The Fourth Sacrifice tct-2

by Peter May

  ‘Why?’ he laughed.

  ‘Because you can do that. You can bring things to life. Reanimate history. I can’t do that for the people who end up on my table. All I can do is cut them up and say how they died. Not very constructive.’

  He had suggested that on their way back to town they stop off at the Huaqing Hot Springs, the winter playground of the emperors who had made their capital at Xi’an. It would be quiet there, he had said, after the crowds in the exhibition halls of the Terracotta Warriors, and the feeding frenzy of touts and tourists surrounding the market stalls outside.

  And it was. In the weeks before the national holiday to celebrate the anniversary of the Liberation, tourism dipped to its lowest point of the season. Only a few souls wandered among the paths and terraces of these centuries-old gardens that climbed into the foothills of Li mountain.

  ‘Who’s the bimbo?’ Margaret asked, nodding towards the scantily clad statue.

  Michael smiled. ‘Yang Guifei,’ he said. ‘One of the Four Beauties of Chinese history. She was one of three thousand, six hundred concubines of the Tang emperor Gao Zong. He fell in love with her. Passionately. Blindly. They spent all their winter months here, warming their love in the hot springs. He became obsessive, began ignoring the affairs of state. All he wanted to do was spend every waking and every sleeping hour with the woman he loved. Then when her adopted son led an uprising against him, his ministers told him that his army would not fight unless she were put to death.’

  Margaret said, ‘He didn’t, did he?’ Michael shook his head and she grinned. ‘You had me worried there for a minute.’

  ‘She saved him from having to do it by taking her own life,’ he said.

  She gasped in frustration. ‘Do you have to spoil every story?’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t make them up. It must be the way I tell them.’

  She wondered if it was a true story and decided it probably was, although romanticised by time, and by storytellers like Michael. All the same, it cast a slight cloud of sadness over the place. Even the privileged lives of emperors could be touched by tragedy. They were, after all, only human.

  ‘But there’s another story associated with this place,’ he said, ‘that is not quite so tragic. Although I’m sure Chiang Kai-Shek probably wouldn’t agree.’ He took her hand, without any apparent self-consciousness, and led her away from the lake over a hump-backed bridge, through scholar trees and up steps to a paved terrace. His hand felt warm and strong, and Margaret found herself responding to his touch. ‘You do know who Chiang Kai-Shek is?’

  She shook her head apologetically, and she felt the overwhelming scale of her ignorance. It made her feel small, and insignificant. ‘Any relation to Barry?’ she asked.

  He drew her a look. ‘When the Qing Dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911,’ he said, ‘the first Republic of China was born. But its founder, Dr Sun Yat-Sen, did not live long, and the country was torn apart by factional warlords. His successor was Chiang Kai-Shek, a brilliant and ruthless leader who crushed the warlords in 1928, and then spent the next two decades engaged in a civil war with the Communists.’ They stopped and leaned on a stone balustrade, looking down on the jumble of stairways and terraces below, and watched the first amber leaves of fall float down on to the water. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Good.’ He turned her round, taking her hand again, and led her across the terrace to a shady villa on the far side. ‘Because in December of 1936 Chiang Kai-Shek lived here, in this house. The Japanese had invaded and were occupying large tracts of the country. But some of Chiang Kai-Shek’s generals thought he was spending too much time fighting the Communists when the real enemy was the invading foreign devils. They wanted him to join forces with the Communists to fight off the Japs. So, with a small band of soldiers, they came here to kidnap him. There was an exchange of fire.’ They were now on the covered terrace that ran the length of the villa. ‘See,’ he said. ‘They have covered the windows here with plastic to protect the bullet holes in the glass.’

  Margaret peered beyond the perspex and saw the round bullet holes in the fractured windows. ‘Yeah,’ she said sceptically. ‘Like these are the original bullet holes.’

