‘Flat?’
‘No, two-bedroomed house by the beach. It’s quiet, so quiet that it’s easy to forget you’re living in Hong Kong.’
I ripped the Cellophane off one of the new shirts and tried it on. ‘Perfect fit,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
As soon as I had finished dressing, Howard asked me if I wanted to eat. I walked over to the polythene bag and took out the keys.
‘Never touch solids this early in the morning,’ I told him. The air was suddenly split with the crump of an explosion, a dull boom that I felt as much as heard.
‘What the hell was that?’
Howard looked at his watch. ‘The noon gun,’ he said. ‘Jardines fire it at this time every day.’ He took me over to the window and pointed down to a shining naval gun at the water’s edge. ‘The story goes that they fired it once to welcome a guest and the navy got pissed off so they were told they had to fire it every day as a punishment. Now it’s a tourist attraction, a gimmick. And don’t worry, they’re firing blanks.’
‘Aren’t we all, Howard. Aren’t we all.’
The heat caught me by surprise again as we walked out of the foyer. Shit, I’d forgotten to use Howard’s deodorant. Already the sweat was collecting in my armpits.
A taxi pulled up in front of the hotel and we both climbed into the back. Howard spoke to the driver in Cantonese and the old man turned the air-conditioning down. For an expat who professed to be totally ignorant of the local language Howard seemed to be able to get his message across without too much trouble. He was a cunning old sod. A couple of times in the lift or when we waited in the police station I’d caught him eavesdropping on the Chinese as they chatted away in sing-song voices, and while I could quite believe he wasn’t fluent I was certain he could understand a lot more than he let on.
‘It’s cold enough in here to freeze a polar bear’s balls,’ he said and rubbed his hands together. I was sweltering.
‘You’ve been out here too long,’ I said.
‘Aye maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right,’ he replied. Crap. He was out here for good.
The taxi made its way up a hill, twisting in and out of the bends like a drunken rally driver. Out of the right hand window the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building danced in and out of view.
‘Helicopter pad,’ said Howard, and pointed to the top of the ultra-modern edifice. ‘They’re not allowed to use it, but it’s there, just in case.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ I said.
‘1997, laddie, 1997. When the Chinese hordes come sweeping over the border the bank’s executives will be picked up off the roof and flown to safety. That’s the story anyway.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘That’s just one of the rumours about Sandberg’s Folly. They say there’s an underground tunnel, big enough to drive an armoured car through, linking the building to the harbour so that when the shit hits the fan they’ll be able to drive all the money out. And they say that the typhoon shields around the bottom of the building aren’t there to keep out the wind but are there to be dropped if the bank is ever attacked.’
‘True or false?’
‘Act your age. These days money is shunted around the world at the touch of a button, you don’t have physically to pick it up. And most of the bank’s business is overseas now, anyway. If ever Beijing did decide to screw up Hong Kong the money would haemorrhage out in minutes, to Bermuda, Canada, America, the UK. All the banks have their own contingency plans drawn up and they don’t involve armoured cars racing through tunnels.’
Dramatic though it was, the Hong Kong Bank building was dwarfed by a tall tower pointing to the sky like an accusing finger. It was of an order of magnitude bigger than the rest, towering over the Central office blocks like a schoolmaster surrounded by his pupils.
‘And that one?’ I said.
‘Ah, the heir apparent,’ he said. ‘The Bank of China. They’re already the real power in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Bank and Standard Chartered might print the notes and make a lot of noise, but it’s the little men in that building that will be running this place as soon as it’s given back to China. That’s the sixth tallest building in the world, and it put a few noses out of joint at the Bank when it was first announced. The Bank had gone and ordered the most expensive building in the world as a sign of their long-term faith in Hong Kong and then the Chinese went and built a taller building right next door. Massive loss of face.’
The road twisted again and Central was hidden from sight as we drove through Mid-levels, a mixture of new residential blocks and old low-rise buildings, lots of trees and greenery. As Howard had said, it was a place for expats, not locals.
It was a pink building, a dirty washed out pink like a block of soap that had been in the shower too long.
The block had been built on a slope in the fork between two roads. As a result the ground floor on the upper road was actually the third floor. I handed the keys to Howard and he unlocked a metal-grilled door, an ornate work of art that squeaked open as he put his weight against it. We climbed the stone stairs shoulder to shoulder up four flights to the top floor where there was another grille in front of the entrance to the flat. I was short of breath and my shirt was wet but Howard was relaxed, not a bead of sweat on his forehead. He had trouble with the lock, pushing the key in and out several times and jiggling it around until finally it slotted home and he pulled the grille outwards. There were two locks in the blue-painted wooden door but Howard had no problems with them and we were soon in the flat.
The door opened straight into the main lounge area, about eight paces wide and about fifteen paces long to a large sliding window. I walked across the perfectly-polished parquet flooring and pushed the window open. Beyond was a tiled balcony with two white wooden chairs and a slatted table. The balcony looked down across the harbour and over to Kowloon. To the right of the balcony were two towering green plants, palms or something, I couldn’t identify them but they looked like they’d been growing for twenty years or more. A small, almost translucent, lizard scuttled from under one of the chairs, through my legs, across the floor and up a wall. There it stopped, feet splayed out like fingers, then it bolted across the ceiling and behind a rattan bookcase. I turned to look at Howard who was standing by a large mirrored bar built into the wall, laden with bottles of Scotch and gin and rows of glasses.
