The Killing Room

I

The campus of the Shanghai Medical University sat behind high grey walls to the left and right of Dong’an Road, a jumble of mostly two-storey buildings linked by tree-lined private roads. Here students walked and cycled free of the traffic that choked the city streets outside, and a blink of late autumn sunshine lifted spirits otherwise destined for winter decline.

Li and Mei-Ling had driven here in silence. She had greeted him brightly enough at his hotel, putting a brave face on a disastrous night. No reference was made to Margaret, or the drink, or the food — or the bruise on Li’s cheek. But Mei-Ling was pale and fragile. She had, she said, arranged for them to meet Jiang Baofu’s course professor at the medical university. And little else had passed between them since.

Professor Lu was a broad man with a wide, flat face and narrow slanted eyes. His thick accent betrayed origins in north-west China. He wore a white coat open over a dusty cardigan and baggy pants, and on the rare occasions when he removed the cigarette from between his lips, he waved it around with nicotine-stained fingers. ‘Jiang Baofu?’ He breathed smoke at Li and Mei-Ling. ‘A brilliant student.’ He shuffled papers absently on the desk in his small office. Sun slanted in between the slats of Venetian blinds and lit his smoke in blue wedges. ‘In all the years I have been teaching, I cannot recall a student with more natural ability. He handles a scalpel as if he was born with one in his hand. If he chose to he could become one of the top surgeons in the country.’ He paused and raised his eyes from his papers. ‘I hope he doesn’t.’

Li frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because that young man is more concerned with the dead than with the living.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean that he has an unhealthy obsession with death. Here, we try to instil in our students a sense of caring, a sense of obligation to the well-being of the patient.’ He flicked a cold glance at Mei-Ling. ‘Even if we do not always succeed.’

Li glanced at Mei-Ling, confused now by a subtext he did not understand. There had been a certain familiarity in the greeting between Mei-Ling and Professor Lu which, Li assumed, had been established in a telephone call to arrange the meeting. Now, it was clear, there was more to it. But Mei-Ling remained impassive.

‘In the case of Jiang Baofu,’ Professor Lu continued, ‘he has no interest whatsoever in the patient, only in the mechanics of the body and the techniques of surgery. He spends hours in pathology, cutting up bodies donated to research. We have tried to persuade him that his talents might best be suited to the field of forensic pathology.’ He gave Li a look that suggested little sympathy, and said with a tone, ‘I’m sure he would be an asset to you people.’ He lit another cigarette from the remains of his old one. ‘However, sadly he still remains undecided.’

‘Surely,’ Li said, ‘if he is so talented, his skills would be best used in the service of the living?’

The professor squinted at him through his smoke. ‘Tell me, Detective, would you rather have a doctor whose technique was impeccable, or one who actually cared about whether you lived or died?’ But he did not wait for Li’s response. ‘I know which I would choose.’

‘You don’t like him much, then?’ Mei-Ling said in a tone laced with sarcasm.

‘Actually, I can’t stand to be near the boy,’ the professor said bluntly. ‘He is …’ and he thought about it for a moment, ‘… uniquely and unremittingly unlikeable. I cannot think of anyone who likes him, staff or students. You never see him in the company of others. In the canteen he always sits alone.’ He shrugged. ‘What more can I tell you? I would describe him as abnormally brilliant, but I think abnormal would suffice.’ He pulled apart the Venetian blinds to let the sunlight fall upon his face. For a moment he closed his eyes, as if basking in its warmth. Then abruptly he let the blinds snap shut. ‘But don’t take my word for it. Ask his professor of pathology. Dr MacGowan is a visiting lecturer from the United States. Jiang idolises him. But I think the good American doctor could quite happily strangle him.’ Professor Lu grinned as some private thought flashed through his mind.

‘May we speak to Dr MacGowan?’ Li asked.

‘Of course. If you can speak English.’

‘I could see that goddamn kid far enough, you know what I mean?’ MacGowan dragged his attention away from the corpse that lay cut open on the table in front of him and looked up at Li and Mei-Ling. ‘This doesn’t bother you, does it? I mean, I guess you people have seen plenty of stuff like this. I’m sorry if this one’s a bit ripe.’

‘Sure,’ Li said. ‘It is not a problem’ But you never got used to the perfume of rotting human flesh. He glanced at Mei-Ling and saw that, if anything, she was paler than when she’d arrived at the hotel. You needed a strong stomach for this sort of thing at the best of times. And for Mei-Ling, this was not the best of times.

She caught Li’s look. ‘I am fine,’ she said.

There were five other bodies laid out on tables in this large, overlit room, each in various stages of decay and dissection. The doctor’s students, first-year novices, were due in five minutes to pick up from an earlier session.

‘Every time I turn around, there he is,’ MacGowan said. ‘Sitting at the back of a first-year lecture, hovering around pathology, hoping to pick up a spare corpse if one of the students doesn’t turn up. Jesus, I even saw him in the street once outside my apartment. The kid must have followed me home. Pretty goddamn creepy, if you ask me.’

There it was again, Li thought. Creepy. How many people had described him that way? He gave me the creeps, Dai had said, and really creepy, Mei-Ling had called him. A creepy medical student, were the words Margaret had used.

MacGowan was about forty-five, and losing his hair. He was lean, and very white — perhaps a consequence, Li thought, of all the hours spent under artificial light in rooms like this. Both Li and Mei-Ling found their eyes drawn to the black hair that grew thickly on his forearms. MacGowan seemed to notice and he became suddenly self-conscious. ‘So what more can I tell you?’ he asked, moving away to a stainless steel sink to peel off his gloves and wash his hands.

‘When you have finished with the bodies in here, what do you do with them?’ Li asked, and he wondered if it was possible that the women they had found in the mud in Pudong had been hacked up in this very room.

‘We burn ’em,’ MacGowan said. ‘But only after we get our money’s worth out of them.’ He grinned.

But Li did not share his amusement. ‘Do you sew the bodies closed at the end of the process?’

‘Sure. We dump all the crap back inside and then stitch them up, though not with the kind of embroidery they get taught to use on live patients.’ He grinned again.

‘What kind of thread do you use?’

MacGowan appeared surprised by the question. He shrugged. ‘Oh, just some rough twine.’ He looked along the cluttered worktop beside the sink and grabbed a ball of coarse black twine. He tossed it to Li. ‘Stuff like that.’

Li examined it. It looked very much like the twine that had been used to suture the women whose mutilated bodies filled nearly half the cooler space at the mortuary. ‘You always use this twine?’

Again MacGowan shrugged. ‘I guess. It’s just standard supply. You’ll probably find the same stuff used in all the hospitals and mortuaries.’

‘May I take a piece?’

‘Sure.’ MacGowan lifted a pair of scissors and handed them to Li so that he could cut off a six-inch length. Li then dropped the twine into a plastic evidence bag and slipped it back in his pocket. ‘So, has this got anything to do with those bodies they found across the river?’ MacGowan asked.

‘What do you know about that?’ Li asked.

‘Only what they’re saying on CNN.’ He paused. ‘They’re reporting that you’ve got some American pathologist from Chicago working on it with you. That right?’

Li nodded. ‘That is correct.’ He was not going to elucidate. He glanced at Mei-Ling. But she did not appear to be listening. ‘One other thing, Doctor,’ he said. ‘When you are instructing your students on the entry cut to make during autopsy, what do you teach them?’

MacGowan frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, do you teach them to make a straight incision or a “Y” cut?’

‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at.’ He smiled. ‘I know it’s normal practice to make a straight entry cut in China, but I prefer to make the “Y”. I figure it gives you better access, so that’s what I teach my students.’ He waved a hand towards the nearest table. ‘Take a look.’ And they crossed to the gaping corpse of a middle-aged man, cut open from shoulders to pubis in a neat Y. The rancid smell of the sewer rose from the body. ‘Aw, Jesus,’ MacGowan said. ‘Some kid’s made a real mess of opening the intestine. Shit everywhere.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Mei-Ling’s involuntary exclamation startled them. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she ran from the room.

MacGowan smiled at Li apologetically. ‘Sorry about that. I didn’t figure that she of all people would be affected that way.’

Li was confused. ‘She’s … not very well,’ he said.

‘That explains it, then.’ MacGowan nodded. ‘Usually by your fourth year in med school you’re over all that kind of stuff.’

Li frowned, perplexed now. ‘What?’

‘Or maybe it was fifth year.’ MacGowan raised his eyebrows to crinkle his receding forehead. ‘Pity. When the professor said you were coming today, he told me she’d been a really promising student. But, then, you know, sometimes people just ain’t cut out for it. So to speak.’

Mei-Ling glanced accusingly at Li in the passenger seat. ‘There are lots of things about me you don’t know,’ she said. They were heading west on Zhaojiabang Road, a six-lane arterial route clogged with traffic. ‘I mean, it’s not a secret. Everyone in the department knows I flunked out of medical school.’ She was clearly touchy about it, and now Li felt guilty for having made her confront again some failure from her past.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not prying. Just interested. But if you don’t want to talk about it …’ He was learning that Mei-Ling was sensitive about more than one area of her life. It was making him a little wary around her now.

She sighed, her eyes fixed on the traffic ahead. ‘It’s no big deal. I wanted to be a doctor since I was a little girl and watched my grandmother dying of cancer. It was during the Cultural Revolution. Medical resources were scarce, and there was nothing our doctor could do for her. I just felt so useless, watching her waste away, unable to do anything to stop the pain or ease the suffering. I used to sit in her room holding her hand. You could smell death coming. It was just a breath away, and yet you knew there was nothing you could do to stop it.’ Mei-Ling paused for a long time, lost in some distant childhood memory. ‘She was so brave, my grandmother. Never complained, never wanted to put us out. But there was one time, I remember, near the end. She was little more than a shadow. She sat up, suddenly, in the bed, her eyes wide. They were so big in her shrunken face. She let out a little groan, and the tears fell from her cheeks. It was the first time I had seen her crying, and I didn’t know what to do. It only lasted a moment, then she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and forced herself to smile and said, “I’m sorry, Mei-Ling”. And she lay back down.’ Li saw that Mei-Ling’s eyes had moistened at the memory. ‘It was as if a crack had somehow opened up in that brave front she put on, and she’d seen death peeking through at her, and for a moment she’d lost all her resolve, all her courage.’ Mei-Ling wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a mirrored moment from a long time ago. ‘And all she could think to do was apologise to me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So I was always going to be a doctor.’

‘Why did you drop out?’ Li was genuinely curious.

She flashed him a sad smile. ‘Because doctors can’t beat death any more than the rest of us, Li Yan, and I’ve never been good at handling failure. I was in my fourth year when my mother died of breast cancer, and I couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. I felt just the same then as I had when my grandmother died, and I thought, what’s the point? So I quit.’

‘And joined the police?’

She grinned. ‘I know. It doesn’t seem like the obvious leap. And it didn’t happen straight away. But that’s a whole other story.’

And Li wondered if that was another area of her life through which he would have to tread carefully in the future. There was a complexity about Mei-Ling that had not been immediately apparent. She leaned over and flipped open the glove box. ‘You’ll find a search warrant in there,’ she said. ‘For Jiang Baofu’s place. It’ll take us about twenty minutes to get there.’

II

Ming-Xin village was a development built at the end of the twentieth century in the far north-west suburbs of Shanghai, near Giangwan Stadium. It comprised low and high rise apartment blocks in pale pink, green and cream, set among landscaped gardens with roads and pathways threaded through them like a maze of crazy stitching. Ornamental evergreen trees marked the boundaries of tiny gardens, large grassy areas were bounded by lush green sub-tropical shrubbery and fleshy leafed trees. Li had seen nothing like it in Beijing. Mei-Ling parked in Nuan-Jiang Road, outside building No. 39, opposite a white three-storey block with terraces and arched windows.

The path to the main door was choked with parked bicycles and motor-scooters. Inside a dark entrance hall, post boxes lined one wall facing the windows of the caretaker’s office. The caretaker was a sparrow-like middle-aged woman wearing a yellow cardigan over a black tee-shirt. She had a mean, thin face below a thatch of short-cropped hair. On the wall behind her was a clock, a calendar and a large coloured map of China. On her desk was a pile of cheap magazines. She was warming her hands on a jar of green tea and looked at Li and Mei-Ling suspiciously with darting dark eyes. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Li showed her his ID and handed her the search warrant to scrutinise. Which she did, taking time and great care to read every character. She was not going to be intimidated by authority. Finally she handed the warrant back through the sliding glass window. ‘What’s he done?’

‘We don’t know. Maybe nothing,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Do you know him?’

The caretaker shrugged and pulled a face. ‘He’s a weirdo. Comes and goes at all hours. Sometimes he’ll talk to you, sometimes he just looks right through you.’

‘Does he have many visitors?’ Li asked.

‘In the year since he moved in I don’t know of one,’ she said. ‘Of course, you’ll have to ask my relief, but she’s never mentioned any.’

‘And she would?’

‘Well, not normally. But we have discussed the fact that no one ever comes to see him. So if she’d seen someone, I think she’d have mentioned it.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘He’s a medical student, isn’t he?’

‘He told you that?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘On one of the rare occasions he opened his mouth. Of course, that was early on. I can’t remember the last time he even acknowledged my existence. But you can smell it off him, you know?’

Li said, ‘Smell what?’

‘You know …’ Her face curled up in disgust. ‘Medical things. Dead people. They cut them up for practice down in that place, don’t they? There’s a smell. Like sickness, or hospitals. I don’t know how to describe it. But it gives me the shivers.’

She rode up in the elevator with them to the ninth floor and along a narrow corridor with windows down one side. On the other side, metal grilles and iron gates covered windows and doors to apartments. Sunshine slanted in through the outside windows, illuminating the passage, and Li saw in its light that the cream and green paintwork on the walls was immaculate. This was no cheap housing thrown up quickly to accommodate the masses. ‘Who lives in these apartments?’ Li asked.

The caretaker said, ‘Mostly company people, a lot of retired folk, a few private individuals.’

‘Who does Jiang rent from?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Since the housing market went private it’s impossible to keep track of who owns what.’ She stopped outside number 2001 and began to unlock the iron gate that guarded the door to Jiang’s apartment.

‘You wouldn’t know how much he pays, then?’

