73‘Ma’am…?’
Becky stood on the balcony and watched a dust trail make its way up the dirt road towards the refuge. Mercy stood behind her. It was dawn.
Two black cars were approaching, they appeared through the gaps in the greenery like images in a kid’s flip book and in front of them were two motorcyclists. Their dust trails plumed above the green undergrowth.
Mercy let out a scream. She clutched one hand across her mouth, the other over her stomach as if to protect her unborn child.
‘It is the Death Squad.’
‘Get the children out, Mercy; take them to the workers’ houses. As fast as you can.’
Becky ran down ahead of Mercy, who was met by Ramon halfway down the stairs. Becky ran past into the dorms and shouted to Paulo. Within minutes they had the sleepy ranks of children filing out of the back door and scampering through the undergrowth towards the other side of the hill and the workers’ houses. She met Mercy, who was the last to leave.
‘I cannot find Eduardo, Miss.’
‘You go, Mercy. I will find him and follow. Go…Go…’
Becky hurried Mercy out. She called out to Eduardo. She ran from room to room. In a panic she raced back up to her bedroom and found him there. He was hiding under her bed. She eased him out. She looked out of her window. The black car had turned into the drive and was nearly at the front door.
‘Stay here.’
It was too late to leave now. She ran back downstairs and bolted the front and back doors. Then she tiptoed back up into the bedroom, picked up the gun and ammunition, held on to Eduardo, and they dropped to the floor to hide behind the chest of drawers. She heard car doors slam. There were voices coming from directly beneath the balcony outside the bedroom window. She heard the sound of men’s voices and footsteps disappearing around to the back of the building. They would not be able to get in, thought Becky. This place was very secure. Father Finn had pointed that out to her on her tour. It had to be, he said. They were remote, at risk from bandits and government troops alike.
Someone was trying to break in at the front. Then she heard a voice she knew. Alex’s voice came loud through the door.
‘Becky, I need your help. They are going to kill me. Open the door. Let me in. I need your help. These men will kill me, Becky. I am sorry for everything. Please believe me, I never meant it to get out of control. I was
just trying to make it, make money for us. I thought it would be okay.’Becky closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hear it. She could tell by every intonation, every inflection, every pause for breath, that the only thing he wasn’t lying about was the fact that he was petrified.
‘All they want is the child. I said I would deliver him. I made a deal, Becky. If I go back on that deal I’m dead. They are armed, they mean business.’
All the time her heart hammered. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Eduardo didn’t take his eyes from her face. In the dark of the shadows Eduardo’s eyes were dark chocolate drops floating in saucers of milk—he clung to her.
Alex shouted again.
‘Believe me, I am so sorry for what happened to you. I would not have hurt you for the world. I am truly sorry, Becky. Can you hear me? I will make it up to you. We can have children, how many would you like? Five? Six? Please, Becky. I will do anything to make it better.’ His voice was beginning to break. At the same time as he was shouting Becky could hear him remonstrating with his companions. ‘Becky, do you have a gun? For Christ’s sake give me something to fight with. They are going to kill me. Open this fucking door. He’s just one homeless boy. He knows no better. He’s a beggar, an orphan. He doesn’t matter, Becky.
We
matter. You matter to me…please, Becky, I am begging you…’Becky moved the rifle onto her lap. From outside there was the sound of fighting, crashing, then Alex
screamed. Afterwards there was silence before a man spoke.‘We have your husband, ma’am. You can save him if you wish. Give us the boy. We will look after him. No harm will come to him, you have our word.’
Eduardo clung to her harder. She drew him closer.
‘It’s my only chance, Becky. It’s all gone wrong for me. I regret everything. Please forgive me. I never stopped loving you. It was everything else. Please don’t let them kill me.’
Silence followed. She buried her face in her hands. Eduardo held on to her arm. She closed her eyes tight. There was the sound of a scuffle and someone being dragged, and Alex’s shouting growing quieter.
‘No. You can’t kill me—please…Becky!’
Alex’s voice was screeching. He was not near the door any more. Becky’s heart pounded in her chest. She held on to Eduardo tightly and clamped her eyes shut. There came an awful silence. Then three precise, perfectly spaced gun shots:
pop pop pop.She drew in a breath and held it as she listened intently. The men were near the house again, but Alex’s voice was not one of them. They were moving around the outside of the refuge. Fredrico gave the order:
‘Torch the place.’
74Amy lifted the wet necklace from the sink. She pulled either end of it as hard as she could. She put one foot on one end and stretched it. She wanted it to be perfect. Amy had woven many beads into it, the biggest, Suzanne’s favourite colour—red—was right in the centre.
