Chinese Whispers

I

She woke with a start, heart pounding, consciousness holding on to the distant echo of the cry which had invaded her dreams. Dreams that hardly ever took her far from the surface, lingering always in the shallows where light and hearing were only a breath away. She sat upright, drawing that breath now, eyes quickly forming shapes from shadows, broken light from the street cut in small pieces by the branches of trees. She never drew the curtains. That way she could see fast, without blinding herself with sudden light.

There it was again, tiny and muffled, and unaccountably devastating in its effect. Nature had surprised her with this sensitivity, tuned to detect the smallest sound, even in sleep, triggering the fight or flight response that had her awake and alert in seconds. There was a third cry, and then a fourth, followed by a long grizzle and a series of sobs, and her alarm subsided into a weary acceptance that she would have to get out of bed. She glanced at the clock display on the bedside cabinet and saw that it was a little after five. Chances were she would not get back to sleep.

She slipped quickly from the bed and lifted her dressing gown from the back of a chair, shivering as she pulled it on and hugged it around herself. The heating would not come on again for another hour, and she still could not get used to the fact that she had no control over it. As she opened the door, she glanced back at the bed and the shape of Li Yan curled up in the foetal position, sheets and blankets pulled tightly around him, the soft, regular purr of his breathing filling the room. And she wondered why Nature did not endow fathers with the same sensitivity.

Li Jon Campbell lay on his back. Somehow he had managed to kick himself free of the quilt and had been wakened by the cold. And now that he was awake, he would discover that he was hungry. Margaret lowered the side of the crib and lifted her son into her arms, scooping up the quilt and wrapping it around him. In another month they would celebrate his first birthday. He was already a big boy. Ugly, Margaret told Li, like his father. Thick, black hair and beautiful slanting almond eyes, he looked like any other Chinese baby. And Margaret might have doubted that there was anything of her in him except for the strangest, startling blue pupils that met hers every time he looked at her. It was odd that it should have been her eyes that she had most obviously given him. She had read that the blue-eye gene was the weakest, and that within a few hundred years would be bred out of the human race entirely. Li Jon was doing his best to redress the balance.

She cuddled and whispered to him as she carried him through to the kitchen to prepare a bottle. She had been too weak after the Caesarian to breastfeed. His crying subsided, and he contented himself with grabbing her nose and holding on to it as if his life depended on it. She pulled herself free as she took him into the sitting room and dropped into a soft chair where she could cradle him and push the rubber teat between his lips. He chewed and sucked hungrily, and Margaret took the moment, as she always did, to find a small island of peace in the shifting sea of her unsettled world.

Not that she ever consciously analysed her position these days. She had long ago stopped doing that. It was not a deliberate decision. More a process of elimination. Her whole life was focused now on her baby, to the exclusion of almost everything else. She could not afford to dwell on her semilegal status, living unauthorised in the official apartment provided by the Beijing Municipal Police for the father of her child. She survived from visa extension to visa extension without daring to think what she would do if ever her application was refused. She had no real income of her own, except for the money they gave her for occasional lectures at the University of Public Security. She had not wielded her pathologist’s knife in almost a year. She was, in fact, no one she would recognise. She would pass herself in the street without noticing. She was less than a shadow of her former self. She was a ghost.

Li Jon was asleep by the time she laid him back in his cot, making sure he was well wrapped and warm. But now she had lost all her own heat and hurried back to bed, dropping her gown on the chair and slipping between sheets which had also grown cold. She shivered and slid across the bed to the heat radiating from Li Yan’s back and buttocks and thighs, and felt his skin burning against hers. He grunted, and she felt the reflex of his muscles as he tried to move away from this source of cold. She tucked in tight and held on.

‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled sleepily.

‘Oh, so you’re not dead,’ she whispered, and her voice seemed inordinately loud in the dark. ‘Or deaf. Or completely insensitive.’

‘What?’ And he half-turned toward her, still drowsy and heavy-eyed, clinging to the last vestiges of what had been a deep, dark slumber.

She slid a cold hand across his thigh and found, to her surprise, a full erection. ‘What the hell were you dreaming?’ she demanded.

He became aware of her cold, and his heat, and felt a warm flood of arousal fill his belly. ‘I dreamt I was making love to you,’ he said.

‘Yeah, right.’

He flipped over so that he was facing her. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘It has,’ she acknowledged. She squeezed him and smiled. ‘But I see that everything’s still in good working order.’

‘Maybe we should give it a run out, just to be sure.’

‘Maybe we should. It might generate a little more warmth than the central heating.’

‘Just a little more…’ He nuzzled against the cold skin of her neck and felt her shiver as he breathed on her. She felt him grow harder as he dragged his lips across her breast to find a nipple, puckered and hard with cold and arousal. He flicked at it with his tongue and then bit until she moaned, and he ran a hand over her belly in search of the soft blonde hair between her legs. He felt the long, vertical weal of her scar, still ugly and livid. No cosmetic bikini-cut, this. And he knew that she was still self-conscious about it. He moved up to find her lips and the warmth of her mouth, flipping over again to lie between her open legs, and then, half crouching, let her guide him inside her. He felt a shudder running through her whole body, like the deepest sigh, and his cellphone began playing Beethoven’s Ode To Joy.

‘In the name of the sky,’ he hissed into the darkness, and immediately felt her go limp beneath him. It was a long time since she had asked him not to answer a call, a final acceptance of the way the dice had fallen. For both of them. And for the briefest of moments, he was tempted himself to let his answering service pick it up. But Margaret was already turning away, the spell broken, the moment lost. He snatched the phone from the bedside cabinet.

‘Wei?’

Margaret listened bleakly as he had a quickfire exchange in putonghua Chinese. A bizarre four-toned cadence that she had never made any real attempt to learn. And yet she knew it was a language her son would speak, and she did not want there to be any part of him she could not understand. Of course, she would teach him English. She would speak to him always in English. But she also knew from her years with Li that there would always be that something Chinese about him that would remain just out of reach.

Li hung up and dropped the phone on the table, rolling on to his back and staring silently at the ceiling. There was a lengthy silence. Their passion had not been spent, but it was gone. Finally he said, ‘There’s been another one.’

She felt her stomach flip over. ‘Another mutilation?’ He nodded and she ached for him. She knew how much they troubled him, these killings. It was always worse with a serial killer. The longer you took to catch him, the more people died. In this case young women. Young, fresh-faced prostitutes trying to eke a living in this new, money-driven China. Every new killing was like an accusation of failure. Li’s failure. And eventually the guilt would get to him, and he would start to feel responsible for every death. Like he had killed them himself. Like now.

II

Zhengyi Road was empty as he cycled north in the dark beneath the trees, dry leaves crunching under his tyres. Up ahead, in the brightly lit East Changan Avenue, the first traffic of the day was already cruising the boulevard: buses packed with pale, sleepy faces, taking workers to factories across town; trucks on the first stretch of long journeys on new roads, carrying the industrial produce of the north to the rice fields of the south; office workers in private cars getting in ahead of the rush hour. Where once the cycle lanes would have been choked with early morning commuters, only a few hardy souls now braved the cold on their bicycles. Car ownership was soaring. Public transport had improved beyond recognition — new buses, a new underground line, a light rail system. The bicycle, once the most common mode of transport in Beijing, was rapidly disappearing. An outmoded transport.

At least, that was what the municipal government thought. They had issued an edict to every police station demanding a response time to all incidents of just twelve minutes, an edict well nigh impossible to achieve given the gridlock that seized up the city’s road system for most of the day. Some stations had brought in motor scooters, but the municipal authority had refused to license them. And, almost as an afterthought, had also denied officers permission to attend incidents on bicycles. A return to the bike would be a retrograde step, they said. This was the new China. And so police cars sat in traffic jams, and average response times remained thirty minutes or longer.

Li had a healthy disregard for edicts. If it was quicker by bike, he took his bike, as he had done for nearly twenty years. As section chief he always had a vehicle at his disposal, but he still preferred to cycle to and from work and get motorised only when required. And no one was about to tell the head of Beijing’s serious crime squad that he could not ride his bike if he wanted to. This morning, however, as an icy wind blew down Changan Avenue from the west and cut clean through his quilted jacket, he might have preferred to have been sitting behind the wheel of a warm Santana. But that wasn’t something he would ever have admitted. Even to himself.

He tucked his head down and pedalled east into the heart of the upmarket Jianguomen district of the city, a flyover carrying him across the Second Ring Road, past a towering blue-lit section of restored city wall. He could see the floodlights illuminating the new City Hall building just to the south. The roar of traffic and exhaust fumes rose up to greet him from below. He quite consciously avoided the thought of the scene that awaited him. They had told him she was the fourth. And with the previous three, whatever his experience and imagination had prepared him for, it had not been enough.

Half a dozen police vehicles were pulled up on the sidewalk at the entrance to the Silk Street Market, engines idling, exhaust fumes rising into the cold morning air. There was a forensics van from Pau Jü Hutong, and Li recognised Pathologist Wang’s car parked up beside the body bus from the morgue. It must have broken all speed limits on empty roads to get there before Li, all the way from the new pathology facility out on the northwest perimeter, near the Badaling Expressway. Another planning coup by the municipal government. By the time a detective got there and back, it could take him the best part of a day to attend an autopsy.

The police activity had attracted a large crowd: local residents, curious commuters on their way to work. Numbers had already swelled to over a hundred and were still growing. Not even subzero temperatures could diminish the eternal curiosity of the Chinese. Two dozen uniformed police officers made sure they stayed behind the black and yellow crime scene tape that whipped and hummed in the wind. Li saw the red digital display on the clock tower flash up a temperature of minus six centigrade. He held up his maroon Public Security ID and pushed his bike through the onlookers. A cold-looking officer with a pinched red face saluted and lifted the tape to let him through. Two hundred metres up the alley, Li could see the photographer’s lights illuminating the spot where the body had been found. A bunch of detectives and forensics officers stood around it, stamping to keep warm. As Li approached, someone spotted him coming, and they moved aside to let him through, opening up like the curtain on a stage to reveal a scene that looked as if it had been set for maximum theatrical effect.

Wang Xing was crouched beside the body, making a careful examination, latexed fingers already sticky with blood. He turned his face toward Li, pale and bloodless, like a mask from a Peking Opera, and for once had nothing to say.

The girl lay on her back, head turned toward her left shoulder, revealing a seven-inch gash across her throat. Blood had pooled around her head like a ghastly halo. Her face had been so savagely slashed it would be almost impossible to make a visual identification. Her black leather jacket lay open, revealing a white, blood-spattered blouse beneath it. The top few buttons of the blouse had been undone, but it did not otherwise appear to have been disturbed. The girl’s arms lay by her side, palms up. Her left leg extended in a line with her body, her right leg was bent at the hip and the knee. Her skirt had been cut open and pulled away to expose the abdomen which had been hacked open from the breastbone to the pubes. The intestines had been drawn out and dragged over the right shoulder, one two-foot piece completely detached and placed between the body and the left arm. What struck Li, apart from an extreme sense of shock, was the impression that this body had been very carefully laid out, as if by some grotesque design. There was something bizarrely unnatural about it. He turned away as he felt his stomach lurch and wished that he still smoked. As if reading his mind, someone held out an open pack. He looked up to see Detective Wu’s grim face, jaw chewing manically on the ubiquitous gum. Li waved him aside and stepped out of the circle of light. The image of the dead girl was burned by the photographer’s lights on to his retinas, and he could not get rid of it. She could only have been nineteen or twenty. Just a child. He felt Wu’s presence at his shoulder, breathing smoke into the light. ‘Who found her?’

Wu spoke softly, as if to speak normally might disturb the dead. Li was surprised. Wu did not usually show such sensitivity. ‘Shift worker on his bike, taking what he thought was a short cut home.’

Li frowned. ‘He didn’t know they’d fenced off the road at the other end?’

Wu shrugged. ‘Apparently not, Chief. He almost ran over her. You can see his tyre tracks in the blood. They’ve taken him to hospital suffering from shock.’

‘Did you get a statement?’

‘Detective Zhao’s gone with him.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘We also spoke to the PLA guard at the embassy end. He was on duty all night.’

Li looked back up the alley. It could only have been a hundred metres. Maybe less. ‘And?’

‘Heard nothing.’

Li shook his head. Still the girl was there. Every time he blinked. Every time he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. ‘Do we know who she is?’

‘Found her ID card in her purse, along with a couple of hundred yuan. Her name’s Guo Huan. She’s eighteen years old. Lives in Dongcheng District, not that far from Section One.’ He carefully removed an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light for Li to see. ‘We also found this…’ Trapped between the sheets of clear plastic was what looked like a cutting from a newspaper or magazine. Li took it and held it to catch the spill-off light from the photographer’s lamps and saw that it was a two-line ad from the personal columns of one of Beijing’s what’s-on magazines. Cute Chinese Girl looks for Mr. Right. I am slim, well-educated and work in antiques. Please send me e-mail. Or telephone. Thinly disguised code for a prostitute seeking customers. There was an e-mail address and a cellphone number. Wu blew smoke through his nostrils like dragonfire. ‘He’s making a fool of us, this guy, Chief. We’ve got to get him.’

‘We’ve got to get him,’ Li snapped, ‘not because he’s making a fool of us, but because he’s killing young girls.’ He turned back toward the body as Pathologist Wang stepped away from it, peeling off his bloody gloves and dropping them in a plastic sack. As was his habit, he had an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips. He bent toward the flame of Wu’s proffered lighter, and as he took the first drag Li saw that his hand was trembling.

Characteristically Wang would make some smart quip, or literary allusion, after examining a body at a crime scene. His way of coping. But this morning, ‘Shit’ was all he said.

Li braced himself. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

‘I never saw anything like it,’ Wang said, and there was a tremor, too, in his voice. ‘And I’ve seen some shit, Chief, you know that.’

‘We all have.’

Wang’s dark eyes burned with a curious intensity. ‘This guy’s insane. A twenty-four-carat maniac.’ He stabbed at his mouth with his cigarette and drew on it fiercely. ‘A similar pattern to the others. Strangled. I can’t tell till autopsy if she was dead when he cut her throat. Unconscious certainly, and lying on the ground. He would have been kneeling on her right side, cutting from left to right so that the blood from the left carotid artery would flow away from him. The facial stuff…’ he shook his head and took another pull at his cigarette. ‘She was dead when he did that. And the internal stuff.’ He looked at Li very directly. ‘She’s a mess in there. From what I can see, it’s not just the womb he’s taken this time. There’s a kidney gone as well.’

‘Organ theft?’ Wu asked.

The pathologist shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Not in these conditions. And it wasn’t surgically removed. Both the uterus and the kidney were hacked out. He may have some anatomical knowledge, but he’s certainly no doctor. He’s a butcher.’

‘Maybe literally,’ Li said.

‘Maybe,’ Wang agreed. ‘But even a butcher would use a knife with more care. This was uncontrolled. Frenzied.’

‘How sure are you it is the same killer?’ Li asked.

‘Completely,’ Wang said, reversing his usual reluctance to commit himself to anything. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. He held it up to the light, and Li saw the half-inch remains of a brown Russian cheroot. ‘If we get as good a DNA sample off this as we got off the others, we’ll know for certain.’

III

The sun sneaked and glanced and angled its way off windows in high-rise apartments and office blocks as it lifted off the eastern horizon and beamed directly along the east-west boulevards of the Beijing grid system. As it rose, it coloured the sky blue. A painfully clear sky, free from pollution or mist, dipping to pale orange and yellow along its eastern fringe. A silvery sliver of moon was caught falling in the west behind the purple-hued mountains Li’s breath billowed and wreathed around his head as he pedalled slowly north, weaving through the traffic along Chaoyangmen Nanxiao Da Jie.

Everywhere the building work went on, rising up behind green-clad scaffolding from the rubble of the old city. Cranes stalked the skies overhead, the roar of diggers and pneumatic drills already filling the early morning air. Most of the street stalls he had cycled past for years were gone; the hawkers peddling hot buns and sweet potatoes from sparking braziers, the old lady feeding taxi drivers from her big tureen of soup, the jian bing sellers. New pavements had been laid, new trees planted. And all along Dongzhimen, east of Section One, new apartment blocks lined the street where just a year before squads of men equipped only with hammers had begun knocking down the walls of the old siheyuan courtyards which had characterised Beijing for centuries. It was cleaner, fresher, and there was no doubt that life for ordinary Beijingers was improving faster than it had done in five thousand years. But, still, Li missed the old city. He was unsettled by change.

So it was comforting for him to know that Mei Yuan was still at the corner of Dongzhimen where she had sold jian bing from her bicycle stall for years. During the demolition and construction work she had been forced to move to the opposite corner of the Dongzhimen-Chaoyangmen intersection. And then she had faced opposition to her return from the owners of a new restaurant built on her old corner. It was a lavish affair, with large picture windows and red-tiled canopies sweeping out over the sidewalk, brand-new red lanterns dancing in the breeze. Street hawkers, they told her, had no place here now. Besides, she was putting off their customers. She would have to find somewhere else to sell her peasant pancakes. Li had paid them a quiet visit. Over a beer, which the owner had been only too anxious to serve him, Li had pointed out that Mei Yuan had a licence to sell jian bing wherever she wanted. And since the officers of Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police, just across the road, liked to get their jian bing from Mei Yuan — on that particular corner — the restaurant might like to reconsider its attitude to the jian bing seller. It did.

Li saw steam rising from the tin-roofed glass cover that sat over the hotplate and the pancake mix and bowls of sauces and spices that surrounded it. An elderly couple were paying Mei Yuan for their pancakes as Li cycled up and leaned his bicycle against the wall of the restaurant. He watched them bite hungrily into their hot savoury packages as they headed off along Ghost Street, where thousands of lanterns swayed among the trees and the city’s new generation of rich kids would have spent the night eating and drinking in restaurants and cafés until just a few hours ago. Mei Yuan turned a round, red face in his direction and grinned. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. The traditional Beijing greeting.

‘Yes, I have eaten,’ he replied. The traditional response. If you had eaten and were not hungry, then all was well.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘A jian bing?’

‘Of course.’

She poured creamy mix on to the hotplate and scraped it round into a perfect pancake. ‘You’re early this morning.’

‘A call-out.’

She detected something in his voice and threw him a quick glance. But she said nothing. She knew that if he wanted to talk about it he would. She broke an egg and smeared it over the pancake, sprinkling it with seeds before flipping it over to paint it with savoury and spicy sauces. Her fingers were red raw with the cold.

Li watched her as she worked; hair tucked up in a bun beneath her white cap, quilted blue jacket over jogpants, sweatshirt and trainers. Her white cotton coat hung open, several sizes too small. She made a poor living from her pancakes, augmented only by the money Li and Margaret paid her to baby-sit for Li Jon. Both Li and Mei Yuan had lost people close to them during the Cultural Revolution. He, his mother. She, her son. Now one was a surrogate for the other. There wasn’t anything Li wouldn’t have done for the old lady. Or she for him.

Her demeanour never changed. Her smooth round face was remarkably unlined, crinkling only when she smiled, which was often. Whatever misery she had suffered in her life she kept to herself. And there had been plenty. Wrenched from a university education and forced to work like a peasant in the fields. A baby lost. A husband long gone.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked, and he pulled out the book she had tucked down behind her saddle.

‘A wonderful story,’ she said. ‘A triumph of humanity over ignorance.’

‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ he read from the title in English.

‘The writer is completely inside the little girl’s head,’ Mei Yuan said, and Li could see from her face that she was transported to some place on the other side of the world she would never see. Her escape from a life that offered little else. ‘She must have been in that place herself, to write it like that.’

She put a square of deep-fried whipped eggwhite on top of the pancake, broke it in four and deftly folded it into a brown paper bag which she handed to Li. He dropped some notes in her tin and took a bite. It tasted wonderful. Spicy, savoury, hot. He could not imagine a life that did not start each day with a jian bing. ‘I have a riddle for you,’ he said.

‘I hope it’s harder than the last one.’

He threw her a look. ‘Two coal miners,’ he said. ‘One is the father of the other’s son. How is this possible?’ She tossed her head back and laughed. A deliciously infectious laugh that had him smiling too, albeit ruefully. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’ A group of passing cyclists turned to stare at them, wondering what was so amusing.

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Is it really so easy? I mean, I spent ages trying to work out if maybe one was the father, and the other the stepfather…’

‘Oh, Li Yan, you didn’t!’ Her smile was full of mock pity. ‘It’s obvious that they’re husband and wife.’

‘Well, yes it is,’ Li said. ‘I just didn’t see it immediately, that’s all.’ He had found a website on the internet which specialised in riddles. But none of them were in the same class as the ones Mei Yuan dreamed up for him.

‘I have one for you,’ she said.

‘I thought you might.’ He wolfed down another mouthful of steaming pancake and waited in trepidation.

She watched him chewing for a moment, reflecting on the problem she was about to set him. ‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field, far from their village in Hunan Province,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to make their way from one end of the paddy to the other. They have just finished lunch. One has the food, the other the drink. By sign language, they agree to meet again and share their food and drink when they have finished planting the field. They each have to plant another ten rows. When he has finished his work, the man with the food can’t see his friend anywhere, he waits for a while, and then, thinking his friend has gone back to the village, he eats the food himself. The next morning, he wakes up to find the other man shaking him, signing furiously, and accusing him of abandoning him and keeping his food to himself. But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and abandoned him. The man with the drink insists he was there all along! They are both telling the truth. How can this be?’

Li groaned. ‘Mei Yuan, I give you two lines. You give me a novel. Too much detail.’

‘Ah,’ Mei Yuan grinned. ‘It is in the detail that you will find the devil.’

Li waved his hand dismissively. ‘I’m not even going to think about it right now.’

‘You have more important things to think about?’

His face darkened, as if a cloud had cast its shadow on him. He closed his eyes, and still the image of the girl was there. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have.’

And she knew she had crossed a line into dangerous territory. She made light of it. ‘Maybe by tonight you will have had time to think.’

‘Tonight?’ Li frowned.

‘Before you go to the Great Hall of the People. I have never been in the Great Hall of the People. If I were not baby-sitting, I would have gone to see you there myself.’

‘The Great Hall of the People,’ Li muttered. He had forgotten that it was tonight. How could he have forgotten? He would, after all, be centre stage. He cringed again with embarrassment at the thought of it. The Public Security Ministry was anxious to improve the image of the police, and with increasing coverage of crime by the media, Li had become one of the most high-profile senior officers in the public eye. He was still young — under forty — tall, powerfully built and, if not exactly handsome, then striking in his looks. He had been considered perfect for the propaganda posters. And some PR person in the Minister’s office had dreamed up the idea of a People’s Award for Crime Fighting, to be presented in the full glare of publicity at the Great Hall of the People. Li’s objections had been dismissed out of hand. Summoned to the office of the city’s police commissioner, he had been made to understand that this was not a matter in which he had any choice. When news of it leaked out, it had led to some good-humoured mickey-taking by some of his junior officers at Section One. But he had also become aware of jealousy among more senior officers at police headquarters downtown, where he knew he had enemies. His spirits dipped.

‘I have other riddles to solve today, Mei Yuan. Why don’t you try yours on Margaret?’

‘Hah!’ Mei Yuan grunted. ‘She is always too quick. She is smarter than you.’

Li tossed his paper wrapping in the bin. ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’ He mounted his bike.

‘You are welcome. Maybe I will ask her, when I see her at the park.’

Li wheeled down off the sidewalk on to the road. ‘She won’t be there for tai chi today, Mei Yuan. She has to go to the visa office to get her extension application in.’

‘She still has to do that?’ Mei Yuan raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you have any influence?’

Li snorted. ‘You know the authorities frown on our relationship, Mei Yuan. Pin-up policeman living in sin with foreign devil. Doesn’t exactly fit the image of the poster campaign. It’s only tolerated because everyone pretends it doesn’t exist. Besides, the entry-exit police are a law unto themselves.’ He pushed off into the road to the accompaniment of a symphony of horns and called back over his shoulder, ‘See you tonight.’

