Chinese Whispers

III

The sun was rising now above the tops of all the new apartment blocks along Dongzhimen, fingers of cold yellow light extending themselves west along the grid. The icy wind carried the breath of winter from the frozen northern plains, laden with the promise of subzero temperatures in the weeks ahead.

Li watched Mei Yuan’s cold red fingers as they worked nimbly about the hotplate to produce his jian bing. Her face, too, was red with the cold, skin dried by the wind. Her eyes watered constantly, as if weeping for the lost summer, or for her lost life. She caught him watching her, and she smiled. Her face lit up, radiant in the morning light, no trace in it of the pain she had endured. She wore her fate with dignity, and always came out smiling.

Li, on the other hand, was sunk in gloom. As if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Cao’s words had stung him, and he wondered if others saw him as Cao did. Cavalier, glory-seeking, too much one of the boys for his subordinates to fully respect him. There were times he took shortcuts, yes, but he never neglected that mind-numbing, painfully slow process of putting a case together piece by piece by piece. He knew the importance of the detail. His uncle had dinned that into him often enough. But sometimes you could get bogged down in it. Sometimes there was so much detail you couldn’t see the bigger picture. Sometimes you just had to trust your instincts and make that leap of faith.

‘A fen for them,’ Mei Yuan said.

‘What?’

‘Your thoughts.’

‘They’re not even worth a fen, Mei Yuan.’

She slipped his jian bing into brown paper and handed it to him. ‘I read about the murders in the paper this morning.’

‘You and the rest of Beijing,’ Li muttered gloomily.

Mei Yuan looked at him perceptively. ‘Should we not?’

‘No,’ Li said emphatically. ‘You should not. The story was leaked, and the paper should have known better than to print it.’

‘Who leaked it?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Then why don’t you ask the editor of the paper.’

‘Oh, I think he’ll be facing that question, and many more, from people much higher up than me, Mei Yuan.’

She nodded mutely. ‘They are terrible killings, Li Yan. Do you not think, perhaps, that people have a right to know?’

‘Why?’ Li asked simply, and he took a bite of his jian bing. ‘Knowing will not protect them, because they do not know who he is. But it won’t stop people being afraid, panicking even. And we will be inundated with cranks claiming to be the Ripper, and with calls from people claiming they know who he is. And we will spend hours and days, maybe weeks, sifting through cranks and crap, wasting valuable time going up blind alleys while the killer remains free to kill again. Our efforts to catch him will be hopelessly diluted.’

‘Yes,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘I can see how that could be.’ There was sympathy in her eyes when she smiled at him. ‘I do not envy you, Li Yan. Trying to catch this man. First you must try to work out who he is. Like a riddle. Only, if you don’t come up with the answer someone will die.’

Li said, ‘And you know how bad I am at solving riddles.’

‘Maybe because there is no life at stake,’ she said. ‘For me it is easy, because it is a game. But to catch a killer is not a game. If you fail, he will kill again. For me, the very fear of failure, and the consequences of that, would numb my mind.’

‘Join the club,’ Li said.

‘But you will catch him.’

‘I have to.’ And just focusing on that thought freed Li’s mind from the clutter which had filled it that morning. What did it matter who had leaked the story? It was another issue, something to be settled another day. A diversion. And he could not afford be diverted. The genie was out of the bottle. There was no way to put it back in. Perhaps, he thought, Mei Yuan was right. He had trouble solving her riddles because it did not matter whether he solved them or not. But the thought that someone might die if he did not catch a killer concentrated his mind in an entirely different way.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘you will have had much time to consider my last riddle.’

Li smiled ruefully. ‘Mei Yuan, I can’t even remember it in detail. Two guys planting rice, wasn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘If you can’t remember in detail there is no point in even thinking about it. I told you, the devil is in the detail.’

There it was again. Detail. The answer to everything was always in the detail. ‘I just can’t give it the time right now, Mei Yuan. Not with this killer still out there.’

