Second Sister Read online

  “Was she in her school uniform?” asked Nga-Yee.

  “Yes. That’s why we noticed her.”

  “The only people there from your school were you two and Violet To,” said Nga-Yee, scanning her memory in case she’d forgotten someone.

  “Violet To? Not the Countess?” said Lily. “Did she have short or long hair?”

  “Long. She was about this tall.” Nga-Yee indicated. “And she wore square-framed glasses.”

  “That’s Violet,” murmured Lily.

  “What’s wrong, Kwok-Tai?” N asked. Nga-Yee glanced at the boy, who was frowning.

  “It’s nothing. I didn’t know Siu-Man and Violet were friends, that’s all.” There seemed to be more to the story, but he didn’t elaborate.

  “I see. Well, I’m sure Siu-Man would have felt grateful for any of her schoolmates who came to say goodbye. But I’m really curious about this class outing.” N skillfully changed the subject back to something inconsequential. “You mean kids these days have the option to visit Disneyland? I thought these school trips would only be to youth camps in the countryside. Healthy body and mind, that sort of thing. Um, I don’t mean that Disneyland is unhealthy for body and mind, of course.”

  Anyone around them would have thought this was a friendly conversation, nothing out of the ordinary except for the presence of two adults, though of course they could have been Kwok-Tai and Lily’s teachers. Lily’s mention of Disneyland sparked a buried memory in Nga-Yee: one day, her father saw on the TV news that construction had started on Hong Kong Disneyland, and he said he would bring the family there. Sadly, he died before the park was completed. Nga-Yee remembered her mother saying the tickets would surely be expensive, and her dad cheerily replying, “We’ll just have to save up for it.” Nga-Yee wasn’t particularly keen on amusement parks, but it was gratifying to see her father so enthusiastic.

  Would Siu-Man have remembered this moment? She’d been only three years old.

  “You must have a class to get to. Lunchtime is almost over,” said N, glancing at the clock. Most of the other students had left.

  “We finished our exams last week, so our afternoons are mostly free now,” said Kwok-Tai. “We can stay a little longer—”

  “No, we can’t,” said Lily, shaking her head. “You’ve got band practice, and I have volleyball.”

  “So you’re an athlete,” said N as Lily smiled shyly. “We won’t take up any more of your time, then. Thanks for talking to us—we’re very grateful.” He dipped his head in a little bow.

  “It’s our pleasure. We’re glad we got to meet Siu-Man’s family. It helps a little,” said Kwok-Tai.

  N pulled out a ballpoint pen and scribbled a string of digits on a napkin. “This is my phone number.” He handed it to Kwok-Tai. “I enjoyed our chat. If you have any problems you want to talk about, feel free to call me. Hopefully we’ll also find out a bit more about Siu-Man that way. She may be gone, but she lives on in our hearts.”

  “Sure.” Kwok-Tai took the napkin. “Are you two leaving now?”

  N looked around. “We might stay a little longer and have a stroll.”

  Kwok-Tai and Lily politely said goodbye and walked off. Now the cafeteria was empty, apart from N, Nga-Yee, and a school attendant eating his lunch at another table.

  “What are we doing next, N?” asked Nga-Yee. She turned to him, startled to find him glaring disapprovingly at her, like a grumpy old man.

  “Miss Au,” he said icily, his brow furrowed. “I told you to let me do the talking. If you keep jumping in and interrupting the investigation, I’ll quit right away.”

  “What did I do? You mean when I spoke up?” Nga-Yee’s shin was still throbbing from the kick. “I happened to remember that they’d brought Siu-Man home, and I wanted you to—”

  “I told you, amateurs shouldn’t interfere.” Even without raising his voice, N sounded threatening. “Kids of fourteen or fifteen are sensitive things. They get startled as easily as small animals. A moron like you with absolutely no psychological awareness should just shut up. You detonated a bomb as soon as you sat down—it took me a huge effort to salvage the situation, otherwise they’d have treated me like the enemy. But I managed to prize out only a few clues, and we never got to the heart of the matter.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thing you opened your big fat mouth about.”

