The Runner

I

Bicycle repair men sat huddled around a brazier, wind fanning the coals and sending occasional showers of sparks off to chase after the snow at its leading edge. About three inches had fallen overnight and Beijing had ground to a halt. There were no ploughs or gritters or low-traction vehicles for spreading salt on the roads. Just a slow-motion ballet of vehicles gliding gently into each other and bicycles dumping their riders unceremoniously in the middle of the road. Even the siren and flashing blue light on Li’s Jeep was unable to speed their progress, and only its four-wheel drive had kept them on the road.

Sun pulled into the kerb outside the Beijing New World Taihua Plaza at number 5 Chongwenmenwai Street and slithered around to the passenger side to help Li out. Li pushed him aside irritably, and eased himself down to the street. The strapping on his chest, beneath his shirt, helped support him, but if he bent or twisted, it still hurt like hell. His face was swollen, black under each eye, and it was still painful to eat or smile. Not that he was much inclined to smile today. Sun reached in beyond him to retrieve the walking stick that Wu had brought into the section that morning. It had belonged to his father and had a large rubber stopper at the end of it. What irked Li more than being given it was that he found it very nearly impossible to get around without it. Especially in the snow. He snatched it from Sun and hobbled over the frozen pavement to the entrance.

The security guard remembered them. He couldn’t take his eyes off Li as he rode up with them in the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

‘What are you looking at?’ Li growled.

‘Fall in the snow?’ the security man ventured.

‘No, I got the shit kicked out of me by a gang of muggers. Hazards of the job. Still want to be a cop?’

The security man opened the door to Sui’s apartment and Li tore off the crime scene tape rather than try to duck under it. They went straight to the bathroom. The Gillette Mach3 razor and the box of four heads was still on the shelf above the sink. But the two bottles of Chanel aerosol aftershave and the gold-coloured breath freshener were gone.

‘Shit!’ Sun said. He opened the bathroom cabinet. ‘They’re not here.’

Li pushed him out of the way. ‘They must be.’ But the cabinet contained only the spare box of toothpaste, the packs of soap, the unopened box of aspirin and the jar of cotton pads. He turned angrily towards the security guard. ‘Who the hell’s been in here?’

‘No one,’ the security man said, shaken. He saw his hopes of joining the force flushing away down the toilet. ‘Just cops and forensics. You people.’

‘And you’d know if there had been anyone else?’ Sun said.

‘No one gets into the building who’s not supposed to be here.’ The security man was very anxious to please. ‘The only other people with access to the apartment would be staff.’

Sun’s cellphone rang. Li reflexively went for the phone that he normally kept clipped to his belt, before remembering that the muggers had taken it. Sun answered, then held the phone out to Li. ‘Wu,’ he said. Li had sent Wu over to Jia Jing’s apartment to get the aftershave from the bathroom there.

‘Chief,’ Wu’s voice crackled in his ear. ‘I can’t find any aftershave. Are you sure it was in the bathroom cabinet?’

Li had also sent Qian over to Dai Lili’s apartment to get the bottle of perfume he had left behind, but he knew now that, too, would be gone. And he began to wonder if his attackers had, after all, been the muggers he had taken them for. He told Wu to go back to the section and handed the phone back to Sun.

‘What’s happened?’ Sun asked.

Li shook his head. ‘The aftershave’s gone there, too.’ Sun’s cellphone rang again. ‘That’ll be Qian, no doubt with the same story.’ Sun answered the phone. ‘Wei?’ And he listened intently for a few moments. Then he snapped his phone shut and turned thoughtful eyes on Li.

‘What is it?’

‘They found a body in Jingshan Park,’ Sun said. ‘A young woman.’

Jingshan Park was situated at the north end of the Forbidden City, on an artificial hill constructed with earth excavated from the moat around the Imperial Palace. Five pavilions sited around the hill represented the five directions of Buddha — north, south, east, west and centre. Each had commanding views of the city, and in more clement weather, Li often climbed up to the central Wanchunting Pavilion — the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring — at the very top of the hill, to look down upon the capital city of the Middle Kingdom and try to unravel the endless complications of his life. Today, in the snow, and following his battering of the night before, he did not relish the climb. Or the complications that awaited him.

The police had closed off the park, and a large crowd was gathered in the road outside the south gate. Li and Sun had to push their way through. Inside, a dozen or more uniformed officers milled around on the cobbled concourse, watching a teenage girl dressed in the red embroidered costume of an empress sweeping a path through the snow with a long-handled broom. It was falling almost as fast as she cleared it. But with the tourists ejected, and no one to pose with her for photographs, it was the only way she had of keeping warm. Mournful vendors stood beneath the pillars of their empty stores, ruing the loss of a day’s income and cursing the killers of the girl on the hill for making their lives just that little bit harder.

Detective Sang hurried across the concourse from the path that led up the hill. ‘Got to be careful on these steps, Chief. They’re lethal in the snow. We’ve already had several accidents on the marble stairs at the top.’

Through the evergreen cypresses that climbed the steep slopes of the hill, Li could just see, blurred by the falling snow, the four upturned corners of the Wanchunting Pavilion with its three eaves and its golden glazed-tile roof. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘The Jifangting Pavilion, Chief.’

Li knew it, and his eyes panned west to see if he could spot the green-glazed tiles of its octagonal two-tiered roof. But it was obscured by the trees. They began the long climb.

‘One of the park attendants found her about an hour after they opened up this morning, Chief,’ Sang told them on the way up. ‘The weather meant there weren’t too many people in the park first thing, or she’d probably have been found earlier. Poor guy’s been treated for shock.’

‘The attendant?’

‘Yeh. It’s pretty messy up there, Chief. Blood everywhere. She must have been brought here during the night and butchered. She was left lying on this kind of stone dais thing under the roof. Looks like there might have been a statue on it or something at one time.’

