The Kowloon Racing Club

By James Rawlins

Hong Kong, 1992. Successful young English expat Charley Thornhill is bored by his predictable lifestyle. In search of adventure, he dreams up a game: The Kowloon Racing Club.

The rules are simple. On receipt of the signal, drop whatever you are doing and race to be the first to find a hidden target in one of the city’s many iconic and atmospheric locations.

But witnessing a disturbing incident during a race sets off a chain of events that turns Charley’s life upside down. As things spiral rapidly out of control, he finds himself caught up between the triads and MI6 in a world where he has no idea who he can trust or which side to pick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803138961

James Rawlins

Dr. Rawlins is an Associate Professor in the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at the University of Southern Mississippi. From 2000 to 2004 he was Senior Research Chemist/Technical Marketing Manager of Powder Coating Raw Materials at Bayer Corporation. He owns more than ten patents, including several in the area of coatings. His research interests include polymer design for thermosetting systems; polymer-coated surfaces; polymer interpenetrating networks; compatible and incompatible blending in crosslinked polymer systems; forensic analysis of polymers, coatings, adhesives, fibers, films; Structure property-relationships with crosslinked polymer systems; raw material development from natural and renewable resources; chemical and biological agent permeability with crosslinked systems, and intelligent and responsive polymers. Dr. Rawlins has a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering.

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Part 1: The Game

1

Into the Walled City

Hong Kong, Thursday 16th April, 1992

Charley Thornhill looked down at the three packets of heroin powder laid out on the counter before him and frowned. He let out a sigh of disappointment and exasperation, then glanced at his watch and cursed under his breath. He really didn’t have time for this.

He looked up at the matronly Chinese lady who was standing on the other side of the counter, watching him and smiling expectantly. She was wearing a light blue pyjama top, and on the wall behind her were several faded posters showing images of common dental problems. Charley himself was wearing a dark grey suit, white shirt, and a red tie.

It was a bizarre situation. And one he needed to extract himself from, quickly, and without any further complications. He smiled apologetically back at the lady and began to speak.

‘Ah, I’m sorry. I think there has been, erm, a misunderstanding.’

Her smile vanished like a light being switched off.

***

Approximately one hour earlier

Charley sat back in his chair and looked up at the clock on the wall. He turned to the young Chinese analyst sitting next to him.

‘It’s going to take us another hour or two to work up the extra calculations that Tom wanted, Lee,’ he said, gesturing at the computer printouts spread out over the table in front of them. ‘It might be a good idea for us to get some take-away dinner. Do you mind popping down?’

‘Sure, no problem,’ Lee replied, ‘but I can probably get this done on my own if you don’t want to stick around.’

‘It’s okay,’ Charley said, ‘I don’t have anything on tonight. And the cricket doesn’t start till tom…’

He was interrupted by a buzzing noise coming from the briefcase he had put on the chair next to him. He stopped talking and looked at it. Lee looked at him, and then at the briefcase. The insistent buzzing continued for a few seconds, then went quiet.

Charley looked at Lee, and stood up.

‘Actually, why don’t you soldier on with this and we’ll take a look in the morning? Think you can manage? Good man.’ He picked up his briefcase and slung his suit jacket over his arm.

‘Okay,’ said Lee, a little hesitantly, ‘I can do that. Although we didn’t discuss…’

‘You’ll be fine. I’ll call later,’ Charley called over his shoulder, already walking briskly towards the lifts, the corners of his mouth turning up in a grin, his eyes sparkling with anticipation, and all thoughts of takeaway dinner and asset valuation scenarios quickly vanishing from his mind.

***

Max van Damm watched the waiter pouring red wine into his glass, and when he started to lift the bottle away, waved his fingers impatiently and successfully procured an extra inch. It was mediocre stuff, but he didn’t care. He had been listening to the man seated to his left droning on about the Chinese economy for the last fifteen minutes and thought that if he was mildly drunk, the rest of the evening might be more bearable.

