There was something rotten here. Wrong play, but true nevertheless. Murray knew and wanted to escape. When he thought she was teasing him about moving his business in there, he had looked ready to kill her. And Janette Campbell knew too. What Keiko had said to Janette Campbell was that Murray had workout machines in the back of the shop, and Mrs. Campbell had thought she meant the little place in the Pooles’ back yard.
The slaughterhouse. Never used but cleaned every day, disgusting to Murray, frightening to Mrs. Campbell.
And what about Tash and Dina and Nicole? Did they know too? Did what they knew make them leave Painchton forever?
She couldn’t explain what Mrs. Watson’s fear might have to do with it. Except that as soon as she had the thought, she realised she could. Mrs. Watson owned the upstairs flat next door; she used it for storage. If she looked out of one of the back windows, she would be able to…
Keiko raced along the hall to the genkan, felt under the pipe, and drew the envelope out. If Mrs. Watson had been looking, she would have seen you. And she would know what you did. And certainly she would have been horrified to see Keiko clutching the letter that threatened to tell them all.
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.