem so clear. “He’s…” She groped for the phrase. “He’s as happy as a pig in shit, making all this trouble,” she said. Murray turned his whole body towards her and gave her a stare that was both hard and vacant at the same time. “And,” she went on, “you shouldn’t let a shitty old pig decide your life for you.”

“You’re right,” said Murray. “I knew that. I just needed to hear someone else tell me.” He sprang out the chair so suddenly that she flinched. And then he moved, faster than walking, smoother than running, out of the room. She heard the front door bang behind him.

“It doesn’t have to be this minute, you… plank,” she said to the empty air, then shook her head at her reflection in the mantelpiece mirror. Not a word. Not a single word about her, about them. Just total concentration on his own little problem. Like a child. She laughed out loud and went back to the kitchen.

The red onion, green pepper, and white radish were sliced into thin lengths with pointed ends like quills, and she sprinkled them into a smoking skillet smeared with a drop of oil. She took an egg from the fridge. She would make it into a thin omelette to wrap around her vegetables, slice the tube into rounds and then sit at the table and nibble away until she was tired. Except that she was tired already. She watched the vegetable strips beginning to crisp at the edges and, moving with sudden speed, she got another two eggs, broke all three into the pan and stirred the mess until it was mixed. While the underside browned, she grated cheese on top, holding the grater over the pan, ignoring the sound and smell of stray shards hitting the stove. She roasted it under the grill until it was bubbling and then, holding it between two slices of toast, she carried it, plateless and licking the melting butter from her wrists, over to the table and ate the lot.

She was in her bedroom about to start undressing when the next knock came.

“Hello?” she said through the door, striking just the right note of caution to let him know that she didn’t assume it was him. And if it was him, he could forget it; he was not getting back in tonight.

“Keiko?” came the answer, just as soft. Malcolm.

He was as uneasy as she had ever seen him, swaying in the familiar side-to-side shuffle, looking down. She had always thought of him as looking at his feet, but she realised now that when he looked down he must be looking at his chest or maybe his stomach; he couldn’t see his feet from there.

“Keiko, I’m sorry to trouble you so late.” It was almost midnight. “But I really need to speak to Murray.”

“Murray’s not here,” she said more sharply than she intended, and Malcolm looked up.

“But he’s been here?” he said. She nodded. “Have you had a row?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“The workshop, probably,” said Keiko. “Have you tried there?”

“There was no answer,” said Malcolm. Then he just stood there, waiting.

“Do you want to come in?”

He nodded and she led him to the kitchen, turning to fill the kettle while he rearranged the table slightly out from the wall and squeezed himself into the sturdiest chair. He looked tired, his lips pale and less clearly outlined than usual against the smooth expanse of his face, grey smudges like thumbprints in the inner corners of his eyes. She put sugar into his tea without asking and sat down opposite.

“Did you hear about Willie Byers?” he asked. She nodded. “And you knew my mother was hoping to buy the place for Murray?” She nodded again and felt the look of incredulity, possibly picked up from Murray himself, pucker her eyebrows. How solemn could everyone be about this? Malcolm blew across his tea, drew in a loud mouthful, and went on. “Murray’s very disappointed.” He looked at her through the oily locks of his fringe and chewed his lip, then seemed to come to some decision. “He was at the house earlier and he was very… upset, and I thought I should ask you to be careful with him.”

“Careful?” said Keiko. Was he warning her or threatening her?

“Gentle, I mean. I know you don’t understand and it’s hard to explain. Impossible to explain, really. So just be kind. And if he needs to talk, just listen. Would you do that for us?”

“It’s too late,” said Keiko. “I’ve already told him what I think and I’m afraid I wasn’t ‘kind and gentle and careful.’ I was straightforward. I actually dared to speak my mind. I know that’s wrong.”

Malcolm smiled at her tone and acknowledged the point with a bow. “Not the Painchton way of doing things?” he said. “Is that what you mean? Or not the Poole way at least?”

“But I think I helped him come to some decision.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said he should take control of the situation. I simply suggested that he could make it happen if he really wanted to and if Mr. Byers had made up his mind, then Murray should change it. I hope he doesn’t. I hope he fails. The Traders’ plans are more important than Murray’s whim.”

“You told him to change Byers’s mind?”

“I was talking in the most general terms, but Murray seemed to think I’d given him an idea.”

