Second Sister

by Chan Ho-Kei

  “Au Nga-Yee! What have you done!” he roared as she ran a feather duster over the bookshelves. The cardboard boxes scattered around the room were lined up nearly against the wall, and the wooden boxes full of random electronic components had vanished. The books were neatly shelved. The junk was gone from his desk, and his stationery stood in an orderly row.

  “What have I done?” She looked at N in surprise. His hair was even more disheveled than usual.

  “Why did you touch my stuff?” he yelled. He strode over and pointed at the round table in front of the bookshelf. “Where are my spare parts?”

  Nga-Yee took a step back and let him see what was at her feet: the three wooden boxes, stacked in the space between the bookshelf and the wall.

  “There’s just enough space to fit them in, so why not put them here?” she said.

  “I use those all the time! If they’re stuck in there, they’ll be hard to get to.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” she retorted. “There was half an inch of dust on those chargers and plugs. You don’t use them at all.”

  He blinked, not having expected the hitherto unobservant Nga-Yee to have picked out this detail. But of course, a clean freak like her would have noticed.

  “What about the stuff on my desk?” He stomped over to it.

  “I threw out the trash,” she said. “The collection point’s all the way down on the first floor—no wonder you couldn’t be bothered to do it yourself. It took me two trips just to—”

  “I don’t mean that,” he snapped. “I had all kinds of evidence set out here! There was a packet from another case—”

  “This one?” She reached under the desk and pulled out a cardboard box. Right on top of the assorted objects inside was an empty peanut packet in a clear plastic bag.

  “You … didn’t throw that away?” He was momentarily stumped.

  “Of course not. I only got rid of the snack bar wrappers, beer bottles, and god knows how many days’ worth of take-out containers,” she said, sounding wounded. “I knew you were using this.”

  “How did you know?”

  “First of all, it’s in a plastic bag. Second, you don’t have any peanuts here, only snack bars.” She pointed at the kitchen. “If you ate peanuts, there’d have been some in the supermarket bag you made me unpack yesterday.”

  “Your explanation isn’t good enough. What if I’d just felt like eating peanuts one day, and the empty packet was in a plastic bag ready to be thrown away?”

  “Third, there weren’t any peanut shells on your desk.” She pointed at the packet. “These were unshelled. If you’d bought them for yourself, why would you have gotten rid of the shells but left the packaging? Is my explanation good enough now?”

  Before he could find something else to needle her with, there was a sharp click from the kitchen.

  “Oh, the water’s boiled.” Ignoring N, she went into the kitchen.

  “So you just helped yourself to my …” He followed her in and watched as she poured the boiling water into a teapot.

  “I was going to cook breakfast, but you don’t even have eggs or bread here. So I’m making tea.” She swirled the teapot gently. “I didn’t expect you to have such good tea leaves—I could smell the fragrance as soon as I opened the tin. What kind of brand is Fortnum and Mason? I noticed it was made in the UK.”

  “Did you consider that the tea might also be evidence for another case?”

  She looked startled for a second, but quickly realized that he was giving her a hard time.

  “You wouldn’t put something that important in the kitchen.” She poured the tea into two cups. “Your teapot seems nice and clean. I guess someone gave it to you?”

  “No. I bought it for myself.” He picked up one of the cups and took a sip. “But I usually can’t be bothered to make tea.”

  “You probably think it’s too much trouble to wash up afterward.”

  They stood in the narrow kitchen, silently drinking their tea. Something about N seemed different at this moment. His expression had softened, and he wasn’t as tense as usual.

  But when he opened his mouth again, she knew she’d been mistaken.

  “If you touch my stuff without permission again, I’ll terminate the investigation immediately.” He put down his cup and went into the bathroom. Nga-Yee held her teacup and wandered back to the living room, only to find that he hadn’t shut the door. She averted her eyes and sat down on the armchair where she’d spent an uncomfortable night.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked when he came back to the living room.

  “I’m about to look now.”

  “Now?”

