The Runner

by Peter May

  Mei Yuan greeted them at the door. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Campbell.’

  And Mrs. Campbell put on her brave face. ‘Mei Yuan,’ she said, her pronunciation still less than perfect.

  ‘I thought today I might teach you how to make jian bing.’

  Mei Yuan smiled mischievously.

  ‘Jan beeng?’ Mrs. Campbell frowned.

  ‘Yes, you remember, Mom, I told you. That’s the Beijing pancakes that Mei Yuan makes at her stall.’

  Her mother looked horrified. But Mei Yuan took her hand to lead her into the house. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure I can find you some heavy clothes to keep you warm.’

  Margaret said quickly, ‘Got to go. Have a good day. I’ll catch up with you later.’ And before her mother could object she was gone, and the taxi went slithering off down the lakeside road.

  * * *

  The corridor on the top floor of Section One was deserted. Margaret looked into the detectives’ room, but it was empty. She heard the distant hum of the central heating boiler, and the muted tapping of fingers on keyboards coming from another floor. She walked on down the corridor and heard voices coming from the big meeting room at the end. Lots of voices, some of them raised. She heard coughing and the clearing of throats, a brief ripple of nervous laughter. She smelled the cigarette smoke out here. And then one voice silencing the others, grave and authoritative. She recognised it immediately. Li. When she had phoned the hospital earlier he had already gone. She was glad to hear that there was nothing wrong with his voice at least. She smiled to herself and went into his office and closed the door to wait for him.

  His desk was piled high with folders and strewn with all manner of papers. There were binders piled along the wall beneath the window and on top of the filing cabinet. She could not imagine what was in them all, or how Li ever found time to read them. The Chinese police, it seemed to her, were obsessed by paperwork, by the minutest collection of every shred of evidence, no matter how small, no matter how remotely connected. There were rarely any sudden leaps forward in an investigation. It was always pedantic and painstaking, and took for ever. Li, alone among the policemen she knew here, had developed an unnervingly accurate instinct for the cases he worked, would follow an intuition, make a leap of faith. He cracked more cases, more quickly, than anyone else. But he went against tradition, rubbed his superiors up the wrong way, stepped on toes, made enemies. By comparison, the cutting up of dead bodies was child’s play.

  She smiled to herself and sat in his seat and saw Macken’s prints strewn across the desk beneath an open folder. She moved the folder aside and began idling through the photographs. She had no idea what they were. Grainy colour prints of some very upmarket sort of establishment. A swimming pool, sauna, restaurants, conference rooms. She stopped for a moment and looked at a picture of a girl standing by a desk looking at the camera. An attractive girl with her hair pulled back rather severely. She dropped it and moved on, stopping again at the only other picture with people in it. Three young men in dark suits, a fourth, bigger man, in a tracksuit, and a Westerner. A man perhaps in his middle sixties, with a head of well-groomed white hair and a close-cropped silver beard. He was tall. Taller than the Chinese, and good-looking in a rugged, sunbed sort of way. While the men in suits looked stiff and formal, the Westerner appeared relaxed, his open-necked shirt worn like a badge of informality. The odd thing was that he seemed vaguely familiar. Margaret was puzzled, because she knew that she didn’t know him, and anyway China was somehow the wrong setting. And yet the grainy quality of the picture was strangely apposite. And then she knew she had seen his picture in a newspaper, or a newsreel. Where, or when, she had no idea. But the familiarity of his face made it likely that she had seen it more than once. She struggled to try to find a context for it, but infuriatingly nothing would come. She put the picture down. If she forced her conscious attention elsewhere, perhaps her subconscious would do the hard work for her.

  It was then that she noticed the pile of photographs lying on the top folder on the desk. From her oblique angle she could see that they were taken at a crime scene. A body lying in blood. She pulled them down to take a look and was shocked by the number of stab wounds puncturing the young woman’s naked body. She could see, even from the photograph, that a knife, or knives, had rained down on her in repeated slashing strokes. Although, oddly, they did not appear to be frenzied strokes like you might expect when so many wounds had been inflicted. There was something almost regular, controlled, about them. It smacked of ritual. And then she looked at the face and realised it was the attractive girl standing by the desk in the photograph she had been looking at just moments earlier.

  * * *

  Li had been caught off-balance by the death of JoJo. His whole mindset had been elsewhere, focused on another case, and he had been so certain that the girl under the sheet would be Dai Lili. Although in retrospect, searching through the rationale which had led him to that expectation, he had found none. There were dozens of young women murdered every year.

  But not like this.

  The detectives in the room who had been at the scene were still shocked by the image of the girl in the pavilion, blood frozen on the stone. Men who had seen things they cared to remember only in their worst nightmares. But something about the sheer brutality of JoJo’s murder, the extraordinary number of stab wounds, had left each and every one of them shaken. Yet one more image to file away in the darkest recesses of their minds.

  The detectives who had not been there were shocked by the photographs strewn across the desk.

  Everyone listened in silence now as Li took them through the events of the preceding day when he and Qian had followed up what had initially seemed like a minor break-in at a photographer’s studio. A sequence of events which had led them to an instant recognition of the girl in the park, and the thought that perhaps in some way the break-in and the murder might be connected.