  “Them bringing Siu-Man home? How is that the heart of the matter?”

  “This is why I hate know-nothing idiots who think they have all the answers.” N reached into his pocket for Siu-Man’s little red phone and pressed a few keys, then waved it in front of Nga-Yee. “I guess you’d like to know where this picture came from?”

  Nga-Yee gasped. It was the kidkit727 photo of Siu-Man being groped by the teenage boy.

  “When digital photography first became popular, the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association created a format known as the exchangeable image file format, or EXIF. This allowed a whole range of metadata to be stored along with the image itself.” He started tapping at the phone again. “Phones today use the EXIF format for storing photos, so they’ll capture information such as the brand and model number of the camera, shutter speed, light sensitivity, aperture size …” He placed the phone in front of Nga-Yee again. “As well as the date and time it was taken.”

  In a box on the screen were a few lines of text, including “2013/12/24, 22:13:55.”

  It took Nga-Yee a couple of seconds to realize why this date was important: the day Kwok-Tai and Lily brought Siu-Man home was indeed Christmas Eve of the year before.

  “So—that means, the same—the same day—”

  “And you mentioned that as soon as we sat down, so there was no way for me to go back to it.” N glared at her. “People are irrational. They judge something’s importance not by the facts, but by their instincts. As soon as those two decided we were on the same wavelength, they were willing to talk about all sorts of things completely unselfconsciously. But even after I spent an hour getting them to feel comfortable with us, if I’d mentioned Christmas Eve, they’d have shut down right away—because of that first impression you left on them while we were still strangers. So now you understand how you ruined everything?”

  “How—how could I have known? You didn’t tell me any of this,” Nga-Yee retorted. She recalled how, when she’d recognized Lily and Kwok-Tai from the Facebook photo, N had asked more than once about Christmas Eve. Obviously he’d already known.

  “Of course not. You’d have given the game away! If I’d told you that kidkid727’s photo was taken on the same date as Lily and Kwok-Tai’s only visit to your place, would you have sat there calmly with a smile on your face, playing the part of the bereaved sister for a whole hour?”

  Nga-Yee had nothing to say to that. N was clearly correct, and his instructions to let him lead the conversation had been very clear.

  “I’m … I’m sorry,” she managed to utter, after a pause. She hated N’s attitude but was self-aware enough to see that she was to blame here.

  “Whatever.” At least N was willing to move on, even if he hadn’t exactly accepted Nga-Yee’s apology. “Just trust me, Miss Au. You hired me to investigate this case, so you’ll have to go along with my methods. That’s the only way to get the answers you’re looking for.”

  “I understand.” Nga-Yee nodded. “So it looks like Kwok-Tai and Lily were at that party too. If Siu-Man really was an escort or took drugs, they’d have known about it.”

  “Escort? Does that photo look like she was a hooker?”

  “Doesn’t it? You mean to say that nasty-looking guy with the red hair was her boyfriend? When kidkit727 said she stole someone’s boyfriend—that’s him?”

  N’s brow crinkled, and he looked her in the eye. “Are you ready for some bad news, Miss Au?”

  She forced herself to nod. After all, she’d promised herself to accept whatever the truth was.

  N went back to the photo and zoomed in on one
portion. “See that?”

  Nga-Yee bent over the screen. N had enlarged a section of the bar table, which was littered with random objects: beer bottles, glasses, instant coffee, peanuts, a dice cup, cigarettes, and a lighter.

  “You’re trying to tell me that Siu-Man smoked?”

  “No, this.” He pointed at the sachet of instant coffee. “Even if you did want a cup of coffee in a nightclub, wouldn’t you order it? Don’t you find it odd that someone would have brought their own?”

  “Oh! So that was drugs? Ecstasy?”

  “Half right. If it was ecstasy or acid, they could have kept the pills in a candy box. Only one drug needs to be disguised as instant coffee: Rohypnol.”

  This was a thunderbolt. Nga-Yee gaped.

