by Peter Tonkin
She was too tired for logical thought, however, and all that would come was a swirl of images, dominated by Richard’s stare as he looked at her with no spark of recognition in his eyes at all. That was really terrifying. That upset all her preconceptions and turned her whole life on its head at a stroke. It was as though she had found him dead after all. It was as though she had found him with a mistress. She had never doubted him before. She had always taken for granted his strength and his love. And now they were not there any more. Or, if they were there, then they were buried somewhere under an experience or a medical condition so terrible or so severe that no one could reach them. But that was what she was here for, to reach into Richard’s damaged mind and pull his strength and his love back up into his eyes. Doing that was even more important than establishing his innocence.
It did not occur to her in her depressed state that establishing his innocence might in itself rebuild his memory and reawaken his love. Instead she found herself glumly rehearsing of Hamlet’s self-pitying lines, ‘The time is out of joint; oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right …’ But no, she thought, as Huuk’s long, inscrutable eyes leapt disturbingly into her mind; she had quoted more than enough Shakespeare for tonight.
As the train pulled through the stations past the Hongs and Tongs of Kowloon towards Tsimshatsui and the tunnel to Hong Kong Island, the people around her came and went, but greater and greater numbers of them stayed. And the age of the other passengers began to fall, and their gender to become dominated until she found herself not only the one Westerner visible in the carriage, but one of only three women. All the other passengers seemed to vary in age from late teens to late thirties. They were dressed in an assortment of clothes but the majority favoured plain slacks and bright shirts with open collars. One or two of them had long hair dragged back into pony tails but most of them wore a kind of short-back-and-sides which spread rapidly into wide mop-like overhangs of thick, lustrous black hair. One or two of them were fat, with cheerfully rubicund faces, but most of them were lean, angular, intense and slightly predatory. They seemed intensely self-absorbed, but even so they were never still. They sat and fidgeted, with hands and knees jumping, elbows tucked in and long yellow fingers frenetically busy. Fiddling with their tickets, endlessly turning their tickets, rubbing their tickets and flicking their tickets.
It never occurred to her that this was the inevitable result of a total ban on smoking on a network in a city where almost everybody smoked. It did occur to her that almost all crime in Hong Kong was performed by young men aged between their late teens and their late twenties. That almost all of it was related to the vicious Triad gangs who were known for their ruthless brutality, and that the rest of it, with quite an overlap in the middle, was performed by addicts desperate to buy drugs. By the time the train plunged down into the tunnel beneath the harbour, Robin had convinced herself that the nervous ticket-flicking which the MTR board worked so hard to discourage was in fact a kind of code which allowed the young men all around her to plan the robbery and murder they would execute upon her at the earliest opportunity.
By the time the train pulled into Admiralty, Robin had frightened herself so badly that she was seriously considering making a run for it; but she knew that Central was next so she stayed in her seat and tried to make a plan instead. The seat she was in was near the doors. This fact made her decide to try to get out first and make a break for it. If she could keep ahead of them, she calculated, she stood a chance of getting up into the street. In the street she would summon help if she still felt threatened. Even at this time of night, the streets of Central were likely to be busy, and protection should not be too difficult to come by. It wasn’t much of a plan but it was better than none. As the train began to slow, she tensed. The minute it rolled into the bright station she was in motion.
She was the first person to the door but it was slow to open and she could feel the weight of people behind her before it parted. More frustratingly, she could see the tide of people from the other coaches begin to thicken and coagulate at the ticket barriers. She half fell out onto the platform and used the stumble in order to give herself a running start. Once she started to ran, however, it was much more difficult for her to see things clearly and it became impossible to plan any further. It also became difficult for her to distinguish any sounds other than her breathing and the beating of her heart, but as she began her flight she thought she heard a sharp cry of surprise and the scuffle of running feet at her back. She ran down the platform, along the line of turnstiles, looking for the shortest queue. The furthest had three people waiting and she chose that because there was nowhere else to go. By the time she joined it, there were only two ahead of her. Then there was only one. She danced with impatience, covering her actions in the eyes of the curious by giving a perfect impersonation of someone with a bursting bladder. The scurry of feet closed in behind her just as her turn came. She slid her ticket into the barrier and waited for the barrier to move in an agony of suspense. There was the sound of laboured breathing immediately behind her but she would not look round. She tried to keep her fists from beating against the recalcitrant barrier. But then it moved. She was in motion at once, dancing through, feeling with enormous relief the shutter close behind her. She looked back over her shoulder as she ran to the escalator, just in time to see the man who had been behind her have his ticket returned as the machine calculated that he had paid too little and the barrier remained closed.
Beginning to shake with relief and reaction, she walked briskly across the concourse and began to climb up towards the street. Her plan had worked perfectly after all. She was among the first out; and she was certainly the first — the only — person on this escalator. Taking more time now, she looked back over her shoulder down into the busy concourse. People were oozing through the barriers like trickles of oil. No one was looking at her. No one was following her. There wasn’t even any undue ripple of movement among the bodies surging slowly across the concourse towards the empty escalators endlessly uncoiling behind her and beside her. What else did you expect from people coming exhausted off the last train of the night? ‘You stupid woman,’ she said to herself. ‘Scaring yourself for no reason!’
