“Business can only succeed in an atmosphere of harmony and concord,” Sir Gordon said. “Perhaps I can help you. But first we must agree that there will be no more violence.”
Timothy hesitated. A full scale war with the Wo Sing Wo could prove costly. Other soldiers would have to be drafted in, perhaps and Vietnamese mercenaries from the street. No one wanted this.
“My associates will insist on defending their interests,” Timothy Wong pointed out.
“I will ensure that Eddie Lau is no longer a problem for you. But I must have your guarantee, no more chopping, no more guns.”
“What will you do?”
“If Eddie is apprehended by the police, and they have evidence to use against him, he will not be able to disturb your associates’ business anymore.”
“And what do you ask in return for this?”
“Of course I shall require some compensation.”
“What form might this compensation take?”
“First, your associates must give the yellow air what they require. A tourist was killed in the Queen Plaza. None of us will be allowed to engage in our normal business until the culprit is found.”
“This might be arranged.”
“Also, Eddie Lau will be difficult to replace. And I shall lose big face when he is arrested. As compensation, your associates must pay me a nominal amount, say five million Hong Kong dollars.”
Timothy Wo cleared his throat; five million Hong Kong dollars was not a nominal amount. But Gordon supposed the Ox would think it was worth it to get rid of Eddie Lau.
“I will have to talk to my associates. This is a lot of money.”
“It is very reasonable. They must decide.” He got to his feet. “Let us return to the party. We can watch the sunset from the poop.” Timothy Wo followed him back up the polished teak steps of the companionway. Back on deck the Cantonese singer had attached herself to the actor who played the mandarin in The Feud Between Two Brothers. They will make a wonderful pair, Sir Gordon thought. Both of them faded and stupid. They will not last five minutes. I will be here forever.
Chapter 40
An oppressive, humid dawn hung over Happy Valley. Trainers, jockeys and owners were scattered around the course watching the morning workout, or were huddled together in conference while stable hands walked the horses in their blankets.
Eddie found Sir Gordon Wu near the winning post, leaning on a shooting stick, perfectly attired, as always, in Burberry tweed raincoat and cap. Eddie was wearing an electric blue suit and white silk shirt. He felt overdressed.
“Eddie,” Sir Gordon said.
“Tai lo,” Eddie said, respectfully.
“What do you think? Fine horse, heya? Her Mother was a champion. Red Ruby.”
Lucky Gem cantered past, a big roan gelding, her flanks steaming, the jockey standing in the stirrups.
“Last race she is disqualified for interference or it will be six wins from nine races.”
Eddie put his hands in his pockets and scowled. He had better things to do in the morning than stare at dumpling meat. But when Sir Gordon summoned you, you had better be there.
“You owe me three million, little brother,” Sir Gordon said.
“I never received my powder.”
“What powder?”
“The number four I buy from Bangkok. It is stolen from trawler off Fat Chui island.”
“You used my three million dollars to buy white powder?”
“Two hundred kilos. Make us all rich.”
“What you do with the money is no concern to me, though I do not approve of this drug business. But you ask me for loan, I give it to you. Now I want my money back.”
Eddie stared at him.
Sir Gordon pointed to Lucky Gem. “You play Happy Valley game, little brother?”
“Of course.”
“You are lucky?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes. Know secret of being lucky, little brother?”
Eddie shook his head, his hands still in his pockets.
“Secret is never back a loser.” The sun rose over the hills and reflected on the glass in Sir Gordon's spectacles.
“Yes, tai lo.”
Sir Gordon removed his glasses and cleaned them with a soft yellow cloth from his jacket pocket. “After you pay me three million dollar you will sit down with Pak yok-kong and settle your disagreement.”
“It was the Ox steal my powder!”
“You have proof?”
“One of his cooks ...”
“Do not care about cooks! You will settle it. This war disrupting business. We are not barbarians. You get in the way of profit, Lau hsu-shui!”
“He cheat me. You will have your three million and big profit if not for that great pile of dung.”
“Pay him what he want for his face and then finish.”
And what about the face I lose? Eddie thought. Three million to you, half million to the Ox, Louis Huu still breathing down my neck for his money. I will have to borrow again just to pay my debt!
Sir Gordon replaced his spectacles. “Do not disobey me, sai lo, little brother. I look after my stable. But if a horse is difficult, only one choice left.”
“You do not have the ginger for it,” he said, and walked away.
***
Lacey had worked overtime all week on the Barbara Warhurst investigation but she still had to keep up with the rest of her caseload. The murder of a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl in Morrison Hill had led to them to a grandfather who had now confessed to indecently molesting a string of young girls.
He told Lacey in the interview room that he believed it brought him luck gambling.
Lacey was at her desk typing up the report. All her life she had wanted to join the police because she couldn't stand the thought of working in an office. The irony of it; she had a friend who worked as a secretary who did less typing than she did.
“If I were you, I'd get a stenographer to do that.”
She looked up. It was Keelan. “Are you applying for the position?”
