The Chinaman Read online

  Shocked shoppers and staff were still filing out of the store, urged on by uniformed constables in yellow reflective jackets, as an inspector shouted through a megaphone that there could be another bomb in the vicinity and would the crowds please keep back. Woody knew that he was just saying that to keep the ghouls away. Two bombs would have meant double the risk for the bombers planting the devices, and the IRA never bothered using two devices against civilian targets, only against the security forces in Northern Ireland. Besides, if there was any chance of a second device they’d keep the ambulancemen back while the Bomb Disposal Squad gave the place a thorough going over.

  There were a handful of sniffer dogs and their handlers checking the street, and Woody could see more dogs inside the store, noses down and tails wagging, happy to be working. One of the dogs in the street, a long-haired Retriever, lunged forward and seized something in its jaws. Its handler yelled and kicked its flanks and the dog dropped whatever it had been holding. It was an arm. The handler yanked his dog away, cursing. The dog cowered, all the time keeping its eyes on the prize.

  Woody went over to the Chief Superintendent and two inspectors who were surrounded by a pack of reporters and photographers. He recognised many of the faces and he knew that all the tabloids and heavies would be represented. If not, some news editor would be getting his backside soundly kicked. The older hacks were taking shorthand notes in small notebooks while the younger ones thrust mini tape-recorders in front of the police. Behind the pack were two television crews trying in vain to get a clear shot. He heard the click-whirr of a motor-drive and he turned to see Dave Wilkins aiming his Nikon at a torso lying in the gutter.

  ‘They won’t use it,’ Woody told him. ‘Too gory.’

  ‘So?’ said the photographer.

  Woody listened to the Chief Superintendent explaining what he thought had happened. A bomb in the back of a motorcycle, no warning, the streets crowded and the stores packed. No idea yet how many had been killed. Fifteen at least. Yes, almost certainly linked to the recent wave of London bombings, four so far. Correction, five including this one. Yes, the IRA had claimed responsibility.

  ‘And that, gentlemen,’ he said with the wave of a gloved hand, ‘is all that I can tell you right now. Would you please all move back behind the barriers and let my men get on with their work. We’ll be having a full press conference at the Yard later tonight.’ He politely pushed his way through the journalists, and they moved aside to let him go, knowing that the officer had said all he was going to say. There was no point in antagonising him. Besides, they all had their own police contacts who would be a hell of a lot more forthcoming.

  Woody went over to the shops facing the department store, noting down the names on the signs. His feet crunched on broken glass and he stepped to one side to let two ambulancemen with a stretcher out of a boutique. They were carrying a girl, her leather jacket and green cords shredded and ripped and dripping with blood. He knew she was a girl because of her long black hair. There was nothing left of her face, just strips of flesh hanging off white bone. Woody felt his stomach heave again. He’d been at accident scenes before, far too many to remember, but he’d never seen such carnage. The area reeked of death, of blood and burning and scorched meat. He fought to keep his emotions under control, knowing that he had work to do. It was harder for the reporters he thought bitterly. The monkeys had it easy. They looked at everything through the camera lens and that insulated them from the reality of it. But reporters had to be there and experience it before they could write about it, they had to open themselves to the horror, the grief and the pain. Sometimes it was almost too much to bear. Almost.

  He stood by one of the ambulances and got some snatched quotes from a couple of harassed stretcher-bearers and then he followed a woman in a fur coat that he’d seen leaving the store, ducked under the barrier and caught up with her. Her eyewitness account was harrowing and she had no qualms about giving her name and address. Her eyes were glassy and Woody knew she was in a state of shock and he held her arm gently as he spoke to her and then gestured over at Wilkins, standing to one side so that he could get a head-and-shoulders shot of her.

  ‘Got all you want?’ Woody asked the photographer.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wilkins. ‘I’ll head back and leave the freelancers to get the rest. You coming?’

  ‘No, I’ll ring the story in, it’ll save time. I’ll see you back there.’

