Death In Shanghai (2 page)

Then he noticed the long nails with their bright purple nail varnish. Claws rather than nails, he thought, weapons for inflicting damage. He never understood why such nails were seen as beautiful or beguiling in a woman. For him, they appeared like the weapons of a predatory insect.

A flash went off as the photographer manoeuvred to get a better shot. More flashes and more rocking of the boat. He took one last look at the body lying half submerged on the sandbank and gestured for the constables to take it out of the water. They reached over the prow of the boat. One constable untied the ropes from the wrists while the other held the body steady. The constable handed both ropes and the stones to Danilov. He felt their weight. About three pounds he guessed. Enough to keep the arms outstretched even in the face of the tide.

Both constables leant out and grasped the naked blonde underneath the shoulders. As they did so, the body came free of the water and a torrent of snakes issued from the stomach. The constables dropped it back in the river and jumped back into the boat. Danilov leant out and saw the body floating now, the blonde hair still waving in the water. For a moment, all he could see were snakes, their heads raised as if to strike. Then he realised that he was looking at intestines, which had fallen out from a vast dark hole where the stomach had once been.

The constables were next to him, chattering loudly in Shanghainese. The old lady looked at the body and spat a long stream of brown juice into the river. Strachan was just staring fixedly at the naked corpse, his mouth slightly open.

Danilov reached down and lifted the body by the shoulders whilst one of the constables took the feet. As they lifted it into the boat, the other constable pushed the intestines back into the stomach cavity with his hands. But still the guts wriggled out beneath his fingers, slithering away from his touch.

Strachan watched, unable to move, fascinated by the paleness of the corpse, its whiteness in stark contrast to the murky grey of the water. The others ignored him as they heaved it into the boat, where it lay there like a dead fish, the intestines still alive as they oozed out of the cavity.

Danilov knelt down and examined the body at his feet. The stomach and thighs had been slashed with deep, frenzied cuts so all that remained was a dark emptiness where life should have been. Surprisingly though, there were no rat bites. In a city teeming with rats, even they had avoided this particular feast. On the chest, or what remained of it, two Chinese characters had been carved. ‘Stra-chan, come and look at this, will you?’

Strachan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and slowly inched his way across the deck, keeping his eyes fixed on the pale body.

‘What do you make of this?’ Danilov pointed to the characters sliced into the flesh. Strachan’s face went bright red as he finally looked away from the body and its intestines lying on the deck.

He reached out and touched Strachan on the hand. ‘Everybody reacts differently, the first time they see a dead person up close.’

Strachan nodded and forced himself to look back at the body. ‘It’s “justice”, sir. The characters for “justice”.’

‘Thank you.’ At a nod from Danilov, the photographer moved into position. Flashes exploded, capturing the body from every angle and every side as he struggled with the rocking of the boat to get his shots.

When he had finished, one of the Chinese constables inched forward to cover the body with a loose tarpaulin. The old woman began to sway backwards and forwards again, propelling the boat towards the shore. Her mouth, with its graveyard of teeth, still held its smile.

‘When we get to shore, fingerprint the body and send it to the morgue. Come back to the station when you’ve finished.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Strachan answered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘You’d better get used to bodies, you’ll see many more before you finish working with me.’

***

‘The Chief Inspector’s been asking after you. Just thought I’d let you know.’

Danilov thanked Sergeant Wolfe, and walked behind the desk of Central Police Station past two Sikh guards, into the inner sanctum of the detectives’ office.

The desks were arranged in two neat rows, one behind the other like a deck of cards laid out for a game of patience. Behind each desk was a detective. Some were going through old files. Some were on the telephone. Some were pretending to read old reports. A few were asleep, their heads nestled in the crooks of their arms.

Danilov put his tobacco tin and keys on his desk, walked up to Chief Inspector Boyle’s office and knocked.

There was no answer. He knocked again.

He heard the faint shuffling of chairs and a loud ‘Enter’. He opened the door and took off his hat. A tall, rather dapper man sat behind his desk, two white tufts of hair above his ears contrasting sharply with a florid face. The curtains were half closed, giving the room a dark, cave-like atmosphere. In the corner, a putter and ball leant up against the eau-de-nil wall, a colour that seemed to cover every wall of every British office he had ever entered. Why they loved this particular colour, he was yet to discover. Perhaps its sickly paleness reminded them of home?

