Hungry Ghost

by Stephen Leather

  ‘She told me nothing, Jeff. Honest. She’s doped up to the eyeballs and in deep shock. She’s in no fit state for anything.’

  ‘That’s not what the nurse said. She said you spent a good fifteen minutes talking to her.’

  ‘She was rambling,’ whined Dugan. ‘Delirious. She wasn’t making any sense. The best thing would be to leave her for a day or two until she’s more coherent.’

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ said Bellamy and a cold fist grabbed Dugan’s heart and squeezed.

  ‘Oh God,’ he moaned, ‘she’s not …’

  ‘No, you daft bastard, she’s not dead. But she’s not in hospital anymore. A group of Xinhua spooks turned up and took her to the airport and a CAAC jet left thirty minutes ahead of schedule with her on board. There’s something bloody funny going on, and I’ve got a feeling you hold the key, Dugan.’

  ‘I’m as confused as you are, Jeff.’

  ‘You better had be, old lad.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘Take it any way you want. But I’d forget any ideas you have about a long-term career with Hong Kong’s finest.’ The line clicked quietly but Dugan could tell that Bellamy had slammed the phone down.

  Lin and Tse waited in the car while Ng took Miss Quinlan into the house. The television and video recorder had been moved out of the lounge and placed on the desk in the study. On the couch were a handful of videocassettes and Ng slotted one into the recorder.

  ‘Would you like to sit on the couch, Miss Quinlan, or would you like me to bring in an easy chair?’ he asked the headmistress.

  ‘This will be fine, thank you,’ said Miss Quinlan.

  The maid came into the study and asked for her coat and she handed it over with a murmur of thanks.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ Ng asked, wanting to put the woman at ease. If she was tense she might miss something.

  ‘Thank you, no.’

  She took her glasses off and began polishing them. Cheng walked in and Ng introduced him to the headmistress.

  ‘Mr Cheng will stay here with you,’ explained Ng. ‘If you recognize anyone on the tapes then please tell him.’

  Cheng picked up a wooden chair, removed its red cushion and put it down next to the Chesterfield. He sat down with his hands in his lap, smiling at Miss Quinlan.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Ng.

  The woman nodded and Ng pressed the ‘Play’ button. The recorder whirred and after a few seconds a view of the pier jerked across the screen, scanning right and left, homing in on faces, seemingly at random, pulling in and out of focus before moving on. Watching the screen made Ng feel nauseous, like riding a big dipper, and he didn’t envy the headmistress the hours ahead.

  In Cantonese Ng told Cheng to make sure that she concentrated – any lapse and he was to rewind the tape. And if after viewing all the tapes she recognized no one, then she was to sit through them all again. As he turned to go Ng almost bumped into Jill, who had appeared at the doorway. She looked rough, her face pinched and drawn, dark rings around her eyes, her hair lifeless, her eyes dull.

  Her lips drew back in an animal snarl. ‘What the fuck is that old bag doing in my house?’ she hissed. ‘Get her out. I want her out of my house now.’

  Ng reached for her, holding her shoulders. ‘She’s here to help.’

  Jill glared at him wildly. She threw up her arms and knocked his hands away, then pushed him savagely in the chest so that he had to take a step backwards.

  ‘Get her out of my house,’ she screamed. Ng tried to grab her again but Jill’s hands lashed out, fingers curled, and one of them caught Ng on his cheek, tearing the skin. She kicked him on the shins and pushed him again and then he lost his temper and slapped her hard across the face, left and right. She collapsed then, keeling against the door-frame and holding it for support, her body convulsed with sobbing.

  ‘She gave away my daughter,’ she gasped.

  ‘I know, I know,’ soothed Ng, stepping forward and taking her in his arms. She reached around his waist and held him tightly, like a lover, her wet cheek against his as she cried. He led her out of the room and across the hall to the lounge. Cheng looked across at the headmistress, his face a mask.

  ‘Mrs Ng is under a lot of strain,’ he said quietly. ‘Please forgive her.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Miss Quinlan. ‘I wish there was something I could say to her to show her how sorry I am.’

  ‘Identifying the man will be help enough,’ said Cheng. He stood up and walked over to the recorder to rewind the tape back to where it had been before Jill’s outburst.

  ‘And I will concentrate, I promise,’ she said. ‘I have no desire to go through the tapes twice.’

  Cheng nodded. The gweipor spoke Cantonese – he would not forget.

  Ng closed the lounge door and helped Jill on to one of the settees.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked, though he could already smell alcohol on her breath.

  ‘Brandy,’ she said.

  He splashed some into a balloon glass and handed it to her. She gulped it down and handed it back, empty. Ng didn’t refill it. He put the empty glass down on the drinks cabinet and went to sit down next to her.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked.

  ‘Miss Quinlan is looking at some videotapes that were recorded soon after Simon disappeared. We hope that the man who took him might be on one of them. She saw the man when he took Sophie. If we can find out what he looked like we should be able to catch him.’

  ‘Unless he’s already left Hong Kong.’

  ‘That is a possibility,’ admitted Ng. ‘We are hoping that isn’t the case. But we have already made arrangements to identify all gweilos who fly out as of today. We have a number of our own men in the immigration department, and while we cannot prevent anyone flying out we will at least have a record of anyone who leaves. Once we have a picture it will not be too difficult to track him down. But we are assuming he is still in Hong Kong. For one thing, he still has Sophie, and there is no reason why he would want to hurt her.’

  At the mention of her daughter’s name, Jill began to cry again, and she pressed the palms of her hands against her temples as if she had a migraine.

  ‘We will get her back, I promise that,’ Ng said, but even as he said it he knew it was not a promise that he was in a position to make.

  ‘And what about Simon? What about my husband?’

  Ng didn’t know how to answer that. He went into the kitchen to get the maid and told her to take Jill to her bedroom, and to give her some hot milk and make sure she took one of her Libriums. She’d be less of a liability sedated than drunk. ‘Anyone who calls is to be referred to Master Cheng,’ he said to the maid. ‘Anyone. Once you have put Mrs Ng to bed I want you to remove the phone from her bedroom so that she is not disturbed. Do you understand?’

  The maid nodded, her eyes wide. She understood; Mrs Ng wasn’t to speak to anyone outside the house. The maid didn’t know what had happened, but she knew it was bad and she knew enough about the Ng family to know that it was best not to ask any questions. Ng watched as she led Jill upstairs, before going out to rejoin Lin and Tse at the car.

  ‘OK,’ said Ng, more relaxed now that he was away from Jill. ‘Let us go and see my father.’

  Golden Dragon Lodge was an anachronism, every bit as out of date as the old triads were in today’s hi-tech society, and Thomas Ng hated it. It was two-thirds up the Peak, some distance below the palatial mansion called Sky High which belonged to the chairman of the HongKong and Shanghai Bank, at the end of a small private road. The grounds were surrounded by a stone wall built without mortar, three times the height of a man, and the only way in was through two huge wooden doors, painted scarlet and peppered with black metal studs as if someone had fired them from a giant sawn-off shotgun.

  The wall surrounded six or seven acres of prime residential land that Ng knew could be redeveloped into a huge tower block worth millions upon millions of dollars. He’d made enquirie
s some years ago and found that planning permission would not be a problem and that the site had a plot ratio that would allow them to build more than twenty storeys high. He had broached the subject with his father, but only once. He made it clear in no uncertain terms that Golden Dragon Lodge was not to be touched and the matter was not to be raised again.

  The grounds sloped at a twenty-degree angle, with the house somewhere in the middle, with breathtaking views of Victoria Harbour and the skyscrapers of Central and Admiralty, and beyond to Tsim Sha Tsui. In the distance, shrouded in mist, were the eight hills that hemmed in Kowloon.

