White Devil - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories) (4 page)

Chau tried to persuade himself that it was better for everyone concerned that he accept the commission, but, in the end, his morals—rendered more flexible over the course of the last few months—were still not supple enough to allow him to say yes.

And so he had said no.

And no one said no to Donnie Qi.

HE OPENED the door to the office and went inside. There was enough moonlight coming through the window to find his way across the small room to the desk. He unplugged his laptop and put it into its bag. Then he knelt down beneath the desk and pried up the loose floorboard. There was a hollow space between the floorboards of the office and the ceiling below, and he reached down into it until his fingers brushed against the cellophane-wrapped bundle that he had hidden there. He clasped it and brought it out. The banknotes wrapped in the plastic sheath were worth $27,725. He put the bundle in the laptop case, replaced the loose floorboard and stood.

He looked around the little office and allowed his thoughts to settle on the first time that he had seen it. He had moved the business here after he had secured his biggest commercial client, and he remembered how excited it had made him feel. It seemed a long way off, now. A different time. He doubted whether he would ever be able to come back here again.

He knew that there was no way he could stay in Hong Kong.

He had already decided that he would have to leave.

He would make sure that Beatrix Rose had recovered—he owed her that much, at least—and then he would leave. He would take a junk to the mainland, and then he would head deep into China. He had relatives in Fushun. He would be able to hide out with them. He was not naïve enough to think that Donnie Qi would forget him, nor that his reach would not extend into China, but he would invest some of his funds in plastic surgery and a new identity. He had the capital to do it. He could start again.

He froze.

Was that a noise?

He listened at the door, closed his eyes and concentrated everything on listening as intently as he could, until he decided that his mind was playing tricks. He picked up the case, descended the iron stairs, and hurried through the darkened warehouse to the back door. He paused there, scanning out into the alleyway beyond. The taillights of his car glowed back at him and he chided himself for leaving them on. He tightened his grip around the handle of the pistol and jogged to the open door. He tossed the bag into the back, threw the car into first, turned out onto the road, and, without another backward glance, sped away.

BEATRIX AWOKE.

What was that?

She lay still for a moment. She had not woken naturally. She was groggy, but awareness was returning quickly. She blinked her eyes, then reached up to rub the sleep away. She was in the bedroom. The surgical stand loomed above her. It was closer than she remembered. Had it been moved?

There
.

Again.

A noise.

She heard the sound of a door open and close. She looked around the bedroom for a weapon and saw the chopsticks, picked one up and clasped it in her fist. It was far from ideal, but, if she needed to defend herself, it would serve.

She opened the bedroom door a crack and looked through.

She saw Chau.

He was at the breakfast bar, laden down with a pair of heavy bags of groceries.

He was wearing another lurid Hawaiian shirt, ice-white jeans and brightly polished sports shoes. His back was to her. Her first instinct was to leave. She felt stronger. Chau hadn’t seen or heard her. She could disable him without much effort, choke him out or knock him senseless. She could kill him if she wanted to be confident that the loose end he represented was tied off. She had already compromised herself beyond a level where she could ever possibly be comfortable. To have been laid up here, unconscious and defenceless, for God knows how many days? That was anathema to her. She had an opportunity now to minimise the damage. She could take a taxi to her hotel, collect her go-bag, head to the airport and leave the city.

She weighed it up for a long moment, feeling the strength in her arms, her fingers opening and closing, but then she closed her eyes and discounted it.

There was much too much uncertainty for her to be comfortable with what had happened to her. But one thing was incontrovertible: he had saved her life.

She opened the door and cleared her throat. He dropped the bags in sudden shock, turned around and gave her a rueful smile.

“You surprised me.”

She checked the room. Just him.

“You are awake.”

She nodded, still cautious.

“How do you feel?”

“All right.”

He indicated her side. “The wound?”

She touched it, prodded it a little. “Sore, but better.”

“And your back?”

