A Spoonful of Murder Read online

  When Mr Svensson came towards us, he was beaming.

  ‘Miss Wong,’ he said. ‘Miss – Wells, was it?’

  ‘Yes – I am the Honourable Daisy Wells,’ said Daisy. I saw the little twitch in her cheek that told me she had noted the order we had been greeted in yet again. In England we are Miss Wells and Miss Wong, but here we were both realizing that I was the daughter of Vincent Wong, and Daisy was simply my friend.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Svensson, smiling almost all the way to his eyes, and he took us both by the hand and shook enthusiastically. His grip was strong enough to make me wince.

  ‘We are waiting for my … brother,’ I said. ‘He has an appointment at the doctor’s upstairs.’

  Mr Svensson twitched.

  ‘And what are you doing here?’ asked Daisy, polite but sharp.

  ‘I’ve just had a meeting with my financial adviser,’ said Mr Svensson, shrugging with exaggerated boredom. ‘Business, you know. Money matters. Not for little girls.’

  I felt Daisy bristle at that, but she giggled and said, ‘Of course!’

  ‘And now I must be going, if you’ll excuse me,’ said Mr Svensson. He looked at his watch quickly. ‘I shall be late.’

  He turned and hurried away. ‘Hurried’ really was the word, I thought. He rushed across the tiled floor of the bank as though he was being chased by a tiger.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Daisy, ‘is there a fire?’

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. I didn’t want her being silly too.

  We wandered around the bank hall for ten minutes by my wristwatch, our footsteps echoing into the large space. I looked at my watch again – it was twenty past twelve.

  ‘Su Li and Teddy ought to be coming back now,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and wait for them by the lifts.’

  We walked away from the hollow boom of bank chatter, and down the main stairs. And there was Mr Svensson again. He was going out of the bank’s entrance very quickly, his back to us.

  ‘Didn’t he leave ten minutes ago?’ asked Daisy, frowning.

  ‘Perhaps he forgot something?’ I said. But despite myself I felt a little frisson of nerves under my skin. It was an odd thing to see. Today we kept seeing odd things.

  Wo On came through the main doors then. He saw us standing beside the bank of lifts and looked puzzled. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  ‘They haven’t come down yet,’ I told him. ‘They’re late.’

  ‘Hazel,’ said Daisy, nudging me. ‘Look at the lift they took. I think the dial is stuck. It’s not quite at the eighth floor.’

  I saw that she was right. The gold arrow was pointing between seven and eight.

  My detective sense never quite stops ticking. It’s like an ember that only needs a breath of air to set it flaring up again. And at that moment I felt it truly begin to smoulder.

  It was probably nothing, I told myself firmly. Su Li was only ten minutes behind schedule.

  Except that I knew Su Li. She likes to be punctual. She taught me to be punctual too.

  ‘We will go up,’ said Wo On. He ushered all three of us into the left-hand lift, which was standing open, its old attendant waiting. ‘Eighth floor, if you please,’ he said.

  I looked at him, and then at Daisy, and something crawled in my stomach, because I saw that whatever I was feeling, they felt it too.

  The lift moved upwards. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

  And then the lift doors opened.

  5

  We were in a beautiful white marble lobby. In front of us was a gold-and-black table, with elegant thin legs and an enormous arrangement of white flowers spilling out of a tall black vase on top. There was a corridor in front of me that stretched away, in gleaming white splendour, all the way to wide windows with a view of the harbour, like a living picture. All along that corridor, and to the left and right of us too, stretched closed white doors bearing little gold plaques with names inscribed on them in curlicue letters. Eight is a very lucky number, and here on the most auspicious floor of the building were dentists and surgeons and women’s doctors and Freudians, every sort of doctor the wealthiest people in Hong Kong could want. Each, I knew, had a suite of rooms, a waiting room and a consulting room. If I pushed open any of these heavy white doors, I would see a pretty receptionist sitting behind a desk, looking at me over her glasses.

