The Runner

I

Traffic in the city had already ground to a halt. And there was not even light, yet, in the sky. Li hobbled past lines of stationary vehicles blocking all six lanes on Jianguomenwai Avenue. A few taxis were making their way gingerly along the cycle lanes, cyclists weaving past them on both sides, leaving drunken tracks in the snow. He would have to take the subway to Section One, for what would probably be his last time.

Margaret was still asleep when he left. He had no idea when either of them had drifted off, finally, to escape from their stalemate for a few short hours. But he had wakened early and lay listening to her slow, steady breathing on the pillow beside him. She had looked so peaceful, so innocent in sleep, this woman he loved. This pig-headed, stubborn, utterly unreasonable woman he loved.

He walked quickly to burn up anger and frustration. Not just with Margaret, but with everything in his life. With a bureaucracy that wouldn’t allow him to marry her and still keep his job. With an investigation that grew more obscure the more he uncovered. With his father for blaming him unreasonably for things that were not his fault. With himself for not being able to solve his own problems. With his Uncle Yifu for not being there when he needed him most.

And still the snow fell.

He reached the subway station at Jianguomen, and limped down the steps. Warm air rushed up to meet him. He bought a ticket and stood on a crowded platform waiting for a train going north. A southbound train, headed for Beijing Railway Station, came in on the other line, debouching a handful of passengers before sucking in all the people on the far side of the platform.

Li had seen the face of the driver in his cab as it came in, pale and weary in the early morning, caught for a moment in the dazzle of lights on the platform. As it left, he saw the guard peering from the side window of the cab at the other end. Had the train come in on Li’s side, heading in the other direction, their roles would have been reversed. And he realised consciously for the first time that the trains were reversible. They could be driven from either end. The same going forwards as backwards. And he wondered why something tucked away in the farthest and darkest recesses of his mind was telling him that there was significance in this.

His train arrived, and he squeezed into it to stand clutching an overhead handrail, using his free arm to protect his ribs from the other passengers crushing in around him. The recorded voice of a female announcer told them that the next stop was Chaoyangmen. And the significance of the reversible train came to him quite unexpectedly. It was Mei Yuan’s riddle. About the I Ching expert and the girl who came to consult him on his sixty-sixth birthday. Somewhere, beyond awareness, his subconscious had been chipping away at it, and now that the solution had come to him, he wondered why he had not seen it immediately. It was breath-takingly simple.

At Dongzhimen he struggled painfully to the top of the stairs, emerging once more into the cold, bitter wind that blew the snow in from the Gobi Desert. The sky was filled with a purple-grey light now, and the traffic was grinding slowly in both directions along Ghost Street. The demolition men were out already, thankful for once to be wielding their hammers, burning energy to keep themselves warm. The snow lay in ledges along every branch of every tree lining both sides of the street, on walls and window-sills and doorways, so that it felt as if the whole world were edged in white. Even the gap sites looked less ugly under their pristine, sparkling carpets.

Li was surprised to see Mei Yuan serving customers at her usual corner, steam rising in the cold from her hotplate as she scooped up jian bing in brown paper parcels to hand over in exchange for cash. She had rigged up an umbrella from her bicycle stall to fend off the snow as she worked. But the wind was defeating it, and large, soft flakes blew in all around her.

‘You’re early,’ he said to her.

She looked up, surprised. ‘So are you.’ There was a moment of awkwardness between them. Unfinished business from the betrothal meeting, unspoken exchanges. Confusion and sympathy. Perhaps a little anger. She said, ‘I’m going to the park later today. With Mrs. Campbell. She expressed an interest in tai chi.’

‘Did she?’ But he wasn’t really interested.

‘Would you like a jian bing?’

He nodded, the smell of the pancakes making him realise for the first time just how hungry he was. Although his head was protected by the hood of his jacket, the snow blew in all around his face, making it wet and cold. Big flakes clung to his eyebrows. He brushed them away. ‘I’m sorry about last night.’

She shrugged. ‘Someday, perhaps, you’ll feel like telling me about it.’

‘Someday,’ he said. And he watched her make his jian bing in silence. When finally she finished it and handed it to him, steaming and deliciously hot in his hands, he took a bite and said, ‘I figured out your riddle.’

‘You took your time,’ was all she said.

‘I had other things on my mind.’

She waited, but when he said nothing, grew impatient. ‘Well?’

He took another bite and spoke with his mouth full, savouring both the pancake and his solution. ‘Wei Chang was the I Ching practitioner, right?’ She nodded. ‘He was born on the second of February, nineteen twenty-five, and he was sixty-six on the day the young woman came to see him. That meant the date was February the second, nineteen ninety-one.’ She nodded again. ‘If you were to write that down it would be 2-2-1991. He wanted to add her age to that and then reverse the number to make a code specially for her. Of course, you didn’t tell me her age. But for this number to be so unusual, so auspicious, the woman had to be twenty-two. That way, the number he was making up for her would be 22199122, yes? Which makes it palindromic. The same backwards as forwards.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I was beginning to despair of you ever working it out.’

