The Fourth Sacrifice (The China Thrillers 2)

by Peter May

  The two men glared at each other for several more long moments. Li was seething. He wanted to throw Birdie’s confession in Chen’s face and tell him what he could do with it. But the longer he restrained the urge, the more he realised just how futile a gesture it would be.

  In the end, all he said was, ‘Yes, Chief.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  Margaret stretched lazily on the bed, luxuriating in a sense of freedom. However painful it had been to make her decision, having made it she felt released from an enormous burden. She had lain for a long time in Michael’s arms last night, simply curled into him for comfort, childlike and secure, and then they had made love and she had slept like a baby until becoming aware of him leaving shortly after six.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she had asked.

  But he had simply smiled and kissed her forehead. ‘Sunday is not a day of rest in China. And there is no rest for the wicked. I’m required on location. I’ll see you later.’

  Now she rolled over and looked at the time. She had promised to take Xinxin to the park. A tiny stab of pain, an echo from another life, came to her with the recollection. She regretted having made the promise. She had done so before confronting Li with her revelations about Michael and her decision to go home. Now all she wanted was a clean break. It could only be painful taking that one step back, even if it was for just an hour or so. But she had promised, and she could not let the little girl down. Too many people had done that already.

  She showered and washed her hair, and as she blow-dried it, looking in the mirror, she thought she looked older, pinched, a little haggard. She had lost weight and could see the faint outline of her ribcage. She enjoyed being slim, but skinny was unattractive. She had seen women in their thirties, desperate to stay attractive, dieting to the point where they aged themselves prematurely. A little flesh on the bone kept you looking younger. All she wanted to do now was get home, and a little comfort eating would do her no harm at all.

  As she went through the clothes in her wardrobe, she realised she would have to pack sometime today. But she didn’t linger over the contents of the rack. There were clothes hanging there that carried too many memories. Clothes she had chosen to wear for Li on certain occasions. Clothes that would always make her think of him. Clothes that she would give to the Salvation Army back home. She pulled on a pair of jeans and tucked a fresh tee shirt into them, then rummaged through the shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe, looking for a pair of trainers. She picked out a white pair with pale pink piping, and froze as she saw a scattering of blue-black powder on the wooden base beneath them. For almost a full half-minute she remained motionless, the trainers in her hand, looking at the powder. She could hear her blood pulsing in her ears. Slowly she reached in and took a pinch of it between her fingers and looked at it closely. The texture and colour were the same as the sample Li had shown her. She turned over her trainers and saw the blue dust compacted in their treads. Without being aware of it, her breathing had turned rapid and shallow. She was trying to remember when she had last worn these trainers, where she could possibly have picked up this strange powdery residue. She retraced her life over the previous few days, and realised with a sudden shock that she had not worn these shoes since the day she had visited the Terracotta Warriors with Michael. Down there in the pits, with the dust and rubble of centuries, the smashed pottery of the warriors had deposited their crumbling ceramic dust, a fired clay that had turned blue-black in the searing heat of the kilns. And she had tramped it into the treads of her shoes.

  But it made no sense. What possible connection could there be between the underground chambers in Xi’an where two-thousand-year-old ceramic warriors stood guard over their emperor, and a series of murders in Beijing? A series of murders which, to all intents and purposes, had already been solved.

  And as quickly as she had let her imagination run riot, she stopped herself. She had no idea if this blue powder matched the other samples. But to her immediate regret, she realised that she wanted to find out. And she found herself suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, being drawn back into a world she had been trying very hard to escape. The force that drew her was irresistible, as was the curiosity which she recognised now was edged by just the faintest hint of apprehension.

  *

  Margaret’s doubts about whether Mr Qi would be at work on a Sunday or not were quickly allayed. After all, criminals did not take weekends off, why should criminalists? He looked at the sample of powder she had brought him in a white hotel envelope and scratched his chin thoughtfully. Her shoes, in a plastic bag, lay on the table.

