1990.” As his eye took in the other photographs on the string, he saw that each one recorded an execution. Some of the captions recorded executions that had taken place as recently as a month ago.
The old man’s hand was gripping his arm because Chan had started to shake. Blinking down tears, Chan pulled himself free. “I better go.”
The old man followed him back into the bookshop. He looked into the black tunnel eyes. The old man made his features plead. “Try to make Thursday.”
At the door Chan left without saying good-bye. Out in the street he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. China: The Hong Kong experience was like camping in the mouth of a cyclops’s lair. Survival required meticulous study of the creature’s habits, but everyone came sooner or later to the same conclusion: The cyclops was insane.
5
Although it was fairly late in the evening before a slot could be found when all three men would be free, the commissioner for security, the commissioner of police and the political adviser all considered the matter sufficiently urgent to meet that night. Tsui picked up Caxton Smith, the commissioner for security, in his chauffeur-driven white Toyota. Together they entered the lift lobby of the government buildings in Queensway, which, at 10:00 P.M., were almost deserted. On the twenty-first floor they walked down the corridor to the office of the political adviser.
Of all the many hundreds of English men and women working for the Hong Kong government, only the political adviser was appointed directly by the Foreign Office in London out of its diplomatic service. He answered not to the governor but to the colonial masters in London and was intended to be the mother country’s eyes and ears. He oversaw every action by the colonial administration that could conceivably have an effect on the precarious relationship between London and Beijing.
Like the political adviser, the commissioner for security also spent 90 percent of his time preoccupied with Chinese matters, but for opposite reasons. Almost all of Hong Kong’s frontier, land and sea, was shared with the PRC and it was the C for S’s job to deal with the many border incidents that arose, from smuggling to illegal immigration to calculated border intimidation by Beijing.
Tsui, who had come from home, wore an open-neck shirt and casual trousers. The two Englishmen were still in their business suits. They sat at a long table in an anteroom to the PA’s main office.
Milton Cuthbert looked up from the short briefing Tsui had been able to send over before the meeting.
“Tell me, Ronny, about the murders first. That seems to be where it all begins.”
Tsui cleared his throat and hesitated a moment before speaking. “Apart from the sensational aspect, not that remarkable. You read about them in the papers. The so-called Mincer Murders. A vat of human flesh, which forensic analysis showed to be the product of three different bodies, was found decaying in a warehouse in Mongkok. The bodies had been put through an industrial mincer and were therefore totally unrecognizable. Further examination showed that all three had been minced while still alive.”
Cuthbert jerked his head up and raised his eyebrows. “You can tell that?”
“It’s all a question of the condition of the nerve endings and blood composition. When the body is in extreme pain, the nerves literally shrink in terror, just like the owner himself, and some sort of chemical is secreted into the blood. The mincer left fairly large chunks, permitting a minimal forensic examination. The mincemeat in the vat showed consistently clenched, terror-stricken nerves, and blood analysis supported the view that the victims were alive when minced.”
“Dear God,” Cuthbert said.
Caxton Smith rubbed his knees nervously. “Dreadful business.”
“Go on, Ronny.”
“There was one other startling revelation by forensic. The bodies had been decapitated during or after the mincing. That is to say that the heads were not minced. No cerebral matter at all was found in the vat.”
“Just a minute,” Caxton Smith said. “These victims were still alive whilst being minced, but decapitated?”
Tsui shot Smith a sharp glance. “Hardly. The only explanation is that at a certain point in the mincing-probably when the victims had already bled to death-the heads were removed.”
“And not found by the investigating team until today?”
“Evidently not,” Cuthbert said, “but let’s not jump the gun. Historical sequence, if you don’t mind, Ronny.”
Tsui paused to take a cough sweet out of a small box before proceeding. He sucked it as he spoke. “Preliminary investigations suggested that the murders were drug-related. At first we assumed the triads-who else? The district commander at Mongkok appointed Chief Inspector Chan to lead the inquiry. However, with the intense media interest and the discovery by Chan that his telephone was tapped and that someone had been copying the case files without his consent, I gave instructions that Chan should report directly to headquarters, a precaution I habitually take with high-profile cases. I appointed Chief Superintendent Riley to supervise the investigation.”
“How did he discover the illegal copying?” Cuthbert asked.
Tsui smiled. “Chan’s basically a streetfighting man. He came up through the ranks and has a hundred tricks up his sleeve. I seem to remember he pasted a hair over the file-something like that. I forget exactly what, but it was sufficient to convince him that there had been some copying done.”
“What was done about it?”
“The tap was removed, and the files were kept in a safe from then on. As far as we know, there’s been no further interference-at least until today.”
“The coastguards and all that?”
“Yes-it’s all in the briefing paper I sent you.”
The three men sat silently for several minutes. Caxton Smith was the first to break the silence. “Just to set my mind at rest, Ronny, why did you think it was a drug-related case?”
“It’s not a question of what I think. You simply have to start with a reasonable hypothesis to give your investigation direction, and drugs were the only one. First, Mongkok is a notorious triad center. Second, with the premeditated torture of three people it just doesn’t look like a crime of passion. Third, the perpetrators would have had to buy or borrow a large industrial meat mincer-an indication that money was no object. There are plenty of cheaper ways to intimidate and murder. Fourth, there had to be a degree of organization. Organized crime is financed in large part by drug dealing.”
“But it could have been a gangland vendetta?”
Tsui sucked loudly on his sweet. “Which brings me to my fifth and probably best reason. There have been no gangland reprisals as far as we know, and our intelligence is pretty good. Which suggests that the victims were murdered by their own organization.”
“Why?”
Tsui shrugged. “Who knows? Betrayal? Hands in the till? Knew too much? Tried to usurp someone higher up the triad pyramid?”
Cuthbert tapped the table. “Very well, three drug-related murders seem an eminently reasonable hypothesis. That doesn’t encroach on my patch at all.”
Tsui looked at him with something approaching amusement. Caxton Smith also smiled. Cuthbert looked from one to the other.
“Well?”
Caxton Smith spoke. “You know very well it doesn’t encroach on your patch, Milton, until you include in your list of suspects the world’s largest criminal organization specializing in the transportation and sale of heroin in Southeast Asia. Some call it the biggest triad of all.”
Tsui swallowed the last of his cough drop. “I believe he’s talking about the People’s Liberation Army, Milton.”
Cuthbert sat back in his seat, looked from one of his colleagues to the other, then fell into thought. One of the advantages of working for a benevolent dictatorship, which was what the colonial system amounted to, was that there was not a great turnover of personnel at the top. One saw the same faces at meetings year after year until what was left unsaid became more significant than anything in the minutes. There were also disadvantages. It was really not possible, for example, for him to maintain that the rumors of the extensive criminal interests of the People’s Liberation Army were untrue. All three men knew perfectly well that PLA generals these days sold
