Blue Lantern (9 page)

This room was the same as Brodie's, but on a lower floor; clean, convenient and characterless.

“Paul, have you been told what your new duties are?”

“Nothing yet, while the case goes on. Flinn hinted I'd be on much the same duties as you after the trial. I expected to be moved. They suspended the other two, the culprits. There's a new team on the island now.”

“Are the brothels and games still there?”

“I reckon so. They've moved a few blocks, but they're still there,” Sherwin said, looking to see how Brodie would take this.

“Like Andy said.”

“It doesn't make any difference to how I feel about what I did.”

A root of cynicism had already germinated in Brodie, despite his inexperience, which told him his friend's gesture was useless. “How's the case going? I've seen a couple of reports in the papers, but you can't tell much. The reporters always twist it.”

But allowing for distortion in the reports, Brodie had concluded that the trial was going badly. The judicial process seemed to him to chafe and scuff along slowly, an old tumbril that might lose a wheel. Sherwin's face darkened, forced to return to the preoccupation of weeks.

“I suppose it's going as well as expected. I'm sure learning a lot.”

“You don't look too pleased, Paul.”

Brodie didn't press; it would be painful to hear what he expected; but Sherwin dropped a shirt back in a suitcase, and sat down beside Brodie.

“What surprises me, is the atmosphere of suspicion from the day I made the report. At first I thought I was imagining it, and my superiors were just being careful. But it's unmistakable. I mean you'd think there would be some degree of approval for trying to clean up the Force, but no. When Internal Inquiries came to see me, it was as though I wasn't telling the truth, trying to pay off a score, or work an angle.”

“Perhaps you should have shut up,” Brodie said, considering how he might have behaved himself.

“We've discussed that. You know how I feel. If it happened now, I'd do the same thing,” Sherwin said abruptly.

“You have to think of yourself, Paul. You're more important than two corrupt cops. You can do a lot for the Force.”

“I can't do anything for the Force if I don't do this. Are you coming down to the level of this place?”

“No, but for Christ's sake, in any walk of life you have to think of yourself. You can't be a complete idealist, or you'll ruin yourself, and not get near achieving any of your objectives.”

Brodie sounded confident, but he wasn't.

“That sounds like a quotation from Andy Marsden,” Sherwin said, too battered by his recent encounters to get into further conflict. He pressed his palms against his forehead. “You ought to hear the scepticism in the court. How could anyone make these incredible allegations against two loyal Chinese officers? That's the tone. Do you realise that
their
story is that I had been on the take, and wanted more, so I pressured them into collecting it, and turned them in when they refused. It's pitiful, but that's their defence. And it has a horrible credibility in court, believe me.”

Brodie saw his friend in no-man's land, a mud covered figure, being shot at from all sides. “As if you were on trial yourself.”

“Exactly. I am on trial.”

“Goddam! There can't be the slightest evidence that you were on the take.”

“Think about it. One of these men has twenty years in the Force. The other, fifteen. Irreproachable records.”

“Uh-huh, and you're a new boy.”

“Sure. And they're impeccable liars. They know police procedures. They didn't break down in the cells and confess.”

Brodie thought for a while, and lit a cigarette. “If they get off, you've done your best.”

Sherwin had reached the same conclusion. “I can accept the verdict. I can see now that to catch these guys I'd have needed marked money, taped conversations, all the gimmicks of professional detection. I wasn't ready for that. Never gave it a thought. What happened, happened in a few minutes, the day they came into my office and made the offer. I locked up their money and told them what I was going to do, what I had to do.”

“OK. The sooner it's over the better, and you can get back to work,” Brodie said, optimistically.

“It isn't as simple as that. I've been dragged into a fog of suspicion. The judge, the lawyers, the police – they've all heard defence counsel thumping the table about a corrupt young police inspector. It's hard to take. And hard to know how much of these speculations might find their way into my personal file.”

Paul Sherwin slumped back on the bed, new hollows in his waxen cheeks.

