The Runner

I

She was late, but knew that to hurry could be dangerous. And so she pumped her pedals at a slow, even rate, keeping pace with the flow of cyclists heading east along the reduced cycle lane in Chang’an Avenue. As the number of motorists had increased and the number of cyclists diminished, so the authorities had allowed the traffic to encroach on the generous cycle lanes originally laid out by the twentieth-century city fathers. Dividers now cut their width by half and streams of taxis jammed the tarmac which had once been the domain of the bicycle.

When she had wakened Li was gone, but his warmth and the smell of him lingered on the sheets and pillow beside her. She had rolled over and breathed him in, remembering how good it had been just a few hours before when he had made slow and careful love to her, and she had felt a desire simply to be absorbed by him completely, to lose herself in all his soft, gentle goodness. To be a better person. And then she had seen the clock, and knew that Mei Yuan would be waiting for her.

The sky was light in the east, pale gold rising to the deepest blue, but the sun had not yet found its way between the sky-scrapers to throw its long shadows westward. And it was so cold her muscles had nearly seized solid.

Up ahead, the traffic had been halted at Tiananmen to allow the dawn ritual of the raising of the flag. She saw the soldiers, in their slow-motion goose-step, march in impressive formation from the Gate of Heavenly Peace to the flagpole in the square, and she dismounted quickly to guide her bike between the stationary vehicles to the other side of the avenue. Below the high red walls of Zhongshan Park, an old man wearing a beret sat huddled on a bench watching the soldiers. A street sweeper in a surplus army greatcoat scraped his broom over the frozen pavings beneath the trees. Margaret cycled to the arched gate and parked her bike, before hurrying into the entrance hall with its crimson pillars and hanging lanterns, and paying her two yuan entrance fee at the ticket window.

Beyond Zhongshan Hall and the Altar of the Five-Coloured Soil, she found Mei Yuan in a courtyard in front of the Yu Yuan pavilion. A row of windows gave on to tanks containing thirty different breeds of goldfish which swam, oblivious to the cold, in water heated to tropical temperatures. Along with half a dozen others, Mei Yuan moved in slow, controlled exercises to traditional Chinese music playing gently from someone’s ghetto blaster. Tai chi looked easy to the non-practitioner, but its leisurely control demanded something of nearly every muscle. It was a wonderful way of maintaining fitness without exertion, particularly for the elderly. Or the pregnant.

When she saw her coming, Mei Yuan broke off to give Margaret a hug. ‘I thought perhaps you were not coming today.’ She looked forty, but was nearer sixty. Her smooth moon face beneath its soft white ski hat creased in a smile around her beautifully slanted almond eyes. She was shorter than Margaret, stocky, and wrapped in layers of clothes below a quilted green jacket. She wore blue cotton trousers and chunky white trainers. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked in putonghua Chinese. It was the traditional Beijing greeting, born of a time when food was scarce and hunger a way of life.

‘Yes, I have eaten,’ Margaret replied. Also in putonghua. She fell in beside the older woman, and after a moment they joined the others in the slow sweep of the tai chi, following the intuitive methodical rhythms evolved over five thousand years of practice. ‘I can’t stay long this morning. Li Yan has asked me to do an autopsy.’ She glanced at Mei Yuan and knew that she would not approve.

‘Of course, you said yes.’

Margaret nodded. Mei Yuan said nothing. She knew better than to question Margaret’s decision. But Margaret saw her disapproval clearly in her face. Pregnancy in the Middle Kingdom was treated with almost spiritual reverence, and the mother-to-be handled like the most delicate and precious Ming china. Even after delivery, the mother would often be confined by relatives and friends to a month of inactivity in a darkened room. They even had a phrase to describe the phenomenon: zuo yuezi. Literally a woman’s ‘month of confinement’ after giving birth to a child. Margaret, however, was not inclined to submit to constraint at any time — before birth or after.

Half an hour later the gathering broke up when the woman with the ghetto blaster apologised and said she had to go. Mei Yuan and Margaret walked back through the park together, past a large group following their wu shu master in the art of slow-motion sword play. The red tassles that hung from the grips of their ceremonial weapons arcing in the sunlight that slanted now through the naked branches of the park’s ancient scholar trees.

