Chinese Whispers

I

It was dark when Li left his apartment. Margaret was still asleep, her first undisturbed night for months. The apartment had seemed strangely empty when they got in the night before, with Li Jon spending the night at Mei Yuan’s. It was odd how a presence you took for granted was never more apparent than when it was no longer there. Margaret had fallen asleep almost immediately. Li had drifted once or twice, but for most of the long hours of the night had lain awake staring at the ceiling in the reflected light from the streetlamps outside. He knew he was in trouble, and had been playing a mind game his uncle had taught him. Take sequential facts that led to a conclusion and rearrange them in any order. Then look at them again with a fresh eye. It was amazing just how often you could reach a different conclusion. But no matter how many times Li rearranged the events of the last forty-eight hours, the conclusion always remained the same. And it scared him.

As he drove west on Changan, retracing his journey of the previous night, the first splinters of sunlight shot like arrows down the length of the city’s east-west artery, blinding him when he glanced in the rear-view mirror. It heralded the break of a day that filled him with dread. It brought no illumination. Merely contrast with the darkness he carried in his heart.

He turned north again at the Muxidi intersection and drove past the academy on his right, and Yuyuantan Park on his left. There was little traffic on the road yet, but even as he looked, the cycle lanes were filling up with huddled figures braving the subzero temperature to cross this city of thirteen million inhabitants to factories and offices on its far-flung outskirts. When he reached the traffic lights at the Yuetan Footbridge, he turned right into Yuetan Nan Jie, and there ahead of him were the rows of pink and white four-storey apartment blocks that housed the most senior police officers in China.

He showed his ID to the guard on duty at the gate and drove into the forecourt parking lot of the first block. He got out of the car and stretched stiff and tired limbs, breathing in the cold, harsh air and trying to blink away the grit in his eyes. He pulled his long, black coat tightly around himself and looked up at the picture windows with their views of the parkland below, the open balconies where the privileged could dine in the shady cool of a summer’s evening, and knew he would never reach those dizzy heights. Not that he wasn’t good enough. He was a better cop than most of the residents of these luxury apartments. But he had a big mouth, which he was about to open again. And this time, even he was frightened of the consequences.

Commissioner Zhu was still in his dressing gown — black silk embroidered with red and gold dragons — when he opened his door to Li. He had been unable to disguise his surprise when Li announced himself on the intercom. A moment’s silence, then a curt, ‘You’d better come up.’

He ushered Li into the spacious living room at the front of the apartment. Net curtains as fine as gossamer hung over sliding glass doors that led out on to the balcony. In the distance, above the tops of the autumn trees, you could just see the roof of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Li could hear the commissioner’s wife in the kitchen, where she had clearly been sent and told to stay. The commissioner stood with his back to the glass doors, his legs apart, arms folded. Against the light, Li could not see his face, only the reflected light from his rimless glasses. Beyond him the sky was a deep orange. ‘This had better be good, Li. I’m not accustomed to being dragged from my bed by junior officers.’

Li took a deep breath. ‘I believe that one of the six of us who took the MERMER test on Monday afternoon murdered Lynn Pan,’ he said.

Zhu remained motionless, and Li could not see in his face what impact his statement had made. The commissioner said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually he cleared his throat and said in a quiet voice, ‘Which one of us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then what makes you think it was any of us?’

And Li told him. About the DNA mismatch, about how only someone with inside knowledge of the police investigation could have so accurately mimicked the Beijing Ripper. About the caller pretending to be him, luring Pan to a rendezvous with death at the Millennium Monument. About Pan’s fears, expressed in her e-mail to Hart, and her private folders on the academy website, with the three graphs marked, Liar, Liar, Liar.

‘But you don’t know whose graphs they were?’

‘No, Commissioner.’

‘And how do you propose to find out?’

‘I’ve asked Bill Hart to gather together all the various pieces of information necessary to make that apparent. Miss Pan’s assistant and the students who took part in the demonstration should be able to provide most of what he needs.’

For the first time, the commissioner unfolded his arms and leaned forward to take a cigarette from a wooden box on a lacquered table. He lit it and blew smoke toward the ceiling. It hung in the still air of the apartment, backlit by the dawn.

‘And supposing you do identify this liar. What then? How does that in any way prove that he murdered Lynn Pan?’

‘It doesn’t. But it would tell us where to look.’

‘And his motive?’

‘The lie, presumably.’

The commissioner snorted his derision. ‘What sort of a lie told during an innocent demonstration could possibly motivate murder? And anyway, how could he lie? We weren’t asked any questions.’

Li nodded. It was one of the many things which had plagued him during all the sleepless hours of the night. How could you lie, if you had not been asked any questions and had given no answers? And yet Pan had marked the files, Liar, Liar, Liar. Somehow, in some way, one of them had been caught in a falsehood. ‘I don’t have the answer to that yet, Commissioner.’

For the first time, the commissioner moved away from the window, and Li saw that his face had turned quite pale. He started circling Li like a hunter stalking his prey, and Li remembered their conversation about the commissioner’s boyhood spent hunting in the forests of the remote Xinjiang province. ‘It seems to me, Section Chief, that you are raising a great many questions to which you do not have any answers. You are indulging in the worst kind of unsubstantiated speculation. It goes against every tenet of Chinese police investigation — tried and tested techniques developed over decades by better men than you. Men like your uncle. I am sure he would be turning in his grave if he could hear this conversation.’

‘My uncle always trusted his instincts, Commissioner, and taught me to trust mine.’

‘Oh, I see. So your instincts are telling you that the deputy minister of Public Security might be a murderer. And presumably, since you have such faith in your instincts, you’ll be suggesting that we just lock him up?’

Li felt the serrated edge of the commissioner’s sarcasm cutting into his fragile confidence. But he stood his ground. ‘There were six of us at the MERMER test, Commissioner.’

Zhu waved his cigarette in the air. ‘Well, that would make you and me suspects, too, I suppose.’

‘I wouldn’t be here, Commissioner, if I thought it was you.’

‘Ah, and that would be your trusty instinct again, Section Chief. Am I supposed to be flattered?’

Li decided not to respond to that one. It might be better to let the commissioner make the next move. So he stayed silent, gazing through Zhu’s net curtains at the sun casting shortening shadows through the park.

‘And what is it you expect me to do, exactly?’ the commissioner said finally. He stopped circling, and blew smoke in Li’s direction.

‘There would be one way of shortcutting the whole process, Commissioner.’

‘And that would be?’

‘If all six of us were to submit to a DNA test.’

He heard the commissioner spluttering. ‘Are you insane, Li? Do you really think I’m going to go to the deputy minister, or the procurator general, or the director general of the Political Department, and ask them for samples of blood to eliminate them from a murder inquiry?’

Li said nothing, and the commissioner began pacing agitatedly by the window, smoke trailing in his wake.

‘You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, Commissioner.’

Zhu stopped and glared at him. ‘Then you’re going to have to come up with some pretty damned good evidence, because I’m not going to act on this until you have. It would be suicide, Li. For both of us. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes, Commissioner.’

Zhu exhaled deeply. ‘We are talking about people in extremely exalted positions here, Li. We’re talking about power and politics, not police work.’ He stabbed his cigarette into an ashtray, and Li could see from his concentrated frown that he was thinking furiously. ‘I might take one or two informal soundings — over a few heads. Just to see how we should proceed.’ He glanced at his junior officer sharply. ‘But in the meantime, I don’t want you breathing a word of this to anyone else, do you understand? Carry on with your investigation into the Beijing Ripper, but for the moment keep your other suspicions to yourself.’

II

From somewhere, the academy’s administrators had secured desks and chairs and a couple of creaking old computers, which Hart had got staff and students in Lynn Pan’s old department to set up in the computer room that had been stripped bare by the thieves. Hart had been at the academy since seven, and called them all in early.

Li recognised the student who had briefed them on the murder for the MERMER test. She and a long-haired male student were sitting at one of the computers. Hart was at the other with Professor Hu. He looked up when Li came in, and Li saw the strain in his face. In all likelihood, he had managed as little sleep as Li. Professor Hu had tied her wavy hair back in a pony tail, accentuating the thinness of her face. Today her business suit was black and severe, as if she were in mourning. And in truth, Li thought, she probably was.

‘Grab a chair, Section Chief,’ Hart said. ‘We’re making progress, but not fast.’

Li drew up a chair and wheeled it in alongside Hart and the professor. There was a graph on the screen which they were scrolling through. ‘You managed to open up the files, then?’ he said.

Hart said, ‘Professor Hu was able to download software from an Internet site shared with some MERMER people in the States. Apparently Lynn had made some changes to her version of it, but it’s essentially the same. The important thing is, it’s allowed us to open up the files so we can look at the graphs.’

‘Not that they tell us anything,’ Professor Hu said. ‘We can’t even begin to decipher them without the photographs that elicited the responses they chart.’

Li still had the commissioner’s words ringing in his ears. You’re going to have to come up with some pretty damned good evidence. ‘They’re useless, then?’ he said.

‘Ah, no. Not quite.’ Hart’s smile was strained. ‘The student who assembled the picture sequences for each of the testees did most of the work on her computer at home. She thinks she’s got a copy of the pics on a zip disk. I sent her home to find out.’

Li said, ‘I don’t suppose she remembered which one of them was “D”?’

Hart shook his head. ‘Afraid not. As far as she was concerned they were just pictures that related to people she’d never even met. Nor would meet. Hometown pictures were mostly downloaded off the Internet, from a list. Another student went and took pictures of apartments at various addresses he was given. But the work had all been shared out. Nobody had a definitive file.’

‘So how do the pictures help us?’

Professor Hu said, ‘If we compare the graphs with the pictures, at the very least we should be able to tell if “D” was one of the testees briefed on the murder. Or not.’

Li frowned. ‘But Professor Pan told me that the computer randomised the pictures. How do you know what order we saw them in?’

Hart said, ‘Apparently first time around the computer takes the pictures and shows them in the order it’s given them. Then it randomises for the subsequent sweeps.’

‘So we only have to look at the first set of charts for each one to tell who had been briefed on the murder and who hadn’t,’ the professor said.

‘Because those of you briefed on the murder will show a MERMER response to every one of the nine photographs that relate to it,’ Hart added.

Li nodded. ‘Okay, but how do we identify who “D” is?’

‘By tying him to the photographs of his apartment and home town,’ Hart said. ‘That’ll be a job for you guys when we get the pics.’ He sighed. ‘But figuring out what the lie was…well, that’s a whole other ballgame.’

Li gave voice to the question that had been niggling at him for hours. The question Zhu had gone to straight off. ‘How could he have told a lie when he wasn’t asked any questions? I mean MERMER’s not a lie detector. What could make Lynn Pan think he was lying?’

Hart shrugged and spread his palms. ‘Beats me.’ He looked at Professor Hu, but she just made a face and shook her head.

Li said, ‘You’ve got my cellphone number. Keep me in touch with progress.’

Li was eating a jian bing from a seller at the Xidan market when his cellphone rang. He had stopped off at Xidan for something to fill the gnawing void that was his stomach. He had barely eaten anything in twenty-four hours, not since his last jian bing from Mei Yuan. He also wanted time alone to think, to consider how he was going to handle the investigation. Commissioner Zhu’s warning to share his suspicions with no one was weighing heavily on his mind. And he knew he could not investigate without the manpower and resources of Section One. At the same time he was still concerned that someone within the section was feeding information to headquarters, which seriously curtailed the number of officers he was prepared to trust.

Ode to Joy interrupted his thoughts. He swopped the jian bing to his other hand and dug the phone out of his pocket. ‘Wei?’ It was Miss Shen Shuji, secretary to Yan Bo, Director General of the Ministry’s Political Department. The director general, she told him frostily, wished to see him at his earliest convenience. Which was Ministry jargon for now.

Li closed his eyes. It was beginning. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ he said.

‘Be sure that you are,’ Miss Shen Shuji told him. ‘The director general has a meeting at nine and would like to see you beforehand.’ She hung up abruptly. Sometimes the secretaries were worse than their masters. Li slipped the phone into his pocket and checked the time. It was just after eight. Yan Bo was at his desk early. Even allowing for the rush-hour traffic, Li knew he could be there in ten to fifteen minutes, so he took his time finishing his jian bing, putting off the moment for as long as possible. Whatever Yan Bo wanted, it was unlikely to be an exchange of pleasantries. One way or another, something of what was going on must have found its way to his office.

Reluctantly, Li threw his jian bing wrapper in the bin and stepped back into his car. He had left the engine running to keep it warm. Carefully, he pulled out into the traffic flow, avoiding the bicycles, and drove a hundred metres south to the intersection, where he turned east into West Changan Avenue. The sun was blinding, diffused by the dirt on his windscreen. He flicked on the wash-wipe, and sunlight smeared itself all over his vision before clearing to reveal the queues of traffic backed up from the flag-unfurling ceremony in Tiananmen Square. By the time he reached the entrance to the Ministry compound on the far side of the square, it was nearly eight-thirty.

He showed his ID to the guard at the gate and drove in to navigate his way through the maze of buildings inside the old British Embassy compound now jointly occupied by the Ministries of State and Public Security. Bizarrely, there were children playing in the road, offspring of some senior mandarin, for whom the oddly cloistered world of the two Ministries was home. Li drove slowly past them and envied them their youth and their innocence — both of which they would lose all too soon.

He parked beside a flower bed outside the block that housed the Political Department and took an elevator up to the fourth floor. Miss Shen Shuji, Li was surprised to discover, was an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties. Attractive, he decided quickly, only for about two seconds. She had blue make-up on her eyes and wore red lipstick, and dressed as if she were just about to head out to a fashion show. There was not the trace of a smile on her face. When he told her who he was, she said, ‘Sit,’ as if he were a dog and picked up the phone to report to her boss that Section Chief Li Yan had arrived. When he refused to follow her order and instead wandered around her office looking at the wall-hangings, she glared at him for several moments before returning to the task he had interrupted — painting her fingernails the same colour as her lips. After several long minutes, her phone rang and she said to Li, ‘You can go in now.’

Li knocked and entered. Yan Bo’s office was a large, blue-carpeted room with wood-panelled walls. Yan Bo seemed very small behind his enormous shiny desk, engulfed by a large, leather reclining chair and dwarfed by the Chinese flags, which hung limply from the wall on either side of his desk. Venetian blinds were lowered and half shut, obscuring the view from his window but allowing long, thin strips of early yellow light to lie crookedly across the contours of the room.

Yan Bo was scribbling something on a tablet of notepaper on his desk. He pulled off the top sheet, screwed it up and threw it in the bin, beginning again on a fresh one. He behaved as if he were unaware that Li had entered. With Yan Bo’s head bowed in concentration over his note-taking, Li could see that his hair was very thin on top and carefully combed to disguise the fact. Li stood in uncomfortable silence waiting for this powerful little man to look up. When, eventually, he finished his scribbling and raised his head, he gave Li a look that verged on contempt.

‘What the hell do you think you are trying to do, Li?’

Li was taken aback by the aggressiveness of his tone. ‘My job, Director General,’ he said.

‘Don’t get cute with me, sonny!’ the political director snapped back at him. ‘There is no part of your job that entails bringing this ministry into disrepute.’

‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ Li said.

Yan Bo slapped his hand on his desk, leaving a damp palm print on its shiny surface. ‘Accusing a senior officer of murder is hardly going to do much for the public image of the Ministry.’

So much for Commissioner Zhu’s consultation with high officialdom, Li thought. He had gone straight to Yan Bo, neatly passing the buck. Li said, ‘With respect, Director General, it would hardly be fair to blame the messenger because you don’t like the message.’

‘Don’t be so damned insolent, Section Chief!’ Yan Bo stood up and glared at Li, then perhaps realising that he was still looking up at him, sat down again. ‘We have barely recovered from the prosecution of Li Jizhou, or the fourteen other officials who were executed in the wake of his conviction.’ Li Jizhou was a former vice-minister of Public Security sentenced to death for his part in a smuggling conspiracy that had brought more than eight billion dollars’ worth of illicit goods into China during the nineties. The scandal had shaken the ministry to its core. Corruption was a highly sensitive issue. Murder was unthinkable. ‘Goddamnit, man! According to Zhu, I am also on your list of suspects. Is that true?’

Li shifted uncomfortably. ‘Everyone who took part in the MERMER demonstration has to be considered a suspect.’

‘Including you?’

‘I’ve already ruled myself out, Director General.’

Yan Bo glared at him, suspecting sarcasm, but unable to detect any in Li Yan’s inscrutability. ‘And do you have any hard evidence to back up your suspicions?’

Li braced himself. ‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet.’ Yan Bo repeated. ‘Not yet?’ He gazed at Li with shining black eyes. ‘Not ever,’ he said. ‘I will not entertain groundless accusations being made about senior officers of this ministry. Not to mention the deputy minister himself. You might think, Section Chief, that your high public profile and your awards and commendations make you something special. Let me assure you they do not. You are nobody. As you will come to realise very quickly if you continue with this line of investigation. Do you understand?’ Li made no reply. ‘Do. You. Understand!’ Yan Bo thundered.

