Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Page 16

  ‘Sometimes, Li Yan, it is good therapy to take your mind off one problem to work on another. Then when you return to the original it might not seem quite so intractable.’

  Li finished his jian bing and grinned. Mei Yuan was usually right about most things. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Give me it again.’

  ‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field in Hunan, a long way from their village,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to go from one end of the paddy to the other …’ She went through the whole riddle once more. The fact that the two men had just finished lunch, sharing their food and drink, agreeing to meet and share again when they each finished planting their remaining ten rows. Li listened carefully, and it started coming back to him. When the man with the food had finished his work he couldn’t see his friend anywhere, and thinking he had gone back to the village, had eaten the food himself.

  ‘So he wakes up the next morning,’ Li cut in, ‘and the other guy’s shaking him and accusing him of being greedy, leaving him there on his own to go off and eat the food by himself.’

  Mei Yuan nodded. ‘But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and left him. The man with the drink insists he was there all the time! They are both telling the truth.’

  Li thought about it. They have just finished lunch and have another ten rows to plant. They are both deaf mutes and can only communicate by sign language. They both claim to still be there when they finish their work, but for some reason they don’t see one another. ‘They’re not blind?’ he said.

  ‘If they were blind, how could they communicate by sign language?’

  ‘Of course.’ Li felt foolish. But they couldn’t hear or speak to each other. If they were both there at the end of the day why didn’t they see each other? Why did the man with the food think his friend had already gone? And then it dawned on him, and he felt even more foolish. ‘Oh, Mei Yuan, that’s not fair.’

  ‘What’s not fair?’

  ‘They’d just had lunch, so it must have been about midday. They still had ten rows each to plant. But it took them an hour to get from one end of the paddy to the other, then it was ten o’clock at night when they finished. And it was dark. That’s why they couldn’t see each other.’

  Mei Yuan grinned. ‘Simple, really. And, of course, they couldn’t call out because they were deaf mutes.’

  ‘But what if there was a full moon that night?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s the rainy season, Li Yan. The sky is cloudy.’

  He gave her a look. ‘You always have an answer.’

  ‘Because there always is one.’

  A shadow fell across his face as he remembered just how few answers he’d come up with on the Ripper murders. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s always an answer. But we don’t always know what it is.’

  * * *

  Qian spotted Li passing the open door to the detectives’ room and hurried into the corridor after him. He caught up with him in Li’s office. Li was surveying the shambles that was his desk. The night before he had lifted most of the piles of paper off it to stack against the wall below the window. This morning they had been replaced by fresh ones.

  ‘Chief.’

  He turned at the sound of Qian’s voice. ‘Unless it’s important, Qian, I don’t have time. I’ve got to get across town for the autopsy.’ He flicked his head towards the wall. ‘Is Wu next door?’

  ‘Chief, the autopsy’s been postponed.’

  Which stopped Li in his tracks. ‘Postponed by whom?’

  ‘An order from headquarters. Just came in a few minutes ago.’

  Li scowled. ‘What in the name of the sky do they think they are playing at?’

  Qian seemed almost afraid to tell him. ‘Lynn Pan was an American citizen.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the American Embassy have requested that one of their people carry out the autopsy. Or at least assist on it.’

  ‘Well, the answer’s no,’ Li snapped. ‘This is an ongoing murder inquiry. I’m not going to have some goddamned American pathologist who knows nothing of the background to the other murders coming in and fucking up our corpse.’

  Qian braced himself. ‘I don’t know that it matters much what we think, Chief. Apparently the Ministry has already agreed. It’s been authorised at the highest level, and the autopsy’s been postponed till eleven.’

  ‘The hell it has!’ Li snatched the phone and started punching in numbers.

  ‘Chief…’ There was something in Qian’s tone that cut through Li’s anger.

  ‘What is it, Qian?’

  ‘There have been other developments. Putting off the autopsy for a couple of hours might not be such a bad idea.’

  Li slowly replaced the receiver. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There was a break-in last night at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lynn Pan’s office was ransacked.’

