Chapter 27

‘Snake! Careful,’ Lee said, hardly raising his voice.

Kreeger could not catch the next words, but they sounded like an identification.

‘Not poisonous, Docta, don’t worry. But watch out for the smaller green snakes—bamboo viper—deadly; one bite and you’re gone.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ Kreeger said before proceeding, with measured footsteps, towards the clearing ahead. He knew at once that this was the crime-scene—the sound of falling water slowly displaced the whispering of the bamboo as he progressed. When he reached the edge of the growth, he peered into that hidden place and saw white foam crashing into a bubbling mountain stream. He stopped, like a soldier suddenly aware that he is in a minefield.

Lee came up behind him, pushed past, and was about to trample on in.

‘Careful, Jon,’ Kreeger said, putting a hand on the detective’s shoulder, ‘we don’t want to disturb anything.’

‘It’s ok Docta; I told you, we have collected all of the evidence.’

‘Just keep to these bigger stones will you, until I have had a good look.’

Lee must have considered it worth his while to go along with the foreigner because after pulling his shoulder free, he clambered up onto an immense slab of basalt that lay in the clearing, alongside the stream. Kreeger followed him, expending slightly more effort, and when they were both up there they put down their bags.

‘That’s where the body was found,’ Lee shouted, over the roar of the water. He pointed from one end of the block, down at a small hollow in the ground, half way between the stream and the forest. Then he moved his arm up towards the hill. ‘This stream runs down from the monastery—up there.’ He waited for the doctor to follow his hand and then turned and pointed to a tributary that joined the flow below the waterfall. ‘And that small one . . .’ He sat down. ‘. . . that runs down from the widow’s villa.’

‘The widow?’

‘Yes, we met her husband last night . . . at the morgue.’

‘Right, Su wasn’t it?’

‘No, Su—Missis Su—is the widow. His name is Ling—Mista Ling.’

Kreeger sat down onto the basalt next to Lee, too tired to bother enquiring why the wife would have a different name from her husband. It was just another one of those things that he had learned to let pass. He pulled out a water bottle from his smaller pack.

Lee dove into his bag and came out with two boxes. ‘Let’s eat first,’ he said, handing one of the boxes to Kreeger. The box he kept for himself was a little bigger; he tore off its lid, snapped open a pair of chopsticks, and attacked the contents.

Kreeger’s lunch received a more delicate touch, as he thoroughly inspected what he was about to eat. His chopstick skills were still elementary, but that was not a problem—he was in no great rush to fill his mouth. Before the first morsel went in, he looked over at Lee, who had lifted the box to within inches of his mouth and was sucking in the rice, helping it along with swift spooning movements of his chopsticks. ‘Suppose I have to eat something,’ he muttered to himself.

He bit down on some kind of root—not too bad. Chewing, he looked down from the vantage point of the stone block. Upstream and downstream the bamboo grew thickly to the water’s edge, but here, under the waterfall, it cleared, as if scared back by the pounding of the water. Between further, small mouthfuls, he tried to imagine what had happened to Nathan Blye out here in this wonderfully peaceful setting. A violent end amid such tranquillity. A kite screeched high above.

‘Nice place, eh Docta?’ Lee said, tearing up his empty lunch box.

‘Yes, I was just wondering …’ He watched Lee fling the pieces off into the foaming water. ‘Nothing. It was nothing.’ He saw the litter bob away then closed his own half-empty box and put it inside his smaller bags. ‘Let’s work,’ he said abruptly, standing up far too quickly for his sore knees. He bent and rubbed through the light cotton of his trousers.

*

Kreeger slowly emptied his larger bag of its equipment, laying everything out on the black rock surface: notebooks, jars and pots, camera and tripod, a rule and a tape measure, plastic bags, tweezers, and a small trowel, among other things. As a pathologist, Kreeger usually got most of his clues from the dead body, but he had spent enough time at crime-scenes to know exactly what to do. He had already decided to take on the role of the detective in this case and do things that back home he would not have to do; things that would normally be done by reliable professionals, people he could depend on to do a thorough job. He looked at Lee sitting crossed legged with a cigarette in his mouth and clucked. Nathan Blye, whoever he was, deserved at least Kreeger’s best effort. He wondered what simple task he could find for the local detective to do.

