The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I) Read online

  The hamlet consisted of just three long alleys of attached Chinese houses dating back a hundred years before the farming families had fled to the colony’s factories. All had narrow, high doors bolted by wide iron rods. They all had identical interiors, just one very tall room with a sleeping loft at the back. Only Fresnay’s was whitewashed and refurbished with a proper kitchen, and most unique, a real toilet installed at the back of the house. A Sanyo tape recorder played cassettes, a tiny oven baked his tarte aux pommes and a little picnic table ‘borrowed’ from Sai Kung Country Park was his dining suite. Only he and Ah Fok enjoyed phone links. There was no route for vehicles to Tai Long. Supplies specially ordered arrived twice a year by chartered boat. The rest had been carried in on someone’s shoulders.

  Claire loved the priest’s get-away. It was so different from the ascetic office he shared at Mosque Junction with a team of wizened, monkish Chinese researchers pouring over provincial Chinese papers and radio transcripts. In Tai Long the priest had indulged in a more eclectic but still educated decor. Throughout twenty-plus years of studying in China, disguised as a layman, and then China-watching in Hong Kong as an official representative of his order, Fresnay had acquired wonderful mementos.

  On one wall was a large frame containing one of the world’s best collections of Mao buttons from the Cultural Revolution in the sixties. Fresnay had hundreds and had even donated some of the most unusual to the Albert and Victoria Museum in London. The most noticeable on display in Tai Long was a six-inch-wide portrayal of the young Mao Zedong standing before a red sun connected by a small wire to a battery hidden in the wearer’s shirt pocket. When turned on, the sun would start to glow brightly, with rays moving away from Mao’s figure in concentric circles.

  Fresnay was proudest of a small ivory circle by a carver in Yunnan. Like a Roman coin, it no longer mattered what name the emperor carried, or whether Mao had been a god to the proletariat or in fact, in reality a murderer. It was nothing less than a work of art.

  There was a small wooden shelf, groaning with books in Chinese, English, Japanese, and French. Propped on top was a set of sketches and photos of priests who had served in China since the seventeenth century. Many were martyrs, trained in Japan or Macau, and sent into the mainland to never return.

  On a shelf hanging over the oven sat two tiny figurines. One was a small Buddha carved in jade, the other a small Hindu goddess, poised on the head of a snake. Fresnay irreverently called them Jack and Jill. Years ago, when Claire had asked why there was no image of Christ in his office, Fresnay had answered simply, ‘I carry Him in my heart, although I can’t say for certain He finds it very comfortable.’

  Claire hosed off her sweaty face in a stone recess of his kitchen that had once held an enormous wok. Ah Fok’s television was broadcasting the horseraces in Cantonese for the benefit of three skeletal locals in windbreakers and shorts huddled around one of his four metal ‘dining tables’ on the veranda. In friendly competition, Fresnay loaded up the Sanyo with some Wagner. A neighbor’s mongrel barked along, dragging his chain along the passageway between the houses. For all the racket, Claire had the impression of absolute peace. The problem of Vic was left behind in the city.

  In less than an hour, they were sitting down to their well-earned lunch and turned to the subject of Dr Liu.

  ‘I’m glad you’re going to pursue this,’ the priest nodded. ‘We did an article about Chinese transplant experiments in the newsletter more than a year ago. Some of the Chinese doctors’ techniques are very advanced. I’ll show you a medical paper presented in Tokyo recently by a Dr Xia Xue Sheng on testicular transplants—’

  ‘Not a lot of volunteers for that, I expect,’ chuckled Xavier.

  ‘You’re right. In fact, not a lot of volunteers at all. Official Chinese documents never discuss donor shortage. It’s a real problem in the West so you have to wonder. Oddly, though, for all their efficiency in finding spare parts, the Chinese haven’t overcome their dependence on foreign drugs to suppress rejection. Such drugs are very costly. I can offer you the manual in Chinese entitled something like, uh, Organ Procurement and Judicial Execution in China, if it’ll help.’

  Claire nodded. ‘It will. But we’re reporting the business angle. The Chinese have crossed the line in everybody’s book if they’re drumming up death sentences just to expand profits from organ exports. I have to pin down the client if I hope to discover exactly what the Chinese promise their buyers.’

