Blue Lantern (3 page)

“Oh, Mike,” Sherwin said with disgust.

Brodie earned enough for his needs, but a girl like Helen Lau would be beyond him. She wasn't the kind of woman you could dine at a street stall. “I've never thought about the implications of accepting a bribe,” he added hastily.

“Well, do you have a price?” Parker asked.

Brodie found the subject intriguing rather than offensive. “I have no idea.”

“I think it's all a myth and a load of nonsense,” Sherwin persisted. “Sure, there's always some corruption where there's police work anywhere. But the kind of institutionalised and systematic extortion that you're talking about doesn't happen here.”

“How can you be so positive?” Parker asked.

“Because there's no evidence, and I have faith in the integrity of the organisation I work for.”

Parker frowned comically. “Integrity?”

The rest of them were silent. They didn't know what to believe. Always, when the subject was discussed it ended in perplexity and uneasiness; feeling foolish for not knowing; not wanting to admit how attractive the money was; not wanting to moralise. To Brodie, the young inspectors each seemed to be divided in their minds between the attraction of money, and the repulsion of corruption, except Sherwin.

“Let me ask you, Don. Would you take the money?” Sherwin asked.

“Well, I don't know,” Parker laughed, turning toward the lecture room as the bell sounded. “I haven't had an offer – yet.”

2

Mike Brodie sat on a chair, naked to the waist. He was behind a screen in the casualty ward at the Queen Elizabeth hospital, while Dr Helen Lau removed his stitches. He had arranged with her in advance that she would see him.

“One of the nurses could be doing this, but I guess it doesn't do any harm for a doctor to confirm her skills occasionally,” she said.

She quickly severed the threads, and drew the loose ends out with tweezers. She smoothed her fingers across the angry red line of tissue, satisfied with the result.

“A little time and the scar will fade to a whitish colour, almost invisible.”

He had his first opportunity to study her, a person with whom he had developed a telephone relationship, a breathless exchange of innocent words in the ether, but words that for him had a subliminal sexual echo. He had remembered little about her, and perhaps imagined too much. Now, all he could see under the loose, starched white coat was an outline of her small figure. Her eyes were large, her lips full, her skin fine and pale like ceramic. Her mahogany hair was tied back, emphasising high cheek bones and a graceful neck. In her doctor role she was withdrawn.

“You've healed well and quickly.”

“I'm sure your neat needlework helped.”

A small dimple appeared on each of her cheeks. “The wound wasn't exactly a case of great surgical difficulty.”

Brodie had decided to plunge, to ask to see her again, but the effect of her presence was austere. The few short, playful conversations on the telephone should have made it easy; but it wasn't easy. He lowered his voice. “Now that we're no longer doctor and patient, can we meet?”

His voice was more gawky that he had imagined; the words fell out inappropriately in a hustling casualty ward. He met an amused stare. The unpleasant cries of sick people intruded from behind the screen. Helen Lau didn't show any surprise or coyness. After all, Brodie thought, she set events in motion.

She paused. “I'll have to think about that. In the meantime, keep out of the way of those squaddies' knives.”

She disappeared behind the curtain before he had a chance to put on his shirt.

The Land Rover turned into Cameron Road. Brodie reported all clear to control. It was a summer night, with only the faintest prickle of stars. The humidity induced torpor. Brodie dozed, lulled by the hum of the radio, and the deft movements of the driver, like a mechanical doll at the wheel.

In these few square miles, amongst the dilapidated tenements and factories and shops, the main part of the population lived, refugees or fugitives from the mainland, millions crammed into cavities of wood and concrete. Most of the people found something useful to do, living off each other by the magic of trade. It was a crowded and decaying place, energised by the people; they worked with concentration, minded their own business, and when work was done, gathered indoors, or at a restaurant with their families, ignoring the streets and all those who stumbled in them. Brodie thought the streets were like flood drains, strewn with waste, the territory of thieves – and the police. On the first of October some people put red flags out of the windows of their tenements. On the tenth of October others put out the red and blue of the Republic, now a remnant in Taiwan. Most people put out their washing; the garments hung on poles in the streetlight, like roosting vultures.

