by Lee Week
He leaned forward accusingly. She held her breath as she waited for the inevitable execution of her character. But it didn’t materialise. Just when she had steeled herself for the worst, he seemed to soften. He shook his head deliberately. ‘It is very bad news. She was so young and pretty and I had hoped we might have a life together. Such a shame.’ He sighed, pouring himself a large whisky as he did so, and sitting further back in his seat. Then he turned to her and smiled. ‘And now you are leaving us too, Lucy, is that right?’ His face was taking on a tight appearance, his fake smile overtaxing it.
‘Yes, I am going to live in America.’
‘In America? Good girl, Lucy!’ He leaned over and patted her leg. ‘I am glad it has turned out so well for you. We can exchange news.’ He paused and added ice to his glass before continuing. ‘You might be interested to learn how your cousin Georgina is?’
86
‘Georgina?’ As guarded as she had meant to be, Lucy’s reaction betrayed her panic as she grappled to understand what game Chan was playing. Lucy couldn’t think how it could possibly benefit him to bring Georgina into it.
‘How is she?’ she floundered.
‘She’s well. Considering what she has been through and what has happened to her. Can’t be easy knowing that you were betrayed by your only family – sold.’
Lucy’s face reddened and her heart pumped.
‘I was left no choice, if you remember. It is hard to think straight when under threat.’
He laughed. ‘Funny, Lucy, I don’t remember it like that. You had plenty of choices.’ He held out each hand in turn, as if weighing the evidence in a hammy gesture. ‘To gamble, not to gamble. To sell your sister, your cousin, or not to sell them. See! Plenty of choices.’
Lucy fought against the instinct to run.
‘I hope Georgina will forgive me, when I explain it to her.’
‘I really wouldn’t count on it. And you won’t be able to explain it to her. You won’t be seeing her again. At least I keep to my side of the bargain. She’s sick and she’s sad – she has no one now and soon she’ll be of no more use to me. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Lucy – to be rid of your cousin? You sold her to me, remember?’
Lucy thought how ugly and mean he looked, as he sat opposite her, shrivelled by his malicious character, delighting in his triumph. She thought about Frank, how kind and generous he was. Soon she would be his wife. She would be as good as anyone then. Chan could go hang himself then.
He continued. ‘It seems you have managed to lose what little family you had, all in the space of about a month. Impressive.’ He leaned forward and rested his hand on her thigh.
She knocked the hand off her leg. ‘I didn’t cause the death of Ka Lei,’ she snapped. She was growing dangerously close to being angry enough not to care about consequences.
He smiled and continued: ‘That’s why you sold Georgina to me in the first place. You were jealous. Ka Lei loved her more than she loved you. Your mamasan filled me in on the details.’ He sat back to watch the outcome of his words. ‘Quite clearly, for Ka Lei there was nothing, and no one, worth living for after Georgina was gone. You weren’t enough, Lucy, were you? You couldn’t even be bothered to look after her properly. You were ultimately responsible for your own sister’s death.’
‘Not just me.’ Lucy fought to contain her anger and lost. The words spat out like venom across the room. ‘You could have done it gently, but you hurt her. She lost something the night that you bought her – not just her virginity – she lost her smile – she didn’t want to live any more. All the harm came from you – all of it.’
Chan laughed. Lucy had to get out. ‘You made me do it all,’ she said, standing abruptly. ‘Now I must go.’ Smoothing her skirt down, she composed herself. ‘Goodbye, Mr Chan.’
‘It’s not goodbye for us, Lucy. We have unfinished business. I might let you leave Hong Kong – might. But, remember, the world is a small place. It doesn’t matter where you go in it – if I want to, I will find you. So, dear Lucy, my advice to you is to keep looking over your shoulder. Oh, and give my regards to your fiancé. Tell him he’s a very lucky man. But then he knows that already.’ Chan laughed.
87
David White sat back in his chair and grinned broadly at Johnny Mann as he walked into his boss’s office.
‘Well done! You’ve done it! We have our killers, Johnny.’ Superintendent White was in jubilant mood until he caught sight of Mann’s face. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m not convinced. I will feel happier when we get the forensics report. I want to know exactly what was in the brothers’ place.’
‘You can’t possibly doubt that they are responsible? It couldn’t fit better, Johnny. One a butcher by trade, and the other a taxi driver and a friend of the girls. What more do you want? I’ll get a unit out to Man Po’s workplace straight away. We’ve closed all the farms, stopped all movement of animals.’
‘I know they played a major part. I am just not sure that they were working alone. Several things don’t add up.’
‘Such as?’
‘There didn’t seem to be the equipment for torture in that room. It was bare except for the mattress, the restraint and the specimen bottles. If the girls were held in that room for weeks at a time – tortured and killed there – there would be some evidence of that. It is definitely a short-stay place.’
‘Bloody hell!’ David White rubbed his bald head vigorously. ‘All right, it’s worth considering. Maybe one of the farms? We might find a second location in one of those?’
‘We might. We haven’t seen anything like that yet, but we have teams out looking.’
‘Did you get anything out of Max?’
‘At the moment he fears something a lot worse than us. I’m going to change that.’
