by Ron McMillan
‘Martinmass is gay?’
‘He thinks nobody knows.’
‘The same guy who thinks wearing a dead crow on his head will make him one of the lads.’ I remembered him tugging nervously at his ring finger whenever the camera was pointing his way. ‘He’s married, right?’
‘You almost never see him and his missus in the same room. She’s a pillar of the Chamber of Commerce wives’ scene, does endless conspicuous charity work. She has recently been lobbying for a memorial to Diana in the garden of the Embassy.’
I had enough of this place already.
‘Let’s go somewhere else, get ourselves one for the road, eh?’
Famous last words. Two hours later, I poured myself from a taxi outside the Hyatt and did my best to negotiate the still-crowded hotel lobby with minimum collateral damage to civilians or hotel furnishings. Just another night in Korea. When I lived in Seoul it was like this, too. Dangerously high levels of alcoholic intake on multiple nights of the week. No wonder I loved every minute of it.
I got myself to my room and, switching on the shower full-blast, stripped off clothes that reeked of sweat and stale tobacco smoke. I was drying off when the doorbell rang.
Twice in the last three nights, the lovely Miss Hong had surprised me. Could this be her again? I pulled on a towelling dressing gown and pulled open the door.
A Korean man in a dark suit and a baseball cap pulled low stood in the murk of the corridor.
‘Mr Brodie?’
‘Yes?’
‘For you.’
He thrust a small package in my hand and was gone. No signature required. It was a box about the size of a paperback book with wrapping around it, and it felt chilled, as if recently taken from a refrigerator. I tore at the paper, and immediately recognised a Fuji instant film box like the ones I used. Inside that, something was wrapped in greaseproof paper, smaller and more dense than a sandwich. I carefully unfolded it, and screamed loud enough to shake the curtains.
Vile and glistening and almost alive, the bloody contents fell to the desk blotter with a sickening wet thunk. Miss Hong’s belly button, yin yang tattoo and all.
Chapter Twelve
‘Good morning Mr Brodie, how may I help you? Mr Brodie?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Yessir. Have a nice day.’
It was too late for that. I couldn’t remember picking up the phone, and the programmed chirpiness of the hotel receptionist had slapped me from an awful nightmare into a reality no less dire. The base unit of the telephone was splashed with droplets of dark red that drew fattening trails to the flap of flesh that sat screaming at me from the centre of the desk blotter.
Miss Hong was a beautiful thing. A little heavy on the make-up, but despite their natural beauty, Korean women see no irony in being the world’s biggest consumers of cosmetics. Her expensive clothes were on the showy side, but nothing on the everyday surface of Miss Hong hinted at her profession. She was a stunning young woman. Determined, hard-working, making a success of her talents – and very, very good at her job.
Only when the clothes came off did she shed some of her patina of professional class respectability. Not being a pop star or a gang member, the two tattoos she sported marked Miss Hong indelibly as a sex-industry pawn. One was a tiny flower on her left breast, exaggerated pink and dark reds glowing from flawless olive skin. The other was the Korean flag around her belly button.
The ‘Taegukki’ is bright and cheery and as overused on the streets of Seoul as the Union Jack is in tourist-trodden London. In its centre is a circular yin yang in red/blue on a pure white background, with four black trigrams representing seasons, points of the compass and other worldly elements I could not recall. Koreans love their flag and take every opportunity to fly it or, better still, to wave it. Miss Hong wore it, in a three-colour yin yang tattoo around her belly button. Now it lay on the desk, shrivelled and discoloured, yet unmistakeable in all its hellish detail.
I fished a name card from my wallet and picked up the phone again. After three rings someone answered awkwardly, followed by a thud as the phone at the other end bounced off a hard surface.
‘Yoboseyo.’
‘John Lee? It’s Alec Brodie.’
‘Mr Brodie.’ Long pause. ‘It is two o’clock in the morning. What is wrong?’
I thought about telling him exactly what was wrong, and decided against it.
‘I need you to come to my hotel room.’
‘Can I see you in the mor – ’
‘Mr Chang will be very angry if you don’t come immediately.’