‘I was distracted.’

‘So I gather.’

But he did not want to get into that. ‘Where did you come across it?’

‘I didn’t. I made it up.’

He looked at her surprised. ‘Really? How in the name of your ancestors did you think of it?’

‘The English book I was reading on Napoleon Bonaparte,’ she said. ‘Not a very serious biography. The writer seemed more intent on making a fool of the Frenchman. He referred to an old joke about Bonaparte’s exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. He was alleged to have said on arriving there, Able was I ere I saw Elba. A perfect palindrome. Exactly the same forwards as backwards. Entirely apocryphal, of course. He was French! Why would he speak in English? But it gave me the idea, and since a palindrome wouldn’t work in Chinese, I made it with numbers instead.’

Li grinned at her, forgetting all his troubles for the moment. ‘You’re a smart lady, Mei Yuan. Did anyone ever tell you that?’

‘All the time.’ She smiled, and the tension between them melted like the snow on her hotplate. ‘It’s an interesting book. I’ll lend it to you if you like.’

‘I don’t have much time for reading just now.’

‘You should always make time for reading, Li Yan. And anyway, there’s an element of criminal investigation in it. That should interest you.’

And Li thought how very soon he would have no interest of any kind in criminal investigation. ‘Oh?’

Mei Yuan’s eyes grew distant, and Li knew that she had transported herself to some other place on this earth. It was why she loved to read. Her escape from the cold and the drudgery of making pancakes on a street corner. In this case, her destination was the island of St Helena — the place of Napoleon’s final exile — and a debate now nearly two centuries old. ‘When the British finally defeated Napoleon,’ she said, ‘he was banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic where he died in 1821. It has long been rumoured and written that he was actually murdered there to prevent his escape and return to France. It was said that his food was laced with arsenic, and that he died from poisoning.’ She reached behind her saddle and pulled out the book, holding it with a kind of reverence. ‘But according to this, a medical archaeologist from Canada disproved the murder theory nearly one hundred and eighty years after Napoleon’s death.’

In spite of his mood and the cold and the snow, Li found his interest engaged. ‘How?’

‘Locks of his hair were taken at autopsy and kept for posterity. This medical archaeologist, Doctor Peter Lewin, got access to the hair and was able to conduct an analysis of it which disproved the theory of murder by poisoning.’

Li frowned. ‘How could he tell that from examining the hair?’

‘Apparently the hair is like a kind of log of chemicals and poisons that pass through our bodies. Doctor Lewin contended that if Napoleon had, indeed, been poisoned, there would still be traces of the arsenic that killed him in his hair. He found none.’

But Li was no longer interested in Napoleon. He was a long way from St Helena and arsenic poisoning. He was in an autopsy room looking at a young swimmer with a shaven head. To her surprise, he took Mei Yuan’s red smiling face in his hands and kissed her. ‘Thank you, Mei Yuan. Thank you.’

II

Margaret woke late, disorientated, panicked by unfamiliar surroundings. It was a full five seconds before she remembered where she was, and the blanks in her memory started filling themselves in like the component parts of a page on the internet. Li. Making love. Triads. His resignation. Fighting. His words coming back to her. I quit the force tonight. Like the cold steel of an autopsy knife slipping between her ribs. But she could feel no anger. Only his pain. And she wished that she could make it go away.

But nothing was going to go away. Not this hotel room, nor the bruised sky spitting snow at the window. Nor her mother waking alone in her tiny apartment, nor this baby that was growing and growing inside her.

Or the strange, nagging idea that had haunted her dreams, and was still there in her waking moments, not quite formed and not entirely within her grasp.

She slipped out of bed and took a shower, trying to wash away her depression with hot, running water. But like the scent of the soap, it lingered long after. She dressed and hurried downstairs, glancing furtively at the reception desk as she passed, hoping that Li had paid the bill and that she would not be stopped at the door like some common prostitute.

As the revolving door propelled her out on to the sidewalk, the cold hit her like a physical blow. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, and saw that the traffic in the avenue was still gridlocked in the snow. No chance of a taxi.

It took her an hour to get back to her apartment, trudging the last twenty minutes through snow from the subway station. One side of her was white where the wind had driven the thick, soft flakes against her coat and her jeans. Her face had frozen rigid by the time she stepped into the elevator. Even had she felt the desire to smile at the sullen operator, her facial muscles would not have obliged. She peeled off her red ski hat and shook out the hair she had flattened beneath it. At least her ears were still warm.

‘Mom,’ she called out as she let herself into the apartment. But there were no lights on, and it felt strangely empty. ‘Mom?’ She checked the bedroom, but the bed had been made and the room tidied. Her mother was not in the kitchen or the toilet, and the sitting room was empty. There was a note on the gate-leg table beside her laptop. It was written in Mei Yuan’s careful hand.

