Chinese Whispers

I

Her body was slim and firm and beautiful. His hands slipped over the softness of her curves, tracing the line of her hips, gliding across her belly and up to the swelling of her breasts. The nipples pressed hard into his palms. He felt her legs wrap themselves around him, crossing in the small of his back as he slid inside her. Her hair smelled of peaches. ‘Help me,’ she whispered, and he heard her say, ‘I love you.’

‘I love you, too,’ he said.

‘Help me,’ she said again.

But he was lost inside her, drifting on a wave of lust, thrusting against it.

‘Help me.’ It was louder, now, more insistent. Another wave crashed over him. ‘Help me!’ she screamed, and he opened his eyes. Her smile had slipped from her face. There were black holes where her ears and eyes should have been, and blood ran across her face like vivid red slashes. He screamed and reared up and something struck him hard on the back of his head.

‘Chief, are you okay?’

It was Wu, his face a mask of concern. The desk lamp was lying on the floor, the bulb shattered into a thousand pieces. The first yellow sunlight was slanting in the window.

Li blinked and couldn’t figure it out. ‘What…?’

Wu stooped to pick up the lamp. ‘You must have had a nightmare, Chief. The whole section heard you screaming. You sure you’re okay?’

‘I was asleep?’ Li could hardly believe it.

‘You dropped off about two, Chief. No one had the heart to wake you.’

‘Shit.’ Li stood up unsteadily and tried to straighten out the creases in his uniform. He was shaken by his dream. It had left him wrestling with feelings of guilt and horror. He looked at Wu and realised he must have been there all night, too. ‘What about you guys?’

‘Oh, we all got a few hours at one time or another,’ Wu said. There was a bedroom on each floor of the section, three beds to a room. Officers detained beyond their shift could always snatch some sleep if things got bad.

‘Where are we at?’

‘About ready for a meeting whenever you are, Chief. The autopsy’s scheduled for nine.’

Li checked his watch. It was six a.m. ‘I need to get changed and showered. Get my brain in gear. Let’s wait until after the autopsy before we do the meeting.’

Wu nodded and was in the corridor before Li called after him, ‘I never saw the statement you took from the security guard.’ Wu had decided to bring him back to Section One, and they had raised all the staff from the museum and the shop who had been on duty at the monument when it closed up for the night, and brought them all in for questioning.

Wu reappeared in the doorway. ‘He didn’t remember her,’ he said. ‘I pulled her pic from the computer, but it didn’t mean anything to him. Only thing that stuck with him was a car parked at the side of the road when he locked up. About five or six metres south of the gate.’

Li had a mental picture of the bloody tracks beyond the fence coming to an abrupt end at just about that point on the sidewalk. ‘Make? Colour? Anyone inside?’

Wu shook his head. ‘He was more concerned about hoofing it back to base for a smoke and a warm and something to eat. He said it was dark-coloured. A saloon. There might have been someone sitting in it, he wasn’t sure.’

Li gasped his frustration.

‘We struck it lucky with the girl, though.’

‘What girl?’

‘From the ticket office. She recognised Pan straight off. Remembered she spoke with a weird accent and was really pretty. Seems she bought a ticket about five-fifteen. Which was unusual, because apparently people don’t normally buy tickets that close to closing time. The girl had already cashed up.’

Li saw Pan striding across the causeway, her long coat flapping about her calves, her collar pulled up around her neck. She must have climbed the steps to the top as the sun was dipping behind the mountains. It had been a spectacular sunset the previous night. It must have been something special from up there. Blue mountains against a red sky, lights going on all across the city. Qian was right. She must have hidden there beneath the arm of the dial, waiting for the place to close up, waiting to meet the man who would take her life. But why? He lifted his coat from the stand. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

His bike was where he had left it the previous morning, chained to the railing leading into what had once been the main entrance to the building. The door had not been in use for as long as Li had been there. He cycled out into Dongzhimen Nanxiao Da Jie and headed south with the traffic, past the restaurant on the corner where Mei Yuan plied her trade. The restaurant was shuttered up, and it was too early for Mei Yuan. There were plenty of other bikes on the road, and traffic was already building up toward rush hour. Li cycled at a leisurely rate, buttoned up tight against the cold, and let the city slip by him. His fatigue had been startled out of him by the icy wind. His thoughts, however, were still full of Lynn Pan and his dream of making love to her. But the only image of her he could conjure in his mind was of her body lying cold and dead under the photographer’s lights at the Millennium Monument. Throat cut. Ears hacked off. Red blood on yellow stone.

On Jianguomen Da Jie, the cycle lane was choked with morning commuters, all wrapped in hats and scarves and gloves, padded jackets thickening slight Chinese frames, white masks strapped across faces to protect against both the cold and the pollution. With the sun at their backs, the stream of cyclists moved like a river, at the same pace, an odd current carrying someone in a hurry past the main flow. A girl chatting breezily on her cellphone weaved in and out among the more sedate of her fellow bikers. Cycling with the crowd brought an odd sense of belonging, of being a part of the whole. They passed the footbridge at Dongdan, and the vast new Oriental Plaza at Wangfujing. And at the Grand Hotel, Li moved out into the traffic to take his life in his hands and turn left into Zhengyi Road. He had done it a thousand times, and it only ever got harder. In the distance he saw a formation of PLA guards marching across Changan from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as they did every morning, to raise the Chinese flag in Tiananmen Square.

Most of the leaves in the trees in Zhengyi Road still clung stubbornly to their branches. Those that dropped were swept up daily by women in blue smocks and white masks. But it was too early for the blue smocks, and the leaves that had fallen overnight scraped and rattled across the tarmac in the wind. Li cycled past the entrance to the Ministry compound and turned in at the newsstand at the end of the road to pick up the first editions of the newspapers. The news vendor was wrapped in layers of clothes, a fur hat with earflaps pulled down over her bobbed hair to overlap the collar and scarf at her neck. She wore fingerless gloves and cradled a glass jar of warm green tea. What was visible of her face smiled a greeting at Li.

‘How are you today, Mr. Li?’

‘Very well, Mrs. Ma.’

She handed him his usual People’s Daily and Beijing Youth Daily, folded one inside the other, in return for a few coins.

‘You’re up early today.’

He smiled. ‘I haven’t been to bed yet.’

‘Ahhh,’ she said sagely. ‘Of course. Another murder.’

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘How do you know that?’

She nodded toward the bundle in his hand. ‘It’s in the paper.’

Li frowned. ‘It can’t be.’ He looked at the People’s Daily. The front page was covered in the usual CCP propaganda Illiteracy rate among adult people slashed. And, Yangtze water cleanup ensured. There was a story about massive new investment in the western provinces, and a photograph of the executive deputy secretary of Tibet answering questions at a press conference. His heart skipped a beat as he saw a photograph of himself receiving his award from the Minister of Public Security. He would not have expected the public organ of the Party to have carried anything on the murders. The Beijing Youth Daily was another matter. Independent of the Party, and increasingly bold in its coverage of Chinese internal affairs, it had begun to garner a reputation for running high-risk stories. But even so, Li could not imagine the paper carrying a crime story about which no details had yet been released. Particularly since the latest murder had only been committed the night before. He unfolded its front page and felt as if he had been slapped. Beijing Ripper Claims Victim No. 5. The headline ran almost the full length of the left side of the front page in bold red characters. Two strips of sub-heading matched it, side by side, white characters on a red background. Body discovered at Millennium Monument, throat cut, ears removed. And, Four previous victims in Jianguomen found with body parts missing. Above the story itself, was a photograph of Li pictured at the award ceremony the previous evening. The caption read, Award-winning Beijing cop, Li Yan, leads investigation.

‘It would make you frightened to go out at night,’ the news vendor said. ‘He must be insane, this Beijing Ripper, cutting open these poor women and taking out their insides.’ Her words dragged Li’s eyes from the paper to her face. She must have read the story from start to finish. As, in all probability, would most of the city’s population in the hours ahead. It was going to spread panic, and it would certainly be picked up by the foreign media. The political implications were unthinkable. How in the name of the sky, he wondered, had they got hold of this kind of detail?

Margaret was feeding Li Jon in the living room when he got in. She was still in her dressing gown, face smudged and bleary from sleep — or the lack of it. He threw the Beijing Youth Daily on to the coffee table in front of her. ‘Look!’ he said.

She glanced at the paper. ‘I see a photograph of you,’ she said. ‘Is that what I’m supposed to be looking at? Maybe I should cut it out and keep it by the bedside, that way I’d probably see more of you than I do at the moment.’

But Li was in no mood for her sarcasm, and in his agitation, he had forgotten that she would not be able to read the headline. ‘Beijing Ripper Claims Victim No. 5.’ He read it for her.

She shrugged. ‘So? It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘That’s not the point!’ His voice was strained by exasperation and anger. ‘No one outside of the investigation knows the kind of detail they’ve printed in there.’

‘So someone leaked it.’

Li shook his head. ‘It doesn’t happen in China.’

‘It does now.’ Margaret pushed up an eyebrow. ‘Welcome to the rest of the world.’ She removed the teat from Li Jon’s mouth and wiped his lips. ‘Good morning, by the way.’

Li threw his hands up in frustration. ‘They’re going to blame me for this, Margaret.’ He cursed under his breath. ‘I’m going for a shower.’ And he stormed off to the bathroom.

Margaret called after him. ‘Your son says good morning, too.’

The slamming of the bathroom door came back in response. After a moment she heard the sound of the shower running, and the shower door banged shut. The phone rang. Usually she did not answer it, because the calls were invariably for Li and the callers spoke only Chinese. But he was in the shower, and in spite of her resentment at being abandoned to play the role of the little wife and doting mother, she did understand the pressure he was under. She lifted the receiver. ‘Wei?’ A female voice spoke to her in Chinese. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ Margaret said. ‘Please hold.’

She hefted Li Jon in her left arm and took the phone through to the bathroom. Li’s uniform and underwear lay crumpled on the floor where he had dropped them. She opened the shower door and immediately felt the hot spray and steam on her face. She saw the shape of Li lathering his head with soap somewhere in the midst of it all and thrust the phone toward him. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘A call for you.’

He fumbled to turn off the water, stinging shampoo running into his eyes as he reached for the phone. ‘Shit, Margaret, could it not have waited?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, and she slammed the door shut behind her.

Li winced, and stood dripping in the cubicle, clutching the phone to his wet head. The cold of the apartment was already making itself felt as the water cooled, and he started to shiver.

‘Wei?’

It was the secretary from the commissioner’s office at police headquarters. The commissioner wanted to see him without delay. Li closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm himself. The storm was about to break. And it was going to break right over his head.

By the time he was dressed and ready to go, Margaret had steamed some lotus paste buns and made green tea. He appeared in the kitchen doorway looking harassed, wearing his long, heavy coat. But he had changed into freshly pressed slacks and a white shirt. Margaret thought he looked stunning, and she always loved the smell of him when he came out of the shower. But he never seemed to be around long enough these days for her to enjoy him.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘Commissioner Zhu is going to cut me up into little pieces and feed me to the fish.’

‘Then you should have some breakfast before you go. To fatten you up for the fish.’

‘No time. I’ll call later.’ And he was gone.

She shouted after him, ‘Are you remembering we’re going out for dinner tonight?’ But the door was already closing behind him. She shut her eyes to try to calm herself, and to prepare herself for the emptiness of the day ahead — before remembering that Li’s father had said he would drop by in the afternoon to see his grandson. Perhaps, she reflected, the day would have been better left empty. She felt her blood pressure start to rise once more.

The phone rang again, startling her this time. She swithered about whether to answer it, but if it was important there was still time to call down to Li from the balcony. And, besides, what else did she have to do with her time? She picked up the receiver. ‘Wei?’

A man’s voice spoke in a clipped American accent. ‘May I speak with Dr. Campbell?’

It seemed so odd to have someone addressing her as Dr. Campbell, not only in her own language, but in a comfortingly East-Coast American accent. ‘This is she,’ she replied.

II

Police headquarters was a short walk from Li’s apartment. The main entrance was two streets down on Qianmen Dong Da Jie, along from the EMS Central Post Office, but Li always entered from Jiaominxiang Lane. The old, arched entrance to the rear compound, opposite the Supreme Court, had been demolished to make way for a new building, clad in marble and designed along classical European lines to blend in with the redbrick one-time CID headquarters on the east side, and the former Citibank on the west. The old Citibank building was now a police museum, and beyond it the new entrance was watched over by two armed PLA guards flanking the gate.

The trees that overhung the lane were still thick with leaves, and the leaves were thick with the dust of construction. The roadway was closed to traffic, and workmen crowded the sidewalks, wheeling barrows and shovelling sand into cement mixers. The Supreme Court had been stripped back to its bones and was being given a new face. Ministry apartment blocks beyond were draped in green netting, behind which yet more workmen put in twenty-four-hour shifts in this relentless process of rebuilding and remodelling the new China.

Li walked briskly through the gates into the rear compound, the sound of pneumatic drills hammering in his ears, drowning the sound of the beating of his heart which, until then, was all he had been able to hear.

The commissioner’s office was on the fifth floor, and Li stood uncomfortably in the elevator with half a dozen other people who, he was sure, could hear his heart beating, too. No pneumatic drills here to drown it out. But if they did, they gave no indication of it. He stepped out into a carpeted corridor and followed it along to the large reception area outside the commissioner’s office. A poster-sized photograph of the face of an armed policewoman, her gun pointing to the ceiling and pressed against her cheek, dominated one wall. The rest of the room was dominated by the commissioner’s secretary, a formidable woman in her fifties who, Li had often surmised, probably bought her clothes mail-order from an outsize store in the US. She was not of typical Chinese dimensions. But in a country where a large proportion of domestic crime involved husband battering, she was not untypical of the older Chinese woman. For all his height and rank, Li always found her intimidating. She was, after all, only a secretary. But like many secretaries, she took her status and power from her boss. And since her boss was Beijing’s top cop, that gave her quite a bit of clout.

She glared at Li. ‘You’re late.’ It was not long after seven, and Li figured she must have been called in early. She certainly looked, and sounded, like a woman who had not had her full complement of sleep.

‘I came straight away.’

‘He’s had to go. Deputy Cao will see you.’

Li breathed an inner sigh of relief. Cao was less likely to be riding his high horse. But if he thought he was in for an easier time, he was mistaken.

Cao turned from the window, where he had been staring morosely out at the traffic below, and didn’t even give Li time to draw breath. His arms were folded across his chest, and in one hand he held a folded and much thumbed copy of the Beijing Youth Daily. He almost threw it on to his desk. ‘You’ve done it this time, Section Chief.’

‘That had nothing to do with me, Deputy Cao,’ Li said.

‘It has everything to do with you, Li!’ Cao almost shouted at him. ‘It’s your case. And it’s your face on the front page of the paper. And the commissioner himself told you only yesterday how important it was that this didn’t get into the press.’

Li held his peace. There was nothing he could say.

Cao waved his arm theatrically in the air. ‘The minister was apoplectic. That’s why it’s me giving you the bollocking and not the commissioner himself. He’s been summoned to the minister’s office to furnish him with some persuasive explanation for this…’ he picked up the paper and then dropped it on the desk again, ‘…this piece of shit.’

‘Someone leaked it,’ Li said lamely.

‘Of course someone leaked it!’ Cao roared. ‘And it could only have been somebody on the inside. A police officer. Somebody under your command.’

‘Or above it,’ Li ventured.

Cao wheeled on him and inclined his head dangerously. He lowered his voice, ‘If I were you, Li, I wouldn’t go suggesting that too loudly around here. It won’t win you many friends. And believe me, right now you need all the friends you can get.’ He snatched a pack of cigarettes from his desk and lit one. ‘Someone in your section has been a naughty boy. I suggest you find out who it is.’

