Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6)

by Peter May

  ‘Sure,’ Li said. He placed his hand over the mouse. It was divided in two at the finger-end, and each half could be clicked down separately. ‘The left-hand side for anything on the target list.’

  ‘And the right-hand side for everything else. So you click once for every image you see.’

  Li shrugged. ‘Seems simple enough.’ He smiled. ‘So how do you know what apartment building I live in?’

  She grinned. ‘We’ve done our homework, Mr Li.’

  ‘If you’d wanted my address you only had to ask.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I’m not sure your partner would have been too happy. She’s an American, isn’t she?’

  Li raised an eyebrow. ‘You have done your homework.’

  ‘On all of you.’ She stood back and smiled at him ruefully. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

  She finished arranging his headgear, and then skipped around to the other desk and opened a beige folder with Li’s name marked on the front of it. She leaned over to hand him his target list and sat down at her computer to prime it for the first test. Li looked at the list. As Pan had said it would, it described nine items: a knife with a jewelled handle; the body of a man washed up on a beach; a woman’s dress with blood on it; a pair of leather gloves; a red car with a missing front fender; your apartment building; the statue of Mao Zedong in front of the provincial government building in your home town; a photograph of a crime scene in which two bodies are charred beyond recognition; the licence plate on your official car.

  Li read it over a couple of times. He had no idea what any of it meant, or why he was going to be shown these things. Pan looked up from her computer screen, positioned so that she would be looking at Li in profile while he was looking at his monitor. ‘All set?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess,’ Li said. ‘Left-hand button for everything on this list, right-hand button for everything else.’

  ‘You got it.’ And then it was as if she flicked off a charm switch and became another person. Cool, focused, impersonal. ‘At the risk of making you conscious of it, I’m going to ask you to try to blink as seldom as possible when I am showing the images. Alright?’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘Focus on the screen. The images will appear for only three-tenths of a second, so please concentrate. There will be three seconds between each image, but try to respond with the mouse button immediately. You will see a total of fifty-four images. It will take approximately three minutes. We’ll have a rest, and then we’ll start again.’

  Li found himself inexplicably tense in anticipation of it and had to make himself consciously relax his grip on the mouse. He flicked a glance at the list, afraid he might have forgotten something on it.

  ‘Eyes on the screen please.’

  His eyes jumped back to the screen and the sequence began. It was all so fast it was hard for him to think consciously about any of the images he saw. The red car with the missing fender, the bloody shirt on the drive at the crime scene, a Swiss army knife, an apartment block that meant nothing to him. It seemed like a long three minutes. He saw one of the pictures of the crime scene that Pan’s graduate had shown them, and the close-up of the man with the back of his head missing. He saw a grey Nissan car that he did not recognise, the statue of Mao from his home town, the murder weapon he had handled only half an hour earlier. There were images of an axe, a licence plate he did not know, a dress with blood on it, the bizarrely familiar pink and white of the police apartment block where he lived in Zhengyi Road.

  And then it was over, and Pan was smiling at him, the charm switch flicked back to the on position. ‘Just relax, Li Yan,’ she said, suddenly informal again, familiar. He allowed himself to blink, and sat back in his chair. The concentration the test had required of him had left him feeling fatigued. And, as if reading his mind, she said, ‘It’s tiring, isn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘Are you going to tell me now how it works?’

  ‘Not yet. We’re not finished. I’m going to show you the same pictures again, although not in the same order. The computer will randomise them. But I need you to treat them in exactly the same way. Left-hand button for the targets, right-hand for everything else. Okay, you ready?’

  In fact, they ran through the images another twice before she finally turned on her sweetest smile and told him it was all over. She came back around the desk and removed his headset. ‘How long will it take you to figure out whether I was one of those briefed on the crime or not?’ he asked.

  ‘I know already.’ This quite matter-of-factly.

  He was intrigued. ‘So, tell me.’

