The Trophy Taker (11 page)

Just as the early-morning traffic was beginning to build, and the Tai Chi enthusiasts were finishing their salute to the sun in the parks and on the rooftops, Mann stepped into the cool of the underground station and took a train home. He’d worked through the night and could do no more for a few hours until it all kicked off again. He needed a shave and a shower. He boarded a train for Quarry Bay, on the north-east side of Hong Kong Island. He lived in a great location: it was served by the wonderfully efficient MTR and was just a short distance from Central and Headquarters. But it wasn’t a community. It was a vertical village – fifty tower blocks with a shopping mall in the centre – affordable housing for the young executive classes.

Mann lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the fortieth floor in one of the older blocks. Built in the early nineties, it had wooden floors, white walls, and very little else. Mann didn’t do the homely look. He had cutlery for one, crockery in single units and a solitary armchair that he’d positioned opposite a massive plasma TV in the lounge.

But his apartment hadn’t always been so Spartan. It had been a proper home once. Not long ago someone had stood in his home and in his heart. Helen had been there.

She was long gone now. He wished he didn’t think of her so often. He missed that spontaneous laugh of hers, that optimistic view of life – so different to his cynicism. He missed the little things she cared about. He missed her. But he didn’t regret her going. She deserved more than he could give. He had never seen himself pushing a baby’s buggy or having friends over for dinner. He hadn’t wanted anything or anyone else – just her. But she wanted the whole package, and he just didn’t have it in him to give.

He flopped onto his bed. He knew that he would sleep for a week if he didn’t watch it, so he dozed, waiting for the alarm clock to sound. In that last hour, just as he was dreamless and heavy as lead, it started ringing and ringing as if from some faraway planet, dragging him into consciousness. He hit the clock first, then hit the floor running. He checked his watch – noon, time for a quick shower; the colder the better.

He stepped out of the MTR half an hour later and cut through the park. It was a ten-minute walk up the hill to Headquarters. The midday air was scented with the smell of lush vegetation. The traffic noise was momen t arily lost in a pocket of wilderness and replaced by the sounds of insects – as loud as pneumatic drills.

He cut across the road, up the cobbled alleyways, past skinny kittens and makeshift kitchens, until he hit Soho, an area of fusion restaurants and fancy artefact shops. In the evening it was given over to partying
Gweilos
who loved its European feel. Cafés spilled over pavements and noisy Italian waiters touted for business.

Mann nodded to a cleaner sweeping the front of a Malaysian restaurant. The man paused, leaned on his broom and inclined his head a fraction Mann’s way. Mann would speak to him later – he was one of three undercover officers working the street.

Mann crossed the packed car park and walked up the well-trodden steps of Headquarters. It took him ten minutes to get past the people waiting to talk to him on the stairs. Finally, he made it to David White’s office.

The Superintendent was alone. He looked harassed. He hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours, and it showed.

‘The post-mortem report makes for gruesome reading, Johnny,’ he said, as Mann walked in and sat down opposite him. The Superintendent was holding the report in his hands. ‘Trophy taker? A torturer? He must hang on to these women, Mann. Where is he holding them? We need to get as many officers out there asking questions as we can. Get some undercover officers into the clubs with foreign hostesses. But for Christ’s sake, make them understand we need discretion.’

‘Don’t worry, David, we’re on to it. But, if he is murdering
Gwaipohs
, it’s a clever choice. Many of these women work under aliases. They have no family here. He must have picked them quite carefully. We have hundreds of matches for our Jane Does.
However
, if this man moves in the nightclub world, he must have frightened a few women along the way. There must have been some who got away without even realising it.’

Just then Ng knocked on the door, followed closely by a very agitated Li. ‘Genghis – this just came in from Scotland Yard.’ Ng handed him a file.

Mann flipped it open and scanned it before reading it out:

‘The fingerprint belongs to Maria Jackson. Born in 1963. British. She had form for drug dealing in the UK. She was given a one-year probational sentence in May 1989. Came to Hong Kong in April 1991. Last known place of employment – the Rising Sun in Wanchai. That was in November 1992.’

‘Interpol are trying to trace any family at the moment but have come up with nothing so far,’ said Ng, handing the photo of Maria to the Superintendent. It was a mugshot taken at the time of her arrest.

‘The pathologist put the woman’s age at mid to late twenties. She’d be forty now. That means she’s been dead ten to fifteen years. So, our murderer has been around a long time,’ said Mann.

‘There’s also victim one … the head … belonged to twenty-eight-year-old Beverly Mathews,’ said Ng.

