A Necessary Murder

by M. J. Tjia

  Turning down a street to her left, she passes a row of dingy shops and pauses in front of one that’s sandwiched between a tobacconist and a cobbler’s. The glass in the shopfront window is too cloudy to see through and, in any case, is covered with a long curtain. The name Chan Chee is painted in white across the cheap panelling above the lintel. As Amah opens the heavy door to step inside, her nostrils are assailed by a mixture of body odour, incense and noodle soup.

  The room is long with a low ceiling. Her heels click across rough, untreated timber and cold air seeps through the cracks in the floor where it’s not covered with rattan mats. Hats and coats line the walls that are yellowed with age and smoke. At a small table to the front of the room, two lascars eat their supper and, as Amah passes them by, they peer at her through the steam rising from their soup. But the four Chinese men playing mah-jong in the corner ignore her, puffing on their pipes, coils of grey smoke suspended on the still air about their heads. The tiles of their game clack upon the tabletop.

  On the back wall is a scroll covered in Chinese calligraphy, but Amah can’t read the black lines and slashes. Back in Makassar she’d learnt some Latin alphabet from the Christian missionary who played pai gow with her grandfather—each week he wagered his allowance of tobacco against her grandfather’s rice wine. And then later, Amah’s stepfather had paid a young man from Holland to teach her to read a little, write a few words. He was also the tutor to the Dutch residents’ children, but she’d always found his lessons such a chore, especially when there was the chance of watching a ship newly arrived in the harbour, silks and birds and pale women in heavy gowns spilling from its decks.

  Amah pushes open the door at the back of the room and peeps through into the kitchen. “Miriam?”

  The kitchen’s much cheerier than the room Amah closes the door upon. The walls are the shade of marigolds and the timber benches have the gleam of fresh straw. A pretty girl, slender and dark, tends to a pot of boiling broth, while Miriam, majestic in a gown of blue and white gingham trimmed with lace—totally unfitted for kitchen work, Amah would have thought—rolls and pushes at some dough on the kitchen table.

  “Li Leen,” she says, a smile lifting her cheeks, which are rosy from the fiery ovens. “Shed your coat, dear. You’re just in time to help me make these jiaozi.”

  She pronounces it wrong, always does, with a long “ee” sound at the end. Amah has tried again and again to correct her, but it has never stuck. Probably in the same way that Amah can never master the word “boot”, according to Heloise. Although how she manages to mispronounce such a simple word to the point that makes her daughter mock and laugh, she isn’t sure. She mouths the word as she takes off her coat and drapes it over a chair.

  “Where’s Uncle Chee?” Amah asks as she ties an apron over her skirt.

  Miriam covers the dough with a damp cloth, pushes a curl of fair hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. “My husband is an enigma, Li Leen. You know that. He could be down by the docks trading some gold for nutmeg or he could be watching a boxing match. I won’t know until he arrives home later tonight, with or without his purse.”

  Amah searches her face for any sign of anger, but Miriam smiles.

  “Don’t worry, Li Leen. Either way, he will return with a bunch of peonies for me, and go to the markets before dawn so I can have a nice lie-in.” She tugs the elbow of the girl at the stove, says, “Rosemary, say good evening to Auntie Leen.”

  Miriam’s daughter has her mother’s freckles and arched eyebrows, but her skin’s darker, has the tone of honey. Amah can see traces of Rosemary’s father too—in her hair with its blackbird sheen and her eyes the colour of apricot kernels. Rosemary pipes out a cheerful greeting to Amah as she pours her a cup of tea.

  “Have you minced the pork for me yet, Rosemary?” Miriam sets the chives onto the board to chop. “I need enough for fifty dumplings.” She pauses, her knife poised over the chives. Her blue eyes find Amah’s. “Were you after Chee, Li Leen?”

  Amah shakes her head. “No. I had a sudden yen for your dumplings.”

  Miriam smiles again, and her cheeks flush darker. “Oh. That’s nice to hear.”

