The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (50 page)

‘About the triads? Well if that’s what they think they’re mistaken because there was nothing in her flat and all I got from the police was a dress, a bag and the watch.’

‘But they wouldn’t know that, would they? Maybe you should try to find out what she was working on.’

I explained that I’d already done that, and told her about my visit to the
Post
’s office. As I did I realized that she was now thinking along the same lines as me, that Sally hadn’t killed herself. I had an ally.

‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘If she had done something to annoy one of the triads, they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of making it look like suicide.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re not afraid of publicity, far from it. Triad killings are as public and as bloody as possible so that they act as warnings.’

‘You seem to know a lot about triads considering that you’re not from Hong Kong.’

She laughed. ‘They’re not confined to Hong Kong, boy,’ she said. ‘There were triad gangs back in my old neighbourhood in San Francisco. Everywhere there are Chinese, there are triads.’

‘Doing what?’ I asked.

‘Usually drugs, they handle a lot of the drugs business from Asia to Europe and the States. And they’re into prostitution. The closer we get to 1997, the more they’re expanding their operations overseas. Hey, have you reported this to the police?’

‘No point,’ I said. ‘They didn’t steal anything and, as you so succinctly put it, they didn’t hurt me too much. And after what I’ve seen of the police here, I’m sure they’ll think it was self-inflicted. Shit, I wish I knew what was going on.’

‘You and me both,’ she replied. A waiter came over and handed down the menus. Jenny looked over the top of hers.

‘I’d like to help,’ she said.

‘You are doing,’ I said.

‘No, really. You probably haven’t even thought of one tenth of the things you’ll have to do. For instance, did Sally leave a will?’

‘What girl her age makes a will?’

‘Exactly. So someone will have to look after her estate, terminate the lease on the flat, dispose of her things. Look, I don’t want to be morbid but there are a lot of things that have to be taken care of.’ She was talking briskly, like a school-teacher organizing a nature walk, and I knew that she was making sense.

‘And you’re going to have to decide what you’re going to do about the funeral.’

‘Funeral?’

‘Of course. Will she be buried here or back in England? And if it’s here how will your relatives come over?’

‘God, you sound so methodical,’ I snapped.

She bit down gently on her lower lip and studied the menu. She kept reading as she spoke. ‘I wanted to help, that’s all. She was my friend, and I feel that you’re a friend too.’

‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to snap at you. I suppose it’s just that Sally is still a very sensitive area and I flinch when anyone presses it.’ I reached over and nudged her hand softly, just enough to make physical contact, to touch.

‘If the offer’s still open, I would like your help,’ I said quietly. She nodded, and smiled again, and I felt better. A lot better.

I had the shepherd’s pie, she had a salad, and we both seemed to have a good time. When we parted she kissed me on the cheek.

When Howard had said ‘Tyley’ I’d heard it as ‘Tai-lee’ and so I did a double take when I met him in his office ten floors above a public car park in Central. I’d been expecting a Chinese.

‘Paul Tyley,’ he’d said and shook my hand firmly and then waved me towards a black leather chair opposite his desk. His office was more that of a civil servant than a policeman, the walls were bare except for a few tasteful prints and his degree in a pine frame. No rusting filing cabinets here, everything was teak veneer and the carpet went all the way up to the walls. There was a pen set on his desk, a grey telephone, a crystal ashtray and a grey folder that had a black and yellow tag like a tiger’s tail. I couldn’t read the name on it from where I was sitting but I knew it was Sally’s file.

Tyley had a boyish face, lots of even teeth, smiling blue eyes and a mop of light brown hair that he kept brushing out of his eyes because it was just a bit too long. With the desk between us he looked to be in his early twenties, but when we’d shaken hands I’d seen the deeply-etched laugh lines around his eyes and there was loose skin around his throat and the forehead under the fringe was marked with wrinkles from years of frowning. Distance was kind to Paul Tyley, but what the hell, I’m no picture.

‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ he said.

‘Did you know Sally?’ I asked.

‘I’d met her a couple of times.’

‘Socially?’

