The Firemaker

I

Wednesday Afternoon

Lily’s anger at being told again that she was not required was palpable, and she watched with grim dislike as Li and Margaret pulled out of the university compound in Li’s Jeep. She strutted off towards the administration block plotting her revenge.

Following their exchange in the autopsy room, Li had been cold and distant. Margaret wondered if this was a response to her jibe about taking two years to solve a murder, or whether it was a repeat performance of his mood swing of yesterday. Despite the fact that he had asked her along, she had the strong feeling that he resented her presence. They drove east in uncomfortable silence through the late morning traffic along West Xuanwumen Avenue, a huge loop of six-lane freeway that marked the outer boundary of the inner city. Bamboo scaffolding scaled concrete towers. High among the structures, tiny figures in blue, with yellow hard hats, moved easily around the skeleton blocks. Giant cranes swung back and forth overhead, like prehistoric monsters stalking a concrete landscape. Margaret’s growing resentment at Li’s silence finally found voice. ‘Look, if you don’t want me around, just say so. Stop the car now and I’ll get a taxi back to the university.’

‘What are you talking about?’ He seemed perplexed, but made no move to pull over.

‘I’m talking about you resenting every minute you have to spend in my company. This may be news to you, but it wasn’t my idea to get involved in any of this. I didn’t offer my help. You asked for it.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘My chief asked for it.’

‘And don’t you just hate the fact that your chief thought you could use the help of some foreigner.’

‘I don’t need your help.’ He flashed an angry glance at her across the Jeep.

‘No? And how long would it have taken you to identify Chao Heng without me?’

‘We would have identified Chao Heng in time.’ His voice was steady and controlled.

‘Yeah, six weeks from now. And you’d probably still be looking at a suicide. Are you going to let me out or not?’

Li kept driving. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why you ever came here in the first place.’ He knew that somewhere in this area she was vulnerable.

‘That’s none of your business!’

But he was not going to be deflected. ‘I mean, when I went to the States I spent months reading up on it. Constitution, law enforcement, culture… Hah.’ He laughed out loud. ‘If it’s possible to use the words American and culture in the same breath.’ She glared at him. ‘You decide to come to China, and what do you do? Nothing. You prepare nothing, you know nothing. About our law enforcement, our history, our culture. You’re in the country five minutes and you’re shouting the odds in the street about male attitudes to women drivers. You pick a fight in a restaurant and offend your hosts who’ve gone to great expense to welcome you.’

‘Welcome me?’ Margaret spluttered her indignation. ‘From the moment I arrived in this goddamn country people have been telling me what not to do, what not to say, in case I stepped on your precious Chinese sensibilities. You know, you people ought to lighten up and join the rest of us in what will very shortly be the twenty-first century.’ She immediately raised a hand. ‘And don’t tell me about your five-thousand-year history. I’ve already had that lecture. How you invented paper and the printing press.’

‘And the crossbow, and the umbrella, and the seismograph, and the steam engine — about a thousand years before the Europeans thought of it,’ Li said.

‘Jesus,’ Margaret gasped. ‘Spare me. Please.’

But Li was on a roll. ‘And what has America given the world? The hamburger and the hot dog?’

Margaret was stung. ‘We invented the light bulb, the means of generating electricity on a commercial scale, the gramophone, the motion picture. We put the first men on the moon, invented the microchip, the personal computer, developed technologies that allow people to communicate around the world in nanoseconds, and send pictures from Mars with better definition than Chinese television. Jesus, everything you people did was in the past. All you can do is look back. We’re doing it now.’

Li flushed with anger, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. ‘Oh yes? And just what exactly is it you are doing now?’ He raised a hand to stop her answering. ‘No, no, let me tell you. You stomp around the world like overbearing school bullies, self-appointed world policemen telling the rest of us how to live and how to behave. And if we don’t knuckle down and conform to your moral code, you’re just as likely to give us a bloody nose. You preach about freedom and democracy, and practise racial and political discrimination.’

‘That’s rich, coming from someone with your country’s human rights record!’

Li swung the Jeep hard left, honking his horn and driving like a man possessed. They swept past Mao’s mausoleum on their left, and the great expanse of Tiananmen Square opened up before them, the orange-tiled roof of the Gate of Heavenly Peace shimmering in the hazy middle distance. ‘Don’t start,’ he said. Hours of listening to his uncle debating world politics with his cronies had given him a good grasp of events over the past thirty years. ‘You’ll be telling me next how the United States had no part in supporting the murderous regime of the Shah of Iran, or in the downfall of the democratically elected president of Chile. That the United States was justified in dropping Agent Orange and napalm on innocent women and children in Vietnam, or in supporting tinpot dictators who were bleeding their people dry, because it suited US strategic policy.’

‘What about the thousands of political prisoners held in Chinese jails without trial?’

‘That’s history. Myth.’

‘Oh yes?’ She waved her hand out of the window at the square. ‘And I suppose it’s a myth that your government sent armed soldiers and tanks into this very square to mow down hundreds of unarmed students engaged in peaceful demonstration. Or is that just “history” as well?’

‘It’s as much history as the National Guardsmen who gunned down protesting students on campus at Kent State University in Ohio, in ’68. The only difference is one of scale.’ He breathed deeply in frustration and banged his open hands down on top of the steering wheel. ‘Dammit, I’m not trying to justify Tiananmen, but the Western view of it is a romantic fiction. Peace-loving students demonstrating for freedom and democracy? Hah! Your cameras never covered the gangs of armed youths roaming the suburbs, attacking and murdering soldiers and police who were under orders not to harm them, and then stealing their weapons. What would your government have done if it had seen its very existence threatened by a million ranting students in the streets of Washington demanding that the President and the Congress explain their policies to them in person, and then abusing and humiliating them on live TV? If gangs of thugs were beating police officers to death, and the seeds of insurrection were being sown throughout the fifty states, do you think they would just have stood by and done nothing?’

Beads of perspiration stood out on Li’s forehead. His eyes burned with a curious fervour. ‘It was a nightmare. I know, I was there.’ And the bloody images swam before his eyes, like the tears he had spilled during those four fateful June days, for the dead, for his country, for the devastating, wasteful futility of it all. ‘But I can look at China today,’ he said, ‘and I see people with money in their pockets, roofs over the heads, food in their bellies, education for their children, an economy growing at ten per cent a year. And I look at what is happening in the Soviet Union, or in Yugoslavia, in the name of freedom, and democracy. I see economic ruin, people going hungry, children dying of disease; I see war and rising crime and death and destruction in the streets. I don’t believe there are many Chinese who would swap what they have for that. You may not like communism, because you’ve been indoctrinated in the West by prejudice and preconception. But in China, for all its faults, it has brought stability and peace, and a population that is healthier, wealthier and better fed than at any time in its history.’

They had turned now into East Chang’an Avenue, Tiananmen Square receding behind them. Margaret glanced back, and tried to imagine the tanks rolling down the streets, the square jammed with a hundred thousand students. She recalled vividly the images that had flashed around the world of the student standing before a tank, refusing to let it past, and the tank driver’s attempts to get around him without hurting him. What bitter tears must have been spilled with the blood. She had heard the passion in Li’s voice, and understood perhaps for the first time the dreadful dichotomy inherent in those images. The wounds clearly still ran deep, and she wondered how it might have been if similar circumstances had presented themselves in the US. There had been rioting in the sixties and seventies over civil rights and Vietnam, divisions that had split the country down the middle. Only now, thirty years on, were some of those scars beginning to heal. Others were still raw.

She shook her head. ‘This is stupid,’ she said. ‘We’re doing what people do that makes them go to war — arguing over their differences. When it’s our differences that make us…’ She searched for the right words. ‘… human, unique.’ He said nothing, and they drove in silence along the length of Jianguomennei Avenue past the CITIC building and the World Trade Centre and up the ramp on to the third ring road. Eventually she said, ‘Where are we going?’ She needed a response from him. Any kind of response, to anything.

