“Yes, sir.”
“In all circumstances?”
“Yes, sir.”
Field smiled and turned back to the box, suddenly less confident that this process was going to lead anywhere. If the headquarters staff wanted something hushed up, he thought it likely they would instruct Givreaux’s men not to attend the scene of the crime, in which case it would be well nigh impossible to file a report, even if they had wished to.
He worked back all the way to April 4, which was where the box started. Most days, there were only a few incidents. May 1 turned out to have been exceptionally busy.
The constable brought him tea and he sipped it slowly and ate the biscuits that had come with it.
There didn’t seem much else that he could usefully do.
He leaned forward to look through the cards for May 1 one more time, going extremely slowly, so as to pick up anything he might have missed. After flicking through five or six, he noticed that there was one missing.
Each card was coded, the serial number written in black ink at the top left-hand corner. Here the cards jumped from F6714 to F6716.
He looked carefully through the whole box to be sure that it had not been filed wrongly, somewhere else.
“Constable . . .” Field leaned back and put his hands in his pockets. “In the Settlement, all incidents have to be first noted in the incident book, usually by the duty sergeant, before an incident report is written up and filed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s the same here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you mind showing me the incident book for May 1?”
The constable nodded and left the room, walking briskly down the corridor. He was gone for perhaps ten minutes and Field began to think he might have consulted Givreaux about this new request, but when he returned, he apologized for the delay and explained that one of the detectives had been noting down the details of a domestic dispute he’d attended.
Field took the book.
He flicked through the pages, his pulse quickening.
It was there, in Ngoc’s neat flowing hand:
There were no further details, nor was there a house or apartment number. Avenue Joffre stretched the entire length of the French Concession, so door-to-door inquiries were likely to prove time-consuming and possibly fruitless. Field assumed that, somewhere, there must be a file on the case.
He turned around again. “You would keep files here on important cases or individuals?”
“No, sir. Rue Wagner.”
“They’re all kept at headquarters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There are none here at all?”
“No, sir.”
“So what happens if you want to look at a file? Do you have to go down to Rue Wagner?”
“A car delivers the file in the morning and takes it back in the evening, sir. Or we can go down if there is a hurry.”
Field nodded and smiled, turning something over in his mind. He held out the incident book. “Do you remember this case—Simonov? Do you remember the address or section of . . .”
The constable looked at the entry and shook his head, but his smile vanished.
Field turned the book around and began to leaf through its pages. He worked forward but nothing caught his eye, so he went to the Simonov entry and worked back to the beginning.
He reached March 31, where the book began.
He walked briskly down the corridor and was about to continue through the hall, but he changed his mind at the last minute and turned right, into Givreaux’s office.
“Success?” the Frenchman asked. He stood and moved to the side of his big teak desk. It was covered in paperwork, held in place by a series of crocodile-skin weights.
“In a sense, yes.” Field cleared his throat. His instincts were to leave it at that, but he could not resist pushing further. “Do you remember the Simonov case?”
The lieutenant was unfazed, responding with an indolent shake of the head.
Field persisted. “Natalya Simonov, Russian girl stabbed more than a month ago.”
“I don’t recall.”
