The Runner

I

The walls were a pale, pastel pink, pasted with posters illustrating exercises for posture and breathing. The grey linoleum was cool beneath her, the air warm and filled with the concentrated sounds of deep breathing. Almost hypnotic.

Margaret tried to ignore the ache in her lower back which had begun to trouble her over the last couple of weeks. She sat with her back straight and stretched her legs out in front of her. Then she slowly bent her knees, bringing the soles of her feet together and pulling them back towards her. She always found this exercise particularly difficult. Now in her mid-thirties, she was ten years older than most of the other women here, and joints and muscles would not twist and stretch with the same ease they had once done. She closed her eyes and concentrated on stretching her spine as she breathed in deeply, and then relaxing her shoulders and the back of her neck as she breathed out again.

She opened her eyes and looked at the women laid out on the floor around her. Most were lying on their sides with pillows beneath their heads. Upper arms and legs were bent upwards, a pillow supporting the knee. Lower legs were extended and straight. Expectant fathers squatted by their wives’ heads, eyes closed, breathing as one with the mothers of their unborn children. It was the new Friendly to Family Policy in practice. Where once men had been banned from the maternity wards of Chinese hospitals, their presence was now encouraged. Single rooms for mother and child, with a fold-down sofa for the father, were available on the second floor of the First Teaching Hospital of Beijing Medical University for Women and Children. For those who could afford them. The going rate of four hundred yuan per day was double the weekly income of the average worker.

Margaret felt a pang of jealousy. She knew that there would be a good reason for Li Yan’s failure to turn up. There always was. An armed robbery. A murder. A rape. A meeting he could not escape. And she could not blame him for it. But she felt deprived of him; frustrated that she was the only one amongst twenty whose partner regularly failed to attend; anxious that in her third trimester, she was the only one in her antenatal class who was not married. While attitudes in the West might have changed, single mothers in China were still frowned upon. She stood out from the crowd in every way, and not just because of her Celtic blue eyes and fair hair.

From across the room she caught Jon Macken looking at her. He grinned and winked. She forced a smile. The only thing they really had in common was their American citizenship. Since returning to Beijing with a view to making it her permanent home, Margaret had done her best to avoid the expat crowd. They liked to get together for gatherings in restaurants and at parties, cliquish and smug and superior. Although many had married Chinese, most made no attempt to integrate. And it was an open secret that these Westerners were often seen by their Chinese partners as one-way tickets to the First World.

To be fair to Macken, he did not fall into this category. A freelance photographer, he had come to China five years earlier on an assignment and fallen in love with his translator. He was somewhere in his middle sixties, and Yixuan was four years younger than Margaret. Neither of them wanted to leave China, and Macken had established himself in Beijing as the photographer of choice when it came to snapping visiting dignitaries, or shooting the glossies for the latest joint venture.

Yixuan had appointed herself unofficial translator for a bewildered Margaret when they attended their first antenatal class together. Margaret had been lost in a sea of unintelligible Chinese, for like almost every class since, Li had not been there. Margaret and Yixuan had become friends, occasionally meeting for afternoon tea in one of the city’s more fashionable teahouses. But, like Margaret, Yixuan was a loner, and so their friendship was conducted at a distance, unobtrusive, and therefore tolerable.

As the class broke up, Yixuan waddled across the room to Margaret. She smiled sympathetically. ‘Still the police widow?’ she said.

Margaret shrugged, struggling to her feet. ‘I knew it went with the territory. So I can’t complain.’ She placed the flats of her hands on the joints above her buttocks and arched her back. ‘God…’ she sighed. ‘Will this ever pass?’

‘When the baby does,’ Yixuan said.

‘I don’t know if I can take it for another whole month.’

Yixuan found a slip of paper in her purse and began scribbling on it in spidery Chinese characters. She said, without looking up, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, Margaret. You have only a few more left to take.’

‘Yeh, but they’re the hardest,’ Margaret complained. ‘The first one was easy. It involved sex.’

‘Did I hear someone mention my favourite subject?’ Macken shuffled over to join them. He cut an oddly scrawny figure in his jeans and tee-shirt, with his cropped grey hair and patchy white beard.

Yixuan thrust her scribbled note into his hand. ‘If you take this down to the store on the corner,’ she said, ‘they’ll box the stuff for you. I’ll get a taxi and meet you there in about ten minutes.’

Macken glanced at the note and grinned. ‘You know, that’s what I love about China,’ he said to Margaret. ‘It makes me feel young again. I mean, who can remember the last time they were sent down to the grocery store with a note they couldn’t read?’ He turned his grin on Yixuan and pecked her affectionately on the cheek. ‘I’ll catch up with you later, hon.’ He patted her belly. ‘Both of you.’

Margaret and Yixuan made their way carefully downstairs together, holding the handrail like two old women, wrapped up warm to meet the blast of cold night air that would greet them as they stepped out into the car park. Yixuan waited while Margaret searched for her bike, identifying it from the dozens of others parked in the cycle racks by the scrap of pink ribbon tied to the basket on the handlebars. She walked, wheeling it, with Yixuan to the main gate.

‘You should not still be riding that thing,’ Yixuan said.

Margaret laughed. ‘You’re just jealous because Jon won’t let you ride yours.’ In America Margaret would have been discouraged at every stage of her pregnancy from riding a bicycle. And during the first trimester, when the risk of another miscarriage was at its highest, she had kept it locked away in the university compound. But when her doctors told her that the worst had passed, and that the baby was firmly rooted, she had dug it out again, fed up with crowded buses and overfull subway carriages. She had been at more danger, she figured, on public transport, than on her bike. And, anyway, women here cycled right up until their waters broke, and she saw no reason to be different in yet another way.

Yixuan squeezed her arm. ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you Wednesday.’ And she watched as Margaret slipped on to her saddle and pulled out into the stream of bicycles heading west in the cycle lane. Margaret’s scarf muffled her nose and mouth against the biting cold of the Beijing night. Her woollen hat, pulled down over her forehead, kept her head cosy and warm. But nothing could stop her eyes from watering. The forecasters had been predicting minus twenty centigrade, and it felt like they were right. She kept her head down, ignoring the roar of traffic on the main carriageway of Xianmen Dajie. On the other side of the road, beyond the high grey-painted walls of Zhongnanhai, the leadership of this vast land were safe and warm in the centrally heated villas that lined the frozen lakes of Zhonghai and Nanhai. In the real world outside, people swaddled themselves in layers of clothes and burned coal briquettes in tiny stoves.

The restaurants and snack stalls were doing brisk business beneath the stark winter trees that lined the sidewalk. The tinny tannoyed voice of a conductress berating passengers on her bus permeated the night air. There were always, it seemed, voices emitting from loudspeakers and megaphones, announcing this, selling that. Often harsh, nasal female tones, reflecting a society in which women dominated domestically, if not politically.

