Fong “ahemed” and the room quieted. Cigarette smoke hung in layered clouds in the room. The windows were open and the hazy saturated air of a Shanghai summer afternoon moved in and out like the water at the shore of a placid lake.
Fong looked around the table. He really didn’t have any plan in mind. Just to get started.
“Lily?”
“Message pick up, did you?” she said in her own private version of English. She was about to add her pet phrase for him, “Short Stuff,” then decided against it in public.
“No, I’m sorry but . . . ”
“Fine. No nose off my teeth,” she said.
He had no idea what that meant, but signalled that she should begin the proceedings. She opened a folder and handed out copies of the autopsy report and the toxicology data then said in her beautiful Mandarin, “If you look at the autopsy report, there is no evidence of previous trauma to the body. In other words, he wasn’t killed then hanged. He was just hanged. There were elevated levels of alcohol in Mr. Hyland’s bloodstream but they weren’t high enough to make him lose contact with reality unless he really wasn’t a drinker. Someone should check into that.”
“I did,” said Fong. “He wasn’t a drunk or an abstainer, just a guy – he drinks, drank.”
Lily nodded.
From a large plastic bag she took out the noose and tossed it on the table then said, “It has one less turn than a traditional hangman’s noose but outside of that it’s standard issue. The position of the ladder conforms to the mathematical paradigm of something that tall being pushed from that height. The rope was easily strong enough to strangle a man of Mr. Hyland’s weight.”
Fong looked up from his notes.
“Yes, sorry about that, but this man’s neck wasn’t snapped like in a proper hanging. He strangled to death. It probably took several minutes.”
She paused as that sank in.
“That accounts for the ligature burns up and down Mr. Hyland’s neck,” she said.
Fong nodded and made a note. He wasn’t sure Lily was right about that.
“There are threads of the hemp embedded in his fingers and palms, which seem to indicate that he fought the rope at the end.”
Fong experienced a moment of real panic. He didn’t want that image in his head. Geoff, dangling, trying to loosen the rope, trying to scream – no.
One of the detectives put down his copy of the report and said, “He changed his mind, you mean?”
“If . . . ” Lily didn’t complete her sentence.
Fong did. “If this was actually a suicide. Anything else, Lily?”
“There were no defensive wounds on the body. No skin under the nails. The only other toxicological findings of interest were traces of seminal fluid in his underclothing . . . ” She paused for a moment as the usual smirks in response to ejaculation at the end of a life passed over the men’s faces then she added, “mixed with Nonoxynol.”
“What’s that?” Fong asked.
“It’s a spermicide.” The men around the table looked blankly at Lily. None had any idea what she was talking about. Lily sighed her you-poor-benightedpagans smile and said, “Some Western women use it as a contraceptive. It seems Mr. Hyland had a little nooky-nooky sometime before his demise.” Then to Fong in English she added, “On message, Short Stuff. Pickup no surprise. No pickup, surprise surprise.”
“How long before his demise, Lily?” Fong asked.
“Not long. Soon details I get, then you get, you get me?”
Fong nodded. A ripple of confusion circled the table, but Fong didn’t want to get sidetracked on that. “Anything else, Lily?”
“No,” she said in Shanghanese.
“What about the flowers that were in his vest pocket?”
“Marigolds, forget-me-nots and primroses,” Lily replied then added, “is there anything . . . ”
Fong cut her off, “What about the vest itself?”
“What about it?”
“It was a thousand degrees that night. Why would he wear a vest?”
Lily shrugged then said, “Perhaps Mr. Hyland was a slave to fashion. Maybe he wanted to die looking his best.”
“True, but who gets laid then kills himself?” asked Li Chou. “This was no suicide. I agree with Zhong Fong.”
“Well, that’s a first,” Fong said in English to Lily, who raised an eyebrow in response.
“What was that, Zhong Fong?” Li Chou asked.
Fong smiled but wondered why Li Chou’s pronunciation of his name sounded to his ears awfully close to Traitor Zhong. “You’re up, Li Chou. What did you and your crew find?”
Li Chou opened a stained folder and spread out a series of documents. “There were literally fingerprints everywhere. Sixteen partials and twenty-seven full prints. We’ve fingerprinted the theatre’s technicians and actors and are slowly identifying whose prints are whose. However, with so many prints on the ladder it is unlikely that this line of investigation will yield anything of interest.
“The rope was actually cut from a stock of rope that was kept in the west side of the theatre. The cut on the tail of the rope there matches the head of the rope used to hang Mr. Hyland.”
“I’m afraid there are small flesh deposits on the rope within reaching distance of the noose which supports Ms. Lily’s supposition that the man suffocated.”
Fong wondered why Li Chou was being so solicitous. What was with the “I’m afraid” part of his last statement? But before Fong could speak, Lily piped up, “I don’t make suppositions, Mr. Li.”
Li Chou’s hands flew up like he was fending off mosquitoes on Good Food Street. “No criticism intended, Ms. Lily.”
“That would be another first,” Fong thought.
“Then there were these.” He pushed a large plastic evidence bag marked Floor Findings onto the table. “Pretty normal stuff, nothing you wouldn’t expect on a stage. A few makeup sticks, bits of torn cloth, cigarette butts, stick matches, a hair clip, three pages of some script, a sodden handkerchief, three small-denomination yuan notes, a paperclip, wood chips . . . ”
Fong interrupted him, “Did Mr. Hyland have a rehearsal set up for that morning?”
“Yes,” replied Captain Chen, referring to his notes. “No one was very happy about it. Apparently once a theatrical production starts to perform it is considered bad form to . . . ”
“Who was called?”
“Called?”
“Told to be at rehearsal,” Fong clarified.
Li Chou gave him a who-cares look.
Fong ignored him and looked to Chen, “I want to see everyone who Geoff called to rehearsal for that morning.”
Chen made a note and flipped open his cell, “Odd to call a rehearsal then kill yourself, don’t you think?”
Fong could have added, “Odd to start writing a book then kill yourself,” but he didn’t.
“Odd indeed, unless you wanted those called to rehearsal to come in and find you still swinging.” It was the commissioner who snuck noiselessly into the room behind Fong. The man had changed his demeanour of late. The rumour in the station was that he was modelling himself after the new actor who played the head of the district attorney’s office on the American television show Law and Order - not the original one, but the one who followed the lady who played it for a bit. Fong had never seen the program, but apparently it was very popular throughout Shanghai. For an instant he wondered if Fu Tsong would have liked the show. The man continued, “An odd sort of ‘up yours’ but, I imagine, in some people’s eyes, a very effective one.”
The commissioner shifted his position in the doorway to catch the light better or something. It unnerved Fong that he hadn’t at least sensed the man’s presence.
“Still to kill yourself like that?” the commissioner pressed on.
“True, sir,” Fong said, “but there is every possibility that this was not a suicide.”
“If it’s not then someone went to serious dramatic lengths to make us believe it was a suicide.”
“Very dramatic lengths,” said Fong.
“Who? Who would do this?”