  ‘It look ve-ery much like same dust,’ he said. ‘Most probably about seventy per cent composition fired clay. The rest organic, mineral, some artefact.’ He looked at her. ‘Where did you find this, Doctah Cambo?’

  ‘I picked it up in the treads of my shoes at the pits of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an.’

  ‘Aha!’ Mr Qi’s face positively glowed with illumination. ‘Then this almost certainly same dust,’ he said. ‘We did analysis on mineral component of clay. Most commonly found in area of Shaanxi province west of Xi’an City. If you find it in pits it must be clay they use to make Terracotta Warrior more than two thousand years ago.’

  And Margaret remembered now reading in the forensic notes that the clay had originated in Shaanxi Province. But she had never made the connection with Xi’an. There had been no reason to, until now. ‘How soon can you tell if it’s the same as the other samples found in the Yuan Tao murders?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said cheerily, ‘it quiet today. No problem. Couple hours, maybe. I can do low power analysis with stereo microscope, and maybe density gradient analysis. Even mineralogical profile if you want. You wanna wait?’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘I can’t.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Could you phone Deputy Section Chief Li with the results?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘No problem.’ He grinned. ‘You clever lady, Doctah Cambo. You should come and work for Chinese police.’

  She smiled. Not a chance in hell, she thought.

  *

  Her taxi dropped her at Silver Ingot Bridge. The corner grocery store was doing good business, and the paths that followed the contours of the lakes were dotted with couples and families out for a Sunday stroll. It was, at least, a day of rest for some. Margaret walked briskly along the south shore of Qianhai Lake, past decaying single-storey brick dwellings, and into the quieter leafy lanes that led to the Lotus Flower Market where Sunday crowds would already be gathering round food stands to buy plates of boiled pig’s intestine garnished with coriander. But Margaret turned off before she got there, through an arched gateway that led into Mei Yuan’s siheyuan. She had been entirely preoccupied with thoughts of the dust of aeons gathered in her shoes, found in a dead man’s apartment, scraped from the clothing of a murder victim. If the samples matched, then the only thing that connected them was the clay used to mould the Eighth Wonder of the World – the thousands of pottery soldiers fired in 220 BC to guard the underground burial chambers of the First Emperor of China. It was baffling. Margaret could make no sense of it.

  Xinxin shrieked and rushed out to greet her in her slippers. She had been standing waiting at the door ever since breakfast. Margaret gave her a big hug and took her hand and led her indoors where Mei Yuan greeted her with a wide smile. ‘She is very impatient,’ she said. ‘I could hardly get her to sleep last night, she was so excited that you were going to take her to the playpark today.’ Her smile faded. ‘You are not really leaving Beijing?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Margaret said, shrugging off her embarrassment.

  ‘There is trouble between you and Li Yan, I think,’ Mei Yuan said.

  Margaret just nodded. She wasn’t about to elaborate. And then she felt Xinxin tugging at her arm. She turned and found her staring up with wide, sparkling eyes, and chattering rapidly.

  ‘She’s asking you to hurry up,’ Mei Yuan said with a grin. ‘She says sh
e’s been waiting for hours.’

  Margaret took Xinxin’s hand. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Mei Yuan stopped them. ‘She’s still in her slippers. Her trainers are by the door. She needs help with the laces.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Margaret said, and she squatted on a low stool by a collection of shoes that Mei Yuan kept to the right of the door. Xinxin’s trainers were tiny, smaller than Margaret’s hands, and Margaret thought how expensive it must be to keep her in shoes she was constantly outgrowing but never wearing out. As she lifted the left shoe, she saw the traces of blue dust on the floor, dark like a stain on the pale green lino, and she felt all the hairs on her neck and arms stand up.