Not for the first time, Margaret found herself wondering what the hell she was doing here. An on-off relationship with a Beijing cop, a child conceived in error and then miscarried in tears. A decision that needed to be taken, a commitment that had to be made. Or not. And then a second conception. Although not entirely unplanned, it had made the decision for her. And so here she was. A highly paid Chief Medical Examiner’s job in Texas abandoned for a poorly remunerated lecturing post at the University of Public Security in Beijing, training future Chinese cops in the techniques of modern forensic pathology. Not that they would let her teach any more. Maternity leave was enforced. She felt as if everything she had worked to become had been stripped away, leaving her naked and exposed in her most basic state — as a woman and mother-to-be. And soon-to-be wife, with the wedding just a week away. They were not roles she had ever seen herself playing, and she was not sure they would ever come naturally.

She waved to the security guard at the gate of the university compound and saw his cigarette glow in the dark as he drew on it before calling a greeting and waving cheerily back. It was nearly an hour’s cycle from the hospital to the twenty-storey white tower block in Muxidi which housed the University of Public Security’s one thousand staff, and Margaret was exhausted. She would make something simple for herself to eat and have an early night. Her tiny two-roomed apartment on the eleventh floor felt like a prison cell. A lonely place that she was not allowed, officially, to share with Li. Even after the wedding, they would have to continue their separate lives until such time as the Ministry allocated Li a married officer’s apartment.

The elevator climbed slowly through eleven floors, the thickly padded female attendant studiously ignoring her, squatting on a low wooden stool and flipping idly through the pages of some lurid magazine. The air was dense with the smell of stale smoke and squashed cigarette ends, and piles of ash lay around her feet. Margaret hated the ride in the elevator, but could no longer manage the stairs. She tried to hold her breath until she could step out into the hallway and with some relief slip the key in the door of number 1123.

Inside, the communal heating made the chill of the un-insulated apartment almost bearable. The reflected lights of the city below crept in through her kitchen window, enough for her to see to put on a kettle without resorting to the harsh overhead bulb which was unshaded and cheerless. If she had thought this was anything other than a temporary address, she might have made an effort to nest. But she didn’t see the point.

Neither did she see the shadow that crossed the hall behind her. The darting silhouette of a tall figure that moved silently through the doorway. His hand, slipping from behind to cover her mouth, prevented the scream from reaching her lips, and then immediately she relaxed as she felt his other hand slide gently across the swell of her belly, his lips breathing softly as they nuzzled her ear.

‘You bastard,’ she whispered when he took his hand from her mouth and turned her to face him. ‘You’re not supposed to give me frights like that.’

He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Who else would be interested in molesting some ugly fat foreigner?’

‘Bastard!’ she hissed again, and then reached on tiptoe to take his lower lip between her front teeth and hold it there until he forced them apart with his tongue and she could feel him swelling against the tautness of her belly.

When they broke apart she looked up into his coal dark eyes and asked, ‘Where were you?’

‘Margaret…’ He sounded weary.

‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘Forget I asked.’ Then, ‘But I do miss you, Li Yan. I’m scared of going through this alone.’ He drew her to him, and pressed her head into his chest, his large hand cradling her skull. Li was a big man for a Chinese, powerfully built, more than six feet tall below his flat-top crew cut, and when he held her like this it made her feel small like a child. But she hated feeling dependent. ‘When will you hear about the apartment?’

She felt him tense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he moved away from her as the kettle boiled. She stood for a moment, watching him in the dark. Lately she had sensed his reluctance to discuss the subject.

‘Well, have you asked?’

‘Sure.’

‘And what did they say?’

She sensed rather than saw him shrug. ‘They haven’t decided yet.’

‘Haven’t decided what? What apartment we’re going to get? Or whether they’re going to give us one at all?’

‘Margaret, you know that it is a problem. A senior police officer having a relationship with a foreign national…there is no precedent.’

Margaret glared at him, and although he could not see her eyes, he could feel them burning into him. ‘We’re not having a relationship, Li Yan. I’m having your baby. We’re getting married next week. And I’m sick and tired of spending lonely nights in this goddamn cold apartment.’ To her annoyance she felt tears welling in her eyes. It was only one of many unwanted ways in which pregnancy had affected her. An unaccountable propensity for sudden heights of emotion accompanied by embarrassing bouts of crying. She fought to control herself. Li, she knew, was as helpless in this situation as she was. The authorities frowned upon their relationship. Nights together in her apartment or his were stolen, furtive affairs, unsanctioned, and in the case of her staying over with him, illegal. She was obliged to report any change of address, even for one night, to her local Public Security Bureau. Although, in practice, no one much bothered about that these days, Li’s position as the head of Beijing’s serious crime squad made them very much subject to the rule from which nearly everyone else was excepted. It was hard to take, and they had both hoped that their decision to marry would change that. But as yet, they had not received the blessing from above.

He moved closer to take her in his arms again. ‘I can stay over tonight.’

‘You’d better,’ she said, and turned away from him to pour hot water over green tea leaves in two glass mugs. What she really wanted was a vodka tonic with ice and lemon, but she hadn’t touched alcohol since falling pregnant and missed the escape route it sometimes offered from those things in life she really didn’t want to face up to.

She felt the heat of his body as he pressed himself into her back and his hands slipped under her arms to gently cup her swollen breasts. She shivered as a sexual sensitivity forked through her. Sex had always been a wonderful experience with Li. Like with no other. So she had been surprised by the extraordinarily heightened sense of sexuality that had come with her approaching motherhood. It had hardly seemed possible. She had feared that pregnancy would spoil their relationship in bed; that she, or he, would lose interest. To the surprise of them both, the opposite had been true. At first, fear of a second miscarriage had made them wary, but after medical reassurance, Li had found ways of being gentle with her, exploiting her increased sensitivity, taking pleasure from driving her nearly to the edge of distraction. And he had found the swelling of her breasts and her belly intensely arousing. She felt that arousal now, pushing into the small of her back and she abandoned the green tea and turned to seek his mouth with hers, wanting to devour him, consume him whole.

The depressingly familiar ring tone of Li’s cellphone fibrillated in the dark. ‘Don’t answer,’ she whispered. And for a moment she actually thought he wouldn’t. He responded hungrily to her probing tongue, hands slipping over her buttocks and drawing her against him. But the shrill warble of the phone was relentless and finally he gave in, breaking away, flushed and breathless.

‘I’ve got to,’ he said, and he unclipped the phone from his belt, heavy with disappointment, and lifted it to his ear. ‘Wei?’