The appearance of another waiter, this time with plates of food, silenced his neighbour. They both looked down, and then Max glanced up at the little menu card resting against a vase of flowers in the middle of the table, and remembered he had pre-ordered the beef wellington. It didn’t look too bad.

‘Well, this doesn’t look too bad,’ he said to his neighbour, hoping to head off any further lectures about Chinese central banking policy. And then he felt it, buzzing away in his jacket pocket, the vibrations clearly detectable through the chair his jacket was hanging on.

‘Thank fuck for that,’ he mouthed exultantly under his breath.

He looked around the table. Everyone had been served and a few people were picking up their cutlery. He sawed off a large chunk of beef and pastry and ate it quickly, followed by several more rapid mouthfuls, not caring what anyone thought of his lack of manners.

‘Hungry, eh?’ said his neighbour, who was yet to start on his meal.

Max nodded, still chewing, and then made a show of reaching down to get something from his jacket. He pulled the pager out of his pocket, and looking at the screen, shook his head regretfully.

He turned to the man, swallowed his mouthful, and said, ‘family emergency back home. I’ve got to get to a phone. Sorry to run off.’

And with that, he stood up, pulled on his jacket, and marched out of the room, pausing briefly at his boss’s chair to whisper something in his ear. When the door of the elegant private dining room closed behind him, he began to run down the short corridor, scattering waiters before him.

***

When Dominic Kendall heard the buzzing of the pager, he gently put down the two bowls of spaghetti bolognese on the worktop, and looked forlornly over to where it sat next to his keys and wallet.

‘Do you need a hand, honey?’ Wendy called through from the living room, where she was sitting at the dining table reading last month’s Vogue magazine with the glass of wine Dom had poured her.

Not for the first time, Dom reflected that being married was a significant disadvantage when the pager sounded. The others didn’t have to deal with this. He walked over to the pager and picked it up. His eyes widened in momentary surprise when he read the message on the tiny screen. Then he shook his head and gave a low whistle of admiration. He stood still in the kitchen for a moment, thinking. Then he picked up one of the bowls and carried it into the living room.

‘What’s up?’ asked his wife, when she saw the single bowl in his hand, and the glum expression on his face.

‘Something’s come up with the airline. Some major cock-up with the in-flight meals. I’ve got to get over there and try to sort it out. I’m so sorry, I know it was supposed to be our night in.’ He put the bowl down in front of her and kissed her on the cheek.

‘What about you – don’t you have time to eat first?’ she asked.

‘No, I called in from the study, they’ve got three flights leaving tonight and hundreds of passengers wanting to know what’s going on.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I need to lose some weight anyway,’ he said with a rueful smile.

He walked back into the kitchen and called up the taxi company. He hated lying to Wendy like this. Why had he ever agreed to keep it secret even from his wife?

***

The taxi joined the traffic heading into the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and Charley decided it was time to tell the driver where he really wanted to go. When he had caught it on the street outside his firm’s office in Central, he had asked for the airport, as it was the same direction, and he hadn’t wanted to spook the driver. Now that they were in the tunnel, he thought it was safe to tell him.

He leaned forward, hoping the driver spoke more English than it had seemed so far.

‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go Kai Tak. Take me to Kowloon Walled City instead. Okay?’

The driver’s eyes flicked up to look at him in the rear-view mirror and he grunted something in Cantonese. He was extremely thin and looked very pale in the tunnel’s soft lighting.

‘Do you understand? Not the airport. Kowloon Walled City.’

The driver nodded briefly and exhaled noisily, a gesture that seemed to convey several different emotions, none of them complimentary towards Charley, though it wasn’t clear whether it was the change of plan or the surprising new destination that had caused such displeasure.

‘Wall City, okay,’ he muttered over his shoulder, as the taxi emerged from the tunnel into Kowloon.

***

Kowloon Walled City. Someone’s really gone for it this time, thought Max, as he stood waiting for a taxi outside a hotel in Central. He tried to remember what he knew about it.

