Necropolis (22 page)

And then there was Wisdom Court. From the moment she had arrived there, Scarlett had been aware that something was wrong. It was just too quiet. But after two days there, going up and down in the elevator, in and out of the front door, she suddenly realized she hadn't seen anybody else. There were no sounds coming from the other flats, no doors slamming or babies crying. No cars ever pulled up. No smells of cooking or cleaning ever wafted up from the other floors. Apart from Mrs. Cheng, she seemed to be living there entirely on her own.

Of course, there was the receptionist. She had barely registered him to begin with. He was always sitting in the same place, in front of a telephone that never rang, staring at a front door that hardly ever opened.

He wore a black jacket and a white shirt. His face was pale. He never changed. Nobody ever replaced him.

How was that possible? Scarlett found herself examining him more closely. The same man in the same place, morning, noon, and night. Didn't he ever eat? Didn't he need toilet breaks? It could have been a corpse sitting there, and once that thought had entered her head, she found herself hurrying through the reception area, doing her best to avoid him. Not that it would have made any difference. He never spoke to her.

On the third evening, after their visit to Disneyland, she challenged Mrs. Cheng. The Chinese woman was making dinner, tossing prawns and bean shoots in a wok.

"Where is everybody?"

"What do you mean, Scarlett?"

"We're on our own, aren't we? There's nobody else in this building."

"Of course there are other people here." Mrs. Cheng turned up the flame. "They're just busy. People in Hong Kong have very busy lives."

"But I haven't seen anybody. There's nobody else on this floor."

"Some of the apartments are being redecorated."

Scarlett gave up. She knew when she was being lied to. It was just another mystery to add to all the others.

The next day, Mrs. Cheng took her to a market in an area known as Wan Chai. As usual, Karl drove them. By now, Scarlett had gotten used to the fact that he accompanied them everywhere and never spoke. She even wondered if he was able to. His role seemed to be to act as a bodyguard. He was always just a few paces behind.

Scarlett had always liked markets, and in Hong Kong there was a vibrant street life, sitting side by side with the expensive Western shops and soaring offices. She had been keen to explore the Chinese streets, the stalls piled high with strange herbs and vegetables, soup noodles bubbling away in the open air, and the signs and advertisements, all in Chinese, filling the sky like the flags and banners of an invading army.

And yet these markets were full of horrible things. She saw dozens of live chickens trapped in tiny cages and — next to them — dead ones, beaten utterly flat and piled up like deformed pancakes. On the stand next door, there was an eel cut into two pieces, surrounded by a puddle of blood. A goat's head hung on a hook, its eyes staring lifelessly, severed arteries spilling out of its neck. It was surrounded by the other pieces of what had once been its body. And finally, there was a whole fish, split lengthways, the two bloody halves lying side by side. That was in many ways the most disgusting sight of all. The wretched creature was still alive. She could see its internal organs beating.

Mrs. Cheng took one look at it and smiled. "Fresh!" she said.

Scarlett wondered how long she could stay in Hong Kong without becoming a vegetarian.

They continued on their way, walking past a row of meat shops. Mrs. Cheng was going to cook again that night and she was looking for ingredients. As they paused for a moment, Scarlett noticed one of the butchers staring at her. He was completely bald with a large, round head and a strange, childlike face.

He seemed fascinated by her, as if she were a film star or visiting royalty. And he wasn't concentrating on what he was doing.

He was chopping up a joint of meat with a small axe. Scarlett watched the blade come down once, twice…

On the third blow, the butcher missed the meat and hit his own left hand. She actually saw the metal cut diagonally into the flesh at the wrist, almost completely severing his thumb as well. Blood spouted. But that wasn't the real horror.

The butcher didn't notice.

He raised the axe again, unaware that his hand was lying flat on the chopping board, the thumb twitching, the pool of blood widening. He was so interested in Scarlett that he hadn't noticed what he'd done. Scarlett stared at him in total shock, and that must have warned him, because at that point he looked down and backed away immediately, cradling the injured hand, then disappearing into the dark interior of the shop.