  But that was not important to us now. We were looking for Su Li and Teddy – and they were nowhere to be seen.

  Wo On went striding along the corridor that led to the window, and Daisy, Ping and I hurried after him. My heart was pounding – although, I told myself, trying most desperately to be rational, all we were likely to find was a cross Su Li, still in the waiting room because the doctor had been delayed.

  Wo On pushed open the last white door on the left, which read DOCTOR CRISPIN AURELIUS in golden letters, and a receptionist in a neat white uniform and with glossy, pinned-back hair looked up at us curiously.

  ‘We have come for Edward Wong and his maid,’ said Wo On. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Not here yet,’ said the receptionist, a little dent appearing in the skin of her forehead as she drew her eyebrows together in disapproval. ‘They are late.’

  Next to me, Daisy made a small hissing noise.

  ‘But we saw them go up in the lift, almost half an hour ago,’ said Wo On sharply. His face was suddenly flushed with worry. ‘They must have come here.’

  ‘I tell you, he has not arrived,’ said the receptionist.

  Wo On swung round towards the corridor, back to the receptionist and then to the corridor again, looking utterly bewildered.

  ‘They came up in the lift,’ he repeated.

  This time Daisy and I turned too, to look at that middle lift, the one Su Li had stepped into with Teddy half an hour before. And, as I did so, my neck prickled and my fingers tingled. There was no doubt about it. Something about the lift was wrong.

  Its doors were shut, which meant that it ought to be either travelling between floors, or stopped on one of the floors below. But the dial above the doors was still hovering just below the eighth floor.

  ‘The lift must be stuck. Have you heard them calling?’ Wo On asked the receptionist.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But it is hard to hear anything – these new doors and walls are thick.’

  ‘We must get those lift doors open,’ said Wo On, sharper than ever. ‘There might be a baby trapped in there!’

  He took off, striding back towards the lift, and Daisy and I ran after him, with Ping hurrying after us. I heard the receptionist begin to speak into her telephone handset, before the door swung closed on her voice.

  My feet slipped on the smooth marble of the floor. It was odd, I thought, how sound died in this space. Our hurrying steps seemed to make almost no noise at all – or was that only because my ears were ringing?

  Together, Wo On and the old lift operator who had brought us to the eighth floor wrestled with the golden lift doors, fighting to prise them apart. Wo On jammed his thick arm into the gap and heaved (the old man was too infirm to be much help). The lift doors were forced apart with agonizing slowness.

  Daisy surged forward to peer inside, pushing me before her – and the spark of nervous fear I had been feeling swelled up and burst into a horrible flame.

  6

  Once, a long time ago, I walked into the Gym at Deepdean and found the body of Miss Bell, and all our adventures began. I remember thinking at first that I wasn’t sure whether she was dead or not. She didn’t look as though she was dead, only lying very still.

  This time, I didn’t have to wonder.

  The lift was sunk down into the shaft, its inner grille only half pulled back, a foot below the white marble corridor of the eighth floor, so we had to peer down into it. But its electric light was still on, and in its glow we could see Su Li sprawled on her back. Her legs were twisted under her, and her arms were folded over her chest, hands covered in scratches. Her neck was bruised – and there was som
ething else that made my breath catch in my throat.

  There was a pin stabbed into her throat. It was a jade hairpin, carved into a rooster shape. And it looked just like – but surely it could not be – the one I had lost.

  I reeled.

  Daisy clutched my hand. ‘Hazel!’ she said. I knew that she had seen what I had. Daisy’s memory is even better than mine, and it would not be like her to miss such a detail. Su Li and the open lift doors blurred in front of me. What on earth had happened?

  ‘Where is Teddy?’ cried Ping frantically from behind me. ‘Where is the baby?’

  I gasped. All I had seen was a body, and the horror of where my pin was. I hadn’t seen what – or who – was not there. I hadn’t even wondered about Teddy until Ping said his name. I had been a detective, not a big sister.

