FEARLESS FINN'S MURDEROUS ADVENTURE (18 page)

I felt for the poor child and called the mother back. I held out three US twenty dollar notes and she pushed the trembling girl towards me. I shoved the money in the mother’s hand, winked at the girl, and shooed them away. The mother was totally bewildered, and the girl was no longer terrified.

The look of relief on that child’s face returns to me still. What else could I have done? Bought a child? I don’t think so!

Mac reckoned that if we had taken the girl her relations would’ve been waiting around the bend in the road to snatch her back. I would’ve liked to have thought so, but I didn’t. With the girl gone to wealthy foreigners it would’ve meant one less mouth to feed.

Desperate situations call for people to do desperate things. I know I have. Killing my enemies I can handle…but buying or selling a child? As long as I’m on God’s green Earth I will never understand the depths of depravity required to do such an abhorrent, inhuman, thing.

HONG KONG

The first four
governors of Hong Kong were Irish men, starting with Sir Henry Pottinger who claimed the territory for the United Kingdom. The Scots like to think that their hands were on the Hong Kong tiller right from the founding of the colony…not a bit of it!

Some of the first western
hongs
in Hong Kong were indeed founded by Scottish Protestants, but all their business was done through the British East India Company. They exported tea, silk and other treasures – from those parts of China that the Roman Catholic Jesuit brothers had already reached and westernised for the greedy, drug-pushing bastards – and they sold opium to the Cantonese Chinese.

In 1898, nearly four decades after the last Opium War,
The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory
was signed in Beijing. The Convention granted control of Kowloon, Hong Kong Island and the New Territories to Britain. Technically, the New Territories were leased to the British Crown for ninety-nine years, while Hong Kong Island and Kowloon had been handed over forevermore. I don’t think the Brits will ever try it on with China again, or the Chinese – too big, too many of them.

Everything mostly settled down and stayed that way, until 1941 and the unfortunate arrival of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War Two. It was not an experience the European population would easily forget. The Japanese occupation was just a blip on the radar to the Brits back in Blighty, but it was a really rough time for the Hong Kongers; they were starved and worked to death by the occupying Japanese Army.

After the war the status quo returned, and fixtures of the privileged life – like the Hong Kong Club – reopened. Once again, the white man lived on the Peak, where the air is fresh and disease free; the Chinese couldn’t go there unless they were carrying out the bidding of their white lords and masters.

In 1965 China’s Chairman Mao stirred up trouble with the Cultural Revolution, quickly followed by his
Red Book
in 1968. The Brits knew how to deal with crazy
Red Book
-waving students in Hong Kong – they smashed their heads in with batons and flung them in jail out in Stanley.

This was pretty much the same way they treated people in Northern Ireland. In response to Civil Rights marches in the late ’60s, the Brits ordered the B-Specials to break students’ heads, burn down their parents’ homes, and throw their fathers and grandfathers into concentration camps. Eventually, the Brits were shooting innocent Catholics on the streets of Derry, and driving young men into the arms of paramilitaries – myself and Mac included.

In the 1920s it was the Black and Tans, in the 1960s it was the B-Specials. Our British neighbours never learnt that the more you stamp on an Irish Paddy, the better he gets at resisting you. The lads finally blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton – the one that Mac and I were to blow the summer we met Anna and Ingrid. They missed the Iron Lady and most of her Cabinet; it was a screw-up, but they tried to make the most of a bad job. The Army Council issued following statement:

———

I can see how pleasant life is for the expat in Hong Kong with enough money to live the high life – and this includes many Irish men and women. I have no intention of joining their ranks at work, rest or play. That’s what I keep telling meself anyway…but it’s not exactly working out. All my nights in Plume’s seem to have consequences. I’ve been put up for associate memberships in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and the Cricket Club; there’s even talk of proposing me for the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club.

The ability to talk rubbish, drink plenty, and pay your monthly bar chits are the only qualifications for an FCC associate membership. Turning up at weekends for the barbecues, wearing a Fred Perry tennis shirt, and not ravishing the members’ wives – unless they insist you do – are de rigueur requirements at the Cricket Club. And you’re probably better off not having a yacht, or even a rowing boat, to fit in at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. However, a healthy bank balance, to pay hefty bar bills, wouldn’t go amiss…or so they’ve told me.

I’m far too fresh in the colony to be considered for the Hong Kong Club, or the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club. Anyway, those retired colonialists on the club committees have the ear of the British Secret Services – to check a man out – and I don’t need anyone checking me out.

———

The New Year’s Eve party in the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club is considered a social highlight of the year. Unfortunately, I managed to put a dampener on it…at least for the vice-commodore and his family.

I don’t exactly recall the name of the Sloan Ranger I escorted to the party, but she may’ve been called Olivia. Anyway, she’d taken a shine to me on one of the weekend junk forays to Cheung Chau Island. Whoever she was, my date vanished once we were in the door. She was probably off somewhere swapping scandals with her fellow Sloans, or powdering her nose – probably with cocaine – or possibly downing a tray of shots in less than thirty seconds…her party piece.

