INCARNATION (11 page)

‘I would have told you,’ he whispered. ‘But I had to keep up the story as long as possible. He told me to.’

‘He?’

‘Matthew. Mr Hyde.’ 

‘Yes, I thought as much. Where did you meet him?’

‘In Sinkiang Province Number Five Labour Reform Camp.’

‘Near Khotan?’

‘Yes. Do you know it?’

David shivered.

‘By reputation. What were you doing there?’

‘My father was arrested, and they made me go with him. My mother too. Our family are Muslims. To the Chinese, that means we’re rebels. As far as they’re concerned, the entire population of Sinkiang is made up of counter-revolutionaries.’

‘They may not be entirely wrong. What did your father do to be put in the camp?’

Tursun looked down glumly at his mug of Horlicks. He had recovered the small boy who’d been hiding behind Hyde’s facade all these months, and with him all the buried emotions of a child.

‘Drink it,’ said David. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a kind of malted milk. Try it and see.’

The boy sipped tentatively at the liquid, frowned in puzzlement, then took another, longer sip. Satisfied, he looked up at David.

‘He had a workmate who was the leader of a Muslim faction. They had jobs in the same brigade at the Silk and Mulberry Research Centre. My father used to supervise the mulberry trees. He knew everything there was to know about the trees: which ones grew best in shade, which ones needed regular pruning. He once showed me how trees with dark leaves were best if you wanted silk for dyeing. His father taught him all those things. Grandfather died when I was three. My father worked very hard, and he kept himself out of trouble. Politics meant nothing to him.’ Tursun paused. Something was troubling him.

‘Mr Laing, my parents know nothing of all this - the deception, my coming here. Matthew Hyde told my father that he should follow my directions, that they would be given a house in England, and work. You must promise me that. They went through terrible things in the camp, and afterwards, in order to get me to India.’

David had already worked out that the last thing anybody wanted was to send the family back to China. The boy, in particular, whatever his real story, knew far too much ever to be allowed within a mile of anyone with so much as a drop of Chinese blood in their veins. No sooner had the thought formed than it was followed by another: who had asked Barry Scudamore to tail him that afternoon? Had David himself been the antique dealer’s target, or the twelve-year-old boy drinking Horlicks in front of him?

‘I need to speak to some important people, Tursun. It won’t be my decision. But you can rest assured that you won’t be sent back to China. I’m certain of that. Now, tell me how your father came to be arrested.’

Tursun took another mouthful of his drink. It was so cosy, David thought, as all these meetings were. He’d sat in this library with a succession of men and women, and sipped tea or coffee, and talked about the weather for a while. And from the weather they’d pass on to horrors beyond belief. He wondered if Glynis Hughes had the slightest idea of the things that were said in these rooms. Torture, rape, sexual infidelity, betrayal, murder, suicide, darkness of any and every kind. This boy sipping Horlicks for the first time knew secrets that could affect the lives of millions.

‘One day, the police raided the house belonging to my father’s workmate. His name was Abdul Wahhab. There were weapons in a pit under the floor. They arrested everyone connected to him. My father had a Koran in our house. He never read it - he can’t read. But the police said it was a sign of subversion. The court sentenced him to fourteen years in a labour camp. They sent my mother as well. I wasn’t at home then, but I was sent to the camp a month later.’

David stopped him.

‘Before you go on, Tursun, I’d like to know one thing: how do you come to speak such good English? You’re not going to tell me Matthew Hyde taught you.’

‘Is my English good?’

‘You know perfectly well it is. Even if you’ve never tasted Horlicks in your young life, you could pass as an English child.’

‘That was the idea.’

‘Whose idea? Matthew’s idea?’

The boy shook his head slowly. He finished the drink and put the mug on the table between them.

‘No,’ he said, ‘that came later. There is a school, a very special school in the east, near Shanghai. There’s a lake called Tai Hu.’

‘Yes, I know of it.’

