Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) (3 page)

But what is there downstairs? The caretaker’s office. I’d never seen it open and today, as usual, a grey curtain conceals the glass window. In the corner there’s a faded plastic sign written in kanji and hiragana. I don’t know what it says, but I can guess. Not here. With a telephone number. I take a picture of the sign. It might come in handy later.
 

The lift doors whisk open behind me, and the old man comes out. He’s carrying a white plastic bag tied at the top and a bundle of newspapers. He bows to me and indicates with a jerk of his head that I should follow him. We walk around the side. Out on the pavement against the rear of the building are stacks of newspapers, plastic bags, old clothes, cans, bottles and broken electric fans. It must be unburnable day today. He tips his head at the piles of clothes and adds his plastic bag to the pile of other bags, then leaves me alone with the rubbish.

Has he been trying to tell me something? I look at the clothes. Paint-splattered and worn out. Like something Steve would wear even out on the town. In fact, this is exactly what Steve would wear. I pick up the bundle. It’s tied with plastic cord in perfect 50cm cubes, just like you are supposed to do, but something Steve would never do, being allergic to exactness, he would say. So it couldn’t be his clothes. But I look at the label sewn into the back of a worn-out shirt. “George” it says. Could be British but could just as easily be from one of the Shibuya boutiques eager to sound foreign.
 

Under a pile of newspapers where the old man had put his pile are sketchbooks. My heart starts beating faster and my hands grow clammy. I pull the newspaper bundles aside and there I see watercolours. Stacks and stacks of his work. I open some at random. Landscapes of Tokyo. Sketches of penguins walking over Shibuya crossing. I remember the day we sat in the coffee shop overlooking the scramble. Hundreds of thousands of people waiting to cross the zebra crossing by the Hachiko exit. I’d said they looked like ants, Steve had laughed and said no, penguins.
 

How could he throw it away? I look around at the rubbish. A coffee pot that was the same as Steve’s. An old futon mattress. A box of mugs and wine glasses still smeared with the different colours of paints. Cadmium yellow, orange and red, the colours Steve mixes to create the sunset pictures that he waits all day to capture from his apartment in the quarter of an hour when he comes alive, splashing water over a giant piece of paper, swirling paint around in the wine glasses throwing yellows down over everything, then splashes of blue, where they meet, they bleed together to make new colours, and just when you think the scene is impossibly bright, one devastating sweep of his brush and there is a purple horizon with all the skyscrapers of Tokyo. I leaf through the sketchbook in my hand. Pages of views of the Tokyo Skytree, only in some it’s tall and straight, in others it’s bent and the colours bleeding. I met him there at the base — he knew better than to invite me to the top—and we had considered eating out if it wasn’t so expensive. Then more pictures of moving figures, men and women.

I have to find one sketchbook. The one with the drawings he’d made of me while I was sleeping. No one had ever wanted to do that to me, to picture me and when he showed me the sketches, I cried. They were so beautiful, nothing like me. A tan cover tied with brown ribbons. Identical to the one I can see in the pile of books in front of me. I push the other papers aside and grab it. On the cover is a company name, Holbein Drawing Book F4. And in a single brushstroke across the front in red: Hana. He’d painted my name on the book on the day he proposed.

Tears fall now onto the sketchbook. My tears blending with the H in Hana. How can this be here in the rubbish? I hold it in my hands, clutch it to my chest.

I pull out a loose sheet. It’s a sketch in pencil. A man sleeps on a bench below a window with bars. On the walls are scribbled the letters “AOI AOI” in different sizes, but they cover the whole wall. The man’s face is turned to the wall, but he looks like Steve, only smaller and more pitiful. There is nothing else in the room but the wall and under the bench has been shaded in with pencil. It looks cold and miserable. The man looks weak and under pressure, weighted down by the strange words on the wall. It’s sad, nothing like Steve’s other pictures. And why is it in the collection with my pictures? I rub the corner of the paper where he had written his name. S. Kemp. It’s heavy watercolour paper, almost the thickness of card, but the paper feels grooved and pitted. I run my fingers over it like Steve used to do in the art department of Joyful Honda. I close my eyes and just feel the paper. I can hear Steve stammering with excitement: “Just feel that. Feel the beauty of the texture, it’s as tough as denim and you can paint or draw on both sides.”
 

