White Devil - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories) (3 page)

She opened the bedroom door.

She was in a flat. Chau’s? It was tiny. The bedroom door opened onto the kitchen diner. She stepped inside. A sofa bed had been pulled open, a mess of sheets dumped atop it. The bed was empty. The apartment was quiet. She went to a window and pulled back the wooden shutters. The glass had a film of dampness on it, the cause of the rinds of mildew that limned the edges where it met the frame. The room smelt ripe and was stuffy. Beatrix unlatched the window and pushed it open. The window gave onto a shaft. The poorly tended nasturtiums that drooped from the window box of the next apartment along had attracted aphids and blackflies, and Beatrix gazed through the buzzing cloud to the three walls that completed the deep well. There were air-conditioning units fixed to the walls, lines that held drying washing, and, at the foot of the well below, a jam of green industrial refuse bins. She looked down. It was a vertiginous drop, maybe a hundred feet, and she felt a little dizzy.

She went back into the bedroom. There was a surgical stand in the corner of the room, a drip tied around the bracket at the top. There was a wastepaper bin next to it and, inside, she saw three plastic bags. The insides of the bags were slicked with scarlet fluid, thick and globulous. She retrieved one, saw that it was marked AB, and remembered the blood that had poured from the wound. She must have been given a transfusion. There were bloody bandages and surgical pads in the bin, too.

There was a stool at the other end of the futon. Two piles of clothes had been neatly laid out atop it. The first comprised the clothes that she had been wearing when she had been injured (she realised that she didn’t know when that was). She picked up the plain black T-shirt that she had been wearing. She held it out and saw the gashes in the fabric, one on the back and one on the side. The garment had been boiled to remove the blood that must have leeched into it, but it was ruined. She tossed it into the bin. Her olive trousers bore a discoloured patch where the blood had seeped in too deeply to be cleaned. She folded them, put them back on the stool and examined the second pile. These were new, a T-shirt and trousers from The Gap, matched to the ones she had been wearing. She took off the pyjamas and dressed. The clothes fitted perfectly. Chau was nothing if not diligent.

He had taken good care of her, but it made no difference.

She couldn’t stay here.

The front door was locked, but she opened it and stepped outside. The corridor had a bare concrete surface that was decorated with a repeating oblong design. The walls were bare, and the lighting was provided by flickering strip lights. Exterior windows admitted brightness from outside, and the interior windows opening onto the corridor were all barred. Plastic jugs of water stood outside the front doors, and, at the far end, Beatrix saw a painted sign that advertised ‘Deluxe Hotel’.

She stepped over to one of the exterior windows. This aspect offered a view of streets that she did not recognise and, in the near distance, the dome and minarets of a mosque she hadn’t seen before. She looked up and down the corridor, unsure which way to go for the elevators, but, before she could proceed any farther, she felt a terrible wave of lassitude. She had to put her arm out to brace herself against the wall. The pain flared from her side again, a sudden pounding that darkened the edges of her vision.

She was still weak.

Too weak.

She looked back at the open door to the flat.

She weighed it all up.

She knew that she didn’t have the strength to get very far. The prospect of just a few extra steps down the corridor was too much for her to contemplate. She was certain that she would collapse.

Could she stay here?

What about Chau?

Whatever else he had done, he had saved her life. He could have abandoned her or left her here to die, and he hadn’t done either of those things. She had been vulnerable and he had cared for her. There was nothing to suggest that would change now that she was recovering.

And she didn’t have much of a choice.

She walked slowly back to the flat, went inside, and closed the door behind her. She crossed to the bedroom, undressed slowly and methodically, and lay down in the bed again. She was asleep within moments.

JACKIE CHAU DROVE around the block three times before he was satisfied that the building was not being observed. He was on Kai Hing Road. It was on the southern edge of the Kowloon peninsula, part of the extensive dockside and within close proximity of the Kwun Tong Bypass. The area was home to a large concentration of warehouses and businesses that profited from the goods that were unloaded from Hong Kong’s unusually deep natural harbour.

