JOHN LANCHESTER
Fragrant Harbour
In memory of my mother
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Note
Map of Hong Kong
Large-scale map of Hong Kong
PROLOGUE: Tom Stewart
PART ONE: Dawn Stone
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter five
Chapter Six
PART TWO: Tom Stewart
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
PART THREE: Sister Maria
PART FOUR: Matthew Ho
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
About the Author
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and incidents in it are imaginary.
Conventions for rendering Chinese names changed in the course of the twentieth century. Canton is now Guangzhou, Peking is Beijing, Fukien is Fujian, and so on. Characters in this novel use the form of name appropriate to their time and place.
PROLOGUE
Tom Stewart
Longevity can be a form of spite. I am an old man myself now, and I recognise the symptoms.
This morning I met my nearest neighbour, Ming Tsin-Ho, on the path down into the village. Ming lives a hundred yards below me in a house with an ugly red-moon gate. On top of the gate is a purple dragon with green eyes and a yellow tongue. Ming bought this monstrosity in the New Territories and had it shipped here in one piece to be dragged up the hill by coolies.
The Chinese like dragons. They think of them as benign. Chinese dragons have many magical attributes, including the ability to choose whether or not they wish to be visible.
I like the fact that the South China Sea has so many moods. Sometimes the water is blue and translucent; sometimes a dirty, turbulent brown. Today it was a choppy grey-green. A faint haze blurred the view over to Hong Kong island. It was a cool morning by local standards. Ming was standing looking at his gate. He was wearing black loose-cut trousers and a white jacket and his absolutely bald head was glistening. He had an expression I had never seen before, a glassiness around the eyes which for a moment made me think he must be drunk. I looked more closely and realised the unfamiliar expression was in fact a smile, a glee he was unable to suppress. He had the air of wanting to talk. I said:
‘Good morning, Mr Ming.’
‘Mr Stewart – this is a sad morning. I have just heard the news of my poor brother’s death,’ he said, beaming, in Cantonese.
So that was it. Ming’s brother was a star of Cantonese opera, an authentic celebrity in that rebarbative form. My grandson had even once taken me to see him in a film, God help me, a comedy dominated by slapstick and the broad physical humour of what in Britain would have been music hall. Ming had not been on speaking terms with his famous younger sibling for the best part of half a century. It was a great topic of conversation on Cheung Chau island, where we both live. Once, when Ming had sued one of the local seafood restaurants after tripping over a chair on the pavement, they had retaliated by displaying posters of his brother in the window until the case was settled out of court. Now Ming was straightforwardly and unmistakably glad that his brother was dead. He held out a copy of Today, one of the least bad of the Chinese newspapers.
‘Nothing in here yet. It will be in the evening papers,’ he said, still beaming.
PART ONE
Dawn Stone
Chapter One
When I was a teenager I used to play a game called Count the Lies. The idea was pretty simple: I just made a mental note of every time I heard someone tell a porky, and kept a running total. It was a one-player game, a form of solitaire. Some days I started playing the game after some more than usually gross piece of hypocrisy or cant at school, some days it would be triggered by something I saw on TV or heard on the radio or read in a paper or magazine or book. Most of the time, though, what started me off on Count the Lies was my parents. It wasn’t so much any specific thing they said as the whole family atmosphere. It was the air we – even that ‘we’ was a kind of lie – breathed. Some days the lies I counted began with ‘Good morning’ (Why? What’s good about it?), carried on through ‘We want you back by half past eleven’ (No you don’t, you don’t want me back at all) and finished with ‘Goodnight’ (the lie here being: oh so you care, do you?).
If I had to explain in a sentence why I came to Hong Kong and why I now do what I do, that sentence would be this: money doesn’t lie.
Money doesn’t lie. It can’t. People lie about money, but that’s different.
*
I have no false modesty about my abilities – in case it ever seems as if I do, let me now state for the record that I think I’m shit-hot – but I nonetheless freely admit I wouldn’t have done the things I have without four big breaks. The first of them was my job on the middle-market middle-England tabloid, the Toxic. (Not its real name.) Prior to that my life went like this: home, school, Durham University, journalism course at Cardiff, job on local paper in Blackpool. I should explain that I am just old enough to have grown up in the days when you were expected to train in journalism on regional papers before moving to London and the nationals. This was back in the Palaeolithic, before Eddie Shah took on the unions and Murdoch broke them. Mastodons roamed the banks of the Thames. Some tribes had not yet learned the secret of fire. Men were men, women were women, small furry animals lived in well-justified fear, and the only people allowed to operate the A3 photocopier in the corner of the office were members of the National Graphics Association. Say what you like about Mrs Thatcher.