  Woody half-heartedly looked for a call box, but knew that he stood little chance in Knightsbridge. He walked to a small Italian bistro and went inside.

  ‘Can I use the phone?’ he asked a waiter. The waiter began to protest in fractured English so Woody took out his wallet and gave him ten pounds. The protests evaporated and he was soon through to the office and dictating to a copytaker straight from his notebook. Twenty-five paragraphs, and he knew it was good stuff. When he’d finished he asked the copytaker to transfer him to the news desk and he checked that everything was OK with Simpson.

  ‘Got it here, Woody,’ he said. ‘Great read.’

  ‘OK, I’m going back to see what else I can get. I’ll call you.’ He hung up before Simpson could order him back to base. On the way out he got a receipt from the waiter.

  There was a pub down the road and Woody gratefully walked up to the bar and ordered a double Bells. It was only when the whisky slopped around the tumbler that he realised how badly his hands were shaking.

  The intercom buzzed, catching them all by surprise, even though they were waiting for him. There were three of them in the flat, drinking tea and watching television. They were casually dressed – baggy pullovers, faded jeans and grubby training shoes – and looked like sociology students stuck with nothing to do between lectures. One of the men was smoking and on the floor beside his easy chair was a circular crystal ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. He leant over and stubbed out the one in his hand, pushed himself up and walked into the hall. On the wall by the door was a telephone with a small black and white television screen; he pressed a square plastic button and it flickered into life.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he said to the figure waiting down below and pressed a second button, the one that opened the entrance door four floors below. As he waited for him to come up in the lift he went back into the lounge. ‘It’s him,’ he said, but they knew it would be because no one else knew they were there and if they did they wouldn’t be coming in through the front door but through the window with stun grenades and machine guns.

  There was an American comedy show on the television and canned laughter filled the room. Through the floor-to-ceiling sliding windows at the end of the lounge the man saw a tug struggle along the Thames, hauling an ungainly barge behind it.

  He went back into the hall and opened the door as the lift jolted to a halt. The man who stepped out of the lift was in his early twenties, wearing grey flannel trousers and a blue blazer over a white polo neck sweater. He had dark-brown curly hair and black eyes and was grinning widely. ‘Did you see it?’ he asked eagerly, before the other man even had a chance to close the door. He punched the air with his fist. ‘Did you bloody well see it?’

  ‘Calm down, O’Reilly,’ said the man who’d let him in.

  O’Reilly turned towards him, his cheeks flaring red. ‘Calm down?’ he said. ‘Christ, man, you should have been there. You should have seen me. It was fan-bloody-tastic.’ He turned back to look at the television set. ‘Has it been on yet? How many did we get?’

  ‘Fifteen so far,’ said the man sitting on the leather Chesterfield directly opposite the pseudo-antique video cabinet on which the television stood. ‘You did well, O’Reilly.’ He was the oldest of the group but even he had barely turned thirty. Although he had the broadest Irish accent he had Nordic blond hair and piercing blue eyes and fair skin. His name was also far removed from his Irish origins but Denis Fisher was Belfast-born and he’d killed many times for the Cause. ‘What about the helmet and the leathers?’ he asked O’Reilly.


  ‘In the boot of the car. Just like you said. It was so easy.’

  ‘Not easy,’ said Fisher. ‘Well planned.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said O’Reilly. ‘I deserve a drink.’ He went into the white-and-blue-tiled kitchen and opened the fridge. ‘Anyone else want anything?’ he called, but they all declined. O’Reilly took out a cold can of Carlsberg and opened it as he walked back into the lounge. He pulled one of the wooden chairs out from under the oval dining-table and sat astride it, resting his forearms on its back.

  ‘What next?’ he asked, grinning.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man who’d opened the door and who was now sitting on a flowery print sofa by a tall wooden bookcase. His name was McCormick. ‘What do we do next?’

  Fisher smiled. ‘You’re so bloody impatient,’ he laughed. He turned to look at the occupant of the chair by the window, the one they called The Bombmaker. ‘That depends on what MacDermott here comes up with.’ The Bombmaker grinned.

