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‘My mother left a list of people I should contact …’
Georgina felt sadness surge. She swallowed hard and tried to stay focused, not think about her mother for just a few seconds. She was jumpy and tired. It would be too easy to get over-emotional.
Lucy placed her hand on Georgina’s arm. ‘Very sat, about your mommy … very sat.’ She turned back to wait for the water to boil.
‘She had been ill for a long time. Four years,’ Georgina said in hushed tones, more to herself than anyone else, as Lucy had her back to her and was busy washing cups.
Georgina thought about those years. She had nursed her mother through two relapses. She’d never really expected her to die. She never thought her mother would ever leave her. She wondered how she had survived those early days, after her mother’s death. At the time she had felt so completely lost. She had gone back to work. The bookshop was just as she’d left it. Iris, her co-worker, was still wearing the same brown court shoes and pink blouse as she had always done, and the same coral lipstick that clung to the edges of her front teeth. Nothing was different, except Georgina.
Iris had never been good with emotions. The sight of Georgina’s distress had made her uncomfortable.
‘Have you no other family?’ she’d asked. ‘No one? Are you sure? You must have some relatives?’
‘I have two cousins in Hong Kong but I’ve never met them,’ Georgina told her.
‘Maybe you should take some time off and go and visit them, Georgina. Hmm? I can cope here. I have to take on some temporary staff nearer to Christmas anyway. I’ll take on somebody now, to cover for you, just until you get back. How’s that?’
Then Georgina had sat down on one of the unopened boxes in the storeroom. ‘I don’t know what to do any more.’ She had put her head in her hands. ‘I feel as if I don’t belong here, without my mum.’
‘You may find what you’re looking for in Hong Kong, Georgina.’ Iris had knelt down beside her and smiled kindly. ‘Who knows? You can only try. Life is a challenge. Sometimes it just throws up loads of shit at us, for no reason. It makes no sense at the time, but it makes us stronger, makes us grow. You need to grow, Georgina. You are twenty-two years old. You’ve been in this shop for five years now. You came in here with all sorts of plans. You were going to go to university. You were going to travel. You had a boyfriend. What happened to Simon?’
‘It just didn’t work out.’
‘You did a marvellous job looking after her, but it’s time for you to live your life now. It’s time to find your wings and learn to fly.’
It made Georgina smile to remember how Iris always erred towards the theatrical. But it had stirred something within her, and that afternoon she’d gone to see the Hos. They sat at a table overlooking the market. Mrs Ho stayed with her while Mr Ho went to fetch her some of her favourite wonton soup. When he returned, Georgina told them she was thinking of going to Hong Kong.
‘Good idea,’ Mr Ho had replied.
‘Don’t be stupid!’ Mrs Ho had retorted angrily in Cantonese. ‘How will she cope out there, on her own? Look at her! Skin and bone!’
Mr Ho had stood his ground. ‘But she’s not coping here, is she? Better go where she has some family to look after her. New start for her.’
Mrs Ho had scowled at her husband, turned back to Georgina, and spoken to her in English.
‘You better stay here, Georgina. You have friends here, don’t you?’
Georgina pushed the wontons around her soup.
‘Not really,’ she answered. ‘Most of my friends went to university when I stayed here. I have you and Mr Ho. I have Iris. That’s it, really.’
‘Better stay here with us then, huh?’ It had broken Mrs Ho’s heart to see her so sad.
Then Georgina put down her spoon and looked past Mr and Mrs Ho, down to the market below where the stallholders were shutting up shop, and for a second she thought she saw her mother. She looked away quickly.
‘They are my cousins. But I’ve never met them. Do you think they would even want to see me?’
‘Of course they would want to see you, Georgina. Why wouldn’t they? But maybe it’s not such a good idea to go there right now.’
‘But I think, perhaps, I should.’ For a few seconds she felt the sadness, which seemed to be cemented to her heart, crack and fall away and hope begin its return.
Mr and Mrs Ho had looked from one to the other. Then Mrs Ho had shrugged and smiled resignedly. Reaching over, she’d brushed Georgina’s hair away from her face and kissed her cheek.
‘Okay then. Maybe you should go,’ she had said with a sigh. ‘Maybe you should go to Hong Kong, Georgina, and find your family.’
And now, for better or worse, Georgina had found them.
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‘I’m gonna make you some tea, okay?’