  IV

  The head of security met them in the lobby. He was agitated, an ex-cop who saw the break-in on his turf as a potential one-way ticket to unemployment. He was a tall man, nearly Li’s height, and wore a grey uniform with clusters of stars and stripes that meant nothing at all. They just looked impressive. It was still early, and staff and students were only now beginning to show up for the day. He steered Li and Wu along a corridor to his office on the ground floor. ‘Look guys,’ he said, appealing to the old boys’ network, ‘I’d really appreciate it if we can keep this low profile.’

  ‘A woman has been murdered,’ Li said sharply. ‘It’s hard to lower a profile like that. What happened here?’

  The security man shrugged his eyebrows. ‘That’s just it. I’ve no idea. None of the alarms was tripped. I can’t find signs of forced entry anywhere.’

  Wu was chewing manically, and swinging the left-hand leg of his shades around the little finger of his right hand. ‘So how do you know there’s been a break-in?’

  ‘Because somebody jemmied their way into Lynn Pan’s offices and cleaned out the lot. Computers, files, just about everything that wasn’t nailed down. A real pro job.’

  ‘Not an inside one?’ Li said.

  The security man pulled a face. ‘I don’t think so. If they had keys to turn off alarms and get in and out the building, wouldn’t they have had keys for her offices, too?’

  Wu said, ‘If they were smart enough to break in without leaving a trace why would they have to force an internal door?’

  ‘Because once you’re in, you don’t have to worry about setting off alarms,’ the security man said. ‘You’ve done the smart bit. You’re not going to be able to hide the fact that you’ve ransacked a whole department, so why worry about breaking down a door?’

  Li wasn’t convinced either way. ‘Let’s take a look.’

  Some of Pan’s staff and students were gathered in the corridor outside the department. Most of them had just heard the news of her death and were still in shock. Their babble of hushed chatter died away as Li, Wu and the security man stepped out of the elevator. Li said to the security man, ‘I don’t want anybody touching anything until forensics have been over the place.’

  He recognised some of the faces in the corridor. Lynn Pan’s assistant, an older woman, who had brought them all tea the previous day and escorted them to the computer room. The student who had briefed them on the ‘crime’ for the MERMER test. He nodded acknowledgement as he passed them and the security man showed the detectives the double doors which had been forced at the end of the corridor. The wood was splintered and broken around the lock. Crude but effective. Beyond the doors, the reception room where Li had sat with Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Minister Wei and the others appeared to have been left undisturbed. Li glanced from the window and saw the minaret-like TV tower catching the light, sharp against the blue of the sky. He could scarcely believe it had been only yesterday afternoon he had stood at that very window looking out at the tower. Then, Lynn Pan had still been very much alive, a beautiful, vibrant living being, demonstrating he
r extraordinary expertise. Why would anyone want to kill her?

  A short corridor led off to the computer room where the MERMER demonstration had been carried out, Lynn Pan’s office through the wall from it, a couple of lecture rooms, another office occupied by Pan’s assistant, and a small staff room.

  The computer room had been cleared apart from the two tables on which the computer equipment had stood, and a couple of office chairs on wheels. The cables remained, but all the equipment was gone. They moved through to Pan’s private office, and Li recognised her scent lingering there still.

  Li said to the security man, ‘Get Pan’s assistant in here.’ And as an afterthought, ‘I met her yesterday, but I can’t remember her name.’

  ‘Professor Hu,’ the security man said.

  While they waited for her, Li wandered around the office. The desk top was completely cleared. The drawers had been opened and emptied. There was a lacquered wooden cupboard against the back wall, and a filing cabinet next to it. The doors of the cupboard stood ajar and it, too, was empty. There were pot plants on almost every available surface. One, which had perhaps stood upon the desk, lay smashed and broken on the floor, earth spilling across worn carpet tiles. Framed certificates hung on the walls, a testament to Pan’s educational history and professional qualifications. There was a photograph of her, along with another woman, taken at a graduation ceremony. They both wore mortar boards and black and crimson gowns, clutching their certificates, and smiling for the camera. It had clearly been taken several years earlier. Pan was younger-looking, long straight hair hanging down over her shoulders. Her smile had been just as radiant then. In another photograph she was pictured with a young, dark-haired American male. Li read the hand-written caption on it. With Doctor Lawrence Farwell, June 1999. She had cut her hair short by then. It suited her.

