Manchester Vice

Chapter 3

3

As I pushed open the door to Chu’s Herbs, a bell tinkled. His shop, I discovered, was little more than a long ill-lit room with a counter to one side. A couple of customers chatted in low voices and a Chinese man wearing a grey suit and a scowl stood behind the counter.

“I’d like to speak to the owner,” I said to him.

He looked me up and down.

“I’m Chu, the owner. What do you want?”

I felt faintly ridiculous at the prospect of doing what I was about to do, but I thought that, having come this far, I might as well get on with it, so I furtively showed him the sheet of paper with the Chinese characters on it.

“Jim sent me,” I said.

I half expected him to question my sanity. Instead, he nodded, and then disappeared into another room. He came back clutching something which he pressed into my hand.

“You must go now,” he told me.

As I returned to my car, I inspected what Chu had given me. It was a key fob, a remote control of some kind, with two small keys dangling from it.

You might suppose I should have gone to the police with these items, and you’d be right. However, being a journalist, my main concern was to find out if they would lead to a story I could use. I reasoned that I could always bring the police in at a later stage if necessary.

I keyed the ‘Old Chapel, Palatine Road’ into my GPS and set off through the dark streets.

By the time I reached Didsbury, my destination, night had fallen and the prospect of entering a strange house on my own was far from appealing. I forced myself not to dwell on the dangers and located the Old Chapel. I couldn’t see the house itself, only the roof. The rest of it was hidden from view by a high brick wall crowned by metal uprights strung with razor wire. The wooden gates, as high as the wall, were similarly topped off.

On an impulse I pointed the key fob at the gates and pressed the button. They swung smoothly open, closing behind me as I drove through. I proceeded slowly up a gravel drive towards the front of the house, which was, as the name suggested, a converted Victorian chapel set in a tree-lined garden. There were no lights in the garden, but enough illumination entered from the street to reveal windows covered by steel shutters – the sort you install to keep vandals out when you own an empty property.

I left the car and tried one of the keys on the front door. It worked. With the aid of the second key I opened a further lock, went inside, and switched on the lights. Before me lay a grand hall with a tiled floor.

At that stage I experienced a moment of paranoia and wondered if I might be walking into a trap, so I listened carefully. There was no sound, other than for the creaking of trees in the wind outside. If anyone was already in the house, they were keeping very quiet.

I walked along the hall and entered a room to my left. It contained a desk and chair, and little else.

There was a ledger of some kind on the desk, the journal Jim had been talking about. I couldn’t resist dipping into it, and soon enough I got to the bottom of Jim’s horrifying secrets.

I don’t have the journal to hand, but I know there was a passage that revealed everything. This is what it said, as best as I can piece together from memory: