He heard the dogs barking, probably fighting over a long-forgotten bone. Stupid animals – their sole aim in life appeared to be to have a full stomach. Whenever he forgot to put the lid on the dustbin they’d be in, rooting for scraps as if they were strays rather than well-fed pampered pedigrees. Dogs never seemed to appreciate when they were well-off. Neither did people.
Grey’s career was finished, he knew that. Less than a week after the abortive attempt to kill Howells, his agent in Beijing had disappeared. There was no trial, no charges, no announcement in the
People’s Daily
. With Hong Kong jittery enough in the run up to 1997, the Chinese had no wish to bruise what fragile confidence remained. Already 60,000 of Hong Kong’s brightest and most able were flooding out of the colony each year, emigrating to Australia, Canada and the United States. They had no wish to make it worse. A show trial of a British agent, even one who was Chinese, would do more harm than good. He had just vanished, and so had his family. The assassin who had survived would have told them where the order to kill Howells had come from, a trail that led straight to Grey’s man. He would have been tortured, Grey was certain of that, and he was equally sure that his man would have told them everything. So what next? There were, in Grey’s mind, two possibilities. They would send a man to eliminate him, as an act of revenge. Or they would release the information to the British authorities. Either way Grey was finished. He had decided not to wait and had handed in his resignation, blaming ill-health. It had not yet been accepted, and there would be a long period of debriefing and arranging to hand over to his successor, but his mind was made up. Maybe that would satisfy them. He poked the fire savagely.
One of the dogs had stopped barking, probably the victor chewing on the bone. He straightened his back and put the poker back on its stand. He’d have to get them in. His wife would give him a hard time when he eventually slipped into their bed if he allowed them to bark too long.
He walked through the kitchen, opened the door and whistled quietly. He heard Lady barking but she remained in the darkness, by the sound of it somewhere near the orchard.
‘Lady,’ he called, but she continued to bark.
He switched on the outside light, set into the wall to the left of the door, but its hundred-watt bulb only illuminated a dozen steps and most of the lawn was still pitch-black. If anything, the light only made the night seem darker. He pulled on his Wellington boots, grunting with the exertion, and then wrapped a red wool scarf around his neck.
He called for the dogs again but they ignored him. One of his collection of walking sticks, a Victorian example with a brass knob on the end in the shape of a swan’s head, was leaning against the door jamb. He picked it up and stepped outside.
He stood on the edge of the pool of light and whistled, swinging the stick in his right hand as if it was a golf club. Lady had stopped barking. ‘Damn dogs,’ he muttered under his breath and headed down towards the orchard. He thought he could hear Lady whining but when he stopped and listened carefully there was only silence.
There was a lump in the lawn to the right of one of the trees, like a pile of wet soil. He headed towards it, the stick held in front of him. He knelt down and reached to touch it. It was warm and wet and when he took his hand away and held it close to his face he could see it was blood. It was Tramp, his brown Labrador. Dead.
He heard a noise, a rustling or an intake of breath, he didn’t know which, but he turned round in a crouch to see a man bent down holding Lady’s collar with one hand, the other clamped around her muzzle.
‘What are you doing with my dog?’ Grey asked. The man took his hand from around Lady’s mouth and immediately she started barking, her eyes wide and panicking. The man was Chinese, Grey realized with a start. He pulled a wicked-looking curved knife from behind his back. He smiled, and before Grey realized what was happening he drew it across Lady’s throat with a jerk and the dog’s legs collapsed from under her. She lay on the grass, chest heaving as blood gushed from her neck, her eyes fixed on Grey.
‘No!’ cried Grey, stepping forward and raising his stick. ‘No, no, no.’
Something hit him on the back of the right leg and then on the left; sharp lines of pain burned behind each knee and he felt blood pour down his calves. The strength went out of his legs and he fell on his knees, the pain making him scream. The sound had barely escaped from his mouth when a hand grabbed his chin from behind and stifled his shrieks. He reached up to hit the man with the stick but a man stepped from the side, another Chinese, a cleaver in his raised hand. He brought it down hard, slashing at Grey’s forearm. Grey saw in horror the way it sank a good two inches into the arm and then the wave of pain hit him and he almost passed out. The stick dropped from his nerveless fingers. His legs had gone numb below the knees, but he could feel strips of pain and knew that he’d been hacked with knives, probably cutting his tendons. He was going to die. Oh God, he was going to die. He tried to use his left arm to pull the hand away from his mouth and then he felt rather than saw another blow and that arm too fell uselessly by his side. He started to shake as if he had a fever; convulsions racked his body.
