The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (37 page)

I sat down heavily on the cane sofa and put my feet on top of a stack of Far Eastern Economic Reviews, pushing aside a set of car keys. Howard walked up to a free-standing fan behind the television and switched it on. It whirled and the draught ruffled the pages by my feet and cooled my face as I took another swallow of the tonic-tainted gin.

‘This is one hell of a nice flat,’ I said, more to myself than to him. He walked the length of the room, pacing like a wary old lion on a route he’d trudged a million times before.

‘It certainly is, laddie.’

‘How big would you say it is?’

‘Three bedrooms, one of them’s a study. About two-and-a-half thousand square feet in all, maybe a bit more.’

‘She lived here alone?’

‘That she did. She valued her privacy.’

‘You’ve been here before?’ I knew he had because he knew there was ice and he knew where to get it and he knew that one of the bedrooms was a study. But he wasn’t stupid and he knew that I knew so he wasn’t going to lie but I wasn’t sure yet if I could trust this man.

He stopped pacing.

‘Several times. We worked together on a couple of articles for the
Sunday Times
last year, and I helped her back when she’d had a few too many at the FCC.’

‘FCC?’

‘Foreign Correspondents’ Club.’

I’d finished the drink and Howard stepped forward to take the empty glass and refill it. By now the ice had melted into pea-sized lumps which bumped against my teeth as I drank. A Singapore Airlines 747 climbed into the sky and then was lost behind a towering residential block and then I watched the wispy white clouds because I didn’t want to ask the questions. I wanted to distract myself, I wanted to be somewhere else, up in the clouds looking down, not sitting on a rattan sofa with a lukewarm drink and a faded old hack who was going to tell me something that I didn’t want to hear, like the policeman who knocks at your door in the middle of the night and says, ‘you’d better sit down, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.’

Happened to me once, years ago, in Glasgow, when I was a young freelance trying to find the Big One that would get me noticed by London. I was on the graveyard shift for the
Daily Record
, from eight in the evening to four in the morning, the shift none of the staff men wanted to work. At least once a week somebody would phone in sick and the news desk would call me because I was young and keen, have notebook will travel and because I needed the money.

The high spot of the shift was organizing the curry run for the subs and a trip out to the main police stations delivering the first edition and picking up the details of the nightly stabbings and assaults. And at closing time there were the phone calls from the drunks, ‘Hey Jim, can you settle a wee argument that me and my pal are having. In the 1972 cup final . . .’ And you had to deal with the complaints if the compiler of the TV page had cocked it up again. That was a real pain until one of the subs gave me a tip. ‘Ask them for the number of their TV licence. That usually shuts them up.’ It worked every time.

I’d just got back with the curries for the lads when the news desk phone rang. It was a watchman at the British Rail works in Springburn ringing to say that a young lad had just got himself electrocuted at the yard. He was one of a group of neds breaking into carriages to steal the first aid kits. They weren’t worth anything but it gave them something to do. This nutter had been standing on the roof of a train, using an iron bar to smash in the windows. He’d swung it too high, touched an overhead power cable and was lying in hospital with third degree burns over most of his body. The caller gave me the kid’s name and address, and his own, not out of any sense of public duty but because he knew I’d put him in the tip-off book and that at the end of the month a cheque would be winging its way to him. That one phone call would earn him almost as much as I got for a full eight-hour shift.

I dragged the late driver out of the photographers’ rest room where he’d been watching a blue movie on their video recorder. He reeked of whisky and his flies were at half mast. Twenty minutes later we were in front of the grey tenement block where the boy lived and I told the driver to wait and went up to the second floor alone and rang the door bell until the lights went on and a small, pale woman in a yellow floral nightie and curlers opened the door and peered at me.

‘What d’ye want?’ she barked.

What I wanted was a quote from the tearful mother and a collect picture of her dying son, and then what I wanted was any other pictures of him so that when the
Glasgow Herald
and the
Express
arrived they’d be shafted. That’s what I wanted, but first I had to get inside the house. I was English but I’d been north of the border long enough to switch into the Glasgow accent and I was young enough to give her the little-boy-lost-look and appeal to her maternal instincts.