  Two guards opened the huge doors to allow the Mercedes in, and it drove slowly along the gravelled track which twisted along the contours of the hill until it ended in front of a double garage with a circular turning area. Although the house itself was built on foundations which cut into the hill, much of the grounds sloped and the site was criss-crossed with wandering paths and stepped walkways. Getting from the garage to the house involved walking up a dozen stone steps and then along a wooden bridge that curved over a man-made pool in which the humps of a stone dragon, twenty yards long at least, rose and fell in the water, leading to a massive head with gaping jaws and staring eyes that glared over at the Bank of China building. In the waters swam huge goldfish which his father fed every morning. Ng stopped on the bridge and looked at the dragon’s head, remembering how he had played around the water with his brothers when they were children. Lin and Tse stopped behind him, fidgeting, not wanting to intrude.

  The grounds were tailor-made for games of hide and seek, full of secret places: caves made from concrete with hidden shrines inside, groves of exotic plants that his father had imported from all over Asia, walkways that led to small pagodas with stone seats and tables, there for no other reason than for you to sit and admire the view. There were statues of giant birds and animals, objects that his father had bought on a whim and spent hours deciding where to place in the wonderland of a garden. There was a Japanese rock garden, dotted with tiny stunted trees, a banana plantation, an orange grove, a waterfall that was powered by a giant pump which cascaded over a secret place where Simon, Thomas and Charles used to sit and eat rice cakes and drink lemonade when they wanted to get away from their young sister. At the bottom of the site, screened from the house, was a swimming pool with its own changing-rooms, tiled like a school’s pool with the depth marked off at intervals and lanes marked in blue tiles on the bottom, with a high-diving board and a springboard. There was another man-made pool to the left, behind a clump of pine trees in which their father had built a stone junk that could only be reached by walking along a stout plank. They used to play pirates there with wooden cutlasses, fighting for possession of the ship for all they were worth, sometimes allowing Catherine and her dolls to play the part of hostages.

  Ng began walking again, over the bridge and up the path that zig-zagged to the front of the building. It was a traditional three-storey Chinese house, but so traditional that it looked like a mockery of what a Chinese house should be. It looked as if it belonged to one of the Cantonese soap operas where warriors with pigtails flew through the air and wizards disappeared in puffs of purple smoke. The roof was pagoda-shaped, with orange tiles that curled up at the edges, and at the four corners were dragon-heads with flaring nostrils and forked tongues. The windows were small and all had shutters. The house had no airconditioning; it never had and it never would, not so long as his father lived there. The shutters were closed in summer to keep out the searing heat, and closed in winter to keep out the cold, and as a result the house was dark and gloomy all year round, except for a few glorious weeks in spring and autumn.

  There was a flagstoned area in front of the main doors to the house where his father waited for him, hands locked behind his back as he looked out across the harbour.

  Tse and Lin stopped at the end of the path, leaving Ng to walk alone across the flagstones to his father. Only at the last minute did the old man take his eyes off the ships in the harbour below and smile at his son.

  ‘You look well, Kin-ming.’

  ‘And you, Father.’ The old man steadfastly refused to use his sons’ English names, and they had given up trying to persuade him otherwise.

  The old man had reached the age where the passing of the years seemed to have no effect on him. His hair had all but disappeared and his skin was mottled with dark brown liver spots, but there were few wrinkles on his face. He was a small man, with round shoulders and slightly bowed legs, the sort of man who always received poor service in shops and hotels until people discovered who he was. It was partly the old man’s fault; he had never been one to wear his wealth. His clothes were always cheap and off-the-peg, his watch was a simple wind-up steel model that was at least thirty years old, and he preferred sandals to shoes. The only jewellery he wore was a thin gold wedding ring. At a conservative estimate his father was worth US$250 million, but he looked like a hawker, spoke guttural Cantonese with a thick mainland accent and could only manage broken English.

