‘You can learn to share,’ said Ah Lan.
‘Thank you, Ah Lan,’ I said hurriedly, because Daisy was puffing up with indignation. ‘We have something for you too.’
‘Hazel!’ hissed Daisy, behind me. ‘Not again!’
‘We want you to be part of the Detective Society,’ I said, ignoring her. I heard her huff in annoyance. ‘It’s all we can give.’
‘As long as it doesn’t interfere with my place in the Five Jade Figures,’ said Ah Lan, winking.
I gave him the translated version of the Detective Society pledge, and Ah Lan recited it. His cheek twitched as he tried not to laugh at some of the words, but all the same I felt he was pleased.
Halfway through, May came running up and asked what we were doing.
‘Boring grown-up things,’ I said quickly.
‘I think you’re lying,’ said May. ‘Some grown-up things are interesting. When I grow up, I’m going to be a pirate queen.’
We watched her as she ran away, brandishing her stick.
‘You have to look after her and Rose when I go back to England,’ I said to Ah Lan. ‘Don’t let them do anything too dangerous.’
‘I’m not sure I can promise that,’ said Ah Lan, leaning on his rake. ‘They’re your sisters. I think it’s in their blood.’
Detective Leung came back to the house one more time, with Mr Wa Fan. Now that I knew about Mr Wa Fan’s secret, I could see how his hand shook when he raised it, how the lines in his face looked as deep as cuts. He really had only wanted to help, and I felt so ashamed of myself that I bowed almost to the ground when I saw him.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Mr Wa Fan put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Your grandfather and I were friends,’ he said. ‘I could do nothing less. But I am sorry, Miss Wong, for what happened. I am sorry for the pain you feel now.’
Detective Leung stopped in front of me. ‘Miss Wong,’ he said, the little dot in his eye dancing as he spoke. ‘I hope you will forgive me for suspecting you. I have to look into everything. It is my job.’
‘It’s – it’s all right,’ I said. ‘You did have to.’
‘Now,’ he went on. ‘You and Miss Wells have been very brave. Especially Miss Wells, with the hotel telephone. Without that, I wouldn’t have known where to find you.’
Daisy glowed. ‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’ she said. ‘I expect you want to give us medals now, don’t you?’
Detective Leung looked at her askance. ‘I do not give out medals,’ he said at last. ‘Pride in the case should be its own reward.’
And, despite everything, I nearly laughed out loud to see Daisy’s cross face.
11
My father and Jie Jie were more wrapped up in Teddy than ever. They hovered around, my father’s eyes straying to him halfway through a sentence, Jie Jie reaching out to touch him as he lay in Ping’s arms – for Ping was to look after him when Daisy and I went home again. It was funny: a few weeks before I would have been furiously jealous, but now I understood that love is not a thing that can be cut up and doled out like a cake. It keeps on expanding.
And I also discovered that although I couldn’t forgive my mother, I still loved her. That was why what she had done hurt me. The pain of it kept overwhelming me whenever I thought of it. It was not fading, like the pain of my grandfather’s death, which had become a soft ache that I could look at and touch and put away like a lovely dress that has become too small now to wear. I tried to laugh and smile and be strong, but it felt as though I was fighting to be so all the time. My mother had done what she had done not just for herself, but for me, and that was dreadful.
Then, one afternoon, my father called me into the Library. He was sitting at his desk, without Teddy for once, and I saw how tired he still looked, and how sad.
‘Father,’ I said to him.
‘My Hazel,’ said my father. ‘I am sorry. I’m sorry for what your mother has done, I’m sorry that I doubted you, I’m sorry that I was angry with you, and I am sorry that I ever made you feel as though I did not care for you.’
‘No, I’m sorry!’ I cried. ‘I was awful, Father, I really was. I didn’t behave like a proper big sister, or a proper daughter. I’m sorry I was angry with you about Su Li.’
‘Hazel, be quiet,’ said my father, and he smiled at me for the first time in what felt like weeks. ‘As your father, I command you to be proud of yourself and what you have done. I made some mistakes, I admit it, and I’m sorry. It breaks my heart that Su Li is dead, and I think you are right that I could have done more to prevent it. But you brought her murderer to justice. You saved your brother and you brought him back to me. You are wonderful and brave and clever, and you are a credit to me. I ought to have said this to everyone, and especially to you, when you first arrived, but I will say it now: Teddy does not change anything. You are still my clever daughter, and I am proud of everything you do with that brain of yours. I am even coming round to your Miss Wells. I see that, although she is wilful, this can sometimes serve her well. You seem to have a talent for – for solving problems together, and this time I am grateful for it.’