‘Maybe it’s the same officer who leaks inside information from my office to yours.’

Cao dropped into his chair and regarded Li speculatively. He shook his head slightly. ‘You’re treading very thin ice here, Li.’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘You run a slack ship up there. You may have admirers in high places because of a couple of high-profile cases, but those of us in the know understand that police work is not about the handful of glamorous cases that might come your way in the course of a career. It’s about the daily slog, cracking every crappy case that gets thrown at you. And that means running a tight ship. Administration, organisation, attention to detail, no matter how dull or how unglamorous. It requires a disciplined approach to the running of your section, it requires your junior officers to respect and, if necessary, to fear you.

‘But not you. You like to be one of the boys. You flit around from case to case like some kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes. You think you can bypass all the usual procedures and solve the crime with nothing more than flair and imagination.’ He took an angry puff at his cigarette, perhaps in frustration that all his years as a predecessor of Li’s at Section One had led to this dead-end deputy’s job. ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that, Li. We have evolved an approach to criminal investigation that gets results by sheer bloody hard work and attention to detail.’ He slapped a hand on top of the Beijing Youth Daily. ‘And splashing the details of the worst serial killings in this city’s history across the front pages of trash like this is not going to help. So I suggest you batten down the hatches up there and find out who’s responsible. Because if you don’t, rest assured that I shall. And there will be hell to pay!’

III

The sun was rising now above the tops of all the new apartment blocks along Dongzhimen, fingers of cold yellow light extending themselves west along the grid. The icy wind carried the breath of winter from the frozen northern plains, laden with the promise of subzero temperatures in the weeks ahead.

Li watched Mei Yuan’s cold red fingers as they worked nimbly about the hotplate to produce his jian bing. Her face, too, was red with the cold, skin dried by the wind. Her eyes watered constantly, as if weeping for the lost summer, or for her lost life. She caught him watching her, and she smiled. Her face lit up, radiant in the morning light, no trace in it of the pain she had endured. She wore her fate with dignity, and always came out smiling.

Li, on the other hand, was sunk in gloom. As if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Cao’s words had stung him, and he wondered if others saw him as Cao did. Cavalier, glory-seeking, too much one of the boys for his subordinates to fully respect him. There were times he took shortcuts, yes, but he never neglected that mind-numbing, painfully slow process of putting a case together piece by piece by piece. He knew the importance of the detail. His uncle had dinned that into him often enough. But sometimes you could get bogged down in it. Sometimes there was so much detail you couldn’t see the bigger picture. Sometimes you just had to trust your instincts and make that leap of faith.

‘A fen for them,’ Mei Yuan said.

‘What?’

‘Your thoughts.’

‘They’re not even worth a fen, Mei Yuan.’

She slipped his jian bing into brown paper and handed it to him. ‘I read about the murders in the paper this morning.’

‘You and the rest of Beijing,’ Li muttered gloomily.

Mei Yuan looked at him perceptively. ‘Should we not?’

‘No,’ Li said emphatically. ‘You should not. The story was leaked, and the paper should have known better than to print it.’

‘Who leaked it?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Then why don’t you ask the editor of the paper.’

‘Oh, I think he’ll be facing that question, and many more, from people much higher up than me, Mei Yuan.’

She nodded mutely. ‘They are terrible killings, Li Yan. Do you not think, perhaps, that people have a right to know?’

‘Why?’ Li asked simply, and he took a bite of his jian bing. ‘Knowing will not protect them, because they do not know who he is. But it won’t stop people being afraid, panicking even. And we will be inundated with cranks claiming to be the Ripper, and with calls from people claiming they know who he is. And we will spend hours and days, maybe weeks, sifting through cranks and crap, wasting valuable time going up blind alleys while the killer remains free to kill again. Our efforts to catch him will be hopelessly diluted.’

‘Yes,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘I can see how that could be.’ There was sympathy in her eyes when she smiled at him. ‘I do not envy you, Li Yan. Trying to catch this man. First you must try to work out who he is. Like a riddle. Only, if you don’t come up with the answer someone will die.’

Li said, ‘And you know how bad I am at solving riddles.’

‘Maybe because there is no life at stake,’ she said. ‘For me it is easy, because it is a game. But to catch a killer is not a game. If you fail, he will kill again. For me, the very fear of failure, and the consequences of that, would numb my mind.’

‘Join the club,’ Li said.

‘But you will catch him.’

‘I have to.’ And just focusing on that thought freed Li’s mind from the clutter which had filled it that morning. What did it matter who had leaked the story? It was another issue, something to be settled another day. A diversion. And he could not afford be diverted. The genie was out of the bottle. There was no way to put it back in. Perhaps, he thought, Mei Yuan was right. He had trouble solving her riddles because it did not matter whether he solved them or not. But the thought that someone might die if he did not catch a killer concentrated his mind in an entirely different way.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘you will have had much time to consider my last riddle.’

Li smiled ruefully. ‘Mei Yuan, I can’t even remember it in detail. Two guys planting rice, wasn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘If you can’t remember in detail there is no point in even thinking about it. I told you, the devil is in the detail.’

There it was again. Detail. The answer to everything was always in the detail. ‘I just can’t give it the time right now, Mei Yuan. Not with this killer still out there.’

‘Sometimes, Li Yan, it is good therapy to take your mind off one problem to work on another. Then when you return to the original it might not seem quite so intractable.’

Li finished his jian bing and grinned. Mei Yuan was usually right about most things. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Give me it again.’

‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field in Hunan, a long way from their village,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to go from one end of the paddy to the other…’ She went through the whole riddle once more. The fact that the two men had just finished lunch, sharing their food and drink, agreeing to meet and share again when they each finished planting their remaining ten rows. Li listened carefully, and it started coming back to him. When the man with the food had finished his work he couldn’t see his friend anywhere, and thinking he had gone back to the village, had eaten the food himself.

‘So he wakes up the next morning,’ Li cut in, ‘and the other guy’s shaking him and accusing him of being greedy, leaving him there on his own to go off and eat the food by himself.’

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and left him. The man with the drink insists he was there all the time! They are both telling the truth.’

Li thought about it. They have just finished lunch and have another ten rows to plant. They are both deaf mutes and can only communicate by sign language. They both claim to still be there when they finish their work, but for some reason they don’t see one another. ‘They’re not blind?’ he said.

‘If they were blind, how could they communicate by sign language?’

‘Of course.’ Li felt foolish. But they couldn’t hear or speak to each other. If they were both there at the end of the day why didn’t they see each other? Why did the man with the food think his friend had already gone? And then it dawned on him, and he felt even more foolish. ‘Oh, Mei Yuan, that’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’

‘They’d just had lunch, so it must have been about midday. They still had ten rows each to plant. But it took them an hour to get from one end of the paddy to the other, then it was ten o’clock at night when they finished. And it was dark. That’s why they couldn’t see each other.’

Mei Yuan grinned. ‘Simple, really. And, of course, they couldn’t call out because they were deaf mutes.’

‘But what if there was a full moon that night?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s the rainy season, Li Yan. The sky is cloudy.’

He gave her a look. ‘You always have an answer.’

‘Because there always is one.’

A shadow fell across his face as he remembered just how few answers he’d come up with on the Ripper murders. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s always an answer. But we don’t always know what it is.’

Qian spotted Li passing the open door to the detectives’ room and hurried into the corridor after him. He caught up with him in Li’s office. Li was surveying the shambles that was his desk. The night before he had lifted most of the piles of paper off it to stack against the wall below the window. This morning they had been replaced by fresh ones.

‘Chief.’

He turned at the sound of Qian’s voice. ‘Unless it’s important, Qian, I don’t have time. I’ve got to get across town for the autopsy.’ He flicked his head toward the wall. ‘Is Wu next door?’

‘Chief, the autopsy’s been postponed.’

Which stopped Li in his tracks. ‘Postponed by whom?’

‘An order from headquarters. Just came in a few minutes ago.’

Li scowled. ‘What in the name of the sky do they think they are playing at?’

Qian seemed almost afraid to tell him. ‘Lynn Pan was an American citizen.’

‘So?’

‘So the American Embassy have requested that one of their people carry out the autopsy. Or at least assist on it.’

‘Well, the answer’s no,’ Li snapped. ‘This is an ongoing murder inquiry. I’m not going to have some goddamned American pathologist who knows nothing of the background to the other murders coming in and fucking up our corpse.’

Qian braced himself. ‘I don’t know that it matters much what we think, Chief. Apparently the Ministry has already agreed. It’s been authorised at the highest level, and the autopsy’s been postponed till eleven.’

‘The hell it has!’ Li snatched the phone and started punching in numbers.

‘Chief…’ There was something in Qian’s tone that cut through Li’s anger.

‘What is it, Qian?’

‘There have been other developments. Putting off the autopsy for a couple of hours might not be such a bad idea.’

Li slowly replaced the receiver. ‘Tell me.’

‘There was a break-in last night at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lynn Pan’s office was ransacked.’

IV

The head of security met them in the lobby. He was agitated, an ex-cop who saw the break-in on his turf as a potential one-way ticket to unemployment. He was a tall man, nearly Li’s height, and wore a grey uniform with clusters of stars and stripes that meant nothing at all. They just looked impressive. It was still early, and staff and students were only now beginning to show up for the day. He steered Li and Wu along a corridor to his office on the ground floor. ‘Look guys,’ he said, appealing to the old boys’ network, ‘I’d really appreciate it if we can keep this low profile.’

‘A woman has been murdered,’ Li said sharply. ‘It’s hard to lower a profile like that. What happened here?’

The security man shrugged his eyebrows. ‘That’s just it. I’ve no idea. None of the alarms was tripped. I can’t find signs of forced entry anywhere.’

Wu was chewing manically, and swinging the left leg of his shades around the little finger of his right hand. ‘So how do you know there’s been a break-in?’

‘Because somebody jemmied their way into Lynn Pan’s offices and cleaned out the lot. Computers, files, just about everything that wasn’t nailed down. A real pro job.’

‘Not an inside one?’ Li said.

The security man pulled a face. ‘I don’t think so. If they had keys to turn off alarms and get in and out the building, wouldn’t they have had keys for her offices, too?’

Wu said, ‘If they were smart enough to break in without leaving a trace, why would they have to force an internal door?’

‘Because once you’re in, you don’t have to worry about setting off alarms,’ the security man said. ‘You’ve done the smart bit. You’re not going to be able to hide the fact that you’ve ransacked a whole department, so why worry about breaking down a door?’

Li wasn’t convinced either way. ‘Let’s take a look.’

Some of Pan’s staff and students were gathered in the corridor outside the department. Most of them had just heard the news of her death and were still in shock. Their babble of hushed chatter died away as Li, Wu and the security man stepped out of the elevator. Li said to the security man, ‘I don’t want anybody touching anything until forensics have been over the place.’

He recognised some of the faces in the corridor. Lynn Pan’s assistant, an older woman, who had brought them all tea the previous day and escorted them to the computer room. The student who had briefed them on the ‘crime’ for the MERMER test. He nodded acknowledgement as he passed them and the security man showed the detectives the double doors that had been forced at the end of the corridor. The wood was splintered and broken around the lock. Crude but effective. Beyond the doors, the reception room where Li had sat with Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Minister Wei and the others appeared to have been left undisturbed. Li glanced from the window and saw the minaret-like TV tower catching the light, sharp against the blue of the sky. He could scarcely believe it had been only yesterday afternoon he had stood at that very window looking out at the tower. Then, Lynn Pan had still been very much alive, a beautiful, vibrant living being, demonstrating her extraordinary expertise. Why would anyone want to kill her?

A short corridor led off to the computer room where the MERMER demonstration had been carried out, Lynn Pan’s office through the wall from it, a couple of lecture rooms, another office occupied by Pan’s assistant, and a small staff room.

The computer room had been cleared, apart from the two tables on which the computer equipment had stood, and a couple of office chairs on wheels. The cables remained, but all the equipment was gone. They moved through to Pan’s private office, and Li recognised her scent lingering there still.

Li said to the security man, ‘Get Pan’s assistant in here.’ And as an afterthought, ‘I met her yesterday, but I can’t remember her name.’

‘Professor Hu,’ the security man said.

While they waited for her, Li wandered around the office. The desk top was completely cleared. The drawers had been opened and emptied. There was a lacquered wooden cupboard against the back wall, and a filing cabinet next to it. The doors of the cupboard stood ajar, and it, too, was empty. There were pot plants on almost every available surface. One, which had perhaps stood upon the desk, lay smashed and broken on the floor, earth spilling across worn carpet tiles. Framed certificates hung on the walls, a testament to Pan’s educational history and professional qualifications. There was a photograph of her, along with another woman, taken at a graduation ceremony. They both wore mortar boards and black and crimson gowns, clutching their certificates and smiling for the camera. It had clearly been taken several years earlier. Pan was younger-looking, long straight hair hanging down over her shoulders. Her smile had been just as radiant then. In another photograph she was pictured with a young, dark-haired American male. Li read the handwritten caption on it. With Dr. Lawrence Farwell, June 1999. She had cut her hair short by then. It suited her.

‘She was a pretty beautiful woman, huh?’ Wu said, peering at the photograph.

‘Yes, she was,’ Li said. Her eyes burned out of the picture at him, smiling, giving, reaching out, and he remembered the strange emotion which had clouded them in those last moments he had seen her alive. What he had taken as an appeal for help. If only he had answered that appeal. If only he had held back, spoken to her before he left. If only.

The security man returned with Professor Hu. She had shoulder-length wavy hair shot through with streaks of grey. She was around five-five, tall for a Chinese woman, and painfully thin. She wore a grey business suit with a white blouse and a red scarf tied at her neck like a slash of blood. Li found it disturbing. Her eyes were red and swollen. She had obviously been doing a lot of crying.

‘Professor Hu,’ Li said, ‘I’m sorry to meet you again in these circumstances. I want to catch the people who did this. I want to catch the person who killed Miss Pan. And I’m going to need your help.’

‘I don’t see…’

He put a finger to his lips to silence her. ‘You know this place better than any of us, Professor. I want you to walk us through it, room by room, and tell us what’s missing.’

She nodded her willingness, and he gave her a pair of latex gloves to slip on, so that she could open filing cabinets and drawers and cupboards without disturbing evidence. Although Li did not expect forensics to find anything. This was a highly professional job. The security man had been right in that, at least.

It took them less than fifteen minutes to go through the department. Every drawer and cupboard that was opened told the same depressing story. Empty. Empty. Empty. Every scrap of stationery, every file, the contents of every drawer. Even the bins were empty. Wu said, ‘Looks like they didn’t know what they were after, so they just took the lot.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Li said.

Wu said, ‘Hey, Chief, you don’t break into a place like this just to empty the bins. They’ve got garbage men for that.’

According to professor Hu, both Pan’s desktop computer and her laptop were gone, along with all her disks. She said, ‘It’s as if the place had been packed up for a removal. All that’s left is the furniture.’

‘Why?’ The word which was finding its way most often to the front of Li’s mind, found expression now on his lips. He turned to the professor. ‘Can you think of any reason why someone would want to steal your files?’

She shook her head helplessly. ‘Not one,’ she said. ‘The work we were doing here was not unique. It wasn’t secret. It wasn’t even valuable. Not in financial terms.’

‘And can you think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill Miss Pan?’

The Professor drew in her lips to try to prevent the tears welling in her eyes. ‘Lynn was the most beautiful, kind and thoughtful human being I ever knew,’ she said, controlling her voice with difficulty. ‘She was goodness personified. Whoever took that life must have been consumed by pure evil.’

