The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  ‘But why Sally? Why check up on her?’

  ‘Because of the letter,’ he said.

  ‘No, I mean, why would anyone bribe her?’

  ‘We’re not concerned with the why,’ he said. ‘Just whether or not it was happening.’

  ‘And was it?’

  He shook his head and looked down at the file as he spoke.

  ‘No, she was clean.’

  ‘So where was the money coming from?’

  He looked up sharply, squinting slightly as he toyed with the tiger tag. Tyley was sitting with his back to a large picture window, but from where I was all I could see was blue sky, the colour of a five pound note, clear and cloudless.

  ‘The money?’ he asked.

  ‘The flat. The car. The clothes.’ I gave him the smile that said ‘trust me’ and he gave me the one that said ‘go fuck yourself.’ This was the sort of non-verbal communication that was going to get him a punch in the mouth.

  ‘I’m not sure I should tell you.’

  ‘She’s my sister.’

  He looked as if he was going to say ‘was’ but he didn’t.

  ‘You’re a reporter,’ he said.

  ‘So was she. If it makes you feel any better we’ll say this is off the record. Not for quotation, etc, etc, etc’

  ‘I’m more concerned about why you want to know.’

  I hate it when they talk like that, playing hard to get. I knew he was going to tell me, he knew he was going to tell me, but he didn’t want to make it easy. He wanted to be talked into it, they always do.

  ‘She was my sister,’ I said, leaning forward to rest my elbows on my knees. ‘Now she’s dead and I want to know why.’

  ‘We’re not investigating her murder. Our job is to investigate corruption.’

  ‘You were investigating her.’ I stood up and began pacing up and down, parallel with the desk. The view was better, the sky was just as blue but I could see a bald spot the size of a digestive biscuit in the middle of Tyley’s head, as bare as an airport runway. He self-consciously reached up to touch it so I guess I was staring. I looked at his ashtray instead. The telephone trilled and he listened before saying, ‘No, I hadn’t forgotten, I’ll call him now.’ He replaced the receiver.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Just my secretary reminding me about a call I have to make.’ He picked up the receiver again and rapidly hit a series of buttons. The phone was similar to the one on Sally’s desk, same design, same colour. He shrugged. ‘Engaged,’ he said. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘Sally,’ I replied. ‘Where was the money coming from?’

  I walked over to one of the watercolours and pretended to study it, to cut down on the eye contact so that he’d be more at ease. It’s easier to speak to someone who isn’t looking at you head on, ask any Roman Catholic.

  ‘She had a rich friend,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Dennis Lai?’ I asked, and turned to look at him.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah? Well I’m not,’ I said.

  ‘She told you about Lai?’

  ‘What would she tell me?’ This wasn’t getting us anywhere, so I decided I’d better play the nice guy, for a while at least, and I gave him a winning smile. ‘She didn’t tell me anything about Lai, I saw his picture in the flat, that’s all. I just put two and two together.’ Humility, that always goes down well.

  ‘Well, you came up with the right answer. Lai paid for the car, the flat, and most of the things in it. She was quite open about it, with us anyway, but she made it plain that she didn’t want it generally known. He’s married, you know.’

  ‘She didn’t do that good a job of keeping it a secret,’ I said. ‘I’ve already met one person who knew.’

  ‘That’s not surprising, Hong Kong is a very small place, and it’s certainly not a place for secrets.’

  ‘But once you found that it was Lai who was helping her, you dropped the investigation?’

  ‘No, we kept the file open.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tyley shrugged and simultaneously flicked the fringe from his eyes. ‘That’s the way we do it. We rarely close files, unless we get a successful prosecution.’

  ‘Did drugs come up at all?’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Sally was working on a drugs story, something to do with a cocaine ring among the gweilos here.’

  ‘Drugs aren’t part of the ICAC’s brief. But no, we didn’t even touch on it.’

  My mind was whirling, firing off in all directions, trying to make sense out of what was happening, why Sally had been killed.

