The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (36 page)

‘Impressive,’ I said.

‘Aye, it’s one of the best. Not up to the standard of the Mandarin or the Regent yet, but they’re getting there. They’ve got the prettiest girls in Hong Kong in reception. Just look at the bonny wee lassies.’ He was practically salivating as he ogled the rank of young girls behind the marble counter.

‘You’re a dirty old bastard, Howard,’ I said.

‘Aye, maybe you’re right. But don’t tell me you’re immune to yellow fever. It gets us all in the end. They’re soft and gentle, it’s like making love to butterflies. Have you ever had a Chinese girl?’

‘I once went out with a girl who had jaundice,’ I said. ‘Come on, leave it out.’ The last thing I wanted right now was a session swapping sexual memories with a lecherous old hack. But maybe Howard was being kind, trying to take my mind off the hell-hole of a mortuary and the fall that had killed Sally. Christ, I needed a drink. We walked to the lift and went up to the top floor, the fifteenth. The label by the button said ‘Health club and swimming pool’. I watched the girl in the white dress get smaller and smaller as we rose up. When the lift doors opened we were so high up that the sound of the piano was lost in the dull throb of faraway conversation. Howard pushed through heavy wooden swing doors into the health club’s reception area where a girl in a bright blue leotard and navy leg warmers bounced up to ask for our membership cards.

Howard explained that we were thinking of joining and just wanted to take a look around to see what facilities were on offer. She nodded her head eagerly, long black hair jerking backward and forward across her shoulders. She was tiny, with flawless skin and a boy’s figure, no make-up or nail polish, just fresh and new and young. I felt a hundred years old. Howard put his wrinkled and liver-spotted hand on her arm like an over attentive Father Christmas and gave her a look that would have alarmed her parents, even if it had come from a fat man in a red suit with a white beard. Like a lamb to the slaughter she offered to show us around.

‘That’s all right, dear. We’ll just wander around on our own.’ He seemed reluctant to let go of her arm and eventually she pulled away, eyeing him like a frightened fawn.

‘Show me the pool,’ I said, and he took me through the exercise room where young girls and overweight middle-aged men were torturing themselves on chrome and black leather machinery that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a space station. A man wearing stars and stripes shorts puffed and sweated away on a jogging machine as he listened to a Sony Walkman while an attendant watched the dial that showed how fast he was running. I thought of getting one for Bill Hardwicke’s office but it would have been an expensive joke.

The pool was a good size, about twenty metres by eight, I guess, with a diving board at the deep end. It was surrounded by bright green artificial grass and white plastic chairs which glinted in the sunlight streaming in through the glass overhead. It had the look of a greenhouse, as the walls too were transparent. The view was nothing special, just the tops of the nearby blocks of flats and shops, but it was bright and sunny and a good place to swim.

Without my having to ask, Howard walked over to the far end of the pool, empty save for a matron in a plastic hat swimming a stoic breaststroke. He stood by one of the big glass panes behind the diving board.

‘Here?’ I said, and he nodded.

I rapped it with my knuckles and it felt solid, more like wood than glass. There was no indication that it was a replacement.

‘You’d need some force to go through that,’ I said, stating the obvious. I pressed my nose against the glass and looked down.

‘She fell into the road?’ I asked and Howard said yes.

‘She didn’t jump,’ I said.

‘I know, laddie, I know.’ It sounded as if he was humouring me.

‘Did she use this pool a lot?’

‘She was a keen swimmer. If she wasn’t swimming here she’d use the pool at the KCC.’

‘KCC?’

‘Kowloon Cricket Club. It’s a few miles from here. They’ve an open air pool.’

‘Sally’s a member?’ The word ‘was’ still didn’t feel right on my lips.

Howard laughed ruefully. ‘Sally wasn’t a joiner, but she could always find someone to sign her in. She had a lot of friends.’ He was having no trouble using the past tense and I could have hit him for that, driven my fist into his face and twisted it so that his lips would split and bleed because I didn’t want her to be dead.

‘What about enemies?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know of anybody who’d want to kill her,’ he said quietly.

