The Fourth Sacrifice

I

The half-dozen detectives freshly drafted in from CID headquarters at Qianmen had been sitting smoking and talking animatedly for nearly half an hour. Their cigarette smoke hung like a cloud over the top floor meeting room at Beixinqiao Santiao, reflecting the mood of their Section One colleagues, who joined them now around the big table to sift through the evidence which had been collected over the past month. The detectives of the serious crime squad were depressed by their failure to achieve any significant progress, and embarrassed by the need for reinforcements.

Li sat brooding in his seat with his back to the window. He had been reinstated as Deputy Section Chief shortly after the first murder, and he was frustrated by the lack of a single substantial lead. He had even begun to question his own previously unshakable faith in himself, and wonder if the death of his uncle and the events of the past three months had taken a greater toll on him that he had realised. There were times, he knew, when his concentration was not what it should be. He had found himself sitting in meetings, his mind wandering to thoughts of Yifu. And Margaret.

Simply bringing her name to mind was painful, accompanied as it was by a host of memories, bittersweet and full of hurt. He thought back to the only time they had made love, the sun streaming in through the dirt-streaked windows of a neglected railway sleeper on a siding near Datong.

‘Boss …’

He became aware of an insistent voice forcing its way into his thoughts.

‘Boss, are you still with us?’

Li looked up suddenly and saw Detective Wu, sunglasses pushed back on his forehead, eyeing him oddly from across the table. He glanced around at the other detectives, almost twenty of them now, and saw that they were all looking at him.

‘Yeah, sure. Sorry …’ Li shuffled the papers on the desk in front of him. ‘Just following a train of thought.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to share it with us, then?’ Li looked towards the door, startled to see that Section Chief Chen Anming had come in without his even noticing.

‘Not worth it, Chief,’ Li said quickly. ‘It wasn’t going anywhere.’

‘A bit like this investigation,’ Chen said. He pulled up a chair and sat down, folding his arms across his chest and surveying his detectives with a stony gaze. Chen was a lean, sinewy man in his late fifties, a thick head of prematurely silver hair streaked with nicotine. He was renowned for his apparent inability to make the muscles of his face form a smile, although the twinkle in his eyes frequently betrayed the very human person that concealed itself behind the hardman image. But there was no twinkle there now. ‘Four victims,’ he said. ‘And we’ve got nothing. Nothing!’ He raised his voice, and then sat silently for several seconds. ‘And now that this latest victim turns out to be an American, the whole thing is turning political.’ He leaned forward, placing his palms carefully on the table in front of him. ‘I just took a call in my office from the Deputy Minister of Public Security.’ He paused. ‘I have never had a call from a Deputy Minister of Public Security. And it’s not an experience I want to repeat.’ He sat back again. The room was absolutely still. ‘So let me make this quite clear. However many more officers we have to draft in, however many hours of overtime we have to work, we are going get a result.’ He waited for maximum dramatic effect before adding, ‘There are careers on the line here.’

‘You mean heads will roll?’ Wu said, grinning, and there was a gasp of smothered laughter around the table.

Chen turned a steely glare on him. ‘Be assured, Detective Wu, yours will be the very first.’

Wu’s grin faded. ‘Just trying to lighten things up, Chief.’

‘OK,’ Li stepped in before ‘things’ went any further. ‘Let’s go over what we’ve got for the benefit of the guys from HQ. And then we’ll have a look at last night’s killing. Wu, you kick us off.’

Wu lifted his file from the desk, tipped his chair backwards and pushed his sunglasses further back on his head. With Wu image was everything, from his faded jeans to his denim jacket and sunglasses. Even the gum he chewed, which must have long since lost its flavour. He was putting on a show for the newcomers.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Number one. August twenty. Tian Jingfu, aged fifty-one, a projectionist in a movie theatre in Xicheng District. Fails to turn up for work. His wife’s away visiting relatives in the south, so his work unit connects with his street committee, who go to his door. No one answers, but they can hear the television going. So they call the census cop and he comes and bursts the door down. The place is filled with twenty million flies. The guy’s lying in the front room with his head cut off. Pathologist reckons he’s been there for two days. There’s no sign of forced entry. But the guy’s been drinking red wine. Unusual. And the autopsy shows its been spiked, a drug called flunitrazepam. His hands have been tied behind his back with a silk cord, and a white card hung around his neck. It’s got the name Pigsy written on it upside down in red ink and then scored through. Pigsy, I think we’re all agreed, is some kind of nickname. The card also has the number 6 written on it. From the position of the body, it looks like he’s been made to kneel, head bowed, and a bronze sword or similar bladed weapon used to decapitate him. Hell of a lot of blood. Other than that, the place is clean, no rogue footprints, fingerprints. Forensics came up with zip.’

He dropped his file on the desk, tipped his chair forward and held his hands out, palms up. ‘I talked to just about everyone who ever knew him. Workmates, neighbours, friends, family. Parents are dead, an aunt still living in Qianmen. Everyone says he was a nice guy, lived quietly. No one knew why anyone would want to kill him. No one saw anything unusual the day he was murdered.’ He shrugged. ‘Zip.’ And with finger and thumb he smoothed out the sparse growth on his upper lip that he liked to think of as a moustache.

Li turned towards Qian Yi. ‘Detective Qian.’

Qian took a breath. ‘OK. Number two. Bai Qiyu, fifty-one, same age as victim number one. Married, with two kids at college. He’s a businessman, manager of a small import-export company in Xuanwu District. August thirty-first, the staff arrive at work in the morning to find him lying in his office. Decapitated. Same thing. Silk cord tying his wrists behind his back — and forensics tell us it’s cut from the same length as the killer used on the first victim. An identical piece of white card round the neck, the same colour ink. Only this time the nickname is Zero and the number is 5. So now we assume we’re counting down the victims. A tape lift from the severed vertebra during autopsy tells us it is a similar, or the same, bronze-bladed weapon. Bai Qiyu has also been drinking red wine, also spiked with flunitrazepam. Like Tian Jingfu, his wife was away visiting relatives. His kids were still there, but not particularly concerned when he didn’t come home before they went to bed. The crime scene is clean, except for one smudged, but printable, bloody fingerprint found on the edge of the desk. But it doesn’t match with anything we’ve got in the AFIS computer.’

Qian took a deep breath and concluded, ‘I personally interviewed nearly fifty people. Same as victim number one. No one knows why anyone would want to kill him. He had no appointments marked down in his diary for that night. He was alone in his office when the last person left the building.’

The detectives from CID headquarters were scribbling furiously, making copious notes, and referring frequently to the files with which they had been supplied. The others watched them apprehensively and with mixed feelings. While each was keen to achieve a break in the case, none of them wanted some smart-ass from HQ to pick up something they’d missed.

