Frogmouth (24 page)

The booklet had been owned by someone called Constable Chee. He had done it. It was the direction of the gasworks in case of an emergency or a leak.

In his office, turning the pages two at a time, following the direction of the arrow through all the streets and lanes, Hurley tried to follow the little hand-drawn arrow to its source.

He lost it. At the end of Singapore Lane, all the sound in the detector stopped and he lost it.

In front of him where Singapore Lane branched out into Hanford Hill and right into Temple Street, the road had been ripped up to make way for new development. The development was going into the old warehouse area bounded by Wylie Street and the old public square to the east. The area had been condemned. It was an area of old, prewar warehouses and godowns for the spice and silk trade. It was closed off by Department of Main Roads cordons and cement pylons in the middle of the roads to stop traffic.

The signal had stopped.

He listened.

He heard only a humming.

O'Yee, looking first one way and then the other, into Hanford Hill, Temple Street—down into the empty, rubbish-blowing canyons between the blackened wooden and brick buildings from a century ago—said desperately to Lim at the street map, "Lim?"

He didn't know. He guessed. Lim said, "Straight ahead into Temple Street!" He listened. He heard the humming. Following O'Yee as he went into the closed-off street, past the gray pylons, into the blowing rubbish and the sudden silence of all the dead buildings, gripping the street map hard in his hand, he heard only the humming.

It pinged. In the silence, he heard it.

It pinged. It picked up the metal pipe under the street and it pinged. O'Yee said in triumph, "Got it!" He looked back at Lim.

He was running, trying to keep pace with O'Yee as he moved faster and faster, following the sound, hearing it get louder and louder.

Lim shouted above the sound, "Straight ahead! Straight down toward Godown Street!" He had found something on his map. It was not part of the modern map at all, but because it was about to be torn down anyway, an insert from an old original map printed directly onto the modern streets. It showed arrows, lines, symbols. It showed a single faded word in type almost too small to read and a Chinese character overlayed on it from what, surprisingly, looked like an old constable's beat book of the type he himself still used.

The character read
Gas
.

Lim, running, hearing the pinging through the earphones as O'Yee followed it, yelled, "Yes! Straight on!"

The pinging turned into a single screaming high-pitched note.

Lim, running with it, yelled, "Go!
Go!
"

It was a photograph. It had been hidden in the cutlery drawer, held there by a single tiny square of plastic tape upside down under the paper lining so nobody would find it. In the kitchen, Spencer, holding it out for Auden to see, said curiously, "What is it? It looks like some sort of white rock or cement cut out to make a seat." There was what appeared to be some sort of clinker-built boat behind it. There was a sign on the clinker-built boat in English and Chinese and Urdu and some other language that had come out blurred.

The sign read,
NOAH'S ARK
.

It was a chair.

It was a family photograph.

It was a little out of focus, blurred.

The person sitting in the chair, looking straight into the camera lens, was smiling.

He found it. It had been on the corner of Shanghai Street and Market Lane.
Hong Bay Gas and Light, Station Two
.

It was the substation. It was not the main gas-generating plant at all, but a storage substation that had been built later, probably when the constable had made the arrow. The arrow was to show that there was some possible danger and the direction it might come, or to show that—

Hong Bay Gas and Light, Station Two.

It was there.

It was at the corner of Shanghai Street and Market Lane. It was intact. It had survived the nineteenth century and half of the twentieth and more, it had survived the bombing and the war. Hurley, correlating it with a modern map, said, "
Christ!
"

It was there. It was on the modern map. It was listed on his modern police map as warehouses and light engineering businesses due for demolition and redevelopment. It was there.

He had no way of getting in touch with O'Yee unless he or Lim rang back.

The phone on his desk was silent.

Hurley, the maps in his hands, ready, staring hard at the phone, willing it, said as a command, "Ring!
Ring!
"

There was something else in the photograph. It was a dog, a Labrador. Curled up to one side of the chair, gazing up at the person in the chair, it seemed to be contentedly sleeping.

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practiced on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realize," he said,
"The bitterness of life."

It was in English. It was from Lewis Carroll's
Sylvie and Bruno
. It was written in a woman's hand. It was a poem on the back of a photograph that had been hidden.

