A Multitude of Sins

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Your father’s a fool!’ Raefe said savagely. ‘Damn it all, can’t he get it into his thick skull that I’m trying to save Melissa’s life?’

  Derry shrugged helplessly. ‘He doesn’t believe things are that bad. He thinks it was unhappiness which drove her to drugs and Jacko, and that you are the cause of her unhappiness. His reasoning is that if he takes her away from your control, then she’s bound to start recovering.’

  ‘If he believes that, he’ll believe anything!’ Raefe said explosively, running his fingers through the thick tumble of his hair. ‘Christ! If she comes back to Victoria now, no one is going to believe she was an innocent victim!’

  ‘Pa doesn’t see it that way. He says if she returns to Victoria everyone will be able to see that she is fine and it will confirm the belief that she was only labelled a drug-taker in order to provide you with a defence.’

  ‘Well, we both know that’s not true, don’t we?’ Raefe said wearily.

  They were silent for a minute or two, and then Derry said: ‘How is she?’

  ‘A mess.’ His voice was curt, but Derry could hear the underlying pain and despair.

  Derry stared moodily out over the airfield. His sister had always been headstrong and self-willed – and heartbreakingly pretty. Their parents had been divorced when he had been twelve and Melissa ten. Their mother’s new lover had not relished being encumbered with her children, and so custody had been awarded to their father and he had compensated for the disruption of their lives by spoiling them both to excess. Derry had enjoyed the spoiling and, as far as he was aware, it had left no long-lasting ill effects on him. But Melissa.… He sighed. All the spoiling in the world would not have been enough for Melissa.

  As a child she had demanded, and received, instant gratification of all her needs. And she had continued to do so as an adult. Her feline seductive prettiness had ensured that she rarely received any obstruction to her wishes. Her father had said it was a pleasure to indulge her, and her many boyfriends had all seemed to think likewise.

  And then she bad married Raefe. The match had alarmed his father, who, despite Raefe’s wealth, regarded him as being socially dubious. If the fellow had a touch of the tarbrush about him, he didn’t want it showing in his grandchildren. Derry had grinned at his father’s fears and had thought that at last Melissa was showing good sense. Raefe Elliot was a distinct improvement on the chinless wonders she had previously favoured.

  Even now he didn’t know what had gone wrong. He suspected that Raefe had tried to curb Melissa’s childish selfishness and that Melissa, unaccustomed to restraint, had rebelled by indulging in flagrant flirtations with Raefe’s friends. If she had hoped that the fear of losing her would bring him to heel like a pet dog, she had been very wrong. His friends had been embarrassed, and Raefe had been, outwardly at least, indifferent.

  Furiously, Melissa had cast her net wider, and from the minute that Derry had known of her affair with an officer serving with the Middlesex he had known that her marriage to Raefe was doomed. He didn’t know when the drug-taking had started. Heroin was easily available in Hong Kong, and it had been her lover in the Middlesex who had introduced her to the habit. She had begun by using it with what she thought was sophisticated carelessness and had plunged with hideous speed into desperate addiction. It had been then that his liking for his brother-in-law had turned into respect.

  When Melissa had confronted Raefe with the truth of her affair, she had also maliciously told him that she was pregnant. That, though he was the father of her child, he would never know for sure whether she was telling the truth or not. Raefe had taken one look at the blond, blue-eyed, pale-skinned specimen she had broken her marriage vows for and had known immediately that there would be no doubt as to the parentage of the child once it was born. Until it was, there would be no divorce. And no scandal. Melissa discovered that her lover, who had promised to love her for eternity, was not quite so constant when faced with an ultimatum that he either stopped seeing her or received the thrashing of his life. It was then that they had become aware of her growing heroin addiction.

  Raefe had taken her to Perth, to a doctor who specialized in conquering drug dependence, but Melissa had no desire to be freed of her craving and he had been unable to help her.

  Raefe had brought her back to Victoria, and a week later she miscarried the baby. It was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and it bad died of heroin poisoning before it had even been born.

