by Nina Jon
Flat 1: J.M. Durham
Flat 2: John Watch
Flat 3: Mr & Mrs Jenson
Flat 4: Jude Chambers
Flat 5: N.C.N.
Flat 6: ——
This house was kept in quite a good standard of repair, as was the house beside it and the house beside that, but the fourth house in the row was very run-down compared to its smarter neighbours. When she reached it, Jane looked into its cluttered kitchen through a dirty, cracked window. Crockery, both washed and unwashed, was piled up in and around the sink. Rubbish was overflowing from a bin on the floor and from what Jane could make out, the oven was in need of a good clean. Jane always derived a sense of satisfaction from a gleaming house and wondered how it would look were she to break into the house and tidy up?
She studied the nameplate – if Mr Kim was living in this house (which she hoped he wasn’t) – then he must be doing so under a British-sounding name, because neither his name, nor the name Sim, nor any names similar, was listed as being a resident. Jane moved to the next house. It was in no better condition than its neighbour. Its windows were so filthy that it was impossible to see in or out of them. Paint was peeling off the windowsills and the front door.
A young woman was sitting on its doorstep, rolling a cigarette. She was dressed in a wrap-around skirt, and her hennaed hair was tied back with a scarf. She lit up the roll-up and inhaled a couple of times, before her cigarette went out. She realised Jane was watching her.
“Can I help you, love?” she asked, re-lighting her cigarette.
“Maybe you can,” Jane replied. “I’m trying to find a friend of mine. He lives in one of these flats, but unfortunately I’ve lost his address. He’s Korean, about the same height and age as I am and his name is Mr Kim. Mr Kim Moo-Hyun, but sometimes he uses the name Sim. It’s possible he may be using yet another name.”
“Sorry, love, but can’t say I’ve seen anyone like that around here.”
“Ah, well,” Jane said. “He may have moved. Possibly I could give you my telephone number and if you were to come across someone who meets his description, you could give me a call?”
“Sure,” the girl said, re-lighting her cigarette for the third time.
Jane glanced across the road towards Jack. He was so young and fast that he had covered all the houses on his side of the street. He looked over at Jane and shrugged, as though to say,
“Nothing so far.”
He checked the road for oncoming traffic and, when it was safe to do so, he crossed the road and began checking those houses on Jane’s side of the street that she had not yet reached. He began at the end of the street furthest away from where Jane stood and made his way up it, house by house. She, meanwhile, continued down the street, checking the names of the houses’ residents as she went, until they met in the middle of the pavement.
“Any luck?” Jack asked.
“No, nothing,” Jane said. “He’s either moved or he’s living under a false name.”
“Hm!” Jack said his hands on his hips. “These Orientals are so fiendishly cunning. Can we go home, Jane? I’m famished and Charity’s making spag-bol for our dinner.”
Had she been alone, Jane would have staked out the road, in case Mr Kim appeared, but as she was with young Jack, she knew she’d have to go home – but she’d return to Leve Street first thing in the morning.
II
To her astonishment, Jane received the good luck she’d told Jack they needed, in the form of a late evening telephone call later the same day. The call was from the young woman Jane had come across smoking roll-ups outside the house on Leve Street, earlier on that day.
“I think I may have found your gentleman friend,” the young woman explained. “I put your card up on the notice board in the kitchen and one of the other girls asked who you were, so I said you were looking for your friend, and described him. She thought she knew him. She works as a waitress, and every day a Chinaman has breakfast at her café. I said your friend was Korean, but to be honest, neither of us would be able to tell the difference…” she said, adding, “…he sort of fits the description.”
