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

by Patrick Sherriff

  Between my handcuffs was my phone.

  “You put your faith in God, I put mine in my smart phone. And these things can record everything somebody sitting close to you says. So, even if you kill me, your confession is there and once it’s on the internet, It never dies. It’s there for eternity. Game over.”

  But I’d pushed my luck too far.

  Blackmore smacked the phone from my hands and it went flying down the aisle. “You think your toys are a match for God’s will?” he said, but there was tenderness and pity in his voice.

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

  He stood and pulled his hand out of his pocket. In that hand was a shiny new hammer. He pulled it back past his head to strike me.

  “…hallowed be thy name…”

  “DAD?”

  The girl in the front of the carriage screamed out in English.

  “DAD, IS THAT YOU?”

  Emi?

  The hammer came down, but Blackmore was looking forward at the girl. Was it Emi? The distraction was enough for me to lean my body back and kick out against him. The hammer struck a monorail window. A crack spread out across the glass, like a map of radiation risk. I aimed a kick between his legs. It was enough to both push him backward and me out into the aisle on all fours.

  My phone was in the aisle in front of me, just out of reach.

  Blackmore was towering over me now, and couldn’t possibly miss a second time. But he seemed unsure what to do. Should he finish me off or was that the wrong thing to do in front of his Emi?

  What would Jesus do?

  I knew what I needed to do. With my hands still cuffed, I scrambled on to my elbows and knees to try to get to the phone.

  The carriage shuddered to a stop and swayed violently right and left. An aftershock. But Blackmore was steady. Emi was screaming. The old lady was trying to shield her. Aunt Tanaka? And that was no grandfather.

  It was Shachou.

  In front of me the president, behind me Blackmore. Stuck in the middle again.

  “Game over,” said Blackmore and he leaned back to swing the hammer at my head.

  There was an explosion.

  Blackmore fell backwards, mouth open and eyes wide.

  He smacked against the floor and the hammer slipped out of his hand under a seat.

  The monorail carriage and everyone in it swayed. I could only hear the ringing in my ears of the gunshot.

  3:14

  I leaned over to check.

  Blackmore was dead.

  I thought better of touching him. His chest wasn’t moving and a pool of blood was forming under his head. I grabbed his backpack and opened it. He had cashed his traveller’s checks.

  I stood and turned away from Blackmore to the president. He was on his knees, with his head bowed to the floor. He straightened up as I approached, but stayed on his knees.

  “I didn’t mean to do it.”

  “You didn’t mean to kill Blackmore?”

  “No. I meant that. I didn’t mean to kill your father.”

  I fell to my knees.

  “What?”

  Shachou bowed his head and continued in a monotone: “It was an accident. The worst thing is when you have no fear. People with fear are like sheep, and the lone wolf can pick them off, one by one. But when people lose fear, they can do anything. Your father was not afraid. He was snooping around and was about to blow the lid on the dumping of nuclear waste in Teganuma. His questioning was making everyone else braver. Well, almost everyone. My boss was getting frightened. He didn’t exactly give the order to kill your father, but he didn’t exactly say not to either.”

  Here was the man who had caused my life to spiral out of control, who had taken the last of my family, my father. I should have been furious with him, but I wasn’t.

  I was relieved.

  Relieved to know the truth. Relieved to know that Papa hadn’t taken the coward’s way out.

  “Tell me more.”

  “What was I to do? I had to do what my boss expected, but I respected your father. I mean, he had a job to do, a code to follow, and so did I. I decided to just give him a scare, to show him that we were serious and that it wasn’t worth it, that he should pick his fights more wisely.

  “So you killed him?”

  “So I followed him that morning to Abiko Station. Platform 4. He was waiting for the 7:55 rapid train to Ueno. I thought I’d just give him a little scare. It was getting crowded, everyone in their lines ready to get on the train. But I was right behind him. He had a briefcase with him and was fumbling with his earphones. I leaned against his shoulder and just said ‘Drop your story, or we’ll drop you’.

