Chinese Whispers

Chapter Five
I

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and Changan Avenue as far as you could see east and west, was bathed in white and blue and green and pink light. The red tail lights of cars and buses and taxis shimmered off into the distance in long lines of sluggish traffic. Qian wound down the window and clamped a blue-flashing magnetic light on the roof of the Jeep, then dropped down a gear and accelerated across six lanes of vehicles to head west.

‘Where are you going?’ Li swivelled in surprise in the passenger seat.

‘She was found at the Millennium Monument, Chief.’ Qian glanced across at him. Wu and Detective Sang sat mute in the back seat.

Li felt something close to relief. ‘It can’t have been the Ripper, then.’ Tagging the Beijing killer as the ‘Ripper’ had been completely unconscious.

‘Why?’

‘Because all the other murders have been in the same area of Jianguomen. Just like Jack the Ripper killed all his victims in the same square mile of London.’ He knew it hadn’t felt right. ‘And today’s Monday. He’s only ever killed at the weekend. And, anyway, his next victim’s not due for another six weeks.’

Wu leaned forward and said, ‘Everything else fits, though, Chief. The strangulation, the cutting of the throat …’ He chewed furiously on his gum. ‘And I was really looking forward to that banquet, too.’

They turned off Fuxing Avenue after Sanlihi Road, heading north and then west again, drifting past the floodlit Ministry of Defence building in its restricted military zone, and next to it the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, the centrepiece of which rose in three tiers to a spire topped by a star in a circle. To their right, Yuyuantan Park lay brooding in darkness, west of the canal where only hours earlier Li and Lao Dai had discussed the murders in the last light of the day. They were less than a mile from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A Dali-esque melting clock above the gate to the Millennium Park told them that it was nearly nine-thirty. Towering above it, the Millennium monument was a huge rotating stone sundial at the top of a broad sweep of steps leading to a circular terrace. The dial was casting its shadows in several conflicting directions, confused by the floodlights now illuminating the crime scene at its base. Its arm was pointing due south, down the length of Yangfangdian Lu to the floodlit spectre of the Beijing West Railway station some two kilometres away. The lights of the multi-storey blocks which lined the avenue, reflected on the two-hundred-and-seventy-metre-long waterway, beneath which five thousand years of Chinese history was carved in bronze plates. It was an impressive vista. And for some poor girl, Li reflected as he pushed through the gate, her last sight on earth. Police and forensics vehicles were pulled into the kerbside at odd angles, and a group of uniformed officers stood stamping and smoking on the causeway just inside the gate. This was not an area dense in housing or nightlife, so only a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered. The uniforms saluted as Li and the other detectives from Section One arrived. There was a young, grey-uniformed security guard amongst them. Beneath a black-peaked cap, he had a fresh face reddened by the icy wind. He wore leather boots and a long grey greatcoat, its black collar pulled up around his cheeks, a red band with yellow characters wound around his left arm. Li stopped and asked him, ‘When does this place normally get locked up?’

‘By six o’clock, Chief,’ the security guard said. ‘Or whenever it gets dark. Whichever comes first. We always clear people out when the light starts to go.’ He shuffled his feet and slapped leather-clad gloves together to keep his hands warm.

‘What time did you close the gates tonight?’

‘It was about half past five.’

‘Did you check to see if there was anyone still inside?’

‘No, Chief. People are always in a big hurry to get out when we start closing up. No one would want to get locked in.’

Li looked at the railing. It was only about a metre high. Easy enough for anyone to get in or out, whether the gate was locked or not. He nodded. ‘Where’s the body?’

One of the uniforms pointed. ‘Right up the top, Chief, behind the arm of the dial.’

‘How on earth did anyone find it up there after the place was closed up?’

‘It was me, Chief.’ It was the young security guard again. His lips were almost blue with the cold. ‘We do shifts here. Check round the perimeter once every hour or so.’

‘Why?’ Li couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to guard an empty park.

‘There’s a lot of valuable stuff in the museum, Chief.’

‘Okay. Go on.’

‘Well, I checked back here about eight o’clock this evening. That’s when I saw the blood.’ He waved his hand towards where a section of the concourse and the railing had been taped off. Li walked towards it and the security guard followed, stamping his feet. ‘I wasn’t sure what it was at first. I thought maybe it was paint. I don’t know, some kind of vandalism. But I quickly figured out it was blood.’ He fumbled with his gloves to take out and light a cigarette. As an afterthought, he offered one to Li. Li shook his head.