  It was a month later when Raefe had returned home from a trip to Singapore and found Jacko Latimer in her bed. Derry didn’t know if Raefe had meant to kill Latimer. He wouldn’t have blamed him if he had done. But, with or without intent, Jacko Latimer had died and they had all had to endure the long-drawn-out agonies of the trial. Melissa had been the least concerned. She was supremely indifferent to Latimer’s death, and seemed almost as indifferent to the sentence Raefe would receive if he was convicted of his murder. It was while they were in court, Raefe tense and strained, his father hunched and suddenly old, that Derry had come close to hating his sister. He said now: ‘Is she still on it?’

  Raefe nodded, ‘In decreasing amounts. And the stuff she is getting is clean, unlike the dirt that Latimer was feeding her.’

  ‘But how long can you keep it up? She won’t stay in the New Territories against her will for ever.’

  A mirthless grin touched Raefe’s mouth. ‘She isn’t there against her will, Derry. She’s there because she wants to be. She doesn’t want to be in Victoria with your father fussing around her, watching her every move. She wants to be where she has access to heroin, even if it is in decreasing amounts.’

  ‘And will it work?’ Derry asked bewilderedly.

  ‘It’s got as good a chance of working as anything else. The household staff are one hundred per cent loyal to me. She’s receiving her heroin under almost medical conditions and she’s being weaned, very gradually, off it.’

  ‘And when she is?’ Derry asked curiously. ‘Will you both move back to your home on the Peak?’

  ‘Good God, no! I shall never live with her again!’

  ‘Then, why not divorce her now? Why persevere with trying to cure her when all you get for your pains is the accusation that you’re keeping her a prisoner and mistreating her?’

  ‘Because she’s my wife,’ Raefe said tightly, ‘and my responsibility. Because when I divorce her I want her to be fit and physically able to start a new life on her own.’

  ‘And if she isn’t?’

  The lines around Raefe’s mouth deepened. ‘She will be,’ he said vehemently, swinging himself down from the jeep. ‘Just tell your father she’s better off where she is than in Victoria, where every petty drug-pusher in town can find her and proposition her.’

  He strode across to his Lagonda, grateful that Derry hadn’t asked to visit Melissa. Derry slammed his jeep into gear, giving him a wave, and then disappeared in a cloud of dust down the road leading towards Kowloon. Raefe wondered if he was still enjoying an affair with Julienne Ledsham and grinned. If the affair was still in progress, he would be enjoying it. Julienne would see to that.

  He was at the intersection of Chatham Road and Salisbury Road when Tom Nicholson, driving his sleek-looking Packard, slammed his hand on the car’s horn, waving for him to pull over.

  He sighed. He was hot and tired, and he wanted nothing more than to get home and shower and sleep. He pulled over, and Tom screeched to a halt in front of him, vaulting from the Packard and striding towards him. ‘You’re just the person I want to see. I’ve been ringing you for the past two days, but your houseboy said he didn’t know when you would be returning. How was Singapore?’

  Raefe knew it wasn’t a question he was interested in receiving a reply to and he ignored it, saying: ‘I only touched down an hour ago. Whatever it was you wanted to see me about, can’t it wait?’

  ‘It can,’ Tom said reluctantly, ‘but I’d appreciate it if you could spare me ten minutes, Raefe. I’ve got problems and I don�
��t know who else can advise me.’

  They were only a hundred yards or so away from the Peninsula. ‘OK,’ he said wearily. ‘Let’s go down to the Long Bar and talk over a couple of drinks.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Tom said briefly, his eyes showing his gratitude. ‘I’ll follow you on.’

  He strode back to his Packard, and Raefe once more put his Lagonda into gear and cruised down the remaining stretch of Salisbury Road and into the Peninsula’s luxurious forecourt.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked Tom when they were sitting with their drinks, fans whirring coolingly above their heads.

  ‘Prejudice!’ Tom said succinctly.

  A glimmer of a smile touched Raefe’s mouth. ‘Who is she?’ he asked, as a waiter removed their glasses and replaced them with two more.

  ‘Lamoon Sheng.’

  Raefe’s brows rose expressively. No wonder Tom had problems. ‘How the devil have you been managing to meet?’

