Pangolin by Peter Driscoll

Author:Peter Driscoll [Driscoll, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

23

By eight forty-five the southbound carriageway of the tunnel was swarming with police from a dozen different branches.

Communications and Transport had provided a command vehicle, mounted on a bus chassis and equipped with radio-telephones to serve as a temporary headquarters. It was parked on the ramp beside the exit portal, next to the Tunnel Company’s emergency trucks, which had been rushed over from the Kowloon side only to be forced by the police to wait before they towed out the damaged vehicles.

Land Rovers from the Police Tactical Unit, which had happened to be in the Causeway Bay area at the time of the accident and had responded to an emergency call on the radio, had ferried the injured to hospital. There were eight casualties of various pile-ups, mostly the victims of neck whiplash and bumps sustained through banging foreheads into steering wheels or dashboards.

In the tunnel itself, a team of Chinese CID were conducting brief interviews with the uninjured occupants of the trapped cars. Those who had seen or heard anything that might be useful in determining exactly what had happened were escorted out to the command vehicle to have their statements taken.

Two photographers were taking shots of the scene from every angle. Two scene-of-crime teams from the Identification Bureau, a total of six men, were searching for footprints on the oil patches on the road, lifting fingerprints from the motorcycle and the Mercedes. One was giving the inside of the car a thorough vacuum cleaning. The two cartridge cases which had been found on the road had been bagged and labelled and rushed to Ballistics.

At ten to nine, the superintendent from Hong Kong Island District Control escorted Horace Stanley, the security officer from the American Consulate General, into the tunnel. Stanley informally identified the dead Chinese-American as Benjamin Chin, a bodyguard who had worked for the State Department Security Service. It was only then that Stanley proved willing to divulge the name of the diplomat Chin had been protecting, and who was now, all too obviously, missing.

The car park at Kai Tak Airport was three quarters empty at this time of day. Baxter had no difficulty in finding a bay for the mail van right opposite the one where his own Range Rover had been parked since seven that morning. He got out of the van, went to the Range Rover, unlocked the rear door, and took out one of the two cylindrical canvas sail bags in which the batwing sails of the Lady Belinda were normally stowed. It was seven feet long and two feet in section, and it fastened up the side by means of a cord passing through double rows of brass eyes. The other bag contained a sail and was already done up.

He passed it through the front door of the Transit to Pritchard in the rear, who spread it out on the cargo deck. He and Quinn rolled the limp form of Kiley on to it squaring him up till he lay on his back in the middle of the rectangle.

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