Chinese Whispers

II

Li and Wu were stepping out into the carpark when Li’s cellphone rang. Qian’s voice sounded oddly strained. ‘Chief, where are you?’

‘We’ve just come out of the autopsy.’

‘Can you come straight back here?’

‘Sure.’

‘And bring Wang?’

‘Why?’

‘We’ve got something here he’s going to have to check out, Chief. It’s not something I really want to tell you about on the phone.’

Li sent Wu back inside to get Wang, and he stood on the steps staring gloomily towards the traffic which sped by on the expressway beyond a vast area of what had once been housing, flattened now for redevelopment. He didn’t really want to think about what it was that Qian needed Wang to check out. Everything about this case seemed to be slipping away from him. Margaret’s confusion freefall. Each time, it seemed, he turned around there was a new development — before he’d even had time to assimilate the last one.

‘What’s happened?’ He turned around to find Margaret, showered and changed, on the steps beside him.

‘I don’t know. Qian didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.’ He looked at her, and she seemed suddenly very small and vulnerable, her hair still wet and combed back from her face. She seemed thinner. Perhaps she had lost weight and he simply hadn’t noticed. He ran a thumb along the line of her jaw and brushed her cheekbone. Her skin was so pale, dotted with tiny faded freckles across the nose. He remembered how Lynn Pan’s lover had described her loss. One minute she’s there. My whole life. The next she’s gone. And he felt how it would be if he ever lost Margaret. The thought struck him like a blow to the solar plexus. It was too easy to take the people you loved for granted, and too late to take it back when they were gone. He knew that Margaret was unhappy, chained to the home and the child, and he simply hadn’t been dealing with it. In the wake of Lynn Pan’s death, she seemed particularly fragile, and he felt the need to hold her and protect her.

Margaret was taken by surprise when he enveloped her in his arms and squeezed all the breath from her lungs. ‘Hey,’ she protested, laughing, and pulled herself free. ‘Who do you think you are, the Beijing Ripper?’

But he wasn’t smiling. He was gazing into the deep, dark blue of her eyes. ‘I love you, Margaret,’ he said.

And she felt the intensity of it. ‘I love you, too,’ she said quietly.

‘I know things aren’t satisfactory right now,’ he said. ‘I know it. I just … I just need to deal with this first. And then we’ll sort it.’

She nodded seriously. ‘I don’t know how we do that.’

‘Neither do I. But we’ve got to try.’ He squeezed both her hands. ‘I can’t promise, but I’ll try and make it to see my father this afternoon.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘I won’t hold my breath.’

They broke apart as her taxi arrived. It was a Mercedes. Li cocked an eyebrow. ‘Can we afford this?’

‘We don’t have to. The good old US of A is picking up the tab.’ She kissed him lightly on the lips and jumped into the back seat. The taxi was pulling out of the gate when Wu came down the steps with Pathologist Wang.

It took them forty minutes to get back to Section One through the lunchtime traffic, sitting in long, frustrating periods of gridlock on the Third Ring Road before turning south and picking their way through some of the less congested back streets. The restaurant on the corner of Beixinqiao Santiao was packed when Li parked their Jeep outside it. The sounds of diners, the smells of lunch, of barbecue and wok, filled the air, making Li aware of a hunger gnawing at his stomach. But he had no appetite and no desire to eat. Beyond Section One, Noah’s Ark Food Room had fallen under the demolition men’s hammer, and behind a hoarding where it had once stood, a giant crane soared into the blue autumn sky, dominating the skyline.

They went in the side entrance and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. There was an odd, faintly medical smell in the air as they walked along the top corridor. It was cold, and when they turned into the detectives’ room they saw why. All the windows stood wide open, and officers were sitting around in their coats and typing with their gloves on. Everyone was smoking. In spite of the cold wind blowing in through the open window, and the smoke that filled the room, the smell was stronger here, and carried more than a hint of something rotten.

Qian was sitting on one of the desks talking on the telephone. He hung up when he saw Li and jumped down. ‘In here, Chief.’ Watched by everyone else in the room, Li and Wu and Wang followed Qian into his office. The windows here were also wide open. The desk had been cleared, and on it stood a cardboard box the size of a shoebox. It had been wrapped in brown paper and secured with clear, sticky tape. Someone had cut open the wrapping, and the paper was folded away from the box, its lid lying on the table beside it. The air was thick with the smell of alcohol, and a stink like meat which had been left in the refrigerator a month past its sell-by date.

‘In the name of the sky, Qian …’ Li screwed up his eyes and blew air out through his mouth. ‘What the hell …?’

