Blue Lantern Read Online Free Page A

subject of a remark to a colleague in the duty room. The live people were the worry, not the dead.
    Brodie was awakened by traffic noise at ten in the morning. The sun glared through cracks in the venetian blind. The room was bright and small; besides the bed it had a dresser, wardrobe, and a low table with two chairs, all in light oak. The white walls were bare, a reminder that he had not settled; this was not home. Nor was Glasgow. His aunt would provide him with a temporary bed if he pressed her. She had always made it plain that ‘bringing up the boy’ was a God-given burden, but a burden; and there had been a soft pressure to leave in his latter years with her. All Glasgow offered was a desk job in a bank, or a place behind the shelves of a bookshop; the city seemed to be set in the yoke of years of old ways of doing things that chafed and excluded him. He had set his mind on emigrating to Australia, when the Hong Kong opportunity had come along; a kind of half-way step.
    The room was warm but not unpleasant. His nakedness was covered by one sheet. He left the bed to adjust the blind, and then lay down again. He reached for an apple from the table and began to eat noisily, masking the grinding sound of traffic; then he smoked; the pleasure of a first cigarette in bed.
    He wondered again about the form under the white coat; Helen’s presence hadn’t left him in three weeks. The door opened suddenly without a knock, and Brodie hauled himself into sitting position, his chest and shoulders damp with sweat. Don Parker, dressed in a tan summer suit came in; his tasks didn’t require a uniform. Parker tapped one of his brogues on the tiles for attention.
    â€œTrouble last night, Mike. I’ve just seen your Super. Thought you’d be interested. Nothing in the papers, of course.”
    â€œYeah?” Brodie rested back, turning his head away from the needles of light which had found another way of penetrating the blind, remembering the chopper victim.
    â€œA fight between strike pickets and cops over near Kai Tak.”
    â€œThrilling stuff.”
    Parker looked put out. “It’s a bad sign. There’s going to be more. A lot more. Your beat is going to liven up, Mike. A bit of action for a change.”
    â€œFine. If there’s something I want on my duty, it’s action.”
    â€œChairman Mao will provide.”
    â€œDon, have you ever been on the beat?”
    â€œGod, no! Some of us have to use our brains, while you guys go out patting the pussies of the bar girls.”
    For a moment, Brodie envied Parker’s nonchalance. He was the British colonialist who ran Hong Kong, as prophesied by the selection board, the district commissioner, policeman and magistrate all in one.
    â€œSo you think Mao is coming over the border?” Brodie asked, swinging himself out of bed.
    â€œMaybe. If not, his pals here will make trouble.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    Parker smiled mysteriously, “We keep up with the frivolities of Mao’s Cultural Revolution on the mainland. We watch who comes and goes from China. We know a damn lot.”
    â€œI’ll stick with the bar-girls,” Brodie yawned.
    Parker turned abruptly and headed for the door. “You’ll have to pull finger if you’re going to get on here, Mike!”
    A flying shoe smashed against the door frame where Parker’s head had been a moment before. Parker was so comfortable, Brodie reflected, that nothing other than living in the Colony for a time could have prepared him for its peculiar alien flavour. The incongruity of a Britisher trying to keep order in a foreign ant-heap had become apparent month by month. And yet he was held in Hong Kong by the Police Force, a piece of dark, complicated machinery which on balance fascinated him, and which he wanted to understand.
    Brodie reached for the handset to try to reach Helen Lau at the hospital. By chance, he found her.
    â€œHi,