Kiss & Die

A woman got out of the lift as he stepped in. He didn’t recognize her. Even though he didn’t know his neighbours well, he knew them well enough to nod to them when he saw them in the lift. This woman was a stranger. New tenant, visitor? He didn’t know which. She wasn’t keen to make eye contact. She hurried past him, her hair over her face, sunglasses on. Mann looked at her feet: pretty shoes. By the time he looked up she had gone.

He got to his floor, walked along the corridor and came to a halt outside his flat door. He put the key in the lock, turned the key and hesitated. Why did he always do that? He walked in, slammed the door shut behind him and threw his keys angrily down onto the coffee table. He knew that one day he’d break the glass top by doing it. It was a white cane table shaped like an elephant – ludicrous, feminine. He stepped over the piles of papers, documents his lounge was littered with and took off his t-shirt. Secured across his chest and beneath his arm he wore a pouch containing two sets of throwing stars, shuriken. Shuriken meant ‘hidden in the hand’. They were the weapons of his enemy: concealed, versatile street weapons. Sometimes they were homemade or customized. Mann had designed his own. He had been fascinated ever since one cut a groove into his face when he was young. He still bore the scar high up on his left cheekbone, it was pale like a quarter moon.

He unstrapped the leather pouch from his arm. It contained six six-inch darts. They were feather tipped, needle pointed, weighted for direct, fast, hard impact. He took a slim dagger named Delilah from his boot and placed her on the table as well. She was his favourite; she had saved him many times.

He poured himself a vodka on the rocks and then stood looking out of his window. The block opposite was lit up sporadically: squares of life in the darkness.

He checked the messages on his home phone. His mother’s voice came over clipped and awkward. It made him smile the way she talked to the answer phone machine as if she expected it to answer her at any moment. Pausing, giving it time to answer her back and then continuing in a fluster when it didn’t. He would call her tomorrow. She didn’t ask, but she needed him to. She wasn’t one for showing or asking for affection. She was a great bottler of emotions but the past few months had left her needing reassurance. Mann was all she had. Her world had been rocked by secrets that refused to stay hidden. And, where there was one, there were a hundred.

He phoned his boss.

‘I heard it was you who found her.’ The voice of Chief Inspector Mia Chou. Always succinct. Straight to the point. They had known each for a long time. ‘The ceremony was definitely an initiation one?’

‘Not just…I found yellow papers.’

‘So a new branch of a society has been created.’

‘I found an emblem printed on paper: a lone wolf.’

‘Anyone see anything?’

‘No, the tourists never see anything; it’s all strange to them. The locals see it all but they pretend not to. The building had been empty about twenty-four hours. It only took them a few hours to set it up. Tom Sheng’s called a meeting for six.’

‘Good.’

Mann could hear in her voice that she knew already. Whatever conversation she had had with Sheng it was probably face to face. Mann knew his thing with Mia wouldn’t last. Sheng had been through most of the good-looking women at the station. It never bothered him to mix work and pleasure.

‘We’ll know more after the autopsy. Grab some rest,’ said Mia. ‘See you at the office in a few hours.’

He stripped off and went in for a shower. He bowed his head in the water and let the needle jets pummel his tired shoulders. He hadn’t been back home for days. It wasn’t home. It was a punishment, a reminder of mistakes made. He should sell the apartment but it would be admitting defeat.

He came back into the lounge in his boxers and dropped the louvre blinds. He sat down in one of the two armchairs, plonked his vodka on the elephant table then he sat back in the chair to close his eyes for a few minutes, try and get some rest. He rolled the vodka glass across his chest. The only noise in the flat was the sound of the ticking clock in the bedroom. He closed his eyes, they felt as if they had sand under the lids. His jet black hair fell across his forehead. The image of the dead girl flashed into his head. His eyes snapped open. There would be no sleep for him tonight. He went into his bedroom and pulled open the laundry pack his maid had left. He slipped on a fresh t-shirt and pulled on his jeans. He picked up his weapons and keys from the elephant table and slammed the door on the way out.

