Chinese Whispers

III

The area around the window in the balcony had been taped off. Lyang had been told not to touch anything in that part of the living room. But forensics were long gone. So, too, the crowds in the gardens below. The management had sent someone out to clean the blood from the paving stones. A woman in a blue overall with bleach and a bucket of hot water. She had been at it for nearly an hour, but the stain was still visible, however faintly. Which would not do at all. Li had no doubt that a team of workmen would be there first thing in the morning to tear up the old pavings and lay new. It would not do to have the blood of one of its residents staining the reputation of the complex, a constant reminder to all the others of the tragedy which had taken place there. It was the kind of thing that could lower the value of property. And no one would want that.

Li moved away from the kitchen window, carrying with him the three glasses of Bill Hart’s scotch that he had brought in to dilute with water. It was how Bill said true scotch should always be drunk, Lyang had told them. A little water to release the flavour. No ice. That killed the taste. Lyang was sprawled at one end of the settee, her left leg folded up to her chest, an arm around it to hold it there, a cigarette burning in her free hand. It was her first cigarette, she confessed, since the day they told her she was pregnant. It had seemed so important, for the baby’s sake, to give up. Now that she was the only one affected by it, she didn’t give a damn. ‘Bill would have been horrified,’ she said, and then bit her knuckle to stop herself crying.

Li handed her a scotch. It was her third. On an empty stomach. And they were large ones. They were all feeling the effects of fatigue and stress, emotionally drained, physically tired. And the alcohol was providing relief and the promise of oblivion. Except for Li. He felt the whisky burning his stomach, but his head remained painfully clear. It was nearly midnight. An hour ago he could barely keep his eyes open. Now he was beyond tired. He knew he would not sleep tonight.

Margaret was curled up in one of the armchairs. She and Lyang had hugged and cried, and now she, too, was drained. Completely exhausted. Looking back, the events of the day seemed to her like a nightmare. Usually you woke up from a nightmare. Margaret knew that only sleep would provide an escape from this one. Alcohol offered her a route to that escape, and she was only too happy to take it. Xinxin was sharing a bed with Ling, and Li Jon was in Ling’s old cot. They had agreed that Margaret would sleep with Lyang, and Li would take the settee. They had talked and talked, at first about Bill and the case, and then about nothing of any consequence at all. Margaret raised her glass. ‘I’m for bed when I’ve finished this.’ And she drained it in a single pull. ‘Which is now.’

‘Me, too,’ Lyang said, and she also drained her glass.

Margaret eased herself out of the armchair and waited as Lyang got unsteadily to her feet. They knew she had been drinking before they got there, and although she seemed quite lucid, its physical effects on her were obvious now. She half staggered across the room, and Margaret put an arm around her to guide her towards the stairs. Margaret glanced back at Li. ‘Will you be okay?’

He nodded and took a sip at his whisky and listened to their uncertain progress up the stairs. He heard them in the hallway overhead, and then their voices distantly in the master bedroom. After a few minutes there was only silence. Li got up and turned off the lights and stood gazing out over the city. There was a time, not so long ago, when the power supply had been erratic, unpredictable. Demand greater than production. Now there seemed a limitless supply of power to burn. To waste. When he had first arrived here from Sichuan nearly twenty years ago, Beijing had shut down at night. Early. There had been very little to entertain a young man beyond his studies. Now the city never slept, and tonight Li knew he would keep it company.

He took another sip of his whisky and looked around the room in the city’s reflected light at all the things Bill Hart and Lyang had chosen to turn an empty apartment into a home. Every picture, every rug, every item of furniture, a decision they had made. With most people there was a story behind nearly everything you found in their home. A personal story, a history of a life together, memories shared. But what did any of it mean when you were gone? When you took those memories with you, and all that was left were their material remains, meaning nothing, except perhaps to the partner with whom the memories were shared, and for whom they now brought only pain.

Li was almost overcome by a sense of melancholy. He felt an intense sadness for Bill and Lyang. For himself, and a life in tatters. For Margaret, and all the unfulfilled dreams that had led her finally to a one-bedroomed police apartment in Beijing, a partner who was never there, a baby who depended upon her and had stolen her independence. A life that was no longer her own.

And he thought of his sister lying awake on a hard bunk in a cell somewhere in the north of the city, shut away from her life, removed from her daughter. And Xinxin, stifling her tears to look after baby Ling and her tiny cousin, taking on a mantle of responsibility she had yet to grow into. Like life itself, there was no way to take back a lost childhood.