He said, ‘The Hard Rock Café.’ But that was all. The atmosphere between them remained sour.

The Hard Rock Café was attached to the Beijing Landmark Towers off Dongsanhuanbei Road. A red soft-top Chevvy with fifties fins projected from a first-floor roof, for all the world as if it had fallen from the top of the adjacent fourteen-storey tower block and lodged there. A blue globe, with the Hard Rock Café logo, sat atop an elaborately roofed mock-Greek-pillared entrance. Out front, on the sidewalk, stood a ten-foot-high red Les Paul guitar. Margaret followed Li up black-and-red steps, scared to touch and smear the polished brass handrail supported on black-and-gold Les Pauls. They passed beneath a large five-point red star over the legend NO DRUGS AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS ALLOWED. They had not spoken for more than fifteen minutes.

Inside, the restaurant was doing brisk business. Staff wearing emerald shirts and black jeans were serving early lunches to Beijing’s new young jet set and a scattering of curious tourists and foreign residents.

A pretty young waitress approached Li and they had a brief conversation. She nodded towards a stall in the far corner, and Li headed off towards it. Margaret followed, depressed and annoyed with him, and wondering why she was here. As they approached the stall, she saw that there were four young men seated in it. They were all immaculately and expensively dressed, with beautifully cut hair and manicured hands. They were unlike any other Chinese she had seen since she arrived. They reeked of wealth. A hush fell over their conversation as Li arrived at the table, and one of them aborted the call he’d been making on his cellphone. The man in the far right-hand corner smiled to show beautiful predatory teeth, and Margaret saw that he was not as young as he had first appeared. Mid-thirties, perhaps. His confidence, and the way the other three at the table deferred to him, immediately marked him out as the man Li had called The Needle. He might sell drugs, but he didn’t look like a man who used them.

‘Well, well,’ he said, still smiling. ‘If it isn’t Mr Li Yan, our friendly neighbourhood cop. Heard you got yourself promoted, Mr Li. Congratulations.’ He held out his hand, but Li ignored it.

‘I want a word,’ he said.

‘Oh, do you?’ The Needle glanced at Margaret. ‘And who’s this? Your girlfriend?’

‘She’s an American observer.’

‘An observer?’ He exaggerated a look of surprise. ‘And what’s she come to observe? How Beijing cops harass innocent citizens?’

‘No,’ Li said evenly. ‘She’s here to observe how innocent citizens are willing to co-operate with the police and spare them the trouble of getting a warrant.’

‘She speak Chinese?’ The Needle glanced at her suspiciously.

‘No.’

‘Hey, lady, you want to fuck?’ The Needle directed this at Margaret in Chinese.

Margaret looked at Li, confused. ‘Was he speaking to me?’

‘Sure,’ The Needle said in English. ‘I just say, how you doing?’

‘I need to talk for a few minutes,’ Li said, ignoring this exchange.

‘Talk, then.’

‘In private.’

‘Where?’ The Needle grew cautious.

‘In the Jeep. I’m just round the corner in the carpark.’ The Needle hesitated. Li said, ‘You’ve got nothing to hide, right? So you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s just a little information I need.’

The Needle was pensive for a moment, then wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood up. ‘You’ve got ten minutes. I’m a busy man.’

His adjutant, on his left, moved quickly to let him out, and he followed Li and Margaret to the door.

‘What’s going on?’ Margaret whispered to Li.

‘We’re just going to have a little chat,’ Li said. But there was something in his tone that set Margaret’s nerves on edge. And there was something cold and hard in his eyes that she hadn’t seen there before.

The Jeep was in the carpark of the Landmark Towers Hotel. Li told Margaret to get in the back. The Needle got in the front passenger seat. Li started the engine. ‘Hey!’ The Needle barked, startled. ‘You didn’t say anything about going anywhere.’

‘Just a short drive,’ Li said, unperturbed. ‘It’ll give us a chance to talk.’ But he said nothing as they drove south, and then west on Gongren Tiyuchang Road. The Needle grew increasingly uneasy.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Just somewhere quiet and discreet, so we won’t be disturbed. I know how important your street cred is. You don’t want to be seen hanging around with a cop, do you?’

‘Stop, right now, and let me out!’ The Needle was starting to panic. ‘This isn’t what I agreed to.’

Li turned south on Dongdoqiao Road. ‘You’re not making a very good show of co-operating with the police,’ Li said. ‘You don’t want to give our American observer the wrong idea, do you?’

‘Fuck your American observer! Let me out!’ He tried to open the door but it was locked.

‘What’s going on?’ Margaret asked from the back, becoming concerned.

‘Oh, nothing much,’ Li said. ‘Just a routine breach of human rights.’

He turned the Jeep hard right, through open gates, and into a vast concourse, the giant circular Beijing Workers’ Stadium looming ahead of them. Soldiers on exercise, dressed in green camouflage, were piling into covered lorries and sweeping through the concourse in a wide arc towards the gates as Li drove in. He steered a course between them and slid the Jeep to a stop outside one of the exit ramps from the stadium. He killed the engine, flicked off the central locking and turned to The Needle. ‘Get out,’ he said.

Through a crack in the vast doors that opened on to the stadium at the top of the ramp, there was a glimpse of green grass and concrete terrace. The Needle jumped out of the Jeep. ‘What the hell are you up to, Li?’

Li rounded the bonnet and with one hand grabbed The Needle by his lapel. There was a sound of tearing cloth and stitching. Margaret was right behind them. ‘What are you doing?’ She was alarmed now.

Li dragged the unwilling Needle up the ramp behind him, the drug dealer’s physical resistance feeble in the face of Li’s size and strength. He searched around desperately for some sign of life — a face, a figure, a witness. But there was no one. No one but Margaret, chasing after them up the ramp, shouting at Li, demanding to know what the hell he thought he was up to.

Li ignored them both, pulling the door open a fraction and jerking The Needle through the gap. Margaret stood for a moment, panting, then squeezed through in their wake, in time to see Li push the other man down the slope, across the running track and on to the grass pitch. Terraces of empty seats rose up all around them. On days when China’s national soccer team played here, it was filled with sixty thousand cheering, screaming fans. Now it was eerily quiet, the voices of the two men on the grass echoing around the acoustic bowl of the stadium. Margaret heard the creak of the door they had entered, and turned in time to see it shutting behind them. A sensation, like ice-cold fingers, touched the back of her neck. ‘Li!’ she screamed. But Li’s attention was elsewhere. His left hand was holding The Needle by his shirt collar, twisting it, pushing it hard into his throat.

Gone was the cool confidence of this untouchable trafficker in drugs and misery. He seemed very small beside Li, childlike and whimpering. His feet almost left the ground. With his free hand, Li drew a large revolver from a shoulder holster beneath his jacket, and pushed the nozzle-end into The Needle’s forehead. His face was pale and grim, his eyes black. Margaret ran on to the grass. ‘Stop this,’ she said quietly. The Needle flicked a panicked glance in her direction. She might be an ally, the witness he needed to stop Li.

Li ignored her. ‘I want you to tell me about Chao Heng and Mao Mao,’ he said, his focus totally on The Needle.

For a moment, consternation replaced fear on the face of the drugs baron. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We both know,’ Li said, ‘that anything you tell me now is just between us. She doesn’t speak Chinese, and I can’t use information extracted at gunpoint against you. So do us both a favour and tell me what I want to know.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

Li sighed deeply. ‘Okay, we’ll do it the hard way.’

‘What?’ The Needle was panicking again. Li turned him round and forced him to his knees. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at? You won’t get away with this!’ The Needle tried to get up and Li pushed him back down. ‘Help me!’ The Needle screamed at Margaret in English.

She stood several feet away, breathing hard, eyes wild with fear and anger; fear of what was going to happen, anger that Li had dragged her here. ‘I won’t be any part of this,’ she said.

‘Don’t be,’ Li said.

She looked around. There didn’t appear to be any way out, and the door they’d come in through was shut. ‘If you harm that man I will give evidence against you.’