Li was aware of the additional tension. He turned to Zhao, at twenty-five the youngest in the section, still lacking a little in self-confidence, but sharp and diligent and shaping up as a prospect for future promotion. ‘Tell us about number three, Detective Zhao.’

Zhao flushed a little as he spoke. ‘September fifteen. Yue Shi, a professor of archaeology at Beijing University, has an arrangement to play chess and drink a few beers with his uncle. His uncle arrives at his apartment in Haidan District near the university campus and finds his nephew lying dead in the sitting room. He has been beheaded, hands tied behind his back, again with the same silk cord. A placard, half-soaked with blood, is lying beside the body. It bears the number 4 and the nickname Monkey. It’s written in red ink, upside down and crossed through.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’ll stick with the parallels first. He has red wine with flunitrazepam in his stomach and blood specimens, just like the others. Tape lift again shows that the weapon used was bronze, suggesting it is probably the same one. But this is where it starts to get a bit different. There is hardly any blood at the scene, but the body is virtually drained of it.’

‘So he was killed somewhere else, then taken to his apartment.’ This from one of the newcomers.

‘Yeah, very clever,’ said Wu. ‘Like we never spotted that one.’

The detective blushed.

‘On you go, Zhao,’ Li said.

Zhao glanced nervously around his listeners. ‘Like the man said, the body had been moved. Fibres recovered from it show that it had been wrapped in a grey woollen blanket of some sort. He had a fine, blue-black, powdery dust in the treads of his shoes and on his trousers. Forensics tell us they are particles of fired clay, some kind of ceramic. But the clay’s not of a type found around Beijing. Apparently it’s a soil type found more commonly in Shaanxi Province.’ He shrugged. ‘We don’t know what that tells us.’ Then he went on, ‘There were smudges and traces of blood in the hall, but no readable footprints or fingerprints anywhere. And the pathologist thinks he’d been killed about twenty-four hours before the body was discovered.’

‘What about the university?’ one of the other detectives from HQ asked.

‘We were all over the place,’ Zhao said. ‘His office, his classrooms, the laboratories. If he’d been murdered in any of these places we’d have found traces. You just can’t clean up that much blood without leaving something behind. His colleagues in the department were stunned. Again, no one could think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill him. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have many friends. He lived for his work, and spent ninety per cent of his waking day absorbed in it.’

‘What age was he?’ The same detective from HQ again.

‘Fifty-two — just a few months older than the others.’

The detective turned to Li. ‘What about the latest victim? What age was he?’

‘Date of birth on his passport was March 1949, which makes him fifty-one. I’m sorry, detective, I don’t know your name.’

‘Sang,’ the detective said. ‘Sang Chunlin.’

‘OK, Sang,’ Li said, ‘it’s a thought worth holding on to. But let’s look at the fourth victim first.’ And he glanced around all the expectant faces. ‘Yuan Tao,’ he said, ‘was a Chinese-American working in the visa department of the US Embassy.’ And he took them through the murder scene, step by step, as he and Qian had done in reality five hours earlier. He told them that Yuan had been illegally renting the apartment at No. 7 Tuan Jie Hu Dongli where the body was found, but not necessarily living there, at least not full time. ‘Apparently,’ Li said, ‘the US Embassy had no idea. They had provided him with accommodation in an embassy compound behind the Friendship Store.’ He paused. ‘They have kindly allowed our forensics people access to the apartment.’ There was just the hint of a tone in this. ‘They have also promised us full access to their file on him — just as soon as Washington can find it and fax it to us.’ There were a few laughs around the table. ‘So until we get that, and until we have the results of the autopsy later this morning, there’s not a lot more I can tell you at this stage.’

He got up and opened a window behind him before lighting another cigarette. The room was almost blue with smoke and his eyes were starting to sting. ‘So what do we know?’ He looked around the assembled faces. ‘We know the killer used a bronze-bladed weapon of some sort — probably a sword. We know that the victims probably knew him. They were drinking wine with him, and as far as they knew had no reason to be on their guard. After all, he managed to spike all their drinks. He knew them well enough to know their nicknames.

‘Red ink on white card — an ancient Chinese symbol for the end of a relationship. I think that underlines the fact that he was well known to his victims. All the names written upside down and scored through — well, we all know the significance of that image. And the numbering of the victims. Starting with six and counting down. Which would lead us to believe that there are another two victims out there somewhere.’

It was a sobering thought, and helped refocus minds around the table.

‘I keep coming back to this age thing.’ It was Sang again.

‘Go on,’ Li said.

Sang scratched his head. He was a good-looking young man, probably not yet thirty, and almost the only detective around the table not smoking. ‘Well, if they’re all the same age, and this guy knows all their nicknames, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that at some time they’d all been in the same organisation, or institution, or work unit together?’

‘The first three were at the same school,’ Zhao said, and reduced the room to a stunned silence. He blushed fiercely as all eyes turned on him.

‘What?’ Li asked. His voice was steady and very level.

Zhao said, ‘I figured you usually get your nickname at school. So I spent yesterday checking it out.’

‘Why the hell did no one think of this before?’ Chen thundered.

It was a reasonable question. But Li had no answer to it.

‘It’s more than thirty years since any of them were at school,’ Zhao said, almost apologetically. ‘I guess that’s why it wasn’t the first thing we were looking at.’

‘And you didn’t think to share your thoughts with us before now?’ Chen asked pointedly.

‘I only got confirmation this morning, chief,’ Zhao said.

‘In the name of the sky, Zhao,’ Li said, ‘this is a team effort. We share information, we share thoughts, we talk to one another. That’s why we have these meetings.’ But how could he blame Zhao when he was the only one who had had the thought?

The detectives from Headquarters sat silent, happy that they shared no responsibility here. Sang, however, was riffling through his file.

‘What school was it?’ he asked. ‘I can’t find it here.’

‘It’s not in there,’ Zhao said. He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘It took me some time to track it down. It was the No. 29 Middle School at Qianmen.’

There was a brief hiatus, and they could hear the scratch of Sang’s pencil in his notebook. Then Li moved away from the window. ‘Right,’ he said decisively. He sat down and pulled his notebook towards him, taking notes as he spoke. ‘We’ll divide up into four groups of five. Group leaders will be Wu, Qian, Zhao, and — Sang.’ Sang positively glowed. ‘I want each group to review the evidence from all four murders and bring their thoughts back to this table. Additionally, each group will take responsibility for specific areas of the investigation. Zhao, we need to talk to the victims’ old teachers. Qian, we need to interview fellow pupils, all their old classmates. It may be that somewhere among them are the next two victims. And we want to get to them before the killer.’

