Hungry Ghost (29 page)

The headmistress took a deep breath and replaced the glasses on her nose. The man’s threat was veiled, but it was a threat nevertheless, and her stomach churned. She looked at him steadily and nodded. She picked up the brass paperknife and rubbed the blade slowly back and forth.

‘I understand completely, Mr Ng. And I repeat that I will do everything I can to help put this right.’

Ng smiled, and he tried to put some warmth into it. It wasn’t the old gweipor’s fault and there was no point in being unduly hard on her. And at the moment she was the only one who could identify the gweilo. He explained about the video cameras, and that he wanted her to go back to the Ng compound to watch the videos and identify the man.

‘Now?’ she said.

‘I am afraid so. It is important that we act quickly. If we can identify the man we might be able to get to him before he can hurt Sophie.’

The headmistress hesitated for less than a second. She reached for the intercom and called in her secretary, explained that she had to go out and that she would phone later that afternoon to say when she would be back. She collected her coat from a rack next to the door and went with Ng to the Mercedes outside the school gates, engine purring.

The phone on Dugan’s desk rang and he grabbed at it, his heart soaring with the thought that it might be Petal, but even as he put the receiver to his ear he knew it couldn’t be her. It was Bellamy.

‘What the fuck’s going on, Pat?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What did she tell you?’

Dugan knew he’d have to be very careful from now on. He was in unchartered waters, not knowing exactly how much Bellamy knew, not even sure how much of what Petal had told him was the truth. He didn’t want to lie to Bellamy, but there was a bond between him and Petal that he didn’t want to break, a trust he didn’t want to betray.

‘She said she was kicked by a gweilo in the hotel room, and that he attacked the two men she was with.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

Bellamy’s voice hardened and Dugan was glad that he was at the other end of a phone and not across the desk in an interrogation room. ‘Don’t fuck me about, Dugan, what was she doing in the hotel room? And who were the two heavyweights with her? And why were they trying to inject a stimulant into him that was powerful enough to give a carthorse a heart attack?’

‘You’ve got the results from the lab?’

‘What do you fucking well think? Look Dugan, you’ve had a rough ride as it is in the force. But it’s nothing compared to the shit that’s about to hit the fan over this one.’

‘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 enquiries 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 air-conditioning; 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.