Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Page 15

  ‘How are you today, Mr Li?’

  ‘Very well, Mrs Ma.’

  She handed him his usual People’s Daily and Beijing Youth Daily, folded one inside the other, in return for a few coins.

  ‘You’re up early today.’

  He smiled. ‘I haven’t been to bed yet.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ she said sagely. ‘Of course. Another murder.’

  He looked at her in astonishment. ‘How do you know that?’

  She nodded towards the bundle in his hand. ‘It’s in the paper.’

  Li frowned. ‘It can’t be.’ He looked at the People’s Daily. The front page was covered in the usual CCP propaganda Illiteracy rate among adult people slashed. And, Yangtze water cleanup ensured. There was a story about massive new investment in the western provinces, and a photograph of the executive deputy secretary of Tibet answering questions at a press conference. His heart skipped a beat as he saw a photograph of himself receiving his award from the Minister of Public Security. He would not have expected the public organ of the Party to have carried anything on the murders. The Beijing Youth Daily was another matter. Independent of the Party, and increasingly bold in its coverage of Chinese internal affairs, it had begun to garner a reputation for running high-risk stories. But even so, Li could not imagine the paper carrying a crime story about which no details had yet been released. Particularly since the latest murder had only been committed the night before. He unfolded its front page and felt as if he had been slapped. Beijing Ripper Claims Victim No. 5. The headline ran almost the full length of the left side of the front page in bold red characters. Two strips of sub-heading matched it, side by side, white characters on a red background. Body discovered at Millennium Monument, throat cut, ears removed. And, Four previous victims in Jianguomen found with body parts missing. Above the story itself, was a photograph of Li pictured at the award ceremony the previous evening. The caption read, Award-winning Beijing cop, Li Yan, leads investigation.

  ‘It would make you frightened to go out at night,’ the news vendor said. ‘He must be insane, this Beijing Ripper, cutting open these poor women and taking out their insides.’ Her words dragged Li’s eyes from the paper to her face. She must have read the story from start to finish. As, in all probability, would most of the city’s population in the hours ahead. It was going to spread panic, and it would certainly be picked up by the foreign media. The political implications were unthinkable. How in the name of the sky, he wondered, had they got hold of this kind of detail?

  * * *

  Margaret was feeding Li Jon in the living room when he got in. She was still in her dressing gown, face smudged and bleary from sleep – or the lack of it. He threw the Beijing Youth Daily on to the coffee table in front of her. ‘Look!’ he said.

  She glanced at the paper. ‘I see a photograph of you,’ she said. ‘Is that what I’m supposed to be looking at? Maybe I should cut it out and keep it by the bedside, that way I’d probably see more of you than I do at the moment.’

  But Li was in no mood for her sarcasm, and in his agitation, he had forgotten that she would not be able to read the headline. ‘Beijing Ripper Claims Victim No. 5.’ He read it for her.

  She shrugged. ‘So? It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not the point!’ His voice was strained by exasperation and anger. ‘No one outside of the investigation knows the kind of detail they’ve printed in there.’

  ‘So someone leaked it.’

  Li shook his head. ‘It doesn’t happen in China.’

  ‘It does now.’ Margaret pushed up an eyebrow. ‘Welcome to the rest of the world.’ She removed the teat from Li Jon’s mouth and wiped his lips. ‘Good morning, by the way.’

  Li threw his hands up in frustration. ‘They’re going to blame me for this, Margaret.’ He cursed under his breath. ‘I’m going for a shower.’ And he stormed off to the bathroom.

  Margaret called after him. ‘Your son says good morning, too.’

  The slamming of the bathroom door came back in response. After a moment she heard the sound of the shower running, and the shower door banged shut. The phone rang. Usually she did not answer it, because the calls were invariably for Li and the callers spoke only Chinese. But he was in the shower, and in spite of her resentment at being abandoned to play the role of the little wife and doting mother, she did understand the pressure he was under. She lifted the receiver. ‘Wei?’ A female voice spoke to her in Chinese. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ Margaret said. ‘Please hold.’

