“I didn’t-”
“By omission,” Keiko said.
“Jesus,” said Fancy. “It’s like being back with the nuns.” Instead of taping the bags, Fancy wound the strip round and round one of her hands until her fingertips turned purple, concentrating hard on it, saying nothing. Then she looked up. “When I came back,” she said, “Pet was in bits. I thought she’d never stop crying. She used to sit with Viola, both of them bawling their eyes out.” She gave Keiko a bleak kind of grin. “Brilliant ego boost.”
Keiko said nothing, didn’t even smile.
“So I suppose I was angry,” Fancy said. As she spoke, she unwound the tape from her fingers and screwed it into a ball. “With Tash, I mean. For hurting Pet. And I just didn’t want to think about her. Or talk about her.”
Keiko weighed her words for a moment. “Understandable,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” said Fancy. She threw the tape ball at the wastepaper basket. It missed.
“Doubting you. I thought you knew something about them.”
“Who?” said Fancy, frowning.
“The missing girls,” Keiko said. “Tash and Nadine Taylor and Nicole Sneddon.”
“Not this again!” said Fancy. “They’re not ‘missing.’”
“But I’ve searched and searched online for Nicole and Dina,” Keiko said. “Why can’t I find them?”
Fancy rolled her eyes and opened her laptop. “What did you look under?” she said. “Cos the best place to find Dina Taylor is in St. Abbs, where she lives. Or under photography, which is her hobby.” She typed in silence. “And there she is. North Berwick High School, summer photography show. This summer, Keeks.”
“High school?” said Keiko. “But Mrs. McMaster said she hung around Murray. How old is she?”
“She didn’t hang around him that way,” said Fancy. “She just liked the bikes. Likes black leather anyway.”
“And what about Nicole Sneddon?”
“Horses,” said Fancy, typing again. “She’s a showjumper. Did you know that? If you don’t add in something extra all you get is LinkedIn and family history. Nikki’s a showjumper and anyway, she was here about two weeks before you arrived, visiting Jimmy and Craig.”
“Well, what about Tash then?” said Keiko. “Can you find her? What were her interests before she got fat and unhappy and broke up with Murray and went away?”
Fancy pressed her lips very close together. As they stood in silence, the shop door opened, letting in a surge of damp air and the sound of cars swishing slowly past in the fog. From Fancy’s face Keiko knew without turning that it was one of them, she just didn’t know which until she looked over her shoulder.
Malcolm was just inside the doorway, wrestling with the neck fastening of his waterproof cape, trying to remove it before stepping from the doormat onto the carpet. The black rubber squeaked against the glass as he struggled, then he gave up and, planting one foot out away from the door to give himself room to manoeuvre, he reached one hand over the opposite shoulder as far as it would go and flung the cape across his back with a grunt, then scrabbled to catch it and pluck it away from him. Underneath, his white overall showed a faint whiter ghost where his apron had been. He had on the white rubber boots he wore in the shop too and as he turned and stretched up to hook his cape over the door hinge, Keiko could see that the boots had been cut down in the back to fit around his ankles. His socks had disappeared, wrinkled down during the slow walk around the corner, and there was a cold, pink vee of wet skin briefly visible before the hems of his sodden trousers came down again.
“I’ve come for my posters, Fancy,” he said in his soft boom.
“They’re ready,” said Fancy. She took a roll of paper from under the counter, plucked the middle sheet free, and spread it on the counter. Malcolm paced over towards them and then stood reading carefully, his eyes pinched up in concentration.
“Good,” he said at last. “You see what I’ve done?”
Fancy and Keiko bent to look. They were price lists for Christmas packs of meat, written in red with a suggestion of snow covering the bigger letters, and decorated at the corners with robins and spruce trees.
“Christmas preparations begin very early,” Keiko said. “Pamela has already been discussing it with me.”
“Can’t come soon enough for me,” said Malcolm. “I’m dying to see how these go. The Family Deluxe is actually the budget option, but I don’t say that. The selling point is that the turkey comes all ready to go in the oven, and the ham’s ready cooked. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret.” He rested the heels of his hands on the counter and relaxed slightly, treading his feet. “The Family Deluxe is going to be just as delicious as the Butcher’s Finest. You know why?” Keiko shook her head. “Because,” he went on, “nobody can cook a ham like me. So the cheap hams that I did are going to taste better than the expensive hams that Mrs. So-and-So tries to do herself. People are scared of the salt, see? They soak out all the flavour and then they’re too scared of the sugar to do a proper glaze. And as for the turkeys. A turkey’s a turkey’s a turkey-it’s what goes in it and on it that makes the difference. Fat, basically. You need fat to cook a good turkey and Mrs. So-and-So won’t have the bottle. She’s terrified of fat. She’d rather pay more for lean bacon and high-meat sausage and have a dry one. So that’s what she’s getting. But the Family Deluxe is stuffed front and back with fatty pork, and I put extra fat under the skin and cover the breast with good fat belly strips. It’s going to be gorgeous. That’s the one to go for. The fat one.” He beamed at them, breathing rather hard after such a lot of speaking.
“Well,” said Keiko. “That’s…” She looked at Fancy for help, but she was just staring, slack-jawed. Malcolm lowered his head.
“I’ll walk back round with you, if you’re going,” said Keiko. “I must settle down to some work soon or today will be lost.”
Despite her umbrella, raindrops-or maybe fog drops, she thought-were clinging to her eyelashes before they had reached the corner. She hugged the roll of posters closer and took an extra little step to keep up with Malcolm, surprised, since he had always seemed to move so slowly, to find that she had to hurry to walk beside him, her feet taking two steps to every one of his. They stopped at the kerb and as Keiko lifted her umbrella to check the traffic through the sheeting rain, Malcolm peered out from under his hood. They caught each other’s eyes and smiled.
Keiko was suddenly overwhelmed with a wave of homesickness like a heavy blanket thrown over her. When she was small, rain like this was funny, never bothersome; it was something to raise her face to and dance in, and she could never understand why grown-up people hunched their shoulders and scowled, why they tried so hard to be angry with the rain. And she knew it was an effort because if the rain got the better of them-if her mother’s umbrella blew out of her hand, or a passing truck soaked her father from head to toe-they would give up the pretence and whoop just like she did. Laugh or cry, it’s the same life, Keko-chan, her mother said.
And then, all of a sudden, as though he had read her thoughts, Malcolm said, “Oh, stuff it!” He stepped into the brimming gutter and splashed a few paces up the road and then down again, kicking up gouts of water with his feet like the man in the old musical. Keiko was about to close her umbrella and join him when she remembered she was holding his posters, so she stayed put but cheered. Then the little stream of traffic came to an end and they crossed the road, Malcolm raising one arm protectively behind her like the wing of a gigantic bird, the ear of some monstrous, dripping elephant.
Murray was perched on a stool behind the counter reading a magazine. She stepped boldly behind the counter, squeezed his hand, and pecked him on one cheek. He wiped his face where her damp hair had grazed against it, so she made a show of smoothing the frizzy tendrils back and holding them against her head with both hands before kissing his other cheek. He smiled and put his hand on her shoulder.