The Fourth Sacrifice

I

Pauper’s hutong meandered through a quiet maze of traditional siheyuan courtyard homes in a leafy area north of Behai Park. Li parked at the end of the lane, and they walked along the narrow alleyway between high crumbling brick walls, past a trishaw with a single bed strapped to the back of it. Stout wooden gates, left and right, opened on to secluded courtyards where as many as four families shared living space on each side of the square. Through the dark openings, Margaret could see bicycles and pot plants, brushes and buckets, and all manner of the accumulated junk of siheyuan life.

Ahead of them, a large crowd of tourists wearing silly baseball hats was gathered around a Chinese tour guide with a red flag and a battery-operated megaphone at his mouth. In a strange metallic monotone, the guide was pointing out the features associated with the siheyuan. ‘This traditional black tile roof,’ he said, then repeated for emphasis, ‘traditional black tile roof. In ancient times, black tiles for ordinary people, for ordinary people.’ And using his rolled up flag on a stick as a pointer, he jabbed at a square brown box mounted on the wall at the top right of the doorway. A thick black cable fed in and out of it. ‘Another traditional feature of siheyuan,’ he said. ‘Traditional feature of siheyuan. This box for cable TV.’ And he giggled at his joke. ‘For cable TV. We have fifteen channel of cable TV going into traditional siheyuan.’

Li and Margaret drew a few curious glances from bored-looking tourists as they passed the group and Margaret heard a middle-aged American lady whisper to her companion, ‘Why does he have to repeat everything? I just don’t know why he has to repeat everything.’

After another twenty yards, beyond a small shop window displaying cigarettes and soft drinks, they turned into an open doorway, stepping over a wooden barrier and then down steps into Pauper’s courtyard. Round coal briquettes were stacked three deep and two metres high against one wall. An old broken chair lay at an odd angle on the stairs. Bicycles rested one against the other. Potted plants bloomed on every available space. Two canaries sang in a bamboo cage hung from a shady tree that seemed to grow out of a crack in the slabs. The atmosphere was curiously still and restful. The city seemed to have melted away into some unpleasant dream somewhere just beyond reach. Margaret saw inquisitive faces peering out of windows and doors at the far side of the courtyard. Li saw them, too. ‘I’m looking for Blind Pauper,’ he called. A woman pointed at a door to their left. It was lying open. Li turned to Margaret. ‘This way.’

They passed another door to a tiny cluttered kitchen with a two-ring gas stove and a charred extractor. A microwave sat incongruously on a melamine cabinet opposite an old white porcelain tub and an electric water heater.

Li paused at the door to the apartment and was about to knock when a woman’s voice called, ‘Who’s looking for Blind Pauper?’

‘Police,’ Li said, and Margaret followed him in.

Pauper was sitting knitting on a two-seater settee opposite a television set mounted on a white-painted wall unit. There was a small table with an ashtray on it, a bookcase, an electric fan. Through a glass-panelled door they could see into her tiny bedroom, bare and cell-like with a single bed. Everything was neatly arranged, fastidiously clean. There were, Margaret noticed, no pictures on the walls.

‘Who’s the woman?’ Pauper said. She was a shrunken old lady with silver hair tied back in a bun. She wore a traditional blue Mao suit and small black slippers on her tiny feet. Margaret would have taken her for seventy, before realising with a shock that she must be the same age as the others. Only fifty-one. Her round, black-lensed spectacles gave her a faintly sinister air.

‘How do you know there’s a woman with me?’ Li asked.

‘I can smell her.’ Pauper’s lips curled in an expression of distaste. ‘Wearing some cheap Western perfume.’

‘She’s an American.’

‘Ah! Yangguizi!’ Pauper spat out the word like a gob of phlegm.

‘I take it you don’t speak English,’ Li said.

‘Why should you think that?’ Pauper said in perfect English, startling Margaret with the sudden change of language, and the vitriol in her tone. ‘You think I am stupid because I come from a poor family and didn’t do well at school?’

‘No,’ Li said evenly. ‘But I know that not many schools taught English in the sixties.’

‘I learned English to read braille. There is not enough of it in Chinese to feed a mind without eyes.’ She paused. ‘You have come about the murders?’

‘Yes,’ Li said. He slipped a book out of the bookcase and started leafing through it, running his fingers over the raised patterns of dots that could be ‘read’ like words. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Please do not touch my books.’ she said. ‘They are very precious to me.’ Li was startled, and peered at her closely, as if believing for a moment that she could actually see. ‘I can hear you,’ she said as if she could read what was in his mind. ‘You may be a policeman, but it doesn’t give you the right to touch my stuff. Who is the American?’

‘I’m a pathologist,’ Margaret said. ‘I am helping with the investigation.’

‘Since when did the Chinese need help from the Americans?’ Pauper’s disgust was patent.

‘We don’t need their help,’ Li said. ‘But one of the victims was an American.’

Pauper frowned. ‘An American?’ She was clearly caught off balance. ‘I only know about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy. What American?’

‘A Chinese-American,’ Li said. ‘He was born here. You went to school with him. His name was Yuan Tao.’

What little colour there was drained from Pauper’s face. ‘In the name of the sky,’ she said. ‘Cat!’ And there was a sudden dawning in her expression. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘He killed them. We knew it was someone out to get us. One by one. But Cat,’ she said again in wonder. ‘I never would have thought him capable of it.’

‘Who’s we?’ Li asked her.

‘Birdie and me. The only ones left.’

‘What about Tortoise? We haven’t been able to track him down.’

‘You’d have to go to hell to find him,’ she said. ‘He’s been dead more than ten years now. A stupid boy. He was simple, you know. He went down to Tiananmen Square the first night of the trouble, to see what it was all about, and got himself squashed by a tank.’ She was struck by another thought. ‘But, then, who killed Cat?’

‘We thought you might be able to tell us.’

‘Me?’ Pauper laughed a humourless laugh, and then she pursed her lips and her eyes wrinkled shrewdly. ‘You think it was one of us.’ And she laughed again. ‘Maybe you think I killed him.’

‘What about Birdie?’

‘Birdie?’ she chortled, and chuckled to herself, unable to contain her mirth. ‘Birdie? Are you serious? Have you spoken to him?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Birdie couldn’t kill anyone. He’s a pathetic, harmless old man.’

‘I thought he was the leader of the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade,’ Li said. ‘The one who led the attack on the teachers, the one who ordered the school gate destroyed.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Pauper said. ‘More than thirty years. He was brave and strong and I thought the world of him then. But when the Red-Red-Red Faction split, they turned on him. You’ve heard the old saying that the wheel of fate turns every sixty years. Well, it turned on poor old Birdie. They beat him and kept him in a room for nearly two years, making him write self-criticisms and dragging him out for struggle sessions. They killed all his birds and finally sent him to Inner Mongolia to labour, building frontier defences. I met him again a few years later, and he was a changed man.’ She laughed, but it was a sour laugh, filled with bitterness. ‘Of course, I was a changed woman by then, too. I had lost my eyes.’

