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

by Patrick Sherriff

  I ran through the konbini store car park. I could take my chances in the open on the main road or go back the way I’d come to the lake. Not much of a choice. OK, back then, back down the gravel path down the hill to the lake. On my right was an apple orchard. I darted between a row. I could hear my Papa’s voice now: “Apples in Japan are three times bigger than in England. You can’t compare apples with apples…”

  Someone was coming down the path from the Lawson’s in a hurry. A cop with a flashlight.

  The trees were too narrow to hide behind. But were easy to climb.

  I shimmied up a tree, two in from the path edge. I got as high up as I could and stayed as still as I could. It wasn’t the best place to hide. I was only two meters off the ground, but it was all there was.

  The man walked the length of the orchard, shining his light across the rows of tree trunks. He came to my tree. The light shone down the empty row.

  Sunday, March 13th, 2011

  TEXT FROM KENTARO YAMANAKA

  Put pebble in left shoe

  Take Narita Line from Higashi Abiko

  Go to the Airport. Terminal One

  Meet me at 8 a.m.

  Keep pebble in shoe

  It will save your life

  Because

  Kitsune is with you.

  6:30

  The text message woke me up. Uncle Kentaro? I was sweating. In 12 hours Emi was supposed to be on a plane out of here.

  I looked up. A girl in high-school knee-high socks was lying on a heart-shaped double bed. A purple bed. She was looking at me, with my phone lying beside her. I stuck my tongue out. She stuck her tongue out. How many sheets could a sheet splitter split, if a sheet splitter should split sheets?

  “How many shits could a shit sleep shitter if a she shu shi sho?”

  She couldn’t say it either. Good. It was me.

  Then it all came together. I was lying on a love hotel bed looking at the ceiling mirror. A love hotel by the lake. I’d waited perfectly still in the orchard for the policeman to go, then followed the shoreline to Hotel Billy, a boxy building that could be anything if it weren’t for a giant manga tattooed naked woman painted on it. Painted over four floors.

  The receptionist never saw my face. I paid through a slot in the wall at the counter, no questions asked.

  That’s love.

  And then I’d slept.

  I rolled off the bed and went to the toilet. It was green, one of those traditional types, with the water flowing from an open pipe into the back of the toilet. So you can wash your hands in the water that refills the cistern after you flush. Push the handle left for big jobs or right for little ones.

  I threw up. Twice. I pulled myself up, yanking the toilet lever to the left.

  I stared at my hair. I needed a shower, but I knew I couldn’t hang around. I had to keep moving.

  I inspected my phone again. 98% battery. I felt like I was on 2%. 6:46 a.m. If I wanted to rendezvous at Narita Airport, I had to move, now. Would have been nice to have had a valid passport with me.

  I watched the water flow on top of the toilet run over a miniature rock pool, before refilling the toilet tank. Very sweet. I dry-heaved a couple of times, then flushed the toilet again, enjoying the sound of the water. I rinsed my hands in the flow and watched the water trickle over the little rocks some more.

  Rocks. More like pebbles. I picked a smooth pebble from the basin, and kept it in my hand.

  I opened the door and looked down the hallway. All clear. The door locked shut behind me automatically. There was no way back in. But no key to return to front desk.

  The hallway was dark, freezing cold, and in almost as bad shape as I was. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes. My life’s savings amounted to the pocket of change on me, and a wad of cash I had not seen but already owed to the yakuza. Plus 10 percent. I had lost Emi. And the police wanted me for murder.

  On the plus side, I had a trip to the airport and a pebble.

  Keep pebble in shoe. It will save your life. I put the pebble in my shoe and shifted it between my toes. I could walk if I put all the weight on my heel that was sticking over the edge of my shoes anyway. What did I have to lose?

  I was on the fourth floor. I passed on the lift and hobbled down the concrete stairs, which came out onto the lobby underneath a plastic palm tree. In front of me were the main entrance double doors of brown glazed glass. To the right, the check-in desk.