Mei Yuan said, ‘I have reserved a room for the wedding ceremony.’ She was the closest thing to a mother-figure in Li’s life. His own mother had died in the Cultural Revolution. Margaret, too, had become very fond of her. She thought of her as her ‘Chinese’ mother. And she wondered how her real mother would get on with her Chinese counterpart when she arrived. Li had asked Mei Yuan to make the arrangements for a traditional Chinese wedding, and Margaret had been happy to leave everything to someone else. She was only half listening to Mei Yuan now. The wedding still seemed distant and remote, as if it were all happening to another person.

‘And I have ordered the flowers for the altars,’ Mei Yuan was saying. She had already explained to Margaret that there were no formal wedding vows in Chinese culture. The couple simply interlinked arms and drank from cups joined by red string, a symbol of their binding commitment. This was performed in front of two altars to honour the ancestors of each family. It had already been decided that this would not take place at Li’s home, as was traditional, since the apartment was too small. ‘Now, it is usual to place a rice bowl and chopsticks on one of the altars if there has been a recent bereavement in either of the families.’ She left this hanging. It was not so much a statement as a question. Margaret immediately thought of her father. But she did not know how her mother would respond.

‘Perhaps Li will want to make the gesture in memory of his uncle,’ she said.

Mei Yuan said, ‘It is some years since Yifu died.’

‘Yes, but his death still casts a shadow over the family. I know that there isn’t a day goes by when Li doesn’t think about him.’ Li’s description of his uncle’s death was as vivid in Margaret’s mind as if she had witnessed it herself. ‘I’ll ask him.’

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘I have spoken to Ma Yun,’ she said, ‘and she will be happy to cater for the wedding banquet. Of course, her price is far too high, but we can negotiate her down. However, there are certain items which must appear on the menu, and they will be expensive.’

‘Oh?’ Margaret was not too concerned. Her definition of expensive, and Mei Yuan’s were rather different. Mei Yuan earned her living from a mobile stall selling fast-food Beijing pancakes called jian bing. She was lucky if she made seventy dollars a month.

‘There must be fish, roast suckling pig, pigeon, chicken cooked in red oil, lobster, dessert bun stuffed with lotus seeds…’

‘Sounds good,’ Margaret said. ‘But why?’

‘Ah,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘because every item of food has a symbolic meaning. We must have fish, because in Chinese the word for fish is pronounced the same as abundance, which means the newly-weds will have plentiful wealth.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Margaret said, and then added quickly, ‘not with alcohol, of course.’

Mei Yuan smiled indulgently. ‘Lobster is literally called dragon shrimp in Chinese,’ she said, ‘and having lobster and chicken together at the wedding banquet indicates that the dragon and phoenix are in harmony and that the Yin and Yang elements of the union are balanced.’

‘And one just has to have one’s Yin and Yang in balance,’ Margaret said.

Mei Yuan ignored her. ‘The roast suckling pig is usually served whole as a symbol of the bride’s virginity.’ She stopped suddenly, realising what she’d said, and the colour rose on her cheeks as her eyes strayed to Margaret’s bump.

Margaret grinned. ‘Maybe we’d better skip the suckling pig, Mei Yuan.’

They hurried on towards the bronze statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen and passed on their left the red, studded gates of the Beijing Centre of Communication and Education for Family Planning. And Margaret was reminded that in a country where birth had been controlled for decades by the One Child Policy, a baby was a precious thing. Her hands strayed to the swelling beneath her woollen cape and she experienced a sense of anticipation that was both thrilling and scary.

At the gate, she retrieved her bicycle and said, ‘Say hi to Li for me. You’ll probably see him before I do.’ Mei Yuan’s stall was on a street corner not far from Section One. It was where Li had first met her. He still had a jian bing for breakfast most mornings.

Mei Yuan opened her satchel and brought out a small, square parcel and handed it to Margaret. ‘A gift,’ she said, ‘for your wedding day.’

Margaret took it, embarrassed. ‘Oh, Mei Yuan, you shouldn’t go buying me things.’ But she knew she could not turn it down. ‘What is it?’

‘Open it and see.’

Margaret carefully opened the soft parcel to reveal, folded within, a large, red, silk and lace square. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. It was real silk, and she realised it had probably cost Mei Yuan half a week’s earnings.

‘It’s a veil,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘To be draped over the head during the ceremony. Red, because that is the symbolic colour of happiness.’

Margaret’s eyes filled. She hugged the smiling Mei Yuan. ‘Then, of course, I will wear it,’ she said. ‘And wish for all the happiness in the world.’ For there had been precious little of it these last turbulent years.

