The Borrowed

by Chan Ho-Kei

  ‘Looks like it.’ Lok pulled out the disc and examined both sides. It was a standard writable CD, unmarked, its surface wiped clean of fingerprints.

  ‘Ah Gut, you’re better with computer stuff.’ Lok handed the CD over.

  ‘There’s just one file.’ Ah Gut pointed at the folder that appeared on his screen. The file was called ‘movie.avi’, created that day at 6.32 a.m.

  ‘Open it,’ said Lok.

  Ah Gut started the player and dragged the file into it. The indicator showed the clip was three minutes twenty-eight seconds long.

  A pitch-black screen, then after two seconds, a street. Night-time. No one around, just boarded-up worksites and streetlamps. Not even a single car, and just one pedestrian, seen from the back.

  ‘Looks like Jordan Road, near Ferry Street,’ Mary said, indicating a corner of the screen. West of Jordan Road was the Kowloon West reclamation project – a massive public works undertaking to create almost a thousand acres of new waterfront property. Numerous construction works were in progress at the moment, and it was predicted that when complete, these would turn Kowloon West into a bustling district. In front of the reclamation project was Jordan Road Ferry Pier, once Kowloon’s busiest transport hub.

  ‘No sound, Ah Gut?’ asked Lok.

  ‘Image only.’ Ah Gut clicked on ‘About this document’ to show it had no sound files.

  The camera was following the walker, a woman in a voluminous jacket, shouldering an enormous bag. Long black hair flowed from underneath her woollen cap. She wasn’t very tall, and walked slowly. Yellowish streetlight made it impossible to tell the colour of her clothes.

  ‘What is this, amateur porn?’ joked Cheung, a young officer.

  Lok was about to snap at him when the woman on the screen suddenly stopped and looked nervously to her left. She seemed startled by some sound.

  Seeing her profile for the first time, Lok felt a rush of blood to his head. He suddenly realized what he was about to see.

  ‘That’s Candy Ton!’ Ah Gut had recognized her too.

  Now everything started happening very fast. Candy Ton began running, disappearing off the right side of the screen. The camera operator seemed agitated too, and the frame wobbled before moving to the left, where four men in masks, baseball caps and heavy-duty gloves were pursuing Candy, wielding metal pipes and cleavers. They sprinted across the screen from left to right. The camera paused a second, then jolted around as it tried to catch up with them.

  Rounding a corner, the four men were closing on Candy. The shortest one was also the fastest, and got to her first, reaching out to grab her collar. Unexpectedly, she lashed out and caught her attacker right in the face with her fist. The short man slumped on the ground, clutching his nose. Candy got away, but now the other three were just a few metres behind her.

  The camera showed that there was no one else around, and the sidewalk ahead led only towards a high footbridge. Candy rushed towards it. The camera was some distance away, but happened to be at just the right angle to capture her expression as she glanced back in terror. She clambered up the stairs, her face twisted in the fear and panic of someone facing death. She almost fell but managed to grab the handrail. Her shoulder bag had disappeared – she must have dropped it, but there was no time to think of that, because in those few seconds, the men had arrived at the stairs too.

  All five people now disappeared behind the bridge railings, so Lok and his team could only watch agitatedly until the cameraperson got there too – but the image stopped at the stairs, instead of climbing them.

  ‘Why’s he stopping?’ cried Mary.

  ‘I think... he got distracted by something?’ Ah Gut didn’t take his eyes from the screen.

  The camera now swerved to the side – and what came next terrified all of them.

  Something lay on the sidewalk by the bridge. The watchers couldn’t tell what it was at first. They didn’t connect this thing to the idea of ‘Candy Ton’, because it was splayed at such an odd angle, arms clutching weirdly at the ground, one leg twisted up to the waist. The head, still in its woollen hat, hair straggling all over, was twisted to one side, and a dark liquid was oozing from it.

  Most terrifyingly, that broken body spasmed a few times before finally growing still.

  ‘Did... did she fall?’ gasped Cheung.

  ‘Maybe she was pushed?’ Ah Gut spoke slowly, trying to hide his unease.

  The bridge was about three storeys high, and to fall head first from it would mean almost certain death.

