Hungry Ghost (8 page)

‘Chance’d be a fine thing,’ howled Colin Burr, a hefty scrum-half with shoulders that looked as if they were made for bursting through doors.

‘Deny it,’ said Dugan. ‘Deny it if you can.’

‘You pen-pushers ought to give it a try some time,’ said Nick Holt, a lanky Scot with a Hitler moustache who’d only been in Hong Kong three years.

‘Yeah, have a go at real police work for a change,’ echoed Jeff Bellamy, the oldest of the group and, like Dugan, starting to lose his hair. Unlike Dugan, though, he’d given up trying to comb what he had left over the bald patch and instead had it cut short, a brown fringe that ringed the back of his head.

‘Real police work?’ sneered Dugan. ‘Don’t make me laugh. When was the last time you put away one of the Dragon Heads? Name one.’

‘Cheung Yiu-chung,’ suggested Holt. ‘He went down for seven years.’

‘Bastard,’ conceded Dugan. ‘OK, name five. Go on, name me three.’

‘Oh piss off, Dugan.’

‘You know what I mean. Sure, your arrest records look better than ours, but almost all yours are small fry. Foot soldiers. But we go after the big fish. The real criminals, the ones who steal billions at a time.’

‘Yeah, but Dugan, how many do you actually catch?’ sniggered Burr as he drank.

‘It takes time to build a case,’ said Dugan. He fell silent and watched Patsy Kensit prance around on one of the screens behind the bar. She was gorgeous. What made him so argumentative was that he knew they were right. In the first place it often required months of painstaking research that owed more to accountancy than to police work before they had enough evidence to make a case. And by the time they’d got enough evidence together the suspect or suspects had usually had plenty of warning, and they were usually rich enough to be able to buy themselves an escape route. It could be frustrating. Bloody frustrating.

Dugan looked away from the screen and scanned the diners, taking in the whole restaurant area with one easy glance. He realized with a jolt that he too was being studied, by a petite Chinese girl with beautiful eyes. She was sitting at a table with two other girls, wearing a dress every bit as black and shiny as her hair. She seemed small, even for a Chinese girl, but the eyes were knowing and teasing. The eyes of a woman, the body of a young girl. She smiled at Dugan, catching him off balance. He looked away, embarrassed, as if he’d been caught peeking through the window of a schoolgirls’ changing-room.

He shrugged. ‘Downstairs?’ he said.

‘Now he’s talking sense,’ said Bellamy. They emptied their glasses and walked the length of the bar and down the stairs that led to the disco. The throbbing beat enveloped them like a clammy mist and they had to push their way through the crowd to reach the bar. Holt ordered a round of drinks and they stood together, watching like predatory sharks preparing to carve through a shoal of fish.

‘What about those two?’ said Holt, nodding at two girls dancing together.

‘Tasty,’ agreed Burr. ‘Very tasty.’

The girls moved well together, obviously used to dancing with each other.

‘Want to give it a go?’ Holt asked Burr.

‘Sure,’ he replied, and the two men placed their glasses on the bar and edged their way on to the crowded dance floor, towards the girls.

‘See anything you fancy?’ Bellamy asked Dugan.

‘Not yet,’ said Dugan, ‘but it’s just a matter of time.’

Across the disco he saw three girls walk down the stairs and stand at the edge of the lights. One was the small Chinese with the beautiful eyes. She seemed to be looking right at him, though he knew he must be obscured in the gloom.

‘You’re staring,’ laughed Bellamy.

‘Pretty, isn’t she?’

‘The short one? Exquisite. But a big gweilo like you would tear her apart. Pick on someone your own size.’

Dugan looked at him and laughed and when he looked back to the stairs the girls had gone.

The two men stood by the bar, scanning the dance floor and tapping their feet to the beat. Burr and Holt seemed to be doing OK, they’d moved in on the two girls and now were gradually edging them apart like sheepdogs with nervous sheep.