‘A bronze Buddha,’ Li said. ‘It was stolen by British and French troops in nineteen hundred.’ He had a clear picture in his mind of the tiny pavilion, open on all sides, its roof supported on ten blood red pillars, the carved stone dais at its centre protected by a wrought iron fence.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to climb the serpentining path up the side of the hill, stepping gingerly on the last few steps to where the track divided, heading east up to the summit and the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring, and west down to Jifangting, the Fragrance Pavilion. Through the trees below them, Li saw its snow-covered roof, and the crowd of uniformed and plain-clothes officers around it. Harassed forensics officers were attempting to keep everyone at bay in order to try and make sense of the tracks in the snow. But it was way too late now, Li knew. And in all likelihood the original tracks of the killer would have been covered by several more inches of snowfall.

He and Sun made their way carefully down the path in Sang’s wake.

‘In the name of the sky, Li, can you not keep these goddamn moron detectives off my snow!’ Li turned to find himself looking into the tiny coal black eyes of senior forensics officer Fu Qiwei. But it was anger that burned in them today, not mischief. They opened wide when he saw Li’s face. ‘Fuck me, Chief! What happened to you?’

‘Collision with a fist and a foot. Surely you can’t make any sense of these tracks now, Fu?’

‘Weather centre says it stopped snowing sometime during the night. Sky cleared for about an hour and temperatures dropped before the cloud rolled back in and there was more snow.’

‘So?’

‘Killers’ tracks could be frozen under the second fall. We already got some good prints from the blood on the floor inside. If you can keep your flatfoots from trampling all over it, we might be able to brush the snow back down to the frozen stuff.’

‘Alright,’ Li shouted. ‘Anyone who is not essential get back up the hill now!’

Detectives and uniformed officers moved away in quiet acquiescence, leaving Fu’s team nearly invisible in their white Tivek suits. Doctor Wang and his photographer from pathology stood shivering under the roof, sucking on cigarettes held between latex fingers. The body had been covered with a white sheet. Normally, by now, blood would have soaked through it, stark against the white. But the blood, like the body beneath it, was frozen solid. And it was everywhere all around the pavilion, caught in its vivid crimson freshness by the freezing temperatures. Li had rarely seen so much blood. It lay in icy pools and frozen spurts all around the central dais, rivulets of it turned to ice as it ran down the carved stonework.

He took a deep breath. No matter how often you came face to face with it, you never got used to death. It took him by surprise every time, a chill, depressing reminder of his own mortality, that he, too, was just flesh and blood and would one day lie cold and lifeless on a slab.

Off down to their left he saw the sweeping eaves of the north gate of the Forbidden City, and the russet roofs beyond, laid out in perfect symmetry. Through the pillars of the pavilion he could see, on its island in the middle of Beihai Lake, the White Dagoba Temple, turned into a factory during the Cultural Revolution. Immediately below, the factories of today belched smoke out into the haze of snow and pollution that filled the Beijing sky. Somewhere, below them and to the east, near the south gate, was the locust tree from which the last Ming emperor, Chong Zhen, had hanged himself to escape the marauding Manchu hordes. This was a place not unused to change, or to death.

A grim-faced Wang approached him. ‘It’s a messy one, Section Chief,’ he said. ‘I never really understood what blood lust meant until today. These bastards must have gorged themselves on it, must have been covered in it from head to toe.’

‘More than one?’

‘At least half a dozen, judging by the footprints in the blood.’ He sighed. ‘I counted more than eighty stab wounds, Chief. These guys brought her up here, stripped her naked, and just kept stabbing her and stabbing her. Long bladed knives. I’ll be able to tell more accurately when I get her on the table, but I’d say nine to twelve inches long.’ He shook his head. ‘Never seen anything like it. You want to take a look? We’ve still got to do the pics.’

Li had no real desire to see what lay beneath the sheet. Wang’s description of how she died had been graphic and sickening enough. He pictured her as he had seen her for those few moments in the hallway outside Margaret’s apartment. She had been so young and timid, her small face marred by its purple birthmark. And he saw her in the photographs her mother had been looking at on the bed, breaking the tape, smiling, exultant. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

They stepped carefully up to the dais and Wang pulled back the sheet. She looked as if she were covered in large black insects, but Li quickly saw that they were the wounds left in her flesh by the knives. She was covered in blood, and it was pooled all around her where once a statue of Buddha had smiled benignly on the world. Her flesh was blue-tinged and stark in its contrast with the blood which had leaked out from every hole made in her by the knives. Her black hair was fanned out on the stone, stuck to the frozen blood. Longer than Li remembered it. He frowned. The birthmark was gone. He stood staring at her in confusion before the mist cleared and he realised it was not who he had expected to see. It was not the runner, Dai Lili. It was Jon Macken’s missing friend, JoJo. Only, now she wasn’t missing any more.

II

Their taxi crawled slowly over the humpbacked Qianhai Bridge that marked the intersection between Qianhai and Houhai Lakes. It had stopped snowing but the roads were still treacherous, and a sky the colour of pewter promised more to come. Out on Houhai, two men had cut a hole in the snow-covered ice, and sat on boxes fishing and smoking. The taxi took a left and followed the lake down a tree-lined street, grey brick courtyards on either side of narrow hutongs running off to their right.

‘This is ridiculous, Margaret,’ Mrs. Campbell was saying for the umpteenth time. ‘I would have been perfectly all right staying in the apartment on my own.’

‘You don’t come all the way to China, Mom, and spend your entire time on your own in a room ten feet square.’

‘You live in one,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And I seem to recall spending more time than I care to remember sitting in a restaurant without eating, with people who couldn’t speak my language.’

Margaret sighed. She had asked Mei Yuan to look after her mother today so that she could check out the lab results on Li’s perfume and breath freshener. But Mrs. Campbell wasn’t pleased. ‘I don’t need a babysitter,’ she had said.

