by Peter May
‘Rudyard Kipling,’ Li said.
‘Ah,’ said Pathologist Wang. ‘A man of letters.’
‘My uncle had a book of his poetry.’
‘Well, of course … He would, wouldn’t he?’ The pathologist dropped his soiled gloves into a plastic bag and almost sang, ‘You’re going to have to catch this guy, Li. Or it’ll be your head.’ He pulled a lighter from his pocket.
‘Don’t light that in here,’ Li said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any need to ask you about the cause of death?’
Pathologist Wang shrugged and put his lighter away. ‘Well, it’s pretty obvious that someone cut his head off. Not quite as cleanly as the previous victims – but it might just be that his blade’s starting to get a little blunt.’ Li ignored the jibe. ‘From the amount of blood I think you could safely say that his heart was still beating when the blow came. So, yes, I’d happily put money on decapitation being the cause of death.’
‘But only,’ said Li, ‘if the government ever decides to legalise gambling.’
Pathologist Wang smiled. His addiction to cards and mah jong was well known. ‘I was speaking figuratively, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Li. He would not have been surprised if money changed hands at Pao Jü Hutong on the outcome of autopsies. ‘What about time of death.’
‘Ah,’ said Wang. ‘Now that really is a lottery.’
‘Your best guess, then.’
The pathologist scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘It takes about twelve hours for rigor mortis to reach its stiffest. He’s not quite there yet.’ Wang looked at his watch. ‘About nine hours, maybe. Say … eight, eight-thirty last night, give or take two or three hours.’ He waved his cigarette at Li. ‘I’m going outside for a smoke if you need me for anything else.’ He pushed out on to the landing.
Li stepped carefully into the sitting room and surveyed the scene. Qian followed at his shoulder.
The body had toppled forward from a kneeling position, and then fallen on to its side, so there was something oddly foetal about its final resting position. Except for the fact that the arms were pinned behind the back, tied at the wrist. Li crouched to have a closer look. Silk cord. Just like all the others. As he stood up and moved carefully round the body, he saw the eyes of the disembodied head watching him. They gave the disconcerting impression of following him as he stepped across the room. He looked away, and his eyes fell on a once white placard lying partially in the main pool of blood. The cord with which it had hung around the neck of the victim had been severed and was stained dark red. Carefully, Li lifted an unbloodied corner of the placard to reveal characters daubed in red ink on the other side. A nickname, Digger, was written upside down and crossed through. Above it, three single, horizontal strokes. The number 3. All so familiar.
Li stood up and looked around the room and realised that something wasn’t right. There was a sofa, a table with a lamp, a TV cabinet with a small set on top. The sofa was old, but it didn’t look sat in. There were no knick-knacks, personal belongings of any sort, papers, mail. Li picked his way carefully around the body and saw that a wastebasket by the TV cabinet was empty. He opened the cabinet. Nothing.
‘What is it, boss?’ Qian asked.
Li went out into the dining area and opened the built-in cupboards against the back wall. There were a couple of jackets, a pair of trousers, a couple of pairs of shoes. They were big cupboards, but they seemed very empty. ‘Do we know who he is yet?’ Li asked, and he went through to the kitchen.
‘Still working on it, boss,’ Qian said. ‘It’s a privately owned apartment. The guy had been renting for about three months, but none of the neighbours knew who he was. They hardly ever saw him.’
‘What about the street committee?’
‘They don’t know either. Since the apartment wasn’t provided by his danwei …’
Li cursed the move to privatise housing. It might be desirable for people to own their own homes, but it was breaking down the traditional structure of Chinese society. The opposite ends of the new economic spectrum, home ownership and unemployment, were creating a large, unregistered, floating population that was almost impossible to keep track of. It was proving a breeding ground for crime. He threw open the kitchen cupboards. Apart from a few cans, and some prepackaged dried noodles, they were empty, too.
‘Who raised the alarm?’
