The Runner

I

Li cycled up Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie Street as the first light broke in a leaden sky. He had taken his father out for a meal the night before, and they had sat staring at each other in silence across the table as they ate. For all the hurt and misunderstanding that lay between them, they had nothing to say to each other. He had been tempted to call Margaret and suggest he drop by, but it was her first night with her mother and instinct had told him to stay well away. He would meet her soon enough at the betrothal. Instead he had gone to bed early, and risen early to be free of the atmosphere that his father had brought to the apartment. He wasn’t sure when he would get away from the office tonight, so his sister had agreed to collect the old man from Li’s apartment and take him to the Imperial Restaurant on Tiananmen Square where they had booked the room for the betrothal meeting. Li was dreading it.

The narrow street was busy with traffic and bicycles. Braziers flared and spat sparks on the sidewalk as hawkers cooked up breakfast in great stacks of bamboo steamers for workers on the early shift. Everyone wore hats today and more muffling. Although it was perhaps a degree or two milder, the air was raw with a stinging humidity that swept in on a north wind laden with the promise of snow.

It was too early for Mei Yuan to be peddling her jian bing on the corner of Dongzhimen Beixiaojie. Right now she would be among those hardy practitioners of tai chi, who would have gathered among the trees of Zhongshan Park as soon as it opened its gates. He would catch breakfast later.

Lights flooded out from the offices of Section One into the dark, tree-lined Beixinqiao Santiao, as Li wheeled his bike past the red gable of the vehicle pound and chained it to the railing at the side entrance. The first officers were arriving for the day shift as the night shift drifted home for something to eat and a few hours’ sleep.

Wu was at his desk when Li popped his head around the door of the detectives’ room. The television was on, and he was watching an early news bulletin. He jumped when Li spoke. ‘Anything new overnight?’

‘Oh, it’s you, Chief.’ He hurriedly turned the sound down on the television. ‘We got beat in the swimming. And didn’t do too well in the track and field either. We might just have pinched it, only the women’s three thousand meters champion failed to turn up, and the Americans took it by half a lap.’

Li sighed. ‘I was talking about the investigation, Wu.’

‘Sorry, Chief. Nothing really. A lot of legwork and not much progress.’

The door of Tao’s office opened, and Qian emerged from it clutching an armful of folders, juggling them to free a hand to switch out the light. ‘Morning, Chief.’

‘Qian. I thought it was a bit early for the Deputy Section Chief.’ Qian grinned and dumped the folders on his desk.

Li was halfway up the corridor before Qian caught up with him. ‘Chief,’ he called after him, and Li stopped. ‘It’s probably nothing, but since you were interested in the break-in at that photographer’s studio, I thought you might like to know.’

‘What’s that?’ Li asked, his interest less than lukewarm. He continued on up the corridor. Qian followed.

‘I got a call from the local bureau first thing to let me know. There was another break-in again last night. Only this time Macken was there and they gave him a bit of a going over.’

Li stopped. ‘Is he alright?’ He had a picture in his memory of Macken as a small, fragile man. It wouldn’t take much to damage him.

‘Just cuts and braises, I think. The thing is, Chief, it was something very specific they were after.’ He paused, knowing he had Li’s interest now.

‘What?’ Li said.

‘The contact prints he made from the negatives they stole the night before.’

Li scowled. He was more than interested now. ‘How the hell did they know he’d taken contact prints?’

Qian made a tiny shrug. ‘That’s what I wondered, Chief. I mean, outside of the local bureau, and the three of us, who even knew he’d made them?’

Li glanced at his watch and made an instant decision. ‘Let’s go see him.’

Macken and Yixuan lived in a small two-bedroom apartment on the tenth floor of a new tower block development in Chaoyang District. Yixuan was not at home when they arrived, and Macken showed them into his study. It was a small, untidy room, walls stuck with prints that had been pasted there for reference. The Macintosh computer on his desk was almost submerged by drifts of papers and prints and stacks of books, mostly of or about photography. A bureau pushed against one wall was stuffed to overflowing with more paperwork and rolls of exposed film. Strips of negatives hung from a length of wire strung across the window.

‘’Scuse the mess, folks,’ Macken said. ‘I’m gonna have to get this goddamn place cleared out before the baby arrives. It’s gonna be the nursery.’ He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. ‘You guys smoke?’ He grinned shiftily. ‘Only room she’ll let me smoke in. And only when she’s out. She says I’ve got to give up when the baby arrives. God knows why. I only smoke ‘cos there’s no other way to get filtered air in this goddamn city.’

Qian took one. Li declined, and Macken lit up. He had a bruise and swelling beneath his left eye, and a nasty graze on his forehead and cheek. Macken caught Li looking.

‘They threatened to do a lot worse. And, hey, I’m no hero. So I gave ’em the contacts.’

Li said, ‘Would you be able to describe them?’

‘Sure, they were Chinese.’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘What can I tell you?’ His smile faded. ‘What I can’t figure is how the hell they knew I had them.’

‘Who else knew?’ Li asked.

‘Outside of me, Yixuan, and the officers from the bureau, no one. Except you guys, I guess.’ He puffed on his cigarette. ‘So when the officers from the bureau came the second time, I didn’t tell them I still had a copy. I suppose it’s safe enough to tell you.’

‘You made two contact sheets?’ Li said.

‘No. After the negatives got taken the other night I scanned the contacts into the computer.’ He searched about through the mess of papers on his desk and found a Zip disk. He held it up. ‘Brought ’em home with me, too. Wanna take a look?’

Li nodded, and as Macken loaded the file into his computer, glanced at Qian. Qian’s English was limited, and Macken’s was quickfire and very colloquial. Li wondered how Qian had managed with him on the phone the other day. ‘You following this?’

Qian shrugged. ‘Just about.’ And, as if he had read Li’s mind, added, ‘His wife translated for us yesterday.’

Macken brought the contact sheet on to his screen. Each photograph was tiny and difficult to interpret. ‘I can blow ’em up, one by one,’ he said. ‘Quality’s not great, but at least you can see ’em.’ With the mouse, he drew a dotted line around the first picture, hit a key and the print filled the screen. It was very grainy, but clearly a shot of a swimming pool, stained glass windows along one side, mosaic walls at either end depicting scenes from ancient China. ‘Can’t figure why anyone would want to steal this shit,’ he said. ‘I mean, they’re not even good pics. I just rattled ’em off for reference. You wanna see ’em all?’

Li nodded, and Macken took them through each of the prints, one by one. Shots of comfortable lounge seats arranged around giant TV screens, massage rooms with one to four beds, the sauna, the communications centre with young women wearing headsets sitting at banks of computers arranged in a pentagon around a central pillar. There was a restaurant, a tepinyaki room, a conference room. In a shot of the main entrance, light falling through twenty-foot windows on to polished marble, there were five figures emerging from a doorway. Three of them, in lounge suits, looked like management types, with expensive haircuts and prosperous faces. Li could nearly smell the aftershave. A fourth was a big man who wore a tracksuit and had long hair tied back in a ponytail. A fifth, unexpectedly, was white, European or American. He looked to be a man in his sixties, abundant silver hair smoothed back from a tanned face against which his neatly cropped silver beard was starkly contrasted. He looked paunchy and well fed, but unlike the others was dressed casually, in what looked like a corduroy jacket, slacks and old brown shoes. His white shirt was open at the neck.

