We walked down into the village and found a phone-box; I shoved a coin in the slot and phoned Dulcie.
“Come and rescue us,” I said. “We’re at Arlen Bank Side—that’s the village, not the house. We’ll be in,” I peered through the window, squinted to read through dirty glass, “in the Lord Hurlington. Come soon.”
“On our way,” Dulcie said, no hesitation. “How many of you?”
“Just two,” I said. “Me and my wife.”
o0o
Dulcie came herself, at that momentous news. Presumably she wanted to congratulate me personally, and commiserate with Carol. When she stepped out of the taxi to find me at an outside table negotiating brandy down the neck of the diminutive and still-shaking Chinese girl perched on my knee, her face should have been saved for a better occasion. I was in no state myself to enjoy it.
I gave her the briefest possible introduction, “Dulce, this is my wife, Suzie Chu Marks,” because Dulcie was a long-time friend and she deserved that much. Being a long-time friend she didn’t ask for more, she didn’t ask anything at all. Reading something of the situation in our faces, she just mothered us gently into the cab and drove off.
This time, halfway back to the city, I remembered to tell her the address had changed. “Take us to Chinatown, I’ll show you where.”
Nothing more than a nod of the head to that, but the back of her neck was eloquent: I want the full story, it was saying, when you’re ready to tell me.
Our eyes met briefly in the driving-mirror, and I guess mine were making promises, but they were probably lying. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to learn or remember the whole story myself, and parts of it I was sure I’d never want to tell. Even to long-time friends.
Suzie spent the whole journey huddled tight against me and I thought I understood, I thought the numbing shock of what we’d seen was all. God knew, it was enough. But she lifted her face from my shirt just once, as we came in sight of the flat; and she whispered, “He looked, he looked just like Jacky did, when they took me to see him in the morgue.”
Nothing I could say to that, I only held her closer and touched my lips to her forehead, tasting cold salt bitter sweat; but inside I was cursing. Cursing myself, for forgetting that. I should have covered her eyes after all, or turned her away from the sight of it. Would have done, if I’d only thought.
Out of the car, and I paid Dulcie with another mute meeting of eyes if not minds. Then my arm around Suzie’s frail-seeming shoulders and we went up those stairs like Siamese twins, joined at the heart in horror.
At the last landing before our private stairs, we found the wrong door closed, the wrong door open. The club was locked up, when it should have been open for business; the fire door stood ajar.
“Didn’t we lock this?” I thought we had, but I was ready to blame my slipshod memory again if she said no.
“Yes,” she said. “Look.”
And her hand was trembling again as she showed me where the wood was split and torn in the frame, where the door had been smashed open.
“Jonty...”
I licked my lips, where they were suddenly too dry to bear. When I could find my voice at all, I whispered, “You stay here.”
“No.”
“Suzie, whoever did this, if they’re still up there...”
“If they’re still up there, two of us is better than one. I said, no more adventures without me,” though she looked a long way, a very long way from adventurous. “And anyway, Lee should be here, he should be in the club and he’s not. And he’s my friend, nearest thing to a brother I’ve got now. I’m coming up.”
“He’s probably gone for the police,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid. He’d have phoned them, wouldn’t he? I’m coming up.”
And she was too, she did. It was as much as I could do to make her walk behind me. Or tiptoe, rather, as I soft-shoed it as quietly as I knew how.
The flat door also had been broken open, though it was pushed to now. I hesitated, almost lifted a hand to knock; but then I laid that hand flat against the wood, and shoved gently. It swung in, and there was the room as I was expecting now, as I was dreading to see it: chaos and disaster, papers strewn everywhere.
Blood on the papers, blood on the carpet too, and I hadn’t been expecting that.
The door a little wider, and I could see one of the sofas; and fuck! yes, there was someone in the flat, and I had a moment of frozen panic before Suzie made some kind of hard, anxious noise in her throat and pushed past me.
Then I could see through the runnels of dried blood that had matted his hair and masked his face, I could see what Suzie had seen faster, something of Lee beneath. I ran across in her wake, my feet skidding unheedingly on letters and magazines, bank statements and God knew what important documents.