We walked back along the pool side and the woman in the pool was Sally, her wet hair plastered to her head as she turned to float on her back and waved. I smiled and raised my hand but then the smile turned into a grimace and Sally turned into an old lady with a white plastic hat. My hand was half outstretched towards her. To cover my embarrassment I ran my fingers through my hair. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’

The flight and the whistle-stop tour of police station, mortuary and hotel had taken more out of me than I realized, and though my eyes opened at nine o’clock I spent over two hours drifting in and out of sleep until Howard banged on the door. I wrapped myself in a large white towel and let him in.

He was wearing a similar safari suit to yesterday, but in cream. He was carrying a plastic bag and he emptied the contents onto the dressing table: three cotton shirts, a couple of pairs of socks and underwear. There was also an aerosol of deodorant. With a jolt I thought of the bag full of Sally’s belongings, lying on the window seat, the silent proof that she was dead and this wasn’t a dream.

‘I thought this might come in handy,’ he said, holding out the deodorant.

‘Yeah, I was sweating a bit,’ I said. ‘I’ll just take a shower.’

The water jetted out hard and fast, almost scouring the skin from my back as I washed and then I turned it on full cold and gasped as the icy water hit me.

‘How far away is Sally’s flat?’ I asked Howard as I towelled myself dry.

‘Fifteen minutes in a cab. Mid-levels, a block in Robinson Road.’

‘Good one?’

‘It’s not the Peak, but it’s a place for expats rather than locals.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘A place called Shek-O, there’re a lot of journalists living there, mostly Aussies. It’s on the south side of the island.’

‘Flat?’

‘No, two-bedroomed house by the beach. It’s quiet, so quiet that it’s easy to forget you’re living in Hong Kong.’

I ripped the Cellophane off one of the new shirts and tried it on. ‘Perfect fit,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

As soon as I had finished dressing, Howard asked me if I wanted to eat. I walked over to the polythene bag and took out the keys.

‘Never touch solids this early in the morning,’ I told him. The air was suddenly split with the crump of an explosion, a dull boom that I felt as much as heard.

‘What the hell was that?’

Howard looked at his watch. ‘The noon gun,’ he said. ‘Jardines fire it at this time every day.’ He took me over to the window and pointed down to a shining naval gun at the water’s edge. ‘The story goes that they fired it once to welcome a guest and the navy got pissed off so they were told they had to fire it every day as a punishment. Now it’s a tourist attraction, a gimmick. And don’t worry, they’re firing blanks.’

‘Aren’t we all, Howard. Aren’t we all.’

The heat caught me by surprise again as we walked out of the foyer. Shit, I’d forgotten to use Howard’s deodorant. Already the sweat was collecting in my armpits.

A taxi pulled up in front of the hotel and we both climbed into the back. Howard spoke to the driver in Cantonese and the old man turned the air-conditioning down. For an expat who professed to be totally ignorant of the local language Howard seemed to be able to get his message across without too much trouble. He was a cunning old sod. A couple of times in the lift or when we waited in the police station I’d caught him eavesdropping on the Chinese as they chatted away in sing-song voices, and while I could quite believe he wasn’t fluent I was certain he could understand a lot more than he let on.

‘It’s cold enough in here to freeze a polar bear’s balls,’ he said and rubbed his hands together. I was sweltering.

‘You’ve been out here too long,’ I said.

‘Aye maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right,’ he replied. Crap. He was out here for good.

The taxi made its way up a hill, twisting in and out of the bends like a drunken rally driver. Out of the right hand window the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building danced in and out of view.

‘Helicopter pad,’ said Howard, and pointed to the top of the ultra-modern edifice. ‘They’re not allowed to use it, but it’s there, just in case.’

‘I don’t follow you,’ I said.

‘1997, laddie, 1997. When the Chinese hordes come sweeping over the border the bank’s executives will be picked up off the roof and flown to safety. That’s the story anyway.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘That’s just one of the rumours about Sandberg’s Folly. They say there’s an underground tunnel, big enough to drive an armoured car through, linking the building to the harbour so that when the shit hits the fan they’ll be able to drive all the money out. And they say that the typhoon shields around the bottom of the building aren’t there to keep out the wind but are there to be dropped if the bank is ever attacked.’

