The Runner

I

Li sat in the large outer office, perched uncomfortably on the edge of a very low settee which had almost swallowed him when he first sat in it. A young secretary at a computer studiously ignored him, and a grey-uniformed security guard watched him with interest from the other side of a glass door. From the window, Li saw the sun, still low in the sky, reflecting on the side of a glass skyscraper and casting long shadows on the city streets twenty-three storeys below. He glanced at his watch for the umpteenth time. He had been kept waiting nearly half an hour.

It was another five minutes before the phone rang and the secretary waved him towards the door of the inner office. ‘You can go in now.’ Li stood up and tugged the wrinkles out of his best suit. He pulled uncomfortably at the knot of his tie. It felt as if it were strangling him. Li never wore a tie. He knocked tentatively on the door, and at the behest of a voice beyond it, stepped into the inner office.

It was a large office with a huge desk set in front of floor-to-ceiling windows which opened on to a spectacular view of the city looking west. Li could see, in sharp outline against the distant sky, the Tianshou mountains where, at midnight the night before, they had pulled the body of Xing Da from the ground. The walls were covered with photographs of security people in various uniforms and at various locations. To the right of the desk, male and female mannequins modelled the latest uniforms. The male wore a light-grey, short-sleeved shirt and trousers with a dark tie and beret. His epaulettes bore silver stars and bars. She wore a light-grey baseball cap, silver-braided and adorned with the badge of Beijing Security. Abnormally large breasts pushed out the folds of her short-sleeved blouse. She wore white gloves, a knee-length skirt and black boots.

Behind the desk, in a black leather executive chair that he wore like an oversized jacket, was a large man with sleek black hair brushed back from a brow like a cliff face. The wide smile that stretched his thick, pale lips, reduced sparkling eyes to gashes on either side of a broken nose. There was no doubting his genuine delight at seeing Li. He blew smoke into the air and said, ‘How the hell are you…what is it they call you now…Chief? I’ve been looking forward to this ever since we got your letter.’ He made no attempt to get up, just reclining himself further in his executive chair and waving Li to a rather modest seat on the other side of the desk. ‘Have a seat, Li.’

Li stood for a moment, hesitating. It occurred to him that he could just turn around and walk out now. Save himself the humiliation. But somehow he knew that would just give Yi even more satisfaction. He sat down.

‘Cigarette?’ Yi held out a packet.

Li shook his head. ‘I’ve given up.’

Yi dropped the pack on the desk. ‘Why am I not surprised? You always were better than the rest of us. Stronger, smarter, faster. More will-power.’ He grinned. ‘So how are things at the Section?’

‘They’re good,’ Li said.

Yi raised an eyebrow. ‘So good that you want to pack it in and come work for Beijing Security?’ He leaned forward, frowning. ‘You know, I’ve been puzzling over that for days. You’re a big name, Li. Cracked a lot of high profile cases. The youngest detective ever to make Section Chief.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘And you want to give it all up?’

‘I have my reasons,’ Li said.

‘I’m sure you do. Just like I’m sure you had your reasons for kicking my ass out of the Section.’

‘You were a bad cop, Yi. I don’t like officers who’re on the take.’

‘You had no proof.’

‘If I’d had proof you wouldn’t be sitting here now. You’d be learning reform through labour. You should think yourself lucky.’

‘Lucky?’ His voice had raised its pitch, and his smile was a distant memory. ‘That you fucked up my career in the police? That I spent six months unemployed? You know my wife left me? Took the kids?’

‘Good for her.’

Yi glared at Li, both his fists clenched on the desk in front of him. Li half expected him to leap over it and attack him. And then suddenly Yi relaxed, and sat back again, the smile returning. ‘But then I made my own luck,’ he said. ‘Got in on the ground floor here at Beijing Security.’ It was a new joint venture between State and private enterprise to take over some of the security aspects of the old Public Security Bureaux. ‘Rising to the very top.’

‘Scum usually collects on the surface,’ Li said. He had known from the moment he set eyes on Yi there would be no job for him here. Not that he could ever have brought himself to work for the man. It was all a question now of which of them would lose face. And Yi was holding all the cards in that particular contest.

Yi’s smile didn’t waver. He said, ‘But I hold no grudges. After all, when someone of your experience and qualifications comes knocking, it would be a foolish man who would close the door on him without a second thought.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘Of course, you couldn’t expect to start on the twenty-third floor. You’d have to begin at the bottom and work your way up. You ever wondered what it’s like, Li, doing the night shift on the gate of some government building in the middle of December? I don’t have to wonder. I know. And you know what, I believe it’s an experience everyone should have. It prepares them better for management.’ He cocked his head to one side and looked at Li appraisingly. ‘You’d look good in uniform again.’ And he flicked his head towards the mannequins. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’

Li stood up. It was time to put an end to this. ‘I think you’re wasting my time, Yi.’

Yi tipped forward suddenly in his seat, the smile vanishing once again, eyes filled with hate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s wasting my time. Soon as your application hit my desk I knew there was something weird about it. Why the hell would a man like you, at the peak of his career, suddenly throw it all away? So I made a few enquiries. Seems you finally got that pathologist bitch pregnant. And now you want to marry her?’ Yi shook his head. ‘And you thought for one minute that we might actually employ you? This is a security firm, Li. And a Chinese married to an American is a security risk. You’re unemployable in this business.’ And suddenly his face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Goodbye.’

He closed the folder on his desk in front of him, picked up the phone and swivelled his chair so that he had his back to Li, looking out over the view of the city. ‘Yeh, get me Central Services,’ Li heard him saying.

Yi had played his cards, and there was no doubt that Li had lost. He stood for a moment, wrapped in his humiliation, then turned and walked out of the office.

II

‘You’re late. Again.’ Margaret raised her eyes through her goggles and froze in mid-cut. She looked in astonishment at Li in his neatly pressed dark suit, white shirt and blue tie. Even if it was loosened at the neck, Li never wore a tie. ‘You look like you’ve just come from a job interview,’ she joked.

Li shifted uncomfortably and glanced at Sun who stood on the opposite side of the body from Margaret, wearing a green apron and a plastic shower cap. Sun’s face was expressionless.

‘I told you I had an important meeting this morning,’ Li said.

‘An appointment, you said,’ Margaret corrected him. She had a habit of remembering things with great accuracy. ‘A mysterious appointment that you wouldn’t tell me anything about.’

‘Have I missed anything?’ Li asked, ignoring the barb.

‘And still won’t apparently,’ Margaret muttered under her breath. She turned her attentions back to Xing Da. His body was just a shell now, ribs cut through and prised apart, the flesh of the chest and belly folded to either side of the central cut of the ‘Y’. The organs had been removed, as well as the brain, the top of the skull lying in a dish next to the autopsy table. Xing’s shaven scalp was folded down over his eyes and nose. ‘He was a mess,’ she said. ‘Broken ribs, liver and spleen mashed, probably by the steering wheel. It seems he was driving. No seat belt, so there were severe head and facial injuries when he hit the windshield. You could almost choose from half a dozen different injuries as being the cause of death, although in fact it was none of them.’

