The Fourth Sacrifice

I

He left Xinxin waiting in the Jeep. And then the Chinese security guard in the gatehouse took great delight in exercising his authority over Li by keeping him waiting until Sophie arrived. Officially this was American soil, and Li had no jurisdiction here. It was not often that an ordinary Chinese could thumb his nose at his superiors with impunity.

Sophie shook Li’s hand warmly. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘We met the other day downtown, at CID HQ.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Li said, and he was aware of her inspecting him with interest. No doubt she knew that he and Margaret had been lovers. Probably the entire embassy knew.

She led him around the side of the Chancery building, and they headed towards the canteen. ‘Have you been here long?’ he asked.

‘Not long. Just about a month.’

‘How’s your Mandarin?’ he asked in Mandarin.

She smiled. ‘I’m Vietnamese. But I don’t speak that very well either.’

Li looked at her appraisingly. ‘How long have you been in America?’

‘Born and bred,’ she said. ‘You don’t think I’d make Assistant RSO at a foreign embassy if I wasn’t, do you?’

He smiled. ‘I guess not.’

Dakers was waiting for them at a table in the canteen. It was crowded with embassy staff tucking into breakfast of waffles and pancakes drowned in syrup and washing it all down with strong black coffee. He stood up and shook Li’s hand firmly. ‘Mr Li,’ he said. ‘Good to see you again. Wanna coffee?’ Li shook his head. ‘Take a seat. What can I do for you?’

Li said carefully, ‘I wanted your permission to ask a few of your embassy people about the whereabouts of Michael Zimmerman last Monday night.’

Sophie’s face flushed and she said, ‘Why do you want to know that?’

Li smiled and waved a hand dismissively. ‘Nothing sinister. It’s routine stuff. We’re just establishing where anyone who knew Yuan Tao was on the night he was murdered.’

‘It’s hardly routine for a Deputy Section Chief to come calling,’ Dakers said shrewdly.

Li grinned. ‘I was hardly going to send a junior officer to speak to the Regional Security Officer of the American Embassy.’

Dakers nodded, satisfied. ‘Fair enough.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I guess I have no objection. What about you, Sophie?’

She shrugged. ‘None at all. Only you don’t need to go any further than present company. I can tell you exactly where Michael was on Monday night — at least, up until about two.’

‘You were at the party, then?’ Li asked.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘It was me that introduced him to Dr Campbell that night.’ Li flicked her a look and wondered if she knew what she was saying, if she was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound. If she was, there was nothing in her expression to give her away.

‘And after the party …?’

‘There were about a dozen of us went on to the Mexican Wave bar.’ She turned to Dakers. ‘You know the place, Jon … where the Hash House Harriers meet up.’

Dakers nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘And Zimmerman left at two?’

‘No, I left at two. I have no idea when he left.’

II

There was a spring in Margaret’s step as she strolled past the surly security guards at the gate of the hotel and turned down Ritan Lu past the rows of fur traders. They looked no happier than usual. Business was not any better.

Michael had gone early, before six, to get out to location, and left his smell and his warmth in the bed with her. She had lain for a long time luxuriating in it, wondering what it was she really felt for him. She found him addictive, wanted to be with him all the time. Early signs of the first flush of infatuation. He was attractive, intelligent, a wonderfully sensitive lover. He had talent, as an archaeologist, as a communicator. She remembered the night at the Sanwei tearoom when he had joined the band to play tenor sax. Talent like that was unusual. And sexy. It was only her lingering feelings for Li that still clouded how she felt about Michael. The further removed she became from Li, she was certain, the clearer her feelings for Michael would become. She needed a complete break from him.

The blast of a car horn startled her as she stepped from the sidewalk to cross the street without looking. She turned and saw Li’s Jeep pulled up in front of her, Li grinning at her from the driver’s seat, Xinxin waving frantically at her from the back. He leaned over and pushed the passenger door open.

She stomped around the bonnet and climbed in with a bad grace. ‘What are you trying to do, kill me?’

‘Actually,’ Li said, ‘I was trying to avoid putting a dent in the fender.’

She made a face at him and felt Xinxin tugging at her from behind, repeating the same phrase again and again. She turned and Xinxin planted a big kiss on her lips and then giggled hysterically. Margaret laughed. ‘What’s she saying?’

‘Hello, Auntie Margaret,’ Li said with a smirk.

‘Oh, my God,’ Margaret groaned. ‘That makes me sound like someone’s ancient maiden aunt.’

‘She was very disappointed you weren’t still there when she woke up this morning.’

Margaret’s smile faded. ‘Well, I hope you told her not to expect me to be around for much longer. She’s lost too many people already to have her expectations built up about anyone else.’ Xinxin bounced around in the back, between the two front seats, waggling her bunches from side to side.

Li pulled out into the traffic again, ignoring a flurry of horns, and said, ‘I’m going up to the archaeology department at the university. I thought you might want to come.’

