The Fourth Sacrifice

I

Margaret stretched lazily on the bed, luxuriating in a sense of freedom. However painful it had been to make her decision, having made it she felt released from an enormous burden. She had lain for a long time in Michael’s arms last night, simply curled into him for comfort, childlike and secure, and then they had made love and she had slept like a baby until becoming aware of him leaving shortly after six.

‘Where are you going?’ she had asked.

But he had simply smiled and kissed her forehead. ‘Sunday is not a day of rest in China. And there is no rest for the wicked. I’m required on location. I’ll see you later.’

Now she rolled over and looked at the time. She had promised to take Xinxin to the park. A tiny stab of pain, an echo from another life, came to her with the recollection. She regretted having made the promise. She had done so before confronting Li with her revelations about Michael and her decision to go home. Now all she wanted was a clean break. It could only be painful taking that one step back, even if it was for just an hour or so. But she had promised, and she could not let the little girl down. Too many people had done that already.

She showered and washed her hair, and as she blow-dried it, looking in the mirror, she thought she looked older, pinched, a little haggard. She had lost weight and could see the faint outline of her ribcage. She enjoyed being slim, but skinny was unattractive. She had seen women in their thirties, desperate to stay attractive, dieting to the point where they aged themselves prematurely. A little flesh on the bone kept you looking younger. All she wanted to do now was get home, and a little comfort eating would do her no harm at all.

As she went through the clothes in her wardrobe, she realised she would have to pack sometime today. But she didn’t linger over the contents of the rack. There were clothes hanging there that carried too many memories. Clothes she had chosen to wear for Li on certain occasions. Clothes that would always make her think of him. Clothes that she would give to the Salvation Army back home. She pulled on a pair of jeans and tucked a fresh tee shirt into them, then rummaged through the shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe, looking for a pair of trainers. She picked out a white pair with pale pink piping, and froze as she saw a scattering of blue-black powder on the wooden base beneath them. For almost a full half-minute she remained motionless, the trainers in her hand, looking at the powder. She could hear her blood pulsing in her ears. Slowly she reached in and took a pinch of it between her fingers and looked at it closely. The texture and colour were the same as the sample Li had shown her. She turned over her trainers and saw the blue dust compacted in their treads. Without being aware of it, her breathing had turned rapid and shallow. She was trying to remember when she had last worn these trainers, where she could possibly have picked up this strange powdery residue. She retraced her life over the previous few days, and realised with a sudden shock that she had not worn these shoes since the day she had visited the Terracotta Warriors with Michael. Down there in the pits, with the dust and rubble of centuries, the smashed pottery of the warriors had deposited their crumbling ceramic dust, a fired clay that had turned blue-black in the searing heat of the kilns. And she had tramped it into the treads of her shoes.

But it made no sense. What possible connection could there be between the underground chambers in Xi’an where two-thousand-year-old ceramic warriors stood guard over their emperor, and a series of murders in Beijing? A series of murders which, to all intents and purposes, had already been solved.

And as quickly as she had let her imagination run riot, she stopped herself. She had no idea if this blue powder matched the other samples. But to her immediate regret, she realised that she wanted to find out. And she found herself suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, being drawn back into a world she had been trying very hard to escape. The force that drew her was irresistible, as was the curiosity which she recognised now was edged by just the faintest hint of apprehension.

Margaret’s doubts about whether Mr Qi would be at work on a Sunday or not were quickly allayed. After all, criminals did not take weekends off, why should criminalists? He looked at the sample of powder she had brought him in a white hotel envelope and scratched his chin thoughtfully. Her shoes, in a plastic bag, lay on the table.

‘It look ve-ery much like same dust,’ he said. ‘Most probably about seventy per cent composition fired clay. The rest organic, mineral, some artefact.’ He looked at her. ‘Where did you find this, Doctah Cambo?’

‘I picked it up in the treads of my shoes at the pits of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an.’

‘Aha!’ Mr Qi’s face positively glowed with illumination. ‘Then this almost certainly same dust,’ he said. ‘We did analysis on mineral component of clay. Most commonly found in area of Shaanxi province west of Xi’an City. If you find it in pits it must be clay they use to make Terracotta Warrior more than two thousand years ago.’

And Margaret remembered now reading in the forensic notes that the clay had originated in Shaanxi Province. But she had never made the connection with Xi’an. There had been no reason to, until now. ‘How soon can you tell if it’s the same as the other samples found in the Yuan Tao murders?’

‘Oh,’ he said cheerily, ‘it quiet today. No problem. Couple hours, maybe. I can do low power analysis with stereo microscope, and maybe density gradient analysis. Even mineralogical profile if you want. You wanna wait?’

She glanced at her watch. ‘I can’t.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Could you phone Deputy Section Chief Li with the results?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘No problem.’ He grinned. ‘You clever lady, Doctah Cambo. You should come and work for Chinese police.’

She smiled. Not a chance in hell, she thought.

Her taxi dropped her at Silver Ingot Bridge. The corner grocery store was doing good business, and the paths that followed the contours of the lakes were dotted with couples and families out for a Sunday stroll. It was, at least, a day of rest for some. Margaret walked briskly along the south shore of Qianhai Lake, past decaying single-storey brick dwellings, and into the quieter leafy lanes that led to the Lotus Flower Market where Sunday crowds would already be gathering round food stands to buy plates of boiled pig’s intestine garnished with coriander. But Margaret turned off before she got there, through an arched gateway that led into Mei Yuan’s siheyuan. She had been entirely preoccupied with thoughts of the dust of aeons gathered in her shoes, found in a dead man’s apartment, scraped from the clothing of a murder victim. If the samples matched, then the only thing that connected them was the clay used to mould the Eighth Wonder of the World — the thousands of pottery soldiers fired in 220 BC to guard the underground burial chambers of the First Emperor of China. It was baffling. Margaret could make no sense of it.

Xinxin shrieked and rushed out to greet her in her slippers. She had been standing waiting at the door ever since breakfast. Margaret gave her a big hug and took her hand and led her indoors where Mei Yuan greeted her with a wide smile. ‘She is very impatient,’ she said. ‘I could hardly get her to sleep last night, she was so excited that you were going to take her to the playpark today.’ Her smile faded. ‘You are not really leaving Beijing?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Margaret said, shrugging off her embarrassment.

‘There is trouble between you and Li Yan, I think,’ Mei Yuan said.

Margaret just nodded. She wasn’t about to elaborate. And then she felt Xinxin tugging at her arm. She turned and found her staring up with wide, sparkling eyes, and chattering rapidly.

‘She’s asking you to hurry up,’ Mei Yuan said with a grin. ‘She says she’s been waiting for hours.’

Margaret took Xinxin’s hand. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

‘Just a minute.’ Mei Yuan stopped them. ‘She’s still in her slippers. Her trainers are by the door. She needs help with the laces.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Margaret said, and she squatted on a low stool by a collection of shoes that Mei Yuan kept to the right of the door. Xinxin’s trainers were tiny, smaller than Margaret’s hands, and Margaret thought how expensive it must be to keep her in shoes she was constantly outgrowing but never wearing out. As she lifted the left shoe, she saw the traces of blue dust on the floor, dark like a stain on the pale green lino, and she felt all the hairs on her neck and arms stand up.

Xinxin dumped herself on Margaret’s knee, urging her to hurry up, but Margaret was hardly aware of her. She turned the trainer over and saw the blue-black dust ingrained in the tread. The other shoe was the same. Confusion swept over her in waves. Now this really did not make sense. Xinxin had not been to Xi’an.

‘What’s wrong?’ Mei Yuan looked at her, concerned.

Margaret said, ‘When did Xinxin last wear these?’

Mei Yuan frowned, perplexed by the question. ‘Yesterday,’ she said. ‘They’re the same ones she was wearing when she was out with you and Li Yan.’

Margaret simply could not get her brain to function. It seemed to be adrift on a sea of extraneous thoughts. Where had they been? She looked at the soles of her own shoes. When she had found the residue in the treads of the trainers from Xi’an, she had put on the same shoes she had been wearing yesterday. But there was no trace of the blue dust. And then she remembered. Of course, there had been a downpour last night. She had run off from here through wet streets in search of a taxi. Whatever residue might have been trapped in her treads would have been washed away.

So, where had they been?

