Chapter 18

[Only by looking inside death can life be found] Ancient proverb.

Dr. Kreeger, a man who in his life had become acquainted with more morgues than he cared to remember, was of course unaware of this particular building’s sad history as he stepped from the yellow taxi this dark evening. He did however immediately notice that the building stood alone; unusual in this country's urban landscape where structures always pushed up against each other in a seeming Darwinian struggle for light and survival. Another oddity was its nakedness—as if it had shrugged off the usual ugly covering of wires, cables, signs, and neon lights and was preparing to slide down into the water.

‘Watch the step, Docta,’ Jon Lee said, pointing to a granite block that had been thrown down before the morgue's entrance.

It was a dark night but Kreeger thought he would not have missed such an obstacle. ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking his left hand from his jacket pocket for extra balance.

Lee must have known that the door would be locked because he didn't try to open it; he just stooped and looked through the chicken-wire and glass. He shouted something then rattled the door by pushing at one of the bars that strutted down from top to bottom.

Kreeger stepped up and joined Lee at the reinforced door, bending also to peer into the gloomy interior. Just as his eyes began to adjust, two small circles of glass glinted on the other side, behind which he was sure he saw eyes—deep, heavy eyes. He gave a start and shot upright, as if a genie had just given him some dark foreshadow of his own destiny. Lee kept his face to the glass and again shouted something through.

‘Relax, Docta,’ he said, lifting himself up.

Whoever was inside rammed back a bolt—it clanked noisily as it came to rest—and as the door creaked open, a voice called gruffly out into the night, beckoning with a withered arm, dragged slowly through the murky air. Kreeger followed Lee in but couldn't get a good look at what had opened the door until it had shuffled back into the dim building and had pulled up under the only source of light—a naked bulb, hanging from somewhere far above by a single electrical wire. When he did see what it was, he winced.

Rocking backwards and forwards in that meagre spotlight was a figure deformed into a cruel caricature of a man. If he could have stood up straight and looked ahead, his eyes might just have levelled into Kreeger's heart, liver for certain. But this was a feat he would never master: a grotesque deformity, a mushrooming hump on his back, pushed him into a severe stoop and he would never make it above the doctor’s kidney.

In what Kreeger took to be a greeting, the hunchback attempted to raise his head towards the two of them—letting out an unintelligible slurry of words with the failed gesture. Kreeger managed to notice his heavy eyelids as they struggled open under their thick covering of glass and a grin that darted out from between the gaps in his teeth. Lee seemed to understand the words and replied in his nonchalant way, obviously thanking the man for letting them in. He then introduced the man to Kreeger:

‘Docta Kreega, Fuk—the night-watchman of the Pei Lin city morgue.’

Kreeger looked down but the night-watchman was unaware that he was being introduced. He dragged himself over to a wall, where he pulled a few levers, illuminating a hallway that led away into the heart of the building. He retrieved a hoop of iron keys from a hook next to the levers then started off down the hallway, without words, pulling himself along like a victim limping from a car wreck. Lee and Kreeger followed.

Behind him, Fuk trailed gritty words that Lee picked up and translated:

‘They wanted to keep the American by himself but the morgue is very busy recently. First they put him with a rich man. He also came down from the hill on the same day. Tonight they get more company. Four bodies come to the morgue; two have to go in with the American: a woman and a teenager both eat too many drugs. A busy night, eh, Docta?’

Kreeger didn't really know what Lee was talking about with the American having 'company', and the idea of bodies being everywhere didn't shock him at all: he had spent most of his professional life in morgues, rummaging around inside rotting cadavers looking for clues. However, four fresh corpses in a single evening did seem like things were busy.

‘Who usually deals with them?’ Kreeger asked.

‘We have a good docta, but he's not forensic, you know. He can usually tell difference between a suicide and a natural; and he can sometimes get us started on a murder investigation. And of course he knows a Phant victim. You will see.’

Kreeger did not ask what a Phant victim was; he was silently agreeing with Lee's statement that the doctor here was not a forensic pathologist. He had not seen a real forensic pathologist since he had arrived in the country and he was not expecting to meet one out here, in this wilderness.

Ahead of them, Fuk lurched past a series of doors—each of which felt the rapping of his knuckles and the wind of his overworked lungs as he spat out words.