‘Mr Chang? I’m sorry, I do not underst – ’
‘Shikurrup. Pally-waa.’ Shut it. Come quickly.
I put the phone down. He would come. The mention of Chang was enough to guarantee that. I gently placed a sheet of writing paper on top of Miss Hong’s Taegukki and sought solace from the mini bar.
I had polished off the whisky miniatures and was making a dent in the vodka stocks when I heard a quiet knock at the door. I checked the spyhole before opening up. Lee’s face was of the luminescent red that suffuses many Asians when they drink. In London a face so red would make you call the paramedics, but in Seoul at this time of night he didn’t warrant a second glance. Before he spoke I silenced him with a raised hand and let him follow me into the room. I stood by the desk, and with the tips of forefinger and thumb raised the writing paper by its edge. His face blanched instantly.
‘Aigoo jingeruh.’ Disgusting. ‘What is it?’
I raised my tee shirt and with finger and thumb drew a rectangle around my navel. His gaze flicked from my stomach to the desktop and back. I watched realisation dawn, his expression widening in growing horror. His mouth hung open, and he drew a glistening tongue across dry lips.
‘You remember the two business girls from the Japanese restaurant?’
He nodded.
‘When I came back to my room that night, one of them was waiting for me. This,’ I waved the paper at the desk blotter, ‘was hers.’ Lee, hand hard against his face, pivoted and rushed towards the bathroom. I opened another vodka miniature, sat down on the bed, and tried not to listen. Just as I realised that nausea had yet to even affect me, saliva flooded my mouth. I fled in Lee’s footsteps and found him staring blankly at the mirror, hands hard on the edge of the wash hand basin, taps running at full power. I sank with my knees astride the toilet bowl and heaved explosively.
When I returned to the room Lee was reaching for the telephone.
‘Not that line. Use your mobile.’
I had watched the cop shows, and calling Chang from the room phone was not the smart move. Lee nodded, reached into his inside jacket pocket for a late-model Samsung, and hit a speed-dial number. While it connected, he took himself back to the bathroom, and from there I heard him talking urgently in a low voice laden with honorifics.
An hour later when Chang arrived, not a hair out of place, I was leaning back on a mountain of soft pillows, alternating sips of vodka with swallows of icy mineral water. A beer can sat in a pool of condensation on the cabinet beside me. It popped open with an angry hiss that startled Chang and Lee into momentary silence. They looked at me with contempt before going back to their conversation, voices low and speech so fast that I barely caught a word.
I closed my eyes and tried to answer two questions. Who could have done this to Miss Hong and, forchrissakes, why? I thought back to Lee’s face when he realised what lay on the desk, a genuine look of spontaneous horror. Chang seemed much less affected but he was older, more experienced, and from the phone summons, had known what to expect. More importantly, his place in the chain of command dictated the cool exterior. I pried open eyes heavy with the blunt force of alcohol working its way through my system. It was nearly four o’clock in the morning and Lee and Chang were still deep in dialogue. I dozed off to the twin soundtracks of voices murmuring in the room beside me, and others shrieking at me from within my own head.
I awoke to set e
yes upon a small video camera that nestled high in the upper folds of the heavy curtain. It had completely slipped my mind. I buried a look of horror in a bout of fake coughing and covered my face with my hands. Lee sat impassively in a chair at the end of the bed while three men in dark suits and latex gloves tore the room apart. Chang was gone. I sat up and fingered a mystery bruise over my ribs that I had first spotted early the previous morning. Maybe Miss Hong had played rougher than I remembered. I made sure it was covered by my shirt before I sat up. That made two things I hoped would escape their notice.
‘What’s going on?’
Lee rubbed life into his tired face and pointed to one of the three dark suits.
‘This is Detective Kwok. He and I went to high school together; we are old friends.’
Kwok was tall, painfully thin and for a man in his thirties conspicuously bald, with what little that remained of his hair cropped close, a fat black stripe above each pointed ear. His features were angular to the point of jaggedness, and from a dark mole on the edge of his jaw a half-dozen wiry black hairs trailed long.