  ‘Deception,’ Tom said distastefully. ‘She goes to nursing classes every Monday and Thursday. The family chauffeur drops her off at the front entrance of the hospital and picks her up.’

  ‘Only she never goes to classes?’

  ‘She used to. Before we met. Now she simply walks straight through the hospital to the rear entrance, and those few hours are the only time we have together.’ His voice was bitter, and Raefe, knowing the impossibility of Tom taking Lamoon Sheng anywhere publicly without knowledge of it reaching her father, said curiously: ‘Where do you go?’

  ‘To the Harlands. They are the only people who know about us, and Adam Harland has been very supportive.’

  ‘He would be,’ Raefe said drily, a nerve beginning to twitch at the corner of his jaw. ‘He knows damn all about the Chinese or what would happen if Lamoon’s deception were discovered.’

  ‘At least he’s free of the stinking racial prejudice which seems to afflict everyone else!’ Tom said explosively. ‘It isn’t as if it’s only the whites! The Chinese are just as bad. Smiling at us and deferring to us, and scorning us behind our backs! The hypocrisy of it drives me wild!’

  Raefe’s smile was cynical. He knew damn well that Tom had never previously given a thought to the racial undercurrents that divided Hong Kong. Before he had fallen in love with Lamoon Sheng, he would have been as horrified as anyone else if a Chinese had stormed the gates of his favourite club. He said mildly: ‘It’s changing. If there’s a war in Europe, it will come over here, and then everything – even Hong Kong – will change.’

  ‘Christ! I can’t wait for a bloody war to change things! I want things to change now!’ He leaned towards Raefe, his hands clasped between his knees, his eyes urgent. ‘I want to marry her, and I want you to tell me the best way of approaching old Sheng in order to ask for his consent.’

  Raefe shook his head. ‘There isn’t any way you can approach Sheng and ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Lamoon isn’t a Wanchai bar-girl with no family to protect her. She’s the only daughter of a very rich man. A very rich Chinese. He’d have your balls if you even suggested that you wanted to marry her.’

  ‘It’s nineteen thirty-nine, not eighteen thirty-nine,’ Tom said persistently. ‘He’s a businessman. He deals with Westerners every day. There must be some way of approaching him!’

  ‘He’s a leader of the Chinese community, Tom. He’s a respected man, and in his eyes his honour would be shamed if it was known that his daughter was in love with a European. If you persist in seeing her, sooner or later you’ll both be found out and then you’ll never see her again.’

  Tom groaned and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘She isn’t a minor. She’s twenty-one, for God’s sake.…’

  ‘It would make no difference if she was forty-one,’ Raefe said, looking across at him pityingly. ‘She’s subject to the rigid discipline of a Chinese family bound by autocratic rules impossible to violate, subject to the will of a father whose authority, by Chinese custom, is absolute. It’s a system that can’t be bucked, Tom. Not yet. Not till European and Chinese ideas about colour and culture change dramatically.’

  ‘Fuck the bloody system!’ Tom said savagely, the skin tight across his cheekbones, his well-shaped mouth thin and straight and bitter with pain. ‘If the only way I can live with Lamoon is by kidnapping her and taking her away from this caste-ridden place, then, by God, that’s exactly what I’ll do! At least in America we could live together openly and not be socially ostracized!’

  ‘Would Lamoon be happy living like that?’ Raefe asked quietly. ‘She’s been brought up as a dutiful daughter, deferring to her father in all things. The fact that she risks so much to meet you as she does is remarkable, but would she be able to face the thought of never seeing her family again? Of being the cause of their loss of face? Family honour, to a Chinese, is more important than life itself. I don’t see how she could make the adjustment. No matter how much she loves you.’

  Tom drained his glass, the set of his jaw determined. ‘When I need your help with Sheng, can I depend on having it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Raefe said, rising to his feet, and then, as they left the bar together, he added with grim humour: ‘When you do face him, you’re going to need all the help you can get!’

  He left Tom outside the Peninsula’s front entrance and drove with unaccustomed tiredness the short distance to the vehicular ferry. The crossing took only eight minutes, and a quarter of an hour later he was in his flat in Central, standing, his face upward, beneath a gushing shower, one of his house-boys busily preparing a meal, the other one pouring him a large Scotch on the rocks.

