* * *
When the taxi reached Vida’s apartment building, Elly found the front door open, and Fergus standing in the dimly lit hallway just inside the door. She could barely see his face in the gloom, but the moment he spoke, she knew that he had been crying.
‘She’s dead, Elly,’ he said. ‘Vida’s dead.’
‘How— What happened?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is . . . when I got here, she was dead . . .’ He started to sob.
‘Come on,’ said Elly. ‘Where is she?’
Fergus pointed to the upper floor, and as they climbed the stairs he said, ‘The door was open, so I walked in and . . .’
Elly was still hoping against hope that this might at least prove to be a natural death — one of those sudden, unpredictable fits or heart attacks that can suddenly strike down even the relatively young. But as soon as she saw the state of the apartment — the smashed china, the overturned furniture — the hope vanished.
‘You probably shouldn’t see her,’ whispered Fergus hoarsely.
‘It’s OK, I’ve seen dead bodies before.’ She closed her eyes for a moment before sliding open the bedroom door.
Vida lay on a mattress and eiderdown on the floor, fully dressed, her feet pointing towards the doorway. Elly had only an indistinct image of the long hair spread out on either side of the poet’s head, but as she stepped nearer, she could see at once that Vida’s normally pale face seemed swollen and blotched with red marks. Even without looking closely, there was no mistaking the cause of death. A thin, silky black cord was still tightly wrapped around Vida’s neck, gouging horribly into the darkened skin, one end tangled in her hair.
Elly was not a religious person, and she doubted that Vida had any religious faith, but her first instinct was to bow her head for a moment in the face of death.
‘What are we going to do?’ wailed Fergus behind her.
Elly turned. She had seen enough.
‘We’re going to call the police. Or rather, I’m going to call the police.’
She stared around at the shambles of the ransacked apartment, in the faint hope that there might be a telephone, but there was nothing.
‘Where’s the nearest phone? Where did you call me from?’ she asked.
‘I found one at the tobacconist’s on Hongo Street, but there may be something nearer. I don’t know.’
‘You stay here. We shouldn’t touch anything.’
Elly ran down the stairs and out into the street. A strange calm had come over her. She could think only of the immediate steps ahead. Find a policeman or find a telephone. Get help.
Though the post office was closed, the café next door to it was still open, but when she burst through the door calling out, ‘Where is your phone? I need to make a call,’ the owner just shook his head, barely glancing up at her from the newspaper he was reading behind the counter.
‘Nothing here. You’ll have to try down the road.’
Elly ran towards the main road, feeling the rain sting her face and hearing a rumble of approaching thunder. Time seemed to have slowed, the way it does in dreams. She could see the lights of the crossroads in the distance, but however fast she ran, she felt as though she would never reach it. She saw the outlines of the buildings against the ink-washed sky with unnatural clarity. As she watched, a jagged crack of lightning split the sky, followed by an echo of thunder.
Halfway along the road, on the opposite side, was a bench, and on it sat a gaunt young man in a black student uniform. The man had a large blue holdall that he had placed on the bench next him. He was clutching its handle in one hand. As Elly ran past, he looked up and stared at her with a wild expression on his face, almost as though he was about to call out to her, but she just kept on running, her eyes fixed on the main road ahead.
There were few people in the street at this hour, but the tobacconist’s kiosk next to the crossroads was still open, with a public telephone on the counter outside its window.
Elly felt a brief moment of panic as she lifted the receiver, struggling to remember the number to call. She had read an article in the paper about the new emergency number system, but she’d never used it before. She was about to knock on the window of the kiosk and ask the tobacconist for the number when she noticed a small card stuck to the inside of the window: Police emergency — 110.
It was only when she had dialled the number, and heard the calm, almost bored, voice on the other end of the line that her unnatural calm dissolved and a sense of dizziness and exhaustion overcame her.
‘Can you describe your location, please?’ said the disembodied voice. Elly stammered out an explanation as best she could, and the voice said, ‘Please remain with the deceased. Our officers will be with you shortly.’
Elly put down the receiver and began to walk back to Vida’s apartment, her legs starting to shake as she did so. On her way back to comfort Fergus, she glanced at the bench on the other side of the road. A vague memory was nagging at the back of her mind. There had been something disturbingly familiar about the face of the student with the holdall who had been sitting there ten minutes earlier. But when she passed it this time, the bench was empty. The young man and his luggage had vanished.
CHAPTER 17
They sat side by side on hard wooden chairs in the police station, Elly staring at the clock on the grey wall in front of her. She seemed to be losing track of time. The last time she had glanced up at the clock, its hands pointed to 8.50 p.m., but now they had crept around to ten. Fergus had promised to be home by ten, she thought pointlessly.
They were in a windowless interview room in the police station, Fergus sweating profusely. The interview was mainly conducted by a weary-looking middle-aged policeman who wore steel-rimmed glasses and looked, Elly thought, like a bank clerk who was bullied by his superiors. There was another, fatter policeman sitting behind him taking notes, and an interpreter in civilian dress whom the police had insisted on bringing in to translate their questions and Fergus’ replies. They refused to allow Elly to interpret, although she would have done a much better job: she had to grit her teeth to resist the urge to correct that police interpreter’s tortuous English.
