Frogmouth

by William Marshall

  NORTH POINT WOMAN IN DEATH FALL

  It was heavy, crude. Like the machete, it was for killing.

  Stillness and silence.

  In the cocoon, there was only the whispering.

  15

  On the phone in the bedroom Feiffer said formally and clearly to Detective Chief Inspector Osgood at North Point Station, "It's a male Malay in his late sixties with cataracts on both eyes who's been dead about a week in a sealed room. The body appears to have about twenty to thirty deep machete or sword-type wounds from the larynx area of the neck continuing in an irregular pattern from the right to the left side of the body and across to the right hand and arm." He was looking down at Idris trying not to see him. "The right hand is almost severed from the body and there are numerous areas of arterial and veinous blood on the bed he's lying on, the walls and the floor." He heard Osgood suck in his breath. "Flies have begun to breed in the wounds." Feiffer, properly, almost primly, said officially, "It's your district, not mine. If you want it regulations say you should have it. Do you want it?" In the main room and kitchen, Auden and Spencer were searching. He heard Spencer in the kitchen opening drawers and pulling their contents out. Feiffer said tightly, "On a scale of one to ten it's ten." Feiffer said, "You're the first call I've put in. If you want it it's up to you to call Scientific and Medical. I'll take my people and hand over the notes and—"

  Osgood said, "Keep it." Osgood said, clearing his throat, "Thanks for telling me." Osgood said, "Keep it."

  "We haven't disturbed anything and the caretaker let me in with a key. If you want to take it over all you have to do is just come over here and we'll pass it over to you and you can have it—"

  Osgood said, "Keep it!"

  "If you handled the suicide—"

  Osgood said, "His name is Idris, wife Mata Idris—"

  "What happened to her?"

  "She went out a window." Osgood said abruptly, "She went out a window about ten days ago while he was out at work, during the day. He worked part-time at—"

  "At the Quarantine Station."

  "When we got there she was plastered all over the pavement from eight stories up, a neighbor or the caretaker had rung him and he was just arriving on a bus." There was a silence. Osgood said, "Yeah, on a bus. Maybe his van was on the blink. I don't know. He had one. I checked with a Customs guy I know at Quarantine." He said quickly, getting rid of it, "It was exactly what it seemed to be: there were no signs of a struggle in the apartment, she had been treated lately by her local doctor for depression, she was wearing a housecoat that looked like it had been worn day and night for the last six months, the autopsy showed she hadn't eaten a meal for a day or so, so she wasn't living the high life—" Osgood said abruptly, "No joke intended— and there weren't the usual exotic little clues Sherlock Holmes would have found to prove she wasn't planning it like theater tickets for tomorrow night, air tickets for Timbuktu or CIA poison pellets or bullet wounds in her left ear and, therefore, she was, nice and simple, easy and straightforward, usual, run-of-the-mill, common or garden-variety suicide." Osgood said, "And her husband arrived by bus. By the sound of it if I had been her I would have jumped long ago."

  "What was he like?"

  "Idris?" There was a silence. There was some other reason Osgood didn't want the case. Osgood said, "I don't know. I hardly spoke to him."

  In the kitchen, Spencer said loudly, "Phil, look at this!"

  Osgood said, "Are you searching the place?"

  "My people are here."

  "Then it's definitely yours. Once you've started on the scene—"

  "You must have spoken to him!"

  "I said about two hundred words to him and he said about two to me!" Osgood said, "It was a suicide plain and simple!" He was getting angry. Osgood said, "Harry, I didn't like him, she obviously didn't like him and, for all I know, nobody in the entire world liked him, but that didn't mean he killed his wife because he didn't, and, because he didn't, he wasn't obliged to say any more than two words to me! He called me sir, he was polite, he wasn't there when it happened and when I asked him if his wife had been under a doctor's care he said yes, gave me the man's name and volunteered nothing." Osgood said, "He worked at the killing grounds out at Quarantine. He had pale, cataracted eyes and he talked in a rasping voice that I had to strain to hear and forced me to lean close to him and that—that I didn't care for!"

