THE 6:20 A.M. HONG KONG Express out of Tokyo Haneda took the better part of five hours to reach its destination.
Iwata spent the flight studying the Mina Fong case file and the still images he had picked up from Hawk Security. By the time he landed at Hong Kong International Airport, Iwata had also picked up a cold. In the arrivals hall, he sat down with a tasteless coffee and waited. Half an hour passed before a slim man with prominent eyebrows approached, hands in his pockets.
“You?” he asked in English. “Iwata?”
“That’s me.”
“The day after tomorrow at 8 A.M., the Cathay Pacific Medical Examiner’s Office. Doctor Wai will be waiting for you.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing here. I don’t know why Taba would want to help you. But I do know what you did to him and my sister. If I were you, I wouldn’t cross paths with me again.”
Then the man was gone. Iwata swallowed a couple of decongestants and approached the taxi kiosk.
The taxi worked its way through the misty roads of Lantau Island, and then over the bridges toward Tuen Mun. Pulling up outside Green Peak Psychiatric Hospital at 2 P.M., Iwata stepped into the drizzle clutching his bag. He looked up at the old building. It was set high up on the green hills overlooking Butterfly Beach, an old British structure built in a time when peace and an ocean view were the only real remedies available to the mentally troubled.
A portly man in a cream linen suit was waiting on the hospital steps. His round, neat face peeked out from beneath an expensive umbrella.
“Mr. Iwata? I’m Mr. Lee, the Fong family lawyer.”
“Mr. Lee. Thank you for seeing me.”
“Welcome to Hong Kong.” He gave a cold, soft handshake. “I must say your English is excellent. For a Japanese, I mean.”
His laughter was a high-pitched crest. Iwata followed him into the reception and the nurse behind the counter smiled and waved them through.
“Mrs. Fong doesn’t get visitors anymore. I’m sure she’ll be glad. Even if she doesn’t say much, she’s listening.”
Lee led Iwata into a large room with French windows. Elderly patients read newspapers or dozed. The TV news was almost deafening. At the open doors to the garden, Lee stopped.
“Mr. Iwata, I think it best if you see her alone. If she sees me coming, she’ll only think I’m bringing more bad news. She’s had such an awful few years, as you know.”
Iwata thanked the portly lawyer and stepped out on to the long stretch of lawn overlooking Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. Mary Fong was seated beneath a white canvas parasol, wrapped in a blanket, her face expressionless beneath sunglasses. He saw Cleo as a withered old woman, drooling in silence, eyes still fixed on that same, never-changing horizon.
I’m happy with you.
Fighting the feeling he had been here before, Iwata crouched down by the old woman.
“Hello, Mrs. Fong. I’m Kosuke.”
She turned her head to glance at him but said nothing. Mrs. Fong went back to her view.
“I know you’ve spoken to police many times about your daughters, but I was just wondering if I could trouble you for a few minutes. I’ve come from Tokyo.”
I’m happy with you. Please let me hear.
“Tokyo? Ohh.”
“That’s right. Mrs. Fong, you know that nobody has yet been apprehended for Mina’s murder … I hope that will only be a matter of time. But that’s not why I’m here.”
In the distance, seagulls hung suspended in the gray. They looked no different from those that flew over Sagami Bay. Above them, planes made their final glum approaches. Iwata took out the photograph he had taken from Mina’s apartment. He held it up in front of Mary Fong, who quivered for a moment, then looked away.
“Mrs. Fong, I need you to help me.”
“Of course.” Her English carried a subtle accent. “You’ve come all this way.”
“From what I gather, Jennifer died some years ago in a boating accident of some sort?”
She laughed defensively.
“You have the wrong person, dear. Jennifer is alive and well, thank you. You must have just missed her, in fact.”
“She came to visit?”
“Just now.”
“Mrs. Fong, from what I can gather, Jennifer’s body was found at sea. Quite far out, in fact. Did she know anybody who owned a boat? A boyfriend, perhaps?”
Please let me hear. Those words of love from you.
Mary Fong chuckled and looked at him over her sunglasses. Her eyes were pink and watery.
“Jennifer is a good girl. She wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
“As far as I know, the authorities labeled it as death by misadventure, possible suicide. Was she acting any differently at the time of her death? Were you ever worried? Did she seem unhappy?”
Mary Fong looked away and pulled the blankets tighter around her frail body.
“Jennifer is a good girl.”
“I’m sorry to ask you, Mrs. Fong, but I really need to be sure about what happened.”
She frowned slightly.
“I’m sorry you’ve come such a long way. But I think you have the wrong person. I’m really very tired, my memory isn’t…”
Iwata stood up and straightened his legs. He took a chair from a nearby garden table.
