The Borrowed

by Chan Ho-Kei

He’d assumed I was a policeman too.

  ‘No,’ said Cop 7.

  ‘Have you asked our Sister Lovely in the bakery downstairs? She’s right by the entrance, she might have seen the person you’re looking for,’ he cooed ingratiatingly.

  Cop 7 thought about it. ‘Could you bring us down to talk to her?’

  ‘Of course! This way, please.’

  We followed him downstairs. At the counter, an older but very fashionably dressed lady was chatting and giggling with a customer.

  ‘Hi, Ah Lung, shouldn’t you be upstairs? If the boss catches you again, you’ll be fired for sure,’ she said to the waiter.

  ‘Sister Lovely, these two officers have something to ask you.’ Ah Lung’s face had a smile forced onto it.

  ‘Ah, really?’ Sister Lovely looked stunned, like a student who knows she’s in trouble with the teacher, but not what for.

  ‘Have you seen this man?’ Cop 7 placed the photo on the counter. ‘He might have been here after eleven o’clock today.’

  Sister Lovely let out a breath and stared at the picture for several seconds. ‘This young man... ah, yes! This morning, around half past eleven, he showed up with another guy, about the same age. They hovered around the entrance for a long time, and they were new faces, so I remembered them.’

  ‘Hovered around?’ I asked.

  ‘They looked like they’d never been here before, sticking their heads in and peering everywhere on their way up to their table. They left around twenty to one, with an older man, maybe in his forties or fifties, a bit plump. He bought quite a few sweetheart cakes on his way out. That made me wonder if they were still hungry after their meal.’

  ‘When the two young people arrived, were they carrying anything?’ Me again.

  ‘That’s... I think so. One of them was holding a black bag. But I may be remembering wrongly,’ said Sister Lovely, brow crinkled.

  ‘When they left, did they still have the bag with them?’ said Cop 7. I guessed he was trying to eliminate the tea house itself as a target. Although none had been struck so far, a bomb here would cause a lot of casualties.

  ‘I think so... Yes, they did, I remember. The other young man had a black bag both arriving and leaving. When I sold those sweetheart cakes to that older guy, I remember wondering if he was going to put them into the bag, because it looked quite full, and I worried they might get crushed before he got home.’

  A chill went through my heart, and I guess Cop 7’s too. This morning, I’d seen Sum Chung and Toh Sze-keung leaving the house empty-handed, and at eleven, they’d arrived here with a heavy bag they’d picked up some time during those two hours.

  ‘Did you see which way they went?’ asked Cop 7.

  ‘No idea. God knows where they were driving off to.’

  ‘Driving off?’ I asked.

  ‘They got into a black car parked across the road – where that white car is now.’ I looked out – by coincidence, the white car was Cop 7’s Volkswagen.

  ‘Do you remember what model of car it was? Did you get a look at the licence plate?’ asked Cop 7 urgently.

  ‘Not even the Monkey King would be able to make out the licence number from clear across the road! As for the model, I don’t know anything about cars. All I can say is it was neither big nor small, it had four wheels...’

  This description was useless, but at least we now knew the gang was driving, which probably meant they were taking the car ferry from United to Jordan Road Pier.

  Cop 7 thanked Sister Lovely, then turned to me. ‘We won’t catch up with them now, but we could go to the pier and have a look around... You haven’t had lunch, have you?’

  I was taken aback by the question. Had I been staring at the pastries like a starving orphan? Embarrassed, I shook my head.

  Ah Lung was still hanging around, so Cop 7 said to him, ‘Go wrap up a few baskets of dim sum. Pork and shrimp dumplings, and some sticky rice with chicken or char siu buns.’

  ‘Yes, Officer!’ Ah Lung vanished up the stairs, and appeared less than a minute later with five or six takeout boxes.

  ‘So many! How will two of us eat all this?’ laughed Cop 7.

  ‘Your work is so hard, it’s better you eat a bit more,’ smiled Ah Lung.

  Cop 7 opened one box – I glimpsed at least ten little dumplings, packed tightly together. ‘Three of these boxes will be plenty. How much?’

  ‘This is just a little token from us, don’t worry about paying.’

