She laughed defensively.
“You have the wrong person, dear. Jennifer is alive and well, thank you. You must have just missed her, in fact.”
“She came to visit?”
“Just now.”
“Mrs. Fong, from what I can gather, Jennifer’s body was found at sea. Quite far out, in fact. Did she know anybody who owned a boat? A boyfriend, perhaps?”
Please let me hear. Those words of love from you.
Mary Fong chuckled and looked at him over her sunglasses. Her eyes were pink and watery.
“Jennifer is a good girl. She wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
“As far as I know, the authorities labeled it as death by misadventure, possible suicide. Was she acting any differently at the time of her death? Were you ever worried? Did she seem unhappy?”
Mary Fong looked away and pulled the blankets tighter around her frail body.
“Jennifer is a good girl.”
“I’m sorry to ask you, Mrs. Fong, but I really need to be sure about what happened.”
She frowned slightly.
“I’m sorry you’ve come such a long way. But I think you have the wrong person. I’m really very tired, my memory isn’t…”
Iwata stood up and straightened his legs. He took a chair from a nearby garden table.
“Do you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Fong?”
“That’s fine. Tell me, have the cherry blossoms arrived in Beppu?”
Iwata puffed out smoke.
“Beppu?” The cigarette bounced on his lips.
“Such a wonderful place for a honeymoon. How is the weather there at the moment?”
“I don’t know. But it’s too early in Tokyo for cherry blossoms.”
“Ah, Tokyo.” She inhaled with pleasure as though she were walking through Yoyogi Park at this very moment, sniffing the blossom-rich air.
“You know Tokyo, don’t you? Did you visit Mina there?”
“She’s such a beautiful child. She wants to become an actress when she leaves school, can you imagine?”
Iwata smoked in silence for a while, then stubbed out his cigarette. The clouds were darkening as they settled over Hong Kong. He checked his watch.
“I worry for that girl sometimes.” The old woman sighed. “She never visits me, you know.”
“Do the names Yuko and Terai Ohba mean anything to you?”
“I’ve never heard those names.”
“What about a family by the name of Kaneshiro?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Fong.”
“Good-bye, darling. Tell Jennifer that I need my hair cut, if you would.”
Iwata stood and left Mary Fong to her memories.
Outside the hospital, Mr. Lee was waiting on the steps, watching the rain.
“Was she any help?”
“Unfortunately not.”
The lawyer reached into his inside pocket and produced a pair of keys.
“The address is on the tag.”
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Lee.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, Inspector.”
Iwata started down the hill, heading for the seafront.
* * *
As the ferry chugged across the bay, Iwata ate rice balls and watched the waves. He could tell his cold would get worse before it got better.
After docking, he explored Discovery Bay—an upmarket, seahorse-shaped residential development built at the foot of the green hills that rose out of the ocean. He walked past modern apartment complexes, luxury villas, expensive restaurants, and various social clubs, all of them requiring membership. At this hour, the only pedestrians were new mothers pushing two-month-salary prams and elderly couples dressed for tennis.
After the better part of an hour, Iwata finally found Mrs. Fong’s apartment building. It was a concrete afterthought at the end of the bay. He took the elevator to the top floor, unlocked number 912, and was immediately hit with the smell of dead flowers. He took in gold mirrors, motionless wind chimes, and faded ink drawings of birds. To the right, he saw Mrs. Fong’s room and the bathroom—to the left, the girls’ rooms.
Mina’s room was spacious, the orange walls adorned with stickers, sea shells spelling out her name. The window looked out to the sea. A white vanity unit stood beneath it. Her walls were a patchwork of magazine cuttings and teenage torsos. Iwata spent the next hour searching her room but he could turn up nothing more than the components of a life that Mina had left behind. Her hiding places contained nothing of interest, the wardrobe contained only clothes. There was nothing in this room that Iwata could match to her new life in Japan.
