The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  I wasn’t teetotal by any means, but I was managing to keep it under control. Sometimes I went for weeks without a drink, and I’d long ago stopped keeping a quarter bottle of gin in my desk drawer. I was doing OK.

  I was about half way through the story when my white phone rang, the shrill warble of a dying bird.

  Roger was deep in thought over his expenses sheet and looking up at the ceiling for inspiration. There was no way on earth he was going to break off from his work of fiction to answer the phone so I hit the ‘Store’ button, sending the magic words into the machine’s mega-memory, and picked up the receiver.

  A voice speaking broken English, the grammar all twisted and the tenses all to cock, asked me my name and then asked me to spell it and then told me to ‘wait for second please for call from Hong Kong’.

  My first thought was that it was Sally, and my God had it really been Christmas since I last spoke to her? But I realized that she would have dialled direct and not gone through the operator, at about the same time the clipped male voice came on the line.

  It was an inspector from the Royal Hong Kong Police. He checked my name, and the spelling, and then he told me Sally was dead and the room sort of telescoped and Roger looked about a million miles away and I felt cold inside and I wanted to say, ‘are you sure?’ or, ‘there must be some mistake’ but I knew it was only on TV that they make mistakes like that and I didn’t want to sound like a twat.

  ‘I didn’t catch your name,’ I said.

  ‘Hall,’ he answered. ‘Inspector Hall. Your name was down as next of kin. Are your parents still living?’

  ‘Our father died some time ago, but our mother is alive. What happened?’

  ‘Your sister died yesterday after falling from a hotel window. At this stage it looks like a suicide case, I’m afraid.’

  My stomach lurched and the hand that held the phone was shaking.

  ‘What?’ I said in a voice that was no more than a whisper. ‘That’s not possible.’ Roger was pretending not to listen.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s definitely her, sir,’ said Hall. ‘She has already been identified.’

  My mind froze, there were a million things I wanted to ask, but my head seemed to be filled with a single thought. Sally was dead.

  ‘Are you still there?’ asked Hall.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sorry, what do you, I mean, is there anything I have to do?’

  He coughed, with embarrassment I guess. ‘There are arrangements that have to be made, sir. It would be a great help if you would come out to Hong Kong.’

  ‘Of course, I’ll be there, I’ll be there.’ He gave me a telephone number where I could reach him and then he hung up. Roger was looking at me strangely and I realized I was sitting there with the receiver pressed hard against my ear, saying nothing.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  My mouth was dry and my hands were damp with sweat, but I just nodded and said yes. I had to look up my mother’s number in my address book, which gives you an idea of how often I rang her. We were a loose-knit family to say the least. She’d remarried five years after our father had died, and spent a couple of relatively happy years with husband number two, running a kennels outside Nottingham, before he was killed in a car crash. He’d been well insured and my mother took the money and went to live with her unmarried sister in a small village near Truro. I suppose I saw her about once a year now and spoke to her on the phone whenever I felt guilty about not keeping in touch which, to be honest, wasn’t all that often. Sally was all the family I really had, or needed, though I didn’t even call her as often as I should. And now I wouldn’t get the chance.

  My mother wasn’t in but my aunt was, and in a way I was relieved because I didn’t know if I’d be able to cope with breaking the news to her. It was bad enough explaining to my aunt that Sally was dead and that I was going to Hong Kong. I hung up on her tears because there was nothing else I could say. If I was distant from my mother I was even further removed from my aunt and the rag-bag of relatives I had scattered around Britain. I only saw them at weddings and funerals, and that was usually only because Sally had dragged me along out of a sense of duty.

  I left my coat hanging on the back of my chair and went to see Bill.

  ‘I need to go to Hong Kong,’ I said.

  ‘Sally?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s dead. I have to go.’

  He started to get up but only managed halfway before he dropped back into the chair with a thud and a jiggling of flesh. He looked as if he cared.