  ‘How much? Don’t make me ask you again.’ Cop 7’s face was stern. I thought Ah Lung had probably never encountered such a stubborn police officer.

  ‘Uh... uh... four dollars twenty.’

  Cop 7 handed over the cash and walked out with the three boxes. I hurried after him.

  ‘I don’t have enough on me to pay for my share,’ I said as we got in the car.

  ‘I forced you to come and help me, I can at least give you lunch.’ He took off his glasses and loosened his tie. ‘Us policemen sometimes end up starving – when you’re after a suspect, there isn’t always time to even take a sip of water. But there’s no reason you civilians should suffer that way. I haven’t had lunch either – and if it was just me, I’d skip a meal. So it’s good you’re here to remind me to eat.’

  I’d been about to thank him – normally I spend less than a dollar per meal, so this was a banquet – but then I thought it was his case, and he’d dragged me in, so this was just payment. Besides, I was a civilian, so Cop 7 would get all the credit for catching the bombers. Four dollars seemed quite cheap, when you put it like that.

  ‘I’ll drive us to the pier, you go ahead and eat.’ Cop 7 had to turn the key three times before the engine finally started.

  It wasn’t much more than a block from Des Voeux to the pier – I’d only stuffed down two shrimp dumplings when we arrived. They were truly delicious – the tea house was not called Number One for nothing.

  There was a long line of cars waiting – perhaps because it was Saturday, when many people worked half the day and now needed to get home to Kowloon. Getting on the ferry might take thirty to forty minutes. Instead of joining the queue, Cop 7 parked by the side of the road.

  ‘You keep eating, I’ll go over to the terminal – I want to ask the staff if they’ve seen any suspicious people or objects. It’ll be dangerous if the bombs are in there. Wait here for me.’

  As Cop 7 walked towards the building, I kept popping tasty morsels into my mouth whilst studying his car. Its interior was spartan, with no ornaments whatsoever. A piece of paper was pasted to the windshield with the Hong Kong Police insignia – probably so he could drive in and out of the station without being stopped. I looked at the dashboard, then below it, until I found the controls for the radio. Turning it on, I tuned it to an English pop song.

  I’d almost finished the first box of dim sum when Cop 7 reappeared. ‘I didn’t see anything. The staff said nothing unusual’s happened so far this afternoon.’

  I handed him one of the boxes and turned down the radio. ‘So they probably took the ferry to Kowloon?’ It was half past three, two and a half hours since the plotters left the tea house. What if they’d already finished their tasks and ‘dispersed’, as Master Chow said?

  Cop 7 picked up a char siu bun and gulped it down in a couple of bites. With his mouth full, he mumbled, ‘Very possibly. I’ve shown Toh’s photo to the staff but they didn’t remember him. All we can do is keep on their tail and gather intelligence.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking...’ I opened the third dim sum box and grabbed a bun. ‘The docks probably aren’t their targets.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Remember that X on the map?’

  ‘You mean on Causeway Bay Magistracy?’

  ‘That was one of them, and the other one was on the straight line between United and Jordan Road,’ I said, munching. ‘I think they might represent the real bombs.’

  ‘The real bombs? You mean at Murray House and Sha Tin?’ />
  ‘No, forget the list, the list was just a decoy. The map shows their real plan. The police found a real bomb at Causeway Bay yesterday, and there was an X there. So that other X on the water might be their other real bomb.’

  ‘You think the target is the ferry?’

  ‘Well, yes, I wasn’t suggesting they’d just drop a bomb into the water.’

  ‘But what’s the point of blowing up a ferry?’

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure either.

  ‘Right, keep thinking about that. In the meantime, let’s get in line.’ He started the car.

  In the half hour we waited, I kept thinking about the possible meaning of every marking on that map. The police quarters and the other three locations from the list that had no times attached were probably just picked out in order to waste the authorities’ time.

  ‘United Pier probably isn’t the real target, because it’s close to the fake targets of Murray House and Central Magistracy, and the officers who’d been sent there could rush over quickly,’ I pointed out. Cop 7 nodded.