  Michael said, ‘You’re such a cynic, Margaret.’ She grinned and he smiled and shook his head. ‘Anyway, they didn’t get him without a chase. He had been in his bed when they attacked, and when they finally caught up with him in a tiny pavilion up on the hillside there, he was still in his pyjamas, wearing one shoe, and without his false teeth.’

  Margaret laughed. ‘So much for his dignity. And did he join forces with the Communists?’

  ‘Reluctantly, yes. Then after the Japs were finally defeated in ’46, the two sides went at it again until the Communists won in ’49, and Chiang Kai-Shek fled to Taiwan where he set up the Republic of China.’

  ‘As opposed to the People’s Republic of China.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m learning something. Three months in this goddamn country and I’m finally learning something about it.’ She smiled up at Michael and found a curious intensity in his eyes and immediately felt a churning sensation in her stomach. He cupped her face in his hands and tilted it towards his. For a moment he hesitated, almost as if giving her the chance to draw back before he either made a fool of himself, or committed them both to a course of action that would take them deep into unknown territory. But she did not draw back, and he kissed her. A long, tender, lingering kiss, and she felt her body drawing into his, felt its hardness and its warmth against her.

  They broke apart and for a moment she closed her eyes, breathing hard, feeling his breath on her face. When she opened them again, she found him looking at her very intently. Then she grinned, and then laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he said, almost a sense of hurt in his bewilderment.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Some girls get romanced under starlit skies and told how beautiful they look. Me? I get seduced with tales of Chiang Kai-Shek and his missing dentures.’

  He laughed, too, then, and as gradually his smiled faded he said, ‘OK, so tonight we’ll find a starlit sky somewhere, and I’ll tell you just how beautiful you are, and just how much I want to make love to you.’

  She was a little shocked, a little pleased, a little scared. ‘Better be careful,’ she said. ‘I might just take you up on it.’

  *

  The faces of dead men looked up at her from the bed. Four men who had all been separated from their heads by a single sword. They had all been sedated with the same drug, but only three of them had swallowed it with red wine. The same three had been executed by a swordsman standing on their left, and had their hands bound by a length of silk secured with a conventional reef knot. The fourth had been killed by an assassin standing on his right, and tied with a reverse reef knot. He had drunk vodka turned blue by a drug he could not have failed to notice. In every other detail the killings were identical.

  Margaret shook her head. Her initial conclusion, she remained certain, was correct. Yuan Tao had been murdered by someone who had attempted to make it look as if he had been a victim of the same person who had killed the other three. And yet, they had all attended the same school, so there was clearly a link. So what was she missing? What were they all missing?

  She ran the other evidence through her mind. The three bottles of wine found in Yuan Tao’s apartment. Three bottles, three more victims. But what were they doing in his apartment? The dark blue dust there too, that matched the substance found on the shoes and trousers of one of the other victims. Another link. But what was the connection? And what had been hidden beneath the floorboards in the illegally rented rooms? She looked again at the photograph of Yuan Tao’s body, the blood draining into the hole in the floor where the linoleum had been ripped back and the floorboards removed. Li had said the linoleum was torn. That suggested a search. Someone looking for somethin
g.

  Margaret had spent an hour or more reading the autopsy reports, looking at the photographs. She had felt a sense of guilt when she and Michael arrived back at their hotel in the late afternoon. Four men had been murdered, the fate of perhaps another three depending on their killer being found quickly. And here she was in Xi’an, hundreds of miles away, flirting with a man who found her attractive and wasn’t afraid to say so, but who had nothing whatsoever to do with the investigation. She had told herself that this was not her investigation. She had been drawn into the whole thing quite against her will. But still she felt guilty.

  She wondered what fresh developments there had been today, and toyed briefly with the idea of trying to phone Li to find out. But she quickly dismissed the thought. She knew that Li would probably be difficult with her, and that she would probably be awkward with him. Which, in turn, made her wonder if her feelings of guilt were not so much about the investigation as about Li and her relationship with Michael. But, damnit, why should she feel guilty? Li was the one who had turned his back on her. An anger flared briefly in her breast, and then subsided, leaving her feeling empty and sad. And she knew that whatever she felt for Michael she was still in love with Li.