Boyle coughed. ‘Inspector Danilov, do take a seat.’ He indicated the only chair in front of him. It was small and hard, forcing all those who sat in it to feel like a penitent schoolboy.

The strong smell of Boyle’s cologne dominated the room.
4711
, thought Danilov, as he took one of the more comfortable seats from its place along the wall and set it down noisily in front of the desk.

Boyle reached forward to open the large silver box in front of him. Inside was a choice of cigarettes: Turkish for smokers who loved a rich aroma, American for the sophisticated and, of course, British Woodbines for those who had acquired the habit in the trenches. Danilov took a Turkish cigarette, lighting it with the onyx lighter that lay next to the cigarette box.

So it was going to be one of those meetings, he thought. Boyle had a particular style: no offer of a seat was going to be a dressing down. A seat and a cigarette was a ‘quiet’ chat. A seat and a cigar was an understanding that Boyle wanted something that only the person blessed with the cigar could provide. All the police dreaded the seat and the glass of whisky, for that meant the miscreant was going to be transferred to some obscure job in the nether reaches of the police universe where the offender would spend the rest of his life arresting dog eaters and night soil collectors.

Danilov inhaled the rich earthy smoke of the Turkish. Fine tobacco, a little elegant for his taste but still a fine smoke.

‘Or would you like a cigar?’ Boyle opened the other wooden box that lay on the table, revealing a selection of the finest Havanas and Dominicans.

‘Thank you, sir. A coffin nail is fine for me.’

Boyle chuckled. ‘Coffin nails. That’s what we used to call them during the war. Long time ago though. Lost a lot of good men, too many.’ He blew a long cloud of blue smoke out into the office. ‘You didn’t fight, did you, Danilov?’

‘No, sir, I was in the Imperial Police in Minsk. We weren’t sent to the Front.’

‘I was a Captain, Manchester Regiment, you know. The scum of the Earth from the back streets of Hulme but damn fine men, if you get my meaning.

‘I understand, sir.’

Boyle stared into mid-air. Above his head, a print of a Chinese street scene hung at a slight angle. Hawkers sold food from banana leaves placed on the ground. People wandered through examining the wares. On each building, Chinese characters blared the names of the proprietors of the shops.

Not a traditional choice for a head of detectives, thought Danilov. He stubbed his cigarette out in a bronze ashtray already full of stubs.

The movement seemed to pull Boyle out of his remembrance of the past. ‘Jolly good. I’ve asked you here today for a couple of reasons, Danilov. Firstly, how was the body that you found this morning?’

‘How was it? Dead, sir, extremely dead.’

‘Suicide?’

‘No. Not unless this one decided to kill herself by slashing her stomach and thighs to the bone, tying her wrists with stone weights, rowing out to a sandbank and then jumping into Soochow Creek. No, sir, I think suicide is out of the question.’

‘Shame that. I had Meaker on the phone. He thought it was, but as it was on our side of the creek, he was going to leave it to us. He seemed rather pleased at the idea.’

‘Inspector Meaker is entitled to his opinion, sir, but it’s not a suicide. Far from it. Murder I’m afraid. A brutal one as well.’

Boyle shuffled the papers in front of him. ‘Well, get it over with as quickly as you can. Upstairs gets its whiskers in a curl when Europeans are murdered. The murder of European women particularly seems to excite them. Got to maintain our prestige. The Chinese depend on us maintaining order. Without it, where would we be? Solve it quickly, Danilov.’

‘The body is on its way to the pathologist now, sir. Dr Fang will do his usual thorough job.’

Boyle harrumphed and lifted a piece of paper from the top of his pile. ‘There’s one other thing that requires a delicate touch. You did rather well with the Bungalow Murders last year and that awkward affair with the American Consul in ’26. As for your time with Scotland Yard, well, enough said.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Danilov recognised when he was being buttered up. ‘But my two years in London were wasted. We never found the anarchists we were looking for.’

‘At least it meant you could polish your English. You speak it better than most of my English chaps.’

‘Thank you again, sir.’

