by Peter May
Li looked around the courtyard, at all the doors and windows that stood open, and wondered how many ears were listening from the dark beyond. ‘I wanted to ask you about Jiang Meilin.’
Concern immediately inscribed itself on the young face. ‘What’s happened to her?’
‘I was hoping you might tell me. Her parents reported her missing five days ago. Have you seen her?’
The boy paled visibly. He shook his head. ‘Not since Sunday. She came here to the house. My folks like her, but they were out. She stayed quite late and went home about twelve.’
‘You didn’t think it was strange that she hasn’t been in contact since then?’
‘Well, yes. Normally she would call me. From a public telephone. She doesn’t have a cellphone, so I can’t call her. And she wouldn’t ever let me go to the house. Said her parents wouldn’t like it. Usually I only see her at weekends.’
‘So you wouldn’t have any idea where she might have gone?’
‘No.’
‘And she never talked to you about leaving home? Running away, maybe?’
The young man’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. ‘No, she didn’t.’
Li took a fresh business card from his maroon Public Security ID wallet and handed it to the boy, holding it at each corner and facing towards him. Lao Rong looked at Li’s name and rank before glancing up, open-mouthed. ‘Section Chief?’
‘Just call me if you hear from her.’
*
He was almost at Dahuisi Lu when he heard a woman’s voice calling after him. He stopped his bicycle and looked back to see a middle-aged woman in a black skirt and cardigan and pink running shoes hurrying after him. In spite of the heat, she wore a headscarf, as if somehow that might hide her identity. When finally she reached him it took her a moment to catch her breath.
‘I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with Lao Rong in the siheyuan,’ she said. One of the many ears listening in the dark, Li surmised. ‘He told you that Meilin went home around midnight.’
‘Did she not?’
‘It was later, Section Chief.’ She glanced over her shoulder, back along the hutong. ‘He’s a bad lot, that boy. Been in trouble with your people a few times.’
‘Are you telling me he lied?’
‘Not exactly. But it was nearer one o’clock when she left. And in tears.’
Li cocked his head, interested for the first time. ‘Do you know why?’
She shook her head. ‘I just know they had a big argument. Raised voices. I heard him shouting, her crying. But I don’t know what it was about.’
Li pursed his lips thoughtfully.
Chapter Three
I
The letter arrived three days after Li asked Wu to circulate a poster of the girl’s face – an image reproduced from one of the photographs in Meilin’s medals cabinet. He had also asked Wu for background investigations on the girl’s family, and the boyfriend. Considering his attachment to a missing-persons case to be something close to demotion, Wu had instigated the checks with bad grace, and ordered teams of uniformed Public Security officers to paste up posters in public places all over Haidian. Now he came into Li’s office holding a sheet of paper and a torn envelope. His face was, unusually, bright with excitement.
‘We’ve got a response, Chief.’
Li looked up blankly from his desk.
‘Jiang Meilin. The missing girl.’ Wu waved the paper and envelope. ‘Anonymous letter.’
Li stood up and reached into his pocket. ‘And you didn’t think to wear gloves?’
Wu’s face fell. ‘I didn’t know what it was until after I’d opened it.’
Li produced a pair of latex gloves and put them on. He took the letter and envelope and placed them carefully on the desk, then leaned over to have a look.
‘It was posted yesterday in Haidian,’ Wu said, as if trying to compensate for his mistake.
Li examined the postmark, then ran his eyes over the neat calligraphy that the sender had used to address the envelope. ‘An educated hand,’ he said. His gaze returned to the postmark. ‘And this is the post office that serves Beida, if I’m not mistaken. It could be the letter was written by a student, or a professor, at Beijing University.’
Wu said nothing. He knew that this was not a conclusion he would have reached himself. But then, that was probably why he was still a detective, while Li was Section Chief.
‘The university recently installed a biometric fingerprint scanner to speed up processing in the canteen. So let’s see what prints we can lift off this . . .’ Li glanced at Wu, ‘. . . excluding yours, of course. Then do a comparison check with their database.’
