Master of Rain

by Tom Bradby

  For a moment Field wished he’d ended up in Crime, which had always been his intention. He thought there was something vaguely disreputable about his own department.

  He pictured Lena Orlov again, and the way her body had strained to avoid her assailant, then he thought about Natasha and her nonchalant disinterest. What did she really think? Hadn’t the two of them been friends? Perhaps that had been the cause of the moments of fragility he’d witnessed.

  Field flicked open the file in front of him and glanced at the small picture clipped to the single sheet of paper it contained. It was a poor photograph, which made Lena look like a convict, her blond hair flattened and her face gaunt. Field thought of the happy family scene in front of the country house in Russia.

  He turned, feeling Yang’s eyes on him, but she was staring in a different direction now, toward Granger’s office.

  Field wondered about Yang and Granger.

  He stood, clutching Lena’s file and the instructions for the fingerprint bureau, ignoring Yang’s casually interested glance as he passed.

  In the lift he opened the folder again. It listed where in Russia Lena was from—near Kazan—and detailed three meetings she had attended at the New Shanghai Life, a magazine funded by Bolshevik intelligence officers from Soviet Russia working undercover at the consulate, but most of the file entries had been written by Prokopieff, who was as gifted with written English as Field was with his Chinese, and even by their standards, this was thin. They had files on so many people and most gave few insights. He’d learned more in five minutes at the woman’s flat.

  Field wondered why she’d attended meetings at the New Shanghai Life. The family had certainly looked as if it was part of the old, decimated aristocratic class and were unlikely recruits to the Bolshevik cause.

  The fingerprint bureau was on the fifth floor, C.6 printed in the middle of its frosted glass door. Field knocked once, then entered.

  The room was in darkness save for the light from two desk lamps, one of which pointed toward a sheet of paper hanging from a piece of string that ran from one side of the room to the other. A tall man with gray hair and glasses, wearing a white coat, was using the other to look at a brown leather ledger, like the ones that filled the bookshelves above him. He sat hunched over it, holding a magnifying glass. He did not bother to look up.

  Field cleared his throat. “I’ve brought the paperwork on the Orlov case.”

  “The Russian prostitute?” The man was English.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Put it in the tray by the door.”

  Field let it drop into the wire basket. “Have you got anywhere yet?”

  The man looked up, staring at Field over his glasses. He had a long nose, with black hairs poking out of both nostrils, and poor teeth. “Do I look like a miracle worker?”

  “Not really, no.”

  The man stared at him. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Yorkshire.”

  “Bad luck.” He exhaled heavily, turning back to his work. “Two days, minimum.”

  “Two days?”

  “Minimum, I said.” He straightened, gesturing at all the ledgers above him. “Do I look as if I have any assistance?” He muttered something to himself, then added audibly, “There were different prints in the apartment, so it might take longer.”

  “Have you found a match for Lu?”

  The man hesitated. “Pockmark?”

  “Yes.”

  “You may be disappointed to discover that I haven’t looked at the Orlov prints and they’re not next in line.”

  “It’s a murder case.”

  “So tell me something new.”

  Field took a step closer, looking over the man’s shoulder at the pages of prints in the ledger that he was using to try to find a match for the one on the piece of paper in front of him.

  “I’m Field, by the way.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You’re Mr. Ellis.”

  “I’m Ellis.”

  “Is there any chance that, when you do come to the Orlov case, you might be able to check Lu’s prints against those you took from the bedroom? It’s just it would help to—”

  “Field.” The man did not look up. “Have you seen me in S.1 recently?”

  “No.”

  “Well, when you do, telling you how to do your job, then you can come up here and help me out with mine.”

  Field retreated, shut the door quietly, and crossed the corridor to the registry, a stuffy, hot room without ventilation or light. It was run by Danny Black, a first-generation Irish immigrant from New York, who’d fled from the civil war in Ireland to the East Coast of America, only to have found his way mysteriously thereafter to Shanghai. Without ever having talked about it, Field knew that he was Granger’s man, toiling away in the undergrowth for reasons unknown. He worked alongside Maretsky, who had a glass cubicle at the far end; both fat men with glasses and curly hair, they could have been twins. They were assisted by a Russian woman of similar physique who sorted through the files, occasionally filling in at the front desk whenever Danny or Maretsky was involved in Modus Operandi briefings or research. Maretsky also had an office up on the sixth floor.

  There was no one in evidence, so Field filled out one of the white forms. He wrote: Natasha Medvedev, Happy Times block, Foochow Road.

  He hesitated a second before taking another sheet, writing Lu Huang on it and hitting the brass bell on the front desk beside him.

