Painkillers by Simon Ings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. .

PAINKILLERS

Š Simon Ings
first published 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishers Ltd, Registered in England No. 1984336 Registered Office: 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

PROLOGUE

Hong Kong
1997

I remember them. Their mouths, and their needles.

There were ten of them, that I recall. Not one of them was out of her twenties, and most were younger. They'd not worked anywhere else, you could tell that. There was nothing usual about them. Nothing used. Armed as they were, they were immune to wear.

I never saw them on the street. Entering the respectable-seeming fabric wholesalers in whose attic they worked, I cannot remember once passing a girl on her way through to the outside. The godowns and junks, the coconut sellers of the wholesale market, the men sorting clams, the cranes loading trucks parked along the Praya - did they ever see these things? Were they even aware of them? Did they know this was Kennedy Town?

Inside, I never saw them dressed. Perhaps they had no real clothes. I never saw any. I remember sea and flame-tinted silk; rich brown lace against white skin. That is all. That, and their painted eyes. Their mouths. They never spoke.

They wielded their machines with the cold proficiency of nurses, screwing their needles through your skin as easily as they might puncture the rind of an overripe fruit. Then they would straddle you. Hose scratched your hips, or the buttery heat of flesh slid there, and already it seemed too much to bear. As though, even without the machines, something obscene had taken place inside you: a tumescence of the nerves. So, for a second, you were tempted to pluck out the needles, be done with all of that, and lose yourself instead inside the girl: a comforting, proletarian fuck.

But you never did.

They clipped fine plastic-sheathed wires to the needles they had buried in your stomach, pubis, thighs, and plugged the wires into a box by the side of the bed. Sometimes, as they leaned and twisted, sorting wires, turning dials, you stroked their breasts. You weighed their breasts in your hand as they hung, straining the embroidered cups of a bra or sliding wetly about against a silk slip. You could gently pinch a nipple, or maybe tug a strap free, and the flesh would slip like mercury out of its sheer container and into your sweating hand. You could do that, but it wouldn't make any difference.

Sooner or later, she would turn that dial.

They were merciless.

Eva thought I was having an affair. Someone from work, she thought: a young ambitious business graduate, arcing her taut body so her hips met mine a clear foot above the sheets, and her well-thumbed mobile phone purred rhythmically beneath the damp pillows of our motel bed.

In the day, alone with her imagination, Eva wept. In the evening, when we went out, fashion shades hid the pinkness of her eyes.

She did what she could to keep me solely hers. She went through my pockets while I was in the shower. When I made a phone call from our apartment she would hover behind the door, listening - and she ordered itemised bills that told her nothing she didn't already know.

She dressed up for me. Gucci. Donna Karan. Alexander McQueen. I remember the night I came in pissed from Frank Hamley's birthday party. She stepped out of the bedroom in a new Stella McCartney slip dress and let me take it off her, very slowly.

She did not make love to me. She simply couldn't. The shame had eaten too deep. It had ruined her. She made home instead. She studied World of Interiors and House and Garden. She hired designers. She bought expensive originals. She browsed for homewares in Seibu and Daimaru. (What would her grand-daddy think, whose head had rolled on Stanley Beach some fifty years before, as he surveyed all this Nipponese extravagance from his frame by the kitchen door?)

She rang me late at the office to ensure I was really there. I always was. Kennedy Town was a very occasional, and strictly daytime, affair: the single release I allowed myself. Anything more ordinary, more human, would have probably finished me off.

Sending Justin to the Higashi school in Tokyo was costing me about Ł70,000 a year. Then there was the luxury to which Eva was accustomed. Her mother had been swaddling her in Chanel since her fourteenth birthday, and had substituted cash for compassion the moment our son was diagnosed. 'Why can't you treat him properly?' she'd say, and more: unmothering the daughter she had never loved.

To start with, Eva used her allowance to help pay for his therapy. But when at last I threw her mother out the house, the cheques dried up. Justin was still living with us then. He was in the room with us, that evening of the final row, banging his head steadily and with increasing force against the leg of a Franck Evennou chair.

The last I saw of the Kennedy Town girls, they were on TV. I was sitting at the bar in the Big Apple on Luard Road, trying to tune out an early-evening Mr Bean rerun, when the picture on the heavy JVC hanging above the optiks yawed and span and the TVB Pearl newsroom came up; and after that a shot of Kwai Chung.

The camera was looking inland from the anonymous centre of the container port. Smuggler's Ridge was a grey line above Kwai Chung's brutal grey apartment blocks. In the foreground, police boats were gathering around an antique Saab junk, retrofitted for salvage work. The junk swung about. The gears at the top of the derrick juddered spasmodically.

It was lifting a container from the shallow water: one of those long steel boxes you see being loaded here by their hundreds onto ships bound for Taiwan and Nagasaki. When I looked again they had lowered it onto a concrete jetty. There were no markings on the box's sides; no identifying plates. Trapped sea-water sprayed from the door's seams, drenching the four policemen who were hammering away at the latch. When the door came free the outflow knocked one of them over.

I grinned, ordered another bourbon. Then they opened the door.

Horror isn't dressed up here; it's an ordinary part of life. On Reclamation Street, men chop live turtles to pieces. Calves' heads bleed into the gutters. Later, on the portable TV at a nearby dai pai dong, I once saw a policeman slipping the dismembered remains of a shark victim into individual plastic bags. Once, a car had burst into flame on the Eastern Corridor; the tabloid photographer used a telephoto lens to capture the way the driver's hair, caught in the searing updraught, ballooned and sprung away from her crisping scalp.

The way it's all displayed so openly - you never quite get used to it. It wasn't much before eight when the TV displayed the contents of the container.

The police had cordoned off North Street by the time I got there. I stood watching over the heads of a curious crowd of restaurateurs and market traders as the police carried box after box, crate after crate, out of the fabric store. I guessed they were taking away the girls' effects. It couldn't have been anything other than perfume, lipstick, underwear, a little cannabis if they were lucky. Certainly no heroin, no small arms or haul of dirty money. It wasn't that sort of establishment.

I thought about their little black boxes: the dials, the pins and the wires. The scent of rose talcum. I realised I was crying.

Hamley wasn't at home and he'd switched off his mobile. I caught the tram into Central and crawled the bars pretending to look for him until I was good and plastered. I hoped he was safe. If he wasn't, then neither was I. The little black boxes, the women with their shiny, silent mouths. Hamley had introduced me to them, but he knew no more about them than I did. Less. Someone had decided to erase the experiment. Did the erasure extend as far as the punters?

I rang his flat again from a phone box off Citibank Plaza; this time I woke up his girlfriend. I was only making things worse. I crossed Garden Road and waved down a cab.

We lived above Magazine Gap, high up the Peak, where the Japanese had erected their Temple of the Divine Wind during the occupation. They never got around to completing it, the British eventually blew it up, and now, from an eighth-floor apartment in nearby Cameron Buildings, Eva's martyred grandfather looked out from his gilt frame on one of the most commanding views in Asia.

I let myself into the apartment as quietly as I could, but I needn't have worried. Eva was out for the count. I swallowed a handful of vitamin B with a glass of tapwater and slipped under the duvet beside her. I lay there, stroking her, stroking her fingers, tracing the elegant curve of her nails, the slight dryness over her knuckles, the hot square of her palm. A little, childlike part of her came alive, just long enough to squeeze my hand. Then I lost her again.

It turned out Hamley had seen the same news report I had. The next day he phoned me at the office, from Macau. He had an onward flight already booked.

'Lisbon?' I said. 'What the hell are you going to do in Lisbon?'

He didn't know. He had no plans. He was just too frightened to stay. 'I mean, Adam, Christ, their fingers...'

'Yes,' I said.

'Why the hell would someone do that to their fingers?'

'They did it themselves,' I told him. 'Trying to force the door.'

'You reckon?'

'A school-friend of mine saw it once.' Dimly, it occurred to me that I was making it worse. 'A fire on board a ship he was serving on. The hatches lock automatically. Steam pours in. A rating got trapped in a compartment and tried to claw his way out.'

'I'll call you from Lisbon,' Hamley said. But he never did.

ONE

London
Spring, 1998

1.

The next time I saw Hamley - the last time - was last spring. Eva and I were back in London by then, running a small cafe by Southwark Market. If you weren't told about us, you'd never have found us; we were squashed in between on one side a specialist fabric wholesaler who opened maybe one day in the week if the elderly owner could be bothered, and on the other, a glorified garage full of broken barrow wheels and boxes of fluorescent tubing.

Nevertheless, the day had been hectic. A bunch of public relations people from the Tate's Bankside development had adopted us, and someone had put the word around about us at IPC tower, which housed something like a hundred magazine titles. Hannah had to go out twice to buy more bread. I thought we had enough chorizo and pecorino to last us the rest of the week, and we were left with about half a day's supply.

I kicked the last of our customers out around five forty-five. Hannah offered to stay and help clear up but it was her early night so I didn't take advantage. I was stuck here until seven anyway, when Eva arrived with the next week's stock.

I set about sweeping the floorboards clear of crumbs and dropped receipts. In the kitchen, hot water spilled from the tap into a bucket plashed with Dettol, and the antiseptic smell of it was just now cutting under the fug of coffee and burnt sugar and melted cheese. I reached for the handle of the front door so I could sweep the step, when it opened by itself. 'We're closed,' I said - then I registered who it was.

I asked him where he'd been, what he'd been doing with himself, and he said he'd kill for a cup of coffee. The pressure had gone out of the Gaggia but I had a jar of instant in the kitchen. When I got there the bucket was overflowing and a fine skein of spray had fanned the polished plaster behind the sink. The floor tiles were sodden.

Hamley followed me in.

I reached for the mop. 'This won't take a second,' I said.

He closed the door behind him.

It was only now I saw how old he had become - and strange. His shoes, which had that weird, squared-off toe fashionable among the Italians, were scuffed down to the leather. His green wool pleated trousers had lost their crease, and there was a large grease-stain on the right lapel of his nasty brown-pink check sports jacket. A cheap blue-and-white stripe shirt was open at his neck, and white chest hairs poked luxuriously up through the gap. They grew so thickly, I imagined they'd run seamlessly into his beard, if he had one; but his face was so smooth and pink he might have shaved only an hour ago.

He said, 'You'd better pray I'm going to prison.'

'What?'

'The day I come out is the day I'm coming after you. Cunt.' The word sat clumsily in his mouth; he had no practice, saying that sort of thing.

'I don't understand why you're so upset,' I said.

He swallowed, broke eye contact. I thought maybe he was going to leave, as suddenly and inexplicably as he had arrived, but he just stood there, staring off into the middle distance like a bored life model.

He had a face that had lost personality as it aged: his sunken eyes had nothing to say. His cheeks had grown jowly, and taken together with the unremarkable line of his chin, they leant him an air of weakness.

'Frank?'

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a letter for me to read.

It was from Hong Kong. The Top Luck inquiry had subpoenaed him.

I folded it up and handed it back. I said, 'This hasn't got anything to do with me.'

I said, 'I don't know what it is you think you're running from.'

Not strictly true: in May 1997 an investigation into the murder of senior Hong Kong movie executive James Yau Sau-Lan stumbled across a money laundering operation.

Yau's company, Top Luck Investments, was established in 1989 to finance Cantonese film production in Hong Kong. In 1992 Top Luck floated its film interests on the Hong Kong stock exchange. They even made movies: an output one film critic called 'pre-eminently forgettable, but pure box-office'. So far, so good. The problem came when you looked at the company's annual turnover. 50 million unaccounted-for US dollars passed through Top Luck's books every year.

It wasn't the first time difficult questions had been asked of Top Luck. As long ago as 1991, an audit report had been ordered on the company at the offices of the Serious Crime Group. The report, which I had compiled and Hamley countersigned, drew only the most ambiguous and tentative conclusions, however, and Top Luck was left free to trade.

The shocking and violent death of its managing director ended Top Luck's run of remarkable - well - luck. When it was revealed in court just how gently Hong Kong law enforcement had treated the company over the years, an enquiry was inevitable.

True, it should have been me giving evidence at the inquiry. But nothing in my behaviour since could possibly arouse suspicion. I served out my time, as shabby and undistinguished as countless others. Come the handover of the colony to the People's Republic, I handed in my badge and slogged my way over to Chek Lap Kok with the rest of the aparatchiks.

It was Hamley, my superior, who had fled so suddenly and inexplicably, and several months before his time, and it was hardly surprising that the enquiry's suspicions had fallen first on him.

I tried pointing this out to him, but it didn't do any good. He wasn't much interested in talking. I don't know what he expected to get out of this meeting, and I don't think he knew either, which of course could made him even more frustrated. I don't remember much about what happened next, except that it got physical. In the end I had to throw the Dettol in his face.

I ran water in the sink for him to bathe his eyes, then I went and looked out a towel for him in the cupboard under the stairs. When I got back I found the kitchen empty and the water still sloshing about weakly in the sink. I heard a car pulling away from the kerb. I ran to the door in time to see the reflections of his brake lights gutter and die in the puddles of the opposite pavement. I rubbed my neck. I thought maybe he'd twisted it, but it felt okay now. I went back inside and fished the Wray & Nephew out of the hole in the back of the cupboard under the sink. The bottle was half full. I looked at my watch: I had about half an hour before Eva turned up. So I finished it.

2.

By the time she arrived I'd wiped down the tables, mopped the floors, and arranged the packet teas in attractive pyramids in front of the window. But I hadn't even begun to clear the paper liners from out the counter, and I'd clean forgotten to scrub out the juicer. Carrot sediment had dribbled and set on the chrome in dirty orange streaks.