Li asked him to hold that one on screen. ‘Do you know who these people are?’

Macken said, ‘The one on the left is the CEO. The bigwig. The other two suits, I dunno. Other management, I guess. They all look like clones, these people. The guy in the tracksuit is a personal trainer. They got a gym down the stairs, you’ll see it in a minute. Members can ask the trainer to design workouts just for them. The guy in the beard, no idea.’

‘Can you give me a printout of that one?’

‘Sure. I can print them all off if you want.’

‘That would be good.’

Macken resumed their journey through the remaining contacts. The gym was well equipped with every mechanical aid to muscle-building you could imagine, plus some. Macken cackled. ‘Looks like the kind of place they might have put you in the Spanish Inquisition.’

There was a shot of the toilets, marble and mirrors in abundance. ‘Goddamn john smelled like a flower shop,’ Macken said. ‘Gives the lie to that old joke about Chinese toilets. You know it?’ Li shook his head. ‘How long does it take to go to the toilet in China?’ Li shrugged and Macken grinned. ‘As long as you can hold your breath.’ He laughed at his own wit. ‘But that place is so goddamn clean you could eat your dinner off the floor.’ Li was not amused.

They came to a picture of a large office with a checkerboard wall at one end opposite a huge horseshoe desk and a glass meeting table with five chairs around it. One wall was also completely glass, with an armed security guard standing self-consciously by the door. The room was filled with potted plants, and a young woman stood by the desk dressed all in black, flared trousers and a polo-neck sweater. Her hair was drawn back from an attractive, finely featured face with a slash of red lipstick. ‘That’s JoJo,’ Macken said, and he turned to Qian. ‘You know, the one I told you about yesterday.’ Qian nodded.

Li said, ‘The one you thought was missing.’

‘I don’t just think it,’ Macken said. ‘She is missing.’ His flippancy deserted him, his twinkling expression replaced by a frown of genuine concern. ‘After I spoke to you people yesterday I made a real effort to try and track her down. She’s not at her work. I phoned several times and they said she hadn’t been there for days. I’ve called her apartment about ten times. No answer. Her cellphone’s been disconnected. Her emails get returned as undeliverable. I even got Yixuan to call her parents, but they haven’t heard from her in weeks.’ He half smiled. ‘My reasons for wanting to find her ain’t entirely altruistic. She set this job up for me, but I ain’t signed a contract yet, and without a contract there ain’t no money.’

‘When did you take the pictures?’ Li asked.

‘Day before yesterday.’

‘So she’s only really been “missing” for two days.’

Macken thought about it and shrugged. ‘I guess. Seems longer.’

Li nodded towards the screen. ‘Why the armed guard?’

‘Oh, they got this big collection of priceless artefacts in the boss’ office.’ He pointed at a door beyond the desk. In there. ‘Vases, jewellery, ancient weapons, you name it. Worth a goddamn fortune.’

‘Do you have a picture of it?’

‘Nah. They wouldn’t let me in there. I was real damn curious. Asked, you know. But they weren’t having any of it.’

Li turned to Qian. ‘I think we’d better pay this place a visit, don’t you.’

II

The Beijing OneChina Recreation Club was in the heart of a redeveloped area of Xicheng District on the west side of the city. The twin apartment blocks above it had views over Yuyuantan Park and the lake. The entrance sat back from the road, behind a high stone wall. Armed security guards manned electronic gates. Beyond, a small ornamental garden had been created in the heart of what was otherwise pure cityscape. A cobbled path serpentined its way through manicured grass to a summerhouse with exaggeratedly up-turned eaves at its four corners. An artificial stream, which in summer would be alive with carp, was frozen solid. Great attention had been paid to the feng shui of this place. Li and Qian climbed nine steps to the doors, and Li glanced into a large glass room displaying Ming vases and artefacts of war, bronze weapons two thousand years old, a skull of earliest Han man. Facing them as they entered were three gold statuettes fronting a huge tapestry woven in gold thread. Li had called ahead on his cellphone, and they were expected. Two girls in shimmering gold qipaos bowed to them in greeting as they entered, and a tall young man in a dark suit asked them to follow him.

He led them through hushed corridors, walls lined with pale hessian, past polished beechwood doors, tables with statues and flowers, and unexpected groupings of sofas and lounge chairs in odd private corners. They passed the glass wall of what Li recognised as the communications centre. The girls at the computers glanced at them as they passed. At the end of the hall they took an elevator up two floors to the administration level and out into the office where JoJo had stood by her desk watching Macken take his photographs. Thick-piled carpets deadened their footsteps as the flunky led them past the armed guard at the entrance. He knocked on the door behind JoJo’s empty desk and waited until he heard a voice invite them to enter. Then he opened the door and let Li and Qian in.

Li recognised the CEO from the photograph. He was young, perhaps only thirty, with the square-jawed, round-eyed good looks of a Hong Kong film actor. His silk suit was beautifully cut, and as he shook Li’s hand, Li noticed that his fingernails were not only manicured, but glazed with a clear varnish.

‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Section Chief Li,’ he said. ‘Your reputation goes before you. I’m Fan Zhilong, chief executive of the company, and the club.’ His cheeks dimpled attractively when he smiled, and his manner was easy and confident. He gave Qian’s hand a cursory shake. ‘Come in, come in.’ He closed the door behind them, and they crossed an acre of cream carpet to a boomerang-shaped black lacquer desk. Three chairs were arranged along the near side of it, and Fan urged them to be seated while he rounded the desk to his executive leather. He lifted a couple of business cards and handed one to each of them and then sat back.

Li glanced at the card. Fan Zhilong was CEO of OneChina Holdings Limited, a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and owners of the Beijing OneChina Recreation Club. He looked up to find Fan regarding him thoughtfully. ‘What can I help you with, Section Chief?’ The desk in front of him was almost empty. There was a diary, a blotter, a pen holder and a leather-bound calculator. At the far end was a keyboard and flat screen monitor. Mr. Fan did not seem like a man overburdened with paperwork.

‘I am hoping that I can, perhaps, be of assistance to you,’ Li said. And as he spoke, he noticed the large alcove beyond the desk. The priceless artefacts of which Macken had spoken were arranged on black shelves lining the three walls, each with its own spotlight. Plates, vases, daggers, tiny figurines. A baby grand piano sat in the centre of the space, beautifully carved, polished and lit in the cross-beams of the various spots.

Fan’s dimples reappeared. ‘I’m intrigued.’

‘We are investigating a break-in at the studio of the photographer you commissioned to photograph the club for your publicity brochure.’

‘Ah, yes. Mr. Macken. The American. Of course, the job has not exactly been promised to him. We still have to approve his submission.’ Fan paused. ‘A break-in?’

‘Yes,’ Li said. ‘What’s odd is that the only thing stolen was the negative of the film he shot here in your club.’

Fan looked suitably perplexed. ‘Why would anyone want to steal that? Are you sure that’s what they were after?’

‘They came back the following night when they learned he had taken contact prints and demanded that he hand them over.’

Fan frowned. ‘Well, I’m sure it’s all very puzzling, but I don’t really see what it has to do with us.’

‘Perhaps nothing at all,’ Li said. ‘But it turned out that Macken had copied his contact prints into his computer. So fortunately he still had copies that we were able to look at.’ He lifted a large envelope. ‘In fact he was able to run off prints for us.’