  The old man kept his hands clasped behind his back and made no move to touch Thomas. That was his way. He could barely remember the last time they had touched, let alone hugged each other. His father was not a physical man, not a toucher, and he always hid his emotions. Even now he seemed placid and at ease, despite the reason for the visit. He had looked the same way at his wife’s funeral some ten years earlier and had looked scornfully at the tears in the eyes of his sons. Thomas had heard him later that night though, alone in his bedroom on the top floor of the house, crying softly and repeating his wife’s name over and over again. Thomas had felt more love for him then than he had ever done before, but he stayed where he was at the bedroom door, unable to walk in and hold his father. He knew that if he had, the old man would never have forgiven him, and he had crept silently back down the stairs.

  ‘Walk with me,’ his father said, and turned along the path that ran by the side of the house. The path was narrow and it wasn’t until it reached a flight of steps set into the hillside and reinforced with slats of wood that they could walk side by side. The steps led to a wide strip of grass surrounded by ornate flower beds. In front of one knelt one of the six old gardeners who toiled to keep the estate in pristine condition. They were paid a pittance, and were now at the age where they worked out of loyalty to the old man and love of the gardens. They lived in a small row of huts behind the pool changing-rooms, along with the three Filipina maids who looked after the house. There were also half a dozen Red Poles assigned to look after the old man. Ng had only seen the two at the gate but he knew that at least two more would be close by, shadowing them as they walked.

  They moved in silence through a circle of alternating stone herons and turtles, all looking up at the sky, and clumps of bushes that gave off a heady perfume that made Ng’s head swim.

  The path led to the two flights of steps, one meandering down to a tarmac tennis court at the far side of the house, the other angling sharply up. The old man gripped the wooden rail of the steps that went up and began to climb, rolling slightly from side to side like a sailor unused to dry land. Ng followed behind, out of breath.

  ‘Not tired, are we, Kin-ming?’

  ‘No Father,’ said Ng. The old bastard was doing it deliberately, to show how fit and strong he was.

  There were eighty-eight steps, a lucky number – unless you were out of breath and had a rapidly expanding waistline. At the top were two red and gold pagodas, left and right, each containing a large circular stone table surrounded by four stools. Beyond the pagodas were two long single-storey buildings, red-painted wood with tiled roofs, where the old man would play mah jong or cards late into the night with his cronies, or table tennis with Thomas, Simon and Charles when they were young. The buildings were either side of a courtyard the size of a basketball court where the old man practised t’ai chi every morning, and where the boys had learnt kung fu with a succession of teachers. It was a play area, a training area; and a pla
ce to come and enjoy the view. It was the highest point of the estate, bar a few yards of sloping hillside which ended at the boundary wall, and it had been Thomas’ favourite spot, until their mother had died, and his father had decided to put her grave on the edge of the courtyard, facing the steps. And not just a grave; the edifice he had built was a monument to her, a huge stone dome inscribed with gold Chinese characters standing on a metre-high podium. It dominated the area, and while it could not be seen from the house below, Ng was constantly aware that his mother was buried there. What made it worse was that his father had decided that he also wanted to be buried there, next to her in the tomb. His father had stipulated so in his will, but Thomas knew that once the old man had died the site would be redeveloped as soon as possible if he had his way.

  The old man ambled over to the right-hand pagoda and sat on one of the stools, motioning for Thomas to take the seat next to him. They were both facing the harbour and they sat in silence watching the ships, junks and ferries criss-crossing the blue waters and the stream of planes landing and taking off from Kai Tak.

  ‘You are watching the airport,’ the old man said eventually, and it was not a question.

  ‘And the ports,’ said Thomas. ‘We are photographing every gweilo who leaves. Once we know what he looks like we will check all the pictures, and we will know whether or not he has left. If he has left there is nowhere in the world where he can hide.’

  The old man nodded. ‘But you think he is still here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because of Sophie?’

  ‘Whatever has happened to Simon, and we are still not sure exactly what has happened, it is the work of a professional. And professionals do not kill children.’

  ‘In the past, maybe. But the world is different now. They blow up planes, they plant bombs in shops.’

  ‘Terrorists, Father, they are terrorists. What has happened to Simon is different. The man who attacked him was a professional. That is another reason we think he will still be in Hong Kong.’