by Graeme Hall
She tried to remember the clients she had seen come to the office when she worked for Sam, but none of them had left any impression.
Later, that evening, conversation with Sam was stilted, Emma’s mind elsewhere.
‘When are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ Sam finally asked.
‘Wrong? Nothing. Honestly. It’s just that my hearing is playing up again.’ Much as Emma wished her hearing was normal there were times when it was useful. She had spent some time earlier wondering whether she should tell Sam that one of his clients might be her brother’s killer. She couldn’t even imagine what words she would use. ‘By the way, Sam, that client of yours, did you know he was a killer?’ Or perhaps: ‘You know that client of yours, Sam? The one you did that big deal for? Well, I thought you might like to know he’s a murdering bastard.’ Emma had just gone round and round in circles. The last thing she wanted to do was to interfere with Sam’s work or do anything that might put him in an awkward position. And – as she had to remind herself – she had no idea if this was the same man or not. She had come to the conclusion that since anything she said couldn’t be unsaid it would be better to say nothing. For the moment anyway. Not until she knew more. Not that she would stop trying to get what she could from Sam, even if she felt bad for not being open about her questions.
‘How did you’re meeting go?’ Emma asked. ‘Sorry for turning up out of the blue like that.’
‘No need to apologise, I’m just sorry I was busy. We could have grabbed a coffee or something. The meeting was fine, and thanks for finding the file.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They’re looking to buy a factory in Shenzhen that makes mobile phones. They already own a major share of a network so I think they want to get into the hardware as well. I guess they can clean up if they make money both from selling people the phones and then getting them to sign up to their network.’
‘I suppose so.’ Emma would have felt better if Sam’s firm working for Bright Talk had been a one-off thing, but it seemed the company was going to be a continuing source of business.
‘Sorry, I forgot to ask, Kate said something about you feeling unwell? She said you looked pale when you left. Are you okay?’
‘Oh, it was nothing. I didn’t mean to worry her, I just felt a little dizzy. It happens sometime with my ears.’ Again the excuse. ‘It was fine when I got some fresh air.’
***
There were several stories for the origin of Tuen Ng – the Dragon Boat Festival. The most popular was that the festival commemorated the death of Qu Yuan, a poet and official of the Chu state in the time of the so-called Warring States. The story went that when the Chu capital fell Qu Yuan drowned himself in a nearby river and the local people raced out in their boats, either to scare the fish away or to retrieve his body. Whatever the truth of that, or any of the other explanations, it was unlikely that the beginnings of the festival involved large numbers of partying expatriates mixing alcohol and sunshine in a very unhealthy combination.
The McShane Adams junk was crowded. In truth it probably had more people on it than its legal capacity, but then since it was moored and tied between two other boats perhaps that didn’t matter. The boat certainly wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Junks were a feature of expat life and working for a firm like McShane Adams that had its own boat was a privilege that made Sam and his colleagues very popular with friends who were not so lucky. There was always a waiting list for the boat at weekends, but Sam preferred the midweek evening outings to Lamma for seafood. Sitting on the top deck after good food and a few beers, the lights of Aberdeen glittering as they sailed back to Hong Kong Island, always made Sam realise just how lucky he was.
Other parts of Hong Kong held more serious Dragon Boat races. In Shatin and on the island of Cheung Chau fiercely competitive crews, often made up of young men from the same families and villages through the generations, raced fast and hard. Stanley, however, was for the expat racers. Not that it wasn’t competitive, especially between the law firms and the banks, but it had nothing of the skill and speed of the real thing. Sam wasn’t interested in taking part but he was more than happy to cheer on his colleagues. But it was a shame Emma hadn’t wanted to come. He had once persuaded her to go on an evening trip to Lamma, but she had been very reluctant and seemed uncomfortable on the boat. He hadn’t pushed it again.
