The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (51 page)

I smiled at Tyley, gave him a friendly wink and shook his hand firmly. He obviously wasn’t fooled because he didn’t offer to buy me lunch or let me marry his sister.

On the way back to Sally’s flat, lurching from side to side in the back of an aggressively driven taxi, I thought back to his question, ‘Did she often lose her temper?’ When I answered no I meant it, but now I remembered one occasion when she’d snapped at me. She was a teenager and the argument was over a boyfriend. Ever since our father had died I’d regarded myself as the guardian of her morals, whether or not she liked it, and I vetted her boyfriends with more care than the Vatican choosing a new pope. Hell, I didn’t vet her boyfriends, I chased them off.

I was staying at home over Christmas and I came back from the pub and found her in the lounge necking with a spotty-chinned sociology student from the local polytechnic. It was almost midnight and he had his hand up the front of her blouse when I walked through the door. I’d grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and thrown him outside before you could say ‘interfering with a minor’.

She’d stood in front of me and glared defiantly up and told me to keep the hell out of her life.

I said that she should be careful who she let touch her, that he wasn’t good enough for her and she shouted that I’d never approve of any of her boyfriends and I said I’d approve when she made a sensible choice instead of the deadheads she insisted on bringing home. And who was I to approve or disapprove? she yelled. Your brother, I’d said, grabbing her by the shoulders. Exactly, she’d screamed. You’re my fucking brother, not my father, and not my fucking husband and then she’d slapped me hard. Hard enough to make my eyes water. We stood staring at each other for a solid minute, and there were tears in her eyes, too.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, then she threw herself against me and flung her arms around my neck and stood on tiptoe to put her cheek next to mine. I could feel her warm breath against my ear. She smelt of spearmint. ‘I’ll always love you,’ she said into my ear. ‘Always.’

‘I know,’ I said. I can still remember the heat from her body as she pressed against me.

Woofer was where Howard had left him, alone and unloved. I knew how he felt. The phone hadn’t moved either. I picked up the receiver and pressed the recall button. The phone clicked madly like a grasshopper calling its mate, then I heard the ringing tone, then a voice said, ‘Lai Kwok-lee.’ That’s all, just his name. A direct line, maybe even a portable phone by his side. Two possibilities, either the phone hadn’t been touched since Sally had been in the flat. Or somebody who had been there after she died had used it. I thought the latter was more likely, Lai had wanted his pictures back. Or something else. I told him who I was.

‘I suppose we’d better meet,’ he said. The words came out slowly, like treacle from a can.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ I replied.

‘Can you come round to my office?’

‘Now?’

‘Certainly. Where are you calling from?’

‘Sally’s flat.’ I don’t know why I told him that because immediately he would know how I’d got his number. I guess I didn’t care, he was going to see me anyway.

‘You should be able to catch a taxi downstairs,’ he said. ‘Tell them you want to go to . . .’ and he spoke a few syllables of Cantonese. ‘Can you remember that?’ he said.

I said no, and I asked him to spell it out phonetically and wrote it down on a notepad by the side of the phone. I repeated it back to him.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘My office is on the thirty-fourth floor. I shall be waiting for you.’ He hung up on me before I could reply. Arrogant bastard. I had that written on one of my school reports, third or fourth year. Not bastard, of course, the governors would never have stood for that, but in the box where the form master got to sum up your character in twelve words or less he’d written that I had ‘yet to learn that arrogance is an unproductive posture’. Nice line, that. Always made me think of an Alsatian with its back legs crossed. I’ve never been back to school, never seen the teacher who wrote those pearls of wisdom. One day I’d like to see him again and compare salary cheques. I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a gin and tonic. I found a fresh bottle of tonic in the fridge behind a red and white carton of Dairy Farm milk and a pack of Tulip unsmoked back bacon. Well, it was hot and my throat felt tight and dry. The bacon looked fresh, sealed in plastic, but there was a cheesy smell from the milk carton.

