by Clive Hindle
But the problem was still there and Philip Chan wasn’t going to let it go; he was like a dog at a bone: how did the Crown account for the traces in the tsai’s flat? For Jack at least the truth came out down a Wanchai bar with his former co-counsel a few days after the newspaperman had been released from custody. The Narcotics boys had been in the tsai’s apartment before the forensic team had been alerted and they had given the place a good dusting over - “as you do,” was the way a jocular Gerry Montrose put it. The film of white powder on the fan was a deft detail. Those cops were never brought to book; the authorities swept it under the carpet, much to Philip’s anger.
Jack’s first call today was to the Mandarin to check if any messages had been left for him. There were none so obviously they were managing without him back home. He was about to leave when he heard a familiar voice behind him. Turning, he was astonished to see Johnny Kwok with two other men coming up from the Captain‘s Bar. Jack’s fists bunched and he balanced on his toes like a tiger about to spring but he overcame the urge and mingled, instead, among the herbaceous plants in the reception area. It proved a sensible move because Plum Moriarty was with Johhny. Curiouser and curiouser: the thought kept recurring. The second man, a tall, muscular Chinese, cast his eyes suspiciously into the shadows of the hotel’s alcoves. Jack recognised a Red Pole when he saw one. Menace throbbed in his movements. As he watched, the man held out his right hand to usher the other two away and, catching sight of the dragon tattoo on his wrist, his stomach turned over. Could this be his attacker?
The men left the hotel through the main entrance. A few moments later Jack sauntered out into the sunshine just in time to see them reach the end of the street. The Sikh porter at the hotel door, seeing Jack’s surreptitious movement, said, “Can I help you, sir, taxi perhaps?”
“No, no thanks, thought I’d forgotten something, that’s all.” He patted his breast pocket. “It’s all here,” he added reassuringly as the Indian’s face shone with a smile. He followed his quarry down the street, conscious that the Sikh was interested in his movements. He had to walk round the corner in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion and prayed that the other men were not looking in his direction. He needn’t have worried. The trio walked swiftly through Hong Kong Park to Garden Road. They crossed the busy thoroughfare and walked into the Peak Tram terminal. Great minds think alike, he thought, but this was a quandary. If he walked in there too they would recognise him. He waited until the tram was winched down from the heights of the Peak and then, as everyone boarded, he bought his ticket, joined the throng and walked to the back as far away from the three men as he could get.
It was impossible to enjoy the vista of Hong Kong harbour slipping backwards behind him as the tram began its journey up the hill because he was too busy keeping his eyes on the men in front and looking away each time the Red Pole glanced suspiciously around. At MacDonnell Road they stood up to alight. He let them disappear into the tunnel before making a belated dash for the closing door. The other passengers looked astonished as he jumped off the tram. Hugging the walls, he followed the men through the corridors until they came out on the street. A black Mercedes limousine waited for them. Two men stood outside the vehicle; they looked like the guys who had followed the ferry from Lantao. Unfortunately, that was where his detective work ended. They all climbed into the limo and it swept away.
Retracing his footsteps to wait for the next tram, he was delighted to find Amie aboard. “How strange to meet you here!” she said with a brilliant smile in which her pearly teeth were shown to best advantage. “Have you been visiting someone?”
“Just been looking around. Taking advantage of the fact that K.K. Chow’s on the case so I should be okay now.”
“Still, you shouldn’t take unnecessary risks. I’ve told you these are dangerous times in Hong Kong. It isn’t just about your private squabbles.”
If he was curious about her fears, it was when they settled down for ching cha in a little tea shop on the Peak that she talked of the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese. Local fears about the effect of the eugenics law in China made Jack realise how strongly ordinary Hong Kong people felt about the British sell out. Rumours abounded of a powerhouse economy being built on the slave labour of a billion people while the CCP became the new royalty and exported billions of dollars abroad for their future bolt-holes. Those issues barely troubled the man in the street back where he came from. The grand colonial past was something to savour for the patricians, whom it had benefited; it scarcely touched the rest of the population. The Chinese eugenics law was barely news back there even though it was ethnic cleansing of an unpleasant kind. It demonstrated that the new Chinese mandarins intended to control who had the right to have children; how many they could have; which genes were deemed to be acceptable; which weren't. “There are many politicians in the West who would envy that sort of social control,” he said wryly.
“Except it isn’t as simple as that,” she responded. “Ethnic cleansing of the worst possible kind is going on too! In Xianjing, in Tibet, to name but two. And anyone who has seen a mob in China stirred to blind hatred by a few rabble-rousers would quake at the thought of the Chinese cloning only those genetic qualities their octogenarian leaders think to be of use in society!” She shook with anger as she told him she had friends who were mown down in Tian An Men Square.
“That was 89 wasn’t it? I was back in the UK by then. I saw it on the television. In common with just about everyone else in the west, I have no appreciation of the horrors of those events.” She nodded, her face grim. “The Basic Law should keep similar atrocities here at bay, shouldn’t it?”