“Hell no, I've got enough paper of my own to push around.”
There was a long and shuffling silence. “I've got an appointment at Narcotics at eleven,” he said.
“Then you've got the wrong building.”
“Stupid of me.” He stayed right there, leaning against the door jamb. “Got a minute?”
“Sure,” she said, brightly. “Have two if you like.”
“About the other day.”
“It's all right. We're grownups.”
“I wanted to apologize.”
“Apology accepted.” She didn't want to talk about this. When you took off your clothes for a man and you didn't get a reaction it was hard to take it any other way but personally.
“I don't know what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Now, that’s not even close to being true.”
Lacey wished he'd just go. “This is why I don't like mixing work with my personal life.”
“I guess it might be better if we didn't see each other again, then. Keep the relationship purely professional.”
“That's the spirit.” She felt as if she was going to choke. No sex for almost a year and when she finally took this massive risk, she proved they were all right about her. An ice queen.
“It's never happened to me before,” he said.
Oh, great, pile it on. In a minute I'm going to punch you in the mouth. “I think we've gone as far as we need with this conversation,” she said.
“It's not your fault.”
“Thanks for calling by.”
Keelan held up his hands, a gesture of surrender. He left.
Lacey stared at the open door for a count of ten then picked up three files, each an inch thick, and threw them at the wall. When Tyler came in she was staring at the litter of papers on the floor.
“You okay, Lace?”
“Sure,” she said. “Paperwork.”
She went back to her incident r
eport. Big girls don't cry. At least that's what her father always said.
Chapter 41
Kennedy Town
The meat processing plant was the smallest of the town's two abattoirs. It faced Belcher Bay, close to the China Merchants Wharf. There were two sheds, one where the killing and boning took place, the other where the fifth quarter was processed. There was a row of aluminum-clad sheds that served as an office and administration block. The yards and buildings were surrounded by a chain link fence.
A night-watchman patrolled the yards from six o'clock at night until five the next morning, when the first shift started work. But that afternoon a man in a black leather jacket approached him as he arrived, handed him a brown envelope and told to go home. He did.
***
The red tail lights of the Mazda blinked as it stopped in front of a padlocked gate. A man jumped out of the passenger side and fumbled with a key. He swung the gate open and the car drove through.
It pulled up in front of the main shed. The driver stopped and turned off the lights.
He got out and flicked on a sturdy halogen torch. He threw open the boot and his associate helped him lift a large sack onto the ground. The driver went to the shed, shining his torch on the set of keys he took from his zippered jacket. He unlocked it and together they carried their load inside.
His associate returned to the Mazda to fetch a canvas bag from under the front seat.
***
Peter Man lay on the floor, a small, ovate bullet hole in his forehead, a look of surprise on his face. Normally, they would have left him on the street as a warning to other enemies of the Sun Yee On, but they had specific orders to keep this particular washing away from the eyes of the police.
The factory reeked of offal and blood. The tables and floors had been cleaned after that day's work, but as both men knew, from their short but spectacular apprenticeship in their trade, you can never quite get the smell of blood out of anything.
Ricky Lam and Daniel Tu were not many months past their eighteenth birthdays. They had brought with them two pairs of white overalls. They slipped them on over their jeans and nylon jackets. Then they lifted Peter Man onto the stainless steel boning table, stripped off his clothes and put them in the canvas bag, to be disposed of later.
Daniel took a filleting knife from the racks on the wall, and stood over the body, chewing on his bottom lip. He was not in the least bit squeamish. He simply had no idea where to start. He thought he would remove Peter Man's arms first, and see how that went.
***
An hour later they were done. Peter Man had made an astonishing mess, but the boys were confident that the liquid parts of him could be disposed of by directing all the fluids down the drains with the hose. They dumped the limbs, head and torso into a stainless steel bin and pushed it out of the boning room to the meat grinder.
The grinder lay at the end of a long chute under the boning tables, where the discarded bones were carried each day by revolving corkscrew blades. Ricky and Daniel had decided against using this piece of apparatus as they did not want the extra trouble of cleaning it afterwards.
By contrast with the white tiles and stainless steel of the boning room, the shed that housed the meat grinder was no more than a few sheets of corrugated iron, open to the elements at one end. The floor was bare concrete, caked with offal and blood. The machine’s casing had rusted, and the only light came from a single bulb suspended on a long and worn flex.
“You know how it works?” Martin said.
“I was here yesterday. The manager showed me.”
Some iron steps led up the outside of the machine to a small opening almost at roof level. Daniel and Ricky struggled to heft the steel bin to the landing. When it was done, Ricky stared into the maw of the machine. There was a steel roller, with sharpened steel prongs attached to it. A chute led away from the end of the machine into a collecting bin. By day, the factory processed pork balls for the poorer restaurants and hawkers of Yaumatei and Mongkok. Peter Man was about to contribute a novel protein supplement to their customers’ diets.