His eyes were closed, his breathing irregular and rasping. He had the phone in his hand, and the butt end of a broken snooker cue at his feet. Suzie’s quick fingers were at his throat, feeling for a pulse. I picked up the phone, ready to call an ambulance and then the police; but she said, “No. Run down to Uncle Han’s, get him. Hurry, Jonty...!”
My reaction, her reaction: not the time to argue which was wiser. Lee was her friend more than mine, and of her culture; that made it her call. I dropped the phone on the sofa and hurried, taking each flight of stairs in three or four reckless bounds till I came down onto the first-floor landing, to the door that hid Mr Han the herbalist. Suzie had been threatening me with this man’s doctoring ever since she brought me here from hospital, our little trip out; so far I’d dodged or avoided or postponed, one way or another. My body, my call. I thought. She obviously didn’t.
Whatever. Please ring buzzer and wait, the sign said, but that day I just crashed through the door. Small reception-room, a few chairs, all of them occupied; the clientèle was mixed, from elderly Chinese to young Western.
There was a middle-aged Chinese woman sitting behind a desk. She looked up, started to smile, said, “Jonty. We’ve been expecting you.” Then, registering my urgency, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Lee. He’s in our flat, he’s been attacked. Suzie said to fetch Mr Han...” Doctor Han? Uncle Han? I didn’t know. I was back to that again, strangers knowing me too well while I was totally at sea with them.
“Yes. Of course. One moment.” Unflustered but very focused now, every movement precise and necessary, she stood up and rapped firmly on a door behind her, then pushed it immediately open and went through. I heard conversation, tonal, guttural, incomprehensible; and thought, Doctor, will I ever speak Cantonese again? Because that was my tutor lying hurt upstairs and very likely for my sake, injured because of me. My tutor and friend, apparently. And my wife’s near-brother, and in a hell of a mess: and all because I couldn’t remember what was important, and I was too stupid to figure it out in retrospect.
o0o
Suzie’s Uncle Han was probably no blood relation—I hoped! Bad genes in the family pool somewhere if I were wrong, because God, he was ugly—but he came running like a father, sprinting bow-legged up the stairs faster than I could keep up with. By the time I reached the doorway in his wake he was already kneeling on the sofa beside Lee, his battered leather medicine-bag was open on the floor and he was dabbing something onto Lee’s scalp with one hand and peeling back eyelids with the other, muttering through buck teeth as he dabbed and peeled.
“Suzie,” I said, “he needs a hospital.”
She just glanced at me, one brief glare, shut the hell up, what do you know? and turned back to Han again.
“I do know,” I said mildly, as if she’d spoken that aloud. “I’ve had my own experience, remember? Head wounds can be dangerous. He needs X-rays, maybe a scan.”
She grunted, glared again, but this time did at least condescend to put it to Han, in a rapid singsong. The language sounded less harsh somehow, when she spoke it.
He replied in half a dozen hard, chopped syllables. She blushed, and reached for the phone. Didn’t
offer me a translation, but I could provide my own: What, you mean you haven’t called an ambulance yet? For God’s sake, girl, I can give him first aid, but he needs a proper check-up, you of all people shouldn’t need telling that.
Before she could dial, though, even three easy digits, Lee stirred and groaned and opened his eyes. I saw her hand freeze on the number-pad; I saw her choose not to use it, not just yet.
“Lee?” she said, and a few words of Cantonese; and when he didn’t respond to that, beyond moving his eyes slowly to find her, she put the phone down and tried him again in English. “How are you feeling, Lee?”
A little pause, as if he were feeling himself out from the inside, checking; and then, “Fuck,” he said, and tried a smile. Didn’t look good, but it worked well. I saw the tension leave Suzie’s shoulders in a rush.
“All right. Just sit still. Uncle Han’s here, he’ll sort you out.”