‘How did that happen?’ Margaret asked.

Pauper swivelled her head in Margaret’s direction and sniffed as if making some olfactory assessment. ‘They thought I was stupid at school,’ she said eventually. ‘Because I could not see right. I kept telling them I had headaches, but they thought I was just malingering. I told them I had a black cloud in my eyes, that I could not see the blackboard any more.’ She shook her head. ‘It was another two years before my father took me to the hospital. But not before I had collapsed. They said I had a tumour in my right eye and that it was malignant and they would have to take the eye away.’ The sour laugh again, lips stretched over yellow teeth. ‘They believed me then.’ She snapped her mouth shut and Margaret saw her lower lip tremble. ‘All I could think was how ugly I would look without an eye. But they said they could give me a glass one and no one would know the difference.’

‘Were you still in the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade then?’ Li asked.

‘No. Birdie had been arrested and we had broken up and gone our separate ways.’

‘So what happened to your other eye?’ Margaret was curious.

Pauper turned a sneer on her. ‘You’re a doctor, can’t you guess?’

‘Not my speciality,’ Margaret said.

‘Hah,’ Pauper said. ‘Doctors! What do they know?’ Her tiny hands clutched her knitting tightly. ‘After about six months the headaches came back. At first I thought it was the glass eye, because it was not so bad when I took it out. But it kept getting worse and the doctors said I had a tumour in the other eye. It would have to go, too, they said. But my father wouldn’t let them. I wasn’t even twenty years old, he said. What had I seen? Of life, of my country.’ Again, her lower lip trembled, and Margaret believed if she had had eyes, tears would have spilled from them.

‘My father was a packer in a factory,’ Pauper said. ‘My mother was dead. We were very poor. But he borrowed money from the other workers. Six hundred yuan. It was a lot of cash in those days. He told the doctors they could have my other eye in two months. But first I was going to see my country. We took the train and went to Xi’an and Chongqing, and then down the Yangtse to Nanjing and Shanghai. And then he took me to his home town of Qingdao, where I had been born. He took me to the top of a hill above the town so that I could look down on it and see the sun rise in the east across the Yellow Sea. But the sea wasn’t yellow. It was red. The colour of blood, and Chongqing looked like it was on fire. I’ll never forget it. I can still see it now, in my mind’s eye. I can never see it again any other way.’

She took a moment or two to steady her breathing, and Margaret saw her grip on her knitting relax just a little. ‘By the time we were on the train home, everything was milky and blurred, like a mist had come down. And then they took my other eye, and I had to learn to “see” in other ways. With my ears and my nose and my fingers. Sometimes I think I can see things better without my eyes.’ She waved a hand towards the other side of the room. ‘That is why I have a television. I see with my ears, and make pictures in my head. I can tell from a voice the expression on a face. I don’t need my eyes any more.’

They sat in silence for what seemed like a very long time. Then Li said, ‘How did you get your nickname?’

‘Pauper?’ The bitterness was back in her laugh again. ‘How do you think? My father could barely afford to clothe me. My mother was dead and he was no good at patching things, so all my clothes were worn and torn and badly patched. Other kids were poor, too. But they didn’t look it. They called me Pauper to make fun of me, and it stuck. All my life. Only, now, I’m Blind Pauper. Poor and blind.’

Li scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Have you ever heard the nickname, Digger?’

She frowned. ‘Digger? No, I have never heard that name. Who is Digger?’

‘We thought it might have been Yuan Tao.’

‘Cat? No. He has always been Cat. Scaredy Cat.’ Her lip curled into its habitual sneer. ‘I am glad someone killed him. What right did he have to a better life than us? What right did he have to revenge?’

They heard a familiar metallic voice buzzing through a megaphone. ‘This traditional siheyuan courtyard. Siheyuan courtyard. In ancient time only one family live here. Only one family. Now there are four family. Four family.’

Pauper put her knitting aside and got stiffly to her feet. ‘How else does a blind person make a living these days?’ she said. ‘They bring tourists to my house to see the curiosity, how an old blind Chinese lady lives. They pay me more money than my father earned in his factory. And at least I am spared from having to look at them.’

Li and Margaret moved to the door. Li said, ‘Do you see Birdie often?’

‘I have not seen Birdie since they took my eyes,’ Pauper said. ‘But he comes to visit me often and his birds sing to me, and chatter and make a wonderful noise.’

‘And he knew about Monkey and Zero and Pigsy as well?’

‘Of course. We spoke several times about which of us would be next.’

The megaphone arrived at the door. ‘Only six people at a time, please. Six at a time. This is traditional siheyuan home. Ve-ery small inside. Ve-ery small.’ He glared at Li and Margaret.

Li said to Pauper, ‘We have an address for Birdie in Dengshikou Street. Does he still live there?’

She nodded. ‘But you won’t find him there now. He has a stall at the Guanyuan bird market. That is where his life is. Where it has always been. With his birds.’

As Li and Margaret pushed out, the tour group was pushing in, chattering excitedly at the prurient prospect of invading an old lady’s privacy.

II

Li manoeuvred his Jeep slowly west through the traffic. Beneath the sprinkling of shade cast by the trees, bicycles weaved precariously in and out of narrow lanes, overtaking tricycle carts, avoiding buses and taxis. The sidewalks were alive with activity in this busy shopping quarter, stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables and great baskets of chestnuts outside shops whose windows were crammed with computers and hi-fis and DVD players. In the hazy distance, they could see the flyover at the junction with the second ring road. Horns peeped and blasted, not so much in anger as frustration. Li leaned on his wheel, his mouth set in a grim line. Soon, he thought, Beijing would slip into permanent gridlock and bicycles would become fashionable again, not just as the fastest, but as the only way of getting around.

‘Do you want to tell me about the nickname?’ Margaret’s voice broke into his thoughts, and he immediately detected the hint of accusation in it.

‘You’ll read all about it in the statements we took at the school,’ he said. And, in a voice laden with meaning, added, ‘When you were in Xi’an.’

He heard her sigh, but kept his eyes on the traffic ahead. ‘I’ll probably get around to reading them sometime,’ she said in that acid tone that was so familiar to him. ‘Maybe next year, or the year after. But right now it might save time if you just told me.’

He shrugged. ‘Like Pauper said, Yuan’s nickname was Cat, not Digger.’