  Now the camera turned upwards, and two figures came into view over the railings, one of them clutching a metal bat. The other one turned to look straight into the lens.

  ‘That’s done it,’ muttered Ah Gut.

  The image started shaking violently, jerking between sky, ground, streetlamp and bridge. The watcher was running for his life, not even stopping to turn off the camera. About half a minute later, the camera was inside a car – he’d made it.

  And with that, the screen went dark. Three minutes and twenty-eight seconds.

  ‘Candy Ton... killed?’ Mary stammered.

  ‘Ah Gut, notify the uniforms to seal off the overhead bridge at Jordan and Lin Cheung Road, and send a forensics team to the site. Mary, stay in the office – you’ll be in charge of comms. Everyone else, come with me.’ Lok had to suppress his rage to give these orders calmly. He hadn’t felt so angry in a long time. Although he couldn’t stand celebrities like Candy Ton, no defenceless person deserved to be murdered by four thugs like that.

  It wasn’t far to the scene, and they arrived a few minutes later. In the car, Lok tried to clear his mind and focus on the investigation.

  ‘The cameraman was probably some paparazzo,’ said Lok. ‘Following her in the hopes of digging up more dirt about Eric Yeung.’

  ‘And he witnessed a murder instead, but didn’t want to get involved, so just sent us the footage?’ said Ah Gut.

  ‘Probably.’ Lok wrinkled his brow. ‘No sound, so I’d guess print media. He’d have hoped a few freeze frames might be worth some cash.’ Something along the lines of ‘Eric Yeung beaten up while sultry Candy Ton smirks’ or ‘Candy Ton and Boss Chor’s secret rendezvous’ would do wonders for sales.

  ‘Mary says no one in the mail room remembers when this came in,’ reported Cheung, coming off the phone.

  ‘It might be one of those journalists who’re always outside the precinct trying to get a scoop,’ said Ah Gut. ‘They could have asked a crime reporter to drop it off, or maybe someone who’d recently transferred from crime to entertainment.’

  ‘We can look into that later. IDing the cameraman isn’t a priority,’ said Lok.

  ‘No one’s phoned in a report – so did they move the body?’

  ‘No idea. But if they’ve covered their tracks, that’ll make things harder for us...’

  The look on Candy Ton’s face in the video had given Lok a bad feeling. Yam Tak-ngok had given orders for his men not to do anything, because he’d take care of this on his own – was he thinking: ‘You’ve beaten up my son, so I’ll take it out on your girl?’ Attacking this singer would have meant Uncle Ngok could keep his dignity and settle the score without provoking a direct conflict with Boss Chor.

  But murder was another matter.

  Had the attack gone wrong? Maybe the intention had only been to scare her, but she’d panicked and leapt over the railing.

  The team arrived at the deserted site. An assault vehicle and eight uniforms had arrived and were securing the area, even though there was no one around.

  Lok glanced at his watch. The incident had taken place twelve hours ago at most. There might still be some evidence left.

  He and Ah Gut walked to the spot where the corpse had lain. No obvious traces of blood, but if someone had swabbed the area with water, it would have dried in a few hours in the windy weather they’d been having. He ordered forensics to investigate, then started climbing – nothing out of the ordinary on stairs or bridge. T
he two men walked to the spot they guessed Candy Ton had fallen from, looking for blood or other marks on the railing.

  ‘The criminals were wearing gloves, so probably no fingerprints,’ said Ah Gut.

  Lok knelt to examine the underside of the railing. ‘Candy wasn’t wearing gloves, and if we can find her prints, we’ll know if she jumped or was pushed – the difference between murder and manslaughter.’

  Leaving an evidence marker, Lok continued to the other end of the bridge. He couldn’t think of any reason for her to jump, unless her pursuers had caught up with her, or if she’d been surrounded. The sidewalk ended at the bridge, so they’d have known she’d go up – and if they’d set others in wait at the other end, she’d have been trapped.

  ‘Commander! They’ve found something!’ shouted one of the forensics officers from below.

  When Ah Gut and Lok got back down, the officer was pointing at the ground. ‘Blood traces – lots of them.’

  They’d sprayed luminol across the ground, revealing a patch roughly fifty by thirty centimetres, just where you’d expect from the video.

