Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Page 14

  This just didn’t fit. The victim was not a prostitute, nor did she correspond to any of the Ripper murders. She had been killed on the other side of town. It was a weekday. The execution had been clumsy, almost slapdash. And yet, there was the note. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off. And the telltale Russian cheroot.

  Li gazed down on the dead girl’s face and ached for her. He remembered her touch, her fingers on his scalp as she adjusted the headset for the MERMER test, her small breasts pressing against her blouse, just inches from his face. The smell of her, sweet and musky. And here she lay, icy cold, all animation gone forever, rigor mortis already setting in.

  He couldn’t bear it any longer and turned away, climbing the three steps to the chrome rail, the city spreading out below him, thirteen million people going about their lives, unaware that one of the herd lay dead at the foot of this monument to the new millennium. Unaware that some monster lived among them, to all intents and purposes one of them. And how would they know him? For he had no horns, no forked tail. He would look just like them. Perhaps he had a family. A wife, children. And Li remembered thinking that someone knew who he was. That you could not return home after an orgy of killing without taking some of the blood of it with you. Someone knew who that monster was. Someone had looked into his eyes and been privy to their own private view of hell.

  The crescent moon had risen higher in the sky now, and in what little light it cast, Li could see, on the distant horizon, the faint shadow of the mountains across whose contours the Great Wall followed its tortuous route. It might once have kept the marauding hordes from the north at bay, but in this twenty-first century, it had failed to keep out the evil that stalked their streets at night. The wind battered his face, stinging cold and taking his breath away, and it was to the wind he attributed the tears that filled his eyes. He pushed himself away from the rail, wiping his face with the back of his hand and found his deputy standing nearby, watching him. ‘I need a drink, Qian,’ he said. And they started off down the steps together. Five thousand years of history carved in bronze stretched away below them. How many lives had come and gone in all that time? What did one more, or less, matter?

  But it did.

  * * *

  They left Wu and Sang and Elvis at the scene to take statements and put the investigation in motion. Qian drove Li to Sanlitun Lu, more commonly known as Bar Street. It was where Guo Huan’s mother had believed her daughter was working as a barmaid. A fifteen-foot plastic beer tankard overflowing with foam stood on the corner of Sanlitun and Gongren Tiyuchang Dong Lu. A bored-looking girl sat behind a window in it selling time on a public phone. They turned north, and the street ahead was ablaze with neon and fairylights. Touts in suits wandered the pavements trying to persuade passers-by that the bar which paid their wages was the best. Qian parked by the kerbside railing about halfway up, and they crossed the road to the Lan Kwai Fang Bar at number sixty-six. Signs in the window advertised Budweiser, and Carlsberg, Dedicated to the Art of Making Beer. Gnarled trees grew out of the sidewalk alongside picture windows which gave on to a dark interior of tables draped with red cloth. Many of the bars and restaurants in Bar Street were haunted by staff from the embassies at the top end of the street. A European crowd. French, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Spanish. But the Lan Kwai Fang was predominantly Chinese.

  Most of the tables were occupied, and there was a babble of voices and music playing when Li and Qian walked in. But almost immediately animated conversations dried up and heads turned in their direction. The music played to silence, music that didn’t stand up to such scrutiny. A cheap pop singer from Taiwan. Li had forgotten that he and Qian were both still in their dress uniforms, long coats hanging open to reveal flashes of silver on black. The two men took off their caps, as if that would somehow make them less conspicuous, and slipped on to high stools at the bar. The barman wore dark slacks with sharp creases and a white shirt open at the neck, sleeves neatly folded halfway up his forearms. His hair was beautifully cut and gelled back from his face. He looked beyond them as several tables emptied, and half a dozen clients slipped out into the night. Then he refocused on the newcomers and smiled nervously.

  ‘Two beers,’ Li said.

  ‘You’re joking, right?’ The barman seemed perplexed, and his smile continued to flutter about his lips like a butterfly on a summer’s day.

  Li glared at him. ‘Do you see me laughing?’

  The barman shrugged. ‘Cops don’t drink in places like this.’