  ‘Go,’ was all he said. He didn’t ask any of the questions they teach you when you’re a keen, hungry cub reporter on the make, he didn’t ask why, when, who, what or where, partly because he knew the answers to three out of the five, one didn’t matter and one was the reason I had to go, but mainly because it didn’t make the slightest difference to him. I was in trouble, I needed his help and he’d give it, no questions asked. Bill and I go back a long way, our paths had crossed on the Mail, the Express, for two fiery months on The Times, and we’d come together again on the 24-hour-a-day comic that we both poured scorn on but which paid us twice what we were worth. I’m not going to give you any crap about me loving him like a brother because I’d still stitch him up if it meant I’d get his job, and I’d leave him as soon as a better offer was waved in front of my nose. But he was a friend in a world full of colleagues and competitors. He opened his mouth and I thought for one horrible moment he was going to say something stupid like, ‘I’m sorry’, and I wouldn’t have been able to take that, not even from him. Behind me in the cavernous office I could hear raised voices and then I heard Gilbert Fell, an old-time sports sub in a red cardigan, scream, ‘fuck this stupid machine,’ followed by the expensive crash of an ATEX terminal being thrown to the ground and stamped on.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ yelled Bill, at last managing to get to his feet.

  ‘Only the sound of my heart being broken,’ I said. I gave him a half wave and said, ‘See you, I’ll phone when I get there.’ But he knew I would, anyway.

  A few years ago I’d have had a travel bag in my bottom drawer, ready, willing and able to be sent abroad at a moment’s notice, but that was before I was a crime reporter. Now the most travelling I got to do was up to Glasgow every once in a while if there was a good murder or a decent rape case. And I’d managed to swing a week in Portugal out of Bill on the back of a time share con that the paper exposed, but generally I was tied to the office and the terminal while Roger snaffled all the trips for himself. Rank has its privileges. And perks. And a car. Bastard. But old habits die hard and I still carried my passport in my inside pocket, and I had a walletful of credit cards.

  Andy was gossiping with one of the prettier copy typists, but even if she’d been at her desk there’s no way I would have asked her to arrange things. This was important, I had to get to Hong Kong and I had to get there now.

  ‘Katy, do me a favour, love,’ I said, and she looked up from her typewriter, keen and eager. She really wanted to be a reporter and if it had been up to me she’d have been given a chance, but there’s no way on God’s earth the unions would let her make the switch.

  ‘I have to get to Hong Kong right away, fix it will you? I’ll call you from the airport to find out which airline. Just get me on the first flight,’ I checked my watch, ‘after eleven o’clock.’

  She was already reaching for her Filofax.

  ‘Any problems, get Robbie on the case,’ and I gestured a thumb at our airline correspondent, slumped in his chair reading Flight International, listening to the phone and drinking herbal tea at the same time. The ubiquitous Robbie Walker, two heart attacks down and one to go, reformed alcoholic and womanizer, he was now a committed health food nut and he would have been out jogging every morning if it hadn’t been for his triple by-pass. He’d been around a good many years and his contacts in the Ministry of Defence were second to none, but that wasn’t the reason he was kept on. Our Robbie’s forte was being able t
o get free flights for the editor and, as long as he could keep on coming up with the goods, he had a job for life and the editor travelled the world free of charge. As nice a bit of symbiosis as you’d be likely to find in Fleet Street.

  ‘Try to get me in Economy and Robbie can get me an upgrade, but I’ll pay the full whack if I have to. If the first flight is full tell Robbie it’s urgent and get him to get me on the jump seat.’

  ‘Will do,’ she said, but I was already walking away from her. As I headed for the stairs Bill put his head out of his glass cage and shouted that the office car was waiting for me at the front door.

