by Peter May
‘And the Chinese are, indeed, pretty pissed,’ said the Ambassador.
‘They’re embarrassed,’ Dakers corrected him. ‘An American citizen’s been murdered on their patch. They’re looking for any way to pass the buck.’
A sudden worm of suspicion worked its way into Margaret’s mind. ‘Wait a minute. When you say this guy was “a member of the embassy staff”, is this some kind of euphemism?’
The Ambassador chuckled grimly. ‘He wasn’t a spy, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And, of course, you’d tell me if he was.’
‘No,’ the Ambassador said, ‘but I’m telling you he wasn’t. He was a low-level official. Only been out here about six months, working on the visa line.’
‘Which probably gives a few thousand people a motive for doing him in,’ Stan said.
‘We’re waiting on the State Department sending his file,’ Dakers said.
There was a pause, then, that no one seemed anxious to fill. Margaret glanced around the faces looking expectantly at her.
‘So what’s any of this got to do with me?’ she asked.
The Ambassador rounded the sofa and sat down. ‘The Chinese police believe they have a serial killer on their hands. They think Yuan Tao is victim number four. The other three were Chinese nationals. But this guy’s an American citizen. And we’d like you to carry out the autopsy.’
‘What?’ Margaret was stunned.
‘You’ve worked with them before,’ Dakers said.
‘Look,’ Margaret said, ‘I came here last spring to lecture for six weeks at the University of Public Security. I did one autopsy as a favour – and spent the next three months regretting it. I do not want to get involved again.’
‘Margaret, I understand perfectly.’ The Ambassador leaned forward earnestly. He was drawing on all his powers of diplomacy. ‘But there’s no way we can get anyone else out here fast enough. Besides which, the Chinese trust you.’
‘Do they?’ Margaret was amazed.
‘Well, they’ve agreed to let you do the autopsy – or, at least to assist.’
‘And if I refuse?’
‘We all have certain obligations to our country, Margaret.’ The Ambassador sat back, playing his trump card – the appeal to her patriotism.
Margaret had always wondered what all that swearing allegiance to the flag and singing the national anthem at school was about. Now she knew. She sighed. ‘I’ll have to rearrange my flight.’
‘Already taken care of,’ Stan said smugly.
‘Oh, is it?’ Margaret threw him a hostile glance and stood up.
‘Oh, and one other thing,’ Stan said, and she saw a strange look of anticipation brighten his eyes. ‘The officer in charge of the case is Deputy Section Chief Li Yan of the Beijing Municipal Police.’ He beamed at her. ‘I think you know him.’
CHAPTER TWO
I
The half-dozen detectives freshly drafted in from CID headquarters at Qianmen had been sitting smoking and talking animatedly for nearly half an hour. Their cigarette smoke hung like a cloud over the top floor meeting room at Beixinqiao Santiao, reflecting the mood of their Section One colleagues, who joined them now around the big table to sift through the evidence which had been collected over the past month. The detectives of the serious crime squad were depressed by their failure to achieve any significant progress, and embarrassed by the need for reinforcements.
Li sat brooding in his seat with his back to the window. He had been reinstated as Deputy Section Chief shortly after the first murder, and he was frustrated by the lack of a single substantial lead. He had even begun to question his own previously unshakable faith in himself, and wonder if the death of his uncle and the events of the past three months had taken a greater toll on him that he had realised. There were times, he knew, when his concentration was not what it should be. He had found himself sitting in meetings, his mind wandering to thoughts of Yifu. And Margaret.
Simply bringing her name to mind was painful, accompanied as it was by a host of memories, bittersweet and full of hurt. He thought back to the only time they had made love, the sun streaming in through the dirt-streaked windows of a neglected railway sleeper on a siding near Datong.
‘Boss …’
He became aware of an insistent voice forcing its way into his thoughts.
‘Boss, are you still with us?’
Li looked up suddenly and saw Detective Wu, sunglasses pushed back on his forehead, eyeing him oddly from across the table. He glanced around at the other detectives, almost twenty of them now, and saw that they were all looking at him.
