The Hungry Ghost Murder

by Chris West

  Only when the last line of imaginary prisoners had gone, could he turn his thoughts to the work in hand.

  He took out his black notebook and worked through the pages again.

  What is known and what is presumed.

  What are the ‘pressure points’ and what action should be applied there.

  Who had the Secretary been expecting that evening? Someone whose impending arrival had cheered him up, but who actually turned out to be his killer? Someone attractive and female?

  He shrugged. Don’t make assumptions, ask questions. What role did the paintings play in the affair? Just a blind alley, or more? Had they once belonged to the Xu family?

  Bao fetched a notepad and pencil, and began drawing a mind-map, whirling the pencil round and round in his fingers when he was thinking, not drawing. In the middle, Wu Changyan; around him, like planets, suspects, facts, times, dates, links. The rubbish bin by his side soon filled up; finally he was left with a nice, clear diagram. Several the links led to Ping Li.

  He looked up. It was afternoon. Had he really been working all that time? Yes, and there was nothing new in that. When a case was getting closer to its solution, time seemed to vanish. It was, he reflected, too late to act today. He felt glad: he didn’t want to act at all. He’d go for a walk instead.

  *

  Revolutionary heroes will never perish.

  Bao Zheng stood reading the inscription by the fast-fading light. He thought of his own military service, and of his comrades who had fallen in battle, some at his side. The ultimate sacrifice. Then he imagined those prisoners again and heard the tramp of their boots, then the sound of one woman’s feet walking out on to ice, the rending and heaving noises that ice makes under pressure: a warning, the crack of its breaking.

  He took out a Panda and lit it with a match that blazed like a flare. He smoked urgently and needily, like a suckling child. Xu Yifeng had sacrificed, too. For another person, not an abstraction.

  ‘If Ping Li killed Secretary Wu, she must be punished for it,’ Bao told himself. He repeated the sentence a few times, to see if it degenerated into nonsense, the way slogans do. It didn’t, though it didn’t uplift him the way great truths did, either. It was what you had to believe to be a good policeman. It was enough.

  He finished the cigarette, threw it onto the floor and ground it angrily on the concrete with his shoe.

  18

  Station Chief Huang was happy to lend Bao one of his motorbikes next morning. The criminal Ma Kai was on the edge of cracking. If he did so while the Beijing policeman was elsewhere in the province, so much the better. It would just underline how much he, Huang Guo, had solved this case on his own.

  Rosina was less happy about Bao’s trip: a twenty-five-year-old lookalike of Xu Yifeng was waiting at the other end. Who knew what tricks such a woman might try if cornered? But she couldn’t stop him. Best do something, something a bit challenging, to take her mind off things. What she wanted, above all, to do was to try and make things up with Fei Huiqing. Huiqing was the only person she’d met in the village whom she had liked, and she felt that renewing the friendship would do them both a favour, not just for the sake of that friendship but for doing something that both of them needed (Huiqing more than Rosina, of course): blowing away the cobwebs of the past and looking to the future. Maybe, for her former friend, even a future with a partner.

  It might be embarrassing to visit her at work. She’d go round to her house that evening.

  *

  Bao bumped up the main street of Wushui village and came to a stop outside Party HQ. This place was poor, the surrounding countryside barren and dry, the buildings wooden shacks or crumbling brick hovels. The clothes of the children who gathered to watch the rider dismount and knock on the metal front door of Wushui’s one proper building would have disgraced Nanping’s old village.

  ‘Come in, Comrade Bao,’ said an old lady in a Mao suit. ‘We got your message. I’m afraid Secretary Fang is out in his fields today, but I can take you down to see the student.

  ‘We can’t understand why she wants to come here,’ the lady (who had turned out to be Secretary Fang’s mother) continued as they walked down the rutted street, followed by a small snake of ragamuffins.

  ‘Research, isn’t it?’ Bao replied.

  ‘There’s not much to research here.’

  ‘She’s an economist.’

