Hungry Ghost

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Do you miss England that much?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’m only joking. And the food is one of the best things about living in Hong Kong, being able to choose any one of a hundred sorts of cuisine: Thai, Korean, all the different kinds of Chinese, Japanese, and even British pub food. No, I don’t miss England that much.’

  ‘So what happened at work to put you in such a gloomy mood?’ she said, pouring beer from a large bottle for him.

  ‘It wasn’t so much work, I was just thinking about Jill …’ He left the sentence hanging and Petal saw his eyes glaze again. Dugan snapped himself out of it, and grinned sheepishly. ‘I’m sorry, I was off again, wasn’t I?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Petal said. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘No, I’m probably worrying about nothing. She rang me this morning and said someone had called her claiming to be Inspector Holt, the friend of mine who was mugged in Hot Gossip. She asked me to check out if there were two guys called Holt and when I called her back she said I was to drop it. But she sounded strained, as if she’d been crying.’

  ‘And you think she’s in trouble?’

  Dugan shrugged and dropped his chopsticks on the table. He leant back in his chair and sighed deeply.

  ‘I don’t know. When we were teenagers we were so close that I knew without asking what was troubling her. Once she married that all changed.’

  ‘That happens. A husband has got to be closer than a brother.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s having problems with her husband, perhaps that’s why she was upset. They could have had a row or something.’

  ‘No, he was there with her, he answered the phone. And he didn’t sound as if they were in the middle of an argument. They’re not the fighting kind, anyway.’

  ‘You said he was a triad leader. That’s a violent way of life.’

  ‘No,’ said Dugan, his jaw tight with conviction. ‘He’s never hurt her, and he never will. He loves Jill totally, and Sophie. Outside the family he’s a hard man, a killer, and he’s got his fingers in some very dirty pies. But he keeps Jill and Sophie right out of it.’

  Petal smiled and nodded. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘She’s your sister.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to steamroller over your opinions.’

  ‘You didn’t, you were sticking up for her, that’s all. I wish I had a brother around to stand up for me.’

  A waiter was hovering nearby, a teenager in a tatty blue waistcoat and black trousers that he’d outgrown. Dugan made a scribbling motion with his hand and asked for the bill.

  ‘I’ll call her again tomorrow, maybe.’

  ‘We could go round and see her if you want.’

  Dugan liked the way she said ‘we’, as if taking it for granted that they were a partnership, a team. But going round to the Ng house wasn’t his favourite pastime. Driving past the guards was a sharp reminder that he was entering enemy territory, and the obvious signs of wealth made him nervous and a little angry. What annoyed him most was the way in which Jill revelled in it; the expensive furniture, the works of art and oriental relics that she so enjoyed collecting, the staff at her beck and call. The house didn’t feel like a home, not to Dugan anyway. It felt like a cage, a moneyed cage.

  The waiter returned with the bill on an oblong aluminium tray. He paid with cash, conscious that both his credit cards were too close to their limit for comfort. The last thing he wanted now was for the waiter to come back with a sly grin on his face to tell him that there was a problem with his card.

  ‘Do you fancy going anywhere for a drink?’ he asked, pushing back his chair and standing up.

  ‘I don’t feel like drinking tonight,’ she said. ‘How about we just go home?’ It was 9 p.m. Dugan’s smile widened, and he took her arm. The waiter came back with a couple of green notes and a handful of coins on the tray and Dugan waved him away as he followed Petal to the door, watching her hips sway as she walked, the way her hair rippled and shone as it moved against her shoulders.

  The slight rocking of the boat and the sloshing of water against the hull was soporific and Howells knew that he’d soon be asleep. He was sitting on a wooden rattan chair that he’d wedged against the door that led out of the main sleeping cabin. The girl was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, staring at him. She’d got past the crying stage and Howells had made no move to hurt her so the fear had subsided. She’d stopped whining for him to let her go, she’d stopped promising that she wouldn’t say anything. At one point she’d pretended to faint and lay on her back making wheezing noises like an upturned turtle. Now she was indignant. She’d threatened him with the police, with her father, and with his bodyguards, eyes flashing fire. Any moment now and Howells reckoned she’d attack him. The kid had spunk.