It was dark. The street was lit by two unreliable lamps and the fat gibbous moon overhead. He turned off. He backed into the narrow alley at the rear of his premises, the car pointing out and the engine still running. He glanced in the mirror. There were two men outside the complex of warehouses. They were smoking cigarettes. He thought he recognised them. Men dressed in the uniforms of the import/export business that was based two warehouses down from him. He knew Donnie Qi could very easily have left a couple of lower ranking triad members—
maa jais,
or little horses—in the vicinity to wait for him to come. But he had already postponed this visit for a week. The
Dai Lo
must have suspected that he would run. Chau knew that Donnie Qi respected his intelligence. He had to hope that he respected it enough to conclude that he wouldn’t take such a foolish risk.

Because it
was
a risk.

A foolish, stupid risk.

But one that he had to take.

He would just make sure that he didn’t stay for long.

He left the door of the Mercedes open, collected his little pistol from the seat next to him and made his way to the building’s back door. He heard the cawing of gulls from the docks, but paid them no heed. He walked quickly. He had to pass along an alleyway, an unlit shortcut that was full of trash and huge cat-sized rats that thrived on the scraps tossed out of the neighbouring warehouse that was used to smoke fish. He reached the door. A drop of stale water from an antiquated air conditioner fell onto his head. He unlocked the door and, his nerves jangling because he knew that it would creak, pulled it open.

The warehouse was quiet and dark. He paused in the doorway, listening hard, but he could hear nothing save the familiar drip of the tap that he had been meaning to fix for weeks. He knew the inside well enough to leave the lights off. He made his way, slowly and carefully, along the aisle that was formed by racking that held his cleaning products and equipment, finding his way to the stairs that would lead up to his office.

THINKING ABOUT Donnie Qi prompted other recollections. Regrets, too, and the sure knowledge that he had arrived at this juncture because of a series of increasingly poor decisions that had been motivated by greed. Chau had owned this business for five years. He had been doing well. He had a series of reliable contracts with small commercial landlords that paid a decent amount each month, enough to live on, even in an expensive city like HK. He had a nice apartment in Kennedy Town, he had been able to afford the payments on the Mercedes, and there was enough money to treat the Tsim Sha Tsui hookers he frequented to nice gifts and treats on their birthdays.

Running the business was hard work, but it was a comfortable, reliable, secure life.

He could have maintained that life for as long as he wanted it, but he had been greedy. He had been approached by a first cousin who said that he had a job that he might be interested in. Chau had known very well that the boy, a callow youth called Liang, had been associating with the local triads. He had heard that it was just a case of a youngster looking up to the glamorously tattooed criminals and their money and status, but he had been quickly disabused of that notion. Liang was a
maa jai
and very much part of the crew. Normally, Chau would have eschewed the invitation, keeping his fingers crossed that his rebuttal wouldn’t be regarded as a snub. But he had looked at the boy, remembering the buck-toothed kid who now drove a Lexus and spent money like water, and he decided that he wanted some of it himself. No, the prospect of making some quick, easy money was attractive, and he had been unable to resist.

More fool him.

Liang had introduced him to Donnie Qi. He was the
Dai Lo
, a medium ranking underboss of the Wo Shun Wo triad. Donnie presided over his part of the Kowloon underworld from the back rooms of the Jade Lotus karaoke bar, a seedy dive on Yau Ma Tei. Chau had been invited to visit him in the club. It was accommodated within a large basement beneath a supermarket, with peeling posters in the lobby advertising the neighbouring twenty-four-hour saunas, massage parlours and clip joints. A rickety shoebox lift descended to the club, where television screens were fixed to the walls and microphones littered the tables. His audience with the
Dai Lo
was quick and satisfactory, with the job put to him in simple terms. An ‘unfortunate incident’ had taken place in a property that Donnie owned, and the resultant mess needed to be cleaned up. He would pay him 2,000 US dollars, ten times what he would normally have charged for a day’s work. Did he want the business?

Chau had said yes.