‘Perfectly,’ Li said.

‘Good. Then I do not wish to hear another thing about it. Get out of my sight.’ He pulled his tablet toward him and starting scribbling furiously, and Li noticed that he was using red ink.

III

Margaret raised her left leg and felt all the stiff muscles of her buttock tug at her hamstring as she stretched. Slowly she turned through ninety degrees, arms raised level with her shoulders and bent up at the elbow, before bringing her foot down and raising the other leg. She felt the same stretching of the muscles, and was amazed at just how out of condition she was. The cold was stinging her face, and although she wore gloves, her fingers were frozen stiff. Her breath wreathed around her head like the smoke of dragon’s fire. The plink-plonk of a traditional Chinese orchestra emanating from a ghetto blaster on the wall lent succour to the illusion.

The previous day’s autopsy had taken more out of her than she could have believed. The muscles of her arms and shoulders were stiff and sore from wielding heavy shears to cut through ribs, and from turning the body this way and that in the course of its dissection. Her lower back and the tops of her legs ached from the angle at which she had held herself to cut through dead flesh and remove organs. Even her thrice weekly tai chi sessions in Zhongshan Park with Mei Yuan had failed to keep her fit and supple for a professional activity she had always taken for granted.

Of course, the trauma of Li Jon’s Caesarian birth and everything else surrounding it had taken it out of her. She had never regained the strength and vigour she had possessed before it, and slothful hours spent trapped in an apartment, reading and feeding and changing diapers had contributed to a decline of which she had hardly been aware. Until now. It worried her that these might be the first signs of old age. And then she looked around and found herself smiling. Most of the old women working through their slow-motion tai chi routines were more than twice her age, some of them in their seventies or even eighties. She had allowed life and events to steal away her initiative. It was time to take control again.

‘You’re very quiet this morning.’

Margaret turned to catch Mei Yuan watching her closely, as she always did. Like an old mother hen. ‘Stuff on my mind,’ she said.

‘Li Yan?’

‘No. I’m afraid I’m obsessing about myself,’ Margaret said. And she felt a sudden pang of guilt. Li had left her to sleep on and gone off to fight dragons on his own. They had both understood the full implications of the files they had uncovered the night before in Lynn Pan’s private webspace but had not discussed it. Li had folded in on himself, as he sometimes did, reluctant to share his deepest worries. She hated it when he was like that with her. She felt shut out, rejected. Once or twice she had surfaced briefly during the night from the deepest of sleeps, to become aware of the shallow, irregular breathing that told her he was still awake. But sleep had always dragged her back down into its warm, comforting oblivion. And when, finally, she had woken, he was gone. The sheets on his side of the bed long since turned cold.

Li Jon, in his buggy, waggled his arms and grinned at her, his tiny nose red with the cold. She saw his father in his eyes and his smile, and wondered where the closeness they had once shared had gone. She felt a tiny stab of fear, like pain, and wondered what kind of future they really had.

‘Let me try you with a riddle, then,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘It may relieve you of the burden of self-examination.’

Margaret glanced at her, wondering for a brief moment if the older woman had somehow been able to read her thoughts. ‘Okay,’ she said. Something else to occupy her mind might be healthier. It was too easy, always, to focus on the negative.

Mei Yuan said, ‘It took Li Yan a whole twenty-four hours to work this one out.’

‘Shouldn’t take me long, then,’ Margaret said, and Mei Yuan grinned.

‘But like you, he was a little preoccupied,’ she said.

The frost was melting now on the trees as the sun rose through gnarled branches and withered leaves. Beyond the big pavilion with the red-painted pillars, a group of men and women were dancing across ancient paving stones to the rhythm of a Latin American band. And on the other side of a bamboo thicket, Margaret saw sunlight catching the shafts of swords as the daily practitioners of the centuries-old art of wu shu sliced through frozen air with ceremonial blades.

‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy…’ Mei Yuan began, and she took Margaret through the complexities of the riddle just as she had done with Li two days earlier. Margaret listened as they continued with their exercises, carried along by the slow, measured rhythm of the group. When she had finished, Mei Yuan turned to look expectantly at Margaret.

Margaret was silent for a moment, then shrugged. ‘They didn’t finish planting till ten at night, maybe later. So it had to be dark. Which is why they couldn’t see one another.’

Mei Yuan smiled. ‘Too easy.’

Margaret laughed. ‘Did it really take Li Yan twenty-four hours to work it out?’

‘To be fair, I don’t think he’d given it a thought until I asked him again the following morning. But, then, I think Li Yan is better at practical mind games than theoretical ones.’

Like solving murders, Margaret thought, to save lives. It was, essentially, what separated them. She only dealt with the dead. Her achievement was in determining how they had died. Li had an obligation to the living — to catch a killer before he killed again. And now the murder of Lynn Pan, with all its political ramifications, had distracted him from the Ripper murders, making it more likely that the killer would remain free to do his worst. She shook her head to snap herself out of it. There was nothing she could do — until, perhaps, he did kill again. ‘I have to go to the visa office today,’ she said, ‘to collect my passport. But I want to go to the flower market first to see if I can’t get some fresh flowers to brighten up the apartment. It seems so dull and stale these days.’

‘You need more plants in the apartment,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘More living, growing things. It is good feng shui.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll get some potted plants, then. Will you come with me?’

‘As long as I can be back at my corner in time for lunch.’

‘We’ll be back in plenty of time,’ Margaret said, pleased to have the company. ‘We’ll take a taxi.’

The flower supermarket was close to the You Yi Shopping Centre on the banks of the slow-moving Liangma River on the north-east corner of the city. It stood in the shadow of the Sunflower Tower, and cheek-by-jowl with an Irish pub called Durty Nellie’s, which boasted a crude painting of a large-bosomed Irish wench clutching a pint of Guinness. Rows of baby pines in green pots were lined up outside the market, Christmas trees for ex-pats. The Christmas season was starting early in Beijing. Next door was a pot plant centre under an arched blue roof.

Margaret asked Mei Yuan to wait for her outside the centre with Li Jon while she ran into the market to get some cut flowers. They would look at the potted plants afterwards. Up half a dozen steps and through glass doors, the market stretched off in a blaze of colour, hundreds of exotic flowers arranged in thousands of pots, the air heady with myriad scents, and the sharp smell of cut green stems. Although it was warm in here, and humid, the girls were all muffled in winter jackets and scarves, smiling when they saw the curling fair hair and blue eyes, urging Margaret to buy from them. ‘Looka, looka,’ they urged, waving hands at big yellow daisies and purple-spotted orchids. There were red, white and pink roses, tulips from God knows where, flowers Margaret had never seen before, bizarre-looking blue and grey conical things like something you might find growing on a tropical reef. Fat-petalled extravaganzas, and fine, feathery ones. A bewildering choice. Margaret took her time, wandering the aisles, letting her eyes fall to left and right until something took her fancy. Finally she settled for a large bunch of yellow and white chrysanthemums. They stood out for their plainness amidst all the exotica, and it was that which appealed most to Margaret in the end.

They were, of course, ridiculously cheap, and Margaret was pleased with her purchase, enjoying the fresh smell of summer in this deepest cold of November.

She was pushing the door open to go out, sunlight flooding in the through the glass, when she heard the scream. It was a deep scream, almost a wail, and carried something primeval in the fear it conveyed. It went through Margaret like a frozen arrow. She hurried out and stopped on the top step. Mei Yuan was standing out among the Christmas trees, arms pressed to her sides, tears streaming down her face. Margaret ran to her, dropping the flowers on the steps. She grabbed Mei Yuan by the shoulders, eyes wide with fear. ‘Where’s Li Jon?’ she shouted. ‘Mei Yuan, where’s Li Jon?’

Mei Yuan’s face was wet with tears and mucus. Her eyes were like saucers. ‘He’s gone,’ she managed to say through deep sobs that wrenched themselves from her chest.

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Margaret was almost hysterical. She looked all around, searching frantically for his buggy.

‘I turned away only for a moment,’ Mei Yuan wailed. ‘To look at the Christmas trees. When I turned back he was gone.’

IV

Li stared gloomily from his window at the evergreens shading the brown marble facade of the All China Federation for Returning Overseas Chinese on the far side of the hutong. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets, as if he thought he might find something there that would show him a way out of his predicament. But they were as empty as he was devoid of ideas. That a senior law enforcement officer, possibly even a deputy minister of Public Security, had murdered Lynn Pan, he had no doubt. But it had been made clear to him by two of those officers that this was a line of investigation he was not to pursue under any circumstances. He had no idea if either of them was the guilty party, but it was perfectly possible. Nothing, it seemed, was impossible any longer — except for Li to continue his investigation. For he could hardly do so without it being apparent to the very people who had instructed him not to. The best he could hope for was that Bill Hart would manage to identify ‘D’. And that if he could do that, perhaps they would be able to tell what the lie had been which had so panicked Professor Pan into her unlikely meeting with Li at the Millennium Monument. And her subsequent death at the hands of her Liar.

He turned back into his office. But there was still the problem of the Beijing Ripper, the tall man in the long coat and baseball cap captured on the EMS video. He was still out there somewhere, plotting his next killing. Planning to replicate the horrific murder of Mary Jane Kelly in precise and gory detail. He might even have chosen his victim by now. It was possible that he had already seen her personal ad in one of the nightlife magazines, or watched her in the lobby of one of the tourist hotels, or stalked her through silent streets late at night. The thought galvanised him into action.

He picked up the phone from his desk and dialled a three-digit number. ‘Qian. I need you in here. And bring Wu.’ They were his most senior detectives, men he had worked with over many years. Wu had even saved his life. If he couldn’t trust them, then all hope was gone from his world for ever.

It was a couple of minutes before there was a knock at the door and Qian came in, followed by Wu. Both looked apprehensive. Everyone in the section was aware that something was going on, but no one knew what. Li waved them to a chair and said, ‘Anyone got a cigarette?’

They looked at him, surprised. It was more than a year since Li had given up smoking. An example to them all, even if none of them had chosen to follow it. Wu tossed a pack across the desk. ‘They say it gives you cancer, Chief. And heart disease. And fucks with your circulation. But, hell, why let a few little things like that stop you?’

Li ignored him and took out a cigarette. ‘Light?’

Qian struck a match and held it across the desk. Li leaned over and sucked a mouthful of smoke into his lungs and nearly choked. When he stopped coughing, he found Wu grinning at him. ‘Never mind, Chief, stick at it. Death’s worth persevering with.’ Li went to stub it out in his empty ashtray, but Wu held up a hand to stop him. ‘Uh-uh,’ he said, and took the cigarette from between his fingers. ‘No point in wasting it. Some of us are beyond saving anyway.’

Qian said quietly, ‘What’s going on, Chief?’

Li seemed to consider what he was going to say for a long time before finally he said, ‘I’m going to tell you guys stuff that I don’t want to leave this office. Is that understood?’ They both nodded, and he added, ‘By the same token, this is information that could endanger your careers, maybe even your lives. So if you don’t want to hear it, you are free to leave, and this conversation never took place.’ He waited, and when neither of them moved, he said, ‘When I went to the MERMER demonstration at the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Monday afternoon, there were five other people there from Public Security. There was a deputy minister, the Beijing police commissioner and his deputy, the head of the political department and the procurator general.’ He paused. ‘One of them murdered Lynn Pan.’

Whatever they might have expected to hear, Li doubted if it was that. Neither of them reacted immediately. Then Qian said, ‘And you know this…how?’

So Li told them, just as he had related it to Commissioner Zhu, from the DNA mismatch to Lynn Pan’s Liar, Liar, Liar files. Then he sat back and let them think about it. If he was going to be shot down in flames by anyone, he’d rather it was by officers in his own section telling him his theory was full of holes. ‘Well?’ he said eventually, when neither of them had spoken.

The two detectives exchanged glances. ‘Shit, Chief,’ Wu said. ‘I wish I’d known what you were going to tell us before you told us. I might have taken you up on your offer to bail out.’ He grinned. ‘Only kidding.’ But his smile quickly faded. ‘We’re in a shitload of trouble, aren’t we?’

Li nodded. Qian said, ‘And you’ve been told to back off?’

‘All the way.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

Li rubbed tired eyes and said, ‘Whoever killed her can’t afford to have me hanging around running the section for much longer. They’ve got to figure that sooner or later I’m going to work out who they are. So the way I see it is this: I’ve got to get him before he gets me.’

A knock at the door made them all jump. ‘Later,’ Li called out sharply. But the door opened anyway.

It was Sang, looking flushed and apologetic. ‘Chief, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to interrupt. I knew you’d want to hear this.’

‘What?’

‘Switchboard just got a call from the local cops over at Liangma. Kid in a buggy got snatched from outside the flower market.’

‘What the hell’s that got to do with us?’

Sang looked as if he’d rather eat glass. ‘Chief, it’s your kid.’

V

The two security guards who looked after the carpark on the west side of the flower market blew smoke into the freezing air and shook their heads. Neither of them had seen anything, they said. They’d noticed the yangguizi arriving in a taxi with the older woman, because you didn’t often see people with gold hair and blue eyes. But it had been busy, cars coming and going. One of them had gone into the carpark to settle an argument between two drivers fighting over the same space. The other had been warming himself over a small paraffin heater they kept in the hut at the gate.

Li felt something like despair. The police activity had prompted the gathering of a large crowd of curious onlookers. And the local police had not arrived quickly enough to stop potential witnesses from slipping through the net. It was a busy time of the day at the flower market. There had been hundreds of people coming and going. A small fruit and vegetable market outside Durty Nellie’s had also been attracting custom. Mei Yuan had left the buggy at the foot of the steps and wandered off through the Christmas trees, wondering if she should buy one as a present for Margaret. When she looked around the buggy was gone.

Li had found it difficult to get a coherent story out of her. Through her tears she had managed to tell him that she had run through the crowds looking for the buggy, and then fearing she’d missed it somehow, turned back to where she’d left it. It was then that fear had taken over, and she had screamed, a part of her hoping that it might be enough to stop people in their tracks, and that the whereabouts of the buggy would become magically apparent. Instead, she had drawn only looks of amazement. People had thought she was a mad woman, and then been startled when a yangguizi came running from the market and started shaking her by the shoulders.

When Li arrived at the market, Margaret was in shock, sitting in the back seat of a black and white, eyes red and blurred, clutching a soft toy she kept in her purse for Li Jon. A small, grey mouse that he loved to swing by the tail and let fly in whatever direction it would go. He had controlled an initial urge to be angry at her for losing his son, but her pain was too apparent in her face, and he knew that it was not her fault.

He slipped into the car beside her now and held her for a long time, pressing her head into his chest, feeling the silent sobs that punctuated her breathing, and let his own tears run free. The world outside seemed a distant place, like a film projected on a screen, the sound turned down, muffled so that you could barely hear it. You could touch it, but it wasn’t real. You could watch it, but didn’t feel part of it. As if they were insulated from it all in a bubble of their own pain.

Li had let Wu take charge of the local cops, organising the corralling and questioning of witnesses, broadcasting a citywide alert on police frequencies, shouting and pointing nicotine-stained fingers, chewing manically on a huge wad of gum. A sharp rapping on the glass made him turn. And from that distant outside world, he saw Wu’s grinning face looming at the window. It seemed like something surreal. The door opened.

‘Chief, we found him.’

Words Li had not expected to hear. He jumped quickly out of the car, Margaret sliding out behind him, clutching his hand. The crowds parted as a tearful, but smiling, Mei Yuan wheeled Li Jon in his buggy toward the car. Margaret ran and grabbed him up into her arms and held him there as if she intended never to let him out of them again. Her tears now were tears of joy.

Li heard Wu’s voice. ‘The buggy was parked by a bench down on the river walkway, under those willow trees.’ He pointed and Li followed his finger. ‘No more than a couple of hundred metres away.’ There was a huge, four-sided advertising hoarding rising on a tubular steel construction from among scrubby trees and bushes on a piece of waste ground beside the walkway. Beyond it, just visible through the hanging fronds of the willows, there was a bench at the river’s edge where old folk would sit in the summer to escape the city heat.

Someone had pushed the buggy away through the crowds when Mei Yuan’s back was turned, past the vegetable market and down on to the river walkway, abandoning it by the bench, obscured by the trees. Li began to have an uneasy feeling.

Wu followed him to the buggy and watched as he crouched down to examine it in detail, going through the pouch that hung from the push bar, and pulling everything out from the tray beneath it. A blanket, a waterproof bag with a bottle of milk, several soft toys.

‘That’s not Li Jon’s.’

Li looked up and saw Margaret, still clutching their son, looking down at him. ‘What isn’t?’

‘That panda.’

Li looked at the panda. He was not familiar with all of Li Jon’s toys and would not have known that it was not his. It seemed new, as if it had just come out of its wrapping. He turned it over, and there was a folded sheet of paper pinned to its back. He froze, initial uneasiness turning now to real fear. He held out a hand toward Wu. ‘Gloves.’