‘Jon, can you put this on one of the boulders over there, near where the body was found.’ He noticed Lee’s expression of bewilderment as he took the jar from him. ‘It’s for the flies. I have to collect samples of whatever might have laid eggs in Blye’s corpse.’ He didn’t tell Lee that the jar contained fresh meat that he had picked up from the morgue the night before. ‘Keep to the stones,’ he called after him.

Kreeger wanted to get as many pictures of the crime-scene as he could. ‘How many people have been here?’

‘Just me and Offica Fat. Oh and the bamboo rat of course, but he disappeared as soon as he showed us the body.’

‘The two of you carried him down?’ Kreeger would believe anything now.

‘That’s right; we bagged him up and took him back along the path to the car. Not too far, as you have seen. Then we came back to check for evidence.’ He paused then added: ‘My car still stinks—that’s why I haven’t been using it for a while. Can’t get rid of the smell, you know?’

Kreeger followed Lee off the basalt and over to where the body had been found, keeping to the boulders and bigger pebbles. ‘Did you get any footprints?’ he said, after the first click of the shutter. ‘Before the ground got all messed up, I mean. Did you find any prints in the mud?’

‘Well, eh . . . no, there weren’t any prints. Nothing at all.’

Kreeger was not surprised. He had met the top detectives and forensic scientists in the country and even they had the same attitude. Everything was too much trouble. And when they did get around to attempting something it was always finished quickly with a that’s-good-enough wring of the hands. Three months ago he would have been infuriated but now he just let it go. ‘No footprints,’ he repeated and took another photograph.

Lee might have been trying to make himself look better when he hit a smaller lump of basalt with a piece of cane, ‘We found his beads on there,’ he said.

Kreeger shrugged at the sharp piece of rock. Why should he care so much; why not take their attitude for a change. This was certain to be the last case he ever worked on in his life; why not just make his report ‘good enough’ and go home, surely that was where he should be right now. Sorry Filcher but the trail was dry; our boy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, he heard himself saying as he got off the bus back in the capital.

‘Prayer beads?’ he said, putting his eye back to the viewfinder.

‘Yes, they all wear them up at the monastery.’

Prayer beads. His stomach knotted as he clicked off another picture. Forget it and go home, he said to himself. He looked into the hollow where Blye had met his end and wondered what kind of lost soul comes half way around the world, winds up in a hellhole like Pei Lin, becomes a novice monk in a monastery on a hill—and wears prayer beads!

‘You okay, Docta?’

‘What? Oh yes; I was just thinking.’ He wanted to tell Lee why he should not be here and where he ought to be right now, explain how he could write up a quick report with the detective’s help and get away as soon as possible. But of course he didn’t. ‘Where exactly was his head?’ he said instead. Kreeger was now standing right over the hollow.

‘Eh . . . I think . . . the head was at this end.’ Lee clambered up onto the small block of basalt where he had found Blye’s prayer beads. He looked down. ‘No, no, the other end; yes, definitely.’

‘And you said that he was covered?’

‘Yes, but not very well. The killers were either too crazy to think much about that, or they didn’t expect anyone to come out here. I don’t know. That.’ He pointed to a pile of old bamboo bark and leaves. ‘They threw that on him.’

‘So parts of him were exposed?’ Kreeger could see that Lee had not understood the word. He rolled his eyes. ‘Open, I mean. Not covered by the bamboo.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lee said.

‘Can you bring over the trowel and the small green bag. And a few of the pots. Here, can you put this back.’ Kreeger handed up the camera. As soon as Lee had slouched off to get the equipment, he moved over to where Blye’s head had lain, at once finding clots of dried blood on the earth. He decided not to wait for the trowel and instead used a broken cane to scratch away the surface of the sandy gravel. Nothing. He moved the cane down the neck, disturbing the sediment, eyes searching. Still nothing. At the left shoulder blade he dislodged something that had not been deposited by the river; a few delicate nudges with the stick brought it to the surface, from where he carefully scooped it up, using the cane now as a spoon. He dropped it into the palm of his free hand and looked down at the dark pod, glistening in the sun. He had found another pupa.

