The Master of Rain

by Tom Bradby

  Lu shook his head curtly, as if dismissing something that Hayek had said, and broke away. Natasha stayed by his side. Field watched as Lu raised his arm to allow her to place her own within it. She was so much taller than him that the effect was both ridiculous and grotesque.

  Field fought back a wave of revulsion. He wiped his forehead and forced himself to walk slowly down the stairs.

  Penelope waited at the bottom, fumbling in her purse for some cigarettes. She took one out and offered him the lighter. “You want one?” she asked as he lit it for her.

  “No thanks.”

  She was drunk now, but so was he. Drunk and disoriented and angry.

  A car pulled up and she led the way out to it. As he climbed in after her, Field could not help looking up toward the Happy Times block. There was still a light on in Natasha’s apartment. Would Lu go up there later?

  Penelope placed a hand on his leg. “Be a dear and open your window.”

  Field sat up straighter, trying to prompt her to take away her hand, before leaning forward to do as she had asked.

  She slipped off her shoes, swept her feet around and placed them on his lap. She smiled at him. “Be a love. They get so sore dancing.”

  Field found himself taking two of her toes between his fingers and massaging them gently before moving down to the base of her foot. The skin was soft, her nails neatly painted. She leaned back and groaned. “Dancing in those shoes is bloody agony.”

  Penelope’s head was on the armrest beneath the window, her eyes shut, as she slid her other foot against his groin. Field tried to push himself farther back into the seat.

  As they pulled up outside the house in Crane Road, Penelope picked up her shoes. “Come on.”

  “I’m bushed. I think I’ll—”

  “Don’t be silly. Geoffrey will be very disappointed not to see you.”

  Field hesitated for a second before stepping out after her. The number one boy opened the door as they climbed the steps of the veranda.

  “Let me take your jacket,” she said.

  “No, I’m . . .”

  “Come on, Richard. You’ve been boiling all night.”

  Field handed it to Penelope, who gave it to the servant. “Is the master in?” she asked, but he shook his head.

  Penelope was already walking through to the sitting room, but Field hesitated again, looking first at the front door, which had been shut, and then at his jacket, which was being taken through to the cloakroom.

  “Penelope.”

  She didn’t answer. He followed her obediently through to the living room. He stood between a grandfather clock and an antique teak desk, beneath thick oil paintings of the English countryside, not dissimilar to those at the country club.

  She had poured him a drink.

  “You know, I don’t want to be a bore . . .”

  “You are being a bore.”

  “I have a very early start.”

  “But you’re young and fit and Geoffrey will be furious with me if you are not here when he gets back.”

  Field looked down at his glass. She drank, but he couldn’t face any more whiskey. Through the haze of his own inebriation, he had the feeling that she was nervous.

  “Come.” She took his glass and placed it with her own on a low Chinese table before grabbing his hand and leading him toward the door to the hallway. “You’ve got to see our greatest treasure.” He resisted at first, then once again found himself following her, this time out into the hall and up the stairs. “It’s a giant gold Buddha,” she said, and as soon as he entered the room, he saw it beside the bed.

  She turned to him. “What do you think?”

  “It’s magnificent,” he said without enthusiasm.

  “Would you hold on a minute?”

  She stepped into the bathroom, slipped her dress from her shoulders, and stepped out of it as it fell to the floor.

  She was wearing a white garter belt and stockings, but no underwear, the patch of dark hair at the base of her belly smaller and neater than he’d imagined, her breasts rounder and more upright than they’d seemed when she’d leaned toward him at the club.

  She reached behind the door for a long silk dressing gown. She wrapped it around herself and looked up, catching his eye. He realized she had known he was watching.

  “Richard . . .”

  “I’m going to go now.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you for a pleasant evening.”

  “Richard, you can kiss me good night.”

  He didn’t move.

  “I’m not that unappealing, am I?”

  She walked over to him, flicking his lapel with one long finger, as Natasha had done two nights before. She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Are you in love, Richard?”

  He didn’t answer, his face burning.

  “I sense a man in love, Richard. Isn’t that so?”

  He stepped back. “I don’t know,” he said, turning to go.

  “Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I disgust you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then your haste does you a disservice.”

  “You are my uncle’s wife.”

  “And you’re ashamed of me?”

  Field sighed deeply.

  “Your uncle hasn’t fucked me for years. Did you know that?”

  Field turned away again and walked down the stairs.

  “Good night, Richard.”

  Twenty-two

  The car pulled up in front of the station in Little Russia. Field watched through the window for a moment as three priests, with long black beards and metal crucifixes, crossed Avenue Joffre and walked slowly in the direction of the Russian church. They passed a small group of Chinese children begging, without a glance.

  He asked the driver to wait and got out of the car. He stretched, every muscle in his body aching after his exertions on the rugby pitch the previous afternoon.

