Dragon Breath

by Valerie Goldsilk

  INSPECTOR SCRIMPLE THRILLER

  BOOK 2:

  DRAGON BREATH

  by

  Valerie Goldsilk

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Published by

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Valerie Goldsilk

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-63355-774-1

  Credits

  Cover Artist: Susan Krupp

  Editor: Dave Field

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Major Cobb—who taught us that prior planning prevents piss poor performance

  To Major French, Staff Warburton and Colour Bryan—for the confidence

  To Derrick F and Mark H—for the opportunities.

  “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas—Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things.”

  -Virgil

  “Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.”

  -John Updike

  * * * *

  This story is set in the late 1990’s, after the Crown Colony of Hong Kong had been handed over to the sovereignty of China.

  Chapter 1

  The newspapers say London is the most happening city in Europe. Nothing much seemed to be happening in Jim Beauregard’s part of London these days. But that was about to change.

  He parked the Saab on the curb outside the Chinese take-away and grabbed his mobile before going in and ordering his usual sweet and sour pork.

  The surly Chinaman behind the counter had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and, pausing only to glare at Jim, he began shovelling red bits into the polystyrene box.

  “You want lice?”

  “No thanks, took me ages to get rid of them last time. Give me some veggies. Those will do,” Jim said. The Chinaman scowled as if he hated customers and wished he was back in a paddy field somewhere near Shanghai. Another man appeared at the door to the kitchen. He was wearing a soiled apron and stood making sucking noises with his teeth.

  Jim paid three pounds fifty and reached for the plastic bag. It was late, close to ten o’clock and he’d just come from work. This was normal because the office was pretty busy these days. It was shipping season and nearly everything was late and half the quantities were wrong and who knew what problems would emerge once the containers arrived and the boxes were opened. Red T-shirts mysteriously transmuted into blue polo shirts. Toy dinosaurs transmogrified into toy elephants. Their Asian offices were a mess but that was par for the course and people he knew in other importing companies didn’t have it any easier. Things simply weren’t black and white in Asia. Everything was grey and nothing was definite. That’s how he remembered it when he’d visited as a student and probably nothing much had changed in the ten years since then.

  He came out of the take-away and instantly the youths were on top of him. The bag of food went flying as somebody punched Jim hard on the shoulder. He stumbled, dropping his mobile phone and another blow hit him in the chest.

  They were swearing at him and hailing down blows until he was down on his knees and had to use his arms to protect his head.

  “You bastard, fucking you! You no take Chiney girl. You leave alone, you fucking hear,” one voice yelled in his ear.

  Jim struggled to his feet cautiously. There were four of them, standing around. One held a baseball bat, the others simply scowled, with clenched fists. None of them were older than twenty-five, he guessed and they were all Orientals. He’d never seen any of them before but he wasn’t very good at differentiating Asian features.

  “What the hell are you talking about,” Jim gasped.

  “You, fucking, whitey, not good for Chinese girl. You get me?” the man with the baseball bat was saying. He advanced slightly and pointed with the red, wooden tip. Jim put up his hands, ready to fend off any blow. He glanced cautiously around but the dark street was empty, everyone at home watching their favourite sitcom.

  “You go with Chinese girl. Now you stop. This time we give warning, like this,” the man said, suddenly swinging the bat backwards and wrecking one of the headlights on the Saab. Jim stifled a swearword. It was too late, the glass sprinkled over the pavement. “Next time we break your head, same way,” the guy said. “You unnerstan’?”

  “Sure, sure, cool, you don’t want me dating any of your sisters.”

  “Fucking right.” The guy turned and spat out a sentence in his native tongue and the gang turned and disappeared down a side-street, giving him threatening backward glances.

  Shit.

  He’d only taken her out three or four times. She’d never even spent the night and when he tried to get his hands on her breasts she’d gone berserk. Not that she had much of a pair but that’s what he’d wanted to find out. Bloody women.

  Jim bent down to retrieve his phone and found that the polystyrene boxes with his food were still intact. He looked up to see the two Chinese servers from the take-away standing in their doorway watching him with inscrutable faces.

  “Thanks for all your help,” Jim said sarcastically and got into the car without bothering to look at the smashed headlight. He’d drop it off at the garage tomorrow.

  It was a ten minute drive to his place and he found a space for the Saab quite close. Finchley wasn’t a bad area to live and he could have taken the tube to work every day but he felt that if you had a decent car you might as well get the mileage on it.

  His flat was on the second floor. A nice decent conversion with three bedrooms and parquet floor in each of them. He’d furnished it with expensive Bokhara carpets and overpriced electronic equipment. The master bedroom was large but could only barely contain the master bed which always made the girls gasp when they first saw it. Nothing to do with his manhood, but it was a good reaction in any case.

  The second bedroom was his study and he’d purchased a big, butt-kicking rosewood executive desk with a burnished leather Director’s chair and the latest Compaq Pentium III to get the image right. The walls were lined with bookshelves and books and an impressionist painter who sadly failed to impress visitors.

