‘I hope Georgina will forgive me, when I explain it to her.’

‘I really wouldn’t count on it. And you won’t be able to explain it to her. You won’t be seeing her again. At least I keep to my side of the bargain. She’s sick and she’s sad – she has no one now and soon she’ll be of no more use to me. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Lucy – to be rid of your cousin? You sold her to me, remember?’

Lucy thought how ugly and mean he looked, as he sat opposite her, shrivelled by his malicious character, delighting in his triumph. She thought about Frank, how kind and generous he was. Soon she would be his wife. She would be as good as anyone then. Chan could go hang himself then.

He continued. ‘It seems you have managed to lose what little family you had, all in the space of about a month. Impressive.’ He leaned forward and rested his hand on her thigh.

She knocked the hand off her leg. ‘I didn’t cause the death of Ka Lei,’ she snapped. She was growing dangerously close to being angry enough not to care about consequences.

He smiled and continued: ‘That’s why you sold Georgina to me in the first place. You were jealous. Ka Lei loved her more than she loved you. Your mamasan filled me in on the details.’ He sat back to watch the outcome of his words. ‘Quite clearly, for Ka Lei there was nothing, and no one, worth living for after Georgina was gone. You weren’t enough, Lucy, were you? You couldn’t even be bothered to look after her properly. You were ultimately responsible for your own sister’s death.’

‘Not just me.’ Lucy fought to contain her anger and lost. The words spat out like venom across the room. ‘You could have done it gently, but you hurt her. She lost something the night that you bought her – not just her virginity – she lost her smile – she didn’t want to live any more. All the harm came from you – all of it.’

Chan laughed. Lucy had to get out. ‘You made me do it all,’ she said, standing abruptly. ‘Now I must go.’ Smoothing her skirt down, she composed herself. ‘Goodbye, Mr Chan.’

‘It’s not goodbye for us, Lucy. We have unfinished business. I might let you leave Hong Kong – might. But, remember, the world is a small place. It doesn’t matter where you go in it – if I want to, I will find you. So, dear Lucy, my advice to you is to keep looking over your shoulder. Oh, and give my regards to your fiancé. Tell him he’s a very lucky man. But then he knows that already.’ Chan laughed.

87

David White sat back in his chair and grinned broadly at Johnny Mann as he walked into his boss’s office.

‘Well done! You’ve done it! We have our killers, Johnny.’ Superintendent White was in jubilant mood until he caught sight of Mann’s face. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m not convinced. I will feel happier when we get the forensics report. I want to know exactly what was in the brothers’ place.’

‘You can’t possibly doubt that they are responsible? It couldn’t fit better, Johnny. One a butcher by trade, and the other a taxi driver and a friend of the girls. What more do you want? I’ll get a unit out to Man Po’s workplace straight away. We’ve closed all the farms, stopped all movement of animals.’

‘I know they played a major part. I am just not sure that they were working alone. Several things don’t add up.’

‘Such as?’

‘There didn’t seem to be the equipment for torture in that room. It was bare except for the mattress, the restraint and the specimen bottles. If the girls were held in that room for weeks at a time – tortured and killed there – there would be some evidence of that. It is definitely a short-stay place.’

‘Bloody hell!’ David White rubbed his bald head vigorously. ‘All right, it’s worth considering. Maybe one of the farms? We might find a second location in one of those?’

‘We might. We haven’t seen anything like that yet, but we have teams out looking.’

‘Did you get anything out of Max?’

‘At the moment he fears something a lot worse than us. I’m going to change that.’

Ng knocked on the door. ‘There is a small trace of human blood in the brothers’ place. Not enough to mean the victims were killed or dismembered there. Another thing … There’s some unusual activity in the New Territories. Someone’s been buying a lot of land up past Shenzhen … through a bogus company.’

Mann left the Superintendent’s office, closely followed by Shrimp, who was waiting for him.

‘Boss …’ Shrimp handed Mann two DVDs. ‘I got these from a stall on Nathan Road. The woman said they are snuff movies. She was very nervous, but greedy of course. They cost me five thousand dollars.’

‘Have you looked at them? Is it one of our women?’

‘I thought I’d better wait …. in case.’

‘In case Helen is in one, you mean?’

88

The three men were crowded into the office, huddled in front of a laptop. ‘It’s not Helen,’ said Mann. ‘It’s too difficult to say whether she’s one of the women on our list but it’s expensively shot. Nice décor. Professionally produced. Believe me, this cost big money to make.’

They watched the screen as a young blonde woman in her early twenties, dressed in bra and panties, cavorted drunkenly around on a purple-silk-covered bed. She was drinking from a champagne flute held up to her mouth by a man. His face was blurred but his body was clear to see.

‘The man who’s pouring drink down her throat, he’s definitely Caucasian,’ said Ng.

‘Definitely: pot-bellied, skinny-legged. I would say he is about sixty,’ answered Mann.

‘What’s his accent?’ asked Ng. ‘He’s saying something I can’t make out – but I know that accent …’

‘He’s Russian,’ replied Mann.

After a few minutes of foreplay the man undressed the girl and tied her hands together. The girl giggled drunkenly. He lifted her into a kneeling position. She was still laughing as he hoicked her arms above her head and onto a restraint hanging from the ceiling. The first camera focused on the girl’s face as she twisted around to see where her partner had gone, then the second camera viewed the back of the kneeling girl. She continued twisting and giggling – waiting. The man’s back came into view.

‘Pause that. Look at his right leg. Deep lacerations. Old scars. Some of those wounds go to the bone. Okay, play …’

The man reached for something off camera. When he pulled his arm back in shot, he was holding a whip in his hand. He began to beat the girl violently.

Her body jerked at each contact and her legs thrashed around the bed as she tried to escape the pain. After three minutes she was covered in bloody welts. The man then stopped and lay down on the bed. He was exhausted from the exertion. His pigeon chest rose and fell as the girl’s body shook violently with the shock and the pain. The only noise was his heavy breathing and the small, sharp intakes of breath from the girl as she tried to talk.

‘Bitte, no more. Bitte. Ich habe ein kind. Bitte. Nicht mehr.’

The view changed to the front. Her head was dropped to her chest. She began whimpering and pleading for mercy. The man knelt behind her. His hands held on to her hips and he lifted her onto his lap as he began forcing himself inside her rectum. As she tilted her head back and screamed in pain, he slipped a length of silk around her neck, took up the slack, wrapped the excess around his fist, and twisted.

The camera zoomed in on her face. He brought her to the moment of death five times before finally letting her go. It took him forty minutes to kill her.

During those minutes Mann went quiet. He was counting the camera angles, listening for background sounds, watching for any mistakes that the filmmaker might have made. He tried hard not to imagine someone he cared for going through what he could see on the screen. The anger inside him was boiling his blood.