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry now,’ laughed Howells. ‘If you’re not quiet you can sleep in the toilet.’

  He’d kept her locked in the toilet while he’d been in Tsim Sha Tsui. He’d thought of tying and gagging her but decided against it in case she panicked and choked. The cubby-hole was wood-lined with no window and the nearest boat was far enough away that her cries couldn’t possibly be heard, and she’d soon tire of yelling. But if she didn’t let him sleep he was serious about putting her back there.

  ‘Sleep,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep,’ she said. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘You will go home. Tomorrow,’ said Howells, the lie tripping easily off his tongue. He still hadn’t decided what he would do with her. He’d never killed a child before but he knew he was quite capable of it. A lot depended on how well his plan worked out. At the moment he needed her alive in case Ng totally refused to co-operate unless he spoke to her. He shifted in the chair and slipped his shoes off his feet.

  ‘My parents will be worried. They’ll be looking for me.’

  ‘They know you’re with me,’ said Howells patiently. ‘They’re not worried.’

  She was persistent. Howells had never married and had no children, and he’d never known his mother or father, he’d been abandoned as a baby and spent his whole childhood in institutions and with a succession of foster-parents. The kids he’d met there weren’t like Sophie Ng at all, they were usually one of two extremes, either browbeaten into meek subservience or delinquents who were forever bucking authority just for the hell of it. Sophie’s social skills and self-assurance were the result of a childhood where there was no shortage of love or money and he envied her that. Howells spent his life looking forward, not back, and he had no regrets about his lot, but he knew that if he’d had a better start in life things would have turned out differently for him. He wouldn’t have had to escape into the Royal Marines, he wouldn’t have been selected for the SBS, he wouldn’t have fought in the Falklands and he wouldn’t have been spotted by a man called Grey at a time when Britain’s intelligence services had decided that it was better to use the highly trained killers of the SAS and SBS to do their dirty work than to put their own Oxbridge paper-shufflers at risk.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ asked Howells. He’d already made her a mug of oxtail soup and a cheese sandwich but she hadn’t finished either.

  Sophie shook her head. ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  ‘So do I, kid,’ said Howells. ‘So do I.’ He wondered what it would be like to kill a child, to feel his hands tighten around her thin, white neck, to hear her small bones snap and to see the fear in her wide, brown eyes just before she died.

  Jill shifted her position for the ten-thousandth time and kicked her legs from under the pale pink silk sheets. Once or twice she’d drifted off into a restless sleep but each time she’d suddenly woken up with her heart pounding and a dull ache in her chest that she knew only the return of her daughter would soothe. Sophie filled her mind incessantly, a labyrinth of thoughts that kept her mind trapped and refused her the luxury of rest. She opened her eyes and looked acro
ss at her husband. He was asleep and she felt a wave of resentment. He was lying on his front as usual, head turned to his left, towards her. He was breathing deeply and evenly, his brow untroubled, the sleep of the innocent – the unworried. How could he? How could he sleep at a time like this? As if he were reading her thoughts Ng opened his eyes.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘No. What time is it?’

  He pulled his left arm from under the sheet and squinted at the slim Cartier watch on his wrist, the one Jill had bought for Sophie to give him last Father’s Day. ‘It’s almost five.’ He sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. ‘You stay in bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea. Are you hungry?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’ll call soon,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ said Ng, sliding off the bed. He grabbed his robe and headed for the kitchen. Jill lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, her arm across her forehead.

  Dugan awoke to the sound of high heels clicking on a wooden floor above his head, pacing backwards and forwards, tap, tap, tap. He groped across the bed but he was alone. He listened, but there was no noise from the bathroom or kitchen. ‘Petal?’ he called hopefully, but she’d gone. She had a cat burglar’s skill for getting out of his bed and the flat without waking him up. He knew without looking that there was a note on the table. All things being equal he’d rather have had a good-morning kiss and a cup of freshly made coffee, but at least the few scribbled words and the flower showed that she’d thought of him as she left.

