The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘He will need to be, won’t he? At the moment we don’t have one.’

  I remembered the hot sticky night in Singapore when we drank beer with Webster.

  He had talked of the flying boat, but his words at that time conjured in my mind an image that existed only in the realm of fantasy, the idea seemed so wildly improbable. And yet here she was, and the very matter-of-factness of that name change – Connemara after the love of Sam Flamenco’s life, Solveig Connemara – gave the mad enterprise a solidity that could not be denied. And yet, it could not be doubted that to set off with a film crew and a troupe of actors in search of an island marked on no maps and home to a mythical monster was indeed an adventure for which the pilot would need to be insane.

  The man spoke again, this time more softly, as if a more pleasant thought had emerged. ‘Hard to believe such a magnificent bird could come out of such a rotten egg, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand your meaning,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be enigmatic. I meant the Empire Air Mail Service for which she was originally built. Such a lovely bird, is she not?’

  ‘Indeed she is, really quite splendid.’

  ‘And yet she came into being born of the conviction that every Englishman should as by birthright be able to send a letter to anywhere in the Empire for the price of a cup of tea. It’s the cup of tea part that gets me.’ He paused and reflected for a second. ‘That’s the beauty of a sea plane, it means the postman can get to places that don’t have runways. The last one got eaten, apparently. All that survived was his hat.’ He walked over to a table and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray there. Then he walked back towards the hotel without another word to us.

  We returned to our room to fetch the postcard we had taken from Curtis’s room in Singapore. Shortly after we got back there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find a pudgy man in a grey suit. His collar button was undone, his tie skew-whiff. He was short with a sad face and dome-shaped head that lent his countenance the aspect of a mole.

  ‘I say,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose you have any paper? I wouldn’t normally ask, but the local paper is filthy stuff, she refuses to use it.’

  ‘Who does?’ I said.

  ‘The Japanese girl, she uses it to fold cranes.’

  ‘I expect they will have some in the writing room,’ I said.

  ‘The hotel won’t let her have any more paper – they think it’s bad luck or something. These bloody people are the limit, most superstitious race on God’s earth. They think everything is bad luck. It’s just an excuse if they don’t want to do something.’

  Jenny, who had been listening, joined me at the door and placed her hand on my back. ‘I don’t think we have any,’ she said.

  He became visibly alarmed. ‘But you must have! Everyone has writing paper, dammit!’ He stood up on his toes and tried to peer over us into the room.

  ‘Well we don’t,’ said Jenny. ‘We hate writing, don’t we Jack? We’d rather get squiffy instead.’

  Frustration creased his brow. ‘Look, I know this is … but don’t you see? The bloody dance is tomorrow. St George’s Day. We’re running a tote on how many she folds. I’ve got her down for six hundred and sixty-seven. She’s slowed down a lot recently … her strength, it’s failing. To tell the truth, I’m quite worried. I told her father to get a new doctor, but he refused. Bloody Jap.’

  ‘How inconsiderate of him,’ said Jenny. ‘Maybe he doesn’t know who St George was.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point.’

  ‘What is the point?’ said Jenny, with a chill in her voice that suggested the chap had better watch his step.

  ‘I’ve got a lot riding on this.’

  ‘Maybe you should offer her a commission.’ She smiled as she said it, but the smile did not reach her eyes and even this boorish chap noticed. He blinked and said as if it were hardly to be credited, ‘Are you being flippant?’

  ‘Look here, Mr … ?’ I gave him a stern look.

  ‘Earwig. They call me Earwig.’

  ‘Well, Mr Earwig, let me be candid with you. We don’t have any writing paper to spare and, if we did, I rather doubt we would give you any in view of your manner—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You knock on our door without introduction, use vulgar language in front of my wife—’

  Another guest had appeared from one of the rooms and paused in the corridor to listen.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said, dismissing the quest. ‘I only asked for paper, not a bag of bloody Spanish doubloons.’ He walked off in exasperation, shoving rudely past the other man, who had the relaxed air of someone who would be unperturbed if the building was on fire. His hair was cropped short in a style that suggested he was or had been in the military, but one got the impression that it was not the ordinary sort of military. More the sort of chap who carries a cyanide pill secreted in a shirt button in case things get dicey.