Wu handed him a pair of latex gloves. Li laid the panda in the buggy and snapped them on, then removed the pin from the note. Carefully he unfolded it, and felt shock, like an electric jolt, when he saw the now familiar characters in red ink.

He heard the trilling of a cellphone and looked up to see faces pressed all around. Eager faces full of wonder and curiosity. There was an odd silence at the heart of the crowd fighting for a view of this bizarre piece of street theatre. He heard Wu’s voice speaking on the phone, and then stood up and shouted at the crowd to move back. A ripple went through them like a wave, as the nearest of them recoiled from his anger. He shouted again, and another ripple created more space. He took his wife and baby in his arms and held them tightly, still clutching the note.

‘Chief…Chief…’ Wu’s voice was insistent. ‘Chief you gotta go. They want you at headquarters downtown. Commander Hu’s office.’ Commander Hu Yisheng was the divisional head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police. Li’s immediate boss.

Li asked for an evidence bag, dropped the note into it and gave it to Wu. He turned to Margaret and said quietly, ‘Go straight home. Take a taxi. Stay there. Don’t answer the door to anyone but me.’

She stared at him, fear and confusion in her eyes. ‘Li Yan, I’ve got to pick up my passport from the visa office.’

‘Get it another day.’

‘No, they said today. They’ve been real bastards about it. I don’t feel secure without it.’

He sighed. ‘Well, keep the taxi waiting outside, then go straight back to the apartment.’

‘When will I see you?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll be in touch.’ And he turned and pushed off through the crowd, and she could see from the way he moved that he was rigid with tension. Li Jon gurgled in her ear and she squeezed him even more tightly, something close to panic rising inside her, forcing an intake of breath interrupted by sobs, like the wheels of a bicycle running over rutted snow.

VI

CID headquarters was housed in the new grey marble building sandwiched between the old redbrick HQ and the police museum. High, arched windows flanked a romanesque entrance between ornamental pillars. The frontage was still shaded by the dusty trees that lined each side of Jiaominxiang Lane.

Li drove past armed guards into the compound at the rear of police headquarters and stepped out into the midmorning sunshine. His mood was bleak as he mounted the steps to the lobby and climbed up to the top floor.

Commander Hu’s new office was dominated by one of those arched windows on the building’s facade. It rose from floor to ceiling, divided into Georgian oblongs, and gave on to a view, through the trees, of the Supreme Court — still clad in green construction netting. His mahogany desk was inlaid with green leather, and he sat behind it resplendent in his black uniform with its silver badges and buttons, and the number 000023 above the flap of his left breast pocket — which made him twenty-third in the ministry pecking order. He was not a tall man, but he had an imposing presence, a full head of grey-streaked hair swept back from an unlined forehead and a handsome face for a man of his years. He did not invite Li to sit, gazing at him instead, from behind his desk, with the look of a man disappointed by the failures of his only son. He shook his head sadly. ‘I am glad that Yifu did not live to see this day.’

Li felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.

‘I don’t know what’s going on Li, but someone up there doesn’t like you very much, and you’ve been giving them all the ammunition they need to shoot you down. I only regret that it has fallen to me to be the one who pulls the trigger.’

‘Commander…’

Hu raised a hand to stop him. ‘I don’t want to hear it, Section Chief. I really don’t.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and reached in to pull out the previous day’s copy of the Beijing Youth Daily. He dropped it on the desktop, with the headline facing Li. ‘The journalist who wrote this has provided a statement implicating you in the leaking of the story.’

Li felt the first pricklings of anger. ‘It’s a lie.’

Hu regarded him thoughtfully for a long time. ‘Actually, I’m inclined to believe you. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s your word against his.’

‘And you would take the word of a journalist over that of a senior police officer?’

Hu sighed deeply. ‘If that was all it was…’ He opened a folder on his desk. ‘I have copies here of an official complaint registered by a serving police officer in the Beijing East district. In it he claims that you assaulted him in the course of his duties.’

Li frowned, wondering what Hu was talking about. And then he remembered the pushy community cop at the antiques market at Panjiayuan who had dealt so insensitively with the mother of Sunday’s ripper victim. You’re lucky I don’t break your neck, Li had told him, and he had a sudden recollection of the officer’s hat rolling away across the cobbles. ‘That officer was interfering directly with a murder investigation and got physical with one of my detectives.’

‘Which one?’

‘Detective Wu.’

‘Well, we’ll talk to Wu in due course, no doubt. Meantime we have several sworn statements from witnesses at Panjiayuan that you physically assaulted the complaining officer, knocking off his hat and threatening him in full public view.’ Hu breathed stertorously through his nose. ‘Is it true, Li?’

Li sighed. ‘He was out of line, Commander.’

‘No, Section Chief. You were out of line. If this community cop was overreaching his authority or behaving badly, then there are proper channels for dealing with that. But to assault a fellow police officer in full public view does nothing but bring disrepute on Public Security and undermine the authority of police officers in the eyes of the masses.’ He shut the folder and reached out a hand. ‘I’ll require your Public Security identity card.’

Li’s heart was pounding. ‘What for?’

‘You’re being suspended, Li, until such time as an inquiry into your conduct is held by an investigating group of senior officers.’ He paused. ‘Your ID.’

Li made no move to give it to him. He said, ‘Commander, we’re in the middle of a serial murder investigation. Someone out there is killing young women. And he’s going to do it again if we don’t stop him.’

‘You’re not a one-man band, Li, even if you think you are. You have a perfectly capable deputy in the section who can take over.’

‘You’re being used, Commander. You said it yourself. Someone up there doesn’t like me. Have you wondered why?’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Because he’s a murderer, that’s why. And he knows if he doesn’t get me out of the way I’m going to expose him.’

Commander Hu looked at him with something close to pity in his eyes. ‘Now you’re just being ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Give me your ID!’ His raised voice heralded the end of his patience.

Li stood for a moment, furious, frustrated. Helpless. Then he reached into his pocket for the well-worn maroon wallet that held his identity card and dropped it on the commander’s desk. He turned without a word and walked out of the office.

Li paced slowly back and forth across the compound for a long time, thinking furiously. He had no doubt that the misappropriation of his son, albeit temporarily, had been a warning. He was being threatened and outmanoeuvred at every turn. Either Commissioner Zhu had confided in more than just the director general of the Political Department, or…the thought coagulated in Li’s head like an embolism…or the killer was Zhu himself. Or the director general. He held his hands out and saw that they were shaking. The guard on the gate was looking curiously in his direction, and he quickly thrust them back into his coat pockets. He had no idea what he was going to do. Where he was going to go. He was no longer Section Chief Li Yan. He was a disgraced officer awaiting internal investigation. How quickly the hero had become the villain. He glanced toward the guards at the gate again and knew that once he went out he would not be able to re-enter without his ID. There didn’t seem anything else for it but to confront the dragon in his lair.

He let anger fuel his determination as he crossed the compound to the main building and rode up in the elevator to the fifth floor. He strode with long, decisive steps, down the hush of the carpeted corridor which led to the commissioner’s inner sanctum. The armed policewoman with her gun pressed against her cheek stared sternly at him from the poster on the wall of the reception room. Commissioner Zhu’s formidable secretary guarded the entrance to his lair. She was a dominating presence.

‘I need to see the commissioner,’ he said.

‘He’s busy.’ Her response was intended to be a full stop on their conversation. It was clear she did not expect a reply.

‘I’ll wait.’

She glared at him. ‘You will not. Your section secretary will require to make an appointment.’

It was obvious to Li that she knew perfectly well that he had been suspended and no longer had access to his section.

Li took a step toward the commissioner’s door. ‘Is he in there?’

She rose to her feet in order to put her full weight behind her threat. ‘If you go in there,’ she said, ‘I shall have you arrested.’

He glared back at her, but knew that it was pointless to do anything other than accept that he was beaten. He could do nothing if he gave them the slightest excuse to put him under lock and key. He turned away in disgust, and his eyes fell on something in the trash that stopped him in his tracks. Amidst the screwed up sheets of paper and cellophane wrappings in the bin lay the dark red and gold of an empty pack of Russian cheroots. Icy fingers wrapped themselves around his heart. He looked at her again. ‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ he said to her. ‘It’s bad for your health.’

She looked at him as if he were insane. ‘I don’t,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘I didn’t think so.’

I

The visa office was even busier than it had been on Monday, and Margaret had to stand in the back of a long line at the visa issuing desk of the foreign section. She had left the buggy in the taxi, and held Li Jon in her arms. There was no way she was letting him go anywhere out of touching distance. He was fast asleep, his head resting on her shoulder, the rest of him a dead weight in arms that were beginning to ache.

She glanced along the desk and saw the frosty-faced visa cop with the bad complexion. Miss Chicken Feet. She didn’t look any better today. She looked up and caught Margaret’s eye. It was a moment before she recognised her, but when she did, a slow, humourless smile crept across her face and sent a chill of apprehension arrowing through Margaret’s very soul.

Margaret looked quickly away and found thoughts that she did not want to entertain for a second flooding her mind. She moved slowly, inexorably, toward the head of the queue with a growing sense of dread. What if there was a problem? What if they wouldn’t give her back her passport? There were others behind her now, and she heard American voices chatting about some business success which had led to the need for an extension. ‘It’s alright, Beijing,’ she heard someone say. ‘If you got money. Ten years ago you couldn’t get a thing. Now there’s nothing you can get Stateside you can’t get here. Another ten years and everyone’ll be speaking English.’

The person ahead of her slipped his passport in their bag and moved away. Margaret found herself at the head of the queue. Her mouth was dry, and her hand shook a little as she pushed her receipt across the counter at the issuing officer. He took it without looking at her and punched information into his computer. Then he looked up curiously at the woman and baby standing in front of him. ‘One moment, please.’ He turned and disappeared through a doorway, leaving Margaret to stand for what seemed like an eternity, with Li Jon growing heavier by the second. This was turning into a nightmare. She glanced down the desk and saw that Miss Chicken Feet was watching her. The issuing officer returned to his seat, and to her relief pushed her passport across the counter at her. ‘Visa denied,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You give incorrect address. Misleading to police. Present visa expire Saturday. You must make arrangement to leave country before then.’

The taxi ride back to the apartment passed in a blur of unreality. The city rose up above her, towering over her on all sides, traffic squeezing in from every direction to choke her taxi’s progress south on the Third Ring Road. She felt mocked, betrayed, robbed. It seemed inconceivable to her that within three days she would have to leave, possibly never to return. This was her home. It was where she had made her life, conceived and given birth to her child. It was where the man she loved had his home, where he worked. It was his country. How could they forbid her to share it with him? She only thanked God that she’d had the foresight to register Li Jon with the American Embassy to obtain his Consular Report of Birth Abroad. If the worst came to the worst, and she really did have to leave, she would at least be able to take him with her.

But somewhere, deep down, she couldn’t believe it would come to that. Li wouldn’t let it. He must be able to do something. He was a senior officer of Public Security, he must have some kind of influence he could bring to bear. It just didn’t seem possible that she would actually have to go.

By the time her taxi was turning into Zhengyi Road, she had persuaded herself that it would all get sorted out. Li would find some way to fix things. But still, she looked at the street she knew so well with different eyes, for somewhere behind them there lurked still the fear that the life that was so familiar to her now would soon be taken away. It left her feeling empty and sick, and she fought to hold on to the optimism she had been trying so hard to build on the ride home.

The taxi dropped her at the roadside outside the ministry compound, and she wheeled Li Jon in his buggy past the armed guard, toward the pink and white apartment block that she had come to regard as home — for better or worse. There was a black and white police patrol car parked outside the main entrance. It was not unusual to see police vehicles within the compound, but as she approached it she saw two uniformed officers sitting inside, and Margaret began to feel distinctly apprehensive.

She walked past as if it wasn’t there, keeping her eyes fixed ahead of her, and turned into the path leading to the main door of the block. She heard car doors opening behind her and then slamming shut. A voice called, ‘Mizz Cambo.’ She was almost at the steps, and wanted just to run up them and disappear inside, shutting the door behind her, closing out the world. She just knew that this was something she didn’t want to hear. She stopped and turned.

‘Yes?’

The two officers approached her, faces impassive, unsmiling. ‘Mizz Magret Cambo?’

‘I just said I was, didn’t I?’

‘You come with us.’ The officer put out a hand and fingers like steel closed around her upper arm.

Margaret pulled herself free indignantly. ‘What for?’

‘You undah arrest, lady. Fail to give change of address to PSB.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’ Margaret’s words made her feel braver than she felt. ‘Do you know who the father of my child is?’

‘Formah Section Chief Li Yan.’

‘Former…’ Margaret’s voice tailed away, and she felt her world falling in around her.

‘Chief Li disgraced officah. He put cult of personality above duty to country.’ It sounded like a mantra that had been put out in a memo. ‘You come with us.’ And he took her arm again. This time she did not resist. There seemed no point. Powerful currents had her in their grip and were sweeping her away on an uncertain tide. This must be what drowning felt like, she thought. As you were dragged down through the water you knew there was no way back, and you released the breath you had been so desperately holding, succumbing to the water that rushed to replace it in your lungs, slipping into the state of unconsciousness that cradled you before death.

II

Li had spent most of the last hour just driving aimlessly through the city, letting the traffic flow carry him where it would. He had driven a couple of times around Tiananmen Square, then turned north up Nanchang Street, flanked on one side by the Forbidden City and Zhongnanhai on the other. Trees on either sidewalk grew across it to intermesh and create a tunnel shading it from the late season sunshine. People were going about their everyday lives, cycling to and from work, shopping, walking, chatting idly on corners or on benches, playing chess, flying kites. It seemed wrong, somehow, that their world kept turning as it always did, while his had turned to dust under his feet. His inertia, his inability to decide his next move, was building a frustration in him that was threatening to explode. He beeped his horn fiercely at a cyclist who turned out of the Xihuamen intersection and Li accelerated past him into Beichang Street. There was nowhere else for him to go but Section One. Even if he was impotent to do anything, to be in any way pro-active, Qian and Wu were not. They were still actively involved in both the Ripper case and the Lynn Pan murder. They could still make a difference. He had to talk to them.

Another fifteen minutes found him on Dongzhimen, heading east, past all the red lanterns hanging from the trees, past street vendors steaming huge trays of dumplings in preparation for the lunch trade that was already starting to gather pace. Men and women in suits streamed out of office blocks and shops and into restaurants, wrapped in warm coats against the cold of the wind, wearing sunglasses to protect them from the blinding autumn sun. Li saw Mei Yuan on her corner as he turned into Hepinglidong Street. He remembered her wet face and red eyes and her distress while Li Jon was still missing. In their own distress, both he and Margaret had not fully appreciated the hell that Mei Yuan must have gone through, believing it all to be her fault. He could see that her eyes were still swollen and red as she served a queue of customers. She did not see him as he turned north, and then west into Beixinqiao Santiao to park in the street outside section headquarters.

He had already reached the top floor and was striding toward his office when the duty officer caught up with him. ‘Chief,’ he called twice, before Li stopped and turned.

The duty officer was a man in his fifties, in charge of security, administration and firearms. ‘Yes, Tao?’ Li said, although in his heart he knew what was coming.

Tao was red-faced and embarrassed, breathless from having run up the stairs after Li. ‘I’m sorry, Chief Li,’ he said, and he genuinely was. ‘But I’m afraid I can no longer allow you access to the building.’

He took a half-step back, almost as if he was anticipating an explosion. Li was angry and frustrated, but he knew that Tao was only doing his job. He said, ‘I just need to get some stuff from the office.’

Tao seemed almost ashamed. ‘Afraid I can’t let you do that, Chief. You can’t touch anything in here. And I’m afraid I’m instructed to ask you to return any files or documents that you may have taken home with you.’

‘In the name of the sky, Tao, I’ve got personal stuff in there.’ He jerked his thumb toward his office and became aware for the first time that a group of detectives was gathered in the doorway to the detectives’ room. He saw a grim-faced Wu among them.

‘I’m sorry, Chief.’ Tao cleared his throat and held out his hand, ‘And I’m afraid I have to ask you for the keys to your car.’

Li stared at him. They really were stripping him of everything. No office, no car, no job. No way to fight back. He put his hand in his pocket and took out his car keys and slapped them into Tao’s outstretched palm.

‘And your tag.’

It was a small, electronic identifier about the size of a cigarette lighter that was read by an infrared security scan as you came in the main door. Li dug it out of his breast pocket and handed it to Tao. Now it was just humiliating. He glanced at the watching detectives. But none of them said a word. He brushed past Tao and headed back toward the stairs. ‘I really am sorry, Chief,’ he heard Tao calling after him before his footsteps echoing on the stairs drowned out everything else.

