He looked at her for the first time and was almost struck dumb by how lovely she was.
She led him up two narrow flights of stairs, climbing slowly in the tight cheongsam, exposing her slender thighs with each step up. The room was furnished like a Victorian bedroom, or a whorehouse in a Western. The girl had a foot up on the bed, exposing more of her thighs as she undid the clasp on her sandals. Then she straightened up and began unbuttoning the front of the cheongsam.
Dubery felt paralysed, and not just by the beer and whisky swilling around in his brain. She was so beautiful, so different . . . He closed his eyes and tried to visualize Helen’s body – the pale, translucent skin, the pink nipples, the dark-blonde tuft of hair – but he couldn’t hold the picture in his mind.
The girl stepped out of the cheongsam and pulled down her knickers. Her breasts were small, the nipples dark and large. In the dim light her body seemed a deep golden colour. She let her hair cascade loose around her shoulders and walked across to stand a few inches in front of him, her nipples brushing against his shirt. He reached out a hand and cupped her right breast, and heard someone groan with pleasure.
It was him. You can’t do this, a voice was saying somewhere in his brain. It’s wrong, you’ll regret it.
She unzipped his trousers and pushed two fingers in to find his penis. It wasn’t a long search – he couldn’t remember ever feeling this hard, this big.
She fondled him for a few moments, then took away her hand and walked over to the bed, where she lay back, one leg stretched out straight, the other bent at the knee, her fingers linked beneath her breasts.
He unbuttoned his boots and took them off, telling himself that it was nothing, everyone did it, that it had nothing to do with Helen. The rogue voice inside his head told him things would never be the same again, but the body on the bed pulled at him like a tide. He wanted to feel it, smell it, taste it, know it.
She’s just a whore, the rogue voice said.
He didn’t care. She was everything he had never had.
‘Condom on table,’ she said.
He picked up the packet like a sleepwalker and took it across to the bed.
She took it from him, slit one open with her fingernail, and deftly readied the purple sheath for him to don. ‘Common sense, yes,’ she said, and squeezed it over the head of his throbbing penis.
Somehow he didn’t come.
She lay back again, this time with her legs spread wide, and as he gently lowered himself on top of her she took the sheathed penis, guided it expertly inside her, and squirmed to drive him deeper.
This time he did come.
On the Ocean Carousel the two men finally abandoned their joint watch. For four hours they had waited, Brownings in hand, for the expected search party, but none had come. Either the crew had yet to miss their comrade, or they simply didn’t care.
Finn took the first sleep, leaving Cafell to stare at the stars and wonder what, if anything, it all meant.
7
The following morning Rosalie and Li held an impromptu conference as they waited for the coffee machine to deliver.
‘One,’ he said, holding a single finger aloft, ‘as far as we know there’s still a shipment waiting to be brought in. Two . . .’
‘If they knew yesterday that Chen had spoken to us – which they did – then they also knew the godown wasn’t safe. They could have arranged to bring the babies in somewhere else.’
‘Maybe. But at a day’s notice? My guess is they’re still out there.’
‘If any of them are still alive. Sorry,’ she said, seeing the look of exasperation on Li’s face. ‘What was two?’
He smiled and raised another finger. ‘We might not have a location to watch, but we do have suspects. I think we should put tails on the Blue Dragon enforcers – the Red Pole and his main helpers. We know who they are.’
She thought about it. ‘Won’t they be expecting it? We’d have to put on a five-star job – overlapping tails, the works. At least thirty officers for twenty-four-hour cover. I can’t see Halliwell agreeing to it.’
‘This time you are going to have to use your charms.’
‘I don’t think I have many today,’ she muttered, fingering the sticking-plaster on her cheek.
‘Oh yes you have,’ Li said mischievously. ‘Halliwell is what the English call a "tit man".’
She grimaced. ‘What do English mothers do to their children?’ she asked.
