The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (63 page)

He said hello to Jenny and she reached out to touch his arm. Lai’s two bodyguards stood by impassively. They were wearing dark suits but were obviously uncomfortable and they both kept moving their shoulders around as if they felt trapped.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I said, more to fill the silence than anything.

My mother walked along the tarmac path that led to the road, supported by my aunt. They looked curiously at Lai and I as we stood together on the grass, but said nothing.

‘You’re welcome to come back for a drink,’ I told Lai. ‘My mother has arranged something.’

‘Thank you, but no,’ he said quietly. ‘I have merely come to pay my respects to Sally. I will leave you now.’

‘Did you . . .?’ I started, but he nodded his head before I finished the question. He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘You can check the numbers?’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘And once I know who we are looking for I’ll call you.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘A few hours at most. I’ll do it when I’m back in London tomorrow morning.’

‘I’ll be at the Inn on the Park,’ he said. ‘I’m staying over for a few days to attend to some business. Call me there.’

‘I will,’ I promised, and Jenny and I walked with Lai and his two minders down the path in silence. Before they left in a dark blue Jaguar I gave Lai Sally’s watch, mumbling something about being sure that Sally would have wanted him to have it.

‘What’s in the envelope?’ Jenny asked. I opened it and showed her.

‘Sally’s phone bill?’

‘Yeah. What I originally asked for was a list of all overseas calls from her flat, but I didn’t realize that Hong Kong telephone bills are all itemized, with every telephone number and the time and cost of each call. And as the flat was in Lai’s name it was no problem getting an up-to-date copy of the bill.’

‘And?’

‘And then I’ll be able to track down every number and find out who she spoke to in England before she died. Because I think that she rang up someone here on the diamond story, and I think that whoever it was, was worried enough to have her killed, ordered Seligman’s car to be bombed and tried to have me killed too.’

She shivered, and I knew it wasn’t the cold. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go talk to your mother.’

There were only fifteen overseas numbers on the phone bill, and nine of those were in Peking, spaced out over the three weeks before Sally had died. The remaining six were all UK numbers.

Jenny and I had sat on the floor in my lounge on the thick red-dyed sheepskin rug that hid the wine stain on the carpet. The CD player was on, digitally playing Louis Armstrong singing something deep and meaningful. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but she was still wearing my light blue bathrobe and her hair was damp, fresh from the shower. I wasn’t due in the office till three but I’d put on number two suit, the one where the zip in the trousers was starting to go, and my Glasgow Press Club tie, green with a yellow quill. Who says journalists have no sense of style?

Of the six UK numbers, one I recognized immediately, it was my office number, the main switchboard. She’d phoned two days before she’d died and been on the line for forty-five seconds which meant she’d tried to leave a message and I cursed Roger the fucking Dodger or Handy fucking Andy or whichever bastard had been too lazy to tell me she’d called. Or maybe she’d phoned late at night and a cleaner had answered, and if she’d got through to me maybe she wouldn’t have told me what she was up to, she probably just wanted to pick my brains. If she’d had anything really serious to tell me she would have rung back, but that didn’t stop the ache in my heart and the horrible gut-wrenching suspicion that if we had talked there might have been something I could have done to have saved her life.

Before she’d phoned me there were three London numbers, one of them she’d dialled twice. The sixth call I noticed with a jolt like an electric shock was several days after she’d fallen to her death and then I realized it was our mother’s number and it had been me that had made the call when I’d gone back to the flat to use the recall button.

That left three numbers.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Jenny.

‘I’ve got a contact who works for British Telecom who’ll trace numbers for me, but there’s no harm in trying the direct approach first.’

First I dialled the number that Sally had called twice. Both times she’d been on the phone for about half an hour, and when a voice answered ‘London Diamond Exchange’ I realized why. She’d been getting background information on the diamond business, the sort of facts and figures that Jenny had scattered on the floor around us, production, prices, exports and so on.