  "Was there a lover involved?"

  Osgood said, "No."

  "What about his side?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "It matters!"

  "I don't think so."

  "Was there or wasn't there?"

  "I don't know! It was a suicide! It doesn't matter why it happened! My job was just to make sure that it did happen and that it was what it appeared to be!" Osgood said tersely, "It was. It was the suicide of a desperately unhappy, probably neurotic middle-aged housewife in a block of apartments who didn't know or didn't care that if she threw herself out from eight stories up it was going to take her a long time to get down and when she did get down her head would go like a watermelon hit with a sledgehammer!" Osgood, losing control, said, "All right? Are you happy now? She looked like nothing on earth—she looked bloody awful—probably almost as bad as what you're looking at now— and what you're looking at now got off a bus, walked over to her and me, looked down as if he saw death every day of his life— which he did, slaughtering poor, bloody dumb animals—and just stood there like a good little boy with those eyes of his waiting for me to ask him questions—which he answered politely and courteously and in order, one at a time!" Osgood said, "He had something wrong with his voice. He had to work to make himself heard. I leaned down to hear him and all the time I did his eyes didn't blink once!" Osgood said, "If he had been speaking Cantonese I could have got one of my Chinese officers to talk to him, but he wasn't: he was Malay, he spoke English, so he talked to me!"

  "Why has it unnerved you, Charlie?"

  "It hasn't unnerved me! If you say the case is ours I'll do it!"

  "I don't mean that, I mean him."

  "He didn't unnerve me! People don't unnerve me!" Osgood said, "Harry, I'm six foot two and two hundred pounds and I've been a cop for twenty years and I've killed two men in firefights and I've—" There was a silence. In the bedroom, the smell was beginning to dissipate through the smashed window. The flies had settled. They were breeding. Osgood said, "I just—"

  "Was there any mention of birds?"

  "Of what? Of birds?"

  "Yes."

  "You mean, as in flap-flap?"

  "As in flap-flap."

  "No. Why?"

  There was a silence.

  It was a silence Osgood did not care for. Osgood, his voice still low, said tightly, "It was weird, Harry: the whole thing. I've seen a lot of reactions to death and there he was just standing there about five foot nothing looking as if the first breeze would blow him away, but he—" Osgood said curiously, "I'm six foot two, Harry and I could have . . ." Osgood said, "He was weird, frightening." It seemed to surprise him to say it: "He just stood there, an old, half-blind old man saying yes sir, no sir and—" Osgood said, "And he frightened the living hell out of all my Chinese officers and he frightened the living hell out of me!"

  "Why?"

  "The silence. He was talking to me, answering my questions, but he—" Osgood said, "You know when you talk to people the silences are—the silences are—the silences aren't part of what—" Osgood said, "I don't know. I can't work it out! You're the third or fourth person I've said I'm six foot two and two hundred pounds to and that I've—" Osgood said, "You know when people talk they say things to hide what they're really thinking in the silences. That was him! That was what he was! He—" Osgood said, "All the time he talked to me, all the time I leaned down to hear him, all the yes sirs and no sirs, all the answers and questions, I heard it! For the first time in my life I heard it in someone—I heard all the silences!" Osgood said, "And . . . and it frightened the shit out of m
e!"

  "What was in the letter? The newspapers said the text wasn't released. It must have been released at the inquest."

  "It was. It was in an envelope addressed to him by his wife. It was left, not in the bedroom or on a table or a desk, but on the veranda." Osgood said, "She must have stood there with it in her hand for a long time and then just dropped it onto the ground before she jumped." Osgood said, "You keep this case, Harry. You do what you want with it. You tear that place to pieces because nothing on earth would get me back in there again!"

  "What did the letter say?"