  After a minute Danny emerged from behind one of the iron shelves at the far end of the room. “Mr. Field,” he said. Everyone liked Danny. His face exuded good-humored bonhomie. “What have you been up to?”

  “A Russian woman,” Field said.

  Danny looked up from the forms. He appeared worried. “Lu?”

  Field waited for him to expand, and when he didn’t, said, “Yes, Lu.”

  Danny looked shifty. “We’ve not got a file for Lu.”

  Field frowned.

  “There’s a background file,” Danny added hastily.

  “Then I’ll take that.”

  Danny turned around, disappearing behind the shelves and reemerging a few moments later with one bulging folder and a slim one.

  “Can I get the current file on Lu?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “There must be one.”

  “We don’t have it.” Danny was flustered.

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Field hesitated. “I thought all files have to be signed out and a memo put through to you if forwarded anywhere different.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have a note of who the file’s signed out to?”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “I mean yes. Granger has it.”

  “Well, I’ll get it from him, then.”

  “Sure.” Danny looked down. He was filling in the book in front of him, writing the file numbers and subjects alongside Field’s name. He turned it around for him to sign before shutting it and retreating behind the shelves once more, without looking back.

  Field took the stairs to the third floor, where Caprisi was on the phone, his jacket over the back of the chair, along with his leather holster. Watching him, Field noticed how well groomed he was, his hair neatly trimmed at the back and side. A leather wallet was open on the desk, and Field saw that there was a photograph inside of a young woman with short dark hair, holding a young boy.

  Caprisi put down the phone and swung around. He saw the direction of Field’s gaze and snatched the wallet up, slipping it into his trouser pocket. “Come on, Krauss has got the body.”

  Five

  Caprisi led Field down the stairs to the basement and through the swing doors of Pathology to the darkened lab at the end. There was a single, bright light in the ceiling and the room was heavy with the smell of formaldehyde. Krauss, in his long white coat, was s
tanding next to Maretsky.

  Lena Orlov lay flat on her back on a metal trolley in front of them. A white sheet covered her from the swell of her breasts to below her knees. Somehow she looked more peaceful here.

  “No assault,” Maretsky said, shaking his head.

  “No sexual assault,” Caprisi corrected.

  “Time of death,” Krauss said, with only the faintest hint of a German accent. “I would say around one o’clock in the morning. If the Russian neighbor found her at one o’clock in the afternoon, then I think she’d already been dead almost twelve hours.”

  “No consensual sex?” Caprisi asked.

  “Not as far as I can tell.”

  “Then why the fancy underwear and the handcuffs?”

  Krauss shrugged. Field didn’t know if it was the light, but Lena Orlov’s skin looked even whiter than it had in the flat.

  “Some kind of fantasy,” Maretsky said. “Was she a prostitute?”

  “We’re not sure of her circumstances yet,” Caprisi said. He turned and it was a second or two before Field realized that he was required to expand.

  “Her file is thin,” he said.

  “There’s a surprise,” Caprisi said.

  “She used to be a tea dancer,” Field went on. “She attended meetings with known Bolsheviks, but I agree with Caprisi, that needs further investigation, because it looks like she was from an aristocratic background in Russia.”

  “All right,” Maretsky said firmly, as if not wanting to dwell on this. “So it’s the usual gray area. A tea dancer makes an arrangement with a man for a sexual meeting, either through her association with Lu or some other avenue. She lets him into the flat . . . Did anyone see him come in?”

  “I just sent Chen back down,” Caprisi said, “but Lu owned the building, so you can be reasonably sure that no one will have heard or seen anything.”

  “The man comes in,” Maretsky went on. “He makes sure she is in these panties . . .” Maretsky thought for a moment, a chubby fist to his mouth, staring at Lena Orlov’s face through his dirty, round, steel-framed glasses. “I think this is a precise fantasy. Everything must be right. He gets her to wear these particular underclothes. Perhaps they have had a relationship or . . . arrangement, and she knows this is his exact fantasy. He handcuffs her to the bed.” Maretsky’s accent seemed to get thicker, Field noticed, the more he had to think, as if the process of drawing on a mental filing cabinet compiled during a different era automatically transported him back there. “Then he . . . This is the point.” He shrugged. “One could say it is a convenient way of ensuring that she cannot resist or fight. Perhaps it even allows him to put a hand over her mouth. But, of course, it’s more than that. This is part of the fantasy. She must be helpless. Supine. Entirely under his control.”

  They were silent again.