  She dropped the autopsy report she had been holding on to the bed, and one of the photographs flipped over. She turned it the right way up and looked at it for a moment. It showed the blood-stained placard that had been hung around the neck of the second victim. She looked at the strange and impenetrable Chinese characters, which meant nothing to her, and was struck by a sudden revelation. Handwriting! Surely the Chinese would have experts in calligraphy able to tell if the characters on the cards had been drawn by the same hand. It had not occurred to her before, she realised, because normal practice would be to compare a written specimen with the handwriting of a suspect, not to compare specimens from different crime scenes. She quickly laid out the photographs of the four placards. But even as she did, her excitement gave way to disappointment. There were only two characters on each one — a nickname and a number. And each was different. The sample was not big enough to make any definitive comparison.

  What about the ink? It might be possible to establish that the same ink had been used in each case. But what conclusion could they draw from that? Only, she supposed, that the killer had access to the same ink, in the way that he had access to the same murder weapon. Which simply raised more questions than it answered.

  But what if — her mind kept returning to the Chinese characters — what if a calligrapher had been able to establish that they had all been written by the same hand? What would that have meant? There was something in the thought that was only just eluding her.

  She tutted with frustration and got up off the bed, catching sight of herself for a moment in the bedroom mirror. With a shock she realised she was still naked. She had not dressed after her shower. And something in her nakedness brought images of Michael into her mind, and she felt the stirrings of sexual desire deep inside. And immediately the guilt returned and she moved quickly away from the mirror to slip into her panties, and the jeans and white blouse she had laid out on the chair. She forced her mind back to blood and headless bodies. She had, she knew, been close to something, something that would make sense both of the things that were different and of the things that were the same.

  She had almost given up, and had started clearing away the autopsy and forensics reports when suddenly she realised what it was. It seemed, somehow, so obvious that she wondered why she had not thought of it before. Quickly she searched her purse for her address book, and found the telephone number for Section One that she had previously tried in vain. She hesitated for a long moment, her heart pounding somewhere up in her throat, almost choking her it seemed. Then she sat on the bed, lifted the telephone and called the Beijing number.

  There were three long, single rings before a telephonist answered in Chinese. Margaret said, very slowly and carefully, ‘Qing. Li Yan.’ A gabble of Chinese came back at her. She tried again. ‘Qing. Li Yan.’ She heard an impatient intake of breath, another burst of Chinese, and then the line was put on hold. After what seemed like a very long time, she heard a man’s voice.

  ‘Wei?’ he said.

  ‘Li Yan?’

  There was a pause. ‘Margaret?’ Something in the way he said her name brought goosebumps up on her arms.

  ‘Li Yan, I’ve thought of something,’ she said. ‘To do with Yuan Tao’s killer …’ She waited for a response.

  ‘Well?’ he said eventually, and there was a tone in his voice that this time raised hackles rather than goosebumps, and she remembered just what a frustrating man he could be. She drew a deep breath.

  ‘You know how you said no one outside of the investigating team and the murderer could possibly know all the details of the killings?’ She didn’t wait for his answer. ‘Well, suppose Yuan Tao’s killer was an accomplice, or at the very least a witness, to the other murders. That would explain how he knew what the modus operandi was. And if he was simply left-handed instead of right-handed, that would explain why that was the only difference in Yuan Tao’s case.’

  Another long silence, then Li said, ‘Well, thank you for the thought. I’ll make a note of it in the file.’

  She felt her anger rising. ‘And that’s all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘How is Xi’an?’ he asked, and when she didn’t, couldn’t, respond, added, ‘You and Mr Zimmerman still just good friends?’

  ‘None of your fucking business!’ she said, and slammed down the phone. And in a single, furious movement, she swept all the photographs and reports off the bed and on to the floor. Why had she even bothered? He didn’t care about her. He didn’t want her sticking her nose into his investigation. He was just a typical chauvinistic, xenophobic Chinese male! She felt tears springing to her eyes, and turned her fury on herself. Why was she upset? Why was she feeling guilty? Why was she wasting her time on this man?