The flat was full of plants, in white pots hanging from the ceiling, standing in saucers on the bar, and trailing over the bookcase. In each corner of the room were circular clay tubs with small trees growing out of peaty soil.
The furniture was all cane and rattan, a Habitat-catalogue of a room with large bulging green scatter cushions on the floor and a glass-topped coffee table covered in glossy magazines and crumpled newspapers.
Against the wall opposite the balcony was a dining table big enough to seat eight people, surrounded by high-backed chairs.
There was a television with a video underneath, and potted ferns on top, and by the bookcase was a racked stereo system with three feet high speakers that looked like a prize from a television quiz show.
‘You look like you need a drink,’ said Howard and I realized I was frowning hard. ‘I’ll get some ice,’ he said and disappeared through a white louvred door that swung gently to and fro behind him. They were still moving when he reappeared with cubes of ice rattling in a crystal bucket.
‘Gin and tonic?’ he asked rhetorically, because he was already unscrewing the top of the gin bottle by the time I nodded. He made it strong and there was no lemon, but it was cold and I needed a drink, not to quench my thirst but to quieten the panic I could feel building inside, like awakening from a nightmare knowing, just knowing, that something bad, something terrible, had happened, but not knowing if the terror was real or the result of a bad dream.
I sat down heavily on the cane sofa and put my feet on top of a stack of Far Eastern Economic Reviews, pushing aside a set of car keys. Howard walked up to a free-standing fan behind the te
levision and switched it on. It whirled and the draught ruffled the pages by my feet and cooled my face as I took another swallow of the tonic-tainted gin.
‘This is one hell of a nice flat,’ I said, more to myself than to him. He walked the length of the room, pacing like a wary old lion on a route he’d trudged a million times before.
‘It certainly is, laddie.’
‘How big would you say it is?’
‘Three bedrooms, one of them’s a study. About two-and-a-half thousand square feet in all, maybe a bit more.’
‘She lived here alone?’
‘That she did. She valued her privacy.’
‘You’ve been here before?’ I knew he had because he knew there was ice and he knew where to get it and he knew that one of the bedrooms was a study. But he wasn’t stupid and he knew that I knew so he wasn’t going to lie but I wasn’t sure yet if I could trust this man.
He stopped pacing.
‘Several times. We worked together on a couple of articles for the Sunday Times last year, and I helped her back when she’d had a few too many at the FCC.’
‘FCC?’
‘Foreign Correspondents’ Club.’
I’d finished the drink and Howard stepped forward to take the empty glass and refill it. By now the ice had melted into pea-sized lumps which bumped against my teeth as I drank. A Singapore Airlines 747 climbed into the sky and then was lost behind a towering residential block and then I watched the wispy white clouds because I didn’t want to ask the questions. I wanted to distract myself, I wanted to be somewhere else, up in the clouds looking down, not sitting on a rattan sofa with a lukewarm drink and a faded old hack who was going to tell me something that I didn’t want to hear, like the policeman who knocks at your door in the middle of the night and says, ‘you’d better sit down, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.’
Happened to me once, years ago, in Glasgow, when I was a young freelance trying to find the Big One that would get me noticed by London. I was on the graveyard shift for the Daily Record, from eight in the evening to four in the morning, the shift none of the staff men wanted to work. At least once a week somebody would phone in sick and the news desk would call me because I was young and keen, have notebook will travel and because I needed the money.
The high spot of the shift was organizing the curry run for the subs and a trip out to the main police stations delivering the first edition and picking up the details of the nightly stabbings and assaults. And at closing time there were the phone calls from the drunks, ‘Hey Jim, can you settle a wee argument that me and my pal are having. In the 1972 cup final …’ And you had to deal with the complaints if the compiler of the TV page had cocked it up again. That was a real pain until one of the subs gave me a tip. ‘Ask them for the number of their TV licence. That usually shuts them up.’ It worked every time.
I’d just got back with the curries for the lads when the news desk phone rang. It was a watchman at the British Rail works in Springburn ringing to say that a young lad had just got himself electrocuted at the yard. He was one of a group of neds breaking into carriages to steal the first aid kits. They weren’t worth anything but it gave them something to do. This nutter had been standing on the roof of a train, using an iron bar to smash in the windows. He’d swung it too high, touched an overhead power cable and was lying in hospital with third degree burns over most of his body. The caller gave me the kid’s name and address, and his own, not out of any sense of public duty but because he knew I’d put him in the tip-off book and that at the end of the month a cheque would be winging its way to him. That one phone call would earn him almost as much as I got for a full eight-hour shift.
I dragged the late driver out of the photographers’ rest room where he’d been watching a blue movie on their video recorder. He reeked of whisky and his flies were at half mast. Twenty minutes later we were in front of the grey tenement block where the boy lived and I told the driver to wait and went up to the second floor alone and rang the door bell until the lights went on and a small, pale woman in a yellow floral nightie and curlers opened the door and peered at me.
