Marine G SBS

by David Monnery

  She turned off the TV and sat gazing at the empty screen, thinking that she was in danger of giving up on her fellow human beings.

  4

  Rosalie arrived at the RHKP building on Arsenal Street soon after seven the following morning. There were only about a dozen people in the OSCG office, and most of those were working on the Bellamy case. According to Pao Xin-xin, a long-time acquaintance from police college days, the heavy money was now on suicide. The problem was going to be getting the dead man’s well-connected family to accept the shame implicit in such a scenario. Not surprisingly, they preferred the notion that the policeman had been killed by enemies he had made in the line of duty.

  Kai walked over to the coffee machine and found, as usual, that the consumer of the last cup had failed to set up another pot. She did so, and sat on the edge of the table reading the papers while the water filtered its way through. The appeal was prominently featured on the front page of six of the seven papers she had given it to, and even in the seventh it shared page three with news of a local film star’s tragic romance.

  She took the coffee back to her desk and sat looking at the phone, willing it to ring.

  It obliged.

  She picked up the receiver. ‘Inspector Kai.’

  ‘Do you like babies?’ a man asked in Cantonese.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. It didn’t seem like the time or place for qualifications.

  ‘Then would you like to have mine?’ the man asked.

  She sighed. ‘Wasting police time is a criminal offence,’ she said. ‘Now get off the line.’ She hung up, wondering how many more would come up with variations on the same theme.

  The phone rang again, and she picked it up half expecting to hear the same caller. But this one was a woman.

  ‘I have some information,’ she said in Cantonese. Her story took some telling, but the gist of it seemed to be that the baby in the neighbouring flat didn’t look like either its mother or father. It also cried all the time, as if it was homesick. And while it was true that the mother had looked pregnant before the baby’s arrival a month before, she could easily have stuffed a sweater under her clothes to fool people.

  Kai thanked the woman and replaced the receiver, marvelling at the human gift for wishful thinking. She felt less generous after two near-identical calls, and almost relished the fifth call, which was essentially a reprise of the first. The sixth caller took issue with her English first name and suggested that she cut her losses and make use of the full British passport with which she had no doubt been issued.

  She started on her second cup of coffee, wondering if the entire exercise was going to prove a disagreeable waste of time.

  The seventh caller offered some sort of answer. ‘You would be wise to cease this line of enquiry,’ an educated male voice told her in English.

  ‘And why might that be?’ she asked, failing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

  ‘The crime rate has been soaring in Quarry Bay recently,’ he said conversationally. ‘Someone broke into one of the flats in your block only a few days ago.’

  She felt the hairs standing up on her arm, but said nothing. The caller seemed to grunt with amusement before he hung up.

  She put down the receiver and sat staring into space, wondering why she had expected the offer of a bribe, yet had not even considered the possibility of a threat.

  The taxi carried Marker and Dubery at a leisurely pace down the almost empty Connaught Road. It was barely nine o’clock, but a few young men were already playing cricket on the Padang. Beyond the wide expanse of mown grass the pale green dome of the Supreme Court and the Corinthian columns of City Hall provided the perfect colonial backdrop.

  As the taxi swung left over Anderson Bridge Marker studied the huge Merlion – half mermaid, half lion – which guarded the mouth of the Singapore River, and wondered once again what had persuaded the city to burden itself with such a ludicrous symbol. The river itself was almost clear of traffic; like much else in the last few years it had been almost sanitized out of existence. The lighters, barges and sampans which had still been crowding its waters at the time of Marker’s last visit were now confined to the bay, while the busy godowns, the warehouses, had been turned into cafes and galleries for the tourists and the local rich.

  In Xiao Guo-feng’s temporary office at the Marine Police Building on Marina Bay, Xiao and Tanaka Sukiman were already waiting for the two SBS men. So were a large silver pot of fresh coffee and another plate of gorgeous-looking pastries. Marker’s thoughts went back to briefings in Poole, with the mug of tea and obligatory plate of Kit-Kats.

  ‘I’m afraid we haven’t found anything useful at the Wu warehouse,’ Xiao began, as Sukiman poured the coffee. ‘At least, not yet. They have bills of sale for all the goods on the premises, most of which come from Red China. We’re checking them out, but at the moment we have no reason to believe that any of the goods are contraband.’

  ‘How did they explain opening fire on your men?’ Marker asked.

  Xiao grimaced. ‘They said they thought we were criminals.’ He put down his coffee cup. ‘We’ve only just started going through the paperwork, but as you’d expect, they do a lot of business with Hong Kong. One of our experts is trying to get into their computer records, but she says she’s not optimistic. One programme already self-destructed on her. She says the defences are very sophisticated.’

  ‘What do the Wu brothers say?’

  ‘They’re complaining about the invasion of privacy.’

  ‘What about my man and his briefcase?’

  Xiao grinned. ‘You really upset Wang, making him lose face like that. As for the man, well, he’s not talking, of course, but it seems likely he’s a Triad accountant. The briefcase contained a lot of financial print-outs, most of which seem to be variations on the company’s tax returns. So there’s a chance we’ll get the Wu brothers for tax evasion, even if we can’t tie them in to the smuggling.’