  ‘That’s all about money, isn’t it? We haven’t got any. Here’s the house.’

  Bao noted that a moped was parked down the side. He wouldn’t have liked to have ridden such a vehicle across dirt roads by night, but it was certainly possible to do so. He knocked on the door.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice with a Shanghai accent. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Someone to see you,’ said Mrs Fang, ‘from – where was it?’

  ‘Police,’ said Bao.

  There was a long pause, then the door opened.

  Despite the photographs, the sight of Xu Yifeng’s daughter came as a shock. Bao was lost for words.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ said the ghost.

  Mrs Fang looked disappointed that she wasn’t going to see any more of this encounter – as did the kids, who had now formed themselves into a semi-circle. Bao thanked her and followed Ping Li into her temporary home.

  The young student lived, as the local people probably almost all did, in one room. There was a desk, two chairs, a table, a stove, an old-fashioned kang bed. On the wall was one scroll, with a classical landscape on it.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ said Li, once the door was shut. ‘Nothing’s happened to my parents, has it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Sit down. Sorry about the mess. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’m from Nanping,’ said Bao.

  Ping Li’s relaxed expression vanished. ‘What’s been happening there?’

  Bao showed her his ID. ‘Name sound familiar?’

  ‘Ah.’ She appeared to relax. ‘You’re Bao Ming’s brother.’

  ‘I am. He’s still drinking, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Are you?’

  Li smiled. ‘Ah. So you know the story, then?’

  ‘Yes. Your mother’s death, the journal she left you. Names of people who persecuted your family back in 1967.’

  ‘Then you should understand how I feel.’

  ‘I do, in a way. Your mother was an honourable woman.’

  Ping Li looked at him carefully. ‘That’s what I think,’ she said after a while. ‘I’m surprised at an employee of the Public Security Bureau thinking so, too.’

  ‘Life is full of surprises,’ Bao said with a smile.

  Ping, who had clearly learnt to distrust smiling policemen, looked even more suspicious. ‘Why are you here, then?’

  ‘To ask questions. Tell me who else you “haunted”.’

  Ping reeled off some names.

  ‘And Chu Youming?’ Bao said at the end. As he spoke, he recalled the vulgarity of the newly-rich man whose wife had owned one piece of calligraphy.

  Ping’s face fell. ‘Oh, yes. Him. I didn’t bother much with him. No reason to.’ But she had gone red.

  ‘And Wu Changyan?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Party Secretary.’

  ‘Oh, yes, him. I did organize an interview. Just in case he remembered mum. But he didn’t even recognize me. So there wasn’t a lot of point in being a hungry ghost with him.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think he had much to do with my family’s suffering, anyway. He was just another Party member back then. I wanted the ones who went out and caused the damage.’

  ‘He used the Cultural Revolution to build up his art collection,’ Bao said gently. ‘Albeit indirectly.’

  ‘No doubt,’ came Li’s casual reply. ‘He had some half-decent stuff.’

  ‘Stuff which had originally belonged to your family?’

  Li shook her head. ‘No. You’re right; I hoped he would have. But he d
idn’t. Nobody did. I’m afraid Red Tiger Zhang and Chairman Mao and your brother and his pals made as good a job of destroying my family property as they did of destroying my family.’

  Bao winced, but wasn’t going to be put off. ‘I think Wu Changyan had seven pieces from your family collection.’

  ‘No, no. He didn’t have any. Mother described every item in her journal, in great detail. Secretary Wu didn’t have one. Why do you think he did?’

  ‘What about Chu Youming?’ Bao answered.

  Ping Li shook her head uneasily - and reddened again. She was not a good liar. Bao thought back to his deliberations of last night, and felt a wave of relief at what this implied. But he still had work to do.

  ‘Tell me about Ma Kai.’ Of all the connecting lines he had drawn in his diagram, that was the strangest. But it had to be real, now.

  This time Ping Li’s reaction was violent. Wide eyes, a gasp, headshakes. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

  ‘He’s confessed to the robberies,’ Bao said.

