The Uninvited (6 page)

But now he didn’t even say that.

He just threw his egg on the floor. It broke open and lay there steaming. He refused to speak to me. I didn’t know what to do. So I cleaned it up. A few minutes later Kaitlin phoned to ask how it had gone. When I told her, she said she was coming home.

‘It’s best you don’t see him for a while,’ she said when she returned. ‘It only upsets him.’

I went out and rinsed the mop under the outdoor tap.

It’s getting darker now, the sky rinsed by the dregs of the hurricane. The scent of wet gorse is vital and crude. I can recognise several bird species now. Black guillemot, cormorant, eider. I’ve seen peregrine falcons too. Here’s what I’d tell Freddy, about birds. I saw some green parakeets in Taiwan, flying over shrines to the dead. In cities, some bird species have begun to imitate electronic devices such as car alarms and doorbells, and even incorporate them into their song patterns. When it comes to ringtones, they favour Nokia. Then I’d ask him: but what if they start to copy a ringtone that is itself a bird-call? Then you might get blackbirds posing as toucans and marsh waders pretending to be mynah birds. Which in turn would copy something else.

The boy would like that. He’d laugh and you’d see his little teeth. There’s usually a gap somewhere, with a new one pushing through. He doesn’t like brushing them, so to cajole him into it, I used to stand next to him in the bathroom and we’d do it together, trying to hit a kind of synchrony. We’d end up pulling grotesque faces, gurning at the mirror and spitting toothpaste.

Sometimes we pretended we had rabies.

My phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket and press answer without looking, expecting it will be Kaitlin. I’m hoping that when she’s finished demanding that I fetch the rest of my stuff – something I refuse to do unless she lets me see Freddy – I’ll get to talk to him. As I’m not officially Freddy’s stepfather, Kaitlin is aware of the power she wields.

But it’s not Kaitlin.

‘How’s it hanging, Maestro?’ Ashok Sharma.

Odd. Normally Phipps & Wexman don’t call me on my mobile: they have a face-to-face policy, and favour Skype.

‘It’s hanging well, thank you, Ashok,’ I tell him. I assume the ‘it’ referent is penis-related, in origin. I picture him the way I so often see him on the screen, shirtsleeves rolled up, feet on the desk, slightly pixellated and time-lagged. He once described his skin colour as Starbucks latte, but when I put a colour chart to his wrist he was forced to agree that Sanderson’s Burnt Umber, from the 2003 range, was more accurate. His mother’s family was originally from Mumbai and his father is Kashmiri, but Ashok, whose name means ‘without sadness’, was born in Florida and calls himself
Yankee to the boner
. This is a pun.

‘Er. Reason I’m calling is the guy you investigated on your Far East trip. The Taiwan whistle-blower?’

Sunny Chen. I quicken my pace.

I say, ‘You’ll have my report by late tomorrow.’

Ashok says, ‘About that.’

I once overheard a colleague referring to Ashok as ‘an irritating jerk’. But I like him. I like his leather and aftershave smell and his playful if somewhat childish nature, and I don’t mind that he calls me Maestro or Spock. When I’m in London, we’ll sometimes go for a drink together by the Thames, where he introduces me as the Pussy Magnet and himself as the Pussy Magnet’s Horny Sidekick, and in between buying drinks for women he wants to have sex with, he tells me about his latest losses on the stock exchange, which he seems to find amusing, like a spectacle he’s not involved in. He sees it as a challenge to make me laugh, and when he succeeds, he punches the air with his fist and shouts, ‘I win!’ and demands that I make him an
ozuru
as a ‘humour tax’. I’ve worked with Phipps & Wexman for five years and he now has thirteen of them on a shelf next to his family portrait: a set of parents and a big-eyed sister with her husband and four kids. He likes to amuse visitors by pretending to feed the origami birds confetti collected from hole-punchers.

‘We’ll have to do some rethinking,’ says Ashok. ‘I’m sorry to lay this on you, but Sunny Chen’s dead.’ I mentally select a sheet of origami paper. I make a frog base. This I double-sink fold, then blintz. ‘You still there bud? You hear what I said? Sunny Chen. Your factory-manager guy. He’s eaten it. I didn’t know how to tell you, so I just thought hey, what can I do. I’ll just come right out with it.’