‘Full.’ Lee translated.

They lost Fuk to another corner and by the time they turned he had reached a door and stopped. Closing in on him, Kreeger’s nose began to twitch, as wisps of rancid air began to mingle in with the morgue’s own smell of ammonia and formaldehyde. It was the room: whatever vile secret it held, a single door was insufficient to keep it in.

Lee and Kreeger stood watching as the hunchback jangled his hoop of key and unlocked the door. He pushed it with a foot and it creaked back on its hinges. Without warning, a tidal wave of airborne putrefaction came crashing out and hit the two men. Jon Lee was the first to retch, quickly putting a soiled rag over his spluttering mouth. Kreeger followed with a red paisley handkerchief.

Regaining control, Jon Lee mumbled through his mouth-covering: ‘So sorry, Docta, power cut. No electric today.’

Fuk, showing no reaction to the foul air, stepped over the threshold and into the darkness, where he did something to illuminate the chamber. Now at least they would be able to see the source of the stench. The night-watchman pulled himself back out of the room and made a gravelly comment to Lee, still without any signs of discomfort. Lee made no attempt to try to talk again, kept the cloth over his face, and simply nodded, whereupon Fuk staggered away down the corridor, further into the bowels of the city morgue.

Lee reached into the room and turned a switch. A rusty overhead fan strained before beginning to move, its blades slowly chopping down at the turbid air beneath. ‘That should clear it in a few minutes,’ he said through his rag, ‘So sorry.’

Kreeger followed Lee in and was expecting a wall of doors behind which would lie cold cadavers in their refrigerated tombs, ready to be slid out for his inspection. Instead he saw large blue boxes jumbled up against the walls. He waited as Jon Lee walked over to the box farthest from the door and dropped down its front; the iron panel cracked the stone floor, echoed around the chamber. Kreeger almost rubbed his eyes in disbelief as the falling metal revealed four outstretched cadavers lying on top of each other.

‘Fuk say he's in this one. Hope he's right,’ Lee said.

Much to the doctor's relief, each body in fact lay in its own individual tray and was wrapped in a translucent blue plastic cover—a surreal veneer to their nakedness and death. Each head was sheathed in a white cloth bag.

Lee tapped the end of the box. ‘This is a new one,’ he said then pointed at something behind.

Kreeger followed Lee’s index finger to a wire coming out of the back of the blue container, which he supposed led to some kind of internal refrigeration unit—the big blue box was in fact a refrigerator.

‘They have to shovel ice into those.’ Lee waved at some of the other boxes. He returned his attention to the opened blue refrigerator and tried to pull out its top tray, obviously knowing which one held the American, but it wouldn't move. ‘Broken,’ he said, ‘we have to roll him out, Docta, so sorry.’

Kreeger could already see that they would have to do more than roll the body to get it out, but he said nothing.

Lee walked over to the examining table, grabbed its head, and pulled it towards the box; it sprang into a convulsive vibration as its caster wheels rattled over the stone floor, filling the room with a mechanical chatter. He positioned the table as close as he could, but the dropped front panel meant that they would still have to heave the body a good few feet through the air. ‘You get his feet, Docta,’ Lee said as he put his hands under the body's shoulders.

Kreeger did not think too much about what was happening—during the last few months he had learned that by not doing so he could more easily maintain some semblance of sanity.

‘Ready, Docta? One two three.’

Kreeger swallowed his indignity and strained, but he was surprised at how light the body was; it almost flew by itself over to the table, where it landed more or less in the middle.

They both pushed the wheeled table back to the centre of the room, into its original position under the light. Lee fussed over the exact position of the corpse on the table for a moment, pushing in the feet and pulling down the shoulders. When he was satisfied he put his hand over the crown of the head, and in one swift jerk, came away with the white cloth bag.

‘Docta Kreega, please to meet Nathan Blye.’

Kreeger did not notice Lee’s grin as the detective unmasked the victim: his eyes were held firmly by what was unfolding on the table. But even he, a man who had spent his career studying the ways both humans and nature can ravage a human body, was not ready for what was revealed. He winced visibly at the rotting head, suddenly exposed and sticking out of the tube of plastic-wrap, shocked by the way the deformed skull with its peeling layers of putrefied flesh stared with its dead eyes up into the naked light-bulb, hairless.

