Hungry Ghost (22 page)

Even before the knife rose in the water in Ng’s fist, Howells knew with a tremor of anticipation what was going to happen, and he moved closer. The knife fell again and again as Ng hacked away at the wrist that was keeping him prisoner, until the water was cloudy with his blood. Howells groaned to himself as he watched.

‘Can you see anything?’ asked Lin. The men all shook their heads. There were four of them in the wooden dinghy, two rowing while Lin and Kenny Suen knelt at the prow looking down into the water. There were two other rowing boats moving clumsily and noisily through the water in a ‘V’ formation, gradually moving further and further apart as they splashed away from the ramshackle wooden pier. Out in the bay the two motor launches carved lines through the water, but Lin could see that they were going too fast to be of any use. He called them up on his radio and told them to shut off their engines and drift with the tide.

‘How long have they been under?’ Lin asked.

Suen checked his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said.

‘Anyone know how long a cylinder of air lasts?’ said Lin.

Nobody did, and Lin knew it didn’t matter anyway. Nobody had seen the diver so they didn’t know how many tanks he had or how many more he’d stashed away on the sea bed. One thing was for sure, fifteen minutes was a long time. More than enough time to cover half a mile at a slow walking pace, and a diver with decent flippers and equipment would move a lot faster. But calling off the search would be as good as admitting that the Dragon Head was dead and Lin wasn’t prepared to take that responsibility.

Howells watched the triads as they searched, safe inside the main cabin of the junk. Once he was sure that Ng was dead he had swum quickly away, keeping low, hugging the contours of the sea bed, shallow breathing to keep the bubbles to a minimum. Without Ng to slow him down he coursed through the water like a shark, arms loose against his sides, head moving from side to side, all the power coming from his thigh muscles. He’d only slowed once, to check the gauge that told him how much air he had left. He’d made it with plenty to spare.

When he surfaced close to the junk he spent a full minute using the dinghy as cover while he checked that he was in the clear before he slid out of the water and on to the wooden platform at the rear of the junk. He stowed all the gear in the engine-room and wrapped himself in a bathrobe before kneeling down on one of the seats in the dining area and scanning the bay with a pair of binoculars. The men who had been on land were rowing their boats about half a mile away, and there were two powerful launches bobbing in the water a few hundred yards in from the entrance to the bay. Howells knew they’d call off the search before too long. They wouldn’t know if he’d swum to a boat, or simply gone ashore at any one of a hundred places around the circumference of the bay and made off in a car. And even if they decided that a boat was the most likely hiding-place, there were still more than a thousand in the bay. Marina Cove alone had spaces for 300 vessels. It would take weeks to search every one, and as it was midweek most of them would be securely locked. All Howells had to do was wait.

‘It’s ten o’clock, Elder Brother,’ said Suen.

‘I know,’ snapped Lin. ‘What do you think we should do? Abandon him? Do you want to explain to his father and his brothers that we left him to die beneath the waves? Do you want to do that?’

Suen lowered his eyes, shamed by Lin’s outburst, but knowing that he was right and that he spoke for others. They had been rowing round and round in circles for almost two hours and seen nothing but rotting vegetation, mouldly driftwood and plastic bags. If they were still under water then they were surely dead. If they had left the water then they had done so unnoticed. Either way they were wasting their time.

Lin used his walkie-talkie to talk to the men in the launches and his teams on land. Nothing. He stood at the prow of the boat, his hands on his hips, his chin up defiantly as if daring the frogman to come up and fight him, man to man.

Dugan was reading the
Standard
with his third cup of coffee when the phone rang.

‘Good morning, Patrick Dugan.’

‘Hiya kid. What’s new?’

‘Nothing much. Business as usual,’ said Petal.

‘What’s the view like from the tallest building in Hong Kong?’ he asked.

‘I wish I had a view,’ she said. ‘I’m nowhere near important enough to warrant an office with a view. Or a high floor. You’d laugh if you saw my cubby-hole. How are you this glorious morning?’

‘Knackered,’ he said. ‘You’ll be the death of me.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Patrick Dugan. I hope this isn’t going to turn into an obscene phone call.’

He laughed, and spilt his plastic cup of coffee across the paper.

‘Fuck,’ he said angrily, and leapt to his feet.

‘I was wrong,’ Petal giggled. ‘It
is
an obscene phone call. I suppose you want to know what colour underwear I’m wearing?’

‘I spilt my coffee, all over my God-forsaken desk,’ he said. ‘Why does this always happen to me?’ He lifted one corner of the paper and carefully poured the brown liquid off and into the waste-paper bin. Luckily it hadn’t soaked through to the two files underneath it.

‘It’s not my day,’ he said.

‘Cheer up,’ said Petal. ‘It can only get better.’

‘Are you free tonight?’ asked Dugan. ‘Some of the guys in the anti-triad squad are having a party at Hot Gossip to celebrate a big drugs bust. You can read all about it on page three of the
Standard
.’

‘Sounds great. What time?’