IV

The new visa office was opposite the Dongzhimen Bridge on the Second Ring Road. It was too far for Margaret to cycle with Li Jon strapped into the baby seat in front of her handlebars. Life had been simpler when the visa office was located in its original crumbling grey brick building on the east side of the Forbidden City, five minutes from the apartment. Now its replacement, in a twin-towered monstrosity of stone, glass and steel, was a twenty-five-minute taxi ride on a good traffic day.

Her taxi parked up beneath the flyover, and the driver settled down, meter still running, to read his Beijing Youth Daily while Margaret struggled to get the baby buggy out of the trunk. She was not in the best of humours by the time she had negotiated four lanes of traffic and a revolving glass door that wouldn’t revolve. And since the counters were on the first floor, there was also the escalator to contend with, which was never easy with the buggy.

The concourse was busy this morning, queues forming at all the counters, raised voices echoing off marble floors and walls. Margaret queued for ten minutes to get her application form and then made her way to the line of desks to sit down and fill it in. Li Jon was not being co-operative. He had been fed and changed before she left, but something was troubling him, and he had been fractious and prone to complaining all morning. Much as she loved him, she found his periods of unaccountable bad temper difficult to cope with. She was sure that one day she would be able to have an intelligent conversation with him and ask him what was wrong. But until then it was a guessing game. Colic, teething, stomach-ache, hunger, dirty diaper. Any one of any number of things. She gritted her teeth and filled out her form.

There was an unusually large number of people queuing at the foreign counter today, and she had to wait nearly twenty minutes before she was seen, acutely aware of the meter in her taxi clocking up every second of it. A frosty young woman in a neatly pressed black police uniform, hair scraped back severely from a pockmarked face, demanded Margaret’s passport. She gave it lengthy scrutiny, before turning her attention to Margaret’s application for a six-month visa extension. Margaret waited impatiently, Li Jon still griping in the buggy beside her. Finally the girl turned the form back toward Margaret and stabbed it with her pen. ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘You fill in address here.’

Margaret scowled. ‘I filled in my address.’ But her heart was pounding. The address she had given was her official address in the staff apartment block at the University of Public Security — an apartment she had not occupied for nearly a year.

‘No,’ the visa cop barked again. ‘You fill in wrong place.’

Margaret looked at the form again and saw that in her hurry she had accidentally filled in the space allocated for a previous address. ‘Shit,’ she muttered under her breath. She started to score it out and write it in the correct space. But the visa cop pulled the form out from under her pen and started to tear it up.

‘No, no, no. You fill out new form.’

Margaret glared at her, barely able to contain her anger or the caustic comment fighting for expression on the tip of her tongue. New China was still bedevilled by the bureaucracy of Old China, and its bureaucrats were just as intransigent. ‘Could you give me another form, then, please?’ she said through clenched teeth.

‘Forms at that counter,’ the visa cop said, pointing to the far end of the concourse where Margaret had queued earlier. ‘Next.’ And the next in line tried to push past. A tall, fat, balding American in a business suit.

But Margaret stood her ground. ‘No, wait a minute! I queued for a form. I filled it out. You tore it up. I want you to give me another form and I’ll fill it out right here.’ She looked at the line of unsympathetic faces behind her. ‘And these people can wait.’

But the visa cop just shook her head and pushed Margaret’s passport back at her. ‘No form here,’ she said.

‘Chrissake, lady, go get a form,’ the fat American said. ‘Face it. You’re in China.’

As if sensing her tension, Li Jon started to cry. Margaret felt her blood pressure soar. She grabbed the handles of the buggy, spun it around and wheeled it off across the concourse. She hated having to admit defeat. It was another fifteen minutes before she found herself back at the application counter pushing her freshly filled-out form across it at the frozen-faced visa cop, who gave no indication that she had any recollection of their previous encounter.

‘Passport,’ she said, and Margaret almost threw it at her. Having examined it only fifteen minutes earlier, she proceeded to examine it again in great detail as if for the first time. Then she looked at the form, scrutinising it carefully, section by section. Margaret stood watching her impassively as she entered details into a computer terminal behind the counter. Then she stamped the form several times and pushed a receipt back across the counter, along with the passport. ‘Visa over there,’ she said, pointing to a young man in uniform sitting further down the same counter. All the people who had been in the line behind Margaret at the visa application desk, now stood in the line ahead of her at the visa issuing desk.

Margaret leaned over the counter and said, ‘Chicken feet.’

The visa cop looked at her in surprise. ‘I am sorry?’

‘Someone told me once they were good for the complexion. You should give them a try.’ And she wheeled the still wailing Li Jon down to the visa issuing desk. It was petty, childish even, but it made Margaret feel just a tiny bit better.

But as she stood in the queue at the visa issuing desk, she saw Miss Chicken Feet with the bad complexion walk along behind the counter and whisper something in the ear of the issuing officer. The young man looked up and ran his eyes quickly down the line. They rested briefly on Margaret, and then he nodded and turned back to his computer terminal. The girl went back to her desk. Margaret began to worry. When she finally got to the head of the queue, the officer didn’t even look at her. He took her receipt and her passport, and his keyboard chattered as he entered data into his computer. He took a thin sheet of official paper from a tray, scribbled on it, and then stamped it with red ink and pushed it across the counter at Margaret. ‘Come back in two days for passport,’ he said.

‘What?’ Margaret couldn’t believe it.

‘Two days,’ said the officer. ‘Next.’

‘I’ve never had to leave my passport before,’ Margaret said.

The officer met her eye for the first time. He was coldly impassive. ‘You want visa, you come back in two days. Okay?’ And he was already taking the passport from the next in line.

Margaret knew she was beaten. She glanced along the counter and caught Miss Chicken Feet smirking.

V

Smoke rose from cigarettes and steam from thermos mugs of green tea. The detectives of Section One sat around the meeting room wrapped in coats and wearing hats. Some even wore gloves. The heating had broken down again.

One wall was covered with photographs taken at four crime scenes. Four young women strangled and savagely mutilated. Each one worse than the last. Sunshine slanted across the wall, bringing cold light to a very dark place. The mood in the room was sombre as they listened to Detective Wu outlining the details of the latest killing. Li watched him pensively. Wu was one of the Section’s senior detectives now, but he was still in love with his image. He always had a piece of gum in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket that he would whip out one-handed and clamp on his face at the first blink of sunshine. Since the sun was shining today he was wearing them pushed back on his forehead. He had been proudly sporting a growth on his upper lip for years, and was considerably chastened when his daughter had brought home a school essay in which she had written of her father, ‘He is growing a moustache.’ To his credit, he told the story against himself. His own personal uniform consisted of baseball boots, faded denims and a short leather jacket, and he grew his hair just long enough to comb over the thinning patch on top. He had been divorced for nearly five years.

He held up a photograph of the chewed-up remains of a brown Russian cheroot still in its evidence bag. ‘It’s like a calling card,’ he told the room. ‘He leaves one of these at every scene. It’s no accident. He knows we’ll find them. It’s like he’s saying, here’s my DNA. You got my code, but you’ll never get my number. The bastard’s playing games with us.’

‘Why would he do that?’ The question came from one of the youngest detectives in the section. Sang Chunlin was tall and wore dark trousers, black shoes and a black jacket. He, too, had a penchant for American-style shades. His thick black hair, cut short side and back, was long on top and swept back in a quiff. The other detectives called him Elvis.

‘If we knew why he did any of it, Elvis, we might be halfway to nailing him,’ Wu said.

‘Well, whatever motivates him it’s not sexual.’ This from Detective Zhao. ‘He didn’t have sex with any of them, did he? There’s been no trace of semen found at any of the scenes.’

‘We don’t know that in this case,’ Wu said. ‘At least, not until we get the reports back from the autopsy and the lab. But, anyway, who knows how he gets his kicks? He takes bits of them away with him.’

Qian came quietly into the room at the back and slipped into a seat. It was unusual for him to be late. But Li knew there would be a good reason. He nodded a silent acknowledgement to his deputy. Qian was several years older than Li. Steady, reliable, the section plodder. Li had persuaded his superiors at headquarters that Qian should be given the deputy’s job, so that Li could hand him most of the responsibility for running the section. Qian would be good at that, he had told them. And it would free Li up to take a more active role in leading investigations. And he had been right. It was a partnership that worked well.

The rest of the detectives were now actively engaged in a debate about motivation, a topic of discussion which, until recently, would have been anathema. Traditional Chinese police work was based on the painfully meticulous collection of evidence, leading to culprit and conviction. Only then would motivation become apparent. Unlike the West, where detectives considered motive the starting point of an investigation. But like everything else in China, this, too, was changing. And Li had been personally instrumental in altering the working practices of Section One.

While he still believed there was value in large group meetings attended by all the detectives, talking through the evidence, discussing the case in the minutest detail, the time it took was no longer a luxury they could afford. The crime rate was soaring as unemployment grew, and it was impossible to keep track of the floating population of itinerant workers moving from city to city. They had to find ways of dealing with crime more quickly and efficiently. They had embraced technology, installing their own Chinese Automated Fingerprint Identification System, CAFIS, at the forensics headquarters at Pau Jü Hutong. Portable computers the size of a briefcase were available to take out on the job. Fingerprints could be taken at any remote location and sent back by landline or cellphone for computer comparison. They had developed software called AutoCAD which could produce scale 3-D computerised recreations of crime scenes from photographs and a single measurement. They now had access to a computerised ballistics database for the whole of China. And some of the most sophisticated laboratory analysis equipment available had been installed at the new pathology centre in the north of the city. But it was at the sharp end — the working practices of investigating detectives — that reform was most required, and Li had instituted a system of spreading the workload by delegating only two detectives to each case.

It was working well. But this case was different. He needed more men on the job. Each pairing still had its own workload, but every detective in the section had now been drafted in to work in some capacity on what was in danger of turning into the worst case of serial murder since the People’s Republic came into being in 1949.

Li looked again at the photographs on the wall. A grotesque catalogue of inhuman behaviour. And he couldn’t help but wonder about motivation. There was something very cold and controlled about all these killings. Pathologist Wang had described the latest attack as frenzied, and yet the killer had taken the time to arrange a piece of intestine beside the body, and carefully laid the remaining entrails across the girl’s shoulder. In the previous case, he had taken the contents of the girl’s purse and arranged them on the ground around her feet. It was bizarre behaviour.

All the victims were prostitutes. They had all been murdered within the same square mile of the city’s Jianguomen district, an area where a large population of foreign embassy staff and five-star tourist hotels attracted a slightly higher class of call girl. All had been strangled, although this was not always the cause of death. All had been killed on a weekend. The first victim, twenty-three-year-old Shen Danhua, had been discovered in a quiet cul-de-sac behind the Friendship Store off Jianguomenwai Avenue. Her face and head were so swollen and distorted from strangulation that identification by relatives had been a problem. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times.

There was a gap of three weeks between the first and second murders. The second was found on a building site behind the China World Trade Center by labourers arriving for the early shift. Li looked at the photographs on the wall. They had pinned up a portrait picture of each of the girls to remind them that these were people, not just victims. It was only too easy to become desensitised, to start seeing corpses as dead meat rather than human beings. The second victim, Wang Jia, had been an exceptionally pretty girl. In the photograph her parents had given them, she was smiling radiantly at the photographer. It was a smile that haunted them all, a reminder of their failure. She had been strangled, and then had her throat slashed twice, left to right, one cut severing both carotid arteries, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord. Her killer had cut open the abdomen from a centre point beneath the ribs, down the right side and under the pelvis to the left of the stomach, and then stabbed at her private parts with the tip of his knife. The pathologist concluded that the attack had been savage and violent.

Just eight days later, the third murder shook the section to its core. The victim, Lin Leman, was slightly older, nearly thirty, found in an alleyway behind stalls where Russian traders sold furs in Ritan Road. Like the others, she had been strangled and had her throat dissevered. But for the first time, the murderer had removed trophies. The entire abdomen had been laid open, the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments and placed by the victim’s shoulder. The uterus, the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been removed entirely, and no trace of them could be found in the vicinity of the crime scene. The only conclusion they could draw was that the killer had taken them away with him.

To compound the bizarre nature of the killing, they had found items from her purse laid on the ground around her feet. A comb, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a torn envelope bearing a date stamp from just a few days before. Pathologist Wang had expressed the opinion that these items had not arrived there randomly or by chance. It was his belief that the murderer had gone through her purse and deliberately arranged the items he had found there at the feet of the corpse. But he could not offer up any explanation.

Nor could any of them understand why the killer left the unsmoked end of a Russian cheroot close by each body. Clearly he had smoked the cheroots before committing the murders. To linger for a smoke afterwards would have been to invite discovery. But he must have known that the police would find the butts. And, if he was a man of any education, that DNA could be recovered from traces of saliva. It was like leaving a signature, an artist’s autograph on his work, so that there would be no room for doubt in identifying the author.

The detectives had moved their discussion from motive to modus operandi. Wu was clear on their killer’s MO. ‘He chokes them until they are unconscious,’ he said. ‘Then he lays them on the ground, on their back, and kneels on their right side. He leans across the body and cuts the throat from left to right. Look at the pics…’ He waved his hand toward the gallery of horrors on the wall. ‘You can see the blood always pools around the left side of the head, never down the front of the body, which it would if they’d still been standing. In some cases the spatter pattern on the ground shows that the blood spurted out from the left carotid artery. The victim was still alive after strangulation, the blood still under pressure.’ He paused briefly to light a cigarette. ‘The point is, he makes sure he gets as little blood on himself as possible. Then, once they’re dead, he starts cutting them open.’

Li spoke for the first time. ‘The trouble with all this is, we know what he does and how he does it. But we haven’t the first idea why, or who. We need some kind of picture in our minds of this man. A profile, some way of narrowing down who we’re looking for. Is he educated, is he a professional man? What age is he, is he married? Does he have sexual or psychological problems? He only kills on weekends. Does that mean his job or a family commitment makes it impossible for him to do it during the week?’ He remembered his Uncle Yifu’s counsel. The answer always lies in the detail. And Mei Yuan’s words came back to him from earlier that morning. It is in the detail that you will find the devil.

‘He’s clever,’ Li went on. ‘All these girls advertised in the personal columns of magazines. They all gave e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers. But he never e-mailed them. We would have found those e-mails on the girls’ computers, and that might have led us back to him. He knew that. And he knew we could check mobile phone records. That’s why the only calls we can’t account for were made from public phones. He’s one step ahead of us at every stage.’

They did not have a single witness. Li was certain that the killer had not chosen Jianguomen by chance. It was an area of four- and five-star hotels, restaurants, bars. It had a transient population of embassy workers and tourists. The murderer most probably met his victims in hotel lobbies where people were coming and going all the time. The girls would feel safe meeting him in a public place, and no one would think twice about a couple making a rendezvous and heading out for the night. Afterwards, their faces were so disfigured, either because of being choked or, in the case of the latest victim, brutally slashed, that by the time police had obtained photographs and got them circulating round the hotels, the chances were that anyone who saw them together had already checked out and moved on.

‘We’re still running DNA checks on all known sex offenders,’ Zhao said. And he shrugged. ‘Nothing yet, though.’

A slow, laborious, time-consuming process, that Li was certain would lead them nowhere. But it had to be done.

‘Can I read you something?’

They all looked around in surprise. Qian sat self-consciously clutching a book that he had taken from his bag. Li saw several coloured strips of paper marking various pages in it.

‘I swear by my ancestors I never knew you could read,’ Wu said, and the room erupted in laughter. ‘You been taking literacy lessons, boss?’

But Qian did not smile. There was something odd in his manner, and he was pale, as if all the blood had been drained from his face. The laughter quickly subsided, and the faces of dead girls looked down on them reproachfully.

‘On you go, Qian,’ Li said.

Qian started flipping through the pages to his first marker. ‘I just wondered if this might seem familiar,’ he said. He found his place and started reading. Smoke rose from cigarettes in absolute silence.

In silence, Qian flicked through the pages to his next marker and began reading again.

Someone muttered ‘shit’ under his breath, like the sound of a pin dropping. And they all heard it. Pages rustled, and Qian moved on to a third passage.

‘In the name of the sky,’ Wu said. ‘These sound like pathology reports on the first three murders.’

Li was on his feet. ‘What the hell are you reading from?’

Qian slowly closed the book. ‘Detective Wu is right,’ he said. ‘They are extracts from police and pathology reports. From nearly one hundred and twenty years ago.’

Every eye in the room was on him, every detective struggling to make sense of what he was saying.

‘I read a review yesterday of a book published for the first time in China. Even from the review I was struck by certain similarities. So I went out first thing this morning and bought it. And it became clear to me very quickly that I was looking at something more than coincidence.’ He held the book up. ‘The Murders of Jack the Ripper,’ he said. ‘The world’s first documented serial killer. He may have murdered as many as seven women in the streets of London, England, in the fall of 1888. And someone is replicating those murders in exact detail, right here in Beijing, one hundred and fifteen years on.’

Li felt the hairs rise up on the back of his neck.

I

The perfume of the postmortem was a haunting scent. Usually it took Li hours to get the smell of it from his nostrils. Blood and decay, the smell of rotting food from the stomach, the stink of faeces from an open intestine, the almost sweet whiff of burning bone as the oscillating saw cut through the skull. Today he barely noticed. The mutilated corpse of Guo Huan lay on the autopsy table, empty of all her vital organs, chest prised open, the last of her body fluids slowly trickling away along the drainage channels and into a collecting bucket. It was cold enough in the autopsy room for his breath to cloud in front of him, but the chill that reached into his bones had nothing to do with the temperature.

When he and Wu arrived, Pathologist Wang had finished with the body and was breadloafing the brain. It was routine stuff. He had already examined the organs the killer had left him. Shortly he would start dictating his notes, and his assistants would reassemble the body as best they could, stitch it up with coarse twine and deliver it to the morgue for cold storage. There was no doubt about the cause of death.

Li looked at the young girl’s horribly slashed features. Her nose was almost completely severed. ‘Can’t you do anything about the face?’ he asked.

Wang looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’

‘She’ll have to be formally identified.’ He could not imagine how it must feel for a parent to look upon their own child in such a state. He did not want to imagine it.

‘Not a lot,’ Wang said, and he turned to slice through another half-inch section of brain.

Li had discarded his quilted jacket, and since they had arrived late had not donned the regulation protective clothing. He wore, instead, a long, heavy coat that he kept in the office. It dropped well below his knee. He had left the collar turned up against the cold. It had big pockets. He lifted the flap of one and took out Qian’s book. ‘Before you dictate your notes,’ he said to Wang, ‘I’d like to read you something.’

Wang glanced up, mildly curious. This was a departure, even for Li. ‘Something literary, perhaps?’ he asked. ‘Something from your uncle’s collection.’

‘Even older than that,’ Li said. He opened the book at a page he had folded over, and started to read.

He looked up and found Wang watching him, open mouthed.

Wu said, ‘You’ll catch flies.’

Wang snapped his mouth shut. ‘You had someone eavesdropping my autopsy,’ he said.

‘Wait,’ Li held up a finger and started reading again.

He looked up. ‘I’m going to skip a bit here.’ And then he continued,

He closed the book. ‘Is that about how it was? What you found during autopsy?’

‘What the fuck is this, Chief?’ Wang almost never swore. It made it all the more shocking when he did. ‘Did you have someone else look at the body before me?’

Li waggled the book. ‘This autopsy was carried out by an English physician called Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown. I just read you excerpts from a deposition he gave to an inquest into the murder of a forty-six-year-old prostitute called Catharine Eddowes in London in 1888.’

Wang shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Jack the Ripper,’ Wu said. ‘You probably never heard of him. But somebody has, and he’s copycatting his killings.’

Wang looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him,’ he said finally. ‘I attended a talk on the Ripper by an expert on the subject.’ He shook his head as if to try to clear it of some fog. ‘I never made the connection, though. It’s funny how detail escapes you.’ He looked at Li in wonder. ‘And yet I always had the strangest sense of déjà vu about these girls. Of course, he never went into quite that much detail.’

‘Who?’ Li asked.

‘I can’t remember his name,’ Wang said. ‘He was some retired English detective who’d written a book about it. He came over from England with a delegation of judges and lawyers for a week-long series of seminars which was supposed to foster an understanding of the English legal system.’

‘When was this?’

‘About two years ago?’

Li frowned. ‘I don’t remember that.’

Wu said, ‘I think maybe you were in the States then, Chief.’

Li looked down at the book he was holding in his hands. ‘Was his name Thomas Dowman, this retired English detective?’

Wang shrugged. ‘Could have been.’

‘Then this is his book.’ Li dropped it on the table. ‘Translated into Chinese.’ Wu picked it up and started riffling through the pages, hungry for more detail. Li said to Wang, ‘In it he describes the discovery of the third victim as having been found with the contents of her pockets arranged on the ground around her feet.’

Wang closed his eyes. There were thoughts occurring to him that were almost too awful to contemplate. He said, ‘Something I remember very vividly from that talk.’ Li waited for him to go on. But it was some moments before he could bring himself to speak. ‘It gets worse.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The mutilation,’ Wang said. ‘His next victim.’ He looked at the girl on the table. ‘After this one. You wouldn’t want to read about what he did to her, never mind see it.’ He looked very directly at Li. ‘You’ve got to catch this killer, Section Chief, before he does it again.’

Li felt the almost unbearable burden of responsibility pressing down on him. Where did they begin? He had not one single concrete lead to go on.

Wang said, ‘Your English pathologist was only partially right, though.’

Li looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What was it he said? There would not be much blood on the murderer? Okay, so most of the mutilation took place after death. But you can’t hack someone about like that, remove a kidney and a uterus and not get blood on yourself. Quite a lot of it.’

Li said, ‘So unless he lives alone, someone must know who he is. Because he’s coming home covered in blood.’

Wang inclined his head in acknowledgement.

II

In the carpark, Li sat behind the wheel of his Santana and opened up the laptop on his knees. He plugged in his cellphone and got it to dial him into the police database from its memory. On the passenger side, Wu was still flicking backwards and forwards through Dowman’s book on the Ripper. He stopped suddenly and looked at Li. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why anyone would cover up for someone doing stuff like this.’

Li shrugged and tapped the relevant details into vacant fields. ‘The history of serial killers is full of loved ones turning a blind eye. Wives, lovers, mothers. More denial than cover-up. Even when confronted with all the evidence, they don’t want to admit it, even to themselves.’ He hit the return key, and several moments later a screen flashed up with Guo Huan’s particulars. A file and a photograph of every resident in Beijing was accessible from the database. Guo Huan had lived with her mother and grandfather. Her father was dead. Her photograph was on the top right corner of the screen. A black and white picture, of not particularly good quality. Li could not tell how good a likeness it might be. But it was better than nothing. He took a note of the address, then shut down the computer and called Qian. When he got through he asked, ‘Has Guo’s family been told yet?’

‘The community police sent someone out to break the news a short time ago,’ Qian told him.

‘Okay. Wu and I are going to visit the mother. Meantime, pull the kid’s photograph from the database and get it circulating in the lobbies of every hotel in Jianguomen. I’ll see if we can’t get something better from the family. Someone, somewhere saw her with the killer. We need to find that someone. We need a witness.’ He hung up and turned the key in the ignition.

Traffic was unusually light, and they cruised east on the Third Ring Road past row after row of new multistorey apartment blocks, shopping malls, and official buildings clad in stone, aping the classical style of traditional European architecture. The sun was low in the sky and blinded Li as he turned south on Andingmenwei Da Jie. Wu still had his head buried in the book. ‘It’s amazing, chief. It’s like he’s making a carbon copy. The Ripper only killed on weekends, and all the murders were within the same square mile of the Whitechapel district of London. All the victims were prostitutes. They were all strangled and then had their throats cut. And then the mutilation.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s strange, though…’

Li glanced across at him. ‘What is?’