Dugan thought about asking Bellamy how his application for a transfer was getting along, but decided against it. Wrong time, wrong place. God, he wished they’d pull their finger out. He was going slowly mad in Commercial Crime’s A Division, even before today’s disappointment. It wasn’t police work, it was clerking, pure and simple. The straw that had broken the camel’s back was the Carrian affair, a three-year investigation followed by an eighteen-month trial, the longest in Hong Kong’s history, and the most expensive. It had ended abruptly when a single judge had decided that the defendants had no case to answer. Almost five years of hard work down the drain. Dugan had worked his balls off on that case, ten or twelve hours a day. He’d eaten, slept and breathed the Carrian case, only to see it dismissed by one man.

The night after the judge had stopped the trial Dugan went out and got seriously drunk. A week later he’d put in his first application for a transfer, to switch from A Division to C Division. A Division handled the long, complex fraud cases, split into four taskforces to handle the big ones. B Division looked after general fraud; a move there would have been seen as a step down, a demotion. C Division had more kudos, chasing up counterfeit cases. That meant a lot of foreign travel, undercover work, the real
Miami Vice
stuff. Trouble was there were only forty officers and the competition to get in was cut-throat. When Dugan had applied he’d been told it would be three years at least until there’d be an opening. Dugan reckoned they were giving him the brush off, that they thought he was too valuable for A Division to lose.

Eventually his patience had snapped and he’d decided to break with CCB completely and try to get back to real police work. But nobody seemed to take his application to join the anti-triad squad seriously – and now he knew why.

Bellamy noticed his silence, and reached over to clink glasses with him. ‘How’s life?’ he asked.

Dugan shrugged. ‘Nothing changes. I’m still pissed off with CCB.’

Burr and Holt were back to back now, moving the girls further and further apart. They’d pulled, all right, and done it without talking, too, because they couldn’t be heard over the driving beat. Dugan drank deeply. He didn’t care any more that it was the wrong time, wrong place.

‘I’ve got to get out,’ he said.

‘Music too loud?’ said Bellamy.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Dugan. ‘Out of Commercial Crime.’

Bellamy shook his head slowly. ‘You’re better off where you are, Dugan.’

‘No,’ hissed Dugan. ‘I want out.’

The two men looked at each other over the tops of their glasses. Dugan wanted to push it, even though he knew by the older man’s silence that he was going to be disappointed. Like phoning to ask a former lover if she’d give it one more try, knowing that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted but determined to try nevertheless, even though the pain of rejection would be worse than maintaining the
status quo
.

Dugan explained about losing the computer case. ‘I want to move to the anti-triad squad. I have to get back to real police work.’

‘Commercial Crime is real police work,’ answered Bellamy, avoiding Dugan’s eyes.

‘I don’t understand why they’re making it so difficult for me to move,’ Dugan drove on stubbornly, knowing the answer. He saw Bellamy’s lips move, but the words were lost in the music.

‘What?’ he shouted.

‘You know why,’ Bellamy yelled. ‘Your bloody brother-in-law. That’s what’s stopping you. Simon bloody Ng and your sister.’

Dugan sighed and felt alternate waves of anger and frustration wash over him. The computer case was the first he’d lost because of Ng, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t be the last. And now it was clear that the powers that be would not allow him to move out of Commercial Crime. Bellamy looked away, embarrassed.

‘Fuck it,’ said Dugan, and forced a grin. ‘Let me buy you a drink. And then I want to get laid.’

When he turned to the bar, she was there. Small and cute and looking up at him with an amused grin on her face. Had she heard him? Dugan hoped not. He smiled. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I saw you upstairs, didn’t I?’

She nodded. ‘And I saw you. Small world, isn’t it?’ She giggled. Pretty mouth, thought Dugan.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked, switching into Cantonese and enjoying the look of surprise on her face.

‘I’d like a soft drink, something long and cool,’ she said quickly in Cantonese and he knew he was being tested.

‘How about me, will I do?’ he asked, and she laughed again.

‘How come your Cantonese is so good? You a cop?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What do you really want to drink?’

‘Perrier,’ she replied.

Dugan ordered himself a beer and a fizzy water for her, and then felt a thump in the small of his back.

‘Don’t forget your friends,’ Bellamy growled.

Dugan ordered a lager for Bellamy and handed it to him without looking. His eyes stayed on the girl, worried in case she moved away.

‘How about an introduction?’ Bellamy asked.

