The Solitary Man (Stephen Leather Thrillers) Page 5

  The noise of the crowd swelled to a deafening roar. Metcalfe grabbed Hastings by the shoulder and shook him. Hastings looked at the pitch. Three Gurkhas had wrestled the naked girl to the ground but she was covered in perspiration and they were having difficulty holding on to her as she wriggled and shook like a stranded fish.

  Hastings twisted around to look at the upper tier again but he couldn’t see the man with the cigar. The spectators at the front of the tier were waving a large South African flag and cheering. Hastings craned his neck but the flag blocked his view.

  Down below, the Gurkhas carried the naked girl off the pitch and the spectators sat down, eager for the game to restart. On the upper tier, the South African supporters dropped back down into their seats. Hastings cupped his hands around his eyes to shield them from the sun. The seat where the man with the cigar had been sitting was empty. Hastings wracked his brains, trying to remember where he’d seen the man before.

  ‘What’s up, Warren?’ asked Davies.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Hastings, sitting down.

  ‘You look like somebody just walked over your grave.’

  Hastings shivered again. Davies was right. That was exactly what it had felt like.

  PADDY DUNNE USED HIS key to open the front door of his sister’s house. On previous visits he’d rung the doorbell, but she’d paid it no attention as if unwilling to allow anything to intrude on her grief. ‘Tess,’ he called. ‘It’s me, Tess.’

  There were three letters on the carpet, an electricity bill and two circulars, and Dunne put them on the hall table. He went through to the kitchen where his sister was sitting at a wooden table, a cup of tea in front of her. The tea had long since gone cold and a brown scum had settled on to its surface. Tess was staring at the cup as if it were a crystal ball into which she was looking for some sign of what the future held for her.

  ‘How about a smile for your brother, then?’ said Dunne as cheerfully as possible.

  Tess didn’t look up. Dunne was carrying a plastic bag of provisions which he took over to the refrigerator. He opened the door and put the carton of milk and the packets of cheese and butter on to the top shelf, then put a loaf of brown bread into the pine bread bin by the stove. He looked in the sink. There were no dirty dishes there, no sign that his sister had eaten breakfast.

  ‘Are you hungry, Tess, love?’ he asked. She didn’t even bother to shake her head. ‘How about a nice piece of toast? With some lemon curd, like we used to have when we were kids? How about that, Tess? Does that sound nice?’

  Dunne sat down opposite her and took her hands in his. Her skin was cold and dry, the nails bitten to the quick. He held her hands gently as if afraid they might break. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said. ‘Mr McCormack phoned me this morning.’ He hunched forward over the table. He was twelve years older than his sister, but since her son had been arrested she’d aged dramatically, and the life seemed to be ebbing out of her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was dull and lifeless, hanging in uncombed strands around her sunken cheeks. Her son’s arrest seemed to have hit her even harder than the death of her husband, five years earlier.

  ‘It won’t be long now, Tess. Mr McCormack said it’s being taken care of, they’re going to get Ray out.’

  For the first time she looked at him. ‘I want my boy back,’ she said, her voice a cracked whisper.

  ‘He’s coming, Tess,’ promised Dunne.

  ‘I want my boy back,’ she repeated, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  THE OLD WOMAN HELD the egg-shaped poppy pod between the first finger and thumb of her left hand and collected the congealed sap with her metal scraper. The scraper was the size of a small saucer with a crescent cut out of it, blackened from years of use. The old woman had been given the scraper when she was a child, when she’d worked the poppy fields of northern Thailand, long before she’d crossed the border into Burma with her family, chased out by the Thai army.

  It was the second time the poppy field had been harvested. It was a good crop, one of the best she’d ever seen. It had rained only twice during the cold season and the plants were healthy and tall, with many of them producing five flowers. She scraped carefully and methodically, but quickly, her fingers nimble despite her years. There were three parallel lines of brown sap, and close by them were three scars where the pod had been cut the previous week. Each poppy pod could be cut three, maybe four times over a period of six weeks. Then she and the rest of the workers would collect the biggest and best of the pods to get seeds for next year’s crop.

