2.

Stanley that afternoon was basking in what might have been idyllic South China Sea sunshine if it had not been for the smog bank which was moving in with impressive zeal across the water. The traders had claimed yet another centimetre of the pavements and alleyways to display their silk handbags, pashmina shawls, polyester ties, fridge magnets, oversized t-shirts, marble globes, chemical hand warmers and cards with your name in Chinese hand crafted for all to see. Tired retirees from America had waddled down from the air-conditioned tourist buses and were sucking on their first Haagen-Dazs cone of the day. Feral Australian children were attempting to blind each other with laser pointers or poking each other with folding walking sticks and Mommy was selecting an embroidered silk jacket for the pooch at home. Delifrance was proposing a new type of baguette with canned peaches, Canadian bacon and crabstick mayonnaise. Watsons the chemists was offering family packs of real Swiss reject chocolate and wasabi flavoured corn snacks. The fruit stall at the crossroads was still warning people not to photograph the fruit. The Bauhaus colossus of the library cum sports centre was closed because today was a Thursday and people didn’t read or exercise on a Thursday. At the front, fish and chips and a pint of frothy cold stuff still to be had for only a hundred dollars but you had to sit downstairs because upstairs was already set for candlelight dinner at five hundred dollars for two, box wine excluded. The workers were felling a few more trees and making way for another gigatonne of fresh, dead, progressive concrete.

The epicene Little Man in the little lane below my flat, who ran the side of a wall he had usurped from another trader, had greeted me with his usual barrage of Cantonese insults for having the temerity to be seen with a varied selection of attractive local girls in broad daylight the past two years. His tribe of semi-triad friends were gathered around an enthusiastic game of cards where no money was on the table but the month’s wages hung in the air so thick you could touch them. The slavering demented son of the tired old lady had said good morning as he always said although it was now getting on for mid-afternoon. The trader twins who sold their dad’s Turner Goes Oriental seriography were lounging and playing some inane game on their new Nokias.

I approached the low bungalow of the Southern District Kai Fong and Family Advancement Association building where a few old local men were skimming through the newspapers looking for a the latest hot racing tip, or perhaps they were reading the political commentaries. It was hung with gaudy election posters. The cooks from the Thai restaurant in their Wellingtons and soiled aprons were squatting and having a cigarette. The whiff of the foul drain hit me again for a moment then mercifully passed. The fat middle-aged woman selling the genuine sterling silver jewellery gave me her usual beaming smile because I had once bought a knick-knack there years ago, or maybe because she was just naturally friendly.

Old Mr Sung’s shop was shut up already or had probably not even opened that day. He only seemed to open on rent collection days. I made my way down the alley at the side of the house. At the end I could just discern the sign for the Italian-style trattoria I had once eaten shortcrust pastry pizza in. The alley was dark and the air was still. I knew Mr Sung lived above his shop. He lived alone. His wife had died a year into my first tenancy and I still remembered the white-garbed crowd at the funeral and the huge wreaths on wooden props. I rang the bell. The metal grille was open. Sung was half-deaf, I knew, so I pushed the door. It opened slowly and ground a little on its hinges. The staircase was just as musty and dusty as my own. I made my way up it and came to the flat doorway which was festooned with red and gold banners with the usual huge Chinese characters of good luck and prosperity. No bell here so I hammered on the door. No answer. I tried the handle. It turned and I pushed the door open. It gave a foot or two then it caught on something which yielded slowly, then shifted a little. I looked around the door into the still entrance alcove. The light was still on and my breath stole away from me as I saw what had stopped the door’s progress.

He lay just the way bodies lie when they suddenly become inanimate objects rather than things which have curled up for slumber. One arm lay under him and his head was twisted the wrong way. His glasses had cracked and lay on the other side away from where his face was now looking with a calm, slightly puzzled stare. The other arm lay lifeless, cupped and palm upwards, frozen and shrivelled-looking. I put a hand to his neck and it was as cold as ice. No wound visible except a crack on the head which had not bled much. In the cramped living room through the open door ahead of me there was no sign of any unusual disorder. The plastic bags suspended on bamboo poles along the ceiling were bulging and dusty, the long wooden sofa was covered by newspapers and a solitary silk cushion. The grimy cream curtains were drawn and fluttered a little at the half-opened window. The only odd thing I noticed was a large, dead unplucked chicken on the glass topped coffee table. It smelt of nothing much at all. There were no dirty dishes in the kitchen and the bathroom towels were dry.

I found my packet of tissues in my jacket pocket and rubbed the door handles clean. I then rubbed around Mr Sung’s waxy neck. I closed the door again with the tissue still in my hand and stepped down the staircase with a gentle, slow, deliberate tread. I wiped the street door clean, the doorbell button clean and closed the door again. In the alley there was no one to be seen. I walked towards the Italian restaurant. It was closed. I feigned interest in the menu in the window a moment. My heart was thumping, my mind was racing but at the edge of all that I was numb all over and my legs were as heavy as a dead elephant.

I turned past the small memorial, the study room, the small clinic and waved vaguely to the Indians at the restaurant. Then it was past the Thai restaurant again, down the alley and up the stairs to my flat. The stalls on the way were all a blur. I sat down on the blue leather sofa a moment but it offered no comfort. Was it a set-up or did stumbling on corpses come with the territory of private detective malgre lui? It looked good in fiction but in reality it wasn’t all that thrilling. Death was ugly, rather tedious and mundane and so was the prospect of explaining to policemen in shabby Hong Kong police stations, again and again, in triplicate. I had done enough of that already. If it was all aimed at me, who wanted me out? Get a grip Trelford. Get a plan.

I shut down my laptop and put it in its bag. Then down the stairs again, a turn left and along to the top of Main Street, as the narrow lane was called. Then right and a determined stride past Delifrance, the parked vans, the silk shops and the postcard stands and the mini luggage emporium and at last I was at Watsons. Then up the stairs to that little Sitting Out Area where you couldn’t smoke but you could loiter and stare and think up your next move. I turned on the computer and it shot into action from its electric sleep. I turned on the wireless and sure enough it found the unsecured wifi connection which broadcasts all over Main Street. I was into Internet Explorer and on the Hong Kong police web site in an instant. Hong Kong police like you to contact them. They have a whole list of forms you can use online just for that purpose. There’s a Complaint of Vehicle Obstruction Form, two Lost Property forms, two Access To Data forms, one for complaining about Unjust Issue of Parking Tickets and another for reporting a Telephone Nuisance. You can even make a complain about the police themselves if you have a lot of time on your hands and you are a truly concerned citizen or simply have a more than usually bloody mind. There’s no form for reporting dead landlords.

Right at the bottom of the page though there’s a link marked General Inquiries. Click on that and your computer warnings swing into action and tell you all about suspect certificates and hostile cookies. Press on regardless. The police in Hong Kong seem to ask a lot for just an enquiry, things like where you live and what your ID card number is. Next I found that handy little Babelfish translator site where you transform basic English into basic just about anything.

URGENT: I am a friend of Mr Sung who lives at XX Stanley Main Street, Hong Kong Island above his shop. I have not seen him for many days and I cannot contact him by telephone. I am worried. He is an old man and he lives alone. Can you send an officer and see he is OK. Thank you very much.

I translated all that and pasted it into the form. I invented a likely name and a likely address somewhere in Guangdong. I clicked on the button and it was gone.

My telephone rang. It was Larry.

“ I banked the cheque. The retainer is just what we need. The Management Office was beginning to get jumpy.”

“ Don’t worry. She probably owns the building. What gives?”

“ Well our little party has a somewhat colourful past for all her twenty-five years. Not that she’s tried to break into films and music but they seem to have broken into her. Quite a few glossy magazine pics with minor entertainment mobsters so maybe she doesn’t say no all the time.”

“ It’s the butter not melting in the mouth look. Gets the guys all the time. Are we going to get hold of all the e-mail you think?”

“ I can try. There are ways.”

“ I just don’t believe the baloney we’ve been handed. Neither do you I suspect.”

“ Always best to stick to the facts. We know nothing really. Did you find her car?”

“ Not exactly.”

“ Meaning?”

“ I’ll let you know about that. In the fullness of time”

“ Don’t you go simple on me. I get enough of that already.”

He hung up.

There were two good places to park a Lancia in Stanley but perhaps Adeline chose a bad place. I had a vague memory of spotting something unusual and flashy on one of my jogs, just in front of the clinic, along by the playground, and I made my way there before the boys in green decided to tow it away. It was still there, a cute red number which had money and the Big Me written all over it. There are ways of inconspicuously breaking into a car in broad daylight but I only knew one. Larry’s patented master keys were valuable at such times but he’d left the Lancia one out of the pack. There was nothing to be seen much in the front or back seats except for the usual Hello Kitty cushions. I made my way to the boot and fiddled with it for a moment. Maybe Italian cars are all the same. Maybe they aren’t. They can’t be that difficult to steal. Italy’s the only country I ever saw where car owners walk around with their car radios in their hands. I was on my tenth key in the European ring and about to sidle away when the boot lurched and sprang open. There was a bag inside, a neat leather holdall, I picked it up. It wasn’t very heavy. A quick wipe all round with the tissues. Nothing suspicious about that. Lancia owners were such clean people.

I walked past the Sung house but it was still as before. No law anywhere, no blue and white tape, no flashing lights of any description. Bodies in Hong Kong are usually found by their smell. No one hears the blows. Call me sentimental, but I felt a little attached to Mr Sung’s corpse. I didn’t want it to start to putrefy. Outside my block the Little Man was reading something. He did that sometimes. Aberrant behaviour. You can’t get enough of it. He didn’t look up. Some of the stall staff gave my bag a glance. Now I looked at it seemed to be more than just a little chichi, not a Trelford bag at all. But maybe I was going up in the world.

Upstairs, I opened the bag, this time wearing the rubber gloves with a hundred legitimate uses in home and office. Every Hong Kong girl wants a Gucci bag but a copy will do. It shows willing. This was no copy. It contained all the things the modern girl needs but which she doesn’t necessarily want to haul around in her handbag. There was a couple of books on political theory, a hand mirror, a pair of silk pyjamas, a hair brush, a battery of make-up, sanitary towels, a folder of photos, a high-resolution digital camera without a data card and pair of slippers. There was even an electric toothbrush and a small brown cuddly bear which had taken a lot of cuddling. All in all, the kind of outfit a girl might compile if she was going to leave town for a few days.

I looked at the camera again. I turned it on. It had nothing in the memory, nothing I could see anyway but Larry might have a way of finding what had been taken recently. The photos were the usual collection of harmless-looking shots: Adeline before the White House, Adeline in front of a university, Adeline on a plane and Adeline in Lan Kwai Fong sipping a cocktail. Adeline with gorgeous young pouting girlfriends or skinny-looking, frowning young men in expensive suits. No one in particular seemed to crop up more regularly then anyone else but one of them I recognised. It was Mr Sung’s tall, shiny and somewhat incompetent son, the boy who had gone to great lengths to impress the judge at the Lands Tribunal that time with his knowledge of the law.

The sleuth in me felt along the lining. No lumps or apparent irregularities. It was a beautiful lining and all the little pockets contained nothing but dust and fragments of wrapping. I looked through the make-up bag again. It all looked very expensive and there was a number of face whitening bottles with names I recognised from the IFC mall. I held them against the light. I opened the lipstick and the mascara, the face powder and the eye lining pencil. Then I saw it. It could have gotten there by accident but I didn’t think so. Those tiny flash data chips were getting cheaper these days but they weren’t yet throwaway items. I kept mine in a little plastic box in my manbag. Putting one under the face powder was an obvious place for a detective but most people aren’t detectives.

I blew away the dust around it and reached in my bag for the USB adapter. On my laptop, the images flashed up in an instant. The same collection of college gal memorabilia but young Mr Sung was definitely in the foreground this time and seemed to be having fun. There were a lot of pictures of Stanley too and some of them seemed to be taken from within the Kai Fong building. I recognised the old lady District Councillor, the one who seemed all too chummy with the Stanley grandees. I also saw that a number of documents  had been photographed, some of them several times, just to make sure.