II

Smoke made it nearly impossible to see from one side of the meeting room to the other. The ceiling fan was on, but only succeeded in moving the smoke around. It was too cold to open a window, and almost the only person in the room without a cigarette was Li. He wondered why he had bothered giving up. At this rate he’d be back on thirty a day without ever putting one to his lips.

There were more than twenty detectives in the room, some arranged around a large rectangular meeting table, others sitting in low chairs lined up along the walls. Flasks of piping hot green tea sat on the table, and every detective had his own mug or insulated tankard. The central heating was toiling to cope with an outside temperature which had so far failed to rise above minus five centigrade, and most of the detectives were wearing coats or jackets. One or two even wore gloves. Everyone knew now why they were there, that this was a priority investigation.

The tone of the meeting was set from the start by a clash between Li and his deputy, Tao Heng. Tao was a man in his fifties with thinning dark hair scraped back across a mottled scalp, his bulging eyes magnified behind thick-rimmed glasses. Nobody liked him.

‘I’d appreciate,’ Tao said, ‘being told why the autopsy of last night’s suicide victim was cancelled.’ He looked around the room. ‘Since I seem to be the only one here who doesn’t know.’

‘The autopsy has not been cancelled, Deputy Section Chief,’ Li said. ‘Merely re-assigned.’

‘Oh? And who is going to do it?’ Tao asked.

‘The American pathologist, Margaret Campbell,’ Li told him evenly.

‘Ah,’ Tao said. ‘Keeping it in the family, then?’

There was a collective intake of breath around the table. Nepotism was considered a form of corruption, and in the present political climate, police corruption was very much under the microscope. No one had any illusions about the subtext of Tao’s comment.

Li said coldly, ‘Doctor Campbell is the most experienced forensic pathologist available to us. If you have a problem with that, Tao, you can raise it with me after the meeting.’

Relations between Li and his deputy were strained at best. When Li left the section to take up his position as Criminal Liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, Tao had succeeded him as Deputy Section Chief, coming from the criminal investigation department in Hong Kong. He had known that there was no way he could try to follow in the footsteps of the most popular deputy anyone in Section One could remember. So from the start he had been his own man and done things his own way. Which was remote and superior. He believed in a dress code. Which was unpopular. He always wore his uniform, and he fined detectives for the use of foul language in the office. If anyone crossed him he could expect to get every shit assignment on the section for the next six months.

When Section Chief Chen Anming had retired earlier that year Tao was expected to succeed him. But Chen’s retirement had coincided with Li’s return from America and Li was appointed over Tao’s head. The appointment had coloured their relationship from the start. And with two such diametrically different personalities, it was a relationship that was doomed to failure.

Tao resumed his silent sulking, and they listened as Wu gave his account of Jia Jing’s adulterous misadventure with the wife of the BOCOG member the previous evening. Some muted laughter was immediately cut short by Li’s admonition to them that he would remove from his job anyone who revealed details of the case outside the section. The official report, for reasons they did not need to know, reflected less than the full story, he told them. And none of them had any doubt what that meant.

They sat, then, with their files open in front of them listening to Sun going over his report on the ‘suicide’ of the swimmer, Sui Mingshan. He had altered it to take account of Li’s thoughts on the shaven head, which he repeated now as if they were his own.

Li took over. He said, ‘I want the swimming pool and Sui’s home treated as potential crime scenes. We won’t know the cause of death for certain until we have the autopsy report, so unless or until we have reason to believe otherwise we’ll treat it as suspicious.’

He flipped through the folder in front of him. ‘You all have the report on the accident which killed three members of the sprint relay team last month.’ There had been no reason then for anyone to think it was anything other than an accident. Three young men travelling too fast in a car late at night, losing control on black ice and wrapping their vehicle around a lamppost. Li said, ‘And the cyclist who was killed in a freak accident in a private pool.’ They all shuffled their papers to bring that report to the top. ‘Three witnesses saw him slip on the diving board and crack his skull as he fell in. Dead by the time they got him out.’ He took a deep breath. ‘We have no autopsy reports. No bodies. But in light of last night’s fatalities, we have no choice but to go back over all these deaths in the minutest detail. I have no idea what we’re looking for, or even if there is anything to be found, but I doubt if there’s anyone in this room who would think the deaths of six athletes in little over four weeks worthy of anything other than our undivided attention.’

There was nobody in the room who did.

‘So let’s kick it around,’ Li said. ‘Anyone got any thoughts?’

Wu had the report on the cyclist open in front of him. ‘These three witnesses,’ he said. ‘They all have addresses in Taiwan. Are they still going to be around for further questioning?’

