The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But I know enough about police work to know that if you don’t have a suspect within forty-eight hours then the chances are that you’re never going to have one. Come on, Howard, we’re wasting our time here.’

  I walked out with Howard behind me, past the spitter and back into the scorching sunshine, swinging the plastic bag by my side. A bag full of Sally.

  This time I was the one walking fast, the anger burning through my system, and Howard had to jog a little to keep up.

  ‘You must let me borrow that book some time,’ he panted as we made our way towards a taxi rank.

  ‘Which book?’

  ‘The one about winning friends and influencing people …’

  ‘Fuck off, Howard.’

  We flagged down another cab and joined a line of traffic waiting to enter the tunnel that linked the island to Kowloon. It took the best part of fifteen minutes to travel the one hundred yards to the tunnel entrance and less than five to drive through it. We had to stop at the rank of pay booths to hand over the toll and then we were into the traffic of Kowloon once more, and on our way to the morgue.

  ‘There’s no need for you to identify …’ Howard began to say, but I cut him short with an angry look. ‘It’s definitely her,’ he finished lamely. ‘One of her friends has already done the paperwork.’

  I didn’t bother even trying to explain to Howard why I had to see Sally one last time, to touch her and feel the cold flesh that would show me that she was dead. I would have had to have told him about a frightened little girl with a tear-stained face who’d climbed into my bed a week after our father had died. It was three o’clock in the morning and she was seven years old. Her hair was unkempt and her cheeks were flushed and wet and she was rubbing her hands together like an old woman. I put my arms around her and held her, feeling the tears trickle onto my shoulder as she cried.

  ‘I dreamt Daddy was back,’ she said, haltingly between the sobs. ‘He came into my room and said he’d been away but he’d come back and he’d bought me a present. He kissed me. I could feel him kiss me. Then I woke up and he wasn’t there.’ She sobbed again and after a while her breathing steadied and deepened and I thought she was asleep, but she spoke again, whispering into my ear. ‘Daddy is dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, love, he is.’ There was no doubt about it, we’d watched the coffin slide along the stainless steel rollers and through a purple velvet curtain on the way to the furnace to the tune of some recorded hymn. We’d seen the coffin go but I knew what Sally meant. We’d said goodbye to a wooden box with a wreath on top, we hadn’t said goodbye to him. He’d died in his office of a massive haemorrhage that flooded his brain in less than two seconds and which killed him before he even hit the floor. Click, like a light being switched off. Sally and I were at home when our mother got the phone call. It was the school summer holidays, I was waiting for my A level results and Sally was enjoying her seemingly endless break from primary school drudgery. Our mother walked into the room in a state of shock and put her arms around us. The Saint was on television, Roger Moore in black and white. It was 4.15 in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday. Our dad was dead and we never saw him again. He was cremated three days later and Sally started having the ‘I’m back’ dreams.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s dead,’ she whispered. ‘They should have let me see him,’ and then she fell asleep. She was right, of course. We’d last seen him at the wheel of his BMW, waving goodbye and promising to take us to the pictures that night. The memories were all of him alive, walking, talking, laughing, shouting. The memories didn’t allow for the possibility of him not coming back. He was alive in our heads and our hearts. We should have been allowed to see him before they cremated him, but that wasn’t the way things were done. He went from the office to a hospital to an undertaker into a sealed coffin and into a furnace. A wake would have been better, the Irish had the right idea, put the corpse on show, remember the good times, celebrate them, but be aware that they are over. It’s not even a human thing. Take two dogs that have lived together for years, then one of them gets run over. The survivor will pine for weeks, searching the house, looking for its partner, ears pricking up hopefully at every night-time noise, just in case. But if you take him to the body of the dead dog, he’ll sniff it, maybe nudge it with its nose, then walk away uninterested. There’s no forlorn howling, no whimpering, no attempt to get the carcass on its feet, just a placid acceptance that what was once living is now dead. Acceptance, that was what I wanted, just the knowledge that Sally was dead so that she wouldn’t walk into my room when I was asleep and say ‘I’m back’ and kiss me on the cheek. But how could I explain that to Howard? I couldn’t, so I didn’t even try.

