The Runner

I

The national team swimming coach was a small man in his middle fifties, wiry and nervous, with close-cropped greying hair and black darting eyes. He didn’t look as if he would have the strength to swim a length of the Olympic-sized pool below them, never mind train a gold medal winner. Even beneath his thick sweatshirt and track suit bottoms, Li could see that he did not have the build of a swimmer. He was slight, almost puny. Perhaps he had reached his current position because of his motivational qualities.

They sat up amongst the tiered rows of blue seats with a grandstand view of the swimming pool. The air was warm and damp. Both Li and Sun had unbuttoned their coats, and Li loosened the scarf at his neck. Away to their right, forensics officers had taped off the diving area and were painstakingly searching every square inch of tile. The diving pool itself was being drained through large filters that would catch any evidence traces that might be suspended in the water. The diving platform and the steps leading up to it had been tape-lifted. But so far all their efforts had been unrewarded.

Coach Zhang could not sit still. ‘It’s outrageous,’ he said. ‘My team are in competition this afternoon and they have nowhere to train, nowhere to warm up.’

Sun said, ‘Aren’t there two pools up at Olympic Green?’

‘They are both in use,’ Zhang said irritably. ‘One for swimming, one for diving. We don’t have access to either.’

Li said, ‘You seem more concerned about training facilities than the death of your star swimmer.’

Zhang flicked him a wounded look. ‘Of course, I am shocked by Sui’s death,’ he said. ‘But the competition is going ahead. I can’t bring him back, and we still have to compete.’

Li smiled cynically. ‘The show must go on. How very American.’

‘Oh, I’d be happy to cancel,’ Zhang said quickly. ‘But we’re not even allowed to say why Sui’s name has been withdrawn. It’s your people who have forced that upon us.’

Li had no reply to that. Instead, he asked about Sui. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘At training, the night before last.’

‘And how did he seem then?’

‘Morose. But he always was. Not one of the more gregarious members of our team.’

‘Did he ever discuss with you the idea of shaving his head?’

Zhang frowned. ‘No. No, he didn’t. And I would not have approved. The naked head is such an ugly thing, and I don’t believe it makes a centimeter of a difference.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘But it doesn’t surprise me. Sui was a very single-minded young man. He had a bout of flu about ten days ago. Knocked the stuffing out of him. We thought he wasn’t going to be able to compete this week. But he worked so hard in training…’ Zhang lost himself for a moment in some distant, private thought, and then he looked at Li and Sun. ‘He was determined he was going to make it. Absolutely determined. I just can’t believe he committed suicide.’

Nor could his team-mates. Li and Sun found them gathered in one of the changing rooms downstairs, sitting around the slatted benches with sports bags at their feet waiting for the mini-bus to collect them and take them across town to Olympic Green. In contrast to the high spirits of the previous evening, their mood was sombre and silent. Not exactly conducive to successful competition.

Although they had been questioned last night by Sun and Qian, they were still eager to help in any way they could. But none of them had had contact with Sui on the day of his death, so nobody had seen his shaven head until they found him dangling above the diving pool.

‘What was he like, I mean as a person?’ Li asked.

Several of them ventured views not dissimilar to his coach. ‘He used to be a lot more fun.’ This from a tall, broad-shouldered boy called Guo Li upon whom high hopes were invested for the two hundred meters butterfly.

‘You’d known him a long time?’ Li asked.

‘We were at school together in Guilin. He used to be a good laugh. You know, serious about his swimming, but fun to be with. Lately he started taking it all a lot more seriously.’

‘How lately?’

‘About six months ago,’ one of the others said. ‘He started getting…I don’t know, too serious.’

‘And started winning big time,’ another of them pointed out.

‘He was a pain in the ass,’ someone else said. And when the others glared at him said defensively, ‘Well, he was. He’d bite the head off you if you looked at him the wrong way.’

Li remembered Wang’s observation at Jia Jing’s autopsy. There can often be behavioural changes with steroid abuse. Users can become moody, aggressive. He said, ‘Is there any chance he was taking drugs?’

‘No way!’ Guo Li left no room for doubt. And there was a murmur of agreement from around the changing room, even from the one who thought Sui was a pain in the ass. ‘He treated his body like a temple,’ Guo said. ‘His diet, his training. There was no way he would do anything to damage himself.’

‘And yet,’ Li said, ‘if appearances are to be believed, he drank a half bottle of brandy and then hanged himself. Hardly the actions of someone who treated his body like a temple.’

None of them had anything to say to that.

Outside, the sun remained winter low in the sky, and snow still lay across the concourse on the shaded side of the building. The road below remained white, too, and as they scrambled down the embankment, students rode gingerly past on bikes that were liable to slither from under them without warning. Sun had parked their Jeep opposite the student accommodation block. ‘Where to now, Chief?’

‘Let’s go and see where an Olympic gold medal prospect lives.’

II

Sui Mingshan, Chinese swimming’s best prospect of Olympic gold, rented an apartment in one of the city’s most up-market new housing complexes, above Beijing New World Taihua Plaza on Chongwenmenwai Street. Three shining new inter-linked towers formed a triangle around the plaza below. Eighteen storeys of luxury apartments for the wealthy of the new China. Out front, a huge Christmas tree bedecked with lights and foil-wrapped parcels dwarfed a gaggle of plastic Father Christmases looking absurdly like over-sized garden gnomes. An ethereal Oh Come All Ye Faithful in Chinese drifted across the concourse. External elevators ascended in polished glass tubes.

Sun parked in a side street and they entered the apartment block at number 5 on the north-west corner. Marble stairs led them to a chrome and glass entrance from behind which a security man in light grey uniform watched them advancing.

‘Can I help?’ he asked, and looked them up and down as if he thought they might be terrorists. Sun showed him his Public Security ID and his attitude changed immediately. ‘You’ll have come to see Sui Mingshan’s place. Some of your people are already here. I’ll show you up if you like.’

He rode up with them in the elevator to the fifteenth floor. ‘How long was Sui living here?’ Li asked.

The security man sucked air in through his teeth. ‘You’d need to check with the sales office around the corner. But I’d reckon about five months.’ He grinned at them in an inexplicably comradely sort of way. ‘Been thinking about joining the police myself,’ he said, as if that might endear him to them. ‘Five years in security. I figure that’s almost like a foot in the door.’

But neither of them returned his smile. ‘Better get your application in fast,’ Li said, ‘I hear there might be a vacancy coming up soon.’ And the doors slid open on the fifteenth floor.

As they stepped on to the landing, Sun asked, ‘Did he have many visitors?’

