The Firemaker

I

Tuesday Afternoon

They stood outside blinking in the sunlight — a very different kind of light from the bright lamps that illuminated the subterranean gloom of the autopsy room. Margaret slipped on her sunglasses. Lily had still not reappeared after her dash to the toilet, and Li and Margaret stood uncertainly, unsure how to conclude their business. Each exhibited a strange hesitancy about saying goodbye. To share the experience of something as traumatic and revealing as the dissection of another human being had an almost bonding effect, inducing a shared and heightened sense of mortality.

Margaret looked up and down the street. ‘Did you leave your car up at Administration?’

‘No, the Chief took it. I’ll take the bus back.’

‘Bus?’ Margaret was shocked. ‘Surely police resources would stretch to a taxi.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t mind the bus.’

‘In this heat? I’ve seen the buses in this city. They’re jammed full. Standing room only. How far is it?’

‘Other side of Beijing.’

Lily appeared, looking distinctly pale. Her heightened sense of mortality had clearly manifested itself in an emptying of her stomach. ‘Lily,’ Margaret said brusquely, ‘I need to go back to Section One with Deputy Section Chief Li.’ She waved her hand vaguely. ‘Administrative detail.’ She paused. ‘So I won’t be needing you any more.’

‘That not possible, Doctach Cambo.’ Lily puffed up her indignation. ‘How you get back to university? I get car and take you there.’

‘Thought she might.’ Margaret smiled sweetly after her as Lily strutted off in the direction of Administration to find their car. Margaret turned to Li. ‘Can I offer you a lift?’

Li returned a wry smile, perfectly well aware of how she had just manipulated Lily. ‘There’s really no need.’

‘Oh, but I insist. I have no further classes today, and I’d be intrigued to see the operational headquarters of Beijing’s serious crime squad. I’m sure Section Chief Chen would have no objections.’

On the long drive across the city, Margaret had ample time to regret her impulsiveness. Lily sat up front with the driver, and Margaret sat in the back with Li in uncomfortable silence, a very awkward space between them that could easily have accommodated a third person. After the adrenalin rush of the morning, her body and brain were once again crying out for sleep, and she found herself having to blink frequently to stay awake. She should, she realised, have gone back to her hotel and slept for the rest of the day. After all, it was bedtime back home. But then again, she persuaded herself, if she had done that her body clock would never adjust to Beijing time.

Li was regretting accepting the lift for very different reasons. He was going to have to take her into the office. Already he could see the smirking faces, hear the whispered comments at his expense. And he knew that he would be unable to conceal his embarrassment. He blushed too easily. And yet it was a measure of his growing ambivalence towards her that he almost relished the opportunity to demonstrate his status and authority.

They approached Section One from the west along Beixinqiao Santiao, passing, at number five, an impressive building studded with colourful mosaic patterns beneath traditional upturned eaves. Marble gateposts were guarded by ubiquitous lions. ‘What’s that place?’ Margaret asked as it slid past their window.

‘Hotel for Overseas Chinese,’ Li said.

Margaret frowned. ‘You mean they have their own hotels?’

‘Some overseas Chinese think they are better than us poor mainlanders,’ Li said. ‘They think their money makes them better.’ He did not approve of the status awarded these overseas Chinese, some of them second and third generation, who returned from places as diverse as Singapore and the United States to flash their wealth and shower gifts upon poor relatives. It was true that for many years the money they had sent back to relatives in China had made an important contribution to the Chinese economy. But that was changing now. So much so that with the rapidly changing economic and political climate, many of these exiled Chinese were returning for good. China itself was becoming a land of opportunity, a place to make money.

As they passed the red-tiled façade of Noah’s Ark Food Room on their right, Li peered in the window, hoping that at this time of day a number of his colleagues would be grabbing a quick lunch — the fewer to snigger at his enforced association with the yangguizi. But the place appeared to be empty. He sighed.

If Margaret had been expecting some impressive showpiece building to house the headquarters of Section One, she would have been disappointed by the undistinguished brick block skulking anonymously behind the trees. From the street there was nothing to suggest that this was the nerve centre of Beijing’s fight against serious crime. Only a well-informed and observant onlooker would have spotted that the registration numbers of all the unmarked cars parked in the street began with the Chinese character representing the word Capital, followed by a zero — the telltale registration mark of all Beijing police vehicles. Li led Margaret, followed by Lily, in through the side entrance and up to the top floor. To his extreme discomfort the detectives’ room was full of officers sitting around poking chopsticks into carry-out dishes of noodles and rice, jars of green tea sitting on desks. There was an odd air of expectation as he walked in, and a hush that descended on their conversation, even before Margaret appeared in the doorway. Her appearance served only to heighten an already tense atmosphere. Detectives sat up self-consciously, wondering, clearly, who she was and why she was there. But Li was determined to play it cool.

‘Qian,’ he said. ‘We’ve made an identification of our burn victim. His name is Chao Heng, graduated from the American University of Wisconsin in 1972 in…’ He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand, ‘… microbial genetics. Whatever that is. Let’s get an address and find out what we can about him ASAP. Okay?’

Qian almost sat to attention. ‘I’m on it already, boss.’ And he reached for a telephone. But he hesitated before dialling, watching, like everyone else in the room, as Li opened the door to his office. There were some stifled sniggers as he stopped in his tracks, confronted by the bizarre figure of an old man with long, wispy white hair and an equally long silver goatee. He was wearing what could only be described as black pyjamas and was sitting cross-legged on Li’s desk. Margaret peered round Li to see what the cause of the hilarity was.

‘What the hell…’ Li looked at the old man in consternation, aware now of some less restrained laughter behind him. Lily had come into the room and was staring open-mouthed at the old man.

‘Who is he?’ Margaret finally asked, perplexed by the bizarre nature of the scene unfolding before her.

‘No idea,’ Li said. And in Chinese to the old man, ‘Would you like to tell me what you are doing in my office?’

More laughter from the detectives’ room as the old man emerged from some deep contemplation and turned on Li a wizened and solemn face. ‘Bad feng shui,’ he said. ‘Ve-ery bad feng shui.’

‘Feng shui?’ Margaret said, recognising the words. ‘I know what that is.’

Li turned to her in astonishment. ‘You do?’

‘Sure. It’s a current passion among middle-class Middle Americans with nothing better to do with their time. A girlfriend dragged me along to a class once. The balance of yin and yang and the flow of ch’i and all that kind of stuff. The spirituality of architecture and interior design.’ She paused. ‘So who’s this guy?’

‘Evidently, a feng shui man,’ said Li through gritted teeth.

‘And… he goes with the job, does he?’

Li glared at her, and was then distracted by more unrestrained laughter from his colleagues. He turned his glare on them, which muted their laughter a little, before turning back to the feng shui man. ‘What are you doing in my office?’ he repeated, although he already knew the answer.

His heart sank as the feng shui man confirmed, ‘Your Uncle Yifu asked me to fix your feng shui. He is very concerned about this place. And he is right to be. Ve-ery bad feng shui.’

Detective Wu brushed respectfully past Margaret with a solemn nod and appeared at Li’s shoulder. He pushed his dark glasses up on to his forehead. ‘Chief wants to see you, boss.’

‘What?’

‘As soon as you got back, he said. I think maybe he’s worried about your… feng shui.’ And he couldn’t keep his face straight any longer.

Li’s lips pressed together in a resolute line. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Margaret, and pushed back out into the corridor.

At the far end he rapped on a door and walked into Chen’s office. Chen’s face clouded as he looked up from his desk. ‘Shut the door,’ he said tersely. ‘What is that man doing in your office?’

‘He’s a feng shui man,’ Li said hopelessly.

‘I know what he is.’ Chen was struggling to keep his voice down. ‘What is he doing here?’

Li sighed. ‘My Uncle Yifu sent him.’

Chen leaned back in his seat and groaned in frustration. ‘I suppose I should have guessed.’

‘I’m sorry, Chief, I had no idea…’

‘You know that the practice of feng shui is not approved of in official institutions. Just get rid of him. Now.’

‘Yes, Chief.’ Li turned to the door, but stopped, his hand still on the handle. He turned back. ‘By the way. The suicide in the park? It’s a murder.’

When he got back to the detectives’ office Margaret was engaged in what appeared to be animated conversation with the entire office, Lily acting as interpreter. Li closed his eyes for a moment and wished, fervently, that he was somewhere else. ‘Hey, boss,’ Wu said, ‘this is some smart lady. Lily’s been telling us how she figured out the identity of the body in the park.’

Margaret was sitting on one of the desks and swivelled towards the door. ‘This is a really nice bunch of guys you’ve got working for you, Deputy Section Chief Li.’

‘Li Yan,’ Li said. ‘My name’s Li Yan.’ And he felt the colour on his cheeks rise involuntarily, blushing to the roots of his hair. He wondered if his day could possibly get any worse, and hurried into his office. The feng shui man was standing in the centre of the room taking notes. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to go,’ Li said.

The old man nodded sagely. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I shall need to give this much thought.’ He pointed towards the filing cabinet on the door wall. ‘This cabinet is no good here. It stops the door opening fully. The door must open one hundred eighty degrees. Negative ch’i collects in empty spaces behind doors, and you can’t see the whole room when you enter.’ He shook his head and turned to the window. ‘Window is jammed. Restricts the view. Will bring limited opportunities.’ He tapped the desk. ‘Are you left or right-handed?’

Li sighed. ‘Right-handed. Why?’