‘It was addressed to you, Chief. Arrived in this morning’s mail. But it was stinking so bad the head of the mail room thought I should open it.’ Qian looked slightly green around the gills. ‘I wish to hell I hadn’t.’

‘What is it?’ Li and Wu and Pathologist Wang approached the open box with a caution which suggested they thought that something might jump out and bite them. Inside, laid out amongst crumpled paper packing was a smooth, faintly reddish-brown-coloured arc of something organic. It was wrapped in plastic and oozing a clear fluid. The stench was fierce. Wu put a handkerchief to his face and moved back, gagging. Li stood his ground with difficulty as Wang snapped on latex gloves and lifted it out of the box.

‘It’s a kidney,’ he said. ‘The left kidney. You can tell because the adrenal gland in the fat that’s been left along the top edge is still “tall”. The gland on the right kidney gets flattened by the liver. It’s been cut in half longitudinally. There’s about one inch of the renal artery still attached to it.’ He sniffed, long since inured to the aromas of the autopsy. ‘Been preserved in alcohol by the smell of it, which is why it feels firm and has lost some of its colour.’

‘A human kidney?’ Li asked, anticipating Wang’s response with a growing sense of horror.

‘Oh, yes. I’ll need to make the proper comparisons of course, but at an educated guess I’d say this is the kidney that was removed from Guo Huan. The renal artery is normally about three inches long. From memory there was around two inches of it left in the corpse.’

Qian went into the top drawer of his desk and lifted out an A4-sized plastic sleeve. Flattened out inside it was a note that had been folded twice over. He handed it to Li, and then moved away towards the open window for air. Li recognised the scrawl of the large, untidy characters, the distinctive red ink.

Chief,

I send you half the kidney I took from one woman. Preserved it for you. The other piece I fried and ate. It was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a while longer.

Signed,

Catch me when you can.

Li found the plastic sleeve trembling in his hands. ‘And it was addressed to me by name?’

‘Yes, Chief.’

Li held out his hand. ‘Give me some gloves.’ He had used up his supply. Qian took a pair from his desk and handed them over. Li pulled them on and then carefully lifted the box away from the wrapping paper. He turned the paper over and smoothed it out on the desk. The label was hand-written. There were half a dozen stamps on it, franked and postmarked the previous day. The circle of red ink was not perfect, but it was perfectly readable. 12.30 p.m. EMS Central Post Office, Beijing.

Li tried to contain his excitement. ‘He’s made his first mistake,’ he said. ‘The parcel was too big to post through a letter box. He must have had to pass it across the counter and get it weighed. So somebody saw him. Somebody saw his face. We’ve got a witness!’

* * *

‘Hey, Chief, isn’t that your old man?’ Wu was chewing like a man possessed. He had now pushed several pieces of gum into his mouth to get rid of the taste left there by the lingering smell of the half kidney. Wang had once explained to him at an autopsy that the smell registered by your nasal sensors was carried on actual particles released into the air by the thing you were smelling. Which is why a particularly strong smell could also sometimes leave a taste in your mouth. Wu had found the concept disgusting, and was now furiously trying to wash away any unwanted particles by stimulating saliva production with his chewing gum.

Li glanced out of the passenger window as they passed the side entrance to the Ministry compound in Zhengyi Road. His apartment was less than two hundred metres beyond the wall. A taxi was pulled in at the kerbside, and the driver was helping his father out on to the sidewalk.

‘Yes,’ he said. Mister Li senior was going to visit his grandson. And Li knew that Margaret would not be surprised that Li had failed to turn up. Again. A part of him wanted to ask Wu to stop, so that he could get out and explain. But there was no point. An excuse, even a good one, always sounded like an excuse.

Ironically, the EMS post office was just around the corner at No. 7 Qianmen Da Jie. It was a huge, twelve-storey building that took up half the block. Rows of distinctive green EMS vans were parked out front, in a narrow carpark screened from the road by trees. Wu parked right outside the main door, waving aside protests from a security man by pushing a Ministry ID in his face. Li stepped out and saw, in the afternoon sunshine, the row of red flags lining the roof of police headquarters on the next half of the block. Wu lit a cigarette. ‘Cheeky bastard. Posting the thing to us from right outside HQ. Like he’s thumbing his nose at us. How was it he signed his note? Catch me if you can?’

Li said grimly. ‘We’ll catch him alright.’ But in his heart he wondered how many more young women would have to die before they did.

