The Chinaman Read online

  Praise for Stephen Leather’s bestselling thrillers

  ‘Raw and uncompromising, this is a compelling and disturbing thriller that will make you think’

  Sunday Mercury, Birmingham on The Eyewitness

  ‘Stephen Leather’s novel manages to put a contemporary spin on a timeless tale of revenge and retribution . . . Leather’s experience as a journalist brings a sturdy, gritty element to a tale of horror . . . which makes The Eyewitness a compelling read’

  Evening Herald, Dublin

  ‘Exciting stuff with plenty of heart-palpitating action gingered up by mystery and intrigue . . . Leather is an intelligent thriller writer’

  Daily Mail on The Tunnel Rats

  ‘As high-tech and as world-class as the thriller genre gets’

  Express on Sunday on The Bombmaker

  ‘A whirlwind of action, suspense and vivid excitement’

  Irish Times on The Birthday Girl

  ‘An ingenious plot, plenty of action and solid, believable characters, wrapped up in taut, snappy prose that grabs your attention by the throat . . . A top-notch thriller which whips the reader along at breakneck speed’

  Yorkshire Post on The Long Shot

  ‘A gripping story sped along by admirable uncluttered prose’

  Daily Telegraph on The Chinaman

  Also by Stephen Leather

  Pay Off

  The Fireman

  Hungry Ghost

  The Vets

  The Long Shot

  The Birthday Girl

  The Double Tap

  The Solitary Man

  The Tunnel Rats

  The Bombmaker

  The Stretch

  Tango One

  The Eyewitness

  Spider Shepherd Thrillers

  Hard Landing

  Soft Target

  Cold Kill

  Hot Blood

  Dead Men

  Live Fire

  Rough Justice

  Fair Game (July 2011)

  Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thrillers

  Nightfall

  Midnight

  To find out about these and future titles, visit www.stephenleather.com.

  About the author

  Stephen Leather was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Before that, he was employed as a biochemist for ICI, shovelled limestone in a quarry, worked as a baker, petrol pump attendant, a barman, and worked for the Inland Revenue. His bestsellers have been translated into more than ten languages, and The Stretch and The Bombmaker have been filmed for television. Stephen Leather now lives in Dublin.

  Visit his website at www.stephenleather.com

  THE CHINAMAN

  Stephen Leather

  HODDER & STOUGHTON

  Copyright © Stephen Leather 1992

  28

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 844 56862 8

  Book ISBN 978 0340 58025 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Nuala

  CONTENTS

  The Chinaman

  Praise for Stephen Leather

  Also by Stephen Leather

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book

  Special Offer

  They made an odd couple as they walked together through the store, the girl and the old woman. The girl was beautiful, quite, quite beautiful. Her sleek black hair hung dead straight down to the middle of her back and it rippled like an oily tide as she wandered through the racks of dresses and blouses. She was tall and slim and wore tight green cord trousers and cowboy boots and a brown leather bomber jacket with the collar turned up. She moved like a model, smoothly and controlled, as if used to being watched. The men that followed her with their eyes had no way of knowing where she came from other than that she was Oriental. She could have been Thai or Chinese or Korean but whatever she was, she was beautiful and that was all they cared about. Her cheekbones were high and well defined and her skin was the colour of milky tea and her eyes were wide and oval and she had a mouth that seemed to be in a perpetual pout. Every now and then something would catch her eye and she would take a dress or a blouse off its rack and hold it up and then shrug, not satisfied, before replacing it. Her hands were long and elegant and the nails were carefully painted with deep red varnish.

  By the girl’s side walked a gnarled old woman, a head shorter and an age older. Her face was wrinkled and pockmarked like chamois leather that had been left for too long in the sun. Her hair was grey and dull and cropped close to her head and her eyes were blank and uninterested in what was going on around her. When the girl asked her opinion on an item of clothing she would barely look at it before shaking her head and then she’d drop her gaze and concentrate on the floor. She wore a thick cloth coat and a faded scarf and she kept her hands thrust deep into her pockets despite the warmth of the store.

  It was a Saturday in January and the weather outside was bitterly cold, piles of dirty slush squashed up against the kerb and wisps of white vapour feathering from the mouths of passers-by. The girl looked over the top of a rack of imitation fur coats topped with a sign that promised thirty per cent off, and through the streaked window. She shivered and didn’t know why. She’d lived in London for as long as she could remember, and unlike her mother she was well used to the British climate. It was as if someone had walked over her grave, or the grave of her ancestors.

  She took one of the coats and held it against herself. A middle-aged man in a fawn trench coat waiting outside the changing rooms with a carrier bag full of packages looked at her and smiled and nodded his approval. She ignored him and studied the coat. The old woman snorted and walked off. The girl looked at the price tag but even with the sale discount she realised she couldn’t afford it.

