Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

She ate dinner, said goodnight to Mrs Cheng and went to her room. She hadn’t finished unpacking and it was as she took out the last of her clothes that she made a discovery. Someone had placed a guidebook for Hong Kong at the bottom of her suitcase. She assumed it must have been Mrs Murdoch and if so, it was a kind gesture – although it was odd that she hadn’t mentioned it. She flicked through it. “The World Traveller’s Guide to Hong Kong and Macau. Fully illustrated with thirty colour plates and comprehensive maps.” It was new.

But that wasn’t the only thing she found that night.

Scarlett had brought a little jewellery with her – a couple of necklaces and a bracelet Aidan had given her on her last birthday. She decided to keep them safe by putting them into one of the drawers in the dressing table. As she pulled, the drawer stuck. That was probably why nobody had noticed that it wasn’t completely empty. She pulled harder and it came free.

There was a small, red document at the very back. It took Scarlett a few seconds to recognize what it was, but then she took it out and opened it.

It was her father’s passport.

Paul Edward Adams. There was his photograph. Blank face, glasses, neat hair. It was full of stamps from all over the world and it hadn’t yet expired.

The chairman had lied to her.

If her father had left his passport in the flat, he couldn’t possibly have travelled to China. And now that she thought about it, there had been something strange about the note he had left her. Why had he typed it? It hadn’t even been signed. It could have been written by anyone.

It was eleven o’clock in Hong Kong. Four in the afternoon in England. Scarlett got into bed but she couldn’t sleep. She lay there for a long time, thinking of the passport, the passport official with the crocodile eyes, the chairman joking about the cry for mercy, the man who had tried to give her a letter.

She had only been in Hong Kong for one day. Already she was wishing she hadn’t come.

Over the next few days, Scarlett tried to forget what had happened and put all her energies into being a tourist. There had to be another explanation for her father’s passport. He might have a second copy. Or maybe his company had been able to arrange other travel documents for his visit to China. It was, after all, just the other side of the border. She made a conscious decision not to think about it. He would be back soon – and until then she would treat this as an extended holiday. Surely it had to be better than being at school!

So she took the Star Ferry to Kowloon and back again and had tea at the old-fashioned Peninsula Hotel – tiny sandwiches and palm trees and a string quartet in black tie playing classical music. She went to Disneyland which was small and didn’t have enough fast rides, but which was otherwise all right if you didn’t mind hearing Mickey Mouse talking in Cantonese. She went up to The Peak, a mountain standing behind the city which offered panoramic views as if from a low-flying plane. There had been a time when you could see all the way to China from there, but pollution had put an end to that.

She visited temples and markets and went shopping and did everything she could to persuade herself that she was having a good time. But it didn’t work. She was miserable. She wanted to go home.

For a start, she was missing her friends at school, particularly Aidan. She had tried texting him but the atmosphere seemed to be interfering with the signal and she got nothing back. She tried to call her mother in Australia but Vanessa Adams was away on a trip. Her secretary said that she would call Scarlett back but she never did.

And it was worse than that. Scarlett didn’t like to admit it. It was so unlike her. But she was scared.

It was hard to put her finger on what exactly was wrong, but her sense of unease, the fear that something was going to jump out at her from around the next corner, just grew and grew. It was like walking through a haunted house. You don’t see anything. Nothing actually happens. But you’re nervous anyway because you know the house is haunted. That was how it was for Scarlett. But in her case it wasn’t a house – it was a whole city.

First of all, there were the crowds, the people in the street. Scarlett knew that everyone was in a hurry – to get to work, to get to meetings, to get home again. In that respect, all cities were the same. But the people in Hong Kong looked completely dead. Nobody showed any expression. They walked like robots, all of them moving at the same pace, avoiding each other’s eyes. She realized now that what she had seen in Queen Street hadn’t been an isolated incident. It was as if the city somehow controlled them. How long would it be, Scarlett wondered, before it began to control her too?

The strange, grey mist was still everywhere. Worse than that, it seemed to be getting thicker, darker, changing colour. Mrs Cheng had said it was pollution but it seemed to have a life of its own, lingering around the corners, hanging over everything. It drained the colour from the streets and even transformed the skyscrapers: the higher storeys looked dark and threatening and it was easy to imagine that they were citadels from a thousand years ago. They didn’t seem to belong to the modern world.

And then there was Wisdom Court. From the moment she had arrived there, Scarlett had been aware that something was wrong. It was just too quiet. But after two days there, going up and down in the elevator, in and out of the front door, she suddenly realized. She hadn’t seen anybody. There were no sounds coming from the other flats, no doors slamming or babies crying. No cars ever pulled up. No smells of cooking or cleaning ever wafted up from the other floors. Apart from Mrs Cheng, she seemed to be living there entirely on her own.

Of course, there was the receptionist. She had barely registered him to begin with. He was always sitting in the same place, in front of a telephone that never rang, staring at a front door that hardly ever opened. He wore a black jacket and a white shirt. His face was pale. And he never changed. Nobody ever replaced him.

How was that possible? Scarlett found herself examining him more closely. The same man in the same place, morning, noon and night. Didn’t he ever eat? Didn’t he need toilet breaks? It could have been a corpse sitting there and once that thought had entered her head, she found herself hurrying through the reception area, doing her best to avoid him. Not that it would have made any difference. He never spoke to her once.

On the third evening, after their visit to Disneyland, she challenged Mrs Cheng. The Chinese woman was making dinner, tossing prawns and bean shoots in a wok.

“Where is everybody?”

“What do you mean, Scarlett?”

“We’re on our own, aren’t we? There’s nobody else in this building.”

“Of course there are other people here.” Mrs Cheng turned up the flame. “They’re just busy. People in Hong Kong have very busy lives.”

“But I haven’t seen anybody. There’s nobody else on this floor.”

“Some of the flats are being redecorated.”

Scarlett gave up. She knew when she was being lied to. It was just another mystery to add to all the others.

The next day, Mrs Cheng took her to a market in an area known as Wan Chai. As usual, Karl drove them. By now, Scarlett had got used to the fact that he accompanied them everywhere and never spoke. She even wondered if he was able to. His role seemed to be to act as a bodyguard. He was always just a few paces behind.

Scarlett had always liked markets and in Hong Kong there was a vibrant street life, sitting side by side with the expensive Western shops and soaring offices. She had been keen to explore the Chinese streets, the stalls piled high with strange herbs and vegetables, soup noodles bubbling away in the open air and the signs and advertisements, all in Chinese, filling the sky like the flags and banners of an invading army.