by Peter May
‘Instinct,’ she said. ‘No matter what causes it, in the end we all die because our hearts stop. On the face of it, I can’t find any reason why this particular subject’s heart stopped. It was firm, the size you would expect. The epicardium was smooth and had the usual amount of epicardial fat. The musculature of both the left and right heart was red-brown, and grossly there were no areas of infarct or fibrosis. The endocardial surface had a normal appearance and there were no mural thrombi. The valves were thin and pliable and neither stenoic nor dilated. The coronary arteries had a normal distribution with little or no atherosclerotic disease. There were no thrombi, and the aorta was patent, without injury, and again showing minimal atherosclerosis.’ She smiled at him, enjoying the opportunity to exercise her knowledge.
He gave her a look. ‘All of which means … ?’
‘That I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. There was no obvious reason why it stopped beating.’
She set her samples on a rack in the cold working area of the cryostat and pressed metal heat sinks against the face of the tissue, to flatten and to freeze it. Minutes later, the samples were ready. She transferred the first one, still in its chuck, to a special cutting area where she drew a wafer-thin blade across its surface. She touched the wisp-thin section of tissue on to a glass microscope slide and Li saw it melt instantly. She stained it with chemicals, and slipped the glass under her microscope to peer at it through the lens.
After a moment she straightened up, pressing both her hands into her lumber region and arching backwards. She appeared to be looking at Li, but he saw that her eyes were glazed. She was looking right through him at something that existed only in her mind.
‘What is it?’ he said.
Her focus returned, but all her flippancy was gone. ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it in a healthy young male before,’ she said, and she shook her head. ‘In stimulant abusers, yes. Cocaine, methamphetamine, could do it. But I don’t think this young man was into stimulants. Steroids, perhaps, although there’s no evidence of that yet.’
Li said, ‘He was urine-tested a week before he died.’
‘And?’
‘He was clean.’
Margaret nodded.
But Li couldn’t contain his impatience any longer. ‘So what did you see in the microscope?’
Margaret said, ‘There are big coronary arteries on the surface of the heart that we all seem to manage to clog up as we age. It’s the most common cause of what you might call a heart attack.’ She paused. ‘But there are also tiny arteries that run through the muscle of the heart. Microvasculature we call them. It’s possible for these to thicken, but for the heart to still look normal, even when it’s sectioned. It takes a microscopic section to reveal the problem.’
Li was unaccountably disappointed. This didn’t sound like much of a revelation. ‘And that’s what Xing had?’ Margaret nodded. ‘So what clogged them?’
‘The thing is,’ she said, frustrated in her attempt to describe what she had seen, ‘they’re not really clogged with anything. It’s like the smooth muscle that lines those tiny arterioles got hypertrophied, thickened somehow. Effectively they closed themselves up and caused him to have a massive coronary.’
‘What would make them do that?’
She shrugged, at a loss. ‘I’ve no idea.’
Li was impatient. ‘Come on, Margaret, you must have some thought about it.’
She tutted. ‘Well, if you were to ask me to guess, and that’s all it would be, I’d say it looked like they could – maybe – been attacked by some kind of virus.’
‘If it was a virus, you’d be able to find it in his blood, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ She prevaricated again. ‘The thing is, knowing what you’re looking for. And if you don’t know that there’s even something there … ’
Sun had followed Li over to the table, listening intently, concentrating hard on trying to understand everything. But the technical vocabulary had been beyond him. ‘So how he die?’ he asked Margaret.
‘At this stage it’s just a theory,’ Margaret said. ‘And if you quote me I’ll deny it. But in layman’s terms, it looks like he had a heart attack brought on – maybe – by a virus.’
Li’s abortive interview at Beijing Security seemed a lifetime away now, of little importance, and no relevance. Instead his head was filled with a single, perplexing question. He gave it voice. ‘Why would you take someone who had died of natural causes and try to make it appear they had been killed in a car crash?’