The main hall was busy, queues forming at windows along a counter which ran the length of it. Lights reflected off a marble floor, and voices off marble-faced walls. One counter sold nothing but paper, string, tape and glue, and Li wondered if perhaps their killer had wrapped his parcel in the post office itself. He looked along the counters as if he hoped that maybe the murderer’s ghost might still be there, some impression, some presence that he had left behind, even just in the memory of one of tellers.

They made themselves known to security and were taken to the manager’s office. Wu nudged Li and nodded towards a copy of the Beijing Youth Daily lying on his desk. The manager was a dapper man in a dark suit, with a collar and tie. He looked at them warily through steel-framed spectacles and offered them tea. Li declined. He showed the manager a colour photocopy of the parcel label, with its stamps and postmark. He said, ‘One of your tellers took a parcel with this address across his or her counter at twelve-thirty yesterday. He or she stamped it and franked it and put it in the mail basket.’

‘So?’

‘So, I believe that teller is the only person we know of who has set eyes on the Beijing Ripper.’

He had calculated that his use of the term would have some effect. And he was not wrong. The manager’s eyes opened wide and flickered briefly towards the newspaper lying on his desk. ‘He was here?’

‘We believe so.’

Li could see the thoughts processing behind the manager’s eyes as clearly as if they were windows. ‘We have thousands of people in here every day,’ he said. ‘I think it’s unlikely that a teller would remember any one of them in particular.’

Wu was looking at a small black and white television screen mounted high on the wall in the far corner of the office. It showed a view looking down on the main hall of the post office. His jaw froze, mid-chew. ‘You guys got closed-circuit TV in here?’

The manager glanced towards the screen, the implications of Wu’s question dawning on them all simultaneously. ‘We have two cameras,’ he said. ‘One on each side of the hall.’

‘And do you record what they see?’ Li asked, hardly daring to believe that they might actually have the killer on video.

‘We recycle the tapes every seven days.’

‘We only need to go back one,’ Wu said, his eyes shining with sudden optimism.

* * *

The recording equipment was in the office of the head of security. He removed his grey-peaked cap and scratched his head. ‘Sure,’ he said in answer to Li’s question. ‘The tapes are all time-coded, so we can find the time you want pretty fast.’

‘Let’s do it, then,’ Wu said.

The security man rummaged in a cupboard and pulled out a VHS tape and put it in an empty machine. He flicked the play switch and then began fast rewinding from the end of it. It went backwards from seven p.m. Li watched the speeded-up comings and goings, like an old Chaplin movie gone mad, with a growing sense of disappointment. He glanced at the other two monitors displaying live pictures from the main hall. He said to the manager. ‘And those are your only two camera positions?’

The manager nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘They’re too high for us to see faces. We’re really only getting the tops of heads.’

The managed shrugged. ‘They weren’t designed to pick out faces, just to give us an overview.’

Li felt fingers of frustration choking back his brief optimism. It would be ironic if they managed to catch their killer on tape, but not be able to see his face.

The time-code on the tape was counting back at high speed. The picture was just a blur. Wu said, ‘Stop it at twelve-fifteen. We’ll watch it from there.’ He shoved another piece of gum in his mouth and lit another cigarette.

The tape ran back a little past twelve-fifteen before the security man could stop it. The picture cleared and they had a view of the hall from the left-hand camera. It was running forward now from twelve-thirteen and fifty-three seconds. Li said, ‘Can you cue up the tape from the other camera while we’re watching this?’ The security man nodded. He found the right tape and set it rewinding in another machine.

The others watched a constant stream of activity on the first monitor. A woman with a pushchair. A bunch of schoolgirls posting some letters. Businessmen with express mail. Ordinary folk going about their ordinary business. The main floor was busy, at least thirty people moving around it at any one time. Maybe more. The picture definition was not good, as if the camera had viewed proceedings through gauze stretched across its lens. Suddenly, Wu shouted, ‘There!’ And he stabbed his finger at the screen.

Li leaned in and saw a figure in a long, dark coat with a shoebox parcel under his arm walking through the sunshine that spilled in from the main door. ‘Shit!’ he muttered under his breath. ‘He’s wearing a baseball cap. He knows about the cameras.’ His face was completely masked by the long peak of the black cap, and plunged into shadow by it. His collar was turned up, and they could not even tell if his hair was long or short. He wore gloves, dark trousers, black shoes. There was not one centimetre of him on view.

Wu was shaking his head. ‘He’s playing with us, Chief. He knew we would see these tapes. He knew how fucking frustrated we would be when we had him right there in our sights and still couldn’t see him. He’s like the invisible fucking man.’