  “I wrote a program to sort through the data while I slept. It looked at all the people I haven’t investigated yet.” He yawned. “I set it to go through all your sister’s classmates’ social media pages and make a note of any posts or comments that mention the words ‘cell phone,’ ‘iPhone,’ and so on.”

  “A computer can do that?”

  “It’s not as sensitive as the human brain, of course.” N sat at the desk and turned on both computers. One screen showed a number of windows, all different sizes: some Facebook pages, some Enoch Secondary School chat groups, some with white letters pouring endlessly across a black background. As for the other screen, it was divided into four, like surveillance footage, and each square showed a different stretch of an MTR platform. Quite a few passengers were getting on or off a train, jostling one another, while a few others were leaning against the blue pillars on the platform or sitting on the benches, heads down and staring at their phones.

  “Huh? So you’re checking the MTR footage after all?” Nga-Yee yelped.

  He pressed a key, and the screen changed. “Ignore that. It’s from a different case.”

  Nga-Yee suspected that he didn’t want to admit he was wrong, but it seemed mean to gloat. “So … did you find any suspects among Siu-Man’s friends?”

  “Let me just sort through this.” He opened a spreadsheet and pasted some text from the black-and-white screen into it. Next, he opened some of the social media pages.

  “You should thank your lucky stars that Androids are most popular in Hong Kong.” He clicked on the spreadsheet. “In North America, almost half of these would be iPhones. Here, it’s only a fifth. Of the 113 students in your sister’s year at school, 105 have smartphones, and 18 of those are iPhones. The others have Samsung, Xiaomi, Sony, or Android brands.”

  N tapped at the keyboard and produced a list of eighteen names.

  “One of these people was responsible for Siu-Man’s death?” asked Nga-Yee.

  “I won’t say definitely, but I’m ninety percent certain that one of these people is kidkit727. Are any of them familiar to you?”

  Nga-Yee stared at the list but could only shake her head.

  “Did your sister ever mention a classmate’s name? Maybe an English name or nickname? This person found so many different ways to target her, it must be someone she’d interacted with a fair bit. It would be natural for her to mention the name in passing.”

  “I … I don’t remember.”

  “Did you talk to your sister at all? She must have talked about her classmates. You really can’t recall a single name?”

  Nga-Yee dug into her memory, but couldn’t come up with anything. At the dinner table, Siu-Man had definitely talked about school, but she simply couldn’t think of any names.

  To put it more accurately, Nga-Yee had never been particularly interested in the minutiae of Siu-Man’s daily life, so it went in one ear and out the other. It was mostly their mother who responded.

  “Are there any pictures? I can’t remember their names, but maybe if I saw what they looked like, that might jog my memory.”

  N sighed and moved the mouse. Going down the list of names, he opened one social media page after another, highlighting the pictures of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. None of them looked familiar. All of them, from the handsome jock to the girl dressed up in Japan
ese accessories, were strangers to her. It was N who gave a brief description of each person—what they’d done, whether they’d shared a class with Siu-Man—as if he and not she were the family member. Nga-Yee looked through more than ten pictures without a single glimmer of recognition.

  “Next, we have … Violet To.” This picture had been taken on campus: a long-haired, bespectacled, rather nerdy girl. “No social media, but there happens to be a picture of her on the school’s extracurricular activities page.”

  “Oh, I think—I’ve seen her before.” Nga-Yee wasn’t good at remembering what people looked like, but there was something familiar about those square-framed glasses and the way they didn’t go with the shape of her face, plus that ill-fitting blue sweater. “That’s right. She’s the girl I saw at Siu-Man’s funeral.”

  “She came to the funeral?”

  “Yes, around eight p.m. By herself,” said Nga-Yee. “She came to offer her condolences. Surely she couldn’t be the culprit?”

  “Or she might have had an ulterior motive: she made sure you saw her there, because she was afraid of being found out.”

  Nga-Yee hesitated. It was difficult to imagine that this child could be the evil, shadowy kidkit727.

  N made a mark next to Violet To’s name and went on pulling pictures up on the screen, but none of the subsequent ones rang a bell with Nga-Yee.