‘In all the time I’ve been on duty, not one,’ said the security man. ‘Which makes him just about unique in this place.’

The door of Sui’s apartment was lying open, yellow and black crime scene tape criss-crossed between the jambs. Li said, ‘We’ll call you if we need you.’ And he and Sun stood and watched as the disappointed security man walked back down the hallway to the elevator. They ducked under the tape into the apartment, and stepped into another world, feet sinking into a deep-piled fawn patterned carpet laid throughout the flat. The walls were painted in pastel peach and cream white. Expensive black lacquered furniture was arranged in a seating area around a window giving on to a panoramic view across the city. A black glass-topped dining table had six seats placed around it, reflecting in a large cut-glass wall mirror divided into diamonds. A huge still-life of flowers in a window adorned one wall, real flowers arranged in crystal or pottery vases carefully placed on various surfaces around the vast open living area. There were the sounds of voices coming from a door leading to the kitchen. Li called out, and after a moment Fu Qiwei pushed his head around the door. He was the senior forensics officer from Pao Jü Hutong, a small wizened man with tiny coal black eyes and an acerbic sense of humour. He wore a white Tivek suit, plastic shoe covers and white gloves.

‘Oh, hi, Chief,’ he said. ‘Welcome to paradise.’

‘Do we need to get suited up, Fu?’ Li asked.

Fu shook his head. ‘Naw. We’re just about finished here. Not that we found anything worth a damn. Barely even a hair. It’s like he was a ghost, completely without personality. Left no traces of himself anywhere.’

‘How do you mean?’ Li was curious.

‘Just look at the place.’ Fu led them into the bedroom. ‘It’s like a hotel room. When we got here the bed was made up like it had never been slept in. Not a trace of dust on any surface you might run your finger over.’ He slid open the mirrored doors of a built-in wardrobe. Rows of clothes, immaculately laundered and ironed, hung neatly on the rail. ‘I mean, you figure anyone’s ever worn this stuff?’ Polished shoes and unmarked white trainers were arranged carefully in the shoe rack below. ‘And I’m thinking, this guy’s what — nineteen? You ever been in a teenager’s bedroom that looked like this? And have a look in here…’ He took them through to the kitchen.

Every surface was polished to a shine. The hob looked as if it had never been used. Crockery was piled neatly in cupboards, cutlery gleamed silently in drawers. There was a bowl of fruit on an island in the centre of the kitchen. It was fresh, but looked as if it had been arranged. The refrigerator was virtually empty. There was an open carton of orange juice, some tubs of yoghurt. The larder was also sparsely stocked. Rice in a packet, some tinned vegetables, dried noodles. Fu said, ‘If I didn’t know the kid lived here, I’d have said it was a showhouse, you know, to show potential customers how their very own apartment could be. Totally fucking soulless.’ He chuckled. ‘Turns out, of course, they got housekeeping in this place. Maids come in every day to clean the apartment, change the sheets, do the laundry, replace the flowers. They even got a service that’ll do your shopping for you. Can you believe it? And hey, look at this…’ They followed him through into a small study, where a polished mahogany desk filled most of the available space. A lamp sat on one corner beside a handful of books pressed between bookends that looked as if they had been placed there by a designer. But it was here that they saw for the first time the only evidence that Sui had lived here at all. The walls were covered with framed winner’s medals, certificates of excellence, newspaper articles extolling Sui’s victories, photographs of Sui on the winner’s podium. Almost like a shrine. And Guo Li’s words came back to Li. He treated his body like a temple.

Fu opened one of the drawers and took out a glossy brochure on the Beijing New World Taihua Plaza apartments. A Perfect Metropolitan Residence it claimed on the front cover. Fu opened it up and read from inside. ‘Listen to this: Atop each apartment tower are the exclusive duplex penthouses for celebrities, featuring the extravagant vertical space of the floor lobby and parlours, generous natural light and open sunshine terraces to capture the magnificent views of the city — a lifestyle only the very rich and successful deserve.’ Fu looked at them, shaking his head in wonder. ‘I mean, have you ever heard any-fucking-thing like it? A lifestyle only the very rich and successful deserve! Did I fall asleep for twenty years or something? I mean is this still China? The Communist Party still runs things, yeh?’ He continued shaking his head. ‘How’s it possible? Only the rich and successful deserve shit like this? Is that how it is now?’ He tossed the brochure on the desk. ‘And I thought I’d seen it all.’

He turned to the two detectives. ‘You know, there’s a private gymnasium down the stairs, and a private pool. Every apartment has fibre optic broadband internet connection as well as international satellite and cable TV. Tell me, Li. This kid was a swimmer, right? Just a boy. How could he afford stuff like this?’

‘There’s a lot of money in international sport these days,’ Sun said. ‘Big prize money at the top events around the world, millions in sponsorship from commercial companies.’

‘Do we know if Sui had a sponsorship deal?’ Li asked.

Sun shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Then we’d better find out.’ Li pulled his gloves on and went through the top drawer of Sui’s desk. There were a few bills and receipts, neatly clipped, an HSBC chequebook, half a dozen bank statements. Li ran his eyes quickly over the figures and shook his head. ‘Well, his bank balance is healthy enough, but not enough to finance a lifestyle like this.’ He bagged the chequebook and handed it to Sun. ‘Better check out his bank. Maybe he had other accounts.’

They took some time, then, to wander around the apartment looking at everything in detail. Fu had been right. It was, indeed, as if a ghost lived here. There were virtually no personal belongings of any kind. No books — other than those placed for effect — no magazines, no family photographs. No loose change, no combs with hair stuck in the teeth, no subway tickets or taxi receipts.

The bathroom, like the rest of the apartment, was unnervingly immaculate. The bathroom cabinet revealed a spare box of toothpaste, two packs of soap, an unopened box of aspirin, a jar of cotton pads. Sun said, ‘Well, if he was taking steroids, or any other kind of performance enhancers, he didn’t keep them here.’

On the shelf above the sink there was a Gillette Mach3 razor and a box of four heads. There were also two bottles of Chanel aerosol aftershave. Li frowned, an unexpected character clue in an otherwise sterile environment. A young man who liked his scents. Li picked up one of the bottles. He sprayed it into the air and sniffed, his nose wrinkling at the bitter orange scent of it. ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing that,’ he said.

Sun said, ‘I’d be amazed if he did. Doesn’t look like he shaved.’ He lifted the box of razor heads. ‘None of them have been used.’ The Chinese were not a hairy race. Some men never had to shave. He picked up a small gold-coloured aerosol smaller than a lipstick. ‘What’s this?’

