Half Life: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 1)

by Patrick Sherriff

  But the phone line went dead, along with his questions. The phone batteries were dead. Death always comes in threes, Papa said.

  It was dark and my back was still killing me. I could hear a single car rumbling across the four-lane Teganuma Bridge above me. Was it after midnight? I couldn’t be seen on the streets.

  But to stay here, I’d be dead from the cold.

  Where were the policemen? Where was Emi?

  I risked a look around. No sign of anyone. No wonder. I stank of swamp and sea water, and sweat. There was no way I could go to the main road. There was no way I could stay here.

  That left only one way—over the bridge out of Abiko, over the lake to the big city of Kashiwa. But I could hardly wander over the bridge. Over meant game over.

  Why go over the bridge when I could go under it? I inspected the underside of the bridge. It looked no more difficult than the climbing frame at my kindergarten school. Just a bit higher off the ground. OK, a lot higher off the ground. Yes, if I followed the steel girder under my back it would take me over the lake, but under the bridge, out of view.

  I did the arithmetic l. Two sets of five steel girders arched over to two sunken piers that carried the weight of the four lane highway. 2. About 20 meters to the first pier. 3. Ten piers to get across the lake. If it takes one exhausted girl a night to cross a 200-meter bridge, how many hours would it take two cops to cross that same bridge when they came to it? Also, would they have enough time to run a bath? How long would it take them to fill it?

  Baths? There was a bathhouse on the other side of the lake. Forget the mathematics, this was my goal.

  I couldn’t walk on the girder, all I could do was scoot along with my body squeezed into the hollow. By lying on my side, I could use my right hand and leg to scoot forward, with my left limbs wedged against the top lip of the girder. I was two meters above the ground. I was shaking. From the cold, my tired muscles, another aftershock? But I was moving forward. Each centimetre a victory against the laws of physics.

  I was pushing my body against its will. Against the wind that blew stronger above the lake. Salty sweat ran into eyes, but I didn’t dare wipe it free for fear of losing my grip and falling into the waters below. Go forward or die. Simple when you have no choice.

  I was nearing the middle when the bridge rattled and shook from side to side. If it was a truck overhead or an aftershock, it was the same thing to me. It was shaking me out from inside the girder. There was nothing for me to grab hold of.

  I was going to fall. I screamed, as I rolled over the lip of the girder, but the pocket of my robe caught on a steel rivet and I dangled head first over the edge.

  I grasped the steel with all I had left. I didn’t fall. But I was staring at the water five meters below. The half-dozen giant fibreglass swan pedal boats moored under the bridge looked the size of real swans. But there was no way I could jump. There was no way I could stay where I was.

  Aunt Tanaka’s voice came back to me: “Just use your common sense, smile and keep moving.”

  The bridge had stopped moving. I smiled. And pulled myself back into the fold of the girder. Then something in my head sent a shudder through me, that I knew how to make it all stop hurting… the cold… the exhaustion… the failure. If I just closed my eyes and let myself drop. Everything would be over.

  But I wouldn’t, not just yet. I still hadn’t found Emi.

  I still could do this. I could. Make it to the other side. I pulled my pocket free of the rivet. And squeezed forward. One notch at a time. I was numb, but numb to my pain. Counting off each notch as I squeezed over the rivets. One, two, three… 26, 27, 28… always forward… 52, 53, 56… and I kept moving… 134, 135, 136… I kept moving until the lake beneath me stopped. After 219, I could go no further. Bushes, concrete and a path below. A grassy verge? That would do.

  I closed my eyes and rolled out of the girder. For a second I felt nothing, only the wind running over me and imagined myself landing like a cat, unharmed, but…

  41.5

  Brambles and thorns pierced the skin on my hands, legs and neck. My head snapped back. I couldn’t catch my breath.

  But the stinging from the thorns told me I was still alive. I laughed. And then cried.

  The only things I could move without pain were my eyes.