‘Why don’t you make it your personal responsibility to find out?’ Li said. Wu pulled a face, and there was a sprinkling of laughter around the table. ‘Talk to the attending officers. Get them to go over it all again, in the smallest detail. There might be stuff that never made it into the report.’ He turned to the detective next to him. ‘And Qian, why don’t you talk to the officers who attended the car crash? Same thing.’ Qian was about ten years older than Li. He would never be management material, but he was steady and reliable and Li had a lot of time for him.

‘Sure, chief.’

‘Shouldn’t we talk to the relatives, too?’ This came from Zhao, the youngest detective in the section, a sharp and intelligent investigator destined, in Li’s view, to be a future deputy chief. But the arrival of Sun had somewhat eclipsed him, and he had spent the last few months sulking in the shadows.

‘Absolutely,’ Li said, ‘and the coaches, and other athletes, as many friends as we can track down. We need to look at financial records, any remaining personal belongings…’ He glanced around the table. ‘I’m sure that Deputy Tao will be able to organise you all to ensure you make the best use of your time.’

There were several stifled sniggers. Tao was fond of charts and worksheets and rotas.

‘What about drugs?’ asked Sang. He was another of the section’s younger detectives. In his early thirties, Sang had distinguished himself, while still downtown, during an investigation into a particularly bloody serial killing, and had transferred to Section One soon after.

‘What about drugs?’ Li asked.

‘Well,’ Sang said. ‘If we’re looking for a motive…’

‘We’re not looking for a motive, Detective,’ Tao cut him off sharply, and the earlier tension immediately returned to the room. ‘We’re looking for evidence. As much as we can accumulate. No matter how painful, or how slow. Only then will we see the bigger picture. There are no shortcuts.’

It was the old argument, the traditional Chinese approach to criminal investigation. Accumulate enough evidence and you will solve the crime. Unlike the approach of criminal investigators in the West, motive was regarded as being of secondary importance, something which would become self-apparent when enough evidence had been gathered.

Li said, ‘Deputy Tao clearly thinks you’ve been reading too many American detective novels, Sang.’ Which provoked some laughter and softened the tension. ‘But I agree with him. It’s too early to be looking at motive. We don’t even know if there has been a crime.’

As the meeting broke up and Li gathered together his papers, he became aware of Tao hanging back to speak to him, and he sighed inwardly. Tao kept his peace until they were on their own. Then he closed the door so that they would not be overheard, and crossed the room to drop his copy of Wu’s report on the death of Jia Jing in front of Li. ‘Why was I not consulted about this?’

‘You weren’t here last night, Tao.’

‘And this morning? Before the meeting? Did it not occur to you, Section Chief, that I should have been briefed before the detectives? Have you any idea how it feels to be told by a junior officer that an autopsy has been cancelled when you know nothing about it?’

‘I’m sorry, Tao, if you feel slighted. Protocol has its time and its place. Unfortunately, this morning there was no time.’ Li picked up his folder to go, but Tao was not finished. He stood his ground.

‘I want to put on record my strongest objections to the fact that this report has been doctored.’ He tapped his forefinger on the file as he spoke.

Li was losing patience. Tao’s pedantry was tiresome at the best of times. But in this instance, he was also touching a raw nerve. ‘Are you objecting to the doctoring of the report or the fact that you weren’t consulted about it?’ They each knew it was the latter.

‘Both,’ Tao said defiantly. ‘As far as I am aware it is not the practice of this section to file inaccurate reports.’

‘You’re right,’ Li said. ‘It’s not. But for reasons I am not prepared to discuss, this case is an exception. And if you have a problem with that then I suggest you take it up with the Minister.’

Tao frowned. ‘The Minister?’

‘Of Public Security,’ Li said wearily. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sure he’ll be at his desk by now if you want to give him a call and express your disapproval in person.’

Tao drew his lips into a thin, tight line. ‘And is the Minister also responsible for re-assigning the autopsy on Sui Mingshan?’

‘I’ve already told you the reason for that.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Tao said. ‘Doctor Campbell is the “best available”. You seem to be of the opinion, Section Chief, that anything American is better than everything Chinese.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps you should have stayed there.’

Li glared back at him. ‘Your trouble, Tao, is that you spent too long under the British in Hong Kong learning how to be arrogant and superior. Perhaps you should have stayed there.’