Li took it from him and frowned. ‘It’s a breath freshener.’ It was exactly the same as the one found among Jia Jing’s belongings. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, as he had done a couple of hours earlier in the autopsy room. The same sharp menthol smell.

Sun sniffed and screwed up his face. ‘I think I’d rather have bad breath.’ He looked around. ‘Well, it doesn’t look like he shaved his own head either. At least, not here.’

‘We should find out if he had a regular barber,’ Li said. Sun nodded and made a note. ‘And get the local police in Guilin to talk to his family. Find out when he left home, how long he’s been living in Beijing, did he have any family here.’

In the living room, Li drew back the net curtains from the window and looked out on the sun slanting between the skyscrapers of the burgeoning Beijing skyline. Traffic jammed the street below, and in the distance he could see lines of vehicles crawling across a long sweep of ring road flyover. Factory chimneys belched their toxins into an unusually blue sky, ensuring that it would not stay that way for long. He wondered what kind of boy Sui had been, who could live his ascetic, dustless existence in this rich man’s bubble and leave not a trace of himself behind. What had he done here all on his own? What had he thought about when he sat in his show-house furniture looking out on a city a thousand miles from home? Or had everything revolved entirely around the pool, a life spent in chlorinated water? Had his existence in this apartment, in this city, been literally like that of a fish out of water? Is that why he had left no traces? Except for his own body, his temple, and a room full of medals and photographs, his shrine.

He turned to find Sun watching him. ‘I don’t think this boy had any kind of life outside of the pool, Sun. No reason for living except winning. If he killed himself it was because someone took that reason away.’

‘Do you think he did?’

Li checked his watch. ‘Margaret will be starting the autopsy shortly. Let’s find out.’

III

Students, future police officers, were playing basketball on the court opposite the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the south end of the campus. The University of Public Security played host to the most advanced facilities in the field of forensic pathology in China, and they were housed in a squat, inauspicious four-storey building along one end of the playing fields. The students were wrapped up warm in hooded sweatsuits and jogpants, shouting and breathing fire into the frozen midday. Through small windows high up in the cold white walls of the autopsy room, Margaret could hear them calling to each other. She, too, was wrapped up, but for protection rather than warmth. A long-sleeved cotton gown over a plastic apron over green surgeon’s pyjamas. She had plastic shoe covers on her feet, plastic covers on her arms, and a plastic shower cap on her head, loose strands of fair hair tucked neatly out of sight. She wore a steel mesh gauntlet on her left, non-cutting hand, and both hands were covered in latex. She wore goggles to protect her eyes, and had tied a white, synthetic, paper-like fibre mask over her mouth and nose. The masks that the Centre usually supplied for pathologists were cotton. But the spaces between the threads in the weave of the cotton masks were relatively large, and more liable to let through bacteria, or microscopic water droplets, or aerosolised bone dust. Acutely aware of the bulge beneath her apron, Margaret wasn’t taking any chances. She had dipped into her dwindling private supply of synthetic masks, affording herself and her baby far greater protection from unwanted and undesirable inhalations.

She had two assistants working with her, and she let them do the donkey work under her close scrutiny: cutting open the rib cage, removing and breadloafing the organs, slitting along the length of the intestine, cutting open the skull. They worked to her instructions, and she only moved in close to make a personal examination of the things that caught her attention. She recorded her comments through an overhead microphone.

Right now she was examining the heart at another table. It was firm and normal in size. Carefully, she traced the coronary arteries from their origins at the aorta, around the outside of the heart, incising every five millimeters looking for blockage. She found none, and began breadloafing part way, examining the muscle for evidence of old or recent injury. When she reached the valves that separate the chambers of the heart she stopped sectioning and examined them. They were well formed and pliable. Although the left ventricle, which pumps the blood out of the heart through the aorta, was slightly thickened, she did not consider this abnormal. A little hypertrophy was to be expected in the left ventricle of an athlete. It was, after all, just another muscle, worked hard and developed by exercise. She was satisfied it was not his heart that had killed this young man.

She then embarked on a process of taking small sections, about one by one-point-five centimeters, from each of the organs for future microscopic examination. Although she did not consider that this would be necessary. Carefully, she placed each one into the tiny cassettes in which they would be fixed in formalin, dehydrated in alcohol and infiltrated by paraffin, creating pieces of wax tissue firm enough to be cut so thin that a microscope could see right through them.

Her concentration was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, and she looked up as Li and Sun came in, pulling on aprons and shower caps. ‘You’re a little late,’ she said caustically.

‘You’ve started?’ Li said.

‘I’ve finished.’

Li looked crestfallen. She knew he liked to be there to go through each step with her, picking up on every little observation. ‘The services of the assistants were only available to me for a short time,’ she told him. ‘And I didn’t think I was in any condition to go heaving a body around on my own.’

‘No, of course not,’ Li said quickly. He half turned towards Sun. ‘You’ve met Sun, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. ‘But I feel as if I have, the amount of talking you’ve done about him.’ Sun blushed. ‘You didn’t tell me he was such a good-looking boy. Afraid I might make a pass at him?’

Li grinned. ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ He looked at Sun. ‘Are you following any of this?’

‘A little,’ Sun said.

‘Ignore her. She loves to embarrass people.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Margaret said. ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re late. You’ve missed all the boring bits. We can get straight to the point.’

‘Which is?’ Li asked.

She crossed to the table where Sui Mingshan lay opened up like his fellow competitor on the other side of the city, cold and inanimate, devoid of organs, brain removed. Even like this he was a splendid specimen. Broad shoulders, beautifully developed pectorals, lithe, powerful legs. His face was obscured by the top flap of skin above the Y-shaped incision which had begun at each shoulder blade. Margaret pulled it down to reveal a young, not very handsome face, innocent in its repose, frozen in death, cheeks peppered by acne. His shaven head had been very roughly cut and was still quite stubbly in places. Li tried to imagine this young man in the apartment they had examined just an hour earlier. Perhaps his spirit had returned there and was haunting it still.

Margaret said, ‘You can see, there is no petechial haemorrhaging around the face, the eyes or the neck. He didn’t die of strangulation.’ She lifted up the flap again to expose the muscles of the neck, and the open area where she had transected the trachea and oesophagus, peeling them away from the backbones and down into the chest. ‘The hyoid bone, just above the Adam’s apple, is broken, and the neck dislocated between the second and third cervical vertebrae, as you can see, cleanly severing the spinal cord.’

She turned the head each way to show them the deep red-purple abrasions where the rope had burned his neck, high up under the jaw bone. ‘It’s all very unusual in a suicide.’