‘Yeah, sure. Sorry …’ Li shuffled the papers on the desk in front of him. ‘Just following a train of thought.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to share it with us, then?’ Li looked towards the door, startled to see that Section Chief Chen Anming had come in without his even noticing.
‘Not worth it, Chief,’ Li said quickly. ‘It wasn’t going anywhere.’
‘A bit like this investigation,’ Chen said. He pulled up a chair and sat down, folding his arms across his chest and surveying his detectives with a stony gaze. Chen was a lean, sinewy man in his late fifties, a thick head of prematurely silver hair streaked with nicotine. He was renowned for his apparent inability to make the muscles of his face form a smile, although the twinkle in his eyes frequently betrayed the very human person that concealed itself behind the hardman image. But there was no twinkle there now. ‘Four victims,’ he said. ‘And we’ve got nothing. Nothing!’ He raised his voice, and then sat silently for several seconds. ‘And now that this latest victim turns out to be an American, the whole thing is turning political.’ He leaned forward, placing his palms carefully on the table in front of him. ‘I just took a call in my office from the Deputy Minister of Public Security.’ He paused. ‘I have never had a call from a Deputy Minister of Public Security. And it’s not an experience I want to repeat.’ He sat back again. The room was absolutely still. ‘So let me make this quite clear. However many more officers we have to draft in, however many hours of overtime we have to work, we are going get a result.’ He waited for maximum dramatic effect before adding, ‘There are careers on the line here.’
‘You mean heads will roll?’ Wu said, grinning, and there was a gasp of smothered laughter around the table.
Chen turned a steely glare on him. ‘Be assured, Detective Wu, yours will be the very first.’
Wu’s grin faded. ‘Just trying to lighten things up, Chief.’
‘OK,’ Li stepped in before ‘things’ went any further. ‘Let’s go over what we’ve got for the benefit of the guys from HQ. And then we’ll have a look at last night’s killing. Wu, you kick us off.’
Wu lifted his file from the desk, tipped his chair backwards and pushed his sunglasses further back on his head. With Wu image was everything, from his faded jeans to his denim jacket and sunglasses. Even the gum he chewed, which must have long since lost its flavour. He was putting on a show for the newcomers.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Number one. August twenty. Tian Jingfu, aged fifty-one, a projectionist in a movie theatre in Xicheng District. Fails to turn up for work. His wife’s away visiting relatives in the south, so his work unit connects with his street committee, who go to his door. No one answers, but they can hear the television going. So they call the census cop and he comes and bursts the door down. The place is filled with twenty million flies. The guy’s lying in the front room with his head cut off. Pathologist reckons he’s been there for two days. There’s no sign of forced entry. But the guy’s been drinking red wine. Unusual. And the autopsy shows its been spiked, a drug called flunitrazepam. His hands have been tied behind his back with a silk cord, and a white card hung around his neck. It’s got the name Pigsy written on it upside down in red ink and then scored through. Pigsy, I think we’re all agreed, is some kind of nickname. The card also has the number 6 written on it. From the position of the body, it looks like he’s been made to kneel, head bowed, and a bronze sword o
r similar bladed weapon used to decapitate him. Hell of a lot of blood. Other than that, the place is clean, no rogue footprints, fingerprints. Forensics came up with zip.’
He dropped his file on the desk, tipped his chair forward and held his hands out, palms up. ‘I talked to just about everyone who ever knew him. Workmates, neighbours, friends, family. Parents are dead, an aunt still living in Qianmen. Everyone says he was a nice guy, lived quietly. No one knew why anyone would want to kill him. No one saw anything unusual the day he was murdered.’ He shrugged. ‘Zip.’ And with finger and thumb he smoothed out the sparse growth on his upper lip that he liked to think of as a moustache.
Li turned towards Qian Yi. ‘Detective Qian.’
