Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) (18 page)

A light comes on two flights above me. I go up one more step. I muffle a cry as I stub my toe on the step. Footsteps above me. The sound of boots on concrete. One or two people? They’re getting closer. Another step. One more to go. They‘ll be coming round the corner at any moment. I reach out for the shiny handle and push it weakly. It opens and I fall through the door. I hold on to the handle on the other side and before I can even think, the door closes behind me. I can’t grab it to stop it making a noise. But my gown gets caught in the door. Through a crack of light I can see the boots crunch past, on their way to the bottom of the stairwell. I hear the door below opening and shutting. So. They must be searching the parking deck.

I tug at my gown. It comes free and the door clicks shut. I’m inside an office but it’s colder than any office I’ve ever been in. The floors are bare concrete and the walls are a pinky magnolia. A row of unlit capsules along the length of the room. It’s a giant-sized vending machine, only no one wants what they’re selling. The feet of the dead are behind glass doors. Two bodies here. Three there and a single one further away from the group. The capsules are stacked in fours. I pull one open, and see the cold body of a thin woman wrapped in a cotton yukata. I don’t pull the tray out far enough to see her face. I don’t suppose it makes any difference seeing her face, a dead body is a dead body. But when you see a face, you should say something. But I don’t know what. It’s the kind of situation Uncle Kentaro knows exactly what to do in. “Ah yes, when accidentally encountering the dead, you should throw salt over yourself, pray to the gods and remember to leave a gift.” Something like that. I have no gifts. Unless someone wants the
natto
roll in the folds of my gown. There’s nothing that needs to be said that can’t fit on a tombstone. Only there are no tombstones. But there is something. Here, just a piece of string tied around her big toe and, at the other end, a brown paper label with a white ring around the hole punched through it. A number and name written in ink. Showa 16. The 16th year of the previous emperor. 1941.

I have an idea. I carefully unwind the string from her big toe and take the label. I bow my head in apology and say,
arigatou gozaimashita
, thank you. I slide the drawer shut.

I walk along to the right and pull out a capsule on wheels. It rolls out like one of those drawers on compressed air for storing your futon. But there are no sheets or blankets here. Just a cold steel slab. I ease myself onto it and lay down like the old lady. My hospital gown is white, not grey-and-white gingham like the gowns of the dead, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I use my hands on the roof of the capsule to monkey-bar my capsule closed. I hear the door to the morgue opening. I tie the tag to my big toe and lay as still as possible and close my eyes.

Then I remember that the lady I took the tag from has no toe tag. And badly bruised and cut up though I am, I don’t think I’ll pass for a 70-year-old.

The drawer next to me rattles open and I hear a man exhale like he’s doing something he has never done before. Maybe he’s never been this close to death. I don’t see what all the fuss is about. A body is just a body. When you’re gone, you’re gone from other people’s lives, that’s the bit that hurts. That’s the bit that matters. Crying over flesh and bones is just like going to the supermarket and crying over the sliced salmon. Right?

The drawer next to me slams shut.

I can feel myself being pulled out. I keep my arms at my sides and my eyes shut. I can’t move. I dare not move. If the cop touches me, it’s game over. Even if I don’t give myself away by moving or sneezing or twitching, if he feels my arm, I’m busted. I’m bruised, worn out, but most importantly, I’m still warm.

“Eh?” the cop cries out when he sees me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

This is it. I’m busted. It’s over. I open my eyes a crack, so that at least I can see the end when it comes. The cop is looking away from me and holding his nose.
 

He slams the drawer shut. I do my best not to make a sound as my head hits the back wall of the capsule. I feel the roll of natto in my pocket and remember that the filling of one is smeared across my gown. The smell must be pretty strong. I guess the policeman is not a fan of natto. Maybe he’s from Osaka. The smell of natto and the smell of dead bodies must be pretty close. I give a prayer of thanks to the gods. Aunt Tanaka had been right all along, natto is good for you. And then I can’t stay awake a moment longer. I’m out cold.

