Those Who Feel Nothing (20 page)

‘So what do you think happened here at the Pavilion?'

Merivale spent a few moments chewing his food. ‘Maybe Rafferty was using the American model. He got this stuff donated to the Pavilion as a tax write-off.'

‘And then never displayed it?'

Merivale shook his head. ‘That doesn't make sense, I agree. I'll understand more when I know what we have. Are you OK with us getting our own experts in to take a look?'

‘Of course,' Gilchrist said.

When the plates were cleared away and they were deep into the second bottle of wine, Gilchrist said: ‘This woman? This Asian art expert.'

Merivale looked out into the courtyard. ‘It never came to trial. Over the weekend in prison Black complained of stomach problems. She had uncontrolled diarrhoea. She began vomiting what appeared to be excrement. She asked for urgent medical attention and was told she'd need to wait until the morning.'

He stopped.

‘And?' Gilchrist said.

‘And she died in the night. In her own filth. Death certificate said she had peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.'

‘No foul play then?'

Merivale just looked at her.

The conversation got brighter after that. Unusually for a man, he asked most of the questions. Perhaps unusually for a woman, she felt uneasy answering them so fobbed him off. But something was definitely happening.

The heat was palpable when they walked out on to Middle Street. They looked at each other. Neither could stop looking.

‘Shall we go back to your hotel?' Gilchrist asked. Damned pheromones.

You rise at four, a little groggy. The hotel has bicycles. It seems apt that you use one of them to cycle out to Angkor Wat to see the dawn before you leave the country. The bike has no lights. That too seems apt.

Actually, hardly anything else on the road has lights either. It takes thirty minutes to reach the site, riding in the gutter as lorries and cars swish by you. Motorized tuk-tuks pass you with couples swathed in blankets huddled inside them. It is cold but you like it.

Somehow nobody side-swipes you as they pass. You come off the road, the bike rattling on the rough path, and head into the jungle. Trees push at you, the bike tries to dump you in potholes. It's humid now and you are drenched in sweat.

There are insect noises, the
cucurrus
of a creature that is loud way beyond its size. But then the ruins of some temple or palace loom before you and suddenly you are surrounded by hundreds of shadowy people, all here to see the sun rise behind the towers of the temple.

You sit at the edge of the lake with everybody else. There are purple lilies on the lake, closed now. Over the next hour, as the sun rises over the parapets, the lilies slowly wake. You witness the dawning, in all its shades, mediated by the zip of hundreds of camera flashes. It's a kind of lightshow. Then the swollen yellow sun rises between the two towers, wreathed in morning mist. You watch its reflection in the dark water among the blossoming lily pads.

You met Michelle when you were fifteen. You were interested in archaeology and soldiering. You had romantic notions of being a scholar-soldier like Paddy Fermor or T.E. Lawrence. You met her in the Ashmolean in Oxford. You were standing either side of an Egyptian mummy. You clicked. Aside from being beautiful – part French, part English, half Cambodian – she was sharp as a tack and warm and friendly and took the piss out of you something terrible.

Her father was an archaeologist for the Louvre. He disapproved of you in your one brief meeting – so brief he didn't recognize you the next time you met. You were an oik with a brain, with too many street fights showing on your knuckles, too much interest in soldiering. But then he would have disapproved of anybody. He wanted Michelle to pursue her interests to the utmost. But if she must get involved with somebody, the last person he wanted was you.

He told her all this and she told you. It made no difference. You continued.

But she was a wraith. You don't mean skinny like these sad girls now. You mean more … elusive. Jesus, you wish you knew words. There was something about her that was insubstantial, dream-like – even non-existent.

You married in secret. She was pregnant. You were both young. She
had an abortion. Woman's right to choose and all that. Except it wasn't her choice. It was at her father's insistence and she acquiesced.

You know it was hard for her. The culture she'd been brought up in …

‘You don't understand,' Michelle had shouted at you, pulling away from your embrace and stepping out from the shelter of the parapet into the rain. ‘It isn't easy for me.'