  The work was repetitive, but the old woman was lucky: she was small and the poppy pods came up to her chest so she could harvest the pea-sized balls of sticky latex without bending. She and the six other women working the field had to be finished before midday. In the morning the sap was moist and easily scraped. By early afternoon it would set and the work would be that much harder, so the opium collectors had gone into the field at first light and would be finished before the sun was high overhead.

  The old woman wiped her resinous scrapings into the small brass cup hanging around her neck. The cup was old, too, older than the woman herself. It had belonged to her mother and she’d been given it on her twelfth birthday, the year she’d married.

  She moved on to the next plant. The old woman preferred collecting sap to making the incisions on the poppy pods. The pods had to be cut from midday onwards, when the sun was at its hottest, so that the heat would force out the milky white sap. It was unbearably hot in the fields in the afternoon, even with a wide-brimmed straw hat, and the sun was merciless on any uncovered skin. The old woman’s skin had long ago turned to the colour and texture of leather, but she still burned if she didn’t take care.

  The cutting was done with a three-bladed knife, and the making of the parallel incisions was the most skilful of the jobs involved in the opium harvest. Too deep and the sap would drip to the ground and be wasted; too shallow and not enough would trickle out. The cutting required more concentration than the collecting of the sap, and any lapse could result in sliced fingers. The old woman’s fingers were crisscrossed with thin white scars.

  Another reason the old woman preferred collecting the opium to making the incisions was that workers had to walk backwards when they were cutting so that they didn’t smear the opium on their clothes as they moved through the field. It was slow, hard work, but it had to be done. She’d been working in opium fields for almost sixty years and had never complained. The opium paid for her food, her clothes, and had allowed her to raise a family.

  She looked across at her grand-daughter who was using a small oblong scraper to collect sap from the plant next to hers. The old woman smiled down at the little girl in her white cotton dress, amused at the way her tongue was stuck between her teeth as she concentrated on her task. The girl knelt down and scraped the resin into a bowl which she kept on the soil by her feet, then grinned up as she realised that her grandmother was looking at her.

  ‘Not tired?’ the old woman asked.

  The little girl shook her head. She wiped her forehead with her arm and sighed theatrically. ‘No. I’m fine.’

  ‘We’ll have a break soon. You can drink some water.’ A break would also give the old woman a chance to smoke some opium. Not the fresh sap that she’d just harvested but opium from the previous year’s crop which she kept in a horn box in the pocket of the black apron that she wore over her red embroidered jacket. Her opium lamp and spirit pipe were in a bag at the edge of the field.

  ‘Who’s that, Grandmother?’ the little girl asked, pointing up the hill.

  The old woman narrowed her eyes and looked in the direction the girl was pointing. At the crest of a hill was a man on a horse. The horse was big, much bigger than the packhorses and mules that carried the opium through the jungle and which brought supplies to the village, and it was white, gleaming in the early morning sun. It stood proudly, as if aware of the attention it was attracting. One by one the women in the
fields stopped what they were doing to look up the hill. The man in the saddle sat ramrod straight, as proudly as his horse. He scanned the fields with a pair of binoculars.

  ‘That’s Zhou Yuanyi,’ said the old woman. ‘Get back to work.’ She seized another oval pod.

  ‘Who’s Zhou Yuanyi?’ asked the little girl.

  ‘It’s his fields we’re working in,’ said the old woman. ‘These are his poppies.’

  ‘Wah!’ said the little girl. She looked around the field in amazement. ‘He owns all these flowers? All of them?’

  The old woman grinned, showing the gap where her two top front teeth had once been. ‘Child, he owns the whole mountain. And those beyond.’

  The little girl stared back at the man on the horse. ‘He must be very rich.’

  The old woman scraped the opium sap from a large pod. ‘The richest man in the world,’ she said. ‘Now get back to work. Don’t let him see you staring at him. Zhou Yuanyi doesn’t like being stared at.’