Margaret turned back to her green tea, still shaking and aroused, desperately wanting to have sex with him, but knowing that the moment had passed. Angry with him, but knowing that it was not his fault. His work intruded on their lives all the time. She had always known it would. And there was even a time when she could have shared in it. But it was months since she had last worked on a case, performed an autopsy. Li had forbidden it, fearing that there could be health risks for the baby, and she had not resisted. Just one more erosion, one more piece of herself falling back into the sea she had tried so hard to build defences against. It was easier now just to give in, and she was no longer interested in his cases.

He clipped his phone back on his belt. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Of course you do,’ she said in a flat tone, and she reached over to switch on the overhead light and turned to blink at him in the sudden brightness. ‘What is it this time? Another murder?’ Beijing appeared to be in the throes of a crime wave. Crime figures were sky-rocketing. And there had been some particularly gruesome killings. Li’s team had just arrested an ethnic Korean for murdering a twenty-nine-year-old woman for her hair. Consumed by some bizarre desire to posses her long, black locks, he had stabbed her to death and then beheaded her with an axe. After taking the head home with him he had peeled off the scalp and hair. When detectives from Section One burst into his apartment, they had found him stir-frying her facial skin with the apparent intention of eating it.

‘No,’ Li said. ‘Not a murder. At least, it doesn’t appear that way.’ Although he smiled, he was perplexed. ‘Death by sex, apparently.’ He stooped to kiss her softly on the lips. ‘Perhaps we had a narrow escape.’

II

Li’s bike rattled in the back of his Jeep. The Chrysler four-wheel drive, built in the city by a Chinese — American joint venture, was affectionately known as the Beijing Jeep, much beloved by the municipal police who had adopted it almost as their own. The vehicle allocated to Li as Section Chief was an unmarked dark green with smoked glass windows. The only indication that this was a police vehicle, to those who knew, was the jing character and the zero which followed it on the registration plate. Normally he left it at Section One and cycled home, which was often faster than trying to negotiate the capital’s increasingly frequent gridlocks, but it was a long way across the city in the bitter cold to Margaret’s apartment, so tonight he had bundled his bike in the back.

Many of the side streets, which had not been cleared of snow, were still treacherous with ice. But as he turned on to West Chang’an Avenue, this brightly lit arterial route which dissected the city east to west, was free of ice, and traffic was light. Hotels and ministry buildings, China Telecom, were all floodlit, and Li could see the lights of Christmas trees twinkling incongruously in hotel forecourts. Just two weeks away, Christmas in Beijing was primarily for the tourists. But the Chinese welcomed any excuse for a banquet.

He drove past the impressive front gates of Zhongnanhai on his left, and on his right the big black hole behind the Great Hall of the People where work had already begun on building China’s controversial new National Grand Theatre, at a cost of three hundred and twenty-five million dollars. Ahead was the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the portrait of Mao smiling benignly over Tiananmen Square where the blood of the democracy protesters of eighty-nine seemed to have been washed away by the sea of radical economic change that had since swept the country. Li wondered fleetingly what Mao would have made of the nation he had wrested from the Nationalist Kuomintang all those decades ago. He would not have recognised his country in this twenty-first century.

Li took a left, through the arch, into Nanchang Jie and saw the long, narrow, tree-lined street stretch ahead of him into the darkness. Beyond the Xihuamen intersection it became Beichang Jie — North Chang Street — and on his right, a high grey wall hid from sight the restored homes of mandarins and Party cadres that lined this ancient thoroughfare along the banks of the moat which surrounded the Forbidden City. Up ahead there were two patrol cars pulled up on to the ramp leading to tall electronic gates in the wall. Li saw a Section One Jeep drawn in at the kerb, and Doctor Wang’s Volkswagen pulled in behind it. There were a couple of unmarked vans from the forensics section in Pao Jü Hutong. A uniformed officer stood by the gate, huddled in his shiny black fur-collared coat, smoking a cigarette and stamping his feet. His black and silver peaked cap was pulled down low over his eyes trying to provide his face with some protection from the icy wind. Although it had been introduced shortly before his spell at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, Li still found it hard to get used to the new black uniform with its white and silver trim. The red-trimmed green army colours of the police in the first fifty years of the People’s Republic had been virtually indistinguishable from those of the PLA. Only the Armed Police still retained them now.

Detective Wu’s call to Li’s cellphone had been cryptic. He had no reason to believe this was a crime scene. It was a delicate matter, perhaps political, and he had no idea how to deal with it. Li was curious. Wu was a brash, self-confident detective of some fifteen years’ experience. Delicacy was not something one normally associated with him. Nor tact. All that he had felt able to tell Li on the phone was that there was a fatality, and that it was of a sexual nature. But as soon as he had given Li the address, the Section Chief had known this was no normal call-out. This was a street inhabited by the powerful and the privileged, people of influence. One would require to tread carefully.

The officer on the gate recognised Li immediately, hastily throwing away his cigarette in a shower of sparks and saluting as Li got out of the Jeep. The gate was lying open, and a couple of saloon cars, a BMW and a Mercedes, sat in the courtyard beyond, beneath a jumble of grey slate roofs.

‘Who lives here?’ Li asked the officer.

‘No idea, Section Chief.’

‘Where’s Detective Wu?’

‘Inside.’ He jerked a thumb towards the courtyard.

Li crossed the cobbled yard and entered the sprawling, single-storey house through double glass doors leading into a sun lounge. Three uniformed officers stood among expensive cane furnishings engaged in hushed conversation with Wu and several forensics officers. Wu’s butt-freezer leather jacket hung open, the collar still up, his cream silk scarf dangling from his neck. He wore jeans and sneakers, and was pulling nervously at his feeble attempt at a moustache with nicotine-stained fingers. His face lit up when he saw Li.

‘Hey, Chief. Glad you’re here. This one’s a real bummer.’ He steered Li quickly out into a narrow hallway with a polished parquet floor, walls lined with antique cabinets and ancient hangings. From somewhere in the house came the sound of a woman sobbing. From the sun lounge behind them Li could hear stifled laughter.

‘What the hell’s going on here, Wu?’

Wu’s voice was low and tense. ‘Local Public Security boys got a call an hour ago from the maid. She was hysterical. They couldn’t get much sense out of her, except that somebody was dead. So they sent out a car. The uniforms get here and think, “Shit, this is over our heads,” and the call goes out to us. I get here and I think pretty much the same damned thing. So I called in the Doc and his hounds and phoned you. I ain’t touched a thing.’

‘So who’s dead?’

‘Guy called Jia Jing.’ Li thought the name sounded faintly familiar. ‘Chinese weightlifting champion,’ Wu clarified for him.

‘How did he die?’

‘Doc thinks it’s natural causes.’ He nodded his head towards the end of the hall. ‘He’s still in there.’

Li was perplexed. ‘So what’s the deal?’