Sang interrupted. ‘Aren’t we jumping the gun a bit here, boss? I mean, OK, so the first three went to the same school. But obviously the American didn’t.’

‘Fair point,’ Li said. ‘But the fact that the others did is too big a coincidence not to be significant. And it’s the first chink of light we’ve had in this case. There’s every possibility it could illuminate a great deal more.’ He paused. ‘Sang, I want your group to try to identify the weapon used. And Wu, I want your people to look at all the forensic evidence again. There’s got to be something we’re missing. We’ll meet again when we’ve got more information on Yuan Tao.’

The meeting broke up amid a hubbub of speculation on new developments, and as a pink-faced Zhao got to his feet, Li caught his eye and nodded. ‘Well done,’ he said. Zhao blushed more deeply.

Clouds of cigarette smoke wafted out into the corridor with the detectives.

Chen wandered round the table to where Li was collecting his papers. ‘I’m glad you finally seem to have learned the importance of working as a team, Deputy Section Chief Li,’ he said with a tone.

‘Just when they’re talking about introducing the concept of one-officer cases, too.’ Li’s tone echoed that of his boss, to Chen’s annoyance.

‘You know I don’t agree with that,’ he said.

‘Which is just about the only thing you and my uncle would have agreed on.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘I think the old way has its virtues, Chief. But we’re living in a changing world.’ Li glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. The autopsy starts at ten.’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t,’ Chen said, stopping Li in his tracks. ‘That’s why the Deputy Minister of Public Security was on the phone. The autopsy’s been delayed until this afternoon. And the Commissioner wants to see you at headquarters right away.’

II

The first blink of sunshine for days dappled the sidewalk beneath the locust trees in Dong Jiaominxiang Lane. The haze of pollution, as it sometimes did, had lifted inexplicably and the sky was breaking up. The city’s spirits seemed raised by it. Even the normally dour bicycle repairmen opposite the rear entrance to the municipal police headquarters were chatting enthusiastically, hawking and spitting in the gutter with renewed vigour. Li cycled past the Supreme Court on his right and turned left into the compound behind police headquarters. He alone, it seemed, was not uplifted by the autumn sunshine that still fell warm on the skin. As he passed an armed police officer standing to attention, and free-wheeled under the arch through open gates, he recalled his first encounter here with Margaret. Her official car in collision with his bicycle … his grazed arm … her insolence …

His smile at the memory was glazed over with melancholy.

He parked and locked his bicycle and walked apprehensively into the redbrick building that housed the headquarters of the criminal investigation department. He had stopped off at his apartment on the way to change into his uniform — dark green trousers, neatly pressed, pale green short-sleeve shirt with epaulettes and Public Security arm badge, dark green peaked cap with its red piping and loop of gold braid. He removed his hat as he stepped inside, ran his hand back across the dark stubble of his flat-top crewcut and took a deep breath.

The divisional head of the CID, Commissioner Hu Yisheng, was standing by the window when Li entered his office. The blinds were lowered, and the slats adjusted to allow thin lines of sunlight to zigzag across the contours of his desk. They fell in bright burned-out bands across the red of the Chinese flag that hung behind it. Li stood stiffly to attention as the Commissioner turned a steely gaze in his direction. He was a handsome man, somewhere in his early sixties, with a full head of iron-grey hair. He held Li in his gaze for what seemed an interminably long time. At first Li felt just uncomfortable, and then he began physically to wilt. It was worse, somehow, than any reprimand that words could have delivered.

Finally the Commissioner said, ‘I was sorry to hear about your uncle.’ And his words carried with them the weight of an accusation, as if Li had been personally responsible. His uncle was still casting a shadow over him, even from the grave. The Commissioner walked round behind his desk and sat down, leaving Li standing. ‘He wouldn’t have been very proud of the way you’re conducting this investigation, would he?’

‘I think he would have offered me good advice, Commissioner Hu,’ Li said.

Hu bridled at the implication. ‘Well, I’ll give you my advice, Li,’ he said. ‘You’d better break this case. And quickly. And let’s stick to conventional Chinese police methods, shall we? “Where the tiller is tireless, the earth is fertile,” your uncle used to say.’

‘Yes, he did, Commissioner,’ Li said. ‘But he also used to say, “The ox is slow, but the earth is patient.”’

Hu frowned. ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘Oh, I think my uncle meant that if you use an ox to plough a field you must expect it to take a long time.’

The Commissioner glared at him. ‘You’ve always been an advocate of assigning cases to individual officers, haven’t you?’

‘As the crime rate rises we have to find more efficient ways of fighting it,’ Li said.

‘Well, I’m not going to get into that argument here,’ the Commissioner responded tetchily. ‘Decisions on that will be taken well above our heads.’ He paused. ‘Like the decision to let the Americans carry out the autopsy on the latest victim.’

‘What?’ Li was stunned.

‘It has been agreed to let one of their pathologists assist. Which means, in practice, that they will conduct it.’

‘But that’s ridiculous, Commissioner,’ Li said. ‘Their pathologist hasn’t been involved in any of the previous autopsies. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘You want to tell that to the Minister?’

Li pressed his lips firmly together and refrained from responding.

Hu put his elbows on the desk in front of him and placed his palms together, regarding Li speculatively. ‘So,’ he said. ‘I understand you have taken on board your section chief’s admonitions regarding the American, Margaret Campbell?’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I have.’

‘Good.’ Hu sat back and took a deep breath. ‘Because she will be conducting the autopsy.’

Li looked at him in disbelief.

He emerged into the glare of the compound in a trance. He took off his hat, turning his face up to the sky, and let the warm sunshine cascade over him like rain. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind of its confusion, hoping beyond hope that when he opened them again the world might have turned in a different direction and all his troubles would be washed away. But he knew it would not be so. He had tried so hard to banish her from his thoughts, from his very soul. How could he face her again now? What could she believe but that he had somehow betrayed her? And in a way, he knew, he had.

He opened his eyes and they fell upon the place he had parked his bicycle. It was not there. He frowned, momentarily confused, and glanced along the row of bicycles parked up against the redbrick building. His was not among them. He glanced in the direction of the armed officer at the gate who was staring steadfastly into the street. Then he looked again for his bicycle. He must have put it somewhere else, or someone had moved it. The parked bicycles stretched all the way round the building to a long line beneath a row of trees. His bicycle was not anywhere to be seen. He could not believe this was happening, and he approached the armed officer angrily.

‘I parked my bicycle just there,’ he said, and he pointed along the inside wall. ‘Just there. Half an hour ago. You saw me come in.’

The officer shrugged. ‘People come and go all the time. I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember me parking my bike there, and someone else taking it?’ Li snapped.