In the street outside, he just kept walking, blinking hard to stop the tears from filling his eyes. He was oblivious to everything around him, blinded by anger and fear and impotence, and an acute sense of loss. It was extraordinary how easy it had been to render him powerless. And completely harmless.

In Hepinglidong Street, Chinese flags whipped in the wind outside a barber’s shop opposite a huge construction clad entirely in green netting and bamboo scaffolding. A worker with a red hard hat stood on the top of it, a green flag raised in one hand, a red one poised in the other, as a huge steel girder was lifted slowly up the outside of the building by a crane that dominated the sky above it. Its shadow followed at a discreet distance. As far as you could see, looking north, blocks of flats wrapped in green net were in various stages of construction. Li passed the entrance to a crumbling old siheyuan courtyard where rusting bicycles nestled under buckled corrugated roofing. There was a tree in the centre of the courtyard, and beyond it you could just see, through its leaves, the windows of Section One.

Someone tugged at his arm. ‘Chief.’ He looked around and saw Wu struggling to keep up with him.

Li did not break stride. ‘What is it, Wu?’

‘They told us we weren’t to talk to you, Chief.’

‘So why are you disobeying orders?’

‘You know I never liked taking orders, Chief.’ Li heard his grin and the open-mouthed chewing of his gum. ‘Except from you, of course.’

A blue and white wall had been built around the gap site left by the demolition of what had once been a covered food market. Li missed the old Beijing. It had all been comfortingly familiar. Now he felt like a stranger, displaced in an alien city.

‘Chief, I can’t keep up with you.’

Li stopped and looked at Wu who staggered to a halt and stood gasping for air.

‘I had to run to catch you up,’ he said by way of explanation.

‘Maybe you should give up smoking,’ Li said.

‘What, and miss the fun of coughing my lungs up every morning?’ They stood just looking at each other for a moment. When Wu’s smile faded he looked faintly embarrassed. ‘We all know you didn’t sell that story to the Youth Daily, Chief.’

‘You know about that?’ Li was taken aback.

‘Someone’s doing a pretty good job of character assassination, Chief.’ Then he winked. ‘A few of the boys are going to have a quiet word with that journalist. And as for that shit community cop, I’ve already called CID to tell them it was the other way around. That guy assaulted me.’ He paused. ‘The boys are going to have a word with him, too.’

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t want anyone getting into trouble.’

‘You’re the one that’s in trouble, Chief.’

Li said, ‘Wu, I’m not your chief any more.’

Wu’s jaw kept grinding away steadily on his gum. ‘Yeah, you are. Qian’s taken over as acting Chief, but everyone knows it’s just temporary. He’s staying in his old office. And no one’s getting to touch a damned thing in yours until you’re back.’

Li felt unaccountably moved and had to blink back the tears he felt pricking his eyes. He looked away toward Dongzhimen so that Wu wouldn’t see them. ‘I appreciate it,’ he said. He pushed his hands deep in his coat pockets and felt awkward. He looked at the ground. ‘So what’s happening?’

Wu’s face clouded. ‘Something you need to know, Chief.’ He hesitated and Li looked up, frowning.

‘What is it?’

‘They’ve arrested Margaret.’

Li couldn’t believe it. ‘What?’

‘It’s really stupid,’ Wu said. ‘Everyone knows she’s been living with you for the last year. But officially she’s still supposed to be in that apartment across town at the University of Public Security.’

Li looked toward the heavens. ‘In the name of the sky, Wu, they allocated that apartment to someone else more than six months ago.’

Wu shrugged. ‘The thing is, officially she never informed her local PSB office. So technically she’s in breach of regulations.’

‘Which everyone knew about. From the tea boy to the goddamned minister!’

‘I guess it’s just another club to beat you with, Chief.’

Li saw a taxi in the line of traffic crawling past. He waved it down. ‘Where’s she being held?’

‘Yuetan police station. That’s the headquarters for the Western District. It’s where she’s still registered.’

Li opened the door of the taxi, but paused and turned back. ‘Thanks, Wu,’ he said.

‘Hey, Chief,’ Wu said, ‘I’ll be expecting a big promotion when you get back in the hotseat.’

Li sat in the back of the taxi watching the city drift past him without seeing it. Someone was trying to dismantle his life, piece by piece by piece. And they were succeeding. He had no job, no car. The life of his child had been threatened, and his lover had been arrested. He felt like a man falling down a mountain, hitting off the rocks, unable to get a hand or a foothold to stop the fall and start the long climb back. He just kept falling. And every time he looked up another rock would smash him in the face. His cellphone trilled. He took it out of his coat pocket and pressed the handset symbol. ‘Wei?’

‘Li Yan?’

He knew immediately that it was his father. And he knew that something must be wrong, for his father never phoned him. ‘What is it, Dad?’ It felt odd to call him dad. He never usually addressed him as anything, and father seemed absurdly formal. But the telephone seemed to require some form of address. He heard a child crying in the background. ‘What’s happened?’

His father seemed disoriented, his voice shaky and uncertain. ‘I’m going to miss my train back to Sichuan,’ he said. ‘Your sister did not come home for lunch. I thought maybe she and Xinxin were eating out somewhere and had forgotten to tell me. So I was fixing something to eat for myself when the school phoned.’

‘What school?’

‘Xinxin’s school.’ He sounded indignant. ‘What other school would it be?’

‘What did they say, Dad?’ Li contained his impatience.

‘They said that Xiao Ling never came to pick up Xinxin. She always picks up Xinxin at lunchtime. They thought maybe something was wrong.’

‘Dad, just tell me what happened.’

‘I went to the school myself. In a taxi. And when I got back here with Xinxin I telephoned Xiao Ling’s work. The neighbour across the landing gave me the number.’ Li bit his tongue. Details he did not need to know. ‘When I phoned, they said she had been arrested.’

For what seemed like a lifetime, Li could not even seem to draw a breath. When finally he did, all he could say was, ‘What?’

‘The police raided the Jeep factory this morning and searched all the staff lockers. In Xiao Ling’s locker they found cocaine.’ The incredulity in the old man’s voice found an echo in Li’s brain.

‘That’s not possible.’

‘She’s a good girl, Li Yan. She would not use stuff like that.’

‘Dad, she couldn’t afford stuff like that,’ Li said. Yet another piece of his life being taken apart. Another demonstration of the power his unknown enemy had over him. Another rock in the face. It was not just Li who was being targeted. It was his whole family. He wanted to punch the roof of the taxi, kick the seat in front of him. He wanted to yell and hit out. But instead he held it all inside himself, seething, dangerous.

‘Dad, just stay there with Xinxin. Don’t answer the door to anyone except me.’

He heard the fear in his father’s voice. ‘Li Yan, what is happening?’

‘Just sit tight, dad. I’ll be there as soon as I can. But it’s going to be a while.’

III

Yuetan police station was on the corner of Yuetan Nan Jie and Yuetan Xie Jie, a block from the park. It was a modern six-story building with a glass centrepiece on its front façade that rose through five storeys. A Chinese flag flapped in the wind above the red, gold and blue Public Security emblem.

Li climbed the steps and pushed through glass doors into a shining marble lobby. A uniformed policewoman sat at a desk with a telephone switchboard. She looked up with clear recognition in her face as she saw Li approaching. ‘I need to talk to the Chief of Police,’ he said.

She fumbled nervously with the switchboard and called through to the chief’s office to pass on his request. She listened, and her face coloured slightly. Then she hung up and said, ‘Sorry, the chief’s not available.’

Li clenched and unclenched his jaw. ‘What floor is his office on?’

She seemed nonplussed. ‘The fifth. But he can’t see you.’

‘We’ll see about that.’ Li looked around for the stairs but didn’t see any. Through double doors was a public office where officials sat behind glass windows administering household and individual registrations. It was where, legally, Margaret should have notified her change of address. Li headed off in the other direction, down a long corridor.

‘You can’t enter the building without a pass,’ he heard the policewoman calling after him. And the sound of her heels clacking on the tiled floor followed in his wake.

He turned a corner and found himself looking through windows into an indoor basketball court spanned by an arched glass roof. He recognised it from the promotional video they had shown at the Great Hall of the People. A recreational facility for the 122 police officers based here. Three of them, in jogsuits and trainers, were bouncing a ball up and down the court, taking it in turns to shoot baskets. Li turned in disgust and started back the way he had come, almost bumping into the pursuing policewoman. ‘Where are the stairs?’ he growled.

‘I’m sorry, Section Chief,’ she said. ‘You can’t go up there.’

Li wheeled around on his heels to face her. ‘Are you going to stop me?’ She just looked at him. ‘So tell me where the stairs are.’

‘There’s an elevator at the far side of the lobby,’ she said meekly.

‘Thank you.’ Li strode back into the lobby and crossed it to the brushed chrome doors of the elevator. As he stepped inside and turned to press the button for the fifth floor, he saw the policewoman, back at her desk, lifting the phone. The doors slid shut, and the elevator whisked him smoothly up through five floors to a white-painted landing where gold characters on a dark blue mural urged officers to Try to Be Best. Corridors ran off left and right. From the right, a small round man in the uniform of a superintendent, first class, emerged from an office with a plaque above the door which read, Logistics. Beyond him, Li saw a large reception room, and a door into the Chief’s office. The logistics officer blocked his way.

‘The chief is not on duty today,’ he said. Introductions were not necessary. Clearly he had been the recipient of the phone call from the lobby.

‘I’ll see his deputy, then.’ Li looked along the doors that lined the corridor. At least three of them were labelled, Deputy Chief.

‘Not available.’

‘One of them’s got to be here.’ Li pushed past the little man and started opening the doors of the deputies’ offices. The first two were empty. The logistics officer trailed along behind him. The third was empty, too.

‘I told you, he’s not available.’

‘He must be in the building. There always has to be someone in charge of the building.’ Li glared at the smaller man. ‘I’m not leaving until I see him.’

The logistics officer sighed. ‘He’s in the gym.’

‘The gym? Where’s that?’

‘It’s on the top floor. If you’ll just wait a minute I’ll call him.’ The logistics officer turned back toward his office.

‘No time,’ Li said, and he strode off down the other corridor. There had to be a stairwell. He found it at the south end of the building and climbed the stairs two at a time. On the landing, the same armed policewoman with whom he had become familiar on the wall of Commissioner Zhu’s reception room gazed down at him from a framed poster. He noticed, absurdly, and for the first time, that she was quite attractive, and he wondered if she was really a policewoman or just a model dressed up for the photoshoot.

The gym occupied the whole of the top floor. A telephone was ringing, unanswered. There were three table-tennis tables, a pool table, a row of comfortable leather armchairs lined up against the end wall. Sunshine streamed in windows all along one side. The walls were lined with photographs of winning police football teams. At the far end was an impressive collection of muscle-building machinery and aerobic exercisers. At first Li thought it was deserted, then the clang of heavy weights from the other side of the gym attracted his attention. The deputy chief, dressed in shorts and a singlet, reclined on his back along a low bench beneath a stand supporting a bar with transferable weights on either end. With upstretched arms he was lifting the bar from its cradle and then lowering to his chest and raising it again in sets of five. Air escaped from his lips in loud bursts, like pneumatic brakes on a truck. The telephone stopped ringing.

Li wandered slowly across the shiny floor of the gym until he was standing almost above the deputy. On the wall was a poster of a golden-haired woman with a man’s body wearing a ridiculously tiny bikini top. Opposite was a poster of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, looking for all the world as if someone had stuck a bicycle pump into some orifice and blown him up. Perhaps it was the deputy chief’s ambition to look like him. Li glanced down. If it was, he had a long way to go. He had short arms and legs, and a wiry, if muscular, body. He would never be a Schwarzenegger. Li waited until the fifth lift, and then leaned over to stop the deputy putting the bar back in its cradle. The deputy gasped, and arms already aching from the lifts started shaking with the strain of holding up the bar. If they gave way, the bar would come down with enough force to crush his chest.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.

Li said quite calmly. ‘You’re holding my partner and my son, and I want them back.’

‘Who the…?’ To the deputy chief, Li’s face was upside down. He tilted his head to one side to get a better look. ‘You’ve been suspended,’ he said, and gasped again as the pain in his arms started to become unbearable.

‘And you think that gives you the right to fuck with my family?’

‘You’re through, Li. All washed up.’ He groaned. ‘I’m going to drop this!’

‘You’re wrong,’ Li said. ‘Not about dropping the bar. You probably will. And it’ll probably take them days to recover all the bits of rib from your lungs. But you’re wrong about me being washed up. Because the charges against me are false. And in a day, or a week, or a month, I will be restored to my rank and position. And when that happens, I’m going to make your life so unpleasant you’re going to wish you’d dropped this bar on your head.’

‘Okay, okay, okay!’ The deputy chief almost screamed. The veins on his arms were standing out like ropes, and Li could see the elbows starting to give. He pulled the bar back in line with the cradle and the deputy let go of it, immediately wheeling around to sit on the edge of the bench, doubled over, flexing his arms and moaning from the pain of it. ‘You bastard!’

‘Believe it,’ Li said.

The deputy cast him a sideways glance. ‘If I had a witness, you’d go down for this.’

‘I want Margaret and Li Jon now,’ Li said. ‘Or I’ll drop the fucking bar on your head myself.’ He cast his eyes around the gym. ‘No witnesses to that, either.’

The deputy chief got to his feet, folding his arms across his chest, and massaging aching upper arm muscles with his fingers. ‘We could only have held them for forty-eight hours. And after that it doesn’t matter. She’ll have to leave the country anyway.’

‘What?’ Li was caught completely off guard.

A slow, bitter smile spread across the deputy’s face. A small revenge. ‘Didn’t you know, Section Chief Li? Your little American lover has had her visa refused. She’s got to be on a plane home by Saturday.’

By the time the deputy chief of the Yuetan police station was back in uniform, he had recovered a little of his dignity and composure. He would not attempt to stop Li from taking Margaret and Li Jon away with him, but it was not something he would forget in a hurry. Li had made himself another enemy. He held himself stiffly as he took Li down to the ground floor and through to the control room. Officers sat behind glass at a bank of computer screens and telephones, in constant radio contact with all the patrol cars in the district.

Li looked around. ‘Where are the cells?’ He had a grim picture in his head of Margaret behind metal grilles in a locksafe door, sitting miserably on a hard bunk bed cradling Li Jon.

‘We don’t have cells here,’ the deputy chief said, imagining the picture that Li had in his head and bristling at it. ‘Suspects are detained in interview rooms, monitored by closed-circuit TV. Nobody gets abused in this station.’ They passed a glass-walled detention room and the deputy stopped outside a door marked Family Room. ‘She’s in here. Normally we use this place to mediate in family disputes. Kind of appropriate, don’t you think?’ He opened the door.

Margaret was sitting at a highly polished, six-sided table reading her copy of the Ripper book, her coat hanging over the back of her chair. Li Jon was asleep in his buggy beside her. She looked up as the door opened and saw Li. She was on her feet and across the room and in his arms almost before he could cross the threshold. ‘Oh, God, Li Yan…’ Her fingers dug into the back of his neck. ‘I’ve been so scared. I knew you’d come and get me, I knew it.’ She broke away and looked at him, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘They’ve refused to renew my visa. They say I have to be out the country by Saturday.’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I heard.’

‘Can’t you do anything about it?’

He shook his head, overcome again by a sense of helplessness. ‘I don’t know. If the worst comes to the worst, you and Li Jon might have to go back to the States. Just for a few days, until I can get things sorted out.’

The Deputy Chief had been listening intently. Li had no idea if he spoke English or not. But now he waggled his finger at them. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You cannot take baby out of country.’

Margaret stared at him. ‘Of course I can. He has a Consular Report of Birth Abroad from the American Embassy. That’s recognised worldwide as his passport. Even by you people.’

But the Deputy Chief just shook his head. ‘No. You did not register baby as foreign resident with PSB. It is law. You must register and pay fee. Consular Report no good now. Baby Chinese. Stay here.’

IV

‘I’m not leaving without him!’ Margaret was almost hysterical in the back of the taxi. ‘You can’t look after him. Jesus Christ, Li Yan, you can’t even look after yourself. And then if they won’t let me back in the country, and they won’t let Li Jon out…’ It didn’t bear thinking about. There was a chance she might never see her son again. ‘I won’t go!’ To make things worse, Li Jon started to cry.

Li closed his eyes. His chest felt bruised, as if someone had taken fists to it. But it was just stress and the hammering of his heart. For one brief moment, in the gym, he felt as if he had stopped falling, that he had found a ledge on which to steady himself before starting the long climb back to the top. But the ledge had given way beneath him and he was plummeting again, back into the abyss. ‘They’ll forcibly deport you,’ he said. ‘Physically put you on a plane. And there’s nothing I can do to stop that.’

‘I’ll take him to the US embassy, then,’ she said. ‘And once I’m in, I’ll refuse to leave. Then the Americans will have to do something about it. After all, as far as they’re concerned, we’re both American citizens.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Li said. ‘It could spark off a diplomatic incident. You could be in there for months. And then even if they did get you and Li Jon out of the country, there’s no way you’d ever get back in.’

