Death In Shanghai (32 page)

Strachan knocked again, this time harder and longer.

The voice inside shouted back, louder and longer. ‘It’s lunchtime, we’re closed. Come back after two.’

Strachan knocked on the door with his fist now. ‘I need to see you now. Urgent.’

A loud ‘
Ta ma de
’ came from inside the room. The door opened and a fat man with glasses, dressed in a white overcoat, stood in the entrance. He was eating a white
bao
. ‘Can’t you see? We’re closed. Lunchtime.’

He tried to shut the door but Strachan inserted his foot between it and the jamb. He put his shoulder against the door and it gave way. ‘Now, I’m going to say this once and once only. Are you listening?’

The fat man nodded his head. A chunk of
bao
fell from his open mouth.

‘You got a fingerprint yesterday from a body in the morgue. I need to know the results. Now.’

The fat man swallowed his food. ‘Yesterday, we won’t have done it yet.’

‘It was a rush job. Urgent. For Inspector Danilov.’

A look of recognition passed across the podgy face and the eyes became small slits behind the glasses. ‘Oh, that one. Danilov promised us ten dollars if we did it for him quickly.’ He stuck out a pudgy hand.

Strachan dug deep in his pockets. He counted the coins. ‘I’ve got eight. Danilov will give you the rest when he sees you.’

The fat man took the money from Strachan’s hand and placed his half-eaten
bao
down on the desk. Strachan noticed it was Char Shao, his favourite.

The technician went behind the counter. ‘We had to work a lot on this one. Danilov asked us to compare it with all the criminals in our files as well as the fingerprints of police officers and government officials. Do you know how many sets of prints that is?’

Strachan shook his head.

‘A lot. A bloody lot, let me tell you.’ He began to search through the stack of papers, files, used chopsticks, used soup bowls and uneaten
bao
on the counter. ‘I know I put it here somewhere. Where is it?’ He moved a bamboo container, left over from yesterday’s lunch. ‘Here it is.’ He held up a piece of paper with two matching pictures of a fingerprint on it. Red lines radiated from the pictures in the same places.

Strachan reached for it, but the technician snatched it back. ‘Danilov also said he would treat us to a meal at Romanov’s. I’ve never eaten Russian food.’

Strachan reached for the paper again. ‘If Inspector Danilov said so, I’m sure he’ll keep his promise.’

The technician handed over the paper and Strachan saw the name written at the top. His face went white. He looked at it again. ‘Are you sure this is the man whose fingerprint matched the one we found on the corpse?’

The technician frowned. ‘Look, whoever you are. I know my job. That patent print matched in 22 different areas. We only need twelve matches for it to stand up in a court of law. It has very distinctive whorls and arches. Plus there’s a bridge that I haven’t seen often at all. It’s a good match, even…’

But Strachan was already out of the door.

He had to tell Danilov whose name was written at the top of the paper.

***

The ropes bit into Danilov’s wrists. He tensed his arms and tried to loosen the bindings, but the more he fought against them, the tighter they seemed to get.

He shouted as loud as he could. A shout of rage and defiance. He listened for a response but nothing came back. He knew he was in a cell and, for some strange reason, he thought he was underground. He wasn’t sure why he sensed this, perhaps it was the way the sounds were absorbed and swallowed up. A dead sound with no echoes, as if everything was solid around him.

He kicked out with his feet but the ropes were just as strong around his legs. He shouted again. His voice sounded hoarse to his ears and, once again, the walls absorbed everything.

He wasn’t sitting in the dark though. There was a small light behind him that gave a brown glow through the cell. It was like the light of early dawn in Minsk when the sun is still below the horizon but its rays are reaching out to the world.

The room was empty. There was nothing there but him, the chair he was tied to, and the black walls.

He shouted once again, louder this time.

A crack of light appeared vertically in the wall opposite him and began to get wider. A black shadow stood in the doorway, its height dominating the entrance.

Then it spoke. ‘Shouting will only make your voice hoarse, Inspector Danilov. Nobody can hear you down here.’

So he was underground. The voice was cultured, elegant and vaguely familiar.

