The Chinaman (7 page)

‘What about?' asked Simpson.

‘Dunno,' said the guard.

‘Do me a favour and ask him, will you?' sighed Simpson. The security guards weren't paid for brain power, just for bulk, but there were times when Simpson wished they were a mite brighter. There was a pause before the guard's laconic voice returned.

‘Says it's about the bombs.'

Simpson felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The IRA bombing campaign had been going on for more than four months and the police seemed to be no nearer catching the bombers. Maybe the punter downstairs held the key, it was amazing the number of times that they came to the paper rather than going straight to the police. Or perhaps it wasn't so surprising – the paper paid handsomely for information. The news editor looked around the newsroom to see who was free and his eyes settled on Woody who was reading the
Daily Star
and picking his teeth with a plastic paper-clip. It had taken Woody weeks of plaintive phone calls before Simpson had allowed him to start shifting again and only after he'd promised not to drink on the job. Not to excess, anyway. Expecting Woody not to drink at all was asking the impossible. And he was a bloody good journalist.

‘Woody!' he yelled.

Woody's head jerked up and he came over immediately, pen and notebook in hand. He was still at the eager-to-please stage. ‘There's a punter downstairs. Something about the bombs. See what he's got, will you?'

Woody nodded and headed for the lift. The man waiting downstairs was Oriental, wearing a blue duffel coat with black toggles, faded jeans and dirty training shoes. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag and was wiping his nose with a grubby handkerchief. He snorted into it and then shoved it into his coat pocket before stretching his arm out to shake hands. Woody pretended not to notice the gesture and herded the old man towards a group of low-backed sofas in the far corner of the reception area. Carrier bags were always a bad sign, he thought, as he watched the man settle into a sofa next to a large, spreading tree with weeping leaves. Punters who arrived at newspaper offices with carrier bags often produced strange things from them. During his twenty years as a journalist Woody had just about seen everything. There were the paranoids who thought they were being followed and who would produce lists of numbers of cars that were pursuing them, or taxis, or descriptions of people who had appeared in their dreams, or lists of MPs who were in fact aliens operating from a base on the far side of the moon. There were the punters who felt they'd had a raw deal from one of the big international companies and had photocopies of correspondence going back ten years to prove it. There were the nutters who claimed to have written Oscar-winning film scripts only to have their ideas stolen by a famous Hollywood director, and they'd open their plastic bags to show their own versions. Sometimes they were written in crayon. Not a good sign.

‘How can I help you?' asked Woody, his heart heavy.

‘My name is Nguyen Ngoc Minh,' the man said, and Woody scribbled in his notebook, just a random motion because he didn't reckon there was going to be a story in this and he didn't want to go through the hassle of asking the guy to spell his name.

The old man thrust his hand into the carrier bag and took out a colour photograph and handed it to Woody. It was a family portrait of the man, an old woman and a pretty young girl. Woody raised his eyebrows inquisitively.

‘My wife,' said Nguyen. ‘My wife and my daughter. They were killed this year.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that,' said Woody, his pen scratching on the notebook. He wasn't using shorthand, he just wanted to be seen to be doing something so that he didn't have to look the man in the eye. The brown eyes were like magnets that threatened to pull him into the old man's soul and several times Woody had found himself having to drag himself back. They were sorrowful eyes, those of a dog that had been kicked many times but which still hoped one day to have its loyalty rewarded.

‘They were killed by IRA bombers in January,' continued Nguyen. He delved into the bag once more and pulled out a sheaf of newspaper cuttings and spread them out on the low table in front of Woody. Among them he saw the
Sunday World
front-page story on the Knightsbridge bombing and the pictures they'd used inside. Strapped along the bottom was a list of the reporters and photographers who'd worked on the story. The intro and a good deal of the copy was Woody's but his name wasn't there, Simpson had insisted that it stay off. Another punishment.

‘I remember,' he said.

