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  The girl’s eyes opened wide, she shook her head. She got up to go to the bathroom. He spoke into the microphone. ‘I don’t think she’s the perp.’

  ‘She may have changed her MO,’ the reply came back from the undercover agent listening in the next room. ‘Whatever happens you have to hold on to her for at least an hour. You can’t be seen going back to the bar too early. You have to make it look like you are still on the prowl.’

  ‘I’m a real sleaze bag.’

  ‘Yep.’

  The girl came back in her bra and pants and giggled coyly as she stood holding on to her clothes. Nope, no sign of a whip anywhere, thought Shrimp as he sat back down on the edge of the bed and handed her a game controller.

  ‘It’s your turn-Super Mario.’

  Chapter 85

  Mann’s mouth tasted like a dog had shat in it. He had been dreaming of drinking a gallon of water. His head was so hot he was sweating hard. He pushed back the sheet that covered him and realized he was lying next to someone. He reached out a hand. His hand lingered as it touched a woman’s body and then it moved up over her waist, along her ribcage, up over her arm and froze. He realized it wasn’t the body he was expecting. He thought he would feel Miriam’s familiar curves but he didn’t, instead it was a skinny little body. He withdrew his hand sharply and opened his eyes. Lilly was lying on her side smiling at him. Mann jumped up. He had his boxers on. That was a tiny consolation. Lilly lay there, naked.

  ‘Shit…what the hell? Lilly, get up. Put something on.’ Mann backed away from the bed.

  ‘That’s not what you said to me last night.’

  Mann shook his head. He tried to remember he couldn’t. ‘There’s no way, Lilly. How the fuck did you get in here?’

  Lilly laughed, she leant up on her elbows. Mann felt sick. Her skinny ribs stuck out, her pierced navel, her tiny breasts. She was a child. Mann turned his head away, sick to his stomach. Lilly got out of bed and picked up her clothes as she went. She paused as she passed him. ‘You couldn’t get enough of it last night. Practically forced me to do stuff I didn’t want to. I just wanted a place to stay. Come home with me, you said, you can sleep in the spare room, you said.’

  Mann closed his eyes, his heart was racing, he felt the bile build in his throat.

  ‘Lilly, do this. Lilly, do that.’ Lilly stayed where she was and made sure Mann had no choice but to look at her. ‘Tut, tut, tut, Inspector Johnny Mann. You should be ashamed.’ Lilly grinned. ‘Well, I can’t hang around. I got school to go to. Thanks for a very nice evening though. I am sure we’ll see each other again.’

  Mann heard the door bang behind her and the sound of her laughter as she walked down the corridor. He stripped off and stepped into the shower. He closed his eyes as the water streamed over his face. He leant against the side of the cold cubicle. His head was banging; he rested it on the cold tiles. Could he really have had sex with Lilly? The only sound in the flat was the ticking of the clock coming from the bedroom. He needed to get dressed. He needed to sort his life out. He walked along the wooden floor, staring straight ahead at his open bedroom door. He nudged it with his foot. It glided open. The clock’s ticking was so loud now it blocked out everything else. Mann stepped inside and looked to his left, his bed unmade; he pulled off the sheets and threw them in a heap on the floor. He swore out loud so many times it became part of his breathing. He picked up his socks from the floor, as he bent down he saw a bag under his bed. He pulled it out, opened it, peeling back layer after layer of plastic. He peeled back the last layer. A familiar face stared back at him.

  Chapter 86

  ‘Give me the clothes you were wearing earlier, before you showered.’ Daniel Lu stood in Mann’s bedroom and handed Mann a forensic suit. ‘Touch nothing.’

  Mia was hovering outside in the hallway. Ng was suited up and helping with the search of the bedroom. He’d been the first to arrive after Mann’s call. Mann looked behind her-no Sheng.

  ‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous. This is my home. I’ve touched everything in here.’ Mann took the suit all the same and slipped it on over his t-shirt and boxers. He hadn’t got very far with dressing.

  Ng emerged from the bedroom and stepped over the officer on his hands and knees searching for hairs on the carpet. ‘They’ll never find anything in this mess, except a dead mouse or something.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Don’t move anything.’