I have taken your mother to Zhongshan Park to teach her tai chi in the snow.

Margaret felt hugely relieved. Her mother was the last person she had felt like facing right now. She switched on the overhead light and saw her own reflection in the window, and realised that she did not much want to deal with herself either. She switched the light off again and sat down at the table, turning on her laptop. The idea that had germinated in her sleep, taken root and poked through into her waking world, was still there. She did not want to try to bring it too sharply into focus in case she lost it. At least, not just yet.

She connected to the Internet, searched through the list of sites she had visited most recently, and pulled up the Time article on Hans Fleischer. She read it all through again, very slowly, very carefully, and then returned to the top of the profile. He had graduated from Potsdam with a double degree in sports medicine and genetics. Genetics. She scrolled down through the article again and stopped near the foot of it. After his time in Berlin he had returned to Nitsche, where he was said to have been involved in — the development of a new method of stimulating natural hormone production. These things had lodged very consciously with her yesterday. But there had been so many other things competing for space in her thoughts. It was sleep which had found room for them there, and brought them fizzing to the surface. And now the idea they had sparked was taking tangible shape in her waking mind.

She grabbed her coat from where it was still dripping melting snow on to the kitchen floor, and pulled on her ski cap and gloves, a vision of the runner with the purple birthmark filling her mind with a bleak sense of urgency. She had only just stepped into the elevator and asked the girl to take her to the ground floor when the phone rang in her apartment. But the doors closed before she heard it.

Li tapped his desk impatiently, listening to the long, single ring of the phone go unanswered at the other end. He waited nearly a minute before he hung up. It was the third time he had called. He had phoned the hotel some time earlier, but she had already left. Reception did not know when. There was a knock at the door and Qian poked his head around it. ‘Got a moment, Chief?’

Li nodded. ‘Sure.’ He felt a pang of regret. After today nobody would call him ‘Chief’ any more.

‘I got that information you wanted from Immigration. About Doctor Fleischer.’ He hesitated, as if waiting to be invited to continue.

‘Well?’ Li said irritably.

Qian sat down opposite him and flipped through his notes. ‘He was first granted an entry visa into China in nineteen ninety-nine. It was a one-year business visa with a work permit allowing him to take up a position with a joint-venture Swiss-Chinese chemical company called the Peking Pharmaceutical Corporation. PPC.’ He looked up and chuckled. ‘Dragons and cuckoo clocks.’ But Li wasn’t smiling. Qian turned back to his notes. ‘The visa has been renewed annually and doesn’t come up for renewal again for another six months. He doesn’t seem to be with PPC any more, though.’ He looked up. ‘Which is odd. Because there isn’t any record of who’s employing him now.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, he has two addresses. He rents an apartment on the east side, near the China World Trade Center. And he also has a small country cottage just outside the village of Guanling near the Miyun Reservoir.’ Qian raised his eyebrows. ‘Apparently he owns it.’ Which was unusual in the Middle Kingdom, because land ownership was one of those grey areas which had not yet been sorted out in the new China.

Li knew the reservoir well. It supplied more than half the city’s water. A huge lake about sixty-five kilometers north-east of Beijing, it was scattered with islets and bays beneath a backdrop of towering mountains still traced with the remains of the Great Wall. He had spent many weekends there during his student days, fishing and swimming. He, along with a handful of close friends, had often taken the bus from Dongzhimen on a summer’s day, packed lunches in their backpacks, and wandered off into the foothills beyond the reservoir to find rock pools large enough to swim in, away from the crowds. On a clear day, from up in the mountains, you could see the capital shimmering in the distant plain. There was a holiday village on the shores of the lake now, and it had become a popular resort for both Chinese and foreign tourists.

He wondered what on earth Fleischer was doing with a house out there.

III

Margaret slipped into Zhongshan Park by the east gate. Through a huge, tiled moongate, she saw snow-laden conifers leaning over the long straight path leading west to the Maxim Pavilion. But she turned south, past ancient gnarled trees and heard the sound of 1930s band music drifting through the park with the snow. It seemed wholly incongruous in this most traditional of Chinese settings.

Mei Yuan and her mother were not amongst the handful of hardy tai chi practitioners in the forecourt of the Yu Yuan Pavilion. Margaret stood, perplexed for a moment, wondering where else they might be. One of the women recognised her and smiled and pointed in the direction of the Altar of the Five-Coloured Soil.

As she approached the vast raised concourse that created the boundary for the altar, the sound of band music grew louder. But she couldn’t see where it was coming from because of the wall around it. She climbed half a dozen steps and entered the concourse through one of its four marble gates. A gang of women in blue smocks and white headcovers leaned on their snow scrapers on the fringes of a large crowd of Zhongshan regulars gathered around a couple dancing to the music. Margaret recognised Glenn Miller’s Little Brown Jug, and even from here could see that the couple were gliding across the snow-scraped flagstones like professional ballroom dancers.

