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The Trophy Taker
LEE WEEKS
The Trophy Taker
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
Copyright © Lee Weeks 2008
Lee Weeks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781847560780
Ebook Edition AUGUST 2008 ISBN: 9780007281879
Version 2018-05-24
Dedication
For my dad, Brian Davies Bateman, who gave me the gift of self-belief.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Chapter Thirty Four
Chapter Thirty Five
Chapter Thirty Six
Chapter Thirty Seven
Chapter Thirty Eight
Chapter Thirty Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty One
Chapter Forty Two
Chapter Forty Three
Chapter Forty Four
Chapter Forty Five
Chapter Forty Six
Chapter Forty Seven
Chapter Forty Eight
Chapter Forty Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty One
Chapter Fifty Two
Chapter Fifty Three
Chapter Fifty Four
Chapter Fifty Five
Chapter Fifty Six
Chapter Fifty Seven
Chapter Fifty Eight
Chapter Fifty Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty One
Chapter Sixty Two
Chapter Sixty Three
Chapter Sixty Four
Chapter Sixty Five
Chapter Sixty Six
Chapter Sixty Seven
Chapter Sixty Eight
Chapter Sixty Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy One
Chapter Seventy Two
Chapter Seventy Three
Chapter Seventy Four
Chapter Seventy Five
Chapter Seventy Six
Chapter Seventy Seven
Chapter Seventy Eight
Chapter Seventy Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty One
Chapter Eighty Two
Chapter Eighty Three
Chapter Eighty Four
Chapter Eighty Five
Chapter Eighty Six
Chapter Eighty Seven
Chapter Eighty Eight
Chapter Eighty Nine
Chapter Ninety
Chapter Ninety One
Chapter Ninety Two
Chapter Ninety Three
Chapter Ninety Four
Chapter Ninety Five
Chapter Ninety Six
Chapter Ninety Seven
Chapter Ninety Eight
Chapter Ninety Nine
Chapter Hundred
Chapter Hundred and One
Chapter Hundred and Two
Chapter Hundred and Three
Chapter Hundred and Four
Chapter Hundred and Five
Chapter Hundred and Six
Chapter Hundred and Seven
Chapter Hundred and Eight
Chapter Hundred and Nine
Chapter Hundred and Ten
Chapter Hundred and Eleven
Chapter Hundred and Twelve
Chapter Hundred and Thirteen
Chapter Hundred and Fourteen
Chapter Hundred and Fifteen
Chapter Hundred and Sixteen
Chapter Hundred and Seventeen
Chapter Hundred and Eighteen
Chapter Hundred and Nineteen
Chapter Hundred and Twenty
Chapter Hundred and Twenty One
Chapter Hundred and Twenty Two
Chapter Hundred and Twenty Three
Chapter Hundred and Twenty Four
The Trafficked
Preview
Chapter One
Chapter Two
About the Author
About the Publisher
1
Hong Kong 2003
Glitter Girl crouched in the darkness. Sweat trickled down her back to the base of her Lurex halter-top and her denim miniskirt rode up around her waist.
She didn’t dare move. She couldn’t see a thing. She tried to rub away the melted make-up that sweated into her eyes and made them sting, but she couldn’t – her hands were tied tightly behind her back. So instead she blinked as hard as she could and stayed absolutely still and hoped that it would come to her in a moment – something would tell her where she was and how she got there. So far, nothing. She did her best not to cry. She could hardly breathe as it was, through the tape over her mouth. She would definitely suffocate if she cried.
As her eyes searched the gloom, shapes began to appear, outlines to form. She looked down at her bare feet and saw that she was squatting on a thin mattress. Long ago it had had some sort of willow pattern, but now there were only dark-rimmed stains, bleeding into one another. To her right, two metres away, was the door through which she must have come, if only she could remember. She twisted around to her left to see what her hands were tied to and recoiled from what she saw. The wall behind her was covered in photos of women. They weren’t nice pictures – not even porno ones like the sort that Darren had up in his garage. The women in these photos stared out, slack-jawed and cloudy-eyed. They were all dead.
2
Detective Inspector Johnny Mann stepped out of his car and straight into a sauna. In the half-hour he’d been driving, cocooned in air-conditioning, the morning heat had arrived outside, sucked all the moisture from the ground and left the air as thick as a wet blanket.
