Hungry Ghost (6 page)

It was three days since he’d killed Donaldson, now safely buried three feet below the courtyard, close to the pool. Howells had sent the two girls back to their village, promising them that he’d return in a few days and knowing it wasn’t true. It felt good to be working again, to be following orders, to be able to use his initiative and his skills. He felt free. He stroked his chin, enjoying the feel of the bare skin now that he’d shaved off the beard and moustache. His hair was still longer than he liked, but he’d change that when he got to Hong Kong.

He’d been to Hong Kong twice before, but both times en route to other destinations. He’d never worked there, just visited a few bars and toured the shops. He remembered buying a camera there, a Pentax, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what had happened to it. Not that it mattered any more. Howells began whistling to himself quietly, his face a picture of contentment.

In his back pocket was the envelope from Grey that Donaldson had so faithfully delivered. It contained two photographs of a man called Simon Ng, three closely typed sheets of background information on him and ten thousand American dollars in large bills. Slightly less actually, because he’d used some of the cash to buy a ticket to Hong Kong. A one-way ticket.

Howells started smiling as he whistled, and the smile quickly widened into a grin. He began laughing out loud, an unnerving, disjointed sound.

It was eight o’clock in the morning when the
QE2
dropped its anchor above Patrick Dugan’s head. That’s what it sounded like anyway. The rattle of metal links against hard wood went on for twenty seconds or so and then stopped dead. God knows what they were doing, but whatever it was they did it every morning. And last thing at night it was furniture-moving, or footsteps, or the shower running. And sometimes it was at three or four o’clock in the morning. But always the anchor dropped at eight, on the dot. Dugan groaned and stuck his head under the pillow. He felt, rather than heard, the sound of lift doors closing several floors below him and knew that he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.

His block was twenty-eight storeys high, and there were eight flats on each floor. If each flat had a average of one point five wage-earners, and most had two or three, then that meant 336 people would be leaving for work of a morning. And assuming they all left between 7.30 a.m. and 9.30 a.m., that meant an average of one every twenty seconds or so. And each departing resident meant a lift door opening and closing twice. There was no way he’d get back to sleep, not with the noise and the sun streaming in through the bedroom window.

‘Shit,’ he said with venom. He decided to make an effort to blank out the sound of the lift but the more he tried to ignore it, the more the vibration through the pillow annoyed him. He tossed on to his front and tried resting his forehead on the mattress. No good. He tried lying on his back. No good. ‘Shit,’ he said again. He decided to get up and groped for a towel to wrap around his waist. It was a thick blue and white striped one he’d stolen from the Shangri-La Hotel in Bangkok and he tied it around his thickening waistline. He’d never got around to buying curtains for his shoebox of a flat and he could be observed by the occupants of at least three dozen other homes during the short walk to the bathroom. He’d got used to the lack of privacy very quickly; it was just the noises which annoyed him now.

When he’d first moved into the flat the one above him had been empty and he’d actually enjoyed waking up in the mornings. Six months after he’d taken on the mortgage his peace and quiet had been rudely interrupted. The new occupants had embarked on a renovation programme that had taken the best part of twelve weeks, drilling, hammering and banging that started at daybreak and went on until early evening. God knows what they did because the biggest flats in the block had only three rooms, small ones by UK standards though fairly spacious in Hong Kong terms.

Then the building work stopped. Bliss. Then the
QE2
started docking every morning, bright and early, and the furniture began moving at night. And someone began arriving home in the early hours, pacing up and down in high heels before spending half an hour in the shower. A hooker, maybe, with carpenters for brothers. And shipbreaking parents. For a time he’d thought there might be a drugs ring operating from the flat and he’d toyed with the idea of flashing his warrant card and demanding a look inside, but thought better of it; not without probable cause, and there’d been no telltale vinegar smells. He had been up once, months ago, when the furniture moving had gone on for what seemed an interminable time, screeching and groaning and scraping until he hadn’t been able to stand it any more. He’d rung the bell and it had been opened by a pretty Chinese girl in sweatshirt and jeans. Behind her were two young men holding opposite ends of a small wooden table.