‘Oh, what . . .’ He turned away before he could finish his instinctive exclamation, snatching the red paisley handkerchief again from his pocket; he coughed into it. Before turning back to the body he looked up for Lee, but the detective had vanished into the shadows, leaving only Blye’s white head shroud on the bloodstained concrete floor.

‘Jon,’ he called out, picking up the hood. ‘I had better change; this could get messy,’ His eyes wandered back to the decayed head.

*

In a small anteroom Kreeger carefully removed his creased white jacket and trousers; his Panama hat fell off as he bent forwards to loosen his shoes.

‘So, Jon, tell me about the case,’ he said, picking his hat up off the floor. ‘My man at the embassy did not tell me much at all; he was just desperate to get me out here—twisted my arm if you know what I mean.’

Lee obviously did not know what the doctor meant. ‘Well, Docta, the body was found a few days before, eh, on Wednesday, that was the second, September the second.’

Kreeger knew that much but checked his watch anyway; if today was the sixth, then Lee was correct: Blye had been found four days ago.

‘Up on the hill outside of the city. Bamboo rat find him.’

‘What? ‘ Kreeger interrupted, ‘a bamboo what?’

‘Rat. A bamboo rat . . . eh, somebody stealing bamboo from the hills around the city. We call bamboo rat.’

‘People steal bamboo here?’

‘Yes, of course, people steal everything here. Bamboo is expensive; before, very expensive.’

‘Why would a thief report a dead body?’ was Kreeger's next logical question.

‘Bamboo rats not bad people, Docta, just very poor . . . and very superstitious. Very superstitious. Dead body is no good for them, must get rid of it.’

Kreeger had picked out the largest blue cotton jacket he could see amongst the few that were hanging on the wall. A suitable pair of cotton trousers was even more difficult to find. Putting them on he felt like one of those boys at school from poor families, whose limbs grow beyond the limits of their parents' paycheques.

‘They told me that he came here to study! but I cannot imagine anything in this place worth a second glance,’ Kreeger said without thinking.

‘Oh, Docta, you hurt me,’ Lee replied with exaggerated indignation.

Kreeger smothered a sheepish grin with his right hand, said nothing.

‘Never mind, you are right. This is not a good place; many bad things happen here. I show you the other bodies later.’ Lee gestured out into the main room where an unknown number of bodies froze and thawed in their plastic wrappers. ‘Blye thought he could find answers here; some of you Westerners look through different eyes, Docta.’

Kreeger was tying up his plastic apron and did not look up; he said:

‘Different eyes, yes, different minds. Everything is different. But not all Westerners think the same. I suppose Blye was a rich kid; had everything; wanted more. I don't know.’ Kreeger sighed. ‘So what was he doing up there in the bamboo?’

‘Oh, he lived up there, Docta.’

Kreeger looked up from the straps of his apron; his blue eyes narrowed.

‘Eh . . . he was with Masta Long . . . in the monastery on the hill . . . nobody told you?’

Kreeger stared at Jon Lee as if he was speaking a language from another world. ‘With . . . Master Lang! In a what?’

‘Long,’ Lee corrected him, ‘It's Masta Long, and he lived in a monastery.’

‘In a monastery . . . on a bamboo hill. Look, Jon, if this is some kind of a joke, I . . .’

‘No joking, Docta. Blye was a, how you say . . . monk . . . no novice. Blye was a novice with Masta Long. He live here for many months already. Many people know about Blye. You know, not many foreigners come to Pei Lin.’

Lee’s crude unmasking of the corpse flashed through Kreeger’s mind: dead eyes staring up from that rotting head, hairless. ‘A novice monk!’ he said with a pronounced expression of incredulity. He thought back to his conversations with Filcher a few days ago. Now he realised how much he was in the dark about this case. They had rushed him out here without so much as a photograph of the young boy. Just who was this Nathan Blye? The son of a diplomat, he had been told, or at least that had been implied. He had filled in the blanks by himself without thinking too much about it: The son of an important diplomat turns up brutally murdered out in one of the provinces is bad for both sides—ours and theirs—rush out a forensic pathologist, who luckily just happens to be in the country at the time, and get things sorted out as quickly as possible. Now he could not even remember exactly what Filcher had said to him—it had all been so rushed and he had been thinking more about Maria and Christina and . . .

