Shadow Creatures (16 page)

‘What kind of something?’

‘Something unusual.’

A slight pause, and then: ‘Where you get this number from?’

‘From a previous customer of yours – a customer who is a close friend of my employer. She was very happy with the service you provided.’

‘You have name?’ the voice demanded.

‘I do, but I don’t really want to say it on the phone.’

‘OK.’ The voice sounded slightly happier, and Rhino guessed that if he had actually named some celebrity that he thought might have bought an exotic animal from Xi Lang then the
phone call would have ended rapidly. Xi Lang only wanted customers who would be careful about giving out too much information.

‘You know where we are?’ the voice said.

‘I do.’

‘Then you come over now.’ A slight relaxation in the voice. ‘We give you good service. You get what you want from us.’

‘We will be there in half an hour,’ Rhino said, and cut the call off.

The drive out to the Sham Shui Po district of Kowloon took about twenty minutes, and in that time they seemed to cross from affluence to poverty and back several times. The
younger Chinese people buzzed around on scooters, dressed expensively in designer jeans and T-shirts, with sunglasses over their eyes and iPods in their ears, but their elders rode around on
bicycles, wearing loose, plain shirts and trousers and wide straw hats. As they got closer to Sham Shui Po, the buildings became older and uglier. The majority of them were still high-rise blocks
of mixed design and variable height, but they were plainer now, made of water-stained concrete, and they had balconies and air-conditioning units stuck randomly all over them. Clotheslines were
stretched from balcony to balcony, and clothes fluttered from them like drab flags.

After a while, they left the residential area behind and entered an area of long, old warehouses made of crumbling breeze blocks and rusty corrugated iron roofs set at shallow angles. Thin,
mangy cats with hungry eyes slunk in the shadows. Rhino drove carefully up to a particular warehouse and stopped.

He got out, motioning for Gecko to join him. Stepping out of the air-conditioned interior of the car was like stepping into an oven. The two of them stood there, looking around, feeling the
sweat prickle down their backs and across their foreheads.

A side door in an anonymous warehouse opened and a large Chinese man in a suit emerged into the sunlight. His eyes were hidden behind black sunglasses. There was a bulge beneath his jacket that
suggested he was armed. Without saying anything, he gestured Rhino over, and expertly searched him from head to foot. Rhino assumed that he was looking not only for weapons but, more likely, for
recording devices that might suggest he was an undercover policeman. The man removed Rhino’s wallet and checked the fake identification carefully, then handed it back. Beckoning to Gecko, he
did the same, then stepped back and nodded.

Rhino went and opened the car door, and Natalie got out, every inch the regal rich princess. The Chinese man stepped towards her as if to search her too, but Rhino put a hand on his chest. The
man stopped, stared at Rhino for a long moment, and then turned to look at the black rectangle of the open door.

A Chinese woman stepped out of the darkness and into the sunlight. It was difficult to tell her age, but Rhino thought she couldn’t be much older than her late twenties. Her hair was
black, and wound into a tight bun on the back of her head, and she wore a red silk dress embroidered with dragons.

‘Mr Lang welcomes you,’ she said in good English, ‘and hopes that you had a pleasant journey. Your visit is unexpected and unplanned, but welcome regardless. Mr Lang does
insist, however, that all visitors be searched. It is a . . . requirement of this establishment.’

Natalie took her hat off and threw it in the back of the car, then followed it with her tiny handbag. She held her arms out from her sides and twirled round. The green silk dress that Rhino had
bought for her didn’t really leave anywhere that she could have hidden anything larger than a credit card.

‘Do I look like I’m hiding anything?’ she asked.

The Chinese woman paused, and then shook her head. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘and I apologize for the necessity of asking. My name is Tsai Chen. Please to come inside.’

The inside of the warehouse was shadowed and mercifully cool. The smell reminded Rhino of the times he had gone to the zoo when he was a kid. It was the smell of the elephant house.

He hoped they didn’t have any elephants there. He just knew that Natalie would want to take one home with her, for real.