‘A lot, I can tell you that. None of these places are cheap.’ She swung the gate out into the corridor and unlocked the door, pushing it open into a small entrance lobby leading to a kitchen. ‘You see what I mean about the smell?’ she said, and she wrinkled her nose. ‘The whole place stinks of it.’

Li was immediately aware of a high-pitched antiseptic odour that suffused the atmosphere of the apartment. It made him think of hospitals and mortuaries, disinfectant and formaldehyde. He stepped in front of the caretaker to stop her from entering. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘We’ll let you know when we’re leaving so that you can lock up.’

She was clearly disappointed not to be allowed in, peering past Li as he spoke, trying to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. ‘So am I supposed not to tell him you were here?’ she said, a distinct pique in her voice.

‘I think we might be speaking to him before you do,’ Li said.

‘So you know where he’s gone, then?’

Li and Mei-Ling exchanged glances. ‘Gone?’ Li said. ‘What do you mean?’ Jiang Baofu had not been at the Medical University when they had. Professor Lu had consulted his timetables and told them the student had no lectures until the afternoon. Li had half-expected to find him at home.

‘He’s gone away for a few days.’ There was a hint of triumph now in the caretaker’s tone. She knew something they did not. ‘He told my relief he was going to visit a cousin somewhere.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the police. You should know that sort of thing.’

‘Did he say when he’d be back?’

‘The weekend, I think. But I couldn’t swear to it. You’ll have to ask her.’

‘We will. Thank you,’ Li said, and he pulled the iron gate closed, and then shut the door on her. They heard her annoyance in the sharp click, click of her heels as she hurried off down the corridor. Li looked grimly at Mei-Ling. ‘You read his file?’ She nodded. ‘He doesn’t have a cousin, does he?’

She shook her head. ‘And Dai’s pretty thorough,’ she said. ‘But we’ll need to check.’

The apartment was small and compact, just two rooms with a tiny kitchen and dining area. But by Chinese standards it was huge for a single occupancy. Li looked around with a sense of awe. The place was spotless, freshly painted walls of cream and pale lime, polished wooden floors gleaming in the sunlight that flooded in through large windows in the living room and bedroom. There was a spartan quality to the apartment. Everything, apparently, had a place and was in it. Cooking implements hung shining side by side from hooks on the wall. Jars stood in ordered rows on open shelves. Worktops on either side of the cooker were immaculate, food containers and an electric blender arranged carefully along the wall behind them. A microwave oven sat on top of a tall green refrigerator. Li looked inside the fridge. It was as ordered as the kitchen, and all but empty. Crockery was neatly stacked in a glass-doored cabinet, and Li recognised the portable television from the night watchman’s hut at Pudong sitting on top of it. A small, square table with a single chair was covered in a lilac-patterned plastic cloth.

Net curtains hung from the window in the small living room. There was an uncomfortable two-seater settee, a desk below the window with a wooden stool pulled up to it. A bookcase next to it was crammed with volumes on medicine and surgery. In the opposite corner another television with a VCR on top of it sat on a stereo cabinet with a CD player and a rack of CDs. Two speaker cabinets, standing nearly three-feet high, stood at either end of the wall. The walls themselves were neatly pinned with charts and diagrams: a representation of the human skeleton with all of its two hundred and six bones labelled; a large photograph of the underside of the brain and brainstem, with labels on each of the twelve pairs of cranial nerves; a poster-sized diagram of the blood vessels of the chest and abdomen with all of the arteries showing in red, the veins in blue, and the organs depicted as see-through shadows; a representation of the eye with its muscles and nerves attached, half of it cut through longitudinally to show its layers and chambers, including the retina, lens, cornea and sclera.

The bedroom walls were naked. Perhaps, Li thought, Jiang was afraid that body parts pasted on the walls here might invade his dreams. There was very little in the bedroom apart from a small wardrobe, a double bed, a chest of drawers with a television on top of it, a single bedside cabinet and one chair.

Li and Mei-Ling had not spoken as they wandered slowly through the apartment drinking in its ordered sterility. Now they stood in the living room looking around at all the hard, cold surfaces unbroken by a plant or an ornament, or anything personal. ‘This guy is very weird,’ Li said eventually, and the echo of his voice sounded odd in the chill silence of the place. ‘There is nothing of him here, not a single clue to his personality. Except for the place itself.’

Mei-Ling nodded. ‘Filled with order, but no warmth.’ She let her eyes wander around the room. ‘How does he spend his time, do you think?’

‘Watching television, apparently,’ Li said. ‘When he’s not reading his medical books or examining his medical posters.’ He shook his head. ‘I have never seen so many televisions in one house. And did you notice the microwave, and the refrigerator, the blender, the stereo …? How can this guy afford these things?’

‘And where does he get the money to pay for the apartment?’ Mei-Ling said. She stooped to open the glass door of the stereo cabinet and switched on the CD. There was a disk in it, and she hit the play button. The room was immediately filled with the cold string sounds of German chamber music. They listened to the strange, alien scrape of it for nearly a minute while Mei-Ling examined the other CDs in the collection. Bach and Beethoven, some traditional Chinese stringed music. She switched the chamber music off, and in the silence that followed turned her attention to a shelf of videos. She took one out at random, slipped it into the VCR and turned on the television. It was a recording, made live, during a heart-transplant operation. The surgical team were speaking in English and sounded American. As it played, Mei-Ling worked her way through the other tapes. ‘They’re all the same,’ she said, examining the labels. ‘Edited recordings of operations, commercially produced for instruction in US medical schools.’ They watched, fascinated for a moment, as the bloody hands of the lead surgeon gently massaged the pumping muscle of a new heart.

Li said, ‘He’s obsessed.’ He let his eyes drift again around the posters on the wall — see-through organs, cranial nerves, corneal sections. ‘I think we should get forensics to go through this place with a fine-toothed comb.’ But he wasn’t sure that they would find anything. It was as if the place had been sterilised. It was not the environment of a normal human being. ‘And we need to find Jiang Baofu as soon as possible and bring him in for questioning.’ He wasn’t quite sure why, but he felt a sudden sense of urgency, as if perhaps he sensed that further lives were now at risk.

III

Margaret felt the chill edge of the wind cut through her as she hurried from the new Arrivals terminal at Beijing Capital Airport to the taxi rank. After the mist and rain of Shanghai, the capital was bright and crisp and clear. The sky was cloudless. The late autumn sunshine, set lower now in the sky, cut deep shadows against the sunlit surfaces of the proud new buildings that lined the expressway into the city. Everything here seemed more ordered. From the compass oriented grid system of roads and buildings, and broad bicycle lanes lined with trees, to the taxi queues and the white-gloved traffic cops pirouetting on circular podiums at road junctions. It was all in stark contrast to the jumble of buildings and streets, and the confusion of traffic and cyclists, that was Shanghai. In the distance, far off to the west, Margaret could see the mountains cut sharp against the sky, snow-capped peaks tracing a brilliant white profile on the deepest of blues. She sat back in her taxi and let the city wash over her. If someone had told her two years ago that she would one day feel at home in Beijing, she would have told them they were insane. But after the pain of her father’s funeral, the sense of dislocation she had felt in Chicago, and the strangeness of Shanghai, it really did feel like coming home.

