The Ghost Marriage Read online

  The Ghost Marriage

  A China Story

  Peter May

  Contents Page

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Peter May

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  First published by Éditions Didier, a division of Hachette Livre, in 2010

  This ebook edition first published in 2017 by

  riverrun

  an imprint of

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2010 Peter May

  The moral right of Peter May to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78648 704 9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.headdesign.co.uk

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Peter May

  FICTION

  The Lewis Trilogy

  The Blackhouse

  The Lewis Man

  The Chessmen

  The China Thrillers

  The Firemaker

  The Fourth Sacrifice

  The Killing Room

  Snakehead

  The Runner

  Chinese Whispers

  The Enzo Files

  Extraordinary People

  The Critic

  Blacklight Blue

  Freeze Frame

  Blowback

  Cast Iron

  Standalone Novels

  Entry Island

  Runaway

  Coffin Road

  NON-FICTION

  Hebrides (with David Wilson)

  Chapter One

  I

  Sweet though it was, the perfume of the incense could not disguise the odour of putrefying flesh. And the summer heat was not helping.

  The cadavers were at the back of the room on a long table, surrounded by bowls of fresh fruit, boiled eggs in bowls of rice, dim sum still warm from the steamer, buns, a bottle of chilled white wine running with condensation.

  The guests assembled at the far side of the room, near the door, and the window with a view on to the siheyuan courtyard. In the hutong beyond, children played unaware of the bizarre marriage taking place behind high walls.

  The spirits of the dead man and his fiancée stood before a temporary altar: paper effigies to be burned, along with paper money, a paper car, and paper furniture that stood outside as comforts to be treasured in the afterlife. A gong sounded in the hands of the priest, and with a swirl of his red robe he placed a ring on the left hand of the paper groom. From the back of the observers, Feng Qi watched as the dead boy’s mother placed a ring on the paper finger of the bride, and he let his eyes return uneasily to the open coffins behind them and the dead girl, whose face was troublingly familiar.

  II

  The No. 1 Kindergarten in Anzhenxili was not far from the No. 3 Ring Road, just north of Tiananmen, and the Forbidden City. As she waited for Li Jon, Margaret gazed from a window across the almost unrecognizable cityscape of post-Olympic Beijing, reflecting on how rapidly much of this city had transformed itself from medieval to ultra-modern in the ten years since she first arrived.

  She turned at the sound of children’s voices filled with the euphoria of freedom after a long day of educational incarceration. Li Jon wrapped himself around her legs, and she lifted him up into her arms: something she would not be able to do for very much longer. He was growing like bamboo. She brushed dark hair from his eyes and saw only his father in him: fine Chinese features that owed nothing to her fair-haired, blue-eyed Celtic heritage. But he had, she knew, inherited his mother’s fiery, querulous spirit, and she took pleasure from his father’s frustration that he had not transmitted to his son more of his gentle Chinese fatalism.

  ‘Did you get my iPod, Mommy?’ He spoke English with her distinctive American accent. But also Chinese, like a native. Both she and Li spoke to their son in their native tongues, sending him to this bilingual kindergarten where he would learn to be a citizen of the world – bridging the cultural divide that had so often caused misunderstanding and conflict between his parents.

  ‘Sure I did, honey. It’s waiting for you back at the apartment.’

  He descended from her arms and took her hand, impatient to be home as soon as possible.

  But he was forced to temper his excitement by a lady who intercepted them at the front door. She wore blue overalls, and a white cloth cap, a few strands of greasy black hair hanging down from one side of it. Her hands were red and callused, her flat peasant face rough and weathered, with troubled dark eyes. Margaret had seen her before, washing the floor of the lobby with slow, languid movements of her mop.

  ‘Sorry to trouble you, lady.’ She was strangely formal, half bowing, almost deferential. ‘They tell me you are wife of Section Chief Li Yan.’

  Margaret took satisfaction from exercising her increasing skill in Chinese. ‘Then I’m sorry to say they tell you wrong.’ The woman’s disappointment was almost palpable, and Margaret immediately regretted her abruptness. She added quickly, ‘An American woman is not permitted to marry a serving Chinese police officer.’ She pulled the child at her side a little closer. ‘But Li Jon is our son.’

  She saw hope flicker again in the woman’s eyes, like the flame of a candle stirring in the wind. The woman reached out a hand to clutch Margaret’s arm, and Margaret could feel the desperation in her bony grasp. ‘Then I beg you to help me, lady.’ She glanced at Li Jon. ‘You are a mother. I am a mother too. But my little girl is gone.’

  III

  The apartment block where Li shared his life with Margaret lay to the east of Tiananmen Square, just south of East Chang’an Avenue, in the old British Embassy compound that was now occupied by the Ministries of State and Public Security. It was the same two-bedroomed police apartment he had once occupied with his late uncle. Now he and Margaret and their child lived there, in flagrant disregard of the rules. Only his elevated position as chief of Section One, Beijing’s serious crime squad, had persuaded the authorities to ignore his indiscretion. That, and perhaps the fact that Margaret still occasionally took time off from her lectures in forensic pathology at the University of Public Security to perform key autopsies for the Beijing police.