‘Oh, I’m from the
Record
, Mrs McNee,’ I said. ‘I’m terribly sorry to hear what happened to wee James. Could I come in and have a word with you?’

‘What?’ she said, and coughed like a rheumatic otter.

‘Well, Mrs McNee, we thought if we printed what had happened to James it would serve as a warning to other children.’

A man appeared behind the yellow nightie, the same size as the woman, with a crew cut and several days’ growth of stubble on his face. His chin was up in the arrogant pose of a small, angry man. In his greying string vest and baggy underpants he looked like an over the hill boxer that some up-and-coming champion had been using as a sparring partner.

‘What did he say, hen?’ he asked his wife.

‘He said something’s happened to Jim.’

The man opened the door wide.

‘You’d better come in, son,’ he said. And that was how they heard that their boy was dying in a hospital bed, from a young reporter who was only there for the story and the picture. She cried and he put his arm around her and then she went and made me a cup of tea and then there was the crackle of a two-way radio and a policewoman and a male colleague rang the doorbell. It happens that way sometimes. And yes I got the quotes, and the pictures, and the page three lead in the second edition. And I left my card on the mantelpiece so that when the guys from the other papers arrived they’d know who had beaten them to it. Things like that were important to me then. They still are.

It’s funny how your mind does that, how it protects itself from facing up to unpleasant realities. Somehow my thoughts had got shunted away from Sally and her luxurious flat and I’d started replaying events of more than ten years ago, memories conjured up from the backwater of my brain.

‘I can’t understand why the police haven’t been here,’ I said.

Howard shrugged. ‘They’re not Scotland Yard, you know, and let’s be honest, they’re not investigating a murder,’ he said.

‘Not yet,’ I said quietly, and drank from the tall, thin glass.

‘Aye, not yet,’ he said, and walked over to the balcony. He turned to face me and leant back on the green railing, arms outstretched as if he’d been crucified.

‘This is one impressive flat, Howard.’ He didn’t reply, and I didn’t look at him. Sometimes it’s better that way.

‘How much would you say a flat like this would cost?’

He paused, then cleared his throat like a head boy at speech day. ‘That would depend on the length of the lease, whether it was furnished or unfurnished, the sort of deal she got from the landlord, service charges . . .’

‘How much?’

‘Anywhere between $20,000 and $25,000 a month, I suppose.’

This time I paused, and I could hear children playing in the street five floors below, shouting and shrieking. ‘And how much did Sally earn, in a good month?’

‘About the same.’

The yelling stopped and there was the sound of feet slapping on the road as they ran off. A dog barked and then I was looking at the clouds again and wishing. I kicked the key ring and it rattled off the magazines and fell onto the floor.

‘What sort of car did she drive?’ I said it quietly but I could feel the anger starting to grow, because this was like pulling teeth and that’s not how it should have been because he was supposed to be on my side.

‘A Porsche, a red one,’ he replied, and we both knew the colour wasn’t important. What mattered was that my sister was living in a flat she couldn’t afford and driving a car she couldn’t have bought. She was 26 years old, she was freelancing for a Hong Kong paper and a couple of magazines and stringing for one of the London quality Sundays. She should have been sharing a flat half the size with two other girls, taking the MTR to work and counting every penny.

‘Where did the money come from?’ I asked, and I still wasn’t looking at him but I could sense him shrug.

‘I don’t know, laddie. None of us knew.’

‘But you wondered? You asked?’

‘Aye, we wondered. But we weren’t asking the questions.’ He walked in out of the sunlight and dropped into a white deck chair opposite me.

‘So who was asking the questions? Who was asking why Sally was living way beyond her means? Who was digging?’

‘The ICAC’

‘The what?’

‘The Independent Commission Against Corruption. The colony’s corruption watchdog. They were originally set up to clean up the Hong Kong police but they’ve moved on to cover racing, business, organized crime. It’s probably the most powerful organization in Hong Kong, powers of search and detention the likes of which you don’t see anywhere else. They’re on a par with the Star Chamber.’

‘And they were investigating Sally?’

He mumbled.

‘What?’ I snapped.

