Chinese Whispers

II

Li drove north on the East Third Ring Road. It was dark now and the tail lights of the traffic stretched ahead of him into a hazy distance. The city basked in its own light, buildings illuminated against the black of the night sky, a million windows lit like stars in a firmament. When he went to see Dai he had been certain that he was looking for two killers. Both of them somewhere out there. One of them tangible. Li had seen him, been mocked by him, without ever knowing who he was. The other a phantom, an idea born of an unexpected DNA result and a host of inconsistencies. A policeman, someone he knew. One of his team. But, as usual, Dai had made him question everything. In my day we had no DNA testing, he had said. It is possible to pick up a sesame seed but lose sight of a watermelon. But when it came to Pan’s murder, no matter how much he wanted not to believe it, he could not question Margaret’s logic in pointing the finger of accusation at a cop. It was the only explanation that brought consistency to inconsistency. And if it was true, then he was even further from solving this puzzle than he had thought.

And yet, Dai had sown a seed of doubt somewhere in the back of his mind, and it had taken root there and was growing. For an experienced cop to have left DNA traces that would blow apart his subterfuge, seemed unthinkable. But, then again, to make a mistake in the heat of the moment, while committing the presumably unaccustomed act of murder, was not. And, still, the biggest question of all was, why?

Li felt his eyes closing as confusion and uncertainty washed over him in a wave of fatigue, and the vehicle in front — a taxi — seemed suddenly no more than inches away. He jammed on his brakes, and the car behind blared its horn. He swerved, almost losing control, then pulled himself back on track, tiredness swept away by a moment of fear and the heart it had left pounding fiercely in his chest. This was crazy!

He had arranged to meet Margaret outside the Harts’ apartment block on the edge of the Central Business District. She would take a taxi back from the pathology lab, she had told him. On the way she would drop off Li Jon to spend the night at Mei Yuan’s tiny siheyuan home on the shores of Qianhai Lake.

A dinner party, an evening of social chit-chat, was the last thing Li felt like. All he wanted to do was sleep, to close his stinging eyes, rest his aching head on a pillow and drift off into some dreamworld where whatever happened, he was always assured of waking up. But it was too late to back out now. And what was it the Americans said: a change is as good as a rest?

He turned off the ring road at Jinsong Bridge and swept from the exit ramp on to Lianguang Road. The Music Home apartments were a blaze of lights, green glass and grey cladding. The shopping mall on the ground floor of the main block was still doing business. Li parked in the street and found Margaret waiting for him outside the entrance lobby. He raised his eyebrows in an unasked question and she nodded. ‘They match,’ she said. ‘We’ll get the DNA results tomorrow. But, really, we don’t need them.’ There was nothing more to be said. She took his arm and they went through glass doors into a huge lobby with inlaid floors and an arched gold ceiling. A security man at the desk asked politely if he could help. They told him who they were and he telephoned the Harts’ apartment before letting them through to the gardens.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘Lyang said this was Bill’s one concession to western comfort, but this isn’t comfort, it’s goddamned opulence.’

Contained within the complex of apartment blocks, and the two landmark towers with their grand piano lids, was nine thousand square metres of landscaped garden on the theme of the four seasons. There was a beach around a kidney-shaped pool, paths and walkways through clusters of trees representing everything from summer through fall to winter and spring. There was a stream spanned by tiny bridges at several points along its length, and a garden cafeteria. On the east side, a sports complex contained an indoor swimming pool with tennis courts above it. At each end, ramps led down to an underground carpark beneath the gardens. Now, however, as the cold November winds blew down from the north, heralding the arrival of winter, the gardens were sad and empty.

Li felt uncomfortable here. As if he had stepped through the looking glass into another world on the far side. This was not the Beijing he knew. There was nothing Chinese about any of it. This, and places like it, were built for the business community, the three hundred thousand foreigners at the heart of the city’s new commercial engine, and the Chinese nouveau riche who bought up all the new apartments and rented for profits of thirty and forty per cent. It was a bubble, double-glazed and insulated from the real world that he knew outside. A world where Chinese people worked hard, died hard and earned little, living and dying in tiny apartments with communal toilets and inadequate heating. A world where prostitutes were being murdered by a maniac living out some twisted fantasy.

They made their way through the gardens to the far side and into the tower on the north-west corner. An elevator sped them soundlessly up to the twenty-third floor and they stepped out into a carpeted hallway. Lyang was waiting for them at the far end, at the open door of the Harts’ apartment.

‘Hey, guys. Welcome to our humble home.’ She grinned and kissed them both on each cheek. In the entrance hall, slippers awaited them on a mat, and they kicked off their shoes to slip them on. The floors were dark polished mahogany. A staircase led off to an upper floor, and they walked through lush Chinese rugs into an open living room whose balcony gave on to a stunning view across the city and the gardens below. Concealed lighting along the perimeter of the ceiling was augmented by Chinese lanterns. Antique cabinets, and bookcases groaning with collectors’ items, lined walls that were hung with original scroll paintings by famous Chinese artists. Through open sliding doors leading off an open-plan dining room, they could see into a fitted kitchen which issued smells that were, finally, stimulating Li’s digestive juices. There was a cinema ratio plasma TV screen on one wall, and beside a state of the art stereo system playing muted jazz, Bill Hart was pouring cocktails at a drinks cabinet.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘No arguments. You guys have got to taste my patent Beijing margaritas with crushed ice.’