‘First of the day,’ I said, and raised my glass to no one in particular. ‘But not the last.’ It tasted good. It usually did. I looked out over the balcony. The tiles on the floor looked like the ones on the wall of the mortuary corridor, cream with a green stripe, and with a shudder I thought of Sally lying naked in the freezer. Jenny had promised to take care of all the arrangements, but I had to speak to my mother first and I might as well do it now because it’d be early morning where she was.

I had to check her number in the small address book which I always carried. She answered on the third ring and she sounded dazed. I suppose the doctor had given her something to take the sting out of her grief, but she was perfectly lucid, just slow and tending to mumble. I asked her what she thought we should do about Sally and she said she wanted her back in England. I didn’t argue because the alternative was a funeral in Hong Kong where she had only friends, no relatives. It made sense to take her back, so I told my mother about Jenny and said she’d get in touch at some point and would she get the name of an undertaker who would handle things in Britain. She said yes but I repeated it all again to make sure she understood. Despite her grief she started probing about Jenny, who was she, how had I met her, all the questions asked by a woman who wants to be a grandmother.

She’d had no children by her second husband and neither Sally nor I had married. I’d come close twice but each time the job, and the drink, had been the more persuasive mistress and I’d walked away, much to my mother’s undisguised dismay. I told her not to be so silly and said I had to go and hung up.

Lai made me wait in reception for twenty minutes before seeing me. A receptionist with shoulder length lightly permed hair and pouting lips asked me if I wanted a coffee and I said no thanks. When she smiled I noticed she had steel braces on her teeth. There were a couple of magazines scattered on a low shiny black table and I idly flicked through them. One was a copy of the latest set of report and accounts of Lai’s company. On page three was a photograph of the man himself, just a head shot, in colour, the face serious and unsmiling, and below it a thousand word chairman’s statement about how well the firm was doing, how confident he was in Hong Kong’s future, how grateful he was to all the staff for their hard work and loyalty. Standard grade-A bullshit. In English and in Chinese. There were some very healthy numbers in the profit and loss account and the balance sheet. Lai was doing all right.

The centre pages were devoted to a montage of photographs of Lai’s operations, the office buildings he owned, an interior of one of his grocery stores, an up-market Chinese restaurant, a gorgeous film actress at work on a film set, and a hotel. The hotel was a metal and glass tower, typical of many in Hong Kong, but this one was familiar. It was the hotel where Sally had been swimming, late at night when the pool should have been closed. It was the hotel where Sally had died.

My head swam and I gripped the accounts tightly and felt my stomach drop away. My tongue felt too big for my throat and I wished that I’d accepted the receptionist’s offer of a coffee. The fact that Lai owned the hotel surely explained how Sally had had the use of the pool at night, and I wondered what other facilities they’d made use of together. I was having some pretty nasty thoughts when the door to Lai’s office opened and he was there. We didn’t shake hands, he just nodded and stepped to one side to let me walk through. The view was stunning, the whole wall opposite the door was glass, a panoramic view of the harbour and Kowloon beyond. Lai’s desk was set in the middle of the office so that when he was working he’d have his back to the window. A smart move because the bustling waterway would be too much of a distraction. A long, low Scandinavian sideboard to the left of the desk was cluttered with a collection of crystal and a large photograph in a red frame. The picture was of Mrs Lai, about twenty years younger than the version I’d seen at the house on the Peak. She wasn’t pretty, even then.

Lai motioned towards three low-backed settees arranged around a low coffee table, and we sat opposite each other, in silence.

He was wearing a dark grey suit with knife-edge creases, a light blue shirt with a white collar and a scarlet tie. He had a thick gold chain around one wrist, a wafer-thin watch on the other, and large gold cufflinks on both.

His hair was starting to grey and he had on the horn-rimmed glasses he’d been wearing in the photographs I’d seen in Sally’s flat. The crooked teeth were the same too. His smile was friendly enough, but Lai was a hard man. The hardness wasn’t a physical thing, it came from within. He sat with the quiet confidence that comes with having money, a lot of it. He was a man who knew he could have anything he wanted, that everything had its price and that he had enough to be able to pay it. What had he thought when he saw Sally, what was the price tag he’d seen when he looked at her? Flat? Porsche? And had she been worth it? Had he . . . God, the thoughts were back, the imaginings of the two of them together, her soft mouth, his crooked teeth. Oh God, no. I took the thoughts and strangled them slowly. I caught myself staring at Lai so I concentrated instead on watching a small freighter sail past in the harbour below. When Lai spoke it was in a brisk, businesslike voice, the arrogance lurking behind it like a mugger in a doorway.