He had heard stories about Kowloon Walled City ever since he had arrived in Hong Kong years before. Some twenty to thirty thousand people lived and worked inside a chaotic, cramped and dirty labyrinth of passageways and tiny apartments, that had organically grown up on the site of an old Chinese military fort. A city within a city, full of the desperate and the downtrodden. Although reputedly much safer now than ten years ago, when it was the infamously shady domain of wretched heroin addicts and low-level triad gangsters, it was still considered off-limits for most people.

Safer or not, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go inside. But he had to. Rules had to be followed.

***

Dom looked again at the message on the screen of the pager while his taxi raced along the main road from Stanley, where he lived on the south side of the island.

CHUN YEE. DENTIST. THIRD FLOOR. KOWLOON WALLED CITY.

Jesus, you couldn’t make it up, he chuckled to himself. Wednesday night, a little after eight o’clock, and he had abandoned his wife and his pasta to dash off to the multi-story shanty town of the Kowloon Walled City to find a dentist called Chun Yee.

He found himself wondering whether this was the kind of place Charley had had in mind when he had dreamed up the Kowloon Racing Club to give them a release from the monotony of expatriate life. Maybe so – it was in Kowloon after all. And it was certainly far outside their normal stomping grounds, in fact, Dom didn’t know anyone who had actually been inside. It was somewhere you talked about, occasionally caught a glimpse of from the window of a plane landing at Kai Tak, and thanked your personal god you didn’t live in.

***

Charley figured they must be getting close, as his taxi made its way through the grid of streets to the north west of the airport. A few more turns and then the brightly lit and busy district gave way onto a patch of scrubby open ground, lit only by the ambient urban glow of the sky and a few nearby streetlights.

And there it was. The infamous Kowloon Walled City, a hundred metres or so away, suddenly very real, and looking every inch the urban legend that it was. Even through the gloom and light drizzle, you could see how chaotic the structure was. Many buildings in Hong Kong looked grim, neglected and unwelcoming from the outside, but this was something else entirely. It looked alien, alive even, squatting there in its patch, its shabby otherworldliness accentuated by the clean straight lines of the tower blocks in the estate to the right. It was about ten storeys high and looked to be a couple of hundred metres long on the side facing them. You could see from the uneven nature of the façade how it had developed almost organically; it looked like someone had made it by picking up a series of small tower blocks and clumsily fitting them together like a puzzle. There were gaps and protuberances. Light shone from many of the windows and parts of the ground floor looked more like shopfronts. The top bristled with aerials and other small structures, silhouetted against the pink-grey sky. There didn’t seem to be any obvious way in.

***

Max stared up at the bizarre structure rearing up before him, and then glanced left and right up the street, half expecting to see one or more of his fellow competitors similarly gazing, equally reluctantly, at the prospect of their next challenge. But the area seemed fairly deserted apart from some children kicking a ball around under some streetlights and a few people sitting on a low wall close to the base of the building.

As he approached the small group, he saw that it was made up of six old men sitting chatting, sheltered by an overhang from what remained of the drizzle, and as usual dressed in pyjama-like clothes. As was also usual, they all stared at him with open curiosity as he drew near.

‘Hello, good evening,’ he said cheerfully, in both English and Cantonese. No response came as the six sat and stared at him.

‘Okay, well, I need to get in, up to the third floor. Can anyone tell me how?’ Again, there was no answer, so he tried Cantonese.

This prompted some muttering and a few chuckles among the group. After a few moments, a man in a vest, rather incongruously wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, called over to the boys playing football and when one came running over, he spoke rapidly to him and pointed at Max. The boy nodded and looked at Max, and then began walking along the street, beckoning Max to follow. Max thanked the old men and headed after the boy, leaving the old men to continue their conversation or, more likely, speculate bawdily about what he might be doing there.

***

Charley walked along the base of the building, passing a series of either dirty or partially boarded up windows, some showing dim light inside, and some dark. About a third of the way along, he reached an archway of sorts, leading into a poorly lit corridor, which seemed to open out quite quickly into some kind of internal courtyard. He stepped into the corridor, conscious now of varied noises of normal human life – music, a child crying, laughter – all of which made the place seem much less forbidding than its grim and strange exterior, and its chequered and unsavoury reputation.

