Chinese Whispers

I

Li stood on the edge of the concourse and looked at the clock on the west tower. It was six minutes past seven, and the eastern sky was yellow beneath the deep blue of the vanishing night. He shivered, more from fatigue than the cold. He was well wrapped up against that, with his long coat and thick red scarf. He wore a pair of soft leather gloves and a dark blue, soft peaked cap. His breath billowed around him in the chill of the early morning breeze. There were hundreds of people criss-crossing the vast paved square in front of Beijing Railway Station, all of them insulated against the winter air that swept into the city from the icy plains of the Gobi desert. The last breath of autumn before winter set in.

Li seemed to be the only person there standing still. A tall, dark figure surrounded by animation. Anonymous creatures hurrying, heads down, to the station or the metro, to the bus stops or taxi stands. They moved around him, like the currents of a river around a boulder, talking on their cellphones, or setting grim faces toward the day ahead. Women with the blue overalls and white face masks were already out with their brooms and shovels, clearing away the detritus of the crowd, raising dust to carry grit in the wind into sleepy eyes. Crowds of travellers, dark-skinned peasants up from the country, sat on the steps atop huge piles of tattered luggage, smoking and laughing and watching the early morning world go by.

Li felt a tap on his arm and found Wu standing there, looking as bad as he felt, if not worse. His hair was unkempt and whipping about his head in the wind, his face pallid and puffy. His moustache seemed even more sparse that usual. Li had phoned him shortly after 4 a.m. to ask him a favour, and heard a woman’s voice in the background. Wu had not sounded too pleased to hear from him. But here he was at the crack of dawn, as arranged, clutching a dog-eared folder. He could have had little more sleep than Li. The nicotine on his fingers seemed more pronounced than usual, and Li surmised that he had spent most of the rest of the night with a cigarette in his hand.

‘What did you get?’ Li said.

‘Everything you wanted.’

‘And it’s him?’

Wu nodded. ‘Yep. Born in Taiyuan City in 1948 and raised in an orphanage in the southern suburbs. It’s all in there.’ He thrust the folder at Li. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu but were afraid to ask.’

‘Where did you get it?’

Wu grinned. ‘Off the Internet, mostly. The ministry’s own website.’ And then his smile faded. ‘And the police net. His registration records. If anyone cared to check, they’d know I was in there. So you’d better get this guy or I’ll be in as much trouble as you.’

‘I’ll get him,’ Li said grimly. He was no longer fighting a phantom, some elusive, faceless enemy. He knew his man. And the playing field had just levelled off.

‘Why do you have to go to Taiyuan City?’ Wu asked. ‘Haven’t you got enough already?’

Li shook his head. ‘In the normal course of events I would go straight to Commissioner Zhu. But Cao’s done such a good job of discrediting me, I’m going to need better proof than a handful of graphs. There are still too many questions I don’t have the answers to.’

‘And you think you’ll find them in Taiyuan?’

‘I have no idea. But it seems like the best place to start. At the beginning.’

Li was about to turn away toward the ticket hall when Wu put a hand on his arm. ‘Something else you should know, Chief.’ Li turned back. ‘We finally made contact with that guy, Thomas Dowman, the one who wrote the Jack the Ripper book. Apparently he had dinner a couple of times with Deputy Cao and his wife when he was here for that legal exchange a couple of years ago. He says Cao was real pally and kept in touch with him by e-mail.’ He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and cupped his hands around it as he lit it. Smoke whipped away from his mouth on the breeze. ‘Dowman sent him an advance copy of the Chinese translation of the book eight weeks ago.’

As the train puffed slowly away from the industrial southern fringes of the Chinese capital, a pretty girl in a red jacket checked his ticket and gave him a plastic token in return. Li took a small chrome flask from his satchel and emptied into it a sachet of wiry, dry green tea leaves. He leaned down to take out the big flask from below the table at the window and pour boiling water from it into his own. Then he screwed the top back on the smaller one and set it aside to let it infuse.

There were two other passengers in his soft class compartment. Both looked like businessmen, in dark suits and plain ties. To Li’s relief, neither of them seemed anxious to indulge in conversation. One had his face buried in a newspaper, and the other was asleep before they left the city. Li opened Wu’s folder and settled down to read all about Deputy Beijing Police Commissioner Cao Xu.

The second in command of the Beijing force had come from humble origins, abandoned by an elderly widowed aunt following the death of his parents in an agricultural accident. He had been two years old then. His aunt had been childless, and he was without family. The authorities had placed him in the care of a state orphanage.

He never graduated from school, being inducted, as many of his generation were, into the ranks of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s teenage missionaries of ideological madness travelled all over China during those years of chaos and persecution. Cao had been no different from the rest, spending several years in various southern provinces before coming to Beijing to join the cheering throngs in Tiananmen Square, where Mao would make regular appearances, urging them to greater efforts in rooting out the enemies of the people. But then Mao, and subsequently the Gang of Four, had passed into history, and China returned from the brink to start reinventing itself. Like everyone else, Cao shrugged off those years and started over. He sat and passed the necessary exams to gain entry into the University of Public Security, where Li himself was later trained. When he graduated, he married Tie Ning, a girl he had met during his Red Guard years. Their first child had died aged three, and then Ning had belatedly given birth to a baby boy, now a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Li unscrewed the cap of his flask and saw that the tea leaves had absorbed enough water to become fleshy and heavy and sink to the bottom. He took a sip and wondered when the man known as Cao Xu had stepped into those shoes. Sometime between the orphanage and the university, he figured. It had to have been at some point during the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, when almost every facet of a once civilised society had been broken down, and the bureaucracy that had been the glue holding China together for thousands of years had all but disintegrated. Li turned back to the printouts.

Cao had risen quickly through the ranks in the Criminal Investigation Department, before being assigned as a detective to the Section One serious crime squad. Li was struck, as he read, by how similar their career paths had been, Cao blazing a trail ahead of him. He was more than fifteen years Li’s senior, but then Li had been a teenager when he enrolled at the Public Security University. Cao had been well into his twenties. So Li had followed not too distantly in his wake.

Like Li, Cao had become Deputy Section Chief, before taking over as head of the department. He had achieved striking success in a rapidly changing city. The very nature of crime and criminals in the People’s Republic was morphing into something quite different then. As economic change swept in, unemployment grew, and crime festered among the increasingly large floating population of itinerant workers travelling around the country looking for work. Cao had introduced changes in policing, modernising the approach of investigators, leading the section to greater reliance on science and technology. He had been a great administrator, politically aware, and a Party member. It was only a matter of time before he climbed higher up the promotion ladder.

When he was appointed deputy commissioner, his passage to the very top seemed assured.

Then a case he had cracked nearly ten years earlier came back to haunt him. Li took another sip of tea and laid his folder on the table. He remembered it very well. A young man who had raped and murdered several women was finally arrested. The evidence against him was flimsy, but enough to convince the judges in a very high profile trial that he was guilty. The authorities had made a great public show of the trial at the time, to increase public esteem for the police which they were anxious to portray as a modern and effective force, protecting ordinary citizens from crime and criminals. The investigation had been led by the then Section Chief Cao Xu. The young man was convicted and executed.