The taxi drew up outside Mei Yuan’s siheyuan, and Margaret asked the driver to wait. She helped her mother out of the car and supported her left arm as she hobbled through the red gateway into the courtyard beyond. Mrs. Campbell looked around with some distaste. ‘She lives here?’ Margaret had thought it one of the tidier siheyuan she had seen.

Mei Yuan greeted them at the door. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Campbell.’

And Mrs. Campbell put on her brave face. ‘Mei Yuan,’ she said, her pronunciation still less than perfect.

‘I thought today I might teach you how to make jian bing.’ Mei Yuan smiled mischievously.

‘Jan beeng?’ Mrs. Campbell frowned.

‘Yes, you remember, Mom, I told you. That’s the Beijing pancakes that Mei Yuan makes at her stall.’

Her mother looked horrified. But Mei Yuan took her hand to lead her into the house. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure I can find you some heavy clothes to keep you warm.’

Margaret said quickly, ‘Got to go. Have a good day. I’ll catch up with you later.’ And before her mother could object she was gone, and the taxi went slithering off down the lakeside road.

The corridor on the top floor of Section One was deserted. Margaret looked into the detectives’ room, but it was empty. She heard the distant hum of the central heating boiler, and the muted tapping of fingers on keyboards coming from another floor. She walked on down the corridor and heard voices coming from the big meeting room at the end. Lots of voices, some of them raised. She heard coughing and the clearing of throats, a brief ripple of nervous laughter. She smelled the cigarette smoke out here. And then one voice silencing the others, grave and authoritative. She recognised it immediately. Li. When she had phoned the hospital earlier he had already gone. She was glad to hear that there was nothing wrong with his voice at least. She smiled to herself and went into his office and closed the door to wait for him.

His desk was piled high with folders and strewn with all manner of papers. There were binders piled along the wall beneath the window and on top of the filing cabinet. She could not imagine what was in them all, or how Li ever found time to read them. The Chinese police, it seemed to her, were obsessed by paperwork, by the minutest collection of every shred of evidence, no matter how small, no matter how remotely connected. There were rarely any sudden leaps forward in an investigation. It was always pedantic and painstaking, and took for ever. Li, alone among the policemen she knew here, had developed an unnervingly accurate instinct for the cases he worked, would follow an intuition, make a leap of faith. He cracked more cases, more quickly, than anyone else. But he went against tradition, rubbed his superiors up the wrong way, stepped on toes, made enemies. By comparison, the cutting up of dead bodies was child’s play.

She smiled to herself and sat in his seat and saw Macken’s prints strewn across the desk beneath an open folder. She moved the folder aside and began idling through the photographs. She had no idea what they were. Grainy colour prints of some very upmarket sort of establishment. A swimming pool, sauna, restaurants, conference rooms. She stopped for a moment and looked at a picture of a girl standing by a desk looking at the camera. An attractive girl with her hair pulled back rather severely. She dropped it and moved on, stopping again at the only other picture with people in it. Three young men in dark suits, a fourth, bigger man, in a tracksuit, and a Westerner. A man perhaps in his middle sixties, with a head of well-groomed white hair and a close-cropped silver beard. He was tall. Taller than the Chinese, and good-looking in a rugged, sunbed sort of way. While the men in suits looked stiff and formal, the Westerner appeared relaxed, his open-necked shirt worn like a badge of informality. The odd thing was that he seemed vaguely familiar. Margaret was puzzled, because she knew that she didn’t know him, and anyway China was somehow the wrong setting. And yet the grainy quality of the picture was strangely apposite. And then she knew she had seen his picture in a newspaper, or a newsreel. Where, or when, she had no idea. But the familiarity of his face made it likely that she had seen it more than once. She struggled to try to find a context for it, but infuriatingly nothing would come. She put the picture down. If she forced her conscious attention elsewhere, perhaps her subconscious would do the hard work for her.

It was then that she noticed the pile of photographs lying on the top folder on the desk. From her oblique angle she could see that they were taken at a crime scene. A body lying in blood. She pulled them down to take a look and was shocked by the number of stab wounds puncturing the young woman’s naked body. She could see, even from the photograph, that a knife, or knives, had rained down on her in repeated slashing strokes. Although, oddly, they did not appear to be frenzied strokes like you might expect when so many wounds had been inflicted. There was something almost regular, controlled, about them. It smacked of ritual. And then she looked at the face and realised it was the attractive girl standing by the desk in the photograph she had been looking at just moments earlier.

Li had been caught off-balance by the death of JoJo. His whole mindset had been elsewhere, focused on another case, and he had been so certain that the girl under the sheet would be Dai Lili. Although in retrospect, searching through the rationale which had led him to that expectation, he had found none. There were dozens of young women murdered every year.

But not like this.

The detectives in the room who had been at the scene were still shocked by the image of the girl in the pavilion, blood frozen on the stone. Men who had seen things they cared to remember only in their worst nightmares. But something about the sheer brutality of JoJo’s murder, the extraordinary number of stab wounds, had left each and every one of them shaken. Yet one more image to file away in the darkest recesses of their minds.

The detectives who had not been there were shocked by the photographs strewn across the desk.

Everyone listened in silence now as Li took them through the events of the preceding day when he and Qian had followed up what had initially seemed like a minor break-in at a photographer’s studio. A sequence of events which had led them to an instant recognition of the girl in the park, and the thought that perhaps in some way the break-in and the murder might be connected.

They kicked around the idea that the photographs had been stolen in preparation for a burglary, that JoJo was in some way involved. It was she who had got Macken the job of taking the pics, after all. But if she was involved, why would they need Macken’s photographs? Surely her inside knowledge would have been far more useful? And as the club’s CEO had pointed out, the pictures were going to be published anyway, in a glossy brochure, and on the Internet. And why would any of this have led to her murder, particularly in such a brutal and bloody way? Li was specifically concerned that she had been taken someplace so public, where she was bound to be discovered, laid out on the stone dais as if on a sacrificial altar.

‘You think somebody’s trying to tell us something, Chief?’ Wu asked.

