Yin Yang Tattoo Page 19

  I stuck my head under the tap and hurriedly combed out the wet curls, sweeping the hair directly back, using an elastic band from my wallet to fix it tight in the shortest of pony tails at the nape of my neck. With collar set high and baseball cap pulled low, the majority of one distinguishing feature nearly disappeared. After a last sceptical glance at the mirror, I picked up my bag and toed open the door.

  Head down and nerves bristling, I hustled along the busy pavement, and almost immediately I spotted a parallel movement, another person’s pace exactly matching my own. Before I could snatch a better look, I slammed into the rear end of a bus queue, knocking an elderly woman to her knees.

  ‘Mian-eyo,’ I said, offering my hand in apology, scared to look sideways in case the other guy was moving in.

  ‘Michin-nom,’ she hissed, waving my hand away. Crazy bastard.

  I apologised again, stepped aside – and chanced the quickest of glimpses at my pursuer who, like me, wore a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. I was running from my own reflection in a shop window.

  Framed by a display of baby clothes, my body language radiated fear and tension. I turned away to face the wide street, which was congested with traffic, packed buses, chauffeur-driven cars and taxis with front seat passengers reading newspapers I wanted to rip from their hands. My own face stared confidently from behind the windows of at least a dozen gridlocked Hyundais and Kias.

  I forced myself to take deep breaths, rolled my shoulders, and raised the skip of my hat. No longer hunched over, no longer with my eyes glued to the ground at my feet like a wanted man, I moved on, desperately trying to emit a carefree confidence that had nothing to do with reality.

  I made it all the way to the ferry terminal without being arrested even once, but I got there with a half hour to kill. Half an hour to stay away from the television that blared from a tall stand in the waiting area, and to steer clear of every shop and stall that sold newspapers, and anyone who might be reading one.

  I ran my gaze around the busy terminal as confidently as possible, drawing slow deep breaths of air thick with sea salt, tobacco smoke, diesel fumes and my own nervous perspiration. Mental checklists of everything I hoped to get done in the next few hours ran in my head like looped video previews. One of my more pressing worries was communications, a concern compounded by my mobile telephone sitting plugged into the charger at home in London.

  Public telephone cards were fine for calling anyone who posed no threat – Naz in London, or Mr Cho in Seoul – but for everyone else, they were not only useless but a liability. Caller ID was common in technology-savvy Korea, so any call I made could be used to trace my location. Purchasing a new mobile was out since I had no idea if a pay-as-you-go service was available and, even if it was, how much ID was required to make the purchase. Now that my face was all over the news there was no way to find out; if it took only five minutes to buy myself a mobile, that was five minutes too long.

  The answer presented itself a few minutes later, a mobile telephone peeking from the side pocket of a hold-all on a bench, its owner, a middle-aged Korean man, dozing, chin on chest. I sat down gently and placed my bag beside his. As I pretented to rummage through the outer pockets of my bag, I quickly palmed the phone – just as he shouted out. Caught red-handed, clutching another man’s property. Except he was talking in his sleep. His chin lowered back to his gently moving chest.

  The terminal’s public toilet was a stinking nightmare, but at least it had a cubicle door that locked. The display on the shiny new Samsung telephone was blank, so I pressed the power button and got the one thing I didn’t want to see. Korean script, surely a request for a security code. I wiped the phone with paper tissue and left it on the cistern.

  My ferry was beginning to board before another chance cropped up. A trio of well-off young females, expensively dressed in new brand-name leisurewear. I watched one of them talk excitedly into a mobile, then slip it into a neat pouch clipped to a shiny new rucksack. The group huddled around a vending machine well apart from their luggage, which sat piled on a bench. Sometimes it’s just too easy to be a bastard.

  On the way to the boat, I put coins in a box and picked out copies of two English dailies, the Times and the Herald.