When I wake up, I’m shivering. How long I’ve been asleep, I can’t tell. Five minutes or five days, I have no way of knowing. My back hurts more than my head. My legs and arms feel like they belong to someone else. But my mind is my own now.

I’m not sure what else I have going for me. Firefly has sided with the police, but he saved me when I fell. If he saved my life then I must be able to trust him. But he might turn me in again. Uncle Kentaro might help me, but he worries so much, he’s more trouble than he’s worth. And the cops? Detective Watanabe has already decided I’m the problem.

If there is any way to find out what’s going on, it’s up to me and no one else to find out.

I feel for my natto roll. It’s still there. I stuff it in my mouth. I guess there are worse things to eat. I run my hands backwards over the roof of my capsule until my head is free of the wall and I ease my bare feet onto the cold concrete floor. I’m still very stiff, but I can stand without feeling dizzy. That will have to do.

I hear footsteps. I push myself back on the tray and push myself back into the capsule just as the door opens. I realise too late I’m on my front with my head closest to the frosted window, not on my back with my feet visible. If anyone sees me they’ll know something is wrong. But I can look through the glass plate. An unshaven, scruffy middle-aged man in glasses and a white coat wheels in a body on a table with wheels. It’s Dr Ishihara. He pulls out an empty tray and rolls the body from the stretcher onto the tray. He huffs and strains to pull the body by the shoulders; it’s too heavy and stiff to move easily. It looks like a woman’s body, but I can’t be sure through the distorted glass. I can’t understand why the hospital would make only one person do a job that needs at least two.

He gets the body into the right position. He ties a label round the toe and slams the tray door shut. The vibrations rattle through the bank of bodies. I hold my breath. He looks around but doesn’t check the other drawers and hurries out of the morgue with the empty stretcher.

I breathe again. It isn’t a smart idea to lie around here. Just breathing marks me out as not belonging. I could head back down to the parking garage, but even if I get past the parking guard, how far will I get in a hospital gown on the streets of Tokyo? I look at my dead neighbours. Their yukata are no less noticeable. And I don’t fancy having to wrestle one off the 70-year-old. She’s already lent me her name; it doesn’t feel right to take her clothes too. But I am cold. I tie the lady’s name back to her big toe.
 

There is no way out of it. I have to brave the rest of the hospital. I open the doorway to the stairwell and climb the flight back to the main entrance. And then think better of appearing in the lobby and risk being handcuffed to a bed for my own good at a moment’s notice. I go up one more floor and push the door open a crack.

All the lights are on. But outside the window it’s dark. I’m standing by the lifts. There are plastic outdoor chairs and tables and a vending machine. Toilets marked for men and women and toilets marked “guests”. A woman in green is walking along with a trolley. A cleaner? There’s something different about the way she moves, the way she has her hair loose. Filipino? It’s hard to tell. Like all hospital employees, she’s wearing a mask. 

She stops her trolley outside the guest toilets and goes inside with a bottle. I have a crazy idea to just climb into her trolley. It’s a yellow plastic thing with separate chutes for burnable and unburnable rubbish. She can take me to the dumpster and then I’m free, but it’s not going to happen. I have no idea whether I should be classified as burnable or unburnable. I mean, at a certain temperature everything is burnable. But anyway, I can’t fit in. And even if I could, she would be suspicious. At the back of the trolley is a section for clothes. There are green bloody scrubs and a hat. I don’t think much of it, but what the hell. I grab it and slip back into the stairwell. 

I pop my head out of the stairwell. The cleaner is putting the empty cans of coffee from beside the vending machine into a yellow plastic bag. She clips the bag to her trolley and enters the lift. When the doors slide shut, I slip out into the hallway and dash into the patients’ toilets. I change out of my hospital gown and put on the green clothes. I take a pair of green slippers from the toilets. I study myself in the mirror. I look like a junior doctor in scrubs, only I have no stethoscope and no ID card. On the wall is a checklist for when the toilets had last been cleaned. A signature in katakana. It’s written with the same ink from a pen hanging from the top of the clipboard. It’s filled in with a time stamp: 02:30am.