Li turned his attention to the letter itself. It was a cryptic note:
I saw your missing girl at a ghost wedding last week. She was the bride.
Li looked up, perplexed. ‘Ghost wedding?’
Wu nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. I did some asking around. Apparently it’s a tradition that still exists in some remote rural communities. It’s bad luck for a young man to die unmarried. So the family buys the corpse of a recently deceased female and they perform some kind of marriage ceremony. A ghost wedding. It seems there’s a sociology professor at Tsinghua University who is something of an expert on the subject.’
II
Tsinghua University was once described by the nearly president of the United States, Al Gore, as the MIT of China. It was an eclectic collection of faculties, from mechanics and technology to law, sociology and medicine. Each faculty was represented by one of the vast stone or marble edifices on each side of a wide, tree-shaded avenue leading to the massive master building at the far end. At this time of year there were almost no students on campus. Only occasional cyclists passed along the boulevard, possibly here for special summer classes. Many of the staff, however, were still at work.
Professor Bao seemed happy for Li to interrupt the monotony of the summer vacation, and used the excuse to stretch his legs and get some air. Two young men in shorts and T-shirts played basketball on a macadam court as the young policeman and the elderly professor walked by.
‘Minghun,’ said Professor Bao, ‘is what it is called among the peoples of the Loëss Plateau. An afterlife marriage. It has its roots in the ancient form of ancestor veneration which maintains that we all continue to exist after death, and that the living are obliged to tend to our needs.’
‘Including the arranging of a marriage?’
‘Indeed. It is traditional Chinese belief that an unmarried life is incomplete, and some parents fear that an unmarried dead son could be an unhappy one. So they find a bride for him after death.’
‘How do they do that?’
‘Oh, usually through an informal network of family or friends, they will find parents who have recently lost a single daughter. Those parents will sell the body as a way of finding their daughter a place in the dead man’s family line. You see, Section Chief Li, outside of the cities, China is really still a paternal clan culture. A woman does not belong to her parents. She has no place on her father’s family tree. She must marry into her husband’s ancestral lineage.’
‘So money changes hands.’
The white-haired old professor nodded and smiled. ‘I know, I know. It is illegal to buy and sell bodies, but it happens.’
‘Even in Beijing?’
‘Unlikely, I would have thought. Unless you had a community of families from an area of China that practised the minghun.’
Which was exactly, Li thought, what he had discovered among the condemned urban slums of Haidian District.
Chapter Four
I
Li and Wu arrived back at Section One at almost exactly the same moment. As Li wheeled his bicycle under the stand at the side entrance, Wu pulled his Beijing Jeep into the kerb and jumped out on to the sidewalk. His sunglasses were down, and he was chewing gum enthusiastically, evidently pleased with himself. ‘Got our man, Chief.’
‘Which man is that, Wu
?’
‘Our anonymous letter writer. Did just as you suggested. Lifted fingerprints off the letter. There were four sets. I took copies of all four up to Beida and ran them past the scanner. Bingo. Up pops an ID. Feng Qi. Second-year student. He’s working at the university over the summer, and still living at the student residences there.’
Li raised one eyebrow and bowed his head to acknowledge a job well done. ‘Better bring him in, then.’
‘The uniforms are already on their way, Chief.’ Wu grinned happily.
II
Feng was sitting nervously on his own at the table when Li and Wu came into the interrogation room. Anxious dark eyes jumped in their direction. He sat uncomfortably on the edge of his seat, leaning forwards a little, and wringing his hands together. ‘You can’t hold me here like this. I have rights.’
Li sat down opposite him. ‘You’ve been reading too much Western detective fiction, son. You have no rights. It is your duty to help us in our investigation and tell us what you know. Failure to do so will only plant in my mind the presumption of your guilt.’
‘I have nothing to hide.’ He tried to sit up straight and present a defiant face.
‘Then why did you write to us anonymously?’