The second number was De Beers, and that made sense because she’d be asking questions about the strike, the miners’ walk-out described in the cuttings that Jenny had got for me in Hong Kong, how diamond production had been hit and how there were still no signs of the miners going back to work, despite two of the miners’ leaders being killed in mysterious, and violent, circumstances.

The adrenaline was starting to flow and the hairs on the back of my neck were starting to stand on end because I could feel we were getting close, I felt as if I was on the trail with Sally, closing in for the kill. Except that when Sally had gone in she’d probably been her normal headstrong self and gone charging in without a second thought. I hit the seven digits and there was a pause and then the ringing tone. Six, seven times it rang and I was starting to think there was nobody there and then the receiver was picked up and a woman with a crisp upper-class accent said ‘Mr Kaufman’s office’ and then it all clicked into place like the jaws of a steel trap springing shut.

‘Mr Kaufman’s office,’ the voice repeated, this time with an impatient edge to it.

Jenny looked at me and mouthed ‘What’s wrong?’ but I shook my head.

‘That is Warren Kaufman’s office isn’t it?’ I said.

‘It is,’ said the voice. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

‘Is he there?’ I said.

‘I’m afraid he’s in a meeting at the moment. Can I get him to call you back?’

‘No, no, that’s all right. I’ll call back later. Thank you,’ I said, and put the phone down.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Jesus H. fucking Christ.’

‘What’s wrong?’ said Jenny, reaching for my hand and holding it close to her chest. I told her.

I told her that Sally had called my office but hadn’t spoken to me because she’d been trying to get Warren Kaufman’s number and had obviously found someone to give it to her. And I told her that the reason Sally hadn’t told me what was going on was because the man who was behind the diamond operation in China was the same man who owned the newspaper I worked for. And that explained a whole stack of worries that had been gnawing away at my insides. Like why she hadn’t called me. Why Bill had managed to track me down to my home. Yeah, the fact that Warren Kaufman was behind it explained a lot.

‘Are you sure it’s him?’ asked Jenny.

‘It was definitely his office, and other than De Beers and the diamond exchange his was the only UK number she called. You can see from the phone bill.’ I handed it to her. ‘She was on the line for twenty minutes so she must have given him a real grilling. And I reckon she told him more than she should have done. You know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. She probably said she’d been to the mine in China, seen the security arrangements, and somehow she managed to trace the ownership of the mine to him.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I promised Lai I’d give him the name.’

‘You must be sure first.’

‘I am sure.’

‘Let me check it out first. It’ll be easier starting with Kaufman’s name and working backwards. Let me see if I can connect him to China. Just give me one day at Companies’ House.’

I agreed, reluctantly because in my heart I was already sure, but I told her everything I knew about Kaufman and his company. She dressed while we were talking and fled the house.

She phoned me in the office later that evening, her voice excited and her breath coming in short gasps.

‘God, you were right,’ she said. ‘One of Kaufman’s mining subsidiaries has an offshoot which has its head office in Panama, the same address as the company that’s involved in the mining joint venture. And I’ve rung one of my contacts in Beijing who says yes, Kaufman was there three years ago talking about exporting industrial diamonds. And I found out why Kaufman wanted to keep it all low key.’

‘Because he’s ripping them off to the tune of millions of pounds a year,’ I said.

‘No, there’s more to it than that. Both he and the Chinese wanted no publicity right from the start because he’s also in partnership with the Taiwanese in a computer manufacturing company in Taipei. Some of the equipment he’s making there has military applications and when Kaufman first started dealing with China there was a lot of tension between the two countries. They’re still technically at war and there was no way the Chinese could be seen to be dealing openly with a man who was such a good friend of Taiwan. So it suited everybody not to announce details of the mining venture.’

‘But I thought relations between the two were warmer now?’

‘Sure, but that’s a recent phenomenon, there’s no problem these days for companies doing business with both. But a few years ago it was a very different story.’

‘We’ve got him,’ I said, elated.