  The concrete path ran along the shoreline, under the bridge. A gravel path led up to the bridge and the lights. The onsen hot spring bath house. Hot, clean water, all the green tea I could take. At the bathhouse, no one asks what your father does for a living. No one can sneer at your ¥500 T-shirts from Joyful Honda. I wasn’t so sure how they felt about stinking blood-stained, sweat and mud-covered rags. And no money. That might be a problem.

  I was staring at the rear of the bathhouse that was behind a two-meter-high plastic bamboo wall. On another day, I could have climbed it. But I didn’t have another day.

  I groaned and pulled myself free of the bushes. Pain shot through my legs when I tried to stand, so I sat with my head on my knees until the shivering was worse than the standing. Where my hands should have been were red-raw chunks of meat, half-frozen and throbbing. I could hear water trickling into the outside bath. It might as well have been halfway across the world as half a meter away behind a plastic bamboo wall.

  A stupid plastic wall, a stupid decision to move, to get involved. Why me? Why couldn’t I have a normal life? Just let me in and I’ll sit in the corner, out of sight. I won’t cause anyone to lose face or have to cover for me, just give me a chance. One chance to get it right. I can look after myself if I just have a little help. Just a little. Papa, why’d you kill yourself? You just left me here with nothing. Less than nothing: Half a life.

  A ray of light picked out scars on my calf muscles beneath my ripped robes.

  The light was coming from a crack in a side door cut into the middle of the bamboo wall.

  A woman kicked the spring door stop into place. She was wearing a blue yukata and towel wound around her head.

  I held my breath, swallowed my sobs and tried to think of a cover story.

  Let’s see. I was out night fishing on a reeking lake all alone and lost my purse and…?

  She was wandering toward me when her face lit up orange from her lighter as she fought the breeze to light her cigarette. She turned her back to me and hurried away toward the shelter of the bridge. That was a good enough chance for me. I hobbled through the open door into the light of the bathhouse.

  Inside was an empty changing room with rows of baskets in numbered cubbyholes. I pulled the nearest one out, No. 61, and stuffed my sopping rags in as my eyes adjusted to the light. I grabbed a white hand towel and limped to the glass doors at the other end of the room. I glanced over my shoulder. A trail of grime led from the exit to the basket and then to my feet. I couldn’t risk leaving a trail, but I was powerless against the pull of the bath.

  I slid two glass doors open.

  Steam rose from three sunken baths, each the size of a vacant lot in Ishinomaki. The air was thick and humid. August, not March. Warmth, delicious in my lungs. But I could feel the pain return to my body as I warmed up.

  There was no one else in the whole place. All to myself.

  To my left was a bath the size of a public swimming pool, I stood on the edge and dipped a toe in. A speck of dried blood spread out, contaminating the pool with a wisp of a cloud.

  I bowed to the waters, stood on the tips of my toes and, arms outstretched, jeté, plié and to finish a pirouette to a row of showers set in the wall at knee height. I sat on the nearest moulded plastic bucket with my back to the room and held the shower nozzle in my left hand and sponge in my right. In front of me was a wall mirror and three pump-action plastic bottles: shampoo, conditioner and body rinse.

  I hit the hot button and a jet of scalding water blasted out of the shower nozzle smacking me full in the face.

  My feet were scratched, bruised and bloody. The crevices between the nails and the skin were scarlet. Three to
e nails were not broken. Scratches covered my legs past my knees. There was dried blood on my thighs, mud had seeped through my clothes and dried in rings under my breasts. I peered at my face in the wall mirror. My face was unscarred, but the person looking back at me was not the same as before 2:46 p.m.

  But I couldn’t go back.

  I pumped all three containers and poured the gunk into my hair and let the water gush over me. The water washed away the dirt, river silt and blood and blended them into an ugly brown puddle on the green tiles. I opened my eyes only to gauge how clear the runoff from my body was.

  I was as clean as I was ever going to get.

  Women’s voices behind me, from the changing room.

  I stood up and looked for a way out, my toes feeling the seams between every tile. I pulled open a sliding door to the outside bath. The cold air slapped me in the face. In front of me steam rose from a spa bath cut into the ground. Beyond that was the plastic bamboo wall. But this time, I was on the right side of it.