Seven years later, a brash new deputy chief of Section One, led an investigation into a similar spate of killings, tracking down and catching the perpetrator — a mentally subnormal middle-aged man living with his elderly mother in a siheyuan in the north of the city. Evidence found in his home and a subsequent DNA test revealed that he had also been responsible for the killings seven years earlier. Cao Xu had sent an innocent man to his death. And such had been the change in media coverage of such matters during the intervening years that it had been impossible to sweep it under the carpet. Cao’s shining star had been tarnished and was no longer in the ascendancy. The deputy section chief who had led the investigation that discredited him was Li Yan.

Li turned to the window and watched the featureless agricultural plains of northern China drift past. A small cluster of crumbling brick dwellings on the banks of a murky-looking canal. Stubbly fields lying empty and fallow, the early morning sun casting its long shadows across the land. It had never before occurred to him that Cao Xu might hold that against him. He had not set out to discredit the deputy commissioner. Cao Xu’s mistake had come to light quite accidentally in the course of another investigation. But, as the authorities had blamed Cao, so he might well have seen Li as the cause of his ills. The full-stop on his progress to the very top. An ambitious man thwarted, like a woman jilted, could be dangerous and vengeful.

Li had had few dealing with him since then, having left the Beijing force soon after to take up a job as criminal liaison with the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. He had been there for more than a year before returning to take up the position of chief with his old section and had only been in that job for about eighteen months. He could count on one hand the number of encounters he’d had with Cao in that time. He could not recall any rancour between them. Was it really possible that beneath his relaxed and languid exterior, Cao had been festering quietly, blame feeding on jealousy and revenge to grow into something dark and sinister?

But to horribly butcher innocent women in the pursuit of that revenge seemed distorted out of all proportion. Surely there had to be more to it than that?

Li drank more green tea and topped up his flask. He gazed sightlessly from the window and saw Lynn Pan’s open, pretty face, the smile that lit it, the warmth of personality that radiated from her eyes and lips and touch. And then he recalled the pale, blood-streaked face on the autopsy table, the ugly gashes where her ears had been hacked off, the gaping wound across her throat. It had all been some horrible accident of fate. Pure chance that an image of Taiyuan had been chosen for that demo. That a ruthless and bloody killer should have been one of its subjects, and that she should have stumbled upon his lie. Not a lie, but a truth. That he could not recognise a place which was supposed to be his home town. If he had been caught in a deception, it was that his whole life was a lie. And she had died to keep it that way.

A solitary figure on a bicycle cycled slowly along the towpath, silhouetted against the rising sun. It was a little girl. Perhaps seven or eight years old, a school satchel slung across her back. She flashed across the frame of the carriage window in a second, an image trapped in the mind. A child. A life. Gone in a moment, like the lives of all those young women that Cao had murdered. Like the life of Lynn Pan. And Li remembered the old saying: the star that shines twice as bright burns half as long.

II

Taiyuan lay 620 kilometres southwest of Beijing. It was the provincial capital of Shanxi, in whose central plain the city nestled on the banks of the Feng river, surrounded by mountains on all sides. The change in the countryside had been gradual. It was lusher here, more temperate, and sheltered by the snowy peaks that rose up into the clearest of blue autumn skies. Every slope had been terraced to grow crops, the plain irrigated to grow rice, a slightly sweet, delicious snow-white rice.

It was early afternoon when Li arrived in the city. The station concourse was jammed with travellers, and hawkers selling everything from maps to tiny toffee apples on sticks. It was warmer here than it had been in Beijing. The sun felt soft on his face. He bought a street map of the city from one of the hawkers and turned east into Yingze Street, away from the old south gate of the ancient city wall, and kept walking. The provincial government administration buildings were somewhere along here before the bridge. He passed a street stall selling the local Yingze beer for three yuan, and crossed through Wuyi Square. Yingze Park, opposite the towering Telecom headquarters, was crowded with people enjoying the late fall sunshine, strolling at leisure around the lake, where three or four weeks from now they would probably be skating. The square was lined with hotels and government buildings. The Hubin Grand Hall, the history museum, the Taiyuan Customs House, and the headquarters of the local Public Security Bureau. Li was tempted to make himself known to them. Their help would have saved him a great deal of time. But he was suspended from duty. He no longer had his Public Security ID. He was just another citizen with no special rights or privileges.

The shops all along Yingze Street were doing brisk business, and Li had to bump and jostle his way through the crowds to make progress east. No one else seemed to be in a hurry. The pace of life here was much slower than he was used to in Beijing. He passed the crowded Tianlong shopping mall and the Shanxi Chinese Communist Party headquarters before reaching the government buildings on the east side of the Yingze bridge. The area had been completely redeveloped, modern buildings rising all around from the rubble of the old. There was a vast open space in front of the main building, much of which was taken up by a parking lot. He climbed the steps into the main hall.

It took about an hour, being passed from desk to desk, department to department, before he was finally directed to the citizens’ registry office at Taiyuan City Hall on Xingjian Road. Here Li found another formidable group of buildings, older, built in the European style, and fronted by a huge courtyard. This time he tracked down the registry office quite quickly and found himself opposite an elderly lady with short, silvered hair on the other side of the counter. She was like a throwback from another era, in her blue cotton Mao suit and black slippers encasing tiny feet. But she smiled at him welcomingly enough and asked what she could do to help. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said when he told her, ‘the Wutaishan Orphanage. It was on the south side of the city, within sight of the Yongzuo Temple.’

‘You mean the Double-pagoda Temple?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You said, was. Does that mean it’s moved?’

‘Oh, no,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s still there. What’s left of it. The place burned to the ground about thirty years ago. They never rebuilt on the site, and the remains of it are still visible. Although it’s pretty much overgrown now.’ She tilted her head and looked at him curiously. ‘I’ve had quite a few enquiries about the place over the years. Mainly from people who grew up in it, wondering what happened. Not so many now, though.’

‘What did happen?’ Li asked.

‘No one knows. It just went up in flames one night. They got all the children out safely, but by the time the fire fighters got there it was too late to save it. An old building, you see. Mostly built of wood. It was all over in an hour.’

Li said, ‘What about the records? All the kids who passed through the orphanage over the years. Presumably you still have that information on file here?’

The old lady shook her head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘In those days all the records were kept at the orphanage itself. Everything was handwritten then. I know, because I was working here all those years ago when the place went up in flames. All our records were handwritten, too. We still have them in the basement. Unfortunately, the records at Wutaishan were destroyed along with everything else. The only thing that burns faster than wood is paper.’ She scratched her head. ‘A great shame. Generations of kids, their history lost forever. And the orphanage was the only family they ever had.’

Li felt himself slipping into a trough of despair. If the orphanage was gone, its records destroyed, there was no way to prove that Cao Xu was not who he said he was. Clearly he had covered his tracks well.

‘What’s your interest?’ the old lady asked, scrutinising him shrewdly.

Li decided to take a chance. ‘I’m a police officer from Beijing,’ he said. ‘We’re investigating the history of someone who grew up in the orphanage.’

The old lady smiled. ‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘I can always tell a policeman. You’re too big to be anything else. And too confident.’ She paused to think. ‘When did this person leave the orphanage?’

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Approximately, then.’

‘I should think he would have been around sixteen or seventeen. Maybe even eighteen. He was born in 1948, which would mean somewhere between 1967 and 1969.’

The old lady thought for a long time. ‘Old Mister Meng would have been there around that time.’

‘Mister Meng?’ Li asked.

