Hungry Ghost (17 page)

‘No, nothing is wrong. But this is urgent, Mrs Ng.’

‘Well, if you leave your number I’ll ask him to phone you when he gets in.’

‘Actually, I’m just about to leave the office – better I call him. What time do you think he’ll be back?’

‘I don’t know,’ snapped Jill, and she slammed the receiver down.

All Howells heard was the click of the line going dead; he had no idea of the venom with which the woman had cut short the conversation or the way she cursed him afterwards, but he knew that she hadn’t been fooled.

Dugan winced as his phone rang. It was Petal. She wanted to see a movie and was Dugan free? Of course, he said, and they arranged to meet outside the cinema later on.

‘How’s your day?’ he asked. That morning she had left without waking him, leaving only an indentation in the pillow and her signature flower.

‘Busy,’ she said. ‘I’ve been tied up all day, that’s why I’m so late calling you.’

‘What is it you do for the Bank of China?’

‘Marketing,’ she said. ‘Promoting their financial services. Nothing exciting. I’m sure my work isn’t anywhere near as fun as yours. What case are you on today? That woman with the cheques?’

He was pleased and flattered that she took an interest in his work and that she’d bothered to remember what he was working on, but all the same he was aware that once again she’d given him the brush-off as soon as he’d asked about what she did. She’d done it pleasantly enough, but he still got the feeling that she was being evasive, that there was something she didn’t want him to know.

‘Yeah, but it’s an uphill struggle.’

‘Think of me and smile a bit,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tonight.’

After they’d said their goodbyes, Dugan sat with his head down over Lee Ling-ling’s file and rubbed his forehead with the palms of his hands. His headache was worse. He drained his fifth paper cup of coffee and was just getting to his feet for another visit to the vending machine when his phone rang again.

‘Pat?’ It was his sister.

‘Jill, how are you?’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

‘Lousy headache, lousy job, and I think the airconditioner in my bedroom is about to pack up. Nothing changes.’

‘Pat,’ she said, and Dugan could tell by the change in her tone that she was serious. ‘Pat, do you know an Inspector Holt?’

‘Only Nick, Nick with the wounded pride and the surgical collar.’

‘No, I don’t mean Nick. Another Inspector Holt. Is there anyone else on the force called Holt?’

‘Not that I know of. Why?’

‘I’ve just had a phone call from someone calling himself Holt, wanting to speak to Simon. He was very evasive when I asked him what he wanted.’

‘Are you sure he said he was a cop?’

‘He called himself Inspector Holt. But he wouldn’t give me his phone number.’

‘Let me check it out, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’ It wasn’t like Jill to get upset at something like that. Dugan was the worrier of the family, and over the years since Jill had married Simon Ng she’d grown increasingly more confident, so much so that occasionally the confidence crossed over to arrogance.

‘OK, Pat. Thanks. It’d put my mind at rest. It’s probably nothing.’

As soon as she hung up Dugan called Personnel and asked them to check their files. There was no Inspector Holt, other than Nick. He called the ICAC and they said they’d check and get back to him.

Jill Ng was sitting on her white leather sofa with the phone next to her, and even though she was waiting for her brother to call her she still jumped when it rang.

‘Pat?’ she said. It wasn’t, it was Miss Quinlan, the headmistress of Sophie’s school.

‘That’s not Mrs Ng, is it?’ asked the old woman, obviously confused.

‘Of course,’ said Jill, equally surprised. ‘Who did you expect?’

The headmistress stuttered and stumbled for words and for a fleeting moment Jill wondered if she’d been drinking.

‘To be honest, Mrs Ng, I’d heard that you and your husband had been involved in an accident. I was calling to see if there was anything I could do. I am rather surprised to find you at home. Inspector Holt said you were in the hospital.’

Jill’s heart froze at the name. She gripped the phone tightly. ‘Inspector Holt?’ she said. ‘He called you?’

‘No, Mrs Ng. He came round. To pick up Sophie.’

Jill sagged back into the leather sofa, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly.

The headmistress realized that something was badly wrong. Her voice began to tremble. ‘He showed me his identification, he was definitely a policeman, I know he was, I had no reason to . . .’ Her voice tailed off.

