Chinese Whispers

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

‘Be my guest,’ Li said.

‘Wow! Invited by the recipient.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Alright.’

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

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

‘Eyes on the screen please.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was intrigued. ‘So, tell me.’

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

‘What about the other thirty-six?’

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, it works.’

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

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

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

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

Li had to agree. ‘Not at all.’

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

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

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

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

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