He put on his sunglasses, pushed his black hair away from his face and looked up at the sky. His dark eyes were swamped with blue. Clear – good. He scanned the horizon … not for long. A bank of clouds sat pregnant with rain and ready to drop. A typical Hong Kong summer – forty degrees and a hundred per cent humidity – the perfect time to go somewhere else. But Mann wasn’t going anywhere. This was the end of a long night and the beginning of an even longer day. He had been on the first response team when they’d found the body. Hong Kong was used to murders, but not like this one.
He checked his watch and looked around the car park – one other vehicle – an unmarked police car. He was relieved. It meant he wouldn’t have to hang about. The autopsy was scheduled for eight. It was twenty to. The sooner they got going, the sooner they’d be able to get out. The mortuary was a place he’d never got used to. The bodies didn’t bother him but the smell – dentist meets butchers – stayed in his nostrils like school dinners and old people’s homes – there for life.
He took off his jacket and draped it over the back seat before reaching in and pulling out his briefcase. Then he slammed the door shut and strode across the gravel to the mortuary entrance. Mann had a tall, athletic English frame along with high cheekbones and a square jaw. He had hooded eyes: deep set, dark chocolate, and smudged with sadness.
His finger was barely off the buzzer before Kin Tak, the young mortuary assistant, appeared. He was smiling – enthusiastic as always – glad to see that Mann was early and eager to begin the morning’s autopsy rota. Dressed in his off-white coat, Kin Tak had that permanently dishevelled look of someone who had never known youth and had spent far too much time caring for dead people. In the mortuary hierarchy Kin Tak was a Diener. He moved, handled and washed the bodies. He didn’t get to do the technician’s job of removing and replacing the organs or sewing up the bodies afterwards, although he was hoping to do that someday. He practised his stitching whenever he could and when no one was looking.
Mann shivered as he hit the wall of cold just inside the door of the once ‘clinically clean’ but now slightly grubby autopsy room. The room had to be kept below minus five to stop further decomposition on bodies awaiting identification and autopsies. He stood squinting beneath a flickering fluorescent strip-light.
‘Full house?’ He looked around at the stainless-steel fridges that ran along three sides of the room.
‘All but two drawers. We had a gang fight come in overnight – twelve chopped – lots of needlework to be done. Lots of practice.’
Two men emerged from a doorway on Mann’s left. He knew one of them well – Detective Sergeant Ng. They’d worked together at the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau. The other man – young and slight – Mann had never seen before.
‘Good to see you again, Ng.’
‘Hello, Genghis.’ Ng came forward to shake Mann’s hand warmly. Ng was portly, in his mid-forties and already losing his hair, but still a notorious flirt. His soft brown puppy eyes, quick smile and deep intelligence made him a magnet for women. He always seemed to find one to look after him. ‘Thought they’d managed to lose you in the New Territories,’ said Ng with a lopsided smile. ‘I’m glad to see they didn’t.’
‘You know me, Confucius – easy-going type, can’t think why some people don’t like me.’ Mann grinned. ‘How’s it going with you?’
‘Not bad, not bad at all, thanks. Still working too hard for too little pay. We miss you down at the OCTB – things are really quiet there without you.’
Mann shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t leave there willingly.’
‘I heard. You irritated the wrong people too many times – that was your trouble. You need to be more careful, Genghis. You should know by now: when you go up the mountain too often you eventually encounter the tiger.’
‘Yeah, but you cannot fight a fire with water from far away – unless of course you’re pissing in the wind, which you do all the time. Then it’s possible.’
Ng’s face broke into a big crooked grin.
‘Very good. Very good. But what does pissing in the wind mean?’
‘Very old English saying. I’ll explain it to you one day.’
‘You’ve been swotting up on your proverbs.’
‘Yep! Thought I’d give you a run for your money …’
Ng turned towards the officer just behind him. ‘Have you met Detective Li?’
Mann looked at the young man who was grinning up at him and evidently itching to speak. He was wearing a brown, seventies-style pinstriped suit with the widest orange kipper tie Mann had ever seen. Mann never remembered going through that fashion stage, although he guessed he must have. He hoped it hadn’t lasted long.
‘I know! I know!’ Ng rolled his eyes towards Li and put his hand up to his mouth to hide what he was about to say. ‘They get younger every year! But …’ he slapped the young detective on the back, ‘he may be only twenty-two and wet behind the ears … talks like a Yank and he definitely hasn’t found his dress sense yet … but …’ Detective Li’s anxious eyes flicked from one man to the other ‘… this guy passed with honours from cadet school. He can Kung Fu kick ass and he knows all about computers. He’ll get there – eventually. Hey, Li?’ Ng pulled him forward by the sleeve. ‘Don’t be put off by the look of this guy,’ he said, gesturing towards Mann. ‘He may look big and white. He may only be half Chinese but he’s still the meanest cop you’ll ever meet. Meet Genghis Khan.’