‘So what did kill him?’ Li asked, intrigued.

‘I have no idea. Yet. But I can tell you what didn’t kill him.’ Li waited, but she wanted him to ask.

‘What didn’t kill him?’ he obliged.

‘The car crash.’

Li frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he was dead before the car hit the lamppost. And since he was driving, and we all know that dead men can’t drive, one has to wonder how the car came to be travelling at a hundred kilometers per hour down a Beijing Street at eleven o’clock at night.’

‘How can you tell he was dead before the crash?’

‘Detective Sun will tell you,’ Margaret said airily. ‘Since he was here on time, he’s already had that described for him. Meantime, I’m going to prepare frozen sections of the heart for microscopic examination.’ She disappeared across the autopsy room to where the organs had been breadloafed and spoke quickly to one of her assistants.

Li looked at Sun. ‘Well?’

‘Hey, Chief,’ he said, ‘my English isn’t that great. I think I understood, but…’ He shrugged.

Li said, ‘Give it a try.’

With some distaste, Sun indicated Xing Da’s superficial injuries, the contusions, abrasions and lacerations about his head and chest and stomach. ‘Doctor Campbell says if this guy had been alive when he picked up all these injuries, they would look quite different. They should be kind of red, or purple, you know, like blood beneath the surface of the skin. Apparently you don’t bleed too well if you’re dead, so if you were dead when you got them, injuries like these would be kind of tough, golden, parchment-like.’ Which they were. Sun took a deep breath. ‘Same with the internal stuff. His liver was pretty much crushed. According to the Doc there should have been at least a couple of litres of blood as a result. There was virtually none.’

Li looked at the body of the athlete thoughtfully. If he was dead behind the wheel of the car before the crash, then it seemed improbable that the others in the car were still alive.

He turned as the assistants wheeled in the cryostat, a deep-freeze about the size of a washing machine for preparing frozen sections of organs for fast microscopic examination. Permanent paraffin sections took hours to prepare. Frozen sections took minutes. Li crossed to the other table and watched as Margaret prepared a section of heart tissue by pressing it into a metal chuck along with a glob of jelly-like support medium. He said, ‘Why can’t you tell what killed him?’

‘Because I haven’t finished examining all the evidence, Section Chief.’

‘What about toxicology?’

‘I’ve sent samples of urine, bile, heart blood, the contents of his stomach and a portion of his liver for analysis,’ she said. ‘We won’t get the results until sometime tomorrow. And even that’s pushing it.’

He nodded towards the samples she was preparing for the cryostat. ‘Why are you doing microscopic sections of the heart?’

‘Instinct,’ she said. ‘No matter what causes it, in the end we all die because our hearts stop. On the face of it, I can’t find any reason why this particular subject’s heart stopped. It was firm, the size you would expect. The epicardium was smooth and had the usual amount of epicardial fat. The musculature of both the left and right heart was red-brown, and grossly there were no areas of infarct or fibrosis. The endocardial surface had a normal appearance and there were no mural thrombi. The valves were thin and pliable and neither stenoic nor dilated. The coronary arteries had a normal distribution with little or no atherosclerotic disease. There were no thrombi, and the aorta was patent, without injury, and again showing minimal atherosclerosis.’ She smiled at him, enjoying the opportunity to exercise her knowledge.

He gave her a look. ‘All of which means…?’

‘That I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. There was no obvious reason why it stopped beating.’

She set her samples on a rack in the cold working area of the cryostat and pressed metal heat sinks against the face of the tissue, to flatten and to freeze it. Minutes later, the samples were ready. She transferred the first one, still in its chuck, to a special cutting area where she drew a wafer-thin blade across its surface. She touched the wisp-thin section of tissue on to a glass microscope slide and Li saw it melt instantly. She stained it with chemicals, and slipped the glass under her microscope to peer at it through the lens.

After a moment she straightened up, pressing both her hands into her lumber region and arching backwards. She appeared to be looking at Li, but he saw that her eyes were glazed. She was looking right through him at something that existed only in her mind.

‘What is it?’ he said.

Her focus returned, but all her flippancy was gone. ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it in a healthy young male before,’ she said, and she shook her head. ‘In stimulant abusers, yes. Cocaine, methamphetamine, could do it. But I don’t think this young man was into stimulants. Steroids, perhaps, although there’s no evidence of that yet.’

Li said, ‘He was urine-tested a week before he died.’

‘And?’

‘He was clean.’

Margaret nodded.

But Li couldn’t contain his impatience any longer. ‘So what did you see in the microscope?’

Margaret said, ‘There are big coronary arteries on the surface of the heart that we all seem to manage to clog up as we age. It’s the most common cause of what you might call a heart attack.’ She paused. ‘But there are also tiny arteries that run through the muscle of the heart. Microvasculature we call them. It’s possible for these to thicken, but for the heart to still look normal, even when it’s sectioned. It takes a microscopic section to reveal the problem.’

Li was unaccountably disappointed. This didn’t sound like much of a revelation. ‘And that’s what Xing had?’ Margaret nodded. ‘So what clogged them?’

‘The thing is,’ she said, frustrated in her attempt to describe what she had seen, ‘they’re not really clogged with anything. It’s like the smooth muscle that lines those tiny arterioles got hypertrophied, thickened somehow. Effectively they closed themselves up and caused him to have a massive coronary.’

‘What would make them do that?’

She shrugged, at a loss. ‘I’ve no idea.’

Li was impatient. ‘Come on, Margaret, you must have some thought about it.’

She tutted. ‘Well, if you were to ask me to guess, and that’s all it would be, I’d say it looked like they could — maybe — been attacked by some kind of virus.’

‘If it was a virus, you’d be able to find it in his blood, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe.’ She prevaricated again. ‘The thing is, knowing what you’re looking for. And if you don’t know that there’s even something there…’

Sun had followed Li over to the table, listening intently, concentrating hard on trying to understand everything. But the technical vocabulary had been beyond him. ‘So how he die?’ he asked Margaret.

‘At this stage it’s just a theory,’ Margaret said. ‘And if you quote me I’ll deny it. But in layman’s terms, it looks like he had a heart attack brought on — maybe — by a virus.’

Li’s abortive interview at Beijing Security seemed a lifetime away now, of little importance, and no relevance. Instead his head was filled with a single, perplexing question. He gave it voice. ‘Why would you take someone who had died of natural causes and try to make it appear they had been killed in a car crash?’

Margaret waggled a finger. ‘I can’t answer that one for you, Li Yan. But I have another question that we can answer very quickly.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Were our suicide-murder and our weightlifter also suffering from a thickening of the microvasculature?’