She came out of her reverie. ‘Yes. He cleans the hall, and the public record office when it shuts at five. He worked as an odd-job man at the orphanage from the mid-fifties until it burned down in the early seventies. There was some speculation at the time about whether he might have been responsible for the fire. But I don’t think so. It was just idle chatter. He’s worked as a cleaner for the municipality ever since. Retired now, of course. But still doing an hour a day for the extra cash.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘If you come back in a couple of hours, you’ll be able to talk to him if you want.’

It was a short taxi ride to the southeast corner of Taiyuan City, but the twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple were visible almost as soon as they left the city centre. The taxi driver was a chatty type, engaging Li in reluctant conversation. Was this his first trip to Taiyuan City? What did he think of it? Where was he from? Did he want to take a detour to the Yongzuo Temple? Li declined the offer, to the driver’s obvious disappointment. He began to tell Li its history. ‘The towers were built in the Ming dynasty,’ he said. ‘Under the Emperor Waili. They are fifty-three metres high. Thirteen storeys of brick and stone.’

Li looked at the towers as they circled them on the ring road. They were awe-inspiring this close up, octagonal structures, tapering to a point at the top, aiming straight up to the heavens. It was little wonder that they had been chosen as the visual symbol of the city. In past centuries, when the buildings of the town were no more than one storey high, it must have been possible to see them for miles.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to stop?’ the driver said. ‘You can see the tablets of the famous calligraphers, Wang Xizhi, Yan Zhenqing and Su Dongpo.’

‘Sounds like something I really shouldn’t miss,’ Li said. ‘Next time.’

The driver shrugged. ‘As you like.’

The Wutaishan Orphanage was on the old road heading south out of town toward the great expanse of paddy fields on the Shanxi plain. There were rows of brick-built workers’ houses in among groves of bamboo and eucalyptus, great bundles of dried corn stalks stacked at the roadside. The original wall still stood around a large area of garden, now overgrown and gone to seed. Rusted wrought-iron gates hung open on buckled hinges. Li asked the driver to wait for him and wandered into the grounds. It had obviously become a dumping ground for overspill refuse from the surrounding houses, filled with the carcasses of long dead cars and bicycles. Among the tangling overgrowth, you could still make out the foundations of the original complex of single-storey buildings which had made up the orphanage. The thorns of wild roses caught on Li’s trousers as he tramped down the growth and made his way to the heart of the site where the main building had stood. Some charred stumps of wooden uprights could still be found poking through the undergrowth. Blackened bricks scattered around where they had fallen when the walls collapsed. He tried to imagine how it must have been, flames reaching into the night sky, the crackle of burning wood, the screams of the children as they were ushered out into the dark to stand at a safe distance and watch the only home they had known vanish in the smoke.

He kicked an old tin can and sent it rattling across the dried ground and looked up to see the twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple dominating the skyline. It would have been impossible to have lived here and not recognise them.

But there was nothing here for Li. Nothing but ghosts and memories. Other people’s memories.

The taxi took him back to the city in about twenty minutes, and he killed the next hour sitting in Yingze Park, drinking a three-yuan can of beer and watching small boys sailing tiny boats in the wind that ruffled the surface of the lake. He let the world pass him by and tried to think of nothing, to keep his mind empty, free to be full only of things that mattered. But despair kept leaking in.

He made his way back to the public records office and got there a little after five. The woman from the citizens’ registry was waiting for him at the top of the steps, wrapped up in a large padded jacket and carrying a deep denim bag. She nodded through glass doors to the large reception hall. ‘That’s him. I told him you’d be looking for him.’

Li saw a wizened old man in faded blue overalls, with a bucket and mop, cleaning the marble tiles on the vast expanse of floor inside. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and pushed open the door into the lobby.

As Li approached him, the old man glanced up and then returned his gaze to the sweep of his mop across the shiny surface of the tiles.

‘Mister Meng?’ Li said.

‘You’ll be the cop from Beijing,’ old Meng said, and Li glanced toward the glass entrance to see the lady from the citizens’ registry watching them with unabashed curiosity.

‘That’s right.’

‘I had nothing to do with that fire.’ Still the old man did not look up.

‘I don’t think for a minute that you had,’ Li said.

The old man gave him a long, appraising look, decayed stumps of teeth gnawing on a piece of his cheek. ‘What do you want, then?’

‘The lady from the citizens’ registry told me that you worked at the orphanage from the mid-fifties.’

‘Nosy old bitch!’ old Meng complained. ‘None of her bloody business.’

‘Did you?’ Li asked.

The old man nodded. ‘I loved that place,’ he said. ‘Knew every one of those kids as if they were my own. Poor little bastards. The place was run by women. There was hardly a man about the place. No father figure, only matriarchs. Broke my heart when it burned down.’

Li said hesitantly, ‘Would you remember one of the kids from back then? I know it’s a long time ago, and all I’ve got’s a name…’

‘Try me.’ Old Meng sloshed water from his bucket on to the floor, and Li smelled the bleach in it.

‘Cao Xu.’

The old man stopped in mid wipe and looked at Li, a strange light in his eyes. ‘Why do you want to know about little Xu?’

‘You remember him, then?’

‘Of course I do. He was a great kid. One of the favourites at the orphanage. Everyone loved him. He used to call me papa.’ Li tried to keep from getting excited. His hopes had been dashed too many times in recent days. ‘Always had a twinkle in his eye and a quip on his lips.’

It certainly didn’t sound like the Cao Xu that Li knew.

‘Have you come to visit him?’

Li was aware of stopping breathing, and it took a conscious effort for him to draw breath again. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘Of course.’ Old Meng glanced at the big clock on the wall. ‘But you’ll need to wait until I finish at six. And then I’ll take you to him.’

Li had never known an hour to pass so slowly. He sat on a low wall in the courtyard outside the municipal building smoking cigarette after cigarette. More for something to do than anything else, he had crossed the road to a small general store on the corner and bought a pack. Now he was nearly halfway through it, and his mouth felt dry and kippered. It was ten past six and almost dark before the old man pushed open the door of the main building and came down the steps toward him, dwarfed by his big coat and wearing a thermal ski cap. He made Li think of his father, and his heart lurched with the memory of the old man abandoned in Lao Dai’s apartment. He must be wondering what had happened to his son.

‘You got a car?’ old Meng said. Li shook his head. ‘We’ll need a taxi then.’

The taxi ride took less than fifteen minutes. Li sat in the back, while the old man sat up front with the driver arguing about the best route to take, a constant dialogue. Li watched the city slip by him as darkness fell. It was darker than Beijing. Here there were fewer lights. They did not have as much power to waste. Li had no idea where they were, or where they were going. He heard the name Taigang mentioned several times, but it meant nothing to him. And then through the windscreen he saw a huge floodlit tower like a cut-down Washington Monument reaching into the blackness. The taxi drew up on the side of a small square dominated by the stone needle, and old Meng climbed stiffly out. Li followed him and looked around. This was no residential area. An area of parkland brooded darkly behind a high fence. The gates to it stood opposite the tower.

‘We’d better hurry,’ the old man said. ‘They’ll be closing up shortly.’

Li followed him across the cobbles and through the gates. There seemed to be one long, treelined avenue washed by the light of ornamental street lamps, and small paths led off at right-angles to left and right. ‘Where the hell are we?’ Li asked.

‘Tomb park,’ said old Meng. And he pointed ahead to a large, floodlit monument. As they approached it Li saw that it was a memorial tomb to the soldiers who died fighting to liberate Taiyuan from the grip of the Nationalists in 1948. It was inscribed, Niutuozai Soldiers’ Tomb.