‘No, I don’t,’ the officer snapped back. ‘I’m not a parking attendant.’

Li cursed. It was unbelievable. Someone had had the audacity to steal his bicycle from inside the municipal police compound. And who would think to question someone taking a bicycle from outside CID headquarters? He shook his head and could not resist the tiniest of ironic smiles at the barefaced cheek. There was not even any point in reporting it. Bike theft in Beijing was endemic. And with twenty million bicycles out there, he knew he would never see his again.

He pulled his hat firmly down on his head and walked the three hundred yards around the corner to his apartment block in Zhengyi Road. He picked up his mail and climbed the stairs to the second floor two at a time, and stormed into the apartment, throwing his mail on the table and his hat across the room into an armchair. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted at the walls, and the release of tension made him feel a little better. He went into the bedroom and stripped off his uniform and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He was tall. A little over six feet, with a good frame and a lean, fit body. He looked at his face and tried to see himself as Margaret would see him a few hours from now. He looked into his own eyes and saw nothing there but guilt. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to see the accusation he knew would be there in her eyes. The anger, the hurt. He had thought he had put the worst of that behind him. And now fate had conspired to contrive this unhappy reunion.

To his annoyance, he found himself choosing his clothes with a little more care than usual, and ended up throwing on his old jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt, angry with himself for even thinking about it. He stuffed his wallet and ID into his back pocket, his cigarettes and lighter into the breast pocket of his shirt, and grabbed Old Yifu’s bike from the hall and carried it down the stairs on his shoulder. He did not notice the letter with the Sichuan postcode that he had dropped on the table, delivered an hour earlier, only three days late.

He cycled east along East Chang’an Avenue, and then turned north, moving with a furious concentration, ringing his bell at errant pedestrians and growling at motorists who seemed to think they had the right of way. The sweat was beading across his brow and sticking his shirt to his back. He still felt like shouting, or throwing something, or kicking someone. Here he was being made to face the two demons he had been trying to exorcise from his life — forced to ride his dead uncle’s bicycle to a meeting with the woman he had been ordered to give up. If he could have brought his uncle back, and fallen into the arms of the woman he loved, he would. But neither of these things was possible, and there was nothing for it but to move forward and face the demons head-on.

Great woks of broth steamed and bubbled on braziers as preparations all along the sidewalk began for lunch. Li smelled dumplings frying in oil and saw women rolling out noodles on flat boards. Charcoal burned and smoked in metal troughs as skewers of spicy lamb and chicken were prepared for barbecue. People ate early on the streets, and for an hour beforehand there was a frenzied activity both by those preparing the food, and those preparing to eat it. Children spilled out of schoolyards in blue tracksuits and yellow baseball caps, and factories spewed their workers out into the sunshine. For a time, Li had been stuck behind a tousled youth toiling over the pedals of his tricycle cart, hauling a huge load of the round coal briquettes that fuelled the winter fires of Beijing. Finally he got past him, squeezing between the cart and an on-coming bus at the Dongsi Shitiao junction. Then he left the sights and smells of food behind as he free-wheeled along the final shaded stretch of road before the corner of Dongzhimennei Street, where he hoped his own lunch would await him in the form of a jian bing.

Mei Yuan was busy preparing two jian bings for a couple of schoolgirls as Li drew up his bike. It gave him the chance to watch her as she worked the hotplate inside the small glass house with its pitched red roof that perched on the rear of her extended tricycle. Her dark hair was drawn back in its customary bun, her smooth-skinned face a little more lined and showing more strain than usual. She grinned when she saw him, cheeks dimpling, and the life immediately returned to her lovely, dark, slanted eyes. She had, he knew, a soft spot for him. There was an unspoken empathy between them. In some very small way he filled the space left by the son she had lost, and she the hole in his life left by the death of his mother — both victims of the Cultural Revolution. Neither made demands on the other. It was just something that had grown quietly.

She poured some pancake mix on to her hotplate and watched it sizzle and bubble before breaking an egg on to it. He could barely resist the temptation to give her a hug. The previous week she had been missing from her corner for a few days, and finally he had gone to her home to find out why. He had found her in bed, sick and alone. One of the new breed of self-employed, she had no work unit to look after her welfare. He had cooked her a meal himself that night, and paid for a girl to go in every day to feed her and keep the house clean. The previous evening she had told him she would be back at her usual corner today, even although he felt she was not completely recovered. And here she was, pale and strained, and fighting to kick-start her life again.

She flipped the pancake over, smeared it with hoisin and chilli, and sprinkled it with chopped spring onion and coriander, before breaking a square of deep-fried whipped egg white into its centre, folding it in half and in half again, and then handing it, wrapped in brown paper, to the second schoolgirl. ‘Two yuan,’ she said, then turned beaming to Li. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I have eaten.’ He made the traditional response to the Beijing greeting, then added, ‘I’m sorry I missed breakfast. Work.’

‘That’s no excuse,’ she chided him. ‘A big lad like you needs feeding.’ She began another jian bing. ‘I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you don’t have an answer to the last riddle I set you?’

He frowned. ‘When did you set me a riddle?’

‘Before I got sick.’

‘Oh,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I don’t remember it.’

‘How very convenient,’ she said. ‘I’ll remind you.’

‘I thought you might.’

She grinned. ‘If a man walks in a straight line without turning his head, how can he continue to see everything he has walked past? And there are no mirrors involved.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Li said. ‘I remember now. It was too easy.’

‘Oh? So tell me.’

Li shrugged. ‘He’s walking backwards, of course.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes, it was too easy, wasn’t it?’ She finished the jian bing and handed it to him. He bit into its spicy, savoury softness and drew out a two-yuan note. She pushed his hand away. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

‘I’m not being silly,’ he insisted, and reached beyond her to drop the note in her tin. ‘If your house was burgled and I was sent to investigate, would you phone my bosses and say, “It’s all right, you don’t need to pay him for this investigation, I know him”?’

She couldn’t resist a smile. ‘Is this a riddle for me?’

‘No, it’s not. I don’t have one today. You didn’t give me enough time to prepare.’

‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ve got another one for you, then. Much harder this time.’ He nodded, and continued stuffing jian bing into his mouth. ‘Three men check into a hotel. They want to share a room, and the receptionist charges them thirty yuan.’

‘That’s a cheap hotel room,’ he cut in.

‘Depends what kind of hotel,’ she said. ‘Anyway, for the purposes of the riddle it’s thirty yuan and they pay ten yuan each.’

‘OK.’

‘So, after they’ve gone up to their room she realises she should only have charged them twenty-five yuan.’

‘This hotel gets cheaper and cheaper.’

