He unstrapped the leather pouch from his arm. It contained six six-inch darts. They were feather tipped, needle pointed, weighted for direct, fast, hard impact. He took a slim dagger named Delilah from his boot and placed her on the table as well. She was his favourite; she had saved him many times.

He poured himself a vodka on the rocks and then stood looking out of his window. The block opposite was lit up sporadically: squares of life in the darkness.

He checked the messages on his home phone. His mother’s voice came over clipped and awkward. It made him smile the way she talked to the answer phone machine as if she expected it to answer her at any moment. Pausing, giving it time to answer her back and then continuing in a fluster when it didn’t. He would call her tomorrow. She didn’t ask, but she needed him to. She wasn’t one for showing or asking for affection. She was a great bottler of emotions but the past few months had left her needing reassurance. Mann was all she had. Her world had been rocked by secrets that refused to stay hidden. And, where there was one, there were a hundred.

He phoned his boss.

‘I heard it was you who found her.’ The voice of Chief Inspector Mia Chou. Always succinct. Straight to the point. They had known each for a long time. ‘The ceremony was definitely an initiation one?’

‘Not just…I found yellow papers.’

‘So a new branch of a society has been created.’

‘I found an emblem printed on paper: a lone wolf.’

‘Anyone see anything?’

‘No, the tourists never see anything; it’s all strange to them. The locals see it all but they pretend not to. The building had been empty about twenty-four hours. It only took them a few hours to set it up. Tom Sheng’s called a meeting for six.’

‘Good.’

Mann could hear in her voice that she knew already. Whatever conversation she had had with Sheng it was probably face to face. Mann knew his thing with Mia wouldn’t last. Sheng had been through most of the good-looking women at the station. It never bothered him to mix work and pleasure.

‘We’ll know more after the autopsy. Grab some rest,’ said Mia. ‘See you at the office in a few hours.’

He stripped off and went in for a shower. He bowed his head in the water and let the needle jets pummel his tired shoulders. He hadn’t been back home for days. It wasn’t home. It was a punishment, a reminder of mistakes made. He should sell the apartment but it would be admitting defeat.

He came back into the lounge in his boxers and dropped the louvre blinds. He sat down in one of the two armchairs, plonked his vodka on the elephant table then he sat back in the chair to close his eyes for a few minutes, try and get some rest. He rolled the vodka glass across his chest. The only noise in the flat was the sound of the ticking clock in the bedroom. He closed his eyes, they felt as if they had sand under the lids. His jet black hair fell across his forehead. The image of the dead girl flashed into his head. His eyes snapped open. There would be no sleep for him tonight. He went into his bedroom and pulled open the laundry pack his maid had left. He slipped on a fresh t-shirt and pulled on his jeans. He picked up his weapons and keys from the elephant table and slammed the door on the way out.

Chapter 5

It was 4 a.m. when Ruby slipped out of the hotel room, into the lift and out onto Nathan Road. She took a taxi to Stanley on the east side of Hong Kong Island, a place famous for its markets selling replica goods and for its beach. But Ruby wasn’t interested in either. The hour was late. It was a winding road that took her there. Wrapped in plastic, the head rocked gently in her lap. She placed her hand on it to settle it.

She told the driver to drop her at the market, then she crossed the street and slipped out of view. The dark night gave her the cover she needed. She turned away from the brightly lit restaurants and bars and headed towards the water. She knew just the place. She walked quickly; her bag was heavy. The head knocked gently against the outside of her thigh as she walked. Inside her thighs were wet. His semen was inside her and his blood on her hands. She reached the place and, in the darkness, put the bag by her feet and leant over the wall, feeling for the line. She found it and pulled it up; she had strong arms, hard hands. After five minutes, the basket came to the surface. Ruby pulled away the strands of seaweed caught in the bamboo struts and rested it on the jut in the wall just below sea level. She reached down and took the head from the bag, unwrapped it, then she placed it just inside the basket and leant over the wall as far as she could whilst holding the head in her hands. She felt the cold water cover her wrists as she gripped the head and lowered the basket into the water. She held it there for a moment, waited until the water had made it too heavy for her to maintain her grip. She stared into the half-closed, glassy-looking eyes before she leant further over the parapet. The sea water was cold as it rose over her wrists. Her hands lost their grip as she gasped, ‘Goodbye my faithless lover.’

The head stared back at her as it sank. Ruby turned away and left to go back home.

Back in the Mansions she turned the key in the door, slipped inside her flat and into her room, then she leant against the door, closed her eyes and sighed, relieved. She was safe but she had the feeling she always got afterwards: lost, empty. Her heartbeat was calming. She opened her eyes and looked around and smiled. Her dolls stared back at her, their bright eyes looked at her adoringly.

‘I’m sorry, my babies, I couldn’t bring your daddy back with me. He wouldn’t come, I had to leave him in the hotel room. He wasn’t a very nice daddy. He wasn’t kind to Mummy. We didn’t like him, did we?’ She looked around the room at her dolls. They stared back. ‘Mummy will find you a better one tonight. Mummy will find you one we can keep forever.’ She clapped her hands in delight. From inside a cupboard a baby cried in answer. Ruby opened the cupboard door and took the baby doll from the shelf; it was still crying, ‘Mummy, feed me, Mummy.’

‘Shush,’ she patted the baby’s back, ‘in a minute my love, Mummy will feed you in a minute.’

Ruby put the doll back and as her hand lingered in the cupboard it traced the outline of something lying there. It was small, no bigger than a mobile phone, it was dry and hard. Ruby touched its face and started to cry. ‘Daddy wasn’t nice to Mummy at all.’

Chapter 6

Kin Tak, the mortuary technician, looked at the clock on the wall: it was almost 5 a.m. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said out loud. ‘No wasting time now. Finish the job. Finish it.’

Kin Tak had a form of Tourette’s syndrome that had been allowed to grow in the dark environment of the mortuary. He tried to curb it. He tried to suppress it but he was on his own for most of the day and night and he talked to himself incessantly. He talked to the people in the drawers. He talked to the dead that roamed his icy rooms, looking for their heaven.

He had worked through the night to make the girl ready. He washed her young body. He worked methodically, meticulously, marvelled at her beauty as he passed a cloth over her young skin. He talked to her as he washed her hair to remove the blood. Now he dried it with a towel, it crinkled into black glossy waves. Kin Tak held it in his hand, ‘Lovely, lovely.’ It was as soft as cotton wool, as springy as air. He marvelled at her slender arms, her slim thighs. She had no imperfections. Her skin was smooth and flawless as the day she slid from her mother’s uterus, fighting for breath in the outside world.

Now he hummed to himself as he pierced the young girl’s eye with the syringe and extracted fluid from the back of the eye. He was practising. Now that the pathologist had done his work it was Kin Tak’s turn. The fluid, vitreous humour, was a vital source of information for determining time of death. But they knew when she had died. She had died a few moments before they had run away and a few moments after they had cut off her hands and slit her throat. Now Kin Tak was allowed to practise his forensic skills before he did what he liked doing best.