Chinese Whispers tct-6

by Peter May

  ‘My uncle always trusted his instincts, Commissioner, and taught me to trust mine.’

  ‘Oh, I see. So your instincts are telling you that the Deputy Minister of Public Security might be a murderer. And presumably, since you have such faith in your instincts, you’ll be suggesting that we just lock him up?’

  Li felt the serrated edge of the Commissioner’s sarcasm cutting into his fragile confidence. But he stood his ground. ‘There were six of us at the MERMER test, Commissioner.’

  Zhu waved his cigarette in the air. ‘Well, that would make you and me suspects, too, I suppose.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here, Commissioner, if I thought it was you.’

  ‘Ah, and that would be your trusty instinct again, Section Chief. Am I supposed to be flattered?’

  Li decided not to respond to that one. It might be better to let the Commissioner make the next move. So he stayed silent, gazing through Zhu’s net curtains at the sun casting shortening shadows through the park.

  ‘And what is it you expect me to do, exactly?’ the Commissioner said finally. He stopped circling, and blew smoke in Li’s direction.

  ‘There would be one way of shortcutting the whole process, Commissioner.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘If all six of us were to submit to a DNA test.’

  He heard the Commissioner spluttering. ‘Are you insane, Li? Do you really think I’m going to go to the Deputy Minister, or the Procurator General, or the Director General of the Political Department, and ask them for samples of blood to eliminate them from a murder inquiry?’

  Li said nothing, and the Commissioner began pacing agitatedly by the window, smoke trailing in his wake.

  ‘You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Commissioner.’

  Zhu stopped and glared at him. ‘Then you’re going to have to come up with some pretty damned good evidence, because I’m not going to act on this until you have. It would be suicide, Li. For both of us. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, Commissioner.’

  Zhu exhaled deeply. ‘We are talking about people in extremely exalted positions here, Li. We’re talking about power, and politics, not police work.’ He stabbed his cigarette into an ashtray, and Li could see from his concentrated frown that he was thinking furiously. ‘I might take one or two informal soundings — over a few heads. Just to see how we should proceed.’ He glanced at his junior officer sharply. ‘But in the meantime, I don’t want you breathing a word of this to anyone else, do you understand? Carry on with your investigation into the Beijing Ripper, but for the moment keep your other suspicions to yourself.’

  II

  From somewhere, the academy’s administrators had secured desks and chairs and a couple of creaking old computers which Hart had got staff and students in Lynn Pan’s old department to set up in the computer room which had been stripped bare by the thieves. Hart had been at the academy since seven, and called them all in early.

  Li recognised the student who had briefed them on the murder for the MERMER test. She and a long-haired male student were sitting at one of the computers. Hart was at the other with Professor Hu. He looked up when Li came in, and Li saw the strain in his face. In all likelihood, he had managed as little sleep as Li. Professor Hu had tied her wavy hair back in a pony tail, accentuating the thinness of her face. Today her business suit was black and severe as if she were in mourning. And in truth, Li thought, she probably was.

  ‘Grab a chair, Section Chief,’ Hart said. ‘We’re making progress, but not fast.’

  Li drew up a chair and wheeled it in alongside Hart and the professor. There was a graph on the screen which they were scrolling through. ‘You managed to open up the files, then?’ he said.

  Hart said, ‘Professor Hu was able to download software from an internet site shared with some MERMER people in the States. Apparently Lynn had made some changes to her version of it, but it’s essentially the same. The important thing is, it’s allowed us to open up the files so we can look at the graphs.’

  ‘Not that they tell us anything,’ Professor Hu said. ‘We can’t even begin to decipher them without the photographs which elicited the responses that they chart.’

  Li still had the commissioner’s words ringing in his ears. You’re going to have to come up with some pretty damned good evidence. ‘They’re useless, then?’ he said.