‘The deal is,’ Wu said, ‘we’re standing in the home of a high-ranking member of BOCOG.’ Li frowned. Wu elucidated. ‘The Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. He’s in Greece right now. His wife’s in their bedroom with a three-hundred-pound weightlifter lying dead on top of her. And he’s, how can I put it…’ he paused for effect, but Li guessed Wu had already worked out exactly how he was going to put it, ‘…locked in the missionary position and still in the act of penetration.’ He couldn’t resist a smirk. ‘Seems like his heart gave out just when things were getting interesting.’

‘In the name of the sky, Wu!’ Li felt the first flush of anger. ‘You mean you just left him like that? For more than an hour?’

‘Hey, Chief,’ Wu held his hands up. ‘We didn’t have any choice. Doc says she’s had some kind of involuntary muscular spasm and she’s holding him in there. We can’t uncouple them, even if we wanted to. And, hey, have you ever tried moving three hundred pounds of dead meat? It’s going to take everyone here to lift him off.’

Li raised his eyes to the heavens and took a deep breath. Whatever he might have imagined, it could never have been this. But the implications were scandalous, not criminal, and his immediate inclination was to wash the section’s hands of it as quickly as possible. ‘What’s the Doc’s prognosis?’

‘He’s given her a sedative. Says when it takes effect the spasm should relax and we can prise him free.’ Again, the hint of a smirk, and Li knew that Wu was choosing his words carefully for their colour, enjoying the moment, and enjoying passing the buck.

‘Wipe that fucking smile off your face!’ Li said quietly, and the smirk vanished instantly. ‘A man’s dead here, and a woman’s seriously distressed.’ He took another deep breath. ‘You’d better show me.’

Wu led him through into a bedroom of extraordinary opulence and bad taste. A thick-piled red carpet, walls lined with crimson silk. Black lacquer screens inlaid with mother of pearl set around a huge bed dressed in peach and cream satin. Pink silk tassles hung from several hand-painted lanterns whose light was instantly soaked up by the dark colours of the room. The air was sticky warm, and layered with the scents of incense and sex.

The room’s incongruous focal point comprised the large, flaccid buttocks of the three-hundred-pound weightlifting champion of China. His thighs and calves were enormous below a thick waist and deeply muscled back and shoulders. A pigtail, like an old-fashioned Chinese queue, curled around the nape of his neck. By contrast, the legs he lay between were absurdly fragile. The woman was pale and thin, with short, bobbed hair, her make-up smeared by sex and tears. It seemed incredible that she had not been crushed by this monster of a man who lay prone on top of her, literally a dead weight. Li thought she looked as if she were in her forties, perhaps twice the age of her late lover.

She was still sobbing quietly, but her eyes were clouded like cataracts and staring off into some unseen distance. Doctor Wang Xing, the duty pathologist from the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong, was sitting in a chair by the bedside holding her hand. He cocked an eyebrow in Li’s direction. ‘Administering sedatives and holding hands is not my usual domain,’ he said. ‘But it’s one for my memoirs, if ever they let me publish them.’ He flicked his head towards the lady of the house. ‘I think it might be worth trying to get him off her now.’

It took eight of them to lift Jia Jing clear of his lover long enough for Doctor Wang to pull her free. She was liquid and limp from the sedative, and he had difficulty getting her into a chair. Li tossed a silk dressing-gown over her nakedness and cleared the room.

‘So you think it was a heart attack?’ Li said.

Wang shrugged. ‘That’s how it looks. But I won’t know for sure until I get him on the slab.’

‘Well, I’d appreciate it if you could have your boys get him out of here just as soon as possible.’

‘They’re on their way.’

‘And the woman?’

‘She’ll be okay, Chief. She’s a bit groggy just now from the sedative, but it’ll wear off.’

Li knelt down beside her and took her hand. Her chin was slumped on her chest. He lifted it up with thumb and forefinger, turning her head slightly to look at him. ‘Is there someone who can come and spend the night with you? A friend maybe?’ Her eyes were glazed. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

There was no response. He looked at Wang. ‘Is there anyone we can get to stay over?’

But suddenly she clutched his wrist, and the glaze had half-cleared from her eyes. They were dark and frightened now, black mascara smudged all around them. ‘He doesn’t have to know, does he?’ Li didn’t have to ask who. ‘Please…’ she slurred. ‘Please tell me you won’t tell him.’

III

Dongzhimennei Street was a blaze of light and animation as Li nursed his Jeep west towards Beixinqiao. Hundreds of red lanterns outside dozens of restaurants danced in the icy wind that blew down from the Gobi Desert in the north. Ghost Street, they called this road. While most of the city slept, the young and the wealthy, China’s nouveau riche, would haunt Dongzhimennei’s restaurants and bars until three in the morning. Or later. But in the distance, towards the Dongzhimen intersection with the Second Ring Road, the lights of Ghost Street faded into darkness where the hammers of the demolition contractors had done their worst. Whole communities in ancient siheyuan courtyard homes had been dismantled and destroyed to make way for the new Beijing being fashioned for the Olympic Games. The mistakes of the West being repeated forty years on, city communities uprooted and rehoused in soulless tower blocks on the outskirts. A future breeding ground for social unrest and crime.

Li took a left and saw the lights of Section One above the roof of the food market. There were lights, too, in the windows of the One Nine Nine Bar as he passed, shadowy figures visible behind misted windows. He turned left again into the deserted Beixinqiao Santiao and parked under the trees opposite the brown marble façade of the All China Federation of Returning Overseas Chinese. During the day there would be a constant stream of ethnic Chinese wanting papers to return to the country of their birth, or the birth of their ancestors, anxious to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the fastest growing economy on earth.

He slipped in the side entrance of the four-storey brick building that housed Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police and climbed the stairs to the top floor. The detectives’ office was buzzing with activity when he poked his head in. It was often busier at night than during the day. Wu was already at his desk, blowing smoke thoughtfully at his computer screen and pushing a fresh strip of gum in his mouth. He looked up when Li appeared in the doorway. ‘How do you want me to play this, Chief?’ he said.

‘Dead straight,’ Li said. He was only too well aware of the possible repercussions of what they had witnessed tonight. Members of the Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games were political appointees. Its president was the city’s Mayor, its executive president the head of the Chinese Olympic Committee. China regarded the success of the Games as vital to its standing in the world, and the committee itself was invested with a huge weight of responsibility. A scandal involving one of its senior members would send shockwaves rippling through the corridors of power. And it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep scandal out of the media. Li was going to have to prepare his own report on the incident to supplement Wu’s.

He glanced towards the office of his deputy. The door was ajar, and the office beyond it in darkness. He had not expected to find Tao Heng at his desk at this hour and was relieved not to have to discuss this with him. He made his way down the corridor to his own office and flicked on his desk lamp, tilting back in his chair so that his head was beyond the ring of light it cast. He closed his eyes and wished fervently that he could have a cigarette. But he had promised Margaret that he would give up, for the baby’s sake, and he was not about to break his promise. In any case, she had a nose like a blood-hound and would have smelled it on him immediately.

