A Spoonful of Murder Read online

‘Welcome home, Hazel,’ he said. Then he put out his hand and took Daisy’s. ‘Welcome to the Big House, Miss Wells. Thank you for coming home with Hazel.’

  ‘You are most welcome, Mr Wong,’ said Daisy and, though her legs were streaked with dirt and her white dress was quite ruined, she managed to drop into the most perfect curtsey. ‘Thank you for having me.’

  ‘Hazel,’ said my father, and when I looked up at him I saw that his eyes were full of tears, but he was smiling. ‘I am sorry for your loss. Ah Yeh was a wonderful man.’

  ‘I am sorry, Father,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘It is good to have you here,’ said my father. ‘I am sorry I could not come to meet you from the ship. But now we are all here, waiting to say hello.’

  I smiled. So it was all just a mix-up. My father would have been there to greet me if he could. It didn’t matter, really.

  And then I saw my sisters, Rose and May. They were standing on the smooth white tiles of the hall floor, shuffling their feet. Rose, in a new white jacket, smiled shyly, her hands behind her back. She was so tall now, and still the prettiest of the three of us, with long eyelashes and a little mouth that was screwed up in a grin. May, though, when she saw me looking at her, hurled herself on me like the monkey we nicknamed her for, squealing. She had been three when I saw her last and now she was five. Secretly, I hadn’t been sure that I would recognize her, but her face, with its strong jaw and little button eyes, was as familiar as ever. I threw my arms around her and buried my face in her soft, rather dirty-smelling hair.

  ‘You’ve got fatter!’ said May. ‘I like it lots. You look nice.’

  ‘I like your hat, Big Sister,’ said Rose, scuffing her feet.

  ‘Thanks, Ling Ling,’ I said, calling her by her nickname as I reached out to hug her. ‘And don’t be rude, Monkey.’ May made a face at me.

  ‘MEI LI!’ my father said to her. ‘Be respectful to your big sister! Miss Wells, these are my other daughters, Rose and May. They are mostly good girls, hmm?’

  May giggled.

  ‘And here is my first wife, June.’

  My mother stepped forward, taking the little dancing steps that she has to with her bound feet, and bowed to Daisy. Her hair was cut in a new style, a fashionable, wavy bob, her face was carefully painted and her curved lips were red. In her white cheongsam she looked very lovely – and very forbidding. My heart beat fast.

  ‘Hello, Miss Wells,’ said my mother to Daisy. ‘It is good to meet you.’

  ‘It is very good to meet you too, Mrs Wong,’ said Daisy, impeccably polite, looking anywhere but at my mother’s tiny shoes.

  Then my mother turned to me. ‘Hello, Ying Ying. Goodness, you are so big now,’ she said in Cantonese, flashing me a glance from the corner of her kohl-rimmed eyes. ‘So much cake in England, hmm? Now, what have you learned at that school of yours?’

  ‘History,’ I said, in English again so that Daisy could understand. I knew that my mother can speak it perfectly well too, although she hates doing so. ‘I know all about the English Civil War now. And in Maths we’re learning algebra.’

  ‘Hazel is the second-cleverest in our year,’ said Daisy eagerly. ‘I am the first, of course, but that can’t be helped. Hazel does very well, considering.’

  ‘Hum!’ said my mother. ‘You are looking very brown, Hazel. Did you not use a parasol on the boat?’

  ‘I – I forgot,’ I muttered. I could feel myself shaking. I felt so small; smaller than Rose. My mother has always had this effect on me, and after two years it was as bad as ever. I looked at her face carefully. I thought she did look angry – I had clearly not been forgiven. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself apologizing.

  ‘And this is Jie Jie,’ said my father, gesturing. ‘Hazel will have explained our family to you, Miss Wells.’

  Jie Jie bowed her head. ‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘Miss Wells, hello. Ying Ying, I am glad to see you again.’

  Jie Jie is taller than my mother, with a little mouth like Rose’s and May’s button eyes. They are usually wrinkled up in a smile, and she smiled at me now, although rather more shyly than her usual head- thrown-back beam – she is always a little nervous when my mother’s around. I smiled back.

