Blue Lantern (23 page)

Brodie stayed in his room. He avoided Vanessa, although she telephoned every day. He hardly ate, and drank too much beer and whisky. His head ached. He read paperbacks to stop thinking. His sleep was a frantic telling and retelling of his side of the story.

The impact of Lo Sun's death did not hit him at first. Lo Sun did not have the character of a breathing individual, a married man, a graduate of Shanghai University in chemistry, a student leader of the Cultural Revolution on the mainland, which is what he had been according to Special Branch's dossier. Lo Sun to him had been like a painted target of the enemy on a pistol range, bloodless cardboard.

The constant presence of violence, and violent death, over the past year had brutalized him to some extent; it no longer sickened or troubled him as it used to. But he began to realize the enormity of what he had done or contributed to, in destroying Lo Sun. He had acted like a deranged man. If he had stayed in Glasgow, his greatest crime would have been urinating in an alley on the way home from the pub. Now he was implicated in kicking a man to death.

Andy Marsden came to his room as soon as he heard about the attorney-general's inquiry. Brodie tried to send him away, but Marsden pressed himself forward, his black button eyes fastened on a point beyond Brodie's sight lines.

“Don't go to pieces, Mike. This is just a little local obstacle you have to steer around.”

“A possible murder charge?”

“Have you seen any of the AG's people? Or the cop doing the coroner's file?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Keep clear of them until the stories of your corporal and constable are straightened up. Tell them you're sick. Tell them anything,” Marsden warned.

“You're going to concoct something?”

“I'm not. But I'll be having a word with Flinn. If you think you can get this job done by telling the truth, you're making a mistake.”

“Lies will make it worse.”

Marsden marvelled at Brodie's simple-mindedness. “I know what happened in the cells without you or anyone else having to tell me. Enough to put you on trial for murder. Oh yes, you would almost certainly be acquitted, but if you go for trial, forget any career in Hong Kong, or any other police force. You'll have a monkey on your shoulder for the rest of your life. Tried for murder.”

“Thanks for the encouraging forecast.”

“Do as I've said, and there'll be no trial. Life will go on,” Marsden said, like a beneficent godfather.

“A little local obstacle.”

Marsden came and sat beside him on the bed, and rubbed the palm of his hand across Brodie's bare chest, watching the golden hairs glisten. “Life will go on.”

When Marsden had gone, Brodie thought he could hear Paul Sherwin saying, “It's simple; all you have to do is tell the truth.”

What was the truth? That he was angered by a kick in the balls? It was more. He lost control facing a man who was involved in killing his friend. He lost control, too, because of the man's obstinacy. And behind this, he was stung by the betrayal of a girlfriend bought with corrupt money, and lacerated by passion for a woman he couldn't reach or match. But these were not justifications; they were merely the stones that had cracked his mind.

“I've been reading about you in the newspapers,” Helen said.

She was lying on her side, facing him. They had a sheet covering them; they had made love; it was always the first item, however many differences simmered between them. They were in Ted Wells's apartment, the spare bedroom, their honeymoon room they called it.

Brodie was uncertain how to begin; there were so many blurs and spaces in the picture he had painted of himself, for her, that he had to be careful. His refuge was that he believed nobody told the unsparing truth about themselves.

“You don't want to talk about it?” Helen asked. “A man was killed. You seem to be in some danger, Mike. I can see you're troubled. I don't believe everything I read, you know.”

He outlined his pursuit of the bombers, and the arrest and interrogation of Lo Sun.

“You were too violent with the man?” she asked in an understanding rather than a critical tone.

“Yes, but I was hurt. I didn't mean to kill.”

Helen seemed to assess his words like a clinical case. “I've had a hand in the trauma that can end life. If it will help you, Mike, very occasionally, if only in my mind, I've had to accept a share of responsibility for a death, a slightly defective diagnosis, an inadequate drug, a small mistake during a procedure.”

“It does help.”

She was silent for a time, and then she said, “I believe you, and I know the strain you were under, losing Paul in that way.”

