Lin stood for a moment in front of the old man looking down on his bald head, and then he squatted down, resting his arms on his knees, his backside just a couple of inches from the ground. It put his head lower than Cheng’s, and accorded him the respect his age and his position warranted. Lin hadn’t adopted such a position for many years; it was a youngster’s way of resting, and his knees shrieked with pain and his calf muscles ached but his face remained impassive.
Cheng kept his eyes on the caged bird as he spoke. ‘What happened, Wah-tsai?’
The old man spoke to him the same way now that he had more than twenty years ago, using the diminutive of his name. Cheng didn’t do it to belittle Lin, or to humiliate him; it reflected the length of time they’d known each other and that theirs was still very much a teacher–pupil relationship. There was a lot Lin still had to learn from Master Cheng if he was ever to get the chance of taking on the mantle of Lung Tau.
‘I have failed, Master Cheng,’ Lin said softly.
‘Tell me what happened,’ replied Cheng, his eyes still on the bird. Lin told him in a gentle voice that belied his strength and size.
When he finished the old man carefully placed the cage on a small rosewood table at the side of the door, in the shade of one of the palm trees. He took a small brass watering can and poured a trickle of water into the bird’s drinking dish, a reward for a song well sung. The bird dipped its beak into the fresh water then threw back its head and swallowed, shaking with pleasure.
‘I shall tell his father,’ Cheng said finally. ‘You must tell his brother. His brother must come back.’
‘He will take charge?’ asked Lin. He wanted to lead the triad so badly that he could taste it, but he knew that it was not his time yet. And he also knew that the worst possible thing would be to push himself forward. Such audacity could easily backfire, fatally. He had seen it happen before.
‘That will be up to his father. But that does not matter. He must be here. Have you told his wife?’
‘I have.’
‘How did she take it?’
Lin was going to say ‘like a gweipor’ but he bit back the words. The bond between Master Cheng and Simon Ng was almost as strong as that between parent and child and unlike Lin the old man’s respect and affection included Ng’s wife and child. ‘Not very well, Master Cheng.’
Cheng nodded thoughtfully. ‘She must be watched, Wah-tsai. Her brother is a policeman and she may be tempted to seek his help.’
‘It will be done, Master Cheng.’
‘We must look for the gweilo. Start with the boats in Hebe Haven, though I do not believe he will be stupid enough to remain there. And send one of your more tactful Grass Sandals around to speak to the headmistress at the girl’s school. She saw the gweilo and we need a description. Once we know what he looks like we should begin to check all the hotels. At the moment that is all we can do.’
‘Yes, Master Cheng.’ Lin straightened his legs with a grunt and backed away from the old man, taking two steps before turning away. As he walked down the path he could hear the old man talking quietly, either to himself or to one of his beloved birds. Lin couldn’t tell which, and he knew it would be impolite to turn and look. He went back to the house to use the phone.
Howells waited until the evening sky darkened before he left the junk. Sophie had demanded that she be allowed to shower and Howells stood guard outside the door to the small shower cubicle until she’d finished. Twice she accused him of peeping and she stayed there until she’d dried herself and dressed again. She wanted to know if he’d get her some clean clothes and he told her that she wouldn’t be needing them because she’d soon be going home. He made the girl a cheese sandwich and gave it to her as he locked her in the toilet.
‘How long are you going to be?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But you’ll be going home soon, I promise. I’ll call your mother and she’ll come and get you. Keep quiet, OK?’
‘OK,’ she said, taking the sandwich. ‘Are you a kidnapper?’ she asked, her eyes wide.
‘I suppose so,’ he said.
‘So if you’re a kidnapper, what am I?’ she asked seriously.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what do you call someone who has been kidnapped?’
‘A victim,’ said Howells, trying to close the door. She put up her small hand and held it open, looking up at him.
‘I’m tired of being a victim,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to go home.’
‘I know,’ said Howells. ‘You’re not going to be a victim for much longer. Trust me.’
‘OK, I will,’ she said, letting go of the door and allowing him to close and lock it.
Howells hadn’t decided what he’d do with Sophie when it was over. It would be a simple matter to phone Ng’s house and tell them where she was. Or it would be just as easy to kill her. He didn’t really care, either way.
He picked up an empty shopping bag from the galley, carried it to the back of the junk and lowered himself down into the boat. It was so dark that he couldn’t see the pier or the beach, so he knew that he couldn’t be seen from the shore, but even so he rowed the boat across to Marina Cove rather than using the outboard, slowly and taking care not to splash.
He guided the boat in among the luxury yachts moored at the marina and tied it up. Once on land he walked slowly, swinging the bag and whistling to himself. The triads would be there, he was sure, and there was no point in trying to sneak past. His best bet was to be out in the open, just a gweilo sailor going out for provisions. There were several dozen people walking along the marina, and many more sitting on their boats; the triads couldn’t stop everyone. He’d left the car at the marina’s car park where there were at least fifty others, and he headed towards it. A young man in a faded T-shirt and cut off jeans was filming his pretty, bra-less girlfriend with a small, hand-held video camera as she leaned on a railing at the water’s edge. Howells turned to look at her as he walked past, partly to shield his face from the lens but also because he got a good feeling seeing her breasts bouncing under her thin cotton top. She smiled at him as she realized he was looking at her and he grinned back.
