Necropolis

displaying read:
    PG
    Scarlett was taken aback. Maybe she was mistaken after all. What did it mean? PG Tips was a type of tea, wasn't it? PG was also a type of movie rating. But what about the 70?
    Scarlett waited, hoping that the sign would change a third time and tell her something more — but nothing happened. It seemed to have frozen. Then, abruptly, it went black, as if someone had deliberately turned it off. At the same moment, she heard police sirens, a lot of them, racing through the streets on the other side of the harbor in Kowloon.
    There was a knock at the door.
    Scarlett went over to the bed and sat down, then quickly picked up a magazine and opened it. Although she wasn't quite sure why, she had decided that she didn't want to be found at the window. "Come in,"
    she called.
    The door opened, and Audrey Cheng came in. She was wearing a tight jersey that showed off the shape of her body — round and lumpy. Her black hair was tied back in a bun. Her eyes, magnified by the cheap spectacles, were full of suspicion. "I just wanted to check you were all right, Scarlett," she said.
    "I'm fine, thank you very much," Scarlett replied.

    "Are you going to bed?"
    "In a few minutes."
    "Sleep well." She seemed pleasant enough, but Scarlett saw her eyes slide over to the window and knew exactly why she had come in. It was the message. She wanted to know if Scarlett had seen it.
    And it was a message — Scarlett was sure of it now. Someone was trying to reach her and had decided that this was the only way. There was some sort of sense in that. A man had tried to hand her an envelope and had been dragged off the sidewalk. Mrs. Cheng and Karl were watching her all the time.
    Perhaps this was the only way.
    But what did it mean? Scarlett had never been any good at puzzles. Aidan had always laughed at her attempts to do a crossword. PG 70. It obviously had nothing to do with tea or movies. Could it be an address, a map reference, the license plate of a car? She went back over to the window and looked out again, but the screen was still dark. Somehow, she doubted it would come back on again.
    Eventually, she stopped thinking about it and tried to go to sleep — and that was when the answer suddenly arrived. Maybe not thinking about it had helped. PG. Wasn't that an abbreviation for page?
    Could it be that someone was trying to make her look at page seventy? But in what? There were about forty or fifty books in the bedroom, most of them old history books that could have nothing to do with Hong Kong.
    She got out of bed and picked one off the shelf at random. Sure enough, page seventy took her to a fascinating description of the way Paris had been laid out in the nineteenth century. She tried a dictionary that had been lying on the table. Page seventy began with "Bandicoot… a type of rat" and continued with a whole lot of words beginning with
    B.
    How about a page in the telephone book? That would make sense if someone was trying to get in touch.
    And then she remembered. There had been one book that she hadn't packed but that had turned up mysteriously in her luggage. The guide to Hong Kong and Macao.
    She went back to her suitcase. She hadn't even taken it out — but then she hadn't needed a guide, not with Karl and Mrs. Cheng ferrying her every step of the way. She carried it over to the light, flicking through to page seventy, and found herself reading a description of a place called Yau Ma Tei —"a very interesting area in Kowloon," the text said. ''Yau Ma Tei means 'hemp oil ground' in Cantonese, although you are unlikely to see any around now." There was a photograph opposite a market selling jade, which reminded her of the amulet that the chairman had given her. She was wearing it now and wondered if he had bought it there.

    She was about to throw the book down — another false lead — when she noticed something. There was a pencil line against the text. It was so faint that she had almost missed it — but perhaps that was deliberate. The line drew her attention to a single paragraph.
    Tin Hau Temple.
    You shouldn't miss this fascinating temple in a quiet square just north of the jade market. Tin Hau is the goddess of the sea, but the temple is also dedicated to Shing Wong, the city god, and Tou Tei, the earth god. Admission is free. And watch out for the fortune-tellers who practice their trade in the streets outside. If you're superstitious, you can have your palm read or your future foretold by a "bird