He wondered, too, if his father was asleep. In a strange house, with a man who didn’t like him much, his dead brother’s best friend. And he remembered that unexpected moment between them when they had hugged, Li scared to squeeze too hard in case he crushed him like a bird.

All these things somehow had Li at their centre. Like satellites orbiting a planet, held there by the force of its gravity, dependent upon it for their very existence. It felt like an enormous burden of responsibility. And he was tired and beaten down, and did not know if he could bear it much longer. He took a long, final drink of whisky from his glass and felt the heat of it snaking its way down inside him. He saw Lyang’s cigarettes lying on the table and took one out of the packet. He lit it with her lighter and this time resisted the urge to choke on his first drag. By the time he finished it, it was as if he had never given up. He stubbed it out viciously in the ashtray, angry at himself for his weakness, and lay back on the settee, staring up at the shadows lying across the ceiling above him. They were static, unchanging, but even as he watched they seemed to take shape and form. The shadow of a man, the head of an elephant, a face. He closed his eyes to shut them out and saw the tall, stooped computer image of Commissioner Zhu crossing the hall of the EMS post office. An outline image passing through three hundred and sixty degrees, showing everything but the face. How could he ever prove it? How could he put a face to that faceless figure? How would he ever know what lie he’d been caught in?

* * *

Li sat up with a start. He had been so certain he would not sleep, he was shocked to realise he had been dreaming. A strange dream full of frantic running down endless corridors, a ferry boat slipping from its berth, gangplank falling away as Li leapt across the gap only to miss the rail and fall. And fall. And wake, heart pounding, a cold sweat beading across his forehead. The fear of the fall, that endless tumbling sensation, is what had woken him. But there was something else, something hidden in an obscure, cobwebbed corner of his mind. Had he dreamed it? He couldn’t remember. Like the dream itself, the memory of it was fading even as he tried to recall it. Perhaps because he was trying to recall it. He swung his legs on to the floor and rubbed his face in his hands, trying instead to empty his mind, to free it from the constraints of imperfect memory. The Tao says be full by being empty, he heard Dai say. And suddenly the memory of what his subconscious had been trying to tell him, pierced his consciousness like a spear.

‘Shit!’ he heard himself say, and he was on his feet immediately. He found a light switch at the foot of the stairs and climbed them two at a time, his slippered feet sliding on the polished surface. He padded along to the end of the hall, hesitated a moment, then knocked softly on the door of the master bedroom. He opened it as Margaret sat upright in the bed. Lyang lay face down beside her, dead to the world. ‘What is it?’ Margaret whispered, alarmed. She had been as certain she would sleep as Li had been that he would not. She glanced at the digital bedside clock. 3.15 a.m. And she had not slept a wink.

‘I need to talk to Lyang,’ Li said, and he moved into the bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed beside the sleeping widow. He looked down at her face in profile, all muscles relaxed, her mouth slightly open, and heard her deep, slow breathing. And for a moment he almost decided it could wait until morning. But it couldn’t, and he shook her gently by the shoulder. It was fully half a minute before he could rouse her.

‘What’s so urgent that you have to wake her up in the middle of the night, for God’s sake?’ Margaret whispered.

‘Trust me,’ Li said. ‘It’s important.’

Lyang raised herself on to one elbow, blinking away the sleep in her eyes. Li could almost see the recollection of the previous day’s events returning to her, grief welling up inside, the pain of a hangover already tightening its grip around her head. ‘What…?’ But she was still barely conscious.

Li said, ‘Lyang, I need you to wake up. This is really important.’

He saw her make the effort. ‘What is it?’

‘Lynn Pan had her own private space on the academy website. What about Bill? He must have had his own space, too.’

Lyang was still trying to clear her head. But even through the fuzziness something connected. ‘Jesus,’ she said, a part of her husband left indelibly in her vocabulary. ‘He did.’ And as the implications of that sunk in, ‘So maybe he put his files in there to keep them safe.’

Li glanced at Margaret and saw the fire of hope light her eyes.

* * *

Lyang sat at the computer by the light of the single lamp on Hart’s desk. Her white satin night-dress hung loosely from her shoulders. Her hair was a mess, her face smeared and puffy. Margaret stood behind her, looking not much better, eyes burning and gritty. Li had pulled up the chair from Lyang’s desk, and sat beside her. ‘How can you access Bill’s private stuff from here? He had to go to the academy last night to get into Lynn’s folder.’