‘Catharine Eddowes wasn’t the Ripper’s fourth victim. You know, like Guo Huan. He killed someone else earlier that night. Someone they called Long Liz. Elizabeth Stride.’ The English name felt odd on his tongue. ‘He strangled her, cut her throat, but that was it. Seems they figured he was interrupted before he could hack her up. So he went off in search of someone else and found Eddowes.’ He looked at Li. ‘You don’t think maybe there was another murder last night, someone we haven’t found yet?’

Li’s heart sank. It wasn’t something he really wanted to think about. ‘If there was another victim, she’s bound to turn up sooner or later,’ he said. ‘With a bit of luck, maybe our man didn’t think an interrupted job was worth copying. Let’s hope so.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘How long has that book been on the shelves, Wu?’

Wu shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’ He flipped to the front of the book. ‘First published in China this year. So it could have been out there for months.’

‘Except that Qian said he read a review in the paper yesterday. You don’t review a book that’s been out for months. Find out when it was released.’ Wu made a note, and Li said, ‘How many women did the Ripper kill in the end?’

Wu shook his head. ‘They don’t seem to know for sure. At least five. Maybe as many as eight.’

‘So if our man sticks to the script, we could be looking at another four murders.’

Wu nodded grimly. ‘Worse than that though, Chief. The Ripper was never caught.’

Guo Huan had lived with her mother in a tiny two-roomed house occupying one side of a siheyuan courtyard close to the Confucian Temple at Yonghegong. A broken-down gate led from a dilapidated hutong alleyway into a narrow, covered passage cluttered by two old armchairs, a smashed-up television set, the rusting carcass of a long-dead bicycle and, at the far end, a neatly stacked row of coal briquettes. The grey-tile roofs of the four ancient Beijing dwellings overhung the courtyard. Moss and weeds grew in the cracks and the courtyard itself was nearly filled by a large scholar tree which had shed most of its leaves. Birds hung in cages from its branches, squawking and screaming at Li and Wu as they ducked in out of the passageway and crunched dry leaves underfoot. The whole area was due for demolition within the next six months.

Sunlight slanted obliquely across the courtyard to shine through the smudged, filthy windows of the Guo house. Li knocked several times and got no response. He shaded his eyes from the light to peer inside, but there appeared to be no one there.

‘What do you want?’

Li and Wu turned at the sound of a woman’s harsh voice, her tongue rolling itself around a very distinctive Beijing r. She wore a dark woollen hat, an old blue Mao jacket over a long pinafore, and woollen leggings under thin cotton trousers, and stood in the doorway of the tiny apartment on the opposite side of the courtyard.

‘Public Security,’ Li said. ‘We’re looking for Mrs. Guo.’

‘Do you people never talk to one another?’ she asked, her voice heavy with contempt. ‘There was one of your people here looking for her an hour ago.’ She looked the two detectives up and down. ‘And he had a uniform.’

‘Do you know where she is?’ Wu asked.

‘She’s not here.’

‘Yes, we can see that.’ Wu controlled his impatience. ‘Do you know where we can find her?’

‘Panjiayuan. She and that girl of hers sell antiques down there.’ She snorted. ‘Antiques! Hah. Junk, more like. What do you want her for?’

‘None of your business,’ Li said.

As they made their way out into the hutong, they heard her shout after them, ‘And you can stick your public security up your arse!’

Wu and Li exchanged glances that turned into involuntary smiles. Li shook his head. ‘Whatever happened to public respect for the police?’ he asked.

The Panjiayuan Market did its business behind low grey walls in the treelined Panjiayuan Lu, just west of the East Third Ring Road. A vast covered area of stalls played host to the Sunday fleamarket, but lay empty during the week. A fruit and vegetable market did brisk business in an open cobbled area at the west end of the compound. Stalls selling traditional paintings and antiques were sandwiched between the two, washed by dull sunlight filtered through a plastic roof. In a cul-de-sac opposite the main gate, a trishaw driver sprawled sleeping in the back of his own tricycle under a candy-striped canopy as Li and Wu drove in. A banner was strung across a wall just inside the gates. Gather all the treasure and make friends in the world. Which Li took to be a euphemism for Collect all your junk and sell it to the tourists. Some of the older buildings that lined the outer wall of the market had been restored to their original splendour, and several traditional Chinese shopping streets had been constructed within, in the shadow of the twenty-storey apartment blocks that grew like weeds here in this south-east corner of the city. Empty shop units, empty apartments, populated only by the ghosts of the people whose homes had been razed to make way for them. Building, it seemed, was outstripping demand.

Li and Wu wandered between stalls peddling paintings and wall-hangings, watched by suspicious, dark-eyed vendors nursing glass jars of green tea or sitting around fold-up tables playing cards. It was clear the two men were neither tourists nor casual Chinese. Which could only mean one other thing. At the far end of one of the aisles, a group of tourists was gathered around a table watching an artist at work, carefully crafting a pen and ink scene of ancient China. Next to him a group of men and women, wrapped up warm against the cold, was playing Great Wall on a rusted metal table. Li interrupted them, flipping open his ID. ‘I’m looking for Mrs. Guo. She sells antiques.’ One of them nodded toward the far aisle, but none of them spoke.

‘Chatty types,’ Wu muttered to Li as they passed a big-bellied shiny Buddha on a plinth. A wooden pig rose up on its hind legs snorting its derision, and a line of bronze warriors gazed upon them impassively. They turned into the aisle at the end and it stretched ahead of them in gloomy half-darkness for sixty or seventy metres. There were stalls and tiny shop units and tables groaning with junk: teapots and door-knockers; small figurines in armour; inlaid wooden boxes; wristwatches displaying Mao heads that nodded away the seconds. Behind glass, shelves of traditional chinaware, ornate wooden carvings. Two teenage girls sat beside a table of polished gramophone horns. ‘Looka, looka,’ one of them said, not yet savvy enough to recognise police out of uniform.

Wu said curtly, ‘Mrs. Guo.’

The other one nodded toward a shop unit two doors along. ‘Police there,’ she said conspiratorially.

‘Thanks for the warning,’ Li said.

There were three people squeezed around a wooden table in the tiny, cluttered shop unit. A woman with long dark hair who looked in her middle forties, a very old man in a wide-brimmed hat drowned by a heavy coat two sizes too big for him, and a young uniformed community police officer. The shelves were lined with blue-ink china vases, and the ceiling was hung with dozens of bells on chains. The young policeman looked up with what seemed like relief when Li and Wu arrived. The old man stared into some unseen place with glazed eyes, and a large, clear drip of mucus hung from the end of his nose. The woman’s eyes were red, her cheeks blotched and tearstained. Li saw something like hope in her eyes when she looked up at them, as if she thought that somehow they might have come to say it had all been a terrible mistake, and that Guo Huan was really alive and well. He ached for her, and the false hope she was conjuring out of the depths of her despair. He said, ‘I’m Section Chief Li Yan, Mrs. Guo. Detective Wu and I are investigating your daughter’s death.’ And whatever hope she might have fostered, he knew he had just stolen away.

He saw her face go bleak. ‘The uniform says she was murdered,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Found her up Silk Street Market,’ the uniform said. ‘Isn’t that right?’ He looked to Li for confirmation, not remotely awed by the presence of superior ranks. ‘Hacked to pieces apparently.’

The girl’s mother gasped her distress and tears blurred her eyes.

Li glared at him. ‘I think you can go now, officer.’

‘That’s alright, Chief. They said I should stay down here and offer support. It’s part of the job in the community branch.’

The mother turned to Li. ‘What was she doing in a place like that at night, alone with a man?’

‘Well, you should know,’ the uniform said, wearing his disapproval like a badge.

Li turned to Wu. ‘Get him out of here.’

Wu grabbed the uniform by the arm and yanked him out of his seat. ‘Hey!’ the officer protested. But Wu had him out of the door and into the alley before he could give further voice to his indignation.

Mrs. Guo looked at Li in consternation, her cheeks shining with silent tears. ‘What did he mean?’

Li shook his head and sat down where the uniform had been. ‘He doesn’t know what he means,’ Li said. ‘These community police are just messenger boys. They don’t know anything.’ Outside in the alley, they heard raised voices, and the sound of something breaking. Li glanced at the old man. He hadn’t moved since they came in. ‘Is he alright?’

A dead look fell across the mother’s face. ‘Who knows? He’s my father. He’s been like that since he had his stroke ten years ago. And what does the state do for him? Nothing. I have to pay for all his medical care. I have to nurse him at home. Me and Huan, with one bedroom among the three of us. That’s why she had to work nights. We needed the money.’

‘Where did she work?’

She shrugged. ‘Different places. Bar work mostly. She said there was always casual work in Bar Street up in Sanlitun.’ Her face crumpled in consternation. ‘Is it true? Was she really…cut up?’

Li nodded. There was no way he could conceal it from her. She would have to identify the body. ‘I’m afraid so.’ And he wondered if Guo Huan’s mother really believed that she was working in bars in Sanlitun all those nights she went off on her own. But, then, if her daughter was bringing in good money, perhaps she didn’t want to know any different.

Wu reappeared and stood in the doorway. He nodded to Li almost imperceptibly. Li said, ‘Did she ever tell you she was meeting anyone? Ever mention a name, a rendezvous?’

The mother held her hands out helplessly. ‘We didn’t talk much,’ she said. ‘About anything. She left school four years ago, and we’ve been working in the shop here together every day since.’ She glanced at her father. ‘With him.’ She paused, dealing with some painful private memory. ‘We ran out of things to talk about a long time ago.’

Li nodded and allowed her a little space before he said, ‘Mrs. Guo, I’d like your permission for a team of forensics people to go into your house and go through all your daughter’s things.’

Her mother sat upright suddenly, as if offended by the idea. ‘I don’t think I’d like that. What difference does it make now anyway? She’s dead.’

Li said patiently, ‘She might have known her killer, Mrs. Guo, in which case we might find some clue to his identity among her things.’ He paused. ‘She wasn’t his first victim. We want to stop him from doing it again.’

Mrs. Guo sank back into her despair and nodded desolately. ‘I suppose.’

‘And if you have a recent photograph of her, that would be very helpful.’

She reached into a cupboard and pulled out a cardboard shoebox tied with pink ribbon. She placed it carefully on the table, undid the ribbon and lifted the lid. It was full of photographs. ‘I always meant to put them in an album.’ She looked around her shop. ‘I sit about here all day and do nothing. The more time you have, the more time you waste.’ She started taking out pictures and laying them in front of her.

They didn’t appear to be in any date order, as if they had been taken in and out of the box often. There were family groups, taken in happier times, a man on Mrs. Guo’s arm whom Li took to be her husband. There were pictures of a little girl smiling toothily at the camera, cheap prints on which the colours were faded now. Guo Huan in school uniform — a blue tracksuit and yellow baseball cap. Guo Huan with short hair, Guo Huan with long hair. All appeared to have been taken several years earlier. Her mother fingered every photograph with a kind of reverence, each with its own memory, every one with its own baggage. And then she pulled out a strip of four photographs of a much older Guo Huan. She handed it to Li. ‘These were taken a month or two ago. In one of those booths.’

Li examined them closely. The smile was self-conscious, and each photograph in the sequence was almost identical. She had shoulder-length hair, and a pretty face all made up for the occasion. Having seen her in Silk Street and at the morgue, Li would still never have recognised her. She had a freshness about her, an absence of cynicism, the anticipation of youth for a life ahead. A life that would never be. ‘May I take these?’ he asked. ‘I promise to return them.’ The mother nodded and he handed the strip to Wu. ‘And I’m sorry to ask, Mrs. Guo, but we will need you to make a formal identification of the body.’

A look of panic flitted across her face. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t.’

‘Is there someone else, then?’

She thought for a moment, and then her face collapsed into resignation as she shook her head. ‘When do you want me?’

‘I’ll have a car come and pick you up in the next hour.’ Li glanced at the old man. ‘Will he be alright?’

‘I’ll have someone watch him,’ she said. And Li saw her lower lip start to tremble as she tried to hold back the tears. But they came anyway, big and silent, making wet tracks down her cheeks. ‘They only let you have one child.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And I’m too old to start again.’ She looked at her father, and Li was sure it was resentment he saw in her eyes. ‘He’s all I have left.’

As they made their way back through the gloom of the antiques alley, Wu said to Li, ‘That goddamned community cop was determined he wasn’t leaving. Actually put up a struggle. Bust a vase.’

‘Put in a complaint,’ Li said.

Wu grunted. ‘Not worth the paperwork, Chief.’

But if Wu was content to put it behind him, the community cop was not. He was waiting for them out front, lingering in agitation beneath a moongate leading to a neighbouring compound. He came chasing after them. ‘Hey,’ he said, catching Li’s arm. ‘Your detective assaulted me.’ He barely had time to draw breath in surprise before Li wheeled around and pushed him hard up against the wall, his forearm against the officer’s throat. The hapless policeman’s hat went spinning away across the cobbles.

‘You’re lucky I don’t break your neck,’ Li hissed at him. ‘I guess you were off the day they taught sensitivity at cop school.’ He released him. ‘Don’t go near that woman again.’

The incident had lasted only seconds, but already a crowd was gathering. It was unheard of for a police officer to be handled like that, and those who had been witness to it were enjoying the moment. The officer straightened his coat and stooped, with as much dignity as he could muster, to retrieve his hat. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ he called after the two detectives. And then he turned and glared at the crowd. ‘What the fuck are you looking at!’

The trishaw driver was still asleep under his candy-striped canopy as Li and Wu turned out of the main gate. Wu was chewing furiously on his gum. ‘I don’t know about you, Chief, but I’m starving.’ He checked his watch. ‘How about we stop somewhere for a bite of lunch.’

Li said, ‘I’m never hungry after an autopsy.’ He sighed. ‘But I’ve got a lunch appointment at twelve, so I’m going to have to find an appetite from somewhere.’

Wu was not impressed. ‘Lucky you. Who’s buying you lunch?’

‘An American polygraph expert from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He’s set up a demonstration this afternoon for a group of top Ministry of Public Security people.’

Wu was unimpressed. ‘A polygraph demonstration?’

‘No,’ Li said. ‘It’s a new thing called MERMER.’

‘Mermer?’ Wu pulled a face. ‘What the hell’s a Mermer when it’s at home?’

‘Some kind of foolproof way of detecting guilty knowledge in the brain,’ Li said. ‘At least, that’s what they claim.’ He cast a wry smile in Wu’s direction. ‘A good job your wife never had access to it.’

Wu laughed. ‘If she had, we’d only have got divorced all the sooner.’

III

The Mo Gu Huo Guo mushroom hotpot restaurant stood on a corner, in the shadow of the tall cylindrical tower of the Central Music Conservatory, just off Pufang Lu. Its speciality was mushrooms from Sichuan and Yunan Provinces. Margaret stood on the steps in the sunshine with Li Jon in her arms. The American polygraph expert had wanted to meet her. He had married a Chinese cop and thought that the two couples might have quite a lot in common. She watched as the Santana pulled up under the trees, a chill wind rustling stubborn leaves that refused to fall. As Li climbed out, Wu slipped into the driver’s seat and drove off.

Margaret eyed the father of her child as he approached her across the broad curve of pavement, his shadow falling away to his right. He looked good in his long coat, tall and broad-shouldered, his black hair cropped in its distinctive flat-top crew cut. His pants were still sharply creased, although a little crinkled around the knee, and his white shirt was tucked tightly in at his impossibly narrow waist. Clothes hung beautifully on the Chinese frame, and Margaret marvelled at how she was still attracted to Li, even after all this time. Her stomach did a little flip, and she remembered how their passion had been frustrated by the call on his cellphone in the early hours of that morning. And she saw a weariness in his face that she recognised as owing more to what the call had led him to confront than to the simple interruption of his sleep.

He smiled and stooped to kiss her, and ran a hand through the black hair beginning to grow more thickly now on his son’s head. ‘Been waiting long?’

‘Just arrived.’

‘They’re probably already here then. We’d better go in.’

He wasn’t volunteering anything about his call-out this morning, and she knew better than to ask.

The restaurant was drum-shaped, like its taller neighbour, the Central Conservatory. It had dining halls on three floors, with private rooms around the outside on the second and third. A pretty waitress in a red jacket and skirt led them up a circular staircase and around a pillared corridor which skirted the second-floor dining room. The American and his wife were waiting for them in a private room about two-thirds of the way around. They stood up from a table with a large pot sunk into its centre, over a concealed gas ring. Steam rose from bubbling stock. The room was ablaze with sunlight, and Li and Margaret were dazzled by it, entering from the dark inner hall.

The polygrapher was tall and slim, a man in his forties with a head of thick, greying hair. He wore a baggy brown suit and checked shirt, with a tie loose at the neck. ‘Yeh, blinding, isn’t it?’ He grinned at them as they shaded their eyes. ‘But, then, I always figure I look better when you can’t see me.’ He shook Li’s hand warmly. ‘Good to see you again, Li Yan. You haven’t met Chi Lyang, have you?’

‘No.’ Li shook hands with a slight but attractive-looking Chinese woman in her mid-thirties. Her long black hair was drawn back in a ponytail. She wore jeans and sneakers and a white blouse. ‘Ni hau,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Hi.’

The American turned to Margaret, extending his hand. ‘And you must be Margaret. My name’s Bill Hart. I have heard so much about you, Margaret.’

‘All of it bad, no doubt.’

He shrugged a shoulder. ‘Pretty much. But I figure, hell, with a reputation like that, you gotta be worth meeting.’

Margaret raised an eyebrow. ‘I hope I won’t disappoint you, then.’

He grinned. ‘Don’t you dare.’ And he turned to his wife. ‘This is Chi Lyang.’

Margaret shook hands with her. ‘Don’t believe everything you hear about me,’ she said. ‘Since I became a mother I’ve retired from hostilities.’

Lyang smiled, dark eyes sparkling. ‘Well, since I became a wife, I’ve had to retire from the police. But I still like to indulge in a bit of hostility now and then.’

‘And, boy, can she be hostile,’ Hart said.

‘We should get on just fine, then,’ Margaret said.

Lyang cupped her hand under a sleepy Li Jon’s chin and he squinted at her in the bright sunlight. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she said.

‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing him. I couldn’t find anyone to look after him at short notice.’

‘If I’d known I’d have brought Ling with me. She’s fifteen months.’

‘It’s Li Jon’s first birthday next month.’

‘Well, you’ll have no shortage of things to talk about,’ Hart said. He rattled off some Chinese at a waitress and she disappeared, returning quickly with a highchair for Li Jon.

They settled themselves around the table, and the red-jacketed serving girls brought in a large tray with plates bearing a variety of raw sliced mushrooms and placed it on a side table. Hart ordered beer, and another waitress brought a large, cooked black chicken in stock and tipped it carefully into the bubbling liquid in the centre of the table.

‘You ever had black chicken before?’ Hart asked Margaret. She shook her head. ‘Just tastes like chicken, except it’s black,’ he said.

Lyang said, ‘In traditional Chinese medicine, black chicken is used to treat female diseases.’

‘And since I don’t have any female diseases, obviously it works,’ Hart said.

Margaret smiled. ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Sounds appetising.’

Li said to Lyang, ‘You speak exceptionally good English.’

She inclined her head a little in acknowledgement. ‘I was a translator at the Ministry of State Security. Russian and English. That was before I moved over to Public Security.’

‘And if she hadn’t become a cop, I’d never have met her,’ Hart said.

‘And if we’d never met, I’d still have been a cop,’ she replied. There was no hint of rancour in her tone, but Margaret sensed some underlying tension. She knew only too well that the authorities would not allow a serving police officer to marry a foreign national. If you wanted to marry, you had to quit the force. She glanced at Li, but he was avoiding her eye.

‘We met at a conference in Boston,’ Hart said. ‘Lyang was trained in polygraphy at the University of Public Security here in Beijing. She was on an exchange trip to see how the Americans do it.’

‘And no doubt we Americans do it better,’ Margaret said. ‘We always do everything better, don’t we?’

Hart smiled indulgently at her sarcasm. ‘We do it differently. And we’ve had a lot more experience. The Chinese began using the polygraph just ten years ago, and it has only been employed in around eight thousand cases since then. Compare that to the States, where we’ve been using lie detection for more than seventy years, and almost every government employee has to submit to a polygraph test to get his job. I think we know a little more about it.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘What’s to know? It’s just a bunch of wires and sensors that read heart-rate, breathing, perspiration. The operator is the lie detector, not the machine. It’s all psychology. Smoke and mirrors.’

Hart laughed infectiously. ‘You’re right, of course, Margaret. Which is why experience counts for so much.’

‘Then how come you manage to get it wrong so often?’

‘Margaret…’ Li said, a hint of warning in his voice.

But Hart was unruffled. ‘Relax, Li Yan, I’m enjoying this. It’s good to do battle with someone who can make a good argument.’ He turned back to Margaret. ‘Actually, we have a pretty high success rate. Ninety percent or higher.’

But Margaret was unimpressed. ‘Not according to the OTA. You know what that is?’

‘Sure. The Office of Technology Assessment. It’s an arm of the US federal government that analyses and evaluates current technology.’

‘Whose evaluation of the success rate of the polygraph is as low as 50 percent. Hell, I can guess and be right half the time.’

Lyang was grinning. ‘Still enjoying the argument, Bill?’

But Margaret wasn’t finished. ‘I read somewhere that between one and four million private citizens in the US submit to a polygraph every year. Even assuming you did have a 90 percent success rate, that’s a heck of a lot of people to be wrong about. People who might lose or fail to gain employment, people stigmatised as liars because of inaccurate polygraph tests. It’s not science, Bill, it’s voodoo.’

Hart’s grin never faltered as he eyed Margaret with something approaching admiration. ‘Jesus, Margaret, they were right about you. I’d love to get you in the chair and wire you up. Pin you down on my territory.’

‘Okay,’ Margaret said, to everyone’s surprise.

‘What, you mean you’d let me give you a polygraph test?’

‘If you let me give you an autopsy.’ The others roared with laughter. And Margaret broke into a smile for the first time. ‘I reckon I’d find out a lot more about you in an hour and a half than you’d ever find out about me.’

Hart nodded, still smiling, acknowledging defeat. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I give in. Let’s eat.’

And the waitresses brought the mushrooms to the table and started cooking them in the stock with the chicken. Lyang showed Margaret how to mix up her own dip from three dishes of sesame paste, chili and garlic, and dip the cooked pieces of mushroom in the mix before eating. Margaret was surprised at just how delicious the mushrooms were, each with its own distinctive flavour and texture. A waitress broke up the chicken in the pot and served portions of it into each of their individual bowls. It melted in the mouth.

‘Actually,’ Hart said, washing down mushroom with beer, ‘I’m not in favour of using the polygraph on employees or job applicants. I regard it only as a useful tool in criminal interrogation. It is at its most effective when the suspect believes the machine will catch him in a lie. You’d be amazed at how often they just confess.’ He spooned some of the stock into his bowl and drank it like soup. ‘You know, the Chinese invented a pretty good method of lie detection about three thousand years ago.’

Li looked up surprised. ‘We did?’

‘Sure we did,’ Lyang said. ‘Works on the principle that if you are telling a lie you produce less saliva. So the ancient Chinese gave the suspect a mouthful of rice to chew, then told him to spit it out. If he was afraid of the test because he was lying, he would suffer from dry mouth and the rice would stick to his tongue and the roof of his mouth. An innocent person, on the other hand, would be able to spit it out clean.’

Hart said, ‘But the Indians had an even better one. They would put lampblack on the tail of a donkey and lead it into a dark room. Suspects were ordered to go into the room and pull the donkey’s tail. They were told that it was a magic donkey and would be able to tell if the suspect was being truthful or not. When the suspects came out of the room their hands were examined. If they didn’t have any lampblack on them they hadn’t pulled the donkey’s tail. Why? Obviously because they were scared of being found out. Guilty as charged.’

‘Almost as scientific as the polygraph,’ Margaret said.

‘Well, if it’s science that impresses you,’ Lyang said, ‘it’s a pity you won’t be at the MERMER demonstration this afternoon.’

Margaret looked at Li. ‘And why am I not invited?’