  Still, we couldn’t work out from there what the criminals’ next move would be. I could only guess that the ‘operation’ they’d talked about would take place on the boat. Maybe Master Chow would use Mr Toh and Mr Sum to distract the crew. But the terminal staff had noticed nothing unusual, so we’d have to ask the sailors ourselves.

  At four o’clock, after two ferries had set off in front of us, we finally got on board. The two-storey car ferry was named Man Ting, and I guessed each deck must hold twenty or thirty cars. I’d been on passenger ferries, but this was my first time sharing the space with vehicles. On the boat, some drivers and passengers stayed where they were, snoozing, chatting, reading newspapers or listening to the radio, but most got out and stood on deck enjoying the ocean breeze.

  Cop 7 and I approached the crew.

  ‘Police.’ He showed his ID. ‘I’d like to ask you all if you’ve seen this young man, some time after twelve forty p.m. today?’

  A few of the sailors gathered round and studied the picture of Toh Sze-keung, but all shook their heads.

  ‘Have you encountered anything odd today?’ Cop 7 asked next.

  ‘No, Officer. Today’s been the same as usual, lots of cars and people, nothing odd about that,’ said a bearded crew member.

  ‘Nothing on our boat, but during the shift change just now, I heard there was a disturbance on the Man Bong,’ said another sailor, in his forties.

  ‘What kind of disturbance?’

  ‘They said about an hour and a half ago, on the Central-to-Yau Ma Tei boat, two young people started shouting about something or other. The crew were afraid they’d come to blows, but after yelling at each other for a while, they seemed to become friends again. Kids today!’

  ‘Can I reach the Man Bong crew to ask more?’

  ‘Of course, but we’ve just left Central, which means the Man Bong will just have left Yau Ma Tei. They’ll arrive at Jordan Road about half an hour after you.’

  We were scheduled to dock at half past four, so the Man Bong would arrive at five.

  ‘Could their target be the Man Bong?’ I asked, once we were back in the car.

  ‘Back to the ferry bomb theory?’ said Cop 7.

  ‘Sinking a ferry wouldn’t achieve much, but maybe they’re after a particular person on that boat.’ I frowned in thought. ‘That would make their conversation much easier to understand. Mr Toh and Mr Sum pretended to have an argument to distract the crew, while Master Chow placed a bomb on the boat. When Mr Toh said the target wouldn’t be easy, he meant there would be too many witnesses on the ferry – but Master Chow said it was more vulnerable than he imagined, because no one there would expect a bomb. It wouldn’t be too hard to kill someone in a city this busy – getting away would be the hard part. But a ferry thirty minutes into its journey is completely isolated – even the coastguard and firefighting boats would have trouble getting to it, and the lifesaving equipment on board isn’t always in good working order. Most importantly, the culprits would be long gone.’

  ‘Damn!’ Cop 7 leaped from the car. I followed closely behind. Sprinting up to the bearded crew member, he gasped, ‘I need to radio to the Man Bong.’

  ‘Officer, I don’t have the authority to do that, you’ll need to talk to the captain. But if you’re just going to ask about your suspects, you might as well wait till we’ve docked, it’s not like you can send a photo over the air...’

  ‘No, I need to send the Man Bong a message.’ Cop 7 grabbed the sailor’s arm. ‘They need to search for suspicious objects – I think there’s a bomb on board.’

  All the crew within earshot looked stunned, and after exchanging looks with the others, the bearded man said, ‘Officer, is this real?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s a possibility. Ask the Man Bong crew to carry out a search, without alarming the passengers.’

  ‘Understood. Please wait here.’ The sailor nodded and went off to the wheelhouse, returning with the captain. Cop 7 explained the situation, and the captain headed back to telegraph the Man Bong. Cop 7 and I sat with the resting sailors, waiting for his return. Although the scenery was beautiful in the bay, and the cool breezes refreshing, we weren’t in the mood to enjoy any of it.

  ‘That’s the Man Bong,’ said one of the crew, pointing at a ferry coming towards us. Looking at that vessel, I couldn’t help imagining it blowing into smithereens and sinking right before our eyes, plunging the passengers and crew into a nightmare few would survive.

