by Peter May
New York • London
New York • London
Copyright © 2003 by Peter May
Cover photograph: © Alamy; Cover: www.headdesign.co.uk
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2019
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e-ISBN 978-1-68144-076-7
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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BY PETER MAY
The Enzo Files
Extraordinary People
The Critic
Blacklight Blue
Freeze Frame
Blowback
Cast Iron
The China Thrillers
The Firemaker
The Fourth Sacrifice
The Killing Room
Snakehead
The Runner
Chinese Whispers
The Ghost Marriage: A China Story
The Lewis Trilogy
The Blackhouse
The Lewis Man
The Chessmen
Standalone Novels
Entry Island
Runaway
Coffin Road
I’ll Keep You safe
Non-fiction
Hebrides with David Wilson
For my sister, Lynne
Acknowledgments
As always, I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to those who have given so generously of their time and expertise during my researches for The Runner. In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to Professor Joe Cummins, Emeritus of Genetics, University of Western Ontario; Steven C. Campman, MD, Medical Examiner, San Diego, California; Dr. Richard H. Ward, Professor of Criminology, and Dean of the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at the University of Newhaven, Connecticut; Professor Dai Yisheng, former Director of the Fourth Chinese Institute for the Formulation of Police Policy, Beijing; Professor Yu Hongsheng, General Secretary for the Commission of Legality Literature, Beijing; Professor He Jiahong, Doctor of Juridicial Science and Professor of Law, People’s University of China School of Law; Professor Yijun Pi, Vice-Director of the Institute of Legal Sociology and Juvenile Delinquency, China University of Political Science and Law; Dr Véronique Dumestre-Toulet of Laboratoire BIOffice, France; Mac McCowan, of ChinaPic, Shanghai; Calum MacLeod and Zhang Lijia for Beijing Snow World and the frozen cottage at Dalingjiang; and Shimei Jiang for her insights into I Ching.
‘I say everyone should die healthy!’
– Tom McKillop,
Head of AstraZeneca,
July 2001
Prologue
The swimmers come in by the south gate, off Chengfu Lu. A dozen of them, balancing carefully in the early evening dark as plummeting temperatures turn the snow-melt to ice under the slithering tyres of their bicycles. The only thing that can dampen their spirits ahead of tomorrow’s competition is the death that lies in silent wait for them just minutes away.
But for now, their only focus ahead is the warm chlorine-filled air, water slipping easily over sleek, toned muscles, the rasp of lungs pumping air in the vast echoing chamber of the pool. A final training session before confrontation tomorrow with the Americans. A flutter of fear in the stomach, a rush of adrenaline that accompanies the thought. So much riding on them. The aspirations of a nation. China. More than a billion people investing their hopes in the efforts of this chosen few. An onerous responsibility.
They wave at the guard who glares sullenly at them as they cycle past. He stamps frozen feet and hugs his fur-lined grey coat tighter for warmth, icy breath clouding around his head like smoke.
Turning right, by pink accommodation blocks, the swimmers shout their exuberance into the clearest of night skies. The foggy vapour of their breath clearing in their wake like the pollution the authorities have promised to sweep from Beijing’s summer skies before the world finally descends for the Greatest Show on Earth. Past the towering columns of the Department of Mechanics, legs pumping in unison, they slew into the main drag. Ahead of them, the ten lit storeys of the master building shine coldly in the darkness. On their right, the floodlit concrete angles of the Department of Technology. On their left, the imposing steps of the Department of Law. The vast, sprawling campus of Qinghua University, dubbed by one American Vice-President as the MIT of China, is laid out before them, delineated in the dark by light reflecting off piles of swept snow. But it is not a reputation for excellence in science and technology which has brought them to this place. It is another kind of excellence. In sport. It is here that John Ma inspired the rebirth of Chinese sport more than seventy years ago, building the first modern sports complex in China. Snow rests now on his head and shoulders, gathering also in his lap, a cold stone statue by a frozen lake somewhere away to their left.
But they are not even aware of this nugget of history, of the statue, of the old pool where Mao used to swim in splendid isolation while the building was ringed by armed guards. They are interested only in the lights, beyond the gymnasium and the running track, of the natatorium. For it is here they have spent these last weeks, burning muscles, pushing themselves to the limits of pain and endurance, urged on by the relentless hoarse barking of their coach.
As they pass beneath the shadow of the athletics stand, a handful of students bounce a ball around a floodlit basketball court scraped clear of snow, sport for them a recreation. Their only pressure is academic, and failure will disappoint only their families and friends.