‘Docta Kreeger.’ Lee's smooth voice broke the doctor's thought, bringing him back to the present.

Lee continued: ‘As soon as we get the body it is very easy to identify. We go to the monastery and get his things then send a fax to the capital. Now they send you to help us find out what happened.’ Lee broke off and stared at Kreeger, as if studying the lines on the older man's face, looking for clues. ‘But you don't seem to know much about him, Docta.’ A grin.

‘No, I suppose I don't. I only know what they told me, which wasn't much at all actually.’

Kreeger started to prepare some of the equipment that he had lugged all the way out from the capital. He opened up a satchel and fished out a few packets and boxes, extracting tools and implements.

Jon Lee hadn't changed; he'd just taken off his jacket and hung a plastic apron around his neck, without even bothering to tie up the straps. ‘I'll keep back, if that's ok?’

‘Fine. I won't be doing too much tonight, just a quick look. I will do the autopsy tomorrow. For now I just want to see what I will be dealing with and it will give me something to tell my man at the embassy when I call him later tonight.’ Kreeger had forgotten to take off his watch, which was still strapped to the ten or so inches of exposed flesh sticking out from the short sleeves of his blue top. He looked at it and frowned. ‘That is if I get back in time,’ he said, taking off his trusty Swiss timepiece.

Lee’s eyes followed it all the way into the doctor’s trouser pocket.

‘So, Jon, what did this Long fellow say . . . Master Long. Is he a suspect? How about the other monks? I presume he has other monks.’

‘Yes, yes, Masta Long he have many followers. He's a very good teacher. My colleagues, Offica Fat and Offica Mao go up to the monastery as soon as we get the body. The monks say Blye was very quiet, only have one friend. I go there myself today. Nothing suspicious. Masta Long is the one good man in this city—you can trust me on that. And his monks they only breathe when he tell them to.’

Kreeger still hadn’t fully comprehended the bizarre past of the young American that was unfolding before him and said nothing. He finished off a strap and started forwards, stopping to pick off a face-mask that hung by itself on a peg near the door. It didn’t look clean but at least it smelled of detergent; he had forgotten to bring his own so it would have to do. He looked around for a cloth hat for his hair until he remembered that was one of the things they never used in the lab—one of the many vexations that had been chipping away at his sanity. ‘What was his name?’ he said at last.

‘Eh . . . what?’

‘Blye’s friend. You just said that he had a friend up at the monastery.’

‘Oh . . . I don’t know. Mao saw him, not me.’

‘Well did they ask him any questions?’

‘Yes . . . I suppose so. Song. Yes, that’s his name. Novice Song.’

‘Come on,’ Kreeger sighed, ‘let's have look at him.’

This time it was Lee who followed, back out into the body room where Blye waited in the coolness, supine under the naked light-bulb.

*

‘I am a pathologist, Jon, not a detective,’ Kreeger said without facing Lee, ‘I might be able to tell you when and how he died, but you will have to take it from there. And I am not sure how much forensic evidence I will be able to collect and analyse. We need labs full of expensive equipment for those kinds of tests. You can't even find that back in the capital, so I'm not sure what I am going to do out here.’ He looked over at the body, then turned back to Lee. ‘Anyway, I will try my best. The fauna will be easier to analyse.’

‘The what, Docta?’

‘Fauna . . . the insects . . . bugs that have infested the body since he died. It's called forensic entymology. We can sometimes calculate the elapsed time since death by what fauna has grown inside the body.’ He stopped and thought for a moment. ‘What do you know about the time of death?’

‘Time of death?’

‘Yes, when do you think he actually died?’

‘Well, Docta,’ Lee took a deep breath then exhaled, almost a sigh. He didn’t look tired but he suddenly sounded it. ‘Some of the other monks say he was in his, how you say, bedroom, no dormitory; he was in his dormitory on the evening of the first, September first, a day before he was found.’ He stopped, tripped his eyebrows, and waited. End of conversation.

‘Go on,’ was Kreeger’s response.