‘I don’t know if it’s aimed at us,’ Li said. ‘But it’s as if her killers were making a statement of some kind. There’s something incredibly cold and calculated about her murder. Although she was naked, there’s no hint of any sexual motivation. I mean, if you’re going to take a girl to a park in the middle of the night, strip her, stab her to death and then leave her spread out on a stone slab for the world to see, you’d have to have a reason, wouldn’t you? And the fact that there were half a dozen or more of them involved, means there was collusion, planning.’ He shook his head. ‘Like some kind of ritual, or sacrifice, or both.’ Unknowingly he had touched on the same thought as Margaret, although for different reasons.

He was both horrified and intrigued, but also acutely aware that time was running out, at least for him. And this case was a distraction, a sideshow at the main event. His announcement that he was putting Sun in charge of it was met with silence. Most of the officers in the room were more senior than Sun, and any one of them might have cause to feel resentful, or jealous. But Li needed them focused on the dead athletes. He snatched a glance at Tao sitting at the other end of the table, and saw the animosity simmering silently in his eyes. The most natural thing would have been for him to delegate the JoJo murder to his deputy. But he was unwilling to place too much trust in Tao. He quickly looked away. There were bigger issues than office politics.

‘I don’t want us losing our focus on the athletics case,’ he said. ‘Because the events of the last twenty-four hours are starting to raise some serious issues, not least for our own investigation.’ He paused. ‘Someone with inside knowledge has been tampering with evidence.’

This time the silence around the table was positively tangible. Even the smoke from their cigarettes appeared to freeze in mid-air. Li explained himself, going through, step by step, the sequence of events which had led him the previous evening to Dai Lili’s apartment in Haidian District, and the discovery of the Chanel perfume and the gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. ‘It would stretch credibility beyond acceptable limits to believe that Jia, Sui and Dai all used the same scents, and all carried the same aerosol breath freshener.’ He laid his hands out flat on the table in front of him. ‘Now, I have no idea what the significance of perfumes and breath fresheners are. But that they have significance in this case is beyond doubt. After I took one of the Chanel bottles from Dai’s apartment last night, all the other bottles disappeared from the other apartments.’

Qian said, ‘How do you know they weren’t taken before that?’

‘I don’t,’ Li said. ‘Except that you yourself went this morning to get the bottle I left in Dai Lili’s apartment last night, and it was gone. I suspect now that my attack was not, after all, unrelated to the case, and that the bottle I took would have been taken by my attackers if it hadn’t broken in my pocket. But the very fact that I had taken it clearly alerted someone to the fact that I suspected a significance. And so, all those seemingly innocent bottles in the other apartments had to go.’

‘Are you suggesting that someone within the section is responsible for that?’ Tao asked, and there was no mistaking the hostility in his voice.

‘No,’ Li said. ‘I’m not. But somebody is watching us very carefully. Somebody seems to know enough about what we’re doing and where we’re at to stay one step ahead of us.’ He took a long, slow breath. ‘I thought, last night, that the breath freshener I took from Dai’s apartment was still in my jacket pocket. Now, I took a bit of a battering, and in all the confusion, I could have been wrong about this. But when I got back here from Jingshan this morning, I got a call from the lab at Pau Jü Hutong to tell me they couldn’t find any breath freshener.’ More silence. ‘Doctor Campbell took the jacket last night from the hospital to the lab, sealed in an evidence bag. It was locked in the repository overnight until the technicians came in this morning. No breath freshener. It may be that it wasn’t there in the first place, that my attackers took it last night. Or it may be that someone removed it from the repository during the night. Either way, apparently they didn’t know that we already had another one.’

‘That’s right,’ Wu said suddenly, remembering. ‘Jia Jing had one on him. We found it when we went through his stuff at the autopsy.’

Li nodded. ‘So we still have something to analyse. And what the stealers of the perfume didn’t realise either, is that there was enough of it soaked into my jacket for us to analyse that, too. With luck, we’ll have the results of both those tests later today.’

‘What about the girl?’ Sang said. ‘The runner, Dai Lili. What do you think has happened to her?’

‘I have no idea,’ Li said. ‘But I have no doubt that her disappearance is related to all the other cases. And I don’t expect to find her alive.’ He let that thought sink in for some moments. ‘But until we know she’s dead, we have to assume that she’s not. And that means we’ve got to move this case forward as fast as we possibly can.’ He sat back and looked around the faces in the room. ‘So who’s got anything fresh?’

Qian raised a finger. ‘I dug up some interesting financial facts and figures, Chief.’ He flipped through his notebook. ‘I’ve been going through bank statements, checking accounts, assets…Seems like all these athletes had pretty extravagant lifestyles. Expensive apartments, flashy cars, nice clothes. And, sure, they all had money in their bank accounts that any one of us would be happy to retire on. Prize money, sponsorship…But not nearly enough to cover their costs.’

Li leaned forward on his elbows. ‘How do you mean?’

‘They were all living way beyond their means. I mean, way beyond their officially declared earnings, or what was going through their bank accounts. They all had credit cards, but they didn’t use them much. Meals and air fares and stuff. Everything else was paid for in cash. Cars, computers, clothes. And the monthly rental on those expensive apartments? Cash again. They’d all show up at the letting office every month with big wads of notes.’

‘So somebody was paying them in cash,’ one of the detectives said.

‘What for?’ Wu asked.

Qian shrugged. ‘Who knows? It certainly wasn’t for throwing races. I mean, they were all winning big time. Real medal prospects.’ He chuckled. ‘And you can hardly pay someone to win. I mean, not in advance.’

The room fell silent yet again. So what were they being paid for?

Wu cleared his throat noisily and stuck a piece of gum in his mouth. ‘I came across something interesting,’ he said. ‘Don’t know if it means shit, but it’s a strange one.’

‘They don’t come much stranger than you, Wu,’ another detective said, and a brief ripple of laughter relieved a little of the tension.