  The police station stood between, but twenty yards back from, two rows of shops. On one side was a tailor’s, on the other another fur shop. Sergei’s apartment was not more than a hundred yards away.

  Inside, the station felt almost like a gentleman’s club. A wide hallway was filled with tropical plants, their leaves swaying gently under the ceiling fans. A Vietnamese constable in a clean, freshly pressed uniform stood behind the front desk. Field introduced himself, produced his identification, and waited while the constable went to find the officer in charge.

  He tried to control his impatience.

  The lieutenant was like a caricature of the colonial Frenchman. He was almost as tall as Field and wore jodhpurs, riding boots, and an open-necked, loose-fitting white cotton shirt, which emphasized the depth of his suntan. His hair was dark, his nose big and broken. His posture and easy manner reminded Field of Lewis. “I am Givreaux,” he said, his handshake firm.

  “Field, S.1.”

  “How can I help you, Mr. Field?”

  “I’m trying to trace the whereabouts of an Igor Mentov, whom we believe used to live on Avenue Joffre.”

  Givreaux shrugged. “I don’t know him.” He spoke with only a slight accent, but “him” was still clipped.

  “We think he was here for only a short period, but our understanding is that he was arrested for an offense, possibly a minor one, at this station on or around May 1.”

  Givreaux shook his head and exhaled noisily. “More than a month ago . . . I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Would it be possible to look through the incident reports for that day?”

  “It is necessary for you to liaise with our intelligence section. They will fill out the papers, come down with you.”

  “My secretary has prepared the paperwork. I understand it will be on its way today, but our intelligence is that this man is going to board the train for Harbin tonight. Time is running out for us.”

  Givreaux looked less sure. “How will it help to look at an old—” />
  “It’s about being sure of who he is and what he’s been up to before we close in. He is part of a conspiracy.”

  Givreaux pursed his lips. “I will have to call them.”

  “Of course.”

  “Please have a seat.”

  Field sat in the rattan chair beneath one of the fans, enjoying the flow of cool air. He crossed his legs and lit a cigarette, glad to be out of the office. The question of the fingerprint file gnawed away at him. He heard Granger’s voice in his head: “It’s a time for knowing who your friends are.”

  Givreaux came back into the room, his leather boots echoing on the old wooden floorboards. “All the officers are out,” he said. “I should make you wait, but . . .” He seemed to make a decision. “It is not such a big deal,” he said, mostly to himself. “The constable will go down with you. Put your head around the door when you are finished.”

  The constable was a young man with an open, friendly face. He led Field down a corridor behind the counter to a big airy room at the end of the building. Every available inch of wall space was filled with wooden box files.

  “What date?” the constable asked.

  “Let’s start with May 1.”

  The man fetched a stepladder from the far end of the room and placed it in the middle of the section directly ahead of them. He climbed up and removed one of the file boxes, which he placed on a low wooden desk.

  Field sat down. For a few moments the man stood uneasily beside him, then he walked quietly away to the window. Field began to leaf through the cards. He found May 1 and worked quickly through it, but the incident reports were restricted to assault, robbery, and lesser offenses. There was no reference to the murder he had read about in the newspaper.

  Field went back and looked through the cards again. Most of the reports had been filled out by a Detective Constable Ngoc and countersigned by a Detective Sergeant Pudowski. There had been two armed robberies on May 1, one in the morning at a fur shop on Avenue Joffre, another at a jeweler’s on Rue des Colonies, both by two masked men carrying machine guns. There was an assault on a Vietnamese driver in the French Park and an incident in which a woman’s handbag had been snatched. Field counted the cards. There were fourteen in all. Not one even hinted at what he was looking for.

  He began to work backward. There were only five incidents on April 30, all written up by Ngoc, none of them serious.

  “Would you like some tea, sir?” The constable was smiling at him. He did not appear suspicious.

  “Yes, please. Lemon, no sugar.” Field listened to his retreating footsteps. “Constable . . .” He waited until the man had turned. “If an incident occurred within this area, there would always be a report?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Even if it were, for the sake of argument, a serious crime, say a murder, and the call had gone first to headquarters on Rue Wagner, you would file a report, because it occurred in your area.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In all circumstances?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Field smiled and turned back to the box, suddenly less confident that this process was going to lead anywhere. If the headquarters staff wanted something hushed up, he thought it likely they would instruct Givreaux’s men not to attend the scene of the crime, in which case it would be well nigh impossible to file a report, even if they had wished to.

  He worked back all the way to April 4, which was where the box started. Most days, there were only a few incidents. May 1 turned out to have been exceptionally busy.

  The constable brought him tea and he sipped it slowly and ate the biscuits that had come with it.

  There didn’t seem much else that he could usefully do.

  He leaned forward to look through the cards for May 1 one more time, going extremely slowly, so as to pick up anything he might have missed. After flicking through five or six, he noticed that there was one missing.

