Cold to the Touch Page 17

  ‘Customers,’ Mike whispered. ‘Someone who wants to choose his very own cow. And then say exactly what he wants done with it.’

  The two men were distinguished by the fact that they did not wear white overalls. They wore winter coats and scarves. They were beyond regulations. Big customers or influential ones.

  Each of them inspected the carcasses. One of the men gave an instruction to the helmeted butcher, who pasted a label on a carcass and listened to further instructions. Sarah could not hear what was said and besides, it could have been in a foreign or technical language. She heard the words ‘nothing too good for Das Kalb.’ Then the second man turned and noticed them. He was half hidden by a carcass. In the dim light, Sarah had an impression of size and authority.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here? Not often we see a woman in here.’

  He turned his back to her, spoke to the butcher. ‘You know it’s no place for a woman. Not back here, anyway. Only in extreme circumstances.’

  A deep voice, carrying a warning.

  ‘Research for a magazine,’ Mike said easily. ‘Got a pass. I do the looking, she does the writing-down on account of me not being so good at that. Don’t worry, we aren’t here to criticise. Brilliant place.’

  The London accent reassured the man, along with Mike’s shirt collar and tie and the masculinity of him. The man moved away, his demeanour indifferent now. The helmeted man glared at them.

  ‘No one told me,’ he began, blustering.

  Mike held up his hand, placating. ‘’S all right, mate, we’re going now, but can you answer me one thing? How the heck do you tell one of these from another and why does it make any difference? They all look good to me.’

  ‘You can tell a steer from a cow, can’t you?’

  ‘Not me, mate, not me. Story of my life,’ Mike said, edging backwards with Sarah in tow, aiming for the dark corridor and with a nothing-to-hide air. His remark provoked a bark of laughter.

  ‘Get her out of here,’ the man said.

  The trio did not watch them go.

  They went back down the long corridor to the exit. The huge container lorries had disappeared into the night. Instead there was a proliferation of delivery vans, high-sided one-ton trucks, smaller vans, every variety of white van. Loading was in progress, porters running with joints of meat, packs of chickens, pre-jointed shrink-wrapped parcels and, destined for the high-sided trucks, half-carcasses of beef.

  Sarah went towards a high-sided van where the driver was getting back behind the wheel.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Research. Can you tell me where you deliver?’

  He looked at his watch and back at her, amazed by the stupidity of a question he had no time to answer. He was looking at a woman full of manic anxiety.

  ‘Where don’t I deliver? Everywhere.’

  ‘Do you deliver as far as Dover?’

  ‘Not me, mate. I mean everywhere in London.’

  He shut the door of the van and drove off.

  ‘How do I find out which of these delivers to a particular butcher on the south coast?’ Sarah asked Mike.

  ‘Needle in a haystack,’ Mike said. ‘You don’t start here, you ask the fucking butcher. What’s the matter, doll? You’re shaking like a leaf.’

  ‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘I saw him. I recognised him, I’m not sure from where. I recognise him. I need to see him in the light. I might know who he is, why she loved him.’

  Sarah wanted to tear out her own hair.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she said, almost yelling in frustration. ‘What better place to hide a body and move it on? He can’t drive, but he has the power to make it happen. They were afraid of him. He knew it would work. It was the only way to get her home.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mike said he was going shopping and left Sarah standing outside a caff in sight of the gates into Grand Avenue. She watched him plunge back into the vibrant light of the meat market.

  Sarah imagined Jessica standing in the same place, summoning courage to go in there alone. She found herself looking towards the entrance and imagining Jessica being dragged out; remembered her saying they threw me out quite gently; they make their own laws.

  She had said so much at the time. There had been a torrent of words, of explanation, a premonition of pain. Jessica had kept rubbing her shoulder, saying she could feel a hook. ‘Did they hurt you?’ Sarah had asked. No, they had not: she had hurt herself. I went to find him. He was avoiding me and I knew I could find him there. I knew he would have to be nice to me in front of all those men. They revered each other, him and those men, but I got the time wrong. I got everything wrong.