Li looked nonplussed. ‘Were they?’

Margaret laughed. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to look, won’t we?’ She pushed her goggles back on her forehead. ‘I prepared permanent paraffin sections of Sui Mingshan’s heart for storage. I assume Doctor Wang will have done the same with Jia Jing’s. Why don’t you phone him and ask him to look at sections of Jia’s heart under the microscope while I dig out the ones I prepared yesterday?’

When Li returned from telephoning Pau Jü Hutong, Margaret had dug out the slides the lab had prepared with the tissue reserved from the previous day’s autopsy, and she was slipping the first one under the microscope. She set her eyes to the lens and adjusted the focus. After a moment she inclined her head and looked up at Li. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘If someone hadn’t taken our boy out and strung him up from a diving platform at Qinghua his heart would have seized up on him. Sooner rather than later. Same as our friend on the table. He had pronounced thickening of the microvasculature.’

There was nothing to discuss. The facts spoke for themselves, but made absolutely no sense. And Li was reluctant to start jumping to conclusions before they had heard from Doctor Wang. So Margaret had the results of the toxicology on Sui’s samples sent up from the lab. By now they were used to preparing copies for her in English as well as Chinese. She had stripped off her gown and her apron, her gloves and her mask and had scrubbed her hands, although she would not feel clean until she had taken a shower. She sat on a desk in the pathologists’ office and read through the results while Li and Sun watched in expectant silence. She shrugged. ‘As I predicted, I think. Blood alcohol level almost zero-point-four percent. Apart from that, nothing unusual. And nothing that would suggest he had been taking steroids. At least, not in the last month. But I’ll need to ask them to screen his blood again for viruses. Though, like I said, you really need to know what you’re looking for.’

The phone rang, and Li nearly snatched the receiver from its cradle. It was Wang. He listened for almost two minutes without comment, and then thanked the doctor and hung up. He said, ‘Jia also had marked thickening of the microvasculature. But Wang says it was still the narrowing of the main coronary artery that killed him.’

Margaret said, ‘Yes, but the thickening of the arterioles would have done the job eventually, even if his artery hadn’t burst on him.’

Li nodded. ‘That’s pretty much what Wang said. Oh, and toxicology also confirmed, no steroids.’

Sun had again been concentrating on following the English. And now he turned to Li and said, ‘So if Jia Jing hadn’t died of a heart attack, he would probably have turned up dead in an accident somewhere, or “committed suicide”.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Probably. And he’d probably have had that long pony tail of his shaved off.’ He paused, frowning in consternation. ‘But why?’

III

The briefing was short and to the point. The meeting room was filled with detectives and smoke. Nearly every officer in the section was there, and there were not enough chairs for them all. Some leaned against the wall sipping their green tea. Deputy Section Chief Tao Heng sat listening resentfully, nursing his grudges to keep them warm in this cold, crowded room.

Delivering the preliminary autopsy reports to the section helped Li clarify things in his own head, assembling facts in some kind of relevant order, creating that order out of what still felt like chaos.

‘What is clear,’ he told them, ‘is that we have one murder, and at least three suspicious deaths. There is little doubt from the findings of the autopsy, that the swimmer Sui Mingshan did not commit suicide. He was murdered. Xing Da, who was driving the car in which the three athletes died, was dead before the car crashed. So the accident was staged. And although we don’t have their bodies for confirmation, I think we have to assume that the other two were also dead prior to the crash. But what’s bizarre is that Xing seems to have died from natural causes. Possibly a virus which attacked the microscopic arteries of the heart.’

He looked around the faces in the room, all clutching their preliminary reports and listening, rapt, as Li laid out the facts before them like the strange and incomprehensible pieces of a gruesome riddle. ‘Stranger still is the fact that the swimmer Sui Mingshan, and the weightlifter Jia Jing, were suffering from exactly the same thing as Xing. Hypertrophy — thickening — of the microvasculature. Both would have died from it sooner or later if murder and fate had not intervened.’

He watched Wu pulling on a cigarette and he ached to suck a mouthful of smoke into his own lungs. He imagined how it would relieve his ache immediately and draw a veil of calm over his troubled mind. He forced the thought out of his head. ‘But perhaps the strangest thing of all, is that each of them had had his head shaved. With the exception, of course, of Jia.’

Wu cut in. ‘Could that be because he was the only one who really did die a natural death? I mean, sure, this clogging of the tiny arteries would have killed him in the end, but he died before anyone could mess with him.’

One of the other detectives said, ‘But why was anybody messing with any of them anyway, if it was some virus that was killing them?’

‘I’d have thought that was pretty fucking obvious,’ Wu said. And immediately he caught Deputy Section Chief Tao’s disapproving eye. He raised a hand. ‘Sorry, boss. I know. Ten yuan. It’s already in the box.’

‘What’s fucking obvious, Wu?’ Li said. It was a deliberate slap in the face of his deputy. There was some stifled laughter around the room.

Wu grinned. ‘Well, all these people had some kind of virus, right?’

‘Maybe,’ Li qualified.

‘And obviously someone else didn’t want anyone to know about it.’

‘A conspiracy,’ Li said.

‘Sure.’

‘And the shaven heads?’

Wu shrugged. ‘Jia’s head wasn’t shaved.’

‘You said yourself his death probably took your conspirators by surprise.’

Wu said, ‘There’s also the cyclist. We don’t know that his head was shaved.’

‘We don’t know that he’s involved at all,’ Li said.

‘Actually, I think we do, Chief.’ This from Qian. All heads turned in his direction.

‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.

Qian said, ‘I spoke to the doctor who signed the death certificate. He remembered quite distinctly that the deceased’s head had been shaved. Recently, he thought. There were several nick marks on the scalp.’ There was an extended period of silence around the room, before he added. ‘And there’s something else.’ He waited.

‘Well?’ Deputy Tao said impatiently.

‘The three “friends” who were with him when he fell into the pool? They’ve all gone back to Taiwan. So none of them are available for further questioning.’

‘And that’s it?’ The deputy section chief was not impressed.

Qian glanced uncertainly at Li. ‘Well, no…I’ve got a friend in the Taipei police…I flew the names by him.’ And he added quickly, ‘Quite unofficially.’ Relations between Beijing and Taipei were particularly strained at the moment. There was no official co-operation between the respective police forces.

‘Go on,’ Li said.

‘The three of them are known to the police there.’ He paused. ‘All suspected members, apparently, of a Hong Kong-based gang of Triads.’

More silence around the room. And then Li said, ‘So somebody brought them over here to be witnesses to an “accident”.’

‘And got them out again pretty fucking fast,’ Wu said. He screwed up his eyes as he realised what he had said, and his hand shot up. ‘Sorry, boss. Another ten yuan.’

