Hungry Ghost (42 page)

Thomas Ng was waiting for him in front of the house and they went inside together. Two men, one old and one young, were sitting at a large desk in the centre of the main reception room, drawing lines on large maps.

‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Ng, and Dugan shook his head. Ng took him through into the room where only twenty-four hours earlier the triad leaders had pledged their loyalty to Ng Wai-sun. All trace of the ceremony had been removed, now it was a family room once more. Even the lamps had been taken away and the room was now illuminated by the electric lights set into antique brass fittings around the room. Ng sat down at the circular table and told rather than asked Dugan to sit down. Dugan took a seat three away from where Ng sat. He didn’t like the way Ng was trying to dominate him so he decided to go on the offensive.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he asked.

‘My brother is dead,’ said Ng. ‘And whoever did it still has Sophie, though at the moment we don’t know if Sophie is alive or dead.’

‘What happened?’

Ng told him how Sophie had been abducted from her school, how the gweilo had demanded a ransom, and how instead of taking the money he had taken Simon Ng instead, and left him to die handcuffed to the anchor of a yacht at Hebe Haven.

‘And what happens now?’ asked Dugan.

‘Now we find the gweilo. And then we find Sophie. We know what he looks like. We have a photograph. We have men at all the ports and at Kai Tak, and we are now searching every block in Hong Kong.’

‘Every block in Hong Kong?’ said Dugan, surprised. ‘You don’t have enough men.’

‘We do now,’ said Ng, but he didn’t elaborate.

‘It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack,’ said Dugan.

‘Not at all,’ said Ng. ‘There are fewer than six million people here, and ninety-eight per cent are Chinese. There is a finite size to this haystack, Patrick, and the needle is different enough to make it clearly visible. It is just a matter of time.’

‘Do you know who he is? Or why he killed Simon?’

‘No,’ said Ng. He did not trust the gweilo cop enough to tell him about his brother’s contact with the mainland or the fact that he had begun spying for them. What he wanted from Patrick Dugan was information about how the police were getting on with their investigation. Nothing more.

‘If you catch him, what are you planning to do with him?’

‘First we will get him to tell us where Sophie is. Then we will ask him why he attacked our family.’

‘And then?’

Ng smiled coldly. ‘We are not planning to hand him over to the police, if that is what you mean.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Dugan. He sat with his elbows on the table and ran his hands through his hair. God, it was hot. His hair was damp with sweat and he could feel it running down the back of his neck and soaking into his shirt. Why didn’t Ng switch the air-conditioner on?

As if reading his mind Ng said: ‘I am sorry about the heat. My father doesn’t believe in air-conditioning.’

‘Is he here?’

‘Upstairs. Polishing his jade, he said, but really he just wants to be alone. He is not a man to share his grief.’

‘He has caused enough in his time,’ said Dugan bitterly.

‘Now is not the time for that,’ answered Ng.

‘I suppose not,’ said Dugan. He looked at Ng, his jaw set tight. He had to help Jill and that meant helping Ng catch the gweilo so that they could get Sophie back, but he was worried about how far he would have to go. He had little loyalty to the police force that had treated him so badly because of his brother-in-law, that wasn’t what was troubling him. What was playing on his mind was Petal and what would happen to her if Ng found out that she would have killed Simon Ng if the gweilo had failed. He breathed out, long and deeply, and looked at Ng.

‘His name is Howells. Geoff Howells.’

Ng looked shocked. ‘The police know who did it? Already?’

‘There’s more,’ said Dugan. ‘He’s been shot. Somebody tried to kill him in his hotel room at the Hilton. They shot him but he got away.’

Ng stood up and walked up and down the room, past the lines of photographs.

‘Do you know why?’

‘Why they shot him? No. Nor do the police. Two Chinese guys were behind it. Robbery maybe.’ He knew that it didn’t sound too convincing, and he knew too that Ng would have his own informers within the police. Hopefully, if he told him as much as he could he’d be too busy going after Howells to bother checking up on what actually happened in the hotel room and that there had been a girl there, a pretty girl with jet-black hair and soft lips.

