The Firemaker

I

Wednesday Night

Above the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Wangfujing Street the sky was ominously dark, the evening light fading prematurely in the shadow of the black clouds congregating overhead. The heat was suffocating. Sweat soaked Li’s shirt, his third that day. On the way there from the railway station he had noticed a digital display on a tower block, alternating time and temperature, reading 20.10 and 37 °C. Some time tonight, he knew, lightning would illuminate the sky, thunder would crash and rumble across the city, and it would rain. Hot, torrential rain that would swell the gutters and wash away the dust of weeks. And after, it would be fresher, cooler, and possible to breathe again.

After writing his report for the Deputy Procurator General, he had turned up unexpectedly at the railway station to see his uncle off on the train. Old Yifu had been glad to see him. Surprised, but pleased. The old man had been quiet and solemn, and they had shaken hands before he climbed aboard the Sichuan express to take his seat in Hard Class among the smoking, eating, spitting travellers that jammed his compartment. Li had watched the train pull away from the platform, gathering speed into the misty evening. A deep depression had settled on him, an unaccountable sense of foreboding. He had wanted to call the train back and tell his uncle not to go. That his sister and her husband could look after themselves. His uncle seemed so fragile, somehow. Old in a way that Li had never seen him before. My only regret is that I was separated from my wife for that period. We had so little time together afterwards, he had told Margaret. Li had never heard him express his loss like that before. It had always been something held close and private.

A red taxi pulled up at the kerbside and Margaret got out of the back. Li’s spirits lifted at the sight of her. She had put on a touch of fresh make-up, her lips warm and red, a smudge of brown on her eyelids emphasising somehow the blue of her eyes. She wore a pair of light, baggy cotton pants that hugged her behind and tapered to fine, slim ankles. She had a pair of white tennis shoes on her feet, and wore a short-sleeved silk blouse tucked in at the waist. A dipping neckline revealed a hint of cleavage, and emphasised the fullness of her breasts. Her hair cascaded back over her shoulders in loops and curls. Her smile was wide and affectionate as she ran up to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to reach up and kiss him. He experienced a mixture of fear and pleasure at the prospect. But she didn’t. ‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ Li responded, suddenly self-conscious. He thought she looked beautiful.

Margaret had seen him standing in front of the bookshop as the taxi drew up. He, too, had changed again, and was wearing a red brushed-cotton shirt, and fawn pants pleated at the waist. Red suited him. Strong and vibrant against the jet black of his hair. He had seemed distracted as he stood waiting for her, something sad in his expression. But his face lit up when he saw her, and his smile had made her stomach flip. She’d had to resist the temptation to reach up on tiptoe and kiss him, a natural, instinctive response to the feelings of affection that filled her with warmth and weakness. Instead, she slipped her arm through his and said, ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Not far,’ he said, and steered her north along the west side of the street.

Wangfujing was the shopping street in Beijing, jammed with department stores, boutiques, photographic studios, jewellers. They were all still open, doing brisk business, crowds of evening shoppers thronging the sidewalks, cramming into fast-food restaurants, spending hard-earned yuan on fresh foods and fancy goods. Trolley buses and taxis and private cars and bicycles clogged the road. The east side of the street was in the process of redevelopment along most of its length. Li said, ‘They are building an underground street three hundred metres long on three levels under here.’

‘What for?’ Margaret asked.

‘More shops,’ Li said. ‘Chinese can’t spend their money fast enough these days. But then Wangfujing Street has always been a place for the rich. It is named after ten princes’ mansions built in the Ming Dynasty, and their sweet-water well.’

Suddenly Margaret became aware of a smoky-sweet aroma filling the sticky night air. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Something smells good.’

He smiled, and they turned west into Dong’anmen Street. Margaret stopped and drank in the scene in amazement. ‘Dong’anmen night market,’ Li said.

A row of food stalls stretching as far as the eye could see ran the full course of the north side. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were crushed along its length, flitting from stall to stall buying a dish here, a bird on a stick there, eggs fried in batter, noodles. From beneath dozens of striped canopies set cheek by jowl under the trees, smoke rose from hot oil in giant woks on open braziers. All manner of foods were being stir-fried or deep-fried. Huge copper kettles on hot plates hissed and issued steam into the night sky, boiling water tipping from long curling spouts to make bowls of thick, sweet almond paste. Li steered Margaret gently through the crowds, past stall after stall groaning with skewered meat and vegetables, whole fish, barbecued baby quails impaled on chopsticks, heads and all. Dozens of chefs in white coats and hats sweated over steaming vats on hot coals, drawing out bamboo racks of steamed buns filled with savoury meats or sweet lotus paste. Rice and noodles and soup were served in bowls, with buckets set at the roadside for the dirty dishes. You bought and ate or drank on the spot. It was a meeting place as well as an eating place, whole families gathering with friends to eat and talk under lights strung from the trees overhead.

Cooks shouted at Li and Margaret as they passed, beckoning them to try their fare. Three yuan a time, Li told her. Livings were made on the basis of volume sales. It was a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach, and just looking at all the food was making Margaret salivate. ‘Have what you want,’ Li said. ‘Just point and we’ll get it.’

They had bowls of rice and barbecued satay with a wonderful spicy peanut sauce, eggs fried in dough, noodles and pickled shredded vegetables. Between each course, they thirstily devoured large chunks of watermelon, skewered on chopsticks, to cleanse the palate. They tried sticks of marinated pork, others of beef, stir-fried with sesame seeds and soy, chunks of pineapple coated in seed and seared over red-hot coals, soup, and almond paste dessert.

‘Stop, stop! I can’t eat any more,’ Margaret said finally, laughing. ‘Take me away from here. I’ll burst.’ It was impossible to look without wanting to taste.

Li grinned. ‘Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.’

‘My stomach’ll be too big to squeeze into any of my clothes if I’m not careful.’

She was holding his upper arm, quite naturally, and without thinking. And as she turned she felt her breasts brush his forearm, a tiny, tingling, thrilling sensation that stirred the seeds of desire somewhere deep inside her. She knew he’d been aware of it, because she felt him tensing. She released his arm and they moved a little apart, self-conscious and awkward, and started walking slowly. She did a quick mental calculation. Li had spent around fifty yuan, just over six dollars, for everything they had eaten. And with a pang of conscience, she remembered how poorly paid the Chinese were compared to affluent Westerners. Fifty yuan was probably a lot of money to him. She determined that the next time, she would treat him. They sauntered idly through the crowds in the direction of the Forbidden City. She took his arm again, and glanced up at him. Why had she ever thought he was ugly? ‘How come you never married?’ she said.

His step did not falter, and he kept his eyes straight ahead. ‘In China it is policy to encourage people not to marry young.’

She looked at him sceptically. ‘And that’s why you never married?’

He reddened. ‘Not really. I guess I just never met anyone I wanted to marry.’

‘Cops,’ she said. ‘The same the world over. It’s not a job, is it? It’s a way of life.’

Until a matter of hours ago, Li would have believed that to be true for him. His widowed uncle had been his role model. Single, driven, ultimately successful. Li had never met his aunt, never really pictured Old Yifu and his wife together. He had always known, because Yifu would never talk about it, how much he missed her. But today, in the park with Margaret, Old Yifu had revealed more of himself than Li had seen in twelve years. And for the first time, Li realised that it was the loss of his wife that had driven Yifu all these years. His work, his pursuit of success, had all been a means of filling the void left by her death. He would have traded it all for the chance of five more precious minutes with her. It was making Li question now what was driving him. If there was a void in his life, it had always been there. He had no memories of a life shared with someone he loved. He had no real sense of what love was, separated as a very young child from his parents, his mother torn away from him, never to be returned. His job, he understood now, wasn’t a way of life, it was an alternative to one.

Margaret had watched the sadness descend on him in an instant, like a veil, his dark eyes deep and languid, almost mournful. ‘A yuan for them,’ she said.

‘Hmm?’ He looked at her distractedly.

‘Your thoughts.’

He dragged himself away from them and forced a smile. ‘They’re not worth half that,’ he said. And, quickly, to change the subject, ‘Are you thirsty?’

She nodded. ‘Very.’ All that salty, sweet food.