  There was still a lot of work to do for Intelligence. Apart from the Japanese army of officers who had infiltrated the British armed forces on the pretext of peacefully learning English, he had uncovered two other Japanese spies he was convinced were of paramount importance. His personal underground information network had reported that the barber at the Hong Kong Hotel was no small-time agent, but a lieutenant-commander in the Japanese navy. God knew what other ranks were in positions of trust inside Hong Kong, listening to the conversations of generals and brigadiers.

  He stepped from the shower, shaking water from his hair, swaddling a towel around his hips. He was in a unique position to ferret out information for British Intelligence. He spoke Cantonese and he commanded Chinese respect on a far deeper level than the day-to-day smiling obsequiousness habitually accorded Europeans. His grandmother had been Eurasian and, though he could quite easily have denied it, he never had. He was in the rare position of being acceptable, with only slight reservations, in both Chinese and European society.

  He lit a cigarette and strolled across to the huge window that looked out over the streets and squares of Central, and the piers and densely packed harbour.

  His wealth cocooned him from the worst aspects of prejudice. Englishmen wishing to do business with Elliots conveniently forgot that old man Elliot had married a girl whose skin was pale gold and not white. Besides, apart from the dark hair there was nothing very Eurasian about the Elliots. Both Raefe and his father had been educated at prestigious American universities. They were American and-they were rich, and old man Elliot’s peccadillo was conveniently forgotten. At least it was forgotten unless there was a question of Elliot marrying one of their daughters. Then prejudice reasserted itself with a vengeance. No one wanted a dark-skinned throwback as a grandchild. It was a risk best not taken. When Melissa Langdon had married Raefe, there had been sighs of relief from anxious fathers, and Colonel Langdon had been, and still was, a man much sympathized with.

  A grim smile touched the corner of Raefe’s mouth. He was well aware of their fears, and of how groundless they were. His grandmother had been Polynesian, not Chinese. Her skin, and the skin of her forebears, had held only the merest hint of colour. The chances of a child of his being born dark were infinitesimal. Not that he cared. His grandmother had been a princess whose line of breeding went back much further than any of the Englishmen who murmured askance about
his being allowed into their bars and clubs. She had been beautiful and courageous, working alongside his grandfather in up-country Malaya and in Sumatra, as responsible for the founding of Elliot wealth as his grandfather had been. If she had been as black as coal, he would have been equally uncaring and just as proud of her.

  Across the Kowloon Peninsula the sky was flushed, the swift pink twilight of the tropics falling swiftly. Whisperings about his racial background had long since ceased to perturb him even faintly; but they had made for inner loneliness when he was a child, and that inner loneliness still remained. He crushed his cigarette out in a jade ashtray. He had thought that his sense of separateness had been over when he had married Melissa. He had thought he was gaining a beautiful wife who would also be his lover and his friend. The bitterness of his disappointment still seared.

  Melissa was incapable of offering loyalty or the kind of companionship on which a marriage could be built. She had only her body and her face, and they had both been so enticing that, God help him, he had paid no attention to her other qualities until he had got his ring safely on her finger and had enjoyed her tantalizing sexuality at his leisure.

  Realization had been tortured. She had wanted him to treat her as her father had done. To indulge and flatter and pamper, and to seek nothing back in the form of companionship at all. He had indulged her financially to the best of his not inconsiderable ability, but he had refused to allow her to shout and be physically abusive to the amahs and houseboys who had served him since he was a child. There had been tantrums, sulks. And then the flirting had begun. He had exercised a patience he had never known he possessed. Knowing that he no longer loved her, he had lovingly tried to make her see how needlessly foolish she was being. Because he had not flown into the jealous rages she craved, her flirtations became wilder and more socially embarrassing. His friends made excuses and no longer visited them, and then Melissa, unable to arouse the attention she sought on home ground, sought it elsewhere. At the Cricket Club and the Swimming Club. And men like her major in the Middlesex were only too happy to oblige her.