Wherever Adeline was, she sure knew how to leave clues.

3.

Chung Hom Kok sprawls like a shanty town above and below the hill line over Stanley but it isn’t a shanty town at all. It has some of the richest people in Hong Kong in its sea view or nothing condominiums, people for who panic consists of having all the servants out of the house or all of the limousines and minivans being serviced at one and the same time. They add bits to it every now and again, a new set of three-storey mini-palaces suddenly arises to give a novel skewered edge to an impossible line of perspective and whichever direction the roofs decide to go, you know it’s going to be all right. It’s crazy paving reaching for the skies.

I got Alex Sung’s address from the legal documents he had so lovingly served me on behalf of the Lands Tribunal. I wondered if he would ever forgive me for pointing out that the flat he thought he owned on behalf of his father had never actually been registered and that the suit his father had launched on his behalf had to be struck out for that rather legalistic reason. The mansionette at the end of one of Chung Hom Kok’s little treeless avenues was part of a neat series which had been named Scenic Horizons but you only got the view when you got well inside, past the high iron filigreed gates and the whitewashed walls lovingly topped with concreted-in broken bottles and scanned by a series of closed circuit cameras. All the cars were hidden in a purpose-built bunker. There was a splashing fountain in the minimalist mock-patio courtyard set within a black marble imitation of a bit of the Trevi scaled down to make way for them.

The old security man eyed me uneasily because people arriving on foot are always suspicious in Hong Kong, even large middle-aged foreigners in suits. I had to sign in yet again and then he rang to see if the party was in. He was, and he was receiving visitors even without speaking to them and knowing their business which I thought very nice of him under the circumstances. There was an election poster hanging up in the lift, for someone who looked vaguely familiar but it wasn’t Mrs Chow. I hoped that the boys in green had not yet discovered the body or at least not scratched their collective heads sufficiently to locate the relatives. I don’t like visiting a house of sorrow unless it owes me or a client a reasonable sum of money. Even then I have been known to think twice about it. They’d saved a lot of space on the lift lobbies and the corridors so they made up for it by adorning the walls with the more decent reproductions – or conceivably originals - of Boucher and his cronies and given delicate stucco reliefs to the corners and pink marble floors and gold fittings just about everywhere else. The cameras were more discreet but they still had every angle covered. The air conditioning was great for cooling down your furs.

He’d opened up already I saw as the lift doors parted and was standing there in an immaculate white terry dressing gown with a pair of brown leather slippers on his strong brown feet. He was a handsome piece of Chinese beef if ever there was one, almost as tall as myself and I felt sure he had real abdominals. Not that any of that interested me but I’m sure the girls dropped like flies as he approached and swooned even more intensely when they heard his address. His gleaming black hair was wet and combed back, there was more than suggestion of a square jaw and the eyes and brow were in the noble mould Trelford used to be before the rot set in.

“ Mr Trelford.”

“ I’m on a job. Looking for a girl you know. Can I come in. Just a few questions.”

“ A girl?”

“ Yes. I’d rather not discuss it out here. ”

He made way for me and I entered the apartment. It was large for Hong Kong, all cream and gold and glass tables, stand-up lamps and modern leather upholstery. The centre piece was the big slab of the sea view window which took up one wall with a showy balcony beyond it where some comfortable garden furniture and shrubbery in pots gave it the holiday resort feel. The beginnings of an orange sunset forcing its way through the smog gave the room a dreamy, poignant kind of look. There were the closed doorways of  two rooms down a short corridor and I assumed all the domestic business happened even further down the corridor as I could just see a small dining table and the edge of a fitted electric range.

“ How’s your father?” I asked as I took a seat on the broader than it needed to be sofa.

He froze for just a moment then let that pass for a while as he straightened up a few cushions and bought in a bottle of mineral water and a few glasses from outside.

“ Fine,” he said at last and put the water in front of me with a fresh glass. His English was ABC, fluent and mannered but don’t look too hard at the tenses and prepositions and articles.

“ Or would you like a coffee?”

“ Not for the moment thanks. You know Adeline Chow, I think. Her mother’s rather concerned about her.”

“ Her mother?”

“ You know who she is of course. Have you seen Adeline recently? ”

“ Let me think about that” but his face didn’t look as if he was thinking much at all. “It would have to be last week some time.”

“ How well do you know Adeline?”

“ Oh, well, you know, we hang out.”

“ Hang out?”

“ We see each other sometimes. She’s down here working at the moment. You know her work.”

“ Not really. Tell me about it.”

“ Well, she’s working on research for her mother’s organisation. The elections are coming and they’re anxious to get out more of the vote, that kind of thing. Plus the fact that she wants to do a Ph.D. and she can see the subject for a thesis in the political mechanisms in Hong Kong.”

“And when did you see her last?”

 “ I guess it was Sunday, now I come to think. She was at the election rally in Repulse Bay. I went along. Has anything happened to her?”

“ We don’t really know. She sent an e-mail to her mother yesterday saying she had to get away for a while but she left her car. We have no idea where she is and why she’s gone.”

He got up and went to the window and studied the horizon.

“ How long have you known Adeline, Alex?”

He turned and took a seat opposite me. The glow of the shower he had emerged from was fading. He looked as drawn and as haggard as a gym-trained hero in the peak of condition ever does.

 “ Hard to say really. I mean we played together as children. Although our families never got on.”

I looked as bemused as I could.

“ You probably never heard the Sung-Chow feud, did you? It all stared over a piece of land in Stanley in the Forties, after the war, and I was always told I could never play with them. But we did.”

“ Very heartwarming. And when you grew up?”

Another pause, a twitch in the seat and a rather involved adjustment of his dressing gown.

“ Well, we saw each other still.”

“ I see. I think I’ll have that coffee now.”

He jumped up from his seat and made his way to the kitchen down the corridor  and I tagged behind him, wondering whether to play the long shot or the ace. The long shot was the safest of course.

“ And your lady friend can come out now. All that holding your breath isn’t good for anyone in the long run.”

Sung Junior froze but his back was acting as good as Gielgud. It stood there stiff, immobile with two spread muscular legs below them, like hunks of striploin in a butcher’s window.

I turned around, I got out my pipe and filled it with Erinmore. There was going to be either a long explanation or a sudden apparition. In the end, after long, long seconds, a door opened and a tall, beautiful Chinese girl emerged in the sort of flush you only see in a woman on your pillow Sunday mornings if you are lucky.

I sat down and gave her time to decide who she was going to run to. But she didn’t run to anyone. Her high heels tinkled on the wooden floor as sexily as you could hope for. She was dressed in a neatly tailored suit in midnight blue with a short skirt which showed a lot of nice and immaculate leg. Her long black hair was slightly tousled but you didn’t look at the hair. She had a sweet baby face, full sensuous lips, large deeply-set naive eyes which looked as if they could light up at the right moment but never if anyone was watching. Her nose was almost aquiline and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine she could ever become like her mother.

“ Nice to meet you Adeline,’ I said. “Come on down and tell me all about it.”

She turned to gaze at Junior just a moment and his virile back had become a full frontal schoolboy caught stealing apples. Then she walked delicately but confidently to one of the leather armchairs and sat in it, swinging one leg over the other, which only added to her allure. I didn’t like the way she was holding her handbag.

“ My mother hired you to find me?”

“ Well, looks as if I may be out of work for a while. Case closed.”

“ But I don’t want to be found. Not yet anyway.”

Her voice had a Roedean edge to it but was far from girlish. Junior had joined us now and was reaching for a cigarette from a packet hidden in a large inlaid rosewood cigar box in the middle of the coffee table. He lit it like it was his first ever and coughed violently on the draw. I lit up my pipe and smiled a little and for no real reason except that you don’t really expect such piquant amateur dramatics in Chung Hom Kok on a Thursday afternoon.

“ Perhaps this might persuade you.”

Nothing had prepared me for what happened next. Girls with gats in all the the B-movies I had ever seen had gloved hands after all. This hand was long, ungloved, delicate and was holding a shiny new Kel-Tec semi-automatic. All that time with Larry’s booklets came back to me in a flash. Nasty little weapon the Kel-Tec semi. No safety catch and awfully easy to hide.

“ Did you get it in the Lane Crawford summer sale or was it a gift with your new platinum card?”

She didn’t even smile at that which I thought a bit mean in the circumstances. The thing was aimed right at my midriff.

“ Pardon the melodrama Mr Trelford but I’m getting to lead a rather melodramatic life. So why are you here exactly ?”

“ It might help my memory a little if you stopped pointing the gun at me. They’re nifty gadgets and no girl should be seen without one. But they are inclined to go off when you least want them to. The suit just came back from the cleaners.”

She laid the gun on her lap and it was now pointed towards the window. Junior coughed again and I looked Adeline deep into the eyes but I was the first to blink.

“ Where did you get the gun from, angel? Who’s frightening you?”

“ I thought I was the one asking the questions, Mr Trelford.”

I poked my pipe bowl with my finger a moment and looked away.

“ I was hired by Mrs Chow, Alex’s mother, earlier on today to find you. It seemed a little strange as there are lots of reasonably competent local operators to do a search job. We normally handle the expat stuff, you know, recoveries, acquisitions and a bit of dirty digging into company background before investors from abroad part with the shekels. Now and again we do some divorce work but I usually give that to my partner as I’m not a keyhole peeper by nature and I’m liable to see things from the other party’s point of view before long. She gave me half an e-mail to look at where you stated you wanted to get out of Hong Kong a while. She wouldn’t tell me the exact reason or whether she knew the exact reason but that’s par for the course with half the cases we handle. We have to believe the dollars rather than what people tell us. I happen to know Alex because his father’s my landlord and is apparently looking after your car for you. I thought Alex might know what’s going on as I can’t seem to locate Mr Sung senior.”

“ Where did you look?” she asked.

“ In all the usual places. No one knows where he’s got to.”

“ And the car?”

“ That’s still standing outside the clinic last time I looked.”

There was a pause. Not much of a pause for what was going on and certainly not a lull.

“ As I said, Mr Trelford. You don’t know what’s going on and you ought to be afraid you might get to know. I suggest you go back to my darling mother and tell her you did find me and that I’m safe and well but I just don’t want to be bothered right now. That also happens to be the truth. Hong Kong is beginning to depress me more than I can say. Everywhere you turn there’s people on the make and people on the take. They’re a shoddy bunch and I don’t think this is the place for me.”

“ So where do you think you’re going to go? Not that I’ll tell anyone and not that you have to tell me. I can’t truss you up and deliver you back to Mommy’s with a lassoo around your neck. You’re too old for that and frankly I’m not the kind of guy to do a woman like Mrs Chow’s bidding without asking a lot of questions first. She stinks.”

She laughed, a high tinkle, the sound her high heels made but in a lower key.

“ We certainly see eye to eye on that one, Mr Trelford.”

I gave her one of my cards, the one with all the contacts numbers and e-mails. She looked at it for a moment and put the gun into her bag.

“ I’m always reasonably ready to help. If you leave the gun at home. Where did you get it? ”

She was just warming to that when a telephone rang. It was Junior’s and it was one of those clam-type things I loathe. Whatever he was hearing was causing him a mixture of emotions. He stiffened a little and put it back into his pocket.

“ It’s my father,” he said at last. “He’s dead.”

There wasn’t grief, there wasn’t shock. In many ways it sounded like relief.

“ Where?” I asked at last.

“ At home. I have to go and identify the body. You’d better stay here, Adeline.”

4.

There was still no blue and white tape and no meat wagon and no flashing lights when we got there. There was the usual man with a camera but the forensic squad hadn’t been called. There was a policemen at the door and two inside. One was an inspector. I knew him, his name was Chiu, a fleshy man the wrong side of fifty, and his English was reasonable.

“A friend of Mr Alex,” I said as I entered and he gave me a once-over which didn’t say anything much.