  The evening passed quickly and soon Claire and Xavier had bedded down on a mattress in a neighboring house long abandoned by its owners. They rose early and ate Ah Fok’s fried buns with green tea and a bowl of congee.

  Claire hated to leave the sanctuary of Fresnay’s hospitality so soon. Xavier seemed unusually relaxed, too but they both needed their Sunday afternoons to get ready for the workweek. Fresnay was heading back with them as well, to take his turn offering midday Mass.

  A ruckus in Cantonese on the veranda outside broke Claire’s sweet melancholy. A wide straw hat with a black cotton rim bobbed as a local crone shrieked at Ah Fok to call the police. Xavier and Fresnay emerged from the front of his house, where they had been checking a faulty rain gutter.

  Fresnay listened closely to the clamor.

  ‘Ah Fok thinks we have another Vietnamese refugee incident. Last summer a whole boatload of them washed up on the shore here.’ They said their good-byes and started heading up the path, but when they were a few hundred feet above the village roofs they heard the Chinese villagers hailing them to return.

  Xavier swore under his breath in Swiss German. ‘We’ll miss the ferry.’ Nevertheless, they turned around.

  Twenty minutes later, Fresnay filled them in: ‘It wasn’t a refugee. It was a body, a guay lo,’ said Fresnay, translating Ah Fok’s heavy Cantonese. ‘I’ve called the Sai Kung Country Park police station and they radioed the officers from Field Patrol Detectment. They’re on their way to a beach just up the coast. Since I know practically all of the westerners in this part of the colony, they’ve asked me to see if I can identify the body. Maybe we can hitch a ride with them back to town.’

  In about twenty minutes they heard the HRH’s helicopter arriving from the military headquarters at Tamar in Central and landing on a small pad built for medical emergencies at the far end of the village. The thunka thunka thunka of engine drowned out any more conversation. In a few minutes, they were setting down on a strip of beach to the north that looked permanently abandoned.

  As they scrambled from the cabin onto the sand, Claire saw three Chinese patrolmen standing in a group, but their uniforms were unfamiliar to her. ‘That’s the FPD police. They patrol for three days at a time through the countryside all over the New Territories,’ explained Fresnay. ‘They sleep in special government outlying stations dotted around the hills.’

  One officer stepped forward to greet them, shaking hands with Fresnay first. Over the roar of the crashing waves, Fresnay exchanged Cantonese shouts. The officer waved Fresnay ahead to a mass of seaweed and what looked from a distance like rotting fish. Only when Fresnay knelt in the wet sand and silently started to pray, Claire realized that the heap of muck in front of him was the corpse.

  Xavier took her arm as they clambered down the dune after Fresnay. She felt his hand muscles bracing into hard knots underneath her arm. A body blow of fishy stink hit her face.

  Xavier grimaced as Claire turned her head toward him and away from the smell.

  She’d seen a lot already—too much.

  It had been a young man’s body, but was barely so now. The light hair was darkened with water and filthy with bits of garbage from the coast. She was looking at the back, now just a slab of bloated, white stiff board. Strange blue blotches marked the torso, except where the abdomen opened, trailing loose white flesh. One leg was missing, the stump washed clean of blood, and shreds of flesh dragged back and forth in the tiny ripples of water nipping at the mound of plant and body. Long raw stripes like rope burns crissc
rossed the body.

  ‘Looks like it caught in the drag of a fishing net. Also supplied a nice breakfast for a small shark,’ said one of the officers, pointing to the stump.

  The chief officer, named Chuk, had brought a body bag with him, a heavy black plastic shroud.

  ‘Lucky you got that telex from Shanghai this morning, otherwise we might be worrying it was your Vic from the office,’ mumbled Xavier. Claire had to admit that the strange thought had occurred to her as well. Maybe that’s why she had felt not only pity for the dead foreigner, but a stab of relief.

  The police clumsily heaved the body over. Claire cringed as they rolled it over on the remaining thigh as the stump travelled an arc through the air right past her nose. She took a breath and looked at Xavier, who nodded in the body’s direction, a look of sympathy and resolve on his face.

  Claire finally looked straight down.

  The cheeks of the face had been gnawed away by fish, including the eyes. Two whitish holes, streaked with blue flesh and red veins, stared up at her instead.