‘When did she go missing?’ asked Mann, scanning the second page of the file Ng had handed him. He pulled out a grainy photo of a woman with big hair and a big smile.

‘Seventeen years ago – July 1986.’

‘You were right to extend the search so far back,’ said Superintendent White.

‘How did you know, boss?’ Li asked, looking very
Saturday Night Fever
in his wide white-collared shirt and his slicked-back hair.

‘She had nothing but metal amalgam fillings in her mouth, Shrimp – every one of them. Most people over thirty have at least a mixture of new and old – she didn’t.’

Superintendent White left his desk, took the report from Mann, and went to stand at the window to read it.

‘I worked on the case. I remember it,’ he said.

‘Was she a resident here, David? Do you remember?’

‘No. She was a tourist. She’d sold the most Renaults in Reading – she won herself a holiday to Hong Kong.’

Superintendent White picked up the old shot of Beverly Mathews taken at a cousin’s wedding a few weeks before she disappeared. ‘She failed to turn up at her workplace back in England. It was then discovered that she hadn’t returned from her holiday.

‘We searched the area. We found nothing. The case was left open but it was generally believed that she’d decided to jack in her job and her life back home and had probably headed off towards Bali or somewhere similar on the backpackers’ trail.’

‘When was she last seen?’

‘At a party in a local’s house out at Repulse Bay. After a night of heavy drinking she decided she needed to get back to her hotel. She was staying in Causeway Bay. Apparently she couldn’t be persuaded to call a taxi from the house, said she needed to get some fresh air and promptly left.’

‘What time was that?’

‘It was about six in the morning when she was last seen. She had to walk down a remote road to get to the bus route. No one ever remembered seeing her in Repulse Bay itself, and I think they would have if she had made it that far – she was wearing very little and it was early in the morning. At the time, it was our guess that if anything untoward had happened it must have happened on that walk – someone picked her up there.’

‘That means our killer has been around for two decades. He’s at least thirty-five, probably over forty.’

‘It also means he could have killed a lot of women in the last twenty years – we could be finding a lot more bodies.’

‘Count on it,’ said Mann.

‘What about the reports of missing foreign women, Ng?’ asked the Superintendent, going back to sit behind his desk. He spread the photos from the autopsy neatly across his desk.

Ng shook his head at the enormity of the task. ‘Sir, Interpol have come up with hundreds of women who are unaccounted for and who fit the profile. Even tracing the people who reported the women missing is proving very difficult.’

‘And attacks on foreign women?’ White picked up the photo of Beverly and the mugshot of Maria.

‘Attacks do not usually involve local men. It’s nearly always between two foreigners. Just a drunken disturb ance,’ replied Ng.

‘Similarities between these women, Shrimp?’ asked the Superintendent, studying the photos in his hand.

‘Foreigners. Young women. He likes young foreigners.’

‘Likes, or maybe
hates
all foreigners, and he certainly doesn’t
like
women,’ said Mann. ‘He enjoys inflicting pain.’

‘Age, sex, ethnicity? Basic similarities? Marks on bodies? What have we got, Ng?’

‘Victim one.’ Ng read from his notes. ‘Beverly Mathews – no evidence of torture. Victim two – a bite mark on the thigh … rope fibres on the wrist. Victim three – many small burns and sexually mutilated.’

‘What about the way they have been killed and dissected?’ White asked Mann.

‘Probably asphyxiated. We’re not sure yet. All three were dismembered in the same manner, though – with precision, neat, surgeon style. The process is important to him. He takes his time over it. He enjoys it.’

White scanned the report. ‘He leaves the bodies somewhere cold, the pathologist said?’

‘He leaves them for long enough for the lividity to settle, then moves them to somewhere else where he takes his trophies and dismembers them. Some of them he freezes,’ answered Mann. ‘Which is useful for us because some parts have been less affected by decomposition than others and some of the surface injuries are still visible.’

‘Like the bite mark that was made after death,’ said Ng.

‘That’s so weird! Why would he do that?’ asked Li.

‘Part of his fantasy. It’s a common trait with serial killers,’ said White. ‘And to return to the body several times before finally disposing of it.’

‘Ng, what did you get from Lucy, the S&M queen?’ asked Mann.

Ng took out his report, flipped open the page, and shrugged dismissively.

‘She gave me a description of six women who had lived in her flat at various times over the last five years. They were all in their twenties. All white. One American, three Europeans, two Antipodeans. According to Lucy, one of the Europeans had a strong accent. She didn’t know where from. None of them had any distinguishing characteristics. Nothing that stuck in her mind, anyway. She seems to have known very little about them. They kept themselves to themselves, she said. She seemed to think that most of them were on their own – no families, no ties. None of them gave reasons for leaving. They just left. She didn’t consider that strange.’