‘We’ll go get some tea,’ he said. ‘I know a place.’

The Sanwei Bookstore was in a small side street off Fuxingmennei Avenue, opposite the Minorities Palace. It was dark here, leafy spreading trees casting shadows from the streetlights, the noise of traffic on the avenue muffled by a bank of trees on the sidewalk side of the cycle lane. Dark hutongs ran off into a maze of siheyuan courtyards, dusty and crumbling and newly emerged from behind hoardings raised during the construction of a new stretch of Underground. Everywhere, families had left the cramped and unbreathable spaces they occupied in tiny houses and spilled out on to the pavements to sit on walls, drinking jars of tea and chatting idly. Men squatted in groups under the trees playing chess, and children chased up and down the sidewalks, burning up energy and their mothers’ patience in the stifling heat of the night.

Li and Margaret had taken a No. 4 bus from the bottom end of Wangfujing. It was an experience for Margaret — standing room only, crushed among the bodies squeezed into the long articulated vehicle, curious faces staring at her with undisguised amazement. Yangguizi never travelled on buses. It was unheard of. And this one was particularly strange. Fair-haired and blue-eyed. A tiny child, clutching at her mother’s breast for fear the foreign devil would snatch her away, couldn’t take her eyes off Margaret for the entire journey.

They missed their stop at Fuxingmen and had to walk back, past Radio Beijing and Beijing Telecom, crossing via a pedestrian underpass to the dark and decaying south side of the street. The Sanwei, which meant ‘three flavours’, Li explained, had an undistinguished window and a dark entrance behind a bus stop. A board leaning against the wall outside promised a jazz band every Thursday evening. Margaret thought it seemed an unlikely venue. ‘Is this it?’ she asked. ‘A cup of tea in a bookshop? And if we come tomorrow we get jazz thrown in?’

He smiled. ‘The tearoom is upstairs.’

He led her into a small entrance lobby. Down a couple of steps, and through glass doors, was the bookshop, row upon row of shelves lined with thousands of books, assistants idly wandering the aisles. It was not doing much business. They turned left through a door and up gloomy stairs into another world.

Here was a room from another age, peaceful and hushed in its dimly lit elegance, cloistered and unreal, an oasis amidst the humid dereliction of the street outside. From its high ceiling, fans swung in lazy unison, stirring paper lanterns hanging over sets of lacquered dark-wood tables and chairs. Along one side ran a narrow passageway behind a low wall and tall columns. Along the other, ornately carved wooden screens were arranged to create private alcoves. Flowers grew in pots on every available space, vases stood on every table. The walls were lined with both modern and traditional Chinese paintings.

A young girl greeted them at the top of the stairs and led them across the tiled floor to a table in an alcove. There was not another soul in the place. The rumble of traffic was a distant memory, and the air-conditioning took the heat out of the night. The girl lit a candle at their table and handed them each a menu. Margaret was afraid to raise her voice, as if in a church. ‘This place is amazing,’ she said. ‘You would never know it was here.’

‘It’s popular with writers and artists,’ he said. ‘And musicians. It’s very crowded at the weekends, and there is usually music. But in the early week it is quiet.’ His eyes reflected the flickering candlelight like shiny black coals. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘Just tea.’

He ordered, and the girl brought a tray of delicacies for them to choose from. Margaret picked a small dish of toasted sunflower seeds to nibble on. The tea came in colourfully patterned china cups set in deep saucers and covered with lids. Hot water was poured over a sprinkling of dried green leaves in the bottom of the cups from a heavy, traditionally shaped brass teapot. The girl left it at the table for them to top up their own. The green leaves floated to the tops of their cups, expanding and turning fleshy as they rehydrated. Li replaced the lids. ‘Better to wait a few minutes.’

They sat in silence then for some time. Not a difficult silence, not awkward or self-conscious, but comfortable. Words seemed unnecessary somehow. Li looked at her hands, clasped on the table in front of her. He marvelled at how pink the flesh was beneath the nails, how delicate the fingers that wielded the instruments of autopsy, cutting open corpses to unravel the mysteries of death.

‘What on earth made you want to be a doctor?’ he asked suddenly, almost without meaning to. And immediately he regretted it, fearing she would take offence at his tone.

But she just laughed. ‘Why? Is it so awful?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be…’ He tailed off and shook his head. ‘You know, when you told those students I was squeamish about being at autopsies, you were right.’

She looked at him, surprised. ‘But you must have been at dozens.’

‘I have. And I want to throw up every time.’

Which made her smile. ‘You poor soul.’

‘I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it. Cutting up dead bodies. Or living ones. In fact, that’s probably worse. Diseases and cancers. People dying all the time.’

‘That’s what got to me,’ she said. ‘People dying on me. It’s much easier dealing with the dead. You don’t get attached to them.’ She removed the lid from her cup and sipped at the tea. It was still very hot, and wonderfully refreshing. ‘I used to think medicine was vocational. You know, something you were born to. But I’m pretty cynical about it now. Most doctors I know are in it for the money. I’d wanted to be a doctor as long as I could remember. To help people, to save their lives, to ease their pain. But it’s not like that. There’s never enough money, there’s never enough time. When you graduate from medical school you think you know it all, then you find out you know nothing. Whatever you can do, it’s never enough.

‘When I worked in the emergency room at the UIC Medical Centre, I had people in my care dying nearly every day. Stabbings, muggings, poor bastards pulled from car wrecks, kids hit by automobiles, fires, suicides. You name it. They’d come in with arms and legs hanging off. People burned from head to toe, so bad they don’t feel a thing. They’ll sit talking to you, and you know what they don’t — in a couple of hours they’re going to die. They talk about patients in trauma. But half the time the doctors are in trauma, too. There’s a limit to how much of that you can take, Li Yan, before you start turning into some kind of automaton.

‘The dead? They’re gone. Where, I don’t know. But the body’s just a receptacle, and I can be cold and detached and clinical about cutting it up, because whoever that person was is not there now.’

Her tea was cooling, and she took a longer draught of it and nibbled some sunflower seeds.

‘I think maybe doctors must be a little like cops,’ Li said. ‘No home life.’

Margaret flicked him a glance and then looked away again quickly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No home life worth a damn.’

He took his life in his hands and strayed into that unknown and potentially treacherous territory he had come close to twice before. ‘Is that why you and your husband divorced?’

She met his eye head-on. ‘Oh, we didn’t get divorced,’ she said.

He was taken by surprise, confused and disappointed. ‘But you said you were no longer…’

‘He’s dead,’ she said simply, interrupting.

‘Oh.’ Li knew he’d just stood on a land-mine. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I’m not.’ But her voice was tight with emotion. She reined it in and kept it to herself for some moments, staring at her hands. Then she said, ‘Michael was a good-looking guy. All the girls thought he was gorgeous, and all my friends thought I was so lucky when we got engaged. So did I. But then, what do you know at twenty-four?’ She took a deep, trembling breath. ‘He was a few years older than me, so I guess I looked up to him. He was so smart, and so passionate about stuff. Especially genetics. And he was always bucking the Establishment, taking the unorthodox view, speaking his mind, even at the expense of his career. That’s why he ended up lecturing at the Roosevelt when he was capable of so much better. I admired him for his principles.’ There was a sad fondness in her smile as she remembered.

‘In the early days we used to sit up talking late into the night, smoking dope and drinking beer and putting the world to rights. Like teenagers. We were big kids, really.

‘But then, life started taking over. For me, anyway. You know how it is. You get your first job. You’re on the first rung of the ladder. They know it, so they work you every hour God gives. You know it, so you do it ’cos you want to climb the ladder. Michael wanted kids, I didn’t. Not then, anyway. There was a lot I still had to achieve in life. I wasn’t about to throw it all away for motherhood. There would be time for that, or so I thought.

‘So maybe it was my fault he started playing around. But I think maybe he’d always been doing it. I just never knew until it all came out at the trial.’ She stopped herself, wondering why she was telling him all this. It was coming so easy, pouring from her like blood from a wound, or maybe pus from an infected sore.

She glanced up and found his eyes fixed on her, deep and dark and sympathetic. Then for a moment she became aware of the girl who had served them shuffling idly between the tables, adjusting a chair she might have adjusted a dozen times before, wiping a speck of dust from a table, her mind lost in thoughts of a life they would never know.