The young man’s fear that he had somehow been identified was finally confirmed, and his defiance foundered, along with his posture. He started to wring his hands again. ‘I didn’t want to get involved.’
‘You are involved.’ Wu pulled up a chair and sat down beside Li. ‘Witness to a possible murder.’
Feng Qi paled, and with Wu’s words, Li for the first time let himself countenance the thought that Jiang Meilin was actually dead. In his mind he saw her smiling photograph from the medals cabinet, and felt her mother’s pain. Margaret’s plea for him to look into the disappearance of a teenage girl had turned suddenly from a favour into a murder enquiry. ‘Better tell us everything you know, son,’ he said.
Feng glanced from one to the other. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’
Li nodded to Wu, who reluctantly offered them each a cigarette, then passed his lighter around. Blue smoke rose through the hot, still air into the shaft of light that fell at an angle from the narrow window high in the wall.
Feng said, ‘Sheng Wei and I were at university together. I’d known him since we were kids back in Shaanxi. My parents moved to Beijing when I was seven, and I didn’t see him again till he appeared one day at my middle school. His family had come to the city, too, and were living in a place just down the street.’
‘You were both from the Loëss Plateau?’
‘Sure.’
‘How many people from the plateau live in that area of Haidian?’
The young man shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. People have been coming here for a couple of generations now. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands.’
‘So tell me about Sheng Wei.’
A cloud, like cataracts, crossed the boy’s eyes. ‘He was killed in a motorbike accident about ten days ago.’ His lips tightened as he drew a deep, trembling breath. ‘Wei was so smart. He had a great future. Everything to live for. It was a tragedy.’ Feng shook his head. ‘I thought I was going to his funeral. It turned out to be his wedding.’
‘A minghun?’
He nodded. ‘Bizarrest thing I ever saw. Paper dummies, all dressed up in traditional wedding costume. The spirits of the dead, to be burned after the ceremony and sent to the afterlife as man and wife. There was a priest and everything. Proxy wedding vows, rings, the lot. Sure, I’d heard about it. But I assumed it was one of those urban myths. Just a story.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to control his breathing. ‘You’ve no idea what it was like seeing Wei lying there in his coffin. And that dead girl in the coffin next to his. The minute I saw her I knew it wasn’t right.’
‘You knew her?’ Wu said.
‘From school. She was about three years behind me. A pretty girl. Kind of quiet. I heard she was doing well in athletics, that she could be up for a scholarship. I was sure I would have heard something if anything had happened to her.’ He looked at Li, an appeal for understanding in his eyes. ‘But there she was. Wei had been killed in an accident. I had no reason to think that something similar hadn’t happened to her, too.’ He paused. ‘Until I saw the Missing posters.’ He closed his eyes again and summoned the courage to ask the question that had been troubling his conscience all this time. ‘You don’t think they killed her, do you?’
Li’s mouth was fixed in a grim line. It was some moments before his lips moved. ‘Someone did.’
Chapter Five
Lianxiang hutong was yet another ancient alley scheduled for demolition. Little by little the authorities were effacing the city’s history, the labyrinth of hutongs and siheyuan that denoted a way of life dating back to the Mongols. Already most of it was gone, replaced by luxury apartments and shopping malls. A new generation of wealthy Chinese was replacing the old Beijingers, and the floating population from all around China which had descended on the city looking for work was being swept away. Where, Li wondered, would they all go? Where would they live? After all, not everyone could be rich – even if Deng Xiaoping had declared it glorious to be so.
He pushed his bicycle along the narrow alley, between high stone walls, until he found the gate to the condemned siheyuan occupied by the Sheng family. In the dark alley leading to the courtyard beyond, he leaned his bicycle against the wall and squeezed past the detritus of disposable lives. The tree shading the courtyard was decorated with bamboo bird cages, and in the confined space the sound of birdsong was almost deafening. The singing was accompanied by the discordant sounds of a piece from the Peking Opera playing on a radio somewhere in the dark beyond open windows and doors. Heat fibrillated in the thick summer air. A very old lady, dressed entirely in black, sat sleeping in the shade.
