Necropolis

by Anthony Horowitz

  My cry for mercy…

  Why had he said that? Cry for Mercy was the name of the monastery where Scarlett had been kept prisoner, on the other side of the door. Of course, he couldn’t possibly have known that but nonetheless he had chosen the words quite deliberately. Was he taunting her? The chairman was already moving back to the desk, but even as he had turned Scarlett thought she had detected something in his eyes, behind his silver-framed glasses. Was she imagining it? He had just given her an expensive gift. And yet, for all his seeming kindness and concern, she could have sworn she had seen something else. A brief flash of cruelty.

  Scarlett spent the rest of the afternoon shopping – or window shopping anyway. She didn’t actually buy anything, which was unlike her. Back in England, Aidan had often teased her that she’d lash out money on a diving suit if it had the right designer label. But she wasn’t in the mood. She wondered if she’d caught a cold. It was still very damp, with a thin drizzle that hung suspended in the air without ever hitting the ground. She was also more aware of the silver-grey mist that stretched across the entire city, even following her into the arcades. The skyscrapers disappeared into it, the top floors fading out like a badly developed photograph. There was no sense of distance in Hong Kong. The mist enclosed everything so that roads went nowhere and people and cars seemed to appear as if out of nothing.

  She asked Audrey Cheng about it.

  “It’s pollution,” she replied, in a matter-of-fact sort of voice. “Its not ours. It blows in from mainland China. There’s nothing we can do.” She looked at her watch. “It’s time for supper, Scarlett. Would you like to go home?”

  Scarlett nodded.

  And then a man appeared, a little way ahead of them. Scarlett noticed him because he had stopped, forcing the crowd to separate and pass by him on both sides. They were in Queen Street, one of the busiest stretches in Hong Kong, surrounded by glimmering shop windows filled with furs, gold watches, fancy cameras and diamond rings. The man was young, Chinese, dressed in a suit with a white shirt and a striped tie. He was holding an envelope.

  “Scarlett…” he began.

  He disappeared. The moment he spoke her name, the crowd closed in on him. It was one of the most extraordinary things Scarlett had ever seen. One moment, the people had been moving along the pavement – hundreds of them, complete strangers. But it was as if someone, somewhere had thrown a switch and suddenly they were acting as one. Scarlett tried to look past the seething mass but it was impossible. She thought she heard a scream. Then the crowd parted. The man had gone.

  Only the envelope remained. It was crumpled, lying on the pavement. Scarlett moved forward to pick it up but someone got there ahead of her … a pedestrian walking past. It was just a man going home. She didn’t even get a chance to look at his face. He snatched up the envelope and took it with him, continuing on his way.

  “What was that?” Scarlett demanded.

  “What?” Audrey Cheng looked at her with empty eyes.

  “That man…”

  “What man?”

  “He called out my name. Then everyone closed in on him.” She still couldn’t take in what she had just seen. “He had a letter. He wanted to give it to me.”

  “I didn’t see him,” Mrs Cheng said.

  “But I did. He was right there.”

  “You still have jet lag.” Audrey Cheng signalled and Karl drew up in the car. “It’s easy to imagine things when you’re tired.”

  Scarlett was glad to get back to Wisdom Court even though she wished her father had been there to greet her. She was going to sleep in his room. Audrey Cheng had taken the guest bedroom. Karl, it seemed, would spend the night elsewhere. She had been completely shaken by what she had seen. How could a whole crowd behave like that? She remembered the way they had suddenly turned. They could have been controlled by some inner voice that she alone had been unable to hear.

  She ate dinner, said goodnight to Mrs Cheng and went to her room. She hadn’t finished unpacking and it was as she took out the last of her clothes that she made a discovery. Someone had placed a guidebook for Hong Kong at the bottom of her suitcase. She assumed it must have been Mrs Murdoch and if so, it was a kind gesture – although it was odd that she hadn’t mentioned it. She flicked through it. “The World Traveller’s Guide to Hong Kong and Macau. Fully illustrated with thirty colour plates and comprehensive maps.” It was new.