'I can't leave you to do any bloody thing,' she said, scrubbing the sheen off the metal with a scourer.

'Leave it to soak for a couple of minutes, darling.'

She dropped it into the sink, knocked the remaining pieces in after it, and tore off her gloves. Her eyes darted about the kitchen, as she hunted for signs of catastrophe.

'I washed the floor in here,' I offered.

'I didn't think it needed it,' she said.

'It was busy today. We're nearly out of sausage.'

'I told you to buy more last Saturday.'

'How were the roads?'

She went back to the till. 'Haven't you cashed up yet?'

'I haven't had the chance,' I said, hating the whine in my voice.

She started scooping change out of the till and onto the worktop in short, compulsive jerks. She scraped pennies into her palm, counting them much like a Macanese croupier deals cards in the Jai-Alai: with an expression somewhere between boredom and contempt. I watched her fingers curl and jerk. She wore her nails short now, and even so one of them had torn. The skin on that side of her finger was inflamed.

'That can wait,' I said, wanting her to look at me, even if it meant a confrontation.

'Don't tell me what to do.'

'Look at me,' I said.

She looked at me. 'What?' she said.

She was my age: twenty-six when we first met. But nothing that had happened in the years since had changed her the way it had changed me, or Hamley. The crows' feet at the corners of her almond eyes were still the suggestive, bedroomy hints I remembered from our first meeting. Her skin was still sound and white: the proverbial porcelain of Orientalist fantasy. Only her hands had changed, coarsened by her work at the cafe - but that was nothing a little cream and a return to our old life wouldn't cure.

'What?'

Her mouth was small, her lips full and puckered: when she was younger she used a dark lipstick to make them appear bruised, an eruption of something absurdly sensual at the centre of that perfect sloe-eyed mask.

I said, 'I think the Japs must have put us in a guide. They like our teas.'

She started counting the silver.

'They come here after matinees at the Globe.'

'I'm counting,' she said.

'Twelve,' I said, plucking a number out of the air.

She flapped a hand at me to shut up.

'Six,' I shouted. 'Twenty-four. Plus three.'

'The cakes are in the boot,' she said, not missing a beat. 'Let's not be here all night.'

Our Mazda Xedos was parked opposite. Its silver skin, so striking in the day, reflected back the sodium-lit surfaces of the street like a fly-spotted mirror. I got all the way to the boot before I remembered the keys. Eva had them. Had she watched me, traipsing out here like an idiot? I went back inside. 'I need the keys.'

'Oh - ' She pressed a fistful of coins to her forehead, as though the close contact might help her remember what they came to. But it had gone out of her head. She slapped the coins back on the counter with a bang. Several went spinning off and disappeared behind the worktop.

'Sorry,' I said.

She fished in her pocket and threw her keys in my general direction. 'Ta,' I said, for all the good it did.

In the boot there were stacks of flat square boxes: the sturdy, corrugated cardboard ones contained pecan pies and apple tartins and carrot cakes so juicy and fatty you could hardly cut them without the whole thing collapsing into a gooey mess. The thin white ones held rounds of brie. There was a carrier full of large paper packets of coffee beans, and the smell coming out of it was so heady and spicy I stuck my head in the bag for thirty seconds of pleasurable hyperventilation. I slung the carrier round my wrist and carried the brie in on top of a stack of cake boxes.

Eva was bagging up the money at last. I dropped the boxes and the bag on the worktop beside her.

She walked past me and out into the road. I followed her. 'I'm quite happy to unload,' I said. She reached into the boot, took hold of a stack and then stuck there. 'Oh fuck it,' she said.

'What?'

'Ugh.'

'What?'

She hoisted the boxes out of the boot and made for the cafe. She was holding them away from her as though they were dirty. They wobbled precariously.

'Let me,' I said. I made to take them from her.

She swerved to avoid me, staggering to keep the pile upright.

'Eva?'

'I can manage.'

I glanced into the boot. Something had leaked onto the plastic sheet lining the boot. I ran my finger through the goo and licked it. It was honey.

When I got back inside, Eva had gone through to the kitchen. I looked for an excuse to follow her. The coffee needed decanting so I took the carrier of beans through. Eva was scrubbing her hands under the hot tap. I edged around her to get to the shelf with the coffee jars. Normally I used the little stepladder but Eva was in the way. I reached up on tiptoe for the first tin. But there was more in it than I expected; it came down too fast and I dropped it. It bounced once. The lid sprang off. Beans shot all over the floor.

Foam span off Eva's hands as she wheeled around. 'You bloody oaf.'

I knelt and felt under the sink for the dustpan and brush. They weren't in the usual corner. I reached further in.

Eva stepped towards me, poised for the kill. 'Needing another tipple?' she said.

I backed out the cupboard and looked up at her.

She said, 'I know where you keep it.'

'I'm simply looking for the dustpan and brush,' I said.

She laughed: it was the closest she ever came to screaming. 'Adam, I can smell it on your breath.' I watched her, showing nothing, until she had to look away. She looked up at the ceiling instead, haughty as a Noel Coward heroine. 'At least have the decency to switch to something tasteless,' she said. 'Vodka. Now isn't that what people usually do?'

Eva turned everything that pained her into social comedy. It made it hard to take her seriously.

I got out the dustpan and brush. Eva went back to bagging up day's takings. When she finally returned, arms laden with little plastic bags of change, I was pouring the beans I'd rescued back into the tin.

'I told you I washed the floor,' I said. 'What's the problem?'

'Adam.'

Back home, as usual, Boots got under my feet. I sat at the kitchen table with the day's post, kicking him out of the way. He took it well. What a game! Scrabbling for purchase on the terracotta, chewing my shoelaces...

'Oh for fuck's - '

'Bootsie! Come here.' Eva knelt at the foot of the stairs, arms extended towards him. He ignored her. He growled, terrorising my shoe.

It was all junk mail. I tore it up and threw it in the bin, turned and tripped over the dog.

'Oh for God's sake feed him, can't you see he's hungry?' Eva straightened up. Her hand shook as she gripped the banister. 'I'm going up to change.'

Boots gave her a cursory glance as she climbed the stairs, heels clicking on the unpolished boards.

'Stupid sod,' I told him, when she was gone. 'You're supposed to be hers.' Boots wagged his tail. I went over to the fridge and took a half-empty can of shit from the door. He scampered over to his bowl and looked up at me with his big cow eyes, ready for our Big Bonding Experience. I emptied out the can into the bowl. He let go a big grateful fart.

I poured myself a Coke and, hearing Eva ascend the carpeted stairs to our bedroom, spiked it with rum from the bottle on top of the Welsh dresser. I sat back down at the table, drank off half, and tried to put my head back together. Even Boots got bored, I sat there so long, and eventually he hauled his way out of the room.

I watched him go, scratching up the wooden staircase Dad and I had built.

Out in the garage, wrapped in greaseproof paper in the drawer of an old chest, sat the beeswax blocks we had bought, the day we had hammered in the last nail. We figured it would take about a week to rub all that wax into the raw pine, and give Eva the antique effect that she wanted. From where I was sitting, I could see the shiny pool where my dad had started the job.

'Adam?'

I came to with a start. I hadn't heard her come down. I was lost in memories, she had taken off her shoes, and besides, we'd done too good a job, Dad and I - not a board on that staircase that squeaked. I turned and read the clock over the fridge. It was half past midnight.

She came over, took the bottle from the table and screwed the cap on. 'Where does this one live?'

I nodded at the dresser.

Maybe she figured something really was wrong; maybe she was just too tired to fight. She didn't say anything, just put the bottle back where it belonged, then folded up a couple of jumpers that were drying on chairs near the washing machine. She folded them up and dropped them onto the bottom step, ready to take them up to the bedroom when she was done here.

'Eva?'

But she was miles away, off in Tidy-up Land. Her own drear little vice. There were some cups on the draining board. She checked they were dry, then she put them away. Boots had finished his shit. She put on rubber gloves, washed his bowl under the hot tap and set it to drain.

'For fuck's sake,' I said.

I'd left the rest of my junk mail and empty envelopes on the table. She sorted through them, choosing what to keep, what to throw away.

I nudged my empty cola glass to the edge of the table. Stuck out a forefinger. Tapped the rim.

The glass shattered at my feet.

Eva, who was far too well bred ever to show a hit, crossed smoothly to the stairs, picked up the jumpers and slapped her way back to the bedroom.

I looked at the glass shards, glinting on the terracotta tiles Dad and I had laid. About an hour later I got around to sweeping them up, and a little after that I turned off the lights.

The bedroom curtains were very thin and I could see well enough to undress without waking Eva. The trouble began when I tried to get Boots off the bed. He was stretched out on my side like he owned the place. 'Piss off.' I nudged him. He woke and wagged his tail.

'Shush.'

He growled happily, paddling the bed like a cat.

'Shut up.'

He lay down again, still on my spot. The room stank of him.

'Jesus.'

I left them to it, got the spare duvet out of the airing cupboard and laid it out on the sofa in the living room. In the bathroom, I sucked water from the tap and swallowed a couple of vitamin B. Closing the cabinet door, I caught sight of myself in the mirror.

Recently, faced with my thinning hair, metallic-grey cheeks, and thickening nails, I had begun to feel as though time were shuttling me off indifferently, eager to be done. Tonight I had something else to worry about.

There were red marks round my neck, where Hamley had seized me. An unmistakable pattern. By morning they would be bruises.

I sneaked back into the bedroom. They were both asleep again. Boots was laid up against Eva's arse, whimpering softly. Good on you, I thought. Pity you can't like her when she's awake. I dug out a turtle-neck from the cupboard and took it with me into the living room.

That way, in the morning, Eva wouldn't see the marks.

Her knowing was the last thing I needed.

3.

When Jimmy Yau Sau-Lan died, no one as much as phoned me. That's how far out of the loop I was. That's how unimportant I had become. I had to find out through the newspaper, and that was only by chance.

Several days after his death - when the news of it was quite stale - the South China Morning Post happened to carry a story about the worsening Triad situation in Macau. With pictures. After that, I knew it was only a matter of time before things started falling in on top of me.

What Jimmy Yau was doing in Macau that day no-one seemed to know. But there probably wasn't any mystery in that. It's only a ferry ride away from Victoria Harbour; I used to take day trips there to sample the restaurants.

What is mysterious is how his attacker knew where and when to hide, to catch Jimmy as he drove his hired convertible along the Rua das Lorchas. The grenade fell short, blowing a two-foot-deep hole in the tarmac; it was the shock wave lifted the vehicle over the rail and dumped Jimmy into the Porto Interior. Witnesses said they saw the upturned car plunge in on top of him. The police had divers and dredgers out there all day but they never found his body.

Four days after Hamley's short, sharp visit, Brian and Eddie - Jimmy Yau's sons and heirs - came bounding into the cafe. You could tell they were the men of the family now because Eddie had got himself a sensible haircut.

I was in the kitchen, making sandwiches, when I heard the prang and clatter of the table football machine. We'd really only put it in the cafe for decoration, and it was so near our busiest time, the players must have been treading everyone underfoot as they rushed from handle to handle. I carried in an order of Italian chicken baguettes to the counter. Hannah was spooning froth into the cappuccinos. She placed them one at a time onto a tray. Her hand was shaking.

Then again, her hand was always shaking. People frightened her. The only reason she worked here was her mother arranged it one summer holiday for her and she hadn't the self-confidence to move on. I asked her what was wrong. She nodded at the boys capering about the table. 'Is it all right, Adam?'

I glanced at them, saw who they were, and stretched my mouth into a rictal smile. 'Of course it's all right, Hannah. Can you look after this lot? Table two.' I nudged the tray towards her. Reluctantly, she took it up and headed into the room. She eased uneasily past the brothers. Eddie spun the handles with a flourish and stepped back into her. She dodged out the wayjust about. Eddie grinned. Brian scored.

'Fuck me,' said Eddie, surprised.

'Fuck yourself,' said Brian, his accent thick and catarrhal, and tossed the ball back into the centre. Brian was faster than his little brother, and more patient. Eddie was smarter. He hunted for an advantage. At a crucial moment he tilted the table by the handles. The legs juddered and scored the floor.

Hannah was still handing out plates and cups to table two, bending from the hips in an unconscious, neurotic display of sexuality. The tourists she were serving - they were so amorphously big, they could have modelled for Gary Larsson - took no notice.

Eddie did. He said something to Brian. Brian studied the backs of her knees. Unable to put it off any longer, I went over. 'Fancy a sandwich?' I said. They turned to me.

Eddie smiled for the both of them. Smiling wasn't in Brian's vocabulary.

'Hey,' said Eddie. He came over and slapped my shoulder. He was wearing a blue and red skinny-rib jumper, rolled up to the elbows. I glimpsed the tangle of scars up his arm, the circular burn-marks from fat cigars. No wonder people weren't eating much. 'Adam, man.'

'Hi, Eddie,' I said.

'Mr Wyatt.'

'Hi, Brian.'

Brian was wearing a black shirt and black jeans. His hair was black. So were the pupils of his eyes; it was like he was frozen in a state of dumbfounded astonishment.

'Are we making a noise here, Adam?'

'It's okay, Eddie.'

'We didn't mean to hurt your table,' said Brian - a truculent child making a rote excuse.

'It's had worse.'

'Hey Brian, it's cool, right?' said Eddie. Jimmy Yau had sent Eddie to study in London, and Eddie had picked up most of his English from parties in Hoxton and raves in posh squats off the M25.

'Yeah,' I said, 'it's cool.'