They re-emerged into the reception room just as Fu Qiwei, the senior forensics officer from Pau Jü Hutong, arrived with a team of three scenes of crime officers. These were the same officers who had attended the crime scene at the Millennium Monument the night before. Fu was a shrunken man with small, coal-dark eyes, thinning hair dyed black and scraped back across his pate. There was nothing he hadn’t seen in a long career. Nothing left that would shock him. He had developed an acerbic sense of humour, a kind of protective shield, like a turtle’s shell. But he wasn’t smiling today. ‘A connection?’ he asked Li.

Li inclined his head slightly. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ He turned to Wu. ‘You’d better hang on here. Start taking statements from staff and students. I’m going to take a look at her apartment.’ He was about to leave when he had a thought and turned back. ‘Professor?’ The professor was standing staring out of the window where Li had stood the previous day. She turned.

‘Yes, Section Chief?’

‘Can you tell me what time Miss Pan left the office last night?’

‘It was a little after five.’

Just time for her to walk to the Millennium Monument and purchase a ticket before it closed. He said, ‘We have this notion that she might have been going to meet someone at the monument. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea who that might have been?’

Professor Hu raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Well, of course I do.’

The room was suddenly very quiet, and all eyes were on the dead woman’s assistant. ‘Who?’ Li asked.

‘Well, I don’t know why you’re asking me. You should know better than anyone.’

Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘She was meeting you, Section Chief. I took the call from you myself.’

Li was barely aware of the change of focus in the room. All eyes were now on him. He felt like Alice in Wonderland, falling into the rabbit hole and tumbling through darkness. ‘And what did I say?’ he asked.

The professor looked at him oddly. ‘You said you needed to speak to Miss Pan urgently, and I put you through to her. She came out of her office a few minutes later with her coat on. She’d had a meeting scheduled for six last night. She asked me to call round everyone and postpone it. Something important had come up and she had to go and talk to you.’

‘I didn’t call,’ Li said, and the professor looked non-plussed. ‘What made you think it was me?’

‘Because you—’ She stopped to correct herself. ‘Because the caller said, This is Section Chief Li Yan. We met this afternoon. I need to speak to Professor Pan on a matter of some urgency.’

‘Someone who knew you were here yesterday afternoon, Chief,’ Wu said. ‘That must narrow it down.’

Li thought about it. There were any number of people who might have known he was here. It would be impossible to draw a ring and say only those inside knew. He felt sick. Pan had thought she was meeting him. She had gone to her death trusting in him. The caller must have been very persuasive. But what bizarre circumstance would have led her to accept such a strange rendezvous? He still found it hard to believe that someone had been able to pass themselves off as him. He turned to the professor. ‘Was there nothing about the call that struck you as…odd? I mean, did this person sound like me?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’d only met you for a few minutes yesterday afternoon. I thought it was you because he said he was. I had no reason to doubt it.’

And neither would Pan. Her Chinese was almost native, but it was American. Her experience of China was limited. Regional variations in accent would mean nothing to her. And once again, the words of Lao Dai came back to him. You have an enemy, Li Yan. Not only was this killer sending Li letters, fulfilling a promise to cut off a woman’s ears, but now he was passing himself off as Li himself. He had used Li to lure Pan to her death, innocent and trusting like a lamb to the slaughter. Li’s shock began turning to anger. He turned to Fu Qiwei. ‘Get a team out to Pan’s apartment. She wasn’t picked at random. She was killed for a reason. Maybe we’ll find it there.’

Sunlight filled the stairwell from the windows at the rear of the Academy as Li made his way down to the floor below. He was surprised to find Lyang in Hart’s office.

‘Didn’t Margaret tell you I worked here mornings?’ she said.

Li said, ‘We haven’t had much chance to talk in the last twenty-four hours.’

Lyang nodded gravely. ‘I saw the paper this morning. It’s awful about poor Lynn. She was just about the nicest person you could ever hope to meet.’

Li said, ‘Is Bill around?’

‘He’s doing a polygraph test this morning,’ she said. ‘A favour for some of your people. Some guy accused of sexually assaulting his thirteen-year-old daughter. He’s agreed to take the test to prove his innocence. I’ll take you along if you like.’

As they passed down a corridor on the south wing of the fourth floor, Lyang said, ‘Bill wasn’t too keen on doing this after we found out about Lynn. He was pretty cut up about it. You know it was Bill who brought her over here?’ Li nodded. ‘He feels really responsible.’ She sighed. ‘But he’d promised the people from Section Six. So…’ Her voice tailed off as she knocked gently on a door and opened it a crack. Two officers from the interrogation unit at Pau Jü Hutong turned in their chairs. ‘Alright if we come in?’ she whispered. Li knew both the faces and nodded his acknowledgement. They waved him in. The room itself was in darkness, the only light coming through what appeared to be a window into an adjoining room. It took Li a moment to realise it was a two-way mirror.

Two cameras mounted on tripods were recording proceedings in the next room. A middle-aged man sat in a chair beside a desk on which a polygraph machine stood idle, spidery needles hovering motionless above the paper conveyer belt on which they would record his responses to Hart’s questions. The man had long hair swept back from his forehead and growing down over his collar. His face was pockmarked from adolescent acne, and a feeble attempt at a moustache clung to his upper lip. He was sitting at right angles to the table, facing a chair in which Hart sat conducting his pretest interview. A monitor on the camera side of the mirror showed a full-screen view of the interviewee, his head cut off above the top frame of the picture, but inset in close-up in the lower left-hand quadrant, obliterating Hart from the recording.

The Section Six interrogators motioned Li silently to a seat. One of them was a woman of about fifty with a round, friendly face, whom Li knew to be a formidable and aggressive interrogator. The other was an older man with a face chiselled out of granite, who had an uncanny talent for gaining the trust of the people he questioned. They were the antithesis of the stereotypical good-cop-bad-cop double act.

The woman leaned toward Li and whispered so quietly he could barely hear her. ‘He’s a smooth operator,’ she said of Hart. ‘That guy was so nervous when he came in he could hardly speak. Now he’s eating out of Hart’s hand. Can’t hardly get the guy to shut up.’

‘He’ll get to the test itself in a couple of minutes,’ Lyang said.

And they heard Hart’s voice across the monitor, soft, soothing, persuasive. His Chinese was almost perfect, his American accent lending it a nearly soporific quality. ‘Now, Jiang,’ he was saying, ‘I’m going to make you a promise right at the start. I’m not going to ask you any questions on the test that I’m not going to ask you right now. There’ll be no surprises, no trick questions. I need a yes, or a no.’

Jiang nodded, and you could see the tension in his face. He laid his forearms flat along the arms of his chair and stretched his palms wide. He swallowed a couple of times, and opened and closed his mouth as if unsticking his tongue from the roof of it. Li remembered the rice test that Hart and Lyang had talked about yesterday.

Hart went on, ‘I’ll begin with what are called known truth questions. They’re questions, the answers to which you know are true and I know are true. What they do is create a picture for me.’ He paused just for a moment. ‘Is your name Jiang?’

‘Yes,’ Jiang said.

‘Are you now in Beijing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I have the questions about why we’re here today.’ Another brief pause. ‘Have you ever put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

Li was startled by the bluntness of the question.

‘No,’ Jiang said.

‘He damn well did!’ the female interrogator hissed. ‘He might have been drunk at the time, but he did it alright. And he remembers he did it.’

Hart continued in the same hypnotic tone, ‘Do you remember if you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina?’

‘No.’

‘Are you telling the truth about not putting your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

‘Yes.’

He shuffled his papers. ‘Then I have those questions we discussed about the past. Do you ever remember doing anything about which you were ashamed?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever remember performing an unusual sex act?’

Jiang seemed embarrassed by this question. ‘No,’ he said. Then added, ‘Only with my wife.’ And a sad smile flitted briefly across his face.

Lyang whispered, ‘She ran off with his sister’s husband and left him to bring up the kid on his own.’

Hart pressed on. ‘Do you remember ever committing a crime for which you were not caught?’

‘No.’

‘Then I have a question which just kind of covers the entire test. Do you intend to answer truthfully each question on this test?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then the last question, just for me. Are you afraid I will ask you a question we have not reviewed?’

‘No.’

Hart stood up. ‘Okay, that’s all there is.’ And he began wiring Jiang up for the test itself — two bands of sensors strapped around the chest and midriff to monitor heart rate, a cuff on the left arm to measure blood pressure, and sensors on the tips of two fingers on the right hand to detect perspiration. He talked as he worked. ‘Now, for each chart, Jiang, I need you to keep both feet on the ground. No moving. No unnecessary talking. Look straight ahead and close your eyes. Think about the questions, think about the answers and try to answer truthfully.’

When he had finished wiring Jiang to the polygraph, he rounded his desk so that he was looking at the subject in profile. ‘Now sometimes,’ he said, ‘I have people come in who just naturally think, I have to beat this sucker. When they do that, generally they have heard that when they get asked a question they should squeeze their toes or bite their tongue or press down on a tack they’ve hidden in their shoe. They make a big mistake when they do that, Jiang. The reason for that is that the equipment is so sensitive that if you have a heart murmur I’ll see that right there on your chart. And when people try doing these things, all they do is cause those pens to go crazy.’ He waved his hand at the needles poised above the chart, ready to go. ‘And when I see that, I have to ask why, when I already told them how best for me to see the truth, why are they trying to change what I’m looking at.’ He looked at Jiang. ‘And what’s the only logical reason you can think of?’

Jiang seemed taken aback that Hart was asking him. He shrugged and said awkwardly, ‘They’re trying to cover something up.’

‘They’re a liar,’ Hart said. ‘And that’s just the way I call it.’ He folded his hands in front of him on the desk and gave Jiang a moment or two to think about it. Then he said, ‘Now what I’m going to do, Jiang, is I want to see what your body looks like normally on the chart. So I want you to choose a number between one and seven.’

Jiang gave a strained chuckle. ‘Not between one and ten.’

‘No. Between one and seven.’ Pause. ‘What’s your number?’

‘Five.’

‘Okay. Now what I’ll do is I’ll go through all the numbers between one and seven. Each time I ask did you choose that number, the only answer I want is, no. Even when I ask you the number five. That way I have a number of truthful responses, and I have one deceptive response. It gives me a chance to adjust the instruments for your body.’

Lyang was smiling. ‘Believe that, you’ll believe anything,’ she whispered. But everyone else in the room was mesmerised by the proceedings on the other side of the mirror.

Hart set the polygraph going, needles scraping back and forth across the paper that scrolled by beneath them, and took Jiang through all the numbers in a random sequence. When he had finished, he switched off the polygraph and tore off the chart. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘It always amazes me. It does.’ He pushed the chart across the desk toward Jiang. ‘It don’t take no expert. See this green line?’ Jiang followed Hart’s finger and nodded. ‘See how it changes? See the highest point on the chart? See what’s below it?’ Li had to admit, Hart was a real showman. Like a magician on a stage.

Jiang craned to see what was written there. ‘It’s the number five,’ he said.

Hart smiled at him. ‘So now we know what you know. And you know why the pens reacted so strong. So if I see that when I ask the real questions, we’ll be able to get right to the bottom of it.’

Jiang slumped back in his seat, his face a mask of misery. He was beaten, even before he took the test. And he was beaten, because he believed he would be.

Hart reset the polygraph. ‘Okay, we’ll go straight to the questions one time.’

He got Jiang to sit facing forward, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor, and pumped up the air in his cuff, and then he ran through the questions, just as he had during the pretest. ‘Did you put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

They did it another two times, the order of the questions changing on each run-through.

When they’d finished the third set, ‘That’s us,’ Hart said. Jiang glanced at him apprehensively, but Hart was giving nothing away. He stepped out from behind the desk to unhook Jiang from the polygraph, then he collected the charts and said, ‘I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’ He went out and left Jiang alone. Jiang sat staring into space for a long time, before dropping his face into his hands to stifle his sobs.

The door opened in the observation room and Hart came in. He seemed surprised to see Li. ‘Li Yan? What are you doing here?’

Li stood to shake Hart’s hand. ‘I stopped by to talk to you about Lynn Pan.’

Hart’s face clouded. ‘I feel like it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t recommended her for the post…Jesus!’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath, trying to control his emotions. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to believe she’s gone.’ He looked at Li. ‘Did you…? Were you called to the crime scene?’ Li nodded. ‘Shit. That must have been tough.’

It was what Margaret had said. And Li wondered if it was really any harder dealing with a murder when it was someone you knew. Of course, you brought a lot of emotional baggage to that circumstance. But he had always found it hard to see the living person in the dead one. It wasn’t dealing with the dead that was difficult, it was the loss of the living. In this case, he had hardly known Lynn Pan. And yet the sense of her loss had been powerful. Perhaps because she had been so brim-full of life.

Li shrugged. ‘Sure. It was hard.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose you would have the first idea why anyone would want to kill her?’

Hart shook his head. ‘It’s inconceivable to me,’ he said.

‘Or why anyone would want to steal her computers, all her files?’

Hart said, ‘I heard there’d been a break-in up there. It’s all gone?’

‘Everything.’

‘Jees…’ He held up his hands. ‘I can’t help you. I wish to God I could.’

Li said, ‘I might as well tell you, because you’ll probably hear it anyway…’ He glanced at Lyang. ‘Apparently she thought she was going to meet me last night at the Millennium Monument.’

Hart’s consternation was plain on his face. ‘Why would she think that?’

‘Because someone phoned up after we’d left yesterday afternoon, saying they were me, and arranging a clandestine meeting?’

‘Why? What for?’ It was Lyang this time.

‘I don’t know.’

Hart said, ‘Man, that’s spooky.’

‘What about her private life?’ Li said. ‘What do you know about that?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘She came round for dinner a couple of times,’ Lyang said.

‘Yeah, but all we ever talked about were people we knew back in the States. Work. You know, stuff we had in common.’

‘And we never got an invite back to her place.’

‘The thing is,’ Hart said, ‘her private life was just that. Private, wasn’t it, Lyang? You know, for such an outgoing girl, she really was a very private person. You got so far with her, and then zap. Down came some kind of shutter. So far and no further. I don’t know anything about her relationships, what she did in her spare time. Hell, I don’t even know if she lived on her own. It’s hard to know if there was anything much at all outside of her work.’ He sighed and then glanced through the two-way mirror. ‘How’s our boy doing?’

‘Feeling pretty sorry for himself,’ said the female interrogator.

Hart glanced at his watch. ‘He’s had long enough to stew. Time to go get a confession.’ He looked at Li. ‘Unless there’s anything else you want to ask.’

Li said, ‘I can’t think of anything right now.’

‘We’ll be seeing you tonight, anyway,’ Lyang said. ‘You and Margaret are still coming to dinner, aren’t you?’

Li had forgotten all about it. ‘Sure,’ he said.

Hart squeezed his arm. ‘Catch you later.’ And he went out still clutching his charts. He hadn’t looked at them once.

Li was anxious to be away, but he also wanted to see how Hart’s interview with Jiang would turn out. ‘Will this take long?’ he asked Lyang.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

So he sat down again and watched as Hart entered the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. Jiang sat upright, almost startled, and you could see his tension in the rigid way he held himself. Hart sat down facing Jiang and put the charts on his knee. He still wasn’t consulting them. ‘On these tests, Jiang,’ he said, those hypnotic tones again, ‘I can make one of three decisions. I can say a person’s telling the truth. I can say a test’s inconclusive, that I just don’t know. Or I can say a person’s not telling the truth.’

Jiang drew in a deep breath, very focused on Hart and what he was saying. He kept nodding, as if he could gain approval by agreeing.