He brushed past his deputy, but paused at the door long enough to tell him, ‘By the way, I’m taking personal charge of this investigation, and I’ll expect officers released from other duties as and when I require them.’

He went out leaving Tao silently fuming in the cold, empty meeting room.

III

Li and Wu arrived at Pao Jü Hutong as the autopsy was nearing its completion. Jia Jing lay on the stainless steel autopsy table, his chest cavity cut open and prised wide like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. Li had downloaded essential information on Jia Jing from the Internet. He was five feet, eight inches tall, and weighed three hundred and thirty-three pounds. Three threes. These should have been lucky numbers, but somewhere it had all gone wrong for Jia. He held the current Chinese weightlifting record with an extraordinary squat lift of one thousand and eight pounds.

His heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, had already been removed. Extraneous body fluids trickled along the side channels, dripping into the drain below. The body was fresh, so the smell was not overpowering, and the temperature in the autopsy room was so low their breath condensed through their masks and clouded around their faces. Chill white light reflecting harshly off scrubbed white tiles made it seem even colder.

Li shivered as he gazed upon the vast cadaver of a man who had once had the power to lift more than three times his own body weight, an achievement put into context by the fact that it had taken eight officers to prise him free of his lover, and four sturdy autopsy assistants to get him from the gurney on to the table. But all his strength was gone now, stolen by death, and all that remained was the mountain of bulging muscle he had worked so hard to cultivate, limp and useless.

Doctor Wang was swaddled in layers of protective clothing, eyes darting behind his goggles, sweat gathering, in spite of the cold, along the elasticated line of his plastic head cover. He had peeled the dead man’s scalp down over his face and was preparing the oscillating saw to cut through the top of the skull and remove the brain.

‘Never seen muscles like them,’ he was saying. ‘In all my years. A man of this size, you’d expect a lot of fat. There’s hardly an ounce of it.’

‘Is that abnormal in a weightlifter?’ Wu asked.

‘If I’d cut one open before, I might be able to tell you,’ Wang said with a faintly withering tone. ‘But I can tell you that all the weight he was carrying, and all the weight he was lifting, will have contributed in no small way to his death. The heart is just another muscle, after all. You put too much strain on it, you’ll damage it.’ He put down his saw and crossed to the table where the sections of Jia Jang’s heart lay at an angle, piled one on top of the other, like thick slices of bread. ‘In this case…’ he picked up a slice of heart, ‘…the left anterior descending coronary artery was clogged, causing it simply to erupt. Probably congenital.’ Holding up the cross section of the artery, he added, ‘There was also an acute rupture of the atherosclerotic plaque. You see this kind of yellow, cheesy stuff? In older people that gets rock hard and calcified. It blocks the lumen of the artery, like sludge build-up in an old pipe, narrowing the available space for the blood to flow through. You can see here that the artery is about zero-point-four of a centimeter in diameter, and it’s about seventy-five percent blocked. And if you look closely under this cheesy stuff…’ Li made a face, but moved closer to see, ‘…there’s a thin layer of red. Blood. Under pressure from the artery it has dissected into and under the plaque, expanding it to further block the lumen, occluding it and stopping blood flow to that portion of the heart which the artery serves.’ Wang sucked air through his teeth. ‘Effectively, he had a massive heart attack.’ He looked at Li. ‘The fact that he was in the act of sexual intercourse at the time may have been what brought it on. A lot of men die on the job…so to speak.’

‘Way to go,’ Wu said.

Wang cast a critical eye over him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were in much danger, Wu.’ The detective pulled a face. ‘I’m amazed, however, that our friend here had the where-withal.’ He crossed back to the body and they followed him, watching as he lifted the penis up and weighed the testicles appraisingly in his hand. ‘Tiny,’ he said.

‘Is there some significance in that?’ Li asked.

Wang shrugged. ‘The muscle mass, the reduced size of the testes. Could be consistent with steroid abuse.’ He paused. ‘Or not. He may just have had small testicles, and built his muscle mass by training very hard.’

‘Yeh,’ Wu cut in, ‘but if his nuts were that small, it would have reduced his testosterone production, and therefore his sex drive, wouldn’t it? Hardly consistent with a man having an affair.’

Wang said, ‘Testosterone is often the steroid of choice when it comes to building muscle. In the short term that can actually increase the sex drive, although a side-effect can be the shrinking of the testes, and ultimately severely impaired sexual performance.’