Margaret looked at him suspiciously. ‘What are we going there for?’

‘I just wanted to ask them about Zimmerman.’

Margaret exploded. ‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, can’t you just let it go?’ Xinxin was startled by the sudden angry words.

Li said calmly, ‘Zimmerman said he heard about what happened to Professor Yue from other people in the faculty. I just want to check on how many people knew what. I already checked his alibi for Monday night. He went on to the Mexican Wave after the Ambassador’s reception, just like he said.’

‘You are such a complete bastard,’ she said. ‘This is absolutely not fair. Michael has done nothing wrong. Everyone loves him. You talk to anyone who knows him. No one’s got a bad word to say about him. They’ll all tell you he’s really good guy. You can’t hound him like this just because you’re jealous.’

‘I am not jealous,’ Li said evenly.

‘Like hell!’

‘Uncle Li, why is Auntie Mar-ga-ret angry?’ Xinxin asked timidly from the back.

‘She’s not angry with us, darling, it’s to do with work,’ Li told her.

‘What are you saying to her?’ Margaret asked suspiciously.

‘I’m just telling her not to worry about you shouting at me. And that Americans are always bad-tempered.’

‘Jesus!’ Margaret hissed.

‘The point is,’ Li said, ‘I’m just tying up loose ends. We follow one line of inquiry until we reach a dead end. Then we move on.’ But he was not at all certain that he would be pursuing this particular line of inquiry if it was not for Margaret’s relationship with Zimmerman. ‘If you don’t want to go, that’s fine. I’ll drop you off at the embassy.’

‘Oh, no you won’t. I’m going with you, even if it’s just to make sure you don’t go getting Michael into any more trouble.’

She felt Xinxin tugging at her sleeve. She turned and found herself looking straight into Xinxin’s earnest little face as the child spoke directly to her with unusual timidity.

Li said, ‘She’s asking if you’ve finished being angry now.’

Margaret pursed her lips in a moment of annoyance, and then found herself forced to smile by the wide-eyed innocent appeal that wrinkled Xinxin’s forehead. She sighed. ‘Tell her, yes. Tell her that I was never angry with her in the first place. And tell her that the next time her uncle starts letting his personal feelings cloud his personal judgement, I’ll slap his goddamn face for him again.’

Li spoke to Xinxin who nodded her head in satisfaction.

‘What did you say to her?’ Margaret demanded to know. She was frustrated at always being at the mercy of someone else’s interpretation.

‘That you were very sorry, and wouldn’t speak to her Uncle Yan like that again,’ he said. Margaret narrowed her eyes at him and he grinned. ‘Only kidding.’

They drove north through Chaoyangmen and Dongcheng District, heading for the third ring road. Li and Margaret sat in silence while Xinxin sang popular kindergarten songs to her panda in the back.

‘What did you mean the other night when you talked about “the Little Emperor syndrome”?’ Margaret asked suddenly.

Li smiled sadly. ‘It is what we call the social consequence of the One-Child Policy.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Chinese society used to be built around the idea of family and community, the individual putting his responsibility for others first. Now, with most families having only one child, the child is spoiled and pampered and thinks only of itself. They become Little Emperors. The future of China will be in the hands of selfish, self-seeking individuals. Just like in America.’

‘Maybe, then, you’ll join the rest of us in the twenty-first century,’ Margaret said.

‘And replace five thousand years of culture and history with the hotdog and the hamburger?’

Margaret was sick of hearing about China’s culture and history. Even Michael was full of it. ‘Well, maybe it’s about time you started looking to the future instead of always living in the past,’ she snapped. ‘Maybe that’s why America ended up the most powerful country in the world. We weren’t shackled by five thousand years of tradition. We just looked straight ahead and made it up as we went along.’

‘And when you run out of ideas,’ Li said, ‘you’ll have no history to draw on. No lessons you can take from the past.’

Margaret said, ‘My old history professor always said the only thing you learn from history is that you never learn from history.’

‘But he would be an American.’

Margaret looked at him triumphantly. ‘Actually, he was Chinese.’

Li flicked her a look. ‘Chinese-American. Yes?’

She glared at him. ‘You’ve always got to have the last word, don’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘I usually do.’

The west gate of Beijing University was a traditional Chinese gate, with sweeping tiled roofs raised on beautifully painted crossbreams and supported on rust-red pillars. Li parked his Jeep in the shade of the trees that lined the street outside, and showed his Public Security pass to the guard on the gate who waved them through, past stone lions that stood sentinel left and right. Little Xinxin trotted at Margaret’s side, clutching her hand as if she were in fear of her life. The campus within sat in the cloistered seclusion of landscaped gardens and tranquil lakes behind high grey walls, a million miles, it seemed, from the frantic activity and roar of the city they’d left behind.