Li said, ‘Because it’s a demonstration for top Ministry of Public Security people, Margaret. The deputy minister himself is going to be there.’

‘We’re trying to secure funding for further research,’ Hart explained.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not invited either,’ Lyang said. ‘Husbands don’t like their wives seeing them caught in a lie.’

Hart held his hands up. ‘I am taking no part in this demonstration. I just set it up for Lynn.’

‘Who’s Lynn?’ Li asked.

‘Professor Lynn Pan. She’s an American Chinese. She was a pupil of the system’s inventor, Dr. Lawrence Farwell, back in the States. She came to live and work in China last year, sponsored by the Chinese Academy to develop a Chinese version of MERMER.’

‘What exactly is Mermer?’ Margaret asked, intrigued.

‘It’s an acronym,’ Lyang said. ‘It stands for Memory and Encoding Related Multifaceted Electroencephalographic Responses.’

‘Sorry I asked,’ Margaret said. ‘What does it mean?’

Hart said, ‘Electroencephalography is a noninvasive means of measuring electrical brain activity.’

Lyang waved her hand dismissively. She turned to Margaret. ‘He’s a scientist, he doesn’t know anything about language. In layman’s terms, they put sensors on your scalp and use a computer to measure your brain’s electrical responses to certain stimuli. Might be something as simple as a photograph of your child. You recognise it, so your brain makes an entirely involuntary electrical response. Proof that you know this child. They show you a picture of someone else’s child, you have no response. You don’t know the kid.’

Hart said, ‘It can be used to discover guilty knowledge in the brain of a criminal. They’ve done extensive testing in the States, using FBI and CIA personnel.’ He smiled. ‘Since you’re so interested in percentages, Margaret, you’ll be pleased to know it has proved 100 percent successful in all tests to date.’

‘Sounds like it could put you guys out of business.’

‘Oh, I doubt it,’ Hart said. ‘MERMER has very specific and narrow applications. It requires a lot of expensive equipment and meticulous preparation.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Speaking of which, we don’t want to be late.’ He signalled the waitress for the check and a gaggle of girls rushed to get their jackets from the stand.

As they rose from the table, Lyang said, ‘Are you busy this afternoon, Margaret?’

Margaret laughed. ‘Lyang, these days I’m never busy.’

Lyang said, ‘I’m going for a foot massage later. Why don’t you join me?’

‘A foot massage?’ Margaret was incredulous. She had seen the signs for foot massage springing up all over the city. It was the latest fashion. But it seemed a little decadent.

‘It’s the most wonderful way of relaxing I know,’ Lyang said.

‘It’s not so easy to relax with an eleven-month-old baby demanding your attention twenty-four hours a day.’

‘That’s what’s so good about the place I use,’ Lyang said. ‘They have a crèche. You can forget baby for an hour and a half.’ She smiled. ‘Go on, treat yourself.’

‘On you go,’ Li said. ‘And when you learn how it’s done you can practise on me.’

Margaret gave him a look.

As a waitress handed Li his coat, Qian’s book slipped from the pocket and fell to the floor.

Lyang stooped to pick it up and raised an eyebrow as she read the title. ‘The Murders of Jack the Ripper.’

Hart laughed. ‘What’s this? Becoming a student of unsolved murders, Li?’

Li smiled reluctantly. ‘I hope not,’ he said.

But Margaret was looking at him curiously. ‘Jack the Ripper?’

Li sighed. There was no avoiding an explanation. ‘I take it you know who he is?’

‘Of course. The Ripper murders were probably the first documented case of serial killings anywhere in the world.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m no expert on the subject, but there can’t be many people who haven’t heard the name Jack the Ripper. He’s kind of like the bogey man.’

Li nodded solemnly and turned to Hart. ‘There’s been a spate of particularly gruesome murders in the city during the last few weeks.’ He glanced at Margaret. ‘We think the killer’s copycatting the Ripper murders.’

Margaret found her interest engaged. ‘Who in Beijing would know enough of that kind of detail to be able to replicate them?’

Li held up the book. ‘Someone who’s read this.’

Margaret took the book and looked at the Chinese characters with frustration. She said, ‘I wish I’d taken the trouble to learn to read Chinese.’

‘It’s only a translation,’ Li said. ‘You could probably get the English original on the Internet.’

‘Professional interest aroused?’ Hart asked.

‘Of course,’ Margaret said. ‘Wouldn’t you have liked to wire up some of the suspects and bamboozle them with your parlour tricks?’

He grinned. ‘Well, if you’d done the autopsies, Margaret, I’m sure you’d have provided me with ample ammunition to extract a confession.’ He turned to Li. ‘Maybe you should get Margaret working on this one, Li Yan.’

‘I’ve retired,’ Margaret said simply, and she lifted Li Jon from his chair and turned out of their private room into the gloom of the inner restaurant.

I

The Chinese Academy of Sciences was in a six-storey grey-tiled building off Sanlihi Lu, facing west toward Yuyuantan Park, and flanked by the Ministry of Finance and the Chinese Institute of Seismology. Hart drew his car up on to the sidewalk and parked facing steps leading up to glass doors. A hanging white banner announced in bold characters that this was the Presidium of Chinese Scholars. A Chinese flag whipped and snapped in the wind and cast its shadow on the green-tiled roof above the main entrance.

On the fifth floor, five of the most senior officers in the Ministry of Public Security sat around a large reception room, drinking green tea and smoking. Vertical blinds shielded the room from the sun as it swung westward. One wall was taken up by a mural depicting a tranquil scene from an ancient Chinese garden. Everyone, with the exception of Li, was in uniform and he realised immediately that he was in breach of etiquette.

‘I’ll leave you to it. Good luck,’ Hart said, and he ducked out the door. What had been an animated conversation fell away into silence as the occupants of the room regarded the newcomer. Procurator General Meng Yongli sat stiffly, with his hat on the chair beside him. ‘Punctual as always, Li,’ he said, his tone rigid with disapproval.

‘You might have taken the time to change into your uniform, Section Chief.’ This from the deputy minister of Public Security, Wei Peng. He was a small, squat man with the demeanour of a frog, and he enjoyed exercising his power. ‘We are here representing the Ministry today.’

‘Give the man a break.’ Beijing’s deputy commissioner of Police, Cao Xu, was so relaxed he was almost liquid. His hat had been tossed on the low table in front of him, and he was slouched in his seat, with one leg up over the arm of it. He was a man who, at one time, had been destined for the top. A predecessor of Li’s in the hotseat at Section One, he had looked set for the commissioner’s job when a past indiscretion had caught up with him and he was promoted sideways to deputy. His progress on the career ladder was at an end, and so he had no need to toady to his superiors. It made him something of a loose cannon. He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘After all, the Section Chief is up to his eyes in murder; isn’t that right, Chief?’

‘And has our hero cracked the case yet?’ Beijing Police Commissioner Zhu Gan’s use of the word hero was laden with sarcasm. He was a tall, lean man with rimless glasses who viewed Li through them with patent dislike. He was not one of Li’s champions, and had made clear to him on numerous occasions his distaste for the award ceremony scheduled for the Great Hall of the People that evening. In his view it was, he had told Li, a dangerous return to the cult of personality. Li might have agreed with him, had he been allowed. But in almost the same breath Commissioner Zhu had told him that since the edict had come from the Minister himself, neither of them was in a position to raise objections.

‘What developments, Li?’ The slight build of the older man who sat sandwiched between the procurator general and the deputy minister in no way reflected his status. As director general of the Political Department, Yan Bo pulled plenty of clout. Li recognised him but had not had any previous dealings with him.

Li looked at the faces expectantly awaiting his response. He did not feel that this was the occasion to share with them the news that their killer was modelling himself on Jack the Ripper. Nor did he feel like explaining that the reason for his failure to change into uniform was that he had been unavoidably detained by lunch. ‘I’ve just come from an interview with the dead girl’s mother,’ he said. Which was not entirely untrue. But he wondered if it would have passed Hart’s polygraph test.

‘She’s the fourth, isn’t she?’ said Deputy Cao taking another pull on his cigarette.

‘That’s right,’ Li said. ‘And probably the worst case of mutilation I’ve seen. Not only did he hack her face to pieces, but he cut her open and made off with her uterus and her left kidney.’ His words conjured images for them that they would, perhaps, have preferred not to envisage so soon after lunch, and they were greeted with silence. Li added, ‘I could have done without being here at all this afternoon.’

Commissioner Zhu said dismissively, ‘I’m sure your team can manage without you for a few hours, Section Chief.’

The door from an inner office opened, and an attractive young woman in her early thirties emerged into the meeting room cradling an armful of folders. Her hair was cut short, spiky on top, and she wore a man’s suit — Armani, Li thought — black pinstriped, over a white open-necked blouse. She had a radiant smile which she turned on the room. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘I am so glad you could make it this afternoon. My name’s Lynn Pan, and have I got a show for you.’

She looked Chinese, but everything else about her was American. Even her heavily accented Chinese. Li immediately sensed a rise in the testosterone level in the room. She had spoken only a couple of dozen words, but already she had these middle-aged senior officers from the Ministry eating out of her hand. They were on their feet in an instant.

She laid down her folders and went round each of them individually, shaking their hands, presenting them with her business card and her winning smile, receiving theirs in return. She arrived at Li last, and he wondered if he imagined that she held his hand just a little longer, that her gaze fixed his just a little more warmly. Her eyes were a rich, dark brown with a deep inner light, and they turned Li’s stomach to mush.

‘Gentlemen, please be seated.’ They sat in their various chairs around the room, and she drew up an office chair on wheels and positioned herself so that she could see them all. She let her gaze wander around the assembled faces, and they almost held their breath waiting for her to speak. Finally she said, ‘You know, there’s one thing that every criminal takes with him from a crime scene. Can you think what that is?’

There was a moment’s silence, then Li said, ‘His memory of what happened.’

Professor Pan turned a brilliant smile on him. ‘You’re absolutely right, Section Chief Li.’ He felt like the star pupil in the class, and the teacher had even remembered his name. ‘It’s like a video recording in his head, and there’s nothing he can do to erase it.’ She looked around the other faces. ‘Usually we search a crime scene for traces of what a criminal has left behind. Fingerprints. DNA. Fibres. All useful in identifying the perpetrator. But what if we don’t find anything? Well, if we have a suspect, we can always look inside his head. Because if he’s guilty, the crime scene will have left an indelible print in his brain. Impossible, you might say.’ She flashed her winning smile once again. ‘Not any more. Because MERMER lets us do just that — look inside someone’s mind and detect knowledge. Replay that video, read that indelible imprint.’ She paused. ‘We call it brain fingerprinting, and we have the technology.’

It had a nice ring to it, Li thought. Brain fingerprinting. It wasn’t about collecting evidence left at the scene by the criminal; it was about reading the print the crime had left in the culprit’s brain.

‘Now, I don’t want to get technical about it,’ the professor said, ‘because it’s a highly complex piece of science. But the essence of it is this: if you are shown something that you recognise, there is a unique electrical response in your brain. It doesn’t matter if you deny recognising that something or not. Your brain’s response is always the same. You have absolutely no control over it. And you know what?’ They all waited eagerly to know what. ‘We can read that response. We attach sensors to your head, entirely noninvasive, and plug you into our computer, and we will know what you know and what you don’t.’ She waved her hand airily toward the ceiling. ‘Which is as much good news for the innocent as it is bad news for the guilty. Because we can rule you out, just as certainly as we can rule you in.’

She stood up and clasped her hands and seemed for a moment transported to another place. She began walking slowly around the room as if addressing students in a lecture room. ‘We call that unique electrical response a MERMER. It’s an acronym. It doesn’t work in Chinese, so there’s no point in me trying to explain. It’s just what we call it. I learned about MERMER from its inventor, who was my professor at university in the United States. Doctor Larry Farwell. A very smart man. Smart enough to recognise that I was smart enough to invest his time in. And now here I am, back in the land of my ancestors, developing a uniquely Chinese version of the process that could revolutionise criminal investigation in the People’s Republic. In every test carried out to date it has proven one hundred percent successful.’ She spun around to face them, eyes wide. ‘But I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want to prove it to you. Because we need your support for the funding that will make this process available to every criminal investigation department in the country.’

It was a very slick and persuasive presentation, and she had been in the room for less than ten minutes. There wasn’t one of the senior law enforcement officers present who didn’t want to believe her.

‘I’m going to demonstrate just how effective MERMER is by subjecting you to a test that I developed for work with my students,’ she said. ‘My assistant and a team of graduates will prepare you for it. You will be split into two groups of three. One group will be briefed on a specific criminal scenario, the other will not. I will be unaware which of you is in which group. But afterwards, when I test you, your brain will provide the answer for me. And I won’t need to ask you a single question. All you will have to do is look at some photographic images on a computer screen while I monitor your brain’s response. And the reason it’s foolproof?’ She held out open palms and smiled, as if it was simplicity itself. ‘Your brain just can’t lie.’

II

Li sat on a stool at a science bench in a darkened room with Procurator General Meng and Commissioner Zhu. Blinds were drawn on the window, and the only light in the room was a desk lamp that focused their attention on a spread of grim photographs arranged on the benchtop. They were colour eight-by-tens of a particularly bloody crime scene. Most crime scenes now seemed all too depressingly familiar to Li. This was no different. Two women and a young man stripped naked and lying side by side by side at odd angles on the top of a makeshift bed. The covers were soaked red by their blood, the dark brown-red of long dried blood. It was smeared on their bodies, and their trunk wounds were gaping dark holes, like so many black beetles crawling over them. Li recognised them as knife wounds. There was a close-up of the male. The back of his head was missing, as if a bullet fired through the front of it had taken the back away as it exited. But he was lying face down, so it was impossible to see the entry wound.

The room had been shot from various angles. It appeared to be a bedroom. Drawers had been pulled out of chests and contents strewn about the floor. There were curtains on the window, but one of them had been pulled free of its rail at one end, the hem of it clutched in the hands of one of the dead women.

Beyond the light, and flitting back and forth on the periphery of their vision, one of Lynn Pan’s graduate students was laying more photographs in front of them.

‘I want each of you to imagine that you are the murderer,’ she was saying, ‘and that this is the scene you have left behind you.’ More photographs. ‘This is the house. You can see it’s a small dwelling in a suburban area of the town.’ A row of featureless white-tile dwellings was shaded by a line of trees. ‘You can see something lying in the drive. Something you took from the scene and dropped there.’ She laid another photograph in front of them, and they saw that it was a white shirt, torn and bloody. She reached down behind the bench and lifted up a large, clear plastic evidence bag with the bloody white shirt sealed inside.

‘Is this a real crime scene?’ Procurator Meng asked, looking with distaste at the shirt. It was a long time since he had been actively involved in crime scene investigation. ‘I mean, is that real?’

‘Of course,’ said the assistant. ‘We wouldn’t have the resources to mock up something like this.’ She lifted another evidence bag on to the counter top. It contained a serrated hunting knife with a bone handle. ‘And this is the weapon you used to commit the murders. You can handle it if you like.’

Li lifted the bag and removed the weapon carefully from inside. He ran the blade lightly across the flats of his fingers. It was still sharp. It was heavy, but nicely balanced. Not a cheap knife. A professional hunter’s weapon. Two inches of the blade at the hilt were serrated. He looked up and found Commissioner Zhu watching him. ‘Don’t let it give you any ideas, Li,’ he said.

Li smiled, flipped the knife over, and held it out to the commissioner, handle first. Beijing’s top cop took the proffered weapon and examined it carefully. Li watched him handle it with the confidence of one used to knives. ‘You look like you were born with one of those in your hands, Commissioner Zhu.’

The commissioner looked at him, surprised. ‘Is it that obvious?’

Li shrugged. He wasn’t sure what the commissioner meant. ‘You just seem comfortable with it, that’s all.’

The commissioner smiled. A rare sight that Li had seldom seen. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said. ‘In Xinjiang Province, where I grew up, my father hunted deer in the forest. My earliest memories are of going hunting with him. Of course, we had no guns. We set traps, with salt as bait, and killed the animals by slitting their throats. My father taught me how to gut a deer in under ten minutes. We ate well.’ All the time he was turning the knife over in his hands, examining it with what seemed to Li almost like fondness.

‘I thought it was the antlers that deer were killed for in the northeast. Some superstition about their powers of healing.’

The older man looked up. ‘It’s Sichuan you come from, isn’t it?’ Li nodded. ‘Pandas,’ said the commissioner. ‘A protected species. You probably didn’t do much hunting in Sichuan.’

‘I’ve never much liked killing anything,’ Li said. ‘Even for the table.’

The commissioner did not miss what he took to be an implied criticism. ‘No doubt you’d rather other people did the dirty work,’ he said.

‘May I see it?’ The procurator general broke in, impatient with their fencing. Unlike the commissioner, he handled it very gingerly, at arm’s length, before laying it back on the bench.

The graduate placed some more photographs in front of them. ‘This is the vehicle you used to get to the victims’ house,’ she said. It was a battered old blue Japanese car. Photographs of the interior showed smears of dried blood on the seats, the dash and the steering wheel. Another gave a close-up of the licence plate, revealing that the vehicle came from Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province.

‘This is the town where you committed the murders,’ the student said, spreading out photographs of what Li took to be the main square in Nanchang, a place he had never visited. There was a photograph of the Gan River running through what looked like an industrial city, largely redeveloped. It did not seem like a town you would find in the tourist guides. ‘And these are the gloves you wore. They were found in the trunk of your car.’ She placed a bloodstained pair of white cotton gloves on the benchtop, still in their evidence bag. ‘You can take them out if you like.’ But none of them took up the offer.

Li looked again at the photographs of the crime scene. It seemed unreal. Blood and death frozen in the frame of a photographer’s camera, overlit by his floods, as if staged for investigation. There was nothing that resembled a living human being less than a corpse. He supposed it was that sense of unreality that protected you from the grim truth, that each of us was mortal and would one day pass this way, too.

The student had finished briefing them on their crime. She stood back. ‘You can go through the photographs again if you like,’ she said. ‘Re-examine any of the exhibits.’ But they had had enough of it. So she opened the blinds and the room flooded with afternoon sunshine. They blinked away the light, and their focus, and the spell was broken, returning them abruptly from Nanchang to Beijing.

The girl smiled nervously. She was not used to being in such exalted company and felt exposed now in the full blaze of sunlight. She said, ‘Professor Pan will show you some photographic images on a computer screen. Some of these images will mean something to you. Some will not. Some will be relevant to the crime you have “committed”, some will be irrelevant. Some will be familiar to you, although not relevant to the crime. Professor Pan will explain exactly what she requires of you when you go into the computer room.’ Her eyes fixed on Li. ‘You first, Section Chief.’

It was a square, featureless room without windows. A door led out into the hallway, and another through to a small lecture room. Cream-coloured walls looked as if they had not seen a paintbrush for some time. The floor was covered with grey carpet tiles. There were two large computer desks placed at right angles to each other in the centre of the room. The bigger of the desks had a large monitor attached to a computer mounted beneath it. A laptop was wired into both. They, in turn, were connected to another computer placed on the smaller desk. Cables spewed out of everything and were arranged in tidy coils on the floor A single overhead lamp focused light on the two desks, leaving everything outside its circle of illumination sunk in gloom.

Lynn Pan carried her own inner light with her, and she seemed to glow as she showed Li into the room. He noticed the way that she was always touching him, a hand on his shoulder, or on his arm as she guided him to a seat at the smaller desk. She then sat on the edge of his desk looking directly down on him, her legs stretched out and crossed in front of her, her calf grazing his. It made Li feel slightly uncomfortable for the first time. But it was not a feeling that lasted long. She fixed him with her eyes and her smile, and he had that mush sensation in his stomach again.

‘I hear it’s a big day for you today,’ she said, and he frowned, uncertain what she meant. ‘The People’s Award for Crime Fighting.’ And his face immediately coloured with embarrassment. But if she noticed, she gave no indication of it. ‘I would have loved to go,’ she said. ‘If I’d been invited. I’ve never been in the Great Hall.’

‘Be my guest,’ Li said.

‘Wow! Invited by the recipient.’

Li searched her face and her tone for some hint of sarcasm, but found none. She had that openness and innocence about her that was common to almost every American he had ever met. Except for Margaret. Her cynicism and sense of irony marked her out as very different from most of her fellow countrymen.

‘Hey, listen, if I can get out of here on time I’ll be there.’ Pan’s smile was radiant. ‘But I gotta process you guys first. Convince you I’m worth backing. Yeah?’

She stood up, suddenly businesslike, and lifted a primitive-looking headset from the desk. Wires trailed out of the back of it like a Chinese queue. It consisted of a broad blue headband made from some kind of stretchy material that fitted across the forehead and around the back of the head. Another band ran from front to back across the scalp, attached by Velcro strips at both ends. Electrodes, each with their own little sewn-in velcro pad, could be moved about on the inner surface of the bands. ‘To optimise the placing of the electrodes,’ Pan explained. ‘Everybody’s head is different.’ She spent some time fitting the headset to Li’s larger-than-average head, her small breasts stretching her blouse just above his eyeline. He tried not to let his eyes be drawn. But he could smell her perfume, feel her warmth, and there was something irresistibly intimate about her hands moving across his scalp, touching his face, his neck. Warm, soft skin against his.

She talked as she worked. ‘When I’ve fixed this, I’m going to give you a list of nine items. We call them targets, but that won’t mean anything to you right now. I’ll explain in more detail afterwards. Anyway, the list will describe things like a knife, a landmark in your home town, your apartment block. Afterwards, I’m going to show you a sequence of photographs on your computer screen, and when you see a picture of any one of those items on the target list, I want you to click the left-hand button on the computer mouse.’ She leaned across him toward the desk to pull the mouse toward them. ‘Take a look at it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with computers or not.’

‘Sure,’ Li said. He placed his hand over the mouse. It was divided in two at the finger-end, and each half could be clicked down separately. ‘The left-hand side for anything on the target list.’

‘And the right-hand side for everything else. So you click once for every image you see.’

Li shrugged. ‘Seems simple enough.’ He smiled. ‘So how do you know what apartment building I live in?’

She grinned. ‘We’ve done our homework, Mr. Li.’

‘If you’d wanted my address, you only had to ask.’

‘Perhaps, but I’m not sure your partner would have been too happy. She’s an American, isn’t she?’

Li raised an eyebrow. ‘You have done your homework.’

‘On all of you.’ She stood back and smiled at him ruefully. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

She finished arranging his headgear, and then skipped around to the other desk and opened a beige folder with Li’s name marked on the front of it. She leaned over to hand him his target list and sat down at her computer to prime it for the first test. Li looked at the list. As Pan had said it would, it described nine items: a knife with a jewelled handle; the body of a man washed up on a beach; a woman’s dress with blood on it; a pair of leather gloves; a red car with a missing front fender; your apartment building; the statue of Mao Zedong in front of the provincial government building in your home town; a photograph of a crime scene in which two bodies are charred beyond recognition; the licence plate on your official car.

Li read it over a couple of times. He had no idea what any of it meant, or why he was going to be shown these things. Pan looked up from her computer screen, positioned so that she would be looking at Li in profile while he was looking at his monitor. ‘All set?’ she asked.

‘I guess,’ Li said. ‘Left-hand button for everything on this list, right-hand button for everything else.’

‘You got it.’ And then it was as if she flicked off a charm switch and became another person. Cool, focused, impersonal. ‘At the risk of making you conscious of it, I’m going to ask you to try to blink as seldom as possible when I am showing the images. All right?’

‘All right.’

‘Focus on the screen. The images will appear for only three-tenths of a second, so please concentrate. There will be three seconds between each image, but try to respond with the mouse button immediately. You will see a total of fifty-four images. It will take approximately three minutes. We’ll have a rest, and then we’ll start again.’

Li found himself inexplicably tense in anticipation of it and had to make himself consciously relax his grip on the mouse. He flicked a glance at the list, afraid he might have forgotten something on it.

‘Eyes on the screen please.’