This time it was a sigh, with most of the air going through his flaring nostrils. Then a shrug. ‘I say he left his dormitory later on that night and was stabbed to death by some crazy drug addict who came across him in the dark, on the hill. Not much to it really. Bamboo rat find him the next day. The body already stinking—in this weather a body rots very quickly, you know, Docta?’

‘Yes I am sure it does.’ Kreeger was alarmed at the detective's certainty—he seemed to have everything clear in his mind before a single fact had been revealed on the examining table or in the laboratory. This wasn't the way an investigation was supposed to progress. Scientific evidence was what built a case and solved a mystery, not the unsubstantiated word of novice monks living together in a monastery on a bamboo hill!

‘Drug addict?’

‘Must be. So violent, you know?’

‘Jon.’ Kreeger hesitated; was it worth explaining how a murder investigation proceeds in a . . . in a what? In a civilised country! ‘Jon, let me at least try to confirm some of that by looking at the body. You know sometimes things aren't what they seem to be at first glance. Let's wait for a few facts before we go jumping to conclusions.’ He was trying to sound optimistic but inside, Kreeger was feeling dejected. He knew this was going to be difficult. He hadn't actually worked on any real cases in the capital but he’d had enough contact with the people through his seminars and courses to get to know a little about their mentality—and this was exactly the kind of thing he had expected. He might as well go back home now for all the use he would be here.

Kreeger stepped towards the centre of the room, stopped, lifted his scalpel, and looked down at the table and its spread of death.

‘Let's get this off first,’ he said, more to the corpse than to his living companion, who was keeping well away from the table.

With the glinting blade delicately held in his rubber-covered fingers, Kreeger leaned forward and began to slit along the plastic wrap, peeling back the layers with his free hand. As the last swath of film came away, Kreeger did something he rarely did during an autopsy—he physically reacted to what he saw, pulling his shoulders back and his head up. The grotesque mutilation and decay was too much even for him to bear.

‘Good God,’ he said regaining a little control, ‘What happened to him up there?’

‘I know, looks pretty bad doesn't it?’ Lee replied from one of the walls. ‘But the addicts here can get a little violent when they have had too much of their medicine. That's why I said he was killed by an addict; I see it many times recently. Out of control. They get completely out of control.’

Kreeger bent back over the corpse, the scientist again in control, taking in at a glance the destruction wreaked on this young body. His trained eye stripped away the decay that had spread across the body since death and saw a fresh corpse ravaged by bleeding lacerations and punctured by gaping stab wounds.

‘You said he was found on Wednesday; was he put on ice that day?’

‘Yes, he got here in the evening and they did the usual thing.’

‘The usual thing,’ Kreeger muttered under his breath with a sneer. ‘So you think he was dead for twenty four hours before being frozen, which he has now been for four days, 96 hours.’

‘Eh . . . Yes, that's right.’

Kreeger doubted the veracity of Lee’s assured statements. A fresh corpse would be neither bloated nor putrefied, but this body seemed to be well bloated with putrefaction already setting in: it would have to have remained unfrozen for most of those ninety six hours to reach such a condition. He doubted that the power supply was that unreliable, which meant . . .

‘And besides today, has the power failed at all?’

‘Probably, it goes off all the time. Never know when the next one is coming. Why? Is it important?’

‘Absolutely. For the decay of the body. And of course for the bugs. Low temperatures will alter their natural life cycles—slowing them right down or terminating them altogether. It depends. The adult insect will be killed and so might a larva, but a chrysalis might survive and hatch out later, if the temperature increases again. So you see, if I want to find out how long Blye has been dead, I have to know when and for how long the power was off.’

Lee obviously didn't see or didn’t care at all and only mumbled that he would try to find out if he could. ‘. . . I doubt if anyone records or remembers those things,’ were his last words.

Kreeger tried to look at Lee to give him one of his I-am-being-serious stares that he had got used to giving since he had been in the country; but Lee had slunk further away into the shadows and seemed to be hiding in one of the corners.

Kreeger went back to work. He pulled up a flap of decayed flesh expecting to find eggs. He had seen enough fresh corpses to know that flies will begin blowing exposed meat as soon as they can, often even before the victim has drawn his last breath; starting with membranes and wounds, they will lay for two or three days, filling the dead body with thousands of egg clusters.