It was a photograph of someone sitting in a wishing chair and smiling.

It was a photograph taken in the Wishing Chair at Yat's.

Feiffer said suddenly, "When he came by bus, was he carrying an umbrella?"

Osgood said, "No. Why?"

Why was because he never went anywhere without it. Why was because she had gone over the edge ten days ago, and, when Osgood or one of his constables had rung him at Quarantine to tell him to come home urgently he had been putting the frogmouth in the van—he had put the umbrella in the van with it ready to drive somewhere—and it had got damaged. Even his damned ghost—if that was what it had been—carried the umbrella.
He had come by bus because the frogmouth was flying free in the van.
It had got caught up, damaged itself, and one of its feathers had been caught in the closed umbrella, the umbrella that had lain unused until—until— Feiffer said urgently, "What else do you know about him? Anything—anything at all!"

"All I know is what a pal at Customs told me plus the usual background. He was a part-time contract worker with the destruction section of Quarantine—a law unto himself because evidently the vet there has a weak stomach—"

Feiffer said, "Hoosier. The vet's name is Hoosier."

"Is it? I didn't talk to him. And that he was sixty-eight years old and, according to my pal, very fucking taciturn, very fucking silent and—" Osgood drew a breath, "—very fucking weird!" There was a silence on the other end of the line. He wanted more. Osgood said, "From what I gather, from what my pal gathered—"

Feiffer said, "Charlie, you had your pal look up his personnel file!"

"That's not legal."

"You did it anyway!"

"Harry, if you'd seen him—"

"I have seen him! I can see him now! He's lying here on the bed like a goddamned squashed cockroach! I'm standing in the middle of his stink!" Feiffer said, "You didn't just ask your pal about him. He worried you. You did a full background on him! Now, who the hell was he?"

"He didn't murder her, she fucking jumped!"

"I know she fucking jumped! She wasn't the only one! You fucking jumped! You took one look at him and your goddamned blood ran cold!" Feiffer said quickly, "I would have done the same! You did a full background check on him and then after you did it, to get flesh on the bones, you rang up everyone you knew who might have run across him!" Feiffer said, shouting, "Charlie, I've got nothing here!
I don't even know his first name!
"

"Jakob. His first name was Jakob." He didn't have to look it up, he knew. Osgood, speaking formally, reciting it line by line from all the times he had thought about it, said, "Jakob Idris, age sixty-eight, Malay origin, resident in Hong Kong thirty-three years, employed as part-time contract specialist labor at Quarantine Station, Hong Bay, original occupation company director, wife Mata, currently deceased, no suspicious circumstances." Osgood said softly, abruptly, "He didn't make my blood run cold, Harry, he frightened me. I don't know why. I don't know how he did it, but he frightened me. I looked at him and I knew that he was something that should have frightened me." Osgood said tightly, "I thought he might have been someone who— I thought—" Osgood said, "But he was as clean as a whistle. All he was, all he was before he was what he was when I met him was a company director of a light engineering works here in North Point. I thought—" Osgood said, "The Idris Garden Implement and Engineering Works—ridiculous. He'd owned the place about twenty-five years and evidently done a fair trade—it wasn't a public company, it wasn't listed on the exchange, but my pal checked with the export section of Customs and it was doing all right until the Americans started doing more and more legal business with China and the Chinese started making the sort of things he made at about one-fifth of the cost." Osgood said simply, "He went broke. One of the guys in the companies squad said that there had been a suggestion that his partner had absconded with the company's funds, but if it was true Idris didn't lay a charge." Osgood said, "He did say something else when I spoke to him. I said something about death—I don't even remember what it was, something bloody saccharine and according to the manual of what to say to distressed relatives—and he said in a whisper, 'like wind, like wings.'" Osgood said, "I was bending down to talk to him. He took a single step back when he said it and smiled at me." Osgood said, "That was when my blood ran cold, that was when—" He said with irritation, embarrassment, "Why the hell am I telling you this? What the hell have I got to do with anything? I'm a cop! I'm supposed to be the opaque bloody repository for bloody bald statements by people I interview. I'm not a participant, I'm a goddamned neutral, unemotional, untouchable observer!"