‘May I see?’ Fan leaned across the desk, and Li handed him the envelope. He drew out the prints to look at them.

‘It was while he was showing me them that Mr. Macken told me about the items you have on display here in your office, explaining that was why you have an armed guard on the door out there.’ Li paused. ‘That’s when it occurred to me that the people who were after these prints may well have been in search of pictures of the interior of the club in preparation for a robbery.’

Fan glanced up at him. ‘You think so?’

‘It’s possible, Mr. Fan. Just what kind of price would you put on your…’ he nodded towards the alcove ‘…collection?’

‘The insurance company valued it at around five million yuan, Section Chief. They would only insure it if we provided armed security. We’re pretty well prepared for any eventuality. So I’m not too concerned about the possibility of a robbery.’

‘That’s reassuring to hear, Mr. Fan.’ Li held out his hand for the photographs. ‘But I thought it worth making you aware of what had happened.’ Fan slipped the prints back in the envelope and handed them across the desk. ‘I’ll not waste any more of your time.’ Li stood up. ‘It’s quite a place you have here. Do you have many members?’

‘Oh, yes, we’ve done brisk business since we opened six months ago. However, it was a massive investment, you understand. Three years just to build the complex. Which is a long time to tie up nearly thirty million dollars of your capital. So we are always anxious to attract new members.’

‘Hence the brochure.’

‘Exactly. And, of course, the photographs will also be going on to our Internet site. So they’re hardly a state secret.’ Fan paused. ‘Would you like a look around?’

‘I’d be very interested,’ Li said. ‘As long as you are not viewing us as prospective clients. One membership would cost more than the combined year’s earnings of my entire section.’

Fan smiled ingratiatingly, dimples pitting his cheeks. ‘Of course. But, then, we do have special introductory rates for VIPs such as yourself. We already count several senior figures in the Beijing municipal administration among our members, as well as a number of elected representatives of the National People’s Congress. We even have some members from the Central Committee of the CCP.’

Li bridled, although he tried hard not to show it. This sounded to his experienced ear like both a bribe and a threat. A cheap membership on offer, as well as a warning that Fan was not without serious influence in high places. Why on earth would he feel the need to make either? He said, ‘Is membership exclusively for Chinese?’

‘Not exclusively,’ Fan said. ‘Although, as it happens, all of our members are.’

‘Oh?’ Li pulled out the prints again and flipped through them until he found the photograph of the four Chinese and the Westerner. He held it up for Fan to see. ‘Who’s this, then?’

Fan squinted at the picture and shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But that’s you in the photograph, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ He looked at the picture again. ‘I think he was a friend of one of the members. They are allowed guests. But I can’t remember who he was.’ He held out his hand towards a door opposite his desk. ‘If you’d like to follow me, gentlemen.’

The CEO led them into a private lounge, and then beyond a screen to double glass doors leading to the swimming pool they had seen in Macken’s photographs. The coloured light from the stained-glass windows shimmered across the surface of the pool in a million fractured shards. The air was warm and humid and heavy with the scent of chlorine. ‘One of the perks of the job,’ Fan said. ‘An en-suite pool. I can take a dip any time I like.’

He led them down a tiled staircase to the sauna below. In a large chamber, walls and floor lined with pink marble, they sat on a chaise longue to remove their shoes and slide their feet into soft-soled slippers. Another dark-suited flunky led them into a long corridor flanked by pillars. At intervals along each wall, the carved heads of mythical sea creatures spouted water into troughs of clear water filled with pebbles and carp. The sauna area was huge. The floors were laid with rush matting, and the walls lined by individual dressing-tables with mirrors and hair-driers for the more vain among the members. There were private changing rooms, and cane furniture with soft cream cushions. The sauna itself lay behind floor-to-ceiling glass walls, and steps led up to a bubbling plunge pool that swept around a central column. More water cascaded from a modern sculpture, and hidden lighting created a dramatic visual effect to accompany the sounds of rushing water.

‘We’re very proud of our sauna,’ Fan said. ‘It is a great favourite with our members.’

He took them through into the lobby which served the physiotherapy and massage rooms. A pretty girl in club uniform smiled at them from behind a reception desk. The rooms were as Li and Qian had seen them in Macken’s photographs, low beds covered with white towels facing large TV screens. Li wondered what activities other than the buying and selling of international stock really took place in these rooms.

Upstairs, Fan took them through several conference rooms and into his own private entertainment area. Soft settees were set around low tables and a pull-down projection TV screen. There was a large, round banqueting table, and through an arch, the aural accompaniment to the food was provided in the form of a grand piano, with chairs and music stands set out for a string quartet.

‘Although, essentially, the entertainment room is provided for the use of the CEO,’ Fan said, ‘it can also be hired out by members. As, of course, can the main dining room itself, as well as several smaller dining rooms. But the tepanyaki room is the most popular for private functions.’ He led them down a corridor into a small oblong room where it was possible to seat eight around a huge rectangular hotplate where a Japanese chef would prepare the food as you waited.

Li had never seen such opulence. And it was hard to believe that while China’s nouveau riche gambled their new-found wealth on the international exchanges, and sat here dining on exotic foods, or basking in the sauna, or swimming languidly from one end of the pool to the other, people a matter of streets away shared stinking communal toilets and counted their fen to pay for an extra piece of fruit at the market. He found it distasteful, almost obscene. A bubble of fantasy in a sea of grim reality.

They followed Fan back through a labyrinth of corridors to the main entrance hall. Fan looked back over his shoulder. ‘Give you a taste for the good life, Section Chief?’

‘I’m quite happy with my life the way it is, thank you, Mr. Fan,’ Li said. He glanced at a plaque on the wall beside tall double doors. THE EVENT HALL, it read. ‘What’s an event hall?’

‘Just what it says, Section Chief,’ Fan said. ‘A place where we hold major events. Concerts, ceremonies, seminars. I’d let you see it, but it’s being refurbished at the moment.’

They stopped at the front door to shake hands, watched by staff standing to attention behind desks that lined the hall to left and right.

‘I appreciate your visit and your concern, Section Chief, and in the light of what you have told me, I will consider asking for a review of our security.’ He nodded towards the glass antiques room. ‘We have exhibits in there worth several millions as well.’

Li was about to open the door when he paused. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘Mr. Macken seemed rather concerned about the whereabouts of your personal assistant, JoJo.’

Fan raised an eyebrow. ‘Did he?’ But he wasn’t volunteering any information.

Li said, ‘Perhaps we could have a word with her before we go?’

‘Sadly, that’s not possible, Section Chief. I fired her.’

‘Oh? What for?’

Fan sighed. ‘Inappropriate behaviour, I’m afraid. JoJo had one of our apartments upstairs. It went with the job. I discovered she was “entertaining” members up there after hours. Strict rule of the club. Staff are forbidden to fraternise with the membership.’

‘Which means you threw her out of her apartment as well?’

‘She was asked to leave immediately, and I put a stop on her cellphone account, which was also provided by the company.’

‘Have you any idea where she went?’

‘None at all. I do know she had a boyfriend in Shanghai at one time. Perhaps she’s gone off there to lick her wounds.’