Margaret waggled a finger. ‘I can’t answer that one for you, Li Yan. But I have another question that we can answer very quickly.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Were our suicide-murder and our weightlifter also suffering from a thickening of the microvasculature?’
Li looked nonplussed. ‘Were they?’
Margaret laughed. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to look, won’t we?’ She pushed her goggles back on her forehead. ‘I prepared permanent paraffin sections of Sui Mingshan’s heart for storage. I assume Doctor Wang will have done the same with Jia Jing’s. Why don’t you phone him and ask him to look at sections of Jia’s heart under the microscope while I dig out the ones I prepared yesterday?’
When Li returned from telephoning Pau Jü Hutong, Margaret had dug out the slides the lab had prepared with the tissue reserved from the previous day’s autopsy, and she was slipping the first one under the microscope. She set her eyes to the lens and adjusted the focus. After a moment she inclined her head and looked up at Li. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘If someone hadn’t taken our boy out and strung him up from a diving platform at Qinghua his heart would have seized up on him. Sooner rather than later. Same as our friend on the table. He had pronounced thickening of the microvasculature.’
There was nothing to discuss. The facts spoke for themselves, but made absolutely no sense. And Li was reluctant to start jumping to conclusions before they had heard from Doctor Wang. So Margaret had the results of the toxicology on Sui’s samples sent up from the lab. By now they were used to preparing copies for her in English as well as Chinese. She had stripped off her gown and her apron, her gloves and her mask and had scrubbed her hands, although she would not feel clean until she had taken a shower. She sat on a desk in the pathologists’ office and read through the results while Li and Sun watched in expectant silence. She shrugged. ‘As I predicted, I think. Blood alcohol level almost zero-point-four percent. Apart from that, nothing unusual. And nothing that would suggest he had been taking steroids. At least, not in the last month. But I’ll need to ask them to screen his blood again for viruses. Though, like I said, you really need to know what you’re looking for.’
The phone rang, and Li nearly snatched the receiver from its cradle. It was Wang. He listened for almost two minutes without comment, and then thanked the doctor and hung up. He said, ‘Jia also had marked thickening of the microvasculature. But Wang says it was still the narrowing of the main coronary artery that killed him.’
Margaret said, ‘Yes, but the thickening of the arterioles would have done the job eventually, even if his artery hadn’t burst on him.’
Li nodded. ‘That’s pretty much what Wang said. Oh, and toxicology also confirmed, no steroids.’
Sun had again been concentrating on following the English. And now he turned to Li and said, ‘So if Jia Jing hadn’t died of a heart attack, he would probably have turned up dead in an accident somewhere, or “committed suicide”.’
Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Probably. And he’d probably have had that long pony tail of his shaved off.’ He paused, frowning in consternation. ‘But why?’
III
The briefing was short and to the point. The meeting room was filled with detectives and smoke. Nearly every officer in the section was there, and there were not enough chairs for them all. Some leaned against the wall sipping their green tea. Deputy Section Chief Tao Heng sat listening resentfully, nursing his grudge
s to keep them warm in this cold, crowded room.
Delivering the preliminary autopsy reports to the section helped Li clarify things in his own head, assembling facts in some kind of relevant order, creating that order out of what still felt like chaos.
‘What is clear,’ he told them, ‘is that we have one murder, and at least three suspicious deaths. There is little doubt from the findings of the autopsy, that the swimmer Sui Mingshan did not commit suicide. He was murdered. Xing Da, who was driving the car in which the three athletes died, was dead before the car crashed. So the accident was staged. And although we don’t have their bodies for confirmation, I think we have to assume that the other two were also dead prior to the crash. But what’s bizarre is that Xing seems to have died from natural causes. Possibly a virus which attacked the microscopic arteries of the heart.’
He looked around the faces in the room, all clutching their preliminary reports and listening, rapt, as Li laid out the facts before them like the strange and incomprehensible pieces of a gruesome riddle. ‘Stranger still is the fact that the swimmer Sui Mingshan, and the weightlifter Jia Jing, were suffering from exactly the same thing as Xing. Hypertrophy – thickening – of the microvasculature. Both would have died from it sooner or later if murder and fate had not intervened.’