Jill’s voice was flat and emotionless when she spoke again. ‘Why didn’t you call me first, before you let him take my daughter?’

‘Mrs Ng, I tried to call, but the phone was engaged. I did try.’ The pleading whine annoyed Jill and she felt a red wave of anger.

‘You’re not fit to be in charge of children,’ she hissed. ‘You let a complete stranger take my child. Oh God, what have you done? What have you done, you old bitch?’

Miss Quinlan began to cry as she felt her world collapse around her. The sound of her tears made Jill hate the old woman even more, but she was so consumed with anger that words failed her. She quietly replaced the receiver, tears welling up in her eyes. She rose unsteadily to her feet and tottered over to a chrome and glass drinks trolley where, with shaking hands, she poured herself a tumbler full of brandy. She gulped it down, the alcohol making her eyes sting, and then refilled it.

She was finding it hard to breathe, as if there were steel bands around her chest and neck that were being slowly tightened. A thousand images of Sophie flashed through her mind: Sophie on Christmas Eve opening her presents, building sandcastles on the beach, riding piggy-back on Simon, playing pirates with Patrick.

She practically ran back to the phone and tapped out the number of her husband’s portable phone, tears streaming from her eyes.

Simon Ng was standing stock-still with his arms outstretched like a man crucified. Before him a small, portly old man with skin like an old chamois leather ran a tape measure around his waist.

‘Same as always,’ he nodded approvingly at his teenage assistant. He measured the length of the arms, the shoulders, and then he knelt down in front of Ng and ran the tape up his inside leg, calling out the measurements to the boy, who wrote them down in a small notebook.

They were in a poky room on the second floor of an ageing building in Tsim Sha Tsui, the walls lined with shelves piled with rolls of cloth. Ng was facing a large oak desk on which were stacks of cloth sample books and to his left was a tall, thin free-standing mirror in which he’d be able to examine the finished product. It took Mr Cheung five days to complete a made-to-measure suit, three days for favoured customers. Simon Ng had been taken to Mr Cheung by his father for his first suit the day before his fourteenth birthday. Mr Cheung never took longer than forty-eight hours with his order.

There were two men sitting on high-backed chairs, one by the door and one by the desk, solid-looking men with calloused hands and hard eyes, bodyguards who’d both been with him for many years. They held the rank of Red Pole in the triad, fighters who had proved their worth. Both had killed for Simon Ng.

The one by the door in a brown suit and wearing brown brogues that wouldn’t have been out of place on the feet of a Scottish landowner was Ricky Lam, forty-eight years old but with not a single wrinkle on his face. Lam had served Ng’s father for more than two decades and still paid regular visits to the old man on the Peak where they would relive old times over a pot of jasmine tea. In the inside pocket of his jacket he carried an ivory-handled stiletto and he had a throwing knife strapped to each arm. Lam could use all three with deadly accuracy, but he could just as easily kill with his bare hands and feet.

The man in the other chair was Lam’s cousin, on his mother’s side, a twenty-nine-year-old kung fu master called Franc Tse. If Ricky Lam represented the traditional triad way of life, then Franc Tse was positively New Wave. He wore pristine white Nike training shoes, skin-tight Levi jeans and an expensive dark brown Italian leather jacket, the sleeves pulled up almost to his elbows and the collar turned up. Whereas Lam’s hair was in the traditional mainland ‘pudding basin’ style, Tse’s was lightly permed and swept back off his forehead. Tucked into the back of his belt was a nunchakyu, two lengths of hard wood separated by a short piece of chain, a martial arts weapon derived from a rice flail. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, Tse would stand in the middle of his room and practise using the flail with his eyes closed, enjoying the hard slap of the wood against his hands and hearing it whistle through the air. He was an expert with the spear, the long knife, the three-section staff and the throwing stars, but the nunchakyu was his favourite.

Both men were fiercely loyal to Simon Ng, and would have had no hesitation in giving up their lives for him, or for his family. Ng in turn trusted them completely. It was a relationship that went far beyond employer–employee, or master and servant; it was bound up with the oaths each had sworn to the triad, the triad that existed before them and would exist long after they were gone from the world. Each had sworn a blood oath to put the triad and its members before family, before friends, before life itself, and each knew they had a part to play in the triad. Lam’s and Tse’s role was to protect the Dragon Head, Simon Ng. And they would – to the death.

