By afternoon the story had grown legs. Someone said she was selling the meat on the other side of the river. Someone said she was keeping a man in the house. Someone said the smell on Binder Lane had changed. That last remark was the one that stayed with Tomas, because he had walked home that way the evening before and had caught, faint as a rumor, a sourness that did not belong to ordinary cooking.
He did not sleep well. In the morning he watched her come again — same coat, same counting of coins, same sixty kilos — and when she turned toward the service road instead of Binder Lane he felt the unease sharpen into something that required a name.
He called the police.
Officer Harris arrived with a younger colleague who still wrote everything down. They were kind to Tomas in the way officers are kind to shopkeepers who might be wasting their time. They asked if Lidia had family. They asked if she had seemed unwell. They asked if he had any reason, beyond a quantity of beef and a look in her eyes, to think a crime was taking place.
“I have a feeling,” Tomas said, and hated how thin it sounded. “She is carrying those bags like they are evidence.”
Harris did not laugh at him. She had a mother the same age, and she had learned that feelings in small towns were sometimes the only warning a person got.
They followed the route Tomas described. The service road ran behind the disused textile sheds and ended at a warehouse that had not legally belonged to anyone in eight years. The city had posted notices. The notices had faded. The padlock on the side door was newer than the rust around it, which was its own kind of information.
The smell reached them before the lock gave.
It was thick and sour and overwhelming, not the clean iron of a butcher’s shop and not quite the smell of death as people imagine death. It was animal and urine and damp concrete and meat left too long in heat. Harris put her sleeve against her face. The younger officer swore once, quietly, and then they forced the door.
What they found was not what the street had imagined.