‘Is there any way you can tell for sure if he’d been taking steroids?’ Li asked. He smelled a scandal. Some high profile Chinese weightlifters and swimmers had tested positive for drug-taking in the nineties and been banned from national and international sport. The authorities were very anxious to clean up the country’s image.

‘I’ve asked specifically for hormone screening. If he took any during the last month it’ll show up in tox. If it’s been longer than that, no.’ He took his oscillating saw around the top of the skull and eased the brain out into a stainless steel bowl. ‘Of course, there can often be behavioural changes with steroid abuse. Users can become moody, aggressive. Talk to people who knew him.’

Li walked over to a side table against the wall, where Jia Jing’s clothes were laid out along with the contents of his pockets and a small shoulder bag he had had with him. The clothes were huge. Vast, elasticated cotton pants, an enormous singlet, a shirt like a tent, a hand-knitted cardigan and a quilted jacket which he must have had specially made. He wore an odd little blue cap with a toggle on the top, and must have looked very odd with his pleated queue hanging down below it to his shoulder blades. Li glanced back at the autopsy table as Wang pulled back the scalp which had been covering his face. Jia’s features were almost as gross as the rest of him, thick pale lips and a flattened nose, eyes like slits in tumescent swellings beneath his brows. He made Li think of a Japanese sumo wrestler. He was an ugly man, and heaven only knew what the woman he died on top of had seen in him.

His pockets had turned out very little. There was a leather purse with some coins; a wallet with several one hundred yuan notes, a couple of international credit cards and membership cards for three different gymnasia; some taxi receipts and a bill from a restaurant; a small gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. Li wondered if steroids gave you bad breath. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, sniffed and recoiled from its pungent menthol sharpness. There was a length of white silk cord tassled at each end. ‘What’s the rope for?’ Li asked.

Wang laughed. ‘That was his belt. Infinitely flexible when it comes to keeping trousers in place over a belly like his.’

Li picked up a dog-eared photograph, its glaze cracked in several places where it had been folded. The colour was too strong and the picture was a little fuzzy, but Li recognised Jia immediately. He was wearing his lifting singlet and a white leather back brace, black boots laced up to his calves. There was a gold medal on a blue ribbon around his neck, and he was holding it up for emphasis. He was flanked on one side by a small elderly man with thinning grey hair, and on the other by an even smaller woman with a round face and deep wrinkles radiating outwards from smiling eyes. Both were beaming for the camera. Li turned the picture over. Jia had scrawled on the back With Mum and Dad, June 2000. Li looked at Mum and Dad again and saw the pride in their smiles, and for a moment he felt their pain. The people they brought in here to butcher did not live or die in isolation. They had mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children. He put the photograph back with Jia’s belongings and wondered how it was possible that such a small woman could have carried such a giant inside her.

He turned briskly to Wang. ‘You’ll let me have your report as soon as you have the results in from tox?’

‘Of course.’

Li said to Wu, ‘You might as well stay with it. I’m heading out to Qinghua University with Sun to talk to Sui Mingshan’s team-mates. Keep me up to date with any developments.’

And he hurried out, feeling oddly squeamish. Death was never easy, but with such a big, powerful man, it seemed particularly cruel somehow. He had been only twenty-three years old.

IV

Sun steered Li’s Jeep carefully through the bike and tricycle carts that thronged the narrow Dongzhimen Beixiao Street, taking them down from Section One on to Ghost Street. Li sat in the passenger seat, huddled in his dark grey three-quarter-length woollen coat, a red scarf tied at the neck, gloved hands resting in his lap. He gazed out at the wasteland on their left. The streets and courtyards, the jumble of roofs that had once stretched away to the distant trees of Nanguan Park and the Russian Embassy beyond, were all gone. They had been replaced by a flattened, featureless wasteland where tower blocks and shops would eventually replace the life that had once existed there. For the moment it provided temporary parking for hundreds of bikes and carts belonging to the traders and customers of the food market opposite. Li looked right, and on the other side of the street the old Beijing that he knew so well existed still, as it always had. Although, for how much longer he was not sure.

A boy stood in the doorway of a downmarket clothes store in his red slippers, slurping noodles from a bowl. Next door, a woman wrapped in a brown coat was arranging oranges in boxes along her shop front. A group of young men was delivering fresh cooked lotus buns from the back of a tricycle, hands blue with the cold. A woman with a jaunty hat and green scarf cycled slowly past them, talking animatedly into her cell-phone. An old man with matted hair, sporting army surplus jacket and trousers, strained at his pedals to move a tottering pile of coal briquettes at less than walking pace.