  Wo On squeezed through the lift doors and opened the grille, then jumped down into the lift itself. He pulled Su Li’s body to one side. I held my breath – but there was nothing to be seen. Teddy wasn’t there.

  Wo On was shouting for Ping to go for help, and the combination of his shouts and the cries of Ping and the lift operator were enough to rouse the workers in the offices nearest us. There seemed a sudden flurry of them. I clutched at Daisy’s arm. I could see everything – the bloody handprint on the edge of the grille where it had been pushed open, in the shape of a large, square male hand, and another one on the operation panel of the lift, the patch of blood on the carpet, the jade pin shining in the soft lift light. But it was as though I was floating. I could not feel any of it. Su Li was dead. In that moment the anger I felt towards her about Teddy had evaporated. I stared at her horrified face, and all I could think was that I had cared about Su Li, and now she was gone. And Teddy was gone too.

  ‘It must have been the lift operator,’ said Wo On, kneeling in front of Su Li’s body, mouth open and eyes wide. I could see his chest rising and falling in panic. ‘See the handprints? He killed Su Li, jammed the lift, pushed open the grille and kidnapped Teddy!’

  ‘He must be a member of the Communist Party!’ cried someone. ‘It’s a plot!’

  ‘No!’ shouted someone else. ‘It’s the Triads. Look – look at that pin! That’s their calling card! The Triads have the child!’

  Ping led us away from the scene (I could feel Daisy twisting round to look back for as long as she could). The next thing I knew we were in low leather chairs that sighed as we sat in them. We were – I realized slowly – back in Dr Aurelius’s waiting room.

  ‘Here’s some tea,’ said Ping. Her face was red and tear-stained, which was odd, because my face was dry. It felt as though there was a stopper inside me, closing away all my emotions just as though I had put them in a bottle.

  I sipped the tea Ping handed me, and sipped again, before I noticed that my mouth hurt because the tea had burned it.

  ‘Oh, what shall we do, Miss Hazel?’ Ping asked, her voice shaking.

  I did not know.

  7

  Then my father arrived. I heard him shouting in the corridor outside. I sat up, and he burst through the door, his suit jacket flapping. He was still wearing his silken house slippers. He knelt down in front of my chair and put his big hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Father!’ I said, expecting him to hug me.

  Instead my father shook me. He shook me so hard that my teeth really did bounce together in my mouth. I bit my tongue.

  ‘Why were you not in the lift with them?’ he cried. ‘Why were you not there?’

  ‘Hazel wanted to show me—’ Daisy said loudly.

  ‘Silence, Miss Wells,’ snapped my father. ‘Wong Fung Ying, answer me.’

  ‘I didn’t think I needed to be there,’ I whispered.

  ‘I should beat you,’ Father said. His face, as I stared into it, was red all over, the blood pulsing beneath the skin. ‘You deserve to be beaten. You left your brother alone, and now he has been taken by that wicked man.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I whispered. I could not speak louder. The stopper in my throat was too tight.

  My father’s shoulders slumped, and he let go of me. I could still feel the prints of his fingers on my shoulders. ‘Of course you didn’t,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You are a child. I should never have allowed Teddy to be so unsupervised. You are correct: you are not responsible; I am. This is my fault. My son has been taken.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I choked out.

  ‘Go home, Hazel. Ping, take them home,’ he said, and that was his final word.

  I wanted to ask if he had seen the pin, and what he thought it meant – but I couldn’t. I was so confused about it. Was it the sign of a Triad gang? I knew that one particular local gang left calling cards like this.

  And my father was wrong, I was not a child. I was Teddy’s big sister, and a detective. If I had been in the lift, I might have been able to stop what had happened to Teddy and Su Li. I might have been able to save them. But I had chosen not to be there, and that was certainly my fault.

  Whatever my father said, Teddy was gone and Su Li was dead because of me.

  Ping rushed us down in another lift, stumbling over her trousers in her haste. Her hands were trembling, and she was still crying, her face red and raw.

