‘That was the idea.’
‘Whose idea? Matthew’s idea?’
The boy shook his head slowly. He finished the drink and put the mug on the table between them.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that came later. There is a school, a very special school in the east, near Shanghai. There’s a lake called Tai Hu.’
‘Yes, I know of it.’
‘It has almost fifty islands. One of them is called Chinghua Dao, Jade Island. You will not find it on any map. Chinghua Dao used to house a Buddhist monastery called Iingyin Si. It was shut down shortly after the revolution, and the monks never returned. Fifteen years ago the buildings were converted into a school. Its name is less poetic than the one the Buddhists gave it: Kiangsu Elite School Number Three.’
He paused, smiling as though something about the name or an image it conjured up amused him.
‘Have you heard of the elite schools?’ he asked.
David shook his head.
‘I’m not surprised. They’re a very well-guarded secret. Matthew Hyde had never heard of them either. They were established by the Chinese intelligence services in the sixties. The aim of the first school was to produce Chinese men and women who could pass themselves off as fully assimilated second-or third-or even fourth-generation Americans.
‘They took boys and girls at the earliest possible age and immersed them in American life and culture. They were brought up like Americans, in every respect. They spoke English every day. Their teachers were Americans who’d been well paid to do the job and keep quiet about it. The children watched American films and read American books and ate American food. Television programmes were recorded on primitive video machines. The latest records from the States or Britain were flown in. By the time they reached their teens, these were Chinese children only in spirit.’
‘Tursun, you’re not remotely like an American.’
‘I’m sorry, I should have explained. That was the first school. I think four American schools were set up in the end. They still exist, but I don’t know where they are. When they saw how successful the experiment was, they began to open other schools. There was a school for German, another for French, another for Spanish. That was when they started bringing in children from minority races, like myself. Han Chinese can’t pass themselves off as second-or third-generation everywhere.
‘I was discovered when I was four years old. Most Uighur children don’t try to speak Chinese until they’re taught it at school, and even then very few become fluent. By the age of four I’d learned as much Mandarin as a Chinese boy of my age. I had an ability for languages. One of the local cadres heard about me and notified Peking.
One week later, I was on a plane to Shanghai. The school I lived at was designed to train children for a life in Great Britain. Mostly, we were supposed to pass ourselves off as the children or grandchildren of Hong Kong Chinese. I was to pretend to be descended from Turkish Cypriots.’
‘You’d have done it perfectly, believe me. I’d like to know more about this later. But now I’d like you to tell me about Matthew Hyde.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The heat had gone from the night. A faint ghost of it remained in corners, among the roots of trees, beneath the eaves of the house, or swathed about clumps of hollyhock and fern. David shivered and stepped to the French window. He looked out into the darkness briefly, then drew the curtains. Suddenly he sneezed, then several times more.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, turning to Tursun. ‘Hay fever.’
‘You should try some Chinese medicine.’
David smiled.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked.
Tursun shook his head. He had crossed from Sinkiang to Ladakh at the end of winter, he knew what cold was.
David returned to his seat.
‘How did you meet Matthew?’
‘He was in the camp. I met him about a week after he was brought there. He was arrested by a man called Chang Zhangyi. Chang Zhangyi is …’
‘I know who he is. Only too well.’
‘Your friend was in a queue for food. He muttered something in English when they handed him a plateful of muck, and I went up to him and said there were ways to get hold of better food. We became friends, of course. They treated him very brutally, much worse than the Chinese or the Uighurs. I did what I could to help, but it was very little. He was a good man. I liked him. Even when things were very hard for him, he would cheer me up.’
‘He always was a bit of a cheery blighter. There were times I felt like thumping him. How come he ended up in a labour camp?’
‘He told me he thought it was a trick to see what he might say if he was caught off guard. The camps are full of informers. It usually involves a deal to take a year or two off someone’s sentence. You can never be sure who’s genuine, who’s working for the party.’
‘Matthew would never have fallen for something like that. I’m surprised they even bothered trying.’
‘That’s what he told me. He and I had long chats during the first week after we met. I told him all about the school. He took a great interest in that. And then, one day he came to me and said he wanted to make a deal. He would tell me a bunch of lies about himself, which I could use to negotiate an early release for my parents and myself. I could have a letter written by him, in which he would request the British authorities to provide my father with a job and a house.’
‘Do you have that letter?’
‘Of course.’
Tursun slipped his hand inside his shirt and brought it out again with a badly crumpled sheet of Chinese writing paper. He unfolded it carefully and passed it to David. Outside, a nightjar called, its lonely cry echoing briefly among the trees. Tursun looked up, unsettled by the bird’s call.
‘This is Matthew’s handwriting all right,’ David said. He glanced through the note. ‘And here’s a little message for me. “David, you bastard - if you don’t set Tursun’s mum and dad up properly, I’ll come back and haunt you.” Doesn’t leave me much choice, does he? I’ll have to keep this. Do you understand? It’s evidence you met Matthew.’
‘You will give it to the right people?’
‘You can be sure of that. You’re a precious asset, Tursun. The state can spare a few thousand to see you’re treated properly.’
