The Redactor, Chapter 08

I had planned to check into a hotel, then hit the streets to hunt down Li Min, but I settled for sticking my head under a tap in the men’s toilets of Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport. The dream of Heiro’s Gothic horror had blown away any thought of pretending I was in Hong Kong to reminisce.

  Plus I only had a few hours buffer. Technically, her birthday began at midnight. I didn’t want to learn the hard way of a pedantic streak in Hiero.

  I would find Li Min, and, doing my best to look sane, warn her to be anywhere but her bedroom—or apartment—on her birthday. No more lies. They just sat around like unexploded ordnance.

  The address I had copied from the student database was for an apartment block in Sai Ying Pun. I withdrew some cash from an automatic teller, then waited forever for my luggage to appear. Somehow it had ended up on the wrong carousel. I exited Arrivals, and merged with a throng of travellers surging toward the taxi rank.

  There was no queue I could discern, and on any other day, I would have floated at the fringes of the crowd, too polite to push forward. But the adrenaline coursing in my veins energized me. My height gave me a good view to curbside. I picked my spot, and drove toward it, surging forward into the smallest gap, and standing firm when the shoves came back.

  Soon I was seated in the backseat of a red taxi, steeping in the Cantonese chatter of the driver, watching a million people I would never meet again drift past outside. The air was humid. The taxi’s air conditioner droned hard but added nothing but its noise to the cab’s atmosphere.

  The apartment block was one of five built to the same design. Each offered a grand view of the other, and not much else.

  I got out, paid the driver, and was deciding whether to ask him to wait when he tore off with a howl of the engine.

  I retrieved the slip of paper with Li Min’s address from my pocket and double-checked I was in the right place. Jade Gardens blazed in green lights, in English and hanzi. Each of the five towers was numbered.

  I realized, with a dip of the stomach, that the address on the slip was not. I’d have to try each until I found the right one.

  I began with number one. Its elevator shot me to the twenty-second floor in seconds, and I followed the signs to apartment fourteen. It was the last along the corridor. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I would have to stake it out if I ran out of luck in the other towers. I had no idea what I would do if I hit another vacant apartment.

  In tower two I was invited to dinner by a smiling couple and their three kids. I regretfully declined, but was thinking, what the hell, if I found my girl, maybe I would return with a bottle of Merlot.

  Tower three was an elderly couple.

  Tower four’s fourteenth floor was being pulled apart.

  Tower five housed a German man, who I roused from bed. He offered me some choice Deutsch and slammed the door in my face.

  I returned serve to the blank face of the door with a few choice words of English and retreated to the lift.

  I returned to Tower One, the readout on my Medline watch blazing iridescent green at 10:33. Blazing next to the time was heart icon, and a pulse reading. I was pushing 130 bpm, needed to calm down.

  On the twenty-second floor, I found apartment fourteen again and knocked. No answer, so I planted my backside on the door and slid into a sitting position on the floor.

  I soon learnt to discern whether the lift at the end of the corridor was rising or falling based on the rumble of its passage. Only three times in the next half-hour did the lift speaker ping announcing an arrival.

  It made me wonder how many occupants the building had.

  Which suggested another thought.

  I rose from the floor with crackling knees, and strode down the corridor to apartment fifteen, and rapped on its door.

  A young Asian man answered. He wore a singlet and boxer briefs, and massive headphones hung from his neck.

  “Do you know the occupant of apartment fourteen?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Know if she’s in?”

  I watched him trying to read me.

  “Have you tried knocking?” he said.

  “Yes. Is she out much, at night?”

  His mouth tugged down at the corners.

  “She keeps to herself,” he said.

  I thanked him and returned to fourteen.

  I tried the apartment on the opposite side of the corridor, but got no answer.

  Slumping onto the floor again, I checked my watch: 10:57.

  My thoughts drifted, only to be snagged on a memory of the dream I’d had that evening on the plane.

  I remembered Hiero telling his Gothic short, and one detail leapt out at me.

  It was the smell...

  Feeling like a fool, I twisted around onto my knees until I could dip my head to the crack at the bottom of the door.

  I sniffed—and got a nose full of dust that set off a sneezing fit. When it subsided I tried again with less gusto.

  The faintest odour of chaos touched my nostrils. I sniffed again, straining to identify it. It could be curdling milk.

  I sprang to my feet and returned to apartment fifteen. The guy didn’t bother with being polite this time.

  “I have a blown fuse in my car and can’t get the hatch open,” I said. “Do you have a toolbox?”

  He gave me a look like I had to be kidding.

  I went down the apartments, rapping on doors, until finally, at apartment three, I found a middle-aged man, who disappeared and returned with a steel toolbox. He yielded it in exchange for my driver’s license.

  The box banged against my leg as I carted it back to apartment fourteen, straining to quiet its clanking contents.