  At first he’d thought it quite cute that she slipped away without waking him, but now Dugan was worried that perhaps she had to be somewhere else when dawn broke. She seemed to be happy with him, and God knows she seemed to enjoy being in bed with him, so what could it be? She couldn’t be married, and it wasn’t as if she rushed to get home before midnight or anything, it was just that when dawn broke she was never there.

  He looked at his watch, and groaned when he saw it was only quarter past five. It had been after two when Petal had eventually flopped down next to him, skin damp with sweat, panting like an exhausted dog. Dugan had felt like he’d been hit by a train at the time and he didn’t feel much better now, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to get any more sleep. The distant clunking of lift doors opening and closing would ensure that. He switched on his CD player and Ultravox filled the air. He twisted the volume button savagely. If he wasn’t going to get any more sleep he was damned if anyone else should.

  Howells’ internal clock woke him up at 5.20 a.m. Early rising was a habit he’d picked up living in a children’s home and which had continued in the Royal Marines, but this was something else, a natural ability to wake up on command that had never failed him. He was still slumped on the chair, though he’d used one of the pillows to support his back. The other was wrapped in Sophie’s arms as she slept on the bed, still in her school uniform.

  His neck ached and his mouth was uncomfortably dry but he’d woken up in worse positions, in peaty trenches in the Falklands or under the blisteringly hot sun of the Libyan desert. A luxury junk was nothing to complain about. He used the bathroom, leaving the door open so he could keep an eye on the girl. He washed himself with a flannel, and shaved using a can of shaving foam and a disposable razor he’d brought with him, but then realized he’d forgotten his toothbrush. No matter, he’d gone without cleaning his teeth for weeks at a time before when out in the field. Toothpaste was a chemical signature that even humans could detect in the jungle or the desert. Soap, too. He swilled his mouth out with warm water and rubbed his teeth with the flannel to get rid of the sour taste of sleep.

  Sophie slept through his ablutions and didn’t even react when he opened the door and went into the galley to boil a pan full of water. He made a pot of coffee, put three sugars into hers and made it half and half with milk, the way he used to like it when he was a kid. His own was black and bitter, the way he liked it now. There had to be a moral there somewhere, he thought, as he carried the mugs into the bedroom.

  He put Sophie’s mug on the floor and gently shook her. She moaned quietly and hugged her pillow tightly. ‘Wake up, kid,’ he said. She murmured something in Chinese and curled up into a foetal ball. Howells checked his watch. It was five thirty-five and it would take him exactly twenty minutes to get the dinghy to the shore and get to the public telephone. He gathered her up in his arms, pillow and all, and carried her through to the toilet. There was just enough room for her to lie on the floor. He closed the door and locked it, then took her untouched coffee back into the galley and poured it down the sink.

  Simon Ng waited for the call in his study, sitting calmly behind his desk with his hands clasped on the blotter. His face was impassive, seemingly unworried; the only sign of tension was the fact that he was unconsciously toying with his wedding ring. His wife’s distress was more evident. She sat on the Chesterfield, her face pale and drawn and her hands trembling. Jill was rarely up at this time of the day, she’d always been a late riser and living with Ng meant that a nine-to-five existence wasn’t exactly at the top of life’s priorities. She’d dressed in an old pair of jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and her hair was dull and lifeless. Ng was immaculate as always in a dark blue double-breasted suit, a crisp white shirt and his Hong Kong Club tie. Dressed to kill, thought Jill ruefully, conscious of the fact that by letting her appearance slide she was causing her husband to lose face in front of his men. She tried to force a smile but Ng seemed not to notice as he sat there, deep in thought. On the left-hand side of the desk was a slim, brown leather briefcase. Ng hadn’t opened it but Jill knew it contained one million dollars.