Qian took a breath. ‘OK. Number two. Bai Qiyu, fifty-one, same age as victim number one. Married, with two kids at college. He’s a businessman, manager of a small import-export company in Xuanwu District. August thirty-first, the staff arrive at work in the morning to find him lying in his office. Decapitated. Same thing. Silk cord tying his wrists behind his back – and forensics tell us it’s cut from the same length as the killer used on the first victim. An identical piece of white card round the neck, the same colour ink. Only this time the nickname is Zero and the number is 5. So now we assume we’re counting down the victims. A tape lift from the severed vertebra during autopsy tells us it is a similar, or the same, bronze-bladed weapon. Bai Qiyu has also been drinking red wine, also spiked with flunitrazepam. Like Tian Jingfu, his wife was away visiting relatives. His kids were still there, but not particularly concerned when he didn’t come home before they went to bed. The crime scene is clean, except for one smudged, but printable, bloody fingerprint found on the edge of the desk. But it doesn’t match with anything we’ve got in the AFIS computer.’
Qian took a deep breath and concluded, ‘I personally interviewed nearly fifty people. Same as victim number one. No one knows why anyone would want to kill him. He had no appointments marked down in his diary for that night. He was alone in his office when the last person left the building.’
The detectives from CID headquarters were scribbling furiously, making copious notes, and referring frequently to the files with which they had been supplied. The others watched them apprehensively and with mixed feelings. While each was keen to achieve a break in the case, none of them wanted some smart-ass from HQ to pick up something they’d missed.
Li was aware of the additional tension. He turned to Zhao, at twenty-five the youngest in the section, still lacking a little in self-confidence, but sharp and diligent and shaping up as a prospect for future promotion. ‘Tell us about number three, Detective Zhao.’
Zhao flushed a little as he spoke. ‘September fifteen. Yue Shi, a professor of archaeology at Beijing University, has an arrangement to play chess and drink a few beers with his uncle. His uncle arrives at his apartment in Haidan District near the university campus and finds his nephew lying dead in the sitting room. He has been beheaded, hands tied behind his back, again with the same silk cord. A placard, half-soaked with blood, is lying beside the body. It bears the number 4 and the nickname Monkey. It’s written in red ink, upside down and crossed through.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’ll stick with the parallels first. He has red wine with flunitrazepam in his stomach and blood specimens, just like the others. Tape lift again shows that the weapon used was bronze, suggesting it is probably the same one. But this is where it starts to get a bit different. There is hardly any blood at the scene, but the body is virtually drained of it.’
‘So he was killed somewhere else, then taken to his apartment.’ This from one of the newcomers.
‘Yeah, very clever,’ said Wu. ‘Like we never spotted that one.’
The detective blushed.
‘On you go, Zhao,’ Li said.
Zhao glanced nervously around his listeners. ‘Like the man said, the body had been moved. Fibres recovered from it show that it had been wrapped in a grey woollen blanket of some sort. He had a fine, blue-black, powdery dust in the treads of his shoes and on his trousers. Forensics tell us they are particles of fired clay, some kind of ceramic. But the clay’s not of a type found around Beijing. Apparently it’s a soil type found more commonly in Shaanxi Province.’ He shrugged. ‘We don’t know what that tells us.’ Then he went on, ‘There were smudges and traces of blood in the hall, but no readable footprints or fingerprints anywhere. And the pathologist thinks he’d been killed about twenty-four hours before the body was discovered.’
‘What about the university?’ one of the other detectives from HQ asked.
‘We were all over the place,’ Zhao said. ‘His office, his classrooms, the laboratories. If he’d been murdered in any of these places we’d have found traces. You just can’t clean up that much blood without leaving something behind. His colleagues in the department were stunned. Again, no one could think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill him. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have many friends. He lived for his work, and spent ninety per cent of his waking day absorbed in it.’
‘What age was he?’ The same detective from HQ again.
‘Fifty-two – just a few months older than the others.’
The detective turned to Li. ‘What about the latest victim? What age was he?’
‘Date of birth on his passport was March 1949, which makes him fifty-one. I’m sorry, detective, I don’t know your name.’
‘Sang,’ the detective said. ‘Sang Chunlin.’