  I couldn’t tell if the clerk was there through the single letter box hole in the wall for passing money. Maybe that meant he couldn’t see me. Fine by me. I walked through the lobby, but felt a sudden bite of pain in my foot. Bloody pebble. I bent over to take it out. That’s when I heard talking in the office.

  It was Japanese, in an Indian accent.

  “No, no, I can’t tell you. Saito-san said I can’t tell anything about the guests. Even to officials of the city. I don’t even know what it is that you do, but I can’t say, even to a police officer. I said the same thing to the city president.”

  “The who?”

  “Exactly. Who was he? I don’t know. I told him like I tell you, you want to know about any girl staying here, you better speak to Saito-san. I know who he is, he is my boss, and I need this job, I have two children to feed and a wife and a mother-in-law…”

  “Don’t worry. Listen, Singh-san, I’m not interested in getting you into trouble. I don’t know anyone at immigration. I don’t think I need to talk to Saito-san. But this is police business. I need to know if anyone stayed here last night. Just between you and me.

  “Well, if you must know, only two people came in last night. Only they didn’t stay in the same room.”

  “That’s unusual?”

  “In a love hotel, that’s unusual.”

  “One was about 50—you can be telling a lot about a person’s age from their hands and their voice—and another a girl.

  “I see. Would you mind telling me their names?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind telling you if I knew their names. But even if I had asked they would have said Watanabe-san or Ito-san.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s like my Japanese textbook all over again. ‘Why did Watanabe-san go to Osaka? Was it business or pleasure? He is a very diligent man, Watanabe-san, always punctual and efficiently working.’ Watanabe-san is just a textbook name. A made-up name.”

  “My name’s Watanabe.”

  “Better than Ito.”

  “Tell me about the girl.”

  “Well, you could tell she was in a bad way. Her hands, you see. Scrubbed clean, but you could see under the nails was still dirt. Lots of dirt, but she sounded sweet. Doesn’t belong here.”

  “Doesn’t belong here? You mean she is still here?”

  I’d heard enough, but the pebble was making a run for the door impossible.

  Think.

  I couldn’t think of anything, so I just shuffled under the money deposit hole in the wall and crouched around the corner—in full view of the entrance doors, but out of sight of the stairs. If I went for the front door, they’d know I was there. If anyone came in the front door I was caught.

  I tucked my head under my folded arms and closed my eyes. I could hear a door sliding open. Wood on wood, not steel on steel. They had stopped talking. Then two sets of feet running into the lobby, then to the stairs.

  Their footsteps went up the stairs.

  Then silence.

  It was time to move. I unrolled myself and ran at the front door. It slid open automatically, ringing a bell in the office. I was outside, but nowhere near a train or bus. But there was a bicycle in front of me.

  A police bicycle.

  I knew better than to steal a police bicycle. But letting the air out of the tires maybe wasn’t so bad. I unscrewed the black plastic caps and rammed my pebble into each until the hiss of air from each tire stopped.

  And then I ran.

  The hotel overlooked Teganuma. There was a single road that ran the length of th
e lake down the hill, past an old folks’ home, and to the bridge back to Abiko. I didn’t want to go back, but Abiko station was the best way to get to the airport. And what could be more natural than a high school student dashing to catch the train to meet friends from her posh Tokyo high school? On Sunday? In uniform?

  I kept the pebble but didn’t put it back in my shoe. The gods would have to be upset with me, I didn’t want to lose a toe. I glanced at my phone. It was 7:01, but already the bridge was clogged with stop-and-go traffic queuing for the petrol station. There was a bus 200 meters away, stuck in the jam.

  I made a dash for it, but there was no bus stop on the bridge. I managed to pass the bus as it crossed the bridge before the traffic picked up, and it passed me again at speed. I looked behind me, I could make out the hotel in the distance now. Was I also seeing two figures running out the doors?

