The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  ‘Okay. So he got Chao here in the dark. He sat and smoked a single cigarette, and waited for daylight. The kids found the blazing body when … ?’

  ‘Around six thirty.’

  ‘So the park had been open for about half an hour?’ Li nodded. ‘He poured gasoline all over Chao and struck a match. He wanted the body to be found still ablaze. Why? A macabre sense of theatre, perhaps; or maybe to create a diversion in which he could walk away unnoticed.’ She turned around. ‘He retreats this way, through the undergrowth, right? Because nobody saw him leave by the path the twins came up.’ She plunged through the shrubs and bushes, away from the clearing. Li hurried after her. ‘He’s going to come out on a path somewhere away over there,’ she called back, waving her hand vaguely into the darkness. The rain was still falling in single fat drops that they could have counted had they so desired. Another flash, the thunder nearer this time. ‘But he’s not going to walk away unnoticed wearing a pair of gloves, is he? Not on a sticky hot summer morning. He could have put them in his pockets, but suppose something went wrong and he got stopped.’ She pushed on through the undergrowth. Li followed. ‘Some quirk of fate. The alarm gets raised sooner than he thought. There’s a cop at the gate who stops anyone leaving. The killer doesn’t want to be found with a pair of gloves in his pocket, a pair of gloves stained with gasoline, maybe blood. So he throws them away, somewhere far away into the undergrowth.’ She mimicked the action. ‘What does it matter if they get found. There’s no way to trace them back to him. Then he remembers something. Damn! He’s still got the key to the stair gate at Chao’s apartment in his pocket. Now, that could tie him to his victim if he got stopped. It’s a long shot, but this guy doesn’t take any chances. He’ll have left his gun hidden in his vehicle. He’s meticulous. He’s a professional. And here’s a loose end. So he hurls the key away into the undergrowth after the gloves. Nobody’s ever going to find it. Hell, nobody’s even going to look. And nobody would know what it was anyway. Just a key. So he doesn’t worry about the fact that he’s not wearing gloves, and that his fingerprints are going to be on it.’

  Her face was gleaming with excitement in the beam of the flashlight. Li’s mind was racing, assimilating what she had said. For a moment he closed his eyes to try to visualise what she had described. He saw very vividly the figure of a man retreating through the undergrowth. He was peeling the gloves from his hands as he went. He threw them as far as he could, then stopped suddenly, remembering the key. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then turned and threw it in the opposite direction, before hurrying off, away from the crackle of flame and smoke behind him. Li opened his eyes, and for a moment night turned to day, thunder crashed overhead, and the rain came down like rods, crashing through the leaves, turning dust to mud beneath their feet as they stood. Margaret’s face had been caught as if by a photographic flash, and the image of it was burned on to his eyes and remained there as he blinked to regain his night sight.

  ‘I mean, maybe it didn’t happen like that at all,’ Margaret said. ‘But it’s possible. Isn’t it? And if it did, then those gloves and that key are still here somewhere.’ She was having to shout now above the crashing of the rain. ‘Worth looking?’

  ‘Was he left- or right-handed?’

  She frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘The killer. Can you tell? Maybe from the angle of the blow to Chao’s head?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not for certain. But if you wanted to go by the laws of probability, he would be right-handed. Why?’

  ‘It could affect the direction he threw the gloves and the key.’

  ‘So you think it’s possible?’

  He nodded. ‘I think it’s possible.’

  She grinned, and he wanted to kiss her right there and then, cup her face in his hands and press his lips to hers. The rain was streaming down her face now, her hair slicked back by the wet. The silk of her blouse clung to the contours of her breasts, nipples puckered and erect, pushing hard against the soft, wet material. She was still not wearing a bra. ‘You want to look now?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s raining!’ he laughed, incredulous. ‘And I should organise an official search.’

  ‘We’re wet already. And before you go calling out half the Beijing police force, it would help to justify it if you’d at least found a glove.’ She fumbled in her purse. ‘I’ve got a key-light in here somewhere.’ And she laughed. ‘Now that’s ironic, isn’t it? A key-light!’ She found it. ‘You take the right side, I’ll take the left. If we don’t find something in ten minutes you can call in the cavalry.’

