Gelignite

THE
MAD BOMBER
OF
HONG BAY

* * * *

Detective Chief Inspector Feiffer saw the flash. There was a brilliant white glare radiating out from a tiny pinpoint in front of the Post Office and a sudden single note of high static as the air around the pinhole was wrenched violently aside. Then there was a sound like a very loud pistol shot or a huge chain snapping and then the concussion roared down the street and blew people walking along the pavement to their knees.

Feiffer reached the Post Office. There was paper fluttering down and ink from the letter-writer's table spread out on the pavement and flowing down the walls. Parts of it weren't ink. They were thicker than ink.

*

GELIGNITE

The Yellowthread Street Mysteries

YELLOWTHREAD STREET*
THE HATCHET MAN*
GELIGNITE*
THIN AIR**
SKULDUGGERY
SCI FI
PERFECT END
THE FAR AWAY MAN**
ROADSHOW*
HEAD FIRST*
FROGMOUTH*
WAR MACHINE*
OUT OF NOWHERE**

Also by William Marshall

THE FIRE CIRCLE
THE AGE OF DEATH
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
SHANGHAI
MANILA BAY
WHISPER

*Published by THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS **forthcoming

MYSTERIOUS PRESS EDITION

Copyright © 1976 by William L. Marshall
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

This Mysterious Press Edition is published by arrangement with
Henry Holt & Company, 115 West 18th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

Cover design and illustration by George Corsillo

Mysterious Press books are published in association with
Warner Books, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10103
A Warner Communications Company

Printed in the United States of America First Mysterious Press Printing: May, 1988

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Ron and Val Fear

The Hong Bay district of Hong Kong is
fictitious, as are the people who, for one
reason or another, inhabit it.

Hop Pei Cove, on the western side of the Hong Kong police district of Hong Bay, smelled of fish. Not fresh, live fish, nor even dead fish, but fish long, long dead, not fresh, not yesterday's or the day before yesterday's fish, but extinct fish, obsolete fish, fish long gone to their fishy after-life, fish of a monumental and ancient age, antique fish, phantom fish, the ghosts of fish, fish drawn, quartered, gulleted, filleted, forked, fed into, finished and fishy. Fish of high, bygone and long dead odour. Stinking fish. Detective Inspector Phil Auden said, 'Blecht—fish!'

It was 5.30 in the morning on Fisherman's Beach at Hop Pei Cove and the driver of one of the police cars parked on the hard packed sand rubbed his hands together and opened a tin of rich smelling body wax to polish the decal on the door of the driver's side of his vehicle. The decal said HONG KONG POLICE on a banner below a picture of a nineteenth century quayside scene surrounded by laurel leaves. He leaned forward into his task and saturated his fish-filled nostrils with the smell of the wax. A fisherman mending his nets and watching four detectives and two uniformed Constables in thighwaders wading thigh-high in the water off the beach shook his head. He looked at the driver again and repaired a break in his net.

On the water, the wind changed and took the smell of fish back to the beach. Auden said, 'The wind's changed.' He drew a breath of relatively pure air. Something floated past him on the surface of the water and he reached for it with his rubber-gloved hands. It was a twig. He let it pass on the current.

Detective Senior Inspector Christopher Kwan O'Yee looked at him. O'Yee was a Eurasian, a little more used from his boyhood in San Francisco (another great stop on the International Fish Sniffer's World Route of Fish Sniffy Beaches) to odours of all ilks, but he still did not like sniffing fish. He glanced down at something near his section of the water. It was Auden's twig doing a quick circuit. He flipped it back to Auden, Auden looked at it and flipped it behind him towards the beach. The wind changed again.

Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer asked, 'What was that?'

'A twig.'

'You're sure?'

Detective Inspector Spencer said, 'It was a twig.'

Doctor Macarthur's voice called out from somewhere near the resuscitation equipment in the ambulance near the waxed police car on the beach, 'What was that?' Resuscitation equipment meant nice deep whiffs of unfishy oxygen anytime you liked.

Macarthur called again, 'What was that?'

Feiffer called back, 'A twig!'