  ‘Where do they drink?’ Qian asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Just not here.’ He leaned confidentially across the bar towards them. ‘Look, I have no problem serving you guys. It’s just … you know, you’re bad for business.’ He nodded towards another couple heading out the door.

  Li was running out of patience. ‘Sonny, if there are not two beers on the bar within the next thirty seconds you’ll find out just how bad for business we could really be.’

  ‘Coming right up, boss,’ the barman said, as if the issue had never been in doubt.

  Li and Qian took their beers to a recently vacated table by the window, to the barman’s further chagrin. Two cops sitting in the window would guarantee no further custom until they left. But he held his peace.

  The two detectives drank in silence for some time. Li took a long first pull at his beer, till he felt the alcohol hit his bloodstream, then he nursed his glass on the table in front of him, lost in gloomy thoughts.

  ‘Such a fucking waste!’ he said eventually and Qian looked at him carefully.

  ‘She made an impression on you, then, Chief?’

  ‘She was beautiful, Qian. I don’t just mean physically. She had something about her. Something inside. It just radiated from her.’ He found Qian looking at him quizzically and he smiled wryly. ‘Sure, if I hadn’t already found the woman I want to spend my life with, I could have fallen for her. Big time.’ And then he saw her blood-splashed profile and the wound where her ear had been removed, and frustration and anger rose in him like bile. You have an enemy, Li Yan, Lao Dai had told him, and Li knew that he was right. That somehow, for some reason, all this was about him. He thumped his fist on the table and both their beers jumped. Heads turned towards them. ‘I’m going to put a stop to it, Qian. I’m not going to let him do this again.’

  Qian nodded reassuringly. ‘We’ll get him, Chief.’

  ‘What I can’t figure,’ Li said, ‘is how the hell he got her to go up there in the first place. In the dark, after it was closed. I mean, he could never have forced her to do it.’

  Qian said, ‘Suppose he arranged to meet her there. Suppose she went there before it closed, and then hid up at the top when the lights went out and the guards locked up. He could easily have climbed over the railing when they’d gone.’

  ‘But why? Why would she meet someone in those circumstances?’

  Qian shrugged. ‘Fear, maybe.’

  ‘Of what? Not of him. She wouldn’t have gone there if she’d thought there was anything to fear from him.’ But he couldn’t rid himself of that look in her eyes the last time he had seen her. He had not understood, then, what it really was. But now he wondered if perhaps she had been afraid, and he had failed to recognise it. But afraid of what?

  Qian said, ‘He took an enormous risk killing her in the early evening rather than the early hours of the morning. I know it wasn’t exactly in full view, but there were security people around. And a goddamned TV station across the road!’ He took another mouthful of beer. ‘And, of course, it’s something else he did differently this time. I mean, what’s weird is why he would set out to copy Jack the Ripper and then not.’

  Li said, ‘Chinese cops have the idea that serial killers never change their MO, probably because we don’t get that many here.’ He shook his head. ‘But it’s a mistake. When I was in the States I read up on some of the most famous serial killers from around the world, and a lot of them changed lots of things from murder to murder. From gun to k
nife, from knife to rope, from rope to hammer. From men to women, or the other way round. And for all sorts of reasons. Some quite deliberately to mislead the police, others just on a whim. Some because it was their MO to change their MO. A serial killer can’t be relied on to stick to the script.’ And he realised with a shock, that’s exactly what he’d been doing – relying on the Beijing Ripper to be faithful to the original. But it wasn’t a script. It was history. And you can’t rewrite history. So why had the killer done just that?

  His cellphone began playing Beethoven in his pocket. He took it out and flipped it open. ‘Wei?’

  ‘It’s me, I’m home. How did it go?’ Margaret sounded weary.

  ‘Not good,’ Li said. ‘He’s broken his pattern.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You remember at lunch today, Bill Hart talked about Lynn Pan, the Chinese-American who’s running the MERMER program?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘That’s who the victim was.’