  ‘So much blood – she must have been badly injured. If she fell from above, there’s probably no hope that she survived,’ added the officer.

  ‘See if you can find other bloodstains. I want to know where the victim was moved – whether she was alive or dead,’ said Lok.

  ‘Commander.’ Cheung approached. ‘We retraced her steps, and found something.’

  Lok followed him to the first street corner the cameraperson had tailed her to. There was a construction site to one side, and some roadworks surrounded by barriers and steel boards.

  ‘Here.’ Cheung pointed into a hole about a metre deep. In a corner, next to some water pipes and electric cables shrouded in canvas, was a shoulder bag, the colour of tea. It looked exactly like the one in the video.

  After photographing it in situ, they hauled it up. The bag contained make-up, snacks, a notebook, some clothes, a cellphone and a wallet. Lok opened the latter and found an ID card with Candy Ton’s name and photo.

  ‘I guess the roughs didn’t notice she’d dropped her bag,’ said Ah Gut. ‘It probably slipped off her shoulder as she turned the corner, and she didn’t have time to stop to get it back.’

  ‘Or she may have thrown it off to run faster,’ said Cheung.

  ‘However it happened, at least we’ve confirmed the victim’s identity.’ Lok stuffed the wallet back into the bag, and looked at the phone. Her last call had been received at 10.20 p.m., from ‘Office’, lasting a minute and twelve seconds. Every call before that was from either ‘Agent’ or ‘Office’ – the only two numbers in her address book. There were no saved texts.

  ‘Ah Gut, check this call log with the provider.’ Lok handed over the phone.

  ‘Since the last call’s from “Office”, why not just go straight to Starry Night?’

  ‘What if she deleted other call records?’

  ‘Are you saying...’

  ‘Just in case.’

  What Lok couldn’t understand was why Candy Ton had been here in the first place, in the middle of the night. Jordan Road was a construction site, and there were no nightclubs around here, nor even any proper transport. As a public figure, she could have got anywhere she wanted by cab, or had her agent drive her, yet she had been walking alone in this desolate landscape. Lok suspected she’d been summoned to some kind of secret meeting – which meant she might have got a call beforehand.

  For there to be only two numbers in her phone, Candy must have been very isolated, or else in the habit of erasing her call log. Entertainment reporters had been known to steal stars’ phones to glean what they could from the calls and texts: affairs, arguments, all could be stir-fried into articles. It wasn’t unusual for a cautious celebrity to make sure their phone didn’t give anything away.

  Who’d summoned Candy Ton to a midnight meeting? One that turned out to be a trap.

  The answer flashed into Lok’s mind: Eric Yeung.

  But if he’d asked her, would she have come? Surely she’d have been more careful than that, especially knowing her boss was responsible for him being beaten up.

  Unless she was being threatened, and had no choice.

  Lok shook his head and stepped back from that line of thought. He’d gone too far into his own mind. There was limited information at his disposal, and he needed to analyse it more deeply before drawing any conclusions.

  After a thorough search, the Crime Unit returned to the office and got to work investigating the persons involved, as well as searching for potential witnesses, starting at Jordan Road and working outwards. Lok personally visited Starry Night, where Candy Ton’s agent said he hadn’t heard from his client that day, and that she was probably resting at home. After trying her home number and getting no response, and then identifying the bag Lok held as Candy’s, he grew anxious. They headed to Candy’s apartment in Kwun Tong, which was small enough that Lok could see at a glance nothing was out of place. The bed and empty bin suggested she hadn’t been home that night, though the agent said he’d driven her home around eleven.

  ‘Did you actually see her enter the building?’

  ‘Well, no... I dropped her off at the car park and left.’ He furrowed his brow, as if he was realizing what trouble he was in. Lok didn’t tell him about the video. He felt this man was probably more worried about explaining himself to Boss Chor than about Candy’s safety.

  Lok went to the building’s management office and requested security camera footage of the main entrance and elevator, but a quick scan showed no sign of Candy. If the agent was telling the truth, that meant she hadn’t gone home after getting out of his car, but had headed straight for her appointment on Jordan Road.