‘We have to move the desk. Light must not come from your writing side. And we need water in here and fresh plants.’ He pointed at dead plants in old pots on the sill. They had once belonged to Li’s predecessor, but since his death no one had watered them and so they, too, had died. ‘This is very bad feng shui. And we should think about the colour of the walls…’

Li took him gently by the arm. ‘I’m quite happy with the colour of the walls. But you really have to go now.’

‘Tomorrow I come back with the plan.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that. I’ll speak to my uncle tonight.’

‘Your uncle is my very good friend. I owe him many favours.’

‘I’m sure.’

The old man took a last look back as Li guided him out into the corridor. ‘Bad feng shui,’ he said. ‘Ve-ery bad feng shui.’

Li turned back into the detectives’ room to find all of them, including Margaret, watching him with ill-concealed smiles.

‘Anyway,’ Margaret said, ‘I think it’s time you took me to lunch, don’t you?’

‘She just asked him to take her to lunch,’ Lily translated quickly for the rest of the room, and they all waited with intense interest to see what Li’s response would be. He was trapped. She had just performed a huge favour for his boss, and therefore indirectly for him. The etiquette of guanxi required him to return the favour. And lunch was a very small price to pay. Except that his colleagues were unlikely to let him forget it in a hurry. He fumbled to remove his fob watch from the small leather pouch looped on to his belt and glanced at the time.

‘I don’t have much time, and it’s a little late,’ he said lamely.

Lily whispered a translation. ‘Aw, come on, boss,’ Wu said. ‘The least you can do is buy the lady some lunch.’

Margaret didn’t need a translation. ‘Something fast. A burger would be fine.’

Li knew there was no way out of it, and a tiny mischievous thought formed itself in his mind. ‘Okay. I know a place.’

‘I tell the driver to bring car round.’ Lily started for the door.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Li said quickly. ‘I’ll take a pool car. We’ll meet you back here in an hour.’ He held the door open for Margaret.

Lily scowled, displeased to be excluded from this outing, but in no position to argue.

‘Bye-bye,’ Wu called after them, in English.

Margaret stopped by the door, struggling to recapture what seemed like a very distant memory of an hour spent with a phrase book on the plane. ‘Zai jian,’ she said eventually, eliciting some laughter and some applause, and a chorus of ‘bye-byes’ from the other detectives.

II

Li picked up a dark blue Beijing Jeep in the street outside and they turned south and then west along Dongzhimennei Street. They sat in silence for several minutes as he appeared to focus all concentration on negotiating the traffic. Eventually Margaret glanced at him and said, ‘Lily said the detectives told her it was your uncle who sent the feng shui man.’

‘Yes.’ Li was not inclined to talk about it, but Margaret persisted.

‘So, it’s not widely practised in China now? Feng shui.’

Li shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But not officially. I don’t know very much about it.’

‘That’s a shame. Since it was the Chinese who invented it. It was an American Chinese who took the class I attended. He told us that the whole philosophy arose from the practice of the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism.’

‘What does an American Chinese know about Taoism?’ Li was scathing.

‘More than you, apparently.’

Li gave expression to his annoyance with a blast of his horn at a cyclist. ‘Taoism,’ he said. ‘From the word tao, literally meaning “the way”. It teaches us we must all find a place for ourselves in the natural way of things that does not disrupt the function of the whole. When we accept our place in the world, we become more concerned for the consequences of our actions, since for every action there is a reaction, and everything we do has a consequence for others.’

Beyond her surprise at this sudden and unexpected articulation of the centuries-old philosophy, Margaret made the connection for the first time with what Bob had been trying to tell her earlier; about Chinese society and the way it is reflected in its legal system; the sublimation of the individual in favour of the collective good; the realisation that none of us is alone in this world, that we are all interdependent.

Almost as if reading her thoughts, Li went on, ‘Of course, this is not just a Chinese philosophy. It has expression in much Western thinking. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…”’

Almost automatically, Margaret recalled the lines from her classes in English Lit. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”’

‘Of course, John Donne was writing in seventeenth-century England,’ Li said. ‘He no doubt drew his inspiration from much older Chinese philosophies.’

Margaret could barely conceal her amazement. ‘They didn’t teach you John Donne at the University of Public Security.’

Li laughed at the idea. ‘No.’

‘At school?’

He shook his head. ‘My Uncle Yifu. He was educated at the American University in Beijing before the communists came to power in ’49. He was offered the chance to do a post-graduate course at Cambridge, in England. But he chose to stay and help build the new China.’ A shadow passed almost imperceptibly across his face. ‘You might say that my uncle was the embodiment of the philosophy of Taoism.’

‘And how did he help to build “the new China”?’ Margaret was sceptical.

But Li didn’t notice. His mind was transported to another place, another time. ‘He became a policeman.’

‘What?’

‘He was considered to be an “intellectual”. And in those days this was not a good thing to be. Free thinkers were dangerous. So he volunteered to join the police force and go to Tibet.’

Margaret blew a jet of air through pursed lips. ‘That’s a bit of a leap. From Cambridge post-grad to Tibetan cop.’

Li was philosophical. ‘It was how the world turned then. He and his wife walked to Tibet from their home in Sichuan.’

‘Walked!’ Margaret was incredulous.

‘There were very few roads in those days over the mountains to the roof of the world. It took them three months.’

This seemed extraordinary to Margaret. The only thing with which she could equate it was the brave trek west across the United States made by pioneers in the early nineteenth century. And yet this had been less than fifty years ago.

‘They brought him back to Beijing in 1960,’ Li said. ‘By the time he retired five years ago, he had become a Senior Commissioner, and was head of the Beijing Municipal Police. I have been staying with him in his apartment since I came here to the Public Security University.’

He wondered if Margaret could possibly divine from this how hard it had been for him to walk in the footsteps of such an uncle. Footsteps that had always been too big, the strides between them too long. If by some miracle he should ever manage to fill them and match the strides, he would be accused of having been given his uncle’s shoes. There was no way for him to win.

They were heading south now on North Xidan Avenue, and near its corner with West Chang’an Avenue Li pulled the car into the kerb outside a colourful restaurant with a red-and-green-striped wall and yellow awnings. A raised, double-sided entrance under a green-tiled arching roof led up to a self-service snack bar on the first floor. In a street jammed with bicycles parked side by side, row upon row under the trees, pavement hawkers of every description were selling their wares: face masks with extending and retracting moustaches; nylons that wouldn’t rip or ladder even when jabbed with a needle. An old lady sat with a pair of scales on which you could weigh yourself for a handful of jiao. The hawkers were attracting large crowds, who paused briefly to take in the blonde-haired, blue-eyed yangguizi who got out of the Jeep with the young Chinese. Margaret felt awkward and, not for the first time, noted that the Chinese were not in the least self-conscious about simply staring at her.

‘Tianfu Douhua Zhuang,’ Li said.

‘I’m sorry?’

He let her precede him up the steps. ‘It is the name of the restaurant. Tianfu meaning “land of abundance”, signifying my home province of Sichuan. Douhua Zhuang means “Tofu Village”. The food is excellent.’

The first floor was jammed with late diners cramming communal tables. Round the walls, pre-cooked dishes sat in bowls behind glass counters. People at the door were queuing for carry-out noodles. Li nodded towards the stairs. ‘There is a proper restaurant with a full menu on the second floor, but we are too late for lunch today. This is for snacks, but you can eat well. Okay?’

‘Sure,’ Margaret said, a little overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. ‘But you choose. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘Okay. You like noodles?’ She nodded, and he grabbed a tray and got them each a bowl of noodles. Then they made their way round the glass counters, Li choosing a range of dishes: boiled tofu with sauce, won-ton, skewered meat, pickled vegetable, sweet dumplings. Everything was smothered with spicy sauces. Li got them each a beer, paid and then found them a corner at a busy table, and they sat down. Conversation lulled momentarily at the table, curious faces turning in their direction, and then the pursuits of idle gossip once more took over and Li and Margaret were relegated to happy anonymity.

‘So…’ Margaret was anxious to pick up their conversation from the car. ‘You’re still living with your aunt and uncle?’

‘No. Just my uncle. My aunt died before I came to Beijing. I did not know her. My uncle has never really got over the loss of her.’

Margaret watched Li carefully, and helped herself from the bowls that he had just visited. The food was delicious, but within minutes a mild burning sensation in her mouth had turned into a searing heat. She gasped for breath. ‘My God, it’s hot!’ And she grabbed her beer, draining nearly half the glass in a single draught. She looked up and saw a smile playing about Li’s lips.

‘Sichuan food,’ he said, ‘is always spicy. It is good, yes?’

She was having hot flushes now, her face, she was sure, a bright pink, perspiration breaking out across her forehead. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You brought me here on purpose, didn’t you? You’re trying to burn the mouth off me.’

Li’s smugness infuriated her further. ‘This is the cuisine of my home,’ he said. ‘I thought you would be interested to try it. I did not realise your soft American palate would be so… sensitive.’

She glared at him. ‘You’re a complete bastard, Li Yan, you know that?’

He felt a thrill of pleasure, not only from the sound of his name on her lips, but from the fact that she had remembered it. She took another gulp of beer and he took pity on her. ‘No, no.’ He took the glass from her. ‘Drinking will not help.’ He took a sachet of sugar from his pocket and passed it to her. ‘This will help.’

‘Sugar.’

‘Sure. It will stop the burning.’

Still suspicious, she opened the sachet and emptied its contents into her mouth. Miraculously, as it melted, so did the heat in the sweetness. ‘It does,’ she said with surprise.

Li smiled. ‘Spicy and sweet. And therein you have the balance of opposites. Yin and yang. As in feng shui.’

