‘Takes me back to my days in Notting Hill,’ he said, and we turned to face the gate. The four Chinese who’d arrived in the car had grabbed the two gate-climbers and were pulling them down by their legs. Once on the floor they started a pitched battle, four against two. The two with cleavers stood back to back while the four late arrivals surrounded them. They had a mixture of weapons, one was using one of those two bits of wood joined by a chain that Bruce Lee used to whirl around his head in kung fu movies, while another had two small swords with curly bits around the handle that he was using to try to trap one of the cleavers every time it came within reach. Another was twirling a staff around his head while the fourth had what looked like a hockey stick. Shit, it was a hockey stick.

  ‘I think they’re on our side,’ I gasped to Robbie, and we ran to join them. Robbie opened the gate and we spilled into the street just in time to see my two would-be attackers fall to the ground under a hail of blows. Even when they’d dropped their cleavers and curled up into fetal balls with their arms wrapped around their heads and their knees up against their chests, the four assailants continued to kick them and hit them, they didn’t stop until there was no sign of movement.

  The newcomers picked them up one by one and threw them into the back of the Transit van. They came inside the gate to collect the other two while their leader, a thickset Chinese wearing an olive leather jacket and brown cords, came over to speak to me.

  ‘I am sorry about thet,’ he said, in a Cockney accent that took me by surprise. ‘Mr Lai told us to keep an eye on you, but I didn’t realize they were so close.’

  ‘What is going on?’ asked Robbie, swinging his truncheon by the side of his leg.

  ‘It’s OK, Robbie,’ I said. ‘These guys work for a friend of mine.’

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ said Robbie.

  ‘No, no, it’s OK, honest. Let them sort it out.’

  He agreed reluctantly, and went back into his den. I could hear a bottle being opened.

  ‘This will not happen again,’ said the Chinese. ‘We will not let anyone get that close again. Besides, having failed so dismally they are unlikely to have another go. But if they do, we will be better prepared.’ He bowed slightly, the action totally out of character with the accent.

  ‘One thing . . .’ he added.

  ‘I won’t mention it to Mr Lai,’ I said. He grinned, realizing that I understood.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do not worry if you do not see my men. They will be around.’ He bowed again, and then got into the car which drove off, the van following with its cargo of four unconscious thugs, now firmly gagged and tied. I didn’t know what they planned to do with them and I didn’t care.

  I was more concerned about how the triads had found my home. Jenny and Lai had both explained how the triads were active in London, but someone must have told them where I was and there weren’t too many people who knew where I lived.

  *

  Deciding where the funeral should be hadn’t been a problem. My mother had wanted Sally buried in the churchyard near her home in the West Country and had already chosen a coffin and a plot near a middle-aged oak tree by the time I was back in England. Jenny had made all the arrangements, just as she’d promised, and she arrived in London two days after me. She stayed at my house. I didn’t mention the attack in London, I didn’t want to worry her. Besides, the Chinese Cockney had been right, having been so soundly beaten they would be unlikely to try again. That’s what I told myself when strange noises woke me in the middle of the night and I strained to hear more over the sound of Jenny’s gentle breathing. If Lai’s men were still around, I never saw them.

  I suppose my mother was used to funerals, having seen off two husbands, and at first I was a little surprised that she wanted Sally buried so close to home because she’d had no qualms about having my father cremated and I don’t think she gave a second thought about his ashes. Then I realized that the death of a spouse is different from the death of a child, and that she probably still had a lot of grieving to do.

  I phoned Lai and told him when and where the funeral would be, and asked him to bring something with him, something that I hoped would solve the riddle of Sally’s murder. He said he’d be there.

  It was Sunday when I called him, and the funeral was Wednesday. I spent the time showing Jenny the London I knew, treating her like a tourist and just enjoying the warmth of her company.

  Not all the time, though. I got the name of a tame Hatton Garden diamond merchant from one of my pals on the Met, and we collected a stack of information about the diamond business from him, technical stuff like world prices, fluctuations, stocks held by the different diamond-producing countries and so on. He was able to supply just what I needed, including tables of average prices on a daily basis for the big diamond exchanges around the world.

  He’d run the charts off from a computer and the graphics weren’t so hot but the figures were clear. Jenny and I spread them out on the kitchen table and looked at them.

  ‘So what are we looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘That, for a start,’ I said, and pointed to a drop in the diamond prices on the Hong Kong bourse about nine months earlier. It lasted for about a month and then the line picked up, it was a small dip but it came at a time when the graphs for London, New York and Tel Aviv were all on the rise.

  She looked confused, so I explained. ‘Everywhere else in the world diamond prices were going up then. But in Hong Kong they were falling. Why? Because somebody was dumping diamonds in Hong Kong, increasing the supply so that prices dropped.’

  ‘So why did they stop?’