  Amah pulls the bowl of pork to herself, adds some of the chives. She’s embarrassed by Miriam’s response. It’s not often she has the time or inclination to regret the way she’d behaved in the past. What’s that saying she used to admire so much? Something about a tongue being like a sharp knife—it kills without drawing blood. But, at moments like this, she feels bad. Poor Miriam. Amah had been so hard on her when they’d first met. Chee had brought Miriam to Liverpool to visit her many years before, but Amah was unfriendly to the young, skinny thing. Unfriendly or wary? Amah can’t remember. Chee had married a white girl. A gweilo from London. Maypole of a thing, Miriam was then, all gangly and pale, and Amah’s unkindness had just heightened her clumsiness over the two days they had stayed with her.

  But look at Miriam now. She’s able to chat with Chee in a patois of English, Chinese and Malay. And her cooking—well, Amah knows she could never cook as well as Miriam does. She watches the other woman as she ladles noodles into a bowl of soup, sending Rosemary to deliver it to the table of Chinese men. And of course she owes a lot to Miriam now…

  “Li Leen.” Miriam’s voice cuts into her thoughts. “Can you finish off the filling while I take these bowls out?”

  Amah rubs the chives into the cold mince, seasoning it as she goes. When Miriam returns, she flattens and cuts out the dough, and between the two of them they fill the circles with deft fingers, pleating the edges until they have a tray of crescent-shaped dumplings.

  Rosemary swings back into the kitchen. “Ma, did you tell Auntie Leen that Jakub is back?” She grins at Amah, pulls a chain and pendant out from under her bodice. “He brought this back for me.” An oval locket, gold, only as big as a fingernail, teeters upon her fingertip. “He said it’s to keep my love’s lock of hair in.”

  “Get away with you,” scolds Miriam, an uneasy smile on her face. She turns to drop the dumplings into boiling water, but her back stiffens, and Amah wonders if a lick of pink creeps up the back of her neck.

  “No, your mother didn’t tell me. It must be nice to have your big brother back. How long has he been in London?” asks Amah.

  Rosemary gathers up a stack of cups to take out into the other room. “He’s been here for nearly two weeks. And I hope he stays this time.” She nudges the door open again, leaving Amah alone with Miriam.

  They’re silent. Miriam continues to lower and scoop dumplings from the pot while Amah washes the bowls and pans. It isn’t until Miriam sets the platter of jiaozi between herself and Amah on the tabletop that she finally meets Amah’s eye.

  “You didn’t tell me he was back?” Amah’s head tilts to the side as she asks the question. “How long was he on the seas for? Three, four years?” But Amah knows exactly how long. Three years, eight months.

  Miriam nods. “We haven’t really seen much of him. I was meaning to have you over for supper one night when he was in.”

  Miriam’s eyes drop to the table. She fidgets with saucers and, picking up a pair of chopsticks, she serves Amah and herself two dumplings each.

  Amah picks up a bottle of soy sauce, asks, “Where did you get this from?”

  “Chee bought a dozen bottles a week ago,” says Miriam. “From the Coromandel. She’s just sailed in from Canton. Same boat Jakub came in on.”

  “He’s been in China?”

  “Amongst other places.” Miriam splashes a liberal amount of soy sauce across her dumplings. “I think he spent most of his time in America, actually.”

  Amah’s chest hurts a little, like it’s been smeared in chilli paste. Ridiculous. It’s no surprise at all that the boy hadn’t contacted her. Why would he?

  She bites into the dumpling. It’s everything she had anticipated. Tender, delicious. She closes her eyes.

  The black figure by the apothecary’s. Something familiar about the shoul
ders, the narrow back. Jakub?

  But why hadn’t he approached her, greeted her?

  She looks up and finds Miriam staring.

  “What’s on your mind, Li Leen?”

  Amah considers her—the faint lines that fan from her kind eyes, the permanent furrows that etch her forehead. What a cheerful mother she must be to her children—the three young ones, to Rosemary, to Jakub. Jakub. She’s a much better mother than Amah has ever been. It’s true. Heloise would agree. Has agreed. Threw it at her head many years before when she’d asked why she couldn’t go live with her sweet Auntie Miriam.

  But Jakub—Amah always thought they had a special connection.