  ‘Ah, no. Not quite.’ Hart’s smile was strained. ‘The student who assembled the picture sequences for each of the testees did most of the work on her computer at home. She thinks she’s got a copy of the pics on a zip disk. I sent her home to find out.’

  Li said, ‘I don’t suppose she remembered which one of them was “D”?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘Afraid not. As far as she was concerned they were just pictures which related to people she’d never even met. Nor would meet. Hometown pictures were mostly downloaded off the internet, from a list. Another student went and took pictures of apartments at various addresses he was given. But the work had all been shared out. Nobody had a definitive file.’

  ‘So how do the pictures help us?’

  Professor Hu said, ‘If we compare the graphs with the pictures, at the very least we should be able to tell if “D” was one of the testees briefed on the murder. Or not.’

  Li frowned. ‘But Professor Pan told me that the computer randomised the pictures. How do you know what order we saw them in?’

  Hart said, ‘Apparently first time around the computer takes the pictures and shows them in the order it’s given them. Then it randomises for the subsequent sweeps.’

  ‘So we only have to look at the first set of charts for each one to tell who had been briefed on the murder and who hadn’t,’ the professor said.

  ‘Because those of you briefed on the murder will show a MERMER response to every one of the nine photographs that relate to it,’ Hart added.

  Li nodded. ‘Okay, but how do we identify who “D” is?’

  ‘By tying him to the photographs of his apartment and home town,’ Hart said. ‘That’ll be a job for you guys when we get the pics.’ He sighed. ‘But figuring out what the lie was … well, that’s a whole other ballgame.’

  Li gave voice to the question which had been niggling at him for hours. The question Zhu had gone to straight off. ‘How could he have told a lie when he wasn’t asked any questions? I mean MERMER’s not a lie detector. What could make Lynn Pan think he was lying?’

  Hart shrugged and spread his palms. ‘Beats me.’ He looked at Professor Hu, but she just made a face and shook her head.

  Li said, ‘You’ve got my cellphone number. Keep me in touch with progress.’

  * * *

  Li was eating a jian bing from a seller at the Xidan market when his cellphone rang. He had stopped off at Xidan for something to fill the gnawing void that was his stomach. He had barely eaten anything in twenty-four hours, not since his last jian bing from Mei Yuan. He also wanted time alone to think, to consider how he was going to handle the investigation. Commissioner Zhu’s warning to share his suspicions with no one was weighing heavily on his mind. And he knew he could not investigate without the manpower and resources of Section One. At the same time he was still concerned that someone within the section was feeding information to headquarters, which seriously curtailed the number of officers he was prepared to trust.

  Ode to Joy interrupted his thoughts. He swopped the jian bing to his other hand and dug the phone out of his pocket. ‘Wei?’ It was Miss Shen Shuji, secretary to Yan Bo, Director General of the Ministry’s Political Department. The Director General, she told him frostily, wished to see him at his earliest convenience. Which was Ministry jargon for now.

  Li closed his eyes. It was beginning. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ he said.

  ‘Be sure that you are,’ Miss Shen Shuji told him. ‘The Director General has a meeting at nine and would like to see you beforehand.’ She hung up abruptly. Sometimes the secreta
ries were worse than their masters. Li slipped the phone into his pocket and checked the time. It was just after eight. Yan Bo was at his desk early. Even allowing for the rush hour traffic, Li knew he could be there in ten to fifteen minutes, so he took his time finishing his jian bing, putting off the moment for as long as possible. Whatever Yan Bo wanted, it was unlikely to be an exchange of pleasantries. One way or another, something of what was going on must have found its way to his office.

  Reluctantly, Li threw his jian bing wrapper in the bin and stepped back into his car. He had left the engine running to keep it warm. Carefully, he pulled out into the traffic flow, avoiding the bicycles, and drove a hundred metres south to the intersection, where he turned east into West Changan Avenue. The sun was blinding, diffused by the dirt on his windscreen. He flicked on the wash-wipe, and sunlight smeared itself all over his vision before clearing to reveal the queues of traffic backed-up from the flag-unfurling ceremony in Tiananmen Square. By the time he reached the entrance to the Ministry compound on the far side of the square, it was nearly eight-thirty.