Brodie removed a letter from his pocket that he had received that morning, written on a small piece of yellow notepaper. He smoothed it out, and strained to read it again in the map-light on the dash-board.
Dear Inspector Brodie, I hope you don't mind me using this rather undistinguished piece of paper to address you, but it is all I have at hand. I'm in my sleeping room at the hospital. It's a fresh evening, the air is soft. I'm going out for a walk to the post office in a moment. I want to stride freely along the road. I want to see people scurrying around out there. I want to glance up and see the stars or clouds, instead of fluorescent light. I'm going to take a good look at a flower stall and buy some for my room. I hope I didn't hurt you too much when I took your stitches out – Helen.

He had pondered on a reply. Helen was exposing a little more of herself and he ought to respond. But when he had tried to, his handwriting was ugly and untutored compared to Helen's flowing script. His thoughts seemed artificial. A second attempt had followed the first into the rubbish bin. He decided he would use one of the typewriters in the duty room when he had arranged his ideas.

Brodie jerked, fully awake when the Land Rover groaned to a stop. A constable ran into the headlights, thin, tightly belted into his khaki uniform, with the big holster on his hip. Brodie leaned out and asked what was happening in Cantonese.

“Body in lane,” the constable replied in English, and pointed.

“A drunk?”

“Chopper job.”

Brodie reported on the radio, and called for an ambulance. Then the squad, apart from the driver, jogged down Cameron Lane. The constables shouted at the crowd to disperse. Brodie pressed into the centre of trouble, jamming his stick into the backs of those who stood in his way. When the throng parted he looked down on a supine, blood-soaked body, dressed in the tunic of a waiter or messenger. The victim had broad bare feet with dirty toenails. The chopper had sliced him on the arms, shoulders and chest, and almost severed his head. Blood spread beneath the body like a cloak.

“He dead, I think,” Sergeant Lam said, his finger on the man's throat.

Sergeant Lam and the corporal began to make enquiries for witnesses from the onlookers and stall-holders; but it would be a fruitless search; nobody ever saw anything. Brodie's first revulsion at the sight of violent death on the street had passed quickly. Now, only the occasional grotesqueness of a particular death might be the subject of a remark to a colleague in the duty room. The live people were the worry, not the dead.

Brodie was awakened by traffic noise at ten in the morning. The sun glared through cracks in the venetian blind. The room was bright and small; besides the bed it had a dresser, wardrobe, and a low table with two chairs, all in light oak. The white walls were bare, a reminder that he had not settled; this was not home. Nor was Glasgow. His aunt would provide him with a temporary bed if he pressed her. She had always made it plain that ‘bringing up the boy' was a God-given burden, but a burden; and there had been a soft pressure to leave in his latter years with her. All Glasgow offered was a desk job in a bank, or a place behind the shelves of a bookshop; the city seemed to be set in the yoke of years of old ways of doing things that chafed and excluded him. He had set his mind on emigrating to Australia, when the Hong Kong opportunity had come along; a kind of half-way step.

The room was warm but not unpleasant. His nakedness was covered by one sheet. He left the bed to adjust the blind, and then lay down again. He reached for an apple from the table and began to eat noisily, masking the grinding sound of traffic; then he smoked; the pleasure of a first cigarette in bed.

He wondered again about the form under the white coat; Helen's presence hadn't left him in three weeks. The door opened suddenly without a knock, and Brodie hauled himself into sitting position, his chest and shoulders damp with sweat. Don Parker, dressed in a tan summer suit came in; his tasks didn't require a uniform. Parker tapped one of his brogues on the tiles for attention.

“Trouble last night, Mike. I've just seen your Super. Thought you'd be interested. Nothing in the papers, of course.”

“Yeah?” Brodie rested back, turning his head away from the needles of light which had found another way of penetrating the blind, remembering the chopper victim.