Then they switched to Cantonese again, Han asking questions, I guess, and Lee responding weakly. Han reached into his bag and came up with a handful of dried leaves which he sorted into Suzie’s cupped palms, a little of this and a little of that. She took them into the kitchen; me, I wanted to seize this hiatus, to seize the phone and make the call myself. But I felt displaced, no part of this, isolated by language and culture both; so I only stood there in the doorway, neither in nor out, hoping that Lee could tolerate a little delay.
My thumb played with the little brass plate below the bell, tracing the engraved lettering. Jack Chu. Perhaps we should get it replaced, Suzie and Jonty Marks it should read instead, there was something morbid about keeping it this way; but again that had to come from her, when she was ready.
Jack Chu. Jacky, she always called him. I wondered if he’d actually been Jack, even, or if his birth certificate said John...
And my thumb was still then on the plaque, as my mind kicked off on a tangent; and I took one pace into the room and looked around, and in all the chaos I couldn’t see my computer anywhere.
This wasn’t the time to say so, obviously, though it was burning suddenly on my tongue. Suzie came back from the kitchen with one of her fine porcelain cups, something in it steaming and aromatic. She held it to Lee’s lips, ignoring his unfocused efforts to take it for himself. As he sipped, she spoke to me without looking round: “Jonty, be useful. Bring a flannel from the bathroom. Wet and warm, not hot.”
I fetched her a flannel and a bowl of water, earning myself a vague smile for reward. When Lee had drunk his tea or medicine, whichever it was—both, presumably—and had had his face washed, the worst of the blood rinsed away, I interrupted another three-way conversation in Cantonese. Trying to be useful indeed, to drag their minds back to the one thing I was certain of. I picked the phone up off the floor and said, “Suzie. Ambulance?”
“Oh. Yes, I suppose. Hang on, though. Lee? Jonty wants you to go to hospital. So does Uncle Han, I guess. Just to be safe. Okay?”
I wouldn’t have given him the choice myself, but he didn’t really make it anyway; he only shrugged and let us decide for him. I was already punching buttons on the phone when Suzie said, “It’ll mean the police too, Jonty.”
My turn to shrug. I was no great fan of the police even in my last life, working with them every day. Right now they were after my mother and I wasn’t fond of them at all—and besides, you’ve seen a murder done today and not reported it; that makes you an accessory, that makes you a fool—but let them come. We’d need to report the burglary anyway, to claim on the insurance.
The ambulance service was experimenting with some kind of triage. When I got through to them, I had to explain that a young lad had been attacked, that he had a head wound and had been pretty much unconscious for a time, didn’t know how long. That would bring us prime service, a team of paramedics on the run; it would also, I knew, bring the police without my having to call them.
Hanging up, looking around to where Lee sat pale and stained on the sofa with his attendants on either side and the steaming cup in his hand now, one small battle won, I thought probably he shouldn’t be drinking anything till the doctors had seen him. Nor sitting up, probably, and certainly not trying to talk. Not being interrogated.
“Lee,” I said hesitantly, “what happened? Can you tell us?” Can you remember? I think I meant, anxiety at least as high as curiosity or anger.
“There isn’t much,” he said. His voice was thin and reedy, and I got a scowl from Suzie for asking, even as she stroked his damp hair on the side he hadn’t been hit. I heard her murmur, “You don’t have to,” but I think Lee heard the same as I did, the underlying message, do if you can.
“There was no one in the club,” he said slowly, frowning, working the story out from his jangled memories. “I was just tidying up a bit, when I heard this great bang from the landing. So I looked round and I could see two men doing the fire door with a sledgehammer. They hadn’t bothered to close the club door or anything, they weren’t worried. They went up to your flat,” which sounded odd where I’d have said they came up here, till it dawned on me that probably he didn’t know quite where he was yet, and definitely I wanted that ambulance, and as soon as possible, “so I locked the club quick and followed them up.”
“Wait a minute.” This was Suzie, trying to get her head around it. “Two men with a sledgehammer, and you followed them up? On your own?”