‘Will you?’ Li glanced at her. ‘He trades in misery and death. He has ruined thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of lives, and you would give evidence against me?

‘Why did you bring me here?’

He gazed at her steadily. ‘To watch,’ he said.

The Needle was sprawled on the grass now, trying to edge away as Li turned his attention back to him. ‘Stay where you are,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll give you a chance. Maybe several. But the odds’ll get shorter.’ He flipped the barrel out from the main body of the revolver and took out the bullets one by one, leaving only a single round. ‘A game invented by our neighbours in Russia.’ He snapped the barrel back in place.

‘For God’s sake!’ Margaret said, and she walked away, out towards the centre of the pitch, her back turned towards them. She put her hands on her hips and stared up to the heavens. Physically, she knew, there was nothing she could do to stop it. But she was damned if she was going to watch.

The Needle followed her with his eyes, a sense of hopelessness growing like nausea in his belly. She wasn’t going to do anything. Li hauled him back to his knees and placed the revolver at the base of his skull. The tip of it was cold and hard against his skin and pulled at his hair. ‘Okay, so I’ll ask you again,’ Li said softly.

‘I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The Needle had had a sudden revelation. Li wasn’t going to pull that trigger. Not with the American there. It was obvious there was friction between them. Then he felt, more than heard, the squeezing of the trigger mechanism raising the hammer, and the smack of it against an empty chamber. He lost control of his bladder and felt a rush of hot urine on his thigh.

Margaret heard the sound of the hammer on the empty chamber echo around the terracing, and swivelled to stare at Li in disbelief. Somehow, somewhere deep inside, she hadn’t believed he would actually do it. ‘Jesus!’ And she listened to her voice whispering round the stadium, as if it belonged to someone else.

‘Tell me about Chao Heng,’ Li insisted.

‘I told you…’ The Needle started to weep.

Crack! The hammer smacked down on another empty chamber.

‘Li! For God’s sake!’ Margaret screamed at him.

‘Tell me,’ Li said, his voice tight and controlled. He blinked and flicked his head as a trickle of sweat ran into one eye.

The Needle felt the grate of the trigger mechanism again. ‘Okay, okay, okay!’ he screamed.

‘I’m listening,’ Li said.

‘Chao Heng was well known,’ The Needle gasped. ‘He used to hang around the clubs downtown trying to pick up boys. The younger the better. Everyone knew what he was like.’ The Needle was babbling like a baby now, words and all inhibition loosened, like the muscles of his bladder, by naked fear. ‘I didn’t know him personally, but I knew him by sight. He got his stuff off a guy called Liang Daozu.’

‘One of your people?’

‘I don’t have any people,’ he shouted, and felt the muzzle of the gun push harder into his neck. ‘Okay, yeah, he was one of my guys.’

‘What about Mao Mao?’

‘What about him?’

‘What was his connection with Chao Heng?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Again the muzzle pushed hard into the base of his skull. ‘For God’s sake, I didn’t even know they knew one another! Mao Mao was low life, street scum. He didn’t move in the same circles as someone like Chao Heng.’

‘Or you?’

‘Or me. Shit, I don’t trade stuff on the streets. Never have. That’s for users and losers like Mao Mao.’

‘Maybe Mao Mao was into little boys, like Chao?’

The Needle shook his head. ‘Not that I knew of.’

Not that anyone else knew of either. Li had read the statements of Mao Mao’s family and friends. He’d had a wife and a kid somewhere, and a string of mistresses. Li’s adrenalin rush was slowly giving way to disappointment. He had The Needle on his knees in front of him, confessing to anything and everything. But not only would it be impossible to use any of it against him, none of it helped in the investigation. He pulled the trigger anyway. Crack!

The Needle yelped. ‘Shit, man, what are you doing! I told you what you wanted to know.’

Li pushed him over on to his back, and The Needle lay staring up at him in disbelief, paralysed by fear. Li extended his arm downwards and pointed the revolver straight at the centre of The Needle’s face.

‘Li?’ Margaret took a step towards him. She had thought it was over. The Needle had talked rapidly for nearly a minute, telling Li, it had seemed, what he wanted to know. Now Li was going to kill him in cold blood.

Li pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. The Needle screamed, a long scream of anguish, the pain of knowing he was going to die, almost worse than death itself.

Margaret’s heart stood still. ‘That’s six,’ she said.

The Needle looked up at Li in breathless disbelief. Li extended his left hand towards Margaret and opened his fist. Six bullets nestled in his palm. ‘The speed of the hand deceives the eye,’ he said grimly.

Margaret closed her eyes. She wanted to strike him with her fists, with her feet, to bite him, inflict pain on him in any way she could. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

Li ignored her, holstering the gun and slipping the bullets into his pocket. He stooped and dragged the hapless Needle to his feet and pushed his face into his. ‘Maybe you think you’ve lost a bit of face here today.’ The Needle said nothing. ‘I just hope the next time you go visiting a stadium, it’s to get a bullet in your head for real. And with a bit of luck they’ll blow your face clean off.’ He let go of him, and The Needle dropped back to his knees. Li looked in disgust at the black urine patch on his trousers. ‘I was going to give you a lift back, but I don’t want you fouling up my Jeep. And maybe you’d rather change before you drop back in on the boys.’

The Needle stared up at him with hatred in his eyes and murder in his heart.

II

‘Just take me straight back to the university.’ Margaret sat tight-lipped and furious in the passenger seat.

‘Sure.’ Li nodded and they drove in silence for some way.

But she was unable to contain her anger for long. ‘You had that all planned, didn’t you?’ He shrugged. ‘And someone at the stadium knew we were coming.’

‘I’ve got my contacts,’ he said.

‘It was moronic,’ she said. ‘Absolutely moronic. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I learned it from a couple of cops in Chicago. I think, maybe, they did it for my benefit. Back seat of the squad car, up a blind alley. A small-time pusher with dirt on someone higher up the chain. They sure as hell scared the kid. He told them everything they wanted to know.’

She flashed him a look that might have turned him to stone had he met her eye. ‘That doesn’t justify it. For them, or you.’

‘At least I saved a dozen of my detectives maybe six weeks’ work chasing a connection that doesn’t exist.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘Because if there was a drugs connection between Chao Heng and Mao Mao, The Needle would have known about it. And, somehow, I believed him when he said he didn’t.’ He glanced over at her. ‘I wouldn’t spill any tears over The Needle. He’ll get over it.’

‘I don’t give a shit about The Needle,’ she said. ‘It’s what you put me through in that stadium. If I’d known there were no bullets…’

‘You would have approved?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Which is why I did not tell you. I was not sure I would even take you into the stadium.’

‘Oh, I’m supposed to feel honoured now, am I? Jesus!’ She slapped her palms on the dashboard. ‘Why did you take me in?’

‘You were so ready to believe in human rights violations in China, I thought maybe you should see some for yourself, first hand, as inspired by Americans.’

‘Well, first off, let’s not confuse human rights and civil rights. What you saw those cops in America do was a breach of that kid’s civil rights. They also broke the law. And I can assure you it’s not common practice.’

‘Nor is it in China.’

‘Oh yeah? Like there are no violations of civil or human rights in China?’

‘Not on my watch.’

‘Oh, so today was the first time you’ve ever done anything like this, right?’

‘It was.’

‘Sure.’

He turned to meet her disbelief face on. ‘It was.’ And the sincerity in his eyes disconcerted her. ‘For myself, I would happily have killed that man. As a policeman, it is against everything I believe. My uncle would be ashamed of me. He would tell me that the measure of any civilisation is the strength and balance of its system of justice. And he would be right. And he would not listen when I told him that I had a feeling, an instinct, that we could not afford to spend weeks, months, maybe years finding this killer. He would tell me that I should employ good police work to back up that instinct.’

In spite of herself, she was interested. ‘What instinct?’