Both sides. I open my eyes and turn the paper over. On the back are rougher practice pencil sketches of hands. A girl’s hands. Some reaching out, others in fists, some with fat fingers and others with thin. But on each wrist there are letters. The same letters from different angles. Letters tattooed onto the wrists. In one sketch the hands are holding onto a skyscraper jutting into the sky.
 

Each hand has one of three letters. A or O or I.

CHAPTER FOUR

I stuff the picture back into the sketchbook and clasp it to my chest. Why is everything that was in the flat out here in the rubbish? Who put it here? Why? Could Steve have done it himself? Why?

I have to think. I crouch down and sit with my arms wrapped around the sketchbook, pressing it to my knees. I’m surrounded by all the neat piles of everything that was Steve’s. I have to get some answers. I start with the easiest.

It wasn’t Steve who dumped all this stuff here. Steve isn’t capable of cleaning up his apartment and sorting everything neatly into burnables, unburnables and recyclables, certainly not in neat Japanese bundles. Not even in the 48 hours since I had last seen him. And Steve would never throw out his old pictures. And not the ones of me. I’m sure of that. So, if it wasn’t Steve, then it was someone else. The landlord? He would have had only 12 hours to have chucked everything out since the 11:12 train. And why, in a half-unrented building, would he be so eager to clear out the room and change the lock in the middle of the night? No, that makes no sense.

I have a feeling eyes are on me. Someone is watching me. I look around, but there is no one on the sliver of street I can see. Behind me lies concrete and a two-foot wide space between manshun
buildings. Above me are black windows each with a little red triangle reaching up into the sky. I shudder. The triangles mean each window has an emergency escape chute in case of earthquake. But nobody is looking at me. That I can see.
   

I know I should move on, but I’m not exactly sure where. I have to think. The thought of lugging that suitcase back to the station lockers fills my burning fingers with dread. I check my purse. My life savings of ¥4,327 make it easy to decide. I will leave my suitcase where it is. It’s not like there’s anything of any value in it. Not even for me. And I might need the ¥200 locker charge for something else. Like food. When did I last eat? It feels like a long time ago.

I walk back down the hill, under the rail line and past Tower Records onto the main street. If I turn left I’ll come to Shibuya Station, to the Hachiko exit where people who don’t know anywhere else in Tokyo meet before crossing the zebra crossing scramble to go shopping at the 109 clothes place. I’d watched them while Steve sketched them, and then we’d eat something from a convenience store.

I call his number again and get the same voice mail message. Steve can’t really be dead, he just can’t. Can he? I get an icy cold feeling in my gut and have to crouch down on my heels. My mind is spinning. If he died in an accident, he wouldn’t have tidied up before. He wasn’t capable of it, even if he wanted to disappear without telling me. So is Detective Watanabe telling the truth, and the body on the tracks really was Steve’s? If falling in front of the train was an accident, why has everything been conveniently removed from his apartment? I don’t know why, but I’m sure the two facts are connected.
 

Then I get another pain, spreading out from my gut. I feel sick. And I know why: If he didn’t clear out his apartment, his landlord didn’t and I didn’t, there was another possibility. A girlfriend.
 

I dry heave and wretch, spitting out the acid that has built up in my mouth onto the street. Three girls in high school uniforms push their way past me. One says: “Hello,” another “Oh my God,” the third, “Don’t touch me!” but I don’t think they know or care what they are saying, they just want to speak the only English they can remember at me. The tallest girl’s bag bumps into my back and I’m knocked off balance, my hands scuffing through the dirt. For a moment I think they’re going to apologise to me, but it’s just a pause before laughter. I’m ashamed. I skip to my feet and lunge forward with my arms raised above my head and bring them down like I’m going to slice off their heads.
 

“
Ra - men- do
,” I hear myself chanting in Japanese.