There was laughter around the room. But Li was not smiling. The more they knew, it seemed, the more dense the mist of obfuscation that surrounded this case became.

Deputy Section Chief Tao pursued Li down the corridor after the meeting. ‘We need to talk, Chief,’ he said.

‘Not now.’

‘It’s important.’

Li stopped and turned and found the older man regarding him with a mixture of frustration and dislike. ‘What is it?’

‘Not something I think we should discuss in the corridor,’ Tao said pointedly.

Li waved his hand dismissively. ‘I don’t have time just now. I have a lunch appointment.’ And he turned and headed towards the stairs where Sun was waiting for him.

Tao stood and watched him go with a deep resentment burning in his heart.

IV

The Old Beijing Zhajiang Noodle King restaurant was on the south-west corner of Chongwenmenwai Dajie, above Tiantan Park and opposite the new Hong Zhou shopping mall, where you could buy just about any size of pearl you could imagine, and the smell of the sea was almost overpowering. Which was strange for a city so far from the ocean. The Zhajiang Noodle King was a traditional restaurant, serving traditional Beijing food, of which the noodle was indisputably king. Hence the name.

Li and Sun had picked up Sun’s wife from the police apartments in Zhengyi Road en route to Tiantan, and as Li parked outside a cake shop in the alleyway next to the restaurant, they saw Margaret standing on the steps waiting for them. Her bike was chained with a group of others by the entrance to a shop opposite. Li saw the little piece of pink ribbon tied to the basket fluttering in the chill breeze and felt a momentary stab of anger. He had asked her repeatedly not to cycle again until after the baby was born, but she had insisted that she would be no different from any other Chinese woman, and took her bicycle everywhere. It was his baby, too, he had told her. And she had suggested that he try carrying it around in his belly on buses and underground trains, squeezed up against the masses. She was adamant that she was safer on her bike.

The introductions were made on the steps outside the restaurant. Wen’s English was even poorer than Sun’s. She was in her early twenties, a slight, pretty girl on whom the swelling of her baby seemed unnaturally large. She shook Margaret’s hand coyly, unaccustomed to socialising with foreign devils. ‘Verr pleased meet you,’ she said, blushing. ‘You call me by English name. Christina.’ Margaret sighed inwardly. A lot of young Chinese girls liked to give themselves English names, as if it made them somehow more accessible, or more sophisticated. But it never came naturally to Margaret to use them. She preferred to stick to the Chinese, or avoid using the name at all.

‘Hi,’ she said, putting a face on it. ‘I’m Margaret.’

With difficulty, Wen got her tongue part of the way around this strange, foreign name. ‘Maggot,’ she said.

Margaret flicked a glance in Li’s direction and saw him smirking. She got Maggot a lot. Her inclination was always to point out that a maggot was a nasty little grub that liked to feed on dead flesh. But since this might leave her open to a smart retort from anyone with a good handle on English, she usually refrained. ‘You can call me Maggie,’ she said.

‘Maggee,’ Wen said and smiled, pleased with herself. And Margaret knew they were never going to be soul mates.

Inside, a maitre d’ in a traditional Chinese jacket stood by a carving of an old man holding up a bird cage. ‘Se wei!’ he hollered, and Margaret nearly jumped out of her skin. Almost immediately, from behind a large piece of ornately carved furniture that screened off the restaurant, came a chorus of voices returning the call. ‘Se wei!’

Margaret turned to Li, perplexed. ‘What are they shouting at?’ He had not brought her here before.

‘Se wei!’ Li repeated. ‘Four guests.’ The maitre d’ called again and was answered once more by the chorus from the other side of the screen. He indicated that they should follow him. Li said, ‘It is traditional to announce how many guests are coming into the restaurant. And every waiter will call to you, wanting you to go to his table.’

When they emerged from behind the screen, rows of square lacquered tables stretched out before them, to a wall covered in framed inscriptions and ancient wall hangings at the back, and a panoramic window opening on to the street on their left. White-jacketed chefs with tall white hats worked feverishly behind long counters preparing the food, while each table was attended by a young waiter wearing the traditional blue jacket with white turned-up cuffs, and a neatly folded white towel draped over his left shoulder. A cacophony of calls greeted the four guests, every waiter calling out, indicating that he would like to serve them at his table. As they were early, and most of the tables were not yet occupied, the noise was deafening.

Li led them to a table near the back and Sun and Wen looked around, wide-eyed. The Beijing Noodle King was a new experience for them, too. Margaret imagined that they probably had more experience of Burger King. ‘Shall I order?’ Li asked, and they nodded. Li took the menu and looked at it only briefly. He knew what was good. His Uncle Yifu had brought him here often while he was still a student at the University of Public Security.

The waiter scrawled their order in a pale blue notepad and hurried off to one of the long counters. A fresh chorus of calls greeted a party of six.

‘So,’ Wen said above the noise, and she patted her stomach, ‘how long?’

‘Me?’ Margaret asked. Wen nodded. ‘A month.’

Wen frowned. ‘No possible. You too big.’

For a moment Margaret was perplexed, and then the light dawned. ‘No, not one month pregnant. One month to go.’

Wen clearly did not understand, and Li explained. Then she smiled. ‘Me, too. Another four week.’

Margaret smiled and nodded and wished she were somewhere else. ‘What a coincidence,’ she said, wondering how many pregnant women in a country of 1.2 billion people might be entering the last four weeks of their confinement.

Wen reached out across the table and put her hand over Margaret’s. ‘Girl? Boy?’ And Margaret immediately felt guilty for being so superior.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

Wen’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. The ultrasound technology was easy. How could anyone not want to know? ‘I got boy,’ she said proudly.

‘Good for you.’ Margaret’s cheeks were aching from her fixed smile. She turned it on Li, and he immediately saw it for the grimace it really was.

He said hastily to Wen in Chinese, ‘Have you enrolled for your antenatal classes here yet?’

She shook her head, and glanced at Sun. ‘No, I’ve been too busy unpacking.’

Sun grinned. ‘I told you, we could open a shop with the amount of gear she’s brought with her, Chief.’

Two beers and two glasses of water arrived at the table.

Li said to Wen in English, ‘Maybe Margaret could take you to her antenatal class this afternoon.’ He looked pointedly at Margaret. ‘And you could get her enrolled.’

‘Sure,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s three classes a week, and a couple of extras I go to as well.’ Once she got her there, she knew she could dump responsibility on to Jon Macken’s wife, Yixuan, who could deal with her in Chinese. ‘They encourage husbands to go, too.’ And she returned Li’s pointed look, the smile bringing an ache now to her jaw. ‘Only, some of them never seem to have the time.’ She turned to Sun. ‘But you’ll want to go, Detective Sun, won’t you?’