A trail of blood led from the foot of the steps to the railing, where it was smeared all over the chrome. Someone covered in quite a lot of it had clearly clambered over the railing and on to the sidewalk. Li followed the trail with his eyes, but it stopped at the side of the road after four or five metres. Perhaps the killer had got into a car parked there. After all, he could hardly have wandered the streets covered in blood without attracting some attention.

Li said, ‘You say you check the perimeter every hour. So you didn’t see any blood here at seven?’

There was a moment’s hesitation before the security guard said, ‘No, Chief.’

Li fixed him with a steady gaze. ‘I don’t want any bullshit, son. It’s important for establishing time of death.’ He paused. ‘You didn’t check the perimeter at seven, did you?’

Li could almost see the blood draining from the boy’s face.

‘No, Chief.’ He shrugged, trying to dismiss his confession as if it were nothing. ‘When it’s cold like this … well, sometimes it’s more than an hour.’

Li said, ‘I don’t care why, I just want the facts. You weren’t here between locking up at five-thirty and checking the perimeter at eight, is that right.’

The boy nodded and couldn’t meet Li’s eye. ‘Yes, Chief.’

So the girl had been killed sometime in that two-and-a-half-hour window. ‘And you followed the blood up the steps?’

The guard nodded, anxious to make up for his shortcomings. ‘Yes, Chief. There’s a lot more of it up there. It led me right to her. She’s lying at the base of the arm, behind it, about three steps down from the top.’

‘You didn’t touch her?’

‘I did not.’ The boy seemed to shudder at the thought. ‘You could see her throat had been cut. There was a big pool of blood under her head. I could see in the beam of my flashlight that it was already drying. There’s no way she was still alive.’

Li flicked his head at Wu. ‘Get a statement off him. Anything he can remember out of the ordinary before he locked up. Anyone unusual. Just anyone he can remember at all.’ He nodded to Qian and Sang and they started the long climb up the steps. Off to their left, lights blazed in the windows of the China Central TV Media Centre, and Li thought that it probably wouldn’t be long before they woke up to the fact that there was a murder on their doorstep. If this had been the United States, he knew, the street would already be jammed with TV trucks and satellite dishes and newsmen clamouring for information. He wondered how long it would be before China went that way, too. It was not a prospect he relished, and he had to wonder at the apparently limitless appetite of the media and the public for the gory details of man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Perhaps if they had witnessed some of what he had seen, that appetite might be somewhat diminished.

About two-thirds of the way up, the entrance to the museum was railed off in darkness, and by the time they reached the circle of the dial, immediately below the long, tapering arm that reached into the night sky, all three detectives were puffing for air. What breath they had left was whipped from their mouths by the wind that blew fiercely up here, bitter and cutting. Flights of steps rising past either side of the circle led right to the top, where a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep of chrome railing gave on to an extraordinary view of the city skyline to the north, all the way to the Mountain of Heavenly Longevity and the Yanshan and Taihang mountain ranges. The same TV tower he had looked at catching the sun that afternoon from the windows of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was now a silver-lit arrow against the black of the sky.

A cluster of figures was gathered around the base of the sundial arm. Lights on stands rattled and shook in the ferocity of the wind. The tape which marked off the trail of blood all the way up from the causeway below was in danger of blowing away. Frail stands shifted and scraped across the concrete. Forensics men in tyvek suits, like ghosts, combed the steps for evidence traces. A small group of men crouched around the body. As Li and the others approached, Elvis stood up, his quiff flying about his head, ruined by the wind. They had to shout to make themselves heard above the noise of it.

‘Who is she?’ Li shouted.

‘Don’t know, Chief. We haven’t moved the body yet. And there doesn’t seem to be a purse. The pathologist’s still examining her.’ His scarf flapped into his mouth and he had to pull it free. ‘But it’s the same MO. Strangled, but not dead when he cut the throat. Which is why there’s so much blood. Left to right, same as always.’

Wang stood up behind Elvis and turned to see Li standing there. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The hero’s return. I thought you were busy banqueting tonight.’

‘I lost my appetite.’

