A woman bought 60 kilos of beef every day… But when the police found out what he needed so much meat for, everyone was horrified…

On the first morning, it was just strange. By the third day, it was a story people whispered as if the crowd itself could hear it. An old woman came into Tomas’s shop right when it opened, paid with worn bills and coins that were counted twice, and left with sixty kilos of beef, which she packed into sacks and could barely drag across the wet pavement.

They weren’t the good cuts. She’d never asked for the good cuts. She wanted the cheap meat, the cuts other customers turned up their noses at, the meat that would have been ground up or sold to the soup kitchen, if it were still accepting deliveries. She clutched her coat as if someone might snatch it from her in the twelve minutes it took her to reach the old access road. Her gaze wandered incessantly—shop windows, alleyway entrances, the bus stop, the man unloading crates on the other side of the street—the way you look when you’re carrying something you can’t afford to drop and for which you have no explanation.

Tomas had stood behind that counter for twenty-six years. He knew the difference between a poor customer and a scared one. Lidia Varga was both, and this combination weighed heavily on him after her departure, heavier than the order itself.

She was seventy-four. Everyone on Market Street knew that. She had lived in the same narrow house at the end of Binder Lane since before the tannery closed. Her husband, Emil, had been dead for eleven years. There were no children to visit her. In winter, she bought two eggs and a small loaf of bread. In spring, she bought a chicken wing when the price had dropped. Sixty kilos of beef every morning—that didn’t fit into this life.

On the fourth day, Tomas packed the last parcel more slowly than necessary.

“Mrs. Varga,” he said. “That’s a tremendous amount of meat for one kitchen.”

She didn’t smile. Her expression was polite, the kind older ladies wear in shops to avoid being stopped. « I’ll pay, » she said.

« I didn’t ask about payment. »

Just to illustrate,
her hands tightened their grip on the plastic bags. For a moment, he thought she would put the bags down and tell him. Instead, she looked over his shoulder at the street, as if the explanation were out there and absolutely had to be kept away.

« Please, » she said. « Just the beef. »

He gave it to her. After she left, the unease lingered. It still clung to him in the sawdust and the bell above the door. He told himself it was none of his business. He told himself old women were allowed to have their quirks. He told himself no one would search a street like that unless they were hiding something terrible.

By the afternoon, the story had taken on a life of its own. Someone claimed she was selling the meat on the other side of the river. Someone else said she was keeping a man captive in the house. Yet another person said the smell in Binder Lane had changed. It was precisely this last remark that stuck in Tomas’s mind, because the previous evening he had walked home along that path and had caught, albeit faintly, a sour smell that didn’t belong to ordinary food.

He slept badly. In the morning he saw her coming again – the same coat, the same counting of coins, the same sixty kilos – and when she turned towards the access road instead of into Binder Lane, he felt the unease intensify into something that needed a name.

He called the police.

Officer Harris arrived with a younger colleague who continued taking notes. They treated Tomas kindly, the way police officers are kind to shopkeepers who might be wasting their time. They asked if Lidia had any family. They asked if she seemed

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