‘I thought you didn’t know anything about feng shui,’ Margaret said suspiciously.

‘Not of its practice. But I understand the principles.’ He filled his mouth with more spicy food.

‘How can you do that?’ Margaret asked. ‘Doesn’t it burn you, too?’

‘I am used to it. And if you will eat some more now, you will find it does not burn so much and you will taste the flavours. And always take some noodles with each mouthful.’

Hesitantly, she followed his advice, and to her amazement the food did not seem quite as hot as it had. But she proceeded more cautiously now, sipping frequently at her beer. ‘So where did you learn to speak such good English? At school?’

‘No. We did learn English at school, but it was my Uncle Yifu who taught me to speak it properly. He said there are only two languages in the world worth speaking. The first is Chinese, the second is English.’

Margaret couldn’t help but notice the warmth in his eyes when he spoke of his uncle, and she realised, almost with a shock, that she had stopped seeing his face as Chinese, or as different in any way. It was just familiar now, a face she knew, a face she had even stopped seeing as ugly, for there was something deep and darkly attractive in his eyes.

‘He made me learn ten words every day,’ Li said, ‘and one verb. And he would test me on them, and make me practise. In Yuyuantan Park there is a place they call the “English Corner”. Chinese who speak English meet there just to talk to one another and practise speaking the language. Uncle Yifu used to take me there every Sunday morning and we would talk English until my head hurt. Sometimes there would be some English or American tourist or businessman staying in the city who would hear about the “English Corner” and come and make conversation with us. And that would be very special, because we could ask about slang and colloquialism and cursing that you cannot find in books. Uncle Yifu always says you only fully understand a society when you know which words they debase for swearing.’

Margaret smiled, seeing the truth in this. ‘Your uncle should have been a teacher.’

‘I think, maybe, he would have liked that. He never had any children of his own, so all the things a father would like to pass on to his son, Uncle Yifu has passed on to me.’ Li raised the noodle bowl almost to his lips, and scooped noodles quickly into his mouth with his chopsticks. ‘But I didn’t learn all my English from my uncle. I spent six months in Hong Kong after the handover, working with a very experienced English police officer who had decided to stay on. This was very good for my English. And then I was sent for three months to the United States to take a course in criminal investigation at the University of Illinois in Chicago.’

‘You’re kidding!’ Margaret shook her head in wonder. ‘I took that course.’

‘But you are a forensic pathologist.’

‘Sure, that’s what I’m experienced in, but I also had firearms training with the Chicago PD. Was a pretty good shot, too. And I took the course in criminal investigation because… well, because it does no harm to broaden your horizons. A year later I was teaching forensics part-time on the same course. That’s where I met your boss. It’s amazing we didn’t run into each other.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Your employer paid for you to take this course?’

‘Hell, no.’ Margaret smiled at the thought. ‘I took three months out at my own expense. I suppose I could afford to in those days. I had a husband who was working.’

‘Ah.’ Li couldn’t have explained, even to himself, why he was disappointed to be reminded that she was married. His eye flickered down to the ring on her wedding finger. ‘You have been married a long time?’

‘Foolishly,’ she said with a bitterness he had neither seen nor heard in her before, ‘since I was twenty-four. Seven years. Must have broken a mirror.’

‘I’m sorry? You broke a mirror?’ Li was confused.

‘It’s a silly superstition in the West. They say if you break a mirror it will bring you seven years’ bad luck. Anyway, I am no longer married, so perhaps my luck is changing.’

Li was unaccountably relieved. But still intrigued. ‘What did he do, your husband?’

‘Oh, he lectured in genetics at the Roosevelt University in Chicago. It was his great passion. Or so I used to think.’ Li heard great hurt in her voice, but she was trying to disguise it by being flippant. ‘He always used to say genetics could be our salvation, or our downfall. We had to make the right choices.’

‘Life is always about making the right choices.’

‘And some of us always seem to make the wrong ones.’ And she suddenly realised she had gone too far, and her eyes flickered downwards with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to know about my sordid private life.’ She tried to laugh it off. ‘I’m sure you’d much rather know how I became an expert in crispy critters.’

‘In what?’

She laughed. ‘That’s what a pathologist I used to work for called his burn victims. Crispy critters. Sick, isn’t it?’ Li thought it was. ‘I guess it’s a kind of self-defence mechanism, that kind of humour. We live in a pretty sick world, and that’s our pretty sick way of dealing with it.’

‘So how did you become an expert in… “crispy critters”?’ The distasteful sound of it seemed to bring back the smells of the autopsy room, and Li’s nose wrinkled in disgust.

Margaret smiled at his squeamishness. ‘Oh, I guess I got interested when I was assisting a pathologist at Waco. And then during my residency at the UIC Medical Centre I got lots of experience dealing with victims in trauma, fire victims from automobile accidents, home fires, airplane accidents, even a couple of cases of self-immolation, like you thought your guy in the park was. Then when I got a job as a pathologist with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, I just sort of developed the speciality. I can’t say it had ever been an ambition. But then, we don’t always end up doing or being what we started out to do or be, do we?’ She looked at him. ‘Did you always want to be a policeman?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Short conversation.’

‘Why did you want to come to China?’ he asked, and it was as if, in asking the question, he had flicked a switch and turned out a light somewhere inside her. She lost all vivacity, and her eyes took on a dull cast.

‘Oh…’ She shrugged. ‘It was just something that came up, when getting away from Chicago was what I most wanted to do in life. It didn’t have to be China. Anywhere would have done.’

A sixth sense told him that he had now entered dangerous territory, and that to venture any further down this particular path would be both fruitless and damaging. He slipped his watch from its pouch on his belt and checked the time.

‘May I see?’ She leaned across and held out her hand. He passed it to her, the chain fully extended. It was a very plain, hexagonal watch set in a heavy pewter-coloured casing. A bald-eagle badge decorated its leather pouch. ‘It’s very unusual,’ she said. ‘Did you get it in the States?’

‘Hong Kong.’ He slipped it back in its pouch. ‘I really must get back to the office.’

‘Of course.’ She washed down her remaining noodles with the last of her beer, and they headed out into the afternoon heat that beat down so relentlessly from the burned-out sky. ‘My mouth is still on fire,’ she said.

He took her arm and steered her south along the sidewalk. ‘Chinese are very practical people,’ he said. ‘Which is why when you have a Sichuan restaurant, you have an ice-cream parlour two doors along.’ And they stopped outside a small glass-fronted shop with multicoloured plastic strips hanging down over the door. Above it, white letters on blue, was the legend Charley’s Ice Cream Parlour. And beneath that, Sino-America Joint Venture.

Margaret laughed. ‘I don’t believe it!’

Li said, ‘Specially to cool the palates of over-sensitive Americans.’

She flicked him a look, and he grinned. They went in and picked a couple of scoops each from a huge range of flavours displayed in a glass freezer cabinet, and then ran to the car and the cool of its air-conditioning before the ice cream melted.

III

Something happened on the drive back. Something beyond touch, or reason. Something very tiny in the great complexity of human relations. Like a radio whose tuning has slipped fractionally off-station, turning fine music into something scratchy and irritating. They had finished the ice cream long before they reached Section One, and the chill of it seemed to cool the warmth there had been over lunch. Margaret began to wonder if she had imagined that warmth. Perhaps it had been the heat of the food. For now Li seemed aloof, disinclined to talk. On those few occasions he met her eye, his eyes were cold, his demeanour polite, but formal. Where was the man she had listened to speaking fondly of his uncle, of Sunday mornings in the park at the ‘English Corner’, of the one ambition he had ever had to be a policeman? The transformation during that short drive from the restaurant to the office was both extraordinary and complete. Back again was the surly, resentful, ugly police officer she had encountered the previous day, and again this morning. Margaret’s few attempts at conversation elicited little more than a monosyllabic response. Was it something she’d said or done? She found herself growing frustrated and angry.

Li was furious with himself. He should never have taken her for lunch. He had been trapped into it by his own weakness, and it was only now, as they drove back to the office, that he realised the full consequences of it. It wasn’t just the ribbing he would receive from his colleagues. That would be embarrassing enough, but he could handle it. What he knew he couldn’t handle was any kind of relationship with this woman. And for a time, as they had talked across the table, he had allowed himself to succumb to some unaccountable attraction to her. And in doing so, had lowered his guard and revealed much more of himself than he would ever have wished. It was ridiculous! And even now, as he manoeuvred the Jeep through the frantic afternoon traffic, he could not for the life of him think what it was about her he found attractive. For a start, she was an American, a yangguizi with a fast mouth. She was arrogant and superior and steeped in a shallow culture that could hardly have been more different from his own. He glanced at her sitting in the passenger seat, stiff and removed. For a time, over lunch, she had seemed almost human, vulnerable, displaying a hint of some deep hurt. Perhaps, he thought, that explained why on the drive back she had become distant again. She, too, had revealed too much and was regretting it.

Lily Ping was furious with both of them. They were more than forty minutes late. She said nothing, of course. Not in the presence of Li. But she sat in the detectives’ office, a brooding presence in the corner, like a black rain-cloud, awaiting their return. Her fury, though, had less to do with their tardiness than the fact that she had been excluded from lunch. She was extremely curious about how it had gone, as were the detectives in the office. But they had other things to occupy them in the interim. A succession of Beijing low lifes had passed through the office — unshaven creatures in dirty tee-shirts and baseball caps, wide boys in cheap suits and oiled hair — before being led down the corridor to the interview room. Pimps and suspected small-time drug dealers who might have known or had some association with the man found stabbed on waste ground out west that morning. The phones had never stopped. Detective Qian must have made twenty calls, and at one stage had sent a police dispatch rider to pick up dental records from somewhere downtown and deliver them to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination. A fax from the Centre had caused some excitement, but no one was sharing any information with Lily. Conversations were cryptic and careful.

