“I’m sorry, Malcolm,” said Mrs. Poole. “We should have told you.”
Mr. McKendrick narrowed his eyes in an effort to understand. Squinting at Mrs. Poole with distaste clenching his jaw, he looked at last more like his capable self again, the egg-faced idiot gone.
“You can’t be sure?” he echoed. He waited for Mrs. Poole to speak, no inkling in his face of the idea that was forming in Keiko’s mind.
“He got rid of the body.”
“How?” said Mr. McKendrick. “Where?”
“Don’t make me say it,” said Mrs. Poole. She fixed her eyes on a spot above Mr. McKendrick’s head. “It was back when Duncan still did all the work out in the old slaughterhouse.”
Malcolm relaxed his grip on Keiko as though to allow her to snatch her hand away from him, but she opened her fingers and wrapped them around his thumb, squeezing until he closed his hand on hers again. She could hear Mr. McKendrick’s breath coming faster.
“When was this?” he said.
“Just over five years ago,” said Mrs. Poole. “We weren’t just thinking of ourselves, James, you’ve got to believe that. You know Duncan would never have tried to save his own name if it hurt somebody else. We didn’t find out until long after. We never found out for sure, to tell the truth.”
“Who was it?” said Mr. McKendrick.
Mrs. Poole bit her lip and said nothing.
“Tash,” Keiko said.
“Who?” said Mr. McKendrick.
“Natasha,” said Mrs. Poole, nodding. “Tash that Pet McMaster had after Fancy went. I found her clothes. That’s all. I found her clothes and her watch and the leather bracelets she always wore. And we never found anything else. But there had been other… things before, so we were pretty sure what he’d done.” Mr. McKendrick was gulping repeatedly, but Mrs. Poole went on. “Tell me I was wrong, Jim, if you think I was wrong. Tell me I should have told everyone that had been in our shop, months later when it was too late to do anything but have nightmares for the rest of their lives. Tell me I should have told Pet McMaster, when she was beside herself with the girl taking off and I was round there every night with… with… so she wouldn’t need to cook.” Mrs. Poole started to weep silently, holding her bottom lip in her teeth and letting the tears spill and fall.
Mr. McKendrick sat for a long time without speaking, staring unblinking at the tablecloth, until the rise and fall of his chest had begun to slow, then he squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again he looked up and took in all three of them with one gleaming sweep.
“You did the right thing. No question. And we’re going to do the right thing now. I love this town.” He paused and struggled for a way to express his next thought. Finding a suitable phrase, he cleared his throat and began again. “Everything I love is in this town, and I will not,” his voice rose, “stand by and let what I love become a freak show. Jesus God, I nearly-But never mind that now. So.” His voice gentled again and he leaned forward to take Mrs. Poole’s hands into his. “I used to be a volunteer fireman, Gracie, as you know, and in my capacity as Chairman of the Traders I had occasion to speak to Mr. Byers more than once about his safety provisions. Basically, he doesn’t have any. If someone put a match to that place,” said Mr. McKendrick, beginning to pat his pockets with useless busyness, “it would go up like straw. So, I have two things I need to ask you, Grace, and neither one of them is easy. First, could you live with it if Murray went in a fire?” He clasped Mrs. Poole’s hands again, waiting until she nodded. “And second-I’m sorry to have ask to ask you to dwell on this-about Willie. Is he-” He turned to Malcolm, out of some chivalrous impulse, and dropped his voice as though letting Keiko and Mrs. Poole not hear him. “Is he somewhere you’d expect him to be?”
The image of the tarpaulin with its leaking bundles blared at Keiko for a moment and she saw a shudder pass through Malcolm, felt another squeeze, on and off again, in his fingers.
“Far from it,” he said, slowly.
“But will I be able to rearrange the-” began Mr. McKendrick.
Malcolm shook his head and looked towards Keiko in desperate appeal.
“It’s very thorough,” Keiko said, and even this sounded like a monstrosity.
“We’ve got a problem then,” said Mr. McKendrick. “It doesn’t matter how complete the burning is, there’s still going to be remains, identifiable remains. If the petrol station was still on the go, if it was an explosion we were looking at, that would be different. But they’ll be able tell if the body wasn’t-as it should have been-before it burned.” He clipped this last word off short with a look at Mrs. Poole, but she only closed her eyes and waited.
“Son,” went on Mr. McKendrick, “I don’t suppose you would be able to deal with it? No of course not, why should you? I was just thinking with you being a butcher…” Mr. McKendrick’s voice died again. He blew out hard and cleared his throat preparing, Keiko assumed, to begin talking them into giving up a bad job. She blurted out what was in her head before she had time to rethink it.
“Fancy!” All three turned to stare at her. “Fancy Clarke. She’s done an anatomy course. She would know what to do with the body. How it should… be.”
Mr. McKendrick started wetting his lips again, over and up, over and up. “Fancy Clarke is not a Painchton girl,” he said.
“Yes, she is,” said Keiko. “Whether you like it or not. Everything she loves is here, Mr. McKendrick, just like you.”
“Could she do it?” he said.
Keiko tried not to think of Fancy putting her head between her knees to stop herself from fainting at the thought of her lessons, tried to see Fancy walking into the workshop. She would surely do it if she could.
“She could do it if she had to,” Keiko said, which was not the same thing at all.
Fancy’s voice on the phone was groggy, and she whimpered at Keiko’s urgent tone.
“What is it now? It’s one o’clock in the morning, Keeks. Tell me tomorrow.”
“Get Viola up and go downstairs to the back lane,” said Keiko. “Mr. McKendrick is coming to get you.”
“Mr. McKen-”
Keiko put down the phone and nodded to Mr. McKendrick, hovering at her elbow.
He was gone and back, with Fancy tiptoeing behind him, wide-eyed over the bundle of blankets, before Keiko had finished closing the bedroom curtains and getting the bed ready. Fancy laid the little girl down, kept her hand on her shoulder until she was back in deep sleep, and then crept out to join the others.
Perhaps it helped that she hadn’t been in Painchton at the time, but Fancy stood up to it better than Keiko could ever have hoped. Only her constant glances over her shoulder to the back corner of the house, towards the lane, the pink workshop, and what lay inside it, told them that she was anything but calm. Keiko did not spare any details, simply laid out the facts in a clear voice, like a teacher.
“So,” she said, finally, “we need your help. Because you understand how the bones and muscles fit together and you’ll be able to sort out and rearrange the parts of Mr. Byers’s body.” She looked straight into Fancy’s face as she spoke, thinking that perhaps if Fancy was going to faint, they could make it happen now and get it over with.
“What about fingerprints?” said Fancy in a whisper.
“There’s going to be a fire,” Keiko reminded her.
“Oh yeah.”
Mr. Kendrick pulled his watch out of his pocket and looked at it, tapping the back softly with his fingernails, thinking hard. Then he dropped it back and put his arm along the back of Fancy’s chair.
“We should aim to get it started by three, get a good couple of hours’ burn in the dead of night before anyone raises the alarm if we’re lucky.” Fancy didn’t move, so Mr. McKendrick cleared his throat and tried again. “We better get started, lovey.” This time she shot to her feet before he had finished speaking.