‘No arguments from me,’ Margaret said.

He kissed her on both cheeks and handed her a drink and then shook Li’s hand. ‘Good to see you, Li Yan. You look whacked.’

‘You’re looking pretty good yourself,’ Li said wryly, and accepted his drink from the American.

Margaret waved a hand around the room. ‘Obviously, I’m in the wrong business. Witchcraft clearly pays better than medicine.’

Hart laughed. ‘I thought it was voodoo.’

‘Whatever.’

He passed a drink to Lyang. ‘Actually, the money’s pretty crap. Well, here in China anyway.’ His smiled faded. ‘Lyang probably told you, I inherited the house in Boston when my wife died.’ He shrugged as if embarrassed. ‘I also picked up a fat insurance cheque that I’d happily have torn in a thousand pieces in return for a chance to turn back the clock. But I couldn’t. So I figured, spend it. I never expected to have it, I wouldn’t miss it when it was gone.’ He let his eyes wander around the room. ‘So we live well. And if we ever have to go back to the States …’ his eyes flickered towards Li and then away again,’… we can rent this place out to give ourselves a nice little income.’

‘You want to see around?’ Lyang said. She was dying to show them.

‘Sure,’ Margaret said.

Li would happily have sunk into one of the comfortable-looking armchairs arranged around a central coffee table, but good manners dictated that he look enthusiastic, and he nodded and forced a smile of false interest across his face.

They put their drinks on the table, and Lyang led them back out into the entrance hall and up polished stairs that turned back on themselves at a halfway landing, leading up then to a long central hallway. At one end was the guest bedroom, which doubled as a study, at the other the master bedroom and the baby’s room. There was also a large storeroom which Lyang said the sales people had told them was a maid’s room. No windows, no ventilation. ‘Foreign architects,’ she said. ‘They probably imagined that would be luxury to us poor Chinese.’

They peeked quietly into the baby’s room and heard the slow, rhythmic breathing of a sleeping child. There were expensive Chinese rugs everywhere, thick-piled and soft underfoot, and from somewhere they had managed to acquire a four-poster bed for the master bedroom. The view from here faced north, towards the lights of the China World Trade Center. In the street a long way below, a traditional Beijing restaurant was doing good business.

Li figured Mao must be turning in his mausoleum.

When they got back downstairs, Lyang excused herself and hurried into the kitchen. Li sank gratefully into the armchair that had been beckoning ever since they arrived and took a long drink of his margarita over a salted rim. He felt the alcohol rushing straight to his brain and immediately began to relax. Perhaps this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least he could escape for a few hours from the horrors of the Beijing Ripper and his victims, and the thought that Lynn Pan had been murdered by someone he knew.

‘Any developments on the Lynn Pan killing?’ Hart asked.

Li groaned inwardly. He wanted to tell Hart it was none of his damned business, but he knew he couldn’t do that. ‘Afraid not,’ he said quickly, before Margaret could say anything. He flashed her a warning look. From now on he was going to share information on the murder with as few people as possible. That included Bill Hart — and most of Section One.

‘It’s a crying shame,’ Hart said. ‘I still feel like shit every time I think about it. I wish I’d never put her name up for that job.’

‘You wouldn’t think of moving over into MERMER yourself?’ Li said. ‘They’re going to need someone to take over the project. And if you’re going to lose your polygraph funding …’

Hart put a finger quickly to his lips and nodded towards the kitchen. ‘No,’ he said in a quite normal voice that belied the warning he had just given. ‘It’s not an area in which I have any real expertise. Sure, I understand the principles, I can read the graphs, but the science and the software are a mystery to me.’

Margaret said, ‘Li Yan never told me how you two met. It wasn’t at a séance, was it?’

‘Bill did a polygraph for us a couple of years ago,’ Li said. ‘A guy who murdered his wife and children and parents in their apartment out in Xuanwu District. We were pretty certain he’d done it, but we just couldn’t prove it. I think that must have been when you were back in the States.’

‘So what did you do?’ Margaret asked Hart. ‘Hang him out the window by his feet and threaten to drop him if he didn’t confess?’

Hart laughed. ‘Didn’t have to. And, anyway, he’d volunteered for the polygraph. Figured he was too smart for us and could beat the test and prove his innocence.’

‘Isn’t there a polygraph expert at the Public Security University who normally does tests for the cops?’ Margaret said.

‘Yes,’ Li said, ‘but the good professor is in big demand all over the country. Not always available.’

‘So you called in the American witch doctor.’

‘Careful,’ Hart said. ‘I’ll start sticking pins in that doll of you I keep upstairs.’

Margaret grinned. ‘So what happened?’