Students and lecturers strolled or cycled along leafy paths that meandered through the lush gardens, ancient bridges sweeping over green waterways lined with flowers and dotted with lilies. On rocky outcrops, almost obscured by trees, tiny pavilions provided seats in the shade for undergraduates poring over textbooks or reading newspapers, or just sitting smoking and quietly reflecting on life. University departments were housed in large white pavilions with maroon windows and towering columns below elegantly curling roofs.

Margaret was entranced. ‘What a wonderful place to come and study,’ she said. ‘It’s so peaceful. So … Chinese.’

‘Actually,’ Li said, ‘it’s so … American.’

She frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This place used to be the site of the American Methodist Yengching University. Beijing University didn’t move here till 1952. All these “wonderful” halls and pavilions were built by the Methodists, designed by an American architect in the Chinese style. In those days, maybe, the Americans still thought there was something they could learn from us.’

The archaeology department stood in a long, two-storey pavilion beyond fresh-cut lawns, lush and verdant from frequent watering. The ground floor had been converted into the Arthur M. Sackler museum of art and archaeology. Administration and lecture rooms were on the floor above. Li took them in through the main door, and they were confronted, across shining marble floors, by two life-sized replicas of Terracotta Warriors standing guard at the far entrance. Margaret was momentarily startled by them, and was transported immediately back to the pit at Xi’an where she had so carefully scraped away the earth to reveal a ceramic face that no one had cast eyes on for more than two thousand years. A bald and wizened caretaker with a speckled face told them they would have to go in by the side entrance and up the stairs to find the head of department.

‘Professor Chang’s not here right now,’ an officious young man in white shirt and dark trousers told them offhandedly in the office. He had a shock of thick hair, dirt under his fingernails, and seemed more interested in the contents of the filing cabinet than in the three visitors.

‘Would you like to tell me where he is?’ Li asked.

‘Not particularly. I’m busy right now.’ The young man was clearly irritated by the interruption.

Li produced his Public Security wallet and held it out at arm’s length. ‘What’s your name?’

The young man turned and saw the ID and his face immediately darkened. His frightened rabbit’s eyes flickered up to Li. ‘I’m sorry, detective, I …’

‘What’s your name?’ Li repeated firmly.

‘Wang Jiahong.’

‘What do you do here?’

‘I’m a lab assistant over in the Art building.’

‘Do you normally speak to visitors like that?’

‘No, detective.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. So maybe now you’ll tell me where I can find Professor Chang.’

‘He’s in the conservation lab.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the Art building. All the labs are over there.’ He tried to make up for his earlier gaffe. ‘I’ll take you if you like.’

The Art building, opposite the College of Life Sciences, was older and less glamorous, dusty grey brick and ill-painted windows. Dozens of student bicycles stood in the square outside. Inside it was drab and dingy, and Margaret smelled the perfume of stale urine wafting from open toilet doors. A room full of students at the end of the corridor was listening intently to a lady lecturer.

Wang Jiahong opened a nondescript door and led them into the conservation lab and then backed out, leaving them in the company of Professor Chang. It was a big cluttered room with old bookcases and wooden cabinets around the walls, and a huge wooden workbench that stood in the middle of the floor. The table was strewn with bits and pieces of pottery, a vast array of carelessly discarded tools and cleaning materials, and several weapons — two daggers, and a bronze sword held firmly in the jaws of a clamp. The floor was littered with wood shavings and dust and shards of broken pottery. The green-painted walls were scarred and stuck with posters and charts and ancient memos that went back fifty years. Daylight squeezed in through slatted blinds.

Professor Chang was working on the bronze sword, patiently removing layers of verdigris that had accumulated over centuries. He wore a dirty white apron and rubber gloves, and waved his hand vaguely around the room.

‘Sorry for the mess,’ he said in English when Li had made the introductions. He peered at Margaret over half-moon spectacles. ‘We’ve been restoring the ancient treasures of China in here for decades. I guess it just never seemed all that important to clean up behind us.’

Xinxin went exploring. Li said, ‘Do you have many staff in the department?’

‘Two hundred students, sixty-seven teachers, twelve professors and nineteen associate professors,’ Professor Chang said.

‘And how many of them would have known the circumstances of Professor Yue’s death?’

The Professor scraped away at the verdigris with a focused concentration. ‘Oh, probably all of them,’ he said.

From the corner of his eye, Li caught Margaret’s head swinging in his direction. He could almost hear her saying, Satisfied? He said, ‘I understood only a few senior members of the department were privy to those details.’

Chang glanced up at him. ‘Well, they were. But you know what people are like. It was a scandal, a gruesome tale. People feed off stuff like that. Archaeologists are no different. It was round the whole department in a matter of hours. Probably the whole of the university.’

Li picked up and examined one of the daggers, still avoiding Margaret’s eye. ‘Do you know the American archaeologist, Michael Zimmerman?’ he asked.

Professor Chang laid down his tools and removed his half-moons. ‘What’s he got to do with this?’

‘Nothing,’ Li said. ‘I just wondered if you knew him.’