‘If I knew what it was, maybe today would never have been necessary. There is something… bizarre about these killings. Something in what we already know that I am missing. Something that troubles my unconscious mind, but that my conscious mind has not grasped. So I have taken a short cut that I should not have taken, because somehow I know there is no time.’

‘You think he’s going to kill again?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ They had stopped at traffic lights, and he turned and examined her face, and thought he saw the shadow of doubt in it. ‘Have you never had an instinct about something? Something you can’t explain, you just feel?’

There was a catch in her throat, and she didn’t dare to speak, as she remembered how she had fought her instincts, committing to an act of faith in Michael that went beyond all reasonable expectation. She found it hard, now, to understand why. She should have known better. She dragged her eyes away from Li’s and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘And I didn’t follow it.’ Her hands were clasped in her lap, and Li saw her knuckles go white. ‘And I should have.’

They drove past the top of Wangfujing Street and into Wusi Street, which took them into Jingshanquan Street and past the rear gate of the Forbidden City. The car in front of them braked suddenly to avoid a child on the road, careening sideways into a trolley bus amidst a shower of sparks, before spinning across two lanes of oncoming traffic and ploughing into the cycle lane. Vehicles travelling nose to tail slithered into one another, locking fenders. All traffic ground to a halt, horns blaring, a trail of devastation across the road. The child who had caused the accident ran away, unharmed, down the far sidewalk. Several cyclists picked themselves off the dusty street, and started examining buckled wheels and twisted frames, shouting oaths at drivers, remonstrating with one another. Some were bleeding from grazes on arms and foreheads, others had torn trousers at the knee and shirts at the elbow. Above the noise of horns and raised voices and revving engines was a woman’s single, repeating scream.

Li had swung the Jeep side-on across the middle of the road and planted a flashing red lamp on the roof, and was now making an urgent call on the police radio. Margaret was shaken, but unhurt. She could hear the woman screaming, but couldn’t see her. She got out of the Jeep and started running between the vehicles and the people standing arguing in the road. There was a crowd gathering around the car that had slewed across the street in the first place. It had half mounted the sidewalk and buried its nose in the trunk of a locust tree. The dazed driver was staggering from the vehicle. Margaret grabbed him and looked at the wound on his forehead. He would live. The woman was still screaming, a babble of hysterical voices rising from the crowd around the front of the car. As she rounded the bonnet, Margaret saw the buckled remains of a bicycle under the front wheel and a woman trapped beneath the bicycle, gouts of blood spouting from a wound high on her left leg. She was screaming more in fear than pain as she saw the life flooding out of her. Li appeared at Margaret’s shoulder. ‘She’s going to die if we don’t stop that bleeding fast,’ Margaret said. ‘We’ve got to get her out of there.’

Li’s voice boomed out above the racket, insistent, commanding, and seven or eight men immediately detached themselves from the crowd. Li waved them to either side of the vehicle and they all found what handholds they could. As they lifted, there was a groan of metal, and a jet of steam escaped from the broken radiator. Margaret grabbed the woman under each armpit and pulled. She was aware of others beside her. The bicycle was torn away. The woman was drawn free. The intensity of her screams was fading along with her life. There was blood everywhere, still pumping from her leg as her heart fought vainly against the rapid drain of the wound.

Li said, ‘Emergency services are on their way.’

‘No time!’ Margaret shouted. ‘Hold her down.’ And to Li’s and everyone else’s amazement, this fair-haired, blue-eyed yangguizi kicked off her trainers and stood on top of the injured woman’s thigh, pressing her full body weight down on to the wound. She grabbed one of the men who had lifted the car, and held him for balance. He froze, like a rabbit caught in headlights. The woman lurched and screamed, and tried to buck Margaret off. ‘For Christ’s sake hold her still,’ Margaret said. ‘Her femoral artery’s been severed. This is the only way I can get enough pressure on it to stop the bleeding.’

Li sat in the road by the woman’s head, gently taking her flailing arms and folding them in, raising her head on to his lap, restraining her fight and her fear, talking rapidly, gently, reassuringly. Her resistance subsided and she relaxed and started weeping. There were several hundred people in the street now, pressing around them in silent amazement. Margaret looked down at the blood oozing slowly through her toes. She had staunched the bleeding for the moment, but the woman had lost a great deal of blood. She was in her mid-forties, stockily built, with the flattened features of a peasant Chinese. Her blue print dress was soaked in red. The ribbon that tied her hair back had come free, and long black strands of it sprayed out across Li’s legs. She gazed up at him as he continued softly speaking, stroking her face. Margaret had no idea what he was saying, but she found it almost impossible to equate this gentle, genuinely caring man with the cold, ruthless individual she had witnessed in the stadium just fifteen minutes earlier.

In the distance they heard the sound of sirens. Minutes later paramedics were pushing their way through the crowd with stretchers, and Margaret was relieved of the burden of standing on the wound. The injured woman held Li’s hand all the way to the ambulance. He returned to find Margaret retrieving her shoes, still an object of intense curiosity for the crowd. They were dispersing reluctantly on the orders of uniformed traffic cops who were trying to clear the road. Li’s hand slipped gently round Margaret’s upper arm and he led her back to the Jeep, her bare feet leaving a trail of bloody footprints in their wake. There was blood drying on her hands, on her tee-shirt, on the bottoms of her jeans. ‘I’m going to need to change,’ she said.

‘I’ll take you back to your hotel.’ Li started the Jeep, turned it around and headed back for the previous junction before swinging north.

III

‘I’ll wait for you here.’ Li had parked in the forecourt at the foot of the steps to the main entrance.

‘Don’t be silly. Come up. You need to wash. You’ve got blood on your hands and your face.’ She jumped out of the Jeep, forgetting, as it was so easy to do, that they had been cocooned in air-conditioned unreality. The heat bounced back at her from the white concrete, dusty and hot, almost violent in its intensity, and she felt her knees weaken.

Li looked and saw the crusty rust colour of dried blood on his hands, aware of it for the first time. In the rear-view mirror he saw a smear of it on his cheek. He could see the dark stains of it on his trousers and jacket, and vivid spatters on the white of his shirt. He got reluctantly out of the Jeep and followed Margaret up the steps, passing between pillars the same colour as the blood on his hands, and into the chilled atmosphere of the lobby. On the third floor, the attendants regarded them with amazement, watching open-mouthed as they walked the length of the corridor.

Her room was soft and luxurious, palely seductive, slashed by the blood-red silk of the headboard on her bed. He never ceased to be astonished by the degree of luxury demanded by foreigners. And yet it was without character or personality, like any hotel room in any city around the world.

She threw her bag on the bed. ‘I’ll take a quick shower and change, then you can get in and wash.’ She grabbed the remote control for the television and switched it on. ‘To stop you from getting bored.’ She smiled. It was tuned to CNN, a news report about freak flooding in northern California. He heard the rush of water in the shower and wandered to the dressing table. There were make-ups items and creams, a map and a guide book. He picked up and flipped through a small red Chinese phrase book, stopping at random. A page on dealing with money. I’m completely broke. Can I use this credit card? He shook his head in wonder at the things foreigners thought important. Another page on ‘entertainment’. Do you want to come out with me tonight? Which is the best disco round here? Li smiled. Somehow he didn’t think that either phrase would trip off Margaret’s tongue.

He lifted a hairbrush and teased some of the shiny golden hair free of its bristles. It was very soft and fine. He put it to his nose and smelled her scent. On an impulse he could not have explained if asked to, he wound the hair around his index finger to make a curl of it, and slipped it carefully into his breast pocket between the pages of a small notebook.

The rush of the shower stopped abruptly, and the bathroom door creaked slightly ajar. In the mirror above the dresser he could see, reflected through the crack in the door, the pale lemon of a towel draped across the shower screen. Suddenly it slid from view, and he saw Margaret’s naked form, still standing in the bath, legs apart, body glistening in the light; slim and white and tempting. Her breasts were firm and erect, juddering as she briskly towelled herself down. He glanced quickly away, reddening with shame, feeling guilt for having looked. But in a moment, his eyes were drawn back, and he saw her step out of the bath, water still clinging in droplets to the pale triangle of curled pubic hair between her legs. She swivelled on the ball of one foot and he caught a glimpse of the pink half-peach rounds of her buttocks and the firm muscle that tapered in from the tops of her thighs. He followed the arch of her back up to beautifully squared shoulders and saw that her head was turned, and that she was watching his reflection watching hers.