‘I’m not sure I’d want to.’

Li looked at her, hurt, wondering what that said about them. About their relationship. Li Jon’s wailing was filling the car, and the driver glanced unhappily over his shoulder and turned up the radio. Unaccountably, Margaret burst into tears. She hated the image of herself as some feeble, tearful female, but she had reached the end of her tether, and control was finally deserting her. Li put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her to him.

‘My God,’ she whispered. ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he brushed away the tears from her face. ‘I wish I did.’

Margaret tipped her head to look at him. ‘They said you’d been suspended.’ He nodded. ‘What for?’

‘I’ve been accused of selling the Ripper story to the Beijing Youth Daily.’

She looked at him askance. ‘You’re kidding.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve also been charged with assaulting a police officer.’

‘And did you?’

He managed a half smile. ‘Just a little.’

Which also brought a smile to Margaret’s face. But it didn’t stay there long. ‘Someone’s got it in for you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever murdered Lynn Pan.’

‘And you’ve still no idea who that is?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to investigate a murder when you have no office, no car, no detectives and no authority.’

They fell into silence then. Margaret’s tears had dried up, her moment of self-pity passing. Li Yan was in even more trouble than she was.

They were heading east on Jinsong Lu in the direction of the Beijing Jeep factory. On their right, row after row of drab, run-down ‘seventies apartment blocks were like old acne scars on the face of the new Beijing. Margaret said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Xiao Ling’s apartment.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s been arrested for possession of cocaine. My father’s looking after Xinxin, and I think he’s just about at his wits’ end.’

They left the taxi idling in the forecourt among the dozens of bicycles huddled together there, as if for warmth. A handful of small boys was kicking a ball about through broken glass that littered the pavings. Li still harboured a sense of shame that his sister and niece should live in a place like this. But she did not earn much money, and the company provided the apartment. She could not afford to move anywhere else. Inside, a toothless old concierge sat behind a grilled window and told them that the elevator had broken down. They would have to take the stairs. As they headed for the open stairgate, Margaret heard her pulling phlegm into her mouth from her lungs and spitting it out on the floor. She held Li Jon tightly to her and followed Li up the steps.

‘You don’t think there’s any way Xiao Ling actually did have cocaine in her locker?’ she asked.

‘Not a chance,’ Li said. ‘Even if the timing had been different, I wouldn’t have believed it. But on the same day Li Jon’s buggy goes walkabout? The same day you have your visa turned down and get arrested? The same day I am accused of things I didn’t do and get suspended from duty?’ He paused for emphasis. ‘I don’t think so.’ He stopped on the next landing to catch his breath. The years of smoking were still taking their toll. ‘He’s trying to destroy me. My family, my career. Anything he can do to discredit me, neutralise me. Here, let me…’ He took Li Jon from his mother’s arms to take his turn at carrying him. ‘It had been my intention to try to get him before he got me. But I wasn’t quick enough off the mark. He got there first.’

They carried on up a stairwell that had once been painted cream, but was now the indeterminate colour of sludge, scarred and peeling. Each landing was cluttered with overspill from the apartments. Bicycles and bins, cardboard boxes and sacks of refuse. The air was bitter with the acrid scent of urine. ‘I never had the chance to talk to you about your father,’ Margaret said. Li glanced back at her, frowning. ‘We had a long talk when he came to see Li Jon yesterday afternoon. There’s stuff you both need to talk about.’

‘I don’t think now’s the time, Margaret.’

‘Maybe not. But in my head I can hear you saying that every time I mention it. There’s never going to be a good time, is there? For either of you. But until you talk, you’re never going to get things fixed.’

‘I didn’t break them.’

‘Perhaps you didn’t, but you haven’t done anything to help pick up the pieces either.’

Li stopped on the next landing and turned. ‘I’ve tried, Margaret. Many times. But I’ve only ever cut my fingers.’ He wheeled away to the door at the far end of the landing, and knocked sharply. They heard running footsteps, and the door flew open to reveal a red-eyed Xinxin. She threw her arms around Li’s legs and burst into tears. ‘They’ve taken my mommy,’ she cried. ‘Uncle Yan, they’ve taken my mommy.’ And she craned her neck back to look up at him. ‘You’ll get my mommy back, Uncle Yan, won’t you?’

‘Sure, little one,’ Li said, with a confidence he did not feel.

Margaret stepped up to take the baby. ‘Your uncle will sort everything out, Xinxin. Don’t worry, it’s all just a mistake.’

Xinxin transferred her hug to Margaret, clinging to her in something like desperation. ‘I want my mommy, Magret. I want my mommy back,’ she whimpered.

Li’s father appeared in the hall. He seemed to have aged in just twenty-four hours, and looked blanched and shrunken, and very fragile. Li said, ‘Get your coat and your hat. Are you all packed?’

He nodded. ‘I was ready to leave for the train.’ He raised his left wrist, and his watch looked very large on it. He squinted at it. ‘I have missed it now.’

Li crouched beside his niece. ‘Xinxin, I need you to go and pack some underwear and some clothes. Quickly. You’re coming to stay with me and Margaret until we get your mommy back.’

‘I’ll give her a hand,’ Margaret said, and she took Xinxin’s hand and they hurried off to her bedroom.

Li and his father stood staring at each other. They were within touching distance, and yet the gap between them was apparently unbridgeable. Li said, ‘I’m going to have to take you to a hotel.’

The old man examined the floorboards for a while, then said, ‘Can’t even find room in your home for your own father.’

Li said, exasperated, ‘It’s an apartment for one, Dad. With Margaret and the baby and Xinxin, you’d have to sleep on the floor. I’ll take you to one of those big international hotels. You’ll be safe there, and comfortable.’

‘And on my own,’ he said. ‘Just as well I’m used to it.’

Li sighed. It was an emotional complication he did not need. ‘I’ll get you booked on a train home tomorrow.’

But the old man shook his head. ‘I will not go home until I know that Xiao Ling is safe and that she and Xinxin have been reunited.’

It was well past the lunchtime logjam, though too early for the evening rush hour, but still the traffic in Jianguomenwai Avenue was surprisingly light. A traffic cop with white gloves stood pirouetting at the intersection with Beijingzhan Street, waving through a huddle of cyclists. Away at the bottom end of the street the clock towers of Beijing Railway station caught the dipping sunlight as it swung westwards. On the northeast corner of the intersection, the three great concave arcs of the Beijing International Hotel swept up through twenty-two floors to a revolving restaurant on the top. Their taxi swung around a semicircular drive to pull up at the red carpet of its chrome, glass and marble entrance. It was beyond anything in old Mr. Li’s experience. Li took the old man’s bag and helped him from the taxi.

‘I cannot afford a place like this,’ he said.

‘Not your problem,’ Li said. He paid the driver, and they pushed through revolving doors into a lobby the size of a football field, marble floors reflecting every light in a ceiling studded with them. Every surface seemed to reflect light, and more of it spilled through floor-to-ceiling windows lining the entrance, falling in great slabs across huge polished desks where assistant managers in immaculate suits sharpened pencils while awaiting enquiries.

Li’s father shuffled after him across acres of floor to an endlessly curving reception desk. A young receptionist in black uniform and white blouse smiled at them, as she had been trained to do, but could not resist a flickering glance to take in the shabby, shambling figure of the old man.

‘It’s alright,’ Li said. ‘Our money’s as good as any foreigner’s.’

The smile vanished from her face. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’d like a single room.’

‘For how long?’

‘One night.’

‘Would that be standard or executive?’

‘Standard.’

‘Smoking or non?’

Li sighed. ‘Non.’

The girl tapped at a computer keyboard below the level of the counter. Then she slipped a registration form across it. ‘Fill that in, please. And I’ll need a credit card.’

Li gave his father a pen to fill in the form. ‘How much is it?’ He said.

She cocked an eyebrow, as if surprised that he would ask. ‘Eighty-one dollars, US.’

‘We’ll pay when he checks out.’

‘I’ll still need your card now. It won’t be charged to your account until departure.’

Li took out his wallet and passed her his credit card. She took it from him and disappeared to the far end of the counter to swipe it through the machine. ‘Eighty-one dollars?’ the old man whispered in awe. ‘That’s crazy.’ It was more than he would have earned in a month while he was still teaching at the university.

‘It’s the nearest hotel to the station,’ Li said. ‘Even if I can’t pick you up tomorrow, you’ll be able to get there on your own.’

‘And if you haven’t got Xiao Ling back…?’

‘She’ll be fine, Dad. You’ll only need one night here.’

The receptionist walked back along the length of the desk and snapped Li’s card on to the counter in front of him. ‘No good,’ she said smugly, taking clear pleasure in her knock-back.

Li scowled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The transaction has been rejected by your credit card company.’

‘That’s ridiculous! Try it again.’

‘I tried it twice, sir. I’m sorry.’ But she wasn’t.

Li’s father stood, pen poised above the registration card. He had not yet got as far as signing it. Li said, ‘Can I use a phone?’

The receptionist shrugged and lifted a telephone on to the counter. Li dialled the number on the back of the card, and when he finally got through to an operator demanded to know why they would not process the transaction.

‘Your card has been cancelled,’ the operator told him.

‘Cancelled?’ Li was incredulous. He looked up to find the receptionist watching him. ‘That’s not possible. Who authorised the cancellation?’

‘I’m sorry, I am not at liberty to give out that information. Thank you for your enquiry.’ And the operator hung up.

Li stood smouldering, angry and humiliated. If they had somehow been able to cancel his credit card, there was a good chance that his bank account had also been frozen. Which meant he would not be able to access any cash, except for the few hundred yuan he carried in his wallet. The receptionist was unable to keep the smirk from her face. Li took the registration card from his father and tore it in half. ‘We’ve changed our minds,’ he said. And he took his father’s arm and led him back across the marble firmament toward the doors.

The old man was confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re fucking with my life, Dad. They’re trying to ruin me and discredit me and grind me into the ground.’ He took a deep breath to regain his composure. ‘I’ll have to find you somewhere else to stay.’

‘I know what it’s like,’ his father said. ‘They did it to me, too. All those years ago. When I was “hatted” and paraded for public ridicule.’ He pulled on his son’s arm and made him stop, and looked up into his eyes with a directness Li had never seen there before. He found empathy in them. ‘Don’t let them break you, son. Not like they broke me. You have to fight them. I know that now. Your mother died fighting them. And I lived because I didn’t. And I’ve regretted it every day of my life since.’

Every west-facing twisted, knotted branch of every tree was edged with a golden pink. The faces of the old men, normally washed pale with a winter pallor, glowed in reflection of the dying day. Thoughts of cards and chess were turning to the bicycles stacked three deep along the fence, and the cold ride home in the fading light.

Old Dai did not seem unduly surprised to see Li, but was clearly fazed by the sight of his best friend’s brother standing there in the park in his fur hat and baggy duffle coat, clutching a battered overnight bag. He gave the older man a long look, then turned back to the final moves of his game. ‘You didn’t come to play chess,’ he said.

‘No,’ Li said. ‘I need a place for my father to stay overnight.’

Dai nodded without taking his eyes from the board. ‘Can your father not talk for himself?’

‘Yes, I can,’ said Li’s father.

Dai raised a hand over the board as if about to make a move, then changed his mind. ‘I hear you have been suspended, Li Yan.’

‘Word travels fast.’

‘A word whispered in the ear can be heard for miles.’ Dai moved his horse. ‘Jiang si le,’ he said, and his opponent gasped his frustration. He immediately stood up and shook Dai’s hand, then nodded to Li and his father and headed off toward the bikes. Dai said, ‘My apartment is very small.’

Li said, ‘So is mine. And Margaret and the baby and my niece are already there.’

‘Where is Xiao Ling?’

‘She has been arrested for possession of cocaine.’

Lao Dai’s head lifted, and his eyes searched Li’s. ‘So now they are trying to destroy you.’

‘Succeeding, too.’

Dai nodded again. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Yifu’s brother is welcome in my house.’ He paused. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

Li said, ‘You can tell me what I should do?’

Lao Dai shook his head sadly. ‘When the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the water.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The Tao says, overcome by yielding. Unbend by being upright. Be full by being empty.’

Li’s father spoke for the first time, surprising them both. ‘Those who know the Tao do not need to speak of it. Those who are ever ready to speak of it, do not know it.’

Li almost smiled, in spite of everything. In other circumstances he might have enjoyed being a fly on the wall in Dai’s apartment tonight. The two old men were like oil and water. But his father was not finished. He said, ‘A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion.’ He turned his head to look at his son, and in his face Li saw for the first time in his life the encouragement of a father. And he knew that his father was telling him to put his trust in himself.

Dai was packing away his chess pieces. Li said to him. ‘Thank you for taking my father. I won’t forget it.’

Dai shrugged, without looking at him. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t let you.’

Li turned awkwardly back to his father and could not think of anything appropriate to say. And to his father’s surprise, as well as his own, he found himself embracing the old man for the first time since he was a boy. Then his father had seemed like a giant. Now he was like a child, and Li was afraid to squeeze him too hard in case he broke.

V

They were holding Xiao Ling in the detention centre at Pau Jü Hutong, a white multistorey block next to the forensic science building. It was the home of the Section Six interrogation unit. The light was fading, along with Li’s confidence, as his taxi pulled up in the hutong outside the centre. He could see fires burning in siheyuan courtyards, and smelled the sulphurous smoke of the coal briquets which were the standard fuel of the Beijing household. The hutong was busy, cyclists returning home from work, motorists inching their way along its crowded length, schoolkids with satchels chatting together in groups, spilling into the roadway and causing a chorus of bells and horns to sound. Their world kept turning, while Li’s had frozen on its axis. It was this constant reminder that while other people’s lives continued unaffected, he had become like a ghost moving among them, unseen, unable to make a difference, trapped somewhere between heaven and hell.

He had expected implacable faces, a thousand reasons — legal and bureaucratic — for not being allowed to see his sister. But the duty officer had nodded unhesitatingly and told Li to follow him down to the cells. He could have fifteen minutes, he was told.

Xiao Ling rose to her feet when Li walked into her cell, but the light of hope that burned briefly in her eyes died again when the door slammed shut behind him. They had given her white overalls and black canvas shoes to wear. She had no make-up on her face, and her complexion was pasty white, dark shadows smudging her eyes. She searched his face for some clue, some hope. And found neither.

‘Why am I here, Li Yan?’ she asked quietly.

‘You know why.’

‘No.’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘I know that they found cocaine in my locker, and that’s what gave them their excuse. But that’s not why I’m here, is it?’ Li could not find the words to answer her. So she provided them herself. ‘I mean, you don’t frame up some nobody worker on the production line of a car plant unless you have a good reason.’ She paused. ‘Like she’s the sister of the top crime cop in Beijing.’ A pained expression fell across her face like a shadow as she tried to understand. ‘Why, Li Yan? What have you done? What have I done?’

He said, ‘Did they search anyone’s locker other than yours?’

‘They didn’t need to. They said they had received a tip-off.’

He nodded. ‘I know the answer, but I still have to ask you…’

‘No!’ She cut him off, and he saw the hurt in her eyes. ‘Of course not. Do you think I would waste money on shit like that at the expense of my little girl? I nearly lost her once. I won’t do it again.’ Her eyes shone in the harsh fluorescent light, and she blinked to squeeze the blur of the tears out of them. ‘Where is she?’

‘Margaret has taken her to our apartment. Dad is staying with Lao Dai.’

She wiped her wet cheeks with her sleeves, and he saw the resentment in her face. ‘You still haven’t told me why.’ She thrust her chin out defiantly, determined not to let her emotions get the better of her.

‘Because I’m close to discovering the identity of a killer high up in Public Security. And he’s trying to destroy me before I can get any closer.’

She drew a deep, faltering breath. ‘It’s always about you, isn’t it? You have always put yourself ahead of us. Always.’

‘Xiao Ling, that’s not true.’ Li felt the sting of her accusation more acutely because perhaps there was a grain of truth in it.

‘You went off to Beijing to make your career and left me to look after Dad.’

‘And you got married and left him to go off and live with some brute farmer.’

‘It wasn’t my place to stay at home!’ Xiao Ling bridled with righteous indignation. ‘It was my duty to go and live with the parents of my husband.’

Li bit his tongue. He could have accused her of deserting her daughter for the chance of a son. He could have charged her with running away from her husband, and abandoning her father. He could have denounced her as selfish and deceitful. All of which would have been true. None of which had led her to a cell in the detention centre in Pau Jü Hutong. He swallowed his anger. ‘I’m going to try to get you out of here,’ he said. ‘But it won’t be easy. They’ve suspended me from my job, and they’re trying to discredit me.’

She looked at him in disbelief. ‘If they can do that to you, then what hope in hell do I have?’

‘Not much,’ he said, his anger finally getting the better of him. They were as different as two people can be who came from the same womb. They had always fought, and she had always infuriated him. ‘But I’m the only fucking hope you’ve got. So don’t fight me, Xiao Ling, don’t blame me. Help me!’