Suzanne was snoring heavily now. She had drunk the entire bottle of gin. Amy went back into the bathroom to retrieve her necklace. She dried it off a little and then knelt beside Suzanne. Suzanne’s hair was still caught up at the top of her head where Amy had arranged it, out of the way. Amy fed the necklace carefully around Suzanne’s neck and she positioned the big red bead right at the front. She pulled the ends to the front and tied them over the knot, as tightly and as carefully as she could. Amy went to the radiator, reached down the side and turned it up full, the way that Lenny had shown her she must do if she was cold. But Amy wasn’t cold.
She washed her face, took off all the makeup and changed into her school uniform. She collected up her
belongings and put them into her bag, neatly and quietly, and then she slipped the brace into her mouth and gave a few sucks of it to position it right. She smiled to herself—she liked its cold raw plastic taste—it was a welcome familiar sensation. It made her feel like she was halfway home. She took the keys and the phone from Suzanne’s handbag and tiptoed out, gently closing the door behind her.
75Mann and Father Finn saw the smoke from half a mile away. Neither of them looked at each other. Both understood what it was that they were racing towards.
‘Our father, which art in heaven…’ Father Finn prayed.
‘What provisions have you for putting out fires?’
‘We have just the hoses outside.’
‘Can we expect help from anywhere else?’
‘No. The local council have been trying to get rid of us for years. We are on our own, Johnny. I pray that everyone is out.’ The air around was already carrying a hint of smoke in it.
They were getting nearer now. People were out of their houses on the side of the road. They were shouting at the Father, waving their arms for him to slow and hear what they had to say. He leaned out of the window to listen as they hurtled past, inevitably slower on the dusty road than they had been on the highway.
‘The black riders came,’ they shouted. ‘Motorbikes and cars.’
Mercy met them as she ran towards the car as it spun into the driveway. She was screaming.
‘Quick, Father. Becky and Eduardo are inside. We cannot get them out.’
She lumbered after them. Ramon was working the water hose. The older children were handing buckets of water to the adults. Mann looked up and saw Becky at the bedroom window. She was holding Eduardo. The wooden balcony was already alight. She was trying to open the balcony door. She was yanking it. Mann could see that she was panicking so much that she wasn’t functioning. He knew what he had to do. He had no choice.
‘I am going in the main entrance,’ said Mann.
‘No, Johnny. You are too weak. You’ll never make it.’
‘Ramon, point everything you have at the entrance. We will come out on the balcony. Father, get ready for us to jump onto something.’
‘I will clear as much as I can here, Johnny. I have the sacks of rice in the Jeepney still, the ones we picked up in Manila. You can jump onto those.’
‘Ready, Ramon?’ Ramon’s head nodded but his face was set in fear. Mann looked up at the window. He could no longer see Becky. ‘Hose me down, Ramon.’ Ramon drenched Mann with the water. Mercy handed him a wet towel and he put it over himself.
‘Okay Let’s go.’
Ramon came behind Mann and blasted the front door as close to it as he could. Mann kicked it open. Clutching his side, he reeled back from the explosion of heat that hit him. Ramon hosed all around and the others threw buckets inside.
Mann kept the towel over his head and raced inside and up the stairs. The hot air heated his lungs like breathing in a furnace. Ramon followed him in and was keeping the flames in control as far as the upper landing. Mann beat the flames around the bedroom door with his wet towel and kicked it open.
Becky and Eduardo had passed out on the floor. Mann hit the floor himself, crawled towards them and dragged them back towards the balcony. He would have to be ready to get them out the second he opened the balcony doors. It would create a through-tunnel of air and the place would be a furnace in seconds. He was choking now. The acrid cinders were catching in his throat and making him retch. He cursed his useless side that stopped him pulling them both at once. He got them to the window and looked down. He saw Father Finn below, the children dragging the sacks towards the house. Father Finn saw him, his face said that they were ready, and Mann reached up, turned the handle of the latch, pulled it all the way down, gave it a good yank, and opened the window a fraction. He shook Becky. She did not stir. There was no way he could carry them both together and jump far enough beyond the balcony. He was going to have to do them one at a time. Mann picked up Eduardo, ready in his arms. He looked back at the door. It would be burning through soon. If he opened the balcony door it would be in seconds rather than minutes. He looked back at Becky; he had no choice, he had to do it. He steeled himself, then he opened the balcony door and threw Eduardo out over the burning balcony and onto the waiting sacks below.
