The triad leader had a wife, an English girl called Jill, and a daughter, eight years old, called Sophie. He had two brothers, one in San Francisco, the other in Vancouver, and a sister who’d stayed in Hong Kong and married a Chinese banker. Father had retired to a large house on the Peak where he spent his time polishing his collection of jade. The father used to be the head of the organization, but now the power lay with Simon Ng.
Howells rang down to reception and asked if he could hire a car through the hotel. It was easily arranged, said the girl who answered, and yes, the hotel could supply him with a road map, she’d send one right up.
He’d travelled on his own passport but booked into the hotel under Donaldson’s name. He’d brought Donaldson’s passport with him, and his credit cards, and his glasses, just to be on the safe side. He didn’t look much like the man buried under the flagstones of the villa in Bali, but neither did the picture in the passport, and with the glasses on he was close enough.
The map arrived and he studied it until the phone rang and the receptionist said his car was downstairs. It was a blue Mazda, almost new, with a pine air-freshener fixed to the dashboard. The agent who’d delivered it to the hotel had left the aircon running so it was pleasantly cool. He dropped the map on to the passenger seat and edged out into the afternoon traffic of downtown Kowloon. The car was a right-hand-drive automatic and the traffic drove on the left so it confused him for a while. He’d been in Bali too long and grown accustomed to driving on the right. Cars and vans were bumper to bumper for the first mile or so as he drove past the tourist shops packed with cameras, electrical goods and clothes. Hong Kong looked a prosperous city, with none of the obvious poverty he’d seen in Indonesia, where the pavements were full of beggars and children in tattered clothes and the roads buzzed with motorcycles. Hong Kong had few bikes, all the cars seemed new, and the crowds on the pavements were well-dressed and affluent. The buildings were as clean and new as the cars, blocks of glass and steel and marble. Howells drove out of Tsim Sha Tsui, through the industrial areas of Kowloon and past towering residential blocks, thirty storeys high. He glanced at the map a couple of times, but only for reassurance. His sense of direction was unfailingly good and he’d been trained to memorize routes. He left the built-up areas behind him and was soon driving through countryside that reminded him of the Brecon Beacons, rolling hills and thickets of wind-stunted trees.
It was an hour’s drive from the hotel to where Ng lived, halfway up a hill that looked down on the South China Sea. The house stood alone, a single storey H-shaped building, two long wings connected by a third block in which was set the main entrance. It was surrounded by green, well-kept lawns on all sides and enclosed by a ten-foot-high stone wall. That was what the file had said, anyway; all that Howells could see from the main road as he craned his neck out of the Mazda’s window was the imposing wall. A single track side-road linked the main road to the compound, winding its way left and right up the wooded hill to a pair of black metal gates. The nearest houses were about half a mile away, red-roofed three-storey blocks that would have looked at home in a Spanish seaside town, but they were served by a separate road. There was only one way up, and there seemed to be no way of getting the car to the top of the hill from where he could look down on Ng’s house. He’d be able to make it on foot, but he’d have some explaining to do if he got caught.
He drove the car off the main road and headed up the track but he’d barely travelled a hundred yards before the way was blocked by a horizontal pole painted in bright red and white. There was a large sign covered in foot-high Chinese characters and Howells didn’t have to be a linguist to work out that it meant ‘Halt’ or ‘Private Property’ or ‘Trespassers Will Have Their Balls Removed’. He stopped the car, but before he could open the door a man came out of a wooden gatehouse, hand moving towards the inside of his brown leather jacket. The hand didn’t reappear, it lingered around his left armpit as if idly scratching. Howells wound down his window and grinned. ‘I’m trying to get to Sai Kung,’ he said to the guard. The man was about fifty, but stockily built and in good condition. He shook his head.
‘Not this road,’ he said, and pointed at the barrier. ‘Private.’ He took his hand away from the shoulder holster, confident that he was talking to a stupid tourist who’d just lost his way. He rested both hands on the car door and leant forward, smiling at Howells with yellowed teeth. ‘You must go back.’