For the first time since rushing to catch a taxi out to Hongqiao Airport early that morning, she took the time to reflect on the previous night. She remembered the reading of the horoscopes, and wondered in the cold light of day if five thousand years of civilisation had given the Chinese insights into people and their compatibilities that Western society could not even guess at. Could Margaret and Li’s conflicting birth years really explain the stormy nature of their relationship? Was she fighting a losing battle against the fates in even trying to hold on to him? She thought about Li’s lucky number three, and Mei-Ling’s dark and foreboding unlucky nine, her trigram the colour of dried blood. And for the first time, perhaps, Margaret began to see that there was a kind of desperation in Mei-Ling in her endeavours to win Li’s affections and shut Margaret out. A yang orphan her aunt had said she was. And there had been a clue in her brother’s description of her fight to succeed in a man’s world. A compensation for something lacking in her life. Margaret realised that she really knew nothing about Mei-Ling, and wondered if perhaps there had been some tragedy in her life that had made her the way she was. Or maybe, as her stars suggested, that tragedy was still to come, a dark shadow hanging over her future. Margaret shivered, as if someone had walked over her grave, and felt a disquiet in the thought that disturbed her.

As her taxi turned off the expressway on to the third ring road, huge new structures rose all around into a sky crowded with neon advertisements for Japanese and American consumer goods. Margaret turned her thoughts to Li, and she remembered him making love to her in the semi-darkness of her hotel room. And then, through a fog of memories made hazier by alcohol, she recalled something else, something she had buried away in the depths of her subconscious. For even in her drunken state, she had been aware of a desperation in their lovemaking, that same quality she had seen in Mei-Ling. Something that owed more to fear than fulfilment. And now it came bubbling back to the surface and clouded her day with depression. She was, she knew, losing him, and perhaps the desperation she saw in Mei-Ling was merely a reflection of the hopelessness she felt in herself.

The taxi had negotiated its way on to the second ring road, and now turned south at the Yong Hegong Lamasery into a labyrinth of hutongs, narrow lanes bounded by siheyuan courtyards that owed their origins to the Mongol conquerors who swept down from the north centuries before. The Beijing Municipal Police Department of Forensic Pathology was buried away in an anonymous white building in Pau Jü Hutong. Margaret’s taxi pulled up beside the concrete ramp that ran up to gates leading into the basement of the building. She paid the driver and stepped out into the midday chill. The brown, brittle leaves of autumn rattled along the cobbles in the breeze. Margaret remembered a moment at this spot when she and Li had almost kissed for the first time, pulling back only at the last moment when they became aware of an armed guard watching them from the gate. There was still an armed guard at the gate, but the world had moved on since then. She thought of Li’s whispered farewell in the early hours of last night. He had to get back to his hotel, he had said. Mei-Ling was picking him up in the morning. He had left Margaret’s airplane ticket on the bedside table and ordered an alarm call for her from the telephone in her room. She had still been drunk, but not so drunk that it hadn’t occurred to her that the only reason Li wanted to go back to his hotel was so that Mei-Ling would not find out he had spent the night with Margaret. The faintest traces of a lingering headache reminded her of her excesses in toasting Mei-Ling to oblivion. It hadn’t taken much. Which was just as well, because Margaret had had a considerable head start in the consumption of alcohol. She wondered how Mei-Ling felt today.

The mutilated remains of what had once been a young woman lay assembled on the autopsy table. Decompositional juices trickled into the drainage channels and the smell of decay hung thick in the air. When they found her body in February, she had already been in the ground for about a week. Now the original carnage inflicted on her, followed by an autopsy and eight months in the freezer, and then four days of slow defrosting, had all taken their toll. The face of the severed head had been virtually obliterated by decay. The white crusting of freezer burn on the skin was being destroyed in turn by the formation of slimy dark green blisters filled with the collected fluids of decomposition.

‘I am glad I never ask her out on date,’ Dr Wang said and he grinned across the table at Margaret.

‘Just as well. She’d probably have turned you down,’ Margaret said dryly. Wang made a little snort through his mask that indicated he was not amused. ‘Did you do the original on this girl?’ Margaret asked.

Wang shook his head. ‘No. That was Dr Ma Runqi. He is gone now.’

‘That’s convenient.’

Wang looked at her and asked guardedly, ‘Why?’

‘Well, it means there’s nobody to answer for this …’ she turned and picked up the translation of the autopsy report, ‘… this shambles.’ Wang did not respond. ‘Have you read it?’ Margaret asked.

He nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘And?’

Wang shrugged noncommittally. He was reluctant to criticise a colleague, even one now departed. ‘It is not what I would have done,’ he said.

‘No.’ And Margaret knew that Wang would have done a much better job. She had worked with him the previous year on the city’s first serial killings, and developed a healthy respect for his work, if not for his sense of humour. She dropped the report on to the worktop and turned back to the body. She scraped gently around the edge of the “Y”-shaped entry wound. The yellow-brown colouring of the betadine that Ma Runqi had noted in his report was no longer discernible, but there were still traces of mud clinging to the skin and clogging the open edge of the wound. ‘He didn’t even clean off the body properly. And he missed the bits of black gritty material here in the areas of haemorrhage along the incision edges.’ She picked at them with the point of the scalpel. ‘You know what they are?’

Wang said, ‘Sure. Someone used electrocautery device to heat-seal small bleeders.’

‘Which would kind of lead you to think that maybe this person was still alive when they were cut open, wouldn’t it? That and the iodine tincture applied to the skin before the incision was made.’ Wang nodded mutely. Margaret pressed on, ‘I mean, Dr Ma notes the tincture, but draws no conclusions, and misses the cauterisation completely. No wonder Section One weren’t making any progress with the investigation. This is a shoddy piece of work, Doctor. What else do you suppose we’re going to find?’

Dr Wang’s silence spoke volumes. And for the moment, at least, his sense of humour appeared to have deserted him.

It was less than ten minutes later that Margaret came across her next ‘find’. It was a tiny suture, half buried in the retroperitoneal fat behind the spleen, tying off one of the renal arteries. Margaret removed the blue polypropylene thread, still tied in its distinctive knot, and held it up for Wang to see. ‘I don’t think it’s any coincidence,’ she said, ‘that I found the same suture, tied with the same blue thread, in most of the victims in Shanghai. It seems that Dr Ma didn’t like getting his hands greasy.’ She took some paper towels to wipe the worst of the fat off her latex gloves to prevent her scalpel from slipping.

‘So this one is same as bodies in Shanghai?’ Wang asked.

Margaret shook her head. ‘No, it’s quite different in a number of ways.’ She had not completed the re-examination, but already there were obvious differences. Wang looked at her for elucidation. She said, ‘Although it is clear that the subject was still alive when the procedure began, as with the Shanghai victims, the lungs and one of the kidneys are still present. As are the eyes. In Shanghai all these organs had been removed. Also, it is quite clear from the examination of the amputation wounds, that the bones have been sawn through, rather than chopped, as again they were in Shanghai.’

‘Then the girl was killed by different person?’