He dropped his eyes immediately, crushingly embarrassed, like a small boy caught peeking at his sister undressing. His heart was hammering against his ribs and his hands were shaking. What could he say to her? How could he apologise? He glanced up and saw that she had moved out of his line of vision. But she had not closed the door. And it occurred to him that she had enjoyed him watching her. That she had known he could see her all along, perhaps wanted him to. He moved away to the window and tried to analyse his feelings towards her. They were completely ambiguous. She was irritating, arrogant… and unaccountably attractive. She both angered and challenged him. There were times when he had wanted to slap her face, and others when he had wanted to touch her and feel the softness of her porcelain-white skin, run his hands through her hair, feel her lips push against his. But more than anything, he was drawn by the provocation in those pale blue eyes, challenging him to a battle of intellect, of culture, of race. He decided to say nothing, behave as if he had never seen her, nor she him.

When she stepped out of the bathroom she was wearing a pale yellow sleeveless cotton dress, cut square across the neck and flaring out from a narrow waist to a line just above her knees. On her feet she wore cream open-toed sandals with a small heel that served to emphasise the gentle curve of her calf. Her skin glowed pink, and her freckles seemed darker somehow, more prominent. She was towel-drying her hair, head cocked at an angle so that it hung down in wet strands. In that moment, without a trace of make-up, her hair still wet from the shower, the simplicity of the pale lemon dress, he thought she looked quite beautiful. His throat was thick, and he could think of nothing to say.

‘All yours,’ she said, nodding towards the bathroom as if nothing had happened. ‘What are you going to do about your clothes?’

‘I’ll have to stop by the apartment and change.’ He brushed past her, smelling her perfume, and went in to wash his hands and face.

On the drive to his apartment he asked if she had a class that afternoon.

‘No,’ she said, ‘just prep for tomorrow. Although I don’t even need that. It’s a lecture I’ve done dozens of times.’ She hesitated. ‘Why?’

He seemed embarrassed. ‘I thought, perhaps, you might want to come back to the office. The results of the DNA tests on the cigarette ends should be in. And a spectral analysis of blood found on the carpet in Chao Heng’s apartment yesterday.’

‘His blood?’ she asked, curiosity aroused.

‘That’s what we’ll find out,’ he said.

She was silent for a moment, thoughtful, then said, ‘Yes. I’d like that.’ She paused. ‘Tell me about the blood in the apartment.’

And so he told her. About the CD on pause, the empty bottle on the table on the balcony, the cigarette ends in the ashtray, the lamp missing from the light over the front door. He painted for her his picture of what he believed happened that night: Chao Heng forced back to his apartment at gunpoint then knocked on the head and sedated; the patch of blood left on the carpet which, he felt sure, would be Chao’s, and which spectral analysis would show to be around twelve to fourteen hours old; the killer carrying the prostrate body of the agricultural adviser down the staircase, locking the stair gate behind them; the drive to the park, the long wait among the trees, and then the immolation and the killer’s escape to anonymity seconds before the blazing body was found.

She sat listening in silence. ‘I hadn’t thought through the planning that must have gone into it. Not in that kind of detail. In my job you are so preoccupied with the details of death that you don’t think much about motivation, or premeditation.’ She fell silent again, thinking about it some more. ‘It’s extraordinary, when you examine it. Why would somebody go to such lengths? I mean, it wasn’t even as though it was a particularly convincing suicide.’ She turned it over again in her mind. ‘Are you sure these three killings are connected?’

‘No, I am not sure.’

‘I mean, they were all professionally executed, but the other two were simple, uncomplicated, almost casual. Chao Heng’s killing was… bizarre and ritualistic and, if you are right in your assumptions, minutely plotted and planned.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You’ve eliminated a drugs connection, right?’ He nodded. ‘So all that’s left to connect them are the cigarette ends.’ He nodded again. ‘And, God knows, that’s pretty damned weird.’ She frowned. ‘Something not right. Something really not right.’ And for a fleeting moment she understood his obsession, was touched by a feeling both ephemeral and elusive, which he might have called instinct. A feeling that left her uneasy and uncertain, but intrigued. ‘Tell me about Chao Heng.’

As he drove along Chang’an Avenue, he recapped for her the details from the file he had been given on Chao Heng. ‘Retired due to ill health?’ she mused. ‘What was wrong with him?’

‘I’ve no idea. His bathroom cabinet was full of medicines.’ He turned into Zhengyi Road and parked in the street outside the police apartments. ‘I’ll be five minutes,’ he said.

She watched him go, noticing for the first time how narrow his hips were in contrast to his broad shoulders, the pleasing square set of his head. She knew he was fit from the way he moved, muscles toned and taut. A man’s body was usually the last thing she found attractive. Normally it was the eyes that would first appeal. Windows on the soul. You could tell so much about someone’s personality from the eyes; their humour, warmth, or the lack of either. She liked a man to be cerebral, to have a sense of humour. Masculinity was important, but ‘macho’ was a turn-off. Li was moody and defensive and prickly, but there was something in his eyes that told her she would like him if only she could get near him. There was no doubting his masculinity, but he had a sensitive — perhaps over-sensitive — quality, betrayed by the ease with which he blushed. No doubt it embarrassed him, but she found it endearing. His guilt, when she had caught him looking at her reflection in the mirror, had been amusing. But for a long moment it had been more, a strange feeling of desire flipping over in her stomach. That feeling returned now, and she felt herself grow hot and flushed. She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. This was not going to happen. She had not escaped from Chicago, from the person she had been, the life she had left in ruins, just to fall for some damned Chinese policeman with a chip on his shoulder and a severe case of xenophobia.

She forced herself to focus on the murders, recreating in her mind the picture of Chao’s apartment that Li had painted for her. If Chao was the key to the three murders, then there must be clues in his life and lifestyle, in his work, his apartment. But her thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the driver’s door. Li was wearing a fresh white short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, and neatly pressed black trousers over gleaming brown shoes. ‘Very smart,’ she said. ‘Who does your ironing for you? Your uncle?’

‘I do it myself,’ he said, and blushed, covering his embarrassment by making a meal of pulling on his seat belt and starting the engine. Margaret looked at him with mixed feelings. In the last couple of hours he had taken her through the entire emotional spectrum, from anger verging on hatred to stirrings of lust and affection. He was an infuriating man.

IV

The headquarters of Section One were still besieged by people who had been summoned to make statements. The offices and hallways of the building were baking in the afternoon heat. Corridors were lined with people on chairs, or squatting with their backs to the wall. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the still air, in long horizontal strands, like mist. Officers and interviewees alike were crotchety and tired. Even the cheap standard-issue stationery slipped into typewriters by secretaries had gone limp. The temperature rose as Li and Margaret climbed the stairs to the top floor, and by the time they had reached the detectives’ office Li’s shirt was sticking to him in a tapering line down his back, turned sheer by perspiration. Margaret could see clearly the sculptured lines of muscle interwoven across his shoulders and upper back. She knew the names of every one, memorised during hours spent studying for anatomy exams: trapezius, hood, latissimus dorsi, erector spinae. She knew the way they were layered and overlapped, and what they looked like beneath the skin. She had never regarded them as anything other than anatomical. Until now. There was something animal, sexual and attractive, about the way they pressed against the wet, semi-transparent cotton of Li’s shirt. She cursed herself under her breath. What in God’s name was happening to her? She forced her eyes away.