They watched as he stood for some time in the centre of the concourse, as if deciding which queue to join. Then he walked to a window at the far end, almost immediately below the other camera. Its view of him would be hopelessly distorted, and he was about as far as he could get from the camera whose shot they were watching now. He conducted his business with a teller they could not see. After a brief exchange, the window was lifted and his parcel taken across the counter. He waited until it had been weighed and costed, and then took a wallet from his coat pocket and paid in cash. He never once looked around, his face hidden from view at every moment. He turned and walked briskly to the door and was gone.

Li turned to the manager. ‘Find out who that teller was and get them in here now.’

The teller turned out to be a plump, middle-aged woman with an attitude. She had done nothing wrong, and as far as she was concerned, she was going to be as unhelpful as possible. They replayed the tape for her and she watched with a bored expression.

‘So what am I supposed to be?’ she asked. ‘Madam Memory? I don’t even look at their faces. It’s bad enough that I can smell their breath through the grilles in the window.’

‘It was an unusual address,’ Wu said.

‘I don’t look at the addresses. I weigh the parcel, I look at the postcode, I get a price. I stamp it, they pay. They go, then it’s who’s next.’

‘You’re not being very helpful, lady,’ Wu said.

‘I’m not paid to be helpful,’ she snapped. ‘I’m paid to do a job. I do it. I’ve done if for years. If anyone’s got any complaint about my work, that’s another matter.’ She looked defiantly around the faces. ‘Is anyone complaining about my work?’

Li said very quietly. ‘Do you have any idea what was in that parcel?’

‘Of course I don’t. What’s it to me what was in the parcel?’

‘Well,’ Li said patiently, ‘it might help you to understand just how much danger you are in.’

For the first time, there was no quick comeback and she visibly blanched. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I think it would be helpful if I explained,’ Li said, ‘that the parcel you took from that gentleman contained the kidney of a woman he hacked to death on Sunday.’ Her eyes widened. ‘You might even have heard of him. He was in the paper this morning. They’re calling him the Beijing Ripper.’ There was the smallest intake of breath, and her hand went to her mouth. ‘Did you see that story by any chance?’ She nodded, unable to speak now. ‘Well, you’re the only person we know of who has seen him.’ Her eyes grew wider still. ‘And if we know you’ve seen him, he knows you’ve seen him. So I don’t really think I’d like to be in your shoes tomorrow when he reads that we have interviewed a witness, a teller at the EMS post office, who took a parcel from him on Monday.’

‘You wouldn’t put that in the paper!’ she gasped.

Li shrugged sympathetically. ‘Maybe we won’t have to. Maybe we’ll catch him by then. But we’re going to need some help. We’re going to need a description. Anything at all you can remember. Anything.’ He paused. ‘It could be the most important thing you’ve ever had to do in your life.’

She asked to see the tape again. Then they played her the second tape, but half of the killer was outside the bottom frame of the picture, and they were looking directly down on top of him. There was not so much as a hair on view.

The teller was babbling nervously now. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. His face was shaded by that cap. And really, I don’t look at them, I don’t.’

‘Anything you can remember,’ Li said again. ‘Was he tall, short? Was he clean shaven? Did he wear glasses …?’

‘Yes,’ the teller broke in eagerly. ‘He had glasses. I remember that. Like sunglasses, only not as dark. You know, like they react to the sunlight, but the lenses never go really black.’

‘Do you remember what kind of glasses?’

She shook her head.

‘Think. Did they have heavy frames? Or were they silver or gold? Steel frames like your boss?’

She glanced at the manager who scowled silently at her. She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t remember. But he was clean shaven. I’m pretty sure about that. I would have noticed if he had whiskers.’

‘What about his accent?’ Li said. ‘Was there anything unusual about his voice?’

He could see the concentration on her face. There was nothing that concentrated the mind so well as fear, and the instinct for self-preservation. But to her own and their frustration, she genuinely could not remember.

Li looked at the monitor. He was right there in front of them. Li could reach out and touch the screen. But they were no nearer to catching him than before. He was taunting, torturing them, of that Li was certain. He plotted and planned his every move, anticipating what they would do at every stage so that he was always one step ahead of them.

‘We’ll need both those tapes,’ Wu said to the head of security, and the security man punched a button and the picture froze on the screen. Li had a sudden inspiration.

‘Take a statement from the teller,’ he said to Wu, and turned to the manager. ‘I want you to come down to the floor with me. And I’ll need a tape measure. I want to take a few measurements.’