The black shadow stepped into the cell, closing the door behind him. The only light now was coming from behind Danilov. He stared into the gloom at the thing in front of him. For a few moments, it appeared to have no face, just darkness where eyes and ears and nose should be. Like the shadow of a man with the shadow of a face.

Then it spoke again.

‘It’s your time, Danilov. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long while but I didn’t think it would come so soon.’

Danilov could see a little more clearly now. The man was dressed from head to toe in black. On his head he wore a mask, but one without definition, just a dull matt-black skin that covered his face and absorbed the light. He saw the man’s eyes. Green. Emerald green.

‘I can see you like my mask, Inspector, you do recognise it, of course?’

Danilov let his head drop to his chest. ‘It’s Yama, I presume. The god of the underworld.’ Every time the man spoke, he caught a whiff of something. Warm, earthy, but with a hint of sweetness in it. Just as the boatman had said.

‘You are probably wondering why you are here?’

Danilov lifted his head and stared straight into the eyes of the black mask. He shook his head.

‘An eye for an eye.’

‘Another saying?’

‘This one from the bible, I think. A terribly judgemental book.’

‘What’s that to do with me?’

‘Everything, Inspector. Today, you are to be judged.’

‘By you?’

‘Today, I’m your judge, your jury, your prosecutor and your executioner.’

‘So, you’ve already decided I’m guilty?’

The man took a step to the side. ‘I didn’t decide, Inspector, you did, long ago.’ The man’s body was close to him now. The sweet smell was even stronger. He tried to lash out, struggling against the ropes that bound his wrists.

‘That won’t help you, Inspector. The others found that out too.’

The door opened behind the man and another shape was silhouetted in the doorway.

‘Do come in, Li Min. My colleague will be the clerk of the court. As you see, we always try to follow the correct procedures for a trial. Shall we begin?’

Li Min moved into the room. For a second, before he closed the door, a shaft of light caught the top of his head and the livid red scar that arched over it.

‘Please read out the charges.’

The Chinese man produced a sheet of thick manuscript paper. ‘Pyotr Alexandrevich Danilov, you are charged that on the 12th November, 1924, you deserted your family, leaving them to face the depredations of the revolutionary authorities alone.’

‘Danilov, you realise in the eighth court of hell, desertion of your family is a very serious offence, to be punished by the gouging out of your eyes, if you are found guilty.’

‘How does the prisoner plead?’ said Li Min, his pen poised over the manuscript waiting for the answer.

Danilov remained quiet, slowly working his wrists against the ropes that bound him.

‘I think you can write down the prisoner pleads guilty, Li Min. After all, the evidence is rather damning.’

‘I didn’t desert my family, I had a job to do.’

‘Please change the plea, Li Min, the prisoner has changed his mind.’

‘Not guilty now, sir?’

The mask turned towards Danilov. He could see the green eyes staring at him from the blackness. ‘That’s right, Li Min, the Inspector pleads not guilty.’

‘When will the trial be, sir?’

‘I think now is as good a time as any, don’t you agree, Li Min?’

The Chinese man nodded.

‘Does the Inspector need time to think about his defence?’

Danilov remained quiet.

‘No, well, let the trial begin.’

‘Before we do,’ Danilov raised his voice, ‘I would like you to remove your mask. I have the right to see my accuser.’

‘You have no rights in my court, only responsibilities and punishments. I’m not on trial here, Inspector Danilov, you are. Request denied.’

The scratching of pen against parchment cut through the silence.

The ropes bit against Danilov’s wrists as he strained against them. He would endure the pain. He had to endure the pain.

The mask sighed. ‘Let’s examine the evidence, shall we? Firstly, you deserted your family in Minsk. Is it true the city was in a state of anarchy?’

‘The government was looking at undesirable elements in the city.’

‘Just “undesirable elements”. So there was no danger?’

There was the sound of pen on parchment again. A scratching, irritating sound that came from Li Min as he wrote down all that was being said. Danilov lifted his head. ‘There didn’t seem to be any. I was a member of the police. I’d never been involved in politics.’

‘Not involved?’ The shadow laughed behind his mask. ‘You say you were not involved?’

‘In Minsk, the Red Army and the Soviets were seen as liberators, welcomed by the people.’

‘And did the Red Army have an equally warm welcome for former officials of the regime?’