‘What d’ye want?’ she barked.
What I wanted was a quote from the tearful mother and a collect picture of her dying son, and then what I wanted was any other pictures of him so that when the Glasgow Herald and the Express arrived they’d be shafted. That’s what I wanted, but first I had to get inside the house. I was English but I’d been north of the border long enough to switch into the Glasgow accent and I was young enough to give her the little-boy-lost-look and appeal to her maternal instincts.
‘Oh, I’m from the Record, Mrs McNee,’ I said. ‘I’m terribly sorry to hear what happened to wee James. Could I come in and have a word with you?’
‘What?’ she said, and coughed like a rheumatic otter.
‘Well, Mrs McNee, we thought if we printed what had happened to James it would serve as a warning to other children.’
A man appeared behind the yellow nightie, the same size as the woman, with a crew cut and several days’ growth of stubble on his face. His chin was up in the arrogant pose of a small, angry man. In his greying string vest and baggy underpants he looked like an over the hill boxer that some up-and-coming champion had been using as a sparring partner.
‘What did he say, hen?’ he asked his wife.
‘He said something’s happened to Jim.’
The man opened the door wide.
‘You’d better come in, son,’ he said. And that was how they heard that their boy was dying in a hospital bed, from a young reporter who was only there for the story and the picture. She cried and he put his arm around her and then she went and made me a cup of tea and then there was the crackle of a two-way radio and a policewoman and a male colleague rang the doorbell. It happens that way sometimes. And yes I got the quotes, and the pictures, and the page three lead in the second edition. And I left my card on the mantelpiece so that when the guys from the other papers arrived they’d know who had beaten them to it. Things like that were important to me then. They still are.
It’s funny how your mind does that, how it protects itself from facing up to unpleasant realities. Somehow my thoughts had got shunted away from Sally and her luxurious flat and I’d started replaying events of more than ten years ago, memories conjured up from the backwater of my brain.
‘I can’t understand why the police haven’t been here,’ I said.
Howard shrugged. ‘They’re not Scotland Yard, you know, and let’s be honest, they’re not investigating a murder,’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ I said quietly, and drank from the tall, thin glass.
‘Aye, not yet,’ he said, and walked over to the balcony. He turned to face me and leant back on the green railing, arms outstretched as if he’d been crucified.
‘This is one impressive flat, Howard.’ He didn’t reply, and I didn’t look at him. Sometimes it’s better that way.
‘How much would you say a flat like this would cost?’
He paused, then cleared his throat like a head boy at speech day. ‘That would depend on the length of the lease, whether it was furnished or unfurnished, the sort of deal she got from the landlord, service charges …’
‘How much?’
‘Anywhere between $20,000 and $25,000 a month, I suppose.’
This time I paused, and I could hear children playing in the street five floors below, shouting and shrieking. ‘And how much did Sally earn, in a good month?’
‘About the same.’
The yelling stopped and there was the sound of feet slapping on the road as they ran off. A dog barked and then I was looking at the clouds again and wishing. I kicked the key ring and it rattled off the magazines and fell onto the floor.
‘What sort of car did she drive?’ I said it quietly but I could feel the anger starting to grow, because this was like pulling teeth and that’s not how it should have been because he was supposed to be on my side.
‘A Porsche, a red one,�
� he replied, and we both knew the colour wasn’t important. What mattered was that my sister was living in a flat she couldn’t afford and driving a car she couldn’t have bought. She was 26 years old, she was freelancing for a Hong Kong paper and a couple of magazines and stringing for one of the London quality Sundays. She should have been sharing a flat half the size with two other girls, taking the MTR to work and counting every penny.
‘Where did the money come from?’ I asked, and I still wasn’t looking at him but I could sense him shrug.
‘I don’t know, laddie. None of us knew.’
‘But you wondered? You asked?’
‘Aye, we wondered. But we weren’t asking the questions.’ He walked in out of the sunlight and dropped into a white deck chair opposite me.
‘So who was asking the questions? Who was asking why Sally was living way beyond her means? Who was digging?’
‘The ICAC’
‘The what?’
‘The Independent Commission Against Corruption. The colony’s corruption watchdog. They were originally set up to clean up the Hong Kong police but they’ve moved on to cover racing, business, organized crime. It’s probably the most powerful organization in Hong Kong, powers of search and detention the likes of which you don’t see anywhere else. They’re on a par with the Star Chamber.’
‘And they were investigating Sally?’
He mumbled.
‘What?’ I snapped.
‘That was the rumour. Hell, it was more than a rumour. They were on her tail like hounds after a fox. You can’t even accept a free trip to Macau out here without clearing it with your editor first. Everything has to be above board. It’s not like London where you get crates of beer and whisky every Christmas and free trips and God knows what else.’
‘But we’re not talking about a few bottles of Scotch here, are we?’
He shook his head and I finished the gin and tonic and stood up.
‘I need to talk to someone at the ICAC, and soon. Can you fix it?’
The Fireman Page 6