Yellowthread Street
The first Yellowthread Street Mystery
William Marshall
FARRAGO
About the Yellowthread Street series
for Gerald and Elvire
The Hong Bay district of Hong Kong is fictitious, as are the people who, for one reason or another, inhabit it.
Hong Kong invites, entices, accepts, accommodates, pleasures, puts up with, cheats and disgorges several dozen million tourists a year, and almost without exception they all leave their air-conditioned, room-serviced, overpriced glass and concrete hotel cocoons with the delicious feeling that, just below the surface of this bursting town, just around the corner from where they bought their transistor radio or made a good deal on their brand-new stereo equipment, there are sinister, secret and very seedy happenings going on.
Most of them keep away from Hong Bay and the bar and dance-hall district around Yellowthread Street (the brochures the Tourist Office hands out say you should) which is where the secret and seedy happenings happen, and they go home safe with slide and eight-millimetre home movies proving they had a wonderful time.
As Detective Inspector Phil Auden went through the door of the Yellowthread Street Police Station in the district of Hong Bay and the day shift left, night fell, seven Jumbo jets carrying a total of two thousand tourists, businessmen, wives and others landed in procession at Kai Tak airport, an American destroyer disembarked eight hundred bored, thirsty, lustful, belligerent sailors for forty-eight hours shore leave, and the Chinese Communists across the border took it into their heads to turn the water off.
Constable Sun looked up from his desk and said, ‘They’ve turned the water off.’
‘Shit!’ said Detective Inspector Auden.
Four streets away from the Yellowthread Street Police Station where Detective Inspector Auden said ‘Shit!’ and Constable Sun shrugged, a man named Chen went back to his room in Cuttlefish Lane near the fish markets with an axe and used it to halve his wife and quarter her boyfriend.
Bill Spencer said, ‘When was that?’
‘Just now,’ Constable Sun said, ‘my brother rang me to ask if I could get him some.’
‘How are you supposed to be able to get him water?’ Auden asked.
Sun shrugged.
‘Hey,’ Spencer said to Auden, ‘Inspector Feiffer left a message he got a tip on the rickshaw basher. He’s gone down to the harbour.’
‘Does he want me?’
‘No.’ Spencer leaned forward on the report typewriter and contemplated the spelling mistakes that were the fault of the machine.
‘How are you supposed to be the water man?’ Auden asked Sun.
Sun went inscrutable. ‘Don’t go inscrutable,’ Auden said.
‘My brother’s a nut,’ Constable Sun said. He looked over at one of the uniformed men, another Hakka-speaking harbour inhabitant named Cho, ‘Isn’t he?’
‘His brother’s crazy,’ Cho said. He was considering the angle of his cap in the dusty glass of the portrait of the Queen. He said, ‘I’ve known him for years. He’s always been crazy.’ He settled his cap.
‘Hmm,’ Auden said. He went to his desk and sat down.
Eight of them and the cleaner named Ah Pin made up the nightshift: Auden, Spencer, Sun, Cho, another uniformed Constable named Lee, Harry Feiffer who was a full Detective Chief Inspector, and Christopher O’Yee who claimed he had an Irish father and a Shanghai mother (or the other way around). Feiffer and O’Yee came through the door together.
Spencer watched Feiffer come in. Feiffer was a big man with tired eyes. He wore a white suit that had been white when it had been made in Hanford Road but had got darker and more faded and stained the longer he wore it in Yellowthread Street. O’Yee came in, went to his desk, took off his coat and shoulder holster, and sat down to get comfortable as the phone rang.
‘Did you get him?’ Spencer asked Feiffer, ‘—the rickshaw man?’
‘No.’
O’Yee said, ‘Yellowthread Street Police Station,’ into the telephone. It was a gamble every time it rang. If it was a Chinese speaker bursting to report a violation of the peace or blood running down a tenement wall on to his produce or into his customers’ soup it took a few seconds for each of them to get their ears and voices set to Cantonese and by that time
the hysterical citizen might have decided he was talking to an English laundry and hung up.