  ‘She was a pretty beautiful woman, huh?’ Wu said, peering at the photograph.

  ‘Yes, she was,’ Li said. Her eyes burned out of the picture at him, smiling, giving, reaching out, and he remembered the strange emotion which had clouded them in those last moments he had seen her alive. What he had taken as an appeal for help. If only he had answered that appeal. If only he had held back, spoken to her before he left. If only.

  The security man returned with Professor Hu. She had shoulder-length wavy hair shot through with streaks of grey. She was around five-five, tall for a Chinese woman, and painfully thin. She wore a grey business suit with a white blouse and a red scarf tied at her neck like a slash of blood. Li found it disturbing. Her eyes were red and swollen. She had obviously been doing a lot of crying.

  ‘Professor Hu,’ Li said, ‘I’m sorry to meet you again in these circumstances. I want to catch the people who did this. I want to catch the person who killed Miss Pan. And I’m going to need your help.’

  ‘I don’t see …’

  He put a finger to his lips to silence her. ‘You know this place better than any of us, Professor. I want you to walk us through it, room by room, and tell us what’s missing.’

  She nodded her willingness, and he gave her a pair of latex gloves to slip on, so that she could open filing cabinets and drawers and cupboards without disturbing evidence. Although Li did not expect forensics to find anything. This was a highly professional job. The security man had been right in that, at least.

  It took them less than fifteen minutes to go through the department. Every drawer and cupboard that was opened told the same depressing story. Empty. Empty. Empty. Every scrap of stationery, every file, the contents of every drawer. Even the bins were empty. Wu said, ‘Looks like they didn’t know what they were after, so they just took the lot.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Li said.

  Wu said, ‘Hey, Chief, you don’t break into a place like this just to empty the bins. They’ve got garbage men for that.’

  According to professor Hu, both Pan’s desktop computer and her laptop were gone, along with all her disks. She said, ‘It’s as if the place had been packed up for a removal. All that’s left is the furniture.’

  ‘Why?’ The word which was finding its way most often to the front of Li’s mind, found expression now on his lips. He turned to the professor. ‘Can you think of any reason why someone would want to steal your files?’

  She shook her head helplessly. ‘Not one,’ she said. ‘The work we were doing here was not unique. It wasn’t secret. It wasn’t even valuable. Not in financial terms.’

  ‘And can you think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill Miss Pan?’

  The Professor drew in her lips to try to prevent the tears welling in her eyes. ‘Lynn was the most beautiful, kind and thoughtful human being I ever knew,’ she said, controlling her voice with difficulty. ‘She was goodness personified. Whoever took that life must have been consumed by pure evil.’

  They re-emerged into the reception room just as Fu Qiwei, the senior forensics officer from Pau Jü Hutong, arrived with a team of three scenes of crime officers. These were the same officers who had attended the crime scene at the Millennium Monument the night before. Fu was a shrunken man with small, coal dark eyes, thinning hair dyed black and scraped back across his pate. There was nothing he hadn’t seen in a long career. Nothing left that would shock him. He had developed an acerbic sense of humour, a kind of protective shield, like a turtle’s shell. But he wasn’t smiling today. ‘A connection?’ he asked Li.

  Li inclined his head slightly. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ He turned to Wu. ‘You’d better hang on here. Start taking statements from staff and students. I’m going to take a look at her apartment.’ He was about to leave when he had a thought and turned back. ‘Professor?’ The professor was standing staring out of the window where Li had stood the previous day. She turned.

  ‘Yes, Section Chief?’

  ‘Can you tell me what time Miss Pan left the office last night?’