Amie laughed. “The Basic Law!” He was reminded that people like Mr. Ma were preparing escape plans precisely because of the same fears but for the ordinary Hong Kong Chinese there was no alternative to the Chinese government. That is what they saw as the British betrayal: they had been given no choice, used as pawns in a diplomatic game. It was pointless arguing that the days of the Raj were long gone; that Britain, if not entirely toothless, was certainly weakened by the internal, family squabbles of Europe. There was, therefore, a degree of gloom in their walk around the Peak, even though it yielded breath-taking views of the harbour and the ships ploughing through the Kowloon Roads. Plumed bow-wakes shot up from the junks. “Stormy waters,” Amie said, “the typhoon is still out there.”
“An allegory for life.”
She smiled and slipped her hand into his. His heart skipped a beat. Maybe she had thought it through and the deliberations had come down in his favour. How it would work out he didn’t know, but you can say that about everything in life. He hid his feelings, though, behind light-hearted banter and they craned their necks towards the horizon in search of the Big Wind but nothing was visible. Whatever held the land in thrall lurked out at sea, choosing the moment and the place to come crashing ashore.
“So, how are you finding Gerry’s flat?”
“Pretty good.” He was playing his cards close to his chest.
“I was very worried about you when I left you last night.”
“Oh, why?” He hoped he hadn’t turned too bright a shade of crimson.
“Oh, on your own,” she said, “in Gerry’s flat, after meeting K.K. Chow.”
“It was no great problem.” Jack was thinking, surely she can’t know? There’s no way she can know. It crossed his mind that Diana could still be sufficient of a bitch to have rung her and just mentioned in passing that she’d been there and he was of course from way back the extra notch on her gun. She wouldn’t actually have had to lie about what happened, just left out the detail that he’d turned down the offer, and Amie would have put two and two together. It had been obvious from the introduction at K.K. Chow’s that no love was lost there. But he dismissed the thought. Diana wouldn’t do that. Even in the old days, she’d have waited for a really vulnerable moment and then slid in the stiletto and Jack had noticed something different about her on this last occasion. It was a
kind of softness and, if not exactly transparency, a translucence that hadn’t been there previously. She’d tried to play the old Diana but her admission that she was acting on orders, almost under duress, had carried with it a hint of self-preservation. He’d been a bit hard on her, throwing her out without her clothes on, let alone keeping the champagne! The look on her face! He’d like to have told Amie of that but thought it best not to go there.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing, just a thought about how I left a case back at work.” Lying tripped off the tongue. That didn’t augur well for a long relationship.
“I’ve taken the day off today, Jack, ” Amie reminded him. “Moriarty’s not in.”
“I remember you saying.” He didn’t let on that he already knew that her boss was in the middle of an assignation with some fairly unsavoury characters. “Great! Am I being presumptuous to think we might spend the afternoon together?”
“Not at all!”
“Fantastic! What do you suggest? I’m game for just about anything. I couldn’t think of anyone’s company I’d rather enjoy.”
“We could do anything. There’s a lot more to see, a lot that has changed since you were last here.”
“We could do a bit of sight-seeing and then go for dinner.”
“We could.” She sounded doubtful. “I will have to go home at some point though. I expect a call from my cousin.”
“This is the one in Macao?”
"Yeah. I haven't spoken to him yet, but he left a message on my answer phone. He’ll ring me tonight, so I should be able to find out what you want to know. About 8 o'clock or so?”
“Maybe I can come over and pick you up around then?”
“Why don't we do that? Go out on Kowloon side!”
“Gaddis?”
“You do have expensive tastes!”
“I don’t know whether you only live once but I do know only once is guaranteed.”
She laughed. “So full of philosophy, Jack! But you’ll need to know where I live.”
“I know. Mei Foo,” he said.
“You know Mei Foo?”
“Mei Foo and I are old acquaintances.”
“You’re full of surprises. Tell you what I’d like to do first?”
“Go on.”
“Take a look at Gerry’s apartment.”
“Really? I thought you’d been there.”
“I have but not for the same reason.”
“Ah.” He didn’t mention that she had answered another question.
He was worried too she’d pick up the scent of the other woman around the place, rather as one tigress can sense another. If she did sense it, she gave no sign of caring, because she was on a mission of her own. It made him think of Krakatoa! The only oriental volcano he could think of.
Amie left around 4 pm promising to see him again that evening and he went for a jog on the Repulse Bay sands with a swim to follow. He was curiously self-satisfied but at the same time he had a sense of doom. He was worried about the thin veneer of a truce with K.K. Chow, but it wasn’t just that. It was the fact that things were going so well, far better than he’d ever imagined when setting off here, and he feared them changing for the worse. The high he’d got from winning Peter’s case had followed him here and, like the storm which was still somewhere out at sea, the high was always followed by a low.