‘Why?’ Li asked.

‘Most suicidal hangings don’t involve such a drop, so the neck isn’t usually broken. Effectively they are strangled by the rope, and there would be evidence of pinpoint haemorrhages where tiny blood vessels had burst around the face, eyes, neck. Petechial haemorrhaging. As you saw, there is none.’

She nodded to one of her assistants and got him to turn the body over. She said, ‘We know that he was alive when he made the drop, because the abrasions made by the rope on his neck are red and bloody. There is no doubt that death was caused by a dislocation of the vertebrae of the neck severing the spinal cord. A broken neck to you.’

‘So…you think he kill himself?’ Sun ventured in English.

Margaret pursed her lips behind her mask. ‘Not a chance.’

Li looked at her. ‘How can you be so sure?’

‘The amount of alcohol in his stomach,’ she said. ‘Can’t you smell it?’ Li found it hard to pick out any one odour from the melange of faeces, blood and decaying meat that perfumed the air. ‘I nearly sent the boys out for some soda so we could have a party.’

‘Half bottle brandy,’ Sun said.

‘Oh, much more than that,’ Margaret said brightly. ‘I nearly had to ask for bread and milk to be brought in. There was so much alcohol in the air I thought I was getting drunk. Not a good idea in my condition.’

‘But he didn’t drink,’ Li said. ‘His team-mates were quite definite about that.’

‘Well, then, I’m surprised it wasn’t the alcohol that killed him. From the smell alone, I’d say we were looking at something around zero-point-four percent. Enough to seriously disable, or even kill, the untrained drinker. Maybe somebody encouraged him to drink the first few. Perhaps with a gun at his head. And if he wasn’t used to alcohol, then it probably wasn’t long before they were able to pour it down his throat.’

‘How do you know he didn’t drink it himself?’ Li persisted.

‘Well, maybe he did.’ Margaret removed her mask and goggles, and Li saw the perspiration beaded across her brow. ‘But with that much alcohol coursing through his veins, he wouldn’t have been able to stand up, let alone climb ten meters to the top ramp of a diving pool, tie one end of the rope around the rail, the other around his neck and then jump off. Someone got him very drunk, took him up there, placed the noose around his neck and pushed him over.’

They heard the hum of the air-conditioning in the silence that followed, and the guys with the basketball were still pounding the court outside.

Eventually, Li said stupidly, ‘So somebody killed him.’

She said trenchantly, ‘When you push someone off a thirty-foot ramp with a rope around their neck, Li Yan, they usually call it murder.’

She returned her attention immediately to the body and asked, ‘Has the question of drug-taking arisen?’

Li frowned. ‘Why? Was he taking drugs?’

‘I have no idea. I’ve sent several samples down to toxicology and asked for priority analysis.’

‘You think he was, then?’

She shrugged non-committally and ran her fingers across the tops of his shoulder and upper back. The whole area was covered with acne spots and scars. ‘Acne is quite a common side-effect of steroids. On the other hand boys of his age can suffer like this.’

‘Toxicology should tell us, though?’

She peeled off her latex gloves. ‘Actually, probably not. He was due to swim in competition today, right?’ Li nodded. ‘So there would be a high risk of testing. If he was taking steroids he’d have stopped long enough ago that it wouldn’t show up.’ She shrugged again. ‘So who the hell knows?’

Outside, the basketball players were taking a cigarette break, steam rising from them with the smoke as they stood around chatting idly, one of them squatting on the ball. It put Sun in the mood, and he lit up, too, as Li dialled Section One on his cellphone. He got put through to the detectives’ room.

‘Qian? It’s Li. Tell the boys it’s official. Sui was murdered.’ He watched Sun drawing on his cigarette and envied him every mouthful. ‘And Qian, I want you to check with the various sports authorities when any of these athletes was last tested for drugs.’

‘You think it is drug-related, then?’ Qian asked.

‘No, I don’t think anything,’ Li said. ‘I just want every little piece of information we can get. The more pixels the clearer the picture.’ He couldn’t stand it any longer. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Sun, ‘Give me one of those.’ And he held his hand out for a cigarette.

Sun looked surprised, then took out a cigarette and handed it to him. Li stuck it in his mouth and said to Qian, ‘This indoor athletics competition with the Americans, it starts today, right?’

‘Yes, Chief.’

‘At the Capital Stadium?’

‘Yeh, the place where they have the speed skating.’

‘Okay, get me a couple of tickets for tonight.’

‘I didn’t know you were a sports fan, Chief.’

‘I’m not,’ Li said, and disconnected. He clipped the phone on his belt and starting searching his pockets for a light, before he remembered he didn’t have one. Sun flicked open his lighter, and a blue-yellow flame danced in the sunlight. Li leaned forward to light his cigarette and saw, over Sun’s shoulder, Margaret coming down the steps of the Centre for Material Evidence Determination behind him. He quickly coughed into his hand, snatching the cigarette from his mouth and crumpling it in his fist. Sun was left holding his lighter in mid-air. He looked perplexed. ‘Put that fucking thing away!’ Li hissed.

Sun recoiled as if he had been slapped, slipping the lighter quickly back in his pocket. Then he saw Margaret approaching and a slow smile of realisation crossed his face. Li met his eyes and blushed, then whispered threateningly, ‘Not a word!’ Sun’s smile just broadened.

As she joined them, Margaret said, ‘Where are you off to now?’

‘We’re going to have a look at the weightlifter’s place.’

‘I thought Wang said it was natural causes.’

‘He did,’ Li said. ‘I just don’t like coincidences.’

Margaret’s hair was held back by a band, and she had not a trace of make-up on her face. But she looked lovely, her skin clear and soft and brushed pink by pregnancy. ‘I’m going back to the apartment,’ she said, ‘to shower and change. Then I guess I’ll head off to my exercise class. Will I see you later?’

‘I’m getting a couple of tickets for the indoor athletics tonight. I thought you might like to come along and see the Americans being shown how to do it by the Chinese.’

Margaret cocked an eyebrow. ‘The other way around, don’t you mean? You people have come a long way in a short time, but you’ve still a long way to go.’

Li grinned. ‘We’ll see. You’ll come then?’

‘Sure.’

And then he remembered, ‘Oh, yeh, and I thought we might have lunch tomorrow, with Sun Xi and his wife, Wen. It would be a good time to meet her. And you could maybe take her up to the hospital tomorrow afternoon. Get her sorted out.’

There was murder in Margaret’s eyes, but she kept a smile fixed on her face. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be convenient for Detective Sun,’ she said through slightly clenched teeth.

