Cold to the Touch Read online

  Sam whistled on his way to work. He was a happy man most of the time, one who loved his profession and could not really have done anything else. There were no hidden yearnings in Sam Brady to be a composer or a famous sportsman: he was already a philosopher and a celebrity in his own right. He drove to the shop from the next town where he lived with Mrs Brady who came from there and worked in the flower shop. Beauty and the beast, she called them; a formidable team. It had been easy for Sam to move from the place where he had been born to somewhere nearby. The Bradys were powerful people in their own quiet way, with a respectable core of knowledge between them as well as never-ending conversations. She knew when anyone had a birthday, anniversary or a death in the next town, since everything was celebrated and commemorated with an order of flowers.

  Sam knew what everyone ate in this village and thus at least half of their habits. They joked about it.

  It was still half-dark when Sam arrived at the shop. Plenty to do today, after early closing the day before. He could never have contemplated being anything other than a butcher/shopkeeper, it was in his bones, ha ha. He was honoured in his trade, a respected professional and it still struck him as odd that although he relished the dismemberment and presentation of dead meat he had never in his life killed a single thing bigger than a fly. That shamed him slightly, perhaps made him less of a man. He envied men who could shoot what they ate.

  He put the key in the lock. The key would not turn, because the door was unlocked already. Silly me, or was it really silly him? For a minute, he could not remember who it was who had locked up yesterday, whether he had left Jeremy with that task or left it to himself because Jeremy had wanted to go somewhere. Or whether he had been distracted in any case because deaf Mrs Smith came into the shop saying she had seen Jess, and he did not know if she meant the dog or the woman, and he knew she could not have seen the dog, except in dreams. Not that it mattered, anyway.

  All this fuss about security that people made these days, what with buzzers and alarms and coded buttons to press. No one had ever tried to burgle a butcher’s shop with its empty overnight shelves, and besides, at least a dozen people had the key to the front door as well as knowledge of the key under the flowerpot for the back door. That included Jeremy, Mrs Hurly, since she was officially the owner of the premises, a couple of neighbours, Mrs Brady in case he forgot it and had to go back in the van, as well as others he could not remember. It really did not matter. The key under the pot was used by the delivery man from Smithfield, if he got there before opening time. There was nothing for this new bloke to steal; he came to deliver, not to take away. He would be wanting to offload and go home, because this was the end of the line. You had to know your way in the dark for that kind of job. Thank God he usually arrived so early on Mondays and Thursdays, so that nobody knew quite how much of Sam Brady’s beef came from wholesale rather than the next field.

  Folk were squeamish. When Sam came back from the abattoir with the pigs he backed the van right up to the door, cut off the heads while the carcasses were still inside, easy, since the necks were broken. Heads were optional, but there were a few old people around here who liked to make brawn. Best people did not know the raw appearance of what they were content to cook. Chickens were another matter, because they were so small. Even so, the customers preferred them without feathers.

  The locks were so commonplace, both at the back and the front, that they would never have deterred anyone with an ounce of determination anyway. You could have got in with a wire. The door stuck, as it did at this time of year. He kicked it open, still whistling. There were footprints over the fresh sawdust put down on the floor after the old sawdust had been swept away and binned yesterday. He loved the sawdust; no had ever thought of anything better. Old butchers knew this and bemoaned the stupidity of Health and Safety regs that preferred plastic to wood, chemical cleaners over sawdust. No sawdust in modern wholesalers’ markets, no wooden chopping blocks, either. Just sad plastic.

  The sawdust was a clean and pale gold dusting on the tiled floor and he walked across it with pleasure, smelling the clean smell. He whistled because it was a whistling kind of day and the overnight rain had left everything fresh. Lovely night in with Mrs Brady and their visiting son, who was a good bloke, apart from his preference for Chinese takeaways instead of home-cooked meaty protein.

  Sawdust out the back, too. He loved the feel of it beneath his boots, it seemed to ward off the cold of the floor. Then he noticed there was more of it than usual out the back; oh well, Jerry went mad with it sometimes, let him be.

