The first step was to find out who the victim was; when he was killed and where. Then I’d need to find out what evidence the police had to justify Dale’s arrest. From what Lucy had told me it seemed that he didn’t have a job; I wondered if he had a fixed place to live. Lucy wanted me to get him released from custody, but I wasn’t at all optimistic about that. Maybe John would have some tips for me. He’d have a much better idea of how things worked in the Philippines than me – which wasn’t difficult seeing as how I had no idea at all. John was a police superintendent and I knew he had contacts in the PNP, the Philippine National Police. Maybe he’d be able to pull some strings for me. He’d left a message for me at the hotel desk. He was busy all day but would meet me for dinner; he’d come to the hotel at about seven thirty.
I decided that I’d better make the most of my short stay. The hotel where I was staying was near to the Star Ferry, where a fleet of open-decked boats had been ferrying passengers to and fro across Victoria harbor for decades. It was still hugely popular even though the mass transit had been operating the same route since the seventies. It wasn’t only popular with tourists either; it was very inexpensive and was the preferred form of travel across the harbor for many of the locals. I took the ferry across the harbor to the island. The city was named after its famous harbor: ‘heung gong’ meaning ‘fragrant harbor’. It could hardly be described as fragrant anymore, and the relentless land reclamation had narrowed it considerably over the years, but it was still an impressive sight. Near the terminal was a building with over a thousand circular windows. When I lived in Hong Kong in the eighties it was the tallest building in the Central district. It was called the Connaught Centre then, but Duncan and I used to call it the building of a thousand assholes. It was dwarfed now and surrounded by skyscrapers.
I still remembered the way to the Peak Tram, a funicular railway which had been built in the nineteenth century but was still hauling passengers to the highest point on the island. I walked to the terminus and rode up to the Peak. Like almost everywhere else it had changed substantially, but for the better in this case I thought. There’s a pathway that loops around the Peak which is a haven of tranquility and offers views in every direction. I trod the path that my brother and I had trodden so many years before and then drank a cold beer. For my journey back the lines for the tram were too long so I took the double-decker bus instead that swayed ominously around the tight curves of the roadway back to Central. I hopped on the Star Ferry and headed back to my room.
Lucy called at six. I’d fallen asleep on the bed. She was at the hotel in Manila. Suzie had stayed longer than intended but was leaving early tomorrow to go back to California. She’d been to the embassy and arrangements were being made for someone to see Dale. His full name was Dale M. Porter; Lucy didn’t know what the M stood for. Suzie hadn’t been allowed to see Dale herself yet but was going to give it another go later. The embassy would try to assist.
“Lucy can you get yourself a local sim card? The call roaming’s going to cost a fortune,” I said.
“I already have,” she said. “Look at the caller display.”
I did and she had.
Chapter Three
A Flying Visit
“So it’s just a flying visit then; literally?” John said.
“Yeah, I went sightseeing this afternoon; the Star ferry, the Peak. I couldn’t keep my eyes open when I got back.”
I was sitting with John Carter in the bar on the top floor of the Peninsula Hotel looking out over Victoria Harbor at the twinkling lights of Hong Kong Island. I must be getting old because the flight had left me feeling like I’d gone ten rounds with Jack Dempsey. I hoped I was going to be able to sleep tonight. If necessary, I’d empty the mini bar in my room.
“And you’re off to Manila in the morning?”
“My flight leaves at nine forty-five so I should be at the hotel in Manila by lunchtime. Lucy’s booked a hotel in a place called Ermita, wherever that is. Anyway, she says it’s near the embassy.”
“It’s the former red light district, but it was cleaned up years ago,” John said. “It’s near Manila Bay. Manila’s not the most attractive city in the World but you should get some nice sunsets across the Bay.”
I’d forgotten quite how tall John was, and since the last time I’d seen him his thinning hair had given up the struggle and departed completely leaving a perfectly spherical dome. He was a good three inches taller than me and his height was further accentuated by the mainly diminutive Chinese clientele in the bar.
“So you solved the Rivera case?” he said.
John was referring to a case I’d been investigating back in October. He’d helped me out a bit. Co-incidentally that case had a Philippine connection too.
“Sorry I couldn’t get the cops to play ball, but I understand it worked out okay your end.”
“As well as these things ever do, I guess,” I said.
“Why don’t you bring me up to speed on the new case – who’s been murdered?”
“I’ve no idea at the moment. I’m hoping to get some information from the embassy tomorrow. If I can pass Porter off as my client – that’s his name, Dale Porter – then I’m hopeful they’ll tell me. All I know so far is that the guy was arrested at the airport in Manila after a trip to Thailand. He has no immigration status in the Philippines although he’s lived there for a few years on a tourist visa. I’ve no idea how he makes a living. I don’t know who the deceased is or when or where the death occurred − but it must have been several weeks ago because apparently he’s been out of the country since early November.”
“Well, if you want information in the Philippines you’ll find that baksheesh still oils the wheels pretty effectively over there. As you know, bribery and corruption are endemic in most Asian countries, although not much in Hong Kong since the ICAC was established.”