Chapter 5

It was 4 a.m. when Ruby slipped out of the hotel room, into the lift and out onto Nathan Road. She took a taxi to Stanley on the east side of Hong Kong Island, a place famous for its markets selling replica goods and for its beach. But Ruby wasn’t interested in either. The hour was late. It was a winding road that took her there. Wrapped in plastic, the head rocked gently in her lap. She placed her hand on it to settle it.

She told the driver to drop her at the market, then she crossed the street and slipped out of view. The dark night gave her the cover she needed. She turned away from the brightly lit restaurants and bars and headed towards the water. She knew just the place. She walked quickly; her bag was heavy. The head knocked gently against the outside of her thigh as she walked. Inside her thighs were wet. His semen was inside her and his blood on her hands. She reached the place and, in the darkness, put the bag by her feet and leant over the wall, feeling for the line. She found it and pulled it up; she had strong arms, hard hands. After five minutes, the basket came to the surface. Ruby pulled away the strands of seaweed caught in the bamboo struts and rested it on the jut in the wall just below sea level. She reached down and took the head from the bag, unwrapped it, then she placed it just inside the basket and leant over the wall as far as she could whilst holding the head in her hands. She felt the cold water cover her wrists as she gripped the head and lowered the basket into the water. She held it there for a moment, waited until the water had made it too heavy for her to maintain her grip. She stared into the half-closed, glassy-looking eyes before she leant further over the parapet. The sea water was cold as it rose over her wrists. Her hands lost their grip as she gasped, ‘Goodbye my faithless lover.’

The head stared back at her as it sank. Ruby turned away and left to go back home.

Back in the Mansions she turned the key in the door, slipped inside her flat and into her room, then she leant against the door, closed her eyes and sighed, relieved. She was safe but she had the feeling she always got afterwards: lost, empty. Her heartbeat was calming. She opened her eyes and looked around and smiled. Her dolls stared back at her, their bright eyes looked at her adoringly.

‘I’m sorry, my babies, I couldn’t bring your daddy back with me. He wouldn’t come, I had to leave him in the hotel room. He wasn’t a very nice daddy. He wasn’t kind to Mummy. We didn’t like him, did we?’ She looked around the room at her dolls. They stared back. ‘Mummy will find you a better one tonight. Mummy will find you one we can keep forever.’ She clapped her hands in delight. From inside a cupboard a baby cried in answer. Ruby opened the cupboard door and took the baby doll from the shelf; it was still crying, ‘Mummy, feed me, Mummy.’

‘Shush,’ she patted the baby’s back, ‘in a minute my love, Mummy will feed you in a minute.’

Ruby put the doll back and as her hand lingered in the cupboard it traced the outline of something lying there. It was small, no bigger than a mobile phone, it was dry and hard. Ruby touched its face and started to cry. ‘Daddy wasn’t nice to Mummy at all.’

Chapter 6

Kin Tak, the mortuary technician, looked at the clock on the wall: it was almost 5 a.m. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said out loud. ‘No wasting time now. Finish the job. Finish it.’

Kin Tak had a form of Tourette’s syndrome that had been allowed to grow in the dark environment of the mortuary. He tried to curb it. He tried to suppress it but he was on his own for most of the day and night and he talked to himself incessantly. He talked to the people in the drawers. He talked to the dead that roamed his icy rooms, looking for their heaven.

He had worked through the night to make the girl ready. He washed her young body. He worked methodically, meticulously, marvelled at her beauty as he passed a cloth over her young skin. He talked to her as he washed her hair to remove the blood. Now he dried it with a towel, it crinkled into black glossy waves. Kin Tak held it in his hand, ‘Lovely, lovely.’ It was as soft as cotton wool, as springy as air. He marvelled at her slender arms, her slim thighs. She had no imperfections. Her skin was smooth and flawless as the day she slid from her mother’s uterus, fighting for breath in the outside world.

Now he hummed to himself as he pierced the young girl’s eye with the syringe and extracted fluid from the back of the eye. He was practising. Now that the pathologist had done his work it was Kin Tak’s turn. The fluid, vitreous humour, was a vital source of information for determining time of death. But they knew when she had died. She had died a few moments before they had run away and a few moments after they had cut off her hands and slit her throat. Now Kin Tak was allowed to practise his forensic skills before he did what he liked doing best.

