of one candle at the far right of the room. The air was thick with the smell of incense, smouldering paper and heat of the people, now gone. He heard the scratch of a rat’s claws as it ran the perimeter of the room and stopped and the sound of another joining it. Cockroaches scurried over walls and ceiling to watch the rats. He looked down at his feet; he was walking on the red summoning cards of hundreds of Triads. He crossed the threshold, beneath the arch of swords, and propped the door open with a discarded wooden thread spool. There was little else to show that this had been a garment factory, so far as he could tell the room was empty of equipment: the machines all gone. All that remained were tatters of material and empty crates. The candle on top of a stack of upturned crates: a makeshift altar. Mann walked across to it. Beside the altar were the discarded sackcloth robes of the Triad initiates, left to rot, no longer needed, and on top of them a shimmering Indian sari. From the corner of his eye he saw a rat jump into a box, two sticks protruded from its end. Mann got close. They were not sticks; they were arms. He looked down into the box. The rats were already feasting on the young girl’s body, the cockroaches tumbling from the box’s sides on top of her.
Mann picked up the squealing rat from the box and flung it at the far wall. He stood in the solitude with the dead girl, listening to the police siren scream to a stop outside.
‘Looks like the party’s over.’
Mann turned to see a large frame in the doorway: Inspector Tom Sheng of the Serious Crime Division. ‘The ambulance is on its way.’
‘Too late. She was dead when I got here.’
Sheng and Mann had crossed paths more than either wanted. They weren’t the best of friends. Tom was brash, arrogant. He played hard and worked even harder. He was a hard-hitting movie-type cop who forgot he wasn’t an actor and life wasn’t a set.
Sheng walked in and shone a light around and into the box with the dead girl. He squatted level with Rajini’s arms, just visible at the rim of the box, held in front of her face as if she were offering them. ‘Why did they cut her hands off? Why torture her first? Why not just execute her? We’ve never seen them mutilate like this before.’
‘They must have wanted to show what they were capable of, put the fear into their new recruits,’ said Mann, picking up the discarded initiation robes and Rajini’s sari.
‘Why strip her first?’
‘Not worthy to wear the robes, more degradation. New rules, new society. Set the tone, scare the hell out of the new recruits. Kids are bound to be different.’
‘Fucking kids are like that these days. Playing sick video games, watching sick movies. Their minds are warped…Plus…’ Sheng stood, pulled at his tie. ‘This fucking summer is driving everyone mad. This was supposed to be my first night off in a fucking month.’
Mann didn’t answer. He knew that if Sheng had been somewhere important when the call came it wouldn’t have been at home. He spent his few nights off playing poker and trying to stay out of his family’s way. He loved his kids but he no longer loved his wife. He did things his way or not at all. But his way wasn’t Mann’s way. They could both be brutal. It was in Sheng’s nature. It was nurtured in Mann.
Tom Sheng moved his torch to the ground. ‘This place is littered with red slips. It must have been a big meeting. We’re going to have to be quicker than this if we’re ever going to catch the bastards.’ He flicked light up at the ceilings to see the cockroaches scuttling into the corners. ‘We’ll let CSI get in here. I’ll see you in the office at six.’ He dusted off his hands and walked back over the stone floor towards the door. He paused in the exit. ‘I have a poker game waiting. Try not to fuck with anything before they have a chance to get in here.’
Mann didn’t answer. He knelt, picked up the burnt oath papers and debris from the stone floor and crumpled it in his hand. Amongst the red dust on his finger tips was a tinge of yellow. He went back over to the box. Beside the young girl’s body in the box was the rooster, headless, draped on paper over her hands. He reached in and eased the paper from beneath and held it up to the light of the candle. On it he saw a circle outline, inside was a lone wolf howling to the sky.
Mann waited until the girl’s body had been taken to the morgue before he headed home. He needed a change of clothes. He needed to shower away the smell of death.
Mann lived in a vertical village built around a shopping mall. It was devoid of character. The only trees were in pots. It housed thousands of middle earners. He lived on the fortieth floor in one of the older two-bedroomed flats. It had parquet floors, white walls and minimal furniture: a table and two armchairs and a large home cinema system. He had bought the flat eight years ago. It was a great location for work, just a few stops away on the MTR. But, it didn’t matter how convenient it was, Mann was hardly ever in it. He lived there alone, but he hadn’t always done.
A woman got out of the lift as he stepped in. He didn’t recognize her. Even though he didn’t know his neighbours well, he knew them well enough to nod to them when he saw them in the lift. This woman was a stranger. New tenant, visitor? He didn’t know which. She wasn’t keen to make eye contact. She hurried past him, her hair over her face, sunglasses on. Mann looked at her feet: pretty shoes. By the time he looked up she had gone.
He got to his floor, walked along the corridor and came to a halt outside his flat door. He put the key in the lock, turned the key and hesitated. Why did he always do that? He walked in, slammed the door shut behind him and threw his keys angrily down onto the coffee table. He knew that one day he’d break the glass top by doing it. It was a white cane table shaped like an elephant – ludicrous, feminine. He stepped over the piles of papers, documents his lounge was littered with and took off his t-shirt. Secured across his chest and beneath his arm he wore a pouch containing two sets of throwing stars, shuriken. Shuriken meant ‘hidden in the hand’. They were the weapons of his enemy: concealed, versatile street weapons. Sometimes they were homemade or customized. Mann had designed his own. He had been fascinated ever since one cut a groove into his face when he was young. He still bore the scar high up on his left cheekbone, it was pale like a quarter moon.
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