‘I should have known from my student days,’ Margaret said. ‘There was always one lecturer, maybe younger than the rest though not always, that the girls would all find attractive. And for a semester, or maybe even a whole year, one of them would have a passionate affair with him. They had so much in common, she would tell the others. He was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced. By the end of the year she would grow up and move on, and he would have another passionate affair with some kid the next year, some starry-eyed young girl who would think he was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced.’ Margaret’s smile was bitter and sad. ‘Michael was one of those. Every year another student, or maybe two. And he would sit up with them into the small hours, smoking dope and drinking beer, putting the world to rights. While I was working ninety-five-hour weeks as an intern, busting a gut to build a career.’ Her eyes started to fill, and for a moment she panicked, thinking she might start to cry. She blinked furiously, and a couple of salty drops splashed on the lacquered surface of the table. She drained her tea, down to the thick green leaves that had sunk to the bottom of the cup. Without a word Li refilled her cup, and then she felt his hand slip over hers, warm and dry and comforting. She blinked at him and smiled bravely. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…’ She sighed. ‘I should never have started this.’

‘It is all right,’ he said softly. ‘Go on if you want to. Stop if you don’t.’

She withdrew her hand from his and took a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. ‘The first I knew anything about it,’ she said, ‘was when the police came to arrest him.’ She remembered vividly how it had been. ‘I was with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office by that time. I’d been working late. Michael was still up when I got home. He’d been smoking a lot of dope and was acting pretty strange. There’d been a murder on campus, in the student residence. One of his students, a nineteen-year-old girl, raped and battered to death. We’d been talking about it the day before. He seemed pretty shocked. I’d fallen asleep on the settee, and the next I knew the police were at the door. Six in the morning. I was still half asleep. I didn’t really know what was happening. They read him his Miranda rights, cuffed him and took him away. He just kept saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags, I didn’t do it”.’ She glanced up at Li, a hint of what he took to be something close to shame in her eyes. ‘And I believed him. Or, at least, I wanted to.’

She shook her head. ‘The trial was a nightmare. He pled not guilty, of course. But there was overwhelming forensic and DNA evidence against him. The prosecution said he’d been drinking and that he couldn’t take the rejection when the girl said no. They said he was used to getting his way with young girls, attractive, impressionable students falling at his feet year after year. A procession of them came to the witness stand and went through their affairs with him in graphic detail.’ She took a moment to control herself. ‘The thing is, I knew it was true. Everything they said. It was just Michael. I was so angry — with myself, for not having seen it. I could believe it of him so easily. I just couldn’t believe he was a murderer. My family, my friends, everyone thought the same. He’d been a rat. Sure. But kill someone? Michael? No, not Michael. Not dear, sweet, intelligent Michael with all his great liberal ideas and his concern for humankind.

‘So I did everything in my power to try to undermine the scientific evidence against him. The blood, the semen, the fibres collected at the scene. Contaminated. All contaminated. Sloppy police work, I said. His legal team did a good job. But not good enough. He was no O. J. Simpson. He couldn’t afford the best. The trial lasted three weeks and it took every penny we had. We lost the apartment, the automobile. I moved in with a friend.’ She paused, lost for a long time in private thought. ‘The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to life. And still he was saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags. You gotta believe me, I didn’t do it”. So I started borrowing money to kick off the appeals procedure. But it wasn’t going well, and he was more and more depressed every time I went to see him. And then one night I got a phone call. He’d hanged himself in his cell. He was dead. It was over, and I could always believe he was innocent. The victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. That’s what my folks said, and my friends. They were really supportive. I cried for about twelve hours, till I got that I was aching so much I couldn’t feel a thing.

‘Then the next day I get this letter through the door. It’s his handwriting. I knew it right away. It was like he’d come back from the dead, and I still wasn’t used to him not being alive. It didn’t say much.’ She bit her lip as she remembered. ‘“Dear Mags, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. But I just can’t go on living with this. I never meant to kill her. I hope you’ll believe that. I’ll always love you. Mikey.”’ Big, silent tears ran down Margaret’s cheeks. ‘He couldn’t live with it. But he made damn sure I had to. Like he was passing on all the guilt. He killed that girl. He raped her and then he hit her again and again and again until he had smashed her skull. He had lied to me about everything. Why couldn’t he have lied to me one last time?’ She put her fist to her mouth and bit down hard on the knuckles. Li stretched over and pulled it gently away and held her hand as she sobbed, and the tears splashed in great heavy drops on the table, glistening in the flickering candlelight.

It was several minutes before she could speak again. Her tissue was sodden, her eyes red and swollen, her cheeks blotched. ‘I never told anyone before,’ she said. ‘About the letter. It was easier to let everyone else go on believing the lie, or at least hold back from giving them a reason not to.’

‘Does it help?’ he asked gently. ‘Having told me?’

‘It may not look like it.’ She half laughed through the tears. ‘But I haven’t felt this good in months.’

She didn’t know why she had told him. Perhaps because he was a stranger, a long way from her life back home, from her friends and her family; because in a few weeks she would be getting on a plane and flying back across the Pacific and would never see him again; because she felt close to him, drawn by his deep, dark eyes and the sensitivity she knew they reflected. But maybe simply because she had needed to tell someone. Anyone. The burden of guilt and hurt and confusion had just become too much to bear. And already she felt the weight of it lifted from her. But she was glad it was Li, and in those moments she felt as close to him as she had felt to anyone in years.

Li, too, was wondering why she had told him. It was almost scary to be the recipient of something so personal, to share in so much of someone else’s pain. He felt privileged, too. She had made herself supremely vulnerable, demonstrating an enormous trust in him, even if she was getting on a plane in five weeks’ time to fly out of his life for ever. He had never, in his thirty-three years, felt so drawn to someone as he was to Margaret now. He was frightened to speak, to do anything that would spoil the moment or bring it to an end. Her hand felt very small in his. He ran his thumb lightly over the Mekong delta of blue veins that ran down the back of it, and felt the pulsing of her blood. He wanted to hold her whole body to him, and feel its life and its warmth and keep it safe. But he did nothing. Said nothing.

After a while she made a little sigh and withdrew her hand from his, searching again for another tissue in her purse. But she couldn’t find one. ‘Do I look awful?’ she said.

‘No more than usual.’ He smiled.

She returned the smile, but it was watery and wounded. ‘I think I could do with a drink,’ she said. ‘Something a little stronger than tea.’

II

Outside, the dark night was filled with a sense of anticipation. The rain was so close you could almost touch it. Families still filled the spaces on the sidewalk and under the trees, but were subdued now, children curled up on mothers’ knees, card games in suspended animation. The men sat and smoked in silence; the hot wind of earlier had stilled, and their cigarette smoke rose in undisturbed columns. Dust and humidity hung in the air, turned blue by floodlights on a building site across the avenue. Great yellow cranes stood silently overhead, waiting for the first drops to come. The road was thick with traffic moving in long, slow columns. Cicadas were screaming in the trees. Everyone and everything, it seemed, was waiting for the rain.

Li and Margaret walked slowly east along the sidewalk past brightly lit barber shops, small stores selling shoes and underwear and throwing great rectangular slabs of light out into the darkness. The sounds of washing-up in restaurant kitchens came from open windows up narrow alleys. Li’s hand engulfed hers and she was happy to leave it there, comforted by its warmth and strength. He knew a bar, he said, at Xidan. They could get a drink there. They walked in silence, his mind full of what she had emptied from hers. And she was happy not to think of anything, to have her mind filled by nothing; no regrets, no sadness, no pain. They passed a small shop whose speciality was shoe repair and key-cutting, its window giving on to a workshop where an old man in greasy overalls sweated over a last. Rows of key blanks hung on rods beside the cutting machine.

Margaret stopped, her hand slipping from his. He turned to see her face etched in concentration as she stared in the window. He looked to see what she saw, and saw nothing but the old man at the last and the key blanks on rods. ‘What is it?’