‘Whatever you say, sunshine,’ said Howells, conscious that another guard had moved out of the trees behind him and was standing at the rear offside wing of the car. Security was good, and he had no reason to doubt that there would be more men scattered through the woods. He reversed the Mazda back down the track and on to the road before driving around to the far side of the hill.
So far as he could see the road was the only way he’d be able to get up to the compound. And even if he got there, what then? This wasn’t a James Bond movie, one man couldn’t storm a fortress alone, no matter how heavily armed. The thought of free-falling in from 25,000 feet made him smile, bringing back fond memories of his days with the SBS. But even then it wouldn’t have been considered without a team of four and stun grenades and Uzis and whatever else they could hold on to at 120 mph during the long drop. No, while he was at home, Ng was safe. Howells drove back to Kowloon deep in thought, whistling quietly to himself through clenched teeth.
Hot Gossip was jumping. It was one of Dugan’s favourite bars and a hangout for many of the unmarried cops, gweilo and Chinese. A bar where you were reasonably sure of picking up a girl and reasonably sure of not picking up something contagious, where the food wasn’t bad and the music was loud and the drinks were expensive enough to keep out the rabble. It was on two floors in Canton Road, the bar and dining area above and a trendy disco below. Dugan was upstairs, priming himself with half pints of lager before diving into the flesh market below.
He was standing by just about the longest bar in Kowloon, a polished black job that could seat a couple of dozen people without looking the least bit crowded. And behind the bar, at intervals of ten feet, were wall-mounted television screens all showing the same music video. At the far end of the bar, where it curved around to the left to the nook where the barmen mixed their high-priced cocktails, was a cluster of tables with pink tablecloths. They too were surrounded by television sets. No matter where you stood or sat you could see a screen without moving your head.
Dugan had left the office early and had walked in on his own but soon found friends in the form of three officers from the anti-triad squad who were also on the police rugby team. They’d begun teasing Dugan about his work, as they always did, and asking when his next quarry would be taking a one-way trip to Taiwan. Dugan was used to the ribbing, in the same way that he was used to suspects disappearing from Hong Kong as soon as the Commercial Crime boys got anywhere near ready to make an arrest.
‘It’s all right for you bastards,’ he said, waving his half-filled glass at them. ‘You can catch them with a gun in their hand or a pocket full of dope. Or you can kick down the door to a fishball stall and catch them with underage girls.’
‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ howled Colin Burr, a hefty scrum-half with shoulders that looked as if they were made for bursting through doors.
‘Deny it,’ said Dugan. ‘Deny it if you can.’
‘You pen-pushers ought to give it a try some time,’ said Nick Holt, a lanky Scot with a Hitler moustache who’d only been in Hong Kong three years.
‘Yeah, have a go at real police work for a change,’ echoed Jeff Bellamy, the oldest of the group and, like Dugan, starting to lose his hair. Unlike Dugan, though, he’d given up trying to comb what he had left over the bald patch and instead had it cut short, a brown fringe that ringed the back of his head.
‘Real police work?’ sneered Dugan. ‘Don’t make me laugh. When was the last time you put away one of the Dragon Heads? Name one.’
‘Cheung Yiu-chung,’ suggested Holt. ‘
He went down for seven years.’
‘Bastard,’ conceded Dugan. ‘OK, name five. Go on, name me three.’
‘Oh piss off, Dugan.’
‘You know what I mean. Sure, your arrest records look better than ours, but almost all yours are small fry. Foot soldiers. But we go after the big fish. The real criminals, the ones who steal billions at a time.’
‘Yeah, but Dugan, how many do you actually catch?’ sniggered Burr as he drank.
‘It takes time to build a case,’ said Dugan. He fell silent and watched Patsy Kensit prance around on one of the screens behind the bar. She was gorgeous. What made him so argumentative was that he knew they were right. In the first place it often required months of painstaking research that owed more to accountancy than to police work before they had enough evidence to make a case. And by the time they’d got enough evidence together the suspect or suspects had usually had plenty of warning, and they were usually rich enough to be able to buy themselves an escape route. It could be frustrating. Bloody frustrating.