‘Sometimes, Li Yan, it is good therapy to take your mind off one problem to work on another. Then when you return to the original it might not seem quite so intractable.’

Li finished his jian bing and grinned. Mei Yuan was usually right about most things. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Give me it again.’

‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field in Hunan, a long way from their village,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to go from one end of the paddy to the other …’ She went through the whole riddle once more. The fact that the two men had just finished lunch, sharing their food and drink, agreeing to meet and share again when they each finished planting their remaining ten rows. Li listened carefully, and it started coming back to him. When the man with the food had finished his work he couldn’t see his friend anywhere, and thinking he had gone back to the village, had eaten the food himself.

‘So he wakes up the next morning,’ Li cut in, ‘and the other guy’s shaking him and accusing him of being greedy, leaving him there on his own to go off and eat the food by himself.’

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and left him. The man with the drink insists he was there all the time! They are both telling the truth.’

Li thought about it. They have just finished lunch and have another ten rows to plant. They are both deaf mutes and can only communicate by sign language. They both claim to still be there when they finish their work, but for some reason they don’t see one another. ‘They’re not blind?’ he said.

‘If they were blind, how could they communicate by sign language?’

‘Of course.’ Li felt foolish. But they couldn’t hear or speak to each other. If they were both there at the end of the day why didn’t they see each other? Why did the man with the food think his friend had already gone? And then it dawned on him, and he felt even more foolish. ‘Oh, Mei Yuan, that’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’

‘They’d just had lunch, so it must have been about midday. They still had ten rows each to plant. But it took them an hour to get from one end of the paddy to the other, then it was ten o’clock at night when they finished. And it was dark. That’s why they couldn’t see each other.’

Mei Yuan grinned. ‘Simple, really. And, of course, they couldn’t call out because they were deaf mutes.’

‘But what if there was a full moon that night?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s the rainy season, Li Yan. The sky is cloudy.’

He gave her a look. ‘You always have an answer.’

‘Because there always is one.’

A shadow fell across his face as he remembered just how few answers he’d come up with on the Ripper murders. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s always an answer. But we don’t always know what it is.’

* * *

Qian spotted Li passing the open door to the detectives’ room and hurried into the corridor after him. He caught up with him in Li’s office. Li was surveying the shambles that was his desk. The night before he had lifted most of the piles of paper off it to stack against the wall below the window. This morning they had been replaced by fresh ones.

‘Chief.’

He turned at the sound of Qian’s voice. ‘Unless it’s important, Qian, I don’t have time. I’ve got to get across town for the autopsy.’ He flicked his head towards the wall. ‘Is Wu next door?’

‘Chief, the autopsy’s been postponed.’

Which stopped Li in his tracks. ‘Postponed by whom?’

‘An order from headquarters. Just came in a few minutes ago.’

Li scowled. ‘What in the name of the sky do they think they are playing at?’

Qian seemed almost afraid to tell him. ‘Lynn Pan was an American citizen.’

‘So?’

‘So the American Embassy have requested that one of their people carry out the autopsy. Or at least assist on it.’

‘Well, the answer’s no,’ Li snapped. ‘This is an ongoing murder inquiry. I’m not going to have some goddamned American pathologist who knows nothing of the background to the other murders coming in and fucking up our corpse.’

Qian braced himself. ‘I don’t know that it matters much what we think, Chief. Apparently the Ministry has already agreed. It’s been authorised at the highest level, and the autopsy’s been postponed till eleven.’

‘The hell it has!’ Li snatched the phone and started punching in numbers.

‘Chief…’ There was something in Qian’s tone that cut through Li’s anger.

‘What is it, Qian?’

‘There have been other developments. Putting off the autopsy for a couple of hours might not be such a bad idea.’

Li slowly replaced the receiver. ‘Tell me.’

‘There was a break-in last night at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lynn Pan’s office was ransacked.’