by Peter May
‘So why would somebody else do it?’ Margaret asked.
Li was baffled. ‘I have no idea, Margaret. But it simply cannot be a coincidence. Four out of five athletes who have died in the last month, all with their heads shaved?’
‘And the weightlifter?’
Li sighed. ‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem any doubt that he died from natural causes. Maybe there’s no connection. Maybe he really is just a coincidence.’
‘But you don’t think so.’
He held up his arms in frustration. ‘I don’t know what to think. I really don’t.’ He checked his watch. ‘But right now I’d better get you home. I have an appointment with a dead runner.’
Margaret said quietly, ‘Will you come back to the apartment after?’
He shook his head. ‘I have an early start tomorrow. An appointment first thing.’
‘What appointment?’
But he looked away, and she knew that when he refused to meet her eyes he was being evasive. ‘Just an appointment,’ he said, and she was certain that he was hiding something from her.
III
The drive out to Dalingjiang was treacherous. There was black ice on the road where the frost had melted in the sun and then refrozen. Li drove carefully, with the heating up high, but still his feet grew cold. The temperature reading on the dash was minus nineteen centigrade.
He parked the Jeep at the top of the dirt track where Sun had parked it several hours before. Only now there was a phalanx of vehicles gathered there. Official cars and the meat wagon from Pao Jü Hutong, and there were nosy villagers gathered at the entrance of the alleyway leading to Lao Da’s house. Even at this hour, and in these temperatures, the curiosity of the Chinese prevailed.
Li heard the quickfire ratatat of a pneumatic drill as soon as he switched off the engine. And when he opened the door of his Jeep was shocked at just how loud it sounded in the still night air. It was little wonder that the villagers were curious. Overhead, stars shone in their firmament like the tips of white hot needles, incredibly vivid against the purest of black skies. Away from the lights of the city, such was their clarity you almost felt you could reach up and touch them, prick your fingers on their light. The moon, close now to its zenith, had risen over the mountains and washed the world with a silver light that you could only distinguish from daylight by its complete absence of colour. Li pushed his way through the crowd and made his way easily by the light of it to the gate of Lao Da’s courtyard, where a uniformed officer stood miserably on guard, wondering what he had done to deserve a job like that on a night like this. Li showed him his ID, and the officer raised his gloved hand stiffly to his frozen face in a brittle salute.
Through the moongate in the courtyard, Li could see black sheets stretched between the trees in the orchard to screen the activity around the grave from Xing Da’s family. Arc lights beyond them cast their light into the sky above, obliterating the stars. The drill stopped, and Li heard the hacking of several pickaxes trying to break through the frozen earth.
Through the windows Li could see, in the lit interior of the house, Lao Da sitting on his own at a table, a bottle and a glass in front of him. He looked up as Li stepped inside. From the bedroom Li could hear the faint, hoarse sobbing of Xing Da’s mother. There was no sign of the grandparents. Perhaps they had gone to a neighbour’s house. Lao Da waved him into the seat opposite, and filled another glass with clear liquor from a bulbous bottle with a label that read, Mongolian King. In the bottom of the bottle was a large, white twisted root of ginseng. The alcohol had the pungent, slightly perfumed smell of mao tai, distilled from the bitter-tasting sorghum wheat.
‘Gan bei,’ the runner’s father said, without enthusiasm, and they chinked their glasses and then drained them. Li tried to catch his breath as he watched Lao Da fill them up again. A photograph in a frame lay on the table, and Li turned it around to look at it. It was Xing Da breaking the tape in first place at some major event, his hair flying out behind him, unmistakable, the flag of independence his fellow athletes had described.
Outside, the pneumatic drill started up once more.
‘The saddest thing,’ Lao Da said, ‘was that he was supposed to come and see us 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. He sounded terrible. We were all very disappointed because, you know, we hardly ever saw him.’ He paused to drain half of his glass. ‘That was about three weeks before the accident. We never did see him again.’
Li emptied his second glass and stood up. There was nothing for him to say. No comfort he could give. He felt the mao tai burning all the way down to his stomach. ‘I’ll go and check on progress,’ he said. He wanted this over as soon as possible.
Beyond the screens, half a dozen men with pickaxes were breaking up the last of the earth around the coffin. It had been buried in only about three feet of soil, and the ground was frozen most of the way down. Li was sure there must be regulations covering burials like this, but if there were, nobody knew them. And if they did, they ignored them. The coffin itself was a crude, home-made box with a heavy lid, well nailed down. It took the officers who had uncovered the coffin several minutes to prise all the nails loose and remove the lid. The body inside was wrapped in a white blanket. Li moved closer for a better look as the pathologist stepped down into the grave to remove the wrapping.
Xing Da lay naked, with his hands crossed over his chest. His skin was a bloodless blue-white in the light of the arc lamps, and apart from the horrific chest and head injuries received in the crash, he looked as if he had lain down there the day before and simply gone to sleep. There was little or no sign of decay. The temperatures had plummeted just a day or two after he was buried, and he was fresher than if he had been kept in the chiller at the morgue.
