“Then Laertes leapt out of his hiding place behind the door and while Mr. Hyland was bent over you he slipped the rope around Geoff’s neck. Captain Chen.”
Chen raced forward and looped the noose over Fong’s head. It hung loosely around Fong’s neck. Fong was about to continue but stopped and stood very still. His eyes hooded. His delicate fingers traced the circle of the noose around his neck. Then his hands were still and his eyes snapped open. Now, they were hard – angry. He barked, “Stop crying.”
The girl looked up at him, wide-eyed.
Fong felt the loose rope around his neck again. “You did it, didn’t you, Ophelia? Until now I only thought you lured Geoff here. That Laertes actually did the hanging. Now I know differently.”
Before she could protest Fong charged on. “So Laertes looped the noose around Geoff’s neck like Captain Chen just did around mine. But it’s loose, isn’t it Captain Chen?”
“Yes, it has to be to fit over your head.”
“So Geoff does this.” Fong straightened up and immediately reached for the noose. Chen leapt forward and fought with Fong to first tighten and then keep the noose on Fong’s neck. Fong tries to loosen the noose but Chen held the knot tight. “The noose is now set, Ophelia, but Laertes literally has his hands filled keeping it on Geoff’s neck. That being the case, who was left to pull the rope to hang Mr. Hyland?”
Ophelia stood. Her shoulders were back, her head held high. “He said I wasn’t her. He said it was all a mistake. He said he was sorry.” Suddenly she was screaming, “Sorry? Sorry? What the fuck does sorry mean?”
Fong weathered the verbal storm then counted to three before he asked, “Mr. Hyland said you weren’t who?” Fong’s voice was low. He dreaded but needed to hear the answer to his question.
“Her. Fu Tsong. Your wife, remember her?”
And there she was. A murderess. As if she had emerged from somewhere deep within the girl. A murderess with motive, means and opportunity – and more importantly – with the rage needed to kill a man she loved.
The formalities of arresting the two actors were handled by Captain Chen who quickly moved them out of the theatre to the waiting patrol car on Nanjing Lu.
Fong and Joan were alone. Fong went to the back of the auditorium and sat in the exact same seat in which he’d last seen Geoff. Then sadly he said, “Fuck me with a stick.”
“Is this a quaint Shanghanese phrase?” Joan asked as she moved up the aisle toward him. “Does it have an idiomatic meaning or is it to be taken literally?”
“In this case I probably deserve it literally.”
“Being a bit hard on yourself, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so.”
Joan put a hand on her hip, sat on the arm of the theatre seat across the aisle from him and said, “Explanation, please.”
He handed her the Shanghai detective’s report of the dead woman found in the Su Zu Creek.
Joan read it quickly then looked at him. “And the key he found on the body fits . . . ?”
“It’s the master key for the guesthouse that Mr. Hyland stayed in.”
Joan thought about that for a moment. “How long was she dead before . . . ?”
“Impossible to say,” Fong interrupted her. “The eels in the Su Zu Creek are ravenous.”
“But she wasn’t at the desk when you went to check Mr. Hyland’s room the day after the murder?”
“No. The woman there was already complaining about how hard it was to keep new workers.”
“So this poor woman was removed to be sure that no one could identify Ophelia as being with Mr. Hyland the night of the murder?”
“That would be my guess,” Fong answered without much enthusiasm. “But when did they kill her? Before they killed Geoff or after, when . . . ?”
“. . . when you could have . . . ”
“. . . done something about it if I had seen what was right in front of me. I allowed myself to be distracted by the little things and ignored the obvious.”
“If that’s true, it’s very bad,” she said flatly.
He looked at her. “Very bad,” she repeated.
Fong nodded.
Joan reached up and tugged at a short blunt stand of hair. “So what exactly did you miss?”
“I missed the biggest clue that Geoff put in front of me.”
“Which was?”
Fong almost laughed but didn’t. Failure wasn’t funny. Murder was certainly not a joke. He took a deep breath then let it out in a line – boy, he wanted a smoke. “The first thing Geoff made sure I saw was Laertes fight Hamlet who just happens to look like a young Geoff. Laertes clearly loves Ophelia. Ophelia loves Hamlet, Geoff. Geoff betrays Ophelia. Laertes and Ophelia kill Geoff. In the West they would say the table was all set for me. Here we’d say the fish’s head faced me.” He looked to Joan. “Do you think . . . ?”
“. . . that the key lady would have lived if you’d understood what Mr. Hyland was trying to tell you?” She let out a long sigh. “No. I don’t. The moment those two murdered Mr. Hyland that poor woman’s fate was sealed. I assume it happened the same night. Once you kill a first time, the second is easier – especially if the second is a poor old woman.”
Fong realized that he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in one long line of relief.
“That still leaves two things about the murder that are unaccounted for,” said Fong.
“What two things?”
“The forget-me-nots in Geoff’s pockets and the vest he wore on the hot night.”
Joan smiled. “Neither strikes me as very mysterious.”
“How do you mean?”