‘He said he wanted to train me to be him. To know everything there was about him. He said I was to claim to be a reincarnation, that it would draw less attention to me once I got to India. We spent weeks going over everything I had to know. Names, dates, places - all the things I’ve told you. And more there hasn’t been time for yet.’
‘I don’t see how …’
'I have a perfect memory. Like a tape recorder. He only had to tell me something once or twice, and I’d have it in my memory for good. Have you got people who can do that?’
‘There are people like you, yes. Some of them do amazing feats with numbers.’
‘He told me how to pass myself off as him, so I could be sure of getting attention, and then he gave me details of Operation Hong Cha. I wasn’t supposed to know what it was all about, just to be able to pass on what he’d found out.’
‘Do you know more?’
‘Yes. A lot more.’
‘We’ll start on it again tomorrow, then.’
The nightjar called again, just once. David looked up. He wondered where Matthew was. They’d been good friends. They’d worked together twice in Sinkiang, and Matthew had saved his life once in Lop Nor. Back home, he’d saved Matthew after the break-up of a long-term relationship. They’d been close. And now? Now, the only link between them was a twelve-year-old boy with frightened eyes and the memories of another man.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The journey home was swift and lonely. David checked more than once, but he was sure there was no tail. It was an elegiac return, like a lover’s homecoming when he has left a much-loved mistress behind. He had lost Matthew Hyde for ever, of that he was now sure. Chang Zhangyi would not have left him in th
at camp for long. And after that … ?
Everything shook as a jet fighter whizzed past overhead. As the crashing faded, he wondered what was going on. Night flights were ordinarily banned. There’d be a flurry of complaints tomorrow. David guessed the plane had flown out of Brize Norton, an air force base that normally plagued the country to the west of Oxford. Either someone had made an almighty mistake that they wouldn’t be allowed to forget in a hurry, or orders had come from very high up requesting night-flying practice within British airspace.
He pressed on, exhausted after a long day. It might almost have been better if he’d just stayed on at Carstairs, in order to get an early start with Tursun in the morning. But he had to see that Sam was all right, had to find a way of making up to him about today. And he needed to speak to Dr Rose as soon as possible.
He didn’t care much what happened to Elizabeth any longer. Her drinking, her infidelities, her abrasive behaviour were all Anthony Farrar’s concern now. Not for the first time, he wondered what Farrar really saw in her, beyond a good figure and a draining enthusiasm for sex. She was rich, of course, with heaps of shares in the family business, Royle International. Did Farrar want to get a foothold there? It seemed a painful way to go about something that might have been more easily accomplished on the old-boy network or the club circuit.
Another jet came thundering out of the empty sky. This one was following the course of the motorway, like a bomber following a river to its target. Surely it was way off the rule book to buzz traffic like that? David thought a discreet phone call might turn up some answers to match the uneasy feeling he was starting to get in the pit of his stomach.
The city appeared slowly, growing about him as though seeded out there in the dark. He remembered the first time his father had taken him abroad, to Central Asia. David had been nine, almost the age Sam was now. They’d gone to attend an academic conference in Samarkand.
Until then, David had never been very far from London. There’d been holidays in Devon or the Lakes, visits to an aunt in Scotland, and a school trip to the Wedgwood Potteries. And now, in a matter of hours, he was transported to a world straight out of the Thousand and One Nights.
On the last day, they’d been driven out into the Kizil Kum Desert, a place of fantastic shapes and unnameable colours, as different from London as the moon. What had struck David more than anything had been the silence. That, above all, had changed him. Stopping in the midst of a vast expanse of dark red dunes, their driver had extinguished the engine, and such a silence had flooded the jeep as David, in all his years of noise and traffic fumes, could never have imagined. On his return to London, he’d found the city brash and desperately loud.
Now, nearly forty years on, the city’s embrace seemed somehow comforting. Deserts, for all their silence, could conceal horrors no city could ever match.
When he reached the house, the lights were still on upstairs. David muttered under his breath. Even in the holidays, Sam was expected to keep civilized hours. He looked up at the house and thought it had suddenly grown ridiculously big. It was a three-storey Victorian town-house, bought for them by Elizabeth’s mother when they married, and now worth massively more than had been paid for it. He’d have a word with Sam, and if the boy was happy with the idea, they could start looking for a smaller place as soon as he’d finished debriefing Tursun. As he climbed out of the car, he thought of Maddie. When she came out of the clinic, wouldn’t she need some sense of stability? It could so easily knock her back again to come home and find a ‘For Sale’ sign in the front garden.
He made to put the key in the front door, but as he did so, the door opened and swung back into the darkened hall. This time he swore aloud. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d had to tell Sam to close the door behind him properly. Surely Nicky hadn’t gone already? She’d always stayed with Sam until David or Elizabeth got back. Had she sensed his passing sexual interest in her and decided to clear off before he got home?
He fastened the lock and snibbed it, then put the hall light on. Right in front of him, Sam’s slippers lay on the floor. He felt a dull prickle of alarm. For the past year, Sam had been wearing his slippers on the way to bed and leaving them on top of a trunk in his room. He’d wear them in bed if allowed to. Ordinarily, when David came back this late, the television would still be playing in the living room, but tonight there was total silence.