And she stepped up into the street and collided with a tall, solid man. He turned towards her and there was something shockingly familiar about his face. Before she could turn away his hand fastened onto her arm and she felt herself being swung bodily out of the bright crowd. Her breathing stopped as though she had been winded. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound would come. And in any case, the street was empty and the nearest person to her was still not even on the escalator yet. She tugged her arm fiercely, but he did not slacken his grip. Instead he reached into the folds of his jacket. An instantaneous vision filled her mind: Twelvetoes’ hand coming out of the fold in his jacket, clutching that massive, deadly panga.
She found that she could scream after all. And she did, at the top of her lungs. No words, just a throat-tearing, terrified animal sound.
He let her go and she staggered back, falling to her knees on the ground. She did not stay there, she scrabbled feverishly onto all fours, hoping to make a sprint start and get away still.
‘Deui mjyuh,’ he said in a guttural gasp. ‘Deui mjyuh!’ Something clattered onto the pavement beside her but she paid it no attention. All her mind was concentrated on the absolute need to get enough grip beneath her feet to run away as fast as she could. She slipped and fell to her knees again, shouting with frustration.
‘Missy,’ came a gentle voice, a woman’s voice, from close beside her. ‘Missy, you arright?’
The sounds which a crowd of people might make suddenly swept over her and she realised that she had been joined on the street by all the other people who had been on the train with her. A group of them were standing around her looking down with lively concern. A young woman with masses of long dark curly hair was crouching on one knee beside her. ‘Missy?’ she repeated anx
iously. ‘You arright?’
‘I,’ said Robin, fighting for breath and self-control, ‘I slipped.’
‘Ah.’ The girl nodded wisely. ‘You take care.’
Robin pulled herself to her feet and stood, testing her ankle and knee joints. No damage. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine really. Thank you. Thank you all.’
She looked around. There, hardly any distance away, was the bright tower of her hotel with ‘The Mandarin’ in bright neon at its peak. She began to walk down the crowded street towards it, but once again a hand fell upon her sleeve. She jumped and gasped.
But it was only the girl. ‘You drop this, Missy,’ she said.
‘No, I …’ said Robin automatically.
The girl held it out towards her and the light fell on it.
‘No, I … Yes. Yes I did. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’
And she took it and hugged it to her heaving breast, holding it as tight as tight while she walked back to the safe haven of the Mandarin. It was a package slightly larger than a paperback book, neatly wrapped in paper covered with pictures of Mickey Mouse.
Chapter Fourteen
Giuseppe Borelli was still on duty when Robin rushed into reception a few moments later, and her breathless request to borrow a laptop computer caused nothing more than the raising of an eyebrow. The condition of her clothes and person would have raised rather more than that, however, if she had allowed them to; but she was not to be sidetracked by his obvious concern. She must have a laptop computer immediately. Could he oblige her with one at once?
Of course there was a range of laptop computers available to the Mandarin’s guests. Would Captain Mariner perhaps like to avail herself of the twenty-four-hour secretarial service also?
‘No, just the laptop,’ she said with unaccustomed rudeness, dancing with impatience.
‘Of course, Captain,’ he capitulated, still frowning with lively concern. ‘Do you have a preference?’
‘No.’ Her tone was a little uncertain as she realised that she might in fact have a preference — for a machine compatible with the disk hidden in the package in her hand. ‘But it must take three and a quarter inch microdisks,’ she added.
‘And what operating system do you prefer?’
‘I don’t know. Anything IBM compatible …’
‘We have quite a range. Most of the hard disks come pre-programed with Works or Windows. Unless you want the Apple or the Orange — or the Apricot ranges. The program best suited to your requirements depends on what you are trying to access, of course …’ Giuseppe paused, his eyebrow still raised slightly, his face now expressing the most innocent enquiry.
Paranoia swept over Robin in a disorientating wave. What did she really know of the charming Italian or of his true intentions? Just because he had a Western face, there was no guarantee that he was honest, trustworthy, uninvolved. She hesitated, her tired mind a whirl, trying to think what to say. She was all too aware that her own expression was changing, losing the open confidentiality which usually characterised it. She began to act — and hoped her performance was convincing. Donning a mask of confusion, she shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘I just want to access some of my notes and things. It’s whatever system we use at Heritage Mariner …’
‘And that is?’
‘I really have no idea.’ Not much of a lie there: she really did have no idea.
‘A word-processing program then. Not a graphics program or a spreadsheet. I will give you a range of word processing programs and desktop publishing systems on microdisk. Follow the instructions. They will all vary and you will need to pay close attention, as I’m sure you realise. I’m sure one of them will be familiar almost at once and then it will be plain sailing from there on.’
Giuseppe’s pious hope was ill-founded, Robin discovered during the next hour or so. The laptop computer he had given her turned out to be an unfamiliar make when she lifted it out of the black zip-top case. She sat it on the table and followed the instructions about how to plug it in. She raised the top and switched the screen on. It offered her a disorientating list of alternative programs and it took her a full fifteen minutes to work out the sequence of commands required to get out of the hard disk and into the mode for drive A. And it was here that her problems really began.