Nowadays someone as bright and ambitious and sassy as I thought I was would start hawking pieces to magazines and papers while still at college, and the plan would be to bypass all that grubby cloth-cap crap about reporting and head as quickly as possible for the clean, well-lit uplands of commentary, opinion, and a column with your second most flattering photo at the top. (Second most flattering, because if you chose the best one (a) your colleagues would take the piss out of you for being vain and (b) people who met you would think, oh, she looks nice in the photo but in real life she could pass for a boxer’s dog.) This, however, was the old days. So I spent eighteen months in Blackpool at the Argus, doing all the usual stuff from local fairs to sport to news (Granny drives Reliant Robin over cliff, survives) to gradually more interesting court cases, to features and eventually – yes – a column. Since the choice of snaps was provided by Eric the staff photographer the idea of a flattering picture was relative. It was more a question of finding one which didn’t make me look like Mussolini.
The other thing which happened was I changed my name. I was christened Doris. Doris! These days I could probably sue my parents for damages. The trouble is that anyone stupid enough to call a child Doris won’t have any assets worth suing for. Dawn Stone made an infinitely better byline.
*
There were lots of local papers. Bla
ckpool wasn’t a random choice. It was, is, regularly the site of party conferences, and I reckoned that if I couldn’t make useful contacts with the nationals during party conferences I might as well give up and train as a solicitor (which was Plan B). I hope I sound as obsessed as I actually was with this issue of breaking out into the nationals. I daresay if I’d gone to Oxbridge I would have had at least half a dozen chums who fell out of bed and into useful, networkable positions on the kind of paper I wanted to work for. But I didn’t, and I didn’t, and I knew that I would have to make any contacts I would use. It was a comfort to tell myself that I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I had my first brushes with the nationals about two months before my first party conference season, during a missing-child case which turned into a search for a body and then, about six months later, into a murder case. (It was the stepfather. Imagine everybody’s surprise.) The story would normally have been out of my league at the paper, as a new arrival, but I had written the initial ‘Where’s Little Jimmy?’ item and so I stayed with it, on and off, until I left. The London hacks were all over it from the start, richer and pushier and yobbier than I had expected, though the man I met and became friends with, Bob Berkowitz, was none of those things. He turned up at the office one day looking for Ken, an old mate from the Brighton Courier, now the Argus’s chief reporter. I looked up from my manual typewriter – there’s a Flintstones-era detail – and saw a short shy man with dark curly hair and glasses, carrying a coat and looking tactically bewildered; bewildered in that way people look when they want you to notice and to offer help.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked, almost certainly in a not very helpful way, a twenty-four-year-old girl scowling over a desk.
‘Is Ken around?’
‘Out on a story.’
He looked at his watch, frowning. ‘But the pubs are shut,’ he said. I gave him one of those laughs you do to show you appreciate the effort someone’s made in making a joke, and we got talking.
Berkowitz was a cut above the usual reptile – that was part of the signal he sent. He wrote longish reportage for the Toxic and was out-of-the-closet-except-to-his-mother-who-probably-knew-but-it-was-never-spoken-about gay. One evening at his flat near Tower Bridge he told me he was ‘an intellectual’, thus becoming the only working journalist I ever heard use the word about himself. We hit it off right from the start.
‘It’s not so much a piece about the kid’s disappearance per se,’ Berkowitz explained to me later, across the road, in the pub we called The Dead Brian. (Real name, The Red Lion.) ‘I’m interested in the effect of these crimes on people and on communities. The aftershocks. What happens at the time when the story isn’t on the front pages any more? How do people get on with their lives?’
I was able to help him out with some contacts and background stuff, and he was nicer about asking for it than people from the nationals usually were; they tended to come over all smarmy and ‘we’re all in this together’ when they needed a favour, and the rest of the time acted like they had it on good authority that their own shit didn’t smell. This was something I got a good look at during that conference, Kinnock’s second as party leader, the one after the one when he fell on his bum in the water while trying to walk along the beach looking dignified and visionary. That conference has happy memories for me, because it was the occasion of my first break. I went out for a few drinks on the last but one evening with Berkowitz and a couple of his London friends. One of them was a broadsheet hack, another was a Tory apparatchik, a back-room boy for one of the big shots, in town for a bit of spying and to write a think-piece for one of the right-wing papers. Berkowitz left early to file some copy, and the rest of us ended up at my flat, where we got exceptionally drunk. I don’t remember how the evening finished, other than being sick and going to bed at some point around five, having somehow called a cab for the apparatchik before passing out. The hack was on the sofa, having conked out a while before.