Dugan looked away from the screen and scanned the diners, taking in the whole restaurant area with one easy glance. He realized with a jolt that he too was being studied, by a petite Chinese girl with beautiful eyes. She was sitting at a table with two other girls, wearing a dress every bit as black and shiny as her hair. She seemed small, even for a Chinese girl, but the eyes were knowing and teasing. The eyes of a woman, the body of a young girl. She smiled at Dugan, catching him off balance. He looked away, embarrassed, as if he’d been caught peeking through the window of a schoolgirls’ changing-room.
He shrugged. ‘Downstairs?’ he said.
‘Now he’s talking sense,’ said Bellamy. They emptied their glasses and walked the length of the bar and down the stairs that led to the disco. The throbbing beat enveloped them like a clammy mist and they had to push their way through the crowd to reach the bar. Holt ordered a round of drinks and they stood together, watching like predatory sharks preparing to carve through a shoal of fish.
‘What about those two?’ said Holt, nodding at two girls dancing together.
‘Tasty,’ agreed Burr. ‘Very tasty.’
The girls moved well together, obviously used to dancing with each other.
‘Want to give it a go?’ Holt asked Burr.
‘Sure,’ he replied, and the two men placed their glasses on the bar and edged their way on to the crowded dance floor, towards the girls.
‘See anything you fancy?’ Bellamy asked Dugan.
‘Not yet,’ said Dugan, ‘but it’s just a matter of time.’
Across the disco he saw three girls walk down the stairs and stand at the edge of the lights. One was the small Chinese with the beautiful eyes. She seemed to be looking right at him, though he knew he must be obscured in the gloom.
‘You’re staring,’ laughed Bellamy.
‘Pretty, isn’t she?’
‘The short one? Exquisite. But a big gweilo like you would tear her apart. Pick on someone your own size.’
Dugan looked at him and laughed and when he looked back to the stairs the girls had gone.
The two men stood by the bar, scanning the dance floor and tapping their feet to the beat. Burr and Holt seemed to be doing OK, they’d moved in on the two girls and now were gradually edging them apart like sheepdogs with nervous sheep.
Dugan thought about asking Bellamy how his application for a transfer was getting along, but decided against it. Wrong time, wrong place. God, he wished they’d pull their finger out. He was going slowly mad in Commercial Crime’s A Division, even before today’s disappointment. It wasn’t police work, it was clerking, pure and simple. The straw that had broken the camel’s back was the Carrian affair, a three-year investigation followed by an eighteen-month trial, the longest in Hong Kong’s history, and the most expensive. It had ended abruptly when a single judge had decided that the defendants had no case to answer. Almost five years of hard work down the drain. Dugan had worked his balls off on that case, ten or twelve hours a day. He’d eaten, slept and breathed the Carrian case, only to see it dismissed by one man.
The night after the judge had stopped the trial Dugan went out and got seriously drunk. A week later he’d put in his first application for a transfer, to switch from A Division to C Division. A Division handled the long, complex fraud cases, split into four taskforces to handle the big ones. B Division looked after general fraud; a move there would have been seen as a step down, a demotion. C Division had more kudos, chasing up counterfeit cases. That meant a lot of foreign travel, undercover work, the real Miami Vice stuff. Trouble was there were only forty officers and the competition to get in was cut-throat. When Dugan had applied he’d been told it would be three years at least until there’d be an opening. Dugan reckoned they were giving him the brush off, that they thought he was too valuable for A Division to lose.
Eventually his patience had snapped and he’d decided to break with CCB completely and try to get back to real police work. But nobody seemed to take his application to join the anti-triad squad seriously – and now he knew why.
Bellamy noticed his silence, and reached over to clink glasses with him. ‘How’s life?’ he asked.
Dugan shrugged. ‘Nothing changes. I’m still pissed off with CCB.’
Burr and Holt were back to back now, moving the girls further and further apart. They’d pulled, all right, and done it without talking, too, because they couldn’t be heard over the driving beat. Dugan drank deeply. He didn’t care any more that it was the wrong time, wrong place.
‘I’ve got to get out,’ he said.
‘Music too loud?’ said Bellamy.