With five people in the small poorly ventilated room, the air quickly became stuffy and foetid. Elly tried to fan herself with a mail order catalogue that she happened to have in her handbag, but it didn’t work very well. For some reason, she kept remembering Vida’s feet. Vida had been lying on her back with her bare feet pointed upwards, and Elly had been surprised to see how hard and calloused her soles were — like those of a farm worker rather than a poet.
The policeman directed most of his questions to Fergus, who was, after all, the person who had found Vida’s body. Elly remembered reading somewhere that the person who finds the body of a murder victim is always the first suspect. She had explained to the police, as she and Fergus were driven to the station, that Fergus was a citizen of an Allied occupying power, and should be allowed to contact the British Liaison Mission before being questioned, but the response was a curt, ‘He is just helping us with our enquiries.’
The policeman kept going over the same ground again and again. Had Fergus seen anyone near the entrance to Vida’s building when he arrived — to which the answer was ‘No’ — and what did the words in her letter mean?
Fergus had handed the letter to the police as soon as they started to question him. Elly could hear how his voice shook as he said, ‘Oh God, if only I’d opened it earlier. If only I’d arrived in time . . .’
If only I’d remembered and given him the letter when he first got home, thought Elly. Would that hour or so have made all the difference? Would Vida still be alive now? Or was she already dead by then?
The policeman stared at the letter in silence, and then said, almost as though offended by the fact, ‘It’s in Chinese.’
‘Yes,’ said Fergus, ‘both she and I used to live in China. That’s how we communicate.’
‘What does this part say?�
�� The policeman was frowning at a sentence in the letter, and shoved the piece of paper across the table so that Fergus could see it.
‘It says,’ Fergus murmured, ‘that she wants to talk to me about something personal.’
Well, thought Elly, he didn’t mention that part before.
‘And what do you think Miss Toko meant when she said she wanted to see you about something personal?’ the policeman was asking.
‘I don’t know.’
It was strange to hear her called by that name. Elly remembered Vida smiling across the table in the café in Kanda, saying, My real name is Toko Kasumi, but no one in my family thinks I deserve that name, and I don’t want it either.
‘Miss Toko’ was not the real Vida. Your real name is the name you choose, the name your true friends call you . . . ‘Miss Toko’ sounded like some completely different person.
Still frowning, the policeman shifted his gaze from the letter to Fergus.
‘Did you have a personal relationship with this woman?’ he asked at last.
‘No!’ Fergus’ reply was too quick, too loud. Elly glanced at him, but his eyes were fixed on the policeman. ‘I mean, she’s . . . she was a friend of a friend of mine — Theodore Cornish. He worked in GHQ’s Legal Department, but he went back to the US last month. He introduced me to her, and then I interviewed her a couple of times — well, a few times, actually — for my newspaper.’
She wanted to put her arm around him, or even just to touch his hand, but didn’t dare.
‘And what’s this,’ asked the policeman, moving his finger down the page, and evidently recognising some of the Chinese characters. ‘Something about photographs?’
‘She lent me some photographs: photos that she took when she was in China. She writes — wrote — “I think I’ve seen the man in the photo. He’s everywhere.” I presume she’s referring to someone in one of those photos, but I don’t know who.’
‘Where are these photographs now?’
Fergus extracted the packet of photos from his satchel and handed it over with an unsteady hand. The policeman slid the photos out of the packet, skimmed through them quickly without comment and placed them into a folder that lay on the metal table in front of him.
‘So what do you know about these photos?’
‘Nothing, really. We’d been planning to meet. She was going to tell me all about them. But I’d been having difficulty getting in touch with her recently, after Ted — that is, Theodore — Cornish left for the States. I sent her a note a couple of weeks ago, trying to make an appointment to meet, but I didn’t hear anything back from her until I read her letter today.’
There was silence for a while. The policeman seemed to be weighing up Fergus’ answers, and Elly had the impression that he was not satisfied with them, but had decided not to press the point for now. He frowned at the letter, and then removed his glasses and polished them with a cotton handkerchief before gazing at Fergus and Elly in turn.
‘Do you have any idea what Miss Toko might have meant by that — “He’s everywhere”?’
‘Absolutely no idea whatsoever,’ said Fergus.
‘And you, Mrs Ruskin?’
But Elly simply shook her head. She wished she could read the rest of the letter; she wished she could understand Chinese. She wanted to feel the tone, sense the emotions that Vida had tried to convey. What words had she used to address Fergus? The precise choice of words made all the difference.
But the policeman folded the letter, slipped it into his folder on top of the photos, and turned his attention to Elly. He asked her whether she knew Vida too. How often had she met her? When had she last seen her? What time was it when Fergus telephoned? What time had she arrived at Vida’s apartment? Had she seen anything suspicious when she arrived?