Ng had left his portable phone on the desk and he stepped around Mr Cheung to pick it up when it warbled. It was Jill.

‘Simon?’

He wanted to chide her for asking the obvious, but he could tell from the tone that something was wrong. Badly wrong. He listened intently as she told him about the phone calls from the gweilo and the schoolteacher.

‘Simon, what’s happening?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. His mind was racing, his brow furrowed, and his two bodyguards fidgeted, picking up his nervousness. Even Mr Cheung walked over to his rolls of cloth and pretended to study them. His assistant stood at Ng’s elbow openly listening, until Mr Cheung angrily waved him away with a flick of his tape measure.

‘I’m coming home now, stay there until I get back,’ he said. ‘Don’t ring anyone, don’t talk to anyone. And don’t answer the phone; if Sophie has been kidnapped it will be better if I speak to them. Do you understand?’

Jill didn’t answer. All Ng could hear were her sobs.

‘Jill,’ he hissed. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ she said eventually.

Ng broke the connection and weighed the phone in the palm of his hand as his men looked on anxiously. First things first – he had to limit the damage. He called the school and spoke to the headmistress, who was every bit as distraught as Jill. He calmly explained that there had been a misunderstanding, that the police had indeed been asked to collect Sophie from school, that it was Ng’s grandfather who had been hurt in a car accident, and that Sophie was now back with the family at the hospital.

‘It was all my fault, I’m afraid, Miss Quinlan,’ said Ng. ‘I went straight to the hospital and phoned a friend in the force asking them to fetch Sophie before I could get hold of my wife. She didn’t know my father was in hospital and she seems to have panicked when you spoke to her. She feels very badly about the way she spoke to you, but I’m sure you understand how upset she was.’

The relief in her voice was obvious now that the old woman believed that her job and her pension and her conscience were safe, but Ng wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that she was convinced by his story. With any luck she’d just let it lie and wouldn’t contact the police.

Ng realized Lam and Tse were looking at him like dogs waiting to be thrown a bone. He nodded curtly. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, picking up his jacket. ‘Mr Cheung, I am afraid I must cut short the fitting.’

Mr Cheung slung his tape measure around his neck and cupped his hands together in front of his chest, bobbing his head backward and forward. ‘Not at all, not at all, not at all,’ he chanted, following on Ng’s heels as the three triads left his shop.

Ng waited on the pavement, Lam watching his back as Tse stepped into the road and waved at the driver of their car. He was another old retainer, Hui Ying-chuen, who still insisted on wearing an old chauffeur’s cap that Ng’s father had given him thirty years ago. There was no need for Tse to wave; Hui wasn’t the sort of driver to sit at the wheel reading a racing paper or to pop into a tea house to yam cha. He already had the Daimler in gear and glided to a halt so that the rear passenger door was exactly opposite Ng. Tse opened the door for Ng and then slid in beside him while Lam took the front seat, eyes ever watchful.

Hui drove quickly but smoothly, his liver-spotted and wrinkled hands light on the wheel and deft with the gear stick. The Daimler was the only one of Ng’s five cars not to have automatic transmission, in deference to the old driver who’d never managed to get the hang of driving without a clutch. The four drove in silence, Hui because he never spoke unless spoken to, Tse and Lam because they knew that during periods of stress their boss often retreated into himself, deep in thought while he considered all his options.

The gates to the compound were already open as they arrived and Jill was at the front door of the house to greet them, her face stained with tears, her eyes red. She threw herself at her husband and hugged him hard. ‘What are we going to do?’ she wailed.

He put his hands on either side of her face and held her in front of him. Her lower lip was trembling and she tried to stop it by gently biting down. ‘We’re going to start by keeping calm,’ he said evenly. ‘We’re not going to help Sophie by crying. Come with me.’ He put his arm around her shaking shoulders and led her through the front door and into the lounge. One of the dogs, he couldn’t remember its name, sniffed at Jill’s legs in puzzlement and Ng glared at it until it backed away, its tail twitching between its legs. He sat her down on the sofa and stood over her so that he had to raise her head up to see him. ‘Tell me again what happened.’