Come to Harm (19 page)

“Well, that's a good girl,” said Mr. McKendrick. “So long as you don't work too hard.” He waited for inspiration about how to begin. To fill the lengthening silence, he went on: “At least that's one worry I don't have with young Craig.” He laughed. “He's full of nonsense, always was. I hope you'd take anything he says with a grain of salt.”

“A grain of salt?” said Keiko. “Is that a proverb? I hear so many things and if I don't understand, I just ignore them.”

It wasn't quite the assurance he was looking for, but it would have to do.

“So … how's it all going?” he said. He laced his fingers together across his stomach in a comfortable gesture and felt his cuffs begin their upward creep.

“The pilot study is complete.”

“This was the smoke and fire questions?”

“It was.”

“And the food will come up next time, you assured me. Because it was food you said you were studying, and it was that that convinced us you were right for Painchton. Someone interested in traditions and beliefs and willing to learn our ways.”

“I'm not an anthropologist, Mr. McKendrick,” she said. “But yes, the food will be there in the end. I'm working on it. The pilot study smooths out the wrinkles in the format and then the profiling questionnaire … smooths out the wrinkles in the subjects—or shows me where they are so I know to allow for them—and
then
the study itself can begin.”

“You must have patience of a saint,” said Mr. McKendrick. “Not that doesn't sound very—I mean to say, I'm sure it's—” He cleared his throat.

“When eating poison, lick the plate,” Keiko said. “That's a proverb my mother often says. In for a penny, you would say. And also, each to their own,” she said, echoing Malcolm.

“Exactly,” Mr. McKendrick said. “And how's everything else? The house … et cetera.” And then, his nerve failing him, he changed the subject, almost. “I hope everybody's treating you well. I drew up a schedule. I hope it's being adhered to.”

“You mean for entertaining me?” said Keiko. “I can assure you, Mr. McKendrick—”

“It wasn't supposed to be just tea and a bun for entertainment now and then,” said Mr. McKendrick, frowning. “We agreed we would help you out day to day.”

“Oh!” said Keiko. “You mean the groceries. If it's the groceries, I don't know where to begin. I can't keep up with it all. I'm drowning. In soup.”

Mr. McKendrick chuckled at her and sat back in his chair. “Drowning in soup!” he said. “What a turn of phrase you have on you.”

“I'm not joking,” Keiko said, gesturing towards the kitchen as though Mr. McKendrick could see what was in there; the tubs of soup she made as a last resort when all hope of finishing up the food was slipping away, tubs stacked three deep in the freezer and more than once already defrosted and poured away when new consignments of frozen foods arrived and there wasn't an inch to spare. Kilo bags of chip shop chips, thin French fries, Cajun skins, extra-thick wedges, crumbed croquettes, and Granny Sarah's roasties (oven or microwave). And towers of cinnamon bagels, blueberry waffles, croissants (cook from frozen), and brioche (defrost at room temperature for twenty-fours and check that product is thoroughly thawed throughout before serving). And Mrs. Watson's cauliflower cheese in Pyrex, Mrs. Dessing's shepherd's pie in Le Creuset, Mrs. McMaster's cottage pie in a tinfoil tray like the tinfoil trays from the Imperiolos with the cardboard lids and the sauce seeping out along the seal. And then the knock at the door and it was Mr. Glendinning straight from the cash and carry and he couldn't resist the Boston cream pies at two-for-one, and she could have a slice now and just put the rest in the freezer.

“Good,” said Mr. McKendrick. “As long as you're not going hungry. I'd hate to send you home to your mammy like some wee waif and stray and have her thinking we didn't take care of you.”

“There's no chance of that,” Keiko said.

“Not that I'm assuming we'll be sending you home at all, mind,” he added. “Maybe you'll stay.”

“Maybe I will,” said Keiko. “I have never met with such kindness before. Mrs. Watson and Mrs. McMaster and Fancy. Rosa and the McLuskies—well, Mr. McLuskie, since his wife is so busy with her political life.”

“And Mrs. Poole,” said Mr. McKendrick, resisting the temptation to pass comment on Etta McLuskie's
political
life. As if he couldn't have been the new provost if he hadn't thought it would be too hard on Grace to see him in Duncan's chain of office. In a roundabout way, annoyance at Etta helped him. He finally dived in and said what he had come for.

“Do you think Mrs. Poole is all right?”

Keiko could not help her eyebrows rising.

“I just thought,” continued Mr. McKendrick, “with you trained up in it, you know.”

“Trained up? In?”

“All of this,” said Mr. McKendrick, waving his hand at the papers on her desk. “People's … How people cope with things like … like what Grace is going through.”

“Ah,” said Keiko.

“And what with you being right here.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. McKendrick, but I would never use my training to encroach on my neighbour's privacy. And even if I couldn't help forming a view, I wouldn't share it with anyone. It wouldn't be ethical.”

Mr. McKendrick drew himself up and back a little in his chair. “Very proper,” he said. “Very commendable.” Then he paused. This was the second time in one day he had found himself bested, but this wee lass was no Willie Byers, surely. “Up to a point, mind you,” he said. “But you're only human—ethics or no—and seeing her every day you must have some—”

“I'm not trained in clinical psychology, Mr. McKendrick,” she said. “I have no specialism in grief and mourning. And I don't see her every day, actually. I really can't help you.”