Jane took the café’s address. It opened at eight o’clock and at half past seven, Jane parked across the street from it. Exactly half an hour after the café opened, the man she’d seen at the wheel of the car strolled passed her car and into the café. Now she was closer to him she was certain it was Mr Kim Moo-Hyun, albeit in disguise (an ill fitting wig, giving him shoulder-length hair, a moustache (probably natural) and raised shoes making him taller than his natural five foot five.) Jane gave him enough time to order his breakfast before following him into the café. Mr Kim was sitting at a corner table with a cup of tea in front of him. When he looked up and discovered his former near-neighbour standing by his table, he appeared neither nonplussed nor unnerved, in fact quite the opposite. He looked relieved.
“My dear Mrs Hetherington,” he said, in a strong Korean accent, his face breaking into a large smile. “Please do join me.” He got to his feet and pulled a chair out for her. “I’ve developed a bad habit of eating English Scotch pancakes for my breakfast,” he announced almost naughtily. “Would you like me to order some for you?”
She declined, but she did share his pot of tea with him. She explained that she’d thought she’d driven past him the evening before, but hadn’t been sure and had wanted to check it out before she said anything. “So I put on my sleuthing hat.”
“You wonder why I am here, Mrs Hetherington. Why I leave my family?” Mr Kim said.
“Only if you wish to tell me.”
“I love my family and I miss them. How are they?” he asked. Behind his glasses, his eyes filled with tears.
“They need you back Mr Kim.”
Mr Kim smiled ruefully.
“My father had Parkinson’s disease. I believe I have it also. If I live on, I will be a burden on my family. I make a decision to end my life. I drive to Newton Park. I have every intention to drive my car into lake and drown, but when I arrived there, I couldn’t. I did not want to die that way. I do not know what to do. I sat behind the wheel of my car for most of the night. I could not drive into lake. I did not wish to return home. I do not wish my family to find me and to take me home or to hospital. I panic. I push car into lake and leave the park. I can’t explain why. I decide to return to South Korea and end my life there. Take a tablet, not wake up,” he said. “I did go. I flew over there and wrote a letter to my loved ones, explaining my decision. I posted it. But, as before, I could not do it. I could not end my life. I thought I could, but I couldn’t. I missed my family so much. I came back. I meant to return to them, but I could not. I tried. I picked up the phone to speak to them, but no words came. I went to house but could not go in. I was ashamed of my behaviour, and feared they would think less of me because of it. I could not return to them but I could not leave them again either. None of this makes any sense Mrs Hetherington, I know this.”
His eyes filled with tears again.
“I take flat, take disguise so I not recognised. I make myself look like a Chinaman.”
Jane took this comment as a joke.
“I wait – sit it out as you English say. I eventually get confidence to go home, I think, but something always stop me. So here I am – in limbo, unable to rejoin family, or sever ties with them completely. When you saw me, I had been to Failsham. I drove past house. It in darkness. I don’t get out, I turn around and drive back to flat. This is not a life, Mrs Hetherington. But what do I do? Matters have gone on so long.”
“You must return to your family, Mr Kim. I have spoken to them. I know how much they miss you, and how much they would welcome you back into their life.”
“But I will be a burden to them Mrs Hetherington.”
“I nursed my dear husband through his final illness, and I derived more comfort from that than anything else I could have done. Your wife and family will want to do this for you, more than anything else they can do.”
Jane wondered how much Mr Kim knew of the events of the last week.
“Mr Kim, your car was found and your letter delivered,” she informed him.
“Yes?” he replied. “I do not follow local news. I follow Korean news on my laptop only. I do not even own a, how you English put it, telly.”
Jane realised that Mr Kim had no idea that the police believed his body to be found, and were about to pull his own son in for questioning on suspicion of murder, if they hadn’t already done so. She would need to tell him this, but wondered how.
“Mr Kim, I must ask you to come with me to the police, something has happened which you will not believe.”
He listened patiently as Jane brought him up to date.
“We must return to my flat for my passport to prove who I am, and then we must visit the police station,” he said.