The clouds had rolled back from her eyes and they shone brightly in the light from the shop. ‘The key,’ she said. ‘The key to the stair gate. The killer must have used it to unlock the gate, right? Whether he locked it behind him or not is unimportant. What’s important is he didn’t leave it in the lock or drop it on the floor. He must have put it in his pocket.’

For Li, this had come straight out of left-field, catching him on the blind-side. ‘Hey, wait. Slow down,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Can we go to the park?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s pitch dark. And it’ll be locked up.’

‘That didn’t stop the killer getting in.’ Her eyes were burning now with a strange intensity. ‘Please, Li Yan. This could be important.’

She wouldn’t discuss it further as they took a taxi back to Section One to pick up a car and a flashlight. She might be wrong, she said. She wanted to walk him through it at the scene. There, it would either make sense or not. He didn’t press her.

They drove through the deserted streets of the Ritan legation area, streetlamps smothered by trees, embassy lights twinkling behind high walls and shut gates. In Guanghua Road, alive in the day with street traders and hawkers of every description, the gates to the park were also closed, locked and forbidding. The park lay brooding in the darkness beyond.

‘This is crazy,’ Li said. ‘Can’t it wait till the morning?’

‘No.’ Margaret jumped out of the Jeep and started climbing the gate. ‘Come on,’ she called. ‘It’s not difficult. And bring the flashlight.’

Li sighed and did as he was told. He wondered if he would have indulged her in this behaviour had it not been for her confession of just an hour before, or if she had not aroused in him such intense feelings of… of what? He had no idea. He had never felt like this before.

He climbed the gate easily and dropped down on the other side to join her. A long, straight avenue lined by trees and park benches cut north into the darkness. As they moved further into the park, away from the streetlights, he switched on his flashlight to lead her through the maze of paths that would take them to the lake.

The park, so open and friendly during the day, dappled by sunlight, and filled with the peace of people seeking solitude or relaxation, seemed oddly menacing in the dark — the rustle of night animals in the undergrowth, the eerie call of an owl, the splash of something landing in water as they neared the lake. The sweet scent of pine filled the hot night air, and the willows hung limp and lifeless, trailing their leaves along the edges of the still water. Li’s flashlight picked out the bridge to the pavilion, reflected white in the black water. ‘This way.’ He took her hand and led her round the east side of the lake to the dusty path that led up to the clearing where the twins and their baby-sitter had stumbled upon the blazing body of Chao Heng less than forty-eight hours before. A length of yellow tape was stretched between two stakes to keep the public out. Li stepped over it, and Margaret followed him up to the clearing. A line of chalk still ringed the crime scene, glowing white in the glare of the flashlight. A charred area remained in the centre of the clearing, but the smell of burning had long ago been replaced by the pungent spice of spruce and locust. But there was a desolate and haunted feel about the place, bled of all colour, monochrome in the harsh electric light. There was a sudden and unexpected flash in the sky, followed a few moments later by the not very distant rumble of thunder. The first fat drops of rain started falling, forming tiny craters in the dust.

‘Better make it quick,’ Li said. ‘We’re going to get soaked.’

But Margaret was oblivious. She walked carefully around the clearing, pulling at the shrubs around its perimeter, stopping finally, facing the path they had come up on the other side. Li had tracked her round with the beam of the flashlight. ‘He was wearing gloves, right?’ she said.

Li nodded acquiescence. ‘He didn’t leave any prints — in the apartment or on the gasoline can. He must have been.’

‘Okay. So he got Chao here in the dark. He sat and smoked a single cigarette, and waited for daylight. The kids found the blazing body when…?’

‘Around six thirty.’

‘So the park had been open for about half an hour?’ Li nodded. ‘He poured gasoline all over Chao and struck a match. He wanted the body to be found still ablaze. Why? A macabre sense of theatre, perhaps; or maybe to create a diversion in which he could walk away unnoticed.’ She turned around. ‘He retreats this way, through the undergrowth, right? Because nobody saw him leave by the path the twins came up.’ She plunged through the shrubs and bushes, away from the clearing. Li hurried after her. ‘He’s going to come out on a path somewhere away over there,’ she called back, waving her hand vaguely into the darkness. The rain was still falling in single fat drops that they could have counted had they so desired. Another flash, the thunder nearer this time. ‘But he’s not going to walk away unnoticed wearing a pair of gloves, is he? Not on a sticky hot summer morning. He could have put them in his pockets, but suppose something went wrong and he got stopped.’ She pushed on through the undergrowth. Li followed. ‘Some quirk of fate. The alarm gets raised sooner than he thought. There’s a cop at the gate who stops anyone leaving. The killer doesn’t want to be found with a pair of gloves in his pocket, a pair of gloves stained with gasoline, maybe blood. So he throws them away, somewhere far away into the undergrowth.’ She mimicked the action. ‘What does it matter if they get found. There’s no way to trace them back to him. Then he remembers something. Damn! He’s still got the key to the stair gate at Chao’s apartment in his pocket. Now, that could tie him to his victim if he got stopped. It’s a long shot, but this guy doesn’t take any chances. He’ll have left his gun hidden in his vehicle. He’s meticulous. He’s a professional. And here’s a loose end. So he hurls the key away into the undergrowth after the gloves. Nobody’s ever going to find it. Hell, nobody’s even going to look. And nobody would know what it was anyway. Just a key. So he doesn’t worry about the fact that he’s not wearing gloves, and that his fingerprints are going to be on it.’

Her face was gleaming with excitement in the beam of the flashlight. Li’s mind was racing, assimilating what she had said. For a moment he closed his eyes to try to visualise what she had described. He saw very vividly the figure of a man retreating through the undergrowth. He was peeling the gloves from his hands as he went. He threw them as far as he could, then stopped suddenly, remembering the key. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then turned and threw it in the opposite direction, before hurrying off, away from the crackle of flame and smoke behind him. Li opened his eyes, and for a moment night turned to day, thunder crashed overhead, and the rain came down like rods, crashing through the leaves, turning dust to mud beneath their feet as they stood. Margaret’s face had been caught as if by a photographic flash, and the image of it was burned on to his eyes and remained there as he blinked to regain his night sight.

‘I mean, maybe it didn’t happen like that at all,’ Margaret said. ‘But it’s possible. Isn’t it? And if it did, then those gloves and that key are still here somewhere.’ She was having to shout now above the crashing of the rain. ‘Worth looking?’

‘Was he left- or right-handed?’

She frowned. ‘What?’

‘The killer. Can you tell? Maybe from the angle of the blow to Chao’s head?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not for certain. But if you wanted to go by the laws of probability, he would be right-handed. Why?’

‘It could affect the direction he threw the gloves and the key.’

‘So you think it’s possible?’

He nodded. ‘I think it’s possible.’

She grinned, and he wanted to kiss her right there and then, cup her face in his hands and press his lips to hers. The rain was streaming down her face now, her hair slicked back by the wet. The silk of her blouse clung to the contours of her breasts, nipples puckered and erect, pushing hard against the soft, wet material. She was still not wearing a bra. ‘You want to look now?’ she asked.

‘It’s raining!’ he laughed, incredulous. ‘And I should organise an official search.’

‘We’re wet already. And before you go calling out half the Beijing police force, it would help to justify it if you’d at least found a glove.’ She fumbled in her purse. ‘I’ve got a key-light in here somewhere.’ And she laughed. ‘Now that’s ironic, isn’t it? A key-light!’ She found it. ‘You take the right side, I’ll take the left. If we don’t find something in ten minutes you can call in the cavalry.’

And before he had time to object, she was off, pushing through the shrubbery, pointing a pencil-beam of light ahead of her. He shook his head. She was in her element. It was as if telling him her story in the tearoom had lifted an enormous burden from her. She hadn’t needed alcohol. She was as high as a kite. And he wondered what on earth he was doing there, soaked to the skin, scrabbling about in the bushes in the dark, in pursuit of something that was probably illusory, the creation of two overactive imaginations on an emotionally charged night.