I can hear my boss chewing rapidly. So he is
eating it
too. But Ashok and Sunny Chen aren’t eating the same thing. The thing Sunny is eating is dust, as in ‘biting the dust’. Whereas Ashok has been psychologically dependent on chewing gum since he gave up smoking: ‘eating’ in his case involves spearmint and a gelatine-based product derived from pigs’ trotters. But Sunny Chen is dead. I can be slow to absorb things. Something like this could take a long time to sink in.

I ask, ‘When?’

‘Today. Our morning, his afternoon. At the timber plant. I’m sending his folks flowers on your behalf. It’ll be appreciated, since you hung out with him.’

I fold some more paper mentally, at high speed. I must be extremely upset. If Kaitlin could see me now, she wouldn’t call me ‘a robot made of meat’. But she might call me an unusually fast walker. Sunny Chen in overalls and a white hard hat showing me round the factory. Sunny Chen in the restaurant, piling on the salt and using the soy bottle like a little watering can. Sunny Chen at the shrines, burning the effigy I made him from the Hell note and talking about badly dressed ancestors eating insects. Sunny Chen’s eyes with tears in them. How I looked at a yellow and blue coach instead, and then folded a praying mantis. I do not know how to behave or what I feel. Perhaps I don’t feel anything.

But I do feel something, of course. The usual suspects: confusion and overload.

It was Martin Yeh who was supposed to be dying. Of cancer. Not Sunny Chen, of – what? A heart attack. Of course. I see the da Vinci diagrams. An artery blocking, a ventricle in spasm.

‘How did it happen?’

I’m aware of Ashok taking a deep breath. ‘Sorry to lay this on you too – but the guy killed himself.’ He pauses. ‘As in, suicide.’ I must have made a noise of some sort – a sigh or sob or groan or something. ‘You OK there?’ says Ashok.

‘No.’

‘Jeez. Like I say, I’m sorry. Take your time, my friend.’

‘Yes.’ We are not actually friends. More colleagues.

I stop walking and start to rock. My heartbeat changes. I rock more urgently. I can get overwhelmed.

‘How do you know it was suicide?’

‘Seems there were witnesses. And CCTV footage. Plus he left a note for his wife. Jeez, man. I’m sorry to break it to you this way. Wish I was there to, I don’t know. Buy you a beer or something. Offer my condolences.’ I turn my face to the wind and breathe in wet air. ‘So what’s your gut feeling here?’

I don’t have gut feelings: I have often told Ashok this. He calls me pedantic. He also refers to me as ‘the in-house Martian’ though he always stresses that he means it ‘with love, my friend’. But I do have instincts. These are different from gut feelings: they are a component of the deductive process; a form of recognition on the subconscious level, of something the conscious has not yet processed. A trick of the mind. But a useful one. That Sunny Chen was an unhappy man I don’t doubt. If there’s CCTV footage, does that mean he killed himself in public view, deliberately? If so, did he intend it as another ‘grand gesture’, despite his discomfort in the role of hero? Most suicides are private. Unless they’re political. The bombers. The self-immolators. The cries for help that go wrong. I need to know how he did it. I met the man and watched him agonise about his ancestors and pour soy sauce directly into his rice bowl in a very un-Chinese way. I told him about Kaitlin and Freddy. This doesn’t mean nothing. This means something, even if I don’t know the word for what it means. His cigarette lighter with ‘good fortune’ printed on it. The black-stemmed bamboos, the feral cats, him saying, ‘I am glad it was you they sent’ and me saying I was too, in Chinese, because it was true.

‘How did he do it?’

He lets out air from his mouth. ‘Look. Are you quite sure you want to know the gory details, Maestro?’ I straighten my back to spread the weight that’s settled on my shoulders.

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, it’s not something you’d want to dwell on and analyse too much and stuff. You’re all on your lonesome up there in your Scottish croft, right?’

‘Ashok. Just tell me.’

‘Er, Jeez. Well. You’ve been to the timber plant, right? Seems there was a health-and-safety issue with access to one of the machines . . . Hey, you still there?’