The swimmers park up among the hundreds of bicycles stacked in rows beneath the student apartments. Washed clothes left hanging on balconies are already frozen stiff. They trot across the concourse, swinging arms to keep warm, and push open the double doors of the east entrance, warm air stinging cold skin. Down deserted corridors to the locker room which has become so drably familiar, synonymous with the pain of the training which they hope will reap its rewards in just a few intense minutes of competition. The hundred metres butterfly. The two hundred metres crawl. The backstroke, the freestyle. The relay.
It is only as they strip and drag on costumes that they notice he is missing.
‘Hey, where’s Sui Mingshan?’
‘Said he’d meet us here,’ someone replies. ‘You see him when we came in?’
‘No … ’ Heads shake. No one has seen him. He isn’t here. Which is unusual. Because if anything, Sui Mingshan is the keenest of them. Certainly the fastest, and the most likely to beat the Americans. The best prospect for the Olympics.
‘He probably got held up by the weather.’
They pass through the disinfectant foot bath and climb steps leading up to the pool, excited voices echoing between the
rows of empty blue seats in the auditorium, wet feet slapping on dry tiles. The electronic clock above the north end of the pool shows ten to seven.
When they first see him, they are slow to understand. A moment of incomprehension, a silly joke, and then a silence not broken even by breathing as they realise, finally, what it is they are witnessing.
Sui Mingshan is naked, his long, finely sculpted body turning slowly in a movement forced by air conditioning. He has fine, broad shoulders tapering to a slim waist. He has no hips to speak of, but his thighs beneath them are curved and powerful, built to propel him through water faster than any other living human. Except that he is no longer living. His head is twisted at an unnatural angle where the rope around his neck has broken his fall and snapped his neck. He dangles almost midway between the highest of the diving platforms above and the still waters of the diving pool below. He is flanked on either side by tall strips of white fabric, red numbers counting off the metres up to ten, recording that he died at five.
It takes all of the swimmers, the team-mates who had known him best, several moments to realise who he is. For his head of thick, black hair has been shaved to the scalp, and in death he looks oddly unfamiliar.
Chapter One
The walls were a pale, pastel pink, pasted with posters illustrating exercises for posture and breathing. The grey linoleum was cool beneath her, the air warm and filled with the concentrated sounds of deep breathing. Almost hypnotic.
Margaret tried to ignore the ache in her lower back which had begun to trouble her over the last couple of weeks. She sat with her back straight and stretched her legs out in front of her. Then she slowly bent her knees, bringing the soles of her feet together and pulling them back towards her. She always found this exercise particularly difficult. Now in her mid-thirties, she was ten years older than most of the other women here, and joints and muscles would not twist and stretch with the same ease they had once done. She closed her eyes and concentrated on stretching her spine as she breathed in deeply, and then relaxing her shoulders and the back of her neck as she breathed out again.
She opened her eyes and looked at the women laid out on the floor around her. Most were lying on their sides with pillows beneath their heads. Upper arms and legs were bent upwards, a pillow supporting the knee. Lower legs were extended and straight. Expectant fathers squatted by their wives’ heads, eyes closed, breathing as one with the mothers of their unborn children. It was the new Friendly to Family Policy in practice. Where once men had been banned from the maternity wards of Chinese hospitals, their presence was now encouraged. Single rooms for mother and child, with a fold-down sofa for the father, were available on the second floor of the First Teaching Hospital of Beijing Medical University for Women and Children. For those who could afford them. The going rate of four hundred yuan per day was double the weekly income of the average worker.
Margaret felt a pang of jealousy. She knew that there would be a good reason for Li Yan’s failure to turn up. There always was. An armed robbery. A murder. A rape. A meeting he could not escape. And she could not blame him for it. But she felt deprived of him; frustrated that she was the only one amongst twenty whose partner regularly failed to attend; anxious that in her third trimester, she was the only one in her antenatal class who was not married. While attitudes in the West might have changed, single mothers in China were still frowned upon. She stood out from the crowd in every way, and not just because of her Celtic blue eyes and fair hair.
From across the room she caught Jon Macken looking at her. He grinned and winked. She forced a smile. The only thing they really had in common was their American citizenship. Since returning to Beijing with a view to making it her permanent home, Margaret had done her best to avoid the expat crowd. They liked to get together for gatherings in restaurants and at parties, cliquish and smug and superior. Although many had married Chinese, most made no attempt to integrate. And it was an open secret that these Westerners were often seen by their Chinese partners as one-way tickets to the First World.
To be fair to Macken, he did not fall into this category. A freelance photographer, he had come to China five years earlier on an assignment and fallen in love with his translator. He was somewhere in his middle sixties, and Yixuan was four years younger than Margaret. Neither of them wanted to leave China, and Macken had established himself in Beijing as the photographer of choice when it came to snapping visiting dignitaries, or shooting the glossies for the latest joint venture.