He scrambled through the bushes to his right, scanning the ground with the flashlight. It had been dry for so long and the ground was baked so hard that the rain wasn’t draining away immediately. It lay in great pools, filling every dip and hollow. Another flash of sheet lightning lit up the park, reflected off every glistening branch and leaf. For a moment he thought he saw a figure darting through the trees, the briefest flickering movement, like half a dozen frames of an old black-and-white movie. He had lost his bearings. It must have been Margaret. He called out, but the rain was still deafening, and he couldn’t hear whether she had replied. He shook his head and wiped the rain from his eyes, and pushed on, swinging the beam of his flashlight from side to side. He went to check the time on his watch, but it wasn’t there, and he remembered breaking the chain earlier in the day. He must have been blundering around in the dark and wet for at least ten minutes by now, he thought. He turned, wondering which way it was back to the clearing. As he did, the beam of his flashlight caught the dark shape of something hanging in the branches of a bush. He swung the light back. It looked like a dead bird. He pushed through the undergrowth towards it, and as he reached out it fell to the ground. He crouched down and shone the lamp on it. It was a sodden leather glove. ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Margaret! I’ve found one.’ He heard her footsteps approaching from behind and turned as a fist smashed down into his face. The shock of it robbed him of his senses and he keeled over, blinking blood and rain out of his eyes. His flashlight clattered away into the bushes. He saw a dark shadow looming over him. And the fist smashed into his face again. And again. Hard. Brutally hard. His attacker was strong and very fast. He saw the fist draw back again and knew he could do nothing to stop it.

‘Li Yan?’ He heard Margaret’s voice above the drumming of the rain. ‘Li Yan, where are you?’

The fist paused and hung uncertainly for a moment, then unravelled into fingers and thumb, flying past him to the ground like some hawk diving on its prey. It retreated again, clutching the glove. Lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous this time, a deafening roar from directly overhead. And for the briefest of moments, Li and his attacker were frozen in the hard blue light, looking straight into each other’s eyes. And then darkness, and the man was gone, crashing off through the bushes, his image still burned into Li’s eyes, as Margaret’s had been earlier.

‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, where are you!’ He pulled himself to his knees, and then dragged himself to his feet. Margaret’s pencil-beam of light flashed in his face. He heard her gasp. ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’

III

The lake and the pavilion were thrown into sharp relief by floodlights raised on stands among the trees. The random cycle of flashing lights on police vehicles and ambulance reflected in rippling patterns on the water. The crackle of police radios filled the night air, competing with the cicadas that had started up again as soon as the rain stopped. Li sat side-on in the driver’s seat of the Jeep, the door open wide, as a medic patched up his face: a split lip, a bloody nose — broken, Margaret thought — a bruised and swelling cheek, and an inch-long split on his left brow that required two stitches.

Margaret watched from the lakeside as Detective Qian organised uniformed officers into groups, dividing and subdividing the immediate territory into quadrants for searching on hands and knees, inch by inch. She checked the time. It was twenty-five to midnight. It was cooler after the rain, a slight breeze stirring the leaves. Her hair and clothes were virtually dry. The ground, parched after weeks of drought, had soaked up all the rainwater, and it was hard to believe now that there had been a deluge less than an hour before. Margaret glanced at Li and felt another pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for her, if he hadn’t indulged her insistence on searching for the gloves by themselves in the pouring rain.

Qian detached himself from the search groups and crossed to Li as the medic finished up. He looked at his boss’s battered face in awe. ‘He made some mess of you, boss.’

‘You want to see the mess I made of his hand,’ Li said grimly.

Qian chuckled. ‘Good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’ Li glared at him and his smiled faded. ‘So why do you think he attacked you?’

‘Because I’d found one of the gloves,’ Li growled.

‘And you think that’s what he was doing here? He’d come back to look for them?’

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe he’d followed us. One thing’s for sure. When he saw us searching the undergrowth he worked out pretty damn quick what we were up to. And now he’s got at least one of the gloves, maybe both of them, and maybe the key as well, if it was ever there.’

‘Hell, boss, why didn’t you just call in a search when you thought of all this, instead of scratching about in the dark and the rain on your own?’ He glanced off towards Margaret. ‘Well, almost on your own.’ He turned back to Li and saw a warning look in his eyes, and decided to back off. ‘I’ll just get these guys started,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the uniforms. And he headed off shouting out instructions.

Li lit a cigarette and looked up as Margaret approached. ‘Don’t tell me it’s bad for my health,’ he said. ‘It can’t do me nearly as much damage as being around you.’ He smiled wryly and winced at the pain. ‘You should have a health warning stamped on your forehead.’

But his attempt at humour only served to deepen her sense of guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this is all my fault.’

Li said, ‘You didn’t murder three people, then come into a park and assault a police officer. How can it be your fault?’

‘Because you wouldn’t have been in the park in the first place. And you certainly wouldn’t have been stumbling about the bushes in the rain trying to find a needle in a haystack.’

‘But I found the needle,’ he said. ‘At least, one of them.’

‘And then lost it again.’

He glanced at her anxiously, hesitating for a moment. ‘What do you think he was doing here? The man who attacked me.’

‘Looking for the same thing as us.’

‘Why didn’t he do that last night?’

She stopped and thought about it, and then frowned and looked at him, concerned. ‘You think he followed us here?’ He inclined his head a little to one side and raised an eyebrow. He did not want to commit himself. ‘Because if he did, that means he’s been watching us.’ And a shiver raised goose bumps on her arms. ‘That’s creepy. Why would he do that?’

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s monitoring our progress. If we get too close to him, or to the truth, he’ll intervene. Like he did tonight.’

Margaret felt the hairs rise up on the back of her neck, and she glanced around the dark perimeter beyond the ring of light, wondering if somewhere out there he was still watching. ‘Did you see his face at all?’ she asked.

‘For a moment,’ Li said. ‘In the lightning flash.’ He could still see the face vividly in his mind’s eye, pale, tinged with blue like the face of a corpse, contorted with fear and… anger. Yes, that was what it had been, anger. But why, Li wondered, had he been angry? With himself, perhaps? For having made the mistake with the gloves in the first place?

‘Would you know him again?’

‘I don’t know. He had the face of a devil. It was like looking at death. He didn’t seem human, somehow.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

And Margaret realised in that moment that Li had thought he was going to die. He had been caught unawares and beaten to the ground with a fist like steel. Lying dazed and helpless in the mud, his attacker looming over him, he had believed that the man would kill him. What had stopped him? Had it really just been her voice calling through the rain? What could she have done? He could just as easily have killed her. But then, she realised, for a professional killer he was behaving uncharacteristically. On impulse. None of it had been planned. He had been responding to the moment, trying to correct or cover up an equally uncharacteristic mistake made nearly forty-eight hours earlier. Perhaps her voice had simply brought him to his senses and he had retreated into the night to lick his wounds. For that was what he was like, she thought. A wounded animal. A professional killer who had made one small mistake, and then compounded it. And that made him extremely dangerous.

A uniformed officer arrived in a police car and got out with a carrier bag of fresh clothes for Li — jeans and trainers and a white shirt, collected from his apartment. Li changed in the back of the Jeep. ‘I should take you back to the hotel,’ he called to Margaret.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘All dried off now.’ She ran her hands back through her hair to untangle the mass of curls. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t sleep, wondering if they’d found anything.’ She was beginning to doubt that she would ever sleep again. ‘How long do you think they will take?’

Li climbed out of the back of the Jeep and glanced up the slope to where police floodlights had turned night into day. Teams of officers were working their way through the bushes, inch by meticulous inch, calling to one another above the thrum of the generator and the screeching of the cicadas. ‘It’s not such a big space to cover. A couple of hours maybe. If they find nothing, we’ll leave armed guards and bring in fresh teams tomorrow to extend the search area.’ He was glad she wanted to stay, not just because he wanted to be with her, but because after the events of tonight he was afraid for her. Afraid of unseen eyes watching them, tracking them. The investigation had become dangerous, and he knew that from tomorrow he would have to sever her connection with it.

As he lit another cigarette, there was a shout from the top of the slope. He threw the cigarette away and ran up the path as a young officer emerged from the undergrowth holding up a single glove with a pair of plastic tongs. So the killer hadn’t got both gloves. Li derived a momentary satisfaction from that. Qian got the officer to drop the glove in a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. He handed it to Li. ‘Look familiar?’

‘I don’t know. I only saw the other one for a few seconds.’ He looked at it closely. It was a plain brown leather glove with a brushed cotton lining, still damp from the rain and stiffening as it dried.