“Mr. Hyland was a middle-aged man having an affair with a young actress.” She looked at Fong who gave no indication that he understood what she was getting at. “Come on, Fong! Okay, I’ll lay it out for you. In middle age, we all thicken Fong, don’t we?” Fong nodded. “The vest helped Mr. Hyland cover that thickening, what Westerners call love handles.” Joan raised her shoulders in the pan-Chinese gesture of “you-get-me?” then added, “How long can anyone hold their stomach in, anyway?”
Fong smiled. So the vest was nothing more than his old enemy, vanity, at work. “And the flowers?”
“Even easier, Fong.”
“They are?”
“Yes, what are the flowers called, Fong?”
“Forget-me-nots.”
“So there it is.”
“There what is?”
Then she said the flower’s name slowly – one word at a time – Forget – Me – Not. “Surely Ophelia put them in Mr. Hyland’s pockets as a final memento, a final love token. A warning not to forget her.”
Fong shook his head but smiled.
Joan got to her feet and her face turned dark. “There is however another mystery that strikes me as potentially far more sinister than anything to do with Mr. Hyland’s death.”
Fong nodded. He knew what she was going to say.
“Who told the two Beijing men that you’d planted a bug on Xi Luan Tu? It wasn’t the snitch in the central stores. He worked for Li Chou.”
This time Fong didn’t even nod.
“Was it Captain Chen?” Joan asked.
Fong looked away.
It was almost midnight when Fong heard the knock on his office door. He’d been sitting in the dark lit only by the ambient light from the neon across the river in the Pudong. “It’s open, Captain Chen.”
The lights played chase-the-colour across the uncomely features of the young man as he entered the office and stood cap in hand. “Sir?”
Fong said nothing.
“You found out, sir?”
“Yes, Captain Chen, I found out. You betrayed me to the men from Beijing.”
After a slight pause, Chen said, “I knew you would figure it out, sir.”
“Then why did you do it?” Fong was on his feet. His voice was loud enough to rattle the glass in the window.
But Chen didn’t flinch. “Because of Lily and X
iao Ming,” he said simply. “This office is a political place. You told me that. I have to protect myself so that I can be there for Lily and Xiao Ming.”
Fong looked at the young man. The colours seemed to float across the man’s unfortunate features.
Then Fong nodded and turned to the window.
“Sir?”
“We all do what we need to do, Captain Chen.” He reached up and touched the cool glass pane of the window. “All of us do what we need to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
A long silence followed. Captain Chen stood very still. Fong stared out at the Pudong. Then Fong turned to Chen. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Captain Chen.”
“Sir?”
“We understand each other now. I will see you tomorrow. We have work to do here, Captain Chen. Much work.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ENDS AND BEGINNINGS
Fong opened the door to the safe house without knocking. The table in the centre of the room was covered with official-looking documents. A few of the mocked-up photographs were there of Geoff in handcuffs. The room’s windows were all closed and curtained so the place was oppressively hot and stuffy despite the late hour. Fong threw open the draperies and pried open a window. It made little difference. Fong leaned out the window. Far-off he heard the gentle lap of the Huangpo River. Looking up, he thought he saw the moon about to set.
Fong checked the other rooms in the house. The elderly Beijing man wasn’t there. Then he heard the front door open.
The politico with the large raspberry stain on his left cheek whom Fong had seen with the two French contractors in his courtyard, what seemed like years ago, strode into the room. The man hoisted a heavy briefcase onto the table and began to pack up the papers.
“Where’s Sheng, the older man from Beijing?” Fong asked.
“Not here, evidently.”
“Where is he?”
The politico looked up at Fong. “You know better than to ask something like that, Traitor Zhong.”
Fong didn’t reply.
The politico continued to pack his briefcase.
“Doesn’t it ever bother you?” Fong asked, knowing full well it was better to keep his mouth shut – tight.
The man looked up from his packing. “No, it never bothers me, Traitor Zhong.”
The single word WHY leapt out of Fong’s mouth. But he wasn’t really asking. He was falling. Begging for an answer. Lost.
The man on the other side of the table was Chinese like him. He was of flesh and would die like him. He probably loved and wanted and yearned like him – yet he did things that were beyond Fong’s comprehension. Then, much to Fong’s surprise, the man answered Fong’s question. “Because, Traitor Zhong, we all need direction. It is wrong to believe that each of us wants to cut our own path. That each of us determines how and where we go. People like you have deluded yourselves into believing that your fellow citizens want to control their destiny. It is not true. It is not even remotely true. Most people, the vast majority of people, want to follow, not lead. They want to be led. We live, we follow, we die. Not hard to understand even for a person as confused as you, Traitor Zhong.”
“And do we leave this world a better place?”
The man looked at Fong for a long moment, then finally said, “How can one possibly know such a thing?” He pushed one of the documents on the table toward Fong. “As chief investigator this requires your signature, just another one of the new formalities, our little step toward transparency.”
The politico snapped his briefcase shut and then, without looking at Fong, turned and headed toward the front door of the safe house.
“People died here,” Fong said to the Beijing man’s back.
The Beijing man stopped for a beat, but he did not turn – did not respond – just left Fong alone – with his thoughts and an empty room.