Brodie and Sherwin decided to have lunch in the Mongkok mess before crossing in the ferry to the Island for the afternoon. The mess was panelled in dark wood, and had dusty cases displaying the tarnished trophies won by the station in competitions with others. A head table and two long tables were occupied by a sprinkling of diners; stewards in green cotton jackets moved through an odour of cabbage soup.

At the entrance they met Assistant Superintendent Freddie Hudson. For his age, forty-seven, Hudson was in a relatively junior position. Brodie had identified him as one of a breed of expatriates who disliked Hong Kong, but couldn't face life in inevitably reduced circumstances in England; he clung to a well paid but minor post. Hudson was in reality a clerk who dealt with the needs of commissioned officers. He was silver-haired with pale, bulbous features moulded randomly, like uncooked pastry. But Hudson, unlike some of his colleagues, was not boorish toward his juniors.

“Come and join me in a drink,” he said, indicating seats at the bar in a courtly way. He seemed to like drinking with the younger fry. He had a certain gaiety and took his work casually. He had arranged the Mongkok end of Sherwin's posting, and welcomed him. He ordered pints of lager for Brodie and Sherwin, a double pink gin for himself, and started to talk about dissident groups in the Colony.

“I think there might be trouble.”

“What kind?” Brodie asked.

“Who can say? The odd riot. A few bombs.”

“Who are these dissidents?”

“The Rickshaw Boy's Association worrying about the price of sandals, for all I know.”

“It doesn't sound much.”

“It's going to affect you lads.”

“How?” Brodie asked.

Hudson grinned to himself, and toked heavily on a cigarette. “Further duties, my friend.”

“More work, great. When do I sleep?”

But Brodie couldn't get Hudson to go beyond the flippant, and left him nursing his secret. “Paul and I are going over to the yacht club after lunch.”

“You're members?” Hudson asked twirling his empty gin glass, and signalling for service.

“No, we're going to join.”

Hudson looked at them sceptically. “Quite right. Get away from police scum.”

Sherwin put his empty glass on the bar and went to sit down. Hudson detained Brodie with a hand on his arm.

“Mike, while we're talking about sailing. The Manila race. You're on for that?”

It was Hudson who had introduced Brodie to Harold Evans, the Treasury official who owned the yacht. Brodie had begun to take the crewing proposal more seriously since Helen had agreed to come. He had already told Evans, who was keen to have a doctor on board, about Helen. The race had been an interesting idea at first, but now it was beginning to have a number of justifications.

“Dead keen. I'll be taking my leave then, and … I could see a bit of the Phillipines.”

“OK, you need to get practice on the boat. Come out during the weekend. With my wife, and a few others. Get away from the police crowd, you know?”

Brodie assented, and left Hudson with the others at the bar. Sherwin was seated with Parker and a couple of his Special Branch cronies. Brodie helped himself to a salad from the buffet and joined them.

“How's the case going, Paul?” Parker asked.

“So-so.”

“I heard it was likely to be thrown out.”

“If you know so much, why ask?”

“Let's leave the case, Don,” Brodie said.

“It's certainly a bad subject for the digestion,” Parker snorted, and the Special Branch pair guffawed.

“What about you, Mike. I hear you've been cleaning up the town.”

“You hear everything don't you?” Brodie replied, troubled that his policing had attracted wider notice than Flinn's in-tray.

Parker darted his eyes from one to the other of them, and fingered the tight knot of his club tie. “Pretty well. Even that you're doing the rounds at the Lotus.”

“Any more, Don, and I'll kick your ass.”

“I don't like the Irish stew,” Sherwin said, rising from the table.

“In the footsteps of Andy Marsden,” Parker said.

Brodie stood up, and his chair squawked on the floorboards. Sherwin grabbed his arm and pulled him away. Parker watched with a steely smile.

Brodie and Sherwin crossed to the Island in the Star Ferry. Out of the atmosphere of the mess, their appetites returned; they bought papers of French fries at a stall, sprinkled them with salt and vinegar, and ate with greasy fingers as they walked. They progressed through Statue Square and along Queen's Road, into the more Europeanised world of airline and shipping offices, columned buildings, glassy facades and shiny cars. Brodie realised how much he was pinned down in Chinese territory a few miles down Nathan Road. He wanted to join the yacht club because he wanted to break out of the small circle of oriental police life. Sherwin understood and shared his feelings, but wasn't driven so much by them.