  “It’s quite a common trick,” said N, unflustered. “Scumbags like that take women out and get them drunk, but most women know to stop before they’re unconscious. These animals then say coffee will sober them up, and they produce a packet of instant. It doesn’t look like it’s been tampered with, so the girls have no way of knowing it was actually cut open and sealed again after the stuff was poured in. If you looked closely, you might be able to tell it was smaller than a regular coffee packet, but with the dim lighting in a bar, most people wouldn’t notice.”

  “So when they took that picture of Siu-Man—”

  “She’d been roofied.”

  “Then she …” Nga-Yee couldn’t bear to finish her sentence.

  “Might have been assaulted as well.”

  Nga-Yee couldn’t breathe. She’d thought the most painful thing she could hear was that her sister had been selling her body or hooked on drugs, but the reality was even more painful. She couldn’t do or say anything; it was as if she were plunging into an abyss, a bottomless pit of darkness and sorrow.

  “I said ‘might,’ Miss Au.”

  N’s words were like the strand of spider silk Buddha lowered into hell, pulling Nga-Yee back from utter desolation.

  “Might?”

  “You said Kwok-Tai and Lily brought your sister home at eleven that night. When a thug has his way with an unconscious girl, he usually isn’t done with her that quickly.”

  Nga-Yee breathed a sigh of relief, and understood why N had been so angry earlier. If she hadn’t jumped in, N might have gotten the truth from Kwok-Tai and Lily about what happened to Siu-Man before they’d brought her home. N could have tackled it from this angle and, following the vine to the melon, found out kidkit727’s identity that way.

  “Is there any way we can get another chance to ask Kwok-Tai and Lily what happened?” she asked frantically.

  “Once a chance is gone, there’s no way to get it back. We’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.” N put Siu-Man’s phone back on the table. “You already know some of the details, I might as well tell you the rest,” he said. “The karaoke bar in the picture is in King Wah Centre on Shantung Street in Mong Kok. I’ve asked someone who knows the neighborhood to dig up Red Hair’s identity.”

  “You located the place by its decor?”

  “No. Smartphones don’t just attach EXIF data when they take pictures, they also have GPS coordinates. There’s only one karaoke bar in King Wah Centre, so it had to be this place. That was a year and a half ago, though, and the bar’s gone out of business since. Even if we could track down the former employees, they wouldn’t necessarily remember anything about the incident. In other words, Kwok-Tai and Lily were our best means of finding out the truth about that night.”

  A wave of defeat swept over Nga-Yee.

  “So Siu-Man liked that band, One Direction?” she asked.

  “One Direction isn’t a band, it’s a group of teen idols. Didn’t she have any posters up at home?”

  “No.”

  “Mmm.” N went back to Siu-Man’s phone and pulled up an album cover showing five handsome men. “The only music your sister had on her phone was One Direction. She and Lily would share news about them on Facebook. I knew this subject would make these two lower their guard. Same with Kwok-Tai—even before I saw the calluses on his fingers, I knew from Twitter that he played guitar. You made me give you all that data about your sister’s classmates. Didn’t you notice any of this?”

  Nga-Yee was stunned. She’d spent at least two days poring over these kids’ social media pages, but hadn’t paid any attention to their interests or daily life. She’d only been searching for posts and pictures involving her sister.

  “Oh yes—were there any text messages on the phone?” asked Nga-Yee. “Did Siu-Man chat with any of her classmates?” She’d suddenly thought that even if her sister didn’t appear anywhere on social media, she might have had private conversations.

  “Nothing.” N jabbed at the screen. “Not even advertisements from her provider. It looked like your sister was in the habit of erasing her in-box. She’d installed Line, but didn’t have a single contact. Again, she might have used it, then wiped it afterward. It’s possible that after what happened, she was so afraid of stirring up more trouble that she deleted all her contacts and messages.”

  “Line?”

  “It’s a sort of instant messaging program—like SMSes,” said N, looking at her as if to say, “Oh right, I forgot you’re from the last century.”

  “Ah!” Seeing the lens on the back of Siu-Man’s phone made her think of something else. “She must have had photos on her phone. Were there any clues there?”

