‘Why did you do that to my mother? Tell me. Why? Pochemu?’

‘A Russian must marry a Russian,’ he grunted and lowered his head into the rain. He would say no more.

‘That is nonsense, Liev Popkov.’

But she left it there. Her Russian was not adequate to the emotions she was struggling with. The sight of her mother’s beautiful face so twisted with anger and the sound of the Russian words pouring from her mouth too fast for Lydia to grasp had shaken her. It had stolen something solid from her world. Why would Liev barge into the house? None of it made sense.


She guided the big bear past the railway station and down to the docks. He seemed to have no care for what direction he took, unaware of where he was going until a singsong girl in a bright yellow short cheongsam that showed off her legs reached out and touched his cheek with a hand whose nails were as green as dragon scales.

‘You want jig-jig?’

He brushed her aside. But his head came up and he looked around, saw the tall metal cranes and the gambling dens and the chain gangs of porters. For the first time he noticed the rain. His bloodshot eye turned to Lydia and frowned.

‘I have a plan,’ she said in Russian. ‘I found a man. He knows my friend, the one I’m searching for. This man I found is… dead now. I did not understand his Chinese words but he said the name Calfield. I think it is here. Somewhere.’

‘Calfield?’

‘Da.’

She knew she hadn’t explained it well, but it was hard to find the words in his language. Her impatience got the better of her. She pulled him toward the buildings overlooking the quayside and pointed to the names up on their frontage. Jepherson’s Timber Yard and Lamartiere Agence. Across the road Dirk & Green Wheelwright next to Winkmann’s Chandlery. All jumbled up among the Chinese businesses.

She gestured to Liev. ‘Calfield? Where is it? You must ask.’

Understanding dawned. ‘Calfield,’ he echoed.

‘Yes.’

It had taken her hours. Lying awake last night, trawling through the nightmare of yesterday. Again and again she came back to the knife disappearing into Tan Wah. His soft hoarse cough. The blood. How could there be so much blood in one so thin? She wanted to scream aloud No, no, but she had made her mind go back, further back. To the wood. When she first asked Tan Wah about Chang An Lo. His chatter of words meant nothing to her but she went over them. Remembering. Listening. Seeing his floating eyes. His hairless face, already a skeleton. His teeth, yellow and chipped.

Words. Sounds. Unfamiliar and alien.

Just as the folds of the dividing curtain turned from black to grey, the start of their last morning in that attic room, one word stepped out into the front of her mind from all the meaningless sounds. Cal-field. Tan Wah had definitely used the word.

Calfield.

She gnawed at it like a bone. He had been taking her to Chang, that much was clear. Then he had waved his bony hand toward the quay and said Calfield.

It was a business or trading company of some sort, she was sure of it. Calfield was an English name and no Englishman lived down there at the docks, so it had to be a business. She had planned to seek out Liev Popkov the second her mother and Alfred left for the station, but his intrusion just made it happen earlier. The honeymooners would set off anyway and probably not even notice she wasn’t there in all the excitement. They wouldn’t miss her.

‘Lydia Ivanova.’ It was the bear. His voice was steadier now, his words less slurred. ‘Pochemu? Why you want this friend so bad?’

She glared at him. ‘That is my business.’

He growled, literally growled. Then he reached into the greasy pocket of his long overcoat and pulled out a stack of banknotes. He took her hand in his great paw and placed the money on her palm, curling her fingers around it to hide it from jealous eyes.

‘Two hundred dollar,’ he said in English.

A wave of sickness hit her stomach. The return of the money was so final. He’d finished with her.

‘Don’t leave. Nye ostavlyai menya.’

He said nothing. Just removed the long woollen scarf from around his neck, draped it over her wet head, and wound it around her shoulders. It stank of God-knows-what filth and stale sweat all mixed up with tobacco and garlic, but something in the gesture stilled her fear. He wouldn’t leave her. Surely.

But he did.


She felt betrayed. There was no reason why she should, but she did. It was a business arrangement, nothing more. Two hundred dollars of protection, that’s what she’d bought. Liev had more than earned it already, risked his life time and again during her search in this dangerous place for no more than Alfred probably paid for her new coat. But now he had returned the money. All of it.

She didn’t understand.

Nor did she understand why she felt so hurt by it. It was business. Nothing more. She watched him walk into a kabak and knew he would not come out this time. He was there to drink. She wanted to shout after him. To beg.