Malcolm put his cup down with a smack, slopping his tea. His eyes were an echo of Murray’s from hours before, piercing but blind. “What exactly did you say to him?” he asked her.

Keiko could remember her words clearly. She had been proud of them, inelegant as they were.

“I said-why does this matter, Malcolm?-I said Mr. Byers was causing trouble and enjoying it, and that Murray was pathetic to say he could only deal with bikes and not people and he should take charge, unmake Mr. Byers’s made-up mind and I said-excuse me, but what I said exactly-was that Mr. Byers was like a pig in shit and that Murray shouldn’t let his life be decided by a stupid, shitty pig.”

Malcolm rose straight up like a whale breaking water and with no backward movement, so that the flimsy table was shoved towards Keiko and pinned her to the wall. He loomed over her, swaying, for just two or three of her racing heartbeats, then he turned and thundered to the door, gathering speed as he went, making the stone floor under Keiko’s feet shudder. She scrambled out from her chair and followed him along the passage, watching the hanks of hair flap, the clods of flesh wallop and shiver with every thumping footfall.

Down the stairs he went, two at a time, the hallway booming back at him. When he turned on the landing, Keiko could see that his whole face was putty grey, his blue lips working grotesquely as he tried to summon his voice. She could feel each of his steps through her own feet and up to her teeth as he pounded along the passageway to the yard, and she was right behind him as he slammed in through the back door of the shop. The moan in his throat got clearer and louder until it burst out of his mouth.

“Mm. Mm! Mum!”

Mrs. Poole was in place in the puddle of light at her desk, with her ledgers spread open before her. She moved only her eyes as Malcolm lurched into the doorway and stopped dead, making Keiko smack into his back.

“Keiko?” she said, her voice defeated and odd-sounding after Malcolm’s panic. “Where is she?” Malcolm reached behind him and dragged Keiko to the front, clamping her to him tightly, her waist in the fold of his elbow. She rocked back and forward against his heaving belly as he laboured to catch his breath and did not even try to struggle as Mrs. Poole rose to her feet, crossed towards them, reached out, and put her hands on either side of Keiko’s face.

“Thank God,” she said. For the first time, in the dim light of the lamp, Keiko could see colour, a bloom of warm brown, in the dark eyes. Mrs. Poole looked up at her son. “What then?” she whispered. “What’s happened?”

“Byers,” was all Malcolm managed to say. He released his grip on Keiko and turned away, letting the cold air sweeping in from the yard door move around her body again. He went back along the passageway at a stumbling trot, barely lifting his feet from the flagstones. Mrs. Poole hesitated until he was halfway down the yard, almost out of sight, then went after him. Keiko followed her. They heard Malcolm fumble for the padlock on the slaughterhouse door and yank it down hard against the hasp, testing it, finding it locked. Then he started to move again at a shuffle; as their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, they could see him pause in the yard gateway before turning and heading down towards the green.

Malcolm shouldered open a back door into Byers’s part of the building, splintering the lock, and they hurried inside, he first and Mrs. Poole and Keiko in his wake like two tugboats following a liner. They passed the filthy toilet Keiko had once glimpsed and burst into Murray’s room. The darkness was so deep it was like stepping into ink. They could see nothing and it sounded still and empty. Only the smell was wrong. Rising up through the mix of wax, oil, and paint was something else-sourness and sweetness combined, metal and animal, perfume and stink.

Mrs. Poole clicked on one of the lights just long enough for Keiko to see but not to comprehend. There was something spreading across the floor and splattered out, something smeared thin, something clotted. Heaps jagged and piled, smooth white and rags, and Murray’s face as the light snapped off again.

Then came Malcolm’s calm voice. “Come on,” he said. “We can phone from the shop.”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Poole whispered. And before Keiko had time to catch a deep breath against the sight that was coming, the lights were on again.

Murray was sitting propped up by the Bantam with his feet braced on the floor and his hands cradled in his lap, head down, eyes half-open. He was dead. Keiko had never seen a dead person before and could not have said how she knew, but there was no urgency in the steps she took towards him, inching close enough to see the cuts running from the base of his palms to his elbows, thick-edged and gaping, the veins inside ripped, the tendons stretched, and all bleached out to the colour of dirty string. She turned away from him to the spread tarpaulin behind her.