“Such a waste. And Lo Sun – another waste.”

“What's done is done. Don't cause yourself pain.”

Her resolute attitude surprised him.

“Will they try you for murder?”

“I don't know. It's in the balance. Does it…put you off me?”

His work had a stain upon it, and the stain had seeped into him.

“It shows the different worlds we inhabit,” she said, biting her lip with a pained expression.

The next day, Flinn came to Brodie's room. He burst in as usual.

“Feeling sorry for yourself, eh?” he sneered, nodding down at Brodie on the bed.

“What do you want?”

“I've seen your two men. Not bad little chaps. Scared to death. They blame you. They say you lost your temper with Sun, and waded into him.”

“Do they admit hitting him?”

“No. They never struck a blow. They stood back while the Big White Chief avenged his friend.”

“Bloody lies!”

“I know. They also say you kicked Sun downstairs at the Mei Foo.”

“Shit!”

“I know.”

“Does it mean I'm gone?”

Flinn gave a wry look. “Hardly. I've told them it's no use trying to blame a brave and loyal officer. I told them no court will believe he did everything, and they did nothing. They know now that you all have to tell the same simple story. Have a look at these.”

Flinn handed over two pages of typescript. Brodie read the copies of the depositions of the two men to be taken before the coroner.

“There's nothing here to implicate me.”

“Or them. A pure case of accidental death following the restraint of a difficult prisoner,” Flinn said briskly.

Flinn's help appeared to be given without willingness, but in recognition of their fraternity.

“Will people – the coroner – believe this?”

Flinn wiped a palm of his meaty hand across his face as though suffering pain. “Nobody gives a fuck whether it's believable to a sane and sober person. It's the evidence. The only evidence. Stick to this story and there can be no ruling other than accidental death. That's how the law works, sonny. And of course, a murder trial will be out of the question. But if you want to go off on a saintly pilgrimage in front of the coroner, to cleanse your soul, you'll end up with turd all over you, no job, and the virtual certainty of a murder trial.”

“Suppose my men change their story?”

“They're too smart for that. They'd be discredited against the written statements.”

“So it's really fixed?”

“Sure, it all ended today with these two pieces of paper. All the rest will be a rumbling noise.”

The lines in Flinn's face deepened in a cynical smile.

18

Brodie attended a meeting with the crown counsel who had been appointed by the attorney-general to inquire into the case. He went to the attorney-general's chambers in Central District. The crown counsel was an Irishman named Desmond Donnelly. Brodie had met Donnelly, a prosecutor popular with the police, when he had appeared as a witness for the crown in high court cases before a jury.

Donnelly was in his fifties, with sleek swept back grey hair, and large eyes dodging behind horned rimmed spectacles. He was easy in manner; a long-time expatriate who had worked in the African colonies; and a drinker, fond of inviting the police witnesses after a case, and telling yarns. He had a pungent bad breath.

Donnelly invited Brodie to take a seat in his office, and took his own seat informally in a chair next to Brodie's, wearing striped trousers, a black waistcoat and white wing collar.

“Well, Mike, what's all this?”

Donnelly's blue hands shook slightly as he lined up his pencil and notepad. Brodie explained, carefully following the lines of the depositions signed by his men. Donnelly listened with amused skepticism.

“Ah, man, don't try to tell me the prisoner tried to escape. I wasn't born yesterday. You and your boys kicked the daylights out of him to get him to talk, didn't you?”

“No, he was violent. He virtually had a fit. I've got the marks to prove it. See this welt on my jaw? He slammed the cell door on me.”

“Maybe, but roughing up a knuckle-head is standard practice. Look Mike, no way will a good guy like you get a bad report from me. Never. You have your career and your future. Just tell me for my own curiosity about the human species, so I'll know, and we'll go out for a pint.”

Brodie felt constrained by the older man's friendly approach to say more. Then he looked into the watery pools behind the spectacles, and suddenly feared there might be a shadow of the disingenuous there.

“Des, I'm telling you, I only used enough force to control Lo Sun, and I got kicked in the balls for my pains.”

