Chinese Whispers

V

Lynn Pan’s apartment was in a new housing development at the south end of Haidian district, not far from Beijing University. The blocks were only four storeys, and had pitched, red-tiled roofs and white painted walls peppered with tiny balconies at every other window. The compound was gated, and guarded by a grey-uniformed Beijing Security officer. Inside there was parking for vehicles, and covered sheds for bicycles. But there were no bicycles parked there. Li flashed his Public Security ID for the guard to raise the gate and the guard said, ‘Your people are already here.’

Li nodded and drove through to park up in front of Pan’s block. He was puzzled by the black and white parked outside it. Forensics travelled in unmarked vans.

In the lobby, an elderly woman grinned at him toothlessly from behind a grilled window. ‘Second floor,’ she said, pointing upwards when he showed her his ID.

On the second-floor landing, the door to Pan’s apartment was standing wide open and he could hear voices from inside. As he went in, he saw that the lock on the door had been forced. The apartment was a shambles. The polished wooden floor in the square hall was strewn with colourful Xinjiang rugs. There were four doors off it. One to a bathroom. Beside it, one to a tiny kitchen. The door to the right led to a living-dining room, its window giving on to one of the small balconies and overlooking the car park below. The fourth door led to the back of the apartment and a double bedroom. The contents of drawers and cupboards had been tipped out on to floors. The doors to the wardrobe stood open. There were two uniformed officers in the bedroom. They turned, startled, as Li appeared in the doorway.

‘What the hell are you guys doing here?’ Li asked.

There was no need to show his ID. They knew immediately who he was. One of them said, ‘The caretaker called the station about the break-in half an hour ago. They radioed the car. It only took us about fifteen minutes to get here.’

‘A break-in,’ Li repeated stupidly.

They looked at him as if he had horns. ‘Sure, isn’t that why you’re here?’

Li said, ‘Haven’t you seen the morning papers? The lady who lives here was murdered last night?’

‘Shit.’ The one who had spoken first suddenly viewed the apartment in a new light.

‘It was in the papers?’ the other one said, incredulously.

‘I hope you haven’t disturbed anything.’

‘No, Chief.’

‘You’ve spoken to the caretaker?’ They nodded. ‘How come the break-in wasn’t reported until this morning?’

‘They didn’t know about it until this morning,’ the first one said. ‘It was a neighbour coming down the stairs who noticed the door lying slightly ajar. Then she saw that it had been forced and told the caretaker. She called us.’

‘And how did burglars get in and out past the security guard?’

‘Beats me, Chief. The guy out there wasn’t on duty last night. We’ll need to pull in the guy who was on the night shift.’

‘You guys won’t be doing anything. This crime scene is now part of a murder investigation and under the jurisdiction of Section One. You make out your reports and have them sent to my office.’

‘Yes, Chief.’ They stood looking at him.

‘You can go now,’ he said.

‘Yes, Chief.’ And reluctantly the two officers donned their hats and ducked out past him on to the landing. He heard their footsteps retreating down the stairs and the imprecations muttered under their breath.

When they had gone, Li stood and looked around him in the stillness of the apartment. It was full of her smell and her presence. Her personality was everywhere, in the choice of pictures she had hung on almost every available wall space — Chinese originals bought at the antiques market; signed prints of narrative pictures by an artist called Vetriano; framed photographs of some picturesque market town in southern France. Li wondered what their significance was. She was there, too, in the brightly coloured curtains on every window, in the dazzling Xinjiang rugs she had bought to cover nearly every square inch of floor, in the black bedcovers printed with white and red Chinese characters that had been ripped from the bed and lay crumpled now on the floor.

Her clothes had been pulled off the wardrobe rail and thrown on the bed. Suits, and jeans, leather jackets, sweatshirts, blouses. A rack of her shoes had been left undisturbed. Trainers and sandals, a pair of Doc Martens, a sturdy pair of brown hiking boots still caked with mud, plain black shoes with chunky low heels. Two Lynn Pans had been torn from the wardrobe. The work persona, the Lynn Pan who liked to wear masculine suits and plain black shoes — although Li knew from their brief encounter that this persona had never masked her essential femininity. And then there was the private persona, the relaxed, informal Lynn Pan who liked to wear jeans and sweatshirts and training shoes, and who enjoyed walking. Where? In the hills out at Badaling? In the Yanshan mountains? And who did she go walking with? Or was she a loner? Certainly, there was no evidence of anyone else sharing her bedroom.

The kitchen was small, but tidy. Although the thieves had opened every cupboard, they had not disturbed the contents. Shelves were neatly lined with dried and tinned foods. The refrigerator was well-stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables. In the freezer there were chicken breasts and fish, and whole-wheat bread that she must have bought in one of the foreign supermarkets. She liked to eat healthily, and she liked to eat at home.