  I put the toolbox down, opened it, and rummaged through it for a screwdriver. I found a twelve-inch flat-blade, and with a quick glance up and down the corridor, set it to the doorjamb.

  For a moment I felt like I was about to pop the safety seal on Life.

  Then I squeezed on the lever until, with a sharp crack, the door jumped backward.

  I eased through the gap, and pushed the door shut.

  It was very dark, the only light coming from the corridor where the door didn’t shut properly, and the corner of a venetian blind that was caught on an empty vase.

  I crossed the room gingerly, fumbled for the blind’s dongle, and opened its louvers. Hong Kong light pollution leaked in, and my eyes adjusted.

  The room comprised a kitchenette, dining area and lounge. Between a small, circular dining table, a two-seater couch, and a couple of bookcases, there wasn’t a lot of room left.

  I stuck my head over the kitchenette’s sink and sniffed at the dishes piled in it. Two wine glasses sat on the draining board. Lumps of something whitish sat in the bottom of the sink amid a tangle of chicken bones. They might account for the smell.

  Two doors were set in the wall opposite the kitchenette. Bedroom and bathroom, I guessed. I crossed the room, and chose one.

  Turns out I chose the bedroom.

  The bedroom was even darker than the living room, but even so, I couldn’t miss it. Hanging over the edge of the bed, angled to catch the scant light coming from behind me, was a thin leg.

  I swept a hand down the inside of the wall and caught the light switch. Dazzling light blazed over the room, and burnt the scene into my memory.

  Li Min lay on top of the covers, naked, one leg crooked over the side of the bed, arms folded up over her head to meet, forming a love heart. She wasn’t smiling any more.

  I moved to her side, and my hands went out mechanically. Her skin was cold to the touch. With two fingers I felt for a pulse at her throat, but it was as still as everything else in the apartment. Dead.

  I retraced my steps into the living room, and for a moment wondered vaguely where the phone might be. I would call for an ambulance.

  The next thing I knew I was hunched over in a dark space that smelt of tile cleaner—the toilet. I don’t remember how I got there. My guts surged again and again, like an animal trapped in my rib cage. My mouth gaped involuntarily. I don’t know how long I squatted there, but nothing came out of my mouth but a trickle of spit.

  When the vomit-reflex finally let go, I collapsed onto the floor, my trunk wrung out and aching. And only then did great sobs tear their way out of my throat. Whole-body sobs. A child’s sobs.

  After that, I sat for a time in darkness on the toilet floor, and listened to the echo of my breathing.

  I returned to the bedroom and forced myself to look at Li Min. I had never seen a dead body before—except once, at the funeral of a great aunt, although I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t constructed that memory from overheard conversation.

  I cupped a hand under her leg that hung over the side of the bed, and gently lifted it and arranged it next to the other. It moved easily, which I guessed meant she hadn’t been dead that long. In her wardrobe I found a dressing gown, and draped that over her.

  My senses played tricks on me and I fancied I could smell Hiero’s aftershave in the air.

  I had to fight the urge to sit down again. My eyes wouldn’t stop blurring. But the thought that he had stood in this same room only hours before steeled my nerves.

  I surveyed the room and tried to piece together the last moments of Li Min’s life.

  A bedside chest of drawers held a lamp with a rice-paper shade, patterned with flowers and bees. Beneath clustered a zoo of stuffed animals around a digital alarm clock and box of tissues. Lying in the scant space left was a shallow dish, still glistening with a trace of moisture, and a hypodermic needle, the kind I had seen in the dirt beneath the cisterns of public toilets.

  So Hiero’s “poison” had been heroin? Heroin in a massive, killing dose.

  I hunted through the drawers. The top two were filled with underwear, socks, and handkerchiefs. The bottom drawer held only one item—a pink journal with lock. On the floor at the base of the drawers lay a condom wrapper, torn nearly through.

  A sharp rapping sound startled me, but not from fear. Anger was fast burning that off. Someone was knocking on the outer door. The light coming from the living room swelled.

  Without thinking, I stooped to wrench the bottom drawer open, retrieved the journal, and thrust it down the front of my shirt. With a final glance at Li Min’s still body, I strode from the bedroom.

  The outer door was half open, and two faces were poking comically through into the gap, silhouetted by the corridor light.

  I hefted the toolbox, pulled the door open, and brushed past them.

  “Blocked toilet,” I said without stopping.

  They were a little couple with wizened faces. The man chattered at my back, but I didn’t stop. At apartment three I exchanged the toolbox for my driver’s license, and if the owner thought anything strange, he wasn’t saying.

  I had to walk a long way before I could hail a taxi, but I was glad for the exercise. The last thing I wanted to do then was sit alone.

  I gave the driver the name of the only hotel I knew in Hong Kong. The one Jean and I had stayed in seven years before.

  The hotel was expensive, and the taxi had taken the last of my cash. My second mistake in Hong Kong was to use my credit card to secure the room. The first had been to secure a toolbox with my driver’s license.