‘How about riding off into the sunset and letting me and this young filly get acquainted.’ He talked in English, quickly, and he used slang so that the girl wouldn’t be able to catch the meaning but she grinned and reached past Dugan, arm outstretched, and shook hands with Bellamy.

‘My name’s Petal,’ she said.

‘Pleased to meet you, Petal,’ said Bellamy. ‘I’m Jeff Bellamy. And this young reprobate is Patrick Dugan. A man to be avoided at all costs.’

‘You can let go of her now, Jeff,’ said Dugan. He took hold of the girl’s hand. It was soft and cool. ‘Nice to meet you, Petal.’

‘Nice to meet you, Patrick Dugan.’

‘It’s my turn to ask,’ he said. ‘How come your English is so good?’

‘I was a good student. A frightfully good student,’ she said, and her accent was pure Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

Dugan gestured at the drink in her hand, bubbles bursting against the slice of lime. ‘Not drinking?’

‘I’m here to dance, not to drink.’

He took the hint and together they moved to the dance floor. She moved well, and she kept close to him as she danced, touching him occasionally, by accident or by design, he couldn’t tell. Just a nudge of an elbow, or their hands would meet as she turned to one side, and each time it was like receiving a small jolt of static electricity. He wondered where her friends were, now she seemed to be alone. The DJ switched to a slow ballad and made some crack about it getting to that time of the night; and Dugan made to leave the floor but she stepped forward and linked her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest, eyes closed. God, she was tiny, like a schoolgirl, though the breasts that pressed against him were those of a woman. He circled her with his arms and he felt big and clumsy. She smelt of fresh flowers.

Howells was sitting at a bar some two miles south of Hot Gossip, in a Wan Chai dive called the Washington Club. The brash signs above the head of the aged doorman who sat outside on a wooden stall promised topless dancers, but it had been many years since the place had seen a naked breast. The main drinking area was a circular bar surrounding a small raised dance floor where two girls wearing identical black and silver swimsuits and high-heeled shoes did their best to keep in time with the music. Between the dancers and the bar a group of middle-aged women in long evening dresses either served customers or sat on stools with faces like thunder.

When Howells had walked in through the door and past the large ornamental fish tank an hour earlier a woman old enough to be his great-grandmother led him to a stool and asked him what he wanted to drink. While she fetched him his lager two of the overweight women moved towards him like menacing bears. One of them reached for his hand and held it, rubbing the flesh gently. She felt like sandpaper, thought Howells. ‘How long you been Hong Kong?’ she asked, smiling with twisted teeth.

‘Two days,’ he answered. His drink arrived and he used it as an excuse to get his hand back. A white bill was folded into a plastic tumbler which the great-grandmother placed in front of him.

The second woman, plump with loosely permed hair and a prominent Kirk Douglas dimple on her chin, blinked and said: ‘Where you stay?’

‘Mandarin Oriental,’ lied Howells.

‘Good hotel,’ she said, nodding. ‘What your job?’

‘Salesman.’

‘What your name?’ said the other woman. Bargirl was not the right description. Barwoman? Barhag? Howells wondered how she listed her profession in her passport.

‘Tom,’ said Howells, using the first name that popped into his head. The women introduced themselves, each formally shaking his hand.

‘You buy me drink?’ asked Dimple.

Howells could see a price list fixed to a pillar to the left of the dancers showing that his lager was about the same price as it would be in a five-star hotel and that the cheapest hostess drink was about three times as much.

He shook his head. ‘Not tonight, thanks.’

‘Not expensive,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Howells, and pointedly ignored them. They spoke to each other in Cantonese, gave him a filthy look each and then walked off. Howells nursed his lager and concentrated on the dancers. One was short with long black hair and a small, upturned nose; the other was taller with a frizzy mane of hair and a curvier figure. Both had skin that was a darker brown than the middle-aged couple who had just tried to mug him. As he watched they moved into a synchronized dance routine, legs kicking and shoulders shaking. They’d obviously done it many times, no need to watch each other’s steps. Real troupers. Another four girls with skin the same colour as the dancers’ sat together at the back of the bar eating shelled peanuts. They were wearing T-shirts over their swimsuits and chattering in a bird-song language, probably Filipina.