She tried to focus. They had been in the Jeep. At Section One. At the university …

‘Jesus,’ she said aloud. Xinxin and Mei Yuan were staring at her apprehensively. At the university they had been in the conservation lab, in that dirty, dusty room where they restored and preserved ancient artefacts. Professor Chang had apologised for the mess. We’ve been restoring the ancient treasures of China in here for decades, he had said. I guess it just never seemed all that important to clean up behind us. Professor Yue had worked there too. And it was on his trousers and shoes that they had first found the residue of blue dust.

Margaret became aware of Xinxin pulling at her hand, her voice whining at her in disappointment. She dropped the tiny shoes, slipped Xinxin from her knee and stood up, her face flushed with confusion and excitement. ‘I’m sorry. Mei Yuan. Apologise to Xinxin for me, but I can’t take her now. I’ll come back later. I have to go to the university.’

The stone lions guarding the west gate seemed to glower at Margaret as she slid from the back seat of her taxi. Of the three huge, studded doors between the columns of the gate, only the centre one remained open. The other two were firmly shut. The uniformed guard watched Margaret approach and she wondered how she was going to explain to him why he should let her in without a pass. But as she got closer she recognised him as the guard who had let them by yesterday. He recognised her, too. Perhaps he remembered that she had been accompanied by a senior police officer, for he waved her through. She smiled, and like Alice through the looking-glass, she slipped from one world into another.

The gardens and lakes and pathways of the campus were virtually deserted. Willows drooped along the water’s edge in the breathless heat of the morning. The occasional student meandered by on his bicycle. She crossed a stone bridge over still water and saw the white-painted pavilion of the archaeology department shimmering beyond its lawns, partially obscured by trees. She was certain that the lab assistant had led them east to the Arts building, past the administration centre, around the edge of Lake Nameless, but there were so many paths she was not sure which one to take.

It was a full fifteen minutes before finally, close to despair, she found what she was looking for. All the paths and pavilions looked alike. But she had recognised the two dusty greybrick blocks immediately. The plaque by the door of the west building revealed it to be the College of Life Sciences, confirming that the building opposite was the Arts building, housing the archaeology labs. The courtyard, filled yesterday with bicycles and students, was quite empty and eerily quiet. The air was heavy with the hum of insects and she could hear birds singing in the trees beyond. Somewhere away in the distance she heard a girl call out a greeting, and even more distantly a boy returning it. The Life Sciences building seemed to be locked up. The Arts building, too, appeared deserted, its rust-red doors closed and forbidding.

Margaret climbed the three shallow steps to the entrance and pushed the right half of the door. It was firmly bolted. She pushed the other half and it swung in to a dark interior. Tentatively she stepped inside, moving slowly across the tiles until her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The corridor, which ran up the centre of the building, had no windows and was very dark. The distant sunlight that bled into it from the glass around the main door barely lit its length. But halfway up, a single slash of bright light fell across it from an open door, and as she approached it, Margaret saw that it was the door to the conservation lab where she and Li had interviewed Professor Chang.

‘Hello,’ she called out, and her voice seemed inordinately loud as it reverberated back at her along the corridor. But there was no response. She reached the conservation lab and pushed the door wider. It creaked open. Sunlight sliced through Venetian blinds in narrow strips that distorted uniformly across the contours of the room. ‘Hello,’ she called again. But there was no one here. The sword that Professor Chang had been restoring was still held tightly in the jaws of a vice on the big central workbench. The room was as dirty and cluttered as she remembered it. She took a small, clear plastic bag from her purse, then laid her purse on the table and crouched down to examine the dust on the floor. Here, there were wood shavings and a kind of sandy grime. She moved around the room to an open area of floor and saw that it was thick with the blue powdery dust. She crouched down again and ran a pinch of it through her fingers. It looked and felt like the same residue that had gathered in the treads of her shoes in Xi’an. She scooped as much as she could into the plastic bag and stood up again.

She had come round the far side of the central workbench, and saw now that it had been moved forward, towards the door, sliding on some kind of mechanism that was bolted to the floor. Beneath it, the lid of a large hatch in the floor stood open, and wooden stairs disappeared down into the lit interior of some kind of basement. For the first time, Margaret began to feel apprehensive. She edged closer to the opening and peered down. ‘Hello,’ she called. But there was no reply, just the smell of cold, damp air rising to greet her, like the musty, fetid stink of the tunnels of the Underground City.

She hesitated for a long moment before her curiosity got the better of her, and she slipped the plastic bag into her pocket and carefully tested her weight on the wooden stairs. They seemed pretty robust, and she tentatively went down into the large, square chamber below. The walls here were stippled with roughcast and stained with damp. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, and a cable fed off along the curved roof of a tunnel that was illuminated by a lamp every fifteen or twenty yards. A metal gate at the opening of the tunnel stood ajar. Again she called, and again there was no reply.

She was tempted simply to turn and climb the stairs back to the conservation lab and hurry out into the warmth and safety of the sunshine outside, when she noticed the brown, crusted smear on the floor. She crouched to look at it more closely. It was blood. Old blood, turning grey-brown. Several weeks old. She looked up and saw that there was a trail of it leading from the tunnel, as if a bleeding body had been dragged into or out of it. Now her apprehension was turning to fear. She felt the chill of the air in her bones. But she was drawn, inexorably, both by her fear and her curiosity, into the tunnel, to follow the trail of dried blood. She made her way carefully along it, keeping a hand always on the wall. It grew colder, her breath billowing in clouds around her. She could see no more than ten or fifteen feet ahead in the mist of dampness. She felt, for all the world, as if she were back in the tunnels of the Underground City, making her way towards the old Beijing Railway Station. As she went further, she saw that the blood had spilled more freely on the rough concrete floor, and she realised she was getting closer to the point of trauma.

Then, out of the mist, she saw that the tunnel opened out into a large, vaulted chamber. Her eyes were drawn to the blood on the floor. There was a huge pool of it there as she entered the chamber, and she recognised the distinctive cast-off patterns that had been flung from the sword delivering the fatal stroke. She looked up and let out a tiny cry of fright as she saw rows of figures standing watching her silently in the gloom. And then the lights went out and she was plunged into total darkness.

II

Li stood smoking by the window. His mind was numb, disabled, it seemed, by some kind of mental inertia. There was a part of him that simply did not want to think about any of it: Birdie’s ‘confession’, the inconsistent evidence, the intruder who had attacked him at Birdie’s apartment, Chen’s instruction to close the case. Most of all, he did not want to think about Margaret: that she was leaving tomorrow for good, that she would even consider marrying Zimmerman. So he filled his head instead with smoke, and gazed emptily at the trees below obscuring the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese.

Qian knocked and poked his head around the door. ‘Boss, I’ve got someone downstairs in the interview room I think you should see.’

Li did not even bother turning to look. ‘I’m not seeing anyone right now,’ he said.

‘I think you’ll want to see this guy,’ Qian persisted. ‘It’s Birdie’s friend, Moon. The one who couldn’t give him an alibi for Monday night.’

Moon was a shrunken little man with a completely bald head and a small round face. He wore a shabby grey suit over an open-necked white shirt with a collar frayed and ringed with grime. He sat, legs crossed, on the chair where Birdie had sat only yesterday pleading his innocence. A hand-rolled cigarette had burned down to nicotine-stained fingers. He was pale, and agitated.

‘Well?’ Li barked at him as he came into the interview room.

Moon glanced nervously at Qian who nodded and said, ‘Just tell him what you told me.’

Moon looked apprehensive. He took a final draw on the stump of his cigarette, stood on it, and then started rolling another. It gave him something to look at rather than meet Li’s eye. ‘I heard what happened,’ he said. ‘I just wish I had come last night. Now it’s too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘I screwed up. I don’t know why. We always played checkers on a Tuesday night, me and Birdie. And we did move it to a Monday night one week because I had a cousin coming in from the country on the Tuesday. Only for some reason, I thought it was the week before last. I was sure it was.’ He looked up, finally, at Li, his moist eyes appealing for understanding. ‘I don’t know … I forget things these days. It wasn’t until my cousin phoned yesterday that I realised. If I’d known it was so important …’ His voice trailed away and he looked down again at his roll-up to hide his tears.

‘What are you saying?’ Li asked.