‘Please, it’s very late,’ he said in his very best Cantonese, not the street talk and triad slang he used at work but polite and all the tones spot on. ‘I am trying to sleep. What are you doing to make so much noise?’

‘We finish now,’ she said in fractured English, smiled and closed the door.

They stopped. But the following night they were back at it again. Dugan had given serious thought to moving. Finding another flat wouldn’t be a problem in Tai Koo Shing, there were thousands of them and a steady stream of vacancies as families packed up and emigrated to Canada or Australia. Trouble was he’d got a ninety per cent mortgage and the rest had taken every cent he had in the bank. There was no way he’d be able to raise the legal fees, stamp duty and estate agent fees to move again. And chances were he’d end up in exactly the same position. It was Hong Kong, when all was said and done. Six million people crammed into a few square miles. You had to expect noise, he told himself.

He’d spent almost ten years in rented flats before deciding to buy, encouraged by the fact that the mortgage costs were actually less than the rent he’d been paying for his flat in Happy Valley with half a view of the racetrack. He’d seen prices plunge before, in the 1980s when the thought of what would happen when the colony was given back to the Communists had put the shits up everybody, but there was an air of confidence in the place when he decided to buy. Sure, there were still queues to get out but for every family selling up there was another eager to get its first step on the home ownership rung, a huge Chinese middle class with money to spend. He’d done all the sums before he’d bought this place, but he had miscalculated on the costs of furnishing it even though it was tiny. In London it would have been described as a compact studio flat but in Hong Kong it was sold as a family-sized home. He’d had to arrange an overdraft to buy the air-conditioners which he’d foolishly assumed the previous owners would leave behind free of charge. He should have known better. When they moved out they even took the lightbulbs and shower curtain, and unscrewed the towel rail at the side of the washbasin.

Dugan had invested every cent he had in the flat and then the geriatric lunatics in Peking ordered the massacre of unarmed students in Tiananmen Square and the bottom fell out of the property market, and for a few agonizing months Dugan’s flat was worth about a fifth less than his mortgage. It had climbed back since, but there was still an air of unease in the colony, based on a total mistrust of the Chinese Government and their trigger-happy soldiers.

The bathroom floor was damp again but he still couldn’t work out if it was condensation or a leak. At least it didn’t smell like piss. He reached for the flush handle but it swung uselessly in his hand and he realized with distaste that the water had been turned off again. It happened every week or so, every time someone in the block needed plumbing work done. The toilet supply was separate from the drinking water; all flushing was done with sea water held in a big tank on the roof, so at least he’d be able to shower and make a coffee – though sometimes they switched off the main water supply as well. He watched two turds gently circle each other like wary otters in the toilet bowl and he cursed quietly. What if he brought a girl back tonight? Great aphrodisiac, a toilet full of stale shit.

He walked into his galley kitchen and put the kettle on the single gas burner. That and a microwave were the only cooking gear he had. Usually he ate out, and all the fridge contained was milk, a few frozen TV dinners and a bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut chocolate. He spooned some Gold Blend granules into his ‘I’m The Boss’ mug and went back to the bedroom to put on a CD. He’d moved the CD player into his bedroom after the night noises started, using music to cover the sound of moving furniture, high-heeled shoes and opening and closing lifts. It almost worked. By the time he’d chosen Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark his kettle was starting to whistle feebly. He poured the water on to the brown granules and showered while it cooled. Mould was starting to grow in the cracks between the tiles and he groaned inwardly – another Sunday morning to be spent scrubbing the walls with an old toothbrush. As usual the hot water laboured to crawl out of the shower head and he had to move his broad back around to rinse off the suds. He shaved in the shower, being careful not to damage his moustache. He’d been growing it for three months now and it was in good shape, almost oblong with just a slight downturn at the edge of his lips. It made him look more serious, he reckoned, and also went some way to make up for the thinning thatch on top of his head. He checked his teeth at the mirror. At least they were OK. Dugan didn’t look at himself through rose-coloured glasses: he knew all his faults; the thickening stomach, the thinning hair, the nose that had been broken once too often playing rugby for the police team. He wasn’t good-looking, and he looked five years or so older than he really was, but his deep blue eyes and warm smile attracted more than enough girls. Girls rather than women; his escorts were usually at least ten years younger than he was, and usually Chinese. The blue eyes and fluent Cantonese usually won them over without too much trouble. Like plucking apples in an orchard. A frustrated gweipor had once asked him what it was about Chinese girls that attracted him so much. ‘There are so many of them,’ he’d answered, only half joking. He relaxed the bared grin into a gentle smile and winked at himself in the mirror.

