by Liz Jensen
I don’t have gut feelings: I have often told Ashok this. He calls me pedantic. He also refers to me as ‘the in-house Martian’ though he always stresses that he means it ‘with love, my friend’. But I do have instincts. These are different from gut feelings: they are a component of the deductive process; a form of recognition on the subconscious level, of something the conscious has not yet processed. A trick of the mind. But a useful one. That Sunny Chen was an unhappy man I don’t doubt. If there’s CCTV footage, does that mean he killed himself in public view, deliberately? If so, did he intend it as another ‘grand gesture’, despite his discomfort in the role of hero? Most suicides are private. Unless they’re political. The bombers. The self-immolators. The cries for help that go wrong. I need to know how he did it. I met the man and watched him agonise about his ancestors and pour soy sauce directly into his rice bowl in a very un-Chinese way. I told him about Kaitlin and Freddy. This doesn’t mean nothing. This means something, even if I don’t know the word for what it means. His cigarette lighter with ‘good fortune’ printed on it. The black-stemmed bamboos, the feral cats, him saying, ‘I am glad it was you they sent’ and me saying I was too, in Chinese, because it was true.
‘How did he do it?’
He lets out air from his mouth. ‘Look. Are you quite sure you want to know the gory details, Maestro?’ I straighten my back to spread the weight that’s settled on my shoulders.
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, it’s not something you’d want to dwell on and analyse too much and stuff. You’re all on your lonesome up there in your Scottish croft, right?’
‘Ashok. Just tell me.’
‘Er, Jeez. Well. You’ve been to the timber plant, right? Seems there was a health-and-safety issue with access to one of the machines . . . Hey, you still there?’
We peered down into the metallic roil of blades. Long way to fall, he said. Turn you into hamburger . . . It’s like being torn into small pieces. When he showed me the pulper, did he really want me to picture what would happen if he threw himself in?
‘Yes. Still here.’
‘The question is why. D’you have any kind of answer?’
I think. ‘Normally suicide is connected to some variant of depression.’
But that’s inadequate. Sunny Chen’s mental pain was a highly focused and particular form of derangement. He had a conviction that he was unable or unwilling to fully convey: a story about hungry spirits that for whatever reason he found untellable. The cargo on my shoulders shifts, then resettles in a new way. Did my investigation trigger his suicide?
‘Anyway, bud, you’ll need to incorporate something on his death in your report. Stephanie Mulligan can give you some input, if you want the psychological angle.’
‘No thanks.’ I say it too quickly and with too much force.
Stephanie Mulligan has been with Phipps & Wexman for four years. She is a competent and extremely ambitious operative who will probably be running the Psych Department within a few years. She is generally considered to be extremely attractive despite her bra size being probably no more than 34A. I try to avoid her. Whenever I think about her no amount of mental origami can counter the damage she inflicts on my nervous system. My attitude towards her is complex for reasons I don’t enjoy going into.
‘She’s done some work on work-related suicide. Could be of help to you.’
‘If I need it, I’ll look it up.’ Too fast, again.
He sighs. ‘Whatever. But turn it around quick.’ I trudge along the muddy path, my anorak brushing against wet swatches of broom, wishing Ashok hadn’t mentioned Stephanie Mulligan. I thought I’d relegated her to the past. ‘So how are you doing otherwise, Maestro?’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’ve been enjoying nature. And I have a goldfish.’
‘Good. Sounds like a start. So. Clear your head, then finish that report and call me when you’re done. It’s a tough call I know. Don’t think I’m unsympathetic. But I’m counting on you to deliver.’
He knows I will. When Professor Whybray recommended me to Phipps & Wexman it was Ashok Sharma who spotted my talent for identifying and tracking patterns, ‘like one of those French pigs that root for truffles in the forests of la Wherever-the-Fuck’, as he put it. It was he who took me on.