From where the five of them stood, inside the doorway, rows of cages and crates stretched away into the darkness. Some of them stood on the floor, and others sat on metal shelving, three or four
levels high. Rhino thought that he could make out, far away, some fenced-off areas of earth or water where animals would be free to roam and stretch their muscles. The warehouse wasn’t silent
either. From every direction Rhino could hear bleats, screeches, growls, barks and other noises that were more difficult to classify, but which obviously came from living things. He couldn’t
see how this many creatures could be kept in these conditions for very long. Just keeping them fed and watered would be a major undertaking in its own right. Presumably Xi Lang had some large
open-air facility somewhere in the New Territories, and this was a staging post, somewhere close to the docks and the airport where the crates of ‘merchandise’ could be stored before
they were sent to their final destination.

Rhino wondered how many of them actually turned up alive. Xi Lang must take precautions to minimize the fatality rate in transit. Maybe he drugged the creatures before they were dispatched. He
wasn’t going to ask – real customers wouldn’t be that interested in the mechanics of the operation, whereas undercover police or other investigators would, and he wanted them to
be counted in the former camp, not the latter.

‘May I offer you some refreshments?’ Tsai Chen said smoothly. ‘Perhaps some jasmine tea?’ Rhino noticed that the large man in the suit who had stepped out to meet them
had come inside and closed the door, and he had been joined by two smaller men.

Rhino was about to say ‘No,’ but Natalie stepped in before he could open his mouth. ‘Thank you – that would be lovely.’

As Tsai Chen gestured to one of the men, she said, ‘We never established the name of the person who recommended our services to you.’

Rhino saw a fleeting look of panic on Natalie’s face, mirrored by one on Gecko’s . . .
Ah
, he thought,
this is where it all starts to go wrong
. . .

The door to Tara’s room opened and one of the two short-haired Eastern European men entered. Tara wished she could tell what country he came from – Russia?
Lithuania? Poland? – but her ear for accents wasn’t good. She just knew he sounded like a baddie from a James Bond film.

He had a small gold earring in his left ear. She hadn’t spotted that before.

He was also carrying a video camera on a tripod. Without looking at Tara, he plonked it down in the centre of the room, facing away from the window. Noticing Tara noticing that, he shrugged.

‘No need to give away location,’ he said.

‘At the angle you’ll be filming, there’s just trees and sky out there,’ Tara pointed out.

‘Even so. Best not to take chances. I have seen these
CSI
programmes on TV – just one piece of a building, with a shadow showing which way the sun was shining, and they can
tell where the video was made. Is very clever. That is why I use video camera instead of mobile phone to record you – harder to trace.’ He nodded towards the tray on the floor, beside
the mattress. ‘You eat OK?’

‘If you like fried chicken.’

‘Who does not like fried chicken?’ he countered.

‘What kind of food do they have in your country?’ Tara asked, trying to get some kind of clue as to where he came from.

‘Fried chicken,’ he said. He looked up at her, from where he was fiddling with the camera, and smiled. ‘We also eat goat, on special occasions. The tender parts of a goat,
grilled.’

‘Lovely.’

‘If you like the tender parts of a goat.’

‘Which are the tender parts?’ she asked.

He frowned. ‘If you do not know, it is best not to ask.’ He gestured to her to come towards the centre of the room. ‘Now, you stand there.’

Standing was difficult. Her muscles didn’t want to obey her, and her legs were shaking with fear. She did as she was told though, and stood in the middle of the room, in front of the glass
eye of the video camera. She cast a despairing glance at the door, but the man had closed it behind him, and she knew that his companion had to be out there somewhere. She could run for the front
door, but she wouldn’t make it, and things would just get worse for her. At least at the moment they were making her relatively comfortable. She’d lived in worse places, and eaten worse
food.

The man handed her a piece of folded-up paper from his pocket. ‘You read this out,’ he said. He held up a hand, indicating that she wait until he had switched the video camera on,
and then his hand swept down in an ‘Action!’ gesture.

She looked at the words on the paper, which were so predictable that she could have scripted them herself. She felt something shrivel inside her as she thought about the effect that the words
would have on Gecko. It was loading a whole lot of guilt on to him that he really didn’t need – and if he agreed to do what the gang wanted then it would be her fault!