“A fight between strike pickets and cops over near Kai Tak.”

“Thrilling stuff.”

Parker looked put out. “It's a bad sign. There's going to be more. A lot more. Your beat is going to liven up, Mike. A bit of action for a change.”

“Fine. If there's something I want on my duty, it's action.”

“Chairman Mao will provide.”

“Don, have you ever been on the beat?”

“God, no! Some of us have to use our brains, while you guys go out patting the pussies of the bar girls.”

For a moment, Brodie envied Parker's nonchalance. He was the British colonialist who ran Hong Kong, as prophesied by the selection board, the district commissioner, policeman and magistrate all in one.

“So you think Mao is coming over the border?” Brodie asked, swinging himself out of bed.

“Maybe. If not, his pals here will make trouble.”

“How do you know?”

Parker smiled mysteriously, “We keep up with the frivolities of Mao's Cultural Revolution on the mainland. We watch who comes and goes from China. We know a damn lot.”

“I'll stick with the bar-girls,” Brodie yawned.

Parker turned abruptly and headed for the door. “You'll have to pull finger if you're going to get on here, Mike!”

A flying shoe smashed against the door frame where Parker's head had been a moment before. Parker was so comfortable, Brodie reflected, that nothing other than living in the Colony for a time could have prepared
him
for its peculiar alien flavour. The incongruity of a Britisher trying to keep order in a foreign ant-heap had become apparent month by month. And yet he was held in Hong Kong by the Police Force, a piece of dark, complicated machinery which on balance fascinated him, and which he wanted to understand.

Brodie reached for the handset to try to reach Helen Lau at the hospital. By chance, he found her.

“Hi, it's your cop reporting.”

“How have you been?”

“Not so good without seeing you.”

“I think you're doing fine.”

“We should meet.”

“I'm thinking about it. I'm very busy.”

“You're very attractive.”

She laughed. “I guess I should be fairly safe with a police officer to protect me.”

Always in a hurry, she broke off the call, but in a way which invited him to call again, or implied that she might call him. Brodie lay back on the bed. He had indulged his curiosity by obtaining some information about Helen from published government records. She was a graduate of Hong Kong's English university in biology. She had qualified in medicine at Guy's Hospital in London, and had passed the US examination for registration there. And she was a member of a government subcommittee on practice standards.

Brodie was awed, almost humiliated, by her academic and professional achievements. She was just two years older than him. Not that he had ever thought seriously of a higher education. Aunt Fiona had found many ways to suggest that the sooner he was earning his keep the better.

Helen seemed to be a member of one of the many almost anonymous middle class families who lived in comfort in Hong Kong. When she was off duty she stayed at her parents' apartment which was in the most exclusive part of Tsim Sha Tsui. He had walked past the block. She said her father had been a merchant in Amoy; her brother was part owner of a shipping company in the coastal trade. Helen herself claimed some affinity with the sea; and when Brodie, in one of their more meandering telephone conversations mentioned sailing, she showed interest.

“I'm thinking of sailing to Manila at the end of the year,” he had said.

“How will you do that?”

“Crewing in the Hong Kong-Manila race on Boxing Day.”

“You have a place?”

“Yes, a guy I know in government has a yacht.”

“I'd love to do that.”

“You have to have experience,” he said, although he had very little.

She sighed. “My family have been coastal seafarers for generations, and my brother has a forty foot ketch on which I've crewed.”

“Are you really interested in the race?”

She hesitated. “Yes, I am. I'd have to know the people I was with.”

“OK. I'll see what I can do.”

“And don't forget, having a doctor on board is always useful.”

Manila, at this point, was a fantasy because he hardly knew her, but it was the genesis of a plan.

He had asked Helen what she did with her time apart from work, and she said she was studying to specialise in anaesthetics. Every Sunday she attended the Anglican church. She went to piano lessons and choir practice once a week, and to classical music concerts whenever she could. He found this collection of virtuous pursuits so far beyond him that he could hardly comment.