He mourned for Bo, a faithful employee, a trusted friend, the closest thing to a father he’d had. Every morning he asked about Bo. Every morning they ignored him.
Bo had been with him almost from the beginning when he had no language, few connections, and no real clue how he was going to get started. When Shanghai was a city in transition, growing fast, greedy for more. When his daydreams were bigger than his abilities, and his only assets were a quick mind, a slick tongue, and an inability to take no for an answer.
Bo had been his translator when no one else would do it. His cook when he forgot to eat, his bodyguard when things got rough, and his conscience when it was lacking. Bo’s son Keung would want for nothing if he got through this and Bo didn’t.
He passed each day by singing, asking about Bo, taking his one trip to the bathroom and daydreaming about playing truth and dare.
Thinking about Darcy, re-imagining all the moments he’d spent with her, helped him stay anchored to the world in a way the cuffs didn’t. If he got out of here he’d see her again. If it was only to see hate burn in her eyes, and walk into another of her punches.
In his head he saw her as he first had in the airport detention room. She’d checked him out, been pleased to hear his accent, more pleased to think he knew what was going on. She’d interviewed him when he’d been trying to interview her, and he’d fallen for her right then. When he’d amused her with push-ups, when he’d told her things he never talked about, and took her dare and danced with her scarf, and watched her face as he touched her body, taking her somewhere she’d never been while never leaving the room.
Will left the bed, the room, the enforced detention every time he thought about Darcy. Her defiance and her anger; her confusion and her hurt. The way she’d looked in her earnest work suit, in the hotel robe, in the grey silk dress. Her laughter, and the way she gave herself to him without question when she could have been cautious, without fear when she should have backed away. Without regret until he caused it.
They had unfinished business. If he got out of here, he planned to finish it. Meanwhile he remembered her singing in the big deep bath and he sang Green Day.
He was asleep when they came for him. More men, this time military. There were rough shouts and scalding lights, gunfire. They knew his name. He was loaded into a van. They told him he was under arrest, but they gave him water and didn’t restrain him. In a hierarchy of kidnappers, these guys had better vehicles, slick uniforms and hardcore weapons and equipment. Things were looking up.
They took him to Quingpu prison. He got food, medical attention, tape across the bridge of his busted nose to help him breathe, more around his ribs. He got hot water and western headache tablets, as much water as he could drink, Chinese pyjamas and a clean, quiet cell to sleep in.
They told him in the morning he’d see his lawyer, and he hoped to hell that meant Pete.
He got a boiled egg for breakfast but no information. The egg did nothing for his hunger and he was desperate for news. This detention was a marked improvement on the last one, but he wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed—for about three years.
At lunchtime there was rice and shortly after he was escorted to an interrogation room, a guard on the door, and told to wait.
He’d been working on a line to use with Pete, something along the ‘fancy meeting you here, we must stop meeting like this’ vein, something to make him laugh. But one look at Pete’s face and his wit was flattened. Pete looked like he hadn’t slept or eaten for a week. His eyes were caves. He was stooped over like he was in pain.
He came into the room and they hugged. Will tried to remember the last time they’d done more than roughhouse each other.
“Oh fuck, Will. What did they do to you?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. You look dreadful. Bo, where’s Bo?”
“He’s all right. We’ve got him. He was badly dehydrated, concussed. They held him with you for five days, and then beat him, and dumped him in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. He knew you were alive because he could hear you singing. He’s the only reason we knew where you were.”
Relief made Will sag against the table. They’d been held together and Bo was okay. “Thank God.”
“You were singing?”
“Yeah. It seemed like a good idea at the time. So when am I out of here?”
Pete looked embarrassed. “That’s the problem. They’re holding you.”
“For what?”
“The Ministry of Justice have pressed charges.”
Will fingered the tape over his nose. He still had a headache. He stood. “Pete, slow it up. I don’t get it, but I want out of here now. We can figure the details later.”
“Will, I can’t get you out yet. I don’t...”
“What’s going on?”
“Will, sit down.”
He lowered himself back onto the welded metal seat. “Talk to me?”
Pete sighed and rubbed his temples with a thumb and forefinger. “This is what we know. Eight days ago at 4.45am you were kidnapped outside the Confucian temple by a group hired to take you.”
“Hired? By who?”
“I’ll get to that. They took you to an abandoned housing estate and held you there. The plan was to collect a ransom and release you, but they didn’t figure on Bo. Bo found the highway, hitched a ride and got to the police. He knew enough to identify two of the men from sketches and direct the police to you.”
“Get to the part where I’m in prison.”
“The kidnap was organised by the family of a man called Feng Kee.”
Will felt all his blood rush to his ankles and pool in his feet.
“They saw your photo in the paper, made the connection that you were involved with Feng, and wanted you to pay.”
Will shook his head. “Pay what?”
“Compensation. They say you killed Feng. The kidnappers are under arrest, along with two of the family members, but so are you, for the murder of Feng Kee.”
A bang sounded in Will’s head. The sound of worst nightmares and caged fears being released. He missed what Pete said.
“What?”