  Sam consulted the list of tasks he had stuck to the board: there was that three-week-old quarter to get out the chiller and leave out the front until later. The chiller was always a separate room, the cathedral or chapel of the place, an institution all of its own, with a satisfying humming sound as soon as he opened the door, ready to look at his stock with pride, ready to tut-tut-tut over it, sausages on one side, not enough, carcasses central, vacuum-packed stuff on the shelves to the left, contraband at the back.

  And there she was, centre stage. A dead woman with her back to him, with an industrial-sized hook through her right shoulder holding her onto the central rail so that she hung level with the carcasses behind. Her head lolled forward, out of sight: he had a glimpse of dark hair. The body was not as well bled as any of the carcasses he collected from the abattoir, although she had begun to resemble one of them, with that waxy sheen to the skin. There was no blood seeping from her: she had bled out. Not well hung yet, not edible.

  In other respects she was unlike the other beefy carcasses delivered or collected from the abattoir. She had all her toes and trotters. Her lifeless arms were slightly bent at the elbow and her hands were half contorted into fists with the palms facing out level with her thighs. Facing him. He could see traces of nail varnish on the fingernails, shockingly blue rather than red, all at odds with the dull yellow colour of her back. She had long feet, pointing downwards, as if she was used to treading on tippy-toes. They pointed like arrows towards the floor.

  Sam’s first thought was wrong delivery.

  But there was no Smithfield delivery due.

  The machinery of the chiller room thundered in his ears. He was noticing sounds he had never noticed before. He screamed once, shut the huge door and leant against it. He looked round the back, saw footprints in the sawdust leading towards the back door, nothing else disturbed. When the Smithfield man came in, he left his delivery on the block. Sam’s imagination was playing tricks: there was no such thing as what he had just seen. It was the beer from last night, it was a reaction to noodles and all that rubbish, it was a sick joke, nothing real. He took a deep breath and opened the door again. The same rushing sound filled his ears, the blast of freezing air hitting him. Touch it, see if it’s real. Touch it.

  Sam pushed the corpse’s buttocks with the palm of his hand, convinced he would encounter plastic, but it was cold, real flesh all right, as cold as any meat refrigerated for hours to just above freezing. She was rock solid, but the force of his pushing made her turn on the hook, lazily, so that for a second he saw her in profile, her downturned face covered by long hair, a stiff, solidified bosom. She swung back. He gazed, transfixed, and saw his whole life passing before him. There was a piece of paper tied to her wrist with the twine he used to dress hens. It read, in bold print, PLEASE BURY AT SEA.

  Then he looked beyond her, to see if there was anything else. His brain began to function: he started the steady calculation of the day’s tasks which he always did when he opened the door of the chiller first thing in the morning. He would stand there and work out what to get out for display, how many steaks to cut, how many orders to fulfil. It occurred to him that this thing, this she,might weigh less than a side of beef. The figure was both full and slight; she would be as easy to remove, if he could work out how to take the weight. He had hefted much heavier half-carcasses, but never a dead woman. The centre of gravity would be different. He had once carr
ied Mrs Brady over the threshold and all the way upstairs, and she was much weightier than this. There was another factor to be considered, too. The last time he had carried a woman, the woman had cooperated. This one would not.

  Sam shut the chiller door again and went into the front of the shop. It was still early, not quite daylight, not a soul in sight out there, although it would not be long before the dog walkers stirred. He paced over the clean sawdust, feeling that every step he made was incriminating, because after five endless minutes he knew what he wanted to do, what every fibre of his being was telling him to do. He simply wanted to get rid of her, and the urge to do it now was overpowering. He had even walked over to the phone on the wall to ask Jeremy to help, he could think of no one else, but of course he could not ask Jeremy to help.