I threw myself at him. ‘I don’t have to go back to England,’ I said, my face muffled in his shoulder. ‘I can stay. I can look after you.’
‘I don’t need looking after, Hazel,’ said my father. ‘You are my child. I look after you, and Rose and May and Teddy – and I will look after your mother. She is still my wife. This is hard to say, but for your sake she will always be part of this family, and she will stay in this house. I think that might be punishment enough.’
‘All right,’ I said in a tiny voice. ‘Thank you. Father, about England … Rose wants to go to school there one day too. Can she?’
‘Rose?’ said my father. ‘But – well, why not? She shall go, and May too, one day. If I have learned anything, it is that it is important never to underestimate anyone, no matter how well you think you know them. But it is also important to remember that you cannot take responsibility for what another person does. Hazel, no matter what she says, you are not the reason for what your mother did. Do you hear me? It isn’t your fault.’
When I came out of the room, I bumped into Daisy, who had been listening at the door.
‘You’re a chump,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You know your father was telling the truth.’
And I finally believed her.
And then we were standing on the boat as it pulled away from the Hong Kong dock, water churning white beneath us and my stomach churning in sympathy. Father and May and Rose and Jie Jie and Ping and Teddy were all waving from the shore, and Daisy was standing beside me, waving back. I watched my life and my family become smaller and smaller, and I felt a tug in my chest, as though my heart was tied to them.
We were on our way back to England, and school, and friendships and arguments and foreign food and grey skies and cold and rain, Kitty and Beanie and Lavinia and George and Alexander, and I couldn’t wait. I knew, more and more, that grown-up life was sometimes rather horrid, but I was learning that I could bear it. I squeezed Daisy’s hand, and waved with my free one, waved and waved until the figures on the dock winked out and we were alone at sea. I was waving goodbye to my grandfather, and Su Li – and my mother too. She was at home today. She had not seen me off, and I was both hurt and glad about that.
‘I’m rather looking forward to going home,’ said Daisy. ‘Aren’t you? Hong Kong has been eventful, and adventurous, but also awful and topsy-turvy. I’m quite ready to go back to being the Honourable Daisy Wells again.’
‘You always were Daisy Wells,’ I said, smiling. ‘Hong Kong just made you a different sort of Daisy.’
‘You’re quite a different Hazel in Hong Kong too!’ said Daisy. ‘I hardly know you any more.’
‘Do you like the Hong Kong me?’ I asked nervously.
‘Oh, more than ever,’ said Daisy, beaming. ‘Only you’re far more difficult to order about.’
‘I like the Hong Kong Daisy too
,’ I said. ‘Let’s not change back again all the way, even when we get back to England.’
‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘But I’m still President, and you’re still Vice-President. Some things will never change.’
‘Some things will never change,’ I agreed, and we did the Detective Society handshake as we leaned against the railing.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
This book was both a joy to write, and extremely difficult. This is mostly because I became aware, as never before, how wide the gap between Hazel and me really is. We share a love of books and mysteries. We both have large, blended families. But a British-American upbringing is not a Hong Kong Chinese one. I’m very lucky to have a group of school friends who have become more like family, who I’ve known since we were Hazel and Daisy’s age and who have, over many years, introduced me to Hong Kong culture. When I told them about this book they were very willing to help me with it. Alison Wong and Scarlett Fu read drafts, and Scarlett took me out for the dim sum meal that Hazel and Daisy eat. Thank you to both of them, and also to Zara Un and Sarah Fok, Alice Shone and Sarah Warry, for seventeen wonderful years of food-based friendship.
I took a research trip to Hong Kong in September 2016. This was in fact supposed to be the beginning of our honeymoon, so I have to thank my husband, David, from the bottom of my heart for the time he spent following me around as I went into raptures over small bits of paper in Hong Kong history museums.
We really did go to the Peninsula Hotel, and the Peak, and several teahouses, and many of the other places Hazel and Daisy visit in this book. We even took a night-time hike down from the Peak and almost walked into a spider. But what we did not do was visit a house like Hazel’s, for one simple reason: they no longer really exist. Old Hong Kong houses were built of granite. They were built to last – but today, almost none of them have. Going hunting for buildings from the 1930s was incredibly difficult, because Hong Kong is constantly changing as land changes hands. To recreate the Hong Kong Hazel knew would have been nearly impossible without the help of a woman who grew up in Hong Kong in the 1940s, in a household very like Hazel’s. Details of the Big House and Hazel’s family, as well as the bank setting and the idea of a lift-based murder, came from her recollections, and interviewing her was truly one of the greatest honours of my life. I hope I have done her and her memories proud – thank you, OB, for giving your time and your knowledge to this project.