The man who had killed Lady stepped over the dead dog and stood before him, the knife pointing at his nose. I’m going to die, was the one thought in Grey’s mind. The man stepped forward and the hand round Grey’s mouth twisted his head up sharply so that he was looking towards the sky. The man fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a piece of tattered paper. He looked at it for a few seconds before speaking. They were being well paid for this job, and although it had been ordered by somebody more than eight thousand miles away the instructions had been quite specific and the man was determined to carry them out to the letter. The woman who was paying the money, paying in taels of gold, would never know whether or not the instructions had been obeyed. But the man would, and he had professional pride. It had taken more than a week to track down the man called Grey, the man who worked in a building called Century House. Soon the job would be over and he could return to Hong Kong.
Slowly, carefully enunciating every word, he repeated the message on the piece of paper, written there in capital letters. ‘This is for Geoff Howells,’ he said, pushing his face up close to Grey’s. ‘For Geoff Howells. Do you understand?’
Grey could feel his life’s blood pouring down his arms and pooling around his legs. He felt elated, light-headed, almost happy, as the blood drained from his brain. He smiled. The hand moved away from his mouth and his chin flopped down, saliva dripping from his lips.
The man standing in front of him repeated the words. ‘Do you understand?’
Grey tried to speak, tried to say that yes, he understood, that he was sorry he couldn’t speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He felt like giggling. He nodded and groaned, trying to form the words.
The man in front of him looked at his two companions, standing behind Grey, blood-wet hatchets in their hands, to check that they had seen the reaction. They nodded silently and the man smiled. As one they raised their hatchets in the air and brought them down one at a time into Grey’s neck.
The flushing water was off again, the handle swinging uselessly in Dugan’s hand. ‘Piss, fuck and shit,’ he cursed. ‘Fuck this flat, fuck this place, fuck this whole fucking town.’ He didn’t feel any better getting it out of his system. He slammed down the lid. There was no problem with the water supply to the shower, thank God, so he pissed gratefully down the plughole and watched the yellow liquid swirl in circles and disappear.
He was in no hurry to get to the office; he’d lost all enthusiasm for the job since Petal had gone. Worse, he’d lost enthusiasm for everything. He’d been out drinking a few times but took no pleasure in it, and he’d spent the best part of the three weeks since she’d gone sitting in his flat watching videos. Not the television, there was precious little point in that, what with the sweeping cuts that took out all but the most innocuous sex and violence and interspersed what was left with adverts every ten minutes or so. He took out three videos a night from one of the Circle K convenience stores and watched them.
He towelled himself dry and put on his grey suit. He couldn’t be bothered cooking breakfast, or even making himself coffee. There seemed to be no point – no point at all.
He locked the door behind him and paced up and down the corridor as he waited for one of the three lifts to haul itself up to his floor. On the way down he leant his forehead against the gap between the two doors and sighed deeply. What the hell was he going to do? He’d sent off at least a dozen applications for jobs in the past fortnight, everything from a credit agency in Singapore to an estate agents in Tsim Sha Tsui, but nothing had come of it. An unemployment rate of less than two per cent and he still couldn’t get a job. What was wrong with him? ‘Oh Petal,’ he moaned quietly. ‘Where are you?’
He’d never before felt so alone. He didn’t even have Jill to lean on, because she and Sophie had returned to England. Maybe that was the only decent thing to have emerged from the whole sorry episode, the fact that their parents had flown over and re-established contact. They’d whisked Jill and Sophie out of the triad compound into the Mandarin Hotel and flown with them back to the UK, all thoughts of the past forgotten. Jill had been too exhausted to argue, and although Thomas Ng had told her that she was welcome to stay, Dugan reckoned she’d done the right thing. Sophie’s prospects would be better in England, too. Hong Kong over the next few years would be no place for children. The tension was building by the week and police riot squads were being trained with tear gas and rubber bullets in the New Territories.
The doors hissed open and he stepped out into the ground floor lobby, turning his face to the large wall-mounted fan and letting the cold breeze play over his damp skin.
Just before the reception desk where a blue-uniformed security guard slept with his head down on his folded arms were the racks of letter boxes, one per flat. He unlocked his. Inside was his electricity bill and a circular from a credit card company. And a postcard, a view of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, the best hotel in the world, on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. He’d never stayed there, but he’d had a drink in the Author’s Wing once. His name and address were written on the back in a handwriting he didn’t recognize. But to the left of the address was something that made his heart leap. No words. Just a flower, carelessly drawn.