Moon lit his cigarette. ‘It was last Monday we played, just like Birdie said. Down on the wall at Xidan. Till late. Then he came back to mine for a beer. Didn’t leave till the early hours. So whatever it was you thought he did, it couldn’t have been him. I swear on the grave of my ancestors.’

Qian chased after Li along the top corridor. ‘What do you mean you’re not going to do anything about it?’

‘Chen doesn’t want to know.’

‘And that makes it right?’

‘No it doesn’t!’ Li turned on Qian, annoyed that this cop, his senior by several years but his junior in rank, should think that Li was in any way happy about it. ‘All Moon’s alibi does is confirm what I already knew. Chen didn’t want to know before, he’s not going to want to know now.’

Qian looked at him and shook his head. ‘Meantime, whoever did it is still out there. And you’re going to let them get away with it?’

Li gasped in frustration. He knew Qian was right. ‘No,’ he said despondently. There was no way his sense of justice would allow him to do that. But it would mean a fight, and right now he did not know if he had the heart for it.

‘Li!’ Chen’s voice reached them down the corridor, and they turned to see the Section Chief hurrying towards them. ‘Take a couple of officers and get out to the airport.’

‘Chief,’ Li said wearily, ‘there’s been a development on the Yuan Tao case.’

‘Now, Li!’ Chen said, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘We’ve got an emergency out there.’

Li glanced at Qian. ‘I’m sorry, chief, I’m not going anywhere until we discuss the Yuan Tao case.’ Chen was stopped in his tracks. There was no way he could ignore this direct challenge to his authority. Li went on quickly, ‘There was a mix-up over Birdie’s alibi. The guy he said he was playing checkers with? The one who said he wasn’t? He got his weeks mixed up. He just came in to tell us he realised he was with Birdie that night after all. There’s no way Birdie could have killed Yuan.’

In the presence of Qian, it was impossible for Chen to ignore this. He paused for a moment, looking dangerously at Li. At length, he made a decision. ‘We’ll talk about it when you get back from the airport.’

Li’s frustration bubbled over. ‘What the hell are we going to the airport for? That’s the jurisdiction of the aviation police.’

Chen kept his temper in check. He said evenly, ‘A large shipment of Terracotta Warriors, destined for a touring exhibition in the United States was being loaded into the hold of a cargo plane at the Capital Airport this morning. There was an accident with one of the forklifts. A packing case containing a warrior fell twenty feet on to the tarmac, breaking open and smashing the contents.’

Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with us?’

‘There were two warriors in the packing case,’ Chen said.

‘So?’ The penny still had not dropped.

Chen sighed. ‘There was only supposed to be one.’

Li’s counterpart in the aviation police based at Capital Airport was a man of medium height, hair swept back and plastered to his skull with some kind of scented hair oil. Deputy Section Chief Wei was perhaps thirty-five years old. He wore a white shirt with jeans and sneakers, sported three rings on each hand, and wore a chunky chain bracelet on his right wrist. He reeked of aftershave. He gave Li an oily smile and shook his hand and introduced him to his subordinate officers, one of whom was in uniform. Li, in turn, introduced Wu and Qian. Formalities over, Wei slid open the door of a Toyota people carrier that would take them out on to the tarmac.

It was a long drive across the apron to where the cargo plane sat shimmering in the heat. Behind them, the old and new terminal buildings had receded into the hazy distance. Ahead of them, a truck and a forklift were parked by the open hold of the aircraft. There were several police vehicles and at least two dozen uniformed officers and several other individuals in civilian clothes. The airplane had been completely ringed off by yellow and black striped tape that fluttered and bowed in the hot breeze that blew unfettered across the runway. The people carrier pulled in beside the aircraft, and the investigating officers from Beijing stepped out into the breeze, negotiating the tape and moving towards the centre of interest — which was a large wooden crate split open by the impact of its fall. Thick protective wadding, which had failed to protect the contents, had sprung free. The shattered remains were spread all around it. Shards of pottery warriors that had survived more than two thousand years only to end up smashed to pieces on the apron of a Beijing airport. Two heads were clearly visible, one of them split completely in half.

‘Who’s in charge of this stuff? Li asked.

A middle-aged man in a suit and wearing sunglasses stepped forward to shake Li’s hand. ‘Jin Gang,’ he said. ‘Head of security at the Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xi’an.’

‘You supervise the packing?’

Jin nodded. ‘There are five of us accompanying the exhibition. My deputy, an archaeologist and two researchers, all from the museum. We were all present when the warriors were packed.’

‘And only one went into each case?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So how come there are two in this one?’

Jin crouched by the broken crate and pulled away several strips of side planking. ‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘There’s a false bottom. The second warrior was already inside when the crate was packed. We’ve checked the rest.’ He nodded towards the stacks of crates half unloaded from the truck. ‘They are all the same.’ He paused. ‘Two go out. Presumably just one comes back.’

Li squatted beside him, looking at the splintered packing case. He picked up a piece of broken pottery and frowned. ‘Are they genuine?’

Jin glanced up at an elderly man who was leaning over and watching every move. The man nodded to Li. ‘I am Yan Shu,’ he said, extending his arm to shake Li’s hand. ‘The senior archaeologist at the Museum. They are all genuine Terracotta Warriors, Deputy Section Chief. There is no doubt about that.’

Li looked up at the faces ranged around him and looking down at him expectantly. ‘Well, where the hell did they come from?’

No one said anything. The wind was increasing in strength, whistling around the undercarriage of the huge metal bird that loomed over them.

‘Well, who made the crates, then?’

‘A packing company in Beijing, in Haidan District,’ Jin said, getting stiffly to his feet. ‘But they were commissioned by the organisers of the exhibition, not by the museum.’

Li rose, too. ‘So who are the organisers?’

‘An American company. The Art of War, Inc. It’s a dedicated company, set up by the Americans to organise the exhibition to go with the documentary series.’

‘What documentary series?’ Li felt like he was wading through a sea of ignorance, the answers to which, apparently, seemed obvious to everyone but him. He glanced at Qian, but he just shrugged.

‘Michael Zimmerman’s The Art of War,’ Jin said. ‘It starts screening in the United States next month.’

Li felt the skin on his face and neck tingling as it tightened, and in spite of the heat he shivered as if someone had just stepped on his grave. ‘What’s Michael Zimmerman got to do with this?’

Jin said, ‘He’s organising the exhibition. The Art of War, Inc. is his company.’

The twin towers of the China World Trade Centre, where Michael Zimmerman had his apartment on the twenty-second floor, towered over the east end of the city, reflecting the warm autumn sunlight. The head of residential security had carefully scrutinised the search warrant issued by the office of the Procurator General, before riding up in the elevator with Li, Wu, Qian and several uniformed officers. Service staff had confirmed that Michael had not spent the night in his apartment. But Li already knew that.

The security man unlocked the door and opened it on to a world of luxury beyond the experience, or even the wildest dreams, of most of Li’s officers. There was a vast expanse of thick-piled wall-to-wall carpet, a luxurious white three-piece suite, a beautiful beechwood dining suite with matching coffee tables and bureau. A huge colour television stood on a white semi-circular stand with a video recorder on the shelf below. There were video tapes piled on the floor all around it. Fine, framed prints hung on cream walls, and wall-to-ceiling windows looked out on spectacular city views. The windows were draped with tastefully patterned curtains that could be drawn, when required, on a world where hundreds of feet below, whole families lived in single rooms. One door stood ajar, leading to a Western brand-name fitted kitchen with every possible appliance and convenience. Another led to a fitted bathroom with a circular sunken bath and a separate shower cabinet. The taps were gold-plated. A master bedroom with fitted wardrobe and king-size bed had an en-suite dressing room.

The detectives stood looking around for several moments in awe. It was hard to believe that such luxury could exist cheek by jowl with the comparative poverty of the people who lived all around it. Li wondered what must go through the minds of those who cleaned and serviced these apartments, returning at the end of the day to crumbling siheyuan homes, or tiny apartments in state-built blocks where communal heating was not turned on until mid-November, when the frost was already lying thick on the sidewalks.

He turned to the security man and told him he could wait outside. When they were on their own, Li said to his officers, ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for, so we’ll look at everything. But go carefully, we’re on diplomatically sensitive turf here.’