‘There have been many bombs since,' said Nguyen, and he pointed to the various cuttings. The judge blown up outside the house of his mistress, the bomb at Bank Tube station, the police van that had been hit in Fulham, the Woolwich football bombing. Good stories, thought Woody. He waited for the old man to continue.

Nguyen told him about the visit by the police, of their promise that the men would be caught. He told him about what he'd later been told at the police station, and by the Anti-Terrorist Branch and finally of his conversation with his MP, Sir John Brownlow. ‘They all tell me the same thing,' he said. ‘They tell me to wait. To let the police do their job.'

Woody nodded, not sure what to say. He'd stopped writing in the notebook and studied the cuttings while the old man talked.

‘I want to do something,' Nguyen said. ‘I want to offer money for the names of the men who did the bombs. A reward.'

Woody looked up. ‘I don't think the newspaper would be prepared to offer a reward,' he said. Too true, he thought. A right bloody can of worms that would open up. It was OK to offer money for the return of a stolen baby, or to pay some amateur model for details of her affair with a trendy businessman or a minor pop star, but he could imagine the response to a request for a reward in the hunt for IRA killers. Put the paper right in the firing line, that would.

Nguyen waved his hands and shook his head.

‘No, no, you not understand,' he said. ‘Reward not from newspaper. From me. I have money.' He picked up the carrier bag by the bottom and tipped the rest of its contents on the table. It was money, bundles and bundles of it, neatly sorted into five-, ten- and twenty-pound notes, each stack held together with thick rubber bands. Woody ran his hands through the pile and picked up one of the bundles and flicked the notes. They looked real enough.

Nguyen read his thoughts. ‘They are real,' he said. ‘There is eleven thousand pounds here. It is all the money I have.'

Woody saw the guard staring at the money open-mouthed and so he began to scoop it back into the plastic bag. The old man helped him.

‘You shouldn't be carrying so much cash around with you,' whispered Woody. ‘Why isn't this in the bank?'

Nguyen shrugged. ‘I not trust bank. Many people have money in bank when Americans leave Vietnam. They would not give money back. They steal. I take care of my own money. This all I have. I want paper to use it as reward. Can do?'

Woody pushed the bag across the table. ‘I'm sorry, no. My paper wouldn't do that sort of thing. And I don't think that any newspaper would.'

The old man looked pained by what he'd been told and Woody felt as if he'd just slapped him across the face. He stood up and waited until Nguyen did the same, the bag of money held tightly in his left hand. He offered the right hand to Woody and this time he took it and shook it. He felt intensely sorry for the old man, sorry for what he'd been through and sorry that there was nothing that could be done for him. He heard himself say: ‘Look, why don't you give me your phone number and if I can think of anything I'll call you?'

Nguyen smiled gratefully and told Woody the number, repeating it slowly and checking as he wrote it down. Woody didn't know why but he had a sudden urge to help the old man, to make some sort of gesture to show that he really did care and wasn't just making polite noises. He wrote down his home number on another sheet of paper and ripped it from the notebook. ‘Take this,' he said. ‘Call me if . . .' He didn't know how to finish the sentence, because he knew there was nothing tangible he could offer. Nguyen bowed his head and thanked Woody and then left. Woody watched him walk down the road, a small man in a duffel coat with eleven thousand pounds in a plastic bag. ‘And I thought I'd seen everything,' he said to himself.

O'Reilly walked up the steps to the main entrance of the police station and turned round so that he could push open the door with his shoulder. He was using both hands to carry a large cardboard box. The box was new and the lettering on it said that it contained a Japanese video recorder. A housewife with a crying child in a pushchair held the door open for him and he smiled boyishly at her.

He took the box over to the enquiries desk and placed it in front of an overweight uniformed constable who looked at him with bored eyes.

‘How can I help you, sir?' the policeman asked unenthusiastically.

‘I found this in my back garden this morning,' said O'Reilly, nodding at the box. ‘It's a video recorder.'