  "Nothing." Osgood said tightly, "Nothing at all. The envelope was addressed to her husband and sealed, and when we opened it there was a single sheet of paper in it." He fell silent for a moment. "It was blank, Harry. It was the sum total of their lives together, everything she wanted to say to him before she died, all the recriminations and explanations and—" Osgood said, "And it was totally, utterly, one hundred percent blank!. That was their life together. That was what it all came down to. Even at the last, even when she could have said whatever she liked and because she was going to be dead when he read it it would have been listened to as something important, even then it was totally, completely blank!" Osgood said, "And he arrived on a bus to look at what the fall had done to her and he was extremely polite and he tried to speak up so I could hear him without straining." He sounded, at the other end of the line, smaller. Osgood said in an awful, strangled voice, "God, Harry, isn't that the most ghastly thing you've ever heard of in your life?"

  Osgood said, "God . . . God only knows what their life together must have been like—God only knows!"

  He had found it in an old 1898 copy of Stringer's History of Hong Kong. He had found the date the gas lights had been turned on in the city. January the first, 1865. He had also found a dog-eared, hand-drawn little booklet from North Point Division from 1866, a constable's beat book giving all the beats through the streets and the names of all the buildings of importance that had to be checked.

  In his office in Headquarters on Artillery Road, Hurley began going through the pages one by one. The booklet was on rice paper to be carried in the tight uniform of the day and he had to be careful turning the pages. In those days the constables had carried .450 caliber single shot Martini rifles painted with a layer of protective grease against the humidity. On page eighteen— Beat Number Eleven—where the names of the streets were carefully written out in English and Chinese there was a stain from the grease where, at some time, for some reason, the constable who had carried the book had got it out quickly with his rifle in his other hand to find something. The page, like the grease, was old, ancient, from another century.

  He went through the pages, following the streets: Jordan, Watchman's, Ice House, Battery, Kan Su—he found the boundary Yellowthread Street made into Hong Bay—Waterloo, Yuet Loi, Phoenix, Kwong Wah Street, Singapore Road, Singapore Lane. The booklet had everything important listed: shops, private homes, the warehouses and banks, money lenders, public works. He found a single mark on Map 21 as Singapore Lane went north into Hanford Hill Road and then twisted away toward Central in the middle of the island. It looked like an additional mark put in by the man who had carried the rifle.

  It was a single character scribbled in pencil.

  It was the character for Gas. It was to one side of Hanford Hill with an arrow pointing east into Temple Street.

  The booklet had been owned by someone called Constable Chee. He had done it. It was the direction of the gasworks in case of an emergency or a leak.

  In his office, turning the pages two at a time, following the direction of the arrow through all the streets and lanes, Hurley tried to follow the little hand-drawn arrow to its source.

  He lost it. At the end of Singapore Lane, all the sound in the detector stopped and he lost it.

  In front of him where Singapore Lane branched out into Hanford Hill and right into Temple Street, the road had been ripped up to make way for new development. The development was going into the old warehouse area bounded by Wylie Street and the old public square to the east. The area had been condemned. It was an area of old, prewar warehouses and godowns for the spice and silk trade. It was closed off by Department of Main Roads cordons and cement pylons in the middle of the roads to stop traffic.

  The signal had stopped.

  He listened.

  He heard only a humming.

  O'Yee, looking first one way and then the other, into Hanford Hill, Temple Street—down into the empty, rubbish-blowing canyons between the blackened wooden and brick buildings from a century ago—said desperately to Lim at the street map, "Lim?"

  He didn't know. He guessed. Lim said, "Straight ahead into Temple Street!" He listened. He heard the humming. Following O'Yee as he went into the closed-off street, past the gray pylons, into the blowing rubbish and the sudden silence of all the dead buildings, gripping the street map hard in his hand, he heard only the humming.

  It pinged. In the silence, he heard it.

  It pinged. It picked up the metal pipe under the street and it pinged. O'Yee said in triumph, "Got it!" He looked back at Lim.

  He was running, trying to keep pace with O'Yee as he moved faster and faster, following the sound, hearing it get louder and louder.