He had driven his van to the property. It certainly
was
unfortunate. The bodies had been removed, but the evidence of what had happened there was still plain to see. Chau knew, figuratively, that death could be grisly. He liked the American TV shows that specialised in this sort of thing, but he had never been called out to deal with something as repellant as this before. There was blood on the furniture and on the walls, there was a splash on the ceiling and dried, crusted blood in the grooves between the floorboards. He knew, from experience, that the nickel-sized stain on the carpet would not be the worst of it, and that there was likely a two-foot stain on the floorboards beneath.

He had been right.

Chau had spent an entire day on the cleanup and Donnie Qi had been pleased with his work.

Pleased enough that more work had followed.

It went well for the first year. There was a steady stream of business: blood to be scrubbed and scoured from the back room of the Jade Lotus where Donnie Qi’s discipline was meted out, the occasional amputated body part to be disposed of at the city dump.

There had been seven bodies to make disappear during that time, too. Those were the longest days. He had invested in equipment more suited to the task: non-porous one-time-use suits and gloves; filtered respirators; chemical-spill boots. He bought biohazard waste containers, including 55-gallon heavy duty bags and sealed plastic containers. He bought a supply of luminol to disclose hidden bloodstains. He bought hospital grade disinfectants, industrial strength deodorisers, heavy duty sprayers, long scrubbing brushes and a wet vacuum. He had even bought a fogger, to thicken cleaning chemicals so that they could get all the way into tight or restricted spaces, like air ducts, for odour removal.

His first “full” cleanup had come in the second month, after he had earned their trust. A man who had been in the life had decided that he would prefer the company of his nubile young wife. He did not listen to the warnings that leaving was impossible and so both he and the girl had been murdered as an example to others who might also question the bonds that tied them. Chau had arrived when the bodies were still warm. He had been deputed two
maa jais
to help and, at his direction, they had dismembered the bodies so that they could be dropped into bin liners and incinerated. They used disinfectant to scrub every drop of blood from all surfaces: counters, ceilings, walls, light fixtures, glass trinkets, family pictures, artwork and appliances. They scraped brain matter from the walls and collected bone fragments that they found embedded in the drywall. They ripped out and discarded blood-soaked carpeting and removed sodden upholstery, window treatments and rugs. They had cleaned the apartment until it was spotless. Chau heard later that Donnie Qi had moved one of his mistresses into the place the day after he had finished.

He learned much. Each type of cleanup was different to the last, with individual problems that needed to be addressed. There were always bodily fluids to deal with, each tiny drop carrying the possibility of a blood-borne pathogen like HIV or hepatitis. It all needed to be treated with proper care and respect. Where the victim was shot in the head, there would be a lot of blood; if someone was shot in the chest, though, there would be much less because the lungs would suck it in. He discovered that it took blood around two hours to coagulate into a jelly-like goo that could be scraped up with a trowel or, if there was enough of it, a shovel. He found that brain matter dried to a substance with a cement-like consistency and, when his putty knives couldn’t remove it, a steam injection machine was needed to melt it.

Chau developed a rapport with Donnie and was pleased to be invited to share a drink with him at the club. Chau was too wise to think that this could be a social call, and had expected that he was going to be offered a bump in pay to keep him exclusive (there had been interest in his services from rival bosses). He had been wrong. Over a very pleasant meal, Donnie had suggested that he was having a problem with a mistress, Lì húa, who was too savvy and cautious to be drawn into a position where she could be disposed of.

Donnie Qi had described his dilemma and then, with cunning gleaming in his eyes, he had suggested that perhaps that was something Chau could assist him with? “Lì húa does not know you,” he had said. “She has not seen you before. She will not suspect.”

Chau had been offered $25,000. He knew the offer was not one that he could very easily decline, and he had considered it. He had watched Lì húa one afternoon, following her from her apartment to the Pacific Place mall. She was beautiful, tall and striking. He thought about how it could be done, and decided that it would be a simple enough thing. Donnie Qi was right. She did not know him. She would not see him coming. He tried to rationalise it, too, how she must have known the possible consequences of becoming embroiled with a man like that. It was her fault, he tried to persuade himself. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else. He would do it quickly and mercifully, rather than the unpleasant death that might visit her if Donnie was forced to put one of the other Wo Shun Wo on the job.