Frogmouth (22 page)

"Do you believe that someone's spirit can come back?" There was something else in the eyes, something troubled. Shek could not read what it was.

"I believe the soul survives. I believe that the spirit of God moves in people and—"

"Yes." Feiffer said softly, "Have you ever seen anyone dead before?"

"I believe that love and gentleness and time—"

"You don't have to stay."

"—and that understanding and the comfort of fellow children of God, fellow worshippers and communicants—"

"Mr. Shek—Peter—"

He was shaking. His hands were trembling and he could not control them. He felt his mouth start to go. He felt a muscle there, twitching. He felt his bladder begin to ache in a long, terrible pain. Everywhere, everywhere there was the smell. Shek, trying to close his eyes, said softly, "Our Father who art in heaven . . ."

He had no idea how bad it was going to be when he opened the door.

It could not have been worse.

At the doorway, collapsing from the knees so suddenly that Feiffer had to catch him to stop him falling as he saw it, Shek cried out at the top of his voice, "Oh!" He was no longer praying, he was shrieking.

Shek, at the door, looking in, shrieked over and over, "Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!
OH, JESUS!
"

He lost it.

On the corner of Singapore Road O'Yee, sweeping the pavement with the dish of the metal detector, said abruptly, "I've lost it."

There was only a heavy humming in the earphones. Behind him he saw Lim look at the open street map in his hand and shake his head.

O'Yee said, "I've lost it! It's gone." There was a public telephone box across the street, unoccupied. O'Yee, shaking his head, sweeping the pavement wider and faster, ordered Lim urgently, "Quick! Ring Hurley and ask him where the hell it goes from here!" They had come across a full half mile from the station. O'Yee said with his head full of the humming, "Now! Do it now! Ring Hurley and find out where the hell it goes!"

Whatever it had been on the bed, it had been cut to pieces. Everywhere there was blood. Whatever it had been on the bed had been dead for a week.

It had been Idris. It had been a man with pale, cataracted eyes. The first blow with the machete had almost severed his head from his neck and, after that, as he writhed, the machete had fallen across him at least another twenty times. Once, the sheet he had been lying on wearing only his pajama pants had been white—it was black and crusted with blood.

The smell was the flies. They had begun to breed.

Feiffer said quickly, "Ring Yellowthread Street Station and get me some backup." He was still holding the man across the chest. He felt his chest heave. He felt him start to retch. It was out, loose, the smell—it was like a fog. Shek, shaking, heard the flies start to rise up. Feiffer, helping the man, nodding to him, said firmly, "Not here. Don't ring from here. Go down to your own apartment and ring from there." He saw the man's eyes. They were not seeing anything. Feiffer, taking him by the shoulder and forcing him around to look at him, said clearly, not in English but in Cantonese, "Is there a toilet on this floor?"

"What?"

"Is there a toilet on this floor you can use?"

"Yes."

"Then use it. Don't run. Go to the toilet first and if you want to throw up, throw up. Don't hurry. And then go to your apartment and ring the station." He saw the man nod. "Yellowthread Street Station in Hong Bay, not North Point, and then stay in your apartment and wait."

"Yes." He tried to speak English, but he had forgotten all the words. Peter Shek—Shek Pak Kin—said, "Hai. Hai.
Yes!
" He tried to be someone he thought he was. Shek, shaking his head, not knowing why he asked, putting his hand to his hair to try to think, asked, "Will you be all right?" In the bedroom, one of the hands had almost been completely severed from the arm. It hung down on a bloody sinew, swarming with small black flies as if it had been a ribbon. Whatever it was in the bed had shrunk. It had receded into the bed, become small in death, like a child. His hands were shaking. He could not control them. He wanted— He wanted as he had always wanted to be kind.

It was not, this time, his turn.

"Thank you. Thank you very much." He forced himself— because he might have to some other time in the future at some other place—to look.

He stopped shaking. He became who he had always hoped he might be.

Shek said quickly, "I'll ring your station. Yellowthread Street Station, Hong Bay. Rely on me." He nodded. Shek, still nodding, turning to go, remembering what it was he had been told to do, said to the room, "Rely on me."