This time it was an English voice and it said, ‘The
Scranton
’s back.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Harbourmaster,’ the voice said. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Detective Inspector O’Yee.’
‘Where’s Inspector Feiffer?’
‘He’s here.’
‘Tell him the
Scranton
’s back,’ the voice said, ‘I’m very busy,’ and hung up.
O’Yee looked over at Harry Feiffer. Feiffer was going through his desk for a blank report form and swearing.
‘The
Scranton
’s back,’ O’Yee said.
‘Oh ho,’ Feiffer said enthusiastically and shut the desk. He seemed very pleased about something. He said, ‘You like movies, don’t you?’
‘I like what?’ O’Yee said. But just then Feiffer’s phone rang and this time it was an hysterical Chinese, a lady, reporting that blood was running down the stairs in her rooming establishment in Cuttlefish Lane and Feiffer took Sun with him and left before O’Yee found out who or what the
Scranton
was and why, if he did, he should like the movies.
He said to Auden, ‘This is a hell of a life,’ and Auden, who hardly ever knew what an Irish Chinaman or a Chinese Mick with an American accent was talking about anyway, nodded automatically.
The hysterical lady’s name was Mrs Fan and she was a fat hysterical lady standing on the portal to her rickety wooden unpainted smelly establishment holding her temples in with her hands and screaming for the police.
‘We’re the police,’ Feiffer said. He pointed at Sun’s uniform to prove the point.
Mrs Fan went on screaming.
Feiffer and Sun went up the stairs.
The bodies were in a room on the third floor at the end of the corridor, on the bed. Whoever had found them had taken one look, left the door open, and run shouting towards the stairs. Along the corridor there were bloody footprints and a skidding smudge where the finder had lost his balance in his haste to get away.
‘The woman,’ Constable Sun said, ‘I noticed her shoes.’
Feiffer nodded. He went into the room and wondered where they drained away the blood from the cuts of meat in butchers’ shops. A light was on in the room and it turned the blood into an off-red colour and made it glisten like women’s lacquered hair under neon light. A pile of bloody clothing was in one corner of the room and the plywood screen to a makeshift cupboard had been thrown on to the floor beside it. A few of the plywood sections had blood on them and there were bloody handprints on a towel on top of it.
Feiffer went over to the pile of clothing and moved the pieces apart with his finger. There were underpants, socks, a shirt, trousers, and a handkerchief.
‘He lives here,’ Feiffer said. Both the bodies were naked. Feiffer pointed to the dead man, ‘He thought he did too, on and off.’ He glanced at the clothing again. ‘He even took a clean handkerchief and left the old one for her to wash.’
Sun looked like he thought that was a poor joke.
‘Force of habit,’ Feiffer said.
‘The husband?’
‘Go through the other clothes in the cupboard. Some of them are probably the boyfriend’s. And call the Medical Examiner when you’re done.’
‘There’s the axe,’ Sun said. It lay behind the door. It didn’t look very sharp, but it must have been to have made such neat cuts.
Feiffer went to the dressing table. It was just to one side of the bed and blood lay like snail tracks across its surface. He took up a framed photograph showing two men and a woman looking proud and hopeful in front of a street food stall
somewhere between Cat Street and Beach Road. Between two buildings you could almost see the harbour.
‘Is this him?’
Sun looked over at the photograph.
‘Now look at the body.’
Sun looked. ‘It’s him. And her.’
‘And the other one’s the husband,’ Feiffer said. He looked at the inscription above the stall in the photograph and tried to make out the minute identity licence tacked to its wooden supports. The licence card was too small, but the characters said ‘Chen and Wang’. He said to Sun, ‘The dead one’s probably Wang. Chen’s wearing a wedding ring.’
‘So—’ Sun said. He kept trying to find somewhere else to look apart from the bed. Mrs Fan came heavily up the stairs. She had changed her steady hysterical screaming into steady hysterical screaming and Sun was glad to turn his attention to her.