Ng knocked on the door. ‘There is a small trace of human blood in the brothers’ place. Not enough to mean the victims were killed or dismembered there. Another thing … There’s some unusual activity in the New Territories. Someone’s been buying a lot of land up past Shenzhen … through a bogus company.’
Mann left the Superintendent’s office, closely followed by Shrimp, who was waiting for him.
‘Boss …’ Shrimp handed Mann two DVDs. ‘I got these from a stall on Nathan Road. The woman said they are snuff movies. She was very nervous, but greedy of course. They cost me five thousand dollars.’
‘Have you looked at them? Is it one of our women?’
‘I thought I’d better wait …. in case.’
‘In case Helen is in one, you mean?’
88
The three men were crowded into the office, huddled in front of a laptop. ‘It’s not Helen,’ said Mann. ‘It’s too difficult to say whether she’s one of the women on our list but it’s expensively shot. Nice décor. Professionally produced. Believe me, this cost big money to make.’
They watched the screen as a young blonde woman in her early twenties, dressed in bra and panties, cavorted drunkenly around on a purple-silk-covered bed. She was drinking from a champagne flute held up to her mouth by a man. His face was blurred but his body was clear to see.
‘The man who’s pouring drink down her throat, he’s definitely Caucasian,’ said Ng.
‘Definitely: pot-bellied, skinny-legged. I would say he is about sixty,’ answered Mann.
‘What’s his accent?’ asked Ng. ‘He’s saying something I can’t make out – but I know that accent …’
‘He’s Russian,’ replied Mann.
After a few minutes of foreplay the man undressed the girl and tied her hands together. The girl giggled drunkenly. He lifted her into a kneeling position. She was still laughing as he hoicked her arms above her head and onto a restraint hanging from the ceiling. The first camera focused on the girl’s face as she twisted around to see where her partner had gone, then the second camera viewed the back of the kneeling girl. She continued twisting and giggling – waiting. The man’s back came into view.
‘Pause that. Look at his right leg. Deep lacerations. Old scars. Some of those wounds go to the bone. Okay, play …’
The man reached for something off camera. When he pulled his arm back in shot, he was holding a whip in his hand. He began to beat the girl violently.
Her body jerked at each contact and her legs thrashed around the bed as she tried to escape the pain. After three minutes she was covered in bloody welts. The man then stopped and lay down on the bed. He was exhausted from the exertion. His pigeon chest rose and fell as the girl’s body shook violently with the shock and the pain. The only noise was his heavy breathing and the small, sharp intakes of breath from the girl as she tried to talk.
‘Bitte, no more. Bitte. Ich habe ein kind. Bitte. Nicht mehr.’
The view changed to the front. Her head was dropped to her chest. She began whimpering and pleading for mercy. The man knelt behind her. His hands held on to her hips and he lifted her onto his lap as he began forcing himself inside her rectum. As she tilted her head back and screamed in pain, he slipped a length of silk around her neck, took up the slack, wrapped the excess around his fist, and twisted.
The camera zoomed in on her face. He brought her to the moment of death five times before finally letting her go. It took him forty minutes to kill her.
During those minutes Mann went quiet. He was counting the camera angles, listening for background sounds, watching for any mistakes that the filmmaker might have made. He tried hard not to imagine someone he cared for going through what he could see on the screen. The anger inside him was boiling his blood.
Shrimp returned. ‘Will we be able to trace him from this film, boss?’
‘Perhaps … It won’t be easy.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘She is German. She said she has a child. She had a family somewhere – find them. And get me a list of the Russian mafia bosses who have been spending time here in the last few years, ones that were injured from a landmine.’
89
Chan stood before CK. He bowed his head before his Mountain Master, his Dragon Head.
CK indicated to Chan to sit. He was in no hurry to say what he had to. But Chan was tired and wanted to get home. He had just arrived back from Russia, had come straight from the airport, but not from choice. He had been summoned. He was tired and he was angry. He had been sent on yet another menial task that any one of a hundred people could have done, but he had to suffer his father-in-law’s humiliation yet again. He wondered how much longer he was going to be able to take it.
‘I will be able to brief you more thoroughly on the results of my trip in the morning, CK. I need to check some figures …’
CK interrupted him with a wave of the hand.
‘I do not wish to talk about the Russians.’ He pressed his fingers together, sat back in his chair and stared hard at Chan. Something was definitely amiss. Chan had seen that look before, though never directed at him. Suddenly there was dryness in Chan’s mouth and his heartbeat quickened. He tried to think of which one of a number of misdemeanours had been discovered.
‘I always hoped that we were of the same understanding, Chan, that we saw eye to eye, as it were. But it appears that I have been blind, while you …’ CK smiled sarcastically, ‘you have been seeing all sorts of things.’
‘I am not following you on this one,’ Chan said, sounding a little too contrived.
CK banged his fist on the desk. ‘I should have your eyes taken out, that you can insult me in this manner. You went behind my back to senior members of other societies. You have been courting allies for your own gain.’
Chan could not control his indignation. He retorted: ‘I have made a lot of money for Wo Shing Shing.’
