Macau, China
BY LONDON STANDARDS – at least where Luke lived in Battersea – the saloon car that came to collect him and Jenny from the Venetian that evening would have been considered distinctly luxurious. A gleaming silver Porsche Panamera, quite possibly costing more, he guessed, than a whole year of his civil-service salary. Here in glittering, freewheeling Macau, though, it did not look out of place amid the Bentley Continentals and the Rolls-Royce Ghosts that pulled up outside the hotel to disgorge long-legged girls in silk cheong sam dresses accompanied by burly men in tuxedos and expensive suits.
Luke didn’t recognize Miss Xinyi at first. The woman who stood holding open the rear door of the Porsche looked quite different from the dowdy corporate executive they had met so briefly at lunchtime in McSorley’s Ale House. Gone were the suit and the sensible shoes, replaced by a black, off-the-shoulder dress, high heels and a single diamond on a gold chain. He would not necessarily have thought of her as beautiful, but she certainly had style. Senhor Rodrigues’s PA looked as if she belonged here. Luke felt strongly that he and Jenny did not.
While Jenny spoke briefly to Miss Xinyi, Luke discreetly photographed the number plate and texted it to Angela and the team back in London, via an anodyne account registered in the name of Pathways Travel, should anyone be monitoring his phone, which he thought they probably were. ‘Thanks for picking us up,’ he said, as they settled into the back seat with Miss Xinyi in front next to the driver. ‘Where are we heading, exactly?’
‘You’ll see,’ she answered cryptically, then added, ‘Senhor Rodrigues has asked me to give you every assistance.’
The car purred away from the hotel entrance, gliding through the night-time streets of Macau. Outside the window they passed a constant kaleidoscope of colours: great neon palaces in pink and purple, dedicated to the delights of gambling. Fireworks lit up the sky at intervals and Chinese characters flashed from the tops of high-rise buildings.
‘This feels like something out of Blade Runner,’ Luke remarked.
Jenny nodded without replying. She, too, was watching the scene outside where it was all cars, no pedestrians. Luke glanced down at the map on his phone. He was tracking their route through GPS, his phone pinging their updated location to the Pathways account every thirty seconds. At least, he thought grimly, they’ll know where to find the bodies if this all goes wrong.
Fifteen minutes later they pulled up outside the entrance to a club. He could see purple velvet ropes and a couple of beefy bouncers in black tie. They were standing with their arms folded and legs apart in a John Wayne stance. It did not look like a welcoming place. Miss Xinyi got out first and they could see her greeting the men on the door and pointing back towards them as she beckoned for them to follow. Then the velvet ropes parted and they were ushered inside. The place appeared not to have any name, and the only clientele coming in were men, mostly Chinese, a few unsmiling Europeans. Russians, he guessed.
Down a flight of stairs, lit by flickering electric candles strung out along the wall, they followed Miss Xinyi, her heels clattering on the steps. Now they were in some kind of dimly lit subterranean lounge with low ceilings, purple strobe lights and an eighties-style disco ball rotating on the ceiling. The air throbbed with a rhythmic, pulsating bass that seemed to bounce off the walls and reverberate inside his head. Luke couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a club but one look at this place told him all he needed to know. It was not the sort of club you went to with friends. Not far from where they stood he could see a raised dais where a line of women were gyrating to the music, dressed in satin corsets, fishnet stockings, silky underwear and high heels. He couldn’t tell where they were from because every one of them was wearing a ghostly white mask. Others were on the dance-floor, accompanied by paunchy, sweaty men in suits with shiny faces and pawing hands. Luke found himself fighting back an overwhelming urge to get out of the place as fast as possible. He looked at Jenny, who grimaced in return.
He also had a strong feeling of déjà vu. A flashback to an earlier mission in Lithuania, where he’d had to seek out a certain informant from inside some dimly lit S&M club in Vilnius. But there was a difference. Everyone in that place had been there by choice, whereas here, in this dark and seedy dive that Rodrigues’s assistant had led them to, well, he had the distinct impression that these women were not exactly there of their own free will.
Luke knew enough about Macau to understand how this worked. The triads controlled the sex trade and paid the police to tip them off each time the authorities decided they needed to stage a crackdown. Young women from poor families arrived from all over South East Asia, answering ads for housemaids and receptionists, then ended up working in saunas and brothels or places like this. Despite carrying a penalty of up to twelve years in prison, the fact was that sex trafficking was rife in Macau where, unlike on the mainland, prostitution itself was not illegal. But was it really possible that their Hannah Slade, a British academic in early middle age, had been brought here? That made no sense to him, because if someone had abducted her, surely what they were after was information, nothing else.
He looked over to Miss Xinyi for an explanation but she was talking to a man with a gold neck chain and an earpiece. Another bouncer, he presumed. Luke leant over to Jenny, straining to make himself heard above the music: ‘This is a wild-bloody-goose chase,’ he said hoarsely. She gave him a look of tired resignation, which he took to mean ‘I agree, but let’s see where this leads.’
Miss Xinyi was beckoning for them to follow her now as she started to weave a path through the couples in clinches on the dance-floor. Who exactly was she? he wondered, as he watched her ponytail swaying down the back of her black dress in front of them. That afternoon, they had sent a request to the China desk in London, asking for a full background bio on her, but nothing had come back yet. Miss Xinyi was clearly a woman of few words: she had said almost nothing in the car on the way over.
Sidestepping people in their path, they followed her until she stopped next to a door on the other side of the dance-floor. Miss Xinyi stood next to it, waiting for Luke and Jenny to catch up. In the dim lighting of the club he could see some sort of wooden shutter, like a miniature window, set into the door at head height. Their host knocked on the door, twice hard, twice softly, clearly a signal. The shutter slid open and a pair of eyes peered out. From her handbag, so small he had barely noticed it before now, Miss Xinyi produced a card and held it up to the window. The door opened, revealing a heavily made-up woman in a tight dress. Luke detected a strong smell of stale cigarettes.
‘Come, come,’ she said, ushering them quickly inside.
But Jenny stood her ground just inside the doorway and addressed Miss Xinyi. ‘Sorry, but where are we going with this?’ she asked. ‘I mean, we appreciate your help in trying to find our friend and everything but we’re in the dark here.’ Jenny looked around her. ‘Literally. I think we need to know what’s going on.’
The words hung in the air as Miss Xinyi stared straight back at her, then broke into what Luke took to be an over-sweet smile. ‘You will see,’ she said, as the woman closed the door behind them and bolted it.