Читать книгу Shanghai - Christopher New - Страница 22

SITTING AT HIS DESK one evening, learning his vocabulary for his next Chinese lesson, Denton kept letting his eyes stray to the photograph of Emily propped against the wall in front of him, next to the picture of his parents. After he murmured each word aloud three times in what he hoped was the right tone, he would try to write the character, then allow himself to gaze at the misty, sepia-coloured portrait in its oval frame. He would purse his lips in an imagined kiss on Emily's, which he couldn't see properly as the photograph was taken in profile, and imagine the moist fresh pressure of her mouth as she responded. Sometimes his eyes would close and he would imagine her body pressing against his, soft and round and giving. Then, before his imagination had stirred him too far, he would open his eyes and check the strokes of the character he'd just drawn.

He was drawing the character for 'like' when there was a cheerful double-knock on the door.

'Come in?' He half-turned, brush in hand.

It was Johnson. Denton's brows rose slightly in surprise. Since that week at the forts, there had been a faint coolness between them, though more on his part than on Johnson's. Denton had started to avoid him except when others were there as well, feeling a slight, but distinct and solid wall inside his chest which he had to surmount whenever Johnson approached him with his affable benevolence.

'Hello.' Johnson closed the door and smiled blandly. 'Busy?'

'I'm learning my Chinese.' Denton dipped his brush in the ink and waited, his hand poised.

'Ah.'

'For tomorrow's lesson.'

'I didn't know you were working at it.' He came across to the desk and looked over Denton's shoulder.

'Just one lesson a week.' Denton held himself rigid, as though afraid Johnson was going to touch him. He gazed steadfastly at the moist, pointed tip of the brush.

'Jolly good,' Johnson said approvingly, yet absently. He leant further over to examine the character; yet, again, he seemed to do so absently. 'It rather looks as though we've got an unpleasant job to do,' he said, straightening up.

'Oh?' When Denton glanced round he saw that Johnson was smiling his usual equable smile, whatever the unpleasant job might be.

'Yes. That fellow that gave us the information about the salt-smugglers - remember him?'

'Yes?'

It wasn't 'us' when you were talking about the bounty, Denton thought with a fleeting sense of recollected smart. It was all 'me' then.

'It looks as though he may have been murdered.'

'Murdered?'

'Mm. They want us to go and identify the body.' Johnson went on dispassionately. 'Won't take long.'

'Us?' Denton exclaimed in alarm. 'But I hardly even saw him!'

'Well, it does help if there are two of us,' Johnson insisted amiably. 'It's a bit difficult to identify them if they've been mutilated, as I gather this one has. I mean, you might've noticed something about him that would help.'

Denton felt, a tide of sick fearfulness washing up his stomach. 'I didn't even look at him,' he protested weakly.

'The police are downstairs waiting,' Johnson went on as if he hadn't heard. 'Won't take half an hour. The mortuary's just round the corner. You'll be back at your Chinese in no time.'

Despite his unwillingness and his squeamish apprehension, Denton tamely pushed back his chair, slipped on his tunic and began silently buttoning it. Johnson leant over the desk again, gazing at the photographs.

'Your parents?' he asked equably.

'Yes.'

'And your sister?'

'I haven't got a sister.' He compressed his lips, then surrendered under Johnson's smiling, innocently inquiring eyes. 'It's my, er, fiancée, actually.' He looked away uncomfortably.

'Oh, fiancée?' Johnson strolled towards the door. 'Very nice' he added perfunctorily.

An English inspector and a Sikh constable were waiting downstairs, the inspector sitting in a cane chair, impatiently slapping the arm with the flat of his hand, the Sikh standing monumentally by the main door. 'Ah, there you are,' the inspector said gruffly as he got up. 'Shall we go?'