At her desk, he read through good grades that had steadily declined and report cards that spoke of a natural intelligence marred by a waspish attitude. He pictured her seated before her teacher on parents’ evening, her mother next to her, exhausted from working long-haul flights, solemnly nodding at the teacher’s words.
If Mina applied herself, she could study anywhere in the world—it’s all ahead of her.
But Iwata knew how the story had ended. At eighteen, she would drop out from the London School of Economics to pursue modeling work in Tokyo. Celebrity and wealth would find her. As would loneliness and barbiturates. Finally, she would be murdered in her own apartment.
Aching and tired, Iwata took another decongestant and swallowed it with tap water from the bathroom. He opened the door to Jennifer’s room, a much smaller space with lilac walls. The color was either Jennifer’s favorite, or a stand against the tyranny of the younger sister’s bright orange. There was a single Bon Iver poster. An almost life-sized stuffed toy dog had been dry-cleaned and shoved in a clear plastic bag in the corner. He pictured Jennifer and the dog together, her tears and secrets fed into the dog’s neck down the years, its eyes glassy, its smile permanent.
Iwata sat on Jennifer’s bed and took out his ferry schedule. He calculated that Mina and Jennifer would have had to have woken up at 5:30 A.M. each day to catch the ferry in time for the school bus. He already knew that their father had kept up regular payments. But Mrs. Fong’s salary from Cathay Pacific had always been meager and after school fees and rent, life would have rarely been anything other than tough down the years.
Iwata started to search the room—rifling through drawers, looking under the bed, and unfolding folded clothes. He found nothing. Her mattress concealed only a forgotten receipt for an inexpensive summer dress. Inside the speakers of her music player were only wires. Her books contained only pages. He felt behind the mirror but touched only glass.
Then he opened her underwear drawer and there, under folded socks, he saw diaries. Jennifer Fong had filled out five large, thick journals through her short life, all of them kept together. The entries were not dated but were all in English. Iwata spent the next two hours ingesting the dead girl’s hopes and fears. Her confessions of lust and hatred.
As a child, everyone had said how pretty Jennifer was. As she grew taller and larger, the compliments passed down to Mina. Jennifer frequently worried about her figure. She was taller than all of her friends and had a thick waist and large breasts. Her clothes no longer fitted her and she concluded she must be fat. Her relationship with her friends was a complicated one. Occasionally, she would pour out her love for them on the page, hoping that their bond would be a lifelong one. But she regarded them, more frequently, as an ancillary commitment in her life, an inconvenience that she did not particularly care for. She was, however, very close to her sister and her mother, though they often argued.
As Jennifer got older, most of her friends started relationships, but whenever she met a boy she liked, she felt too unattractive to initiate one. At sixteen, on a school trip, an English boy named Neil began talking to her. He repeatedly told her how beautiful she was. He was skinny, shorter than her, with braces and clumsy facial expressions. But nobody had ever shown an interest before. When he asked to meet her the next day, she agreed.
<
br /> He walked her around the city aimlessly for three hours before eventually taking her to the beach. The sky was battleship gray, and in the distance a storm was building. Sitting in the damp sand, they shared a can of Coke without saying anything. When it was gone, Neil kissed her. As she tasted the metallic sugar of his saliva, she knew this wasn’t what she wanted.
On the way home, she cried without knowing why. When Jennifer told her friends, they made such a fuss over her that she began to feel her life was, at the least, becoming more interesting. She began to feel important things were going to happen to her soon. She stopped wearing glasses and went on the pill. She did not speak to Neil again for several years, though they seemed to rekindle a strong friendship later on.
Teachers always liked Jennifer, perhaps because her younger sister had been prone to tantrums. In contrast, while Jennifer did not display the same academic potential, she was friendly and likeable. In fact, the only detectable animosity in any of her journals was toward her Japanese father—Shoei Nakashino.
Mina and her father would often tease Jennifer. They would call her “Baby Elephant” in Japanese, then stomp around the room with imaginary trunks, knocking things over. It was one of the few “games” he seemed to enjoy with them. Jennifer would never let her tears spill until later.