‘No, I think it was probably just the circumstances that were different. I believe this girl was murdered by the same hand.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Well, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence. The iodine tincture, the “Y” entry cut, the cauterisation of the incision edges. Then there’s the toxicology. The succinic acid and the benzodiazepine in the urine.’ And with her tweezers, she picked up again the blue polypropylene suture knot. ‘And this.’

Wang shrugged. ‘It is just suture knot.’

‘It’s a one-handed tie. I remember practising this one for hours when I was at med school. The difference is, I’m right-handed. The way this one loops through, it could only have been tied by a left-hander, as were all the others in Shanghai. And it would be some coincidence if different surgeons hundreds of miles apart used exactly the same blue plastic thread, don’t you think?’ Wang nodded, and Margaret said, ‘I’ll want to take a sample of the twine used to sew up the body back to Shanghai. Forensics will be able to determine if it’s the same stuff.’

‘So why you think some organs and eyes are left?’ Wang’s curiosity was aroused, and Margaret guessed that he was jealous of her involvement in the Shanghai murders.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s almost as if they were interrupted, or …’ she lifted the original autopsy report again and scanned it thoughtfully, ‘… or something made them give up.’ Something caught her attention and she frowned. ‘I see Dr Ma notes that the right side of the heart was thickened and enlarged when he performed the original autopsy. So he didn’t miss quite everything.’

The heart, which had been found in a separate bag with the liver, one of the kidneys and the pancreas, had been cut open and was seriously deformed by decomposition. It was impossible now to see the gross evidence of inflammation that Dr Ma had noted eight months earlier. Margaret stood staring at it for a long time. ‘I wonder …?’ she murmured, and she turned the heart over, carefully leaning in to ease open the stump of the aorta to get a look at the aortic valve. She scrutinised it carefully for several minutes before turning her attention to the pulmonary artery and the pulmonic valve. She let out a small gasp of satisfaction and glanced up at Wang. ‘You want to take a look?’

Perplexed, he leaned over the heart and repeated her examination. ‘What do you see?’ she asked.

He said, ‘Tiny vegetations on the leaflets of the valves.’ He looked up. ‘I am not familiar with this.’

‘They’re little crumbly chunks of bacteria, often collected from the skin at dirty injection sites,’ she said. ‘It’s quite common for them to combine with fibrin and white blood cells on the flaps of the valves that separate the chambers of the heart. Probably not a phenomenon that’s all that common yet in China. But it’ll come.’

Wang frowned. ‘She was junkie?’

‘Heroin probably. And if Ma Runqi had been doing his job properly he would have seen those and gone on to look for injection sites, maybe in the foot or the inside crook of the arm.’ She sighed. ‘In all likelihood, that’s exactly what the surgeon who killed her did. When he removed the heart he would have seen the telltale evidence of swelling on the right side and checked out the valve flaps. This guy knew his stuff, knew that the little vegetations gathered there meant that the girl was a user. He probably went on to do what Dr Ma didn’t — check for injection sites.’

Wang was puzzled now. ‘But what difference would it make to them if this girl was junkie?’

Margaret had a sick, sinking feeling in her stomach. ‘I don’t know. Unless …’ she was reluctant even to entertain the thought, because it simply didn’t make sense, ‘… unless they were after her organs. In which case they’d have been useless because of the high risk of infectious disease.’

Wang was watching her carefully. ‘You don’t think they were?’

‘Well, you tell me,’ Margaret said. ‘If you were going to murder someone for their organs, would you keep them alive while you removed them?’

Wang laughed. ‘Of course not. This would be insane.’ And she heard an exact echo of the words she had used with Li and Mei-Ling.

‘My point exactly,’ Margaret said.

‘So why would discovery that she is drug addict make them cut short procedure?’

Margaret shook her head, totally mystified. ‘If they weren’t after the organs, then I have no idea.’

They spent the next twenty minutes further retracing Dr Ma Runqi’s erratic steps, leading eventually to the bivalved womb which Dr Wang laid out carefully on the table. In spite of further deterioration, Margaret saw that the endometrium bore the same distinctive adhesive scarring she had noted in several of the women in Shanghai. Wang let out a derisive snort. ‘Hmmmph! How often have I seen this?’

Margaret looked at him curiously. ‘You have?’

‘Sure. These cowboy doctors. They don’t give shit about the poor women when they scrape them out.’

‘Of course,’ Margaret realised. ‘She’s had an abortion.’ And immediately she felt an empathy with the poor dead girl.

‘Too many like this,’ Wang said. And he glanced around and lowered his voice, as if he might be overheard. ‘One Child Policy.’

Margaret nodded. ‘I’d have thought maybe you guys would have got good at this by now, after all the practice you’ve had.’

Wang shook his head. ‘Not this guy.’ He grinned. ‘Use condom, then no need abortion.’

When they had stripped off their gowns and gloves and masks, and showered away the stench of death, Margaret and Wang met up again in his office to review their findings. Margaret was still browsing thoughtfully through Ma Runqi’s original report. She looked up suddenly and found Wang watching her appraisingly. He was momentarily discomposed at being caught gaping so openly. She said, ‘These gold foil restorations she’d had done to her teeth … In the States, if you saw dental work like this on a Jane Doe, you’d think either she was very rich or very poor. Rich because she could afford to have it done. Or poor because she went to the dental school for free treatment and let the students practise on her with the gold foil.’ She paused. ‘Work like that would be expensive in China, right?’

‘Ve-ery expensive,’ he said. ‘Only rich people and foreigner can pay for that.’

‘Yet here’s this Chinese girl, a junkie, who no one seems to have missed, and she can afford to have work like this done on her teeth? I guess treatment’s not free at the dental schools here?’

Wang shook his head. ‘No. And we check out all the clinics in Beijing that can do this.’

Margaret frowned. ‘But what if she wasn’t from Beijing? What if she was from Shanghai? I guess they’ve got places there capable of doing this kind of work?’

‘Sure.’

‘So did anyone check out the clinics there?’

Wang shook his head. ‘Why should we think she come from Shanghai?’

‘No reason. Until now, maybe.’ Margaret ran her hands thoughtfully back through her damp hair. ‘I’ll take the x-rays down to Shanghai with me, and someone can check that out.’ And then, almost thinking out loud, ‘But if she was from Shanghai, then why would they follow her to Beijing just to kill her?’ It suggested to her that the victims were not simply picked at random. Margaret lifted the report again. ‘Blood type O. The most common blood type on earth.’ She paused and thought about it. ‘Which would also make her a universal donor.’

‘But they no need to come to Beijing for blood type O,’ Wang said.

‘No …’ Margaret shook her head slowly. There was no clear understanding for her in any of this. She lifted Ma Runqi’s report again. A thought wrinkled her brow. ‘I don’t suppose anyone thought to DNA-match the body parts?’

Wang shook his head decisively. ‘Why would we, Doctah Cambo? Visual matching was only requirement. All the pieces were found together.’

‘According to the report the arms, legs and head were separately wrapped, even though they were found in the same bag as the torso. Dr Ma notes that the severed pieces were slightly better preserved.’ She reflected on this for a moment. ‘Would it be possible for you to DNA-match all the parts now? I mean, do you have that facility here?’

‘Not here,’ Wang said. ‘At Centre of Material Evidence Determination. At University of Public Security. It take a couple of days, maybe.’ He paused. ‘You think maybe the parts come from different bodies?’