She ignored him. ‘She calls the bellboy, explains the situation, and gives him five yuan to take up to the room to pay them back. On the way up, the bellboy figures it’s going to be hard for these guys to split five yuan three ways. So he decides to give them only three — one each — and keep the remaining two for himself.’

‘Dishonesty,’ said Li, shaking his head sadly. ‘This is what I have to deal with every day.’

‘The question is,’ she ignored him again. ‘If each of the three men got one yuan back, that means they only paid nine yuan each. A total of twenty-seven yuan. The bellboy kept two to himself. That makes twenty-nine yuan. What happened to the other yuan?’

Li stopped chewing for a moment as he did a quick calculation. Then he frowned. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said. Then, ‘But that’s not possible.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Therein lies the riddle.’

He did the calculation again and shook his head. ‘I’m going to have to think about this. Obviously it’s something really simple.’

‘Obviously.’ She delved into the bag hanging from her bicycle. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. I brought you this. I thought you might be interested to read it.’ She took out a battered, dark blue, hardcover book. ‘Redgauntlet by Sir Walter Scott.’

‘I know the name. I think my uncle might have had some of his books. Who is he?’

‘Was. He was a very famous Scottish writer. I saw the movie Braveheart recently, about the Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace. It made me interested in the country. So I’ve been reading Sir Walter Scott. I think you might enjoy him.’

Li took the book. ‘Thanks, Mei Yuan. It might be a while before I can get it back to you. I’m pretty much up to the neck in a case just now.’

‘That’s all right. Whenever,’ she said. ‘What a friend has is never lost.’

Some people came for jian bings and she turned to cook them, and Li stood silently watching the traffic, reflecting on the tragedy of a dozen years of madness that had stolen the life of a clever, educated woman, and cast her eventually on to the streets to make a living cooking savoury pancakes. But by the time Mei Yuan had finished and turned back, his minded had drifted again to Margaret and the encounter he could not avoid. He came out of his reverie to find her watching him.

‘What’s on your mind, Li Yan?’ she asked.

How could he explain it to her? How could he even begin to explain it? He said, ‘What would you do if your heart said one thing and your superiors another?’

‘Is this a riddle?’

‘No, it’s a question.’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘This is a conflict between … what … love and loyalty?’

‘I suppose it’s something like that, though not quite that simple.’

‘If only everything in life was as simple as the solution to a riddle,’ she said, and touched his arm. ‘Is there no way to accommodate both? It is better to walk on two legs.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t.’

III

Li walked past the games court, cracked concrete baking behind a chickenwire fence. A group of students was playing volleyball, shouting and laughing. Li felt envious of their youth, free from the concerns of the real world that lay beyond the campus. He had been a student here himself once. He knew how it felt, and he experienced a sense of loss at an innocence long gone.

He had been angered, on his return to Section One, to discover that the Americans had insisted on carrying out the autopsy at the Centre of Material Evidence Determination on the campus of the University of Public Security in south-west Beijing. Dr Campbell, apparently, had complained that facilities at Pao Jü Hutong were not good enough. He remembered just how much she had irritated him when they first met. She was having the same effect on him now.

He saw the limousine with its big red shi character, meaning envoy, followed by 224, identifying it as a US Embassy car. It was parked outside the Centre, and for a moment all his anger and irritation was displaced by a huge sense of apprehension. He felt his pulse quicken, and his mouth became dry.

Detective Qian was already there, and he glanced anxiously at Li as he entered the autopsy room. There was a very young-looking Asian woman with short, dark hair standing at the back of the room. Her face was very pale and she looked as if she wished she were somewhere else. Pathologist Wang had brought his two assistants from Pao Jü Hutong. With Margaret he had been examining photographs of the crime scene laid out on a white covered table, along with the placard that had been hung around the victim’s neck. The room almost crackled with an unspoken tension.

Li’s first sight of Margaret put him at a distinct disadvantage. Preparations for the autopsy were almost complete, and she was dressed ready to begin, almost unrecognisable beneath layers of professional clothing: surgeon’s green pyjamas, a plastic apron, a long-sleeved cotton gown. Her hair was piled beneath a shower cap, and her face hidden behind her surgeon’s mask and goggles. The soft, freckled skin of her forearms was concealed by plastic sleeve covers, and her long, elegant fingers, by latex gloves. All these layers were like a barrier between them, concealing and protecting her from his gaze. He, on the other hand, in jeans and open-necked shirt, felt exposed and vulnerable to the eyes he sensed piercing him from behind the anonymity of the goggles. She looked long and hard in his direction, then the voice he knew so well said, ‘Late as usual, Deputy Section Chief.’ And he felt himself blush.

‘For the record,’ he said. ‘I would like it to be known that I object to this autopsy being carried out by anyone other than our own pathologist, who has conducted the previous three autopsies in this case.’

‘Really?’ That familiar acid tone. ‘Perhaps if you had called in a professional sooner, there wouldn’t be the need for a fourth autopsy.’

Li heard the Asian girl gasp. It was like a slap in the face. A calculated insult. He glanced at Wang, uncertain as to whether his English had been good enough to follow this quick-fire exchange. But if the Chinese pathologist had understood, he gave no indication of it. His loss of mianzi, face, like Margaret’s hurt, was hidden behind mask and goggles.

Margaret nodded to the two assistants. ‘Now that the boss has finally arrived, I suppose we’d better begin.’

They glanced at Pathologist Wang, who made some imperceptible gesture of consent, and they went out and wheeled in the body, still fully clothed, on a gurney, and positioned it beneath a microphone hanging from the ceiling.

It was a bizarre sight, lying on its back, arched over the arms which were pulled behind to where they were still tied at the wrist. The head, propped on a blood-soaked towel, was placed approximately at the neck, but lying at a very odd angle and staring, open-eyed and open-mouthed, off to one side.

Margaret used the moment, when all attention was focused on the corpse, to sneak a proper look at Li. He was thinner than when she had seen him last, the strain showing in shadows beneath his eyes. She was shocked by how Chinese he looked. When she had been with him almost every waking hour, she had ceased completely to see him as Chinese. He was just Li Yan, who touched her with a gentleness she had not known before in a man, whose eyes were soft and dark and full of humour and life, drawing her unaccountably to him. Now all that familiarity was gone. He seemed almost like a stranger, and she succumbed to an odd sense of disappointment. All she really felt towards him now was anger.

She turned her attention quickly back to the body and switched on the overhead microphone, escaping into a professional world where death took precedence over life. But she paused for a moment, struck by the strange posture of the body, flexed against the hands behind its back, the odd position of the disembodied head. It somehow reinforced the sense of a man forced to his death, much more than a simple stabbing or shooting. There was something in his demeanour that hinted at the terror he had experienced in the anticipation of his own beheading. It was unimaginable. She quickly began the preliminary examination, recording for later transcription, what she saw as she went.