She searched the faces of the onlookers as she drew closer, and spotted Mei Yuan watching intently. But there was no sign of her mother. She eased through the crowd and touched Mei Yuan’s arm. Mei Yuan turned, and her face lit up when she saw her.

‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’ she said.

Margaret frowned. ‘Who is?’

‘Your mother.’ Mei Yuan nodded towards the dancers, and Margaret saw with a shock that the couple dancing so fluidly through the falling snow comprised an elderly Chinese gentleman and her mother.

Margaret’s hand flew to her mouth and she couldn’t help exclaiming, ‘My God!’ She watched for a moment or two in stunned disbelief, and then remembered her mother’s fall. ‘What about her leg? She could hardly walk yesterday.’

Mei Yuan smiled knowingly. ‘It’s amazing what a little sexual frisson can do to aid recovery.’

Margaret looked at her as if she had two heads. ‘A little what?’

‘She’s quite a flirt, your mother.’

Margaret was shaking her head in disbelief, at a loss for words. ‘My mother!’ was all she could find to say.

The music came to an end, and the dancers stopped. The crowd burst into spontaneous applause, and the elderly Chinese gentleman bowed to Mrs. Campbell, before heading off to rejoin his friends. Mrs. Campbell hurried over to where Margaret and Mei Yuan were standing. Her face was flushed and animated, eyes brimming with excitement and pleasure. She was also more than a little breathless. ‘Well?’ she said, beaming at them both. ‘How did I do?’

‘You were marvellous,’ Mei Yuan said, with genuine admiration.

‘I didn’t know you could dance,’ Margaret said.

Mrs. Campbell raised one eyebrow and cast a withering look over her daughter. ‘There are many things you don’t know about me,’ she said. ‘Children forget that before they were born their parents had lives.’ She caught her breath. ‘I take it the fact that you were out all night is a good sign. Or do I mean bad? I mean, is the wedding off or on? I’d hate to have to go home early. I’m just beginning to enjoy myself.’

Margaret said, ‘Li is quitting the force. He posted his resignation last night.’

‘No!’ Mei Yuan put the back of her hand to her mouth.

‘He seemed to think that would make me want to marry him again.’

‘And did it?’ her mother asked.

‘Of course not. But I can’t win, can I? I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. And I’m damned if I’m going to be either.’

Mrs. Campbell sighed deeply. ‘Just like her father,’ she said to Mei Yuan. ‘Obstinate to the last.’

‘Anyway,’ Margaret said, ‘I’d hate to spoil your fun. Don’t feel you have to go home early on my account. I just stopped by to say I’m going to be busy today.’ She turned to Mei Yuan. ‘If you don’t mind babysitting for a few more hours.’

‘Really, Margaret!’ her mother protested.

But Mei Yuan just smiled and squeezed Margaret’s hand. ‘Of course,’ she said. And then her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. She still held Margaret’s hand. ‘Don’t abandon him now, Margaret. He needs you.’

Margaret nodded, afraid to catch her mother’s eye, reluctant to show the least sign of vulnerability. ‘I know,’ she said.

The snow was lying thick on the basketball court behind the wire fencing. On a day like this the students were all indoors, and Margaret made the only tracks on the road south from the main campus to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination, where she had carried out her autopsies. Inside, the centre was warm and she pulled off her hat and made her way along the first-floor corridor that led to Professor Yang’s office.

His secretary smiled and inquired, in her limited English, after the health of Margaret’s baby, and then she knocked on the professor’s door and asked if he would see Doctor Campbell for a few minutes. Of course he would, he said, and Margaret was ushered in to a warm handshake and an invitation to take a seat. Professor Yang was a tall, lugubrious man with large, square, rimless glasses, and a head of very thick, sleekly brushed hair. He was sometimes a little vague, like an original for the absent-minded professor, but that only disguised a mind as sharp as a razor. It would be easy to under-estimate him on first meeting. Quite a number of people had. To their cost. He was an extremely able forensic pathologist in his own right. But it was his political acumen, and administrative skills, which had propelled him into his current position of power as head of the most advanced forensics facility in China. Samples from all over the country were sent to the laboratories here for the most sophisticated analysis. Its staff were regularly posted on attachment to other facilities around the world, to learn and bring back the latest refinements in DNA testing and radioimmunassay and a host of other laboratory techniques.

He had a soft spot for Margaret. ‘What can I do for you, my dear?’ His English was almost too perfect, belonging in some ways to another era. The kind of English no one spoke any more. Even in England. He would not have been out of place as a 1950s BBC radio announcer.

‘Professor, I have a favour to ask,’ she said.

‘Hmmm,’ he smiled. ‘Then I am certain to oblige. I rather enjoy having attractive young ladies in my debt.’