‘Now here’s the thing,’ Hart said. ‘We’re not dealing with a criminal case here. You’re just an ordinary guy, working hard to raise his family, making his contribution to society. Now, some of the criminals I deal with, that they bring down here from the cells uptown, they don’t contribute to anything. They’re just kind of leeches on society.’ He leaned forward, creating a sense of confidentiality between them. ‘When I look at the charts, and from talking with you here today, I know you’re no criminal, that’s for darn sure. In fact, I’m inclined to think you’re kind of a nice guy. And life’s dealt you a pretty bum hand.’

Jiang nodded vigorously.

‘The thing is, is that as far as what Shimei is saying, it happened. And you’re remembering it. But you’re having a problem bringing it forward to talk with somebody. To try and understand why. And I can understand the fear and embarrassment for you. That’s the biggest thing, isn’t it?’

Jiang was nodding miserably now.

‘Because you can remember it happened, but if you come right out and tell somebody, how do you handle that picture you have of yourself, because you’re not like that normally.’

‘I’m not,’ Jiang whispered.

‘We all have a view of ourselves, Jiang. The way we believe that the rest of the world looks at us. We call that our ego. And when that is threatened, we have what we call an ego defence mechanism which, to protect that image we have of ourselves, will push things back into our subconscious and lead us to deny that they ever occurred — when, in fact, we ourselves know that, yes, it did happen. But because it is so out of character for us in normal situations, we really don’t know how to deal with it.’

Jiang was still nodding his agreement. You could see in him, as clear as day, the desire to confess. To tell this soft-spoken sympathetic American the truth, because after all he had already seen it in the chart.

Hart was still talking. ‘And so, we are left in a predicament where we feel so much pressure. It’s called anxiety. And our anxiety gets to be so great that our total thinking, our total being, is just taken up with trying to fight it.’ He leaned even closer, and put a comforting hand on Jiang’s knee. ‘The thing is that you know, and I know, that what happened was probably brought on by the booze.’

‘Yes…’ Jiang’s voice was a whisper.

‘And you were lonely. After all, your wife had left you. How long had it been? Two years? That’s a long time for a man to be on his own, Jiang.’

Jiang had tipped his head into his left hand, his palm hiding his eyes, but you could see the tears running down his pockmarked cheeks.

‘And that’s why you did it, wasn’t it, Jiang?’

‘Yes.’ Almost inaudible.

‘I need you to tell me, Jiang, that you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina. And all that anxiety is just going to lift right off your shoulders.’

Again, the bluntness of it seemed shocking, but Li knew that the form of words was important for legal purposes.

‘I did it,’ Jiang said.

‘You put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

‘Yes.’

‘All the way?’

‘Yes.’ And he wept openly now.

Hart patted his knee gently. And he still hadn’t looked at the charts.

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A break-in,’ Li repeated stupidly.

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

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

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

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

‘I hope you haven’t disturbed anything.’

‘No, Chief.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You can go now,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘There’s been a break-in.’

‘I can see that. Who are you?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Li sighed heavily. ‘I don’t think…’

‘I want to know!’ the girl insisted.

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

‘Oh, my God!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She took a deep breath and nodded her head.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’d like to do it,’ she said.

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

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

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

I

Li arrived at the pathology centre off the Badaling Expressway shortly before eleven. He pulled in beside a Beijing Jeep from Section One, and saw Wu standing smoking in the doorway, waiting for him.

‘Hey, Chief.’ Wu pushed his shades back on his forehead, threw away his cigarette and followed him into the lobby and along the corridor to the changing rooms.

Li said, ‘Did you turn up anything at the Academy?’

‘Not a thing, Chief. I talked to all the students and staff who worked with her. No one had a bad word to say about her.’

I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes.

‘And there just doesn’t seem any reason why anyone would want to steal those computers and files,’ Wu was saying. ‘The computer equipment wasn’t even new. You’d only get a handful of yuan for that stuff on the black market. And like the security guy said, it was a pro job. Why would they want to steal a lot of old junk?’

Li hung up his coat and slipped a green surgical gown over his shirt. ‘When we figure that out, we might know why she was killed.’ He pulled a shower cap over his head. ‘Someone broke into her apartment and took her laptop.’

Wu was sitting pulling elasticated covers over his shoes. He raised one eyebrow. ‘You still think she was killed by the Ripper? I mean, the same guy who killed those other women?’

‘I know it doesn’t make sense, Wu, but it’s hard to call it any other way. How else do we explain the letter promising to cut off the ears of the next victim, and then Pan turning up with her ears removed? And then there’s the trademark cutting of the throat. The Russian cheroot.’

He looked at Wu, who could only shrug an acknowledgement. ‘I don’t know, Chief. There’s so many inconsistencies. Maybe…maybe the other murders were just a smokescreen — to confuse us, to obscure the real reason for killing Professor Pan. Maybe she’s what it’s all really about.’

Li stopped to consider the idea. ‘It’s a hell of an elaborate smokescreen,’ he said. ‘But it’s a thought, Wu. It’s a thought.’

He pulled plastic covers over his shoes. Regulations in the new facility. Everyone attending an autopsy had to wear protective clothing. They took cotton masks from the locker and pocketed them for later use. It had been established that bone dust breathed in during the cutting of the skull with an oscillating saw, could carry viral particles, including AIDS. These days no one was taking any chances. Although Li thought it unlikely that a woman involved in a long-term relationship with another woman would have AIDS.

They went back out into the corridor and turned toward the autopsy room at the end. ‘So has the American pathologist turned up yet?’ Li asked.

‘Yeah.’

Li felt anger rising in him again, like mercury in a thermometer. ‘It’s madness, Wu. Absolutely fucking insane! Where’s Wang?’

‘In the autopsy suite, Chief. They’re doing the autopsy together.’

‘Well, that’s something at least.’ He pushed open the swing doors into the autopsy room. ‘I don’t suppose he speaks Chinese?’

‘I shouldn’t think so, Chief.’ The two pathologists were standing with their backs to the door, examining photographs taken at the crime scene. Wu said in his halting English, ‘You don’ speak Chinese, Doctah, do you?’

The pathologists turned, and Margaret smiled beatifically at Li. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t. Although after all this time, I should really, shouldn’t I?’ She took pleasure in Li’s shock at seeing her there, and even more from his immediate attempt to mask it. ‘I heard you weren’t too happy that some “goddamned American” was going to screw up your case.’

‘Where’s Li Jon?’ he asked.

Which immediately set her on edge. The little wife and mother wasn’t to be trusted with the proper care of their child. ‘I parked him under the autopsy table,’ she said. ‘Next to the drainage bucket.’ Li’s eyes very nearly flickered toward the table, but he stopped them in time. And Margaret added, with more than a tone, ‘Mei Yuan has him. Until this afternoon, that is — when your father’s coming to see him.’ A pause. ‘Is there any chance you’ll be there?’

‘I doubt it,’ Li said, his voice stiff with tension.

‘I’ll tell him you were asking for him, then, shall I?’ And she turned back to the photographs. ‘So…now that we have the domestic arrangements out of the way, I suppose we should really get on with the job in hand.’

The photographs were laid out on a side table, a graphic, vividly coloured record of a woman’s murder. On another table her bloodstained clothes had been spread out for examination, carefully cut from the body to avoid damaging it during their removal. The spotlessly clean stainless steel autopsy table lay empty in the middle of the floor beneath lights that would focus on the corpse, and a microphone dangled from an outlet in the ceiling to record the pathologists’ every observation.

Through windows in the swing doors at the far end of the room, Li could see the assistants retrieving the body from a two-tier storage facility beyond that could handle up to eighty bodies at any one time. He heard the sound of the drawer sliding open, and the rattle of the gurney as they transferred Lynn Pan’s dead weight on to it.

Margaret said, ‘I’ve spent the last hour going through Doctor Wang’s autopsy reports with him, so I think I’m pretty much up to speed.’

The double doors banged open and the assistants wheeled in the corpse in its white body bag. They manoeuvred the gurney alongside the autopsy table and carefully unzipped the bag, before transferring the oddly pale body on to the stainless steel. A wooden block with a curved indent was placed below the neck to support the head.

Li was almost afraid to look at the body. He knew it was no longer the Lynn Pan he had met yesterday, but it was hard to separate it from the force of her personality. He made himself turn his head. Naked, she looked tiny, like a little girl, small breasts flattened out against her ribs, her legs slightly apart, feet splayed like a ballet dancer’s. In life he’d had the impression of someone much bigger, much stronger. She would have been no match for her killer. Fingers like rods of iron clamped around her delicate neck, choking the breath and the life from her.

Margaret turned from the table. ‘My God, she’s like a child,’ she said. She had not known what to expect, and was taken by surprise. ‘What age was she?’

Wang consulted his notes. ‘Thirty-three, Doctah.’

Margaret crossed to the table and gazed down upon her flawless face, and saw that she had been very beautiful. ‘What a waste.’ She glanced up and found Li watching her.

He saw the shock and the empathy in her eyes. Shock because it was difficult not to feel a sense of loss when something so beautiful is destroyed. Empathy because she was almost the same age as Margaret, and it is hard in that circumstance not to feel vulnerable yourself. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes. Perhaps even in death Lynn Pan had that effect on people.

Margaret took a deep breath. It was her first autopsy for some considerable time. She had long ago stopped seeing the victims who had passed across her table as anything more than evidence to be examined in the minutest detail, a receptacle for vital clues that might lead to the capture of their killer. It was harder coming back to it than she had imagined. Defences were down. She had been softened by motherhood and domesticity, she had allowed herself to become human again, in a way that you cannot afford when your job is cutting open other human beings.

Li knew it would be hard for her. He watched as she summoned all her professionalism and began her external examination. There was not much of her to be seen under the shower cap and goggles and mask. Her smock and plastic arm cuffs covered every inch of her white skin, latex gloves and the mesh gauntlet on her noncutting hand hid the beauty of her long, delicate fingers. It was something in the way she held herself that betrayed her tension. If only to Li.

There were several red-purple bruises on Lynn Pan’s arms and legs, where perhaps she had fought briefly against her killer. ‘No defence wounds on the hands or forearms,’ Margaret said. ‘No cuts or slashes, which would suggest she was at least unconscious before he cut her throat.’

Around her neck and jawbone there was similar coloured bruising consistent with having been caused by thumb and fingertips where she had been pinned against the base of the sundial arm and choked. A cluster of three round bruises about one and a half centimetres in diameter on the left side, a larger bruise on the right, probably made by the thumb — suggesting that the murderer might have been right-handed. Margaret was confident that where the head had been banged up against the foot of the monument, she would find an area of subgaleal haemorrhage when she examined the scalp.

‘This guy needs to cut his fingernails,’ Margaret said. There were marks on Pan’s throat, consistent in relation to the bruising with having been left by the killer’s fingernails. Tiny crescent-shaped abrasions between half and one centimetre long, flakes of skin heaped up at their concave side. Margaret cocked her head, frowning slightly. ‘Usually someone defending themselves against strangulation would leave vertically oriented scratches near the top of their own neck, at the base or sides of the mandible, as they tried to pry themselves free.’

‘She was wearing gloves, Doctah,’ Wang said.

‘Ahh.’ Margaret had missed that in the photographs. She was rusty.

The slashing of the throat was ugly and vicious. It began five centimetres below the point where the left earlobe had been severed. It made a jagged crescent around the throat, following the line of the jaw, severing the windpipe, both carotid arteries and the internal jugular, and cutting through all the muscle and soft tissue right down to the vertebrae, marking the intervertebral cartilages. The blood vessels contained clot. Margaret thought that the wound had probably been inflicted by a sharp, pointed, long-bladed knife, about six to seven inches long. And it was her view that from the angle of the cut and the tearing of the skin, the knife had been drawn across the throat from left to right.

She examined the face next, pulling back the eyelids and peering at the eyes. ‘There is florid petechial haemorrhaging of the conjunctiva and the face,’ she said. ‘Tiny burst blood vessels,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘Caused by the pressure created when the blood draining from the head is cut off, but blood is still pumping into it through the arteries.’ She turned the head to the right to examine what remained of the left ear. ‘He’s been in a hurry with this. It’s a very crude amputation. He must have pulled the ear away from the side of the head with his free hand and cut down along the shape of the skull with a single stroke of his knife. The wound is not very accurate.’ A part of the ear still remained attached to its stump. On the right side, half the lobe remained clinging stubbornly to the side of the head by the smallest flap of skin.

As she examined the hair and the external scalp, Margaret could smell the faint lingering traces of Lynn Pan’s shampoo. A soft, sweet, peachy smell that made her seem altogether too human, too recently alive. She stepped back and nodded to Doctor Wang who drew blood for toxicology from the femoral vein at the top of her right leg.

Li could not look as Wang handed the blood to an assistant and then held open Pan’s right eyelid to pierce the eyeball with a syringe and draw off a quantity of clear, vitreous fluid. They would turn her over now and examine the back of her, before replacing her front-side-up and carving her open, cutting through delicate ribs with steel shears, removing the heart and lungs and the rest of the organs, cutting round the top of her skull and removing the brain. A monotonous, routine, dehumanising process that would reduce this once vibrant young woman to a dissevered pile of flesh and bones to be stored in a deep freeze for anything up to five years, depending upon how long it took to catch and execute her killer.

Margaret worked her way through the rest of the autopsy with dispassionate detachment. Like riding a bicycle, you never forgot how. She had simply wobbled a little at the beginning. Everything about Lynn Pan was normal and healthy. Her heart, lungs, liver, both kidneys. She had been a model of fitness and good health.

Li stood watching, determinedly unemotional, trying to focus his feelings in a positive way. He closed his eyes as Margaret sliced down the length of the intestine and tried not to let the smell affect him. She had been killed for a reason — a reason that had nothing to do with the other murders, although it appeared she had been killed by the same hand. Her computers and files had all been stolen, from her workplace and her home. She knew, or had in her possession, something…information, perhaps, that someone did not wish anyone else to know. So the motive for killing her was different from the others. She did not relate in any way to any of the Jack the Ripper slayings or their Beijing copies. And yet they had so much else in common. The method of killing, the Russian cheroot. And the letter which had promised to cut the ears off the next victim, a promise fulfilled in the killing of Lynn Pan. An incontrovertible link.

‘Did we manage to recover saliva from the cheroot found at the Guo Huan crime scene?’ he asked Wang.

‘English, please,’ Margaret said without looking up.

Li repeated the question in English.

‘Sure,’ Wang said. ‘The lab confirm this morning. We have DNA match with other killings.’

‘How long will it take to DNA-test the cigar end found by Pan’s body?’

‘I gave it to lab last night,’ Wang said.

And Margaret added, ‘I have requested that they fast-track the testing process. We should hear later today.’

Li said, ‘What are you going to put in your report to the Americans?’

Margaret said, ‘For God’s sake, I haven’t finished the autopsy yet!’

‘But you already know the cause of death.’

She sighed, reluctant to commit herself too early. ‘Subject to toxicology, I’ll be telling the embassy that she died from rapid blood loss caused by the severing of the main arteries of the neck. She had been strangled and was probably unconscious when her throat was cut.’

‘Do you think she was killed by the same person who murdered the others?’

She glanced at Wang. ‘What do you think, Doctor? You did the other autopsies.’

Wang pulled a face. ‘Inconclusive,’ he said. ‘She was strangled like others, yes. Throat cut, left to right, like others. Yes. But no other injury. This is not like others. Also, she no prostitute, like others. She no killed in Jianguomen, like others.’ He looked at Margaret. ‘How ’bout you, Doctah?’