Yixuan had appointed herself unofficial translator for a bewildered Margaret when they attended their first antenatal class together. Margaret had been lost in a sea of unintelligible Chinese, for like almost every class since, Li had not been there. Margaret and Yixuan had become friends, occasionally meeting for afternoon tea in one of the city’s more fashionable teahouses. But, like Margaret, Yixuan was a loner, and so their friendship was conducted at a distance, unobtrusive, and therefore tolerable.
As the class broke up, Yixuan waddled across the room to Margaret. She smiled sympathetically. ‘Still the police widow?’ she said.
Margaret shrugged, struggling to her feet. ‘I knew it went with the territory. So I can’t complain.’ She placed the flats of her hands on the joints above her buttocks and arched her back. ‘God … ’ she sighed. ‘Will this ever pass?’
‘When the baby does,’ Yixuan said.
‘I don’t know if I can take it for another whole month.’
Yixuan found a slip of paper in her purse and began scribbling on it in spidery Chinese characters. She said, without looking up, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, Margaret. You have only a few more left to take.’
‘Yeh, but they’re the hardest,’ Margaret complained. ‘The first one was easy. It involved sex.’
‘Did I hear someone mention my favourite subject?’ Macken shuffled over to join them. He cut an oddly scrawny figure in his jeans and tee-shirt, with his cropped grey hair and patchy white beard.
Yixuan thrust her scribbled note into his hand. ‘If you take this down to the store on the corner,’ she said, ‘they’ll box the stuff for you. I’ll get a taxi and meet you there in about ten minutes.’
Macken glanced at the note and grinned. ‘You know, that’s what I love about China,’ he said to Margaret. ‘It makes me feel young again. I mean, who can remember the last time they were sent down to the grocery store with a note they couldn’t read?’ He turned his grin on Yixuan and pecked her affectionately on the cheek. ‘I’ll catch up with you later, hon.’ He patted her belly. ‘Both of you.’
Margaret and Yixuan made their way carefully downstairs together, holding the handrail like two old women, wrapped up warm to meet the blast of cold night air that would greet them as they stepped out into the car park. Yixuan waited while Margaret searched for her bike, identifying it from the dozens of others parked in the cycle racks by the scrap of pink ribbon tied to the basket on the handlebars. She walked, wheeling it, with Yixuan to the main gate.
‘You should not still be riding that thing,’ Yixuan said.
Margaret laughed. ‘You’re just jealous because Jon won’t let you ride yours.’ In America Margaret would have been discouraged at every stage of her pregnancy from riding a bicycle. And during the first trimester, when the risk of another miscarriage was at its highest, she had kept it locked away in the university compound. But when her doctors told her that the worst had passed, and that the baby was firmly rooted, she had dug it out again, fed up with crowded buses and overfull subway carriages. She had been at more danger, she figured, on public transport, than on her bike. And, anyway, women here cycled right up until their waters broke, and she saw no reason to be different in yet another way.
Yixuan squeezed her arm. ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you Wednesday.’ And she watched as Margaret slipped on to her saddle and pulled out into the stream of bicycles heading west in the cycle lane. Margaret’s scarf muffled her nose and mouth against the biting co
ld of the Beijing night. Her woollen hat, pulled down over her forehead, kept her head cosy and warm. But nothing could stop her eyes from watering. The forecasters had been predicting minus twenty centigrade, and it felt like they were right. She kept her head down, ignoring the roar of traffic on the main carriageway of Xianmen Dajie. On the other side of the road, beyond the high grey-painted walls of Zhongnanhai, the leadership of this vast land were safe and warm in the centrally heated villas that lined the frozen lakes of Zhonghai and Nanhai. In the real world outside, people swaddled themselves in layers of clothes and burned coal briquettes in tiny stoves.
The restaurants and snack stalls were doing brisk business beneath the stark winter trees that lined the sidewalk. The tinny tannoyed voice of a conductress berating passengers on her bus permeated the night air. There were always, it seemed, voices emitting from loudspeakers and megaphones, announcing this, selling that. Often harsh, nasal female tones, reflecting a society in which women dominated domestically, if not politically.
Not for the first time, Margaret found herself wondering what the hell she was doing here. An on-off relationship with a Beijing cop, a child conceived in error and then miscarried in tears. A decision that needed to be taken, a commitment that had to be made. Or not. And then a second conception. Although not entirely unplanned, it had made the decision for her. And so here she was. A highly paid Chief Medical Examiner’s job in Texas abandoned for a poorly remunerated lecturing post at the University of Public Security in Beijing, training future Chinese cops in the techniques of modern forensic pathology. Not that they would let her teach any more. Maternity leave was enforced. She felt as if everything she had worked to become had been stripped away, leaving her naked and exposed in her most basic state – as a woman and mother-to-be. And soon-to-be wife, with the wedding just a week away. They were not roles she had ever seen herself playing, and she was not sure they would ever come naturally.