Shanghai

'Isn't the Chinese government going to ban opium soon?' he asked Jones.

'They keep talking about it, but they'll never do anything.' Jones yawned suddenly. 'Too much money in it. Besides, half of 'em are addicts anyway. All those eunuchs in Peking and so on.'

'I can see how you could easily become one,' Denton meditated aloud, still tinged with the drowsy flush of his intense yet tranquil visions.

'Become a eunuch? So can I. Get a hammer and slosh 'em.'

'An addict.'

'Once a week,' Jones held up his forefinger and wagged it admonishingly. 'Only a week and no more. That's the absolute limit.'

'Have you ever smoked opium, Su-mei?' he asked her the following evening. He raised himself on his elbow to look down at her.

She gazed up at him warily, her eyes opaque. 'Why?'

He shrugged. 'I had some last night.'

'Did you like it?'

He nodded. 'It was....' his Chinese failed him. 'It was strange,' he said at last.

'Opera singers take it,' she murmured, brushing the hair away from her eyes. 'One day I will be an opera singer.'

'Do you know how to make it?'

Her lids dropped slowly, giving her a sly, mocking look. 'You want me to?'

He bent his head down until his lips brushed her nipple. 'Maybe. One day.'

'If you teach me English, I will.'

Her limbs loosened under his touch. She let her fingertips trail lightly along his flanks, down to his thighs.

Her nails brushed across his skin like the claws of a kitten, sharp yet playful.

30

HIS RENEWED FRIENDSHIP with Mason was precarious from the start, and Denton was always uneasy with him, like an actor playing a role that didn't suit him. So he felt almost a sense of relief when it began to cool a few weeks later and resumed what seemed a more natural state of distant neutrality.

Going to Mason's office to give him some documents that the clerk had mistakenly placed on his own desk, Denton found Ching in the room, about to leave. Ching smiled as genially as ever at him, scratching his pale, taut cheek with the long, curved talon of his little fingernail. 'Good afternoon, Mista' Den-tong. How are you do?'

Denton nodded, while Mason smirked connivingly, 'I'll see what I can do then, Mr Ching.'

'Thank you, Mista' May-song. Thank you,' Ching answered affably as he closed the door.

Denton gave Mason the papers.

'Ah, thanks, old chap.' He glanced down at them inattentively. 'Er.... Funny man, old Ching, you know....'

'Yes?'

'He's just been talking to me about that spot of trouble on the Alexander the First - you know, when they were loading that night you came along.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. It cost the company quite a packet, apparently.' Denton shrugged as Mason looked up, drumming his fingers on the papers Denton had just given him.

'Seems to think you might have it in for him.'

'No. Why should I?'

'That's what I told him.' He paused, cleared his throat and glanced away out of the window at the river. 'You know, with your girl and a sniff of opium now and then, I expect you could do with a bit of extra income now and then, couldn't you?' He looked back at Denton, winking and slapping his pocket. 'I mean, you wouldn't turn the odd favour down if someone offered it to you and nobody was any the wiser, would you? Know what I mean?'

Denton hesitated, embarrassed rather than tempted. He'd heard rumours, he'd seen Ching passing an envelope to Mason on their first visit to the Alexander the First, and there had been the hints Ching had dropped to him over that contraband cotton. But this was the first time a Customs officer had approached him. Although there seemed to be a veiled threat behind Mason's words, his tone was so genial and natural that it seemed hard to be curt or indignant. 'Well, I don't know,' he muttered uncomfortably, as if it was he who was the guilty one. 'I mean, I don't really need anything extra, you know.'

'Oh come on,' Mason cajoled him blandly, 'It's not as though we're overpaid, is it? Everyone takes a bit, you know.'

'Well, all the same I don't really want to get mixed up with that kind of thing,' he said apologetically.

'What sort of thing?' Mason chivvied him. 'It's the way of life out of here. You're practically expected to, I mean, in England it'd be a different matter, but out here....' He waved his hand largely. 'Way of life. When in Rome, you know, sort of thing.'

But Denton refused to yield. 'I've got some papers to see to,' he said woodenly, turning to the door.

Mason sighed loudly in helpless resignation. 'Well, there's none so blind as those that won't see, so they say.'