  “Then I yanked his briefcase out of his hands and threw it on the tracks. He had heard me. He understood me. But he looked straight over my shoulder at the train signboard. It said three minutes until the next train.

  “He jumped down to the tracks to get his briefcase back. It was a brave thing to do. But foolish. He hadn’t done his homework. He didn’t know that right before the rapid train the Hitachi Express comes through. But he didn’t know, he didn’t take the train every day. The train came flying into the station, didn’t even stop.

  “There was nothing anyone could do. The police ruled it a suicide. What else could it have been? But your father saved your life.”

  “What?”

  “He would never have backed down from the truth because of threats to his own life. If he wasn’t scared to lose his life, I had to threaten someone he would do anything to protect, the only person he loved more than truth itself. You. His death meant you could live.”

  I needed a moment to think this through. There was something I didn’t get.

  “Why did you kill Blackmore?”

  “There are many things I’ve done that I’m not proud of, and I know I’m coming back as a stray dog or worse. It’s far too late for me. But I promised myself on the platform three years ago that I would atone for some of the evil I have done in this world. I vowed that one day I would begin to repay my debts to you.”

  He nodded at the body lying behind me. “That’s my first down payment.”

  “And this…” he said, pulling Blackmore’s backpack from my hands, “…this $100,000 belongs to Emi.”

  He straightened up, turned to the girl cowering with Aunt Tanaka and bowed again. And kept bowing until we pulled into the monorail station at the other end of the zoo.

  Epilogue

  Even through the nicotine-stained windows of Uncle Kentaro’s place I could easily make out the red and white JAL logo on the side of the jumbo jet as it streaked across the sky, high above Lake Teganuma, heading toward the Pacific.

  But Emi didn’t notice the plane. She was humming a song to herself as she scrubbed the genkan entrance to Kentaro’s house with salt and water. Kentaro didn’t notice the plane, he was listening to Aunt Tanaka as she praised Emi, something she’d been doing every day for the past month.

  “She’ll make a fine priestess one day. She has the temperament. You are a very lucky man,” she said.

  “How right you are, Tanaka-san, on both counts.”

  When Aunt Tanaka had gone back to her home at the bottom of the hill, Uncle Kentaro unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket.

  “Look at this, Hana. I got it from the Abiko police koban.”

  I sighed. The less I had to do with policemen the better.

  “Aoi was five when she disappeared from the street outside her Abiko home in 1997. Nobody has seen her since, the police have no leads. But they do have a ¥10 million reward.”

  “Great. I’m still waiting for them to decide whether they are going to pay me the ¥10 million for catching Blackmore.”

  “Well, technically Shachou caught him. With a bullet. And the cops can hardly pay public funds to the top yakuza in Abiko. That would be somewhat illegal. Anyway, this Aoi girl. Do you think she knows she’s been abducted? Where is she now? What do you think her parents are going through every day not kn
owing the truth? You are pretty good at uncovering the truth Hana, and this needs to be solved.”

  I sighed again. “If she’s still alive.”

  “If she’s still alive.”

  He passed me the flier. A blurry snapshot of a little girl in the grey empuku uniform of a kindergarten school. She had a bowl cut and a single topknot tied with a pink ribbon. She was too shy to look straight at the camera.

  She’d be 20 this year.

  “Interested?” Uncle Kentaro said.

  Truth, lies and trust: a note on Half Life

  Investigative journalist Jake Adelstein once astutely tweeted: “Abiko is not so much a place, as a state of mind.” This is both true and false. Abiko is a place, and a damn fine one too, on the eastern edge of Tokyo.

  Ever since Hana Walker came to me shortly after the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown hit Japan on March 11th, 2011, I’ve been grappling with questions of truth, lies and trust.

  What is true of Hana’s story is for the reader to decide. But there are some questions of accuracy that should be addressed. Firstly, chronology. I’ve no reason to believe that what Hana described didn’t happen, it’s just that Hana’s timekeeping seems somewhat off. A few examples (I’m sure the diligent reader can find more):

  • The severity of the meltdown at Fukushima only became apparent from midnight March 12th, not March 11th as the twitter feeds that she provided indicate.