A knock on his door brought him sharply back from his tobacco reveries and he tipped forward again in his chair. ‘Come in.’

Sun Xi stepped in from the corridor. ‘They told me you were in. Do you have a minute, Chief?’ He was a young man, not yet thirty, who had recently transferred to Beijing from Canton where he had a brilliant record of crime-solving and arrests. As Li had once been, he was now the youngest detective in Section One, which specialised in solving Beijing’s most serious crimes. And like Li before him, he had already tied up an impressive number of cases in just a few short months in the section. He reminded Li very much of himself at the same age, although Sun was more extrovert than Li had ever been, quick to smile, and even quicker with his one-liners. Li had immediately spotted his potential and taken him under his wing. Sun dressed smartly, his white shirts always neatly pressed, pleated slacks folding on to polished black shoes. His hair was cut short above the ears, but grew longer on top, parted in the centre and falling down either side of his forehead above thick dark eyebrows and black, mischievous eyes. He was a good-looking young man, and all the girls in the office were anxious to catch his eye. But he was already spoken for.

‘Pull up a chair,’ Li said, glad of the diversion. And as Sun slipped into the seat opposite, he asked, ‘How’s Wen settling in?’

Sun shrugged. ‘You know how it is, Chief,’ he said. ‘Provincial girl in the big city. It’s blowing her mind. And the little one’s started kicking hell out of her.’ Like Li, Sun was anticipating fatherhood in a little over a month. Unlike Li, Sun had already been allocated a married officer’s apartment in Zhengyi Road, and his wife had just arrived from Canton.

‘Has she sorted out her antenatal arrangements yet?’

‘You’re kidding! You know what women are like, she’s still unpacking. I’ll need a whole other apartment just to hang her clothes.’

Li smiled. Although he saw Sun as being like a younger version of himself, they had married very different women. Margaret’s wardrobe could only be described as spartan. She detested shopping. He said, ‘Margaret’s been going to the antenatal classes at the maternity hospital for several months. Maybe she could give Wen some advice on where to go, who to see.’

‘I’m sure Wen would appreciate that,’ Sun said.

Li said, ‘I’ll speak to her.’ Then he sat back. ‘So what’s on your mind?’

Sun took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Sure,’ Li said reluctantly, and he watched enviously as Sun lit up and pulled a lungful of smoke out of his cigarette.

‘I got called out to a suspicious death earlier this evening, Chief. Not long after you left. At the natatorium at Qinghua University.’ He grinned. ‘That’s a swimming pool to you and me.’ He pulled again on his cigarette and his smile faded. ‘Apparent suicide. Champion swimmer. He was supposed to take part in a training session at the pool with the national squad ahead of tomorrow’s two-nation challenge with the Americans.’ He paused and looked at Li. ‘Do you follow sport?’

Li shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘Well they got this challenge thing this week with the US. Two days of swimming events up at Olympic Green, and three days of indoor track and field at the Capital Stadium. First ever between China and America.’

Li had been aware of it. Vaguely. There had been a considerable build-up to the event in the media, but he hadn’t paid much attention.

‘Anyway,’ Sun said, ‘this guy’s been breaking world records, expected to beat the Americans hands down. Only he turns up for tonight’s training session half an hour before the rest of them. The security man on the door claims he never even saw him go in. The place is empty, the coach hasn’t arrived. The swimmer goes into the locker room and drinks half a bottle of brandy for Dutch courage before he undresses and hangs all his stuff neatly in his locker. Then he takes a five-meter length of rope and goes up to the pool wearing nothing but his birthday suit. He climbs to the highest diving platform, ten meters up. Ties one end of the rope to the rail, loops the other round his neck and jumps off. Five meters of rope, ten-meter drop.’ Sun made a cracking sound with his tongue at the back of his mouth. ‘Neck snaps, clean as you like. Dead in an instant.’

Li felt an icy sensation spreading in his stomach. Random pieces of information, like digital bytes on a computer disk, suddenly began forming unexpected sequences in his head. He said, ‘Weren’t there three members of the national athletics team killed in a car crash in Xuanwu District last month?’ He had seen a report of it in The People’s Daily.

Sun was surprised. ‘Yeh…that’s right. Members of the spring relay team.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t see the connection.’

Li held up a hand, his brain sifting and cataloguing the information it had absorbed on a daily basis and filed under Of No Apparent Importance But Worth Retaining. Maybe. He found what he was searching for. ‘There was a cyclist…I can’t remember his name…He came second or third in the Tour de France last summer. Best ever performance by a Chinese. Drowned in a freak swimming accident a couple of weeks ago.’

Sun nodded, frowning again, the connections beginning to make themselves.

‘And I’ve just come from a house where a weightlifter collapsed and died tonight during the act of sexual intercourse. A heart attack. Apparently.’ Had it not been for this bizarre event, it was possible Li would never even have been aware that there might be connections to be made.

Sun chuckled. ‘So you figure the Americans are bumping off our top athletes so they’ll get more medals?’

But Li wasn’t smiling. ‘I’m not figuring anything,’ he said. ‘I’m laying some facts on the table. Perhaps we should look at them.’ The words of his Uncle Yifu came back to him. Knowing ignorance is strength. Ignoring knowledge is weakness. He paused. ‘You said apparent suicide.’

Sun leaned into the light of Li’s desk lamp, cigarette smoke wreathed around his head. ‘I don’t think it was, Chief.’

The ringing of Li’s telephone crashed into the room like an uninvited guest. Li snatched the receiver irritably. ‘Wei?’

‘Section Chief, this is Procurator General Meng Yongji.’ Li’s lungs seized mid-breath. The Procurator General was the highest ranking law officer in Beijing, and Li was not accustomed to taking calls from him. It was the Procurator General’s office which decided whether or not to prosecute a case in the courts, and in some cases would take over an investigation completely. It was a moment before Li could draw in enough air to say, ‘Yes, Procurator General.’

‘I received a call several minutes ago from the executive assistant to the Minister of Public Security.’ Meng did not sound too pleased about it and Li glanced at his watch. It was nearly ten-thirty, and there was a good chance Meng had been in his bed when he took the call. ‘It seems the Minister would like to speak to you, Section Chief. In his home. Tonight. There is a car on its way to pick you up.’

Li understood now why Meng sounded unhappy. Protocol demanded that any request from the Minister should be passed down through a superior officer. But, in effect, the Procurator General had been woken from his sleep to pass on a simple message, and he clearly did not relish the role of message boy. He heard Meng breathing stertorously through his nostrils on the other end of the line. ‘What have you been up to, Li?’

‘Nothing, Procurator General. Not that I know of.’

A snort. ‘I’d appreciate being kept informed.’ A click and the line went dead.