In his own office, Denton tipped his chair back and gazed up at the ceiling with the sense of having avoided an unpleasant social duty rather than a moral catastrophe. It's the way of life out here, he thought, watching two large black flies flitting round and round on the listless air. When in Rome. And yet he wasn't tempted. He wondered why. Just because it was dishonest? But suppose nobody suffered from it, as might often be the case? Would it still be wrong? He felt his mind groping for a certainty that wasn't there. It was queer, unnerving, when you kept on asking why. He couldn't see through the mists these repeated questions rolled over his mind. Yet if he imagined himself being offered an envelope as Mason was, something stiffened in his arm as if to push it away. Was that all it was - just an instinctive recoil? Or merely a reaction he'd been taught as a child, like his religion? But he'd given up his religion easily and painlessly. Could he give up his honesty in the same way? One day he'd have to find the time to study philosophy and ethics, the meaning of life and that sort of thing, to try and find the answers to all these questions. It would be good to get out of all this dim uncertainty into something definite and secure. One day he'd really do that, when he had time.

He let the chair drop forward with a bang and turned to his forms, sighing in the heat.

Mason never mentioned the subject again, but they gradually cooled to each other once more, though at first without any open break. It was merely that Mason never invited him to smoke opium again and they avoided each other in the mess. It was not until some months later that they actually quarrelled, when they were both on duty one breathless June afternoon on adjoining sections of the wharves. Denton was going to his office when Mason called him from the corridor, his heavy face damp with sweat. There were motes of dust sliding through the sunlight that slanted relentlessly in between the slats of the bamboo-blinds.

'I say, John.' His voice was unusually friendly, wheedling almost. 'They've put the Marseilles in berth nine?'

'Yes, there's been an accident on the cranes at ten. They can't work them, apparently.'

'Oh, accident, eh?' Mason brushed the tips of his moustache up thoughtfully, frowning down at the sheaf of manifests in his other hand. 'The thing is, I know some of the chaps on that boat, I was expecting to have a chat with them. Tell you what, I'll do the Marseilles and you do the Wonosobo.' His faced cleared. 'Got the manifest, have your Here's the Wonosobo's.'

Denton looked down at the papers Mason was holding out. 'I think, as it's berthed in my section,' he said slowly, with an almost reluctant dryness, 'perhaps I'd better do it myself.'

'Why?' Mason's face began to darken beneath its shiny glow of sweat. 'Not much to ask, is it? No need to be such a stickler - after all, it would've been in my section, but for this blasted accident anyway, wouldn't it?'

'Yes, but all the same,' Denton persisted, hardening as much against Mason's hectoring as against the corruption he suspected lay behind it. 'All the same, I think I'd better do it, as things stand.'

Mason stepped nearer, bringing his face close to Denton's. 'Now listen here, old man, I've got a special reason to do the Marseilles.' His voice was quiet but unpleasantly tense, his eyes gazing hard at Denton's. 'As I've already told you. I want to have a chat with some of the chaps on board. Got it? They're friends of mine.'

'Friends of Ching too?'

'Ching?' Mason stiffened. 'What are you getting at?'

'Nothing,' Denton stared obstinately down at his papers. 'Couldn't you talk to your friends while I inspect the ship?'

Mason's neck began to swell, and the veins stood out on his forehead. His cheeks became florid. 'You trying to insinuate something, old man?' he asked threateningly.

'No,' Denton's voice was blank and dead. He took a sudden breath, as though he was about to jump from a height.

'Well, then....'

'But as I've been given the Marseilles, I'll just have to inspect it, unless I'm ordered not to. That's all.'

'Oh you will, will you? Well, listen here, Mr Holy Bloody Denton,' Mason was speaking now with loud, angry irony. A passing clerk glanced at him in timid awe and hurried on down the corridor. 'Just you listen here. I don't think you've quite got the hang of things out here yet. I'm your senior in rank, right? You're just a probationary inspector, right? You're not established yet, are you? You could be kicked out quite easily, and don't you forget it. Well, as your senior in rank, I say I'm doing the Marseilles. So I am doing it. And you're doing the Wonosobo. If you don't mind.'

Denton frowned down at his papers, his cheeks flushing.

'My orders - '

'Or if you do mind, for that matter. Now take this bloody manifest.'

'My orders are to inspect all the vessels in my section.' Denton said doggedly.

'Well, I'm giving you another order!'

'You realise I'll have to report this to Mr Brown?'