‘Oh, yes, I know him,’ said the professor. He took the dagger from Li and laid it back on the table. ‘He came here when he was researching the background for his documentary on Hu Bo. Professor Yue had been a protégé of Hu’s. Yue and Zimmerman became very friendly.’ There was something in his tone that gave Li cause for thought.

‘You sound as if you don’t approve.’

‘I don’t like Michael Zimmerman,’ Professor Chang said bluntly, and Margaret felt the colour rising on her cheeks, stinging as if from a slap.

Li glanced at her. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because under all that superficial charm, Deputy Section Chief, he’s a driven man. I don’t know what it is that drives him. Ambition. Greed. But he uses people, manipulates them for his own ends.’

‘Is that what he did to Professor Yue?’

‘I don’t know.’ The professor thought about it for a moment. ‘But Yue seemed to fall under his spell. They became very close. Too close. I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was healthy.’

The sidewalks in Haidian Road were piled high with multicoloured boxes filled with computers and printers, scanners and modems, monitors and hard drives. Every shop blazed out names like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Pentium. This was the silicon sales valley of Beijing, awash with computing power: microchips, software, every peripheral imaginable. Unlike the Russian fur trade, business was good. People jammed the stores, and traffic had ground to a halt.

They had left the university in silence and were now gridlocked in the Haidian Road log jam.

Li glanced across at Margaret. The colour was still high on her cheeks and she was sitting staring straight ahead. In the back, Xinxin was mercifully engaged in a complex game of make-believe with her panda.

Finally, Li said, ‘I thought no one had a bad word to say about him. They’ll all tell you he’s a really good guy, you said.’

Margaret’s words came back to haunt her. She turned and looked at Li with something close to loathing in her eyes. ‘One person’s opinion, that’s all.’ She would never admit to Li how shocked she had been to hear it. Professor Chang had not been describing the Michael she knew. It was as if he had been talking about someone else. But it had hurt.

‘Everyone loves him, that’s what you said. Talk to anyone who knows him. Well, we did.’

She shook her head. ‘You’re pathetic, you know that? What did you go to the university for? To find out if people there knew the details of Professor Yue’s death. And what did you find out? That they all knew. So, naturally, Michael would have heard, too. But does that satisfy you? Oh, no. Someone doesn’t like him. So fucking what? The only thing we’ve learned here today is that you’re a sad, jealous fool.’

Xinxin had abandoned her panda and was staring at Margaret in wide-eyed alarm. ‘Fuck,’ she said, aping Margaret. ‘Fuck, fuck!’

Li glared at Margaret. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve just taught my niece her first English word.’

The police radio crackled and Li heard his call sign. He unhooked the receiver angrily.

She turned and stared out the window at nothing, biting back the tears. She was determined not to spill them. At least, not in front of Li. It was incomprehensible to her that someone could think so badly of Michael. Was she blind? Were all his other friends and colleagues blind, too? Of course not. It was just the view of one twisted individual, she told herself. Who knew what history there was to it? She heard Li finish his call.

‘That was Detective Sang,’ he said quietly, and she turned to look at him defiantly. ‘Apparently Birdie’s alibi doesn’t hold up. He wasn’t playing checkers at Xidan the night Yuan was killed. We’re asking the procurator’s office to issue a warrant for his arrest.’

III

Birdie was lost without the creatures which had given him his nickname. He looked naked and vulnerable without his birds around him. It was hard to define, but the man who sat before them was like a human shell, empty and vacant. Almost, Li thought, like a man who had lost his soul. He sat on the edge of his chair, shoulders slumped, hands lying limp together in his lap, staring back at them from behind dark, frightened eyes. His face was streaked by the tears he had spilled when they refused to let him bring his birds. His blue Mao suit was crumpled and dirty, and hung loosely on his gaunt frame. The room was warm and airless, a place devoid of human comfort; naked cream walls scarred and chipped, and scored with the names and thoughts of the thousands of people, both innocent and guilty, who had faced interrogation here during many long hours. Sunlight slanted in through a slit of a window high up on the back wall, slashing the side wall with burned-out yellow. Cigarette smoke, in slowly evolving strands, was suspended in its light. The cassette recorder on the table hummed and whirred in the still of the room. From outside they could hear the distant rumble of traffic from Dongzhimennei Street and, closer, the incongruously innocent sounds of children playing in the hutong.

A trickle of sweat ran down Detective Sang’s forehead. He leaned forward, strained and intense. He had been very anxious to participate with Li in the interrogation, and Li had allowed him to take the lead while he tried to remain detached and objective. Sang was neither. He was blunt and aggressive, and frustrated by Birdie’s apparent confusion over where he had, in fact, been on Monday night. Birdie was certain, he said, that he had been playing checkers with Moon, but if Moon said he wasn’t, then he must have been doing something else. He just couldn’t think what it was. Usually he spent nights alone at home. Sometimes he would watch television, although he could not remember what programmes he might have watched on Monday night. But usually he went to bed early, when his birds tucked their heads under their wings. He had an early start, he said. He always went to the park before going to the bird market.

