John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

On the third floor, next to the identification bureau, the forensic artist, the Australian named Angie, kept a studio. Policemen liked to visit her. You wouldn’t have described her as beautiful, but she glowed with a womanly softness that was beaten out of the female cadets in the first six months.

Instead of a desk, telephone and files, the FA had an easel, chalk, airbrush, charcoal, acetate paints and a lot of natural light. She worked as close to the window as she could. Under her hand the dead came to life, the unknown fugitive acquired features that could be shown to eyewitnesses. A sideline was cartoons that the men liked to show wives and girlfriends, proof that cops were human too.

Chan had persuaded her to draw Sandra in the early days of their marriage. He still had the sketch. Somehow it was more alive than all the photographs. Angie had caught her eyes: large, Caucasian, sly, hungry.

“Ah,” Angie said when she saw Chan. “The man who thinks in three dimensions.”

Chan smiled. Everybody liked Angie. “Are they ready?”

“As it happens, yes. It’ll cost you a beer, though. Haven’t done plaster busts for ages. Quite a challenge. Three dimensions just isn’t the same as two, as Michelangelo pointed out. I was here at the break of dawn finishing them. Want to see?”

Angie crossed the room to a heavy varnished cupboard. She took out three identical cardboard boxes, each apparently a perfect cube.

“Turn your back.”

Chan turned to face the window. He glanced at the sketch on the easel. A Chinese in his early forties with a low brow frowned out. There had been a number of rapes on a housing estate in Junk Bay; eyewitness accounts all mentioned the low brow and the frown.

“Okay, you can look.”

It was true, three dimensions were not like two. There was Polly on a table between her two Chinese companions, smiling, without a care in the world. Jekyll and Hyde were more serious but happy to be by her side. Somewhere in ancient Taoism it was said that all man’s problems came from having a body. Well, these three didn’t anymore.

“Very good.”

Angie smiled. She removed the wigs, put the busts back in their boxes, laid the wigs on top. “Charlie, look, I know it’s been a while, but I was really sorry to hear about you and Sandra. I know how much she… well, I’m just sorry.”

Chan shrugged. “It’s not easy being married to a cop. Not in Hong Kong.”

“Oh, don’t blame yourself or the police. Look, it’s none of my business, but she was a wanderer. Nice, good-hearted, but a wanderer. Believe me, I’m Australian. We don’t know much, but we do know wanderers.”

Chan took his eyes off the boxes to hold Angie’s smile. Men talked about her, adored her, even fantasized about her, but not in the usual way. Policemen thought they could be sane and happy with a woman like her: soft, big-hearted, overweight, unambitious, Australian. In Hong Kong underachievers were like gold.

Angie laid the boxes one on top of the other. He could carry them like that until he found help. “Don’t forget, you owe me a beer.” She smiled.

Chan picked up the boxes, nodded. He hesitated. There was that housewarming party his sister insisted he go to. Her husband and his rich lawyer friends would be there. It would surprise them if he turned up with a woman. She would be someone to talk to at least. He put the boxes back on the table, pushed his hair back. He hadn’t done this since Sandra left. He couldn’t believe how hard it had become.

“If you’re free tonight, I have to go to a party. It’s my sister; they’ve bought a new apartment. We wouldn’t have to stay. I’d like it. I mean, I’d appreciate it. It would be great if you would. We could slip away early and have a beer somewhere.”

Angie smiled. “That would be real nice, Charlie. Great. Look forward to it.”

In the courtyard Chan gave two of the boxes to Aston to carry. The dignified thing would have been to find a police car to take them back over to the Kowloon side of the harbor, but even with the siren blaring it would take over an hour. From Angie’s studio he had seen how slowly the traffic was moving toward the tunnel. A siren couldn’t move that kind of jam; there was nowhere for it to go. As they were walking along Lockhart Road, Chan caught sight of Riley in the back of a police car stuck in traffic. Chan pretended not to see his gesticulations.

Walking toward the underground, Aston almost dropped Jekyll and Hyde. Chan held Polly close in the press of people on the train.

The party was worse than he’d expected. Male lawyers and businessmen, Chinese and British, talking about money and vintage wine stood in small groups with their women hanging on their arms in pearls and low-cut dresses. The women lawyers wore somber-colored business suits, shared negative judgments about their male colleagues and waited to see who would come to seduce them. About one half of the room was filled with Chinese people who Chan could tell were even richer than the lawyers; they wore the same kind of clothes and jewelry, but their eyes never bothered to check if they were impressing clients or colleagues. They were safe in their castles of cash, and it was the world’s job to impress them.

Chan knew that he was being measured, in the second it took to blink at him, against a scale of money-and instantly discarded, with a sardonic turn of the head. Dress had a lot to do with it. The men wore suits with labels like Kent and Curwen, Ermenegildo Zegna, Yves Saint-Laurent; Chan’s white and blue butcher’s stripe had been hip when he’d bought it for Jenny’s wedding, but sweat darkened it in patches under the arms, and there was a small stain on the left lapel. He could have carried it off, though, if like these people, he’d lived with money long enough for it to slow his movements, mellow his nerves, condition all his reactions as if life consisted of swimming through liquid gold.

Instead he endured the sort of rudeness that justified homicide. While Angie visited the bathroom, he leaned against a wall with a glass of beer in his hand and conjured from memory gratifying cameos of murderers he had known: gunmen, knifemen, stranglers, bludgeoners, kickers, artists of the four-inch meat cleaver. Such expertise wasted on domestic disputes and gangland vendettas when it could have been put to good use at a party like this.

The Chinese waiters in white jackets, hired for the evening, disconcerted him. With the alertness of fighter pilots they could spot an empty glass from the other side of the room and close in from behind with a fresh shot. Their courtesy and dedication were impregnable and, to Chan, profoundly depressing. When he was seventeen, his aunt had given him a choice between two careers: police constable or waiter. It could have been he in the white jacket with the obsequious smile masking malice aforethought.

When Angie returned, he showed her around the apartment, dwelling longer in the emptier rooms. The new flat was too big for just one couple and servants, but that was the point. No amount of expensive Italian furniture, which his sister and her husband already owned anyway, could make the statement as well as a four-thousand-square-foot flat. Most families lived in spaces one tenth of that size. In Hong Kong real wealth expressed itself through space.

Pushing open a door to a fourth spare bedroom, Chan heard a murmur, an intake of breath. Angie held back, but Chan entered the room just long enough to glimpse a couple, a Western man with a Chinese woman, in an airtight embrace. It was the man, apparently young and blond, who was showing the most flesh with his shirt nearly off, backed up against a window while the woman pushed against him. The woman turned at the disturbance, raised her eyes at Chan, then turned back to the man. Chan had glimpsed a long jaw on a Chinese face; from the back she was mostly black hair, strong shoulders and a silver dress that shimmered like water and revealed 80 percent of her vertebrae. He closed the door with care until the last inch, which he completed with a malevolent bang. Angie grinned.