A blast of flame from the balcony sent Mann reeling backwards The entire platform was fiercely alight now. For a second it eased as Ramon blasted it with the hose. Mann dragged Becky into his arms. The balcony was all but gone in flames. Ramon’s hose ceased to have any effect on it. The heat was biting the back of Mann’s throat. He heard the roar of the fire beneath him and the sound of glass shattering in the house. His skin began to scorch. He was clutching at the small amount of oxygen left in the room and he knew he was passing out. He looked behind him. The door to the bedroom was all but burnt through. He looked at Becky, he was glad she was unconscious. Hopefully she wouldn’t feel the pain.
‘I’m sorry, Becky, truly sorry, but…’ he kissed her face ‘…but we are not going to fucking die here. Agreed? That’s it then, no argument.’
With his last atom of strength he stood to his feet, wrapped the wet towel over his and Becky’s heads and cradled her in his arms.
He looked back towards the door, any second now it would be too late. There was a huge roar all around them. The whole refuge felt like it was about to collapse. The glass was cracking and about to shatter in the balcony doors. Then it would be too late and they would be engulfed in flames. It was now or never. Better to die on the way out than be trapped here.
He took one last look at Becky, took a step back, and ran at the balcony doors, blasted them apart with a kick and jumped into the fire. It was like jumping into a lava flow. Mann threw himself and Becky forward straight into the mouth of the volcano.
At that second when his clothes caught fire and he felt them stick to his body, at that exact second when he felt the excruciating pain of death and he opened his mouth to cry out in agony, it was filled with a cold, hard torrent of water from above.
76Morning had come to Fields Avenue. The cockerels that would die later that day in the cock-fighting arena, pitched against one another in a slaughter of blood and feathers, now stood proud and erect as they crowed their last ever morning salute from the confines of their crates. A weak sun turned the dawn sky milky blue. Fields Avenue was stupefied. Its occupants lay in a tangling of bodies, asleep in their beds, collapsed in spent lust.
The street children were awake early. Their pavement beds grew too hard to bear beyond a few hours. They were hungry and on the scavenge. The bins at the back of the restaurants would be a welcome source of breakfast. They had worked their way up Fields Avenue and now they gathered one by one in the place where a man was dying. The old woman was there too. She was watching silently from the doorway. Outside the Bordello the Colonel’s journey was almost complete. Dismembered whilst still breathing, the Shabu had made the night a long one.
‘Finish it. Please’
Stevie Ho came around to the back of the Colonel’s chair and held the point of his knife directly over the Colonel’s heart. He rested the point between the exposed ribs and placed the palms of his hands over the hilt, one on top of the other.
‘You were a worthy opponent. You died a good death. I will give you your wish.’
77‘You all right, Johnny?’
Mann awoke lying on his back, staring up at the blue sky with Father Finn’s face blocking his view.
‘I’m okay, Father. How are the others?’
‘They’re recovering, Eduardo is awake and he’s fine. Becky is just coming around, the doctor is with her. Just rest now, Mann, you’ve lost a lot of blood.’
‘What time is it?’ Mann felt a pain in his lungs as he talked.
‘It’s three o’clock. You have been asleep for a few hours. You are very weak, Johnny. Mercy has cleaned you up, the bullet is out, but you need stitching. The doctor is on his way.’
Mann was on a makeshift bed under the trees in the garden. A gentle breeze fanned his skin. The sun flitted through the leaves and skipped across his face. The sky was blue, but ash and soot still floated past. He turned his head to see that the refuge was destroyed. Ramon was busy keeping the house dampened with the hose. Some of the staff were helping him, some others were making lunch in a field kitchen. The children were running
around shouting excitedly. They were splashing in the pools of water that had landed on hard ground and had not yet evaporated or been absorbed. Their arms outstretched as wings, they were re-enacting the moment Remy’s plane dumped the lake on their heads.‘Thank God you all got out, and thank God for Remy. He managed to empty eight hundred gallons of water right on target.’
‘He did a good job.’
‘He’s a good man, all right. He phoned me to say he’s landed at Clark now, he’s making his way over. I said we’d crack open that bottle of malt you brought over with you. We will need to camp out at the workers’ houses until we can rebuild the centre. I’ve already started working on the designs. I have decided it was a blessing in disguise. Now we can build a bigger centre—specially designed for our needs. I have organised for you two to stay with Ramon and Mercy until we can arrange something else.’