‘OK,’ said Sang eventually. ‘So you agree — you don’t have an alibi?’

Birdie shook his head despondently. ‘But I don’t need an alibi. I haven’t done anything.’

‘Are you saying you didn’t know anything about the murders?’

‘No. I told you. Me and Pauper talked about them.’

‘So you admit you knew that three of the former members of the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade had been murdered?’

‘I told you we had heard.’

‘And had you heard how they were murdered?’

Birdie winced. ‘We heard they were … executed.’

‘What do you mean by “executed”?’

‘That …’ he shifted uncomfortably, ‘that their heads had been cut off.’

‘Who told you that?’ Li asked.

Birdie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. People just knew.’

‘What people?’ Sang pressed him.

‘A woman at Zero’s factory.’

‘That’s Bai Qiyu?’

‘Yes.’

‘What woman?’

‘I don’t know. I think maybe she was the one who found him. Pauper could tell you. She knew more about it than me. She talks to people, she hears things.’

‘So you and Pauper figured that someone was going around killing the members of the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade, and that sooner or later you were going to be next?’

‘That’s what Pauper thought.’

‘Did Pauper always do your thinking for you?’ Sang sat back. ‘Was it Pauper’s idea to kill Yuan Tao before he killed you?’

Birdie was rocking slowly backwards and forwards in his chair. His hands were no longer limp in his lap. They were clasped and wringing one another. ‘We didn’t kill Cat!’ He almost shouted it in tearful defiance. ‘We didn’t know he was in Beijing. We never even thought of him.’

‘There’s no point in lying to us, Birdie,’ Sang said reasonably. ‘We’ll find out the truth in the end.’ But Birdie just stared back at him. ‘How did you find out Cat was back? Did someone see him by chance? Or maybe he contacted you. He must have made arrangements to meet his other victims. Is that what happened? Did he come to the bird market and arrange to meet you somewhere?’

‘No!’

‘What did he say? That he wanted to talk about what happened back in the sixties? That it was too late now for recriminations, but that he wanted to know why? That he wanted to understand? Is that what he said to the others, do you think? Is that why they agreed to meet him? Because they felt guilty? Even after thirty years?’

‘I don’t know,’ Birdie protested. ‘How would I know what he said to them?’

But Sang was on a roll. This was his chance to impress Li, and he was taking it. ‘You must have been scared, Birdie. You must have known he was going to kill you, too.’

‘No!’

‘What did you do? Follow him? That how you found out about the apartment in Tuan Jie Hu Dongli?’

‘What apartment?’

‘I guess you must have gone there that night and waited for him. How did you know to look under the floorboards?’ But Sang wasn’t interested in waiting for Birdie’s spluttered protests of ignorance. He pressed on. ‘You must have been struck by the irony of it when you found the sword there. The chance to kill him with his own weapon, the same way he killed the others, the same way he intended to kill you.’

‘No … no …!’ But Birdie’s denials were feeble now, his eyes filling again with tears.

‘What else did you find under the floorboards? A killing list, maybe. Silk cord to bind his wrists, the same silk cord he meant to use on you? What did he say when you confronted him? Did he admit it?’ Sang leaned forward again, speaking almost softly now. ‘Why did you kill him, Birdie? You could just have gone to the police. What happened? Was it anger? Did he spit in your face? Or was it guilt? The only way you could lay the ghost of the past? That dreadful day in the spring of ’67, remember it? When you humiliated and beat and hounded Cat’s father to his death in the schoolyard in front of everyone, in front of his wife? An old man with a heart condition. You must have felt very proud of yourself.’

Birdie had stopped wringing his hands now. They hung loosely at his sides as he rocked to and fro, and sob after sob ruptured his breathing until Li thought he was going to choke. He stared at his inquisitors unseeingly, and tears ran in rivers of regret down his face.

‘Is that why you had to kill Cat, too? Is that why you forced to him to his knees and raised that sword above his head and cut it off with a single stroke?’

Birdie howled like an animal, a deep throaty howl that rose from his diaphragm and sent a shiver through each of the detectives. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he shouted. And Li and Sang exchanged glances.

‘Didn’t mean to what?’ Li asked.

‘Kill Teacher Yuan.’ Birdie clawed at his face with his fingers, trying to wipe away the tears. ‘I never meant to do it. Please, please, please, I didn’t mean to.’

‘It’s Cat we’re talking about now, Birdie,’ Li said softly. He waited for a moment. ‘How did you know exactly what it was he had done to the other three?’

But Birdie was shaking his head from side to side, still rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he kept repeating.

‘The placard around his neck. How did you know to do that? The name upside down and scored through.’