Larvae. Where there should have been small sausage-like eggs, he saw hundreds of dead larvae. He picked one out with the tweezers and held it up to the light. Impossible to identify the species, but it looked as of it was in its third stage, already having shed two of its skins. Not exactly what he expected.

‘Jon,’ he called out, ‘Jon, can you look in my large bag and bring me a few of the translucent plastic pots.’

Lee’s lethargic voice came from somewhere distant. ‘Pots?’ A long pause. ‘Okay, I’ll have a look.’

Kreeger looked back down at the body.

He noticed that Blye had been in water around the time of his death. He had probably died from the stabbings and not by drowning, but he had certainly spent some time in water. He rubbed a section of rough skin with his stainless-steel pointer; anserina cutis: goose skin. And nearby he found skin macertion—all swollen and wrinkled, like a washerwoman's hands. He would cut open the lungs tomorrow, during the autopsy, but he was sure he would not find any water in them.

‘Pots,’ said Lee, spilling a few on the table next to the body. He quickly backed away.

‘I’ll need some labels,’ Kreeger called after him as he dropped one of the cream-coloured monsters into a pot. He gave his attention back to the body, looking it over from top to bottom. ‘You never take their underwear off?’ Kreeger’s voice wasn’t loud enough to reach the room that Lee had gone into to look for labels. He walked around the table to Blye’s groin area, wondering if that was Asian modesty or if it served any practical purpose. Anyway this might be lucky for him. The outside pocket of Blye’s under-shorts was encrusted with dried blood and he had to unstick the opening with the scalpel before he could get inside. He moved his finger carefully along the seem, and at the bottom corner he found what he was looking for. He quickly checked to see if there were any more, but this was the only one. Next he used a pair of scissors to cut away the pocket—it was the only way to extract his discovery without damaging it. He left it attached to a small square of cotton, picked it up with the tweezers and dropped it into a pot—unlike the larvae this specimen rattled as it hit the plastic.

‘Labels,’ said Lee, dropping the them next to the pots—he had even remembered a pen.

For the next ten minutes the doctor busied himself around the corpse, using nothing more than the steel pointer, a pair of tweezers, and occasionally the scalpel. He scrutinised everything that was exposed to him on the surface of the cadaver, collecting information, clues—building a picture of Nathan Blye's watery and painful demise.

At last Kreeger stepped back from the table, having decided that Blye had almost certainly died from massive organ failure as a result of one or more of the punctures he had received in his abdomen. Exactly which organ was the first to go might be impossible to deduce, but he would have a look tomorrow. He shuddered. Now that the work was done the emotion that he had suppressed at the beginning of the examination again welled up inside of him, as sometimes happened after an especially gruesome case. No matter how many violent killings he saw, a fresh atrocity always moved him—but never until the work was done.

He bulwarked his emotion with a wall of detached industriousness, maintaining an unclouded, analytical mind for the duration of an examination; but at some point after he put the scalpel down, it would hit him. The wave might come immediately, as had just happened; sometimes it came later, during his evening meal or in a dream while he was sleeping. It was not something he worried about; he simply let it wash over him. For a few moments he was sickened and disgusted by the depravity of his fellow humans and then it was gone.

*

He turned around to look for Lee. But the detective had disappeared again. ‘Jon, where are you?’ he called out, getting nothing back but an echo. ‘Jon . . .’

He stopped as Lee's silhouetted form appeared in a doorway next to the changing room.

‘What's in there?’

‘I think this is where Docta Lin works, a kind of, how you say, lab. I think it's his lab.’

‘Good,’ Kreeger said walking over to the open door, ‘I was wondering where I might set up a small workspace for myself. Do you think he would mind?’

‘Well . . . eh . . . he might; I don’t think we should . . .’

Kreeger stepped towards Lee, who was in no hurry to get out of the way and seemed almost to be barring the doctor's entry. ‘Jon, I am sure it will be alright,’ he said, pushing past. He stopped with just one foot inside the room, as if beaten back by a strong headwind. His jaw dropped. ‘Are you sure this is a lab?’ he said, taking in with one swift glance the static chaos within. The rectangular room was not small, the walls stretched away into the dimness, but from the space between those limits came a sense of punishing claustrophobia. Two sturdy wooden benches struggled down the sides of the longer walls from the door end, grabbing most of the space. The benches were cluttered with jars, trays, bottles, dishes, papers, and things Kreeger had no intention of finding out about. Above the benches, snaking along the walls were shelves, full of more glass jars, plastic pots, and bottles of colourful liquids. His eyes fell on one particular translucent bottle in which swam what could only have been a human foetus. He stepped back.