  There was a moment’s silent incredulity at the other end of the line, then, ‘Jesus Christ,’ Margaret whispered. ‘You met her this afternoon.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Li felt a fleeting pang of guilt at the feelings Pan had aroused in him.

  ‘That must have been tough.’

  ‘It was.’

  There was a long silence, and then, ‘Is that music I hear?’

  ‘I’m in a bar with Qian, up in Sanlitun.’

  ‘Is there a connection?’

  ‘No, we’re having a drink.’

  Another silence. Then, ‘I had a great time tonight, too,’ she said with a tone. ‘With your friends from the Ministry. They spoke Chinese all night and left me to my own devices, smiling like an idiot every time one of them looked at me. I’ve got cramp in my cheek muscles.’ In the background Li heard the baby start to cry. Margaret said, ‘When will you be home?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’ And she hung up.

  Li felt rebuked, and resented it. He flipped the phone shut and stuffed it in his pocket. He finished his beer and stood up. ‘We’d better go.’

  And the barman breathed a sigh of relief as the two cops slipped out into the street. The cold air brought the blood rushing immediately to their cheeks and burned their lungs. Qian said, ‘I didn’t know she was American.’

  It took Li a moment to realise what he meant. ‘Your English has improved,’ he said.

  Qian shrugged. ‘I’ve been taking lessons.’

  Li was taken aback and looked at his number two in surprise. ‘Why?’

  ‘Seems like English is the language you need to get on these days. The language of the future.’

  Li blew a puff of air through his lips. ‘Who knows what we’ll all be speaking in a hundred years.’

  ‘You and I will be speaking Chinese with our ancestors.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Li managed a tired smile. ‘And you never can tell. If the economy continues growing at the present rate maybe the rest of the world will be speaking Chinese by then.’

  They dashed across the road between cars, and when they got into the Jeep Li said, ‘So, anyway, what difference does it make?’ Qian looked at him quizzically. ‘Her being American.’

  Qian started the engine. ‘There’s no way we’ll be able to keep it out of the papers, Chief.’

  Tuesday

  Chapter Six

  I

  Her body was slim and firm and beautiful. His hands slipped over the softness of her curves, tracing the line of her hips, gliding across her belly and up to the swelling of her breasts. The nipples pressed hard into his palms. He felt her legs wrap themselves around him, crossing in the small of his back as he slid inside her. Her hair smelled of peaches. ‘Help me,’ she whispered, and he heard her say, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, too,’ he said.

  ‘Help me,’ she said again.

  But he was lost inside her, drifting on a wave of lust, thrusting against it.

  ‘Help me.’ It was louder, now, more insistent. Another wave crashed over him. ‘Help me!’ she screamed, and he opened his eyes. Her smile had slipped from her face. There were black holes where her ears and eyes should have been, and blood ran across her face like vivid red slashes. He screamed and reared up and something struck him hard on the back of his head.

  ‘Chief, are you okay?’

  It was Wu, his face a mask of concern. The desk lamp was lying on the floor, the bulb shattered into a thousand pieces. The first yellow sunlight was slanting in the window.

  Li blinked and couldn’t figure it out. ‘What …?’

  Wu stooped to pick up the lamp. ‘You must have had a nightmare, Chief. The whole section heard you screaming. You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I was asleep?’ Li could hardly believe it.

  ‘You dropped off about two, Chief. No one had the heart to wake you.’

  ‘Shit.’ Li stood up unsteadily and tried to straighten out the creases in his uniform. He was shaken by his dream. It had left him wrestling with feelings of guilt and horror. He looked at Wu and realised he must have been there all night, too. ‘What about you guys?’

  ‘Oh, we all got a few hours at one time or another,’ Wu said. There was a bedroom on each floor of the section, three beds to a room. Officers detained beyond their shift could always snatch some sleep if things got bad.

  ‘Where are we at?’

  ‘About ready for a meeting whenever you are, Chief. The autopsy’s scheduled for nine.’

  Li checked his watch. It was six a.m. ‘I need to get changed and showered. Get my brain in gear. Let’s wait until after the autopsy before we do the meeting.’