‘Fairly late, I’ve got a stack of paperwork to get through. Say about eleven o’clock. We can eat in the restaurant there, they serve food practically through the night.’

‘OK, I’ll see you there at eleven.’

‘Hey, before you go, can you give me your number at the bank? I’ve tried to get you a couple of times but the switchboard girls never seem to know where to get you.’ Dugan felt that she hesitated, but after a second or two she brightly gave him the number. He wrote it down on the first page of his desk diary. ‘One more thing,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Just what colour is your underwear?’

‘That is for me to know, and for you to find out,’ she laughed sexily, and hung up on him. God, thought Dugan, the night felt like a lifetime away.

Lin eventually called off the search at one o’clock. He radioed the launches and told them to wait at the entrance to the bay and check any boats that left. Wherever possible they were to search the vessels, but if that proved impossible they were to make a note of the name and identification number. He left two Red Poles at Marina Cove and a handful of men scattered around the circumference of the bay, but in his heart of hearts he knew it was too late. The gweilo had been well prepared. He was either safely on board a boat or he’d long since swum to the shore and escaped.

They left the three dinghies tied where they’d found them and walked in disconsolate silence back to the cars. Howells watched them go before allowing the girl out of the toilet.

‘I’m hungry,’ she pouted.

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Ravenous. What do you want?’

‘I want to go home.’ She stamped her foot as she spoke and Howells smiled. Any man who got stuck with this young lady was going to have a hard life.

‘To eat,’ he said. ‘What do you want to eat?’

The look of deviousness that flashed across her face was so transparent that Howells laughed out loud.

‘Can I have a look in the galley to see what there is?’ she asked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. This was obviously a girl who was used to getting exactly what she wanted from her doting parents.

‘No,’ said Howells patiently. ‘You stay here.’

‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen,’ said Sophie, toying with a strand of her blonde hair. Howells gave her a mock growl and she glared at him. ‘You’re going to be sorry when my father catches you,’ she threatened. Howells said nothing.

The convoy of cars moved slowly up the approach road to the compound like a funeral procession. Lin and Suen were in the lead car, Ng’s Daimler. They saw Jill standing at the front door as they crackled to a halt on the gravelled drive.

‘Shit, Elder Brother. Who’s going to tell the gweipor?’

‘You want to do it?’ asked Lin, savagely, and snorted as Suen shook his head. ‘I’ll tell her. And then I’ll speak to Master Cheng. Keep the men by the guardhouse. I’ll come and talk to them soon.’

He stepped out of the plush interior of the car and walked towards Jill, his arms out to the side, shoulders low. He found it impossible to meet her eyes as he got close. He had little respect for the white woman, she shared the Dragon Head’s bed but not his office and he tried wherever possible to have nothing to do with her. He was certainly not afraid of her, but now she was a stark reminder of his failure, of his failure to protect his boss, her husband.

It seemed to Lin that the closer he got to her, the more his guilt grew, until he could feel it as a heavy weight pressing down on the back of his neck, compressing his spine and making his legs buckle. He tried to straighten his back, to thrust back his shoulders but the pressure just intensified. He stopped, some ten feet in front of her, and looked at her shoes, bright red, the colour of blood.

‘Where are they?’ she asked quietly. ‘What has happened?’

She spoke to him in Cantonese, and as always Lin marvelled at how well she spoke the language that defeated so many gweilos. But when he answered it was in halting English. She was a gweipor and there was no way he could bring himself to speak to a gweipor in his own language. The difference would always be there and in Lin’s mind it was a difference that had to be highlighted.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Ng,’ he said. He forced himself to look at her face. ‘The man grabbed your husband and took him into the water. He was wearing diving equipment. We do not know what has happened to him.’

Jill sagged on the doorstep as if Lin had punched her in the stomach. She wrapped her arms around her middle and bent forward, making a low moaning noise like a wounded animal.

‘And my daughter?’ she asked, still in Cantonese.

Lin shook his head. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘There was no sign of her.’

Jill collapsed in a heap, legs splayed as she slid down the door frame, hugging herself. Lin didn’t know what to do; he took an uncertain step forward and then stopped, embarrassed by her show of grief. He was saved by the amah who ran down the corridor and crouched next to her mistress, talking to her softly before helping her to her feet and into the shadows of the house. Lin sighed with relief and turned his back on them. Telling Master Cheng would be no easier, but at least he would take the news better, and he would know what they should do next. He walked around the right-hand side of the house, his feet crunching on the stones. The right-hand wing of the H-shaped house contained the bedrooms, and though it was early afternoon the curtains were drawn. It looked like a house in mourning. The path narrowed and then forked into two, one winding to the left around the back of the house, the other curving away to the right, through a sprinkling of fruit trees and past a small goldfish pool to Cheng’s small one-storey house surrounded by its shady palm trees. It was cleverly landscaped so that there was no sign of it from the main house, and Lin heard the songbirds long before he got there. Cheng was sitting on his front doorstep holding a wicker cage in his lap, head on one side as he listened to the deep-throated warble of the yellow and brown bird within.

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.’