“ Heart attack we think,” sad Chiu in Cantonese. “ We’re very sorry, Mr Sung.”

Junior looked at the body and there was real horror showing now. His face looked panic-stricken.

“ How did it happen?” he asked.

“ Well, he fell but that probably didn’t kill him. When did you see him last?”

“ I think it must have been Sunday. The family dinner. He looked fine.”

“ You can never predict a heart attack at this age.”

All the strokes and heart attacks I’d seen looked a different colour but it was hard to gauge anything by that now. The body was the usual sickly grey quickly turning to pure translucent white. Sung Senior looked quite horrible in death.

“ So you can formerly identify him. That’s all in order then. We’re going to movc the body to the Government mortuary. You might like to inform a funeral director. Have you got a number?”

Sung Junior was still staring at the scene, saying nothing. Suddenly he raced to the bathroom and there was the unmistakable sound of vehement but largely unproductive vomiting.

“ It strikes some people that way,” I said but Inspector Chiu and I knew otherwise. Chiu said something to the the two other policemen, one of whom was closing the living room window. The chicken was nowhere to be seen, I noticed. Then more people arrived: another Sung son, a much smaller one who bore no resemblance to Junior, and a scrawny-looking girl in beige office wear who was probably his girlfriend. Then a number of the old worthies from the Kai Fong popped their heads around the door, gasped, cursed and slowly hobbled downstairs. By the time all that was over, Junior had returned from the bathroom and sat down on the living room sofa, his face like a man with a stag night hangover.

I had other thoughts in my head at that moment than being a bereavement counsellor so I made my excuses and left. As I was passing the Italian restaurant again, my telephone rang and to keep in with the mobile spirit I decided to talk as I walked to my flat. It was Mrs Chow.

“ Hello Mr Trelford. Any news?”

“ Not exactly. Did you know Mr Sung at all?”

“ Sung?”

“Yes, the man who was looking after the car.”

“ Oh yes. What about him?”

“ He’s dead.”

“ Oh really. How did it happen?”

“ The police aren’t sure. Could be a heart attack.”

“ I see. Unfortunate. Well I have good news for you. I think your job might be over. Adeline has been in touch by telephone and she says she’s quite fine but she just needs some rest at the moment. I quite understand her. She’s still in Hong Kong and well so there’s no point looking for her any more. But you can keep the retainer. I’m very grateful to you and if....”

“ What else did she say?”

“ Sorry?”

“ And when did she call you?”

“ Just a few minutes ago in fact. I was just going into a meeting.”

“ And she sounded all right?

“ Absolutely fine, yes.”

“ The reason why I ask is that until you or I have actually seen her, you can’t be a hundred percent sure she isn’t being held against her will or something of that nature. Did that explanation ever occur to you, Mrs Chow?

“ Oh I don’t think that’s the case here. She’s a rather an emotional girl. If something were wrong, I would have felt it. I think the matter is settled, Mr Trelford. And now I really must be getting on.”

The line went dead. Interesting place, Hong Kong. Come and find my daughter, Mr Trelford. Highly urgent, Mr Trelford. Take the case, Mr Trelford. Then only a few hours later it’s pull down the curtain, get off the case and shut up, Mr Trelford. But she hadn’t actually said the last part again. Perhaps she trusted me.

I was more interested in the contents of the little data chip. I sat down in Casa Trelford, ignoring the cold pipe smoke fug which hit even me as I opened the door and refusing to be depresed by the rubbish bags piling up in the kitchen, and flashed up the four sharp documents Adeline had made a point of photographing. One was the main page of her passport. The other three some of kind of balance sheet or ledger but it was all in Chinese and hand-written Chinese at that. I attached the three photographs to an e-mail and sent them to the office. I sent a back-up copy to my private e-mail just in case. Then I put the chip inside a little plastic holder and sealed it into an envelope addressed to my post box in Central. When pretty girls in Hong Kong start carrying shooters around in their Vuitton bags, you have to take all the precautions.

I was just thinking of going back to Chung Hom Kok when the telephone rang again. It was Larry.

“ Only one body today,’ I said.

“ Whose.”

“ My landlord’s. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Don’t worry. I’m sure the rent roster is the first thing they’ll clear up. Did he fall or was he pushed?”

“ Hard to say. It looks like a heart attack. But not to me. I also found the little honey. But she pulled a Kel-Tec on me and said she doesn’t want to be found.”

“ So you’re off the case.”

“ Mrs C seems to think so. She gave me the kiss off. But I’m intrigued. No law against a man looking into something on his own, just as an honest concerned citizen.”

“ Doesn’t pay the rent.”

“ Well we must be all right for a month or two. The cheque cleared I take it?”

“ Find out tomorrow. But I think it’s as good as gold. Still can’t figure why she asked us.”

“ Well gwailos do make good fall guys, don’t they? At the very least, they help to gum up the works.”

“ I don’t get you.”

“ Neither do I.”

“ Shall I still try to get hold of the e-mail. Yahoo is pretty sticky about total access to holder’s accounts but you can get individual e-mails and ISP addresses if you look as if you really want them. Through the police of course.”

“ Use your contacts then. I’d like the e-mail. I’m pretty sure it was sent in Hong Kong.”

“ So where will you be if I want you?”

” In Stanley for a while. I’m going to look up an old friend.”

“ I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“ Did I ever?”

As I marched along the bay front, a strange procession was taking place. At the head of it was the old bag on the election poster which festooned the Kai Fong building. She was followed by a number of faceless minions handing out leaflets. Mrs Lee was being very loud because she had one of those mobile PA systems strapped to her withered body. She eyed me for a moment as friendly as a solictor’s letter. She was dressed mainly in red and gold which gave her message loud and clear without the amplification. It was vote for me and get rich. She had a borad sash with her name on it and her new perm was as stiff as a Presbyterian funeral. The make-up was as thick as the walls of the Reichsbank. I put a finger in one ear to show my appreciation. I was on the electoral roll after all. The procession turned left at the Blue House and the raucous rant of Mrs Lee reverberated down the tree-lined lane like a police incident room on Saturday night. Thank God we didn’t have many elections in Hong Kong.

I found Jimmy Perry behind a glass of box red in the comfier corner of his Italian restaurant looking as usual as if he was going to have a stroke before bedtime. If I ever thought I was overdoing it in any way, I always had Jimmy to comfort me. There he was, the purple-visaged John Bull of Stanley, popping away the red like Lucozade from breakfast to late dinner and all organs still holding up. I dodged past the plastic vines and Ruffino bottles and sat down.

‘ ‘ello stranger,” he said in his Barnsley drawl.

“ Hello Jimmy. Got used to the building work yet?”

“ Oh don’t get me on. Can’t see in front of me. Who wants to come down to Stanley and sit and look at concrete mixers. It’s a scandal.”

“ But who ordered them all Jimmy. Come on, tell me who’s on the make.”

“ Oh it’s that old cow you just saw witht’ megaphone. Mrs Money Bags Lee.”

“ But how does she do it. Come on. I need to know.”

“ Need to know. You’re bloody puddled man if you don’t know. Every bugger knows.”

“ Well what does every bugger know?”

“ Well look. See that set of small traders’ places they’ve built down where temporary market used to be? Guess who dished the leases out. Bloody local committee, not government, not tender. Bloody pepercorn rent while I’m paying through the nose for this pile of crap down at this end. All the trade will sit down there and I’ll have nowt. That’s bloody socialism for you. That’s the bloody free economy too.”

“ It’s enough to drive you to drink.”

“ You can bloody well say that again.”

A glass of red was brought to me but I let it sit there.

“ Keep it up Jimmy.”

I was walking up the escalator, past the Park N Shop and all the shops selling cushions and candles and children’s books. I emerged on the Plaza walkway and was approaching the taxi rank. There was hardly ever a queue and there was nearly always a taxi roaming around, looking for a return fare. I hailed one. Then something curious happened. A black Lexus pulled up and the door swung open.

“ Get inside, Mr Trelford,” a voice said. It was a nice voice in the circumstances, a voice you found hard to connect to small, hand-held guns of any kind.

The man got in with me. He was Chinese, nicely dressed, about forty and stank of ginger, tobacco and just a hint of cologne. I couldn’t see much of the driver. He looked smart too and a lot younger.

“ Thanks for the limo,” I said.

“ No jokes please, Mr Trelford,” the man said in a local accent edged with a patina of North America.

“ Your work is over, Mr Trelford, and certain parties just want to wish you well and thank you for a job well done. They want to be generous to a struggling enterprise like your own. It can’t be easy meeting all those bills and in such a difficult area of business too, with all that competition and overheads.”

He took a thick brown envelope out of his pocket and put it in my lap.

“ Of course, certain parties just want to be assured that, on acceptance of our appreciation, your work on the matter can be brought to a formal and definite close and you can move on, to pastures new, as the saying goes, I believe.”

Here was another character who had been watching a lot of Turner Classic Movies.

“ So I just put the envelope in my pocket and walk away. Or I throw it back at you and look hard, hurt and disdainful. Or do I get bumped off in any case? Which page are we on exactly?”

“ Always the joker. And so pleasant to listen to. You have many admirers, Mr Trelford.”

“ Look, get a life and leave Warner Brothers in the DVD racks for a minute. This is 2007 if you hadn’t realized. My office doesn’t have blondes in bottles, PXs are digital, you can’t find a pawnbroker at a moment’s notice to hide your incriminating evidence and all the doctors with bags full of needles have gone legit and moved into Prince’s Building. All their clients are in support groups or are on the line to The Samaritans anyway. If you can turn off the channel, so can I.”

I think I’d lost him there. The car drove down to the Carmelite monastery, the door opened and I got out, leaving the wad of  money on the thick leather seat.

I made my way wearily down the street and up the stairs home. I needed a drink and there was some awful King Roberrt bathtub Scotch I kept for emergencies in the kitchen cupboard. I sat down on the blue sofa and inhaled a large slug of it. I turned on the CD player and surrendered to some Debussy, the Piano Fantasy, which Debussy hadn’t had the nerve to call a piano concerto or it would be more widely played than it is. Around 8 pm, with the cheap booze making my temples throb but warmng the rest of me, just as I was thinking of walking up to Cheung Hom Kok again, I was tight enough for that, my telephone rang. It was Sung Junior.

“ She’s gone,” he said without so much as a lead-in.

“ Gone?”

 “ She left a note. Gone.”

I laid down the mug of Scotch with an audible clatter.

“ What the hell. Take two Panadol and call me in the morning.”

In the films, the broads disappeared and stayed gone. They didn’t turn up, wave a gun at you and say they didn’t want to be rescued. If they did, they hung around for a while to sing a duet or at least jump into bed with you. Times had changed.

5.

King Robert does not give you a real hangover. Its effects are more existential than that. You only notice as the day progresses and the feeling that you are about to have a massive stroke is replaced by a generalised nausea Camus or Sartre would have killed for.

“ A lot of clues. Or red herrings. What do you think, Larry? Ugly local Mainland-aligned politician possibly linked with corruption in Stanley is blackmailed by own daughter who has some nasty facts about her friends and is about to be set up for the death of a Stanley grandee to at least scare her and keep her quiet. But Mrs C backs out of that and decides to set up a dumb gwailo instead. Or is it all coincidental? Are the men in the Lexus running the show or are they just mobsters for Mrs C ?  And what happened to the dead chicken? Answers please on a postcard.”

We were in the office in what was called the conference room because it had a table, chairs and a bunch of plastic flowers in a metal vase.

“ You certainly had a lively afternoon.”

“ And now the heroine has disappeared again. Left a note apparently. Where would you disappear if you had to lie low and you had a gun and you were an intelligent Roedean girl with good legs? And why do you have the gun?”

“ How do you know she disappeared? Maybe they took her.”

“Hadn’t seriously thought of that. Hang on.”

I picked up my phone and called Junior. He answered immediately. He was on his way in to see me. All he would say right now was that  the security staff had told him Adeline left with two men in a car early yesterday evening.

