Bill for the Use of a Body (7 page)

Hayashi was duly offered fruit, soft drinks, ices, sweets and other stopgaps to hunger from an aluminium trolley wheeled ceaselessly up and down the walkway of the coach by an obsequious attendant. But, with an impassive nod of the head, he declined these amenities and, presently, walked through to the restaurant car.

There, unlike the sad little menus on British Railways, he was offered a choice of four set meals, ranging from soup, fish and fruit at the equivalent of seven shillings and sixpence, to a six-course dinner including a steak at the equivalent of thirty-five shillings. But Hayashi felt that he had no appetite for European-style food, so he ordered the Japanese dinner. Even when that came he found that he could do no more than toy with some delectable morsels of raw fish. But when in Europe as a younger man he had acquired a taste for wine; so he ordered a bottle of the best champagne, regardless of the fact that it cost him the equivalent of twelve pounds sterling.

The train accomplished its six-hundred-mile run to Kyoto in the scheduled six hours and arrived punctually to the minute. He had telephoned for his Mercedes to
be at the station to meet him, so in another fifteen minutes he was home and had sent for Udo Nagi.

Since then Hayashi had received a number of progress reports from Nagi. Now on this afternoon of the 18th of February he was conning over the summary of the results of the investigation that he had ordered to be made.

Nagi was a big man for a Japanese. As a youth he had been a professional wrestler, but while still young he had come to the conclusion that life could be more pleasant living on the immoral earnings of women than by participating in gruelling bouts in the ring. His size and fearsome reputation soon led to his becoming the protector of a score of girls whom he exploited most profitably in depleting the dollar rolls of the American Occupying Forces. Then he discovered that even more money could be made out of peddling dope. Early in his new activities he came into conflict with the strong-arm men of Hayashi's organisation. Their ultimatum had been ‘become one of our agents or become a corpse'.

To begin with he had felt very sour at losing his independence but the drop in his income led to his working very much harder, so he received promotion. Later he was blindfolded one night and taken to Hayashi's house. While still blindfolded he had a long interview with Hayashi, who reached the conclusion that Udo Nagi had not only brawn but brains. In the years that followed he had been given increasingly more important parts to play in the organisation, although it was not until 1956 that he had actually seen Hayashi face to face. For the past three years he had been Hayashi's Chief of Staff.

During the past three months Udo Nagi's agents had investigated thoroughly the families and pasts of the four men whose heads in boxes had preceded that of Hayashi's son to Police Headquarters in Tokyo. His agents had also tirelessly pursued every clue to the way these men, and the younger Hayashi, had spent their time while in Hong Kong, and had also made exhaustive enquiries in Macao.
The result was a dossier of over a hundred pages on each of them. To summarise their contents:

The radio salesman, Otoya Matsuko, had gone to Hong Kong in September 1952, to solicit stocking-up orders for the winter season. He was unmarried and said to be much addicted to women. He had stayed for five nights at the Broadway, one of the less expensive hotels in Kowloon. A number of his customers recalled the police enquiries that followed his disappearance, and a few of them remembered him personally as a small, bespectacled, pleasant-mannered man; but after a lapse of eleven years no-one at the hotel could give any information about him.

Dr. Yasunari Kido was a lung specialist and had gone to Hong Kong to attend a conference on tuberculosis in April 1956. He was married but known to frequent a well-known geisha house in Yokohama, his home city. He was a man of some means and had stayed at the de-luxe Peninsula Hotel. Such doctors as had attended the conference and who could be traced spoke of him as a jolly fellow and something of a
bon vivant
. Two of them had enjoyed good dinners with him and said that he had not appeared to have a trouble in the world. They had not even heard of his disappearance, because he had remained in Hong Kong for the full week of the conference, then left his hotel in a normal manner. However, as it happened, the doctor had a livid scar on his right cheek from an old war wound; so two of the staff at the Peninsula remembered him.

