BLOOD DRAGON Freddie Peters (books to get back into reading .TXT) 📖

tempted to flick through the pages but moved it to one side, and started arranging on the long glass table top the documents she had collected about her father’s disappearance.

There was, to start with, the meagre set of papers she had kept herself from the past.

The black and white photo she had looked at only yesterday beckoned her again.. An elegant young man in a three-piece suit sporting a mandarin collared shirt, and a young woman with long dark hair in a short dress patterned with large stripes. Nancy remembered the dress and its typical 60s colours. Both are smiling broadly. He has his arm wrapped around the young woman’s shoulders and she has laid her hands on the shoulders of a little girl called Nancy.

Nancy checked the date on the back of the picture. By then her and her parents had left China as the Cultural Revolution was biting hard. They had just arrived in Paris after months of travelling through China’s countryside to escape the communist regime. A trip that had finally taken them to the shores of Guangdong province, leaving for Hong Kong from there and then reaching France.

Her hands were clammy. She pushed away the rest of the memories that had terrified her as a child. The nightmare that had lasted for years, only assuaged when she, at last, had convinced herself she would never have to go back to China.

The few official documents her father had gathered, when they left, were no longer relevant. They were written in Chinese and she could barely decipher the ideograms on them. She hadn’t spoken Mandarin for years … except occasionally to help some bemused tourists. The language she had learned as a child was now laced with a heavy English accent.

The next pile of documents neatly spread out on the table had been gathered recently. Pole assured her he had been in touch with contacts in Hong Kong as well as Interpol. Nancy sat back and pondered.

How careless of her not to have probed a little more.

She pulled the satchel that always lay on the side of the sofa and took the legal yellow ruled pad from it.

She had already listed the documents she had gathered, without bothering to capture these in a Word document. Her indecision and lax attitude towards a case, her own case, that she should have taken so much more seriously, irritated her.

She stood up, took a few paces towards the large windows that overlooked the building’s gardens. The sky was just starting to clear a little. The sun had risen only recently, and clouds were beginning to disperse. There was not much point in castigating herself. She had to decide whether she truly wanted to keep digging into her past.

“No … no.” Nancy shook her head forcefully. People had helped. They had been hurt, or perhaps worse. She owed it to them to take the search seriously. She had succeeded in mounting some of the most complex defence cases, in front of both the British courts and international tribunals. She would approach her own case with the same professionalism, no matter how great the emotional cost.

She returned to the sofa and sat down again.

The documents Pole had gathered for her had confirmed what she had always suspected. Her father had become involved in the arts again when returning to China, trying to spur a new movement, introducing new ways of thinking and making that came from the contemporary art world that had developed earlier in Europe and America.

A magazine called Menshu, printed in Wuhan, had published a small article written by him. The magazine had been censored in 1987, barely a year after her father had arrived back in China. She surmised he must have kept in touch with some of his old friends and been introduced to the new Chinese avant-garde, sending an article from Paris shortly before he left France.

The few pictures, this time in colour, told her they would have been shot using a Polaroid camera and developed instantly. Her father was standing in front of a large poster. A circle in red and black turning upon itself with a red bar across it, had been drawn at its centre. The new U-turn to the past was the sign used by the new generation of artists.

A few more pictures were now spread out on Nancy’s coffee table. She had gone through them before with scant interest. She didn’t know who these people were and had assumed they were part of her father’s artistic crowd.

Nancy was about to tidy up the photos into a pile when she stopped herself dead. The Polaroid had faded considerably but there was a man at the back of the small group of people gathered in the picture she thought looked familiar. Nancy tilted the picture a little. She moved to the wall and turned up the light to full. It was still difficult to see but she now recognised him.

Nancy moved back to her study, opening a couple of drawers, rummaging frantically through. She found the magnifying glass she was looking for, returned to the lounge and looked at the photo again closely. It was him, unmistakeably.

Deng Xiao Ping himself … the man who had been and still was the symbol of China’s opening up to the world after years of communist introversion.

“Impossible …” Nancy shut her eyes and kept them closed for a moment. She opened them up again and returned the magnifying glass to enlarge the face she had been trying to identify.

There was no doubt left in her mind. Her father had gathered together a group of friends, presumably artists, and he was introducing them to Deng.

Her father had re-joined the Chinese Communist Party wholeheartedly.

* * *

“I’ll tell him as soon as he has arrived.” Andy was gesticulating to attract Pole’s attention.

Pole looked at the clock on the wall. It was barely 8am. Someone was keen to get on with their day.

“Ferguson?” Pole balanced his tea on the low partition that divided