  Marker felt disappointed. ‘Were they questioned about the fax?’

  ‘Oh yes. They agree it looks like it was sent from their office, but they deny any knowledge of sending it. They employ over fifty workers, delivery people are always coming and going, they don’t keep their fax machine under constant surveillance, etc., etc.’ Xiao ruefully shook his head. ‘There’s no way we can prove otherwise.’

  The four men were silent for a few moments.

  ‘If the information on sailings and cargoes is coming from Hong Kong,’ Marker asked, ‘why not relay it directly to the base on Rempang? Why put it through Singapore?’

  ‘Family ties could be one reason,’ Xiao replied, ‘but these days that’s not so likely. My guess would be to establish a cut-out between the principals in Hong Kong and their hired guns. Which reminds me, we did pick up one piece of information which might be useful. We put a tap on the Wu phones yesterday morning, and just before the raid the older brother took a call from Hong Kong. It was mostly family talk, but towards the end of the call the man in Hong Kong said that "one of their friends" had killed himself two nights ago, and that there might be a delay in re-establishing access to their usual channels of information. I listened to the tape, and the word "friends" was certainly not being used in any real sense.’

  ‘An informant,’ Marker guessed.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘An English police chief killed himself in Hong Kong on Friday night,’ Dubery volunteered. ‘It was in this morning’s paper.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Marker murmured.

  Xiao turned to Sukiman. ‘Are we going to continue with the operation?’ he asked.

  Sukiman looked thoughful. ‘It looks as if we have discovered the identity of at least one of our enemies. And they have told us there may be a delay before they can resume operations. I think we should suspend ours until we can follow up the leads we have. I shall have to talk to London, and then to the authorities in Hong Kong.’ He turned to Marker. ‘You have had no news of your colleagues?’

  �
��Not yet. But they’ve only been at sea for thirty-six hours.’

  ‘I have some information that may be relevant,’ the Malay said. ‘A lifebuoy from the Ocean Carousel was picked up in the South China Sea early this morning by a bulk carrier.’ He turned to the large map on the wall. ‘Here, about a hundred miles north of Bunguran. Of course, it is possible that this lifebuoy was lost overboard several days ago, before the ship was hijacked, but it seems much more probable that the pirates are trying to convince the world that the ship has sunk.’

  Marker agreed. ‘Especially if it still had the name Ocean Carousel written all over it. On Rempang they were going to great lengths to remove all trace of that name. In fact I think I even saw one man working on the lifebuoys.’

  ‘I did,’ Dubery said quietly. ‘At least we know they’re heading north,’ he added.

  ‘Looks like it. I think it’s time we reported in,’ Marker decided.

  Xiao told him he could use the office next door.

  It might be half-past two in the morning in Poole, but Colhoun had told Marker to wake him at any time of day or night with news of Cafell and Finn. He punched out the CO’s home number, and imagined it ringing in the country house on the Dorset coast.

  ‘Colhoun,’ the familiar voice answered almost immediately.

  ‘Marker, boss.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ If the CO had been sleeping there was no sign of it in his voice.

  Marker brought him up to date. ‘Sukiman will be talking to the Foreign Office sometime today,’ he concluded, ‘but it’ll probably take days to get anything off the ground. I’d like to move on to Hong Kong. Rob and Finn already seem headed in that general direction, and it seems pretty clear that at least some of the piracy is organized from there.’

  There was a silence while Colhoun thought about it. ‘In principle, yes,’ he said at last. ‘But I want to make sure that you’ll get adequate cooperation from the locals, which means calling in a few favours. And I’m going to leave that till morning. Cafell and Finn will be at sea for a few days yet, and people who get woken up at three in the morning – myself excepted, of course – are rarely at their most accommodating. What time is it now in Singapore?’

  Marker looked at his watch. ‘Nine forty-four,’ he said.

  ‘Seven and a half hours’ difference. All right, I should have something for you by ten . . . seventeen-thirty your time. I’ll call you at your hotel at eighteen hundred. In the meantime you can book yourselves on an evening flight.’

  * * *

  Cafell stood up and arched his back. He and Finn would have to keep up with their exercises, he thought, or both of them would be too stiff to move once they reached their eventual destination.

  His companion was asleep, curled up like a baby with an innocent expression on his face. Given their current circumstances it was an almost painful sight.

  Cafell found his mind rerunning the terrible sequence yet again: the boat, the jagged flash, the empty sea. For the hundredth time he asked himself what kind of men could do something like that. He knew it was a futile question, but it seemed almost to have a life of its own.

  He had helped to kill one man in his military career: one of the guards at the camp in Haiti had died as a result of bullets fired by him and Marker. He had not enjoyed it, either at the time or in retrospect, but he had not had any trouble accepting it either. Even in a bad cause – and that had been a good one – the lottery of combat seemed a very different business from the cold-blooded murder of defenceless people. He knew he could never commit the latter, and he had no idea how anyone else could.