  And before he had time to object, she was off, pushing through the shrubbery, pointing a pencil-beam of light ahead of her. He shook his head. She was in her element. It was as if telling him her story in the tearoom had lifted an enormous burden from her. She hadn’t needed alcohol. She was as high as a kite. And he wondered what on earth he was doing there, soaked to the skin, scrabbling about in the bushes in the dark, in pursuit of something that was probably illusory, the creation of two overactive imaginations on an emotionally charged night.

  He scrambled through the bushes to his right, scanning the ground with the flashlight. It had been dry for so long and the ground was baked so hard that the rain wasn’t draining away immediately. It lay in great pools, filling every dip and hollow. Another flash of sheet lightning lit up the park, reflected off every glistening branch and leaf. For a moment he thought he saw a figure darting through the trees, the briefest flickering movement, like half a dozen frames of an old black-and-white movie. He had lost his bearings. It must have been Margaret. He called out, but the rain was still deafening, and he couldn’t hear whether she had replied. He shook his head and wiped the rain from his eyes, and pushed on, swinging the beam of his flashlight from side to side. He went to check the time on his watch, but it wasn’t there, and he remembered breaking the chain earlier in the day. He must have been blundering around in the dark and wet for at least ten minutes by now, he thought. He turned, wondering which way it was back to the clearing. As he did, the beam of his flashlight caught the dark shape of something hanging in the branches of a bush. He swung the light back. It looked like a dead bird. He pushed through the undergrowth towards it, and as he reached out it fell to the ground. He crouched down and shone the lamp on it. It was a sodden leather glove. ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Margaret! I’ve found one.’ He heard her footsteps approaching from behind and turned as a fist smashed down into his face. The shock of it robbed him of his senses and he keeled over, blinking blood and rain out of his eyes. His flashlight clattered away into the bushes. He saw a dark shadow looming over him. And the fist smashed into his face again. And again. Hard. Brutally hard. His attacker was strong and very fast. He saw the fist draw back again and knew he could do nothing to stop it.

  ‘Li Yan?’ He heard Margaret’s voice above the drumming of the rain. ‘Li Yan, where are you?’

  The fist paused and hung uncertainly for a moment, then unravelled into fingers and thumb, flying past him to the ground like some hawk diving on its prey. It retreated again, clutching the glove. Lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous this time, a deafening roar from directly overhead. And for the briefest of moments, Li and his attacker were frozen in the hard blue light, looking straight into each other’s eyes. And then darkness, and the man was gone, crashing off through the bushes, his image still burned into Li’s eyes, as Margaret’s had been earlier.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, where are you!’ He pulled himself to his knees, and then dragged himself to his feet. Margaret’s pencil-beam of light flashed in his face. He heard her gasp. ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’

  III

  The lake and the pavilion were thrown into sharp relief by floodlights raised on stands among the trees. The random cycle of flashing lights on police vehicles and ambulance reflected in rippling patterns on the water. The crackle of police radios filled the night air, competing with the c
icadas that had started up again as soon as the rain stopped. Li sat side-on in the driver’s seat of the Jeep, the door open wide, as a medic patched up his face: a split lip, a bloody nose – broken, Margaret thought – a bruised and swelling cheek, and an inch-long split on his left brow that required two stitches.

  Margaret watched from the lakeside as Detective Qian organised uniformed officers into groups, dividing and subdividing the immediate territory into quadrants for searching on hands and knees, inch by inch. She checked the time. It was twenty-five to midnight. It was cooler after the rain, a slight breeze stirring the leaves. Her hair and clothes were virtually dry. The ground, parched after weeks of drought, had soaked up all the rainwater, and it was hard to believe now that there had been a deluge less than an hour before. Margaret glanced at Li and felt another pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for her, if he hadn’t indulged her insistence on searching for the gloves by themselves in the pouring rain.

  Qian detached himself from the search groups and crossed to Li as the medic finished up. He looked at his boss’s battered face in awe. ‘He made some mess of you, boss.’