“This whole thing is a bungle. It’s clearly a case of mistaken identity. But it’s not going to be so easy to get you out and there’s no provision for bail.”
“I knew Feng Kee.”
Pete started in surprise. “You knew this man? How?”
“When I arrived. He was the landlord. And when I couldn’t pay the rent one month he agreed to a deal, a percentage of my first year’s income. I was stuck, I knew I was being ripped off, but I had nowhere to go, and I needed the office to look like I knew what I was doing. So I sucked it up, and I paid everything he’d asked for. And at the end of the first year I moved. He came after me. He wanted more. The same deal or he’d tell the Ministry of Commerce I was a fraud, have me arrested and deported. I ignored him. I thought he’d get tired of harassing me and go away.”
Now it was Pete’s turn to need the table for support. “Thank God, Will. This is nothing. I’ll have you out of here by tomorrow latest.”
“There’s more. One night he ambushed me outside my apartment. We argued. He pulled a knife. Said I had to pay or he’d kill me. I beat the shit out of him, and I left him on the street. But he was alive, Pete, I thought he was alive.”
Pete was holding his head in his hands.
“Talk to me, Pete.”
“Were you alone? Where was Bo?”
“Sent him home. His wife was still alive then.”
“All right.” Pete was all lawyer business. “I’ll need to get a proper statement. We need a local lawyer. We need... They say they have witnesses you beat Feng to death. I laughed it off. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“You were in London. You were busy.”
“I’m your brother and someone threatened to kill you.”
Will looked at his hands resting on the tabletop. His knuckles were bruised, like his eye s
ockets. He had grime under his nails. These were the hands he’d used to build his life. To clear land, to chop wood, to hold books he’d struggled to understand. These hands had fought for his safety, protected Pete and built them a fortune. But they’d always been stained by guilt no matter how hard he’d worked to make good. He knew what Pete was thinking and wouldn’t say.
“I might have killed Feng.”
“No, Will.”
Will closed his eyes. He was back in Tara. It was dusk, mosquitoes thick in the air. It was the evening his life changed forever, for the better. “I sat on that bank and I let him drown. You don’t think I’m capable of killing a man? We know I am.”
Pete’s head shot up, his raised voice made the guard outside the door eye them through the window. “You let him drown, you didn’t hold him under.”
“If he’d tried to set foot on land I would have.”
“You didn’t kill him, the drink did.”
“I could’ve saved him.”
“No. He’d have dragged you down with him. If you didn’t do what you did, he’d have killed one of us, both of us.”
Will’s hand went to his side, to the burn scar. Norman had come close to killing him, and closer to killing Pete, on more than one occasion. That night when he’d taken a drunken swim, Will could’ve saved him, but he didn’t. And if he had to make the same choice again he would.
“I killed Norman Vessy. Then I committed fraud by taking his pension and unemployment cheques and cashing in his inheritance.”
“It would’ve come to me anyway. If you hadn’t taken it he’d have pissed it all away.” Pete’s voice broke, “We were kids, Will. What were we supposed to do?”
“We got away with it then, so maybe now I have to pay.”
“No, Will. No. You didn’t kill Norman, and you didn’t kill Feng. You can’t think like that. Will, look at me. You didn’t do this. The one who made this mess is that bitch, Darcy Campbell. This would never have happened without those pictures. She incited this. You were right all along to be so cautious.”
Will’s long-healed burn scar itched, and his broken ribs telegraphed an ache through his torso, but watching Pete struggle to accept the truth of this—that his brother might be a murderer twice over—was a greater agony. Pete’s fists were balled but his eyes were wet. He would fight this with everything he had, but it might be more than Will deserved.
On the creek bank it had suddenly fallen silent when Norman stopped splashing, when he stopped yelling. Will sat there for hours, never taking his eyes off the water, being eaten alive by the mossies, frightened it was a trick. Frightened the minute he relaxed Norman, like some creature from a horror movie, would spring back to life, bigger and stronger than ever. It was the night of his sixteenth birthday.
The night when Feng pulled a knife, he’d been almost ten years older, and he’d learned that once you put them down hard, monsters didn’t get up again. He’d hurt Feng. He’d stood over him to make sure he wasn’t getting up, and he’d left him on the street to fend for himself, just like he’d left Norman to drown.
It was the same thing. It was time to pay. Pete just hadn’t recognised it yet. He reached across the table and grasped Pete’s hand. It was too much to hope there was another way. It was too soon to tell him to let go.
“Make sure Bo is okay. He’ll need something to do. And leave Darcy alone. You’re not to go after her. Promise me.”
Pete glared at him. “Stop it. Right now stop it. You’re getting out. You’re getting your life back.”
Will nodded. It was too hard to fight Pete. A wave of exhaustion had cracked over his head. He felt like an old man. He needed to lie down. Pete was saying, “We’re getting you out, we’re getting you out,” over and over, but all Will understood was the sound of his hubris smacking him on the back of the head and laughing.
23. Accused
“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” — Confucius
The reporters, photographers and film crews hanging about outside twenty-seven Zhongshan Road were bored, hot and hostile to a newcomer, especially one who had no official press credentials.