‘Couple in the flat below.’ Qian wrinkled his face ‘The guy woke up to find the top sheet of their bed soaking wet. He thought for a minute he’d pissed himself during the night. Till he got the light on. The sheet’s bright red. He starts screaming, thinking it’s his own blood. His wife wakes up and she starts screaming, too. Then she sees the big red patch on the ceiling, and the blood dripping through. They were both pretty shaken up.’
He followed Li through to the bedroom and watched him as he carefully pulled back the top covers and examined the sheets, then checked inside the bedside cabinet before getting on his knees to look under the bed. ‘What is it you’re looking for, boss?’
Li stood up and was thoughtful for a moment. ‘No one’s been living here, Qian,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been using the place, cooking the odd meal, staying over the odd night. But it’s not been lived in. There are no clothes or personal stuff, no food …’
Qian shrugged. ‘There’s washing hanging out there on the balcony.’
‘Let’s take a look.’
They moved with great care back through the living room and out the screen door on to the glassed balcony. A circular drying rack was suspended from the ceiling, and hanging from it were a shirt and two pairs of socks. Li put out his arm to stop Qian from touching it. He rummaged in his pockets and brought out a small pocket flashlight. He shone it towards the ceiling above the drying rack, and in its light they saw the complex silver traces of an elaborate cobweb. A big, fat, black spider scurried away from the light. Li switched it off. ‘There was certainly a washing done here. But it was some time ago.’ He looked thoughtfully at Qian. ‘Let’s talk to the folk downstairs.’
*
The officer who’d been sitting with old Hua seemed glad to get away. As he passed Qian on the way out he put his hand up to his chest and made a mouth with it that opened and closed, and he raised his eyes to the heavens. The apartment was the same layout as the one above, but old Hua and his wife used it differently. They dined in the same central room, shelves of crockery hidden behind a checked drape, but slept in the smaller back room, and lived in the front room that looked down on to the street. The contrast with the apartment above could not have been greater. Here was a place that was lived in, every corner crammed with furniture, every surface cluttered and piled with the stuff of daily living. There were family photographs pinned to the wall, a calendar, some old posters from the twenties and thirties advertising soap and cigarettes. The place smelled of soiled clothes and body sweat and cooking. It smelled of life.
‘Have some tea.’ The old man waved his hand at the table. ‘The water’s still hot.’ But Li and Qian declined. From the bathroom they heard the sound of running water. ‘That’s her third shower,’ old Hua said. ‘Silly old bitch thinks she’s still got blood on her. I told her she was clean. But she won’t listen.’
The old man was almost completely bald. What little hair remained he had shaved into his scalp. He was wearing blue cotton trousers and a grubby-looking white shirt that hung open, exposing a buddha-like belly and breasts. He had nothing on his feet and was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
‘I mean, it’s not as if I’m not used to death,’ he said. ‘I was only scared when I thought it was my blood. Other people’s blood doesn’t bother me.’
Li pulled up a chair. ‘How is it that you’re used to death?’ he asked. He had encountered death himself, many times, and had never got used to it.
Old Hua grinned. ‘I work for the Public Utilities Bureau,’ he said. ‘Have done for thirty years. It’s not unlike your Public Security Bureau. We’re both in charge o
f people. Only with you it’s the living. With me it’s the dead.’
Qian frowned. ‘Public Utilities … You work at a crematorium?’
‘I don’t just work there,’ Hua corrected him. ‘I’m a mortician,’ he said proudly. ‘It’s a long time since I went round with the wagon fetching corpses from their homes. I dress up the bodies now – for the benefit of the living, of course. Taught myself from books on cosmetics and barbering. Mind you, it’s not so easy with some of these accident victims. You know, when the face is all smashed up and you’ve got to use cotton wool, and paper pulp, and plaster and the like to re-make it––.’
‘Yes, well right now,’ Li interrupted him, ‘we’re all dealing with the dead.’
Old Hua jerked his head toward the ceiling. ‘Him up there?’
