‘Did she have any problems, anything that was worrying her?’

  ‘Not that I know.’

  ‘What about enemies?’

  Howard didn’t answer, just shrugged.

  ‘What do the police think? Was it an accident?’

  ‘They just don’t know, laddie, they just don’t know.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Kowloon Public Mortuary.’

  ‘I want to go there. And to the hotel. And I want to speak to the police.’ I’d written down the name of the inspector who’d phoned me in London and I handed the piece of paper to Howard. ‘That’s the guy I’m to see.’

  ‘I know him,’ he said. He walked over to the bed and picked up the phone, dialling the number from memory. He fixed up an appointment for us and five minutes later the turbaned Indian was opening the door to a taxi. In flawless Oxbridge English he asked me where I wanted to go and Howard told him.

  The Indian spoke to the driver who nodded and crashed the taxi into gear and we moved out into the traffic with a series of gut-wrenching jerks.

  ‘Where do they learn to drive as badly as this?’ I asked Howard, only half-joking.

  ‘Practice, laddie. It takes years of practice.’

  *

  We were early, and the bastards made us wait. Howard and I sat on a wooden bench while a fan circled slowly overhead. I’d taken my jacket off and rolled up my sleeves and loosened my tie, but was still panting like an overweight Labrador.

  An old man hobbled past and slowly lowered himself onto the wooden bench next to ours, using a rubbertipped steel walking stick to steady himself. His skin was as brown and wrinkled as an autumn leaf and what little hair there was left on his head was short, stubbly and white. His toes peeped through holes in his slippers and the nails were black with dirt or age. The face was a blank mask, thin bloodless lips and impassive eyes, the eyebrows had all but disappeared. He was clinging to life as tenaciously as a pensioner to a bargain in a church hall jumble sale. I don’t know why he bothered.

  ‘Probably a triad boss come to give himself up,’ whispered Howard, and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow. The old man cleared his throat and then sucked up the phlegm from his nasal passages with a guttural sound like a drain being cleared. He rolled whatever he’d dragged up around his tongue, breathed in through his nose and spat noisily at the wall opposite. The green and white mass of saliva hit the plaster with an oily splat and began to dribble down slowly, fighting gravity every inch of the way. I felt sick but I couldn’t take my eyes off, as it smeared itself to the floor.

  ‘Jesus, Howard.’

  ‘You get used to it, laddie. Just be glad he didn’t aim at your foot.’

  A door at the end of the corridor opened and a young Chinese in a green uniform and shiny black belt walked out, his well-polished boots clicking on the stone floor. He beckoned to Howard and me with his hand, and ushered us into the room.

  ‘Very polite,’ I whispered to Howard.

  ‘He doesn’t speak English,’ he replied.

  ‘How do you know?’

  He pointed to the chrome numbers stitched onto the shoulders of the green shirt.

  ‘The ones that can speak English have a red strip of material under the numbers,’ he said. ‘Not that that means anything – the little bastards will still send you in the wrong direction just for the fun of it.’

  The youngster pointed to a pair of old wooden chairs in front of a rusting metal desk. ‘Please wait here. The inspector will be in to see you shortly,’ he said in accentless English, and left us alone in the room. A gun in a glistening holster bumped against his hip as he walked. From the size of it he’d need both hands just to aim it.

  Howard was totally unashamed. ‘Maybe his mother hasn’t got round to sewing them on yet,’ he laughed and flopped into one of the seats.

  On the wall behind the paper-strewn desk was a map of Hong Kong, dotted with pins of various colours, and with police mugshots stapled haphazardly around it. The filing cabinets were made of the same grey gunmetal as the desk with identical rust stains. There was a carpet of indeterminate colour on the floor, dotted with small flecks of plaster that had fallen from the damp, peeling ceiling.

  The window obviously hadn’t been washed for years, it was streaked with grey and made the outside look as foggy as a winter’s day on the Isle of Dogs. A small air-conditioner set into a hole in the wall next to the glass did its best to keep the temperature of the room below boiling point, but it was failing miserably and groaning like a sick horse.