Margaret took a long, deep inhalation of breath and shook her head. ‘I have not the faintest idea, Doctor. As we say in America, I’m flying a kite here.’

Wang frowned. ‘You want to fly kite in Beijing, you should go to Tiananmen Square.’

IV

Nine chairs, tipped to an angle of forty-five degrees, were balanced one on top of the other in an upward arc, counterbalanced by six upside down teenage girls in yellow and green costumes, stacked up like steps on a stairway to heaven. They appeared to be defying gravity and breaking all the laws of physics at the same time. A pale blue spotlight cast their shadows on a screen at the back of the stage. It was not until, with a small shriek, one of the girls overbalanced and all the chairs went tumbling across the stage, that Li saw the girls were supported on wires. They went spinning through the air, crashing into each other like demented birds.

Immediately, a middle-aged woman sitting in the front stalls got stiffly to her feet and began screaming imprecations at them for their clumsiness. Several boys came running on to the stage to retrieve the chairs, and the girls began slowly descending, faces pink with exertion, embarrassment and, perhaps, fear.

‘I’m so sorry, Ma’am,’ the youngest of them whimpered. ‘It was my fault.’

‘You are all to blame!’ the woman yelled. ‘You are supposed to be a team. Each one relies on the other. You all depend on everyone else making those little adjustments, all the time. What kind of fools are you going to look if you do that in front of an audience tonight?’

The younger ones hung their heads. One or two of the older girls, who were maybe seventeen or eighteen, thrust their chins forward defiantly. The boys had reassembled the chairs and were preparing to set up the stunt all over again.

‘This time,’ the woman bellowed, ‘I want you to hold your positions for two minutes!’

There were audible groans from the girls. Li turned to Mei-Ling and whispered, ‘Do you think they’re still attached to those wires during the real show.’

‘I hope so,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘There could be a lot of cracked skulls if they’re not.’ She smiled wryly. ‘The trouble is, there are nine chairs. Lucky for some, unlucky for others. I should know.’

The woman at the front, who had heard the voices from the back, turned round and glared at them. ‘This is a rehearsal,’ she shouted. ‘Members of the public are not allowed.’

Mei-Ling followed Li down the right-hand aisle. ‘Police,’ Li said, and flashed his ID.

The woman glared from one to the other, and Li saw that she was only, perhaps, forty. But her face was set in a permanent scowl that made her look older, and she was supporting herself on a stout walking stick. ‘What do you want?’

‘We’re looking for Sun Jie,’ Mei-Ling said.

The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is he in trouble?’

Mei-Ling shook her head. ‘It’s about his wife, Wu Liyao.’

‘You’ve found her?’

‘Perhaps. That’s what we’d like to discuss with Sun Jie.’

‘Well, maybe you’d like to discuss it with me first,’ the woman said. ‘The little bitch owes me. Disappeared right before we were supposed to go on tour. And then Sun Jie was no damned good to us. What did she do? Run off with some fat cat?’

‘Actually,’ Li said, ‘we believe she might have been murdered.’

Which took the wind right out of the woman’s sails. She sat down very suddenly, leaning heavily on her stick, and waved her hand in the direction of the stage. ‘Take a break, girls,’ she called. Her eyes were strangely glazed for a moment before she turned them up to Li. ‘What happened?’

‘We need to confirm identity first,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Was she an important member of the troupe?’

‘Oh,’ the woman said dismissively, ‘she no longer performed. She was too old for that. She and Sun Jie trained the young ones. And, anyway, she damaged one of her feet in a fall. She was no longer capable of producing the level of performance required.’

Li and Mei-Ling exchanged looks. Li said, ‘Do you know the sort of people she mixed with, if anyone might have borne her a grudge?’

‘The people she mixed with were all acrobats,’ the woman snapped. ‘This is not just a job, it is a way of life. And she had no life outside of the circus.’

‘What about her husband?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘They both used to be stars of the show. But age takes its toll, you know.’ The woman smiled sourly. ‘I used to be a star of the show myself, and look what it did for me.’

Li knew that it was neither time nor wear and tear that had imprinted the ugly scowl so deeply in the woman’s face. That came from inside. A reflection of the soul. The stick was another matter. He said, ‘So where can we find Sun Jie?’

‘Huh!’ the woman was scornful. ‘He’s a waste of space, that one. He was beside himself when Liyao went missing. Eventually, when they couldn’t find her, he rejoined the tour. But he’s never been the same man since.’ She sneered, ‘He’s found religion now, you know. He’s a Buddhist.’ She couldn’t keep the contempt out of her voice. ‘He spends his afternoons at the Jing’an Temple.’ She checked her watch. ‘If you hurry you’ll catch him there now.’

A pall of sweet smoke hung in the still air over the temple like a protective cloud. Here was a bizarre anachronism, a corner of ancient China lurking behind brick walls and surrounded on all sides by towers of glass and concrete and steel. The entrance courtyard, behind high gates, was crowded with people burning paper offerings and incense in large smouldering metal boats. Yellow and red flags hung from covered balconies where monks roomed beneath crumbling black-tiled roofs. Covered passageways, supported on rust red pillars, provided shelter for elaborate gold-leaf altars presided over by giant Buddhas.

Li looked around in wonder. He had never been in any kind of temple before. Religion was a mystery to him, intriguing, perplexing, even a little frightening, and beyond all comprehension. He stared in amazement as young women knelt on crimson altar cushions, hands clasped in prayer, incense sticks smoking between pressed palms. Men and women of all ages and backgrounds sat sociably around tables lining the courtyards and passageways, folding sheets of gold and silver paper into tiny origami shapes with which they filled red paper carrier bags and old shoe boxes before burning them. He had no idea why.

He was surprised when Mei-Ling took his arm and leaned in confidentially. ‘This place was a hotbed of corruption in the twenties and thirties, you know. Legend has it that it was run by a six-foot, four-inch abbot. Apart from being married to a very rich woman, he had seven concubines. He conducted business with the gangsters of the day, and wouldn’t go anywhere without his White Russian bodyguards.’

They wandered through an inner chamber where people were pasting thousands of gold-coloured strips of paper to the walls. Some of them bore small photographs. Perhaps, Li thought, pictures of dead relatives. Through another courtyard, eyes stinging in the smoke, they saw saffron-robed monks gathered around a huge jade Buddha, chanting incantations from open prayer books.

‘There is a much grander temple up the road,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘The one the tourists all go to. Filled with treasures from the past. It only survived the Cultural Revolution because the monks cleverly pasted giant posters of Mao Zedong over the gates, and the Red Guards would not defile the likeness of their hero to gain entry. So it survived intact.’

From here, Li and Mei-Ling turned south, through a circular opening in a yellow wall and into a narrow passageway, with prayer rooms leading off to left and right. Shrubs and miniature trees grew everywhere in terracotta pots. The eerie mumblings, and chants and cants of small gatherings of monks, drifted out of open doorways. They heard the steady clapping of hands, the deep, sonorous and monotonously regular beat of a drum. They followed the directions given them by the crippled manageress of the acrobatic circus and found themselves in a room at the end of the passage where half a dozen monks sat around a long table reading in silence. A solitary figure in a shabby blue suit sat alone at one end of a row of seats at the back of the room. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, his head bowed. Long strips of red cloth hung from the ceiling, embroidered with black characters. A red velvet cloth was draped across the prayer table, and candles burned around a small Buddha at one end of it. Several of the monks glanced curiously at Li and Mei-Ling as they entered and approached the man in the blue suit. It wasn’t until Li asked him if he was Sun Jie, and he looked up, that Li realised he was still a young man, perhaps under thirty, even younger than his lost wife.