“Do you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Fong?”
“That’s fine. Tell me, have the cherry blossoms arrived in Beppu?”
Iwata puffed out smoke.
“Beppu?” The cigarette bounced on his lips.
“Such a wonderful place for a honeymoon. How is the weather there at the moment?”
“I don’t know. But it’s too early in Tokyo for cherry blossoms.”
“Ah, Tokyo.” She inhaled with pleasure as though she were walking through Yoyogi Park at this very moment, sniffing the blossom-rich air.
“You know Tokyo, don’t you? Did you visit Mina there?”
“She’s such a beautiful child. She wants to become an actress when she leaves school, can you imagine?”
Iwata smoked in silence for a while, then stubbed out his cigarette. The clouds were darkening as they settled over Hong Kong. He checked his watch.
“I worry for that girl sometimes.” The old woman sighed. “She never visits me, you know.”
“Do the names Yuko and Terai Ohba mean anything to you?”
“I’ve never heard those names.”
“What about a family by the name of Kaneshiro?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Fong.”
“Good-bye, darling. Tell Jennifer that I need my hair cut, if you would.”
Iwata stood and left Mary Fong to her memories.
Outside the hospital, Mr. Lee was waiting on the steps, watching the rain.
“Was she any help?”
“Unfortunately not.”
The lawyer reached into his inside pocket and produced a pair of keys.
“The address is on the tag.”
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Lee.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, Inspector.”
Iwata started down the hill, heading for the seafront.
* * *
As the ferry chugged across the bay, Iwata ate rice balls and watched the waves. He could tell his cold would get worse before it got better.
After docking, he explored Discovery Bay—an upmarket, seahorse-shaped residential development built at the foot of the green hills that rose out of the ocean. He walked past modern apartment complexes, luxury villas, expensive restaurants, and various social clubs, all of them requiring membership. At this hour, the only pedestrians were new mothers pushing two-month-salary prams and elderly couples dressed for tennis.
After the better part of an hour, Iwata finally found Mrs. Fong’s apartment building. It was a concrete afterthought at the end of the bay. He took the elevator to the top floor, unlocked number 912, and was immediately hit with the smell of dead flowers. He took in gold mirrors, motionless wind chimes, and faded ink drawings of birds. To the right, he saw Mrs. Fong’s room and the bathroom—to the left, the girls’ rooms.
Mina’s room was spacious, the orange walls adorned with stickers, sea shells spelling out her name. The window looked out to the sea. A white vanity unit stood beneath it. Her walls were a patchwork of magazine cuttings and teenage torsos. Iwata spent the next hour searching her room but he could turn up nothing more than the components of a life that Mina had left behind. Her hiding places contained nothing of interest, the wardrobe contained only clothes. There was nothing in this room that Iwata could match to her new life in Japan.
At her desk, he read through good grades that had steadily declined and report cards that spoke of a natural intelligence marred by a waspish attitude. He pictured her seated before her teacher on parents’ evening, her mother next to her, exhausted from working long-haul flights, solemnly nodding at the teacher’s words.
If Mina applied herself, she could study anywhere in the world—it’s all ahead of her.
But Iwata knew how the story had ended. At eighteen, she would drop out from the London School of Economics to pursue modeling work in Tokyo. Celebrity and wealth would find her. As would loneliness and barbiturates. Finally, she would be murdered in her own apartment.
Aching and tired, Iwata took another decongestant and swallowed it with tap water from the bathroom. He opened the door to Jennifer’s room, a much smaller space with lilac walls. The color was either Jennifer’s favorite, or a stand against the tyranny of the younger sister’s bright orange. There was a single Bon Iver poster. An almost life-sized stuffed toy dog had been dry-cleaned and shoved in a clear plastic bag in the corner. He pictured Jennifer and the dog together, her tears and secrets fed into the dog’s neck down the years, its eyes glassy, its smile permanent.
Iwata sat on Jennifer’s bed and took out his ferry schedule. He calculated that Mina and Jennifer would have had to have woken up at 5:30 A.M. each day to catch the ferry in time for the school bus. He already knew that their father had kept up regular payments. But Mrs. Fong’s salary from Cathay Pacific had always been meager and after school fees and rent, life would have rarely been anything other than tough down the years.
Iwata started to search the room—rifling through drawers, looking under the bed, and unfolding folded clothes. He found nothing. Her mattress concealed only a forgotten receipt for an inexpensive summer dress. Inside the speakers of her music player were only wires. Her books contained only pages. He felt behind the mirror but touched only glass.
Then he opened her underwear drawer and there, under folded socks, he saw diaries. Jennifer Fong had filled out five large, thick journals through her short life, all of them kept together. The entries were not dated but were all in English. Iwata spent the next two hours ingesting the dead girl’s hopes and fears. Her confessions of lust and hatred.