  ‘W-what robberies?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  Bao then stayed silent and fixed her with a stare. ‘Tell me how you met him,’ he said finally.

  More silence. It can be one of an interrogator’s best tools.

  ‘I don’t … What’s this got to … ’

  ‘Just tell me, please. I am not here to gather evidence against him. The opposite actually.’

  ‘I … don’t understand.’

  ‘I will explain once you have told me some more. Tell me about your relationship with Ma Kai.’

  Li pondered the offer for a long time. ‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘It was at the snooker hall. I was sitting in my room at that grim hotel one evening, reading some academic study on – I can’t remember – when I realized how bored I was. So I put on the one decent outfit I’d brought with me, and walked round the village till I found somewhere interesting. I walked in; all the boys stared at me; Kai had the guts to come over and get talking. From then on ... You look shocked, Lao Bao. Students are boring; campus life is boring; it’s not nineteen eighty-eight any longer. Our home-grown repression and all this political correctness that’s so fashionable in the West have seen to that. Kai showed me around. We went out to an old barn that used to belong to my family, and I had sex with him there. It was bloody good, too!’

  Bao tried to hide his distaste at the thought. ‘And you planned the robberies with him?’ he said, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as possible.

  ‘What robberies?’ she said again, even less convincingly than before.

  ‘Please, Miss Ping. You are a very poor liar.’

  Silence.

  ‘What has he been telling you?’

  ‘I haven’t talked to him.’

  ‘So – how come you knew about him and me?’

  ‘I worked it out. That’s my job. Tell me what role you had in the robberies.’

  ‘And then you’ll arrest me?’

  ‘No.’

  Li’s puzzlement looked genuine. ‘I had no role. Apart from … I did recommend Chu Youming as a target.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lying again.’

  ‘OK, I asked him to steal a piece of calligraphy from Chu’s. That one had been ours. It was the only piece I found in the whole village. Isn’t it a crime to receive stolen goods? That’s what that rat Chu Youming had done, via Red Tiger Zhang and that little runt of a man, Ting. Ai, there’s someone I’d like to have haunted! But Ting was dead, of course.’

  ‘Tell me about your visit to Secretary Wu.’

  More puzzlement. ‘It was boring. We sat and talked about what we were supposed to talk about: politics, history, economics – for a man with no formal training, he had a reasonable grasp of the subject.’

  ‘This was at his house?’

  ‘Yes. Nice place.’

  ‘He wasn’t in the habit of letting strangers in.’

  ‘I’d heard that. So I wore my snooker-hall outfit when I went to see him in his office to ask for a proper interview. Then a terrible old Mao jacket and trousers when I actually did go and see him.’ She smiled. ‘I think he was disappointed, but he did his duty and went on with the interview anyway. I suppose as a man, you disapprove.’

  Bao grinned evasively. ‘Tell me about Wu’s pictures.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. They weren’t ours, that’s all I know.’

  Ping Li’s face reddened. Bao stared at her – something he still found painful. She wasn’t lying about the pictures, he felt sure. They hadn’t belonged to her family. But she was holding something back.

  ‘Someone stole them,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. It wasn’t me. Or Kai. He wasn’t interested in pictures.’

  ‘But … you know who it might have been.’

  ‘No. Why should I?’

  Bao sighed. ‘Because Wu Changyan was killed by the thief, and Ma Kai currently stands accused of the killing, and will soon have a false confession beaten out of him by the local police if I don’t find out who really did do the murder.’

  Ping Li stared at him, stunned into silence. Finally she said, ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘Because you’re a policeman. What d’you really want?’

  ‘The truth. And for Kai not to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit.’

  ‘What’s that to you?’

  ‘Injustice?’

  ‘You’re Party born and bred, Bao Zheng!’ Li glared at him defiantly, then looked away and fell silent. Bao let her stay that way, reflecting as he did so, on the sad state of relations between intelligent youngsters and the forces of law and government. Then he thought of the end this woman’s mother had met. He took out the list of charges against Ma Kai and gave it to her.