The bathroom shelves were lined with soaps and shampoos and skin cleansers. There was very little in the way of make-up, either here or in the bedroom, and he remembered how little she had worn the afternoon that he met her. A touch of brown on the eyelids, a hint of blusher on her cheeks, the merest smudge of colour on her lips. She’d had a beautiful complexion and fine bone structure. Make-up would have been superfluous.

A small dining table with two chairs sat by the window in the front room. There were potted plants everywhere: green, leafy spider plants, a yucca tree, a beautiful winter-flowering azalea. The air was filled with their fragrance. Bookshelves lined one complete wall. Books on China and Chinese dialects; rows of cookery books with recipes and cuisines from all over the world; a twenty-six-volume encyclopaedia; Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary; a dictionary of quotations; reams of fiction — Steinbeck, Hemingway, Greene, Rushdie, Wolfe, and dozens more that Li had never heard of. Clearly, she had been a reader.

There was a two-seater settee covered in silk throws, and one armchair set to get the best light from the window. Obviously where she sat to read. A TV and video had not been touched, but cables lay around a coffee table beside the armchair, and the table itself seemed oddly bare.

A dresser opposite the window had been ransacked. Much of its content lay strewn across the floor. CDs, photo albums, personal papers. Li could read some of the CD titles without stooping to pick them up. Jean Michel Jarre’s The China Concerts. A large collection of Bach fugues. Handel’s Water Music. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On a stereo cabinet beside the dresser, the CD drawer of a neat little Sony stack lay open. There was a CD in it. The second disk of The China Concerts. Li took a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and slipped them on. He switched on the stereo and the CD drawer slid shut. He pressed play and was immediately assaulted by loud synthesiser music, not much to his taste. He picked up the CD box and looked at the titles. Orient Express, Magnetic Fields, Laser Harp … The final track was called Souvenir of China. He flipped through the previous tracks until he got to it, and suddenly the room was filled with the sound of children’s voices. Chinese children. The noise of a camera shutter, the sound of synthesiser strings stepping down through a slow, sad melody. More Chinese voices. The punctuation of a monotonous, steady drumbeat.

Li found himself oddly affected by the music, the hair rising on his neck and across his scalp. It was strangely apposite to his mood, the sense of sadness and desolation in this dead woman’s apartment, his memory of her forever stained by the bloody corpse lying at the base of the Millennium Monument.

He sat down and picked out a print-sized photo album from the mess on the floor. It had clear plastic sleeves, two photographs in each. They were mostly pictures of Pan and a friend in backpacks and boots, posing on a hillside somewhere, spectacular backdrops behind them. Pan’s face was red with the cold, and radiant in its smile. The two girls were clearly on their own, the remote on the camera snapping pictures of them together. Both were laughing hysterically. There were more sombre pictures of each of them individually, and several panoramas of the plains of northern China laid out below them. In one, Li could detect the plume of pollution hanging over a distant Beijing.

The other girl seemed strangely familiar. And then Li placed her. She had been in the graduation photograph with Pan on the wall in Pan’s office. An old friend from back in the States. A plain girl, with an attractive smile.

He heard a sharp intake of breath, and a muted, throaty exclamation of fear. A woman’s voice. He turned his head to find himself looking at the plain girl with the attractive smile. She was standing in the open doorway to the hall, but she wasn’t smiling. Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God, what’s happened here? Who are you?’

Li stood up immediately and switched off the stereo. The silence seemed deafening in its absence. ‘Didn’t the caretaker tell you?’

‘She never said a thing.’ It was a Californian accent.

‘There’s been a break-in.’

‘I can see that. Who are you?’

‘Section Chief Li Yan, Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police.’

‘Where’s Lynn? Does she know about it, yet?’

Li felt sick. Of course, he realised, an American in Beijing was hardly likely to buy the Beijing Youth Daily. He didn’t even know if she spoke or read Chinese.

‘What’s your relationship to Miss Pan?’ he asked.

‘We’re friends. We were at university together. Where is she?’ There was a hint of panic, now, in her voice.

Li said, ‘I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but Miss Pan was murdered last night.’

He had not known what reaction to expect, but the feral howl that escaped the girl’s mouth punctured him like a cold, steel blade, nearly bringing tears to his eyes. He quickly crossed to the door and led her to the settee. She slumped into it like a woman falling. A dead weight. But apart from that single howl, not another sound issued from her lips. Big, silent tears rolled down her cheeks, and she clutched her hands in front of her, wringing them so hard her knuckles were turning white. Li sat down beside her and gently prised her hands apart, holding one of them in both of his. ‘Can I get you water or something?’

She shook her head. She spotted the photo album Li had been looking at and pulled her hand free of his to pick it up. As she flicked through it, Li could see the pain every image inflicted on her, each one with its own special memory. She snapped it shut again and sat silently shaking. Li allowed her some time to regain control. Finally, she said, without looking at him, ‘Of course, you didn’t know her.’

