The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (41 page)

‘What is it you want?’ she asked. Shit. So much for doorstepping rule number three. I widened the smile and told her I was doing a series on Hong Kong tycoons and as her husband was obviously one of the territory’s (I nearly said colony but I knew how sensitive they get about that) most successful businessmen obviously I wanted to include him but I’d obviously called at an inconvenient time and obviously I was saying obviously too much. Obviously.

‘Do you think he would be interested? I wouldn’t need too much of his time?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure he would be,’ she replied, and managed a half smile. It seemed I’d moved up from pest exterminator to drain unblocker so I asked her if she’d mind giving me a bit of background on her husband. I kept dropping in the word successful because her weakness was vanity and I could see her mentally preening herself, bathing in the reflected glory of her man. The man who’d paid for her Rolex, her house and her passport.

Of course, she said, sit down, she said, would I like a cup of tea, she said, still no smile but I’d got around her defences, found the weak spot. I took out the notebook from my jacket pocket and rested it on my knee, looking for the general question that would keep her talking and give me a chance to think.

‘Where did you first meet?’ I asked, pen poised like a heron about to stab a fish. It’s easier if you know what you’re looking for, if there are a few simple facts to slot into a story that you’ve already written in your head, the who, why, what, where and when. You know what you want, it’s just a matter of the approach, meek and mild, aggressive, subtle, press the right buttons and get the information. Sometimes it’s just a quote you want, a tight paragraph to put colour into a story, ‘I warned him not to go to the depot at night, I knew something like this would happen one day.’ Sometimes all you want is confirmation that the schedule line you’ve given the news desk is close enough to the truth to stand up as a story.

But sometimes you don’t know what you want, you fix up an interview and you go along with eyes and ears wide open, antennae twitching because you know there’s an angle there and you don’t want to miss it. It’s not such a problem for the features boys, they can write a colour piece about a paper clip or a postage stamp and they’re so good at it they have you clamouring for more. But hard news is different — you’re looking for the angle, the human interest, the tickle at the back of the neck that lets you know you’ve got the splash or a page lead at worst.

I did six months on an evening paper in the Midlands and blotted my copybook by getting pissed one night and turning up three hours late for my early morning shift. The punishment dreamt up by the rat-faced news editor, who spent most of his time selling his reporters’ stories to the nationals, was to send me along to the inspector who ran the local police horse training school. I sat with the guy in his pokey little office for an hour chatting about horses and crowd control and dressage and my smile was wearing thin and my backside was numb and then I hit paydirt.

‘See what you can get out of it,’ Rat-Face had said. ‘I see it as a spread with lots of pics.’ Like hell he did. He saw it as a way of teaching me a lesson.

‘Where do the horses go when they retire,’ I asked the inspector and his eyes hardened a little and he said they didn’t retire.

‘We keep them until they’re too old to work,’ he said and adjusted his tie and I left it at that because the hairs on the back of my neck were tingling, I had the story and I wasn’t going to blow it by cross-questioning the guy with a notebook on my knee so I changed the subject and talked about temperament and feeding and led him by the nose for a full twenty minutes until he’d forgotten what he’d told me.

Then we went out with a photographer to the training field, and while the inspector rode stiff-backed between flagwaving and shouting constables I stood next to a hardbitten sergeant in jodhpurs and chatted, gave him the rueful smile and said, ‘It’s a pity the poor buggers can’t be put out to grass,’ and shrugged. No notebook, no pen, no looking at him as we spoke, just talking as we watched the horse being trained to intimidate football fans and striking miners.

‘Too bloody expensive. And where would we keep them?’ he replied as the wind ripped the flags through the air, snapping and cracking either side of the horse and rider. ‘These horses are trained to work, they’d go mad grazing in a field somewhere.’

‘So what happens? The vet puts them down, I suppose.’

‘You’re joking, man. The guy from the knacker’s yard does it, and he pays for the meat too.’

He turned to look at me, suspicion aroused. ‘This is off the record, right?’ he asked.