‘I agree,’ Margaret said. ‘As things stand, the evidence is inconclusive.’

‘What about the letter?’ Li said. ‘The ears.’

‘Circumstantial,’ Margaret said. ‘It doesn’t prove anything. You have to make your own judgement on that one.’ She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘The unsmoked end of that Russian cheroot is the crucial piece of the jigsaw that we don’t yet have. If they can recover saliva and we get a DNA match, then I think you’d have to say that it was the same killer. If not…’ she blew a jet of air through pursed lips, ‘…I’d say you were heading for confusion freefall.’

II

Li and Wu were stepping out into the carpark when Li’s cellphone rang. Qian’s voice sounded oddly strained. ‘Chief, where are you?’

‘We’ve just come out of the autopsy.’

‘Can you come straight back here?’

‘Sure.’

‘And bring Wang?’

‘Why?’

‘We’ve got something here he’s going to have to check out, Chief. It’s not something I really want to tell you about on the phone.’

Li sent Wu back inside to get Wang, and he stood on the steps staring gloomily toward the traffic which sped by on the expressway beyond a vast area of what had once been housing, flattened now for redevelopment. He didn’t really want to think about what it was that Qian needed Wang to check out. Everything about this case seemed to be slipping away from him. Margaret’s confusion freefall. Each time, it seemed, he turned around there was a new development — before he’d even had time to assimilate the last one.

‘What’s happened?’ He turned around to find Margaret, showered and changed, on the steps beside him.

‘I don’t know. Qian didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.’ He looked at her, and she seemed suddenly very small and vulnerable, her hair still wet and combed back from her face. She seemed thinner. Perhaps she had lost weight and he simply hadn’t noticed. He ran a thumb along the line of her jaw and brushed her cheekbone. Her skin was so pale, dotted with tiny faded freckles across the nose. He remembered how Lynn Pan’s lover had described her loss. One minute she’s there. My whole life. The next she’s gone. And he felt how it would be if he ever lost Margaret. The thought struck him like a blow to the solar plexus. It was too easy to take the people you loved for granted, and too late to take it back when they were gone. He knew that Margaret was unhappy, chained to the home and the child, and he simply hadn’t been dealing with it. In the wake of Lynn Pan’s death, she seemed particularly fragile, and he felt the need to hold her and protect her.

Margaret was taken by surprise when he enveloped her in his arms and squeezed all the breath from her lungs. ‘Hey,’ she protested, laughing, and pulled herself free. ‘Who do you think you are, the Beijing Ripper?’

But he wasn’t smiling. He was gazing into the deep, dark blue of her eyes. ‘I love you, Margaret,’ he said.

And she felt the intensity of it. ‘I love you, too,’ she said quietly.

‘I know things aren’t satisfactory right now,’ he said. ‘I know it. I just…I just need to deal with this first. And then we’ll sort it.’

She nodded seriously. ‘I don’t know how we do that.’

‘Neither do I. But we’ve got to try.’ He squeezed both her hands. ‘I can’t promise, but I’ll try and make it to see my father this afternoon.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘I won’t hold my breath.’

They broke apart as her taxi arrived. It was a Mercedes. Li cocked an eyebrow. ‘Can we afford this?’

‘We don’t have to. The good old US of A is picking up the tab.’ She kissed him lightly on the lips and jumped into the back seat. The taxi was pulling out of the gate when Wu came down the steps with Pathologist Wang.

It took them forty minutes to get back to Section One through the lunchtime traffic, sitting in long, frustrating periods of gridlock on the Third Ring Road before turning south and picking their way through some of the less congested back streets. The restaurant on the corner of Beixinqiao Santiao was packed when Li parked their Jeep outside it. The sounds of diners, the smells of lunch, of barbecue and wok, filled the air, making Li aware of a hunger gnawing at his stomach. But he had no appetite and no desire to eat. Beyond Section One, Noah’s Ark Food Room had fallen under the demolition men’s hammer, and behind a hoarding where it had once stood, a giant crane soared into the blue autumn sky, dominating the skyline.

They went in the side entrance and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. There was an odd, faintly medical smell in the air as they walked along the top corridor. It was cold, and when they turned into the detectives’ room they saw why. All the windows stood wide open, and officers were sitting around in their coats and typing with their gloves on. Everyone was smoking. In spite of the cold wind blowing in through the open window, and the smoke that filled the room, the smell was stronger here, and carried more than a hint of something rotten.

Qian was sitting on one of the desks talking on the telephone. He hung up when he saw Li and jumped down. ‘In here, Chief.’ Watched by everyone else in the room, Li and Wu and Wang followed Qian into his office. The windows here were also wide open. The desk had been cleared, and on it stood a cardboard box the size of a shoebox. It had been wrapped in brown paper and secured with clear, sticky tape. Someone had cut open the wrapping, and the paper was folded away from the box, its lid lying on the table beside it. The air was thick with the smell of alcohol, and a stink like meat which had been left in the refrigerator a month past its sell-by date.

‘In the name of the sky, Qian…’ Li screwed up his eyes and blew air out through his mouth. ‘What the hell…?’

‘It was addressed to you, Chief. Arrived in this morning’s mail. But it was stinking so bad the head of the mail room thought I should open it.’ Qian looked slightly green around the gills. ‘I wish to hell I hadn’t.’

‘What is it?’ Li and Wu and Pathologist Wang approached the open box with a caution which suggested they thought that something might jump out and bite them. Inside, laid out among crumpled paper packing was a smooth, faintly reddish-brown-coloured arc of something organic. It was wrapped in plastic and oozing a clear fluid. The stench was fierce. Wu put a handkerchief to his face and moved back, gagging. Li stood his ground with difficulty as Wang snapped on latex gloves and lifted it out of the box.

‘It’s a kidney,’ he said. ‘The left kidney. You can tell because the adrenal gland in the fat that’s been left along the top edge is still “tall”. The gland on the right kidney gets flattened by the liver. It’s been cut in half longitudinally. There’s about one inch of the renal artery still attached to it.’ He sniffed, long since inured to the aromas of the autopsy. ‘Been preserved in alcohol by the smell of it, which is why it feels firm and has lost some of its colour.’

‘A human kidney?’ Li asked, anticipating Wang’s response with a growing sense of horror.

‘Oh, yes. I’ll need to make the proper comparisons of course, but at an educated guess I’d say this is the kidney that was removed from Guo Huan. The renal artery is normally about three inches long. From memory there was around two inches of it left in the corpse.’

Qian went into the top drawer of his desk and lifted out an A4-sized plastic sleeve. Flattened out inside it was a note that had been folded twice over. He handed it to Li, and then moved away toward the open window for air. Li recognised the scrawl of the large, untidy characters, the distinctive red ink.

Li found the plastic sleeve trembling in his hands. ‘And it was addressed to me by name?’

‘Yes, Chief.’

Li held out his hand. ‘Give me some gloves.’ He had used up his supply. Qian took a pair from his desk and handed them over. Li pulled them on and then carefully lifted the box away from the wrapping paper. He turned the paper over and smoothed it out on the desk. The label was hand-written. There were half a dozen stamps on it, franked and postmarked the previous day. The circle of red ink was not perfect, but it was perfectly readable. 12.30 p.m. EMS Central Post Office, Beijing.

Li tried to contain his excitement. ‘He’s made his first mistake,’ he said. ‘The parcel was too big to post through a letter box. He must have had to pass it across the counter and get it weighed. So somebody saw him. Somebody saw his face. We’ve got a witness!’

‘Hey, Chief, isn’t that your old man?’ Wu was chewing like a man possessed. He had now pushed several pieces of gum into his mouth to get rid of the taste left there by the lingering smell of the half kidney. Wang had once explained to him at an autopsy that the smell registered by your nasal sensors was carried on actual particles released into the air by the thing you were smelling. Which is why a particularly strong smell could also sometimes leave a taste in your mouth. Wu had found the concept disgusting, and was now furiously trying to wash away any unwanted particles by stimulating saliva production with his chewing gum.

Li glanced out of the passenger window as they passed the side entrance to the Ministry compound in Zhengyi Road. His apartment was less than two hundred metres beyond the wall. A taxi was pulled in at the kerbside, and the driver was helping his father out on to the sidewalk.

‘Yes,’ he said. Mister Li senior was going to visit his grandson. And Li knew that Margaret would not be surprised that Li had failed to turn up. Again. A part of him wanted to ask Wu to stop, so that he could get out and explain. But there was no point. An excuse, even a good one, always sounded like an excuse.

Ironically, the EMS post office was just around the corner at No. 7 Qianmen Da Jie. It was a huge, twelve-storey building that took up half the block. Rows of distinctive green EMS vans were parked out front, in a narrow carpark screened from the road by trees. Wu parked right outside the main door, waving aside protests from a security man by pushing a Ministry ID in his face. Li stepped out and saw, in the afternoon sunshine, the row of red flags lining the roof of police headquarters on the next half of the block. Wu lit a cigarette. ‘Cheeky bastard. Posting the thing to us from right outside HQ. Like he’s thumbing his nose at us. How was it he signed his note? Catch me if you can?’

Li said grimly. ‘We’ll catch him alright.’ But in his heart he wondered how many more young women would have to die before they did.

The main hall was busy, queues forming at windows along a counter which ran the length of it. Lights reflected off a marble floor, and voices off marble-faced walls. One counter sold nothing but paper, string, tape and glue, and Li wondered if perhaps their killer had wrapped his parcel in the post office itself. He looked along the counters as if he hoped that maybe the murderer’s ghost might still be there, some impression, some presence that he had left behind, even just in the memory of one of tellers.

They made themselves known to security and were taken to the manager’s office. Wu nudged Li and nodded toward a copy of the Beijing Youth Daily lying on his desk. The manager was a dapper man in a dark suit, with a collar and tie. He looked at them warily through steel-framed spectacles and offered them tea. Li declined. He showed the manager a colour photocopy of the parcel label, with its stamps and postmark. He said, ‘One of your tellers took a parcel with this address across his or her counter at twelve-thirty yesterday. He or she stamped it and franked it and put it in the mail basket.’

‘So?’

‘So, I believe that teller is the only person we know of who has set eyes on the Beijing Ripper.’

He had calculated that his use of the term would have some effect. And he was not wrong. The manager’s eyes opened wide and flickered briefly toward the newspaper lying on his desk. ‘He was here?’

‘We believe so.’

Li could see the thoughts processing behind the manager’s eyes as clearly as if they were windows. ‘We have thousands of people in here every day,’ he said. ‘I think it’s unlikely that a teller would remember any one of them in particular.’

Wu was looking at a small black and white television screen mounted high on the wall in the far corner of the office. It showed a view looking down on the main hall of the post office. His jaw froze, mid-chew. ‘You guys got closed-circuit TV in here?’

The manager glanced toward the screen, the implications of Wu’s question dawning on them all simultaneously. ‘We have two cameras,’ he said. ‘One on each side of the hall.’

‘And do you record what they see?’ Li asked, hardly daring to believe that they might actually have the killer on video.

‘We recycle the tapes every seven days.’

‘We only need to go back one,’ Wu said, his eyes shining with sudden optimism.

The recording equipment was in the office of the head of security. He removed his grey-peaked cap and scratched his head. ‘Sure,’ he said in answer to Li’s question. ‘The tapes are all time-coded, so we can find the time you want pretty fast.’

‘Let’s do it, then,’ Wu said.

The security man rummaged in a cupboard and pulled out a VHS tape and put it in an empty machine. He flicked the play switch and then began fast rewinding from the end of it. It went backwards from seven p.m. Li watched the speeded-up comings and goings, like an old Chaplin movie gone mad, with a growing sense of disappointment. He glanced at the other two monitors displaying live pictures from the main hall. He said to the manager. ‘And those are your only two camera positions?’

The manager nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘They’re too high for us to see faces. We’re really only getting the tops of heads.’

The managed shrugged. ‘They weren’t designed to pick out faces, just to give us an overview.’

Li felt fingers of frustration choking back his brief optimism. It would be ironic if they managed to catch their killer on tape, but not be able to see his face.

The time-code on the tape was counting back at high speed. The picture was just a blur. Wu said, ‘Stop it at twelve-fifteen. We’ll watch it from there.’ He shoved another piece of gum in his mouth and lit another cigarette.

The tape ran back a little past twelve-fifteen before the security man could stop it. The picture cleared and they had a view of the hall from the left-hand camera. It was running forward now from twelve-thirteen and fifty-three seconds. Li said, ‘Can you cue up the tape from the other camera while we’re watching this?’ The security man nodded. He found the right tape and set it rewinding in another machine.

The others watched a constant stream of activity on the first monitor. A woman with a pushchair. A bunch of schoolgirls posting some letters. Businessmen with express mail. Ordinary folk going about their ordinary business. The main floor was busy, at least thirty people moving around it at any one time. Maybe more. The picture definition was not good, as if the camera had viewed proceedings through gauze stretched across its lens. Suddenly, Wu shouted, ‘There!’ And he stabbed his finger at the screen.

Li leaned in and saw a figure in a long, dark coat with a shoebox parcel under his arm walking through the sunshine that spilled in from the main door. ‘Shit!’ he muttered under his breath. ‘He’s wearing a baseball cap. He knows about the cameras.’ His face was completely masked by the long peak of the black cap, and plunged into shadow by it. His collar was turned up, and they could not even tell if his hair was long or short. He wore gloves, dark trousers, black shoes. There was not one centimetre of him on view.

Wu was shaking his head. ‘He’s playing with us, Chief. He knew we would see these tapes. He knew how fucking frustrated we would be when we had him right there in our sights and still couldn’t see him. He’s like the invisible fucking man.’

They watched as he stood for some time in the centre of the concourse, as if deciding which queue to join. Then he walked to a window at the far end, almost immediately below the other camera. Its view of him would be hopelessly distorted, and he was about as far as he could get from the camera whose shot they were watching now. He conducted his business with a teller they could not see. After a brief exchange, the window was lifted and his parcel taken across the counter. He waited until it had been weighed and costed, and then took a wallet from his coat pocket and paid in cash. He never once looked around, his face hidden from view at every moment. He turned and walked briskly to the door and was gone.

Li turned to the manager. ‘Find out who that teller was and get them in here now.’

The teller turned out to be a plump, middle-aged woman with an attitude. She had done nothing wrong, and as far as she was concerned, she was going to be as unhelpful as possible. They replayed the tape for her and she watched with a bored expression.

‘So what am I supposed to be?’ she asked. ‘Madame Memory? I don’t even look at their faces. It’s bad enough that I can smell their breath through the grilles in the window.’

‘It was an unusual address,’ Wu said.

‘I don’t look at the addresses. I weigh the parcel, I look at the postcode, I get a price. I stamp it, they pay. They go, then it’s who’s next.’

‘You’re not being very helpful, lady,’ Wu said.

‘I’m not paid to be helpful,’ she snapped. ‘I’m paid to do a job. I do it. I’ve done if for years. If anyone’s got any complaint about my work, that’s another matter.’ She looked defiantly around the faces. ‘Is anyone complaining about my work?’

Li said very quietly. ‘Do you have any idea what was in that parcel?’

‘Of course I don’t. What’s it to me what was in the parcel?’

‘Well,’ Li said patiently, ‘it might help you to understand just how much danger you are in.’

For the first time, there was no quick comeback and she visibly blanched. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I think it would be helpful if I explained,’ Li said, ‘that the parcel you took from that gentleman contained the kidney of a woman he hacked to death on Sunday.’ Her eyes widened. ‘You might even have heard of him. He was in the paper this morning. They’re calling him the Beijing Ripper.’ There was the smallest intake of breath, and her hand went to her mouth. ‘Did you see that story by any chance?’ She nodded, unable to speak now. ‘Well, you’re the only person we know of who has seen him.’ Her eyes grew wider still. ‘And if we know you’ve seen him, he knows you’ve seen him. So I don’t really think I’d like to be in your shoes tomorrow when he reads that we have interviewed a witness, a teller at the EMS post office, who took a parcel from him on Monday.’