  There was a knock at the door, and she jumped up quickly, brushing the tears from her eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me. Michael.’

  She took a deep breath, blinked furiously and checked her hair in the mirror before going to open the door. His smile of greeting was warm and open and friendly, and after her brief exchange with Li she just wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her there. But ‘Hi’ was all she said. ‘Come on in. I’m nearly ready. Just got to put on a little make-up.’ He came into the room and she saw, with embarrassment, his eyes drawn to the pictures and papers strewn over the floor. ‘A bit of an accident,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pick these up.’

  ‘Here, I’ll help you.’ Michael crouched to gather up the scattered files.

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ Margaret said quickly. But it was too late. He was already looking at a photograph of one of the headless bodies.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ He turned away from it, his face screwed up in disgust.

  She snatched it from him. ‘Big mistake,’ she said, ‘letting you see stuff like that. Men usually find what I do for a living a big turn-off.’

  He stood up, his face pale and shocked. ‘I’ll try not to think about it,’ he said. ‘It’s just a bit of a jolt seeing someone you know with their head cut off.’

  ‘Someone you know?’ Margaret frowned and then looked at the photograph she had taken from him. It was Yue Shi. ‘Of course,’ she realised. She had not made the connection before. ‘He was a professor of archaeology at Beijing University.’

  ‘It was a terrible shock when I heard about what happened to him,’ Michael said. ‘I never expected to actually see what happened to him.’

  Margaret was concerned. ‘I’m so sorry, Michael. Did you know him well?’

  He shrugged. ‘He wasn’t a close friend, but we had a lot of contact while I was researching the documentary series on Hu Bo. He was Hu’s protégé. Studied under him at the university and assisted in several major excavations. He knew the old man as well as anyone. He was invaluable in giving me a picture of
Hu Bo the man, rather than just Hu Bo the archaeologist.’

  Margaret threw her files on the bed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she put her arms around his waist and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss him lightly on the lips. ‘I didn’t want anything to spoil tonight for us.’

  He smiled wanly. ‘It won’t, he said. And he bent to return her kiss, and slip his arms around her. ‘I think I could probably do with a drink first. Then I’ll show you Xi’an. And then we’ll eat.’

  ‘And then …?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Margaret. Let’s just wait and see.’

  And she felt a huge surge of disappointment, and she cursed Li and his investigation. Whatever she did, whichever way she turned, somehow he always seemed to be there spoiling things for her. And now he had driven a wedge between her and Michael, brought home to him the reality of her job, confronted him with the death of a friend. As if, somehow, Li had planned it all, to ensure that her relationship with Michael stayed, as she had described it to him, platonic.

  *

  When they stepped out of the Japanese-owned Ana Chengbao Hotel it was dark, and Margaret looked in astonishment at the transformation of this dusty and undistinguished daytime city into a night-time place of light and life. The towering south gate, immediately facing them, and the crenellated city wall that ran off to east and west, were outlined in yellow neon, for all the world as if someone had taken a luminous yellow marker pen and drawn them against the night sky. Multicoloured lights illuminated the elegantly curled roofs of the ancient gate and the watchtowers that shimmered in the distant darkness.

  Michael grinned. ‘A bit Disneyesque,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ And he took her by the hand and flagged down a taxi.

  Their car followed the route of the great moat, which was separated from the wall by a park full of quiet walkways and peaceful pavilions completely encircling the city. Above it, for mile after mile, the crenellations of the wall were drawn yellow on black. The sidewalks of the streets outside, empty during daylight, had turned into endless open-air eateries. Row upon row of tables was laid out under the trees, lit by low-hanging red lamps strung from loops of electric cable. Braziers and barbecues burned and smoked in the dark, while people congregated in their thousands, families, friends, eating together beneath fleshy green leaves in the balmy autumn evening.