He was referring to the Independent Commission against Corruption, an independent body set up in 1974 to tackle rampant corruption, with investigative powers the police could only dream about. When I was in Hong Kong in the 1980’s a Chinese classmate told me that the locals reckoned that the initials stood for ‘interfering with Chinese ancient customs’.
“Another thing: if the victim of the killing’s a local you might find things more difficult, but if it’s an expatriate I don’t think the police will have much interest in the matter. They’ll probably be doing no more than going through the motions. Foreigners get killed or disappear all the time in the Philippines, though not as many as in Thailand, and it’s not a priority for the police, especially if the person’s a tourist. Steer clear of lawyers though; they’ll do nothing and they’ll rob you blind.”
“If the police have enough evidence to make a charge what’s the next step?”
“He’ll spend a long time in jail before it gets to court – maybe years. Some prisoners wait more than ten years before the case gets to trial, and the jails are pretty appalling. I visited one in Rizal not long ago — 162 prisoners in a single cell and only twenty-four beds.”
He noticed my look of slight skepticism.
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “You’ll have to test the water. If the evidence is overwhelming there’s probably not much you can do; but you may find that it’s no more than circumstantial. If the evidence is thin, you may be able to get him out of jail if he surrenders his passport; provided he has a fixed place to live and reports to the police station on a regular basis. Between you and me the police there often let foreign suspects out in the hope that they’ll disappear and they won’t need to investigate the case anymore.” He smiled broadly. “In my experience investigations in the Philippines are less than thorough as a rule.”
We had a quiet dinner at a table overlooking the harbor. It was nouveau cuisine so after a few mouthfuls it was gone. By ten I was having difficulty keeping my eyes open.
“Last time we talked you sounded a bit disillusioned with the place,” I said, referri
ng to the city, not the hotel.
“It’s not the same, that’s for sure,” John said. “In the old days when you were here we still had a governor, remember that? Now we have a chief executive who is supposedly elected by Hong Kong people but the truth is that all the candidates are vetted and have to be approved by the Mainland Government. That’s why there’s been all this unrest recently. Poor old Maggie Thatcher would be turning in her grave. She spent years negotiating the agreement for a fifty-year transition period after the handover in 1997. During that time the Mainland Chinese Government promised a high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong but they’ve clearly reneged on that. The local people here may be ethnically Chinese but they have a strong sense of identity as Hong Kongers and there’s a lot of discontent, especially amongst the young. If truth be told most locals don’t even like the Mainlanders. They want true democracy, but they’re never going to get it unfortunately. Did you read about the gaffe made by a current government official recently? He said that if Hong Kong had true democracy then the place would end up being run by the poor people. Hah.”
“Do you plan to stay here after you retire?”
“No, I’ll be going back to England - back to Blighty. You’re probably not familiar with the term, but that’s what we call the old country. I read once that it derives from the days of the British Raj, from an Urdu word meaning British or English.”
John was a mine of information about Britain’s colonial history; maybe because he’d spent most of his life living in one of the last colonial outposts of the British Empire. He was proud, rightly perhaps, of the sound administrations Britain had left her old colonies.
“I think you yearn for the old days, John. When Britain was a great empire.”
“We even owned your lot once,” he said, with a grin.
“I don’t know what we’d have done without you,” I said.
“Did you know the British introduced the rubber tree to Malaysia – or Malaya as it then was? We took some seedlings from South America, nurtured them in Kew Botanical Gardens in London and then transplanted them in Malaya – and now it’s one of the mainstays of their economy. Mind you it wasn’t all good. We got the Chinese hooked on opium to facilitate the tea trade and Captain Cook’s men introduced syphilis to Tahiti. I have to admit we made a bit of a mess of the Middle East too.”
“Well, who knows, maybe we’ll meet up in Blighty one day. I was in London as a student in the early nineties, as you know, but I’d like to see some more of the country sometime. Perhaps you can find me a case to investigate there one day and we could team up again. This is a short and sweet visit though, I’m afraid, John. Maybe I’ll be able to stop over again on the way home, although Lucy is trying to persuade me to fly back via Bangkok with her.”
“When are the two of you going to get it together?”
“We’ve known each other a long time, John, ever since she came to work for me fifteen years ago. I'm a good deal older than her − when we first met she was just out of school and I was in my late twenties − and it was just a working relationship at first. As time passed we became friends, then close friends and then intimate friends. Now we're about as close as two mortals can be, probably because we're rather similar in most ways. Earlier this year I moved to a bungalow just a stone's throw from Lucy's place and since then we've obviously seen a lot more of each other. We're very fond of each other, but neither of us is the marrying kind − I think we both value our independence too much, and we like our own space. She puts up with me and helps me organize my life − and I let her. And she makes me laugh, and helps me in ways too numerous to mention. That’s about it really, although I can't imagine a life without her.”
“Last of the old romantics, eh?” John said.