After we’ve said goodbye I switch off my phone and breathe in deep lungfuls of dark, saturated air. Sheep are scattered here and there, white blobs in a murk of collapsed bracken and heather. I turn and head back for the black granite boulder that marks the turn of the sheep-path. Seagulls wheel overhead.
‘Sunny Chen is dead. Sunny Chen is dead. Sunny Chen is dead.’
If I say a thing aloud it can sound like someone official speaking, and then I can begin to believe it. I walk faster, visualising the pulping machine, and the heap of woodchips and sawdust in the skip below, stained red from Sunny Chen’s blood. Sunny Chen mashed to hamburger. I have to go through the whole process with him. I don’t know why. Not just once, but again and again, with his heart and his da Vinci aortas and ventricles sliced through by the whirring blades, and the crimson blood splattering against the stainless steel walls of the machine.
When I first asked Sunny Chen how he felt about the whistle-blower he’d said, I would like to kill him. Later, when he burned himself in effigy, he was showing me he planned to do just that.
I missed it. But someone else might not have.
In the absence of anything you could call a body, the police would have had to scoop up the pulped sawdust to verify Sunny Chen’s DNA. They’d probably have used an ordinary shovel. Then they’d have put the material into a Ziploc plastic bag for analysis.
A company can lose millions of pounds through an act of sabotage or through bad publicity generated by a disgruntled worker. It will need a complete rebranding, and may have to relocate. Profit is an end product of a motivated workforce. It would be absurd to expect all employees to be happy all day long. But when the seed of discontent is sown, it can spread like contagion. With Sunny Chen’s suicide, the negative PR impact has been amplified.
In my dealings with him, he didn’t strike me as a brave man so much as a desperate one.
Yet it was Sunny Chen who blew the whistle and became an international – what?
A star, some will say. But he’s gone. So technically, a more accurate analogy would be ‘comet’.
Phipps & Wexman protocol defines him as a saboteur.
While to the police, he’s now some red-pink mush in a bag which will be stored in a refrigerator unit along with similar bags containing parts of other Chinese people, all clearly labelled using a standardised numerical code linking each specimen to a police case file. Every discipline has its own methodology, but this at least is what I imagine happening to Sunny Chen’s pulped remains, which will later make their way into a traditional Chinese coffin.
They make the body disobey the mind, he’d said. The spirits had got inside him and made him act against his will. They’re our blood, but they hate us.
The French term un acte manqué describes a form of self-sabotage whereby the unconscious sets about wrecking – for whatever reason – what the conscious has built. Could it be that one version of Sunny Chen sabotaged Jenwai while another turned a blind eye? And that when he’d returned to normal and seen what ‘they’ had done, he’d panicked and felt such remorse that his only recourse was suicide?
Mental breakdown explains both Chen’s suicide and the uncharacteristic behaviour that preceded it. That’s the slant I’ll use in my report, to explain his arrival in the Ziploc bag. For now, it’s the closest I’ll get to the true answer.
But if the Sunny Chen case were a piece of origami I would flatten out the creases, work out where I went wrong, and start again.
Outside, the moon is a thin, luminous scrape and the stars throb weakly above the sea. I switch off my computer and swivel my chair from side to side in rhythmic arcs. I can hear the gulls screech.
Is human hamburger a foodstuff that a hung
ry ghost might crave?
CHAPTER 3
Sometime at the end of the twentieth century there was a breakthrough in the world of origami. Before then, it was considered impossible to fabricate an animal or other form that had a large body and thin appendages from a single sheet of paper. This limited your range of designs. Anything like an insect with feelers, for example, was out of the question. But then, thanks to mathematical computer models pioneered by the physicist and origamist Robert J. Lang, which involve dividing the original piece of paper into circles and then sub-dividing the circles into creases, you can make just about anything with protrusions. A millipede. Mating locusts. A spiked sea urchin. Or Lang’s famous hermit crab, which I am tackling now. The back-coated kozo paper I have chosen is tough, but thin: Indian Violet with a black dot pattern. I began it when I moved here and it is now one-third complete. It’s a job requiring both paper clips and tweezers.