His eyes jumped back to the screen and the sequence began. It was all so fast it was hard for him to think consciously about any of the images he saw. The red car with the missing fender, the bloody shirt on the drive at the crime scene, a Swiss army knife, an apartment block that meant nothing to him. It seemed like a long three minutes. He saw one of the pictures of the crime scene that Pan’s graduate had shown them, and the close-up of the man with the back of his head missing. He saw a grey Nissan car that he did not recognise, the statue of Mao from his home town, the murder weapon he had handled only half an hour earlier. There were images of an axe, a licence plate he did not know, a dress with blood on it, the bizarrely familiar pink and white of the police apartment block where he lived in Zhengyi Road.

And then it was over, and Pan was smiling at him, the charm switch flicked back to the on position. ‘Just relax, Li Yan,’ she said, suddenly informal again, familiar. He allowed himself to blink, and sat back in his chair. The concentration the test had required of him had left him feeling fatigued. And, as if reading his mind, she said, ‘It’s tiring, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘Are you going to tell me now how it works?’

‘Not yet. We’re not finished. I’m going to show you the same pictures again, although not in the same order. The computer will randomise them. But I need you to treat them in exactly the same way. Left-hand button for the targets, right-hand for everything else. Okay, you ready?’

In fact, they ran through the images another twice before she finally turned on her sweetest smile and told him it was all over. She came back around the desk and removed his headset. ‘How long will it take you to figure out whether I was one of those briefed on the crime or not?’ he asked.

‘I know already.’ This quite matter-of-factly.

He was intrigued. ‘So, tell me.’

Her smile turned secretive. ‘Not yet. I’m saving that for the finale.’ She lifted his list of targets and slipped it back into his folder. ‘But I will tell you exactly what it is I just put you through. And why.’ She adopted her sitting position on the edge of the desk again, her legs stretched out in front of her, arms folded. ‘It’s just a demonstration program,’ she said, ‘but basically it consists of me showing you fifty-four images. Nine of these are what we call probes. That is to say, they relate specifically to the crime that three of you were briefed on. Images that you would recognise instantly if you were one of those three. Another nine of the fifty-four were the targets that I gave you a list of. Each target corresponds to one of the probes. For example, your apartment block would correspond to the private dwelling house where the murder took place. You recognise your apartment block, and if you are one of those briefed, you recognise the murder house. Your brain emits the same recognition signal, the same MERMER.’

‘What about the other thirty-six?’

‘Irrelevants. That’s what we call them, because that’s what they are. Irrelevant. Although again, a number of them will correspond to the probes. So that you see your apartment block, the murder house, and some other apartment block that means nothing to you.’

The logic of it began to drop into place for Li. ‘Okay, I get it,’ he said. ‘You use my apartment block as the benchmark. The thing you know is familiar to me. If you get the same reading from the murder house, you know I’ve been briefed. But if the murder house and the irrelevant apartment block give the same reading, which is different from my apartment, you know I haven’t.’

She half-nodded, half-shrugged. ‘I guess that comes somewhere close to it. I would probably have said that the determination of guilt or innocence consists of comparing the probe responses to the target responses, which contain a MERMER, and to the irrelevant responses, which do not.’

Li let the implications tumble around in his mind. ‘That’s extraordinary,’ he said finally. ‘If it works.’

‘Oh, it works.’

‘You would know beyond doubt that a guilty suspect had knowledge of a crime scene that only the culprit could possess. And you could instantly rule out an innocent suspect if you could demonstrate that they had no recognition of specific elements of the crime or the crime scene.’

‘Which has been done,’ Pan said. ‘In the States. Where Doctor Farwell demonstrated to an appeal court that a man who had served twenty-two years of a prison sentence for murder had no details of the crime scene stored in his brain, while the details of his alibi were. And that evidence was ruled admissible by the judge.’ She laughed to herself. ‘Unlike poor old Bill Hart’s dinosaur technology. I can’t think of a single court anywhere that accepts the polygraph test as evidence.’

‘You don’t think much of the polygraph, then?’

‘I don’t. In a conventional polygraph test, emotion-driven physiological responses to relevant questions about the situation under investigation are compared to responses to control questions which are invasive and personal and not relevant to the issue at hand. Their only purpose is to emotionally and psychologically disturb the subject. So even if the subject is innocent, and truthful, he is subjected to a highly invasive and stressful ordeal. I don’t think you could say that about the MERMER test, do you?’

Li had to agree. ‘Not at all.’

‘The trouble with the polygraph, Section Chief, is that it’s not science. It’s artful and disturbing psychological manipulation.’

Li blew air through pursed lips. ‘You and Margaret would get on like a house on fire.’

Pan inclined her head. ‘Margaret…’ she repeated the name. ‘Campbell?’ Li nodded. ‘She’s quite a character, I hear. I’d like to meet her.’

‘If you can make it tonight you will.’ He stood up, his height restoring the mantle of dominance she had taken from him and worn herself during the test. But she didn’t seem to mind. The warmth in her eyes as they met his was unmistakable, and the twinkle in them suggested she was flirting.

‘I will do my very best to be there,’ she said. She stretched out a hand to shake his, and held it as she spoke. ‘It’s been a real pleasure, Section Chief.’

III

Margaret watched as a mother lifted her child into the shiny brass seat of the rickshaw. The little girl was perhaps three years old, drowned by a quilted red jacket, a sparkling red band keeping her long, black hair out of her face. Thousands of backsides had polished the seat to a brilliant shining gold. The rest of the life-sized statue was tarnished and dull, including the rickshaw man with his shaved pate and his long pigtail. A camera flashed in the afternoon sunshine. A few yards away a middle-aged man swept his hair self-consciously to one side as he posed for his wife’s camera with a couple of brass musicians. A man with a suit and an umbrella stood beside a brass barber shaving the head of an eternally acquiescent client. A half-empty open-sided blue tourist bus crawled past, the tour guide barking the history of Wangfujing Street through a speaker system that filled the air. The name Wangfujing derives from a fifteenth century well…No one was listening.

Beijing’s best-known shopping street had changed almost beyond recognition since Margaret had first kept an appointment there with Li Yan outside the Foreign Language Bookstore more than five years before. Vast new shopping complexes in pink marble had risen from the rubble of the old. Giant TV screens played episodes of a popular soap opera. Crowds of affluent Chinese, the new bourgeoisie, roamed the pedestrian precincts viewing luxury goods behind plate-glass windows, anxious to spend their new-found wealth. On the corner of Wangfujing and Donganmen, outside the bookshop, an old man wearing a cloth cap and dark blue cotton jacket pedalled up on his tricycle with a steaming urn to warm the young security men on traffic duty with mugs of hot green tea. They gathered around him like children, with their red armbands, laughing and giggling and poking each other while traffic at the junction ground to a halt.

Margaret smiled. While so much about China had changed in just five years, the character of the Chinese had not. There was something irresistibly likeable about them — unless you happened to be trying to renew your visa. The thought clouded her afternoon with memories of that morning’s debacle. She tipped Li Jon’s buggy on to its back wheels and bumped it up the two steps to the open doors of the bookstore, brushing aside the heavy strips of clear plastic that kept in the heat. An overhead heater blasted them with hot air, and Margaret turned off to their right where she knew they kept the stands of English language fiction and nonfiction books. Rows of shelving between grey marble pillars delivered books on every aspect of foreign language and culture to an increasingly literate population, hungry to feed a new-found appetite for learning about the world beyond the Middle Kingdom. People spoke here in hushed and reverent tones, in direct contrast with the cacophony in the street outside.

Margaret found what she was looking for on the middle shelf of the back wall. There were two English-language originals of Thomas Dowman’s The Murders of Jack the Ripper sitting side by side. She lifted one and found an assistant who wrote her out a slip in exchange for the book. She spotted a manned cash desk on the far side of the shop and took her slip there to pay for the book, before returning with her receipt to collect it from the assistant. It was tiresome, but it was the Chinese way, and you just got used to it. And it was also, she supposed, one way of keeping the unemployment figures down.

Outside, the blue bus was making its return trip, the tour guide’s nasal hollering still an assault on the ears. Before the liberation in 1949, Wangfujing was known as Morrison Street…And still no one was listening. A fresh bunch of people was posing with the brass statues. Margaret pushed Li Jon’s buggy to the junction, where the security men had returned to traffic duty, and flagged a taxi, fumbling in her pocket for the address Chi Lyang had written down for her after lunch.

The Jade Fingers Blind Massage Club was on the twenty-fifth floor of a new shopping mall in Chaoyang District, off the east Third Ring Road, just south of the Lufthansa Centre. Lyang was waiting for her in the reception room. ‘It’s all fixed,’ she said and nodded to one of two Chinese girls behind the desk who came to relieve Margaret of Li Jon and the buggy. Margaret looked anxiously as the girl wheeled her son away through swing doors. ‘Relax,’ Lyang said. ‘Let go. That’s what this place is for. Some time out from life. Enjoy it.’

Margaret said, ‘I haven’t had time out from life since I don’t know when.’

‘Then you’re long overdue.’

The other girl from Reception led them down a long, narrow corridor. Openings without doors led off into massage rooms every few metres. There was thick, soft carpet underfoot, and a hush suffused the place, broken only by the odd murmur of distant voices. Some of the rooms were empty. In others women swaddled in towels lay on massage tables, groaning while girls in white overalls worked strong fingers into soft flesh.

‘Don’t worry, it’s women-only,’ Lyang said, catching Margaret’s expression.

Margaret said, ‘Why is it called the blind massage club?’

‘Because all the masseuses are blind,’ Lyang said.

Margaret laughed. ‘Ask a silly question.’

Lyang said, ‘It’s a good job for a blind person, based solely on touch. Something I’m more than happy to support. And imagine, a blind masseuse has nothing to distract her. Her entire focus is on you, and the whole landscape of your body beneath her fingers.’

‘I thought we were having a foot massage.’

‘Today, yes. But some other time you must try the whole body massage. It leaves you feeling fantastic for the rest of the day.’

They turned into a room with two reclining armchairs, a footstool in front of each and a low table between them. The girl from Reception invited them to sit, and they arranged themselves comfortably in the chairs and removed their shoes and socks. A few moments later both receptionists returned with small wooden barrels lined with plastic and filled with hot, aromatic water. Scented herbs floated on the surface, their fragrance rising with the steam. A barrel was placed in front of each chair and Lyang and Margaret slipped their feet into the water. It was so hot Margaret almost had to withdraw her feet immediately, but the burning quickly subsided and she started to relax.

Lyang said, ‘They’ll leave us now to steep for about twenty minutes.’

Another girl brought in cups of jasmine tea and Margaret took a sip and allowed herself to unwind. A wave of fatigue washed over her and she closed her eyes, remembering the cry of the baby which had wakened her at five that morning. For the next hour and a half her oversensitised inner alarm system could take a break. Without opening her eyes she said, ‘So what was it about Bill Hart that made him worth giving up your job for?’

‘Oh, I didn’t give it up for him. I gave it up for me.’

A slight frown creased Margaret’s brow. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I fell in love,’ Lyang said simply. ‘What’s a girl gonna do? It was him or my job.’

‘And you didn’t resent that?’

‘Well, sure. But it wasn’t Bill I resented. It was the goddamned stupid rule we have about cops not marrying foreigners. And, anyway, I didn’t do anything he didn’t. He gave up a wellpaid job in the States to come and work in China for about a tenth of the money. That makes me feel good. It means he must love me, too.’

‘Didn’t you want to go and live in the States?’

‘Not really. This is my home. And besides, Bill wanted to come and live here. He still can’t get over the idea of a civilisation that’s five thousand years old.’

‘Well, of course, he comes from a country where the most exciting thing we’ve produced in two hundred years is the burger.’

Lyang laughed. ‘You sound just like him. His favourite gag just now is, what happens if you leave an American and a cup of yoghurt alone in a room for a week?’ She paused waiting for a response.

Margaret obliged. ‘And that would be?’

‘The yoghurt develops its own culture.’ Which brought a smile to Margaret’s lips. And Lyang added, almost apologetically, ‘I only tell it because he does.’

Margaret grinned, opening her eyes and tilting her head to look at her. ‘As long as you don’t tell it to Li Yan. I like giving him a hard time about China, and I hate giving him ammunition for return fire.’ She paused. ‘So what do you do all day every day?’

‘I still work.’

Margaret was taken aback. ‘Doing what?’

‘At the academy. It’s just part time, but I work mornings as Bill’s assistant. I know you don’t think very much of the polygraph…’

Margaret broke in, ‘I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.’

Lyang said, ‘And we’d know if you were.’ They both laughed. Then she said, ‘The truth is, Bill’s more of a scientist than a practitioner. The academy is employing him to develop something based on the polygraph which is more suited to the Chinese. He was responsible for persuading Lynn Pan to come to China to work on the Chinese version of MERMER.’ She hesitated and glanced over at Margaret. ‘You don’t work at all?’

‘I give the occasional lecture at the Public Security University.’

‘But no pathology?’

Margaret shook her head. ‘The Ministry is not particularly keen on Americans conducting autopsies on Chinese crime victims. I think they think it reflects badly on their own pathologists.’

‘But Bill said you’d done autopsy work for us before.’

‘Special circumstances,’ Margaret said. ‘And, then, when the baby came, things changed.’

‘How?’

‘Well, Li Yan and I are not married, for a start.’

‘Obviously.’

‘But we do live together.’

Lyang sat up, interested. ‘Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.’

Margaret waggled a finger at her. ‘That’s just it, you don’t ask. At least, that’s the position the Ministry takes. They don’t ask, we don’t tell, they don’t know. Officially. That way we get away with it — as long as we don’t marry.’

Lyang whistled softly. ‘And Li Yan wouldn’t think about giving up his job?’

‘I wouldn’t ask him,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s a part of him. It would be like asking him to cut off a leg.’ She sighed. ‘The upshot of it all, though, is that it’s no longer politic for him to request permission to use me for autopsies on special cases.’ She qualified herself. ‘On any cases.’

‘So you’re leading a life of leisure and pleasure as a mother and wife…well, almost wife?’

Margaret laughed. ‘No, I think the word I think you’re looking for is vegetating.’

‘So what do you do all day?’

‘Oh, I stay home and look after our son. Do a bit of housework, a bit of cooking. I never know when Li Yan’ll be coming home or when he’ll be called out. I don’t have any friends in Beijing, so I never go anywhere…’ She shook her head in something close to despair. ‘You know, the kind of domestic bliss every American woman aspires to.’ She sat up and turned toward Lyang. It felt good to talk, to get some of this stuff off her chest. It had been a long time since there had been anyone other than Li to whom she could unburden herself. ‘It’s like I’ve stopped living, Lyang. Like my whole life’s been sucked into my baby, and my only future is to live it vicariously through him.’

‘Jesus, Margaret…’ Lyang had clearly picked up her husband’s slang. ‘You sound like you need a few bodies to cut up.’

Margaret laughed out loud. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That would probably be good therapy. You’ve no idea how much I miss the smell of an open intestine, or that slurping sound the brain makes when it plops out of the skull.’

‘Hmmm,’ Lyang said. ‘I can see how you’d miss that.’

The receptionists looked curiously at the two women lying back laughing on their reclining seats when they came in to take away the soak barrels. They returned a few moments later to dry off the two pairs of feet and place them on towels on each of the footrests. Margaret watched curiously as the two blind masseuses were led in to squat on stools at the end of each footrest. Lyang’s girl was very young, perhaps only nineteen or twenty. Her eyes were bizarrely pale, almost grey, and seemed fixed beneath beautifully slanted lids. Margaret’s masseuse was older, about thirty, and her dark eyes seemed to be constantly on the move, squinting to one side and then back again. Both were slightly built, wearing white cotton overalls, and when Margaret’s girl lathered her tiny hands with soft-scented cream and began working on Margaret’s feet, Margaret was astonished at the strength in them.

‘Of course, you know why Western men like Asian women,’ Lyang said, and Margaret could hear the mischief in her voice.

‘Why?’ she asked, without opening her eyes.

‘Because they have such small hands.’

Margaret smiled and frowned at the same time. ‘And that’s attractive because…?’

‘It makes their dicks seem bigger.’

They laughed again, and saw the incomprehension on the faces of their masseuses. A foot massage was supposed to be relaxing, therapeutic, not funny. But Margaret was finding the whole experience therapeutic in other ways. ‘I guess that must be why I fell for Li Yan,’ she said.

Lyang frowned, knowing there was a gag coming, but not seeing it. ‘Why?’

‘Because he makes my hands look so small.’

Their raucous laughter was inappropriate, and inordinately loud in the hushed atmosphere of the Jade Fingers Blind Massage Club. Margaret’s masseuse found a painful area on the sole of her foot and seemed to dig into it particularly hard with her thumb. Margaret gasped. But there was also an odd pleasure in the pain. She lay back then and succumbed to both the pain and the pleasure as her girl worked her way around her toes, down all the painful bumps in her arch, around the heel and back up the outside edge. She knew what all the muscles were, could picture them as the girl’s dextrous fingers sought them out, folded one over the other around the delicate bones of the foot. It was deliciously relaxing.

After a long period of silence, Lyang said to her, ‘What have you done about Li Jon?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘His nationality.’

‘Well, he’s both, of course. Chinese and American.’

‘You’ve registered him with the Embassy?’

‘Sure.’ It had been a complex procedure. Chinese and American laws were in conflict over the nationality of a child born to a Chinese-American couple. The Americans, the consul for American Citizen Services at the embassy had told Margaret, defined a child born to one American anywhere in the world as a US citizen at birth. The Chinese used the same legal premise for their citizens abroad, but allowed mixed citizenship couples, legally resident in China, to pick a citizenship for their kid after birth. Margaret had wanted to register Li Jon with the US embassy. Li was anxious for his son to remain Chinese. They had almost fallen out over it. In the end Margaret had persuaded Li that the Chinese were never going to deny his son nationality as long as they were there in China. But she wanted Li Jon properly registered as a US citizen, so that there would never be a problem about them taking him to the US if they ever decided to go there. So she had gone to the embassy and had an interview with a sympathetic consul who set in motion a series of background checks on both Li and Margaret before finally issuing Li Jon with a Consular Report of Birth Abroad — which would effectively act as his passport for the first five years and make him officially a US citizen.

‘You got one of those Consular Report things?’ Lyang asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Yeah, Bill insisted we did that for Ling, too. So she’s a fully fledged stars and stripes citizen. It stuck in my craw a little to have to register her as a foreigner with the local police. It was expensive, too.’ A thought struck her. ‘Hey, how did you do that when you two aren’t…you know, married? Not even officially living together.’

‘We didn’t,’ Margaret said. ‘It was going to be too complicated. Officially, I still live in an apartment provided by the University of Public Security. That comes under the Western Beijing Police district. In reality, Li Yan and I share his police apartment in the Central Beijing Police district. We were just never going to be able to explain it.’

‘The endless complications of life in China,’ Lyang said. ‘You know, you and Li Yan should come over some night for a meal. We’ve got a lot in common, we four.’

‘I’d like that,’ Margaret said. ‘It would be nice to get out for a change. Where do you live?’

‘Ah,’ Lyang said. ‘That was Bill’s only stipulation — that if we were going to live in China, it wasn’t going to be in some dilapidated apartment where the government controls the heating. His first wife died in a road accident, and he had been rattling around on his own in their big town house in Boston. So when we got married he sold it, and we bought one of those fabulous new modern apartments near the Central Business District. You know, the ones built for foreigners. We’re in a complex called Music Home International. It’s silly, really, but the two apartment blocks have got like huge grand piano lids on their roofs.’ She seemed a little embarrassed. ‘You can’t miss them. But there’s a health club with a pool and tennis courts, and there’s a beautifully landscaped private garden which is going to be just great for Ling in the summer.’

Margaret felt a twinge of jealousy. Not that any of these things amounted to a lifestyle she aspired to, but they sounded a great deal more appealing than Li’s Spartan police apartment with its tiny rooms and irregular heating. And the thought returned her to a reality from which she had escaped all too briefly into a world of laughter and freedom from maternal responsibility. She had forgotten what it was like to have a life of your own, and she wasn’t sure that a friendship with Lyang would be a good thing. It could be very unsettling.

IV

Li sat with Procurator Meng, Deputy Commissioner Cao, Deputy Minister Wei Peng and Director General Yan Bo in a stilted silence in the reception room where they had first gathered. They had come in one by one from their MERMER tests flushed and fatigued and oddly self-conscious. Conversation had been desultory, and none of them had talked about the test. They were all, with the exception of Li, smoking. In exasperation, he had eventually gone to the window to draw the blinds and open it. He stood now gazing west, beyond Yuyuantan Park where he had sometimes played chess with his uncle, toward the distinctive minaret-shaped TV tower catching the midafternoon sun. It felt like they had been there all day. In fact it had been little more than two hours. But Li was growing impatient now, anxious to get back to his investigation.

He turned as the door behind him opened and Commissioner Zhu, the last of them to be tested, breezed in from the computer room. He was actually smiling and, like the others before him, faintly flushed. ‘Charming woman,’ he said, adjusting his frameless spectacles on the bridge of his nose.

‘Quit dreaming, Commissioner,’ his deputy said. Cao was draped languidly on his chair watching his boss with knowing eyes, smoke seeping from the corners of his mouth. ‘It’s your backing she’s after, not your body.’ And Li realised that she had probably been doing a number on them all, each of them convinced that her warmth and touch and eye contact meant that they had struck some special chord with her. Li smiled to himself. Whatever it was she had, or did, it worked. And as he glanced around the other faces in the room, he knew that the same thought was also going through their minds.

The door opened and Professor Pan came in briskly, clutching a sheaf of papers. The moment she entered the room, Li knew that something was wrong. Her whole demeanour had altered unmistakably. There was a droop in her shoulders, her face seemed pale suddenly, and drawn. She was still smiling, but the smile was fixed and false, and she seemed reluctant to make eye contact with any of them. ‘Gentlemen, I am so sorry to keep you,’ she said. Her eyes flickered briefly around the room, and Li saw something strange in them. Something like confusion. All the confidence in them had vanished, and yet she was working hard at maintaining the facade. He wondered if something had gone terribly wrong with the tests. If she was going to fail to identify the three ‘criminals’. But then she said, ‘The tests are quite conclusive. Commissioner Zhu, Procurator Meng, Section Chief Li. I think my findings would be sufficient to convict you all of murder in a court of law.’

There was a spontaneous burst of applause, and Li looked around his fellow guinea-pigs. If any of them was aware of the change in Miss Pan it did not show.

‘Congratulations, Professor,’ Procurator General Meng said. ‘I think we are all very impressed.’

And Li wondered for a moment if it was all just some kind of sophisticated parlour trick. If it was, it was a very good one. ‘How do we know you weren’t aware all along which of us was briefed?’ he asked.

She swung wounded eyes on him, and he saw the hurt in them. But before she had a chance to speak, Deputy Cao said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Li. If the thing didn’t work, she knows we’d find out soon enough.’ And although she said nothing, Pan held Li’s eyes for longer than she had to, and he saw something else in them. Something confounding. Something like fear and a plea for help.

‘I think,’ the Deputy Minister said, ‘I can speak for everyone here when I say that I believe you can count on our backing for your project.’ He looked around, as if defying anyone to contradict him.

Pan tore her eyes away from Li’s and forced the smile back to her lips. ‘That’s very gratifying, Deputy Minister Wei. I’m very grateful to you all for your patience. I know it’s been a long afternoon for you.’

‘Not at all, Professor,’ Commissioner Zhu said. ‘I think we’ve all enjoyed the experience. A welcome break from the routine of the office.’

She nodded, glancing at her watch. ‘Well, I don’t want to keep you any longer, gentlemen. Thank you so much for coming.’ She made a tiny bow, and turned and hurried out of the room. Li saw the smile wiping itself from her face as she disappeared through the door.

‘Well, how did it go?’ Bill Hart pressed him eagerly as they went down the stairs together.

‘Oh, I think she’ll get her funding okay,’ Li said.