‘It has almost fifty islands. One of them is called Chinghua Dao, Jade Island. You will not find it on any map. Chinghua Dao used to house a Buddhist monastery called Iingyin Si. It was shut down shortly after the revolution, and the monks never returned. Fifteen years ago the buildings were converted into a school. Its name is less poetic than the one the Buddhists gave it: Kiangsu Elite School Number Three.’

He paused, smiling as though something about the name or an image it conjured up amused him.

‘Have you heard of the elite schools?’ he asked.

David shook his head.

‘I’m not surprised. They’re a very well-guarded secret. Matthew Hyde had never heard of them either. They were established by the Chinese intelligence services in the sixties. The aim of the first school was to produce Chinese men and women who could pass themselves off as fully assimilated second-or third-or even fourth-generation Americans.

‘They took boys and girls at the earliest possible age and immersed them in American life and culture. They were brought up like Americans, in every respect. They spoke English every day. Their teachers were Americans who’d been well paid to do the job and keep quiet about it. The children watched American films and read American books and ate American food. Television programmes were recorded on primitive video machines. The latest records from the States or Britain were flown in. By the time they reached their teens, these were Chinese children only in spirit.’

‘Tursun, you’re not remotely like an American.’

‘I’m sorry, I should have explained. That was the first school. I think four American schools were set up in the end. They still exist, but I don’t know where they are. When they saw how successful the experiment was, they began to open other schools. There was a school for German, another for French, another for Spanish. That was when they started bringing in children from minority races, like myself. Han Chinese can’t pass themselves off as second-or third-generation everywhere.

‘I was discovered when I was four years old. Most Uighur children don’t try to speak Chinese until they’re taught it at school, and even then very few become fluent. By the age of four I’d learned as much Mandarin as a Chinese boy of my age. I had an ability for languages. One of the local cadres heard about me and notified Peking.

One week later, I was on a plane to Shanghai. The school I lived at was designed to train children for a life in Great Britain. Mostly, we were supposed to pass ourselves off as the children or grandchildren of Hong Kong Chinese. I was to pretend to be descended from Turkish Cypriots.’ 

‘You’d have done it perfectly, believe me. I’d like to know more about this later. But now I’d like you to tell me about Matthew Hyde.’

T
he heat had gone from the night. A faint ghost of it remained in corners, among the roots of trees, beneath the eaves of the house, or swathed about clumps of hollyhock and fern. David shivered and stepped to the French window. He looked out into the darkness briefly, then drew the curtains. Suddenly he sneezed, then several times more.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, turning to Tursun. ‘Hay fever.’

‘You should try some Chinese medicine.’

David smiled.

‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

Tursun shook his head. He had crossed from Sinkiang to Ladakh at the end of winter, he knew what cold was.

David returned to his seat.

‘How did you meet Matthew?’

‘He was in the camp. I met him about a week after he was brought there. He was arrested by a man called Chang Zhangyi. Chang Zhangyi is …’

‘I know who he is. Only too well.’

‘Your friend was in a queue for food. He muttered something in English when they handed him a plateful of muck, and I went up to him and said there were ways to get hold of better food. We became friends, of course. They treated him very brutally, much worse than the Chinese or the Uighurs. I did what I could to help, but it was very little. He was a good man. I liked him. Even when things were very hard for him, he would cheer me up.’

‘He always was a bit of a cheery blighter. There were times I felt like thumping him. How come he ended up in a labour camp?’

‘He told me he thought it was a trick to see what he might say if he was caught off guard. The camps are full of informers. It usually involves a deal to take a year or two off someone’s sentence. You can never be sure who’s genuine, who’s working for the party.’

‘Matthew would never have fallen for something like that. I’m surprised they even bothered trying.’

‘That’s what he told me. He and I had long chats during the first week after we met. I told him all about the school. He took a great interest in that. And then, one day he came to me and said he wanted to make a deal. He would tell me a bunch of lies about himself, which I could use to negotiate an early release for my parents and myself. I could have a letter written by him, in which he would request the British authorities to provide my father with a job and a house.’

‘Do you have that letter?’

‘Of course.’

