“That’s one theory, I suppose. It still drives me nuts to find this disorder. We’re trying to run a professional, global business. We have procedures and rules that have evolved over time and are getting more and more modern and here I feel I’ve stumbled into the archaeological records of a Ching dynasty silk trader, written in a foreign language and half of which have been lost. I mean look at this. Is this an English sentence?” He pointed at a fax.
Foxcroft nodded politely and asked, “So what are your conclusions?”
“I can only assume that it’s being done on purpose.”
“Probably, partially, and also these sort of written records are not important so why spend time on them? Remember that the Chinese have a much more highly trained memory than any of us Westerners and so they tend to avoid writing things down. Often to protect themselves, or because it’s simply not necessary. It’s all up here.” The Detective tapped his temple with the mobile phone antenna. “By the age of eight a Chinese kid has had to memorise over five thousand characters just to be able to read and write.”
“I expect you get used to it after all these years.”
“One has to and its part of the job’s challenge and enjoyment. I’ve seen quite a few blokes driven to drink and distraction. You can’t let it get to you. You can’t get angry at it. You’ve got to accept it as another way of living. The traditional colonial way of dealing with it was to legislate everything and then make them learn it by rote. Make sure they fill in the forms, file all the papers in the right place. In the Force we call it the Police General Orders, the PGO’s, it’s like a bible. It works well until you get to a point where free thought and initiative is required. Then the system breaks down.”
“But they have some brilliant business people.”
“Yes, but that’s deviousness rather than initiative.”
Jim shook his head. “Rather you than me. I’ll be glad when all this has been sorted out and I can get back to my logical, simple existence in the City. Can I offer you a drink or something?”
Foxcroft shook his head. “The reason I’m here is that I’m still puzzling through the connections in these cases. Because there are connections, and they scare me. This is not a series of simple Triad murders. Nobody believes that of course. There’s much more power motivating this, undoubtedly political. There are stakes here that are so high, someone is willing to over-react. Trust me, we don’t get that many murders in Hong Kong. The bodies are piling up at a furious pace. I’m speaking frankly here and this shouldn’t go beyond these four walls.”
“There is some information that may or may not be of interest to you,” Jim said, once the inspector had lapsed into a questioning silence. “Our biggest problem in McPherson Ferguson is that we’ve been getting increasingly worse quality product and containers that have been arriving in Europe are missing cartons—we call it short-shipments—on a regular basis. Any of three things could be happening. The factory is cheating us and loading less. In which case our office here is allowing it on purpose or has been too stupid and inefficient to control the problem. Or the cartons are being stolen during custom checks—possible but very rare. Or the cartons are being off-loaded at their destination. Now, that is much more likely but who would want one or two boxes of shirts or toys? There simply isn’t enough margin in that to mount an international operation. If that was Bob Chen’s scam and he wanted to line his pockets, it’s pretty cheap stuff.”
Foxcroft took out a black notebook and jotted down a few sentences. He said, “Is there any pattern in the products or the destinations?”
Jim looked slightly triumphant. “Not really except one: they all come from the same factory complex in Shanghai.”
“Ah-ha,” Foxcroft replied and scratched his nose slowly with the end of his gold Cross pen. “Then they’re smuggling stuff.”
“That’s what I thought. But what? Drugs, weapons? Not people. They’d only get one or two adults into that sort of space and that hardly seems worth it.”
“Not to be discounted. The Chinese are experts at quiet, insidious manoeuvres. When they ask for a bribe it is so small it hardly seems worth arguing about. We Westerners accept money once, a huge amount, then do a runner. But to them small dribs and drabs are more sensible, less conspicuous, less aggravating. Two men per container, maybe ten containers a month, every month for two years. That amounts up.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Your shipments all go to the same destination, do they?” Foxcroft asked.
“Not one, but a limited list of destination ports. Our clients dictate where they want the goods, of course. Europe and USA ports like Le Havre and Rotterdam, San Francisco.”
“Right. Good locations for illegal immigrants. Now assuming these short shipments are all coming from the same origin, then it would be interesting to know exactly where else that factory is shipping to.”
Jim nodded in agreement. They were onto something.
“How can we find that kind of information?” Foxcroft asked.
“What we need is a company that specialises in supervising shipments and auditing factories, maybe they have records that we could get into. There’s a company called Global Quality Assurance. One of their salesmen came to see me in London. I was going to get in touch with them this week. We were thinking of using them to find out why there were so many short shipments.” Jim leant forward, his elbows on the desk.
Foxcroft looked puzzled for an instant. “I know this company…” He hesitated. “The boss plays golf with a mate of mine and we’ve met up for beers a few times.”
“Are they well-known out here? Are they reputable?”
“I’ve no idea. But I think they’re pretty established. In fact I’ve got the guy’s mobile number in my phone memory.”
Foxcroft made the call. A telephone operator answered and asked him to leave a message. Ten minutes later the MD of Global Quality Assurance called back.
“Hey, David, this is Simon Foxcroft from the Hong Kong Police. I’m here with Jim Beauregard from a company called McPherson Ferguson. We are working on a case related to this company and I wonder if you could give us some help finding data.”
