The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (40 page)

I showered and dressed and drank three strong cups of coffee and ate a Danish pastry with chopped up bits of green stuff on the top, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

It was Sunday so there was hardly any traffic on the expressway and I was in the
Post
’s office with Healy long before Jardines were firing their gun.

He met me in reception on the second floor, a cigarette in his hand and ash down the front of his shirt. The shirt was dirty enough to have been the one he was wearing last time I saw him, and it was certainly the same tie. He’d shaved, though.

He shook my hand and again my stomach turned as I felt the stub of his index finger press into my palm. The
Post
’s office was pretty much the same open plan tomb as I worked in back in London, though here the glass cubicles were gathered together in the middle. There were about half the number of terminals around and most were unoccupied. All the windows had been blocked off and filters fitted over the fluorescent lights so that the VDUs wouldn’t give the journalists eye-strain by the end of an eight-hour shift.

The desks were piled high with old newspapers, stacks of press releases and reference books. So much for the paperless office.

An old Chinese lady in blue jeans and a purple apron was emptying the waste paper baskets into a plastic barrel on wheels that was almost as tall as she was. She pulled it after her on a piece of thick rope.

Healy led me over to what I guess was his desk. It was covered in a thick layer of grey dust and there were cigarette burns all along the right hand side. An unhealthy looking china cup with a curved ‘S’ handle lurked behind an opened pack of Ritz crackers.

‘You want one?’ he asked, waving the box under my nose.

‘No, thanks,’ I said, and he took a handful and began slotting them into his mouth like coins into a vending machine.

I sat down in front of the grey and white terminal, as familiar to me as an old sock. I’d been using the sodding things for four years and my eyesight had suffered for it and there were times when I missed the old manual typewriters but the new technology was cleaner and faster and a lot easier on the fingers.

‘Same system?’ asked John and I nodded, sure, the good old Atex 6000, saviour of the newspaper barons and curse of the unions.

‘What was her logon?’ I asked.

‘SALLY, I think, but she might have had a separate one for the Sunday paper,’ he replied, so I keyed in OPT INFO and then called up the list of logon names. There were two, SALLYS and SALLYD, so I went for the daily.

I keyed in SALLYD and the VDU flashed once with ENTER PASSWORD. I looked at John and he smiled like a benevolent uncle. Passwords were supposed to be secret but most journalists knew each other’s.

‘STAR,’ he said. ‘She always was the modest one.’

I laughed at that because I knew what he meant and he was right.

I hit S-T-A-R, the screen flickered and I was through to her queue, a news queue with about a dozen stories in, none with her logon next to them.

The same went for SALLYS. Nothing. No stories, no notes, no contact numbers. As if she’d never worked on the paper. I flicked through her Save-Get queues, but they were empty, too.

‘She was working on at least three stories that I knew about,’ said John in answer to my unspoken question, lighting a cigarette and letting it dangle from the corner of his mouth.

‘If there was anything in the system it’s not there now,’ I said.

He sat down heavily on a chair and back-heeled it over to mine, wheels skidding along the vinyl-covered floor.

His nicotine-stained fingers flashed across the keyboard and he called up queue after queue, holding queues for finished stories, queues that sub-editors used and then he went into the features department section but there was nothing.

‘It looks as if everything she wrote has been purged from the system,’ said John.

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘How would I know?’ he replied, crumbs sticking to his upper lip. ‘I don’t go through their personal queues.’

Like hell, I thought. Everybody did in London and I was damn sure things were no different in Hong Kong.

‘Have you got back-up copies?’

‘Not of the stuff in the personal queues, only what goes through the working queues.’

‘Can you remember what she was working on?’

‘A few things, sure, but Sally was a loner. I knew about the stories I’d given her but the rest of the time she worked on her own and just produced the copy when she was ready. She was freelance, remember, not staff.’

I leant back on the chair and put my feet on the desk, next to the VDU. John inhaled deeply and blew a tatty smoke ring towards the ceiling. Ash scattered across the keyboard as he waved his hand at me.