'Cool.' Brian blinked. It was impossible to say how much Brian understood. It never seemed to make any difference to what he did.

There wasn't anything anyone wanted to say after that, so I went back to the counter.

'Is everything all right?' Hannah squinted across the room, like she was trying to tune out the parts of it that worried her.

'I know them, Hannah. It's fine.' I plucked a handful of slips from the hook by the coffee machine. 'Are these fresh orders?' Without waiting for an answer I returned to the kitchen. If they wanted to say something to me, they were going to have to say it. I didn't have time for their Joe Pesci impressions.

It didn't take them long to start fucking the place about again. When Hannah came in to tell me, she gripped the door-jamb like it was the only thing keeping her upright.

'Get him another coffee,' I told her. 'Sponge him off and calm him down.'

'He wants to complain.'

'So let him.'

'To you.'

I followed her out of the kitchen in time to see a blue Mondeo pull away from the kerb.

'Hey, we're sorry, man,' Eddie said.

The other customers looked like the only reason they were still here was Brian had nailed them to their seats.

'It was an accident, Mr Wyatt,' Brian glowered.

'No problem,' I said.

Hannah meanwhile had fetched a cloth, and she began to mop up the table where Brian had backed into it. Then she knelt and ran the cloth over the floor. Brian had a good long look at her arse.

'That's enough,' I said.

Brian looked at me like I was the one with the problem.

Eddie played diplomat.

'Do you have ten minutes?' he said.

We walked down Stoney Street, past the Clink to the river. The sky was clear, and there were pockets of warmth wherever the sun found a way through to ground level.

Eddie said, 'They listened to Hamley yesterday.'

'Was I mentioned?'

'Oh yes.'

He hadn't wasted any time. I said, 'What's going to happen to me?'

Eddie shrugged. 'Frank knows a little bit. It's nothing Top Luck's lawyers can't chip to shit.'

'He said I knew about the money?'

'He said you turned a blind eye to certain things.'

The road led under Cannon Street railway bridge and slewed right, to meet the embankment. The Thames was still black and gelid, like it had bubbled up from an ice cave. A Japanese family were hesitating outside the Anchor, intimidated by the pub's authentic interior: a warren of gloomy snugs.

The pub is set back from the river. 'Trading In The British Tradition', runs the sign above the door; sadly, it doesn't say what it's trading it in for. There's a raised, paved seating area looking over the river, and sometimes on summer evenings I sat out there, watching St Paul's mellow out in the dying light, while around me the Germans and Japanese tucked into 'Good 'Ole Fish & Chips' and 'Dr Boswell's Lamb & Mint Pie'. I picked us a table in the shadow of the rail bridge.

I insisted on going in and buying; that way Eddie wouldn't be there to see me pouring one double into another. A thin stream of Coke filed off the pungency of the rum. While Brian and Eddie's lagers were pouring, I drank off a finger's-worth and added some ice.

'Mum wants your help,' said Eddie, when I got back.

'Oh yes?'

Money. Great name, scary woman. I liked her, as much as you can like someone you don't trust.

'She wants you to come round for dinner.'

'I can't see what use I can be to her,' I said.

'Don't worry about that,' said Eddie. 'Think what use she can be to you.'

I thought about Jimmy Yau's promises to me, and I thought about Macau. I thought about Frank Hamley in Hong Kong, telling tales.

'I'll try and make it,' I said. 'Things are busy right now.'

'She's doing eels and bitter melon,' said Eddie. Like this would tempt me.

I wondered if their sister would be there. 'When?' I said.

'Next Thursday.'

I shook my head.

'You can make time for it,' Brian said.

'It's Justin's birthday,' I told him.

Brian blinked, like, So what? But Eddie was all heart. 'Hey, man, we didn't know. How old is he, anyway?'

We walked back to the cafe. I thought they were just going to get back in their car, but Brian whispered something in his brother's ear, and after a short conference, conducted out of my hearing, they followed me in.

There was a queue waiting to pay stretching almost to the glass partition, and Hannah had given the till a nervous breakdown. Eddie and Brian waited patiently while I sorted her out and helped her get through the line. When the counter was free, Eddie and Brian came and leant there. Eddie with me, Brian with Hannah: he had drills for eyes. Hannah couldn't meet his stare. She turned her back on him and started wiping down the juicer. He watched her backside.

'I'll get mum to suggest another night, then.'

'Sure,' I told Eddie. 'Right.'

'My name is Brian,' said Brian, startling us both. Eddie watched his brother. 'We're in film,' Brian said.

The object of Brian's affections ducked down out of sight and changed the CD in the machine. And changed it again. It was a good machine - a Nabeshima - and it had lots of buttons...

Brian knew when he was being snubbed. He shoved his fists in the pockets of his jeans and tried to act casual.

Eddie sighed. 'Good to see you, Adam,' he said.

'Likewise.'

Eddie led his brother out of the cafe. At the doorway he turned. 'Hey, Adam' He held up something small and shiny. Oblique sunlight cast strange, intagliated shadows over his scarred arm. 'Catch.' He threw it to me. I snatched at it and missed. It ricocheted painfully off my thumb and bounced across the floor. It was the ball from the football table.

Eddie grinned. 'Too much Coca-Cola, mate,' he said.

4.

I was already half-way up Hemingford Road before I remembered that tonight was Eva's dinner party. Angelica Loh and her husband had already arrived, drinking brandy from Eva's best glasses. They I could cope with; they were the least pretentious of Eva's Hong Kong friends. Loh Han-Wah was a patents lawyer with run-down offices in the City. Angelica had resigned from her stylist's job at Elle Decoration to look after their second baby and was well into her second year of domestic contentment. They had left Hong Kong in 1995, eighteen months before we did, and had been good to us when we first arrived. The others, who arrived in dribs and drabs over the following hour, were people I could have lived without - women who spent their lives giving each other dinner parties to help out various fashionable charities.

How they'd rolled up in London I was never too sure; the Handover hadn't triggered the exodus some British newspapers had expected, and most of the colony's smart money had stayed put. Maybe their stockbroker husbands had caught wind of the depression soon to sweep over East Asia. Princesses from mansions overlooking Shek O, they had emigrated en masse to Little Venice and the King's Road, acquiring, after a couple of British winters, the lost and ludicrous aspect of exotic birds shivering their lives away in a municipal zoo.

This evening Eva - ever ready to bind herself to the rack of social disappointment - had invited them over for supper in our tiny, petit-bourgeois kitchen.

While Eva poured brandy in the living room for David Kwok, the art dealer, and Flora Chau and Brenda Lai, Loh Han-Wah followed me downstairs to the kitchen and helped me set the table. His eyes twinkled behind round wire-framed spectacles as we worked. 'What's for dinner Adam?'

'I've no idea,' I admitted, my mind still occupied with the day's disastrous trade at the caf. 'Here, we'll need an extra spoon, apparently.'

'Ah,' he said. He liked me, but my reputation made him uneasy. He always seemed to be about to make some devastating witticism, but he never did.

'Business going well?' I asked. A client of his was contesting rights to a minidisc format. His firm and the suits from Nabeshima had been head-to-head for months.

'I think we're ready to settle.'

'Shall we come down?' This from Eva, peering at us from over the banister.

Loh smiled vaguely at her. His glasses, reflecting the hob light, hid his eyes.

'Sure,' I said.

'Darling, you're always so enterprising,' said David Kwok. Kwok ran an off-Bond Street gallery of antique oriental fabrics, prints, and what the decoration magazines call 'artefacts'. It was all unbelievably nasty stuff. Since shifting operations from Hong Kong's Hollywood Road to London's West End he had begun to fancy himself as a connoisseur, which for him meant adding a nought to everything and screaming abuse at the poor sods at Phillips whenever a piece didn't make its reserve. 'And how long has it been open?' He tented his fingers in front of his mouth, waiting for the response. His hands, smooth and plump as a child's, always unnerved me.

'Eighteen months,' Eva told us. 'The returns are excellent, especially with all the work that's going on in Greenwich.'

The trouble with Eva was, she had to talk everything up. She had to compete. Our cafe wasn't anywhere near Greenwich - the Millennium Dome was two whole bends in the river further east - it was in Southwark. When the new Tate opened at Millbank, then we'd have more trade than we could cope with. But we'd spent the past eighteen months serving sandwiches to road builders, and olives and focaccia to a handful of corporate refugees from Sea Containers House. It was a slow business but a promising one. In fact the reality of it was much more exciting than all her nonsense about the killing we were making but weren't.

But oh no, Eva had to compete. 'It's a bit of fun,' she said, with a casualness any fool could have seen through. 'Just while Adam gets started again.'

I stared at her. Brenda and Flora exchanged glances. Loh fixed me with his speculative smile.

'That's so good,' his wife, Angelica, enthused. She laid her perfectly manicured hand on Eva's wrist. 'It's a great idea.' She was a dreadful Polly-Anna, but she knew how to keep potentially acid evenings like this bright and bubbling; I was grateful.

'Red, anyone?' I said - my own attempt at social lubrication. Very suave. Very urbane. Everyone here knew I'd not be 'starting again' any time soon. How could I, given the cloud surrounding my departure?

Against all evidence, I had given Top Luck a clean bill of health. If now the enquiry did not think I was culpable, it was only because my subsequent performance provided me with a dismal kind of alibi. I spent a lot of time between '92 and '97 on sick leave. Dreadful, shrieking stomach pains, like talons, shredding my insides, had me in and out of clinics for months. The doctors couldn't find anything. And the rum smell in my skin and hair, the long lunch-hour, the tie askew and the three day-old shirt gave personnel more straightforward reasons for my poor results.

'And how are you, Adam?' said Angelica, treating me like an invalid as usual. 'How are we?' I'd half-expected her to say - though I saw her difficulty. The codsup I had made of Hong Kong was hardly for the dinner-table. If it hadn't been for the Handover, I wouldn't have lasted the year. As for another appointment - well, word travels fast in this business.

Easier, then, to make out that I'd suffered a misfortune, a breakdown, ME - something for which I could not be held culpable. 'Oh, keeping busy,' I said, in my best duffer-pottering-about-the-garden manner. 'Eva keeps me in trim.'

David Kwok laughed a dirty laugh. Eva coloured up.

'And you, David,' I said, feeling the heat of the second bottle of merlot rise in my throat. 'Flogged any treasures recently?'

Nobody else missed my tone - Loh's spectacles were flashing like there were LEDs built into the rims - but David Kwok was too fat and too happy with himself ever to notice a hit from me. 'You must come,' he went on, explaining about his latest venture, a fine arts gallery in Dering Street. 'It's next to Anthony D'Offay.'

He had new pieces arriving from mainland China every couple of months. How he got away with it I could never figure. Most of it belonged in a museum, which is probably where it originated. David Kwok was going up in the world. The first time I met him he was churning out fake Alexander McQueen for Stanley Market.

The phone rang. I stood up. David, bless him, decided he still wasn't getting enough attention, and got to the phone before me. 'Wai?'

I took the receiver off him. He winced and shook his hand, like I'd hurt him. As if.

'Adam?'

'Yes.'

'It's Money.'

I swallowed. 'Uh-huh.' I couldn't have been put more off my stride if she'd turned up at the door.

'Did Eddie behave himself today?'

I glanced round at the dining table. Everyone was looking at me. 'Yes,' I said.

'You know how those two are.' She made them sound like a couple of feisty dogs.

'Yes,' I said.

'I forgot it was Justin's birthday, I'm so sorry.'

'That's fine,' I said, as neutrally as I could.

She twigged at last that something was wrong. 'Have I caught you at an awkward moment?'

'We've got some friends round.'

'Who is it?' said Eva.

'It's a woman, Eva,' said David Kwok. As though women were an exotic breed of deer. A well-spoken woman.' He turned to look at me over his shoulder, all coquettish. I half expected him to flutter his eyelashes. 'Very mysterious.'

'Would you like me to call back?' said Money.

'No, no. Let me take it upstairs. Stay on the line, yes?'

Eva wanted me to tell her who it was, but David was prancing around like a fairy, distracting us all. 'So sorry,' he was saying, 'I hear a bell, I answer itjust like Pavlov's dog.'

I ran up to the living room, where Boots was flopped disconsolately on the sofa. He stood up and shook himself, expecting some attention. I ignored him, and took the stairs to the bedroom two at a time. But Boots was too fast for me: as I opened the bedroom door he muscled in past me and jumped onto the bed. I had to tussle with him to get to the phone. I snapped up the aerial. 'Mrs Yau?' I sat down on the edge of the bed and held Boots at bay by his flea collar. He licked my hand.

'Eddie tells me you have a lovely cafe,' Money said.

God knows where that came from. I could hardly imagine Eddie saying, 'Guess what, Mother, Adam Wyatt and his wife run this lovely cafe...'

'Thank you,' I said.

'Look, Adam, I realise you're busy but we really ought to meet up. I haven't seen you since Jimmy... How does next Friday suit you?'

'I'll have to ask Eva,' I said.

'I'm not inviting Eva.'

This was more the woman I remembered; I almost smiled.

'Frankly, I don't think she'd be too delighted to know I was seeing you.'

'Do you have to tell your wife everything?'

I stayed silent - the telephonic equivalent of a shrug.

'I don't suppose for a second you've told her about Frank Hamley.'

Boots leapt on the bed and nuzzled the phone. I clouted him and he fell off the mattress.

'Adam?'

'I'm here.'

'Friday, then,' she said.

'Friday I work at the cafe.'

'Wednesday?'

'I don't think so.'

'You might want to have a read of today's Post before you put me off altogether.'

I swallowed.

'Adam?'