  Lim shouted above the sound, "Straight ahead! Straight down toward Godown Street!" He had found something on his map. It was not part of the modern map at all, but because it was about to be torn down anyway, an insert from an old original map printed directly onto the modern streets. It showed arrows, lines, symbols. It showed a single faded word in type almost too small to read and a Chinese character overlayed on it from what, surprisingly, looked like an old constable's beat book of the type he himself still used.

  The character read Gas.

  Lim, running, hearing the pinging through the earphones as O'Yee followed it, yelled, "Yes! Straight on!"

  The pinging turned into a single screaming high-pitched note.

  Lim, running with it, yelled, "Go! Go!"

  It was a photograph. It had been hidden in the cutlery drawer, held there by a single tiny square of plastic tape upside down under the paper lining so nobody would find it. In the kitchen, Spencer, holding it out for Auden to see, said curiously, "What is it? It looks like some sort of white rock or cement cut out to make a seat." There was what appeared to be some sort of clinker-built boat behind it. There was a sign on the clinker-built boat in English and Chinese and Urdu and some other language that had come out blurred.

  The sign read, NOAH'S ARK.

  It was a chair.

  It was a family photograph.

  It was a little out of focus, blurred.

  The person sitting in the chair, looking straight into the camera lens, was smiling.

  He found it. It had been on the corner of Shanghai Street and Market Lane. Hong Bay Gas and Light, Station Two.

  It was the substation. It was not the main gas-generating plant at all, but a storage substation that had been built later, probably when the constable had made the arrow. The arrow was to show that there was some possible danger and the direction it might come, or to show that—

  Hong Bay Gas and Light, Station Two.

  It was there.

  It was at the corner of Shanghai Street and Market Lane. It was intact. It had survived the nineteenth century and half of the twentieth and more, it had survived the bombing and the war. Hurley, correlating it with a modern map, said, "Christ!"

  It was there. It was on the modern map. It was listed on his modern police map as warehouses and light engineering businesses due for demolition and redevelopment. It was there.

  He had no way of getting in touch with O'Yee unless he or Lim rang back.

  The phone on his desk was silent.

  Hurley, the maps in his hands, ready, staring hard at the phone, willing it, said as a command, "Ring! Ring!"

  There was something else in the photograph. It was a dog, a Labrador. Curled up to one side
of the chair, gazing up at the person in the chair, it seemed to be contentedly sleeping.

  He thought he saw an Elephant

  That practiced on a fife:

  He looked again, and found it was

  A letter from his wife.

  "At length I realize," he said,

  "The bitterness of life."

  It was in English. It was from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno. It was written in a woman's hand. It was a poem on the back of a photograph that had been hidden.

  It was a photograph of someone sitting in a wishing chair and smiling.

  It was a photograph taken in the Wishing Chair at Yat's.

  Feiffer said suddenly, "When he came by bus, was he carrying an umbrella?"

  Osgood said, "No. Why?"

  Why was because he never went anywhere without it. Why was because she had gone over the edge ten days ago, and, when Osgood or one of his constables had rung him at Quarantine to tell him to come home urgently he had been putting the frogmouth in the van—he had put the umbrella in the van with it ready to drive somewhere—and it had got damaged. Even his damned ghost—if that was what it had been—carried the umbrella. He had come by bus because the frogmouth was flying free in the van. It had got caught up, damaged itself, and one of its feathers had been caught in the closed umbrella, the umbrella that had lain unused until—until— Feiffer said urgently, "What else do you know about him? Anything—anything at all!"

  "All I know is what a pal at Customs told me plus the usual background. He was a part-time contract worker with the destruction section of Quarantine—a law unto himself because evidently the vet there has a weak stomach—"

  Feiffer said, "Hoosier. The vet's name is Hoosier."

  "Is it? I didn't talk to him. And that he was sixty-eight years old and, according to my pal, very fucking taciturn, very fucking silent and—" Osgood drew a breath, "—very fucking weird!" There was a silence on the other end of the line. He wanted more. Osgood said, "From what I gather, from what my pal gathered—"

  Feiffer said, "Charlie, you had your pal look up his personnel file!"