‘You smarmy bastard, you,’ he said. He walked barefoot back to the kitchen, leaving behind a trail of wet footprints on the polished wooden floor. The hot coffee gave him a boost and the energy to dry himself and dress. His grey suit was sombre enough for a senior inspector in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force but it could do with dry cleaning. It was crumpled, but not stained, so he could live with it for a few days longer. His white shirt was clean and he wore his second-best rugby club tie. He stood in front of the fitted unit that stretched from the floor to the ceiling and used his reflection in one of the mirrored cupboard doors to help comb his hair over his bald patch. It didn’t look too bad. A hell of a lot better than it looked in the changing-room after a game of rugby, that was for sure. Not that baldness worried him, but there was no harm in making the most of what he had left.

He switched off the CD player, double-locked the front door behind himself and waited for the lift. There were three, computer-controlled so that you never had to wait more than thirty seconds. There was a note in Chinese taped to one of the lift walls. He couldn’t read it, his fluency was confined to spoken Cantonese, but he knew that it meant the water had been switched off.

Dugan’s office was in Wan Chai, close to the bar area and the quickest way this time of the morning was to go by MTR, the Mass Transit Railway. Dugan could walk from his flat to the MTR station under cover every step of the way, thanks to the interlinking design of the Tai Koo Shing complex; tower blocks, schools, restaurants, department stores, all linked by covered walkways.

A small group of elderly women were practising t’ai chi on the podium, watching the moves of a white-haired frail grandmother in black silk trousers and white shirt and trying to copy them. The moves had started life as one of the most effective of the Oriental martial arts but through centuries of teaching, of being passed from instructor to pupil, they had lost all purpose and were now no more than a slow-motion dance, useful for keeping old folks supple but of little use in a fight. Dugan smiled as he imagined the grandmothers trying to fight off a mugger and wondering why they couldn’t disable their attacker by standing on one leg and waving their hands in front of them.

Blankets and mattresses had been spread out around the fountains to air in the morning sun and he threaded his way through them to the entrance to Cityplaza, the estate’s main shopping complex which also contained the MTR station.

It never ceased to amaze Dugan how clean it all was, the lack of litter and graffiti. If it had been in England the vandals would have long covered every flat white surface with spray-painted obscenities, but Tai Koo Shing looked pretty much as it did when Swires first built it on reclaimed land more than a decade earlier.

Dugan remembered the pictures in the
South China Morning Post
of the queues to buy flats in the first block, and ever since it had been a place where middle-class Chinese aspired to live, the two-and three-bedroomed flats often representing the pinnacle of a lifetime’s work or the launch pad to emigration. And because it was a middle-class dormitory town and not a working-class dumping ground, and all the residents had to pay a fairly hefty monthly management charge, it was always well cared for and repairs were usually done promptly. It was an OK place to live, once you got used to the crowds. It was busy even first thing in the morning, and on weekends it wasn’t worth trying to do any shopping there it was so crowded. They came from all over Hong Kong to wander around and window-shop, to gaze at the displays of high-priced fashion and state-of-the-art consumer electrical equipment. Some bright entrepreneurs had even started running bus trips from the villages in the New Territories, and on weekends you’d see lines of old men and women with dirt-encrusted hands and worn clothes being taken around in groups, wide-eyed at the bright, shiny affluence of it all. The MTR station was mobbed, as usual, and Dugan had to fight to get on to the first train that stopped. A small man in stained T-shirt and shorts called him a ‘gweilo prick’ but Dugan didn’t let on that he’d understood. No point.