  Earlier that month, sitting in the garden at home, his father, a retired Polaris submarine captain, had told him that he still didn’t know whether he would have obeyed an order to launch his nuclear missiles against the Soviet Union. ‘I would have been responsible for killing fifty million people,’ he had said. ‘Maybe more. All just getting on with their lives.’

  Cafell had been shocked, not so much by the feelings as by his father’s admission of them. He had also been strangely pleased, and had told his mother as much. ‘I never understood how they could put such a burden on good men,’ was all she had said. But then his mother had always been opposed to nuclear power in all its incarnations.

  He had been really lucky with parents, he decided. And they would make good grandparents, if he ever had any children.

  His thoughts turned to Ellen, as they seemed to do every other minute of the waking day. They had been together more than six months now, though in some ways it seemed only days, in others more like years. It was all so simple and yet so confusing at the same time. They loved each other, liked each other, enjoyed doing many of the same things. That was the simple part. She hadn’t said she would only marry him if he quit the SBS, but in his own mind Cafell knew that for him the two were incompatible. Children had a right to a father who was there, and to a father who guarded his own life more jealously than an SBS officer sometimes could.

  It had also occurred to him that the SBS was like an extended boyhood adventure, and that the time had come for him to grow up.

  At other times, as he watched friends playing musical marriages, he found it hard to believe he would ever give up the life he loved for such a thin chance of lasting happiness.

  By the time he had spent a week in this open-air prison he should have all the answers, Cafell told himself. Always assuming that a posse of pirates didn’t suddenly swarm over the containers above him, in which case everything else would become somewhat academic.

  * * *

  By four in the afternoon Rosalie had taken ninety-seven calls, not one of which had offered her and Li any assistance in their investigation. There were only two other detectives in the vast OSCG office, both of them using the excuse of a paperwork backlog to escape an afternoon with their extended families. Rosalie no longer had such a family, but she couldn’t help thinking that there had to be better ways of spending a Sunday than sitting at her desk, being variously propositioned, bored and threatened by complete strangers.

  Three more calls, she told herself. Then she would put the answering machine on and go out for an expensive meal. Maybe go to a film afterwards – something that would make her laugh.

  It was lucky that she was still rummaging around in her desk when the hundred and first call came in.

  ‘My name is Chen,’ the voice told the answerphone after a brief pause. The man didn’t sound nervous, just somewhat taken aback. ‘I am a doctor of traditional medicine in Mongkok,’ he went on, ‘and I have some information about the business of the children.’

  She picked up the receiver. ‘I’m Inspector Kai. What can you tell me?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, sounding pleased at hearing a real voice. ‘You are there.’

  ‘I was just leaving,’ she volunteered. There was something in the man’s voice which encouraged trust.

  ‘It is not a long story,’ he said, ‘but bear with me – I sometimes have trouble keeping things in order these days.’

  ‘Take as long as you want,’ she said.

  ‘As I said, I am a traditional doctor, an acupuncturist and herbalist, but I also prescribe Western medicines for some complaints. I live in Mongkok, just north of Argyle Street. Do you know the area?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Mongkok was one of Kowloon’s poorest areas, a maze of narrow streets and overcrowded apartment blocks. It was also one of the main recruitment areas of the Blue Dragon Triad.

  ‘Yesterday evening some young men came to see me. They wanted me to examine some babies, they said. It wasn’t really a request, you understand, but of course I would have gone in any case. They took me to their car – a red one, but I’m afraid I know nothing about cars – and drove me to a warehouse. I couldn’t tell you where exactly, because they made me wear a blindfold until I was inside the building. The journey was about twenty minutes, I think. It was a large warehouse, a modern one, and right next to the harbour. We went out of a door, across a
dock and into a large boat-house. There were two boats tied up inside, a large black speedboat and an ordinary-looking sampan. I was taken aboard the sampan and shown ten babies, eight of them alive. The two who had died showed all the symptoms of bacterial pneumonia. The others, as far as I could tell from a brief examination, showed no signs of the disease as yet. But some of them probably would in due course, I told the men. They wanted to know how long, and seemed relieved when I suggested it could be a matter of several days. They then drove me back to Mongkok, and of course made it clear that I should not talk about this with anyone.’

  ‘I’m glad you have,’ Rosalie said. ‘Do you think you would be able to identify the location from the harbour?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. So much has changed in the last few years, and I don’t often leave home any more. I hardly recognize my own street, let alone others.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘But I did see the name of the speedboat,’ he added, almost mischievously. ‘The Sea Dragon.’

  ‘Great,’ she said, more enthusiastically than she felt. The harbour was probably home to a hundred speedboats bearing the same nomenclature, for in the matter of both boats and people the Chinese showed an irritating lack of imagination when it came to bestowing names.

  ‘And the sampan had three square holes cut in the planking on either side, like windows. I have never seen one like it.’

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes.’ He had been saving the best for last. ‘They are coming for me again tonight,’ the doctor said. ‘They want me to look at some more babies.’