Sun looked a little bemused. He came from a world where men and women led separate lives. He looked to Li for guidance. Li said, ‘Sure he will. But not this afternoon. He’s going to be too busy.’

‘And I suppose that applies to his boss, too,’ Margaret said.

‘I’m picking up my father at the station. Remember?’ Li said, and suddenly reality came flooding back. For two days Margaret had been able to return to her former self, focused on her work, on the minutest observation of medical evidence, a fulfilment of all her training and experience. And suddenly she was back in the role of expectant mother and bride-to-be. Li’s father arrived today, her mother tomorrow. The betrothal meeting was the day after. The wedding next week. She groaned inwardly and felt as if her life were slipping back on to its course beyond her control.

The food arrived. Fried aubergine dumplings, mashed aubergine with sesame paste, sliced beef and tofu. And they picked at the dishes in the centre of the table with their chopsticks, lifting what they fancied on to their own plates to wash down with beer or water.

‘I thought this was a noodle restaurant,’ Margaret said.

‘Patience,’ Li said. ‘All will be revealed.’ And they ate in silence for several minutes, turning their heads towards the door each time a new group of guests arrived, and the chorus started all over again. The restaurant was beginning to fill up now.

Then Wen said to Margaret, ‘You must have big apartment, Maggee, married to senior officer.’

Margaret shook her head. ‘We’re not married. Yet.’ Wen was shocked, and Margaret realised that it was not something Sun had discussed with her. ‘But we get married next week,’ she added for clarification. ‘And, yes, we will have a big apartment. I hope.’

Li was aware of Sun glancing in his direction, but he kept his eyes fixed on his food as he ate. And then the noodles arrived. Four steaming bowls on a tray, each one surrounded by six small dishes containing beanpaste sauce, cucumber, coriander, chopped radish, chickpeas and spring onions. Four waiters surrounded the holder of the tray, and called out the name of each dish as it was emptied over the noodles.

‘This is one hell of a noisy restaurant,’ Margaret said as she mixed her noodles with their added ingredients. She lifted the bowl and slurped some up with her chopsticks, adept now at the Chinese way of eating. ‘But the food’s damn good.’

When they finished eating, Li said to Margaret, ‘Why don’t you and Wen get a taxi up to the hospital. I’ll take your bike in the back of the Jeep, and you can get a taxi home.’

‘Will I ever see it again?’ she asked.

‘I’ll bring it back tonight.’

‘What about your father.’

Li smiled. ‘He goes to bed early.’ He paused. ‘And your mother arrives tomorrow.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ she said. But she had not missed his point. It would be their last chance to be alone together before the wedding.

Li asked for the check, and Wen and Margaret went to the ladies’ room. Sun sat silently for a moment or two. Then he looked at Li. ‘Chief?’ Li glanced up from his purse. ‘She doesn’t know, does she?’

And all the light went out of Li’s eyes. He supposed it was probably a common topic of conversation in the detectives’ room. But nobody had ever raised it with him directly before. ‘No,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want her to.’

V

The crowded sidewalk was lined with winter-naked trees. Pedestrians wrapped in fleeces and quilted jackets stepped between them, in and out of the cycle lane, dodging bicycles and one another. A kind of semi-ordered chaos. On the street, motorists behaved as if they were still on foot, or on bicycles. Four lanes became six. Horns peeped and blared as vehicles switched non-existent lanes and inched through the afternoon gridlock. The voice of a bus conductress cut across the noise, insistent, hectoring, a constant accompaniment to the roar of the traffic.

The taxi had dropped Margaret and Wen on the corner, and they had to make their way back along Xianmen Dajie, Tweedledum and Tweedledee waddling side by side through the crowds, breath clouding in the freezing temperatures. To Margaret’s surprise and bemusement, Wen had taken her hand. She felt as if she had stepped into a time-warp, a little girl again, walking to school hand in hand with her best friend. Except that she was in her thirties, this was Beijing, and she hardly knew the girl whose hand she was holding. Still, even if there was an awkwardness about it, there was also a comfort in it. And Wen was quite unselfconscious. She was babbling away in her broken English.

‘Is verr exciting be in Beijing. I always dream be here. Everything so bi-ig.’ She grinned. ‘I really like. You like?’

‘Sure,’ Margaret said. Although she might not have admitted it, Beijing was probably as close to being home as anywhere she had ever lived.

‘Chief Li, he verr nice man. You verr lucky.’

Margaret’s smile was genuine. ‘I think so.’

Wen’s face clouded a little. ‘Verr lucky,’ she repeated, almost as if to herself. Then she brightened again. ‘You can have more than one baby, yes?’

‘I guess,’ Margaret said. ‘If I wanted to. But I think one’s probably more than enough.’

‘You verr lucky. I can only have one baby. One Child Policy.’

Margaret nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Maybe we can trade, yes? You have one baby for me, I have many baby for you.’ She grinned mischievously, and Margaret realised that maybe there was more to Wen than met the eye. Language was such a barrier. Without a grasp of its nuances and subtleties, it was nearly impossible to communicate your real self, or to fully grasp the true character and personality of others. And she wondered how she would ever have formed a relationship with Li if his English had not been as wonderfully good as it was. Even then, she had sometimes suspected, there were parts of each other they would never truly get to know.

As they passed the entrance of the two-storey administrative block of the First Teaching Hospital of Beijing Medical University, with its marble pillars and glass doors, a girl came down the steps towards them from where she had clearly been waiting for some time. Her gloved hands were tucked up under her arms to keep them warm, her eyes watering and her nose bright red. As she stepped in front of them to halt their progress, she stamped her feet to encourage the circulation.

Initially, Margaret had thought there was something familiar about the girl. But with the woolly hat pulled down over her forehead and the scarf around her neck there was not much of her to go on. It wasn’t until she turned to glance behind her that Margaret saw the purple birthmark on her left cheek. ‘Lili,’ she said, the name coming back to her. Behind the tears of cold she saw quite clearly that there was fear in the girl’s eyes.

‘I told you, I need to talk to you, lady.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be running today?’

‘I already run in heats. First place. I get inside lane in final tomorrow.’

‘Congratulations.’ Margaret frowned. ‘How did you know to find me here?’

Lili almost smiled and lowered her eyes towards Margaret’s bump. ‘I phone hospital to ask times of classes for antenatal.’

‘And how did you know it was this hospital?’

‘Best maternity hospital in Beijing for foreigner. I take chance. I need to talk.’

Margaret glanced at her watch, intrigued. ‘I can give you a few minutes.’

‘No.’ The girl looked around suddenly, as if she thought someone might be watching. ‘Not here. I come to your home. You give me address.’

For the first time, Margaret became wary. ‘Not if you won’t tell me what it is you want to talk to me about.’

‘Please, lady. I can’t say.’ She glanced at Wen who was looking at her wide-eyed. ‘Please, lady, please. You give me address.’

