Speeding to Edison's Rescue

For Gillian he use different technique

No wonder Peter Lam Kin Ngok needs to go at 114 kph in a 50 kph zone. You too would drive like Jehu if you were Edison Chen's manager.

First, there's that call from the fluffy toy-shop employee you keep on the payroll to keep tabs on the Clot to follow up, then there's the round of "love hotels" in Kowloon Tong to make.

By the way, don't these prostitution dens have wonderful names? My favourite (name, that is) is the Beverley Hotel – just a stone's throw away from my daughter's school – with its associations of a day at the races in the East Riding. Incidentally, in view of the growing number of Hong Kong lasses opting for a career in entertainment, how appropriate that all these knocking shops should be cheek by jowel with the institutes of instruction.

Then, a conference with your solicitor and the Senior Counsel you've instructed to take on your various ongoing speeding cases to decide what speed you'll tell the courts the radar gun actually recorded. Next (oh how hard a busy tycoon works!), there are the expert witnesses to decide on from the dossier compiled by the private investigator who specialises in the more shadowy areas into which the lego-judicial industry has spread its greedy tentacles.

Peter, chairman of East Asia Entertainment, is keeping tight-lipped about the exact date and location of his stud's much-awaited press conference back in Hong Kong. It's a pretty safe bet that neither Cecilia Cheung's dad, who rejoices in the nickname "Mustachio Yung" and whose upper lip shows that hirsuteness runs in the family, nor her father-in-law Patrick Tse, will be sent an invitation to the event. Nor Vincy Yeung's uncle, Albert Yeung, the head of Peter's rival, the Emperor Entertainment Group.

Not, I hasten to add, because any of these gentlemen are likely to be in any way put out by Edison's exploits (the Chinese way is after all to eat bitterness – though Edison prefers to vary the diet), nor because they don't get on together (they make rather a photogenic triad, I think), but simply because they are very busy men. You simply can't be in two places at once, so something will have to give, and it is Edison's homecoming which will, I'm reliably informed, have, regrettably, to be given the chop. Anyway, I'm sure they'll send one of those enormous arrangements of flowers propped up on an artist's easel. I hear white lilies are in season.

Peter was asked by a concerned and compassionate member of the fourth estate how his star client was feeling.

"What can you expect a 27-year-old kid to feel about such an incident?" replied Peter, reading from the Line-to-Take that's been distributed to all those involved in the affair (a much warmer word, I feel, not to say more descriptive and more accurate).

What the newspaper doesn't report is the follow-up question fired at him by David Webb, who had arrived late after attending a string of AGMs in the morning and briefing the world's media on the David Li insider-trading scandal – I mean, "incident". Or, even, "non-incident", given that the US$8 million he gave to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was actually lai see money. You don't believe me – check out the timing.

"Look here, Lam," said Webb, who likes getting straight to the point, "this is no incident. Why do you dishonour those who have suffered so terribly by trivialising it in this way?"

Lam pondered a moment before answering. He neither glanced down at his crib sheet nor across at the guy from Edelman standing in the wings. He had decided to make a clean breast of things.

"Okay, okay, Webbie," he said. "I give it to you straight, as you nice guy and I used to have Sinclair Spectrum. And today St Valentine's Day. We can't say 'massacre' because it not fair on girls he rejected, who never got chance to die and go to heaven."

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