One was a night porter whom he had asked to tell him of a night spot where there was a good selection of Chinese girls, ready to accommodate visitors in comfortable quarters, and the man had recommended him to a house in Hong Kong named the Moon Garden. In the early hours of the morning he had returned to his hotel, and told the porter that he had had a good time; so obviously he had come to no harm there. The other was a
waiter who had seen him one evening in the lounge of the hotel standing drinks to a good-looking blonde. She was not a regular habitué of the hotel and the waiter remembered the incident only because Dr. Kido had given him an exceptionally generous tip, probably with a view to impressing his companion.

The engineer, Kayno Nakayama, was another bachelor, but he kept a regular mistress in a flat in Tokyo. He had gone to Hong Kong in August 1957 and with him he had taken his assistant, a young man named Araki. They had stayed at the Victoria Hotel in Queens Road. Araki had at the time been engaged to a girl of good family whom he had shortly afterwards married; so from fear that he might be called on to give evidence in court which could wreck his marriage prospects, he had refrained from giving the police a full account of how he and Nakayama had spent their time while in Hong Kong. But Udo Nagi's agents had unearthed the fact that one night during their stay the two men had not occupied their beds at the Victoria. Informed that he might become the victim of an unpleasant accident unless he came clean, Araki had supplied the following information.

After a week in Hong Kong he had felt the urge for a little feminine entertainment and, having heard of a house called the Moon Garden, he had suggested that Nakayama should go with him to it. Nakayama had at first demurred, as he was a man of fifty and perfectly content with his mistress in Tokyo. But Araki had persuaded him and he had thoroughly enjoyed his night there. Evidently this departure from a normal humdrum fidelity had stimulated his sexual appetite, for three days later he told Araki that he had become acquainted with a beautiful English woman and was going with her to Macao for the week-end. Hardly able to contain himself at this amazing piece of luck, he had departed, but had never been seen again.

The dealer in cultured pearls, Zosho Iwanarni, had gone to Hong Kong in January 1960. He was married but living apart from his wife, who had stated without beating about the bush that he was an inveterate womaniser. He had stayed at the Golden Gate Hotel in Austin Road and the manager there remembered him on account of the police enquiries subsequent to his disappearance, and because on one occasion he had had to be prevented from taking a prostitute to his room. On three nights out of the nine he had spent there he had slept out, presumably with a woman. But no-one who had been questioned could throw further light on his doings while in Hong Kong.

The younger Hayashi had gone to Hong Kong in the previous November. Being a rich man, he had stayed at the fabulous Marco Polo in Kowloon. His disappearance having occurred only a few months ago, several of the staff there remembered him perfectly well; but they could give little information of any value. On two nights out of the seven that he had stayed there he had not come in until the small hours of the morning and, knowing his tastes, his father had no doubt that on those nights he had gone with some woman. However, on leaving the Marco Polo he had asked that his room should be made available again to him two days later, as he was only going on a forty-eight-hour trip to Macao.

Boiled down this added up to: Three of the men had definitely sought sexual entertainment while in Hong Kong and there was good reason to suppose that the other two had also done so. Two of them had visited the Moon Garden Night Club. One of them had been seen in the company of a blonde girl and another had said that he had made the acquaintance of a beautiful English woman, who was, possibly, the same person. Nakayama had told Araki that he was going to Macao with his new acquaintance for the week-end, and Hayashi had also left Hong Kong to spend forty-eight hours in the Portuguese colony. It therefore seemed a possibility that a blonde English
girl had been employed to lure all five men to Macao and their deaths.

Nagi had gone personally to Hong Kong to investigate the Moon Garden. He found it to be one of the best houses and run by a Chinese named Mok Kwai. But no European girls were employed there and Mok Kwai had assured Nagi that none ever had been. Neither, Mok Kwai informed Nagi regretfully, could he supply one on call, much as he would have liked to earn a good fee for so doing. Therefore it did not appear that the blonde had any connection with the Moon Garden, and it might well be no more than a coincidence that both Dr. Kido and Nakayama had visited the same establishment.