He was a big man, with a well-developed upper chest and arms, and thick, sturdy legs. A sprinter. Built for power. The shadow of his hair lay across his scalp where it had been shaved off, shocking in its absence, and there was something like the hint of a smile on his face. As if he were mocking them. They had so many questions. And he had all the answers. Only, he could never tell them. Not now. Not ever.
Chapter Five
I
Li sat in the large outer office, perched uncomfortably on the edge of a very low settee which had almost swallowed him when he first sat in it. A young secretary at a computer studiously ignored him, and a grey-uniformed security guard watched him with interest from the other side of a glass door. From the window, Li saw the sun, still low in the sky, reflecting on the side of a glass skyscraper and casting long shadows on the city streets twenty-three storeys below. He glanced at his watch for the umpteenth time. He had been kept waiting nearly half an hour.
It was another five minutes before the phone rang and the secretary waved him towards the door of the inner office. ‘You can go in now.’ Li stood up and tugged the wrinkles out of his best suit. He pulled uncomfortably at the knot of his tie. It felt as if it were strangling him. Li never wore a tie. He knocked tentatively on the door, and at the behest of a voice beyond it, stepped into the inner office.
It was a large office with a huge desk set in front of floor-to-ceiling windows which opened on to a spectacular view of the city looking west. Li could see, in sharp outline against the distant sky, the Tianshou mountains where, at midnight the night before, they had pulled the body of Xing Da from the ground. The walls were covered with photographs of security people in various uniforms and at various locations. To the right of the desk, male and female mannequins modelled the latest uniforms. The male wore a light-grey, short-sleeved shirt and trousers with a dark tie and beret. His epaulettes bore silver stars and bars. She wore a light-grey baseball cap, silver-braided and adorned with the badge of Beijing Security. Abnormally large breasts pushed out the folds of her short-sleeved blouse. She wore white gloves, a knee-length skirt and black boot
s.
Behind the desk, in a black leather executive chair that he wore like an oversized jacket, was a large man with sleek black hair brushed back from a brow like a cliff face. The wide smile that stretched his thick, pale lips, reduced sparkling eyes to gashes on either side of a broken nose. There was no doubting his genuine delight at seeing Li. He blew smoke into the air and said, ‘How the hell are you … what is it they call you now … Chief? I’ve been looking forward to this ever since we got your letter.’ He made no attempt to get up, just reclining himself further in his executive chair and waving Li to a rather modest seat on the other side of the desk. ‘Have a seat, Li.’
Li stood for a moment, hesitating. It occurred to him that he could just turn around and walk out now. Save himself the humiliation. But somehow he knew that would just give Yi even more satisfaction. He sat down.
‘Cigarette?’ Yi held out a packet.
Li shook his head. ‘I’ve given up.’
Yi dropped the pack on the desk. ‘Why am I not surprised? You always were better than the rest of us. Stronger, smarter, faster. More will-power.’ He grinned. ‘So how are things at the Section?’
‘They’re good,’ Li said.
Yi raised an eyebrow. ‘So good that you want to pack it in and come work for Beijing Security?’ He leaned forward, frowning. ‘You know, I’ve been puzzling over that for days. You’re a big name, Li. Cracked a lot of high profile cases. The youngest detective ever to make Section Chief.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘And you want to give it all up?’
‘I have my reasons,’ Li said.
‘I’m sure you do. Just like I’m sure you had your reasons for kicking my ass out of the Section.’
‘You were a bad cop, Yi. I don’t like officers who’re on the take.’
‘You had no proof.’
‘If I’d had proof you wouldn’t be sitting here now. You’d be learning reform through labour. You should think yourself lucky.’
‘Lucky?’ His voice had raised its pitch, and his smile was a distant memory. ‘That you fucked up my career in the police? That I spent six months unemployed? You know my wife left me? Took the kids?’
‘Good for her.’
Yi glared at Li, both his fists clenched on the desk in front of him. Li half expected him to leap over it and attack him. And then suddenly Yi relaxed, and sat back again, the smile returning. ‘But then I made my own luck,’ he said. ‘Got in on the ground floor here at Beijing Security.’ It was a new joint venture between State and private enterprise to take over some of the security aspects of the old Public Security Bureaux. ‘Rising to the very top.’
‘Scum usually collects on the surface,’ Li said. He had known from the moment he set eyes on Yi there would be no job for him here. Not that he could ever have brought himself to work for the man. It was all a question now of which of them would lose face. And Yi was holding all the cards in that particular contest.
Yi’s smile didn’t waver. He said, ‘But I hold no grudges. After all, when someone of your experience and qualifications comes knocking, it would be a foolish man who would close the door on him without a second thought.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘Of course, you couldn’t expect to start on the twenty-third floor. You’d have to begin at the bottom and work your way up. You ever wondered what it’s like, Li, doing the night shift on the gate of some government building in the middle of December? I don’t have to wonder. I know. And you know what, I believe it’s an experience everyone should have. It prepares them better for management.’ He cocked his head to one side and looked at Li appraisingly. ‘You’d look good in uniform again.’ And he flicked his head towards the mannequins. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’
Li stood up. It was time to put an end to this. ‘I think you’re wasting my time, Yi.’