She'd told you in the kitchen garden of Fulham Palace by the Thames on a blowsy day, thunderclouds broiling in the sky, the rain suddenly pelting down, trapping you in this shallow stone porch.

‘I thought your father brought you up to be free?' you said, reaching out to draw her back in.

She pulled away from your arm. She was already drenched. Now the rain was like a curtain between you. You felt you were parting it as you stepped down to join her.

Michelle jabbed at her own face with a long finger. ‘My father is white but everyone sees an Oriental. A slanty-eye. They don't know if I'm Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese or Thai. Most people don't even know Cambodia exists.'

‘So?'

‘So they make assumptions about how I'm supposed to behave. They think we
Orientals
are all tea ceremonies and geishas, or mail-order brides, submissive and pliant.'

‘Nobody who has known you for half a second would think that,' you said, reaching out to her again. She stepped away from you, into a puddle. Your eyes were stinging, the rain flooding you. Her dress was clinging to her. You were trying to push down the thoughts the sight of her in the rain inevitably produced.

‘Your father gave you a liberal education,' you said. ‘He encouraged you to be yourself. How do you get from that to obeying him about an abortion?'

‘My father is liberal, yes he is. But he is also half French and I am his daughter. That makes him the most illiberal liberal in existence.' She bared her small, pointed teeth in a cold laugh. ‘The French demonstrated with the guillotine during their glorious revolution that there is nothing more fascist than a liberal fervent about freedom.'

‘Can we focus on the abortion?' you said. You reached out your hand. ‘And can we get out of the ruddy rain?'

Michelle stepped past you back beneath the portico. You sloshed in after her.

‘I had an enlightened education, it is true, but I am also a Cambodian woman. Do you think my mother was equal to my father? I love him but he is a colonizer, like all men. Paternalistic. He claimed to know what was best for her, he claims to know what is best for me.'

She took your hand. ‘I'm sorry, Jimmy.'

You squeezed her hand. ‘I'm not a colonizer. You're my wife.' You smiled. ‘There's always our next one.'

She looked at you for what seemed a long time. You held her look though you wanted to blink the stinging water from your eyes. You couldn't read her expression. You'd never been able to but had never dared say it in case it fed into the old stereotypes about Oriental inscrutability.

You sat on a stone bench, side by side, holding hands but unspeaking, until it was time for you to go. You had a train to catch back to your barracks. The rain had stopped but plump beads of water plopped from the arch masking the garden beyond.

‘Leave me here,' she said when you stood. ‘I want to walk in the gardens after the rain. Smell the air.'

‘And see if the rain has brought anything up from beneath the soil?' you said with a smile. Six months earlier you'd both volunteered for a dig in Tuscany, in the fields around the hill town of Chiusi. There the number of Etruscan finds you made on a daily basis during the wet months had almost become a joke. Things buried years ago would slowly rise to the surface after heavy rain.

A kiss then you left her there, sitting in the garden of Fulham Palace. You left her reluctantly. You consciously didn't look back, though you ached to do so. A superstitious dread was rising in you that if you looked back you would somehow trigger some ur-myth: that she would turn into a pillar of salt or be lost to Hades.

Hades worried you most. You'd gone on from Tuscany to Turkey and during that dig had once stood at the mouth of Hades – or what archaeologists had identified as the cave the ancients believed to be the entrance to Hell. You didn't know if there was a Cambodian equivalent of such myths or of such a cave. Of course, Pol Pot was turning the entire country into a living hell.

But that was not to be your fate. Or hers. Instead, she simply disappeared from your life. Vanished. Unreachable. Over the next two years there were times you wondered if you had entirely imagined her. Even when she contacted you to say that she was back in Cambodia with her father you didn't know that you believed it was her. Not until you saw her nailed like a bat to a barn door in the playground of Security Prison-21.

Gilchrist didn't know where she was when her phone woke her. She had dragged herself unwillingly from Merivale's bed in the middle of the night and come home but it took her a moment to figure out she was actually back in her own bed.

‘Bellamy?' she said, her voice croaky.