  Jie Jie is Rose and May’s mother. Although she is part of my family, to the rest of the world she is not as important as my mother. Although she is my father’s wife at home, when he leaves the house, my mother is the only wife he speaks of in polite society. I had tried to explain it to Daisy on the boat, but she had got stuck on the fact that in public my sisters are my mother’s children, but in private they belong to Jie Jie. It simply makes sense to me, but of course it’s not British at all.

  What I did not tell Daisy – what I have not told anyone – is that sometimes I wish that I didn’t belong to my mother at all, but to kind, warm, smiling Jie Jie.

  ‘Now, the next introduction will be a surprise to you, Hazel, as well as Miss Wells. I wish it was under happier circumstances, but – well, you’ll see. Su Li!’

  And then, out of the shadows of the columns came Su Li. I jumped, and I could feel my smile growing. Su Li was here at last! Now she would turn to me, laugh, hold out her arms and say, ‘Miss Hazel!’ I had not quite been able to explain it to Daisy, but Su Li was not just Hetty to me, but Mrs Doherty too. She was almost my third mother.

  It had all been a mistake. She would become my maid again, and everything would be all right. Ping was nice, but she was not my Su Li.

  ‘Su Li!’ I cried. ‘Hello!’

  But Su Li did not look at me. She kept her head bowed, focused on something in her arms: a bundle that she was hugging close to her chest.

  Suddenly the bundle wriggled, and I stepped backwards in alarm. I thought for a moment that it must be a puppy – or a real monkey, like Rose used to ask for before May was born. But then the blanket the bundle was wrapped in shifted, and I saw that it was not a monkey or a puppy.

  It was a plump, sleepy baby, swaddled up so that only its face was free. It blinked at me, and then its forehead wrinkled, as though it was just as puzzled about what was happening as I was.

  ‘Gah!’ it said.

  ‘Hazel,’ said my father behind me, his voice booming with pride. ‘Miss Wells. Meet the newest member of the family and Su Li’s new charge, your little brother, Edward Wong.’

  7

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The word echoed around the big hall.

  ‘No?’ asked my father, frowning.

  I took a deep breath. The baby blinked up at me, and then Su Li looked up at me too. Just for a moment her eyes met mine – and then they widened, and she flushed and jerked her chin back down.

  ‘Take him, Hazel!’ said my mother crossly. ‘He’s so fat, just like you. Su Li can’t hold him for long.’

  ‘But,’ I said. ‘You – he – how could you have had a baby?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything to do with me,’ said my mother in Cantonese, crosser than ever. I knew I had offended her. She nodded her beautifully made-up face at Jie Jie, who grinned proudly and then covered her mouth with her hand.

  I looked back at the baby in Su Li’s arms. I am not stupid – I know how babies happen (although Kitty has told us some things that I am sure are lies). But I could not understand how this one could have appeared without my knowing anything about it. Babies take a long time to be born, months and months – and I had seen my father in the summer. He hadn’t said anything about a brother then. I had even spoken to him on the telephone, only a month before, and he had not mentioned a baby at all.

  But then I remembered what he had written on the parcel he had sent me at Christmas: Your real present is at home, and I got a sinking feeling through my body. He had, in his own way, told me that Edward had been born, but I hadn’t understood what he had meant. I had thought I might be getting a new car, or a set of bookshelves in the Library. Not this.

  ‘We weren’t certain until after I came home from the Orient Express,’ said my fath
er. ‘And then we weren’t certain he would be a boy. He was born in November, and he was rather ill at first, so I decided to surprise you when you next came home. Are you surprised, Hazel?’

  ‘Very,’ I said numbly.

  This was the moment when Su Li finally tipped the baby forward into my arms, and I found myself holding Edward Wong. He was indeed very heavy. He pursed his lips at me and blew a bubble.

  ‘We had firecrackers,’ said May. ‘Hung up all down the front of the house, just like there were for me, only I wasn’t a boy, remember? I helped set them off and it was SO loud. It made him scream and scream. It was funny.’

  ‘I’ll take him, Hazel,’ said Rose, and she pulled Edward out of my arms. ‘You’re going to drop him. Look, you hold him like this.’

  Edward beamed gummily at her.

