David Rotenberg - The Hamlet Murders

“You can go, Mr. Paulin.”

“Good.”

“But don’t think of coming back to Shanghai, Mr. Paulin.”

The man whirled on Fong, clearly about to defend his right as a British citizen to come and go as he wished, to do business where he damned well pleased – but all he said was, “Anything else?”

“Yes.” Fong made him wait for it. Then on the off breath he said, “Murder eats away the heart. It was only chance that saved you from killing your wife. Don’t forget that. And remember that chance does us a favour once but charges us twice. You owe fortune twice now, Mr. Paulin.”

Fong held out the man’s passport. “You’ll need this to leave China. You have six hours to be gone from the Middle Kingdom. Starting from this very moment.”

Mr. Paulin slammed the door as he left Fong’s office. Fong counted to twenty then released his breath and turned to the window. On the other side of the glass was the world famous Bund and across the Huangpo River the Pudong, which was in short order becoming the very centre of the miracle of economic revival that was Shanghai. He looked at the shiny new buildings but was unimpressed. “Maybe just because I’m getting older,” he said aloud to the empty room and leaned his head against the cool windowpane. He was having more and more trouble keeping the world’s evil at bay. The mangled body of Mrs. Paulin that they had extracted from the wrecked taxicab would now wake in the morning with him and accompany him to sleep at night – as would the relieved look on her husband’s face. So many souls tucked beneath his skin, fighting for space in the membranous sack around his heart. So much ghostly weight.

Fong looked up. The room was filled with officers waiting for him. He wondered how long he had indulged in his memory.

Li Chou was at the far end of the oval table. His men were on either side of him. Lily sat halfway up one side with her young assistant. Chen sat across from her with Fong’s people.

Fong “ahemed” and the room quieted. Cigarette smoke hung in layered clouds in the room. The windows were open and the hazy saturated air of a Shanghai summer afternoon moved in and out like the water at the shore of a placid lake.

Fong looked around the table. He really didn’t have any plan in mind. Just to get started.

“Lily?”

“Message pick up, did you?” she said in her own private version of English. She was about to add her pet phrase for him, “Short Stuff,” then decided against it in public.

“No, I’m sorry but . . . ”

“Fine. No nose off my teeth,” she said.

He had no idea what that meant, but signalled that she should begin the proceedings. She opened a folder and handed out copies of the autopsy report and the toxicology data then said in her beautiful Mandarin, “If you look at the autopsy report, there is no evidence of previous trauma to the body. In other words, he wasn’t killed then hanged. He was just hanged. There were elevated levels of alcohol in Mr. Hyland’s bloodstream but they weren’t high enough to make him lose contact with reality unless he really wasn’t a drinker. Someone should check into that.”

“I did,” said Fong. “He wasn’t a drunk or an abstainer, just a guy – he drinks, drank.”

Lily nodded.

From a large plastic bag she took out the noose and tossed it on the table then said, “It has one less turn than a traditional hangman’s noose but outside of that it’s standard issue. The position of the ladder conforms to the mathematical paradigm of something that tall being pushed from that height. The rope was easily strong enough to strangle a man of Mr. Hyland’s weight.”

Fong looked up from his notes.

“Yes, sorry about that, but this man’s neck wasn’t snapped like in a proper hanging. He strangled to death. It probably took several minutes.”

She paused as that sank in.

“That accounts for the ligature burns up and down Mr. Hyland’s neck,” she said.

Fong nodded and made a note. He wasn’t sure Lily was right about that.

“There are threads of the hemp embedded in his fingers and palms, which seem to indicate that he fought the rope at the end.”

Fong experienced a moment of real panic. He didn’t want that image in his head. Geoff, dangling, trying to loosen the rope, trying to scream – no.

One of the detectives put down his copy of the report and said, “He changed his mind, you mean?”

“If . . . ” Lily didn’t complete her sentence.

Fong did. “If this was actually a suicide. Anything else, Lily?”

“There were no defensive wounds on the body. No skin under the nails. The only other toxicological findings of interest were traces of seminal fluid in his underclothing . . . ” She paused for a moment as the usual smirks in response to ejaculation at the end of a life passed over the men’s faces then she added, “mixed with Nonoxynol.”

“What’s that?” Fong asked.

“It’s a spermicide.” The men around the table looked blankly at Lily. None had any idea what she was talking about. Lily sighed her you-poor-benightedpagans smile and said, “Some Western women use it as a contraceptive. It seems Mr. Hyland had a little nooky-nooky sometime before his demise.” Then to Fong in English she added, “On message, Short Stuff. Pickup no surprise. No pickup, surprise surprise.”

“How long before his demise, Lily?” Fong asked.

“Not long. Soon details I get, then you get, you get me?”

Fong nodded. A ripple of confusion circled the table, but Fong didn’t want to get sidetracked on that. “Anything else, Lily?”

“No,” she said in Shanghanese.

“What about the flowers that were in his vest pocket?”

“Marigolds, forget-me-nots and primroses,” Lily replied then added, “is there anything . . . ”

Fong cut her off, “What about the vest itself?”

“What about it?”

“It was a thousand degrees that night. Why would he wear a vest?”

Lily shrugged then said, “Perhaps Mr. Hyland was a slave to fashion. Maybe he wanted to die looking his best.”

“True, but who gets laid then kills himself?” asked Li Chou. “This was no suicide. I agree with Zhong Fong.”

“Well, that’s a first,” Fong said in English to Lily, who raised an eyebrow in response.

“What was that, Zhong Fong?” Li Chou asked.

Fong smiled but wondered why Li Chou’s pronunciation of his name sounded to his ears awfully close to Traitor Zhong. “You’re up, Li Chou. What did you and your crew find?”

Li Chou opened a stained folder and spread out a series of documents. “There were literally fingerprints everywhere. Sixteen partials and twenty-seven full prints. We’ve fingerprinted the theatre’s technicians and actors and are slowly identifying whose prints are whose. However, with so many prints on the ladder it is unlikely that this line of investigation will yield anything of interest.

“The rope was actually cut from a stock of rope that was kept in the west side of the theatre. The cut on the tail of the rope there matches the head of the rope used to hang Mr. Hyland.”

“I’m afraid there are small flesh deposits on the rope within reaching distance of the noose which supports Ms. Lily’s supposition that the man suffocated.”

Fong wondered why Li Chou was being so solicitous. What was with the “I’m afraid” part of his last statement? But before Fong could speak, Lily piped up, “I don’t make suppositions, Mr. Li.”

Li Chou’s hands flew up like he was fending off mosquitoes on Good Food Street. “No criticism intended, Ms. Lily.”

“That would be another first,” Fong thought.

“Then there were these.” He pushed a large plastic evidence bag marked Floor Findings onto the table. “Pretty normal stuff, nothing you wouldn’t expect on a stage. A few makeup sticks, bits of torn cloth, cigarette butts, stick matches, a hair clip, three pages of some script, a sodden handkerchief, three small-denomination yuan notes, a paperclip, wood chips . . . ”