Free The Rain Killer by Luke Delaney

bodies.’
    ‘DNA,’ Ma suddenly jumped in. ‘Books. Dried blood. Who cares? I have
political
connections. You let me go. I go back to China. You can’t touch me.’
    ‘You have diplomatic immunity?’ Townsend asked.
    ‘No,’ Ma admitted, still smiling. ‘Political friends. Powerful people. I don’t care about your evidence. You let me go.’
    Sean leaned back in his chair and tried to suppress a slight smile as he pulled a sheet of paper from his thin brown cardboard folder and pushed it across the table towards Ma. ‘I’m not sure you really want to go back to China, Mao. You see I’ve been in contact with our colleagues in the Chinese Criminal Investigation Department. When I found out you’d only been here a little more than a year, it made me wonder what you might have done before. So I thought I’d better find out. Our Chinese colleagues told me that you’re a known Triad. An enforcer. A suspected assassin.’
    ‘They can’t prove anything.’
    ‘Maybe not the
work
you’ve done for the Triads, but I asked them to check on unsolved cases involving the murders of prostitutes, and guess what they found, Mao?’ Ma said nothing – his face stone as he waited for Sean to continue. ‘Three unsolved cases. Two women raped and killed in Shanghai and one more in Hong Kong. DNA recovered from their bodies belongs to the same man. The Chinese police are very interested in comparing your DNA to their samples. Chinese justice is swift and final, Mao. The penalty for murder is death by firing squad. Lethal injection, if you’re lucky. Are you sure you want to go back to China?’
    ‘You think I’m afraid of death?’ Ma replied.
    ‘Perhaps not,’ Sean played along. ‘But what about spending the rest of your life locked up in a British prison – like a caged animal?’
    ‘No prison can hold the Great Snake,’ Ma answered. Townsend and Coleman raised their eyebrows in confusion, but from the moment he’d seen the snake wrapped around Ma’s body, Sean had suspected it was more than just a tattoo. ‘If you saw what I had escaped as a child, you would know I can escape anything.’
    ‘Chinese Police say you’re originally from the French Concession area of Shanghai,’ Sean explained, noticing the tension that suddenly flowed into Ma’s body. ‘Tough?’
    ‘How could you ever hope to understand?’ Ma spat at him. ‘You think poverty is not having the latest colour TV. I shared one room with my mother and one cockroach-infested kitchen with a dozen other families – no toilets. We washed in the street at an illegal water tap the Triads built for us. If we went into the city the police arrested and beat us just for being there. We were outcasts in our own country. You had to fight like a tiger or die like a dog. I chose to fight and I grew strong. People respected me,’ he insisted, raising his voice. ‘Feared me.’
    ‘But when you were still a small child,’ Sean continued, ‘how did your mother feed you? How did she put clothes on your back? She would have needed money.’
    ‘We ate when we could – I wore clothes until they fell off my body,’ Ma barked. ‘All that mattered was staying alive.’
    ‘But she must have done something to earn money,’ Sean persisted. ‘She couldn’t go into the city to work, so what did she do – steal, scavenge on the rubbish tips of Shanghai? Or perhaps she was a …?’ He let the question hang.
    ‘I didn’t need her,’ Ma insisted. ‘I grew stronger and stronger. I knew what I was becoming – could feel its power as we became one.’
    ‘Became one with what?’ Sean asked, even though he already knew the answer.
    ‘The Great Serpent,’ Ma proudly answered, leaning back in his chair, his eyes wild with excitement. ‘The Great Snake.’
    ‘When did this …
transformation
happen?’ Sean kept him talking.
    ‘It is still happening,’ Ma tried to explain, ‘but it was always meant to be. Ever since I was a child. I was even born in the year