  Squeezed into a front-row window seat I checked the phone. The battery indicator showed it was fully charged. I pressed the power switch to close it down, then fired it up again, and to my relief it came alive without the need for a security code. OK, the damn thing was a garish purple and covered in cutey-pie stickers, but it worked. I switched it off to save the battery and because I didn’t need incoming calls from a tearful teenager.

  For the duration of the sea journey I stayed in the seat, my back to the other passengers. Sensational accounts in the two newspapers were predictably, depressingly alike, and contained only one piece of real news, something that I had known would come, yet hoped I would never hear. Miss Hong’s mutilated naked body had been found tangled in rusted junk in shallow waters by the banks of the Han River, less than a mile from the Hyatt. Now the police and the media were all over the case. So much for Chang’s ability to keep it under wraps, I thought. I read on. The foreigner suspected of killing Miss Hong was on the run, somewhere in Korea. Police were posted at all international departure points, and citizens were asked to watch out for the man in the photograph, who had a Scottish accent and spoke some Korean. A substantial cash reward was offered. Nowhere was there a single mention of Chang or K-N Group. Maybe Schwartz’s PR efforts were reaping dividends.

  As I watched scenery peel past the salt-smeared window my thoughts drifted to Jung-hwa. It was thanks to her that I had escaped from Seoul, and not a moment too soon. I yearned for the woman’s gentle touch and mischievous smile.

  Powerful diesels pushed us south-west across calm seas that glinted in the morning sun as we followed a low-lying coastal plain speckled with factory stacks and fishing villages that barely registered on my consciousness.

  I brooded until the ferry pulled into the southern port of Tongyeong. Dense housing, no two homes the same, clung to steep slopes that looked down from three sides over a harbour basin packed tightly with fishing boats, ferries, and rusty coastal puffers, all function and no form.

  I prowled the aisles of a modern supermarket and filled a hand basket with a variety of lightweight snacks while I scanned the ceilings and shelf-tops for security devices. I saw only one small CCTV camera covering the check-outs and a mirrored office window that would allow staff to monitor parts of the store. When one corner display put me momentarily out of sight, I slipped a bottle of men’s hair dye and a pair of scissors into an inside jacket pocket, then joined the short line at the check-out counter.

  My journey resumed on a creaky old bus that had seen better days, and soon crossed the short bridge linking the south coast of the mainland to Geoje Island. Tower cranes and a blanket of rust marked a massive shipyard on our left, and shortly after that I changed to another bus that continued south. It laboured through hilly countryside that shrugged off all signs of modern architecture or industry, and terminated at the tiny fishing-and-seafood resort of Haekumgang. A picture-postcard bay and spectacular offshore rock features gave the place its name – diamond mountain of the sea. On the hill overlooking the bay stood the village’s one modern yogwan. Walking from the bus stop I heard steps behind me, and at a corner I sneaked a backward glance at a Western woman, casually-dressed and toting a small backpack. At the reception desk of the inn, she hung back, politely giving me space while I checked in and made my next mistake. The middle-aged lady behind the counter complimented me on my Korean as she pointed the way to my room, through the door directly behind the Westerner, who stepped forward to the desk. As we passed she nodded, and I mumbled a quick ‘hello’ in English from under my hat, cursing my stupidity. Being unable to speak Korean was part of my new identity, and already I had fucked up.

  The room’s red-tiled bathroom had a small mirror blotched by fungus that seemed to
grow in the light of a tired fluorescent tube that dangled from rusted chains of unequal lengths. I stripped to the waist, pulled a battery-operated beard trimmer from my toilet bag, and set to work. The trimmer made heavy weather of cropping my hair, tugging and tearing painful slow sweeps across my scalp, and it took the better part of an hour to achieve what I wanted: every last curl flushed down the toilet and only the shortest of hairstyles remaining in place.