‘So you’re Sally’s brother. She spoke of you often.’

I bet she did. Well she said not one word about you, pal. You were a deep dark secret that she kept well hidden from me. From the brother she shared everything with.

He reached up to straighten his glasses and the sleeve of his suit rode down to reveal the watch fully. It matched the one Hall had passed on to me, Sally’s watch. The one Lai had given her. Oh God, they’d had matching watches. The shared intimacy shocked me, it was as if I’d found them in bed together, laughing and kissing, her on top the way she liked it. I wondered if his had an engraving on the back, and what it said. I couldn’t bear the thought of the two of them together and I tried to blot the images out of my mind.

There was so much I wanted to ask Lai, but all that came out of my mouth was ‘Why? Why did she die?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly.

The silence fell on us again and I looked at his wife’s photograph smiling at me from the sideboard.

‘What were you doing with my sister?’ I asked.

‘I loved her,’ he said flatly, and I couldn’t stop the snort of disbelief exploding from my nostrils.

‘What did your wife have to say about that?’ I said, trying to wound, to hurt.

He shook his head, sadly. ‘She understood.’

‘Understood what? That her meal ticket was leaving. I bet that pleased her no end.’

‘Who said anything about leaving her?’ he said, and that stopped me dead in my tracks. ‘There was no question of me leaving my wife. She knew that.’ He could see the disbelief on my face. ‘So did Sally,’ he added.

‘Why the flat then? And why the car? And the money in her account.’

‘The money was all hers. I never gave her the money. She wouldn’t take it.’

‘The car then?’

‘The car was a present.’

‘A Porsche. A fucking Porsche. What did she have to do for that?’ The thoughts were running wild now, like mischievous dwarfs on the rampage, pinching and biting.

He was trying to calm me, using the voice of a parent speaking to a petulant child. ‘She didn’t have to do anything. I wanted to give her things. I loved her.’

‘So did I,’ I said with venom.

‘I know,’ he said quietly. Time stopped, our eyes locked as I tried to read his immobile features, tried to work out what he’d meant by that, if he really knew. He looked me full in the face as I studied him, perfectly relaxed, his lips slightly pursed, no wrinkles on his forehead. The martial arts expert at rest. Did he know? Would she have told him, would any girl ever admit to such a secret, that the love she shared with her brother was more than just the bond between siblings, that from time to time, when things really got tough, we’d seek physical comfort from each other, and had done ever since the first time, years and years ago, when our father had died and she’d crept into my bed. I knew that my half of the secret was locked away deep inside and I’d never, ever, reveal it to anyone.

Surely she would have been the same? She wouldn’t have told him. And yet Lai was looking at me with an air of quiet confidence that filled me with such jealousy that I wanted to strike out at him. Instead I attacked him verbally, trying to wound him with words. Time started again.

‘And your wife?’

‘My wife and I have been married for a long, long time. There is a bond between us that cannot be broken. You do not understand.’ He reached up to push his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose.

‘You are not Chinese,’ he said, as if that was the answer to everything. It wasn’t, and I let him know it.

‘Neither was Sally,’ I said. ‘Are you saying that she was happy with the arrangement?’

‘Sally and I did not have an arrangement, as you call it. We loved each other. But love does not necessarily imply that we would be together, or even that we would want to be together. I have a wife, and children, a family. And with that family comes responsibilities, responsibilities that I cannot, and will not, walk away from. I have my family, Sally had her job, her career.’ He shrugged, the shoulders moving powerfully under the jacket. I remembered the photograph of him in a karate suit. At first glance he looked soft, a pampered executive in squeaky clean clothes and all the trimmings, but the stomach was flat and the legs in the tailored trousers looked strong and his hands had powerful fingers, the nails clipped straight across. He sat with them in his lap, fingertips gently touching, elbows resting on his knees.