Sun was oblivious. ‘No,’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tomorrow will be good. I very grateful to you Misses, eh…Miss…’

‘Doctor,’ Margaret said, flicking Li a look that might have dropped a lesser man. ‘But you can call me Margaret. And it’s my pleasure.’ She waved Sun’s cigarette smoke out of her face. ‘You know, you should have given that up long ago. Apart from the fact that it is not good for you, it is not good for your wife, or your baby.’

Sun looked dutifully ashamed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I should follow example of Chief. He has great will-power.’

Li looked as if he might kill him, and then he saw that Margaret was giving him another of her looks. Her eyes strayed down to his still clenched fist, where Sun’s scrunched up cigarette was beginning to turn to mush. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ And then she beamed beatifically. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’ And she turned and headed off into the early afternoon sunshine towards the white apartment block at the north end of the campus.

Sun grinned at Li. ‘Near thing, Chief.’

‘Let’s just go,’ Li said, with the weary resignation of a man who knows he’s been rumbled.

IV

Jia Jing lived in another of Beijing’s new luxury apartment complexes, this time beyond the China World Trade Centre at the east end of Jianguomenwai Avenue. As they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, Li said, ‘There’s something wrong with the world, Sun, when you can live like this just because you can lift more weight than anyone else, or run further, or swim faster. I mean, what makes any of that more valuable than the guy who sweeps the streets?’

‘People aren’t going to pay to watch a guy sweeping the streets, Chief,’ Sun said. And, of course, Li knew that he was right.

They let themselves into the apartment with the key the security man on the desk had given them. If Sui’s apartment had been the height of luxury aspired to by the wealthy, Jia’s apartment was quite the opposite. It was large, with a long rectangular living and dining area with three bedrooms off it. But it was filled with cold, hard surfaces, unrelenting and austere. Jia Jing had not been a man to seek comfort, except perhaps between the legs of another man’s wife.

The floors were polished wood, reflecting cold, blue light from the windows. The furniture was antique, purchased for its value rather than its comfort. There were lacquered wooden chairs and an unforgiving settee, a magnificent mirrored darkwood cabinet inlaid with beech. An old-fashioned exterior Chinese door, restored and varnished and mounted on a heavy frame, stood in the centre of the room serving no apparent purpose. A dragon dog sat on either side of it. Beyond it, the sole comfort in the room — a luxuriously thick Chinese rug woven in pale pastel colours. The walls were hung with traditional Chinese scrolls. Candles in ornate holders sat on a dresser below a long antique mirror and a scene of ancient China carved in ivory and mounted in a case.

One of the bedrooms was empty. In another, a large rug on the wall above Jia’s antique bed was woven with a strange modern design of angles and circles. Facing the bed, a huge television sat on yet another antique dresser.

‘I’m surprised it’s not an antique television as well,’ Sun said.

There was a video player on the dresser beside it, and in the top drawer, a neatly stacked row of tapes in unmarked boxes. Li took one out, slipped it into the player, and turned on the television. After a moment they found themselves watching the flickering images of two black men and a Caucasian woman engaged in bizarre sex acts. Li swore softly and ejected the tape. He tried another. Two women writhed together in an apparently unsatisfied pursuit of sexual gratification. From their imprecations, and foul-mouthed mutual encouragement, it was clear that they were Americans. Li turned it off and glanced, embarrassed, at Sun. ‘He had a big appetite for a man with such small testicles.’

Sun frowned. ‘Small testicles?’

‘According to Wang, abnormally small.’

The third bedroom had been turned into a study. There were only three items of furniture in it. A desk, a chair and an antique roll-top dresser. The drawers and cupboards of the dresser were filled with personal papers — bills, receipts, letters. The death of Jia Jing was not a criminal investigation, so his personal effects would remain undisturbed. Li turned on the computer, and when Windows had loaded resorted to a trick Margaret had taught him. He clicked on the Internet Explorer web browser and opened up the document entitled HISTORY, where the last three hundred sites Jia had visited were stored. A quick scroll down them told Li that Jia’s use of the Internet had been primarily for accessing porn.

‘Not so much an appetite as an obsession,’ Sun observed.

Li powered down the computer. There was something depressing about delving into the dark side of people’s secret lives once they were dead.

The bathroom was spartan and functional, cold white tiles on the floor, no mats or rugs to soften the shock for naked feet. In a wall cabinet above the sink, they found two bottles of aerosol aftershave, identical to those they had found in Sui Mingshan’s bathroom. The same brand. Chanel.

‘You think maybe the whole Chinese team got a job lot?’ Sun said, smiling. ‘Maybe Chanel is sponsoring our Olympic effort. We could be the best-smelling team at the Games.’

But Li wasn’t smiling. There were warning bells ringing in his head. He knew there was something wrong here. He picked up one of the bottles and fired a burst of aerosolised perfume into the air. They both sniffed and recoiled in unison. It was a strange, musky smell, like almonds and vanilla, with a bitter edge to it. Not sweet.

‘No wonder he had to resort to watching porn if he smelled like that,’ Sun said.

But Li could not recall any scent from Jia the night they found him in the bedroom in Beichang Street. He remembered only the sweet, heavy scents of incense and sex in the room.

He sprayed a tiny puff from the other bottle on to his wrist and smelled the same bitter orange scent of the one he had tried at Sui Mingshan’s apartment. He held his wrist out for Sun to sniff.

Sun wrinkled his nose. ‘Same as the one at Sui’s place.’

Li nodded. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ The smell seemed to have filled the bathroom. It was offending Li’s olfactory senses and making him feel a little queasy. ‘I don’t like breathing this stuff.’

They opened the door of the apartment to find an elderly couple standing in the hallway looking perplexed, a little dazed. ‘Is this number twelve-oh-five?’ the old man asked.

‘Yes,’ Li said cautiously. ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘It’s our son’s apartment,’ the woman said, and Li suddenly recognised them as the old couple flanking Jia in the photograph they had found among his things. His parents. Sun flicked him a look.

‘We’re police officers,’ Li said. He had no idea if they had been notified.

‘They told us this morning,’ Jia’s father said. ‘We’ve travelled up from Yufa by bus.’ Li knew Yufa. It was a small town on the road south to Gu’an. The bus would have taken several hours. He could imagine what a depressing journey it had been. ‘Did you know him?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘He was a lovely boy,’ his mother said. ‘Couldn’t do enough for us. He bought us a colour television, and a video recorder, and a new refrigerator…’

‘Sent us money every month,’ his father said. Money that would stop now. And Li wondered how much of what Jia owned they would inherit. The value of the antiques in the apartment alone was probably several thousand dollars. More than they could have hoped to earn in a lifetime. But the inheritance laws were still in a state of flux. It might be that everything went to the State. Had they any real idea how much their son had been earning?