‘And anyone who knew him at school would know that?’

He nodded. ‘Which kind of punches a hole in your theory about his killer being one of the remaining Red Guards.’ He turned to look at her, but she was frowning into the middle distance, lost in thought.

‘It’s looking less and less likely anyway,’ she said. ‘One of them’s dead, the other’s blind. That just leaves Birdie. And he would know Yuan’s nickname. Unless …’

‘What?’

‘Unless he deliberately used another name to confuse the police.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Li said.

‘Why not?’

‘You would have to be pretty smart to think of something like that. From all accounts Birdie would have trouble getting his IQ up to room temperature.’

‘So why are we going to see him?’ But before he could respond, she answered for herself. ‘No, don’t tell me, I know. “Because Chinese police work requires meticulous attention to detail.”’ She sighed again and looked at the traffic ahead of them. It was at a standstill. ‘Chinese police work also requires great patience,’ she said. ‘Since it takes so goddamn long just to get from A to B.’

But Li’s patience had already run out. He opened the window and slapped a flashing red light on the roof, flicked on his siren and squeezed across the line of on-coming traffic into a narrow lane. He pulled the Jeep in beside a railing and jumped out. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll walk the rest. It’s not far.’

A hundred yards down, the lane was crowded with people buying tropical fish from roadside vendors. Jars of exotic marine life were piled on stalls and carts, plastic trays filled with terrapins and tortoises laid out along the sidewalk. An old lady was selling goldfish in water-filled plastic bags hung from the handlebars of her bicycle. They passed a long, corrugated shed stacked from floor to ceiling with tanks full of brilliantly coloured fish fighting for space in green, bubbling water. Margaret had never seen so many fish. There was an ocean’s worth. Whole shops were devoted to selling accessories — tanks, stands, lighting, feed. The shed and stalls and shops were jammed with customers. Feng shui was back in fashion. Fish were in. Business was good.

They turned west, leaving the fish market behind, past demolition work behind high hordings, then south again at Chegongzhuang Subway Station. On South Xizhimen Street, on the sidewalk beyond the tree-lined cycle lane, they saw the first clutches of old men gathered around their birdcages. Bicycles parked by the hundred lined the sidewalk on either side of the entrance to the market. Men with birds of prey tethered to the handlebars of their bicycles showed off new, brilliantly coloured purchases in bamboo cages. Budgerigars, canaries, hawks, parakeets. The collective sound of ten thousand birds drowned out even the roar of traffic on the second ring road.

Li and Margaret turned under a red banner into a covered courtyard stacked high with thousands of cages filled with the most extraordinary dazzle of coloured birds. Yellow, green, vermilion, black with yellow flashes. Old men and young boys bargained noisily with loquacious venders selling everything from kittens and hamsters to grasshoppers caged in tiny bamboo mesh balls. A bald man in a blue shirt and grey waistcoat stood behind a counter laden with a hundred different tobaccos, fine-rolled, rough shredded, black, yellow, green. Great bundles of whole dried leaf hung from the wall behind him between racks of rough carved wooden pipes with curling stems. Margaret was wide-eyed. As with so many things in China, she had never seen anything like it before.

Li stopped at an antiques stall sandwiched between rows of hanging cages and had to raise his voice almost to a shout to ask an old woman where they could find Birdie. She pointed towards a stall at the bottom of the row but said, ‘You won’t find him there now. Only in the mornings. At this time of day he’ll be in Purple Bamboo Park.’

It took them another half-hour to get to Purple Bamboo Park through late afternoon traffic that was gathering itself for the rush hour frenzy. Margaret recognised the entrance to the park, with its tiers of curling bamboo roofs, topiary elephants and incongruous European mannequins standing amidst a profusion of flowers. She had passed it daily, on the cycle from the Friendship Hotel to the People’s University of Public Security when she first arrived in Beijing.

At the gate Li spoke to the ticket collector who knew Birdie well. He came every day, she said. Bicycles were not normally allowed in the park, but his tricycle was a carrier for the birdcages that he piled upon it, one tied to the other, or hung from the handlebars. The birds were his constant and only companions, so they let him in with his tricycle, and he wheeled it to a cool bamboo pavilion east of the lake where he practised wu shu.

Li and Margaret walked in silence through the gloomy green shade of the early evening, through thick groves of the purple bamboo that gave the park its name. Beyond the weeping willows at the far side of the lake the sky glowed pink as the day slipped slowly towards night. They turned off the main thoroughfare and followed a narrow path that curved up under leaning pine trees to an open pavilion overlooking a brackish brown pond. A dozen cages filled with chattering, singing birds, hung from a bamboo roof supported on stout, lacquered posts. Beneath it, a man in black pyjamas and canvas slippers brought his silver sword arcing through the gloom to pierce and slash the thick, warm evening air in the ancient Chinese sword art of wu shu. He was tall and gaunt, with thin wisps of fine dark hair, and a straggling beard that clung precariously to his sunken cheeks and swept to a point at the end of his chin.

Li and Margaret stopped for a moment, as yet unseen by the man in the pavilion, and watched as he took his sword through all its motions with a bold confidence that belied his appearance. Margaret flicked a glance at Li. Here was an echo of his Uncle Yifu, who had been practising sword strokes in Jade Lake Park when Li had first taken her to meet him. Li’s face, however, gave nothing away.

The birds had betrayed their presence to their master, chatter increasing at the approach of strangers, and the swordsman stopped in mid-stroke and glanced towards them. He seemed alarmed, and Margaret saw fear in his black eyes. And although he relaxed a little as they approached the pavilion and he saw Li’s uniform, gone was all the poise and confidence he had shown in his handling of the ornamental sword.

Li held up his Public Security ID. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘You speak English?’ Birdie shook his head. ‘You know why we’re here?’ Birdie shook his head again. Li took the sword from him and examined it. It was a cheap, lightweight effort that concertinaed for ease of carrying. ‘You seem pretty good with this thing. You get a lot of practice?’

Birdie nodded. ‘Every day,’ he said. ‘It helps me relax.’

‘Just for the record, do you want to tell me your full name?’

‘Ge Yan,’ Birdie said. ‘But no one calls me that.’

‘What do you know about what happened to Monkey and Zero and Pigsy?’

The colour drained from Birdie’s face and he sat down on the narrow bench that ran between the lacquered posts.

‘I don’t suppose he speaks English?’ Margaret interrupted impatiently.

Li flicked her a look. ‘I’m afraid not.’ And with a tone, ‘What a pity you don’t speak Chinese.’

She deserved that, she realised, and backed off to the edge of the pavilion to watch from a distance. Birdie cast a nervous eye in her direction.

‘Never mind her,’ Li said. ‘Answer the question.’