Mr Kim’s flat was in one of the last of the houses on Leve Street. This was one of the properties Jack had checked out. When Jane got there, she realised that Jack hadn’t appreciated that the property had a basement flat. Had he seen it he might have worked out that an overgrown laburnum tree covered up the flat’s nameplate, and had he lifted back the laburnum bush, he would have seen, written there, in small but immaculate handwriting, the name: ‘Mr Sim.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE NIGHT OF HARRISON MONK’S DEATH
I
While Mr Kim waited for his family to arrive, the Chief Constable himself telephoned the pathologist who was conducting the autopsy on the body previously thought to be Mr Kim. “Hello, sir,” the pathologist said at the other end of the phone. “Are you taking a personal interest in this case?” “If you want a job done properly you have to do it yourself,” the Chief Constable replied curtly. “Have you got the results?” “I’ve literally just fi nished,” the pathologist said. “They’re rather interesting, as a matter of fact.” “Don’t tell me, the man lying on the slab isn’t our missing Korean?” the Chief Constable said dryly. “He isn’t Korean at all. I’m still waiting for some results to come back, but I think he’s Chinese. He’s also slightly too tall to be Kim Moo-Hyun. Kim was fi ve foot fi ve,” whereas this fella is almost fi ve foot six.”
“Mr Kim Moo-Hyun still is five foot five,” the Chief Constable said.
“He’s also far too young to be Kim. There is something else, sir. That missing tooth was removed after death – the wound shows absolutely no signs of healing – then the poor man’s face was smashed in with some type a blunt object, in what I presume was a clumsy attempt to make the body appear to be that of Kim’s to throw us off the trail.
“A clumsy but almost successful attempt,” the Chief replied, coolly. “How did he die?”
“Suffocated. I would say the assailant was leaning over the victim when he died. It took some force. I’d say the assailant was male. Judging by the direction of the wound, the deceased was prostrate on the ground when he died and he was almost certainly unconscious. There’s a wound to the back of his head, which occurred prior to death, consistent with falling backwards downstairs. The body was moved after death and disposed of in the sea. You’ll need to ask the tide specialists to work out when and where it entered the sea. Does that help?” he asked.
II
“I owe you an apology Mrs Hetherington,” D.I. Smith said. “It appears you were correct.”
“The confusion is understandable. I take it you haven’t as yet identified the man washed up on the beach?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.”
“I think I can help you there, although I wish to God I couldn’t.” Jane was sure she knew the real identity of the body on the beach. She’d known from the moment Mr Kim joked about making himself look like a China man. “I think you will find the murderer drove away from the scene of the crime with the victim’s body in the boot of the victim’s own car.”
III
When Cheung Kin didn’t get in touch, Foo Yong placed the advert prepared by Jane on-line and in Chinese speaking magazines. She even ran the ad on local radio, but whatever she did, it failed to elicit any response from Cheung Kin, nor from anyone else. She spent a fortnight driving up and down the country, speaking to people in the Chinese community. They had been very kind and welcoming, but as to the whereabouts of her fiancé, she was no wiser. She’d returned to Southstoft, only for her uncle to tell her this proved him right. She should forget Cheung Kin, he was a bad one, already in another country with another woman, and Foo Yong was a fool for not believing him when he said this.
Foo Yong hated her uncle for saying this to her. But where was Cheung Kin? Surely her uncle wasn’t right, was he? He could not have abandoned her, could he? She hadn’t seen the News. She knew nothing of a body on the beach. Since her return, she’d locked herself in her room, to lie in the dark, staring at the photograph of her fiancé on the screen of her phone.
When Foo Yong answered the door of the small flat above her uncle’s Chinese restaurant where she lived, and found a woman police constable standing there, she felt a perverse sense of relief. When she looked into the face of the young police officer, Foo Yong knew exactly why she was there.
“Can we go somewhere where we can sit down, love?” the WPC said.
Holding back the tears Foo Yong led her into her tiny flat, where they both sat down.
“You have come about my betrothed, Cheung Kin, haven’t you?” she said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“We have reason to believe he may be,” the young policewoman said, as gently as she could.
“I knew he would not leave me. I knew he would not.”