‘Do you know how he died?’ his mother asked, and Li again wondered at a creature so small producing a monster like Jia. In his mind he saw the weightlifter lying dead between the legs of his adulterous lover, lying cut open on the pathologist’s table. Either image would have been shocking to this old couple.

‘It was natural causes,’ Li said. ‘A heart attack.’ And he added unnecessarily, ‘He died at the home of a friend.’ He would see that they never learned the truth. They were much more worth protecting than those who concerned the Minister of Public Security.

But as he and Sun left them to enter their son’s apartment, he knew that nothing could protect them from what they would find in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. His heart ached for the poor parents of a dead rich boy.

In the street outside, a sweeper wearing a grubby white hat and a blue face mask rattled the twigs of his broom along the gutter, collecting trash in a long-handled can that opened and closed, like a mouth, to devour the garbage. He emptied it into a large trash can on wheels. His eyes above the mask were dead and empty, his skin dry, cracked, ingrained with the dust of the city. And Li wondered why he wasn’t just as deserving as a weightlifter or a swimmer. But the new creed, it seemed, was that only the rich and successful were worth rewarding. Although death, he figured, had probably never been part of that reckoning. And he recalled his Uncle Yifu quoting an old Chinese proverb. Though you amass ten thousand pieces of silver, at death you cannot take with you even a copper penny.

V

Someone had brought a portable television up from an office downstairs, and when Li and Sun got back to Section One, most of the officers in the detectives’ office were crowded around it. The excited voices of a couple of commentators soared above the roar of the crowd belting out of the set’s tiny speakers.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Li barked. And they all turned guiltily towards the door, like naughty children caught in an illicit act. Someone hurriedly turned the set off. Sun smirked happily at them. He wasn’t one of the bad boys.

Wu said, ‘Professional interest, Chief. They’ve already had the four hundred meters freestyle and the hundred meters butterfly. They’ve got the breast stroke and the crawl to come. One hundred and two hundred meters. We figured we should take it in.’

‘Oh, did you? And what does Deputy Tao think?’

‘He told us to turn it off,’ Sang said.

‘And you ignored him?’ Li was incredulous.

‘Not while he was here,’ Wu said. ‘But he went out about half an hour ago. He didn’t say we had to keep it switched off when he wasn’t here.’

Li cast a disapproving glare around the faces turned towards him. ‘You guys are fools,’ he said. ‘You didn’t even put a lookout on the stairs.’

And they all burst out laughing.

But Li’s face never cracked. ‘I suggest you get back to your work. We’ve got a murder inquiry in progress here.’ He turned towards the door as they started returning to their desks, but paused, turning back. ‘Just out of interest…how are we doing?’

‘Won the butterfly, first and second,’ Wu said. ‘Lost the freestyle, but took second and third. We’re ahead on points.’

Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘Good,’ he said.

He was halfway down the corridor when Qian caught up with him. He was clutching a sheaf of notes. ‘Couple of things, Chief.’ He followed Li into his office. ‘You asked about dope-testing.’

Li was surprised. ‘You’ve got that already?’

‘It’s a matter of record, Chief. Same with all the sports authorities. Seems that nowadays they all do out-of-competition testing, to discourage athletes and other sportsmen from using drugs to enhance their training. They’re given twenty-four hours’ notice, and then it’s mandatory to provide the required urine samples.’

‘Couldn’t they just turn in clean samples?’ Li asked. ‘Someone else’s urine, even?’

‘Not these days, apparently,’ Qian said. ‘The guy I spoke to from the Chinese authority said the athlete being tested is assigned what they call a chaperone. Someone of the same sex. He or she stays with the athlete the whole time. Has to watch them pissing in the jar, and then the athlete has to pour the stuff into two small bottles they label as A and B samples. These are packed into small cases, locked with special seals and sent to a laboratory for analysis.’

‘So what about the people we’re interested in?’

‘Sui was tested two weeks ago. Clean. Two of the three killed in the car crash were tested a week before the accident. Also clean. The cyclist hasn’t been tested since he was last in competition. It’s normal to test first, second and third in any competition, and then they pick someone else at random. He came third in his last event and was clean then. Jia Jing was tested six weeks ago. Also clean.’

Li sat down thoughtfully. ‘Almost too good to be true,’ he said. ‘There must be ways these people can cheat the tests.’

‘Seems like the international sports bodies have got wise to all the tricks, Chief. The stuff this guy told me! There was one female swimmer in Europe apparently laced her sample with whiskey, making it worse than useless. Pissing the Drink, they called it. She got banned. It’s easier for the women to cheat, though. I mean, you and I have got our dicks out there for the chaperone to see, there’s not much you can do about it. But this guy said they caught women hiding clean samples in condoms tucked up inside themselves. They were even buying one hundred percent drug-free urine on the Internet.’

Li said, ‘You’re taking the piss, right?’

Qian grinned. ‘Straight up, Chief. But there’s this World Anti-Doping Agency now, and they’ve got people supervising who know every trick in the book. It’s hard to put one by them. Really hard. And particularly in China, because the government here’s so keen for us to have this squeaky clean image for the Olympics.’

Li nodded. ‘You said, a couple of things.’

‘That’s right, Chief. The officer who attended the car crash that killed those three athletes? He’s in an interview room downstairs, if you want to talk to him.’

The traffic cop sat smoking in an interview room on the second floor. His black, fur-collared coat hung open, and he had unbuttoned his jacket to reveal his neatly pressed blue shirt below. His white-topped peaked cap sat on the table beside his ashtray. He had broad, well-defined northern features, short hair brushed carefully back, and was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, when Li and Qian came in. He stood up immediately, stubbing out his cigarette and snatching his hat from the table. He was clearly ill at ease, finding himself on the wrong side of a Section One interrogation.

‘Sit down,’ Li told him, and he and Qian sat down to face him across the table. ‘We have the report you filed on the fatal car crash you attended in Xuanwu District on November tenth. Three athletes, members of the Chinese hundred-meters sprint relay team, were found dead inside the wreck of their car.’ Li dropped the report on the table. ‘I want you to tell me what you found when you got there.’