Birdie’s eyes darted back towards Li. ‘They were murdered,’ he said, almost in a whisper, as if afraid to say it out loud.

‘Do you know who by?’

He shook his head. ‘But we are next.’

‘Who are next?’

‘Me and Pauper.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Pauper said that someone is trying to kill us all. All of us who were in the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade.’

‘And why would someone want to do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Li paused to think for a moment. He was still holding Birdie’s sword. He retracted the blade and threw it to him. ‘Here.’ Birdie caught it adeptly with his left hand. Li glanced at Margaret. She had not missed the significance. ‘Left-handed,’ Li said.

Birdie shrugged. ‘So what?’

‘No reason.’ Li lit a cigarette and watched the blue smoke curl slowly up in the still evening air. The light was beginning to fade.

‘What has he told you?’ Margaret asked.

‘The same as Pauper. He knew about the murders and figured they were next.’

‘Does he know about Yuan Tao?’

‘I haven’t asked him yet?’

Birdie seemed alarmed by this exchange in English. ‘What are you saying?’ he asked nervously.

‘We were talking about an old schoolfriend of yours. Yuan Tao.’

Birdie’s eyes opened wide. ‘Cat?’

‘We found him dead in an apartment on the east side of the city. Murdered just like the others.’

For a moment Birdie just stared at him, and then unexpectedly his eyes filled and big teardrops spilled from them and rolled down his cheeks. Li was stunned by his reaction. Margaret moved towards them. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘I just told him about Yuan.’

Birdie put a hand to his mouth to try to stifle his sobs. He drew in a breath in a series of small gasps and then issued a deep, animal moan, and the tears streamed down his face to gather among the whiskers of his beard. He looked up at Li with pain and hopelessness in his eyes. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I am so sorry.’

Li stood stock still. ‘Did you kill him, Birdie?’

Birdie shook his head, and when he found the breath to speak again, said, ‘No. I did not kill him. But we took his life away all those years ago. Back in the Cultural Revolution.’ A string of sobs pummelled his chest. ‘When we killed his father. In the school yard, with his mother watching.’ His eyes appealed pathetically for an understanding he knew would not come, his upturned face glistening with tears. ‘We did not mean to. We were just children.’ He broke down again, and held his face in his hands, weeping like the child he had once been. Li and Margaret waited in silence for his sobs to subside. There was something faintly shocking in watching a grown man cry so freely.

Finally, he regained some measure of control. ‘I have spent my life regretting the things we did then,’ he said. ‘China had gone mad, and we were carried along by the insanity. And now China has healed itself, but you cannot bring back the lives that were taken, or take away the pain from the wounds that will not heal.’ He wiped the tears from his face with the palms of his hands. ‘It has left me with a nervous condition now. I cannot work, except with my birds.’ He gazed up at his beloved birds singing in their cages. ‘They have no past, no future. They know nothing of my guilt. They make no judgements. I am free only with them. I have been free only ever with them.’ And after a moment, ‘Poor Cat,’ he said.

‘Cats and birds don’t really mix, do they?’ Li said, unmoved by Birdie’s display of remorse. His reading of the diary was still too vivid in his memory.

Birdie looked at him, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was Cat who murdered the others. Revenge for the killing of his father. You and Pauper were almost certainly next on his list.’

‘You still think I killed him?’ Birdie looked at him in disbelief.

‘Kill or be killed.’

Birdie shook his head. ‘I didn’t even know it was him. And even if I had, how could I have taken his life again?’ He ran his hands through his thinning hair in abject despair. ‘I only wish I had come higher on his list. At least, then, I would not have had to live with the guilt any more.’

‘Where were you on Monday night?’ Li asked.

Birdie looked at him, and there was a mix of panic and fear in his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Monday? At home maybe.’

‘And you live on your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘So there wouldn’t be anyone to back that up?’

Birdie was becoming increasingly agitated. ‘No. Yes. The girl in the lift. She must have seen me coming in.’

‘At what time would that be?’

‘I don’t know … Perhaps about seven.’

‘And when does the lift girl finish for the night.’

‘Ten usually.’

‘So, if you’d gone out after ten no one would know.’

‘I didn’t go out after ten!’ Birdie’s protestation was shrill and fearful.

‘What’s happening?’ Margaret asked.

‘He doesn’t have an alibi for Monday night,’ Li said.

‘Wait a minute!’ Birdie’s eyes had suddenly lit up. ‘Monday night. Monday night,’ he said excitedly, and a residue of sobs momentarily robbed him of his ability to speak. ‘Monday night I was playing checkers on the wall down at Xidan with my friend Moon. Usually we play Tuesday, but he had something else on and we played Monday instead. We sat and talked and smoked till maybe about twelve, when we finished playing. And then I went to his place for a beer before I came home.’

‘And he’ll confirm that if we ask him?’ Li felt unaccountably disappointed. However pathetic Birdie might have become, it did not alter the dreadful things he had done, and Li had found himself wanting it to be Birdie who had taken the life of his old classmate.

Birdie said. ‘Old Moon, he’ll remember for sure.’ And then his excitement subsided, and he stared dejectedly again at the cobbled floor of the pavilion. ‘Poor Cat,’ he said.

III

It was dark as they drove east on West Chang’an Avenue. Up ahead the lights erected in Tiananmen Square for National Day reflected hazy colour in the misty night air. A long line of red taillights snaked off into the distance. Li and Margaret had not spoken much since they left the park. He had asked her where she wanted to go, and she had said back to her hotel. And then they’d lapsed into silence.

Suddenly she said, ‘So what do you suppose it was that Yuan Tao had hidden under the floorboards in that apartment?’

He glanced at her, surprised that her mind was still turning around the investigation. ‘The sword, I guess,’ he said. ‘It is not the sort of thing he would have wanted to carry in and out of the foreign residents’ compound.’

Margaret fell again into silence. In spite of her question, she was rapidly losing interest in the investigation. As they passed Tiananmen Square her thoughts turned to Michael. She wanted to find him and tell him she was sorry. To try to make him believe that it had not been her idea to question him over his knowledge of the murder victims, or his whereabouts on the night of Yuan’s death. She tried to analyse the feelings that had swept over her in the moments after they discovered that Michael had recommended Yuan Tao to the dealer at the Underground City. Shock. And, momentarily, fear. Why had she been afraid? Surely she could not, in her wildest dreams, have imagined that Michael was in any way involved in these murders? And yet that is what Li had thought — or wanted to think. Or wanted her to think. He had leaped so eagerly on her revelation that Michael had known Professor Yue. She knew it was only his jealousy, but still she had felt relief when Michael had reminded her that the night of Yuan’s murder was the night she had met him at the Ambassador’s residence. It was impossible for him to have been involved.