Clutching his laptop under one arm, the young detective stepped forward and stared up into Mann’s face.
‘Awesome,’ he said. ‘Truly awesome. Heard all about you, boss – honoured.’ His eyes stayed fixed on Mann’s face as he shifted his weight from one snakeskin boot to the other and grinned inanely. ‘You’re a legend – a one-man triad annihilator. Never heard you called Genghis Khan before, though.’
Ng thumped Mann in the ribs. ‘I named him that because he is a tenacious warrior and he looks like a wild man.’
Li giggled nervously – high-pitched and girly. Ng put a protective hand on his shoulder and edged him further forward.
‘And I have decided to call Li “Shrimp”, owing to his peculiar resemblance to one.’
The boiled-sweet complexion; the random crests of over-gelled hair. Mann could see what he meant.
‘Shrimp here is a regular Bruce Lee. Aren’t you?’ said Ng proudly.
Detective Li blushed a deeper scarlet and his eyes darted around the room. ‘I wouldn’t say that … but …’
Mann shook Li’s hand with an extra-firm grip that left Li wincing and Ng chuckling. ‘Good man – useful to have around. Take no notice of Confucius. Good to have you on the team, Shrimp.’
‘Thank you, boss …’ Li beamed, his mouth showing more gum than teeth. ‘Awesome.’
‘We called in at headquarters earlier, Genghis. The place is heaving. There are people there I haven’t seen for years,’ said Ng.
‘I know. This is big. The top brass want it dealt with super-fast, before we lose what few tourists we have.’
‘Is it true it’s a Gwaipoh?’
‘Yes, a white foreigner. She was discovered sixteen hours ago, dumped in a bin bag on a building site out in the New Territories, near Sha Tin. A workman found her when he started moving some rubble. She’d been there a few days.’
‘Anyone notice anything?’
‘No. There’s a constant stream of construction vehicles twenty-four hours a day. It’s easy to get in and out of the site. She could have been dumped at any time – day or night.’
Kin Tak appeared beside them, ready to start the autopsy.
Ng turned to Li. ‘You ready for this, Shrimp? You’re about to attend the autopsy of a murdered white woman – a rare thing over here. We usually only get to see dead triads, don’t we, Mann?’
‘Yes, and the more we get of those, the better,’ Mann said, and signalled to Kin Tak that they were ready for what was to come.
3
Morning finally arrived outside. Glitter Girl watched the faint rays of light squeeze through the cracks in the far wall. She watched them widen, soften and fill with spinning dust particles. She felt a little calmer. She loved pretty, sparkly things. She thought of home: Orange County, USA. It was a Saturday night and she was sixteen. It was her first ‘proper’ dance and her first date with Darren. Her mama said her dress was too tight, too revealing. She’d had to smuggle it out of the house in a bag and change in Darren’s car. That had been the most special night of her life, spinning round and round in Darren’s arms, showered with light beams from a rotating disco ball. Darren’s strong arms held her so tightly that she’d thought she would faint. That was the night she knew he was the one for her. How wrong she had been.
And then it occurred to her – the room was the same size as the one she and Darren had started out their married life in – in the days before he’d started hitting her. When he’d started that, there had been no stopping him. Oh sweet Jesus! Why did it remind her of that room? Was it because Darren had beaten her so badly in that room that she’d thought she was going to die, and now she actually was? Her mama always said she’d come to no good and she was right. She was right about a lot of things – especially about Darren.
Glitter Girl looked at the photos of the women. Some of them were staring straight at her, but their eyes were blank. She’d seen eyes like that before. When she was a little girl on the farm she’d fallen on the dung heap and, as she’d struggled to get out of the muck, she’d turned and the dead piglet had been right there in her face. Its eyes were cloudy too, and although it wasn’t alive it was moving with maggots.
In the dim light she tried to make out the room. On the far side, hanging from a hook beneath a row of shelves, she saw what looked like a piece of fur and strips of pale animal hide. On the shelf itself there were jars like the ones her grandma kept pickles in. She was trying to make out what was inside when she stopped, held her breath and looked towards the door. A key was turning. Someone was coming.
4
‘Okay, gentlemen, shall we begin? It’s a Jane Doe, is that right?’