She glared at him defiantly before the little girl in her bubbled to the surface and her lower lip quivered. ‘Just get me out of here, Li Yan. Just get me out.’

By the time he came back down the ramp into the hutong, it was dark. The temperature had dropped, and there was a mist rising from the land. Headlights caught it in their beams, and raked the treelined alley, catching icy cyclists and hunched pedestrians in their frozen light. Li slipped his cellphone from his pocket and flicked through its address list. The battery was low, and the light that illuminated the tiny screen flickered in the dark. He found the number he was looking for and pressed the dial button. He put the phone to his ear and listened to the musical sequence of digital numbers, and then the long, single rings. It was answered on the third, and he asked to speak to Pi Jiahong. The girl asked for his name and told him to hold. After a long wait he heard Pi’s voice. ‘Hey, Li Yan. Long time.’ They were old friends. But his voice did not carry an old friend’s warmth. He sounded strained and cautious. They had spent their first two years at the University of Public Security together before Pi dropped out to take a law degree at Beida. Now he was one of the most dynamic of Beijing’s new breed of criminal lawyer.

‘I need your help, Pi.’

‘What?’ Pi tried to sound jocular. ‘The chief of Section One needs my help?’

‘I’ve been suspended, Pi.’

There was a brief silence. Then, ‘I heard,’ Pi said quietly.

Li wondered why he was not surprised. He remembered Dai, in the park, saying, A word whispered in the ear can be heard for miles. ‘They’ve arrested my sister for possession of cocaine. They found it in her locker at work. It was a plant, Pi. They’re holding her at Pau Jü. She needs legal representation.’

There was a longer silence at the other end. ‘I’m kind of busy right now, Li. A heavy case load.’

‘I need someone to bail her out,’ Li said.

‘I can recommend someone…’

‘I’m asking you.’

Another long silence. ‘Li, I’ll be honest with you. I’m hearing stuff about you. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. Probably isn’t. But you know how it is. Shit sticks.’ He paused. ‘And it rubs off.’

Li felt a band of tension tighten around his forehead. His throat was dry and swollen. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, old friend,’ he said.

‘Aw, come on, Li, don’t be like that…’

The cellphone battery gave out and cut him off, saving Li the trouble. Li thrust the phone in his pocket, wrapped his coat tightly around himself, and set off north toward the Yong Hegong Lamasery and East Andingmen Avenue, where he could get a taxi. It was a long walk in the cold and the dark. Long enough to reflect upon betrayal and lost friendships, upon tears and hopelessness. Long enough to think about Margaret’s deportation, about his son, his family, his own powerlessness to alter this course of events. It was far, far, too long a walk.

It took Li another half-hour to get back to the apartment. Conscious of his dwindling resources, he took the subway from Yong Hegong. Three yuan instead of thirty in a taxi. The underground train was jammed to capacity, and Li stood clutching the plastic overhead handle, pressed on all sides by fellow Beijingers on their way home from work, some reading papers or books, others listening to music on their iPods, a young couple holding hands. But he didn’t hear them or feel them or smell them. He was isolated and insulated, trapped in a bubble, removed from real life. And it was almost as if he was invisible to them. No one looked at him. No one thought twice about a tall Chinese in a black coat, swaying with the crowd in the Beijing metro. He was just one of more than a billion. What difference could he possibly make? He might as well not exist.

He got off at Wangfujing and walked down to the Grand Hotel. The subway beneath Changan Avenue was deserted. Several of the lights were not working, and it was dark. He heard a sound behind him and turned quickly. But there was nobody there. Just an echo from the far stairway, and his own feeble shadow on the wall. But, still, it left his heart pounding, and he realised just how far he had fallen that he was scared now of his own shadow.

When he turned into the ministry compound, just past the Chung Fung restaurant, he thought that the guard cast him an odd look. Did they all know? Even down to the lowest ranking guard on night shift? Had he really become such a pariah? Or was he just being paranoid? He glanced up the street toward his apartment block and saw a familiar vehicle parked outside the main entrance. It was a Section One Jeep. A panic gripped him, and he started running. He stopped briefly as he reached the Jeep, but there was no one inside. He ran up the steps and into the lobby. The elevator was there, its door standing open, the floor littered with cigarette ends, the smell of stale cigarette smoking clinging to every porous surface. The ride to the fourth floor took an eternity. He fumbled to get his key in the lock, and when he got into the apartment found Margaret already halfway to the door.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’ he said.

‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘Qian is here. He just arrived.’

Li looked beyond her into the sitting room and saw Qian standing awkwardly by the window. Xinxin was sitting on the floor with baby Li Jon propped between her legs watching television.

‘Are you alright?’ Margaret said. ‘You’ve been away for ages.’

Li nodded. ‘I’m okay. My father’s with Lao Dai.’ He did not want to get into the whole credit card thing right now. He looked again at Qian and stepped into the room. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

Qian looked grim. ‘William Hart has been found dead in the gardens of his apartment building. Apparently he fell from a window on the twenty-third floor.’

I

Steam rose from sewers through gratings in the road at the China World Trade Center, dispersing in the traffic, lost in their exhaust fumes. Lines of cars moved steadily on to the southbound lanes of the East Third Ring Road, and their tail lights arced off into the night. Li sat numbed in the passenger seat next to Qian.

‘You could be in big trouble for this, Qian,’ he said.

Qian shrugged. ‘I’ve known you for how long, Chief? Fifteen years? More? I think that qualifies us as old friends. Strictly speaking, I’m off duty right now. So I’m giving an old friend a lift to the apartment of an acquaintance who has been killed.’

Li stared off into the night. He was deeply shocked by the death of Hart. Not just because he was someone he had known and liked, but because he was the last hope for identifying Lynn Pan’s killer. Which was no doubt why he was dead. Li felt responsible. He should have warned him. But, then, his day had simply collapsed around him, fallen in with the rest of his world. Hart had been the last thing on his mind.

They turned off at the Jinsong bridge, and Qian was waved through by uniformed officers at the entrance to the Music Home Apartments complex. The gardens that Li and Margaret had walked through just twenty-four hours earlier were jammed with people. Police and forensic vehicles were pulled up at the northwest tower. The whole area was floodlit, and people from the other apartments and the shopping plaza were pressing up against a cordon of officers determined to keep them back. Li and Qian abandoned the Jeep and pressed through the crowds to be let under the tape by the officer in charge of crowd control. They hurried along the path and through a curve of covered walkway that spanned the stream. Hart had fallen on to an area of white tiled concourse around a rocky pond. There was a lot of blood, stark and red against the white of the tiles. His torso was unnaturally twisted, and his arms and legs lay flung out from it at odd angles. His left forearm and hand were missing. The skull was split open. Li could hardly bring himself to look. Instead, he tilted his head up to see the lights of the apartment twenty-three floors above. It was a hell of a fall. No chance of survival.

He tilted his head down again and found that the eyes of every officer at the scene were on him. His arrival had caused a spontaneous hiatus in the proceedings. The photographer’s flash had stopped flashing. Pathologist Wang was crouched over the body, but twisted around so that he could catch a sight of Li. Officers from his own section stood gawping at him. Forensics officers in their white Tyvek suits squatted motionless around the body, where they had been searching for the tiniest pieces of evidence.

The only movement came from the head of forensics, Fu Qiwei, who was walking toward him through a scene frozen in time, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a VCR. He was grinning, his black eyes shining. And he held out his hand to shake Li’s. ‘Hey, Chief,’ he said. ‘Got some fucking memo today saying you’d been suspended and that I wasn’t to consort with you. Who uses a fucking word like consort?’ He scratched his head as if trying to puzzle it out. ‘Anyway. Never got the chance to read the goddamned thing. Catch up on it tomorrow. More important things to do right now.’ Li nodded and shook his hand firmly.

‘Memo? What memo?’ Wang said. ‘I haven’t even had the chance to look at my mail today.’

‘Me, neither,’ Wu said, stepping out of the bunch of detectives. He looked around. ‘I guess we’ve all been too busy, haven’t we?’ Heads nodded their agreement, and as if the pause button had been pressed again, the crime scene came back to life. Only Hart remained dead.

Qian whispered in Li’s ear, ‘Everybody’s with you, Chief.’

Li did not trust himself to speak for a moment, then he turned to Wu. ‘What’s the story, Detective?’

Wu said, ‘Everything points to an accident, or suicide, Chief. Hart was in the apartment on his own. Window on the balcony’s wide open. His wife was out shopping somewhere with the baby and wasn’t home yet. It was a neighbour returning from work who heard the scream. Looked up and there was Hart dropping like a stone.’

‘The neighbour heard a scream?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Was that before or after he came out the window?’

Wu shook his head. ‘He can’t tell. He heard the scream before he saw Hart. One thing’s for sure, though, he was alive during the fall. The neighbour says his arms were windmilling like crazy.’

Li closed his eyes, and could only imagine what thoughts must have being going through Hart’s mind as he fell to his death, knowing its inevitability. Did those few seconds it took to fall seem like a lifetime, or were they over in a flash? He opened his eyes again. ‘There’s no way it was suicide or an accident, Wu. Hart was working all day trying to decipher Lynn Pan’s graphs. Either he found out who the liar was, or he was getting close to it.’

Qian said, ‘So if you were here in your capacity as Section Chief, Chief, how would you want things handled?’

Li said, ‘I’d have officers take statements from every resident in the complex. Find out who was in the garden coffee shop at the time, what staff were on duty. I’d talk to the security officer in the lobby — how did the killer get in without coming through security? Check for closed-circuit TV. Check the taxi companies in case the killer came by taxi, or got away in one. Someone, somewhere, saw something, whether they know it or not. Maybe a stranger in an elevator, someone behaving oddly. We need forensics to go through the apartment with a fine-toothed comb. My feeling is that the killer is a real pro, so we probably won’t find anything. But people make mistakes.’

Wu looked at Qian, who nodded. ‘I’ll get on with it,’ he said.

‘Wu.’ Li put a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘Where’s his wife?’

‘In the apartment. There’s a female officer with her. She’s pretty upset.’

‘Maybe I should identify the body for the record,’ Li said. ‘Save her the trauma.’

Wu shrugged. ‘She’s already done it, Chief. Insisted on seeing him.’

Li nodded and Wu went off to issue instructions to the other detectives. He turned to Qian. ‘I’d like Margaret to do the autopsy.’

Qian raised an eyebrow. ‘That might be a bit difficult, Chief.’

Li said, ‘The Americans are probably going to request that one of their people do it anyway. And if we move fast, do it tonight, then it’ll be a fait accompli.’

‘Okay,’ Qian said. ‘I’ll set it up.’

‘One other thing, Qian,’ Li said. ‘I don’t want my son and my niece left alone in the apartment. Is there any way we can get an officer to stay with them until after the autopsy?’

Qian shook his head. ‘Not officially. I’d never get away with it.’ He hesitated. ‘But like I said, officially I’m off duty. I’ll stay with them. No one’ll lay a finger on them while I’m there, Chief. You can count on it.’

Li looked into the eyes of the older man and saw in them only devotion and trust. He wanted to hug him, but all he said was, ‘I know.’

Lyang was like a shadow, insubstantial, almost transparent. She sat in a trance at the dining table where they should have eaten the previous night, her hands in front of her, fingers interlocked. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut. She turned them on Li as he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. The female officer got up and moved away. Forensics were through in the living room, examining the balcony in the minutest detail. It was from one of its windows that Hart had fallen. They had already found damage to the sill, and scuff marks on the polished mahogany floor that Hart and Lyang had been so careful to protect with slippers laid out at the door for guests. Nothing else seemed out of place, Chinese rugs and wall hangings, the stereo switched on, but the music on pause. There was a drink sitting on the drinks cabinet. Untouched. It was one of Hart’s faux margaritas. The ice was all melted now. He must have mixed it when he came in. Hardly the actions of a man about to throw himself off a balcony. Perhaps he had put on the music, mixed himself a drink, and then there had been a knock at the door. He’d put the music on pause, put down his drink and let in his killer.

Lyang spoke unprompted, softly, her voice hoarse. ‘He called me about two hours ago on my cellphone,’ she said, and Li found it hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of guilt when he met her eyes, even although there was no hint of accusation in them. ‘He said he thought he had cracked the graphs. That’s exactly what he said. I didn’t know what he meant, but he didn’t want to say any more on the phone. He said he would tell me when we met back here. I was at the supermarket with Ling. I finished the shopping and came straight back.’ Her voice tailed off and she pressed her lips together, eyes closed, regaining composure. ‘I missed him by about fifteen minutes. The police were already here, along with just about every nosey goddamned neighbour in the complex.’

Li reached across the table and put his hand over both of hers. It was fully a minute before she could bring herself to continue. ‘I wish…I wish I’d been able to see him one last time. You know, just to appreciate him for the lovely man he was. To let him know that I loved him.’ She caught her breath and closed her eyes to stop herself from weeping. ‘Last time I saw him was this morning when he left the apartment. You know how it is. You don’t pay any attention. You don’t expect to not ever see someone again. I can’t even remember how he looked, if I said goodbye, if he was smiling, or if I was. All I can remember is…is how he was down there.’ She tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward the window.

‘You don’t have to talk right now,’ Li said.

‘I want to,’ she insisted. A sudden flame of anger burned in her eyes. ‘I came back up here and cried like I’ve never cried in my life. I cried so hard it was physically painful.’She put her hand to her chest. ‘I can still feel it, like cracked ribs.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And there comes a point when you just can’t cry any more. Not straight off, anyway. And I got to thinking how I could do something positive. Something Bill would have wanted me to do. So I searched the apartment to see what he had brought home with him. There was nothing here. Nothing in his study. Not even his briefcase. And he always had his briefcase with him. So then I phoned the academy, and they said he had taken everything away with him.’ She clutched Li’s hand with both of hers. ‘They killed him, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘They came in here and threw him off the balcony and stole all his stuff. And we’ll never know what it was he found. What he meant when he said he’d cracked the graphs.’

And Li knew she was right. That his last chance of identifying Lynn Pan’s killer, and understanding why she had to die had gone out of the window with Bill Hart. The killer was going to get away with it. Two people dead. Li’s career in ruins, his future and his family torn apart. And not one way that Li could think of to strike back.

For the first time, he let the suspicions he had been suppressing for most of the day fizz to the forefront of his mind. There was only one person who knew everything Li knew. Only one person he had told. Commissioner Zhu, that morning in the commissioner’s apartment. The commissioner had subsequently spoken to the director general of the Political Department, Yan Bo, but how much had he told him? Enough to prompt him to warn Li off. But how much had Yan Bo known about Hart? When the commissioner had asked Li how he intended to find out who the liar was, he’d told him, I’ve asked Bill Hart to gather together all the various pieces of information necessary to make that apparent. Li felt ill at the thought that those words might have sealed Hart’s fate.

And then there was the empty pack of Russian cheroots in the trash in the office of the commissioner’s secretary. The same brand as those found beside the Ripper victims, the same brand that forensics had retrieved from the crime scene at the Millennium Monument. Zhu would have had full access to the files on the Ripper murders. Hadn’t the commissioner himself asked Li for daily reports? He would have known what brand of cheroot had been found at the Ripper crime scenes. Easy enough to buy a pack at any tobacconist’s, leave one at the scene of Pan’s murder, dispose of the rest. But it was careless of him to throw the empty pack in the trash. Was it a sign of his arrogance, his supreme confidence that he was untouchable? Or did he simply just never envisage a circumstance in which it might have been seen there?

And who else would have had the power to engineer Li’s suspension, to take his life apart the way it had been? There wasn’t anything about Li he wouldn’t know. He had his mole in Li’s section, his informant, someone who would keep him in touch with everything going on in that office. Li realised he would probably never even know who that was.

There was something else which had been troubling him. A memory from that afternoon at the academy when he and the commissioner had been briefed together on the murder for the MERMER test. A picture in Li’s head of the ease with which the commissioner had handled the murder weapon, a large hunting knife serrated at the hilt. You look like you were born with one of those in your hands, he had said to him. And the commissioner had told him about his hunting trips with his father in the forests of Xinjiang Province. We killed the animals by slitting their throats, he had said. My father taught me how to gut a deer in under ten minutes. He knew how to use a knife. How easy would it have been for him draw a blade across Lynn Pan’s throat?

All of which brought him back to the single, most troubling question of all. Why?

Lyang’s voice dragged him away from his darkest thoughts. ‘Li Yan…’ He looked at her. ‘Don’t leave me alone. Please. I don’t think I could face a night here on my own.’

‘Lyang…’ Li squeezed her hands. ‘We need to establish…we need to know that Bill was pushed.’

‘You mean an autopsy?’ She seemed almost matter-of-fact about it. And Li remembered that she had been a cop. She knew the procedure.

He nodded. ‘I’m going to ask Margaret to do it.’