  Leaving a journalist alone in an office is asking for trouble. I began idly flicking through the green folders and sheafs of typed papers, looking for anything interesting. Looking for Sally’s name. I’d just started to open the top right hand drawer when the door opened and two men walked in, one Chinese, one European.

  I gave them a winning smile and walked back to the side of the desk where I belonged, dropping into the chair next to Howard.

  The European was Hall. He didn’t offer to shake my hand so I didn’t bother to stand up. I guess he was a bit pissed off at my attempt at breaking and entering. Hall was a shade under six feet, brown hair cut to regulation length and wearing a grey off-the-peg suit with trousers that were just a bit too tight around the groin. His tie was dark blue with a coat of arms on it.

  He had the same wary world-wise look that plain clothes policemen all over the world have after they’ve been lied to so many times that they expect to come across the truth about as often as Halley’s comet.

  It was also a look that said that the last thing he wanted to do at the moment was to talk to the brother of a girl who’d just been scraped off a Hong Kong pavement.

  His companion was harder to read, tall for a Chinese and well built, wearing faded jeans and a black leather jacket that was scuffed around the elbows. His hair looked as if it had been cut with a set of blunt shears and a pudding basin and his nose had obviously been broken a couple of times. The tie was a masterpiece of bad taste, bits of purple, green and Picasso-type shapes in black and white. He obviously had no mother, no girlfriend, and no sister, because no girl would allow someone she loved to dress that way. He wore a thick gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand and a bulky gold chain on his right wrist and as he listened to Hall he toyed with the ring and studied me.

  Hall didn’t introduce him, but they both nodded at Howard. Hall had brought a file with him, identical to those already littering the desk, and he opened it as he sat down. He interrogated me for the best part of an hour, and he was good. He followed up several lines of questioning, checking the spelling of all names, cross-referring on times and dates, when I’d last seen her, who her friends were, former colleagues, present lovers. He wrote everything down, filling two A4 sheets with his small scribble.

  When he’d finished he opened a drawer in the right hand side of his desk and took out a large polythene bag containing a leather shoulder bag, a navy blue dress and a pair of white shoes. Hall took them out, placing them on his desk top one item at a time. He opened the flap of the bag and took out a thin gold watch that I’d never seen before, a money clip, a Gucci purse and a set of keys.

  ‘These are your sister’s effects,’ said Hall. ‘We found them in the changing room.’ He handed me a typewritten list and a cheap biro. ‘Can you sign for them, at the bottom.’

  I scrawled my signature and then he ripped off the top copy, putting it in the plastic bag along with her belongings. He pushed the bag over to my side of the desk.

  ‘There should be a ring.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Hall.

  ‘A ring. A gold ring with a heart on it. I gave it to her on her twenty-first birthday.’

  Hall looked over at his colleague, who shook his head.

  ‘There was no ring,’ said Hall. ‘Perhaps it is at her flat. We haven’t been there yet.’

  ‘She swore she’d never take it off,’ I said, and then realized how silly that sounded. ‘Never mind,’ I said.

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me, anything I haven’t asked you that you think might be important?’ asked Hall.

  ‘I want to know what happened.’

  Hall paused, studying a sheet of paper in the file.

  ‘She fell from a high-floor window, dead on arrival. There was no note. You know as much as we do at the moment.’

  ‘Sally wouldn’t have committed suicide.’

  ‘You sound very sure of that.’

  ‘I knew her. She was my sister.’

  ‘That may be, but she could have changed. Something could have happened.’

  ‘Do suicides normally throw themselves through windows?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Look, I’m a journalist, I’ve covered more than my fair share of jumpers. The sort that jump are the ones that want to attract a crowd, to become the centre of attention for once in their lives. They usually sit out on a ledge and wait for someone to talk them out of it.’