Li held the receiver halfway between his ear and the phone for several moments before finally hanging up. The icy sensation he had felt earlier in his stomach had returned, and a chill mantle seemed to have descended from his shoulders over his whole body. To be summoned to the home of the Minister of Public Security at ten-thirty on a cold December night could only be bad news.

IV

The black, top-of-the-range BMW felt as if it were gliding on air as it sped past the north gate of the Forbidden City and turned south into Beichang Jie where Li had attended the death of Jia Jing only two hours earlier. Li had changed into his uniform in his office, and sat now on soft leather in the back of this ministerial vehicle, stiff and apprehensive. As they passed them, Li saw that the electronic gates of the senior BOCOG official were locked, and there were no lights on in his home. The cops were all gone. Li had stayed long enough to see the body of the weightlifter bagged and taken away in the meat wagon, trying all the while to assuage the growing hysteria of the adulterous wife as her sedative started wearing off. There were, he had told her, no guarantees that her husband would not get to know what had happened there that night, and she had dissolved into uncontrollable sobbing. He had left when finally a girlfriend arrived to spend the night.

The street was virtually deserted now as they passed through the tunnel of trees that arched across the roadway, and at the Xihuamen intersection they turned west. The high walls of Zhongnanhai rose up before them. When the car stopped at the gate, his electronic window wound down automatically, and Li showed his maroon Public Security ID to the armed guard who scrutinised his face and his photograph carefully in turns. And then the car was waved through, and Li was within the walls of Zhongnanhai for the first time in his life. He found that his breathing had become a little more shallow. Lights burned in the windows of a government office compound away to their left, but they quickly left these behind as the car whisked them along a dark road lined with willows, before emerging into the glare of moonlight shining on frozen water. Zhonghai Lake. It was white with ice and a sprinkling of snow reflecting a nearly full moon.

Here, on the shores of this lake, his country’s leaders and high officials lived in the luxury and seclusion of their state villas and apartments. The privileged indulging the privileges of power. Catching the light on the far shore, Li saw a pavilion by a small jetty, eaves curling outwards and upwards at each of its four corners. A mist was rising now off the ice, and through it, lights twinkled in homes beyond yet more trees on the other side.

The driver turned off the lakeside road into a driveway that curved through a bamboo thicket. The hanging fronds of leafless willows rattled gently across the roof. He pulled up outside an impressive villa built on two levels in the traditional Chinese style, pillars the colour of dried blood supporting the sloping roof of a veranda which ran all the way around the house. Inside, the driver left Li standing nervously in a dark hallway of red lacquered furniture and polished wood before a young woman in a black suit appeared and asked him to follow her up thickly carpeted stairs.

At the end of a long hall of hanging lanterns, she showed him into a small room lit only by an anglepoise and the flickering light of a television set. A soccer match was playing on it, but the sound was turned down. A polished wooden floor was strewn with Xinjiang rugs. A small desk with a laptop computer sat below a window whose view was obscured by wooden slatted Venetian blinds. The walls were covered with framed photographs of the Minister in his dress uniform shaking hands with senior police officers and leading politicians. He was pictured smiling with Jiang Zemin; towering over Deng Xiaoping as they shook hands; warmly embracing Zhu Rongji.

The Minister was sitting on a soft, black two-seater sofa, scribbling by the light of the anglepoise on a bundle of papers balanced on his knee. More papers and official publications were strewn across the seat next to him. He was wearing soft, corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt and carpet slippers. A pair of half-moon reading glasses was balanced on the end of his nose. He glanced up distractedly and waved Li to a well-worn leather armchair opposite. ‘Sit down, Li, I’ll be with you in a moment,’ he said, and returned to his papers.

Li felt stiff and awkward in his uniform and wondered if he’d made a mistake in wearing it. He perched uncomfortably on the edge of the seat and removed his braided peaked cap. He glanced at the TV screen and saw that China were playing South Korea. Korea were two goals ahead.

‘You like football, Li?’ the Minister said, without looking up.

‘Not particularly, Minister,’ Li replied.

‘Hmmm. Athletics?’

‘Not really.’

‘Don’t like games at all, then?’

‘I enjoy chess.’

The Minister peered at him over his half-moons. ‘Do you now? Any good?’

‘I used to give my uncle a decent game.’

‘Ah, yes…’ The Minister put his papers aside and turned his focus fully on to Li for the first time. ‘Old Yifu. He was a foxy old bastard, your uncle. Good policeman, though.’ He paused. ‘Think you’ll ever make his grade, Section Chief?’

‘Not a chance, Minister.’

‘Ah…’ the Minister smiled. ‘Modesty. I like that.’ Then his smile faded. ‘But, then, you’re not going to make any kind of grade at all if you’re not prepared to rethink your personal plans.’

Li’s heart sank. So this is why he had been summoned.

But the Minister cut his thoughts short as if he had read them. ‘Though that’s not why you’re here.’ He appeared to be lost in reflection for some moments, as if unsure where to begin. Then he said, ‘A certain wife of a certain member of a certain committee made a telephone call tonight after you left her home.’ The Minister paused to examine Li’s reaction. But Li remained impassive. He should have realised that a woman in her position would always know someone of influence. The Minister continued, ‘The recipient of that call made another call, and then my telephone rang.’ He smiled. ‘You see how connections are made?’ Li saw only too well.

The Minister removed his reading glasses and fidgeted with them as he spoke. ‘As far as we are aware, no crime was committed tonight. Am I correct?’ Li nodded. ‘Then it is perfectly possible that a certain weightlifter arrived at the home of a certain committee member for reasons unknown to us. Perhaps he wished to make representations on behalf of his sport to that committee member who, unfortunately, was out of the country. But, then, we’ll never know, will we? Since the poor chap collapsed and died. Heart attack, is that right?’

‘We’ll know for sure after the autopsy.’

‘And that, of course, will all be reflected in the official report?’

Li hesitated for a long moment. He despised the thought of being involved in any way in a cover-up. If he had thought there was anything more to it than sparing the blushes of a few officials he might have fought against it. But in the circumstances it hardly seemed worth it. He could almost hear his Uncle Yifu referring him to Sunzi’s Art of War and the advice offered by history’s most famous military strategist that He who knows when to fight and when not to fight will always win. And there were other, more important battles, he knew, that lay ahead. ‘I’ll see that it does, Minister,’ he said.

The Minister smiled and appeared to relax. ‘I’m glad. It would be a great pity, damaging even, if certain people were embarrassed by certain unwarranted speculation.’

‘It certainly would,’ Li said, unable to keep an edge of sarcasm out of his voice.

The Minister glanced at him sharply, searching for any hint of it in his expression, his smile dissolving quickly into studied reflection. After a moment he folded his reading glasses, placed them carefully on the table beside the sofa and stood up. Li immediately felt disadvantaged, still balanced uncomfortably on the edge of his armchair clutching his hat. But he had not been invited to stand.