  She hefted Li Jon in her left arm, and took the phone through to the bathroom. Li’s uniform and underwear lay crumpled on the floor where he had dropped them. She opened the shower door and immediately felt the hot spray and steam on her face. She saw the shape of Li lathering his head with soap somewhere in the midst of it all and thrust the phone towards him. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘A call for you.’

  He fumbled to turn off the water, stinging shampoo running into his eyes as he reached for the phone. ‘Shit, Margaret, could it not have waited?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, and she slammed the door shut behind her.

  Li winced, and stood dripping in the cubicle, clutching the phone to his wet head. The cold of the apartment was already making itself felt as the water cooled, and he started to shiver.

  ‘Wei?’

  It was the secretary from the Commissioner’s office at police headquarters. The Commissioner wanted to see him without delay. Li closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm himself. The storm was about to break. And it was going to break right over his head.

  By the time he was dressed and ready to go, Margaret had steamed some lotus paste buns and made green tea. He appeared in the kitchen doorway looking harassed, wearing his long, heavy coat. But he had changed into freshly pressed slacks and a white shirt. Margaret thought he looked stunning, and she always loved the smell of him when he came out of the shower. But he never seemed to be around long enough these days for her to enjoy him.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘Commissioner Zhu is going to cut me up into little pieces and feed me to the fish.’

  ‘Then you should have some breakfast before you go. To fatten you up for the fish.’

  ‘No time. I’ll call later.’ And he was gone.

  She shouted after him, ‘Are you remembering we’re going out for dinner tonight?’ But the door was already closing behind him. She shut her eyes to try to calm herself, and to prepare herself for the emptiness of the day ahead – before remembering that Li’s father had said he would drop by in the afternoon to see his grandson. Perhaps, she reflected, the day would have been better left empty. She felt her blood pressure start to rise once more.

  The phone rang again, startling her this time. She swithered about whether to answer it, but if it was important there was still time to call down to Li from the balcony. And, besides, what else did she have to do with her time? She picked up the receiver. ‘Wei?’

  A man’s voice spoke in a clipped American accent. ‘May I speak with Doctor Campbell?’

  It seemed so odd to have someone addressing her as Doctor Campbell, not only in her own language, but in a comfortingly East-coast American accent. ‘This is she,’ she replied.

  II

  Police Headquarters was a short walk from Li’s apartment. The main entrance was two streets down on Qianmen Dong Da Jie, along from the EMS Central Post Office, but Li always entered from Jiaominxiang Lane. The old, arched entrance to the rear compound, opposite the Supreme Court, had been demolished to make way for a new building, clad in marble and designed along classical European lines to blend in with the redbrick one-time CID headquarters on the east side, and the former Citibank on the west. The old Citibank building was now a police museum, and beyond it the new entrance was watched over by two armed PLA guards flanking the gate.

  The trees that overhung the lane were still thick with leaves, and the leaves were thick with the dust of construction. The roadway was closed to tr
affic, and workmen crowded the sidewalks, wheeling barrows and shovelling sand into cement mixers. The Supreme Court had been stripped back to its bones and was being given a new face. Ministry apartment blocks beyond were draped in green netting, behind which yet more workmen put in twenty-four-hour shifts in this relentless process of rebuilding and remodelling the new China.

  Li walked briskly through the gates into the rear compound, the sound of pneumatic drills hammering in his ears, drowning the sound of the beating of his heart which, until then, was all he had been able to hear.

