“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.