Mr Saheed, the pathologist, had arrived. He was a tall, wiry fifty-five-year-old, originally from Delhi and now settled in the region. He had an abrupt manner, and a habit of grunting his reply, but it was just his way. He was a very good pathologist who never minded questions as long as they weren’t too puerile. Mann had learned a lot from him over the years and on the several occasions they had met over a mortuary slab.
The detectives waited while Saheed rammed his feet into a pair of white rubber boots and pulled on a starched white coat and plastic apron. He looked over his glasses and raised an eyebrow at Mann.
‘Yes. It’s a Jane Doe, sir, and I’ll be recording,’ Mann said, in answer to Saheed’s silent enquiry as to which of the detectives would be taking the role of assisting Kin Tak. ‘Ng here is photographer, and that leaves Detective Li to do the dirty work. Scrub up, Shrimp,’ he said, remembering the first time he had attended an autopsy. It was at the height of the invasion of the Vietnamese boat people. A pregnant woman and her two children had been washed up after spending a week in the water. It was an experience he’d never forget.
Kin Tak checked a number on a fridge door against one on his list, pulled out one of four drawers, slid a white body bag out onto the trolley and wheeled it over to the stand above a drain in the centre of the room.
Saheed began dictating into the microphone clipped to his breast pocket:
‘The head of a Caucasian woman … late twenties … frozen after death. Bluish discoloration around the mouth … no obvious sign of injuries.’ Mann looked over his shoulder as Saheed shone a light inside her mouth.
‘She looks like she’s had a fair amount of work done, sir.’
‘Yes. She should have dental records somewhere.’
‘Cause of death, sir?’
‘Asphyxiation of some kind – we will have to wait for the x-rays to be sure. Let’s move on. There’s plenty more of Jane to get through. Wash her hair, please, Kin Tak. Sieve the contents and send them off for analysis.’
Kin Tak unzipped the bag along its length and lifted out a woman’s thigh, dissected at the knee and hip. He weighed it in a set of scales suspended above the table, before placing it on the slab. Ng measured it and recorded its dimensions on his pad.
Saheed turned the leg over twice, examining it closely before lifting his head to address the policemen. ‘Tell me what your observations are, Officer,’ he said to Li, who had managed to avoid getting too close to the table so far.
Li stepped forward and stared nervously at the leg. ‘Uh …’ His eyes darted hopelessly around the room in search of an answer.
‘And yours, Inspector?’ Saheed turned to Mann.
Mann pointed to the knee joint. ‘Pretty impressive, sir. Someone enjoys his work. Likes it to look neat.’
The pathologist grunted his agreement before addressing Li again. ‘Do you cook, Officer? Ever had to joint or bone meat? No? Well, let me tell you, it’s a skill. You need to be at least a competent surgeon or at worst a good butcher. You need a very sharp knife and you need to know where to saw, chop and cut. Like here,’ he said, tapping the open knee joint with his scalpel. ‘Now, let’s see what else we have … Victim is approximately twenty-five years old, five foot five inches tall, and … what’s this?’ He paused to study a mark on the inside of the thigh.
‘We have us a biter,’ Kin Tak blurted out, unable to contain his excitement.
The pathologist looked up, nodded and smiled at his assistant. He allowed Kin Tak his little eccentricities and his almost Tourette’s-like need to voice his observations. ‘Yes … There is a human bite mark here on the inside of the thigh, made after death occurred. Within twelve hours, I would say.’ Ng stepped forward to photograph the bite mark and measure dimensions in preparation for a cast to be made. ‘She had been dead at least a week before being dismembered.’
‘So, someone hung on to her after they killed her and before they froze her?’
‘Why would they do that?’ Li looked at Mann.
‘All sorts of reasons, Shrimp. None of them nice.’
5
Reasons? He shrugged. She had made him feel good – reason enough. He hadn’t wanted to let her go. He had a video of her death, which he watched often. He was watching it now – sat in his chair, remote in one hand, cock in the other. Ready to pause and rewind at his favourite bit. The look on her face when she knew this time was the last! He loved that bit.
He watched himself turn and grin at the camera, a length of twine in his hand. The girl, frantic, trying to get away from him. But she couldn’t. She was tied tightly to the chair. Only her pretty little head moved in tiny shakes as she squealed into the gag. There was nothing she could do. Her fate was in his hands. Wait … It was coming to his favourite bit now. Tourniquet in place. Turn it once, twice … turn and tighten. Hold it for longer this time … Yes! She knows this is it! Her eyes bulged. Her body convulsed. The shaking stopped. Still he carried on watching. This was his favourite part of the film. She was dead but he wasn’t finished with her. Pause. Rewind. Pause. Rewind.