  Flash bulbs went off around the room. Daniel’s team were busy grid searching his lounge. The whole of his building was sealed off.

  ‘Were you alone here last night?’ Mia stood in the doorway, waiting for an answer.

  ‘No.’ He didn’t look at her. He knew if there was one person who would guess he was trying to hide something it would be Mia.

  ‘Well, did you get her name by any chance?’

  ‘No.’ Mann didn’t like lying to Mia but he had to give himself time to think. This was his problem and he had to think it through before he involved anyone else.

  Mia sighed. ‘You better start remembering, Johnny, because whoever she was she put a head under your bed.’

  ‘It’s not just any head. I know him. I met him the other night at the bar in Vacation Villas.’

  ‘Still believe in coincidences?’ Daniel Lu spoke whilst at the same time bagging up Mann’s bed sheets. ‘Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to set you up, Mann. They must want you bad.’

  ‘What did she look like?’ Mia was exasperated. Her frown line had gained extra depth. ‘Mann, talk to me. This girl you had back here last night, what did she look like?’

  Mann shook his head. ‘I didn’t get a good look at her. She’d left by morning.’

  ‘That good, huh? Bloody hell, you’re a liability at the moment. You’re going out of your way to mess up. What the hell do you think you were doing getting blind drunk and picking up women when we are in the middle of a murder investigation and one, may I add, in which your operative, your officer, Tammy Wang, was killed? Does it mean shit to you, Mann?’ Mia was too fuming now to stay any longer. ‘Take the head down to Saheed. This is your baby, Mann. This is all yours. You messed up, you clean up and then I want you in my office with a full report on my desk. I want that girl found. I want her DNA off those sheets, Daniel. Mann, you are a walking disaster at the moment.’

  The men said nothing after Mia left. Mann finished getting dressed. The whole of his flat seemed to be being taken for evidence. All he was left with was the piles of his father’s life-the one thing he didn’t want. Daniel came to find him in the kitchen. Mann was holding on to the edge of the sink, head bowed, trying not to throw up.

  ‘You can get this down for Saheed to look at now. He’s ready to do the autopsy. We’ll be a while longer here. It’s better that you leave us to get on with it.’

  Mann nodded. ‘Where’s Sheng?’

  Daniel Lu shook his head and shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. He hasn’t been seen since yesterday.’ He picked up his key to leave. ‘And you better get your locks changed, Mann. If it wasn’t your mysterious woman then someone else went to a lot of trouble to leave this here.’

  Chapter 87

  Mann sat in the car park and rested his head on the steering wheel. The head was on ice in a box on the backseat. Kin Tak tapped on his window.

  ‘Inspector?’

  Mann nodded, pulled his keys from the ignition and opened the door. ‘Sorry.’ He clutched his bottle of mineral water as if it were his leash on the world. He’d sat outside in his car until he felt ready. He hadn’t had the stomach for it ten minutes earlier. They crossed the gravel path carrying the box. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  Mr Saheed was business as usual. ‘Hello again, Inspector.’

  Kin Tak unpacked the head and placed it in a stand on the autopsy table.

  ‘His name is Peter Thorne. He’s a forty-five-year-old businessman from the UK,’ said Mann.

  Saheed made an incision in the scalp from behind the ear, around the back of the
head to the other ear. Then he peeled the scalp away from the top of the head and placed it over Peter Thorne’s face. Saheed talked to Mann as he worked. ‘We have already established that the head was removed after death.’ He looked at Mann over his bifocals. ‘Moved to your apartment, I hear. You should try not to take your work home with you, Inspector. A fine-bladed chopper was used to sever the spine between the third and fourth vertebrae.’

  Kin Tak fetched a small electric saw and pressed the button to start it. It buzzed and whined like a dentist’s drill but louder, much louder, as it cut through the bone. Mann clenched his teeth. The sound was like nails down a blackboard. The smell of burning bone filled his nose. He swallowed. He squeezed the plastic bottle of water without even realizing he had. It cracked as it popped in his hand as it expanded again. Kin Tak took a small hammer and chisel and dislodged the portion of skull that he had sawn through. There was a sound like a boot being freed from sticky mud. He laid the top half of the skull to one side and began stripping the membrane with a pair of pliers. Kin Tak reached inside and extracted the brain.