‘When?’

‘Last night. He killed the two men and got away before the police arrived. They’ve put a stop on him at the airport but as they don’t know what he looks like they think he might get out using a false passport. They don’t know that you have his picture. But they are checking all the hospitals and doctors. They don’t think he’s going anywhere without medical treatment.’

Ng laughed. ‘The police are stupid,’ he said. ‘Do they imagine he will just walk into a Government hospital with a bullet wound? This man, this Geoff Howells, is a professional killer, an assassin.’

‘So what do you think he will do?’

‘If he does need medical attention he will get it from an underground doctor, one without the necessary qualifications to practise legally, from the mainland perhaps. They are not too difficult to find.’

‘If they are not difficult to find, then the police will find them too.’

‘There is a big difference between finding them and getting them to talk. Such men have no reason to tell the police anything. But they will tell us.’

‘I bet,’ said Dugan. ‘I just bet they will.’

Ng sat down again. ‘There is one thing I do not understand. How do they know this man Howells killed my brother?’

That was the question Dugan had been hoping Ng wouldn’t ask, because for the life of him he didn’t know what to say because as things stood at the moment the police had no way of connecting Howells with the death of Simon Ng; that connection had come from Petal.

‘I don’t know,’ Dugan lied. ‘They won’t let me anywhere near a murder investigation, you know that. I’m stuck in Commercial Crime. I only got the information second-hand, but it’s kosher.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Ng. ‘Look Patrick, what you’ve told me is going to be a big help, a really big help. But can you do me a favour? Will you keep tabs on the police end for me, and if anything comes up, let me know?’

‘Sure,’ said Dugan, and he practically sighed with relief. If he wanted him to act as a source of information on the investigation into Howells then the chances were that he wouldn’t start asking anyone else. So long as they depended on him to keep them informed then he could make sure Petal stayed out of it.

‘I want something in return,’ Dugan added. ‘I want to be in on this. I want to be there when you catch him. And I want to help get Sophie back.’

‘You will be more use to us staying at work and keeping tabs on the investigation,’ said Ng.

‘I can do that on the phone. I want to help,’ insisted Dugan.

Ng looked at Dugan thoughtfully, weighing him up, and then nodded.

‘OK, Patrick, I don’t see why not. So long as I have your word that nothing you see or hear will ever be used against us, as you cops are so fond of saying.’

‘To be honest, I think my days with the police are almost over anyway,’ said Dugan. ‘But I’m not switching sides. I’m doing it for Jill, and for Sophie.’ And for Petal, he thought. Especially for Petal.

‘I’ll have a room made up for you upstairs,’ said Ng. ‘We’re controlling the search from here. I’ll get on to the men and tell them that we are now looking for a man who has been shot. There is also an outside chance that he will call again about Sophie. If he does he’ll call Simon’s house and the call will be transferred here. Either way all we can do now is wait.’

‘I’ll wait,’ said Dugan. ‘I’ll wait for ever,’ he added as Ng left the room.

Edmunds had thought he’d have to wait until closing time before Amy went home, and he almost missed her when she came out of the Washington Club at about two o’clock in the morning. She looked different in her jeans and leather bomber-jacket. Younger. He knew that his visit to the bar and Howells’ picture had upset her and she was in a hurry to warn him but even so he’d assumed that the mamasan would have made her stay until the end of the shift, and he knew from asking the girls that they didn’t shut their doors until after four o’clock.

She waved goodnight to the doorman and stood at the side of the road and hailed a taxi. Edmunds kept his head down until her cab drove off and then he pointed after it.

‘Follow that taxi,’ he said.

‘Like in the movies?’ said the driver.

‘Yeah, just like the movies. Hurry up before you lose them.’

The driver laughed and jerked the car away from the kerb. There was something hanging from the driver’s mirror, a sort of upturned horseshoe, a gold-coloured ingot hanging beneath it, and below that brass rings tied to a red cord that swung back and forth with the motion of the cab. Every thirty seconds or so it emitted a couple of bars of disjointed metallic music. Edmunds had no idea what purpose it served, whether it was religious or just to bring good luck, but it was as annoying as hell. The roads were fairly clear and they had no trouble keeping the taxi in sight as it headed towards the harbour and through the tunnel. More than half the vehicles on the road were red and grey taxis so Edmunds knew that there was no chance of their being spotted and he relaxed a little.