Hart grinned. ‘I never doubted it. What did you think?’

Li had to acknowledge, ‘I was very impressed. If MERMER is as reliable as that in the field, then it could revolutionise criminal investigation.’

‘Of course, it has to be used very carefully,’ Hart said. ‘I mean, think about it. You’re the investigating officer. You make a detailed examination of the crime scene, so now you carry the same information in your brain as the killer. Can we always be sure we’ll know which is which, who is who?’

Li nodded. ‘A fair point. And I suppose an investigating officer would have to be very careful that he didn’t accidentally provide a suspect with information that might read like guilty knowledge in a MERMER test.’

‘Absolutely,’ Hart said. ‘If this thing really is going to work in the field, then the rules of engagement are going to have to be very tightly defined and applied. Otherwise it could be open to abuse.’

‘Like corrupt officers deliberately contaminating a suspect’s mind with information from a crime scene so that it will show up on a MERMER?’

Hart smiled knowingly. ‘Not that an officer in the People’s Republic would dream of doing such a thing.’

‘Nor any in the United States,’ said Li.

‘God forbid.’ Hart threw up his hands in mock horror, and they shared a grin. Then Hart’s smile faded. ‘I guess if Lynn gets her funding, then there’s a good chance mine will get cancelled.’

‘Why?’

‘Shit, Li Yan, Margaret was right. Compared with something like MERMER, the polygraph’s a dinosaur. And in untrained hands it’s just about useless. She put her finger on it when she said it’s the operator who’s the real lie detector. And it takes a lot of training and a lot of experience to be good at it.’ He sighed. ‘Your bosses at the ministry are less than convinced by it. I think they see it as not much more than a very expensive psychological rubber hose with which to beat a suspect.’ He laughed. ‘Hell, a real rubber hose is a lot cheaper and probably just as effective.’

‘And just as inadmissible in court as a polygraph,’ Li said. ‘So what’ll happen if your funding gets cancelled?’

‘I’m going to have to go back to the States to look for work.’

‘And would Lyang be happy to do that?’

Hart pulled a face. ‘I haven’t told her yet, Li Yan. I figure there’s no point in worrying about it until it happens.’ He paused. ‘But, no, she wouldn’t be happy.’

They came down the final flight of steps into the entrance lobby. Hart shook Li’s hand. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. ‘And, hey, listen, why don’t you bring Margaret round for dinner some night? I get the feeling that she and Lyang might get on pretty well.’

‘I’ll mention it to her,’ Li said.

‘Well, what about tonight?’

Li shrugged apologetically. ‘I’ve got an appointment I can’t get out of.’ There was a hint of embarrassment in his smile.

Hart remembered suddenly. ‘Of course, it’s your award thing tonight at the Great Hall. I read about that in the paper the other day. You must be very proud.’

Li forced a smile. ‘Sure,’ he said.

As he pushed out through the swing door Hart called after him, ‘Don’t forget to ask Margaret about dinner?’

Li waved a hand and was gone, out into the cold afternoon air. He pulled up his coat collar and turned south toward Fuxingmenwai Avenue. A car horn blasting from across the street drew his attention, and he looked round as a large black Ministry limo made a u-turn and drew in at the kerb alongside him. A door opened, and as he leaned down, he saw Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Cao sitting in the back seat. ‘Get in, Li,’ the commissioner told him. Li slipped into the front passenger seat beside the uniformed driver. ‘Do you have a car with you?’ asked the commissioner. Li shook his head.

‘In the name of the sky, Li, you didn’t come on your bicycle?’ Deputy Cao regarded him with something akin to contempt.

‘No, I didn’t, Deputy Cao,’ Li said.

The commissioner tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Section One,’ he said. And to Li, ‘We’ll give you a lift back, and you can brief us on the Beijing Ripper.’ Li’s surprise must have been evident in his face, because it made the commissioner smile. A smug smile, Li thought. ‘Don’t be so shocked, Li. There isn’t much goes on in your section that I don’t get to hear about.’

‘Why didn’t you mention it upstairs?’ Deputy Cao asked.

‘I didn’t think it was appropriate. Not in front of the deputy minister and the procurator general,’ Li said.

‘So tell us,’ the commissioner said, ‘what makes you think these killings are a copycat of the Jack the Ripper murders?’

Li pulled the book from his pocket and handed it into the back of the car. ‘Just published in China. A translation from the English original. It details all the killings attributed to the Ripper. The killings here in Beijing are like a carbon copy, even down to the smallest detail.’

‘Like?’ demanded Deputy Cao.

‘Like the contents of her purse being arranged around the feet of victim number three…the removal of her uterus and parts of her vagina and bladder. Like the missing left kidney and the womb in victim number four. And dozens of other small details, even down to the number of stab wounds in victim number one.’ The commissioner was still examining the Ripper book. Li went on, ‘Then there’s the fact that our murderer only kills on the weekends, and that all the victims have been found within the same square mile of the city.’

The commissioner passed the book to Deputy Cao. ‘It is him,’ he said.

Li frowned. ‘It is who?’

‘Thomas Dowman,’ said Deputy Cao. ‘The author of the book. We met him when he came to Beijing a couple of years ago.’

‘I heard he gave a lecture on the Ripper,’ Li said.

‘That’s right,’ said the commissioner. ‘Deputy Cao and I were both there. Almost every senior officer at the Ministry was. A fascinating profile of an unfathomable murderer. Mr. Dowman certainly knows his stuff.’

‘And so does someone else,’ said Li.

The commissioner leaned forward, grasping the back of Li’s seat. ‘Let’s keep this within the department for the moment, Li. We don’t want the press getting wind of it.’

‘That’s hardly likely,’ Li said.

‘There are journalists in this city who don’t know where to draw the line any more,’ Deputy Cao said ominously. ‘With the Olympics coming in 2008, the government has been…’ he hesitated, searching for the right words, ‘…overkeen, shall we say, to show the world what an open society we have become. There are those in the media who are taking advantage.’

‘And it’s not just a matter of creating public panic,’ Commissioner Zhu said. ‘That would be bad enough. You only have to look at how press coverage of the Washington sniper last year just about paralysed the US capital.’

‘It’s a political matter, Li,’ Cao said. ‘You can imagine the coverage such a story would generate around the world. Not exactly the image of Beijing that the government wants to promote ahead of the Olympics.’

‘So let’s keep it nice and quiet, Section Chief,’ the commissioner said. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the front of the limo. ‘I want detailed progress reports on my desk. Daily. I am not going to preside over a police department which permits some lunatic to re-enact the Ripper murders from first to last.’ He paused. ‘Get him, Section Chief Li, before he kills again.’ As if Li needed to be told.

I

The chatter of computer keyboards, like cicadas, filled the air as Li strode along the top floor corridor of Section One. Voices and cigarette smoke drifted out of the open door of the detectives’ room. ‘Wu! Qian!’ he shouted as he stalked past, but didn’t wait for a response. At the next door along he turned left into his own office and looked at the piles of paperwork gathering in drifts on his desk. A veritable paper blizzard. Reports from all the detectives working on the case, reports from forensics and pathology on each of the murders. Reports from headquarters on all manner of internal affairs in which he had absolutely no interest. The day’s mail, which he had not yet had an opportunity to open, was piled up in a wire tray. He hung his coat on the stand and slumped into his chair, letting his eyes close as it reclined. He could not bear an untidy desk. Somehow it cluttered his mind, fogged his thinking.

‘Chief?’ Qian’s voice from the door made him open his eyes. He sat up. Wu was hovering at Qian’s shoulder.

‘Qian, the commissioner has asked for daily progress reports on the Ripper murders. I want you to take care of them.’ He could see Qian’s shoulders slump, but it wasn’t something he could afford to get bogged down with himself.

‘Yes, Chief.’

Wu said, ‘I checked out the publication date of the Ripper book. It’s been on the shelves here for less than a week, Chief.’

Li reached for the mail and started absently opening envelopes and consigning their contents either to the bin or to the pile on his desk. ‘So it wasn’t the appearance of the book which sparked off the killings,’ he said. ‘Given that the first killing was five weeks ago.’ He paused to think about it for a moment. ‘See if you can track down a telephone number or even an e-mail address for the author. It might be useful if we could speak to him.’

‘Sure, Chief.’

Li screwed up some departmental circular and threw it in the bin. ‘And something else.’ He fixed them both with a look they knew well. ‘Someone in this section is feeding information to headquarters. Specifically, the commissioner’s office.’

Qian was shocked. ‘What, one of our people, Chief?’

‘One of our people, Qian. I don’t know who it is. I don’t want to know who it is. But it might be worth circulating the thought among the team, that if I ever find out, he can kiss his career goodbye, along with his testicles. I decide what information leaves this building, and what stays within its walls. Is that clear?’

‘Crystal, Chief,’ Qian said.

Li sliced open the envelope he was holding and pulled out a handwritten letter. Almost immediately he dropped both on the desk and sat staring at them.

‘What is it, Chief?’ Wu asked.

‘Get someone up here from forensics,’ Li said quietly. ‘Now!’ There was something imperative in his tone, and Wu turned immediately and headed back for the detectives’ room and a phone. Qian crossed to his boss’ desk.

‘What is it?’

‘A letter from our killer.’

The single sheet of stationery was folded once — large, untidy characters scrawled in red ink.

Apart from the red ink and the strange, stilted language of it, what struck Li most forcibly about the letter was its signature. The Beijing Ripper. It was what the commissioner had called him only half an hour earlier.

‘It feels like a translation from another language,’ Elvis was saying. He had a photocopy of the Ripper letter in his hands, scowling at its odd phraseology. ‘Nobody would write Chinese like this.’

‘Unless maybe he was a foreigner,’ Qian said, which brought a murmur of speculation from around the table. The meeting room was packed. Every detective on duty was crammed in, every one with a colour photocopy of the letter. This was new. No one in the section could ever remember a murderer sending a letter to the investigating officer. Since such cases did not normally receive widespread, if any, coverage in the media, the murderer would not know who the investigating officers were until they caught him. But in this case, the envelope was addressed to Section Chief Li personally.

Li turned the photocopy over and over in his fingers, considerably disturbed by it. Forensics had been quick to confirm that his were the only fingerprints on the original. It was written on commonplace stationery. The postmark on the envelope was Central Beijing. It had been posted that morning and arrived with the afternoon delivery. It could only have been a matter of hours after his last murder that the killer had written it. It made his killings seem even colder, more calculated — in direct contrast to Pathologist Wang’s verdict of frenzy. Of course, they knew now that there was nothing at all frenzied about the murders. They were meticulous replications of another man’s madness. But what kind of man was it who could map out his murders with such careful precision, who could cold-bloodedly murder a girl, then set about carving her up according to a 115-year-old blueprint?

‘Is there any significance to the red ink, do you think?’ Elvis asked. ‘I mean, I know he says it’s a substitute for his victim’s blood, but…’

He left his question hanging. In Chinese culture, red ink in a letter symbolised the end of a relationship. It was one reason why Li had asked for it to be copied in colour, so that if there was significance in the colour of the ink, no one would miss it. But no one in the room had any idea what significance it might have. The end of a relationship with whom? The victim? Did that mean he knew her, or she him?

Li glanced at Wu. He had picked up the Ripper book from the table some minutes earlier, and still had his nose buried in it. ‘I hope we’re not distracting you from your reading, Wu,’ Li said.

Wu looked up. Normally Li would have expected a smart retort. But instead Wu looked wan. Shocked. ‘I don’t think the red ink has any significance at all,’ he told the room. ‘Not in any Chinese sense, anyway.’ He flattened the book open on the table where he had been reading. ‘I think I should read you this.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and began: Dear Boss, I am downward on whores and I will not stop the tearing of them until I am caught…He looked up, sensing that he did not have to read any further. ‘Police investigating the Whitechapel murders in London were given the letter by a news agency which received it on the 27th of September, 1888. It’s almost exactly the same as the letter you received today, Chief. Except that it’s addressed to Dear Boss, and signed Jack the Ripper. It seems that’s where the name first came from.’

Li reached out for the book, and Wu pushed it across the table. He said, ‘Seems like they don’t reckon it was sent by the killer, though. They figure it was some smart-ass journalist trying to stir up interest in the story.’

Qian said, ‘But ours must have come from the killer. I mean, nobody except the police would know about the murders?’

‘Whoever he was, he knew my name,’ Li said. ‘He knew the address of this section.’ Which ruled out most of the population of Beijing. Section One was tucked away in an obscure hutong in the northeast of the city. An anonymous brick building opposite the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese. It did not advertise itself in any way. Outside of a hardcore criminal element, few people even knew of its existence.

‘Hey, come on, Chief,’ Elvis was chewing absently on a matchstick, and toying with his redundant sunglasses. ‘Most of China knows who you are these days. You’ve been splashed all over the papers ahead of this award thing tonight. You’re a hero.’

Which brought some laughter from around the room. But Li was not amused. He said to Qian, ‘Get someone to go through the book and make an abstract of all the salient details. Get that copied and circulating. And since Elvis isn’t invited to the ceremony tonight, maybe he could do it.’

‘Aw, Chief…’

Qian grinned. ‘You got it, Chief.’

‘And let’s get a few more copies of the book itself. Get a dozen. Everyone on the case should read it.’

‘Hey,’ Wu cut in, ‘I just figured out who the killer is. It’s the author. He’s hoping to turn it into a best-seller by getting the cops to buy up all the copies.’

Which brought a smile even to Li’s lips. When the laughter subsided, he said, ‘The thing is, if the murderer sticks to his mentor’s script, then we should know what his next move is.’ He consulted the book again. ‘According to the original Ripper’s timetable, he didn’t strike again for another six weeks, which might just give us a bit of breathing space. That’s the good news.’ He flipped through a few pages then stopped. ‘The bad news is that Jack’s next victim was a woman called Mary Jane Kelly, and he cut her up so badly she was hardly recognisable as human.’ The silence in the meeting room was very nearly tangible. Li’s eyes strayed to the photographs of the dead girls on the wall. Guo Huan had joined them now, a blow-up of one of the photographs from the strip given him by her mother. Her crime scene was set out below her in not so glorious technicolor. There was too much red. ‘I don’t want another girl up there on the wall,’ he said. ‘Whatever we do, we’ve got to stop that from happening.’

II

The sun was dipping fast in the west now, pink light catching the particles of pollution along the horizon, turning them orange beneath the darkening blue above. Li pulled up on to the sidewalk in front of the main gate of Yuyuantan Park. Red lanterns spun lazily in the dying breeze. A shady character wearing a dark suit and smoking a cigarette cupped in his hand was doing his best to impress a pretty girl leaning against the railings. She was dressed all in white — white coat, white bootees, white handbag clutched demurely in front of her in both hands. Seemingly he was succeeding, because she was staring up at him adoringly, apparently oblivious to the fact that his eyes were constantly on the move, above and beyond her, left and right. He spotted Li’s car the moment he parked it by the gate. And he watched suspiciously as Li got out of the driver’s side. His eyes flickered toward the registration plate, and Li could see that he recognised the jing character followed by O as the trademark police registration it was — something only someone with previous experience of the police was likely to know. Li wanted to tell the girl to go home, to have nothing to do with this wide boy. He was bad news. But it was none of Li’s business.

He circumnavigated the barrier at the gate of the gardens outside the park. It was here that all the old men came to play cards and chess and chequers and dominoes. In the summer, there was shade from the trees. In the winter, there was the warmth of companionship. And it saved them the two yuan payable for entry to the park itself. A path overhung by the naked branches of gnarled trees and lined by bicycles parked three deep led into the main garden where a statue carved from white stone watched the men in dark clothes huddled around their games. Beyond the trees, the roar of the traffic had become a distant rumble. A woman with short hair and a red jacket sang Peking Opera to the accompaniment of a wizened old man drawing his bow across the two strings of an ancient erhu. The evening sky reflected a cold blue off the canal which ran south out of Yuyuan Lake, a body of water which would be frozen solid in under a month, attracting skaters from all over the city. The last golden beams of sunlight warmed a silver-haired old man practising his tai chi as he gazed out over the water.

Groups of men were dotted about all over the central concourse, gathered around the benches where the games were being played. Dai Yi was playing chess in the centre of one of the huddles. Li’s Uncle Yifu had always called him Lao Dai — old Dai — even though he was several months younger. He was a short man, stocky, with a round, smiling face. His head was completely bald, and he always wore a black baseball cap with an unusually long peak. He had very round eyes that always smiled, even when the rest of his face bore a grave expression. He was absorbed in his game, as were the spectators — about half a dozen of them. His opponent wore a battered fawn hat with a short brim above a lugubrious face with deep lines chiselled out of folded lava rock. He was rigid with tension, the knuckles on his left hand glowing white as it tightened around his pack of cigarettes. The remains of a cigarette between his lips bled smoke into streaming eyes. But he seemed oblivious. It was obvious to Li as he eased through the group and took in the board, that Lao Dai was one move away from checkmate. The man with the cigarettes was desperately seeking a way out. Finally he slid a wooden disc with a red character, marking it out as his Horse, on a zigzag move and shouted, ‘Jiang!’ It was a last act of pure defiance. For Lao Dai ‘ate’ it with his Cannon and pronounced, ‘Jiang si li!’ Checkmate. There was a collective sigh as Lao Dai sat back, and the two opponents traded a cursory handshake. The man with the cigarettes threw away the one that was in his mouth and lit another. There was a brief exchange of goodbyes, and the gathering began to disperse. The sun was sinking fast now and it was getting colder. Time for something to drink, and something hot to eat.

‘Life is no fun any more, Li Yan,’ Lao Dai said without looking up, his attention focused on gathering up the discs and putting them in their box along with their embroidered cloth board. Li was surprised that the old man had even seen him arriving. ‘It is boring when you win all the time.’

‘As boring as it was when you lost all the time to my uncle?’

The old man grinned and looked up at him finally. ‘Ah, but when you always lose, you can still look forward to the day when you will win. But when you always win, you can only ever look forward to defeat. It is better to win some, and to lose some. Your uncle always used to say, ten thousand things find harmony by combining the forces of positive and negative.’ The old man examined his face. ‘I see him in you tonight. I have never seen him there before.’

‘I wish there was more of him in me,’ Li said. ‘Then I might know better what to do.’

‘Ah, but you are young still. How can you always know what to do? Wisdom only comes with age.’

And Li remembered another of his uncle’s sayings. ‘The oldest ginger is the best.’

Lao Dai’s smile widened but was touched by sadness. ‘It’s hard to believe he’s been gone five years. There is not a day goes past that I do not think about him.’

Li nodded. He did not want to get into a discussion about his uncle. The memories that would resurrect would be too painful. ‘I came to see if you needed a taxi to take you to the Great Hall tonight.’

The old man waved his hand dismissively. ‘No, no, of course not. I will take my bicycle, as always. The day I stop cycling is the day I will die.’ He stood up and lifted his precious box of chessmen. ‘Walk with me to the subway.’ It was too far now for Lao Dai to cycle from his home in the southeast of the city, to the garden outside the park. And the traffic was too dangerous. So he took the subway and the bus, and would be home in just under an hour. It never occurred to him not to come.

They walked past the bristle-headed old man still performing his tai chi and on to the path that followed the canal. Lao Dai took small, shuffling steps, and seemed always on the point of overbalancing. The sky above them soared from pale lemon to the deepest, darkest blue. A splinter of moon was visible rising on the far horizon, and the last of the sun, even though they could not see it, glanced its light off countless windows in dozens of high-rises.

‘So what troubles you?’

Li said, ‘What makes you think I am troubled?’

The old man shook his head. ‘To answer a question with a question is evasion. Your uncle could never hide his worries from me, either. Which is why he would never meet my eye when we played chess. He would have made a lousy poker player.’ Lao Dai stopped and put his hand on Li’s arm. ‘I could never fill Yifu’s footsteps. Nor would I try. But I knew him well, and I know he would want you to come to me if you were in trouble.’

Li was embarrassed and moved at the same time. He wanted to hug the old man, but it was not the Chinese way. Dai and Yifu had served together for many years in the criminal investigation department of the Beijing Municipal Police, Yifu rising to high office before his retirement. Although Dai had not reached the same dizzy heights, he had nevertheless been a section chief. He was a good man, clever and principled. Both had been widowers and were inseparable after retirement. Yifu’s death had left a huge hole in the old man’s life, and with no children to fill the void, Li was the closest thing to family that he had left.

‘I am responsible for the murders of young women,’ Li said finally.

Lao Dai chuckled. ‘You are killing them yourself, I take it?’

‘I am failing to catch the man who is,’ Li said. ‘The longer I take, the more he will kill.’

Lao Dai sighed. ‘It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one. If you fill your mind with guilt for the actions of another, you will leave no room for the clear thinking you will need to catch him.’ He set off again along the path, and Li followed. ‘You had better tell me all about it,’ he said. And Li did. Everything from the first victim to the last, from the discovery of the Ripper book to the letter from the killer himself. Dai listened without comment. A faraway look glazed his eyes, and concern clouded the smile that usually lit them. ‘You have an enemy, Li Yan,’ he said at length.

Li was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families what else do all these murders have in common?’

Li thought about it for a moment, and then saw the old man’s reasoning. ‘The police,’ he said.

‘More specifically…’

‘Me?’

‘It was you he wrote to, was it not?’ He regarded Li with some sympathy. ‘By making a hero of you they have made you a target, Li Yan. Where once you were known to only a few, now you are known to all.’ And Li remembered Elvis’ words at the meeting: You’ve been splashed all over the papers ahead of this award thing tonight. You’re a hero. Dai added, ‘Their ignorance was your strength, now their knowledge is your weakness. Yifu would have been proud of you tonight, but he would also have opposed this award with all his might.’

‘But what possible motive…?’

Old Dai raised a hand to stop him. ‘Jealousy, revenge, any one of many twisted things. But you cannot know this, Li Yan. You cannot know who or why, not yet. It is too big a leap. Remember Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which was in truth a great fall back. Your knowledge is your strength. Take small steps and keep your balance. He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady. He who takes long strides will not maintain the pace.’ And Li realised that it was a philosophy Lao Dai applied to his own life, not just in metaphor, but in fact. Dai smiled. ‘You know what Yifu would have said?’

Li nodded. ‘The answer lies in the detail.’

They had reached the steps of the Muxidi subway. Lao Dai stopped and poked a finger in Li’s chest. ‘One step at a time, Li Yan. One small step at a time.’ And then he patted his arm. ‘I will see you tonight. I will be Yifu’s eyes and ears. I will be his pride.’ And he turned and headed carefully toward the escalator, one small step at a time.

III

Li Jon was sleeping and Margaret switched on a lamp by her chair. She could no longer read by the dying light of the day, although she had barely noticed it going. She was absorbed in the book. Both fascinated and horrified. All the autopsies she had performed over many years had led her to believe that she had witnessed the fullest extent of man’s inhumanity to man, or woman. But as she read Dr. Thomas Bond’s medical notes on the post-mortem he had helped perform on the Ripper’s most mutilated victim, the unfortunate Mary Jane Kelly, she realised that there was perhaps no limit, and that there would always be horrors worse than she could imagine.

Dr. Bond’s notes on what he found at the scene of the crime and during the subsequent post-mortem had only been discovered as recently as 1987. Margaret was fascinated by how close, procedurally, his descriptions were to the account she might have made herself more than a century after he had written them.

He laid bare the crime scene in cold, unemotional terms:

His post-mortem notes were even more chilling in their detail of the Ripper’s bestiality.

Margaret could visualise it all, and oddly it affected her more than if she had carried out the autopsy herself. Something about the act of exercising your professional expertise removed you, somehow, from the human horror of it all.

The Ripper had taken Mary Jane’s heart. It was not found at the scene of the crime and never recovered. Margaret knew that at least two of the Beijing victims had been missing body parts. She was not sufficiently familiar with any of the cases to make direct comparisons with the victims of Jack the Ripper. But she did know that the Beijing equivalent of the Mary Jane Kelly killing had not yet been committed, and it chilled her to the bone to think that such a fate awaited some poor innocent Chinese girl out there. A living being with hopes and aspirations destined to flounder on the blade of a maniac. Unless Li could stop him. The thought brought home to her just how much pressure he must be under. And with the thought came her frustration that there was nothing she could do to help.