The spectator boats were moored in two lines along the side of the race course, each tied tightly to its neighbours. Sam had no idea what time of the morning the boats had taken up their positions, but it must have been early. Like everyone else he’d had to take a sampan from the beach to get to the McShane Adams junk, and the Hakka boatwomen were doing very good business with overcharged fares. What choice did people have? They either had to pay or swim.
‘Here you are,’ said Sam, passing Kate a beer fresh from the icebox. Kate was in a bikini and a wide-brimmed hat, making the most of the sun that had decided to grace the day, and Sam tried not to look too obviously at the flower tattoo on her upper left thigh. He was dressed rather more conservatively in a polo shirt and long shorts. He was conscious of how pale his legs were compared with everyone else.
‘Thanks. How many more races to go?’ asked Kate.
‘Just three, I think. The two semi-finals and then the final. You getting bored?’
‘A little. It depends on the men in the boat.’
‘I see. You’re perusing them with an experienced eye? Their paddling technique? Stroke rate? Whether they’re together or not?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Something like that …’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t do the same, Sam. All those athletic young women in wet T-shirts. I mean, I’m straight, but even I get turned on by some of them. But of course, I forget, you’re taken.’ Sam wondered if he detected a slightly bitter tone in Kate’s voice. Not that she was jealous of Emma, more that she was angry with Sam for breaking their shared single status. The bond they shared had been damaged. Perhaps irrevocably.
‘What happened to the guy you were seeing?’
‘Scumbag. Dumped me for some compliant little Filipina.’
‘Oh … First semi-final coming up. Are we in this one?’ Sam asked to the boat at large. The McShane Adams dragon boat had been doing surprisingly well given that most of its members had spent the majority of their practice sessions discussing strategy and techniques in the Stanley bars rather than practising on the water.
‘No. Next one.’ The voice of one of the litigation department.
Sam had never got over just how noisy a dragon boat race was: the drummers on each boat setting a tempo; the less-than-coordinated thrashing of the paddles in the water; all topped off with the descant screams of the spectators. All conversation stopped while six boats stormed along the course, the top three going into the final.
‘Did you not want to be in the boat, Sam?’ Paul Ridgeway had appeared alongside Sam and Kate. His combination of sneakers, chinos and an Oxford shirt with buttoned down collar made Sam feel underdressed. Kate pulled on a T-shirt. ‘I can’t say I blame you,’ he continued, ‘it was never my sort of thing either.’
‘Too much work to do,’ said Sam.
‘Ha! Good answer!’ Paul laughed. That rarest of things. ‘Speaking of which, Mr Leung has invited us to dinner at the Jockey Club on July 5th.’
‘Including me?’ Sam was surprised.
‘Including you, Sam. Mr Leung likes you and … well, I’m not going to be around forever. It’s as much a post-handover social thing as anything. Not directly work-related. A bit of a pain, I know, but he’s a good client. Some of his colleagues will be there I expect, but Elizabeth will be coming with me. Is there anyone …? Mr Leung tells me you have a partner?’
‘Yes. Emma. You may remember her. She worked for me as a temp last September.’
‘Sort of, I think. I’m not sure how Mr Leung knows more about your personal life than I do, but an
yway, if she’s available he thought perhaps you would like to ask her to join us. Ah, it looks like they’re getting ready for the next semi-final. If you’ll excuse me I need to go and make myself visible.’
‘Sort of,’ said Kate who had been listening attentively. ‘Sort of remembers her. Everybody remembers Emma. Every man, anyway. Still, flavour of the month, aren’t you? Dinner with a client at the Jockey Club?’
In spite of screams and shouts of encouragement, the McShane Adams dragon boat came only fifth in the second semi-final.
‘I hope that’s not an omen,’ said Kate.