‘Are you ready to talk?’ He spoke in casual, American-accented English.
I hesitated. He looked impatient.
‘Should I have a lawyer here?’ My tongue had trouble getting around the words.
Kwok pointed at the bloody mess, now ziplocked in a clear evidence bag. ‘Tell me what you know about this.’
My mouth felt like it was coated with animal fur. I raised my hands in a ‘wait a minute’ sign, and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, but everything I owned, toothbrush included, had been bagged and tagged. I rinsed my mouth and drank metallic cold water straight from the tap before returning to where Kwok had set out a seat for me. He leaned against the desk, forcing me to look up at him. Basic interrogation techniques, paragraph one. A notebook and pen appeared in his hands.
‘Three nights ago, on Sunday night, I met two women at dinner with Mr – ’
‘Detective Kwok already knows about that.’
Kwok silenced Lee with an angry glance and waved at me to continue.
‘When I came back to my room, one of the women was waiting for me. Her name was Miss Hong. She had taken the room key from my jacket pocket and let herself in.’
‘So you arrived back at the hotel alone?’
‘Yes. I came in the front entrance at about eleven-thirty. I remember looking at the clocks above the Reception desk.’
‘Did anyone see you with her?’
‘No, I don’t think – wait a minute, yes. There was a security guard.’
I plucked at a memory of Miss Hong opening my room door from inside, wearing only a towelling bathrobe. She waved the whisky miniatures and expressed her breathy welcome just as a deep voice from behind made me jump with fright. A hotel security guard on corridor patrol, smiling indulgently. I related all of this to Kwok.
‘And after you came into the room, what did you do?’
‘What do you think?’
He frowned at the thought. ‘Tell me about the tattoo.’
I explained how Miss Hong liked drinking games, how we ended up licking whisky from each other’s belly button and, since hers was tattooed so distinctly, I wasn’t about to forget it in a hurry.
‘Was there any dispute between you and Miss Hong?’
‘Definitely not. We stayed up most of the night drinking and having sex.’
Kwok seemed to believe at least this much. He doubtless had already talked to the hotel’s housekeeping department. If what happened to Miss Hong had taken place here, no room maid could have failed to notice.
‘When did Miss Hong leave?’
‘When I woke up, she was already gone. I was really drunk, so she could have left anytime.’ I finally grasped what he was getting at. ‘But nothing happened to her that night.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she was here again on Tuesday, the night before last.’
‘You asked her to come here again?’
‘No, she just appeared. I bumped into her in the lobby and she invited herself up.’
‘For more sex?’ He was taking notes as he spoke.
‘When I woke up she was gone again. Same as the first time.’
‘How much did you pay her for the two nights?’
‘What?’
‘She was surely a prostitute. When did you pay her, and how much?’
I knew before I even spoke how stupid I sounded.
‘She didn’t ask for money.’
‘How about the first time?’ He looked at his notepad. ‘Sunday night.’
‘I thought Mr Chang sent her.’
‘You’re a photographer.’
‘Yes.’
‘A professional photographer.’
‘Yes.’
‘How often do you spend days taking photographs for other people, free of charge?’
I shook my head.
‘Is there something so special about you that a prostitute would spend two nights in your bed without cash changing hands?’
‘I never paid her.’
Kwok looked sceptical, and asked about the delivery of the package. I explained that it was very dim in the hotel corridor, and that I didn’t get a good look at the delivery man. I could only remember was that he was Korean and that he wore a dark suit, not a hotel uniform, with a baseball cap pulled low. Kwok spoke softly to one of his colleagues, who stepped out into the corridor. A few seconds later he was back, murmuring in Kwok’s ear. He glanced at me.
‘What?’
‘Light bulbs outside your door have been removed.’ He changed tack:
‘Can you remember anything else about what happened between you and Miss Hong that might help us?’
‘Not really. The obvious thing is right there in the bag.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
My stomach lurched. Maybe he knew.
‘I don’t understand.’