What sort of man could just about cut off his own hand without any sort of reaction? On the chopping board, human blood mingled with animal blood. It was no longer possible to tell which was which.

Scarlett didn't eat meat that night. And as soon as she had finished dinner, she went back to her room.

The apartment had cable TV and she watched a rerun of an old British comedy. It didn't make her laugh, but at least it reminded her of home. She was thinking more and more about leaving. If her father didn't arrive soon, she would insist on it. How could this have happened to her? How had she found herself on the wrong side of the world, on her own?

She went over to the window and looked out.

Hong Kong by night was even more stunning than it was by day. The windows were ablaze —

thousands of them — and all the skyscrapers used light in different ways. Some seemed to be cut into strange shapes by great slices of white neon. Others changed color, going from green to blue to mauve as if by some sort of electronic magic. And quite a few of them carried television screens so huge that they could be read all the way across the harbor, advertisements and weather information glowing in the night, reflecting in the dark water below.

One such building was directly opposite her. As she gazed out, thinking about the butcher, thinking about the still-living fish that had been cut in half, she found herself being drawn almost hypnotically toward the building. It must have belonged to some sort of bank or financial center — the screen was displaying the performance of stocks and shares. But even as Scarlett watched, the long lists of numbers were wiped from left to right and replaced by four letters in burning gold.

SCAR

It was her own name, or at least half of it. She smiled, wondering what the letters actually stood for.

South China Associated Railways? Steamed Chicken And Rice? But then four more letters appeared, tracking from the other side.

LETT

And that was no abbreviation. It was her. Scarlett. The two blocks had formed her name, and now they were flashing at her as if trying to attract her attention. She stood at the window, not quite believing what she was seeing. Was someone really trying to send her a message, using an electric sign on the side of a building to get it across?

A few seconds later, the screen changed. Now it had turned white, and the message it was displaying read:

PG

Scarlett was taken aback. Maybe she was mistaken after all. What did it mean? PG Tips was a type of tea, wasn't it? PG was also a type of movie rating. But what about the 70?

Scarlett waited, hoping that the sign would change a third time and tell her something more — but nothing happened. It seemed to have frozen. Then, abruptly, it went black, as if someone had deliberately turned it off. At the same moment, she heard police sirens, a lot of them, racing through the streets on the other side of the harbor in Kowloon.

There was a knock at the door.

Scarlett went over to the bed and sat down, then quickly picked up a magazine and opened it. Although she wasn't quite sure why, she had decided that she didn't want to be found at the window. "Come in,"

she called.

The door opened, and Audrey Cheng came in. She was wearing a tight jersey that showed off the shape of her body — round and lumpy. Her black hair was tied back in a bun. Her eyes, magnified by the cheap spectacles, were full of suspicion. "I just wanted to check you were all right, Scarlett," she said.

"I'm fine, thank you very much," Scarlett replied.

"Are you going to bed?"

"In a few minutes."

"Sleep well." She seemed pleasant enough, but Scarlett saw her eyes slide over to the window and knew exactly why she had come in. It was the message. She wanted to know if Scarlett had seen it.

And it was a message — Scarlett was sure of it now. Someone was trying to reach her and had decided that this was the only way. There was some sort of sense in that. A man had tried to hand her an envelope and had been dragged off the sidewalk. Mrs. Cheng and Karl were watching her all the time.

Perhaps this was the only way.

But what did it mean? Scarlett had never been any good at puzzles. Aidan had always laughed at her attempts to do a crossword. PG 70. It obviously had nothing to do with tea or movies. Could it be an address, a map reference, the license plate of a car? She went back over to the window and looked out again, but the screen was still dark. Somehow, she doubted it would come back on again.

Eventually, she stopped thinking about it and tried to go to sleep — and that was when the answer suddenly arrived. Maybe not thinking about it had helped. PG. Wasn't that an abbreviation for page?

Could it be that someone was trying to make her look at page seventy? But in what? There were about forty or fifty books in the bedroom, most of them old history books that could have nothing to do with Hong Kong.