  Her smile turned secretive. ‘Not yet. I’m saving that for the finale.’ She lifted his list of targets and slipped it back into his folder. ‘But I will tell you exactly what it is I just put you through. And why.’ She adopted her sitting position on the edge of the desk again, her legs stretched out in front of her, arms folded. ‘It’s just a demonstration program,’ she said, ‘but basically it consists of me showing you fifty-four images. Nine of these are what we call probes. That is to say, they relate specifically to the crime that three of you were briefed on. Images that you would recognise instantly if you were one of those three. Another nine of the fifty-four were the targets that I gave you a list of. Each target corresponds to one of the probes. For example, your apartment block would correspond to the private dwelling house where the murder took place. You recognise your apartment block, and if you are one of those briefed, you recognise the murder house. Your brain emits the same recognition signal, the same MERMER.’

  ‘What about the other thirty-six?’

  ‘Irrelevants. That’s what we call them, because that’s what they are. Irrelevant. Although again, a number of them will correspond to the probes. So that you see your apartment block, the murder house, and some other apartment block that means nothing to you.’

  The logic of it began to drop into place for Li. ‘Okay, I get it,’ he said. ‘You use my apartment block as the benchmark. The thing you know is familiar to me. If you get the same reading from the murder house, you know I’ve been briefed. But if the murder house and the irrelevant apartment block give the same reading, which is different from my apartment, you know I haven’t.’

  She half-nodded, half-shrugged. ‘I guess that comes somewhere close to it. I would probably have said that the determination of guilt or innocence consists of comparing the probe responses to the target responses, which contain a MERMER, and to the irrelevant responses, which do not.’

  Li let the implications tumble around in his mind. ‘That’s extraordinary,’ he said finally. ‘If it works.’

  ‘Oh, it works.’

  ‘You would know beyond doubt that a guilty suspect had knowledge of a crime scene that only the culprit could possess. And you could instantly rule out an innocent suspect if you could demonstrate that they had no recognition of specific elements of the crime or the crime scene.’

  ‘Which has been done,’ Pan said. ‘In the States. Where Doctor Farwell demonstrated to an appeal court that a man who had served twenty-two years of a prison sentence for murder had no details of the crime scene stored in his brain, while the details of his alibi were. And that evidence was ruled admissible by the judge.’ She laughed to herself. ‘Unlike poor old Bill Hart’s dinosaur technology. I can’t think of a single court anywhere that accepts the polygraph test as evidence.’

  ‘You don’t think much of the polygraph, then?’

  ‘I don’t. In a conventional polygraph test, emotion-driven physiological responses to relevant questions about the situation under investigation are compared to responses to control questions which are invasive and personal and not relevant to the issue at hand. Their only purpose is to emotionally and psychologically disturb the subject. So even if the subject is innocent, and truthful, he is subjected to a highly invasive and stressful ordeal. I don’t think you could say that about the MERMER test, do you?’

  Li had to agree. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘The trouble w
ith the polygraph, Section Chief, is that it’s not science. It’s artful and disturbing psychological manipulation.’

  Li blew air through pursed lips. ‘You and Margaret would get on like a house on fire.’

  Pan inclined her head. ‘Margaret …’ she repeated the name. ‘Campbell?’ Li nodded. ‘She’s quite a character, I hear. I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘If you can make it tonight you will.’ He stood up, his height restoring the mantle of dominance she had taken from him and worn herself during the test. But she didn’t seem to mind. The warmth in her eyes as they met his was unmistakable, and the twinkle in them suggested she was flirting.

  ‘I will do my very best to be there,’ she said. She stretched out a hand to shake his, and held it as she spoke. ‘It’s been a real pleasure, Section Chief.’