‘I’m not surprised. Though this one’s not quite as messy.’

‘What makes you think it’s the same killer?’

‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt, Chief. I read the note you got this afternoon.’ He jerked his head over his shoulder towards the body lying behind him. ‘He’s cut off her ears. Just like he said he would.’

Li was stunned. ‘You’re kidding.’

Wang shrugged. ‘That’s all, though. Apart from cutting her throat, he’s left the rest of her intact. One thing different — he made a bit of a mess of it this time. Severed both carotids and got blood all over himself. You’d better take a look.’

He moved aside and Li took a step down into the light to look at the body. She was wearing a long, dark coat buttoned up to above the breast. There were calfskin gloves on her hands which lay open at her sides. Her legs were twisted sideways beneath the coat, one lying across the other, and Li could see the bottom of her dark pinstriped trousers above chunky-heeled shoes. The gash in her neck was semicircular and very deep, like a wide, dark smile. Her head was lying at an angle, to the left side, but because the hair was cut so short, the gash on the right side of her head where her ear had been was only too apparent. Li was in shock, and it was several moments before he was able to consciously reason why. He put out a hand and found Qian’s arm to steady himself.

‘Chief, are you okay?’ The concern in his deputy’s voice was clear, even although he was having to shout.

She had been so full of life, and charm and charisma. A smile that would have broken most men’s hearts. Doe-eyes that looked so deeply into yours you felt almost naked.

‘He’s broken the pattern in more ways than one,’ Li said, but too quietly for Qian to hear.

‘What’s that?’

Li turned towards him. ‘She’s no prostitute, Qian.’

Qian was amazed. ‘You know her?’

Li nodded. ‘I met her this afternoon. She’s a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.’

He looked back at her fine features spattered with blood. Open eyes staring into oblivion, lips slightly parted, the delicate line of her jaw tracing a shadow to the bloody hole in the side of her head. Short hair gelled into spikes, and he remembered with a dreadful sense of guilt that last look she had given him. What had seemed, unaccountably, like an appeal for help. To which he had failed to respond.

He turned away, filled with confusion and guilt. Lynn Pan lay dead beneath the Millennium Monument, and he knew that somehow it was his fault.

‘Hey, Chief …’ It was one of the forensic ghosts. He was holding up a clear plastic evidence bag, and had to grab the bottom end of it to stop it flapping about in the wind. ‘It’s him, okay.’ And Li saw, in the bag, the unsmoked end of a brown Russian cheroot.

Li looked at the footprints in the blood, and the trail of it leading away down the steps. The force of it spurting from the severed arteries must have taken the killer by surprise. Maybe he thought she was already dead. He must have been covered in the stuff. It looked, too, as if he had lost his footing, stumbling through the blood pooling around the head. Perhaps removing the ears had been more difficult than he had anticipated. And yet it was all so uncharacteristic of the cold, calculated butchery practised upon the other victims. Then he had worked to a plan and a pattern, paying homage to his nineteenth-century English hero.

This just didn’t fit. The victim was not a prostitute, nor did she correspond to any of the Ripper murders. She had been killed on the other side of town. It was a weekday. The execution had been clumsy, almost slapdash. And yet, there was the note. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off. And the telltale Russian cheroot.

Li gazed down on the dead girl’s face and ached for her. He remembered her touch, her fingers on his scalp as she adjusted the headset for the MERMER test, her small breasts pressing against her blouse, just inches from his face. The smell of her, sweet and musky. And here she lay, icy cold, all animation gone forever, rigor mortis already setting in.

He couldn’t bear it any longer and turned away, climbing the three steps to the chrome rail, the city spreading out below him, thirteen million people going about their lives, unaware that one of the herd lay dead at the foot of this monument to the new millennium. Unaware that some monster lived among them, to all intents and purposes one of them. And how would they know him? For he had no horns, no forked tail. He would look just like them. Perhaps he had a family. A wife, children. And Li remembered thinking that someone knew who he was. That you could not return home after an orgy of killing without taking some of the blood of it with you. Someone knew who that monster was. Someone had looked into his eyes and been privy to their own private view of hell.

