I was cooking in a quaint, snug little café tucked away in a back street of Oxford, where the walls are always warm and the tea never truly goes cold. The chairs seemed to float, the lights hummed with their own language, and, at the end of my shift, as I reached for the polished brass switch above the counter, my eye was drawn beyond the windows reflection into a far-off, misty world.
Just outside, where the pavements melt into fog, a man huddled on the kerb, breath rising like silver ribbons. At his feet, pressed so close it was as though their two shadows had merged, lay an enormous old hound, its coat shaggy and damp. Both man and beast looked battered by rain, worn out by night winds, and lonelier than any bell toll at midnight.
My heart twisted strangely in my chest, as though Id just remembered something long forgotten. I recalled the pot of hot stew left warming on the stovea serving left over and too precious to simply throw away. Without thinking, I ladled it into a container, then rifled through the larder for something suitable for the hound. I mustered up courage from somewhere and stepped out into the surreal English dawn, where lamplight skittered on puddles like small silver fishes.
When I handed the steaming stew to the man, his eyes, as weary as Wiltshire stones, met mine with a look so full of both exhaustion and gratitude that I felt rooted to the paving. He thanked me several times in a voice soft as drizzle, saying he hadnt eaten in over a day. The dog thumped its mighty tail against the stones, offering a hopeful sort of thanks. The man ate as if the food might drift away if he blinked too long. Watching warmed me inside, as though Id sipped the stew myself.
That night, I pedalled home through shadowy streets feeling lighter, as if even small kindnesses might matter more than the dark would have you believe.
But morning struck oddlylike a church bell tolling the wrong hour. Someone was rapping at my door.
Two constables in navy uniforms stood on my doorstep, tall and unsmiling, as if drawn in from an Edwardian play.
You are being held on suspicion of poisoning and causing grievous bodily harm. Please, you must come with us immediately, one said, extending his badge like a strange playing card.
My breath seemed to freeze in my chest.
Poisoning? Who? I only I only served a man some stew! I managed, my words disappearing into the hall like autumn leaves.
They werent listening. The police had already pieced together their story: CCTV showed me bringing food to the man. That, they insisted, was the only meal hed eaten in twenty-four hoursafter which, hed collapsed, desperately ill.
Later I learnt the horror of it. During the fog-blurred night, the man had been taken to the hospitalunconscious, gravely poisoned. His life dangling by a slender, invisible thread.
The next days drifted past me as if Id fallen from a bicycle and become part of the river. I shivered in the bleak police station, ransacking my memories for where Id gone wrong. Could the stew have been spoiled? Did the man eat something else? I knewknew in my bonesthat the food Id given was safe, wholesome, ordinary.
Only days later did the truth emerge, stranger than any nightmare. Investigators uncovered a terrible pattern: nearby, a mobile outreach van had also been serving food to the homeless, using containers identical to my own. Someone had intentionally poisoned the lotstriking through kindness like a knife through bread.
One by one, hospitals filled with those suffering the same symptoms. All across the city, people from Oxfords hidden margins fell ill.
Someone, in a dreadful and anonymous act, had decided to cleanse the citywide-eyed cruelty disguised as charity, a plan to rid Oxford of the vulnerable in silence.
Only the man outside my café ate good, honest food that night. The poisoned portion was received afterward from those whose role it was to protect.
When the mix-up was discovered, I was released from the station with hasty apologies, but tranquillity never settled over me again. In the drifting hush of Oxford nights, I knew that somewhere a person moved through the cityutterly untroubledwho had calmly decided to murder the hungry and spare no regret.
No one knew their face. Only that the world had grown stranger and far, far colder.
