Nine Dragons - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories Book 2) (4 page)

“My name is Grace.”

“Hello. Nice to meet you.”

She found a sweet little smile. “Hello.”

Beatrix nodded at the trash. “Taking the rubbish downstairs?”

“Yes.”

“Where is your mother?”

A quick flash of discomfort passed across her pretty face. “She is asleep.”

“And you’re not?”

She squirmed. “I have work to do.”

Beatrix knew that there was no point in pressing any further. Grace seemed uncomfortable with that subject and most likely wouldn’t answer. The woman had probably been hooking all night and the chances were that now she was in a drugged-out stupor, leaving her daughter to take care of the domestic chores. It was a shabby, unpleasant kind of life for a young girl, but Grace wasn’t Beatrix’s daughter, and she had long since abrogated any right that she might have had to moralise about anything.

Beatrix stooped to collect her bag and was about to bid her farewell when the girl’s face broke into a smile. “Do you like my English?”

She rested the bag on the floor again. “It’s very good. Did you learn it at school?”

Her face clouded again and Beatrix guessed that she didn’t go to school. “I learn it on YouTube.”

“It’s excellent.”

She beamed with pride. “Thank you.” She collected the bags and dragged them to the lift. Beatrix pulled the grille back so that she could get inside and then slid it closed for her.

“Goodbye, Grace.”

“Goodbye, Beatrix.”

She waited until the interior door had wheezed shut and the car had started to descend, and then she turned to her own door. She unlocked it and went inside.

There was a single window in the sitting room. The window was uncovered. The view was of the buildings directly opposite, but, behind them, she could see the towering edifices that comprised the business district around Causeway Bay. When she pushed her head close to the glass and looked to the right, she could see a sliver of dark blue from the harbour. It almost counted as a sea view.

The flat was miniscule. The main room was large enough for an armchair and a small bookshelf, onto which Beatrix had stacked the books she had purchased from market stalls in Kowloon: Woolf, Forster, Dickens, and Hardy. The dark wood parquet floor was scuffed and aged. The kitchen was crammed inside what was not much bigger than a cupboard, with a single ring cooker and a sink. The toilet was in a similar cubbyhole, with a shower directly overhead so that you had to sit on it to wash.

The walls bore a variety of documents, maps, photographs, lists of names and addresses, all of them decorated with the felt-tip markings that she had made across them. The photographs were of girls whom Beatrix’s investigators had suggested matched Isabella’s description. They were all taken with a long lens and, although they all shared superficial similarities—the blonde hair, the blue eyes—she had known immediately, every time, that none of them was Isabella.

She went through to the bedroom. It was big enough for her futon, but only when the last few inches at each end were pushed vertically up the walls. She could sleep by lying flat out, but there was barely any room to spare. The room had a concrete floor that had been stained with numerous unpleasant and noxious-looking liquids.

The room had the only other window in the flat, although the view through the dirty panes was spectacular. It framed the high-rises on Lockhart Road and, behind them, the looming majesty of the Peak. She opened the window to ventilate the stuffy room, leaned out and looked down. She was vertiginously high and, from up here, she could see the squares and rectangles that formed the backyards of the businesses down below. The spaces were hemmed in by plywood fences and protected from the elements by makeshift roofs that were constructed from sheets of plastic made opaque by years of birdshit that had rained down on them. The roofs had collected the plastic bags, trash and other detritus that had been tipped out of the windows of the building. Beatrix watched the silvery outline of a huge gull as it swooped down onto a bag that must have been a recent addition. It tore through the plastic with its beak, liberated the carcass of a chicken and flapped away with it.

She was tired. It had been a long night, powered by adrenaline, and it was catching up with her. She was not as young as she used to be, after all.

She collected the dope and headed for the roof.