And something about that thought made the tears fill her eyes again. It was some moments before she could speak. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. Then even through her pain and tears she found something to make her smile. A memory of the character that her husband had been. ‘He’d have enjoyed the irony.’ But the smile was short-lived, and she bit her lip.

‘We’ll come over here afterwards, with Li Jon and my niece, Xinxin. Spend the night if you want.’

‘I’d like that.’

And from the bedroom they heard the sound of baby Ling crying. Tears, perhaps, for the father she would never know.

II

Li stood on the steps of the pathology department watching the headlights of vehicles probing the mist on the Badaling Expressway. Above it, the sky was inky dark, the stars clearer out here on the fringes of the city, away from the lights and the pollution. He cut a faintly absurd figure in his green smock and shower cap, but he was oblivious of his appearance, even if there had been anyone there to see him. There were only a few vehicles in the carpark, one or two lights in windows dotted about the dark frontage of the building. A minimum staff on night shift. He had needed air before he could face the autopsy. There had been too many familiar faces recently staring back at him with dead eyes from the autopsy table. It had been only yesterday morning that Lynn Pan had come under the pathologist’s knife. Now Bill Hart. Li remembered the soft, seductive voice teasing the confession from the child abuser. Hart himself had described the polygraph as a psychological rubber hose. But that was not how he had used it. He had found empathy with his subjects, made a connection between them with his simple humanity. He had not deserved to die like this.

Li took a last lungful of ice cold air and turned back into the building.

Margaret looked up as he came through the door into the autopsy room. Their eyes met briefly in common bond. Pathologist Wang stood on the opposite side of Hart’s shattered body. Wu leaned against a wall watching from a distance. Margaret had performed autopsies before on people she knew. But somehow this was much more distressing. She had hardly known Bill Hart, but something about his sense of humour had chimed with her. And their history, although short, had been so recent. Just twenty-four hours ago he had been wiring her up for a polygraph test she never took. A battle of wits they had never fought. And she remembered with a jolt her wisecrack at lunch that first day they met. He had offered to prove the efficacy of the polygraph by giving her a test, and she had agreed, but only if he would let her give him an autopsy. Everyone around the table had roared with laughter. He had never given her that test, but she was about to perform the autopsy. It seemed now like a sick joke.

She closed her eyes for a moment to drag her professionalism back from the edge of despair. When she opened them again, she took in the broken body that lay on the table in front of her and wiped all memory of Bill Hart from her mind. His head was markedly misshapen, with open comminuted fractures of all the cranial bones, and wide lacerations over the scalp. Multiple blunt force injuries is how she would describe them in her report, but the words were insufficient to describe the devastation.

His teeth were in good repair and, remarkably, undamaged, but the maxilla and mandible bones of the jaw were both fractured. There was blood in his mouth and nostrils, and his lips were blue. She spoke up for the benefit of the microphone recording her external examination.

The neck has been rendered asymmetrical due to fractures. There are faint and poorly defined areas of acchymosis about the neck, and there is palpable bony crepitance on rotation of the base of the head.

‘He landed on his head by the looks of it,’ she said and glanced up to see the pain in Li’s eyes.

The chest is also markedly misshapen by fractures of all of the ribs and a wide laceration that crosses from the left shoulder area over to the right lower chest, through which there is avulsion of muscle and portions of rib and internal organs.

Somehow in the fall, there had been a traumatic amputation of the left forearm and hand. The autopsy assistant handed it to Margaret in a plastic bag.

The recovered distal left upper extremity is received separately in a red plastic bag and comprises the distal forearm and hand. The medial aspect of the wrist bears abraded laceration, and the third and fourth nailbeds bear subungual hematoma. There is a pink, flaky material with the appearance, possibly, of skin under the left third and fourth fingernails.

Margaret turned to examine the right hand.

The nailbeds of the right first and fourth fingers show red-purple subungual hematoma, and the index fingernail is torn.

‘Is there significance in that?’ Li asked, detecting her concern.

‘It means that he put up a hell of a fight not to get thrown out that window. I think we’ll find his attacker’s DNA in the skin under his fingernails.’ She didn’t want to think about his panic in those last moments as he fought desperately to stay alive, and she moved quickly to the legs, only to find more evidence of his struggle. She fought a different battle, to control the emotion in her voice.

There is a patterned abraded contusion crossing the anterior right thigh. This 3 x 1½ inch, horizontally oriented area bears vertically oriented striations within the abrasion, and contains what appear to be splinters of wood and varnish.

Almost identical abrasions were evident on the left thigh, above multiple fractures of the femur, tibia and fibula. She turned to Wang. ‘Not sustained in the fall. Do you agree, Doctor?’

Wang nodded. ‘Bruising too defined,’ he said. ‘Dark purple, compared with other bruising, which is not so dark, not so defined.’

‘And almost symmetrical. Pretty much consistent with him being forced out of the window,’ Margaret said. ‘Bracing himself against the sill, but being manhandled over it.’

They moved on to the internal examination, where the injuries were even more horrific. There was not much left of the lungs or the heart, the pleural and pericardial cavities having been lacerated by the multiple fractured rib ends, as had the diaphragm and the peritoneal cavity. The spinal column was completely severed. It was a catalogue of fractures — cranial, facial, spinal, the pelvis, the arms, the legs. Most of the organs had been lacerated or torn apart by the force of the impact.

‘There’s no doubt, then?’ Li said finally.

‘You know pathologists never like to commit themselves,’ Margaret said. She looked into Bill Hart’s clear, open, undamaged eyes, and remembered the life and mischief with which they had once shone. She raised her eyes to meet Li’s. ‘But if you’re asking me, he didn’t jump.’

She moved away from the table, pulling down her mask to suck in air. She had had enough and was content to let Wang finish up. ‘I need to shower,’ she said to Li. ‘I’ll meet you in the lobby.’

She stood under the jets of hot water, letting them run freely over her upturned face and streaming down her body, soaking away a little of the tension that held her in its grip. It was probably the last autopsy she would ever perform in China. She had no idea if she would be on an airplane back to the States on Saturday or cooped up at the US Embassy with her baby son. Neither scenario was one that she wanted to entertain. Nor could she face the thought of another autopsy back home. If that was where she ended up. She had seen more than enough death to last her a lifetime. Perhaps it was giving birth that had changed her. The creation of life, as opposed to picking over the remains of it. Whatever it was, right now she no longer had the stomach for it.

She let her fingers trace the scar of her Caesarian. It was still hard to believe that by cutting her open they had brought life into the world. Her son. And her thoughts turned to his father. Only now, faced with the prospect of losing him, did she realise how unthinkable it was. However unsatisfactory their life here might have been, at least they had been together. And in the end it was that having, that belonging, which mattered most. She wished she could do more to help him, but other than her job she had no idea what. She was as helpless in the face of his faceless enemy as he was.

She dried herself vigorously with the towel and slipped back into jeans and sweatshirt, pulling on her trainers and drowning herself in the warmth of a large, quilted anorak. Li was waiting for her in the lobby and took her in his arms in a long, silent hug, cradling her head against his chest. She felt small like that, all wrapped up in him, safe from the world and everything out there that was trying to harm them. But she knew it was an illusion. No one was keeping Li safe from harm.

‘Section Chief.’ The voice made them break apart, and Li turned to see the head of the pathology lab crossing the lobby toward them, double doors swinging in his wake. Professor Nie Rong was a tall, skinny man, with tiny lozenge-shaped spectacles perched always below the bridge of an unusually long nose. The few strands of hair that remained to him were carefully arranged across his great, bald dome. His white lab coat flapped open as he walked, and Li wondered what the head of the laboratory was doing here at this time of night. He seemed oddly reticent, reluctant to meet Li’s eye. He shook hands with Margaret, and then folded his arms across his chest, still clutching a well-thumbed folder in his left hand. Li speculated on whether he might be embarrassed by Li’s presence at the facility. He must have heard that he had been suspended. ‘I’m sorry,’ the professor said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this…’

‘If you’re going to ask me to leave,’ Li said, ‘we’re just going.’

‘No,’ the professor said hastily. ‘It’s not that. I…I’m afraid there’s been a fuck-up in the lab.’ It was so unusual to hear the normally mild-mannered and polite head of pathology use such language that Li was startled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, this time reverting to English and inclining his head toward Margaret. ‘You ask for DNA profile in big hurry yesterday.’

Margaret frowned, flicking the still wet curls from her face. ‘You mean the sample from the cigar butt found by Lynn Pan’s body?’

He nodded. ‘We tell you is different from DNA found at other murders.’

Margaret looked at him, mystified. ‘So what’s changed?’

‘Lab assistant mix up samples. DNA same as other murders.’

Margaret immediately looked at Li. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered, the implications of what the professor had just told them striking her like a slap in the face. She turned back to him. ‘You sure?’

‘Sure, I’m sure.’

Li was finding it hard to take on board. ‘But if that’s true, then Pan’s killer is the same person who killed the four prostitutes. The Beijing Ripper.’ All the distinctions he had drawn between the Ripper killings and the Pan murder came tumbling down around his head.

Professor Nie moved on quickly, perhaps hoping to distract and deflect from the appalling error committed by his lab. He waved the folder in his hand. ‘Also we have positive DNA match between kidney sent to you and victim number four. And comparison of notes? One with kidney, one with ears? Calligraphy expert believe written by same hand. But no matter. We make chemical analysis of red ink. Same in both. Paper same, too. Ve-ery distinctive watermark.’

On the steps, Margaret took Li’s arm, and noticed that the crescent of moon was almost imperceptibly bigger tonight. ‘So,’ she said. ‘The Beijing Ripper is a cop. Makes sense, I guess.’

A tidal wave of thoughts he had been diverting elsewhere as a result of the DNA test was flooding back into Li’s head. The Ripper had known Li’s name and the address of Section One, to be able to send him the half kidney. Just as Pan’s killer had known his home address and had access to the ministry compound. And he recalled Lao Dai’s words in the park when he first described to him the nature of the murders. You have an enemy, Li Yan, he had said. And in response to Li’s incredulity, This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families, what else do all these murders have in common? The police. That is what Old Dai had said. And Li. Someone with a grudge against him. Jealousy or revenge. What had never occurred to either of them was that the killer himself might also be a policeman. ‘Commissioner Zhu,’ Li said.

‘What?’ Margaret looked at him, startled.

‘He attended the lecture given in Beijing two years ago by Thomas Dowman, the Jack the Ripper author. He knew all about the original Ripper murders, and he personally asked for daily reports on our progress on the Beijing killings.’

Margaret pulled a face. ‘Probably half the ministry went to that lecture.’

‘He’s an expert with a knife. He told me himself his father taught him how to gut a deer. They poisoned the animals with salt and then slit their throats.’

Margaret cocked an eyebrow. ‘That’s a little more convincing,’ she conceded. And she recalled Dai’s comment on him the night he made the speech at Li’s award ceremony. He does not much like our young friend. He is full of praise. Noisy praise, like a drum with nothing inside it. He says only good things of Li Yan. His tone is honeyed, but there is vinegar on his tongue.

‘He’s the only one I told about Hart examining the graphs to try and establish the identity of Lynn Pan’s liar,’ Li said.

But Margaret was shaking her head. Still none of it really made sense. ‘But what was the lie she caught him in? I mean what could she possibly have found out about him in the course of those tests? That he was the Beijing Ripper? How?’

Li’s head hurt. He tried to shake it free of confusion. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ In spite of all his schooling in the traditions of Chinese detective work, Li still needed a motive. The killing of all those young prostitutes. There is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself, Dai had said. What purpose? To leave Li drowning in a sea of murders he could not solve? To undermine and discredit him? Did the commissioner really dislike him so much? Li knew, because Zhu had made it clear, that he did not approve of Li’s award, or the use of his image to spearhead the ministry’s poster campaign. But it hardly seemed a motive for murder.

And then the image returned to him of the figure in the CCTV video crossing the hall in the EMS post office. A tall figure, like Zhu. Slightly stooped. Like Zhu. He closed his eyes and let the air escape slowly from his lungs through slightly pursed lips. What a fool he had been to trust him.

III

The area around the window in the balcony had been taped off. Lyang had been told not to touch anything in that part of the living room. But forensics were long gone. So, too, the crowds in the gardens below. The management had sent someone out to clean the blood from the paving stones. A woman in a blue overall with bleach and a bucket of hot water. She had been at it for nearly an hour, but the stain was still visible, however faintly. Which would not do at all. Li had no doubt that a team of workmen would be there first thing in the morning to tear up the old pavings and lay new. It would not do to have the blood of one of its residents staining the reputation of the complex, a constant reminder to all the others of the tragedy that had taken place there. It was the kind of thing that could lower the value of property. And no one would want that.

Li moved away from the kitchen window, carrying with him the three glasses of Bill Hart’s scotch that he had brought in to dilute with water. It was how Bill said true scotch should always be drunk, Lyang had told them. A little water to release the flavour. No ice. That killed the taste. Lyang was sprawled at one end of the settee, her left leg folded up to her chest, an arm around it to hold it there, a cigarette burning in her free hand. It was her first cigarette, she confessed, since the day they told her she was pregnant. It had seemed so important, for the baby’s sake, to give up. Now that she was the only one affected by it, she didn’t give a damn. ‘Bill would have been horrified,’ she said, and then bit her knuckle to stop herself crying.

Li handed her a scotch. It was her third. On an empty stomach. And they were large ones. They were all feeling the effects of fatigue and stress, emotionally drained, physically tired. And the alcohol was providing relief and the promise of oblivion. Except for Li. He felt the whisky burning his stomach, but his head remained painfully clear. It was nearly midnight. An hour ago he could barely keep his eyes open. Now he was beyond tired. He knew he would not sleep tonight.

Margaret was curled up in one of the armchairs. She and Lyang had hugged and cried, and now she, too, was drained. Completely exhausted. Looking back, the events of the day seemed to her like a nightmare. Usually you woke up from a nightmare. Margaret knew that only sleep would provide an escape from this one. Alcohol offered her a route to that escape, and she was only too happy to take it. Xinxin was sharing a bed with Ling, and Li Jon was in Ling’s old cot. They had agreed that Margaret would sleep with Lyang, and Li would take the settee. They had talked and talked, at first about Bill and the case, and then about nothing of any consequence at all. Margaret raised her glass. ‘I’m for bed when I’ve finished this.’ And she drained it in a single pull. ‘Which is now.’

‘Me, too,’ Lyang said, and she also drained her glass.

Margaret eased herself out of the armchair and waited as Lyang got unsteadily to her feet. They knew she had been drinking before they got there, and although she seemed quite lucid, its physical effects on her were obvious now. She half staggered across the room, and Margaret put an arm around her to guide her toward the stairs. Margaret glanced back at Li. ‘Will you be okay?’

He nodded and took a sip at his whisky and listened to their uncertain progress up the stairs. He heard them in the hallway overhead, and then their voices distantly in the master bedroom. After a few minutes there was only silence. Li got up and turned off the lights and stood gazing out over the city. There was a time, not so long ago, when the power supply had been erratic, unpredictable. Demand greater than production. Now there seemed a limitless supply of power to burn. To waste. When he had first arrived here from Sichuan nearly twenty years ago, Beijing had shut down at night. Early. There had been very little to entertain a young man beyond his studies. Now the city never slept, and tonight Li knew he would keep it company.

He took another sip of his whisky and looked around the room in the city’s reflected light at all the things Bill Hart and Lyang had chosen to turn an empty apartment into a home. Every picture, every rug, every item of furniture, a decision they had made. With most people there was a story behind nearly everything you found in their home. A personal story, a history of a life together, memories shared. But what did any of it mean when you were gone? When you took those memories with you, and all that was left were their material remains, meaning nothing, except perhaps to the partner with whom the memories were shared and for whom they now brought only pain.

Li was almost overcome by a sense of melancholy. He felt an intense sadness for Bill and Lyang. For himself, and a life in tatters. For Margaret, and all the unfulfilled dreams that had led her finally to a one-bedroom police apartment in Beijing, a partner who was never there, a baby who depended upon her and had stolen her independence. A life that was no longer her own.

And he thought of his sister lying awake on a hard bunk in a cell somewhere in the north of the city, shut away from her life, removed from her daughter. And Xinxin, stifling her tears to look after baby Ling and her tiny cousin, taking on a mantle of responsibility she had yet to grow into. Like life itself, there was no way to take back a lost childhood.

He wondered, too, if his father was asleep. In a strange house, with a man who didn’t like him much, his dead brother’s best friend. And he remembered that unexpected moment between them when they had hugged, Li scared to squeeze too hard in case he crushed him like a bird.