***
Emma felt guilty about not wanting to join Sam on the McShane Adams junk. Many people would have jumped at the chance to spend a day watching the races from a boat with a well-stocked drinks cabinet. But she really didn’t like being on junks. She’d tried a few when she first came to Hong Kong. After all, it was what everybody did at the weekend. At least that’s what she was told. Pile on board with a chiller full of drinks and food, perhaps the Sunday paper, and spend the day moored in a quiet bay. But she didn’t go in for water sports and soon started to feel trapped, especially when some banker tried to hit on her, and the bottom line was that she simply didn’t care for being on the water. Even when she needed to cross the harbour she always took the MTR rather than the ferry, and the Easter trip to Macau had been a nightmare she’d had to hide from Sam. Anyway, today she had something else to do.
Emma was grateful that the library was open on a public holiday. She felt a sense of déjà vu as she sat down at the microfiche reader. Her life had changed immeasurably since she was in the same library just a few short months ago; she was in love, living with her boyfriend. And yet here she was again, still looking for answers to the same question. A question that didn’t seem to want to go away.
She had spent the weekend wondering what to do, trying to behave normally and not let Sam think anything was wrong. Not that anything was wrong as such, but Emma sensed a storm might be coming, as if the No. 1 typhoon signal had been raised. She wished it was like a real typhoon where you could plot the expected path and when it was going to hit. She couldn’t see anything good that was likely to come out of what she was doing, but it was as if she had no choice in the matter. She was being taken down this path whether she liked it or not. So here she was shortly after the library opened for the day with a pile of microfiches for 1992 editions of the South China Morning Post. What was she looking for? Any story that might have mentioned Gao Zhihua in a context that gave her some clue as to what his role had been in Xinhua.
She wished the microfiches had some sort of search facility. Within an hour her eyesight was tiring and she had barely reached the end of January. She leant back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. She opened them as wide as she could then shut them for a moment. She had been scanning pages for any stories that made reference to Xinhua or the New China News Agency. There were plenty but she could quickly dismiss them all as irrelevant; most of them being to do with politics and the handover. They rarely mentioned individuals. At most there was reference to ‘a Xinhua spokesman’, and certainly not Gao Zhihua.
By midday Emma had reached July and she was more than ready to take a break. Leaving the rest of the microfiches by the reader, she went to get some fresh air and walked towards Queen’s Pier. She bought an iced tea from a vendor and sat looking over to Kowloon trying to let her mind go blank.
‘Emma?’ A man’s voice behind her. She turned to see who it was.
‘Liang-bao? Hi … what are you doing here?’
‘Nothing much. Since it’s a holiday, I’ve no classes today. I was thinking of going over Kowloon side. What about you?’
‘What about me?’ Emma was disoriented for a moment. Wondering what Liang-bao was doing there.
‘What are you doing sitting on a bench by the harbour with a carton of iced tea?’
‘Just taking a break.’ She didn’t want to explain why she’d been in the library, so she changed the conversation. ‘How’s Alice? I’ve not seen her for a while.’
‘She’s excited her cousin’s going to be back in town soon. She’s planning loads of things for them to do together.’
‘Is that the cousin who’s studying in Shanghai?’
‘Kwok-wah. Yes.’
‘How’s he doing there?’
‘I don’t really know. I haven’t met him myself yet. When he’s back we should all get together – Alice and myself, Kwok-wah, you and Sam … I’ll have a word with Alice. Try and fix something up.’
They sat in silence for a while. Emma wasn’t ready to go back to her microfiches just yet, but she wished Liang-bao would go away and leave her in peace. Instead he sat looking across the harbour towards the Peninsula Hotel and the Cultural Centre until he spoke again.
‘I do envy Alice – the way she’s so close to her cousin. They’re almost brother and sister. Of course not many people in China have a sibling. You know about the one-child policy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, I do understand the need for it, why we have it, but sometimes I think it is strange. Several generations growing up without any brothers or sisters. Which means the next generation won’t have any aunts or uncles, so there won’t be any cousins in the future either. Well, there will be some. There are some cases where two children are allowed. But not for most people. It’s going to be peculiar, I think. What about you? Do you have a brother?’