A saxophone lay discarded on the bed. Rows of Italian suits and designer jeans hung in the wardrobe. There were more than a dozen pairs of shoes on the rail beneath them. Drawers were filled with name-labelled tee shirts and boxer shorts. The bathroom cabinet was well charged with brand-name soaps and shower gels: Yves St Laurent, Paco Rabane.

From the moment he had stepped into the apartment Li had been vaguely, almost subconsciously, aware of a low-pitched scent that hung in the air. It was very background, and it was not until he walked into the bathroom and it became stronger, rising above the scents of soaps and shampoos, that he became properly conscious of it. He tracked it down to a small, brown bottle with a screw cap that was squeezed into a corner of the bathroom cabinet. Li unscrewed the cap and sniffed the sweet, pungent smell of the essential oil it held. He looked at the label. Patchouli. He knew immediately it was what he had smelled in both of Yuan’s apartments. Very faint, barely registering. And he realised now that the strange sense of something familiar that had always haunted him around Zimmerman was that same scent of Patchouli. Never strong, but always there, somewhere just beyond consciousness. He cursed himself for not being aware of it before. While it had promoted an uneasiness somewhere at the back of his mind, it had never made the leap to the front of it.

But now he knew that Zimmerman had been in Yuan’s embassy apartment, and the one he had been renting secretly in Tuan Jie Hu Dongli. Probably on the night Yuan had been murdered. Something turned over inside him, and Li realised with a shock that there was a strong chance that Margaret could be in danger.

He went back into the main room as his officers sifted through Zimmerman’s personal belongings. Wu, sunglasses pushed back on his head, was examining the piles of videos stacked on the floor around the TV cabinet. ‘This guy must watch a hell of a lot of movies,’ he said. Li took one of the boxes from him and read the label.

‘They’re rushes,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Wu looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘VHS copies of the stuff Zimmerman’s been shooting out on location. Presumably he looks at it each day when he gets in at night.’

‘If he gets in at night,’ Wu said with a raised eyebrow.

In spite of the fact that none of his detectives knew about the relationship between Margaret and Zimmerman, Li felt himself blushing.

But Wu didn’t notice. He was too concerned with trying to get one of the tapes to play. Finally he got a picture up on the screen of extras dressed as peasants, storming the square below the stele pavilion at Ding Ling, and Li recognised the setup he had witnessed out on location two days earlier. A big, red-bearded face beneath a baseball cap ballooned into shot. ‘OK, cut,’ said the face, and its owner ran a finger horizontally across his throat. The picture slewed haphazardly across the square before dropping to an out-of-focus shot of a piece of ground and then cutting to black.

Li didn’t know what he hoped to find here. He had no idea what Zimmerman was involved in, or to what extent. But he did not have high expectations of something incriminating simply dropping into his lap. He crossed to the bureau. A micro-hifi sat on top of it, and there were a dozen or more CDs on the shelf. He flipped idly through them, curious about Zimmerman’s taste in music. They were nearly all jazz, and a few classical collections. Verdi, Mozart, Bach. And, incongruously, one collection of sentimental love songs by Lionel Ritchie. He wondered what it was that had attracted Margaret to him. Li had taken an immediate and instinctive dislike to Zimmerman the first time they had met at the Sanwei tearoom. But then his view of him had been clouded by a jealousy he neither wanted nor could control. Now that Zimmerman was a suspect in both a murder investigation and an attempt to smuggle priceless artefacts out of the country, Li’s feelings towards him were coldly professional.

‘Hey, boss,’ Wu said. ‘Look at this.’ And he held up a tape. Li crossed to have a look at it. ‘Why do you think he’s got a security tape from Beijing University? What’s the Fourth Chamber?’

Li snatched the tape and examined it. It was a labelled tape from an internal video security system at the university. Written on it by hand were the words, Fourth Chamber, and it was dated September 14th. Li repeated the date aloud. ‘September fourteenth … Should that date mean something to us?’ Wu shrugged.

Qian said, ‘We found Professor Yue’s body on the fifteenth.’

Li handed the tape back to Wu. ‘Put it on,’ he said.

Qian drew the curtain on the window behind them to stop sunlight reflecting off the screen, and all the officers gathered around to watch. The picture flickered and jumped as a fuzzy black and white image came into focus. The lighting was poor, and it was difficult to tell what they were looking at. There was no soundtrack. There appeared to be rows of dark figures standing still in the background. But then almost immediately a moving figure came into shot, emerging from the bottom of the screen, from below the camera. It was the hunched figure of a man, staggering as he was pushed forward by a more erect figure following behind. As they reached almost centre screen, the second man forced the first one to turn and then pushed him to his knees.

‘Shit,’ Wu said. ‘That’s Yue Shi, Professor Yue. Look, his hands are tied behind his back.’

And they saw, also, the placard hanging around his neck and could clearly read the name, Monkey, upside down and scored through, below the number 4. The professor seemed to be weeping. The other man, whose face they still could not clearly see, appeared to be talking to him and looking around. And then he turned, so that he was almost facing the camera. Li had known, from the moment the figures stumbled into shot, who they were. But it was still a shock to see Yuan Tao turning towards the camera, his face triumphant, almost gloating. The last time Li had seen him was on the autopsy table.

Yuan raised something from his side, and they saw that in his right hand was his executioner’s sword, the bronze replica that he had commissioned from Mr Mao in Xi’an. The professor made a half-hearted attempt to get to his feet, but Yuan pushed him down again. He was easy to manipulate under the influence of the flunitrazepam. Yuan put his hand on the back of Yue’s head and pushed it forward, then he stood back, adopting a position, legs astride, slightly behind his victim and to his left. He placed the blade of the sword briefly on the back of the professor’s neck, and then in one swift and expert movement, he raised it high over his head and brought it down to send the professor’s head spinning away across the floor.

In Zimmerman’s apartment there was a collective intake of breath, six men watching in horror as the headless body of Yue Shi fell forwards and sideways, blood spurting from the severed carotid arteries. Yuan stepped back, took a rag from his pocket and drew it swiftly along the length of his sword, then seemed to look behind him again at the rows of silent witnesses.

Li said, ‘No wonder they knew how to replicate the murders. They had the whole thing on tape.’

One of the uniformed officers made a dash for the bathroom, hand over his mouth.

‘What’s Yuan doing?’ Wu asked in a hushed voice. ‘What are those figures he’s looking at in the background?’

Li picked up the remote control and pressed the pause button. The picture flickered momentarily, and then held in a perfect freeze-frame. Li leaned forward to try to make out what it was in the background. ‘In the name of the sky,’ he whispered. ‘They’re Terracotta Warriors.’

Margaret stood shivering among the silent figures. She was not certain if it was the cold or her fear that made her tremble so violently. In the momentary glow of the pinpoint of red light that flashed at regular intervals overhead, the faces of her companions took brief form in the dark and then plunged again into blackness. But their faces were cold as stone, lifeless eyes staring off towards an eternity into which they had been marching for two thousand, two hundred years. She did not know how many of them there were. Dozens perhaps. They stood in hushed rows, one behind the other in the cold and dreadful darkness of this underground chamber. They had had time to get used to it. Margaret had not.

At first, after the lights had gone out, there had been a distant clang of metal and she had called out, frantically hoping that someone would hear her. Terrified, she had felt her way back up the tunnel, inch by inch, one hand on the wall, one probing the darkness ahead of her. She could not remember ever having been so completely without light. The blackness seemed to take form and substance, enveloping her totally. It was frightening, disorientating. She had wondered if this was how it felt to be blind, and thought briefly of Pauper losing her sight slowly, first one eye, then the other. When she had told them her story of the sun rising red over the Yellow Sea and firing the town of Chongqing in the light of its crimson dawn, Margaret had been able to visualise it so clearly. Now she could see nothing, not even in her mind’s eye.

Up ahead her hand had touched something cold and wet, and she recoiled with a little scream. After a moment she had reached out again, and realised that what she felt was the cold metal of the gate at the tunnel’s entrance. Her relief was only momentary, as she realised that the gate was shut. And locked. Any illusions she may have harboured that she had been shut in here by accident had quickly vaporised. Her fear had turned to terror, and she had made her way quickly back to the chamber where the Terracotta Warriors stood waiting for her, as if it had been their destiny, and hers, to share the darkness of this awful place.