‘Yes, but your methods … underhand – snake in the grass …’
‘I was not aware that the Wo Shing Shing was a society with ethics. The porn industry would be a much poorer place without Wo Shing Shing money.’
Chan’s bravado had overstretched itself. CK was furious. He sprang out of his chair and marched over to the window to regain his self-control. Chan stared at his back, watching his shoulders rising and falling and seeing the tension in his slight frame – how his head dipped and lifted as he ran through his thoughts. At last, he turned around, and Chan could see that he was still at bursting point.
‘I am the Dragon Head, the Master of the Mountain, not you. It is me who decides what this organisation stands for, and what it puts money into, not you. You have betrayed me, gone behind my back and humiliated me. People will know.’ CK leaned across the desk and glared into Chan’s face as he sat unflinching. ‘I don’t think you fully understand what you have done, my worthless son-in-law. You have caused me to lose face, and that is unforgivable. When you first came to me – a strong, brave young man – a newly trained lawyer, educated in England, people told me you had betrayed your own family, killed your own family members to advance yourself. I did not listen. They told me you had betrayed a friend. I didn’t believe them. They told me that you were a snake. A snake who could change his skin but whose blood would always run cold. They were right.’
Chan stood to attention and bowed slowly. His fists were clenched to his sides and his face was ashen. He glared at CK.
‘Forgive me, my Dragon Master. I am your humble servant.’ He stood and walked backwards out of the room, his eyes fixed on CK all the way.
Once outside, he unclenched his fists and looked at the imprint of his fingernails in his palms.
‘You have looked into the eyes of your successor, old man,’ he said under his breath. ‘Never again will you talk to me like that.’
90
‘Two snuff movies. Made at the same location – different covers on the bed, different camera angles, but definitely the same place. In the first film the woman was killed by an old Russian soldier. In the second it was an oriental – possibly Japanese, maybe Korean.’
‘So we have our second location?’ David White did not look pleased.
‘Yep! We certainly have that! A film set that cost a lot of money – professional and slick. That would explain why they are manicured, prettied up, David. They are used for big-budget snuff movies. Four different cameras for a start, and professional lighting. That was an expensive set we were looking at. That takes massive money. And, most importantly, all for the enjoyment of one man. I’d say, if I wanted to buy myself into a movie like that, I’d be looking to pay two to three million US. There’s the girl to find: pretty, foreign, alone, disposable. It takes time and work to handpick girls like that. Then they must be held somewhere for a long period – we know that by the state of the bodies, tortured and filmed, until the final scene in their sad, wasted lives – to ultimately be the vehicle of some rich, twisted bastard’s fantasy.’ Mann shook his head and gulped his drink.
‘Did you find a match for her among the photos taken from the old surgery?’
‘Shrimp is looking for that right now.’
Li knocked and came into the office.
‘We have it, boss. The girl in the first film? We found a photo that matches her on the wall in the brothers’ place. Interpol have an open file on her. Her name is Claudia Weiss. She was a German girl working as a topless waitress in Kowloon. Been missing since April 2000.’
‘She had a child?’
‘Yes. A little girl. She lives with the grandmother in Bavaria.’
‘Okay, so I accept the killings don’t end with the brothers, but they wouldn’t have a photo of Claudia Weiss up in their house if they weren’t involved in it all somehow.’ David sighed heavily and seemed to sink into his chair. ‘This is all we bloody need …’
‘Bernadette and Georgina – their photos weren’t on the wall. It could mean they’re still alive at this second location.’
‘We have a whole new investigation going on,’ said White, head in hands.
‘… And we have a whole set of new players in it,’ Mann added.
91
‘Was there a clue
as to the production company?’ David asked.
‘No chance. But I’m having Ng analyse the film to see if it resembles any legit work we know of.’
‘There must be more films.’
‘Yes, Shrimp’s going back out to see the contact again – see if he can find out more. I think there’s going to be a lot more of these films, David. You know Hong Kong. We’ll copy anything. But this is going to involve some of our big guys. You know – the guys we can’t touch?’
‘We can only hope to bring justice for her and the others in the end.’
Mann looked at him – he knew that tone.
‘Save your bullshit for someone else. I can hear it in your voice – you’re already thinking, if Mann’s right and these are some big guns having themselves some fun with women with no family, no connections – in other words, no value – then we have no hope of getting justice for these women. The men who did this are untouchable. They will have enough power and enough money to buy their way out. I can’t live with that, David. I failed Helen. I failed that young woman in that film, and all the others like her. I owed them my protection and I failed them. We all failed them.’
‘This is Hong Kong – it isn’t all black and white, Mann.’
‘No, it’s all the colour of money, isn’t it, David?’
‘If that were true we wouldn’t be standing here, would we? I know you are frustrated, Mann, I know you would like things done differently. But don’t lose sight of the goal. Things don’t always come right when they are supposed to, but eventually people get what they deserve. A few years down the line they have to account for their misdeeds – even if they end up punished for something different, they get it in the end.’
Mann laughed – hollow and cynical. ‘Now that bit I do believe. But sometimes you have to hurry the process of retribution. Sometimes it doesn’t come quick enough and you have to give it a hand.’