‘He brought a copy of the FTP software back with him last night.’ Lyang shuffled through the desk drawers to find the CD, then slipped it into the tray that the iMac had spat out to receive it. She double-clicked the icon and loaded the software on to the hard disk. ‘Okay.’ She squeezed her temples and let out a long breath. ‘Jees, I feel like shit. Can someone get me a glass of water?’

‘I’ll get it,’ Margaret said, and she disappeared out into the hall.

Lyang opened up the Fetch programme and entered the academy’s FTP address into the dialogue box.

‘You know his user name and password?’ Li asked.

‘Sure. It’s bill.hart.’ She tapped it in, then paused at the password, trembling fingers hovering over the keys. Li heard her breathing become shallower and saw tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. ‘He changed his password to Ling after she was born,’ she said, before finally she was able to bring herself to type it in and hit the return key.

Margaret returned from the bathroom with a glass of water and Lyang drank thirstily, emptying it in one draught. They were now looking at a screenful of icons, all of Hart’s personal and private files. Lyang pushed the arrow about the screen until it was hovering over a folder labelled Pan’s Files. She dragged it to the desktop and it copied on to Hart’s computer. She double-clicked to open it. Inside there were thirteen folders, and a computer-shaped icon with the MRM motif in blue within it. Twelve of the folders looked like copies of the ones they had found the previous night among Lynn Pan’s files. Graphs A to F and Pics A to F.

Lyang flashed the arrow around the screen with frightening speed, opening and closing folders. There were three graph files in each of the Graph folders, but instead of being empty, the Pics folders now contained jpeg images of all the photographs the testees had been shown during the MERMER demonstration.

Li said, ‘Bill told me that one of Pan’s students thought she still had those on disk at home.’

‘Looks like she came up with the goods, then,’ Lyang said. ‘We can look at all of these.’

Margaret leaned in closer to the screen. ‘But you won’t be able to see the graphs, will you? Not without the software.’

Lyang’s arrow shot across the screen and double-clicked on the MRM icon. ‘Looks like Bill thought of everything,’ she said. The computer whirred, and images flashed across the screen as the MERMER software loaded up. ‘He’d have known he’d need a copy of this to work with the graphs at home.’

‘What’s this?’ Li stabbed a finger at the thirteenth folder. It was labelled, Report.

Lyang opened it up to reveal a word-processing document. She double-clicked to open it. A document unfolded on the screen. It was headed Preliminary Findings, MERMER Demo — Bill Hart. ‘Seems he already started to write up what he found,’ Lyang said, and her voice cracked on found. She put her hand to her mouth to hold back her emotion, and bit hard on her finger. ‘Typical Bill,’ she said.

Li pulled his chair closer to read the document which Hart had written.

A careful comparison of the first of the three graphs in each folder with the known sequence of photographs shown to each subject has enabled us to identify which of them was briefed on the murder for the purposes of the demonstration. MERMER responses to the ‘probe’ photographs, all of which related to the murder, were easily identified on the graphs. As a result, we were able to pinpoint A, B and C as the ‘murderers’, thereby eliminating them from our attempts to identify subject D, whom Professor Pan had labelled a ‘Liar’.

Li sat stunned. He knew who had been briefed on the murder, because he was one of them. And the Procurator General and Commissioner Zhu were the others. Which meant that Zhu was not the liar, and therefore almost certainly not the killer.

‘That blows a bit of a hole in your theory about the Commissioner,’ Margaret said helpfully. ‘Who’s left?’

Li said, ‘His deputy, Cao Xu, the Deputy Minister, and Yan Bo, the Director General of the Political Department.’ And he remembered Yan Bo scribbling in red ink on his notepad.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘So now we’re climbing even higher up the ladder.’

Li turned back to the screen, agitated now. There was more.

Identifying why Professor Pan labelled subject D a ‘Liar’ has proven more difficult. Apart from a continuity of response to the ‘probe’ pictures — that is to say, none of them showed a MERMER response — the graphs relating to the ‘target’ and ‘irrelevant’ pictures appear to be anomalous.

And that was as much as Hart had written.

‘Is that it?’ Li said.

Lyang shook her head, scrolling up and down the page. ‘There’s nothing else. If he knew more than that he’s taken it with him.’

‘But what does he mean, anomalous?’ Li said.

‘Hang on,’ Margaret interrupted. ‘You two are way ahead of me here. Would someone like to explain what targets and probes and irrelevants are? It’s like another language.’