Li’s heart sank as he turned into the detectives’ room and saw heads lift and faces light in expectation. The door to his office stood ajar, and beyond it the room seemed to glow, as if filled with sunlight, and yet his windows, he knew, faced north-east and only caught the sun obliquely in the early morning. Necks craned to catch his expression as he pushed the door open. His office was unrecognisable. All the furniture had been moved. A large fish tank filled with golden carp stood on a table in one corner. Flowers bloomed in pots all along the windowsill. A small tree in a porcelain pot spread large fleshy leaves into the office from another corner. His desk now faced the door, side-on to the window on its left. The filing cabinet that had stood behind the door had been moved to the far corner. The floor was covered with paint-spattered blankets, and a painter in overalls stood on a stepladder spreading bright yellow paint over cream walls that had gone grey with age and smoke. The previously jammed window stood wide open — no doubt, Li thought furiously, to let the paint fumes escape.

The feng shui man from the previous day was sitting cross-legged again among the files on Li’s desk, examining a large sheet of paper held open in front of him. He looked up at Li and smiled. ‘Much better. You like it?’ He held out the sheet of paper. ‘My plan. Ve-ery good feng shui.’ He smiled at the walls. ‘Yellow. The colour of the sun. The colour of life. This will uplift your spirit and stimulate your ch’i. You feel good, you work better.’ He grinned, revealing his bad teeth. ‘Your men are very good. They move furniture ve-ery quickly.’

Li was incredulous. ‘You used my detectives to move the furniture?’ Behind him, he heard the unrestrained mirth of his detectives. He looked at the fish tank, and the array of plants. ‘Who’s paying for all this?’

‘Your uncle tells me, spare no expense. I think he is very fond of you.’

Li grew hot with anger. He looked at the painter, who was listening in with interest. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Out.’

‘But I haven’t finished yet,’ the painter protested.

‘I don’t care. Get your blankets off my floor, take your paint and your ladders, and go. This is a working office, and I am in the middle of a murder investigation.’

‘But once it’s dried, I’ll never be able to match the joins.’ The painter saw Li’s eyes widen with fury. ‘Okay, okay. I’m out of here.’ He scrambled down the ladder and began clearing his stuff.

Li took the old man by the arm and invited him to get down off his desk. ‘Tell my uncle thank you very much,’ he said, struggling to keep his anger under control. ‘But I have to work now, so you’ll have to go.’

‘I’ll send the painter back on the weekend,’ said the feng shui man.

Li drew breath sharply and clenched his fists at his side. ‘Just go.’

‘Okay,’ the feng shui man said. He looked around the office, and nodded, satisfied. ‘You feel mu-uch better now.’

And the crowd of detectives at the door parted, like the Red Sea, to let him through. Margaret stood smiling just inside the office. She might not have understood a single word, but she knew exactly what had transpired. The painter rattled his ladders, lifted his paint pot, and hurried out after the feng shui man. Li glared at the faces gathered round the door. ‘What are you lot looking at?’

Wu said, ‘Nothing, boss.’ He cast an appraising eye around the room, nodding his approval. ‘Bi-ig improvement.’ There was a splutter of laughter among the others.

‘Get out,’ Li said, shaking his head and restraining a smile, able finally, if reluctantly, to see a funny side to it. He called after them, ‘And if I get any more crap from you guys, I’m going to give that feng shui man every one of your addresses.’ He pushed the door shut.

Margaret said, ‘It is much better like this. Or, at least, it would have been if you’d let him finish painting the walls.’

‘Don’t you start.’ He looked at the piles of transcripts under the window. They seemed to have doubled in size since the morning. His desk was covered again with folders and papers. ‘Would you look at this stuff. I’m going to go blind with paperwork before we’re through with this investigation.’ There was a knock at the door. ‘What!’ he shouted.

Qian poked his head in apologetically. ‘Sorry, boss. Thought you’d like to see the preliminary reports from forensics. They came in by fax about an hour ago.’

Li grabbed the sheets and ran his eyes over the fax-fuzzy rows of tiny Chinese characters that delivered verdicts on the DNA tests and the spectral analysis of the blood from Chao’s apartment. He looked up at Margaret. ‘It was Chao’s blood on the carpet. And as near as they can determine, it was spilled some time Monday night into Tuesday morning.’

‘Which bears out your theory,’ she said.

He nodded, and paused to re-examine the fax. Then he met her eye, and there was a muted excitement in his voice. ‘The DNA from saliva traces on all three cigarette ends matches.’

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘So they were all murdered by the same guy.’

She sat at his desk, swivelling the chair slowly from side to side. The detectives’ office outside was empty. They were all in the meeting room with Li, reviewing progress. She looked at the ragged line on the wall where the fresh yellow paint stopped and the old paint began, and she smiled. His Uncle Yifu was certainly nothing if not persistent. She wondered if he had any idea how much it embarrassed Li, and from all that she knew of him concluded that he probably did. Her eyes fell on the faxes that still lay on Li’s desk, and she marvelled at how it was possible for people to read these strange and complex pictograms. She had read somewhere that although different languages were spoken throughout China, the written language, the characters, remained the same. They just had different words for the same pictures. Of course, standard Beijing Mandarin was now taught in all the schools.

From somewhere deep in the building she could hear the distant sounds of phones ringing, voices raised, the chatter of keyboards. She closed her eyes and started tumbling backward through a dark abyss.

She opened her eyes immediately, or so she thought. She had not realised how tired she was. Her brain was still not keyed to Beijing time. She looked at her watch and realised with a shock that she had just lost twenty minutes. She blinked and tried to make her mind focus on something. The cigarette ends. There was a pack of cigarettes lying on the desk. She picked it up and took one out. The tobacco had a strong, bitter, toasty smell. It made her think of coffee stewing on a hot plate. She examined the pale pattern on the cork-coloured tip, the brand name red on white just above it. A single cigarette end at each crime scene. Smoked by the same man. What was it that was so wrong about that? She knew, of course. No professional would be so careless. And yet they were professional killings. And then suddenly she had a revelation, and sat forward in the chair, heart pounding. It had only been obscure because it was so obvious.

The sound of voices came through from the outer office as the detectives returned from their meeting. Li appeared in the doorway.

‘I’ve just had a revelation,’ she said.

‘You hungry?’ he asked, as if he hadn’t heard

She hadn’t thought about it, but now that she did she realised that her stomach was growling. ‘Sure. Listen, this is important.’

‘Good. I haven’t eaten all day. We’ll get something at the stall on the corner, and then I’m going to the Ministry of Agriculture. If you want to come…’

‘Try keeping me away.’ She stood up. ‘Li Yan… Are you going to hear me out or what?’

He held the door open for her. ‘Tell me on the way.’ But, as he turned, the chain on his fob watch caught on the handle and broke. ‘Damn!’

She looked at the chain. ‘It’s just a broken link. It’s fixable.’

‘Later.’ He slipped it off his belt and dropped it into the top drawer of his desk. He saw she was wearing a wristwatch and tapped his own wrist. ‘You can keep me right.’

By the time they were out in the corridor she was having trouble keeping up with him. He seemed infused with a fresh energy and new determination. ‘I just put a stop to wasting any further time on trying to make some futile drugs connection. At least it’ll cut down on the paperwork.’

‘Li Yan… The cigarette ends…’

‘What about them?’

They were on the stairs now. ‘I think I know why he left one at each crime scene.’

Li stopped. ‘Why?’

‘Because he wanted you to find them. He wanted you to make the connection.’

‘Why?’ Li asked again.

‘I don’t know. If we knew that we wouldn’t be here. But it makes a hell of a lot more sense than believing that someone so careful and meticulous in every other respect would be so careless in that one.’

Li stood and thought about it. He was on the step below her, and she became aware that her eyes and his were on a level. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring off into the middle distance, lost in contemplation. It gave her an opportunity to look at him close up. The features she had first taken as ugly she saw now as strong. A forceful nose, a well-defined mouth, prominent brows, beautiful, almond-shaped eyes, a brown so deep and warm it was hard to distinguish the iris from the pupil. He had a strong jaw, dimpled at the chin, and his flat-top crew cut emphasised the squareness of his head. His skin was the colour of pale teak, and was remarkably unlined, except for the traces of laughter around his eyes and mouth.