We peered down into the metallic roil of blades.
Long way to fall,
he said.
Turn you into hamburger . . . It’s like being torn into small pieces.
When he showed me the pulper, did he really want me to picture what would happen if he threw himself in?

‘Yes. Still here.’

‘The question is why. D’you have any kind of answer?’

I think. ‘Normally suicide is connected to some variant of depression.’

But that’s inadequate. Sunny Chen’s mental pain was a highly focused and particular form of derangement. He had a conviction that he was unable or unwilling to fully convey: a story about hungry spirits that for whatever reason he found untellable. The cargo on my shoulders shifts, then resettles in a new way. Did my investigation trigger his suicide?

‘Anyway, bud, you’ll need to incorporate something on his death in your report. Stephanie Mulligan can give you some input, if you want the psychological angle.’

‘No thanks.’ I say it too quickly and with too much force.

Stephanie Mulligan has been with Phipps & Wexman for four years. She is a competent and extremely ambitious operative who will probably be running the Psych Department within a few years. She is generally considered to be extremely attractive despite her bra size being probably no more than 34A. I try to avoid her. Whenever I think about her no amount of mental origami can counter the damage she inflicts on my nervous system. My attitude towards her is complex for reasons I don’t enjoy going into.

‘She’s done some work on work-related suicide. Could be of help to you.’

‘If I need it, I’ll look it up.’ Too fast, again.

He sighs. ‘Whatever. But turn it around quick.’ I trudge along the muddy path, my anorak brushing against wet swatches of broom, wishing Ashok hadn’t mentioned Stephanie Mulligan. I thought I’d relegated her to the past. ‘So how are you doing otherwise, Maestro?’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’ve been enjoying nature. And I have a goldfish.’

‘Good. Sounds like a start. So. Clear your head, then finish that report and call me when you’re done. It’s a tough call I know. Don’t think I’m unsympathetic. But I’m counting on you to deliver.’

He knows I will. When Professor Whybray recommended me to Phipps & Wexman it was Ashok Sharma who spotted my talent for identifying and tracking patterns, ‘like one of those French pigs that root for truffles in the forests of
la
Wherever-the-Fuck’, as he put it. It was he who took me on.

After we’ve said goodbye I switch off my phone and breathe in deep lungfuls of dark, saturated air. Sheep are scattered here and there, white blobs in a murk of collapsed bracken and heather. I turn and head back for the black granite boulder that marks the turn of the sheep-path. Seagulls wheel overhead.

‘Sunny Chen is dead. Sunny Chen is dead. Sunny Chen is dead.’

If I say a thing aloud it can sound like someone official speaking, and then I can begin to believe it. I walk faster, visualising the pulping machine, and the heap of woodchips and sawdust in the skip below, stained red from Sunny Chen’s blood. Sunny Chen mashed to hamburger. I have to go through the whole process with him. I don’t know why. Not just once, but again and again, with his heart and his da Vinci aortas and ventricles sliced through by the whirring blades, and the crimson blood splattering against the stainless steel walls of the machine.

When I first asked Sunny Chen how he felt about the whistle-blower he’d said,
I would like to kill him.
Later, when he burned himself in effigy, he was showing me he planned to do just that.

I missed it. But someone else might not have.

In the absence of anything you could call a body, the police would have had to scoop up the pulped sawdust to verify Sunny Chen’s DNA. They’d probably have used an ordinary shovel. Then they’d have put the material into a Ziploc plastic bag for analysis.

A company can lose millions of pounds through an act of sabotage or through bad publicity generated by a disgruntled worker. It will need a complete rebranding, and may have to relocate. Profit is an end product of a motivated workforce. It would be absurd to expect all employees to be happy all day long. But when the seed of discontent is sown, it can spread like contagion. With Sunny Chen’s suicide, the negative PR impact has been amplified.

In my dealings with him, he didn’t strike me as a brave man so much as a desperate one.

Yet it was Sunny Chen who blew the whistle and became an international – what?

A star, some will say. But he’s gone. So technically, a more accurate analogy would be ‘comet’.