  The taxi stopped in front of a line of wreaths on the pavement. Before I could reach for the door handle it was opened by a swarthy youth wearing a red T-shirt and dark blue shorts. His hair was damp with sweat and in his hand he held a battered black clipboard. He spoke to me in rapid Cantonese and I shook my head. Howard was still sitting in the taxi, sorting green notes out of his wallet. The man pushed the clipboard in front of my face – it held a chart full of different designs of wreaths, circular, oval, square, plain and fancy. He poked at one of the varieties with his forefinger and spoke to me again. I shrugged, but by then Howard was by my side.

  ‘What does he want?’ I asked.

  ‘He wants to know if you will buy any flowers.’ He could see my confusion, so waved his hand, taking in the tower blocks around us. ‘These are all funeral parlours. He just assumed that you are here to make funeral arrangements and he hopes you will buy one of his wreaths.

  ‘Tell him to fuck off, Howard,’ I said. Two more taxis had pulled up behind ours and more of the vultures descended, grabbing for the door handles before the wheels had stopped turning.

  ‘Where do we go?’ I asked Howard, and he led me down a small side road towards a high wall. There was a sign there which said Kowloon Public Mortuary with a row of Chinese characters below it. Across a tarmac car park was a building the colour of creme caramel. We walked to two glass doors at the entrance but they were locked and Howard had to press the bell by the side of the doorway until a young Chinese girl in a white coat came to open it. We walked into a cool hall tiled like an East End butcher’s shop. There was a big steel freezer door to the left but we walked past it, Howard talking to the girl in English, slowly, pronouncing each word clearly and precisely.

  ‘She’s on the ground floor, this way,’ he said to me. We followed the girl to another freezer door, which she pulled open with a grunt. Plumes of cold air billowed out and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees. I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. I’d visited mortuaries in Britain but they were as sanitized as a supermarket, bodies neatly stored away in oversize filing cabinets. This place was obscene. The fridge was filled with metal racks, like steel bunk beds, three high. Each was occupied by a corpse. Not one was covered, they were just lying there in the clothes they’d been delivered in. There was an old man in a pair of green and white pyjamas, his face twisted into a sneering grimace, a child with her throat cut, her head practically severed from her body, a young man in a safari suit who’d obviously gone through a car windscreen. All of them just lying there like broken robots.

  ‘Why aren’t they covered with cloths or something?’ I asked the girl, but I’d spoken too fast and she just gave me a puzzled look. ‘This is macabre, Howard. It’s like something out of a cheap horror movie.’

  At the far end two corpses, stiff with rigor mortis, had been stacked against the wall like planks of wood. They were both men, and both had been placed with their foreheads against the side of the fridge, arms frozen by their sides.

  All the bodies had labels tied to their big toes, name, date and identification number.

  The girl walked towards the two standing bodies, and then turned left and pointed at one of the racks.

  ‘Oh God, I don’t believe this,’ I said. The
corpses were all dressed in the clothes they’d died in, and Sally had been wearing nothing when she’d fallen from the hotel. Now she was lying on a sheet of metal as naked as the day she was born, her flesh as cold and white as a boiled chicken, frost collecting on the black triangular thatch of hair between her legs. Close up I could see she was covered in grey bruises and contusions and then I realized I was looking at the good side, the side that hadn’t hit the ground first. Howard put his hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me back but I shook him off and stepped forward, my arms stretched out towards her. Her left side was crushed and mangled, the face, down the arm and hip and her leg, the blood congealed and hard, the flesh ripped and shredded from the impact, fragments of bone protruding through the punctured skin. I looked at Howard and his face said: ‘What did you expect after falling fifteen floors?’ and though the words were never phrased I said: ‘I thought she’d at least have been covered. At least they could have covered her up.’ I pointed at the girl in the white coat, my finger wavering before her startled face.