‘You think I’d use this in the paper?’ I laughed and slapped him on the back. That got me out of saying yes it was off the record because no it wasn’t, I was going to use every word. I changed the subject and before long the inspector rode up, followed by the red-faced and slightly out-of-breath photographer, and asked did we have everything we wanted and I gave him the winning smile and sure we did and thanked them both for all their help.

‘Anytime,’ said the inspector, and I thought sure, and I winked at the sergeant as the photographer and I climbed into the company van. Lambs to the slaughter, I thought. I was twenty-four years old and as cocky as hell.

It took me half an hour back at the office to track down the abattoir where the horses were slaughtered and I went round and chatted with a man in a blood-stained apron who, for a few quid and the promise of a few more, gave me the name of the pet food company where the horse-meat went.

Back in the office again I went through the picture files and came up with a handful of black-and-white shots of horses who’d been honoured for bravery and long service and had presumably ended up in cans of dog and cat food. Two phone calls to rent-a-quote animal lovers, another to a local MP and a call to the police press officer for an official statement and the story was in the bag.

The paper splashed it – ‘Hero horses killed for Pet Food’ – and we spilled it over to the centre spread. I could see Rat-Face’s eyes light up with pound signs but I beat him to it, sold it to the
Express
for more than I normally earned in a month and two months later I got my first job in Fleet Street. I’d burnt off a couple of coppers but what the hell, I wasn’t going back.

So I sat in an uncomfortable leather armchair and let Mrs Lai’s words pour over me like syrup over a pancake, thick and clogging and sickly sweet, while I nodded and smiled, doodling in the notebook because I wasn’t after his life story. I was looking for the angle.

They’d come across from China together in a leaky boat thirty years ago, a couple of teenagers with their belongings in a canvas bag, and five taels of gold in a leather pouch tied around his neck.

The money was the life savings of his peasant parents, given to them so that they could start a new life in capitalist Hong Kong, she said, but with a downcast look and a lowering of the voice that gave her away – he’d stolen it and given them and the poverty of mainland China two fingers. He’d looked after the money then and that’s how it had always been. They’d married in Hong Kong and used the gold to rent a small room in the New Territories and to buy half a dozen manual sewing machines, paying shifts of illiterate young girls with nimble fingers and simple minds to run them twenty-four hours a day, churning out dresses and T-shirts or whatever the buyers from the UK or America wanted.

Mrs Lai kept the books, Dennis cracked the whip, and soon they had a small van and then a bigger factory and more machines and more exploited teenagers and then he’d gone into plastics, making cheap toys to put in Christmas crackers and then manufacturing practical jokes, fake dog shit and rubber chickens and then the calculator boom took off and he was into injection moulding and started making the plastic cases that surrounded the chips and liquid crystal displays from Japan and then he’d moved into transport and at one point during the heady days of OPEC lunacy he’d owned a couple of oil tankers.

He moved out of textiles as the EEC and the United States began to build trade barriers, taking over a string of restaurants and a small construction firm. He was marked out as a coming man then and found the banks were falling over themselves to lend to him and he borrowed heavily on the back of a couple of high-profile contracts he’d managed to snatch from under the noses of the big boys and then he bought a small parcel of Central land at a Government Land Auction and put up his own building, taking over the top three floors as his headquarters and renting out the rest to one of the minor hongs. Dennis Lai, local boy made good. Long before he’d reached the top and got his house on the Peak Mrs Lai had stopped keeping the books, had got pregnant twice – a boy and a girl – had spent three years in Canada to get her citizenship and now devoted herself to charitable works and expanding her wardrobe and jewellery collection.

She told the story reverently, like she was laying out a treasured dress in front of me, at times looking like a little girl begging for approval, a pat on the head and a smile, yes, you did well, you got out of the fields and away from the insects that scarred your bowed legs with bites that the Chanel skirt couldn’t hide, you escaped from the poverty that you hated so much that you ran away from your family and now wear your wealth on your wrists and round your neck and hang it on the wall so that you always know it’s there. I was starting to feel sorry for the overweight and not particularly attractive Chinese lady with bad skin as her gloss gradually rubbed off but I pushed thoughts like that away and concentrated on her story. There were things I needed to know about her husband, about how he really made his money because the rags-to-riches story she’d paraded in front of me was straight out of Fantasy Island, who his business contacts were, why my sister had his picture on her wall and why one of the same pictures was in a silver frame on top of Mrs Lai’s grand piano.