Yi tipped forward suddenly in his seat, the smile vanishing once again, eyes filled with hate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s wasting my time. Soon as your application hit my desk I knew there was something weird about it. Why the hell would a man like you, at the peak of his career, suddenly throw it all away? So I made a few enquiries. Seems you finally got that pathologist bitch pregnant. And now you want to marry her?’ Yi shook his head. ‘And you thought for one minute that we might actually employ you? This is a security firm, Li. And a Chinese married to an American is a security risk. You’re unemployable in this business.’ And suddenly his face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Goodbye.’
He closed the folder on his desk in front of him, picked up the phone and swivelled his chair so that he had his back to Li, looking out over the view of the city. ‘Yeh, get me Central Services,’ Li heard him saying.
Yi had played his cards, and there was no doubt that Li had lost. He stood for a moment, wrapped in his humiliation, then turned and walked out of the office.
II
‘You’re late. Again.’ Margaret raised her eyes through her goggles and froze in mid-cut. She looked in astonishment at Li in his neatly pressed dark suit, white shirt and blue tie. Even if it was loosened at the neck, Li never wore a tie. ‘You look like you’ve just come from a job interview,’ she joked.
Li shifted uncomfortably and glanced at Sun who stood on the opposite side of the body from Margaret, wearing a green apron and a plastic shower cap. Sun’s face was expressionless.
‘I told you I had an important meeting this morning,’ Li said.
‘An appointment, you said,’ Margaret corrected him. She had a habit of remembering things with great accuracy. ‘A mysterious appointment that you wouldn’t tell me anything about.’
‘Have I missed anything?’ Li asked, ignoring the barb.
‘And still won’t apparently,’ Margaret muttered under her breath. She turned her attentions back to Xing Da. His body was just a shell now, ribs cut through and prised apart, the flesh of the chest and belly folded to either side of the central cut of the ‘Y’. The organs had been removed, as well as the brain, the top of the skull lying in a dish next to the autopsy table. Xing’s shaven scalp was folded down over his eyes and nose. ‘He was a mess,’ she said. ‘Broken ribs, liver and spleen mashed, probably by the steering wheel. It seems he was driving. No seat belt, so there were severe head and facial injuries when he hit the windshield. You could almost choose from half a dozen different injuries as being the cause of death, although in fact it was none of them.’
‘So what did kill him?’ Li asked, intrigued.
‘I have no idea. Yet. But I can tell you what didn’t kill him.’ Li waited, but she wanted him to ask.
‘What didn’t kill him?’ he obliged.
‘The car crash.’
Li frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he was dead before the car hit the lamppost. And since he was driving, and we all know that dead men can’t drive, one has to wonder how the car came to be travelling at a hundred kilometres per hour down a Beijing Street at eleven o’clock at night.’
‘How can you tell he was dead before the crash?’
‘Detective Sun will tell you,’ Margaret said airily. ‘Since he was here on time, he’s already had that described for him. Meantime, I’m going to prepare frozen sections of the heart for microscopic examination.’ She disappeared across the autopsy room to where the organs had been breadloafed and spoke quickly to one of her assistants.
Li looked at Sun. ‘Well?’
‘Hey, Chief,’ he said, ‘my English isn’t that great. I think I understood, but … ’ He shrugged.
Li said, ‘Give it a try.’
With some distaste, Sun indicated Xing Da’s superficial injuries, the contusions, abrasions and lacerations about his head and chest and stomach. ‘Doctor Campbell says if this guy had been alive when he picked up all these injuries, they would look quite different. They should be kind of red, or purple, you know, like blood beneath the surface of the skin. Apparently you don’t bleed too well if you’re dead, so if you were dead when you got them, injuries like t
hese would be kind of tough, golden, parchmentlike.’ Which they were. Sun took a deep breath. ‘Same with the internal stuff. His liver was pretty much crushed. According to the Doc there should have been at least a couple of litres of blood as a result. There was virtually none.’
Li looked at the body of the athlete thoughtfully. If he was dead behind the wheel of the car before the crash, then it seemed improbable that the others in the car were still alive.
He turned as the assistants wheeled in the cryostat, a deep-freeze about the size of a washing machine for preparing frozen sections of organs for fast microscopic examination. Permanent paraffin sections took hours to prepare. Frozen sections took minutes. Li crossed to the other table and watched as Margaret prepared a section of heart tissue by pressing it into a metal chuck along with a glob of jelly-like support medium. He said, ‘Why can’t you tell what killed him?’
‘Because I haven’t finished examining all the evidence, Section Chief.’
‘What about toxicology?’
‘I’ve sent samples of urine, bile, heart blood, the contents of his stomach and a portion of his liver for analysis,’ she said. ‘We won’t get the results until sometime tomorrow. And even that’s pushing it.’
He nodded towards the samples she was preparing for the cryostat. ‘Why are you doing microscopic sections of the heart?’
‘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.