  III

  Margaret watched as a mother lifted her child into the shiny brass seat of the rickshaw. The little girl was perhaps three years old, drowned by a quilted red jacket, a sparkling red band keeping her long, black hair out of her face. Thousands of backsides had polished the seat to a brilliant shining gold. The rest of the life-sized statue was tarnished and dull, including the rickshaw man with his shaved pate and his long pigtail. A camera flashed in the afternoon sunshine. A few yards away a middle-aged man swept his hair self-consciously to one side as he posed for his wife’s camera with a couple of brass musicians. A man with a suit and an umbrella stood beside a brass barber shaving the head of an eternally acquiescent client. A half-empty open-sided blue tourist bus crawled past, the tour guide barking the history of Wangfujing Street through a speaker system that filled the air. The name Wangfujing derives from a fifteenth century well … No one was listening.

  Beijing’s best-known shopping street had changed almost beyond recognition since Margaret had first kept an appointment there with Li Yan outside the Foreign Language Bookstore more than five years before. Vast new shopping complexes in pink marble had risen from the rubble of the old. Giant TV screens played episodes of a popular soap opera. Crowds of affluent Chinese, the new bourgeoisie, roamed the pedestrian precincts viewing luxury goods behind plate-glass windows, anxious to spend their new-found wealth. On the corner of Wangfujing and Donganmen, outside the bookshop, an old man wearing a cloth cap and dark blue cotton jacket pedalled up on his tricycle with a steaming urn to warm the young security men on traffic duty with mugs of hot green tea. They gathered around him like children, with their red armbands, laughing and giggling and poking each other while traffic at the junction ground to a halt.

  Margaret smiled. While so much about China had changed in just five years, the character of the Chinese had not. There was something irresistibly likeable about them – unless you happened to be trying to renew your visa. The thought clouded her afternoon with memories of that morning’s debacle. She tipped Li Jon’s buggy on to its back wheels and bumped it up the two steps to the open doors of the bookstore, brushing aside the heavy strips of clear plastic that kept in the heat. An overhead heater blasted them with hot air, and Margaret turned off to their right where she knew they kept the stands of English language fiction and non-fiction books. Rows of shelving between grey marble pillars delivered books on every aspect of foreign language and culture to an increasingly literate population, hungry to feed a new-found appetite for learning about the world beyond the Middle Kingdom. People spoke here in hushed and reverent tones, in direct contrast with the cacophony in the street outside.

  Margaret found what she was looking for on the middle shelf of the back wall. There were two English-language originals of Thomas Dowman’s The Murders of Jack the Ripper sitting side by side. She lifted one and found an assistant who wrote her out a slip in exchange for the book. She spotted a manned cash desk on the far side of the shop and took her slip there to pay for the book, before returning with her receipt to collect it from the assistant. It was tiresome, but it was the Chinese way, and you just got used to it. And it was also, she supposed, one way of keeping the unemployment figures down.

  Outside, the blue bus was making its return trip, the tour guide’s nasal hollering still an assault on the ears. Before the liberation in 1949, Wangfujing was known as Morrison Street … And still no one was listening. A fresh bunch of people was posing with the brass statues. Margaret pushed Li Jon’s buggy to the junction, where the security men had returned to traffic duty, and flagged a taxi, fumbling in her pocket for the address Chi Lyang had written down for her after lunch.

  * * *

  The Jade Fingers Blind Massage Club was on the twenty-fifth floor of a new shopping mall in Chaoyang District, off the east Third Ring Road, just south of the Lufthansa Centre. Lyang was waiting for her in the reception room. ‘It’s all fixed,’ she said and nodded to one of two Chinese girls behind the desk who came to relieve Margaret of Li Jon and the buggy. Margaret looked anxiously as the girl wheeled her son away through swing doors. ‘Relax,’ Lyang said. ‘Let go. That’s what this place is for. Some time out from life. Enjoy it.’

  Margaret said, ‘I haven’t had time out from life since I don’t know when.’

  ‘Then you’re long overdue.’

  The other girl from Reception led them down a long, narrow corridor. Openings without doors led off into massage rooms every few metres. There was thick, soft carpet underfoot, and a hush suffused the place, broken only by the odd murmur of distant voices. Some of the rooms were empty. In others women swaddled in towels lay on massage tables, groaning while girls in white overalls worked strong fingers into soft flesh.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s women-only,’ Lyang said, catching Margaret’s expression.

