The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  Howard stood by the door with his arms folded as I gave the room the once over. I’d obviously been given the executive package because there was a vase of carnations on the dressing table and three books of matches with my name embossed in silver letters. OK, so my name was spelt wrong, but the thought was there. There was a cushioned bench seat under the window which looked out over the harbour. The water was chock-a-block with ships, either sluggishly rolling at anchor or busily sailing through, freighters, tugs, junks, fishing boats. A real working harbour. Immediately in front of the hotel was a typhoon shelter and though the weather was perfect and the water calm it was packed with boats. To the left of the shelter the vessels were pretty white yachts, expensive playthings for the Hong Kong rich. But to the right was a different story, a flotilla of small, dirty, wooden junks, with washing hanging from rope lines and steam rising from cooking pots. The yachts were once-a-week boats, but the junks were homes, where families lived, loved and did the laundry. There must have been a hundred of them, moored tightly together. God knows where they got their water from but there was no doubt where their sewage went because on the prow of one of the scruffy boats was a stocky fisherman who had opened up the front of his denim shorts and was playing a stream of urine into the water below.

  ‘Welcome to Hong Kong,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’ grunted Howard from the door.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said as I watched a white hydrofoil shoot past leaving a white wake foaming behind it. ‘Fancy giving me a geography lesson?’

  Howard joined me at the window. ‘That’s Kowloon over there,’ he said, and pointed straight ahead. ‘Tsim Sha Tsui to be one hundred per cent accurate, where the best shops and bars are. Over on the left is the Regent Hotel, with the New World Hotel next to it. Over to the right is the airport. That’s all on the mainland, behind Kowloon are the New Territories and beyond that is China. We’re on Hong Kong Island, in Causeway Bay. The business section is called Central, you can’t see it from here but it’s on our left. Between Central and here is Wan Chai.’

  ‘The world of Suzie Wong?’

  ‘A long time gone, laddie. More’s the pity. It’s a wee bit more commercial now. The road below us is the harbour expressway, it runs from one end of the island to the other, from here it passes alongside North Point and then Quarry Bay and beyond.’

  ‘Behind us?’

  ‘The Peak, home to the rich and famous, and the other side is mainly residential. That’s Hong Kong.’

  ‘Not much to it, is there?’

  ‘Not in terms of square feet, but there’s a lot going on. This place hums, that’s its big attraction …’

  He fell silent as he realized that I wasn’t really paying attention, just letting his words wash over me. Hong Kong still felt like a dream, my mind was still back in London and I guess the jet lag wasn’t helping. We stood together, looking down at the ships in the harbour.

  ‘Where did it happen, Howard?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Kowloon side,’ he said, nodding towards the mainland. ‘A hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. You can’t see it from here.’ He paused, but he didn’t wait for me to ask for more details, he knew what I wanted to know, it was just a question of choosing the right words.

  ‘She was in the swimming pool on the top floor. It was late evening and she was alone.’

  I pictured her carving through the water with her lazy crawl, breathing every second stroke. She loved to swim, she could go on for hours, never tiring, never changing the pace. I was faster over a short distance, but I tired quickly whereas she was a stayer.

  ‘She went through the window. No one seems to know what happened,’ Howard said.

  ‘She didn’t jump,’ I said. It wasn’t a question but he took it as one.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m telling you. She didn’t jump.’ I turned to look at him. ‘Did you know her?’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a small place, everybody knows everybody else. And you know what journalists are like.’

  Yeah, I knew. And a stringer like Howard would probably be scared shitless that somebody young and keen like Sally would steal some of his precious strings.

  ‘Her copy was good,’ he said. ‘She was a hard worker, all right, she’d take any job that was going. Any job that would get her a by-line. Seemed happier freelancing, because there were plenty of people more than willing to give her a staff job.’

  ‘You socialize with her much?’

  ‘Occasionally. And she rang me up a few times for help on stories. She was relatively new so I was a good source of background for her.’