Li turned away from the glare of the floodlights and looked around him. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom of the poorly lit pathways that criss-crossed the park, he suddenly realised where he was. ‘It’s a cemetery,’ he said. In the cities no one buried their dead any more. Land was at a premium. Cremation was the only permitted form of disposal.

‘This way,’ old Meng said. And he headed off to the left down a long pathway strewn with leaves. Small posts with built-in lights every few metres cast feeble illumination across their route. Li could see the mounds on either side, and the stone tablets raised in the memory of the dead. He had seen graves in the countryside, where the peasants still buried their dead on the land. He had attended many cremations. But he had never been in a city cemetery like this before, hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies interred all around him. He pulled his coat tight to keep out the cold, damp sorrow of the place. Old Meng stopped and took out a small flashlight from a bag slung across his shoulder and flashed its beam from one headstone to another. ‘Somewhere around here,’ he mumbled. Then, ‘Ah, here he is.’

Li’s mouth was dry, and he felt the blood pulsing in his throat, as he knelt down beside a small, plain headstone lying crookedly at one end of a short mound. The municipal authorities clearly made some attempt at keeping the cemetery from falling into total ruin, but still the grass grew up around the tablet, almost obscuring it. He pulled it aside, and by the light of Meng’s lamp rubbed away the layer of moss that concealed the inscription.

‘Scarlet fever,’ Meng said. ‘Took him in a matter of days.’

Li took the flashlight from him and peered through its light at the faded characters carved in the stone. It said simply, Cao Xu. 1948–1962. He had been only fourteen years old when he died.

I

There were queues of people up ahead trying to get into the hard class waiting room. A female announcer with a high-pitched nasal voice cut above the gabble in the station to announce the departure of the 19.10 train to Shanghai, followed by information about a delay in the arrival of the 14.45 from Xian. Strings of red electronic characters streamed across information boards. A woman in a white smock was selling hot noodles in polystyrene cartons.

Li checked into the soft class waiting room and glanced at the departure board. As far as he could tell, his train would leave on time. A 7.30 p.m. departure, arriving back in Beijing at 2.30 the following morning. Seven hours! He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It seemed like an eternity.

The real Cao Xu was dead. Carried away in childhood by scarlet fever. He had the testimony of the old man and knew from him that there were others who worked at the orphanage back then who were still alive and would remember him, too. And there must be kids they could track down who would recall the real Cao Xu — and his passing.

But Li was the only person who knew how it all fitted together. The only one who could convincingly discredit the man who had stolen a dead child’s identity and lived a lie for more than forty years. That put Li, and everyone close to him, in danger. When he left this morning, his cellphone was dead. He had forgotten to recharge the battery. So Margaret had loaned him hers. He took it out now and dialled the number of the Harts’ apartment. Lyang answered. Her voice sounded dull and lifeless.

‘Everything alright?’ Li asked.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You want to speak to Margaret?’

Margaret’s voice was full of concern. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Yes. I found Cao Xu.’

There was a moment of stunned silence on the other end of the line. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He died, Margaret. From scarlet fever, aged fourteen. I’ve seen his grave. The orphanage where he grew up was destroyed by fire in the early seventies, along with all its records. He must have torched the place to cover his tracks.’

There was more silence from Margaret’s end. ‘But if he didn’t come from Taiyuan, how did he even know of this boy’s existence to be able to steal his identity? And if he set the place on fire, then he must have been there. Why didn’t he recognise the twin pagodas?’

Li thought about the overgrown remains of what had once been the Wutaishan Orphanage, almost in the shadow of the twin pagodas. It would have been impossible to have been there without seeing them. And if Cao, or whoever he was, had seen them, then he would have registered a MERMER response during the demonstration. A black cloud descended on his mind, obscuring the clarity he thought he had found here in Taiyuan City. ‘I don’t know. Either the fire at the orphanage was a quirk of fate, and he just took advantage of it, or…’ He hardly dared think about it. ‘Or someone else set the fire for him.’

‘Which means that someone else knows that he’s not who he says he is.’

‘Or knew,’ Li said. ‘It seems that people don’t live very long when they know the truth.’

‘Oh, Li Yan.’ He heard the fear in Margaret’s voice. ‘For God’s sake, be careful.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back sometime before three.’

He disconnected the phone, and dropped into a soft leather seat to stare up at the electronic arrivals and departures board, seething with a latent fury that had been building in him these last few days, determined that the killing would stop here, that he would get his life back again, and that the man who called himself Cao Xu would be brought, finally, to justice.

But he had no idea how he was going to make it through the next seven hours.

II

The lights of an airplane tracked their way across the vast expanse of black sky visible through the open curtain. Margaret lay on the bed twisted in her nightshirt. It was warm in the apartment, in spite of the subzero temperatures outside, and she had pushed aside the duvet in an attempt to cool herself. For a second night she could not sleep, too many thoughts crowding an already overcrowded mind. She had tossed and turned restlessly, too hot under the duvet, slightly chilled without it. Again and again she turned everything Li had told her over in her head. But still there was something that did not chime, something that did not quite make sense. And underlying everything, was a dread of what awaited her in just over twenty-four hours. Expulsion from China; the thought that she might be parted from her son; the fear that she might never see him again if she was.

It did not help that Lyang had fallen asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, and was now breathing heavily, turned away from Margaret and lying on her side. She had been poor company all day, morose and monosyllabic. Understandable in the circumstances. But Margaret suspected that she had also been taking some kind of sedative. Her eyes were dead, lacking the life that Margaret had seen in them when they’d first met only four days ago. She was slow in response to anything Margaret said to her, and she did not seem to have eaten anything all day. Margaret had done her best to keep the children amused, but it had been a strain. And now when she wanted to sleep, it was eluding her again.

The red digital display told her it was 1.14 a.m. She closed her eyes and felt the ache behind them. She tried to empty her mind and let sleep steal in to carry her off. Instead, she was startled upright by the ringing of a telephone on the bedside table.

Lyang moaned in her sleep and rolled over, but she did not wake up. The phone rang three, four times. Long, single rings. Margaret shook her by the shoulder. ‘Lyang, wake up for God’s sake!’

Lyang opened bleary eyes. ‘What…’

‘The phone!’ Margaret almost shouted at her. She was scared to answer herself in case the caller spoke Chinese.

Lyang glanced over at the clock, but couldn’t make out the blurred red figures. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s a quarter past one.’

‘Who the hell’s phoning at this time of the morning?’ Lyang reached over and lifted the receiver. ‘Wei?’ She listened for a moment, frowning, then thrust the phone toward Margaret. ‘It’s for you.’

Margaret’s eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘Me?’ Her heart was still pounding. Who knew she was here apart from Li? ‘Who is it?’

‘Someone called Dai. He says you’ll know who he is.’

‘Dai?’ Now she was scared. She grabbed the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Magret,’ Dai said. ‘Am so sorry to phone at this hour of night. I don’t wanna scare you, but Li Yan’s father, he is not well. His heart, maybe. I have telephone for ambulance, but who know when it arrive. Please come here. You doctah, right? He need help.’

‘Jesus…’ Margaret’s thoughts were racing. ‘Keep him warm, okay? Get him to lie flat with a blanket over him. Don’t let him stop breathing. You know CPR?’

‘Sure. It part of police training.’

‘Okay, hang on till I get there. How long by taxi?’

‘Fifteen minute, maybe. Not long.’