‘What is it?’ Li asked.

Wu said, ‘Well, I noticed from a couple of the statements that some of the deceased had been suffering from the flu not long before they died.’ Li suddenly remembered Sui’s coach, Zhang, when they interviewed him at the poolside. He had a bout of flu about ten days ago, he had said of Sui. Knocked the stuffing out of him. And Xing Da’s father. He had told Li that Xing was supposed to have visited his parents at the end of October, for his mother’s birthday. But he phoned to say he couldn’t come, because he and some other members of the team had picked up the flu at a meeting in Shanghai.

Wu went on, ‘So I checked. Turns out that every one of them, including our weightlifter, who we know died of natural causes, suffered from the flu within six weeks of their death.’ And he looked at the detective who had made the smart quip earlier. ‘Which seems pretty fucking strange to me.’

Tao’s eyes were ablaze with anger. ‘He’s a puppy!’ he spluttered. ‘The newest kid on the block, still wet behind the ears. You can’t put him in charge of a serious investigation like this.’

There was just Li and Tao and a lot of smoke left in the room after the meeting. Li had known he would have to face the storm. ‘He may be the newest kid on the block, but he’s also one of the brightest,’ he said. ‘And, anyway, I need everyone else on the other case.’

Tao squinted at him. ‘Do you really think you’re going to crack this one before they kick your ass into touch next week? I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ The gloves were off now.

‘Well, if I don’t, at least you’ll know I’ve been keeping the hot seat well warmed for you. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? My seat. So that you can bury the work of this section under goddamn drifts of paperwork, like the bureaucrat and pedant that you are.’

‘I believe in good, disciplined police work.’

‘That would tie this whole section up for so long the entire Olympic team would probably be dead by the time you cracked the case.’

‘And you’re making such great strides forward, Section Chief.’ Tao’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. He was no longer making any attempt to disguise his contempt for his boss, or to even pay lip service to the respect due a senior ranking officer. ‘Do you know how humiliating it is for me to have the most junior officer in the section assigned to a case over my head?’

‘If you were less fixated on rank and position, Tao, and more concerned with getting the job done, you wouldn’t see it that way. And then you wouldn’t need to feel so humiliated. But if you think that making detectives wear suits, and fining them for saying fuck, constitutes “good disciplined police work”, then God help this section when I’m gone.’ And he turned to march out and leave Tao festering on his own.

Margaret looked up from his desk as Li banged into his office and he almost dropped his files, so startled was he to see her there. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.

‘I came along to see if I could help make sense of the tests they’re doing for you at the pathology centre.’ She stood up. ‘But if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just go home again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘It hasn’t been a good morning.’

She took in his battered face. ‘You look awful.’

‘Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.’ He dumped his files on the desk.

‘What’s happened?’

And he told her. About the other bottles of perfume and aftershave going missing. The breath freshener disappearing from his pocket, although through the blood red mist of his beating, he could not be certain it had still been there. ‘You didn’t look in the pockets, did you?’ She shook her head.

And then he told her about the girl in the park.

She lifted up the photographs from the desk. ‘This her?’ He nodded. ‘Who is she?’ And she was shocked to learn that JoJo was a friend of Macken and Yixuan. ‘What happened about the break-in at his studio?’

He shrugged. ‘We don’t know.’

‘Are they connected?’

‘Don’t know that either.’

The phone rang and he snatched the receiver. Margaret watched a deep frown furrow his brow as he conducted several quickfire exchanges. He listened for a long while then, and finally he hung up to gaze thoughtfully past her into some unseen place. She waved a hand in his line of vision. ‘Hello? Are we still here?’

He re-focused on her. ‘That was Chief Forensics Officer Fu at Pau Jü Hutong. He had the results of the analysis from the lab.’

‘And?’

‘The perfume’s alcohol-based. The scent is a mix of almond and vanilla. Just like it smelled. Not very pleasant, but not very sinister either.’

‘And the breath freshener?’

Li shrugged. ‘Apparently it’s just breath freshener. Active ingredient Xylitol.’ He ran his hands back over his finely stubbled head. ‘I don’t understand. I really thought this was going to be a breakthrough.’

‘In what way?’ Margaret asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I just thought it was too much of a coincidence.’ He flung his arms out in frustration. ‘And, I mean, somebody went into those apartments and stole those other bottles. Took the other breath fresheners.’

‘Maybe they were just trying to put you off the scent,’ Margaret said. Then she made a tiny shrug of apology. ‘Sorry, no pun intended.’

But he was still hanging on to one last hope. ‘Fu said there was something else they discovered. He said it would be easier to show me than tell me.’

Margaret came round the desk. ‘Well, let’s go see.’

The Pau Jü laboratories of forensic pathology at the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination were bunkered in the bowels of a multi-storey white building tucked unobtrusively away in a narrow hutong behind the Yong Hegong Lamasery. Just about ten minutes from Section One. Li parked in the snow outside, and took Margaret’s arm as they went up the ramp, past armed guards, into the basement of the centre. He still needed his stick for support.

Fu greeted them enthusiastically. ‘We got some good footprints frozen under the snow at Jingshan,’ he told Li. ‘We’ve now got seven quite distinctly different treads. So there were a minimum of seven of them involved in the actual murder. And this…’ he held up a glass vial with a blob of white, frothy liquid at the bottom of it, ‘…was careless. Someone gobbed. We found it frozen solid in the snow. So now we’ve got DNA. You catch the guy, we can put him at the scene.’ He turned and smiled at Margaret and switched to English. ‘Sorry, Doctah. English no verr good.’

Li said impatiently, ‘You were going to show me something to do with the perfume.’

‘Not the perfume,’ Fu said. ‘The bottle.’ He took them through glass doors into a lab. Everything was white and sterile and filled with flickering fluorescent light and the hum of air-conditioning. On a table sat the Chanel bottle partially reconstructed from the pieces found in Li’s pocket. Beside it, drying on a white sheet, was the label. Distinctive cream lettering on black. Chanel № 23. It was torn and creased, and the black ink had turned brown where it had soaked in the perfume. It had also streaked and run through the cream lettering.