  ‘They didn’t stop,’ I said. ‘Look at the graphs. The prices of diamonds rose in Hong Kong, sure, but not as fast as elsewhere in the world. They obviously realized that selling too many at a time would attract attention, so they controlled the flow. Maybe they started selling them on other markets. But this is the giveaway. See how prices really started taking off when the miners’ strike started in South Africa. In New York, London and Tel Aviv, they shot up. But in Hong Kong, nothing. When the supply from South Africa was cut back, obviously more Chinese diamonds were put on the market. Not a huge amount, nothing compared with what De Beers produces, but enough to distort the prices in a small exchange like Hong Kong. Then after a few weeks prices start to rise again. See?’

  ‘But didn’t the dealers notice?’

  ‘Maybe they did. Somebody must have mentioned it to Sally, this isn’t the sort ofthing you stumble across. I suppose she came across it when she was doing her interviews for the advertising feature. In fact, thinking about it, I bet most of the dealers would be pretty pissed off about what was happening, seeing what it was doing to diamond prices.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Jenny, looking at the graphs. ‘Diamond trading is an international business . . . what if the dealers were buying in Hong Kong and then reselling them overseas? If whoever was mining them in China was dumping them in Hong Kong at prices below New York and London, surely the local dealers wouldn’t miss out on the opportunity of making a quick profit. They wouldn’t care where they were coming from. Just so long as they had a piece of the action.’

  She looked up from the graphs, her eyes sparkling because she knew she was right. Then she frowned. ‘But why didn’t whoever was mining the diamonds simply sell them in New York and London themselves?’

  ‘How would they have got them there?’ I answered. ‘It’s one thing to get them from China to Hong Kong, but it’d be a different matter to get them unnoticed into the United States. By doing it through Hong Kong they could spread the diamonds around the world without attracting attention to themselves.’

  ‘Until Sally found out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Until she found out.’

  ‘What now?’ she said.

  ‘Now we wait for Lai.’

  *

  On the day of the funeral Jenny stood next to me, her arm through mine, and she cried softly. She was on my right, my mother on my left, in the front pew of the sandstone church where my mother went every Sunday. Behind us were a scattering of relatives, a couple of dozen at most, mainly elderly, and several that I couldn’t put names to. Bill Hardwicke was there, and I was grateful to him for that. He hardly knew Sally, but he came anyway. We listened to a service given by a vicar who didn’t know the deceased but who did his best to persuade us that it was all for the greater good. We sang a couple of hymns and bowed our heads and then we stood in the graveyard and watched her being lowered into the ground.

  I hadn’t seen Lai in the church but he was there in the cemetery, a grey wool coat draped over the shoulders of an expensively-cut black suit, flanked by two Chinese heavyweights. One of them I recognized because he’d helped save my life a few days earlier. The three of them stood to one side of the grave, about twenty feet away, close enough to intrude. Lai stood with his head bowed, his hands clasped just below his groin, deep in thought.

  I knew that the Sally he was remembering wasn’t the same girl who filled my thoughts, the chameleon that was my sister had left behind a jumbled set of memories, and I doubt that any two of her friends would have seen her the same way. But that didn’t make any of the faces of Sally any less real, that much I knew.

  When it was all over I walked over to him, with Jenny still on my arm. He shook my hand, saying nothing. I guess I knew what was on his mind, and he knew what I was thinking, so there was no need to put any of it into words.

  He said hello to Jenny and she reached out to touch his arm. Lai’s two bodyguards stood by impassively. They were wearing dark suits but were obviously uncomfortable and they both kept moving their shoulders around as if they felt trapped.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ I said, more to fill the silence than anything.

  My mother walked along the tarmac path that led to the road, supported by my aunt. They looked curiously at Lai and I as we stood together on the grass, but said nothing.

  ‘You’re welcome to come back for a drink,’ I told Lai. ‘My mother has arranged something.’

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ he said quietly. ‘I have merely come to pay my respects to Sally. I will leave you now.’

  ‘Did you . . .?’ I started, but he nodded his head before I finished the question. He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘You can check the numbers?’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘And once I know who we are looking for I’ll call you.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘A few hours at most. I’ll do it when I’m back in London tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I’ll be at the Inn on the Park,’ he said. ‘I’m staying over for a few days to attend to some business. Call me there.’

  ‘I will,’ I promised, and Jenny and I walked with Lai and his two minders down the path in silence. Before they left in a dark blue Jaguar I gave Lai Sally’s watch, mumbling something about being sure that Sally would have wanted him to have it.

  ‘What’s in the envelope?’ Jenny asked. I opened it and showed her.

  ‘Sally’s phone bill?’

  ‘Yeah. What I originally asked for was a list of all overseas calls from her flat, but I didn’t realize that Hong Kong telephone bills are all itemized, with every telephone number and the time and cost of each call. And as the flat was in Lai’s name it was no problem getting an up-to-date copy of the bill.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then I’ll be able to track down every number and find out who she spoke to in England before she died. Because I think that she rang up someone here on the diamond story, and I think that whoever it was, was worried enough to have her killed, ordered Seligman’s car to be bombed and tried to have me killed too.’

  She shivered, and I knew it wasn’t the cold. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go talk to your mother.’