‘How well did you know him?’
‘I didn’t. I passed him on the stairs, maybe twice. Didn’t look like he had that much blood in him. A washed-out sort of face he had, pasty and pale. What did they do to him to make him bleed like that?’
‘They?’
‘Well, whoever did it.’
‘So you didn’t see anyone coming or going last night?’
‘Not a soul.’
‘And you didn’t hear anything?’
‘Not a thing. The wife’s half deaf, you know. We have to have the television up at a terrible volume. We never hear anything from above or below.’
‘When did you go to bed?’
‘That would be about nine o’clock. I’m normally at my work by six.’ He scratched his belly and stubbed out his cigarette.
So there was no sign of the blood at nine. Li guessed that beneath the floorboards there wouldn’t be much of substance between floor and ceiling. That amount of blood would have soaked through fairly quickly. Which would put the killing perhaps a couple of hours later than the doctor’s estimate.
‘When did you wake up?’
Old Hua started rolling another cigarette. ‘I don’t know for sure. About three, half-three maybe.’ Which narrowed the time of the murder to a six-hour window.
Li said, ‘How long do you think the blood had been dripping on you?’
Hua shrugged. ‘Who knows. Usually I sleep like a baby. And the wife takes pills, so it takes a bomb to wake her. But it was pretty sticky, so it couldn’t have been that fresh.’
Maybe around midnight, then, Li thought. When the street would be deserted and most people in their beds. He jerked his thumb towards the bedroom. ‘Do you mind if we take a look?’
‘Go ahead.’ Hua finished rolling and lit his cigarette.
Li and Qian went to the bedroom door and surveyed the dark stain on the ceiling, the blood drying brown on the crumpled bed sheet below.
‘Just who’s going to clean up all that mess?’ the old man shouted through. ‘That’s what I want to know.’
Li turned back into the hall and was startled by the apparition of old Hua’s wife, stark naked, emerging from the bathroom clutching a towel. She let out a tiny scream of fright and with a judder of old and sagging breasts, hurried back into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Old Hua just laughed. ‘Not a pretty sight, eh?’
Li and Qian exchanged glances and suppressed smiles.
‘Thank you, Mr Hua,’ Li said. ‘We’ll take full statements from you and your wife later.’ He paused at the door. ‘One more thing. Do you have any idea who owns the apartment upstairs?’
‘Nope. The guy who had it died about a year ago and left it to some relative who’s been renting it out. Just like the old landlords, eh? We had a revolution to get rid of these types. Seems like we’ve just come full circle.’
As Li and Qian re-entered the victim’s apartment on the fourth floor, two assistants were manoeuvring the corpse into a body bag for removal to Pao Jü Hutong, where the autopsy would be carried out in a few hours’ time.
‘Once forensics are finished, I want the apartment sealed off,’ Li said. ‘No one gets in here without referring to me first. And I want to know who the hell owns this place. If anyone knows who our John Doe is, it’s got to be the guy who rented him the apartment.’
A sudden commotion in the back room distracted him. One of the assistants called out, ‘Is Deputy Section Chief Li still around?’
‘Here,’ Li said, and crossed quickly to the room.
The assistant stood up and handed him what appeared to be a small, dark blue notebook. ‘It was hanging out his back pocket.’
Li held the corner of it between thumb and forefinger, and his heart skipped a beat as he recognised the silver crest on the front. It wasn’t a notebook. It was a passport. He eased it open and looked at the photograph inside, then at the head still staring back at him from the floor. His eyes flickered down the page to the name, Yuan Tao.
‘Shit,’ he whispered, realising the implications.
‘What is it?’ Qian asked anxiously over his shoulder.
‘This might be the same as the other murders in almost every other detail. But there’s one very big difference.’ He held up the passport and Qian immediately recognised the eagle crest. ‘This guy’s an American.’
