Although the sun was almost directly overhead, she was soon running in shade as the side street narrowed dramatically, becoming little more than a crooked shaft bored deep into a squalid mass of tumbledown shacks, hovels and filthy open-fronted bars, wrought out of shipping containers in a fashion not unlike the office complex at Shah’s business premises. Unlike him, however, the owners of these bottom-feeding operations had not a care for good order or cleanliness.

In one place, which seemed to service a purely Chinese market, blood was pooling under the barstools of its patrons, who all turned on their perches to watch her run past. She had no idea where the blood was coming from, or whether it was human. Impassable to road traffic, the undrained passageway doglegged around to the right, between two saloons that appeared to loom over the laneway – this being due to the verandas on their upper floors cantilevering out to such an extent that only a few inches separated them, creating the effect of a tunnel. As narrow as the path was through here, at least it was clear.

She could see why now, even in the gloom. Brass shell cases gleamed in the mud, picking up the reflection of neon lights, and red candlelit lanterns from what she assumed was the door of a Chinese brothel. A man lay dead, face down in the filth. Dark arterial blood leaked from five or more bullet holes punched into his torso. The wound that had killed him, however, was almost certainly a shotgun blast that had carried away the better part of his head, spraying it over the fibrous cement panels of the saloon in front of which he’d died.

One of Shah’s men was waiting for her a short distance ahead, nodding when he saw her and gesturing for her to hurry up. He waited next to a solid steel door that opened onto a gloomy staircase. A short Chinese woman ranted at him in a language neither of them understood, undeterred by the presence of the man’s weapons. ‘They fucked off in here,’ he said.

Jules heard the cough and bark of back-and-forth gunfire from somewhere inside. She could also hear what sounded like the roar of a crowd. ‘What the hell is this place?’ she asked, as she flicked off the safety on her pistol.

‘Fight club,’ he said without further explanation. ‘Come on.’

They plunged into the darkness, past a drunk lying in his own vomit and shit. The stench of him was sick-making.