‘She doesn’t need it any more. Won’t even know it’s gone, Daddy!’ Sammy had protested.
And that’s what had hurt, scraped open wounds that had never properly healed. Of course she was right. He had bought Elinor the locket to celebrate their wedding anniversary, a lifetime ago when Sammy had been almost twelve and her brother Stevie almost fourteen. Sammy had helped him choose it, had wrapped it for him and admired it from first sight with such an intensity that her mother had promised that, one day, it would be hers. None of them had understood how quickly that day might come.
So he had said no, refused her, not yet willing to let go. Sammy had shouted and argued that it was what her mother would have wanted, and then it was his turn to raise his voice and demand to know how the hell she knew what her mother wanted. They used their anger as shields. Hurting each other, because they were family. Goodfellowes. Sammy had returned to school on Sunday, early and in silence, leaving him to feel as though he had been stranded on an ice floe. That’s what he liked about his rented apartment in Chinatown, not just that it was small and cheap and close to Westminster and because the streets offered impulse and inspiration to rouse the dullest of wits, but even more because you could never be alone in Chinatown, not in the way you could on an ice floe.
The next few moments were to amount to a minute and a half of intense and potentially dangerous confusion. He was preoccupied by lingering thoughts of Sammy, and distracted by the small band of buskers playing jazz on the steps of the Garrick in the half-hour before the theatre doors opened. His new shoes were rubbing raw, which didn’t help when you were about to launch yourself upon Trafalgar Square in the teeth of the rush hour. And if he had to carry his mobile phone along with copies of Hansard and a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet in the battered wicker basket on his handlebars, he really should have switched the damned thing off. But it started to burble just as he passed South Africa House, just as the traffic lights changed, just as dusk began to muster her forces and take control of the sky – and just as a retired actuary from Margate, jaw defiant beneath uncompromising NHS horn-rims, and driving his treasured Vauxhall in town for the first time in twelve years, came to a complete halt in the middle of the intersection while he attempted to locate the switch for his sidelights. Cabbies shouted, traffic weaved, Chaos Theory took the entire east side of the square in its grip. Butterfly wings had nothing on retired actuaries from Margate. Goodfellowe, caught off guard while scrabbling for his phone, lost control.
The chauffeur in the Rolls-Royce behind had witnessed both the mounting confusion and the changing lights. He had also seen what he thought to be a gap, a window of opportunity, a chance to beat the muddled masses. And his passenger was in a hurry. So he had put his foot down, only to find the leap for freedom suddenly barred by what appeared to be an attempted suicide. His foot slammed from accelerator to brake. Turbo drive to rodeo ride. From the back seat of the wildberry-red Silver Dawn, an exasperated and freshly rumpled passenger bent down to gather up his scattered documents. Then he turned to mouth an unmistakably personalized oath at the cyclist.
Thomas Goodfellowe, tribune of the people and Member of Parliament for Marshwood, had had his first brush with Frederick E Corsa, a man who took pride in representing no one but himself.
At almost the same moment as he was staring into the storm-whipped eyes of Freddy Corsa, another confrontation was taking place which was to have an equally significant effect on Tom Goodfellowe’s life and reputation.
Scarcely more than a moderate stone’s throw from Little Newport Street could be found ‘Zhu’s Apothecary’ – but only if one knew where to look. The entrance stood in a covered alleyway off one of Chinatown’s back streets, and nothing but a small window presented itself to the street. The pseudo-Shanghai lamp-post which had once illuminated the end of the alleyway had been moved – at the insistence of the local feng-shui man and at the considerable expense of the City of Westminster – ten yards farther down the pavement, leaving both alley and apothecary in the grey shadow of evening. All sight of the frugal herbal emporium inside was blocked by display cases packed with the strange wares of the Oriental pharmaceutical trade – weirdly shaped roots, seeds, exotic barks, deer tails, dissected life forms of indeterminate origin, sun-dried sea horses and absurdly twisted ginseng, forces of herbalism that offered restoration and renewal from an extraordinary range of ailments, many of which Western medicine scarcely pretended to understand and some it hadn’t even heard of. Chinese doctors, as Mr Zhu was fond of remarking, had been at it a long time, surgically removing abdominal tumours under anaesthetic while Boadicea was still bathing in pig shit and knee-capping Romans.
‘Westerners strange,’ he reflected in his castrated English. ‘Pay doctors when sick. Chinese punish doctor when sick, pay to keep healthy.’ And so from a hundred different bottles and a score of rosewood drawers he would dispense herbs and potions, weighing out the ingredients in his hand-held scales and wrapping them in twists of brown paper, while above him a bright brass ceiling fan turned slowly, mixing the peppery aromas and pushing them gently around his unpretentious shop.
Mostly his customers were, like Zhu himself, from Hong Kong, with a scattering of regulars from the other Malay, Singapore and Vietnamese Chinese communities which were threaded through the fabric of Chinatown. Western customers were few, and usually ignorant, ripe for picking. Often they had little idea of what they wanted and no idea of what they were getting; they were there to experience the atmosphere rather than the herbal cures, most of which required lengthy boiling and smelled foul. So he would mix ingredients like a short-order chef, a pinch of this and a handful of that, anything which could do little harm and which would smell inoffensive to the squeamish Western nose. Much of the bulk was made up of used tea leaves from his brother’s restaurant in Gerrard Street, which his niece and receptionist, Jya-Yu, dried in the kitchen out back. ‘Every ingredient tested,’ he would promise with a grin, although his teeth protruded and his accent was so bad that few Westerners would understand, happily lost in the performance as his hands moved like a magician’s above the piles of strangely coloured herbs. They would smile, Mr Zhu would smile and give a little bob and bow, and on most days everyone would be happy. But not today.
The previous night had been a long and difficult one for Zhu, locked in a fevered game of pei-gau in the basement room beneath Madame Tang’s cake shop. He had emerged at three a.m. with a savage headache and without a penny of the two thousand pounds he’d had in his pocket at the start of the evening. ‘Fate’, as Jya-Yu had pronounced caustically, trying to put the disaster behind them, but Uncle Zhu was the type of man who always believed in giving Fate a little helping hand. So when the callow corporate-image executive shambled into his shop after an extended lunch, demanding tiger bone as a pick-me-up for his manhood and digging in his suit pocket for a handful of notes, Uncle Zhu was not slow to see the possibilities.
‘Tiger bone not legal,’ he warned, unable to scrape his eyes from the cash.
‘Neither’s not paying your VAT,’ the young man responded gruffly and dug out yet more crumpled notes. ‘Come on. Tiger bone. The real stuff.’
Jya-Yu muttered a warning but Uncle Zhu spat back, his judgement temporarily impaired by poverty and his inability to cure his own headache. ‘Fate,’ he snapped, and proceeded to rummage in a drawer at the bottom of the counter, out of sight of the customer. He reappeared with a twist of silver paper, which he opened with considerable care on the counter to reveal a small spoonful of pale grey-white powder.
‘That all?’ rasped the image executive, swaying slightly. ‘Give me more. Tonight’s a big night.’
Zhu ducked down again and bobbed back up with a second twist. ‘Plenty strong, even for big man like you,’ he chuckled. He exposed the additional powder before carefully rewrapping both parcels. He looked deep into the executive’s eyes, which were glazed, focusing in a laboured manner. The breath smelt desiccated, dried by too much red wine. Uncle Zhu decided to add another fifty per cent to the first price he’d thought of.
‘Hundred and fifty.’
Surprisingly, Uncle Zhu’s accent coped with figures far better than any other aspect of the English language and it appeared to be the first part of the transaction the customer even