When they were out on the street again, Li turned to Qian. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

Qian grinned. ‘I think if he’d offered me a cut-price membership I’d have bitten his hand off.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘What I don’t understand is why he made the offer at all. If he’s got nothing to hide, he’s got nothing to fear from me. So why try and buy me off?’

‘You’re getting paranoid in your old age, Chief. Just think of the kudos he’d get from having Beijing’s top cop on his books.’

‘Hmmm.’ Li was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, ‘I think we’ve probably been wasting our time on this, Qian. Better get back to the section.’

III

As they parked outside Section One, the first flakes of snow fluttered on a wind with an edge like a razor. Tiny, dry flakes that disappeared as they hit the road. There were too few of them yet for there to be any danger of them lying. Moments earlier, as they had passed Mei Yuan’s corner, Li had seen her stamping her feet to keep them warm. Business was slow, but Li had no time to eat and so they had not stopped.

On their way up the stairs they met Tao in the stairwell coming down and had a brief conference on the landing of the second floor. Li made an effort to be civil, and told him about the developments with Macken and their visit to the club.

‘So you think someone’s planning to rob the place?’ Tao asked.

‘It’s a possibility,’ Li said. ‘I’ve warned them of it. But their security’s pretty good, so I don’t see that there’s much else we can do.’

Tao nodded. ‘I have a meeting with the administrator,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour.’ He got a further half a dozen steps down the stairs before he stopped and called back, ‘You have heard about the athlete who’s gone missing?’

Li frowned. ‘No.’ And then he remembered Wu saying something about someone not turning up for a race.

‘Chinese three thousand meters indoor champion,’ Tao said. ‘Failed to show up for her race last night. Now, apparently nobody can find her.’

A dozen detectives were gathered around the TV set in the detectives’ room. A few faces turned towards the door as Li and Qian came in. Sun waved him over. ‘Chief, this could be important.’

There was a news bulletin on air, reporting on the aftermath of the China — USA indoor athletics meeting, and the failure of the Chinese distance runner, Dai Lili, to turn up for her race the previous evening. She had been favourite to win the three thousand meters, and if she had that would have been enough to tip the overall points balance in China’s favour. So there were a lot of unhappy people around this morning. And still no sign of Dai Lili. The American press had cottoned on to the fact that there was something strange going on, and given Beijing’s promise of free and open reporting during the Olympic Games, the authorities were reluctant to clamp down too hard on the foreign media. There was live coverage of a veritable media scrum outside the Capital Indoor Stadium, with both foreign and domestic journalists pressing for an official statement. In the background Li could hear an American reporter speaking to camera. ‘The failure of Chinese champion Dai Lili to turn up for the event, comes on top of a disastrous month for Chinese athletics in which up to six of the country’s top athletes have died in unusual circumstances…’ So the genie was out of the bottle. And there would be no way now to get it back in.

Wu was saying, ‘She lives on her own in an apartment on the north side, Chief, but apparently there’s nobody home. Her parents say they don’t know where she is either. And given our current investigation, I figured maybe it was worth following up.’

Li nodded. ‘What do we know about her?’

‘Not much yet,’ Sun said. An image of her face flashing on to the screen caught his eye. ‘That’s her.’

Li looked at the face and felt the skin prickling all over his head. He had seen her for only a few moments in poor lighting on the landing of Margaret’s apartment, but the birthmark was unmistakable. She had wanted to speak to Margaret. Margaret had given the girl her address, and she had already turned up there once. Given the fate met by six of her fellow athletes, it was all just too close to home for comfort.

He said to Sun, ‘Get your coat. We’re going to the stadium.’

Li and Sun had to elbow their way through the crowds of reporters and cameramen gathered outside the official entrance to the stadium, bigger flakes of snow falling now with greater regularity. The mood of the media was more subdued than Li had seen earlier on television, the cold sapping energy and enthusiasm. Hostile eyes followed the two detectives to the door, where Li rapped on the glass and showed his ID to an armed guard inside.

Supervisor of Coaching Cai Xin was not pleased to see them. ‘I have better things to do with my time, Section Chief, than to waste it on fruitless police interviews.’ His mood had hardly been improved by defeat.

Li said evenly, ‘I can arrange, Supervisor Cai, to have you taken to Section Six for interrogation by professionals if you’d prefer.’

Which stopped Cai in his tracks. He looked at Li appraisingly, wondering if this was a hollow threat. Cai was a man not without influence after all. ‘I don’t see what possible interest the police could have in any of this,’ he said.

‘We have six dead athletes,’ Li said. ‘And now a seventh has gone missing. So don’t fuck with me, Cai. Where can we talk?’

Cai took a deep breath and led them to his private room, trackside, where he had spoken to Li and Margaret three nights earlier. The colour had drained from his face, a mix of anger and fear. ‘I could have you reported, Section Chief, for speaking to me like that,’ he hissed, and he glanced at Sun.

Sun shrugged. ‘Seemed perfectly civil to me, Supervisor Cai,’ he said, and Cai saw that there would be little point in pursuing his indignation. Better just to get this over with.

‘What do you want to know?’ he said curtly.

‘Who told the media about the dead athletes?’ Li asked.

‘I’ve no idea. But when six of your best Olympic prospects fail to turn up for a major international event, then questions are going to be asked. And some of those deaths are hardly secret. The car crash which all but wiped out my relay team was reported in the China Daily last month.’

‘Why didn’t Dai Lili turn up last night?’

‘You tell me? She seemed very cosy with your American friend.’

Li sensed Sun turning to look at him. But he kept his focus on Cai. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘I saw them talking out there in the lobby the other night.’

‘After you’d given your athletes strict instructions not to speak to either of us,’ Li said, and Cai immediately flushed.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

‘Yeh, sure,’ Li said. ‘And I suppose you never asked her what it was she was speaking to Doctor Campbell about.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t she tell you? Was that the problem? Did you fall out over it? Is that why she failed to turn up?’

‘This is preposterous!’

‘Is it? She was very keen to speak to Doctor Campbell about something. Something she never got the chance to do, because she ran off scared when she saw you. I don’t suppose you’d know what it was she wanted so urgently to tell her?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. And I resent being questioned like this, Section Chief. I resent your tone and I resent your attitude.’

‘Well, you know what, Supervisor Cai? You probably don’t know it, but my investigation into your dead athletes has turned into a murder inquiry. And there’s a young girl out there somewhere who could be in very grave danger. For all I know, she might be dead already. So I don’t particularly care if you don’t like my tone. Because right now yours is the only name on a suspect list of one.’

Cai blanched. ‘You’re not serious.’

‘You’ll find out just how serious I am, Supervisor Cai, if I don’t get your full co-operation. I want her home address, her parents’ address, her telephone number, her cellphone number, her email address, and any other information that you have on her. And I want it now.’

As they crossed the bridge over the river beyond the stadium, Sun breathed in the lingering scent of the sewer and his face wrinkled in disgust. He blew out his cheeks and hurried to the other side. He turned as Li caught him up. ‘You were a bit hard on him, Chief,’ he said. ‘You don’t really consider him a suspect, do you?’

‘Right now,’ Li said, ‘he’s the best we’ve got. He’s the only common factor. He was known to all of the victims. He’s hostile and defensive, and he has a very dodgy track record on the subject of doping. He gave his athletes instructions not to talk to me the other night, and then saw Dai Lili speaking to Margaret. Suddenly Dai Lili goes missing. Big coincidence.’