“You’re right. She left with two men. Let’s assume they had a gun pointed at her. Why would anyone take her?”

“ To keep her quiet. There are elections coming up, we know that. And something potentially damaging has happened right in the middle of a bit of the DAB heartland. Either Mr Sung has been rubbed out or documents have gotten into the wrong hands, maybe more hands than just Adeline’s. Or maybe Adeline just wants to lie low for a while. Who knows what she’s been up to. She’s a loose cannon. Think of it, a girl her age walking around with a gun in Hong Kong. It’s ludicrous. When were the documents photographed? How do you know it wasn’t her suggestion to get a nice white Sir Galahad like you involved? I suggest you look at the facts. There’s one dead body and one person who is said to have disappeared but she hasn’t or hadn’t. Now we need to know more facts. Such as what was in the rest of the e-mail. And what Mr Sung died of. Then we can proceed. All the rest just stinks. It’s out of a corny set-up for something. Crooks in cars, photographed documents placed where anyone would find them after just a bit of looking. Stick to the facts, Nigel.”

I filled another pipe and despite a rather pained expression from Virginia through the glass, I lit it up.

“ Just one thing. If you wanted to hide someone in Hong Kong, how would you go about it?”

“ There are safe houses but Hong Kong isn’t a good place for that. There aren’t enough remote areas and there are too many nosy neighbours wherever you go. The place isn’t anonymous enough. If you have a pretty girl hiding out somewhere, the news gets out amongst the crooks because they’re horny as hell and there are so many of them in any given triad cell. And they know too many other people, taxi drivers, restaurant owners, newspaper stalls, minicabs. Tell you how they once did it. In the ‘70s. Her name was Pak Mei Ling. They moved her around. From brothel to brothel and hotel room to hotel room. And they made a bit of money on the side too, with the aid of some light kind of drugging. They made her into a hooker. She was never in one place for longer than a few hours. No one except her pimp knew where she was. We only tracked her down by accident. She bumped into one of our own men. We got it free for in those days if you knew where to ask and most of us did.”

“ But if Mrs C has told her contacts in low places to hide her, don’t you think Mommy will object if her precious little daughter becomes a hooker and potential junky.”

“ They only use junk when they run out of ideas. Plenty of other drugs available these days. Again you’re letting assumptions get in the way of possible facts. Now what strikes you first about Adeline? Is there one funny thing about her, one naive, first-impression suggestion of a fact that hits you when you set eyes on her or just glance at a photo? What is it? No family resemblance, right? Mrs C’s hubby is just as ugly as she is. So how did they produce this little goddess? Just think laterally. Forget your intelligence for a while. Be naivc. Pretend you’re a disappointed old flatfoot like me, just for a second.”

“ Another husband? A lover?”

“ No. Again, you’re brain is moving too fast, imagining, reasoning, speculating. And the fact is very simple when you bother to ask for it. She was adopted. Whilst you were chasing around yesterday, I did some basic uninformed thinking. Just ordinary police work, asking questions like who people are and what they are and how they came about. There’s no record of her being born in her birth year in Hong Kong.There is evidence of her stated place of birth when she got her first ID card and that was in Eastern Guangdong province. There’s also evidence of a legal adoption if you look long enough. We have the documents, or copies of them. Adeline is just for show, to complete the happy family. She’s no Chow. There’s a third fact for you to chew on. And something tells me that Mrs C doesn’t give a damn about Adeline as long as she doesn’t get in her hair. Never make even the most basic assumptions. Always get the facts.”

A potential source of fresh facts now presented itself in the doorway. It was Sung Junior who looked really spruce and dapper in one of those wispy Hong Kong jackets complemented by pristine ironed flannels and the shoes with snaffles I hated so much. He looked drawn and the glow from tennis, or whatever sport boys like himself played in the morning, was fading fast. Yet you felt he could still get the girls without all that much trouble. Loyal to her training, Virginia gave him coffee and a newspaper. As she did so, her tongue appeared ready to drop out of her soft pink mouth if he so much as looked at her full on.

“ Morning Alex. This is my partner Mr Snowdon. He’s the brains of the operation. Why don’t you tell me what you know.”

“ I got back about 7 pm and I found a note. Adeline wrote she was going and wanted to be alone for a while. I shouldn’t try to find her. She was all right and everything would be fine.”

“ Have you got the note?”

“ I tore it up.”

“ Wish you wouldn’t do that. But go on. Where do you think she’s gone?”

“ I have no idea.”

“ Any other boyfriends in the frame. Sorry to ask.”

“ She doesn’t sleep around if that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t mean that. Just wondering where she would go if she wanted to lie low for a while.”

“No idea.”

“ And what did the car look like that picked her up?”

“ It was a Lexus.”

“ And the men?”

“ One was older, well-dressed, and the driver was a young man.”

“ All right. Now pardon me for saying so Alex but you look mightily disturbed by events, more disturbed than if you were witnessing a girlfriend running away from home and your father having a fatal heart attack.”

“ Of course. It’s only natural. You see, Mr Trelford, you’re missing one important fact. I killed my father.”

Larry looked at me with a dubious expression which could have meant anything.

“ Go on. Tell me how you did it.”

“ I didn’t mean to do it. I called round to see him to discuss amongst other things getting engaged to Adeline. He was dead set against it. We got into an argument and I pushed him. He feel, his head started bleeding. He didn’t look as if he was breathing. I called Adeline. She said she would deal with it and that I should come home and say nothing to anybody.”

“ And how did she deal with it exactly.”

“ She said her mother would know what to do. She wrote to her. Or telephoned.”

“Are you sure he was dead when you left the house? Why didn’t you call an ambulance?”

“ I don’t know. I panicked. It was all a blur.”

“ And Adeline came running and knew what to do. Lucky boy.”

He lit up a cigarette and wasn’t coughing this time.

“ How long has she been running around with a Kel-Tec automatic in her handbag?”

“ Oh, she’s always had it. Said she just carried it for fun. It was never loaded.”

“ So yesterday when she pointed it at me, she was just playing?”

“ I’m really not sure.”

“ Look Alex. I’m not in the business of covering up murder or manslaughter. That makes me an accessory. My professional advice to you is to go and tell the police. I can’t order you to do that and I don’t have to report a crime immediately or even sometimes at all, particularly when I’m on a job. Even in Hong Kong private dicks are given a certain leeway. But something about this whole business intrigues me. I was hired to find Adeline but that commission has lapsed. If you were to pick up the torch and hire me, just in formal terms, that would help to clear me for what I want to do in the near future. There’s more to this business than meets the eye.”

“ Oh please. I’m only too willing to hire you. If you think you can find Adeline.”

“ I can’t guarantee that. No one can. She may have been abducted. She may be in on something much bigger. She may think she’s running the show and she may turn out to be not quite the lovely doe-eyed girl you’ve got the hots for. I can’t guarantee I’ll deliver an angel to you. When I’m through, you may not want to walk down the aisle with her at all.”

“ I’ll take the risk. Just find her. Tell her to come back to me.”

“ Well you could start by giving me all her mobile phone numbers and all the credit card details you have on her. I have a feeling she won’t be shopping at Pacific Place for a while or making many calls but if she even leaves her phone on for a minute, we can get a trace of her location, sometimes to within a few streets. Are you going to go to the police?”

“ Not for the moment.”

“ That’s your decision. Right now we don’t have all the facts about how your father died. He may have had the heart attack coming or he may have had it subsequent to the fall. He may have had it before he fell. You may be in the clear. I can’t help you with that. The only thing you can do is to get a good lawyer. One word of advice though. Say nothing to the police. You were very fluent and forthcoming with your confession to us just now but don’t be so free and easy once they get you down to Police HQ, if ever they do. Just mention you saw your father and stick to that. If they keep asking you questions just say you want a solicitor present and say nothing more. Do you hear me? No shakes, no tears, no honest statements in front of nice concerned uniformed officers. It all comes up in court.”

He nodded and made up a list of all the numbers he knew. He got up to go. We gave him the usual forms to sign but we didn’t ask for an advance of fees. We’re nice that way- sometimes. He walked out of the office and Virginia couldn’t keep her eyes off him.

“So we have another fact.,” I said to Larry when he was gone.

“ You have, yes. The fact that he has confessed to killing his father in some way. Not that he actually did it.”

“ I see the distinction thanks. But why should he confess to us?”

“ Maybe miss sweetie drawers told him to do it. She seems to be a somewhat forceful character. He just looks plain stupid.”

Virginia winced a little as she picked up the coffee cup. Perhaps she was going to keep it in her drawer for private moments. 

6.

The Eldorado Hotel in Mong Kok may be a terrible place to live but it’s a great place to die. Every week or two there’s a new suicide there, a bent stockbroker with the police about to sign the warrant or an old Mainland lady just plain tired of mahjong and shopping. The hotel is well situated, at the junction between Argyle Street going West and East, and Nathan Road which runs from Tsim Sha Tsui and as far north as you would want it to go. The hotel is squashed under another motorway turn-off going a completely different direction, just in case you have to make a quick getaway. You can check in any time and order two girls and a crate of Carlsberg to follow you up to the room and no one will bat an eyelid.

I’d taken one of the back-facing rooms at the end of a forlorn grey-carpeted corridor. The room had a complimentary plastic comb in a plastic wrapper and cheap shampoo in mean-sized plastic bottles and two complimentary condoms to whet your appetite on the cigarette-burnt bedside table in a neat, pink cardboard case with the hotel’s name on it. There was a deadly-looking minibar which only contained beer, salted nuts and imitation cola, a dusty air conditioner running at full pelt set into the grimy, pitted window and a dingy orange carpet fighting bravely for dominance with an ugly green bedspread which had the aura of debauch etched on it so clearly you could almost touch it. The large pristine TV set was permanently set to the porn channel.

I set up the computer at the glass-topped table by the window and selected one of the dozens of free wireless signals which crowded in on me. In a few moments I was exploring Sex141, a web site which offered you the locations, numbers and provocative photos of girls in their late teens and early twenties, all to be had at clearly marked prices. There wasn’t a picture of Adeline anywhere but that didn’t stop me looking. There were 221 girls available in Mong Kok and a tawdry set they looked. One girl brothels aren’t illegal in Hong Kong but most of the girls in them look more than shop-soiled. The true gold, I decided, was to be found on the Tsim Sha Tsui page. There were even more girls for hire there and one or two of the ads didn’t have a photo but offered attractive girls for hotel service only. The girls all had the same number so it was almost certainly an agency. All I had to do was call up, describe in broad terms what I was looking for and hope for the best. It was a long shot but perhaps I would stumble on something meaningful if I chatted to the pimps and girls long enough.

Before I dialled I snapped a towel out of the plastic wrapper in the bathroom and spread in onto the bed cover to lie down on. I took out my small Sony portable player with the inbuilt speaker and Debussy wafted towards me as incongruous as a nun in a liquor store.

I was thinking about two things mainly, neither of which was why a man with my training and character and fundamental views on life was lying in a flea-pit brothel of a hotel as part of his normal working day. One of them was the mystery of Adeline but it was less a mystery now and more that uncomfortable feeling I had when a very beautiful girl walked into my life. Leidenschaft the Germans call passion, a form of suffering, and the way in which Adeline bore on my mind and got into my imagination was filling me with feelings of dread. As if she would want a clapped-out forty something whose idea of wealth was having two hundred dollars in his pockets at the same time. As if love lasted longer for Trelford than a walk in the rain. She was certainly an interesting girl but what sort of girl exactly? She had a long story to tell and I like long stories.