'Well, go along and report it, then,' Mason said in high, sneering tones. 'Run along and report it then, there's a good boy.' Then, as Denton turned away, 'Only don't forget he's on leave. And don't forget to let me have the Marseilles' manifest first, either. All right?'

Denton went instead to the Superintendent of the Wharves. He was kept waiting outside his office while the clerks covertly eyed him and whispered smilingly to each other as if they knew already what was going on. Denton waited uneasily, licking his lips. How was it that he felt almost guilty for being there? He had to keep reminding himself that it was Mason who had something to answer for, not himself. And yet he still felt uneasy.

Superintendent Smith was burly, irascible and said to be a heavy drinker, which the hectic flush on his face suggested was true. He'd never got far in the service and was bitter about it. He'd been a 'tide-waiter,' and 'outside' man, for most of his career, and the 'inside' men, who could pass examinations, had taken the top jobs and sat in cool offices while he was sent to remote posts from one end of China to the other.

A voice boomed angrily behind the heavy wooden door and a clerk scurried out with anxious, humiliated eyes.

'Now what's all this nonsense about, Denton?' Smith's protuberant, bloodshot eyes stared at him impatiently. 'Mason wants to do the Marseilles. What are you making a fuss about it for? Can't you arrange a swap between yourselves without running to me?'

'It was my section, sir,' Denton began falteringly, on the wrong foot already. 'And I....'

'You what?'

'I didn't see any good reason for changing ships.'

'Good god, is that all?' Smith shook his grey head in mock amazement. His fist rose and thumped the desk in front of him, making the pens and pencils quiver. 'Mason tells me he wants to speak to a friend on the ship. Isn't that a good enough reason? What's wrong with that? A bit of a swap, that's all.'

Denton hesitated, pressing his lips together. He sensed he was about to cross some boundary, although he couldn't have said what exactly it was.

'Well? Don't mind walking a couple of hundred yards to the Wonosobo, do you?' Smith laughed bluffly, his ill-temper apparently draining away at the sight of Denton's abashed hesitation. 'Young feller like you? Bit of exercise'd do you good!'

'Did Mr Mason tell you what he wanted to talk to these friends about?' Denton said at last, plunging suddenly across the unknown boundary.

'What d'you mean?' Smith's thick brows contracted like two stiff grey brushes. 'Talk about? What d'you mean? Are you trying to accuse anyone of improper conduct, Denton?' He jutted his chin forward over the desk grimly, the brief, false heartiness swept from his face. 'You'd better be careful what you're saying, you know. That's a serious matter. Have you got any evidence?'

Denton swallowed. 'I only meant that Mr Mason's reasons didn't seem good enough to me, sir.'

'Oh, they didn't, didn't they? They didn't seem good enough?' He leant back slowly, nodding, his head on one side. 'So they didn't seem good enough to you, Mr Denton, eh? Well, let me tell you something, lad,' he leant forward again, speaking in a growling whisper. 'Let me tell you something. They're good enough for me. And if they're good enough for me,' his voice began to rise slowly, ominously, 'they should bloody well be good enough for you!'

Denton stared rigidly in front of him, at the brass buttons on Smith's uniform. 'You are satisfied with Mr Mason's reasons, then, sir?' he asked stiffly.

'That's just what I've been saying, isn't it, lad? How many times do I have to repeat myself?' He glared at Denton with those bulging, bloodshot blue eyes that seemed to have a film of anger over them. 'And what's more, I don't like young officers getting above themselves and coming in here suggesting all sorts of things about their brother officers, without a shred of evidence! I don't like it at all! Is that clear?'

Denton felt the muscles growing rigid in his cheeks. 'Yes, sir.' After a pause, he heard his voice speaking sarcastically, almost of its own accord. 'Very clear.'

'And don't you cheek me, young feller!' Smith's voice rose to a shout and his eyes bulged dangerously, as if they might pop out. 'Just yes sir, no sir, understand? I don't want any of this suggestive “Very clear” stuff from you. I don't know what you're thinking, lad, but you'll keep you tongue under the lock and key if you know what's good for you! Understand?'

'Will that be all, sir?' Denton heard his voice as if speaking of its own accord again, small but unbending.

'Yes it bloody well will.'

He felt Smith's eyes glowering at his shoulders still as he opened the door and went out.