  I was at Gatwick an hour later and I called Katy from a pay phone. She said she’d got me on the direct Cathay flight and that Robbie had fixed it so that I didn’t have to pay. I could tell from her voice that she knew about Sally, but like Bill she didn’t say anything. I wasn’t surprised she knew. A newspaper office is the last place you can expect to keep a secret. I got to the desk twenty minutes before take-off and the British Airways guy who did the button pressing gave me a strange look when I said I had no luggage, but Robbie had got me on First Class so he had to bare his teeth and ask me to go straight to immigration please and have a good flight. The Asian smile would have to wait until I got on the plane. I wasn’t thinking straight, I couldn’t concentrate, all my thoughts had been removed and individually packed in cotton wool and sealed in polythene bags. I didn’t want to think about Sally, not right now, so I left the bags alone, I couldn’t risk opening by mistake the one that had her name in it. But I’d forgotten something and I was just about to walk through immigration when I remembered what it was. I’d run out of coins for the phone. But the paper accepts all collect calls so I rang Katy and asked her who our stringer was in Hong Kong.

  ‘I’ll check with Foreign,’ she said and she went off to Nick Webber’s glass box. Fifteen minutes to go before take-off so there was no rush but I was still tapping the phone nervously against my ear by the time she came back on.

  ‘Howard,’ she said. ‘Howard Berenger.’

  ‘Staff or freelance?’ I asked, because stringers could be either.

  ‘Freelance,’ she said. ‘Do you want his number?’

  ‘No kid, it’s all right. Just call him and tell him to meet me at the airport. Tell him what I look like, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. She sounded like she was going to add ‘Good luck’ and I was relieved when she didn’t.

  ‘Hell, I nearly forgot. Ask Roger if he’ll finish my story. It’s slugged RAPE23 and it’s damn near finished so I want my name on it.’

  ‘Will do,’ she said.

  I made the plane with five minutes to spare. I’ve flown on most of the airlines in the world at some time or another, and after a while they all seem the same. The service varies, so do the uniforms and the food, but a plane is a plane and time in them is wasted time. I took the freebie shaving kit so that I would look halfway decent when I landed in Hong Kong and I took the headphones and put them on right away because I didn’t want to make small talk with the tweed-jacketed bearded guy with bad teeth in the seat next to mine.

  A Chinese girl with an American accent and too much eye make-up asked me if I wanted a drink. Do bears shit in the woods? Of course I wanted a drink, I’d wanted a drink every day of the three weeks I’d been on the wagon, and I wanted a drink now more than ever because I needed something to keep Sally in the bag and out of my head. I’d promised myself that I’d stay off the booze this time, come what may, but this was different. I needed a drink and if I didn’t have one I knew I’d go crazy, so I ordered a gin and tonic.

  It came with a tinfoil packet of salted nuts which I treated with the contempt it deserved. I held the glass up to my eyes, watched the bubbles collect on the inside and smelt the lime that nestled among the ice cubes and then I sniffed it and felt the spray tingle against my nose and I could smell the gin and then I sipped it and let the coldness of it roll around my tongue and down my throat and then I drank it in three gulps and it was gone. Three weeks. Almost a record.

  The stewardess took the empty glass and then we taxied to the runway. The engines went on and the seat kicked me in the back and we were up in the air with just sixteen hours, or however long it was, between me and Howard Berenger and Hong Kong.

  I put the seat fully back and tuned the stereo into the jazz channel and while Grover Washington Jr did his stuff I slowly and carefully opened the plastic bag with Sally’s name on it.

  Sally is twelve years younger than me and I’ll be thirty-eight next birthday so she had more of her own teeth and a lot less cynicism than I had.

  She’s a full head shorter than I am which makes her about five feet two and me the older brother she always has to look up to. Her eyes are blue and bright and her nose turns up just enough to be pretty without being cute and she has a habit of licking her upper lip with her catlike tongue when she’s worried. Describing a sister’s figure is tough because you’re talking about a body that I’d grown up with and seen change over almost three decades, but she was slightly plump and I guess if I was eyeing her up in a pub I’d have said that her breasts were just a shade too full and her legs a bit too short, but there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been glad that she was my sister. She’s smart, very smart, smarter than I am, she can out-think most people she meets and five minutes into a conversation she’s finishing their sentences for them. She’ll grow out of it I guess, except that she wasn’t going to because she’s dead and I must get out of the habit of thinking of her in the present tense because now she’s part of my past.