‘Hello!’ Li called out. And after a short time a middle-aged woman in a blue blouse and red cardigan emerged from the south-facing door. She looked at him curiously for a moment, before curiosity gave way to fear as realization dawned.
‘Can I help you?’ But she knew what he wanted.
‘Yes,’ Li said. ‘You can tell me where you got the body of the girl you married to your dead son.’
*
Sheng Nuwa and her husband Dai sat side by side in the semi-dark and comparative cool of an inner room, its window shutters closed, the only light spilling in through an open door. Both faces were ghostly pale as they surrendered to Li’s hard gaze. Li wondered if this was, in fact, the room where the minghun had been played out. Feng Qi’s description of the odour had stayed with him, and he wrinkled his nose at the thought of it.
Sheng Nuwa said, ‘We had no idea until we saw the Missing posters. She was only delivered to us on the day of the wedding. We thought she had come from the crematorium. That’s what the man who brought her said.’
‘I’ll need his name.’
‘We don’t know it.’ It was the husband who spoke this time, and when Li blew his disbelief through pursed lips, he added quickly, ‘They told us they weren’t able to get us a body, so we had resigned ourselves to proceeding with just the paper dummy. Then this guy arrives at the last minute.’
‘Who did you go to originally to ask for a body?’
Sheng Dai glanced darkly at his wife. Their reluctance to speak was clear.
But Li was losing patience. ‘Come on! Spit it out! You’re in trouble enough as it is. Don’t make it worse.’
The dead boy’s mother said, ‘We were given a name. A certain Gan Bo. He could find wives, we were told, for the living. It’s hard these days for a single man to find himself a woman.’
It was, Li knew, a demographic time bomb for the future of his country. A legacy of the one-child policy, and the traditional preference for boys over girls. With only 100 women for every 130 men, there was a growing demand for mail-order brides. And a criminal element had appeared to satisfy that demand, trading women for money.
S
heng Nuwa brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes. ‘But we were told that sometimes Gan Bo could supply dead ones, too.’
Li could barely conceal his disgust. ‘So you put in an order for one.’
Her eyes dropped away from his. ‘We were only trying to do the best for our son.’
‘And what did Gan Bo say?’
Sheng Dai said, ‘He told us he would see what he could do. But he came back a couple of days later and said he couldn’t get one in time. And with the summer heat, we couldn’t wait.’
‘So then some guy just appeared from nowhere?’
‘Yes. On the morning of the minghun. He brought the girl in the back of a van. Said that Gan Bo had been able to find a body for us after all. We’d already acquired a second coffin.’
‘And you paid him.’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘He wanted dollars.’
‘How much?’
‘Twelve hundred.’
Li clenched his jaw involuntarily. So that was what a young girl’s life was worth these days. Twelve hundred dollars. The price of a plasma TV. ‘Tell me what the man who brought the body looked like.’
But the dead boy’s father just shrugged. ‘I didn’t pay him much attention. I was kind of in shock. He was just some guy. Forty, maybe. A little older. He didn’t stay long.’
Li found himself strangely disappointed that this description, however brief, in no way resembled the tall, skinny boy who had been Meilin’s lover. ‘And the bodies? I suppose you had them cremated.’ All evidence destroyed in the furnace.
‘That was the original plan,’ Sheng Nuwa said. ‘But then a cousin with a little land out near Donghulinmen offered to let us bury them there, and we jumped at the chance.’
Chapter Six
Li and Margaret drove in silence, south-west out of Beijing on the G109. Meilin’s parents sat in the back of the Jeep, Jiang Jin with his arm around his wife. But there was no consoling her. Li had broken the news to them that afternoon, and Jiang Ning had barely stopped crying since. Her eyes were red raw. There was only one final act now to be played out in the life and death of their daughter. And that was the identification of her body.