Several shaven heads turned now from the table and glared at them for having had the audacity to break the silence of the room. Their silence. Li produced his Ministry ID and said to the man in the blue suit, ‘We want to talk to you about your wife.’

Li saw a moment of hope light in Sun Jie’s eyes, then cloud again almost as quickly with fear. He glanced nervously towards the monks. ‘Not here,’ he said, and he stood up and hurried out into the passageway. Li and Mei-Ling followed.

Sun Jie led them quickly away from the main courtyard, passing through two circular openings, until finally they found themselves in a deserted square beneath the rising balconies of the monks’ living quarters. It was a tight, claustrophobic space, several levels of roof plunging downwards in a dramatic sweep overhead, only to turn up at the last moment, rising to narrow points at the corners. The chanting and the smoke and the beat of the drum seemed a long way away from here. The monks’ daily washing, draped across plastic lines on the balconies above, stirred slightly in the breeze. Sun Jie stopped and turned to face them suddenly, as if he had been steeling himself to confront the truth. ‘Is she dead?’

Li saw no point in offering false hope. ‘We have recovered the body of a woman who may be your wife. Unfortunately her features are—’ He hesitated. ‘She has suffered a certain amount of decomposition. We would like you to make an identification.’

There was no perceptible change in Sun Jie’s expression. But he was silent for a very long time before he said, ‘What makes you think it is Wu Liyao?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘She had stress fractures in one of her feet. The pathologist thought it might have been a sports injury.’

‘Which foot?’

‘The right.’

Sun Jie’s head sank. ‘When do you want me to look at the body?’

‘Today, if possible.’

He nodded, and Li said, ‘Is there anything at all you can tell us about your wife’s disappearance that might help shed light on what happened to her?’

Sun Jie lifted his head to gaze hopelessly at the heavens. Then he looked at Li. ‘She went out shopping one Saturday morning and she never came back.’

‘Do you think she planned it?’ Mei-Ling asked.

He looked at her with dead eyes. ‘She left a pot of soup simmering on the stove, and she was halfway through writing a letter to her mother. She had just put in a washing to pack clean clothes for a tour.’ He paused. ‘So I think she meant to come back.’

Mei-Ling pressed him, ‘There was no chance she was seeing someone else?’

‘None.’

‘How can you be sure?’

His smile was a sad one. ‘Because the demands of the troupe were such we barely had time for one another, never mind anyone else.’ He shook his head, eyes laden with regret. ‘The things you think are important …’ He turned his gaze on Li. ‘So you never found the man who was following her?’

‘What?’ Li was startled. There was no mention in the report of a man following her. He looked at Mei-Ling and she shrugged.

‘I knew they didn’t believe me at the time,’ Sun Jie said. ‘A distraught husband trying to find excuses for a wife who’d left him. But she saw him several times. She told me. She was really spooked.’

Li felt his scalp tighten. It was the first break they’d had, the first hint that any of these women might have been watched, that they might have been stalked and snatched. ‘What exactly did she tell you?’

Sun Jie fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette and Li lit it for him. ‘The first time she saw him, she told me, she was coming home from the theatre one night after a performance. I had the flu and was in bed. She’d seen him in the atrium outside the theatre, and then again on the bus. She hadn’t thought much about it until she saw him again a few days later standing across the road from the bus stop, outside the exhibition hall, smoking a cigarette and watching her as she got on the bus. She still wasn’t particularly concerned. But a couple of days after that she saw him in our street, standing just inside the entrance to an alleyway. And she knew he was watching her. She got really scared then. And that’s when she told me.’

‘What did he look like, this guy?’ Li asked. He was almost certain Sun Jie was going to describe someone very like Jiang Baofu.

Sun Jie drew on his cigarette and blew smoke at the sky. ‘Well, that’s the thing. That’s why she noticed him at all. I mean, a face like that you wouldn’t forget. Liyao said he had long, greasy hair. He wasn’t very tall, kind of squat and thick-set. She said he looked like a Mongolian, and he had a real ugly scar on his upper lip. She thought it could have been a hare-lip.’

V

The miniature house of tin and glass mounted on the rear of Mei Yuan’s tricycle was looking a little battered and the worse for wear. The pink tin roof was dented and discoloured, and the searing heat of the hotplate inside had scorched the cream-painted sides. Mei Yuan, too, was showing signs of age. Wrapped in a thick padded jacket and scarf, a woollen hat, with a turned up peak, pulled down over greying hair, her face was red raw with the cold. Her lips were cracked, and her brow furrowed in a concentrated frown against the icy wind. She wore thick gloves and stood stamping her feet on the sidewalk beneath the trees at the corner of Dongzhimennei Street and Chaoyangmen. She gave the appearance of being crushed by the onset of winter.

But the moment she saw Margaret her eyes lit up, and the familiar dimples appeared in her cheeks, like deep scars in her round face. She was almost overcome by excitement. ‘Ni hau, ni hau, ni hau,’ she babbled excitedly, and threw her arms around Margaret in a very un-Chinese expression of affection. Margaret held on to her tightly. It felt as if Mei Yuan was about the closest thing left in the world to someone who cared about her. Then Mei Yuan held her at arm’s length and inspected her. ‘Ni chi guo le ma?’ she asked — the traditional Beijinger’s greeting — Have you eaten?

‘Yes, I have eaten,’ Margaret lied. It was the traditional response. But, in truth, she was ravenous. She had not eaten all day.

‘I will make you a jian bing,’ Mei Yuan said, astutely. ‘I need the practice. I have hardly sold one since midday.’

And Margaret watched as Mei Yuan poured a ladleful of her pancake mix on to the sizzling hotplate behind the glass screens of the miniature house. When she flipped it over, she spread it with chilli sauce and hoisin and then broke an egg on to it, before sprinkling it with chopped spring onion and pressing down a square of deep-fried egg white. The whole thing was folded over twice and wrapped in brown paper. Mei Yuan handed it to Margaret, her face gleaming with pleasure. ‘So,’ she said, ‘how is my Li Yan? I am missing him.’

Margaret bit into the soft savoury pancake and tried to seem natural. ‘He’s fine,’ she replied. But Mei Yuan had an unerring instinct for the truth, and for the obfuscation of it. Her smile vanished immediately.

She said, ‘What is wrong?’

‘Nothing is wrong,’ Margaret responded.

‘And I ride home each night on a dragon’s back,’ Mei Yuan said.

Margaret chewed reflectively for a moment on her jian bing before she said, ‘He has found someone in Shanghai who I think maybe he likes better.’

Mei Yuan snorted her derision. ‘How can he know he likes her better when he cannot know her as well as he knows you?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Perhaps he has gotten to know me too well and doesn’t like what he sees. Anyway, she is Chinese. I am not.’