  The old woman took a quick look over her shoulder, up the hill. Zhou Yuanyi took the binoculars away from his eyes. He was wearing sunglasses, but from a distance it looked as if he had no eyes, just black, empty sockets. He kicked the white horse hard in the ribs, jerked on the reins and turned it around, riding down the far side of the hill, out of sight. The old woman watched him go, then turned back to her poppy plants. There was still much work to do.

  WARREN HASTINGS PRESSED A yellow button on the dashboard of his Range Rover and the wrought-iron gates glided open. He nudged the car forward into the compound, its tyres crunching on the gravel drive. His two-storey house with its white walls and red-tiled Spanish-style roof was illuminated by his headlights, and long black shadows were thrown up against the tree-lined hillside behind the building.

  He’d stayed on Hong Kong Island until late, knowing that both cross-harbour tunnels would be blocked solid by spectators returning to Kowloon and the New Territories. Two large Dobermanns came running around the side of the house, their stubby tails wagging and their long pink tongues lolling out of their mouths.

  Hastings cut the engine and climbed out of the Range Rover. ‘Hiya Mickey, hiya Minnie,’ he said, greeting the dogs with pats on their heads.

  Behind him the wrought-iron gates began to close, but as they did two headlight beams swept across the compound and a Mercedes saloon accelerated through the gap. It braked hard and skidded several yards across the gravelled drive. The dogs stared at the car, their ears up.

  The engine of the Mercedes was switched off, but the headlights stayed on, blinding Hastings. He was as tense as the two dogs, aware of every sound in the night air: the metallic creaking of the two engines as they cooled, the Geiger-counter clicks of the crickets on the hillside and the far-off rumble of a minibus heading towards Sai Kung. Mickey looked up at Hastings, his eyes bright and inquisitive.

  ‘Trousers,’ said Hastings, squinting into the lights.

  He heard the driver’s door open and first one foot then another step on to the gravel. The door clunked shut, the sound echoing off the hillside.

  ‘Who is it?’ Hastings called. ‘What do you want?’

  Mickey took two paces forward, his hackles up. Whoever it was remained silent. Hastings put up a hand, trying to block out the blinding headlights.

  ‘That’s no way to greet an old friend, is it now, Hutch?’ The voice was gruff, almost hoarse, the accent pure Geordie.

  Hutch stiffened at the use of his real name. It had been a long time since anyone had used it. He screwed up his eyes, but he still couldn’t see who it was.

  The visitor walked to stand in front of the car, between the headlights. ‘You don’t look bad for a man who’s been dead for seven years,’ he said.

  The man chuckled and it was the sound of rustling leaves, an ironic, bitter laugh devoid of amusement. He walked forward. As he got closer, Hutch could just about make out the man’s features: he had grey hair, slicked back from his forehead and curly at the ends, thin lips, a nose that was slightly crooked. It was the man who’d been staring at him in the stadium. Billy Winter.

  ‘What do you want, Billy?’ he asked.

  ‘Brandy and Coke would be nice.’ Winter extended his hand, but Hutch ignored it.

  Mickey and Minnie both took a step forward, their teeth bared in silent snarls. Hutch stroked the back of Mickey’s neck. ‘Trousers,’ he said, his eyes fixed on Winter. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard.’ Winter kept his hand out and eventually Hutch shook it. ‘That’s better,’ said Winter. ‘Can we go inside? It’s like a sauna here.’ He took a large white handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket and wiped his forehead. ‘And what’s this business about trousers?’

  ‘They’re trained to obey key words,’ said Hutch. ‘That way no one else can give them instructions.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Winter. He looked at the dogs. ‘Sit,’ he said. The dogs stared at him. ‘What makes them sit?’ Winter asked. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth as if he feared being overheard.

  ‘Blue,’ said Hutch. Both animals sat obediently.

  Winter raised an eyebrow, impressed. ‘Trained to kill, are they?’

  ‘Do you want me to say the word?’

  Winter grinned but didn’t reply. He started walking towards the house.

  ‘How did you find me, Billy?’ Hutch asked.