She was checking her watch yet again when Li and Margaret finally returned. A few heads lifted to cast curious glances in their direction, but for the moment the work in hand was serious and took precedence. The smart comments they would save for later. Lily’s annoyance intensified when Li and Margaret failed even to acknowledge her, and passed straight through into Li’s office. Neither was smiling, and they brought in with them a strange, strained atmosphere. Qian followed them through. Li had already picked up the phone.

‘That’s us, Chief. Any time.’ He hung up and turned to Margaret. ‘The Chief’ll be through in a minute. He wants to say thanks.’

‘Does he.’ Margaret’s voice was flat.

Qian handed Li the fax from the Centre. ‘Dental records confirm the identity of the burn victim, boss. As you thought, his name was Chao Heng. Apparently he was the scientific adviser to the Minister of Agriculture before retiring six months ago through ill health. Lived in an apartment in Chongwen District.’

Li read quickly through the report from the Centre and looked up at Margaret. ‘You were right on both counts,’ he said. ‘Identity, and sedation.’ He waved the fax. ‘That’s the test results from the Centre. They show a high level of ketamine in his blood.’

Margaret nodded dully. Had she had a continued involvement in the case, then her interest would have been keener. As it was, she felt deflated, depressed. Others would unravel the crime she had identified. She had nothing further to contribute, or at least she would not be asked to do so. Li’s sudden mood change was having a more profound effect on her than she could have imagined. She had only been in China twenty-four hours, but already it seemed like a lifetime, and she was ready to go.

Li risked a couple of quick glances in her direction as she gazed absently past him and out of the window. He found annoyance welling up inside at her apparent lack of interest. She was happy, it seemed, to swan in for a couple of hours, demonstrate her superior knowledge, and swan out again. Well, to hell with her! He returned the fax to Qian. ‘Thanks. We’ll talk in a minute.’

Qian turned and passed Section Chief Chen on the way in. Chen shook Margaret’s hand warmly. ‘Dr Campbell, I am so very grateful to you for your help. It has been invaluable, Li Yan, has it not?’

Li nodded solemnly. ‘It has.’

‘And has my deputy looked after you well?’ Chen asked Margaret.

‘Oh, very well,’ said Margaret. ‘He took me to lunch at a Sichuan restaurant. My mouth is still burning.’

‘It was my pleasure,’ Li said.

Chen laughed heartily, to the amazement of the detectives who could hear him through the open door. He steered Margaret out and into the corridor, followed by a resentful Lily. ‘Come, I will see you to your car. And I will phone Professor Jiang this afternoon to thank him personally for letting us borrow you.’

Margaret flicked a backward glance over her shoulder to see Li already involved in discussions with his detectives. In all likelihood she would never see him again.

As she turned to be led down the corridor, Li looked over to the door to see her back for an instant before she disappeared. Apparently, he thought bitterly, he wasn’t even worth a backward glance.

Another couple of sullen hoodlums were bundled in to have details taken before being led away for interrogation. ‘We took more than fifteen statements this morning,’ Wu told Li. ‘Anyone and everyone who knew Mao Mao. The scum of the earth. Dope dealers, pimps, prostitutes.’ Li wandered through to his office and Wu followed. ‘He wasn’t a very nice guy, Li Yan. Nobody’s shedding any tears for him. Even his family. You’d think a mother would grieve for her son. When we told her, she just spat and said, “Good riddance”.’

From his window, Li could see into the street below. Through the foliage he watched as Margaret got into the BMW. Good riddance. Mao Mao’s mother’s words about her son found an echo in his present thoughts. Just before she closed the door, Margaret glanced up. Damn! She’d seen him watching. He took a quick step back, then felt foolish. This was absurd! He focused his mind again on Wu, who was still talking. ‘It was definitely drugs he was into, but he wasn’t one of the Golden Circle, just one of the flies attracted by the dung.’

The Golden Circle was what they called the ring of dealers at the centre of the Beijing drug trade, the ones whose hands were always clean, who always had an alibi, who never took the rap. They were the ones who made the money, trading death for gold.

‘Of course,’ Wu said, ‘no one knows a thing.’ He paused. ‘And you know what, boss? You get an instinct for these things. I don’t think they’re lying.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes they know more at the top about what’s going on at the bottom than the other way around. Take out the file on The Needle for me. Leave it on my desk. I’ll have a glance at it tonight.’ The Needle was the nickname they all used for the man everyone knew was behind most of the heroin on the streets. But what was known, and what could be proved, were two very different things. A conspiracy of silence surrounded him, a phenomenon almost unknown in Chinese society. The masses line was no competition for the aura of fear that surrounded him.

‘Sure, boss. And I’ll get those statements to you as soon as we can get them typed up.’ Wu headed back to his desk.

From the door Li called after him, ‘By the way… was he a smoker? Mao Mao.’

Wu looked sheepish. He knew he’d been caught out. ‘Don’t know, boss.’

‘Better find out, then.’ Li beckoned to Zhao to follow him into his office. It was stiflingly hot. He tried to open his window more fully, but the feng shui man had been right, it was well and truly jammed. Whether or not it restricted the view, it certainly stopped the flow of oxygen. ‘Any news on the intinerant?’ Li asked.

‘Yeah, we got confirmation back from Shanghai on his identity.’ Zhao consulted his notebook conscientiously. ‘Guo Jingbo, aged thirty-five, divorced. No criminal record. No known criminal associations. He was a builder’s labourer. Finished on a building site in Shanghai about six weeks ago and told friends he was going to Beijing in search of work. But he didn’t register with Public Security until four weeks ago, so there’s a missing two weeks in there.’

‘And did he find any?’

‘Any what?’ Zhao looked mystified.

‘Work,’ Li snapped irritably.

‘Couldn’t have looked too hard,’ Zhao said. ‘No record of him even applying for any job.’

‘Associates in Beijing?’

‘None that we know of. He was staying in a hostel in the north of the city. Not somewhere you’d want to spend any great length of time. So most people don’t. Nobody really knew who he was or what he did.’

‘Was he a smoker?’

Zhao nodded. ‘Nicotine stains on his fingers, matches and a half-empty pack of cigarettes in his pocket.’

‘Brand?’

‘Chinese.’

Li grunted. There wasn’t a single damned thing in any of this to give them even a start. He sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better start rounding up all the itinerants who’ve registered in the city in the last six weeks.’

Zhao looked pleased with himself. ‘It’s under way, boss.’ Then his face clouded. ‘Might take some time to do all the interviews, though.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s more than fifteen hundred of them.’

‘So what are you hanging around for?’ Li jerked his thumb towards the door. ‘Get started.’

As Zhao went out, Wu poked his head in. ‘Just spoke to a couple of Mao Mao’s pals. He didn’t smoke. So that cigarette end wasn’t his.’

Li nodded. ‘Thanks.’ He got up and closed the door and settled back in the tilting wooden chair he had inherited along with the office. It groaned as if objecting to being sat on, and the tilting mechanism squeaked. It had probably never been oiled since new. He put his hands together as if praying, placed the tips of his fingers beneath his nose, and leaned back with his eyes closed. The first image that floated into his consciousness was Margaret laughing across the table from him at the Sichuan snack-house. He blinked her away furiously and found himself standing on the edge of the clearing in Ritan Park looking at the smouldering cross-legged figure beneath the trees. He was able to visualise his thoughts in three dimensions, words and images co-existing. The first of those words, a question, drifted into his peripheral vision. ‘Why?’ It had all been so elaborate and high-profile. A murder in a public place staged to appear, at least superficially, like some form of ritual self-sacrifice. Li placed himself in the position of the murderer and faced the same difficulties the murderer must have faced. Somewhere, somewhere private, the victim’s home perhaps, the murderer had struck Chao Heng on the head, hard enough to induce unconsciousness, but not to kill him. He had then sedated him by injecting ketamine into his foot. If this had all taken place in Chao’s apartment, then the murderer faced the problem of transporting the body to the park, unseen, to stage the finale. It would have had to have been dark. And he would have had to have manoeuvred the body into the park before first light, long before it opened. He must then have sat with the semiconscious Chao in the privacy of the clearing until early morning activities in the park were well under way. The clearing was hidden from general view, but the risk of discovery must have been high. Another image drifted into the picture in his head. The cigarette end. If the murderer was a smoker, and he had sat for two or three hours waiting for the park to open, why was there only one cigarette end? Wouldn’t he have smoked at least four or five cigarettes, perhaps more in that stressful situation? He put the cigarette end to one side, next to the ‘Why?’. The killer had then arranged the still-dazed and compliant Chao into the lotus position, poured gasoline over him and set him alight. The danger of discovery at that moment must have been at its most intense. He must have retreated through the trees, away from the path that the children ran up just minutes later to make their awful discovery. So the killer was still in the park when the body was discovered. Someone must have seen him. A Witness. As if in some virtual-reality mind game, he placed the ‘Witness’ word next to the ‘Why?’ and the ‘Cigarette End’ and pulled the ‘Why?’ back to centre vision. Why? Why would anyone go to such elaborate and dangerous lengths to fake a suicide? And why would someone so meticulous be careless enough to leave a cigarette end at the scene of the crime. He placed the ‘Cigarette End’ centrally next to the ‘Why?’ and let his eye wander to the ‘Witness’ on the periphery. No matter how careful he was, someone must have seen him.