‘You wouldn’t put that in the paper!’ she gasped.

Li shrugged sympathetically. ‘Maybe we won’t have to. Maybe we’ll catch him by then. But we’re going to need some help. We’re going to need a description. Anything at all you can remember. Anything.’ He paused. ‘It could be the most important thing you’ve ever had to do in your life.’

She asked to see the tape again. Then they played her the second tape, but half of the killer was outside the bottom frame of the picture, and they were looking directly down on top of him. There was not so much as a hair on view.

The teller was babbling nervously now. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. His face was shaded by that cap. And really, I don’t look at them, I don’t.’

‘Anything you can remember,’ Li said again. ‘Was he tall, short? Was he clean shaven? Did he wear glasses…?’

‘Yes,’ the teller broke in eagerly. ‘He had glasses. I remember that. Like sunglasses, only not as dark. You know, like they react to the sunlight, but the lenses never go really black.’

‘Do you remember what kind of glasses?’

She shook her head.

‘Think. Did they have heavy frames? Or were they silver or gold? Steel frames like your boss?’

She glanced at the manager who scowled silently at her. She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t remember. But he was clean shaven. I’m pretty sure about that. I would have noticed if he had whiskers.’

‘What about his accent?’ Li said. ‘Was there anything unusual about his voice?’

He could see the concentration on her face. There was nothing that concentrated the mind so well as fear, and the instinct for self-preservation. But to her own and their frustration, she genuinely could not remember.

Li looked at the monitor. He was right there in front of them. Li could reach out and touch the screen. But they were no nearer to catching him than before. He was taunting, torturing them, of that Li was certain. He plotted and planned his every move, anticipating what they would do at every stage so that he was always one step ahead of them.

‘We’ll need both those tapes,’ Wu said to the head of security, and the security man punched a button and the picture froze on the screen. Li had a sudden inspiration.

‘Take a statement from the teller,’ he said to Wu, and turned to the manager. ‘I want you to come down to the floor with me. And I’ll need a tape measure. I want to take a few measurements.’

III

It had been an awkward half hour. Both Margaret and Li’s father had paid lip service to the thought that Li might turn up any at moment. But neither really believed it. The old man had sat in the apartment with his coat and hat on, a fur hat with fold-up earmuffs pulled down over thin, grey hair, his gloves folded neatly on his knees. He had spent all of five minutes half-heartedly bouncing Li Jon on them before becoming bored with the child and handing him back to Margaret. He had accepted an offer of tea, taken two sips and then left it to grow cold on a low table beside the settee.

Margaret knew that he disapproved of her. That he would have preferred a Chinese girl to have been the mother of his grandson. Just one more grudge to bear his son. And so she had made no attempt to engage him in conversation. Neither of them considered it worth making the effort.

Finally she stood up. ‘Normally I take Li Jon out for a walk at this time. In his buggy. You’re welcome to join us if you want. Or you can wait here in case Li Yan arrives.’ She was determined not to sit on in this atmosphere. To her disappointment he stood up, almost eagerly, clutching his gloves.

‘I will come with you.’

A girl carved in pewter played a Chinese zither. Another, chiselled from white marble, sat reading a book in the dappled shade of the trees. There were occasional small squares set off the path through the gardens which separated the two sides of Zhengyi Road. Old men in baseball caps sat smoking on the benches that lined them. An old woman in a quilted purple jacket sat gazing into space, her bobbed hair the colour of brushed steel. Couples strolled arm in arm, mothers with children, school kids with pink jackets and jogpants.

Margaret pushed Li’s buggy north at a leisurely rate, wind rustling the leaves overhead. The buggy was blue, punctuated by the odd coloured square, and had small yellow wheels. There was a support for his feet, and a plastic tray in front of him for toys. A hood, folded away now, could extend from back to front if it rained. A bag which hung from the back of the pushbar, and a tray under the seat, held extra clothes and toys and a flask of warm milk if it was needed. This was a walk she had taken often in the last few months. An escape from the apartment, and in the cold autumn air a chance to breathe again after the suffocating heat of the summer. But now she resented the silent presence of Li’s father as they headed toward the traffic on Changan Avenue.

‘Why do you bother?’ she said eventually and turned to look at him.

He kept his eyes straight ahead. He was not a stupid man. He knew what she meant. ‘Because he is family,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Margaret said. ‘He’s your son. And yet you treat him as if somehow everything bad that’s ever happened in your life is his fault.’

‘He must bear responsibility for his shortcomings. He has been less than diligent in his filial responsibilities.’

‘And maybe you haven’t been such a good father.’ He flicked her a glance. ‘You were so obsessed with the loss of your wife, you forgot that your son had lost his mother. If ever a boy needed his father, it was then. But, no, you couldn’t see past yourself, past your own hurt. You couldn’t reach out to a kid who was hurting just as badly, maybe worse.’

‘What would you know about it?’ he said defensively.

‘I know what Li has told me. What happened, what he felt. Things he probably hasn’t told another living being. Certainly not you. And I know that the Cultural Revolution wasn’t his fault. That it wasn’t his fault his mother was persecuted for being an intellectual. He didn’t invent the Red Guards. He wasn’t even old enough to be one.’

‘You know nothing of these things. You are an American.’

‘I’m an American who has spent most of the last five years in China. I have talked to a lot of people, listened to their stories, read a great many books. In fact,’ she added bitterly, ‘I haven’t had much else to do with my life this last year, raising your grandson. I think I know a little about what the Cultural Revolution was, what it meant to those who survived it. And those who didn’t.’

The old man held his own counsel for several minutes as they reached the top of the road and turned west toward the ramp to the underground walkway. As they passed into the darkness of the tunnel beneath Changan Avenue he said, ‘In China we treasure a son, because it is his duty to look after us in our old age. He and his wife, and their children, will look after his parents when they can no longer look after themselves.’ His voice echoed back at them off the roof and the walls.

‘Yeah,’ Margaret said unsympathetically. ‘That’s why the orphanages are full of little girls, dumped by their parents, abandoned on doorsteps. Great system.’

‘I did not invent the One Child Policy,’ Li’s father said bitterly. ‘I only thank God I had a daughter before they thought of it. She, at least, has taken her responsibility to her father seriously.’

Margaret forced herself to remain silent. Xiao Ling, she knew, had been anything but the dutiful daughter.

‘But Li Yan? The moment he is old enough, he is off to Beijing to live with his Uncle Yifu and train to be the great policeman. Never a second thought for the family he left behind in Sichuan.’

They emerged into the bright sunlight on the north side of Changan, and a shady path led off toward Tiananmen, the trees that hid it from the road casting their long shadows against the high red wall that bounded the gardens outside the Forbidden City. Margaret bumped the buggy into Nanheyan Street and swung hard left into the gardens. Anger forced her to break her silence.

‘That’s what really sticks in your craw, isn’t it? That he came to live with his Uncle Yifu. Your brother. Who was more of a father to him than you ever were.’ She barely stopped to draw breath. ‘And don’t give me that crap about how Li Yan was responsible for his uncle’s death. We both know that isn’t true. Even if he still feels guilty about it. But you never fail to play the guilt card, do you. Never miss a chance to turn the knife in all his emotional wounds. Because you know it works every time. I think you must take pleasure in his pain.’

It was out now. She’d said it all, and there was no taking it back. Before them, the old moat wound its way through the remodelled gardens to a tall, arched bridge in white marble beside a pavilion where water tumbled down over moulded rock. Beyond it, the Gate of Heavenly Peace rose in red-tiled tiers into the sky. It was sheltered here, and barely a ripple broke the surface reflection of the willow trees overhanging the water. People strolled along the paths on both sides of the moat, unhurried, drinking in the peace and quiet of this oasis of tranquillity in the very heart of the city.

Margaret and Li’s father walked in silence with the buggy, then, Li Jon fast asleep, head tipped to one side, oblivious of the tension between his mother and his grandfather. Margaret looked at her child. Round, chubby cheeks, rosy in the cold. Slanted eyes shut tight, lids fluttering slightly, rapid eye movement behind them reflecting some dream that she would never know and he would not remember. And it struck her with a sudden jolt, that her son shared her genes with those of his grandfather. These two adults, at loggerheads with each other, had come together over thousands of miles and millions of years in the living, breathing form of this tiny child. She felt immediate regret at the harshness of her words and turned toward Li’s father with an apology forming on her lips. But it never came, halted by the shock of seeing the tears that streaked the old man’s face.

‘I have never meant to cause him pain,’ he said, and he turned to meet Margaret’s eye. ‘He is my son. His mother’s child. I love him with all my heart.’

She was filled with confusion and consternation. ‘Then why…?’

He raised a hand to stop her question and took out a handkerchief to wipe his face. ‘There is not much of me in Li Yan,’ he said finally. ‘Not that I can find. But he is the image of his mother. I see her in everything about him, in everything he does. In his eyes and his smile, in his long-fingered hands. In his stubbornness and his determination.’ He paused to draw breath, and fresh tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘He thinks that somehow I blame him for her death.’ He shook his head. ‘I never did. But when he left, to come to Beijing, it was like losing her all over again. He was everything I had left of her, and he took that away from me.’ He blinked hard to stop the tears falling from beneath the tangle of white fuse wire that grew from his brows. He put a hand on the push arm of the buggy to steady himself, and she saw the brown spots of age spattered across the crepe-like skin on the back of it. He seemed shrunken, smaller somehow, drowned by his big brown duffle coat, and clothes that hung so loosely on his tiny frame that they only fitted where they touched.

‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered, realising for the first time that the pain he had inflicted on his son was only a reflection of the pain he felt himself. But only because he had never expressed it, at least not to Li Yan. Not in that way. ‘You have to tell him,’ she said. ‘You need to talk. Both of you.’

‘I have never spoken of these things to a living soul,’ he said. He looked at Margaret. ‘But, then, neither have I spilled tears in public.’ He drew breath. ‘The Tao teaches us that agitation within robs one of reflection and clarity of vision. In this state of mind it is impossible to act with presence of mind. So the right thing is to keep still until balance is regained.’ He waggled his head sadly. ‘I have never stopped to think beyond my own pain. Until now. Never stopped to reflect, and regain my balance.’ Something like a smile creased his face. ‘Harsh words sometimes carry hard truths, and make one stop to reflect.’

Margaret could not think of a single thing to say. She put a hand over his, and felt the cold in it. ‘You should be wearing your gloves,’ she said. But he only nodded. They had reached the bridge, and Margaret said, ‘Could you lift one end of the buggy? He always wakens when I have to bump him up the steps.’

‘Of course.’ He wiped his face again, and blew his nose, and stooped to lift the foot of the buggy. And together they carried the child that bound them across the steep arch of this ancient bridge to the other side of the moat.

‘You push him,’ she said, when they got to the other side. And as they walked in silence together toward the pond where golden carp swam around a copper fountain, she slipped her arm through his.

IV

Pau Jü Hutong was a maze of ancient Beijing courtyard dwellings, narrow alleys with tin roofs and grey brick walls, tiny shops behind sliding windows, and ancient trees that sprouted gnarled branches to shade the tarmac. Old men on tricycles pedalled up and down its length, school kids in woolly hats carrying well-worn satchels made their way home from school in groups of two and three.

Wu drove carefully between the parked vehicles, past the towering white detention centre where Section Six interrogators grilled criminal suspects, and turned in at the entrance to the Beijing Forensic Science Institute. The guard, huddled over a stove in the gatehouse, recognised them through the window, and the steel gates concertinaed to let them in. There was a police minivan and a black and white Jeep in the forecourt, and half a dozen other unmarked vehicles. Wu parked up and Li got out, clutching the two video tapes from the EMS post office. They climbed the steps, past two dancing red lanterns, and plunged into the building.

The AutoCAD computer was in a darkened room on the second floor. Li had phoned ahead, and so they were expected. A lab assistant shook their hands and took the video tapes, assuring them that the process of digitisation would only take a matter of minutes. ‘We require just a few frames in order to be able to lift the stills,’ she said. They followed her into the adjoining media room where she put the first tape into a player and started running it through. ‘Anywhere about there,’ Li said, stabbing his finger at the screen. He wanted the biggest and clearest possible images of the killer. The assistant stopped the tape. Their man had just stepped out of the burned-out patch of sunlight on the floor of the EMS hall. She ran it back a short way, and then punched a button on another machine and set the tape playing again. She let it run for about thirty seconds, then ejected it and put in the second tape. They repeated the process, capturing the best images of the man in the baseball cap, before the assistant flicked switches on all of the machines and one of them spat out a shiny silver disc about twelve centimetres in diameter.

She waggled it at Li. ‘Digitised on to DVD. Do you have the measurements?’ Li nodded and she picked up an internal phone and told someone called Qin at the other end that they were ready for him.

Qin was a big man in every way, nearly as broad as he was tall. He had cropped black hair and thick eyebrows that fell away in steep curves on either side of his eyes. His gold-framed glasses somehow softened the threat of his physical presence. He had been instrumental in developing the AutoCAD software. As he slipped the DVD into the computer and began capturing matching still images from each camera using the time-codes, he explained, ‘Used to be that we needed to take measurements from every side of a crime scene to build an accurate 3-D image. Now we just need one to get the scale for the whole thing.’ He examined the pictures of the killer striding across the concourse with his long coat and his baseball cap and the box with the kidney under his arm. ‘What measurements did you take?’

Li said, ‘The length of the hall, the height of the counter, the width of the windows…’

Qin cut him off. ‘The width of a window will do.’ Li placed the piece of paper with the measurements on the computer table. Qin typed in the width of the window in centimetres. ‘Okay, now the computer will do the rest.’ He ran the mouse dextrously across its mat and the arrow on the screen dipped and dived. Menus dropped down, options were selected. The screen divided into two halves. The left half showed one of the stills of the killer caught in mid-stride. For the moment the other half was blank. Qin pulled down another menu, highlighted one of its options, and the blank half filled in with an outline 3-D graphic image of the EMS hall, with the kidney man at its centre. By manipulating the options, Qin was able to take them through a 360-degree circle around him. At intervals he hit the print button, and the printer spewed out hard copies.

Li and Wu watched, fascinated as they took a tour of their murderer. The computer could not show them his face, but it gave them an accurate picture of his build and his shape. He seemed tall, with broad shoulders, but carrying little weight, and was slightly stooped. The shape of his head was obscured by the baseball cap.

‘That’s amazing, Chief.’ Wu’s jaw was hanging open. He had never seen this technology in action before and had forgotten to keep chewing.

‘Can you give us an idea of his height?’ Li asked.

‘I can tell you exactly what height he is,’ Qin said. ‘I can even tell you what size shoes he wears.’

Li found himself clenching his fists. It took them one step nearer to him. One step at a time. He looked at the image on screen with an unblinking intensity. There he was, right in front of them. He thought he was being so clever, and although it was still not enough, they knew more about him now than he could ever have imagined.