‘What did she want to speak to Doctor Campbell about?’

Li shook his head in frustration. ‘I wish I knew.’

IV

Dai Lili’s parents lived in a crumbling siheyuan courtyard in a quarter of the city just west of Qianmen and south of the old city wall which had protected the imperial family and their courtesans from the vulgar masses that thronged outside the gates of the ancient capital. In the days before the Communists, the streets here were full of clubs and restaurants and gambling dens. It was a dangerous place to venture alone in the dark. Now Qianmen was a vibrant shopping area, filled with boutiques and department stores, fast food shops and upscale restaurants.

Li inched his Jeep through the afternoon traffic on Qianmen’s southern loop, past sidewalks crowded with shoppers buying long johns and Afghan hats. A young woman dressed as Santa Claus stood in a doorway hailing passers-by with a loudspeaker, urging them to buy their loved ones jewellery this Christmas.

They took a left into Xidamochang Street, little more than an alleyway lined with barber shops and tiny restaurants where proprietors were already steaming dumplings for that night’s dinner, dumplings that were particularly delicious if allowed to go cold, and then deep fried in a wok and dipped in soy sauce. They narrowly missed knocking down a haughty girl in a full-length hooded white coat who refused to deviate from her path. Cyclists wobbled and criss-crossed around them, collars pulled up against the snow that was driving in hard now on the north wind.

About three hundred meters down, they parked up and went in search of number thirty-three. Bamboo bird cages hung on hooks outside narrow closes, birds shrilling and squawking, feathers fluffed up against the cold. Outside number thirty-three, a young man in a fawn anorak was throwing a ceramic bead into the air for a grey and black bird which would return to land on his outstretched left hand for a piece of corn as a reward for catching it.

The entrance to the home of Dai Lili’s parents was through a small red doorway in a grey brick wall. The carcasses of several bikes lay around outside, cannibalised for their parts. A narrow close led over uneven slabs into a shambolic courtyard stacked with the detritus of half a century of people’s lives, overspill from homes barely big enough for their occupants. Nothing, apparently, was ever thrown away. Li asked an old woman with bow legs and a purple body warmer over an old Mao suit where he could find the Dai family, and she pointed him to an open doorway with a curtain hanging in it. Li pulled the curtain aside and smelled the sour stench of stale cooking and body odour. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’ he called.

A young man emerged from the gloom, scowling and aggressive. ‘What do you want?’ His white tee-shirt was stretched over a well-sculptured body, and there was a tattoo of a snake wound around his right arm, its head and forked tongue etched into the back of his right hand.

‘Police,’ Li said. ‘We’re looking for the parents of Dai Lili.’

The young man regarded them sullenly for a moment then nodded for them to follow him in. He flicked aside another curtain and led them into a tiny room with a large bed, a two-seater settee and a huge television on an old dresser. A man in his fifties sat smoking, huddled in a padded jacket, watching the TV. A woman was squatting on the bed, dozens of photographs spread out on the quilt in front of her. ‘Police,’ the boy said, and then stood in the doorway with arms folded, as if to prevent further intruders or to block their escape.

Li inclined his head so that he could see the photographs that the woman was looking at. They were pictures, taken trackside, of Dai Lili bursting the tape, or sprinting the last hundred meters, or arms raised in victory salute. Dozens of them. ‘Do you know where she is?’ he said.

The woman looked at him with dull eyes. ‘I thought maybe you were coming to tell us.’

‘Why?’ Sun asked. ‘Do you think something has happened to her?’

The man turned to look at them for the first time, blowing smoke down his nostrils like an angry dragon. ‘If something had not happened to her, she would have been there to run the race.’ There was something like shame in his eyes where once, Li was sure, there would only have been pride.

‘Do you have any idea why she didn’t turn up?’

Dai Lili’s father shook his head and turned his resentful gaze back on the television. ‘She tells us nothing,’ he said.

‘We don’t see her much,’ said her mother. ‘She has her own apartment in Haidian District, near the Fourth Ring Road.’

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘About two weeks ago.’

‘How did she seem?’

Her father dragged his attention away from the screen again. ‘Difficult,’ he said. ‘Argumentative. Like she’s been for months.’ There was anger mixed now with the shame.

‘Things haven’t been easy for her,’ her mother said quickly in mitigation. ‘Her sister has been going downhill fast.’

‘Her sister?’ Sun asked.

‘Ten years ago she was the Chinese ten thousand meters champion,’ the old woman said, the pain of some unhappy recollection etching itself in the lines on her face. ‘Lili wanted so much to be like her. Now she is a cripple. Multiple sclerosis.’

‘Lili’s done everything for her!’ Li and Sun were startled by the voice of the young man in the doorway coming unexpectedly to his sister’s defence, as if there were some implicit criticism in his mother’s words. The two detectives turned to look at him. He said, ‘That’s all that ever drove her to win. To get money to pay for the care of her sister. She doesn’t live in some fancy flat like all the rest of them. Everything she’s ever earned has gone to Lijia.’

Sun said, ‘Where is Lijia?’

‘She is in a clinic in Hong Kong,’ her father said. ‘We have not seen her for nearly two years.’

‘They say she is dying now,’ the mother said.

‘Could Lili have gone to see her?’ Li asked.

The mother shook her head. ‘She never goes to see her. She couldn’t bear to look at her, to see her wasting like that.’

Li said to her father, ‘You said Lili was argumentative.’

‘She never used to be,’ her mother said quickly. ‘She used to be such a lovely girl.’

‘Until she started winning all those big races,’ her father said, ‘and making all that money. It was like she felt guilty for being able to run like that while her sister was withering to a shadow.’

‘If anything made her feel guilty it was you.’ There was unexpected bitterness in the voice of Dai Lili’s brother. ‘Nothing she could ever do would make her as good as her sister. Not in your eyes. And you resented it, didn’t you? That she was the only one who could do anything to help Lijia. While all you could ever do was sit on your fat ass and watch TV and collect your invalidity from the state.’

And Li noticed for the first time that Dai Lili’s father had only one leg. The left trouser leg was empty and folded under him on the settee. Li’s eyes strayed to a crude-looking prosthetic limb propped in the corner of the room, straps hanging loose and unused. When he looked up again, the boy had left the room. ‘Do you have a key for her apartment?’ he asked.

The snow was lying now in the street, the merest covering, pretty in the lights from the windows and streetlamps, but treacherous underfoot. There was very little light left in the sky, helping to deepen the depression that Li carried with him from the house. He checked his watch and handed Sun the keys of the Jeep.

‘You’d better take it,’ he said. ‘You’ll be late for your antenatal class.’

‘I don’t care about the class, Chief,’ Sun said. ‘It’s Wen having the baby, not me. I’ll go to the girl’s apartment with you.’

Li shook his head. ‘I’ll get a taxi. And then I’m going straight on to the betrothal meeting.’ He summoned a smile from somewhere. ‘Go on. Go to the hospital. It’s your baby, too. Wen’ll appreciate it.’

V

The Tian An Men Fang Shen Imperial Banquet Restaurant stood on the east side of Tiananmen Square behind stark winter trees hung with coloured Christmas lights. Margaret’s taxi dropped them on the corner, at the foot of stairs leading to twin marble dragons guarding the doors to the restaurant. Mrs. Campbell’s knee, bandaged and heavily strapped, had stiffened up so that she could hardly bend it. To her mother’s indignation, Margaret had borrowed a walking cane from an elderly neighbour. ‘I am not an old lady!’ she had protested, but found that she was unable to walk without it. An affront to her self-image and her dignity.