Margaret appeared at his shoulder. ‘May I take a look?’ He handed it to her, and she examined it closely through the clear plastic. ‘There,’ she said, and teased out a maker’s label that had curled up at the seam just inside the open end. She squinted at it in the light. ‘Made in Hong Kong,’ she read. ‘And there, just inside the thumb…’ She folded out a small, dark stain for him to see. ‘Could be blood.’ She turned the glove over. ‘It hasn’t been worn much.’

‘How do you know?’ Li asked.

‘Leather stretches with wear, takes on the shape of your hand. This looks as if it’s not long off the peg. See, there’s barely been any pull at the stitching. They were probably custom-bought for the job.’

‘In Hong Kong?’

‘That’s where they were made. They’re expensive gloves. Probably not widely available in China. If at all. But you’d know more about that than me.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. He took the bag and handed it back to Qian, and they had a brief exchange. Margaret followed him back down the slope to the Jeep. ‘What now?’

‘The glove’ll go straight back to the lab for forensic examination. And we’ll wait until they find the key. Or not.’ He lit a cigarette and looked at her apprasingly. ‘You were right about the gloves. Let’s hope you were right about the key as well.’

It was nearly half past midnight when the shout came that they had been waiting for. The key had been nestling in among the roots of a small shrub, about thirty feet from where they had found the glove. Li looked at it excitedly in its small plastic bag, brought to him out of a glare of floodlights by a triumphant Detective Qian. If luck was on their side, it could turn out to be the key to a great deal more than Chao Heng’s stair gate. He turned to find Margaret, eyes gleaming, looking at the key as he held it up. He wanted to kiss her. He would never have had the thought that had led them to find it. She used the same thought processes he did. Visualised things, it seemed, in the same way. But she had made a leap of imagination that would not have occurred to him. A wild and unlikely leap in the dark. So unlikely that even if he’d had the thought he would probably have dismissed it. Perhaps she was less afraid of being wrong than he was.

The drive to the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong was a revelation to Margaret, an insight into the street life of the real Beijing tucked away behind the façades and advertising hoardings of the new China. Even at this late hour, the streets teemed with night life, the population emerging again from steamy-hot homes into the relative cool of the hutongs after the rain. Li’s Jeep followed in the wake of a forensics van, two sets of headlights raking the narrow alleyways and siheyuan, capturing for brief moments families eating at tables on the sidewalk, a man sprawled in an armchair gazing at the flickering blue light of a television set, food served to card players through open windows whose light spilled across the tarmac, people on bicycles that wobbled in the headlights as the vehicles raced past. Margaret peered from the window on the passenger side, faces flashing past, staring back at her. Some blankly, some with hostility, others with curiosity. Beijingers, Margaret thought, had a preoccupation with getting their hair cut. Barbers everywhere were still doing business. She checked the time. It was almost 1 a.m.

There was an urgency now about Li. His face had swollen around his left eye. It was bruised a deep blue. But the eyes themselves were sharp and alive and burning with a fierce intensity. He was in a hurry to get his man.

They abandoned the Jeep in the street and ran up the ramp through large open gates, past armed guards, into the bowels of the Pao Jü laboratories of forensic pathology. ‘A few minutes, Li, that’s all,’ the lead forensics officer told him. They waited in an office on the ground floor, Li sitting on the edge of a desk swinging his legs impatiently. Margaret recalled Bob’s tale about the Three Ps — Patience, Patience and Patience. The three things you must have to survive in this country, he had said. Li seemed to have run out of all of them. She examined his face. ‘They must have some witch-hazel here.’

‘Some what?’ he said.

‘It’ll bring down the swelling and stop your face from going completely black and blue by the morning.’

She spent some time in conversation with a lab assistant before he went off, returning a few minutes later with some clear fluid in a bottle and some large wads of cotton wool. She soaked a wad and told Li to hold it to his face. He didn’t argue with her, but with his free hand shook a cigarette from its packet and lit it. He had only taken one pull at it when the lead forensics officer hurried in, pink with exertion and breathing hard. He, it seemed, had also been infected by Li’s sense of urgency.

‘A single index finger. Smudged. No use.’

‘Shit!’ Li looked sick.

‘Hang on,’ the forensics man admonished him. ‘We also got a thumb.’ He held up a sheet of paper with a blow-up of the print. ‘It’s not Chao’s, and it’s just about perfect.’

IV

It was after two when Li and Margaret stepped back out into Pao Jü Hutong. It was cool now, the air fresh and breathable. For the first time since she had arrived, Margaret could see stars in the sky. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy. She felt an odd sense of exhilaration. The glove and the key had been a major breakthrough. An officer had been sent to Chao’s apartment building to check that the key fitted the stair gate. It did. Close forensic examination of the glove had revealed a speck of blood at the top of the interior lining of the middle finger. It might have come from a paper cut, or a damaged cuticle. But there was enough there to enable a DNA comparison with the saliva on the cigarette ends. That test would be done at the Centre of Material Evidence Determination in the morning — along with a comparison of the bloodstain on the outer glove with blood samples taken from Chao Heng. If both tests proved positive, it would conclusively tie the wearer of the glove to the murder of Chao and both the other victims. The thumbprint from the key had been faxed to Hong Kong. It was possible, just possible, that by morning they would know the identity of the killer.

In spite of being on the wrong end of a beating, Li was euphoric. He was still pressing the wad soaked with witch-hazel to his face. ‘Let me see,’ Margaret said as they reached the Jeep. She took his hand away from his face and stood on tiptoe to look closely at the bruising. Her face was only inches from his. He could feel her breath warm on his cheek. He flicked a glance at her, but she was focused on his injuries. ‘The swelling’s gone down already,’ she said. ‘You won’t be such a mess in the morning.’

But the mention of the morning only depressed him. He would have to tell her then that she could no longer assist on the case. It was too dangerous. His superiors would forbid it. He knew how she would react. With anger and hurt. After all, he would not have come this close to breaking the case without her. He glanced at her again. Her face was open, eager and happy. She had exorcised ghosts from her past tonight, she had trusted him with her pain. And tomorrow… He closed his eyes and sighed. He did not want tonight to end.

She laughed. ‘What’s the big sigh for? You should be pleased with yourself.’

He forced himself to return her smile. ‘I’m pleased with both of us,’ he said. ‘We make a good team.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, nodding. ‘I do the thinking, you take the punches. You’re good at that.’

He grinned and took a mock swipe at her. And when she raised her arm as a shield he grabbed it, pulling her close and pressing her back against the side of the Jeep. They froze in anticipation of a moment they had been flirting with all night. But the moment passed, unconsummated, as she smiled wryly and tipped her head in the direction of the two armed guards watching from the gate. ‘I think we’re in danger of putting on a show,’ she said.

He glanced ruefully at the guards. ‘You want me to take you back to the Friendship?’

‘You were going to buy me a drink,’ she said. ‘Before someone had the crazy idea of going gallivanting through Ritan Park in the dark and the rain. Will that bar still be open, do you think?’

He shook his head. ‘Not at this hour. But I know somewhere that will.’

There was no queue to get into the Xanadu at this time in the morning. Li had been half afraid that it might be closed. But there was still a steady traffic in and out. Groups of youngsters stood about on the sidewalk outside, smoking and talking. They eyed Li and the yangguizi with vague curiosity as they pushed through them and went in past the bouncers. Li took out his wallet to pay, but was waved on through. Inside, the music was still loud, but slow, reflecting the late hour. Margaret took his arm and put her lips to his ear. ‘I wouldn’t have thought a place like this was your scene,’ she shouted.

‘It’s not,’ he shouted back. ‘But you wanted a drink. This is about the only place we’ll get one.’

He led her through to the bar. Most of the tables on the main floor were still full, and through the haze of smoke that filled the place, Li could see that there were no free tables up in the gallery. ‘What do you want to drink?’

‘Vodka tonic with ice and lemon. But I’m paying.’ She took out some notes.

He waved them aside. ‘No, no.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘You bought me dinner, I’m buying the drinks.’

‘No.’ He still refused to take the money.