  Margaret said, ‘Why is it called the blind massage club?’

  ‘Because all the masseuses are blind,’ Lyang said.

  Margaret laughed. ‘Ask a silly question.’

  Lyang said, ‘It’s a good job for a blind person, based solely on touch. Something I’m more than happy to support. And imagine, a blind masseuse has nothing to distract her. Her entire focus is on you, and the whole landscape of your body beneath her fingers.’

  ‘I thought we were having a foot massage.’

  ‘Today, yes. But some other time you must try the whole body massage. It leaves you feeling fantastic for the rest of the day.’

  They turned into a room with two reclining armchairs, a footstool in front of each and a low table between them. The girl from Reception invited them to sit, and they arranged themselves comfortably in the chairs and removed their shoes and socks. A few moments later both receptionists returned with small wooden barrels lined with plastic and filled with hot, aromatic water. Scented herbs floated on the surface, their fragrance rising with the steam. A barrel was placed in front of each chair and Lyang and Margaret slipped their feet into the water. It was so hot Margaret almost had to withdraw her feet immediately, but the burning quickly subsided and she started to relax.

  Lyang said, ‘They’ll leave us now to steep for about twenty minutes.’

  Another girl brought in cups of jasmine tea and Margaret took a sip and allowed herself to unwind. A wave of fatigue washed over her and she closed her eyes, remembering the cry of the baby which had wakened her at five that morning. For the next hour and a half her over-sensitised inner alarm system could take a break. Without opening her eyes she said, ‘So what was it about Bill Hart that made him worth giving up your job for?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t give it up for him. I gave it up for me.’

  A slight frown creased Margaret’s brow. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I fell in love,’ Lyang said simply. ‘What’s a girl gonna do? It was him or my job.’

  ‘And you didn’t resent that?’

  ‘Well, sure. But it wasn’t Bill I resented. It was the goddamned stupid rule we have about cops not marrying foreigners. And, anyway, I didn’t do anything he didn’t. He gave up a well-paid job in the States to come and work in China for about a tenth of the money. That makes me feel good. It means he must love
me, too.’

  ‘Didn’t you want to go and live in the States?’

  ‘Not really. This is my home. And besides, Bill wanted to come and live here. He still can’t get over the idea of a civilisation that’s five thousand years old.’

  ‘Well, of course, he comes from a country where the most exciting thing we’ve produced in two hundred years is the burger.’

  Lyang laughed. ‘You sound just like him. His favourite gag just now is, what happens if you leave an American and a cup of yoghurt alone in a room for a week?’ She paused waiting for a response.

  Margaret obliged. ‘And that would be?’

  ‘The yoghurt develops its own culture.’ Which brought a smile to Margaret’s lips. And Lyang added, almost apologetically, ‘I only tell it because he does.’

  Margaret grinned, opening her eyes and tilting her head to look at her. ‘As long as you don’t tell it to Li Yan. I like giving him a hard time about China, and I hate giving him ammunition for return fire.’ She paused. ‘So what do you do all day every day?’

  ‘I still work.’

  Margaret was taken aback. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘At the Academy. It’s just part time, but I work mornings as Bill’s assistant. I know you don’t think very much of the polygraph …’

  Margaret broke in, ‘I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.’

  Lyang said, ‘And we’d know if you were.’ They both laughed. Then she said, ‘The truth is, Bill’s more of a scientist than a practitioner. The Academy is employing him to develop something based on the polygraph which is more suited to the Chinese. He was responsible for persuading Lynn Pan to come to China to work on the Chinese version of MERMER.’ She hesitated and glanced over at Margaret. ‘You don’t work at all?’

  ‘I give the occasional lecture at the Public Security University.’

  ‘But no pathology?’

  Margaret shook her head. ‘The Ministry is not particularly keen on Americans conducting autopsies on Chinese crime victims. I think they think it reflects badly on their own pathologists.’