The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (62 page)

The case dragged on and on and when it was obvious that it was going over to the next day I left and phoned Bill. He said I might as well call it a day and go home.

Home is a two-bedroomed house on the Isle of Dogs that I’d bought four years ago before the developers had laid the first brick. It had trebled in value, and I hated it, but it was within walking distance of the office and that was a big plus at the time because they’d taken my driving licence away. The door opened straight into the sitting room and the front window looked out over a scrap of garden about the size of a boy scout’s groundsheet on which grass stubbornly refused to grow. The area around our enclave of brick-built houses was still very seedy, decaying tower blocks of council flats, abused and neglected and a far cry from the towering homes of Hong Kong, where I’d never seen any graffiti or vandalism. On the Isle of Dogs our fences and walls were regularly spray painted with ‘Build homes for the people, not for the City’ and all that rubbish. The locals were still sour about what the eastward expanding City had done to property values here, but what the hell, the locals weren’t the sort who’d ever want, or be able, to buy their own homes whatever the price.

The developers had wisely built a twelve-foot wall around our settlement of middle-class boxes, giving it the air of a fortress surrounded by enemy territory. They hadn’t put broken glass or barbed wire on the top yet, but I was sure it would come. The wrought-iron gate was opened electronically by a guard who sat in what looked for all the world like a concrete pillbox, without the machine gun. In time, that would probably come, too.

A black cab dropped me off outside the gate and I waved to the guard as he opened it for me.

It was Robbie Brady, a forty-year-old ex-copper with short greying hair, a square jaw and a Spanish-style moustache that he’d started growing after he’d left the force. He was a good guy, and in the days when I’d been drinking heavily he’d often carried me into the house after I’d been poured out of a car. He understood, he usually had a bottle of Scotch tucked away somewhere in his little pillbox.

As the taxi drove off, a white Transit van screeched around the corner and braked heavily. The back doors were flung open and four Chinese youths jumped, or fell out, shouting and screaming, waving cleavers, faces contorted with fury and hate. They ran towards me, no planning or forethought, just a random charge that was terrifying in its ferocity. I slipped inside the gate and screamed at Robbie to close it but the mechanism was so slow that two got through before it clicked shut. The two trapped outside threw themselves at the gate and began to climb up, but at that point I was more worried about the two young thugs facing me.

They came at me with the cleavers raised above their heads, mouths open and shrieking. Robbie came out of his den, uniform immaculate, buttons shining, and a three foot long truncheon in his hand. I ran towards him and he stepped to one side, then dropped low and swung the stick like a baseball bat, catching one of my pursuers in the stomach. He grunted and pitched forward, the cleaver clattering along the ground, sparking on the paving stones.

I moved to pick it up but the second attacker was too close, and I ducked away as his cleaver sliced through the air missing my shoulder by inches. I backed away, towards the aluminium dustbins lined up behind Robbie’s pillbox waiting for the rubbish to be collected. I grabbed one of the dustbin lids and held it in front of me like a shield as the guy kept on coming, forcing me back against the wall. He chopped down and I raised the lid to block it and it cluncked down hard, banging the lid against my head. I lashed out with my foot and caught him just above the knee as he raised the cleaver again. Behind him I could see his two pals reach the top of the gate, then another car pulled up and four more Chinese got out, shouting and waving. Reinforcements. Christ, what the hell was going on? Everybody was screaming now, including me, and even Robbie was bellowing like a bull, charging towards my attacker as he slashed left and right, each time connecting with the edge of the dustbin lid. Each failure to cut me to the bone seemed to increase the fury of his attacks and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to fend him off for much longer, when Robbie cracked him on the back of his head with his truncheon and he fell to his knees and then keeled over with a long, low groaning wail. Robbie was breathing heavily, but he was smiling and I could see he was having fun.