"What sort of factory was it? Was it big?"

"He made goddamned shovels! It was somewhere up in the redevelopment area. He didn't even have a long lease on it. When the business went bust the lease had about eighteen months to run. Eighteen months ago when the development was in the planning stage the developers were paying millions to buy leases. They didn't have to buy his: they just had to wait and let it run out. It's due to run out in about three weeks." Osgood said, "I don't know—should I feel sorry for him? Maybe he was a man who, all down the line, had had life kick him in the teeth." Osgood, losing control, going too far into it, said, "I don't know! I'm not going to tell you anything else because anything else is just speculation!" Osgood said, "You've got it! You want it! You fucking do it!"

"How big was the factory?"

"It was the old gasworks at the corner of Godown Street and Tung Kun Street! I didn't go there! It was all closed up! He had the whole place for the business! The business failed! He was going to expand into the lawn mower business or the bloody bulldozer business or something so he leased the entire building, but the tide of bloody world politics overtook him and what he had was just a bloody great empty—"

Feiffer said tightly, "
Aviary
."

Osgood said, "What?"

Feiffer asked almost casually, "Did he make machetes along with his rakes and his shovels, Charlie?"

"I suppose so." Osgood said, "What are you talking about? Has this got something to do with Yat's?
You're not saying he did that?
" Somehow, it would have made everything clear. Somehow, it would almost have been a relief. Osgood, sounding anxious, said with hope, "
Are you saying he did all that at Yat's?
"

"I'm saying—"

It made sense of it. It made sense of it all. It made sense of the way a six-foot-two man had felt when a tiny, pale-eyed old man had said something to him in a whisper. Osgood, seizing it, said quickly, "He wasn't some poor bloody victim of life! He was the one who did the victimizing!" Osgood said, "Even his poor bloody daughter—even her— He put her in the bloody loony bin with the way he was!"

"What daughter?"

Spencer, at the door to the bedroom, holding up the photograph, said urgently, "Harry—"

"
What fucking daughter?
"

"The one in the loony bin in St. Paul de Chartres hospital! I couldn't get to talk to her! I only found out she even bloody existed when I saw the funeral notice in the paper!" Osgood, reaching hard for something to hang on to, looking for a way out, said as a command, "Look around! There isn't even a bed in the bloody apartment for her! He must have put her in, thrown away everything that even reminded him or his wife of her and then, as if she had ceased to exist—"

"Why is she in St. Paul's?"

"Depression. She's not a fucking loony. She's a sort of come-and-go patient who never goes. She—" Osgood said, realizing where it was leading, "No, it wasn't her, no."

He had the photo. Spencer, putting it into Feiffer's hand, said again, "Harry—"

"Harry, she—" Osgood, at the other end of the line, said, "No. No. No!" There was a limit. He had come to it. It wasn't possible. Osgood said over and over, "No! No! No!"

He looked down at the photo. It was of Yat's. It was of the Wishing Chair at Yat's. He saw the dog sleeping by the chair with a blur where, even it its sleep, before it had been gutted in the rain, its tail wagged for anyone who came to it. It was her. Sitting in the chair, half smiling on a day a long, long time ago, it was her.

Osgood said in desperation, too much threatened, too much unsure, unknowing, incapable of dealing with it, with what it all meant if it was true, "Harry, for Christ's sake,
she's only fourteen years old
!"

It was her. She was the one. In the photo, taken years ago, taken when she was about eleven or twelve, sitting on the Wishing Chair, she was smiling. It was her. On the bed, Idris's hand had almost been severed from the wrist. It hung down covered in flies, by a single ribbon of sinew.

On the other end of the line, Osgood, in the terrible hush, said desperately, "Harry! Harry,
are you still there
?"

He found it. There, at the corner of Godown and Tung Kun streets, in the deserted rubbish-blowing, closed-off roads and lanes of the development area, he found it. Now, on a peeling derelict wooden sign above the boarded-up windows and doors, the brick, warehouselike building read
IDRIS GARDEN IMPLEMENT AND ENGINEERING WORKS
.