  But the Man Bong didn’t explode, only passed quietly by.

  About fifteen minutes later, when our ferry was almost at the Jordan Road terminal, the bearded sailor hurried back and said, ‘Officer, the Man Bong crew say they’ve found nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘They searched twice, but there were no suspicious objects at all. Is your information correct, Officer? Their captain said he could take the boat out of service when they get to Central, but if it turns out to be wrong, he’ll get into big trouble – he doesn’t want that responsibility.’

  Cop 7’s face contorted, as if he was having trouble making a decision.

  ‘No need to take it out of service – tell them to continue as normal,’ I interrupted, making my voice sound authoritative. ‘The Man Bong should reach United Pier around four thirty, and then should be at Jordan Road by five? We’ll wait at Jordan Road and get on the boat ourselves to investigate. Tell the crew to stay vigilant for now – the bomb might be set to go off on the next trip.’

  ‘Yes, Officer.’ Beardy dashed off once again to the bridge.

  ‘We’ll wait in the car – let us know if there’s any news,’ I said to the other crew members, who nodded in acknowledgement.

  Back in the car, Cop 7 turned to me with an unhappy expression. ‘Why’d you let the Man Bong continue its journey? What if the crew have missed something, and there’s a disaster at sea?’

  ‘We don’t even know that there really is a bomb on board!’ I snapped. I was getting used to working with Cop 7, and was even beginning to feel like his equal. ‘Anyway, I noticed something strange, and now I think we may have been wrong.’

  ‘Strange how?’

  ‘Didn’t that crew member say earlier that the dispute on the Man Bong took place an hour and a half ago, on the Central–Yau Ma Tei route?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That was the two-thirty ferry. It’s less than a half-hour journey from Central to Yau Ma Tei, call it an hour there and back, including turnaround time. While we were waiting to board, I observed four car ferries in rotation on this line, leaving every fifteen minutes. Sister Lovely said Toh Sze-keung and the rest left Number One Tea House around twelve forty. If they had to wait in line, say, half an hour to board, they’d have been on the one-fifteen ferry – but they ended up on the two-thirty one. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?’

  ‘Maybe they were targeting the Man Bong specifically,’ Cop 7 shot back.

&
nbsp; ‘They could just as easily have done that on the one-thirty trip.’

  ‘Or maybe they did board the one-fifteen or one-thirty boat, and got right back on after disembarking at Jordan Road, which would bring them back to Central in time to get on the two-thirty one.’

  ‘Not possible. They’d have to queue again each time – they couldn’t just get back on. And they couldn’t have stayed on board, or the crew would have mentioned it when you asked if anything odd had happened. Besides, that probably isn’t allowed, with these ferries being so crowded.’

  Cop 7 was silent, as if thinking it through.

  ‘Now I think about it, there’s an issue with our previous supposition,’ I went on. ‘They might be targeting a particular person, but there’d be no way to be sure which boat the victim would board. So I have a new idea.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘A car bomb.’

  Cop 7’s eyes widened.

  ‘Think about it – everything makes sense.’ I gestured at the cars surrounding us. ‘The criminals’ target is some British person. They wait near the dock, and when they see the victim’s car approach, they follow and get on the same boat. Toh and Sum then fake a fight to distract the target long enough for Master Chow to plant a bomb in his car.’

  ‘Why a British person?’

  ‘Master Chow said, “The white-skinned pig won’t be expecting this move.”’

  We went looking for the bearded sailor once more, asking him to get in touch with the Man Bong again.

  ‘Officer, we’re about to dock – I have a lot to do.’

  ‘Just one question – please,’ implored Cop 7. ‘Ask if there were any foreigners on the Central-to-Yau Ma Tei boat – this is the last time I’ll bother you.’

  Beardy seemed surprised a police officer would ask so humbly, and went off reluctantly.

  He was back a minute later.

  ‘No, they said not a single one.’ He looked as though he no longer trusted us.

  ‘None?’

  ‘It was a boatful of Chinese people,’ sighed the sailor. ‘Officer, why not just wait at the dock? The Man Bong will be along at five o’clock, and then you can question them for as long as you like.’