  Nausea rose from her stomach like the cold waves lapping at her shoes. But before she gave in to it, she struggled to speak. Despite the torn eyeholes and gnawed cheek flaps, the matted hair and the remains of a mouth choked by seaweed and a filthy plastic bag, she herself recognized this person.

  She turned to Xavier and felt herself gagging and falling forward, her knees sinking into the sand as he fumbled with her arm to assist her. ‘It’s not Vic,’ she spat out, between dizzying upheavals, ‘—but—’

  There was a knife tattoo just below the collarbone.

  Chapter Four

  —Monday morning—

  In the US consulate’s lobby, a nervous Cecilia stood dwarfed by a towering Marine on guard. Her chin barely topped his belt buckle. She wore a security badge clipped to the collar of her best linen suit. She offered Claire an uneasy smile but the hand holding her purse trembled. The Chinese girl couldn’t hide her relief at seeing Claire in the flesh after the news about Hager. Claire reassured her that whatever was happening, it was unlikely to pose any danger to an editorial assistant. Privately, Claire wished she could be more confident. One absent, one dead.

  Business World’s Asian network wasn’t too healthy this week.

  For her part, Claire was comforted by the sight of Cecilia so poised. She was lucky to have such a bright stalwart. But how could she be sure Cecilia was as steady as she appeared? Cecilia guarded a private space that one didn’t touch out of respect for the diligent child sitting on the factory floor, the disillusioned idealist in the mental ward of Queen Mary Hospital, the loyal librarian quietly filing in the office. Sadly, New York editors like MacDermott rarely acknowledged that Cecilia Chao existed.

  The meeting at the consulate was set for nine and at precisely five minutes to nine, G. Harris Hillward of Groton, Princeton, and Georgetown descended from the innards of ‘Political and Econ’ to collect the two women. Though Claire was almost as familiar a face at the Consulate as she was at Fresnay’s office, she couldn’t skirt the security check that protected the Harrises of America from the patient queue outside the building of Leungs, Wongs and Changs seeking visas for a life in the shopping malls of Van Nuys and Seattle. She had often observed a certain hauteur in Harris and reasoned that if every day a person passed patient queues of locals waiting for a visa, one could get an inflated sense of your value to mankind.

  Harris’s own high opinion of himself however, might not be based entirely on diplomatic standing or hordes of wannabe green-card applicants. He was simply too good for his job—although Claire couldn’t be sure exactly what his job was. Certainly Jim had never let on. But then Harris never admitted to knowing Jim. He spoke better Chinese and French than most of his peers in the State Department. Languages were his passion, followed by wine and cooking. Unfortunately, individual relationships weren’t his strong suit. Outgoing women like Claire bewildered him. No matter how many of Harris’s elegant dinner parties Claire attended, his private life remained more secret than that of most Hong Kong expatriates.

  Loneliness sat on his shoulders like a well-cut blazer—not embarrassing to witness, just noticeable.

  Smoothing his thinning blond hair and adjusting his bowtie to a perfect angle, Harris ushered them into the elevator. He commented on the weather. Harris gave off the air of someone who liked his work to feel like polite social interplay. But after lengthy small talk he usually caught up with supplying a journalist with what was needed and never failing to get something in return.

  That said, Claire and Harris had never once in all their years of professional acquaintance met to discuss a murder.

  As they approached the conference room, Harris said, ‘The Hong Kong police haven’t completed all their tests yet, but since Craig Hager was an American citizen, we all thought it would be helpful to go over the facts while they’re still fresh with Vice-consul Dobbs.’

  They entered a meeting room Claire knew well from press conferences. Harris introduced Claire and Cecilia to Whitney Dobbs, a prematurely stooped man with a mole unfortunately placed just under his nose. Though he wasn’t actually Chinese, something Chinese had subsumed Dobbs during his ten years of service in Asia. It took scant imagination to add a wispy beard and long fingernails and envisage him two centuries ago serving at the imperial Chinese court.

  Harris then introduced Senior Superintendent John Slaughter, who immediately extended his hand, laughing slightly and saying, ‘It isn’t necessary to introduce me to Miss Raymond.’ They’d had sporadic contact ever since Claire had arrived in Hong Kong as an eager young reporter.