She remembered the hurt in his eyes when he realised why Li and Margaret had driven out to the Ming Tombs that morning, and she felt sick. A traitor.

Li sneaked a look at Margaret. But she seemed preoccupied. A long way away. And he was overcome by a sudden depression. He had loved her so much, it had been painful to be with her. And then it had been painful to be without her. And now he was condemned to some state of limbo where he could neither possess her nor escape her. It was as if, somehow, she had died but her body kept coming back to haunt him. And this spectre that was his constant companion, cast a deep shadow over his memories of how good they had once been together, how sweet it had once felt.

His thoughts were interrupted by his call sign on the police radio. He unhooked the receiver and responded. A radio operator’s voice from Section One crackled across the airwaves, and Margaret heard Li’s voice flare briefly in annoyance, and then subside to a reluctant acceptance of the response that followed. He rehooked the receiver and drove on in silence. But she could see the tension in his grip on the steering wheel.

‘Bad news?’ she asked at length.

He glanced at her and hesitated for a long moment before deciding that it didn’t really matter whether he told her or not. ‘You met my sister the other night,’ he said. ‘At the Sanwei tearoom.’ She nodded. ‘You remember I told you before that she was pregnant?’ She nodded again, and he told her how Xiao Ling had abandoned Xinxin at his apartment and gone south to have the baby at the home of a friend, and how Xinxin’s father didn’t want to know about any of it.

‘Jesus!’ Margaret said. ‘How on earth are you coping?’

He looked grim. ‘I’m not.’ He sighed. ‘You remember Mei Yuan? The jian bing seller?’

‘Of course.’

‘She was going to keep Xinxin for a few days until I got something else arranged. She phoned the office this afternoon to say that her cousin’s husband has had to go into hospital for an operation.’

Margaret shook her head, perplexed. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Her cousin was looking after the jian bing while Mei Yuan looked after Xinxin. But with the cousin’s husband in hospital she can’t do the jian bing because she has to take him his meals.’

Margaret was astonished. ‘Doesn’t the hospital feed its patients?’

‘In China,’ Li said, ‘many people prefer family meals to hospital food. So tomorrow Mei Yuan will have to take over the jian bing again from her cousin because she cannot afford to lose the income. Which means she cannot look after Xinxin. When I have dropped you at the hotel I will have to go and pick her up and take her back to the apartment.’

The huge, red neon CITIC sign rose out of the mist ahead of them above the lights of the teatime traffic. ‘I’d like to meet her,’ Margaret said, taking both Li and herself by surprise. She had no idea why, but just the thought of Li’s niece, and that he was responsible for her, made him somehow more human again, more vulnerable, more like the man she had known. It was meeting his uncle that day in Jade Lake Park that had first changed her view of him, from a surly, xenophobic Chinese policeman, to a man who blushed easily, who got embarrassed and was sensitive to the feelings of others.

He looked at her and frowned. ‘Why?’

She just shrugged.

Without another word, Li did a U-turn at the next junction and headed east again, and then north towards the northern lakes and Mei Yuan’s hutong.

Yingdingqiao, or Silver Ingot Bridge, was a tiny hump-backed marble bridge, spanning the narrow waterway linking Houhai Lake in the north and Qianhai Lake in the south. It was an ancient commercial crossroads in the comparative backwaters of Beijing’s Northern Lakes district. The lights of a mini-market in an elegant five-sided traditional building blazed out across the water. In brick hovels with tin roofs, old women clattered woks over fiery stoves, sending steam and smoke and wonderful cooking smells issuing into the night air. Li nosed the Jeep carefully over the bridge. Further along the lake to their right, a children’s playground stood silent and deserted in the darkness. And as they turned south along the southern shore of Qianhai Lake, they saw the dazzling spectacle of the 140-year-old Kaorouji restaurant that had been the favourite eating place of Manchu princes in the nineteenth century, serving up roast mutton hotpot and other Muslim delicacies. Its lights twinkled and danced on the other side of the water behind the swaying fronds of weeping willows.

Mei Yuan’s siheyuan was unusually fronted by a small strip of garden with cut grass, shrubs and trees behind a low fence. She and Xinxin were sitting at a table making dumplings when Li and Margaret came in. She was delighted to see Margaret, and hugged her like a mother might hug a daughter she has not seen in months. It was a very un-Chinese show of affection. She beamed and told them both to sit, and apologised profusely to Li for the inconvenience. Her cousin’s husband would only be in hospital for a couple of days, and she could take Xinxin again the day after tomorrow anyway, since it was Sunday and she always took Sundays off. She stopped to draw breath, and they all noticed Xinxin sitting in wide-eyed amazement, her jaw slack, mouth open, as she gazed in wonder at Margaret. This was possibly the first non-Chinese person she had ever seen, or certainly the first she had seen in the flesh.

‘Xinxin, this is Margaret,’ Li told her. ‘She is an American.’ He was not sure if she would even know what an American was. Zigong, in Sichuan Province, where she had grown up, was deep in the heart of rural China. Not many, if any, foreigners would ever have ventured there. And Li had no idea how well acquainted, if at all, she was with Western television programmes. If she had heard Li, she gave no sign of it, but kept staring at Margaret as if unable to believe her eyes.

‘Hello, Xinxin,’ Margaret said. And she held out her hand. ‘I am very pleased to meet you.’

If it was possible, Xinxin’s eyes widened further, and she recoiled from Margaret’s outstretched hand and looked at Li with something like fear in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what she is saying,’ she said. ‘Is it a different kind of Chinese, like you and Mei Yuan speak sometimes?’

‘No, Xinxin,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘It is another language. She has different words to describe the things you and I have the same words for. Sometimes Chinese people learn their words, too. And sometimes they learn ours.’

Li thought how good Mei Yuan was with the child.

‘What’s an American?’ Xinxin asked.

‘The name of your country is China,’ Mei Yuan explained. ‘So you are called Chinese. An American is someone who comes from the country of America.’

Margaret smiled apprehensively, feeling shut out of the conversation. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

Li said, ‘Xinxin’s getting a lesson in geography and linguistics.’

‘Can I touch her hair?’ Xinxin asked.

Li looked at Margaret. ‘She wants to touch your hair.’

‘Sure.’ Margaret remembered with a jolt that it had been in the Muslim quarter in Xi’an with Michael that she had been asked the same thing by the waitresses.

Xinxin tentatively reached out to run her fingers through the silky gold of Margaret’s curls. Her face broke into a wide, and completely disarming smile. ‘It’s so soft,’ she said. ‘Is it real?’

‘Of course it’s real,’ Li said.