  ‘You want to see the mess I made of his hand,’ Li said grimly.

  Qian chuckled. ‘Good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’ Li glared at him and his smiled faded. ‘So why do you think he attacked you?’

  ‘Because I’d found one of the gloves,’ Li growled.

  ‘And you think that’s what he was doing here? He’d come back to look for them?’

  Li shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe he’d followed us. One thing’s for sure. When he saw us searching the undergrowth he worked out pretty damn quick what we were up to. And now he’s got at least one of the gloves, maybe both of them, and maybe the key as well, if it was ever there.’

  ‘Hell, boss, why didn’t you just call in a search when you thought of all this, instead of scratching about in the dark and the rain on your own?’ He glanced off towards Margaret. ‘Well, almost on your own.’ He turned back to Li and saw a warning look in his eyes, and decided to back off. ‘I’ll just get these guys started,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the uniforms. And he headed off shouting out instructions.

  Li lit a cigarette and looked up as Margaret approached. ‘Don’t tell me it’s bad for my health,’ he said. ‘It can’t do me nearly as much damage as being around you.’ He smiled wryly and winced at the pain. ‘You should have a health warning stamped on your forehead.’

  But his attempt at humour only served to deepen her sense of guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this is all my fault.’

  Li said, ‘You didn’t murder three people, then come into a park and assault a police officer. How can it be your fault?’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t have been in the park in the first place. And you certainly wouldn’t have been stumbling about the bushes in the rain trying to find a needle in a haystack.’

  ‘But I found the needle,’ he said. ‘At least, one of them.’

  ‘And then lost it again.’

  He glanced at her anxiously, hesitating for a moment. ‘What do you think he was doing here? The man who attacked me.’

  ‘Looking for the same thing as us.’

  ‘Why didn’t he do that last night?’

  She stopped and thought about it, and then frowned and looked at him, concerned. ‘You think he followed us here?’ He inclined his head a little to one side and raised an eyebrow. He did not want to commit himself. ‘Because if he did, that means he’s been watching us.’ And a shiver raised goose bumps on her arms. ‘That’s creepy. Why would he do that?’

  Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s monitoring our progress. If we get too close to him, or to the truth, he’ll intervene. Like he did tonight.’

  Margaret felt the hairs rise up on the back of her neck, and she glanced around the dark perimeter beyond the ring of light, wondering if somewhere out there he was still watching. ‘Did you see his face at all?’ she asked.

  ‘For a moment,’ Li said. ‘In the lightning flash.’ He could still see the face vividly in his mind’s eye, pale, tinged with blue like the face of a corpse, contorted with fear and … anger. Yes, that was what it had been, anger. But why, Li wondered, had he been angry? With himself, perhaps? For having made the mistake with the gloves in the first place?

  ‘Would you know him again?’

  ‘I don’t know. He had the face of a devil. It was like looking at death. He didn’t seem human, somehow.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  And Margaret realised in that moment that Li had thought he was going to die. He had been caught unawares and beaten to the ground with a fist like steel. Lying dazed and helpless in the mud, his attacker looming over him, he had believed that the man would kill him. What had stopped him? Had it really just been her voice calling through the rain? What could she have done? He could just as easily have killed her. But then, she realised, for a professional killer he was behaving uncharacteristically. On impulse. None of it had been planned. He had been responding to the moment, trying to correct or cover up an equally uncharacteristic mistake made nearly forty-eight hours earlier. Perhaps her voice had simply brought him to his senses and he had retreated into the night to lick his wounds. For that was what he was like, she thought. A wounded animal. A professional killer who had made one small mistake, and then compounded it. And that made him extremely dangerous.

  A uniformed officer arrived in a police car and got out with a carrier bag of fresh clothes for Li – jeans and trainers and a white shirt, collected from his apartment. Li changed in the back of the Jeep. ‘I should take you back to the hotel,’ he called to Margaret.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘All dried off now.’ She ran her hands back through her hair to untangle the mass of curls. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t sleep, wondering if they’d found anything.’ She was beginning to doubt that she would ever sleep again. ‘How long do you think they will take?’