Later that evening he took a cab through the Cross-harbour tunnel to Mongkok and walked across the square between the blocks towards Amie’s flat. He didn’t have any real recollection of Mei Foo, even though he’d been here that once previously. One Chinese housing estate looks very much like another - rows of concrete monoliths - but one thing which distinguishes them from their British counterparts is the absence of graffiti and rubbish. Children playing in the square looked at Jack curiously. No matter how common Europeans were in the city, obviously they didn’t see many of them here. He took the lift to the twelfth floor and knocked on Amie’s door. To his surprise it was open. He was reluctant to barge in but eventually plucked up the courage. The rooms were tiny. A writing desk in one corner bore an envelope. She had started to write out his address but she’d made a mistake. There was nothing else there so maybe she’d redone it and posted the letter? He called her name; there was no response. He crossed to the bedroom. It was tidy; everything was normal. Feeling like an intruder, he looked around. The bed was a water-bed. Mildly amused he sat down on it, feeling it move beneath him. On a dressing table was a selection of lipsticks, face powder, eye make-up. On the stool in front of it underwear was neatly folded. The cheong-sam she’d worn on the night of the festival hung on a coat hanger on the wardrobe door. He listened for a few moments. Children shouted in the courtyard and a hum came from the flat next door, probably a television or radio. As his ears became accustomed to the environment he heard running water. It was slow, just a trickle, but there was a tap running.
The bathroom door was shut so he knocked. There was no response. He opened it and looked in then recoiled in shock. In the bath, under crimson water, lay a woman’s nude body. “No!” Almost involuntarily, the cry escaped his lips and he moved forward, grabbed the hair and lifted the hideously white head out of the water. It had already distended Amie’s face to a degree which made it unrecognisable and the flesh was peculiar, rubbery. Across the neck a slash wound, several inches deep, gaped like obscene lips. He dropped it hurriedly back into the murky water and nearly gagged. He fought the urge to run. As his head cleared he looked round for signs of struggle. He saw none. Nothing had been ransacked.
Pulling himself together he located a telephone in the hallway and rang Graham Witherspoon, a cool, sane head in a crisis. The Australian’s jovial tone turned to one of incredulity. "Struth!" he exclaimed, "Jack, stay there. Don't move! I'll come across. Let me call the cops. Don‘t you do it!" Jack thanked him, his words like a whisper, hoarse in his throat. He couldn't bring himself to go back into the bathroom. Instead he walked into the bedroom. Without thinking he opened the bureau drawer. In it was an envelope full of photographs.
On automatic pilot, he began to leaf through the shots, the usual family scenes and a few landscapes as well. Then he saw something familiar: a picture of a man staring out from a promontory over a slate-coloured sea. He’d been to seaside places with Amie but not this one. He was looking at a photograph of himself on Cullernose Point the night he'd been waylaid by a masked attacker. Numbed by this second shock of the evening, he stuffed the photograph in his pocket so the cops wouldn’t find it. Nosing around now with greater intent he found the perfect replica of the ninja uniform which one of the would-be assassins had worn on the same cliff top. Time then passed very quickly and he scarcely had the energy to think before Graham arrived with the R.H.K.P. "What has this got to do with you?" the Inspector asked.
"Nothing that I know of," he lied and he gave a brief explanation of how he knew Amie and what he was doing there, careful however not to mention Gerry Montrose, whose name seemed to be a red rag to a bull for anyone in an official position. He escaped any further grilling only through Graham's influence.
Later, when the police had finished with him, Graham drove him home and patted him on the shoulder as he got out of his Rover. Promising he'd be okay, he could see a homily about cross-cultural relationships coming so he cut the Aussie short. It was bad enough that he felt responsible for Amie’s death. Even if he couldn’t work out what she had been doing on that remote Northumbrian beach he couldn’t believe she had meant to harm him. If I had never come here, would she still be alive, he wondered?
Guilt is a peculiar thing. Even if you can console yourself rationally that it can’t be down to you, it is impossible to escape the emotional idea that you are actually responsible for everything that goes wrong around you. Anyway, whether or not such thoughts were a million miles from the truth and whatever that truth was, it was time for Jack to make himself scarce. There was nothing for him in Hong Kong now. All roads led to M
anila.
PART 3
CHAPTER 1
The city of Manila stretches from Manila Bay to the Sierra Madre foothills and is four cities in one: Manila, Caloocan, Pasey and Quezon. Travelling in a taxi from the airport down Roxas Boulevard Jack struck up a conversation with the driver, who took pride in pointing out some of the most expensive nightclubs in the world. He assumed Jack was there for the clubbing. "You'll be going there, eh?" he asked, pointing at the swish hacienda-like building of the racy boulevard. His English was good. The American military had long had bases here and the Americans usually tried to build up the infrastructure of any country they occupied, even if it was only to promote the dubious virtues of the American way of life, the first of which was that everything and everyone had a price.