Marker was halfway through breakfast on Stonecutters’ Island when an orderly came to tell him Chief Inspector Ormond was on the phone. He took the call in the base commander’s office.
‘Thought you’d like to know,’ Ormond said, ‘we’ve found a motive for suicide. Turns out Bellamy knew Lansing, the captain of the oil-tanker which was hijacked. More than knew him, in fact. His wife says they’d been drinking buddies for more than ten years. Lansing even stayed with them a couple of times when his ship was in port.’
‘You think he passed on the information not knowing that his friend would take the fall?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And was then overcome by remorse . . .’
‘More like self-disgust, from what I knew of him. I know it sounds a wee bit too much like Hollywood, but it’s the best we’ve come up with so far.’
‘Thanks for letting me know,’ Marker said.
‘All part of the service,’ Ormond said drily, and hung up.
Marker was putting down the phone when the base commander walked in through the door. ‘Everything OK?’ he asked cheerily. ‘We’re looking after you all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ the Marine colonel added when Marker was halfway out the door, ‘there was a Signal 3 typhoon blowing around the Spratly Islands yesterday afternoon. Thought you might like to know.’
‘Thanks,’ Marker said soberly. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, but he supposed knowing was better than not. Cafell and Finn would be having a rough trip.
Down at the base dock he found Dubery waiting at the controls of the Rigid Raider which they had commandeered for the day. The lad looked terrible, Marker thought. He’d either had too much to drink, a sleepless night, or both.
‘Where to, boss?’ the Scot asked.
Marker looked at the map he’d borrowed. The idea of the expedition was to give the younger man a sense of the local geography, not to mention jogging his own memory. ‘Let’s head out this way,’ he told Dubery, tracing a route with his finger, west towards the northern tip of Lantau, through the Kap Shui Mun channel and out towards the estuarine border between Chinese and British waters.
The Scot gunned the outboard and directed the powerboat out into the bay. Three miles to the south Marker could see two green and white ferries crossing in mid-harbour. Behind them the towers of Central and Wan Chai stood out sharp against the clear blue sky.
The Rigid Raider headed steadily west-north-west, its prow aimed at the gap between the hilly heights of northern Lantau and Tsing Yi, where smoke from a coastal power station rose straight as a beanstalk into the heavens. All around them the sea was full of small boats – the graceful junks with their latticed sails, sampans in all shapes and conditions, assorted powerboats and modern yachts, water taxis and ferries plying their trade between the colony’s 230-odd islands. There was only one large ship in sight, an empty oil-tanker edging its way south into the West Lamma Channel, presumably bound for Singapore and the West.
Marker silently wished its captain luck.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the Kap Shui Mun channel and another twenty to pass the two islands known as The Brothers. Lantau was to their left now, and some twenty miles to the west they could make out the thin line of the Chinese coast.
‘Let’s just sit awhile,’ Marker yelled, and with what looked suspiciously like reluctance Dubery cut the engine.
Motion suited the Rigid Raider – without it the boat bobbed in the swell like a large fibregla
ss bath. Marker waited until a Macau hydrofoil had thundered past, and half jokingly asked the other man what he had got up to the night before.
The Scot actually blushed.
‘Want to talk about it?’ Marker asked.
Dubery exhaled noisily. He felt relieved to get the chance, but still didn’t know what to say. ‘I made a mistake,’ he began, but even that didn’t seem completely honest. Because when all was said and done he still wasn’t sure it had been a mistake.
‘What happened?’
‘I went into the city with a bunch of lads. We had some drinks at a disco, a lot of drinks, and then one of the lads said he knew somewhere that was different. That was the word he used. And aye, it was different all right. They had all these girls who were, well, deformed, I guess. . . one had no legs and one was blind . . . it was disgusting . . .’ He looked up at Marker. ‘I don’t mean the girls were disgusting – it was the whole thing . . .’
He stopped and looked out across the sea, and Marker resisted the temptation to fill the silence.