Hart said, ‘I did one of my little parlour tricks. Got him to pick a number and then lie about it. Then I showed him the result on the chart and that was that.’

‘What was what?’ Margaret said.

‘He didn’t even have to take the test,’ Li said. ‘The guy broke down there and then and confessed.’

‘Was that before or after you held him under the water?’

Hart shook his head. ‘I’m never going to convince you, am I?’

‘Probably not.’

Li said, ‘So you think you could beat the number test?’

‘I’ve no idea. But we’re never likely to find out, are we?’

‘I’ve got a machine upstairs,’ Hart said. ‘In the study. It would only take a few minutes.’

‘No chance,’ Margaret said.

‘Go on,’ Li said. ‘You can’t sit there and pour scorn on the man’s work and then refuse to let him prove himself.’

‘It wouldn’t work on me,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d feel guilty even when I was telling the truth.’

Hart smiled. ‘Let me be the one to judge that.’ He called through to the kitchen. ‘Honey? How long till grub’s up?’

‘Another ten minutes,’ Lyang called back.

‘Plenty of time,’ Hart said.

There were two desks in the study, each pushed against facing walls. A third wall was floor to ceiling window, and facing it a futon was set against the fourth. There were matching iMac computers on each desk, cosmic screen savers mixing through sequential photographs of deep space: planets and moons, gas clouds, comets and galaxies. There was a solitary lamp on Hart’s desk illuminating his private polygraph machine, pens poised to point the finger at whomsoever should dare to prevaricate.

‘Nervous?’ Hart asked.

‘You bet,’ Margaret said, and she was beginning to wish she’d just kept her mouth shut.

‘Sit down.’ Hart pulled a chair on castors out from below his desk and beckoned her into it. He opened a drawer and started to take out the wires and cuffs and bands that he would attach to her before starting his little demonstration.

They heard Lyang on the stairs. ‘Don’t start without me,’ she called, and she ran along the hall and hurried in. ‘This I’ve got to see. Dinner can wait.’ She sat down by her desk, bumping against it and causing the screen saver on her computer to vanish. She glanced at the on-screen desktop which it revealed. ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘I’ve got mail. I never have mail.’ She smiled at Margaret. ‘We have broadband internet and no one ever writes to me.’ She clicked on the icon of a postage stamp at the foot of her screen. It had a red circle with a white ‘1’ inside it, indicating there was a message. The e-mail browser appeared on the screen, and the message was highlighted in the inbox. Lyang sat for a long time staring at it.

Hart was attaching a blood pressure cuff to Margaret’s left arm. He glanced across. ‘Who’s writing to you, honey?’

In a very small voice, Lyang said, ‘A dead woman.’

There was an extraordinary moment when time seemed simply to stand still, and they were frozen motionless by her words. It was a moment that seemed to Li to last a lifetime. He had been gazing out over the city, watching cars and trucks and buses etch lines of coloured light into the night, and even they seemed to come to a halt. He turned finally. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s from Lynn Pan,’ Lyang whispered, and Li felt all the hairs on his arms and shoulders stand up.

They gathered around her computer. The highlighted e-mail was titled For Bill, and was timed and dated at 5.03 p.m. the previous day, less than two hours before her murder.

‘Well, open it, for God’s sake,’ Hart said, and Lyang double-clicked on the highlighted bar. The e-mail opened up full-screen.

From: ‘Lynn Pan’ ‹lpan2323@sina.com›

Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2003 17:03:00

To: ‘Lyang Hart’ ‹lhart@earthmother.com›

Subject: For Bill

Bill,

No time to explain. Couldn’t e-mail you at work in case of intercept. Only have Lyang’s home e-mail. Scared something might happen to me. If so visit my private folder on academy website. User name ‘lynn.pan’. Password ‘scribble’. If I’m okay when you get this, drop it in the trash. I’ll explain later.

Lynn

There was something disturbing about reading the last words set down by a person who had been murdered so soon afterwards. Someone who had known they were in danger, someone who feared the worst. Lyang turned towards Li. ‘Why would she be scared something might happen to her when she thought it was you she was going to meet?’

Li had no idea. ‘Maybe she thought she couldn’t trust me. Maybe she thought someone would get to her first.’

‘But why? What was she scared of?’

Li tipped his head toward the computer. ‘Maybe we’ll find the answer in the private folder she mentions in the e-mail.’ He looked at Hart. ‘Do you know what she’s talking about?’

Hart nodded. ‘Websites are just space on a computer somewhere that’s linked to the worldwide web. Usually there are public folders, which anyone on the internet can access, and there are private folders, which only you can access. Private storage space, really. Most educational institutions allocate private folder space to staff and students on their websites.’

‘So now that you’ve got her user name and password you could access her private folder from here?’

‘Afraid not. You need special software. An FTP client. I don’t have that at home.’

‘But you do at the academy?’ Hart nodded. ‘We’d better go there, then.’

Lyang said, ‘What about dinner?’

‘I just lost my appetite,’ Li said.

And as they headed downstairs to get their coats, Margaret said, ‘I guess this means we’re never going to find out how good a liar I am.’ But no one was listening.