  “So they’d met before?” Caprisi asked. “Whoever it was, it was definitely not a first assignation?”

  “Possibly.” Maretsky shrugged again. “Probably. I would guess there was a pattern that led up to this: same setting, with the underwear and the handcuffs, but not going to this point. Perhaps culminating in some form of violence, but not murder.”

  Field looked at Lena Orlov’s face. There was no sign of any bruising there, nor on her neck or shoulders, but she seemed nonetheless to bear the hallmarks of a victim. Perhaps it was because of what he knew, or thought he did, of her circumstances, but he could imagine her allowing herself to be beaten.

  He saw Natasha Medvedev again in his mind’s eye, strong hands clutching at her shoulders until the knuckles whitened. Would she have submitted herself to violence in this manner?

  “So it couldn’t be the result of an argument?” Caprisi asked. “Jealousy? Lovers’ quarrel?”

  “It’s possible, but it is better to begin with what is likely.”

  Maretsky displayed a disarming modesty. Field thought it was the deliberate act of a clever man to tailor his manner to his audience.

  “But you think not?” Caprisi asked.

  Maretsky turned to the pathologist.

  “Savage stabbing. Eighteen in all,” Krauss said, nicotine-stained fingers pressed to his lips. He dropped a hand and pulled back the sheet, revealing Lena’s naked, punctured body. The blood had been cleaned from her skin, which made the livid bruising around the stab wounds even more visible. There were so many holes that in some places the skin looked as though it had been stretched too thin and hung like thread. In others—around the top of her vagina—incisions grouped close together had created deep craters. Field blanched and turned away. Caprisi eyed him curiously, as if surprised at his squeamishness.

  “See,” Krauss went on as Field forced himself to turn back. “Frenzied. Again and again, in her stomach and in the upper part of her sexual organs.” He reached down and put one long, slim, bony finger on the dark mound of hair at the base of Lena Orlov’s stomach. “Here, and on her breasts also.”

  “This is not sudden anger,” Maretsky went on, no longer prepared to invite conflicting views. “Not the anger that stems from a disagreement or jealousy: that would be done in a flash, then instantly recoiled from. One incision, or a couple at most, instantly regretted as the perpetrator senses this will result in death and that he has gone too far. No, this stems from a deep-seated rage. It is perhaps sexual in nature. It has been building for a long time. The relationship . . . arrangement . . . has been leading up to this point, though poor Lena has not known it. It has exploded here.”

  “He’s done this before?” Caprisi asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps, or he has?”

  “He has, I would say.”

  “But we haven’t seen anything like it?”

  “I’m checking the records. And we’re talking to the French gendarmerie. We’ve even contacted the Chinese police, not that that will do any good.”

  Once again, they all stared silently at Lena Orlov’s body, until Field cleared his throat and took a step back.

  They left Maretsky and Krauss together in the basement—both, Field thought, in their own way, creatures of the darkness—and got back into the lift. Caprisi pulled across the metal cage door with unnecessary aggression and leaned back heavily on the wall behind him.

  “I’m sorry to be ignorant,” Field said, “but are all tea dancers prostitutes?”

  “Try one for size and you’ll see.”

  Caprisi hit the buttons for the third and fourth floors, then leaned back again with a sigh, his face softening. He seemed suddenly less hostile. “You know,” he went on, “they say these Russian women commit suicide at the rate of one a week. They come here with nothing . . .” Caprisi turned to him. “You imagine, you grow up in a beautiful house, with a large staff and the belief that the world is there to serve you and then”—he flicked his fingers—“all gone. Months if not years of terror as you escape across the vast wilderness of your country, and then you wind up here, penniless, your father and mother probably dead. How do you support your siblings? What do you do to stay alive? If you do nothing, then you live on the streets and slowly starve to death.”

  The lift seemed to be moving more slowly than ever. Field thought of the big house his own mother had been brought up in and the shame of his father’s bankruptcy.

  “Some teach English, or music, or French or Russian. Many of them go to the cabarets and offer themselves for a dance at a dollar a time. You want more? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on their mood, on you, on the money.”

  They’d reached the third floor. Caprisi jammed his foot in the door.

  “That’s the demimonde. Les entraîneuses, they call them. The entertainers. Beautiful, sad women, reduced to a life nothing could have prepared them for, and which many cannot manage.”

  Caprisi was staring at Field with intense, dark eyes. “Try one, Field, and see how much you hate yourself.” Then he stepped out and walked away.

  Field now put his foot against the door. “I didn’t know you were married.”
>
  Caprisi turned. “Who says I’m married?”

  “The photograph . . . I thought . . .”