  The Commissioner’s office was on the fifth floor, and Li stood uncomfortably in the elevator with half a dozen other people who, he was sure, could hear his heart beating, too. No pneumatic drills here to drown it out. But if they did, they gave no indication of it. He stepped out into a carpeted corridor and followed it along to the large reception area outside the Commissioner’s office. A poster-sized photograph of the face of an armed policewoman, her gun pointing to the ceiling and pressed against her cheek, dominated one wall. The rest of the room was dominated by the Commissioner’s secretary, a formidable woman in her fifties who, Li had often surmised, probably bought her clothes mail-order from an outsize store in the US. She was not of typical Chinese dimensions. But in a country where a large proportion of domestic crime involved husband battering, she was not untypical of the older Chinese woman. For all his height and rank, Li always found her intimidating. She was, after all, only a secretary. But like many secretaries, she took her status and power from her boss. And since her boss was Beijing’s top cop, that gave her quite a bit of clout.

  She glared at Li. ‘You’re late.’ It was not long after seven, and Li figured she must have been called in early. She certainly looked, and sounded, like a woman who had not had her full complement of sleep.

  ‘I came straight away.’

  ‘He’s had to go. Deputy Cao will see you.’

  Li breathed an inner sigh of relief. Cao was less likely to be riding his high horse. But if he thought he was in for an easier time, he was mistaken.

  Cao turned from the window where he had been staring morosely out at the traffic below, and didn’t even give Li time to draw breath. His arms were folded across his chest, and in one hand he held a folded and much thumbed copy of the Beijing Youth Daily. He almost threw it on to his desk. ‘You’ve done it this time, Section Chief.’

  ‘That had nothing to do with me, Deputy Cao,’ Li said.

  ‘It has everything to do with you, Li!’ Cao almost shouted at him. ‘It’s your case. And it’s your face on the front page of the paper. And the Commissioner himself told you only yesterday how important it was that this didn’t get into the press.’

  Li held his peace. There was nothing he could say.

  Cao waved his arm theatrically in the air. ‘The Minister was apoplectic. That’s why it’s me giving you the bollocking and not the Commissioner himself. He’s been summoned to the Minister’s office to furnish him with some persuasive explanation for this …’ he picked up the paper and then dropped it on the desk again, ‘… this piece of shit.’

  ‘Someone leaked it,’ Li said lamely.

  ‘Of course someone leaked it!’ Cao roared. ‘And it could only have been somebody on the inside. A police officer. Somebody under your command.’

  ‘Or above it,’ Li ventured.

  Cao wheeled on him and inclined his head dangerously. He lowered his voice, ‘If I was you, Li, I wouldn’t go suggesting that too loudly around here. It won’t win you many friends. And believe me, right now you need all the friends you can get.’ He snatched a pack of cigarettes from his desk and lit one. ‘Someone in your section has been a naughty boy. I suggest you find out who it is.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the same officer who leaks inside information from my office to yours.’

  Cao dropped into his chair and regarded Li speculatively. He shook his head slightly. ‘You’re treading very thin ice here, Li.’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘You run a slack ship up there. You may have admirers in high places because of a couple of high profile cases, but those of us in the know understand that police work is not about the handful of glamorous cases that might come your way in the course of a career. It’s about the daily slog, cracking every crappy case that gets thrown at you. And that means running a tight ship. Administration, organisation, attention to detail, no matter how dull or how unglamorous. It requires a disciplined approach to the running of your section, it requires your junior officers to respect and, if necessary, to fear you.

  ‘But not you. You like to be one of the boys. You flit around from case to case like some kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes. You think you can bypass all the usual procedures and solve the crime with nothing more than flair and imagination.’ He took an angry puff at his cigarette, perhaps in frustration that all his years as a predecessor of Li’s at Section One had led to this dead-end deputy’s job. ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that, Li. We have evolved an approach to criminal investigation that gets results by sheer bloody hard work and attention to detail.’ He slapped a hand on top of the Beijing Youth Daily. ‘And splashing the details of the worst serial killings in this city’s history across the front pages of trash like this, is not going to help. So I suggest you batten down the hatches up there and find out who’s responsible. Because if you don’t, rest assured that I shall. And there will be hell to pay!’