‘Cheap crap,’ Fu said in English.

‘Chanel is hardly cheap, or crap,’ Margaret said.

‘Chanel, no,’ Fu said grinning. ‘But this no Chanel.’

‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.

Fu reverted to Chinese. ‘I went to the expense of buying a bottle of Chanel from the Friendship Store,’ he said. And he lifted the bottle out of a drawer, placing it on the table beside the broken one and its damaged label. ‘It was the cheap ink that made me wonder,’ he said. ‘So I thought I would compare it to the real thing.’

Margaret lifted the bottle from the Friendship store and looked very carefully at the lettering. There were subtle, but distinct differences, and the black was deeper, sharper. She looked at the label recovered from Li’s bottle. ‘It’s a fake,’ she said.

‘Yeh, it fake,’ Fu confirmed. ‘And you know how I know for sure?’ He looked at them both expectantly. But, of course, they didn’t know. ‘We phone Chanel,’ he said. ‘They don’t make number twenty-three.’

III

‘It just doesn’t make any sense.’ Li’s mood had not been improved by their visit to Pau Jü Hutong. They had made the short trip back to Section One in silence. These were almost the first words he had spoken, standing on the third-floor landing one floor down from his office, trying to catch his breath. His beating the previous night had taken more out of him than he would care to admit.

Margaret said, ‘Just about every label on every market stall in China is a fake.’

‘Yes, I know, but these athletes were all earning incredible amounts of money. Apart from the fact that they could afford the real thing, why would they all go out and buy the same fake Chanel?’ And almost as an absurd afterthought, ‘And why were they all using breath freshener?’

‘There’s a lot of garlic in Chinese food,’ Margaret said. Her flippancy turned his glare in her direction. She gave a small, apologetic smile. ‘Sorry.’

They carried on up to the top floor. Li said, ‘I’ve got to go and talk to some people about this. If you wait in my office I’ll be along in a few minutes and call you a taxi.’

‘You’ve called me a lot worse,’ Margaret said. But her attempts to lighten his mood with a little humour fell on unreceptive ears. He went into the detectives’ room, and she shrugged and headed on down the corridor to his office. When the taxi came, she would pick up her mother from Mei Yuan’s stall and retreat to that tiny oasis of calm that was her apartment. Except, now that she had to share it with her mother, there was very little calm left in it.

There was a man standing staring out of the window in Li’s office when she walked in. He turned expectantly at the sound of the door opening, and she recognised him immediately as Li’s deputy, Tao Heng. A man, she knew, whom Li detested. He seemed startled, behind his thick, square glasses, to see her.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I was waiting for the Section Chief.’ He looked embarrassed. His face was flushed, and she saw that he was perspiring. As if he had read her mind, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.

‘He’ll be along in a moment,’ Margaret said.

‘I’ll not wait,’ Tao said, and he walked briskly to the door, avoiding her eye. She moved aside to let him past, and he dodged awkwardly around her. He stopped in the doorway, still holding the handle, and turned back. For a moment he hesitated, and then he said, ‘I suppose it’ll be a relief to you, not to have him coming home every night railing about his “pedantic” deputy.’

The bitterness in his voice was shocking. In fact, Li hardly ever talked about Tao, although his deputy clearly thought he did. Some giant chip on his shoulder. Margaret was startled, confused. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Tao appeared to regret immediately that he had said anything, but he seemed unable to control himself. It was as if he could no longer contain the flood of vitriol that he had been holding back to release against Li, and it was starting to leak out anyway. ‘What are you going to do? Take him back to America? I suppose there are any number of agencies over there who would consider it a feather in their cap to have an ex-Chinese cop of Li’s standing on their books.’

Bizarrely, Margaret wondered for a moment at the quality of Tao’s English, before remembering that he had worked for years with the British in Hong Kong. And then she replayed his words for their meaning and felt the cold chill of a dreadful misgiving creep across her skin. ‘Ex-Chinese cop?’

Tao looked at her blankly, and then a mist cleared from his eyes. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ A smile that Margaret could have sworn was almost gleeful spread across his face. ‘He hasn’t told you.’

Margaret’s shock and disbelief reduced her voice nearly to a whisper. ‘Told me what?’

And just as quickly, the glee slipped from Tao’s face, as if he were having second thoughts about whether or not this was something to be pleased about. He became suddenly reticent, shaking his head. ‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘You’ve started,’ Margaret said, shock and fear now fighting for space with anger. ‘You’d better finish.’

Tao was no longer able to meet her eye. ‘It’s policy,’ he said. ‘Just policy. I can’t believe you don’t know.’

‘What policy?’ Margaret demanded.

He took a deep breath, as if indicating that he had also taken a decision. He looked her straight in the eye, and she felt suddenly disconcerted by him, afraid. ‘It is impossible for a Chinese police officer to marry a foreign national and remain in the force. When Li marries you, his career will be over.’

Li had seen Tao come into the detectives’ room and thought he looked oddly flushed. His deputy had avoided making eye contact with anyone in the room and hurried into his office, shutting the door firmly behind him. Li had thought no more of it. When he got back to his office he was surprised not to find Margaret there. He called the switchboard and asked if anyone had ordered a taxi for her. But no one had. He looked out the window at the brown marble facade of the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, snow clinging to the branches of the evergreens that shaded its windows, and saw Margaret on the street below, walking quickly towards the red lanterns of the restaurant on the corner and then turning south towards Ghost Street. He was puzzled only for a moment, before turning his mind to other things.