  Hall leant back in his seat and seemed about to speak. I pre-empted him by holding up my hand. ‘Let me finish,’ I said. ‘Sally wasn’t the sort to kill herself, period. But, and this is one fucking big but, if she was she wouldn’t throw herself through a window. She talked tough, but she couldn’t bear pain. You couldn’t get her into a dentist’s chair without pumping Valium into her. If Sally was going to kill herself she’d make sure it was perfectly painless and she’d make damn sure there wouldn’t be any blood.’

  I looked at the two coppers and could see in their eyes that they weren’t listening to me, any moment now one of them was going to lean forward and say, ‘there, there, it’ll be all right.’

  I banged my hand down on the desk. ‘Why won’t you just believe me,’ I yelled, trying to shock them into action.

  ‘There’s no need to raise your voice,’ said the Chinese guy in an American accent. Mid-West, I think. I ignored him.

  ‘Suicide is not unusual in Hong Kong,’ said Hall quietly, as if he was talking to an imbecile. ‘It’s like a pressure cooker here, one of the most densely populated places in the world. Not everyone can adapt to it.’

  I closed my eyes and sighed deeply, he just didn’t understand.

  ‘If she’d had a problem she’d have called me,’ I said wearily.

  ‘Hong Kong is not an easy place for European women, the social scene for them isn’t as, shall we say, fulfilling as it is for the men. You wouldn’t believe how many expat wives are on tranquillizers, or how many just pack up and leave their husbands after a year or so here. Few marriages can survive this place.’

  ‘Sally wasn’t married.’

  ‘I know, I know. But the pressures are the same.’

  ‘She wouldn’t kill herself. She’d just leave.’

  The two policemen looked at each other and I could practically hear them thinking, ‘he isn’t listening to a word we say.’ Yeah, well maybe they were right. But I knew Sally, and they didn’t.

  ‘What happens now?’ I said.

  ‘There’ll be an autopsy,’ Hall replied. ‘Then we’ll be able to release the body. You can either take her back to England or make arrangements here.’

  ‘You’re still waiting to do an autopsy? But it happened three days ago. Why the delay?’

  ‘It takes time,’ Hall said, wearily. ‘We don’t have the facilities, or the manpower, that you have back in the UK. We’ve just lost two pathologists to Canada, part of the brain drain. I’m afraid your sister has got caught in the backlog. I’ll do everything I can to speed things up, but . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘Well why bother with an autopsy, if you are so sure it was suicide? Are you telling me that there’s some doubt about the cause of death?’

  Hall shook his head. ‘No, but an autopsy might tell us why she killed herself. She might have been drinking, or on drugs.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m the drinker of the family, and she never took drugs.’

  ‘She might have been ill.’

  ‘So ill that she’d throw herself through a window to end it all sooner rather than later? Christ man, you seem to be doing nothing more than trying to come up with reasons she would kill herself. I wish you’d put the same amount of effort into finding out what happened. Have you spoken to her friends? Her colleagues? Was she alone in the pool when it happened?’

  ‘There were no witnesses. The pool was closed, locked up for the night.’

  ‘So how did she get in?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘The pool was just for guests of the hotel?’

  ‘No. Members of the health club could use it as well. Your sister was a member, but that doesn’t explain what she was doing there after the place had closed.’

  ‘And what was she doing there?’

  ‘Swimming, it appears. Naked. We didn’t find a swimming costume.’

  ‘And what are you doing now?’ I said.

  ‘Doing?’

  ‘About finding her killer?’

  ‘At the moment we don’t know if we are looking for a killer.’

  ‘What sort of investigation is this?’ I asked him. ‘You haven’t even searched her flat, for God’s sake. By the sound of it you couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, never mind investigate a murder. Where the fuck is your boss? Perhaps I can get some sense out of him.’

  ‘I am Inspector Hall’s superior officer,’ said the Chinese, quietly. ‘And I can assure you that everything that can be done, will be done. It is less than three days since your sister died. You cannot expect miracles.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But I know enough about police work to know that if you don’t have a suspect within forty-eight hours then the chances are that you’re never going to have one. Come on, Howard, we’re wasting our time here.’