She had forgotten about that. She flexed her shoulder, then reached around and probed with her fingers. It was sore, too, and she felt the rough bumps of additional stitching. “Just a scratch.”

He shook his head. “You are not fine. My friend, the doctor, he said you had serious internal bleeding. Very serious. And you lost a lot of blood.”

“You transfused me.”

“He did. Four bags.”

She looked down at the shopping bags and the food that had spilled out. Chau followed her gaze and knelt to pick up a piece of meat wrapped in grease paper.

“Want some breakfast?”

CHAU HAD bought
dim sum
. He had dumplings, or
gao
. They were filled with vegetables, shrimp, tofu and meat, and wrapped in a translucent rice flour skin. He had steamed buns, together with meatballs, pastries and small rolls. There was a pot of
congee
, the mild-flavoured porridge that had been cooked until the rice had started to break down. She said she would take a bowl, and he doled out a serving and offered her aduki beans, peanuts and tofu as toppings. She ate quickly, realising that she was even hungrier than she thought. She cleared the plate and took two of the steamed buns, identified by Chau as
bao
.

Chau asked if she was finished and, when she said that she was, he took her plate and stood it in the sink. He boiled a kettle of water.

“
Yum cha
,” he said, indicating the kettle. “Tea drinking time. I have oolong, jasmine, chrysanthemum. You like?”

“Jasmine,” she said. “Thank you.”

She watched as he set to work. He was fastidious about it. He poured the boiling water into two
gaiwan,
lidded bowls for the infusion of tea leaves, and then let it stand for three minutes to cool a little. Then he took a handful of jasmine pearls and dropped them into the
gaiwan
, steeped the brew for another minute and then handed one to her.

He put both hands around the vessel. “You drink like this,” he said. He used the lid to block the jasmine pearls and sipped the liquid with long, noisy slurps.

She looked at his performance sceptically.

“You must drink it like that,” he explained, without embarrassment. “The air bubbles when you slurp, they enhance flavour.”

She gave a gentle shake of her head and sipped the tea a little more decorously.

“How long have I been out?”

“A week. My friend says it was better that you sleep.”

“You drugged me.”

“He did.” He shrugged. “I am sorry. But he said it was best.”

She waved it off. “What did he do to me?”

“It was small wound, but it was deep. It damaged your chest wall. Blood was gathering and needed to be removed. He drained it with tube.”

A thoracostomy. Beatrix knew that she had been lucky. The knife had penetrated the musculature that protected the vital upper abdominal organs beneath. A thoracostomy was the opening of a hole to drain the blood from the pleural cavity. She would have died without it, but it wasn’t a difficult procedure and it was relatively discreet. Once the blood was drained, the major risk to her recovery would have been infection. And provided that the thoracostomy tube was sterile, there was a low risk of that.

“He did all that here?”

Chau pointed to the sofa. “There. How do you feel?”

“I’m fine.”

She reached for a pastry and felt a jolt of pain from her side.

“It hurts?”

There was no point in pretending otherwise. “A little.”

“My friend says you must rest.”

“He does?”

“He says another week.”

She laughed grimly. “Impossible.”

“A week, and then therapy.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“He says you are lucky to be alive. The knife missed your vital organs. But you lost a lot of blood.”

“I can’t stay here,” she insisted.

She tried to stand, but, as she did, she was buffeted by a deep debilitating wave of lethargy.
Not again
. She had no strength in her legs and, unable to resist, she dropped back down again.

“Please, Beatrix Rose. You must rest.”

“I can’t. I have things to do.”

“Nothing that cannot wait.”

“I have to—”

“Stay here today,” he insisted. “Rest. One more day, please. We will see how you feel tomorrow, yes?”

She leaned back against the wall. She could have made it out of the flat. She thought that she could have summoned the strength for that. But she didn’t know where she was. Hong Kong suddenly seemed very big and very confusing. She could barely remember where to find her hotel. Chau’s suggestion became more attractive.

“One day.”