  “Nothing important, Miriam,” she says. “I was just wondering if I could sneak a bottle of this soy sauce into Agneau’s kitchen. Do you have any spare?”

  Miriam takes a bottle from the larder and places it in a basket as Amah finishes her last bite of dumpling. Amah had planned on staying the whole evening but her heart isn’t in it anymore. She’s just reaching for her bonnet when the door that leads to the back alley creaks open. Heavy footsteps tread down the short corridor towards them. A man’s footsteps. Jakub’s?

  But no, it’s Chee. As predicted, he’s holding a bunch of flowers, but they’re daisies rather than peonies. Amah knows he’s a good seventeen years older than his wife, but really, despite several white strands in his hair and a bit of a round belly, he looks much the same as he did twenty-six years ago when he’d fetched her from Makassar. He beams at Amah, insists she sit back down, calls her his kodok kecil, his little frog, as he has done since she was little. Amah suspects he’s imbibed in a little too much rum or rice wine with the sailors by the dock.

  Along with the flowers, Chee hands his wife a hessian bag from which she brings out half a coconut. “Masak coco flummery thing I like, silakan?” he urges.

  Amah and Chee chat over cups of jasmine tea, which he proudly pours from a white teapot in the shape of a resting camel, while Miriam prepares custard to go with whipped egg white and the coconut flesh that Rosemary shreds for her.

  Chee tells them of a new boxer he’d bet on. “Won 15s, I did. I know he would win, because he is very angry young man. Very marah.” He points at Amah. “Your Jia Li, he would like it.”

  Amah’s smile is grim. “Her name is Heloise, now, Uncle, not Jia Li, and it’s ‘she’ not ‘he’.” Although she concedes that he’s probably correct about Heloise enjoying the boxing.

  Chee waves his hand at her, repeats “Jia Li,” before telling them of the newest vessel in dock.

  By the time Miriam walks Amah to the front door of the shop, the night sky has taken on the gleam of an oyster shell. Miriam has tried to insist Chee accompany his niece home, but Amah’s adamant. She’ll be fine. A cab driver will be glad of the fare.

  At the door, she turns around, nods towards the scroll on the back wall. “What does that say, Miriam?” she asks, pointing at the Chinese script. Something wise, perhaps. Like Deep doubts, deep wisdom, or the proverb that used to hang on the wall in her grandfather’s sitting room in Makassar: A man is never too old to learn.

  Miriam points at the scroll, her finger following the lines of ink. “If you want your dinner, don’t offend the cook.”

  Light the colour of parchment glimmers past the edges of the drawing room curtains, marking Amah’s way through the gentle mist that hangs in the air. She pulls the netting back from her face and glances up at the window. Heloise still has guests with her. A pleasant tinkling on the pianoforte reaches Amah’s ears. Can’t be Heloise playing then. Neither her brief time at a ladies’ college or the expensive lessons she insisted upon taking a year beforehand had improved her skill. Now, if she just practised once in a while instead of gallivanting around town all the time… her lip twists to the side.

  Amah passes the front door and continues around the corner in order to enter the house from the back. The fog’s not bad, and yet the street seems darker than usual. She pauses. The rest of the street is asleep; no lights to illuminate the oak trees or the carriage that waits by the side of the road. She can just discern the faint movement of the two horses as they nod gently against their mouthpieces.

  It takes her less than a second to realise what the problem is. The lamp post closest to the servant’s entrance to Heloise’s house isn’t lit. Her eyes search the darkness, seek out further shifts in the shadows.

  How very strange. They’ve never had problems with this lamp, not from a shortage of gas, and not from one of those explosions, thank heavens. She treads closer towards the lamp post, wishing her heels didn’t click so loudly in the silence. A crunch under her left sole. Her right shoe scrapes something forward, something that tinkles. Glass. She peers up at the lamp post. The lamp’s dome has been smashed, leaving a jagged saw of glass.

  Amah frowns. Such a quiet street.

  Dread creeps its sticky fingers up her spine.

  Close at hand, hidden in the gloom, she senses something wicked. Something watching her. She feels it bursting to free itself, like a held breath. Its foulness suffuses the air, its charred eyes are upon her throat. She takes two steps backward. Swinging around, she just reaches the top of the six steps that lead down to the servant’s door when she’s knocked from behind.