If he took his girls to the beach, he would watch from a distance, dressed in a full suit, tie slightly loosened, the only casual thing about him being a baseball cap to protect his balding scalp. Jennifer would call for him to join them in the water, but he would pretend not to notice over his newspaper.
Iwata flipped ahead in her life, well into adolescence.
Father has been in touch. He’ll be visiting for two days, and he wants me to book a table for our “usual” meal for three. He uses the word “usual,” though this actually means annual. I suggested inviting Mum, but of course he found this ridiculous. I really don’t see the point anymore. His dinners require two or three cancellations beforehand, and when they finally do come around, he just half-listens and checks his watch the whole time. Not that he looks me in the eye anymore. The second I sprouted breasts, he stopped looking me in the eye. Maybe he thinks I’m no longer a little girl, and his work as a father is done?
Shoei Nakashino died two weeks shy of his fifty-sixth birthday, a perfunctory heart attack in the London office of a nappy conglomerate. Jennifer, Mina, and Mary Fong had attended the funeral and were summarily ignored by Nakashino’s second family.
In her diary, Jennifer’s musings on death were short and sad. It was hard for her to see how she could wait a full year until university began. She was desperate for something or someone to come along.
And as the diary entries came to an end, it seemed as if someone had.
Between the pages, she had kept cinema tickets and a dried Chinese hibiscus petal. Beneath it, the simple words:
I’VE NEVER MET ANYONE LIKE HIM.
No introduction, no explanation, no outpouring of first love. Just that statement. Iwata went back to the start and read through a second time but could find no other mentions of “him.”
Checking his watch, Iwata returned the journals to their nest and squinted at the photographs around the frame of the mirror. Most were of Mary and Mina, who were both naturally photogenic. There was only a single photograph of Jennifer, sitting on the beach, shielding her eyes from the sunset. Her hair was wet from the ocean and the muscles in her arm were captured clearly in the orange light.
Iwata knew Jennifer was a good swimmer—she had letters from the beach authority thanking her for her lifeguard volunteering.
I LOVE THE OCEAN. IT’S THE ONLY THING I’LL MISS NEXT YEAR.
Next year had come and gone.
Iwata sat at her desk and opened her school yearbook. He scanned the faces and names, wondering who might have known Jennifer, who might have hated her, or loved her from afar.
Cross-referencing with Jennifer’s journal, he recognized only three names in the yearbook:
Kelly Ho
Susan Cheung
Neil Markham
Shutting the yearbook, Iwata ran his finger across the gold leaf address.
CHAPTER 19: IF THERE IS A HIM
IN THE TAXI, IWATA ACCEPTED roaming charges and looked up the school Web site. North Point International School was approaching its thirtieth year with a fifteen hundred–strong student body and a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:9. Annual fees for reception students were fifteen thousand five hundred dollars, while years seven to eleven ran at twenty-four thousand dollars. The headmaster was a Swiss national with a Ph.D. in economics and extensive experience in educational management across Europe, the United States, and Asia.
The street leading up to the school was lined with eucalyptus trees. Chauffeurs clustered together under umbrellas, smoking and laughing. When their designated child emerged, they hastily stubbed out their cigarettes and fixed their smiles.
The taxi pulled up at the bottom of the road and Iwata watched the last of the day’s students drain out of the doors. There were no rebellious haircuts, facial piercings, or kissing couples.
Closing his eyes, Iwata saw a big building with tall windows in the middle of an empty field.
You must be very tired, Kosuke.
Feeling a nauseating twist in his gut, he shook off the memory. He paid the driver, climbed the steps, and showed his TMPD credentials to the security guard.
Inside, the empty corridors smelled faintly of feet and linoleum. The school looked nothing like Sakuza Orphanage but the smell was a perfect echo. Iwata consulted the floor plan and took the elevator to the top floor. At the end of the corridor, he knocked on a door with a brass plaque:
DR. GUILLAUME ROSSETTI
A doughy, balding man wearing rimless spectacles opened the door. He wore a tan suit with a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and a single gold ring. He had freckles over his nose and a curious look on his face. Iwata held up his ID once again.
