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dressing table and three books of matches with my name embossed in silver letters. OK, so my name was spelt wrong, but the thought was there. There was a cushioned bench seat under the window which looked out over the harbour. The water was chock-a-block with ships, either sluggishly rolling at anchor or busily sailing through, freighters, tugs, junks, fishing boats. A real working harbour. Immediately in front of the hotel was a typhoon shelter and though the weather was perfect and the water calm it was packed with boats. To the left of the shelter the vessels were pretty white yachts, expensive playthings for the Hong Kong rich. But to the right was a different story, a flotilla of small, dirty, wooden junks, with washing hanging from rope lines and steam rising from cooking pots. The yachts were once-a-week boats, but the junks were homes, where families lived, loved and did the laundry. There must have been a hundred of them, moored tightly together. God knows where they got their water from but there was no doubt where their sewage went because on the prow of one of the scruffy boats was a stocky fisherman who had opened up the front of his denim shorts and was playing a stream of urine into the water below.
    ‘Welcome to Hong Kong,’ I said.
    ‘Huh?’ grunted Howard from the door.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said as I watched a white hydrofoil shoot past leaving a white wake foaming behind it. ‘Fancy giving me a geography lesson?’
    Howard joined me at the window. ‘That’s Kowloon over there,’ he said, and pointed straight ahead. ‘Tsim Sha Tsui to be one hundred per cent accurate, where the best shops and bars are. Over on the left is the Regent Hotel, with the New World Hotel next to it. Over to the right is the airport. That’s all on the mainland, behind Kowloon are the New Territories and beyond that is China. We’re on Hong Kong Island, in Causeway Bay. The business section is called Central, you can’t see it from here but it’s on our left. Between Central and here is Wan Chai.’
    ‘The world of Suzie Wong?’
    ‘A long time gone, laddie. More’s the pity. It’s a wee bit more commercial now. The road below us is the harbour expressway, it runs from one end of the island to the other, from here it passes alongside North Point and then Quarry Bay and beyond.’
    ‘Behind us?’
    ‘The Peak, home to the rich and famous, and the other side is mainly residential. That’s Hong Kong.’
    ‘Not much to it, is there?’
    ‘Not in terms of square feet, but there’s a lot going on. This place hums, that’s its big attraction . . .’
    He fell silent as he realized that I wasn’t really paying attention, just letting his words wash over me. Hong Kong still felt like a dream, my mind was still back in London and I guess the jet lag wasn’t helping. We stood together, looking down at the ships in the harbour.
    ‘Where did it happen, Howard?’ I asked eventually.
    ‘Kowloon side,’ he said, nodding towards the mainland. ‘A hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. You can’t see it from here.’ He paused, but he didn’t wait for me to ask for more details, he knew what I wanted to know, it was just a question of choosing the right words.
    ‘She was in the swimming pool on the top floor. It was late evening and she was alone.’
    I pictured her carving through the water with her lazy crawl, breathing every second stroke. She loved to swim, she could go on for hours, never tiring, never changing the pace. I was faster over a short distance, but I tired quickly whereas she was a stayer.
    ‘She went through the window. No one seems to know what happened,’ Howard said.
    ‘She didn’t jump,’ I said. It wasn’t a question but he took it as one.
    ‘Nobody knows,’ he said.
    ‘No, I’m telling you. She didn’t jump.’ I turned to look at him. ‘Did you know her?’
    He nodded. ‘It’s a small place, everybody knows everybody else. And you know what journalists are like.’
    Yeah, I knew. And a stringer