Kin Tak was unusually quiet as he attended to the tasks of washing and weighing, measuring and finally laying the parts of Helen’s body out on the mortuary slab.

Mr Saheed arrived. As he stepped into his boots and pulled on his latex gloves he looked at the policemen. They looked at Mann. ‘Gentlemen? Something I need to know?’ They all looked at Mann. ‘Inspector Mann?’

Mann didn’t answer, he just shook his head. ‘Okay.’ Mr Saheed picked up his notes. ‘Found this morning. Is that right?’

Ng nodded.

‘Do we have an ID for her?’ He looked over his glasses at Mann.

‘Her name is Helen Marie Bateman,’ Mann said, without taking his eyes from her face.

Saheed looked questioningly at Ng, who replied by rolling his eyes towards Mann. Mann caught it and shook his head. ‘I’m okay.’

‘Let’s begin then. Helen Bateman – torso and head are still attached, arms and legs have been dissected from the body at the hip and shoulder joints. She was frozen after death. There’s a bluish tint around her mouth. She was probably killed by asphyxiation. No signs of a ligature, or bruising around the neck. No signs of asphyxial haemorrhaging, probably suffocated using a bag. She has several small wounds on her torso, concentrated on the buttock and upper-thigh area. I would say that they have all been made by the same instrument. Not sure what yet.’ He took a swab from one of the wounds while Li photographed and measured them.

‘A metal-tipped whip,’ said Mann. Although he kept his eyes on her face, he had noted her injuries while Kin Tak had been laying her body out for examin ation. He had done it subconsciously. He hadn’t even registered he was doing it. Even if the lover didn’t want to see it, the policeman in him had no choice.

‘We’ll see what the lab comes back with.’ Mr Saheed paused as he looked over his glasses at the three officers. Li and Ng remained silent.

‘She looks very thin,’ Mann said quietly, almost to himself.

The pathologist paused and looked at him. ‘Yes, skin is slack, indicating rapid weight loss. There is a wound across the lower abdomen, and there’s this.’

Mr Saheed turned her arm over, and the needle marks were plain. Mann was fighting for breath now. He could see nothing but Helen’s beautiful face: laughing, smiling, crying, screaming, pleading for mercy. It was as if he had murdered her with his own hands. He felt so much pain that it made him want to crumble, to dissolve into the ground. He also wanted to run as fast and as far as he could from her dead body. At the same time he longed to take hold of her, even now, even when the stench of her rotting body stayed on his hands. He wanted to protect her. But he was too late.

He couldn’t stay to watch Saheed cut her. He knew the man had to do it, but he wouldn’t have allowed him to touch her while he watched. Not his Helen.

He stood outside the mortuary door and put his hand against the wall for support.

Ng came out to find him when the autopsy was over. He placed a hand on Mann’s shoulder.

‘You all right, Genghis?’

‘She looked so …’

Ng patted his back. ‘I know what you want to say – It is the beautiful bird who gets caged. I am sorry, Mann.’

‘You know the wheel of life, Ng? Well, whatever I was in the last life, it wasn’t nice.’

‘The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials, Genghis. You’ll be okay.’

‘I’m not being perfected, Ng – I’m being punished.’

‘Don’t even think that. Helen’s life was not dictated by you. She chose her own path, it was just unfortunate that there was someone waiting for her along it.’

Li caught up with them, and Mann turned to him as he drew level.

‘What else did you find out, Li?’

Just as Li was about to answer, Ng put up a hand behind Mann’s back to silence him before he could say it. There were some things Mann just wasn’t ready to know.

Meanwhile, Kin Tak waited till everyone had left, then he slid Helen’s body out from the fridge, wheeled it to the centre of the room, unzipped it and put it back onto the slab, piece by piece.

61

Back at Headquarters there seemed to be a distinct lack of policemen in the building. Those who were there quickly averted their gaze from Mann and made themselves busy with anything that involved walking the opposite way to him.

Inside room 201, David White was waiting. He came around from behind his desk.

‘I am sorry, Johnny, truly sorry.’ He put his hand on Mann’s shoulder.

Mann slumped. ‘You should have seen her, David. She was emaciated. Her body was covered in wounds. She suffered such a lot. Who could have done this? And why Helen? She had no connection to Club Mercedes, or to the nightclub world any more. She’d been working as a PA for the last two years.’

‘I don’t know, Johnny. I wish I did but I don’t.’

‘God help him when I find him, David. His last minutes will be filled with more pain than he can imagine.’

‘We’ll double our efforts, I promise you. We’ll have an answer for you, but you must go home now. I’ll come around later to check on you. I’ll bring a bottle of something. We’ll get drunk together.’

‘The only thing I want to do now, David, is find the bastard who did this. I don’t want to go anywhere.’

‘I know you don’t, Johnny, but you have to. You can’t investigate your own girlfriend’s death. You just can’t. I won’t allow it. Rest for a couple of days, then we’ll talk about what you can do.’

‘Don’t pull me off this case, David. Don’t do it.’ The blood returned to Mann’s face.

‘Go home for now. Rest. I’ll be around in the evening. We’ll talk it through then.’

But when White got to Johnny Mann’s apartment later that evening, Mann wasn’t there.

Mann was waiting for Mandy in the smoking room – the alley at the back of the pub. He sat in the half-light, tucked against the wall. He had been knocking back the vodka for hours but he seemed to have drunk himself sober. Nothing helped numb the shock or the pain. Nothing could turn back time. He had come to talk to Mandy. He had to talk to someone else who knew Helen well. He had to understand what had happened.

‘You knew her, Mandy,’ he asked when she joined him. ‘Did you think she meant to leave me?’

‘Johnny, what’s the point in all this? She’s dead. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s just no point in torturing yourself.’

‘Did she, Mandy? I need to know.’

‘All right, Johnny, I’ll tell you. She loved you. She wanted to stay with you. But she was tired of waiting for you to commit. She came to see me a couple of weeks before she left. She said she was going to go back to England if you didn’t try to stop her. At least, she intended to disappear for a few days and wait to see what you did. I warned her that pretending to leave you wasn’t a good idea, that you’d never been one for emotional blackmail and that it might backfire on her. Anyway, she obviously went through with it. She phoned me just after she left. She was in the taxi. She said that you’d been there when she’d left. She said you didn’t try to stop her, and she said she was going to lie low for a few days and then decide what to do. I waited for a call from her to say where she was staying. When it never came I just presumed she had gone through with it after all and had returned to England. That maybe she did want a clean break after all. I’m sorry, Johnny. Maybe I should have said something before. I never dreamed that …’

‘I know, Mandy. That she was being held somewhere, tortured, starved, and finally murdered. It’s not the kind of thing you could imagine happening to someone you know.’

Mandy placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

‘She loved you, Johnny. That’s a rare and precious thing in this world. You threw it away. But you didn’t kill her.’