Heaven's Light (12 page)

‘Because money’s a measure of success. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. Not pound notes, necessarily, but everything that goes with it. Money talks. Money means respect. If you’re not rich, no one takes a blind bit of notice.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Barnaby was engaged now. ‘I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that commitment matters, and passion, and equality and all that stuff
and, of course, you’re right. They do all matter. But that’s not the end of the story. I’m with you. You know I am. I speak your language. I stand up in the bloody magistrates’ court and I plead for all these misfits, these poor bloody inadequates that can’t even tie their own shoelaces. I know these people. They’re my bread and butter. Liz and I wouldn’t eat without them. But wringing my hands and getting them a conditional discharge isn’t enough. They just go back to it. Shoplifting. Credit cards. DSS stuff. Whatever. And they
still
can’t tie their bloody shoelaces.’

‘And money?’

‘Money can solve that. In fact, money’s the only bloody way it can be solved.’

‘By you getting rich?’

‘By me getting other people to take some notice of what I happen to believe.’

‘Which is?’

‘The need to spread it about a bit.’

‘Spread what?’

‘Money, of course. We used to call it taxation. Remember taxation? The rich paying their dues? The poor just a little less helpless?’ Barnaby looked up.

‘That was a political speech,’ Kate said quietly. ‘I didn’t know you made political speeches.’

‘Maybe you didn’t listen hard enough.’

‘On the contrary.’ She got up, retrieving the cat from the open hatchway. ‘I listened all the time. That’s probably what turned you on. But you were a clown, a kid, a child. And that’s what made you so attractive, believe it or not.’

Barnaby watched her stroking the cat, amazed at how effortlessly she’d stepped from politics to something infinitely more personal. He’d come here to tell her she
wouldn’t be front-page news. Now she was analysing an affair that had crucified them both.

‘You’re saying you mothered me?’

‘Not at all. I’m saying I loved your enthusiasm. Your … naïvety, I suppose. There was nothing you wouldn’t do, no mountain you wouldn’t climb. Kids are like that. Until they learn.’

‘And you think I’ve learned?’

‘I think you’ve changed.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘Possibly.’

Barnaby reached for the wine bottle. There was enough left for half a glass each.

‘A vote for the Chablis party,’ he said lightly. ‘Never take a man seriously when he’s been drinking.’

‘Bullshit. Drink lowers your guard.’

Kate raised her glass, smiling. Miles away, Barnaby could hear the howl of a police siren. He closed his eyes, knowing he should change the subject, telling himself he hadn’t come here to revive an old affair. The past was the past. Put to the test, he’d backed off, and nothing he could ever say or do would ever change that.

‘My mate Charlie,’ he began, ‘also had a very good day.’

Kate sat back, cross-legged, thoughtful, listening to Barnaby describe Charlie’s encounter with the city’s Strategy Unit. The guys that ran the place were evidently fed up with rule from Westminster and Whitehall. They’d had enough of ministerial diktats and years of trench warfare. So much so that, according to Charlie, some seemed on the edge of open rebellion.

Barnaby paused, eyeing Kate. ‘You’d know,’ he said. ‘True or false?’

‘True. Except that we run the city. The guys Charlie met are council officers. We decide. They deliver.’

‘But the real decisions are made elsewhere. That’s Charlie’s point. The guys that matter are up in London. What they say goes. No?’

Kate looked briefly pained. Admitting her own political impotence wasn’t something that came easily. At length, with some reluctance, she nodded.

‘He’s right,’ she said. ‘In the end we control maybe fifteen per cent.’

‘Of what?’

‘The city’s budget.’

‘So what’s that got to do with local democracy?’

‘Nothing.’ She paused. ‘But, then, no one’s really bothered. You know the average turnout for local elections in this bloody country?’

‘No.’

‘Thirty per cent.’ She made a vague, despairing gesture with the empty wine glass. ‘You spend weeks, months, knocking on doors, holding meetings, drawing up petitions, trying to get people motivated, but when it comes down to it just three punters out of ten take the trouble to vote.’

‘You’re saying we get what we deserve?’