Taking a deep breath, she looked up at the camera.

‘Eduardo,’ she said, and then improvised by adding, ‘Gecko – I am being held by some men who say that they have talked to you before. They say that you have to come and
work for them. If you don’t, they say they will hurt me.’ She could hear the tremor in her voice, and tried to suppress it. ‘They say they will hurt me badly, and that it will be
your fault. They say that you must come back to your flat, and that they will be waiting for you there.’ She paused, reading the last sentence. ‘They say you have three days.’

The man behind the camera paused, then clicked the
Off
button. ‘That is fine. We will edit down and send to his mobile phone.’ He glanced at Tara, and frowned slightly at her
expression. ‘You want to do it again? More feeling, maybe?’

‘I think I’ve put all the feeling I can manage in there,’ she said quietly. She looked at him. He didn’t look like a bad man, particularly. He looked like someone you
might find behind a bar, or running a stall in a market. ‘Would you really hurt me?’ she asked tremulously.

He grimaced, and shrugged. ‘I have my orders,’ he said. ‘If I do not follow orders, then it is me that gets hurt. Given a choice . . .’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re only following orders.’

‘We have a saying in my country – “The fish eats the fly, the man eats the fish and the bear eats the man”. You, I think, are the fly, and I am not the bear.’

‘Which country is that?’ Tara tried again. The man just smiled, picked up the camera and the tripod, and left.

Tara shivered, feeling a twisting sensation in the pit of her stomach.
Hurt badly
. That had been the phrase on the paper.

She didn’t want to be hurt badly. She didn’t want to be hurt at all.

But she didn’t want Gecko to have to work for a criminal gang either.

She had been
so
stupid. This was all her fault!

‘D
o you remember my friend Savannah Drummond?’ Natalie asked. Her heart was beating fast, but she kept a polite smile on her face. She
kept telling herself,
This is a business discussion; there’s no reason to panic
, but these were career criminals they were dealing with.

Tsai Chen inclined her head, but said nothing. It was obvious to Natalie that she didn’t recognize the name – it would be unusual if she did, unless Natalie’s friend Savannah
actually
had
bought some exotic pet from Xi Lang – but she was too polite to say so, especially with a potential client standing just in front of her. And Savannah was careful enough
of her own privacy that any enquiry from the Triads would hit a stone wall.

‘She had the cutest little set of meercats, the last time I saw her,’ Natalie continued. ‘I asked her where she got them, and she mentioned Mr Xi Lang. As I was passing through
Hong Kong on a shopping trip, I thought I would pop in to see what other things you might have.’

Tsai Chen didn’t make any gesture or movement, but the second suited man moved quietly away, presumably to check on their computer records. That left the larger man still standing there
like a small but very threatening mountain.

‘And what kind of . . . items . . . were you interested in?’ Tsai Chen asked.

‘Something that nobody else has,’ Natalie replied. ‘A speciality item.’ She smiled her best, politest, whitest smile. ‘Meercats are
so
last year. I want
something that will make my friends green with envy.’

The first man came back with a tray containing a small teapot and two small cups. Tsai Chen carefully poured out two cups of honey-coloured tea, handed one to Natalie and then took the second
one herself. Bodyguards don’t get refreshments, Natalie mentally observed.

‘Could I interest you in a dolphin?’ Tsai Chen asked calmly.

‘My local aquarium has seven dolphins,’ Natalie countered, just as calmly. She took a sip of her tea. It had a delicate floral taste. ‘Oh, how exquisite.’

‘Do they have Yangtze River dolphins? They are very rare. Almost extinct, in fact. In another few years you might have the only living Yangtze River dolphins in the world.’

Natalie shrugged, doing her best to look bored. ‘Dolphins are dolphins,’ she said casually.

‘Then perhaps a rhinoceros?’

Natalie tried not to look over at Rhino. ‘Where would I put it?’ she asked.

‘One of our customers drained their swimming pool and put a rhinoceros in there.’

‘Rather cramped, surely?’ Natalie said. ‘You would only have room for one, and it would get lonely.’