Chinese Whispers

IV

The head of security met them in the lobby. He was agitated, an ex-cop who saw the break-in on his turf as a potential one-way ticket to unemployment. He was a tall man, nearly Li’s height, and wore a grey uniform with clusters of stars and stripes that meant nothing at all. They just looked impressive. It was still early, and staff and students were only now beginning to show up for the day. He steered Li and Wu along a corridor to his office on the ground floor. ‘Look guys,’ he said, appealing to the old boys’ network, ‘I’d really appreciate it if we can keep this low profile.’

‘A woman has been murdered,’ Li said sharply. ‘It’s hard to lower a profile like that. What happened here?’

The security man shrugged his eyebrows. ‘That’s just it. I’ve no idea. None of the alarms was tripped. I can’t find signs of forced entry anywhere.’

Wu was chewing manically, and swinging the left-hand leg of his shades around the little finger of his right hand. ‘So how do you know there’s been a break-in?’

‘Because somebody jemmied their way into Lynn Pan’s offices and cleaned out the lot. Computers, files, just about everything that wasn’t nailed down. A real pro job.’

‘Not an inside one?’ Li said.

The security man pulled a face. ‘I don’t think so. If they had keys to turn off alarms and get in and out the building, wouldn’t they have had keys for her offices, too?’

Wu said, ‘If they were smart enough to break in without leaving a trace why would they have to force an internal door?’

‘Because once you’re in, you don’t have to worry about setting off alarms,’ the security man said. ‘You’ve done the smart bit. You’re not going to be able to hide the fact that you’ve ransacked a whole department, so why worry about breaking down a door?’

Li wasn’t convinced either way. ‘Let’s take a look.’

Some of Pan’s staff and students were gathered in the corridor outside the department. Most of them had just heard the news of her death and were still in shock. Their babble of hushed chatter died away as Li, Wu and the security man stepped out of the elevator. Li said to the security man, ‘I don’t want anybody touching anything until forensics have been over the place.’

He recognised some of the faces in the corridor. Lynn Pan’s assistant, an older woman, who had brought them all tea the previous day and escorted them to the computer room. The student who had briefed them on the ‘crime’ for the MERMER test. He nodded acknowledgement as he passed them and the security man showed the detectives the double doors which had been forced at the end of the corridor. The wood was splintered and broken around the lock. Crude but effective. Beyond the doors, the reception room where Li had sat with Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Minister Wei and the others appeared to have been left undisturbed. Li glanced from the window and saw the minaret-like TV tower catching the light, sharp against the blue of the sky. He could scarcely believe it had been only yesterday afternoon he had stood at that very window looking out at the tower. Then, Lynn Pan had still been very much alive, a beautiful, vibrant living being, demonstrating her extraordinary expertise. Why would anyone want to kill her?

A short corridor led off to the computer room where the MERMER demonstration had been carried out, Lynn Pan’s office through the wall from it, a couple of lecture rooms, another office occupied by Pan’s assistant, and a small staff room.

The computer room had been cleared apart from the two tables on which the computer equipment had stood, and a couple of office chairs on wheels. The cables remained, but all the equipment was gone. They moved through to Pan’s private office, and Li recognised her scent lingering there still.

Li said to the security man, ‘Get Pan’s assistant in here.’ And as an afterthought, ‘I met her yesterday, but I can’t remember her name.’

‘Professor Hu,’ the security man said.

While they waited for her, Li wandered around the office. The desk top was completely cleared. The drawers had been opened and emptied. There was a lacquered wooden cupboard against the back wall, and a filing cabinet next to it. The doors of the cupboard stood ajar and it, too, was empty. There were pot plants on almost every available surface. One, which had perhaps stood upon the desk, lay smashed and broken on the floor, earth spilling across worn carpet tiles. Framed certificates hung on the walls, a testament to Pan’s educational history and professional qualifications. There was a photograph of her, along with another woman, taken at a graduation ceremony. They both wore mortar boards and black and crimson gowns, clutching their certificates, and smiling for the camera. It had clearly been taken several years earlier. Pan was younger-looking, long straight hair hanging down over her shoulders. Her smile had been just as radiant then. In another photograph she was pictured with a young, dark-haired American male. Li read the hand-written caption on it. With Doctor Lawrence Farwell, June 1999. She had cut her hair short by then. It suited her.