‘Takes me back to my days in Notting Hill,’ he said, and we turned to face the gate. The four Chinese who’d arrived in the car had grabbed the two gate-climbers and were pulling them down by their legs. Once on the floor they started a pitched battle, four against two. The two with cleavers stood back to back while the four late arrivals surrounded them. They had a mixture of weapons, one was using one of those two bits of wood joined by a chain that Bruce Lee used to whirl around his head in kung fu movies, while another had two small swords with curly bits around the handle that he was using to try to trap one of the cleavers every time it came within reach. Another was twirling a staff around his head while the fourth had what looked like a hockey stick. Shit, it was a hockey stick.

‘I think they’re on our side,’ I gasped to Robbie, and we ran to join them. Robbie opened the gate and we spilled into the street just in time to see my two would-be attackers fall to the ground under a hail of blows. Even when they’d dropped their cleavers and curled up into fetal balls with their arms wrapped around their heads and their knees up against their chests, the four assailants continued to kick them and hit them, they didn’t stop until there was no sign of movement.

The newcomers picked them up one by one and threw them into the back of the Transit van. They came inside the gate to collect the other two while their leader, a thickset Chinese wearing an olive leather jacket and brown cords, came over to speak to me.

‘I am sorry about thet,’ he said, in a Cockney accent that took me by surprise. ‘Mr Lai told us to keep an eye on you, but I didn’t realize they were so close.’

‘What is going on?’ asked Robbie, swinging his truncheon by the side of his leg.

‘It’s OK, Robbie,’ I said. ‘These guys work for a friend of mine.’

‘I’m calling the police,’ said Robbie.

‘No, no, it’s OK, honest. Let them sort it out.’

He agreed reluctantly, and went back into his den. I could hear a bottle being opened.

‘This will not happen again,’ said the Chinese. ‘We will not let anyone get that close again. Besides, having failed so dismally they are unlikely to have another go. But if they do, we will be better prepared.’ He bowed slightly, the action totally out of character with the accent.

‘One thing . . .’ he added.

‘I won’t mention it to Mr Lai,’ I said. He grinned, realizing that I understood.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do not worry if you do not see my men. They will be around.’ He bowed again, and then got into the car which drove off, the van following with its cargo of four unconscious thugs, now firmly gagged and tied. I didn’t know what they planned to do with them and I didn’t care.

I was more concerned about how the triads had found my home. Jenny and Lai had both explained how the triads were active in London, but someone must have told them where I was and there weren’t too many people who knew where I lived.

Deciding where the funeral should be hadn’t been a problem. My mother had wanted Sally buried in the churchyard near her home in the West Country and had already chosen a coffin and a plot near a middle-aged oak tree by the time I was back in England. Jenny had made all the arrangements, just as she’d promised, and she arrived in London two days after me. She stayed at my house. I didn’t mention the attack in London, I didn’t want to worry her. Besides, the Chinese Cockney had been right, having been so soundly beaten they would be unlikely to try again. That’s what I told myself when strange noises woke me in the middle of the night and I strained to hear more over the sound of Jenny’s gentle breathing. If Lai’s men were still around, I never saw them.

I suppose my mother was used to funerals, having seen off two husbands, and at first I was a little surprised that she wanted Sally buried so close to home because she’d had no qualms about having my father cremated and I don’t think she gave a second thought about his ashes. Then I realized that the death of a spouse is different from the death of a child, and that she probably still had a lot of grieving to do.

I phoned Lai and told him when and where the funeral would be, and asked him to bring something with him, something that I hoped would solve the riddle of Sally’s murder. He said he’d be there.

It was Sunday when I called him, and the funeral was Wednesday. I spent the time showing Jenny the London I knew, treating her like a tourist and just enjoying the warmth of her company.

Not all the time, though. I got the name of a tame Hatton Garden diamond merchant from one of my pals on the Met, and we collected a stack of information about the diamond business from him, technical stuff like world prices, fluctuations, stocks held by the different diamond-producing countries and so on. He was able to supply just what I needed, including tables of average prices on a daily basis for the big diamond exchanges around the world.