  ‘Get a cloth, something to cover her with.’ She didn’t move, her mouth open like one of the frozen corpses. ‘Now,’ I shouted at her. ‘I want her covered, now.’ She ran from the cold room, coat flapping around her legs. I took Sally’s hand in mine and it felt like wax. Her breasts wobbled grotesquely as I raised her arm and pressed her palm against my cheek. The ring wasn’t there.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here,’ I said to her quietly, then as an afterthought I added, ‘Sleep well, love.’ I put her arm back alongside her body and walked away without looking back. Howard followed me out of the fridge and closed the door behind us. I didn’t even notice the heat as we stepped into the outside air, though within seconds I could feel the beads of sweat collecting on my brow. Condensation was starting to collect on the inside of the polythene bag. I’d forgotten I was still holding it.

  ‘We’re going back to the Excelsior?’ said Howard, as he pushed me into the back of a cab.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to see where it happened.’ He didn’t argue, just gave the name of the hotel to the driver and then settled back into the plastic seat, eyes closed like a Buddha in repose.

  It was a modern glass and steel structure, flanked by shops filled with cameras and Gucci bags, places where tourists could be fleeced by professionals. The pavements were packed with people, moving slowly, knocking and banging gently into each other in the afternoon heat. Young Chinese couples walking arm in arm, sweating tourists in brightly coloured holiday outfits, schoolchildren in white uniforms with book-filled rucksacks on their backs, and a seemingly endless supply of old ladies in virtually identical flowery cotton shirts and trousers. There were old men in shorts and plastic sandals, fit young men in dark suits with slim briefcases, middle-aged men carrying birds in small cages, and women with babies strapped to their backs with strips of cloth, a tidal flow of humanity that coursed through the arteries of Kowloon.

  The taxi door was opened by a youth in a scarlet outfit that looked like it belonged in the Charge of the Light Brigade. I left Howard to pay the fare and walked into the lobby through two huge frosted glass doors, each held open by a young boy. They seemed to go for door opening in a big way in Hong Kong, probably a combination of cheap labour and expensive automatic doors. The atrium seemed to stretch up forever, it was square with ranks of internal balconies crawling with ivy. Four cylindrical see-through lifts glided silently up and down while below them a bustling coffee shop was entertained by a gorgeous Chinese girl in a white dress playing a grand piano. I craned my neck back to watch one of the passenger-filled lifts soar up as Howard arrived at my side.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, it’s one of the best. Not up to the standard of the Mandarin or the Regent yet, but they’re getting there. They’ve got the prettiest girls in Hong Kong in reception. Just look at the bonny wee lassies.’ He was practically salivating as he ogled the rank of young girls behind the marble counter.

  ‘You’re a dirty old bastard, Howard,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, maybe you’re right. But don’t tell me you’re immune to yellow fever. It gets us all in the end. They’re soft and gentle, it’s like making love to butterflies. Have you ever had a Chinese girl?’

  ‘I once went out with a girl who had jaundice,’ I said. ‘Come on, leave it out.’ The last thing I wanted right now was a session swapping sexual memories with a lecherous old hack. But maybe Howard was being kind, trying to take my mind off the hell-hole of a mortuary and the fall that had killed Sally. Christ, I needed a drink. We walked to the lift and went up to the top floor, the fifteenth. The label by the button said ‘Health club and swimming pool’. I watched the girl in the white dress get smaller and smaller as we rose up. When the lift doors opened we were so high up that the sound of the piano was lost in the dull throb of faraway conversation. Howard pushed through heavy wooden swing doors into the health club’s reception area where a girl in a bright blue leotard and navy leg warmers bounced up to ask for our membership cards.

  Howard explained that we were thinking of joining and just wanted to take a look around to see what facilities were on offer. She nodded her head eagerly, long black hair jerking backward and forward across her shoulders. She was tiny, with flawless skin and a boy’s figure, no make-up or nail polish, just fresh and new and young. I felt a hundred years old. Howard put his wrinkled and liver-spotted hand on her arm like an over attentive Father Christmas and gave her a look that would have alarmed her parents, even if it had come from a fat man in a red suit with a white beard. Like a lamb to the slaughter she offered to show us around.