Li turned off Changan Avenue into Zhengyi Road and headed south, the high grey brick wall on his right concealing from public view the compound of the Ministries of State and Public Security, once the home of the British Embassy. Shop windows shone in the dark beneath the trees, uniforms and the paraphernalia of the police exhibited behind plate glass. Batons and baseball caps, tear-gas and truncheons. And books on every subject under the sun, from police procedure to pornography in art. He passed the Shanghainese restaurant where he and Margaret sometimes ate, just a short walk from their apartment, and turned into the compound past the armed officer on sentry duty. He drew up outside the apartment block reserved for senior officers and glanced up to see a light shining from their veranda on the seventh floor.

Inside the main door, he stopped to empty the contents of his mail box. Bills and circulars. He slipped them into his jacket pocket and walked into the empty elevator. The door slid noisily shut and the metal box rattled its way slowly up seven floors. He tried to empty his mind, as Old Dai had counselled, but found any number of things jostling to fill it again. The murders, the award ceremony and, strangely, Mei Yuan’s riddle. He tried to recall it. Something about deaf mutes in a rice paddy. But his concentration was shot, and already it seemed like an eternity since she had told him it that morning. Was it really only that morning he had been called out to the murder of Guo Huan?

The doors of the elevator slid open and he slipped his key in the lock of the apartment. He found Margaret with her legs curled up below her on an armchair, her face buried in a book. The apartment was in darkness, apart from the lamp by her chair. He switched on the overhead light, and she blinked in its sad yellow glare.

‘Hi,’ she said. And he stooped to kiss her on the cheek, like a husband returning home at the end of a day at the office. And she waiting for him, like some suburban housewife, reading crime stories to fill the hours.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

‘Your Jack the Ripper book.’

He frowned. ‘In English?’

She laughed. ‘In what else? I found it at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Wangfujing.’

He heard the sound of distant alarm bells ringing somewhere in the back of his mind. ‘When was it published?’

She flipped through the pages to the front of the book. ‘About eighteen months ago.’

‘So it’s been available here, in English, for some time.’

‘Must have been. There were still a couple of copies on the shelf.’ She could see that wheels behind his eyes were turning. ‘Why? Is there something significant in that?’

‘Could be,’ Li said. ‘The Chinese translation was only published a week ago. So if the killer is using this book as his blueprint he must be an English speaker.’

‘Or a foreigner,’ Margaret said. And Li recalled Elvis commenting on the Chinese content of the Ripper letter. Nobody would write Chinese like this. And Qian’s words, Unless maybe he was a foreigner. But it was clear that the strange Chinese was just a translation from arcane nineteenth-century English. The killer had lifted the translation from the book. Li’s mind froze on that thought. He couldn’t have. If he was working from the English original he would have had to make the translation himself. Then how did it come to be an exact match for the translation in the Chinese version of the book? No two translations would be exactly the same. He took out his cellphone and began dialling.

‘What is it?’ Margaret asked. But all he did was lift a finger to silence her.

‘Elvis, it’s the Chief. Get on to the Chinese publisher of the Ripper book and find out who translated it. As much background on him as you can.’

‘Chief,’ Elvis’ voice came back at him. ‘There’s a paragraph on the flyleaf about the translator. And he’s a she. Lives in Hong Kong.’ A pause. ‘You still want me to contact the publisher?’

‘No. No,’ Li said. ‘Forget it.’ And he flipped his phone shut. It was inconceivable that the killer was a woman. And Hong Kong was a little far to commute for murder.

Margaret was still watching him. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ she asked.

He said, ‘I received a letter this afternoon from the killer. It was, word for word, the original Jack the Ripper letter. But, of course, it was in Chinese. Character for character the same as the translation in the Chinese version of the Ripper book.’

Margaret immediately saw his problem. ‘So you’re thinking, if he’s been working from the English version, how did he manage to produce the same translation as the Chinese one.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, that’s easy.’

‘Is it?’

‘Sure. He only sent the letter today, right? Or yesterday.’ Li nodded. ‘So if the Chinese version has been out for a week…’ She didn’t even have to finish.

Li sighed his frustration. ‘I’m not even thinking straight any more,’ he said. Why had he not seen that for himself? He was blinding himself with guilt and pressure, failing to find the logic in the detail. Old Dai was right. It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one, he had said. If you fill your mind with guilt for the actions of another, you will leave no room for the clear thinking you will need to catch him.

Margaret’s voice, laden with sympathy, tumbled softly into his thoughts and startled him. ‘Li Yan, you’ve got to be at the Great Hall in under an hour.’

‘Shit!’ He looked at his watch. ‘I have to shower and change.’ He hurried through to the bathroom, divesting himself of clothes as he went. Margaret followed behind picking them up. ‘When’s Mei Yuan coming?’ he called over his shoulder.

‘She’ll be here any time.’

He stepped into the shower and under a jet of hot steaming water. Margaret stood watching him through the misting glass. He was a fit, powerful man, tall for a Chinese, over six feet, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had a swimmer’s thighs and calves. The hot water ran in rivulets over firm, toned muscles, and she wanted just to step in beside him and make love to him there and then, with the thought of Mei Yuan due to arrive at any moment, and Li Jon asleep through the wall. A moment snatched. A sense of urgency, like there had once been always in their lovemaking. But she knew the moment would not have been right for him. So she stood, holding his discarded clothes and watching the shape of him blur in the steam as it condensed on the glass.

He called out, eyes shut against the foaming shampoo, ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘What did you learn from the book?’

‘That nineteenth-century London cops were either incompetent or stupid.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Li Yan, they let people sluice away blood and other evidence from crime scenes. Mortuary assistants washed down bodies before the pathologists carried out their autopsies. Vital evidence literally flushed down the drain.’ She had been horrified as she read. ‘After the night of the double murder, they found some graffiti chalked on the entrance to tenement dwellings, alongside a bloody scrap of skirt from one of the victims. Before they could even photograph it, the police commissioner insisted that it be washed off.’

‘What!’ Li couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Why?’

‘Good question,’ Margaret said. ‘One I’d have loved to have asked him.’

‘But he must have had a good reason.’

‘Oh, he gave a reason, but it wasn’t a good one. He said he was afraid that the graffiti would spark anti-Semitic riots.’

‘Why?’

Apparently the Ripper had made some kind of allusion to the Jews, as if a Jew might be responsible for the killings. There was a large immigrant Jewish population in the east end of London at that time, and the commissioner said he feared that the locals would turn against them.

‘But that’s absurd! If it was a real concern, all they had to do was cover it up under police guard until it was properly examined and photographed.’

‘You might think that. And I might agree with you. But apparently that never occurred to him. And for a man who ultimately lost his job through his failure to catch the Ripper, destroying what might have been very crucial evidence was a very strange thing to do.’

Li turned off the water and pushed open the shower door. He stood dripping wet and naked, quite unself-conscious. ‘And he was the police commissioner?’

‘Sir Charles Warren. Commissioner of the metropolitan police.’ She eyed him lustfully and took hold of him with her free hand, feeling him swelling in her grasp from an immediate rush of blood. ‘If we didn’t have to be out of here in the next twenty minutes…’

He grinned. ‘Twenty minutes, huh? I suppose I could always try to speed things up.’

She squeezed him hard, making him flinch. ‘I should be so lucky.’

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her softly, and then parted her lips with his tongue and sought hers. Li Jon started crying in the next room. He dropped his forehead on to her shoulder.

‘Shit,’ she hissed. And the buzzer sounded at the door. She pushed his clothes into his wet arms and said, ‘You’d better get dressed fast. I’ll let Mei Yuan in.’ As he danced naked through the hall toward their bedroom she shouted after him, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re having dinner tomorrow night with the Harts — if you can tear yourself away from the office for once.’

IV

The Great Hall of the People had played host to some of the fiercest political struggles in modern Chinese history. Built by Mao in the 1950s after the creation of the Republic, it stood along the west side of Tiananmen Square, facing east toward the Museum of Chinese History and had been witness to the bloody events of 1989, when students demanding democracy were crushed under the wheels of army tanks. An event that had catapulted the Middle Kingdom headlong into such radical change it had produced not democracy, but instead the fastest growing economy in the world.

It was an impressive building, three hundred metres long, its three-storey façade supported by tall marble columns. Along with all the other buildings around the square, it was floodlit. The whole of central Beijing, it seemed, was floodlit, obliterating the stars that shone beyond the light in a clear, black sky overhead.

It took Li and Margaret just fifteen minutes to walk in the cold to the Great Hall from their apartment, along Qianmen Dong Da Jie and up through Tiananmen from the south end, past Mao’s mausoleum. Margaret had queued once to see the great man lying preserved in his coffin beneath a glass dome and came away convinced that all she had witnessed was a wax effigy.

She held Li’s arm and felt his warmth and strength even through the thickness of his coat. Beneath it he wore his dress uniform, and he cut an impressive figure as he strode across the pavings of the huge square. She was proud of him, even though she knew he was opposed to this award and dreading the ceremony.

There were streams of cars dropping people off on the corner of Renminda Hutong Xilu, where they were entering the gardens in front of the hall through turnstile gates. Guests of honour strolled across the vast, paved concourse and stood chatting in groups on the steps beneath the pillars. Margaret felt a small frisson of excitement. The Great Hall of the People was a piece of history, and she was about to enter it with the man who would be centre stage in its auditorium. ‘How many people are going to be here?’ she asked. She had not expected so many cars.

‘It will be full,’ Li said.

‘How many is that?’

‘Ten thousand.’

‘Ten thousand!’ It seemed inconceivable. ‘Who are they all?’

‘Invited guests,’ Li said with a tone, and Margaret felt his tension.

‘It must be some size of auditorium.’

‘It’s on three levels,’ he said. ‘Sixty metres wide, seventy metres from stage to back, and forty metres high.’ Figures that had been dinned into him in primary school. ‘And there are no pillars.’ The coup de grâce. His teacher’s eyes had shone with wonder as she told them. Li doubted if she had ever actually seen it for herself — a hick teacher from a primary school in rural Sichuan. He had later seen her beaten to death by Red Guards.

They crossed the concourse, and Li flashed his ID to the guard on duty, who immediately saluted and lifted the chain to let them through. On the steps they were greeted by Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Cao, who were standing smoking in the cold night air, accompanied by their respective wives. Zhu glanced at his watch and said, ‘You’re late.’ He made no introductions and ignored Margaret. ‘They’re waiting for you.’ He took Li by the elbow and steered him away up the stairs.

Li called back to Margaret, ‘I’ll see you after the ceremony.’

She nodded, smiled politely at Cao and the two women. ‘Ni hau,’ she said, and made her way up through the pillars to the main entrance, conscious of their silence and of their eyes on her back.

Inside, she had to put her purse through an airport-style x-ray security machine and walk through a frame that scanned her for…she had no idea what. Metal objects, she supposed. Guns or knives. As if she might be intent on attacking the father of her child. Through another doorway and she was into the main lobby, a huge marbled hall, overlooked by a balcony that ran all the way around it. Stairs led up to it from either end. Tall wooden double doors along the entire length of the central hall, on both levels, led into the auditorium itself. There were already thousands of people thronging the floor, the echo of their voices thundering back at them from a ceiling you could hardly see, enormous chandeliers casting yellow light on a sea of black heads. Margaret felt at once conspicuous, anonymous and lost, aware of her fair hair and blue eyes drawing curious looks. Most of the guests would not have expected to have encountered a yangguizi on an occasion like this. She felt a tug on her arm, and turned to find a young Chinese girl grinning up at her.

‘Magret,’ Xinxin said. Li’s niece was nearly ten now and almost up to Margaret’s shoulder. Although her English was excellent, she still pronounced Margaret’s name the way she had when they had first met and the child had no English at all.

‘Xinxin!’ Margaret was both pleased and relieved to see her. She stooped to kiss her and give her a hug, and then looked around. ‘Where’s your mother? And your grandfather?’

By way of reply, Xinxin took her hand — which still felt very small in hers — and said, ‘You come with me, Magret. We are invited to reception for guest of honour.’ And she glowed with obvious pride and pleasure at the thought that her Uncle Yan was the guest of honour.

The child led the adult confidently through the crowds to the north end of the hall and up a staircase at the far corner to the pillared balcony above. They hurried then across thick red carpet, past open doors leading to a huge overlit room with chairs set in a circle below a wall displaying a vast aerial photograph of the Forbidden City. ‘That Beijing Room,’ Xinxin said. ‘There is one room for every province in Great Hall. Even one for Taiwan, for when she come back to China.’ She grinned as if she understood the politics of it.

Margaret couldn’t resist a smile. ‘How do you know all this, little one?’

‘I come here on tour with school,’ she said. ‘All school visit Great Hall of People.’

Almost opposite the Beijing Hall, an enormous doorway led to the reception room, already crowded with dignitaries. There were high-ranking police officers and government ministers. Faces Margaret had only ever seen in newspapers or on television screens. She also saw some more familiar faces. Detectives from Li’s section. Qian and Wu and a few others whose names she could not recall. Glasses filled with champagne and orange juice were set out on a long table beneath a twenty-foot mural of a Chinese mountainscape illuminated by a rising sun. Most of the guests were drinking champagne.

Li’s sister, Xiao Ling, and his father stood uncomfortably on the edge of the gathering, clutching glasses of orange juice. They did not belong here and they knew it. A retired teacher living in an old folks’ home in Sichuan and a worker on the production line of the Beijing Jeep factory. Li’s father had made the trip specially to see his son. There had always been difficulties between them, but his father could not bring himself to miss such a moment. He was staying with his daughter and granddaughter during his visit.

Xiao Ling shook Margaret’s hand rather formally. She did not speak English, and she and Margaret had never really hit it off. Neither did Margaret get on with Li’s father, who regarded their relationship as ‘unfortunate’. He would have preferred that Li had found a Chinese girl to father his son. He, too, shook Margaret’s hand. ‘I will come tomorrow to see my grandson,’ he said. ‘With your permission.’ As if she might have refused it.

‘Of course,’ Margaret said.

‘In the afternoon,’ he added.

‘Magret, Magret,’ Xinxin clamoured for her attention. ‘You want drink?’

‘Champagne,’ Margaret said quickly. She needed a drink.

Xinxin came back with champagne for Margaret and an orange juice for herself. Margaret took a couple of quick swallows, and felt the bubbles carry the alcohol almost immediately into her bloodstream. She could do with a few of these, she thought.

‘Perhaps I might be allowed a glass. It is not often that I have had the chance to drink champagne.’ The voice at Margaret’s side startled her, and she turned to find Lao Dai standing by her shoulder. He was wearing a thick blue jacket over a knitted jumper, baggy trousers and scuffed leather shoes. A navy blue baseball cap was pulled down over his bald head. She had met him for the first time only after Yifu’s death, and they had struck up an immediate rapport. He took her hand warmly in both of his and held it for a moment. ‘How are you, Margaret?’ His English was almost perfect.

‘I am well, Mr. Dai,’ she said. And she turned to Xinxin. ‘Xinxin, could you get a glass of champagne for Mr. Dai?’ Xinxin skipped off, happy to have an errand to run, and Margaret turned back to the old man. ‘And you?’

‘Oh, as always,’ he said. He shook hands, then, with Xiao Ling and Li’s father, and they had a brief exchange in Chinese which, to Margaret’s surprise, brought uncharacteristic laughter to their lips.

‘What’s so funny?’ Margaret asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Dai said. ‘I told them I shouldn’t drink too much champagne or Li Yan would have to arrest me for being drunk in charge of a bicycle.’ His eyes twinkled mischievously. Xinxin returned with his champagne and he raised his glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and took a long draught of it, putting the back of his hand to his lips as he then broke wind. One or two faces turned and scowled in their direction. But Lao Dai just lifted his glass and grinned, displaying broken and discoloured teeth, and they turned quickly away again. ‘Stuffed shirts,’ the old man whispered conspiratorially to Margaret. ‘In my day you succeeded on merit. Nowadays it’s down to brown-nosing and politics.’ He took another quaff of his champagne. ‘Li Yan is jade among stones.’

A sprinkling of applause drew their attention, and Margaret craned to see Li Yan being led up a broad staircase to the reception room by the minister of public security, flanked by his deputy and the commissioner of police. Trailing behind were Deputy Cao and all the wives. Margaret should have been there among them. But she and Li Yan were not married, and she was not Chinese. She would be bad for the image of the poster boy.

The crowd parted, like the Red Sea, to let Li and the entourage through to the champagne. The minister raised his glass and proposed what Margaret took to be a toast. She heard Li Yan’s name, and along with the others she raised her glass and repeated it. The minister then made a short speech to which everyone listened attentively.

‘What’s he saying?’ Margaret whispered to Dai.

‘Oh, he’s just talking the usual shit,’ said the old man.

Applause marked the end of the speech, and the leading entourage and guests of honour started to make their way through to the auditorium. Lao Dai took Margaret’s arm to steady himself, and Xinxin held her hand, and they followed the crowd downstairs and into the first level of the auditorium where nearly four thousand people were already seated. There were another three thousand on the second floor, and more than two thousand on the top.

The stage was vast, each side draped with long red flags. Margaret, Dai and Li’s family took seats reserved for honoured guests near the front and found themselves almost on a level with the stage. The lights dimmed and there was a fanfare of martial-sounding music, and a visual presentation began, projected on to a large screen disclosed by a rising curtain. There was a voice-over commentary, images of police officers at work: in offices and cars, catching criminals, giving evidence in court. Some flickering archive footage showed early police officers in green army uniform performing military-style drill outside a police station. The film cut to a modern police station with a well-equipped gymnasium and basketball court, and showed smartly dressed officers in their new black uniforms standing cheering a police football team. Then there was news footage of Li Yan leading a man in handcuffs out of an impressive-looking building. Margaret recognised the man as the former deputy mayor of Beijing whom Li had arrested for fraud and corruption. It had been one of the most high profile cases of the last few years. The deputy mayor had been found guilty and sentenced to death, which would mean a bullet in the back of the head. He was currently awaiting the outcome of an appeal that would reduce his sentence to life imprisonment if successful.

The music soared and swooped, switching from martial to classical and back again. It ended as suddenly as it began and everyone dutifully clapped. A curtain fell, and an officer in uniform walked out to a microphone in centre stage and made a short speech. ‘More shit,’ Dai whispered to Margaret, and then the Minister of Public Security walked out to thunderous applause. As the applause died away, he took out a sheaf of notes from an inside pocket and embarked on a speech which lasted nearly fifteen minutes. The Chinese were fond of making speeches. Margaret looked at Dai, but he just shook his head. ‘You don’t even want to know,’ he said.

Margaret looked about her and saw TV cameras strategically placed around the hall, recording the entire ceremony. It was probably going out live on one of the China Central TV stations. A phalanx of press and official photographers was clustered around the front of the stage, cameras flashing. Most of the invited guests would be police officers and their families, she thought, or people employed directly or indirectly by the Ministry — a strange brotherhood to which police everywhere seemed to belong.

The minister finished his speech, to more applause. An elaborate table draped in red silk had appeared from somewhere — Margaret had not seen it brought on — displaying a wooden shield bearing the red, blue and gold crest of the Ministry of Public Security. The police badge. Beijing Police Commissioner Zhu walked on to shake the Minister’s hand and take up a position in front of the microphone. His rimless glasses caught and reflected the light, and you could not see his eyes. It made him appear oddly sinister, tall and thin and sightless. He waved a hand toward the shield and began speaking.

Dai whispered, ‘He’s talking about Li, now.’ He listened for a bit and then said, ‘He does not much like our young friend.’

‘You mean, Li?’

Dai nodded. ‘He is full of praise. Noisy praise, like a drum with nothing inside it. He says only good things of Li Yan. His tone is honeyed, but there is vinegar on his tongue.’

Margaret glanced around. If Commissioner Zhu’s words were having that effect on other members of the audience there was nothing in their faces to show it. The Minister beamed happily at the commissioner’s side, and Margaret wondered if perhaps Lao Dai was reading more into the speech than was intended. And yet she knew that he was a clever man, experienced and perceptive. It gave her cause for disquiet.

Dai said, ‘I knew him when he was a rookie cop and I was section chief. I didn’t trust him then. Look at his face. There is the weasel in it.’ And there was, indeed, something weasely about his face, Margaret thought. He was not the usual pan-faced Chinese. He had a weak, receding jaw, and a forehead that sloped steeply back from his brow. ‘He is like a bellows. Empty when at rest, and full of air when set in motion.’ Dai chuckled. ‘In his case, hot air.’

Zhu finished his speech, and with a flourish stood aside, extending his arm toward the wings to welcome Li on stage. As Li walked briskly to the table to accept his award, he received a standing ovation, almost as if the guests had been briefed. As she herself stood, Margaret wondered if it had been stipulated on their invitation cards. Li took the shield from the minister, shaking hands with both men. So many cameras flashed, the stage was transformed into something like a scene from an old black-and-white movie, too few frames making the picture flicker and jerk and run too fast. The papers would be full of it tomorrow, and there would be plenty of images to choose from for the hoardings around the city.

Li cleared his throat as he approached the microphone, but spoke in a strong, clear voice.

‘Do you want to know what he is saying?’ Dai whispered.

Margaret shook her head. She had schooled him in his speech, persuaded him to reduce it from more than ten minutes to a little over three. She knew it by heart. His acceptance of the award not for himself, but on behalf of all his fellow officers. The need for the police in China to move forward, embracing new ideas and new technology to fight the rising wave of crime that was coming with increased prosperity.

His speech was met with yet another standing ovation, and Li walked off with the others as the curtain came down to a loud reprise of the martial music which had kicked off the whole proceeding.

‘Well, thank God that’s over,’ Margaret said. ‘Where’s the food?’

Old Dai grinned. ‘In the Sichuan Room,’ he said.

The Sichuan Room was at the bottom of a flight of stairs, beyond the empty and forlorn-looking Taiwan Room. It was clad entirely in white marble, pillars, walls and floor, beyond a huge tapestry of a Sichuan forest scene. Tables for a banquet were set out on a pale Chinese carpet. Ten tables, ten to a table. Only special invitees were to be fed in the company of the principal guest of honour. A four-man troupe of Sichuan folk musicians played discreetly at the far end of the room.

Li Yan’s family and Lao Dai were escorted to a table near the door. To her surprise, Margaret found herself being seated at the same table as Li, along with the minister and his deputy, the commissioner and his deputy, and their wives. She leaned toward him and said in a stage whisper. ‘How did you manage this?’

The minister said in impeccable English, ‘He told us that if he couldn’t have you at our table, he would take you for a McDonald’s instead.’ There was no trace of a smile as he spoke, but something in his eyes told Margaret he was not as po-faced as he appeared.

There was a ripple of uneasy laughter around the table.

‘Personally, I prefer Tony Roma’s,’ Margaret said. ‘Or the Hard Rock Café—they do good burgers. But I guess I’ll just have to make do with this instead.’

No one seemed certain whether she was being funny, or just rude, and her response was met with an uneasy silence. Li looked embarrassed.

‘It’s a joke,’ Margaret said. ‘I love Sichuan food.’ And she waved a hand in front of her mouth and blew. ‘Hot!’

‘You like spicy food, then?’ Deputy Cao said languidly.

‘Sure.’

‘Personally, I think Sichuan cuisine lacks something in subtlety and sophistication. All that chili only there to disguise poor quality of meat.’

‘What is your taste, then, Deputy Cao?’ the Minister asked him.

‘He likes hotpot,’ his wife said. She was a small, wiry woman, with short, bobbed hair the colour of steel. She looked uncomfortable in a black evening gown.

‘Ah, yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Invented by the Mongols, wasn’t it? Water boiled up in their helmets over an open fire to cook chunks of mutton hacked off the sheep.’

‘So?’ Deputy Cao said, a hint of defensiveness in his voice.