Margaret couldn’t resist a smile. Professor Yang took the Chinese system of guanxi—a favour given is a debt owed — very literally. ‘I’ve been working with Section Chief Li on the dead athletes case.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve been following it quite closely. Very interesting.’

‘I wonder if you might know anyone with a background in genetics. Someone who might be able to do a little blood analysis for me.’

Professor Yang looked as if his interest had just increased. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘my best friend from school is now Professor of Genetics at Beijing University.’

‘Do you think he might be prevailed upon to do me a favour?’

‘There is, my dear, a certain matter of some outstanding guanxi between myself and Professor Xu.’ It was odd how this strangely BBC voice became suddenly Chinese in a single word before returning again to the contorted vowels and diphthongs of his old-fashioned English. ‘So, of course, if I ask him, he will do me a favour.’

‘And then I will owe you.’

He beamed. ‘I do so much like having guanxi in the bank.’

‘I’ll need to retrieve some of the heart blood I took from the swimmer, Sui Mingshan. There should be enough left.’

‘Well, let us go and see, my dear,’ he said, and he stood up and lifted his coat from the stand behind the door. ‘And I shall accompany you to the university myself. I do not get out nearly enough. And I have not seen old Xu in a long time.’

Along with the blood, Margaret had sent urine, bile, stomach contents and a portion of liver for analysis. There was still a good fifty millilitres of Sui’s blood in the refrigerator available for testing. Margaret drew off most of it into a small glass vial which she sealed and labelled and packed carefully into her purse.

Professor Yang arranged for a car and driver to take them across town. Ploughs had been out on the Fourth Ring Road, and they made slow but steady progress through the lines of traffic heading north before turning off on the slip road on to Souzhou Street and driving deep into Haidian’s university-land.

Beijing University, known simply as Beida, sat in splendid snow-covered isolation behind high brick walls, an extraordinary rambling campus of lakes and pavilions and meandering footpaths. Professor Xu’s office was on the second floor of the College of Biogenic Science. He could not have been more different from Professor Yang — short, round, balding, with tiny wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of a very small, upturned nose. Yang always cut an elegant figure in his immaculately pressed dark suits. Xu sported a well-worn, padded, Chinese jacket open over a tee-shirt and baggy corduroy pants. He smoked constantly, and his brown suede shoes were covered in fallen ash.

The two men shook hands with genuine pleasure and clear enthusiasm. There was an exchange which Margaret did not understand, but which made them both laugh aloud. Xu turned to Margaret. ‘He always more lucky than me, Lao Yang. Always with pretty girl on his arm.’ His English wasn’t as good as Yang’s.

‘That’s because I’m so much better looking than you, Professor,’ Yang said. And he turned to Margaret. ‘He was an ugly boy, too.’

‘But smarter,’ Xu said, grinning.

‘A matter of opinion,’ Yang said sniffily.

Xu said to Margaret. ‘Lao Yang say you need some help. He owe me so-oo many favour. But I do favour for you.’ And suddenly his smile was replaced by a frown of concentration. ‘You have blood?’

Margaret took the vial out of her purse. ‘I hope it’s enough. I took it from a young man who was suffering from an unusual heart condition. Hypertrophy of the microvasculature.’ Yang quickly translated this more technical language. Margaret went on. ‘I am wondering if his condition might have been brought about by some kind of genetic disorder.’

Xu took the vial. ‘Hmmm. Could take some time.’ He held it up to the light.

‘We don’t have much time,’ Margaret said. ‘This condition has already killed several people, and may well kill several more.’

‘Ah,’ Yang said. He laid the vial on his desk and lit another cigarette. ‘Why you think there is genetic element?’

‘To be honest,’ Margaret said, ‘I don’t know that there is.’ She glanced at Yang. ‘I’m making a wild guess, here. That these people might have been subjected to some kind of genetic modification.’

Yang translated, and Margaret could see that Xu found the suggestion intriguing. He looked at Margaret. ‘Okay, I give it big priority.’

On the way back in the car, Yang and Margaret sat in silence for some time, watching the traffic and the snow. They were back on the ring road before Yang said to her, ‘You think someone might have been tampering with the DNA of these athletes?’ He, too, was clearly intrigued.

Margaret looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry Professor, I hope I am not wasting your friend’s time. It really is the wildest stab in the dark.’

A police Jeep, windows opaque with condensation, was parked at the front door of the Centre of Material Evidence Determination when Professor Yang’s car pulled in opposite the basketball court. As the professor helped Margaret towards the steps, the doors on each side of the Jeep opened simultaneously, and Li and Sun got out in a cloud of hot, stale cigarette smoke. Margaret turned as Li called her name, and she saw him limping towards her on his stick. At least, she thought, he still appeared to be in a job. She searched his face anxiously as he approached, and saw tension there. But also, to her surprise, lights in his eyes. She knew immediately there had been developments. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

He said, ‘I know why they shaved the athletes’ heads. At least, I think I do. But I need you to prove it.’