‘Can … what did you say her name was?’

‘Margaret.’

‘Can Mar-ga-ret help us make dumplings?’

Li looked doubtful. ‘We can’t really stay long, Xinxin. We have to get you home to bed.’

‘Oh, please …’ She widened her eyes to try to look her most appealing.

Li said to Margaret. ‘She wants you to help make dumplings.’

Margaret smiled, delighted. ‘I’d like that.’

For twenty minutes or more they sat drinking green tea and rolling round thin pancakes from pieces of dough cut off a roll. Xinxin showed Margaret how to spoon a little of the dumpling mixture into the centre of the pancake, fold it over and then crimp it around the edges, so that it looked a little like a seashell. The secret of the perfect dumpling was to finish it off by squeezing the mixture into the very centre by applying pressure with both thumbs and forefingers. The first few times Margaret made a mess of it, and the mixture came squirting out over the table, to Xinxin’s endless mirth and delight. Her giggling was infectious, and finally Li and Mei Yuan and Margaret were all reduced to helpless laughter, too.

Oblivious to the fact that Margaret could not understand a word, Xinxin chided her for getting it wrong and explained how it should be done, demonstrating as she went and producing perfect dumplings every time. Eventually, Margaret, too, was producing dumplings that were passable, if not perfect.

Xinxin nodded her satisfaction and began counting the dumplings they had made, making Margaret count with her. Mei Yuan helped with the numbers, and Margaret very quickly discovered that you only had to learn to count to ten to make almost any number. Ten-five was fifteen, five-ten was fifty. Fifty-nine was five-ten-nine. They had made ninety-five dumplings, so she never got to learn what a hundred was.

‘You will stay and have dumplings before you go,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘They will cook in ten minutes.’

But Li became suddenly self-conscious. ‘Another time, Mei Yuan,’ he said. ‘I must get Xinxin home. And I don’t want to keep Margaret back any longer.’

Xinxin said, ‘Is Mar-ga-ret coming, too?’

‘I’m afraid not, little one,’ Li said. ‘We have to drop her off at her hotel.’

A black cloud cast a shadow over Xinxin’s face and her mouth turned down in a sulky temper. ‘Won’t go without Mar-ga-ret,’ she said.

Li sighed.

‘What’s wrong?’ Margaret asked.

‘The Little Emperor syndrome,’ Li said. ‘She won’t go unless you come with us.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘OK. I’ll go back with you.’ For a moment their eyes met and she felt strangely uncomfortable, and flushed with embarrassment. To his annoyance Li blushed too, and he turned to find Mei Yuan watching them appraisingly.

Xinxin’s good humour returned immediately she learned the good news. Mei Yuan gathered her things together and put them in a bag along with the books she had brought the other night. ‘A book is like a garden carried in the pocket,’ Xinxin told Li.

Li frowned his surprise and looked at Mei Yuan who smiled. ‘I’ve been teaching her old Chinese proverbs,’ she said. ‘You’ll probably hear a few more of them.’

‘That reminds me,’ Li said. ‘I have the solution to your riddle.’

Mei Yuan smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘You do?’

‘You deliberately misled me,’ Li said. ‘You planted a whole set of figures in my head that did not make sense. You had me wasting my time trying to make them work.’

‘What was the riddle?’ Margaret asked.

Mei Yuan told her. ‘That’s easy,’ said Margaret. ‘Your arithmetic doesn’t add up.’

‘I just told you that,’ Li protested.

But Margaret gave them the solution anyway. Starting with the twenty-five and adding the three and the two to make thirty. Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. She said, ‘I give you a stone, you give me back jade.’

‘What about me?’ Li said. ‘I got the answer, too.’

‘But you took so long,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘the stone I gave you turned to stone.’

Margaret laughed. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Here’s one for both of you.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It is National Day in Beijing. The middle of the day. Everyone is out in the streets. Li Yan walks from Xidamochang Street to Beijing Railway Station, and yet not a soul sees him. How is this possible?’

Both Li and Mei Yuan were silent for a moment as they considered the puzzle. Mei Yuan shook her head. ‘This I will need to think about.’ She opened the door and ruffled Xinxin’s head, turning to Li. ‘You have a very clever lady, Li Yan. Take care not to let her go.’

And they both blushed fiercely.

Xinxin’s face was relaxed and beautiful in the repose of sleep. Margaret sat on the edge of the bed and brushed a few stray strands of hair from her cheek and gazed down on her innocence. Xinxin had ‘read’ to her from her picture book when they got back to the apartment. And although she could not really read, she had been read the story so often by Mei Yuan in the last couple of days that she knew it off by heart. She still did not fully grasp that Margaret could not understand what she said, and gabbled to her constantly, tutting with irritation whenever Margaret responded in English. ‘You must teach her to speak Chinese,’ she had said to Li in annoyance.

Now, as she lay sleeping, Margaret’s heart went out to her. Abandoned by her mother, rejected by her father, landed on an uncle who had not the first idea of how to look after her. And she felt for Li, too. It was an awesome responsibility, the life of another person. Particularly one so young and utterly dependent. And it was not a responsibility for which he had asked. Somewhere, Margaret became aware, deep inside of her there was a latent desire to share in that responsibility. Something hormonal, she supposed. That chemical spark that fired a woman’s desire to have children. She was thirty-one years old, and she had never once felt the desire to have children. Until now. Absurdly. Inappropriately. Impossibly. And yet, as she gazed on the sleeping child, some primeval instinct was conjuring a longing to hold her to her breast, to protect her from all the dreadful slings and arrows that life would throw at her.

Suddenly aware that a constriction in her throat was causing her to breathe erratically, she looked up to find Li standing watching her from the doorway. Her face coloured in embarrassment, as if she believed he could somehow read her thoughts. She looked away, and saw the photographs of Old Yifu on the wall, and unaccountably felt tears filling her eyes. She blinked them quickly away, looking down at the bed to hide them from Li. She picked up Xinxin’s picture book and stood up, pretending to scrutinise the pages. Her eyes fell on the vertical columns of large Chinese characters that ran up the right margin of each page, and clutching at something to say to hide her emotion she said, ‘Do you really read from right to left?’

Li took the book from her and closed it gently. ‘Only when the characters are on the vertical. When they are horizontal we read left to right.’ He seemed very close now. She could hear his breathing, and the familiar smell of him made her heart beat a little faster. He said, ‘They say that Chinese children learn to read up and down because they are very obedient and always obey their parents.’ He made an up and down nodding motion with his head. ‘But Western children are very disobedient and never do what they are told. That is why they read from left to right.’ And he moved his head from side to side as if shaking it.

She smiled. ‘When you say “they” say, I take it you mean the Chinese.’