He’d run the charts off from a computer and the graphics weren’t so hot but the figures were clear. Jenny and I spread them out on the kitchen table and looked at them.

‘So what are we looking for?’ she asked.

‘That, for a start,’ I said, and pointed to a drop in the diamond prices on the Hong Kong bourse about nine months earlier. It lasted for about a month and then the line picked up, it was a small dip but it came at a time when the graphs for London, New York and Tel Aviv were all on the rise.

She looked confused, so I explained. ‘Everywhere else in the world diamond prices were going up then. But in Hong Kong they were falling. Why? Because somebody was dumping diamonds in Hong Kong, increasing the supply so that prices dropped.’

‘So why did they stop?’

‘They didn’t stop,’ I said. ‘Look at the graphs. The prices of diamonds rose in Hong Kong, sure, but not as fast as elsewhere in the world. They obviously realized that selling too many at a time would attract attention, so they controlled the flow. Maybe they started selling them on other markets. But this is the giveaway. See how prices really started taking off when the miners’ strike started in South Africa. In New York, London and Tel Aviv, they shot up. But in Hong Kong, nothing. When the supply from South Africa was cut back, obviously more Chinese diamonds were put on the market. Not a huge amount, nothing compared with what De Beers produces, but enough to distort the prices in a small exchange like Hong Kong. Then after a few weeks prices start to rise again. See?’

‘But didn’t the dealers notice?’

‘Maybe they did. Somebody must have mentioned it to Sally, this isn’t the sort ofthing you stumble across. I suppose she came across it when she was doing her interviews for the advertising feature. In fact, thinking about it, I bet most of the dealers would be pretty pissed off about what was happening, seeing what it was doing to diamond prices.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Jenny, looking at the graphs. ‘Diamond trading is an international business . . . what if the dealers were buying in Hong Kong and then reselling them overseas? If whoever was mining them in China was dumping them in Hong Kong at prices below New York and London, surely the local dealers wouldn’t miss out on the opportunity of making a quick profit. They wouldn’t care where they were coming from. Just so long as they had a piece of the action.’

She looked up from the graphs, her eyes sparkling because she knew she was right. Then she frowned. ‘But why didn’t whoever was mining the diamonds simply sell them in New York and London themselves?’

‘How would they have got them there?’ I answered. ‘It’s one thing to get them from China to Hong Kong, but it’d be a different matter to get them unnoticed into the United States. By doing it through Hong Kong they could spread the diamonds around the world without attracting attention to themselves.’

‘Until Sally found out.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Until she found out.’

‘What now?’ she said.

‘Now we wait for Lai.’

On the day of the funeral Jenny stood next to me, her arm through mine, and she cried softly. She was on my right, my mother on my left, in the front pew of the sandstone church where my mother went every Sunday. Behind us were a scattering of relatives, a couple of dozen at most, mainly elderly, and several that I couldn’t put names to. Bill Hardwicke was there, and I was grateful to him for that. He hardly knew Sally, but he came anyway. We listened to a service given by a vicar who didn’t know the deceased but who did his best to persuade us that it was all for the greater good. We sang a couple of hymns and bowed our heads and then we stood in the graveyard and watched her being lowered into the ground.

I hadn’t seen Lai in the church but he was there in the cemetery, a grey wool coat draped over the shoulders of an expensively-cut black suit, flanked by two Chinese heavyweights. One of them I recognized because he’d helped save my life a few days earlier. The three of them stood to one side of the grave, about twenty feet away, close enough to intrude. Lai stood with his head bowed, his hands clasped just below his groin, deep in thought.

I knew that the Sally he was remembering wasn’t the same girl who filled my thoughts, the chameleon that was my sister had left behind a jumbled set of memories, and I doubt that any two of her friends would have seen her the same way. But that didn’t make any of the faces of Sally any less real, that much I knew.

When it was all over I walked over to him, with Jenny still on my arm. He shook my hand, saying nothing. I guess I knew what was on his mind, and he knew what I was thinking, so there was no need to put any of it into words.