  He was ashamed of himself for thinking get rid of her, but it was all he could think. Anything else was ruin. The immediate and long-distance future stared at him. The shop would be shut, his valuable stock would be contaminated, Health and Safety would keep him shut for months of fumigation, new equipment, and would anyone, ever again, buy meat out of that chiller? As for his reputation, he might as well go and kill himself, quite apart from the fact that everyone would think it was him who’d done it. How else would the body of a woman have found its way into his fridge unless he himself had put it there? There was a fishmonger in the next town whose wife had disappeared. Everyone thought he had taken her out in his boat, weighted her down and pushed her over the side, no one would believe she had just gone. They would think him a murderer, too. Sam was not, at this stage, thinking of how this obscene spectacle had got there, that was a stretch too far: he was simply trying to go back to the moment when she had not been there and wanting desperately to retrieve it. Put her right to the back, then, pretend she wasn’t there, cover her up with sawdust and sacking and vacuum-packed chicken breasts behind the curtain of sausages, and later, much later, she would simply disappear. Or stay where she was and await a decent burial, like Jack Dunn’s dog. Until he could steel himself to cut her into unrecognisable pieces, to be disposed of with the other specialist waste. Sweeney Todd had done it. He wished there was a pie maker next door.

  Sam found himself on the verge of hysterical laughter, which turned into tears. He sat where he was, paralysed, useless, unable to move towards the phone, to the dutiful, obvious thing that would ruin him. He was overwhelmed with sadness, anger: shame.

  He registered the sound of a knock at the door. There was a figure framed in the glass of the window, a face peering in. His instinct was to move towards it and throw himself against it to stop anyone entering, and then he saw who it was. Sarah Fortune, out for an early walk. It had to be her, it had to be fate, that particular woman; a virtual stranger, but the only one he knew who had shown herself willing to tell a lie in a good cause. He had never been so grateful to see anyone in his life. Someone who would know what to do, just like she had with Mrs Hurly. He beckoned her in, gesturing that the door was open. She did not hesitate, slipped the bolt on the door behind as soon as she was inside. That small action made them conspirators.

  Sam suddenly became his usual hearty customer-orientated self, slipping into another mould and amazed to hear the sound of his voice, which brought him down to whatever it was that passed for earth.

  ‘Well, miss. What are you doing out so early? Fancy seeing you here, gracing my humble premises. Was it breakfast you wanted? Nice to see you, to see you nice.’

  Then he burst into noisy sobs.

  Sarah let him cry for a minute, then put a hand on his arm, lightly. The touch made him shudder, then made him feel better.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Brady? Shall we go out the back? Make a cup of tea?’

  She was handing him a paper handkerchief to wipe his eyes. The gesture touched him with its sheer futility. She wasn’t going to hug him better, she wasn’t going to help. No one could help, but at least someone could share.

  ‘Come out the back. I’ve gotta show you something.’

  The door to the chiller swung open again. Sam could not remember which of them had depressed the handle. He remembered, later, the way she had stood next to him, looking in, standing there impassively like some kind of doctor, analysing what she was seeing rather than reacting. This time he noticed more details, such as the way the slender feet of the corpse were purple with congealed blood, while the clenched hands were pale, the fact that there was varnish on the toenails, as well as on the fingernails, things like that.

  They both stared, like an old couple in front of a favourite programme on a TV screen. He heard her sniff, once, and realised that she had started an almost noiseless weeping, whereas his had stopped.

  ‘Poor cow,’ she said. ‘Poor cow.’ And then, ‘Shut the door, will you? We don’t want her getting warm.’

  Her voice was hollow and neutral. Then they faced each other. Sarah smiled at him, tremulously.

  ‘My word,’ she said. ‘She’s let herself go a bit, hasn’t she? I’ve seen her looking better.’

  The bad joke, the graveyard remark, some sick bit of wit introduced them back to the everyday world. No wonder people laughed like hyenas at funerals: it was all part of grief.

  ‘I hope she had a good enough life,’ Sam said, responding in kind. ‘And I wished she’d asked me before taking up residence here, otherwise I could have got her a room on her own. Either way, she’s certainly going to be the death of me.’

  ‘I expect she caught a bad cold,’ Sarah said. ‘What am I going to do?’

