Tom Bradby - The Master Of Rain

The lieutenant was like a caricature of the colonial Frenchman. He was almost as tall as Field and wore jodhpurs, riding boots, and an open-necked, loose-fitting white cotton shirt, which emphasized the depth of his suntan. His hair was dark, his nose big and broken. His posture and easy manner reminded Field of Lewis. “I am Givreaux,” he said, his handshake firm.

“Field, S.1.”

“How can I help you, Mr. Field?”

“I’m trying to trace the whereabouts of an Igor Mentov, whom we believe used to live on Avenue Joffre.”

Givreaux shrugged. “I don’t know him.” He spoke with only a slight accent, but “him” was still clipped.

“We think he was here for only a short period, but our understanding is that he was arrested for an offense, possibly a minor one, at this station on or around May 1.”

Givreaux shook his head and exhaled noisily. “More than a month ago… I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Would it be possible to look through the incident reports for that day?”

“It is necessary for you to liaise with our intelligence section. They will fill out the papers, come down with you.”

“My secretary has prepared the paperwork. I understand it will be on its way today, but our intelligence is that this man is going to board the train for Harbin tonight. Time is running out for us.”

Givreaux looked less sure. “How will it help to look at an old-”

“It’s about being sure of who he is and what he’s been up to before we close in. He is part of a conspiracy.”

Givreaux pursed his lips. “I will have to call them.”

“Of course.”

“Please have a seat.”

Field sat in the rattan chair beneath one of the fans, enjoying the flow of cool air. He crossed his legs and lit a cigarette, glad to be out of the office. The question of the fingerprint file gnawed away at him. He heard Granger’s voice in his head: “It’s a time for knowing who your friends are.”

Givreaux came back into the room, his leather boots echoing on the old wooden floorboards. “All the officers are out,” he said. “I should make you wait, but…” He seemed to make a decision. “It is not such a big deal,” he said, mostly to himself. “The constable will go down with you. Put your head around the door when you are finished.”

The constable was a young man with an open, friendly face. He led Field down a corridor behind the counter to a big airy room at the end of the building. Every available inch of wall space was filled with wooden box files.

“What date?” the constable asked.

“Let’s start with May 1.”

The man fetched a stepladder from the far end of the room and placed it in the middle of the section directly ahead of them. He climbed up and removed one of the file boxes, which he placed on a low wooden desk.

Field sat down. For a few moments the man stood uneasily beside him, then he walked quietly away to the window. Field began to leaf through the cards. He found May 1 and worked quickly through it, but the incident reports were restricted to assault, robbery, and lesser offenses. There was no reference to the murder he had read about in the newspaper.

Field went back and looked through the cards again. Most of the reports had been filled out by a Detective Constable Ngoc and countersigned by a Detective Sergeant Pudowski. There had been two armed robberies on May 1, one in the morning at a fur shop on Avenue Joffre, another at a jeweler’s on Rue des Colonies, both by two masked men carrying machine guns. There was an assault on a Vietnamese driver in the French Park and an incident in which a woman’s handbag had been snatched. Field counted the cards. There were fourteen in all. Not one even hinted at what he was looking for.

He began to work backward. There were only five incidents on April 30, all written up by Ngoc, none of them serious.

“Would you like some tea, sir?” The constable was smiling at him. He did not appear suspicious.

“Yes, please. Lemon, no sugar.” Field listened to his retreating footsteps. “Constable…” He waited until the man had turned. “If an incident occurred within this area, there would always be a report?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even if it were, for the sake of argument, a serious crime, say a murder, and the call had gone first to headquarters on Rue Wagner, you would file a report, because it occurred in your area.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In all circumstances?”

“Yes, sir.”

Field smiled and turned back to the box, suddenly less confident that this process was going to lead anywhere. If the headquarters staff wanted something hushed up, he thought it likely they would instruct Givreaux’s men not to attend the scene of the crime, in which case it would be well nigh impossible to file a report, even if they had wished to.

He worked back all the way to April 4, which was where the box started. Most days, there were only a few incidents. May 1 turned out to have been exceptionally busy.

The constable brought him tea and he sipped it slowly and ate the biscuits that had come with it.

There didn’t seem much else that he could usefully do.

He leaned forward to look through the cards for May 1 one more time, going extremely slowly, so as to pick up anything he might have missed. After flicking through five or six, he noticed that there was one missing.

Each card was coded, the serial number written in black ink at the top left-hand corner. Here the cards jumped from F6714 to F6716.

He looked carefully through the whole box to be sure that it had not been filed wrongly, somewhere else.

“Constable…” Field leaned back and put his hands in his pockets. “In the Settlement, all incidents have to be first noted in the incident book, usually by the duty sergeant, before an incident report is written up and filed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s the same here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you mind showing me the incident book for May 1?”

The constable nodded and left the room, walking briskly down the corridor. He was gone for perhaps ten minutes and Field began to think he might have consulted Givreaux about this new request, but when he returned, he apologized for the delay and explained that one of the detectives had been noting down the details of a domestic dispute he’d attended.

Field took the book.

He flicked through the pages, his pulse quickening.

It was there, in Ngoc’s neat flowing hand: Incident number F6715. Body of woman found stabbed, Avenue Joffre. Natalya Simonov.

There were no further details, nor was there a house or apartment number. Avenue Joffre stretched the entire length of the French Concession, so door-to-door inquiries were likely to prove time-consuming and possibly fruitless. Field assumed that, somewhere, there must be a file on the case.

He turned around again. “You would keep files here on important cases or individuals?”

“No, sir. Rue Wagner.”

“They’re all kept at headquarters?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are none here at all?”

“No, sir.”

“So what happens if you want to look at a file? Do you have to go down to Rue Wagner?”

“A car delivers the file in the morning and takes it back in the evening, sir. Or we can go down if there is a hurry.”

Field nodded and smiled, turning something over in his mind. He held out the incident book. “Do you remember this case-Simonov? Do you remember the address or section of…”

The constable looked at the entry and shook his head, but his smile vanished.

Field turned the book around and began to leaf through its pages. He worked forward but nothing caught his eye, so he went to the Simonov entry and worked back to the beginning.

He reached March 31, where the book began.