Fong grabbed the official document and sat. The new state font must have been reduced in size. He held it close but it remained just a blur. He tried it at full arm’s-length – still no go. “Damn,” he muttered as he reached into his coat pocket and put on his new glasses. The fog of dark strokes cleared and the shapes emerged as characters.
As he signed the document, Joan entered the room and sat opposite him.
“Nice haircut,” Fong said.
Joan touched her ragged hair and shook her head. “How nice of you to finally notice. It makes me look Parisian, don’t you think, Detective Zhong?”
Actually Fong didn’t know from Parisian, nor did he care. Joan Shui’s short hair simply allowed him a better view of the strength inherent in her face.
“I like you with glasses, Detective Zhong.”
Fong had forgotten he still had them on. “Thanks.”
“They make you look intelligent.”
“Well, looking intelligent is something.”
“Yes, it is. Let’s get out of this place.”
A half-hour later, Fong and Joan Shui stood side by side on the Bund Promenade looking across the Huangpo River at the Pudong as he finished telling her about his confrontation with Captain Chen.
“It was the right thing to do, Fong. Now you know where his loyalties lie. You know him well enough to work with him.”
“I think so.” A silence fell between them. The distance between her left hand and his right on the railing was a mere four inches – yet it could have been a mile or seven hundred miles.
“So what happens next?” Fong asked.
Joan wasn’t sure exactly what he meant but chose to believe he was talking about her next professional move now that this “unpleasantness” was over. “Well,” she said, “Shanghai’s becoming a modern city. It’ll need its own arson department soon enough. You folks can’t always be calling over to old HK for help.”
“That’s true,” he said – but nothing more.
Somehow their hands, despite the fact that neither had moved, seemed even farther apart – no longer a mile or seven hundred miles – now a light year or twenty.
She took a deep breath and made a decision. “I’ve been in love once before.”
“With Wu Fan-zi.”
“Yes, with Wu Fan-zi,” she agreed. “What about you, Detective Zhong?”
“Once.”
“But not with Lily?”
“No. To my shame, not with Lily.” It was his turn to agree.
“With the actress?”
“Her name is Fu Tsong.”
There it was. Wrong tense. She looked at his delicate features and suddenly she knew he’d done it on purpose. That he’d offered her an opening. Now she needed to figure out if she was brave enough to take it.
She was.
“You meant, her name was Fu Tsong.”
Fong nodded slowly.
“She is too much with you, Fong.”
Again Fong nodded. “I can’t seem to let her go.”
“Then don’t. Just give her a place at the table, but not every seat, or the one to which the fish head points.”
“Is that what you’ve done with Wu Fan-zi?”
Now it was her turn to nod.
“What place does he have at your table?”
She thought about that for only a moment then responded, “Fire. Every time my life becomes about fire Wu Fan-zi is at my side, alive as when he first touched me.” She looked at the distance between their hands on the rail. “Can you do that with Fu Tsong?”
Fong didn’t know. Then he looked into the depths of Joan Shui’s eyes. “Yes, I think I can.”
“How?” Joan’s voice was hard. There was no movement in it. If Fong couldn’t answer this she would take the next available flight back to Hong Kong and never again set foot in Shanghai or have any contact with the man who now stood beside her, his hand so close to hers on the railing, again.
“Fire with Wu Fan-zi and you, right? Art, especially theatre and Shakespeare for Fu Tsong and me.”
“Only in those places?” she pressed.
“Only in those pla
ces.”
There was a beat – a flutter of gulls moving in an arc high to the west – and the miracle happened. From light years apart hands met, fingers entwined and a sea breeze, all the way from the mighty Yangtze, blessed their coming together.
The darkness came on fast that evening. Time was moving quickly as Fong and Joan sought out a place to be alone – but privacy was the hardest thing to find in a city of 18 million souls.
“I would invite you back to my hotel but I have no room booked and no money on me to purchase one,” Joan said.
He began to laugh.
She liked the sound and joined in. Their laughter grew until they staggered with the force of it. Passersby stopped and stared at them. Older people scolded. Finally Joan got enough control of herself to ask, “What are we laughing about?”
Fong answered through bursts of laughter that caused tears to roll down his cheeks, “I’ll soon be in the same situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“My rooms are going to be part of a new condominium project. They’ve offered me the right to buy them but . . . ”
“. . . but the price is a bit steep?”
“Yeah,” Fong stopped laughing, “you could say that.”
“Do you like these rooms, Fong?” she asked.
“I do.”
Joan looked at the proud newness of the Pudong across the Huangpo River then turned and looked at the Bund behind her. It felt right. She touched Fong’s face, “Would I like your rooms, do you think?”
Fong put his hand up to her hair and felt its bluntness, “I hope you would.”
She put her lips to his and whispered into his mouth, “Ask me to your rooms, Fong.”
Fong turned his head and whispered in her ear, “Would you come with me to my rooms, Joan Shui?”
She whispered back into his ear, “I thought you’d never ask.”
Next in the Zhong Fong series…
The Golden Mountain Murders
As Shanghai surpasses Hong Kong as Asia’s most important city, Zhong Fong’s Office of Special Investigations faces an increasingly sophisticated, and increasingly global, breed of criminal.
The Hamlet Murders Page 20