“He's going to make a mess,” Ricky said.
“When he's in the trays, it's the manager's problem. He knows what to do. He's a sworn brother.”
Daniel went back down the steps and found the start button. The generator coughed into life, and the grinder started up. It sounded like a freight train. Ricky stared into the chute at the gleaming metal teeth spinning on the roller.
He took Peter's left lower leg from the bin and dropped it in.
When the bones hit the blades they made a noise like firecrackers going off. In seconds the roller had reduced them to splinters and the meat into cubes. The rollers continued to spin and Ricky dropped more and more of Peter Man into the machine. The meat carcasses that were usually fed into the grinder were mostly flayed bone, but Peter’s carcass still had most of the flesh attached and his remains sent a fine pink spray over the metal sides of the chute. Ricky took a step back, worried about getting some of Peter Man into his perfect hair.
Almost done. He threw in the right arm. The pitch of the machine rose to a shrill whine.
Daniel looked up from below. “What's happening?”
Ricky stared into the chute. He realized that he should have first jointed the arm, as he had done to the legs. “He's jammed,” he shouted. He stepped forward. “Shut it off!”
Daniel Tu could not hear his partner over the noise of the machine. He saw Ricky reach in, and pressed the emergency stop button. He was a second too late.
***
Ricky Lam screamed, stared in horror at the blood spurting from his hand. He instinctively jammed his other hand over his bleeding fingers. He began to walk in circles, clutching his injured hand between his legs.
“What happened?” Daniel shouted.
“Told you to turn off the machine!”
“Should have waited!”
“My finger! Lost one of my finger!”
Ricky was spraying blood everywhere. “What are we going to do?” Daniel said.
“Help me stop this bleeding!”
Daniel ran back to the boning room, grabbed Peter Man's shirt and jacket from the canvas bag. When he got back to the meat grinder, Ricky was sitting on the metal floor, crying. Daniel wrapped the shirt around his hand as a dressing and helped him back down the steps.
What were they going to do? Half of Peter Man was still in the steel bin, the other half, white fat and raw red mincemeat, was at the other end of the chute.
Daniel went back to the machine, and peered into the chute. The arm was still jammed between the rollers. He saw a bloodied finger, reached down, picked it up and wrapped it in Peter Man's jacket.
“Get me to the hospital,” Ricky said. “Come back and finish later!”
Daniel helped him back to the car. Ricky collapsed into the passenger seat. He was pale and shivering.
Daniel jumped in, threw the jacket with Ricky's finger in the console and started the engine. Ricky scrabbled to wind down the window with his good hand and vomited.
Daniel squealed the tires as he drove through the gates and headed down Belcher's Street, then turned up the hill towards Pokfulam Road. He decided to make for the twenty-four-hour casualty department at the Queen Mary hospital.
***
At first, the triage sister on duty thought the two young men who staggered in at a quarter past midnight had been in a fight. One of them had his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked dressing, the other was carrying an expensive-looking jacket with dark stains on it.
“Lost his finger!” Daniel shouted at her. “We were cutting some meat and the knife slipped! He chopped it right off!”
She led the two men through to the casualty ward and called over the duty intern. He took away the makeshift dressing and inspected the wound. His patient was showing signs of shock. He ordered an intravenous colloid and paged for a surgeon.
The triage nurse fetched admission forms. The intern accepted the mis
sing digit from Daniel and unwrapped it carefully in the surgical room. He stared at it and blinked. It had been a long night and he was not sure at first if he had made a mistake. He returned to the patient to check.
“How did this happen?” he asked Martin.
“Told you. We were chopping meat at our restaurant,” Daniel said.
The intern examined the wound more closely. It was jagged, a stripping wound inconsistent with a traumatic amputation from a meat cleaver. Something was wrong. He went back to re-examine the amputated part.
***
There are two uniformed policemen on duty at all times in the emergency rooms of all Hong Kong hospitals. The intern summoned them on his pager.
“Something very wrong here,” he said when they presented themselves in the corridor. “We have two young men in our casualty room, I think maybe they have been in a very bad fight.”
“What is the problem?”
“One of them has lost his index finger. He said he did it himself, chopping meat in his restaurant.”
“But?”
“But the part he brought with him was a thumb.”
Chapter 42
Kam Chun-kwan had professed complete ignorance of anything except his own name just a week before. Now he sat in the same interrogation room and named Ricky Lam as the killer of Barbara Warhurst. Lacey called in a stenographer to take down his statement.
As he talked she watched him, her chin resting on her hand, and tried to work out what was going on.
“So you saw everything ?” she asked him, in Cantonese.
“Happens right in front of me. How I not see it?”
“That is just what I asked you directly after the shooting. You said you were in the kitchen.”
“Do not understand,” he said.
“Go on with your statement,” Lacey said.
“I am serving a customer. Hear a shout. This man runs into my restaurant.”
Chasing the Dragon: a story of love, redemption and the Chinese triads (Opium Book 2) Page 18