  ‘See what true love can do to a man,’ he said with a smile. ‘If he wins the tote he’s hoping to take Sugarpie out.’

  ‘Who’s Sugarpie?’ said Jenny.

  ‘A rather attractive Siamese lady.’ He sauntered off.

  Some time later, Jenny took the writing paper which she had saved from the SS Pandora library and gave it to Hoshimi.

  We returned to the lobby with the postcard and showed it to the man at the desk, inquiring about Finky’s Fotographic. We were directed to an arcade of shops across from the hotel. A small crowd of dozing rickshaw drivers sprang to attention on seeing us leave the hotel and we wended our way through them and across the street.

  The studio stood in a row of shops, which included tailoring services, travel goods, temple artefacts. There was also a darkened shop with a ‘Closed’ sign on the door, called Burma, Bangkok and North Borneo. Import & Export. In the window there was a model of an Empire Flying Boat, and a dusty globe with a length of red string pinned across its surface linking Rangoon to Bangkok, Georgetown, Singapore and Kuching in Borneo. It was too dark to see further into the shop.

  Next door, the window of Finky’s Fotographic featured a display of framed photographs arranged around an antique bellows camera. The name ‘Fink’ was written in gold cursive letters across the glass and this was repeated on the front door. There seemed little sign of life and, not sure of the protocol, we knocked, waited for a brief moment and then entered. A bell rang. The shop smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. It was lined on either side with shelves laden with photographic supplies, and at the far end was a desk and a chair. A chap in a linen suit sat at the desk in the gloom, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘We meet again,’ he said. It was the man we had seen earlier by the river.

  ‘Are you Mr Fink?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘Yes.’ He reached out his hand and I shook it, saying, ‘Jack and Jenny Wenlock.’

  He shook Jenny’s hand as well and said, ‘Welcome to The Garden of Perfect Brightness. This your first time in Bangkok?’

  We said that it was, and he told us he had been here eight years. ‘Whereabouts in England are you from, Mr Fink?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Brighton. I used to be the Brighton Biffer.’ Seeing the look of polite puzzlement on our faces, he continued, ‘Boxing. Middleweight.’

  We looked appropriately surprised.

  He opened a drawer and took out a tin that once had contained throat lozenges. ‘Excuse me while I take my medicine.’ He removed the lid to reveal the contents: a collection of dried grubs. He popped one in his mouth.

  ‘Caterpillars of the Swallowtail, they feed them on rue.

  Here did she fall a tear, here in this place

  I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace.

  ‘Shakespeare. They are said to be good for the particular form of epilepsy I suffer from. Reduces the severity of the seizures, the frightening clarity of the auras.’

  ‘Do they work?’ I asked.

  He paused to consider. ‘I’m not sure they do. But
rue is a versatile plant. Gulliver, after returning from his sojourn in the land of the Houyhnhnms, used to stuff his nose with it because he couldn’t bear the stink of English people. Not that I mean to suggest that you—’

  We laughed. ‘Do you dislike England so terribly?’ I said.

  ‘Is that why you don’t go back?’ asked Jenny.

  He laughed. ‘No! No, I love the old place. I love the grime and soot and brown skies filled with choking smoke, dreary grey clouds, and rainslicked streets where armies of miserable blighters crowd the pavement and say nothing more adventurous in their lives than,’ he tilted his head back and scrunched his lips up towards his nose as if balancing something on his top lip and said in a comic voice, ‘Cheerio!’

  We laughed.

  ‘Yes, how can you not love dear old Blighty? I would go back, but I’m afraid it might be rather difficult on account of a misunderstanding I have with the Royal Military Police. Besides, I seem to have mislaid a vital piece of equipment here in Bangkok.’

  ‘Perhaps we could help you find it,’ said Jenny. ‘Jack is a detective.’