Danilov’s head went down and looked at the feet of his jailer. He was wearing brown brogues beneath his black gown. ‘No, they didn’t.’

‘Didn’t they have a history of reprisals against the former officials of the Tsar and the Mensheviks?’

‘Yes but…’

‘And didn’t those reprisals also include members of the families of those officials?’

‘Yes, sometimes. But you have to understand there was no danger at that time.’

‘So you left the city?’

The pen had been scratching all his answers on to a parchment. For a moment, it stopped, waiting for his response.

‘I went to Moscow.’

‘Why?’

Danilov struggled against the restraints again, trying to keep his movement away from the eyes of the man in the mask. ‘I had a case. A murderer had fled there. We went after him.’

‘What had the murderer done?’

‘He had killed his mother and father.’

‘So, you abandoned your family to bring the killer of another family to justice?’

‘I didn’t abandon my family.’

‘But you left them.’ The man held his arms out wide as if appealing to a non-existent jury.

‘I went to do my work.’

‘How long were you away?’

‘Five weeks,’ said Danilov quietly.

The scratching of the pen got louder and then stopped.

‘I didn’t hear you?’

‘Five weeks. I was away five weeks.’

Danilov could hear the noise of the fountain pen as it scratched his words on the parchment.

‘Five weeks to catch a killer?’

‘He escaped.’

‘So you captured him once, he escaped and you stayed on in Moscow to catch him again?’

‘Yes.’ The bald-headed Chinese man stopped writing and looked down at him.

The mask continued. ‘Meanwhile, the situation in Minsk changed, didn’t it?’

‘I tried to get back, but…’

‘The purge began. Officials were being arrested, their families persecuted.’

‘Yes, the town was isolated, even the trains stopped running. I couldn’t return.’

‘And your family?’

Danilov looked down at his hands tied to the arms of the chair. ‘They were caught up in it all. With two other families, they decided to leave the city and go south.’

‘They fled south.’ More scratching from the pen of the Chinese man. ‘And what did you do?’ the man in the mask asked softly, the hand coming up to scratch the outside of the mask where the nose should have been.

‘I followed them.’

‘No. What did you do before you followed them?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I think you do, Inspector. Didn’t you arrest the killer in Moscow first?’

‘Yes, but that was my job, to catch the killer. That was why I was there. And the news was so confused from Minsk. Nobody knew what was happening.’ Danilov paused to catch his breath. ‘I followed as soon as I could,’ he said quietly.

‘Wasn’t there a woman too?’

‘A woman?’

‘The sister of the man you were chasing.’

‘Her? Yes, she was in Moscow too.’

‘Didn’t you stay on in Moscow because of her?’

‘Yes…I mean no. It wasn’t like that.’

‘Like what?’

Danilov raised his voice. ‘You are insinuating that I stayed on in Moscow because of her.’

‘Well, didn’t you?’

‘She asked me to stay to catch her brother. She didn’t trust the police in Moscow.’

‘So you stayed.’

‘Yes.’

‘For five weeks.’

‘Yes.’

‘Whilst your family were forced to flee from a purge in Minsk.’

The answer when it came was soft, a whisper. ‘Yes.’

Danilov’s interrogator turned to the bald-headed Chinese man. ‘I think the case is proven, don’t you, Li Min?’

‘Haven’t you ever made a mistake? Haven’t you wished you could roll back time and change what you did? Acted differently, made different choices?’ Danilov shouted at the mask. Then he dropped his head onto his chest. ‘If I had my time back, I would have stayed with Maria and Ivan and Elina.’

The man’s voice was firm, almost strident. ‘The only mistake I made, Danilov, was not starting my work earlier. I thought the system would punish those who had committed crimes. But I was wrong. Even worse, I found it rewarded them.’

Danilov lifted his head again, aware of the change in the man’s voice. ‘So that’s when you started killing?’

‘I didn’t “start killing” as you say. I began to judge those who had done wrong, to bring them before the court. To punish them for the crimes that I knew they had committed, but that the courts of Shanghai refused to do anything about.’

Danilov waited for a while and then he said, ‘I know who you are. I’ve known for a while. You made too many mistakes.’