  So she didn’t want him to know about this meeting? thought Lok.

  The agent said that Candy had seemed perfectly normal last night. She was quite a taciturn character and didn’t show much emotion – the sort of star who kept her head down and worked hard.

  ‘She’s down-to-earth, not like most girls her age, dreaming of stardom,’ he added.

  ‘And her family?’

  ‘I don’t think she has one,’ said the agent vaguely.

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘Candy never talks about her personal life, only that her family’s all gone.’

  ‘Then who was her guardian? She joined Starry Night three years ago, when she was just fourteen. She’d have needed an adult’s consent.’

  ‘I... I don’t know. Sir, I just work here. The boss asked me to be her agent, and I didn’t ask too many questions.’

  So that’s how it was. Inspector Lok understood this man’s predicament. Candy Ton might have been a runaway, and Boss Chor didn’t seem like the sort of chap who’d bother with red tape.

  Having found no clues at Candy’s apartment, Lok returned to the police station. The press had only been told that someone had fallen from a bridge at Jordan Road the night before, that Triads might be involved and investigations were under way. Forensics said Candy’s fingerprints weren’t on the railing, so she might have been thrown over. And the blood traces stopped abruptly at the side of the road, suggesting the criminals had taken away the corpse – or the dying woman – in a car.

  ‘Why move the body?’ asked Mary. ‘Triads murder in order to intimidate – they don’t usually try to conceal their killings.’

  ‘That means they had a different motive,’ said Cheung. ‘Maybe the boss only told them to “send his regards” to Ms Ton, but the ruffians got carried away and accidentally killed her?’

  ‘Even if it was a mistake, why take away the corpse?’

  ‘Because they knew they were in trouble,’ answered Ah Gut. ‘Think about it, Candy Ton was quite possibly Boss Chor’s mistress. If Uncle Ngok wanted revenge, it’d be along the lines of kidnapping her and taking nude photos, that sort of thing. Murder is different – there’s no coming back from that. In the underworld, if your men accidentally kill one of m
y people, then it has to be a life for a life. Those thugs would have feared getting killed in turn, but if they concealed the body, then she’d just be “missing”, and there’d be no death to be avenged, and Hung-yi would have no reason to demand their heads from Hing-chung-wo.’

  ‘But someone taped the whole thing...’ mumbled Mary, still trying to think it through.

  ‘In any case, this isn’t going to be easy,’ said Ah Gut.

  Inspector Lok listened in silence to his team’s discussion. Ah Gut’s view was logical, but something about it felt wrong.

  *

  ‘Commander, big trouble,’ said Ah Gut the next morning, striding agitatedly into the inner office, where Lok sat staring at the photographs and relationship webs on his noticeboard. He was pointing outside, towards the main office.

  Once again, the entire team was gathered around Ah Gut’s desk, animatedly discussing the video of Candy Ton’s attack which was playing on the screen.

  ‘What’s up, did you find something new in the footage?’

  ‘No,’ said Ah Gut, gesturing at the images. ‘This isn’t the CD we got yesterday. Someone’s put the video on the web.’

  4

  THE FOOTAGE FIRST surfaced on one of Hong Kong’s anonymous chat boards. Someone posted a link that led to a free web-hosting service with the video on its server.

  The initial responses were ‘What kind of trailer is this?’, ‘Isn’t that Candy Ton?’ and ‘What a disgusting film.’ But when someone pointed out that a variety show Candy was due to guest-star on had been cancelled at the last minute, people began to realize this might be the real thing. Some still insisted it must be a promotional stunt, but others retorted, ‘Candy Ton’s always been a terrible actress – remember how that three-year-old was better than her in Autumn Sonata? If she could pull something like this off, she’d have won an award by now.’

  This point of view received widespread support. The woman running for her life in the video was clearly not faking it. Some people recalled seeing Ms Ton at an event that weekend wearing a jacket and hat just like that, and so the online discussion moved on from ‘Is that really Candy Ton?’ to ‘What happened to Candy Ton?’ Many of the participants were worried fans. Meanwhile, the video became generally accepted as genuine after the chat board’s moderators deleted the entire thread. Of course, by this time the video had been downloaded multiple times, and reposted on other sites.