Jim listened to his end of the conversation but it didn’t tell him much. When Foxcroft rang off he explained that Murphy had told him they had records available on a CD-ROM from one of the mainland government departments which listed every container in and out of China giving origin and destination as well as all cargo details.
“He sounded a bit cagey about it,” the detective grinned, “so I guess they must have bribed some official for this list. Useful in their line of business. He’ll get back to me once he’s had one of his girls make the search.”
“Is there any way the police can check out that factory in Shanghai then?” Jim asked.
Foxcroft smiled. He shook his head. “Not legally. Hong Kong is now part of the mainland but there’s no jurisdiction. Anything like that would have to be clandestine. Not within my area of competence.”
But Jim thought there was something in the copper’s face that implied this wasn’t such a great impossibility. Foxcroft seemed to have a cunning light in his eyes but he wasn’t going to share his real thoughts.
They talked some more, then Foxcroft stood up, ready to leave, promising to keep Jim informed.
“I got a phone call from Scrimple earlier.”
“Oh, yes?”
“He said he’s resigned and is going off to Thailand for some holiday. Do you know him well?”
“Resigned?” Foxcroft stuffed his mobile in the back pocket of his jeans. “That’s a bit extreme. Maybe his time has come. He had a pretty shitty posting.”
“What’s the story on Scrimple? He seems a good guy but not too happy with his job.”
“I only know the gossip around the messes,” Foxcroft said. “He got involved in a strange Triad case a few years back and since then he’s been a marked man. It’s how the Force works. You tread in shit, it
sticks. He practically rolled in it. One of his best friends, another boom-baan, committed suicide and another inspector, a guy from Organised Crime got shot while they were trying to make an arrest. It didn’t help Scrimple’s career prospects. So he’s been jogging on the spot ever since.”
“That’s what he hinted at when we were drinking in Wanchai yesterday.”
“What, before he went blasting off with his gun? Not the smartest thing to do. Anyway, his problems were before my time, but they still talk about it. Whatever actually happened, Scrimple didn’t come out smelling of roses. He’s lucky they allowed him to stay on in the Force.”
“Poor guy.”
Foxcroft shrugged as if to say, one can’t fight fate and its twisted sense of humour. Nor could you avoid making stupid mistakes if providence had chosen to burden you with insufficient common sense. He suspected it was a mixture of both in the case of Theo Scrimple.
* * * *
By six thirty Jim called it a day and decided it was time for a swim in the hotel pool. He’d tried phoning Doris a few times and left some voice mails but so far she hadn’t replied.
He’d spent half an hour talking with the Old Man back in London, updating his boss on what he was doing and on how poorly, in his opinion, the office had been run. Mr. Ferguson didn’t comment too much, telling Jim tersely to get on with his action plan and start interviewing replacements as soon as possible. Nor did the shocking murder of the Fashion Coordinator elicit much of a response from the other end of the phone. It was just another horror on top of what had gone before. One could become numbed by the accumulation of disasters. McPherson Ferguson’s reputation would probably never recover from these incidents.
As Jim was walking out of his hotel room in a bathrobe, the phone rang. It was Doris, finally.
“I’ve been so busy taking care of my sister’s children,” the girl explained.
Jim didn’t reply. His instinct was to let it pass although his feelings were hurt. It sounded too glib a response but making a fuss wasn’t going to get him into her knickers or a place in her heart, two alternatives that remained attractive to him as he listened to her voice.
“Have you had dinner yet?” she asked.
“I was just going up for a swim.”
“I’ll come over in an hour. We can go for sushi.”
The only raw fish that Jim wanted to eat was hers, nevertheless it sounded like a good idea. He agreed and went upstairs to the rooftop pool where he vented his frustrations by thrashing around in the luke-warm water. The harbour lights glinted and the sound of the city, although muted was constant in the distance.
Doris rang from downstairs an hour and a half later by which time Jim had started to worry she was going to bottle out again. Doris sparkled in a tight black, sequined dress. She brushed his cheek with her glossy lips then led him to the escalator, into the basement.
“It’s one of the best Japanese in town,” she explained. The Chinese waitresses, dressed up in kimonos with pillows strapped to their backs yelled out Japanese greetings. Doris ordered the most expensive tuna fish sashimi, while Jim chose a hot saki.
“Have you been working hard?” she asked.
“Pretty hard and its driving me nuts.”
“What happened?”
Jim took a sip of his rice wine, careful not to burn his lips. “Far too much. Another Manager, an English woman, was found dead and then yesterday myself and a police inspector I was drinking with were attacked by a bunch of triad guys in the street.”
Doris dropped her chopsticks with shock. Jim grinned, pleased with the effect his news had on her. At least all the excitement was paying some unexpected dividends.
“Oh, my God, Jim. Tell me you’re joking?”
He shook his head, setting his face into a serious expression. Then he slowly updated her on what had happened since their tea together. He enjoyed the look of horror in her eyes.
“What about the office then?” Doris asked when he’d finished his recital.