Li told Sun to pull in at the corner where a woman was cooking jian bing in a pitched roof glass shelter mounted on the back of an extended tricycle. She wore blue padded protective sleeves over a white jacket, and a long black and white chequered apron over that. A round white hat was pulled down over her hair, covering her eyebrows, and there was a long red and white silk scarf wrapped several times around her neck. For years Mei Yuan had occupied the space on the south-east corner of the intersection. But all the buildings had been demolished and hoardings erected. She had been forced to the opposite side of the road.

Li gave her a hug.

‘You missed breakfast this morning,’ she said.

‘I was too early for you,’ he smiled. ‘And my stomach has been grumbling all morning.’

‘Well, we can put that right straight away,’ she said, brown eyes shining with fondness. She glanced at Sun. ‘One? Two?’

Li turned to Sun. ‘Have you tried a jian bing yet?’

Sun shook his head. ‘I’ve driven past often enough,’ he said, ‘but I never stopped to try one.’ He did not sound very enthusiastic.

‘Well, now’s your chance,’ Li said. And he turned back to Mei Yuan. ‘Two.’

They watched as she leaned into the shelter through a large opening on the far side and poured a scoop of batter mix on to a large hotplate. She dragged it into a perfect circle before breaking an egg on to it and smearing it over the pancake. From a jar she sprinkled the pancake with seeds and then flipped it over, steam rising from it all the while. Above the roar of the traffic in Ghost Street and the blasting of car horns, they could hear the repetitive rhythmic thumping of sledge-hammers on concrete as demolition men worked hard to reduce the city around them to rubble.

Mei Yuan was smearing the pancake now with hoisin and chilli and other spices from jars around the hotplate before throwing on a couple of handfuls of chopped spring onion. Finally she placed a square of deep fried, whipped egg white in its centre, folded the pancake in four and scooped it up in a paper bag. Li handed it to Sun who looked apprehensive. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Try it.’

Reluctantly, Sun bit into the soft, savoury, spicy pancake which dissolved almost immediately in his mouth. He smiled his surprise. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘This is good.’ And he took another mouthful, and another. Li grinned. Mei Yuan had already started on his.

She said, ‘I have the answer to your riddle. It really was too easy.’

‘Riddle?’ Sun looked perplexed. ‘What riddle?’

Li said, ‘Mei Yuan and I set each other riddles to solve each day. She always gets mine straight away. I usually take days to figure out hers.’

Sun looked from one to the other in disbelief before taking another mouthful of jian bing and saying, ‘Okay, try it on me.’

Li looked faintly embarrassed. ‘It’s just a silly game, Sun.’

‘Let the boy see if he can work it out,’ Mei Yuan said.

Li shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What is as old as the world, but never older than five weeks?’

Sun thought for a moment, then he glanced suspiciously from one to the other. ‘Is this a joke? There’s a catch, right? So I make a fool of myself.’

‘There’s no catch,’ Li said.

Sun shrugged. ‘Well, then, it’s obvious,’ he said. ‘It’s the moon.’

‘Hah!’ Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. ‘You see? Too easy.’ Then she looked thoughtfully at Sun. ‘You know, I could have made a better riddle out of it with you.’

Sun was taken aback. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Your name is Sun. In Roman letters that would be spelled S-U-N. Which in English means the sun, in the sky. Given some time I could have made an interesting wordplay with sun and moon to create a riddle just for you.’

‘You speak English?’ Sun was clearly astonished at the idea that some peasant woman selling snacks on a street corner could speak a foreign language. Then suddenly realised how he must have sounded. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’

‘Do you speak English?’ Mei Yuan asked.

He shrugged, embarrassed now. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘Not very well.’

Li grinned. ‘Mei Yuan graduated in art and literature from Beijing University.’

‘But life does not always follow the path we plan for it,’ she said quickly. ‘Do you have any English books? My passion is reading.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Sun said, clearly disappointed that he could not oblige. Then suddenly he said, ‘But I have a friend whose English is excellent. He has many books. I’m sure he would be happy to lend you some. What kind do you like?’

‘Oh, anything,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘History, literature…’ she grinned, her cheeks dimpling, ‘…a good detective story…’

‘I’ll see what he has.’

Li reached over and pulled out a book stuffed down the back of her saddle. It was where she always kept her current book, pages read in snatches between the cooking of pancakes. ‘Bon-a-part-e,’ he read, ignorance furrowing his brow. ‘What is it?’