  Li climbed out of the back of the Jeep and glanced up the slope to where police floodlights had turned night into day. Teams of officers were working their way through the bushes, inch by meticulous inch, calling to one another above the thrum of the generator and the screeching of the cicadas. ‘It’s not such a big space to cover. A couple of hours maybe. If they find nothing, we’ll leave armed guards and bring in fresh teams tomorrow to extend the search area.’ He was glad she wanted to stay, not just because he wanted to be with her, but because after the events of tonight he was afraid for her. Afraid of unseen eyes watching them, tracking them. The investigation had become dangerous, and he knew that from tomorrow he would have to sever her connection with it.

  As he lit another cigarette, there was a shout from the top of the slope. He threw the cigarette away and ran up the path as a young officer emerged from the undergrowth holding up a single glove with a pair of plastic tongs. So the killer hadn’t got both gloves. Li derived a momentary satisfaction from that. Qian got the officer to drop the glove in a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. He handed it to Li. ‘Look familiar?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only saw the other one for a few seconds.’ He looked at it closely. It was a plain brown leather glove with a brushed cotton lining, still damp from the rain and stiffening as it dried.

  Margaret appeared at his shoulder. ‘May I take a look?’ He handed it to her, and she examined it closely through the clear plastic. ‘There,’ she said, and teased out a maker’s label that had curled up at the seam just inside the open end. She squinted at it in the light. ‘Made in Hong Kong,’ she read. ‘And there, just inside the thumb …’ She folded out a small, dark stain for him to see. ‘Could be blood.’ She turned the glove over. ‘It hasn’t been worn much.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Li asked.

  ‘Leather stretches with wear, takes on the shape of your hand. This looks as if it’s not long off the peg. See, there’s barely been any pull at the stitchin
g. They were probably custom-bought for the job.’

  ‘In Hong Kong?’

  ‘That’s where they were made. They’re expensive gloves. Probably not widely available in China. If at all. But you’d know more about that than me.’

  Li nodded thoughtfully. He took the bag and handed it back to Qian, and they had a brief exchange. Margaret followed him back down the slope to the Jeep. ‘What now?’

  ‘The glove’ll go straight back to the lab for forensic examination. And we’ll wait until they find the key. Or not.’ He lit a cigarette and looked at her apprasingly. ‘You were right about the gloves. Let’s hope you were right about the key as well.’

  It was nearly half past midnight when the shout came that they had been waiting for. The key had been nestling in among the roots of a small shrub, about thirty feet from where they had found the glove. Li looked at it excitedly in its small plastic bag, brought to him out of a glare of floodlights by a triumphant Detective Qian. If luck was on their side, it could turn out to be the key to a great deal more than Chao Heng’s stair gate. He turned to find Margaret, eyes gleaming, looking at the key as he held it up. He wanted to kiss her. He would never have had the thought that had led them to find it. She used the same thought processes he did. Visualised things, it seemed, in the same way. But she had made a leap of imagination that would not have occurred to him. A wild and unlikely leap in the dark. So unlikely that even if he’d had the thought he would probably have dismissed it. Perhaps she was less afraid of being wrong than he was.

  *

  The drive to the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong was a revelation to Margaret, an insight into the street life of the real Beijing tucked away behind the façades and advertising hoardings of the new China. Even at this late hour, the streets teemed with night life, the population emerging again from steamy-hot homes into the relative cool of the hutongs after the rain. Li’s Jeep followed in the wake of a forensics van, two sets of headlights raking the narrow alleyways and siheyuan, capturing for brief moments families eating at tables on the sidewalk, a man sprawled in an armchair gazing at the flickering blue light of a television set, food served to card players through open windows whose light spilled across the tarmac, people on bicycles that wobbled in the headlights as the vehicles raced past. Margaret peered from the window on the passenger side, faces flashing past, staring back at her. Some blankly, some with hostility, others with curiosity. Beijingers, Margaret thought, had a preoccupation with getting their hair cut. Barbers everywhere were still doing business. She checked the time. It was almost 1 a.m.