Margaret helped her up the steps, and they were greeted inside the door by two girls dressed in imperial costume — elaborately embroidered silk gowns and tall, winged black hats with red pompoms. The entrance to the restaurant was filled with screens and hanging glass lanterns, its ornamental cross-beams colourfully painted with traditional Chinese designs. A manageress, all in black, led them past the main restaurant and into the royal corridor. It was long and narrow, lanterns reflecting off a highly polished floor. The walls were decorated with lacquered panels and red drapes. There were private banqueting rooms off to left and right. Li had booked them the Emperor’s Room, and Margaret’s mother’s jaw dropped in astonishment as she hobbled in ahead of her daughter. A four-lamp lantern hanging with dozens of red tassels was suspended over a huge circular banqueting table. Each of seven place settings had three gold goblets, a rice bowl, spoon, knife and chopstick rest, also in gold, and lacquered chopsticks tipped with gold at the holding end. Each serviette was arranged in the shape of an imperial fan. At one end of the room, on a raised dais, were two replica thrones for the emperor and empress. At the other, through an elaborately carved wooden archway, cushioned benches and seats were gathered around a low table on which all the presents from each family were carefully arranged. Soft Chinese classical music plinged gently through hidden speakers.

Mei Yuan had been sitting on the long bench waiting for them. Earlier in the day Margaret had taken the gifts from the Campbell family to Mei Yuan’s siheyuan home on Qianhai Lake. Mei Yuan, acting as Li’s proxy, had selected the gifts from the Li family and arrived early at the restaurant to set out the offerings from both families and await the guests. She stood up, tense, smiling. Margaret looked at her in wonder. Mei Yuan’s hair was held in a bun on the top of her head by a silver clasp. She wore a turquoise blue embroidered silk jacket over a cream blouse and a full-length black dress. There was a touch of brown around her eyes, and red on her lips. Margaret had never seen her dressed up, or wearing make-up. She had only ever been a small peasant woman in well-worn jackets and trousers and aprons, with her hair pulled back in an elastic band. She was transformed, dignified, almost beautiful. And Margaret felt tears prick her eyes at the sight of her.

‘Mom, I’d like you to meet Mei Yuan, my very best friend in China.’

Mrs. Campbell shook Mei Yuan’s hand warily, but was scrupulously polite. ‘How do you do, Mrs. Yuan?’

Margaret laughed. ‘No, Mom, if it’s Mrs. anything, its Mrs. Mei.’ Her mother looked confused.

Mei Yuan explained. ‘In China, the family name always comes first. I am happy for you simply to call me Mei Yuan.’ She smiled. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Campbell.’

There was an awkward exchange of pleasantries about flights and weather before the conversation began to run dry. They all took seats as a girl in a red patterned tunic and black trousers poured them jasmine tea in small, handleless, bone china cups, and there was a momentary relief from the need to make small talk as they all sipped at the hot, perfumed liquid. To break the silence, Mei Yuan said, ‘Li Yan did not come for his breakfast this morning.’

Mrs. Campbell said, ‘Margaret’s fiancé takes his breakfast at your house?’

‘No, Mom. Mei Yuan has a stall on a corner near Li Yan’s office. She makes kind of hot, savoury Beijing pancakes called jian bing.’

Mrs. Campbell could barely conceal her surprise, or her horror. ‘You sell pancakes on a street corner?’

‘I make them fresh on a hotplate,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘But really only to feed my passion in life.’

Margaret’s mother was almost afraid to ask. ‘And what’s that?’

‘Reading. I love books, Mrs. Campbell.’

‘Do you? My husband lectured in modern American literature in Chicago. But I don’t suppose that’s the kind of reading you’re used to.’

‘I am a great admirer of Ernest Hemingway,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘And John Steinbeck. I am just now reading The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald.’

‘Oh, you’ll enjoy it,’ Mrs. Campbell said, for the moment forgetting who she was talking to. ‘A talented writer. But Gatsby was the only really great thing he wrote. He was ruined by alcohol and his wife.’

‘Zelda,’ Mei Yuan said.

‘Oh, you know about her?’ Mrs. Campbell was taken again by surprise.

‘I read about them both in Mr. Hemingway’s autobiography of his time spent in Paris.’

‘A Moveable Feast. It’s a wonderful read.’

‘It made me so much want to go there,’ Mei Yuan said.

Mrs. Campbell looked at her appraisingly, perhaps revising her first impressions. But they had no opportunity to pursue their conversation further, interrupted then by the arrival of Xiao Ling and Xinxin with Li’s father. Xinxin rushed to Margaret and threw her arms around her.

‘Careful, careful,’ Mei Yuan cautioned. ‘Remember the baby.’ Xinxin stood back for a moment and looked at the swelling of Margaret’s belly with a kind of wonder. Then she said, ‘You’ll still love me after you have your baby, won’t you, Magret?’

‘Of course,’ Margaret said, and kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll always love you, Xinxin.’

Xinxin grinned, and then noticed Mrs. Campbell. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is my mommy,’ Margaret said.

Xinxin looked at her in astonishment. ‘You are Magret’s mommy?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs. Campbell said, and Margaret saw that her eyes were alive for the first time since she had arrived. ‘What’s your name?’

‘My name’s Xinxin, and I’m eight years old.’ And she turned to Xiao Ling. ‘And this is my mommy. Xiao Ling. But she doesn’t speak any English.’

Mei Yuan took over then and made all the introductions in Chinese and English. Mrs. Campbell remained seated after Margaret explained that she had injured her leg in a fall. The last to be formally introduced were Margaret and Li’s father. Margaret shook the hand which he offered limply, and searched for some sign of Li in his eyes. But she saw nothing there. His old man’s face was a blank, and he turned away to ease himself into a seat and turn a disconcertingly unblinking gaze on Margaret’s mother.

Xinxin was oblivious to any of the tensions that underlay relations among this odd gathering of strangers and said to Mrs. Campbell, ‘What’s your name, Magret’s mommy?’

‘Mrs. Campbell.’

Xinxin laughed and laughed. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Your real name. Your given name.’

Mrs. Campbell seemed faintly embarrassed. ‘Actually, it’s Jean.’

‘Jean,’ Xinxin repeated, delighted. ‘That’s a nice name. Can I sit beside you, Jean?’

The elderly American flushed with unexpected pleasure. ‘Of course, Xinxin,’ she said, trying very hard to pronounce the name correctly.

And Xinxin climbed up on the bench beside her and sat down, her feet not touching the floor. She took Mrs. Campbell’s hand quite unselfconsciously and said, ‘I like Magret’s mommy.’ And in Chinese to Li’s father, ‘Do you like Jean, too, Grandad?’

And Margaret saw him smile for the first time, although she had no idea what was said in the exchange between grandfather and grandchild. ‘Sure I do, little one. Sure I do.’

And then they all sat smiling at each other in awkward silence. Margaret glanced at her watch. ‘Well, the only thing missing is Li Yan. As usual. I hope he’s not too late.’