‘I hesitated to call, ma'am, as I didn't want to disturb you …'

‘Enough with the innuendo, Detective Sergeant. What is it?'

‘Don-Don has just phoned to say he's opened that metal door at the back of the store. It leads into a tunnel. And in the tunnel he's found a body.'

‘I thought that was the point of the exercise: to find all the bodies Rafferty had dug up.'

‘This is no bag of bones, ma'am. This is a murder victim.'

Gilchrist got out of bed and walked towards the bathroom, still holding the phone to her ear. She was aching in odd places but now wasn't the time to remember why.

‘Youk?'

‘Hard to say, ma'am – face bashed in, I believe. But it has to be a possibility.'

‘No identification on him?'

‘None.'

She reached in and turned the shower on. ‘I'm on my way,' she said. ‘I'll meet you at the Pavilion.'

‘Shouldn't I stay out of it as Donaldson made the discovery?'

‘OK then, check out Youk's old address. I'll phone you in a while.'

‘Righty-ho, ma'am. Might we expect to see Agent Merivale today?'

Did she hear the cheeky sod chuckle?

‘Fuck right off, Detective Sergeant.'

‘Certainly, ma'am,' he said, ending the call.

I
t actually takes you forty-five hours to fly from Siem Reap to Budapest. And that's the quick way, via Singapore and Frankfurt. A long time for your quarry to remain unaware. A long time for you to think about what you are doing.

You check into a five-star hotel beside the Danube. You've read about the importance of this broad river over the centuries. A conduit and a barrier.

There is a Chinese restaurant directly opposite that you mean to try later. For now you hit the bar and gaze blankly out at the broad, brightly illuminated Danube. The river traffic is mostly restaurant boats plying between the bridges.

You were in Budapest because Howe had told you where to find the other two. He'd also told you what Sal Paradise was up to, then and now.

‘The older, pre-Khmer Rouge guys – the tunnel rats and Viet Vets – still dominate in Vietnam, hunkered down in Hanoi and Saigon. Excuse me – Ho Chi Minh City. They're handling the heroin and the antiquities and the people trafficking. A nice little combination – the three get sent together.'

‘And here it's Sal Paradise?'

‘Not just him. There's another guy behind him. We never see him.'

‘You do the people trafficking and the heroin?'

‘Fuck off – I'm strictly antiquities. Paradise handles all the rest.'

People traffickers. There are such people. People without feelings. More than you would like to believe. For a while you worried you were such a person until you figured out the difference.

‘If there's a reception party waiting for me in Budapest I'll come back for you,' you said to Howe.

Howe nodded. ‘I know.'

You killed him even so. You can't seem to process that.

You're supposed to meet somebody in the Liszt Museum. Cloak and dagger but you don't need to argue unnecessarily with Sal Paradise. The museum is in an apartment where the composer and pianist used to live. You climb a couple of flights of stairs and go into a small foyer. Your shoes squeak on the waxed wooden floor. You are the museum's only visitor.

The rooms are deserted. Your contact is not here unless it is the elderly woman who took your entrance money at the makeshift counter in the foyer.

You read on a notice on the wall that Liszt, like all great pianists, had an unusually large hand span, which made his compositions almost impossible to play by anyone with smaller hands. There is a plaster cast, and a bronze cast, of one of his hands. They are different sizes, which confuses you.

You are looking at his death mask, covered in warts, when your contact finally arrives. She doesn't speak, simply places an A4 envelope on the glass cabinet you're looking into and walks away. You examine Liszt's warts for five more minutes then leave the museum.

‘What have we got, Detective Sergeant?' Gilchrist said as she joined Donald Donaldson in the store halfway down the Pavilion tunnel.

The hard hat he was wearing looked like a joke one from the seafront because of his enormous head. Coupled with his white forensics onesie it made him look like a gay polar bear circa Village People.

He indicated the half-closed metal doorway at the back of the store. Bright lights spilled out from arc lamps. ‘When we forced the door open first thing this morning, we found a body. We're assuming male.'