  Stage two was complicated by Korean-only instructions on the bottle of dye. Products like this were the only reason so few Korean men have grey hair. The stuff had to be straightforward to apply, but the instructions taught me next to nothing. I understood something about ‘three minutes’, which was how long I left the first mucky application before rinsing it out. The mirror over the desk in the bedroom showed me the results. The hair was uneven in length and in colour, whole patches showing flashes of dirty blond – and half the lines on my forehead had taken to the dye best of all.

  I went back to the sink and this time worked the dye into every short hair on my head, ruining a soft shaving brush in the process. After another three-minute spell of growing panic I took a long hot shower, scrubbing hard at hair and scalp and forehead.

  Back to the room mirror, where things looked much better, if shockingly black. Another couple of minutes of probing scrutiny passed before it finally dawned on me what was wrong. I returned to the bathroom, this time to take a toothbrush to my eyebrows. I spent another hour tweaking and trimming with the scissors, trying to get rid of that home-made look.

  I propped myself against a pile of pillows at the head of the bed and thought about the stranger in the mirror. Maybe if I saw him often enough he would start to look natural. Natural was important, but what I needed most of all was to be different. So different from my photograph that I could walk the streets without the constant fear of a strong hand landing on my shoulder. I would find out soon enough.

  Less than thirty-six hours had passed since I fled Seoul. Yet today’s newspapers, proud bearers of yesterday’s news, were full of me, which meant that Chang or the police, or both, had gone public as soon as I went missing. I knew I had to speak out and make my case, which was where the purple telephone came in.

  The phone at the other end rang eight or nine times before being picked up. To my relief I got a real human being to talk to, not an automated answering service to negotiate.

  ‘British Embassy, how may I help you?’ A Korean woman, complete with near-perfect Home Counties accent.

  ‘Eric Bridgewater, please.’

  ‘I am sorry, but consular hours are from – ’

  ‘Believe me, he will want to take this call. My name is Brodie.’

  A long pause.

  ‘Can you tell me your name again?’

  ‘Brodie, Alec Brodie.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Please hold the line, Mr Brodie, and I will see if Mr Bridgewater is available to take your call.’

  A few seconds later:

  ‘Eric Bridgewater.’

  ‘We met at the K-N reception in the Shilla Hotel, when Bobby Purves introduced us and told me never to call you if I was in trouble.’

  ‘I remember. Where are you calling from?’

  ‘Do you want the address of the nearest police station while I’m at it?’

  ‘You have caused the Embassy a great deal of trouble, not to mention embarrassment.’

  ‘If I had just foreseen being falsely accused of a hideous murder, maybe I could have saved you the ordeal of a few awkward phone calls.’

  ‘Witnesses put you with the dead prostitu – ’

  ‘Her name was Miss Hong. And yes, I knew her, but I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘So why did you run? Our advice in such cases is always the same. If you are innocent, surrender yourself and let the authorities take care of it. You are only making things worse.’

  ‘Worse than WHAT?’ In the mirror above the small dressing table, my face was bright red, a forehead pulse point throbbing so hard that one eyelid flickered out of control. ‘Do you know how I spent the other day? Let me tell you – five hours in a Seoul police station, getting my kidneys pounded with phone books and my head held underwater for so long paramedics had to bring me back from the dead. The police wanted a confession. To a murder I know nothing about. Now there is a nationwide manhunt under way with my mugshot on the front of every newspaper in the country. Tell me, wise counsel, just how much fucking worse can it get?’

  He let that one sit for a few seconds.

  ‘If you are arrested and charged while still on the run it will make things worse. Anything that hints at guilt can only work against you.’

  He had a point.

  ‘But I’m being set up.’

  ‘You will have to do better than that. This is Seoul, not Hollywood.’

  ‘I assume you’re taping this.’ I said, ‘Just for the benefit of anyone with a brain who might listen later, I did not kill Miss Hong. The last time I saw her, she was alive and well, and pouring whisky into my belly button – not the typical behaviour of anyone under threat from a murdering maniac.

