David Rotenberg - The Lake Ching murders

“No, I think that’s enough, Fong.” But the coroner was smiling as if he’d been lied to.

“Who cares?” demanded Lily. “Some girl took off her clothes while that stuff played. What’s the difference what the songs were?” Her vehemence ended the discussion. She tossed a bag of dirt on the table. “That was found on the runway. Again I’m not sure why the specialist thought it was important.” The bag was handed around. Fong made a point of hardly looking at the thing and handed it on to Chen.

“What else do you have, Lily?” asked Fong, making sure that he didn’t look back at the bag in Chen’s hands.

“A stack of clothes that I’ve only begun to catalogue. Seventeen wallets. All of which identify who these guys were but little else. Drivers’ licences, picture IDs, pictures of grandkids.”

“No visas or passports?” asked Fong.

A silence descended on the room. Everyone knew what the question meant. If these men entered China without visas or passports, then they were government guests and this whole thing was even bigger than it already was.

“I’ve asked Chen to check their hotel in Xian. It’s possible that the men left those kind of documents with the front desk, I guess,” said Lily.

Fong wanted to leave this behind for a while. There was more than enough fear to go around without the possibility of government involvement. Although they all knew that was silly. There was government involvement in everything that was important in the Middle Kingdom. It was just a matter of how much involvement . . . and who in the government.

“What else have you got, Lily?”

“Just a roll of film from one of the Japanese men’s cameras. The other camera had no film in it.”

“So what’s on the film, Lily?”

She switched to English despite the obvious anger of the coroner. “I don’t know, Fong. No black room here, safe.”

Quickly, he responded in Shanghanese, “There is nothing secret here, Lily. Why do you think they put us up in this abandoned factory? It’s got to be bugged. Just get the pictures developed. There’s nothing else we can do.” He turned to the men. “Lily was concerned that she couldn’t find a secure darkroom to develop the film.”

“No, sir. Miss Lily was concerned that I am untrustworthy,” Chen stated.

The tension in the room mounted exponentially. Fong got to his feet. “That’s enough, Captain Chen. Lily was wrong. It was nothing more than a mistake for her to use English. Apologize, Lily.”

Lily glared at him.

“I said apologize, Lily.”

After a moment of resistance, Lily bowed her head slightly. A gesture so old that Fong sensed the Earth growing beneath her feet, her legs up to the knees in dung-filled water, a peasant’s hat on her head. Fong was always astounded how vibrantly alive the old ways were even in the likes of modern women like Lily. “For this insult I ask your forgiveness, Captain Chen.”

Chen waited for a beat then snapped his head down then back up quickly. The tension was gone. Through the ritual, forgiveness had been found. Through the old ways.

“Can I see the shots of the Japanese again?” Fong asked.

Lily pushed twenty-odd photographs across the table to him. He sorted them quickly.

“What, Fong?” Lily asked, but Fong wasn’t answering questions. He was staring at the wide-angle photo of the runway and its six chairs. Five of the six were occupied by the dead Japanese men, but the sixth sat empty at the head of the runway – the best view. “If this had been a banquet,” Fong thought, “the head of the fish would have pointed in that direction – the place of honour. An empty chair. An extra room at the hotel in Xian. One and the same?” Fong rifled through the photos again. The man with the ill-fitting expensive glasses was to the right of the empty seat. The men with cameras were both to the left. “From the missing piece, deduce the whole,” he told himself. He allowed words into his mouth, “Cameras, empty seat, glasses. Glasses, empty seat, cameras.” Seeing. All about seeing. Yeah, but seeing what?

Fong looked up. They were all watching him closely. Fine. But he was leading this meeting. He signalled to the coroner that it was his turn.

“Why don’t you call me grandpa, Fong, everyone else seems to think it fits.”

“Fine, Grandpa, your turn.”

The coroner started by lamenting the nature of the search and then tossed the specialist’s request for a toxicology scan on the table. “A wee bit late for that now. There was no doubt alcohol on board. Maybe opium or hashish. Whatever it was it. . .it had to be pretty potent to subdue that many men. Seventeen men are a lot of men to execute. The others would have to have been either restrained or drugged while the murderers got on with their butchering.”

“Your best guess, Grandpa?” Fong asked.

The coroner waggled his head back and forth a few times. “It’s an agricultural area, there’s always the possibility of adding that government insecticide crap to their drinks.”

Swallowing the tasteless insecticide was the most common means of suicide in rural China. But it was a woman’s death choice. Fong thought it more likely that the eel farming in the area provided better opportunities for toxins. There was always the possibility of local concoctions. Poisoning had a long history in China.

Poison in drinks had a particularly long history.

“Perhaps that explains why there were no half-empty glasses found anywhere on the boat,” suggested Fong with a wry smile.

Lily, Chen and the coroner reached for the photos and scanned them quickly. Not a single glass appeared in any of the shots. Lily looked up at Fong. “You noticed that.”

“Crime sites consist of what is there and what isn’t, Lily.”

“Very good, Fong.”

“Thanks, Grandpa. What’s next?”

“The cut marks are interesting if your delectations move in that direction. The Japanese were gutted in a mockery of that thing they do over there whenever someone burps after dinner or some such silliness.”

“Hari Kari,” said Lily.

“Yeah, whatever they call it. The men who did this knew how to butcher things. It’s like the Japanese were ‘dressed’ for an exhibit or something.”

Fong was sure to let his breath out slowly. His pulse was racing. The mongoose was in furious motion.

“What do you make of the way the Koreans were shot?” asked Chen.

Fong looked at the young man.

“Again, you’re too young to know about this kind of thing. At the end of the war before our glorious liberation,” his sarcasm was so thick that the air in the room seemed to hover for a moment, “Korean gangs made major inroads in our cities. They spread terror by shooting people beneath the armpits and then hanging them from beams. It takes a long time to die that way. Shooting someone from right to left pretty much guarantees that the bullet will stay in the body, but it will not kill immediately. Just pain. Lots of pain.”

“Koreans are good at that.” The flat statement from Chen surprised everyone. Fong added it to his mental “Chen file.”

Fong nodded for the coroner to continue. “The knives were sharp but beyond that I haven’t got a thing to go on. But these . . . ,” he tossed out several close-up photographs of the faceless Chinese men, “are interesting. Take a look at the top of the cut mark. The guy who ordered these pictures really knew what he was doing. See the angle he’s guiding us to look at?”

As the others looked, Fong considered grandpa’s last remark: “. . . he’s guiding us to look at.” Could it be that the specialist knew that they, or someone like them, would come to investigate further than he’d been allowed to? Is it possible that he arrested those three men knowing full well that they weren’t the real criminals? Were they left by him as possible clues for investigators like us to follow? Was the specialist actually, somehow or other, still guiding this investigation from wherever he was?