It passed. He had seen it and it had passed. He was a lay preacher at the North Point Chinese Baptist Church. Doing what he did best, he went quickly and without detouring to the toilets to call for help.

At his desk in the Detectives' Room, Auden looked at the wall.

It had a large hole knocked in it.

He shrugged. Such things happened. So what? In the cells downstairs he heard Spencer call up, "There's a hole down here off the cells in the basement!"

"Hmm." Auden, yawning, said without interest, "Really?"

He yawned again.

He shrugged.

He sniffed.

He bathed in nobility.

The phone on his desk rang and, always at the service of the poor downtrodden peasantry, his chivalry gleaming like a grail, craning a little forward on his chair to stop his arse hurting, Auden the First, lending his ear, asked kindly—majestically— "
Yes . . . ?
"

Coming back from the phone box out of breath, Lim said, "Singapore Lane. It turns off left into Singapore Lane." He pointed down at the pavement. "Setts. The bricks set in the pavement and on the road are handmade nineteenth-century bricks—it's the only street in the entire area that hasn't been ripped up or redeveloped or bombed. Hurley says the old gas pipes come down here and they start to divide down the end here." He looked at the end of the lane. The end of the lane marked the beginning of the new Japanese shopping town development. "He says you've probably got your depth on the detector at three foot six or two feet—the gas pipe here is only twelve inches below the surface! The old part of the station and Singapore Lane—they're the only two intact nineteenth-century features left in the entire area!" He was shouting at O'Yee to make himself heard above the traffic and the earphones. "Set your depth at twelve inches!"

"Okay." It came back, the pinging. The hum died, became thinner, turned into a whine and, at exactly twelve inches, the pinging came back.

It was louder, tighter. It sounded close. O'Yee, sweeping the pavement and finding the sound everywhere as it echoed and bounced off the detector dish, said, pointing, "That way! It goes straight down that way on the left-hand side of the pavement." It was the nineteenth century. It was twelve inches below his feet. Starring to break into a run, O'Yee going forward, followed it.

Whoever had done it had had a key or been staying there. There was nothing in the apartment that displayed any sign of a forced entry. The apartment was as Mrs. Idris had probably left it ten days ago: clean, polished, orderly. Only the flies had come in secretly and they rose up as he moved in the bedroom in swarms. They were breeding, infesting the corpse. He touched at Idris's shoulder, trying to move it to one side with his handkerchief clamped over his nose, and the flies rose up around him in swarms.

The smell was awful. It was everywhere in the room, moving out into the rest of the apartment like a fog. It moved out with the flies. It was the sickly, thick rancid smell of decay and bad meat and it turned his stomach.

Whoever had done it had been in the apartment for some time. He had known who it was, felt comfortable enough with them to stay in his pajamas or close his door as they stayed in the main room. They had not been staying over: there was no divan or couch in the main room, nothing in the bathroom cabinet that should not have been there or had not been purchased some time ago and, when the first blow had caught him in the neck, Idris had been lying alone in the center of the bed. All the pillows had been piled up into one stack: he had been lying there alone thinking or reading or calling to someone. Then, after it had been over, they had gone into the bathroom, washed the blood off, cleaned up the bathroom again and, changing the clothes they had come in or discarding something they had put on over their clothes, they had gone again, silently, unseen, out through the main door.

In the cupboards in the bedroom there were women's clothes. They were housecoats and slippers and underwear—they were the clothes of a dumpy housebound woman who listened at doorways for someone to talk to. She had been dead ten days. The thing on the bed had been dead for a week. In that time, no one had come. In all her life, waiting at the door, no one had come for Mrs. Idris either. The smell of decay was not only coming from the bed and the dead man and the flies—it had been in there a long time as, little by little, day by day, hiding, waiting, hoping, she also had decayed. He went back to the bed and looked down hard and carefully at the corpse.