Mei Yuan waved a hand dismissively. ‘Culture and colour do not count. It is only the heart that matters. Here …’ She started rummaging in the bag hanging from her trike, and pulled out a dog-eared paperback book. ‘I have been keeping this for you.’ It was a volume of Chinese love poetry, translated into English. ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Chinese are no different. We all feel and express the same things.’ She paused, and with a twinkle added, ‘You should give this to Li Yan.’

And Margaret thought what an extraordinary person Mei Yuan was. A well-read and educated woman, torn down by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, content now to sell jian bing on the street corner and indulge her passion for reading. She had lost her son during those terrible years, as Li Yan had lost his mother. And by some strange quirk of fate they had found each other on a street corner, and somehow managed to fill the missing parts of each other’s lives. ‘Thank you,’ Margaret said, and she gave Mei Yuan a hug. ‘When do we collect little Xinxin?’

Kites filled the sky like birds, and the children cast shadows several times longer than themselves. The vast expanse of Tiananmen Square meant nothing to them, other than limitless open space and empty skies in which to fly their simple structures of wire and plastic. None of them had been born when the tanks rolled in, leaving the blood and hopes of a generation to stain the paving stones. A century of bloody change had been played out here, and now it was just a place to fly a kite.

Mei Yuan said the kindergarten often brought the children here to fly their kites in the late afternoon when the sky was clear and the cold winds blew down from the north. Now the sun was very low in the west, and the strong shadows it cast somehow charred all colour from the scene, except for the red walls of the Forbidden City, and the orange-tiled roof of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. A troupe of armed police in long green coats and peaked caps marched past them in rigid formation, eyes fixed and unblinking. A woman with a thick scarf wrapped around her mouth tried to sell the two women a kite shaped like an eagle. The square was busy with tourists up from the country. There was barely a Western face in sight, and so Margaret was an object of great curiosity. Several groups of peasants followed them for some way before hurrying off excitedly to tell their friends about the blue-eyed, fair-haired foreign devil.

When Xinxin saw Margaret she squealed with excitement, but was caught in a quandary. She wanted to run and jump into her arms, but she was flying a kite and could not let go. Her little face was a picture of conflicting emotions. Mei Yuan resolved the problem by taking the line from her, and freeing her up to give Margaret the biggest of hugs. Margaret crouched and held the child to her, and felt her warmth and her love through the thick layers of clothes. Although only six, Xinxin had already picked up a few words of English. And so she stood back and said solemnly, ‘How do you do? So nice to see you.’

Margaret grinned and said, ‘Ni chi guo le ma?’ Which sent Xinxin and her classmates into a fit of hysterical giggles. Xinxin’s pink coat was buttoned up to the neck, and her face was the same colour of crimson as her woollen tights. Mei Yuan had tied her hair in bunches high on each side of her head, and Margaret thought she looked good enough to eat. Fleetingly she wondered what her own child would have been like. Much older than Xinxin now, and no doubt she would have taken all her worst features from her father. She shook the thought aside and asked if she could have a go at flying the kite. Mei Yuan translated for her, and Xinxin nodded vigorously, and all the children and their teachers gathered round as Margaret took the line and pulled and tweaked until she had Xinxin’s box-kite soaring into the deepening blue. Applause broke around her and she found herself laughing. She had forgotten what a wonderful release it was to fly a kite. She had not grown up in the Windy City for nothing.

In the taxi out to the airport, Margaret read to Xinxin in English from a big coloured picture book. Xinxin loved to have Margaret read for her, even if she did not immediately understand all the words. And it was amazing just how many words she had picked up in the last year. Conversation through the medium of English alone was limited, but just possible.

Margaret looked up to find Mei Yuan watching them fondly. The older woman said, ‘I have a riddle for you to take to Li Yan.’ Margaret smiled. It was a game Li and Mei Yuan had played for years during encounters at Mei Yuan’s jian bing stall.

‘What if I guess it first?’ Margaret said.

‘You usually do,’ Mei Yuan grinned.

‘Okay, try me.’

Mei Yuan said, ‘Imagine you are a bus driver on the number one route through Beijing. When the bus stops at the Friendship Store it is empty, but six passengers get on. At Wangfujing, three get off and another eight get on. At the Forbidden City five get off and fifteen get on. It is getting busier now. At Xidan, eight passengers get off, but ten get on.’ She paused. ‘Are you still with me?’

Margaret nodded. She had been furiously doing her arithmetic and trying to keep up with the constantly changing calculation.

‘Okay,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘So what height is the driver?’

Which stopped Margaret in her tracks. It was the last question she had been expecting. She had a figure of twenty-three in her head, and was wondering where the trick was. But the driver’s height …? She blinked uncomprehendingly at Mei Yuan, and Mei Yuan laughed and raised her hands.

‘Don’t try and work it out now. Think about it,’ she said. ‘But do not ask Li Yan until you have the answer yourself. For you will see then how important it is that you ask this question correctly.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Xinxin demanded to know. ‘Speak Chinese, speak Chinese!’

Mei Yuan laughed. ‘I was just giving Margaret a message for your uncle. When you are older, perhaps, Margaret will pass it on to you, too.’

Xinxin was almost beside herself with excitement when they got on to the main concourse in the new departure hall at the Capital Airport. She had never been anywhere so big, with so many people and so many lights mirrored in so many shiny surfaces. It was dazzling. She had never flown before, either, and with the fearlessness of the young could not wait to get aboard the airplane.

Margaret asked Mei Yuan to stay with Xinxin while she checked them in at the airline desk. Xinxin’s little case was small enough to travel as hand-luggage, and Margaret only had her briefcase. She stood in a long line waiting to check in, and then hurried away across the concourse to the shopping area to purchase a pack of mints for Xinxin to suck during take-off and landing. If she had never flown before, her ears might react badly to the change in pressure. There was a queue here, too, and Margaret stood letting her mind and her eyes wander.

Suddenly a face on the far side of the mall impinged on her consciousness, and a stab of fear shook her to the core. It was a face she had seen before. Flat Mongolian features, long greasy hair, a scarred lip stretched over yellow protruding teeth. And he was staring back at her. A tour group led by a guide wearing a silly yellow baseball cap and carrying a blue flag crossed her line of sight and the Mongolian disappeared for several moments. She craned to try to catch a glimpse of him through the heads, but when the group had passed he was gone, and for a moment she began to doubt that she had seen him at all.

She had forgotten all about the mints now, and left the line, rushing across the concourse, eyes darting left and right, trying to get a sight of him. But he was nowhere to be seen. Where could he have gone? How could he possibly have been here in Beijing? She remembered his face from that dark night on the Bund as clearly as she had ever remembered anything in her life. She could not possibly have mistaken him. Could she? She stopped and felt the bumping of her heart beneath her breast, like someone physically punching her. Her breathing was fast and shallow, her mouth dry.

‘Magret, Magret, what wrong?’ Xinxin’s little voice crashed into her thoughts. And a little hand slipped into hers. She turned round to see Mei Yuan and the little girl staring at her curiously. What kind of sight must she have presented?

‘Are you all right?’ Mei Yuan asked, concerned.

‘Sure,’ Margaret said, unconvincingly, trying to control her breathing. ‘I’m fine.’ But she wasn’t.