‘Okay, give me your address…’ She searched quickly through the drawer in the bedside cabinet and found a pen and a scrap of paper. She scribbled down the address and hung up.

‘What is it?’ Lyang asked. She was fully awake now, and watching Margaret, concerned.

‘I think Li Yan’s father’s had a heart attack. I’m going straight over there in case the ambulance doesn’t arrive in time. Will you be all right with the kids?’

‘Sure I will. They’re out of it anyway.’ She swung her legs out of the bed. ‘Let me call you a taxi. It could be long enough before you pick one up in the street at this time of the morning.’

It was bitterly cold as Margaret stepped from the northwest tower into the garden and hurried along the path by the small stream. She pulled her oversized anorak around herself for warmth. The area of white paving stones indelibly stained with the blood of Bill Hart had been replaced by a gang of workmen first thing the previous morning. The lighting in the garden was muted at this hour. Just enough for Margaret to see by. She crossed the stream and up steps to the entrance lobby on the south side. The night security guard looked up from behind his desk where he was reading some lurid magazine and creating a fog of cigarette smoke all by himself. She scarcely gave him a glance as she ran across the lobby and out through the gate to the street. A taxi stood idling at the kerbside. Margaret climbed into the front seat where she found herself separated from the driver by a metal cage. Through the bars, she slipped him the note in Chinese that Lyang had given her of old Dai’s address. The driver snorted and spat a gob of mucus out through the open window on his side of the cab. ‘OK,’ he said. He rolled up his window, passed her back her note, and the car juddered off into the road.

The streets were almost deserted as the taxi made its way on to the Third Ring Road and headed south. Margaret was aware of the driver glancing at her curiously. It was not often that some blue-eyed, fair-haired foreign devil would get into his cab in the middle of the night and ask to be taken into the heart of a Chinese residential area. He turned west off the ring road at the Huawei Bridge on to Songyu Nan Lu and drove along its treelined length without passing another vehicle. At the cancer hospital they joined the Second Ring Road for a short distance before turning south on Fangzhuang Lu.

Margaret’s initial panic was wearing off, to be replaced, as she sat thinking about it, by a growing unease. How on earth had Dai known where to find her? She supposed it was possible that Li had told him. But he had dropped his father off with Dai even before they knew about Bill Hart’s murder. Perhaps he had phoned later to leave a contact number.

She replayed the phone call in her mind. She had only met Dai on a handful of occasions, but been struck each time by just how perfect his command of English was. Tonight he had called her Magret. He had dropped his plurals and spoken always in the present tense. And yet his English had still been good. Perhaps under stress it was just not as good as at other times. She glanced nervously at her watch. If she had known how to, she would have told the driver to hurry up. He seemed to be taking the journey at an unusually leisurely rate.

They were in Pufang Lu now, heading west through a forest of tower blocks rising above trees rattling dying leaves in the wind. The driver dropped her on the corner opposite Dai’s block and pointed it out. She gave him twenty yuan. ‘Syeh-syeh,’ she said, and as she ran across the road the wind blew her anorak open to let the November wind caress her with its icy fingers. The cold made her eyes water.

She hurried down the path past the shuttered jian bing stall and turned up steps through the doorway on to the ground floor landing. It was gloomy in here and smelled of stale cooking and body odour. The elevator was turned off, and the gate on the stairwell was shut. She cursed, looking around for some kind of telephone entry system, but could not see anything. By chance she tried the stairgate and it swung open. Either the last resident to use it had forgotten to lock it, or it was broken. She didn’t care. She took the steps two at a time, pausing on the third landing to catch her breath, before running up the next two flights. On the fifth landing she stopped for several moments, leaning against the wall, her breath rasping and abrasive in her lungs. Then she heaved herself off the wall and ran along the doors looking for the number 504.

Of course, it was the last door she came to. There was no bell, and she banged on it hard with the flat of her hand. When there was no response, she banged again. Harder, and called his name. A door further along the hall flew open, and a man’s voice shouted imprecations at her. She ignored him and kept banging until, finally, she heard stirring within, the rattling of a chain, and the door opened a crack.

‘Mr. Dai, Mr. Dai, let me in! It’s Margaret.’

The door opened wider, and a pale-faced Dai stood blinking in the landing light, dressed in his pyjamas, a worn silk dressing gown hastily pulled around him. He looked both frightened and puzzled. ‘Margaret…What are you doing here?’

Margaret’s panic was returning now. ‘You phoned me!’ she almost shouted.

‘What?’ The old man looked at her as if she was mad.

‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God.’ Margaret was almost incoherent. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Li, is there?’

Dai was shaking his head. ‘Of course there isn’t. He’s asleep. Or, at least, he was. What in the name…?’

But Margaret pushed past him into the tiny apartment. ‘Where’s your phone?’

Lao Dai shut the door firmly behind them and led her through to a small, tidy sitting room. ‘I will not even ask,’ he said, and pointed to the phone on a low table beside the settee.

Margaret fumbled for the piece of paper with Dai’s address. Thank God Lyang had had the foresight to write her own telephone number on the back of it in case Margaret needed to call. Margaret dialled it now. The phone rang. Three, four, five times. ‘Come on, come on,’ Margaret urged through clenched teeth. ‘Answer, for God’s sake!’ But it just kept on ringing. By the time it reached the tenth ring, her insides had turned to jelly. How could she have been so stupid! She hung up and looked at Dai, as if he might provide her with the inspiration for what to do next. But he only looked perplexed and not a little scared.

Li Yan, she thought. He had her mobile. He’d know what she should do. She picked up the phone and dialled. But almost immediately the messaging service kicked in. Either the phone was switched off or there was no signal. She hung up the phone and knew she had to get back to Lyang’s apartment. Li Jon and Xinxin were there. She would never forgive herself if something had happened to them. And yet, why else would someone have lured her away with such an elaborate trick? She felt acid rising in her throat.

‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered jumping quickly to her feet. ‘Mr. Dai, you’ve got to call the police for me. Please. My baby’s life is in danger.’ And she pushed past old Dai and fled down the hall to the front door and out on to the landing.

‘Where?’ he called after her. ‘Where should they go?’

She stopped, thinking furiously. ‘The Music Apartments…I can’t remember what it’s called. There are giant piano lids on the roofs. It’s where Bill Hart lived.’

She almost fell twice on the stairs, before staggering past the stairgate and running out into a wall of freezing cold night air.

Outside, the streets were empty. Not a taxi in sight. She remembered Lyang’s words. It could be long enough before you pick one up in the street at this time of the morning.

She started running east along Pufang Lu crunching dried leaves underfoot, stumbling on uneven pavings. To the south, beyond the sports complex, the lights of the Feng Chung shopping centre still blazed into the night. Every step brought deeper despair, a sense of complete hopelessness. And helplessness. It would take her an hour, longer, at this rate, and what kind of state would she be in when she got there? The tears came, then, turning almost to ice as they streamed down her cheeks. There were lights burning in the police station on the corner of Fangxing Lu, and Margaret hesitated at the steps leading up between chrome pillars to its glass doors. Through them she could see a large board on the wall of the lobby, photographs of every officer working out of that office. And she knew that not one of them would speak English. What could she say to make them understand? Some tearstained mad foreign woman running in out of the night, jabbering incomprehensibly. They would probably lock her up.