Her face lit up. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. You know him?’ Her eyes flickered between them.

‘Not personally,’ Sun said.

Li shook his head.

‘He was a dictator in nineteenth-century France,’ she told them, ‘who conquered nearly all of Europe. He died in lonely exile, banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic. Some people even think he was murdered there. It is a fascinating story. I can lend it to you if you are interested.’

‘My English wouldn’t be good enough,’ Sun apologised.

‘Put it on the shelf for me,’ Li said, and he stuffed it back down behind the saddle. He had almost finished his jian bing, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, licking his lips. ‘So what do you have for me today?’

Mei Yuan’s smile widened, lights dancing mischievously in her dark eyes. ‘This is a good one, Li Yan,’ she said. ‘It is the story of Wei Chang.’ And she wiped cold red hands on her apron. ‘Wei Chang,’ she began, ‘was born on the second of February in the year nineteen twenty-five. He was a great practitioner of I Ching, and people would come from all over China to seek his advice and learn the future. One day, on his sixty-sixth birthday, a young woman came to see him. Before anything else he explained to her how important numbers and calculations would be in correctly interpreting her situation and prospects. For that reason, he said, he would not ask her name, but would instead give her a unique number. In that way they could keep a record of her readings. Then he explained how he would arrive at that unique number.

‘He would take that day’s date, put her age at the end of it, then reverse it — so that it would be easy for her to remember. So he wrote down the date, and when she told him her age, he could not believe it. Looking at her in astonishment he said, “In all my sixty-six years this has never occurred before. And to think that it has happened on my birthday. This is a most auspicious day for both of us.”’

Mei Yuan paused and looked at them both. ‘Why did he say this?’

Li and Sun looked at her blankly, to her great delight.

Sun said, ‘I think I prefer your riddles, Chief. They’re a lot easier.’

Li was lost in thought. ‘Obviously something to do with the numbers,’ he said.

‘Think about it,’ Mei Yuan told him, ‘and you can tell me tomorrow when I make you another jian bing.’

Li nodded. ‘Did you see Margaret this morning?’

‘Yes.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I am doing my best, Li Yan, to educate her in the niceties of the traditional Chinese wedding. But she seems a little…distracted.’ She paused. ‘She said to say hi, I’m not sure why, because she’ll see you at the autopsy.’

Li knew immediately from her tone that she disapproved. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Mei Yuan,’ he said pointedly, clearly drawing a line that he did not want her to cross. He dropped a ten yuan note in her tin.

‘And your young friend?’

‘Try keeping me away,’ Sun grinned. ‘You don’t mind if I bring my wife sometime? She always complains I keep her tied to the kitchen and never take her out for a meal.’

Li cuffed him playfully around the head. ‘Cheapskate,’ he said.

When they got on to the ring road heading north, Sun said, ‘So you’re going ahead with it then?’

Li looked at him, but Sun kept his eyes on the road. ‘With what?’

‘The wedding.’

Li guessed that everyone in the section must know by now. Tao, too. He would no doubt be waiting in the wings to fill his shoes. ‘Yes,’ he said simply.

Sun refrained from comment. Instead, he asked, ‘When do your parents arrive for it?’

‘My father gets here from Sichuan tomorrow,’ Li said. ‘Margaret’s mother flies in from America the day after.’ He grimaced and blew air through clenched teeth. ‘I’m not looking forward to it. Two people from opposite ends of the world, and from either end of the social spectrum. I can’t see how they’re going to get on.’

Sun said, ‘Didn’t they meet at the betrothal meeting?’

Li glanced at him self-consciously. ‘We haven’t had the betrothal meeting yet.’ The betrothal meeting would normally have taken place six months before the wedding. In this case it would be only a matter of days. ‘Thank heaven we have Mei Yuan to bridge the gap.’

‘She’s an unusual woman,’ Sun said. ‘How does someone with a degree from Beida end up selling pancakes on a street corner?’

‘The Cultural Revolution,’ Li said. ‘She was an intellectual, and suffered particularly badly. They took away her baby boy and sent her to work in the countryside. She never saw him again, and never recovered.’ He knew that in many ways he had filled the hole in her life left by the son she had lost and never had the chance to raise. He turned to Sun, a sudden recollection returning. ‘Who do you know in Beijing who has English books?’

Sun shrugged. ‘No one,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe I could buy her some books at the English Language Bookstore. She wouldn’t ever have to know, would she?’

Li looked at him, moved by his thoughtfulness. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t.’