THE ROOF was accessed through a door on the top floor that opened when Beatrix put her shoulder to it. She stepped out into the darkness. The exit was in a raised brickwork housing and the roof was arranged in three staggered levels, all of them littered with all manner of debris. Air-conditioning units whirred and glugged. Discarded trash, snagged on sharp points, flapped and rustled in the gentle breeze. Television aerials, bent flat by decades of resisting the typhoons that tore in off the East China Sea, prickled densely. The motors that raised and lowered the building’s unreliable elevator buzzed into life. Fat gulls took to the air as Beatrix stepped out, and the concrete surface was slick with their guano.

Beatrix picked a careful path through the rubbish to the edge of the building. The view was spectacular. The harbour was a palette of black and greys under the looming moon, the skyscrapers on both sides of the water vying for her attention. Rolling away above even those were the vastness of the nine hills that surrounded the city. Local mythology said that they were nine sleeping dragons. They warranted their names.

She drew her focus in a little. The next building, a little shorter than this one, was close at hand, to the east. Windows faced her, some of them lit and uncovered, and, through frosted glass, she saw a blurred figure raise its arms and stretch. She drew closer to the edge, dropped to a sitting position and dangled her legs over the side. Beatrix did not suffer from vertigo, which was just as well. When she looked down, the cars and lorries that were jammed up along the length of Lockhart Road looked small and insignificant. The span between the two buildings was connected by a taut metal wire that suspended some sort of electric cabling. The distance between one building and the next was thirty feet. The pipe was attached to the wire along its length by a series of regularly spaced plastic ties. Beatrix looked down to where the pipe was attached to the parapet by a metal ring. A similar fixing supported it at its destination.

She took the joint from her pocket and lit up. The air was fresh this high up, absent the smells of the city that she had come to accept as its unavoidable background: the fried meat and fish, vegetables, peanut oil, soy sauce and chilli and vinegar, the sweat of her fellow inhabitants and the faint, but unmistakeable, odour of excrement. She held the joint below her nose and inhaled the sweet scent. She put it to her mouth and drew down on it. She inhaled deeply, right down into her lungs, and held the smoke there. She felt the tension seep away from her taut muscles.

She planted her hands behind her, leaned back and angled her head towards the moon. She closed her eyes and exhaled.

CHAU HAD tried to persuade Beatrix to take a cell phone so that he could easily get in touch with her. She had refused. She had no interest in owning a piece of technology that could be used to track her location. When she needed a cell phone, as when they were working on an operation, she would purchase a prepaid burner and then dispose of it when she was finished. She had set out a procedure whereby he could get in touch with her. He would hide a coded message in a Facebook group dedicated to model boats. She visited a local Internet café every day and, when she saw his message, she would respond with a variation of one of several messages that she had told him to memorise. Each message contained the venue and time for a meeting.

She saw the message the week after she had poisoned David Doss. She replied, nominating the Lookout Restaurant at the top of the Peak. The message suggested that she would be there at midday, but she set off three hours earlier so as to arrive in plenty of time to check that Chau had not been followed.

She took the MTR to Central Station and walked the short distance to the foot of the Peak. She rode the century-old funicular railway to the top. She circled the area twice, eventually finding a spot in the restaurant where she could watch the comings and goings without being seen herself. She had an hour to wait for Chau. She ordered a latte and entertained herself by drinking in the vast, improbable view. She had travelled all over the world during her career, and the vista from here matched any that she had ever seen. The harbour stretched out between the mainland and the island, crisscrossed by the Star Ferry and the legion of private yachts and junks that plied its waters. The Peak was elevated enough to look down on the stupendous sight of the skyscrapers on both sides of the water, so audacious and lofty that Manhattan’s was rendered pedestrian in comparison. It was a crystal clear day, without a cloud in the sky, and she was able to see beyond the buildings to the mountains that penned in the city to the north and, beyond them, the rest of China. It was a view of which it was impossible to tire.

The funicular ascended the side of the hill at a quarter to the hour, and Beatrix knew Chau would be on it. She watched him disembark from the railway and approach the restaurant. She had been trying to teach him the basic elements of tradecraft, but he found the whole thing too exciting, like some cut-price James Bond, and she had not been impressed with his progress. She knew that he found her attractive, and that revealing what she was capable of doing had not soured her to him. Worse, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.