  Xinxin dumped herself on Margaret’s knee, urging her to hurry up, but Margaret was hardly aware of her. She turned the trainer over and saw the blue-black dust ingrained in the tread. The other shoe was the same. Confusion swept over her in waves. Now this really did not make sense. Xinxin had not been to Xi’an.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mei Yuan looked at her, concerned.

  Margaret said, ‘When did Xinxin last wear these?’

  Mei Yuan frowned, perplexed by the question. ‘Yesterday,’ she said. ‘They’re the same ones she was wearing when she was out with you and Li Yan.’

  Margaret simply could not get her brain to function. It seemed to be adrift on a sea of extraneous thoughts. Where had they been? She looked at the soles of her own shoes. When she had found the residue in the treads of the trainers from Xi’an, she had put on the same shoes she had been wearing yesterday. But there was no trace of the blue dust. And then she remembered. Of course, there had been a downpour last night. She had run off from here through wet streets in search of a taxi. Whatever residue might have been trapped in her treads would have been washed away.

  So, where had they been?

  She tried to focus. They had been in the Jeep. At Section One. At the university …

  ‘Jesus,’ she said aloud. Xinxin and Mei Yuan were staring at her apprehensively. At the university they had been in the conservation lab, in that dirty, dusty room where they restored and preserved ancient artefacts. Professor Chang had apologised for the mess. We’ve been restoring the ancient treasures of China in here for decades, he had said. I guess it just never seemed all that important to clean up behind us. Professor Yue had worked there too. And it was on his trousers and shoes that they had first found the residue of blue dust.

  Margaret became aware of Xinxin pulling at her hand, her voice whining at her in disappointment. She dropped the tiny shoes, slipped Xinxin from her knee and stood up, her face flushed with confusion and excitement. ‘I’m sorry. Mei Yuan. Apologise to Xinxin for me, but I can’t take her now. I’ll come back later. I have to go to the university.’

  *

  The stone lions guarding the west gate seemed to glower at Margaret as she slid from the back seat of her taxi. Of the three huge, studded doors between the columns of the gate, only the centre one remained open. The other two were firmly shut. The uniformed guard watched Margaret approach and she wondered how she was going to explain to him why he should let her in without a pass. But as she got closer she recognised him as the guard who had let them by yesterday. He recognised her, too. Perhaps he remembered that she had been accompanied by a senior police officer, for he waved her through. She smiled, and like Alice through the looking-glass, she slipped from one world into another.

  The gardens and lakes and pathways of the campus were virtually deserted. Willows drooped along the water’s edge in the breathless heat of the morning. The occasional student meandered by on his bicycle. She crossed a stone bridge over still water and saw the white-painted pavilion of the archaeology department shimmering beyond its lawns, partially obscured by trees. She was certain that the lab assistant had led them east to the Arts building, past the administration centre, around the edge of Lake Nameless, but there were so many paths she was not sure which one to take.

  It was a full fifteen minutes before finally, close to despair, she found what she was looking for. All the paths and pavilions looked alike. But she had recognised the two dusty greybrick blocks immediately. The plaque by the door of the west building revealed it to be the College of Life Sciences, confirming that the building opposite was the Arts building, housing the archaeology labs. The courtyard, filled yesterday with bicycles and students, was quite empty and eerily quiet. The air was heavy with the hum of insects and she could hear birds singing in the trees beyond. Somewhere away in the distance she heard a girl call out a greeting, and even more distantly a boy returning it. The Life Sciences building seemed to be locked up. The Arts building, too, appeared deserted, its rust-red doors closed and forbidding.

  Margaret climbed the three shallow steps to the entrance and pushed the right half of the door. It was firmly bolted. She pushed the other half and it swung in to a dark interior. Tentatively she stepped inside, moving slowly across the tiles until her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The corridor, which ran up the centre of the building, had no windows and was very dark. The distant sunlight that bled into it from the glass around the main door barely lit its length. But halfway up, a single slash of bright light fell across it from an open door, and as she approached it, Margaret saw that it was the door to the conservation lab where she and Li had interviewed Professor Chang.