Left to amuse meself, I noticed a girl in an outdated dress standing at the wall. She was watching the dancing couples, and I felt sorry for her obvious discomfort.

“Hello there young lady…would you care to dance?”

“Me? Yes…please. Thank you,” she said, with a shy smile. 

She’s awkward, and I get the impression she’s not used to being asked to dance.

“And tell me my beauty, who are you? What do you do? And where did you pop up from?” I asked, as we stepped on to the dance floor.

“Well, actually, I’m Veronica, Veronica ffrench. Daddy’s the vice-commodore here. He and Mummy are entertaining guests in their private quarters. And I’m far too young to be included in their private party, Mummy says.”

“I see. Well then, my dear, aren’t I the lucky one.”

“Lucky, you say…but how so?”

“Well, for a start, we wouldn’t be having this grand little dance would we, if you were locked away with a gaggle of auld fuddy-duddies. Now would we?”

At that moment the band struck up a fast dance. Trying to keep up with me, Veronica caught her heel in the brass inlays on the floor, and her body turned…but her foot didn’t. She twisted her ankle and fell to the Compass Room floor.

Before I got Veronica to her feet, the band stopped playing and a steward went looking for her parents. Every pair of eyes on the dance floor followed me as I helped her to a chair by the wall. When the music started again, I waited by her side as the dancers crowded back on the dance floor.

By the time the vice-commodore and his wife arrived to comfort their sobbing daughter it was almost midnight. I told them Veronica needed medical attention, and I offered to take her. My offer was met with a withering
it’s your fault, and you’ve ruined our New Year’s Eve
look from Mummy. Evidently, I wasn’t to be trusted to take her daughter to the Adventist Hospital on nearby Stubbs Road.

The vice-commodore and his sour-faced wife stood on either side of their injured daughter. They lifted her to her one good foot just as the bells, flares, fireworks and clocks of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club marked the start of a new year. Amidst the bellowing car horns of Causeway Bay and Stubbs Road, they supported Veronica down the steps leading away from the clubhouse and into a waiting limousine.

When Olivia – or whoever she was – arrived back on the scene, in the hope of a grope and a New Year’s kiss, I told her what happened.

“Oh dear, that’s a problemo there dear Finn. I’d give this place a wide berth for a while…definitely a very wide berth!” she advised, while checking the crowd to see if anyone had seen her talking to me.

I happily followed her advice.

HONG KONG: JANUARY, 1985

I’m finally meeting
Fran Cooke this afternoon, in the Peninsula Hotel – ten months after I arrived in Hong Kong. He’s been called back from Kuala Lumpur to report on a Malaysian bank official whose severed head was found in a sports bag at a Kowloon hotel. The rumour on the street links the gruesome murder to Fran’s Clarrion story. His story’s certainly got legs, and I’m curious to be filled in on what could turn out to be the biggest corporate fraud in the history of Hong Kong.

———

“Finn, let me give you a potted history of Clarrion and its illustrious founder, Mister G. Han. But first, let’s order a true colonist’s afternoon tea…watercress and smoked salmon finger sandwiches, followed by freshly baked scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, served with Victoria blend tea. How does that sound to you?”

“Very British, if you really want to know.”

“Excellent, that’s exactly the reaction I’m looking for…cricket on the green, all’s well within the Empire, and everyone’s a decent chap goes without saying.”

Now he has me really puzzled. Is he having me on, or is he a bit soft in the head? There’s been no British Empire for over fifty years – thanks be to God.

Proceedings were temporarily halted while our afternoon tea was laid out before us by two smiling girls; they’re wearing black silken tunics, white lace-bordered aprons and little starched white hats. They double-checked everything and retreated with coordinated bobbed curtseys.
Very 1920s
, I thought.

“I’ll play mother then Finn, if that’s all right with you,” announced Fran, as he poured tea into two bone china cups and pushed the sterling silver creamer closer to me.

Jaysus, Somerset Maugham eat your heart out. This is like something out of a Noël Coward play…and I wonder what role I’ve been given – probably the bloody butler!

“You’re looking puzzled Finn…don’t be. All this is by way of setting the scene that allowed one of the biggest financial scams in Hong Kong to get under way. The heads of the main banks and the regulators of financial services in the Colony are all ex-public school boys, steeped in the traditions of fair play. In other words, don’t be rude to new people, or too suspicious or intrusive, and give a chap the benefit of the doubt.

“It was in this context, back in 1972, that the newly arrived Mister G. Han decided to exploit these very British attitudes to investment and banking, and to create a classic bubble company using naught but smoke, mirrors and boxes of very expensive Cuban cigars. Oh yes…and what I’ve just been discovering, which is that he’s had the cooperation of some decidedly dodgy financial fellows in Kuala Lumpur all along. You see, everyone had confidence in Han because he spread rumours that his main backer was a filthy rich sultan. I think that’s just more smoke and mirrors though – to cover up the shady Malay investments – but I have to do some more digging before I know for sure.”

I’ve had my fill of watercress and strawberry jam, but Fran’s managed to keep my attention – mostly by the mention of Cuban cigars and a filthy rich sultan. I already know about smoke and mirrors to create an illusion. So, with my curiosity intact, he continued.