'What's happened?'

'Frank was knocked down by a hit-and-run crossing Queensway.'

I felt as though I were falling.

'He was due to give further evidence. They don't think he'll regain consciousness.'

'What are you saying?'

'The inquiry is going to be looking for a new witness.'

'You know I wouldn't cooperate.'

'I know,' Money said. 'But I'm not the one who ran over Frank's head.'

5.

I got downstairs again to find things warming up pleasantly. Angelica and Loh Han-Wah were holding hands, listening to a funny story of Eva's. David Kwok had drunk himself silent and Brenda and Flora were bullying him into making a liberal gesture for some charity or other. Hardly anyone noticed when I took my seat.

'But you must,' Flora insisted. David blinked. 'It'll bring so many interesting people to your new gallery - '

Loh's laughter drowned out Flora's third-degree. Eva, pleased with her story, leaned over to me. 'Who was it?' she said.

'Some old friends,' I said, off the top of my head.

'Who?'

'Mike and Ylwa,' I said. They were old acquaintances of mine from Hong Kong. Still there, for all I knew.

'Really?' Eva looked like she wanted all sorts of gossip, so I set about clearing the table of empty bottles. 'More wine, anyone?'

Flora and Brenda wanted David Kwok to auction something for a regional opera company they fancied. 'Something small,' Flora suggested. 'Something jade.'

They all left early, off to mansions in Barnes and mill-houses in quaint little villages served by the M4. Eva washed up. I dried.

'Even when you grill it, it just falls apart,' Eva complained. 'Let's not do it again.'

She had cooked a favourite of hers this evening - talapia with a peach salsa. She'd lifted it from a copy of House & Garden.

'It was delicious,' I said, and meant it.

'It looked like we'd scraped it off the grill.'

'Nobody cares about that.'

But Eva cared. Nothing, apparently, had been quite right. 'We should just have plonked a bowl of fruit on the table,' she said, demolishing each stage of her perfectly nice meal in turn.

'You like tirami su.'

'It was too wet,' she said.

I let it go. It wasn't the food was upsetting her, it was the people, and the games they played.

There was a third of a bottle of red still on the table, but I resisted and screwed the cork in.

Eva snapped off her rubber gloves. 'Let's leave this.'

'I'll finish.'

'No. Come to bed.'

I followed her up.

In the bedroom, she took off her earrings and heeled her way out of her shoes. Boots bounded up the stairs. Eva swung the door shut on him and after a couple of minutes whining and scrabbling, he got the message and thumped back down the stairs.

I watched her undress. It had been a long while since we had been this intimate with each other. Her body surprised me. The way it had thickened. Was her period due? I had no idea. She slipped into bed.

I finished undressing and got in beside her. The sheets smelled of dog.

She reached for me. Her hands touched my hands. Fumbling, I took hold of her. She rolled onto her front, moving closer. I laid my hand like a dead thing on her back. The knobs of her spine made a ridged line against my palm.

'Thanks for tonight,' she said.

'I'm sorry I got a bit pissed.'

'Did you?'

I yawned. I couldn't help it.

'What did they have to say?'

'Who?'

'Mike and Ylwa.'

I'd had time, by now, to get my story straight. 'It was a social call,' I said. They're coming to London in about a month.'

'It was nice of them to look us up.' She smiled, the way she used to. 'Don't you think it's nice?'

'Yeah,' I said, resisting another yawn.

She touched my cheek. 'Sleep tight.'

I closed my eyes. Relief flooded me. I couldn't lie to her any more - not tonight.

I lay there a minute, forcing my shoulders to untense. I thought she was going to turn off the light, but nothing happened. I opened my eyes. She was looking at me. 'What are those marks on your neck?'

I rubbed at them, hiding them; I turned the other way. 'Just muck, I suppose. I should have had a shower when I came in.'

She believed me. Because I was a good liar. Because it was easier.

She turned out the light.

6.

Money Yau lived in one of those huge Georgian piles overlooking Blackheath. I had the taxi drop me at the bottom of Eliot Hill, and walked the last half mile from Lewisham. The streetlights fell away at the edge of the scrubland, and the roads that criss-crossed the darkness were barely wide enough for the BMWs and Volvos that frequented them. In place of road markings were lines of fussy white stakes, everywhere chipped and scraped after one too many private parties at the V&A, one too many bottles of rioja at Zinc.

Jimmy Yau bought the place, thinking to retire here come the Hnadover. He never lived to enjoy it. He'd have been the only householder on Wat Tyler Road who didn't belong to the Chelsea Arts Club. What he had seen in the place I had no idea, unless it was an ancestral preference for high ground. I imagined him, in furs and leather helmet, defending his hilltop palisade. It was the only picture I had of him that ever seemed to sum him up.

The gate was open when I arrived. I caught a glimpse of white walls, elegant high windows, honeysuckle - the security light flashed on the moment I stepped on the gravel. I stumbled through a halogen glare and took shelter in the porch. They must have noticed the light go on inside because the front door was already ajar.

'Adam.'

I was still dazzled, and the light from the hall was streaming out past the girl who stood there. All I could see was her silhouette.

'Remember me?' she said. There was an edge to her voice; she had expected more from me than this rabbit-in-the-headlights gawp.

'Zoe,' I said, stupidly.

She was at least as tall as her father. Much taller than Brian and Eddie. I wondered if they envied her that - her physical similarity to their father.

'Come on in.'

'I hoped you'd be here,' I said, stepping past her. Her hair smelled sweet and androgynous - CK One, I told myself, though I knew well enough that startling scent. I watched as she shut the door.

She was wearing a georgette slip dress sheer enough that I could follow her long, too-slender legs past the beaded hem. Her Miu-Miu sandals were so wafer-thin, the straps so wire-tight, they had to be some kind of NASA by-product.

'Mother's in the kitchen still. Would you like a drink?' The pearl studs in her ears picked up and accentuated her eerie, blind-seeming grey eyes. Her teenage gawkiness was gone, but she had filled out hardly at all. Her breasts were tiny, pointed nubs against the grey silk. She looked more than ever like a half-starved Siamese.

I followed her into the living room.

'Do you still drink rum?' she said; she was watching me in the mirror above the drinks cabinet.

'White, if you have it.'

'Bacardi?'

My mate Ron. 'Why not?'

Her eyes didn't leave me once.

I sat down uninvited on the sofa and stared into the fire. 'I noticed there's a film on tonight. One of Brian and Eddie's.' It was one of those gas contraptions, the flames too blue at their heart to be convincing. 'I think I remember it. What's it called?'

'Full Auto Angel,' she said.

'I set my video.'

'I thought you couldn't watch them.'

'Well,' I said.

'There.' She sat on the seat next to mine, sipping from a glass that was clear and ice-filled, like mine. How old was she now? Twenty. Twenty-one. Her arms were smooth and unblemished. I thought about Brian and Eddie. I wondered where her scars were.

'How's Eva?' she said.

'Fine.'

'Eddie said your cafe's nice.' She drew her nails through her hair, drawing it from her ear, showing off her smooth, freshly shaved arm-pit.

I looked away. 'I guess it's what I need right now,' I said, and strained the rum out of the ice. As soon as I swallowed I knew it was a mistake. Everything went rubber: my neck, my gut. I closed my eyes, fighting a sudden nausea. Deep inside, the aliens flexed, multiple elbows drumming at my chest wall as they sucked the clear hot goodness from my intestines.

'And Justin?'

'Justin's well,' I said, when I could.

'Where is he now?'

'A school in Kent.'

I tried breathing, and decided it was good.

'Knox Lodge,' I said. 'It's a special school. New.'

'I missed you at the service.'

'I wasn't invited.'

'Would you have come?'

Jimmy Yau was always getting in the way of Zoe and me. Death itself had not stopped him.

'Dad liked you a lot,' she said. She looked at the fire. She drank her drink. 'Do you miss him?'

I didn't know what to say.

She put her glass down with a thunk on the coffee table. 'Nobody else does,' she said.

'I'm sure that's not true.'

'Mother's angry with him.'

'That's not so unusual - '

'Granddad's lost his mind. Brian and Eddie, well, they wouldn't show feeling if you chopped them into little pieces in front of each other.'

I dared a small smile.

Zoe watched me. As usual, she was hungry for something.

'I miss him,' I said. 'In some ways I'm not sorry about what happened. I took a lot of damage, knowing him.'

'Adam?'

I turned in my seat. Drops of split rum chilled my thigh.

'I hope you set your video.' Money Yau had aged a lot in the two years since we'd last met. The whiteness of her hair I had expected; but not the way her face had sunken in. 'I'm so glad we've done this at last,' she said.

'Money.' I stood up. 'It's good to see you.'

Her eyes, which had always seemed so mild and reticent, alone still held the spark of life. And her voice - that too remained poised and youthful. The overall effect was of a vital and indomitable woman looking and speaking through a grotesque paper mask. 'Come through to the dining room,' she said. 'Everything's set.'

Eddie and Brian were carrying dishes in from the kitchen. Eddie grinned his not-quite-friendly grin and asked me how I was doing. Brian, distracted by my arrival, lost the plot and began orbiting the table, anxiously sniffing the food on each plate. Obviously this meal was something he found profoundly unconvincing - a charade he might yet penetrate, given brains enough and time.

Either Eddie had been having a little joke with me, or Money had changed her mind about serving eels. Crispy duck was followed by red mullet in a hot ginger sauce, a dish of bitter melon, and a salad of cucumber and beansprouts and about half a ton of salt. I'd forgotten how much of a taste I'd acquired for the Hong Kong style: I ate so fast I hardly spoke. Plus, I was trying to soak up Zoe's too-generous glass of rum. My insides were okay but my head still felt like it was bobbing about near the ceiling rose. When I swallowed it lashed about at the end of my rubber umbilical neck.

'It's quite an early one,' Money said/ 'Isn't it, Eddie?'

'Yeah,' said Eddie, poking experimentally at his mobile phone.

'My husband did the choreography.'

It had always puzzled me, the simple pride Money took in talking up hher sons' films. As though she didn't know full well where they came from, or what they had involved. I wondered what the commissioning editor at Channel 4 would think - some silk-tie innocent, scoffing posh school dinners in the Union - were he suddenly to be confronted by Eddie's smile, Brian's drowned eyes, their arms, their burned and shredded backs.

I tried to get her to talk about Jimmy, I suppose to show Zoe I cared.

'Privacy came naturally to Jimmy,' Money said. 'It's very hard, now that he's gone, to know what to do for the best.'

'Zoe tells me his father doesn't understand what happened.'

'Zhenshu's senile,' she said, flatly, refusing my easy sympathy. There were other things on her mind.

'Most of these are businesses I've never heard of. I'm beginning to think some of these so-called managers are taking me for a ride.'

I nodded and grunted, my mouth full of rice scented with lotus flowers. I felt awkward, listening to Money's business problems when her children were in the room. Not that Brian or Eddie were paying any attention. Some communication was taking place between them, some wordless, piquant traffic. They seemed to stir and turn their heads and move their hands in unison, as though this unlooked-for and unprecedented screening had triggered old routines in them.

'The tax office sent me another reminder.'

I dragged my attention back to Money. She was still on about her financial worries.

'I know they're going to fine me but it's the interest they charge that frightens me.'

A whole case of rum couldn't have made that evening any more surreal than it already was. Each year organised crime launders about twenty billion US dollars through Hong Kong; not a little of it passed through Jimmy Yau's hands at one time or another. And here was his widow, worrying over her annual tax return.

The first, stylophoned bars of Fr Elise burst from Eddie's jean-jacket. He took out his mobile and thumbed it. 'Hello?'

'Edward, turn that thing off.'

'Seb? Right - '

'Ed - '

'Cool.'

'Edward, we're eating.'

Smoothly, Eddie got up from the table and walked to the window, phone still pressed to his ear. 'Eleven thirty, mate. Yeah. Kickin'. Rice grains fell from the lap of his linen trousers.

Everything was 'cool' with him. 'Big', or, even 'wicked'. Things were 'happening' with him. His laughter was clipped, anxious, and coke-fuelled. Brian, meanwhile, sat watching his younger, smarter brother - the grub who had usurped him - with eyes flat and impenetrable as steel plate.

'It takes me the whole of every morning, just replying to official enquiries about the estate,' Money complained.

I couldn't work out what she wanted from me. She wasn't so naive: her anxiety over such routine matters had to be part of some strategy. But what was she angling for? I gave her the calm-down speech I'd used on tax evasion suspects: your tax man is your friend and your confessor, with good will all can be redeemed, and so on.

Brian meanwhile had turned his attention back on his food. He prised a chopstick into the poached eye of his fish and used it to snap the bony plate over the gill.

'Brian. Stop it.'

Brian stared his mother down.

'So, Adam,' she said, fingers fluttering at her throat. Brian unnerved her - there was too much of his father in that dead stare of his. 'How long can an appeal like that drag on?'

Eddie laughed. 'Yes, mate. Yes. Hell, mate, yes. Hell, yes. YES! Yes mate.'

The skull came to pieces under Brian's chopstick. He mushed the cream inside fish's tiny brain pan.

'Thirty, forty minutes, mate,' said Eddie. 'Yes. Yes.' He thumbed off his mobile. 'Fucker,' he said.

He came back to the table and clapped Brian on the shoulder. Brian stood up and followed his brother out of the room.

Money said nothing, just let them go. Was she intimidated, or just fed up? Her face was too loose and sunken to read.

The front door banged shut.

'Well,' she sighed, 'let's all have a drink.' She said it as though she'd just put two toddlers to bed. Not intimidated, then - and I had the sense that her flighty-and-no-good-with-numbers routine hadn't been meant for me at all, but for them.