  ‘Did she have any problems, anything that was worrying her?’

  ‘Not that I know.’

  ‘What about enemies?’

  Howard didn’t answer, just shrugged.

  ‘What do the police think? Was it an accident?’

  ‘They just don’t know, laddie, they just don’t know.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Kowloon Public Mortuary.’

  ‘I want to go there. And to the hotel. And I want to speak to the police.’ I’d written down the name of the inspector who’d phoned me in London and I handed the piece of paper to Howard. ‘That’s the guy I’m to see.’

  ‘I know him,’ he said. He walked over to the bed and picked up the phone, dialling the number from memory. He fixed up an appointment for us and five minutes later the turbaned Indian was opening the door to a taxi. In flawless Oxbridge English he asked me where I wanted to go and Howard told him.

  The Indian spoke to the driver who nodded and crashed the taxi into gear and we moved out into the traffic with a series of gut-wrenching jerks.

  ‘Where do they learn to drive as badly as this?’ I asked Howard, only half-joking.

  ‘Practice, laddie. It takes years of practice.’

  We were early, and the bastards made us wait. Howard and I sat on a wooden bench while a fan circled slowly overhead. I’d taken my jacket off and rolled up my sleeves and loosened my tie, but was still panting like an overweight Labrador.

  An old man hobbled past and slowly lowered himself onto the wooden bench next to ours, using a rubbertipped steel walking stick to steady himself. His skin was as brown and wrinkled as an autumn leaf and what little hair there was left on his head was short, stubbly and white. His toes peeped through holes in his slippers and the nails were black with dirt or age. The face was a blank mask, thin bloodless lips and impassive eyes, the eyebrows had all but disappeared. He was clinging to life as tenaciously as a pensioner to a bargain in a church hall jumble sale. I don’t know why he bothered.

  ‘Probably a triad boss come to give himself up,’ whispered Howard, and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow. The old man cleared his throat and then sucked up the phlegm from his nasal passages with a guttural sound like a drain being cleared. He rolled whatever he’d dragged up around his tongue, breathed in through his nose and spat noisily at the wall opposite. The green and white mass of saliva hit the plaster with an oily splat and began to dribble down slowly, fighting gravity every inch of the way. I felt sick but I couldn’t take my eyes off, as it smeared itself to the floor.

  ‘Jesus, Howard.’

  ‘You get used to it, laddie. Just be glad he didn’t aim at your foot.’

  A door at the end of the corridor opened and a young Chinese in a green uniform and shiny black belt walked out, his well-polished boots clicking on the stone floor. He beckoned to Howard and me with his hand, and ushered us into the room.

  ‘Very polite,’ I whispered to Howard.

  ‘He doesn’t speak English,’ he replied.

  ‘How do you know?’

  He pointed to the chrome numbers stitched onto the shoulders of the green shirt.

  ‘The ones that can speak English have a red strip of material under the numbers,’ he said. ‘Not that that means anything – the little bastards will still send you in the wrong direction just for the fun of it.’

  The you
ngster pointed to a pair of old wooden chairs in front of a rusting metal desk. ‘Please wait here. The inspector will be in to see you shortly,’ he said in accentless English, and left us alone in the room. A gun in a glistening holster bumped against his hip as he walked. From the size of it he’d need both hands just to aim it.

  Howard was totally unashamed. ‘Maybe his mother hasn’t got round to sewing them on yet,’ he laughed and flopped into one of the seats.

  On the wall behind the paper-strewn desk was a map of Hong Kong, dotted with pins of various colours, and with police mugshots stapled haphazardly around it. The filing cabinets were made of the same grey gunmetal as the desk with identical rust stains. There was a carpet of indeterminate colour on the floor, dotted with small flecks of plaster that had fallen from the damp, peeling ceiling.

  The window obviously hadn’t been washed for years, it was streaked with grey and made the outside look as foggy as a winter’s day on the Isle of Dogs. A small air-conditioner set into a hole in the wall next to the glass did its best to keep the temperature of the room below boiling point, but it was failing miserably and groaning like a sick horse.