  ‘We will leave that cooking for a few days,’ Saheed said as he placed the brain in a bucket of formalin. ‘I can’t dissect till it toughens up. I will let you know what I find from the swabs in the mouth and the fluid tests. They will tell us whether there are drug traces. But I can confirm that the same blade has been used in this case as in the others. Inspector, are you listening? Are you all right?’

  Mann shook his head, he took a swig of water. ‘I have to go.’

  Chapter 88

  Mia was waiting for Mann when he got back from the autopsy.

  ‘Saheed confirms, it’s the same killer.’ He looked at her face and looked away. She was pale: angry, upset, disappointed, the adjectives went on and on. Mann knew that he couldn’t keep Lilly a secret, and he didn’t intend to, but first he had to work out what had happened before it was too late.

  ‘And the same killer that was in your bedroom. I am going to have a hard job from stopping Sheng breaking out the champagne. How do you think it reflects on the rest of us? We are supposed to be a team, Mann, have you forgotten that?’

  Mann tried to focus on what she was saying but his mind kept coming back to the thing that felt more immediate, more gruesome than anything else right now. Was what Lilly had said true? Christ, could he have done it? Could he have had sex with Lilly? He shook his head. He didn’t remember. How had they ended up back at his flat? He didn’t remember anything.

  ‘You listening, Mann?’

  Mann nodded.

  ‘Someone went to a lot of trouble to plant that head in your apartment, why did they do that?’

  ‘The perp gets off on that. She loves the thrill. She doesn’t care any more. For some reason she doesn’t care about her own life. She doesn’t use a condom. She doesn’t care about leaving her DNA. She’s left traces of herself everywhere.’

  ‘It’s all linked to you, Mann.’

  Mann looked across at Shrimp and Ng. Mann could see by their faces that even they were beginning to wonder what was going on in his head.

  ‘Who was Peter Thorne to you?’

  ‘He was a man I met in a bar, the night I found Max Kosmos’s body. There is nothing more for me to say, Boss.’

  ‘Why you?’ Mia crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. ‘It has to be someone with a personal grudge against you for some reason. It could be a past girlfriend of yours, Mann.’

  ‘I’ve dated my share of nutters but I don’t remember one who had all the makings of a serial killer.’

  ‘The head could have been brought in by someone posing as your cleaner, Genghis. When we went to your apartment the other day the doorman said the cleaner had just left but she hadn’t cleaned, had she?’

  Mann shook his head. ‘I’ve already talked to the man on the desk. He doesn’t know one cleaner from another and this isn’t his usual block. They work a rota. The way he described her it could have been anyone. Anyway, I cancelled my cleaner and I left instructions at the desk telling them not to allow anyone in to my apartment, not my cleaner or anyone else.’

  Mia shook her head and ran her hand back through her hair to scrape back the few strands that had fallen down from their clasp. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny. I’m under pressure, that’s all. We all are.’ She turned to Ng. ‘Did Thorne have any connection to the Leung Corporation?’

  ‘No. He had never worked for them.’

  ‘Or to Mann?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We know Victoria Chan is out to get you. She has the power. She has the contacts.’

  Mann shook his head. ‘I certainly wouldn’t rule her out of this. But murder? I can’t see her getting her hands dirty.’

  ‘Oh, I can. I can see her bathing in virgin’s blood and using testicles for earrings,’ said Mia. ‘She’s as ruthless as they come. And you still don’t remember who she was you were with last night?’

  Shrimp’s eyes darted back and forth and always back towards Mann. He ran the pencil through his fingers like a cheerleader’s baton, a nervous tic.

  Shit…Mann wanted to throw up. Had he raped Lilly? Had he had underage sex with a child? Had he abandoned every moral fibre in his body? If he had, what else was he guilty of? Did he know himself any more? Did he trust himself?