Birdie stopped rocking and stared at Li through his tears. ‘It’s Teacher Yuan you’re talking about. That’s what we did to him in the Cultural Revolution.’ He suddenly banged his fist on the table in frustration. ‘How many times do I have to pay for that?’ he shouted. ‘How many deaths can you die in one lifetime? We were just children. We didn’t know what we were doing. Only what Chairman Mao told us. He was the red, red sun in our hearts.’

No, Li thought. He was the blood-red hate in your souls.

They climbed the stairs to the top floor in silence. Sang glanced apprehensively at Li several times. ‘You don’t look too pleased, boss,’ he said. ‘For a man who’s just cracked a case.’

‘We haven’t cracked anything,’ Li growled. ‘Far from it.’

Sang was astonished. ‘He as good as admitted it.’

‘No he didn’t. He was confused. He didn’t seem to me able to make a proper distinction between Yuan and his father.’

‘But, boss, he had both motive and opportunity. He admitted he knew about the other murders, he doesn’t have an alibi — in fact he lied about it.’ Sang had to walk quickly to keep up with Li along the top corridor.

Li shook his head. ‘The answer’s always in the detail, Sang.’ His uncle’s words fell from his lips as if they were his own. ‘And the detail just doesn’t add up. Where did Birdie get the flunitrazepam from? How did he know about the placard round the neck, or tying the hands with silk cord?’

Sang shrugged. ‘Coercion. He probably forced it out of Yuan. And maybe the flunitrazepam was under the floorboards along with everything else.’

Li stopped suddenly and turned to look at Sang. ‘Let me ask you something, detective. Does Birdie look to you like someone who could threaten anyone?’ Sang looked uncertain. ‘And even if somehow he had managed to force all those details out of Yuan, why did he then write “Digger” on the card instead of “Cat”? How could he get that wrong?’

Sang was at a loss.

Li turned into the detectives’ office. Half a dozen detectives were gathered around Margaret and Xinxin, involved in some game with playing cards. They melted away to their desks when Li came in.

‘Qian,’ Li barked, and Qian jumped.

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Get a search warrant for Birdie’s apartment.’

‘Why are we searching his apartment if you don’t believe he did it?’ Sang asked. He almost tripped on Li’s heels as Li stopped and turned on him.

‘Police procedure, Sang. I’m assuming you learned something at Public Security University. We follow a line of inquiry to its conclusion. I don’t expect to find anything incriminating there. I want to eliminate him from our inquiries.’

IV

Five police vehicles brought Li and Margaret, Qian, Wu, Zhao and Sang, along with six uniformed officers to the alleyway leading off Dengshikou Street, where Birdie had his apartment on the ninth floor of a decaying seventies apartment block. This was in the heart of Beijing’s shopping district, just off Wangfujing Street, where massive redevelopment was throwing up luxury international hotels and vast shopping plazas. Remnants of the past, however, still survived in little pockets like this.

The lane was dirty and potholed. Women sat behind shabby stalls pedalling lukewarm noodles in a watery sauce. A spotty youth was selling cigarettes and soft drinks from a hole in the wall. The arrival of the police was creating a stir, and a crowd of Chinese, taking a break from the banality of their everyday lives, quickly gathered.

From the lane, the officers entered a courtyard through a door in an iron gate. Bicycles stood in neat rows under canopies on three sides. Garbage was piled in a heap on steps leading inside where a teenage girl operating the lift viewed the arrival of the police with momentary alarm. She was sitting huddled on a seat, with a pile of cheap romance magazines on her knee, listening to scratchy pop music on a transistor radio. A jar of cold green tea stood on the floor beside her. A fur coat hung on the wall behind her, as if she were anticipating a cold winter. Li and Margaret and two of the detectives, Wu and Qian, squeezed in beside her. The others started up the stairs.

‘Do you know Mr Ge?’ Li asked the lift girl. She looked puzzled and shook her head. ‘He lives on the ninth floor. He keeps birds.’

Her face screwed up in disgust. ‘Oh, the bird man,’ she said. ‘I hate him. He’s always bringing his smelly birds in here. It’s all right for him. He’s used to it, but I can smell them for hours after he’s gone.’

‘Take us up, please.’

She shrugged and pressed the button for the ninth floor, and the lift jerked and whined and began its slow ascent.

‘Do you remember what time he came in on Monday night?’ Li asked.

She laughed. ‘Are you kidding? Do you know how many people live in this building? Do you think I care when they come and when they go. I don’t even look at them.’

‘But you’d know the bird man, wouldn’t you? You’d smell his birds.’

‘He’s in and out all the time,’ the girl said dismissively. ‘And, anyway, I wouldn’t know one day from the next. They’re all the same to me. You want my job? You can have it.’

‘So you wouldn’t know if he had any visitors recently?’ Li asked hopelessly.

‘Gimme a break,’ said the girl.

Margaret watched the exchange with an idle curiosity. Beyond her first flush of interest, the lift girl clearly couldn’t give a damn and was being less than helpful.