She got out of bed and picked one off the shelf at random. Sure enough, page seventy took her to a fascinating description of the way Paris had been laid out in the nineteenth century. She tried a dictionary that had been lying on the table. Page seventy began with "Bandicoot… a type of rat" and continued with a whole lot of words beginning with

B.

How about a page in the telephone book? That would make sense if someone was trying to get in touch.

And then she remembered. There had been one book that she hadn't packed but that had turned up mysteriously in her luggage. The guide to Hong Kong and Macao.

She went back to her suitcase. She hadn't even taken it out — but then she hadn't needed a guide, not with Karl and Mrs. Cheng ferrying her every step of the way. She carried it over to the light, flicking through to page seventy, and found herself reading a description of a place called Yau Ma Tei —"a very interesting area in Kowloon," the text said. ''Yau Ma Tei means 'hemp oil ground' in Cantonese, although you are unlikely to see any around now." There was a photograph opposite a market selling jade, which reminded her of the amulet that the chairman had given her. She was wearing it now and wondered if he had bought it there.

She was about to throw the book down — another false lead — when she noticed something. There was a pencil line against the text. It was so faint that she had almost missed it — but perhaps that was deliberate. The line drew her attention to a single paragraph.

Tin Hau Temple.

You shouldn't miss this fascinating temple in a quiet square just north of the jade market. Tin Hau is the goddess of the sea, but the temple is also dedicated to Shing Wong, the city god, and Tou Tei, the earth god. Admission is free. And watch out for the fortune-tellers who practice their trade in the streets outside. If you're superstitious, you can have your palm read or your future foretold by a "bird of fortune."

And at the very end of the paragraph, also in pencil, was a message:

: p.m.

Scarlett didn't get very much sleep that night. Someone was trying to reach her — and the risk was so great that they'd had to take huge precautions. First, they'd slipped a book into her suitcase. Maybe they'd bribed someone at the airport. Then they'd somehow taken over a whole office block to draw her attention to it. The message had been clever too. PG 70. Anyone whose first language was Chinese would have had difficulty working out what it meant. It had taken her long enough herself.

She had to visit the temple and she had to be there at five o'clock. Maybe someone who knew her father would be there. Maybe they'd be able to tell her where he really was.

There was a fire in Hong Kong that night. The office building with the giant screen burned to the ground, and when Scarlett woke up, the air was even darker and hazier than ever, the smoke mixing in with the pollution. She looked out of the window, but she couldn't see the other side of Victoria Harbor.

The whole of Kowloon was covered in fog.

Mrs. Cheng was more chatty than usual at breakfast. She mentioned that nine people had been killed and insisted on turning on the television to see what had happened. Sure enough, there it was on a local news channel. The image was a little grainy and the announcer was speaking in Chinese, but Scarlett recognized the building, directly opposite Wisdom Court, right on the harbor front. The images had been taken the night before, and there were flames exploding all around it, the reflections dancing in the black water. Half a dozen fire engines had been called to the scene.

But the firemen weren't doing anything. The camera panned over them. None of them moved. None of them even unwound their hoses.

They just stood there and let the building burn.

EIGHTEEN

Birds of Fortune

The Tin Hau Temple was a low, narrow building, crouching behind a wall and surrounded by trees, almost as if it didn't want to be found. There were tower blocks on every side, the dirty brick walls crowding out the sky. But in the middle of it all, there was a space, a wide square with trees that seemed to sprout out of the very concrete itself. Some benches and tables had been set out, and there were groups of old men playing a Chinese version of chess. A few tourists were milling around, taking photographs of each other against the green, sloping roofs of the temple. The air smelled faintly of incense.

It hadn't been easy getting Mrs. Cheng to bring her here.

From the very start, Scarlett knew she had to be careful. Mrs. Cheng had shown her the news report for a reason. She hadn't been fooled by Scarlett's act of the night before, and she was letting her know it. If Scarlett asked straight out to go to the Tin Hau Temple at five o'clock, she would be more suspicious than ever.