The second thought which never succeeded very long in cancelling the first was the distinct impression I had been followed to the hotel, but it wasn’t the usual sort of tail. This one was foreign, a European, and he was getting on in years to say the least. I went through my memories of the trip to Kowloon again, trying to register the moments I had seen him. I felt his eyes on my back as I walked across the enclosed footbridge from Pacific Place over to Admiralty Centre. I think I glanced at him first though as he came down the ramp from the High Court and I thought he must be a barrister or minor judge I didn’t know. He was tall, wiry, withered and had that distinguished but rather seedy edge to him so I guess I must have thought him more likely a barrister. As I went down the escalator, I caught a few reflections in the chrome and he was still on me like a cheap suit. I caught him in the edge of my vision as I got my ticket and lost him a while as I went down the escalator to the platform. But there he was again a carriage away, behind a newspaper which never moved below his locks of combed-back, silver grey Brylcreemed hair. When I got out at Yau Ma Tei he almost stumbled for a moment as he fought past the rush of people, anxious to beat the beeps and get out before the doors closed.

It was too early for dial and dip so I decided I would take a look at the phone mall. If Mr Silver Fox was around he would probably show up or maybe he was working with someone. I don’t have many extra senses but I always know when I’m being followed and sometimes when I’m being lied to. I strode down the Via Dolorosa corridor and got into the Schindler. There was only a vague smell of rancid perfume in it at this time of day. The black marble lobby looked deserted but then even amateur tails don’t necessarily hang around lobbies. They can wait in a car or sit in the dai pai dong opposite over the same, sad glass of thick, scummy tea for hours. They can be studiously admiring their fingernails on a bench in the park or be dutifully perusing an arcane tome they’re holding upside down in the bookshop down the road. A lot of them stand transfixed in front of shop windows full of ladies’ garments or flick through teen magazines at Seven-11. Most of them think they’re invisible so location isn’t all that important to them.  

I crossed the road and fought my way down the street lined with lightly vibrating minibuses and wretched hawkers selling their daily catch of toys and fake handbags from Canton. The air was thick with diesel and fug and a nasty feeling of people on the make. Within a few minutes I felt him on me and I glimpsed a pair of brown brogues and some razor creases in grey cavalry twill. He’d also donned a hat which was unusual in Hong Kong unless it is a baseball cap or something with a sun visor. His was a trilby and it even had a small feather in it. The phone mall was in full swing and crowded in the way only Hong Kong can be, a pulsating swarm of short-haired heads on diminutive bodies swirling insatiably around the glass counters and overfilled windows. I didn’t want to lose him. To tease him a little I went upstairs and then did a quick turn back down. He was coming up immediately of course on the other escalator and looking the other way. After five more minutes I’d had enough so I walked up to him at as he was looking at a Hello Kitty phone as rapt as a choirmaster conducting in front of his bishop.

“ Aren’t you a bit too old for this game?” I said.

He put down the phone and smiled. I could now see he had a thin rakish moustache careering along his upper lip. His face looked like an anorexic ferret mostly but had little pink blood vessels on its nose and over the cheekbones. His deeply-set eyes were grey, sharp and clear.

“ Am I that obvious?”

“ As obvious as Santa’s beard. Care for a drink? All this footwork is mighty hard on the constitution.”

A few minutes later and we were sitting in the bar of the Eldorado being served knockout gin and tonics by a smiling Filipina with too much leg showing. The bar was empty save for us, dim, upholstered in plastic and smelled like a cat box. The Silver Fox had relaxed a lot and looked almost pally.

“ Jacques is the name but you can call me Harry. Never did much field work so no wonder you twigged so fast. I was at the ICAC twenty years until anno domini came along, as it must. Still follow the old cases in my way. Gets me out and about.”

“ So why are you following me? If I’m corrupt, where’s all the loot?”

“ Oh it’s not you at all. It’s your latest client I’m more concerned about. Mrs Chow. The woman with friends in low places.”

I let that pass. There was a buzz in my pocket and an SMS from Larry showed on my phone. I should check my e-mail and fast.

“ I just wonder why she hired you,” he said.

“ I’m not working for Mrs Chow.”

“ Oh. So why did you go and see her?”

“ Well that’s always confidential. I’m in the business of keeping an agency going, not giving myself things to do in retirement. Why don’t you tell me what you know about Mrs Chow and why she still gets you out of the house.”

His face changed for a moment and I began to see the old investigator at his desk once more, at the Independent Commission Against Corruption above the car park in Central.

“ Chow stinks to high heaven. When I was at the Commission, there was a team of five of us investigating all the various leads. The DAB came from almost nowhere and now has a network of supporters all over the territory. They sit on District Boards and liquor licensing committees and a few of them are JPs. The bus their voters to the booths with offers of free bags of rice and all sorts of other bung. They’re too friendly with the triads more than anything else and they in turn are called patriotic by Peking. It’s like the situation of the IRA and Sinn Fein. One set of front men fighting the elections and another set carving up the territory and doing all the dirty work. When the new director arrived we were simply closed down and I took early retirement. I was disgusted.”

“ So what are the recent leads you’re following.”

“ Nothing much except one thing. I’m very interested in her daughter. Too good to be true, isn’t she? One minute she’s snapped in a night club with a film producer, and we know how many of those are mobsters, and another she’s the sweet little researcher in Southern District. Have you seen her recently by the way? I’ve lost touch.”

“ What’s her name?”

“ Adeline. Awful name. Catches in your teeth, doesn’t it?”

“ And what do you think she’s up to?”

“ Hard to say. I’m particularly interested in her contacts with one man. Chung Kar-luk. Used to be the Sun Yee On’s big man on the Mainland but recently he’s moved to Hong Kong and is seen in the same places as Ms Adeline on certain occasions.”

“Got a photo?”

 “Yes. But not here. It’s in my room. I’ve a theory about Chung. Nothing I can prove but my old nose itches when I see him. I don’t know what.”

“ Where are you staying?”

“ Here. I’m in the room next door to you. I like your music. Very civilized.”

“ It’s hard to be civilized at the Eldorado.”

Ten minutes later and we were sat in his room. There was a bottle of Gordon’s and a large half-finished bottle of tonic water on the bedside table. He had the curtains drawn and one of the lamps on. The room was much the same as mine but there were more cigarette burns on the furniture.

“ Can’t seem to find it,” he said after a while, rifling through a battered black leather attaché case which I knew was Government issue.

“ How did you manage to keep the case?”

“ Ask no questions, get no lies.”

“ Bit of a giveaway, isn’t it?”

“ Gets you good service in certain quarters.”

“ But not when you’re supposed to be playing a clapped-out businessman on the bum. What other type of white man would stay here?”

“ As I say. Not a lot of field practice. Amateur really.”

So here I was, undercover with this large neon sign next door to me. We had to be the talk of the neighbourhood by now.

“ Just a minute. Have to go to the toilet. That gin’s beginning to work on me.”

“ Be my guest.”

But I didn’t use the toilet immediately. I signalled to Jacques to be quiet and reached for something in my little manbag. It was one of Larry’s favourites. A Hammerstein 3-in-one bug detector, five hundred US on e-Bay if you can find one. It scanned all the usual frequencies for you and when it had done that you could use it to check for cameras with a little infrared beam. Then it had a built-in metal detector you could run over the place to locate any recording bugs. Quite a nifty gadget as gadgets went. I went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet. Then I took my little gold pencil out of my pocket and wrote down some words on my lined journalist’s jotter for Jacques to follow. He looked shaken at first and then he began to smile. He liked playing amateur sleuth, that was obvious. He must have been in the scouts once too.

The frequency scanner came up almost immediately on the police and services band. Then I flashed the red beam around the walls and chairs and the ceiling and onto the TV set and the pictures but nothing showed.

“ Interesting weather we’ve been having.”

My smile was as false as a ten-dollar Rolex.

I switched on the metal detector and ran it around the room. It got upset at the little hot water machine but that’s only natural. I lifted it to check. Nothing showing. I ran it along the bed but there was only the weakest of glows. Then I ran it down one of the the armchairs and it glowed again. More brightly this time. Could be springs or nails but I didn’t think so. I bent down and looked. Then I saw it.  It was a neat little bug and you had to peer real close to spot it. It was in the join of the fabric and well pressed in. You wouldn’t feel it even if you had your back on it.

“ I think Hong Kong weather perfectly despicable most of the time,” Jacques said, not at all uneasily, and he offered me another drink. We started to chat about holidays and airlines and we were making a good job of it. I scribbled more on the jotter to the effect that the bug should be left in place and he’d better telephone from the lobby. He gave me the thumbs up and I left it at that.

I took my leave of Mr Jacques and went into my room, thinking that I’d better check into another hotel and fast. But what the hell, I thought after a while. Maybe the Silver Fox would be good company. Maybe he would tell me something I didn’t already know. I might even find out who wanted to bug a silly old man with too much time on his hands.

The scan I did in my room produced nothing and the password screen on my computer was still up. All seemed well.

 I logged in and checked my e-mail. Together with all the spam for penis patches and sure-thing stocks there was a note from Larry with an attachment. The attachment was an e-mail and I already knew most of it. The first paragraph was interesting.

Mommy,

I’ve done something foolish. I think I killed someone, not wanting to but it’s happened and that’s all there is to it. I’m deadly serious. This isn’t a joke. I got into an argument with an old man in Stanley and I  pushed him over and he didn’t get up again. I’m sure you’ll know who I mean.

I put on some Debussy and dozed off.

7.

There was a knock at the door. I woke up. There are service knocks, money knocks and knocks from good girls who might. This was another knock, very familiar, and when I looked through the little spy hole and saw two boys in green and a large European in a black uniform I knew what was going on.

“ Come on in, boys.”

The European was a man I still recognised. I’d come across him twenty years ago when he was an up-and-coming inspector on Lantau Island, the place they sent the expats in the force they didn’t know what to do with, ones too stupid or too objectionable for all the regular postings. He interrogated everybody on the ferry rather than talking to them and people soon gave him a wide berth. He’d obviously come up in the world as he had a lot of pips on his shoulder now. He was medium sized, with medium-length hair and a hard kind of obtuse, big-jawed, blue-eyed medium Irish face. He was more than medium offensive.

“ Commander Littlejohn. I think we met once.”

I ushered then to seat themselves and the two standard issue policemen sat on the bed looking uneasy the way many policemen do when they’re asked to sit down and be gentle.

“ Oh yes. Must have been years ago. So what can I do for you gentlemen?”

“ Do you know Mr Sung of Stanley well?”

“ I wouldn’t say we were bosom pals. He’s my landlord. If we’re talking about the senior one who recently demised. I know Mr Alex Sung in a professional capacity.”

“ It’s the senior one we’re interested in at present. You know he’s dead.”

I reached for my pipe and filled it whilst I thought about that. The Commander had produced a neat little pad and pen and one of his escorts was already scribbling along too.

“ I know he’s dead, yes.”

“ Do you know how he died?”

“ I’m not certain. Seems it might have been a heart attack. I hear there’s going to be an inquest.”

“ What are you doing here at the moment?”

“ Well, I’m working believe it or not.”

“ Working on what, Mr Trelford?”

“ I would have thought that was obvious as you probably know I’m a private investigator and this hotel is the biggest open brothel in town. Now you can answer some of my questions Commander and then maybe you’ll get out of here and leave me in peace. I don’t like a posse of the local constabulary disturbing my siesta with a lot of fool questions and I don’t like being interviewed about dead men without a solicitor present or perhaps at least as a matter of courtesy knowing where it’s all going. Not that I want a solicitor really as God knows I can’t afford one but as you know I’m well versed in the law, knowing for example that when you’re invited in and you’re not making an arrest you ought to remove your caps. Police Standing Orders para. 5 section 2.”

The Commander took his hat off and his men followed suit.

“ That’s better. You seem half human already Littlejohn. You’re still interrogating instead of being nice to people I see. Bluster won’t get you anywhere here. So say what you have to say and then get out please.”

“ Just what has Mr Sung hired you to do?”

“ Well that’s confidential but you ought to be able to put two and two together.”

“ Is it related to the death of his father?”