VI

The taxi dropped Li on the edge of a wide slash of waste ground. There were no lights, the road here was pitted and broken, and the driver refused to take his car any further. Looking back, Li could still see the tall streetlights on the Fourth Ring Road, catching in their beams the snow that drove horizontally across the carriageway. He could only just hear the distant roar of the traffic above the whining of the wind. Somehow, somewhere, the driver had taken a wrong turn. Li could see the lights of the tower blocks where Dai Lili lived, but they were on the other side of this bleak, open stretch of ground where hutongs and siheyuans, once home to thousands, had been razed to the ground. It was easier to walk across it than have the driver go round again to try to find the right road.

He watched the taillights of the taxi recede towards the Ring Road, and pulled up his collar against the snow and the wind to make his way across the wasteland that stretched in darkness before him. It was harder than he had imagined. The tracks left by great heavy treaded tyres churning wet earth in the Fall had frozen solid and made it difficult to negotiate. Frozen puddles had disappeared beneath the inch of snow that now lay across the earth, making it slippery and even more treacherous.

He knew that he was already late for the betrothal. But he had come this far, and once he got to the apartment he would call on his cellphone to say he would be another hour. He slipped and fell and hit the ground with a crack. He cursed and sat for a moment in the snow nursing a painful elbow, before getting back to his feet and pushing on again towards the distant towers, cursing his luck and his situation. It was another fifteen minutes before the lights of the courtyard in front of the first tower picked out the cars that were parked there, and threw into shadow the bicycles that sheltered under corrugated iron. He was almost there.

A voice came out of the darkness to his left, low, sing-song and sinister. ‘What do we have here?’

‘Someone’s lost his way.’ Another voice from behind.

‘Lost your way, big man?’ Yet another voice, off to his right this time. ‘We’ll set you on your way. For a price.’

‘Better hope you got a nice fat wallet, big man. Or you could be a big dead man.’ The first voice again.

Li froze and peered into the darkness, and gradually he saw the shadows of three figures emerging from the driving snow, converging on him from three sides. He saw the glint of a blade. He fumbled quickly in his pocket for the penlight he kept on his keyring, and turned its pencil-thin beam on the face of the nearest figure. It was a young man, only seventeen or eighteen, and he raised a hand instinctively to cover his face. Snowflakes flashed through the length of the beam.

‘You boys had better hope you can run fucking fast,’ Li said, realising he was shouting, and surprised by the strength of his own voice.

‘What are you talking about, shit-for-brains?’ It was the first voice again. Li swung the torch towards him and he stood brazenly, caught in its light.

‘I’m a cop, you stupid little fuck. And if I catch you you’re going to spend the next fifteen years re-educating yourself through labour.’

‘Yeh, sure.’

Li pulled out his ID, holding it up and turning the penlight to illuminate it. ‘You want to come closer for a better look?’

There was a long, silent stand-off in which some unspoken message must have passed between the muggers, because almost without Li realising it they were gone, slipping off into the night as anonymously as they had arrived. He peered through the driving snow but could see nothing, and he felt the tension in his chest subsiding, and the air rushing back into his lungs, stinging and painful. God only knew how close he had been to a knife slipped between the ribs. Nice place to live, he thought.

Dai Lili’s apartment was on the seventh floor. The elevator was not working, and Li was grateful that the runner had not lived twenty storeys up. He unlocked the stairgate and climbed wearily up seven flights of stairs. Every landing was piled with garbage, and there were usually three or four bicycles chained together on each. A smell of old cabbage and urine permeated the whole building. Green paint peeled off damp walls, and vandals had scrawled obscenities in all the stairwells. Most of the doorways had padlocked steel grilles for additional security.

Li could not help but make a comparison with the homes of the other athletes he had visited in the last few days. There was none. They were at opposite ends of the social and financial spectrum. Here lived the poor of Beijing, rehoused in decrepit tower blocks thrown up to replace the communities which the municipal planners had seen fit to demolish. They had been just as poor then, but the traditional Chinese values of family and community had survived a thousand years of poverty, and people had felt safe, a sense of belonging. Overnight their security, their communities and their values, had been destroyed. And this was the result.

The security gate on Dai Lili’s door was firmly locked, but the light-bulbs in the hallway had been stolen and it took Li several minutes, fumbling in the dark with his penlight, to find the right key and unlock it. When, finally, he got the door itself open, he stepped into another world. The foul odours which had accompanied him on his climb were absent from the cool, sterile atmosphere of the apartment. He hurriedly closed the door to keep the foul stuff out, and found the light switch. The apartment was small. Two rooms, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet. Naked floorboards had been sanded and varnished a pale gold. The walls were painted cream and unadorned with pictures or hangings. There was little or no furniture. A bed and a small desk in one room. Nothing in the other except for a padded grey mat on the floor, about two meters square. A series of diagrams had been pinned to one wall illustrating a sequence of exercises designed to tone every muscle group in the body. Li could see the impressions in the mat where Lili must have performed her last set of exercises. But there was nothing to indicate when that might have been.

There were no curtains on the windows, and he stood for a moment looking south at the lights of the city, and the snow driving through them out of a black sky. He turned and cast his eyes around the room. What kind of creature was she that could live in a place like this? Spartan, without personality, without warmth.

He went back to the bedroom. The single bed was dressed with a white duvet and one pillow, neatly plumped and cold to the touch. Sliding doors revealed a built-in closet. Her clothes hung there in neat rows. Tracksuits and tee-shirts and shorts. Nothing for dressing up. Socks and panties were carefully stacked on shelves, and half a dozen pairs of trainers and running shoes sat side by side on a shoe-rack in the bottom of the closet. On the desk, a hairbrush still had some strands of her hair caught between its bristles. There was a comb, a tub of facial astringent, unscented. No make-up. This girl was obsessive. There was room for only two things in her mind, in her life; her fitness and her running.

In the kitchen there were fresh vegetables in a rack, fresh fruit in a bowl on the worktop. In the cupboard Li found packets of brown rice, tinned fruit and vegetables, dried lentils and black beans. In the tiny refrigerator there was tofu and fruit juice and yoghurt. No meat anywhere. Nothing sweet. No alcohol. No comfort eating.

The toilet was spotlessly clean. A shower head on the wall drained through a grille built in to the concrete floor. There was anti-bacterial soap in the rack, a bottle of unperfumed hypo-allergenic shampoo. Li opened a small wall cabinet above the sink and felt the hair stand up on his neck and shoulders. This girl, who wore no make-up, who used unscented soap and shampoo, who cleaned her face with unperfumed astringent, had two bottles of Chanel sitting in her bathroom cabinet, side by side. The same brand as the after-shave he had found in the homes of Sui and Jia Jing. He sprayed each in turn into the cold, clear air of the toilet and sniffed. One he did not recognise. It had a harsh, lemon smell, faintly acidic, certainly not sweet. The other he knew immediately was the same as the aftershave he had breathed in at Jia Jing’s apartment. Strange, musky, like almonds and vanilla. Again, bitter. No hint of sweetness.

It was a coincidence too far, bizarre and unfathomable, and he cursed himself for not having paid more attention to his earlier concerns about the same scents turning up in the other apartments. They had made an impression on him at the time, but it had been fleeting and all but forgotten. He slipped one of the bottles into his pocket and started going through the apartment again in the minutest detail. He lifted the mat in the main room and rolled it into a corner. There was nothing else in the room. In the bedroom he checked inside every shoe, and went through the pockets of all the jogpants. Nothing. He was about to leave the room when something caught his eye lying against the wall on the floor beneath the desk. Something small and gold-coloured that was catching the light. He went down on his knees to retrieve it, knowing that he had found what he was looking for. He was holding a little cylindrical aerosol breath freshener, and suspected that when he finally found this girl she was going to be long dead.