  On the morning when she had met Jessica all those weeks before, it had been much later in the morning than this. Now it was almost four a.m., peak trading time. There was a multitude of white vans, cars, white-clad smokers huddled by the entrances for a quick gossip with fellow addicts before going back in. She should be over there, talking to them, but what could she ask? In a minute, maybe. There was so much to ask.

  When she had met Jessica, half a mile from here, it had been nearly six a.m., two hours later than it was now. Jessica had gone into the market at the wrong time to find and confront the Lover who went shopping around three in the morning. Sarah had taken Jessica back to her own flat, fed her something, listened to her rambling and ended up making her talk about home, about her childhood, her background, and the sea, simply to make her change the subject. She had been trying to distract the obsessive girl, talked about her own dreams of a different way of life instead and then Jessica had sprung into action. Jessica had been wildly excited in her own ability to fix it, to do something within her power to fulfil a dream. Jessica described Pennyvale as perfect for Sarah’s needs, the perfect place: she was longing to be there by proxy. It had happened so fast and she was so delighted with herself that she was irresistible, no one could resist her, and then when it was done, and even in between, she returned to the old theme. You want to live in a cottage by the sea? Really? You’d love it there, Sarah, you really would, I could tell you how to find a place, and my mother has places. And then, He loves me, Sarah, he really loves me . . . how can he not? How can he leave me? How can he not want to be with me?

  Sarah could hear herself saying, Go on, and tell me all about home: tell me about the place where you grew up – am I going to love it as much? Getting seriously excited herself, thinking, Yes, here’s an opportunity; I’ll do it, I’ll do it; I’ll give the dream a try. Not listening to anything else as freedom beckoned. How thoughtless she had been not to listen to all the other things she could have been told.

  She watched a duo of seagulls circling above the high glass ceiling of Grand Avenue. All roads lead to the sea and beyond: this place had the feeling of being the centre of the universe, the underbelly, the belly feeder of a nation, famous for meat. Smithfield, purveyors of food for the capital. All roads led to and from here, bringing the food in, taking it away. She remembered another passage she had read from one of Mr Hurly’s books in Mrs Hurly’s tiny house. The passage had made her angry.

  There was a definite association between butchers, drovers and highway robbers, and butchers were known for their violent natures. A survey of those hanged in the eighteenth century showed that among the trades, the main ones to reach the scaffold were butchers first, then weavers and then shoemakers.

  Sarah watched the seagulls and heard their voices. The words had made her angry because those who were hanged were the poorest, the desperate, as well as the most ambitious and the ones who refused to compromise. Reckless Jessica Hurly might have gone to the scaffold if she had lived then. She had gone to her own scaffold. Sarah sipped sugared tea and wished she could feel hungry, to displace the feeling of disgust. Mike had been gone for a long time in there, doing his artful man’s work in an environment where only men could ask questions and in which she felt impotent and useless. She was working things out, slowly, if not necessarily surely, hopin
g that her imagination was not squaring too many circles, reminding herself of the disciplines of her former life and education which dictated that fact was the only good foundation for any well-built belief, and imagination was only the mortar. She was trying to resist believing what she imagined must be true; trying and failing, counting on her fingers.

  Jessica had gone back to Das Kalb. The owner does small private parties on Sunday nights.

  DK was within walking distance from here.

  A meat market was the perfect place to recycle a body; that was what a meat market was for, and it would stop for no one.

  He could have carried Jessica here. He could have donned a white coat and delivered her here. In dark deserted streets who would notice? He would be a butcher on his way to work with something bloodless in a sack.

  Mike appeared, carrying two bulging carrier bags.

  ‘You can get free-range eggs and bacon in there, too. Thought I’d pose as a customer. Got us breakfast. I need it.’