“ I said you could say your piece, not that you could go on harassing me. If you want to invite me down for a chat at police HQ any time you’re welcome to do so and such things are easily arranged on the telephone. Here’s my card. If I see you or your men tailing me or knocking on my door or calling around for informal chats at 4 pm again I’ll apply for a High Court writ to get you from doing so again. And fast.  Read the regulations Mr Littlejohn and get off your high horse.”

I got up and went to the door. It’s nice to open it up sometimes and clear a room full of law.

“ All I will say Mr Trelford is that Mr Sung’s death is being treated as a murder investigation in view of certain findings made by the police forensics team and that we would request your cooperation in the matter. We’ll be in touch again at an appropriate juncture. Your attitude today has been noted.”

They got up to go.

“ Well I never ever scored very high on attitude, that’s for sure. Have a nice day Commander, unless you have other plans.”

They marched back down the Via Dolorosa corridor.

“ Bull’s-eye, old boy,” Jacques said in an undertone, emerging from his room. “First rate.”

I shooed him into mine.

“ Can’t find any bugs in here. Maybe they think I’m not important.”

“ Who do you think’s listening?”

 “ In your case, hard to say. Maybe it’s Mrs C and maybe it isn’t. If I were you, I’d go back home and save on the hotel bill. You’re as undercover as Dolly Parton down here.”

“ Don’t agree, old man. Best fun I’ve had in years.”

My telephone rang. It was Junior. He sounded flustered to say the least.

“ Mr Trelford, I’ve got to see you. It’s about Adeline. Something’s happened. I need your help. Please come.”

“ Where are you?”

“ At home. Please hurry. I can’t discuss it on the phone.”

“ Hold the fort, Harry,” I said. “ I have to step out for a while. And stay off the gin too, if you can manage.”

I took my manbag and my diminishing tin of Erinmore and got down to the MTR without any eyes on me that I could sense. Just to show what a big shot I was these days, I decided to get a taxi at Admiralty and the driver didn’t know the address but that was par for the course. I had enough Cantonese to direct him.

The security guard was napping at Scenic Horizons but he was able to open the door after a few insistent buzzes on the intercom. Junior was in his dressing gown but his aura was fading fast. He had been doing some kind of fitness routine and was lightly flushed. The room smelled of burnt tobacco and clean, young sweat.

“ I had a call. They’ve got her and they want a hundred thousand.”

“ Who’s got her?” I said, sinking into the sofa.

“ I don’t know but they sounded nasty.”

“ They generally do. Where’s the drop?”

“ The what?”

“ Where and when do they want you to take the money?”

“ Oh, they’re going to tell me tonight.”

“ Can you get that much together?”

“ Yes. It’s not a problem.”

I thought for a moment how nice it would be if a hundred thousand Hong Kong or any other dollars were not a problem.

“ Well I guess you should wait here and wait for instructions and tell me as soon as you know. Have the police been in touch?”

“ No. Why should they be?”

“ Nothing. Just asking. Just remember what I told you. Say nothing, casually or otherwise. Just stick to your story and don’t be bullied. And call me the moment they show up.”

“ Should we tell them about Adeline?”

“ I don’t think so. They’ll only make things worse. A hundred thousand isn’t really a ransom demand anyway unless they’re really desperate or small-time operators. Perhaps something’s gone wrong their end and they just want to get her off their hands. So you’re still sticking to your story that you killed your father?”

“ Of course. That’s the truth.”

“ As you like. But a few things don’t quite add up in your story. Like why someone else is taking the rap for it all.”

“ I don’t understand.”

“ You really must have magnificent abs.”

I thought it wasn’t a particularly good time for sweating him and in any case policemen like Littlejohn do it so much better then me. Sweating your own client is best saved for when they get a bit difficult about the bill.

“ Don’t forget to call me the moment anything happens. And don’t answer the door to any hoods, cops or travelling salesmen.”

I called Mrs C’s office and she was still seeing people if it was urgent and if you were a registered voter. I broke the bank again and took a taxi. The driver knew the address immediately this time. When I arrived, the Plaza lobby was full of people rushing out of the lifts and hanging around waiting. There was no need to sign in.

Up in the smog, the girl with swooshing legs was still there at her counter looking less of a challenge than before. It had obviously been a long day and her defenses were beginning to wilt. In the old days I might have slipped her a Chambers card and given her an unambiguous leer but I was getting beyond it.

“ It’s urgent of course. And very personal.”

“ Of course,” she said and looked nervously at the line of petitioners on the benches behind me. “ I’ll let Mrs Chow know immediately.”

I took a seat.

“ Isn’t it a scandal,” I said to an old lady beside me with a jade ring and two gold teeth in her upper gums. “ You buy a property nowadays and it just isn’t worth anything any more. Time was when you could buy a flat and it doubled in value in six months. Not that I ever lived in one of them of course. I prefer public housing. And hasn’t that gone up in price terribly the last few years? All those horrible foreigners moving in everywhere and all the improvements you have to make to your properties. You just can’t live.”

The old woman smiled at me with total incomprehension but obvious sympathy.

“ Chee-sin” said a voice behind me as I was led to Mrs Chow’s office.

Mrs Chow had had a long day too and the first layer or two of make-up were running to wherever layers of make-up run when they can’t cut it any more. The light seemed a little brighter than before but the carpet was still liable to trip you up if you weren’t careful.

“ Mr Trelford.”

“ You can call me Nigel, Mrs Chow. I think all this formality might be preventing us from getting down to basics. Like what sort of game are you pulling and how I fit into the general scheme of things.”

“ I don’t quite understand.”

“ Well let me see if I can spell it out for you in simple words like concealment, manipulation, fall guys and organised crime. Do they ring any bells?”

“ Sit down a moment, Mr Trelford, calm yourself and tell me just what is going on please.”

“ Just this, Mrs Chow. The last two days have been highly illuminating to lovers of film noir and Raymond Chandler like me. All the characters are there: the wicked old hen behind her desk feeding a private dick the wrong information, a stiff in his own hallway, a broad with a gat, a young dashing hero with as much backbone as a jellyfish and a small posse of the local Keystone cops calling round for informal chats in the afternoon. Then there’s the bumbling tail, the mysterious man in the back of the limousine and the wad of readies in the plain sealed wrapper. Have I left anything out?”

“ I wouldn’t really know.”

“ As I told the man in the limousine, I’m all in favour of reality TV, as long as I don’t have to watch it, and I adore TCM but this is Hong Kong 2007 and my patience is wearing a little thin. Live your clichés if you must but isn’t it about time you told me what’s going on.”

“ There are a lot of things you don’t understand Mr Trelford, no matter how long you live here. You don’t understand the hybrid nature of Hong Kong and what it means to be Chinese, a culture of surfaces. Do you think our way of running things is any worse than your men in Washington and London and Rome? Is everything above board there Mr Trelford? Are justice and transparency alive and well? Is there no corruption in high places, no violence at the edges, no things we shouldn’t be more than a little ashamed of?”

“ Tell me about Adeline. What is she working at. Who is she working for?”

“ Adeline is I think alive and well and need not concern you.”

“ So that’s why we’re getting the ransom demands.”

“ Ransom demands?”

“ Perhaps you don’t know as much as you think you do. But one thing I want to tell you. Everything I do has a lot people behind it. There’s not only my partner. Everything I do is backed up by a number of people in the know who get all the details sent to them at regular intervals. If I’m discovered in a burning car drunk as a skunk, if I suddenly develop a drug habit and die of an overdose or even if I have a coronary or am hit by a truck crossing the road some dark night, everyone who can arrest and destroy you will know everything within a day. You’d better pray for my health Mrs Chow and for all those near and dear to me. Do I make myself clear?”

“ Perfectly. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of people to see before I can go home tonight.”

“ Yes. The electorate, bless them. Tell me. Do they get cheques or is it all cash in hand?”

She let that one go.

“ Good night, pussy cat. Let’s do lunch.”

As I was making my way out of the lobby, Junior called. The drop was at midnight.

8.

I’m not awfully good at holding clients’ hands, especially men’s hands. You sit with them and usually they smoke without inhaling or they inhale too deeply. They drink too much, play with their phones or just look like wild animals in the headlights waiting for some kind of deliverance. Sometimes there’s a little whimper or a sigh or a hard swallow.

They may even begin to talk about their early childhood. Anything can happen really and at such moments I feel very much like a professional, a mental health professional.

Junior was being quite good. He only went to the window every five minutes and only fussed with the cushions and the lamp shades every ten. He changed his shoes several times, as if there were ever a perfect pair for making a ransom drop. He brushed his teeth three times and washed up twice. He didn’t talk much. When he did it was mostly to offer me more soda water or more potato crisps. The TV was on but the volume was off, which is the way I nearly always watch TV.

“ It may be a long night,” I said at last. “ You might want to lie down and get some rest. No need to sleep exactly.”

“ Will it be all right? Is she still alive?”

“ I think so. They’re not interested in the money. If they were, there’d be a good chance she’d be dead by now. I think the money they’re asking is just to cover expenses and for form’s sake. And as delivering her is the main aim of the operation, they won’t harm her.”

Put like that, I half believed it myself.

“ That’s good,’ he said and stretched his length on the sofa for a whole minute before returning to his nervous cower and setting fire to another Marlboro Light. 

At last I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“ The only thing that’s gnawing at me a little, Alex, is why anyone would want to kidnap her. Can you enlighten me on that?”

“ No idea.”

“ Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. She wrote to her dear Mommy straight after you announced you had killed your father and took the blame for it. Within a few hours I’m hired to find her and play fall guy. Then along come two men in a car and take her away. Maybe they were part of the same operation.”

“ But why would anyone kidnap her?”

“ Call it protective custody if you like. To stop her going to the press. Or to the police. It’s election year after all.”

“ So you think Mrs Chow kidnapped her own daughter.”

“ Stranger things have happened.”

“ So no harm will come to her then.”

I nodded.

The call came at twenty minutes to midnight. I was listening on the speaker phone. First we heard Adeline saying a few words but it could have been a tape. The kidnapper spoke harsh low-class Cantonese with a Mainland slant to it. It was longer than it needed to be, as if they didn’t really worry about traces. Junior mentioned he had a companion and who he was. That didn’t shake their end one bit. We were to drive immediately to a lay-by where the hiking trail started, near the bridge at Tai Tam Tuk reservoir, and await further instructions. If we were followed by police or by anyone else, the deal was off. They didn’t sound menacing. They sounded calm and plain devious. I didn’t like it at all.

We went down to the car park and got into Junior’s red Alfa Romeo. It sounded smooth, aggressive and rich. We drove past the Ma Hang housing estate which looked ghostly in the calm of Stanley. Then we turned left at the bottom of the road and took the first of the grand turns on the narrow Tai Tam road. Now it was the steep bank up to the roundabout and a turn right and we were on the coast road. It was a brisk night and the promise of a chilly early morning later on. Stanley Bay to our right looked serene and almost picturesque. There was very little traffic.  A few taxis were hanging about the American Club, waiting for the late stragglers from the bar. The huge high-rise fortress of the Manhattan complex was silhouetted against a moonlit sky. Junior drove calmly, resisting the urge I could feel in him to put his foot down and release his tension. The road wound and wound, odd bushes and ferns tickled the doorway left and whispered to us like a curse or a caress, it was hard to say which. On my lap, in a Lane Crawford plastic bag, was the bundle of money in used five hundred dollar bills.

Turtle Cove below us now and the sinuous line of houses on the promontory. The beginnings of Tai Tam Tuk estuary below us and the line of the hills and the road leading to Shek O above. A pair of joy riders on motorbikes whizzed past us. Another two hundred yards and the reservoir lurched towards us like a weird gulf of big brown void, sparkling lightly in the moonlight.

We stopped in the little lay-by as instructed. To our left, there was a changing room for hikers, twenty yards down a wooded drive which skirted the reservoir, a likely observation point for a kidnap gang if ever there was one.

We waited.

We didn’t have to wait long. A slowly moving minivan approached us, paused a second and moved on past. It was jet black with tinted windows. Then Junior’s phone rang and he turned on the tinny speaker.