  ‘All in good time, old lad.’

  Hutch hesitated for a moment, then he followed Winter. The front door had two security locks and Winter stood to the side while Hutch opened them.

  ‘Takes you back, doesn’t it?’ said Winter. ‘All the locks. There’s something about the rattle of keys, still gives me the willies, even now.’

  ‘Yeah? I never give it much thought.’ He pushed open the door and let Winter walk in first.

  Winter frowned as he heard a rapid beeping noise. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Security system,’ said Hutch. He walked over to a console on the wall by the kitchen door and tapped in a four-digit code. The beeping stopped. Mickey and Minnie stood at the threshold waiting for permission to enter. Hutch waved them through and they trotted obediently into the hallway. ‘Through there,’ Hutch told Winter and indicated the door to the sitting-room.

  As Winter sat down on a long brown leather sofa, Hutch went over to a rattan drinks cabinet. ‘No Coke,’ he said.

  ‘Brandy and ice’ll be just fine,’ said Winter, adjusting the creases on his slacks. He looked around the room. ‘Nice place,’ he said amicably. ‘You wouldn’t know you were in Hong Kong, would you? It’s a little piece of England, isn’t it?’ He patted the arms of the chair with the palms of his hand. ‘I must admit I was surprised to discover that a man who spent so much of his time in solitary confinement had decided to hide in the most crowded city in the world.’ Mickey and Minnie stood by the french windows, watching the visitor. Winter stared back at them. ‘Sit,’ he said. The dogs didn’t move. ‘Blue,’ said Winter, louder this time. The dogs remained standing, their ears pricked, their mouths slightly open. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Winter asked Hutch.

  ‘They’re trained not to obey strangers,’ said Hutch, heading towards the kitchen with an empty ice bucket.

  Winter glared at the Dobermanns. ‘Stay!’ he said authoritatively. The dogs stood stock still. ‘Gotcha!’ said Winter.

  When Hutch returned with the bucket filled with ice, Winter and the dogs were still staring at each other.

  ‘You look better without the beard,’ said Winter. ‘Made you look like a bit of a wild man, you know. The glasses suit you, too. They make you look almost intellectual. I nearly didn’t recognise you.’

  ‘Thanks for the character analysis,’ said Hutch, without warmth. ‘How did you know where I was?’ He poured a large measure of brandy into a glass and dropped in three cubes of ice.

  ‘Looked you up in the phone book,’ said Winter. Hutch gave him his drink. ‘Aren’t you having anything?’ Winter asked
.

  Hutch shook his head. ‘How did you . . . ?’ Realisation dawned. ‘Eddie Archer.’

  ‘Best paperwork in the business,’ said Winter. He sipped his brandy and smacked his lips in appreciation. ‘Oh, yeah, your passport runs out in two years. Eddie asked me to tell you not to apply through official channels. It’s genuine, but the birth certificate isn’t. He’ll fix you up with a new one, but you ought to know that his prices have gone up substantially.’

  ‘So much for honour among thieves.’

  Winter grinned. ‘You always said you were innocent, Hutch.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ve known Eddie a lot longer than you. We grew up together in Newcastle . . .’

  ‘Spare me the deprived childhood story, Billy. I know it by heart.’ Hutch went over to a wood-framed armchair and sat down. Mickey padded over to stand next to him but Minnie remained with her eyes fixed on Winter. ‘So you heard that my body wasn’t in the plane, and you paid Eddie a visit. Who else knows?’

  ‘Just Eddie. And me.’

  ‘What do you want, Billy?’

  Winter studied Hutch as if wondering how to phrase his reply. He swirled the brandy around his glass. ‘I need you to do a job for me.’

  ‘What sort of a job?’

  ‘The sort only you are qualified to do, Hutch. I need you to help me get a guy out of prison.’

  Hutch shook his head. ‘I’m not going back to the UK.’

  ‘He’s out here. In Bangkok.’

  Hutch sighed deeply. ‘Billy, I run a kennels. I train dogs. I breed Dobermanns. I don’t break people out of prisons.’