The three stare at each other, amazed that a foreigner can speak Japanese, as if they had just heard a talking dog. And then the tallest girl bows her head. She’s showing respect, that I know the basic commands of kendo swordsmanship. I pull back to avoid striking her. But her bow is just a feint to the side, and I hurtle forward and lose my balance again, grazing knees and hands on the concrete. The tallest girl laughs, and says something to the other two that I don’t catch, but the meaning is clear.
Don’t bother with the freak, she’s nothing
. I’m not a talking dog, I’m less than a dog.

Some time passes, I don’t know how long. A large man in a mask brushes past me. He is wearing a grey-green pinstripe suit and carries a walking stick like it’s a fashion accessory. He has bright pink socks, and dyed red hair, but he stares at me. I’m the one who doesn’t belong. I run, turn right up the hill, away from the Shibuya station, go left past a shop selling lace-up boots painted with Union Jacks, then past the museum of salt and tobacco before I slow down to catch my breath. The joke I’d shared with Steve, the ridiculousness of a museum dedicated to salt and tobacco, doesn’t seem funny any more. A waitress is wiping the table outside a café where me and Steve would sit watching the world. I nod to her like an old friend. She had served us every Sunday for the last six months that we’d been going out, but today she doesn’t even notice me.

I look down at my leather boots. Without Steve, who else can I turn to? I know the answer, but I don’t want to admit it.

I walk on, further away from the centre of Shibuya, north towards Yoyogi Park, letting my feet take me wherever. Past the impossibly expensive clothes boutiques, through back roads that end suddenly in a jumble of apartment buildings, Black Cat delivery depots and abandoned shopping bicycles chained to poles. When I’m in Shibuya with Steve, every street is unique, bustling with life and colour, funny half-English signs or half-crazy businesses, but now, alone, one street looks much like another.
 

I don’t know how long I’ve been walking or where I am, except it’s nowhere I’ve been with Steve. I walk too close to the shops. The great automatic glass doors slide open and my ears are blasted by assistants screaming their welcomes at me. I retrace my steps as best I can until I hit a main road and head up the hill. The streets are crowded even as I walk further away from Shibuya Station. But I like it better this way, with people around. I keep my eyes down, but scour the pavements. If I move and stay out of other people’s line of sight, maybe I’ll be OK. I’m at the top of the hill and near the police station again.
 

The crowd begins to thin out. I see a sign in English for Yoyogi Park and follow it along a two-lane road thick with traffic. An old man is walking backwards down the hill. I have to get out of his way, but he doesn’t acknowledge me. I watch him continue down the street. How will he cross the road? I follow his movements down the hill. In every case a pedestrian darts out of his way. A woman with a chihuahua in a pushchair walks out onto the street. A girl looking at a smartphone sidesteps him without a moment’s hesitation. And further down the hill in the distance I spot a big man wearing a mask and carrying a walking stick. And he has pink socks.

CHAPTER FIVE

I turn down the first side street and slip through the backstreets. Can’t be sure if he knows I saw him, I don’t want to stare or tip him off that I have. There’s no mistaking his stick and his mask. A pair of pink socks could be a coincidence. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but given the pink socks, the mask and the stick, this seems unlikely.

Now I’m close to Yoyogi Park. In front of me is a building that looks like an old cinema in the centre of a car park. I run over the asphalt and go in the first entrance. I don’t think the masked man has seen me, but there is no way to be sure. I dart into the first door. An ugly squiggle and the letters NHK. This must be where they film all the boring stuff that goes on the TV.
 

Maybe a few hundred old people are standing in the lobby, two old men are sitting on bar stools on a stage, chatting on microphones. They are on a stage all lit up. The crowd stand in their coats to watch the conversation. The celebrities on stools keep talking to themselves and don’t seem to notice that there are hundreds of old people standing around watching them. They could just as well have missed their last train home and been sitting on bar stools in a hole-in-the-wall salaryman bar in Shimbashi killing time before the morning trains start up again, but for the stage make-up and bright lights. One of them must be 80 years old. His eyes blink in the glare of a spotlight.