7.

She led us back into the living room. 'What'll you have, Adam?'

I'd eaten well, so I risked a whisky and soda. Zoe went to the sideboard and made three.

'I was hoping you could come visit me sometimes,' said Money, 'and help me with all this.'

'It would be worth investing in some professional advice,' I said. Zoe handed me a glass. I sipped. It was practically neat. 'I can't see that I'd be much use.'

Zoe sat on the sofa beside her mother and set down their glasses. The liquid inside them was pale, the soda water fizzing furiously. I sipped again from mine. There was barely a hint of gas. Was Zoe trying to get me drunk?

'Of course,' said Money, 'Zoe does what she can to help.'

Zoe shrugged.

'You know she deferred a year at college? To help me.' Money smiled at her daughter. 'But I was never a good listener, was I?'

Zoe returned her mother's secret smile. Had they had a row? Were they making up?

'Like I said, professional help will be cheaper in the long run.'

'But complicated.'

'How so?'

'Adam,' said Money. 'I want you to do me a favour. I want you to deal with Jimmy's affairs.'

I stared at her.

'Zoe stayed home to help, but I'd sooner she used the year to relax. It's been a difficult time for us all, and she deserves the time for herself.'

'I don't think - '

'I want her to travel, to enjoy herself.'

'Another drink?' Zoe said. I looked at my glass. It was empty.

'Jimmy's affairs weren't always very clear,' Money admitted. 'I don't want her getting into trouble.'

She'd rather I did. Well, I could hardly blame her for that. I wouldn't want my child associated with Jimmy Yau's 'unclear' affairs, either.

'What about Eddie?' I said, angling for an easy out.

Money snorted. 'I need help, not stunts.' Her contempt for her son was appalling. She had a crudeness that had been bred out of Eva's friends, though they all came from the same stock.

'I'm sure he could do a good job,' I said, 'given the chance.'

Zoe set down my glass. There wasn't the faintest hint of soda in it. She knew my weakness. She wanted her mother to know it, too, for some reason.

Still, it was my out, so I took it; I drained the glass in one. The aliens in my chest spasmed and thrashed. 'I can't help you,' I said. 'For one thing, I've already got a job.'

Money laughed. 'You surely don't mean the cafe.'

'Eva's relying on me,' I said.

For another thing, I was breathing fire into her face. Sweat had broken on my forehead, that had nothing to do with the gas fire. Even I could smell it. Whisky, Wray & Nephew, last night's wine and God knows what else. She really should have taken the hint.

'Would you like another?' said Zoe, reinforcing the obvious point.

'Leave him alone,' Money said.

None of us said very much for a while. We had moved into new territory. Black water. The deep dead sea where deals rise like foam off the tip of an oar - and last about as long. There is nothing so evanescent as organised crime.

'I want you to tidy up Jimmy's affairs,' Money said. 'Turn as much as you can into legitimate interests. Liquidate the rest.'

The enormity of it misfooted me. I struggled not to laugh.

'Is that so unreasonable a request?'

I turned to Zoe. The kid who thought she could show me up with a couple of shots of Glenlivet. 'Is this what you've been up to, Zoe?' It was too absurd. 'Taking apart a triad?'

She sighed. 'We control fifty money-changers in the Hong Kong-Kowloon region. Four money transmitters, a securities broker, two remittance corporations. Dad shut down Miami operations in '95, once FinCEN got wind of our Mexican giro house investments, and converted them to roubles. Thirty billion, all ready to plough into St Petersburg, only the Florence DIA arrested dad's co-investor. He managed to divert about half our moneys into arranging exports of Kazakhstani mercury. The money we get now from the mining companies in Brazil we trade for cocaine in Columbia and change that for Italian gold in Slovakia.'

I stared at her.

'We are not a fucking triad.' She refilled my glass.

I looked at Money. She was serious. I looked at Zoe - her hungry eyes.

They were monsters.

'You want to demolish all that?'

'Top Luck's just the weakest, the first to go,' Money sighed. 'But without Jimmy, everything else will come apart in time.'

Zoe explained. 'When we launder money from Shenzhen, we take eighty percent. The market rate is only sixty, so why do our clients keep coming back to us? Last year we exported a consignment of caesium to Korea, and they insisted on paying us for red mercury. That's triple our expected profit and we - '

'I don't want to know this,' I said.

They tried again.

I stood up. 'I don't want to know.'

We're sitting on a time bomb, Adam - '

'It had nothing to do with me.'

'No,' Money agreed, coldly. 'But Top Luck has.'

Slowly, clumsily, I sat down. My hand was shaking so much, Zoe had to take the glass off me before she could fill it.

Money cocked her head on one side, examining me. 'How did you think you were keeping the enquiry at bay? Personal charm?'

'Jimmy said - '

'Jimmy protected Frank Hamley, too.'

I tried picking up my drink. The rug was old but fuck it, I thought, whisky won't stain it. I wiped my chin.

'I'm the one protecting you now,' Money said. I'm all that's standing between you and the inquiry. For the moment, you're safe. But it's only a matter of time before my bluff is called. Look at Hamley.'

I looked at Zoe instead. She was studying the ice in the bottom of her glass. It had been Money's idea to get me drunk. That's why Zoe was still here. Money was using her daughter to soften me up.

I thought about what would happen if I said yes to them. The work they would have me do. The lies I would have to tell Eva. The double life I would lead. Zoe's thin arms, her blind, hungry doll eyes. The androgynous scent of her skin, like a perfume.

I thought about what would happen if I said no. About Hong Kong, about testifying at the inquiry, about what I would say. I thought about Jimmy's colleagues, clinging to the wreckage of their fractured empire, watching me from the gallery, watching me on TV, reading about me in the papers and on the internet, waiting for the moment when the gweilo starts to squeal.

Or rather, not waiting. What load does it take to crack open a skull? Does the speed of the car make a difference? The pressure in the tyre?

'Which is it to be?' Money said.

I told her no.

Never, but never, make a grand exit. Be quiet, dignified, melt into the background, fade gently away - then if something goes wrong you won't make a prat of yourself.

They rang me a taxi but I didn't want to linger there a moment more than I had to. I said I'd wait outside and get some air before the ride; I said a few other things as well, and I don't think they were sorry to see me go.

They swung the door on me and I headed down the gravel drive between rhododendrons and untidy ornamental firs. It was a clear night, and cold, and the air hit the back of my throat like menthol.

The moon, a fat crescent, lit my way to the gate. A partial eclipse had taken a bite out of its bottom corner; it hung there, precise and asymmetrical, like a carefully turned engine part.

I cast my mind back, trying to recall when I had last seen the stars. A summer night beside the Cam, in my first summer vacation. Sleeping under a net on a small game reserve in Zimbabwe. The night the electricity failed in the resort town of Buzios, during my six-month affair with KPMG Rio...

I'd got as far as the open gates when the security light from Hell came on again to light my way. Even reflected off the gateposts, the glare was unbearable. I winced, shielding my dark-adapted eyes, and tripped on something hard and unyielding.

I threw my hands out to break my fall and crashed like a tree. Something big and sharp razored my palm. I sat up, dragged in a burning breath, and held my hand up to the moonlight. There was a glass shard there, a big one, sticking up out of a rising pool of blood. Black blood filled the basin of my palm and dribbled off.

Shock made me stupid: I pulled the shard out. I must have screamed, but no one came to the door.

I got up and saw what had tripped me. A metal plate: the gates locked into it when they were shut. I catted. Saliva ran down my chin. I wiped it away with my good hand. It smelled of spirits and fish and soy sauce. Blinking against the harsh light, I staggered back to the house.

I rang the bell and waited, studying the wound in the light from the glass-panelled door. Bits of shattered glass were still buried there. I could see them glittering - bright flecks. Or was it bone?

The door opened. 'Adam,' Zoe said, then, 'Jesus.'

'I fell,' I said.

'Let me look,' said Zoe. She took my hand in both of hers.

'Ow.'

'What is that? Glass?'

'Can I come in?'

'Or is it grit?'

'Ow.'

'Come on, then,' she sighed, and led me down the hall.

There were voices coming from the kitchen. Music and screaming. Full Auto Angel through a cheap speaker.

The kitchen wasn't a bit like the rest of the house. The red floor tiles were lifting. The table was topped with sickly yellow Formica.

All I need is a tissue,' I said. 'I'll take the cab to casualty.'

Money was clearing up after our meal. There were garlic skins and fish-guts all over the chopping block.

'Don't be silly,' she said. 'Zoe, get me the first-aid box.'

The TV sat on the top of the fridge.

Brin was tied to a table. A girl in a bikini and RayBans was whipping him with a car aerial. The scene was cut to look like a special effect.

In a moment the door would burst in under a hail of shotgun pellets. Cantonese extras in Versace jeans and blue sweatbands identifying them as members of the secret Order of the Paper Chrysanthemum would steal in like ghosts, silence the girl with a touch, and pass through.

Brian would not appear again until the third reel, posing as a wheelchair-bound cripple. Taken apart and reassembled, the wheelchair would in Brian's hands make a primitive but impressively loud heavy machine gun, in a scene praised by cult film critic Kim Newman for its 'exuberant post-Besson pastiche', and later analysed shot by shot in a long behind-the-scenes exclusive in Fangoria magazine.

Zoe came back in with a Tupperware cake-box and a bottle of medicinal alcohol.

Money dipped the bottle over a cotton swab and cleaned the cut, then used a pair of eyebrow tweezers to pull the bits out. I told her not to probe so deep, to let me go and get the cut seen to properly, but she wasn't listening. I winced and tugged away. She leaned her wrist into mine, pinning my hand against the table, and probed still deeper.

'Fuck! Shit!'

'Oh, grow up,' she muttered, peering myopically into the tear.

Eddie was taunting his pursuers, knocking one after the other off the top of the HSBC building in ever more gymnastic and unlikely ways. It was like watching music. Like jazz. Like the dialogue you get between guitars. Eddie was much fitter then.

She rummaged about in the cake box and came out with paper sachet. She tore it open and withdrew a bright, scythe-shaped needle. Now I was really in trouble. 'I'd rather - '

'Oh Adam,' she said, losing patience with me, 'I do this all the time for the boys.'

The girl in the bikini had revived and was being comforted by her faithful, somewhat boyish female companion.

I thought about Brian and Eddie - their scarred arms.

'The scraps they get into, if I hadn't learned how by now we'd never be out of Casualty.'

'But my palm - '

'Put your hand on the table.'

'Cab's here,' said Zoe, leaning in.

'Tell him we'll be a few minutes.'

'I can - '

'Oh for God's sake Adam keep still.'

I swallowed. 'Is that proper surgical thread?'

'For heaven's sake,' she sighed. She pressed the needle in.

'Christ!'

'What now?'

'You can't just poke it in like that.'

'Why not?'

'Because it hurts, you stupid bitch. It hurts, damn it.'

She blinked at me. 'Brian and Eddie don't carry on like this,' she said.

'Here,' said Zoe, coming in again. She handed me a glass. It was so full the rum dribbled off my fingers.

'What?' she said, meeting my eyes with her hungry, Siamese smile.

'Now. Adam,' said Money, 'hold still.'

Zoe hunkered down beside me and slid her arm round my shoulders. I looked away, at her hand. The long bones of her fingers, her delicate wrist, the blue tracery under her skin. I smelled her again.

Money's needle went in, and out, and in.

8.

The letter came lunchtime the following day, franked Hong Kong, with a government stamp. Eva saw.

'Aren't you going to open it?' she said.

It was thin - a single sheet. A friendly one-liner from a former colleague? A formal summons on ICAC letterhead? Would it make any difference, which it was? I crammed it unopened into the inside pocket of my jacket, drew the jacket off the chair and slipped it on, one-handed. 'Let's get going,' I said.

'You can't drive in that state.' Eva pulled the plug out of the sink and snapped free of her rubber gloves. We'd just eaten a late lunch, and planned to get to Knox Lodge by 4.30. 'Why won't you listen? We'll have an accident.'

'Tell you what,' I said, kicking the kitchen door open. The warped wood grated sickeningly on the stone step. 'You keep rehearsing that idea - see if you can make it happen.'

There was a narrow leaf-sodden path connecting the basement area to the garage. She followed me out in her slippers.

'Adam, I am really not that interested in your fragile ego, I am - '

'I'm driving,' I said. I unlocked the garage door and pulled it up on its rollers with my good hand. I glanced at her, ready for the next round, but she had gone back inside.

The garage was on the same level as the kitchen, which was to say seven foot below the road. The drive was absurdly steep - there were steps set into one side because you couldn't walk the slope without them. In winter sometimes the whole thing became an ice-ramp. When we were visiting Justin once, the AA had to winch us onto the road.

The Xedos needed cleaning - I tried not to rub against it as I sidled towards the driver's door. I took a moment to fuss about with the controls, adjusting wing mirrors and the seat position so I could drive comfortably one-armed. Eva had insisted we buy an automatic and for once I was grateful. I reversed up the steep drive and onto the street. Eva was already waiting on the pavement, arms folded over her Karen Millen suit. I unclipped the door. She started to get in when I remembered Justin's birthday present.

'I thought you had it,' she said.

'Of course I don't,' I said.

'Okay,' she said. 'I'll go and get it. Jesus.' I watched her back to the front door, noticing the stiffness in her shoulders, the mincing steps she took in her new boots. She let the door stand open while she went inside.

All this damage from one sly little visit to Money. I was a nervous wreck. My hand was stiffened and useless. Eva had dressed it that morning and in the light of day the stitches looked frighteningly professional. 'Where did you go?' she asked me. 'Did you have to wait long?'