  He pulled the door shut on Li Jon’s bedroom and stood listening for a moment. It had taken him some time, and the reading of a favourite bedtime story, to persuade the child to put away his new video iPod and settle down to sleep.

  Margaret had placed bowls of rice and a plate of sweet and sour pork on the table in the living room, and they sat down to eat together with bottles of beer as darkness fell on Zhengyi Road. The light of the streetlamp outside their first-floor window danced as the breeze blew through the leaves of the locust trees that lined the street. But even with all their windows open, the heat r
emained oppressive and overpoweringly humid. Li’s fresh white shirt was already sticking to him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, then ran the palm of it back over his short-cut hair.

  ‘There are seventeen million people in Beijing,’ he said. ‘Thousands of them go missing every day. They look for work, they don’t find it, they move on.’

  ‘She’s just seventeen, Li Yan.’ Margaret had no idea why she was playing advocate for the cleaning woman at the kindergarten. Except that the appeal from one mother to another had touched something inside her.

  ‘Teenagers are always disappearing. Runaways mostly. Unless there is evidence of a crime there is nothing much I can do about it.’

  ‘Imagine,’ Margaret said, ‘that we were talking about Li Jon.’

  Li’s chopsticks paused, midway to his mouth, and he looked at the woman with whom, in spite of every cultural and linguistic obstacle, he had fallen in love. She always knew just what buttons to press. Not that he felt manipulated. It pleased him to think that someone could know him that well, and yet still choose to be with him. Finally he popped the pork into his mouth, masticating thoughtfully.

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Somewhere in the north-west of the city. She wrote down her address.’ Margaret pushed a dirty piece of paper across the table. ‘Her family came to Beijing from Shaanxi Province about five years ago. A place called Chenjiayuan, on the Loëss Plateau.’

  Li nodded. He had heard of the Loëss Plateau, a dense labyrinth of eroding canyons along the Yellow River. A remote and arid place, where some villages were still unreachable by road. Anyone who could, left. Many of them came to the Chinese capital in search of work, sharing homes at first with friends or relatives who had preceded them, before finding somewhere to stay themselves. Beijing was increasingly dividing into small, distinct communities, tiny ghettos that shared the same rural and provincial heritage.

  ‘Her father recently lost his job. Their only income is what the mother makes cleaning at the kindergarten. The girl’s been gone almost a week, Li Yan.’

  ‘I suppose they reported it to Public Security.’

  ‘Of course. But like you said, the city is full of missing people.’

  Li sighed. ‘And what do you suppose I can do about it, Margaret?’

  ‘You could ask Public Security for a progress report. An enquiry from the great Section Chief Li Yan would surely put a fire up their ass.’

  Li raised an eyebrow and regarded her with a mixture of affection and irritation. He was accustomed to her sarcasm by now, of course, but cursed himself for still letting it affect him. He thought for a moment. ‘And you conducted this entire conversation in putonghua?’

  Margaret allowed herself a tiny smile of satisfaction. ‘Of course.’

  Li nodded his approval. ‘Good. After ten years you finally seem to be making some progress with the language.’

  Her eyes narrowed.

  Chapter Two

  I

  Li gazed from his office window, down through the dusty leaves of the trees into the narrow Beixinqiao Santiao below. Faded gold characters spelled out the name of the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese on brown marble across the street. The air was filled with the roar of traffic on the new boulevard that cut through what had once been a quiet, residential neighbourhood, and air pollution reduced the apartment blocks which had appeared all around to carbonized shadows.

  The square, four-floor, flat-roofed building that housed Section One was one of the few left standing in an area redeveloped beyond recognition.

  Li blew smoke out through the open window, taking another pull on his cigarette before turning at the sound of his door opening. Detective Wu leaned in and forced a smile. He had not been happy to be sent on a commission to the Missing Persons Bureau, like some messenger boy. He was a homicide detective, and above such things. The only thing that pleased him was the message he had brought back. ‘Bureau Chief Chen says if things are quiet in serious crime, he would be happy to pass some of his missing persons over to you.’

  Li was not amused. The minimum he expected from an inferior officer like Chen was a little respect. But respect was a rare commodity in the brash new China. ‘What did he tell you about the girl?’

  Wu shrugged his shoulders, working his chewing gum from one side of his mouth to the other. He had not changed in all the time Li had known him, and the moustache he’d been trying to grow for the last fifteen years was still no thicker now than then. Ubiquitous sunglasses were pushed high up on his forehead. ‘Nothing, Chief. Her folks reported her missing about five days ago. They opened a dossier, and since then . . . nothing.’