Tursun slipped his hand inside his shirt and brought it out again with a badly crumpled sheet of Chinese writing paper. He unfolded it carefully and passed it to David. Outside, a nightjar called, its lonely cry echoing briefly among the trees. Tursun looked up, unsettled by the bird’s call.

‘This is Matthew’s handwriting all right,’ David said. He glanced through the note. ‘And here’s a little message for me. “David, you bastard - if you don’t set Tursun’s mum and dad up properly, I’ll come back and haunt you.” Doesn’t leave me much choice, does he? I’ll have to keep this. Do you understand? It’s evidence you met Matthew.’

‘You will give it to the right people?’

‘You can be sure of that. You’re a precious asset, Tursun. The state can spare a few thousand to see you’re treated properly.’

‘He said he wanted to train me to be him. To know everything there was about him. He said I was to claim to be a reincarnation, that it would draw less attention to me once I got to India. We spent weeks going over everything I had to know. Names, dates, places - all the things I’ve told you. And more there hasn’t been time for yet.’

‘I don’t see how …’

'I have a perfect memory. Like a tape recorder. He only had to tell me something once or twice, and I’d have it in my memory for good. Have you got people who can do that?’

‘There are people like you, yes. Some of them do amazing feats with numbers.’

‘He told me how to pass myself off as him, so I could be sure of getting attention, and then he gave me details of Operation Hong Cha. I wasn’t supposed to know what it was all about, just to be able to pass on what he’d found out.’

‘Do you know more?’

‘Yes. A lot more.’

‘We’ll start on it again tomorrow, then.’

The nightjar called again, just once. David looked up. He wondered where Matthew was. They’d been good friends. They’d worked together twice in Sinkiang, and Matthew had saved his life once in Lop Nor. Back home, he’d saved Matthew after the break-up of a long-term relationship. They’d been close. And now? Now, the only link between them was a twelve-year-old boy with frightened eyes and the memories of another man.

T
he journey home was swift and lonely. David checked more than once, but he was sure there was no tail. It was an elegiac return, like a lover’s homecoming when he has left a much-loved mistress behind. He had lost Matthew Hyde for ever, of that he was now sure. Chang Zhangyi would not have left him in that camp for long. And after that … ?

Everything shook as a jet fighter whizzed past overhead. As the crashing faded, he wondered what was going on. Night flights were ordinarily banned. There’d be a flurry of complaints tomorrow. David guessed the plane had flown out of Brize Norton, an air force base that normally plagued the country to the west of Oxford. Either someone had made an almighty mistake that they wouldn’t be allowed to forget in a hurry, or orders had come from very high up requesting night-flying practice within British airspace.

He pressed on, exhausted after a long day. It might almost have been better if he’d just stayed on at Carstairs, in order to get an early start with Tursun in the morning. But he had to see that Sam was all right, had to find a way of making up to him about today. And he needed to speak to Dr Rose as soon as possible.

He didn’t care much what happened to Elizabeth any longer. Her drinking, her infidelities, her abrasive behaviour were all Anthony Farrar’s concern now. Not for the first time, he wondered what Farrar really saw in her, beyond a good figure and a draining enthusiasm for sex. She was rich, of course, with heaps of shares in the family business, Royle International. Did Farrar want to get a foothold there? It seemed a painful way to go about something that might have been more easily accomplished on the old-boy network or the club circuit.

Another jet came thundering out of the empty sky. This one was following the course of the motorway, like a bomber following a river to its target. Surely it was way off the rule book to buzz traffic like that? David thought a discreet phone call might turn up some answers to match the uneasy feeling he was starting to get in the pit of his stomach.

The city appeared slowly, growing about him as though seeded out there in the dark. He remembered the first time his father had taken him abroad, to Central Asia. David had been nine, almost the age Sam was now. They’d gone to attend an academic conference in Samarkand.

Until then, David had never been very far from London. There’d been holidays in Devon or the Lakes, visits to an aunt in Scotland, and a school trip to the Wedgwood Potteries. And now, in a matter of hours, he was transported to a world straight out of the Thousand and One Nights.