The Sikh led the way through the narrow streets, the others followed three abreast. Hawkers were selling from their stalls beneath hissing paraffin lamps - tea, food, fruits and vegetables - and a fortune-teller sat against the wall beside two old men squatting over a Chinese chess board, while a silent crowd stood round them, watching each move. Denton glanced at them all abstractedly and scarcely heard the strident, bargaining voices all round him, his mind tremulously foreseeing every kind of mutilation that a body could suffer; but Johnson was as undisturbed and detached as ever; talking on in that monotonous, faintly twangy voice of his. The inspector merely grunted noncommittally while Denton walked slightly apart, as though an invisible film separated him from both the street and his companions. 'Old Derek's all right,' he remembered Jones saying as they left Johnson picking his teeth in solitude at the dinner table one evening. 'Only he does drone on and on, doesn't he?' That droning jarred on him now more than ever.

Denton felt a new soft, squelchy quiver of fear as the Sikh led the way past a blue-glazed gas light into the mortuary. A few Chinese in white overalls were gossiping loudly at the back of a large hall, in which were several rows of almost empty benches. At the other end of the hall, guarding a gloomy corridor, a clerk sat at a high wooden desk, making entries in a register. The inspector spoke to him curtly and the clerk ran his finger up and down the columns of one page after another.

A wailing noise started abruptly at the far end of the corridor and everyone glanced round, except the clerk, whose finger was still running up and down the columns in his register. A frail old Chinese woman in black tunic and trousers was led out by two younger men who held her by the arms. She was throwing her head about and shouting wordlessly, yet her eyes seemed quite dry. Some of the attendants gossiping at the back looked incuriously round at her as they talked without any change in their voices. The police inspector glanced sharply at her, frowning.

'Number thirty-four,' the clerk said at last.

The inspector and Johnson followed an attendant while Denton went along behind them, clutching at every delay.

The air in the corridor seemed cool although there were no windows. The attendant opened a door and they walked into a cell-like room, in the walls of which were little tunnels with cloth flags hanging down in front of them, each cloth with a number stencilled on it in black paint. Here the air was really cold and for the first time since he'd come to Shanghai, Denton shivered. The attendant looked slowly and lazily for the appropriate flag, and Denton felt his heart thudding softly, his fingers clenching as, with a bored sigh, the man lifted the cloth and pulled out a stretcher on silent, rubber wheels. A naked body lay on the stretcher, packed in ice, with many congealed stab and slash wounds on its waxen face and chest. Denton shuddered as he looked at the arms. Both hands had been severed at the wrists.

'Twenty-two wounds,' the inspector was reading from the card pinned to the stretcher at the mutilated head. 'Hands missing, face seriously disfigured. Found in Soochow Creek near Garden Bridge, seven fifteen this morning. No identification marks, about thirty to thirty-five years old.' He turned to Johnson, laying the card down and wiping his fingers fastidiously. 'This your chap? How long's he been missing?'

'I haven't heard from him for two or three weeks,' Johnson reflected in his detached, twangy voice. 'But this chap's in such a mess it's really hard to tell.'

'I suppose we've got his finger-prints,' the inspector grunted. 'Otherwise they wouldn't've bothered to chop his paws off. Looks as though they didn't like the look of his face much, either.'

Denton gazed at the corpse while the other two talked. Strangely enough, now that he'd seen it, it wasn't so terrible after all, he felt with a surprised, buoyant sense of relief. The rigidity of the limbs, of the feet stiffly sticking up, the waxy pallor of the skin beneath its almond surface, the blocks of ice on which it lay, and which were packed round it, even between the legs, all seemed to dehumanize the corpse. It was hard to conceive of that lifeless marble thing as the living, breathing, furtively swift informer he'd seen a few weeks before in Johnson's room. Denton's gaze moved a little guiltily up the legs to the genitals, dropping from a little triangular patch of black fur between the spread thighs like a piece of limp gristle with a thick, crooked blue vein in it. So the Chinese weren't entirely devoid of body hair, the thought came to him, as though that were the issue he'd really come to settle. The belly was flat, the ribs starkly visible beneath the skin. Finally he gazed at the stumps where the hands should have been, blue round the skin and red inside, with jagged-edged faces of white, crushed bone. Instead of the horror he'd felt at first, now he felt only a distant repulsion, as if he were in a butcher's storeroom. The stab wounds in the chest were blue round the edges too, and he thought with what force the knife must have been driven into the flesh. The wounds' mouths were crusted with dried blood.