He opened his eyes and shouted, ‘Qian.’

Qian appeared quickly at the door. ‘Boss?’

‘How’s your list of habitués in the park progressing?’

‘Getting there.’

‘Well, get there faster. And start interviewing ASAP. Someone saw the murderer. He was still in the park when the kids found the burning body. We want people’s memories when they’re still fresh. Put as many men on it as are available.’

Qian said, ‘Consider it done.’ He turned back to the detectives’ room.

Li called after him, ‘Has anyone been out to Chao’s apartment yet?’

‘Just the uniforms, to seal the place up.’ Qian looked at his watch. ‘Forensics should be there within the half-hour.’

Li jumped to his feet. ‘Okay, as soon as you’ve set up the interviews, you can run me over there. I want to take a look at the place.’

Qian nodded and disappeared. Li stuck his hands deep in his pockets and wandered to the window. Already it seemed like hours since he had watched Margaret get into the back of the car. She seemed remote now, and irrelevant. He focused his mind back on the picture in his head. The ‘Why?’ was the answer, but not the means of finding it. The cigarette end was what bothered him most. That and the cigarette ends at the other two crime scenes. He had a sudden thought and lifted the phone. He dialled quickly and waited impatiently. Someone picked up at the other end. ‘Dr Wang? I want you to do something for me…’

IV

Chao Heng had lived in an apartment just off Xihuashi Street in the Chongwen District in the south-east quarter of the inner city. It was a relatively new high-rise block that stood in its own compound behind high walls. Glassed-in balconies, like miniature conservatories, projected from every apartment, and were used for everything from growing vegetables and pot plants to drying clothes and bedding. The walls of the block, all the way up to the twelfth floor, were studded with self-contained air-conditioning units that blew cool air through the apartments and belted hot air out into an already overheated atmosphere. Qian parked their Jeep in the compound next to a blue-and-white, and the forensics van which had got there ahead of them. Old women sat in the shade of huge umbrellas watching with dull-eyed curiosity. Some children were kicking a ball about in the heat of the sun, their cries echoing back from the walls of high-rise buildings that loomed over them like the walls of some deep secret canyon. Dozens of bicycles stood parked in neat rows under the shade of a line of trees, but there were no other vehicles in the compound.

The dusty entrance hall seemed gloomy after the sunlight that blasted white off every surface outside. The doors of the elevator stood open. The operator, a skinny man with wizened brown skin, wearing only a pair of old blue shorts and a grubby singlet, squatted on a low stool just inside, smoking cheap, acrid-smelling cigarettes. There was a pile of ends and ash on the floor beside him. The air hummed with the buzz of flies and the distant echo of the kids playing outside. It was hot and airless. He spat on the floor and stood up as Li and Qian approached. ‘Who are you going to see?’

Li produced his maroon Public Security ID wallet and opened it to show the operator his photograph. ‘Beijing Municipal Police. CID.’

‘Oh. You’ve come to see Chao Heng’s place.’ He stood to one side to let them in. ‘Some of your people are already up there.’ He closed the doors and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

The elevator started its slow assent, groaning and complaining as it went. ‘Does everyone use the elevator?’ Li asked.

The old man shrugged. ‘Not always. During the night, when the elevator is switched off, residents use their gate keys.’

‘And there are gates on all the stairs?’ Li asked. The operator nodded. ‘So what about visitors?’

‘They have to take the elevator.’

‘What about when the elevator is turned off?’

‘No one comes visiting at that time.’

‘But if they did?’

The old man shrugged again. ‘Whoever they were visiting would have to know they were coming, so that they could come down the stairs and unlock the gate to let them in.’

‘So you get to see just about everyone who comes and goes.’

‘Yep.’

Li and Qian exchanged glances. There was a good chance, then, that this man had seen the murderer. Li said, ‘So what about Chao Heng? Has he had many visitors recently?’

The old man’s lip curled in distaste. ‘Chao Heng always has visitors. Young boys and yangguizi.’

‘Young boys?’ Qian looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean, young boys?’

‘Young boys!’ the old man repeated as if Qian were deaf. ‘Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen… Such men should be locked up.’ Qian looked faintly shocked.

Li said, ‘And foreigners, you said. What kind of foreigners?’

‘Americans, I think. They never spoke any Chinese.’

‘And other Chinese visitors?’

‘Oh, some posh-looking people in big cars. Chao was some big shot at the Ministry of Agriculture.’

The lift juddered to a halt on the fifth floor. Li said, ‘What about last night? Did he have any visitors last night?’

The old man opened the doors and shook his head. ‘Not for a week or two.’

‘Then he must have gone out himself some time yesterday, or last night.’

‘Not when I was on.’ The old man was adamant. ‘He’s hardly been over the door himself in a month. Chao Heng was not a well man.’

Li and Qian stepped out of the lift. Li said, ‘We’ll want you to come up to headquarters and make a detailed statement. Can you get someone to stand in for you?’

‘Sure. The street committee’ll arrange it.’

A uniformed police officer stood outside the door to Chao Heng’s apartment. Inside, two forensics officers wearing white gloves and plastic slip-on shoe covers were going over every inch of it. The air-conditioning was switched off, so it was unbreathably hot. Li and Qian took gloves and shoe covers from a bag at the door and slipped them on. The forensics men nodded acknowledgment and one of them said, ‘Don’t touch anything unless you have to.’

By Chinese standards, this was a large apartment for a single person. Off a central hall were two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchenette and dining area and a living room that opened out on to the glassed balcony. It was a measure of Chao Heng’s status that he should be given such an apartment.

Li and Qian wandered from room to room, observing, absorbing. Li sniffed. Above the rancid smell of stale cigarette smoke, on a higher, sharper note, there was a strange antiseptic smell in the place, like disinfectant or something medical. It was not pleasant. In the kitchen the smell gave way to the stench of rotting food coming from a bin that needed to be emptied. Dishes lay unwashed in the sink. Worktops were dirty and littered with the debris of food preparation. An ashtray was filled to overflowing. Li lifted one of the cigarette ends and looked for the brand name. Marlboro. He put it back. A small refrigerator had virtually no food in it. Apart from a pack of tofu, there were just half a dozen bottles of beer, and one bottle of Californian red wine. Unusual. A gift, perhaps. Or brought back from a trip abroad. Li looked at the label. Ernst and Julio Gallo, Cabernet Sauvignon. Chao Heng obviously didn’t know much about wine, or he wouldn’t have kept a bottle of red in his refrigerator. So it was unlikely he had bought it himself. A wall cupboard was full of dried and canned food: noodles, mushrooms, dried fruit and cans of fruit, tinned vegetables, a large jar of flour, smaller jars of crushed lotus seeds and sweet paste for dim sum. On the work surface beneath it, a can-opener and several empty cans that had once contained lychees in syrup, beansprouts, water chestnuts.

‘A vegetarian?’ Qian suggested.

‘Possibly.’ Li let his eyes wander over all the different jars and cans and packs of food in the cupboard. There certainly didn’t seem to be any meat, or meat products. There was something else missing, something obvious only because of its absence. But it still took him a few moments to identify it. ‘No rice either,’ he said.

‘Maybe he ran out,’ Qian said.

‘Maybe he did.’

They went into the bathroom. Like the kitchen it was a mess. Old tubes of toothpaste, creams and ointments cluttered the shelf above the sink. The mirror was spattered with soap and shaving foam. A bloodstained safety razor that had been less than safe lay in a sink which had a ring of grime around it. Used towels were draped over the side of the bath which was ringed, too, with filth, like the contour of scum left by polluted seawater when the tide retreats. Li removed a glove and felt the towel. There was still a hint of dampness in it.

Qian opened a small cabinet on the wall, and cardboard boxes and plastic tubs rattled out and on to the floor. He stooped to pick them up, replacing them one by one. Li looked over his shoulder. There were drugs of some kind, commercially packaged Western medicines with strange and exotic names: Epivir, AZT, Crixivan; and a whole range of traditional Chinese and herbal medicines. ‘Either he was a health freak or a hypochondriac,’ Qian said.

‘Or sick,’ said Li. ‘Like the elevator man said.’

Qian closed the cabinet and they went through to the first bedroom where one of the forensics men had found Chao’s needle set. It consisted of a hypodermic, a metal spoon, a length of nylon cord, a small sachet filled with white powder. They were contained within a tarnished and battered metal box, which bore the scars of time and travel. It was significant, Li felt, that it had not been in Chao’s possession when they found him.

There were mirrors all around the walls, including one full length at the foot of the bed. The bed was unmade, and a dresser was covered in jars of cream and powder, lipstick, eye make-up, perfumes, lotions and potions of every kind. Qian surveyed them with distaste. ‘It’s like a whore’s bedroom,’ he said. And almost as if to bear him out, when he opened the wardrobe he found it hanging with black and red silk dressing gowns hand-embroidered with dragons and butterflies. In the drawers there were silk pyjamas, exotic male underwear, thongs and g-strings. There were suspenders and stockings, women’s shoes, a short leather whip with three tails. ‘This guy really was sick.’ Qian looked around the room. ‘God knows what must have gone on up here with that procession of young boys.’

They left the forensics man dusting for prints and went through to the other bedroom. By comparison it was neat and tidy. The bed was made up with clean sheets. It didn’t look as if it had been slept in recently. The wardrobe was hung with rows of dark suits and pressed white shirts. Beneath them a row of polished brown and black shoes on a rack. In the other bedroom they had just seen the private face of Chao Heng. In this one they saw the face he showed in public. Two different faces, two different people. Li wondered which, if either, was the real Chao Heng. And how many people, if any, knew who that was?