‘You know what I mean,’ said Dugan. ‘Out of Commercial Crime.’
Bellamy shook his head slowly. ‘You’re better off where you are, Dugan.’
‘No,’ hissed Dugan. ‘I want out.’
The two men looked at each other over the tops of their glasses. Dugan wanted to push it, even though he knew by the older man’s silence that he was going to be disappointed. Like phoning to ask a former lover if she’d give it one more try, knowing that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted but determined to try nevertheless, even though the pain of rejection would be worse than maintaining the status quo.
Dugan explained about losing the computer case. ‘I want to move to the anti-triad squad. I have to get back to real police work.’
‘Commercial Crime is real police work,’ answered Bellamy, avoiding Dugan’s eyes.
‘I don’t understand why they’re making it so difficult for me to move,’ Dugan drove on stubbornly, knowing the answer. He saw Bellamy’s lips move, but the words were lost in the music.
‘What?’ he shouted.
‘You know why,’ Bellamy yelled. ‘Your bloody brother-in-law. That’s what’s stopping you. Simon bloody Ng and your sister.’
Dugan sighed and felt alternate waves of anger and frustration wash over him. The computer case was the first he’d lost because of Ng, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t be the last. And now it was clear that the powers that be would not allow him to move out of Commercial Crime. Bellamy looked away, embarrassed.
‘Fuck it,’ said Dugan, and forced a grin. ‘Let me buy you a drink. And then I want to get laid.’
When he turned to the bar, she was there. Small and cute and looking up at him with an amused grin on her face. Had she heard him? Dugan hoped not. He smiled. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I saw you upstairs, didn’t I?’
She nodded. ‘And I saw you. Small world, isn’t it?’ She giggled. Pretty mouth, thought Dugan.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked, switching into Cantonese and enjoying the look of surprise on her face.
‘I’d like a soft drink, something long and cool,’ she said quickly in Cantonese and he knew he was being tested.
‘How about me, will I do?’ he asked, and she laughed again.
‘How come your Cantonese is so good? You a cop?’
‘Of course,’ he said. �
�What do you really want to drink?’
‘Perrier,’ she replied.
Dugan ordered himself a beer and a fizzy water for her, and then felt a thump in the small of his back.
‘Don’t forget your friends,’ Bellamy growled.
Dugan ordered a lager for Bellamy and handed it to him without looking. His eyes stayed on the girl, worried in case she moved away.
‘How about an introduction?’ Bellamy asked.
‘How about riding off into the sunset and letting me and this young filly get acquainted.’ He talked in English, quickly, and he used slang so that the girl wouldn’t be able to catch the meaning but she grinned and reached past Dugan, arm outstretched, and shook hands with Bellamy.
‘My name’s Petal,’ she said.
‘Pleased to meet you, Petal,’ said Bellamy. ‘I’m Jeff Bellamy. And this young reprobate is Patrick Dugan. A man to be avoided at all costs.’
‘You can let go of her now, Jeff,’ said Dugan. He took hold of the girl’s hand. It was soft and cool. ‘Nice to meet you, Petal.’
‘Nice to meet you, Patrick Dugan.’
‘It’s my turn to ask,’ he said. ‘How come your English is so good?’
‘I was a good student. A frightfully good student,’ she said, and her accent was pure Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
Dugan gestured at the drink in her hand, bubbles bursting against the slice of lime. ‘Not drinking?’
‘I’m here to dance, not to drink.’
He took the hint and together they moved to the dance floor. She moved well, and she kept close to him as she danced, touching him occasionally, by accident or by design, he couldn’t tell. Just a nudge of an elbow, or their hands would meet as she turned to one side, and each time it was like receiving a small jolt of static electricity. He wondered where her friends were, now she seemed to be alone. The DJ switched to a slow ballad and made some crack about it getting to that time of the night; and Dugan made to leave the floor but she stepped forward and linked her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest, eyes closed. God, she was tiny, like a schoolgirl, though the breasts that pressed against him were those of a woman. He circled her with his arms and he felt big and clumsy. She smelt of fresh flowers.
Hungry Ghost Page 6