No, he thought, not quite total. A muffled sound was coming from the front room, a sound he didn’t like. He hurried to the door, then paused. In the few feet he’d crossed, he had changed from worried father to something none of his friends would have recognized, something he had trained to become in places that did not exist.
He went down to the kitchen and took a knife from the block, a well-made knife with a ten-inch blade. Holding it carefully, he crept back to the living room. He pushed down the handle and gave the door a shove. The room was in darkness, save for the flickering of the television, which showed nothing but a mesh of black and white lines.
He pressed the light switch and blinked as the room came leaping into life. At first, nothing seemed out of place. The furniture was exactly as he’d left it, the paintings on the walls were untouched, the ornaments on the mantelpiece had not been moved.
The smell was the first thing he really noticed. A beautiful smell made up of jasmine, lily, and rose. It filled the room, and he breathed it in deeply, wondering at its delicacy. There was something of the erotic in it. He thought of a bedchamber hung with silk, and a bed strewn with dark red petals. On the mantelpiece, two incense cones smoked silently, sending spirals of blue smoke into the congealing air.
He took a step forward. That was when he caught sight of her, on the sofa. She was naked, and for a horrible moment he thought it was all a clumsy attempt to seduce him. Then he saw the tape over her mouth and heard her groan and sob in an attempt to speak. Her arms had been tied behind her back, and her ankles fastened with more tape.
He went up to her and peeled the tape gently from her mouth.
‘Nicky, what happened? Are you hurt?’
She shook her head. All her terror was in her eyes. Her body had gone rigid with fear.
‘Sam? Is he … ?’
He could not get the words out. She shook her head.
‘He’s upstairs. I don’t know … Two men, they …’
He bent as though to untie her. That was when he noticed what they’d done to her body. He stood back to see more clearly. Her attackers had written on her naked flesh with a pen of some sort. The message was in Chinese characters. On her left breast they’d written: Meiren - Beautiful Woman. On her right breast: Shuai nanhair - Handsome Boy. Then along her belly: Bie shi yiban ziwei zai shintou.
He recognized the last words. They were the last line of a well-known poem by the Emperor Li Yu. Like an owl screeching, they ran through his mind even as he got to his feet and hurried to the door: ‘Parting lies in the heart like a bitter taste.’
He ran up the stairs two at a time. Bie shi yiban. The words of the poem rang at every step like a bell in his head. Sam’s room was at the end of the corridor on the first floor. Ziwei zai shintou. The door was wide open, and light spilled into the passage. David knew he was taking an enormous risk going into the room without a gun, but his gun was in his bedroom on the next floor, and he wasn’t prepared to waste another second getting to Sam.
He dashed through the door and pulled up hard.
Bie shi yibari ziwei zai shintou.
They hadn’t stripped him naked, they hadn’t beaten they hadn’t so much as disturbed a hair on his head. David moved into the room carefully, inching his way forward, feeling the hair start to move on his neck, straining to understand what they had done.
The boy was sitting on a large wooden stool, to which he was fastened by thick leather straps.
‘Sam, what’s wrong? What have they done?’
Sam turned a distressed face to him.
‘I have to keep tight hold, Da
d. They said …’
‘Yes, I see, son. Don’t move. Just stay as you are. Can you do that? Can you hold on a little longer?’
Sam nodded. He was holding a rope and pulling back on it very hard with both hands. The other end of the rope was attached to a spring mechanism that fed into the trigger of a large crossbow whose bolt was directed exactly at Sam’s heart. By holding the rope he ensured that the spring remained taut. If he slackened his hold by a mere fraction, the spring would catapult the bolt straight into his chest.
David had had little experience with them, but he knew that crossbows were not toys but serious weapons that could inflict frightening injuries. At this short range, the bolt would not only pierce Sam’s slim body but would tear through it and embed itself in the wall behind.
In his long experience with weapons, the one thing he’d learnt was to do nothing hastily. The crossbow had been set up as a booby trap of sorts, and well-made booby traps often had more than one way of being sprung. The obvious thing to do was check the bolt. If nothing stood in his way, he could simply lift it from the groove and disarm the weapon. The moment he looked at it, he knew that wasn’t an option. Someone had designed a long cage to fit over the bolt. It held it firmly in place, and would only release it when the trigger fired. His next thought was to move the whole crossbow. It was screwed down firmly to a metal stand, and the stand was bolted to the floor. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble.
‘Dad, my arms are sore. I can’t hold it much longer.’
‘Don’t worry, Sam. If I can’t find a way of disarming this thing quickly, I’ll take over.’
‘You’ve got to hurry, Dad. I’m really tired. I’ve been holding this thing for hours.’
‘OK, Sam, I’m coming now. I’ll get hold of it, then I want you to make a phone call. I’ll give you the number.’
He turned and smiled at the boy. Sam was trembling, straining to keep the tension in the rope. He smiled back at him bravely, but David could see he was terrified.
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