He walked into the courtyard and looked around. It wasn’t so much a courtyard as a small void among the jumble of buildings. Rubbish was scattered on the floor at the base of the walls. He looked up. The uneven walls were festooned with pipes and wires. There was a metal grate a few stories up which was half covered in rubbish. Where it was clear, the pink night sky was just visible, a small square of light some ten or so stories above. At ground level, various doors and more passageways led off the courtyard. It was all sporadically lit by weakly glowing bulbs and strip lights, some of which flickered on and off.

An old lady was sitting on a chair just inside one of the doorways. Charley smiled at her and asked how to get to the third floor. She shook her head and shouted something into the room behind her. A moment later a younger woman appeared. Charley looked hopefully at her and asked if she spoke English.

‘Some,’ she said, nodding.

‘Fantastic,’ said Charley, feeling totally out of place. ‘Look, I need to get to the third floor. I’m looking for a dentist, called Chun Yee. He or she has something for me. Can you help me?’

The woman hesitated. Charley didn’t want to lose this small possibility of useful assistance, and added, ‘I’ll pay, if you can help me.’ The woman looked down at the old lady and said something briefly to her, in a language that didn’t sound like Cantonese. Some other southern Chinese dialect, he guessed, and he found himself wondering how they had ended up in this grim place. Maybe they came from somewhere worse, God help them.

The woman looked squarely at him.

‘Okay I show you third floor. How much you pay me?’ she said.

‘Twenty dollars?’ he offered. The woman nodded again and put out her hand. Charley took a note from his pocket and handed it to her. She passed it to the older lady without saying anything. The note disappeared instantly into a pocket in her flowery nightdress.

‘Third floor this way,’ said his new guide, and walked across the courtyard to a dingy looking passageway, without waiting to see if he was following. She headed on into the gloom, with Charley right behind her. He was taking no chances of getting lost in this place.

***

The boy led Max through a narrow doorway and immediately up some stairs. They emerged into a long hallway. Water dripped from the tangled mass of pipes and cables overhead and formed small pools on the uneven concrete floor. The walls were discoloured by damp and showed occasional mouldy patches. There were doors every few metres, and Max realized that most of the rooms behind must be absolutely tiny. Some were open, and through them came the sound of televisions, radios, and people chatting. Then to the right came a much larger opening, with a metal shutter pulled to one side, and from which emanated a strong, sickly meaty smell. Max risked a glance inside and saw pig carcasses hanging from hooks in the ceiling, and several topless men working over large buckets of reddish liquid. Like the passageway it was far from clean inside. Max moved quickly on after the boy, hoping they hadn’t seen him.

He wondered whether he could trust the boy and whether he was doing the right thing, blindly following him into this bizarre labyrinth. The boy had simply nodded when Max had explained that he needed to find Chun Yee the dentist. But what choice did he have? He couldn’t wander round on his own hoping to stumble across good old Chun Yee. He might emerge decades later, with an opium habit and looking like one of the elderly residents, he thought to himself, chuckling at the image in his mind.

***

‘How long have you lived here?’ Charley asked his guide as they walked up a damp and stuffy stairwell, thinking that some conversation might help keep her on his side.

‘Five years,’ she replied, without looking back at him.

‘Oh, right, and, is it, um, is it safe?’

‘Eh?’ she quickly snapped back.

‘You know, is it safe, here inside the Walled City. Not dangerous,’ he tried to explain.

‘Safe for me,’ she said, followed by a quick snort of laughter.

‘Great, that’s encouraging,’ Charley said quietly to himself, as he carefully picked his way up the least dirty steps, avoiding the rubbish and occasional puddle.

At a small landing she paused, looking up and down the stairs as if reminding herself how many floors they had climbed, then she peered out into the passageway that led off the stairwell. ‘Third floor,’ she announced.

