John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“Incredibly fast response, even for you,” Riley said. “Just this minute left a message at Mongkok. Tried to get you at home too. How on earth did you get here so fast?”

“Taxi,” Chan said. “What happened?”

“Unclear as yet. Damned tricky one, though. The publicity’s going to be as bad as if the governor died. They’re draining the pool. I called you just in case there’s a connection to your mincer case. I’d heard that you intended to question her.”

At back around the swimming pool more halogen lamps bored into the water, bounced brittle light off the tiled surround and painted white masks over serious English and Chinese faces. From somewhere a sucking sound accompanied the descending water level that fell perhaps an inch every thirty seconds. No one had thought it worth trying to save the naked woman in the center; she remained anchored, apparently by her neck, while her body and legs swooped toward the surface in a perfect frozen dive. Everyone in the business saw there was no life in it to save. Yellow fluid dribbled slightly from the gaping mouth; intelligence had forsaken those eyes hours ago.

When the water level sunk to waist-height, Emily turned to face him. Two U-shaped scars under her breasts revealed a secret vulnerability. Chan regretted his curses.

“For now we’d better treat it as suspect homicide?” Riley said, coming up behind him, his voice rising into a question.

“Of course.” Out of the corner of his eye Chan saw the Chinese technicians dusting the Italian marble table with meticulous Oriental care. Sweaty hands on smooth surfaces made the most beautiful prints: “Sleep with me.” “No.”

When the water was at knee height, Chan jumped in, knelt to examine the chain that held her. It was padlocked through a thick patent leather belt that was buckled around her neck. An extra hole had been bored in the leather. At the other end the chain was padlocked to a cast-iron grille at the bottom of the deep end. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back. Just under her thighs on the tile surface of the pool lay three keys. First impressions were finely balanced: A suicide dressed up as murder? Murder masquerading as suicide? Or merely an elaborate suicide with an element of self-mockery: The belt around her throat was Chanel; the two padlocks were solid brass and glinted gold in the water. Chan borrowed paper and pencil from a detective constable. With Riley hovering over his shoulder he sketched the swimming pool, the position of the body.

“Of course, unless it’s related to the Mincer Murders, it’s out of our area. We’ll have to give it to Central.”

Chan stepped back, sketched the position of the house in relation to the pool. “In the morning. Until then it’s ours. And if it is related, I don’t want to come in cold on another detective’s screwup.”

“Quite.”

Chan looked at Riley. “Best not touch anything, sir. I wouldn’t want you to become part of the chain of evidence. Have you touched anything?”

The question had the desired effect. Riley retreated to the collection of vehicles on the other side of the house. Chan followed him. In one of the police vans he found a video recorder which he took to the pool at the back. Everyone moved out of the way when he started to shoot. It was an automatic reflex: Overall shot of area; relationship of pool to house; film closely around the perimeter; zoom in on body; pause over cigarette butts, if any, broken fencing, if any, bushes. From the corner of his eye he saw that the technicians had finished dusting the marble table. He panned slowly from pool to table: “Sherlock Holmes used cocaine.” “It had to be you; there’s really no one else I can talk to.”

There was no point videoing the inside of the house. Three officers had reported that there were no signs of disturbance. Pausing over her with the camera still whirring as she lay, now faceup on the bottom of the pool, Chan acknowledged a failure of professional objectivity. Through the lens he saw a fine, strong spirit, lost in a cloud.

In his twenty-five-hundred-year-old masterpiece The Art of War Sun-tzu exalts one principle above all others: Cover your back. Chan supposed government servants worldwide lived by that motto, whether they’d read Sun-tzu or not. At his desk in Mongkok he dictated a memorandum to the Commissioner of Police the Right Honorable Ronald Tsui, JP, copied to Chief Superintendent John Riley.

File 128/mgk/HOM/STC

The deceased, Madame Emily Ping Lin-kok, was known to me both socially and as someone who may have had information relevant to the above investigation. On 11 May 1997 at around midnight (no earlier time for the interview could be arranged) I visited her at her mansion on Old Peak Road. We sat together at a marble table on her veranda near her swimming pool. Unfortunately Madame Ping was unable or unwilling to provide any information relevant to the investigation, and I left sometime later. It is likely, therefore, that my own fingerprints will have been lifted from the aforementioned marble table.

Signed: Chan Siu-kai, Chief Inspector, Homicide

On the front page of the South China Morning Post Jonathan Wong read of Emily’s death. The report hinted strongly at suicide although the investigation was not complete. He read the follow-up feature in the middle pages-a flattering resume of her life with testimonials to her commercial genius (a genius that, it was suggested, may have contained seeds of imbalance)-then put the newspaper on his desk.

Poor Emily… just like a woman, to play hard ball harder than anyone else and then expect to be forgiven, even loved for it. My friend the bitch is dead.

He stood up, walked around his desk with an eye fixed on the newspaper article. He searched his heart for sorrow but found instead a kind of hysteria that broke on his face in the form of a grin. The empress was dead, just as the old man had predicted. Wong wondered if the old man had killed her. It seemed unlikely, somehow. He was not that kind of psychopath.

Now was the moment to make his choice. He ought to reflect, go home and discuss it with that beautiful wife whom he had rescued from the gutter and who despised him.

Instead he picked up the telephone and dialed a number that he had written on a scrap of paper, something he rarely did.

“I would like to see you,” he said into the receiver. After listening for less than twenty seconds, he replaced it again. Even so are decisions made that bend souls. Well, he would not expect to be loved-or even forgiven.

He stood up, took advantage of the harbor view that was a privilege of partners in his firm. He watched a Star Ferry cross to Kowloon and a 747 take off from the airstrip that jutted into the water. Still standing, he pressed one of the internal autodial numbers on his telephone. The LED display showed that he was calling Rathbone, the senior partner.

“I’m going to need to see you. It’s about the matter we discussed. You’ll have to bring the other three. No, not now. When I tell you. Just stand by. And call a full partners’ meeting for next week. Just do as I say.”

He retrieved his jacket from a wardrobe behind his chair, walked around his desk and paused again at the view. He’d gazed upon it so often for so long it was a kind of inner landscape. There was nothing, not his flat, his wife’s body, the palm of his hand, that he knew better, but it had changed overnight. It was like a bar of music that one has heard for years; suddenly someone has the idea of playing it in a different key, and the meaning is altered forever. To his eyes the harbor view was as alluring as always, but darker and infinitely more powerful. Come to think of it, it was even more entrancing than before.