  I moved back to the chair and sat in it. The ice had been broken now, he was talking freely, the earlier reluctance had evaporated like sweat off a camel’s hump.

  ‘So who would hurt her, Paul? Who would want to kill my sister?’

  He paused, still fingering the tag. ‘Mrs Lai, maybe?’

  ‘A woman scorned? Hardly likely, is it?’ She hadn’t looked the killing type, but maybe the thought of losing all that money would push her to the edge. And it wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford to pay someone to do her dirty work. ‘Did you come across any enemies while you were investigating her?’

  ‘Not really. Certainly no one who would want to kill her.’

  ‘Somebody must have hated her enough to write that letter.’

  ‘After you’ve spent some time in Hong Kong you’ll realize that anonymous letters are nothing special out here. It’s a pretty poisonous place. But writing a letter is one thing, killing is another.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll try that number again.’ He picked up the receiver, and this time pushed the recall button, and then waited as it dialled the number. He swept his hair back with his hand, listened for ten seconds or so, then put the phone down.

  ‘Still not there,’ he muttered. He looked at me curiously for a while. ‘I’ve got to ask,’ he said, ‘what happened to your face?’

  ‘I was mugged,’ I said.

  ‘Did you report it?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, they didn’t take anything. Look, what do you think happened to my sister?’

  ‘How would I know?’ he said. ‘The last time I saw her was …’ he checked inside the folder, ‘four months ago.’

  ‘How did she seem?’

  He sighed deeply, folded his arms across his chest and settled back in his chair. Talk about giving off defensive signals, Tyley was practically going into hibernation.

  ‘Please, I have to know,’ I said.

  He seemed to reach a decision, ran his fingers through his hair and said, ‘The first time she was here she was helpful, seemed very interested in our job here, she went out of her way to answer our questions.’

  ‘About Lai?’

  ‘Everything. She quite happily supplied us with bank statements, invoices, receipts. I wish all our investigations were as pleasant. But the second time was a completely different matter.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She went for me, verbally. Called me all sorts of names, accused us of persecuting her. Said she’d splash my name across the front page of the Post.’ He smiled. ‘I had to tell her that it’s against the law to report on an ICAC investigation and she hit the roof.’

  ‘Maybe you’d touched a nerve during the second interview.’

  ‘Or maybe she’d just got that much more attached to Lai. Or maybe at the time of the second interview she really did have something to hide. Or maybe I just caught her on an off day. Did she often lose her temper?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t sound like her.’

  ‘Perhaps it was the wrong time of the month,’ he said, and looked at his watch. Subtle.

  ‘I won’t take up any more of your time.’ I was going to stick the word ‘precious’ in the sentence but I thought better of it. No point in antagonizing Paul Tyley, I might need him again. That’s the name of the game, you nurture and encourag
e the contacts you need, the ones you have to go back to. The rest you can burn, like tissues, use once and throw away.

  I smiled at Tyley, gave him a friendly wink and shook his hand firmly. He obviously wasn’t fooled because he didn’t offer to buy me lunch or let me marry his sister.

  On the way back to Sally’s flat, lurching from side to side in the back of an aggressively driven taxi, I thought back to his question, ‘Did she often lose her temper?’ When I answered no I meant it, but now I remembered one occasion when she’d snapped at me. She was a teenager and the argument was over a boyfriend. Ever since our father had died I’d regarded myself as the guardian of her morals, whether or not she liked it, and I vetted her boyfriends with more care than the Vatican choosing a new pope. Hell, I didn’t vet her boyfriends, I chased them off.

  I was staying at home over Christmas and I came back from the pub and found her in the lounge necking with a spotty-chinned sociology student from the local polytechnic. It was almost midnight and he had his hand up the front of her blouse when I walked through the door. I’d grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and thrown him outside before you could say ‘interfering with a minor’.

  She’d stood in front of me and glared defiantly up and told me to keep the hell out of her life.

