Tokyo Time by Dawn Farnham

Author:Dawn Farnham [Farnham, Dawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brash Books
Published: 2023-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Paper in hand, Martin reported to the Tokko the next morning. The Tokko offices were on the same floor of the Municipal Building overlooking the Padang but on the opposite side. Whereas the CID occupied the offices of the old Improvement Trust, the Tokko’s had been the Department of Sanitation and Sewage. The sign above the door had been cursorily painted over, but the dark lettering was still visible. It was childish, perhaps, but it gave him a secret pang of pleasure. Rain spattered the windows of the waiting room.

A Japanese guard gave him the eye. He waited. He knew how these things worked. He would be left waiting. It made suspects nervous. He kept his eyes down. The Japanese didn’t like it if you looked them directly in the eye. He toyed with reading the copy of the Syonan Times on one of the chairs but decided against it. If you looked casual, the Japanese didn’t like it either. But he’d seen the article about Eva’s death. How she and her husband were great friends of Nippon and how the detectives were on the job bringing justice to the poor victims of the city. The commissioner and the mayor had given an interview and so had the newly arrived chief justice of Syonan. The civil courts, the newspaper informed the public, would reopen and the laws of Britain would apply. Martin held out no great hope that justice would actually be done. Justice in these times was not a collective matter. It lay in the heart of each individual.

An hour crawled by. The clerk glanced at him from time to time but presumably dared say nothing. The ceiling fan rattled and turned, barely moving the air. In the boredom, his thoughts ranged about and it occurred to him that someone had taken over all the files of the British CID offices on Robinson Road. Among them might be the file on Irene. He was tortured by the uncertainty that their affair had been detected by her husband, Paul Sheridan, Australian managing director of Malaya Rubber.

She was shot in the course of a robbery was how the coroner put it, by a person unknown. An open verdict. But Martin knew that Paul Sheridan, on the surface urbane and gentlemanly, was, behind closed doors, a violent man. What the CID had suspected or done about that he did not know. He had never been questioned in connection with Irene and was not privy to the case, which was investigated entirely by British detectives and headed up by DCI Newlands, a man currently locked up in Changi. Now, though, he might be able to get hold of the file.

A thin Chinese man approached him. A nest of ancient pockmarks lay on his cheeks and his shiny forehead. “Mr. Bach?” He pronounced it Batch. Martin didn’t bother to correct him and stood up.

“Yes.”

“I am Toh. The interpreter.”

“I see. How do you do?”

Toh bowed. “Thank you. Please follow me.”

To Martin’s surprise, Toh left the office and went down the stairs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.