‘She was a pretty beautiful woman, huh?’ Wu said, peering at the photograph.

‘Yes, she was,’ Li said. Her eyes burned out of the picture at him, smiling, giving, reaching out, and he remembered the strange emotion which had clouded them in those last moments he had seen her alive. What he had taken as an appeal for help. If only he had answered that appeal. If only he had held back, spoken to her before he left. If only.

The security man returned with Professor Hu. She had shoulder-length wavy hair shot through with streaks of grey. She was around five-five, tall for a Chinese woman, and painfully thin. She wore a grey business suit with a white blouse and a red scarf tied at her neck like a slash of blood. Li found it disturbing. Her eyes were red and swollen. She had obviously been doing a lot of crying.

‘Professor Hu,’ Li said, ‘I’m sorry to meet you again in these circumstances. I want to catch the people who did this. I want to catch the person who killed Miss Pan. And I’m going to need your help.’

‘I don’t see …’

He put a finger to his lips to silence her. ‘You know this place better than any of us, Professor. I want you to walk us through it, room by room, and tell us what’s missing.’

She nodded her willingness, and he gave her a pair of latex gloves to slip on, so that she could open filing cabinets and drawers and cupboards without disturbing evidence. Although Li did not expect forensics to find anything. This was a highly professional job. The security man had been right in that, at least.

It took them less than fifteen minutes to go through the department. Every drawer and cupboard that was opened told the same depressing story. Empty. Empty. Empty. Every scrap of stationery, every file, the contents of every drawer. Even the bins were empty. Wu said, ‘Looks like they didn’t know what they were after, so they just took the lot.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Li said.

Wu said, ‘Hey, Chief, you don’t break into a place like this just to empty the bins. They’ve got garbage men for that.’

According to professor Hu, both Pan’s desktop computer and her laptop were gone, along with all her disks. She said, ‘It’s as if the place had been packed up for a removal. All that’s left is the furniture.’

‘Why?’ The word which was finding its way most often to the front of Li’s mind, found expression now on his lips. He turned to the professor. ‘Can you think of any reason why someone would want to steal your files?’

She shook her head helplessly. ‘Not one,’ she said. ‘The work we were doing here was not unique. It wasn’t secret. It wasn’t even valuable. Not in financial terms.’

‘And can you think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill Miss Pan?’

The Professor drew in her lips to try to prevent the tears welling in her eyes. ‘Lynn was the most beautiful, kind and thoughtful human being I ever knew,’ she said, controlling her voice with difficulty. ‘She was goodness personified. Whoever took that life must have been consumed by pure evil.’

They re-emerged into the reception room just as Fu Qiwei, the senior forensics officer from Pau Jü Hutong, arrived with a team of three scenes of crime officers. These were the same officers who had attended the crime scene at the Millennium Monument the night before. Fu was a shrunken man with small, coal dark eyes, thinning hair dyed black and scraped back across his pate. There was nothing he hadn’t seen in a long career. Nothing left that would shock him. He had developed an acerbic sense of humour, a kind of protective shield, like a turtle’s shell. But he wasn’t smiling today. ‘A connection?’ he asked Li.

Li inclined his head slightly. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ He turned to Wu. ‘You’d better hang on here. Start taking statements from staff and students. I’m going to take a look at her apartment.’ He was about to leave when he had a thought and turned back. ‘Professor?’ The professor was standing staring out of the window where Li had stood the previous day. She turned.

‘Yes, Section Chief?’

‘Can you tell me what time Miss Pan left the office last night?’

‘It was a little after five.’

Just time for her to walk to the Millennium Monument and purchase a ticket before it closed. He said, ‘We have this notion that she might have been going to meet someone at the monument. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea who that might have been?’

Professor Hu raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Well, of course I do.’

The room was suddenly very quiet, and all eyes were on the dead woman’s assistant. ‘Who?’ Li asked.

‘Well, I don’t know why you’re asking me. You should know better than anyone.’

Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘She was meeting you, Section Chief. I took the call from you myself.’

Li was barely aware of the change of focus in the room. All eyes were now on him. He felt like Alice in Wonderland, falling into the rabbit hole and tumbling through darkness. ‘And what did I say?’ he asked.