  Mr Fink looked aghast, ‘Oh God, is he?’

  ‘Not that sort, Mr Fink,’ I hastened to reassure him. ‘Whatever the nature of your misunderstanding with the police, it is no concern of mine. I used to work on the railways.’

  ‘What is it you have mislaid in Bangkok?’ said Jenny.

  ‘My heart, of course. What does any chap lose here?’

  ‘Oh I see,’ she said. ‘You poor thing.’

  ‘My pen ry,’ he said.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘My pen ry, it means never mind. You’ll hear it a lot. Besides, losing one’s heart is not so very terrible, that’s what the heart is for. It’s easily done. Especially here. It’s some kind of sorcery, I’m sure of it. If you let her into your heart, your ruin is assured.’ There was a pause that turned slightly awkward. Mr Fink’s disclosure seemed a touch too intimate for a first acquaintance and it was difficult to know what to say now. He took out another cigarette and lit it without offering us one. ‘Railwayman, you say?’

  ‘He’s teaching me to fire a steam engine,’ she said proudly.

  ‘What’s there to teach?’ he replied in a dismissive tone. ‘You just throw in some coal and wait, don’t you?’

  ‘You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried,’ she admonished.

  ‘A fire is a fire.’

  ‘No it jolly well isn’t!’ Jenny contradicted him with the zeal of the newly converted. ‘There are all sorts of fires, and you have to match your fire to suit the terrain. If you are going uphill—’

  ‘That’s easy, I throw in more coal.’

  ‘Well I’m afraid you are too late if you do,’ said Jenny with the air of one who has just clinched the argument. ‘You should have thrown the coal in fifteen minutes ago, it won’t help you now. You’ll just end up at the station with too much steam and have to blow it off. Thirty gallons of your hard shovelling blown off in a minute.’

  Mr Fink seemed to quail. ‘I never knew it could be so complicated.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Jenny. ‘There are so many things you have to take into account, even the phase of the moon. Did you know that?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fink. ‘I knew that.’

  Jenny shot me a glance and said nothing.

  I put the postcard down on the table. ‘We were rather hoping you could tell us something about this photograph. It was sent by a friend of ours. This would appear to have your shop’s marque on it.’

  Upon seeing the card all the colour drained from his face and he froze. Into his eyes came the desperate look of a man who beholds the ghost of a man he once slew.

  ‘Mr Fink, are you all right, sir?’ I said. ‘Mr Fink?’

  He sat not moving, like one carved from stone.

  ‘Mr Fink,’ said Jenny, ‘would you like some water?’

  He gave his head a barely perceptible shake and said in a pained whisper, ‘I am having a seizure. You must wait.’

  We stood there awkwardly. Slowly his fainting fit passed and his features shed whatever force had locked them.

  ‘I do apologise,’ he said. ‘It happens from time to time.’ He looked down at the card, the way a dog looks at the stick that has beaten it.

  ‘Can you tell us anything about this picture?’ I said. ‘Is it one you remember taking?’

  ‘I take lots of pictures,’ he said in a voice suddenly cold.

  ‘It was sent by Mr Curtis,’ said Jenny. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Name rings a bell, I suppose.’

  ‘Was he a customer here?’ I asked with mounting frustration.

  He made no answer. All the warmth had evaporated.

  ‘Do you recognise the location?’ Jenny persisted.

  He shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  My voice rose a register in exasperation. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Mr Fink, I find it rather hard to believe you would not remember the location of this scene. It is quite extraordinary, the way the tree has grown around the stone head. I don’t believe I could ever forget seeing such a wonder. If it were in England the roads to it would be clogged with the traffic from sightseers.’

  He looked me in the eye, wearing an expression that suggested this new topic of conversation was very painful for him. ‘Actually, I do mind you saying. And we are not in England. Sights like this might strike you as marvellous, but they are ten a penny here. If you want to see some ruins, you should visit Ayutthaya, the old capital, about thirty miles north. Then you’ll see. There’s a trip there tomorrow, as it happens, taking Hoshimi. I expect you saw her on the lawn.’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ said Jenny.