The third floor appeared more or less similar to the ground floor. A poorly lit passageway with the same jumble of pipes and wires overhead, and doors or larger openings leading off to tiny apartments or small shops. Some of the apartments they passed were actually quite homely, all things considered; the residents had made some effort to paint and decorate them, but there was still a strong feeling of grinding poverty exuding from every pore of the building. Then, they found themselves beside a sort of shop window, behind which were dusty shelves covered with plaster casts of teeth. A dentist. He felt excitement building. Was he the first?

Charley’s guide pushed open the door, which was only half closed, and leant in. She spoke quickly in Cantonese to someone he could not see. Then she leaned back round the doorframe and beckoned him to follow her in. Charley stepped towards the half open door, his emotions racing. Surely it couldn’t be the dentist he was looking for, already. What were the chances? But if it wasn’t Chun Yee, why did he need to go in?

He pushed open the door and found himself in a small room, the walls a grubby painted white, with badly worn lino covering the floor and a rather ancient looking dentist’s chair on one side of the room. On the other side was another doorway, covered by a patterned curtain. There was a faint institutional smell to the room, as if it had just been scrubbed down. It was oddly out of place amid the generally rank aromas of the Walled City. The smell reminded Charley of the corridors of his prep school in the English countryside, a place that in all other respects felt a very long way from where he was now.

Behind a small counter stood a small Chinese lady in a light blue pyjama suit. She looked vaguely matronly. She smiled at Charley and said something in Cantonese he didn’t understand. Charley glanced at his guide and wondered why she had gone so quiet. Then the matronly lady reached under her counter and pulled out an antique-looking Chinese box. Bloody hell, thought Charley, for the third or fourth time that evening. It is Chun Yee. I’ve won. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he thought about Max and Dom, who he assumed were still scurrying haplessly round the grimy maze of the Walled City in search of Chun Yee. He hoped they hadn’t got into any trouble, at least half earnestly.

But his smile faded quickly when she lifted the lid off the box and took out three greenish-brown blocks of different shades and textures, several phials of clear liquid, and a couple of packets of white or light brown powder. She placed all these in a row on the counter and looked at him, still smiling. Oh crap, thought Charley. This was awkward. He flicked a glance at his guide, but she was studiously looking at the floor.

‘Okay mister,’ the lady said, this time in English, ‘what kind you want? Thai? Afghan? Burmese? Buy for take home or want to do here? Some customers like to use the chair.’ At this she gestured at the ancient dentist’s chair. Charley shuddered at the thought.

‘After, can rest here,’ she continued, and stepped across the room to pull back the curtain covering the other doorway. Behind it, Charley could see a small room with several mattresses on the floor. God, was that someone’s legs and feet he could see? Rest here? He started to feel quite sick.

‘Ah, I’m sorry. I think there’s been, erm, a misunderstanding,’ he explained, as ingratiatingly as he could. ‘I’m, er, not looking for this kind of thing. Very sorry.’ So sorry, he added in Cantonese, for good measure.

The woman’s smile vanished. Now she too turned to look at Charley’s guide, who was still doing her best to pretend she wasn’t there. The woman looked back at Charley; all signs of friendliness had totally disappeared.

‘What trouble is this?’ Then, without looking away, she barked several words loudly in Cantonese. Charley knew he needed to dig himself out of this, and fast. He turned to his guide and said in a low whisper, ‘Why did you bring me here? I never asked for… this!’ gesturing as he spoke at the array of narcotic merchandise spread out before him. His guide looked vaguely apologetic, but said nothing.

‘Get me out of here!’ he hissed at her. But before she could say or do anything, two men pushed through the door and came into the room, stopping just a foot or so away from Charley, and between him and the door. They were in their twenties, and scruffily dressed. One had tattoos on his neck and upper arms. They both looked at him belligerently. It was clear he wasn’t going anywhere just yet.