‘I thought you people believed in equality,’ she said. ‘Women hold up half the sky in China. Isn’t that what Mao said?’ And in that moment she thrust the notes into his hand. ‘You’re buying, I’m paying. And I’m going to get us that table over there that these people are just leaving.’ And she breezed off across the floor to lay claim to the table.

She sat down quickly, getting there just ahead of a group of two girls and a sullen youth who had been standing at the foot of the stairs. They glared at her resentfully and moved away. She looked around and realised she was causing a bit of a stir. As far as she could see, she was the only Caucasian in the place, and for all she knew the only one who’d ever been in it. It didn’t look like the kind of stop-off that would be on the tourist itinerary. Faces at the tables around her were turned in her direction, gazing with glazed and unselfconscious interest, until she smiled and they became suddenly embarrassed and returned shy smiles like coy children.

On stage a stunning-looking girl in a sexy silk dress with daring splits up either side sang a mournful melody to the accompaniment of a guitarist, and a keyboard player triggering pre-programmed, synthesised computer music. The backing sounded professional. The singer was awful. Margaret watched her with a mixture of horror and embarrassment. She had no talent for it whatsoever. But no one else seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t care. Li arrived with her vodka and a large brandy and sat down opposite her. She flicked her head towards the stage. ‘Pretty face. Shame about the voice.’

Li smiled. ‘She’s my best friend’s girl.’

Margaret almost choked on her vodka. ‘You’re kidding me.’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t like her much either.’

She looked at him curiously. ‘And she’s really your best friend’s girl?’ He nodded. ‘So is it her you don’t like, or her singing?’

‘Both.’

‘Why don’t you like her?’

‘Because she’s a prostitute, and he’s mad about her, and he’s going to end up getting hurt.’

Margaret looked at the girl in astonishment, and with fresh eyes. ‘But she’s… beautiful. Why would she throw herself away on prostitution?’

‘You’ve heard her singing,’ Li said. ‘And anyway, she’s not some street-corner hooker. It’s all private deals behind closed bedroom doors in high-class joint-venture hotels. She probably makes a lot of money.’ He shrugged. ‘A girl like that, she’s just making use of the one asset she has — while she still has it.’ He looked at her on the stage, eyes closed, living out some sad fantasy, giving her heart and soul to the cheap lyrics of a popular Taiwanese ballad. What arrangement, he wondered, had she arrived at with the manager that allowed her to sing here, escaping for a time from the sordid world of clawing, pawing, sexually frustrated foreign businessmen? He almost felt sorry for her. He had believed her when she told him she loved Ma Yongli. He treats me like no one’s ever treated me before. Like a princess. What he hated was the effect she had on him, turning him from a confident, cocky young man with a wicked, if juvenile, sense of humour into a sycophantic and simpering acolyte, all confidence lost in a welter of self-doubt. There was something going on in Yongli’s head that told him she was too good for him. He couldn’t believe his luck, or that it would last. It was pathetic, and Li hated to see it, and blamed Lotus when perhaps the fault was Yongli’s.

‘Well, well, well. I see you took my advice and got yourself a woman after all.’ Li turned to find himself looking up into Yongli’s big, round, smiling face. But the smile vanished almost immediately. ‘In the name of God, what happened to you? Don’t tell me she’s beating you up already?’

Li grinned. ‘I got on the losing end of an argument with a villain.’

Yongli shook his head in amazement. ‘Must have been a big bastard to put one over on you.’

‘Caught me off guard,’ Li said ruefully.

Margaret watched the exchange with interest. She could make an educated guess about the topic of conversation. For a moment she had been nonplussed to find that there was something familiar about the face of the big, bluff man who had arrived at their table. And then she had placed him. He had been with Li that first night at the duck restaurant. The affection between the two men was obvious. He turned and grinned at Margaret, and she grinned back, attracted by the infectious quality of his smile and the laughter in his eyes. ‘So are you not going to introduce me?’ he said to Li in a heavily American-accented English.

‘Ma Yongli, this is Dr Margaret Campbell.’

Yongli took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly with full lips. ‘Enchanté, madame,’ he said. ‘I learned that in Switzerland. It’s French.’

‘I know,’ Margaret said. ‘Et moi, je suis enchantée aussi à faire vôtre connaissance, monsieur.’

‘Hey. Woah.’ Yongli held up his hands. ‘I only know Je suis enchanté, madame. No one’s ever talked back to me before.’ He laughed. ‘I’m impressed.’ Then he leaned over confidentially. ‘Actually, I do know one other phrase, but it’s not the sort of thing you would say in polite company. And Li Yan is a bit sensitive. It’s way past his bedtime, you know.’

‘I know. It’s my fault,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m keeping him out late. But his uncle’s away, so he won’t get into any trouble.’

‘Oh.’ Yongli looked at Li knowingly. ‘When the mouse is away the cat will play.’

Li said, ‘I think that’s the other way round, Ma Yongli.’

‘Ah,’ Yongli said to Margaret, ‘I always get my cats mixed up with my mice. What will you have to drink?’

Margaret lifted her glass. It was almost empty. ‘Vodka tonic.’

Yongli pointed at Li’s glass. ‘Brandy,’ he said. And to Margaret, ‘We have to celebrate. It is so long since I saw Big Li with a woman I was beginning to think he was gay. Back in a minute.’ And he headed for the bar.

Li grinned, a little embarrassed. ‘Ignore him. He’s an idiot.’

‘He’s nice.’

Li felt a pang of jealousy. ‘You probably think he’s good-looking. Most women do.’

‘No.’ She shook her head solemnly. ‘But he’s attractive. What was he doing in Switzerland?’

‘Training as a chef. He spent time in the United States, as well.’

‘Oh,’ Margaret said, cocking an eyebrow. ‘He cooks, too? That makes him very attractive.’ She had been immediately aware of that defensive look men got when they were jealous, and she enjoyed the fact that Li felt that way about her. If only he knew that Yongli wasn’t half as attractive as he was — at least, not in her eyes.

She was beginning to relax, the alcohol easing away some of the tension of the night. It also seemed to be going very quickly to her head. Perhaps it was the tiredness. She had slept for only a handful of hours during the last seventy-two.

Yongli returned with the drinks and sat down at their table with a beer. ‘So,’ he said to Margaret. ‘Cut up anyone interesting recently?’

‘Oh, just a burn victim, a stabbing, an Alanto-occipital disarticulation. Would you like me to go into the gory details?’

Yongli shook his head and said firmly, ‘No thanks.’

‘That’s my trouble,’ Margaret said. ‘The only interesting people I ever get intimate with are dead. The live ones tend to lose interest in me as soon as they hear what I do for a living. They think I’m only after their bodies.’

Yongli laughed. ‘You can play with my organs any time.’

‘I’m more interested in a man’s brain,’ she said. ‘Only the sound of the saw cutting through the skull usually puts them off.’

‘Hey.’ He put up his hands and grinned, shaking his head. ‘I’m not going to win this one, am I?’

‘Nope.’ She raised her glass. ‘Cheers.’

They all drank. Li enjoyed the way Margaret had dealt with Yongli. He was usually too quick for most people. And women preferred to laugh at his humour, rather than compete with it. She caught his eye over the glass, and they shared a moment.

There was a scattering of applause around the club as Lotus finished her song and gushed her thanks. She was finished for the night, she said, and stepped down from the stage. Margaret was uncertain whether the applause was for the performance or the fact that it was over. Lotus approached their table, flushed and a little breathless. Yongli was on his feet in an instant, pulling out a chair for her. ‘I’ll get you a drink. What would you like?’

‘Some white wine.’ Lotus had learned to affect a taste for wine during the many meals she had sat through in restaurants in joint-venture hotels. She looked at Margaret expectantly, waiting for an introduction.

In English, Yongli said, ‘Lotus, this is Li Yan’s friend…’

‘Margaret,’ Margaret said.

Lotus shook her hand. ‘Ver’ pleased meet you,’ she said.

‘Lotus only speaks a little English,’ Yongli told Margaret, almost apologetically.

‘A lot more English than I speak Chinese,’ Margaret said.

Lotus sat down as Yongli headed for the bar. She was clearly intrigued by Margaret, immediately seeking her approval. ‘You like my singing?’