  “Nice moves.”

  I instinctively unrolled my towel to hide my chest.

  Someone my age was sitting in the water. Sitting at the edge of the pool with her back to me. Delicate shoulders. Heavy tan. Dyed brown hair tied in a top-knot. Dainty towel folded on her head. Eyes closed. I slipped into the bath as far from her as I could.

  “I like to dance, yes,” I said.

  “Are you reading ballet at university?”

  “Reading ballet?”

  “Yes, as a subject.”

  “No, I just liked it as a kid. Haven’t studied it since…”

  “I expect you’ve heard of Kaisei High school? That’s where I study. Next year I’m going to university, then the partying begins. But until then, this provincial bathhouse is the most pleasure my father will allow. He is the president, don’t you know, of the largest textile manufacturers in the Kanto region. He’s very big in pyjamas. I expect you will be studying abroad? Is it your father who is a foreigner or your mother? I can tell from your legs you know, not weak like Japanese legs. You are so lucky to be able to speak a foreign language without even trying. You can study anywhere in the world. I’m stuck with Todai.”

  “I’m not studying anywhere, I…”

  “God I’m so jealous. Well, I suppose it’s to be expected. Will your family be leaving Japan for home now? Since the earthquake, I mean. I would if I didn’t have to stay here. Of course, we will be spending the next month in Kyoto. I mean, you just can’t live here with the aftershocks. But it would be a shame to leave. Japan is such a safe country.”

  “It doesn’t feel so…”

  “We don’t do crime, well not the petty stuff. I mean, my bicycle was stolen once, but it was a Peugeot, you could understand why some thief would want it. And my mother’s Prius was stolen. The police said it was the work of a gang because there was no smashed glass. There was nothing. They had just driven in with a tow-truck, and hauled it away.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Probably it was the Chinese, that’s what they said. There are gangs of them you know and they steal things in order to sell to the Africans. Africans prize Japanese cars above all others, because they are the most reliable in the world, the best engineering in the world…”

  She kept talking. The sound of her Tokyo accent washed over me. It gave me time to think. What was I going to do?

  I had to find Emi. Grandpa O was after me. Ono was after me. And now the police were after me. And I was running out of time.

  A stainless steel clock with a red digital readout:

  4.15 a.m.

  That couldn’t be right. It was late at night, but surely not so late. I looked again:

  41.5

  The heat of the bath.

  “… you can’t trust anyone in America either. It’s such a violent country. When I was shopping on Fifth Avenue at Macy’s—do you know it?—a black man chased after me with a hammer. Can you imagine something like that happening here? No, of course not…”

  But I had an idea. I stepped out of the bath in slow motion, retracing my steps. The girl still had her eyes closed. I rolled the door open enough for me to slip through…

  “…it’s not as cool as London. But, English food is just horrible. England has nothing. It’s just a floating museum. Have you ever been to London? I was shopping on Bond Street…”

  …and scamper to the changing rooms.

  I had a matter of a minute at most to make this work. I dashed through the changing room looking for baskets with clothes in. There were three, but No. 19 was my prize. Neatly folded in it was a high-school uniform and mobile phone with recharger. These had to belong to the girl. I pulled her panties, socks and bra over my damp skin and threw on the blouse, skirt and sweater. Everything was tight, the bra straps cut into my shoulders. But it would do. I tossed the phone into a waste bin by the sinks. But I stuffed the recharger into her Louis Vuitton bag.

  Her purse was at the bottom of the basket. I grabbed it and flipped it open. I read her commuter pass: Mayumi Okami, aged 17. I headed for the side door exit then caught sight of a high school girl staring at me. Only it wasn’t. It was me in the mirror.

  Convincing if you didn’t look closely.

  That gave me another idea.

  11:51

  I skipped over the muddy trail I’d left coming in and brushed through the noren curtain marking the exit to the main lobby. The woman who had been for a smoke was behind the counter. She squinted her eyes and was about to speak, I had to make this work. I cut her off.