Lyang turned towards her. ‘Three of the six subjects were briefed on a murder, for the purposes of the demo. When it came to the test all six were shown nine photographs relating to that murder — things that only the ones who’d been briefed would recognise. They’re called probes. They were also shown nine photographs of things that were known to them — their apartment, their dog, their car. And these are called targets. The idea being that the brain’s response to these things that are known to them will be the same as the response to the probe photographs. In the case of the ones who were briefed, that is. And not, in the case of the other three.’

Margaret was nodding. ‘Okay, and let me guess. The irrelevants are photographs that don’t mean anything to any of them, so they have negative responses to compare to the positive ones.’

‘You got it,’ Lyang said. ‘And they get to see thirty-six irrelevants.’

‘So what did Bill mean by anomalous?’ Li asked again.

Lyang rubbed her tired and swollen eyes. ‘I don’t know. It may be that they were getting a MERMER response from some of the irrelevants.’

‘You mean recognising pictures of things they weren’t expected to?’ Margaret said.

‘Exactly,’ Lyang said. ‘It can happen. Sometimes an irrelevant is accidentally known to them. Usually they are given a list of things in advance, so that if they might be shown something they recognise it can be changed before the actual test. That wouldn’t have been done for the demo.’

Li was shaking his head, baffled. ‘So how could Lynn Pan possibly tell from any of these responses that somebody was lying? I mean, lying about what? Lying how? All they were doing was looking at pictures.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Margaret said suddenly. She looked at Li. ‘You remember Mei Yuan’s riddle?’ He looked at her blankly. ‘The one about the two deaf mutes in the paddy field.’

Li blinked in surprise. ‘So she tried that one out on you after all.’

But Margaret wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing off on lateral plains. ‘Each of them thought he was left in that field on his own,’ she said. ‘And that the other one had sneaked off with the food or the drink to keep it for themselves.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Lyang said, looking from one to the other through a haze of fatigue.

So Margaret told her the riddle, but didn’t wait for her to work it out. ‘It was dark,’ she said. ‘That’s why they couldn’t see one another. They were both there, and neither of them was lying about it. They were both telling the truth, but they just didn’t know it.’

‘You’ve lost me now, too,’ Li said.

Margaret was searching for a way to unfuzz her mind, to express herself clearly. She waved a hand at the computer. ‘This MERMER thing. It can’t tell if you’re lying, right? Your brain sees something it recognises, it makes an involuntary response. You record it right there on the graph, and it’s plain for everyone to see. You see something you don’t recognise, you have no response. That’s also on the graph. So it’s got nothing to do with lying. But it’s got everything to do with telling the truth.’

They were both looking at her, concentrating hard, waiting, still not getting it.

‘Don’t you see? You can’t help but tell the truth, because you have no control over how your brain responds. Lynn Pan must have known there were anomalies in the irrelevants. But that’s neither here nor there. If you have a MERMER response to something you’re not supposed to, well that’s just a measure of the imperfect conditions in which the test was being conducted. But if you don’t have a MERMER response to something you should have, then that’s weird. That’s really off the wall. That doesn’t make any sense at all.’

Light began to dawn in Li’s eyes. ‘It’s one of the targets,’ Li said. ‘He didn’t recognise something he should have.’ Then he frowned. ‘What the hell could that be?’

Lyang said, ‘Well, we only have to look at nine photographs in relation to the graph to find out.’

She went into the Graphs D folder and double-clicked on the first of the graph icons, and the MRM software decoded the document. A window opened up on the computer screen showing a jagged graph line running from left to right. Using the mouse to capture the scroll bar at the bottom of the window enabled Lyang to scroll through the length of the graph. Its peaks and troughs related to a bar running along the top of the screen which held tiny icons of the images being shown at that moment to the testee. Each image was labelled probe, target, or irrelevant. So it was a simple matter to compare the graph responses to the target pictures, while enabling them to ignore the other forty-five.

Li focused all his attention on the graph. The MERMER responses, indicating knowledge or recognition, were represented by distinctive peaks that stood out well above the average flat response. The tiny icons of the photographic images were hard to make out. Li saw a car, but it just looked like any other ministerial car. No doubt Subject D, as Hart had called him, would have recognised its number plate. He saw the pink and white ministerial apartments where he had called on Commissioner Zhu first thing the previous morning. But there was nothing in that to give away the identity of Subject D. All five of the senior officers who had taken part in the demonstration with Li that day would have apartments in those blocks. Only Li, as by far the most junior officer, was allocated an apartment in the ministry compound. There was a picture of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. A son, perhaps. Li did not recognise him. There was a photograph of the exterior of a restaurant. It was not one Li knew. A favourite eatery, perhaps. Another showed the main entrance of Beijing Police Headquarters in East Qianmen Avenue. Any one of them would have recognised that one. Infuriatingly, there was nothing that indicated to Li the identity of Subject D.