  “This is the last one,” said N, indicating a Facebook page. The profile picture showed a boy and a girl in short-sleeved summer clothes, standing in front of a classroom blackboard. The boy had a square face and hair just a little longer than a crew cut, while the girl had short hair and an attractive face. “The girl is Lily Shu. She and Violet To were both in the same class as your sister for three years in a row. I guess they’re … Miss Au? What’s wrong?”

  “They … they were at the funeral too. The girl looked devastated.”

  “They?” N jabbed at the boy. “Him too?”

  Nga-Yee nodded.

  “That’s Chiu Kwok-Tai. He was in Siu-Man’s class this year. Looks like Lily Shu’s his girlfriend.” N checked a browser window on the other computer. “He has a Samsung, not an iPhone.”

  “It’s them, I’m sure of it. They came to our place once. Siu-Man wasn’t feeling well, and they brought her home.”

  “They’ve been to your home?” N’s eyebrows lifted slightly. This had caught his interest.

  “Yes. It would have been—last Christmas Eve.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That should be right. Our mom told Siu-Man to be home by half past ten, but it got to eleven and she still hadn’t shown up, and we couldn’t reach her on the phone. We were starting to get worried when the doorbell rang. They said Siu-Man had started feeling unwell at the party, so they’d come to make sure she got home safely. My mom nursed her all night long.” Nga-Yee felt a twinge of sadness as she remembered. “When I saw the girl at Siu-Man’s funeral, I thought she must have been Siu-Man’s good friend. But looking at this, she might be … might be—”

  “Might be the cyberbully who drove your sister to her death?”

  Nga-Yee said nothing, just stared at the photo, her face blank. What N said a minute ago about an ulterior motive could equally apply to this classmate.

  “In any case, we should investigate the Shu girl. Whether or not she was the one who sent the messages, we’ll definitely be able to learn more about your sister’s school life through her.”

  “Are you going to tail her and Chiu Kwok-Tai?”

  “Much simpler. I’m going to do what I did with Shiu Tak-Ping, and have a chat with them.”

  “But if she’s the culprit, she’s hardly going to admit it.”

  “You really are a moron.” N laughed. “Have you been in touch with your sister’s school? Or can you find an excuse to visit?”

  Nga-Yee thought about it. “Siu-Man’s form teacher said she left some textbooks in her locker and asked if I could go fetch them.”

  “Perfect.” N turned back to the screen, glanced at the spreadsheet again, then reached for the old-fashioned push-button phone on his desk. “It’s not nine o’clock yet, but I’m guessing Miss Yuen will be up already.”

  “You’re going to phone Miss Yuen?” Nga-Yee turned to retrieve her bag from the armchair so she could get Miss Yuen’s number from her planner.

  N waved to tell her not to bother, quickly keyed in a string of numbers, and hit the button for speakerphone.

  “Hello?” came a rather hoarse voice from the speaker, after three rings.

  “Good morning, is this Miss Yuen?” N’s voice was warmer than Nga-Yee had ever heard it. He leaned toward the phone. “My name is Ong. I’m a friend of the Au family.”

  “Oh, hello, good morning.”

  “I’m very sorry to call this early.”

  “Not at all. On a weekday I’d already be at school by this time,” she said politely. “What can I do for you, Mr. Ong?”

  “It’s about Siu-Man’s textbooks. I believe she left some in school? I’m calling to see if I can fix a time to come get them.”

  “Ah, yes, some reference books. Miss Au never got back to me about them, and I didn’t want to bother her … How is Miss Au?”

  “She’s all right, thanks for asking. It’s just taken her a long time to accept what happened to Siu-Man. When she mentioned the textbooks, I thought there’s no point in putting off dealing with them. After all, it must be almost the end of the semester.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Ong. You’re right. I’d like to make sure Siu-Man’s possessions get back to her family as soon as possible. Where do you live? Let’s fix a time and I’ll bring them to you.”

  “It’s kind of you to offer,” said N, still in that friendly voice Nga-Yee couldn’t believe was coming from his mouth. “But my work schedule is irregular. Rather than you trying to accommodate me, it’s probably easier for me to come by the school. Would Monday morning work for you?”

