Free Hungry Ghost by Stephen Leather Page A

painstaking research that owed more to accountancy than to police work before they had enough evidence to make a case. And by the time they’d got enough evidence together the suspect or suspects had usually had plenty of warning, and they were usually rich enough to be able to buy themselves an escape route. It could be frustrating. Bloody frustrating.
    Dugan looked away from the screen and scanned the diners, taking in the whole restaurant area with one easy glance. He realized with a jolt that he too was being studied, by a petite Chinese girl with beautiful eyes. She was sitting at a table with two other girls, wearing a dress every bit as black and shiny as her hair. She seemed small, even for a Chinese girl, but the eyes were knowing and teasing. The eyes of a woman, the body of a young girl. She smiled at Dugan, catching him off balance. He looked away, embarrassed, as if he’d been caught peeking through the window of a schoolgirls’ changing-room.
    He shrugged. ‘Downstairs?’ he said.
    ‘Now he’s talking sense,’ said Bellamy. They emptied their glasses and walked the length of the bar and down the stairs that led to the disco. The throbbing beat enveloped them like a clammy mist and they had to push their way through the crowd to reach the bar. Holt ordered a round of drinks and they stood together, watching like predatory sharks preparing to carve through a shoal of fish.
    ‘What about those two?’ said Holt, nodding at two girls dancing together.
    ‘Tasty,’ agreed Burr. ‘Very tasty.’
    The girls moved well together, obviously used to dancing with each other.
    ‘Want to give it a go?’ Holt asked Burr.
    ‘Sure,’ he replied, and the two men placed their glasses on the bar and edged their way on to the crowded dance floor, towards the girls.
    ‘See anything you fancy?’ Bellamy asked Dugan.
    ‘Not yet,’ said Dugan, ‘but it’s just a matter of time.’
    Across the disco he saw three girls walk down the stairs and stand at the edge of the lights. One was the small Chinese with the beautiful eyes. She seemed to be looking right at him, though he knew he must be obscured in the gloom.
    ‘You’re staring,’ laughed Bellamy.
    ‘Pretty, isn’t she?’
    ‘The short one? Exquisite. But a big gweilo like you would tear her apart. Pick on someone your own size.’
    Dugan looked at him and laughed and when he looked back to the stairs the girls had gone.
    The two men stood by the bar, scanning the dance floor and tapping their feet to the beat. Burr and Holt seemed to be doing OK, they’d moved in on the two girls and now were gradually edging them apart like sheepdogs with nervous sheep.
    Dugan thought about asking Bellamy how his application for a transfer was getting along, but decided against it. Wrong time, wrong place. God, he wished they’d pull their finger out. He was going slowly mad in Commercial Crime’s A Division, even before today’s disappointment. It wasn’t police work, it was clerking, pure and simple. The straw that had broken the camel’s back was the Carrian affair, a three-year investigation followed by an eighteen-month trial, the longest in Hong Kong’s history, and the most expensive. It had ended abruptly when a single judge had decided that the defendants had no case to answer. Almost five years of hard work down the drain. Dugan had worked his balls off on that case, ten or twelve hours a day. He’d eaten, slept and breathed the Carrian case, only to see it dismissed by one man.
    The night after the judge had stopped the trial Dugan went out and got seriously drunk. A week later he’d put in his first application for a transfer, to switch from A Division to C Division. A Division handled the long, complex fraud cases, split into four taskforces to handle the big ones. B Division looked after general fraud; a move there would have been seen as a step down, a demotion. C Division had more kudos, chasing up counterfeit cases. That meant a lot of foreign