He became aware of her looking at him, and for a moment they stood staring into each other’s eyes. And then he was overcome by embarrassment.

‘It’s an interesting thought,’ he said, almost dismissively. ‘But it doesn’t take us any further.’ He turned and resumed his progress down the stairs.

She chased after him. ‘Yes it does. If he wanted you to make the connection, it means he had a motive for doing so.’

‘Of course,’ Li said. ‘But it doesn’t help us know what that motive is. We need more information.’

Margaret tutted her irritation. ‘Well, thanks for the thought, Margaret, it was really helpful.’

Her sarcastic edge and serrated tongue were becoming familiar to him. He decided to play dumb. ‘It was,’ he said, as if blissfully unaware of her tone. He smiled to himself as he heard her gasp of exasperation. Perhaps he was finally beginning to get her measure.

Mei Yuan sat on a stool by her jian bing ‘house’ on the corner of Dongzhimennei. Business was slow, but she was not unhappy. It gave her time to read. She had almost finished her copy of Meditations, and it was from some cold imagined Dutch medieval landscape that she had to drag herself as a dark blue Beijing Jeep pulled up at the kerb and a pale, blonde Western woman in a lemon dress got out of the passenger side. Then she saw Li coming round the bonnet, and her face broke into a smile. ‘Hey, Li Yan, have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I have eaten, Mei Yuan. But I am hungry.’

‘Good. I will make you a jian bing.’ She lit the gas under her hot plate and looked at Margaret. ‘Two?’

‘Two,’ said Li. And in English, ‘Mei Yuan, this is Dr Margaret Campbell, a forensic pathologist from the United States.’

‘Ah.’ Mei Yuan held out a plump hand. ‘Are you here on holiday or on business?’

Margaret was taken aback by the perfect English that rolled fluently off the tongue of what she had taken to be a peasant street vendor. ‘I’m lecturing at the People’s University of Public Security,’ she said.

‘And are you a practising pathologist, or an academic?’

Again Margaret was startled. ‘Practising,’ she said. ‘I only lecture part-time.’ And then, ‘You speak excellent English.’

‘Thank you,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘I get very little chance to practise it nowadays. So I am what you would call a little rusty.’

‘No, not at all.’ Margaret glanced at Li for illumination.

‘Mei Yuan was a graduate of art and literature at Beijing University in the late fifties,’ he said.

Mei Yuan added, without any apparent regret, ‘But my life did not follow an academic course. I spent most of it in the countryside in Hunan province. I only returned to Beijing a few years ago when my husband died.’ She turned to Li. ‘You missed breakfast.’

‘I was too early for you.’

‘I think, perhaps, my riddle was too difficult for you. You were avoiding me.’

Li laughed. ‘No, I wasn’t. I figured that out yesterday afternoon.’

‘Figured what out?’ Margaret asked.

Li shook his head, smiling. ‘It’s a sort of game we play,’ he explained. ‘I usually stop for breakfast on the way to work. Mei Yuan will pose me a problem, or a riddle. I’ve got till the next day to figure it out. If I come up with the right answer, I set her one. Mind games.’

Mei Yuan laughed. ‘Mindless games. For people with nothing better to do at that time of the morning.’

‘So what was the riddle?’ Margaret was intrigued.

‘There are two men,’ said Li. ‘One of them is the keeper of all books, giving him access to all knowledge. Knowledge is power, so he is very powerful. The other has only two sticks. But they give him more power than the other. Why?’

Margaret thought for a moment. ‘That’s easy,’ she said.

Li looked at her sceptically. ‘Oh, sure.’

‘We have a saying at home about not having two pennies to rub together — meaning you are very poor. But if you have two sticks to rub together, you can make fire. And if you can make fire you can burn books and destroy the knowledge they contain. You take away knowledge, you take away power.’

Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. ‘Very good.’

Li was astonished, and full of grudging admiration. ‘It took me all day to work that out.’

Margaret grinned, and as Mei Yuan prepared their jian bings asked her about the book she was reading.

‘Meditations,’ she said.

‘Descartes?’ Margaret was taken aback.

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘Have you read it?’

‘No. I suppose I should have. But there are so many books. You can’t read them all.’

‘If I had one wish in life,’ said Mei Yuan, ‘it would be that I could spend the rest of it doing nothing else all day but reading.’

Li remembered the books lining the wall in Chao Heng’s apartment, and wondered if he had read them all.

Margaret bit into her jian bing and crunched it cautiously. ‘Hmmm,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘It’s fantastic.’ And then quickly, ‘It’s not going to burn the mouth off me, is it?’

Li laughed. ‘Not this time. Just a gentle chili burn.’ And she felt the slow warmth and the flavours fill her mouth.

Mei Yuan handed one to Li. ‘So,’ she said. ‘You have something for me today?’

Li’s mouth was full of jian bing. He shrugged apologetically. ‘I haven’t had a chance to think of anything, Mei Yuan. I have a big investigation on.’

She waggled a finger at him. ‘This is no excuse.’

‘Okay,’ he said, his mind turning over quickly. ‘What about this? A man commits three perfect murders on the same night. There is nothing to connect them to one another, or to him. But he quite deliberately leaves a clue beside each victim which makes it clear that they were all killed by the same man. Why does he do this?’

‘That’s not fair,’ Margaret said.

Mei Yuan looked at her, puzzled. ‘You know the answer to this?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Then it must be very difficult.’ She thought for a moment. ‘What sort of clue does he leave?’

‘A cigarette end. He is clever enough to know that traces of his saliva will remain on the paper and that the police will discover that the DNA in the saliva from each cigarette end is the same.’

She looked from one to the other. ‘Is this real?’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘Then I will think about it,’ said Mei Yuan seriously. ‘And if you ask me tomorrow I will tell you what I have thought.’

Li smiled. ‘I only hope I will know the answer by then, so that I can tell you if you are right or wrong.’

In the Jeep, as they headed north through the traffic chaos of bicycles and buses in the narrow Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie Street, Margaret said, ‘Why is a woman like that selling fast food on a street corner?’

Li shrugged. ‘The Cultural Revolution ruined many lives in China. Hers was only one.’

Margaret shook her head in exasperation. ‘What exactly was the Cultural Revolution?’ And she was immediately embarrassed by her ignorance. ‘I mean, I know I should probably know. But it was a long time ago in a far-off place… from America, that is.’ She flicked a glance at him. ‘Jesus, I never realised how little I knew about the rest of the world until I came here.’

Li glanced at her across the Jeep and thought for a moment. ‘You know how it is, as a young person, to feel you have no control over your life, that everything is run by old people? And that by the time you are old enough to change things, you are too old to enjoy them? Well, the Cultural Revolution reversed all that. It gave power to the young, to change things while they were young.’ He shivered in the heat as memories of his childhood came flooding back.

‘Young people came from all over China to Beijing to become Red Guards and parade in front of Mao in Tiananmen Square. For them, Mao was the “red, red sun in their hearts”. But really, they were just children with all discipline removed. They went crazy. They attacked people just because they were “intellectuals”. They could come into your house and take over your home. And you would be “criticised”, and maybe you would have to write essays criticising yourself, or they would force you through “struggle sessions” or maybe just beat you up for fun. Many people were put in prisons or sent to labour camps. Others were killed — just murdered. And nothing would happen to those who killed them because the legal system had fallen apart, and most policemen were in prison themselves or had been sent to labour in the countryside.’

Margaret tried to imagine how it must have been, to have all the constraints of a civilised society removed, for power to be in the hands of children run riot. But it was unimaginable.

‘All the worst and most basic instincts of human nature were given free rein,’ Li said. ‘And you know how cruel children can be. In my classroom at primary school, my teacher was made by some of the older kids to sit in front of class wearing a dunce’s cap and recite over and over, “I am a cow demon”. For a short time you think it is funny. But then when your teacher is found kicked to death in the school dining room, you get pretty scared.