“ Where are you now?” said the voice in Cantonese, as bright and brreezy as a hotel telephonist.

“ At the beginning of the reservoir, Stanley side.”

“ Good. Now listen. Get out and walk to the beginning of the bridge. We’ll call again when you get there. Take the money with you. Mr Trelford should stay behind in the car. No tricks. We’re watching your every move.”

Junior looked at me. He was pale, petrified and seemed to have aged a decade.

“ You’d better do what the man says.”

I got out with him and stood by the open car door. He took the bundle of money from my hands and walked down the road. After twenty yards, he turned right and he would be at the beginning of the bridge in a matter of minutes. I then knew what I had to do. I bent down as if getting back into the car but I didn’t. I crouched down and hit my belly and slammed the door. The eyes or field glasses of any observer in the hikers’ hut must be on Junior, not me. I waddled and crawled through the gravel of the pathway leading to the hut and reached a small clump of bushes. There was the sound of rushing water down a little gully to my left and it masked nicely the sound of my knees and my feet now as I stood up and skirted the trees along the path up to the hut. The low concrete hut was brightly lit but seemed a little less than usual. They’d probably taken out one or two of the fluorescent tubes. I smelt cigarette smoke on the air and a short burst of that low static sound walkie talkies make. I wished I had a weapon but I guessed my fists and a lot of hope would have to do.

Very gently, I tiptoed across the path and clung to the back wall of the hut. There were two openings with slatted pieces of glass at the top of the wall above my head. I took off my watch and turned its back to my eyes and lifted it on its strap to the beginning of the window opening. I could just reach it. I turned the back of the watch around. Something that looked like a small wiry Asian was standing on the wooden bench,  peering through the slatted glass on the other wall. He probably had some glasses trained on the road. I couldn’t see the bulge of a weapon on him and on the bench there was only a bottle of water and packet of cigarettes. I now saw the tiny walkie talkie in his hand and he whispered something into it. He wasn’t at all jumpy.

Gently I tapped one of the slanted glass panels with my watch. He didn’t notice. Then I walked round to the side door by the pathway and tapped again. There was a short sound like the movement of feet, then nothing. I tapped again. He was playing dead. I could hear his mind working. He was thinking police, security guards or a double cross. Perhaps he saw himself back again in the prison he had been in already, eating the congee and gambling for smokes. That would break him in a minute, I knew. Or maybe he was clever and could pretend to be a birdwatcher or hiker. You probably needed brains to think that fast though.

My man didn’t have all that many. He opened the door and looked as crazy as Manson. He also looked as frightened as hell. I kicked the door and caught him with a belly punch. He fell down and from where he lay his feet came up and hit me on the left leg. There wasn’t a lot of power behind the kick and he was only wearing sneakers but there was enough for me to hurt and stagger a second. I threw myself on him and hit him again, this time on the chin, what little he had of it. His body went limp for ten whole seconds, just enough time to reach into my pocket for the little pair of cuffs, another of Larry’s Christmas presents. I snapped one cuff on his right arm and dragged him towards a water pipe I could see under the washbasin in the small Chinese style squat toilet cubicle at the far end. He was coming to now and I had to work fast. I lifted his arm and ran the short linking chain of the cuffs around the water pipe. There was hardly room enough to do it but I managed in the end. I clicked the second cuff on his left wrist. He woke up then and stared at me and spat a gob of phlegm on my face as easily as a cobra spitting venom. I wiped it off with a couple of tissue from my bag, pinched his nose a moment and then stuffed the wad harder than I needed to into his awful, gaping, half-toothed maw.

There was a crackle on the walkie talkie. I pulled out the gag and told him what to say. I had my hands lightly around his neck as he spoke the few words to say that all was in order. The other end was saying someone had arrived. My man was perfectly cooperative. People often are when you can throttle them if they aren’t. Already he was thinking of less time in Stanley prison. Good for him and good for me. I pushed a fresh gag in his mouth and signalled goodbye. I took the tiny radio and ran like a madman down the gravel path and along the road, trying to keep my body low against the bushes at the edge of the lake. Two winds in the perilously narrow road and I saw Junior standing by the proud Colonial monument to Sir Henry May who, I remembered from the many times I’d seen it, had opened the Tai Tam Tuk reservoir in 1918. It must have been quite an achievement then. The wall and bridge along it was a hundred yards long and two hundred feet high. It had little neon tubes of light running across it on the right side. On my left the lake looked huge, sinister and as indiscriminating as an act of God. On my right, down the long curved drop of the reservoir wall, I could see the lights of the estuary village below and heard the roar of the water as it rushed down into it. The hills all around shrouded the valley in a pall of grim, dark-purple nothing.

Junior saw me but didn’t move. There was nothing on the bridge. The road was not much more than two metres wide, a real traffic bottleneck in the daytime. The next minute was an agony. Time was in the grip of all that space, all that helplessness. There was nothing human about it any more. At last, we saw the dark minivan turning the curve in the road at the other end of the road. It was moving as slowly as a President’s hearse. It reached the middle of the bridge and stopped. Junior knew what to do. He wasn’t shifting feet or looking dumb this time. I wondered why he hadn’t called. Perhaps he had been instructed not to or perhaps he was in his usual funk. There was a sound of the side van door being slid open. A figure got out which didn’t look like a hoodlum. It stood there. It was impossible to say if it was being held or restrained. It just didn’t budge. Junior was marching now and he held the bag of money forward like a tribute. He reached the front of the van and its long curving windscreen caught a little under the lights. There was an exchange of words. Then it happened.

A strong figure of a man emerged from the driver’s side and rushed towards him. Another burly figure approached him from the other side. There was a struggle for a

moment and a flailing of arms. The money dropped to the ground. The men got their hands around Junior’s legs and got him on the wall. It was a grim, dirty wrestling match and Junior gave all he had, trying to free his arms, hit the ground and roll and kick. But it was no use. Something heavy hit him and he went limp. Then he was on the wall, immobile, a mere inert bundle of something or other. They pushed the bundle. It dropped. There was a thud, a scrape, then a weak splash, then nothing.

It was that easy to end someone, that easy to get the big sleep.

 9.

Larry saved me. I’d told him what we had in mind when the ransom instructions arrived and he had said he would keep in contact but at a distance. He was now in his small Japanese imitation Land Rover just down the road in front of the American Club pretending to be waiting for someone. The day Larry waits for a rich American in his free time will be some day indeed.

The black minivan had done a fast reverse and towards the Shau Kei Wan end of the bridge and we stood as much chance finding it as winning the Mark Six lottery. We drove that direction now out of sense of loyalty or shock or whatever you do feel when your client gets wasted, which we discovered isn’t all that much in the early morning and probably wouldn’t be any other time of day. We telephoned the ambulance as most people do, when really the meat wagon is what you need. Some poor emergency nurse would be up to his thighs in pure cold Tai Tam water, feeling for a pulse where there couldn’t be one and being peered at by a swarm of local constabulary, all in the headless chicken mode they switch to when anything disastrous or dirty happens. We’d also reported the man chained up in the hikers’ hut. We supposed the car would be found at the same time as it was cute, red and shiny.

“ Murder a day Trelford, the mortician’s friend,” said Larry. “ Just follow him around and inform the coroner.”

He looked kind of funny behind the wheel of such a silly little car but I didn’t say so.

We took the left turn at the end of the road and drove down the bank into the grim streets of Shau Kei Wan and Sai Wan Ho. Another Seven-11 had opened opposite another Circle-K. Another foot and body and anything else if you asked for it massage centre had sprung up on another first floor and another set of buildings was being cleared, demolished and turned into bijou residences with shopping mall and fitness centre ensuite. The streets were still buzzing with oversized cars, empty buses, speeding taxis, gas-guzzling minivans, desultory shoppers, shuffling vagrants and bizarrely dressed Mainlanders on a spree. There were the same occasional children on errands to somewhere or just hanging around in McDonalds until their parents stopped their mahjong game. The food hawkers at the junctions were serving curried fish balls and barbecued squid on a stick. Soon the bright pencil towers of Kornhill and Tai Koo were before us on both sides, a cold, savage and treeless Metroland where people thought they were getting ahead at last on the 25-year mortgage plan.

“ For God’s sake, let’s get a drink,” I said at last as we were heading into Quarry Bay. “I’ve had enough of the City Of Life for one night.”

Tong Chong Street was a favoured hangout for the journalist and media crowd and the bars and restaurants had groups of foreigners but more often loners seeking inspiration and commiseration at the bottom of a glass.  There were yesterday’s papers in the bar and I glimpsed a picture of Mrs Chow and friends preparing for an election they believed they had a good chance of winning. It was hard to know why. After all, they were against democracy, against a fair share for all and against a welfare state.

“ How do they do it?” I asked Larry who had installed himself behind a larger-than-life glass of red wine. “ They seem to have all the wrong policies.”

“ But they do get the vote out. Vans, electoral rolls, signing up the old and the feeble and the frightened and the bigoted. Most Hong Kong people are too lazy to register and too lazy to vote. The like to march though – if the weather’s nice and they feel disgruntled. But the economy’s on the up again. No different from anywhere else I suppose.”

“ But people in Britain used to fight for their rights. Lots of them still do.”

“ Blair finished all that. Fitted carpets, central heating, EasyJet holidays, cheap lager, lots of allowances to keep the unemployable off the streets and out of your living room with a gemmy in their hand. More persuasive than Socialism wouldn’t you say? Cheers.”

“ I think we’re in a real mess right now. I’m frightened actually. I think this could be it. Former barrister found dead in doorway. What’s your theory?”

“ Well addressing ourselves strictly to the facts, it looks like a cover-up of a murder, or a manslaughter. Mrs Chow’s alarm bells started ringing when she got the e-mail. She thought you would either be a good fall guy for the job or you would actually find Adeline. She wouldn’t lose either way. She didn’t want to involve a local firm as the news would get out to everyone that way and scandal of any kind is what she and her friends really can’t use at the moment. Why they staged this trap to kill Mr Sung junior is a mystery to me. Of course he knew that Adeline had killed Mr Sung or that she had claimed to do so but it does seem a little heavy-handed. It would have been much better to get him to take the blame or set him up for the crime and leave it at that.”

“ Unless they were overtaken by events.”

“ Such as?”

“ The police seem to have cast-iron evidence that he was murdered. That didn’t seem obvious to me when I saw the corpse. I believe young Alex’s story now. I think they did have an argument and he pushed him and that he was as scared as hell. I think that’s how he persuaded Adeline to take the blame. He was a pretty hopeless kind of person whereas she, well I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. She scares me.”

“ So you think Sung senior wasn’t killed by a fall or a push?”

“ No. And I want you to find out how it was done and as fast as you can. When we know how he was killed we might find out why Alex was killed. At the moment, we’re seeing a picture but it’s the wrong picture.”

He got back into his Jeepette and went in search of elucidation in the police haunts he knew about. I walked down Tong Chong Street with the chill of autumn upon me, a relative chill because Hong Kong is never really cold. I felt shop soiled, worn and thin. There was a McDonalds open and I ate a cheeseburger without much interest and without much sensation. It is the perfect food for thinking as nothing much gets in the way. But I wasn’t thinking much. Memories of Junior in his dressing gown, memories of Junior looking pale and haggard and as frightened as a rabbit at the wheel of his car and the march towards his death. How did it feel to be tossed into the air and feel that bounce against Sir Henry May’s granite bricks? It sounded as good a way to go as any. This was no time to be sentimental about a young man gone. He wasn’t very heroic and he wasn’t all that likeable. But who was in Hong Kong - the town with the most of everything and the best of nothing.

