Bill for the Use of a Body (2 page)

The small dark eyes in Hayashi's wrinkled face narrowed to slits, and in a venomous whisper that was almost a hiss he said, ‘In that, honourable sir, you are mistaken. You cannot refuse me the fullest possible particulars of those earlier victims, their families, business associates and so on. With that information, and by an exhaustive enquiry into my son's activities while in Hong Kong, I shall succeed in hunting down this English pig who has become an assassin. Yes, if it costs me my last hundred yen I'll see to it that he pays in full for his abominable crime. And when I get him I shall not call on the law to provide him with a relatively painless execution.'

The Police Chief rarely felt sympathy for any of the many criminals with whom his work brought him into contact and he had none at all for Hayashi, except as a father who had just lost his only son, for he knew him to be a man who had brought disgrace on his country, and had good reason to believe that he had amassed his big
fortune mainly in ways that had brought misery to great numbers of people.

Okabe also knew that Hayashi had contacts in every port in the China Seas, and the wealth to employ scores of unscrupulous hirelings who would use methods barred to the police to extort the truth from people; so there was quite a possibility that, sooner or later, he would get his man. He had spoken with such cold, malevolent determination that, at the thought that he might succeed, even the hardened Police Chief felt a sudden surge of pity as he envisaged the ghastly death in some secret hide-out that Hayashi would inflict on the Englishman who it was presumed had killed his son.

Julian Day was sitting on the grass, in the warm February sunshine, near the flagstaff on the Peak of Hong Kong. The Peak is so often mentioned as a main feature of the beautiful island that many people who have never been there are apt to visualise it as a somewhat larger Gibraltar: a solitary mountain rising out of the sea. But that is far from being the case. The Peak is only the highest of nine mountains in the eleven-mile-long island, and the island itself only the second largest of an archipelago which, together with Kowloon on the mainland and the New Territories, goes to make up the three hundred and sixty square miles of the Colony.

Even from where Julian was sitting, eighteen hundred feet up, other peaks to the south and east, outlined against a cloudless blue sky, cut off his view of many of the beautiful bays with their beaches of golden sand. But looking northward he saw a magnificent panorama spread before him. The ground sloped almost sheer to the splendid city of Victoria, nearly three miles long and half a mile deep, curving along the nearer shore of the enormous harbour.

Riding at anchor in the harbour, gaily dressed with flags but looking like toys at that distance, lay a part of the Western Allies' Far Eastern Fleet—three aircraft carriers, four cruisers and eight or ten destroyers. Fringing the docks were a score of merchant ships and liners.
Resembling water-beetles, the big ferries that carried a hundred thousand people a day scuttled back and forth between Victoria and her twin city of Kowloon on the peninsula opposite. From the peninsula's eastern side the great causeway of the Kai Tak Airport projected like a pointing finger out into the sea, and every few minutes an aircraft owned by one of a dozen nations was either landing or taking off from it. Beyond the sprawling city the land broadened out into hills and fertile valleys, then in the distance there rose range after range of mountains, merging some twenty miles away into Red China.

As Julian's gaze roved over the massed roofs down on the sea-shore he marvelled at the way in which Hong Kong had grown since he had last been there. The city had not only spread both to east and west as far as the eye could see, but a score of skyscrapers now towered up from it and another dozen dwarfed the biggest older buildings in Kowloon. The airport too had formerly had only two short runways, whereas now, by a great feat of underwater engineering, it had been extended for a mile and a half out into the sea, so that the largest jet aircraft could land there.

