A Million People, Hadley Read online

  “I just mean I know where the family home is. On the Margalla Road. Beneath the hills. Near the cricket ground. It is a beautiful part of Islamabad. Islamabad is a beautiful city. Parts of it. I don’t really know what I’m saying.”

  “Don’t be nervous. Here, have a drink.”

  She pulled out a quarter bottle of twelve-year-old Bell’s, took a mouthful and offered it to me. I took a swig, realising I was kissing her lips, the inside of her lips even, by proxy. She was looking straight ahead, fidgeting with her fingers.

  “Have you met my husband?” she asked.

  “No, I haven’t. I believe…”

  “What do you believe?”

  “I hear he is very powerful.”

  “Yes. Very strong. What was that song they were singing in the bar?”

  “Which song?”

  “The song they were singing. About a strong man.”

  “Ah, right. That’s an old song. By Rick Astley.”

  “I like it,” she said. “Like my husband.”

  “Rick Astley is like your husband?”

  “The strong man. I like the reference. Do you like it?”

  She had hit a bit of a nerve here. It was a favourite of an ex-girlfriend who had left me for a gangster.

  “I quite like it,” I said. And that slight connection let the words tumble out. “I am not going to write a story about you or tell anyone.”

  She turned and smiled and I saw the dimples. She put her hand on my knee. “Thank you, Bradley.”

  “Hadley.”

  “Thank you, Hadley.” Tears bulged in her eyes now. Either she was playing the politician, or my kindness, or desire to prolong the relationship or, who knows, far down the line, the dim prospect of me getting into her pants had made her really sad.

  “It isn’t in me to let you down,” I added. Total, nonsensical capitulation in front of a good-looking woman. “No one would believe me if I told them anyway.”

  “You can take me back now.”

  But I didn’t want the conversation to be over quite so soon. I shifted in the sand and leant towards her, leaning my head on my elbow. “Marina’s a funny old name for a Pakistani,” I said.

  “Is it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “And any old port in a storm. Any old marina in a storm, more like.”

  “I see,” she said. “You are making a Western play on words at my expense. You have convinced me of your ignorance of Pakistani culture. Take me home.”

  “Please, don’t take offence. I was just trying to break the ice.”

  “Take me to the Mid-Levels. I will show you where. Then I will say goodbye. No, please be waiting.”

  “What?”

  “Thank you for everything, Mister Hadley. I’ve changed my mind. You can go now.”

  “I can go?”

  “Yes, I know my way around these parts. Leave me, please.”

  “But we are at the end of the road here. We are a long way from town. Let me drive you home.”

  “You can walk with me to the village.”

  “What’s in the village?”

  “Come along.”

  Come along? She wasn’t my bloody mother. I followed her nevertheless, watching her bottom flick from side to side in the expensive jeans which narrowed down to high heels. I breathed in a scent of flowers. We passed the mini-golf course and the roundabout and turned into the village down a narrow road next to the Thai restaurant. She was walking about ten feet in front of me, past the spooky house with tiny windows covered in decades of grime on the left and rounded the corner of an abandoned village house that had been boarded up for years. I stopped in my tracks, slightly pissed off at her just marching ahead and taking me for granted. It must have been all of five seconds, ten at the most, before I too turned the corner to see – nothing.

  She had disappeared. She had turned a corner and vanished.

  I looked around me. There was a pink and yellow house battened down for the night. She hadn’t gone in there. I would have heard her if she had. The house on the corner was a traditional, two-storey “siu chuen nguk” village house which had been abandoned and chained up for as long as I could remember. White board on the front door, brown board on the tiny windows with pretty, rotting, blue wooden frames. Rust dripped off the locks on to utility bills and posters of varying age and repair plastered across the walls. Don’t do this, don’t do that. “Ground under repair.” “Danger.” “Planning permission under consideration.” “Ice for sale (opposite Thai restaurant).”

  “Marina?” I called softly, but not softly enough to stop a dog from barking in reply. The lanes of Shek O are like a model village. Not like a model village in which everything is tidy, mown, manicured and bland and the residents look at you through gaps in the curtains. But a scaled-down model of a village. I was standing within feet of people fast asleep. Where had she gone? I’d heard no car, no voices, no gate opening. No sounds of a struggle. No footsteps. I looked back the way we had come. Someone had told me that the ancient spooky house with the grimy windows was in fact a columbarium, in which the resting place for an urn of ashes cost more in rent per square foot than the most expensive real estate in the world. The cost of dying index.

  It occurred to me once again that I had an enormous story on my hands. A career-changing scoop. Not only had I found the missing bloody prima donna princess, I had gone and lost her again. I walked up the hill beyond where Marina had disappeared and stopped. I looked for big holes she might have fallen into, but there weren’t any. I looked for ditches under the ancient, tiny, gnarled trees, but again, nothing.

  “This is just silly,” I said.

  I wandered back to the beach, strangely not fearing the worst. I took a swig from my hip flask and sat down on the sand where we had been just minutes before. Why had I told her I wouldn’t write a story? What was the matter with me? This was pure gold. I had to be a strong, strong man.

  I rang the office where I knew Fagin, the backbone of the desk, was on the overnight shift.