  The comedy show was interrupted for a news flash and a sombre man with movie-star looks reported that sixteen people had died in a bomb explosion and that the Provisional IRA had claimed responsibility. They then cut to a reporter in a white raincoat standing under a street-lamp in Knightsbridge, who said that police now believed that the bomb had been in the back carrier of a motorcycle and that it had been detonated by a timing device.

  O’Reilly punched the air again, and The Bombmaker’s grin widened.

  The police car drove slowly down Clapham Road. Constable Simon Edgington’s left hand was aching from the constant gear changing and he cursed the bumper-to-bumper traffic under his breath. It wasn’t even worth switching the siren on because there wasn’t enough room for the cars and buses to pull to the side.

  ‘It’s getting worse,’ he groaned.

  ‘Sorry?’ said his partner, a blonde WPC called Susan Griffin who had joined the Met on the graduate entry scheme. One of the high-flyers, a sergeant had told Edgington, closely followed by a warning not to try anything on because she’d reported the last constable whose hand had accidentally slipped on to her thigh during a hasty gear change.

  ‘The traffic,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be all night at this rate.’

  She looked down at the sheaf of papers on her black clipboard. ‘This is the last one,’ she said. ‘Chinese or something. God, I don’t think I can pronounce their names. Noog-yen Guan Fong and Noog-yen Goy Trin. Does that sound right?’ The names on the sheet were written as Nguyen Xuan Phoung and Nguyen Kieu Trinh.

  He laughed. ‘Sounds like a disease,’ he said.

  She gave him a frosty look. ‘It’s not really a laughing matter is it, Simon?’

  Edgington flushed. Griffin was a year younger than him but she acted as if she already had her sergeant’s stripes. But his embarrassment came from the fact that he knew she was right, it wasn’t the sort of thing to joke about. He wanted to tell her that he was just nervous, that he was trying to relieve the tension that was knotting up his stomach, and that he’d never thought when he signed up three years earlier that he’d have to knock on the doors of complete strangers and tell them that their nearest and dearest had been scattered all over Knightsbridge by a terrorist bomb. He wanted to explain but knew he’d sound like a wimp so he concentrated on driving.

  They’d been given three addresses, all south of the river. The first had been a middle-aged couple in Lambeth, a schoolteacher and his wife. Their teenage son had been in the passenger seat of an old Mini that had been fifty feet or so from the motorcycle when the bomb had gone off. Several pieces of wire that had been wrapped around the explosive had burst through the windscreen and torn his face and throat apart. The couple had already seen a report of the bombing on the evening news and before Griffin had spoken the wife’s legs had given way and her husband had had to help her to a chair in their cramped kitchen. Edgington had been quite happy to let his partner do the talking, he didn’t think that he could have kept his voice steady. He’d joined the police to catch criminals, not to act as some kind of messenger of death. And she’d done it so bloody well, sat them both down, made them cups of sweet tea, phoned their daughter and arranged for her to come round and look after them. She’d sat with them on the sofa until the girl came and then left them to their grief. All the time Edgington had stood by the kitchen door, feeling useless, but Griffin hadn’t mentioned it when they got back into the car.

  The next call had been at a small flat in Stockwell. No relatives this time, but a boyfriend who burst into tears and hugged the WPC when she told him what had happened. They were going to get married, he’d sobbed. She was pregnant, he said. She held him until the tears stopped and sat him down and asked him if there was anyone she could call, a friend or a relative. Did she suffer, he asked. No, she lied. The sergeant had told them that the girl had died screaming on the pavement with both her legs blown off. ‘No, she didn’t suffer,’ she said without hesitation.

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and she gave him a handkerchief while Edgington telephoned the boy’s mother. She said she’d be around in fifteen minutes and Edgington and Griffin decided that he’d be OK on his own until then. They left him hunched over a mug of tea which he clasped tightly between his hands.

  ‘It’s coming up on the left,’ she said.