'Did it hurt?'

'Did they give you any antibiotics?'

Drizzle spattered the windscreen. I thumbed the stick down one notch to turn on the wipers, and stretched the stitches in my palm. I winced.

The pain became a warmth, then, as it eased, a buzzing shape - a thick crescent, with an edge taken out of one corner. It felt as if the shard was still there, and it reminded me of something.

'Adam.'

Eva was back already, struggling with the PlayStation box. She had wrapped it in shiny gold paper. I leaned over and opened the door for her. She clambered in part way and dropped the box over her seat into the rear of the car.

'Careful,' I said, 'it's delicate.'

'Oh Adam, just - '

'What?'

She bit her lip.

I waited till she'd strapped herself in. 'Eva?' I wanted to say I was sorry.

'Can we go now?' she said, tightly.

I put the car into gear. There's a button on the stick you have to press to take it out of reverse, and another bolt of heat shot through my palm. This time I recognised the shape.

'There was a lunar eclipse last night,' I said.

'I wish you'd let me drive.'

'It was very pretty.'

'I'm only trying to be nice,' she said.

We took the A13 to the Dartford Crossing. The M25 was so unnaturally quiet, I even got to play with the cruise control. Since it was clear by then that I wasn't going to run us off the road, Eva cut back on the anxious glances and sharp intakes of breath. She wasn't any more relaxed - but there were different reasons for that.

Knox Lodge lies just outside Staplehurst, about forty minutes off the M20. It started life as a country house, but it's been institutionalised for so long, accreting prefabs and benches and extra toilet blocks, today it resembles any mediocre private school.

Injured pilots were treated here during the second world war; the Ministry of Defence used it as a sort of workhouse-cum-retirement home for fifty aged pen-pushers when they restructured Porton Down; in the Seventies, young offenders went there as an alternative to Borstal. The district health authority rattled about in it until '92.

The rumour was it was going to be Britain's first Higashi school, especially since local authorities were refusing to help out parents paying for their kids to go to the one in Boston.

The principal, Guy Criville, was a convert - he had a photograph of himself with Dr Kitahara on the wall behind his desk - but whatever his professional allegiances, his school hadn't the money to run his mentor's full programme. A lot of people found Criville's pint-sized version pretty disappointing, but Justin had already been through Kitahara's Daily Life Therapy in Tokyo and it was pretty obvious by the end that he simply wasn't up to the full programme.

If you're autistic, the world is meaningless.

Literally. Meaningless. The parts of your brain that give meanings to things don't work properly, or at all. That's why, in extreme cases, you never really acquire language. All you have, at best, is a serious of bird calls - noises that conform roughly to words, which you rote-learn to use in specific situations. Calls for food, calls for the toilet, calls for Give-me-that and for Take-this-away.

Because nothing in the world makes any sense, you can't spot the obvious patterns. Sunset, bedtime; breakfast, bathtime - to you it's just one damn thing after another. You never know what's going to happen next, and of course it's only a tiny step from that to thinking that the next thing that'll happen could be very bad indeed.

The best you can hope for is a little control. A routine you can rehearse, repeat and comprehend. Lunch at 12.05:00pm and not, under any circumstances, 12.06:35pm, because that opens a window for the chaos to get in. A tea of bread and butter cut always into isosceles triangles of exactly the same size, because a square piece once choked you, and you daren't risk it happening again.

And then, just when you think you've got the lid on things - this is where the irony becomes really delicious - there are other people.

We're all born with a message inside our heads: a piece of information so incredible, it has to be coded in our genes - because we'd never work it out on our own. It says to each of us - if you can believe this - that there are other people, like us, waiting to make contact. Think about it: other people. It even tells us what they look like.

If you're autistic, you can't hear the message. Without it, there is only one reasonable conclusion left for you to draw: you are alone. (The animated furniture around you wants you to join in with their unpredictable games - and sometimes you do - but nothing on earth will convince you that that you are one of them.)

It was just before four thirty in the afternoon when three hat-stands entered Justin's room. They stood there a moment, flailing and hooting, and then they started interfering with him.

Justin's favourite carer, Francis, came and led us to his room. School was over for the day and the kids here were left to themselves until tea at 5pm. Justin was bouncing up and down on the bed when we came in. He was very beautiful. Eva's breath caught in her throat.

There was his face, of course, but we were used to that. It's that expression of theirs: calm, untouched, transcendent. If you let yourself, you can end up believing it's not a lack of something but - on the contrary - a surfeit, that makes them act the way they do. Popes have canonised such holy fools; there are saints whose lives read like case studies in pervasive developmental disorder.

These days, no-one's fooled for long. The real world's the only radio show in town: dare to tune out and you're nowhere but gone.

Francis crossed the room and extended his hand. 'Justin,' he said, easily, 'come over here.'

Justin stopped bouncing. His hair, which had grown almost to his shoulders, descended in a fan around him. He shook his head, clearing it out his eyes.

It was his hair made the difference, I decided. A dark halo for a fallen angel. (Parents are entitled to their metaphors, however trite.)

'Justin?'

He turned and looked at Francis with eerie beneficence.

Francis extended his hand. 'Take my hand.'

Justin gripped his forearm.

Gently, Francis brought the hand into his.

'Remember? It's your birthday. Remember the story? Your birthday.'

He didn't remember a thing, so we sat down and read it all through with him again, only this time with Eva there too.

The front of the scrap-book read 'My Birthday Book'. Inside there was a photographic mock-up of the afternoon as we hoped it would go.

There were Polaroid snaps of the PlayStation game, and its modified handset with outsize buttons. There were pictures of Eva and I; a picture of a birthday cake. Beside each picture there was a sticker with a clock-face printed on it. Francis and I had drawn in the hands ourselves with a gold pen, so Justin could rehearse what was going to happen and when.

In Justin's world there was no such thing as a pleasant surprise. The previous year we took him to Camber Sands, but it had never occurred to us to tell him that we were only going out for the day. As far as he knew he was going to be stranded in this sandy wasteland for ever, never to see his home again. He spent the day screaming his head off, unable to tell us why he was so afraid.

Eva, feeling excluded, got up and walked round the room. The walls were painted a muted orange - a warm, restful colour. Justin's latest pictures were blu-tacked above the bed. A tree, a house, and a picture of Francis. You could tell it was Francis because the head was dark brown. The face was a blank: tiny white dots for eyes, another dot for the mouth, no nose. Faces meant nothing to him, and besides, being autistic means you look more at the edges of objects than at their surfaces - the same, they say, is true of cats.

Mobiles hung from the ceiling: planes, clowns, five-pointed stars, and some dough decorations we had brought him last Christmas. The more glittery ones were hung low enough for him to stir with an upraised hand.

Eva rarely visited Justin. It was her fear of him that had put him in residential care in the first place. Now that he was older - now that he wasn't smashing light bulbs or poking his finger in and out of his anus - a more complex feeling was holding her back. Embarrassment, and an uneasy and mistaken idea that, in her absence, Justin and I had formed an exclusive bond.

Justin loved Eva's gold wrapping paper. While I assembled the machine he tore the sheet into confetti and threw handfuls into the air. I plugged the lead into the aerial socket of the TV and left Francis to sort out the tuning. I sat on the floor and gathered the scraps up. Eva came and joined me. Justin held out his hands. Eva poured the rubbish into his palms. He threw it straight away into the air. Eva laughed, shaking it out of her hair.

Francis turned the PlayStation on. Sony's fanfare blasted across the room. Justin stuffed his fingers into his ears and screamed.

'Nice one, Francis.'

'Fuck. Shit.' Francis fumbled with the remote and killed the sound.

Justin rocked back and forward - an old stereotypy.

'Oh dear,' Eva sighed, deflated by the sight. Justin did outgrow things, but so slowly, it was hard sometimes to believe in his progress.

'Hey, Justin,' said Francis, 'show Daddy and Mummy your present?'

Justin blinked at him.

'Your other present?'

He still had his fingers in his ears.

Francis extended his hand. Justin gripped his forearm and stood up. They walked round the far side of the bed together.

'We got another present,' Francis explained, as Justin disappeared under the bed.

'A present?' said Eva. 'From whom?'

'I can't read the card.'

'Your present!' Justin shouted. He turned to Eva. 'Your birthday! Your present!' He waved a thick red plastic cylinder over his head. There were diamond patterns transferred onto the barrel: white and blue and green.

'It came this morning,' said Francis, ushering Justin back into the centre of the room. 'Show mummy your present.'

Justin hoofed the carpet, a temperamental foal. 'I'll get you Jews!'

'Do you want a drink?' said Francis.

'I'll get you Jews!'

'Show mummy your present. I'll get you a juice from the fridge.'

I touched the cylinder in Justin's hand. He whipped it away from me.

'Was there a card?' Eva asked.

Francis had it in his back pocket to show us. He handed it to Eva on his way out to the fridge.

'I'll get you Jews!' Justin chanted, waving the cylinder in the air.

'Soon, Jessie, soon,' I soothed - not that "soon" meant anything to him, any more than the niceties of "you" and "I".

Justin thrust the cylinder at my face. I took it. Justin stood back and watched.

It was a kaleidoscope. I held it up to my eye.

Justin clapped his hands, laughing.

'It's from Money,' said Eva. She crumpled the card in her fist.

I let the kaleidoscope drop from my eye. Justin pushed it back in my face; it cracked against my cheekbone. 'Fuck.'

'There.' She threw the card at me. 'Look.'

I laid the kaleidoscope on the floor and flattened out the card. 'Now you are SEVEN,' it said. I opened it. Underneath the doggerel, Money had written a message in Cantonese. 'What does it say?'

'Oh, it's terribly nice,' Eva spat - but whatever sting hung off the tail of that remark, it was interrupted by Francis's return.

9.

At tea-time Francis led Justin off to eat with the other children. Normally Eva and I would have eaten with Guy Criville and his staff, who made a point of their hospitality towards parents; but Criville was at an NAS conference in Birmingham, and when Justin's language therapist met us in the corridor, Eva was full of excuses about how we'd just eaten.

'We can't just ignore them,' I complained, as she led me across the lawn at the back of the main building. 'Don't you want to hear how he is?'

'Don't you dare play the guilt card with me.'

I made a good show of being exasperated. Six brick stairs led us down to the sports field, and beyond it - where I remembered fields, a couple of years ago - a housing estate. 'What are we doing out here, anyway?'

'You think I don't know what she's like?' Eva snapped. 'you think I don't know what she married into?'

It didn't take a genius to work out what this was all about.

I thought of him, Eva's luckless grandfather, looking out from his frame on our living room wall, flushed by the light flooding in from Magazine Gap.

Come the Japanese occupation, it was said, Eva's granddad worked with Hong Kong's rag-tag resistance, spying for Britain through a cabal of canny pro-Allied fishing concerns. That, anyway, was the excuse the Kempeitei had made for beheading him.

Why Jimmy's father Zhenshu should have been the one to betray Eva's grandfather, no-one could ever tell me. There were no personal or business ties to speak of between them. Eva's granddad owned a fishing fleet; Zhenshu, one of a meagre handful of Chinese lecturers, taught electrical engineering at the University of Hong Kong. But Zhenshu's friendship with the senior officers of the Kempeitei had already made him a notorious figure long before any blood was spilled, and perhaps he was simply their spy.

Whatever - by the time the war was over, the rumour of Zhenshu's treachery was rife enough that living any longer in Hong Kong was clearly impossible. Zhenshu met his wife the day he arrived in Tokyo, penniless and brandishing questionable papers. A wealthy woman by all accounts, she died in childbirth, less than a year after they met. Where her fortune went to wasn't clear, though as I later discovered while looking through his papers, Zhenshu's life was a long and confusing catalogue of legal wranglings and Quixotic projects, and might easily have consumed a dozen such personal fortunes.

Little Jimmy grew up with his father in the Japanese whaling port of Abashiri. He told me about it once. The boats. The smell. His dad, living from hand to mouth, fixing short-wave radios.

Yes, I knew what Money had married into. I also knew, better than most, the price she had paid. 'She's living in a foreign country,' I said, 'and she's just lost her husband. Cut her some slack, love, please.'

'You wouldn't know a threat if it grabbed you by the neck and shook you.'

'Really,' I said, conscious of the faint yellow marks under my chin.

'She knows where Justin lives.'

'So?'

'Adam, think. How could she know that? She's been spying on us.'

'Oh, really...' Money wasn't spying on us. She didn't have to. She knew where Justin was, because I had told her daughter, only the night before. 'She's got no reason at all to threaten us, Eva. None. She's just a lonely old woman.'

We got back to find Justin kneeling on the bed, the kaleidoscope glued to his eye, and Francis hogging the PlayStation.

'Yes, he should be able to manage that,' Francis said, quickly dropping the outsize, brightly-coloured control box. 'Justin? Come here, your daddy wants to show you something.'

Eva, sidelined again, shot him a hurt look.

'Justin,' I said, 'come look at this.'

Justin climbed off the bed.

'Mummy?' I said, 'are you going to see, too?'

Eva sat down cross-legged between me and Francis.

'Justin!'

Justin came over to our friendly triangle, collided with Eva and, unable to distinguish her from the furniture, clambered right over her into the centre.

'Oh. But - Christ,' said Eva, fending off Justin's random, scything movements.

'Are you okay?'

'Oh, it's terribly nice.' It was so close to her intonation - a perfect playback - I thought at first it was Eva had spoken. But it was Justin.