The lights of a car raked across the front of the building, and she swivelled in time to see a taxi turning into Pufang Lu. She almost screamed at it to stop, running into the road waving her hands in the air. She saw the driver’s face caught in the light of a streetlamp. A moment of indecision in it as he saw the crazed yangguizi running across the street. But to Margaret’s relief he pulled up. Legs almost buckling under her, she yanked open the passenger door and dropped into the seat beside him. He looked at her, alarmed.

‘Oh, Jesus…,’ she whispered, realising that she had no idea how she was going to tell him where to take her. Lyang had not written down her own address. She tried to stop her brain from spiralling into further panic. Think, think, she told herself. Then, ‘Jinsong Bridge,’ she said, suddenly remembering the turn off the ring road. The driver stared at her, clearly not understanding. ‘Jin Song,’ she said, trying to make the tonal distinction between the syllables, as she had heard the Chinese doing. And what was the word for bridge? ‘Jin Song Qiao.’

The driver nodded. ‘Ha,’ he said, and to her relief slipped his taxi into gear. They sped off east and then swung north.

Margaret looked down and saw that her knuckles had turned white, her fingers intertwined in a knot of tension in her lap. She tried to relax, to think positive thoughts, to convince herself that she was blowing this out of all proportion. But she couldn’t. The fact that someone had telephoned her, pretending to be Dai, to get her out of the apartment, simply filled her with the most unthinkable dread. She remembered Li telling her that Lynn Pan had been lured to the Millennium Monument by someone on the telephone pretending to be him. That could only have been Cao. And tonight, it could have been no one else.

The journey back to the Music Home Apartments — frustratingly the name came back to her now — seemed interminable, the city floating past her in slow motion as they headed north on the East Third Ring Road. At last she saw the grand piano lids on top of the two towers. ‘There,’ she shouted at the driver, pointing through the windscreen. ‘I want to go there.’

He peered in the direction she was pointing and nodded, indicating first, and then turning off at the Jinsong Bridge into Jinsong Lu. He pulled up outside the main entrance to the complex and Margaret threw a bunch of notes at him. She slammed the door behind her and ran through the gates and into the glare of the entrance lobby with its arched gold ceiling. The desk where the security guard had been sitting when she left was vacant. The lurid magazine he had been reading was lying on top of it. The ashtray was full to overflowing, and beside it lay an open pack of cigarettes, half full. His lighter was lying on the floor. Margaret stooped to pick it up, and she knew that there was something terribly wrong.

Something like a moan came up from her throat, animal-like, involuntary, and she battered through the doors and out into the garden. She ran blindly through the foliage, crossing the artificial stream at the first bridge, and hammering across the pavings to the northwest tower. Past the spot where Bill Hart had fallen from twenty-three floors up. And all she could see were the photographs Pathologist Wang had shown her of the terrible mutilations inflicted on those poor prostitutes by the Beijing Ripper. By Deputy Police Commissioner Cao Xu. In the lobby, she repeatedly pressed the button for the elevator. Gasping for breath, she waited a lifetime for the numbers to descend to the ground floor. And to her complete and utter despair, it had to come all the way down from the twenty-third floor.

I

In the darkness, something caught a fragment of light, deflecting it toward the door. There was someone there, concealed among the shadows. The creak of a floorboard, and then hot breath in the cold air. A knife arced through a shaft of light that slanted in through the window. No time to avoid it. No room to escape. Li screamed and opened his eyes, breath tearing at his lungs, his face a mask of perspiration. His three travelling companions were staring at him resentfully, all awakened from their slumbers. The thundering in his ears passed with a hiss as the train emerged from a long tunnel back into the starlit night. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, embarrassed, and turned toward the window. The crescent moon lay on its back, like a smile in the sky, amused by his embarrassment.

His dream had left him shaken. He checked the time. It was just after 2.15. They should be back in Beijing in a quarter of an hour. He took out a handkerchief to wipe the coating of fine sweat from his forehead, and fumbled for the cellphone in his pocket. He got it to repeat dial the Harts’ apartment. It rang, and rang. And no one was answering. And still Li let it ring, panic starting to seize him now in its debilitating grip.

Margaret heard the phone ringing from the hallway as soon as she left the elevator. She hurried along it to the Harts’ apartment, tempering haste with caution now. To her horror, she found that the door was not shut. It lay six inches ajar, a wedge of feeble light from the dimly lit hallway falling into the darkness beyond. Cautiously, Margaret pushed the door open and felt for the light switch inside. She flicked it down, but nothing happened. And fear washed over her like iced water. Still the phone was ringing. She pushed the door wide and waited a moment for her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom before stepping in and running through to the living room to pick up the phone. But all she got was a dialling tone. Whoever was calling had finally given up. She quickly replaced the receiver and spun around. There was no one there. She could see clearly enough now in the ambient light of the city reflecting on walls and ceilings through the apartment’s generous windows.

‘Lyang?’ she called out. And her own voice seemed deafening in the silence that followed it. Then another voice, like a muffled cry, sounded from somewhere up the stairs, and Margaret found herself shaking, almost uncontrollably.

She started toward the stairs, listening carefully, and almost fell over something soft lying on the floor. She crouched down to pick it up and saw that it was one of Li Jon’s cuddly toys that she normally kept in the buggy. Her hand flew to her mouth to stop herself from crying out. She stood up and pressed it to her breast, and realised that she had no means of protecting herself or her child. She threw the soft toy on to the settee and moved quickly into the kitchen. On a work surface by the hob, there was a knife block where Lyang kept all her kitchen knives for food preparation. Margaret drew out the biggest of them. A wooden-handled implement with a blade about eight inches long. The weight of it in her hand gave her the tiniest sense of security. Her own preference for autopsy was a French chef’s knife. She knew how to use a blade like this and would not hesitate to do so if her baby had been harmed in any way.

She moved like a shadow back through the dining room into the hallway at the foot of the stairs and began climbing them very gingerly, one step at a time.

There was an odd smell on the top landing, like the sour stink of the autopsy room, and Margaret saw a trail of something dark on the floor leading to the master bedroom. She knelt down and touched it with the tips of her fingers. It was wet, slightly tacky. She raised her fingers to her nose and immediately knew the smell of blood. For a moment, fear almost robbed her of the strength to stand up straight. And shaking now like the leaves fibrillating among the branches of the autumn trees outside, she inched her way along the hall to the master bedroom in the dead silence of the apartment, trying to avoid stepping on the blood. When she got to the door she tentatively put out her hand and pushed it open wide.

There, on the bed, where Margaret had been so desperately seeking sleep just over an hour ago, was the outline of someone lying on their back, half-wrapped in what looked like black sheets. Margaret glanced back along the hall, then stepped into the bedroom, and almost fell as her foot skidded away from her on the blood pooling there. And in that moment she realised that the sheets were not black. They were soaked in blood. She steadied herself and took a step forward and nearly screamed. Lyang was lying naked in the middle of the bed, her shoulders flat, but the axis of her body inclined to the left side. Her head was turned on her left cheek, her left arm close to her body, the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across her abdomen. Her right arm rested on the mattress, bent at the elbow, her fingers clenched around a wad of blood-drenched sheet. Her legs were wide apart, and the whole surface of her abdomen and thighs had been removed, the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. Her breasts had been cut off, one of them carefully placed under her head along with the uterus and kidneys, the other by her right foot. Her liver was placed between her feet, the intestines on her right side, the spleen on her left.

Margaret knew without looking that the flaps of flesh removed from the abdomen and thighs had been placed on the bedside table. Doctor Thomas Bond’s description came flooding vividly back to her. Words she had read only two days earlier.