  Jim dropped the Chinese food on the kitchen countertop and went into the third bedroom to take off his dark blue Hugo Boss suit and Church’s. He hung up his Hermes tie on the motorised rack and slipped into a pair of jogging pants and a sweatshirt. Summer was waning and it was starting to get chilly outside. The central heating hadn’t come on yet.

  He ladled the food out onto a plate, filled a large wine glass from an opened bottle of Shiraz and went to sit in front of his gloriously large television screen.

  Jim was half-way through his meal when the phone began to ring.

  “My cousin told me he just beat you up? Are you alright?”

  “Physically yes, but I suppose my pride is hurt. You didn’t have to arrange for me to be beaten up just because I wanted to get intimate wi
th you.”

  The girl sounded contrite at the other end of the phone.

  “It’s nothing to do with what happened between you and me. I like you, I’m just not ready to do that. I think he or some of his guys saw us together and that got him mad.”

  “It’s none of his business,” said Jim, putting his spoon down and taking a sip of his wine. “Or is it that he fancies you and wants to make sure no big white man comes close?”

  The girl said, “It’s different for Chinese people, you know that. I’ve been trying to tell you. We live in England but our culture is still very strong. They don’t like it if one of us has a foreigner boyfriend.”

  “Yes, I noticed. Who’s going to pay for my broken headlight?”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “Probably not. Don’t worry about it. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do about this yet. I don’t have the time and energy at this moment to engage in a major race war.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jim,” the girl said softly at the other end of the phone.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’m tired and a bit bruised and my sweet and sour pork’s getting cold.”

  He replaced the receiver and finished eating, then got onto the Internet and surfed around for a while, studiously avoiding the temptation to download any new emails. He’d had enough for one day.

  * * * *

  The General Manager of McPherson, Ferguson & Co. Ltd. was a small runt of a man who rarely smiled and whose fingers bore the tell tale rust-coloured stains of a compulsive lifetime smoking habit. He was a hard Glaswegian like the founders of the firm who’d bought a couple of schooners in the late 1800’s and ventured eastwards to trade tea, oranges and opium.

  “What in God’s name do you think those slanty-eyed bastards have done this time?” he was asking, studying a fax he’d just been handed.

  “They say the factory can’t make the pieces on time and it’ll be first week of September by the time they’re ready to ship,” the blonde assistant said.

  “This is a joke, isn’t it,” the GM snarled. “Did you know about this, Jim?”

  “No, Dougie, but it’s not the first time they’ve tried it.”

  Jim Beauregard was sitting at the conference table looking at the shipping schedule just printed out for the morning meeting.

  The assistant hopped nervously from one foot to the other.

  “Where’s your boss, girl? This is another one of his great, glorious screw ups. Jim, I’m not going to put up with this any longer. You keep on covering for Sawyers. But this is the clincher. Either this whole thing is sorted out and every single piece and container get shipped on time or he’s for the high-jump. Oh, run along, girlie. Get out of my conference room.” He shooed the assistant as if she were a frightened farmyard chicken. She scurried off.

  “I’m surrounded by incompetents. And you can stop smirking, Jim, my boy. You’re not so hot yourself. You’re only surviving because in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. You know what a mess it is down there in those heathen Asian countries and so you know when they’re going to screw up. The rest of them have no clue. And who the hell ever appointed Bob Chen to be the boss of our Hong Kong office? He’s a corrupt, slimy Chink bugger who isn’t fit to run a Soho noodle shop.”

  “Calm down, Dougie. It’s always like this and we’ll find a way. We’ll airfreight the last batch and bill it back to the factory and ignore Bob Chen when he starts up wailing about his face.”

  “They should never have let a local run the office. This company made it big because a bunch of good, canny Scotsmen went out there and sorted things out with their own bare hands.”

  “It’s politically correct,” Jim reminded his boss. “Hong Kong has gone back to the Chinese. It’s good to have a local man running the operation.”

  “Not when he’s turned the whole office into a Triad gambling den. I’d hate to think of the backhanders he’s pocketing. He’s laughing all the way to the Bank of China.” Dougie Campbell threw his stocky frame into the high-backed leather chair that was his by virtue of his position. “The Old Man has gone soft in the head to go for all this localisation crap. Bob Chen’s got something on him. Probably photos with women which he’s threatening to send to the Old Man’s wife.” The GM frowned. “You going to fire Sawyers or am I going to have to do it for you?”

  Jim replied, “Give him another chance. This isn’t his fault.”

  “They’re his shipments. Whose bloody fault is it?”

  “You know how hard it is to control the shipments. It’s a long way and communication might be fast and easy these days but we’re still talking different languages.”

  “We’re all speaking English. What the hell are you on about? Universal business language. English.” The GM thumped the table hard and stuck a cigarette in his mouth, scowling out of the window where the murky waters of the Thames were visible through a slight morning fog.