The minister laughed. ‘I think Ms Campbell is implying that hotpot is not quite the height of sophisticated eating either.’

Cao shrugged dismissively. ‘Well, that is rich coming from American. Not a country exactly famous for its cuisine.’ He lit a cigarette.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Margaret said breezily. ‘There are a hell of a lot more McDonalds’ around the world than there are hotpot restaurants.’

Even Commissioner Zhu, silent until now, cracked a smile. ‘She might have a point there, Cao.’ Margaret looked at him carefully, and saw more clearly the weasel in him that Lao Dai had pointed out.

‘Only the young in China eat burger,’ Cao said. ‘With age come wisdom. People eat hotpot for thousands of year. In a hundred year they will still be eating hotpot. I wonder how many McDonald’s restaurants there will be.’

‘So you don’t approve of American culture, then?’ Margaret said.

‘It is short-lived and worthless,’ replied Cao.

‘Is that why you smoke American cigarettes?’ Margaret nodded toward his pack of Phillip Morris lying on the table. ‘So your life will be equally short-lived and worthless.’

There was a moment’s dangerous silence, before the minister guffawed. ‘I think you’ve finally met your match, Cao,’ he said.

Margaret caught Li’s eye, and felt pierced by the cold steel of his silent disapproval. She turned her most charming smile on the deputy commissioner and said, ‘Actually, I’m only joking, Deputy Cao. I love hotpot, too.’ And she turned the same smile back on Li, as if to say, You see, you can take me places without getting a red face.

Through all the hubbub of voices in the Sichuan Room, above the sound of crockery as waiters brought food to tables, came the unmistakable warble of a cellphone. Deputy Minister Wei Peng tutted his disapproval. ‘Some people have no sense of propriety,’ he said. But within half a minute, the individual lacking that sense of propriety revealed himself to be Deputy Section Chief Qian. He was clearly embarrassed to interrupt proceedings at Li’s table, but determined nonetheless. His face was drained of colour.

‘Please accept my apologies for the interruption, Minister,’ he said, and then turned to Li. ‘I’m sorry, Chief, there’s been another murder.’

Qian’s words struck him with the force of a fist in the solar plexus. He almost physically winced. ‘There can’t have been,’ he said.

Qian shrugged. ‘Girl found dead. Strangled. Throat cut. Pathologist Wang seems to think it’s our man again.’

‘But that’s not how it’s supposed to be…’ Li had been so sure that the killer would stick to his mentor’s script. He felt sick. He had taken his eye off the case, relaxed for just a moment. And a girl had died. He stood up. ‘Gentlemen, ladies. I’m sorry, I have to go.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Li,’ Commissioner Zhu said sharply. ‘You have a whole section of detectives to handle something like this. You can’t walk out on your own banquet.’ He glanced with some embarrassment toward the minister. But the minister remained silent.

Deputy Cao said, ‘Oh, let him go. He hasn’t learned yet that the art of management is delegation. He thinks he’s so good that no one else can do it better. Isn’t that right, Li?’

Li calmly folded his napkin and laid it on the table. ‘Excuse me,’ was all he said, and he headed off through the tables with Qian to where Wu and several others were waiting for them at the door. Animated conversation became suddenly hushed at the sight of the guest of honour leaving the banquet.

‘Well,’ Margaret said brightly, breaking the tense silence around the table. ‘We’d better nominate someone else to toast or we’ll never get a drink tonight.’

I

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and Changan Avenue as far as you could see east and west were bathed in white and blue and green and pink light. The red taillights of cars and buses and taxis shimmered off into the distance in long lines of sluggish traffic. Qian wound down the window and clamped a blue-flashing magnetic light on the roof of the Jeep, then dropped down a gear and accelerated across six lanes of vehicles to head west.

‘Where are you going?’ Li swivelled in surprise in the passenger seat.

‘She was found at the Millennium Monument, Chief.’ Qian glanced across at him. Wu and Detective Sang sat mute in the back seat.

Li felt something close to relief. ‘It can’t have been the Ripper, then.’ Tagging the Beijing killer as the ‘Ripper’ had been completely unconscious.

‘Why?’

‘Because all the other murders have been in the same area of Jianguomen. Just like Jack the Ripper killed all his victims in the same square mile of London.’ He knew it hadn’t felt right. ‘And today’s Monday. He’s only ever killed at the weekend. And, anyway, his next victim’s not due for another six weeks.’

Wu leaned forward and said, ‘Everything else fits, though, Chief. The strangulation, the cutting of the throat…’ He chewed furiously on his gum. ‘And I was really looking forward to that banquet, too.’

They turned off Fuxing Avenue after Sanlihi Road, heading north and then west again, drifting past the floodlit Ministry of Defence building in its restricted military zone, and next to it the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, the centrepiece of which rose in three tiers to a spire topped by a star in a circle. To their right, Yuyuantan Park lay brooding in darkness, west of the canal where only hours earlier Li and Lao Dai had discussed the murders in the last light of the day. They were less than a mile from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A Daliesque melting clock above the gate to the Millennium Park told them that it was nearly nine-thirty. Towering above it, the Millennium Monument was a huge rotating stone sundial at the top of a broad sweep of steps leading to a circular terrace. The dial was casting its shadows in several conflicting directions, confused by the floodlights now illuminating the crime scene at its base. Its arm was pointing due south, down the length of Yangfangdian Lu to the floodlit spectre of the Beijing West Railway station some two kilometres away. The lights of the » blocks that lined the avenue, reflected on the 270-metre-long waterway, beneath which five thousand years of Chinese history was carved in bronze plates. It was an impressive vista. And for some poor girl, Li reflected as he pushed through the gate, her last sight on earth. Police and forensics vehicles were pulled into the kerbside at odd angles, and a group of uniformed officers stood stamping and smoking on the causeway just inside the gate. This was not an area dense in housing or nightlife, so only a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered. The uniforms saluted as Li and the other detectives from Section One arrived. There was a young, grey-uniformed security guard among them. Beneath a black-peaked cap, he had a fresh face reddened by the icy wind. He wore leather boots and a long grey greatcoat, its black collar pulled up around his cheeks, a red band with yellow characters wound around his left arm. Li stopped and asked him, ‘When does this place normally get locked up?’

‘By six o’clock, Chief,’ the security guard said. ‘Or whenever it gets dark. Whichever comes first. We always clear people out when the light starts to go.’ He shuffled his feet and slapped leather-clad gloves together to keep his hands warm.

‘What time did you close the gates tonight?’

‘It was about half past five.’

‘Did you check to see if there was anyone still inside?’

‘No, Chief. People are always in a big hurry to get out when we start closing up. No one would want to get locked in.’

Li looked at the railing. It was only about a metre high. Easy enough for anyone to get in or out, whether the gate was locked or not. He nodded. ‘Where’s the body?’

One of the uniforms pointed. ‘Right up the top, Chief, behind the arm of the dial.’

‘How on earth did anyone find it up there after the place was closed up?’

‘It was me, Chief.’ It was the young security guard again. His lips were almost blue with the cold. ‘We do shifts here. Check round the perimeter once every hour or so.’

‘Why?’ Li couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to guard an empty park.

‘There’s a lot of valuable stuff in the museum, Chief.’

‘Okay. Go on.’

‘Well, I checked back here about eight o’clock this evening. That’s when I saw the blood.’ He waved his hand toward where a section of the concourse and the railing had been taped off. Li walked toward it and the security guard followed, stamping his feet. ‘I wasn’t sure what it was at first. I thought maybe it was paint. I don’t know, some kind of vandalism. But I quickly figured out it was blood.’ He fumbled with his gloves to take out and light a cigarette. As an afterthought, he offered one to Li. Li shook his head.

A trail of blood led from the foot of the steps to the railing, where it was smeared all over the chrome. Someone covered in quite a lot of it had clearly clambered over the railing and onto the sidewalk. Li followed the trail with his eyes, but it stopped at the side of the road after four or five metres. Perhaps the killer had got into a car parked there. After all, he could hardly have wandered the streets covered in blood without attracting some attention.

Li said, ‘You say you check the perimeter every hour. So you didn’t see any blood here at seven?’

There was a moment’s hesitation before the security guard said, ‘No, Chief.’

Li fixed him with a steady gaze. ‘I don’t want any bullshit, son. It’s important for establishing time of death.’ He paused. ‘You didn’t check the perimeter at seven, did you?’

Li could almost see the blood draining from the boy’s face.

‘No, Chief.’ He shrugged, trying to dismiss his confession as if it were nothing. ‘When it’s cold like this…well, sometimes it’s more than an hour.’

Li said, ‘I don’t care why, I just want the facts. You weren’t here between locking up at five-thirty and checking the perimeter at eight, is that right.’

The boy nodded and couldn’t meet Li’s eye. ‘Yes, Chief.’

So the girl had been killed sometime in that two-and-a-half-hour window. ‘And you followed the blood up the steps?’

The guard nodded, anxious to make up for his shortcomings. ‘Yes, Chief. There’s a lot more of it up there. It led me right to her. She’s lying at the base of the arm, behind it, about three steps down from the top.’

‘You didn’t touch her?’

‘I did not.’ The boy seemed to shudder at the thought. ‘You could see her throat had been cut. There was a big pool of blood under her head. I could see in the beam of my flashlight that it was already drying. There’s no way she was still alive.’

Li flicked his head at Wu. ‘Get a statement off him. Anything he can remember out of the ordinary before he locked up. Anyone unusual. Just anyone he can remember at all.’ He nodded to Qian and Sang and they started the long climb up the steps. Off to their left, lights blazed in the windows of the China Central TV Media Centre, and Li thought that it probably wouldn’t be long before they woke up to the fact that there was a murder on their doorstep. If this had been the United States, he knew, the street would already be jammed with TV trucks and satellite dishes and newsmen clamouring for information. He wondered how long it would be before China went that way, too. It was not a prospect he relished, and he had to wonder at the apparently limitless appetite of the media and the public for the gory details of man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Perhaps if they had witnessed some of what he had seen, that appetite might be somewhat diminished.

About two-thirds of the way up, the entrance to the museum was railed off in darkness, and by the time they reached the circle of the dial, immediately below the long, tapering arm that reached into the night sky, all three detectives were puffing for air. What breath they had left was whipped from their mouths by the wind that blew fiercely up here, bitter and cutting. Flights of steps rising past either side of the circle led right to the top, where a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep of chrome railing gave on to an extraordinary view of the city skyline to the north, all the way to the Mountain of Heavenly Longevity and the Yanshan and Taihang mountain ranges. The same TV tower he had looked at catching the sun that afternoon from the windows of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was now a silver-lit arrow against the black of the sky.

A cluster of figures was gathered around the base of the sundial arm. Lights on stands rattled and shook in the ferocity of the wind. The tape that marked off the trail of blood all the way up from the causeway below was in danger of blowing away. Frail stands shifted and scraped across the concrete. Forensics men in Tyvek suits, like ghosts, combed the steps for evidence traces. A small group of men crouched around the body. As Li and the others approached, Elvis stood up, his quiff flying about his head, ruined by the wind. They had to shout to make themselves heard above the noise of it.

‘Who is she?’ Li shouted.

‘Don’t know, Chief. We haven’t moved the body yet. And there doesn’t seem to be a purse. The pathologist’s still examining her.’ His scarf flapped into his mouth and he had to pull it free. ‘But it’s the same MO. Strangled, but not dead when he cut the throat. Which is why there’s so much blood. Left to right, same as always.’

Wang stood up behind Elvis and turned to see Li standing there. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The hero’s return. I thought you were busy banqueting tonight.’

‘I lost my appetite.’

‘I’m not surprised. Though this one’s not quite as messy.’

‘What makes you think it’s the same killer?’

‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt, Chief. I read the note you got this afternoon.’ He jerked his head over his shoulder toward the body lying behind him. ‘He’s cut off her ears. Just like he said he would.’

Li was stunned. ‘You’re kidding.’

Wang shrugged. ‘That’s all, though. Apart from cutting her throat, he’s left the rest of her intact. One thing different — he made a bit of a mess of it this time. Severed both carotids and got blood all over himself. You’d better take a look.’

He moved aside and Li took a step down into the light to look at the body. She was wearing a long, dark coat buttoned up to above the breast. There were calfskin gloves on her hands, which lay open at her sides. Her legs were twisted sideways beneath the coat, one lying across the other, and Li could see the bottom of her dark pinstriped trousers above chunky-heeled shoes. The gash in her neck was semicircular and very deep, like a wide, dark smile. Her head was lying at an angle, to the left side, but because the hair was cut so short, the gash on the right side of her head where her ear had been was only too apparent. Li was in shock, and it was several moments before he was able to consciously reason why. He put out a hand and found Qian’s arm to steady himself.

‘Chief, are you okay?’ The concern in his deputy’s voice was clear, even although he was having to shout.

She had been so full of life, and charm and charisma. A smile that would have broken most men’s hearts. Doe-eyes that looked so deeply into yours you felt almost naked.

‘He’s broken the pattern in more ways than one,’ Li said, but too quietly for Qian to hear.

‘What’s that?’

Li turned toward him. ‘She’s no prostitute, Qian.’

Qian was amazed. ‘You know her?’

Li nodded. ‘I met her this afternoon. She’s a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.’

He looked back at her fine features spattered with blood. Open eyes staring into oblivion, lips slightly parted, the delicate line of her jaw tracing a shadow to the bloody hole in the side of her head. Short hair gelled into spikes, and he remembered with a dreadful sense of guilt that last look she had given him. What had seemed, unaccountably, like an appeal for help. To which he had failed to respond.

He turned away, filled with confusion and guilt. Lynn Pan lay dead beneath the Millennium Monument, and he knew that somehow it was his fault.

‘Hey, Chief…’ It was one of the forensic ghosts. He was holding up a clear plastic evidence bag, and had to grab the bottom end of it to stop it flapping about in the wind. ‘It’s him, okay.’ And Li saw, in the bag, the unsmoked end of a brown Russian cheroot.

Li looked at the footprints in the blood, and the trail of it leading away down the steps. The force of it spurting from the severed arteries must have taken the killer by surprise. Maybe he thought she was already dead. He must have been covered in the stuff. It looked, too, as if he had lost his footing, stumbling through the blood pooling around the head. Perhaps removing the ears had been more difficult than he had anticipated. And yet it was all so uncharacteristic of the cold, calculated butchery practised upon the other victims. Then he had worked to a plan and a pattern, paying homage to his nineteenth-century English hero.

This just didn’t fit. The victim was not a prostitute, nor did she correspond to any of the Ripper murders. She had been killed on the other side of town. It was a weekday. The execution had been clumsy, almost slapdash. And yet, there was the note. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off. And the telltale Russian cheroot.

Li gazed down on the dead girl’s face and ached for her. He remembered her touch, her fingers on his scalp as she adjusted the headset for the MERMER test, her small breasts pressing against her blouse, just inches from his face. The smell of her, sweet and musky. And here she lay, icy cold, all animation gone forever, rigor mortis already setting in.

He couldn’t bear it any longer and turned away, climbing the three steps to the chrome rail, the city spreading out below him, thirteen million people going about their lives, unaware that one of the herd lay dead at the foot of this monument to the new millennium. Unaware that some monster lived among them, to all intents and purposes one of them. And how would they know him? For he had no horns, no forked tail. He would look just like them. Perhaps he had a family. A wife, children. And Li remembered thinking that someone knew who he was. That you could not return home after an orgy of killing without taking some of the blood of it with you. Someone knew who that monster was. Someone had looked into his eyes and been privy to their own private view of hell.

The crescent moon had risen higher in the sky now, and in what little light it cast, Li could see, on the distant horizon, the faint shadow of the mountains across whose contours the Great Wall followed its tortuous route. It might once have kept the marauding hordes from the north at bay, but in this twenty-first century, it had failed to keep out the evil that stalked their streets at night. The wind battered his face, stinging cold and taking his breath away, and it was to the wind he attributed the tears that filled his eyes. He pushed himself away from the rail, wiping his face with the back of his hand and found his deputy standing nearby, watching him. ‘I need a drink, Qian,’ he said. And they started off down the steps together. Five thousand years of history carved in bronze stretched away below them. How many lives had come and gone in all that time? What did one more, or less, matter?

But it did.

They left Wu and Sang and Elvis at the scene to take statements and put the investigation in motion. Qian drove Li to Sanlitun Lu, more commonly known as Bar Street. It was where Guo Huan’s mother had believed her daughter was working as a barmaid. A fifteen-foot plastic beer tankard overflowing with foam stood on the corner of Sanlitun and Gongren Tiyuchang Dong Lu. A bored-looking girl sat behind a window in it selling time on a public phone. They turned north, and the street ahead was ablaze with neon and fairylights. Touts in suits wandered the pavements trying to persuade passers-by that the bar that paid their wages was the best. Qian parked by the kerbside railing about halfway up, and they crossed the road to the Lan Kwai Fang Bar at number sixty-six. Signs in the window advertised Budweiser, and Carlsberg, Dedicated to the Art of Making Beer. Gnarled trees grew out of the sidewalk alongside picture windows that gave on to a dark interior of tables draped with red cloth. Many of the bars and restaurants in Bar Street were haunted by staff from the embassies at the top end of the street. A European crowd. French, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Spanish. But the Lan Kwai Fang was predominantly Chinese.

Most of the tables were occupied, and there was a babble of voices and music playing when Li and Qian walked in. But almost immediately animated conversations dried up and heads turned in their direction. The music played to silence, music that didn’t stand up to such scrutiny. A cheap pop singer from Taiwan. Li had forgotten that he and Qian were both still in their dress uniforms, long coats hanging open to reveal flashes of silver on black. The two men took off their caps, as if that would somehow make them less conspicuous, and slipped on to high stools at the bar. The barman wore dark slacks with sharp creases and a white shirt open at the neck, sleeves neatly folded halfway up his forearms. His hair was beautifully cut and gelled back from his face. He looked beyond them as several tables emptied, and half a dozen clients slipped out into the night. Then he refocused on the newcomers and smiled nervously.

‘Two beers,’ Li said.

‘You’re joking, right?’ The barman seemed perplexed, and his smile continued to flutter about his lips like a butterfly on a summer’s day.

Li glared at him. ‘Do you see me laughing?’

The barman shrugged. ‘Cops don’t drink in places like this.’

‘Where do they drink?’ Qian asked.

‘I don’t know. Just not here.’ He leaned confidentially across the bar toward them. ‘Look, I have no problem serving you guys. It’s just…you know, you’re bad for business.’ He nodded toward another couple heading out the door.

Li was running out of patience. ‘Sonny, if there are not two beers on the bar within the next thirty seconds you’ll find out just how bad for business we could really be.’

‘Coming right up, boss,’ the barman said, as if the issue had never been in doubt.

Li and Qian took their beers to a recently vacated table by the window, to the barman’s further chagrin. Two cops sitting in the window would guarantee no further custom until they left. But he held his peace.

The two detectives drank in silence for some time. Li took a long first pull at his beer, till he felt the alcohol hit his bloodstream, then he nursed his glass on the table in front of him, lost in gloomy thoughts.

‘Such a fucking waste!’ he said eventually and Qian looked at him carefully.

‘She made an impression on you, then, Chief?’

‘She was beautiful, Qian. I don’t just mean physically. She had something about her. Something inside. It just radiated from her.’ He found Qian looking at him quizzically and he smiled wryly. ‘Sure, if I hadn’t already found the woman I want to spend my life with, I could have fallen for her. Big time.’ And then he saw her blood-splashed profile and the wound where her ear had been removed, and frustration and anger rose in him like bile. You have an enemy, Li Yan, Lao Dai had told him, and Li knew that he was right. That somehow, for some reason, all this was about him. He thumped his fist on the table and both their beers jumped. Heads turned toward them. ‘I’m going to put a stop to it, Qian. I’m not going to let him do this again.’

Qian nodded reassuringly. ‘We’ll get him, Chief.’

‘What I can’t figure,’ Li said, ‘is how the hell he got her to go up there in the first place. In the dark, after it was closed. I mean, he could never have forced her to do it.’

Qian said, ‘Suppose he arranged to meet her there. Suppose she went there before it closed, and then hid up at the top when the lights went out and the guards locked up. He could easily have climbed over the railing when they’d gone.’

‘But why? Why would she meet someone in those circumstances?’

Qian shrugged. ‘Fear, maybe.’

‘Of what? Not of him. She wouldn’t have gone there if she’d thought there was anything to fear from him.’ But he couldn’t rid himself of that look in her eyes the last time he had seen her. He had not understood, then, what it really was. But now he wondered if perhaps she had been afraid, and he had failed to recognise it. But afraid of what?

Qian said, ‘He took an enormous risk killing her in the early evening rather than the early hours of the morning. I know it wasn’t exactly in full view, but there were security people around. And a goddamned TV station across the road!’ He took another mouthful of beer. ‘And, of course, it’s something else he did differently this time. I mean, what’s weird is why he would set out to copy Jack the Ripper and then not.’

Li said, ‘Chinese cops have the idea that serial killers never change their MO, probably because we don’t get that many here.’ He shook his head. ‘But it’s a mistake. When I was in the States I read up on some of the most famous serial killers from around the world, and a lot of them changed lots of things from murder to murder. From gun to knife, from knife to rope, from rope to hammer. From men to women, or the other way round. And for all sorts of reasons. Some quite deliberately to mislead the police, others just on a whim. Some because it was their MO to change their MO. A serial killer can’t be relied on to stick to the script.’ And he realised with a shock, that’s exactly what he’d been doing — relying on the Beijing Ripper to be faithful to the original. But it wasn’t a script. It was history. And you can’t rewrite history. So why had the killer done just that?

His cellphone began playing Beethoven in his pocket. He took it out and flipped it open. ‘Wei?’

‘It’s me, I’m home. How did it go?’ Margaret sounded weary.

‘Not good,’ Li said. ‘He’s broken his pattern.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You remember at lunch today, Bill Hart talked about Lynn Pan, the Chinese-American who’s running the MERMER program?’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s who the victim was.’

There was a moment’s silent incredulity at the other end of the line. then, ‘Jesus Christ,’ Margaret whispered. ‘You met her this afternoon.’

‘Yeah.’ Li felt a fleeting pang of guilt at the feelings Pan had aroused in him.

‘That must have been tough.’

‘It was.’

There was a long silence, and then, ‘Is that music I hear?’

‘I’m in a bar with Qian, up in Sanlitun.’

‘Is there a connection?’

‘No, we’re having a drink.’

Another silence. Then, ‘I had a great time tonight, too,’ she said with a tone. ‘With your friends from the Ministry. They spoke Chinese all night and left me to my own devices, smiling like an idiot every time one of them looked at me. I’ve got cramp in my cheek muscles.’ In the background Li heard the baby start to cry. Margaret said, ‘When will you be home?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’ And she hung up.

Li felt rebuked, and resented it. He flipped the phone shut and stuffed it in his pocket. He finished his beer and stood up. ‘We’d better go.’

And the barman breathed a sigh of relief as the two cops slipped out into the street. The cold air brought the blood rushing immediately to their cheeks and burned their lungs. Qian said, ‘I didn’t know she was American.’

It took Li a moment to realise what he meant. ‘Your English has improved,’ he said.

Qian shrugged. ‘I’ve been taking lessons.’

Li was taken aback and looked at his number two in surprise. ‘Why?’

‘Seems like English is the language you need to get on these days. The language of the future.’

Li blew a puff of air through his lips. ‘Who knows what we’ll all be speaking in a hundred years.’

‘You and I will be speaking Chinese with our ancestors.’

‘You know what I mean.’ Li managed a tired smile. ‘And you never can tell. If the economy continues growing at the present rate maybe the rest of the world will be speaking Chinese by then.’

They dashed across the road between cars, and when they got into the Jeep Li said, ‘So, anyway, what difference does it make?’ Qian looked at him quizzically. ‘Her being American.’

Qian started the engine. ‘There’s no way we’ll be able to keep it out of the papers, Chief.’