Robin was as computer-literate as the next person. She did not have the deep passionate knowledge that Helen DuFour possessed. Helen’s desk was a great moulded plastic complex of processors, modems and databases — almost a supercomputer itself, and intimately linked to the Superhighway. Robin’s desk was Victorian, mahogany. But, that said, she used the company’s computers confidently and regularly, taking for granted the kind of programs and systems which had allowed her into the Sulu Queen’s network. But, although she could use them, she had no idea how they were set up or how to make them work from scratch. She was a confident, accomplished driver; now she was being asked to build an engine. She soon found that she didn’t really know where to start. And Helen was in Moscow, effectively out of reach. Robin could think of no one at home in the office to check with further. And, now that she had lost her trust in Giuseppe Borelli, she found that she was also suspicious of international telephone lines in any case. So she plunged on alone and unadvised.
The disk from the Sulu Queen, designed to function as a part of the ship’s network, not on its own, contained no program that would allow her access to the information hidden within it. She established that fact first. Then she proceeded doggedly, from bad to worse. Giuseppe had given Robin ten disks which he said contained the most common word processing and DTP programs. All she had to do was find the one which worked on the dead first officer’s network and she would gain access to the information on his disk. Each one she loaded and accessed, however, presented her with unfamiliar screen formats and irritatingly complex instructions. The more she concentrated and the harder she tried, the more exhausted she became and the sillier and sillier the mistakes she made.
Time and again, Robin stopped, horrified, as some utterly unexpected result arose out of a carefully-thought-out sequence of actions and instructions, suspecting for terrifying minutes that she had ruined the whole system and wiped the disks clean by accident. It became clear to her at last that only someone who knew more about computers than she did, or someone who knew the name of the word-processing program she was seeking, could help. But the most obvious sources of that knowledge were all, like the first officer and network manager, dead. Too tired to think clearly or to plan further, she owlishly ensured that the disk from the Sulu Queen was separate from the other disks Giuseppe had given her and slid it back into the wrapping paper. Then she stood, irresolute, in the middle of her bedroom, prey to another bout of paranoia, wondering where she could hide the precious thing.
*
Andrew Atherton Balfour’s call to arms caught up with Robin in the Landmark at ten thirty the next morning. She had gone there to get some necessities, starting with clothing, but when she actually heard her name being called, she was looking longingly at a display of the latest computers and thinking of the dumb little disk in the birthday present from a dead officer to his daughter who would not be six for another couple of weeks.
Robin had finally surrendered the precious parcel, and the priceless disk she could feel through the paper, to the night porter at 12:25 a.m., able to think of nothing else to do with it; and he had placed it immediately in the hotel’s safe. Then she had turned forlornly away, exhausted, defeated, starving, but too sleepy to think of anything beyond a relaxing bath and bed. Just one look at her had been enough to disturb the porter and soon after she arrived back in her room a gentle knock on the door alerted her to the fact that the Mandarin’s fabled family atmosphere was wrapping her in its gentle arms. Leaving the bath running, she wrapped herself in the fluffy white robe hanging behind the bathroom door and crossed the reception room. ‘Yes?’
‘It is Lao Sung the night porter here, Captai
n Mariner. I thought perhaps you would like a cup of tea.’
‘Oh, that would be heavenly!’ She opened the door and the night porter brought in the tray at once.
‘I will bring up some sandwiches in a few moments,’ he told her paternally. ‘I will leave them immediately outside the door so as not to disturb you again.’ He placed the tray gently beside the laptop on the teak table in the middle of the room.
‘Thank you, Mr Sung,’ she said, although she felt that the words were scarcely adequate.
‘Also,’ he said, hesitating slightly, ‘I observed when we talked just now that your clothing may require a little care. The concierge also expressed some concern upon that point when I took over from him.’
‘I fell over,’ she said, again, inadequately.
He tutted. ‘Would you like the hotel doctor to examine you?’ he asked solicitously, pouring the tea.
‘No. I am not hurt. Thank you.’
He glanced up at her. ‘Milk and sugar? It is Daijeeling tea.’
‘I’ll do that myself, thank you. And I would love some sandwiches. Meat, please, of any kind.’
He straightened and smiled. ‘I had thought beef, with a trace of English mustard on one side and some Burgess’s creamed horseradish on the other.’
‘Are you psychic, Mr Sung?’
‘Concerned, Captain Mariner. I will go now, before your bath overflows. We have a Malaysian prince immediately below you and I know he would not like to be disturbed at this time of night. Your sandwiches will be here within ten minutes.’
Fortunately the sandwiches were covered with damp paper, for it was the better part of an hour before she could bring herself to drag her stiff body out of the scalding bath water. Then, wrapped in the hotel’s cotton-wool cloud of towelling robe, steaming gently in the cool air, she snatched the sandwiches in and had a midnight feast sitting in the middle of her bed at the better part of two o’clock in the morning. And the next thing she knew it was 9 a.m. on Monday morning.