  He showed his ID to the guard at the gate and drove in to navigate his way through the maze of buildings inside the old British Embassy compound now jointly occupied by the Ministries of State and Public Security. Bizarrely, there were children playing in the road, offspring of some senior mandarin, for whom the oddly cloistered world of the two Ministries was home. Li drove slowly past them, and envied them their youth and their innocence — both of which they would lose all too soon.

  He parked beside a flower bed outside the block which housed the Political Department, and took an elevator up to the fourth floor. Miss Shen Shuji, Li was surprised to discover, was an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties. Attractive, he decided quickly, only for about two seconds. She had blue make-up on her eyes and wore red lipstick, and dressed as if she were just about to head out to a fashion show. There was not the trace of a smile on her face. When he told her who he was, she said, ‘Sit,’ as if he were a dog, and picked up the phone to report to her boss that Section Chief Li Yan had arrived. When he refused to follow her order and instead wandered around her office looking at the wall-hangings, she glared at him for several moments before returning to the task he had interrupted — painting her fingernails the same colour as her lips. After several long minutes, her phone rang and she said to Li, ‘You can go in now.’

  Li knocked and entered. Yan Bo’s office was a large, blue-carpeted room with wood-panelled walls. Yan Bo seemed very small behind his enormous shiny desk, engulfed by a large, leather reclining chair, and dwarfed by the Chinese flags which hung limply from the wall on either side of his desk. Venetian blinds were lowered and half shut, obscuring the view from his window, but allowing long, thin strips of early yellow light to lie crookedly across the contours of the room.

  Yan Bo was scribbling something on a tablet of note-paper on his desk. He pulled off the top sheet, screwed it up and threw it in the bin, beginning again on a fresh one. He behaved as if he were unaware that Li had entered. With his head bowed in concentration over his note taking, Li could see that his hair was very thin on top and carefully combed to disguise the fact. Li stood in uncomfortable silence waiting for this powerful little man to look up. When, eventually, he finished his scribbling and raised his head, he gave Li a look that verged on contempt.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are trying to do, Li?’

  Li was taken aback by the aggressiveness of his tone. ‘My job, Director General,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t get cute with me, sonny!’ the Political Director snapped back at him. ‘There is no part of your job that entails bringing this Ministry into disrepute.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ Li said.

  Yan Bo slapped his hand on his desk, leaving a damp palm print on its shiny surface. ‘Accusing a senior officer of murder is hardly going to do much for the public image of the Ministry.’

  So much for Commissioner Zhu’s consultation with high officialdom, Li thought. He had gone straight to Yan Bo, neatly passing the buck. Li said, ‘With respect, Director General, it would hardly be fair to blame the messenger because you don’t like the message.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned insolent, Section Chief!’ Yan Bo stood up and glared at Li, then perhaps realising that he was still looking up at him, sat down again. ‘We have barely recovered from the prosecution of Li Jizhou, or the fourteen other officials who were executed in the wake of his conviction.’ Li Jizhou was a former vice-minister of Public Security sentenced to death for his part in a smuggling conspiracy which had brought more than eight billion dollars’ worth of illicit goods into China during the nineties. The scandal had shaken the ministry to its core. Corruption was a highly sensitive issue. Murder was unthinkable. ‘Goddamnit, man! According to Zhu, I am also on your list of suspects. Is that true?’

  Li shifted uncomfortably. ‘Everyone who took part in the MERMER demonstration has to be considered a suspect.’

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘I’ve already ruled myself out, Director General.’

  Yan Bo glared at him, suspecting sarcasm, but unable to detect any in Li Yan’s inscrutability. ‘And do you have any hard evidence to back up your suspicions?’