The traffic was thicker in Kowloon and Edmunds’ cab moved closer, leaving just two or three cars between it and the one they were following. They passed by the airport, its runway lights switched off, and then they burrowed through a maze of housing and commercial blocks, until they were the only two cars on the road and Edmunds told his driver to drop back. Eventually their quarry stopped and they waited at a distance while Amy paid her fare and got out of the cab. She walked to the entrance of a grimy, soot-stained building, shops with their shutters down on the ground floor, a dozen floors of flats above with tiny metal-framed windows, some with clay plant-pots standing ill at ease on fragile-looking wrought-iron balconies that appeared to have been tacked on to the outsides of the flats as an afterthought.

‘Wait here,’ said Edmunds, and he opened the door quietly and ran down the road to the building where she had entered. The metal gate at the entrance was not locked and though it was rusting and the purple paint was peeling off it opened easily. An old man in a white vest that had seen better days was slumped over a wooden table, snoring and spluttering in his dreams.

Edmunds slipped past him. A quick look round confirmed that there was no lift so he headed up the stone stairs on the balls of his feet, pausing at each turn to check that the next flight was clear. He moved quickly up to the second floor but then he heard her footsteps and he began to move more slowly. She passed the third floor and by then he was one flight behind her and breathing with his mouth wide open and taking extra care whenever he put his feet down. When she got to the fourth floor he heard her open her handbag and heard metal jingling as she took out her keys. As he heard the key being slotted into the lock he risked a quick look around the stairwell and saw her push open the door. He ducked back, his heart pounding in his ears, but she hadn’t seen him; he waited until he heard her step across the threshold and then ran up to the door and followed her inside, grabbing her shoulder and pressing his hand across her mouth.

Before she could scream or struggle he hissed: ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you, or him. Do you understand?’

She nodded, her eyes wide with fear, but she didn’t look as if she was going to struggle so Edmunds slowly took his hand away.

‘Where is he?’ he asked.

She looked at the bedroom door, her reflexes taking over, so Edmunds didn’t wait for an answer. Amy followed him in. Howells was asleep, lying on his front.

‘How badly is he hurt?’ asked Edmunds, keeping his voice low. Howells came awake immediately and began rolling off the bed, hands moving to fighting position, ignoring the pain. Edmunds stepped back, holding his arms out to the side, showing he was unarmed. ‘I’m here to talk, Howells, that’s all. Back off.’

Howells carried on moving, oblivious to the fact that he was stark naked. He looked behind Edmunds to the room beyond, and then when he saw that the man was alone side-stepped across to the doorway so that he was between him and the exit. His face was calm and relaxed, the same as it was when Edmunds had last seen him, when he had killed three people and saved his life. Howells had no weapon but if the file was right then he didn’t need one – even with a bullet wound he’d still be fast and strong enough. He knew his own limitations and hand-to-hand combat with someone almost half his age was one of them, unless Howells was a lot weaker than he looked.

‘Who are you?’ Howells asked, his voice rock-steady, his feet evenly spaced on the wooden floor, toes digging in for balance, heels up ready to move fast, hands poised to strike. The bandage was on his right shoulder so Edmunds knew that if the attack came it would be from Howells’ left side so he drew back his right leg, ready to block with his own left hand, shifting position slowly so it wouldn’t alarm the Brit. One of the first things they taught you about interrogation was that when you take away a man’s clothes you take away his confidence and his identity, but Howells was no less of a killer naked, and it was the American, clothes and all, who was the more nervous.

‘Edmunds. Jack Edmunds. CIA.’

‘What does the CIA want with me?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Do I know you?’

‘You saved my life a few years back in the Lebanon,’ explained Edmunds, keeping his hands low and avoiding any gesture that could be interpreted as threatening. ‘I was being held hostage and the Company was dragging its feet on the ransom.’