‘That was the rumour. Hell, it was more than a rumour. They were on her tail like hounds after a fox. You can’t even accept a free trip to Macau out here without clearing it with your editor first. Everything has to be above board. It’s not like London where you get crates of beer and whisky every Christmas and free trips and God knows what else.’

‘But we’re not talking about a few bottles of Scotch here, are we?’

He shook his head and I finished the gin and tonic and stood up.

‘I need to talk to someone at the ICAC, and soon. Can you fix it?’

‘Aye, nae bother.’

I put the glass down on the bar and walked through the louvred door into the hallway beyond. There was a spare bedroom, obviously unused, and next to it a bathroom, the soap still wrapped and the towels neat and tidy and no hairs in the bath so she hadn’t had visitors recently or if she had they’d stayed in her bedroom. The kitchen was square, a mass of gadgets, an electric rice cooker, an electric wok, two toasters, a huge green fridge that was empty except for three bottles of white wine and a half empty carton of milk that was two days beyond its sell-by date and starting to go off. There was a pile of dirty plates and pans in both sides of the double sink and I remembered how untidy she’d been as a kid and the rows she’d had from our mother for leaving her bedroom in a mess.

The master bedroom was nothing like the rough and tumble tomboy’s bolt hole that she’d slept in as a child, it was a woman’s room, soft and gentle – and tidy. A king-sized bed with an ornate carved wooden headboard, silk sheets and feather pillows. There was a thick blue rug by the bed that matched the cotton curtains and the pots of flowers on the large dressing table. The wardrobes were built into the wall and were big enough to walk in if they hadn’t been bulging with clothes and shoes. The bathroom door was opposite the bottom of the bed and it was blue, too, and it smelt of talc and perfume that I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t believe she lived here, she didn’t belong, it wasn’t a place that Sally, my Sally, would have wanted.

Then I saw the large blue mongrel with a lolling tongue sitting by the side of the bed nearest the wall with its nose torn and one of its ears hanging loose. She’d been eight when I’d bought it for her when our mother wouldn’t let us have the real thing because of the mess, the smell, the hairs, the trouble. So she talked to it and slept with it and called it Woofer and as she grew older she told him all her secrets. He was the one real thing in the flat, the one piece of my sister’s life that I could recognize, and I saw her sitting on the bed and holding the silly blue dog and putting her nose against his and talking to him in a low, serious voice as his tongue swung stupidly to and fro and I held out my hand to stroke her hair but she wasn’t there and Woofer was still on the floor looking at me through brown glass eyes. I found her ring in a crystal dish on the dressing table. The ring she said she’d never take off. The ring I gave her.

The study was closer to what I’d expected, a huge wooden desk surrounded by piles of newspapers and magazines, a battered old grey metal filing cabinet. There was a half-written story about diamonds as an investment in the electric typewriter on the desk. It was bland and needed a good sub and I could tell that her heart hadn’t been in it. Freelancing is like that, you get given all the dross that the staff reporters don’t want to do, the advertising features, book reviews and personal finance articles, but every now and again you come up with a splash, a story to get the adrenaline going and that’s what makes it worthwhile, the kick that’s worth waiting for.

There was a large multicoloured map of the world pinned to the wall and she’d divided it into time zones with a red felt-tipped pen and stuck flags into about a dozen major cities, London, New York, Toronto, Tokyo, and I guess they were places where she’d filed copy, or maybe she was just being optimistic because the merits of diamonds as a nest egg wasn’t exactly going to make the front page of the
New York Times
. Next to the map was a dark brown cork notice board. Stapled to this was a scattering of newspaper cuttings in various stages of decay with paragraphs circled, story ideas for her to follow up in the future. Except that she didn’t have a future anymore. There were three photographs on the board, all of the same man, a middle-aged Chinese with horn-rimmed glasses and slightly crooked teeth. One was a black and white head shot, a PR handout maybe, the other two were in colour, one of him laughing as he leant against the bonnet of a dark green Rolls Royce and the other of him in a karate suit and a brown belt, standing in the ready position as if preparing to bow, hands clenched tightly into fists either side of his groin, the effect spoiled because again he was smiling for the camera. I pulled one off the board but there was no caption on the back so I went back to the lounge and dropped it into Howard’s lap.