Margaret was not quite sure why she had agreed to come along when Li asked her. After their visit to the university her interest in the investigation was all but dead. She was tired of the emotional roller coaster that sent her hurtling from Li to Michael and back again. It was going nowhere fast. And, if she was honest with herself, she no longer cared who had killed Yuan. What did it matter to her, anyway? Some thirty-year-old vendetta that belonged to another culture in another time. How could she ever hope to understand any of it?

The lift juddered to a standstill on the ninth floor and the door slid open. Li led the way down a corridor with white walls and pale green painted windows that looked down on to the courtyard below. Through a half-glazed door, they turned into a dark hallway, and Margaret saw the number 905 above a door that was shuttered and padlocked. Li stood aside and let Qian unlock it with the keys they had taken from Birdie. After several moments of apparent difficulty, Qian stepped back and shrugged. ‘The lock’s burst,’ he said. ‘We didn’t need the keys after all.’ He pulled back the shutter.

‘What do you expect to find here?’ Margaret asked.

‘Nothing,’ Li said, to her surprise.

‘If he did it,’ she said, ‘the chances are there will be some trace evidence here. A speck of blood, a hair. Maybe something more. White card, red ink.’

‘If he did it.’

‘You don’t think he did?’

‘I am certain he didn’t.’

Sang and Zhao and the uniformed officers arrived breathless and perspiring after their nine-flight hike. Li pulled on a pair of white gloves and the others followed suit. ‘Bag all the clothes,’ Li said, ‘clean or dirty. And I want all his shoes. Don’t disturb anything unnecessarily, but I want to go through every single little thing in the apartment.’ He nodded to Qian who pushed the door open.

They were hit immediately by the smell and the noise. ‘In the name of the sky!’ Qian took out a handkerchief to cover his nose and went inside, fumbling for a light switch. When he found it, a fluorescent strip hanging from the hall ceiling flickered and hummed and threw a cold light back off walls that had not been painted in twenty years.

‘Jesus!’ Margaret said.

She looked in amazement at the bamboo cages that hung in profusion from the ceiling. Dozens of them, hooked on to a pulley-type contraption that allowed Birdie to lower and raise them all at the same time. Each of the cages was filled with birds, frantic with the intrusion of light and strangers, squawking and flapping their wings in panic. The noise was deafening. Immediately to the left, a scullery kitchen was caked in grease, old bottles of sticky cooking sauce fighting for space with dirty dishes on the top of an old wooden cabinet. A blackened wok and a couple of filthy pans stood on a two-ring gas stove. Further down the hall, on the left, laundry hung on lines strung across a stinking toilet. Dirty linen lay all over the floor. A fridge-freezer and a top-loading washing machine made it difficult to squeeze past to the far end of the passage where Wu pushed open the bedroom door. More cages hung from the ceiling and stood on every available space: a desk, a wardrobe, a dresser. The din was unnerving. Margaret almost gagged from the stench. It was practically impossible to believe that someone actually lived here.

On their right, a door led into a tiny living room. More cages, more birds. Some of them in here were flying free, and the detectives ducked as frantic wings beat the air about their heads. There was bird shit all over the floor. Through a screen door, the air of a glassed balcony was almost black with flying birds. Birdie had rigged up old branches, and bits and pieces of furniture to try to recreate some kind of natural habitat in there.

‘My God!’ Margaret shouted above the noise. ‘This is unnatural! The man must be insane.’

Li nodded grimly. Somewhere, somehow, Birdie had lost his grip on reality, his ability to relate to the world, to people. His love of birds had become an obsession, a substitute for life. What was it about these creatures that so fascinated him? Was it the illusion of freedom created by their ability to fly? And yet, what freedom was there for a bird in a cage? Perhaps in robbing them of their freedom, he took some for himself. Freedom from the past. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from reality.

Officers began piling clothing and footwear in large plastic bags, checking through drawers and cupboards, peeling back brittle grey lino to check the floorboards below.

‘I’m going out to the landing,’ Margaret said, and with her hand over her nose she pushed her way back up the hall towards the door. As she reached it she heard a shout of excitement, and several officers hurried into the bedroom. Curiosity got the better of her, and she made her way back down the hall. Li pushed past the uniforms, and she saw Detective Wu standing holding a bronze sword in his gloved hands, like a trophy.

‘It was hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe, boss,’ he told Li. Margaret pressed into the room and looked at it. It was about a metre long, with a glazed wooden handle inlaid with mother of pearl. There were no obvious traces of blood. It was clean and sharp.

Sang looked triumphantly at Li. ‘That looks like a pretty impressive detail to me, boss.’ And Li thought he detected just a hint of smugness in his tone.