He watched Wu pulling on a cigarette and he ached to suck a mouthful of smoke into his own lungs. He imagined how it would relieve his ache immediately and draw a veil of calm over his troubled mind. He forced the thought out of his head. ‘But perhaps the strangest thing of all, is that each of them had had his head shaved. With the exception, of course, of Jia.’
Wu cut in. ‘Could that be because he was the only one who really did die a natural death? I mean, sure, this clogging of the tiny arteries would have killed him in the end, but he died before anyone could mess with him.’
One of the other detectives said, ‘But why was anybody messing with any of them anyway, if it was some virus that was killing them?’
‘I’d have thought that was pretty fucking obvious,’ Wu said. And immediately he caught Deputy Section Chief Tao’s disapproving eye. He raised a hand. ‘Sorry, boss. I know. Ten yuan. It’s already in the box.’
‘What’s fucking obvious, Wu?’ Li said. It was a deliberate slap in the face of his deputy. There was some stifled laughter around the room.
Wu grinned. ‘Well, all these people had some kind of virus, right?’
‘Maybe,’ Li qualified.
‘And obviously someone else didn’t want anyone to know about it.’
‘A conspiracy,’ Li said.
‘Sure.’
‘And the shaven heads?’
Wu shrugged. ‘Jia’s head wasn’t shaved.’
‘You said yourself his death probably took your conspirators by surprise.’
Wu said, ‘There’s also the cyclist. We don’t know that his head was shaved.’
‘We don’t know that he’s involved at all,’ Li said.
‘Actually, I think we do, Chief.’ This from Qian. All heads turned in his direction.
‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.
Qian said, ‘I spoke to the doctor who signed the death certificate. He remembered quite distinctly that the deceased’s head had been shaved. Recently, he thought. There were several nick marks on the scalp.’ There was an extended period of silence around the room, before he added. ‘And there’s something else.’ He waited.
‘Well?’ Deputy Tao said impatiently.
‘The three “friends” who were with him when he fell into the pool? They’ve all gone back to Taiwan. So none of them are available for further questioning.’
‘And that’s it?’ The deputy section chief was not impressed.
Qian glanced uncertainly at Li. ‘Well, no … I’ve got a friend in the Taipei police … I flew the names by him.’ And he added quickly, ‘Quite unofficially.’ Relations between Beijing and Taipei were particularly strained at the moment. There was no official co-operation between the respective police forces.
‘Go on,’ Li said.
‘The three of them are known to the police there.’ He paused. ‘All suspected members, apparently, of a Hong Kong-based gang of Triads.’
More silence around the room. And then Li said, ‘So somebody brought them over here to be witnesses to an “accident”.’
‘And got them out again pretty fucking fast,’ Wu said. He screwed up his eyes as he realised what he had said, and his hand shot up. ‘Sorry, boss. Another ten yuan.’
There was laughter around the room. But Li was not smiling. The more they knew, it seemed, the more dense the mist of obfuscation that surrounded this case became.
* * *
Deputy Section Chief Tao pursued Li down the corridor after the meeting. ‘We need to talk, Chief,’ he said.
‘Not now.’
‘It’s important.’
Li stopped and turned and found the older man regarding him with a mixture of frustration and dislike. ‘What is it?’
‘Not something I think we should discuss in the corridor,’ Tao said pointedly.
Li waved his hand dismissively. ‘I don’t have time just now. I have a lunch appointment.’ And he turned and headed towards the stairs where Sun was waiting for him.
Tao stood and watched him go with a deep resentment burning in his heart.
IV
The Old Beijing Zhajiang Noodle King restaurant was on the south-west corner of Chongwenmenwai Dajie, above Tiantan Park and opposite the new Hong Zhou shopping mall, where you could buy just about any size of pearl you could imagine, and the smell of the sea was almost overpowering. Which was strange for a city so far from the ocean. The Zhajiang Noodle King was a traditional restaurant, serving traditional Beijing food, of which the noodle was indisputably king. Hence the name.