All these things somehow had Li at their centre. Like satellites orbiting a planet, held there by the force of its gravity, dependent upon it for their very existence. It felt like an enormous burden of responsibility. And he was tired and beaten down, and did not know if he could bear it much longer. He took a long, final drink of whisky from his glass and felt the heat of it snaking its way down inside him. He saw Lyang’s cigarettes lying on the table and took one out of the packet. He lit it with her lighter and this time resisted the urge to choke on his first drag. By the time he finished it, it was as if he had never given up. He stubbed it out viciously in the ashtray, angry at himself for his weakness, and lay back on the settee, staring up at the shadows lying across the ceiling above him. They were static, unchanging, but even as he watched they seemed to take shape and form. The shadow of a man, the head of an elephant, a face. He closed his eyes to shut them out and saw the tall, stooped computer image of Commissioner Zhu crossing the hall of the EMS post office. An outline image passing through three hundred and sixty degrees, showing everything but the face. How could he ever prove it? How could he put a face to that faceless figure? How would he ever know what lie he’d been caught in?

Li sat up with a start. He had been so certain he would not sleep, he was shocked to realise he had been dreaming. A strange dream full of frantic running down endless corridors, a ferry boat slipping from its berth, gangplank falling away as Li leapt across the gap only to miss the rail and fall. And fall. And wake, heart pounding, a cold sweat beading across his forehead. The fear of the fall, that endless tumbling sensation, is what had woken him. But there was something else, something hidden in an obscure, cobwebbed corner of his mind. Had he dreamed it? He couldn’t remember. Like the dream itself, the memory of it was fading even as he tried to recall it. Perhaps because he was trying to recall it. He swung his legs on to the floor and rubbed his face in his hands, trying instead to empty his mind, to free it from the constraints of imperfect memory. The Tao says be full by being empty, he heard Dai say. And suddenly the memory of what his subconscious had been trying to tell him, pierced his consciousness like a spear.

‘Shit!’ he heard himself say, and he was on his feet immediately. He found a light switch at the foot of the stairs and climbed them two at a time, his slippered feet sliding on the polished surface. He padded along to the end of the hall, hesitated a moment, then knocked softly on the door of the master bedroom. He opened it as Margaret sat upright in the bed. Lyang lay face down beside her, dead to the world. ‘What is it?’ Margaret whispered, alarmed. She had been as certain she would sleep as Li had been that he would not. She glanced at the digital bedside clock. 3.15 a.m. And she had not slept a wink.

‘I need to talk to Lyang,’ Li said, and he moved into the bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed beside the sleeping widow. He looked down at her face in profile, all muscles relaxed, her mouth slightly open, and heard her deep, slow breathing. And for a moment he almost decided it could wait until morning. But it couldn’t, and he shook her gently by the shoulder. It was fully half a minute before he could rouse her.

‘What’s so urgent that you have to wake her up in the middle of the night, for God’s sake?’ Margaret whispered.

‘Trust me,’ Li said. ‘It’s important.’

Lyang raised herself on to one elbow, blinking away the sleep in her eyes. Li could almost see the recollection of the previous day’s events returning to her, grief welling up inside, the pain of a hangover already tightening its grip around her head. ‘What…?’ But she was still barely conscious.

Li said, ‘Lyang, I need you to wake up. This is really important.’

He saw her make the effort. ‘What is it?’

‘Lynn Pan had her own private space on the academy website. What about Bill? He must have had his own space, too.’

Lyang was still trying to clear her head. But even through the fuzziness something connected. ‘Jesus,’ she said, a part of her husband left indelibly in her vocabulary. ‘He did.’ And as the implications of that sunk in, ‘So maybe he put his files in there to keep them safe.’

Li glanced at Margaret and saw the fire of hope light her eyes.

Lyang sat at the computer by the light of the single lamp on Hart’s desk. Her white satin night-dress hung loosely from her shoulders. Her hair was a mess, her face smeared and puffy. Margaret stood behind her, looking not much better, eyes burning and gritty. Li had pulled up the chair from Lyang’s desk, and sat beside her. ‘How can you access Bill’s private stuff from here? He had to go to the academy last night to get into Lynn’s folder.’

‘He brought a copy of the FTP software back with him last night.’ Lyang shuffled through the desk drawers to find the CD, then slipped it into the iMac. She double-clicked the icon and loaded the software on to the hard disk. ‘Okay.’ She squeezed her temples and let out a long breath. ‘Jees, I feel like shit. Can someone get me a glass of water?’

‘I’ll get it,’ Margaret said, and she disappeared out into the hall.

Lyang opened up the Fetch programme and entered the academy’s FTP address into the dialogue box.

‘You know his user name and password?’ Li asked.

‘Sure. It’s bill.hart.’ She tapped it in, then paused at the password, trembling fingers hovering over the keys. Li heard her breathing become shallower and saw tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. ‘He changed his password to Ling after she was born,’ she said, before finally she was able to bring herself to type it in and hit the return key.

Margaret returned from the bathroom with a glass of water and Lyang drank thirstily, emptying it in one draught. They were now looking at a screenful of icons, all of Hart’s personal and private files. Lyang pushed the arrow about the screen until it was hovering over a folder labelled Pan’s Files. She dragged it to the desktop and it copied on to Hart’s computer. She double-clicked to open it. Inside there were thirteen folders, and a computer-shaped icon with the MRM motif in blue within it. Twelve of the folders looked like copies of the ones they had found the previous night among Lynn Pan’s files. Graphs A to F and Pics A to F.

Lyang flashed the arrow around the screen with frightening speed, opening and closing folders. There were three graph files in each of the Graph folders, but instead of being empty, the Pics folders now contained jpeg images of all the photographs the testees had been shown during the MERMER demonstration.

Li said, ‘Bill told me that one of Pan’s students thought she still had those on disk at home.’

‘Looks like she came up with the goods, then,’ Lyang said. ‘We can look at all of these.’

Margaret leaned in closer to the screen. ‘But you won’t be able to see the graphs, will you? Not without the software.’

Lyang’s arrow shot across the screen and double-clicked on the MRM icon. ‘Looks like Bill thought of everything,’ she said. The computer whirred, and images flashed across the screen as the MERMER software loaded up. ‘He’d have known he’d need a copy of this to work with the graphs at home.’

‘What’s this?’ Li stabbed a finger at the thirteenth folder. It was labelled, Report.

Lyang opened it up to reveal a word-processing document. She double-clicked to open it. A document unfolded on the screen. It was headed Preliminary Findings, MERMER Demo — Bill Hart. ‘Seems he already started to write up what he found,’ Lyang said, and her voice cracked on found. She put her hand to her mouth to hold back her emotion, and bit hard on her finger. ‘Typical Bill,’ she said.

Li pulled his chair closer to read the document which Hart had written.

A careful comparison of the first of the three graphs in each folder with the known sequence of photographs shown to each subject has enabled us to identify which of them was briefed on the murder for the purposes of the demonstration. MERMER responses to the ‘probe’ photographs, all of which related to the murder, were easily identified on the graphs. As a result, we were able to pinpoint A, B and C as the ‘murderers’, thereby eliminating them from our attempts to identify subject D, whom Professor Pan had labelled a ‘Liar’.

Li sat stunned. He knew who had been briefed on the murder, because he was one of them. And the Procurator General and Commissioner Zhu were the others. Which meant that Zhu was not the liar, and therefore almost certainly not the killer.

‘That blows a bit of a hole in your theory about the commissioner,’ Margaret said helpfully. ‘Who’s left?’

Li said, ‘His deputy, Cao Xu, the deputy minister, and Yan Bo, the director general of the Political Department.’ And he remembered Yan Bo scribbling in red ink on his notepad.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘So now we’re climbing even higher up the ladder.’

Li turned back to the screen, agitated now. There was more.

Identifying why Professor Pan labelled subject D a ‘Liar’ has proven more difficult. Apart from a continuity of response to the ‘probe’ pictures — that is to say, none of them showed a MERMER response — the graphs relating to the ‘target’ and ‘irrelevant’ pictures appear to be anomalous.

And that was as much as Hart had written.

‘Is that it?’ Li said.

Lyang shook her head, scrolling up and down the page. ‘There’s nothing else. If he knew more than that he’s taken it with him.’

‘But what does he mean, anomalous?’ Li said.

‘Hang on,’ Margaret interrupted. ‘You two are way ahead of me here. Would someone like to explain what targets and probes and irrelevants are? It’s like another language.’

Lyang turned toward her. ‘Three of the six subjects were briefed on a murder, for the purposes of the demo. When it came to the test all six were shown nine photographs relating to that murder — things that only the ones who’d been briefed would recognise. They’re called probes. They were also shown nine photographs of things that were known to them — their apartment, their dog, their car. And these are called targets. The idea being that the brain’s response to these things that are known to them will be the same as the response to the probe photographs. In the case of the ones who were briefed, that is. And not, in the case of the other three.’

Margaret was nodding. ‘Okay, and let me guess. The irrelevants are photographs that don’t mean anything to any of them, so they have negative responses to compare to the positive ones.’

‘You got it,’ Lyang said. ‘And they get to see thirty-six irrelevants.’

‘So what did Bill mean by anomalous?’ Li asked again.

Lyang rubbed her tired and swollen eyes. ‘I don’t know. It may be that they were getting a MERMER response from some of the irrelevants.’

‘You mean recognising pictures of things they weren’t expected to?’ Margaret said.

‘Exactly,’ Lyang said. ‘It can happen. Sometimes an irrelevant is accidentally known to them. Usually they are given a list of things in advance, so that if they might be shown something they recognise it can be changed before the actual test. That wouldn’t have been done for the demo.’

Li was shaking his head, baffled. ‘So how could Lynn Pan possibly tell from any of these responses that somebody was lying? I mean, lying about what? Lying how? All they were doing was looking at pictures.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Margaret said suddenly. She looked at Li. ‘You remember Mei Yuan’s riddle?’ He looked at her blankly. ‘The one about the two deaf mutes in the paddy field.’

Li blinked in surprise. ‘So she tried that one out on you after all.’

But Margaret wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing off on lateral planes. ‘Each of them thought he was left in that field on his own,’ she said. ‘And that the other one had sneaked off with the food or the drink to keep it for themselves.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Lyang said, looking from one to the other through a haze of fatigue.

So Margaret told her the riddle, but didn’t wait for her to work it out. ‘It was dark,’ she said. ‘That’s why they couldn’t see one another. They were both there, and neither of them was lying about it. They were both telling the truth, but they just didn’t know it.’

‘You’ve lost me now, too,’ Li said.

Margaret was searching for a way to unfuzz her mind, to express herself clearly. She waved a hand at the computer. ‘This MERMER thing. It can’t tell if you’re lying, right? Your brain sees something it recognises, it makes an involuntary response. You record it right there on the graph, and it’s plain for everyone to see. You see something you don’t recognise, you have no response. That’s also on the graph. So it’s got nothing to do with lying. But it’s got everything to do with telling the truth.’

They were both looking at her, concentrating hard, waiting, still not getting it.

‘Don’t you see? You can’t help but tell the truth, because you have no control over how your brain responds. Lynn Pan must have known there were anomalies in the irrelevants. But that’s neither here nor there. If you have a MERMER response to something you’re not supposed to, well that’s just a measure of the imperfect conditions in which the test was being conducted. But if you don’t have a MERMER response to something you should have, then that’s weird. That’s really off the wall. That doesn’t make any sense at all.’

Light began to dawn in Li’s eyes. ‘It’s one of the targets,’ Li said. ‘He didn’t recognise something he should have.’ Then he frowned. ‘What the hell could that be?’

Lyang said, ‘Well, we only have to look at nine photographs in relation to the graph to find out.’

She went into the Graphs D folder and double-clicked on the first of the graph icons, and the MRM software decoded the document. A window opened up on the computer screen showing a jagged graph line running from left to right. Using the mouse to capture the scroll bar at the bottom of the window enabled Lyang to scroll through the length of the graph. Its peaks and troughs related to a bar running along the top of the screen which held tiny icons of the images being shown at that moment to the testee. Each image was labelled probe, target, or irrelevant. So it was a simple matter to compare the graph responses to the target pictures, while enabling them to ignore the other forty-five.

Li focused all his attention on the graph. The MERMER responses, indicating knowledge or recognition, were represented by distinctive peaks that stood out well above the average flat response. The tiny icons of the photographic images were hard to make out. Li saw a car, but it just looked like any other ministerial car. No doubt Subject D, as Hart had called him, would have recognised its number plate. He saw the pink and white ministerial apartments where he had called on Commissioner Zhu first thing the previous morning. But there was nothing in that to give away the identity of Subject D. All five of the senior officers who had taken part in the demonstration with Li that day would have apartments in those blocks. Only Li, as by far the most junior officer, was allocated an apartment in the ministry compound. There was a picture of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. A son, perhaps. Li did not recognise him. There was a photograph of the exterior of a restaurant. It was not one Li knew. A favourite eatery, perhaps. Another showed the main entrance of Beijing Police Headquarters in East Qianmen Avenue. Any one of them would have recognised that one. Infuriatingly, there was nothing that indicated to Li the identity of Subject D.

Lyang suddenly stopped scrolling. ‘There,’ she said. And she pointed at the screen, almost triumphantly. She had followed in the footsteps of her dead husband and found what he found. ‘No MERMER.’ The graph showed a flat response to a picture clearly labelled target, where there should have been a MERMER response.

‘What is it?’ Margaret squinted at the picture, but it was too small to be identifiable.

Lyang double-clicked on the icon and the photograph opened up on top of the graph to reveal an orange sky at sunset, framed by the branches of trees drawing the eyes toward two serrated towers in silhouette rising against gold-edged clouds.

‘What’s that?’ Margaret asked.

Li frowned. ‘I’ve no idea. Looks like a couple of pagodas.’

‘It’s the Double-pagoda Temple,’ Lyang said, taking them by surprise, and they looked at her to see tears making slow tracks down her cheeks. ‘Also called the Yongzuo Temple. I only know because when he first came here, Bill did the whole tourist bit. Dragged me round every tower and palace and tourist attraction in Beijing. And then we did trips. Overnights to places like Xian and Taiyuan.’ She nodded toward the screen and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. ‘Which is where that is.’ She forced a smile. ‘It was typical of Bill. He knew more about China than the Chinese. The twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple are the symbol of Taiyuan. But if you don’t come from there you probably don’t know that.’

Margaret said, ‘Well Subject D certainly didn’t.’ She shrugged. ‘But I don’t see the significance of it. Why were they showing it to him in the first place?’

Li slapped his hand on the desk. ‘It has to be his home town,’ he said. ‘It’s the only category of the nine target pictures that it would fit. They showed all of us pictures of our home towns.’

Margaret ran her hand back through tangled, tousy hair. ‘But why wouldn’t he recognise his home town? I mean, if those pagodas are the symbol of the place…’

Li sat staring into space, his brain working overtime. Finally he said, ‘There can only be one reason he didn’t recognise it.’ He looked at Margaret. ‘It’s not his home town.’

She frowned. ‘You mean they made a mistake?’

‘No. I mean he’s not who he says he is.’

Margaret threw her hands out in despair. ‘And we don’t even know who he’s supposed to be.’

Li pressed fingers into his temple, screwing up his eyes in concentration, trying to get his mind to focus. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We can find that out easily enough now.’ He was thinking back to the MERMER test itself. Lynn Pan had shown Li a list of his target pictures. He knew he was going to see a picture of his home town in Sichuan. She must have shown the man who killed her a similar list. And he must have known that he wouldn’t recognise the place that was his home town. Even before she showed him it. And there was nothing he could do about that. His brain would respond in a way over which he had no control. It would tell her the truth, and reveal his lie. She must have known instantly that there was something far wrong. And he must have been watching for it, knowing she would see it, and planning how he would get rid of her even before the test was over.

But if he wasn’t who he was supposed to be — a high-ranking officer in the Ministry of Public Security — who the hell was he?

He closed his eyes and tried to picture the three men. Deputy Minister Wei Peng, squat, toad-like, arrogant, a stickler for protocol. Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu, tall, languid, unpredictable. Director General Yan Bo, older, shrunken, a man who enjoyed exercising his power. ‘In the name of the sky,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s Cao Xu! It’s the Deputy Commissioner.’

He opened his eyes and found Margaret and Lyang staring at him. ‘How can you know that?’ Lyang asked keenly. She had a vested interest. This was the man who murdered her husband, or had him killed.

‘Because the figure in the video, the one caught posting the parcel with the kidney in it at the EMS post office, was tall.’ One hundred and seventy-seven point five centimetres, Forensic officer Qin had been able to ascertain from the AutoCAD graphic. Five feet, eleven inches. ‘And he took a size forty-three shoe. There’s no way either the Deputy Minister or the Director General fit that profile. It has to be Cao.’

‘How can you prove that?’ Lyang said.

‘By finding out where he says he was born. If it’s Taiyuan, that pretty much clinches it.’

Margaret was having trouble dealing with the concept, and she recognised the truth of what Mei Yuan had said to her that morning. Li’s mind worked better on the practical than the abstract. He could solve a real problem better than he could solve a riddle. ‘But if he’s not the deputy commissioner, who is he?’

‘Oh, he’s the deputy commissioner, alright,’ Li said. ‘He’s just not Cao Xu.’