“That’s another complete nightmare. No one will tell me anything. As if they don’t know or Bob Chen might come back from the dead and curse them all for leaking his secrets to a smelly foreigner. The files are all incomplete, not as if somebody trashed them, but as if they were done sloppily, only when it took someone’s fancy. The smartest person in the office is this girl Madeleine Fong. She’s clammed up completely as if she knows much more but is frightened of getting involved. What can I do? Fire anyone who won’t cooperate?” Jim paused to pick up a piece of eel from his plate. “I should by rights! Threaten them all with dismissal.” He placed the eel in his mouth, chewed for a moment, then added: “What’s the use, then our shipments will be even more screwed up than ever before. You don’t know any good Office Managers by any chance? Don’t you have a cousin or brother who’s in the trading business?”
“None that could do this.”
“Anyway what’s happened with your school-friend, the one who works for that Henry Chan guy, the tycoon?”
“She’s been too busy.”
“Don’t you talk all the time on the phone?”
“She hasn’t time for chatting. But we’re going to meet up soon. I’m trying to get her to tell me more about her boss but she’s very defensive. Even he doesn’t treat her so well. For a billionaire he is very mean. And he’s always yelling and shouting. There’s a lot of stress.”
“So no idea yet why they kept on mentioning our company? There must have been some dirty deals going down using Bob Chen as a fixer.” Jim explained about his meeting with Simon Foxcroft and how the detective thought the short-shipments may have been part of a human cargo scam.
“You really think so?” Doris asked.
He raised his hands in the air and turned down the corners of his mouth like a puzzled Frenchman. “How the hell do I know? It’s all a mystery and what’s worse a real pain in the frigging gonads at this moment.”
“It’s very exciting.”
“I’d rather it was boring and I was back watching the Nine o’clock news on my leather sofa in Green Hills Garden.”
“What a typically English comment.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“Lots of things but you’ll never understand.”
“Try me.”
She shook her head smiling. “My auntie has gone to visit her friends in Shenzhen today.”
Jim was puzzled. “So?”
“You’re not very smart today, Mr. Big Import Manager out of his depth in Hong Kong, are you?” She laughed, reaching across and stroking his stubbly chin.
“Your Auntie has gone to Shenzhen?” he repeated and then realised what she was trying to tell him.
Chapter 17
The two burglars wore black balaclavas and rubber-soled Doctor Martin boots. Their torches were taped up except for small pinpricks of red light. They both carried sturdy diving knives strapped to their right calves in case they were attacked by dogs or rabid night watchmen.
Echo One had done this sort of thing before and whereas Echo Two had not, he was barely nervous because his SAS training had taught him the basic drills as well as given him the confidence to cope with all types of challenges clandestine work might toss at him.
“No broken glass on top of this section,” Echo One whispered. Echo Two made the okay sign, visible in the light from the quarter-moon in the blue-black sky.
Echo One got his back against the wall and placed the palms of his hands together, creating a stirrup for Echo Two. His partner catapulted himself up until he lay stretched across the top. Reaching his arm down and bracing with the other, Echo Two dragged One up to his position.
Silently they lay there for a minute, listening and watching, even smelling the air, allowing all their senses to get involved and especially the sixth sense which some people didn’t believe in, but they knew better.
Echo One, the leader, pointed a gloved index finger at his partner, who blinked only in acknowledgement. The other two memb
ers of their team were on the roof of a nearby building watching through passive night goggles and the sights of a silenced sniper rifle. It shouldn’t come to this but the mission wouldn’t fail through lack of fire power. The briefing officer had decided against the burglars carrying side-arms. It made sense under the circumstances but both men felt naked without their Brownings.
Ten minutes later they’d crossed the empty car park, avoided a sleeping security guard and were crouching under a window that had been left conveniently open. During the initial recce this entry point was noted although alternatives had been planned in case a zealous employee had closed it by the time they got there.
As a youngster, not older than twelve, Echo One had learnt the trade of housebreaking from his father. After his father had disappeared for his final, longest stretch in Wandsworth Prison the young lad had chosen a more stable profession and managed to slide into an apprenticeship with the Royal Engineers. But years later the Regiment had found him and reawakening his family traditions, honed his forgotten skills to a greater perfection, putting them to more productive uses for Queen and country. In Northern Ireland he’d been a highly sought-after expert for special ops.
The factory area was non-descript. It could have been anywhere in China. The concrete walls, the flimsy windows. The long, low, three-storey building was a machine for manufacturing products. It housed trestle tables at which hundreds of young female workers could sit on tiny, three-legged wooden stools, their small hands assembling whatever was decreed by the management.
The two SAS men had been briefed on this in the embassy cellar. They’d only arrived in Shanghai the day before and there was minimum time to adapt and acclimatise to local customs or conditions. Not that it mattered. They had a job to do and were trained to drop from the sky and hit the ground running, jumping, ducking, diving, rocking and rolling. Mentally these men lived in a parallel universe. They were briefed on a mission; their eyes glazed up, they thought hard about everything that could go wrong, took all necessary precautions, both psychological and physical, packed their kit, checked their armaments and got on with the job.
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