But the feature which more than any other showed the growth of the two cities was that in a hundred places where there had previously been areas of mean streets or waste land there were now great blocks of modern flats; while further out in the suburbs there were whole groups of these blocks. Yet even those that Julian could see with his bird's-eye view he knew to be only a small part of the amazing feat that the Government of the Colony had achieved to cope with the enormous influx of refugees from Red China. At Choi Hung they had erected eight blocks all twenty storeys high with forty flats on each floor. That estate alone accommodated some fifteen thousand people; and to care for the children they were opening a new school for a thousand pupils every ten
days. As he thought of that, Julian wished that the anti-colonial Americans and the Blacks, Browns and Yellows who so consistently abused Britain in their parrot-house, the United Nations, could be forced to come to Hong Kong and see what the old British Raj, at its best, could do.

He knew, though, that although this herculean labour for humanity was mainly due to the able planning and administration of selfless and devoted British civil servants, it could not have been achieved without the wholehearted co-operation of the Chinese, who made up nine-tenths of the Colony's population.

Before the war Hong Kong's prosperity had arisen from the fact that it was the entry port for the great Chinese city of Canton that lay some sixty miles away to the west up the great island-spattered estuary. With the triumph of Communism in China the door had suddenly been slammed, cutting off the multi-million trade between Europe and China. For a while it had looked as though Hong Kong must wither and become bankrupt. But during the years of strife on the mainland great numbers of wealthy Chinese had seen the red light, got their money out in time and emigrated to Hong Kong. With British encouragement these highly intelligent men had revolutionised the status of the Colony. It had originally been mainly a channel for supplying China with goods from the Western world, but by building over 5,000 factories, large and small, and establishing a great variety of new enterprises, they had made the Colony not only self-supporting, but, with the one exception of Japan, the greatest centre of industry in the Far East.

To that had to be added the contribution of the million Chinese who, mostly penniless, had sought refuge in the Colony. Thrifty, cheerful and industrious by nature, they were gluttons for work. They were no believers in short hours, let alone wildcat strikes. Their one aim in life was
to be able to support their families in comfort and have a little money put by in case of misfortune. Three hundred thousand of them had been settled on farms, to start with in wooden shacks, but now great numbers of them were living in pleasant bungalows with radios, refrigerators and washing machines. Hundreds of thousands of others who, at first, teemed like ants in squalid shanty towns had since earned enough to furnish and live well in the flats on the great housing estates that the Government let to them at a nominal rent.

As Julian's eyes again swept the seventeen square miles of blue water that formed the almost land-locked harbour, they came to rest on Stonecutter's Island. It lay close to and on the west side of the Kowloon peninsula. On a Christmas night twenty-two years earlier he had taken his life in his hands and, fully clothed, swum the two miles out to it. Even when, utterly exhausted, he had floundered ashore, and for many hours afterwards, he had still been in deadly peril; for the whole area was swarming with Japanese. At 3.15 that afternoon Hong Kong had surrendered, but the bestial Japs were still butchering any stray British soldiers they came upon, and only the fact that Julian knew a few sentences of Japanese had later saved him.

That he knew any Japanese at all was due to the extraordinary flair of the Service departments for posting square pegs in round holes. Julian had joined up in Cairo early in the war. As he could speak most of the Mediterranean languages, including Arabic, Russell Pasha had, with his usual good sense, secured him a commission in the Interpreter Corps. In that capacity he had fought with the New Zealanders during General Wavell's brilliant campaign in Libya and later in the disastrous expedition to Greece. After the evacuation of what remained of the British force to Egypt he had been seconded to Intelligence and for some weeks employed in Cairo translating Arabic documents. Then it had been decided to increase the
Headquarters Staff in Singapore; upon which, although Julian knew nothing about the Far East or any of its languages, some dunderhead had had him posted there as an extra Intelligence Officer.

As he had a flair for languages, after some months of tuition he picked up enough Japanese and Chinese to get the general sense of printed or typed documents, but no-one pressed him to exert himself. The convinced opinion of the General Staff was that the Japanese had no intention of entering the war against Britain. It was said that they still had plenty on their plate in China and that they would be fools to imperil the seaborne trade out of which they were making so much money. For a young subaltern Singapore offered many delightful distractions; so, with an untroubled conscience, Julian had spent a minimum of time in his office and had happily given himself up to the joys of tennis, bathing, cocktail parties and good dinners with pretty girls.