  Li knew that in all probability the dossier had never been opened beyond that first entry. The bureau had neither the time nor the manpower to go chasing every missing teenager. ‘Okay, thanks, Wu. Oh . . . and you can tell Bureau Chief Chen that if he ever wants to work in serious crime, he’s going to have to improve his success rate and find a few missing persons first.’

  Wu smirked ironically and closed the door behind him.

  Li sat down and gazed at the paperwork accumulating in piles on his desk. In normal circumstances he would have let the matter drop there. But he knew that Margaret would press to know what action he had taken. He sighed and checked his diary. He had a dental appointment later that afternoon in Haidian District, not far from where the girl’s parents lived. He determined to visit them on his way home.

  II

  The girl’s family lived in one of those Soviet-style apartment blocks thrown up in the Seventies in an attempt to solve Beijing’s housing problem. It was one of the few remaining in a derelict quarter of Haidian marked for demolition. The sombre, weathered exterior was disfigured by lines of decrepit air-conditioning units, most of which no longer functioned.

  Li chained his bicycle to a crowded stand beneath a rusted metal roof. In these days of dense traffic, bicycle was still the most efficient way to get around. The elevator in the block was broken, and he climbed to the fourth floor up a graffiti-covered stairwell that smelled of stale urine.

  The narrow hall of the Jiang family’s apartment gave access to the single room in which they lived and slept, a bathroom in which it was nearly impossible to turn around, and a tiny kitchen with a single gas ring, a microwave and a stone sink.

  Jiang Ning greeted him at the door. It was her day off work, and she was both startled and overjoyed to see him, grateful nearly to the point of tears. She guided him into the disorderly room shared by mother, father and daughter. A double bed was pushed into one corner, a single bed diagonally opposite. A small TV sat on a wooden cabinet behind a square table covered with an impermeable tablecloth. There was an old, worn divan, a single armchair, and almost no room to move. An emaciated, dark-skinned man with thinning black hair brushed across a narrow skull sat at the table playing solitaire with a pack of soiled playing cards. He wore grey shorts and a dirty white singlet.

  ‘My husband, Jin,’ Ning said, and the man nodded cautiously in Li’s direction. ‘That’s Meilin’s bed over there.’

  Li looked at the tiny single bed, and the posters taped to the wall above it. Chinese sports stars. Runners. Faces and names that had become familiar in every home during the Games. Medals and ribbons were carefully exhibited in a glass-doored cabinet beside the bed, along with several photographs of a teenage girl smiling at the camera.

  Ning followed his eyes. ‘That’s her,’ she said. ‘The best daughter a mother could hope for. Not hanging about on street corners, or out at clubs and bars downtown. She’s an athlete, Section Chief. A junior champion. One day she will run for China, I know it.’

  Li wandered over to look at her victor’s medals. Meilin was a middle-distance runner – 800 and 1500 metres. She had won an impressive number of events. He turned to face her parents. ‘When did you first become aware she was missing?’

  ‘When I returned from visiting my family in Shaanxi last weekend she w
as gone,’ Ning said.

  Li’s gaze moved to the girl’s father. Jiang Jin shrugged. ‘She was in and out over the weekend. I was out a lot myself, and back late Sunday night. She wasn’t home yet. But I didn’t think much of it. She’s been seeing some boy over at Dahuisi. Coming home later and later.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘She’s not the angel her mother thinks she is.’ And Li sensed the tension between them. ‘Anyway, I went to sleep, and didn’t start to worry till I woke up in the morning and she still wasn’t here.’

  ‘She’d been gone more than twenty-four hours by the time I got back,’ Ning said. ‘That’s when I reported it to Public Security.’

  The name ‘Ning’ meant ‘tranquillity’, but there was very little tranquil about the missing girl’s mother now. Her hands trembled, and she seemed always on the point of tears.

  Li looked at her husband again. ‘What is it you do, Mr Jiang?’

  ‘Plays cards!’ Ning’s voice was heavy with resentment.

  But Jiang Jin ignored her. ‘I start a new job with the city parks division next week.’

  Li nodded. ‘Tell me about Meilin’s boyfriend.’

  III

  Lao Rong lived with his parents in one of the few remaining hutongs in Dahuisi, just north of Beijing Zoo, in one of four small houses enclosing a traditional siheyuan courtyard. Slate roofs descended toward a locust tree that shaded the paved yard. In among the carcasses of long-dead bicycles, coal briquets were already piled high in preparation for the winter. A white-painted sign on the wall outside gave notice that the property was to be demolished.

  A call to Wu from his cellphone had pre-armed Li with the information that Lao, although just nineteen, already had a criminal record. For theft. The boy was alarmed by Li’s visit. A tall, thin lad, with long hair that fell into his eyes, he directed the Section Chief away from the house to a dark corner of the courtyard. ‘What do you want? I ain’t done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I never said you had. But when you act this nervous it makes me wonder.’

  ‘My father’ll kill me if I get in trouble with the police again.’