  She looked through the large glass window again at the bustling crowds fighting to get into the department store across the road. She wanted to join them and go hunting for bargains but she could see that the old woman was tired and impatient to go home and they had an hour’s travelling ahead of them. She put the coat back on the rack.

  A large black and red motorcycle threaded its way through the traffic and parked on the double yellow lines in front of the main entrance to the store. It was brand new and gleaming apart from the tyres which were crusted with ice. On the back carrier box was the name of a courier firm. She watched the rider dismount like a cowboy getting off a horse. He was dressed in black leather with a white wrap-around helmet and a tinted visor. There was a walkie-talkie in a leather case hanging from a belt around his waist and a black receiver clipped to his left shoulder. The rider switched on his hazard warning lights and the amber flashing was reflected on the wet road. He looked up and down the pavement as if checking for traffic wardens and then turned his back on the bike and crossed the road towards th
e boutique. He stepped to one side to let a trio of giggling schoolgirls leave the shop and then came in. As he passed the girl he looked at her, up and down, and she turned to watch him go, his leathers squeaking with every step. The rider was empty handed so the girl assumed he was there to collect something, but he continued to move through the shoppers, passed the pay counter and then he pushed open the doors at the other side of the shop and went out into the street.

  The girl frowned and turned back to the window. The bike’s lights were still flashing. Her frown deepened and at that moment the twenty-five pounds of Semtex explosive in the back carrier box exploded in a flash of blinding white light, blowing in the window and striking her with thousands of glass daggers. At the last moment she tried to turn towards her mother, to shield her, but they died together in the hail of glass.

  The Press Association news desk received the call as the first ambulance arrived at the department store, blue light flashing and siren whining. The reporter who took the call later told the police that the voice was Irish and had given a codeword that the police identified as genuine; the tip-off was not a hoax. The voice was that of a man, he couldn’t tell if he was young or old, and the caller said that a bomb had just gone off in Knightsbridge and that the Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for it. The reporter hadn’t recorded the call, he was new on the job and no one had told him that he was supposed to. The line went dead and he took his notebook over to the news editor who told him to check with the police that there had indeed been an explosion and three minutes later the story went out over the wires as a flash – IRA BOMB EXPLODES OUTSIDE LONDON STORE – AT LEAST FIVE DEAD.

  By the time it appeared on the screen of the news editor of the Sunday World he’d already had a phone call from a member of the public keen to earn a tip-off fee. He’d assigned two reporters to start phoning the police and their Sinn Fein contacts and was trying to track down their Belfast stringers.

  It was 5.30 p.m., the crossing over point when the day shift began to drift off to the pub and the night reporters were arriving. The picture desk had sent two freelances and a staffer to the scene, but Knightsbridge was at least half an hour’s drive away from the paper’s Docklands offices.

  More information was trickling over the wires on PA and Reuters and the death toll kept climbing with each snatch of copy.

  ‘Jesus, now they’re saying twelve dead,’ said Jon Simpson, the news editor. Behind him stood the chief sub and the editor, reading over his shoulder.

  ‘Splash?’ said the chief sub, knowing the answer would be yes. The front page lead at the afternoon conference had been a sixties pop star’s drug problem.

  ‘We’ll have to pull our fingers out if we’re going to make the first edition,’ said the editor. ‘We’ll take the whole of page one, two and three, let me see the pics first. Hold the MP story until next week and hack back the food safety feature. Hang on, no, drop it altogether. And we’ll save the splash until next week as well, it’s exclusive.’ The chief sub scurried back to his terminal to redraw his page plans, shouting to the picture editor to send over everything he had.

  ‘You’ve got two hours until the first edition, Jon. Get everybody on it.’ The editor wandered over to the picture desk while Simpson picked up the phone.

  ‘Where’s Woody?’ Simpson yelled at his deputy who was busy scrolling through the PA wire.

  ‘Where do you think?’ he shouted back, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Drunken pig,’ said Simpson and rang the King’s Head, a short stagger away from the office.

  As the phone trilled behind the bar, Ian Wood was downing his second double Bells and trying to look down the front of the barmaid’s blouse. She saw what he was up to and flicked her towel at him and laughed. ‘Don’t let Sandy catch you doing that,’ she scolded and he grinned.

  ‘Your husband’s too good a guv’nor to go slapping the customers around,’ he said, finishing his whisky.

  ‘Another?’ she said as she picked up the phone. She listened and then mouthed silently ‘Are you in?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’ he mouthed back.

  ‘The office,’ she replied, and he realised they looked like a couple of goldfish gasping for breath. He nodded and took the phone off her. She picked his glass up and refilled it.

  ‘Woody, are you on for a double shift?’ asked Simpson.

  Woody looked at the double measure of whisky in his glass and licked his lips but hesitated for only a second before he told Simpson he’d do it. Woody was a freelance and he needed the money. If he’d been staff he’d have told the news editor where to get off, but it had been a long time since anyone had given Ian Wood a staff job.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘IRA bomb. A big one. Knightsbridge.’

