Chapter 48
‘His name is Kai Jin,’ Hester said. ‘He was the most gifted portrait artist I ever had the privilege to teach.’
‘It’s definitely him?’ Poe asked.
‘I’d recognise his work anywhere.’
With Bradshaw’s help, Hester changed the conference call to a split screen – half her, half tattoo photograph. She used a cursor to demonstrate.
‘See here, the meticulous brush marks, the fluid style,’ she said.
‘The radiant effects of light on the face. He had an extraordinary range of half-tones, the ones that lie between shadow and light. Where illumination and darkness meet. I hadn’t seen anything like it since I’d studied the great portrait artists.
Except I thought Kai was better. The renderings of light and form are lifelike, yet they also have an element of interpretation.
The portrait isn’t a carbon copy of his subject.
It was inner emotion that interested Kai.
His paintings spoke to the soul; they did to me anyway. ’
That was good enough for Poe. Eric Stryker hadn’t been wrong; Hester was the expert they needed. ‘Tell me about him,’ he said.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Enough to find him.’
‘Kai was tormented,’ Hester began. ‘All the great artists are, of course, but his was more about external pressures than internal suffering.’ She paused.
Looked as though she was figuring out the best way to explain.
‘His great-grandmother could trace her lineage back to the Song Dynasty. Her family was highly respected in China.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Japanese Imperial Army took her as a comfort woman. In other words, she was forced into sexual slavery. Endured it for most of the Second World War. When she was repatriated, she was pregnant. The child, Kai’s grandmother, was shunned.
When she was old enough, she fled China for England.
Made a new life for herself. She got married and had children, and those children got married and had children.
One of those children was Kai. Unfortunately, his great-grandmother’s past caught up with the family.
By this time they were integrated into the Chinese community in Newcastle.
According to Kai, they even paid a percentage of the profits of their wholesale business to the Forty-Fours.
I understand the Forty-Fours are one of the biggest triads in the world and I guess paying was easier than resisting.
Anyway, because they paid the Forty-Fours, they enjoyed a level of protection even when their Japanese blood became known.
It meant there were no reprisals, no repercussions. ’
‘But?’
‘But children are cruel. The adults played the game. Did what the Forty-Fours told them and left the family alone. But you can’t tell seven-, eight-, nine-year-olds that. Kai was mercilessly bullied. Eventually he found a way to cope.’
‘His art?’
Hester nodded. ‘Exactly. He threw himself into it. I’ve seen some of the stuff he did before he attended the Royal College of Art, and even then he was leagues above everyone else.
I’m sure part of that is down to what happened to his great-grandmother.
Just as the sexual slavery shaped her, three generations later it would shape the artist her great-grandson would become. ’
‘You taught him at the Royal College?’
‘I shouldn’t really call it that. He didn’t need teaching. Maybe some of his excesses needed to be curbed, but really, I thought of my role as making sure his work was given the attention it deserved. Which I did.’
‘And then?’
‘And then he disappeared. Left college, left the art world. Truth be told, he left a hole in my professional life that has never been filled. It’s why I wanted to thank you. Not just for letting me see his work again but for letting me know that the rumours weren’t true.’
‘What rumours?’
‘Kai gambled, Poe. Possibly because of his childhood trauma, possibly because that’s just how some people are wired. And in the Chinese community, gambling doesn’t have the same social stigma it does in ours.’
‘He owed money?’
‘It seems his talents only stretched to painting. He accumulated serious debts with serious people.’
‘Triads?’
‘That’s the gossip.’
‘You don’t strike me as someone who listens to gossip, Hester,’ Poe said.
‘I don’t. But I heard it anyway. And Kai did disappear.
When no one knows the reason, the information vacuum is filled with speculation.
And like it or not, the rumour that cropped up most often was that he refused to pay the Forty-Fours what he owed, and they made an example of him.
Kai wouldn’t have been the first, and I doubt he’ll be the last. I’d hoped he’d moved back to China.
That one day I’d start to see his paintings again.
But when I didn’t, the triad rumour become increasingly plausible. ’
‘What did you hear?’
‘That they’d chopped off his hands,’ Hester said. ‘And without his art, he had no reason to live. That is why I’m so grateful to see this tattoo.’