Yang said, ‘Well, let’s not stand here discussing it in the snow, shall we? You had better come along to my office and we’ll have some tea.’

Li could barely contain himself on the walk along the hall to Yang’s office. Well over half the day had gone already, and his revelation was burning a hole in his brain. Yang told his secretary to make them tea, and swept into his office. Li and Sun and Margaret followed. Yang hung his coat on the stand and said, ‘Well? Are you going to put us out of our misery, Section Chief? Or are you going to stand there dithering until the tea arrives?’

Li said, ‘It’s the hair. If they were taking drugs there would be a record of it right there on their heads. Even if they managed somehow to get the stuff out of their systems there would still be traces of it in their hair.’

‘Jesus,’ Margaret whispered. ‘Of course.’ And now that it was out there in front of her, she wondered why it had not occurred to her before.

Li said, ‘I’ve already done some research on the Internet.’ And Margaret knew that the hours she had spent schooling him on how to get the best out of a search engine had been worthwhile. He said, ‘I found an article in a forensic medical publication. It seems some French scientists recently published a paper on hair analysis in a test group of bodybuilders. They found that…’ he fumbled in his pocket for the printout he had taken from the computer. He opened it up, searching for the relevant paragraph. ‘Here it is…that, quote, long-term histories of an individual’s drug use are accessible through hair analysis, whereas urinalysis provides only short-term information. End quote.’ He looked up triumphantly.

Yang said, ‘But if they all had their heads shaved, how will we ever know?’

Margaret said, ‘But they didn’t, did they?’ She turned to Li. ‘The weightlifter who died from the heart attack. He still had his hair.’

‘And plenty of it,’ Li said. ‘A ponytail halfway down his back.’

Margaret looked troubled. ‘The only problem is,’ she said, ‘I have absolutely no expertise in this area.’ She looked to Professor Yang. ‘And I’m not sure if anyone here does.’

Yang’s secretary knocked and came in with a tray of tall glasses and a flask of hot tea. ‘Ah, good, thank you, my dear,’ said Yang. ‘Ask Doctor Pi to step into my office for a few moments, would you?’ She nodded, set the tray down on his desk and left. The professor started pouring. ‘You know Doctor Pi, don’t you, Margaret?’ he said.

‘Head of the forensics laboratory, isn’t he?’

Yang nodded. ‘Spent some time last year on an exchange trip to the US.’ He smiled. ‘One of my little hobby-horses, exchange trips.’ He started handing full glasses of tea around. ‘I believe Doctor Pi took part in a study in South Florida to ascertain cocaine abuse in pregnant women by performing hair assays.’ He grinned now. ‘You never know when such skills might come in handy.’

Doctor Pi was a tall, good-looking young man with a slow, laconic manner, and impeccable American English. Yes, he confirmed when he came in, he had taken part in such a study. He sipped his tea and waited expectantly.

‘It was successful?’ Margaret asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We found we could reliably look at drug exposure months after it had passed out of the urine or the blood. Anything up to ninety days after. A kind of retrospective window of detection.’

Li said, ‘If we could provide you with a hair sample would you be able to analyse it for us, open up that retrospective window.’

‘Sure. We got facilities here that would let me do a pretty sophisticated radioimmunassay.’

‘What kind of sample, exactly, would you need?’ Margaret asked.

‘I’d need forty to fifty strands of hair from the vertex of the scalp, cut at scalp level with surgical scissors.’

Margaret said, ‘You’d need alignment maintained?’

‘Sure. You’ll have to rig up a little collection kit to pack it in, so that you maintain hair alignment and root-tip orientation for me. About two and a half centimeters would provide an average sixty-day growth length.’

Margaret said to Li, ‘Is the weightlifter still at Pau Jü Hutong?’

‘In the chiller.’

‘Then we’d better get straight over there and give him a haircut.’

Pi sipped his tea. ‘It would help,’ he said, ‘to know what I was looking for.’

‘Hormones,’ Margaret said.

‘What, you mean like anabolic steroids? Testosterone derivatives, synthetic EPO, that kind of thing?’

‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘I mean the real thing. No substitutes or derivatives or synthetics. Testosterone, human growth hormone, endogenous EPO. You can measure the endogenous molecule, can’t you?’

Pi shrugged. ‘Not easy. Interpretation is difficult because physiological levels are unknown. But we can look at the esters of molecules like testosterone enanthate, testosterone cypionate and nandrolone, and determine whether they are exogenous or not. So I should be able to identify what is endogenous.’

Li looked confused. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

Professor Yang said, ‘I think it means, yes, Section Chief.’

IV

The light was fading by the time Margaret got back to the apartment. The snow had stopped falling, but it still lay thick across the city, masking its beauty and its imperfections. She had cut a lock of Jia Jing’s silken black hair according to Doctor Pi’s instructions, and delivered it in its proper orientation back to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination.