It was very bright in here, fluorescent light reflecting off white tiles. On the walk down a long, cool corridor, they could see through windows into labs on either side. They looked, Margaret thought, much like forensic science labs anywhere, the trophies of difficult or gruesome court cases lining the walls. On the back wall of the electron microscope lab there were photo-enlargements of a monstrous hairy-looking insect. Another showed the tip of a screwdriver next to a close-up of the wound it had caused. Through another window, they saw pasted to the wall a series of white linen sheets, about a foot square, each with a small bullet hole surrounded by rims of black soot. In another room, a table was laden with the hardware of death — handguns, rifles, shotguns, each labelled with an evidence tag. In yet another, the paraphernalia of illicit drug use; small metal spoons, bent and blackened; syringes; bottles of pills.

Like many forensic lab technicians, Mr Qi, took positive pleasure in the macabre. He was a small man with thinning hair and a cheery face. His white lab coat was several sizes too large for him and in urgent need of laundering. A colourful abundance of pens, pencils and rulers grew out of his breast pocket. He pointed through a window to their left. ‘That was domestic in Chongwen District.’ He was enjoying the chance to exercise his English. They saw a blouse stretched out on a paper-covered workbench. It was peppered with linear stab holes and tears, and stained with blood that was now dry and grey-brown. ‘Husband come home and find her lying on floor of bedroom. Thirty-seven stab wound. At first we think she interrupt burglary. Turns out it is husband. He has other woman and wants rid of wife.’ He grinned. ‘I like this new Chinese crimewave. It make life ve-ery interesting.’

He swung his rear end at the security sensor on the door of his lab. The magnetic identification card in the billfold in his back pocket activated the lock, and with a whirr and a dull clunk the door opened. He grinned again. ‘Make life easy when hands full. Welcome to my lab.’ Margaret, Li, Qian and Sang followed him in, all garbed in the white lab coats they had donned in the ante-chamber at the entrance to the suite. Feet had been scraped on grilles and wiped on mats, to prevent dirt and dust from the outside world tracking in on the spotlessly clean and shiny floors.

The comparison microscope sat on a table on its own. Its base was between two and three feet square. It supported two stages, each about six inches square, where the objects to be magnified and compared were placed beneath bright lamps that would illuminate them for the lenses. Above them, a maze of mirrors and lenses arranged on two turrets, fed the magnified images up to a couple of eyepieces where the examiner could scrutinise the images side by side. From a port beneath the eyepieces, a video signal was fed to a large colour monitor on a stand.

The sections of vertebrae cut from the necks of each of the victims stood in four formalin-filled jars on the lab table. Mr Qi’s assistant removed each of them in turn and washed off the formalin so that the fumes would not make Mr Qi’s nose burn and eyes water as he examined them under the microscope.

Mr Qi, meantime, clamped the bronze sword they had found in Birdie’s apartment to a rolling stand that would hold it steady as the blade was placed on its stage for examination, a few centimetres at a time. It had already been subjected to minute forensic examination, revealing no fingerprints, no blood. All traces of its owner had been carefully and meticulously excised. But its blade had been sharpened on only one side, and so only one edge had been used for cutting.

Mr Qi dropped the blinds on the window to the corridor with a clatter and turned out the lights. The room was plunged into darkness except for the glow of the monitor and the lamps in the comparison microscope that illuminated the white coats of the little group of investigators that was gathered around it.

The assistant trimmed the first section of vertebrae with a jeweller’s saw, and placed it on the left-hand stage. Mr Qi arranged the blade of the sword so that a section about two-thirds of the way along its length rested on the right-hand stage, approximately in the area of the ‘sweet spot’ that Margaret had spoken about at the autopsy. He peered down into the eyepieces and began adjusting his focus. For the moment the image on the monitor was blurred, and the detectives shuffled impatiently. Margaret knew that the process would take time.

Centimetre by centimetre, Mr Qi moved the stage upon which the blade rested, by means of a series of small cranks and gears, focusing on the tiny nicks and striations shown up under magnification, and comparing them with the microscopic scores left on the cartilage of the first piece of neck.

‘Aha!’ he said suddenly, and they all jumped. ‘We have a match.’ And he refocused the lenses so that the image on the monitor slipped into sharp focus. Side by side, the hugely magnified images of the neck cartilage and the blade revealed an identical and matching pattern of vertical scores of varying heights and widths. Mr Qi grinned at them triumphantly. ‘This sword cut off this head.’ And he took a red, felt-tipped pen from his pocket and carefully marked the section of blade that matched the piece of neck and annotated it with the specimen number. ‘Next,’ he said happily.

One by one, Mr Qi matched up sections of the blade to the other three neck specimens. The first three sections overlapped at either the left or right margins. The fourth was about an inch away, nearer the handle end. Mr Qi marked each match with a different coloured pen.

With practised expertise, Yuan Tao had hit the sweet spot of his blade with unnerving accuracy. His own killer had not achieved the same degree of precision. But beyond any shadow of a doubt, this was the murder weapon. Li stared at the red, yellow, green and blue markings on its blade with a brooding intensity.

Sang was gleeful. ‘Still think Birdie isn’t our man, boss?’