  I said that she should be careful who she let touch her, that he wasn’t good enough for her and she shouted that I’d never approve of any of her boyfriends and I said I’d approve when she made a sensible choice instead of the deadheads she insisted on bringing home. And who was I to approve or disapprove? she yelled. Your brother, I’d said, grabbing her by the shoulders. Exactly, she’d screamed. You’re my fucking brother, not my father, and not my fucking husband and then she’d slapped me hard. Hard enough to make my eyes water. We stood staring at each other for a solid minute, and there were tears in her eyes, too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, then she threw herself against me and flung her arms around my neck and stood on tiptoe to put her cheek next to mine. I could feel her warm breath against my ear. She smelt of spearmint. ‘I’ll always love you,’ she said into my ear. ‘Always.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I can still remember the heat from her body as she pressed against me.

  Woofer was where Howard had left him, alone and unloved. I knew how he felt. The phone hadn’t moved either. I picked up the receiver and pressed the recall button. The phone clicked madly like a grasshopper calling its mate, then I heard the ringing tone, then a voice said, ‘Lai Kwok-lee.’ That’s all, just his name. A direct line, maybe even a portable phone by his side. Two possibilities, either the phone hadn’t been touched since Sally had been in the flat. Or somebody who had been there after she died had used it. I thought the latter was more likely, Lai had wanted his pictures back. Or something else. I told him who I was.

  ‘I suppose we’d better meet,’ he said. The words came out slowly, like treacle from a can.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I replied.

  ‘Can you come round to my office?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Certainly. Where are you calling from?’

  ‘Sally’s flat.’ I don’t know why I told him that because immediately he would know how I’d got his number. I guess I didn’t care, he was going to see me anyway.

  ‘You should be able to catch a taxi downstairs,’ he said. ‘Tell them you want to go to …’ and he spoke a few syllables of Cantonese. ‘Can you remember that?’ he said.

  I said no, and I asked him to spell it out phonetically and wrote it down on a notepad by the side of the phone. I repeated it back to him.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘My office is on the thirty-fourth floor. I shall be waiting for you.’ He hung up on me before I could reply. Arrogant bastard. I had that written on one of my school reports, third or fourth year. Not bastard, of course, the governors would never have stood for that, but in the box where the form master got to sum up your character in twelve words or less he’d written that I had ‘yet to learn that arrogance is an unproductive posture’. Nice line, that. Always made me think of an Alsatian with its back legs crossed. I’ve never been back to school, never seen the teacher who wrote those pearls of wisdom. One day I’d like to see him again and compare salary cheques. I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a gin and tonic. I found a fresh bottle of tonic in the fridge behind a red and white carton of Dairy Farm milk and a pack of Tulip unsmoked back bacon. Well, it was hot and my throat felt tight and dry. The bacon looked fresh, sealed in plastic, but there was a cheesy smell from the milk carton.

  ‘First of the day,’ I said, and raised my glass to no one in particular. ‘But not the last.’ It tasted good. It usually did. I looked out over the balcony. The tiles on the floor looked like the ones on the wall of the mortuary corridor, cream with a green stripe, and with a shudder I thought of Sally lying naked in the freezer. Jenny had promised to take care of all the arrangements, but I had to speak to my mother first and I might as well do it now because it’d be early morning where she was.

  I had to check her number in the small address book which I always carried. She answered on the third ring and she sounded dazed. I suppose the doctor had given her something to take the sting out of her grief, but she was perfectly lucid, just slow and tending to mumble. I asked her what she thought we should do about Sally and she said she wanted her back in England. I didn’t argue because the alternative was a funeral in Hong Kong where she had only friends, no relatives. It made sense to take her back, so I told my mother about Jenny and said she’d get in touch at some point and would she get the name of an undertaker who would handle things in Britain. She said yes but I repeated it all again to make sure she understood. Despite her grief she started probing about Jenny, who was she, how had I met her, all the questions asked by a woman who wants to be a grandmother.

  She’d had no children by her second husband and neither Sally nor I had married. I’d come close twice but each time the job, and the drink, had been the more persuasive mistress and I’d walked away, much to my mother’s undisguised dismay. I told her not to be so silly and said I had to go and hung up.