The professor looked at him oddly. ‘You said you needed to speak to Miss Pan urgently, and I put you through to her. She came out of her office a few minutes later with her coat on. She’d had a meeting scheduled for six last night. She asked me to call round everyone and postpone it. Something important had come up and she had to go and talk to you.’

‘I didn’t call,’ Li said, and the professor looked nonplussed. ‘What made you think it was me?’

‘Because you-’ She stopped to correct herself. ‘Because the caller said, This is Section Chief Li Yan. We met this afternoon. I need to speak to Professor Pan on a matter of some urgency.’

‘Someone who knew you were here yesterday afternoon, Chief,’ Wu said. ‘That must narrow it down.’

Li thought about it. There were any number of people who might have known he was here. It would be impossible to draw a ring and say only those inside knew. He felt sick. Pan had thought she was meeting him. She had gone to her death trusting in him. The caller must have been very persuasive. But what bizarre circumstance would have led her to accept such a strange rendezvous? He still found it hard to believe that someone had been able to pass themselves off as him. He turned to the professor. ‘Was there nothing about the call that struck you as … odd? I mean, did this person sound like me?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’d only met you for a few minutes yesterday afternoon. I thought it was you because he said he was. I had no reason to doubt it.’

And neither would Pan. Her Chinese was almost native, but it was American. Her experience of China was limited. Regional variations in accent would mean nothing to her. And once again, the words of Lao Dai came back to him. You have an enemy, Li Yan. Not only was this killer sending Li letters, fulfilling a promise to cut off a woman’s ears, but now he was passing himself off as Li himself. He had used Li to lure Pan to her death, innocent and trusting like a lamb to the slaughter. Li’s shock began turning to anger. He turned to Fu Qiwei. ‘Get a team out to Pan’s apartment. She wasn’t picked at random. She was killed for a reason. Maybe we’ll find it there.’

* * *

Sunlight filled the stairwell from the windows at the rear of the Academy as Li made his way down to the floor below. He was surprised to find Lyang in Hart’s office.

‘Didn’t Margaret tell you I worked here mornings?’ she said.

Li said, ‘We haven’t had much chance to talk in the last twenty-four hours.’

Lyang nodded gravely. ‘I saw the paper this morning. It’s awful about poor Lynn. She was just about the nicest person you could ever hope to meet.’

Li said, ‘Is Bill around?’

‘He’s doing a polygraph test this morning,’ she said. ‘A favour for some of your people. Some guy accused of sexually assaulting his thirteen-year-old daughter. He’s agreed to take the test to prove his innocence. I’ll take you along if you like.’

As they passed down a corridor on the south wing of the fourth floor, Lyang said, ‘Bill wasn’t too keen on doing this after we found out about Lynn. He was pretty cut up about it. You know it was Bill who brought her over here?’ Li nodded. ‘He feels really responsible.’ She sighed. ‘But he’d promised the people from Section Six. So …’ Her voice tailed off as she knocked gently on a door and opened it a crack. Two officers from the interrogation unit at Pau Jü Hutong turned in their chairs. ‘Alright if we come in?’ she whispered. Li knew both the faces and nodded his acknowledgement. They waved him in. The room itself was in darkness, the only light coming through what appeared to be a window into an adjoining room. It took Li a moment to realise it was a two-way mirror.

Two cameras mounted on tripods were recording proceedings in the next room. A middle-aged man sat in a chair beside a desk on which a polygraph machine stood idle, spidery needles hovering motionless above the paper conveyer belt on which they would record his responses to Hart’s questions. The man had long hair swept back from his forehead and growing down over his collar. His face was pockmarked from adolescent acne, and a feeble attempt at a moustache clung to his upper lip. He was sitting at right-angles to the table, facing a chair in which Hart sat conducting his pre-test interview. A monitor on the camera side of the mirror showed a full-screen view of the interviewee, his head cut off above the top frame of the picture, but inset in close-up in the lower left-hand quadrant, obliterating Hart from the recording.

The Section Six interrogators motioned Li silently to a seat. One of them was a woman of about fifty with a round, friendly face, whom Li knew to be a formidable and aggressive interrogator. The other was an older man with a face chiselled out of granite, who had an uncanny talent for gaining the trust of the people he questioned. They were the antithesis of the stereotypical good-cop-bad-cop double act.