  Leaving a journalist alone in an office is asking for trouble. I began idly flicking through the green folders and sheafs of typed papers, looking for anything interesting. Looking for Sally’s name. I’d just started to open the top right hand drawer when the door opened and two men walked in, one Chinese, one European.

  I gave them a winning smile and walked back to the side of the desk where I belonged, dropping into the chair next to Howard.

  The European was Hall. He didn’t offer to shake my hand so I didn’t bother to stand up. I guess he was a bit pissed off at my attempt at breaking and entering. Hall was a shade under six feet, brown hair cut to regulation length and wearing a grey off-the-peg suit with trousers that were just a bit too tight around the groin. His tie was dark blue with a coat of arms on it.

  He had the same wary world-wise look that plain clothes policemen all over the world have after they’ve been lied to so many times that they expect to come across the truth about as often as Halley’s comet.

  It was also a look that said that the last thing he wanted to do at the moment was to talk to the brother of a girl who’d just been scraped off a Hong Kong pavement.

  His companion was harder to read, tall for a Chinese and well built, wearing faded jeans and a black leather jacket that was scuffed around the elbows. His hair looked as if it had been cut with a set of blunt shears and a pudding basin and his nose had obviously been broken a couple of times. The tie was a masterpiece of bad taste, bits of purple, green and Picasso-type shapes in black and white. He obviously had no mother, no girlfriend, and no sister, because no girl would allow someone she loved to dress that way. He wore a thick gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand and a bulky gold chain on his right wrist and as he listened to Hall he toyed with the ring and studied me.

  Hall didn’t introduce him, but they both nodded at Howard. Hall had brought a file with him, identical to those already littering the desk, and he opened it as he sat down. He interrogated me for the best part of an hour, and he was good. He followed up several lines of questioning, checking the spelling of all names, cross-referring on times and dates, when I’d last seen her, who her friends were, former colleagues, present lovers. He wrote everything down, filling two A4 sheets with his small scribble.

  When he’d finished he opened a drawer in the right hand side of his desk and took out a large polythene bag containing a leather shoulder bag, a navy blue dress and a pair of white shoes. Hall took them out, placing them on his desk top one item at a time. He opened the flap of the bag and took out a thin gold watch that I’d never seen before, a money clip, a Gucci purse and a set of keys.

  ‘These are your sister’s effects,’ said Hall. ‘We found them in the changing room.’ He handed me a typewritten list and a cheap biro. ‘Can you sign for them, at the bottom.’

  I scrawled my signature and then he ripped off the top copy, putting it in the plastic bag along with her belongings. He pushed the bag over to my side of the desk.

  ‘There should be a ring.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Hall.

  ‘A ring. A gold ring with a heart on it. I gave it to her on her twenty-first birthday.’

  Hall looked over at his colleague, who shook his head.

  ‘There was no ring,’ said Hall. ‘Perhaps it is at her flat. We haven’t been there yet.’

  ‘She swore she’d never take it off,’ I said, and then realized how silly that sounded. ‘Never mind,’ I said.

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me, anything I haven’t asked you that you think might be important?’ asked Hall.

  ‘I want to know what happened.’

  Hall paused, studying a sheet of paper in the file.

  ‘She fell from a high-floor window, dead on arrival. There was no note. You know as much as we do at the moment.’

  ‘Sally wouldn’t have committed suicide.’

  ‘You sound very sure of that.’

  ‘I knew her. She was my sister.’

  ‘That may be, but she could have changed. Something could have happened.’

  ‘Do suicides normally throw themselves through windows?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Look, I’m a journalist, I’ve covered more than my fair share of jumpers. The sort that jump are the ones that want to attract a crowd, to become the centre of attention for once in their lives. They usually sit out on a ledge and wait for someone to talk them out of it.’