The road was rutted with snow and ice. Bicycles and carts bumped and slithered across it. Snow, like a dusting of icing sugar, covered the rubble in the ugly gap sites the demolishers had created, if it was possible to create anything by destruction. Margaret was in danger of turning her ankle, even falling, as she hurried, oblivious, through the crowds of late morning shoppers and cyclists that choked the main approach to the large covered food market. Through tears blurring vision, she was unaware of the looks she was drawing from curious Chinese. She cut an odd figure here in north-west Beijing as she strode towards Ghost Street, her long coat pushed out by her bulging belly, golden curls flying out behind her, tears staining pale skin.

How could he not have told her? But as soon as the question formed in her mind she knew the answer. Because she would not have married him if he had. His work was his life. How could she have asked him to give it all up? Of course, he knew that, which is why he had decided to deceive her.

But you can’t build a relationship on lies, she thought. You can’t build a relationship on deception. He had been stalling her for weeks on the issue of the apartment for married officers. And how stupid was she that she hadn’t suspected? That it had never even occurred to her that there would be a price to pay for getting married? And how had he been going to tell her after the deed had been done? What did he imagine she would think, or say, or do?

The thoughts were flashing through her mind with dizzying speed. She stumbled and nearly fell, and a young man in a green padded jacket and blue baseball cap grabbed her arm to steady her. It had been an instinctive reaction, but when he saw that the woman he had helped was a wild-eyed, tear-stained yangguizi, he let her go immediately as if she might be electrically charged. He backed off, embarrassed. Margaret leaned against a concrete telegraph post and tried to clear her brain. This was crazy. She was being a danger to her baby. She wiped her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to steady herself. What in God’s name was she going to do?

The snow, which had earlier retreated into its leaden sky, started to fall again with renewed vigour. Big, soft, slow-falling flakes. Suddenly Beijing no longer felt like home. It was big and cold and alien, and she felt lost in it, wondering how it was possible to feel like a stranger in a place so familiar. And yet she did. The irony was, that a hundred meters down the road, Mei Yuan would be turning out jian bing in the lunchtime rush, and Margaret’s mother would be with her. There was no chance for her to be alone, to find some way of coming to terms with all this before she had to face Li again. Her mother would be expecting her, and there was no way she could abandon her ten thousand miles from home in a city of seventeen million Chinese.

She dried her remaining tears and thanked God that the ice-cold wind would explain her red-rimmed watering eyes and blotchy cheeks. She sucked in a lungful of air and headed off, more carefully this time, towards the corner where Mei Yuan plied her trade. As she approached it, she saw that there was a large crowd gathered around the stall. She eased herself through the figures grouped on the sidewalk and realised that it was a queue. Mei Yuan hardly ever did this kind of business. And then Margaret saw why. Mei Yuan was standing a pace or two back from the hotplate, supervising, as Mrs. Campbell made the jian bing with an expertise Margaret found hard to believe. Even harder to believe was the sight of her mother in a blue jacket and trousers beneath a large chequered apron, with a scarf tied around her head. The Chinese were jostling to be first in line, eager to be served by this foreign devil making their favourite Beijing pancake.

Mrs. Campbell glanced up as she handed a jian bing to a smiling Chinese and accepted a five yuan note. She caught sight of Margaret as she handed over the change. ‘You’ll have to take your place in the line,’ she said. ‘You’ll get no favours here just because you’re another da bidze.’ And her face broke into a wide grin. Margaret was struck by just now natural and unselfconscious the smile was. She was not used to seeing her mother this happy. It was inexplicable.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘Look at the line. That’s why. Mei Yuan says we’re doing ten times her normal business. And anyway, it’s easy, and it’s fun.’ The queue, meantime, had grown bigger as more Chinese gathered around to watch this exchange between the two foreign women. Mrs. Campbell looked at the first in line. She was a middle-aged woman warmly wrapped in her winter woollies, eyes wide in wonder. ‘Ni hau,’ Mrs. Campbell said. ‘Yi? Er?’

‘Yi,’ the woman said timidly, holding up one finger, and the crowd laughed and clapped.

Margaret looked at a smiling Mei Yuan. ‘When did my mother learn to speak Chinese?’ she asked.

‘Oh, we had a small lesson this morning,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘She can say hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome, and count from one to ten. She also makes very good jian bing.’ Then a slight frown of concern clouded her happiness. She inclined her head a little and peered at Margaret. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Margaret said quickly, remembering that she wasn’t. ‘I was just coming to collect my mother to take her home.’

‘I’ll get a taxi back later,’ Mrs. Campbell said without looking up from her jian bing. ‘Must make hay while the sun shines.’

Mei Yuan was still looking oddly at Margaret. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Of course,’ Margaret said, self-consciously. She knew her face was a mess, and she knew that Mei Yuan knew there was something wrong. ‘Look, I have to go. I’ll see you later, Mom.’

She knew she should be happy at this unexpected change in her mother, a woman who had stood on her dignity all her life, who never ventured out with a hair out of place or her make-up incomplete. And here she was, dressed like a Chinese peasant selling hot pancakes from a street stall. Freed somehow from the constraints of her own self-image. Free, for the first time that Margaret could remember, to be unreservedly happy. Perhaps playing at being someone else allowed her to be truly herself for the first time in her life. Mei Yuan was having a profound effect on her.

But Margaret was unable to break free from the constraints of her own unhappiness, and as she slipped into the back seat of a taxi on Ghost Street, she was overwhelmed again by a sense of self-pity.

IV

The apartment was strangely empty without her mother. It was amazing how quickly you could get used to another presence in your home. Even one that was unwelcome. Margaret shrugged off her coat, kicked off her boots and eased herself onto the sofa. She felt her baby kicking inside her, and it set her heart fluttering with both fear and anticipation of a future which had been thrown into complete confusion in the space of a couple of hours. She didn’t want to think about it. And so she stretched out on the sofa and found herself looking out of an upside down window at the snow falling thick and fast. She closed her eyes, and saw the face of the bearded westerner in the photograph on Li’s desk, almost immediately followed by a certain knowledge of who he was. She sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Fleischer. Hans. John of the Flesh. The mental translation she had done of his name at the time. Doctor. Shit!