She wheeled away, trying to hold down the vomit rising in her throat. The man was completely insane. He had attempted a full replication of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and most horribly mutilated of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Almost like some kind of game, he had carved her up according to his mentor’s blueprint, placing pieces of her around the body, just as they had been found one hundred and fifteen years before. It was a feast of savagery such as Margaret had never seen. He must surely have slipped now beyond the realms of this world into some dark abyss where the light of human goodness had never shone. Where only evil resided in its purest, blackest form. And if he had been capable of this, what in the name of God had he done to the children?

II

They came up a long, steeply sloping ramp from the platforms below. Steam and smoke filled the air, along with the hissing of old steam-driven boilers and the voices of porters shouting up and down the quays, pushing metal-wheeled trolleys piled with great stacks of mail in canvas sacks.

The stream of passengers, newly alighted from the train, moved slowly, as if in a trance, subdued and still half asleep, about to be rudely awakened by the icy blasts that awaited them above. Li pushed through the bodies ahead of him, heedless of the curses that followed in his wake. When he got no reply from Lyang’s apartment, he had telephoned and got Wu out of his bed for the second night running.

Uniformed ticket collectors stood at the top of the ramp taking tickets from passengers as they filed out through the gates. Li thrust his ticket at the nearest of them and pushed out into the arrivals hall. Wu was waiting by the door, chewing mechanically, scanning the faces as they appeared at the top of the ramp. He raised an arm to catch Li’s eye and called out to him. Li hurried over. Wu looked terrible. ‘We’ve got cars on the way,’ he said. ‘I’ve left the motor running in mine.’

Li followed him down the steps into the bitter cold of the night, new arrivals streaming out behind them in search of buses and taxis. Wu’s Santana was idling in the middle of the concourse, a blue light flashing on the roof.

He called back over his shoulder. ‘You’d better be right about all this, Chief. Or I am in the deepest shit.’

For once in his life, Li hoped earnestly that he was entirely wrong.

It was with a sickening sense of anticipation that Margaret pushed open the door to the children’s room. The curtains had been drawn and it was darker in here. But there was still enough light for Margaret to see that the bed that Xinxin had been sharing with baby Ling was empty. And so was the cot.

She spun around and looked down the length of the hallway toward the Harts’ study at the far end. The door was pulled to. She had been wrong about the trail of blood leading into the master bedroom. It led from it, all the way to the study door. She started walking slowly toward it, the kitchen knife clutched tightly in her hand. Somehow her fear had gone, to be replaced by a slow burning determination that drove her on, like an automaton, toward the study. He was in there. She knew he was. And so was Li Jon. And Xinxin. With that monster. Chinese wall-hangings that Bill and Lyang had chosen together, stirred slightly in the breeze of her passing, their wooden weights clunking gently against the wall. She hesitated for only a second outside the door before pushing it open.

Her eyes fell immediately on two swaddled bundles propped among the cushions on the settee. No trace of blood, just the gentle sound of breathing. The deep, slow breath of sleep. The sound of life. Miraculously Ling and Li Jon were oblivious to the hell unfolding around them. Unharmed. In her relief, Margaret nearly dropped her knife. She took a step into the room, and a sound off to her right made her turn toward the window. A muffled cry escaped from somewhere behind the hand clamped firmly across Xinxin’s mouth. Margaret froze in horror.

Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu had wheeled one of the desk chairs up to the window and was sitting on it, his back to the city below him. Xinxin, still in her little pink nightie, was held firmly between his legs, one hand nearly covering her face, the other holding the edge of a long-bladed knife hard against her throat. Margaret could see the sheer terror in her eyes.

It was something else altogether that she saw in Cao’s eyes. There was light in them, but a light like darkness, like smouldering coals. Something not quite human. As a little girl, Margaret had heard Biblical tales of the Angel of Death. If such a thing existed, then she was staring it in the eye right now. He was smothered in sticky, dark blood. It was all over his hands and face, as if he had gorged himself on poor Lyang. Indulged himself in a banquet of slaughter.

‘Let her go!’ Margaret said. Her only fear now was for Xinxin.

Cao smiled. He moved his head from left to right and Margaret heard bones cracking in his neck. ‘How is poor old Mistah Li?’

‘Let her go,’ Margaret said again, and she took a step toward him. Xinxin squealed as the blade broke the skin on her neck, and Margaret stopped dead in her tracks.

‘Did you recognise her?’ Cao asked, relaxing again. Margaret frowned her confusion. ‘My Mary Jane,’ he added. And she knew that he was talking about Lyang. Except that somewhere in his twisted mind he saw her now only as Mary Jane Kelly. She nodded, and he smiled his pleasure. ‘I am good,’ he said. ‘As good as him.’

‘Let her go.’ Margaret nearly shouted.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We make exchange. Little girl for you. You can be my sixth. My Alice. I don’t wanna hurt the little girl. She still have her innocence. Only when she lose innocence do I take life.’

Margaret realised that the best she could hope for was to buy herself some time to try to figure out what to do. She had to get him talking, keep him talking. ‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘Li Yan is on his way. We know who you are.’

He smiled. ‘No. Perhaps you know who I am not. But you do not know who I am.’

‘Who are you then?’

‘I am the man who is going to kill you. And your precious Li Yan cannot stop me. He is a fool. He never would catch me, except for the stupid MERMER test. And that idiot Professor Pan. So sure she could seduce us all.’

‘How did you do it?’ Margaret asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Break into the academy. Steal all those computers. Break into her house.’

He shook his head, smiling smugly. ‘No, no, no. I do not do those things. I am policeman for thirty year. So maybe I know a few people. So maybe they owe me some favour. You know. Guanxi. No question ask.’ He pressed the blade harder into Xinxin’s throat, and Margaret saw a trickle of blood appear. Xinxin stood rigid and still, like a rabbit caught in the headlamps of a car. ‘It feels so nice,’ Cao said. ‘That fine edge of steel, when it cut through soft flesh.’

Margaret felt her panic returning. But she forced herself to speak with a cold calm that she did not feel. ‘If you harm a hair on that child’s head, I’ll kill you.’ And she tightened her grip on her knife.

‘You will not have to.’ The voice came from behind Margaret and to her right, so startling her that she nearly cried out. She turned to see the slight figure of an older woman standing in the doorway. She seemed bizarrely familiar, but Margaret could not place her. She had shortcut silver hair and wore a heavy black jacket buttoned up above grey cotton trousers gathered at the heel over flat, black shoes. Everything about her seemed small and sinewy. Her face, although remarkably unlined, was stretched too tightly over the skull beneath it.

‘Tie Ning!’

The sound of Cao’s voice made Margaret turn her head toward him again, and the shock in his face brought to her a realisation of who this woman was. His wife. The quiet lady who had looked so uncomfortable in her black evening dress at Li’s award ceremony. Her English was better than her husband’s and she spoke it for Margaret’s benefit rather than his.

‘I have been sitting in my car in Jinsong Lu ever since he came in. Trying to find the courage to follow him. Afraid of what I would find if I did. If only I had not been afraid for so many years, perhaps all those young women would still be alive.’

‘You followed me here?’ Cao said in Chinese. He sounded incredulous.