Gosh, how I don’t miss so many things about my twenties. I had to work the next day. The morning was heavy going. I kept sneaking off to the loo and dry-retching. At lunchtime there was a buzz from reception saying someone had come to see me. It was the Tory back-room boy. He was wearing dark glasses and looked as hung over as any human being I had ever seen. At close range I noticed he was trembling slightly. He had changed his suit but still smelt of drink.
‘Can we go somewhere?’
For a split second I wondered if we had had sex at some point in the depths of the night before. No – I might be blurry on the details, but I was confident I’d remember that.
There was a crappy hotel with a crappy bar not far away. We went there and he ordered two Bloody Marys. By this time I found I could remember his name: Trevor.
‘Feeling a bit rough,’ he said, playing with the swizzle stick. When he took the shades off, his eyes were bloodshot. We took his-and-hers swigs of our drinks.
‘Bit out of line last night,’ he said. ‘Thing is, I told you a couple of things I shouldn’t have. You know. Real D-notice stuff. I’ll have to ask you to keep it, er, them, under your, er, hat. I could lose my job.’
He was having trouble with his tone. That last remark wasn’t sure whether it wanted to be a plea or a threat. I put my hand on his wrist for a second.
‘I won’t breathe a word.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
‘Think nothing of it.’
‘I won’t forget this.’
He finished his drink. He looked at his watch.
‘Well –’
‘Don’t let me keep you. Thanks for the drink.’
‘No, thank you.’
He scuttled off.
I had then, and have still, no idea what secret he was talking about, but six weeks later I had a call from the diary editor of the Toxic, who had been at university with our Trev. He asked if I could send some clippings and ‘pop down to London for a chat’. That was my first break.
*
Robin Robbins, diary editor of the Toxic, was the first posh person I ever got to know well. He had a posh person’s affectation of using language that either exaggerated or minimised the amount of effort involved in doing something. In his world people ‘strolled’ over to the East End to cover a gangster’s funeral, and ‘hurtled’ to the stationery cupboard to get a new typewriter ribbon. To ‘pop’ meant to take a six-hour round trip to London by train, and to ‘chat’ meant to undergo a job interview.
He took me to lunch. The restaurant was airy, light, noisy, and metropolitan. The waiters wore blue-and-white striped aprons cut open across the back to show their bums. One of them flirted with me, which helped me to feel, albeit very faintly, as if I knew what was going on. Robin did a certain amount of Durham/Cardiff/Blackpool small talk, and asked me how I knew Berkowitz, who he said had ‘something terribly New York about him’. (This meant that Berkowitz was Jewish.) Robin asked me what I thought about Princess Diana’s dress sense. I called her Lady Diana and he corrected me by using the right locution without any emphasis. Something about him made me aware that for the first time in my life I was meeting someone who would genuinely, literally, given the right circumstances, sell his grandmother. It was an exciting feeling.
‘What’s the most important thing for any diary journalist?’ Robin asked.
I thought: self-hate. I said:
‘Contacts!’
By the time we got to coffee he was talking about the job.
‘The diary is where new talent gets its first try on the paper. It’s our nursery, our colts team, our apprentices’ workshop. It’s where most people started, present company included. As I said when I rang you, this is not a permanent job, as such. Three months, with the prospect of more work after if we get along, from your point of view as well as ours. By the end of that time you’ll probably be my boss, or editing one of our rival papers.’
And if it doesn’t work ou
t, tough shit. For my leaving do in Blackpool, we went to the Dead Brian and then drunk-drove dodgem cars.
*
The diary was a gossip column, and the page – Dexter Williams’s Diary, after its notional founder – was the usual mix of anonymous innuendo and spite and half-truth, concentrating on the worlds of media, showbiz, politics, and the explosively burgeoning field of the famous-for-being-famous. Nothing wrong with that, you might well say, given that it’s what the customers are known to want – and Toxic market research showed that Dexter was one of the first things the punters turned to in the morning. The trouble was, I hated everything about it. To get stories you needed contacts, and I didn’t have any; plus, not having done anything like it before, I found that I couldn’t bear the whole business of picking up fag ends, working stories up out of nothing, and all the rest. One of the ways in which people usually made a start as diarists was by shopping friends – i.e. taking things friends had told them in confidence and turning them into saleable pieces. Posh people and people with London connections had a big head start.
To make it worse, I was not the only person who had been taken on to do ‘my’ job. This was standard management practice at the Toxic, part of the culture: you would give two people the same job description and resources, see who came out on top, and then sack the other one, usually by moving them sideways and downwards to a job they couldn’t possibly accept. As a management technique this was impressively horrible. The person given the same job as me was a chubby public schoolboy called Rory Waters.
On my first day I arrived a careful three minutes early to find him sitting at the next desk, already typing something (what? what?).
‘Er, I’m Dawn,’ I said.
Fragrant Harbour Page 1