  I last saw her about a year and a half ago, in London. Sally had a grasshopper mind, chopping and changing and job-hopping whenever she got bored. Her CV was a nightmare. She’d dropped out of teacher training college and went off to sell skiing equipment in some posh resort in the Alps. She did well but soon got bored and came back to England with a couple of thousand pounds in the bank and a suntan and got a job as a computer operator with one of the big City stockbroking firms. Three months later she switched over to programming and made section head before chucking it in and crewing a yacht being delivered to some property tycoon in Australia. She spent a couple of months in Oz selling advertising space on a daily and decided she’d like to be a journalist, wangled a courier flight back to England and hit Fleet Street, except that the Street hit back. No experience and no union card meant that she had as much chance of getting a job on the nationals as she had of winning the Grand National without a horse. She managed to get a few shifts on one of the Sunday tabloids but then the chapel found out she wasn’t in the union and showed her the door. She got a few articles published in women’s magazines, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Sally had set her heart on seeing her name in lights, and what she wanted she usually managed to get.

  How, she’d asked me, sitting cross-legged on the leather sofa in my flat, how could she break into the closed shop that journalism had become? Find a free sheet that’ll take you on, or a trade magazine. Learn the business from the bottom, shorthand, typing, pick up the basic skills and the union card, then switch to a local weekly paper, covering the courts and the district council meetings, think of it as an apprenticeship, then move up to one of the regional evenings or dailys. Keep pushing stuff out to the nationals, spend your holidays haunting the pubs and bars where their reporters drink, keep pestering the news editors until they give you a few shifts just to shut you up and then prove how good you are. If you’re good you’ll get in. If you’re not, you won’t. That’s how I did it and it took me five years. That’s what I told her, big brother offering younger sister the benefit of his advice. It felt good.

  ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers,’ she said, and flicked her hair sideways in annoyance. So much for brotherly advice.

  ‘There’s got to be a quicker way,’ she said, and true to form she found it. In Hong Kong. The journalists there are a transient bunch at the best of times so it was fairly easy for anyone who can st
ring a couple of words together to get a job on one of the papers. That guaranteed membership of the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association which in turn entitled her to a union card back in London. Smart girl. She’d arrived in Hong Kong eighteen months ago and I’d spoken to her half a dozen times on the phone. She was enjoying herself so much she’d decided to stay. Hong Kong was magic, do you miss me? How’s London? How’s the comic? Must go, bye. Crazy. I’d barely thought of her during the time she was in Hong Kong, I guess because I knew she’d always be there at the end of a phone if I needed her, but now she was dead and the feeling of loss was a dull ache that just wouldn’t go away. I missed her, I wanted to talk to her, with her. Shit, she was my sister and I should have been there.

  I realized with a jolt that I’d said the last bit out loud and I opened my eyes to the tune of Sadao Watanabe’s ‘Birds of Passage’ to see a stewardess bending over me with a worried frown spoiling her little girl looks. She asked me if I was all right and I said sure, just a bad dream, and would she please get me another gin and tonic and make it a double. This time I didn’t savour it, I drank it quickly, but it didn’t do anything to make the ache go away. I hadn’t expected it to, it would take more than a couple of gins. At the very minimum it would need answers to the five questions Bill Hardwicke hadn’t asked. I was going to Hong Kong to get the five answers and then I’d take it from there. Sally wasn’t a jumper, she was too full of life to have ended it by throwing herself through a window God knows how many storeys up. She was full of fun and pulled me out of black depressions more often than I cared to remember.