  “Excuse me, I don’t wish to bother you, but there is a strange girl in the baths. An impostor. I think she didn’t pay. She has awfully smelly clothes. I think she might be one of those Chinese gangsters, you know?”

  She didn’t know, but she looked up startled and picked up the phone. I was pretty sure she was less scared of Chinese gangsters than a Keisei High School senior’s complaint to Papa.

  I didn’t hang around to find out. I wanted to get out of there. And I was starving.

  I grabbed the only pair of shoes that looked like high schooler’s leather shoes. I ran into the empty car park and slipped the shoes on. They pinched my toes, but they would have to do. I jogged to the main road and turned right down the hill to a Lawson convenience store.

  The doors to the convenience store slid open automatically.

  “Welcome honoured customer!” an old lady sang out.

  I ran my fingers over the soft lamb leather of Mayumi’s wallet. Three crisp ¥10,000 notes. She could have bought a hotel room at The Akasaka Prince Hotel with half the money. But in Abiko, it meant all the rice balls and instant ramen a girl could desire.

  I bought three natto rice balls and a cup noodle. I peeled back the lid of my polystyrene cup and pressed the hot water button on the kettle beside the counter. I sat down on a stool between an ATM and a photocopier at a chipboard counter that ran along the wall-length store window overlooking the parking lot. A home-made advertisement on the notice board for the ABC Happy English School.

  “You learn, we’re happy! Let’s Beautiful English!”

  I unplugged the photocopier, plugged in my phone to charge it.

  My back was to the entrance when he came in.

  Boots crunched on the concrete of the floor as the door slid open.

  “Welcome honoured customer!” the clerk sang out again.

  “Where’s your notice board?” I recognised the confident voice. Sgt. Watanabe from the lake.

  “Next to where the honoured customer is sitting.”

  He walked up behind me. I could smell the cold of the lake, and tobacco from his uniform.

  He hit some buttons on the photocopier and swore to himself.

  “Excuse me, Miss.”

  I ducked my head down and stuck my nose into my cup noodle, shuffling my stool further under the counter, ramming my knees against the window. I didn’t dare turn to face him.

  He breezed past and staple-gunned a poster to th
e notice board. Even with the faintest dart of my eyes I could make out the black letters: “Wanted.” There was a blurry picture of an elementary school student with jet-black hair. The student looked like…

  Hana Walker

  on Suspicion of Murder

  ¥10,000,000 reward

  I gagged. I couldn’t breathe. I could feel the policeman staring at me. If he started to talk to me, what would I do? I was trapped. Trapped, trapped, trapped.

  “Late night studying?” he said to me.

  I nodded, but didn’t look his way.

  “Exams can be hell. But you should get yourself home. It’s not safe to be out this late.”

  I nodded.

  He strode to the door. It swished open. For a moment he paused.

  “You, lady. You need to get your photocopier fixed.”

  And then he was gone.

  I sat. I breathed. When I moved again my cup noodle had gone stone cold in my hands.

  I needed to sleep. I needed to eat. I needed help. But most of all, I needed to plug the photocopier back in.

  I looked around. The clerk was stacking shelves. No one else there. I unplugged my phone charger and plugged the photocopier back in.

  I studied the wanted poster.

  The picture was me all right. Just the wrong person, wrong place, wrong time. It was back when I’d dyed my hair black. Mama and Papa were alive. It was a blow-up from an elementary graduation trip group shot. We’d gone to Nikko. To climb the steps up to Tokugawa’s tomb. Mama had just stopped smoking. She’d had a scare. I’d messed up my exams and couldn’t get in to the cheap public junior highs. All that was left were the expensive private schools. For the kids with Papas who could afford entrance fees for their children and chemotherapy for their wives.

  But I didn’t understand the poster. Put some adjectives on me and I disappeared. I was a “dangerous” fugitive. A “foreign” killer. How did they get my name so quickly? And a picture?

  Then I saw two red lights flashing. Coming along the road from the baths. A cold sweat ran down my scalp to the back of my neck.