  He looked quite different without the hard hat and overalls that they had abandoned, innocent and ordinary until he turned his left cheek and then he looked as if he had authority. No one could fail to recognise him; he had presence. He sat down next to her, shaking his head.

  ‘I’ve fucked that up,’ he said. ‘I really have. Got enough meat for two weeks and nowhere to put it. I went back to our stall. And he saw me. He was at the front of the stall and he saw me. He clocked me. The old bloke sizing up the beef. He was putting it on the account for DK. Got to be the owner, like the wine waiter said. Look, he’s coming out, over there. Get inside, quick.’

  There was a narrow counter on the inside of the caff’s window. He pulled her inside and they leant on the counter, looking out, shielded by the light. They watched the big, imposing man come out through the main gates, followed by a white-coated porter carrying bags, walking towards a taxi carelessly parked amongst the delivery vans. The bags were placed inside, the man followed and the taxi moved away slowly. From this distance, the facial features were blurred by light and dark.

  ‘They’re only going round the corner to DK,’ Mike said. ‘Das Kalb. I got that for definite. Our favourite place. They have veal on the menu every night. Know what it means, doll? Das Kalb. The Calf.’

  She tipped the last of the tea into her mouth and hoisted her bag.

  ‘Home,’ she said.

  A huge surge of hunger came roaring back. Sarah could not remember when she had last eaten.

  ‘The way I see it,’ Mike said, ‘is like this. The Das Kalb man is important business. He’s a buyer. Even without him, look at the way they work. If you looked after stall fifty-five, one of the biggest and the bestest, what would you do if someone got in the back in the dark and inserted the body of a woman on the delivery line and hung it up along with the rest so that it was delivered to you? You’d see it for sure, you’d see it as soon as it passed the weighing station, but then what would you do? Call the police? What would happen if you did? All hell would break loose, that’s what would happen. You’d have to stop selling. The heavy-handed mob would come in and close you down. They’d close down the whole market. Your business would be bust; the people who ordered from you might never come back. The other wholesalers would hate you. Close the whole market and what would be the loss? A million or more? You’re having a hard enough time as it is. What would you do, doll, what would you do?’

  ‘I’m not a man. I don’t have a business to run. What would you do?’ Sarah was chewing a piece of toast that tasted of sawdust.

  ‘What would I do if I were a hard-headed businessman butcher in hard times with people to pay and a living to make and a brotherhood behind me? I’d hide it away. I’d hide the body good and deep in one of those freezer rooms. I’d freeze it or disguise it until I could get someone to take it away. I might chop it into pieces. Business is business and the bitch is already dead. It’s a body like so many other bodies – corpses don’t faze them, they handle them all the time. It doesn’t belong to you, you haven’t ordered it, but it’s going to ruin you. You haven’t got a choice: there is no choice. Nothing gets in the way of business. You’ve got to sell and sell soon, so you get rid of it and get on with business. You get someone to take it away and pretend it hasn’t happened. That’s what I’d do. You’d get rid of it and you’d be safe. You’d be easily persuaded to do that.’

  Sarah remembered Sam’s impulse when he had found the body of Jessica. I wanted to get rid of it. I wanted it to go away. Even a decent man might be tempted.

  ‘Especially if a favoured customer paid you or asked you,’ she said.

  Mike nodded.

  ‘You wouldn’t do favours like that on a regular basis, but you might do it just this once. You’d do it because you could and it would be the easiest way out. You might do it because it looked like the only way out. He’s engineered things so that choice is the last thing on the menu. He’s got you fixed.’

  He had finished his poached eggs on toast. Sarah had averted her eyes from the yellow mess while being grateful for the existence of hard men with good digestions and clear-thinking minds.

  The coffee also tasted of nothing.

  ‘Any more of that? Yup, you’d store it out of the way, ’cos only one or two people would know. Better still if you could get someone to take it away immediately. Someone who really needed his job. A delivery man, maybe. Someone who would take it far, far away, dump it on someone else, either the last in the line or someone who deserves it, or who’d pass it on to someone else even further away to bury it for you or dump it in the sea.’