  She stood there with crossed arms, as if considering. She seemed to have taken it all in, as if she had known everything that had gone through Sam’s head in the last ten minutes, when his life and his business had flashed before him, and all he had wanted to do was hide that awful body. She shook her head, her face wet with tears.

  ‘We dial nine nine nine, Sam. There is absolutely nothing else to do. Anything else will make everything worse. Then we wait.’

  He nodded, humbly. She was right. He liked the ‘we’. ‘You do it. I can’t. I want … I wanted to do something else. I wanted to hide her. Cut her up and bury her.’

  ‘I know you did. I would have, too. Right. I’ll do it.’

  ‘I could have killed her,’ he said, his voice rising in panic. ‘They’ll think I killed her.’ ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘Do you know who she is?’ he burst out.

  ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Yes. She’s Jessica Hurly. Mrs Hurly’s daughter. I’ll call them now.’

  Them.The forces of law and order. A mighty force of ineptitude, who would blame the nearest.

  Jessica, you silly bitch.

  They both conjoined in a minute of hating her.

  Sam listened to Sarah on the phone. A girl has been murdered and her body deposited in the fridge of the butcher’s shop in Pennyvale. You’ll need to send a whole team and someone to control the traffic. There’s no need for sirens – she is definitely dead.

  It was the strangest of sensations, sitting there waiting. Sam pulled down the blinds at the windows. He only ever did that to keep the place cool on the sunniest of days. The blinds were stiff from winter disuse and he cursed them. Then they sat by the counter on the two chairs reserved for the less able customers.

  ‘I can’t work it out,’ Sam said. ‘Why would anyone do that to Jessica Hurly? She was the Pennyvale bicycle, but what was so bad about that? Why bring her back like this?’

  ‘Perhaps there’s another way of looking at it. Why would anyone do this to you? Were you one of her lovers?’

  ‘How much do you know? No, I wasn’t one of her lovers, far too old. But she did used to play here, when she was a kid. Maybe she brought them here later.’

  ‘Here?’

  Sarah was surprised.

  ‘Not here, up there.’ He pointed to the ceiling. ‘There’s a flat up there. You get to it round the back, up some steps outside. It’s all Hurly property. Little wild Jessie had plenty of pla
ces to go. The rest of the kids had to make do with cars and the beach. Privilege not always a good thing, is it?’

  He laughed, without any mirth, and then groaned aloud.

  ‘I’ve just thought of something else. There are two Jessicas in that chiller. There’s Jack Dunn’s dog. They’ll think I make a habit of it. Health and Safety’ll kill me for that alone.’

  ‘Jack Dunn’s dog,’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes. I found it dead on the road, months ago. I picked it up, shrink-wrapped it, put it in the back of the chiller in the freezer section for him to collect whenever he came back. He’d want to bury it, I thought. Closure, innit? Besides, I couldn’t report it. It was full of shot and with a cut throat. Jerry killed it. I should have buried it for him.’

  He was talking to himself rather than to her. It made little sense. Sarah looked at her watch.

  ‘How big is this dog?’

  ‘Small.’

  She was coldly decisive.

  ‘I reckon it’ll take them another ten minutes at least to get here. Go and get that dog out of the freezer. The dog’s going to do for you as much as the body. The body’s a bad accident that’s just happened, but no one’s going to understand the dog. The dog’s really going to muddy the waters. Quick, get it.’

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you. I’m going to take the dog home and fetch the vicar. Then I’m coming back. I’m your witness. You stand outside and wait.’

  Seven-thirty a.m. A woman sauntering home after an early walk, bearing a white carrier bag with the butcher’s distinctive logo. Sam Brady did good strong bags, everyone used them again and again. They were bags for life.

  Sarah tried to walk nonchalantly, the way she did when she was walking home from a long stroll on the cliffs, genuinely tired. Tried and failed, so that by the time she turned the corner into her own road she was running, the big bag containing desiccated frozen dog banging against her legs. She felt more than a little mad, but it was often when she felt like this that she knew her instincts were right.