‘Of course.’ He dropped the book on the bed and she felt an arm slip around her waist. He lowered his head to kiss her, and she tipped her face towards him in an instinctive response. It was only the shock of his lips on hers that suddenly made her pull away.

‘No!’ she said, and then suddenly remembered Xinxin and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘No, Li.’ They stood staring at each other for a moment. Then she said, ‘I’d better go. I’ll get a taxi in the street.’ And she hurried past him, stopping in the living room to pick up her folders, before running out and down the stairs. He heard the door slam behind her, and felt the tears run warm on his cheeks.

IV

Margaret struggled out of her taxi, laden with the files that Li had dumped on her. She fumbled to pay the driver, then hurried into the Ritan Hotel, past the deserted lobby shop with its display of overpriced trinkets, and turned right towards the elevators.

In the short taxi ride from Li’s apartment to her hotel, her distress had turned to anger. How dare Li play with her emotions like that? How could she ever hope to accept his rejection if he could not accept it himself, if he became jealous of any relationship she had with another man, if he was going to succumb to his own weakness every time they were together? And she was just as angry with herself for almost having given way to desires she had been trying to sublimate. Desires she had been forced to sublimate. What had seemed clear and easy and right with Michael just twenty-four hours before was suddenly thrown into confusion again. She needed time to think.

‘Margaret.’ She turned at the sound of Michael’s voice just as the elevator doors slid open.

‘Michael. What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you.’ He approached across the vast expanse of marble looking at his watch and smiling ruefully. ‘For the last two hours. You people work long days.’ His face clouded. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Margaret. About this morning.’

‘I wanted to talk to you, too, Michael.’ Margaret sighed. ‘I can’t apologise enough. It was just Li Yan being jealous. Trying to get back at me through you.’ The elevator doors slid shut again.

Michael frowned. ‘I thought you and he were history.’

‘So did I.’

He shuffled awkwardly. ‘Look, Margaret. The thing is, if it gets around that I’m some kind of suspect in a murder investigation, it could completely ruin my connections here in China.’

Margaret couldn’t stop herself laughing. ‘Oh, Michael,’ she said. ‘You’re not a suspect. Li was just playing silly games with the most tenuous of links. There’s no question of anyone thinking you had anything to do with this. You were with me the evening Yuan was killed, you weren’t even in the country when another two of the murders took place.’ She paused, gasping her frustration. ‘What can I say? Forget it. It’s not even an issue.’

He seemed to relax a little then, and smiled. ‘Have you eaten?’ She shook her head. He said, ‘Good, ’cos I booked us a table at a little place I know.’ He checked his watch again. ‘They should still be serving. Just.’

She glanced down at herself. ‘Michael, I’ll have to change first. Fifteen minutes. That’s all. I promise.’

He grinned. ‘OK. Starting from …’ he raised his wrist and began pushing buttons on his watch, ‘… now.’ He started the stopwatch function. She pressed the call button for the elevator.

He held open her hotel room door as she staggered in and dropped her files on the bed, papers spilling out across the bedspread and dropping on the floor. He stooped to start picking them up. ‘Just leave that stuff,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it later.’ She grabbed some fresh underwear from a drawer, and took a pair of jeans and a lemon tee shirt from hangers in the wardrobe. ‘A quick shower,’ she said. ‘I promise I won’t be long.’

He grinned and tapped his watch. ‘Still counting.’

She hurried into the bathroom and quickly stripped off and started the shower running. She caught a glimpse of herself naked in the mirror and remembered being with Michael the night before, his hands gentle on her breasts and buttocks, the great sense of his contained strength and control as he slipped inside her. The steam from the shower misted her reflection and she turned to step into the stream of deliciously hot water.

‘So if I’m no longer the prime suspect, who is?’ she heard Michael call through from the bedroom.

‘It’s a long story,’ she called back.

‘Better make it quick, then. You’ve only got another ten minutes.’

She laughed and started lathering herself with a big soft sponge drizzled with shower gel. ‘Yuan’s father was killed back in the sixties by a group of six Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.’ She spluttered briefly as she pushed her head back under the shower and let the water run down her face. ‘Yuan was at university in America and didn’t know about it till he got his mother’s diary thirty years later. Seems he came back to take his revenge.’

Michael said something but she couldn’t hear him.

‘What was that?’

He raised his voice. ‘So who killed Yuan?’

‘The best bet is some guy they call Birdie. Works at the bird market.’

‘Why would he want to kill Yuan?’

‘Because Birdie’s the last surviving member of the group of Red Guards that killed Yuan’s father. He was sure to have been on Yuan’s hit list.’ She rinsed the shampoo out of her hair. ‘Mind you, he might be the best bet, but he’s a pretty poor one. The guy’s a misfit. Lives on his own with a bunch of birds. Suffers from nerves and can’t do proper work … and a whole bunch of other reasons I wouldn’t even bore you with.’

She turned off the shower and stepped out of the bath reaching, eyes closed, for the bath towel on the rail. She felt a hand touching her and screamed with fright, opening her eyes with a shock. Michael stood grinning in the steam-filled room, holding out the bath towel. ‘Jesus, Michael!’ she said. ‘You gave me a fright.’ She snatched the towel and wrapped it around herself.

He cocked an eyebrow and said, ‘That’s not what you said last night.’ And he slipped his arms around her waist and drew her towards him.

‘You’ll get all wet,’ she protested.

‘Tough.’ And he leaned in to her and dropped his head to kiss the softness of her neck. She felt a wave of pleasure and desire weaken her knees, and smelled the heady scent of his patchouli lacing the perfume of her bath gel. She took his face in both her hands, feeling the scratch of his whiskers, and raised it to meet hers. They kissed. A long, passionate kiss, and she felt his erection press against her belly. And suddenly she thought of Li, stooping as he bent to kiss her. The touch of his lips. Her sudden fear, and flight from the apartment. She broke away from Michael, breathing hard, and her smile was a little strained. ‘Better hurry if I’m going to beat that clock,’ she said.

The Ya Mei Wei restaurant was tucked away down the unpromising Dong Wang hutong off Kuan Street, opposite the AVICS space technology building. As Margaret stepped from the taxi she had to dodge a phalanx of cyclists without lights, jostling for space in the strip of road left to them by manic night drivers freed from the constraints of daytime and rush-hour traffic. With bicycle bells still ringing in her ears she made it to the sidewalk and peered down the dark, misty hutong. ‘We’re eating down there?’ she asked. And when Michael just nodded, she said, ‘This isn’t another place like the one you took me to in Xi’an?’