  “That’s absolutely fine. Sorry to make you come all the way,” said Miss Yuen. “Will you be coming on your own or with Miss Au?”

  “On my own—” The words were scarcely out of his mouth when Nga-Yee rushed forward and grabbed the phone, pointing vigorously at herself with her other hand. It was clear what she meant: bring me along, or I’m not letting go. N grimaced, reluctantly nodded, and wrestled his hand free. “I would have come on my own, but perhaps Nga-Yee would want to see the place where her sister studied. Let me ask her. It may help ease her pain.”

  “All right, then. I hope Miss Au feels better soon. How about eleven thirty?”

  “That’s fine. Thank you. See you the day after tomorrow.”

  “See you then.”

  As soon as he hung up, Nga-Yee yelled, “Don’t even think of leaving me out. I’m coming along.”

  “Stop being so suspicious.” N was back to his surly voice.

  “Well, that was a quick change,” Nga-Yee joked. “Hey, I’m your client. Maybe you could try being polite to me, like you were with Miss Yuen.”

  “Being polite to you wouldn’t help the investigation one bit, you idiot. Why would I bother putting in the effort? Besides, that wasn’t politeness, it was social engineering.”

  “What?” Nga-Yee had never heard this phrase.

  “All good hackers can do it. It means using social interactions to gain entry to a system. Chatting with someone till they give up their password, or tricking them into doing it. Maybe even making them do it for you.” N smiled grimly. “The weakest link is always humankind. Computer systems will get more and more perfect as time goes on, but human frailty will never change.”

  Nga-Yee mulled this over. She wasn’t thrilled at the idea of seeing human beings as objects to be used, but she understood that N was stating a fact. In a competitive society, people get divided into the users and the used. It was easy to join the ranks of the successful if you were adept at exploiting the weakness of others.

  “By the way, how do you have Mis
s Yuen’s number?” Nga-Yee asked.

  “I’ve been looking into anyone your sister interacted with. Of course I got her number,” he answered nonchalantly. “I forgot to mention it earlier, but this Yuen woman is a suspect—she has an iPhone too.”

  Nga-Yee stared at him. She couldn’t imagine Siu-Man’s teacher hounding one of her own students to death.

  “Remember, Lily Shu might not be kidkit727. We’re visiting the school to try our luck and see if any of the other seventeen—no, eighteen—suspects are worth investigating further. The worst thing you can do is go in with preconceived ideas. It’s fine to have a hypothesis, but you have to remember that it may not be true. You should actually work hard to disprove your hypothesis rather than looking for evidence to prop it up.”

  Nga-Yee nodded. She’d once read a book on logic that used this example: it’s not rational to conclude that “all crows are black” just because you’ve seen ten thousand black crows; a single white crow could overturn your thesis. Instead, you’d have to take the inverse—there are nonblack crows in the world—and show that it couldn’t be true.

  Of course, it would be near impossible to prove such a thing. Nga-Yee worried that this trip to the school might not turn up any compelling evidence.

  There was no help for it. They’d just have to take it step-by-step.

  “Could I have a list of the eighteen suspects?” Nga-Yee pointed at the spreadsheet. “I’ll go through them when I get home and see if any of their names or faces spark a memory.”

  N eyed her sideways, as if to say, “You could look at them a hundred times, you won’t find anything,” but he hit print and, ten seconds later, handed her an A4 sheet.

  “Is this all their online information—Facebook, Insta-whatever?” Nga-Yee ran her finger down a column. “These look too short to be web addresses.”

  “You are such a bother.” N tapped a few more keys, and the printer spit out a second page. This was densely covered in print, with more than a hundred lines.

  “So many?” Nga-Yee asked.

  “The first list had shortened hyperlinks. These are the full addresses—even a primary school student would be able to figure that out. I hope you’re satisfied now, Miss Au?” N yawned. “I’ll start my investigation at your sister’s school at eleven thirty a.m. the day after tomorrow. If you want to join me, please be there on time. And now I must beg your ladyship to relieve me of your gracious presence, for I must retire to my bedchamber.”