  III

  The sun was rising now above the tops of all the new apartment blocks along Dongzhimen, fingers of cold yellow light extending themselves west along the grid. The icy wind carried the breath of winter from the frozen northern plains, laden with the promise of subzero temperatures in the weeks ahead.

  Li watched Mei Yuan’s cold red fingers as they worked nimbly about the hotplate to produce his jian bing. Her face, too, was red with the cold, skin dried by the wind. Her eyes watered constantly, as if weeping for the lost summer, or for her lost life. She caught him watching her, and she smiled. Her face lit up, radiant in the morning light, no trace in it of the pain she had endured. She wore her fate with dignity, and always came out smiling.

  Li, on the other hand, was sunk in gloom. As if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Cao’s words had stung him, and he wondered if others saw him as Cao did. Cavalier, glory-seeking, too much one of the boys for his subordinates to fully respect him. There were times he took shortcuts, yes, but he never neglected that mind-numbing, painfully slow process of putting a case together piece by piece by piece. He knew the importance of the detail. His uncle had dinned that into him often enough. But sometimes you could get bogged down in it. Sometimes there was so much detail you couldn’t see the bigger picture. Sometimes you just had to trust your instincts and make that leap of faith.

  ‘A fen for them,’ Mei Yuan said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your thoughts.’

  ‘They’re not even worth a fen, Mei Yuan.’

  She slipped his jian bing into brown paper and handed it to him. ‘I read about the murders in the paper this morning.’

  ‘You and the rest of Beijing,’ Li muttered gloomily.

  Mei Yuan looked at him perceptively. ‘Should we not?’

  ‘No,’ Li said emphatically. ‘You should not. The story was leaked, and the paper should have known better than to print it.’

  ‘Who leaked it?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Then why don’t you ask the editor of the paper.’

  ‘Oh, I think he’ll be facing that question, and many more, from people much higher up than me, Mei Yuan.’

  She nodded mutely. ‘They are terrible killings, Li Yan. Do you not think, perhaps, that people have a right to know?’

  ‘Why?’ Li asked simply, and he took a bite of his jian bing. ‘Knowing will not protect them, because they do not know who he is. But it won’t stop people being afraid, panicking even. And we will be inundated with cranks claiming to be the Ripper, and with calls from people cl
aiming they know who he is. And we will spend hours and days, maybe weeks, sifting through cranks and crap, wasting valuable time going up blind alleys while the killer remains free to kill again. Our efforts to catch him will be hopelessly diluted.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘I can see how that could be.’ There was sympathy in her eyes when she smiled at him. ‘I do not envy you, Li Yan. Trying to catch this man. First you must try to work out who he is. Like a riddle. Only, if you don’t come up with the answer someone will die.’

  Li said, ‘And you know how bad I am at solving riddles.’

  ‘Maybe because there is no life at stake,’ she said. ‘For me it is easy, because it is a game. But to catch a killer is not a game. If you fail, he will kill again. For me, the very fear of failure, and the consequences of that, would numb my mind.’

  ‘Join the club,’ Li said.

  ‘But you will catch him.’

  ‘I have to.’ And just focusing on that thought freed Li’s mind from the clutter which had filled it that morning. What did it matter who had leaked the story? It was another issue, something to be settled another day. A diversion. And he could not afford be diverted. The genie was out of the bottle. There was no way to put it back in. Perhaps, he thought, Mei Yuan was right. He had trouble solving her riddles because it did not matter whether he solved them or not. But the thought that someone might die if he did not catch a killer concentrated his mind in an entirely different way.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘you will have had much time to consider my last riddle.’

  Li smiled ruefully. ‘Mei Yuan, I can’t even remember it in detail. Two guys planting rice, wasn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘If you can’t remember in detail there is no point in even thinking about it. I told you, the devil is in the detail.’

  There it was again. Detail. The answer to everything was always in the detail. ‘I just can’t give it the time right now, Mei Yuan. Not with this killer still out there.’