The woman leaned towards Li and whispered so quietly he could barely hear her. ‘He’s a smooth operator,’ she said of Hart. ‘That guy was so nervous when he came in he could hardly speak. Now he’s eating out of Hart’s hand. Can’t hardly get the guy to shut up.’

‘He’ll get to the test itself in a couple of minutes,’ Lyang said.

And they heard Hart’s voice across the monitor, soft, soothing, persuasive. His Chinese was almost perfect, his American accent lending it a nearly soporific quality. ‘Now, Jiang,’ he was saying, ‘I’m going to make you a promise right at the start. I’m not going to ask you any questions on the test that I’m not going to ask you right now. There’ll be no surprises, no trick questions. I need a yes, or a no.’

Jiang nodded, and you could see the tension in his face. He laid his forearms flat along the arms of his chair and stretched his palms wide. He swallowed a couple of times, and opened and closed his mouth as if unsticking his tongue from the roof of it. Li remembered the rice test that Hart and Lyang had talked about yesterday.

Hart went on, ‘I’ll begin with what are called known truth questions. They’re questions, the answers to which you know are true and I know are true. What they do is create a picture for me.’ He paused just for a moment. ‘Is your name Jiang?’

‘Yes,’ Jiang said.

‘Are you now in Beijing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I have the questions about why we’re here today.’ Another brief pause. ‘Have you ever put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

Li was startled by the bluntness of the question.

‘No,’ Jiang said.

‘He damn well did!’ the female interrogator hissed. ‘He might have been drunk at the time, but he did it alright. And he remembers he did it.’

Hart continued in the same hypnotic tone, ‘Do you remember if you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina?’

‘No.’

‘Are you telling the truth about not putting your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

‘Yes.’

He shuffled his papers. ‘Then I have those questions we discussed about the past. Do you ever remember doing anything about which you were ashamed?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever remember performing an unusual sex act?’

Jiang seemed embarrassed by this question. ‘No,’ he said. Then added, ‘Only with my wife.’ And a sad smile flitted briefly across his face.

Lyang whispered, ‘She ran off with his sister’s husband and left him to bring up the kid on his own.’

Hart pressed on. ‘Do you remember ever committing a crime for which you were not caught?’

‘No.’

‘Then I have a question which just kind of covers the entire test. Do you intend to answer truthfully each question on this test?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then the last question, just for me. Are you afraid I will ask you a question we have not reviewed?’

‘No.’

Hart stood up. ‘Okay, that’s all there is.’ And he began wiring Jiang up for the test itself — two bands of sensors strapped around the chest and midriff to monitor heart rate, a cuff on the left arm to measure blood pressure, and sensors on the tips of two fingers on the right hand to detect perspiration. He talked as he worked. ‘Now, for each chart, Jiang, I need you to keep both feet on the ground. No moving. No unnecessary talking. Look straight ahead and close your eyes. Think about the questions, think about the answers and try to answer truthfully.’

When he had finished wiring Jiang to the polygraph, he rounded his desk so that he was looking at the subject in profile. ‘Now sometimes,’ he said, ‘I have people come in who just naturally think, I have to beat this sucker. When they do that, generally they have heard that when they get asked a question they should squeeze their toes or bite their tongue or press down on a tack they’ve hidden in their shoe. They make a big mistake when they do that, Jiang. The reason for that is that the equipment is so sensitive that if you have a heart murmur I’ll see that right there on your chart. And when people try doing these things, all they do is cause those pens to go crazy.’ He waved his hand at the needles poised above the chart, ready to go. ‘And when I see that, I have to ask why, when I already told them how best for me to see the truth, why are they trying to change what I’m looking at.’ He looked at Jiang. ‘And what’s the only logical reason you can think of?’

Jiang seemed taken aback that Hart was asking him. He shrugged and said awkwardly, ‘They’re trying to cover something up.’

‘They’re a liar,’ Hart said. ‘And that’s just the way I call it.’ He folded his hands in front of him on the desk and gave Jiang a moment or two to think about it. Then he said, ‘Now what I’m going to do, Jiang, is I want to see what your body looks like normally on the chart. So I want you to choose a number between one and seven.’

Jiang gave a strained chuckle. ‘Not between one and ten.’

‘No. Between one and seven.’ Pause. ‘What’s your number?’

‘Five.’