***

Dom had seen several people coming and going through a covered alleyway that ran directly into the Walled City from the street where his taxi had left him. He followed them in and saw that there was a queue of people waiting to use one of several water pipes that jutted out from the ground in the middle of a small courtyard where the alleyway ended. They were filling buckets or large bottles and either carrying them off, or in some cases, just taking them a few metres away and then washing either themselves or small piles of laundry. The atmosphere was quite jovial, and no one paid any attention to the Englishman in the suit and raincoat. He remembered that there was no running water inside the Walled City.

What a life these people have, he thought to himself. He and his friends wouldn’t last a week living somewhere like this. For the first time, he questioned the appropriateness of what they were doing, taking their game into a place like this. It’s not a game for these people, he thought, far from it. But their home was certainly an atmospheric setting for one of their Races.

***

Oh great, thought Charley. This goes from bad to worse.

The man with the tattoos pointed his finger at Charley’s face. ‘What you doing here? You causing trouble here?’ he said aggressively.

As calmly as he could, Charley explained there had been a misunderstanding and that he was looking for someone else, he wasn’t looking to buy drugs. If they would just let him go all would be fine. He had no interest in their business. He looked past them to his erstwhile guide.

‘Look, help me out here, okay? You brought me here. Tell them I’m looking for someone else.’

After a moment’s silence she spoke rapidly to the two men, pointing at Charley as she did so. The men listened, not taking their eyes off Charley. When she had finished, they almost looked disappointed that there was no need for any of whatever they had come to dish out. The tattooed man looked scathingly at Charley and spoke briefly to his guide.

‘They think you should pay them for the trouble,’ she said, looking a little sheepish.

‘What trouble?’ Charley started to say but then stopped himself, thinking the sooner he got out of that room, the better. Never mind the Race, he just wanted to get away from that dentist’s chair and those filthy mattresses.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said wearily, taking a twenty dollar note out of his pocket. He placed it on the counter, and walked between the men towards the door. They let him pass. His guide followed and a few seconds later they were both out in the passageway. His appetite for further explorations in the Walled City had reduced massively. But still, there was a Race to be won, and that had to take precedence. No one had ever given up before, and he wasn’t going to be the first.

Out in the passageway, it was time to regroup, take stock, and press on. Charley looked at his guide. He had little choice but to try again with her help, to put the opium den misunderstanding behind them and start afresh. He tried to start off again on a friendly note.

‘Look, never mind what just happened. What’s your name?’

She looked at him without emotion. ‘Ang,’ she said quietly.

‘Are you Chiu Chow?’ he asked, remembering suddenly that many of the Walled City’s residents were Chiu Chow, as people from Chaozhou in the nearest mainland province of Guangdong were known. Finally, a half-useful bit of Walled City trivia. She nodded.

‘I went there, last year, to Chaozhou,’ Charley carried on.

Ang spat on the floor with distaste. ‘Chaozhou,’ she muttered, barely audibly. Okay, Charley thought, best not carry on with that line of enquiry. But getting her name seemed a positive step.

‘Look, Ang, don’t worry about what happened in there. No problem. You weren’t to know.’ Ang didn’t say anything. ‘But I do need to find this dentist, Chun Yee. As soon as possible. It’s like a game. No drugs, nothing bad, no trouble. But I need to get there first. Before my friends.’

‘Will you help me?’ he asked. ‘If we find Chun Yee first, I’ll give you twenty more dollars.’ Ang just nodded, and then she headed off down the passageway. It seemed she was resigned to dealing with this strange gweilo until he left the Walled City.

Charley followed as she led the way. It was unremittingly grim, but he was relieved once more to see signs of normal human life, in the form of more small apartments, all with doors open, and the noise of radios and people talking. For the first time he caught a whiff of something actually appetising – slow braised pork perhaps – and his stomach responded with a rumble he thought would probably echo off the narrow walls.

After just a few metres she turned into a stairwell and soon they were back on the third floor, though it was clear now to Charley that there was not just one third floor, but a number of not necessarily connected third floors. You could get lost in here for months, he thought, wondering what