I flagged down a taxi and felt the night upon me, harsher than before, and a million lives crowded around me, lives of mind-numbing work, cable TV, air conditioning, vague hopes and short-term satisfactions. I got out in Hennessy Road in Wanchai, where you can always find a welcome if your wallet is even half-way full. The girls stood in pairs at the junctions and at the entrances to the bars now, looking for their marks under the gaudy signs which were parodies of adventure. They eyed me hungrily now as they knew the signs of the spiritually bankrupt better than a stage psychic. Walk-in, walk-up sex never interests me in the normal run of things. It’s too much of a self-fooling to ring true, even at the bottom of a deep pit of despair or drunkenness. But some liked the self-deception and revelled in what Wanchai had to offer. The bars were always buzzing.

I sat down in the Devil’s Advocate and for no good reason had a bottle of white wine brought to me. It was all oaky vanilla and grapefruit, as mysterious as a tax demand. Thankfully, it was chilled out of all recognition and all the thrill you got was an icy kind of anaethesia in your throat and a rising sense of well, things may not be all that bad after all. They even brought me an ice bucket as they sensed a big spender and hoped one bottle wouldn’t do. Two girls at the next table, Filipinas of course, were holding on for dear life to the remains of their cocktails. It must have been a slack night.

“ Why don’t you join me? Your glasses look parched.”

They hopped over and their skirts gripped their legs like cling film. They were young for the game, eighteen going on twenty-five but it was hard to see how old they were really under all the make-up and fake jewels and stiff tied-back hair.

And we went through the usual routine. Of course they were on tourist visas and they were here visiting relatives and things were hard in the Philippines and they liked Hong Kong but it was expensive. They wanted to find jobs because they were graduates and respectable God-fearing homely girls and they didn’t really want to look after children and cook and clean for a living. They wanted to earn money and it was difficult for everyone from the Philippines where money just couldn’t be made even by nice attractive graduates with tied back hair and a horde of poor relatives all suffering from incurable conditions, the rest of the family being struck by the effects of tsunamis, fires, divorces, road accidents, collapsed buildings and vicious Chinese landlords. If there is a Hell, the Filipinos will be taking the hats and coats at the entrance and telling you all about it, largely because they want everyone to know what they escaped from. There’s no need for a heaven for Filipinos. They are happy with a clean, crisp Green Card.

Even though the ersatz wine was kicking in with a vengeance, I decided to take a rain check on a threesome or even a twosome. When faced with a choice between quiet desperation and surefire degradation with a brown fuzzy glow to it I always choose to go on suffering. Maybe I’m not an expatriate at all.

As I approached Stanley in the taxi I wondered if I could close my eyes and smell corruption in the air, the same way you can sense chaos in Italy or order in Switzerland. I opened my eyes at last as there wasn’t any clue. It was peaceful kind of place, low-rise mainly, boring mainly, a ramshackle collection of villas, market stalls and attempts at provision for tourists, a harmless little enclave where everyone got on with their business and watched the bucks quietly roll in. In that sense it was little different from anywhere else in Hong Kong. It just had better air and a lot less traffic.

I jumped out of the taxi at the entrance to Watson’s and the market looked horrid and sinister and empty the way only markets can when the people have gone. The old lady in her fluorescent striped overall was making a very late collection of the litter bins and didn’t look up as I passed. A few cockroaches skittled across my path but I was too lazy to try to crush them. It’s marvellous how a bottle of wine can make you just peachy inside and even believe that the low life has a right to go on breathing. You might even greet a policeman or a District Councillor in such a state of well-being.

I managed to keep a respectable straight line up to the street doorway and found the keyhole at first attempt. The door slammed behind me as usual with its usual metallic clang. I opened up the door, turned on the fluorescent light I always used to find the less glaring lamp and got a sudden eyeful of green uniformed constabulary sitting on my sofa, looking as peaceful as folks at a drive-in movie when it’s time to go home. But they weren’t going home.

10.

Police Central in Arsenal Street could be the headquarters of a respectable modern global bank because it’s tall, shiny, solid-looking and is full of computers and paper. Everyone there is in a grim and dreary business but they go about it like they’re handling loans and debits all day. I really feel sorry for coppers deep down as they joined up to fight crime or rescue children from burning buildings but they’re just paper pushers like everyone else in the end. In Hong Kong, the paper is abundant, stencilled, lined, in two languages and has a tired, cheap look to it. On the desk before me Littlejohn and two locals in plain clothes were leafing through a stack of it in a plain brown Government folder with my name on it somewhere amongst the numbers, labels and squiggles. I wonder how much they kept on the criminals.

“ Mr Trelford, thank you for coming to see us this morning. I apologise for the late hour but our enquires are rather urgent.”

It was all being taped of course and you could see the words appearing in front of the judge and him noting what a nice, polite lot the police were these days. I smiled. Littlejohn looked remarkably fresh for the hour but his Irish face looked strangely more Irish now with the beard shadow upon it. His uniform was crisp and neat and all the studs on it were bright and shiny.

“ As I told you before Mr Littlejohn when you stormed round to my hotel room the other afternoon whilst I was working, I never object to helping the police.”

“ Thank you Mr Trelford. I wonder if I you would mind telling us where you were this evening and more precisely at midnight or thereabouts.”

“ Well, before I start helping you in some way I think it would be polite of you to help me out and tell me if I am suspected of a crime and what crime that would be. I’d also like to know if I am not suspected, what crime you’re investigating within the present parameters of discussion. Not that I’ve anything to hide but you do know that I’m a private investigator and I have a duty to my clients’ confidentiality.”

“ We’re aware of that. We’re actually interested in two deaths, one of which we strongly suspect is a murder and one, the one which occurred this evening in fact, which we provisionally believe was a murder. The first party referred to is your landlord Mr Sung and the second is your client Alex Sung, Mr Sung Junior.”

“ Well, I’m quite surprised to hear you think Mr Sung senior was murdered.”

“ The autopsy had revealed that he died not from a fall or a heart attack. He died from the injection of a substance we believe to be carbolic acid which was administered directly to the heart muscle. We believe he was unconscious at the time. Although the symptoms of his death mimicked in every way those of a heart attack and the point where the needle entered the body was hard to detect, our pathologist is adamant that is how he died.”

I said nothing for a while.

“ And how can I help you with the provisionally believed murder of Mr Alex Sung?”

“ You can tell us where you were this evening.”

“ At what time.”

“ I can tell you that at around midnight and until about two a.m. I was with my friend and partner Larry Snowdon. Before that time I was assisting a client.”

“ Could you tell us a little more.”

“ Not at this stage. I’m sorry to say that my instincts as a former barrister and my present duties as a private investigator somehow mitigate against me chatting away with the police with the tape running or justifying myself in some way when there are two murders in the frame. So I will make a statement now and then you will have to decide whether you want to take it as it sits and release me or whether you want to detain me and charge me but heaven knows why and with what evidence. So here it is. I did not kill or assist the killing of Mr Sung senior and I did not kill or assist the killing of Mr Alex Sung Junior. That’s all I have to say.”

Littlejohn looked at this two local assistants who seemed to know a lot more than him, but that wasn’t saying much. I looked at the tape machine and one of them had the intelligence to turn it off. Then I looked at the two men, one by one, and then the door. They got up and left. Littlejohn looked a lot smaller without men at his side.

“ As I said, Littlejohn, I’m more than willing to help the police but it would be nice if you treated a man civilly and with just a little respect. You could have met me for a drink and nice little chat in some lobby lounge but instead you choose to drag me into this glittering, high-tech, pencil-pushing hell hole at this ungodly hour for an old-fashioned full frontal grilling. As if it’s going to get you anywhere. Man, you’re so ham-fisted you’re positively dangerous.”

“ Tell me what you know. None of this is on the record.”

“ Everything is on the record with a copper like you. I don’t trust you and I don’t like you. You have what you would call a public relations problem.”

“ So who will you talk to.”

“ No one if you’re in on it. Why don’t you hand the investigation over to someone with a bit of imagination.”

“ Who for example?”

I thought for a moment.

“ Is Jake Holloran still around?”

“ Halloran? He’s practically retired.”

“ Another good man gone then.”

“ No no. He’s still with the force. He mainly does admin and training these days.”

“ As I said, another good man gone.”

“ So if we release you, you’ll keep in touch with us and tell us where you are and chat to Superintendent Halloran when he becomes available? ”

“ Sounds like a deal to me.”

“ I can’t do anything like that without authorisation. I’m going to have to hold you until I can work things out. I’m sorry about that.”

Then Littlejohn’s two-goon support group came back in and they sat shuffling their files and notebooks and whispering away in Cantonese for a while. It’s very difficult to whisper in Cantonese as you get all the tones wrong. It’s Nature’s shouting language if ever there was one. Littlejohn’s Cantonese sounded half-way right sometimes if you used your imagination.

I was led down the blue carpeted corridor to the Schindler and taken down not to the holding cells but to a kind of visitors’ canteen with vending machines and a lot of formica-topped tables and screwed down benches where most of the relatives of Hong Kong’s scumbags had sat some time, sipping lai cha and sucking up noodles and trying to put a brave face on another pinch in the family. It was yet another place I’d seen recently to slit your wrists or at least gulp and sigh in. If only gumshoeing had more glamour, we’d all be doing it. I thought for some time how old Marlowe would have handled things and reckoned I came out at least even. They had stenographers in those days of course and he would have snarled at them and hit the desk with his hat. The rooms would have been full of tobacco smoke but now every police office just smelled of musty ink and that sickly fug of electronic gadgets overheating. There were no ashtrays anywhere and spittoons were definitely yesteryear. Otherwise the situation was about the same: dim policemen trying to work the muscle, a vaguely heroic private dick protecting his client and trying not to be the fall guy and no one anywhere besides them giving a damn really as long as they got their payoffs and it all stayed out of the papers. Film noir was definitely still in.

Around an hour later, the place started to fill up with sorry-looking molls in culottes and boots and wrinkled blouses and hair that looked as if it had been crispy fried. There were mean little men with pinched, furrowed faces and permed or tinted hairdos hugging showy mobile phones and wobbling their legs like they did when the race meetings were on. Sometimes there was a respectable looking man or woman who could have been a duty lawyer or a social worker or just an honest branch of the family no one talked about in mixed company. They tried not to look round and often they were fighting back tears. “It has come to this” hung in the air like a workhouse motto and if you wanted to write a new soap opera, all the main ingredients were there before you in the raw, but no one would buy it because it was all so mean and dull. There was shoplifting and petty gambling and drunk driving and small-time larceny as a backdrop, peppered with ketamine tablets and a bit of white angel dust if you were lucky. Nothing very fancy, nothing very noble and nothing at all even engaging about it all.

After another half hour or so, but time never really runs like a clock with the police, I was taken down to the holding cells. The two policemen who led me down looked deferential and almost apologetic as they led me down. My watch and my shoelaces and my manbag and everything else which made me human was taken away and put into a thick brown envelope or a large plastic bag. I was being processed. I asked for a pencil and a few sheets of paper and the door was slammed. I always felt like Gulliver in a cell. No one appreciates just how nice and large rooms outside the slammer really are. There were bunk beds but I was alone. I was given me some cigarettes and a lighter as a pipe could be used as a weapon, as we know, but I wondered what kind of weapon. It was dim inside, the air conditioning was brisk and dry and cold. The walls were brown with a neat snot green trim to lift your spirits. There was the luxury of a squat toilet and a tap and a stainless steel wash basin but no mirror, no complimentary toiletries, no turn-down service and no minibar. There was a small table and a chair screwed to the floor so I sat down and took one of the sheets of paper and tore it up into small pieces. I made some chessmen by writing their names on the scraps of paper with my short brown pencil. A second sheet of paper gave me the board and I sat up an elaborate defence against a hostile, knowing, relentless opponent. Somehow he seemed to anticipate all my moves. He was caught within half an hour by a delayed Kiesentzky gambit which completely nullified his elaborate Cambridge Springs defence.

The lower bunk bed looked inviting after that although it had been designed by someone who didn’t think beds were for sleeping much. It had a sliver of a mattress, springs which grated at your body and all the give of a concrete pavement. The stiff grey blanket gathered around me, I eventually dozed off into that place people go to when they are just too frustrated and angry and bored to bother too much about being human and alive any more.