  They kicked around the idea that the photographs had been stolen in preparation for a burglary, that JoJo was in some way involved. It was she who had got Macken the job of taking the pics, after all. But if she was involved, why would they need Macken’s photographs? Surely her inside knowledge would have been far more useful? And as the club’s CEO had pointed out, the pictures were going to be published anyway, in a glossy brochure, and on the Internet. And why would any of this have led to her murder, particularly in such a brutal and bloody way? Li was specifically concerned that she had been taken someplace so public, where she was bound to be discovered, laid out on the stone dais as if on a sacrificial altar.

  ‘You think somebody’s trying to tell us something, Chief?’ Wu asked.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s aimed at us,’ Li said. ‘But it’s as if her killers were making a statement of some kind. There’s something incredibly cold and calculated about her murder. Although she was naked, there’s no hint of any sexual motivation. I mean, if you’re going to take a girl to a park in the middle of the night, strip her, stab her to death and then leave her spread out on a stone slab for the world to see, you’d have to have a reason, wouldn’t you? And the fact that there were half a dozen or more of them involved, means there was collusion, planning.’ He shook his head. ‘Like some kind of ritual, or sacrifice, or both.’ Unknowingly he had touched on the same thought as Margaret, although for different reasons.

  He was both horrified and intrigued, but also acutely aware that time was running out, at least for him. And this case was a distraction, a sideshow at the main event. His announcement that he was putting Sun in charge of it was met with silence. Most of the officers in the room were more senior than Sun, and any one of them might have cause to feel resentful, or jealous. But Li needed them focused on the dead athletes. He snatched a glance at Tao sitting at the other end of the table, and saw the animosity simmering silently in his eyes. The most natural thing would have been for him to delegate the JoJo murder to his deputy. But he was unwilling to place too much trust in Tao. He quickly looked
away. There were bigger issues than office politics.

  ‘I don’t want us losing our focus on the athletics case,’ he said. ‘Because the events of the last twenty-four hours are starting to raise some serious issues, not least for our own investigation.’ He paused. ‘Someone with inside knowledge has been tampering with evidence.’

  This time the silence around the table was positively tangible. Even the smoke from their cigarettes appeared to freeze in mid-air. Li explained himself, going through, step by step, the sequence of events which had led him the previous evening to Dai Lili’s apartment in Haidian District, and the discovery of the Chanel perfume and the gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. ‘It would stretch credibility beyond acceptable limits to believe that Jia, Sui and Dai all used the same scents, and all carried the same aerosol breath freshener.’ He laid his hands out flat on the table in front of him. ‘Now, I have no idea what the significance of perfumes and breath fresheners are. But that they have significance in this case is beyond doubt. After I took one of the Chanel bottles from Dai’s apartment last night, all the other bottles disappeared from the other apartments.’

  Qian said, ‘How do you know they weren’t taken before that?’

  ‘I don’t,’ Li said. ‘Except that you yourself went this morning to get the bottle I left in Dai Lili’s apartment last night, and it was gone. I suspect now that my attack was not, after all, unrelated to the case, and that the bottle I took would have been taken by my attackers if it hadn’t broken in my pocket. But the very fact that I had taken it clearly alerted someone to the fact that I suspected a significance. And so, all those seemingly innocent bottles in the other apartments had to go.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that someone within the section is responsible for that?’ Tao asked, and there was no mistaking the hostility in his voice.

  ‘No,’ Li said. ‘I’m not. But somebody is watching us very carefully. Somebody seems to know enough about what we’re doing and where we’re at to stay one step ahead of us.’ He took a long, slow breath. ‘I thought, last night, that the breath freshener I took from Dai’s apartment was still in my jacket pocket. Now, I took a bit of a battering, and in all the confusion, I could have been wrong about this. But when I got back here from Jingshan this morning, I got a call from the lab at Pau Jü Hutong to tell me they couldn’t find any breath freshener.’ More silence. ‘Doctor Campbell took the jacket last night from the hospital to the lab, sealed in an evidence bag. It was locked in the repository overnight until the technicians came in this morning. No breath freshener. It may be that it wasn’t there in the first place, that my attackers took it last night. Or it may be that someone removed it from the repository during the night. Either way, apparently they didn’t know that we already had another one.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Wu said suddenly, remembering. ‘Jia Jing had one on him. We found it when we went through his stuff at the autopsy.’

  Li nodded. ‘So we still have something to analyse. And what the stealers of the perfume didn’t realise either, is that there was enough of it soaked into my jacket for us to analyse that, too. With luck, we’ll have the results of both those tests later today.’

  ‘What about the girl?’ Sang said. ‘The runner, Dai Lili. What do you think has happened to her?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Li said. ‘But I have no doubt that her disappearance is related to all the other cases. And I don’t expect to find her alive.’ He let that thought sink in for some moments. ‘But until we know she’s dead, we have to assume that she’s not. And that means we’ve got to move this case forward as fast as we possibly can.’ He sat back and looked around the faces in the room. ‘So who’s got anything fresh?’