No.

She pulled the scarf as far over her face as it would go and scuttled along close to the wall, keeping her eyes on the ground, seeking no contact of any kind with the faces and bodies that milled around her. She knew she was in danger. She remembered the moon-faced man who had tried to buy her and the American sailor. She fingered the two hundred dollars in her pocket and was tempted to cast it away, knowing it increased her risk, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. To throw money away would feel like slitting her wrists.

What she needed to do was to go into one of the European companies and ask. Simple.

A hand touched her shoulder, a black-eyed smile leaned toward her face. She jumped away and hurried for the first door she could see that bore an English sign above it. E. W. Halliday. Maybe the smile meant well. She would never know. She pushed open the door and was instantly disappointed. The place was nothing like she had been expecting. It was a long and low-ceilinged room that even in daylight remained dim because the window was so small and grimy. A handful of Chinese workers were busy stacking cardboard cartons onto pallets against the wall, but an unpleasant oily smell seeped in from behind large double doors that led to what appeared to be a factory behind.

A Chinese man at a desk near the door raised his head. He wore tiny steel-rimmed glasses and a thin ribbon moustache that made him look almost European, and his desk was littered with thick ledgers. A tall black telephone was ringing, but he ignored it.

‘Excuse me,’ Lydia said, ‘do you speak English?’

‘Yes. How may I help you, miss?’

‘I am searching for a company called Calfield. Do you know it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In Sweet Candle Yard.’

‘Could you direct me there, please?’

At that moment the double doors swung open, breathing a gust of hot air into the front office and giving Lydia a brief glimpse of a kind of purgatory taking place behind. Dozens of matchstick figures were leaning over great vats with long paddles, pushing something down into a steaming liquid that scalded their faces a raw and blistered scarlet. As the doors swung shut they disappeared back into their own daily hell.

‘You go down Leaping Goat Lane and over to the godowns. Calfield is there.’

The man waved a hand in a vague direction, bowed a dismissal, and picked up the telephone to stop its jangling. Lydia left, the oily stink still in her nostrils. Outside she stared at the numerous streets and alleyways running off the quayside. Leaping Goat Lane.

Which one?

All the signs were written in Chinese characters. She could be looking straight at Leaping Goat Lane and not know it. A rickshaw raced past and water splashed from its wheels, drenching her in slime. Her satin shoes were ruined; she was wet through and shivering.

‘Leaping Goat Lane,’ she said aloud and climbed up on the low ledge of a stone trough in front of a water pump where the water had dripped into a frozen tear. At the top of her voice she shouted out, ‘Can anyone tell me which is Leaping Goat Lane?’

Several of the heads hurrying past turned to stare at her with interest, and she saw two thin men in bamboo hats swerve from their path and shoulder their way toward her. She swallowed. It was a risk, but time was running out for Chang and she was desperate to find him. Suddenly she was whisked off her feet. Something seized her, whirled her into the air, and shook her like a rag doll. Her eyes rattled in her head. She kicked out. Punched the side of a face. Bit some thing.

‘Lydia Ivanova. Nyet. No. Nyet.’

It was Liev Popkov. He shook her again and she wrapped her arms around him with relief.


They hurried down Leaping Goat Lane. The rain was falling harder. A mule train carrying great coils of rope trekked past them with much shouting and whip cracking. Liev Popkov kept one hand firmly round Lydia’s wrist.

He had been angry with her. For misunderstanding him. For thinking he would go into a bar for anything other than information. He told her off, shouted at her for leaving instead of waiting, and his anger pleased her. She knew she should be frightened of him but she wasn’t. No more than her mother had been in the face of his drunken onslaught. That thought jolted her. Even the men at the wedding party had backed off in alarm and talked of guns and police, but not Valentina. It made Lydia wonder for the first time whether her mother knew Liev Popkov better than she was admitting.

‘The godowns.’ Lydia pointed.

Ahead of them stood a group of buildings, large and lifeless, with corrugated roofs and no windows. These were the warehouses where imported and exported goods were stored until the tax inspectors had taken their cut. A few uniformed guards with guns on their hips patrolled in a desultory manner, more interested in keeping dry than watching out for thieves. The yards here were even worse than the streets. They stank of putrefaction. All around were bundles of sodden rags, at the base of walls or hunched tight under a sill or in a gutter.