‘Find out from her who’s who,’ Feiffer said, ‘and get the doctor, fingerprints and the photographer up.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to the food stall to arrest the other one.’
‘He won’t have gone to work after this,’ Sun said.
Feiffer nodded at the soiled handkerchief on top of the pile of bloody clothes. ‘Force of habit,’ he said and went out to leave Mrs Fan and the screaming to Sun.
‘Who’s this?’ the voice on the other end of the phone demanded.
O’Yee said, ‘This is Detective Inspector Christopher O’Yee, who the bloody hell is this?’
‘The
Scranton
’s back,’ the voice said.
‘I’m getting sick of this.’
‘Is Inspector Feiffer there?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Tell him the—’
‘You’re not the Harbourmaster,’ O’Yee said.
‘What?’
‘The Harbourmaster.’
‘Of course not!’
‘Who are you?’
‘Inspector Feiffer said one of his men would come down here while it’s in. We’re next. He said we’d be next and now it’s in again. He made a promise to me.’
‘You’re next?’
‘Yes!’
‘Next for what?’
The voice obviously thought he was slow. ‘For the
Scranton,’
the voice said. ‘You’re slow. Who is this?’
‘I’m a policeman,’ O’Yee said. ‘What or who is the
Scranton?’
‘The
Scranton
is an American destroyer of course!’
‘Of course it is,’ O’Yee said. ‘Now who are you?’ He waited.
‘This is the manager of the Peacock Cinema on Icehouse Street of course!’
‘Of course it is,’ O’Yee said. ‘Now what can I do for you?’ He thought he sounded very civil for a man fast going paranoid. ‘What seems to be your problem?’
‘Didn’t Inspector Feiffer tell you?’
‘No.’ He said, ‘Did you say
Cinema?’
Something went ‘click’ in his mind.
‘The Peacock on—’
‘I think I’m your man,’ O’Yee said. ‘Why don’t you take it slowly for me?’
At the other end of the line he heard the man sigh and draw a calming breath before he began to take it slowly for him.
Minnie Oh was a clerical error. Someone in Police Administration in Salisbury Road had decided Yellowthread Street needed a woman police constable with a hard face and an unsympathetic manner for the whores and madames off Icehouse Street and the Jasmine Steps, and by mistake they sent Minnie.
She had even been given an office at the rear of the station.
Both Auden and Spencer had an overwhelming urge for Minnie, not to mention the urges of Constable Lee, Constable Sun and the eighty-year-old cleaner Ah Pin, and so when the American woman from New Jersey (she said, ‘I’m from New Jersey’) came in wearing a camera she had purchased at the airport (it still had the shop label on it) and a voluminous raffia bag for the things she was going to purchase and said, ‘I’ve lost my husband,’ Spencer thought it was an ideal opportunity to steal a quick march on the opposition.
He said, ‘Best if you see the Woman Police Officer.’
The New Jersey lady looked around the room. The desks were all scarred, untidy and inefficient looking and the two tone paint on the walls—green and faded green—reminded her of precinct stations in New Jersey, so she knew she wasn’t going to get any satisfaction anyway. She said, ‘I don’t care who I see.’
‘Matters of a personal nature—’ Spencer said. He glanced towards the corridor that led to Minnie’s room.
‘It’s not that personal.’
‘Well—’ Spencer said.
‘We were walking along and I lost him.’
‘I see.’
‘Yeah.’ She looked at the room and looked like she did not approve. ‘I thought you British cops did better than this.’
‘I don’t know,’ Spencer said, ‘I’ve only been here two weeks.’ He said, ‘I was with Administration.’ She couldn’t have cared less. He said, ‘I’ve just passed my detective’s exam.’ Spencer said, ‘Will I get you the Woman Police Officer?’
‘O.K.’ the New Jersey lady said.
‘Name?’
‘I don’t know anybody. We just got off the plane. Goddamned airline lost the baggage so we’ve been wandering around waiting for it to turn up. I haven’t even got a hotel—’