‘As I was saying, you handled those delicate situations rather well. The thing is, we’ve had a strange note from the French. The French Head of Detectives actually, a Mr…’ he glanced down at the paper he was holding ‘…a Mr Renard.’

‘Is it the note that’s strange, sir, or the fact that the French have sent it?’

‘It’s both, Danilov. Last time we talked to them was spring last year, when we had that little problem with the communists. Anyway, a meeting has been set up for tomorrow morning with him. Usually, I’d go myself but I’ve got a Council session and it can’t be postponed. Can’t stand the frogs anyway. Had enough of them in the war. Far too dramatic for my tastes. Quite like the language though, became quite good at it, even if I do say so myself. Damn fine wine too, if my memory serves me right.’

‘Where is the meeting, sir?’

‘Oh yes, that would help wouldn’t it?’ He scanned the note quickly, his lips moving as he read the words. ‘Ah, here it is, Avenue Stanislaus Chevalier at 10 am. Their HQ, it would seem.’

Danilov took out his notebook and wrote down the details.

‘Do report to me afterwards, Danilov. Can’t have those frogs sending you off on a wild goose chase.
Une poursuite de l
’
oie sauvage
, if I remember my French.’

‘A better translation, sir, might be
un ballet d
’
absurdit
é
s
or more simply
une recherche futile
.

‘Well, that’s as may be. French never was my strong suit.’ Boyle closed the cigarette case, always a sign that the meeting was over. ‘Clear this blonde case up quickly, Danilov.’

‘I’m going to see the pathologist right away, sir.’

‘Good. It’s probably just a lovers’ quarrel that’s gone too far.’

‘It went too far, sir, of that I am sure, but it’s more than a lovers’ quarrel. I believe it’s far darker and more dangerous than that.’

***

Inspector Danilov returned to his desk after the interview with Boyle. He stood in front of it for a long time, realising that something was wrong. The ink bottle was in a different place, and the pencil was half an inch out of alignment. He reached down and put them back exactly where they should have been.

Behind him, he could hear the muffled sniggers of the other detectives.

‘Wha’s up, Danilov, somethin’ not right?’ This was from Cartwright, a detective with the imagination of a bull and the wit of a dinosaur. ‘Out of whack, are we?’

Danilov turned back and addressed Cartwright, but actually talking to all of them. ‘I’d rather you didn’t touch anything on my desk in future.’

‘Always so prim and fuckin’ proper aren’t we? I thought you Russians were rougher and tougher, like the girls in Blood Alley.’ More sniggers from the detectives.

‘Not all of us are the same, Cartwright. Just like you English, we are different too.’ He looked him up and down. ‘You, for instance, had an egg with two slices of bacon this morning for breakfast. I had just one cup of coffee. You had an argument with your wife last night and this morning it continued. I live alone. And your house boy has left, as well. I prefer to do without servants. Your…’ he stopped here looking for the right word ‘…paramour…is also two-timing you with…’ he swivelled round and pointed at another detective, Robson, sitting to the left of Cartwright. ‘Such women, of course, do not interest me.’

‘Wha’ the fuck? How do you know…?’

But Cartwright was already talking to the back of Danilov as he walked out of the detectives’ office.

‘You’ll get your comeuppance one day, you mark my words. You may speak bloody English but you’ll never be an Englishman. Bloody Russian prick!’ Cartwright shouted to the closing door.

Danilov had already gone next door to see Miss Cavendish, the office secretary. She was an old maid who had been born in Shanghai and lived there all her life, but still didn’t speak a word of Chinese. ‘Well, there’s no need is there, they all speak English. Or at least the ones I have to speak to. Or they speak pidgin. And I’m frightfully good at pidgin. Second language to me it is.’

Danilov stood in front of her desk and coughed. She glanced up and he caught a waft of her scent. French and very floral. ‘Miss Cavendish, could I bother you for the file on the French Head of Detectives? A Mr Renard, I believe.’

‘Actually, it’s Major Renard, Inspector. I’ll have it on your desk in an hour.’ She leaned forward and whispered, ‘I couldn’t help but hear what you said about Cartwright, he will be upset.’

‘Cartwright can’t be upset, Miss Cavendish. That would indicate an ability to feel. He is either totally happy or totally drunk. Those are the limits of his emotions.’