The Last Six Million Seconds Read Free

first and then in winged armies. They loved the heads of mammals. From his forensic science course Aston knew that with perfectly designed needles they injected instar larvae into the eyes, mouth and nose. Aston was particularly angry that they should violate the blond-haired head, but not for reasons of race. The more he photographed it, the more he suspected it of having belonged to a woman. He hit out at the swarm that divided around his hand and continued to grow. Then, giving up the fight, he worked more quickly, trying to complete the job while the ice was still smoking. By the time he had finished with the last head he was working inside a black, buzzing cloud.
    Aston went below to change. He rejoined Chan on the bridge, where he was smoking and talking to the captain. He stood apart from them and tried to follow. He had spent his regulation six months learning the local dialect and was able to say, “What is your honorable name? I am now going to arrest you,” and many other useful phrases, but Chan cursed a lot and indulged in wordplay. Chan threw him a glance from time to time yet made no effort to slow his speech or include him in the conversation.
    Behind them Chinese constables kept their distance from Aston, the man who handled the dead. He heard a word repeated overand over that sounded like the number “four,” pronounced say. It was almost identical in sound to the word for death, which was why four was an unlucky number. Aston’s apartment block was the forty-fourth building in his street, but the postal address was forty-six; few Chinese were prepared to live in a building twice named death.
    Aston kept his eyes on the chief inspector. One thing about Chan Siu-kai, nicknamed Charlie by his British colleagues: He was not inscrutable. Under pressure a slight twitch appeared under his left eye, and his lean face expressed every mood. He was the product of an affair, they said, between a wandering Irishman and a Cantonese girl and had benefited from the conjunction of opposing genes, although he would never have put it that way himself. In the mess they whispered that he often cut himself shaving because he hated to look in a mirror at a mostly Western face, albeit a handsome one. Aston could testify that Chan frequently bore signs of such mishaps.
    For all his good looks, Aston guessed that the chief inspector did not much like himself. But then Aston, who had been a policeman now for nearly three years, had begun to wonder who on earth over the age of thirty did. Still more intriguing to the young Englishman, who had no problem with mirrors, was the way the Eurasian’s rugged self-disdain sometimes attracted the fiercest and most desirable women; Chan, divorced, never paid them any mind.
    Finally Chan left off talking to the captain. Aston shouted in English over the noise of the engines. “I guess those heads fit the other remains.”
    “Either that or we have six homicides instead of three.”
    “Well, the DNA will tell us. There’s plenty to do now, even if we still don’t have any fingers to print. I’ll get to forensic first thing tomorrow for the odontological profiles. Some of the missing persons lists actually include dental records.”
    “Okay.” Chan twitched but showed no enthusiasm.
    “At least we’ve got a good chance of finding out who those poor bastards really were.”
    Chan exchanged glances with the captain. “Sure.”
    “And when the forensic artist’s produced some drawings, we’ll have something to fax to the foreign consulates. The Caucasian was probably from overseas.” Aston finally detected embarrassment in Chan’s mobile features. “Hey, is there something I’m missing?”
    Chan shrugged. “Just that the investigation may be over.”
    Aston froze. “Over?”
    “You heard what the coastguards said. They had orders to intercept that bag.”
    “So what?” Aston’s voice had risen an octave. “You bribed them. We have the bag.”
    Chan pushed the hair back