‘She was working on a feature on drugs in Hong Kong, the cocaine scene, who was supplying it, where it was coming from, the damage it was doing. She was chasing up a couple of leads on the triads being involved and getting a lot of help from her contacts in the police.

‘The advertising department had asked her for a couple of articles on the diamond exchange for a supplement we’ve got coming out next month. I think she’d started on that.

‘And I’d given her a cracker of a story to chase up about the thousands of Vietnamese refugees being held in the camps here.’

‘Nothing new about that,’ I said.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ he replied, dropping ash over his trousers as he leant forward. ‘Seems one of the reasons the Government is taking such a long time to let the poor buggers out is because they reckon the North Vietnamese are using them as a cover for getting agents into the West. Once they get through the holding camp they can be sent to Britain, Canada, the United States. We’ve heard that the government is putting its own men into the camps to try to sniff out the spies. Great story.’

‘If it’s true,’ I said.

‘It’s a great story whether or not it’s true,’ he laughed, spraying biscuit crumbs over the VDU.

‘But there’s nothing in the system at all.’

‘Doesn’t look like it.’ He leant forward and used a page from a notebook to wipe the gunge off the screen, but he just smeared it across the plastic.

‘How come?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe somebody has beaten you to it.’

‘Who could have done it?’

‘Security isn’t exactly watertight here. There’s a whole pool of freelances with access, on top of a couple of hundred reporters and subs. The advertising department aren’t supposed to get into the editorial queues but it’s not exactly unknown. And there are always strange faces wandering around. They’ve even locked the toilets because of the number of people who were wandering in off the streets for a pee.’

‘Did she have a desk here? Or a locker?’

‘No. She kept everything in her briefcase.’

‘Briefcase?’

‘A big leather fake Gucci case she brought back from Bangkok a few months ago. She carried everything in it.’

‘There’s no sign of that either,’ I said.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘I wish I knew,’ I said. ‘I just wish I knew.’

The doorbell chimed twice and then there were footsteps and the door opened, a smiling Filipina face and a flash of white teeth, cute and curvy in a flowery print dress and working for peanuts for a Chinese family because peanuts in Hong Kong was better than nothing in the Philippines.

‘Yes, sir?’ she asked, rolling the ‘r’ like a West Country burr, smiling naturally, little lines crinkling at the corner of her eyes so she was older than I’d first thought.

‘I’d like to see Mr Lai,’ I said and she said, ‘Follow me, sir,’ and led me through the hall and left into a lounge with a huge picture window that looked out over Central and across the harbour, a view similar to the one from Sally’s flat but with no tower blocks in the way. The view from the top. A view that only money, real money, could buy.

‘Wait here, sir,’ said the maid and the eyes crinkled again and she smiled and walked out of the room, long legs taking their time because she knew I was watching her go. The room was light and airy and expensive, a room that could have featured in any upper crust glossy coffee-table magazine without a single alteration. It was a room to look at and to admire, not to live in. It was like being in a film set. The discreet wallpaper looked like silk which meant it probably was and the floor was made of a wood that I didn’t recognize, a brown so dark that it was almost black. At least twenty cows had given their lives to make the leather sofa that ran along one side of the room with enough space to seat a football team. The reserves, a referee and a couple of linesmen would have had no problem finding somewhere to sit, from the obviously antique Chinese wooden collectors’ pieces to the leather armchairs either side of a Victorian metal fireplace, not just for show because even Hong Kong gets cold in winter. That’s what it had said in the Cathay Pacific guide to Hong Kong, anyway. Above the fireplace was an oil painting, I didn’t recognize the style but I knew the name in the bottom right hand corner and I whistled gently. At one end of the room, to the left of the picture window, was a baby grand piano and I recognized the name on that too, and the man in the photographs in solid silver frames, with his family, arm around his children, a pudgy teenage boy and a gangly girl, a wedding photograph, a graduation picture, Lai Kwok-lee at work, rest and play.

Footsteps behind me, the click, clack, click of high heels on hard wood and I turned to see a middle-aged Chinese woman walk into the room, chin up as she measured me through inquisitive eyes and I gave her the professional smile, the one that puts them at ease and makes them think you’re on their side, the one that lulls them into a false sense of security so you can get in close and get what you want. She was the one in the wedding photograph with Lai so it wasn’t hard to work out that she was his wife.