  “Fagin? It’s Hadley.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Sorry to interrupt your animal porn channel. I happen to be calling in with a terrific story.”

  “A story? It’s almost four in the morning.”

  “We could talk about the time. But I would rather give you some copy. Are you ready?”

  “Is this some sort of wind-up? Have you been drinking?”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I am. But if this is some sort of a wind-up…”

  “Pakistani politician Marina Makhdoom…”

  “Wait, you’re writing a story about Marina Makhdoom?”

  “Pakistani politician Marina Makhdoom…”

  “Hold on. How do you spell her? M. A. C…”

  “M.A.K.H. doom, as in your career prospects. Pakistani politician Marina Makhdoom, whose whereabouts have been subject to mass media speculation in recent weeks, has turned up in Hong Kong and spent Friday night wining and dining at one of Hong Kong’s hottest nightclubs

  “Whoa, laddie. You saw her?”

  “I did.”

  “Totally cool. Where were you?”

  “Rick’s.”

  “Rick’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Hadley, Rick’s is a dive.”

  “Okay. Just say at a Hong Kong nightclub.”

  “And you saw her wining and dining? Who was she with? That sounds posh.”

  Fuck me, the Scottish git was right. “Okay… Pakistani politician Marina Makhdoom, whose whereabouts have been subject to etc etc, has turned up in Hong Kong and spent part of Friday night at a nightclub.”

  “Is ‘whereabouts’ singular or plural?”

  “You mean are ‘whereabouts’ singular or plural.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t fucking care.”

  “Go on.”

  “Second paragraph, nice and brusque: And then she disappeared again.”

  “What?�
��

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Marina Makhdoom turns up and then vanishes?”

  “Well that’s what happened. I was with her, here in Shek O, and then she took off and I don’t know where she went.”

  “Hadley.”

  “What is it?” I took a mouthful from my hip flask.

  “Have you been drinking all night?”

  “Fagin, I wouldn’t lie to you. This is all true. I have these great quotes. But I am quite tired.”

  “Well, can’t we just say she’s turned up in Hong Kong? And forget about the going missing again. Perhaps she just took a corner somewhere and you didn’t see.”

  “That’s exactly what happened. Terrific. You’re right. I also have these great quotes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I wasn’t taking notes, but she said that she hadn’t left her husband, as people have been saying, but that she loves him ‘in perpetuity’.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It’s a legal term. Land law, I think. It means she’s never, ever going to give him up in the words of Rick Astley. She also said ‘any port in a storm’ and that she finds it difficult to navigate.”

  “Hadley.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “Well, great. Here I am, giving you a fucking scoop about one of the most famous women on the planet, and all you can say is you don’t know what the fuck I am on about.”

  “Exactly. You were singing just now.”

  “Well… so where do we go from here?”

  “If it’s a scoop, why don’t you write it up in the morning. Later in the morning, I mean. After due consideration. For instance, I don’t suppose she would have said anything had she known you were a journalist.”

  “I told her I was a journalist!”

  “So she said all that was on the record? Any port in a storm, all that?”

  “Well not exactly.”

  “I rest my case.”

  The bastard was right. I would sleep. Then I would try to find her. Then I would write my story. I lay back, closed my eyes and thought about drinking from her bottle.

  I WOKE TO THE SOUND of happy people. The beach was filling up fast. So early in the day? I looked at my watch. It was already ten. I was crumpled and drained and my neck hurt and I badly needed a wash. I bought a toothbrush and toothpaste at a convenience store and rinsed myself in the cold shower next to the car park, using a cleanish rag from the car as a towel. I went back into the village and stood at the spot where Marina had vanished. The ancient brick wall of the abandoned house and a chained gate on one side, and impenetrable foliage and a wall on the other.

  A middle-aged gweilo walked past with an unkempt dog.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Have you seen a young Pakistani woman around here?”

  He looked around sheepishly and said: “I am afraid my dog has been in the long grass and will be covered in ticks. Come along, Baxter.”

  So the nutter brigade was out early, then. And this particular nutter had a dog with the same name, and not a common one at that, as my news editor.

  I sat at the Thai restaurant with no walls, overlooking the roundabout, breathing in the scent of sea. There’s nothing pretty about Shek O in the sense of a prim English village. There are tarpaulins, wires, scrappy corrugated tin roofs, tall, tatty hoardings advertising Coke and seafood, and traffic signs and antennae sprouting up everywhere. But the overall impression is that of harmony. I felt a Paul McCartney song coming on and had to put a stop to that straight away. A Chinese workman in his sixties, dressed in white with white flour or plaster on his face and wearing a green cowboy hat, walked past, followed by a black stray dog with white feet, its head held high. Then came another old man on a child’s bicycle with an old-fashioned car horn on the handlebar. He went round the roundabout and back the way he had come, giving me a smile as he passed. Up in the scarred green hills the other side of the beach, a tiny man was jumping up and down and waving his arms. None of my business. I turned to look inside the restaurant to signal for a beer. The owners were sitting round a table chopping vegetables as their children did their homework. A grandmother was bouncing a baby on her lap. I felt totally relaxed. In fact, so relaxed, that I stopped worrying about Marina. My phone rang. An unknown number.