Kin Tak was a diener, a mortuary technician. His job was to assist the pathologist in a post mortem examination, take tissue samples, weigh organs, take samples for the lab and record the findings of the post mortem. But Kin Tak was more than that – he was a student of the art of beautifying the dead and he was a student of pathology. He was a devoted mortuary technician who lived and slept amongst the dead. His skin seldom felt the sun, wind or rain on it. It had become cheese-like in its appearance. He practised his stitching whenever he could. Choppings gave him plenty of practice. But this was not a chopping tonight; these were wounds he had not seen before. He picked up the severed right hand. It was not a clean cut. It was a broad, layered wound, some of the flesh was missing. He would have to improvise by stretching what skin he could to stitch neatly. But not yet, he wasn’t ready yet. He moved down her body. Her small hips, not yet spread by childbirth. He combed her pubic hair.

The bell rang. Kin Tak felt the excitement turn his stomach but he was agitated. He hadn’t finished with the young woman’s body. It would have to stay where it was.

‘Fuck. Fuck.’ He snorted a giggle out of his nose and clamped his hand over his mouth to suppress it. ‘Sex. Sex.’

He knew she would come tonight. She wouldn’t mind the young woman’s body being on view. She would be pleased. She was still learning and he had such a lot more to teach her. She would pay him the way she always did. She would give him her body. She would take off her clothes and lie on the autopsy table; he would gently part her naked thighs and stroke her warm wet sex; but she would never let him do any more. She said that if she did, she would have to kill him.

He rushed to answer it. He squinted at the bright security light at the entrance haloed in moths. He was ready for her, he opened the door and stepped back, startled as he saw Mann standing there. He craned his neck to look past him into the darkness to see if there was anyone else and then he shook his head, agitated, disappointed: ‘Fuck.’

He stood back to allow Mann inside, then he scurried behind him almost tripping over in his haste to overtake him and get through the doors first. ‘Fuck. Shit. Too late now.’

Inside the autopsy room he turned and stared at Mann. He couldn’t take his eyes from Mann’s face. He remembered all too well every bereaved, haunted person who ever stood in that place. He felt the sorrow as well as the beauty of death: he collected it like a library of loss. When he looked at Mann he remembered the dead person that Mann had loved. He remembered Helen. Kin Tak had developed his senses to a point where he could see the restless spirits as they followed the living around. Helen followed Mann. She hadn’t always done. She had come back for a reason now. With a shiver, he unfroze his stare.

Mann followed him into the curtain of cold that lay behind the mortuary door. The place was always the same; even though it had recently had a facelift – new equipment, tables, the works – it still smelt the same: formaldehyde and meat.

‘How’s it going, KT? I hope you don’t mind me dropping in. I knew you’d be here. Is the autopsy completed on the Indian girl brought in last night?’ Mann looked over at the girl’s body laid out on the autopsy table.

‘Yes, very busy. Just finishing.’

‘I want to know your opinion about the weapon that was used to cut off her hands. What can you tell me?’

‘Ah. She was killed when her throat was cut. But…’

‘Yes?’

‘She would probably have bled to death just as quickly. The severing of her hands cut through the main artery. The blood must have been everywhere.’ Kin Tak’s eyes darted from Mann to the girl.

His eyes settled back on Mann and he waited. He wasn’t prepared to go on until Mann had met his side of the deal. Give a little: get a little in exchange. Give and take. Mann understood. In Kin Tak’s dead world his entire existence relied upon the knowledge of the whole story; he must know every detail about the death and how they came to have a date of birth on the outside of their mortuary drawer and a date of death ticket wrapped around their toe. But Mann could see that as much as Kin Tak wanted to know the details, he kept looking at the clock on the wall – he was nervous.

‘There must have been two hundred people there. She was part of a Triad initiation ceremony. We don’t know why she was killed. I found her in a dungeon. She was hog tied, her throat had been cut. I found her hands in the box.’