'Justin,' said Francis, 'come here.' He got him sat facing the screen and gave him the control box. Justin turned it over and over under his nose, sniffing it.

When he was done, Francis guided his fingers over the buttons, into the first level of Return of the Jedi. 'No, Justin, move it like this.'

Justin dropped the control box and started flapping his hands.

'Come on, Justin.'

'Oh, it's terribly nice,'

'No. Take it. It's fun.'

'Oh, it's terribly nice.'

Something was disturbing him. The sound from the TV was low enough, it shouldn't be distressing him. Was it the screen - something in the repeat-rate of the frames? Or had the break to his usual schedule unnerved him at last, in spite of all our rehearsals?

Eva tried stroking his hair. He slapped down her hands.

'Such hair,' she cooed, 'why's it so long?'

Francis caught my eye before I forgot and gave the game away. Justin's terror of having his hair cut was a quite usual obsession at his stage of development. The last time the school barber was round his tantrum lasted well into the night. I'd tried a couple of times, but I was expecting trouble, and maybe some of my nervousness had transmitted itself to him. Justin was hypersensitive to other people's anxiety.

Saying nothing, Francis left the room a moment and returned with scissors and a comb. He offered them to Eva.

'Oh - ' Eva crooned. 'But it's such a pity to cut your beautiful hair, isn't it?' Justin flapped at her to be still. I saw how, as she stroked him, the sleeve of her dress was rubbing back and forth across his arm, just below the hem of his T-shirt. Eva's dress wasn't a harsh material, but to Justin - it must feel like sandpaper to him.

'Maybe this isn't the best time,' I said, as lightly and casually as I could manage.

Francis shot me a look to be quiet.

Eva blinked puzzled, from Francis to me. 'What is it?' she said.

'Try cutting his hair,' said Francis.

Eva smiled. 'Okay.'

Francis reached over to hand Eva the scissors.

Justin looked up as they passed overhead.

He threw the control box at the screen.

'Justin!'

He came upright suddenly, as though jerked on the end of a wire, and started prancing and hopping all over Eva's legs.

'Calm down,' Francis urged, trying to steer him away.

Justin gave a yelp of fear and batted Francis's arm out the way. Seeing a gap open up between Eva and Francis, he bolted for freedom and flung himself on his bed.

From the TV came a muffled explosion. Justin wheeled round and looked up at the screen. It was full of flame and spinning wreckage. Justin started banging the back of his head against the headboard. It boomed, rebounding off the wall.

'Justin, stop that,' said Eva.

Justin looked at her, his mouth a perfect O, and screamed.

Eva, brooking no nonsense, went over to him, grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off the bed.

What happened then was so predictable, I could only stand there and watch it happen, as in a bad dream. Eva recoiled, blood streaming from her nose. Justin lashed out again and again. He caught her in the chest, again in the face.

I launched myself at him, snaring him, pinning his arms at his sides. He screamed and bit my hair. I yelped as it tore from my scalp. I squeezed as hard as I could. He kept struggling. I turned us both round and saw Eva with her face buried in her hands, blood streamed between her fingers. 'Oh fuck!' She bent over, her head between her knees, the way she used to when morning sickness hit her unawares.

Justin, exhausted at last, gave himself to my bear hug, and broke into a new fit of more melodic screaming. I squeezed harder. My bad hand was on fire, the moon-shaped cut opening round the stitches, and I could feel blood sticking my hand to Justin's towelling shirt.

Eva took her hands away from her face and stumbled out the room and down the hall. If she wanted the bathroom she was going the wrong way.

Francis, defeated and embarrassed, picked up the scissors and comb from the floor, and started straightening the room. He bent down at the foot of the bed and picked up the kaleidoscope.

He tipped it upright. Shards of brightly coloured plastic fell onto the carpet. 'Shit,' he said.

We must have made a picture, driving back from the school. Eva's nose wouldn't stop bleeding, which meant she couldn't drive. Not unless she wanted to be snorting and spitting blood out the window the whole way: hardly her style. My hand was so stiff and sore, meanwhile, I had to slow to a 10mph crawl and steady the wheel with my forearm whenever I made a sharp turn.

The driveway was a particular challenge.

'For God's sake watch what you're doing,' Eva cried, as the gatepost loomed up out of the darkness towards her window.

I braked hard, to be spiteful. 'Is your nose better?'

'Yes.'

'Then you bloody do it.'

'I will.'

'Oh don't bother,' I grumbled, yanking into Reverse.

'Let me out first,' Eva said.

'I can do this, goddamnit.'

'I just want to go inside.'

I watched her to the door. She let herself in and switched on the hall light. Her round-shouldered, mincing turn as she swung the front door shut reminded me, in a way her words could not, how much damage she was taking.

I put the car into first gear, with the little button they give you for that purpose, and slid the wheel around. This time I got the angle.

I pushed the car into Park, got out and walked round the front of the car, rummaging through my trouser pockets for the garage keys. Standing there, knowing that the Xedos, at the flick of a button, could roll down and emboss me on the garage door, gave me the usual cheap thrill.

I unlocked the door and swung it up on its weights.

The stench of dog shit assaulted me immediately. My first thought was, I must have locked Boots inside. But there was no sound. The door trundled and clanged to a stop. I stood aside, removing my shadow, letting the car's headlamps light up the interior.

It took me a moment to make sense of it.

Boots was nailed to the wall.

10.

They had crucified him St Andrew-style. His legs, splayed and stretched, made a rough X. His chest was impossibly expanded, the two halves stretched apart by the unnatural extension of his forepaws. The skin over the ribs was tight like a drum. The belly, its contents drawn up under the ribcage, was tiny and concave, like the pictures I had seen of starvation victims.

The left eye was tight shut, the eye muscles puckered and creased. The lip on that side was drawn up in a snarl so extreme, it looked as though his cheek had been cut away. Flecks of blood on the teeth sparkled in the headlights.

The top two bolts were driven between the bones of Boots's forelegs, just below the paws. The paws hung limp, at right angles; it looked, comically, as though Boots was waving. Congealed blood hid the bolt heads.

His back legs had been more difficult to fix. The bolts were only part-way into the wall, and the tissue through which they'd been shot was broken and shapeless.

I got back in the car. I shifted into neutral and feathered the brake, edging into the garage. Once I was parked I engaged the handbrake, turned off the headlights, and pressed the lever that unlocked the bonnet. I left the engine idling, so the exhaust would cover the smell.

I had left a crawl-space of a couple of feet between the front bumper and the rear wall, where Boots was fastened. I edged along it and felt under the bonnet for the bonnet release. I got the bonnet up and manoeuvred the rod into place to hold it upright.

I kept a tool chest in the corner of the garage. I emptied it out one-handed and found the tire-iron - absurdly small, it was more like a tin-opener - fishing about in the bottom. I edged back to where Boots was hanging and wedged the iron under the first bolt. But I was one-handed and clumsy and the lip slid off the head. A bone cracked.

The kitchen door grated open.

I dropped the tire iron and came out from behind the bonnet.

Eva poked her head around the garage door. 'Have you seen Boots?' she called, over the purr of the engine.

'No.'

'He's not in the house.'

'He must be,' I said.

'He's not.'

'Well he's not in here.'

She hesitated at the door, all little-girl-lost. 'What are you doing?' She wrinkled her nose. 'Trying to gas yourself?'

'Well don't stand over the exhaust pipe,' I said.

She stepped round the side of the car.

'No.'

'What?'

'The car's filthy, you'll get your dress messed up.'

'What are you doing anyway?'

'I think a spark plug needs replacing.'

'Now?'

'It's okay.'

'How can you see to work?'

'It's okay.'

'What's the matter with the light?'

She reached for the switch.

'I don't need it,' I snapped.

'Oh well break your neck in the dark then,' she said. 'Miserable sod.'

I waited until I heard the kitchen door slam shut.

Boots's leg was shattered, splinters of bone sticking through the skin. I bent the leg away from the wall: it made a wet, clicking sound. If I wasn't careful I'd prise the leg away and leave the paw bolted to the wall.

With my good hand I fixed the tire iron under the bolt again and worked it more gently. It began grinding in its socket. Another minute and the thread disintegrated. After that I managed to jiggle the bolt out by hand. I looked for somewhere to wipe the blood off my fingers. There was an old pair of jeans I used for painting in a bag behind the toolbox. I was just fishing them out when the kitchen door opened again.

'Bootsie?'

I heard Eva scuffing about in the basement area, and a rustling as she pulled aside the undergrowth of overgrown budleia and honeysuckle. 'Oh Boots.'

The other bolts were loose. They'd used too powerful a gun, because the cement had pulverised around the metal. Once that first, difficult bolt was free, Boots was pretty much just hooked there.

I got him down, clumsily enough, trying to keep his blood off my clothes. When he fell his muzzle came open and a black pool ran out of his mouth. I knelt down and felt inside.

His tongue was missing.

The message was pretty much unmistakable. How many more of these, I wondered, before they ran over my head?

I cast around for the tongue in the dark. Maybe it was somewhere in that puddle of brown slurry at my feet. Either that or we were going to find it under the pillow come bedtime. Or floating in the milk carton at breakfast. Or -

The exhaust fumes were making me nauseous so I slid into the driver's seat and turned off the engine. I took the keys with me as I climbed out. I went round the back of the car and opened the boot. I lifted out the plastic liner Eva had laid there to catch crumbs and spillages. Flakes of dried icing dusted my trousers.

I carried the liner round to the front of the car, laid it out and rolled Boots onto it. I wrapped him up and dragged him round to the boot. I needed both hands to get him into the car. I tried not to rub the liner across my stitched palm, got my arms round him at last, and manhandled him into the boot.

'Are you going to help me or not?'

I slammed the boot shut so hard the car bounced.

'He's not in the house,' she said.

'Did we leave a door unlocked?'

'No.'

I put my hands in my pockets in case she saw blood stains. I stood side on to her, and glanced down my shirt front. It was too dark to see anything. 'Then how can he have gone?'

I followed her back into the house along the leaf-sodden path to the kitchen door. In the light from the kitchen window I saw my shirt was clean.

In the house, there was nothing out of place. No sign, beyond the missing dog, that they had been here. I couldn't resist looking under the pillows in the bedroom - God knows what Eva made of that - but there was nothing there.

I wondered how I was going to explain the holes in the garage wall.

I said, 'Did you see him when you went back for the present, this afternoon?'

I left him in the kitchen.'

'Did you see him?'

She thought about it. 'No.'

'But you left the door open when you went back.'

'No I didn't.'

'You did. I saw you.'

'Did I?'

'Yes.'

She thought about it. 'I went upstairs for the PlayStation. It was still in the bedroom.'

'Well,' I said, 'there you are, then.'

'Well wouldn't you have seen him?'

'I don't know,' I said.

She swallowed. 'Oh, Adam...' She reached out to touch my arm. I stepped away, conscious suddenly of the smell sticking to me; something gluey between the second and third fingers of my left hand. I shoved my hands back in my pockets. 'I'd better get moving,' I said, and headed down the stairs to the kitchen.

She followed me down. 'Where are you off to?'

'Well if he's not in the house I'd better go look for him, hadn't I?'

'I'll come with you.'

'Wait in the house. He hasn't been fed - he'll probably be back before I am.'

'Where are you going to go?'

'I'll just drive around a while, see if I can see him.'

It needed two hands to open the kitchen door.

'Adam,' she said, 'wait.'

'What?'

'Your hand's bleeding again.'

'It doesn't matter,' I said. I gave the bottom of the door a kick and it came open.

'Let me drive.'

'For God's sake,' I shouted, 'let me do something.'

Her smile was so gentle, something dropped inside me. 'Thanks,' she said, softly. 'If you're sure.'

I smiled back at her, because it was what she wanted, and went back to the car.

11.

My hand felt like there was a wasps' nest under my skin. It was so swollen, the palm so blackened, I couldn't bear to look at it. I drove one-handed down Hemingford Road, then swung a left and tried heading south, but the traffic was so heavy I lost my temper and turned again too early, losing myself in the mewses and plazas that fill the junction of Liverpool Road and Upper Street. When at last I found a way through, I found myself on Islington Green, heading towards the Angel. I remembered the canal and braked sharply for the left turn down Duncan Street. The driver behind nearly rear-ended me. As he overtook, we wound down our windows and he called me a cunt. 'Leather interior,' I sneered back. It was nice not having Eva in the car.

The Grand Union Canal runs underground through Islington, directly beneath the road I was driving down. At the end of the street, where the tunnel ends, a small copse of mature trees hides the emerging water. I dog-legged right and drove slowly, trying to see into the cutting. There were lights down there - houseboats, moored along the towpath from the mouth of the tunnel all the way down to the next bridge. So that was out. After that the road veered right, away from the water. There wasn't any other traffic just then so I whipped as fast as I could through a four-point turn and drove back the other way, and over the canal. I took the first right turn, hoping this road would follow the line of the water. The Georgian facades moving past me were smart enough but the road might have been a dirt track, the way it felt under my wheels, all patched and pitted, with speed bumps every few yards. I gritted my teeth, kept to a steady 25mph, and tried not to hear Boots thumping about in the back.

I reached the junction, looked right, and there was a pub, the Narrowboat, built on the corner of the bridge and the cutting. So that was out.

I dog-legged left again and then I really lost it: every street I tried turned out to be a dead end until I reached Rheidol Terrace, by which time it felt like I was miles off course. I drove down it anyway until it suddenly opened out, roads leading off every place, and a church rose up ahead of me, and I finally admitted defeat. I turned immediately right, more out of panic than anything else, and found myself in the middle of a council estate. The road disappeared into the darkness, straight and uniform as a scene from an arcade game. Every few yards it narrowed into pedestrian crossings, but the only people I saw were gathered around a phone-box on one of those paved dead spaces the designers call squares.