‘The body is that of a well-nourished Asian man, appearing to be in his early fifties. The decedent is the victim of decapitation that will be described further below. The decedent is clothed in charcoal grey pants, white socks and black leather shoes, and is wearing a white shirt that is blood-soaked about the anterior and lateral aspects of the collar, and about the chest area.’

The assistants turned the corpse over, creating the macabre illusion of the body rotating around a fixed head. The ensemble now resembled something far more difficult to see as human than as some unrelated waxwork body parts. Margaret examined the white silk cord binding the wrists, raised the ring-flash camera offered by one of the assistants, and took several photographs. The other assistant handed Margaret an eighteen-inch length of twine. She tied its two ends to the silk cord, a couple of inches apart, and about three inches from the knot, and then cut the cord between the two twine knots, preserving the cord knot intact. Pathologist Wang laid it out on the adjoining table. Margaret photographed the wrists again.

‘On removal of the cord, the wrists are seen to bear faint pink contusions that will be described further below.’

Pathologist Wang’s assistants then carefully removed Yuan Tao’s clothes and laid them out on the table next to the silk cord. They checked and found nothing in the pockets of the trousers. They turned the body again to lie on its back, and Margaret began to examine it in detail.

‘The body has been refrigerated and is cold to the touch. Rigor mortis is present in the jaw and extremities, but is not observed in the neck, due to the decapitation. Fixed post-mortem lividity is only faintly observed in the posterior dependent parts.’

Li interrupted. ‘Can you give me any idea of the time of death?’

She sighed and switched off the microphone. ‘Why do policemen always insist on asking a question they know cannot be answered with any degree of accuracy?’

Li thought he could detect a smile somewhere beneath Pathologist Wang’s surgical mask. But Margaret pressed on. Her question had been rhetorical.

‘Since the body has been refrigerated, there is no point in my taking liver temperature. I’d say rigor mortis has been set for a few hours, so I would guess perhaps he died somewhere between twelve and sixteen hours ago.’

That would put time of death between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. the previous night, Li thought. A little later than Wang’s estimate, but it fitted better with the movements of the people in the apartment below.

‘May I proceed?’ Margaret asked. Li nodded.

She examined the head, turning it freely this way and that, at one stage lifting it up by its hair, leaving soft, currant-red clots of blood on the table. She described the dark, staring eyes that remained fixed as she turned the head, the mouth held open by rigor, as if frozen in the act of screaming.

‘There is a two-to-two-and-a-half by four-centimetre area of pink contusion with golden, parchment-like abrasion over the malar area of the right cheek and the lateral orbital rim.’

Injuries sustained as the head hit the floor and rolled. Now she moved to a description of the trauma, scrutinising the neck wound in detail.

‘There has been complete decapitation as mentioned above. The posterior edge is three centimetres inferior to the anterior edge and the wound edge is sharpest on the left posterolateral aspect. There is a thin rim of abrasion at this posterolateral edge, and its anterior aspect bears a one-by-two-and-a-half-centimetre flap of skin. This flap of skin rests against the anterior, exterior aspects of the neck. There is vital reaction at the wound’s edge. The wound crosses the spinal column at the fifth-sixth intervertebral space. There is complete transection of all soft tissue structures of the neck: the trachea at the level of the third tracheal ring; the carotids inferior to their bifurcations. The soft tissue edges indicate a forward direction of the instrument.’

‘Meaning what exactly?’ Li asked.

She threw him a withering look. ‘That I’ve seen a cleaner cut,’ she said.

She proceeded to photograph the neck from various angles, before examining the grey-green discolouration on the pale tan cut surface of the spinal column. She indicated that she wanted a tape lift. Pathologist Wang cut a length, several inches long, of broad, clear, sticky tape. Holding it by the ends, he placed it over the cut surface of the tough, fibro-cartilaginous tissue between the fifth and sixth vertebrae, and Margaret pressed it home. Wang then peeled it away, taking with it some of the microscopic metal or mineral particles left by the blade of the murder weapon, and preserved them by sticking the tape across the rim of a glass petri dish.

Margaret looked up at Li. ‘I take it you’ve followed similar procedures on the previous victims?’

‘We have.’

‘And?’

‘The particles were subjected to analysis under a scanning electron microscope. The primary elements detected were copper and tin.’

‘Bronze,’ she said. ‘Some kind of ceremonial or ornamental sword? Perhaps even a genuine artefact?’

‘Perhaps,’ Li conceded.

‘Well, it must be one of the three,’ she said. ‘No one’s made bronze swords for serious use since they discovered iron.’ She paused for thought. ‘What about the signature?’

Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

Margaret was impatient, and addressed him as if talking to a child. ‘Even the smoothest blade has nicks and imperfections that leave microscopic striations on the cut bone — a signature. I assume you have taken sections of vertebrae from the previous victims?’

Li glanced at Wang who nodded.

‘Good,’ said Margaret. ‘Then there’s an outside chance that if you examine the cut surface of the bone or disc, using a comparison microscope, you can match up the striations and tell if the same murder weapon was used in each case. An experienced swordsman would normally strike with the same part of the blade each time, what you might call a sweet spot. So it might have left the same signature each time. And, of course, if you ever recover it, you will certainly be able to match the sword to the murders — a little like a ballistic comparison. It’s called toolmark examination.’

‘This is not … mm … a procedure we have previously employed,’ Pathologist Wang said, and Li was surprised at the fluency of his English.

‘Well, I’d like you to employ it now,’ Margaret said. ‘It could be important. If your criminalist needs advice on the procedure I’ll be happy to help.’ She gave the nod to one of the assistants to cut a section of the spinal column. Using the same oscillating saw he would later employ to remove the top of the skull, he cut through the spinal column a few inches below the wound and put the severed chunk of vertebra into a formalin-filled storage jar held by his colleague.

The sound of the saw had been sharp and mournful, for all the world like some unearthly creature wailing for its dead. Sophie, who had been standing at the back of the room, sweat gathering across her scalp, her complexion like putty, put a hand over her mouth. But she caught Margaret’s eye and knew that one way or another she had to stick this out. She swallowed hard, breathed deeply, and tried to think herself somewhere else.

Margaret stood back to let the assistants collect blood and vitreous samples for toxicology. Again she took the opportunity to steal another look at Li, who kept his eyes steadfastly on the procedure. She wanted to grab him and shake him and ask him why. But she felt the tears start to fill her eyes and she looked quickly away again, as the needle inserted by one of the assistants to draw fluid from the right eye of the decedent caused the eyeball to collapse. She refocused on the job in hand. The rest of the autopsy was largely routine and would take around forty-five minutes. Just forty-five more minutes.