  Mann shrugged. He didn’t know anything any more. Nothing seemed real. Nothing was fitting. ‘Well, we do know now that Michelle has to be innocent. We have to let her go. Unless it was someone working for or with her?’

  ‘She was in prison. She can’t have snuck back and left the head. It has to be someone else.’

  ‘I need to talk to her again,’ said Mann. The eagle flew by the window. Mann wanted to reach out and jump on its back.

  Chapter 89

  ‘Inspector?’ Michelle looked at Mann as he walked into the interview room. She twisted one hand around another. She bit her lip. She had on a plain blue t-shirt and prison trousers. Her eyes were swollen bloodshot bags. She was trembling from withdrawal. Mann felt sorry for her.

  ‘Sit down, Michelle.’ Mia and Ng were watching from the monitoring room outside.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  She shrugged. Mann passed her a cigarette.

  ‘Michelle, another man has been murdered. His name is Peter Thorne. Ring a bell?’

  She lit the cigarette and looked up at Mann. She shook her head. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

  ‘Can you give us any more information about the woman who you get the drugs for? The woman who gave you Max Kosmos’s wallet in exchange?’

  She shook her head and dragged heavily on the cigarette. ‘I told you, Inspector, I never see her. She’s very careful about that. Never gives the instructions with the same person. Sometimes she even sends a guest up and pretends it’s a song request. She’s clever.’

  ‘You forgot to mention you also get her a drug called Papaverine. Any reason for that?’

  ‘I forgot that’s all.’

  ‘Do you know what it does?’

  ‘Yeah, I looked it up. It makes cocks hard.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you supplied it?’

  ‘I didn’t think it was important.’

  ‘Anything else you want to tell me that may or may not seem important to you?’

  She shook her head. She was getting agitated. She scratched at the skin on the inside of her wrist. She drew heavily on her cigarette.

  ‘You know Victoria Chan well?’

  Michelle thought for a moment before answering. ‘I know her as well as everyone does. She’s been coming to the Mansions this last year. She’s been offering us deals to sign up and become part of the refurb project. She’s been a good friend. She wants to help us.’ She blew the smoke out in a disgusted groan. ‘She isn’t like some people who you think are good but turn out to be bad.’ She paused and looked at Mann. ‘Just like you, huh, Inspector? I used to look up to you. Not any more.’ Michelle looked around her. ‘I want someone else i
n here as well.’

  ‘There are cameras, Michelle. Everything is recorded.’

  ‘Even so, I don’t feel safe.’ Michelle looked up at Mann. ‘I talked to Lilly on the phone this morning. She didn’t go home last night. She said she’d stayed with you.’ Michelle stared hard at Mann, giving him the chance to deny it.

  Mia’s eyes opened wide. She stared at Mann on the small screen and shook her head, waiting for Mann to deny it.

  ‘She says she stayed in your apartment last night and you had sex.’

  Mann looked up at the camera. Mia stared back at him.

  Chapter 90

  Mia caught up with Mann and Ng in the locker room. ‘I have to suspend you. You’re now officially a suspect, Mann. Don’t go anywhere until it’s all cleared up.’

  Mann looked at Mia’s face. She was fuming but she was also devastated. He nodded. He knew she had no choice. He would have done the same thing.

  ‘She has refused a rape test. She is not pressing charges. She is probably looking for some payout. Christ, Johnny, I don’t know what the hell is going on. Either you have been stitched up better than Kin Tak can sew up a corpse or you are so out of your head you just don’t know what the hell you are doing any more. Which is it? Either way your fucking judgement is seriously impaired. What the fuck were you thinking?’

  Mann took a deep breath in through his nose and bowed his head against the locker door. He rocked his head from side to side against the cold metal. ‘I don’t know. I blacked out. I don’t remember anything after leaving the bar. I woke up this morning and she was in my bed. I don’t think we had sex but I don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! Yeah, well that doesn’t inspire huge confidence in me. You have lost it, Mann. You have compromised your judgement. You’ve been crossing the line too often recently, Mann. At a time when Victoria Chan is after your blood and stopping at nothing to stitch you up, you seem to be doing everything to give her a helping hand.’