  Next to her was Cheng. He was well-used to rising early; he was often up to watch the dawn and listen to his birds proclaiming dominance over the little territory they had. He too seemed untroubled, sitting with his back ramrod straight, his hands resting on his knees.

  Standing by the open door was a big bruiser of a man, well over six feet with thick forearms that were a tailor’s nightmare. His name was Lin Wing-wah, but for five years or more he’d been the triad’s Hung Kwan and everybody called him Elder Brother. He’d started off as a tough street fighter, a basic 49 Red Pole in charge of one of Ng’s Mong Kok fishball stalls. He’d spent some time as the Cho Hai official, in charge of organizing the triad’s rapidly expanding protection rackets, but when the Hung Kwan slot fell vacant Ng moved Lin into it. His sheer physical presence meant that Elder Brother was rarely disobeyed. His hair was parted in the middle and tied back in a small pigtail and he had a thin, drooping moustache under a nose that had been broken more times than was good for it. There was a black wart with a clump of hairs sprouting from it just above the middle of his lips. He called it his beauty spot. Lin was big and ugly, but Ng didn’t pay him to win beauty competitions. He was paid to be the triad’s strong-arm man and he did the job perfectly, and enthusiastically.

  Lin’s soldiers were split into a dozen fighting sections of between twenty and twenty-five men, and he had two of his best units waiting outside. There were four Mercedes in the drive in addition to Jill’s Porsche, Ng’s Daimler and the 560SEL that Manny drove. There were another six cars lined up on the single-track road leading from the compound. Lin was as prepared as he could be, but he still had no idea who the enemy was, or where the handover was to take place. Howells had told Ng that he wanted the money by seven o’clock and that he would call one hour earlier. That meant that Howells wanted the swap to take place within an hour’s drive from the house, but at this time of the morning that just about covered the whole of Hong Kong island, Kowloon and the New Territories. A map of the territory had been pinned to the wall opposite the window and though it was small in area Lin knew there were a million places to hide, even for a gweilo.

  There were only four of them in the study, but the room felt crowded, oppressive. They were careful to avoid eye contact with each other, like warring relatives at the reading of a will. Jill couldn’t understand it, the crisis shou
ld have brought them closer together but instead it seemed to have isolated them, locked each of them into their own private world. Right now what she needed most was physical contact with her husband, his arm around her, the reassuring feel of his flesh, but she was reluctant to show her feelings in front of his men. Worse than that, she was afraid that he would refuse to comfort her, that he would be embarrassed by her and reject her. She could see now the power he had, how hard and controlled he was when dealing with a crisis. It wasn’t the Simon she knew, despite the occasional smiles he threw her way. For the first time she was a little frightened of him. She had to be like him, strong and controlled. Public displays of hysteria wouldn’t get her anywhere.

  The phone rang and they all jumped, even Cheng. Ng let it ring, three times, four times, before he picked it up, so as not to appear to be too anxious. Lin slipped out of the room to pick up the extension.

  ‘You have the money?’ asked Howells.

  ‘Yes. I want to speak to my daughter.’

  ‘You can talk to her all you want once I have the money,’ said Howells. The line clicked as Lin picked up the phone in the lounge.

  ‘I want to talk to her now,’ said Ng, firmly.

  ‘She isn’t with me now. Once you have given me the money I will tell you where she is.’

  ‘How can I believe you?’

  ‘You have no choice. Now listen and listen carefully. I will only tell you once.’

  ‘I am listening.’

  ‘You know a place called Hebe Haven, about half an hour’s drive from your house?’

  ‘Yes, I know it.’

  ‘There is a pier there, an L-shaped pier.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are to park your car on the road and walk to the pier. To the right, as you face the sea, is a row of concrete steps that lead down to the water. I want you to wait there at exactly seven o’clock. Alone. With the money. If you are not there the girl will die. If you are not alone, the girl will die. If you do not have the money with you, the girl will die. Do you understand?’