  But that wasn’t the only thing she found that night.

  Scarlett had brought a little jewellery with her – a couple of necklaces and a bracelet Aidan had given her on her last birthday. She decided to keep them safe by putting them into one of the drawers in the dressing table. As she pulled, the drawer stuck. That was probably why nobody had noticed that it wasn’t completely empty. She pulled harder and it came free.

  There was a small, red document at the very back. It took Scarlett a few seconds to recognize what it was, but then she took it out and opened it.

  It was her father’s passport.

  Paul Edward Adams. There was his photograph. Blank face, glasses, neat hair. It was full of stamps from all over the world and it hadn’t yet expired.

  The chairman had lied to her.

  If her father had left his passport in the flat, he couldn’t possibly have travelled to China. And now that she thought about it, there had been something strange about the note he had left her. Why had he typed it? It hadn’t even been signed. It could have been written by anyone.

  It was eleven o’clock in Hong Kong. Four in the afternoon in England. Scarlett got into bed but she couldn’t sleep. She lay there for a long time, thinking of the passport, the passport official with the crocodile eyes, the chairman joking about the cry for mercy, the man who had tried to give her a letter.

  She had only been in Hong Kong for one day. Already she was wishing she hadn’t come.

  CONTACT

  Over the next few days, Scarlett tried to forget what had happened and put all her energies into being a tourist. There had to be another explanation for her father’s passport. He might have a second copy. Or maybe his company had been able to arrange other travel documents for his visit to China. It was, after all, just the other side of the border. She made a conscious decision not to think about it. He would be back soon – and until then she would treat this as an extended holiday. Surely it had to be better than being at school!

  So she took the Star Ferry to Kowloon and back again and had tea at the old-fashioned Peninsula Hotel – tiny sandwiches and palm trees and a string quartet in black tie playing classical music. She went to Disneyland which was small and didn’t have enough fast rides, but which was otherwise all right if you didn’t mind hearing Mickey Mouse talking in Cantonese. She went up to The Peak, a mountain standing behind the city which offered panoramic views as if from a low-flying plane. There had been a time when you could see all the way to China from there, but pollution had put an end to that.

  She visited temples and markets and went shopping and did everything she could to persuade herself that she was having a good time. But it didn’t work. She was miserable. She wanted to go home.

  For a start, she was missing her friends at school, particularly Aidan. She had tried texting him but the atmosphere seemed to be interfering with the signal and she got nothing back. She tried to call her mother in Australia but Vanessa Adams was away on a trip. Her secretary said that she would call Scarlett back but she never did.

  And it was worse than that. Scarlett didn’t like to admit it. It was so unlike her. But she was scared.

  It was hard to put her finger on what exactly was wrong, but her sense of unease, the fear that something was going to jump out at her from around the next corner, just grew and grew. It was like walking through a haunted house. You don’t see anything. Nothing actually happens. But you’re nervous anyway because you know the house is haunted. That was how it was for Scarlett. But in her case it wasn’t a house – it was a whole city.

  First of all, th
ere were the crowds, the people in the street. Scarlett knew that everyone was in a hurry – to get to work, to get to meetings, to get home again. In that respect, all cities were the same. But the people in Hong Kong looked completely dead. Nobody showed any expression. They walked like robots, all of them moving at the same pace, avoiding each other’s eyes. She realized now that what she had seen in Queen Street hadn’t been an isolated incident. It was as if the city somehow controlled them. How long would it be, Scarlett wondered, before it began to control her too?

  The strange, grey mist was still everywhere. Worse than that, it seemed to be getting thicker, darker, changing colour. Mrs Cheng had said it was pollution but it seemed to have a life of its own, lingering around the corners, hanging over everything. It drained the colour from the streets and even transformed the skyscrapers: the higher storeys looked dark and threatening and it was easy to imagine that they were citadels from a thousand years ago. They didn’t seem to belong to the modern world.