  I walked out with Howard behind me, past the spitter and back into the scorching sunshine, swinging the plastic bag by my side. A bag full of Sally.

  This time I was the one walking fast, the anger burning through my system, and Howard had to jog a little to keep up.

  ‘You must let me borrow that book some time,’ he panted as we made our way towards a taxi rank.

  ‘Which book?’

  ‘The one about winning friends and influencing people . . .’

  ‘Fuck off, Howard.’

  *

  We flagged down another cab and joined a line of traffic waiting to enter the tunnel that linked the island to Kowloon. It took the best part of fifteen minutes to travel the one hundred yards to the tunnel entrance and less than five to drive through it. We had to stop at the rank of pay booths to hand over the toll and then we were into the traffic of Kowloon once more, and on our way to the morgue.

  ‘There’s no need for you to identify . . .’ Howard began to say, but I cut him short with an angry look. ‘It’s definitely her,’ he finished lamely. ‘One of her friends has already done the paperwork.’

  I didn’t bother even trying to explain to Howard why I had to see Sally one last time, to touch her and feel the cold flesh that would show me that she was dead. I would have had to have told him about a frightened little girl with a tear-stained face who’d climbed into my bed a week after our father had died. It was three o’clock in the morning and she was seven years old. Her hair was unkempt and her cheeks were flushed and wet and she was rubbing her hands together like an old woman. I put my arms around her and held her, feeling the tears trickle onto my shoulder as she cried.

  ‘I dreamt Daddy was back,’ she said, haltingly between the sobs. ‘He came into my room and said he’d been away but he’d come back and he’d bought me a present. He kissed me. I could feel him kiss me. Then I woke up and he wasn’t there.’ She sobbed again and after a while her breathing steadied and deepened and I thought she was asleep, but she spoke again, whispering into my ear. ‘Daddy is dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, love, he is.’ There was no doubt about it, we’d watched the coffin slide along the stainless steel rollers and through a purple velvet curtain on the way to the furnace to the tune of some recorded hymn. We’d seen the coffin go but I knew what Sally meant. We’d said goodbye to a wooden box with a wreath on top, we hadn’t said goodbye to him. He’d died in his office of a massive haemorrhage that flooded his brain in less than two seconds and which killed him before he even hit the floor. Click, like a light being switched off. Sally and I were at home when our mother got the phone call. It was the school summer holidays, I was waiting for my A level results and Sally was enjoying her seemingly endless break from primary school drudgery. Our mother walked into the room in a state of shock and put her arms around us. The Saint was on television, Roger Moore in black and white. It was 4.15 in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday. Our dad was dead and we never saw him again. He was cremated three days later and Sally started having the ‘I’m back’ dreams.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s dead,’ she whispered. ‘They should have let me see him,’ and then she fell asleep. She was right, of course. We’d last seen him at the wheel of his BMW, waving goodbye and promising to take us to the pictures that night. The memories were all of him alive, walking, talking, laughing, shouting. The memories didn’t allow for the possibility of him not coming back. He was alive in our heads and our hearts. We should have been allowed to see him before they cremated him, but that wasn’t the way things were done. He went from the office to a hospital to an undertaker into a sealed coffin and into a furnace. A wake would have been better, the Irish had the right idea, put the corpse on show, remember the good times, celebrate them, but be aware that they are over. It’s not even a human thing. Take two dogs that have lived together for years, then one of them gets run over. The survivor will pine for weeks, searching the house, looking for its partner, ears pricking up hopefully at every night-time noise, just in case. But if you take him to the body of the dead dog, he’ll sniff it, maybe nudge it with its nose, then walk away uninterested. There’s no forlorn howling, no whimpering, no attempt to get the carcass on its feet, just a placid acceptance that what was once living is now dead. Acceptance, that was what I wanted, just the knowledge that Sally was dead so that she wouldn’t walk into my room when I was asleep and say ‘I’m back’ and kiss me on the cheek. But how could I explain that to Howard? I couldn’t, so I didn’t even try.