There was such pleading in her eyes that Margaret, although reluctant, could not resist. ‘Hold on,’ she said, and she fumbled in her purse for a dog-eared business card. It had her home address and number, as well as a note of a friend’s number she had scribbled on it when she could find nothing else to write on. She crossed it through. ‘Here.’ She held it out and the girl took it, holding each corner between thumb and forefinger. ‘When will you come?’

‘I don’t know. Tonight, maybe. You be in?’

‘I’m in most nights.’

Lili tucked the card carefully in her pocket and wiped her watering eyes. ‘Thank you, lady. Thank you,’ she said. And she made a tiny bow and then pushed past them, disappearing quickly into the crowd.

Wen turned excitedly to Margaret. ‘You know who that is? That Dai Lili. She verr famous Chinese runner.’

VI

Li sat on the wall outside the subway, watching crowds of travellers streaming out on to the concourse from the arrivals gate at Beijing Railway Station. Away to his left a giant television screen ran ads for everything from chocolate bars to washing machines. The invasive voice of a female announcer barked out departure and arrival times with the soporific sensitivity of a computer voice announcing imminent nuclear holocaust. No one was listening.

Li had butterflies in his stomach and his mouth was dry. He felt like a schoolboy waiting in the office of the head teacher, summoned to receive his punishment for some perceived misdemeanour. He had not set eyes on his father for nearly five years, a state of affairs for which, he knew, his father blamed him. Not without cause. For in all the years since Li had left his home in Sichuan Province to attend the University of Public Security in Beijing, he had returned on only a handful of occasions. And although he had been too young to be an active participant in the Cultural Revolution, Li felt that his father blamed him, somehow, for the death of his mother during that time of madness. A time which had also left his father in some way diminished. A lesser man than he had been. Robbed of hope and ambition. And love.

They had not spoken once since their brief encounter at the funeral of Li’s Uncle Yifu, his father’s brother. It had been a painful, sterile affair at a city crematorium, attended mostly by fellow police officers who had served under Yifu during his years as one of Beijing’s top cops, or alongside him in the early days. Old friends had travelled all the way from Tibet, where Yifu had been sent by the Communists in the fifties when they had decided that this particular intellectual would be less of a danger to them serving as a police officer a long way from the Capital. They need not have worried, for Yifu’s only desire had been to build a better and fairer China for its people. The same people who later abused him and threw him in prison for three years during the Cultural Revolution. An experience from which he had drawn only strength, where a lesser man might have been broken. Like his brother, Li’s father.

Li saw his father emerging from the gates, dragging a small suitcase on wheels behind him. He was a sad, shuffling figure in a long, shabby duffel coat that hung open to reveal a baggy woollen jumper with a hole in it over a blue shirt, frayed at the collar. A striped cream and red scarf hung loosely around his neck, and trousers that appeared to be a couple of sizes too big for him gathered in folds around shoes that looked more like slippers. He wore a fur, fez-like hat pulled down over thinning grey hair. Li felt immediately ashamed. He looked like one of the beggars who haunted the streets around the foreign residents’ compounds in embassy-land. And yet there was no need for it. He had an adequate pension from the university where he had lectured most of his adult life. He was well cared for in a home for senior citizens, and Li sent money every month.

Li made his way through the crowds to greet him with a heart like lead. When he got close up, his father seemed very small, as if he had shrunk, and Li had a sudden impulse to hug him. But it was an impulse he restrained, holding out his hand instead. His father looked at him with small black eyes that shone behind wisps of hair like fuse wire sprouting from the edge of sloping brows, and for a moment Li thought he would not shake his hand. Then a small, claw-like hand emerged from the sleeve of the duffel, spattered with the brown spots of age, and disappeared inside Li’s. It was cold, and the skin felt like crêpe that might rip if you handled it too roughly.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Li said.

His father did not smile. ‘Well, are you going to take my case?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’ Li took the handle from him.

‘You are a big man now, Li Yan,’ his father said.

‘I don’t think I have grown since the last time you saw me.’ He steered the old man towards the taxi rank where he had parked his Jeep, a police light still flashing on the roof.

‘I mean, you are a big man in your job. Your sister told me. A Section Chief. You are young for such a position.’

‘I remember once,’ Li said, ‘you told me that I should only ever be what I can, and never try to be what I cannot.’

His father said, ‘The superior person fulfils his purpose and does not boast of his achievements.’

‘I wasn’t boasting, father,’ Li said, stung.

‘He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady.’

Li sighed. There was no point in exchanging barbs of received Chinese wisdom with his father. The old man had probably forgotten more than Li ever knew. And yet the wisdom he imparted was always negative, unlike his brother, Yifu, who had only ever been positive.

Li put the case in the back of the Jeep and opened the passenger door to help his father in. But the old man pushed away his hand. ‘I don’t need your help,’ he said. ‘I have lived sixty-seven years without any help from you.’ And he hauled himself with difficulty up into the passenger seat. Li banged the door shut and took a deep breath. He had known it would be difficult, but not this hard. A depression fell over him like fog.

They drove in silence from the station to Zhengyi Road. Li turned right and made a U-turn opposite the gates of the Beijing Municipal Government, crossing the island of park-land that split the road in two, and driving down past the Cuan Fu Shanghai restaurant where he and his father would probably take most of their meals. The armed guard at the back entrance to the Ministry of State and Public Security glanced in the window, saw Li, and waved them through.

Li pulled up outside his apartment block on their right, and he and his father rode up in the elevator together to the fourth floor. Still they had not spoken since getting into the Jeep.

The apartment was small. One bedroom, a living room, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a long, narrow hallway. Li would have to sleep on the settee while his father was there. He had borrowed blankets and extra pillows. He showed the old man to his room and left him there to unpack. He went to the refrigerator and took out a cold beer, popped the cap and moved through to the living room which opened on to a large, glassed terrace with views out over the tree-lined street below, and beyond the Ministry compound to the Supreme Court and the headquarters of the Beijing Municipal Police. He drained nearly half the bottle in one, long pull. He was not sure why his father had come for the wedding. Of course, it had been necessary to invite him, but such was the state of their relationship he had been surprised when the old man had written to say he would be there. Now he wished he had just stayed away.

Li turned at the sound of the door opening behind him. Divested of his coat and hat, his father seemed even smaller. His hair was very thin, wisps of it swept back over his shiny, speckled skull. He looked at the bottle in his son’s hand. ‘Are you not going to offer me a drink? I have come a long way.’

‘Of course,’ Li said. ‘I’ll show you where I keep the beer. You can help yourself any time.’ He got another bottle from the refrigerator and opened it for his father, pouring the contents into a long glass.

They went back through to the living room, their awkwardness like a third presence. They sat down and drank in further silence until finally the old man said, ‘So when do I get to meet her?’

‘The day after tomorrow. At the betrothal meeting.’