‘However,’ the Minister said, ‘there are other, more consequential issues, raised by the death of Jia Jing tonight. You may not be aware of it, Li, but he is the fifth senior Chinese sportsman to die within the last month. All, apparently, from natural or accidental causes.’

‘Three members of the sprint relay team,’ Li said. ‘A cyclist, a weightlifter.’

The Minister looked at him thoughtfully and raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve been keeping your eye on the ball.’ He seemed surprised.

Li did not like to admit that he had only spotted the ball for the first time that night. What was significant to him was that others had been keeping an eye on it long before him. But now he was one step ahead of them. ‘You’re going to have to revise that figure, Minister. The number is up to six.’

The Minister had a young, unlined face, the merest trace of grey in his hair, although he was probably in his mid-fifties. He appeared suddenly to age ten years. ‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t have all the details yet. It appears to have been a suicide. A member of the swimming team. He was found hanging from the diving platform in the training pool at Qinghua.’

‘Who was it?’

‘His name was Sui Mingshan.’

The name had meant nothing to Li, but the Minister knew immediately who he was. ‘In the name of the sky, Li! Sui was our best prospect of Olympic gold. He should have been swimming against the Americans tomorrow.’ He raised his eyes to heaven and sighed deeply. ‘How on earth are we going to keep a lid on this?’ Then his mind took off in another direction. ‘It can’t be coincidence can it? Six of our leading athletes dead within a month?’

‘On the balance of probability, Minister, it seems unlikely,’ Li said.

‘Well, you’d better find out, pretty damned fast. And I don’t want to read about this in the foreign press, do you understand? It will be difficult enough to explain the absence of such athletes from this event with the Americans, but with the Olympics coming to Beijing in 2008, we cannot afford even the whiff of a scandal. The prestige and international standing of China are at stake here.’

Li stood up, still holding his black peaked cap with its silver braiding and shiny Public Security badge. ‘The investigation is already under way, Minister.’

The Minister found himself looking up at Li who was a good six inches taller than him. But he was not intimidated. The power of his office gave him supreme confidence. He scrutinised Li thoughtfully. ‘We can’t afford to lose officers of your calibre, Section Chief,’ he said. ‘This…personal problem that you have…How can it be resolved?’

‘With all due respect, Minister, I don’t believe that I am the one with the problem. There is no legal requirement—’

The Minister cut him off. ‘Damn it, Li, it’s not law, it’s policy.’

‘Then you could make an exception.’

‘No.’ His response was immediate and definitive. ‘No exceptions. You make one, others follow. And when many people pass one way, a road is made.’

‘Then I may have to pass on the baton before the case is resolved.’

The Minister glared at him. ‘You’re a stubborn sonofabitch, Li. Just like your uncle.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

The Minister stood staring silently at Li for several long moments, and Li was not sure if he was furious or just at a loss for words. Finally he turned away, retrieved his half-moons from the table and sat down again on his sofa, lifting the bundle of papers back on to his knee. ‘Just keep me informed.’

And Li realised he was dismissed.

V

Wu’s report was waiting for him on his desk when he got back to Section One. It was nearly midnight. He was too tired to change out of his uniform, throwing his cap on to the desk and slumping into his seat wearily to read the report, reliving the sad absurdity of the whole sordid tale. He got up and crossed to the door and shouted down the corridor, ‘Wu!’

After a moment Wu appeared, emerging from the detectives’ office, cigarette smoke billowing at his back. ‘Chief?’

Li breathed deeply as if he might be able to steal some second-hand smoke, waved him up the corridor and went back to his desk. When Wu came in he chucked his report back at him. ‘Do it again.’ Wu frowned. ‘Only this time, leave out the stuff in the bedroom.’

‘But that’s the juiciest bit, Chief.’

Li ignored him. ‘Our weightlifter arrived looking for our committee member, but before he could say why, he collapsed and died. Okay?’

Wu looked at him curiously. ‘That’s not like you, boss.’

‘No it’s not. Just do it.’ Wu shrugged and headed for the door and Li called after him, ‘And tell Sun I want to talk to him.’

When Sun came in Li told him to close the door behind him and turn out the overhead light, which left only the ring of light cast around the desk by its lamp. He motioned Sun to take a seat, then sat back so that he could watch him from outside the reach of the light. His eyes were stinging and gritty. It had been a long day. ‘Tell me why you think this swimmer didn’t kill himself,’ he said.

Sun said, half-rising, ‘I’ve finished my report if you want to read it.’

‘No, just tell me.’

Li closed his eyes and listened as Sun described how he and Qian Yi, one of the section’s older detectives, had arrived at the natatorium shortly after seven-thirty.

‘What made us suspicious initially was the security man on the door saying he didn’t see Sui going in. I asked him if there was any chance Sui had arrived when he was in the toilet. He said he’d been at his post for two hours, uninterrupted. So I asked if there was any other way in. Turns out there are half a dozen emergency exits that you can only open from the inside. We looked at them all. One of them was not properly shut, which had to be how Sui got in without being seen.’

Li thought about it for a moment. ‘Why would he have to sneak in through an emergency exit? Wouldn’t he just have walked in the front door? And if he did come in the emergency door, how did he open it from the outside?’

‘I asked myself the same questions,’ Sun said.

‘And did you come up with any answers?’

‘The only thing I could think was that he wasn’t on his own.’

Li frowned and opened his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

Sun leaned forward into the light. ‘I mean that he didn’t go there of his own free will, Chief. That he was taken, against his will, by people who had already got him drunk. People who had arranged to have that fire door left unlocked.’

Li raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘And all this speculation because the security man didn’t see him going in? Eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable, Sun. Memories are defective things. Maybe he did go to the toilet and just doesn’t remember. Maybe he was reading and didn’t notice Sui going past.’

‘And the fire door?’

Li shrugged. ‘Doors get left open.’ Sun seemed slightly crestfallen. Li said, ‘Tell me you’re basing your doubts on more than a security man and a fire door.’

Sun shook his head, exasperated by his boss’ scepticism. ‘Chief, I don’t know what to say. It just didn’t feel right. Everything about it. His team-mates said he never touched alcohol. Ever. Yet he was stinking of drink, and there was a half-empty bottle of brandy in the bag in his locker. And, I mean, if he’d drunk a half bottle of brandy, would he have been in any state to fold up his clothes and leave them hanging in his locker? And, anyway, why would he? And why would he shave his head?’

Li sat forward. This was a new piece of information. ‘He’d shaved his head?’

‘Yeh. He could only have done it a couple of hours before. There were fresh nick marks on his scalp, dried blood, and he had a full head of hair the last time anyone saw him.’

Li puzzled over this for several moments. ‘Was there a pathologist in attendance?’

‘Doc Zhu, one of Wang’s deputies from Pao Jü Hutong.’