  Amah is thrown forward, wrenches her ankle on the second last step, clips her forehead hard against the door. She crumples to the ground. Groaning, she tries to sit upright. Her fingers find the fissure of skin that peels open above her brow, the hot blood gushing down the bridge of her nose, stinging her eyes. It’s so dark. Too dark. She can’t see a thing.

  She tries to get up, find her bag, her knife, but cries out as pain judders up through her left leg from her ankle. Collapsing back, she’s just about to try again when somebody lands on top of her, so heavily the breath grunts from her body.

  She scrambles against him, strains with her fingers until her fingernails tear, thrashes her legs, her sprained ankle forgotten. But something isn’t right. He’s not moving—is as heavy as a sack of rice—apart from his head, that lolls damply against hers each time she tries to push him away. She hefts against his shoulders, shoving him aside, so that they lie crammed against each other in the confined space of the landing. She can smell the nilam oil, and something more gamey, raw; thinks she can feel its stickiness smeared across the skin at the base of her throat. Gagging, she pushes him away.

  The servant door swings open. A lantern is held above her head, so bright she has to shield her eyes with her hand. She can’t see who holds it.

  She clambers into a seated position, crouches away from the body. His face is hidden from view, pressed against the tiled step, but the crown of his head faces her at an unnatural angle, almost reaches between his shoulder blades. The tartan tie she recognises, although the green stripes, and the blue, are soaked in gore the colour of cherry pulp.

  McBride.

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s chilly when I wake. I squint past the shadows of my room, see dawn’s pearl light glimmer through a crack in the curtains. I burrow backwards into the bed, want to melt into the soft warmth of Hatterleigh’s body, search out the hard. But all I find is cool linen, empty space.

  Opening my eyes, I stare at the bed’s velvet canopy—at sprigs of flowers coiled around golden artichokes.

  He went home after the police were called and interviewed us in the drawing room. The only guests who still remained by that time were the Pidgeons and Hatterleigh. The others had left throughout the evening, thank heavens. I don’t know when. I drank a great deal of champagne.

  A headache taps at the base of my skull. My mouth is dry, sour. I roll over, press my face into the pillow where I’ve dribbled in my sleep. Poor Amah. By the time Bundle had drawn her into the kitchen, called me down to her, she’d managed to wipe some of the blood from her face and hands. But there was one crimson globule of something—my stomach squelches like it did last night—teetering from the damp strands of hair by her right ear. My
eyes were drawn to it as she spoke, as she told me of the dead man on the back step of my house.

  Hatterleigh was already there, gazing down at the man’s body when I reached the back door.

  “No, Heloise, you mustn’t,” he said, grabbing hold of my shoulders as I tried to push past.

  I frowned up at him—his face was pale—and said, “Of course I must.”

  The man’s body lay on its side across the landing, arms and feet splayed back. But it was almost as if his head was on a hinge, pressed right back, like no circus contortionist I’d ever seen. The light from Bundle’s lamp cast a shadow of my hair, feather quivering aloft, across the wide pool of his blood—ruby dark and as still as a lake.

  My bedroom door creeps open and Amah pokes her head around.

  “Ah. Finally. You are awake.”

  She limps into my room, closely followed by Abigail, the new girl who helps out during the day. While Abigail kneels, stokes the fire back to life, Amah yanks the curtains open.

  I groan, bury my head under one of my frilled pillows. “It’s too early. Let me sleep.”

  I feel the mattress dip slightly as Amah sits next to me. She waits for Abigail to leave the room, close the door quietly behind her, before she says, “Well, it’s all right for you. Poor Bundle went to bed very late and was up before sunrise trying to mop the blood from your back step.”

  “Bloody hell. The poor thing.” Lifting the pillow, I clamp it under my head. “Pass me that glass of water, would you?” As I take the cold glass from Amah, I think of the two policemen that Pidgeon had summoned, of how one stomped his great heavy boot into that pool of blood while turning the corpse over. How the corpse’s head refused to follow the rest of his body, his face lolling against the bottom step.