‘Perhaps we should check further up and downstream, see what we can find,’ he said when he had finished potting and labelling the fresh evidence. ‘The monastery is up there, you say?’ he pointed up the river.

Lee frowned, as if he wasn’t understanding what he was hearing. He said nothing, just looked upstream.

*

They left most of the equipment on the rock, with the roar of the waterfall, and started up the side of the stream. Kreeger carried a small bag, Lee took nothing. The bamboo pushed right up to the water’s edge and they often had to wade into the flow to make headway.

‘When did it last rain up here,’ Kreeger asked, not expecting a clear answer.

‘Almost two weeks ago, on the Wednesday, I think. Offica Fat, he checked.’

Kreeger was surprised that the detective had bothered to get that information but tried not to show it.

‘What did you find back there, Docta?’ Lee said

‘Eh?’ Again Kreeger was surprised; it was the first sign of interest Lee had shown. ‘Oh, I found a few pupae in the earth. Could be very useful.’

‘Pupae?’ Lee said.

Kreeger didn’t know if Lee was unsure what a pupa was or whether he knew but was unclear how one could be of any use in a murder investigation. ‘You know it was somebody in your country who was the first person ever to use forensic entymology to solve a murder case.’ He had decided to first give Lee a history lesson. ‘Using insects to help him find the perpetrator of a crime; thousands of years ago.’ He checked to see if Lee was paying attention. ‘Somebody was hacked to death in a village and when the magistrate came he ordered every man to bring out his sickle and line up in front of him. ‘Hold up your sickles,’ the magistrate ordered. They did so, and the magistrate waited; waited until flies began to show up, buzzing around one particular tense man near the end of the line. Of course he had cleaned off his murder weapon, but however hard you scrub, a residue of blood will always remain—enough for flies to sniff out and come to. The magistrate had his killer.’

‘Fascinating, Docta.’ Lee thought for moment. ‘But we have no sickles to attract flies here.’

‘Ha, the first way was the simplest. Since then we have developed many other ways to use insects. Usually it is still very simple.’ He stopped and wondered whether it was worth trying to explain even the basic, rudimentary concepts to the man; but Lee still seemed attentive so he made a start. ‘You see insects are the first animals to find and colonise a corpse, and this insect fauna always follows a predictable succession in its arrival and departure. It is simply a matter of identifying which insect is presently in the body and finding out how long it has been there (from its life-stage), then we can calculate the post-mortem interval—the elapsed time since death. Simple, but extremely effective. Blow flies are usually the first insects to get to a corpse; for up to three days into the decay process they will lay eggs. The eggs incubate for two days, so if I find the eggs of a blow fly, I know that the victim died less than five days ago. I can use larvae and pupae in similar ways.’ Kreeger checked over his shoulder, but Lee had dropped further behind him—too far to hear anything. He grinned back at Kreeger when he caught the doctor’s eye, shrugging at the sticky mud at his feet.

After ten minutes or so the stream’s course was broken by a dog’s leg. The near bank fell away into a sandy deposit, where, as in the previous clearing, the bamboo could not get a footing. Kreeger stopped. No sooner had he put his right foot in the soft alluvial than a bell chimed above him. He looked up: nothing but an immense forested hillside, over which floated the muffled sound. A breeze picked up, almost at once, and the bamboo seemed to whisper back in harmonious response. Another chime. Kreeger looked behind him, but Lee had long since disappeared—probably given up and gone back for a snack.

Chanting voices began an ordered accompaniment to the bell. Kreeger fell onto a big pebble and looked around him. He noticed the footprints almost at once and regained his feet. Human footprints in such an out-of-the-way place! He tried to see through obvious conclusions.