‘Okay, thank you, Inspector.’ He held up his hand, closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. ‘That’s all I need to know.’ He snapped his eyes back open and stood up straight, business-like. ‘I can tell you, Inspector, that, after my examination, I conclude that her hands were severed by something other than a chopper or a saw, or a knife. They were severed by something as sharp as a razor but with three blades to it. It bit into her wrists, it snagged there and it cut right through. Yes, each cut is clean but there are so many that her wrist was torn apart.’

‘Have you ever seen that kind of damage before?’

‘No. Now you must excuse me, Inspector. I have much to do and the morning is coming. It is good to see you, come again soon.’ Kin Tak paused and turned and looked at Mann, as if he wanted to say something, then he shook his head and scurried on towards the door.

Mann walked back across the gravel car park to his car, his feet crunching on the surface. When he got to his car he paused and stood there for a few seconds. Whether it was the sound of his feet on the gravel or the smell of the shrubs around the edge of the car park that had done it, his memories would not allow him to get into his car or drive off. They demanded to be acknowledged. He stood for a few moments in the dark, listening to the first bird calling dawn, and he remembered that day when he had said his final farewell to Helen’s body. When he had stood where he was standing now, but could not cry. All he could do was rage inside. Two years ago he had felt as near to the edge as he had ever been. That was, until now. Now, he felt he had built a platform over that edge and he was living, sleeping, existing on it and all around him was a sheer drop.

Chapter 7

It was 8 a.m. when Mann stood with ten other officers in the incident room. Next to him were the two men he shared an office with: Detective Sergeant Ng and Detective Constable Li – a.k.a Shrimp.

‘Okay, this is how I see it.’ Tom Sheng addressed the new team.

The incident room was on the twentieth floor of the police headquarters building. It was split into three sections. The first section at the entrance was where the Senior Investigating Officer set up base. The SIO was the person in charge of the enquiry and decided which line it would take. A screen separated that from the largest part of the room, the central section that had the bulk of the PCs, filing cabinets, and a large desk with four interfacing PCs. Along the back of the room was one long desk and a further five PCs and a phone between each. The third section was a staff room and a general ‘spilling over’ room for impromptu meetings. Each section was separated by screens. Each screen a multi-purpose white board.

‘We work together on this. We need to move fast.’ Tom Sheng paused and looked around the room. ‘Collaboration is the key word here. I want no fucking egos taking over on this one. Chief Inspector Mia Chou and I will be allocating jobs to those best qualified, not those in a certain department.’

Mann looked over at Mia. She was perched on the edge of the central table with her arms crossed over her chest. She was immaculate as ever, just a small strand of hair had worked its way loose from the knot at the back of her head. She flicked it away irritably. She never wore lipstick. She played her looks down, looks distracted from the seriousness of her career. She was a good cop, conscientious, steady. That’s why she’d been promoted over him. There were very few other female officers of her rank. She’d worked hard for it. Mia did everything by the book. Mann did everything by his own rules. They were chalk and cheese but somewhere in the middle they both wanted the same things.

‘There will be no favouritism,’ Tom Sheng continued. ‘First of all, let’s be clear about events. What happened last night, Mann?’

Mann stepped up to the white board. He began pinning up photos. They were images of Rajini’s body squashed into the box; her arms were sticks in front of her face, held up to the camera. Her hands and the rooster were thrown into the box with her. There were shots from the autopsy. Mann didn’t need to look; he had it all stored in his brain whether he wanted it or not.

‘We got an anonymous call through to the hotline at 9 p.m. saying that there would be an initiation ceremony taking place that evening in Mong Kok.’

‘Any trace on it? Any chance of voice recognition?’ asked Sheng.

‘No. I’ve played it back. It’s someone being paid to read the details. It’s been sent via a third party. I left with Officers Li and Ng and we split into three teams, each covering a different section of Mong Kok.’ Mann put up a map of the area. ‘There were thirty officers altogether.’

‘So, you didn’t have enough manpower?’ Tom Sheng interrupted.

‘It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d had a fucking hundred times that amount,’ Mann snapped back. ‘It’s the most densely populated area in Hong Kong. Every doorway leads to a dozen more. In the end, it was all bullshit. It was in Yau Ma Tei, not in Mong Kok. It was off the night market here…’ Mann pointed to it on the map. ‘We were set a false trail. We were never meant to arrive on time, just meant to arrive.’