  ‘He likes everyone,’ said May. ‘We call him Teddy.’

  ‘Su Li is his maid now. Don’t argue, Hazel,’ said my mother, as if reading my mind. ‘Your father says so, and so that’s just how it will be. I think you’d like to be shown to your room now, wouldn’t you? Ping, take them both upstairs.’

  I was stunned. This was all wrong. I reached out my hand to Su Li, and she took a step backwards. She was still refusing to look at me.

  ‘Su Li, the baby needs his afternoon tonic,’ snapped my mother.

  ‘Teddy is going to grow up into such a strong boy!’ said my father, his face softening. ‘He must take his medicine. Attend to it, Su Li.’

  A hole seemed to have opened up in my stomach. I had been nervous about coming home because of my mother. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might have been worried about the wrong thing.

  8

  As the eldest daughter, my room always used to be between my mother’s and my father’s on the first floor – but now Ping led Daisy and me to a room close to the bridge over to the servants’ quarters. It was not a little girl’s room but a guest’s. Everything in it was blue and silky – the counterpanes on the matching teak beds, the soft rug on the carpeted floor, the paintings on the walls of English skies and seas, and the sprays of flowers in the blue-and-white vases. I ought to have felt pleased at how lovely it was, but it only made me feel empty.

  ‘Teddy is in your old room, miss,’ Ping said to me, bowing very low – with a quietly sympathetic look, I thought, that showed she knew what I felt. ‘But here is nice. You’ll see.’ I knew it wasn’t Ping’s fault, not a bit of it, but all the same I could barely look at her.

  At last Ping had tidied away our things, patted down our beds and pattered apologetically out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  I sat down on my bed. It gave thickly under me – the mattress was soft and padded, like the whole room.

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy.

  ‘I’m all right!’ I said.

  ‘You aren’t,’ she said. ‘If you were, you wouldn’t be telling me so. And you have had the most dreadful shock.’

  ‘It – it wasn’t supposed to be like this!’ I cried. ‘I know that Grandfather is dead. But everything else was supposed to be the same! It’s not fair!’

  I heard how childish I sounded, and I didn’t care.

  ‘Hazel, I quite understand. It’s always frightfully annoying to have relatives, isn’t it? If I could, I’d have come out of an egg. And babies are a horrid surprise. Why do grown-ups seem to like them so much? It’s utterly unfair that they always assume that you’ll get along with your sibling. Squinty and I hated each other when we were little. Once he tried to push me down the stairs, only Mrs Doherty stopped him. Mummy spanked him for it. It was the first time we’d seen her in weeks, so I remember it perfectly.’

  ‘I don’t hate babies,’ I said. ‘I never hated Rose and May when they were babies, and I don’t hate them now, either. Only—’

  Only, I thought to myself, they’re girls, like me. Only, when they were born, I was still my father’s favourite. Only, the reason why I was allowed to go to school in England was because I was the oldest girl – because Father didn’t have a son.

  What will change now that he does?

  ‘Only it’s different in Hong Kong,’ I said, stumbling over my words. ‘Having a boy matters. Boys are … boys are more important than girls. I mean, of course they’re not really, but that’s what people think.’

  ‘That’s just the same as in England!’ said Daisy dismissively. ‘No one cared a pin about me when I was born, because Bertie already existed. And he’s still the one who’s supposed to do clever things, even though you know he doesn’t have half the brains I do. He’d be much happier being a society wife than I ever would.’

  I sighed. Daisy was quite sure that she understood, but I knew that she didn’t. A boy was everything in Hong Kong. A brother would change things. I tried to explain again.

  ‘Teddy is Jie Jie’s,’ I said. ‘My father’s second wife, not his first. If Teddy had been a girl, he would have been just like Rose and May – not as important as me, because I’m my mother’s daughter. But he’s a boy, the first one in the family. Which means that it doesn’t matter who his real mother is. He’s my father’s heir. Everyone will pretend that he’s my mother’s real son, and he’ll be treated as though he’s more important than any of us. It’s already begun. He has the room next to hers.’

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy. ‘That is very odd.’ She put out her hand and patted my shoulder. ‘But – it’s still not so different from England.’