‘There is one thing,’ said Elly tentatively. ‘Not when I arrived at the apartment, but later, when I was looking for a public telephone to call you, I saw a young man sitting on a bench a little way down the road from Vida’s — from Miss Toko’s — apartment block. He was just kind of staring at the street. I don’t know if it’s important, but it seemed really odd. It was dark and starting to rain, and he was just sitting there.’
‘Could you describe this man to us?’ asked the policeman.
Not really, thought Elly. How do you describe someone whom you’ve just seen for a few moments? ‘He was wearing a student uniform — you know, one of those black ones with brass buttons. He was thin, and I suppose quite young — I don’t know, nineteen or twenty, maybe. And,’ she added, ‘he had a big holdall with him. The kind you use to carry things like tennis rackets. I think it was blue.’
The fat policeman was jotting down notes, but his superior didn’t seem to want to pursue the matter. He just nodded and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Ruskin,’ and then stood up and opened the door of the interview room, gesturing for Elly to leave.
‘I’d like to speak to your husband alone now, if you don’t mind. You can wait for him in the reception area. One of the duty clerks will bring you a cup of tea.’
Fergus looked up pleadingly at Elly as she left the room. She thought that this was how a parent must feel, leaving her small child at school for the first time. Her heart ached for him, but there was nothing she could do.
* * *
In the grimly functional reception area, with its posters displaying unflattering mugshots of wanted and missing people, Elly asked for permission to use the telephone. The British Liaison Mission’s office would be closed at this hour, of course, but she had the home telephone number of Fred Quincy from the Mission in her address book. Elly could hear the sound of chatter in the background as she spoke to Quincy, and suspected that she had interrupted him in the midst of some kind of party.
‘My God! How ghastly for you!’ said Fred, when she explained, as simply as she could, what had happened. ‘But look, Elly, no one could possibly suspect you and Fergus of being involved in a thing like that. I’m sure the police are just following procedure, and you’ll both be home in no time. Don’t worry, though. I’ll pass the word to our legal eagle just in case, and you call me again right away if those police give you any trouble.’
There was a burst of laughter and the clink of dishes on the other end of the line.
‘I’m so sorry, Elly. I have to go. It’s wretched that this has happened to you. What a shock! You’ll be all right, won’t you?’
‘Yes. I suppose so. Thank you, Fred.’
The line went dead, and she returned to staring at the wanted posters on the walls, from which a row of eyes stared back at her with stony hostility.
When Fergus emerged from the interview room about half an hour later, his face was drawn and pale, and he looked exhausted. Elly was longing to know if the police had questioned him further about his relationship with Vida, but felt that this was not the moment to ask. Fergus said nothing to her. He simply took her arm as they stepped out together into the steamy evening.
The moment they opened the front door of the police station, there was a flash and a popping sound. Lightning, Elly thought. But then she saw the photographer standing in the street close to the entrance, with a silvery metal disk attached to his camera. As she turned to look at him, she was blinded by another burst of light from a flashbulb.
The Japanese newspapers were on to the story already. It must have been the police who had tipped them off. Would her face and Fergus’ be all over the front pages of tomorrow’s newspapers?
It was only as she and Fergus sat silently side by side in the taxi heading home that she remembered Watanabe’s warning. Any hint of scandal could ruin your chances of adoption, the lawyer had said.
Elly stared unseeingly at the blurred glitter of night-time Tokyo, tears running down her cheeks. Fergus, who must have thought that she was crying for Vida, took hold of her hand. She knew that she should be weeping for the dead poet and the terror of her death. But instead the words that kept running like a chant through Elly’s head were, Maya. Oh M
aya. What have we done? Have we come this far only to lose you again?
CHAPTER 18
Afterwards, Jun thought that his brain must have blanked out for a while. He had become completely cold and numb, unable to move and unable to think. Without even being quite sure how or when he had got there, he found himself sitting on a bench by the road, with the precious holdall next to him, staring at the street to see what would happen.
He watched the red-haired man — Mr Ruskin — arrive at the apartment building, and then, only a few minutes later, dash out into the road, waving his arms in panic as he ran. Jun’s first thought was that the man had gone to call the police, but instead it was the Rabbit who eventually appeared at the door in a taxi.
By now, thoughts were starting to flow again through Jun’s mind. He should have known. Hadn’t Goto asked, ‘What do you think’s going to happen to her?’ He should have guessed when he saw what they’d done to the Soviet Korean. This had always been how it was going to end. The smashed apartment. The body on the floor. The swollen face and bulging eyes. He had led them to her. Goto’s story about another organization having taken over surveillance of the Fox, he realized, had probably just been a ploy to make sure that he was out of the way when they killed her.
‘I’ll throttle you with my bare hands . . .’ he remembered Goto once saying to him. Only in this case it had not been with bare hands, but with a thin black silken cord.
Worst of all was the thought that his flights of fantasy might have caused her death. Goto had taken his report about the Fox’s meeting with the mysterious stranger in Ueno Park so seriously. Perhaps that had been the moment when Goto or one of the others had decided that the Fox had become too dangerous, and had to be ‘dealt with’.
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 17