said you wouldn’t mind if I telephoned you at home. I’ll be sending the full report, but it’s a bit lengthy. I thought you might want to have the gist over the phone, to see if I can help any further. Shall I read the summary?” Chan grunted. “Not very exciting, I’m afraid.” Spruce’s voice dropped to a monotone as he read. “The samples which are water-resistant proved on examination to consist mostly of natural resins, probably derived from pine, and a variety of synthetic latex. The latex has probably been introduced in order to attain a specific degree of plasticity. Titanium dioxide was also found in a small quantity.”
“I’m sorry,” Chan said, “I think I lost you at ‘water-resistant.’ ”
“We seem to be talking about a form of gum, sir.”
“Huh?”
“Resins give the consistency, latex holds it all together in one lump in your mouth and titanium dioxide provides coloring. I don’t know the case, of course, but the likely explanation is that the victims shared a packet of chewing gum before they died.”
“Chewing gum?” Cops were inured to trivia, but it could still hurt.
“Afraid so. Of course there may be more to it; it’s hard to say from here. What’s the weather like over there?”
“Hot.”
“I was wondering if you needed any assistance at the scene of crime itself?”
“Oh, well, just a thought.”
“Is it cold there?”
“Fairly chilly. And raining.”
“Next time.”
Spruce perked up. “You’ll see the number for my direct line on the covering letter to the report, sir.”
“Thanks.”
Chan hung up, then lifted the receiver and let it dangle. In the dark he groped his way back to the bed, lay down and instantly fell asleep again. Then he woke with a jolt. Gum? He switched on a light this time, padded back to the telephone. It took half an hour for the Scotland Yard switchboard to locate Spruce.
“You didn’t mention flavoring,” Chan said. “That titanium, for coloring, right?”
“Correct.”
“And the resins and the latex, they would be tasteless in themselves, I guess?”
“Correct. No flavoring is recorded here as being found on the specimens. Flavoring is the first to dissolve, though. I took up gum when I gave up cigarettes. It can be very disappointing after the first three minutes. Monotonous and tasteless. I suppose you don’t use chewing gum yourself, sir?”
“I’m still with nicotine.” Chan reached for a pack of Bensons on the coffee table. “Suppose there never was any flavoring. What would that give?”
“Flavorless gum, sir. No tasty lead-in period. Not an attractive commercial proposition, I would have thought. An acquired taste anyway.”
“Or a specialized use. You’ve been a great help, Spruce. Next time I’ll ask for you to bring the report personally, business class.”
“Oh, thank you, sir.”
44
Nine thirty A.M. in the car park of the University of Hong Kong Chan and Aston waited for Dr. Lam. Only five minutes late, the dentist’s black Mercedes drew up. Lam spoke a few words to his driver, then climbed the stairs with the two policemen to the radiation laboratory. Vivian Ip was waiting. She gestured to the lead-glass cabinet. “All yours,” she said to Chan.
Chan pointed to the small reddish-colored block in the far corner on the other side of the glass. “What’s that?”
Lam peered through his thick spectacles. “May I?” He slipped his hands into the concertina arm sockets and manipulated the metal instruments until he was able to lift the block. He used the pincers to squeeze it and observed the dent that was retained by the material. He withdrew his hands.
“I don’t know. Unless I hold it in my hands, I can’t give a professional view.”
Vivian Ip assessed him with her quick eyes. “So what would be a professional guess? I mean, if you came across something like that during the course of your dental practice, what would you assume it was?”
She looked at Chan, who nodded approval.
“Gum. You all must have had to bite on it at one time or another. It retains the bite so a dentist can tell which teeth are proud of the others, where the pressure points are, how to design false teeth, that sort of thing. Actually there are a hundred and one uses for it in a dentist’s surgery.”
“Does dental gum have the same ingredients as chewing gum?” Chan asked.
“I have no idea. Actually it doesn’t much matter what you use; anything that would retain the bite would do. Something with resins and latex would be normal. Coloring to make it easier to work with.”
Aston was beginning to catch up. “Could it be used to construct a dental record-you know, upper left incisor missing, that sort of thing?”
Lam looked from Aston to Chan. “Impossible.” He thrust his hands in his pockets, walked up and down in front of them as if addressing a seminar. “If the purpose of the exercise was to construct a dental record from a distance without the patient’s mouth to look at, gum would have only a secondary function. You’d need detailed photographs of the mouth, taken with a miniature camera; that’s what one would rely on to identify crowns, fillings, et cetera. The gum would be used as a cross-check, to see if there were any special features to the bite-a gap not obvious from the pictures, half a bicuspid missing, that sort of thing. It would take a professional, of course.” He adjusted his spectacles, looked at Chan and smiled. “So I was right; it wasn’t food between the victims’ teeth.”
Chan nodded at Vivian Ip, then led Lam and Aston back down the stairs to the car park where Lam’s Mercedes was waiting. The interlude had taken less than fifteen minutes and could be said to have produced a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Chan complained in the taxi to Aston, it could also be said that they were back to square one: Who were the bodies in the vat? Who were the heads in the bag? He told the taxi driver to take them to the address of a small and very exclusive surgery in a small commercial building on the Peak near the tram stop, where they had made an appointment with Hong Kong’s most expensive cosmetic surgeon.
“Blond hair and blue eyes are two of mankind’s less successful genes. Men can expect to be balding by their mid-thirties, and women will likely be shortsighted. Both sexes will be prone to skin cancer if they spend much time in the sun. The tendency of other races to emulate North European genes through cosmetic surgery is a function of Hollywood and the advertising industry. In Asia, though, the curve is declining rapidly. In the eighties I would do on average forty or fifty eye jobs a year. Nowadays, maybe ten.”
The speaker, Dr. Alexander Yu, smiled; as he did so, slanted lids closed tight as oyster shells. A gene, surely, designed for a race that for ten thousand years looked up from intense green paddy to squint at the sun.
“Eye jobs?” Aston, blond and blue-eyed, said.
“The so-called epicanthic fold, also known as the Mongolian eye fold-I’ve got it-is an inward fold of the upper eyelid across the inner corner of the canthus; it’s what makes us look slit-eyed. Everyone from Mongol extraction has it, so, as a matter of fact, do some American Indians and some Poles and Scandinavians. Now and then women pay to have it removed.” He gestured to the wall, which was adorned with before and after photographs. Chan stood to examine them.
Well, every profession must market itself according to its skills. His stomach turned at the monstrous victims of facial burns, traffic accidents, violent assaults, all of whom had reachieved a degree of aesthetic normality at Yu’s expensive hands. In between the monsters were interspersed the faces of perfectly normal Chinese women-rich Chinese women, Chan suspected-who had paid Yu to modify the so-called Mongolian fold. The result was hardly Caucasian; in the “after” photos eyes no rounder than Chan’s peered out of distinctly flat, high-cheekboned Han faces.