On balance, I’m glad I have to recast the Taiwan report. Chen’s suicide means that some of his more cryptic behaviours – the dark references to ‘the pressure’, the preoccupation with the muddy smear, the ancestor-talk – can be seen as symptoms of his breakdown. But my own culpability is another matter. I’ve never previously known anyone who committed suicide. Will it take the rest of my life to process what has happened? I don’t know.
If Freddy were here, he would say, ‘Yet’, as per the rules of a playful accord we have concerning unacquired knowledge, whereby if one of us said they didn’t know something, the other had to say ‘Yet’. And then the other one – usually me – would provide the missing information, or we’d look it up, or just speculate.
But it is untested ground.
It’s Tuesday 18th September. My laptop tells me the forecast is for more rain, and highs of twelve degrees. After two hours’ work on the hermit crab with Dvor?ák on the speakers I’m interrupted by Skype ringing.
Caller: Ashok Sharma, Phipps & Wexman. Time: 08.18.
That’s early, for Ashok. I’m tempted to reject it, but I can’t. Working from home was a right I campaigned for after things deteriorated with Kaitlin. Ashok agreed in the end, on condition that I stay contactable at all times. I turn down Dvor?ák and press answer. Ashok’s looking tired and dishevelled and a shade paler. I focus on the door handle which is visible behind his left ear. I don’t do eye contact, but I have ways of hiding it.
‘You there bud?’
‘Yes. Working on the hermit crab.’ I hold it up to show him.
‘Cool, man. Look, things are turning weird on us. It’s happened again.’
‘What has?’
‘Just had another case like Chen’s. Sabotage followed by self-harm, take two. The world of finance this time. Employee of Sverige Banken, the Swedish bank. They’re the client.’
I settle the hermit crab back on the desk. ‘Go on.’
‘Guy called Jonas Svensson.’
‘Ashok, Ashok, Ashok. Scandinavian languages have a soft J. So it’s pronounced Yonas.’
‘Whatever. The good news is, our friend Yonas is still alive. But only just. They pumped his stomach and induced a coma. When he wakes up – we’re talking tomorrow or the day after – you need to talk to him.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Deliberately screwed up some coffee futures deal. Lost the bank millions. Didn’t deny it. Wouldn’t explain. Or couldn’t. I’ve mailed you the details.’ Ashok’s PA, Belinda Yates, appears with a steaming cup which she places on the desk next to him. ‘Thanks babe.’ He posts a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth then points at me. ‘OK. Your wish is my command. What’ll make you happy?’
Freddy, I think. Freddy here, with me. But I don’t say that as it’s inappropriate to the matter in hand, so I say, ‘I want to see Sunny Chen’s suicide note.’
Ashok says, ‘Cops in Taiwan say it doesn’t make sense.’ I see the white blob in his mouth as he speaks. ‘Turns out it’s not a note. Much weirder. Some little drawings and a hand-print. Chen’s wife says he can’t have done it. She’s very insistent. But she found it next to a shrine thing they have in the kitchen, where they left each other messages. So sounds like wishful thinking to me. Didn’t know the Chinese had shrines in their kitchens. Something new every day, right?’
Sunny Chen said he’d made the hand-mark in the timber factory himself. But at the same time he’d wanted the police to take fingerprints. Why?
‘I need to see the note. Have they taken fingerprints of it?’ I reach for my Swedish dictionary, and flip through it. I have a habit of underlining words that appeal to me. Utveckling. Olika. Näktergal. Talartid.
‘Doubt it. But I’ll check. By the way, got something to cheer you up. Whybray’s in town.’
‘Professor Whybray? You’re sure?’ I close the dictionary. The professor retired after Mrs Whybray died. He moved to Toronto. He called it a city after my own heart. ‘What brought him back?’