SHE SLEPT again. The dreams returned, but they were not as vibrant and real as she remembered from before. Lucas was in them. He was standing on a beach. The sand was a bright white. And the sea, washing ashore in gentle waves, was an unnaturally vivid blue. He was trying to say something, his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear the words. She recognised the beach. It was in the Maldives. They had visited the islands on their honeymoon. She looked down and saw two rows of footprints in the sand. When she looked back up, Lucas was standing ankle deep in the water. She tried to take a step to him, but she couldn’t move. The tide continued to roll in, the waves coming faster and deeper, the water reaching up to his waist, then his chest, then his neck. She reached for him as the water rose again, filling his mouth and then rising above his head, submerging him.

When the waves rolled back again, he was gone.

She looked to the beach.

There was only one set of prints.

WHEN SHE awoke again, the bare window was dark save for the reflected glare of neon from a sign somewhere outside. She sat up and remembered, more quickly this time, where she was and what had happened to her. She reached down to the wound in her torso and pressed against it. It was still sore, but she thought that the edge had gone.

She rose, bracing herself against the wall. There was definitely more strength in her legs. She felt grimy and unclean. She hadn’t showered for… She tried to think, but she had lost track of the days. A week? It had been a while, however long it was.

She walked carefully to the door and went into the main room beyond. Chau was sitting in a seat with his back to her, watching an old Bruce Lee movie on a television that Beatrix had not noticed before. He hadn’t heard her. She stood in the doorway for a moment, quietly looking around the room and reasserting everything in her mind. Her eyes settled on the TV and she watched, absently, for ten seconds. She recognised the film.
Enter the Dragon
.

“Good evening, Chau.”

She saw him jump a little, his hand flapping up to his heart.

“I didn’t hear you,” he exclaimed.

“Sorry.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Better.”

“You look better.”

“How long this time?”

“Two more days.”

“Two? We said one.”

“You did not stir, and I did not want to wake you.”

“No more drugs?”

“No,” he assured her. “All natural. I think it is what you needed.”

She still felt uncomfortable. The prospect of her lying here, in a place belonging to a man that she didn’t know, was against every one of her instincts. She had been right about it when she awoke for the first time. She was vulnerable, and the thought of that set her teeth on edge.

“Are you hungry?”

She was. She nodded and waited as Chau got up and went over to the kitchen. “Sit,” he said, pointing at the armchair that he had just vacated. “I make dinner.”

The chair was the only one in the flat. She didn’t demur and, as he busied himself taking ingredients from the fridge, she watched the film. “You like Bruce Lee?” he asked her.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“You know, he grew up in Hong Kong?”

“I did.”

“He was in gang. The Tigers of Junction Road. In Kowloon. Not far from here.”

That made her wonder where she was, but she let the question pass. She did feel vulnerable. But if anything was going to happen to her here, the chances were that it would already have happened. Chau had looked after her. Trust was something she rarely accorded anyone, and certainly not a man like him, but there was no reason for suspicion. She owed him that, at least.

Chau had left a bowl of chicken breasts in the fridge to marinate in soy sauce. He seared batches of the chicken in a wok, adding chillies, peppercorns, spring onions and peanuts. He made a sauce with Shaohsing rice wine, Chinese black vinegar and chicken stock. It wasn’t long before the room began to fill with a delicious, fragrant aroma.

“It smells good, yes?”

She conceded that it did.

“It is gunpowder chicken. My mother used to make it for us. It is a dish from Sichuan province. That is where my mother and father came from. They came here to escape the communists. Do you like chilli, Beatrix Rose?”

“It’s Beatrix.”

“I am sorry?”

“My name. You can call me Beatrix. Just Beatrix.”

He flustered. “Yes, of course. Beatrix.”

“And yes, I like chilli.”

“Very good.”

He served the chicken in two pretty bowls. He gave her a bowl and a set of chopsticks. She ate quickly. The food was delicious and she was hungry. Chau sat cross-legged on the floor, eating more slowly, watching her. When she was done, she rested her chopsticks in the bowl and looked at him.