In other circumstances Margaret might have been ambiguous, perhaps ironic, even cruel. But somehow there was such innocence in Lotus’s question that she couldn’t bring herself to do anything other than lie with great sincerity. ‘Very much,’ she said.

Lotus beamed with pleasure. ‘Thank you.’ She reached out and touched Margaret’s hair as if it were gold. ‘Your hair ver’ beautiful.’ And she gazed into Margaret’s face quite unselfconsciously. ‘And your eyes so blue. You ver’ beautiful lady.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Bukeqi.’ Margaret frowned. It sounded like boo keh chee.

Li said, ‘It means you are welcome.’

Lotus took Margaret’s hand and ran her fingers lightly over the forearm. ‘I never see skin so white. So many beauty spot.’

‘Freckles,’ Margaret laughed. ‘I hated them when I was a kid. I thought they were ugly.’

‘No, no. They ver’ beautiful.’ She turned to Li. ‘You ver’ lucky.’

Li blushed. ‘Oh, no, we’re not… I mean, Margaret’s a colleague. From work.’

‘What are you saying?’ Margaret asked, surprised by Li’s sudden lapse into Chinese.

‘Just that we only work together.’ He blushed again. Lotus’s arrival had unsettled him completely.

‘You policeman?’ Lotus asked Margaret with incredulity.

‘No. A doctor.’

‘Ah. You fix up his face?’

‘Sort of.’ She smiled at Li’s bruised and battered face.

Yongli returned to the table with two bottles of champagne in an ice bucket, and four glasses. Lotus gasped in delight, forgetting to speak English. ‘Champagne! What’s this for, lover?’

‘A small celebration.’

‘What are we celebrating?’

‘Oh, the fact that it’s three in the morning and Big Li’s not tucked up in his bed yet. The fact that he’s out on the town with a woman…’

‘Aw, shut up,’ Li said.

‘She’s a doctor,’ Lotus protested.

Yongli leaned over confidentially. ‘That’s what she tells all the boys. Actually she cuts up dead people for a living.’

Lotus looked at Margaret, shocked. Margaret said, ‘What’s going on? Will somebody speak English?’

‘Ma Yongli’s just playing the fool,’ Li said.

‘No I’m not.’ He squeezed the cork out of one of the bottles and started filling the glasses, champagne foaming over brims and spilling on the table. ‘I’m just proposing a toast.’ He pulled his chair in beside Lotus and raised his dripping glass. ‘To the two most beautiful women in the Xanadu. Probably in Beijing. Maybe even the whole of China.’

Margaret looked around. ‘What table’s the other one at?’

Lotus laughed and put a hand on her arm and said, as if to an idiot, ‘He mean me and you.’

Margaret supposed it was unfair to make judgments on someone’s intelligence based on the few words of your language that they knew. She took in Lotus’s almost childish delight at having to set her straight. It was quite possible, she supposed, that Lotus was wondering how someone so stupid could possibly be a doctor. ‘Oh,’ she said, and smiled, raising her glass. ‘Well, I’ll drink to that.’

And when they had finished the first bottle, Yongli opened the second, and Margaret began to lose track of their conversation. The champagne on top of the vodkas, on top of her lack of sleep, had resulted in the club starting to make slow revolutions around her. They all seemed to be laughing a lot, even Li, who in her experience was not given to laughing easily. She had no real idea of what she was saying. Answering, it seemed, endless silly questions about America, about money, about… she wasn’t sure what. Every time she lifted her glass it seemed to have miraculously refilled itself. Was there a third bottle on the table?

It seemed like a long time later, and Lotus had her by the arm, and she thought they must be going to the little girls’ room. There was a very large step up, and she almost fell. Somewhere in the distance she heard Li’s voice. He seemed to be calling her name. He didn’t think she should be doing this, whatever it was she was doing. Perversely, it made her more determined to do it. And suddenly there were a lot of bright lights in her eyes and faces turned up towards her, and a sound like running water. Only it wasn’t running water. It just sounded like it. And then she realised it was people clapping. Lotus put something in her hand. It was heavy and tubular with a mesh ball on the end. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, and heard her voice booming around the club. More running water.

Lotus turned her to her left and she saw a blue screen, words frozen on it in white. Yesterday… The sound of an acoustic guitar. Lotus’s voice. ‘You sing.’ But she couldn’t, and missed the first line, and Lotus leaned close and sang instead. Now it look a though they hee to stay… All she could see now was Michael’s face. All she could hear was his voice. I didn’t do it, Mags. And she felt the tears running hot down her face as Lotus’s grotesque parody of The Beatles’ original forced its way into her consciousness, each word stinging like a slap in the face. She had thought the pain would be all gone now. But Michael seemed to want to go on hurting her for the rest of her life. He took her in his arms now, saying something softly in her ear, but she couldn’t make out what it was. He led her back down the high step, past the running water. She felt fresh cool air in her face. She turned to look at him, with the weary anticipation of more earnest protestations of innocence. But it wasn’t Michael after all. Of course, she remembered, she was in China. And Michael was dead. And these people were speaking another language.

‘Where are you going to take her, Li?’ Yongli wasn’t exactly sober himself.

‘Back to the apartment.’

‘Do you need help with her?’ Lotus said.

Li nodded. ‘Yes. Please.’

The smell of smoke and coffee was the first thing she was aware of. Very slowly the room began to take shape around her, a room similar in shape and size to Chao Heng’s living room. Through the glass panes that boxed in the balcony on the far side of the room, she could see the tops of trees swaying slightly in the wind, leaves reflecting light from the streetlamps. There was very little light in the room itself. A small lamp somewhere in a distant corner. She tried to focus on where she was. On a settee, she realised, half sitting, half lying, her head pitched to one side. She turned it to the other side as she felt a movement beside her, and saw Lotus kneeling there with a steaming mug of black coffee, trying to get her to sip it. But the smell of it was doing unpleasant things to her stomach. ‘Bathroom,’ she said, and wondered distantly if the urgency she felt was conveyed by her voice. Apparently so, for hands were quickly helping her to her feet. And it wasn’t far to stagger, it seemed, to a room filled with bright hard light reflecting from white tiles. The unpleasantness in her stomach rose rapidly into her consciousness, and she pitched forward on to her knees, clutching at the rim of something hard and white, mouth and throat filled with a horrible burning sensation. Then she was on her feet again and someone was splashing cold water on her face, and the lights went out on the world.

Li stood unsteadily by the front door. Yongli winked at him. ‘See you, pal. Tell her it was all my fault. I should never have bought that champagne.’

‘It made her very sad,’ Lotus said. ‘I think maybe she has some great tragedy in her life.’

Li nodded. ‘Maybe.’ Lotus leaned across and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek, and he felt guilty for all the things he had thought and said about her. He didn’t know how he would have coped tonight if she hadn’t been there. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

She squeezed his hand. She wanted him so much to like her. ‘See you.’

Li closed the door behind them and wandered back up the hallway to his uncle’s bedroom. In the reflected half-light from the street, he saw that she had already managed to kick the covers off. Lotus had undressed her and come through to the living room saying, ‘She has beautiful breasts. I wish I had beautiful breasts like hers.’ They were beautiful breasts, full and white, with small dark red aureolae. One arm was thrown carelessly across her chest. The bed cover had twisted around one leg, fully exposing the other and the triangle of tight blonde curls between them. He remembered seeing her reflected in the mirror in the hotel bedroom. She had wanted him to see her. He felt the same ache of desire now. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her face, pale and untroubled, at least for now, by her unhappy past and uncertain future. He ran his fingers softly over its contours. She had changed so much in him, in such a short time. The way he saw himself, his job, his uncle. It was as if he had been sleeping and she had touched him awake. He had not wanted a life, and now he did. He leaned over and kissed her forehead, and untwisted the sheet so that she was decently covered. As he left the room, he pulled the door gently closed and stood for some minutes in the hall with his eyes shut, breathing steadily. He heard the blood as it coursed through his veins. He heard the crackle of cigarette phlegm in his lungs. He heard the tick, tick of the clock in the living room. He heard his life slipping through his fingers like sand. And he made a fist to stop it. It was too precious to just let go.