But this pleasant existence was not destined to last. In September 1941 the energetic Major-General Christopher Maltby was nominated to succeed General Grassett as G.O.C. British Troops in Hong Kong; and with him, as one of his Staff Officers, he took Julian.

On arriving there they found the same state of complacency as had existed in Singapore, and Julian discovered that the island in the China Seas offered a personable bachelor who had ample private means even more distractions; so for some weeks, although his new Chief worked him considerably harder, his leisure was most happily filled by participating in the peacetime activities of the Colony.

Nevertheless, he was aware that his General and the Governor, Sir Mark Young, also newly appointed, were extremely worried men. Neither of them concealed from his Staff the anxiety he felt about the poor state in which he found Hong Kong's defences.

The mobile military garrison consisted of only four
battalions: the 2nd Royal Scots, the 1st Middlesex, the 5/7th Rajputs and the 2/4th Punjabis, and all were under strength owing to the prevalence of malaria and venereal disease. At the last moment they were reinforced by two Canadian battalions: the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada; but these troops, gallant as many of them proved when they found themselves with their backs to the wall, were raw, ill-disciplined and quite unfitted to be put into a line of battle before they had had several months' intensive training. To these could be added seven companies of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, many of whom were middle-aged and, again, were unsuited to being thrown into a battle. With this force, totalling some six thousand men, half of whom could not be deployed, Maltby was expected to hold a line on the mainland laid down by some past military pundit that extended for ten and a half miles against—as it later transpired—thirty thousand battle-hardened Japanese.

The prospect of having to defend the island would not have appeared quite so grim if Maltby had had adequate sea and air forces to support his troops on the mainland and, when they were forced to withdraw, to prevent the island being invaded. But the Navy could muster only two old destroyers and six motor torpedo boats, while the pitiful air force consisted of four Vickers Wildebeeste torpedo bombers and three Walrus amphibians, none of which had a maximum speed of more than one hundred miles per hour.

Still more perturbing, the garrison's munitions had been most scandalously allowed to run down. Shells for the gunners would have to be so strictly rationed that it would be impossible for them to put up barrages lasting for more than a few minutes; ammunition for the mortars was so limited that the whole lot would be blazed off in a single day's intensive fighting; effective training had to be curtailed because little small-arms ammunition could
be spared for it; the supply of drugs and other hospital requirements was hopelessly inadequate and the four torpedo bombers had not a single torpedo.

Yet in the winter sunshine the social life of the Colony continued unabated. There were dances at the Peninsula Hotel, water picnics in Gindrinkers Bay, golf tournaments on the fine course in the south of the island, and every Saturday the race course in Happy Valley was thronged with huge crowds that afterwards dispersed to form hundreds of jolly parties in private houses.

It was not until Sunday December the 7th that Maltby knew definitely that his testing time could not now be long delayed. He was attending a Church Parade that had all the glamour of a peacetime military ceremony. He had just finished reading the first Lesson when an officer came in to whisper to him the disquieting news that the Punjabis had reported a threatening concentration of Japanese troops to be massing on their front north of Fan Ling. The General and his senior officers quietly slipped away and back to his Headquarters. But there was little that he could do. The Royal Scots, the Rajputs and the Punjabis were already thinly spread out along the preordained front line. The Middlesex and the Canadians were held in reserve on the island. All units were alerted and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps swiftly mobilised to take up their war stations.

It was at ten to five on the following morning that Julian was roused from the deep healthy sleep of the young by his Chief, Major Charles Boxer, the senior Intelligence Officer on the General's staff. Boxer had been sitting up all night listening to the broadcast from Tokyo. At 4.45 an announcer who had been giving particulars of the programme for the coming evening was suddenly replaced by another, who had harshly declared that Japan was now at war with Britain and the United States of America.