‘Yes … sounds good … thanks.’ Georgina yawned and sat down heavily on the stool.
‘I hope I’m not stopping you from going to work, Lucy. I’ll be fine here by myself, honestly.’
‘Hey, no worry, right?’ Lucy handed her tea in a chipped cup. ‘Working later.’ She smiled, turned away and began busying herself. ‘Good, huh? Give me more time to get to know you, huh?’
‘So you work when you want to?’
‘For sure!’
Lucy turned away from Georgina and searched for something in a cupboard. ‘And what kind of work do you do, Lucy?’
There was a pause, as Lucy pondered the question that she knew she would have to answer sometime. She stopped and turned and met her cousin’s gaze.
‘I work in nightclub.’
‘You’re a singer!’ Georgina exploded. ‘How cool!’
Lucy laughed. ‘No … but my mommy was a singer, did you know that? Ah! Juz a momen. I remember something I want to show you.’ Lucy slipped out from behind the breakfast bar and shuffled into the bedroom. She stood on a chair and pulled down a box. ‘Georgina, come see what I have here,’ she called as she carried on rooting through the box’s contents and pulled out an old tattered photograph. She held it aloft to show Georgina as she walked in behind Lucy. ‘See anyone you know?’
Georgina sat on the bed beside Lucy. She took the photo from her and studied it. It was an old black and white print of a man and woman and two girls, all in traditional Chinese dress. They were posing in front of a painted backdrop: tranquil water and weeping willows. Georgina turned it over – there was writing on the back: December 1950, Hong Kong, and some Chinese script. Turning it back, it was her mother’s smile she recognised first, then the shape of her face. Feng Ying was the smaller of the children, holding on to her elder sister Xiaolin’s hand, and she was staring into the camera with her head tilted to one side.
‘Nice picture, huh?’
Georgina nodded, transfixed by the treasure she held in her hands. ‘So beautiful.’
‘I’m gonna get you a copy, okay?’
As Georgina looked up and nodded her appreciation, Lucy saw that her cousin’s eyes were watery. She jumped up. ‘More tea! We need more tea!’ And she scurried back out to the kitchen. ‘Chinese tea, the best! Do you like it?’ she called.
Georgina didn’t answer: she was transfixed by the photograph. Lucy came in again, carrying a tray. ‘Long time ago, this picture, huh? You know this picture was taken when our family first moved here to Hong Kong. See! There is father, mother, and two little girls. My mommy and yours, see? When our family came from mainland China, long time back … they had big hopes then, but …’ she shrugged ‘… didn’t work out so good, huh? But your mom, she did fine,’ Lucy continued. ‘She was good in school … learn a lot … worked in a bank. Really good how she manage to get that kind of job.’
‘She met my dad in that bank.’
‘Yes! Very lucky. My mommy not so lucky.’ Lucy shrugged. ‘Maybe she not so clever …’
Lucy poured out more tea. Georgina was still looking at the photo. ‘Have you got any more photos?’
‘No, shame, I have very little of our family. Now not many of us left, huh, juz the three of us now.’
‘Lucy, I am very grateful to you for letting me stay. But what about you and Ka Lei? You have to share a room now?’
‘No problem. We always share.’
‘My room is always empty?’
‘An American girl had your room. I don’t know where she is now.’ Lucy rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nice girl, very pretty; blonde hair, long nails.’
He liked her nails. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her. He liked women who looked after themselves. He had made her paint her nails especially, on that last day before he chased her through the forest. He’d made her paint them in stars and stripes, like the American flag. She had painted her nails with expert precision, each stripe was perfectly in line. In the centre of each nail she had painted one red star and sprinkled it with glitter. He smiled to himself, satisfied. Now he would always know which finger was hers.