It's like a piece of meat, he thought. It's just a piece of meat. And although his heart was thudding steadily against the hollow wall of his body, he no longer feared he would faint or throw up. The face had been slashed all over. The confusions and ridges from the cuts made it almost impossible for him to compare the lifeless, disfigured visage with the dimly-remembered face of the informer. Besides, the lifelessness seemed so absolute that he couldn't really believe it had ever been alive. That was what took the horror away. At the actual moment of death, with terror gripping the muscles and screaming through the eyes, it might have been different.

'What do you think, John?' Johnson used his Christian name for the first time, with a familiar little smile.

Denton shook his head slowly. 'I don't know....' He felt them both glancing at him for some sign of weakness, but he pretended not to notice, looking thoughtfully down at the head again, the sightless eyes, dead and pebbly, the skin all round them lacerated and swollen. Then he noticed a little whitish line from an old scar across the temple, and instantly recalled seeing the same mark of Johnson's informer when the man had hurried past him to the door.

'Yes, it is the same man,' he said suddenly and decisively. 'That scar on his forehead - I noticed it in your room that night, just as he was leaving.'

They both bent over the head, while the attendant hawked loudly and impatiently behind them.

'This one, you mean?' the inspector pointed.

Johnson pushed out his underlip consideringly. 'Well, it could be,' he pronounced almost grudgingly at last. 'I can't say I really remember exactly, but ... yes, it could be.'

'I'm sure it's the same scar,' Denton said coldly, as if his words had been doubted.

The inspector stood back and gestured to the attendant, who was now belching quietly. With a bored, disdainful shake of his head, the man rolled the corpse back into its grave-like slot.

'Well, we can try and locate some next of kin, then,’ the inspector said briskly. 'You haven't got any ideas, I suppose? No? Just let me have his name and any address you've got for him, would you? Chilly in here, isn't it?'

As the inspector opened the door, Denton saw a little grey shape scurrying along the wall. It ran over the inspector's shoe and disappeared into the corridor.

'God damn it! A rat!' the inspector shouted with sudden intensity, as though for all his apparent unconcern, his nerves had really been stretched taut in there. The attendant slammed the door after them, chuckling in his phlegmy throat. 'Him too cold,' he muttered. 'Him not likee cold.'

'Pity about that, if it really was my chap,' Johnson ruminated evenly on the way back to the mess. 'He was quite a useful informer. Don't know if I'll find anyone as good to take his place. Still I suppose something'll turn up.... If it really was him, of course.'

'I'm quite sure it was the same man,' Denton said shortly, nettled by Johnson's persistent doubt.

Johnson didn't reply. He had stopped to bargain with a grey-haired woman hawker who was squatting beside a basket of oranges.

'Here you are, have one,' he said as they walked on. 'Yes, I didn't know you were engaged. Of course a lot of people are when they first come out here, but then it often all falls apart.'

Denton cupped his palm round the globe of the orange without answering. Johnson's voice had seemed to express satisfaction, relish even, about the disintegration of engagements.

'What are you doing next Saturday, by the way?' Johnson asked obliviously as they turned towards the steps of the mess. 'I was wondering whether you'd like to come for a little stroll, see a bit more of the place. Bit too hot still for a real hike, of course.'

Johnson had avoided looking at him while he spoke, perhaps to make the invitation seem more casual. But there was almost a pleading note in that flat, monotonous voice as he ended.

'I'm afraid I've got another invitation,' Denton excused himself thankfully. 'I'm going to tea with the Dean of the cathedral,' he added with a touch of pride.

'The Dean?' Johnson repeated with an indifference Denton felt sure was feigned. 'Well, some other time then, eh?'

It was not until he was going to bed that Denton thought of the rat again and imagined it nibbling at the frozen corpses in the mortuary. Apprehensively, with a suddenly shivering back, he looked round the skirting board of the room before he turned out the light.