‘OK, Sang,’ Li said, ‘it’s a thought worth holding on to. But let’s look at the fourth victim first.’ And he glanced around all the expectant faces. ‘Yuan Tao,’ he said, ‘was a Chinese-American working in the visa department of the US Embassy.’ And he took them through the murder scene, step by step, as he and Qian had done in reality five hours earlier. He told them that Yuan had been illegally renting the apartment at No. 7 Tuan Jie Hu Dongli where the body was found, but not necessarily living there, at least not full time. ‘Apparently,’ Li said, ‘the US Embassy had no idea. They had provided him with accommodation in an embassy compound behind the Friendship Store.’ He paused. ‘They have kindly allowed our forensics people access to the apartment.’ There was just the hint of a tone in this. ‘They have also promised us full access to their file on him – just as soon as Washington can find it and fax it to us.’ There were a few laughs around the table. ‘So until we get that, and until we have the results of the autopsy later this morning, there’s not a lot more I can tell you at this stage.’
He got up and opened a window behind him before lighting another cigarette. The room was almost blue with smoke and his eyes were starting to sting. ‘So what do we know?’ He looked around the assembled faces. ‘We know the killer used a bronze-bladed weapon of some sort – probably a sword. We know that the victims probably knew him. They were drinking wine with him, and as far as they knew had no reason to be on their guard. After all, he managed to spike all their drinks. He knew them well enough to know their nicknames.
‘Red ink on white card – an ancient Chinese symbol for the end of a relationship. I think that underlines the fact that he was well known to his victims. All the names written upside down and scored through – well, we all know the significance of that image. And the numbering of the victims. Starting with six and counting down. Which would lead us to believe that there are another two victims out there somewhere.’
It was a sobering thought, and helped refocus minds around the table.
‘I keep coming back to this age thing.’ It was Sang again.
‘Go on,’ Li said.
Sang scratched his head. He was a good-looking young man, probably not yet thirty, and almost the only detective around the table not smoking. ‘Well, if they’re all the same age, and this guy knows all their nicknames, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that at some time they’d all been in the same organisation, or institution, or work unit together?’
‘The first three were at the same school,’ Zhao said, and reduc
ed the room to a stunned silence. He blushed fiercely as all eyes turned on him.
‘What?’ Li asked. His voice was steady and very level.
Zhao said, ‘I figured you usually get your nickname at school. So I spent yesterday checking it out.’
‘Why the hell did no one think of this before?’ Chen thundered.
It was a reasonable question. But Li had no answer to it.
‘It’s more than thirty years since any of them were at school,’ Zhao said, almost apologetically. ‘I guess that’s why it wasn’t the first thing we were looking at.’
‘And you didn’t think to share your thoughts with us before now?’ Chen asked pointedly.
‘I only got confirmation this morning, chief,’ Zhao said.
‘In the name of the sky, Zhao,’ Li said, ‘this is a team effort. We share information, we share thoughts, we talk to one another. That’s why we have these meetings.’ But how could he blame Zhao when he was the only one who had had the thought?
The detectives from Headquarters sat silent, happy that they shared no responsibility here. Sang, however, was riffling through his file.
‘What school was it?’ he asked. ‘I can’t find it here.’
‘It’s not in there,’ Zhao said. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘It took me some time to track it down. It was the No. 29 Middle School at Qianmen.’
There was a brief hiatus, and they could hear the scratch of Sang’s pencil in his notebook. Then Li moved away from the window. ‘Right,’ he said decisively. He sat down and pulled his notebook towards him, taking notes as he spoke. ‘We’ll divide up into four groups of five. Group leaders will be Wu, Qian, Zhao, and – Sang.’ Sang positively glowed. ‘I want each group to review the evidence from all four murders and bring their thoughts back to this table. Additionally, each group will take responsibility for specific areas of the investigation. Zhao, we need to talk to the victims’ old teachers. Qian, we need to interview fellow pupils, all their old classmates. It may be that somewhere among them are the next two victims. And we want to get to them before the killer.’