‘Not socially,’ he said, fingers absently running up and down the tag. There was probably a colour coding for the files. I wondered what yellow and black signified. ‘She came in for an interview. Twice,’ he added.

‘She was under investigation?’

He gave me a smile that said ‘of course’ and I gave him one back that said ‘I knew you’d say that’. We sat there grinning like a pair of frightened monkeys.

‘Why?’

‘We’d had an anonymous letter pointing out that she was a journalist living well beyond her means, driving an expensive car and with a wardrobe of quality clothes.’

‘And the flat.’

He nodded, and then turned it into a head flick to swing the fringe to one side again.

‘And the flat,’ he said. ‘A very expensive flat and no accommodation deal.’

‘You check every anonymous tip-off?’

‘Most,’ he said. ‘Especially those concerning the police, civil servants, jockeys and journalists. All of them are in positions of influence, and all can abuse it. Corruption runs right through Hong Kong. Or at least it used to.’

He sounded like a government warning, ‘taking bribes can damage your health’. He opened the file and looked down, the fringe hanging vertically, a curtain of hair that hid his eyes as he read the top sheet.

‘I thought this place thrived on corruption,’ I said.

‘Not anymore,’ he said. ‘At least not as openly as it used to. We’ve pretty much cleaned up the police force, and business here is a darn sight cleaner than it used to be. And we sorted out the stock exchange.’

‘But why Sally? Why check up on her?’

‘Because of the letter,’ he said.

‘No, I mean, why would anyone bribe her?’

‘We’re not concerned with the why,’ he said. ‘Just whether or not it was happening.’

‘And was it?’

He shook his head and looked down at the file as he spoke.

‘No, she was clean.’

‘So where was the money coming from?’

He looked up sharply, squinting slightly as he toyed with the tiger tag. Tyley was sitting with his back to a large picture window, but from where I was all I could see was blue sky, the colour of a five pound note, clear and cloudless.

‘The money?’ he asked.

‘The flat. The car. The clothes.’ I gave him the smile that said ‘trust me’ and he gave me the one that said ‘go fuck yourself.’ This was the sort of non-verbal communication that was going to get him a punch in the mouth.

‘I’m not sure I should tell you.’

‘She’s my sister.’

He looked as if he was going to say ‘was’ but he didn’t.

‘You’re a reporter,’ he said.

‘So was she. If it makes you feel any better we’ll say this is off the record. Not for quotation, etc, etc, etc’

‘I’m more concerned about why you want to know.’

I hate it when they talk like that, playing hard to get. I knew he was going to tell me, he knew he was going to tell me, but he didn’t want to make it easy. He wanted to be talked into it, they always do.

‘She was my sister,’ I said, leaning forward to rest my elbows on my knees. ‘Now she’s dead and I want to know why.’

‘We’re not investigating her murder. Our job is to investigate corruption.’

‘You were investigating her.’ I stood up and began pacing up and down, parallel with the desk. The view was better, the sky was just as blue but I could see a bald spot the size of a digestive biscuit in the middle of Tyley’s head, as bare as an airport runway. He self-consciously reached up to touch it so I guess I was staring. I looked at his ashtray instead. The telephone trilled and he listened before saying, ‘No, I hadn’t forgotten, I’ll call him now.’ He replaced the receiver.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Just my secretary reminding me about a call I have to make.’ He picked up the receiver again and rapidly hit a series of buttons. The phone was similar to the one on Sally’s desk, same design, same colour. He shrugged. ‘Engaged,’ he said. ‘Where were we?’

‘Sally,’ I replied. ‘Where was the money coming from?’

I walked over to one of the watercolours and pretended to study it, to cut down on the eye contact so that he’d be more at ease. It’s easier to speak to someone who isn’t looking at you head on, ask any Roman Catholic.

‘She had a rich friend,’ he said quietly.

‘Dennis Lai?’ I asked, and turned to look at him.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

‘Yeah? Well I’m not,’ I said.

‘She told you about Lai?’