  ‘It isn’t like England!’ I cried. ‘It’s no use pretending it is. You don’t understand.’

  I was getting so tangled up that I realized I hadn’t even mentioned the truly dreadful thing. Yes, Teddy threw the order of my family into chaos. But it was not just that – or, rather, that was not what was important. Teddy already seemed to have taken Su Li away from me.

  What if he was taking my father too?

  9

  I was here to mourn Ah Yeh – and, I was discovering, to learn the new shape of my family – but, despite all that, the very fact of being in Hong Kong was still joyous. And there were holiday moments during our first week, like deep breaths between the sorrow.

  It was funny, though, to notice how closely watched Daisy and I were in Hong Kong. In England I have become used to hours when Daisy and I are alone, without a mistress or another grown-up near us at all. But here there was always someone walking behind us, usually Ping, hurrying along with little panting steps. I tried not to resent Ping for not being Su Li, and usually almost managed it, but all the same her presence sometimes felt rather like the mourning dresses my mother had chosen for me – just a little too tight for the person I was now.

  On Saturday Daisy and I and Ping and Wo On went up the Peak Tram. My father was supposed to come, but at the last minute Teddy developed a cough, and so my father stayed home to watch him and dose him with medicine. I told myself I didn’t mind.

  I sat pressed back against our padded first-class seats as the carriage jerked upwards alarmingly, too fast for my stomach to keep up with it. I looked out and got a juddering, sideways view of Hong Kong, green and blue and brown and white. I turned my eyes forward and kept them fixed on the two empty chairs that are always reserved for the Governor and his wife.

  ‘Has the cable ever broken?’ said Daisy quietly in my ear.

  ‘I – don’t – think – so,’ I managed, feeling my bones jumping about with every tug upwards. I clung to the wooden seat and tried not to look as though I was praying. I have never liked the Peak Tram – but I do love the view from the top. When we emerged and turned to look, Daisy put one gloved hand to her lips in amazement, and I felt a proud flutter in my chest. When I was little, I used to think that Britain was the most perfect place in the world. I spent whole days wishing myself away from dull, ordinary Hong Kong and into an English storybook world. But now, coming back, I finally understood that Hong Kong had magic about it too.

  There was my city, so far below that it looked as though I could reach down and touch it. The thick gre
en of the mountainsides was dotted with white mansions, and there was ours, way below and to the left. From up here we could see the lines of roads, like the ribs of an open fan. Across the harbour was Kowloon Island, the windows of the Peninsula Hotel glinting in the sun. I pointed right, to where the Peak Tram had started out from, and further along to show Daisy my father’s bank, near the gleaming new Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank we had seen from the car ferry. Then I pointed left again, to a place that I knew would please Daisy. ‘That’s the prison,’ I said. ‘There, near the police station. That’s the beginning of Western, the district where all the gangs are.’

  ‘Ooh!’ said Daisy appreciatively. Ping had come to stand behind us, holding up our parasols against the yellow morning sun, and I nodded at her in thanks.

  ‘And there–that’s Man Mo Temple, the one Grandfather used to go to,’ I said, pointing to the little green roof gleaming up at us. Saying it, I felt a stab of sadness. I was always being reminded of him. It felt as though I should be able to reach out and touch him too – only I could not.

  After that I took Daisy to the Russian bakery on Queen’s Road, where they served Black Forest gateaux, with chocolate melting off them in the heat, and dainty fruit tarts (covered not in strawberries and raspberries, but lychees, mangoes and Chinese gooseberries – for we were still in Hong Kong, after all). I ate yellow cake, mah lai goh, and I was utterly happy.

  We went to the zoological and botanical gardens too, where a monkey threw a peanut at Daisy, and she threw it straight back. It was all enormous fun, until a rather odd thing happened. When I think back on it now, I realize that Daisy and I ought to have recognized how important it was. But we didn’t, until much later – until now.

  We were walking back to the car under a cool grey sky when a woman rushing past us in the street stumbled in front of me.

  I instinctively stepped forward to catch her (Wo said, ‘Miss Hazel!’ warningly), and as I did so I saw a little scar like a half-moon of dots on her neck, underneath her neat bun.