As they dawdled down toward Causeway Bay, Sherwin said, “My old man tried to stop me coming to Hong Kong. He said police lived inside the fence, but not in the house.”

“Like dogs.”

“He may have had a point,” Sherwin said.

“It's that sense of being excluded.”

At the typhoon shelter, the sleek hulls of the yachts glistened on the tide. Brodie and Sherwin strolled along the breakwater to the clubhouse. Inside they appreciated the deep leather chairs, the brass fittings, the cool spaces; they examined pennants on the walls, etchings of early Hong Kong, old photographs of fast white yachts, the gleaming trophies, and the paintings of the prosperous white males who had been past presidents. They browsed in half a century of yachting history; they might have been in Poole or the Isle of Wight.

An elderly man in a blue chalk-striped suit and red spotted bow tie approached them. He had a door-keeper's eye for strangers. “I'm the assistant secretary.”

“We've come along to see if we could join.”

“That's
very
good,” he replied with a needling stare.

Brodie felt they were being appraised, two neatly summer-suited young British men, with their back-street Indian tailoring, shiny-new, pulling at poorly stitched seams.

The assistant secretary proffered a freckled hand upon hearing their names. “You need forms and references. I suppose you live here as permanently as any of us? Young executives of international trade?”

“We're police inspectors,” Sherwin said bluntly.

The assistant secretary paused, it seemed to consider their unusual way of life. “You have a boat?”

“No,” Brodie said.

“Ha! You are getting one?”

“Well, not immediately. Does it matter?”

“No,” the assistant secretary said, airily, checking the wings of his bow tie.

“How much is membership going to cost?” Sherwin asked.

The assistant secretary looked startled at the subject of money. He made a derisory reference in a low voice to an entry fee of several thousand dollars, and a monthly levy, shrugging at the figures as though they were unworthy of mention.

“That's a bit stiff. We only get sixteen hundred a month,” Sherwin said.

The assistant secretary adjusted his spectacles. “Really?”

Brodie felt that he was becoming an anecdote, to be related with the Port and Stilton.

“You have to be accepted by the membership committee,” the assistant secretary added on a falling note, which diminished hope.

“We'll think it over,” Brodie said.

“Yes, do.”

Brodie and Sherwin retreated across the varnished deck of the foyer.

“Do you want the forms?” the assistant secretary called.

“We'll wait,” Brodie said, and he butted clumsily against Sherwin as they made a line for the door.

Brodie could feel the scornful eye of the assistant secretary burning into a spot between his shoulder blades.

Brodie and Sherwin loafed silently along the waterfront in Causeway Bay instead of heading back toward Central District.

“Damn it, Paul,” Brodie said at last, “you didn't have to be so forthcoming with that old tit about how much we earn!”

“They don't want us.”

“Shall we have a beer?”

They were at the outskirts of Wanchai. Brodie led the way into a bar, and Sherwin followed into the initial blackness, the blood-thumping of electric music, the blur of coloured lights, the perfume of girls. They drank the cold beer together for a couple of hours, and after a while the liquor healed their wounds, and they relaxed into the warmth of the evening. They did not have a post mortem on the assistant secretary; Brodie was too embarrassed, and Sherwin seemed not to care. Girls sat with them, and Brodie felt the proximity of their bodies, wanted to touch a cheek, to slip his fingers though a split at the back of a girl's dress, under the silk, to the skin…

Brodie's patrol was getting near the end of their shift on an unusually uneventful night. They were driving down a lane in Sham Shui Po to the junction of Shun Ho Road, heading toward the harbour, when a Leyland diesel lorry, a fifteen tonner with a closed canopy, blasted across the intersection in front of them. The truck hit a petrified rickshaw man, and destroyed his rickshaw. Bits of wood and wire whirled in the air as the vehicle roared away, leaving the rickshaw man crumpled in the gutter.