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Dr Hing, as he was called by his henchmen, was of Brazilian and Chinese lineage. He was the head of a worldwide criminal organisation that specialised in kidnapping and blackmail. The band made no distinction between industrialised countries and developing ones, between dictatorships and democracies – it grabbed money wherever it was possible to grab it. Four years earlier, Maille had needed to go looking for Hing, who, at the time, had tried to blackmail Bernadette Ericsson, an extraordinarily enterprising and rich old Frenchwoman who had lived on the island since 1988. Hing had kidnapped Eriksson’s cook and threatened to send her body back to the old lady in pieces. With a stroke of luck and also due to the swift reaction of the harbour police, it had been possible to find the cook – imprisoned in the larder of a container ship that was on the verge of setting sail from the docks of Port Louis towards Montreal. In gratitude for this rescue Bernadette Ericsson had donated a big sum of money for the revival of «Lemusair» – Maille liked always to believe that this donation was a gift for the return of the cook. Nevertheless, he knew well that one cannot imagine that every day will be a success.

There were some pictures of Dr Hing, but nobody knew how old they were or from where they came: he looked like a little bit fat, bespectacled Asian, with a rather shy and not unappealing smile. It was said that Hing had obtained a doctorate in art history, but Maille doubted that because he himself had spent a couple of semesters in that faculty at the University of Santa Lemusa. Other police informers claimed that Dr Hing used to be a dentist. Maille did not find that paticular claim implausible; Hing, he mused, was probably the sort who, instead of removing the troublesome wisdom-teeth of his patients, extracted the «Splendid Eight» from them.

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