CK turned to Victoria. ‘This is the time you have waited for. You see me as old now, you think it is your time. You think that I must have grown tired of the business world and I want to retire.’ He paused. ‘Of course that is what you think, my darling daughter. You think you are being so clever: you would play us all. Ensnare Mann with your beauty and your sex, get your greedy hands on his father’s estate and then have me killed. I have no doubt that you would kill me yourself if you had to. But, it seems your ample feminine charms were not enough to turn him and I must do it myself. You will never be strong enough to be my successor. You have failed, my darling daughter.’

CK called and the door opened. Four more bodyguards entered the room. ‘Mann, before I kill you I want you to know that I watched Helen die. I went to that club often. I enjoyed the company of many women there but I had my favourites. They were friends of yours. Some of them you knew intimately. Helen was one. She was my favourite. She took a long time to die. But you saw that didn’t you? You watched the recording. You weren’t thinking dispassionately when you listened to the voices in the background. You failed to recognize mine. I’ve always suspected you would have in time.’ Mann didn’t speak, he bowed his head. Now he knew why Helen hadn’t wanted to let him go. He knew why every time he closed his eyes he saw her face, he heard her pain. ‘Thanks for this,’ CK waved the contract in the air, ‘I waited a long time for this. Your father beat me to some of the best deals. He was a very clever man. He turned moral in the end, tried to save the world. See, you are the same type after all? Such a waste but I am too old to keep playing games; now it’s just about the money.’ He turned to his bodyguards. ‘Take my daughter and the inspector and kill them.’

Victoria screamed. ‘No, Father, please.’ She tried to run but the bodyguard held her back. He stared coldly at her.

‘You were never my favourite. Take her…’

Two of the bodyguards came forward and dragged her away from her father. Another walked towards Mann. Mann’s pulse slowed right down. He felt the adrenalin turn his blood to ice. In his mouth he moved the arrow that he had snapped from the Parker pen out of his cheek and into the centre of his tongue and he waited until he was within range, he eased himself to his left slightly and felt the gun in his back travel two inches to his right and then he shot it straight into the bodyguard’s eye. It pierced his retina and exploded his eyeball. At the same time Mann twisted his body away from the gun in his back. The shot missed Mann and hit the bodyguard who keeled clutching his eye. Mann back flicked his fist into the man’s face and he broke his nose, cheek and cracked his eye socket. He dived forward towards Ng and caught him around the shoulders and rolled with him to protect him, laying his body across his, but it was too late. CK had already shot Ng through the head. His skull shattered. His body lifeless beneath Mann’s. Mann gave a cry of pain, a roar of anger as he turned, rolled away from Ng and reached inside his shirt with his left hand. There, between the cloth and the bandages, pressed around his chest, was Delilah. And on her hilt she bore something precious. The bodyguards reached for their weapons at the same time as Mann dropped to one knee, rolled and fired Delilah over their heads. She turned direction in the air, almost hovered and then dropped blade first as CK looked up to see what it was. A flash of steel, a plume of black. It sunk deep into his left eye, so far that Delilah was pushing to come out the other side of his skull. CK was driven back by the force and smashed against the mahogany book shelf and slid down to the floor.

Victoria screamed. There was a pause as if the room stood still and then she laughed. Mann thought at first it was shock but it gathered momentum and the bodyguards joined in. She went over to her father and stared down at him and giggled at the kite eagle’s long black tail feathers that were a perfect manoeuvring tool in the air. They were still vibrating as they protruded from his eye socket. She went over to CK, put her foot on his face, her Jimmy Choo heel dug into his chin and she pulled on the eagle feathers, wiggled them to dislodge them and then slid Delilah out, brain matter and eye attached.

‘You know, Father, you disappointed me too.’

She came over to Mann, who was knelt beside Ng, feeling no triumph now, only a bitter loss. She put Delilah in his lap. It was as if Mann had stuck to the script when he hadn’t realized there was a whole different play going on.

She leant over to kiss his lips softly. ‘I intend leaving the country for a while. I will be going to the Philippines. But, don’t think it’s the end for us, Mann, think of it as the beginning.’ She stood up, picked up her bag. ‘And, by the way,’ she tore up the contract and handed it back to Mann, ‘you don’t get out of it that easily. I prefer to be partners, lovers even, who knows, Mann? I never wanted my shares in the Mansions. You own it all, baby.’ Then, she moved towards the door. ‘We have a plane to catch. Don’t hurt him. Drop him back at the Mansions,’ she said to her hovering bodyguards who were still waiting for the satisfaction of kicking the shit out of Mann.

By the time the bodyguards had thrown Mann’s body out of the car and it had rolled to a stop in front of David, he had only three of the hundred and thirty stitches remaining. And three of the four bodyguards would never make it on the plane. Victoria had already left.

Chapter 111

Shrimp floated in and out of the dark world of pain. He heard someone singing, a haunting wailing song like he had heard on the stairs in the Mansions. He heard the soft giggles of a child and felt something cold and plastic brush his face. He heard the cries of a baby and a mother soothing it. His pain came in searing stabs, in long excruciating waves that felt as if someone was twisting his gut inside out. Sometimes it was accompanied by crying, sometimes laughter. He felt his tongue swelling. He tried to keep his pulse slow and stem the loss of blood. He tried to talk but as if in a dream the words went unheard. Help me. Help me. The woman muttered to him, he couldn’t make it out. She sat beside him in the dark. She held his hand and sometimes she stroked him tenderly. Shrimp felt her body on his. He felt the sting of a knife. The deep pain that was working its way into his heart.

Chapter 112

‘Fuck. Am I dead?’ Mann awoke to find himself being sewn up by Kin Tak. In the background he could hear an angel singing. He tried to sit up but he couldn’t; he was restrained.

‘We couldn’t stop you moving. Very hard to sew neatly when you keep moving. I am not used to that.’ Kin Tak was sewing him up and Lilly was hovering over him.

Mann grabbed at her wrist as she hovered over his face with a wad of cotton wool. She shrieked in fright. ‘Where am I?’

‘In my bedroom.’

‘Oh God…’ Mann moaned as he pulled against the strap.

‘No, it’s all right. The Africans brought you up here.’

Mann stared at Kin Tak not understanding. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Lilly asked me to sew you up.’

‘Yeah…that reassures me.’

‘I had no idea men bleed so much. No one usually bleeds when I stitch them up.’

‘You didn’t want to go back to hospital,’ said Lilly.

The singing stopped. Michelle came to stand and watch. ‘You were really beaten up. Blood everywhere,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I wonder why that was.’ Mann touched the swellings on his face. The stitches were back.

‘Very clean. The wound was very clean. Made by the same instrument that took that young girl’s hands off. I recognized it.’ Kin Tak beamed proudly as he carried on sewing up the gash across Mann’s stomach.

‘Yeah. Sorry about that. I got scared. I didn’t know what to do,’ said Lilly.