The Uninvited Read Free Page B

I know it is shocking.’
    ‘No, I’m interested. I like seeing new things.’
    There was quite a long pause which I did not know how to fill. Then he nodded towards the door and said, ‘Well, Hesketh. You didn’t come here to talk about death.’
    In his office, we settled on either side of a desk littered with wood samples labelled in both Chinese and English. It took half an hour to get through my list of questions. He answered diligently, checking dates and figures on his computer. It all added up, and he appeared clean. As for the four female administrative staff, they had already been eliminated by the police: none of them had access to the relevant files.
    ‘I’d like to see round the factory,’ I told him.
    ‘Of course. Our operations manager will be happy to show you.’
    He made a call and within minutes, a slight man he introduced as Sun-kiu ‘Sunny’ Chen appeared in a hard hat. I’d been curious to meet Sunny Chen, not least because one of the fraud officers had referred to him as ‘an oddball’, a term which always piques my interest. He hadn’t gone into details, but just tapped the side of his head in the international gesture denoting madness, and said I’d see for myself. The others had grinned.
     
    Sunny Chen’s movements were jerky and puppet-like. I couldn’t tell his age. Mid-forties perhaps. He was diminutive, with much darker skin than Martin Yeh (Monsoon River) and a hectic look. The two men conversed briefly: I missed most of what they said, but their body language told me there was respect between them. Sunny Chen and I shook hands. We began in Chinese, but I found myself struggling, so after two and a half sentences we switched.
    ‘You know, my father worked here, until he retired. My grandfather too, and four uncles. Jenwai was a good company. Moral. Trustworthy.’ Sunny Chen wiped his brow, which bore a sheen of sweat.
    Martin Yeh sighed. ‘If I had been here . . .’ He didn’t finish his sentence, but shrugged and began a new one. This was about needing to go home and rest. I responded that this seemed wise, given his health status. After I’d seen the factory, he said, Sunny would take me to lunch on his behalf. The two of them had a swift exchange in Chinese, about the name and location of the restaurant. Then we said goodbye and I followed Sunny Chen outside.
     
    The courtyard faced the factory entrance, which was festooned with warning signs and surveillance cameras. In the shade of its concrete flank, Sunny Chen offered me a cigarette which I declined. He lit one for himself and inhaled deeply. His fingers were stained with nicotine. He jerked his head towards the building. You could hear the machinery inside working at full tilt.
    ‘So what do you make of the whistle-blower?’ I asked.
    ‘He deserves to die,’ said Sunny Chen. ‘In fact, I would like to kill him myself.’ Then he laughed. His teeth were an ivory colour – somewhere between Silver Birch and Musk Keg.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He has brought us shame.’ This remark indicated he was more bothered by corporate loss of face than by the company’s intrinsic rottenness. Did this make him a traditionalist? I made a mental note.
    ‘Have you any idea who he is?’
    His head gave an abrupt twitch. ‘The police asked me the same thing. And I said yes. But they didn’t listen. Please come in. I will show you inside.’
    In an antechamber near the entrance, we put on fibre face masks and overalls. Mine were far too small. Sunny Chen gave me a hard hat like his own with built-in ear mufflers. I like wearing headgear. The skull feels pleasingly cushioned.
    ‘We will have to shout in there,’ he said, waving me in.
    In the vegetable world there’s no real time of death. In the right conditions, flowers can last a week, irradiated strawberries a month, apples or onions a year. Technically, a tree is killed when it is chopped down. But its aroma – of bark, of sap, of dense, massed fibre – lingers for decades