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Max lived in Sheung Sai Wan, Western District. It was an area that, despite its name, was the least westernised district of all Hong Kong. It was also the place that the British had first settled in, then hastily fled from when malaria came biting at their heels. Industries in the area were small and family run. Life was as it used to be. Profits were small and everyone had something to sell. Traditional skills and oriental sundries crowded the cobbled alleyways. Bolts of silk that were rolled from one-hundred-year-old spools. Chinese calligraphy that was carved into ornate ‘chops’ made from ivory and jade. Snakes had their gall bladders removed and presented to the purchaser to drink, before being placed back in their wooden box – gall-bladderless. But Western District’s days were numbered: new developments were poking their bony fingers out of the living decay and time-debris. The Fong family – Max, his brother Man Po and his father – lived on Herald Street. It was one of the broader, quieter roads at the lower end of the district. Most of the buildings on Herald Street had a shop front. Some shops were still in full use, merchandise spilling out and obstructing the pavement. Others had rusted-up metal shutters and decrepit doorways that had been a long time silent. There was a peaceful, dusty old quiet about Herald Street, but there was also a permanent smell of decay there: rotting, fermenting vegetation, cultivated by years of neglect. The Fong family lived in a four-storey building situated three-quarters of the way along the street. They had had a thriving business once. Father Fong had been a well-respected doctor. He had held his practice on the ground floor of the house, and the shop front had served as the dispensary. Queues had formed from the shop entrance and continued down Herald Street on most days, with people waiting patiently to see him. He was so respected that it was widely accepted he could perform miracle cures, and his notoriety spread in both Chinese and Western circles.
The shop was crammed with all manner of cures and herbs, dried skins and animal parts. It was all kept in perfect order. That was in the days that his wife was alive. It was she who had structured the day-to-day running of the surgery. Under her supervision, Max had helped his father, dispensing the medicine, weighing out the various herbs, bagging them up according to prescription. He had started to train in acupuncture and showed an aptitude for it. His mother spent a lot of time nurturing Max’s abilities. Those were happy days in the Fong household – before his mother died suddenly. She was shopping for groceries when she was hit on the head by a piece of falling construction material being used to build one of the new tower blocks. The shock was too great for Father Fong. His world was shattered, and only the chore of looking after his twelve-year-old son and treating his patients kept him from ending his own life. The business would have gone to pieces, if it hadn’t been for the employees who took over as best they could, keeping things ticking over. One of them, a young woman by the name of Nancy, who had been in their employ since the age of fifteen, and who Mrs Fong had not only trained but had been particularly fond of, came to the fore and did a good job of running the show. She proved herself to be more than just adept at running things – she set her sights on marrying management. It didn’t take her long to work out the best line of approach, and in her attempt to seduce Father Fong she stuck to him tighter than a pressed flower and made it very obvious she was easily plucked.
Father Fong had panicked into marrying her – anyone was better than no one, and the boy needed a mother. But, once married, Nancy quickly grew discontented and let the business fall into decline. Then, as luck would have it, just as Father Fong’s patience was stretched to breaking point, she fell pregnant and became so tired that she had to sit in the upstairs lounge all day, feeding the canary and eating buns. In jubilation at her pregnancy, Father Fong forgave her laziness and bought her a dog, a small white toy Pekinese. All you could hear all day long was the tap tap of the ping-pong ball and the yap yap of little ‘Lucky’, as Nancy played with her beloved dog.
That summer, when Nancy was pregnant and Father Fong too busy to see her cruelty, she poured pints of vindictive venom on her stepson, whom she hated with as much perverse energy as she loved the dog. Max was beaten and starved and locked in the store cupboard, which had no artificial light, just a tiny barred window. It had been summer and the storms had come, lightning illuminating the room for seconds at a time. The heat made his clothes stick to his body, so that he had to pull them off and sit naked, squashed up in the suffocating darkness, panting, breathless with fear and excitement, screaming as the lightning blinded him and the rain came lashing down.
That summer he became a man. He touched his body in the darkness and felt its yearnings and longings. He became a man, caged in that cupboard, howling at the storm.
One day, in the last stage of Nancy’s pregnancy, while she was resting, Max found himself alone with Lucky. The dog sat watching him from its place on the leather-look sofa. Its pink tongue protruded as it panted in the heat. It kept its bulbous eyes on the bedroom door, patiently waiting for its mistress to wake. Max looked at the dog and gave in to an overwhelming desire to kill it. Taking Lucky by the throat, he shook and squeezed the little dog until its eyes bulged from its head and its body stopped running in midair. As Lucky collapsed, limp in his hands, Max jammed the ping-pong ball – Lucky’s favourite toy – into the back of its throat to make it look as if the ball had been the cause of the animal’s demise. Then, trembling, he ran to his bunk to hide and waited for Nancy to awaken and find her beloved dog. When she did, she screamed so loud that Max felt a spurt of hot pee shoot down his leg. The neighbours heard her screams and came down from the floors above to investigate; and Father Fong came rushing up from the surgery below to find the reason for her anguish. It was Father Fong who, after examining the dog, discovered the ping-pong ball. Max’s trick had worked. He was safe.