Skin, bones, and flesh were more or less separate, although the seeping blood had carried some of the smaller pieces with it and merged them. The skin was folded in a square-edged pile, topped by something like a nubbly deflated beach-ball that Keiko couldn’t identify. She took a step closer. It was a scalp, the hair kinked into crests with blood. She stared at it and took another step, but a movement caught her eye. Mrs. Poole, standing at the opposite edge of the tarpaulin, had raised her hand, telling her not to go any closer. When Keiko looked down, she saw that her feet were less than another pace away from the edge of the spreading.

“Come on, Mum,” said Malcolm again.

Mrs. Poole shook her head. “We don’t even know who it is,” she said. “At least let’s make sure.”

Keiko looked back at the heaps on the floor, searching for something to tell her that these bundles had been Mr. Byers, and for the first time her stomach threatened to give way in a slow roll forward like a child tumbling over in water.

Mrs. Poole crossed to the bench, to another neat stack, this one only a bundle of clothes, and picked up a wallet from the top of the pile. She opened it gingerly, fingering the contents with great tenderness, as if a small display of respect could make up for the degradation behind her. Keiko felt the urge to laugh but caught herself. Hysteria had no place here.

Mrs. Poole put down the wallet and turned to them with a nod. Then she cast her eyes around the room with a speculative gaze, so unfitting to the moment that if Malcolm had not been there, Keiko would have felt fear at being near her.

“There’s tape over the doors,” she said. Keiko looked at her in puzzlement for a moment before turning to the big double doors to the street. They were sealed around their edges and over the keyhole with broad grey tape. She glanced at the small window. It was covered with a square of cardboard cut from a crisp box and taped around the edges.

“Nobody can see that the light’s on,” Mrs. Poole said. She nodded and cast her eyes around again with the same calm, thoughtful look.

“It’s over, Mum,” said Malcolm. “Come on. It’s over now.”

“Wait,” said Mrs. Poole. “Just a minute. We need to decide what to do.”

“What are you talking about?” Malcolm said. He ran one massive hand, dark-looking against his candle-white face, over his mouth.

Mrs. Poole’s voice was lighter than Keiko had ever heard it as she answered. “Everything’s changed now. Let me think. Stop rushing me.” She looked away from his set face and towards Keiko.

“Are you talking about trying to cover this up?” said Malcolm.

“Trust me,” said his mother. “No good would come of letting it out.”

“Mum, you can’t be serious,” said Malcolm, plaintive and wheedling now. “We could never clean this up, never mind explaining where Byers and-” He choked on the name and pressed his hand against his mouth again.

“I think Malcolm’s right, Mrs. Poole,” said Keiko. Malcolm held out his arm towards her, displaying her to his mother like evidence. Mrs. Poole watched him for a moment, then Keiko saw a spark of light in her eyes and a suggestion of a smile twitch at her lips.

“What?” Keiko asked her.

“No, we couldn’t manage it,” she said, “but I can think of someone who’ll help us.” She was almost laughing. “Who can you think of who knows how to do everything, or thinks he does, and would do anything in the world for me without turning a hair, would do anything for this town?”

Keiko smiled back at her.

“Jimmy McKendrick?” said Malcolm. “You’re going to ask Jimmy McKendrick to cover up murder? Mum, please. You’ve lost your mind.” His voice was rising.

Keiko looked between one and the other. If Malcolm was beginning to panic, then it was up to her. What she had to do was get Mrs. Poole away from here so her senses would return to her.

“Let’s at least ask Mr. McKendrick what to do,” Keiko said. “And whatever he says, we’ll be guided by him. We can phone him from my flat.”

Mrs. Poole picked her way around the edge of the tarpaulin, moving towards Murray. Keiko watched her bend over, smooth his hair up away from his face. Briefly, she saw the peak on his forehead and the hook of his brows before it fell forward again. Mrs. Poole pushed down his eyelids with the tips of her fingers.

“My bonny baby,” she said. The toe of one shoe was in the blood and Keiko hoped she would notice and not need to be told to wipe it clean before walking out into the lane. “My baby boy.”

As she let go of Murray’s face, Mrs. Poole rocked her foot back onto the heel and looked at the blotch. She didn’t wipe it, but took her shoe off and cradled it in the crook of her elbow before turning and limping away.