The Devil
“All mankind bears witness to-day that there is no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the
mind of man can conceive which he has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not
perpetrate if he is allowed to go on.”
- Rudyard Kipling
“Nobody promised me anything. Nobody threatened me, nor did anyone blackmail me. It was for my own good that I admit these crimes and cleanse my soul. There is no reason for me to keep it within myself.”
- Goran Jelisić
In the night he dreamt that he was visited again.
In the dream: his room, reflected perfectly. Nothing else outside of its confines. No endless dark expanse or stilled city – he knew that the universe as it was understood terminated beyond where the peeling linoleum flooring met the skirting board.
Leave me there.
When he awoke, it retreated, and he could remember nothing of it. He lay in the muddied space between consciousness and unconsciousness, half-covered by a thin blanket, breathing slowly, watching the dust particles drifting lazily in the confines of the weak light that came in through the window. For the first time since he’d moved in, his ears picked up on the constant low drone of the air conditioning unit. Occasionally, it would give out a sort of metallic choking sound, before continuing as usual; it gave the impression that the room itself was respirating. He lay there listening to it for a few minutes, before a piece of metal balustrade came loose from the stairwell of the building and clattered against chipped terrazzo below, startling him suddenly.
After a while, like some ancient automaton coming slowly to life, he stood and haphazardly made the bed; the mattress – bare, with a rust-coloured stain eating into one corner – was drenched in sweat. It was the summers here: he found them utterly interminable. The humidity of Hong Kong seemed to him like some acrid chemical that seeped through his pores and into his skin and imbued into his bloodstream some strange phlogiston that burned and ate away at his organs from the inside. Even the rain – something that he’d long been accustomed to in Belfast – was different here; it was heavier, more acidic, and bought with it the torrential monsoon winds that whipped and lashed at the leaves of the bamboo palms like some furious dance, shrieking as it swept through the city street by street.
He limped to the toilet and urinated, then searched through his small cupboard before crossing the little whitewashed room to the window, his Royal Hong Kong Police uniform draped over his arm. So thick was the layer of condensation on the glass that he could not make out anything outside. The usual dawn chorus of Hong Kong – the manic honking of the traffic, the crying of the Koels, the hacking coughs of the labourers as they spat into the gutters – was eerily absent. As he wiped away the condensation, he spotted something nestled in the corner of the glass. Trapped in between the two thin panes was a small, fat locust.
The insect seemed to tense up as it stared back up at him, its antennae flicking and its banded hindlegs twitching erratically, yet it made no noise. He was reminded suddenly of something he’d witnessed in Macau some years ago; half drunk, he’d stumbled into a small bar on some backstreet bar where a cricket fight was being held. The insects were set down in a small bowl by their handlers and agitated with a thin wooden switch, before the divider separating them was lifted, and the crickets would engage in what seemed to him to be more of a frenzied dance than gladiatorial sparring. Gambling on these fights was quite illegal but was done flagrantly regardless, without any regard for the wrath of the authorities. The spectators crowded around the table in their short-sleeved shirts and thick-framed glasses, smoking and tapping their 20 avos coins on the tabletop anxiously. They did not jeer or yell, and seemed to be wholly absorbed by the fight, watching the insects tentatively approach each other with the same concentrated expression a sculpture might have when deciding from which angle to attack a block of marble. The wooden table, lit harshly from above, its surface marked and gouged and covered with a layer of cheap undercoat, seemed to represent to these men the entire expanse of the world as they knew it, such was their focus on it and duelling of the two combatants.
He locked eyes with the locust for an amount of time that for him was momentary but for it would have been a significant part of its lifetime. Its expression and feelings totally alien and unknowable. They seemed, he thought, to have some sort of understanding.
The street was almost empty when he left the building, save for an old man in a cotton shirt working open the creaking shutters of a small electronics shop, and a stray dog that crept around some discarded boxes. When it locked eyes with him it twitched and darted off into a nearby alleyway, the mouth of which was plastered with ragged posters advertising greyhound racing or children’s tutors. Displayed prominently above all the others was a poster depicting the enormous head of Deng Xiaoping, as his glowing visage hovered over a pleasant depiction of Victoria Harbour, its waters blanketed by pale pink flower petals.
