‘I thought I’d find you up here.’ Mia walked across the roof and stood beside Mann looking at the harbour and the sea beyond. ‘What’s the latest on Tammy?’

‘Still critical.’

‘I heard you paid a visit to Victoria Chan’s office.’

‘News travels fast.’

‘Only some news – only when it’s to certain people’s advantage. You better stay away from them now, Mann. I’ve been told by the top brass to warn you off. You can’t go in there and threaten her. This was supposed to be stealth not aggression.’

‘I’m playing the game, Mia. I’m doing what they expect. Any less and they’d know it wasn’t for real.’ He shook his head and took a deep breath in. ‘It’s beginning to feel like whichever way I play it I can’t win. Victoria Chan knew about Operation Schoolyard. She knew about Tammy.’

‘How?’

‘She made it her business. She paid someone here at the department.’

Mia wasn’t having it: ‘It’s not possible. She’s lying. Only a handful of us knew the details about Operation Schoolyard. It’s gone wrong before, Mann, it doesn’t mean that someone’s corrupt in this department.’

‘It’s not the first time we’ve had corrupt police officers either though, is it? Why the hell didn’t Tammy do as I ordered?’ Mann shook his head, slow, heavy. ‘Tom Sheng denies he had anything to do with it. I don’t believe him.’ He stared hard at Mia. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Mia?’

‘Like what? I know as much as you do.’ She turned back to stare out at the rooftops.

Mann shook his head, exasperated. ‘Some people have waited a long time to see me in this kind of a mess. My judgement’s all to hell. I am not thinking straight.’

Mia reached out and rested her hand on Mann’s arm. ‘I know you have too much in your head right now with your father’s mess but don’t be such a hard man. You’re not always in this alone. You want to talk, I’m here.’

‘Thanks, Mia, but it’s probably best for me to work it out alone.’

‘What about your mother? Is she helping with it?’

‘No. She is doing what she does best, ignoring it and hoping it will go away. I don’t blame her. I’ve done my best to do the same but it’s not working so well for me.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘It seems like a massive task. I thought I could walk away from my father’s past. But I can’t. Now it’s up to me to finish the job. The thing is, all the years my mother chose to ignore it and leave it untouched, his wealth has been growing, the investments are now huge. I own a large part of a company that mines diamonds in Sierra Leone; I own several cocoa plantations on the Ivory Coast. Each project could take me a year to unravel in order to try and do something positive with it. I wish I could give it all away and forget it existed.’

‘What about the family in Amsterdam? Do they have a say?’

‘My brother Jake is named in some of the documents. I will try and guide him through it all when I’ve negotiated my own way first. His stepdad Alfie is a nice guy. He’ll want me to do what I think best. He’s a cop. He’s not going to want Jake inheriting Triad money. I’ll talk to him. I keep meaning to call. I just don’t know what to say. I wish my dad’s business could wait until the murder investigation was over but with Victoria pushing me and causing chaos I think I have run out of time. I feel like she’s out to break me. I feel like she knows every move I make. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind. I can’t stop thinking about Helen. I even feel her presence in the flat, smell her perfume. I feel like someone’s been in there, someone’s been looking through my drawers, looking through the papers.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe I’m just getting paranoid. But now, with Tammy going against my orders I’m wondering if I ever gave her them. Did I not make it clear?’

‘Let’s see if the Indian boy can tell us any more. He’s waiting to be interviewed now.’

‘Okay but…’ Mann sighed. ‘I don’t think it’s him, he’s covering for someone he cares about.’

Mann left the bodyguard’s finger on the parapet for the eagle and followed Mia off the roof.

Chapter 58

Shrimp stood opposite Kin Tak in the autopsy room. ‘Could this be the weapon?’ He took out the urumi and allowed it to slowly unwind to the floor.

Kin Tak coughed as a gasp turned to a phlegm rattle in his throat. He took the urumi from Shrimp with outstretched arms as if it were a baby. He laid it flat out on the counter and reached for his tape measure. He measured the strands of the urumi and wrote down his findings. He examined it under a magnifier. ‘I can say, without doubt, that this is the weapon. This is it.’

‘I have downloaded a demonstration from the Internet. It’s awesome,’ Shrimp said when he got back to the office. ‘This little baby has three one-inch bands of razor-sharp steel. It’s basically a flexible sword.’ Shrimp let it unravel slowly towards the floor.

‘It looks tricky to use.’ Mann watched, fascinated. He appreciated the centuries-old skill that had first dreamt up the weapon.

Shrimp went back to his desk and turned his monitor so that Mann and Ng could see. ‘It’s not easy. It was only given to the most gifted apprentices in Indian martial arts schools.’ Shrimp pressed the play button on the video link and two combating Indian men, practising urumi combat, came to life on the screen. They were sparring with the urumi and using a two-bladed knife to defend themselves. ‘You need some strength but it’s mainly down to agility and technique. This is the ideal weapon for a woman. You can tuck it into your belt or pop it into your handbag, and you can take out several opponents at once with this little baby. Someone knew what they were doing to be able to use it accurately. The damage it causes is easy to identify when you’ve seen it once. The speed with which it comes through the air, the razor-sharp edge of the three blades makes an unmistakable wound. It took Rajini’s hands off like a hot knife through butter. And it made a mess out of Max Kosmos.’

‘It’s a horrible-looking thing.’ Ng shook his head as he picked a Danish pastry apart; he didn’t share the others’ enthusiasm for weaponry.

‘You see how the metal coils are whipped in circular movements in the air and then cracked down on the opponent, blocked here by a sword?’

Mann peered in at the video. ‘Blow it up for me, Shrimp.’

‘It will lose definition but I’ll try.’

He clicked to enlarge the picture and Mann leaned across and pressed the pause button. The picture was a little blurred but still clear enough to see what Mann wanted. ‘Look what they have in their hands. It’s not a sword. It’s the same knife we found on Mahmud, the one used to stab Tammy. It’s the double-bladed one.’

‘Right, are you all ready?’ Mia appeared at the door.

Shrimp was busy typing in the knife’s details into a search engine. ‘Bundi knife. That’s its name.’

Mann picked it up from his desk. ‘let’s see if Mahmud knows what it’s called.’

Chapter 59

Mahmud looked every inch a frightened little boy – he also looked like he’d been passed over a cheese grater, his face and arms cut from when he was thrown headfirst into the police van the night before. Mann sat across from Mahmud in the interview room and stared at him. Shrimp leant on the wall and watched. Mia was watching from the monitoring room.

‘Mahmud Khan, you are under arrest for the attempted murder of a police officer.’ Mahmud stared at his lap. He was shaking. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’

Mahmud shook his head.

‘Let me tell you then. You were caught by one of my officers in the act of escaping. You were found in possession of the assault weapon used to attack police officer Tammy Wang. Is that correct?’

Mahmud nodded.

‘Is this yours?’ Mann picked up the knife; a two-bladed traditional martial arts knife now wrapped in polythene. He turned it over in his hands.

Mahmud nodded again.