'A what?'

(Ambulances meant you didn't have to wade about waist high in dirty South China Sea effluvia and smell the smell of fish.)

'A bloody twig!'

'—Thank you!'

A little farther out in the effluvia Constable Sun called out, Here!' He touched at something an inch below the surface with his rubber glove. He called out again, 'Here!' and took a long plastic bag from a packet inside his shirt. He called out, 'It's a leg—' and opened the bag underwater to scoop it up.

Doctor Macarthur's head went zipp!—phew! out of the ambulance doors as he stuck his oxygen-filled Roman nose into the world to see what had happened. He called out, 'What's been found?'

'A leg!'

'Good! Good!'

Sun sealed the bag with a length of wire attached to it and went sloshing in towards shore dragging the leg and water-filled plastic bag a little behind him.

Spencer watched him go. Something else floated by and he leaned towards the surface of the water to see what it was. It was a fish. The fish swam off. 'What's the tally?'

O'Yee said. 'Part of a shoulder, two legs and a hand.'

Auden said, 'And part of a hip and pelvis.'

'Yeah.' O'Yee looked at the surface of the water for any further bits of the anatomical jigsaw. O'Yee said, 'The hip and pelvis were me bits found by the swimmer.'

Auden said, 'Anyone who swims in this muck at half past four in the morning
deserves
to find a hip and pelvis.' He asked O'Yee, 'Did you take the call?'

'Constable Lee took it.'

Auden turned to Lee, a hundred feet away in the ragged line of waders, 'What was he doing at half past four in the morning?'

'Who?'

'The person who reported finding the first part.'

Constable Lee said, 'He was swimming.' He looked across to where Constable Sun was dragging the plastic bag across the sand towards the ambulance and Doctor Macarthur was waiting like an anxious birthday-boy to receive it, 'He was out for a swim.'

'At half past four in the morning?'

Lee watched as Sun handed the object to Macarthur and caught a heavy whiff of fish. Lee said, 'I don't think he'll be doing it again for a while.'

Feiffer ordered, 'Stop that talking. Keep spread out.' He was thinking of the work piling up at the Station and the faces of the North Point detectives who had agreed, grudgingly, to cover it. He said to Auden, 'I don't want anything missed.' He glanced at the beach and saw Sun wading back through the light swell as Macarthur carried his trophy into the ambulance, 'We need the complete body.' The wind changed again and he wished he had been born without his olfactory lobes. He said irritably to Spencer who was concentrating very hard on his particular part of the job, 'Just try and concentrate on your particular part of the job, will you?' and turned down windward.

A crowd had gathered along the beach seawall and stood like Roman spectators in an amphitheatre watching the disposal men dispose of the Christians after the lions had disposed of the Christians. Their muttering made a heavy humming sound and the wax-in-the-nose policedriver thought briefly that he might go up and move them on, noted that the way to the wall was mined with the lethality of anti-personnel fishstinks, and decided against it. He glanced towards the open doors of the ambulance where the Government Medical Examiner was happily assembling parts of a body on a steel tray and took another blob of wax for the decal. He looked at the decal before blobbing it. The decal shone.

O'Yee shivered. Later, when the sun got higher, it would be a warm Spring day, but now, up to bis waist in night cold water, it was cold. He looked at the humming crowd and then back to the water. Something white was floating there, a few inches below the surface. He watched it come. It moved with the current and then turned in a little eddy below the surface. It was another hand. O'Yee closed his eyes and took out a plastic bag.

Spencer said, 'I've got something!' He said, 'Oh—Jesus—' He looked away.

O'Yee directed the mouth of the plastic bag over the hand and sealed the top.

Spencer said, 'It's a stomach—' His own turned. He took out a plastic bag with an effort of will and snared it.

Constable Lee said, 'I've got something!' It was a section of chest, still wearing a shirt. The shirt was waterlogged and torn. It seemed to be brown in colour. He took out his bag.

Auden looked at O'Yee'and Spencer going towards the shore with their bags. Something touched him on the leg. He looked down expecting to see a fish. It was a head.