Emma hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to what Liang-bao had been saying, but his question made her sit up and take notice.
‘No, I don’t.’ She said. Not a lie but not quite the whole truth either. She didn’t feel the need to expand on it.
‘So that’s something we have in common,’ he said. ‘Do you ever wish you did? Have a brother, that is?’
Uneasy at the direction the conversation had taken, Emma had difficulty in knowing what to say.
‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ she lied, before adding brusquely, ‘I’ve got to be going.’
Back in the library Emma found was she shaking. She took the opportunity to go into the toilets to throw some water on her face and gather her thoughts before returning to her research. Her head told her it was just chance that Liang-bao had talked about families. That it was a natural conversation in view of Alice and her cousin. But there was also something odd about the conversation, she was sure of it, but she didn’t know what. Emma dried her face with a paper towel, screwed it up into a ball and threw it into the bin, determined to forget about Liang-bao and get back to Gao Zhihua and his role in Xinhua.
Searching through the microfiches was proving both fruitless and tiring. She concluded that she really hadn’t thought through just how much time it would take and how remote the likelihood of finding anything was. Things improved when she moved on to the CD-ROMs with their search facility. It was limited in scope, not a full text, but she could at least search for keywords in headlines. She looked for ‘Xinhua’, ‘New China News Agency’ and ‘Gao Zhihua’ himself. His name itself found nothing but the other two inevitably gave a string of results. She started to go through them one by one: stories about Hong Kong after the handover; criticisms of Chris Patten (‘sinner of a thousand years, whore of the East’); stories about how wonderful China was and the good works of the Communist Party; rebuttals of Western criticism. Most could be quickly eliminated and none made any reference to Gao Zhihua.
Emma was close to giving up when she found it. A report in the business section about the twelfth Asian Telecommunications Industry Conference. A report on a speech given about the future of the telecommunications industry in China. A speech given by a representative from Xinhua. A speech given by Gao Zhihua.
***
That night Emma slept fitfully. Her tinnitus was particularly bad. The usual low-pitched roaring in her right ear was especially loud, and there was a new sound: a high-pitched whine in her left. It had been a particularly hot and clammy night and
even Emma, who generally didn’t mind the heat as much as Sam did, found herself throwing off the bed sheet to allow the ceiling fan to caress her skin. There was a distant sound of thunder and Emma looked over at Sam to see if he was awake, but he slept on. Emma started thinking back over the day and knew there was no chance of getting back to sleep any time soon. Not wanting to disturb Sam, she got out of bed and went into the living room and looked out at the night scene. Lights sparkled on the container ships moored in the western harbour approaches, and even at this hour – in the middle of the night – she could see barges coming and going, loading and unloading. Business, trade, stopped for nothing. Not the clock, not the weather, not for politics. Certainly not for politics. But that was Hong Kong. Business, finance, profit, deals were what the city was all about. What the city had always been about and what would always come first. She was never quite sure whether that was a good or bad thing. In the distance, beyond Lantau, she could see lightning.
She thought about Gao Zhihua and what she had learnt today. She knew she couldn’t be certain – perhaps she could never be completely sure – but it seemed more likely than not that the Gao Zhihua who had killed Peter was one of Sam’s clients. So, what was she supposed to do with this information? Should she tell Sam? And if she did what did she expect him to do about it anyway? Emma went to the bedroom door and watched Sam sleeping. He had discarded the sheet completely and lay there naked in the heat. He’d come back from a day on the junk more than a little the worse for wear, and pink from the sun. He’d be painfully burnt in places by the morning. He looked vulnerable. Here was the man who had brought her not only happiness but even more importantly a stability. The possibility of a future. She knew she loved him. She knew that he loved her. She knew she couldn’t do anything, or ask him to do anything, that would jeopardise his career. But she also knew that she had to do something for Peter. If only she had the faintest idea of what.