I take the clipboard and the pen. Although I have no ID and no way to answer anyone if stopped, I have the clipboard and pen, and no one wants to talk to someone with a clipboard and pen. Just as long as no one looks closely at the title on the sheet and realises I’m not a toilet monitor. But no one will, I’m pretty sure. 

Now what? I can just walk out of the front door; maybe no one will be around or on the ball enough to stop me. But something is telling me I have unfinished business here. How is it that Dr Ishihara, Liberty Pachinko, Detective Watanabe and me are all connected to St Christopher’s? Why was I brought here and not to another closer hospital? What is so special about this place?
 

I’m at a loss to know what to do. If I had my smartphone, I could call Uncle Kentaro. But I need answers. If it’s after 2:30am, then now is as good a time as any to get some answers while all those who have my best interests at heart are still asleep.

I slip out of the toilets and look both ways. The stairs and elevator lobby are empty. I study the floor guide at the lifts. A sign beside the lift has explanations for what is on the three floors. There’s something wrong about this. Think. Uncle Kentaro says Japanese don’t like the number four “shi” because it sounds the same as the word for death. Then it would make sense in a hospital not to call a floor the fourth, the death floor. But I’m sure that when I stood outside and looked up at the building there were five storeys. But according to the lift there are only four and an underground basement.
 

I carefully open the door to the stairs. I tiptoe slowly into the stairwell. The automatic light doesn’t come on. I close the door behind me as slowly as I can so the latch barely clicks. I listen. Nothing. But it’s not exactly silence. I hear something. Scurrying sounds. Not human sounds. Rats? Insects? It couldn’t be either, not in a hospital. I walk to the stairs and wave my arms around. A light comes to life. I hear more scurrying sounds, then silence. I walk up the stairs as fast as I can. I examine the concrete steps. I don’t want to trip and I don’t want to step on something not human. I pass doors for the first, second and third floors, then an unmarked door and, up a final flight, I see
 
a No Admittance sign to the roof. So the unmarked door is actually for the fourth floor. I walk back down to the unmarked door. It’s nothing special, just a white plasticky door with a single lock in the middle of the doorknob like in hotel bathrooms. One kick and the whole thing would splinter open. Even I could do it in my condition. But it might be unlocked. I turn the handle. 

I have a sudden fear that this is a trap. I look around the stairwell, at the light strips that come on automatically. Is there a camera somewhere? Am I being watched? I hear the scurrying sound again. Is that voices on the other side of the door? I go up the flight of stairs away from the door and look down at it from the No Admittance sign. I’m breathing hard. I try to control my breathing. I stop moving and concentrate on keeping calm. The fluorescent lights go off. I can’t see anything, but I can hear something. It’s a voice from behind the door. I hear the door being unlocked and the catch slipping as the knob turns and the door swings out onto the stairway. I hear men’s voices. But it’s in a language I don’t know. Not English, and I don’t think Japanese. Korean?

The smell of burning tobacco fills the stairwell. Then the talking becomes a little frantic. I think. Though I can only hear one voice. I’m frozen to the spot scared that my breathing will give me away. What if he decides to walk up to the roof? The light will come on and he’ll find me.

I’m sure I hear the man climb the steps. What now? I have to distract him before he sees me. I do the only thing I can. I drop my clipboard between the rails of the staircase. I hold my breath. The footsteps come again, but is he moving so slowly that the lights don’t come on?
 
The lights snap on now, but in the next instant there’s an explosion of noise as the clipboard clatters onto the basement floor five floors below.

The man says something under his breath then runs down the steps, two at a time. He hasn’t seen me. I watch as he goes down the flights of stairs. I could run out onto the roof. But I don’t fancy going though all that again. Or go down the stairs and try my luck escaping. Or I could wait here and hope no one comes for me. But I know any escape is temporary. I have to find out what’s going on, and you can’t find out what’s going on if you leave every door closed. Whatever lies behind that door might hold the key to the mystery. I call it intuition. Uncle Kentaro calls it asking for trouble.