‘Okay. Now what I’ll do is I’ll go through all the numbers between one and seven. Each time I ask did you choose that number, the only answer I want is, no. Even when I ask you the number five. That way I have a number of truthful responses, and I have one deceptive response. It gives me a chance to adjust the instruments for your body.’

Lyang was smiling. ‘Believe that, you’ll believe anything,’ she whispered. But everyone else in the room was mesmerised by the proceedings on the other side of the mirror.

Hart set the polygraph going, needles scraping back and forth across the paper that scrolled by beneath them, and took Jiang through all the numbers in a random sequence. When he had finished, he switched off the polygraph and tore off the chart. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘It always amazes me. It does.’ He pushed the chart across the desk towards Jiang. ‘It don’t take no expert. See this green line?’ Jiang followed Hart’s finger and nodded. ‘See how it changes? See the highest point on the chart? See what’s below it?’ Li had to admit, Hart was a real showman. Like a magician on a stage.

Jiang craned to see what was written there. ‘It’s the number five,’ he said.

Hart smiled at him. ‘So now we know what you know. And you know why the pens reacted so strong. So if I see that when I ask the real questions, we’ll be able to get right to the bottom of it.’

Jiang slumped back in his seat, his face a mask of misery. He was beaten, even before he took the test. And he was beaten, because he believed he would be.

Hart reset the polygraph. ‘Okay, we’ll go straight to the questions one time.’

He got Jiang to sit facing forward, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor, and pumped up the air in his cuff, and then he ran through the questions, just as he had during the pre-test. ‘Did you put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

They did it another two times, the order of the questions changing on each run-through.

When they’d finished the third set, ‘That’s us,’ Hart said. Jiang glanced at him apprehensively, but Hart was giving nothing away. He stepped out from behind the desk to unhook Jiang from the polygraph, then he collected the charts and said, ‘I‘ll be back in a couple of minutes.’ He went out and left Jiang alone. Jiang sat staring into space for a long time, before dropping his face into his hands to stifle his sobs.

The door opened in the observation room and Hart came in. He seemed surprised to see Li. ‘Li Yan? What are you doing here?’

Li stood to shake Hart’s hand. ‘I stopped by to talk to you about Lynn Pan.’

Hart’s face clouded. ‘I feel like it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t recommended her for the post … Jesus!’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath, trying to control his emotions. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to believe she’s gone.’ He looked at Li. ‘Did you …? Were you called to the crime scene?’ Li nodded. ‘Shit. That must have been tough.’

It was what Margaret had said. And Li wondered if it was really any harder dealing with a murder when it was someone you knew. Of course, you brought a lot of emotional baggage to that circumstance. But he had always found it hard to see the living person in the dead one. It wasn’t dealing with the dead that was difficult, it was the loss of the living. In this case, he had hardly known Lynn Pan. And yet the sense of her loss had been powerful. Perhaps because she had been so brim full of life.

Li shrugged. ‘Sure. It was hard.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose you would have the first idea why anyone would want to kill her?’

Hart shook his head. ‘It’s inconceivable to me,’ he said.

‘Or why anyone would want to steal her computers, all her files?’

Hart said, ‘I heard there’d been a break-in up there. It’s all gone?’

‘Everything.’

‘Jees …’ He held up his hands. ‘I can’t help you. I wish to God I could.’

Li said, ‘I might as well tell you, because you’ll probably hear it anyway …’ He glanced at Lyang. ‘Apparently she thought she was going to meet me last night at the Millennium Monument.’

Hart’s consternation was plain on his face. ‘Why would she think that?’

‘Because someone phoned up after we’d left yesterday afternoon, saying they were me, and arranging a clandestine meeting?’

‘Why? What for?’ It was Lyang this time.

‘I don’t know.’

Hart said, ‘Man, that’s spooky.’

‘What about her private life?’ Li said. ‘What do you know about that?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘She came round for dinner a couple of times,’ Lyang said.

‘Yeah, but all we ever talked about were people we knew back in the States. Work. You know, stuff we had in common.’

‘And we never got an invite back to her place.’

‘The thing is,’ Hart said, ‘her private life was just that. Private, wasn’t it, Lyang? You know, for such an outgoing girl, she really was a very private person. You got so far with her, and then zap. Down came some kind of shutter. So far and no further. I don’t know anything about her relationships, what she did in her spare time. Hell, I don’t even know if she lived on her own. It’s hard to know if there was anything much at all outside of her work.’ He sighed and then glanced through the two-way mirror. ‘How’s our boy doing?’