  ‘Hello,’ she called out, and her voice seemed inordinately loud as it reverberated back at her along the corridor. But there was no response. She reached the conservation lab and pushed the door wider. It creaked open. Sunlight sliced through Venetian blinds in narrow strips that distorted uniformly across the contours of the room. ‘Hello,’ she called again. But there was no one here. The sword that Professor Chang had been restoring was still held tightly in the jaws of a vice on the big central workbench. The room was as dirty and cluttered as she remembered it. She took a small, clear plastic bag from her purse, then laid her purse on the table and crouched down to examine the dust on the floor. Here, there were wood shavings and a kind of sandy grime. She moved around the room to an open area of floor and saw that it was thick with the blue powdery dust. She crouched down again and ran a pinch of it through her fingers. It looked and felt like the same residue that had gathered in the treads of her shoes in Xi’an. She scooped as much as she could into the plastic bag and stood up again.

  She had come round the far side of the central workbench, and saw now that it had been moved forward, towards the door, sliding on some kind of mechanism that was bolted to the floor. Beneath it, the lid of a large hatch in the floor stood open, and wooden stairs disappeared down into the lit interior of some kind of basement. For the first time, Margaret began to feel apprehensive. She edged closer to the opening and peered down. ‘Hello,’ she called. But there was no reply, just the smell of cold, damp air rising to greet her, like the musty, fetid stink of the tunnels of the Underground City.

  She hesitated for a long moment before her curiosity got the better of her, and she slipped the plastic bag into her pocket and carefully tested her weight on the wooden stairs. They seemed pretty robust, and she tentatively went down into the large, square chamber below. The walls here were stippled with roughcast and stained with damp. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, and a cable fed off along the curved roof of a tunnel that was illuminated by a lamp every fifteen or twenty yards. A metal gate at the opening of the tunnel stood ajar. Again she called, and again there was no reply.

  She was tempted simply to turn and climb the stairs back to the conservation lab and hurry out into the warmth and safety of the sunshine outside, when she noticed the brown, crusted smear on the floor. She crouched to look at it more closely. It was blood. Old blood, turning grey-brown. Several weeks old. She looked up and saw that there was a trail of it leading from the tunnel, as if a bleeding body had been dragged into or out of it. Now her apprehension was turning to fear. She felt the chill of the air in her bones. But she was drawn, inexorably, both by her f
ear and her curiosity, into the tunnel, to follow the trail of dried blood. She made her way carefully along it, keeping a hand always on the wall. It grew colder, her breath billowing in clouds around her. She could see no more than ten or fifteen feet ahead in the mist of dampness. She felt, for all the world, as if she were back in the tunnels of the Underground City, making her way towards the old Beijing Railway Station. As she went further, she saw that the blood had spilled more freely on the rough concrete floor, and she realised she was getting closer to the point of trauma.

  Then, out of the mist, she saw that the tunnel opened out into a large, vaulted chamber. Her eyes were drawn to the blood on the floor. There was a huge pool of it there as she entered the chamber, and she recognised the distinctive cast-off patterns that had been flung from the sword delivering the fatal stroke. She looked up and let out a tiny cry of fright as she saw rows of figures standing watching her silently in the gloom. And then the lights went out and she was plunged into total darkness.

  II

  Li stood smoking by the window. His mind was numb, disabled, it seemed, by some kind of mental inertia. There was a part of him that simply did not want to think about any of it: Birdie’s ‘confession’, the inconsistent evidence, the intruder who had attacked him at Birdie’s apartment, Chen’s instruction to close the case. Most of all, he did not want to think about Margaret: that she was leaving tomorrow for good, that she would even consider marrying Zimmerman. So he filled his head instead with smoke, and gazed emptily at the trees below obscuring the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese.

  Qian knocked and poked his head around the door. ‘Boss, I’ve got someone downstairs in the interview room I think you should see.’