31

TWO WEEKS LATER, Denton was transferred to a different section of the port, along the French Bund. He was on night duty, and he shared the patrol of the whole sections with Johnson. Johnson seemed oblivious of the change Su-mei's alchemy had worked on Denton, and even of the passing of time; he still treated him like and inexperienced griffin and saw himself as a benevolent paternal advisor, impervious to Denton's distant off-handedness. 'If there's any help you want with those forms, just sing out,' he would offer in his friendly monotonously deadening voice. Or, 'Have you done the manifest for the Camboge? I'll check the duty for you if you like.'

Denton put up with it, only occasionally frowning with irritation and answering curtly when Johnson's mild persistence spoiled his concentration.

One night in July, when the moist heat hung like a still, vaporous curtain and a typhoon warning signal had gone up in the harbour, Johnson's launch broke down. He joined Denton on Lolly Kwai's boat for the journey back to the Customs House. 'Looking forward to your first typhoon?' he asked avuncularly 'We had a really bad one a couple of years ago. There were ships blown right onto the Bund. Not against the Bund,' he went on with his maddening talent for needless exposition. 'Actually on it, on the road itself.' He waited smiling, to see the effect of his revelation on Denton's face.

'Yes, I heard about it,' Denton said carelessly. 'By the way, what happened to those two smugglers we caught last summer?' Maliciously, he emphasised the word 'we' - Johnson had taken all the prize money.

'Didn't I tell you?' Johnson's equanimity was undisturbed. 'They were strangled. I had to go to the Chinese court in Chapei to give evidence. Rather an unpleasant way to die. They do it slowly.' His flat, even sympathy made strangling sound like a mild digestive discomfort. 'I had a wonderful hike round Hankow on the prize money. I suppose you got a bit too, for that cotton on the Alexander the First?'

'Yes. So did Lolly Kwai, of course.' Denton glanced back at the wheelhouse.

'Ah yes. You'll find he's jolly useful,' Johnson said encouragingly, as though Denton had only arrived a day or two before. 'I expect your fiancée will be coming out soon?' Denton hesitated. Johnson must have been the only officer in the mess who didn't know it was all over - who didn't even know about Su-mei. He felt a pitying thought, like the flutter of a bird's wing, stir his mind. Johnson was so isolated that he didn't even know that. He was so boring because nobody talked to him, and nobody talked to him because he was so boring. Behind his dull, perpetually good-natured smile, he lived a solitary life of crowded ostracism. 'No,' Denton said, his voice relenting slightly. 'As a matter of fact it's all over. We've broken it off.'

'Oh, all over, is it?' Johnson nodded, as though the news was unsurprising and unremarkable, like a change of plans for the summer holidays. 'Well, there are plenty of things to do out here of course.' He began to hum a tune in his nasal, toneless voice.

Denton felt his brief, vague ripple of pity had been wasted. He looked away at the lights of the French Settlement, his mind passing from Johnson's indifferent 'plenty of things to do' to the thought of the green-shuttered house of pleasure in rue Molière, which Jacob Ephraim still praised so highly, and then to Pock-mark Chen and Su-mei. She'd been right, she'd had no more trouble with him. Apparently the Green Triangle weren't strong enough to challenge the Red Triangle after all. And his own status had protected her from Pock-mark Chen. She continued to pay the Red Triangle, but she wouldn't tell him how much. When he'd remonstrated with her occasionally in the early days for paying at all, she'd stared at him with a child-like amazement, as though he'd suggested she should walk out into the street without her clothes on. 'They're just extortioners,' he'd said. 'No,' she protested. 'They look after people.' To her it was like paying tax to an unofficial government, one that could protect her in fact from the real one - or so she believed. Yes, that amazement was child-like. Although she could be shrewd and wise about some things, he thought of her, and it flattered him to do so, as a child. She was still only seventeen, Chinese style - he'd bought her a gold hairpin on her birthday - but her parents had sold her in a famine as soon as she'd begun to menstruate and she must have been used by many men since then. Yet she still seemed unspoilt to him, unspoilt and even innocent. Those early times when she'd seemed merely mercenary had soon passed. Now she never asked him for money. He gave her some every week and she took it, in that curious face-saving way that forbade her to thank him; but she never asked for it. Sometimes she bought him little presents with the money he gave her, or that she earned as a sing-song girl, like the seal on which she'd had his name engraved in Chinese characters, and the little ornaments she'd placed about his room. Of course she only sang in restaurants now, she had no other 'protector' as she called him. And she was clever, too - the way she picked up English! Quicker than he'd learnt Chinese in the beginning - though he hadn't had a 'sleeping dictionary' then, of course.