The officer cleared his throat nervously. ‘I was on patrol with officer Xu Peng in the vicinity of Taoranting Park at eleven thirty-three on the night of November ten when we received a call that there had been a road accident in You’anmennei Dajie—’

Li cut him off. ‘Officer, I don’t want you to sit there and regurgitate your report. I can read, and I’ve read it. I want to know what’s not in the report. What you felt, what you smelled, what you thought.’ He nodded towards the ashtray. ‘You can smoke if you like.’

The officer appeared to be relieved, and took out a pack of cigarettes. After he had lit one, it belatedly occurred to him that he should have offered one to his interrogators. He held out the pack. Qian took one. Li didn’t. The officer took a deep drag on his. ‘I hate car crashes,’ he said. ‘They can be God-awful messy things. Bits and pieces of people all over the place. Arms and legs. Blood everywhere. Stuff you don’t want to see.’ It was as if Li had opened a floodgate. Now that he had started, the traffic cop couldn’t seem to stop. ‘My wife keeps on at me to give it up. Get a job in security. Anything but traffic.’ He flicked nervous eyes at them. ‘There’s nights I’ve come home and just lain on the floor shaking.’

‘Is that how it was the night you attended the accident in You’anmennei Dajie?’

The cop nodded. ‘Pretty much. The car must have been doing over a hundred KPH. It was a hell of a mess. So were the guys inside. Three of them. Two in the front, one in the back — at least, that’s where they started off. They weren’t wearing seat belts.’ He grimaced, recalling the scene, pulling images back into his mind that he had probably hoped were gone forever. ‘It’s bad enough when you don’t know them, but when it’s people you’ve seen on television, you know, big-time sports stars…well, you always figure stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like that.’

‘You recognised them, then?’

‘Not straight off. Well, two of them, yeh. I mean, they always wore their hair short anyway, so they didn’t look that different with their heads shaved.’

Li felt as if the room around them had faded to black. He focused his entire attention on the officer in front of him. ‘Their heads were shaved?’ he said slowly.

The cop seemed surprised by Li’s interest. He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a fashion these days, isn’t it? All these sports stars in the West have been shaving their heads last couple of years. It’s catching on here now.’

‘So you didn’t think it was odd?’

‘Not in those two, no. It was the other one that kind of shocked me. Xing Da. That’s why I didn’t recognise him at first. He always wore his hair shoulder length. It was kind of like his trademark. You always knew it was him on the track, all that hair flying out behind him.’

‘And his head was shaved, too?’ Li asked.

‘All gone,’ the traffic cop said. ‘It looked really weird on him.’

As they climbed the stairs back to the top floor Li said, ‘What about the doctor’s report?’ Pieces of this bizarre puzzle appeared suddenly to be dropping into place, but Li could still make no sense of the picture it was forming. It had, however, got his adrenaline pumping.

Qian said, ‘Got it upstairs, chief. But all he did was sign off the death certificates. Death caused by multiple injuries suffered in a car accident.’

‘Fuck!’ Li cursed roundly. A staged suicide in which the victim’s head had been shaved. Three deaths in what appeared at the time to have been an accident. All with their heads shaved. And all four, members of the Chinese Olympic team. The trouble was, the evidence from the crash — the vehicle and the bodies — was long gone.

Wu intercepted them on the top corridor. ‘Those tickets you got Qian to order for tonight, chief? They arrived by courier. I put them on your desk.’

‘Fine.’ Li brushed past, his mind on other things, but Wu called after him. ‘Something else, Chief…’

Li turned and barked, ‘What!’

‘Those three athletes in the car crash?’

He had Li’s attention now. ‘What about them?’

‘Only two of them were cremated, Chief. The parents of the other one live out in a village near the Ming tombs. Seems they buried him in their orchard.’

Li wanted to punch the air. But all he said was, ‘Which one?’

‘Xing Da.’

VI

The village of Dalingjiang lay fifty kilometers north-west of Beijing in the shadow of the Tianshou mountains, a stone’s throw from the last resting place of thirteen of the sixteen Ming emperors. A rambling collection of brick-built cottages with slate roofs and walled courtyards, Dalingjiang was believed to have the best feng shui in the whole of China. After all, its inhabitants reasoned, thirteen dead emperors couldn’t be wrong.

Li took Sun with him to drive the Jeep. They had headed out of the city on the Badaling Expressway, past countless developments of pastel-painted luxury apartments with security-gated compounds and private pools. Built to meet the demands of the new bourgeoisie.

The sun was dipping lower now as they neared the tombs. The mountains had lost their definition, and looked as if they had been cut from paper and laid one over the other, in decreasing shades of dark blue, against a pale orange sky. The road was long and straight, lined with tall, naked trees with white-painted trunks. The roadside was piled high with bricks and stacks of golden corn stalks. They passed a peasant on a bicycle, a large parcel in his basket, his daughter on a makeshift seat over the rear wheel. Perhaps he had spent his hard-earned cash on a Christmas present for his Little Empress.

Off to their left, Li saw a large white scar cut into the shadow of the hills. It interrupted his silent thoughts. ‘What the hell is that?’ he asked Sun.

Sun screwed his eyes against the setting sun and glanced in the direction of Li’s gaze. ‘That’s Beijing Snow World,’ he said.

‘Beijing what?’

‘Snow World. It’s an artificial ski slope. At least, it’s real snow artificially generated. Guaranteed not to melt till the spring.’ He glanced at Li. ‘Haven’t you heard of it?’

Li shook his head. He felt like a stranger in his own country. A ski slope! ‘Who in the name of the sky goes skiing in China?’ he asked.

Sun shrugged. ‘The new kids on the block out of Beijing. The sons and daughters of the rich and successful. It’s pretty neat.’

Li was amazed. ‘You’ve been there?’

‘Some friends took me out when I first got here.’ He grinned. ‘I guess they thought I’d be impressed, a country bumpkin up from the provinces.’

‘And were you?’

‘You bet.’ They were approaching the turn-off. ‘You want to see it?’

Li glanced at his watch. There was time. ‘Let’s do it.’

A long, newly paved road took them down to an elaborate black and gold wrought-iron gate between two low, white buildings with steeply pitched red roofs. Hawkers were selling fruit and vegetables and tourist trinkets off the back of bicycle carts, stamping their feet in the cold, grim expressions set in the face of a meagre trade. Sun parked the Jeep among the hundred or so private vehicles outside the gate, and went into the right-hand building to buy them visitors’ passes. Li stood listening to western elevator music being piped through speakers mounted on every wall. He could see, through the gate, lampposts lining a long walkway up to the main building, speakers dangling from each one. The air was filled with their music, pervading every tree-lined slope, reaching perhaps into the very graves of the emperors themselves.