The couple with the dog were still there, walking slowly by the moored yachts, occasionally stopping to peer through the portholes. God knows what they thought they were looking for, thought Howells. Wet air tanks and a schoolgirl tied to the bed, no doubt. He reached the car and threw the shopping bag on to the back seat before driving off.
As he drove off he noticed two men in a dirty white Honda Civic, both wearing dark glasses. One of them had a notebook and he started scribbling as Howells turned onto the main road and headed back to Tsim Sha Tsui. They were obviously clocking all the cars that left, and that meant they’d probably be tracing them too. It wouldn’t be too long before they tracked down the hire company and it was a short step from there to the Holiday Inn and room 426. No sweat, he was checking out anyway.
Jill Ng sat on the small brass-framed bed with the floppy grey and white Old English Sheepdog on her lap and used one of its ears to wipe her tears. She was in Sophie’s bedroom, surrounded by her things, her clothes, her toys, her books. Her Garfield telephone crouched on the bedside table, ready to spring. A poster of a bare-chested rock band that her father had said was too revealing for a girl her age but which she’d begged and pleaded to be allowed to pin on her wall. Her school books piled high, unopened, on her child’s size desk. Jill’s mind was in turmoil, a jumble of thoughts of her husband and daughter, flashes of the good times, the holidays, the Christmas present openings, the birthdays, the rows, the arguments, the tears.
There was a bottle of tablets next to Garfield, green ones that the doctor had given her to treat the depression that had hit her like a tidal wave during the weeks after Sophie’s birth. She’d kept them hidden at the back of the bathroom cabinet like an unsavoury secret, a memory that she was ashamed of but which couldn’t be banished. Next to the tablets was a glass of
brandy, half finished. She’d used the alcohol to wash down two of the tablets and now she sat and waited for the combination of alcohol and chemicals to numb the pain and allow her to fall into the oblivion of sleep.
Outside the bedroom door sat Rose, squatting on the floor with her back against the wall. She too was crying.
Howells delivered the car back to the hotel and checked out, settling his account in cash. He had no fear at all of being traced as he’d given Donaldson’s name and passport details. The trail stopped dead at the Holiday Inn. He walked along Salisbury Road past the Regent Hotel on his left, the grand old Peninsula on his right, to the Star Ferry terminal. An old man wearing blue and white striped pyjamas and a baggy green pullover was selling English newspapers and he stopped to buy a Times. It was only one day old. He paid the man and dropped a dollar coin into the turnstile at the entrance to the ferry terminal and didn’t bother collecting his change. The old lady in a blue patterned trouser suit behind him pocketed the unwanted cents without a thought.
He sat in the middle of the ageing ferry on a hard wooden bench seat, listening to the comforting throb of the engines below. Most of the skyscrapers in the island’s business district had huge neon advertising signs on the top. Even the futuristic HongKong and Shanghai Bank building, looking for all the world like a Ford Cortina radiator, had the bank’s red and white hexagonal logo at its summit. Not one of them was flashing as Kai Tak airport was just across the harbour and it was a difficult enough approach without the hassle of competition for the landing lights.
A ferryman in a dark blue sailor suit and black plastic sandals stood by the upraised ramp that allowed passengers on and off, idly running a thick, hemp rope through his grubby hands. He cleared his throat loudly and spat noisily into the waves.
Howells flicked through the paper. It was the first English newspaper he’d read in more than two years, but there was nothing in it that interested him. The names of the politicians were the same, so were the policies and the rhetoric. Inflation was under control, the pound was strong, the peasants weren’t revolting, all was well with the world. None of it mattered to Howells any more. All he cared about was working again, to be given the chance to show what he could do, what he’d been trained for.
He left the paper, half-read, on the bench when he left the ferry. The sailor took it and put it with his collection in his locker. Later that night they would be back on sale.
Howells caught a taxi to the Hilton, where he booked in under his own name. The young man behind the reception desk gave him a big toothy smile and asked how Mr Howells would be settling his account and when Mr Howells said it would be cash the smile tightened a smidgen and he asked for a deposit. The Hilton was used to businessmen and plastic cards, but Howells had plenty of yellow thousand dollar notes left, more than enough to win another gleaming smile.
Howells turned down the offer of a bellboy to show him up to his room. It was on the tenth floor, and not much different from the one he had just checked out of with a colour television, minibar, a big double bed and an uninspiring painting on the wall. It could have been a hotel room anywhere in the world, Hilton circa late 1980s.
It was nine o’clock at night, which meant it was one o’clock in London, lunchtime for the hundreds of thousands of the capital’s bureaucrats – not that it would matter. Grey never answered the phone number he gave his agents, or associates as he preferred to call them. Their calls were always routed through to an answering machine which he religiously checked every hour, either manually or with a small coded bleeper that he carried which allowed him to listen to the machine’s tape from a phone anywhere in the world. Howells rang through and the machine clicked on after the fourth ring. He heard Grey’s sombre voice repeat the number and then there was a high-pitched tone, the signal to talk.