Immediately she crossed to her little gate-leg table and lifted one of the leaves. She set her laptop on it and plugged it in, and while it booted up got down on her hands and knees to unplug the telephone and replace it with the modern cable from her computer. She drew in a chair and dialled up her Internet server. This was good, she thought. Something else to fill her mind. Something, anything to think about, rather than what she was going to do at the betrothal meeting tonight.

She had first heard of Doctor Hans Fleischer during her trip to Germany in the late nineties to give evidence on behalf of her dead client, Gertrude Klimt. The prosecutors had brought charges against many of the doctors in the former East German state who had been responsible for feeding drugs to young athletes. But the one they most wanted, the biggest fish of all, had somehow swum through their net. Doctor Fleischer had simply disappeared. His photograph had been in all the German papers; old newsreel of him at the trackside during Olympic competition in the eighties had played endlessly on German newscasts. There were various rumours. He had gone to South America. South Africa. Australia. China. But no one knew for certain, and the good doctor had successfully avoided his day in court, and a certain prison term.

Margaret had set Google as both her home page and her search engine. She tapped in ‘Dr. Hans Fleischer’ and hit the return key. After a few seconds her screen was filled with links to dozens of pieces of information on Fleischer harvested from around the Internet. Mostly newspaper and magazine articles, transcripts of television documentaries, official documents copied on to the net by activists. Almost all in German. Margaret scrolled through the list until she hit a link to a piece on him carried by Time magazine in 1998. She clicked on the link and up came the text of the original story. Half a dozen photographs that went with it confirmed Margaret’s identification. He had sported a beard then, too. Close-cropped, unlike his hair, not quite as silver in those days, shot through with a few streaks of darker colour. He had not even bothered to try to disguise himself. Perhaps he had assumed that he would be safe in China, anonymous.

The article traced Fleischer’s career from a brilliant double degree in sports medicine and genetics at the University of Potsdam, to his meteoric rise through the ranks at the state-owned pharmaceutical giant, Nitsche Laboratories, to become its head of research, aged only twenty-six. The next five years were something of a mystery that not even Time had been able to unravel. He had simply disappeared from sight, his career at Nitsche mysteriously cut short. There was speculation that he had spent those missing years somewhere in the Soviet Union, but that is all it ever was. Speculation.

Then in 1970 he had turned up again in the unlikely role of Senior Physician with the East German Sport Club, SC Dynamo Berlin. At this point, the Time piece fast-forwarded to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the German Democratic Republic. The files of the East German secret police, the Stasi, fell into the hands of the press. And there, the true role of Doctor Fleischer was revealed for the first time. An agent of the Stasi, codenamed ‘Schwartz’, Fleischer had been instrumental in establishing and controlling the systematic state-sponsored doping of GDR athletes for nearly two decades.

Pioneering the use of the state-developed steroids, Oral-Turinabol and Testosterone-Depot, his initial success in developing a new breed of super athletes was startling. From a medal count of twenty at the 1972 Olympics, East German competitors doubled their medal tally to forty in just four years, in the process winning eleven out of the thirteen Olympic swimming events in 1976.

Most of the athletes had come to him as children, taken from their parents and trained and educated in a strictly controlled environment which included administering the little blue and pink pills on a daily basis. Pills which turned little girls into hulking, masculine, sex-driven winning machines, and little boys into growling, muscle-bound medal winners. Fleischer had always assured them that the pills were nothing more than vitamin supplements. He had been an austere father-figure whom the children had nicknamed Father Fleischer. But by the time they were old enough to realise that the pills they had been swallowing during all those years were more than just vitamins, the damage had already been done. Both to their psyches and their bodies. Many of them, like Gertrude Klimt, would later die of cancer. Others had to endure a different kind of living hell; women giving birth to babies with abnormalities, or finding that their reproductive organs had been irreparably damaged; men made sterile, or impotent, or both; both sexes, in their thirties, suffering from debilitating tumours.

In the nineties, when the truth finally emerged, these children, now adults, had wanted their revenge. Many of them handed back the medals they had won and came forward to give evidence at the trials of their former coaches, nearly all of whom had been involved in doping the athletes in their care. But the one they had most wanted to see in the dock, the one who had promised them the earth and fed them the poison, Father Fleischer, was gone.

The Time article quoted sources as saying that he had left SC Dynamo Berlin sometime in the late eighties, before the house of cards came tumbling down, and returned to work for Nitsche. There he was reported to have been involved in research to develop a new method of stimulating natural hormone production. But it had never come to anything, and he had disappeared from Nitsche’s employment records in the Fall of 1989. By the time the Wall came down in 1990, he had disappeared, apparently from the face of the earth.

Until now.

Margaret looked at an on-screen photograph of him smiling into the camera, a tanned, nearly handsome, face. But there was something sinister in his cold, unsmiling blue eyes. Something ugly. She shivered and felt an unpleasant sense of misgiving. He was here, this man. In Beijing. And Olympic athletes were dying for no apparent reason. Surely to God this wasn’t another generation of children, Chinese this time, whose lives were being destroyed by Father Fleischer? And yet, there was nothing to connect him in any way. A chance snapshot taken at a recreation club for wealthy businessmen. That was all.

Margaret re-read the article, pausing over the speculation surrounding his activities after leaving the Berlin sports club. It had been rumoured that he had been involved in the development of a new method of stimulating natural hormone production. She frowned, thinking about it. Stimulating natural hormone production. How would you do that? She went back to his original qualifications. He had graduated from Potsdam with a double degree. Sports medicine. And genetics. None of it really helped. Even if he had found a way of stimulating natural hormone production in those dead athletes, autopsy results would have shown abnormally high hormone levels in their bodies. She shook her head. Maybe she was simply looking for connections that didn’t exist. Maybe she was simply trying to fill her mind with anything that would stop her from thinking about Li, about how he had lied to her, and what she was going to do about it.