The crescent moon had risen higher in the sky now, and in what little light it cast, Li could see, on the distant horizon, the faint shadow of the mountains across whose contours the Great Wall followed its tortuous route. It might once have kept the marauding hordes from the north at bay, but in this twenty-first century, it had failed to keep out the evil that stalked their streets at night. The wind battered his face, stinging cold and taking his breath away, and it was to the wind he attributed the tears that filled his eyes. He pushed himself away from the rail, wiping his face with the back of his hand and found his deputy standing nearby, watching him. ‘I need a drink, Qian,’ he said. And they started off down the steps together. Five thousand years of history carved in bronze stretched away below them. How many lives had come and gone in all that time? What did one more, or less, matter?

But it did.

* * *

They left Wu and Sang and Elvis at the scene to take statements and put the investigation in motion. Qian drove Li to Sanlitun Lu, more commonly known as Bar Street. It was where Guo Huan’s mother had believed her daughter was working as a barmaid. A fifteen-foot plastic beer tankard overflowing with foam stood on the corner of Sanlitun and Gongren Tiyuchang Dong Lu. A bored-looking girl sat behind a window in it selling time on a public phone. They turned north, and the street ahead was ablaze with neon and fairylights. Touts in suits wandered the pavements trying to persuade passers-by that the bar which paid their wages was the best. Qian parked by the kerbside railing about halfway up, and they crossed the road to the Lan Kwai Fang Bar at number sixty-six. Signs in the window advertised Budweiser, and Carlsberg, Dedicated to the Art of Making Beer. Gnarled trees grew out of the sidewalk alongside picture windows which gave on to a dark interior of tables draped with red cloth. Many of the bars and restaurants in Bar Street were haunted by staff from the embassies at the top end of the street. A European crowd. French, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Spanish. But the Lan Kwai Fang was predominantly Chinese.

Most of the tables were occupied, and there was a babble of voices and music playing when Li and Qian walked in. But almost immediately animated conversations dried up and heads turned in their direction. The music played to silence, music that didn’t stand up to such scrutiny. A cheap pop singer from Taiwan. Li had forgotten that he and Qian were both still in their dress uniforms, long coats hanging open to reveal flashes of silver on black. The two men took off their caps, as if that would somehow make them less conspicuous, and slipped on to high stools at the bar. The barman wore dark slacks with sharp creases and a white shirt open at the neck, sleeves neatly folded halfway up his forearms. His hair was beautifully cut and gelled back from his face. He looked beyond them as several tables emptied, and half a dozen clients slipped out into the night. Then he refocused on the newcomers and smiled nervously.

‘Two beers,’ Li said.

‘You’re joking, right?’ The barman seemed perplexed, and his smile continued to flutter about his lips like a butterfly on a summer’s day.

Li glared at him. ‘Do you see me laughing?’

The barman shrugged. ‘Cops don’t drink in places like this.’

‘Where do they drink?’ Qian asked.

‘I don’t know. Just not here.’ He leaned confidentially across the bar towards them. ‘Look, I have no problem serving you guys. It’s just … you know, you’re bad for business.’ He nodded towards another couple heading out the door.

Li was running out of patience. ‘Sonny, if there are not two beers on the bar within the next thirty seconds you’ll find out just how bad for business we could really be.’

‘Coming right up, boss,’ the barman said, as if the issue had never been in doubt.

Li and Qian took their beers to a recently vacated table by the window, to the barman’s further chagrin. Two cops sitting in the window would guarantee no further custom until they left. But he held his peace.

The two detectives drank in silence for some time. Li took a long first pull at his beer, till he felt the alcohol hit his bloodstream, then he nursed his glass on the table in front of him, lost in gloomy thoughts.

‘Such a fucking waste!’ he said eventually and Qian looked at him carefully.

‘She made an impression on you, then, Chief?’

‘She was beautiful, Qian. I don’t just mean physically. She had something about her. Something inside. It just radiated from her.’ He found Qian looking at him quizzically and he smiled wryly. ‘Sure, if I hadn’t already found the woman I want to spend my life with, I could have fallen for her. Big time.’ And then he saw her blood-splashed profile and the wound where her ear had been removed, and frustration and anger rose in him like bile. You have an enemy, Li Yan, Lao Dai had told him, and Li knew that he was right. That somehow, for some reason, all this was about him. He thumped his fist on the table and both their beers jumped. Heads turned towards them. ‘I’m going to put a stop to it, Qian. I’m not going to let him do this again.’