  ‘If you don’t tell me the whole truth, Li, that young man will die. Like an animal, grovelling on his knees, with his hands behind his back. His family will get sent a bill for the bullet.’

  Ping Li stared at the list for a long time.

  ‘You’ll kill him anyway,’ she said finally.

  ‘No. He’ll be punished for the thefts, but not by death.’ Bao held out the charge sheet. ‘I’m on your side. As far as I can be. I want to see justice done, For the thief to be punished. For the killer of Wu Changyan to be punished – not Ma Kai. Any charges of accessory to burglary that you might liable to face – I’m going to forget those. I shan’t tell anyone, and nobody in Nanping has the intelligence to work them out. But you must tell me the truth.’

  Li stared at the sheet, then began to cry. Finally she said, not to Bao but to the room, to someone in her own mind, ‘Forgive me.’ Then she turned to the inspector.

  ‘He was so good to my mother. They were in the cowshed together; he’d do extra work for her, give her food, everything. His own wife had died, you see.’ She glanced up at the policeman with the beseeching look of a child. ‘They were his family’s paintings, not ours. And I told him about them. That smug bastard Wu had had them all those years, and he hadn’t even known.’

  ‘How did you know who they belonged to?’ Bao asked slowly. He felt oddly untriumphant, despite the fact he was now only a few words away from knowing the killer’s identity.

  ‘The journals. My mother described several collections, not just ours. She knew what would happen to them. She hoped someone like me would come along and restore justice later. Which, I guess, they did in a way.’

  The young orphan began to cry again. Bao thought of Rosina. What would she do at a moment like this? He reached out a hand to her, the hand of compassion. Li shrank away. Probably right to.

  So he asked: ‘Who did Secretary Wu’s paintings really belong to?’

  19

  ‘So you’re ready to confess, Ma Kai?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I knew you’d see sense.’ Station Chief Huang looked across the desk at the young prisoner and allowed h
imself a smile. ‘You’ll be amazed how much better you feel when you’ve told us everything.’

  ‘So I can die happy?’

  ‘That’s not my decision. I can only control the way your family are treated. Now, tell me the story.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Don’t play games. Not now you’ve made your mind up. You planned a raid on Secretary Wu’s house.’

  ‘Yes. I knew he was rich. Party bosses all are. So I went there and broke in.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Try. A side window? In the kitchen?’

  ‘That’s right. A side window. In the kitchen. And I found the house full of CD players, videos – ’

  ‘Secretary Wu collected paintings.’

  ‘And paintings. Lots of them. Calligraphy, too?’

  ‘Calligraphy, too. Then?’

  ‘Then I was looking round the living room, when I heard a noise. From upstairs – it does have two storeys, the house I burgled, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You know bloody well it does.’

  ‘Well, the old bugger was asleep. And there was me, convinced he’d gone out. All the other robberies, I made sure the owner wasn’t about. This one – well, I felt like a change. Anyway, he woke up. And came down the stairs to investigate. I – what did I do? – I tried to hide. Behind a sofa? Yes. And he came into the room. Of course, his paintings were missing. And his calligraphy. So he realized he’d been burgled. He says: “I know you’re still here. I’m going to kill you.’’ So he takes a gun out of his pocket, and begins prowling round, looking in all the corners. Finally, of course, the sofa is the last place left. He walks up to it, he holds out the gun with one hand; with the other, he pulls the sofa away from the wall. Then … what did I do then?’

  ‘Stop fucking about, Ma. You hit him.’

  ‘Yes, I hit him. With … ’

  ‘A heavy blunt object.’

  ‘What heavy blunt object?’

  ‘Er, a piece of wood.’

  ‘A piece of wood. On the head?’

  Huang nodded.

  ‘How many blows, Chief?’

  ‘You know, Ma. This bullshit won’t do you any good.’