‘You think I don’t know?’ she said, still in English. ‘Ever since I covered up for you all those years ago, when you raped and murdered that poor girl, I have known I made a mistake. I wanted to believe you when you said it was an accident. I was infatuated. I would have done anything.’ She looked at Margaret. ‘She was a Red Guard, just like us. She was my friend. But I loved him. They would have shot him. So we ran. We hid in Henan Province, in the country. And I went to Taiyuan City to burn down the orphanage there, to steal him the identity of a boy who died.’ She took a deep breath, conjuring up some distant memory. ‘I knew him, Cao Xu. A gentle boy. We grew up there together.’ She turned her gaze back on her husband. ‘I pushed you, I know I pushed you. To more success. To greater power. And all the time I wanted to believe. That it had really been an accident. That it had happened only one time. That with time and distance you would become like the boy whose name you took.’ She sighed. ‘But each time a girl was murdered and they could not find her killer I wondered. I wondered if there was something inside you that I could never reach, never touch. Something dark and hidden, beyond my understanding. Beyond yours.’

‘They…they know,’ Cao almost whispered. ‘They know everything.’

She ignored him and took a step closer. ‘I never knew for sure until I found blood on your shirt when that first girl was murdered. But, even then, it wasn’t until the third killing that I went into your study and found the book and the cuttings taken from the personal ads. Prostitutes advertising their services. And then I knew.’ Margaret saw her lower lip tremble. ‘And still I did nothing.’ She turned to Margaret, tears running slowly down the parchment skin of her cheeks. ‘I am so ashamed. When I read the story in the paper of those terrible murders…I knew I was responsible. And that it had to stop.’

Cao listened to her with a mouth half opened in disbelief. And there was fear in his eyes. Margaret was certain that was what it was. He was afraid of her. She had always been stronger than him, driven him onwards and upwards, forced the agenda. But, in the end, his weakness had been greater than her strength.

Somewhere from the streets below, they heard the sound of police sirens rising into the night, the squealing of tyres.

‘Let her go,’ Tie Ning said suddenly, and Cao flinched. ‘Let. Her. Go!’

He would not meet her eye, but in sheepish acquiescence took his hand from Xinxin’s mouth and lowered the knife meekly from her neck. Xinxin emitted a long, mournful wail as she ran across the room into Margaret’s arms. Margaret held her tightly for just a few moments then forced her to break her grip. ‘Go!’ she said to her. ‘Get out of here. Now!’

Xinxin was sobbing hysterically. ‘You come, too, Magret. You come, too.’

Margaret took her roughly by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Go!’ she almost screamed at her. ‘Take the elevator and don’t stop until you are out of the building.’ Margaret pushed her toward the door and heard her feet slapping on the wooden floor as she ran wailing along the hallway and down the stairs. Margaret would not leave without the babies.

Tie Ning turned to her. ‘You go, too.’

Margaret shook her head. ‘We’ll wait here together until the police arrive.’

Tie Ning shook her head sadly. ‘There will be no police.’ She snatched the knife from Margaret’s hand and in five short strides had crossed the study to the window. Cao sat frozen in fear and disbelief as she swung it viciously across her body from left to right and his neck opened up in a wide, black smile. Blood spurted from severed arteries and gurgled in his open windpipe. He dropped his knife and his hands went to his neck, scrabbling at the wound as if somehow they could keep the blood in.

Tie Ning stood above him watching, as the life ebbed out of him in moments. Fear of her, fear of death, fear of whatever lay beyond, was clear in his eyes. He slithered from the chair on to the floor, and it ran away on its castors to bump into what had once been Lyang’s desk. His blood pooled around him on the polished floor.

She turned, her back to the window, silhouetted against floor-to-ceiling glass giving on to the magnificent panorama of Beijing beyond. And still more sirens sounded in the night. Margaret saw blood running along the blade of the knife as Tie Ning raised it from her side. ‘I am sorry,’ she said.

III

There were several police cars in the street out front, officers streaming out and into the main lobby. Wu pulled the wheel of his car sharp left and they cut through a side street at the west end of the complex to turn into the street at the back of the towers, opposite a double-storey red and gold restaurant, deserted now and shrouded in darkness. There were three other police vehicles here already. The rear exit from the northwest tower provided the most direct access.

As Wu pulled up at the kerb, several officers gathering on the sidewalk looked up suddenly, and Li heard one of them swearing. He peered up through the passenger window in time to see what looked like a giant bird swooping down on them from above. He barely had time to register the fact that it was not a bird, but a human being, arms and legs extended, a coat opened out like the wings of an eagle, before it smashed on to the hood of the Santana. The car lurched sickeningly, and blood immediately spattered across the wind-screen, obscuring their view. As he jumped out of the passenger side, Li could hear Wu cursing in shock and disbelief. One of the officers shouted, ‘It’s a woman!’ And Li’s heart seemed to freeze in his chest. He almost couldn’t look. Tiny fragments of glass showered on them like rain.

As he turned, he saw silver hair and wide-open staring eyes. Wu was at the other side of the car. ‘Shit, Chief,’ he said. ‘It’s Cao Xu’s wife.’

A police radio was crackling in the cold night air. One of the officers said, ‘They found the security guard. Someone cut his throat.’

Li vaulted up the steps to the exit door from the northwest tower and kicked it until the glass shattered and the door burst inwards. He skidded across the lobby through the broken glass as the doors of the elevator parted to reveal a small child standing there in the light. It took him a moment to realise it was Xinxin. She ran to him, howling, and he swung her up in his arms, holding her so tightly she almost couldn’t breath.

‘Where’s Margaret?’ he said.

‘She’s still upstairs.’ She fought to draw breath against the sobs that were stealing it from her. ‘Uncle Yan, a man tried to cut my throat…’

Li turned to the officers running in behind him. ‘Someone get her a medic, fast.’ He thrust her into the arms of a young uniformed policeman and slipped into the lift just before the doors slid shut. He heard her call his name as he punched button number twenty-three, and the lift started its high speed ascent.

Curious residents were up and about now, coming out of their apartments into the hallway on floor twenty-three, wrapped in dressing gowns, scratching their heads. Li shouted at them to get out of the way and ran the length of the hall to the open door of the Harts’ apartment. ‘Margaret!’ He screamed her name into the darkness, and to his intense relief he heard her voice call back from somewhere upstairs.

He strode up the stairway into the top hall and saw the door of the study lying open. Margaret was sitting on the settee cradling the still sleeping Li Jon in her arms. ‘Thank God,’ he whispered, offering thanks to whatever deity it was that had watched over her, even if it was not one he believed in.

As he came into the room, she laid the baby carefully back among the cushions and let him take her in his arms, enveloping her, absorbing her, so that they were almost one. He glanced across the room and saw Cao lying in his own blood, twisted, half-propped against the remains of the window, throat and mouth gaping. The freezing November night blew in through the jagged shards of glass that framed the view to the north. ‘What happened?’ he said.

‘Lyang’s dead.’ He shut his eyes in despair. ‘Cao’s wife killed him, then she went through the window.’ Margaret looked up at him. ‘She was the one who burned down the orphanage. She was the one who knew the real Cao Xu. She was one of the orphans.’

He kissed her forehead. ‘It’s over, Margaret,’ he said. ‘It’s all over.’

She let him press her head gently into his chest. ‘Li Yan,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. ‘Who was he? Who was he really?’

Li looked over at the bloody remains of the deputy police commissioner. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Like Jack the Ripper, we probably never will.’ He shook his head. ‘Chances are we might only ever know him by the name he gave himself. The Beijing Ripper.’