Perhaps a third face revealed itself in Chao’s living room. Here was a comfortable, stylish room tastefully furnished with items of traditional Chinese lacquered furniture, many of them antiques; low tables inset with mother-of-pearl, hand-painted screens subdividing the room, embroidered silk throws draped over low settees. Three walls were hung with original scroll-mounted paintings, the fourth groaned with books from floor to ceiling. Books of every description in Chinese and English. Classic fiction in both languages: from Cao Xueqin’s A Dream of Red Mansions, and Ling Li’s Son of Heaven, to Scott’s Redgauntlet, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. A veritable library of scientific textbooks: Plant DNA Infectious Agents, Risk Assessment in Genetic Engineering, Plant Virology, Genomic Imprinting. Books on health: The Classified Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion, Fighting Drug Abuse with Acupuncture.

Qian whistled in amazement. ‘Can any one person read that many books in a lifetime?’

Li picked one out at random, Gene Transfer in the Environment, and examined the spine. ‘Chao Heng apparently,’ he said, slipping the book back into the bookcase.

In the far corner of the room there was an illuminated fish tank, multicoloured tropical fish zigzagging through a meticulously recreated seabed, air bubbling constantly up through the water from an oxygen feed. Tins of fish feed were stacked on a small table beside it. Li picked one up. It was half full. He sprinkled some feed on the water and watched the fish peck at it in desultory fashion as it fell slowly to the bottom of the tank. He wandered out on to the glassed balcony. It was north-facing, so no hotter than the rest of the house. There were two comfortable armchairs and a low table with a single, empty bottle of beer on it, an ashtray with half a dozen cigarette ends and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Li picked up the pack. There were ten or more cigarettes still in it. He replaced it on the table. With the angle at which the light was striking the bottle, he could see smears of greasy fingerprints all over the dark glass. It was strange, he thought, how dead people left physical traces behind them long after they were gone. This apartment would be filled with vestiges of the oily residue left by Chao Heng’s fingers on everything he touched. A touch that was uniquely his. Or hair gathered in the drainer in the sink and the bath, caught on combs and brushes. The fine dust of his dead skin shed over years would lie like a hidden snow among the fibres of the carpet and the bed, and in ledges along undusted surfaces. His scent would linger in the weave of the clothes that hung in the wardrobes. His personality, in all its diversity, reflected in his choice of lifestyle, clothes, furniture, and in the books he read. All of these were clues, not necessarily to the murder, but to the man. And knowing the man was an important step towards knowing his killer.

From the balcony, Li looked down into the compound below. He could see the three police vehicles and the gate in the high wall that led in from the street. He closed his eyes and pictured the killer carrying Chao’s prostrate form over his shoulder between the door of the apartment block and the nearest parking point. It was about fifteen feet. He opened his eyes and checked the streetlights. They were few and far between, and the trees would cast dense shadows. But there would be a light over the main entrance and it would have illuminated those fifteen feet, making it the highest risk point of the journey from the apartment to the park. And that after carrying Chao down five flights of stairs, unlocking and then locking the stair gate behind him again. His killer was not only a very determined man, but he was strong and fit.

‘Qian,’ he called.

Qian came on to the balcony. ‘Yes, boss?’

‘Go downstairs and see if the light over the front door is working. And check if the stair gate is locked while you’re at it.’

Qian hovered for a moment, awaiting an explanation, but when none was forthcoming, nodded and said, ‘Sure,’ and left the apartment.

Li stood for a long time, thinking, visualising. Eventually he wandered back into the living room and his eyes fell upon the bookcase again. As they drifted back and forth across the rows of multicoloured jackets, he recalled Mei Yuan’s riddle: Two men. One of them is the keeper of every book in the world, giving him access to the source of all knowledge. Knowledge is power, so this makes him a very powerful man. The other possesses only two sticks. Yet this gives him more power than the other. Why? And suddenly Li knew why. He smiled. How apposite, he thought. How strange. Perhaps Mei Yuan had psychic powers.

A tiny winking red light on the other side of the room caught his eye. He crossed to a small cabinet with an inset shelf. Set back on the shelf was a mini hi-fi stack with tuner, cassette and CD. Li crouched down to look at the array of pinpoint red and green lights, and a digital display of the numeral ‘9’. ‘Either of you guys touched the hi-fi?’ he called through to the forensics men.

‘No,’ one of them called back.

‘Me either,’ the other one shouted.

Li looked up as Qian came back in, a touch out of breath. ‘Someone stole the lamp, boss. At any rate, there’s no lamp in the light fitting, and the old boy in the lift says it was working okay when he finished up last night. Oh, and the gate’s locked.’

Li nodded. ‘Know anything about hi-fi systems?’

‘Got better things to spend my money on. In any case, I’d never have time to listen to one. Why?’

‘Chao left his on. In fact, he left the CD on pause. The light’s still blinking. You want to hear what he was listening to when his killer came calling?’

‘How do you know his killer came here?’ Qian was curious.

‘Educated guess,’ Li said, and he pressed the Play button. Immediately the room was filled with the sounds of strange and alien music. He stood up and lifted an empty CD case off the top of the cabinet. ‘Western opera,’ he said. And reading from the cover, ‘Samson and Delilah. Saint-Saëns.’ He took out the inner sleeve. ‘Track nine. “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix”.’ And he read, ‘“Samson, the champion of the Hebrews enslaved by the Philistines, knows that he should resist the approaches of the temptress Delilah. But his determination crumbles when she seduces him with this song of love. He yields completely, enabling Delilah to discover the secret of his strength and cut off his hair, rendering him powerless.”’

Was it to the temptation of his drug habit, or his preference for young boys, that Chao Heng had yielded, leaving him powerless in the hands of his murderer? The voice of the female soprano rose in sensuous crescendos.

‘So?’ Qian was impatient. He had to raise his voice above the music. ‘What are you basing this educated guess on?’

‘On a number of things,’ Li said. ‘The first of them being that Chao Heng was almost certainly here last night.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The bath-towel hanging over the bath is still damp. He’d fed his fish, probably quite late on, because they’re still not that hungry. He’d left his cigarettes on the table on the balcony, and his needle kit in the bedroom. And smokers and junkies don’t leave those kinds of things behind. Not voluntarily. He didn’t leave by the elevator. There was no key among the effects found with his body, so how could he have locked the stair gate behind him?’

Li wandered back across the room to the balcony. ‘I think he was sitting here, listening to Delilah seducing Samson, and having himself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. He had probably been here some time, judging by the number of cigarette ends in the ashtray and the progress of the CD. It was late, long after the lift had been shut down, maybe one or two in the morning, when the rest of the building was asleep. He was watching for a car below. A delivery of heroin, perhaps. The promise of a young boy. Who knows? When he saw the lights of the car, he got up, paused the CD, took his key and went down the stairs to unlock the gate. It would have been darker than usual, because the killer had just removed the lamp from the light over the front door. Maybe that’s why Chao didn’t recognise immediately that his visitor wasn’t who he was expecting.

‘Whoever it was probably had a gun and forced him back up to the apartment. Once here, he struck him on the head with a blunt object, maybe even with the gun, and injected him with ketamine. He waited, maybe as long as an hour, to be sure he hadn’t been seen, then carried or dragged Chao down the stairs and locked the gate behind them at the bottom. Under cover of the darkness created by the removal of the lamp, he carried him the fifteen feet to where he’d parked the car. Then it was off to Ritan Park, and you can pretty much put the rest together yourself.’

By now Samson had well and truly succumbed to the charms of Delilah. Qian blew air through pursed lips. ‘That must be some education you had, boss.’ He paused and thought about it. ‘How do you know the killer was acting alone?’

‘I don’t.’

‘I mean, it would have been easier with two.’

Li nodded. ‘Yes, but there’s something very…’ He struggled to find the right word. ‘… individual, almost eccentric, about this. It just feels to me like a single twisted mind at work.’

One of the forensics team called them through to the hall. He was crouched outside the kitchen door, scraping carefully at the carpet. ‘Patch of blood,’ he said. ‘Looks quite fresh, too. Spectral analysis will tell us just how fresh.’

Qian looked at Li with renewed respect. ‘If that’s Chao’s blood, it looks like you could be right, boss.’ Then he grimaced. ‘Trouble is, it doesn’t really get us any closer to the killer.’

‘Everything we know gets us closer to the killer,’ Li said evenly. ‘Time we talked to the street committee.’

V

Liu Xinxin, chairwoman of the street committee, was a small, nervous, skinny woman of around sixty. She lived in a ground-floor apartment in Chao Heng’s block. Her greying hair was drawn back in a tight bun from a delicately featured face, she wore an apron over a grey smock and a pair of black baggy trousers that stopped six inches above her ankles. Her hands were white with flour. ‘Come in,’ she said when she answered the door. She brushed a rogue strand of hair away from her face and left a smudge of flour on her forehead. She led them into the kitchen where she was preparing dumplings for the family meal. ‘You’ve come at a bad time. My husband will be home soon, and then my son and his wife.’

Li nodded. ‘There is never a good time to come about death.’

There was a loud crash from another room, a skitter of giggles, and two boys of pre-school age chased one another, shouting and screaming, through the hall. ‘My grandchildren,’ Liu Xinxin said. And then she added, quickly, as if they might suspect her family of being politically incorrect, ‘The elder boy is my daughter’s.’ A shadow passed across her face. ‘She died in labour and they had to cut the child out of her. My son-in-law couldn’t deal with her death, or with the child, so my son and his wife adopted him.’