Donnelly accepted this reluctantly. “Yes Mike, I've seen the medical report on you.”

A few days later the attorney-general's chambers released a statement saying that they had no evidence of police impropriety, but the question would have to wait the decision of the coroner. Later, Brodie spent two days in a poky witnesses' room at the court in Victoria, waiting for the inquest on Lo Sun to be called. He inhaled the frowsy smell of unease as people sat, eyes down, waiting tensely.

When the inquest was heard, the coroner, a saturnine Britisher, a lifetime expatriate, and a loud young Australian crown counsel, pecked at Brodie and his men in the witness box, but the childishly rote testimony held firm. There was an air of grievance in the court. Body movements, gestures and heavy breathing showed that the testimony was unacceptable; but there it was, on the record, uncontradicted. The coroner, in charging the jury, grumbled that the wounds suffered by the prisoner did not seem consistent merely with an attempt to escape, but the jury had to rely upon the evidence, not what they thought or guessed might have happened. He said he had to direct that the only finding open to them was death by accident. The jury returned the verdict without retiring. The verdict was greeted with hisses and cries.

After the coroner had discharged the case, the corporal and the constable came up to Brodie, baring their teeth in wide grins. Brodie shook hands; they were partners.

Andy Marsden placed a manicured hand on Brodie's shoulder. “What did I tell you!”

Brodie took two days leave after the coroner's hearing, and spent one of them swimming, and lying on the chilly, deserted beach at Repulse Bay, and the other on a shake-out cruise around the island with Harold Evans. The strikes, the bombings and the riots, a distant after-shock from Mao's mainland revolution, had ceased for no discernible reason, other than perhaps that the point had been made. The dissidents had shown that they could disrupt the Colony. The government was chastened by the show of force; liberal voices urged and promised good works. Trade had to go on.

As the days sped on toward Christmas, Brodie resumed his patrol under Flinn's watchful eye, making sanctioned arrests. He saw little of Vanessa. He gave her money, and took her body occasionally, sometimes at her urging. At these times he tried to think only of what he took, and ignore the darkness of what he could not take or know about her.

In contrast, he was constantly in touch with Helen, on the telephone, and through her casual notes which arrived two or three times a week. He even got into the way of responding with a few thoughts of his own. The trivial notes maintained a bond. And he saw Helen at least twice a week for a film, or afternoon tea, although their opportunities to sleep together were rather less.

Brodie was leaning on the rail of the seventh floor terrace, looking out over the neatly mown lawns of the government's Mt Nicholson apartments. These were set in a private hollow in the hills, facing a distant Victoria, with a sliver of harbour beyond, and further in the haze, the towers of the Kowloon peninsula.

Helen would not venture on to the terrace, concerned at being seen in this enclave of Hong Kong's most senior civil servants. It had been difficult for Brodie to persuade her to come to Mt Nicholson. For him the place was a lucky find, acquired for the weekend from an acquaintance of Harold Evans, for the price of walking and feeding a precious Scots terrier. It was a taste of a lifestyle far above a police inspector. The apartment had numerous rooms, and a feeling of space and light which placed it in a different country to the fumes and enclosed din of Mongkok.

Later, Brodie was taking Helen to see a play at a church hall in Happy Valley, an amateur production of ‘The Importance of Being Ernest' performed by students from the English university. If Helen had not arranged the outing, Brodie would never have dreamed of going to an amateur performance – or probably a professional one. He was beginning to enjoy Helen's taste, even if it was not his.

They had a bath together in the big tub, and then they dropped towels on the bed and lay on them, naked in the flowery smell of bath salts, letting their skin dry in the air.

“What's the matter, Mike? Even when you laugh you seem to be hurting. That awful case is behind you now. Tell me.”

He had no urge to share his troubles, but he had to respond. And he valued her advice, even if he didn't follow it, as a reckless car driver values road signs he may not obey. “When it comes to organized crime, I'm not allowed to make arrests without authority. The people I arrest are set up by my bosses. They're patsies.”