Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

And yet these markets were full of horrible things. She saw dozens of live chickens trapped in tiny cages and – next to them – dead ones, beaten utterly flat and piled up like deformed pancakes. On the stand next door there was an eel cut into two pieces, surrounded by a puddle of blood. A goat’s head hung on a hook, its eyes staring lifelessly, severed arteries spilling out of its neck. It was surrounded by the other pieces of what had once been its body. And finally there was a whole fish, split lengthways, the two bloody halves lying side by side. That was in many ways the most disgusting sight of all. The wretched creature was still alive. She could see its internal organs beating.

Mrs Cheng took one look at it and smiled. “Fresh!” she said.

Scarlett wondered how long she could stay in Hong Kong without becoming a vegetarian.

They continued on their way, walking past a row of meat shops. Mrs Cheng was going to cook in the flat again that night and she was looking for ingredients. As they paused for a moment, Scarlett noticed one of the butchers staring at her. He was completely bald with a large, round head and a strange, childlike face. He seemed fascinated by her, as if she were a film star or visiting royalty. And he wasn’t concentrating on what he was doing.

He was chopping up a joint of meat with a small axe. Scarlett watched the blade come down once, twice…

On the third blow, the butcher missed the meat and hit his own left hand. She actually saw the metal cut diagonally into the flesh, almost completely severing his thumb. Blood spouted. But that wasn’t the real horror.

The butcher didn’t notice.

He raised the axe again, unaware that his hand was lying flat on the chopping board, the thumb twitching, the pool of blood widening. He was so interested in Scarlett that he hadn’t noticed what he’d done. Scarlett stared at him in total shock and that must have warned him because then he looked down and backed away immediately, cradling the injured hand, disappearing into the dark interior of the shop.

What sort of man could just about cut off his own hand without any sort of reaction? On the chopping board, human blood mingled with animal blood. It was no longer possible to tell which was which.

Scarlett didn’t eat meat that night. And as soon as she had finished dinner, she went back to her room. The flat had cable TV and she watched a rerun of an old British comedy. It didn’t make her laugh but at least it reminded her of home. She was thinking more and more about leaving. If her father didn’t arrive soon, she would insist on it. How could this have happened to her? How had she found herself on the wrong side of the world, on her own?

She went over to the window and looked out.

Hong Kong by night was even more stunning than it was by day. The windows were ablaze – thousands of them – and all the skyscrapers used light in different ways. Some seemed to be cut into strange shapes by great slices of white neon. Others changed colour, going from green to blue to mauve as if by some sort of electronic magic. And quite a few of them carried television screens so huge that they could be read all the way across the harbour, advertisements and weather information glowing in the night, reflecting in the dark water below.

One such building was directly opposite her. As she gazed out, thinking about the butcher, thinking about the still-living fish that had been cut in half, she found herself being drawn almost hypnotically towards it. It must have belonged to some sort of bank or financial centre – the screen was displaying the performance of stocks and shares. But even as Scarlett watched, the long lists of numbers were wiped from left to right and replaced by four letters in burning gold.

It was her own name, or at least half of it. She smiled, wondering what the letters actually stood for. South China Associated Railways? Steamed Chicken And Rice? But then four more letters appeared, tracking from the other side.

And that was no abbreviation. It was her. Scarlett. The two blocks had formed her name and now they were flashing at her as if trying to attract her attention. She stood at the window, not quite believing what she was seeing. Was someone really trying to send her a message, using an electric sign on the side of a building to get it across?

A few seconds later, the screen changed. Now it had turned white and the message it was displaying read:

Scarlett was taken aback. Maybe she was mistaken after all. What did it mean? PG Tips was a type of tea, wasn’t it? It was also a type of certificate, before a film. And what about the figure 70?

Scarlett waited, hoping that the sign would change a third time and tell her something more – but nothing happened. It seemed to have frozen. Then, abruptly, it went black, as if someone had deliberately turned it off. At the same moment she heard police sirens, a lot of them, racing through the streets on the other side of the harbour in Kowloon.

There was a knock at the door.

Scarlett went over to the bed and sat down, then quickly picked up a magazine and opened it. Although she wasn’t quite sure why, she had decided that she didn’t want to be found at the window. “Come in,” she called.

The door opened and Audrey Cheng came in. She was wearing a tight jersey that showed off the shape of her body – round and lumpy. Her black hair was tied back in a bun. Her eyes, magnified by the cheap spectacles, were full of suspicion. “I just wanted to check you were all right, Scarlett,” she said.

“I’m fine, thank you very much,” Scarlett replied.

“Are you going to bed?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Sleep well.” She seemed pleasant enough, but Scarlett saw her eyes slide over to the window and knew exactly why she had come in. It was the message. She wanted to know if Scarlett had seen it.

And it was a message. She was sure of it now. Someone was trying to reach her and had decided that this was the only way. There was some sort of sense in that. A man had tried to hand her an envelope and he had been dragged off the pavement. Mrs Cheng and Karl were watching her all the time. Perhaps this was the only way.

But what did it mean? Scarlett had never been any good at puzzles. Aidan had always laughed at her attempts to do a crossword and she had come bottom in the school quiz. PG 70. It obviously had nothing to do with tea. Could it be an address, a map reference, the registration of a car? She went back over to the window and looked out again but the screen was still dark. Somehow, she doubted it would come back on again.

Eventually she stopped thinking about it and tried to go to sleep – and that was when the answer suddenly arrived. Maybe not thinking about it had helped. PG. Wasn’t that an abbreviation for page? Could it be that someone was trying to make her look at page seventy? But in what? There were about forty or fifty books in the bedroom, most of them old history books that could have nothing to do with Hong Kong.

She got out of bed and picked one off the shelf at random. Sure enough, page seventy took her to a fascinating description of the way Paris had been laid out in the nineteenth century. She tried a dictionary that had been lying on the table. Page seventy began with “Bandicoot… a type of rat” and continued with a whole lot of words beginning with B. How about a page in the telephone book? That would make sense if someone was trying to get in touch.

And then she remembered. There had been one book which she hadn’t packed but which had turned up mysteriously in her luggage. A guide to Hong Kong and Macau.

She went back to her case. She hadn’t even taken it out – but then she hadn’t needed a guide, not with Karl and Mrs Cheng ferrying her every step of the way. She carried it over to the light, flicking through to page seventy and found herself reading a description of somewhere called Yau Ma Tei – “a very interesting area in Kowloon,” the text said. “Yau Ma Tei means ‘hemp oil ground’ in Cantonese, although you are unlikely to see any around now.” There was a photograph opposite of a market selling jade, which reminded her of the amulet that the chairman had given her. She was wearing it now and wondered if he had bought it there.