Bill for the Use of a Body Read online

  When she had done, Urata said, ‘Thanks a lot, Merri, You’ve certainly given us a good picture of how the place has grown. But, as you know, I’m in shipping and you’ve said nothing about pirates. It’s said they are still pretty active in these parts. Would that be so?’

  Merri gave a slow nod. ‘Yes; piracy still goes on. But not in a form that should worry you. As far back as anyone can remember there have been bad men sailing these seas who attack small coastal vessels and rob them of their cargoes. If, too, they find a passenger on board whom they know to be wealthy they take him prisoner and hold him to ransom. But in these days they would never dare to attack anything larger than a junk.’

  ‘How about the drug traffic?’ Julian enquired.

  ‘That, too, continues, in spite of all efforts to prevent it. In 1917 the British Government agreed to stop importing opium into China, but after nearly a hundred years the habit of smoking it had become ingrained in the Chinese people, and for a long time past they had taken to growing it for themselves. Today China is not an importer but an exporter of the drug and it is largely from there that the addicts in Hong Kong receive their supplies.’

  ‘Are there many addicts here?’

  ‘Alas, yes. It is a terrible problem, and has become much more difficult to deal with since the practice started of converting opium into heroin. That greatly reduces the bulk of the drug so makes it much easier to smuggle.’

  ‘In the States they’re doing a big job reclaiming addicts’, Urata put in. ‘Are they doing anything of that kind here?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Merri informed him. ‘Out at Tai Lam we have a special prison for the treatment of addicts who have been convicted, and at the new hospital at Castle Peak there is a special ward set aside for addicts willing to submit voluntarily to a course of treatment. My mother works for the Hong Kong Advisory Committee on Narcotics, in a special section of the Customs employed in preventing the smuggling of drugs, so I could tell you a lot about such matters. She wanted me to work in her office, but I would not like such a life, and as I have never travelled I greatly enjoy talking to people who come from all parts of the world. That is why I asked Major Stanley, who is the head of the Hong Kong Tourist Association, to take me as one of his private guides.’

  ‘Are you very booked up?’ Julian enquired casually.

  ‘I expect to be free after tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘I have been taking Mr. Urata round for the past few days, but on Wednesday he is leaving for Manila.’

  ‘In that case I wonder if you would care to act as guide for me? I arrived only yesterday and it’s over twenty years since I was in Hong Kong, so there are lots of places that I would like you to take me to.’

  Producing a card from her bag she handed it to him and said, ‘It would be a pleasure, Mr. Day, if my office has not already booked me for another engagement. Here is the address. Please check with them. Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Repulse Bay.’

  ‘You are wise. It is much more pleasant out there than at the hotels in the town. If all is well, then, I’ll call for you with a car at half past nine on Wednesday morning.’

  Urata got to his feet and said with more geniality than he had previously displayed, ‘You’re a lucky guy to be staying on here, if you get Merri for a guide. But now it’s about time that we got back to the city for lunch. Merri’s car is parked down where the road ends. Can we give you a lift back?’

  Julian was more than satisfied at having achieved such a promising opening to his acquaintance with the beautiful Miss Sang; so he resisted the temptation to deprive Urata further of having her to himself, and said, ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll walk. It was good of you to let me join you.’

  Seating himself again, he watched them go down the steps in the grassy slope. Ten minutes later he followed. A mile’s walk brought him to the highest station of the cable railway that serves the many fine private properties scattered about the seaward slope of the Peak. In one of its cars he made the precipitous descent to the city. There he took a rickshaw to the office of the Tourist Association. To his relief he learned that Miss Sang would be free on Wednesday morning, so he booked her services from then for the remainder of the week, then he lunched at the Parisian Grill. When he had finished his meal he began to wonder how to while away the afternoon.