  Qian raised a finger. ‘I dug up some interesting financial facts and figures, Chief.’ He flipped through his notebook. ‘I’ve been going through bank statements, checking accounts, assets … Seems like all these athletes had pretty extravagant lifestyles. Expensive apartments, flashy cars, nice clothes. And, sure, they all had money in their bank accounts that any one of us would be happy to retire on. Prize money, sponsorship … But not nearly enough to cover their costs.’

  Li leaned forward on his elbows. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘They were all living way beyond their means. I mean, way beyond their officially declared earnings, or what was going through their bank accounts. They all had credit cards, but they didn’t use them much. Meals and air fares and stuff. Everything else was paid for in cash. Cars, computers, clothes. And the monthly rental on those expensive apartments? Cash again. They’d all show up at the letting office every month with big wads of notes.’

  ‘So somebody was paying them in cash,’ one of the detectives said.

  ‘What for?’ Wu asked.

  Qian shrugged. ‘Who knows? It certainly wasn’t for throwing races. I mean, they were all winning big time. Real medal prospects.’ He chuckled. ‘And you can hardly pay someone to win. I mean, not in advance.’

  The room fell silent yet again. So what were they being paid for?

  Wu cleared his throat noisily and stuck a piece of gum in his mouth. ‘I came across something interesting,’ he said. ‘Don’t know if it means shit, but it’s a strange one.’

  ‘They don’t come much stranger than you, Wu,’ another detective said, and a brief ripple of laughter relieved a little of the tension.

  ‘What is it?’ Li asked.

  Wu said, ‘Well, I noticed from a couple of the statements that some of the deceased had been suffering from the flu not long before they died.’ Li suddenly remembered Sui’s coach, Zhang, when they interviewed him at the poolside. He had a bout of flu about ten days ago, he had said of Sui. Knocked the stuffing out of him. And Xing Da’s father. He had told Li that Xing was supposed to have visited his parents at the end of October, for his mother’s birthday. But he phoned to say he couldn’t come, because he and some other members of the team had picked up the flu at a meeting in Shanghai.

  Wu went on, ‘So I checked. Turns out that every one of them, including our weightlifter, who we know died of natural causes, suffered from the flu within six weeks of their death.’ And he looked at the detective who had made the smart quip earlier. ‘Which seems pretty fucking strange to me.’

  * * *

  Tao’s eyes were ablaze with anger. ‘He’s a puppy!’ he spluttered. ‘The newest kid on the block, still wet behind the ears. You can’t put him in charge of a serious investigation like this.’

  There was just Li and Tao and a lot of smoke left in the room after the meeting. Li had known he would have to face the storm. ‘He may be the newest kid on the block, but he’s also one of the brightest,’ he said. ‘And, anyway, I need everyone else on the other case.’

  Tao squinted at him. ‘Do you really think you’re going to crack this one before they kick your ass into touch next week? I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ The gloves were off now.

  ‘Well, if I don’t, at least you’ll know I’ve been keeping the hot seat well warmed for you. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? My seat. So that you can bury the work of this section under goddamn drifts of paperwork, like the bureaucrat and pedant that you are.’

  ‘I believe in good, disciplined police work.’

  ‘That would tie this whole section up for so long the entire Olympic team would probably be dead by the time you cracked the case.’

  ‘And you’re making such great strides forward, Section Chief.’ Tao’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. He was no longer making any attempt to disguise his contempt for his boss, or to even pay lip service to the respect due a senior ranking officer. ‘Do you know how humiliating it is for me to have the most junior officer in the section assigned to a case over my head?’

  ‘If you were less fixated on rank and position, Tao, and more concerned with getting the job done, you wouldn’t see it that way. And then you wouldn’t need to feel so humiliated. But if you think that making detectives wear suits, and fining
them for saying fuck, constitutes “good disciplined police work”, then God help this section when I’m gone.’ And he turned to march out and leave Tao festering on his own.

  * * *

  Margaret looked up from his desk as Li banged into his office and he almost dropped his files, so startled was he to see her there. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.

  ‘I came along to see if I could help make sense of the tests they’re doing for you at the pathology centre.’ She stood up. ‘But if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just go home again.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘It hasn’t been a good morning.’

  She took in his battered face. ‘You look awful.’

  ‘Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.’ He dumped his files on the desk.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  And he told her. About the other bottles of perfume and aftershave going missing. The breath freshener disappearing from his pocket, although through the blood red mist of his beating, he could not be certain it had still been there. ‘You didn’t look in the pockets, did you?’ She shook her head.

  And then he told her about the girl in the park.

  She lifted up the photographs from the desk. ‘This her?’ He nodded. ‘Who is she?’ And she was shocked to learn that JoJo was a friend of Macken and Yixuan. ‘What happened about the break-in at his studio?’

  He shrugged. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Are they connected?’

  ‘Don’t know that either.’

  The phone rang and he snatched the receiver. Margaret watched a deep frown furrow his brow as he conducted several quickfire exchanges. He listened for a long while then, and finally he hung up to gaze thoughtfully past her into some unseen place. She waved a hand in his line of vision. ‘Hello? Are we still here?’