‘You will bring her here?’

‘No, we’re having the betrothal at a private room in a restaurant.’

His father looked at him, disapproval clear in his eyes. ‘It is not traditional.’

‘We’re trying to make everything as traditional as we can, Dad. But my apartment is hardly big enough for everyone. Xiao Ling wanted to be there, and of course Xinxin.’ Xiao Ling was Li’s sister, Xinxin her daughter. Since her divorce from a farmer in Sichuan, Xiao Ling had taken Xinxin to live in an apartment in the south-east of Beijing, near where she had a job at the joint-venture factory which built the Beijing Jeep. Xiao Ling had always been closer to her father than Li, and maintained regular contact with him.

His father stared at him for a long time before slowly shaking his head. ‘Why an American?’ he asked. ‘Are Chinese girls not good enough?’

‘Of course,’ Li said, restraining an impulse to tell his father that he was just being an old racist. ‘But I never fell in love with one.’

‘Love!’ His father was dismissive, almost contemptuous.

‘Didn’t you love my mother?’ Li asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Then you know how it feels to be in love with someone, to feel about them the way you’ve never felt about anyone else, to know them as well as you know yourself, and know that they know you that way, too.’

‘I know how it feels to lose someone you feel that way about.’ And the old man’s eyes were lost in reflected light as they filled with tears.

‘I lost her, too,’ Li said.

And suddenly there was fire in his father’s voice. ‘You didn’t know your mother. You were too young.’

‘I needed my mother.’

‘And I needed a son!’ And there it was, the accusation that he had never put into words before. That he had been abandoned by his son, left to his fate while Li selfishly pursued a career in Beijing. In the traditional Chinese family, the son would have remained at the home of his parents and brought his new wife to live there too. There would always have been someone to look after the parents as they grew old. But Li had left home, and his sister had gone shortly after to live with the parents of her husband. Their father had been left on his own to brood upon the death, at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, of the woman he loved. And Li suspected he resented the fact that Li had shared an apartment in Beijing with Yifu, that Li had always been closer to his uncle than to his father. He fought against conflicting feelings of anger and guilt.

‘You never lost your son,’ Li said.

‘Maybe I wish I’d never had one,’ his father fired back, and Li felt his words like a physical blow. ‘Your mother only incurred the wrath of the Red Guards because she wanted to protect you from their indoctrination, because she tried to take you out of that school where they were filling your head with their poison.’ And now, finally, he had given voice to his deepest resentment of all. That if it wasn’t for Li his mother might still be alive. That they would not have taken her away for “re-education”, subjected her to the brutal and bloody struggle sessions where her stubborn resistance had led her persecutors finally to beat her to death. Just teenagers. ‘And maybe my brother would still have been alive today if it hadn’t been for the carelessness of my son!’

Li’s tears were blinding him now. He had always known that some twisted logic had led his father to blame him for his mother’s death. Although he had never felt any guilt for that. How could he? He had only been a child. His father’s blame, he knew, had been cast in the white heat of the horrors he had himself faced in that terrible time, marched around the streets in a dunce’s hat, pilloried, ridiculed and abused. Imprisoned, finally, and brutalised, both physically and mentally. Was it any wonder it had changed him, left him bitter, searching for reasons and finding only blame?

But to blame him for the death of his uncle? This was new and much more painful. He still saw the old man’s eyes wide with fear and disbelief, frozen in the moment of death. And his father blaming him for it hurt more than anything else he might ever have blamed him for, because in his heart Li also blamed himself.

He stood up, determined that his father should not see his tears. But it was too late. They were already streaming down his face.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I have a murder inquiry.’ And as he turned towards the door, he saw the bewildered look on his father’s face, as if for the first time in his life it might have occurred to the old man that blame could not be dispensed with impunity, that other people hurt, too.

‘Li Yan,’ his father called after him, and Li heard the catch in his voice, but he didn’t stop until he had closed the apartment door behind him, and he stood shaking and fighting to contain the howl of anguish that was struggling to escape from within.

VII

Margaret had waited up as long as she could. On TV she had watched a drama set in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was beautifully shot, and although she had not been able to understand a word of it, the misery it conveyed was still powerful. It had depressed her, and now her eyes were heavy and she knew she could stay up no longer.

As she undressed for bed, washed in the moonlight that poured in through her window, she saw her silhouette on the wall, bizarre with its great swelling beneath her breasts, and she ran her hands over the taut skin of it and wondered what kind of child she and Li were going to have. Would it look Chinese, would it be dark or fair, have brown eyes or blue? Would it have her fiery temper or Li’s infuriating calm? She smiled to herself, and knew that however their genes had combined, it would be their child and she would love it.

The sheets of the bed were cool on her warm skin as she slipped in between them, disappointed that she was going to spend the night alone, that Li had not come as he had promised. She thought about Wen and her childish, smiling face, and that fraction of a second when it had clouded. You verr lucky, she had said of Margaret about Li, and Margaret wondered now if that moment of shadow had signalled that all was perhaps not entirely well between Wen and Sun. But it was no business of hers, and she had no desire to know. Her own life was complicated enough.

For once she had not been the only mother-to-be whose partner had failed to turn up. Sun, of course, was not there. But for the first time that Margaret could remember, Yixuan had been on her own as well. Jon Macken had not been with her.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key in the lock, and her heart leapt. Li had come after all. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly eleven. Better late than never. But as soon as he opened the bedroom door she knew there was something wrong. He only said, ‘Hi,’ and she could not see his face, but somehow his voice in that one word had conveyed a world of unhappiness.

She knew better than to ask, and said simply, ‘Come to bed.’

He undressed quickly and slipped in beside her. He had brought with him the cold of the night outside, and she wrapped her arms around him to share her warmth and banish the night. They lay folded around each other for a long time without saying anything. In the vertical world, outside of their bed, he always towered over her, dominant and strong. But here, lying side by side, she was his equal, or greater, and could lay his head on her shoulder and mother him as if he were a little boy. And tonight, she sensed that somehow that was what he needed more than anything. She spoke to him then, out of a need to say something. Something normal. Something that carried no weight to burden him.

‘Jon Macken didn’t turn up today at the antenatal class,’ she said. ‘First time since I’ve been going there.’ Li didn’t say anything, and she went on, ‘Turned out his studio was broken into last night. You know, he’s got some little shop unit down at Xidan. Secure, though. He had an alarm system and everything installed. So it must have been professionals.’ Li grunted. The first sign of interest. She knew that work was always a good way to bring him out of himself. ‘Anyway, the weird thing is, they didn’t really take much. Trashed the place and took some prints or something, and that was it. He says the police were useless. Yixuan thinks they probably didn’t care much about some “rich American” getting done over. Insurance would pick up the tab, and anyway shit happens, and it’s probably better happening to an American than a Chinese.’