  ‘Or someone who was going that way, anyway. Someone who was paid to take it home? That’s what he did. He couldn’t do it himself. He paid someone to take it home, someone who couldn’t refuse.’

  Mike sat back.

  ‘Wherever, doll. Someone would take her, especially if he needed his job. Or was paid enough. It could be done, not easily, but it could be done. I might have done it myself twenty years ago, as long as I didn’t know who it was. A corpse doesn’t have a personality in a meat market. You can see what it’s like around there. Frantic rush to load up, mostly in the dark. Who’d notice another small steer wrapped in a bit of sacking or any old wrapping being slung in the back of a van? Something less than the size of a calf.’

  ‘Someone took her home,’ Sarah said doggedly. ‘Someone was forced – or paid – to take her all the way home. She was labelled for home.’

  ‘So she was. Gottit. A freelance Smithfield delivery man dedicated to stall fifty-five, others too, maybe. Someone who leaves about four in the morning and does small orders, longdistance. Little deliveries to independent butchers. Last in the line is somewhere godforsaken like Pennyvale. Can get in any time and leave the orders, if he arrives early. Only he never, ever calls on Wednesdays and there were no outstanding orders, so no one looks for him or even dreams of him. Only maybe that Wednesday he did. Because he was paid. Because he could.’

  Dear S,

  I can scarcely believe you’ve been away for so many days. It feels like years and everything has stood still.

  On demand, a bit of local history for you.

  You’ve been asking a lot of questions, but I relish the chance to communicate, it brings you back into the house. The weekend was endless; selfishly, I hope it was for you too. I’d hate for you to be tempted back to Sodom and Gomorrah before you had a chance to start somewhere else.

  Tea with Celia, sad. Both numb and raving at the same time, moments of crystal clarity when asked to recall.

  Asks after you, saying where is she, will she come back? She’s pathetically polite and grateful. I liked the other, ruder one better.

  No Hurlys in the graveyard. He might have been there, except for the fact that the body was never recovered.

  Next question. According to her mother, Jessica had always wanted to be buried at sea. A childish ambition: you know how children and teenagers can be wonderfully ghoulish and dramatic about
death. Wanted to be buried at sea like a Viking in a burning boat.

  YES, Sam is going to be allowed to open the shop again, soon! No blood contamination, apparently, so sooner than we thought. Date will be fixed tomorrow. He’ll be placing orders and he’s beginning to cheer up.

  Him and me painted the walls grey. Looking good. I hope you like it.

  No sign of J. and J., tho’ no one else being suspected. Cops think they’re long gone. Definitely not looking for anyone else. They found the dog, though, but no one helped them close that particular circle. They are very slow, these cops. They know Jessica was seen here, but they can’t find anyone who actually did spot her.

  Local paper full of the news. Copy in the post, as requested.

  I do like you, Sarah. Very much. Please come back. Isn’t it better not to know? Let it rest.

  Love,

  Andrew

  PS. I’m not gay. It just seems to have been expected of me, but you knew that, didn’t you?

  Dear A,

  Yes, I always knew that.

  And I think I’m beginning to know how Jessica was killed, but I’ve got to stay until I can get something like proof. Let me know as soon as Sam has the all-clear, and has a date for Smithfield deliveries, will you? This is very important. Then I’ll come back, maybe bring a friend.

  City life OK, but confusing. At least we have seagulls.

  Talk soon,

  Love, S

  Dear Sarah,

  What friend?

  Sleep on it. Too restless to sleep, even with Mike beside her.

  ‘How do we find the delivery man, Mike?’

  ‘You won’t find him via Smithfield. Cover’s blown and no one will say. What you do is you start the other end. You go to Pennyvale and wait for him to turn up. You really believe all this, don’t you? And you want me to go with you? I hate the place.’