‘No, I’m saying it’s a vicious circle. Your friend Charlie’s right about Whitehall and Westminster. It’s a huge scandal, the way they’ve taken charge. But they justify it by saying people like me are unrepresentative. That we have no mandate. That we’re speaking for no one. In their eyes, of course, that’s wonderful. It gives them the right to walk all over us and that’s exactly what they want to do. We’re there to be crushed because we’re dangerous. And we’re dangerous because we might know a thing or two about what’s really going on. God forbid, we might even care
enough to want to change things. But we can’t, of course, because they won’t let us.’ She was playing with the cat’s ear. ‘In the end, local government’s more trouble than it’s worth. They’ll just disinvent it. And no one’ll spot the difference until it’s too late.’

There was a long silence. Barnaby watched the animal nuzzle the crook of Kate’s arm. ‘A political speech.’ He mimed applause. ‘Bravo.’

‘Don’t be cheap.’

‘I’m not. I’m impressed.’

‘Are you?’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Impressed enough to want to do something about it? Or impressed because you’re back here like this?’ She gestured at the space between them.

Barnaby put down his glass and reached for her hand. She’d taken to wearing a ring on her forefinger, a big chunky thing that was slightly loose.

‘You want to know the truth?’ he said.

‘Yes, please.’

‘If I knew a way,’ he nodded, ‘I’d change it all tomorrow.’

Liz was still watching television when Barnaby got home. She looked up as he closed the front door then turned her attention back to the set. Barnaby carefully circled the room, bending over the sofa and kissing his wife on the cheek.

‘Sorry it’s so late,’ he said. ‘Got held up.’

‘What have you been eating?’

‘Pasta. Lots of garlic. Italian place.’

Liz nodded, still watching the screen. Rows of old men in berets were marching across a stretch of gleaming sand.
Tiny figures on a reviewing stand offered limp salutes beneath a line of snapping tricolours.

‘Normandy,’ Liz said, after a while. ‘Extraordinary how this stuff can still move you.’

Barnaby watched the pictures for a moment or two, picking out the faces on the reviewing stand. Mitterrand was there, and so was Major, and he thought at once of Kate, cross-legged in the bay window, telling him what a fraud it all was. Flags. Medals. Marching bands. Anything to keep the people in step. Anything to prevent them thinking for themselves.

Liz was still talking about Normandy. If only their respective fathers had still been alive, all this would have meant so much.

‘My dad hated the war,’ Barnaby said. ‘He spent most of it being seasick.’

Liz glanced up. In the pale blue light from the television her face was empty of expression. Barnaby repeated the joke, thinking she couldn’t have heard it, expecting – at the very least – a smile. Instead, she reached for the remote control, muting the sound on the television.

‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying to phone you.’

Barnaby muttered something about the batteries in his mobile. In fact, he’d left it in the car. ‘I’ve been having dinner,’ he said. ‘With a Chinese man.’

He began to explain about Zhu but she turned away. It dawned on Barnaby that something must have happened. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s been going on?’

Liz didn’t answer. When Barnaby stepped round the sofa she got up and walked out to the kitchen. Barnaby followed, hearing the angry rattle of cups and saucers from the sink. He stood by the breakfast bar, eyeing the silent television,
waiting patiently for some clue to this mood of hers. The Queen was sharing a joke with a man in black. Kids were waving flags. A veteran in a wheelchair was trying hard not to weep.

Eventually Liz left the sink, knotting the drying-up cloth in her hands. Barnaby stared at her. Suddenly it was all too obvious what had gone wrong.

‘Jessie?’ he queried tonelessly.

Liz nodded. ‘She was upstairs,’ she took a deep breath, trying to control herself, ‘but she said she couldn’t wait any longer.’

BOOK TWO

March 1995

Few inhabitants in Portsmouth complain of such things as are the consequence of a garrison town, such as being examined at the gates, such as being obliged to keep garrison hours, and not be let out, or let in, after nine o’clock at night. Such things no people will count a burden where they get their bread by the very situation of the place.