Lyang suddenly stopped scrolling. ‘There,’ she said. And she pointed at the screen, almost triumphantly. She had followed in the footsteps of her dead husband and found what he found. ‘No MERMER.’ The graph showed a flat response to a picture clearly labelled target, where there should have been a MERMER response.

‘What is it?’ Margaret squinted at the picture, but it was too small to be identifiable.

Lyang double-clicked on the icon and the photograph opened up on top of the graph to reveal an orange sky at sunset, framed by the branches of trees drawing the eyes towards two serrated towers in silhouette rising against gold-edged clouds.

‘What’s that?’ Margaret asked.

Li frowned. ‘I’ve no idea. Looks like a couple of pagodas.’

‘It’s the Double-pagoda Temple,’ Lyang said, taking them by surprise, and they looked at her to see tears making slow tracks down her cheeks. ‘Also called the Yongzuo Temple. I only know because when he first came here, Bill did the whole tourist bit. Dragged me round every tower and palace and tourist attraction in Beijing. And then we did trips. Overnights to places like Xian and Taiyuan.’ She nodded towards the screen and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. ‘Which is where that is.’ She forced a smile. ‘It was typical of Bill. He knew more about China than the Chinese. The twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple is the symbol of Taiyuan. But if you don’t come from there you probably don’t know that.’

Margaret said, ‘Well Subject D certainly didn’t.’ She shrugged. ‘But I don’t see the significance of it. Why were they showing it to him in the first place?’

Li slapped his hand on the desk. ‘It has to be his home town,’ he said. ‘It’s the only category of the nine target pictures that it would fit. They showed all of us pictures of our home towns.’

Margaret ran her hand back through tangled, tousy hair. ‘But why wouldn’t he recognise his home town? I mean, if those pagodas are the symbol of the place …’

Li sat staring into space, his brain working overtime. Finally he said, ‘There can only be one reason he didn’t recognise it.’ He looked at Margaret. ‘It’s not his home town.’

She frowned. ‘You mean they made a mistake?’

‘No. I mean he’s not who he says he is.’

Margaret threw her hands out in despair. ‘And we don’t even know who he’s supposed to be.’

Li pressed fingers into his temple, screwing up his eyes in concentration, trying to get his mind to focus. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We can find that out easily enough now.’ He was thinking back to the MERMER test itself. Lynn Pan had shown Li a list of his target pictures. He knew he was going to see a picture of his home town in Sichuan. She must have shown the man who killed her a similar list. And he must have known that he wouldn’t recognise the place that was his home town. Even before she showed him it. And there was nothing he could do about that. His brain would respond in a way over which he had no control. It would tell her the truth, and reveal his lie. She must have known instantly that there was something far wrong. And he must have been watching for it, knowing she would see it, and planning how he would get rid of her even before the test was over.

But if he wasn’t who he was supposed to be — a high-ranking officer in the Ministry of Public Security — who the hell was he?

He closed his eyes and tried to picture the three men. Deputy Minister Wei Peng, squat, toad-like, arrogant, a stickler for protocol. Deputy Commissioner Cao Xu, tall, languid, unpredictable. Director General Yan Bo, older, shrunken, a man who enjoyed exercising his power. ‘In the name of the sky,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s Cao Xu! It’s the Deputy Commissioner.’

He opened his eyes and found Margaret and Lyang staring at him. ‘How can you know that?’ Lyang asked keenly. She had a vested interest. This was the man who murdered her husband, or had him killed.

‘Because the figure in the video, the one caught posting the parcel with the kidney in it at the EMS post office, was tall.’ One hundred and seventy-seven point five centimetres, Forensic officer Qin had been able to ascertain from the AutoCAD graphic. Five feet, eleven inches. ‘And he took a size forty-three shoe. There’s no way either the Deputy Minister or the Director General fit that profile. It has to be Cao.’

‘How can you prove that?’ Lyang said.

‘By finding out where he says he was born. If it’s Taiyuan, that pretty much clinches it.’

Margaret was having trouble dealing with the concept, and she recognised the truth of what Mei Yuan had said to her that morning. Li’s mind worked better on the practical than the abstract. He could solve a real problem better than he could solve a riddle. ‘But if he’s not the Deputy Commissioner, who is he?’

‘Oh, he’s the Deputy Commissioner, alright,’ Li said. ‘He’s just not Cao Xu.’