‘It will be just for a night for me, Father. I can’t stay. I leave tomorrow. I have to get back to Hong Kong as fast as I can. It’s not over till I make sure the trafficking ring is broken. We have to finish it off now that it’s wounded, and I have to make sure CK sticks to his side of the bargain. I can’t do that from here.’
Father Finn left to help Ramon and keep the flames from reigniting in the intense heat. Mercy and the others moved the children back and away to the cool of the gardens.
Mann stood, checked that he wasn’t about to fall down, looked and saw that the others were too busy
to watch him. He was looking for something that he hoped no one else would find. He had a hunch that the DDS would leave something behind. He looked around him and began searching.He made his way across to the far side of the driveway. There was an area that Father Finn liked to call his garden shed. It was a cluster of small wooden structures, some used for storage, others just palm-thatched open-sided summer houses for tranquillity and a bit of peace. As he neared the space between two of the huts, he found what he was looking for—Alex Stamp.
Mann knelt beside him and looked him over. He had seconds rather than minutes left, thought Mann. His chest was saturated with blood. His face was grey. His breathing was so shallow that Mann couldn’t be sure he was still alive. Mann checked for a pulse. As he pressed his fingers to the carotid artery, Alex opened his eyes.
‘Come to gloat?’ He could barely speak.
‘No…death comes to all of us.’
Alex Stamp smiled ruefully.
‘Yeah, well, don’t let me keep you.’
‘I’m not here to give you the last rites, but I will hear your confession. Where is CK’s daughter? You do that and I’ll do my best to keep you alive.’
‘You’re too late. She’s already dead. Tell Becky I am sorry. Tell her…’
‘I’ll tell her nothing. She’s suffered enough. Go to hell.’
Mann listened to the sound of death—the last gurgle
of laboured breathing as Alex’s lungs became waterlogged. He covered the body with a piece of sacking and then he moved into the shade of one of the summer houses. He sat down and looked at his phone. It was late afternoon. He had several missed calls. He phoned Shrimp first.‘Boss, you okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I have some awesome news. Amy Tang walked back into school minutes before the deadline was up this morning.’
‘How?’
‘No one really knows. She said she got a taxi. None of the firms can confirm that, she said she thought it was a minicab that she hailed outside a flat. She gave a vague statement to the police. Said she just walked out. But, get this? Before she turned up we got an anonymous tip-off as to where she was being held. When we got to the flat, it was the weirdest thing. A Chinese woman was dead in there. Lying out on a bed in the back room. The autopsy is being done, but it looks like she died from strangulation. There was a string necklace type of thing around her neck—it had beads and stuff. The place was like an oven in there. Initial blood examination also indicated that she was heavily sedated—we found a half-empty bottle of sleeping pills in her bag. Apart from that the place was orderly. Clean, no sign of a fight. The woman had been drinking—there was an empty gin bottle in there. Nothing else, absolutely nothing else, and no little girl. Then I got a call from the school to say that she had just walked
back in. She’s been interviewed. She’s drawn pictures of the suspects. One of them was definitely Alex Stamp, the other was the dead woman. She said that she was babysat by two other Chinese men—she drew one of them, London Chinese, named Sunny. He says he is a member of the White Circle. He’s not saying anything else. She couldn’t remember what the other one looked like, or even his name. She says she had put the necklace around the woman’s neck as a leaving present. Strange child.’‘She’s not strange. She’s CK’s daughter. She’s
resilient’‘Another thing, boss. Information at the flat led us to another location. We found a group of six Filipinas, all of them under eighteen; all of them illegally trafficked in via Amsterdam in two lorries. They were in a bad state. It took them a month to reach the UK. It was a very slick outfit. They are being looked after for a few days and then they’ll be flown home.’
‘Do we know who is the head of the White Circle yet, boss?’
‘He’s about to show his hand, Shrimp.’
Mann made another call.
‘You managed it then, Micky?’
‘After I got the tip-off it was easy. Common goals, common aims, the Flying Dragons were keen for me to infiltrate the White Circle. I had to change allegiance for a while. But it worked and I managed to get myself hired as her bodyguard. I still don’t know where the tip-off came from. That little girl—Amy Tang—she’s smart. She said to me “Drop me off here at the end of
the school driveway. I will tell them that I caught a taxi here. Don’t go back to the flat.” She was already changed into a school uniform; she had it all planned. She just got out of the car and walked up the driveway, her bag over her shoulder. She looked like nothing had happened.’‘Well done, Micky—thanks for your help, now get the fuck out from undercover.’
‘You know what else she said? “One day I will be the Dragon Head of the Wo Shing Shing, Pat, and I will remember you.”’