Li and Sun had picked up Sun’s wife from the police apartments in Zhengyi Road en route to Tiantan, and as Li parked outside a cake shop in the alleyway next to the restaurant, they saw Margaret standing on the steps waiting for them. Her bike was chained with a group of others by the entrance to a shop opposite. Li saw the little piece of pink ribbon tied to the basket fluttering in the chill breeze and felt a momentary stab of anger. He had asked her repeatedly not to cycle again until after the baby was born, but she had insisted that she would be no different from any other Chinese woman, and took her bicycle everywhere. It was his baby, too, he had told her. And she had suggested that he try carrying it around in his belly on buses and underground trains, squeezed up against the masses. She was adamant that she was safer on her bike.
The introductions were made on the steps outside the restaurant. Wen’s English was even poorer than Sun’s. She was in her early twenties, a slight, pretty girl on whom the swelling of her baby seemed unnaturally large. She shook Margaret’s hand coyly, unaccustomed to socialising with foreign devils. ‘Verr pleased meet you,’ she said, blushing. ‘You call me by English name. Christina.’ Margaret sighed inwardly. A lot of young Chinese girls liked to give themselves English names, as if it made them somehow more accessible, or more sophisticated. But it never came naturally to Margaret to use them. She preferred to stick to the Chinese, or avoid using the name at all.
‘Hi,’ she said, putting a face on it. ‘I’m Margaret.’
With difficulty, Wen got her tongue part of the way around this strange, foreign name. ‘Maggot,’ she said.
Margaret flicked a glance in Li’s direction and saw him smirking. She got Maggot a lot. Her inclination was always to point out that a maggot was a nasty little grub that liked to feed on dead flesh. But since this might leave her open to a smart retort from anyone with a good handle on English, she usually refrained. ‘You can call me Maggie,’ she said.
‘Maggee,’ Wen said and smiled, pleased with herself. And Margaret knew they were never going to be soul mates.
Inside, a maitre d’ in a traditional Chinese jacket stood by a carving of an old man holding up a bird cage. ‘Se wei!’ he holl
ered, and Margaret nearly jumped out of her skin. Almost immediately, from behind a large piece of ornately carved furniture that screened off the restaurant, came a chorus of voices returning the call. ‘Se wei!’
Margaret turned to Li, perplexed. ‘What are they shouting at?’ He had not brought her here before.
‘Se wei!’ Li repeated. ‘Four guests.’ The maitre d’ called again and was answered once more by the chorus from the other side of the screen. He indicated that they should follow him. Li said, ‘It is traditional to announce how many guests are coming into the restaurant. And every waiter will call to you, wanting you to go to his table.’
When they emerged from behind the screen, rows of square lacquered tables stretched out before them, to a wall covered in framed inscriptions and ancient wall hangings at the back, and a panoramic window opening on to the street on their left. White-jacketed chefs with tall white hats worked feverishly behind long counters preparing the food, while each table was attended by a young waiter wearing the traditional blue jacket with white turned-up cuffs, and a neatly folded white towel draped over his left shoulder. A cacophony of calls greeted the four guests, every waiter calling out, indicating that he would like to serve them at his table. As they were early, and most of the tables were not yet occupied, the noise was deafening.
Li led them to a table near the back and Sun and Wen looked around, wide-eyed. The Beijing Noodle King was a new experience for them, too. Margaret imagined that they probably had more experience of Burger King. ‘Shall I order?’ Li asked, and they nodded. Li took the menu and looked at it only briefly. He knew what was good. His Uncle Yifu had brought him here often while he was still a student at the University of Public Security.
The waiter scrawled their order in a pale blue notepad and hurried off to one of the long counters. A fresh chorus of calls greeted a party of six.
‘So,’ Wen said above the noise, and she patted her stomach, ‘how long?’
‘Me?’ Margaret asked. Wen nodded. ‘A month.’