  “I think we’re going to have a problem with the ten containers of workmen’s shirts for M & S. This factory was completely the wrong choice.”

  “I don’t want to know, Jim. You’re the Import Manager. You deal with it.”

  “This is the import meeting, it’s when we talk about problems,” Jim reminded his boss.

  “I don’t want to hear about problems. I want to hear solutions. Fire Sawyers.”

  * * * *

  His temp was sitting at her desk sorting through the correspondence. Most of it was junk mail. Real information arrived electronically these days. She smiled at him nervously because he still hadn’t spoken to her apart from a curt “good-morning.”

  Jim said, “Want to do lunch, Doris?”

  “Are you still angry?” the young Chinese girl asked. She was wearing a pale green business dress that was more decent than most London office girls were wearing these days.

  “I’m a bit irritated but I know it’s not your fault. So let’s talk about it.”

  “Where do you want to eat?” She rearranged the stacks of letters on her desk and looked at him sideways.

  “Lucio’s? Let’s go early before the common people arrive.”

  She nodded and gave him a warm smile. If she had been his permanent secretary he’d never have considered getting too friendly with her. It made things around the office complicated but Mavis was on maternity leave and she’d be back next month and Doris Yung would be somewhere else.

  Jim went into his office and had a quick glance at the screen of his IBM Thinkpad, the standard model for managers who were required to travel. It was big enough to use every day around the office and convenient enough to hump around airports. Ten more emails had come in but nothing that looked urgent or interesting. There was one from his mate, Bill, who worked as an accountant and seemed to spend his time forwarding jokes, clogging other people’s hard drives. He didn’t bother opening it, just deleted it right away.

  There was a fax copy of an invoice in his tray and he studied it casually. It was just confirmation that three hundred and ninety-four thousand, two hundred and seventy-five U.S. dollars had been refunded to their Hong Kong office by a supplier who had screwed up an order so badly all the goods had to be shipped back to China and re-worked. They were desk lamps in assorted colours. At the last minute the client, a firm that McPherson, Ferguson had been selling to for decades, had tested some samples and found that some of the components had been switched, probably to reduce manufacturing costs, which left them unable to meet the UK safety regulations. Some buyers might have just accepted the goods and pushed for a discount but this buyer was pedantic and so Jim’s company had agreed to take a hit but then passed it on to the factory.

  Here was another example of how poor the quality control of the Hong Kong office was. Bob Chen’s people should have been in the factory—it was a big order—checking it once or twice during production and then sending samples to a laboratory before the goods were released for shipment.

  Jim tapped his pencil on the surface of the de
sk. Either it was bad management or they didn’t give a damn. They were trying it on to see how much they could get away with. A few changed components and the profit margin could go up nicely. If the factory got away with it once, they’d carry on doing it until they were caught, then plead ignorance or misunderstanding. It was just one of their games. And McPherson Ferguson’s Hong Kong office was probably taking a little kickback to look the other way.

  The amount of the invoice didn’t look familiar. Jim frowned and checked the rest of the information. It appeared to be the claim he had in mind. “Desk lamps Blue/Red/Black/Metallic, 18 containers,” no indication of the FOB Hong Kong price, the free-on-board price at which the factory sold the goods and delivered them to a vessel or forwarder in Hong Kong nominated by the client.

  Jim went back outside and pulled open one of the metal filing cabinets holding the order files. He riffled through the supplier names until he found the one for Ever Splendid. On the left hand page of the file were all the relevant document copies such as the Purchase Order, the Letter of Credit and the Product Specifications. On the right page was any correspondence relating to the order and shipments. Sometimes one order was one shipment, sometimes they had multiple shipments because the client only wanted so many pieces at a time in his warehouse. Most of McPherson Ferguson’s clients were major or medium sized retailers who sometimes sourced their own products or used Far East experts like Jim’s company to get specific products at prices they might not negotiate themselves because they didn’t have the contacts or the volumes.

  Jim found the information he was looking for. The original Purchase Order had the total FOB price and the per piece price. It was confused a bit because there was a two per cent discount in lieu of spare parts. He took the file back into his office, giving Doris a quick, distracted smile. She was reading her emails and playing with a lock of her charcoal hair.

  He pulled over his calculator, the one with the big buttons he’d picked up in Hong Kong on his last trip. The original order total was three hundred and seventy-five U.S. dollars. Why was the factory refunding three hundred and ninety-four thousand, two hundred and seventy-five U.S. dollars? He had a good idea why. Some little clerk had made a careless mistake. The difference was eighteen thousand, seven hundred and seventy-five U.S. dollars which was—he tapped rapidly on the calculator—exactly five per cent. A nice little commission to whoever had handled the order in Hong Kong. An illegal commission. All prices quoted to McPherson Ferguson were supposed to be net. No rebates or other forms of holding money back in the Hong Kong office. That operation ran as a cost centre and was not intended to make money. All financing was handled out of London and usually by back to back Letters of Credit from their clients.