“What type of car does your boyfriend drive and where does he normally park his car when he goes to work?” the police officer asked her.
“He drove a Ford. He always parked in same place, but his car not there. I look already.”
“Would you be able to let us have some samples of your boyfriend’s hair and maybe a used toothbrush?” the policewoman asked.
IV
Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider. He wasn’t a cock-a-snoop-at-the-world, devil-may-care, individualistic and proud of it, outsider. No, he was a desperately shy homosexual with a pronounced stammer, outsider. He was the type of boy who’d been tormented and bullied at school. This hadn’t made him bitter and aggressive, in fact quite the contrary, but it had made him the type of man who guarded his privacy fiercely.
Only a few weeks after leaving drama school he was offered the lead in a cop show – neither he, nor his classmates, could believe his luck.
‘Your character, Inspector Hubris, has an eye for the ladies and they for him,’ the producers had explained, adding, ‘We don’t care what you do in your personal life as long as the viewers don’t end up reading something about you that destroys their faith in your character. There’s no chance that’s going to happen, is there, Mac?’ they’d asked. He’d shaken his head vigorously. What else could he have done? It was his big break. Besides back then it was true. He hadn’t anyone. But then he met Harrison Monk and made biggest mistake of his life.
The moment MacCallum had heard Monk’s voice on the end of the line, demanding they meet on the top floor of a multi-storey car park on St Andrew’s Street, in Southstoft where MacCallum was still filming on location; he knew Monk was intending to blackmail him about the weekend the two men had spent together. How could he have been so stupid, MacCallum thought, as he stood in his hotel bathroom staring at himself in the mirror. The man who looked back at him was crying.
The Callum MacCallum who walked towards the car park disguised as an old man, would never have intentionally hurt anything or anyone. He was a vegan. He didn’t even wear leather. If he came across a pigeon with an injured foot, he’d take the bird home with him and return it to health. He’d only taken the screwdriver with him that night for self-protection. It was three a.m. and for all he knew Harrison Monk could have been waiting for him with a baseball bat and three mates.
I
t was nearly three-thirty a.m. when the two men finally stood face to face. It was cold on the top of the car park. A fierce wind was blowing. MacCallum turned his collar up to protect himself from the cold. He was glad he was wearing gloves. The car park was deserted. Only one car was parked on the top floor – Monk’s car. MacCallum looked up at the CCTV camera pointing at him.
“What’ya lookin’ at? Worried someone will see through the disguise? Worried what your public will think of you being seen with me, Mac?” Monk sneered. “It’s sorted. I’ve vandalised more cameras than you’ve enjoyed hot dinners – no one’s watching us, baby!”
“Wha… wha… wha…” MacCallum struggled even to begin his sentence.
“Wha… wha… wha…what’s that you’re saying, Mac? Can’t quite make it out?”
“What do you want?” MacCallum burst out, the adrenaline and terror causing his stammer to disappear.
“What… what… what do I want? I want money, that’s what I want. I want money,” Monk sang. “Give me money.”
MacCallum knew he would be unable to say more than a few stammered syllables, and therefore he tried to remove a notepad and pen from his pocket, but when he thrust his hand into his pocket, Monk, jumpy at the best of times, pulled out a thick knife and advanced. MacCallum waved the notepad at him. Relax, he wanted to say, but no words came out. On the notepad he wrote the words, “How much?”
“How much do you think the press will cough up for the exclusive right to tell the British public that clean-cut hetro-man Inspector Hubris pays good money to spend the weekend with the likes of me? Make your momma real proud reading that in the papers, I’ll bet.”
MacCallum wanted to shout – But I didn’t! You know I didn’t! – but the words wouldn’t form. On the streets below a police car roared by, its siren blasting out, and a group of youngsters walked by, laughing and screaming. How he envied them their happiness. “You told me you loved me,” he wrote. Even as he wrote it, he knew it was pathetic, but still he wrote it and held it up for Monk to read.