Deducing the best way to approach, he began to spiral in on his target, according to an inexplicable deposit of boulders and pebbles. When he finally reached the centre he settled onto a boulder and wished he had not taken the trouble. The prints were not fresh, in pieces (a heel a ball, a toe), and compounded each other. But he could make out at least two pairs of shoes, each with a peculiar pattern of concentric coils, as if a child had been running his finger around and around in the mud. On closer inspection they looked washed, and by looking even closer he found a tell-tale sign where a print had been made over a new plant root—definitely rained upon. Then he noticed the print of an uncovered foot beyond a large pebble, away from the mess of coiled shoeprints that the had been looking at. Somebody had trodden barefoot through the clearing; it seemed as if the person had been standing on the pebble and had slipped down into the mud, leaving a perfect print.

Kreeger had paid particular attention to Blye’s feet during his inspection the night before. The arch of his left foot had showed a definite abnormality. The skin was in decayed ribbons and the flesh putrefied, but the bone structure and ligaments were in tact and that was good enough for the doctor. At some point in Blye’s short life he had injured his foot and broken one of those ligaments, which had healed out of alignment. This would not have caused Blye much trouble, but it would definitely have flattened the arch a little—compared to the right foot.

Kreeger, sitting on his big pebble, was now looking at the print of a left foot, and indeed the arch was flattened; but this was an old print, washed by rain—he would at least need to compare it with the print of a right foot. He scoured the immediate area with his eyes but found nothing.

The chanting stopped first, five chimes before the bell—Kreeger counted them off, subconsciously. He got up, cursing Lee’s incompetence and started back to the murder scene. He was wasting his time out here—it was too late.

When Kreeger pushed back into the clearing, sweating like a racehorse, he saw Jon Lee stretched out on the basalt slab, snoring, an empty food bag lying next to him.

He awoke as Kreeger’s green bag hit the black rock. ‘Oh . . . ah . . . Docta. I . . .’

Kreeger turned his back on him and walked towards the water, breathing heavily. Lonely. He put his feet in the water; it felt cool. He tore off his shoes and socks, threw them behind him, and waded on in. The shards of basalt ripped at the tender skin of his feet, the coolness of the water stinging. He pushed on into the current, his five senses suddenly overflowing with the energy of their surroundings, this beautiful miniature universe. He pulled up a heavy foot and struggled one step closer to the waterfall; then the other. He picked a spot in front of him, a vertical crack in the wall of rock, down which thundered a mass of water. Fighting the torrent, he stepped closer and closer, until, soaked by the cool spray, he was an arm’s length from the rock-face.

He stopped, mesmerised by the flashing foam, dropping before him like a wall of ice from a train window. He leaned forward with both arms outstretched, fingers splayed, searching for the rock; they found the slippery surface and took his weight. He eased himself into the falling water, and when its full force came crashing onto the crown of his head, his mind emptied. Maria, Blye, Lee, his barren future—all pounded out by that immense force of nature. He cried out, a word, a single unintelligible utterance, that was consumed by the violent roar around him.

*

‘That was just what I needed,’ Kreeger said, reassuring an incredulous Jon Lee, who had hopped to the water’s edge as his guest had disappeared into the wall of water.

Stepping from the water, Kreeger peeled off his dripping shirt; and as he threw it up onto the rock, something plopped into the shallow water at Lee’s feet—a coin had fallen out of its pocket. Lee bent to search for it, pushing his hand into the translucent water. He came up with something that was not made of copper.

‘Well, well, Docta,’ he said holding it up to the dripping Kreeger.

Kreeger squinted and had to wipe drops from his eyebrows, but he quickly identified the small glass receptacle. ‘Break the glass and make a wish,’ he said slowly.

Lee dragged his hand through the water again and came up with several more phials. ‘Sorry, can’t find your coin,’ he said to Kreeger with a grin.

Kreeger was already up on the rock; he held out his hand and pulled Lee up after him; and as the detective bagged the fresh evidence, he struggled out of his sodden trousers, ‘They should be dry in a minute or two,’ he said, laying them out on the hot black basalt. He looked around before realising that he had thrown his shoes on the bank; he clambered back down and walked towards the water.