Li snorted now. ‘That sounds like paranoia to me,’ he said.

‘Maybe it wouldn’t seem that way if you were on the receiving end.’

‘The receiving end of what? Does he speak Chinese?’

‘No.’

‘So he’d have trouble telling the cops exactly what had happened, or what he’d lost. And they’d have as much trouble telling him that there were nearly fifty thousand cases of theft in Beijing last year, and that they’ve as much chance of finding the perps as getting a Green Card in America.’

Margaret sighed. ‘Does that mean you won’t look into it for him?’

‘What!’

‘I told Yixuan you’d ask about it.’

‘What the hell did you tell her that for?’

‘Because she’s my friend, and I’m your wife. Well, almost. And what’s the point in being married to one of Beijing’s top cops if you can’t pull a few strings?’

His silence then surprised her. She had thought she was doing a good job of drawing him out. She had no idea that she had touched a raw nerve. So she was even more surprised when he said, ‘I’ll ask about it tomorrow.’

Finally she drew herself up on one elbow and said, ‘What’s wrong, Li Yan?’

‘Nothing that a family transplant wouldn’t cure.’

‘Your father,’ she said flatly.

‘According to Dad, not only did I abandon him, but I was responsible for the death of my mother, as well as…’ But he broke off, and couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Margaret had always known that Li had a difficult relationship with his father. And God knew, she understood well enough. Her relationship with her own mother was less than ideal. But she felt a surge of anger at his father’s cruelty. How could Li possibly be responsible for his mother’s death. ‘As well as what?’ she asked softly.

‘Yifu.’

She heard the way his throat had constricted and choked off his voice, and she wanted just to hold him for ever and take away all his pain. She knew how he felt about Yifu, how the guilt had consumed him in the years since his murder. Why did they have to kill him? he had asked her time and again. It was my fight, not his. What right did his father have to lay the blame for that on his son? What did he know about any of it anyway, what had happened and why? Margaret was dreading meeting him, dreading being unable to hold her tongue. Her record in the field of tactful silence was not a good one. She sought Li’s lips in the darkness and kissed him. She felt the tears wet on his cheeks and said, ‘Li Yan, it was not your fault.’ But she knew she could never convince him. And so she held him tighter and willed her love to him through every point of contact between them.

He lay in her arms for what felt like an eternity. And then, ‘I love you,’ she said quietly.

‘I know.’ His voice whispered back to her in the dark.

She kissed his forehead and his eyes, and his cheeks and his jaw, and ran her hands across his chest and found his nipples with her teeth. It was their last night together before her mother would arrive tomorrow and invade her space like an alien. She wanted to make the most of it, to give herself to Li completely, to give him the chance to lose himself in her and for a short time, at least, leave his pain behind him. Her hands slid over the smooth contours of his belly, fingers running through the tangle of his pubic hair, finding him there growing as she held him. And then he was kissing her, running his hands over her breasts, inflaming sensitive nipples and sending tiny electric shocks through her body to that place between her legs where she wanted to draw him in and hold him for ever.

The knocking on the door crashed over their passion like a bucket of ice cold water. She sat up, heart pounding. The figures on the bedside clock told her it was midnight. ‘Who the hell’s that?’

Li said, ‘Stay in bed. I’ll go see.’ He slipped out from between the sheets and pulled on his trousers and shirt. He left the bedroom as the knocking came again. At the end of the hall he unlatched the door and opened it to find himself looking into the face of a skinny girl with straggling shoulder-length hair. It was a pinched face, red with the cold, and she was hugging her quilted anorak to keep herself warm. She looked alarmed to find herself confronted by the tall, dishevelled, barefoot figure of Li.

‘What do you want? Who are you looking for?’ he demanded, knowing that she must be at the wrong door.

‘No one,’ she said in a tremulous voice. ‘I’m sorry.’ And she turned to hurry away towards the stairwell and retrace her steps down the eleven flights she must have climbed to get here, for the lift did not operate at this time of night. In the landing light, as she turned, Li saw that she had a large, unsightly purple patch on her left cheek. He closed the door and went back along the hall to the bedroom.

‘Who was it?’ Margaret asked. She was still sitting up.

‘I don’t know. Some girl. She must have got the wrong apartment, because she took off pretty fast when she saw me.’

Margaret’s heart was pounding. ‘Did she have a large purple birthmark on her face?’

Li was surprised. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know her?’ He couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice.

Margaret had forgotten all about her. But in any case, could never have imagined that she would come at this time of night. ‘Her name is Dai Lili. She is the athlete who said she wanted to speak to me last night at the stadium.’

Now Li was astonished. ‘How in the name of the sky did she find out where you live?’

‘I gave her my card.’

Now he was angry. ‘Are you mad? When? Last night?’

‘She tracked me down to the maternity hospital this afternoon. She was scared, Li Yan. She said she had to speak to me and asked if she could come here. What else could I say?’

Li cursed softly under his breath with the realisation that he had just been face to face with the only person in this case who was prepared to talk — if not to him. ‘I could still catch her.’

Margaret watched anxiously as he pulled on his shoes and ran to the door. ‘You need a coat,’ she called after him. ‘It’s freezing out there.’ The only response was the sound of the apartment door slamming shut behind him.

The cold in the stairwell was brutal. He stopped on the landing and listened. He could hear her footfall on the stairs several floors down. For a moment he considered calling, but feared that she might be spooked. So he started after her. Two steps at a time, until a sweat broke out cold on his forehead, and the tar from years of smoking kept the oxygen from reaching his blood. Five floors down he stopped, and above the rasping of his breath could hear the rapid, panicked patter of her steps floating up to him on the cold, dank air. She had heard him, and was putting even more space between them.

By the time he got to the ground floor and pushed out through the glass doors he knew she was gone. In the wash of moonlight all he could see was the security guard huddled in his hut, cigarette smoke rising into the night. Even if he knew which way she had gone, he realised he could never catch her. She was a runner, after all, young, at the peak of her fitness. And he had too many years behind him of cigarettes and alcohol.

He stood gasping for a moment, perspiration turning to ice on his skin, before he turned, shivering, to face the long climb back to the eleventh floor.

Margaret was up and waiting for him, huddled in her dressing-gown, a kettle boiling to make green tea to warm him. She didn’t need to ask. His face said it all. He took the mug of tea she offered and cupped it in his hands, and let her slip a blanket around his shoulders.

‘What did she want to speak to you about?’ he asked, finally.

Margaret shrugged. ‘I don’t know. And since it’s unlikely she’ll come back again, we probably never will.’

‘I don’t like you giving out your address like that to strangers,’ Li said firmly.

But Margaret wasn’t listening. She had a picture in her head of the girl’s frightened rabbit’s eyes at the stadium the night before, and the anxiety in her face when she spoke to her that afternoon. And she felt afraid for her.