  • Abiko was not a hotspot of radiation contamination in the immediate days following the earthquake. This unwelcome distinction is believed to be due to the rains that fell on March 17th or 18th, as I recall, so Hana’s claim to have overheard Sgt. Watanabe talking about the city being a hotspot on March 12th cannot be correct. Hana must have been suffering the effects of Grandpa O’s muscle relaxant to be so confused.

  • The rush of flyjin (a pun on gaijin, the Japanese slang for foreigner) at Narita Airport, if it happened at all, certainly didn’t happen in the hours after the earthquake. The British Embassy did lay on an emergency flight days later to evacuate any British ex-pats to Hong Kong who wanted to leave, but I understand it was not even half full.

  • Prime Minister Naoto Kan didn’t resign until Friday, August 26th, 2011, despite Hana’s recollection that he did on March 13th. This is a matter of public record. After much thought, I included an abridged version of his letter of resignation in this book because, although it happened outside the timeframe of Hana’s story, his resignation was a direct result of the events of March 11th. How Hana could have become quite so confused, I cannot begin to speculate.

  • Prince Akishino is indeed the patron of the Japan National Bird Festival, president of the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology and fan of the Beatles. Though the festival in Abiko is usually held in November.

  • Many of the tweets included in Hana’s account bear marked similarities to those that I tweeted myself in those dark days of March, so I have no reason to doubt their veracity. If Hana’s description of Ishinomaki rings true, it may be because it bears a striking resemblance to a trip I took here in May, 2011.

  There are other parallels that I would be remiss not to mention. The discussion of lucky stone foxes being used to predict stock market fluctuations sounds remarkably like an equally unlikely but true episode involving a ceramic toad in Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr. Much of Uncle Kentaro’s philosophy seems culled from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. Max Frisch did indeed say “Truth is the best disguise,” in his play The Fire Raisers. I did not look for a source for the phrase “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” as it was a favourite of my mother’s.

  My only knowledge of the ways of the yakuza comes from Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein, who kindly verified the truth of the phrase Konna namaiki na busu shinjae. My only knowledge of Mormonism is from Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. My only knowledge of business English comes from Doing Business in English, a Berlitz textbook from the 1980s, still considered a key text in the use of bills of lading and fax cover sheets.

  There is no record of any dumping of nuclear waste in Teganuma in the 1960s, though perhaps that is to be expected since any evidence would have died with Hana’s father, God rest his troubled soul.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank best-selling thriller writer Barry Eisler for his early encouragement and for demonstrating what is possible in the brave new world of self-publishing.

  I am indebted to the beta readers who diligently and expertly hunted down errors of fact and judgement from an earlier draft of Half Life, and encouraged me to soldier on. An aspiring author could ask for no better beta readers than Sandra Barron, Lynwen Davison, Dan Elvins, William Farr, Pierre-Yves Genot, Good and Bad Japan, J.C. Greenway, Nancy Reed Imai, Jesse Johnson, Bill Jokela, Brian Lynn, Michael Gillan Peckitt and Mary Raikes.

  And a special thanks goes to Chief Editorial Lackey (1st Class) Dan Ryan who baby-sat this project with me and is one of only two people on Earth, outside the intelligence community, obviously, who knows just how awful the first draft really was. Any errors that have slipped through to the book you see before you now are entirely my fault.

  Some final points before you nip off…

  At the time of writing, Japan had still not joined the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, making the premise for this book still all too real for children caught in the middle of international marriages that break down.

  If you would like to learn more about the disasters of March 11th, 2011, a good place to start is 2:46 Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, also known as Quakebook.

  And thank you for reading. If you have any comments, please feel free to drop by www.patricksherriff.com.

  The final thanks go to my wife, without whose love, patience and instant coffee, none of this would have been possible.

  Patrick Sherriff

  November 11th, 2013

  Learn of new releases, including the next Hana Walker mystery, here: www.patricksherriff.com