Daniel Defoe, 1724

Chapter Five

Louise Carlton had fought a number of battles during a difficult year but the sweetest victory of all had delivered her one of the best views in London. From the sixth floor at MI5’s new headquarters she sometimes felt she could almost touch the Thames. It was there day and night, a constant presence beyond the metal-braced bomb-proof curtains: the muted throb of the barges pushing upstream, the impatient parp-parp of the tourist boats jostling for precedence under Lambeth Bridge, the shriek of the gulls wheeling over the litter-strewn mudflats at the foot of the Albert Embankment. She stood at the window, nursing her second slice of chocolate gateau, aware yet again of how right she’d been to fight for this office. The job, by its very nature, was already hopelessly claustrophobic. Working in one of the cubby-holes in the back of the building would have entombed her for ever.

She finished the cake and looked at her watch. Ellis was late. He’d said he’d be over by three at the latest. Maybe the MI6 people across the river had kept him longer than he’d anticipated. Or maybe he’d had to check in at the DTI. Serving trade ministers in this government had suddenly become a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation.

Louise returned to her desk and reached for the file,
polishing her glasses and then reading quickly through the second of the reports that Ellis had prepared for her. It was still difficult to justify a full surveillance operation on Raymond Zhu but it was becoming uncomfortably plain that the latest outbreak of inter-agency turf warfare would soon force her hand. The wretched man’s name was beginning to crop up in too many of the intelligence digests that daily crossed her desk. So far she’d seen nothing outrageous, nothing to warrant a grade-one classification, but that, she knew, was hardly the point. For whatever reasons, Raymond Zhu was attracting a great deal of attention. And that alone was justification enough for her to gather in the various bits of the jigsaw and attempt to put them together. An office on the sixth floor with a commanding view of the Thames demanded no less.

To her quiet satisfaction, Ellis had become a bit of a fan. She’d only met him on a couple of occasions but she was extremely deft at penetrating the usual layers of bureaucratic body-armour, and she’d sensed an immediate rapport beneath the South London accent and the gruff one-liners. As a woman blessed with few illusions about her age and appearance, she knew that his warmth was probably synthetic, a gambit to secure an ally in some private tussle of his own, but in a sense that was a reassurance. The most productive relationships were rarely based on anything as unreliable as sex appeal.

She glanced over the report again to check if there was anything she’d missed. Zhu had been in and out of the country a number of times since June last year. He was based in Singapore, had business contacts in Zurich and Frankfurt, but now seemed to be making the UK his European base. He travelled from country to country in a private jet, and it was Ellis himself who had noted the registration
at Heathrow and commissioned discreet enquiries. The aircraft, it transpired, was Swiss-registered and on long-term charter to Celestial Holdings, Zhu’s Singapore-based trading company, and amongst other extras Zhu had stipulated a full supplement of airways maps for mainland China. Evidently he went there a great deal, though Ellis had been vague on precise destinations.

China. Louise gazed at the window-pane as the first fat drops of rain dimpled the view. Asia’s sleeping giant was currently the buzzword around a handful of the key Whitehall ministries – the Foreign Office, DTI, Ministry of Defence – and everyone agreed that rich pickings awaited the UK businessmen who could turn courtship into a solid commercial marriage. 1.2 billion consumers represented the biggest market on earth and the major European players were falling over each other trying to get there first. Winning in China had suddenly become the race that mattered and, in Whitehall terms, that made the contest irresistible.

But where did Zhu belong in all this? Louise returned to the file. Ellis had been assigned to prepare the ground for Zhu’s first visit. Zhu had contacted the DTI for assistance in placing an order for 50,000 sets of counter-insurgency equipment. He was representing a client whose shopping list was extensive. It included batons, body-armour, small arms, ammunition, specialist training and a comprehensive tactical communications set-up. The latter had been the juiciest plum on Zhu’s tree and when the tenders came in from the handful of firms contacted by the DTI, the lowest had been priced at £47 million. That sort of money wasn’t exceptional but the specification on which Zhu was insisting was extremely high, and the DTI analysts scented the possibility of more orders in the wind. As to the end-user,
opinions were still mixed. Certainly not Singapore. More probably one of the bigger regional countries – Malaysia, say, or Indonesia. Maybe even the big one. China.