“It’s what we both feel comfortable with I guess, John. It's who we are. Neither of us is the kind to wear our heart on our sleeve, but that doesn't mean we don't care for and appreciate each other. It might seem unusual to others, but as Lucy says, ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. We're comfortable as we are and I’ve no doubt we're going to grow old together. And you know?” I said, “I wonder how many couples who drift apart, separate or divorce might have stayed together if they'd just allowed each other a little more space.”
We chatted for a while longer about times gone by and times ahead. From what I gathered John’s imminent retirement couldn’t come soon enough for him. I struggled to keep my eyelids from drooping but John could see I was fighting a losing battle. He was having none of it though.
“What you’re feeling isn’t ordinary tiredness, Kane; it’s jet lag. If you go to bed now you won’t have a relaxing sleep. I’ll take you for a steam bath and a massage.”
“It’s good of you, John, but I’ve got to get to the airport early tomorrow.” It was a halfhearted kind of protest.
“I’m about to retire. Compared to me you’re just a boy. When I was your age I routinely went without sleep for two, sometimes three days in a row. Anyway, your flight’s not that early and you can check in online. You won’t need to leave the hotel until eight at the earliest. Six hours’ sleep is all you’re going to need, trust me.”
I shrugged and went for my wallet. “It’s your turf,” I said, “so you’re the boss.”
“The meal and drinks were on me,” John said. “I paid the check while you were in the restroom.” He ducked out of there and I followed.
Back in the nineties when I briefly worked undercover for a drugs operation in Hong Kong and John was the senior inspector in overall charge of the investigation we would routinely visit the huge ostentatious night clubs which abounded in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon where my hotel was situated. Each of the clubs, like Club Volvo or China City, employed over a thousand hostesses who would chat to customers for US$40 per fifteen-minute unit of time. The girls were available as escorts, so the clubs were little more than fronts for prostitution, and the clientele were mainly gangsters and the nouveau riche to whom such ostentatious vulgarity was a magnet. The clubs were vast and ferried the VIPs to their tables in miniature Rolls Royce’s. There was a latent violence in those places. You felt you were in the presence of people who would do something unpleasant to you if you looked at them in the wrong way, as if you were in one of those Jackie Chan movies when everything is about to explode around you. Those dinosaurs were a product of the eighties and they’d all disappeared now. It was no great loss.
John steered me to an up-market massage parlor where we had a sauna and steam bath followed by a dip in the ice-cold plunge-pool. Dressed in shorts and bathrobes we moved to the sitting area where a range of drinks and snacks were served and we watched a Cantonese gangster movie whilst having manicures, pedicures, foot-scrubs and Hopi ear candling. I reminded my host that Hopi ear candling was something the US had given to the world – courtesy of our Native Americans of course. He laughed.
“Is that the best you can come up with?” he said.
Finally, we were escorted to a massage room where we lay on adjacent tables and had girls walking up and down our backs, digging heels and toes into our spines and then manually manipulating and massaging our limbs, one by one. My masseuse was nicknamed ‘Fan Shu’ she told me, and it meant sweet potato; I could believe it. It was a two-hour experience but I dozed off after half an hour. When I woke up I felt like a million dollars. We went to the Four Sisters, a nearby bar, to spend some of it and had whiskeys and beer chasers. At a quarter before two John decided to release me.
“It’s always good to catch up with you Kane. Let me know if you think I can help in any way with your new assignment, and try to drop in on your way home. Better if you can give me a bit more notice next time. I could arrange a junk trip, like the old days.”
We walked the short distance back to my hotel and said adios. “Say Hi to Lucy for me − maybe I’ll get to meet her one of these days,” Carter said, as he closed the taxi door and headed home. At least I hoped he was going home.
I slept like a baby, except that I didn’t wake up crying or wet the bed, and I was back to my old self by the time my alarm sounded. I never use an alarm at home, but I’d had serious doubts about whether my body clock was in proper working order. I showered and shaved and was on the train to the airport by eight fifteen; by nine I was sitting in the terminal building by the departure gate. It would take about two hours to get to Manila, and maybe another hour and a half to go through the airport formalities and take a cab to the hotel. It was colder than I expected. The outside temperature was fourteen degrees but the air conditioning everywhere was still on full blast so I dug the linen jacket out of my suitcase and put it on. I called Lucy and asked her to make an appointment for us to see the embassy staff. She was still in bed.
I considerably underestimated the traveling time from Manila airport to the hotel and on numerous occasions during the journey I thought I was more likely to end up in a hospital or morgue, but at least the taxi driver knew where the hotel was. The small hotel Lucy had selected was on the waterfront. We had a two-room suite with a balcony looking out over Manila Bay. Lucy was looking tanned and ridiculously healthy and showed no sign of the stress and anxiety I’d expected. For a moment I wondered if the whole thing had been an elaborate ruse to get me there on a false pretext.
“How was Hong Kong?”
“A bit of a blur,” I said. “How was Phuket?”
“Well I didn’t stay there long. I met Suzie and Dale and we flew to Koh Samui.”
“I suppose you’re no nearer finding out about what all this is about?”
The Black Widow - Mark Kane Mysteries - Book Three: A Private Investigator Crime Series of Murder, Mystery, Suspense & Thriller Stories...with a dash of Romance Page 3