When he opened them again he was in bed. The sun was streaming in through the window. The professor looked at the alarm clock with disgust, reached an arm out and flicked the small switch on its side. Mornings were the worst part of the day. He got out of bed and remembered suddenly the events of the night before. Ignoring the chaos in his apartment he pulled on his trousers and shirt, took the book from his jacket and headed out of the front door. He had decided the night before that he would visit the University library and research the name Amichi as it related to cartography or Chinese Buddhist temples. He knew he didn’t have much to go on but libraries were his place, they were his territory and he knew he would be safe there, at least.
By the time he got there Lisa was already at one of the tables surrounded by books and opened newspapers. The professor sat down beside her and whispered, ‘How are you getting on?’
Lisa shook her head. ‘Not very well. Not one mention of Amichi in any of these books on Chinese Buddhist temples.’
She pointed to a stack of books a metre high. The professor laughed. ‘Have you left any books for anyone else?’
Lisa continued: ‘There is an Amichi mentioned in this volume by someone called Carter, but it’s far too early, probably two hundred years off, no way would this Amichi be our one.’
The professor sat back and thought a while. He pressed his hands together in a manner that suggested prayer; Lisa thought perhaps he was praying, but for what she did not know. Slowly, he began to speak.
‘What if… what if he is not connected with Buddhist temples at all, what if the book was merely a way of hiding the map? Wouldn’t that make sense, to hide a map inside a book that has little relevance to it? Perhaps the Buddhist temples were just a red herring to take us, and anyone, off the scent.’
‘But uncle, that takes us further away from finding an answer. How do we even start to look for someone called Amichi?’
The professor thought. ‘The girl,’ he said finally. ‘The television said that the girl was from a small island off the mainland. We have to find out which island. Perhaps she was related to this Amichi. Perhaps she is Amichi.’
‘Uncle, how do we even go about finding which of the islands we are looking for? There could be dozens of possibilities.’
The professor smiled. ‘The television also said that they were driving her body back tonight.’
Lisa asked, ‘How does that help us? We can’t follow them. We don’t know where she is or when she might be leaving.’
The professor tapped his forehead. ‘Listen, Lisa, they are driving her back tonight.’
‘Yes, but I still do not see how that helps us, they could drive her anywhere.’
‘To an island?’
Lisa stopped for a moment. ‘If the police are driving her to an island it must have a bridge. Why would they not say, be flying her back, or sailing her back. How many inhabited islands are connected to the mainland via bridge?’
Lisa stood and rushed off to the reference section to see if she could find a detailed map of Hong Kong, while the professor sat back in his chair. The smile on his face gave something of his satisfaction away and the slight tapping of his fingers on the desk suggested the rest.
Lisa came back with an arm full of maps and booklets.
‘There are five main bridges to inhabited islands. There are smaller ones but I guess records there would not be up to date anyhow. There is the Tsing Ma Bridge, of course — we can discount that, the Kap Sui Mun between Ma Wan and Lantau, the Ting Kau that connects the airport with Lantau, the Tsing Yi bridge that connects Tsing Yi and Tsing Chau and, lastly, the Ap Lei Chau bridge.’
The professor looked impressed. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Out of all those only the last leads to a small island off the mainland, Ap Lei Chau. It would be obvious that the police could use the bridge to take her home. There is a large population there and it is an easy place to hide if you wanted to. I am sure, however, that they would keep records of births, deaths and such like.’
‘Shall I get their number?’ Lisa asked.
‘Yes,’ the professor replied.
Lisa returned with the number for the small police station that was housed on the island of Ap Lei Chau. The professor looked at it quizzically. ‘Good job,’ he said. ‘Very good job indeed.’ Outside the city bustled and the air was thick with smoke and exhaust fumes. In amongst the traders that floated by the docks sat a man, thirty-five, one of those people that you find difficult to place. He looked Caucasian, yet there was something distinctly Oriental about him. His face had the easy grace of someone who had once had money but had had to come to terms with losing most of it in needless ways. On his head was perched an American air force cap that jarred with the dirty white shirt that he wore open to the waist. It was early in the morning and already Joe Hutchins had been drinking.
He was finding it hard to sleep these days. It was too noisy for one thing, this big city; there were too many things going on that he wanted to be a part of. Every time he closed his eyes he would think of something and have to get out of bed, but that wasn’t all. There were the visions. He called them visions but they were dreams, really — strange, weird dreams that seemed to come out of nowhere — that had suddenly started to affect him. Dreams of being trapped, of being in the dark, of smoke and flame and of death. He knew the dreams were leading him somewhere but he didn’t know where. So he drank and he drank heavily. It was barely midday and he had already finished a healthy bottle of bourbon, an American drink if ever there was one. Daddy would be proud! He raised the bottle and gave a toast to the brave boys of the American air force of which his father had been part. ‘Here’s to you, Pops,’ he said to no one and swigged another mouthful, gulping it down, trying not to bring it back up again. He was seated at one of the small stalls that grow like mushrooms about the Hong Kong waterfront. In front of him was a bowl of noodles that he had no intention of eating. Every now and then to appease his stomach he would buy a bowl of noodles and stare at it for a while before taking another sip of bourbon and throwing the whole bowl away. His stomach was fooled for a while and he didn’t have to go through the indignity of actually eating anything. There were some who might argue that Joey Hutchins’ life had hit a point of no return. He drank to keep out what was already inside his head but the more he drank the easier it was to sleep and the more he slept the easier life got. His father had been a US airman and his mother a dancer from China, not an unusual combination of nationalities in modern day Hong Kong but it had left him feeling out of place and alien. He was, it seemed, an alien in a land of aliens. He had wanted, of course, to follow in the old man’s footsteps, dear old dad, the brave US pilot, but since the ever increasing paranoia of Americans in the 1980s, neither country wanted to claim him for their own and he ended up working a small Cessna out of Hong Kong delivering packages to the more remote of the islands.
That was until his brush with the local law. It had been a tough time. The increased amount of traffic had slowed the flight paths down to the outer islands and besides he had no idea what was in any of the packages he couriered. He just picked them up and delivered them but, as he also knew, everyone hates the mailman. He should have known, though, he should have seen it coming, he had been in enough bars, enough gambling dens, enough dives to smell the smallest, sweetest smelling rat in the world. Money was tight, though, so he had taken the job.
There were three of them, in big expensive suits, with bulges in their pockets. Each of them wore enough gold to fund a small revolutionary army and had tattoos, in Chinese and English, on their hands, indicating which Chinese gang they were affiliated with. Up until then Joe had made a point of never accepting a job from anyone who smelt of cordite or who had tattoos on a part of their anatomy that couldn’t be covered up by a shirt but, as you already know, money was short.