But then Nagi had had a lucky break. One of his agents who was making enquiries at Macao had spent several days questioning the officers and crew of the ferry steamer that plied between Macao and Hong Kong. As a great number of visiting Westerners made the trip and the boats were always crowded, the hope of identifying a fair woman who had crossed in the company of a Japanese several months before was slender. But it happened that an elderly steward had noticed such a couple. His reason for doing so was that back in the 1940s, before he had had the misfortune to become bankrupt, he had frequented a high-class brothel owned by a Mr. Lo Kung, and he had felt certain that the woman was Mrs. Lo.

Nagi had promptly crossed to Macao and made enquiries at the brothel. There he learned that Lo Kung had died at least ten years before and that after continuing to run the place for a while Mrs. Lo had sold it. Since then it had changed hands several times and all its old staff had been dispersed. But an advertisement in the local paper had brought forward an old crone who had worked there in Lo Kung's time. To Nagi's delight she produced a really valuable piece of information. After selling the brothel Mrs. Lo had bought herself a pretty
little villa on the sea-shore, and she was able to give Nagi the address.

Enquiries at the villa of an elderly couple who occupied the place as caretaker servants elicited the fact that Mrs. Lo came there very seldom. They were under the impression that she was very rich and spent most of her time travelling, but they had been in her employ only two months and had not even seen her. Their money was sent to them monthly through the post from a bank in Hong Kong.

Another advertisement produced two couples who had earlier acted as caretakers at Mrs. Lo's villa. The first couple had been there from May 1956 until August 1957, the second from January 1960 until the previous December. Both, for a handsome remuneration, had the same story to tell. They had seen Mrs. Lo only once and on each occasion she had brought a Japanese gentleman to the villa. They assumed that she intended to sleep with him, but did not wish them to know about that, as in both cases after they had served a good dinner she had given them money, telling them that she wished them to go to an hotel for the night and not return to the villa until the following evening. When they had returned neither she nor the Japanese was there, so they cleared up and thought no more about it. Then a few weeks later they had been given three months' pay and told that their services were no longer required.

It was in April 1956 that Dr. Kido had disappeared and Hayashi had done so the previous November. In consequence Nagi swiftly came to the conclusion that each time Mrs. Lo lured a victim to her villa, and either handed him over to be killed by her associates or killed him herself, she shortly afterwards engaged a new couple as caretakers, so that no enquiry at the villa would disclose that she had ever brought a Japanese there.

Nagi then took strong action. Having mustered his thugs, he went to the villa at night, had the caretaker
couple tied up and searched it. In a locked inner cellar he found the remains of five headless bodies in varying stages of disintegration from having been covered with quicklime. After relocking the cellar so that his captives should remain in ignorance of what he had found there, it occurred to him, as they had said that they had never seen Mrs. Lo, to question them about who had engaged them. Sweating with terror, they had described a tall middle-aged Chinese named Ti Cheng, who had aggressive features and a slight squint. To Nagi's intense satisfaction the description fitted Mok Kwai of the Moon Garden.

Returning to Hong Kong, he set his people to keep Mok Kwai under observation. He had feared that if Mrs. Lo did spend most of her time travelling he would either have to wait a long time for results or kidnap the brothel keeper one night and take him to pieces. But he did not wish to risk trouble with the exceedingly efficient Hong Kong police; so he decided to give Mok Kwai ten days, and on the eighth day Mok Kwai led his shadowers to the quarry.

Now, with pardonable pride, Udo Nagi revealed to his master the final result of his investigation. They were seated cross-legged facing one another on mats in a room that was bare of furniture except for one long low table, and lacked all decoration except for one vase of carefully arranged flowers that stood in a corner.

Having said his piece, Nagi remarked, ‘Since it is clear, Honourable Master, that the woman has sought to revenge herself on officers and men of the 230th Regiment for at least the past thirteen years I find it surprising that she has claimed only five victims.'

Hayashi gave a sign of disagreement. ‘You must remember that, although the 230th Regiment numbered several thousand men, the great majority of them were either peasants or low-paid workers who, if they survived the war, would not have had the money to leave Japan
again. But that is beside the point. We now know the name under which the woman who either murdered my son, or was responsible for his death, is living in Hong Kong. I mean to make her pay a price. Go now and arrange matters so that she should come here and grovel to me.'