The assistants placed a block of wood under the body, mid-chest, to help expose the chest cavity when she made the initial ‘Y’ shaped incision, starting at each shoulder, meeting at the bottom of the breast bone, then continuing on down past the umbilicus to the public bone.

Once the rib cage had been cut away, providing easy access to the organs, Margaret worked her way systematically through the heart and lungs, finding nothing abnormal, until she came to the stomach. She clamped and transected the oesophagus, freeing the stomach from its fatty connections, then cut it from the duodenum. Everyone was hit by the smell of alcohol. Margaret sniffed two or three times and raised an eyebrow.

‘Smells like vodka to me. A man after my own heart.’

She held up the stomach and, making a small incision, drained its contents into a measuring jug. The stink of it filled the room. She opened the stomach up for inspection.

‘The oesophagus is lined by grey-pink mucosa. There are no diverticula or varices. The stomach contains four hundred and seventy-five cubic centimetres of thin, blue-brown liquid containing multiple tiny, pale blue particles resembling medication residue. No recognisable food is identified. An ethanol-like odour is noted. The gastric mucosa is stained pale blue, apparently by the gastric contents, and the rugal pattern is normal.’

She switched off the microphone again. ‘Roofies,’ she said. ‘Classic date rape drug. Two or three 2 mg tablets and the recipient becomes looped, spacy, sleepy … Even more effective when taken with alcohol. Explains why he submitted so placidly to his execution. Except for the minor bruising around the wrist ligature, there is absolutely no sign of trauma to indicate that he put up any kind of a fight.’

‘It was a drug called flunitrazepam that was identified in the stomachs of the other … mm … victims,’ Pathologist Wang said.

‘Same thing,’ said Margaret. ‘Roofies is the street name. Rohypnol is the trade name. Made by the Roche Company. Very popular in the wrong hands when it was first marketed because it was colourless, odourless and tasteless when dissolved in drink. So Roche changed the formula to make it turn blue. Kind of hard to slip into someone’s drink without them noticing.’

Wang said, ‘In the other three it was mixed with red wine.’

Margaret thought about it for a moment. ‘Hm. I guess that would probably do it. Might make it a bit turbid, though if you weren’t a practised wine drinker you might not know the difference. But in this case,’ she indicated the open carcass on the autopsy table, ‘it would sure as hell have turned bright blue in vodka.’

Li frowned. ‘Then why would he have drunk it?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s amazing what most people will do with a gun pointed at their head.’ She nodded towards the blood-stained placard lying on the adjacent table. ‘I guess they hung that placard around his neck before they gave him the chop.’

‘That’s our assumption,’ Li confirmed.

She waited, but he volunteered nothing further. ‘So what does it mean?’ she asked.

He returned her gaze and spoke evenly. ‘The top character represents the number three.’

Margaret furrowed her brows. ‘But I thought Yuan Tao was the fourth victim?’

‘He is. The killer started at six and seems to be counting down.’

‘So there are another two victims on his list?’

‘That’s how it looks.’ Li paused for a moment, then carried on, ‘The character scored through is a nickname. They all had nicknames — Zero, Monkey, Pigsy. They were all at the same middle school together.’

Margaret raised an eyebrow and thought about it for a moment. ‘But not Yuan Tao?’

‘Until we get the file from your embassy, we don’t know anything about him. But given that he’s an American, that would seem unlikely. His nickname, apparently, was Digger. The name character for it, as with all the others, is upside down’

Margaret was intrigued. ‘Why? Does that have any special significance?’

‘During the Cultural Revolution,’ Li said, ‘people who were held up to ridicule as “revisionists” or “counter-revolutionaries” were sometimes publicly paraded with such nameplates hung around their necks, their names written upside down and crossed through. It was to signify that they were considered “non-people”.’

She wondered what it must have been like to be a “non-person”. During these last months she had learned enough about the Cultural Revolution to know that almost everyone in this room would have been a target for such persecution. The humiliation, degradation, and sometimes death inflicted on intellectuals, educated or professional people, during those dark years was unimaginable. And it was only just over twenty years since it had all come to an end. Still too close for comfort.

She switched on the mike and returned to the rest of the autopsy. Liver, spleen, pancreas, kidney, guts, bladder. The only problem arose when the assistants had difficulty preventing the head from slipping away across the table while cutting through the skull with the oscillating saw. Finally, they achieved their aim, one holding the head steady with two hands, the other cutting, and then delivering the brain into Margaret’s hands for weighing.

With sections taken from each of the organs, and the autopsy virtually over, the assistants sewed up the carcass and roughly stitched the head back on to the neck. It was a grotesque parody of a human being that they then hosed down. They scrubbed off the blood and blotted it dry with paper, before slipping it into a body bag and wheeling it away for return to the refrigerator.

Margaret peeled off her latex gloves, removing the steel-mesh glove from her non-cutting hand, and untied the gown and apron, letting them fall away. Despite the coldness of the autopsy room she was perspiring freely. She snapped off her goggles and mask and pulled away the shower cap to shake her hair out over her shoulders.

Li saw her properly for the first time — her pale, freckled skin, the slightly full lips, her well-defined brows, the ice-chip blue eyes — and his heart flipped over. All he wanted to do was take her face in his hands and kiss her. But he did not move. She turned to find him looking at her, and she had an overwhelming desire to slap his face as hard as she could. But instead, she moved to the adjoining table to look at the items that had been removed from the body, and the photographs taken at the crime scene.

Li, and Doctor Wang, and a very pale-looking Sophie gathered around. Margaret glanced at Sophie and saw that her hands were trembling. At least she had stuck it out. Not many people made it through their first autopsy without throwing up. Then she turned her attention to the photographs.

‘What’s this hole in the floor?’ she asked Li, picking up a print that clearly showed where the floorboards had been lifted.

‘We don’t know,’ Li said. ‘The linoleum had been pulled back and the boards removed. Most of the blood drained into the hole and dripped through the ceiling of the apartment below.’

‘Were the boards nailed down or loose?’

‘They had been nailed down at one time, but it appears that the nails had been removed some time ago. The boards must have fitted very loosely. They would have creaked or rattled underfoot.’

‘Some kind of hiding place?’

‘Possibly.’

Margaret examined the picture some more. ‘Had the linoleum been lifted, or was it torn?’

‘It appeared to have been torn.’

She nodded thoughtfully and dropped the picture back on the table. ‘Pathologist Wang says the other victims had red wine in their stomachs.’

This was a sudden leap that left Li more than a little puzzled. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I don’t see the connection.’

‘Of course not,’ she responded curtly, and clearly had no intention of explaining. ‘So we can assume that the killer was known to them. They’re having a drink with him.’

