Tak-Wing went to them, grabbed them, and hurled them into the backroom before he did something worse to them. He locked the door with an outside padlock, then buried the key in the bottom of the family’s dwindling sack of rice, hiding it from himself so that if a murderous impulse he couldn’t repress struck him later, he’d have to dig and search to get it out.

When they were as safe as he could make them, he ran out into the rain and vomited.

As the Japanese held the British prisoner at Stanley and Sham Shui Po, Tak-Wing held Emily and Raymond prisoner. She didn’t show up at the hospital for work the next morning, so when I set out on my rounds, the first place I went was the Tai Hang house. I stood on tiptoe to look in the window and saw him sitting at the dining table, head slumped forward in his hands. After a minute, he got up, rustled around in a half-full sack of rice that leaned against the wall and then stepped toward the backroom. I saw the lock on the door. He moved to open it, changed his mind, returned to the rice sack and buried what could only have been the key inside. Then he went back to the table and dropped his head back into his hands. What was he doing to her in there?

I had to finish my rounds for the day. There were so many people in the missions and on the street waiting for me. The others would all be out on their rounds too, so there would be no one to plan with until evening.

But that night, while Duffy, Courchene, Ting-Yan, and I shared a pot of rice, a can of beans, and a few wilted vegetables, I told them what I had seen.

“That can’t be good,” Courchene said. “I’ve met men like Tak-Wing before and seen what they do. Nothing good ever happens with guys like that.” He ate slowly, though he was clearly hungry. We all were. Selwyn-Clarke made sure we had food, but there was no such thing as plenty. He had just come back from three weeks in detention and what he described as the weirdest cricket game in history. Being held by the Kempeitai, he said, was not an experience he’d wish on anyone. And the cricket match had been an utter waste of time when he could have been out there doing his humanitarian work. What on earth did the city’s new masters intend for the city, and how were they going to govern it? His wife, Hilda, came in a car to pick him up, and he went back with her to their home in the Mid-Levels to recover.

“Tak-Wing seems unstable.” Professor Duffy said. “Still, one hates to invade a couple’s privacy.” Clearly, she had not been looking very closely at Emily.