“Grief and mourning,” Mr. McKendrick said. “So you think that's all it is, then? Good. I'm glad to hear it. Good to know.” He gave her a sharp look. “Are you all right? You've gone a wee bit peelie-wally all of a sudden.”

Keiko nodded. “Just tired,” she said, and he got to his feet.

She could barely hear his goodbyes as she saw him out, struggling to find her feet in a flood of ideas that had surged up too fast for her to get astride them. She had just lied to Mr. McKendrick. She
did s
ee Mrs. Poole every day. Because every day Mrs. Poole scrubbed the building in the back yard, even though Malcolm said no one ever used it. Why would anyone do that? Her own words came back to her. “I am not a clinical psychologist; I have no specialism in grief and mourning.”
I don't need one though,
she thought.
You don't need training to know that a woman doesn't clean an unused room because her husband died. You only need to have seen a bit of Shakespeare to know why someone keeps on endlessly cleaning.

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.

An hour later, she stared unblinking at the graph she had made until her eyes started to water. She went to the bathroom, took out her lenses, and came back again, threading the wires of her spectacles around her ears.

Maybe Mrs. Watson had seen something surprising behind Keiko in the street that first day. Or maybe she'd been trying not to sneeze. One thing was for sure: there was nothing in her profile—not in scruples, trust, discretion, anywhere—that marked her out as different from Pet McMaster, Pamela Shand, or Moira Glendinning. They were all as innocent as newborn babes.

They
were, but it wasn't like that for everyone. Hidden in the crowd of forty was a very worried little band. Their names, when she put them together, rang a faint bell somewhere. Imperiolo, McLuskie, Dessing, and Ballantyne. Where had she come across them bunched together before? Murray, she remembered, had told her she'd be better off without the Imperiolos and McLuskies as friends. Except that it wasn't both Imperiolos that stood out on this graph she was staring at; it was Kenny Imperiolo, him alone. And it wasn't Andrew McLuskie, Master Baker, but his wife, Provost Etta. Likewise, Alec Dessing and Margaret Ballantyne ran with the herd, and it was only
his
wife and
her
husband who had made the anxiety indicators shoot off the top of the scale.

What did these four have in common? She was sure there was something. She could see them as clear as day, as if she was looking down on them from above.

That was it! Of course she
had
seen them, across the street. She had seen them going into the flat door beside the ironmongers, to Mr. McKendrick's offices up there. They, along with Jimmy McKendrick himself, were the Painchton Traders committee.

Well, of course they were worried! Her shoulders fell and she let her held breath out with a hiss, almost laughing. They were steering a massive project, involving all kinds of decisions and initiatives—including having her here in the flat doing this project. She heard again Mr. McLuskie's voice telling her she must be wondering why they'd brought her there. And then she remembered his voice saying it was anyone's guess what was wrong with Etta. He had said she was
up to high doh
. And Mrs. Imperiolo had said her husband was
stressed to his oxters,
and Keiko had had to ask Fancy for translations.

But if they were merely anxious about Traders business, wouldn't their spouses understand that? Why would Andrew McLuskie and Rosa Imperiolo be puzzled if that was all that was going on?

So what
was
worrying them? Keiko glanced back at the graph again. She hadn't asked the right questions; she didn't know. And she
couldn't
ask the right questions—simply couldn't—because of conscience, ethics, morals … and the small fact that the questions she asked were supposed to help with her PhD and not with Painchton's secrets, whatever they were.

Unless … Keiko lay back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. The target questions—food fads and health scares; her shitty kale, as Fancy called it—they were sacred and they were harmless. But the filler questions could be anything at all. And if she wrote on the front page that responses to the
study questions
were anonymous, then possibly, logically, technically, you could say that the
filler questions
, not actually a
part
of the study, were …

Well, if she never put a name to this, it would be that much easier to forget once it was done.

She was surprised to find herself wondering what her mother would tell her to do.
Let the stream flow past you
, was a favourite of her mother, who would not let the slightest trickle flow anywhere without her permission. But sometimes, and more honestly, she would say:
Cover your ears, Keko-chan, and steal the bell.

It would be for a good cause—for Murray. No one should have to laugh to keep from screaming. No one should have to know things that were crushing them and be sure that no one else would understand. Another saying of her mother's popped into her head, the best one yet. She said it aloud to herself.

“The weak are meat. The strong eat.” And she nodded, decided at last.

But would it work? Could she find out Painchton's secrets this way, through a questionnaire? She gave a dry laugh. Everybody else certainly thought so. As soon as Murray had heard about her work he had thought she could help him. And Mr. McKendrick reckoned she could analyse Mrs. Poole. All of them believed that Keiko's training, her expertise, her methods, would let her crack open their secrets like eggs against stone.

But that was the mark of a layman. Keiko sat up a little straighter in her chair. A professional always acknowledged the limits as well as the scope of her discipline. So, yes, she would design a study within a study to see where the secret lay. She would also, however, complete her investigation of the committee. If Sandra Dessing's husband and Iain Ballantyne's wife were as worried and puzzled about their spouses' stress as Rosa Imperiolo and Andrew McLuskie were, she would have discovered something.

She turned over a new page on her scribble pad.

Fillers,
she wrote.

Snoop spouses

She stood at last, knuckling her back, looking out across the empty street to the dark buildings across the way. She stretched and made her way across the room towards bed. Then she wheeled back and added a third line to her list:

Find the girls
.