In the hallway outside her apartment, he had locked the door and the gate before remembering that he had meant to call the restaurant to tell them he would be late for the betrothal. He cursed under his breath and fumbled to switch on his phone in the dark. He pressed a key and the display lit up. The slightest of sounds made him lift his head in time to see a fist, illuminated by the light of his phone, in the moment before it smashed into his face. He staggered backwards, dropping his phone, gasping and gagging on the blood that filled his airways. Someone behind him struck him very hard on the back of the neck and his legs buckled. He dropped to his knees and a foot caught him on the side of his head, smacking it against the wall. He heard his own breath gurgling in his lungs before a blackness descended on him, soft and warm like a summer’s night, and his pain melted away.

VII

Plates of food sat piled on the revolving centre of the banqueting table. Delicacies served to the emperor. Snake and scorpion, five-flavoured intestine, jelly fish, sea slugs. And more mundane fare. Meat balls and sesame buns, soup and dumplings. Everything hot had long since gone cold. And everything cold seemed even less appetising than when served. Nothing had been touched. Margaret’s mother had spent much of the time eyeing the table with great apprehension and, Margaret thought, when Li failed to appear and the meal appeared destined to remain uneaten, considerable relief. The gifts in front of them remained unopened.

Margaret was angry and worried at the same time. It was more than an hour since Mei Yuan had called Section One to find out what had happened to Li. Nobody knew. And there was no response from his cellphone. The atmosphere had deteriorated to the point where the tension between the two families gathered for the betrothal was very nearly unbearable. Conversation had long since dried up. Mei Yuan had done her best to stay animated and fill the silences with her chatter. But even she had run out of things to say, and they all sat now avoiding each other’s eyes. Xinxin was fast asleep with her head on Mrs. Campbell’s lap, purring gently, the only one of them unconcerned by the fact that her uncle was more than two hours late.

The two waitresses who had brought the food stood on either side of the door exchanging nervous glances, concerned, embarrassed, and resisting a temptation to giggle. They quickly stood aside as the manageress entered briskly with a harrassed-looking Qian in tow. His face was flushed, colour blushing high on his cheeks beneath wide eyes that betrayed his concern.

Margaret was on her feet immediately. ‘What is it?’

Qian spoke quickly, breathlessly, in Chinese for several seconds and Margaret turned to Mei Yuan to see the colour drain from her face. She looked at Margaret and said in a small voice, ‘Li Yan has been attacked. He is in the hospital.’

Li had been drifting in and out of consciousness for some time, aware of a dazzle of overhead light, the beeping of a machine off to his left, winking green and red lights registering on the periphery of his vision. He had also been only too aware of a pain that appeared to have wrapped itself around his chest like a vice. His head throbbed, and his face felt swollen and incapable of expression. His tongue seemed extraordinarily thick in a dry mouth that tasted of blood. Just to close his eyes and slip away was a blissful escape.

Now he was aware of a shadow falling over his eyes and he opened them to see Margaret’s worried face looking down at him. He tried to smile, but his mouth hurt. ‘Sorry I was late for the betrothal,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘The lengths you’ll go to just to get out of marrying me, Li Yan.’ And her words brought back to him a dark cloud of recollection, his meeting with the Commissioner. Had it really only been yesterday morning? She added, ‘The doctor says nothing’s broken.’

‘Oh, good,’ Li said. ‘For a moment there I thought it was serious.’ Margaret’s hand felt cool on his skin as she laid it gently on his cheek. It had taken her half an hour to get a taxi, another hour to get to the hospital. The snow had turned to ice on the roads and the traffic had slithered into chaos. ‘Who did this to you, Li Yan?’

‘Some punk kids.’ He cursed his carelessness. They must have followed him up to the seventh floor and waited in the dark for him to come back out.

‘Not related to the case?’

‘I don’t think so. Just muggers. They threatened me outside and I scared them off.’ They had taken his wallet, his cellphone, the keys of the apartment, his Public Security ID.

‘Not far enough,’ Margaret said.

He raised himself up on one elbow and groaned with the pain. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, concerned.

He pointed to a chair across the room. ‘The plastic bag on that chair,’ he said with difficulty. ‘You’ll find my jacket inside.’ He found it hard to believe now that he had had the presence of mind to get the first officer on the scene to strip it off him and bag it. He had become conscious when Dai Lili’s neighbour from the end of the hallway had nearly fallen over him in the dark. Almost his first thought was the bottle of perfume in his pocket. His fingers had found broken glass as they felt for it in the dark, the strange musky-smelling liquid soaking into the fabric. ‘There’s a bottle of perfume in one of the pockets. Broken. Only, I don’t think it’s perfume that was inside it. I’m hoping there’s enough of it soaked into the fabric of the jacket for you still to be able to analyse it.’

Margaret left him briefly to look inside the bag. She recoiled from the smell. ‘Jesus, who would wear perfume like that?’ And she knotted the bag tightly.

‘Athletes,’ Li said. ‘Dead athletes. I found it in the apartment of the girl who was so keen to talk to you.’

Margaret was shocked. ‘Is she dead?’

‘Missing. But I’m not confident of finding her alive.’ Margaret returned to the bed, perching on the edge of it and taking his hand.

‘I don’t like what’s happened to you, Li Yan. I don’t like any of this.’

Li ignored her concern. ‘In one of the other pockets you’ll find a small aerosol breath freshener. I’d like to know what’s in it.’

‘We’re not going to know any of that stuff till tomorrow,’ Margaret said, and she pushed him gently back down on to the bed. ‘So there’s no point in worrying about it till then. Okay?’

His attempt at a smile turned into a wince. ‘I guess.’ He paused. ‘So what did you make of my father?’

Margaret thought about how his father had barely even looked at her during their two-hour wait in the restaurant. ‘It’s difficult to know,’ she said tactfully, ‘when someone doesn’t speak your language.’

Li frowned. ‘He speaks English as well as Yifu.’

Margaret felt anger welling suddenly inside her. ‘Well, if he does, he didn’t speak a word of it to me.’

Li closed his eyes. ‘He is an old bastard,’ he said. And he opened his eyes again to look at Margaret. ‘He disapproves of me marrying outside of my race.’

‘Snap,’ Margaret said. ‘My mother’s exactly the same. If only she’d known he spoke English they could have passed the time exchanging disapproval.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Oh, Li Yan, why did we bother with any of them? We should just have eloped.’

‘If only it was that easy.’

She sighed. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘About what?’

‘The betrothal. We can’t get married if you don’t ask me.’

‘I’ll re-book the restaurant. We’ll do it tomorrow night.’

‘You’re in no fit state,’ she protested.

‘You said there was nothing broken.’

‘You’re concussed. They’ll not let you out if you’re still that way in the morning.’

‘I’m out of here first thing tomorrow,’ Li said. ‘Whether I’m concussed or not. That girl’s missing. If there’s the least chance that she’s still alive, then I’m not going to lie here feeling sorry for myself when somebody out there might be trying to kill her.’