I should have turned around, but I was mesmerised by the road and the simple shapes of the buildings. There were climbing frames and swings in front of each block; and lawns, if you could call them that. Someone had gone mad on the landscaping: there wasn't a flat foot of grass anywhere.

The darkness ahead of me grew. The estate ended. I couldn't make out what lay beyond. Belatedly, it dawned on me: that unlit strip, where the road finished, could only be the canal.

The kerbs branched off here and there like cilia into parking bays. The ground rose slightly and the road ended at last in a small turning circle. I found an empty bay and parked.

The road, barred to vehicles by metal posts, ended here. But the pavements met and continued over the canal on a concrete footbridge. About eight feet upstream, a square metal duct carried power cables over the water on a separate bridge, topped by a cruel metal railing. The gap between the footbridge and the duct was in shadow: neither the lights from the factory opposite nor the estate's streetlights penetrated that strip of water. I looked around, wondering how easily I would be observed.

The kids were still lingering near the telephone box, lit brutally by the fluorescent light coming from the all-night store on one side of the square: they were too far away to matter.

I opened the boot. The in-built light came on. The plastic was smeared brown in places where Boots had shifted about in his wrapper, but nothing had leaked. I gathered him up, cast around quickly and, unobserved, carried him onto the bridge.

I balanced him on the rail a moment as I tried to get my bad hand out the way, but he tipped off anyway. He plummeted into the water, leaving behind, as his epitaph, the scent of honey.

The wrapper came undone immediately. It unwrapped, a grey, shapeless bloom. Trapped air kept it bobbing on the surface as, caught by the small, sluggish current of the water, it disappeared under the footbridge.

I should have tied him up.

I crossed the bridge and waited for Boots to emerge. The wrapper came first, the old plastic glistening, smeared by streetlights. Then Boots. His legs were sticking up out of the water.

I should have weighted him down.

The left front paw hung at a drunken angle, where I'd broken it with the tire iron. His head was bent back under the water, and the collar looked like a strangler's cord around his neck.

The collar.

I'd forgotten the collar.

All this cloak-and-dagger business and I'd forgotten the one thing that really mattered - the collar had a brass disc clipped to it, and engraved on the disc, the word BOOTS. And our phone number.

I had to remove the collar. I had to get Boots back.

Downstream there was a large play area, landscaped into terraces. A winding path connected the bays - one for swings, one for a Wendy house, one for a frame; others I couldn't make out. There were no lights, and I couldn't see the steps. They were so shallow and needless, I couldn't predict where they'd be. Twice I stumbled.

The fence separating the playground from the towpath was only just above waist-height. There were trees growing near the fence so scaling it wasn't a problem.

Boots wasn't much further downstream than when I'd left him, but he'd moved further into the middle.

I cast round for something - a stick, anything - to pull him into the bank. I tried breaking a branch off a tree. The bark cracked easily enough, but the green wood within tore wetly and wouldn't give. I tried twisting the branch and got a mouthful of leaves. It was too heavy to twist with one hand anyway - in my hurry I'd snapped off about a third of the tree.

The striking of a match brought me back to reality.

There was a boy on the footbridge. He was sitting astride a mountain bike, lighting a cigarette. He took in a lungful of smoke, and blew it over the match. The flame guttered and died. He flicked the dead match idly into the water.

He didn't take his eyes off me once.

I dropped the branch. The leaves, hitting the gravel, made a sound like rain.

The boy tapped ash over the rail.

I walked along the canal towards him. Silhouetted by streetlight, his face was unreadable. I avoided his eyes and kept walking, under the bridge and out the other side. I heard the rhythmic clicking of his back wheel as he rocked back and forth on the bike. As I came out from under the bridge I looked up, nervously, expecting to see him there, but he wasn't. The towpath opened out for a strip of grass and some benches, some trees: the ground was white with blackthorn blossom. I looked back again.

The bridge was empty.

The Narrowboat was barely five minutes' walk upstream. I looked for a way up to street level, but it turned out I didn't need one: the pub had a narrow yard which gave onto the towpath; the door was open and spiral stairs led up to a veranda with a view of Wenlock Basin.

Inside, blackboards offered 'good food', board games, and After Noah playing live on Friday night. I ordered a large Lamb's and used the wallphone by the bar. I lost my only small change straight off because I didn't realise it was one of those phones you pay only when the other party answers. Which meant getting more change from the barman and another double.

I said, 'Is he back yet?'

'No. Where the hell are you?'

'I've been round everywhere. You sure he's not in the garden or something?'

'Adam, I don't understand this. I'm sure he didn't get out while I was upstairs. You'd have seen.'

'Maybe I didn't.'

The jukebox kicked in.

'What's that music?'

'The Champions, I think.'

'What?'

'It had William Gaunt in it. Look, I'm coming home. I can't drive much more with this hand.'

'Is that a jukebox?'

'I'll see you in a few minutes.'

'You're in a pub!'

'Well of course I'm in a bloody pub,' I said, 'It's got a bloody phone, hasn't it?'

She slammed the phone down on me.

I got a third large one, stared down the barman, and looked for somewhere quiet to sit. The back room was carpeted and done out like a barge, with wooden sloping walls and a wooden ceiling. There were old prints of canals on the walls, and a photographic blow-up of a rustic lock-gate on the back wall. Most of the tables were free: a table of students, one of whom thought Merce Cunningham was 'crap'; a middle-aged couple in pebble glasses, nursing their drinks in silence until the woman started describing the pins and needles down the backs of her knees.

I nursed my rum, working up the courage to open that morning's letter. It had been burning a hole in my pocket all day. Finally I got it open.

It was official enough. On ICAC letterhead, no less. They were even offering to pay my air fare. They had a contact number for me to ring in London 'at your earliest convenience'. Underneath there was a PS.

'Call me first - DW.'

Daniel White: typical of him, still keeping things so friendly so long after the event. I missed him.

I screwed the letter up and dropped it in the ash tray.

Which left me with my only other alternative.

I got my wallet out and counted through my small change.

Directory Enquiries had no number listed under Money or Jimmy Yau.

'Try Yau Wai-hing,' I said, and spelled it out, stretching the operator's patience. Yau Wai-hing - Money's Cantonese name.

'Here's your number,' she said.

I let the number repeat, so I had it. I took a deep breath - and I dialled

Hong Kong
1989

12.

When I first arrived in Hong Kong, in March 1989, it was with the idea that I'd be lecturing on management culture or business ethics or some such thing - a junket, basically.

It was a view my boss, Frank Hamley, seemed happy to encourage. He wasn't a policeman - he had no law enforcement background at all - but had joined the Serious Crime Group straight from a stint pen-pushing for Legco. When I arrived, Hamley's unlikely empire consisted of a handful of underpaid, overworked pen-pushers in an annex off the old Serious Crime Group building.

Massive expansion in the Far Eastern exchanges had snapped the old lines of corporate accountability; nobody, inside or out of these vastly distended companies, knew how to maintain effective control of them.

'We're the ones with our fingers in the dike,' Hamley told me proudly, over deep-fried oysters on the terrace of a restaurant in Lau Fau Shan. 'We're the ones at the sharp end,' he added - he had an unhappy knack of mixing his metaphors.

The job excited him. You could see it was a game with him. He didn't have to work. Hamley had money - he was born into it. With that came certain social expectations, which he seemed determined to foil. Still, joining the Serious Crime Group hadn't seemed to spoil his social life any. Had he joined an outfit more obviously targeted at the Establishment - the Independent Commission Against Corruption, say - reactions would have been quite different.

Hamley did a lot of entertaining, those first few weeks of my stay, and he was never slow to show me around. I shook hands with Chris Patten and talked dogs with his wife Lavender. A minor Jardine invited me to Bermuda. At a piano recital in the China Club Hamley, staggeringly drunk, insisted to David Bonavia that I was the man he had to talk to for his latest volume of punditry.

Everyone wanted the novelty of knowing him. Even minor royalty like Victor Pang.

'I met him at Jardine's,' Hamley told me. He had a way of talking about his business contacts as though he'd stumbled across them at a cocktail party. 'Miserable old sod. Mind, his daughter's good for one.'

Victor Pang Ka-Shing was an anomaly. Born in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation, he was brought up by his mother in Shanghai. A fervent and romantic Maoist in his teens, he joined the PLA straight from school, and it was only during the Cultural Revolution that he fled to Hong Kong. A self-made man, he proved himself as much of a workaholic as any of his peers. But he broke the mould early on, using his money to create a private world far away from their influence.

They despised him for that. In the Lusitano Club he had become a 'character', for which crime his wife had never forgiven him. But that wouldn't stop the Lusitano Clubnor his wife, come to thatdriving here tonight and eating his food and drinking his brandy.

While we ate, the sun mellowed into late afternoon over the Chinese mainland. On the shoreline, a hundred metres off, the waves spat and rattled, sculpting dunes from the town's beach of a billion discarded oyster shells.

'So what went wrong in Rio?' Hamley said.

Rio was my last job - a consultancy post with KPMG. I enjoyed the city more than my job, but Hamley's question mystified me. 'Nothing went wrong,' I said, pursuing an oyster round my plate.

I looked up at him. He'd gone back to his food. A drop of sauce ran down his slightly receding chin - he wiped it off with his hand. He leaned back into the late sunlight. Tiny crumbs of golden batter clung to the chest hairs poking luxuriantly out of his open-necked shirt. 'You left pretty suddenly, they said.'

'My contract expired.'

'Our friend Harold said you're an adventurer.'

Harold was my old boss. It was his reference had got me my posting.

'A bit of a buccaneer, he said.' He shovelled rice into his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. 'Only you don't know it yet.'

I pushed my plate away. 'Very Harold,' I said.

'Really?'

'Dramatic. He spends his weekends writing screenplay proposals.'

'I didn't know that,' Hamley admitted.

'They don't sell,' I said.

Essentially, the Serious Crime Group were an anti-Triad office, fielding two hundred detectives - many of them in deep cover - all over the New Territories. They had few establishment connections, and no background in finance. So how had they managed to recruit Hamley, a leading market consultant?

Today, the arrangement seems quite natural, because we're much more used to the idea of crime as an industry. The south-east Asian crash of '97-'98, for example, is directly related to a global criminal recession: between ten and thirty per cent of all Japanese non-performing bank loans are gang debts.

Back in '89, though, the arrangement was unprecedented, and not a little spacy. Somewhere - working undercover in a hong, ransacking secret data cores - an SCG detective (this is what I fantasised) had stumbled across something. A hint of what was to come. I imagined it: a laundering network so big, the markets themselves were at risk!

I ironed my shirts very diligently in those days, and trawled Golden Arcade for the most fuck-off counterfeit RayBans I could find.

'The Rolex too?'

Coyly, I flashed my fifty-dollar timepiece in the sun.

Hamley shook his head. 'I can never keep my focus in those places. The last time I went in for a watch I came out with a Shrap Elsmate calculator and a five-CD set of Anita Mui.'

Before sunset, we drove on. Hamley wrestled the Saab through eddies of traffic bound for Un Long and Sheung Shui. It was turning seven when we turned left onto a gravel road and wound round a hill bright with suburban overspill and night-time construction. Another turn-off took us onto an older road, once metalled, now pitted and rough. The Saab's cultivated suspension wallowed and pinged in distress.

I pulled the shade down against the setting sun. We were driving straight into it now, away from the suburbs of Yuen Long and into a region of market gardens.

The windscreen was tinted, browning out the sunset, and mellowing the raw electric lights of the villages. The road dipped sharply. We rounded a bend, and the sea came back into view. It burned like blood in the dying light.

'A pretty place, don't you think?'

I nodded.

'Make the most of it. Most of our clients have land deals round here. Here and Shenzhen.'

'Pang actually lives around here?'

'Why not?'

'It's a way out of town,' I said. I'd expected an exclusive retreat; I was disappointed.

'He got fed up of Shek O,' Hamley said. 'or maybe he got fed up of his wife. She lives there, anyway, doing the Shek O thing.'

About half way down the hill we joined the queue of big cars pulling into sandy lots along the beach. Flames leapt from iron drums, screwed into the shingle every twenty metres.

Hamley led me up the bank, hands shoved casually in his trouser pockets, and down again towards the party. Old oil drums gave way to bespoke iron braziers, camp fires to barbecues. The coconut matting laid over the beach must have run to a couple of acres. Paper lanterns, swinging in the sea breeze, lit the way from pavilion to pavilion, barbecue to barbecue. Tibetan prayer-flags fluttered against bamboo poles, marking the tide line.

We passed a servant in whites carrying a silver tray. Hamley picked up a couple of glasses and handed me one. I drank, and snorted, as the champagne went up my nose.

'Victor?'

Victor Pang stood sentinel at the head of the path, absurdly formal in a black linen suit and a shirt so flat and shiny it might have been made out of plastic. He had one of those childlike, despotic faces you find leering through the fog in old Sherlock Holmes serials. Hamley introduced me. Pang squeezed the blood from my hand.

Hamley and Pang caught up while Pang greeted the new arrivals. They came from private islands off Lantau, from casinos in Macau and car dealerships in Shenzhen and private galleries in Central. They'd acquired their wives the way you acquire expensive sports cars - l

PAINKILLERS

PROLOGUE

Hong Kong1997

ONE

LondonSpring, 1998

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Hong Kong1989

12.

Hong Kong
1997

London
Spring, 1998

Hong Kong
1989