Qian nodded reassuringly. ‘We’ll get him, Chief.’

‘What I can’t figure,’ Li said, ‘is how the hell he got her to go up there in the first place. In the dark, after it was closed. I mean, he could never have forced her to do it.’

Qian said, ‘Suppose he arranged to meet her there. Suppose she went there before it closed, and then hid up at the top when the lights went out and the guards locked up. He could easily have climbed over the railing when they’d gone.’

‘But why? Why would she meet someone in those circumstances?’

Qian shrugged. ‘Fear, maybe.’

‘Of what? Not of him. She wouldn’t have gone there if she’d thought there was anything to fear from him.’ But he couldn’t rid himself of that look in her eyes the last time he had seen her. He had not understood, then, what it really was. But now he wondered if perhaps she had been afraid, and he had failed to recognise it. But afraid of what?

Qian said, ‘He took an enormous risk killing her in the early evening rather than the early hours of the morning. I know it wasn’t exactly in full view, but there were security people around. And a goddamned TV station across the road!’ He took another mouthful of beer. ‘And, of course, it’s something else he did differently this time. I mean, what’s weird is why he would set out to copy Jack the Ripper and then not.’

Li said, ‘Chinese cops have the idea that serial killers never change their MO, probably because we don’t get that many here.’ He shook his head. ‘But it’s a mistake. When I was in the States I read up on some of the most famous serial killers from around the world, and a lot of them changed lots of things from murder to murder. From gun to knife, from knife to rope, from rope to hammer. From men to women, or the other way round. And for all sorts of reasons. Some quite deliberately to mislead the police, others just on a whim. Some because it was their MO to change their MO. A serial killer can’t be relied on to stick to the script.’ And he realised with a shock, that’s exactly what he’d been doing — relying on the Beijing Ripper to be faithful to the original. But it wasn’t a script. It was history. And you can’t rewrite history. So why had the killer done just that?

His cellphone began playing Beethoven in his pocket. He took it out and flipped it open. ‘Wei?’

‘It’s me, I’m home. How did it go?’ Margaret sounded weary.

‘Not good,’ Li said. ‘He’s broken his pattern.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You remember at lunch today, Bill Hart talked about Lynn Pan, the Chinese-American who’s running the MERMER program?’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s who the victim was.’

There was a moment’s silent incredulity at the other end of the line, then, ‘Jesus Christ,’ Margaret whispered. ‘You met her this afternoon.’

‘Yeah.’ Li felt a fleeting pang of guilt at the feelings Pan had aroused in him.

‘That must have been tough.’

‘It was.’

There was a long silence, and then, ‘Is that music I hear?’

‘I’m in a bar with Qian, up in Sanlitun.’

‘Is there a connection?’

‘No, we’re having a drink.’

Another silence. Then, ‘I had a great time tonight, too,’ she said with a tone. ‘With your friends from the Ministry. They spoke Chinese all night and left me to my own devices, smiling like an idiot every time one of them looked at me. I’ve got cramp in my cheek muscles.’ In the background Li heard the baby start to cry. Margaret said, ‘When will you be home?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’ And she hung up.

Li felt rebuked, and resented it. He flipped the phone shut and stuffed it in his pocket. He finished his beer and stood up. ‘We’d better go.’

And the barman breathed a sigh of relief as the two cops slipped out into the street. The cold air brought the blood rushing immediately to their cheeks and burned their lungs. Qian said, ‘I didn’t know she was American.’

It took Li a moment to realise what he meant. ‘Your English has improved,’ he said.

Qian shrugged. ‘I’ve been taking lessons.’

Li was taken aback and looked at his number two in surprise. ‘Why?’

‘Seems like English is the language you need to get on these days. The language of the future.’

Li blew a puff of air through his lips. ‘Who knows what we’ll all be speaking in a hundred years.’

‘You and I will be speaking Chinese with our ancestors.’

‘You know what I mean.’ Li managed a tired smile. ‘And you never can tell. If the economy continues growing at the present rate maybe the rest of the world will be speaking Chinese by then.’

They dashed across the road between cars, and when they got into the Jeep Li said, ‘So, anyway, what difference does it make?’ Qian looked at him quizzically. ‘Her being American.’

Qian started the engine. ‘There’s no way we’ll be able to keep it out of the papers, Chief.’