‘Not much help then, was she?’ said Superintendent White.

‘She wasn’t trying.’ Mann took the report from Ng and looked at Lucy’s statement. ‘Leave her to me, Ng. Li – get me photos of those women. Find out all you can about them. I want a name for them all. They deserve that much – and Shrimp …’ he handed Li a photo from the autopsy on victim three, ‘that tattoo. What would you say it was?’

‘A fish?’

‘Possibly – but I’d say it’s more likely to be a mermaid. Find out all you can about it. I want to know where she got that tattoo, look into the ink used – it differs in different countries. And the design – see if you can trace the artist … And remember, Shrimp – these women could have been somebody’s girlfriend, wife. They could have been somebody’s mother if they had had the chance. Real names and faces – I want to see them. And – before you go – a name for this perpe t rator. It’s up to you.’

Li didn’t hesitate. ‘The Butcher.’

‘The Butcher?’ The Superintendent looked questioningly at Li.

‘Yes, sir. You need to be a good surgeon to be able to bone and joint a piece of meat, or at least a good butcher – the pathologist said.’

‘The Butcher it is then.’

Just then an officer opened the door with a message. A second bag of bodies had been found.

Mann and his team were the second squad car to arrive at the New World restaurant in the New Territories. Two young policemen had cordoned the site off as best they could and were in the process of trying to keep a group of people away from an object buried beneath builders’ rubble at the far end of the car park.

As Mann’s car went to turn in, an open-backed meat lorry carrying pig carcasses blocked their path. The driver had slowed down to see what was happening, and was contemplating turning in to the restaurant car park but changed his mind when he saw the police car in front of him. Instead, he pulled out of the way and parked across the road, and stuck his large, gormless head out of the cab window to see what was going on.

As his vehicle turned in, Mann looked into the back of the truck. Pig carcasses were thrown haphazardly into the back of the lorry, forming a mangled jigsaw of puffy white flesh.

The police car headed for the far end of the car park, trying to avoid contaminating the area even further or covering the killer’s tracks. They swung round to park.

‘Anything?’ asked Ng, following Mann’s gaze and pointing towards the lorry.

‘Not sure. Take down the plate number for me, Li. Now, let’s get a move on – looks like chaos over there. Put these over your shoes.’

Mann handed Li two plastic bags and rubber bands. Li looked at him.

‘So we know which prints are ours. Although, I seriously doubt anyone else is wearing winklepickers.

‘What the fuck are they doing?’ Mann pulled the bags over his shoes and marched off in the direction of the rear of the building, where an extension for a new dining room was being built. ‘They’re trampling over everything.’ He pointed towards a crowd gathered around a mound of smashed masonry, then shouted to the crowd to stand back. They chose not to hear and continued to form an ever-shuffling yet impenetrable ring around the source of a stomach-churning smell of putrefied meat, which grew more intense at every step. As they neared the police officers could see a black plastic bag partially hidden among one of the slabs of broken-up concrete paving.

Mann shouted again. This time some of the crowd turned to watch the three policemen marching across the car park, but they didn’t all pull back. Some of them were transfixed to the spot, rooted in disgust and repulsion, with bulging eyes and hands clasped over mouths. Others ran back and forth like demented yoyos – not able to stay with the offending object and not able to leave it.

No 3D High Definition could prepare the men for the reality of what they saw and what they smelt. This time Mann shouted to one of the young policemen, who, in his attempt at restoring order, was taking names of some of the people present, and making the mistake of turning his back on the rest.

‘Stand back!’ Mann shouted. He turned to Ng. ‘Fuck! The bag looks fit to burst.’

‘There must be a hole in it – look at the flies!’ said Ng.

‘We better get there quick and stop that crowd touching it before it’s too …’

At that second, and fifteen metres out of Mann’s reach, one of the restaurant workers became ever more brave with a metal rod he’d found amid the rubble. He dug a little deeper into the stretched plastic than he intended. The black bag ripped from one end to the other and spewed up its rotting treasure in volcanic style. The restaurant worker screamed and jumped back several feet, where he stopped, frozen to the spot and staring wide-eyed as a wet curly-haired head, carried by a viscous stream of melted body fat and water, slid onto his foot.

Mann moved forward to get a better look: wide-jawed, big-mouthed, perfectly even teeth …

Shit! An American, that’s all we need!

Meanwhile, the pig lorry pulled noisily away and started its ascent of Monkey Mountain.