  “Only a few. I looked at the metadata, and it’s the same story as her text messages and Line: your sister deleted most of them. Of the ones remaining, only one of them has any schoolmates in it.”

  N opened Siu-Man’s photo album and showed her: Siu-Man and Lily, both in uniform, standing in a school corridor. From the angle, it looked like Lily had been holding the phone. Their faces were close to the lens, and both were grinning. Lily’s hair was longer in the picture than now.

  “This was taken in June the year before, when they were still in year one,” said N.

  Tears sprang to Nga-Yee’s eyes. How long had it been since she’d seen Siu-Man smile?

  “So that means … Lily probably isn’t kidkit727?” Nga-Yee looked up. “She was so close to Siu-Man, and cried so much at her funeral. She looked close to tears just now too. I don’t think she could be the culprit, could she?”

  N shrugged. “Maybe she’s a very accomplished actress.”

  Nga-Yee found this hard to swallow. “An actress? She’s only fourteen or fifteen, a child.”

  “Don’t underestimate youngsters today, especially in this sick society. From a young age, kids must learn how to survive in a jungle of deceitful adults. In order to get their children into elite schools, parents make their five-year-olds sit through interviews pretending to be perfectly polite snot-noses. Then they get back home and they can go back to being monsters, little emperors ordering their servants around.”

  “That’s a bit extreme—”

  “It’s the truth,” N snapped. “Like Kwok-Tai said just now, the school forbade the students to say anything about your sister. That’s sheer hypocrisy. So you stop them talking about it—does that mean it didn’t happen? You think you can just weed out the source of the disturbance, plug everyone’s ears and cover their eyes, and go back to playing happy families? What kind of foundation are they laying? With the staff behaving like this, there’s no way the kids won’t learn from them.”

  Nga-Yee had nothing to say.

  “All in all, until we find conclusive evidence, don’t trust a single person.” N stuffed Siu-Man’s phone back into his pocket.

  “Where would we find this evidence?”

  “No idea, but I do know who we should talk to next.”

  “Who?”

  “The Countess.”

  “Because Lily and Kwok-Tai saw her on the day of the funeral?”

  “No, because of this.” He reached into another pocket and pulled out a white smartphone. How many of these did he have on him? This was a small one, no larger than
a business card, but almost half an inch thick. N tapped the screen and held it up to Nga-Yee. It was a Facebook photo: a pretty girl in a white dress, her hair in a bob and her features so delicate she could have been a doll, holding up her phone for a mirror selfie in what looked like her bedroom: everything around her was pink. Just as Nga-Yee was about to ask N if this was the Countess, she realized that the picture looked familiar.

  “I’ve seen that before—Oh!”

  She’d seen it yesterday. In Miranda Lai’s hand was an iPhone.

  “She was one of the eighteen iPhone owners,” said N.

  Nga-Yee had to marvel at N’s memory: he’d clearly dredged up this fact the instant Kwok-Tai mentioned Miranda’s name.

  “So—So she’s our lead suspect. Lily said she had a grudge against Siu-Man. And she must have come to snoop on the day of the funeral, but didn’t dare to show herself—”

  “There you go again. Remember what I said to you?”

  Nga-Yee froze. N’s rebuke as he’d looked at the eighteen names sounded in her ears: The worst thing you can do is go in with preconceived ideas. It’s fine to have a hypothesis, but you have to remember it may not be true. You should actually work hard to disprove your hypothesis, rather than looking for evidence to prop it up.

  “Got it. The Countess might be the culprit, or she might not. But where is she now? Miss Yuen said everyone’s working on their extracurriculars.”

  “The fourth-floor rehearsal room, right above us.” N pointed at the ceiling. “The Countess is in the Drama Society. They’ll be getting ready for the combined schools performance a month from now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Unlike a certain person whose head is stuffed with straw, I don’t find it hard to remember basic information about eighteen students.” N never let slip a chance to have a dig at her. “I knew we were going into the lion’s den today, so I made sure to have everything I needed to know at my fingertips. I’ll need every trick I have to get these little devils to tell the truth. I’m not like this person who wastes her time worrying what people will think of her because of her colleague’s outfit.”