‘Yes, we have already made that assumption.’ Li’s response came with a tone. But she appeared not to notice.

‘And he endeavoured to disguise the fact that he was drugging them by dropping the Roofies in red wine,’ she said pensively. ‘So why did he hand Yuan Tao a bright blue vodka? And why, as you asked yourself, did Yuan drink it?’

‘Coercion,’ said Li. ‘You suggested as much.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘but it’s a change of pattern. Serial killers are usually very predictable. Once they have established a pattern, they normally stick to it. Religiously.’

She began scrutinising the other photographs taken at the death scene: the body taken from several different angles, the main pool of blood draining into the space left by the removal of the floorboards; the arterial blood spatter patterns from the two carotid arteries from which blood had spurted at approximately two and ten o’clock directions from the neck, travelling between one and two metres from the body. It was a bloody event. The main pool had formed once the body had collapsed and blood continued to drain from the carotids. Margaret became very interested in a less dramatic scatter of blood, following a line at right angles to the body on its right side. She put the photograph down and gazed at the white-tiled wall in front of her. ‘So our killer was left-handed,’ she said finally.

‘How can you possibly know that?’ It was the first time that Sophie had spoken and everyone looked up at her in surprise. She became suddenly self-conscious. ‘I mean, everything I’ve read says it’s almost impossible to tell the handedness of a killer in a blade attack.’ She felt she had to explain.

‘True,’ Margaret said. ‘But I’m not looking at the angle of a blade entering a body here. I’m looking at the cast-off pattern left by the sword. Look, see …’ She pointed out the line of tiny blood droplets that she had been studying. ‘When the blade goes through the neck in a downward slicing motion, it collects a certain amount of blood en route. And as the swordsman follows through with the downward arc of his sword, a certain amount of blood is cast off by the momentum. That’s what this line of droplets is here, on the right side of the body.’

‘How does that tell you the handedness of the killer?’ Sophie had forgotten, for the moment, about her squeamishness.

‘You ever heard of Tameshi Giri?’ She looked around the blank faces. No one had. ‘It’s a Japanese martial art,’ she explained. ‘The art of cutting things with swords. Its exponents practise on tightly bound bundles of straw. I believe it might even be Chinese in origin.’ Li and Wang still looked blank. Margaret smiled. ‘I did an autopsy on an assisted Hara Kiri suicide, where once the victim had disembowelled himself, his Tameshi Giri assistant beheaded him.’

‘Eugh!’ Sophie shivered. ‘You mean people actually choose to die by having their heads cut off?’

Margaret nodded. ‘It saves you from too much suffering once you’ve slit your belly open. It’s not exactly common, but there have been several cases. I had to make a small study of them for mine.’ She turned to Li. ‘The cutter stands behind the victim and to his left if he is right-handed. And on the right if he is left-handed.’ She passed him the photograph. ‘As you can see, the cast-off pattern is on Yuan Tao’s right. So his killer was left-handed.’

Li looked at the picture for a long time. ‘Are you saying this killer is some kind of Tameshi Giri expert?’

‘No. I’d say he wasn’t a novice. He certainly knows how to handle a sword. But the cut is not very clean. There was a marked abrasion at the entry edge, and quite a large, irregular flap of skin at the exit edge. So he wasn’t an expert.’

‘Pathologist Wang thought perhaps the blade was getting blunt,’ Li said drily, and Margaret smiled at the pathologist’s implied criticism of the investigation.

‘All the more reason to think this was no expert,’ she said. ‘An expert would keep his blade well honed.’

‘The first three … mm … victims were much more cleanly cut,’ Wang offered.

‘Were they?’ Margaret frowned, computing several possibilities in her mind. At length she asked, ‘Are the photographs from the other crime scenes available?’ Wang nodded and sent one of his assistants to get them. ‘I’d also like copies of the autopsy reports on the other victims. Translated, please. And access to all the other evidence.’

Li bridled. ‘This is a Chinese police investigation,’ he said.

‘Of an American citizen,’ Margaret fired back. ‘And we don’t have two years to wait for a result.’

‘Two years?’ Sophie said. ‘What do you mean?’

Margaret turned a syrupy smile on her. ‘Deputy Section Chief Li once told me that it took him two years to clear up a murder here. Par for the course for the Chinese police, I think.’

‘That was one case,’ Li retorted, barely containing his fury. ‘And at least we broke it. If it had been in America, it would still be languishing in an unsolved cases file.’

The assistant returned with three large brown envelopes, and Margaret held them for a moment. ‘And am I allowed to look?’ she asked Li pointedly. He kept his lips pressed together in a grim line and nodded curtly. She smiled sweetly. ‘Thank you.’ And she spread the photographs from each envelope out on the table. Immediately she gasped with frustration. ‘I thought you said this was a serial killer?’

‘It’s what we believe,’ Li said more confidently than he felt.

‘Well, victim number three’s been moved from the murder scene. There’s not nearly enough blood here.’

‘We are aware of that.’ There were echoes in this for Li of that morning’s meeting. Fresh eyes casting a sceptical look at the evidence.

‘Another break in the pattern,’ Margaret said. And she started examining the blood spatter patterns in the photographs of the first two murders. ‘And yet another.’ She dropped the photographs back on the table. ‘Victims one and two were killed by a right-handed bladesman. You can see for yourself. The cast-off patterns are on the left side of the bodies.’

Li examined the photographs. ‘Well, there’s no way of making that comparison with victim number three. And, anyway, it’s perfectly possible that the killer is equally good with left or right hand.’ He was getting defensive now.

But Margaret was dismissive. ‘Unlikely.’ She picked up and began studying the photographs of the bound wrists of each of the victims in the order of their killing. ‘Pass me the silk cord we took from the decedent,’ she asked Sophie.

Sophie blanched at the prospect, and very gingerly lifted the cord between thumb and forefinger and passed it across the table. Margaret took it and looked at it very closely.

Li said, ‘We have already established that the cord used to bind the first three victims was all cut from the same length. I am sure we will find the same with that one.’

Margaret shrugged, clearly unconvinced. ‘Then why’, she asked, ‘when he was tying the wrists of Yuan Tao, did he use a different knot than the one used on the other three?’

Li frowned and took the cord, looking at the knot closely, then examining the photographs. ‘They all look the same to me,’ he said.

‘They all look like reef knots,’ Margaret said. ‘But the first three were tied by a right-handed person. Right over left and under, left over right and under. The fourth is exactly the reverse. Tied by a left-hander.’ Li looked at her, trying to absorb the implications. ‘The point is,’ Margaret went on, ‘Yuan Tao was clearly killed by someone else. It’s a copycat murder.’