  Hall leant back in his seat and seemed about to speak. I pre-empted him by holding up my hand. ‘Let me finish,’ I said. ‘Sally wasn’t the sort to kill herself, period. But, and this is one fucking big but, if she was she wouldn’t throw herself through a window. She talked tough, but she couldn’t bear pain. You couldn’t get her into a dentist’s chair without pumping Valium into her. If Sally was going to kill herself she’d make sure it was perfectly painless and she’d make damn sure there wouldn’t be any blood.’

  I looked at the two coppers and could see in their eyes that they weren’t listening to me, any moment now one of them was going to lean forward and say, ‘there, there, it’ll be all right.’

  I banged my hand down on the desk. ‘Why won’t you just believe me,’ I yelled, trying to shock them into action.

  ‘There’s no need to raise your voice,’ said the Chinese guy in an American accent. Mid-West, I think. I ignored him.

  ‘Suicide is not unusual in Hong Kong,’ said Hall quietly, as if he was talking to an imbecile. ‘It’s like a pressure cooker here, one of the most densely populated places in the world. Not everyone can adapt to it.’

  I closed my eyes and sighed deeply, he just didn’t understand.

  ‘If she’d had a problem she’d have called me,’ I said wearily.

  ‘Hong Kong is not an easy place for European women, the social scene for them isn’t as, shall we say, fulfilling as it is for the men. You wouldn’t believe how many expat wives are on tranquillizers, or how many just pack up and leave their husbands after a year or so here. Few marriages can survive this place.’

  ‘Sally wasn’t married.’

  ‘I know, I know. But the pressures are the same.’

  ‘She wouldn’t kill herself. She’d just leave.’

  The two policemen looked at each other and I could practically hear them thinking, ‘he isn’t listening to a word we say.’ Yeah, well maybe they were right. But I knew Sally, and they didn’t.

  ‘What happens now?’ I said.

  ‘There’ll be an autopsy,’ Hall replied. ‘Then we’ll be able to release the body. You can either take her back to England or make arrangements here.’

  ‘You’re still waiting to do an autopsy? But it happened three days ago. Why the delay?’

  ‘It takes time,’ Hall said, wearily. ‘We don’t have the facilities, or the manpower, that you have ba
ck in the UK. We’ve just lost two pathologists to Canada, part of the brain drain. I’m afraid your sister has got caught in the backlog. I’ll do everything I can to speed things up, but …’ He left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘Well why bother with an autopsy, if you are so sure it was suicide? Are you telling me that there’s some doubt about the cause of death?’

  Hall shook his head. ‘No, but an autopsy might tell us why she killed herself. She might have been drinking, or on drugs.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m the drinker of the family, and she never took drugs.’

  ‘She might have been ill.’

  ‘So ill that she’d throw herself through a window to end it all sooner rather than later? Christ man, you seem to be doing nothing more than trying to come up with reasons she would kill herself. I wish you’d put the same amount of effort into finding out what happened. Have you spoken to her friends? Her colleagues? Was she alone in the pool when it happened?’

  ‘There were no witnesses. The pool was closed, locked up for the night.’

  ‘So how did she get in?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘The pool was just for guests of the hotel?’

  ‘No. Members of the health club could use it as well. Your sister was a member, but that doesn’t explain what she was doing there after the place had closed.’

  ‘And what was she doing there?’

  ‘Swimming, it appears. Naked. We didn’t find a swimming costume.’

  ‘And what are you doing now?’ I said.

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘About finding her killer?’

  ‘At the moment we don’t know if we are looking for a killer.’

  ‘What sort of investigation is this?’ I asked him. ‘You haven’t even searched her flat, for God’s sake. By the sound of it you couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, never mind investigate a murder. Where the fuck is your boss? Perhaps I can get some sense out of him.’

  ‘I am Inspector Hall’s superior officer,’ said the Chinese, quietly. ‘And I can assure you that everything that can be done, will be done. It is less than three days since your sister died. You cannot expect miracles.’