It was some time before she had realised that the winking red light which afforded her the briefest glimpses of her companions, was the light of a security camera mounted on the wall above the tunnel entrance. Was it an infrared camera? Was there someone, somewhere, at a monitor who could see her in the dark, who was watching her every movement? The thought made her feel sick.

Now she squeezed herself carefully among the warriors to crouch down and obscure herself from the camera and huddle, arms around her legs, for warmth and comfort. She wanted to cry. She did not know how long she had been here. But it seemed like a very, very long time.

III

Li slammed down the phone and shouted, ‘Wu!’

Wu appeared quickly in the doorway. The office behind him was buzzing with activity.

‘Boss?’

‘Get down to the Procurator General’s office and pick up that warrant for Zimmerman.’

‘On my way.’

Qian took his place in the doorway as Wu left it. ‘No one seems to know where Zimmerman is, boss. He’s not out on location, or at the production office. He’s not at the American Embassy …’

The phone on Li’s desk rang. He snatched the receiver. ‘Just a moment,’ he barked into it and put a hand over the mouthpiece. He flicked his head at Qian. ‘Try that bar where he said he was the night of Yuan’s murder. The Mexican Wave. I think it’s in Dongdaqiao Lu.’ And into the phone, ‘Deputy Section Chief Li.’ He flicked open his file on the murders and a couple of sheets of paper fluttered to the floor. He leaned over to pick them up.

‘It’s Mr Qi here, Deputy Section Chief. At the Centre of Material Evidence Determination. Hope I didn’t get you out bed.’

‘What do you want?’ Li was in no mood for Qi’s levity. He laid the fallen sheets on his desk in front of him.

‘I’ve got the results here that Dr Campbell asked for. She wanted me to phone you.’

Li frowned. ‘What results?’ His eyes were drawn by the printed sheets he had picked from the floor. They were in English, two of the pages from the print-out Margaret had made of the North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts after she had downloaded it from the Internet.

‘The dark blue dust she brought in this morning. She wanted me to run a comparison with the samples you found on Professor Yue and at Yuan Tao’s embassy apartment.’

Li was mystified. ‘She brought you a sample? This morning?’

‘Yes,’ Qi said. ‘It was a positive match.’

He now had Li’s full attention. ‘Did she tell you where she found it?’

‘Sure,’ said Qi. ‘It was in the tread of her shoes from when she was in the pits of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an.’

But Li barely had time to register this information before a name leaped out at him from one of the sheets of paper on his desk. A name that came several paragraphs below Yuan’s, in a list of winners in a minor Tameshi Giri competition in San Diego. It seemed extraordinary to him that they hadn’t seen it before. But, then, they hadn’t been looking. He felt sick.

‘Hello … hello …’ he heard Qi saying. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Sure.’ Li’s throat was thick. He knew now who had killed Yuan. ‘Thank you, Mr Qi.’ He hung up and sat for a moment. A thousand conflicting computations ran through his mind before one of them punched up an answer that sent a chill through him. He became aware that the sheet of paper in his hand was trembling.

He jumped up suddenly, lifting his jacket from the back of his chair, and headed for the door. In the detectives’ office he called to Qian to give him the mobile phone. Qian threw it across the desk and he caught it deftly and clipped it on to his belt. ‘Keep me in touch with any developments,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to find Dr Campbell. I think she could be in danger.’

The playpark was almost deserted. A handful of toddlers played in a sandpit watched by their mothers, who sat nearby on toy cars, smoking and talking. A breeze that stirred the leaves of the surrounding trees rattled the empty climbing frames. A giant Donald Duck, facing a slightly smaller dinosaur, presided over motionless swings and roundabouts. Out on Lake Houhai, the warm wind sent tiny ripples racing across the surface of the water. Li looked around with an increasing sense of anxiety. Margaret and Xinxin should have been here by now. But there was no sign of them. There was a shop in a tiny pavilion on the waterfront selling soft drinks and cigarettes. The proprietress sat reading a magazine. She shook her head when Li asked if she had seen a yangguizi with a little Chinese girl. No, she said. She had been here all morning and would have noticed something so unusual.

Li hurried back through a small park, past a garden where a woman in a white coat administered a massage to a fat, middle-aged man lying face down on a table. A few old men sat on benches around a circular flowerbed, staring into space. There was barely a flicker of interest in their eyes as Li ran past them to the hutong where he had parked the Jeep. He backed up and drove to Mei Yuan’s siheyuan.

She was surprised to see him, and he was relieved to see Xinxin. He looked around. ‘Where’s Margaret?’ he asked, expecting that she would come through the door from the other room any moment.

‘She wouldn’t take me to the park,’ Xinxin said petulantly. ‘She promised.’

‘She said she’d be back later,’ Mei Yuan said to her. ‘You know that.’

Xinxin folded her arms crossly. ‘Fed up waiting,’ she said.

‘Well, do you know where she went?’ Li asked impatiently.

Mei Yuan nodded towards Xinxin’s trainers by the door. ‘She got very excited when she found some dark blue powdery stuff on Xinxin’s shoes.’

Li stooped immediately to look at them, and recognised the blue-black ceramic dust he had found on Professor Yue and in his killer’s apartment. He frowned his confusion. This didn’t make any sense. He looked up at Mei Yuan, but she just shrugged.

‘She said she had to go to the university.’

IV

Margaret felt her fingers and joints stiffening. She had started to shiver uncontrollably, her lower lip trembling with every breath. It was, she recognised, the early stages of hypothermia. She had lost all sense of time now, and realised that soon she would start to become drowsy, comatose. If she allowed herself to drift off into sleep she knew it was a sleep from which she would never awaken.

Stiffly she got to her feet again and stamped them on the concrete floor. She swung her arms in circles around her body to try to get her circulation going and generate the heat that would keep her alive. For a long time she had been afraid of someone coming. But now she would have welcomed it. Anything would be better than dying down here in the cold and dark, simply slipping away without so much as a fight. They were insidious, intangible enemies, the cold and dark. You could not fight them. Their patience was endless, and would far outlast her will to survive. It seemed ironic that just a few feet above her the sun was shining, warm and bright and full of life. But there was no way she could reach it, or it reach her. And not for the first time did she feel the urge to cry, but fought it back. Tears would be futile.

She had long ago stopped trying to make sense of anything. Her thoughts and her senses had been focused on the need to stay alive. Twice she had made her way back to the gate hoping that she might find some way to break it down or force the lock. But it was solid and unyielding.

She had carefully picked her way through the ranks of the warriors to the back of the chamber. There it narrowed, and two steps led down to the opening of another tunnel. Hope had flared briefly, only to be extinguished by the discovery of another gate, which was also locked.

One by one she had counted the warriors. There were sixty-seven of them, including eighteen kneeling archers. She had felt their features, as if she might find in their faces some expression of comfort. But their cold, hard bodies were icier to the touch than the dead she had dissected on her autopsy table. And now she felt physical and mental control slipping away from her. Fear of death was slowly giving way to acceptance of it. How long could you remain afraid? Fear, like pain, could not sustain itself indefinitely.

But it was fear that returned, like a knife plunged into the heart, as suddenly she found herself dazzled by light. They were the same feeble lamps as before, but their light now seemed blinding after the dark. She screwed up her eyes against the glare until her pupils shrank to bring the light into perspective, painfully restoring her sight. The chamber appeared smaller somehow than it had in the darkness of her imagination. The warriors stood mute and expressionless, unblinking in the sudden light, unmoved by her plight.

She heard the distant clang of the metal door and the scrape of it on the concrete floor. She eased herself back among the soldiers as if they might protect her. A soft footfall echoed along the corridor towards her. She strained in the mist and gloom to see who it was, fear almost robbing her of the ability to breathe. This is what she had wanted. This is what she had told herself would be preferable to dying of hypothermia alone in the cold and dark. Now she was not so sure.

The shadow of a man moved through a halo of light cast by the lamp in the tunnel just beyond the chamber, but it had no definition in the mist, insubstantial and wraithlike. She wanted to scream, but no sound would come. And then the figure stepped into the chamber and she saw Michael’s sad, smiling face, and her legs nearly buckled under her with relief.

‘Michael,’ she gasped. And his eyes flickered among the serried ranks of the warriors until he picked out her face, pale and frightened, among the bold, bearded faces of her protectors. But her relief was momentary, and quickly replaced by a deep chill that had nothing to do with the cold in this place. ‘Michael, what are you doing here?’ And she was almost surprised by the calm of her own voice.