All very annoying.

She sipped her coffee and watched. He stopped, just as she had instructed him to do, and she watched for a sign of anybody who might have been tailing him. She saw nothing.

She switched to a chair that faced the door and waited for him to climb the steps to the restaurant and come inside. He saw her, started to wave before remembering that she had told him never to attract attention to himself, then came over and sat down.

“Hello, Chau,” she said.

“I was not followed.” He said it proudly, like a child fishing for praise.

“You sure?”

A disappointed frown passed across his brow. “Yes. I—”

“What about her?” Beatrix said, nodding at the pretty girl who had just sat down at a table on the other side of the room.

“She was not… She did not…”

“I know. I was kidding.”

Beatrix very rarely joked, and she delivered it with the most deadpan expression that it took Chau a moment to realise that she was making fun of him.

He started to speak, but she cut him off.

“Well?”

“He is dead,” he said. “Three days ago. They did not find a cause. Unhealthy living, they say.”

“Mr. Ying?”

“He is pleased.”

“As he should be.”

“He has paid the rest of the fee. I have it.” He made an exaggerated gesture at the bag that he had slid under the table.

“Just leave it there when you go,” Beatrix said.

“I know,” he said with a little flash of indignation. “I remember.”

There had been a good amount of money from the work that they had done together. She kept some of it in a safety deposit box ready to pay the investigators who were searching for her daughter back home. Then, she would transfer it in batches from various Western Unions throughout the city. Chau kept the rest for her.

“Did he say anything else?” she asked.

“There will be another job soon. No details yet. He will contact me when he is ready.”

“Very good, Chau.” He made no move to leave. She sighed. “Is there anything else?”

“You said you would think about having something to eat with me.”

“And I was joking, Chau. I told you before. No mixing business with pleasure.”

“I would cook, Beatrix.”

“Then the answer is definitely no.”

She was being unfairly harsh. He had cooked for her while she was recuperating from the stab wound. It was simple, homely Chinese food and it was good. But she wasn’t interested. She had no interest in companionship. She was quite happy to eat takeout, read, get high, sleep. She knew that Chau would want to know about her history, and that he would probe and probe until she would have had to tell him about Lucas and Isabella. She had no interest in talking about that with anyone. It was dangerous. More to the point, it was too raw. And his view of her as a glacial, humourless killer was useful. There was no profit in him digging beneath the harsh exterior.

He frowned.

Beatrix rolled her eyes. He was like a child, and she felt bad for teasing him. “The other day, Chau. With Doss. You did well.”

She had never praised him before. He smiled. “I am learning, Beatrix.”

“Yes, you are. Keep learning. The day you think you know everything is the day you make the mistake that kills you.”

He nodded solemnly. “I understand.”

“See that you do. Now, we’re done. Go back down, get on the train and head away from your apartment.”

“I know, I know—”

“And leave the bag.”

He stood.

“Be careful, Chau. I’m serious.”

“I know, Beatrix. I
am
careful.”

He turned and crossed the restaurant to the exit. Beatrix turned back to the window and watched him walk towards the funicular railway again.

Her life had changed so much that it was utterly alien to her. She was a foreigner in a strange city, a
gweilo
, friendless save for a man she hardly knew. Another world away, her daughter was missing. The only way she could pay for the search that was her only chance of finding her was to kill in the service of the vast criminal network that cocooned the city.

What were a few more deaths on her conscience?

It was too late to worry about that.

It was a small price to pay.

BEATRIX TOOK out the radio that she had bought from one of the dubious sellers in Chungking Mansions, switched it on and tuned in to the World Service. They were broadcasting a Radio 4 programme about wildlife in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It made her think of home and, for a moment, she felt morose. The chill mornings, the fog cloaking the flattened landscape; it could hardly be more different to where she was now.