“Doctor Rossetti? I’m Inspector Iwata, Tokyo Metropolitan Police. I was wondering if I could take a moment of your time.”
“Oh. Come in.”
The floor-to-ceiling window framed Hong Kong and its jade waters like a canvas. Iwata sat in an expensive brown leather chair before a Murano glass bureau.
“Well, you have come a long way. I presume you’re not here to make inquiries about enrollment?”
His chuckle was a cloying peal.
“I’m here about two former students. Mina and Jennifer Fong.”
“Ah, of course.” Rossetti’s smile faded. “We were very sorry to learn of what happened. What a terrible episode. You’re investigating?”
Iwata nodded noncommittally.
“Doctor Rossetti, do you know if Jennifer was having a relationship of any kind while she was a student here?”
“Jennifer? No, I never heard of anything like that.”
Rossetti plucked delicately at his chin as if it were a small fruit.
“Was there anything that stood out about her?”
“To be honest, Inspector…”
“Iwata.”
“Iwata, what does that mean by the way?”
“Stony rice paddy. You were saying…”
“To be honest, Jennifer always seemed the timid type. I wouldn’t put her with that sort of thing.”
“Doctor Rossetti, I’m going to need the contact details for three former students.”
“That wouldn’t be a problem but I was actually just on the way out. Would it be possible to send you the information tomorrow or—”
“I won’t be here for long, sir. I’d appreciate those details right away. The first name is Susan Cheung.”
Rossetti exhaled and went over to a large, gray cabinet. “You may be in luck, we try and keep our records up-to-date as we host various reunions and fund-raising events with old students. Now, let me see. Susan Cheung. Bit of a handful, if I remember correctly. Here she is … No, all I have is an old address for her, bu
t our last mailing was returned undelivered, I’m afraid. Looks like she moved.”
“And what about Kelly Ho?”
“Ah yes, Kelly. Now that’s a name I know well. She worked here for a year.”
“She’s a teacher?”
“That’s right. Well, for a time.”
“Why did she leave?”
Rossetti shifted with mild embarrassment.
“Ms. Ho was a perfectly good teacher. But she met her husband and then, well, you know how these things are. Now what was that last name?”
“Neil Markham.”
Rossetti looked up from the files.
“Is this to do with what’s been in the papers?”
“I don’t know anything about Neil Markham and the papers.”
“If you say so.”
Rossetti sat back down, wrote two addresses on his notepad, and ripped off the page like a prescription.
“That first one is for Kelly Ho. The second is for Neil Markham. When you see them, please extend my regards.”
Iwata stood and gave a lackluster bow.
* * *
The taxi stopped outside a handsome gated community with high white walls and metal railings. Iwata sneezed and dabbed at his streaming eyes with a tissue as he passed palm trees and perfectly green lawns. It was as though a small, wealthy village had been constructed on top of a golf range. Kidney-shaped pools were still and dark. Statues of lions made from faux marble stood guard outside doors. Except for the distant droning of aircraft and a yapping dog, the community was silent.
Iwata glanced at his watch as he walked past identical houses; it was 7 P.M. He stopped outside number 14 and pressed the bell. A short woman with a soft but tired face answered the door. Kelly Ho was halfway through adjusting an earring and her makeup looked hastily applied. Her lips glistened and her hair was expensively styled, but there was a pink rawness beneath her eyes and the smell of baby milk about her.
“Please come in, Inspector.”
“Sorry I couldn’t give much warning.”
“Not at all. Come through.”
The dark wood floors gleamed and practically every surface held fresh flowers. Lamps cast a mellow light. She gestured for Iwata to sit on the large white sofa laden with cushions. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History lay open on the coffee table. A baby monitor blinked in the corner.
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