  Wu nodded and was in the corridor before Li called after him, ‘I never saw the statement you took from the security guard.’ Wu had decided to bring him back to Section One, and they had raised all the staff from the museum and the shop who had been on duty at the monument when it closed up for the night, and brought them all in for questioning.

  Wu reappeared in the doorway. ‘He didn’t remember her,’ he said. ‘I pulled her pic from the computer, but it didn’t mean anything to him. Only thing that stuck with him was a car parked at the side of the road when he locked up. About five or six metres south of the gate.’

  Li had a mental picture of the bloody tracks beyond the fence coming to an abrupt end at just about that point on the sidewalk. ‘Make? Colour? Anyone inside?’

  Wu shook his head. ‘He was more concerned about hoofing it back to base for a smoke and a warm and something to eat. He said it was dark-coloured. A saloon. There might have been someone sitting in it, he wasn’t sure.’

  Li gasped his frustration.

  ‘We struck it lucky with the girl, though.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘From the ticket office. She recognised Pan straight off. Remembered she spoke with a weird accent and was really pretty. Seems she bought a ticket about five-fifteen. Which was unusual, because apparently people don’t normally buy tickets that close to closing time. The girl had already cashed up.’

  Li saw Pan striding across the causeway, her long coat flapping about her calves, her collar pulled up around her neck. She must have climbed the steps to the top as the sun was dipping behind the mountains. It had been a spectacular sunset the previous night. It must have been something special from up there. Blue mountains against a red sky, lights going on all across the city. Qian was right. She must have hidden there beneath the arm of the dial, waiting for the place to close up, waiting to meet the man who would take her life. But why? He lifted his coat from the stand. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

  His bike was where he had left it the previous morning, chained to the railing leading into what had once been the main entrance to the building. The door had not been in use for as long as Li had been there. He cycled out into Dongzhimen Nanxiao Da Jie and headed south with the traffic, past the restaurant on the corner where Mei Yuan plied her trade. The restaurant was shuttered up, and it
was too early for Mei Yuan. There were plenty of other bikes on the road, and traffic was already building up towards rush hour. Li cycled at a leisurely rate, buttoned up tight against the cold, and let the city slip by him. His fatigue had been startled out of him by the icy wind. His thoughts, however, were still full of Lynn Pan and his dream of making love to her. But the only image of her he could conjure in his mind was of her body lying cold and dead under the photographer’s lights at the Millennium Monument. Throat cut. Ears hacked off. Red blood on yellow stone.

  On Jianguomen Da Jie, the cycle lane was choked with morning commuters, all wrapped in hats and scarves and gloves, padded jackets thickening slight Chinese frames, white masks strapped across faces to protect against both the cold and the pollution. With the sun at their backs, the stream of cyclists moved like a river, at the same pace, an odd current carrying someone in a hurry past the main flow. A girl chatting breezily on her cellphone weaved in and out amongst the more sedate of her fellow bikers. Cycling with the crowd brought an odd sense of belonging, of being a part of the whole. They passed the footbridge at Dongdan, and the vast new Oriental Plaza at Wangfujing. And at the Grand Hotel, Li moved out into the traffic to take his life in his hands and turn left into Zhengyi Road. He had done it a thousand times, and it only ever got harder. In the distance he saw a formation of PLA guards marching across Changan from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as they did every morning, to raise the Chinese flag in Tiananmen Square.

  Most of the leaves in the trees in Zhengyi Road still clung stubbornly to their branches. Those which dropped were swept up daily by women in blue smocks and white masks. But it was too early for the blue smocks, and the leaves which had fallen overnight scraped and rattled across the tarmac in the wind. Li cycled past the entrance to the Ministry compound and turned in at the news-stand at the end of the road to pick up the first editions of the newspapers. The news vendor was wrapped in layers of clothes, a fur hat with earflaps pulled down over her bobbed hair to overlap the collar and scarf at her neck. She wore fingerless gloves and cradled a glass jar of warm green tea. What was visible of her face smiled a greeting at Li.