As a child, everyone had said how pretty Jennifer was. As she grew taller and larger, the compliments passed down to Mina. Jennifer frequently worried about her figure. She was taller than all of her friends and had a thick waist and large breasts. Her clothes no longer fitted her and she concluded she must be fat. Her relationship with her friends was a complicated one. Occasionally, she would pour out her love for them on the page, hoping that their bond would be a lifelong one. But she regarded them, more frequently, as an ancillary commitment in her life, an inconvenience that she did not particularly care for. She was, however, very close to her sister and her mother, though they often argued.
As Jennifer got older, most of her friends started relationships, but whenever she met a boy she liked, she felt too unattractive to initiate one. At sixteen, on a school trip, an English boy named Neil began talking to her. He repeatedly told her how beautiful she was. He was skinny, shorter than her, with braces and clumsy facial expressions. But nobody had ever shown an interest before. When he asked to meet her the next day, she agreed.
He walked her around the city aimlessly for three hours before eventually taking her to the beach. The sky was battleship gray, and in the distance a storm was building. Sitting in the damp sand, they shared a can of Coke without saying anything. When it was gone, Neil kissed her. As she tasted the metallic sugar of his saliva, she knew this wasn’t what she wanted.
On the way home, she cried without knowing why. When Jennifer told her friends, they made such a fuss over her that she began to feel her life was, at the least, becoming more interesting. She began to feel important things were going to happen to her soon. She stopped wearing glasses and went on the pill. She did not speak to Neil again for several years, though they seemed to rekindle a strong friendship later on.
Teachers always liked Jennifer, perhaps because her younger sister had been prone to tantrums. In contrast, while Jennifer did not display the same academic potential, she was friendly and likeable. In fact, the only detectable animosity in any of her journals was toward her Japanese father—Shoei Nakashino.
Mina and her father would often tease Jennifer. They would call her “Baby Elephant” in Japanese, then stomp around the room with imaginary trunks, knocking things over. It was one of the few “games” he seemed to enjoy with them. Jennifer would never let her tears spill until later.
If he took his girls to the beach, he would watch from a distance, dressed in a full suit, tie slightly loosened, the only casual thing about him being a baseball cap to protect his balding scalp. Jennifer would call for him to join them in the water, but he would pretend not to notice over his newspaper.
Iwata flipped ahead in her life, well into adolescence.
Father has been in touch. He’ll be visiting for two days, and he wants me to book a table for our “usual” meal for three. He uses the word “usual,” though this actually means annual. I suggested inviting Mum, but of course he found this ridiculous. I really don’t see the point anymore. His dinners require two or three cancellations beforehand, and when they finally do come around, he just half-listens and checks his watch the whole time. Not that he looks me in the eye anymore. The second I sprouted breasts, he stopped looking me in the eye. Maybe he thinks I’m no longer a little girl, and his work as a father is done?
Shoei Nakashino died two weeks shy of his fifty-sixth birthday, a perfunctory heart attack in the London office of a nappy conglomerate. Jennifer, Mina, and Mary Fong had attended the funeral and were summarily ignored by Nakashino’s second family.
In her diary, Jennifer’s musings on death were short and sad. It was hard for her to see how she could wait a full year until university began. She was desperate for something or someone to come along.
And as the diary entries came to an end, it seemed as if someone had.
Between the pages, she had kept cinema tickets and a dried Chinese hibiscus petal. Beneath it, the simple words:
I’VE NEVER MET ANYONE LIKE HIM.
No introduction, no explanation, no outpouring of first love. Just that statement. Iwata went back to the start and read through a second time but could find no other mentions of “him.”
Checking his watch, Iwata returned the journals to their nest and squinted at the photographs around the frame of the mirror. Most were of Mary and Mina, who were both naturally photogenic. There was only a single photograph of Jennifer, sitting on the beach, shielding her eyes from the sunset. Her hair was wet from the ocean and the muscles in her arm were captured clearly in the orange light.
Iwata knew Jennifer was a good swimmer—she had letters from the beach authority thanking her for her lifeguard volunteering.
I LOVE THE OCEAN. IT’S THE ONLY THING I’LL MISS NEXT YEAR.
Next year had come and gone.
Iwata sat at her desk and opened her school yearbook. He scanned the faces and names, wondering who might have known Jennifer, who might have hated her, or loved her from afar.
Cross-referencing with Jennifer’s journal, he recognized only three names in the yearbook:
Kelly Ho
Susan Cheung
Neil Markham
Shutting the yearbook, Iwata ran his finger across the gold leaf address.