The second blow had caught him on the side of the chest as he had writhed as his neck pumped blood. The second blow had opened his chest. It was a home for the flies. Then he had twisted back and the third blow had hit his hip as he doubled it up, the fourth and fifth the severed arm and then, after he was dead— after he had stopped moving—the blows had come at spaced, timed intervals up and down his body and striped him like a flaying. Feiffer tried to put his hand under the shoulder to move the body a fraction, but the smell was too bad and he recoiled. In the room, through the handkerchief, Feiffer said, "God Jesus—" He wanted to throw up. He tried again and got his hand flat under the shoulder and felt something wet and viscous where the blood had soaked through the mattress and puddled on the bed support.

The eyes stared up at him. They were pale, milky with cataracts, dried out. There were fly eggs everywhere on the face. The face was no longer a face but a flat picture of a face. He pushed a little harder under the shoulder and felt something hard. It was a cheap ballpoint pen covered in blood.

All he wanted to do was get out of the room and throw up. The smell was everywhere in the apartment. All the windows were closed. Reaching under farther, feeling his hand touch something soft and wet, he retrieved the notebook Idris had been writing in when he had been killed.

He read only the word
NOTES
printed in gold on the leatherette cover before the smell finally got to him and, gagging and dry retching, he had to run to a window in the main room and smash the lock open with the butt of his gun to get it open to breathe.

At the open door to the caretaker's apartment on the first floor, Spencer, banging hard to attract someone's attention, called out in Cantonese, "Hullo! Is anyone there?" There was no one. The apartment was empty, deserted. He asked Auden in English, urgently, "Phil, this is North Point. It isn't our precinct. Did the caller say it was Harry or not?"

"Yes!" Auden, glancing up and down the corridor, banging on other doors, said, "Yes!"

"What apartment is he in?"

"I didn't ask!"

"
Why not?
"

"Because I didn't, that's all!" He was at the apartment door three numbers away, pounding on the knocker. Like all the other apartments on the floor, there was no one there. Auden, going down the line banging at first one door and then the next without waiting for a response, yelled, "He said he'd meet us here!" He saw someone turn into the corridor eight doors away and he snapped at him in Cantonese. "You! Where the hell's the caretaker?" He saw the man's face. Auden going toward him said, "Shek? Are you Shek the caretaker?" He saw traces of vomit on the man's shirt where he had thrown up. Auden, dreading what they were going to have to see, said as the man, nodding, came quickly toward him, "Oh Christ . . . Oh Christ, not
today
!"

In his little office on the third floor of Police Headquarters on Artillery Road, Hurley had all the old maps spread across his table. He had a clear line drawn through Singapore Lane. He followed it with his finger until it slipped off the edge and joined Map 567A on the 1899 Authorized Street Map of the southern parishes of Hong Kong. There was no Map 567A. There were, these days, no more parishes. He had an old map done by the Japanese that almost joined the section, but all the streets seemed to have been changed or bulldozed through to make military supply lines or holding areas or perimeters and even if he could have made sense of the Japanese characters, all the names of the roads and streets and perimeters were in code.

He found one street on the map for some reason marked in English. The name of the street was All Conquering Victorious Army Street. He had absolutely no idea what street on the 1899 map it had represented or, now, forty years later, what street—if any, if it was even still there—in the midst of nonstop development what street it represented now. It was hopeless. In Singapore Lane O'Yee was on his own. After that, like the old maritime maps of the unknown world there were only dragons.

He looked again. He could find nothing.

Hurley, useless at even that simple, small task for a historian, said in disgust, "Damn it! God bloody
damn it
!"

"
Twenty-eight!
"

It was a cry of pain, of terror.

"AARAGG—RAAG!"

In the cocoon, it penetrated.

"Twenty-eight!
Twenty-eight!
"

In the cocoon, where all the movement had stopped and there was only waiting, there was a whisper, a rasp. There was the glitter of something blue-black and then something silver.

The silver thing was a machete.

The cocoon waited, the redness glowing.

There was a whisper, a rasp.

"
Twenty-eight!
"

It was a scream of approaching terror.

". . . Jakob . . ."

Over and over, in the bedroom where he lay on the bed making his notes, over and over he heard the woman in the housecoat call to him.