  It was the wettest season of the year, so Slaughter wore a colonial garment that bespoke long service in Britain’s more tropical colonies—a single-breasted brown twill jacket with short sleeves, and four pockets and a belt of the same cloth. A lifetime in the Far East had weathered his florid face and huge hands with brown sun splotches. There were broken veins around the upper cheeks and the salt-and-pepper hair was cut short.

  Claire had heard once that in his youth Slaughter had married a beautiful Malay girl from Penang with a very large and open-minded family. It had been a happy union until she’d perished suddenly of dengue fever. He hadn’t remarried. Nor had he been able to face retirement back in England. He’d tried for a few years to work in New Zealand, but this stab at a quieter life hadn’t taken. Like many colonial officers, he now realized that he had nowhere else to go—except a tiny pub frequented by other ex-colonial police somewhere in a corner of England where the stories and the rounds grew larger as the afternoon passed.

  Slaughter wasn’t ready to live in the past, but Claire could sense that he resented that the colonial life would be over within two years. His breed now faced the leftovers of grandeur and the diminishment of everything he and his mates had worked to protect, shift by shift, season by season, when the Communist troops arrived on July 1, 1997.

  He didn’t have to explain this to Claire. Wasn’t it obvious, when he sat down at the long table, on the job at nine in the morning in the American Consulate instead of his own headquarters? At what point had the foreigners’ weight of gravity shifted to Americans, wondered Claire? She remembered working in a Hong Kong dominated entirely by the Australian press and the colonial services fifteen years ago. Now America’s investment was second only to Japan’s stake in the colony. In any event, they all faced the imminent eve of China’s takeover with its host of uncertainties. And the biggest investor in Hong Kong in both dollars and time was none other than Beijing.

  Harris offered coffee and Danish, should anyone have the stomach. Slaughter opened his folder to take notes.

  ‘Miss Raymond, when did you or your staff person here, Miss Chao, last see or talk to Mr Hager?’

  ‘On Friday. I went out at lunchtime to the Cheung Chau flat where my deputy Victor D’Amato lives. Vic hadn’t turned up at work and wasn’t answering his phones. He wasn’t home, but Craig was there, with Vic’s friend Nancy Che
w. That’s the girlfriend I mentioned to you yesterday on the telephone,’ Claire nodded to Harris.

  ‘We’re seeing her this morning, too,’ Harris confirmed to Slaughter.

  ‘I want to start at the beginning, Claire, although Mr Harris has given me a short briefing already. Tell us about your relationship with Mr Hager.’

  ‘Well, my predecessor here in Hong Kong hired Craig about four years ago, that is, one year before I joined, on a retained basis of $500 month as stringer. We don’t have a lot of copy requirements from Bangkok or I would have fired him.’

  ‘Why?’ Slaughter raised his eyebrows.

  Why protect Craig now? She explained: ‘The bureau chief who hired him did so for the wrong reasons, in my opinion. He knew his way around the bars, had good contacts with the local police and excellent relations with guys at the Bangkok Post and the other Thai papers. He talked a good line to visiting New York editors about the Thai way of life—cultural customs, drug scene—he was a bit of a glamor boy, the kind of guy you’d hire to play a foreign correspondent in a movie, but not quite the real thing when it came to copy.’

  Slaughter smiled. He’d handled a lot of such characters in his time.

  ‘Apparently the diplomat Dobbs hadn’t. ‘Could you explain further?’

  ‘Craig wasn’t a business reporter. He wouldn’t look at the figures, couldn’t break down a quarterly report, and wouldn’t question the analysts’ company research. His personality was too flamboyant and flaky for Business World’s profile. He was offhand, even snide. But he’d gotten along very well with the man who hired him. He’s in our Los Angeles bureau now covering the film industry. Someone at the Foreign Correspondents Club told me that Craig took him around the Patpong girlie bars together.’

  ‘Could Hager survive on $500 a month?’ They all knew the answer.

  ‘Of course not, Mr. Dobbs. He was a trust fund baby and he never hurt for cash. In fact, he was the only stringer in my network of eleven reporters that never complained about late payments or backed-up expense reimbursements from New York. You expect that to crop up when people are eking out a living on a package of strings. New York is very slow to accept that the rents all over Asia are sky high. Craig’s lifestyle wouldn’t have helped. You can imagine what happens in New York when Yolanda, a single mother commuting from New Jersey, has to process hundreds of dollars of bar bills as work expenses.’