  Each card was coded, the serial number written in black ink at the top left-hand corner. Here the cards jumped from F6714 to F6716.

  He looked carefully through the whole box to be sure that it had not been filed wrongly, somewhere else.

  “Constable . . .” Field leaned back and put his hands in his pockets. “In the Settlement, all incidents have to be first noted in the incident book, usually by the duty sergeant, before an incident report is written up and filed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s the same here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you mind showing me the incident book for May 1?”

  The constable nodded and left the room, walking briskly down the corridor. He was gone for perhaps ten minutes and Field began to think he might have consulted Givreaux about this new request, but when he returned, he apologized for the delay and explained that one of the detectives had been noting down the details of a domestic dispute he’d attended.

  Field took the book.

  He flicked through the pages, his pulse quickening.

  It was there, in Ngoc’s neat flowing hand: Incident number F6715. Body of woman found stabbed, Avenue Joffre. Natalya Simonov.

  There were no further details, nor was there a house or apartment number. Avenue Joffre stretched the entire length of the French Concession, so door-to-door inquiries were likely to prove time-consuming and possibly fruitless. Field assumed that, somewhere, there must be a file on the case.

  He turned around again. “You would keep files here on important cases or individuals?”

  “No, sir. Rue Wagner.”

  “They’re all kept at headquarters?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There are none here at all?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So what happens if you want to look at a file? Do you have to go down to Rue Wagner?”

  “A car delivers the file in the morning and takes it back in the evening, sir. Or we can go down if there is a hurry.”

  Field nodded and smiled, turning something over in his mind. He held out the incident book. “Do you remember this case—Simonov? Do you remember the address or section of . . .”

  The constable looked at the entry and shook his head, but his smile vanished.

  Field turned the book around and began to leaf through its pages. He worked forward but nothing caught his eye, so he went to the Simonov entry and worked back to the beginning.

  He reached March 31, where the book began.

  F6222, an entry read. Body of a woman found stabbed. Avenue Joffre. Ignatiev, Irina. Field closed the book carefully and put it on top of the box. “Thank you.”

  He walked briskly down the corridor and was about to continue through the hall, but he changed his mind at the last minute and turned right, into Givreaux’s office.

  “Success?” the Frenchman asked. He stood and moved to the side of his big teak desk. It was covered in paperwork, held in place by a series of crocodile-skin weights.

  “In a sense, yes.” Field cleared his throat. His instincts were to leave it at that, but he could not resist pushing further. “Do you remember the Simonov case?”

  The lieutenant was unfazed, responding with an indolent shake of the head.

  Field persisted. “Natalya Simonov, Russian girl stabbed more than a month ago.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “It was dealt with by CID at Rue Wagner?”

  “Probably.”

  “I imagine it is quiet here, relatively speaking.”

  “Depends on what you mean by quiet.”

  “You get a lot of murders?”

  Givreaux was staring at him, now understanding the drift of his questions. “Not a lot, no.” He moved closer. “I forgot your name. You are Richard . . .”

  “Field.”

  “Field, yes.” Givreaux’s gaze was level.

  “What about Irina Ignatiev?”

  Givreaux’s brow creased, as if he were trying to recall the name.

  “Her body was also found on Avenue Joffre, on March 31—
two and a half months ago.”

  Givreaux shrugged.

  “Also dealt with by Rue Wagner?”

  “Sure. It was . . . I remember now. It turned out to be a domestic, I think. Why, are you—”

  “Is Constable Ngoc around?”

  “Ngoc?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He made a note of the incident here.”

  Givreaux nodded. “It was CID who attended.”

  “Is there any chance I could have a word with Constable Ngoc?”

  “He will not be in today.” Givreaux showed Field to the door. “I’m sorry not to have been more help.”

  Twenty-three

  Field instructed his driver to take him down to the Customs House on the Bund. It was still overcast and the light drizzle left him again with wet feet, so he took the stairs to the seventh floor in an attempt to stamp out the water. As he climbed, he looked down toward the neat public gardens next to Garden Bridge.

  The immigration room was small and crowded. It smelled of damp from too many raincoats and umbrellas. Field strode over to the counter in the far corner and interrupted the woman behind the grille as he produced his card. “I’m afraid I need some assistance.”

  An older woman in a black cardigan turned around and stepped forward to examine his ID before moving to unlock the partition door. She ushered Field into a back room.

  “I’m correct in thinking that everyone who arrives in the city has to register with you here?” Field shook his foot to try and get rid of the last of the water.

  “In theory, yes. As you know, not everyone does.”

  “But Russians have never been refused entry, so there would be no point in trying to come in illegally.”

  “Less bureaucracy.”

  “But life is difficult without identification papers,” Field persisted, thinking of the hours he’d spent here filling out the necessary forms.