‘Not all the girls were like that,’ Dubery went on. ‘There was one . . .’ He stopped again, and turned to face Marker. ‘Were you ever unfaithful?’ he asked. ‘When you were married, I mean.’
Not until I knew it was over, Marker thought, but he didn’t think that was what Dubery needed to hear. ‘Not in deed,’ he said, ‘but I thought about it more than once.’
‘Isn’t that what matters?’ Dubery asked miserably. ‘Having the strength to resist temptation?’
Marker shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t really know. I don’t think there’s any hard and fast rules. How would you feel if Helen was unfaithful to you?’
Dubery realized with a jolt that he had never even considered the possibility. ‘I guess I would know she didn’t love me any more,’ he said after a moment’s thought.
‘Maybe that would be so, maybe not. People do things for the strangest of reasons, and most of the time they don’t have a clue what those reasons are. Do you think you still love her?’
‘Yes . . . And I want to feel sorry for what happened, but I know I’m not.’
Marker felt surprised for the first time. ‘Are you planning to go back for more?’ he asked, almost coldly.
‘Oh no, I don’t mean that. I . . .’ Dubery had a mental picture of the cheongsam sliding to the floor, and wondered if he did mean that. ‘I don’t know what I mean,’ he said hopelessly.
‘Well, that’s probably a start,’ Marker said. He felt sorry for Dubery, but there was no way for anyone else to work out what the lad’s true feelings were. ‘A friend of my dad’s once said that everyone needs one story they can’t tell to their grandchildren. Maybe this is yours.’
The Scot smiled back, and for the rest of the morning he seemed at least a couple of notches above suicidal.
Cafell and Finn had spent the first couple of hours of the day slowly drying out. The sea had seemed almost preternaturally calm, as if it was trying to make up for its tantrum of the day before, and the two men had kept their ears open for sounds of a search party, restricting their own vocal exchanges to whispers.
Once during the morning they had heard voices, but they had seemed some way away. This time they were closer, and growing more so.
Cafell pointed downwards with his finger, and Finn nodded. Whoever it was, they were in the channel below, where their ex-comrade had played pinball with his head. The language sounded Chinese, but neither SBS man was known for his linguistic abilities.
A laugh sounded not ten feet away. The two Englishmen held their breath, half expecting to see a head appear above the rim of the container, but instead a cloud of blue smoke suddenly came into view, dissolving on contact with the faint breeze. The smell of strong tobacco reached their nostrils.
A sudden shout erupted, and for a long moment Cafell thought they must have left some tell-tale clue of their presence in the channel below, but a burst of laughter came hard on the shout’s heels, and then the sound of receding footsteps.
They heard the voices once more, this time at a much greater distance, and then only the sounds of the ship and the sea.
The clock behind the bar of the Horse and Groom was showing only a couple of minutes past the hour when she walked in through the door, recognized Marker with a smile, and wove her way through the tables towards him. She was wearing a simple light-grey dress, flat shoes and hardly any make-up. Her blue-black hair was gathered at the nape in a burgundy-coloured scrunchy. There were more worry lines around her eyes than he remembered, but they didn’t begin to make a dent in her beauty.
‘What would you like?’ he asked.
‘What are you drinking?’
‘Merlot. It’s not bad.’
‘I’ll have some.’
He walked up to the bar and asked the young Australian for another glass of Merlot.
‘Same one?’ the Aussie asked, nodding in her direction. ‘I’d say she was worth waiting twenty-four hours for.’
‘Thanks,’ Marker said. ‘I really needed your approval.’
Back at the table they toasted their reunion.
‘So what are you doing in Hong Kong this time?’ she asked. ‘Same as before, or can’t you tell me?’
‘It’s no great secret. Not from the police, anyway,’ he added wryly. He told her about the international anti-piracy initiative, and the connection with Douglas Bellamy’s death which they had discovered in Singapore.
‘What do you think of Ormond?’ she asked.
‘He seems OK.’ Marker suddenly felt anxious. ‘Why, isn’t he?’