  The bus turned left onto the main road that led to Abiko station. I would be a good couple of hundred meters behind as I turned the corner. But a dozen passengers were standing at the bus stop. I hobbled to the end of the queue and gave a silent prayer to the god of salarimen who makes them turn up for days missed due to an earthquake. I hobbled aboard.

  Standing room only. Old folks. High school boys and girls. None with my uniform. Good. I didn’t feel like making small talk. In 10 minutes I’d be at the station, hidden in a crowd of day-trippers to Tokyo. An old man with no hair was staring at mine. I held on to a handle with one hand, with the other I smoothed my skirt. Men were pressing up against me. I couldn’t move away, couldn’t breathe. I could only turn outwards and face the window. The bus moved, we all moved. I looked up. A girl stared down at me from an advert above the bus handles.

  Wanted. Dangerous fugitive. A foreign killer.

  I bent down and put the pebble back in my shoe. A policeman was running with a bicycle at his side behind the bus.

  8:22

  Sgt. Watanabe was a couple of streets behind when the bus pulled in to Abiko Station. I pushed my way through the old folks to the front of the bus and ran up the station steps to the ticket machines under the “Let’s Shopping” poster.

  Abiko Station has two lines—the Joban, an always-busy commuter line to Ueno in central Tokyo. And there was the line I would take, the always-empty Narita local service, a single track line to the airport nobody used since the fast trains from Tokyo started up.

  So I knew something was wrong when I got to the escalator going down to Platform 2 for Narita and the platform was overflowing. I waded in to the mass of people all squeezed together, trying to force my way through. I couldn’t. But no one hunting me could pick me out. I limped forward with the press of the crowd. A thousand heels click-clacked on the metal steps of the escalator, locked in position to save energy. We all stopped as one.

  Something was… wrong.

  We shook. The ground swayed. Back and forth. People’s mobile phones were bleeping. An earthquake warning. Others were looking about for confirmation.

  “It’s not just me, right?”

  “That really was an aftershock?”

  “I’d say it was a Shindo 4.”

  “Magnitude 5.4, epicentre Ibaraki.”

  I looked at the walls, asking my own questions. “Will the roof hold? Where is safe? Is this where I want to die? Where is Emi?”

  And it passed. We all resumed moving, and shared smiles. So sorry we panicked there, we didn’t really think we were going to die, honest.

  All escalators were off, as were the lights, and only a dim overcast sun penetrated the gloom. Were we at war? Who was the enemy? And what was I doing with this bloody pebble in my shoe?

  The train was already full when it pulled in to the station. In my carriage there was a woman shouting Cantonese into her cell phone, a tall white man eating a sandwich, and a mother fussing at her daughter in French. All foreigners. Strange.

  I took my place squeezed in with people by the doors, but manoeuvred myself to face the lucky ones sitting on the bench with their backs against the walls. I didn’t know who was pressing into my back, but I could look ahead. And I could breathe.

  The Cantonese woman stopped shouting then glanced at my face and hair. What was different, what was the same? I could see her making the calculations. I chose to stare blankly beyond the sitting heads, to the world out of the window. Concrete buildings and the shuttered Mama and Papa iron-mongers and fruit stalls. Blue tarps on broken roofs. But no high watermarks. No dead fish. No real suffering here.

  In 40 minutes the train took us further away from Tokyo towards Narita. The airport control tower looked out over fields.

  My ears popped as the train entered a tunnel and squealed to a stop at a platform somewhere under Narita Terminal 1.

  I went with the flow of the crowd, since there wasn’t any other choice. We slogged up the still escalators away from the harsh world of loudspeakers and concrete into the closeted terminal world of carpeted walls.

  And security.

  The crowd slowed to a standstill as male and female guards in white gloves rifled through bags. I broke into a cold sweat. I was on the run for murder, only here there was nowhere to run.

  “ID please,” said a woman in a navy blue fake-police uniform.

  “I’m just here to meet someone, not to fly.”