  Filling in time was Julian Day’s perpetual problem. For years he had drifted round the world doing little else. He had a fine house in Gloucestershire, but since he had inherited it he had never been there. With it he had inherited a baronetcy, and his real name was Hugo Julian du Crow Fernhurst; but he never used it. As a product of Eton and Oxford he should have been able to come to Hong Kong with a sheaf of introductions to some of the most interesting people, to sign his name in the book at Government House and to be made a temporary member of the Hong Kong Club; but none of these things was for him, because his real name might have aroused in people’s minds a most discreditable affair of the past in which he had been the principal figure.

  The fact was that he was absurdly oversensitive about the folly which had ruined his career when young, and underestimated both the shortness of people’s memories and the fact that few of them took the view that a youthful indiscretion damned a man for life. His dread of being recognised and ostracised was so great that for years he had avoided mixing with English people of his own class and for company made friends with foreigners or casual acquaintances met on liners or in hotel bars.

  Any thought of marriage he had long since ruled out as impossible, because he was by nature fastidious, and the only sort of woman he would have cared to make his wife was of the kind who moved in the circles from which he was debarred.

  Now, a new thought stirred in his mind. To ask any English or American girl, or a foreigner who would at times wish to go to London, and so risk sharing the shame to which he was liable to be exposed, was out of the question. But that would not apply to an Eurasian with whom he could make a home in Hong Kong. They need never go to England or mix with the Government House set. He was so utterly weary of drifting from place to place, living in hotels and on liners, or taking furnished flats. How wonderful it would be to settle down at last with a home of his own and a wife who was intelligent, amusing and unbelievably beautiful.

  Before he left the restaurant he had made up his mind to marry Merri Sang.

  Chapter IV

  Set a Killer to Catch

  a Killer

  At the moment when Julian Day’s mind was illuminated by the thought that if only he could persuade Merri Sang to marry him his long lonely years of restlessness, roaming the world would be forever behind him, and that his life would begin anew following a pattern of tranquil blizs, some fourteen hundred miles away in Japan Mr. Inosuke Hayashi was conferring with one Udo Nagi, his right-hand man for conducting his nefarious enterprises.

  It was December when Hayashi had been interviewed by Police Chief for External Affairs Okabe, in Tokyo. Okabe had been only too glad to see him depart, carrying his son’s head in its box; for from the head there emanated a most unpleasant smell, even when the box had been rewrapped in good thick brown paper.

  Snow had been falling outside and it was bitterly cold. Not knowing the reason for which he had been asked to come to Tokyo, Hayashi had planned to spend the night in a comfortable suite at the Imperial Hotel. But now, his agile mind seething with rage and venom, he decided to go straight home; so that he might the sooner set to work the network of agents that he controlled in the Far East on the job of enabling him to exact vengeance on his son’s murderer.

  At the hotel he enquired about trains and collected his suitcase, then went to the station. Such is the efficiency of the Japanese railways that, having shown his ticket to a porter who told him where he should stand on the platform, when the train came in the coach in which he had reserved a seat drew up immediately in front of him.

  It was a very long coach with a walkway down the centre and on either side pairs of seats similar to tho
se in air-liners, so that each occupant could adjust his and lie back to sleep if he wished. But Hayashi’s agitated brain was in no state for sleep. Like the other passengers, he took off his shoes and sat with his small feet on the foot-rest.

  The train remained two minutes exactly, neither more nor less, in the station then it shushed out, soon to attain a speed of a hundred miles an hour as it hurtled through the vast areas of shanties that house the greater part of Tokyo’s ten million population and make it the largest, ugliest and most depressing city in the world.

  Hayashi was duly offered fruit, soft drinks, ices, sweets and other stopgaps to hunger from an aluminium trolley wheeled ceaselessly up and down the walkway of the coach by an obsequious attendant. But, with an impassive nod of the head, he declined these amenities and, presently, walked through to the restaurant car.