‘No, no, I think he probably is,’ she said, wondering why he seemed so worried. ‘But he doesn’t like me very much, so if you need to keep in his good books . . .’
‘I’d rather keep in yours. What’s he got against you?’
‘He was a friend of my father’s, and I think he felt more betrayed than most. I guess I’m a constant reminder of it all.’ She took a sip of wine. ‘This is nice.’
He took a sip as well. ‘You got promoted, I gather.’
‘Twice. I’m Inspector Kai these days, with my own long-term investigation. Well, Li and I are jointly in charge.’
‘What are you investigating?’
She explained about the baby-smuggling, and was pleased to see he made no flippant comparisons with the trades in drugs, dissidents and simple refugees. ‘I was out with your Marines the other night,’ she said, and told him about the appeal, Dr Chen’s tip-off and the abortive sea chase. She decided not to tell him about Chen’s murder the day before: for the first time in twenty-four hours those minutes in the corridor were consigned to the back of her mind, and she wanted them to stay that way. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Are you ready to eat?’
The restaurant was only a short walk away, up one of the steeply sloping streets on the other side of Hennessy Road. It was Vietnamese.
‘This family came on one of the first boats to reach Hong Kong,’ she explained. ‘They own five restaurants now.’
Inside it was crowded, but a smiling old Vietnamese ushered them into a window seat for two and chatted to Rosalie in Cantonese. ‘I booked,’ she explained after he had left. ‘At this table you can smell the jasmine in the garden,’ she added.
He smiled at her, and grabbed a drinks list from an adjacent empty table. They both decided on a bottle of ‘33’, a French beer long popular in Vietnam. ‘Any recommendations?’ he asked, switching to the food menu.
‘The set meal is nice. Seven courses, all variations on beef.’
‘And I don’t suppose there’s any Mad Cow Disease out here. Sounds good.’
She passed on the order in Cantonese.
‘Are you going to stay in Hong Kong?’ he asked, once the old man had shuffled away. ‘Will it be safe?’
‘I don’t know. The Communists are bound to purge the RHKP, and I don’t suppose being half-English will be a great asset.’ She smiled wryly. ‘But I can’t pretend the idea of moving to England f
ills me with enthusiasm. This has always been my home.’
Marker could hear the bitterness beneath the surface. She had never seemed a contented person, but three years earlier there had been an optimistic energy to set against the legacy of her unhappy past. For the moment that energy seemed at a low ebb. Maybe it was just the current investigation that was depressing her – it would be surprising if it wasn’t.
‘How is England these days?’ she asked.
‘Depressing,’ he admitted. ‘We’ve had fifteen years of government by people who don’t give a toss for anyone but themselves and their friends, and it’s taken its toll.’
‘But has it changed the way people are with each other?’ she asked. ‘Can politics do that?’
He thought about that. ‘I think it has,’ he said eventually, and started to explain why he thought so.
She listened, noting that the intensity she remembered was still there, if perhaps a little tempered by age. But he would always be an outsider – that was why they had understood each other. She remembered their first meeting, at a restaurant table full of English officers. They had all been celebrating something, having a whale of a time, and although he had joined in, had done nothing to dampen anyone else’s enjoyment, he had still seemed a man apart. There had been a certainty about him, an utter self-reliance, which at first she had found almost chilling.
It was, she had come to realize over the next few days, both his blessing and his curse. People with his kind of self-knowledge found it hard to understand others.
‘Three years older,’ he said, breaking the reverie.
‘Three long years. Tell me what happened with Penny? Are you still together?’
‘Nope. After I went back from here we lasted another year or so. It seemed to get a little worse each day . . . it was like being in a slow-motion car accident, just sliding towards disaster and nothing anyone could do about it.’ He shrugged. ‘And then one day she was gone. It was strange. It felt terrible, but it also felt like a huge relief. It was like reaching rock-bottom. Things could only get better.’
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