‘We better to ask Docta Lin first,’ Lee said.

‘No, no, I am sure he will not mind.’ Kreeger’s eyes continued their exploration. A few stools alongside the benches kept back the jumble of boxes, crates and ancient equipment that fought for the floor space. There was even a skeleton at the back of the room—it had fallen over and looked as if it were crawling from the rubble of a natural disaster.

Kreeger had thought he had got used to the conditions in which people in this country worked, but the scene of physical derangement that met his eyes as he stood half inside Doctor Lin’s workplace stunned him.

‘Oh my,’ he muttered; then addressing Lee he added, ‘I am not sure if I could actually work in here.’

‘I think we shouldn’t, Docta Kreega.’ Lee almost smiled in relief; not only was he being uncooperative but he was also enjoying watching his guest struggle with his new surroundings.

Kreeger thought fast before submitting himself to the inevitable. ‘Well, I suppose I could clear off part of the workbench and set myself up.’ He let out a long sigh. What choice did he have after all. He faced Lee and said, ‘Jon, could you bring in my bags from the changing room, and the pots from the examining table—just the pots by the head, leave the ones at the feet; I'll start organising things in here.’

Lee attempted a protest but quickly gave up—scorched back by one of the doctor’s glares.

When Lee had disappeared, Kreeger tried to snap a mental picture of the lab. It was by far the worst he had seen during his stay and he wanted to keep a memento of it, something he could look back on in the future when the nightmare that was this trip had started to recede from his mind, something that could reawaken a memory. Although Kreeger had not had a very pleasant experience over here, certainly nothing that came close to his dreamy expectations, he did want to remember what had happened, what it had been like. He might put some of it in those books and papers he was going to write in his retirement—the parts about how not to conduct forensic pathology.

Lee came back with his arms full before Kreeger had even started on a bench. He quickly moved over to the one on the left and, using his forearm, slid away some of the clutter. Lee dropped everything in a single, sudden release onto the hard surface.

‘Careful, Jon.’ Kreeger said with a squint aimed at the clumsy man.

‘So sorry, Docta.’ Lee shrugged.

‘I will need a strong desk-lamp and a good microscope, Jon.’ He looked over at an antique-looking microscope on the other workbench. ‘ I don't want to touch anything in here without checking with your doctor . . . eh . . . what's his name?’

‘Lin. Docta Lin.’

‘Yes, if you could ask him.’

‘Okay,’ Lee replied, ‘I suppose I could leave message with old Fuk on the way out. Fuk can give the message to Lin tomorrow morning.’

‘Alright then, let's get Blye back on ice shall we.’ Kreeger started for the door. ‘Oh, his clothes,’ he said, remembering what he had extracted from Blye’s underwear. ‘Where are the clothes that he was wearing?’

Lee said that Blye had been wearing the usual monk’s robes but he wasn’t sure where they were now. Kreeger made him agree to also write that on the note for Dr. Lin.

*

Nathan Blye, bloody and stiff, was waiting for them on the table in the autopsy room. He didn't resist as the two men sheathed him in fresh plastic and swung him back into his refrigerated box. After confirming that Lee had taken all of the correct pots through to the lab, Kreeger put the remainder, that waited on the examination table, into the blue box after the body.

‘I said that I would show you the other bodies, Docta.’ Lee pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket in preparation.

Kreeger could not recall that particular promise and was a little surprised at Lee’s sudden enthusiasm, but he thought that it might be interesting to have a quick look. ‘OK,’ He said, ‘Let's see what you have.’

The second tray down was working better than Blye's had and Lee managed to slide it half way out before it jammed. It was enough; Lee pulled off the white hood and they both got a clear view of Blye's closest neighbour.

It was the body of a young woman; and compared to Blye, whose putrefied remains were still fresh in his mind, Kreeger thought she looked almost serene. Not a single blemish marked her milky face. He was not sure why but only her hooded eyelids, straining above enlarged eyeballs, indicated that she was dead. They looked so inhuman and lifeless against her faultless complexion.