‘The Home Office.’ I have known the professor for fourteen years and seven months. But it’s three years and two months since I saw him in the flesh. Not a week has gone by when I have not remembered something he taught me, and applied it. Last Christmas he sent a card. To the young and bright from the old and wise. I could hear him saying those words aloud. I follow your work with interest. His voice is high and reedy and always sounds a little hoarse. Congratulations on solving the Hungarian conundrum. With affection, Victor. I never called him Victor. He used to tease me about my inability to drop the formality of his title. I’m excited. I can feel chemical changes in my brain.
‘What’s the project?’ It must be something big to have brought him back. Something to ‘get his teeth into’. That’s how he’d put it. He could never resist challenges.
‘It’s hush-hush. But he asked after you and hinted at a contract for us. Wanted to know if you’re still Venning. So I said what’s Venning. And he said get Hesketh to educate you.’
‘He was referring to Venn diagrams. They’re a very effective device for analysing patterns of unity and differentiation. Named after the mathematician John Venn, who incorporated them into set theory in the 1880s. If you’re looking for a speedy categorisation tool that’s highly visual and comprehensible at a glance, and flexible enough to accommodate an infinite number of new factors, you can’t do much better. They consist of overlapping or interlocking circles. You can incorporate U-shapes too. And the S-form. Depending on complexity.’
‘Get out of there! So when I see you doodling a bunch of amoeba fucking, that’s what you’re up to?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there was I thinking, ask not the reason why. Hesketh is Hesketh.’
‘Who else would I be?’
‘No one. And they only made one of you. Which is why you’re packing for Sweden.’
‘I want to go by train.’ I like trains.
‘I anticipated that, bud. Belinda says it’s do-able if you can get to Edinburgh tonight. Svensson should be out of his coma by the time you arrive. Find me the pattern. Love you, my friend. Bye.’
He gives his signature dismissal – head down, a fist-clench high in the air, like a sportsman – and then he’s gone.
When Ashok says ‘love you, my friend’, he doesn’t mean it. It’s a florid form of expression, of the type Kaitlin once classified for me as ‘the vernacular of dick-swinging’. When I say to someone that I love them, however, I mean it. For someone aged thirty-six I have not said it very often. Three times in two years, to the same woman. And when I stop loving them, I say: ‘Kaitlin, I don’t love you any more and I can never love you again.’
She confessed to her affair on Saturday 5th May. By tacit agreement, my workroom was my territory and she and Freddy never came in. I don’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me work.
She said, ‘Hesketh. I made a mistake. You and I can go back to normal. It’s over.’
I was doing a tricky blintz fold at the time, on a moth. It demanded all my concentration.
‘W
hat’s over?’
But she didn’t reply. When I finished the next fold to my satisfaction and looked up, I saw her staring at me urgently, as if expecting a response. As if I were telepathic: as if I, of all people, should have guessed that she had been leading another secret life, in parallel to the one that was on show. I have no radar for lies. Why would I suspect that her yoga lessons were not real yoga lessons, or that her ‘late conference meetings’ masked another type of rendezvous?
I said, ‘Whatever it is, you’re going to have to explain.’
And so she did explain. And then I understood.
She’d had an affair. It had lasted eight weeks. And now it was over. That’s what she meant when she said we could ‘go back to normal’.
But we couldn’t.
Two species of bird feature in the glossary of cuckoldry. First, the cuckoo, which lays its solo egg in another bird’s nest, leaving others to do the nurturing. In this reading, the ‘cuckold’ is the cuckoo’s victim: the non-biological father of another man’s offspring. The second bird is the cockerel, which echoes ‘cuckold’ linguistically. Some accounts claim that the origin of the ‘horned cuckold’ dates back to a time when cockerels were castrated, and their spurs sliced off and stuck through their combs where they were said to implant themselves and grow, giving the impression of horns. As the cockerel had been castrated, the ‘horns’ became an obvious symbol of the bird’s impotence. From a physiological point of view, the implantation seems unlikely. Meanwhile, the whole notion of horns representing men who have been sexually betrayed is also puzzling, because horns, being of a phallic shape, prominent on males, and often used for fighting, are generally associated with potency.