‘Yes, boy, we’ve got him. You can tell Lai, now. See you soon.’

I phoned Lai at his hotel and we talked for the best part of an hour. I was all fired up to dish out the same treatment to Kaufman that Lai had given the triads in his factory. I wanted Kaufman to suffer. I wanted him to scream. And I wanted him dead.

I know a better way to hurt him, Lai said. Trust me. We will have our revenge. He told me what he wanted to do, revenge Chinese-style.

‘We’ll do it your way,’ I said, when he’d finished.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

It was just four days after the funeral when it started. A couple of paragraphs on a left hand page of the
Financial Times
saying that a Kaufman Industries construction subsidiary had been awarded two prestigious hotel contracts, one in Shanghai and one in Peking. Jenny pointed it out to me over breakfast. I was getting used to having her around. Already her clothes were hanging next to mine in the wardrobe and her toothbrush seemed like it had always been in the bathroom. She’d taken two weeks’ holiday to stay with me and I wasn’t looking forward to the time when she’d have to go back to Hong Kong. Neither of us could work out what the significance of the hotel contracts was, but the following day the shares nudged up a couple of points.

A week later the office was buzzing with the news that a group of the paper’s executives were flying to China to advise on the setting up of a new English language newspaper in Peking. The rumours hit fever pitch just before Kaufman called a press conference confirming the deal. Kaufman Industries was to build a newspaper publishing plant just outside the Chinese capital using state-of-the-art technology. In return for a US$40 million investment the British company would get free advertising space which it could then sell on to other companies. The paper was pitched at an initial circulation of five hundred thousand but Kaufman had also agreed to build another ten plants in provincial centres with pages transmitted across the country by satellite. Within five years sales were projected at nine million in a country that was eager to learn English and take its place in the modern world. Kaufman himself led the team that visited China and for several days our paper was filled with pictures of him, Kaufman at the Great Wall of China, Kaufman in the People’s Palace, Kaufman meeting top Chinese dignitaries. At the end of his four-day visit to the mainland the Chinese announced that Kaufman would be the main contractor in a new superhighway linking Peking to Guangzhou. But the revelation that really started the share prices soaring was that there would be no restrictions on foreign exchange, the Chinese would pay in American dollars.

Kaufman was hailed as the man who had finally cracked the China market, one of the heavy Sundays ran a centre-spread profile on him and Tony Wilkins, one of our best feature writers, was seconded to ghostwrite a book by Kaufman on doing business behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Jenny and I watched and waited, spectators unable to take part, not even knowing what Lai had planned. Jenny had extended her stay, using up her full quota of paid leave. When I asked her what would happen when her holiday entitlement ran out she just laughed and made a joke about unpaid holiday. I wanted to ask her to start looking for a job in London, maybe ask for a transfer within her company, but I was frightened of showing her just how much I cared. Frightened of showing her how much I needed her.

In the two weeks after Kaufman’s China visit it seemed as though the industrialist could do no wrong, contract after contract was signed, with more and more of his finances and management being committed to the mainland: a soft drinks bottling plant, a power station, several office blocks and a stake in a new container terminal. It looked as if Tony was going to have his work cut out for him.

Kaufman became the darling of the Stock Exchange and in less than one month since I’d left Hong Kong the shares rocketed forty per cent. There was talk of the shares being listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a sign of Kaufman’s faith in the colony and in China. According to the guys in the City office Kaufman was stretching himself a little too far, and there were market rumours that the group was planning a rights issue to raise more capital. Not that that was reckoned to be a bad thing now that Kaufman Industries had the support of China to what appeared to be an unprecedented extent and the big institutions were queuing up to grab a piece of the action. Their hopes proved to be stillborn when Kaufman called a press conference to announce that a Chinese investment bank was taking a nine per cent stake in his company. Admittedly they were paying a bargain basement price but it was evidence of a further strengthening of the links between the conglomerate and the mainland and the City lapped it up.