‘True or false?’

‘Act your age. These days money is shunted around the world at the touch of a button, you don’t have physically to pick it up. And most of the bank’s business is overseas now, anyway. If ever Beijing did decide to screw up Hong Kong the money would haemorrhage out in minutes, to Bermuda, Canada, America, the UK. All the banks have their own contingency plans drawn up and they don’t involve armoured cars racing through tunnels.’

Dramatic though it was, the Hong Kong Bank building was dwarfed by a tall tower pointing to the sky like an accusing finger. It was of an order of magnitude bigger than the rest, towering over the Central office blocks like a schoolmaster surrounded by his pupils.

‘And that one?’ I said.

‘Ah, the heir apparent,’ he said. ‘The Bank of China. They’re already the real power in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Bank and Standard Chartered might print the notes and make a lot of noise, but it’s the little men in that building that will be running this place as soon as it’s given back to China. That’s the sixth tallest building in the world, and it put a few noses out of joint at the Bank when it was first announced. The Bank had gone and ordered the most expensive building in the world as a sign of their long-term faith in Hong Kong and then the Chinese went and built a taller building right next door. Massive loss of face.’

The road twisted again and Central was hidden from sight as we drove through Mid-levels, a mixture of new residential blocks and old low-rise buildings, lots of trees and greenery. As Howard had said, it was a place for expats, not locals.

It was a pink building, a dirty washed out pink like a block of soap that had been in the shower too long.

The block had been built on a slope in the fork between two roads. As a result the ground floor on the upper road was actually the third floor. I handed the keys to Howard and he unlocked a metal-grilled door, an ornate work of art that squeaked open as he put his weight against it. We climbed the stone stairs shoulder to shoulder up four flights to the top floor where there was another grille in front of the entrance to the flat. I was short of breath and my shirt was wet but Howard was relaxed, not a bead of sweat on his forehead. He had trouble with the lock, pushing the key in and out several times and jiggling it around until finally it slotted home and he pulled the grille outwards. There were two locks in the blue-painted wooden door but Howard had no problems with them and we were soon in the flat.

The door opened straight into the main lounge area, about eight paces wide and about fifteen paces long to a large sliding window. I walked across the perfectly-polished parquet flooring and pushed the window open. Beyond was a tiled balcony with two white wooden chairs and a slatted table. The balcony looked down across the harbour and over to Kowloon. To the right of the balcony were two towering green plants, palms or something, I couldn’t identify them but they looked like they’d been growing for twenty years or more. A small, almost translucent, lizard scuttled from under one of the chairs, through my legs, across the floor and up a wall. There it stopped, feet splayed out like fingers, then it bolted across the ceiling and behind a rattan bookcase. I turned to look at Howard who was standing by a large mirrored bar built into the wall, laden with bottles of Scotch and gin and rows of glasses.

The flat was full of plants, in white pots hanging from the ceiling, standing in saucers on the bar, and trailing over the bookcase. In each corner of the room were circular clay tubs with small trees growing out of peaty soil.

The furniture was all cane and rattan, a Habitat-catalogue of a room with large bulging green scatter cushions on the floor and a glass-topped coffee table covered in glossy magazines and crumpled newspapers.

Against the wall opposite the balcony was a dining table big enough to seat eight people, surrounded by high-backed chairs.

There was a television with a video underneath, and potted ferns on top, and by the bookcase was a racked stereo system with three feet high speakers that looked like a prize from a television quiz show.

‘You look like you need a drink,’ said Howard and I realized I was frowning hard. ‘I’ll get some ice,’ he said and disappeared through a white louvred door that swung gently to and fro behind him. They were still moving when he reappeared with cubes of ice rattling in a crystal bucket.

‘Gin and tonic?’ he asked rhetorically, because he was already unscrewing the top of the gin bottle by the time I nodded. He made it strong and there was no lemon, but it was cold and I needed a drink, not to quench my thirst but to quieten the panic I could feel building inside, like awakening from a nightmare knowing, just knowing, that something bad, something terrible, had happened, but not knowing if the terror was real or the result of a bad dream.