He bent at the waist, letting his eyes drop over the foreground, and touched a dirty shoe. He stopped and raised his eyes again, back to the opposite bank. He had seen something; something out of place, attached to a stave of bamboo that had adventurously struck out on its own towards the water: it fluttered against the thick green stem. He wondered why he hadn’t seen it before—it was so obvious, like a beacon of phosphorescence, flashing through a dark night. Leaving his shoes in the dirt, he stepped back into the water. A kite circling high above must have spied the white man wearing only his orange under-shorts wading through the foamy water—it screeched.

Three steps out of the water, his mind clicked with recognition; but what was it doing here, pinned to a tall, swaying stave of bamboo, in the middle of nowhere. He checked the ground before moving closer; there was nothing, but he kept to stepping stones all the same. His mind went back a few hours, to the treacherous bend in the mountain road on the way up here, to Jon Lee’s superstitious talk of angry spirits looking for humans who don’t suitably appease them. It seemed to be old—the paper had faded and the ink had run—but there was no mistaking what it was.

‘Ghost money,’ he bellowed above the roar of the waterfall. The kite answered with another screech. He bellowed again, enjoying the resonance of those special words.

Lee took off his shoes and socks and was already in the water when Kreeger sent him back for the camera and his green bag. The doctor perched an a pebble, birdlike, and waited, staring up at the flapping note of ghost money.

‘Are you sure?’ Lee said as he panted out of the water, the green duffel bag on his back and the camera around his neck.

‘I don’t know what else it could be. It is for Blye I suppose?’

Lee stepped a little closer and confirmed that it was indeed ghost money, ‘For Blye? he repeated Kreeger’s question. ‘Must be.’

‘So they kill him then immediately try to appease his soul with spirit money?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well I would need a damn lot of money to appease my soul if I had just been tortured to death the way he was. A damn lot of money.’

*

‘Ok, Docta, lets go home.’ Lee had reached Fat’s car first and was refreshing himself on sweetmeats that he was picking from a bag. ‘Here, have one.’

Kreeger pulled up and slowly lowered his bags to the ground; he was puffing and sweat ran off his body. His eyes narrowed as he looked up at Lee from his bent position. He ignored the offer of a snack. ‘Jon, have you forgotten that I need to visit the monastery?’ It was not a question. His now-free hands balled into fists as he straighten himself up.

Lee lifted his wrist and checked his watch. ‘Getting late, Docta. Don’t want to drive down the mountain in the dark. Very dangerous. Had better get going. Come back another day.’

Kreeger moved to within an inch of Lee, dwarfing the smaller man. ‘No Jon; we go now,’ were his only words, spoken with menace from his towering position. He waited longer than was necessary before turning away and silently loading his bags into the back of the car, carefully positioning the buzzing jar of flies. ‘And drive carefully,’ he said having lodged the jar between a box and the spare tyre.

A few minutes of careless driving later they passed a huge wrought-iron gate, which sealed the only gap in an imposing wall, the top of which had been decorated with shards of glass and barbed wire.

‘This is all hers now,’ Lee said, stopping the car a few yards from the portico.

Kreeger looked back at the gate. ‘You mean the widow?’

‘Missis Su, yes.’

The doctor whistled, as if to congratulate Mrs. Su on her wealth. ‘But didn’t you say that she had moved down into the city? She must be really crazy.’

‘Yes,’ Lee agreed, ‘Really very crazy.’ He drove on

‘He died at about the same time as Blye didn’t he? Kreeger said without any warning.

Lee said nothing for a moment then took his eyes off the road to look at Kreeger. ‘No, I told you last night. Blye was alive on the first; old Ling died five or six days before, according to what we know.’ He looked back at the road, just in time to miss a huge pothole. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just thinking.’ Thinking again with his clear, sharp mind; the same mind he’d had before arriving in this country, before the privations and shock of his strange new surroundings had dulled it. Even his body felt rejuvenated after his splash in the water.