V

It was late afternoon by the time he got back to the apartment. He had with him a copy of The Murders of Jack the Ripper, and Elvis’ digest, which he had not yet had a chance to read. At the detectives’ gathering, a packed meeting had discussed developments. The kidney, the video tape from the EMS post office, the AutoCAD analysis of the killer. They had new photographs on the wall now. Pan’s murder scene. The bloody corpse cheek by jowl with the photograph of Pan and her lover in their graduation gowns. They discussed Pan’s sexuality, her autopsy. When Li distributed the computer printouts with the 3-D graphic of the murderer, a tantalising glimpse of their prey, an unusual hush had fallen over the meeting. But for all the interviews, autopsy reports, photographs, printouts — a veritable paper mountain generated by five murders — they were no nearer to catching him. Before he wound up the meeting, Li asked if anyone wished to confess to briefing the Beijing Youth Daily on the Beijing Ripper. Unsurprisingly, no one did.

Margaret was in her usual armchair, reading in the last hour of daylight, her book tilted toward the window. She had fully intended to talk to Li about his father when he got in, but he was earlier than she expected, and she knew by his face that something had happened.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘about missing my father.’ He dropped his coat on the settee and slumped into a chair.

She closed her book. ‘What happened?’

He said, ‘Yesterday it was a letter. Today it was half a kidney.’

‘Jesus! Whose?’

‘The girl we found Monday morning. We’ve still got to DNA match it, but Wang’s pretty sure. And there was a note with it. Pretty vile stuff. He claims to have eaten the other half.’

Margaret frowned. ‘I thought you had assigned an officer to go through the Ripper book and list all the salient facts.’

‘I did. Elvis. I think it took him most of the night to do it.’

‘Didn’t he tell you that Jack the Ripper sent half a kidney to someone through the post?’

Li shook his head. ‘He’s on night shift, and his digest only got handed out this afternoon. No one’s even had the chance to look at it yet.’

Margaret lifted her copy of the book off the floor and started thumbing through it. ‘It was sent to a guy who ran some kind of vigilante group that was patrolling the streets trying to catch the Ripper. Ah, here we are…’ She folded the book back on itself. ‘Lusk, that was his name. Chairman of the Mile End Vigilante Group. And there was a note with that, too.’ She read it out. ‘From Hell. Mishter Lusk, Sor, I send you half the kidney I took from one woman. Preserved it for you. Tother piece I fried and ate, it was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a while longer. Signed, Catch me when you can, Mishter Lusk.’ She looked up and saw that the colour had drained from Li’s face.

‘It’s almost word for word,’ he said. And he closed his eyes and the image of the killer was still there, etched indelibly in his memory. ‘I’ve seen him, Margaret.’

Margaret straightened up in the chair. ‘What do you mean?’

And he explained about the video and the AutoCAD imaging software. ‘Here…’ He opened his folder and handed her one of the computer printouts, along with a copy of a still from the video.

She gazed at them, fascinated. ‘So close…’ she said, and had no need to finish. She laid the prints aside and looked at him. He seemed exhausted, pale and tense. ‘You need a drink,’ she said.

‘I do.’ She got up and went into the kitchen to get him a beer from the refrigerator, and to mix herself a vodka tonic ‘Maybe it’s good we’re going out for dinner tonight,’ she called back through. ‘You need a break from all this.’

‘I’m not sure how much of a break it’ll be,’ he said. ‘It was Bill who brought Lynn Pan over here, remember. He feels really lousy about it.’

‘Oh, yeah, of course.’

She came back through with the drinks and handed him a cold bottle of beer. He put it to his lips and sucked it down thirstily. She said, ‘We’ve got to talk about your dad.’ And she saw his eyes close, hoping that the world would just go away. He really didn’t want to hear it. And, almost as if to rescue him, the phone rang. Margaret said, ‘It’ll be for you.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know.’

Reluctantly, Margaret picked up the receiver. ‘Wei?’ Li opened one eye to watch her as she listened. She slipped her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘It’s Wang.’ And into the phone. ‘I’ll get him for you.’ But she didn’t move. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Okay.’ Li saw a frown form itself on her face, a frown that turned into consternation. He opened his other eye.

‘What is it?’

She held up a hand to silence him. ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll tell him.’ She hung up and looked at him, but he saw that she was looking some place way beyond him, eyes glazed, their focus somewhere else entirely.

‘What!’ He sat up, forcing her to switch focus to him.

‘He just got the DNA results from the lab. From the cheroot found by Pan’s body.’ She paused. ‘It’s different.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean it’s different. Not the same as the DNA they got off all those other cheroots.’

Li found himself tumbling through the confusion freefall Margaret had predicted that morning if the DNA failed to match. Neither of them had believed then that such an eventuality was likely. ‘How’s that possible?’

Margaret consciously tried to stretch the horizons of her thinking so that it would not be limited by the obvious. But it was only the obvious that came to mind. ‘She must have been killed by somebody else.’

He shook his head. ‘But that’s not possible.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, think about it. Someone out there is producing carbon copy killings of the Jack the Ripper murders. Always the same MO. Strangulation, and then the cutting of the throat. Half-smoked Russian cheroot left by the body. We get a letter from him threatening to cut off the ears of the next victim. It’s word for word the same as the first of the Jack the Ripper letters. The next victim is Pan. She is strangled, has her throat cut. A Russian cheroot is found by the body. Her ears are cut off. It has to be the same killer.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Think about the things that don’t match. The fact that Pan wasn’t a prostitute. The fact that she was murdered in another part of the city from all the other victims. The fact that she wasn’t mutilated — apart from the cutting off of the ears.’

Li shook his head vigorously, heaving himself out of his chair. ‘It doesn’t matter. The things that don’t match don’t matter.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because only the killer of the first four victims would be able to replicate the things that do match in the fifth.’ He opened out both palms and cocked his head, as if challenging her to contradict him. And he waited.

She looked at him speculatively for a moment, then said, ‘You’re overlooking something.’

‘What?’

‘The killer is not the only person who knows his MO.’

He stared at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Well, who else?’

‘Every police officer on the investigation.’

He was about to dismiss the notion out of hand. But something stopped him. A memory that wormed its way to the head of the queue of thoughts fighting for space in his mind. A conversation he’d had with Bill Hart after the MERMER demonstration at the Academy. Of course, it has to be used very carefully, Hart had 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? But he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting that someone on my team murdered Lynn Pan?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Someone who used the other murders as a convenient cover. Someone who knew enough detail to make it convincing and throw your investigation into confusion. Who else but a cop would have access to that information?’

Thoughts tumbled through Li’s brain like balls in a lottery drum. He didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t find a convincing counterargument. If the DNA didn’t match, it was the only possible answer. Which meant they were now looking for two killers. And one of them was someone he knew.

In his search for some alternative, his eyes fell upon a pile of envelopes and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper sitting on the table. At first he wasn’t even looking at them, they were just a convenient focus for the eye. He was running through all the people on his team, the officers from forensics, the pathology lab, everyone who would have access to the kind of information which would allow them to stage Lynn Pan’s killing in such a way that Li would think it was another Ripper murder. And then another ugly little thought sneaked up out of left field and he found himself staring at the parcel on the table and listening to the blood pulsing in his head. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he said.

Margaret looked toward the table. ‘Just the mail. I picked it up when I came back from the autopsy.’ And then she realised what was in his head. ‘Oh, God…’ It was barely a whisper.

The parcel was about twelve centimetres square, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with sticky tape. Li’s name and address were written on it, in what seemed to Li like a familiar hand. But there were no stamps. No postmark. It had been hand-delivered. ‘Do we have any gloves in the house?’ he said, not taking his eyes off it.

Margaret nodded and ran off to the kitchen. She returned a few moments later with a pair of clear plastic disposable food-handling gloves. She kept a box of them in the cupboard above the food preparation area. Li took them and pulled them on, and very carefully began picking at the sticky tape until he had raised a corner of it. Then he eased it free of the paper, a centimetre at a time until he was able to open one end of the parcel. He slid out a plain, white cardboard box tied with a red ribbon. He undid the ribbon and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled in cotton wool stained with blood that had dried and turned brown, were Lynn Pan’s ears. Margaret’s gasp was quite involuntary. Li felt nausea turning to anger. Tucked down the side of the box was a folded note. He gently eased it out and open it up. Red ink. And what appeared to be the same, spidery handwriting as before.

I

A red flag flapped in the wind outside the white-tiled police station on the corner of Fanggu Lu and Fangxing Lu. As the sun went down, the wind was doing its best to detach stubborn leaves from the scholar trees that lined the street. A couple of bicycle repair men on the corner wore gloves to protect oily fingers from the cold as they worked on the skeleton of an upturned cycle, the last job of the day. Li drove past the sports centre on his left, basketball courts and soccer pitches, a domed stadium with indoor tennis courts. Beyond it, traffic buzzed like flies dying in the autumn cold around the multistorey Feng Chung shopping centre. At the end of the street he parked and crossed to the apartment block on the corner. A jian bing lady was selling pancakes from a stand in the gardens, while a warden swaddled in blue coat and red armband wore a white face mask as she patrolled the perimeter, casting a long shadow across the grass.

At the entrance to Lao Dai’s apartment, a couple of tricycle goods carriers were parked under a tin roof, and another Chinese flag snapped and cracked like a whip in the breeze. Li climbed the couple of steps to the door and went in. A short flight of stairs led to a lobby and the elevator. A stairgate stood ajar at the entrance to the stairwell. Off to the left, a corridor led to a door with a plaque that read, Veteran Senior Officers Activity Centre. For some reason it was also labelled in English, Old Cadres. Li knocked and walked in. An old man with a very large pair of glasses sat reading the Beijing Youth Daily next to a dispenser of bottled water. He looked up at Li, his face expressionless, then he looked at the front page of his paper and then back at Li.

‘Ni hau,’ Li said, and the old man nodded silent acknowledgement.

A big screen television stood on a wooden cabinet next to a tall refrigerator which had seen better days. In an alcove at the far end of the room, the last sunshine of the day slanted in through windows on two sides. Two old men sat playing chess among the potted plants. From a room in a corridor leading off, Li heard the sound of men’s voices raised in an argument.

The apartment was provided by the Ministry of Public Security for retired senior police officers. Li wondered if he, too, would end up in a place like this one day. He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table with the chess players. For some reason, Old Dai never went to the park on a Tuesday.

‘You just cannot keep your face off the front pages of the newspapers these days, can you?’ Dai said, without looking up.

‘So it seems,’ Li replied. He paused. ‘Dai, I need your advice.’

Dai’s chess partner immediately rose to his feet. He had a long, lugubrious face, and a cardigan that hung open to reveal an egg-stained shirt. ‘No cheating,’ he said, and he headed out into the stairwell.

Old Dai grinned. ‘As if I needed to.’ And then his smile faded. ‘You are in trouble?’

Li sighed. ‘Maybe.’

Dai returned to his examination of the chessboard. ‘You had better tell me.’

‘I think the woman killed last night might have been murdered by a police officer.’

Dai lifted his eyes from the chessboard, all thoughts of the game banished from his mind. ‘Why do you think this?’

Li told him, and Dai sat listening in silence and gazing pensively from the window. When he had finished, Li added, ‘Margaret has taken the ears to the pathology department to confirm that they are Lynn Pan’s. Not that I think there is any doubt. A visual match will do for now. A DNA match will seal it for the record.’

‘And the handwriting?’

‘I have requested a calligrapher to compare the characters on the note that came with the ears, to the characters on the one that came with the kidney. Forensics are comparing the inks.’

‘But you don’t expect a match?’

‘No.’

Dai sat in silence for some time. At length he said, ‘The parcel with the ears had no stamp or postmark?’

‘It was hand-delivered.’

‘So whoever left it in your post-box had access to the Ministry compound.’

‘A cop,’ Li said flatly.

Dai nodded. But it was not a nod of agreement. Only an acknowledgement. ‘I am puzzled,’ he said.

‘Why? What’s puzzling you?’

‘If this police officer had knowledge of the previous murders and wished you to believe that Miss Pan died by the same hand, why would he leave his saliva on the cigar? For he would know, surely, that when you tested the DNA it would not match.’ He looked Li in the eye. ‘That was careless of him, don’t you think?’

II

Li drove north on the East Third Ring Road. It was dark now and the tail lights of the traffic stretched ahead of him into a hazy distance. The city basked in its own light, buildings illuminated against the black of the night sky, a million windows lit like stars in a firmament. When he went to see Dai he had been certain that he was looking for two killers. Both of them somewhere out there. One of them tangible. Li had seen him, been mocked by him, without ever knowing who he was. The other a phantom, an idea born of an unexpected DNA result and a host of inconsistencies. A policeman, someone he knew. One of his team. But, as usual, Dai had made him question everything. In my day we had no DNA testing, he had said. It is possible to pick up a sesame seed but lose sight of a watermelon. But when it came to Pan’s murder, no matter how much he wanted not to believe it, he could not question Margaret’s logic in pointing the finger of accusation at a cop. It was the only explanation that brought consistency to inconsistency. And if it was true, then he was even further from solving this puzzle than he had thought.

And yet, Dai had sown a seed of doubt somewhere in the back of his mind, and it had taken root there and was growing. For an experienced cop to have left DNA traces that would blow apart his subterfuge, seemed unthinkable. But, then again, to make a mistake in the heat of the moment, while committing the presumably unaccustomed act of murder, was not. And, still, the biggest question of all was, why?

Li felt his eyes closing as confusion and uncertainty washed over him in a wave of fatigue, and the vehicle in front — a taxi — seemed suddenly no more than inches away. He jammed on his brakes, and the car behind blared its horn. He swerved, almost losing control, then pulled himself back on track, tiredness swept away by a moment of fear and the heart it had left pounding fiercely in his chest. This was crazy!

He had arranged to meet Margaret outside the Harts’ apartment block on the edge of the Central Business District. She would take a taxi back from the pathology lab, she had told him. On the way she would drop off Li Jon to spend the night at Mei Yuan’s tiny siheyuan home on the shores of Qianhai Lake.

A dinner party, an evening of social chit-chat, was the last thing Li felt like. All he wanted to do was sleep, to close his stinging eyes, rest his aching head on a pillow and drift off into some dreamworld where whatever happened, he was always assured of waking up. But it was too late to back out now. And what was it the Americans said: a change is as good as a rest?

He turned off the ring road at Jinsong Bridge and swept from the exit ramp on to Lianguang Road. The Music Home apartments were a blaze of lights, green glass and grey cladding. The shopping mall on the ground floor of the main block was still doing business. Li parked in the street and found Margaret waiting for him outside the entrance lobby. He raised his eyebrows in an unasked question and she nodded. ‘They match,’ she said. ‘We’ll get the DNA results tomorrow. But, really, we don’t need them.’ There was nothing more to be said. She took his arm and they went through glass doors into a huge lobby with inlaid floors and an arched gold ceiling. A security man at the desk asked politely if he could help. They told him who they were and he telephoned the Harts’ apartment before letting them through to the gardens.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘Lyang said this was Bill’s one concession to Western comfort, but this isn’t comfort, it’s goddamned opulence.’

Contained within the complex of apartment blocks, and the two landmark towers with their grand piano lids, was nine thousand square metres of landscaped garden on the theme of the four seasons. There was a beach around a kidney-shaped pool, paths and walkways through clusters of trees representing everything from summer through fall to winter and spring. There was a stream spanned by tiny bridges at several points along its length, and a garden cafeteria. On the east side, a sports complex contained an indoor swimming pool with tennis courts above it. At each end, ramps led down to an underground carpark beneath the gardens. Now, however, as the cold November winds blew down from the north, heralding the arrival of winter, the gardens were sad and empty.

Li felt uncomfortable here. As if he had stepped through the looking glass into another world on the far side. This was not the Beijing he knew. There was nothing Chinese about any of it. This, and places like it, were built for the business community, the three hundred thousand foreigners at the heart of the city’s new commercial engine, and the Chinese nouveau riche who bought up all the new apartments and rented for profits of thirty and forty percent. It was a bubble, double-glazed and insulated from the real world that he knew outside. A world where Chinese people worked hard, died hard and earned little, living and dying in tiny apartments with communal toilets and inadequate heating. A world where prostitutes were being murdered by a maniac living out some twisted fantasy.