  ‘From Nagasaki. She’s got the atom-bomb disease, whatever that is. Something to do with the blood. No one seems to know much about it.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Jenny. ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘She’s folding origami cranes. There is a children’s legend in Japan, apparently, that says if you fold a thousand origami cranes you get your dearest wish answered. Don’t ask me what number she is on now, Earwig will tell you. He’ll ask you for paper, if he hasn’t already. Has he? He’s running a tote, you see. The swine.’ He stopped, and looked at me.

  ‘We’re sorry if we are importuning,’ I said with forced patience, ‘but to be perfectly frank, we are very worried about our friend.’

  ‘Are you now? Well, I shouldn’t be. If he’s gone missing in Bangkok, there will be a woman involved somewhere, there always is.’

  ‘There was talk of a girl with blue eyes,’ I said.

  He looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Was there? I wouldn’t know.’ The look in his eyes suggested that he did. ‘European girls are not easy to find in Bangkok, Malaya is better. Most chaps here are more than satisfied with the local girls. Or you could try the cemetery – a lot of chaps who go missing end up there.’

  I found the facetiousness of Mr Fink’s last remark tiresome and contrived. It was clearly designed to avoid giving a straight answer. ‘Mr Fink, I will ask you directly: is it your opinion that Mr Curtis is dead?’

  ‘Well, we’re all dead in a way here, aren’t we? I know I am.’

  ‘Please don’t play games with me.’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Wenlock, are you familiar with the cliffs at Beachy Head?’

  ‘I have heard them spoken of.’

  ‘People often go there to throw themselves off, people for whom the pleasures of this world have lost their savour. It takes a few seconds to complete the drop, considerably longer than a man being hanged. Have you ever wondered what passes through the mind of a chap as he falls?’

  ‘I am pretty sure I never have, but I suspect two seconds or whatever it is are not really sufficient to have thoughts of any great consequence.’

  Mr Fink’s last few comments had been delivered in a deadpan voice, contrived to give us the impression that he was world-weary and did not care very much. But with the talk of jumping off Beachy Head he now bec
ame animated, as if this was his true passion. ‘Yes, that is the fly in the ointment when it comes to Beachy Head. But here in Bangkok it is different. We too are all falling to our death, but the Siamese have contrived to slow time down so that we can better enjoy the sensation.’

  ‘If you feel you are dying,’ I said with mounting impatience, ‘then perhaps you ought to visit a doctor.’

  ‘Ah yes, but what if he cured me?’

  ‘What about the buffalo?’ Jenny said with feigned sweetness, trying to approach him from a different angle. ‘Could it be significant?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ he said, ‘it’s just a buffalo.’ The anguish in his voice suggested it might be more than just a buffalo. ‘If it was a picture of a cow in a field in England, would you ask if it were significant?’

  ‘The message written on the back suggests something rather more serious than a girl,’ Jenny retorted.

  He turned it over and read it. ‘Look, Mr Wenlock, if you are going to start looking for Curtis, might I suggest you send your wife out of the country first?’

  ‘No you may not!’ cried Jenny.

  ‘Well that would be my advice,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Is it terribly unsafe here?’ I said. ‘So far everyone has been most pleasant.’

  ‘Everyone smiles,’ added Jenny.

  ‘Yes, don’t they?’ said Mr Fink. ‘The Siamese smile is a strange beast. Often it can mean the opposite of what you suppose. If your mother just died, for example, and you told a chap about it, in all likelihood he would smile. If a man was about to cheat you, he would smile. Or if you embarrassed him. Or if a chap was standing before you plotting your murder, he would give you the most beatific smile of all.’

  He paused and his eyes narrowed as if recalling a particularly painful memory.

  ‘Nothing is as it seems here … nothing.’

  I retrieved the postcard. ‘If you should think of anything that might help us in our—’

  He cut me off. ‘Mr Wenlock, don’t be such a bloody fool! Look, you both seem like very nice people, but if you don’t mind me being frank, you seem a bit wet.’