  And then there was Wisdom Court. From the moment she had arrived there, Scarlett had been aware that something was wrong. It was just too quiet. But after two days there, going up and down in the elevator, in and out of the front door, she suddenly realized. She hadn’t seen anybody. There were no sounds coming from the other flats, no doors slamming or babies crying. No cars ever pulled up. No smells of cooking or cleaning ever wafted up from the other floors. Apart from Mrs Cheng, she seemed to be living there entirely on her own.

  Of course, there was the receptionist. She had barely registered him to begin with. He was always sitting in the same place, in front of a telephone that never rang, staring at a front door that hardly ever opened. He wore a black jacket and a white shirt. His face was pale. And he never changed. Nobody ever replaced him.

  How was that possible? Scarlett found herself examining him more closely. The same man in the same place, morning, noon and night. Didn’t he ever eat? Didn’t he need toilet breaks? It could have been a corpse sitting there and once that thought had entered her head, she found herself hurrying through the reception area, doing her best to avoid him. Not that it would have made any difference. He never spoke to her once.

  On the third evening, after their visit to Disneyland, she challenged Mrs Cheng. The Chinese woman was making dinner, tossing prawns and bean shoots in a wok.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “What do you mean, Scarlett?”

  “We’re on our own, aren’t we? There’s nobody else in this building.”

  “Of course there are other people here.” Mrs Cheng turned up the flame. “They’re just busy. People in Hong Kong have very busy lives.”

  “But I haven’t seen anybody. There’s nobody else on this floor.”

  “Some of the flats are being redecorated.”

  Scarlett gave up. She knew when she was being lied to. It was just another mystery to add to all the others.

  The next day, Mrs Cheng took her to a market in an area known as Wan Chai. As usual, Karl drove them. By now, Scarlett had got used to the fact that he accompanied them everywhere and never spoke. She even wondered if he was able to. His role seemed to be to act as a bodyguard. He was always just a few paces behind.

  Scarlett had always liked markets and in Hong Kong there was a vibrant street life, sitting side by side with the expensive Western shops and soaring offices. She had been keen to explore the Chinese streets, the stalls piled high with strange herbs and vegetables, soup noodles bubbling away in the open air and the signs and advertisements, all in Chinese, filling the sky like the flags and banners of an invading army.

  And yet these markets were full of horrible things. She saw dozens of live chickens trapped in tiny cages and – next to them – dead ones, beaten utterly flat and piled up like deformed pancakes. On the stand next door there was an eel cut into two pieces, surrounded by a puddle of blood. A goat’s head hung on a hook, its eyes staring lifelessly, severed arteries spilling out of its neck. It was surrounded by the other pieces of what had once been its body. And finally there was a whole fish, split lengthways, the two bloody halves lying side by side. That was in many ways the most disgusting sight of all. The wretched creature was still alive. She could see its internal organs beating.

  Mrs Cheng took one look at it and smiled. “Fresh!” she said.

  Scarlett wondered how long she could stay in Hong Kong without becoming a vegetarian.

  They continued on their way, walking past a row of meat shops. Mrs Cheng was going to cook in the flat again that night and she was looking for ingredients. As they paused for a moment, Scarlett noticed one of the butchers staring at her. He was completely bald with a large, round head and a strange, childlike face. He seemed fascinated by her, as if she were a film star or visiting royalty. And he wasn’t concentrating on what he was doing.

  He was chopping up a joint of meat with a small axe. Scarlett watched the blade come down once, twice…

  On the third blow, the butcher missed the meat and hit his own left hand. She actually saw the metal cut diagonally into the flesh, almost completely severing his thumb. Blood spouted. But that wasn’t the real horror.

  The butcher didn’t notice.