“Just burglars,” he said. “Burglars usually run. Oh, and I took something with me. I broke one of your cues, Suze.” And then he giggled at the way that sounded, while she shook her head, so what? I don’t give a damn, and I thought that the heavy end of a snooker cue could make a lethal club, if only he’d been the type to use it. “But they didn’t run,” he went on unnecessarily. “They must’ve heard me coming, I made sure of that, I went up dead loud; and they were ready, they grabbed me as I came in. Beat me up a bit, I suppose. And they asked me something,” he said, frowning to remember. “Oh, yes. They asked me where the old woman was. That’s what they said, the old woman. I thought you’d love that, Suze.”
They hadn’t meant Suzie, obviously; but I saved it up in any case, I just knew how much my mother would hate it.
“So what did they hit you with, to knock you out?” I asked, thinking that it couldn’t have been the sledge or he wouldn’t be talking, most likely wouldn’t be breathing any too well or too much longer.
“Did they hit me, is that what happened? I don’t remember that.”
Suzie glanced at me, suddenly fretful. I gave her the best smile I could, and, “Nothing to worry about. No one ever remembers being hit,” which was an exaggeration, but true enough. Even so, I was glad to hear a siren in the street below, to see the square shape of one of the new US-style city ambulances nose to a halt outside.
“I remember sitting here, after,” he said. “I don’t remember waking up, but sitting here, yes. Looking. All this mess they made. And picking up the phone, I remember that. Thinking I should call somebody. Did I do that, is that why you’re all here?”
“No,” Suzie said gently. “You just went back to sleep for a bit. And no wonder, with that bad head. Be quiet now, here come the people to take you to hospital.”
o0o
The paramedics were tougher on him than I’d been, tougher on everyone. No question of Lee’s walking down all those stairs, even with willing support on either side to hold him up, even though he swore that he could do it. They brought a stretcher and strapped him down, against accidents of gravity or his own stubbornness or both. Sooner them than me, I thought, watching them carry him out.
Mr Han left immediately behind them, heading back to his surgery, and Suzie after him: “I’ll follow the ambulance,” she said, “stay with Lee. He’s got no family close, and someone should be there for him. I’ll phone you later.”
“Sure, fine. I’ll be here.” Couldn’t go out, actually, with all the doors bust open. “You go, I’ll see to everything.”
o0o
Left alone, I thought I oug
ht to prioritise: check for what was missing, what was damaged. Phone the insurance company—only I’d have to find the policy first, find out who we were insured with. Which meant clearing up all those papers, going through them, getting them sorted...
Instead I walked to the window to watch as they drove away, the big white ambulance and the little black Mini; and there moving into the space they left was a police car. Suzie was getting the best of this deal, I thought. By a long way.
Just a couple of lads in uniform, though, this time at least. One of them I knew slightly, from his having arrested a few of my previous clients. That made it easy: a burglary interrupted, a guy knocked on the head—possibly with his own snooker cue, that’s it on the carpet there, no, no one’s touched it since we found him—and no more story than that, nothing to stand out. That might buy us a little peace, though I didn’t think it would save us in the end. I thought either a computer or some officious little paper-processor would register our names or the address, and pass the report up onto DCI Dale’s desk; and then I thought he’d be around again with more questions. Who did we think had broken in? What did we think they were after? Why didn’t we call him immediately, why did we tell the uniforms we thought it was a casual break-in when this was the second time in as many days, when did we last see my mother...?
But that was for later, and with luck not any time today. Today I showed the lads around, they asked what was missing, I said a portable computer but not much else that I could see. Presumably they’d panicked after Lee came up, I said, grabbed what was instantly accessible and run. The police gave me a crime number for the insurance and a phone number for a 24-hour locksmith, said to let them know if I turned up anything else, and went away.
I scooped the living-room papers into a single pile in the middle of the carpet for later sorting, and went through to the spare bedroom, where the mess was worse: not just individual papers but whole files had been strewn around in there. Assuming as I had to that they’d been looking for something specific—a folder labelled SUSI, perhaps?—I could only hope they’d had no more joy than I had, in finding it. Okay, they had the computer now; but I still had a copy of the SUSI file, and thank God for my cautious soul and my ingrained habit of making back-ups. They had as much information now as I did—if they could crack my password—but at least I hadn’t lost it.
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