IV
‘This had better be good.’ Margaret strode across the floor of the lobby in the Ritan Hotel, glancing at her watch, Sophie hurrying in her wake. ‘I’ve got exactly two hours to finish packing and get to the airport.’ She stopped at the glass doors and turned to Sophie. ‘Anyway, how can you not know what it’s about?’
‘Because they haven’t told me anything. Honest, Margaret. All I know is the RSO’s been in with the Ambassador for the last two hours and all engagements for the rest of the morning have been cancelled.’
They ran down the steps to where a sleek black embassy limousine idled quietly in the damp morning air.
‘And they didn’t need to send a car, for God’s sake!’ said Margaret. ‘It’s just a couple of streets away.’
‘They said it was urgent.’ Sophie opened the door for Margaret and then slid in after her.
‘This isn’t one of your little jokes, is it?’ Margaret said, suddenly suspicious. The car drew away from the steps and swung out of the gate, past the glowering security guards.
‘Of course not,’ Sophie said. Her tone was defensive, even hurt. ‘I’m sorry if my little bit of fun backfired last night.’
‘It didn’t,’ Margaret said quickly, but she avoided meeting Sophie’s eye. ‘Bit of a coincidence, though, you being his little sister’s best friend.’
‘Not really. Michael was out here most of last year shooting the series that starts back home next month. It was he who encouraged me to apply for the posting. China sounded, well … a bit exotic. And so here I am.’
‘And so is he – for the next few months if he’s just starting filming. I don’t suppose that had anything to do with your decision to apply for the job?’
Sophie turned and smiled. ‘I can always dream, can’t I? But I’m sure he’d much rather spend time with you than me. He was disappointed that you left so early last night.’
Margaret checked her watch again and changed the subject. ‘I hope this isn’t going to take too long, Sophie, or the American government will be picking up the tab for me missing my flight.’
Sophie shrugged. ‘Who knows – maybe the Chinese have refused you an exit visa.’
Margaret turned, genuinely shocked. ‘They couldn’t do that, could they?’
*
The Ambassador’s secretary led them straight into his office. The Ambassador, in his customary shirtsleeves – rolled up this time – was standing with hands on hips looking out of the window. Stan Palmer sat at the coffee table sipping black coffee, papers spread in front of him. His normally smooth façade seemed a little ruffled.
Jon Dakers, the Regional Security Officer, was perched on a corner of the Ambassador’s desk, talking into the telephone. He sounded agitated. ‘Well, get them to give me a call as soon as they’ve got it. And fax it direct to the embassy.’
> The Ambassador turned as Margaret and Sophie entered. ‘Thank you for coming so promptly, Margaret.’
‘What’s this all about, Mr Ambassador? I need to be at the airport in less than two hours.’
‘And I need a favour, Margaret.’ He crossed the room and indicated that she should take a seat. She did so, reluctantly. The Ambassador remained standing. He paused for a moment. Then, ‘A member of the embassy staff, a Chinese-American called Yuan Tao, was murdered last night,’ he said. ‘Someone decapitated him.’
‘Jesus,’ Margaret said.
‘And it gets worse,’ Stan said, raising what looked suspiciously like a plucked eyebrow.
‘Really?’ said Margaret. ‘I can’t think of anything much worse than decapitation.’
‘For us, not for him,’ Dakers said, crossing the room to stand beside the Ambassador. The RSO was a solid, square man, an ex-cop, bald and aggressive, with a close-cropped silver-grey beard. ‘He was murdered in an apartment he’d been renting in the Chaoyang District.’ He paused, as if this should mean something to Margaret.
‘So?’ she asked.
Stan said, ‘Embassy staff are allocated apartments in special embassy compounds. In Yuan Tao’s case, a two-room affair in a block just behind the Friendship Store.’
‘Technically,’ Jon Dakers said, ‘he was breaking the law.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Margaret said. She had bitter experience. ‘You got to register where you’re staying with Public Security, and they get pretty pissed if you spend even one night somewhere else.’