Chinese Whispers

IV

Pau Jü Hutong was a maze of ancient Beijing courtyard dwellings, narrow alleys with tin roofs and grey brick walls, tiny shops behind sliding windows, and ancient trees that sprouted gnarled branches to shade the tarmac. Old men on tricycles pedalled up and down its length, school kids in woolly hats carrying well-worn satchels made their way home from school in groups of two and three.

Wu drove carefully between the parked vehicles, past the towering white detention centre where Section Six interrogators grilled criminal suspects, and turned in at the entrance to the Beijing Forensic Science Institute. The guard, huddled over a stove in the gatehouse, recognised them through the window, and the steel gates concertinaed to let them in. There was a police mini-van and a black and white Jeep in the forecourt, and half a dozen other unmarked vehicles. Wu parked up and Li got out clutching the two video tapes from the EMS post office. They climbed the steps, past two dancing red lanterns, and plunged into the building.

The AutoCAD computer was in a darkened room on the second floor. Li had phoned ahead, and so they were expected. A lab assistant shook their hands and took the video tapes, assuring them that the process of digitisation would only take a matter of minutes. ‘We require just a few frames in order to be able to lift the stills,’ she said. They followed her into the adjoining media room where she put the first tape into a player and started running it through. ‘Anywhere about there,’ Li said, stabbing his finger at the screen. He wanted the biggest and clearest possible images of the killer. The assistant stopped the tape. Their man had just stepped out of the burned-out patch of sunlight on the floor of the EMS hall. She ran it back a short way, and then punched a button on another machine and set the tape playing again. She let it run for about thirty seconds, then ejected it and put in the second tape. They repeated the process, capturing the best images of the man in the baseball cap, before the assistant flicked switches on all of the machines and one of them spat out a shiny silver disc about twelve centimetres in diameter.

She waggled it at Li. ‘Digitised on to DVD. Do you have the measurements?’ Li nodded and she picked up an internal phone and told someone called Qin at the other end that they were ready for him.

Qin was a big man in every way, nearly as broad as he was tall. He had cropped black hair and thick eyebrows that fell away in steep curves on either side of his eyes. His gold-framed glasses somehow softened the threat of his physical presence. He had been instrumental in developing the AutoCAD software. As he slipped the DVD into the computer and began capturing matching still images from each camera using the time-codes, he explained, ‘Used to be that we needed to take measurements from every side of a crime scene to build an accurate 3-D image. Now we just need one to get the scale for the whole thing.’ He examined the pictures of the killer striding across the concourse with his long coat and his baseball cap and the box with the kidney under his arm. ‘What measurements did you take?’

Li said, ‘The length of the hall, the height of the counter, the width of the windows …’

Qin cut him off. ‘The width of a window will do.’ Li placed the piece of paper with the measurements on the computer table. Qin typed in the width of the window in centimetres. ‘Okay, now the computer will do the rest.’ He ran the mouse dextrously across its mat and the arrow on the screen dipped and dived. Menus dropped down, options were selected. The screen divided into two halves. The left half showed one of the stills of the killer caught in mid-stride. For the moment the other half was blank. Qin pulled down another menu, highlighted one of its options, and the blank half filled in with an outline 3-D graphic image of the EMS hall, with the kidney man at its centre. By manipulating the options, Qin was able to take them through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle around him. At intervals he hit the print button, and the printer spewed out hard copies.

Li and Wu watched, fascinated as they took a tour of their murderer. The computer could not show them his face, but it gave them an accurate picture of his build and his shape. He seemed tall, with broad shoulders, but carrying little weight, and was slightly stooped. The shape of his head was obscured by the baseball cap.

‘That’s amazing, Chief.’ Wu’s jaw was hanging open. He had never seen this technology in action before and had forgotten to keep chewing.

‘Can you give us an idea of his height?’ Li asked.

‘I can tell you exactly what height he is,’ Qin said. ‘I can even tell you what size shoes he wears.’

Li found himself clenching his fists. It took them one step nearer to him. One step at a time. He looked at the image on screen with an unblinking intensity. There he was, right in front of them. He thought he was being so clever, and although it was still not enough they knew more about him now than he could ever have imagined.