This conclusion, Ellis had explained in a dry aside, accounted for Zhu’s instant elevation to CIP status. Commercially Important People held the keys to doors that the UK couldn’t afford to ignore. No one was getting silly over forty-seven million quid’s worth of batons and hand-held radios but what really mattered, what really revved up Ellis’s superiors at the DTI, was the prospect of what might happen after that. The UK had already grabbed a big chunk of world defence sales. Given a step or two towards democracy, there wasn’t anything we wouldn’t flog our Far Eastern brothers.

Louise smiled. She liked Ellis’s turn of phrase. Not just the pithiness and the cynicism but the fact that he trusted her enough to lower his guard like this, discarding the flannel that usually wrapped inter-agency reports. In another footnote, he’d briefly described his attempts to host Zhu around the standard CIP circuit. Visits to factories in the Midlands and the North had been a waste of time. Ditto the offer of an after-hours tour of the Tower of London and the chance to share dinner with minor royalty. None of these bonbons had made the slightest impression on the man. All he’d politely requested was the chance to conduct normal commercial negotiations face to face with the firms responsible for the tenders. Beyond that, in Ellis’s phrase, he’d slipped the leash and disappeared.

There was a knock at the door. Louise got up and opened it. Ellis’s raincoat was dripping on the carpet. She hung it on the hat-stand beside the photocopier before sitting down again behind the desk. At once, Ellis saw the open file, his
own signature scrawled over the bottom of the report’s final page.

‘Six seem to think he’s clean,’ he said at once.

Louise permitted herself a smile. MI6’s brief confined the agency to gathering intelligence overseas but the end of the Cold War had forced them to revise their operational remit. Nowadays they spent more time chasing commercial intelligence than military or state secrets.

‘Clean?’ she enquired. ‘What exactly would that mean?’

Ellis was eyeing her empty plate. For a man in his early thirties, he was already carrying a good deal of bulk. ‘It means they buy him as a businessman. They’ve been nosing around in Singapore and it all seems to check out.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. It seems he went into construction in the early seventies after we buggered off and left them to it. Celestial was his holding company from the start. He got his hands on some of those housing projects and he never looked back.’

Louise pulled a pad from a drawer and began to scribble notes. She’d been to Singapore a couple of years back, after a quiet invitation from the people in the Ministry of Home Affairs responsible for the island’s internal security. One of the non-stop drizzle of introductory statistics that had stuck in her memory was the sheer pace of the building programme: one apartment completed every fifteen minutes.

She looked up, her pen poised.

‘And after construction? He spread his wings?’

‘Yes, related industries first. Heavy plant, air-conditioning systems, big chain of wholesale carpet and furniture outlets. Stuff that would end up in the projects. That took him to the end of the seventies. The eighties, he got
bolder. Ship repair. Then container leasing. And hotels, of course.’

Louise nodded, making a separate note in the file. To date, Zhu’s only confirmed UK acquisition had been a rundown hotel on the south coast. She turned a page, looking for the name.

‘The Imperial,’ Ellis said helpfully.

Louise glanced up. She’d noticed how intuitive Ellis could be, how he liked to gamble on private hunches. More often than not, she concluded thoughtfully, the gamble paid off.

‘Bournemouth, wasn’t it?’ she said.

‘Southsea.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s part of Portsmouth. The posh bit, by the seaside.’

‘So where might that fit in our friend’s little portfolio?’

‘God knows. I asked the blokes at Six but they’d got no further than logging the bank transfer. Zhu seems to have got the place for a song. They’re saying a hundred and ten thousand.’

‘What about the hotels in Singapore?’

‘They’re all conversions. Apparently that’s quite unusual out there but Six tell me he’s made himself a tidy little niche. Big emphasis on Chinese food and décor. Specially reserved suites for visiting businessmen.’

‘What kind of businessmen?’

‘All sorts.’ For the first time, Ellis consulted a small notebook. ‘Japanese. Taiwanese. Hong Kong.’

‘Mainly Asians?’

‘Yes, that seems to be his line. The odd Westerner, but not too many.’ Ellis was peering at the note book. ‘
Guanxi
,’ he said at last.

‘
Guanxi?
’

‘It means family ties. One of the guys who briefed me at Six speaks Cantonese. He says this
guanxi
’s the key to it all. The Chinese are locked into clan networks. Zhu would be typical.’