  “Of course. But no one comes in without a picture ID.”

  “I don’t have a passport.”

  “I don’t need your passport, just a picture ID.”

  “Of course.” I reached for the student ID of Mayumi Okami, but held my thumb over the picture. In bad light, I might have passed for her, but not here under the eyes of a security guard. I held my breath.

  “Let me see that…” she said.

  But there was another aftershock. A few of the foreigners in the crowd screamed, and people jostled forward. A woman lost her balance and hit the floor. The guard glanced at the name on my ID and handed it me back to pick the woman up off the floor. I threw my phone and wallet into the tray for the x-ray machine and strolled through the metal detector gate.

  And breathed again.

  In the departure hall it was chaos. The boards said all flights were delayed. British Airways had emergency flights to Hong Kong. There were people of every nationality in the concourse trying to buy tickets out of the country, or trying to find out information about flights somewhere. Anywhere but here.

  But if this wasn’t your home why would you stay? If it was, why would you stay? Why was I here? Where would I go, if not here?

  I slumped down on a bench closest to the exit doors. I could see everyone coming in and could get to the street faster from here. But I didn’t have a passport or any money. Or a home to go to. There was nowhere for me to flee. I fumbled for my phone and looked down. No signal in the building. Time – 8:22 a.m.

  A voice over my left shoulder said “You’re late. But I’ll give you a break this time.”

  “Uncle Kentaro. Where’s Emi? Why did you bring me here? And what was the deal with the pebble?”

  “All in good time. First, follow me.”

  I followed him. He followed a yellow tape pasted onto the floor. It led to a bank of seats bolted together in two rows of ten. So many different people, but all had the same expressions, like family around a deathbed.

  We sat side by side, in chairs bolted together.

  “Well?” I said.

  He sucked his teeth.

  “Well… let me tell you a story. If I tell you the emperor died after the empress, you’ll get the order of who died first confused. But if I tell you the emperor died of a broken heart, you’ll remember. Did he really die of a broken heart? What does it matter? You’ve remembered the true order.”

  “Is the emperor dead?”

  “No, no. Put it another way, we need stories to teach us what’s important. Are they true? It doesn’t matter. Their truth is the information they impart. But I can’t tell you everything, because you never listen to what you are told. Just look at the me
ss you made in the water museum.”

  “That wasn’t my fault.”

  “Think about what happened and why.”

  “I don’t know why. Why are we here?”

  “You want to know why I brought you here, sometimes the best way is to show not tell. Takes a lot longer and maybe wastes time, but it works out better in the long run. Trust me, let me show you. Look around.”

  I did.

  “What do you see?”

  A woman in her 30s but wearing a short Burberry yellow plaid skirt, a green beret with a pink T-shirt. She was waving her arms around when she spoke.

  “People trying to fit in, but who don’t belong.”

  English in front, Cantonese behind.

  “Do you think they are different from us?”

  A Filipino woman using her reflection in her iPhone to check her makeup.

  “I’m not them. They see me and they see Japanese. I see them, and I see foreigners.”

  A Korean girl wearing a red baseball cap, orange hair waving behind.

  “Are you Japanese?”

  A teenage boy wearing an embroidered silk green baseball jacket with Japan written on it.

  “It’s what my passport said when I was born.”

  Possibly an American wearing a Cambridge University T-shirt.

  “Which passport? Don’t you have two? A British one too?”

  “I have to choose which. I chose Japanese, because I live here.”

  “But if you lived in Britain, you would choose your British passport. Do you think people would see you as Japanese?”

  Some western faces but 90 percent were other.

  “Maybe. But I am who I am.”

  They looked Japanese but the styles were a couple of seasons old.

  “So, you are the same person, no matter where you are, whatever your papers say?”

  “Of course.”

  Uncle Kentaro held my hand in both of his.

  “So, these people, who choose to be in Japan, are different from you? Is it possible we’re all foreigners, wherever we live? That where you are born is incidental?”