Darcy was lucky it wasn’t a name tag required event. She knew she was better off looking like a random hopeful than being identified as part of the reason for all the hanging around.
There was no news about Will Parker’s kidnap, and no one from Parker Corp was talking. Will had been missing for ten days now and for every one of those days Darcy felt the weight of her own responsibility squeezing her like too tight shoes, hobbling her emotions with remorse, and crippling her intentions with doubt.
There was a direct line between the publication of Will’s pictures and his disappearance. He’d been paranoid about protecting his image for a reason, and as it turned out, that paranoia wasn’t so irrational. She’d effectively carved Will Parker’s reputation up, then served him to his kidnappers. It was worse than legally questionable, worse than ethically and morally reprehensible. It’d made her sick on the flight over and unable to sleep or look at herself in the mirror of her cheap hotel.
And if he died, and the betting was he was already dead, days ago—Darcy could barely begin to comprehend what that would do to her. Especially as she had unfinished personal business with Will Parker.
She stood in the hot sun, ignored the aggression and closed ranks of the existing press pack, and worried about how she was going to get inside to talk to Peter Parker.
Around lunchtime there was a flurry of movement, the group split, cars arriving, taxis pulling up. There’d been an announcement from the Ministry of Justice.
Darcy grabbed the arm of a passing CBN cameraman, hoping he spoke English. “What’s going on?”
He reefed the door of a waiting taxi open. “It’s all over.”
Her heart stopped and she swayed.
“You need to get out of the sun.”
“What happened?”
“He’s in prison.”
“Not dead?”
“No.” He laughed. “I lost.” He got in the taxi, barked an instruction to the driver and slammed the door.
Not dead. Not dead. Her heart was still pumping. But how did he go from being kidnapped to jailed? She found shade to stand in and called Aileen McVale again. Again straight to her message bank. Then she called Robert Yee.
“You’re in Shanghai?”
“I’m outside Parker Corp.”
“I didn’t know the Herald was sending anyone. Makes sense it’s you.”
“They didn’t.”
“Come again?”
“Parker sued. I got sacked. I’m here under my own steam.”
“Shit.”
“I need help, Robert.”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel responsible for all this. I feel like I need to do something to fix things.”
Robert laughed. “Who are you? You can’t fix this. You don’t have an employer. And you do know he’s been charged with murder?”
“No. Oh God.” Will Parker a murderer? He’d admitted to being a brawler, he had the physique of a boxer, but a murderer? She couldn’t envisage it. He could be hard, vicious even, but he had iron control. Would he have killed to get from Tara to here?
“What are you thinking, Darcy?”
“I’ve got no good reason, but I don’t think he’d kill anyone. Knock them out cold, hurt them maybe, but murdering someone?”
“It could be self-defence. We don’t know. Ministry of Justice isn’t saying much. But it’s pretty damn bad. Being Will Parker sucks right now. But I don’t think he’d murder anyone either.”
“From you that’s gracious. You saw the worst of him. I don’t understand why you didn’t complain. Or why you’d want to give him a break now.”
“Then why are you ringing me?”
“I’m desperate.”
“I feel guilty too. I slipped those two security dudes a tip to make it look like I was being roughed up. They held me down.
Half the yelling Parker was doing was at them to let me up. I wanted to give you a story if I couldn’t give you the photos. He never told you that, did he?”
Darcy hung her head, her handset was sweaty in her grip. Her sense of guilt was a knife blade in her side. “No. He let me think he was a brute.”
“And afterwards I was too embarrassed to admit it. I figured it was better if you didn’t know. I’ll help. Of course I will. What do I need to do?”
“Get me inside Parker Corp.”
Robert groaned. “I said I’d help, not work miracles.”
“I thought you were Lin Gui? You know, Chinese Ninja.”
There was a long pause before he said. “We’ll work something out. I’m on my way.”
Darcy lent against the sun baked stone of the number twenty-seven and sipped her bottled water. She tried on the idea the man she’d gone to Shangri-La and back with was a murderer. The only way she could get it to fit was to imagine it as self-defence.
She had enough money to hang out in Shanghai for a fortnight if she didn’t freelance a story. But if she could use the information she knew about Will, and write a story that raised questions about his imprisonment, then she’d be able to stay on and see this out, without it costing her every cent she owned. Without it burying her soul in disgust at the chain of events she’d created, at the ruination of a good man.
Will Parker was a good man. She knew it. She believed in it. She’d do whatever she could to make others see it too. And if that meant convincing Peter Parker to drop his suit against her, and allow her to use the information she knew about Will, she’d find a way to do it.
The rest of the press pack had dispersed now. Gone to chase other leads, maybe even other stories. Robert said the urgency would go out of the whole thing now because the news would be controlled by the Ministry of Justice and Will wasn’t going anywhere.
There was one other man loitering about like she was. He kept looking her way, no doubt annoyed to find a rival on the scene. Darcy braced for an argument when he approached.
He said, “Miss Campbell?” and she didn’t know if she should be surprised he knew her name, or was Will Parker’s inscrutable driver.
Detained Page 16
