He sighed as he pulled into a parking space outside the shop, hoping things would go better this time. He had to put his discomfort aside and concentrate on the case. It didn’t help that he was brooding on the information Angus had just given him about the boy who’d been associated with Zhang Li.

The signs outside the herbalist shop had already been brought in, even though it was still an hour before closing time—they can’t have been expecting much more business. He gave his paisley tie one last reassuring tug before stepping across the threshold.

There was no one at the counter, no one else in the shop. He could hear Angela Nguyen speaking on the phone in the back room and decided to let her finish her conversation.

A row of colourful boxes caught his eye from one of the aisles and he wandered over to inspect. The aisles were so narrow he couldn’t stand far enough away to read the names of the products and was forced to put on his reading glasses. The flimsy metal shelving shuddered as he reached for a box. Some kind of hair-restorer, he surmised, if the picture on the front was any guide. He looked around. The counter was still empty, the only noise came from a humming fridge and the voice of the girl on the phone. He saw no evidence of security cameras in the ceiling corners—it wouldn’t do to let the beautiful interpreter catch him in the act of inspecting boxes of hair-restoring lotion.

Prising open the cardboard box he plucked out the enclosed leaflet, looking for some English instructions. The Chinese seemed to have a way with herbs; they, if anyone, should have found a cure for baldness. Not that he was thinning too badly, he reassured himself as he smoothed down his feathery hair, and certainly not enough to do a Barry and shave it all off.

He examined the leaflet, finding nothing but Chinese writing. Shit. And now he must attempt to straighten up the box and squeeze it back into its original condition.

Busy as he was behind the shelving, Wayne only noticed the boy when he was already at the counter, leaning against it, cocking his head as if trying to hear the phone conversation in the next room. He looked to be about fourteen. A small fourteen. Swamped in camouflage army pants and a jungle green military jacket, his clothes were totally unsuitable for the current heat wave. As he pulled away from the counter, the boy scratched his head, his neck, then his arm, gazing around the shop in much the way Wayne had when he’d been looking for security cameras.

Wayne froze behind the shelving; he didn’t want to give his position away before he knew exactly what the boy was up to. The boy straightened his shoulders as if taking a breath of courage and then slipped behind the counter and pinged the till.

Wayne now had a clear view of him. This was the same boy in the photo Angus had shown him earlier. But the face was skeletal, the eyes wide and wired, skittering around the room like black beetles. The boy hesitated at the open till, picking at a sore on the side of his mouth. Wayne cursed his bad luck. Give him a grown man any day over a teenage boy with something to prove and a habit that left him with no boundaries.

Like a starving man snatching food, the boy began to stuff his jacket pockets with cash from the till.

Wayne had seen all he needed. He stepped out from behind the shelving. ‘Hold it right there, son. Police.’

At that moment, Angela emerged from the back room. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. He couldn’t have reached her even if his mind had registered the split second whirl of movement. The boy lunged towards Angela, clasping her in front of him like a shield. With one hand clamped around her neck, the other reached into the folds of his jacket and pulled a machete from its hidden scabbard.

Wayne’s gut twisted with a painful lurch. He’d be paying for this later if he survived, damn his weak belly. Holding his hands up in supplication he said, ‘It’s okay, son, it’s okay. Put the knife down. You don’t have to do this. Let her go and we’ll have a talk.’

‘Stay there, stay there, I’ll kill her!’ the boy screeched through a spray of spittle.

The girl looked to be on the verge of fainting. Her eyes rolled and her knees sagged. In this state, without her mask of self-confidence, he realised how much younger she was than he’d first thought. Christ, he’d been bantering about aphrodisiacs with a girl who was only sixteen if she were a day. Now he understood Barry’s tasteless jibes.

The boy staggered back as he tried to support her, barked something in Vietnamese and placed the gleaming blade to her throat. She swallowed her scream and straightened, making herself several centimetres taller than her captor.

He’s a wild animal, Wayne thought. Any sudden move from me, and the girl’s throat will be slit from ear to ear.

‘Can I close the shop, mate?’ he said. ‘We don’t want anyone crashing our friendly little party, do we?’ He fought to keep his tone steady; he’d seen first hand the damage a machete could do to the human body when he was in Nam. Without waiting for an answer and keeping his movements slow, he moved to the front door and flicked the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’. Over his shoulder he said, ‘I’ll close it too,’ and slipped the bolts.

He took several steps towards the counter. The boy yelled at him to stay back, his eyes darting about the room.

Wayne stood and waited for the silence to do his work for him. He stared hard at the boy, saw him lick his dry lips, jacket moving in and out with rapid, shallow breaths. The fridge by the counter hummed, the sound of a leaking tap dripped from the back room. Eventually the machete began to tremble in the small white-knuckled hand. As the blade began to waver, Wayne could see the kid’s grip upon the girl weakening.

‘So, what’ll it be, boss?’ Wayne kept his voice soft and low to force the boy to listen closely. ‘The way I see it, you either let her go, take the money and run, or you let her go and have a nice friendly chat with me.’

There were other options too of course; one involved slicing and dicing them into stir-fry. ‘C’mon Sammy, I know you speak good English, I know all about you. Put the knife down so we can have a talk. You don’t really want to hurt your sister, do you? She’s the only family you’ve got.’

21

EXCERPT FROM CHAT ROOM TRANSCRIPT 081206

BETTYBO: I wagged scool agin 2day

HARUM SCARUM: Bad grl!

BETTYBO: I hate zoe carmkel

HARUM SCARUM: hate cn b good. Use it. I do

BETTYBO: I hate that pig he maks mum cry. I wish I was KE

HARUM SCARUM: let KE empowa u

BETTYBO: I wanna c u f2f

HARUM SCARUM: No sme

Stevie finally answered one of Monty’s missed calls while she was driving to Stella Webster’s house.

‘I’ve been trying to call you all day,’ he said.

‘And I called you back mid-morning and your phone was off—where were you?’

‘I had an appointment.’

She waited for him to offer something else. He didn’t. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘What’s new? Other than you dobbing Tash and me in to Dolly, that is.’

‘Stevie, I had no choice. The complaint form was handed to me by mistake. I warned you about it, it should have gone straight to her anyway.’

‘She offered me a promotion.’

She thought she detected a sigh of relief from his end of the phone. ‘There you go then. No harm done.’

‘What were you ringing me for?’

‘There’s so much going on I don’t know where to start. Firstly, you’ll be pleased to know that none of the impounded Glocks matches the one that killed Kusak. Look, about Natasha...’ He hesitated. ‘About last night, I’m sorry; I got a bit carried away. I’ve not been feeling...’