He fished in his pocket to find his purse when Sun emerged with their tickets. ‘How much do I owe you?’

But Sun waved him aside. ‘I think I can afford to stand you a ten yuan ticket, Chief.’

Attendants in red ski suits let them through the gate. The walk up the cobbled walkway took them to a long, green-roofed building. It was warm inside, with large restaurants off to left and right, floor to ceiling windows giving on to views of the ski slope itself. The one to the left was still doing late business, groups of wealthy young men and women in fashionable ski gear gathered at round tables, picking over the debris of their meals, draining the last of their beer. The other restaurant was empty, and Sun led Li through it to a café at the far end. It, too, was deserted, apart from a young woman behind a polished wood counter. She wore the Snow World uniform of dark grey trousers and a dark waistcoat over a white blouse. They ordered tea from her and sat by the window.

Li looked out in astonishment at the dozens of skiers gliding down the shallow slope, then queuing to be dragged back up again on a continuous pulley. At the far side, screaming children sitting in huge inflated tyres flew down a separate run, while a motorised skidoo plied a non-stop trade for goggle-eyed thrill seekers up and down a deserted slope off to the right. He watched as a novice, a young girl togged up in the most expensive of designer ski wear, tried to propel herself along the flat with her ski sticks. She looked clumsy in the great plastic boots that were clipped into her skis, and she ended up sitting down with a thump, severely denting her dignity. There was nothing very sophisticated about any of it, but it was a brand new China experience for Li. ‘Do these people actually have their own skis?’ he asked Sun.

Sun laughed. ‘No, most of them hire everything here.’

‘How much does it cost?’

‘About three hundred and sixty kwai for a day’s skiing.’ Half a month’s income for the average Chinese.

Li looked at Sun in astonishment. ‘Three hundred and sixty…?’ He shook his head. ‘What an incredible waste of money.’ He had only been in America for little over a year, but somehow China had changed hugely in that time, and he felt as if he had been left behind, in breathless pursuit now of changes he could never catch. He glanced at Sun and saw the envy in the young man’s face as he looked out at these privileged kids indulging in pursuits that would always be beyond his pocket. There were only ten years between them, but the gap was almost generational. While Li saw Beijing Snow World as something invasive and alien to his country’s culture, it was something that Sun clearly aspired to. On the other side of the glass, a young woman walked past with two tiny white pet dogs frolicking at her heels. One of them wore a pink waistcoat.

Sun laughed. ‘That’ll be to keep it warm. She must be going to eat the other one first.’

The setting sun had become a huge red globe and was starting to dip below the line of the hills. Li drained his tea and stood up. ‘Better go,’ he said.

It was twilight as they drove into Dalingjiang. The village square was a dusty, open piece of broken ground where the men of the village sat on well-worn logs lined up against the wall of the now crumbling production team headquarters of the old commune. Several village elders were gathered in the dying light, smoking pipes and indulging in desultory conversation. A rusty old notice board raised on two poles had nothing to announce. Nothing much happened any more in Dalingjiang. They watched in curious silence as the Jeep rumbled past. Along another side of the square, were the logs laid out for the women. But they were empty.

Sun pulled up at the village shop, a single-storey brick building with a dilapidated roof and ill-fitting windows. Corncobs were spread out to dry over the concrete stoop. The door jarred and rattled and complained as Li pushed it open. A middle-aged woman behind two glass counters smiled at him. He flicked his eyes over the half-empty shelves behind her. Jars of preserves, Chinese spices, soy sauce, cigarettes, chewing gum. Under the glass were packets of dried beans, cooking utensils, coloured crayons. Crates of beer were stacked under the window.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.

‘I’m looking for the home of Lao Da,’ he said. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘But you won’t be able to drive there. You’ll have to park at the end of the road and walk.’

She gave him instructions and they parked the Jeep further up the dirt road and turned off through a maze of frozen rutted tracks that led them between the high brick walls of the villagers’ courtyard homes. There were piles of refuse gathered at the side of the larger alleys, stacks of red bricks, sheaves of corn stalks for feeding the donkeys. Dogs barked and bayed in the growing darkness, a scrawny mongrel beneath a piece of corrugated iron growling and whining at them as they passed. A donkey looked up with interest from its evening meal, and a cackle of hens ran off screaming from behind their chicken wire. The air was filled with the sweet scent of wood smoke, and they saw smoke drifting gently from tubes extending horizontally from holes in the side walls of houses. There were no chimneys on the roofs.

They found Xing Da’s parents’ house next to a derelict cottage, long abandoned and left to rot. The children of the village no longer stayed to work the land as their ancestors had done for centuries before them. They left for the city at the first available opportunity, and when their parents died, their houses were allowed to fall down — or else be purchased by entrepreneurs and developed as country cottage retreats for the wealthy.

Li pushed open a rusted green gate and Sun followed him into the courtyard of Lao Da’s cottage. In the light from the windows they could see firewood and coal stacked along the wall. Frozen persimmons were laid out along the window ledges. Li knocked on the door, and a wizened old man opened it, too old to be Xing Da’s father. Li told him who he was and who he was looking for, and the old man beckoned them in. He was Xing’s grandfather, it turned out. His wife, who looked even older, sat on a large bed pushed up below the window by the door to the kitchen. She glanced at the strangers without showing the slightest interest. Her eyes were vacant. In the light, Li saw that the old man’s face was like parchment, dried and creased. His hands, the colour of ash, were like claws. But his eyes were lively enough, dark and darting. He called through to the bedroom, and Lao Da emerged, peering at Li and Sun with suspicious eyes. Although lao meant old, Lao Da was only in his forties, half the age of his old father. He glanced beyond the policemen to the kitchen doorway where his wife had appeared, holding aside the ragged curtain that hung from it.

‘It’s the police,’ he said to her. And then to Li, ‘What do you want?’

‘It’s about your son,’ Li said.

‘He’s dead,’ his father said, his voice laden with everything that meant to him.

‘I know,’ Li said. ‘We have reason to believe that the crash he was involved in might not have been an accident.’ He saw the frown of confusion spreading over Lao Da’s face, like blood soaking into a carpet. ‘We’d like to perform an autopsy.’

‘But we buried him,’ his mother said from the doorway, in a small voice that betrayed her fear of what was coming next. ‘Out there, in the orchard.’

‘If you’d agree to it,’ Li said, ‘I’d like to have him exhumed.’

‘You mean you want to dig him up?’ his father said. Li nodded, and Lao Da glanced towards his wife. Then he looked again at Li. ‘You’ll have a job,’ he said. ‘The ground out there’s frozen harder than concrete.’