Nancy produced a son that evening. Her pelvis was too small and the large baby had to be pulled from her like a calf. Consequently, the baby’s head was misshapen and his look somewhat strange. Nancy didn’t care for the ugly baby at all – she was still mourning for her dog.
She finally left the Fong household for good when Man Po was one year old.
After she left, the surgery dwindled until it became just an occasional knock on the shutter to ask for this and that. Then Father Fong would pull down the dusty jars and rummage through old boxes and tins until he put together a prescription, but his heart wasn’t in it any more.
Now, the shutter outside their house no longer opened and closed; it was firmly shut. They continued to live in the two-bedroom apartment on the first floor. Old Father Fong slept in one room, while the brothers slept in bunks in the other. But Father Fong was mainly housebound now. Arthritis had crept into his joints and settled in the marrow, drying them up like abandoned riverbeds. His physical world had narrowed to just a few rooms, and every year saw him shrink a little more. His old slippered feet wore a path on the floor tiles as he shuffled painfully back and forth from kitchen to bedroom to sitting room, only stopping to make kissing noises to the bright yellow canary that twisted its head this way and that as it watched the old man from the confines of its bamboo cage. He spent his days preparing food for his sons and waiting for them to come home.
Man Po was fourteen years younger than Max, which made him nearing forty-six, but he would always look like a baby. He had a round face and large eyes and the hair on his head looked as if it had been hand-stitched like a doll’s. He dribbled from the lazy corner of his mouth. The things he enjoyed in life were simple. He loved his work – driving his lorry. And he especially loved butchering the pigs.
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Club Mercedes was Hong Kong’s newest and most exclusive nightclub – for the moment. It occupied the top floor of the most prestigious shopping mall in Hong Kong, situated in the heart of Central District on Peddar Street in the Polaris Centre – a landmark in privileged shopping. On its seven floors were the pick of top European designers, jewellers by royal appointment and Rolex suppliers. Club Mercedes sat on top of all of it on the ‘lucky’ eighth floor.
The club was officially owned by a consortium of top businessmen. It was really owned by the Wo Shing Shing triad society and provided a useful way to launder money.
Over three hundred hostesses of various nationalities worked within its golden walls. Plenty of Gwaipohs for a murderer to choose from, Mann thought.
Mann decided to pay Lucy a visit that evening, while, at the same time, checking up on how many foreign girls were working there. He made his way past Dolce and Gabbana and Yves St Laurent and reached the foot of the conical glass elevator that would take him up to the top floor.
A stunning Asian beauty in a cheongsam greeted him as he stepped inside.
‘Welcome to Club Mercedes,’ she said, bowing and pressing the ascent button in one perfectly choreographed move.
Just as the doors were closing a Chinese woman stepped in. She stood at a discreet distance from Mann and kept her eyes floor-bound – except for the odd flutter of lashes and tilting of the head to see if Mann was still looking at her – which he was. Mid to late twenties, he reckoned. She had that ‘been around the block look’: black leather trousers, black polo neck and a gold chain snaking her collarbone. He surmised rightly that she was a hostess going to work.
When the elevator slid to a silent halt and the cheongsamed lovely had completed her farewell bow, Mann and the woman both stepped out onto a red carpet. A pair of solid gold crouching dragons met them (strategically placed according to feng shui), as did two impressively built doormen. As they made their way up the narrow strip of carpet, a smiling woman in a red and gold cheongsam appeared. Mamasan Linda was a petite Chinese with an outwardly kindly nature but an inwardly frozen heart that could only be melted by money in her hand. She was a former hostess herself. When her appeal had begun to wane she was lucky enough to have made the right people happy over the years, and was rewarded for her services to mankind by being placed in a lucrative job.
‘Aye! Good girl, back so soon, huh?’ Mamasan Linda said to the woman from the lift. ‘Customers waiting! Go change, quick-quick!’ She ushered her past and into the club. Then she looked towards Mann, bowed and smiled respectfully. ‘Can I help you, Inspector?’