‘It all got out of control. Even the extremist cadres in the Party, who had set it all in motion, and thought they could control it for their own ends, lost control. Many of the country’s leaders had been purged, Deng Xiaoping among them. And eventually the army had to be sent in to restore some kind of order. But we had twelve years of it. Twelve years of madness. I was born the year before it began. I was thirteen when it ended, and my family was destroyed.’

Margaret was shocked. ‘What do you mean, destroyed?’

Both my parents were sent to labour camps. They had been denounced as ‘rightists’. They were educated, you see. My mother died there, and my father was a broken man. My Uncle Yifu was a policeman in Beijing. He was denounced and spent three years in prison.’

Margaret was stunned. ‘I had no idea. I really had no idea.’

She thought of all the Chinese she had met since her arrival. Every one of them had lived through the Cultural Revolution. Some of them would have been Red Guards, others their victims. Now, it seemed, they lived and worked together as if nothing had happened. ‘How do people do that?’ she said. ‘I mean, live with each other again. Red Guards, and the people they persecuted.’ A society riddled with the forces of guilt and revenge.

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just seemed natural. Like being better after being ill. You just got on with your life. People didn’t talk much about it at the time. They do now, if you ask. For many people being a Red Guard was the most exciting time of their lives. They travelled all over the country. They didn’t have to pay for their train fares or their food. People were scared of them. They had power.

‘You know, maybe like old soldiers remembering a war, no matter whether it had been good or bad for them, the experience was so heightened, everything in their lives after it seems dull.’

‘And their victims?’

‘When the war ends you don’t go on fighting,’ Li said. ‘You get on with the peace.’

Margaret was not convinced she could have been so philosophical. ‘What happened to Mei Yuan?’

‘She was sent to a labour camp in Hunan where she was forced to work in the fields along with the peasants. But in some ways she was lucky.’

‘Lucky!’

‘Her husband was sent to the same camp. They were not separated like so many others.’ His face clouded. She saw it immediately.

‘What?’

He shrugged. ‘In other ways she was not so lucky.’ There was a catch in his voice. ‘Their baby boy was taken away from them. She never saw him again.’

A towering marble statue of Chairman Mao in greatcoat and peaked cap stood just inside the gate of the Ministry of Agriculture on Hepinglidong Street, an arm outstretched in welcome. The Ministry, set in its sprawling, leafy compound, was housed in a huge concrete edifice behind stone-pillared gates. A stone-faced guard stood outside, glowering at a crowd of several dozen schoolchildren and their teachers, who had set up a long table on the sidewalk. A strip of white linen ran its length, and the children were trying to persuade passers-by to sign it in support of some conservation issue.

Li skirted the schoolchildren and turned past the guard and parked the Jeep in the shade of a large tree inside the compound walls. He said, ‘Perhaps you should wait for me here. It might not be politic for me to take you into a government building.’

She nodded. ‘Sure.’ She watched him head off inside and sat for a long time thinking about the Cultural Revolution, about what it must have meant to have had your parents torn away from you as a child, to grow up in a world where all the norms of civilised behaviour were turned on their head. That was all Li had known until he was thirteen. What would ‘normal’ have meant to him? She wondered who had raised him when his parents were in labour camp. Did he have any brothers or sisters?

After a time she found herself succumbing again to an overpowering desire to sleep, and she did not want Li returning to find her snoring in the passenger seat. She got out of the Jeep and wandered back through the gates to the street to see what cause the children were espousing. Beneath green Chinese characters on a long white banner was an explanation in English. They were collecting a million signatures in support of an international drive to save the world from desertification.

Almost immediately she was besieged by clamouring teenage girls who took her hands and pulled her towards the table. A teacher on the other side smiled and handed her a red marker pen. What the hell, she thought. It seemed like a reasonable enough cause. She glanced briefly at all the multicoloured character signatures scrawled across the cloth, before stooping to sign her own name in looping Roman letters. All the children gathered round to watch in amazement, and her signature provoked both astonishment and amusement.

The girls were eager to try out their embryonic English. ‘You British?’

‘No, American.’

‘American! Coca-Cola. Big Mac.’

Margaret smiled wryly. Maybe Li was right. Perhaps that was how the rest of the world saw America’s contribution to international culture after all. In a country whose culinary creations included aromatic crispy duck and lamb that ‘tastes like honey’, fizzy drinks and hamburgers probably seemed pretty crass. But then, she reflected, there were always long queues at the McDonald burger joints she had seen in Beijing.

As she turned back towards the gate, a taxi drew up and a familiar figure emerged. Perspiring profusely, and gasping with the effort of getting out of the car, McCord leaned through the window to pay the driver. As the taxi pulled away, and he turned into the Ministry of Agriculture, Margaret fell into step beside him. ‘Well, hello again,’ she said.

He turned, startled, with eyes like a frightened rabbit. When he saw who it was his face relaxed into a sneer. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’

‘I work here, remember?’

‘Of course.’ She paused. ‘You were very rude to me in the bar last night.’ He looked at her blankly. ‘You probably don’t even remember.’

‘So what are you doing here?’ he persisted.

‘Oh, nothing much. Lending my expertise to the fight against Chinese crime would probably be a good way of putting it.’ He frowned. ‘I did an autopsy on a murder victim who used to work here.’

McCord stopped in his tracks. ‘You did the autopsy on Chao Heng?’

‘Yes. Why? Did you know him?’

McCord brought out a grubby white handkerchief and mopped his face, avoiding her eye. ‘Worked with him for five years. A real weirdo.’ Then he looked at her very strangely, she thought. ‘I heard he committed suicide.’

But her mind was riffling back through the things Li had told her earlier about Chao Heng, making a connection that hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘Wait a minute. After his postgrad year at Wisconsin, he spent seven years at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. Isn’t that the place you got kicked out of?’

‘I didn’t get “kicked out” of anywhere.’

‘So you knew him back then?’

‘So what? It’s not a crime.’ He dabbed furiously at his face with his handkerchief. ‘You’re not suggesting I had anything to do with his murder, are you?’

‘Of course not. I doubt if you could hold a match steady long enough to strike it.’

His mouth relapsed into its earlier sneer. ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’

‘Hey,’ Margaret said, ‘you already asked me that. And you know what? I can’t think of a single reason why I should.’

He glared at her for a moment, thoughts flitting through his mind like clouds on a windy day. But he thought better of giving voice to any of them. And suddenly he had that frightened-rabbit look again, and he turned without a word and hurried off towards the main building. He passed Li in the doorway but didn’t acknowledge him. Li walked across the compound to where Margaret stood waiting.

‘Renewing old friendships?’ he asked.

‘You know, that man seriously pisses me off,’ Margaret said.

‘He didn’t look too happy about seeing you either.’ They walked towards the Jeep. ‘You know he and Chao Heng worked on the super-rice project together?’

‘He just told me. Well, not in so many words. But I guessed that’s what it was.’ She glanced at him. ‘You learn anything new in there?’

Li sighed. ‘Not a lot more than we already knew. Just that Chao was responsible for setting up the research project that led to the development of the super-rice. Apparently he was the one who suggested bringing McCord in. It seems they knew one another in the States.’

‘Yes, they were both at the Boyce Thompson Institute. I just put that one together.’

Li climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. ‘Most of the technology for the super-rice was developed at Zhuozhou agro hi-technology development region, just south of Beijing. After that they spent a number of years in the south near Guilin in Guangxi province conducting field trials. That’s where Chao was before returning to Beijing to be appointed adviser to the Minister of Agriculture.’

Margaret was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Could you show me Chao’s flat?’ she asked.

‘We’ve already been through it from top to bottom.’

‘I know… I’d just like to look for myself.’ She looked at him very directly. ‘Indulge me. Please?’

He looked at the appeal in those palest of blue eyes and knew that he couldn’t resist. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

She checked her watch. ‘Just after four.’

‘Okay. I have to go to the railway station first to pick up tickets for my uncle. Then we’ll go to Chao’s flat.’