  Lai made me wait in reception for twenty minutes before seeing me. A receptionist with shoulder length lightly permed hair and pouting lips asked me if I wanted a coffee and I said no thanks. When she smiled I noticed she had steel braces on her teeth. There were a couple of magazines scattered on a low shiny black table and I idly flicked through them. One was a copy of the latest set of report and accounts of Lai’s company. On page three was a photograph of the man himself, just a head shot, in colour, the face serious and unsmiling, and below it a thousand word chairman’s statement about how well the firm was doing, how confident he was in Hong Kong’s future, how grateful he was to all the staff for their hard work and loyalty. Standard grade-A bullshit. In English and in Chinese. There were some very healthy numbers in the profit and loss account and the balance sheet. Lai was doing all right.

  The centre pages were devoted to a montage of photographs of Lai’s operations, the office buildings he owned, an interior of one of his grocery stores, an upmarket Chinese restaurant, a gorgeous film actress at work on a film set, and a hotel. The hotel was a metal and glass tower, typical of many in Hong Kong, but this one was familiar. It was the hotel where Sally had been swimming, late at night when the pool should have been closed. It was the hotel where Sally had died.

  My head swam and I gripped the accounts tightly and felt my stomach drop away. My tongue felt too big for my throat and I wished that I’d accepted the receptionist’s offer of a coffee. The fact that Lai owned the hotel surely explained how Sally had had the use of the pool at night, and I wondered what other facilities they’d made use of together. I was having some pretty nasty thoughts when the door to Lai’s office opened and he was there. We didn’t shake hands, he just nodded and stepped to one side to let me walk through. The view was stunning, the whole wall opposite the door was glass, a panoramic view of the harbour and Kowloon
beyond. Lai’s desk was set in the middle of the office so that when he was working he’d have his back to the window. A smart move because the bustling waterway would be too much of a distraction. A long, low Scandinavian sideboard to the left of the desk was cluttered with a collection of crystal and a large photograph in a red frame. The picture was of Mrs Lai, about twenty years younger than the version I’d seen at the house on the Peak. She wasn’t pretty, even then.

  Lai motioned towards three low-backed settees arranged around a low coffee table, and we sat opposite each other, in silence.

  He was wearing a dark grey suit with knife-edge creases, a light blue shirt with a white collar and a scarlet tie. He had a thick gold chain around one wrist, a wafer-thin watch on the other, and large gold cufflinks on both.

  His hair was starting to grey and he had on the horn-rimmed glasses he’d been wearing in the photographs I’d seen in Sally’s flat. The crooked teeth were the same too. His smile was friendly enough, but Lai was a hard man. The hardness wasn’t a physical thing, it came from within. He sat with the quiet confidence that comes with having money, a lot of it. He was a man who knew he could have anything he wanted, that everything had its price and that he had enough to be able to pay it. What had he thought when he saw Sally, what was the price tag he’d seen when he looked at her? Flat? Porsche? And had she been worth it? Had he … God, the thoughts were back, the imaginings of the two of them together, her soft mouth, his crooked teeth. Oh God, no. I took the thoughts and strangled them slowly. I caught myself staring at Lai so I concentrated instead on watching a small freighter sail past in the harbour below. When Lai spoke it was in a brisk, businesslike voice, the arrogance lurking behind it like a mugger in a doorway.

  ‘So you’re Sally’s brother. She spoke of you often.’

  I bet she did. Well she said not one word about you, pal. You were a deep dark secret that she kept well hidden from me. From the brother she shared everything with.

  He reached up to straighten his glasses and the sleeve of his suit rode down to reveal the watch fully. It matched the one Hall had passed on to me, Sally’s watch. The one Lai had given her. Oh God, they’d had matching watches. The shared intimacy shocked me, it was as if I’d found them in bed together, laughing and kissing, her on top the way she liked it. I wondered if his had an engraving on the back, and what it said. I couldn’t bear the thought of the two of them together and I tried to blot the images out of my mind.