‘They know where he’s come from?’

‘Seems so.’

‘And?’

‘They’re saying Fukien. That’s one of the southern mainland provinces. Lots of merchants and traders.’

‘But isn’t that what he’s put in his passport?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have they looked any further?’

‘I doubt it.’

Louise leaned back in her chair, amused. Back in June last year, immigration officials at Heathrow had discreetly photocopied Zhu’s Republic of Singapore passport and Ellis had faxed her the results. Against ‘Birthplace’, Zhu had entered the city of Amoy, capital of Fukien province.

Louise reached for the phone at last and enquired about the tea trolley. It seemed that several portions of gateau were unsold. She passed on the news, drawing a broad smile from Ellis. Then she consulted the file again.

‘This equipment deal,’ she said. ‘Have you licensed it yet?’

‘No, the FCO are hiding behind Six. They want to know where the stuff’s going.’

‘So what’s Zhu’s line? About the end-user?’

‘He’s saying Singapore. Like they all do.’

‘Singapore?’ Louise laughed, consulting Zhu’s shopping list. ‘Fifty thousand batons? Half a million CS canisters? I thought the place was well behaved. Crime free.’

‘Singapore’s a fiction. You know it and I know it. But
that’s not the point. Someone has to sell the stuff. Why not us?’

‘Why not, indeed?’

Louise extracted a slim brown envelope from the file and emptied the photographs inside onto the desk. They were telephoto shots of Zhu, acquired before Christmas. He’d spent several days in central London, visiting estate agents, and the photos showed him crossing a series of busy pavements. In his long shapeless overcoat and his peaked leather cap, Zhu looked unworldly and out of place, as if he’d just parachuted in from another planet. Louise had never seen a businessman quite like him. She slid one of the photos across the desk. The estate agency in the background was Knight, Frank and Rutley.

‘He’s been looking for somewhere to live.’ She smiled. ‘Properties around one and a half million.’

Ellis briefly studied the photo. ‘Anything take his fancy?’

‘Yes,’ Louise struggled to her feet, hearing the clatter of the tea trolley in the corridor outside, ‘though I understand he’s just left for Singapore again.’ She paused by the door. ‘Did he ever mention the name Hayden Barnaby?’

It was nearly midnight, local time, when the little private jet swooped down into Singapore’s Changi International Airport. The sudden rumble of wheels woke Barnaby and he pulled himself upright, tightening the seat-belt, trying to make sense of the runway lights racing past the window. Across the narrow aisle, Zhu sat in one of the rearward-facing seats, eyes closed, hands carefully composed in his lap. The last time they’d talked was hours ago, somewhere over the Bay of Bengal.

The aircraft taxied to a corner of the apron and nestled
amongst a line of parked jumbos. The pilot opened the door, and by the time Barnaby stepped down into the sticky midnight heat a uniformed official was already bowing respectfully to Zhu. Inside the enormous terminal building, it was cooler, acres of gleaming floor broken by the bent shadows of hurrying passengers. Barnaby stopped to adjust the strap on his shoulder-bag, overwhelmed by the almost clinical sense of order. Airports were generally chaotic, even at midnight, but this one felt like a tomb.

The trip east had been at Zhu’s suggestion. Delighted by the winter’s progress on the Imperial, he’d invited Barnaby to spend a day or two looking round the city he called home. Singapore, he said, had come a long way in no time at all, and the lessons of progress might repay a little exploration. Barnaby had scribbled the phrase on the pad he kept on his desk and, after Zhu had hung up, he’d spent several minutes wondering what the other man had meant. Supervising the rebuild on the Imperial had occupied more time than he’d ever imagined possible, but his working relationship with Zhu had been a fairy-tale – every query promptly answered, no decision ducked, even the biggest invoices paid scrupulously within ten working days – and by early spring he’d been able to welcome his new client back to the hotel in time to see the scaffolding come down after completion of the exterior works. For once, Zhu had allowed himself a broad smile, standing on the Common, gazing up at the newly painted stucco, and afterwards, over sandwiches in the newly restored dining room, he’d congratulated Barnaby on the fine job he’d done. He’d been told, he’d said, to expect the best. And he hadn’t been disappointed.