‘No,’ he said confidently. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

Fifty yards down, crumbling brick walls rising above them on either side, two forlorn red lanterns hung outside a maroon-painted wooden doorway that was firmly shut. Michael rapped on the door.

‘This is it?’ Margaret said.

Michael smiled. ‘You should never judge a book by its cover.’

A handsome woman of about forty, wearing a pink silk suit, opened the door. Her face lit up in a smile when she saw Michael and she stretched out her hand to shake his. ‘Mr Zimmerman,’ she said. ‘I am so pleased to see you again.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘You are a little late.’

Michael raised his hands in abject apology. ‘I am so sorry, Zhao Yi. Are we too late?’

‘Of course not,’ Zhao Yi said, her smile broadening. ‘Never too late for good friend.’

Michael made the introductions and Zhao Yi ushered them inside. The contrast with the hutong outside could not have been more startling. This was another world. The centrepiece was a reproduction of a traditional Beijing-style courtyard with sloping green tile roofs and a tiny bridge over a small stream. Along one side, doors led off to a huge dining lounge. Along the other, more doors led off a narrow corridor to private rooms behind screen windows. Zhao Yi led them across the courtyard and into their own private room where a table was set for two, candles burning, soft classical Chinese music playing from discreetly hidden speakers. It seemed they had the whole restaurant to themselves. It was nearly ten o’clock, long past Beijing evening meal time.

Immediately several girls in matching silk buzzed around them like bees, bringing hot and cold starter dishes to the centre of the table. ‘Just help yourself,’ Michael said. ‘As little or as much as you want. They’re only appetisers.’ He nodded towards the stainless-steel pots that stood beside each place on circular racks above big purple candles. ‘Have you had Mongolian hotpot before?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a real treat here.’ He said to Zhao Yi, ‘We’ll have a bottle of that Rioja you have. The ’93.’

She nodded and melted away, leaving Michael and Margaret to pick at the selection of starters: spicy lamb, roasted peanuts in chilli, fish in sweet and sour sauce. The wine came and Michael raised his glass to touch Margaret’s. The light from the candles flickered and refracted red in the wine, and danced in Michael’s eyes. ‘To us,’ he said.

‘To us.’ And Margaret found that irritating sense of guilt returning. She took a big swallow of wine and determined not to let Li ruin her evening in the way he had spoiled her day.

Michael said, ‘There’s one thing puzzling me.’ He paused. ‘No, two actually.’ He thought for a moment. ‘This Birdie character … If there were six Red Guards, and only three murders, how is he the last surviving member?’

Margaret laughed. ‘That’s your training, isn’t it? You don’t miss thing. Every tiny detail’s important.’

‘I told you. Archaeology is just like police work. A slow, painstaking process of digging into the past, uncovering and recreating an event, or a place.’

‘You should have been a Chinese policeman. They like their detail, too.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘I was just talking shorthand, Michael. He’s not the last surviving member. There’s another one. A woman, but she’s blind. The third one was killed at Tiananmen Square.’ She took some more fish. ‘This stuff’s fantastic.’ She washed it down with more wine and said, ‘So what was the other thing?’

Michael put both elbows on the table and leaned towards her, maintaining a very steady eye contact. ‘If it’s over between you and Detective Li, why is he jealous of me?’

Margaret wished with all her heart that Michael had not raised the spectre of Li again. It was hard enough for her to keep him from her thoughts without Michael constantly reminding her. She sighed. Honesty was the best policy. ‘The reason we broke up was because his bosses told him our relationship was …’ she searched for the right words, ‘… inappropriate for a high-ranking Chinese police officer.’

‘You or his career, in other words.’ She nodded. ‘And he chose his career.’

Margaret felt a stab of annoyance. ‘It’s not that simple, Michael.’

He held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry. Things never are.’

‘I guess,’ said Margaret, ‘he’s just finding it very hard to live with his decision.’

‘And what about you?’

‘It was hard, I’ll admit. It wasn’t what I wanted. But it’s history now. I’m only looking forward.’

He smiled at her fondly and reached out to squeeze her hand. ‘I’m glad,’ he said.

The girls came then and lit the paraffin candles, and filled the pots above them with boiling spicy stock that bubbled and steamed at the table. Plates of raw meat — marinated lamb, wafer-thin sliced pork, strips of beef, marinated prawns still in their shells — were placed before them along with plates piled high with crispy lettuce. They cooked everything themselves, a piece at a time, in the boiling stock, and then dipped it in hot soy dips before letting the flavours explode in their mouths.

‘This is wonderful,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve never tasted meat or prawns so tender.’ And she copied Michael, cooking the lettuce in the stock as well. It cleansed the palate between meat or fish.

They finished the wine and Michael ordered another bottle. Margaret felt warm, and sensuous and sated, and Michael was making her laugh a lot with a story about a misunderstanding of French farce proportions during a dig in Egypt. Then, after a while, she realised she had got a little drunk, and that Michael had stopped talking and was leaning his chin on his hands and gazing at her across the table.

‘I know it’s too soon to tell you I love you,’ he said suddenly. ‘But I don’t care.’

And just as suddenly, Margaret felt very sober and her heart was pounding. ‘What?’

He produced a small red jewellery box from his pocket and opened it to reveal a rose-gold ring set with a diamond solitaire. ‘If someone had asked me a week ago I’d have told them I never expected to marry. But I hadn’t met you then.’ He paused and she saw that his eyes were moist. ‘That’s why I wanted to know about Detective Li. I’m crazy about you, Margaret. I want you to marry me.’

She sat and looked at him in stunned silence for what seemed like an eternity. Then she laughed in disbelief and shook her head. ‘Is that a proposal?’

‘It sounded like one to me.’

‘Well, then, the answer’s no.’

His face coloured. ‘Why?’

She laughed again. ‘Because I hardly know you, Michael. We only met a few days ago.’

He held her gaze for a long time, then smiled and snapped the box shut. ‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

‘Because you know it’s true.’

‘Well, if that’s the only problem, it’s easily remedied. With a little time and a lot of exposure.’ His smile faded and he looked at her very seriously. ‘I mean it, Margaret. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before.’ Then he shook his head, laughing at himself. ‘And you’re making me feel like a clumsy schoolboy getting his first refusal.’

‘Oh, Michael.’ She reached out to put her hand over his. ‘This is all just too soon for me. I need time. To get over Li. To sort out my feelings about you.’ She paused. ‘Last night was wonderful. But I’ve got to know there’s more to it than that. I threw away seven years of my life married to the wrong man. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.’

He nodded. ‘I understand. I do. So I’ll put the ring on ice, as well as your answer. Because I’m not going to give up on you, Margaret. I’m just not letting you get away that easily. So if you really want to close the door on the past, I’m going to be right there helping you do it.’