Li said, ‘I met her yesterday afternoon for the first time. Just a few hours before she was killed.’

The girl turned to look at him. Through her tears she examined his face, and he saw a sad smile in her eyes. ‘And, naturally, you fell for her.’ Li felt the colour rise on his cheeks. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Everybody does.’ She corrected herself. ‘Did. Everybody fell for Lynn. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes.’

‘Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why someone would want to kill her,’ Li said.

‘How …?’ The girl hardly dared to ask. ‘How did it happen?’

Li sighed heavily. ‘I don’t think …’

‘I want to know!’ the girl insisted.

Li said, ‘She was strangled, and had her throat cut.’

‘Oh, my God!’

For a moment Li thought the girl was going to be sick. But she controlled herself. He said, ‘Do you know if she had any special relationship? I mean, do you know if there was someone she was seeing?’

The girl nodded. She was wringing her hands again and staring at the floor. After a long silence she said in a voice that was almost a whisper, ‘Me.’

Li frowned in consternation. ‘I don’t understand.’

The girl said, ‘We were lovers. Ever since we met at university. There hadn’t ever been anyone else.’

Li was still struggling to come to terms with what the girl was saying. ‘You mean, you and she …? She was …’

‘A lesbian?’ the girl asked the question for him. She shook her head. ‘I suppose that’s what people would call us. But we were really just two people who loved each other.’ She bit her lip hard to stop herself from crying, and Li saw blood on her front teeth. ‘When she got the job offer out here, there was no question that I wouldn’t come with her. Not that I had the first idea what I would do. In the end I got a job teaching English at a private school near the university.’

Li was stunned. It had never once occurred to him that Pan might have been gay. There had been no hint of it in the way she had flirted with him. But then he remembered how she’d had them all in the palm of her hand the previous day. Every one of the six Ministry officials who had gone for the MERMER test had been smitten by her. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes, the girl had said. Did that suggest her killer might have been jealous? There was no indication that he knew any of his previous victims. But if he had known Pan, perhaps fallen for her, and then discovered that she was forever beyond his reach … A motive? But then why would he break into her department at the Academy to steal all her files? And what did he hope to find in her apartment? Li was in no doubt that the murder and the break-ins were connected. But none of it made the least sense to him.

He was still trying to come to terms with Pan’s sexuality. ‘You didn’t share the apartment with her,’ he said.

For the first time, the girl showed apprehension. ‘It’s frowned upon here, isn’t it? Officially?’

Li understood. ‘You’ve nothing to fear from me,’ he said.

‘We decided it would be safer if we had separate apartments. At least, that’s how Lynn wanted it. She always liked her own space. Somewhere she could retreat to, to be on her own.’ The sadness in the girl’s face was nearly unbearable. ‘Me? I would have wanted to be with her every living minute.’

Li heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up out front. He stood up and went to the window. It was the forensics van from Pau Jü Hutong. Fu Qiwei’s second team spilled out into the car park. He turned back into the room. ‘That’s the forensics people arriving,’ he said. ‘Before they come in and start taking this place apart, do you think you could have a look around, maybe tell me if anything’s missing?’

She took a deep breath and nodded her head.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Try not to touch or disturb anything.’ He helped her to her feet and squeezed her hand. ‘Take your time. I’ll keep them out of here until you’re done.’

He went out on to the landing to wait for the forensics guys to come up the stairs and ask them to give her a few minutes. And they stood around in silence, smoking and waiting. It was nearly ten minutes before the girl came out. ‘Her computer,’ she said. ‘She always kept a laptop on the coffee table beside the big armchair. It’s gone. And I can’t find any of her disks anywhere.’

Li was glad of the cold air in his face and his lungs as he stepped out with the girl into the yellow autumn sunshine. The wind tugged at their clothes and stung their skin.

She said, ‘Will you need someone to identify her?’

‘Yes.’ He thought about Bill Hart, or perhaps Professor Hu. ‘But you don’t have to worry about that.’

‘I’d like to do it,’ she said.

Li closed his eyes. He saw the gash in her neck, the gaping wounds on each side of her head where her ears had been hacked off. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

‘I want to,’ the girl insisted. ‘One minute she’s there. My whole life. The next she’s gone. And I don’t even get the chance to say goodbye to her? I want to see her. I want that chance.’

‘Okay.’ Li nodded. There was no point in trying to dissuade her. He knew that people often needed to see the body. A confirmation of death. As if somehow they can’t believe unless they see. It was not a need he shared. He had seen enough bodies in his life to know that they were nothing but empty receptacles, that the person who had once animated them was long gone. And that it was better to remember them as they were. As it was, he knew that this girl’s last and lasting image of her lover would be one of horror, one that would taint every other memory she had of her for the rest of her days. And he grieved for them both.