‘You surprise me,' said the policeman. He opened the flaps at the top of the box and looked inside. He saw a black video recorder, still in its polythene wrapping. There was a blank guarantee card and an instruction booklet.

‘You've no idea where it came from?' the officer asked, and O'Reilly shook his head.

‘It looks new,' said O'Reilly. ‘I thought of keeping it but my wife said no, it might belong to someone, and besides, you know, there might be a reward or something. So she said take it to the police, you know, and so here I am.' O'Reilly smiled like an idiot. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, a flat cap and a sheepskin jacket. That was all the disguise he needed because even if they ever connected the delivery of the video recorder with the explosion, all the guy would remember would be the hat and the glasses. People's memories were generally lousy when it came to describing faces, even with the latest computerised photofit systems.

‘Very public-spirited of you, sir,' said the policeman. ‘Now, can you give me your name and address?'

O'Reilly gave him a false name and an address in nearby Battersea and explained again how he'd found the video recorder while the policeman carefully wrote it all down.

‘Right, sir, that's all. We'll be in touch if it isn't claimed,' he said, and O'Reilly thanked him and left. He passed the housewife outside, kneeling by her child and wiping its face with a paper handkerchief. She looked up at him and smiled and he winked at her. ‘Lovely kid,' he said.

The policeman lifted the box, grunting as he did so, and carried it out of the office and down a white-tiled corridor to a windowless storage room. He found a space for it on one of the grey metal shelves, next to a set of fly-fishing tackle and a bundle of umbrellas. The room was full of abandoned or forgotten belongings, all waiting to be taken to one of the city's lost property storage centres. The policeman walked back to the reception desk and forgot all about the video recorder and the man who'd delivered it.

The bomb was similar in design to the one they'd used outside the Knightsbridge department store. The Bombmaker had stripped out most of the workings of the video recorder and replaced it with twenty pounds of Semtex explosive. There were no nuts and bolts in this bomb because the aim was to demolish a building rather than mutilate crowds of people but it used a similar detonator and timer. There were two anti-handling devices, though, just in case it didn't go off for any reason. Any attempt to open the casing would set it off, and it was also primed to explode if it was connected to the mains, just in case any light-fingered copper decided to pop it into his car and take it home. The Bombmaker did not have a very high opinion of the police, be they in Belfast or London.

O'Reilly delivered the bomb at four o'clock and it was set to explode an hour later, just as the shifts were changing at the station. He was back in the Wapping flat well before the timer clicked on and completed the circuit which detonated the bomb in a flash of light. The force of the explosion blew out the front and the back walls of the police station and the two floors above it collapsed down, trapping and killing dozens of men and women in an avalanche of masonry and timber and choking dust.

Woody was reading the morning papers when the telephone rang. As usual he'd started going through the tabloids first, and on the desk in front of him he'd opened the
Sun
and the
Daily Mirror
. Both had used pictures of the aftermath of the police-station bombing. The
Sun
had the better photographs but the
Mirror
had the edge when it came to eye-witness accounts. He reached for
Today
as he answered the phone.

‘Mr Wood?' asked a voice that Woody didn't recognise.

‘Yes?'

‘It is Nguyen Ngoc Minh. I came to your office three days ago.'

‘I remember,' said Woody. The Chinaman. He flicked through
Today
. Same pictures as the
Sun
, more or less. Plus a line drawing of the inside of a booby-trapped bomb, a Blue Peter do-it-yourself guide for amateurs to follow. And here's one I exploded earlier, thought Woody with a wry smile. ‘How can I help you?'

‘You have seen the newspapers today?'

‘The bombing?'

‘These people must be stopped, Mr Wood.' Woody was only half listening to the man, he had a sickening feeling that he knew where the conversation was heading. Would the paper offer the reward? Would the paper put pressure on the police? The army? The Government? Woody didn't want to be rude to the old man but he wasn't prepared to be used as the paper's agony aunt. Not on a freelance's pay, anyway. He thought of giving The Chinaman the phone number for
Today
. He began turning the pages looking for the number.