Her mother had not yet returned, and there was something cheerless about the place. More so than usual. She felt the radiator in the sitting room and it was barely lukewarm. The communal heating was acting up again. The overhead electric light leeched the colour out of everything in the apartment, and Margaret shivered at the bleak prospect of life here on her own with a baby. There was no question of Li being allowed to share the apartment with her officially. She would not even be allocated a married couple’s apartment — because she was not married to him. And they could not afford to rent privately if Li was unemployed.

She arched her spine backwards, pressing her palms into her lower back. It had started to ache again. Her antenatal class was due to begin in just over an hour. She had not felt like going out again into the cold and dark, but the apartment was so depressing she could not face the prospect of sitting alone in it waiting for her mother to return. A wave of despair washed over her, and she bit her lip to stop herself crying. Self-pity was only ever self-defeating.

She went through to the bedroom and opened the closet. Hanging amongst her clothes was the traditional Chinese qipao which she had bought to wear on her wedding day. She had sat up night after night unpicking the seams and recutting it to accommodate the bulge of her child. Still, it would have looked absurd. She had intended wearing a loose-fitting embroidered silk smock over it, to at least partially disguise her condition. She lifted the qipao and the smock from the rail and laid them out on the bed beside the red headscarf that Mei Yuan had given her, and gazed upon the bright, embroidered colours. Reds and yellows and blues, golds and greens. Dragons and snakes. In the bottom of the closet were the tiny silk slippers she had bought to go with them. Black and gold. She lifted them out and ran the tips of her fingers over their silky smoothness. She threw them on the bed suddenly, knowing she would never wear them, and the tears came at last. Hot and silent. She didn’t know whether she was crying for herself, or for Li. Maybe for them both. Theirs had been a difficult, stormy relationship. They had not made things easy for themselves. Now fate was making them even harder. She had been born in the Year of the Monkey, and Li in the Year of the Horse. She remembered being told once that horses and monkeys were fated never to get on. That they were incompatible, and that any relationship between them was doomed to failure. She felt her baby kick inside her, as if to remind her that not everything she and Li had created between them was a failure. Perhaps their child could bridge the gulf between horse and monkey, between China and America. Between happiness and unhappiness.

A hammering at the door crashed into her thoughts and startled her. It was a loud, persistent knocking. Not her mother or Mei Yuan. Not Li, who had a key. Hastily, she wiped her face and hurried through the hall to answer the door. Before she did, she put it on its chain. The moment it opened, the knocking stopped, and a young man stepped back into the light of the landing, squinting at her between door and jamb. He was a rough-looking boy, with a thick thatch of dull black hair, and callused hands. She saw the tattooed head of a serpent emerging from the arm of his jacket on to the back of his hand. He smelled of cigarettes and alcohol.

‘You Doctah Cambo?’

Margaret felt a shiver of apprehension. She had no idea who this young man was. He was wearing heavy, workman’s boots, and could easily have kicked in her door. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘You come with me.’

‘I don’t think so.’ She tried to close the door, but he was there in an instant, his foot preventing her from shutting it. ‘I’ll scream!’ she said shrilly.

‘My sister wanna talk t’you,’ he said gruffly, and pushed the door back to the extent of its chain.

‘Who the hell’s your sister?’

‘Dai Lili.’

Margaret stepped back from the door as if she had received an electric shock. The hammering of her heart was making her feel sick. ‘How do I know she’s your sister? What does she look like?’

He touched his left cheek. ‘She got mark on face.’

And Margaret realised what a stupid question she had asked. Millions of people had seen Dai Lili running on television. Her birthmark was her trademark. ‘No. I need more.’

He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a dog-eared business card. ‘She gimme this to give you.’ And he thrust it through the gap towards her. It was the card she had given Dai Lili that day outside the hospital. She knew it was the same card because it had the scored-through phone number of her friend scrawled on it.

Margaret took a deep, tremulous breath. The boy was clearly agitated. He kept glancing nervously towards the elevators. It was a big decision for her. She knew she probably should not go, but the picture in her mind of the young runner’s face, the fear in her eyes, was still very vivid. ‘Give me a minute,’ she said, and she closed the door before he could stop her. She shut her eyes, her breath shallow now and rapid. ‘Shit!’ she whispered to herself. And then she went into the kitchen and lifted her coat and hat.

When she opened the door again, the young man seemed startled to see her, as if he had already decided she was not going to reappear. ‘Where is she?’ Margaret asked.

‘You got bike?’

‘Yes.’

‘You follow me.’

In the detectives’ room a crowd was gathered around the television set to watch the ad going out on air. Li had taken the very nearly unprecedented step of asking Beijing TV to put Dai Lili’s photograph out on all of its channels, appealing for any information from the public on her whereabouts. They had set up six lines, with a bank of operators to take calls. Li was certain that she was involved. Somehow. She had been desperate to talk to Margaret, and now she was missing. He was convinced that if they could find her she would be the key to everything. But only if she was still alive. And his hopes of that were not high.