The professional smile was having about as much effect as if I’d waggled my ears, I was looking into a cold, placid round face with narrow lips and hard eyes, hair short and permed, a wide nose and a large dimple in the middle of her chin. Not ugly but far from pretty, the body stocky and rectangular, clothed in a little something Chanel had thrown together for a few thousand pounds. The gold and diamond Rolex on her thick weight-lifter’s wrist wasn’t the sort they sell for $200 in Temple Street when the police aren’t looking, and the necklace would have kept a family of four in relative luxury for about a decade.

I couldn’t see her teeth because she wasn’t smiling but I would have bet a month’s expenses that any cavities she had were filled with enough gold to send a prospector running to the saloon shouting, ‘drinks all round, I’m gonna be rich.’

I told her who I was and who I worked for and I gave her the boyish smile, the one that says I’m only doing my job and I’d really appreciate any help you could give me because I’m not really sure what I’m doing. I raised my eyebrows expectantly but she still didn’t speak and the idea of pretending to throw a fit and trying to win the sympathy vote crossed my mind.

‘I was just admiring the photographs,’ I said, and nodded towards the baby grand. Get her talking, break the ice. ‘You have a lovely family.’

A slight smile, a curt formality for a compliment paid. No warmth.

‘Who is the photographer in the family?’ I asked, throwing her a question that was going to need an answer so I could at least see if she could talk.

‘My son,’ she said, and there was a glint of gold from the corner of her mouth. ‘He wants to be a professional photographer when he is older.’

I was in. Always works with mothers, the boyish smile and ask about the kids. ‘What was he doing on the roof of the train, Mrs McNee? Where did James go to school, Mrs McNee? How do you feel, Mrs McNee?’

‘He’s very good,’ I said. ‘Does he want to work for newspapers, or magazines?’

‘Advertising,’ she said, and I thought he’s probably right, there’s more money in it and probably as much integrity. My face was starting to ache. She was weighing me up and I got the impression she ranked me slightly higher than the man who came round to spray against cockroaches. She hadn’t offered to shake hands, she hadn’t asked me to sit down and she hadn’t smiled. Maybe she had oil on her hands, maybe the chairs weren’t made for sitting on, maybe she was on the sort of diet where they wire your jaws together. Maybe she just wanted me to get the hell out of her house.

‘How can I help you?’ she asked eventually.

‘Actually, it was your husband I wanted, Mrs Lai,’ I said. ‘Is he here?’

She made an impatient clicking noise behind her tightly closed lips and I could see that when I finally got the hell out of her house the maid with the ‘come get me’ smile and the long legs and the flashing eyes was going to get a tongue-lashing that would make her wish she’d stayed in the Philippines.

‘No he is not.’ The click again. The accent wasn’t English, it had a hint of Canadian so I guess she’d studied there or more likely spent a few years there to establish residency and get her hands on a passport while hubby kept churning out the money in Hong Kong. They’ll take anyone, the Canadians, providing they’ve got the money or the entrepreneurial background to set up their own business. Then when the lifeboat is ready they move back to Hong Kong to milk it for as much as they can before 1997, knowing that they can jump ship whenever the going gets rough.

I couldn’t hear the hum of an air-conditioner and I wasn’t likely to in a house like this, but I was starting to sweat so maybe it wasn’t switched on. I could feel dampness between my shoulder blades and at the back of my legs and I wanted to wipe my forehead but I didn’t have a handkerchief and even if I had I wouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of seeing my discomfort.

‘Oh, I’m sorry to have bothered you. Perhaps I should have phoned first.’ Bullshit. Rule number one of the doorstepping game – don’t let them know you’re coming. Rule number two – don’t give up. They’ll weaken eventually and ask you in so long as you’re polite and keep smiling. Rule number three – when you’re inside keep them talking so they don’t get the chance to ask what it is you want, because you can’t say you’re after a page three lead or a picture of their dead son or a chance to prove how good you are.