He shook his head, and his smile was laden with regret. ‘I should be asking you that.’ He stepped towards her and she withdrew among the warriors.

‘Don’t come near me!’

‘Jesus, Margaret, you don’t think I’m going to harm you!’ And there was hurt in his voice that she could believe him capable of such a thing. ‘I love you.’

She looked at him and was shocked to see that he meant it. ‘So what are we doing here, Michael?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is where Professor Yue was killed, isn’t it? Right where you’re standing. Before you moved the body to his apartment.’

Michael looked down at the dried pool of blood at his feet. He nodded slowly.

‘For God’s sake, why?’

He looked up again, and there was a light in his eyes. ‘It’s the final part of the story,’ he said. ‘The only bit I can’t tell. At least, not yet.’

Margaret found herself breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. Her fear and panic was mixed in equal parts with disillusion, frustration, even anger. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Hu Bo’s greatest achievement.’ Michael sunk his hands in his pockets and moved across the chamber, head bowed as if deep in thought. Then he looked up and his face was alive and intense. ‘The building above us,’ he said. ‘The Arts building. It was the home of the archaeology department during the Cultural Revolution. It’s where Hu Bo and several of his colleagues sought refuge from the madness. Here, they could keep their heads down below the parapet and wait until it was all over. Then, in ’74, they got word of an extraordinary find in Xi’an. Life-sized warriors fired in clay and buried underground to protect the tomb of the First Emperor. Some of them had been dug up and restored by the local cultural centre. But the authorities in Beijing did not yet know.’ He drew his hands from his pockets and spread them out towards her, as if appealing to her imagination to picture what he was telling her. ‘Imagine, Margaret, how they felt. What could turn out to be one of the most extraordinary finds of the century, discovered at a time when Red Guards were still roaming China, ransacking museums, destroying the country’s relics and artefacts.’

And Margaret realised it was not really her he was addressing, but his audience. This was a story he had probably rehearsed in his mind a thousand times. She glanced up at the security camera and wondered if the performance was being recorded for posterity.

‘Hu and two of his colleagues slipped out of Beijing and travelled to Xi’an to see for themselves.’ Michael’s absorption in his story was complete. ‘It was true. They talked to the people at the cultural centre, the peasants who had dug the wells, and persuaded the head of department back in the capital that an exploratory dig was worthwhile. But they would make no big thing of it, for they did not want to attract unwelcome attention.

‘And no one paid them any. A bunch of old men, with the aid of a few enlisted peasants, digging holes in the middle of nowhere.’ His eyes sparkled and he clenched his fist in triumph. ‘But those holes took them right down into what the official team later called the fourth chamber. And, just like the archaeologists who came so soon after, they found that it was empty. Filled with sand and silt.’ He paused, eyes wide, breath billowing about him in haloes. ‘Except for one ante-chamber that was crammed with warriors. Nearly a hundred and thirty of them. Perhaps they had simply been stored there, awaiting later deployment. Perhaps they were flawed in some way and had been discarded. We’ll never know. But Hu and his colleagues understood the importance of their find. And they knew that it was only a matter of time before the authorities found out what they were up to.’

Michael moved about upon his stage, as if addressing himself to an audience of the very warriors he was talking about. But his eyes were fixed on Margaret, appealing to her to share his excitement, desperate to draw her into his story, to know how it was he felt, how this had all come about.

‘The warriors they found had been badly damaged by the collapse of the roof and the walls,’ he said. ‘But Hu’s greatest fear was that the Red Guards would come and destroy them for ever, denounce them as “old culture”, proof of the crimes of the “imperialist royalists” of China’s past. So they brought in a mechanical digger and simply dug out the whole ante-chamber, filling crate after crate with earth and pieces of the broken warriors. The crates were shipped back to Beijing by road and stored in a warehouse belonging to the university in Haidan. Then one by one they were transferred to the university itself and secreted down here in the bomb shelter that their predecessors had dug in the sixties.’

Michael let out a deep breath and smiled at Margaret. ‘You see, they thought they were saving them for posterity. But, then, to everyone’s surprise, the authorities sanctioned an official excavation, and within a year the thousands of warriors in Pit No. 1 were being uncovered. Hu Bo and the others were trapped by their own good intentions. To admit that they had removed the warriors from the fourth chamber could leave them open to accusations of theft, or worse.

‘So they made a pact. They spent the next twenty-five years restoring the warriors they had recovered from Xi’an, piece by tiny piece, down here in what they came to call their own fourth chamber, and upstairs in the conservation lab. Their existence, in fact the very existence of the bomb shelter, was known to only a few. The university authorities who had been here in the sixties had long since been purged. Officially, this place didn’t exist. Still doesn’t. It was the perfect hiding place for the warriors.’

In spite of herself, in spite of her situation and her fear and her anger, Margaret had been drawn into Michael’s story. ‘What was the pact?’ she asked.

Michael knew now that he had her back again. ‘They agreed that whichever of them outlived the others, would reveal the existence of the warriors before he died, so that they could be returned to the nation and their rightful place in the fourth chamber that they had been taken from.

‘In 1998, Hu Bo, who by then was the last surviving member, was diagnosed with cancer. He had only weeks to live, and he confided the secret of the fourth chamber to his protégé here at the university.’

‘Professor Yue,’ Margaret said. Michael nodded. She said, ‘Don’t tell me, I can guess the rest. He got greedy, right? I mean, down here there’s all these Terracotta Warriors that no one else knows about. If he can get them out of the country, boy, is he going to make a lot of money. How much would just one of these fetch in the West?’

Michael spread his hands. ‘They’re priceless, Margaret. We’re talking millions. For the lot, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions. And not too many to flood the market and bring down the price. There are dozens of tycoons out there, men who have everything, men who will pay extraordinary amounts just to know that they have a genuine Terracotta Warrior standing in their library or in their study.’

‘And so all that stuff about the wonders of history and the science of archaeology goes out the window because you see the chance to make a fast buck.’ Margaret had moved now, out from the safety of her towering warriors. She remembered the night she had first met Michael at the ambassador’s residence. The truth is never dull, he had told her. That extraordinary mix of human passion and frailty, maybe darkness, that leads to the commission of the crime. No, she thought now, it wasn’t dull. Just sordid.

Michael seemed shocked by the sudden contempt in her voice. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t like that. Yue Shi had no way to get them out of the country. When he confided in me I knew I was uniquely placed to do it. I’d organised exhibitions before, my high media profile gave me a lot of clout. But, I mean, it’s not as if we were stealing them. No one knew about them anyway. And they’d be just as safe, if not safer, in the hands of private collectors. And the things I could do with the money, Margaret. The projects I could fund without having to go cap in hand to universities and charitable organisations and broadcasters back home. There are excavations all around the world that are just waiting for funding.’

‘How noble,’ Margaret said. ‘And this money, these excavations … they’re worth killing for, are they? Worth the lives of men?’

Michael shook his head and moved towards her, appealing for her understanding. ‘For God’s sake, Margaret, that’s really not how it was.’

‘Don’t come near me!’ she shouted. And he stopped in his tracks, startled by the fear in her voice and the hate in her eyes. He had lost her again.

He sighed. ‘We’d installed a video security system,’ he said, almost hopelessly. ‘So that none of us who knew what was down here could cheat the others.’

‘Whatever happened to honour among thieves?’

He shook his head, ignoring her barb. ‘I got a phone call from the lab assistant upstairs. He and the professor had been organising the removal of the warriors, one by one, to a workshop we were renting in Haidan. He was in a hell of a state. Professor Yue had been murdered down here in the underground chamber. The whole thing was on tape. I hurried over and we found the body lying there, decapitated.’ He looked down at the huge pool of dried, crusted blood. ‘We knew we had to move it or risk the warriors being discovered. We wrapped him in blankets and polythene sheets and took the body to his apartment. It was a bloody affair. I’ve never seen so much blood.’ He blanched at the thought, remembering the detached head, the strange form of the headless body. ‘And then I looked at the tape and recognised Yuan Tao straight away. God knows why the professor brought him down here. Maybe he was trying to buy him off, buy his life back. Who knows? The thing was, Yuan had seen the warriors. He knew they were here. We were no longer safe.’