  ‘Next. I don’t know who killed her, but I have a fair idea why they did it. To blackmail me into participating in the massive con game that K-N Group are pulling off with their GDR issue – ’

  ‘Blackmail, too. What are you going to claim next, that – ’

  ‘Shut up and listen. The GDR issue is a complete fraud. K-N is facing bankruptcy, and the GDR is their last chance. K-N needed my photographs from recent visits to North Korea, along with credibility they could borrow from my trips to the North to help convince the Due Diligence team of the GDR’s viability. They also had me fake photographs of what was supposed to be an existing K-N plant in the North, photographs I took last week in a warehouse in Cholla province. The fake photographs are right there in the brochure K-N Group is using to promote the GDR.’

  ‘Apart from hearing you admit to participating in this supposed act of fraud, I fail to see how your finger-pointing might in any way provide you with any defence – ’

  ‘Precisely. You get the point, at last. If I turn myself in just now, K-N’s powerful mates and Chang’s money bury any hint of trouble with the GDR. And at the same time, they bury me.’

  He mulled that one over.

  ‘And what are you suggesting the Embassy might do?’

  ‘Begin by looking into the GDR. The Due Diligence team that’s being suckered is British, as are the banks and many of the investment funds behind the issue. The chief banker involved in the scam is British – Martinmass – who works for a British bank. Bobby Purves’ son was abducted for two hours on Sunday and his family were threatened with violence – most of them are British, too. And then there is me. British. As in citizen of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom. As in what the fuck happened to British Diplomatic Service responsibilities to its overseas citizens.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  ‘OK? I’m warning you ahead of time about a threat to British citizens and companies, and the open criminal involvement of a Briton who is a regular guest at British Embassy functions. So get this: letters telling everything, including the fact that you are already aware of this, are on their way to the Press in London and Seoul as we speak. Another copy is addressed to your bosses at Whitehall. So if you have any desire to hang onto your job, you might want to start doing it, and now.’

  ‘Now hold on right there – ’

  ‘Get to work, you useless prick.’

  I switched off the phone and set it aside. It was time to get started on those letters.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Night had long since fallen when at last I descended into the village in search of the first proper food of the day, and if the meal was overdue, the darkness could not have suited me more. Bare-headed for the first time since I left Seoul, I was testing public reaction to my new look, and even the prospect of a near-deserted fishing village on an island off the south coast scared me.


  Narrow twisted lanes were dark but free of threat, an occasional curious face peering out from corner store or tidy courtyard. The flickering blue of televisions lit households from within; a pro-baseball match was under way and, by the sounds of it, much of Haekumgang was following the action.

  Nearer the harbour a wider lane took on the green cast of fluorescent strip lights suspended at odd angles along the outsides of seafood restaurants, most of which sat deserted. In the lower halves of windows, murky glass tanks teemed with live fish, eel and squid. Five minutes after watching their choice swing from tank to kitchen in a dripping net, customers would be putting chopsticks to dinner – cooked or raw. Freshness re-defined.

  Selecting a place to eat out of a dozen lookalike establishments was never easy, but tonight the decision was made for me. A cheery middle-aged woman stepped onto the street and ushered me indoors, not about to take no for an answer. The restaurant was exactly as I would have pictured it. Concrete floor, powder blue walls with vertical lines of dark red Korean script advertising its menu, and a small wooden counter by the door for diners to lean on while they argued over who would pay the bill. About ten customers dotted the dozen or so tables, and I was pleased to see that the obligatory television screen was blank.

  I could have done without the small group at a corner table where the Western woman from the yogwan sat with two European men. Walking straight back out would only draw more unwanted attention, so I took a window seat in the opposite corner as far from them as I could get. Earlier, I was too busy hiding my face to notice how attractive the woman was. Her lightly-freckled cheeks were aglow with alcohol, and she wore wavy brown hair in a long pony tail that she fingered absent-mindedly as she talked. She was somehow familiar, yet only in the vaguest of senses, as if we might have crossed paths recently in a taxi line or subway car.