Howells gave his name, the date and time, and said simply that the contract had been signed and that he was now at the Hilton Hotel awaiting further instructions, and then rang off. All that was left to do now was to wait. He thought of calling Mrs Ng and telling her where her daughter was, but decided against it. It would do the girl no harm to spend another night on board the junk, and it would keep the triads doubly occupied, if nothing else. He poured himself a lager from the bar and lay on the bed watching television. He chuckled through an old episode of The Man from Uncle, a boyish Ilya Kuryakin and an earnest Napoleon Solo blowing away THRUSH agents with no blood and no recoil from the guns.
Grey was in his office on the ninth floor of Century House when the phone rang, but he made no move to answer it. He sat in his big, black leather swivel chair, his fingers steepled under his chin and listened carefully as Howells dictated his message. When the machine clicked off, he reached for the black push-button phone that squatted next to the brass-framed photograph of his wife, standing in the garden with a basket full of cut roses, the dogs at her heels. He had the number ready on a slip of paper and he punched out the digits that would connect him to Hong Kong.
He waited for the electronic impulses to travel up to the satellite way out in space and back to the few square miles of British soil on the rump of Southern China where it was relayed to an office in the Central business district, to an office with cheap teak-veneered furniture and an answering machine not unlike his own.
A man’s voice, guttural with a heavy Chinese accent, carefully repeated the number in English and then the tone signalled that it was time to leave a message.
Grey took a deep breath and in a level voice passed what he knew would be the death sentence for the man he had sent to Hong Kong. ‘Geoff Howells,’ he said. ‘Hilton Hotel.’ Then he slowly spelled out the name and hung up.
He had never met the assassin who would get the message, and he hoped he never would. All he knew was that the assassin was called Hua-fan, that Hua-fan had a one hundred per cent success rate and that when Hua-fan’s work was done and Howells was dead then the circle would be closed. Strange name for an assassin, he thought. Hua-fan. Chinese for flower petal.
Petal had dressed all in black, and she looked very, very sexy. She had on a pair of cotton trousers that ballooned out over her hips and tapered down to her ankles, like something out of the Arabian Nights. Her top was a close-fitting silk shirt that clung to her like a second skin, the collar buttoned up tight and held in place with a man’s black bow tie. Round her waist hung a loose, thick leather belt. The outfit effectively covered every inch of skin below her neck, except for her tiny hands, and what made it all the more sexy was that Dugan knew every inch of her body underneath the clothing – it was as if her body was a secret that she allowed him alone to share. As she walked across the bar to where he was standing, he could see heads turning to watch, attracted by the sway of her hips, the glossy hair and the achingly pretty face, but it was Dugan she slept with, Dugan that she undressed for.
He could see some of the heads looking to see who she was there to meet, and Dugan stood taller and sucked in his gut. Without thinking, he raised his hand to smooth down his hair.
‘Hi,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Been waiting long?’
‘A lifetime,’ he said, and he was only half joking. ‘What do you feel like?’
‘Just a Perrier water,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the beginnings of a headache.’
Dugan ordered her drink and then led her over to the table he’d booked earlier. He pulled the chair out for her and pushed it in as she sat down. Dugan marvelled at the way she brought out the gentleman in him when they were in public, and brought out the animal in him when they were in bed. A waiter came over with two large glossy cardboard menus. Petal ordered a cheeseburger with French fries and Dugan asked for Hainan Chicken – pieces of cold chicken with a selection of spicy sauces, rice and soup. There was nothing unusual in the gweilo choosing from the Chinese menu while the local girl opted for Western food, it happened all the time to Dugan. The girls were trying to prove how modern, how westernized they were, while Dugan simply pref
erred to eat eastern food.
‘Why so late in the office?’ she asked, both hands clasped around the glass of sparkling water. She looked nervous, thought Dugan. Probably the headache.
‘A couple of cases that need tidying up, nothing much. One of them comes to court next week so I had to get all the paperwork out of the way. Really boring stuff, but it has to be done.’
‘You don’t like your job, do you?’
Dugan shrugged. ‘It’s OK. But I’d rather be doing real policework, rather than just shuffling papers. Life is funny, isn’t it? We spend almost one third of our lives doing jobs we don’t particularly like, and another one third asleep. That means we only do what we really want to do for one third of our lives, and into that time we have to cram eating, washing, shopping, cleaning the house. Life is so short, Petal. Too short to fill with things we don’t enjoy. Don’t you think?’
‘At least you can change your life, Pat. You can switch jobs, or you can always go back to England.’
‘Sure, but I still have to work. But what can I do? No work, no money. And Hong Kong is the last place in the world to be without money. That’s what makes the place tick. I wish I’d been born rich.’
‘You’re not poor, not by any means.’ She reached up and touched his cheek. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’ She pinched the lobe of his ear, hard.
‘Ouch,’ he said, surprised at the pain, but at the same time excited by it.
Hungry Ghost Page 18