  There, unlike the sad little menus on British Railways, he was offered a choice of four set meals, ranging from soup, fish and fruit at the equivalent of seven shillings and sixpence, to a six-course dinner including a steak at the equivalent of thirty-five shillings. But Hayashi felt that he had no appetite for European-style food, so he ordered the Japanese dinner. Even when that came he found that he could do no more than toy with some delectable morsels of raw fish. But when in Europe as a younger man he had acquired a taste for wine; so he ordered a bottle of the best champagne, regardless of the fact that it cost him the equivalent of twelve pounds sterling.

  The train accomplished its six-hundred-mile run to Kyoto in the scheduled six hours and arrived punctually to the minute. He had telephoned for his Mercedes to be at the station to meet him, so in another fifteen minutes he was home and had sent for Udo Nagi.

  Since then Hayashi had received a number of progress reports from Nagi. Now on this afternoon of the 18th of February he was conning over the summary of the results of the investigation that he had ordered to be made.

  Nagi was a big man for a Japanese. As a youth he had been a professional wrestler, but while still young he had come to the conclusion that life could be more pleasant living on the immoral earnings of women than by participating in gruelling bouts in the ring. His size and fearsome reputation soon led to his becoming the protector of a score of girls whom he exploited most profitably in depleting the dollar rolls of the American Occupying Forces. Then he discovered that even more money could be made out of peddling dope. Early in his new activities he came into conflict with the strong-arm men of Hayashi’s organisation. Their ultimatum had been ‘become one of our agents or become a corpse’.

  To begin with he had felt very sour at losing his independence but the drop in his income led to his working very much harder, so he received promotion. Later he was blindfolded one night and taken to Hayashi’s house. While still blindfolded he had a long interview with Hayashi, who reached the conclusion that Udo Nagi had not only brawn but brains. In the years that followed he had been given increasingly more important parts to play in the organisation, although it was not until 1956 that he had actually seen Hayashi face to face. For the past three years he had been Hayashi’s Chief of Staff.

  During the past three months Udo Nagi’s agents had investigated thoroughly the families and pasts of the four men whose heads in boxes had preceded that of Hayashi’s son to Police Headquarters in Tokyo. His agents had also tirelessly pursued every clue to the way these men, and the younger Hayashi, had spent their time while in Hong Kong, and had also made exhaustive enquiries in Macao. The result was a dossier of over a hundred pages on each of them. To summarise their contents:

  The radio salesman, Otoya Matsuko, had gone to Hong Kong in September 1952, to solicit stocking-up orders for the winter season. He was unmarried and said to be much addicted to women. He had stayed for five nights at the Broadway, one of the less expensive hotels in Kowloon. A number of his customers recalled the police enquiries that followed his disappearance, and a few of them remembered him personally as a small, bespectacled, pleasant-mannered man; but after a lapse of eleven years no-one at the hotel could give any information about him.

  Dr. Yasunari Kido was a lung specialist and had gone to Hong Kong to attend a conference on tuberculosis in April 1956. He was married but known to frequent a well-known geisha house in Yokohama, his home city. He was a man of some means and had stayed at the de-luxe Peninsula Hotel. Such doctors as had attended the conference and who could be traced spoke of him as a jolly fellow and something of a bon vivant. Two of them had enjoyed good dinners with him and said that he had not appeared to have a trouble in the world. They had not even heard of his disappearance, because he had remained in Hong Kong for the full week of the conference, then left his hotel in a normal manner. However, as it happened, the doctor had a livid scar on his right cheek from an old war wound; so two of the staff at the Peninsula remembered him.

  One was a night porter whom he had asked to tell him of a night spot where there was a good selection of Chinese girls, ready to accommodate visitors in comfortable quarters, and the man had recommended him to a house in Hong Kong named the Moon Garden. In the early hours of the morning he had returned to his hotel, and told the porter that he had had a good time; so obviously he had come to no harm there. The other was a waiter who had seen him one evening in the lounge of the hotel standing drinks to a good-looking blonde. She was not a regular habitué of the hotel and the waiter remembered the incident only because Dr. Kido had given him an exceptionally generous tip, probably with a view to impressing his companion.