They made their way through the gardens to the far side and into the tower on the north-west corner. An elevator sped them soundlessly up to the twenty-third floor, and they stepped out into a carpeted hallway. Lyang was waiting for them at the far end, at the open door of the Harts’ apartment.

‘Hey, guys. Welcome to our humble home.’ She grinned and kissed them both on each cheek. In the entrance hall, slippers awaited them on a mat, and they kicked off their shoes to slip them on. The floors were dark polished mahogany. A staircase led off to an upper floor, and they walked over lush Chinese rugs into an open living room whose balcony gave on to a stunning view across the city and the gardens below. Concealed lighting along the perimeter of the ceiling was augmented by Chinese lanterns. Antique cabinets and bookcases groaning with collectors’ items lined walls that were hung with original scroll paintings by famous Chinese artists. Through open sliding doors leading off an open-plan dining room, they could see into a fitted kitchen which issued smells that were, finally, stimulating Li’s digestive juices. There was a cinema-ratio plasma TV screen on one wall, and beside it a state-of-the-art stereo system playing muted jazz, Bill Hart was pouring cocktails at a drinks cabinet.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘No arguments. You guys have got to taste my patent Beijing margaritas with crushed ice.’

‘No arguments from me,’ Margaret said.

He kissed her on both cheeks and handed her a drink and then shook Li’s hand. ‘Good to see you, Li Yan. You look whacked.’

‘You’re looking pretty good yourself,’ Li said wryly, and accepted his drink from the American.

Margaret waved a hand around the room. ‘Obviously, I’m in the wrong business. Witchcraft clearly pays better than medicine.’

Hart laughed. ‘I thought it was voodoo.’

‘Whatever.’

He passed a drink to Lyang. ‘Actually, the money’s pretty crap. Well, here in China anyway.’ His smiled faded. ‘Lyang probably told you, I inherited the house in Boston when my wife died.’ He shrugged as if embarrassed. ‘I also picked up a fat insurance cheque that I’d happily have torn in a thousand pieces in return for a chance to turn back the clock. But I couldn’t. So I figured, spend it. I never expected to have it, I wouldn’t miss it when it was gone.’ He let his eyes wander around the room. ‘So we live well. And if we ever have to go back to the States…’ his eyes flickered toward Li and then away again, ‘…we can rent this place out to give ourselves a nice little income.’

‘You want to see around?’ Lyang said. She was dying to show them.

‘Sure,’ Margaret said.

Li would happily have sunk into one of the comfortable-looking armchairs arranged around a central coffee table, but good manners dictated that he look enthusiastic, and he nodded and forced a smile of false interest across his face.

They put their drinks on the table, and Lyang led them back out into the entrance hall and up polished stairs that turned back on themselves at a halfway landing, leading up then to a long central hallway. At one end was the guest bedroom, which doubled as a study, at the other the master bedroom and the baby’s room. There was also a large storeroom, which Lyang said the sales people had told them was a maid’s room. No windows, no ventilation. ‘Foreign architects,’ she said. ‘They probably imagined that would be luxury to us poor Chinese.’

They peeked quietly into the baby’s room and heard the slow, rhythmic breathing of a sleeping child. There were expensive Chinese rugs everywhere, thick-piled and soft underfoot, and from somewhere they had managed to acquire a four-poster bed for the master bedroom. The view from here faced north, toward the lights of the China World Trade Center. In the street a long way below, a traditional Beijing restaurant was doing good business.

Li figured Mao must be turning in his mausoleum.

When they got back downstairs, Lyang excused herself and hurried into the kitchen. Li sank gratefully into the armchair that had been beckoning ever since they arrived and took a long drink of his margarita over a salted rim. He felt the alcohol rushing straight to his brain and immediately began to relax. Perhaps this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least he could escape for a few hours from the horrors of the Beijing Ripper and his victims, and the thought that Lynn Pan had been murdered by someone he knew.

‘Any developments on the Lynn Pan killing?’ Hart asked.

Li groaned inwardly. He wanted to tell Hart it was none of his damned business, but he knew he couldn’t do that. ‘Afraid not,’ he said quickly, before Margaret could say anything. He flashed her a warning look. From now on he was going to share information on the murder with as few people as possible. That included Bill Hart — and most of Section One.

‘It’s a crying shame,’ Hart said. ‘I still feel like shit every time I think about it. I wish I’d never put her name up for that job.’

‘You wouldn’t think of moving over into MERMER yourself?’ Li said. ‘They’re going to need someone to take over the project. And if you’re going to lose your polygraph funding…’

Hart put a finger quickly to his lips and nodded toward the kitchen. ‘No,’ he said in a quite normal voice that belied the warning he had just given. ‘It’s not an area in which I have any real expertise. Sure, I understand the principles, I can read the graphs, but the science and the software are a mystery to me.’

Margaret said, ‘Li Yan never told me how you two met. It wasn’t at a séance, was it?’

‘Bill did a polygraph for us a couple of years ago,’ Li said. ‘A guy who murdered his wife and children and parents in their apartment out in Xuanwu District. We were pretty certain he’d done it, but we just couldn’t prove it. I think that must have been when you were back in the States.’

‘So what did you do?’ Margaret asked Hart. ‘Hang him out the window by his feet and threaten to drop him if he didn’t confess?’

Hart laughed. ‘Didn’t have to. And, anyway, he’d volunteered for the polygraph. Figured he was too smart for us and could beat the test and prove his innocence.’

‘Isn’t there a polygraph expert at the Public Security University who normally does tests for the cops?’ Margaret said.

‘Yes,’ Li said, ‘but the good professor is in big demand all over the country. Not always available.’

‘So you called in the American witch doctor.’

‘Careful,’ Hart said. ‘I’ll start sticking pins in that doll of you I keep upstairs.’

Margaret grinned. ‘So what happened?’

Hart said, ‘I did one of my little parlour tricks. Got him to pick a number and then lie about it. Then I showed him the result on the chart and that was that.’

‘What was what?’ Margaret said.

‘He didn’t even have to take the test,’ Li said. ‘The guy broke down there and then and confessed.’

‘Was that before or after you held him under the water?’

Hart shook his head. ‘I’m never going to convince you, am I?’

‘Probably not.’

Li said, ‘So you think you could beat the number test?’

‘I’ve no idea. But we’re never likely to find out, are we?’

‘I’ve got a machine upstairs,’ Hart said. ‘In the study. It would only take a few minutes.’

‘No chance,’ Margaret said.

‘Go on,’ Li said. ‘You can’t sit there and pour scorn on the man’s work and then refuse to let him prove himself.’

‘It wouldn’t work on me,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d feel guilty even when I was telling the truth.’

Hart smiled. ‘Let me be the one to judge that.’ He called through to the kitchen. ‘Honey? How long till grub’s up?’

‘Another ten minutes,’ Lyang called back.

‘Plenty of time,’ Hart said.

There were two desks in the study, each pushed against facing walls. A third wall was floor to ceiling window, and facing it a futon was set against the fourth. There were matching iMac computers on each desk, cosmic screen savers mixing through sequential photographs of deep space: planets and moons, gas clouds, comets, and galaxies. There was a solitary lamp on Hart’s desk illuminating his private polygraph machine, pens poised to point the finger at whomsoever should dare to prevaricate.

‘Nervous?’ Hart asked.

‘You bet,’ Margaret said, and she was beginning to wish she’d just kept her mouth shut.

‘Sit down.’ Hart pulled a chair on castors out from below his desk and beckoned her into it. He opened a drawer and started to take out the wires and cuffs and bands that he would attach to her before starting his little demonstration.

They heard Lyang on the stairs. ‘Don’t start without me,’ she called, and she ran along the hall and hurried in. ‘This I’ve got to see. Dinner can wait.’ She sat down by her desk, bumping against it and causing the screen saver on her computer to vanish. She glanced at the on-screen desktop which it revealed. ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘I’ve got mail. I never have mail.’ She smiled at Margaret. ‘We have broadband internet and no one ever writes to me.’ She clicked on the icon of a postage stamp at the foot of her screen. It had a red circle with a white ‘1’ inside it, indicating there was a message. The e-mail browser appeared on the screen, and the message was highlighted in the inbox. Lyang sat for a long time staring at it.

Hart was attaching a blood pressure cuff to Margaret’s left arm. He glanced across. ‘Who’s writing to you, honey?’

In a very small voice, Lyang said, ‘A dead woman.’

There was an extraordinary moment when time seemed simply to stand still, and they were frozen motionless by her words. It was a moment that seemed to Li to last a lifetime. He had been gazing out over the city, watching cars and trucks and buses etch lines of coloured light into the night, and even they seemed to come to a halt. He turned finally. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s from Lynn Pan,’ Lyang whispered, and Li felt all the hairs on his arms and shoulders stand up.

They gathered around her computer. The highlighted e-mail was titled For Bill, and was timed and dated at 5.03 p.m. the previous day, less than two hours before her murder.

‘Well, open it, for God’s sake,’ Hart said, and Lyang double-clicked on the highlighted bar. The e-mail opened up full-screen.

There was something disturbing about reading the last words set down by a person who had been murdered so soon afterwards. Someone who had known she was in danger, someone who feared the worst. Lyang turned toward Li. ‘Why would she be scared something might happen to her when she thought it was you she was going to meet?’

Li had no idea. ‘Maybe she thought she couldn’t trust me. Maybe she thought someone would get to her first.’

‘But why? What was she scared of?’

Li tipped his head toward the computer. ‘Maybe we’ll find the answer in the private folder she mentions in the e-mail.’ He looked at Hart. ‘Do you know what she’s talking about?’

Hart nodded. ‘Websites are just space on a computer somewhere that’s linked to the World Wide Web. Usually there are public folders, which anyone on the Internet can access, and there are private folders, which only you can access. Private storage space, really. Most educational institutions allocate private folder space to staff and students on their websites.’

‘So now that you’ve got her user name and password you could access her private folder from here?’

‘Afraid not. You need special software. An FTP client. I don’t have that at home.’

‘But you do at the academy?’ Hart nodded. ‘We’d better go there, then.’

Lyang said, ‘What about dinner?’

‘I just lost my appetite,’ Li said.

And as they headed downstairs to get their coats, Margaret said, ‘I guess this means we’re never going to find out how good a liar I am.’ But no one was listening.

III

They drove in silence through the canyon of light that was Changan Avenue, floodlit buildings rising like cliffs on either side. Past the Forbidden City where the ancient rulers of China once held court. Past the closed world of Zhongnanhai, where the present rulers of China lived in private villas around a glittering lake. Past the telegraph office, the Ministry of Commerce, the Minzu Palace. To the intersection at Muxidi where they turned off on to Sanlihi Road and into the shady side street where they parked in front of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There were still lights on in most of the windows, night classes in progress, staff and students working late on research projects and theses.

Hart led them up the steps two at a time and waved his ID card at the security man in the lobby, although it was hardly necessary. They took the elevator to the fourth floor and followed him down a long corridor to his office. He blinked in the harsh glare of the fluorescent strip lights as they flickered and hummed and spilled their ugly light into every dark corner. He rounded his cluttered desk and sat in front of his computer and switched it on. It whirred and creaked and hissed and started to load its operating system.

He sat back. ‘It’ll take a minute or two.’

They had barely spoken a word in the twenty minutes it had taken them to drive to the academy. Li felt almost brittle with tension. He had no idea what would be in Lynn Pan’s private Internet folder, but he knew it would be key. He felt Margaret at his shoulder, and she gave his arm a gentle squeeze.

She said, ‘So what do people normally keep in their private Web space?’

‘Mostly stuff you want to save for your eyes only,’ Hart said. ‘A lot of people are involved in confidential research. Most of the computers here are on a network. So much computing space is shared, it’s difficult to keep things private.’

His desktop screen had loaded now. He pulled down a menu and selected Connect, then went into a folder labelled Applications and double-clicked on something called Fetch. More screens unfolded and Hart opened up a Dialogue Box, which prompted him to enter an FTP address, a user name and a password. He entered the FTP address for the academy’s website, then tapped in lynn.pan and scribble. Almost immediately they were looking at a screenful of icons representing folders that Pan had stored in her private space. ‘Jesus,’ Hart said. ‘What are we looking for here?’

‘There,’ Li pointed. It was a folder labelled MPS Demo, Mon. 10th. ‘Those must be the files from the MERMER demo she gave us yesterday afternoon.’

Hart clicked his mouse on the icon and held it down. The image turned into a silhouette, and he dragged it across the screen, out of the website window, and on to his desktop, where he released it. The file immediately began copying from the Academy’s computer on to Hart’s desktop PC. It took less than a minute, after which he disconnected from the website and double-clicked on the folder he had downloaded. It opened up a window filled with more folders. Twelve in total. Six were labelled Graphs A, Graphs B, Graphs C, through to Graphs F. The remainder were classified Pics A through to Pics F.

‘What are they?’ Margaret asked.

‘At a guess,’ Hart said, ‘I’d say that the Graphs folders contain the graphs showing the brainwave activity of each of the Ministry people during their demo test yesterday. And the Pics folders probably contain the pictures each of them was shown to stimulate that activity.’

‘Who’s who?’ Li said.

‘No idea.’ Hart turned to look up at Li. ‘She must just have labelled you A through F instead of using names.’

‘But we could each be identified by the pictures we were shown,’ Li said. ‘There was personal stuff among them. I was shown photographs of my apartment building, my home town. I guess everyone else was shown theirs, too.’

‘Then you would know which graph belonged to which person,’ Margaret said.

‘Might take a while,’ Hart said. ‘You know, getting hold of that kind of information. The students who did the research might remember, but I’m guessing their notes were probably among the casualties of that burglary last night.’

‘Let’s have a look at some of the pics,’ Li said, and he leaned in as Hart double-clicked on one of the Pics folders.

Its window opened up and Hart cursed. ‘Shit!’ The folder was empty. He went systematically through the other five. Empty. ‘What the hell…’

Lyang said, ‘Why would she upload six empty folders?’

‘Christ knows,’ Hart said. ‘She was probably in a hurry. Maybe the MERMER software puts the pics somewhere else when it’s running a demo, and she never retrieved them. I just don’t know.’

‘Maybe you’d better check the Graphs folders,’ Margaret suggested.

Hart opened up Graphs A. Its window contained three files, small icons representing single sheets of paper with folded corners. There was a design within each icon which seemed to be made up from the letters MRM, and each file was labelled with a title in a coloured strip beneath it. Graph 1, Graph 2, Graph 3. ‘She must have done three run-throughs,’ Hart said.

‘She did,’ Li confirmed. ‘Can you open those up?’

Hart shook his head. ‘I don’t have the MERMER software.’ And to prove his point he double-clicked on a file icon and a message in a box appeared mid-screen. File cannot be opened because the application software that created it cannot be found.

‘So what use is any of this stuff?’ Lyang said. ‘We don’t have any of the pics. We don’t know which graph relates to who…’

And Margaret added. ‘We don’t know how any of it relates to her murder, or even if it does.’

Li was staring grimly at the screen. His disappointment was nearly choking him. ‘Open up each of the folders,’ he said.

Hart shrugged. ‘What’s the point? We can’t open up any of the files.’

‘Humour me.’

Hart started going through each of the folders as Li had asked. They were all the same. Until he got to Graphs D, and his hand froze on the mouse. For instead of the files being labelled, Graph 1, Graph 2, Graph 3. They were labelled, LIAR, LIAR, LIAR.