His walk to the Central Police Station on Hollywood Road took only fifteen minutes, the streets of haphazardly placed tong lau with their cracked facades and smoggy windows and ancient air conditioning units that rained flakes of rust onto passersby slowly receding, replaced by the colonial Edwardian buildings that intermingled with more modern, glass-fronted affairs. The station itself was an impressive building, dating back to the mid-1800s, and he much preferred it to the towering office buildings and apartment blocks that dominated the other side of the harbour. They seemed to him too unnatural; out of place in the landscape that they overlooked and blotted out with their shadows. He imagined the city folding over itself; the skyscrapers crushing down on the Old Town like a jumble of enormous teeth, the Financial District’s looming concrete palate bearing down on him. The mirrored world of his dream slunk back unnoticed into some crevasse in his head momentarily, vanishing before he fully noticed it.
Perhaps it was his discomfort that made him specifically petition the Crown Agents not to have him stay in the police barracks, which provided a clear view of the enormous Bank of China tower and the Connaught Centre, the building creatively nicknamed ‘The House of a Thousand Arseholes’ due to its prominent circular windows. He was surprised when the authorities granted his request, informing him that he was to be housed in an older tong lau a few streets away from the station. His flat in the building was old and crumbling and situated above a laundrette, but he paid these conditions little mind.
As he entered the station, he awkwardly greeted the receptionist, whose name he thought might have been Lai and who appeared incredibly small in comparison to the enormous oak desk she sat behind, and was about to make his way further into the building when she stopped him and informed him that a call had come in: some sort of incident at Kowloon Tower, the scale of which was yet unknown; he was to retrieve his sidearm and proceed there immediately, he was urgently requested. A Detective Inspector would meet with him at the scene. He nodded mutely and after a pregnant silence answered to the affirmative in his poor Cantonese. He felt as if he could do nothing else.
-
If the rest of the city’s looming skyscrapers appeared hostile and out of place to him, then the Kowloon building seemed constructed specifically to exemplify these traits. It was enormous, especially compared to the verdant park and squat dwellings that surrounded it. Just two years previously, the site had been a hulking slum built out of an old fort, with a population of just over 30,000 crowded into the relatively small space. In 1994, the slums were gone, demolished completely, and in their place rose the Kowloon tower: an enormous Postmodernist growth that cast aside the area’s reputation for triads and backstreet animal butchery and seemed to symbolise Hong Kong’s unheeding march into the future. He did not particularly think highly of it. Its construction was announced when he had arrived in the colony four years previously and since then he had watch it grow like a particularly stubborn weed.
Certainly, it was not cast in any better light for him when he arrived. He had been driven there by a Dutch Afrikaans Detective Sergeant who had been on his way to deal with the aftermath of an armed robbery at a jeweller’s further on in Shek Kip Mei, but the man did not know anything more about what had occurred than he did.
The mist, by now receding slightly, shrouded the bottom of the tower as if making some sort of attempt to defend it. Stepping out of the car, he could just about make out the line of policemen attempting to disperse a small crowd that was beginning to gather. Approaching the building’s foyer, he passed a bicycle courier who was complaining very loudly in Mandarin about the disruption to an uncaring constable with close-cropped hair who nodded at him as he ducked awkwardly under the police caution tape.
Outside the building’s revolving doors was a tall man standing idly with his hands in his pockets. As he was about to tell him to disperse, the man stepped forward and he realized that it was in fact DI Richard Standish and as a consequence he felt slightly foolish.
“William Keaning!” Exclaimed Standish, grinning sheepishly as the two men shook hands. “I had no idea who I’d be meeting here. I certainly wasn’t expecting you. No offence, of course.”
“Very little taken,” replied Keaning. “I thought that I’d have Yip or someone with me. Is he still off?”
“Afraid so.”
They stood silently for a moment. Standish was cheery, English, and had transferred to the RHKP a few years before him. He was wiry and very tall, and although he was only in his mid-thirties, he had the appearance of a much older man. He looked to Keaning more like someone better suited to be a cricketer than a policeman. They had only worked together on a handful of jobs previously and consequently Keaning did not know him very well, and he searched desperately for something relatively light-hearted to ask him before they got down to business. He failed to come up with anything and relented.
“They were unfortunately very light on the details of what’s happened before I came over. It’s a murder, though, isn’t it? Far too much urgency for a sudden death or something,” said Keaning.
“They’re saying familicide. This chap, Vladimir Galkin, he’s some sort of oil and gas magnate. Russian. He lives in the penthouse with his wife and two daughters. And he’s killed them, and then himself. The maid found them this morning as she was coming in,” said Standish, pausing suddenly and looking vaguely uneasy. Perhaps he’d become aware he’d kept using present tense. “I’m lying. He’s not Russian, he’s Kazakh, or Georgian, or something. And she’s his mistress, not his wife.”
“I imagine we’ll have to go in at some point then.”
“I imagine we shall.”