The Last Six Million Seconds Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 cheaperways 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