She wiped her hands on her apron and took it off. ‘So… Mr Chao,’ she said. ‘Nobody liked him much. Come through.’ And she led them into a cluttered living room, birdcages arrayed along one wall. Pale lemon-and-white birds filled the room with a constant chirruping chorus. The balcony was chock full of plants and drying clothes hanging from a line. Condensation was forming on the glass. Against the opposite wall stood an old upright piano covered with the remains of big character posters which had, at one time, been pasted all over it. ‘It’s not mine,’ Liu Xinxin said, following their eyes to the piano. ‘It belongs to the state. I’m a musician really. I don’t know how I got mixed up in street politics, except I’ve been a good member of the Communist Party for nearly forty years. I was only sent for reform two times. Maybe you’ve heard some of my songs?’ She addressed this to Qian, who was nonplussed. He looked to Li for help.

Li said, ‘Perhaps if you told us what you’d written…’

‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, ‘hundreds. More than I can remember. I’ve lost more than I’ve written. In the sixties a collection of my songs was put together in Shanghai. They were all typeset and ready for publication. And then came the Cultural Revolution and my music was condemned as “reactionary”. I never did like the official formula for composition — “High, Fast, Hard and Loud”.’ She parodied stiff marching movements to each word as she said it. ‘So they were lost. About fifteen years ago I tried to trace them. But the typesetter was dead, and the publisher knew nothing about the proofs.’ She gave a tiny philosophical smile. ‘But other songs survived… “Let’s Build Our World Together” and “That Was Me Then And This Is Me Now” and “Our Country”.’

Both Li and Qian had sung ‘Our Country’ as children, and ‘Let’s Build Our World Together’ had been popular when Li was a teenager in the eighties, and had won a national award. Both were struck by a sense of awe and amazement that this insignificantly tiny and ageing lady should have written such songs.

She saw their surprise and smiled ruefully. ‘Today, if I was thirty years younger and writing the same songs, I would have been gloriously rich, and very glamorous, and poor Mr Deng, had he still been alive, would have been very pleased with me.’

Liu Xinxin smiled, and her smile was infectious, and Li found himself being drawn to her. ‘It could not have been easy for you,’ he said. ‘A woman writing music in a man’s world. My uncle used to often quote an old proverb which he said was still part of the male Chinese mindset, even in communist China: “A woman’s virtue is that she has no talent”.’

The old lady grinned. ‘Ah, yes, but Mao said, “Women hold up half the sky”.’ And her words brought Margaret sharply, and unexpectedly, back into Li’s thoughts.

Qian had wandered over to the piano and lifted the lid to stare at the keys in wonder. Music was a mystery to him. ‘Did you write all your songs on this?’ he asked.

A sadness clouded her eyes. ‘Only the recent ones. The best I wrote on my first piano. It was the love of my life. My passion… Long gone.’ She paused. ‘But you came to ask about Mr Chao.’ She grinned bravely. ‘So… I’ll make us some tea and you ask.’

Li and Qian sat on the edge of low chairs as she bustled back and forth from the kitchen, boiling a kettle and making them cups of green tea. The children were somewhere else in the house, drumming incessantly on what sounded like an old tin, competing with the racket of the birds. ‘You said nobody liked him much,’ Li prompted her above the noise as she poured the tea.

‘That was mostly because no one knew him,’ Liu Xinxin said. ‘The Ministry of Agriculture owns several apartments in this block, but Mr Chao never mixed with those families. And with the rest of us he was… how can I explain it?… standoffish. Like he was better than us. You would recognise him in the street and say “hi” and he would look the other way. He never smiled or acknowledged anyone. I think he was a very sad man.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Li slurped his tea. It was good.

‘A man who never smiles must be sad,’ she said. ‘And his eyes, if you ever got a chance to look into his eyes, they were so full of pain, as if he were carrying some unbearable burden. Of course, Mr Dai, the elevator man, knew him best. He is on my committee, so we would often discuss Mr Chao.’ She paused to reflect, and then corrected herself. ‘When I say Mr Dai “knew” him, what I mean is that Mr Dai saw him most often. Like I said, no one knew him.’

Li asked, ‘And his family? Do you know anything about his background?’

She shook her head. ‘Only the information given when he first came.’

‘Which was how long ago?’

‘About two years. He had been working near Guilin in Guangxi province in the south for some years before they transferred him back north to Beijing and an apartment here. But he has not worked much in the last six months. He has not been well, I think.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘They said he had been married and divorced, and that he had a young family somewhere in the south.’ She dropped her voice. ‘He liked young boys, you know.’

Li stifled a smile. He could imagine the conversations that must have taken place between Liu Xinxin and Mr Dai and other members of the committee, about the comings and goings at Chao’s flat in the night. But they would have been afraid of his privileged position in Party and state. Perhaps they had reported him to the Public Security Bureau and been told to mind their own business. The scientific adviser to a minister of state would have been a powerful and influential man, a modern-day mandarin. One would have had to have trodden carefully. Li finished his tea and stood up. ‘Well, thank you very much, Old Liu. You have been very helpful.’ Qian took his boss’s cue and got to his feet.

‘Won’t you stay and have another cup?’ She seemed reluctant now to let them go.

‘We don’t want to keep you back, with your family due home soon.’

‘Oh…’ She waved her hand dismissively. ‘They won’t be back for ages yet. Would you like me to play you one of my songs?’

Not wanting to hurt her feelings, Li said, ‘We really don’t have the time.’

‘Just one, then,’ she said, and she headed for the piano and drew up a stool. ‘You must know “Our Country”. They sang it in all the schools.’

Li and Qian exchanged looks. There was no escaping it. ‘Just the one, then,’ Li said.

She beamed. ‘And you must sing it with me.’ And as she played a brief introduction, ‘I’ll sing the verses and you join in the choruses.’

As they stood round the piano singing the words and melody written by this old lady more than thirty years before, Li was glad that there were no witnesses to his embarrassment. He could imagine what comments would be passed in the office. At least he could rely on Qian, who seemed equally ill at ease, to keep silence. Then he noticed Liu Xinxin’s two small grandsons standing in the doorway looking at them in astonishment, and, a moment later, their equally astonished parents fresh home from work. Li closed his eyes.

They left the apartment, colour high on their cheeks, thoughts held close, and got into the Jeep. They sat for a long minute in silence before the first sign of a crack appeared in Li’s façade. A small explosion of air escaped his nostrils. Qian looked at him in time to see the façade crumble. It was infectious. His face cracked, too. Within moments, both were laughing almost uncontrollably, tears streaming, stomachs aching, like a couple of small boys hearing their first dirty joke. All embarrassment was dissipated. As Li gasped to catch his breath, he wondered for a moment what they were laughing at, before realising it was themselves.

A sharp rap at the driver’s window made them turn. It was a young uniformed constable. Qian rolled down the window. ‘Yes?’

‘Census Constable Wang,’ the officer said, peering in disapprovingly at the two grinning faces. ‘This is my patch. You should have come to me before interviewing members of this street committee.’

Li leaned over, still with a smile creasing his face. ‘Don’t worry about it, Wang. We were only here for a singing lesson.’ And he and Qian burst into fresh roars of laughter. Wang jumped back, pink-faced and angry, as Qian revved the engine and backed out into the compound with a squeal of tyres. He watched them go with the self-righteous anger of a thwarted petty bureaucrat, the sounds of their laughter still ringing in his ears.

When Li and Qian returned to Section One, there was a constant procession of people arriving to make statements. The street outside was jammed with bicycles and taxis, groups of men and women standing discussing the reason for their summons, children waiting in the care of patient grandparents. These were people from all walks of life: itinerant workers recently arrived in Beijing, small-time crooks, early morning habitués of Ritan Park — civil servants, factory workers, housewives, an army of pensioners. Additional officers had been drafted in from CID headquarters downtown to help with the interviews.

Qian could barely find space to park the Jeep, and he and Deputy Section Chief Li had to push their way through the bodies to reach the door. Inside was no better. There were queues trailing back down the stairs. Extra interview rooms had been set up on every floor to try to cope. Interviews were being recorded and transcribed, and the girls in the typing pool had been put on shifts to keep the flow of paperwork moving. And as far as Li could see when he entered his office, all that paperwork was moving on to his desk. There was a mountain of it accumulating there. Hundreds of statements had already been taken in all three murder cases — hundreds, maybe thousands, more were still to come. Also on his desk were the pathologist’s report from the autopsy on Chao, along with a résumé of his education and career at the Ministry of Agriculture, and various forensics reports from the different crime scenes. And beneath a pile of photocopied statements, he found the file he had asked Wu to take out on The Needle. He scratched his stubbled head and felt crushed already by the weight of it all. It could take weeks just to go through what was already there. A young female administration officer entering with another armful of statements was the final straw. He stood up and raised his hands to stop her. ‘Enough! I don’t want any more of these statements on my desk.’

The girl, a timid nineteen-year-old, was fazed and looked around helplessly. ‘Where’ll I put them, then?’

Li glanced round the room. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘On the floor under the window. Separate the cases and keep three separate piles. I want only stuff I’ve asked for on my desk, all right?’

She nodded, flustered, and crouched down to start arranging the files on the floor as requested. Another huge pile thumped down beside her. She looked up, startled, as Li said, ‘And you can sort that lot out while you’re at it.’