‘What would she tell me?’ This wasn’t getting us anywhere, so I decided I’d better play the nice guy, for a while at least, and I gave him a winning smile. ‘She didn’t tell me anything about Lai, I saw his picture in the flat, that’s all. I just put two and two together.’ Humility, that always goes down well.

‘Well, you came up with the right answer. Lai paid for the car, the flat, and most of the things in it. She was quite open about it, with us anyway, but she made it plain that she didn’t want it generally known. He’s married, you know.’

‘She didn’t do that good a job of keeping it a secret,’ I said. ‘I’ve already met one person who knew.’

‘That’s not surprising, Hong Kong is a very small place, and it’s certainly not a place for secrets.’

‘But once you found that it was Lai who was helping her, you dropped the investigation?’

‘No, we kept the file open.’

‘Why?’

Tyley shrugged and simultaneously flicked the fringe from his eyes. ‘That’s the way we do it. We rarely close files, unless we get a successful prosecution.’

‘Did drugs come up at all?’

‘Drugs?’

‘Sally was working on a drugs story, something to do with a cocaine ring among the gweilos here.’

‘Drugs aren’t part of the ICAC’s brief. But no, we didn’t even touch on it.’

My mind was whirling, firing off in all directions, trying to make sense out of what was happening, why Sally had been killed.

I moved back to the chair and sat in it. The ice had been broken now, he was talking freely, the earlier reluctance had evaporated like sweat off a camel’s hump.

‘So who would hurt her, Paul? Who would want to kill my sister?’

He paused, still fingering the tag. ‘Mrs Lai, maybe?’

‘A woman scorned? Hardly likely, is it?’ She hadn’t looked the killing type, but maybe the thought of losing all that money would push her to the edge. And it wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford to pay someone to do her dirty work. ‘Did you come across any enemies while you were investigating her?’

‘Not really. Certainly no one who would want to kill her.’

‘Somebody must have hated her enough to write that letter.’

‘After you’ve spent some time in Hong Kong you’ll realize that anonymous letters are nothing special out here. It’s a pretty poisonous place. But writing a letter is one thing, killing is another.’

‘I guess so.’

He looked at his watch. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll try that number again.’ He picked up the receiver, and this time pushed the recall button, and then waited as it dialled the number. He swept his hair back with his hand, listened for ten seconds or so, then put the phone down.

‘Still not there,’ he muttered. He looked at me curiously for a while. ‘I’ve got to ask,’ he said, ‘what happened to your face?’

‘I was mugged,’ I said.

‘Did you report it?’

I shook my head. ‘No, they didn’t take anything. Look, what do you think happened to my sister?’

‘How would I know?’ he said. ‘The last time I saw her was . . .’ he checked inside the folder, ‘four months ago.’

‘How did she seem?’

He sighed deeply, folded his arms across his chest and settled back in his chair. Talk about giving off defensive signals, Tyley was practically going into hibernation.

‘Please, I have to know,’ I said.

He seemed to reach a decision, ran his fingers through his hair and said, ‘The first time she was here she was helpful, seemed very interested in our job here, she went out of her way to answer our questions.’

‘About Lai?’

‘Everything. She quite happily supplied us with bank statements, invoices, receipts. I wish all our investigations were as pleasant. But the second time was a completely different matter.’

‘In what way?’

‘She went for me, verbally. Called me all sorts of names, accused us of persecuting her. Said she’d splash my name across the front page of the
Post
.’ He smiled. ‘I had to tell her that it’s against the law to report on an ICAC investigation and she hit the roof.’

‘Maybe you’d touched a nerve during the second interview.’

‘Or maybe she’d just got that much more attached to Lai. Or maybe at the time of the second interview she really did have something to hide. Or maybe I just caught her on an off day. Did she often lose her temper?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t sound like her.’

‘Perhaps it was the wrong time of the month,’ he said, and looked at his watch. Subtle.

‘I won’t take up any more of your time.’ I was going to stick the word ‘precious’ in the sentence but I thought better of it. No point in antagonizing Paul Tyley, I might need him again. That’s the name of the game, you nurture and encourage the contacts you need, the ones you have to go back to. The rest you can burn, like tissues, use once and throw away.