  ‘Christ. How many dead?’

  ‘They’re saying twelve now, no make that thirteen, but they’re still counting. Get out there and get the colour. Link up with the monkeys while you’re there, they’ll need their captions written.’ Woody heard Simpson call out for the names of the photographers. ‘Dave Wilkins is the staffer, find him,’ he said.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Woody and hung up.

  He took the glass off the bar and swallowed it down in one.

  ‘You off, Woody?’ said the barmaid, surprised.

  ‘Duty calls, darling,’ he said. ‘Can you cash me a cheque?’

  ‘Fifty?’ she asked.

  ‘Fifty is magic. You’re a life-saver. If ever that husband of yours . . .’

  She waved him away and counted out the notes as Woody handed over the cheque.

  ‘See you later,’ he said, and walked down the dimly lit corridor and out of the pub door into the street. He turned right and walked the short distance to The Highway and hailed a cab heading towards the City.

  The driver looked over his shoulder when Woody told him where he wanted to go. ‘We’ll never get near the place, mate,’ he said. ‘There’s a bomb gone off.’

  ‘Yeah I know,’ said Woody. ‘I’m a reporter.’

  ‘OK,’ said the cabbie and sped off down the road. ‘Which paper d’yer work for then?’

  ‘Sunday World,’ replied Woody.

  ‘Yeah?’ said the cabbie. ‘What happened? Page Three girl killed was she?’ His deep-throated laughter echoed around the cab.

  They hit unmoving traffic long before they reached Knightsbridge and though the cabbie tried to find a way through the side-streets they were soon helplessly locked in.

  ‘Best I can do,’ said the driver apologetically, his professional pride wounded.

  ‘No sweat,’ said Woody, getting out. He handed a ten-pound note through the window. ‘I’ll walk from here. Call it a tenner and give me a receipt, please.’

  ‘Clamping down on expenses, are they?’

  ‘Yeah, tell me about it.’

  The cabbie signed a receipt and handed it to Woody. Then as an afterthought he ripped off a few blank receipts from his pad. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘fill these in yourself.’

  ‘You’re a prince,’ said Woody, and put them gratefully into his raincoat pocket.

  He began to jog slowly towards the sound of sirens, his feet slapping on the wet pavement and his raincoat flapping behind him. Despite the cold he soon worked up a sweat. Ian Wood was not a fit man. He was slightly overweight but that wasn’t the problem, he was out of condition because he never took any exercise, hadn’t since his schooldays.

  The police had cordoned off the area around the store and a burly sergeant blocked his way when he tried to duck under the barrier. He fished out his yellow plastic Metropolitan Police Press card and after the copper had scrutinised it he was waved through.

  It was a scene from hell. Wrecked cars were strewn across the road, still smoking and hissing. There was an assortment of emergency vehicles, all with their doors open, radios crackling and lights flashing. There were two fire engines though their hoses were still in place, unused. There had obviously been a num
ber of small fires burning but the firemen had used extinguishers to put them out. There were half a dozen ambulances, and as Woody walked towards the police top brass one of them pulled away and its siren kicked into life. Something squelched under Woody’s shoe and he looked down. He was standing on a hand. It was a small girl’s hand, the skin white and unlined, the nails bitten to the quick. The hand was attached to a forearm but that was all, it ended in a ragged, bloody mess at the point where there should have been an elbow. Woody’s stomach heaved and he pulled his foot away with a jerk, a look of horror on his face.

  He backed away and bumped into a policeman wearing dark-blue overalls, black Wellington boots and thick, black rubber gloves that covered most of his arms. The policeman picked up the dismembered arm and dropped it into a plastic bag he was carrying. As he straightened up, Woody saw that the man’s face was covered with a white surgical mask and then he saw the blonde wavy hair and realised it wasn’t a man at all, but a woman in her twenties. There were tears streaming down her face. She turned away from him, walked a few steps and bent down again. This time she picked up a shoe with a shattered bone sticking out of a green sock. Woody shuddered. There were dozens of policemen dressed in the same overalls and following the girl’s grisly example. Woody realised with a jolt why the body count hadn’t been finalised. It was at least an hour since the bomb had gone off and they were still picking up the pieces. Ambulancemen were ferrying bodies on stretchers at the run, some of the victims moaning or screaming, others still, their faces covered with blankets. The policemen in their blood-spotted overalls worked at a slower pace, knowing that it was more important to be thorough than fast. They were not in the business of saving lives, simply collecting evidence.

  Woody looked around, surveying the damage. All the windows of the store had been blown in, as had those in the shops opposite, and the stonework was pitted and blackened. Lying half on and half off the pavement was the twisted frame of a motorcycle, the back a mass of scorched and melted metal. It was being examined by two middle-aged men in white overalls.