  The traffic crept along and eventually they reached the turning.

  ‘Number 62,’ she said before he asked.

  He drove slowly, counting off the numbers. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  She checked the computer print-out on the clipboard and nodded. ‘That’s what it says here.’

  He stopped the car and they both looked at number 62. It was a Chinese take-away, with a huge window on which were printed gold and black Chinese letters and above it a sign that said ‘Double Happiness Take-Away’. Through the window they could see two customers waiting in front of a chest-high counter.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, opening her car door. Edgington caught up with her as she reached the entrance and followed her in.

  Behind the counter was an old Oriental man shouting through a serving hatch in a language neither of them could understand. He turned and placed two white plastic carrier bags full of cartons of Chinese food in front of one of the customers and took his money. There was a loud scream from the kitchen and the man stuck his head back through the hatch and shouted and waved his arm.

  He came back to the counter and smiled up at Edgington and Griffin.

  ‘What I get you?’ he asked. He was a small man, his shoulders barely above the counter. His face was wrinkled but the skin wasn’t slack, his cheekbones were clearly defined and there were no loose folds under the chin. It was hard to tell exactly how old he was, he could have been in his forties and had a rough life, or he could have been a well-preserved sixty-year-old. Griffin noticed how sad his eyes were. They were eyes that had seen a lot of suffering, she decided.

  ‘Are you Mr Noog-yen?’ she said, and he nodded quickly but corrected her pronunciation, saying his name as ‘Newyen’. The single customer left at the counter stood openly watching and listening to the conversation. Edgington stared at him until the man’s gaze faltered and he studied the menu pinned to the wall.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ Griffin asked the old man.

  ‘I very busy,’ he replied. ‘No staff. You come back later, maybe?’ There was a thud from the hatch and he went over and picked up another carrier bag. He handed it to the customer. ‘Come again,’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid we have bad news for you,’ said Griffin. She looked at the clipboard again. God, she thought, how do you pronounce these names? ‘Mr Nguyen, do you know a Xuan Phoung or Kieu Trinh?’ Both names started with Nguyen so she’d guessed that that was the family name and that everything that came after it were their given names.

  The man frowned. Another customer came in and stood behind Edgington. Griffin tried pronouncing the names again but still nothing registered so she showed him the compu
ter print-out and pointed to the two names.

  He nodded, his eyes wary. ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘And my daughter.’

  ‘I’m afraid there has been an accident,’ said the WPC. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’

  The man waved his hands impatiently. ‘What has happened?’ he insisted.

  ‘Mr Nguyen, please, it would be much better for you if we could sit down somewhere.’

  ‘No staff,’ he said. ‘My wife not in kitchen, so much work to do. What has happened?’ He spoke each word carefully, as if stringing a sentence together was an effort, and he had a vaguely American accent. But he seemed to have no trouble in understanding what she was saying.

  ‘Mr Nguyen, your wife and daughter are dead. I’m very sorry.’

  He looked stunned. His mouth dropped and his hands slid off the counter and down to his sides. He started to say something and then stopped and shook his head. Edgington turned to the customer and found himself apologising, but for the life of him he didn’t know why. He felt his cheeks redden.

  ‘Do you understand, Mr Nguyen?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘What happened?’ said the old man.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ she asked again. She didn’t want to explain about the bomb while she was standing in a Chinese take-away.

  ‘We can go back of shop,’ he said. He shouted through the hatch and as he opened a white-painted door a balding Oriental with sleeves rolled up around his elbows and a grease-stained apron came barrelling out. He ignored Nguyen and glared at the customer. ‘What you want?’ he barked.

  Nguyen led them down a tiled hallway, up a flight of wooden stairs and through a beaded curtain. Beyond was a small room with heavy brocade wallpaper and a faded red patterned carpet. The furniture was dark rosewood, a square table with carved feet and four straight-backed chairs with no cushions. On one wall was a small red and gold shrine in front of which a joss stick was smouldering, filling the air with sickly sweet perfume.