  “Hello?”

  I could hear traffic in the background, but there was no voice. The phone rang off. Then it rang again. I answered but did not say anything. I could hear the traffic noise. Then a man started to sing from a distance. He wasn’t singing “From a Distance”, but was singing from a long way away. It was a loud, echoing sound, starting low and rising. It was the Muslim call to prayer from a crackling loudspeaker.

  “Hello?” I said.

  The phone cracked as if changing hands, and as if it were a really crap phone.

  “Hello?” a man said.

  “Hello.”

  A long pause, and then: “Be my servant.” That’s what it sounded like anyway, in a strange unplaceable accent.

  “Sorry?”

  “Be my servan-ter.” And that was exactly how it sounded. Be my servant with an extra syllable and extra emphasis. And it was sung in a kind of a chant, like the Magnificat or Te Deum, except there was the Muslim call to prayer in the background.

  “I’m sorry this is a really bad line…”

  It was so bad that the man at the other end hung up.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHRUBS NEWS AGENCY has its Asian headquarters on the twenty-third floor of an office overlooking the harbour with the Kowloon hills in the distance and mainland China beyond. I sat at my desk, closed my eyes and tried to relax. I had had a bizarre and personal exchange with one of the most famous women in Asia and every time I thought about it my heart skipped a beat. It was like revisiting a dream. I had told Fagin to keep schtum about it until I had decided what to do. After all, I had told her I wouldn’t write a thing. Why did I do that? She was a spoilt army brat who could twist men round her little finger. I should have been banging out my story right now, telling anyone who approached: “You’re not going to believe this.” But I had promised her I would censor myself. Why? There was zero chance I would ever get to see her again. She would have woken up around two in the afternoon and thought: “Fuck me, that was a lucky escape. Meeting the only journalist on the planet who didn’t know a perfect story when it kicked him in the balls.” Then she would have taken a couple of Alka-Seltzers and gone back to sleep.

  I did know the perfect story, as long as I could get someone to corroborate it. It couldn’t just be me going on about me meeting her. It was a tough one. But I would be a star, even though, recently, I had been thinking of getting off this “general news” beat and writing about the tea market and becoming an expert. Something less fraught, anyway, though I hadn’t quite thought it through. Shrubs wasn’t going to pay me to write solely about tea. But I wanted to do something simpler and more relaxing, to wander slowly around cool plantations in the highlands of India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia asking Tamil girls how they knew when the leaf was ripe to pluck. And then I would sit down to a nice cuppa on the veranda of some plantation with the owner and his smoking-hot wife and talk about aroma. As I said, I hadn’t thought it through.

  “Hadley? You look awful.”

  My dream was broken by my bright and perky news editor, Rodney Baxter, the aroma of whose perky aftershave troubled my stomach as I returned to work on the Monday, starting at the unearthly hour of midday.

  “Thanks, Rodney. Couple of late nights.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Can’t answer that, Rodney.”

  “Well, sorry to have to make you work, now you’re here in the office. Can you give me a few graphs on this?”

  He dropped a print-out on my desk. It was an emailed press release from the Pakistan Consulate. It was a statement about Marina. I read the top – Marina had not gone missing, it said. She w
as visiting a sick relative in Hong Kong. Ah. I had been scooped.

  “I could give it to the Hong Kong bureau, but they don’t know the story as well as you,” Baxter said. “And Islamabad haven’t opened yet.”

  “Sure. Leave it with me.”

  “Also throw in some of the stuff from the papers. Lots of sightings of her in the bars but no solid sources.”

  “Sure. Rodney?”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where were you last night, by the way?”

  “Usual places. Friday night was the long one.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Hadley? I’m sure if you had been on the ball you could have found her at one of your usual places. Maybe you could have bought her a drink. Had a little dance.” Rodney cackled. “But then again, maybe her usual places are different from your usual places.”

  “Definitely.”

  Towards the bottom of the consulate statement it said Marina was expected to contest the next general election and to run for office as the new leader of the Pakistan Popular Party.

  “Leave it with me,” I said.

  Hong Kong had its own bureau, but they were so busy with the democracy protests and financial markets that a lot of their news was handled on the editing desk. This was a pretty boring story, to tell the truth. So she was expected to do all this. That wasn’t news. What was news was that I seemed to know a lot more about what Marina was up to in Hong Kong than the consulate did. But where had she gone? I had a sudden bout of the collywobbles, thinking that maybe, after all, she had been abducted, but I didn’t really believe that. Shek O is home to a pretty eclectic bunch of people, rich and poor, Chinese and white, Pakistani and Thai. She could have slipped into anyone’s home. Maybe a boyfriend’s. That would be it. That’s why she asked to go to the beach.

  “Marina Makhdoom.”

  This was Marcus, who was sitting opposite me with a wet, supercilious smile on his ginger face. He had his feet on the desk and his keyboard on his lap, chewing gum and leering all at the same time. He was handsome in a T.E. Lawrence sort of way and always smelt of incense and dope. He was a dope.

  “What about her?” said Fagin, with a glance in my direction.