‘Why would someone want to run the risk of you finding it?’ Tom Sheng asked.

‘Because it was a special night. They knew we wouldn’t find it but they wanted to make sure it was acknowledged. Not only was the girl sacrificed but a new society was born. It is a branch of the Wo Shing Shing. I found their emblem amongst the burnt oaths. And I found this…’ Mann pinned up a photo of a lone wolf howling inside a circle. ‘Someone wants their birth announced.’

‘What’s the purpose of these new societies? Why change the format? Why start recruiting girls and ethnic minorities? What is the need for it?’ asked Sheng.

‘The Triads have always targeted the teenage underdog. The young Indian population feel abandoned. They feel marginalized. They can no longer compete. The Indians and the other minorities used to be on a level playing ground, now someone’s dug up the goal posts and moved them. School places are allocated by a points system and the higher up the social scale you are the more points you seem to have. Plus you have to read and write Mandarin.’

‘What do we know about the victim?’

‘We don’t have a name for her yet. The autopsy showed she died due to asphyxiation when her throat was cut. We know she was of Indian descent, approximately fourteen years of age.’

‘What’s the latest on Operation Schoolyard?’ asked Sheng.

Mia answered, ‘We have one operative in the school. She’s twenty but looks much younger. It’s been hard to infiltrate; hard to get someone convincing enough. She joined a month ago as a student in the senior school. Her aim is to infiltrate into the new gangs. It’s a tricky area, new to us, dealing with girls, and immigrants.’

‘This initiation was brutal,’ said Mann. ‘She’s young to handle this.’

‘She’s twenty,’ said Mia. ‘There are people in this room who went undercover at that age. The difference is, she’s a woman. But that isn’t a problem. We need to play the same game and keep up.’

‘All right.’ Tom Sheng looked around the room. ‘There’s one thing we haven’t covered. Operation Schoolyard is all about infiltrating the ranks of the new Triads. What we need now is someone to give us an insider’s view on what is really going on at the top. We need to know who’s making all the decisions that filter down to these kids. Who’s pulling the strings? We need an insider.’ Tom Sheng looked at Mann, He had a hard job keeping the smug look off his face. ‘I think that’s your job, Mann, don’t you?’

Chapter 8

Mann was grateful to get out of the building. He left Headquarters and walked through the small lush garden that fronted it. The palms were being watered with a fine mist. It clung to his skin and cooled quickly as he took the steps up to the elevated walkways slung between Hong Kong’s buildings like Tarzan ropes, allowing the city’s seven million residents to escape the pavements and move from building to building all in the name of commerce. Money was king, queen and country.

Mann stood six foot two and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. It was less than his usual weight. But he had been ill. He’d caught malaria in the jungles of Burma. He’d nearly died rescuing his eighteen-year-old half-brother who was supposed to be building a school for refugees and ended up getting kidnapped. Mann had had no choice but to go.

He checked his watch; he was early. He had time to phone. He stood on the walkway and took out his phone.

‘Mum?’

She was pleased to hear his voice, he could tell. ‘Are you better? I haven’t seen you properly since you came back from Burma.’ Her accent was old school English: loosened a little by modern times but still tight, taut.

‘I’m all right, Mum. I’ve been busy.’

Mann allowed the pause that followed. He was used to pauses when he talked to his mother. They had so many things to say and yet they said very little. They loved one another but they were too alike. If one closed emotionally then so did the other.

‘Have you time to come over soon?’

‘I’ll see. I have so many things to sort out at home.’

‘Your father’s affairs?’ A frosty, hurt voice.

‘Yes.’

Mann rubbed his face with his hand. He was irritable now. Talking to her agitated him at the moment, he couldn’t help it. He took a deep breath.

‘Look Mum, I have to go. I’ll call you later.’

Mann closed the phone and slipped it back in his pocket. Now he really felt like shit. He knew what she’d be doing. She’d be staring out of the French windows, listening to the carriage clock tick. Her grey eyes would be filled with the colour of the sky. Her prim, upright figure would be stiff shouldered. She would be feeling like shit. Just like Mann.