Now that he could see his desktop again, Li began sorting out the files he wanted to hand. He glanced at the autopsy report and, quite involuntarily, found himself thinking about Dr Margaret Campbell. They were fragmentary thoughts, bits and pieces of conversation: ‘no man is an island’, ‘must have broken a mirror’, ‘you don’t want to know about my sordid private life’. Visual moments: the wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand, the freckles on her arm, the soft thrust of her breasts against the thin white cotton of her tee-shirt.

Annoyed with himself, he put the autopsy report to one side and forced himself to concentrate on the forensics reports. But they told him nothing he didn’t already know. The spectral analysis on the blood found in Chao’s apartment would, however, be telling. As would the result of the request he had put to Dr Wang. But neither of those would be available until tomorrow. He felt a twinge of irritation at having to wait. Which was unusual, for he was normally a patient man. But there was some instinct at work telling him that somehow speed was important in this, that the usual pedantic sifting of information, the slow building of layer upon layer of carefully gathered evidence, was not the required approach. And yet that was what all his training and experience demanded.

His eyes wandered thoughtfully across the text of the three forensics reports. Still the only real evidence gathered at each scene had been the Marlboro cigarette ends. The fact that Chao smoked, and that Marlboro was his brand, had been troubling Li since he found the cigarette ends and the pack in Chao’s apartment. It raised the possibility that the cigarette end found near the body in the park had been smoked by Chao himself, a final wish granted by his killer. In which case there was nothing to connect Chao’s murder with the other two, except coincidence. But Li didn’t like coincidence. And, in any case, Chao had been sedated, his cigarettes had been left in the apartment, and if he had been capable of smoking, the cigarette would have had to have been provided by his killer, who must also have smoked Marlboro. Another coincidence. Altogether too many. Li drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk. And tomorrow, he thought, seemed far too long to have to wait for answers.

Another batch of statements was carried in and distributed on the piles beneath the window. Through the open door he saw that the detectives’ room was still a hive of activity. He lifted the file on Chao and flipped it open. There was precious little detail here. Born 1948, in the town of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, the year before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. His father was a professor of English and his mother a Party cadre. He came to Beijing in 1966, the year Li was born, and enrolled at Beijing Agricultural University just as the Cultural Revolution was sweeping the country. Two years into a degree course in agronomy and crop sciences he was denounced by fellow students turned Red Guards and forced to drop out. The phrase denounced by Red Guards conjured for Li images of repeated beatings, hours of enforced self-criticism, endless essays confessing to reactionary weaknesses and imperial tendencies. Often it was simply an opportunity for adolescents, freed from the constraints and disciplines of an organised and civilised society, to explore the dark and cruel side of their human nature. Bullies and brutes given the freedom to express themselves in torture and murder without fear of retribution. They were, after all, only cleansing their country of its class enemies, those upholders of the Four Olds. Children were freed to taunt and torment their teachers, forcing them to wear dunce caps and grovel before them in class. Li had witnessed it first hand in his own primary school. Fortunately, by the time he reached middle school, the madness had just about run its course. He imagined that Chao’s fellow students had probably picked on him because he was soft, perhaps overtly homosexual, perhaps simply still confused about his sexuality. He was sent to the countryside for re-education.

Here there was a gap in the record of nearly a year. There was no indication of where he had been sent. Either through extraordinary good fortune, or through some influence that his mother had been able to bring to bear, he suddenly turned up in the United States enrolled as a student at the University of Wisconsin. Graduating in 1972 in microbial genetics, he stayed on a further year to complete a postgraduate doctorate in biotechnology. And then he won a research fellowship to the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University, where he remained until 1980, when he returned to China to teach at the very university he had been forced to abandon twelve years earlier.

He had married very quickly then, but was divorced again within three years, during which time he had managed to father a daughter. Li wondered why he had felt the need to marry. Clearly it was always going to be a relationship doomed to sexual failure. Was there really a need to create a veneer of heterosexual respectability? Might he not just have been discreet in his lifestyle?

Whether or not his particular predilections were known, they had not affected his career. He had been influential in the setting up of Beijing Agricultural University’s National Key Laboratory of Agricultural Biotechnology, under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, and spent the next ten years directing field projects in Beijing, at the Changping Experiment Station in Hui Long Guan District, Changping County, and then at the agro hi-technology development region in Zhuozhou. He had spent nearly four years working on some unspecified research project near Guilin, then in 1996 he had been brought back to Beijing and appointed senior technical adviser to the Minister of Agriculture before being forced to retire through ill health six months ago.

Li shut the folder. A life summed up in a few scant paragraphs. But it told him nothing about the man, what had driven his ambition, what had led him to heroin and the destruction of his health, what had motivated someone to kill him. Tomorrow, he hoped, he would glean much, much more when he paid a visit to Chao’s danwei at the Ministry of Agriculture. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Everything was tomorrow! He reached for the file Wu had left for him on The Needle. Somewhere in the drugs connection, he felt sure, he could establish the first concrete link between two of the murders at least.

There was a soft knock at the door and Section Chief Chen came in. He closed the door behind him. ‘Chaos out there.’ And he took in the piles of statements gathering under the window. ‘This could keep us busy for weeks.’

‘Or months,’ Li said gloomily.

‘How is it going?’

‘Slowly. I’ll be in a better position to brief you on progress tomorrow when we get some tests back from forensics. Until then, we are still sifting through the jigsaw for the first piece.’

Chen nodded. ‘Well, I have some good news. In view of the success of the autopsy carried out this morning by Dr Campbell, Professor Jiang has offered us her services for the duration of her stay in Beijing. Provided, of course, that it does not interfere with her lectures.’

Li drew a deep, slow breath. ‘That’s very good of the professor, Chief, but it’s really not necessary.’

‘Oh, but I’ve already accepted on your behalf. I told the professor she could carry out the other two autopsies in the morning.’

Li clenched his jaw, trying to stay calm. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have done that, Chief. I’ve already asked Professor Xie to do the autopsies. This is a Chinese investigation, about which Dr Campbell knows nothing. I have no need of her.’

Chen was about to overrule his junior colleague when their eyes met and he thought better of it. Li was clearly determined, and Chen had already overruled him once on the same subject. Perhaps the younger man should be allowed a little latitude to do things his way. He sighed. ‘Oh, well, I’ll tell the professor that other arrangements had already been made, and that while we are very grateful for the offer, Dr Campbell’s services will not be required.’ He paused and added, ‘But if this is something personal, Li Yan, then you are very foolish to allow it to cloud your professional judgment.’

He left, and Li stared into space, part of him wishing he had accepted the offer, part of him knowing that if he had, then the danger was that it would have become personal — in a way that might well have clouded his professional judgment. She had stirred in him feelings he had spent ten years suppressing, in favour of his career, and did not want to encourage now. He opened the file on The Needle to cast an eye over an old adversary.

VI

The scrape of a door opening was sufficient to penetrate the fragile quality of her sleep. She blinked and lifted her head from a pillow that seemed uncommonly hard and unyielding. One arm had gone to sleep and would take longer to waken than she. Her neck seemed locked in one position. Through fuzzy, unfocused eyes, she saw a man approach the bed. What was a man doing in her bedroom? She raised herself up, blinking hard, heart pounding, and realised she wasn’t in bed. For a brief, panic-stricken moment she had not the faintest idea where she was, before suddenly the truth dawned on her. She had fallen asleep at her desk, head resting on her right forearm, in which her blood supply was now painfully re-establishing itself.

‘You all right?’ Bob asked.

‘Yeah. Sorry. I guess I must have fallen asleep. Didn’t get much last night.’

Last night? When was that? Her brain couldn’t seem to find a context for anything. Like the blood finding its way back into the veins of her arm, memories of the last twenty-four hours leaked back into her consciousness accompanied by a series of pains — behind her eyes, at either temple, at the base of her neck. She remembered the autopsy, the lunch with Li, and her subsequent depression. And then she remembered being called in to see Professor Jiang and asked if she would be prepared to carry out another couple of autopsies and advise Deputy Section Chief Li’s murder inquiry in a consultative capacity.

That recollection brightened her again now. She remembered apologising to Professors Tian and Bai and Dr Mu for having displaced them from their office and, in a grand and magnanimous gesture, offering to let them have it back. After all, she had told them, now that she was assisting Section One with a murder inquiry she would not be spending so much time at the university. She was excited by the prospect.

‘But where will you prepare your lectures?’ Dr Mu had asked Veronica to ask her.

‘In my hotel room,’ Margaret had replied. ‘There’s plenty of space, it’s air-conditioned, I have access to a telephone, and downstairs there’s a business centre where I can get anything I want photocopied, faxed, e-mailed, you name it.’

They had clearly thought she was mad, but were happy enough to get their office back, and so were not going to argue.

‘You should have gone back to your hotel,’ Bob told her.

She shook herself to try to clear her head, but only succeeded in producing a pain that felt as if it would crack open her skull. ‘Ow.’ She rubbed her temples. ‘I know. I meant to. I must just have put my head down for a minute, and then… well, bang. What time is it?’

‘Five thirty. Professor Jiang would like a word.’

‘Another one? What, now?’

Professor Jiang smiled uneasily when she came into his office. Veronica sat primly in a chair, hands folded neatly in her lap. She regarded Margaret with some caution. The professor indicated a chair and Margaret sat and listened while he spoke to her earnestly for about two minutes. Then he sat back and allowed Veronica to translate.

‘Professor say Section Chief Chen call to say sorry, but his deputy think you are… how to say?… superfluous to the inquiry.’ She sat back, pleased with her ‘superfluous’, unaware of its connotations of uselessness and rejection which hit Margaret like a slap on the face.