Mamasan Linda had not met Mann before, but she had seen him and knew all about him. Even though Hong Kong was one of the most densely populated places on earth, it was still just a big village at heart. Plus, there weren’t many six-foot-two Eurasian policemen around, and there definitely wasn’t another like Mann. His reputation for tough justice singled him out. He had earned the respect of cop and criminal alike because Mann feared nothing, and in Hong Kong society, no matter what side of the law you were on, that was attribute number one.
‘Good evening, Mamasan. I need to speak with the foreign hostesses you have working here. I won’t keep them long – just routine enquiries.’
Mamasan Linda listened with a fixed smile on her face, then nodded and beckoned Mann to follow her.
He had plenty of time to look around the half-empty club as they made their way through; Mamasan Linda wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry in that tight dress. It seemed funny, thought Mann, quaint even, all the money spent on the club: Italian lighting, rivers of red velvet, herds of black leather, yet there was still something else: the inevitable gold, red and chintz and those irrepressible ‘lucky fish’. No matter what the designer had originally planned for the club, in Hong Kong you could never get away from the slightly tacky look. He loved his birthplace for it – that wonderful mix of East and West that never let itself be corrupted by ordinary style.
Mann was shown into a VIP room at the back of the club. Most of the rooms in the club were themed, and this one was traditional Mandarin and housed an impressive collection of antique black lacquered furniture inlaid with abalone shell, silk-painted screens and ornately carved wooden seats.
Mamasan Linda left him in the care of Mamasan Rose, one of the newest mamasans at the club. She brought the foreign girls to him one at a time. Eleven were in so far that evening, out of twenty-five, she explained.
One of three sunny-faced, robust-looking Australians came in to be interviewed first. Her name was Angela. She and her two friends were working and living together, sharing a flat in Kowloon. They’d been in Hong Kong for two months and were working their way around Asia. They’d already done the lucrative Tokyo circuit, missed out Thailand (where holidaying Westerners weren’t interested in paying for white women and locals couldn’t afford them), and had made a detour around the Philippines where there were a lot of lonely wealthy Westerners but no hostess clubs to work out of. Finally they had stopped in Hong Kong en route to Singapore. From there they were headed home to resume their jobs as dental nurses.
Mann asked Angela if she’d had any friends go missing unexpectedly. What? Was he serious? she answered. People were always moving on. What did he expect? Had she heard anything about a problem client? She shrugged. Nothing she couldn’t handle.
Mann interviewed the rest quickly: the other two Australians, who were clones of the first, two Kiwis, three Brits, two Americans, and a tall Irish girl named Bernadette. They all said the same thing – they were used to people disappearing, it happened all the time. People came and went continuously. Hong Kong was a transient society. Girls came to work there from all over the world; they did their business and left. They brought with them a new alias, but their identity was always the same. Mann had seen it many times. They were game players looking for easy money – looking to turn their God-given assets into cold hard cash. But at the moment the game wasn’t going all their way. Someone else was having fun making his own private collection of foreign dolls.
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‘Is Lucy working here tonight?’ Mann asked Mamasan Rose when he’d finished interviewing the foreign girls. Mamasan Rose smiled curiously at Mann, said she was, and left to fetch her.
As soon as she entered Mann recognised her as the woman from the lift with the leather trousers. Now she was wearing a lilac-coloured figure-hugging evening dress that she didn’t quite have the figure for, and an extra coating of lip-gloss. He waited while she sat and readied herself.
‘Hello again, Inspector.’ She smiled sweetly, a very practised smile, and adjusted her dress to show a flirtatious amount of leg.
Surprising, thought Mann. She was nothing special to look at; her sickly sweet smile was set into an over-rouged face. But then she didn’t have to be beautiful. According to James Dudley-Smythe she was extremely talented in other ways.
She giggled, batting her eyelashes and feigning shyness under his scrutiny.
‘Are you the only Lucy working here?’
‘Yes, just me, Inspector. There’s only one Lucy.’
‘Well, it must be you I want then.’
Lucy raised an inquisitive eyebrow and pursed her lips into a ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ smile.
‘I have heard that you provide certain services for men who like something special.’
Lucy’s face was a picture of surprise but her eyes betrayed her. Mann could see that she was as sharp and as calculating as they come – but most of all she was a survivor. She had seen right into the depths of men’s souls. It may not have been a pretty sight, but boy was it lucrative.
‘I mean that you cater to certain tastes. Men who like to feel pain, feel it and inflict it.’