He saw Wu hanging up his telephone. ‘Any news?’ he called.

Wu shook his head. ‘Nope. According to the security man Fleischer hasn’t been back to his apartment for days. And that place out by the reservoir is some kind of summer house. It’s been shut up all winter.’

Li gasped his frustration. Doctor Fleischer, apparently, had disappeared into thin air. They had officers watching his apartment and the club. Inquiries with his previous employer, Peking Pharmaceutical Corporation, revealed that he had been running their highly sophisticated laboratory complex for the last three years, but had left their employ six months ago, just after his work permit and visa had been renewed. Li headed for the door.

‘By the way, Chief,’ Wu called after him. ‘Anything we put in the internal mail last night is history.’

Li stopped in his tracks. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Motorbike courier was involved in a smash on the second ring road first thing this morning. Mail was all over the road…most of it ruined.’

Li lingered in the doorway. Was it fate? Good luck, bad luck? Did it make any difference? He said, ‘What about the courier?’ He did not like to think that the fates might have intervened on his behalf at the expense of some innocent courier.

‘Broke his wrist. A bit shaken up. Okay, though.’

But even if his letter of resignation had failed to reach its destination, it was only a stay of execution. Li shook his head to clear his mind. It was not important now. Other things took precedence. He turned into the corridor and nearly collided with Sun.

‘Chief, is it okay if I take a couple of hours to go up to the hospital with Wen? I still haven’t made it to one of these antenatal classes yet and she’s been giving me hell.’

‘Sure,’ Li said, distracted.

‘I mean, I know it’s not the best time with everything that’s going on just now…’

‘I said okay,’ Li snapped, and he strode off down the hall to his office.

Tao was waiting for him, standing staring out of the window into the dark street below. He turned as Li came in.

‘What do you want?’ Li said.

Tao walked purposefully past him and closed the door. He said, ‘You had my personnel file out last night.’

Li sighed. It did not occur to him to wonder how Tao knew. ‘So?’

‘I want to know why?’

‘I don’t have time for this right now, Tao.’

‘Well, I suggest you make time.’ The low, controlled threat in Tao’s voice was clear and unmistakable.

It cut right through Li’s preoccupation, and he looked at him, surprised. ‘I’m not sure I like your tone, Deputy Section Chief.’

‘I’m not sure I care,’ Tao said. ‘After all, you’re not going to be around long enough for it to make any difference.’ Li’s hackles rose, but Tao pressed on before he could respond. ‘Seems to me it’s a serious breach of trust between a chief and his deputy when you go asking junior officers to pull my file from Personnel. Makes it look like it’s me who’s under investigation.’

‘Well, maybe it is,’ Li snapped back.

Which appeared to take Tao by surprise. ‘What do you mean?’

‘In the mid-nineties you were involved in an investigation by the Hong Kong police into the activities of Triad gangs there.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘You spent time working under cover. You got very close to what was happening on the ground. But you didn’t make a single arrest of any note. Not a single prosecution worth a damn.’

‘No one working on that investigation did.’ Tao had gone very pale.

‘And why was that?’ Li asked.

‘We never got the break we needed. Sure, we could have picked up all the little guys. But more little guys would just have taken their place. It was the brains behind them that we were after, and we never got near.’

‘I remember hearing a rumour that was because the Triads were always one step ahead of the police.’

Tao glared at him. ‘The insider theory.’

‘That’s right.’

‘There was never any evidence that they had someone on the inside. It was a good excuse thought up by the British for explaining their failure.’ The two men stared at each other with mutual hatred. But Li said nothing. And finally Tao said, ‘You think it was me, don’t you?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘That’s why you pulled my file.’

‘We’ve got Triads in Beijing, Tao. Anyone with specialist knowledge could be valuable.’

Tao narrowed his eyes. ‘You don’t believe that. You think I’m involved.’

Li shrugged. ‘Why would I think that?’

‘You tell me.’

Li turned and wandered towards his desk. ‘There are certain anomalies in this investigation which require explanation,’ he said. ‘The bottles of perfume removed from their apartments, the return visit by the thieves who robbed Macken.’

Tao looked disgusted. ‘And you think I was responsible for those…anomalies?’

‘No,’ Li said. ‘I had a look at your file, that’s all. You’re the one who’s jumping to conclusions.’

‘There’s only one conclusion I can jump to, Section Chief Li. You’re trying to smear my name so I won’t get your job. Some kind of petty revenge.’ Tao gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘Your parting shot.’

Li shook his head. ‘You’re obsessed with getting this job, aren’t you?’

‘I could hardly be worse at it than you.’ Tao stabbed a furious finger through the air in Li’s direction. ‘And one way or the other, I’m not going to let you fuck it up for me!’

Li said, ‘That’s ten yuan for the swear box, Deputy Tao.’

Tao turned on his heel and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. And Li closed his eyes and tried hard to stop himself from shaking.