As he idly watched the dim lights of the quays slip past, haloed with misty rings, he noticed something moving near the shore. His glance slid over the vague shape, moved on to a ship, then slid back again. The shape was a string of sampans moving quietly along beside the wharves, with only one weak yellow lamp flickering in the leading boat.

He called softly to Johnson, who was on the starboard side of the bow, cooling his bland, smug face against the breeze the launch itself was making. The air smelt of fish and oil and the heavy sulphurous smell of the Chinese factories in Pootung on the other shore.

'Yes, what is it, old chap?' Johnson asked brightly.

Denton pointed. 'Those sampans look a bit suspicious. Let's go in and look at them.'

Johnson gave the order to Lolly Kwai at once, while Denton was still turning to the wheelhouse. Denton suppressed the twinge of irritation he felt. He watched the sampans moving unconcernedly along in the dark. Either they hadn't noticed the launch, which was unlikely, or else they had nothing to hide. But Johnson was smiling with the faint, complacent air of alertness that was the nearest he came to excitement - he seemed to think there was something in it. 'A little prize money would come in handy,' he murmured, narrowing his eyes. 'I haven't had any since Easter.'

They drew closer. Denton could see now that there were four sampans altogether, with two men in the leading one. One sat in the bow gazing incuriously at the approaching Customs launch; the other was barely rowing at the stern, just stirring the water to guide the little convoy closer to the wharves as it floated down on the current. The sampans were heavily loaded, but the two men's obvious unconcern convinced Denton they must after all be perfectly innocent.

Lolly Kwai hailed them. 'What are you carrying in those sampans?'

'Silk bales.' The one rowing spat into the water.

'Where to?'

The man nodded at a large Fukienese junk moored at a pontoon a couple of hundred yards downstream.

Johnson interrupted Lolly's next question in his own flat, awkward Chinese. 'Where is the silk going?'

'Foochow.'

'Have you paid likin?'

The two men stared at him blankly.

'Likin!' Lolly shouted bullyingly. 'Have you paid likin?'

The bigger one looked at the other questioningly. They both shrugged.

'I'll have a look,' Denton said. But with a 'No, you might fall in and you can't swim,' Johnson had already dropped neatly down onto the sampan, which was almost awash with the weight of its cargo. 'You keep an eye on these chaps, see they don't make a bolt for it.' His smile had become the slightly superior smirk of the schoolmaster who was alive to the pranks of the children and was showing a colleague how to deal with them. But there was an acquisitive sharpness in his eye as well, and Denton guessed he was after the main share of any prize money there might be going. Lolly Kwai must have thought so too; he was muttering something disparagingly under his breath. They leant over the rail, watching Johnson struggling with the corner of an old, frayed sail that had been lashed across the cargo. He turned and gestured to the two men, who were watching him with sullen indifference, to untie the knots. The bigger one moved unwillingly forward and reached for something on the deck. Johnson bent over the rope again. Suddenly the Chinese straightened up and hit him with some sort of club. Denton heard the heavy, smacking thud on the back of Johnson's skull and the soft, almost drowsy, gasp that he immediately gave. His body sagged at once as if it had turned to jelly, and slithered down over the side of the boat into the river. At the same time both men dived over the other side and swam away into the shadow of the nearby wharf.

There were perhaps two seconds of startled silence while they stared at the gently widening ripples where Johnson had slid beneath the water, then Lolly suddenly shouted and two sailors jumped in. They dived, surfaced, shouted, dived and surfaced, again and again. Denton gripped the rail, his arms quivering, staring numbly at the black water where the sailors' heads kept bobbing up, then vanishing. He felt a tingling on his scalp at the back of his head, just where the blow had struck Johnson.

All around him there were shouts, questions, answers. Someone brought a lamp and held it over the water. The light glistened peacefully on the silky surface while the shouts grew less excited and the two sailors in the river spent a little longer breathing gulps of air before each dive. Gradually they all became silent, and the two sailors stopped diving altogether, clinging to the side of the sampans. Lolly Kwai looked at Denton inquiringly, his usually genial face lugubrious.

'Perhaps he swam to the shore?' Denton suggested, unbelieving himself.