  He raised the axe again, unaware that his hand was lying flat on the chopping board, the thumb twitching, the pool of blood widening. He was so interested in Scarlett that he hadn’t noticed what he’d done. Scarlett stared at him in total shock and that must have warned him because then he looked down and backed away immediately, cradling the injured hand, disappearing into the dark interior of the shop.

  What sort of man could just about cut off his own hand without any sort of reaction? On the chopping board, human blood mingled with animal blood. It was no longer possible to tell which was which.

  Scarlett didn’t eat meat that night. And as soon as she had finished dinner, she went back to her room. The flat had cable TV and she watched a rerun of an old British comedy. It didn’t make her laugh but at least it reminded her of home. She was thinking more and more about leaving. If her father didn’t arrive soon, she would insist on it. How could this have happened to her? How had she found herself on the wrong side of the world, on her own?

  She went over to the window and looked out.

  Hong Kong by night was even more stunning than it was by day. The windows were ablaze – thousands of them – and all the skyscrapers used light in different ways. Some seemed to be cut into strange shapes by great slices of white neon. Others changed colour, going from green to blue to mauve as if by some sort of electronic magic. And quite a few of them carried television screens so huge that they could be read all the way across the harbour, advertisements and weather information glowing in the night, reflecting in the dark water below.

  One such building was directly opposite her. As she gazed out, thinking about the butcher, thinking about the still-living fish that had been cut in half, she found herself being drawn almost hypnotically towards it. It must have belonged to some sort of bank or financial centre – the screen was displaying the performance of stocks and shares. But even as Scarlett watched, the long lists of numbers were wiped from left to right and replaced by four letters in burning gold.

  It was her own name, or at least half of it. She smiled, wondering what the letters actually stood for. South China Associated Railways? Steamed Chicken And Rice? But then four more letters appeared, tracking from the other side.

  And that was no abbreviation. It was her. Scarlett. The two blocks had formed her name and now they were flashing at her as if trying to attract her attention. She stood at the window, not quite believing what she was seeing. Was someone really trying to send her a message, using an electric sign on the side of a building to get it across?

  A few seconds later, the screen changed. Now it had turned white and the message it was displaying read:

  Scarlett was taken aback. Maybe she was mistaken after all. What did it mean? PG Tips was a type of tea, wasn’t it? It was also a type of certificate, b
efore a film. And what about the figure 70?

  Scarlett waited, hoping that the sign would change a third time and tell her something more – but nothing happened. It seemed to have frozen. Then, abruptly, it went black, as if someone had deliberately turned it off. At the same moment she heard police sirens, a lot of them, racing through the streets on the other side of the harbour in Kowloon.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Scarlett went over to the bed and sat down, then quickly picked up a magazine and opened it. Although she wasn’t quite sure why, she had decided that she didn’t want to be found at the window. “Come in,” she called.

  The door opened and Audrey Cheng came in. She was wearing a tight jersey that showed off the shape of her body – round and lumpy. Her black hair was tied back in a bun. Her eyes, magnified by the cheap spectacles, were full of suspicion. “I just wanted to check you were all right, Scarlett,” she said.

  “I’m fine, thank you very much,” Scarlett replied.

  “Are you going to bed?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Sleep well.” She seemed pleasant enough, but Scarlett saw her eyes slide over to the window and knew exactly why she had come in. It was the message. She wanted to know if Scarlett had seen it.

  And it was a message. She was sure of it now. Someone was trying to reach her and had decided that this was the only way. There was some sort of sense in that. A man had tried to hand her an envelope and he had been dragged off the pavement. Mrs Cheng and Karl were watching her all the time. Perhaps this was the only way.

  But what did it mean? Scarlett had never been any good at puzzles. Aidan had always laughed at her attempts to do a crossword and she had come bottom in the school quiz. PG 70. It obviously had nothing to do with tea. Could it be an address, a map reference, the registration of a car? She went back over to the window and looked out again but the screen was still dark. Somehow, she doubted it would come back on again.