Li knew him. He was young, not very experienced. ‘What did Zhu say?’

‘Not a lot, Chief. Just that there were no external signs of a struggle, and that death appeared to have been caused by a broken neck due to hanging. Of course, he couldn’t commit to that until after the autopsy.’

‘Who’s doing the autopsy?’

‘He is.’

Li shook his head. ‘Put a stop on that. I don’t want anyone with his lack of experience touching the body.’

Sun was taken aback, and for a moment didn’t know how to respond. Was this vindication? ‘You mean you think I might be right? That this isn’t just a straightforward suicide?’

Li pondered his response briefly. ‘While accepting that your assumptions are speculative, Sun, I think they are not unreasonable. For two reasons.’ He held up a thumb to signify the first. ‘One. We’ve got to look at this in the context of six top athletes dead in a month. It stretches the theory of coincidence just a little far.’ He added his forefinger to signify the second. ‘And two. There’s the hair thing. That just doesn’t make sense.’

Sun looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You asked why Sui would have shaved his head. My understanding is that it’s not unusual for swimmers to shave off their hair in order to create less resistance in the water.’

Sun nodded. ‘And…?’

Li said, ‘Well, if you were planning to kill yourself, why would you shave your head to make yourself faster for a race in which you had no intention of taking part?’ He saw the light of realisation dawning in Sun’s eyes, and added, ‘But that leaves us with an even more implausible question. Why would somebody else do it?’

VI

Margaret was finding it difficult to sleep. She liked to keep her curtains open, safe in the knowledge that there were no other tower blocks sufficiently close to allow anyone to see in, even if she put the lights on. She enjoyed moving around the apartment, able to see by the light of her small television set, and the ambient city lights that surrounded her. For some reason she had become more sensitive to bright light since becoming pregnant, and there was a sense of security in the darkness. She felt safer. She also liked to look out over the city on a clear night like this. You could see the tail lights of cars and buses for miles as they negotiated the gridiron road network of the capital, queuing in long tailbacks at rush hour, speeding along deserted ring roads late at night, like now.

But tonight, the nearly full moon was bathing her bedroom in a bright silver light, falling through the window and lying across her bed in distortions of bisected rectangles, keeping her awake. And Li’s departure had left her frustrated and lonely, and still with the aching regret of unfulfilled sex.

In just over a week she would be married. And yet the thought filled her with dread. Of the ordeals she would have to endure in the next few days. A belated betrothal meeting. The reunion with her mother. The first meeting with Li’s father. And then what? What would be different? Until Li was allocated an apartment for married officers they would still be forced to spend much of their lives apart. And when the baby came…She closed her eyes. It was a thought she did not want to face. She had attended enough births during her time as an intern at the UIC Medical Centre in Chicago to know that it was an experience she would have preferred not to live through in person. She found pain hard enough to cope with when it was other people’s. Her own scared her to death.

She turned on to her side, pulling the covers up over her head, determined to try to sleep, and heard a key scraping in the latch. She sat bolt upright and glanced at the red digital display on the bedside clock. It was 1:14 am. Surely he hadn’t come back at this time of night? ‘Li Yan?’ she called, and her bedroom door swung open and she saw him standing there in the moonlight. He still had on his uniform and cap, his coat slung over his shoulder.

‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he said.

She tutted her disbelief. ‘Of course you did. You’re sex obsessed. Why else are you here?’

But he didn’t smile. ‘I’ve got a couple of favours to ask.’

‘Oh, yes?’ But she didn’t ask what. ‘Are you going to stand out there in the hall all night, or are you coming to bed?’ She grinned. ‘I do like a man in uniform.’

He moved into the room, pushing the door shut behind him, and started to undress. She watched the way the light cut obliquely across his pectorals and made shadows of the six-pack that ribbed his belly as he opened his shirt. He moved with an easy, powerful grace, and she felt the rekindling of her earlier frustrated desires as he slipped out of his pants and stood three-quarters silhouetted against the window. But he made no attempt to get into bed. He said, ‘There’s a young guy in the section. I’ve talked to you about him. Sun.’ She waited in silence, wondering what on earth he could be going to say. ‘He came up from Canton three months ago, and they’ve only now allocated him married quarters.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, stung. ‘So the junior detective gets an apartment, but his boss has to wait.’

‘That’s just an administrative thing,’ Li said quickly, not wanting to get involved in a discussion about apartments. ‘The point is, his wife’s just arrived from the south. She doesn’t know anybody here, she doesn’t know Beijing. And she’s due about the same time as you are. I thought…well, I wondered, if maybe you could show her the ropes, so to speak.’

Margaret snorted. ‘Hah! Like I’ve not got enough to think about with my mother arriving, a betrothal meeting, a wedding…’ She stopped and looked at him hard. ‘You didn’t come here at one o’clock in the morning just to ask me to nanny some country-girl wife of one of your detectives.’

‘Well,’ Li said. ‘There was something else.’

‘And what was that?’

‘I want you to do an autopsy.’

She was silent for a very long time. ‘I thought I was banned,’ she said quietly. ‘You thought there could be health risks for the baby, and I didn’t argue with that. What’s changed?’

‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.’ He paused. ‘And I won’t ask if you think there is the slightest risk.’

She knew that in reality if there was no risk to her there was no risk to the baby. And she had never been inclined to put herself at risk. ‘What’s the case?’ She could barely keep the excitement out of her voice. It was a chance to take her life back, be herself again, put all these other personas — wife, mother, daughter — on the back burner, at least for a time.

He sat on the edge of the bed and took her through the events of the evening. She lay thinking about it for a long time. ‘Who’s doing the autopsy on the weightlifter?’

‘Wang.’

She nodded. Wang was okay. She had worked with him before. ‘What about the others? The road accident victims, the guy who drowned. Can I see their autopsy reports?’

Li shook his head. ‘We don’t autopsy every accidental death, Margaret. Only if there are suspicious circumstances, or cause of death is not apparent. We don’t have enough pathologists.’

‘That’s inconvenient,’ she said, unimpressed. ‘I don’t suppose we can dig them up?’

Li sighed, realising himself just how little they were going to have to go on. ‘Burials are forbidden in the city. I’ll check, but I’m pretty sure they’ll all have been cremated.’

‘You’re not making this very easy for us, are you?’

Li said, ‘The more I think about it, the more it seems to me like someone else has been trying to make it that way.’

Margaret snorted her derision. ‘In the event that you ever got around to actually investigating.’

Li said evenly, ‘Will you do the autopsy on the swimmer?’

Her face was in shadow but he heard her grin. ‘Try stopping me.’ And after a pause she grabbed his arm. ‘Although, right now I’m hoping we can get to the third reason you came back.’

‘There was a third reason?’ he asked innocently.

‘There had better be.’ And she pulled him into her bed.