‘So you used the tape to replicate his murder of Professor Yue, to try to make it look as if they had both been killed by the same person.’

Michael nodded grimly. ‘We didn’t know about the other murders until we confronted him at the apartment at Tuan Jie Hu Dongli. That’s when we discovered that he’d already killed two other people.’

Margaret shook her head in disbelief. She had thought that she knew Michael. Never in her worst nightmare could she have dreamed him capable of this. ‘And you had no qualms about any of it?’

‘Of course I had qualms,’ he protested. ‘But you’ve got to understand, we had no choice. The smuggling of artefacts out of China is a capital offence. If the authorities caught us we would be executed. And we weren’t about to start having a whole lot of sympathy for Yuan Tao. After all, he was a murderer. He’d just killed three people. When the cops eventually caught up with him, it’d be a bullet in the head in a football stadium somewhere.’

His logic was impeccable, but Margaret still found it impossible to empathise. She sublimated her fear beneath a strange professional detachment. ‘How did you know that the fourth victim should be numbered with a three?’

He shook his head. ‘We almost didn’t. But in the apartment, along with the sword, we also found three lengths of silk cord, and three placards already numbered — one, two, three. We realised that he must have been counting down from six.’

‘And the drugs?’

‘They were there under the floorboards with the rest of the stash.’

‘And how did you force him to take them?’

Michael shrugged. ‘It was strange. I think he realised that there was not going to be any way out for him, and he almost seemed happy, as if we were relieving him of the responsibility of having to kill again. He suggested the vodka. He said the drug was more effective with alcohol.’

‘And it didn’t strike you as odd that it turned bright blue?’

Michael frowned at her. ‘How did you know that?’

‘It’s my job, Michael,’ Margaret said contemptuously. ‘Didn’t you think anyone would notice when they cut him open? Did you think he had duped his victims with a bright blue drink?’ She almost laughed. ‘He was leaving a message for us. A clue. And we had no idea.’ She thought for a moment. ‘And the nickname. Where did that come from?’

Michael looked perplexed. ‘We’d seen the nickname around Yue’s neck, and figured we should put one on Yuan’s.’

‘And you believed him when he told you it was Digger?’

‘We had no reason not to.’

Margaret shook her head in frustration. ‘We’ve been so fucking blind!’ she gasped. What was it Li was forever quoting his Uncle Yifu as saying? The answer is always in the detail. ‘Digger,’ she said. ‘That’s you. The archaeologist. Another clue we were too damned stupid to see.’ She looked at him. ‘So who was it who did the dirty deed? Who was it who actually brought the sword down on that man’s neck and cut his head off?’

‘It wasn’t me, Margaret. I could never have brought myself to do something like that.’

‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘You’d take the money, but you wouldn’t spill the blood.’ She paused, her thoughts racing, then turned on him. ‘And how did the murder weapon find its way into Birdie’s apartment?’

He shuffled awkwardly and scuffed his foot on the floor. ‘One way or another you kept me pretty well apprised of developments.’ He shrugged but wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘Jesus, Margaret, you told me yourself he was the number one suspect.’ He paused. ‘And his address was right there among the stuff we took from Yuan’s apartment …’

He glanced up to see the pain in her eyes. She turned away, tears filling them. Her disillusion was complete. She had trusted him totally. Just as she had trusted the other Michael in her life. And they had both betrayed her. She had never felt so utterly empty before. If she was to die now, then at least it would be an escape from her own extraordinary stupidity.

Li walked quickly, half running, through the shaded paths of the university campus. It was deserted in the afternoon heat, the first withered leaves beginning to drift from the trees on the edge of a warm autumn breeze. The guard at the gate had remembered Margaret arriving. But that had been this morning, and he had not seen her since, he said.

Li had first tried the archaeology department, but the pavilion was locked and deserted. Now he was following Margaret’s footsteps of several hours earlier, in search of the Arts building.

The afternoon sun slanted across the courtyard in front of the greybrick block, shadows lengthening as the sun slipped progressively lower in the sky. One half of the door stood ajar, and as Li climbed the steps, a young man emerged and almost bumped into him. It was Wang Jiahong, the surly lab assistant who had brought them here yesterday. He was startled, and his face coloured beneath his shock of black hair. He ran the back of a dirty hand across his forehead to wipe away a fine film of perspiration. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked. His voice carried more confidence than his frightened rabbit eyes.

‘The American lady I was with yesterday,’ Li said. ‘Have you seen her?’

Wang shook his head. ‘Here?’ he asked.

‘No, in fucking Shanghai!’ Li barked. ‘Of course, here!’

‘No,’ Wang said. And there was more than a hint of truculence in his tone.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. There’s nobody here but me. And I’ve been around all day. I’m just about to lock up. You can look around if you want.’

Li glanced at his watch. If she had been here at all, she must be long gone by now. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s all right.’

Wang stood watching Li out of sight as he retraced his steps towards the west gate. The reflections of weeping willows shimmered on Lake Nameless as the breeze ruffled the surface of the water. A bird swooped low across it, calling as it went, before veering off and rising skyward beyond the treetops. Li felt curiously deflated, and apprehensive. Where had Margaret gone? She had been on campus, certainly, but perhaps she had left by another gate. He took a small notebook from his back pocket, checked a telephone number and then unclipped the mobile from his belt. He dialled Mei Yuan’s neighbour and asked her to check if the yangguizi had come back yet. After a long wait Mei Yuan came to the phone to say that there was no sign of Margaret. Li sighed and made his way back to the west gate. He asked the guard again if he was certain that he had not seen Margaret leave. If she had left, the guard assured him, it must have been by one of the other gates.

Li was about to turn away in search of his Jeep when he caught sight of a familiar vehicle parked across the road, a vehicle he had seen just two days ago parked outside CID headquarters downtown. The red shi character on the registration plate filled him with a sudden sense of dread. And he knew that Margaret must still be here, and that her life was in grave danger.

By the time he reached the Arts building again he was breathless and sweating. The door was still ajar. Wang had not locked it as he said he was going to. Li made his way cautiously inside, down the darkened corridor to where light still fell out across the floor from the open door to the conservation lab. As he moved towards it, he heard a rustle of clothes and a shadow filled the light that came from the doorway. He had no time to move before Wang was upon him, pushing him back against the wall. A pain like a vice encircled his bruised ribs and he gasped, momentarily disabled. Wang sensed the moment, and took off like a sprinter from the blocks, his sneakers squeaking on the tiled floor as he hurtled down the corridor and turned out of the door. For a moment, as Li caught his breath, he contemplated going after him. Then he saw, through the open door, Margaret’s purse lying on the workbench in the conservation lab.

Margaret’s face was streaked with tears. ‘All those lies,’ she said. ‘All those lines you fed me. And I swallowed them all. What a fool I’ve been!’ She heard her own voice echoing back at her through the mist, like a voice of reprimand. And she began to feel her control dissolving.

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. She was beyond resistance. Almost beyond caring any more what happened to her. ‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘I meant every word. Margaret, you must believe me. I love you. I want you to marry me.’

She broke free and looked at him with disgust. ‘Don’t insult me, Michael. Don’t make me a bigger fool than I already am.’

His despair was patent. ‘Margaret, none of this has to end badly. It really doesn’t. Nearly half the warriors are already on their way out of the country. We could be rich, you and I. Beyond our wildest dreams.’

She almost spat in his face. ‘You make me sick, you know that? You proved to me that I didn’t know you at all. And you really don’t know me any better, do you?’ He stepped towards her and she backed off. ‘I told you, stay away from me!’

‘What do you think I’m going to do, kill you?’

‘No. No doubt it’ll be one of your friends who’ll do that.’ Her tone was acid and filled with contempt.

He shook his head in despair. ‘I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.’ He held out his hand to her. ‘Come with me now. We’ll get on a plane and just go. I don’t care about the rest of these.’ He waved his hand towards the warriors. ‘Only about you.’

‘Is that right?’ she said, and she retreated further, backing into the ranks of Qin’s underground warriors. She reached out and pushed with all her strength at the heavily armoured figure of a general. The ancient warrior tipped forward on his base, overbalancing and crashing to the ground at Michael’s feet.

Michael winced, almost as if in pain. ‘Jesus, Margaret! What are you doing? These things are priceless!’