Kwok picked up the clear plastic bag that held the green Fuji instant film box that the package had arrived in.
‘The serial number on this matches the boxes in your camera case.’
Without looking away, he plucked yet more evidence bags from a folder and laid them out in front of me. Ten of them. Ten instant photographs of Miss Hong and a visibly pissed Alec Brodie, naked and in a variety of pornographic poses. One of them showed me holding a whisky miniature and pointing gleefully at her tattooed stomach. We were sitting at the bottom of the bed and she took the photograph by pointing the camera at the mirror. In bedrooms the world over, digital cameras were used to the same ends, but I liked the tactile experience of shooting Polaroids and sharing the wait for the results. We had shot all ten and laughed together at the blurry square frames. Our fingerprints had to be all over the pictures in the evidence bags.
‘Are you aware, Mr Brodie, that in my country the penalty for murder is death?’
I leaned down, hand on forehead, hiding my face and trying to keep their attention on me. I prayed that they didn’t look up.
Chapter Thirteen
When Kwok and his colleagues left I gave them twenty minutes to be sure they were not going to return and, after checking the deserted corridor, slipped back into the room and double-locked the door behind me. From the chairs that flanked the small coffee table it was impossible to credit how lucky I had been when Kwok and his boys failed to spot the little video camera clamped amidst the ruffles at the top edge of the heavy curtain. I had watched, frozen with panic, while one of the juniors pulled back both curtains, gave a cursory glance at the empty window ledge, and roughly tugged the drapes back into place, the overlap almost entirely concealing the camera from view. For two solid hours, I lived in fear of them spotting its lens peeking from within the curtain fabric. Now, it took me twenty seconds to unfasten the little bracket and bring it back down.
I slipped back out to the corridor carrying only a package wrapped in a laundry sack. Two scary minutes of jiggling at a time-worn lock
got me into a chambermaid’s store-room. I leaned back on the door and lit up the bare bulb suspended by a cord from the ceiling. Metal shelving covered three walls, the fourth taken up by a long stainless counter and double sink. High in one corner looked good, a pile of linen tied in neat bundles, still in fine condition, but in the pampered world of the deluxe hotel, already too well-used for a spoiled clientele. I worked my package deep within the folds of towels coated in dust that looked undisturbed in months.
Pre-dawn in a five-star hotel lobby is a setting I have often enjoyed, whether sitting half-pissed and sucking on an ill-advised nightcap, or ahead of an early morning flight, perking up my senses with caffeine.
I lounged close to horizontal in the plush armchair, cup and saucer on my chest. Six o’clock in the morning and sleep was the last thing on my mind. A low table supported my feet and beside them sat a large pot of strong coffee. Enough of that and I might out-run the cloud of fatigue that threatened to smother me like a heavy blanket.
The cathedral-sized lobby hummed with the muted din from an electric floor polisher swung around by a cleaner in a dark green boiler suit ironed so lovingly it had knife-edge creases down the sides of the arms and legs. Waxy doughnuts passed in sweeping arcs from polishing pad to marble floor, bringing it to a sparkling state worthy of the big-bucks customers upstairs. Guests whose heads had yet to stir from over-sized feather pillows.
Down below them, my head was a mess. Arriving in Seoul four nights ago felt like a homecoming, but right now, I never felt further from home.
Being allowed to sit here was confusing enough. A short while ago, when I thought I could be facing months behind bars while Korean justice sat locked in the mire of bureaucracy, Detective Kwok only advised me to ‘stay close to the hotel’. They took my passport, but they didn’t even fingerprint me, and I couldn’t work out why I was getting the kid-gloves treatment. Maybe it was all down to the power of Chang’s money. With K-N Group on the verge of an investment drive that might pluck the entire corporation out of the debt fire, the last thing Chang needed was bad publicity. Dining out with a whore who wound up mutilated after spending a couple of nights screwing his contractor would not be great PR. If so, I hoped he could keep this under wraps until the real murderer was found. Wrapped up in that thought was the assumption that Chang already knew I didn’t kill Miss Hong. This in turn might mean something else: that he knew who did.