‘Your man very lucky,’ Lee said. ‘She can play all night.’ He broke off in a cackle of laughter.

Kreeger began to verbalise his confusion but Lee stopped him.

‘She's a night flower, Docta. Aghh ... how you say ... a hooka. Yes, she's a hooka. But Blye needs money now; maybe ... ‘ But the gravity on Kreeger's face stopped him from saying what he wanted to. ‘Just joking, Docta, so sorry.’

‘How about the next one?’ Kreeger asked, preferring not to know about the untimely demise of the night-flower.

Lee pushed the hood back over her head and put his shoulder to the tray. It jerked back in. The next tray was not as easy to pull out and Kreeger had to lend a hand. It creaked under the effort of the two men then slid out a little—enough for a view. Lee snatched off the head cover.

Filling half the face, two open eyes stared straight up, as if in caricature, bulging, bug-like.

‘Phant, Docta,’ Lee said.

That name again, Phant; Kreeger’s mind looked back.

‘An overdose. Phant very popular drug here. An ancient narcotic, but now we have a new kind, for the modern age.’ Lee checked to see if Kreeger was listening then went on, ‘It's now very dangerous. A special cactus grow in the desert; tribes dry the roots and smoke it—for many hundreds of years, thousands maybe. Now they cultivate the cactus and bring it here to the city. Somebody has a factory where they purify the root and mix it with opium paste. Ha . . . smoke too much and you look like him.’ He nodded down at the frog-eyed cadaver. ‘She too, take the drug,’ he said tapping the tray they had just heaved back in, ‘but somebody else got her before the drug could.’

‘How does the drug kill them?’

‘Too much I guess. I don't really know—Docta Lin, he knows. Phant make people go crazy, lose control, become very violent until it burn them through. Then finished. Dead.’

‘Can't you close the factory?’ Kreeger asked.

‘Easy if we know where it is or who makes the drug. But we don't know.’ Lee tapped the outside of the tray on which the frog-eyed corpse lay. ‘Look around the city, Docta, you will see many people like him. Ha, drug and violence, eh Docta, I'm sure you didn't expect to find that out here.’

Kreeger hadn't and was wishing himself home again as this strange local policeman divulged the sordid secrets of his new host city.

‘Pei Lin not a good place, so sorry.’

They both heaved back the tray then pulled at the bottom one. It slid out more easily than any of the others. After exposing the rotting face, Lee swiftly put his rag over his mouth and identified the corpse.

‘Ah, this is Mista Ling. I already tell you about him,’ he said, his voice muffled by the cloth.

Kreeger should have taken his cue from Lee, but he hadn’t and was now far too late in pulling up the facemask that still dangled under his chin. He wrenched himself back with a nosefull of putrefaction. It took him a second or two to breath again. ‘The man from the hill?’ he said at last through the mask.

‘Yes, arrived here the same time as Blye, but dead a lot longer.’

Kreeger had already smelt the advanced state of decay—his eyes confirmed it.

‘Nothing special about him; maybe he should not be in the morgue—but this is not my decision. His wife, Su, gone a little crazy, you know?’ He touched the side of his head to make sure Kreeger understood. ‘She ran away from their big house on the hill, probably after he died, and she told nobody, did nothing about his body, just left him up there to rot. Near the monastery, you know. His old nurse found the body a few days ago; she went back to the house for something—a purse or something like that. So they bring the body down for old Docta Lin to look at. We found the wife here in the city, already moved into a new apartment.’

‘What does she say about it?’

‘Nothing sensible; she's crazy and scared of something, I don't know what. Says she hated him for keeping her up there on the hill for so long and treating her so bad. Just cries when you mention her husband; says she loves him again. Crazy, you know how a woman can get.’

Kreeger was glad that he didn’t know. He said nothing as they slid old Ling back into the blue box-like refrigerator, which they then sealed up.

*

Fuk was not at his post when they reached the front door of the building. Kreeger had to remind Lee to write the note for Dr. Lin, which the detective did so quickly and, Kreeger felt, with far too few words. Kreeger glared but the note stayed short. The two men let themselves out.