‘I thought you didn’t care.’ And she pushed again with all her might, and a standing archer followed the fate of his general, great shards of splintering pottery scattering across the floor.

Michael tried to grab her, but she retreated further among the silent figures. ‘Don’t, Margaret. Please. These things have survived more than two thousand years. They are part of an historical record of the achievements of mankind. Don’t harm them.’

And in his sincerity, she saw again that part of him which had first drawn her to him. But she knew it had been corrupted by greed and murder, by that human passion and frailty and darkness that he had talked about the night they had met. His sin had been weakness. And the flaw ran too deep. Redemption was impossible.

‘I’ll abandon the filming. We’ll go to America. When we get there I’ll tell the world about what happened here, about the warriors of the fourth chamber. It doesn’t matter if they’re in a museum or some rich man’s study. But we must preserve them. At all costs.’ He looked in abject dismay at the shattered pieces of the two warriors lying all around him.

‘Very touching.’ The voice came out of the mist and startled them both. Michael spun around as Sophie emerged from the shadows of the tunnel holding a gun. Her face was pale and grim.

‘How long have you been there?’ Michael asked quickly.

‘Long enough,’ said Sophie. ‘Wang called me right after he called you. So I’ve been treated to the greater part of your little performance.’ She turned towards Margaret with a superior smile that carried with it more than a hint of bitterness. ‘Good, isn’t he?’ Margaret stared back at her filled with conflicting emotions of fear and dismay. ‘Only, he’s not good at all,’ Sophie said. ‘He got me involved in this. It was he who came running to me for help. I’d have done anything for him, and he knew it.’ She laughed at her own stupidity.

‘You killed Yuan,’ Margaret realised.

Sophie flashed her a look. ‘Not bad for someone who looks like they ought to be in the second grade.’ Her smile was sour. ‘Ironic really. I even took part in the same Tameshi Giri competition as him in California one time. He didn’t remember me, of course. I wasn’t in the same class as him. But I still managed to cut his head off. I did all Michael’s dirty work. Even planted the sword for him.’ She paused. ‘You think you’re the fool? Well, I’m the biggest fool of all. Because I thought I could make him love me the way I’ve always loved him. I even introduced him to you, so that when I suggested to Dakers that you do the autopsy, we could still keep track of things.’ She swung her gun in Michael’s direction and raised it at arm’s length. ‘Only the stupid bastard went and fell in love with you. And now he wants you to take his hand and skip the country, leaving me to face all the shit.’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘Well, no fucking way!’ And she fired a single shot that struck him in the throat.

The sound of it crashed deafeningly around Hu Bo’s secret fourth chamber as Michael toppled backwards, sending several of his beloved warriors tumbling to the ground with him. Margaret screamed, and her hand shot to her mouth in horror as she saw the blood bubble around Michael’s lips, gurgling from his throat where the bullet had severed one of his carotid arteries and smashed through his windpipe. His eyes flickered in panic as the life ebbed from him, his hand clutching hopelessly at his shattered throat. His mouth opened, as if he would speak, but no sound came out of it.

Margaret saw Sophie’s shooting arm swing towards her, and caught the light glinting on the tears in her eyes. It was almost certainly those tears, blurring vision, that caused Sophie’s first shot to miss. The head of the warrior next to Margaret shattered, and razor-sharp needles of it slashed her cheek. She turned and fled towards the dark interior of the chamber, toppling pottery figures as she went. Another shot sounded, and Margaret heard a warrior explode into the ceramic dust of two millennia somewhere off to her left. Then she slipped on the slimy surface of the floor and crashed down heavily on her elbow. She gasped in pain, and turned to see Sophie looming over her.

Then suddenly, bizarrely, there came the electronic trill of a telephone ringing. There was a moment of confusion in Sophie’s face as she turned. Li was about ten feet away. In his right hand he held the sword that Professor Chang had been restoring. His left hand was fumbling to switch off the mobile phone on his belt. But it was all too late. Sophie’s face lit up in a savage smile. She fired, and Li spun away to his left, tumbling among the debris of the warriors.

Margaret screamed and staggered to her feet, clutching her arm, almost blinded now by her tears, and numb with terror. She stumbled towards the tunnel entrance at the rear. But she knew it was hopeless. She knew the gate there was locked. And even if it hadn’t been, how far would she have got before Sophie caught up with her? She waited for the bullet in her back, almost praying for it to release her from this hell. But it didn’t come. She reached the gate and shook it, as if perhaps she rattled it hard enough she could somehow make it open. Then she turned, her back to the bars, and saw Sophie walking slowly towards her. There was a strange, mad, fixed smile on Sophie’s face, like the face of a deranged child. She reached Margaret and looked into her eyes for a very long time before hitting her hard across the face with the barrel of her gun.

Margaret was almost blinded by the pain, and the light that seemed to fill her eyes. She felt her legs buckle, and she slid to the floor. She sensed the shadow of Sophie’s gun crossing her face, and she looked up to see the barrel of it staring back at her. ‘Bitch!’ Sophie said, and then her eyes and mouth opened wide, as if in great surprise. And she and Margaret both looked to see the long blade of a bronze sword projecting from her chest. She hung, as if suspended on it, for several moments, before the blade suddenly withdrew and she collapsed like a house of cards to reveal Li on his knees behind her, supporting himself on the sword, his white shirt soaked red with his own blood.

Margaret howled and scrambled towards him on her knees, in time to catch him as he fell. She fell with him, cushioning him against her breast. She managed to pull herself up into a half-sitting position, his head in her lap. Quickly, efficiently, she tore away his shirt, folding it into a thick wad and pressing it hard into the wound high on his chest. Her tears ran freely as she rocked him back and forth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Li Yan, I’m so, so sorry. I made such a mistake.’

His eyes flickered open and he looked up at her, shaking his head, almost imperceptibly. ‘My fault,’ he said. ‘I was stupid and did not follow my heart. Next time …’ He coughed and flinched from the pain and screwed his eyes shut.

She glanced back through the shadows of the warriors, and saw Michael lying dead in the debris. Poor, stupid Michael. And she knew what it was that had corrupted him most. It had been his innocence, his belief that somehow, like one of his stories, everything could be as simple as he wanted it to be. That stealing what no one knew existed wasn’t theft. That killing a man who had killed others wasn’t murder. That love could be secured with a ring and a proposal. Her own words came back to her from the night they had shared in the Muslim Quarter in Xi’an. She had said to him, None of us would ever embark on the journey if we thought too much about where it was going to end. Neither of them could have dreamed then that he would become the tragic end to his own story of Hu Bo, lying lifeless among the shattered remnants of the warriors of the fourth chamber.

She looked down at Li lying in her arms, his breathing shallow and erratic. She had always loved him. And all she had ever wanted him to do was love her back. ‘You know what this means?’ she said still sobbing.

He opened his eyes again. ‘No. What does it mean?’

‘It means I’m going to have to cancel another flight for you.’

He smiled. ‘You don’t have to cancel a flight just to come to my funeral.’

She laughed through her tears. ‘You stupid baby,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to die. I’m not going to let you die. But if I’m not around, who’s going to bring you your food in the hospital?’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people whose help has been invaluable in researching The Fourth Sacrifice. In particular, I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks to Dr Richard H. Ward, Professor of Criminology and Dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, Texas; Steven C. Campman, MD, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC; Professor Dai Yisheng, former Director of the Fourth Chinese Institute for the Formulation of Police Policy, Beijing; Police Commissioner Wu He Ping, Ministry of Public Security, Beijing; Professor Yu Hongsheng, General Secretary of the Commission of Legality Literature, Beijing; Professor He Jiahong, Doctor of Juridical Science and Professor of Law, People’s University of China School of Law; Professor Yijun Pi, Vice-Director of the Institute of Legal Sociology and Juvenile Delinquency, China University of Political Science and Law; Ms Chai Rui, Department of Archaeology, Beijing University; Stanley J. Harsha, Cultural Affairs Office, US Embassy, Beijing; Ms Zhang Qian, Xi’an Foreign Language University, Xi’an; Mr Qiang, Director of the Terracotta Warriors Museum, Lintong County, Shaanxi Province; Zhao Yi for her wonderful Mongolian hotpot; and Shimei Jiang and her family in Beijing for their friendship and hospitality.