‘Feeling pretty sorry for himself,’ said the female interrogator.

Hart glanced at his watch. ‘He’s had long enough to stew. Time to go get a confession.’ He looked at Li. ‘Unless there’s anything else you want to ask.’

Li said, ‘I can’t think of anything right now.’

‘We’ll be seeing you tonight, anyway,’ Lyang said. ‘You and Margaret are still coming to dinner, aren’t you?’

Li had forgotten all about it. ‘Sure,’ he said.

Hart squeezed his arm. ‘Catch you later.’ And he went out still clutching his charts. He hadn’t looked at them once.

Li was anxious to be away, but he also wanted to see how Hart’s interview with Jiang would turn out. ‘Will this take long?’ he asked Lyang.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

So he sat down again and watched as Hart entered the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. Jiang sat upright, almost startled, and you could see his tension in the rigid way he held himself. Hart sat down facing Jiang and put the charts on his knee. He still wasn’t consulting them. ‘On these tests, Jiang,’ he said, those hypnotic tones again, ‘I can make one of three decisions. I can say a person’s telling the truth. I can say a test’s inconclusive, that I just don’t know. Or I can say a person’s not telling the truth.’

Jiang drew in a deep breath, very focused on Hart and what he was saying. He kept nodding, as if he could gain approval by agreeing.

‘Now here’s the thing,’ Hart said. ‘We’re not dealing with a criminal case here. You’re just an ordinary guy, working hard to raise his family, making his contribution to society. Now, some of the criminals I deal with, that they bring down here from the cells uptown, they don’t contribute to anything. They’re just kind of leeches on society.’ He leaned forward, creating a sense of confidentiality between them. ‘When I look at the charts, and from talking with you here today, I know you’re no criminal, that’s for darn sure. In fact, I’m inclined to think you’re kind of a nice guy. And life’s dealt you a pretty bum hand.’

Jiang nodded vigorously.

‘The thing is, is that as far as what Shimei is saying, it happened. And you’re remembering it. But you’re having a problem bringing it forward to talk with somebody. To try and understand why. And I can understand the fear and embarrassment for you. That’s the biggest thing, isn’t it?’

Jiang was nodding miserably now.

‘Because you can remember it happened, but if you come right out and tell somebody, how do you handle that picture you have of yourself, because you’re not like that normally.’

‘I’m not,’ Jiang whispered.

‘We all have a view of ourselves, Jiang. The way we believe that the rest of the world looks at us. We call that our ego. And when that is threatened, we have what we call an ego defence mechanism which, to protect that image we have of ourselves, will push things back into our subconscious and lead us to deny that they ever occurred — when, in fact, we ourselves know that, yes, it did happen. But because it is so out of character for us in normal situations, we really don’t know how to deal with it.’

Jiang was still nodding his agreement. You could see in him, as clear as day, the desire to confess. To tell this soft-spoken sympathetic American the truth, because after all he had already seen it in the chart.

Hart was still talking. ‘And so, we are left in a predicament where we feel so much pressure. It’s called anxiety. And our anxiety gets to be so great that our total thinking, our total being, is just taken up with trying to fight it.’ He leaned even closer, and put a comforting hand on Jiang’s knee. ‘The thing is that you know, and I know, that what happened was probably brought on by the booze.’

‘Yes …’ Jiang’s voice was a whisper.

‘And you were lonely. After all, your wife had left you. How long had it been? Two years? That’s a long time for a man to be on his own, Jiang.’

Jiang had tipped his head into his left hand, his palm hiding his eyes, but you could see the tears running down his pockmarked cheeks.

‘And that’s why you did it, wasn’t it, Jiang?’

‘Yes.’ Almost inaudible.

‘I need you to tell me, Jiang, that you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina. And all that anxiety is just going to lift right off your shoulders.’

Again, the bluntness of it seemed shocking, but Li knew that the form of words was important for legal purposes.

‘I did it,’ Jiang said.

‘You put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

‘Yes.’

‘All the way?’

‘Yes.’ And he wept openly now.

Hart patted his knee gently. And he still hadn’t looked at the charts.