I met many kind and helpful people in Hong Kong who influenced this story. Special thanks to Professor David Fauré at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who was so generous with his time and answered all my questions about 1930s Hong Kong life, Professor Simon Haines, and Associate Professor Eddie Tay, who allowed me to speak to his students about publishing and took us for a wonderful campus lunch. John Millen at the South China Morning Post has been wonderfully helpful from the outset of this project, and I was delighted to meet Karly Cox, Miuccia and Sebastian for a very noisy dim sum interview in the traditional 1930s teahouse that has become the Luk Man.
Although this is a novel, and therefore full of things that are inevitably not as correct as a history book, I have tried to use the truth as much as I can. The history of Hong Kong is an incredible one – if you’re interested in finding out more, I think Steve Tsang’s book on it is very good. The Triads as an organization are absolutely real, and very much a part of Hong Kong society then and now (although there is no such thing as the Five Jade Figures, and I have not drawn on any real people in my portrayal of Sai Yat and his gang). Mui tsai are also real – as Hazel says in her glossary, they were originally slaves, rather than paid servants, and because of this they were (quite rightly) being outlawed in the 1930s. However, I decided to keep them in my story by name on the understanding that the fair and generous Mr Wong would have been paying his, and also educating them!
Wealthy Hong Kong children like Hazel and her siblings really did live in fear of being kidnapped, and they were always carefully watched for that reason. The lift to the doctor’s (yes, doctors’ offices really were above banks) would be one of the only times a child like Teddy would have been without a guard of some kind. And, by the way, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building is both a real place and a real bank – if you or an adult you know bank with HSBC, you use it every day.
All the food in this book has been recommended to me by various Hong Kong friends and readers. I have eaten (almost) everything I describe here, including thousand-year egg and chicken feet. I liked them both a lot! If you live in England and you want to try them too, I’d recommend visiting Chinatown in London. Unsurprisingly (given its history as a British colony) a lot of London’s Chinese population are of Hong Kong descent, and so the food available there is close to what you’ll get in Hong Kong itself.
Mrs Svensson’s name is Kendra because of Kendra Gilbertson, whose generous bid in the Authors for Refugees auction won her the right to see her name in one of my books. My research into Hong Kong reminded me how its history (just like that of every city and country in the world) is a history of migration, sometimes forced. Hazel and her family do not know it, but the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong is just round the corner, followed swiftly by the Second World War. Anyone can become a refugee, and during those years even Hong Kong’s wealthiest families did. To those of us currently happy and safe in our homes, remember how lucky you are. Treat today’s refugees as though they matter just as much as you know you do.
And now, on to the proper thank-you bit.
I am enormously indebted to the generosity and wisdom of my early readers, without whom this story would be not nearly as good or as true: Miuccia Chan, Sebastian Wong, Karly Cox, Scarlett Fu, Alison Wong, Kwan Ching Yi Angie, Cerrie Burnell (who gave me invaluable advice on Ah Lan), Charlie Morris, Anne Miller, Kathie Booth Stevens, Wei Ming Kam, Viki Cheung, Katherine Webber and the Tsang family. Anything that is correct is down to them. Anything that is wrong is absolutely my fault.
Thank you to my endlessly brilliant Puffin team: Nat Doherty, Tom Rawlinson, Naomi Colthurst, Harriet Venn, Sonia Razvi, Francesca Dow, Jane Tait, Frances Evans, Jan Bielecki, Wendy Shakespeare and everyone else who has worked in-house on this book. My name is on its cover, but it wouldn’t mean much without their support. Thank you also to my agent, Gemma Cooper, who has adored and fought for this series for many years, and to Jenny Bent, who has tirelessly worked to send Daisy and Hazel around the world. Thanks to Nina Tara for a beautiful cover and maps, and thanks to the woman who brings Hazel’s voice to life in my audiobooks, Katie Leung.
Thank you to my family and friends, who have supported me through this weird process once again. Special shout-out to my partner-in-crime, Non Pratt, and to Team Cooper. Thanks to my wonderful parents, who would love me whatever I did (but are especially proud of the book thing), and my wonderful husband, who once again has lived with me every day of this book and remarkably still enjoys my company. And thank you to my brother and sister, Richard and Carey Stevens, who are absolutely nothing like Rose, May and Teddy but who I thought of often while I was creating Hazel’s siblings.
And, finally, thank you to my fans. Your letters, your drawings, your reviews, your stories, your costumes, your plays, your lessons, your parties, your events and your Detective Societies have brought my characters to life in the most extraordinary ways. I am astonishingly lucky to inspire you, and you are the reason I wrote this book.
London, August 2017
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