Lolly shrugged, then shook his head. There had been something conclusive about the way Johnson had slid down below the surface, as though his body had been weighted with lead. 'It is a long time already,' he muttered.

Denton drew his watch out and examined its large dial under the lamp. Twenty past three. They'd been searching for nearly an hour already. He imagined Johnson floating near the bottom with the same bland smile on his face, only his eyebrows faintly raised in surprise. He closed the watch with a snap and put it away. 'I'll have to report it to the French police,' he said dully. 'Take the sampans in tow.' His limbs had stopped trembling. As the boat got under way again, he stared down at the dark, oily water with the last unreal hope that Johnson might yet suddenly pop up his head and wave to them with his cheerful, self-satisfied grin. But at the same time he felt a tremulous, rising sense of relief. Suppose he had boarded the sampan instead of Johnson?

While he was making a long, detailed statement to a French police officer who chewed his pen in ferocious concentration as he tried to translate Denton's sentences into official French, Lolly got the covers unlashed from the impounded sampans. The cargo was nothing but sacks of sawdust. He shook his head gloomily when he showed them to Denton by the grey cheerlessness of the first light. 'It was a trick. No silk at all. They wanted to get Mr Johnson.' He paused, thrusting out his underlip and scratching his slightly stubbled chin. 'Mr Johnson or you.'

The typhoon came and the harbour emptied as all the ships steamed downriver to ride the storm out in the open sea. But it wasn't a bad one, the winds were no stronger than a gale at home, and there was only the continuous rain that fell steadily for two days and nights from a sky vast with clumsy, tumbling grey clouds. The canals flooded onto the streets and sedan-chair bearers walked waist deep in muddy water; the rickshaw and wheelbarrow coolies couldn't work for a day until the floods subsided. Watching the rain from his window, Denton saw a wheelbarrow go floating down the street at the height of the flood, with an anguished coolie plunging after it.

Then the clouds began to thin, to fall apart and let in gaps of blue. The rain eased, and by the evening of the third day the sky was clear and serene, a pale greenish blue with a faint orange tinge where the sun had set, as though that too had been washed by the rain.

Four days later, Johnson's body floated to the surface, bloated and decomposing. It was picked up by the river police three miles down-stream, against the walls of the Bund. Denton was called to the mortuary to identify the body. The dingy waiting room didn't seem to have changed since the first time he'd gone there with Johnson himself to help identify his informer's body. The same clerk was yawning over the same maroon-coloured ledger, the same attendants were chatting and playing cards at the back of the hall. It almost seemed as though the same mute, hollow-eyed men and women were still waiting on the same bare benches for their missing relatives to be brought in.

A senior police inspector turned towards him with a smile of recognition. 'Hello, Denton, haven't seen you since that dinner at your chief's house. How are you getting on?'

It was Everett, the man who'd shared his cabin on the Orcades coming to Shanghai.

'Just been promoted,' Everett said proudly, glancing down at the shiny new pip on his shoulder. He gave Denton a cloth to hold over his nose. 'I'm afraid the body isn't really cold yet, it still smells.'

Denton gazed at the distorted and rotting corpse. The swollen features retained hardly any trace of that insistently affable smugness that Denton had come to detest. It was not a face he was looking at, Denton thought, but the putrid carcase of a face. Only the short, dark hair seemed the same, as though it hadn't died at all. Looking at the hair alone, still dripping on the ice, you could imagine Johnson had just been in for a swim. Denton pressed the cloth closer to his nose. It had been soaked in some strong disinfectant stuff, but he could still smell the powerful sickly-sweet scent of decaying flesh that he'd first caught in the burial house Wei had shown him last summer. When the attendant turned the head, Denton saw a livid, ulcerous bruise at the base of the skull.

He looked away with a sudden queasy turning of his stomach. 'Yes, that's him,' he muttered. 'That's about where he was hit, too.'

Outside, while the two attendants shuffled indifferently past on sandalled feet, carrying in another corpse, Everett paused for a few 'inquiries,' as he called them with a slightly self-important inflection in his voice. 'I suppose you didn't get a good look at the man who struck him?'

'No, it all happened so quickly. He was quite big, that's all.'

'Would you know either of the two men again?'

Everett was jotting down his replies in a little black notebook, and the official act, the official tone of voice, irritated Denton. He shrugged. 'No, it was pitch dark.' He watched a stone-eyed young Chinese being led into the mortuary by a police corporal.