  ‘Poor Su Li!’ she kept on whispering. ‘And poor Teddy!’

  There were heavy black police cars pulling up at the bank as we went out of its main doors. Daisy made a cross clucking noise with her tongue.

  ‘They’re too late! They’ll miss things,’ she said to me. ‘Half the people who were here will have already gone. How will they find Su Li’s murderer now? How will they find Teddy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘I – I can’t think.’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Daisy.

  I turned on her furiously.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Hazel! You don’t have to think. Just sit quietly, and let me think for you. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  I understood that Daisy was trying to help. She was looking after me in the only way she knew how. But, all the same, I didn’t think it would work. I had grown up hearing horrid stories about children who were kidnapped. It’s quite common in Hong Kong, among families who are as rich as mine. That is why we always have maids and chauffeurs with us, why we are kept in the house so much. If we go out alone, we might be taken. And now it had really happened – to my own brother.

  We climbed into the car. Wo On was already there, and he started the engine. It revved up, and we sped away. I saw Wo’s hands clenched tight on the steering wheel. I saw how his shoulders shook.

  Outside, Hong Kong scrolled by, hot and bright. But now the way I saw all the streets had changed. They were suddenly places where Teddy might be. He could be any of the swaddled babies being carried past us, their faces squashed up against women’s backs. He could be in any of the bundles piled up on carts. He could be in that bucket, or being carried along in that rickshaw.

  He could be anywhere.

  Once before, at Fallingford, the Wells and Wong Detective Society had been confronted by a mystery that came very close to us – but it had been Daisy and her family who were affected, not me. I had only been able to watch. Now our positions were reversed, and I was lost in the horror of what had happened. My brother had been taken. My maid was dead.

  It was my fault.

  Our car drove up to the front door of my house and we ran up the granite steps to find it in chaos. The gardeners were all armed, the dogs had been let out to patrol during the day, instead of at night, Rose and May were sobbing in the front hall, being held by a white, shaking Jie Jie, and my mother was waiting for me.

  ‘Wong Fung Ying,’ she snapped. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘Teddy’s gone. And Su Li – Su Li’s been killed.’

  I swallowed, and my eyes prickled. It was the first time I had said it out loud. Even though I had seen the lift, it still felt hardly real. Su Li had been alive this morning – now, suddenly, she was not. And, just li
ke with Ah Yeh, I had not had time to say goodbye. I had been rude to her, and now I could never take that back. I was remembering again how she had behaved – how she had been kind to me on the journey, and I had ignored her. And her expression, as she walked into the lift. Had that been a clue? Could I have stopped what had happened, if I had only been a better detective? I had the horrid feeling that I had missed something. Su Li … Su Li had known that man.

  Jie Jie let out a gulping wail.

  ‘You were not with them?’ asked my mother. She had her arms folded, and in the cool darkness of the hall her hair seemed to fade away, so that only her pale, beautiful face and red lips hovered above me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, Ah Mah! We didn’t get in the lift. We didn’t know anything was wrong until we went up to look for them. Then Wo On forced open the doors, and—’

  Jie Jie had buried her face in Rose’s dark hair, but now she swung round to stare at me. I had never seen her look at me like that – as if she hated me.

  ‘You should have been there,’ she hissed. ‘What sort of big sister are you?’

  My tongue felt thick, and my eyes ached. It was the same question all over again, and I still couldn’t answer it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t know.’

  I turned round and ran across the tiles of the hall, through the wide doorway and up the stairs.

  ‘Fung Ying, come back here!’ shouted my mother. I knew I ought to obey her – every Hong Kong bone in my body told me to stop and turn round and be a good daughter. But, as my feet clattered and my heart thumped, I had never felt less good in my life.

  8

  I slammed the door to our room and leaned against it, and almost immediately Daisy began to hammer on it.

  ‘Hazel!’ she cried. ‘Hazel! This is not good detective behaviour! Let me in! Oh, Ping’s here too. Hazel!’