  ‘That’s all right, dear. We’ll just wander around on our own.’ He seemed reluctant to let go of her arm and eventually she pulled away, eyeing him like a frightened fawn.

  ‘Show me the pool,’ I said, and he took me through the exercise room where young girls and overweight middle-aged men were torturing themselves on chrome and black leather machinery that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a space station. A man wearing stars and stripes shorts puffed and sweated away on a jogging machine as he listened to a Sony Walkman while an attendant watched the dial that showed how fast he was running. I thought of getting one for Bill Hardwicke’s office but it would have been an expensive joke.

  The pool was a good size, about twenty metres by eight, I guess, with a diving board at the deep end. It was surrounded by bright green artificial grass and white plastic chairs which glinted in the sunlight streaming in through the glass overhead. It had the look of a greenhouse, as the walls too were transparent. The view was nothing special, just the tops of the nearby blocks of flats and shops, but it was bright and sunny and a good place to swim.

  Without my having to ask, Howard walked over to the far end of the pool, empty save for a matron in a plastic hat swimming a stoic breaststroke. He stood by one of the big glass panes behind the diving board.

  ‘Here?’ I said, and he nodded.

  I rapped it with my knuckles and it felt solid, more like wood than glass. There was no indication that it was a replacement.

  ‘You’d need some force to go through that,’ I said, stating the obvious. I pressed my nose against the glass and looked down.

  ‘She fell into the road?’ I asked and Howard said yes.

  ‘She didn’t jump,’ I said.

  ‘I know, laddie, I know.’ It sounded as if he was humouring me.

  ‘Did she use this pool a lot?’

  ‘She was a keen swimmer. If she wasn’t swimming here she’d use the pool at the KCC.’

  ‘KCC?’

  ‘Kowloon Cricket Club. It’s a few miles from here. They’ve an open air pool.’

  ‘Sally’s a member?’ The word ‘was’ still didn’t feel right on my lips.

  Howard laughed ruefully. ‘Sally wasn’t a joiner, but she could always find someone to sign her in. She had a lot of friends.’ He was having no trouble using the past tense and I could have hit him for that, driven
my fist into his face and twisted it so that his lips would split and bleed because I didn’t want her to be dead.

  ‘What about enemies?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know of anybody who’d want to kill her,’ he said quietly.

  We walked back along the pool side and the woman in the pool was Sally, her wet hair plastered to her head as she turned to float on her back and waved. I smiled and raised my hand but then the smile turned into a grimace and Sally turned into an old lady with a white plastic hat. My hand was half outstretched towards her. To cover my embarrassment I ran my fingers through my hair. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’

  The flight and the whistle-stop tour of police station, mortuary and hotel had taken more out of me than I realized, and though my eyes opened at nine o’clock I spent over two hours drifting in and out of sleep until Howard banged on the door. I wrapped myself in a large white towel and let him in.

  He was wearing a similar safari suit to yesterday, but in cream. He was carrying a plastic bag and he emptied the contents onto the dressing table: three cotton shirts, a couple of pairs of socks and underwear. There was also an aerosol of deodorant. With a jolt I thought of the bag full of Sally’s belongings, lying on the window seat, the silent proof that she was dead and this wasn’t a dream.

  ‘I thought this might come in handy,’ he said, holding out the deodorant.

  ‘Yeah, I was sweating a bit,’ I said. ‘I’ll just take a shower.’

  The water jetted out hard and fast, almost scouring the skin from my back as I washed and then I turned it on full cold and gasped as the icy water hit me.

  ‘How far away is Sally’s flat?’ I asked Howard as I towelled myself dry.

  ‘Fifteen minutes in a cab. Mid-levels, a block in Robinson Road.’

  ‘Good one?’

  ‘It’s not the Peak, but it’s a place for expats rather than locals.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘A place called Shek-O, there’re a lot of journalists living there, mostly Aussies. It’s on the south side of the island.’