It was practically a speech, a story she’d obviously delivered before, and she told it without pausing for breath, refusing to give me a chance to ask any questions. She didn’t even stop while the maid served tea. The Filipina was flirting outrageously, and she leant forward when she handed me the blue and white Wedgwood cup and saucer so that I could see down the front of her dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she gave me a smile that said she knew that I knew she wasn’t wearing a bra. She offered me a tray with a sugar bowl that matched the cup and solid silver tongs but I said no thanks, sweet enough, but she didn’t get the joke. All the time Mrs Lai was speaking, and she didn’t even look round as the girl left the room.

Eventually she finished and clasped her hands together in her lap. ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is our story. We have had a tough life, but through hard work and diligence we have done well. We have much to thank Hong Kong for. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have many things to do.’ She rose to leave, but I held my hand up to stop her and asked her: ‘Could I just ask you a couple of questions first, Mrs Lai?’ She sat down again and reclasped her hands, fingers rubbing together. The atmosphere was starting to get chilly again, and it wasn’t the air conditioning.

‘Your husband is obviously very well-known in Hong Kong,’ I said, trying to appeal to her vanity again. ‘I suppose the newspapers here are forever bothering you for interviews.’

She gave me a curt smile, a quick flash of teeth and the glint of gold. ‘From time to time, yes,’ she said.

‘I was wondering if you could tell me the last time he was interviewed so that I could get a copy, it would help me with the background.’

‘But I have given you all the background,’ she said firmly, and I heard the click behind her closed lips.

‘It would help me to check that I don’t make any mistakes,’ I pushed. ‘Can you remember when he gave his last interview?’

‘I can, but it will be of no use to you, I’m sure. He was interviewed by the
Hong Kong Economic Journal
.’

‘I’ll try to get a copy, what date was it?’

‘It won’t do you any good, it is a Chinese newspaper, and I am quite sure you are incapable of reading Chinese.’ She got to her feet. ‘And now, I really must . . .’

‘What about the English language press?’ I said. She shook her head and walked to the door.

Oh well, all or nothing, I was leaving anyway. I asked her if Sally had interviewed Lai recently and I could see by the look in her eyes that I’d pushed her too far.

‘The girl who died?’ she asked quietly, and then realization dawned and her mouth fell open.

‘I should have realized,’ she hissed, venom in her voice. ‘I should have realized when you told me your name. You are her husband?’

‘Brother,’ I said. ‘She interviewed your husband?’

She flung open the door and click-clacked across the hall to the main entrance where the maid already had the door open for me.

‘I shall inform my husband of your visit,’ said Mrs Lai, and it sounded like a threat.

‘Did she come here?’ I pressed.

Her eyes hardened and the lips drew back in a canine snarl, and for one moment I thought she was about to spit in my face.

‘Leave my house now,’ she whispered. ‘You have overstayed your welcome.’ Then she turned her back on me and click-clacked back down the hall.

‘Goodbye, sir,’ said the maid, smiling brightly.

‘I love the way you roll your r’s,’ I said, and winked. She was still giggling as she closed the door behind me. At least I’d made a good impression on somebody.

I started walking down the Peak, heading for the harbour. There were no other pedestrians, and as I sweated along the pavement the cheapest car that drove past me was a very large Mercedes with a liveried chauffeur in the front and a child with a BMX bicycle in the back.

My shirt was soaked and I was dying for a drink by the time I’d gone a hundred yards and after half a mile I leant against a stone wall in the shadow of a leafy tree that wouldn’t have been out of place in Kew Gardens. A taxi dawdled along the road and I plunged back into the sunshine and flagged it down. The shirt felt even damper in the refrigerated air of the cab and I leant back and closed my eyes.