  Li braced himself. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Yan Bo repeated. ‘Not yet?’ He gazed at Li with shining black eyes. ‘Not ever,’ he said. ‘I will not entertain groundless accusations being made about senior officers of this ministry. Not to mention the Deputy Minister himself. You might think, Section Chief, that your high public profile and your awards and commendations make you something special. Let me assure you they do not. You are nobody. As you will come to realise very quickly if you continue with this line of investigation. Do you understand?’ Li made no reply. ‘Do. You. Understand!’ Yan Bo thundered.

  ‘Perfectly,’ Li said.

  ‘Good. Then I do not wish to hear another thing about it. Get out of my sight.’ He pulled his tablet towards him and starting scribbling furiously, and Li noticed that he was using red ink.

  III

  Margaret raised her left leg and felt all the stiff muscles of her buttock tug at her hamstring as she stretched. Slowly she turned through ninety degrees, arms raised level with her shoulders and bent up at the elbow, before bringing her foot down and raising the other leg. She felt the same stretching of the muscles, and was amazed at just how out of condition she was. The cold was stinging her face, and although she wore gloves, her fingers were frozen stiff. Her breath wreathed around her head like the smoke of dragon’s fire. The plink-plonk of a traditional Chinese orchestra emanating from a ghetto blaster on the wall lent succour to the illusion.

  The previous day’s autopsy had taken more out of her than she could have believed. The muscles of her arms and shoulders were stiff and sore from wielding heavy shears to cut through ribs, and from turning the body this way and that in the course of its dissection. Her lower back and the tops of her legs ached from the angle at which she had held herself to cut through dead flesh and remove organs. Even her thrice weekly tai chi sessions in Zhongshan Park with Mei Yuan had failed to keep her fit and supple for a professional activity she had always taken for granted.

  Of course, the trauma of Li Jon’s Caesarian birth, and everything else surrounding it, had taken it out of her. She had never regained the strength and vigour she had possessed before it, and slothful hours spent trapped in an apartment, reading and feeding and changing diapers had contributed to a decline of which she had hardly been aware. Until now. It worried her that these might be the first signs of old age. And then she looked around and found herself smiling. Most of the old women working through their slow-motion tai chi routines were more than twice her age. Some of them in their seventies or even eighties. She had allowed life, and events, to steal away her initiative. It was time to take control again.

  ‘You’re very quiet this morning.’

  Margaret turned to catch Mei Yuan
watching her closely. As she always did. Like an old mother hen. ‘Stuff on my mind,’ she said.

  ‘Li Yan?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid I’m obsessing about myself,’ Margaret said. And she felt a sudden pang of guilt. Li had left her to sleep on and gone off to fight dragons on his own. They had both understood the full implications of the files they had uncovered the night before in Lynn Pan’s private webspace, but had not discussed it. Li had folded in on himself, as he sometimes did, reluctant to share his deepest worries. She hated it when he was like that with her. She felt shut out, rejected. Once or twice she had surfaced briefly during the night from the deepest of sleeps, to become aware of the shallow, irregular breathing which told her he was still awake. But sleep had always dragged her back down into its warm, comforting oblivion. And when, finally, she had woken, he was gone. The sheets on his side of the bed long since turned cold.

  Li Jon, in his buggy, waggled his arms and grinned at her, his tiny nose red with the cold. She saw his father in his eyes and his smile, and wondered where the closeness they had once shared had gone. She felt a tiny stab of fear, like pain, and wondered what kind of future they really had.

  ‘Let me try you with a riddle, then,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘It may relieve you of the burden of self examination.’

  Margaret glanced at her, wondering for a brief moment if the older woman had somehow been able to read her thoughts. ‘Okay,’ she said. Something else to occupy her mind might be healthier. It was too easy, always, to focus on the negative.

  Mei Yuan said, ‘It took Li Yan a whole twenty-four hours to work this one out.’