Chinese Whispers

Chapter Four
I

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

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

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

‘Yes, Chief.’

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

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

‘Sure, Chief.’

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

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

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

‘Crystal, Chief,’ Qian said.

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

‘What is it, Chief?’ Wu asked.

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

‘What is it?’

‘A letter from our killer.’

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

Dear Chief,

I am downward on whores and I will not stop the tear of them until I am caught. Good work the last was. I gave to the lady no time for squealing. I like my work and want to start again. You will hear more of me with my small funny plays. I saved a part of the red substance kept in a bottle from the last work to write with, but it disappeared thick as the adhesive and I cannot employ it. Red ink is good enough, I hope ha ha. Next work that I do I will cut off the ears of the lady to send to the senior police officers just for fun. My knife is so nice and sharp, I want to get to work immediately if I get a chance. Good luck.

Sincerely yours,

The Beijing Ripper

(Don’t mind me giving my trade name.)

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Aw Chief …’

Qian grinned. ‘You got it, Chief.’

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

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

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