  *

  There were only fifteen overseas numbers on the phone bill, and nine of those were in Peking, spaced out over the three weeks before Sally had died. The remaining six were all UK numbers.

  Jenny and I had sat on the floor in my lounge on the thick red-dyed sheepskin rug that hid the wine stain on the carpet. The CD player was on, digitally playing Louis Armstrong singing something deep and meaningful. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but she was still wearing my light blue bathrobe and her hair was damp, fresh from the shower. I wasn’t due in the office till three but I’d put on number two suit, the one where the zip in the trousers was starting to go, and my Glasgow Press Club tie, green with a yellow quill. Who says journalists have no sense of style?

  Of the six UK numbers, one I recognized immediately, it was my office number, the main switchboard. She’d phoned two days before she’d died and been on the line for forty-five seconds which meant she’d tried to leave a message and I cursed Roger the fucking Dodger or Handy fucking Andy or whichever bastard had been too lazy to tell me she’d called. Or maybe she’d phoned late at night and a cleaner had answered, and if she’d got through to me maybe she wouldn’t have told me what she was up to, she probably just wanted to pick my brains. If she’d had anything really serious to tell me she would have rung back, but that didn’t stop the ache in my heart and the horrible gut-wrenching suspicion that if we had talked there might have been something I could have done to have saved her life.

  Before she’d phoned me there were three London numbers, one of them she’d dialled twice. The sixth call I noticed with a jolt like an electric shock was several days after she’d fallen to her death and then I realized it was our mother’s number and it had been me that had made the call when I’d gone back to the flat to use the recall button.

  That left three numbers.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘I’ve got a contact who works for British Telecom who’ll trace numbers for me, but there’s no harm in trying the direct approach first.’

  First I dialled the number that Sally had called twice. Both times she’d been on the phone for about half an hour, and when a voice answered ‘London Diamond Exchange’ I realized why. She’d been getting background information on the diamond business, the sort of facts and figures that Jenny had scattered on the floor around us, production, prices, exports and so on.

  The second number was De Beers, and that made sense because she’d be asking questions about the strike, the miners’ walk-out described in the cuttings that Jenny had got for me in Hong Kong, how diamond production had been hit and how there were still no signs of the miners going back to work, despite two of the miners’ leaders being killed in mysterious, and violent, circumstances.

  The adrenaline was starting to flow and the hairs on the back of my neck were starting to stand on end because I could feel we were getting close, I felt as if I was on the trail with Sally, closing in for the kill. Except that when Sally had gone in she’d probably been her normal headstrong self and gone charging in without a second thought. I hit the seven digits and there was a pause and then the ringing tone. Six, seven times it rang and I was starting to think there was nobody there and then the receiver was picked up and a woman with a crisp upper-class accent said ‘Mr Kaufman’s office’ and then it all clicked into place like the jaws of a steel trap springing shut.

  ‘Mr Kaufman’s office,’ the voice repeated, this time with an impatient edge to it.

  Jenny looked at me and mouthed ‘What’s wrong?’ but I shook my head.

  ‘That is Warren Kaufman’s office isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ said the voice. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  ‘Is he there?’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s in a meeting at the moment. Can I get him to call you back?’

  ‘No, no, that’s all right. I’ll call back later. Thank you,’ I said, and put the phone down.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Jesus H. fucking Christ.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Jenny, reaching for my hand and holding it close to her chest. I told her.

  I told her that Sally had called my office but hadn’t spoken to me because she’d been trying to get Warren Kaufman’s number and had obviously found someone to give it to her. And I told her that the reason Sally hadn’t told me what was going on was because the man who was behind the diamond operation in China was the same man who owned the newspaper I worked for. And that explained a whole stack of worries that had been gnawing away at my insides. Like why she hadn’t called me. Why Bill had managed to track me down to my home. Yeah, the fact that Warren Kaufman was behind it explained a lot.

  ‘Are you sure it’s him?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘It was definitely his office, and other than De Beers and the diamond exchange his was the only UK number she called. You can see from the phone bill.’ I handed it to her. ‘She was on the line for twenty minutes so she must have given him a real grilling. And I reckon she told him more than she should have done. You know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. She probably said she’d been to the mine in China, seen the security arrangements, and somehow she managed to trace the ownership of the mine to him.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I promised Lai I’d give him the name.’

  ‘You must be sure first.’

  ‘I am sure.’

  ‘Let me check it out first. It’ll be easier starting with Kaufman’s name and working backwards. Let me see if I can connect him to China. Just give me one day at Companies’ House.’

  I agreed, reluctantly because in my heart I was already sure, but I told her everything I knew about Kaufman and his company. She dressed while we were talking and fled the house.

  She phoned me in the office later that evening, her voice excited and her breath coming in short gasps.

  ‘God, you were right,’ she said. ‘One of Kaufman’s mining subsidiaries has an offshoot which has its head office in Panama, the same address as the company that’s involved in the mining joint venture. And I’ve rung one of my contacts in Beijing who says yes, Kaufman was there three years ago talking about exporting industrial diamonds. And I found out why Kaufman wanted to keep it all low key.’