  The engineer, Kayno Nakayama, was another bachelor, but he kept a regular mistress in a flat in Tokyo. He had gone to Hong Kong in August 1957 and with him he had taken his assistant, a young man named Araki. They had stayed at the Victoria Hotel in Queens Road. Araki had at the time been engaged to a girl of good family whom he had shortly afterwards married; so from fear that he might be called on to give evidence in court which could wreck his marriage prospects, he had refrained from giving the police a full account of how he and Nakayama had spent their time while in Hong Kong. But Udo Nagi’s agents had unearthed the fact that one night during their stay the two men had not occupied their beds at the Victoria. Informed that he might become the victim of an unpleasant accident unless he came clean, Araki had supplied the following information.

  After a week in Hong Kong he had felt the urge for a little feminine entertainment and, having heard of a house called the Moon Garden, he had suggested that Nakayama should go with him to it. Nakayama had at first demurred, as he was a man of fifty and perfectly content with his mistress in Tokyo. But Araki had persuaded him and he had thoroughly enjoyed his night there. Evidently this departure from a normal humdrum fidelity had stimulated his sexual appetite, for three days later he told Araki that he had become acquainted with a beautiful English woman and was going with her to Macao for the week-end. Hardly able to contain himself at this amazing piece of luck, he had departed, but had never been seen again.

  The dealer in cultured pearls, Zosho Iwanarni, had gone to Hong Kong in January 1960. He was married but living apart from his wife, who had stated without beating about the bush that he was an inveterate womaniser. He had stayed at the Golden Gate Hotel in Austin Road and the manager there remembered him on account of the police enquiries subsequent to his disappearance, and because on one occasion he had had to be prevented from taking a prostitute to his room. On three nights out of the nine he had spent there he had slept out, presumably with a woman. But no-one who had been questioned could throw further light on his doings while in Hong Kong.

  The younger Hayashi had gone to Hong Kong in the previous November. Being a rich man, he had stayed at the fabulous Marco Polo in Kowloon. His disappearance having occurred only a few months ago, several of the staff there remembered him perfectly well; but they could give little information of any value. On two nights out of the seven that he had stayed there he had not come in until the small hours of the morning and, knowing his tastes, his father had no doubt that on those nights he had gone wi
th some woman. However, on leaving the Marco Polo he had asked that his room should be made available again to him two days later, as he was only going on a forty-eight-hour trip to Macao.

  Boiled down this added up to: Three of the men had definitely sought sexual entertainment while in Hong Kong and there was good reason to suppose that the other two had also done so. Two of them had visited the Moon Garden Night Club. One of them had been seen in the company of a blonde girl and another had said that he had made the acquaintance of a beautiful English woman, who was, possibly, the same person. Nakayama had told Araki that he was going to Macao with his new acquaintance for the week-end, and Hayashi had also left Hong Kong to spend forty-eight hours in the Portuguese colony. It therefore seemed a possibility that a blonde English girl had been employed to lure all five men to Macao and their deaths.

  Nagi had gone personally to Hong Kong to investigate the Moon Garden. He found it to be one of the best houses and run by a Chinese named Mok Kwai. But no European girls were employed there and Mok Kwai had assured Nagi that none ever had been. Neither, Mok Kwai informed Nagi regretfully, could he supply one on call, much as he would have liked to earn a good fee for so doing. Therefore it did not appear that the blonde had any connection with the Moon Garden, and it might well be no more than a coincidence that both Dr. Kido and Nakayama had visited the same establishment.

  But then Nagi had had a lucky break. One of his agents who was making enquiries at Macao had spent several days questioning the officers and crew of the ferry steamer that plied between Macao and Hong Kong. As a great number of visiting Westerners made the trip and the boats were always crowded, the hope of identifying a fair woman who had crossed in the company of a Japanese several months before was slender. But it happened that an elderly steward had noticed such a couple. His reason for doing so was that back in the 1940s, before he had had the misfortune to become bankrupt, he had frequented a high-class brothel owned by a Mr. Lo Kung, and he had felt certain that the woman was Mrs. Lo.