  ‘It was a little after five.’

  Just time for her to walk to the Millennium Monument and purchase a ticket before it closed. He said, ‘We have this notion that she might have been going to meet someone at the monument. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea who that might have been?’

  Professor Hu raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Well, of course I do.’

  The room was suddenly very quiet, and all eyes were on the dead woman’s assistant. ‘Who?’ Li asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know why you’re asking me. You should know better than anyone.’

  Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘She was meeting you, Section Chief. I took the call from you myself.’

  Li was barely aware of the change of focus in the room. All eyes were now on him. He felt like Alice in Wonderland, falling into the rabbit hole and tumbling through darkness. ‘And what did I say?’ he asked.

  The professor looked at him oddly. ‘You said you needed to speak to Miss Pan urgently, and I put you through to her. She came out of her office a few minutes later with her coat on. She’d had a meeting scheduled for six last night. She asked me to call round everyone and postpone it. Something important had come up and she had to go and talk to you.’

  ‘I didn’t call,’ Li said, and the professor looked nonplussed. ‘What made you think it was me?’

  ‘Because you—’ She stopped to correct herself. ‘Because the caller said, This is Section Chief Li Yan. We met this afternoon. I need to speak to Professor Pan on a matter of some urgency.’

  ‘Someone who knew you were here yesterday afternoon, Chief,’ Wu said. ‘That must narrow it down.’

  Li thought about it. There were any number of people who might have known he was here. It would be impossible to draw a ring and say only those inside knew. He felt sick. Pan had thought she was meeting him. She had gone to her death trusting in him. The caller must have been very persuasive. But what bizarre circumstance would have led her to accept such a strange rendezvous? He still found it hard to believe that someone had been able to pass themselves off
as him. He turned to the professor. ‘Was there nothing about the call that struck you as … odd? I mean, did this person sound like me?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’d only met you for a few minutes yesterday afternoon. I thought it was you because he said he was. I had no reason to doubt it.’

  And neither would Pan. Her Chinese was almost native, but it was American. Her experience of China was limited. Regional variations in accent would mean nothing to her. And once again, the words of Lao Dai came back to him. You have an enemy, Li Yan. Not only was this killer sending Li letters, fulfilling a promise to cut off a woman’s ears, but now he was passing himself off as Li himself. He had used Li to lure Pan to her death, innocent and trusting like a lamb to the slaughter. Li’s shock began turning to anger. He turned to Fu Qiwei. ‘Get a team out to Pan’s apartment. She wasn’t picked at random. She was killed for a reason. Maybe we’ll find it there.’

  * * *

  Sunlight filled the stairwell from the windows at the rear of the Academy as Li made his way down to the floor below. He was surprised to find Lyang in Hart’s office.

  ‘Didn’t Margaret tell you I worked here mornings?’ she said.

  Li said, ‘We haven’t had much chance to talk in the last twenty-four hours.’

  Lyang nodded gravely. ‘I saw the paper this morning. It’s awful about poor Lynn. She was just about the nicest person you could ever hope to meet.’

  Li said, ‘Is Bill around?’

  ‘He’s doing a polygraph test this morning,’ she said. ‘A favour for some of your people. Some guy accused of sexually assaulting his thirteen-year-old daughter. He’s agreed to take the test to prove his innocence. I’ll take you along if you like.’

  As they passed down a corridor on the south wing of the fourth floor, Lyang said, ‘Bill wasn’t too keen on doing this after we found out about Lynn. He was pretty cut up about it. You know it was Bill who brought her over here?’ Li nodded. ‘He feels really responsible.’ She sighed. ‘But he’d promised the people from Section Six. So …’ Her voice tailed off as she knocked gently on a door and opened it a crack. Two officers from the interrogation unit at Pau Jü Hutong turned in their chairs. ‘Alright if we come in?’ she whispered. Li knew both the faces and nodded his acknowledgement. They waved him in. The room itself was in darkness, the only light coming through what appeared to be a window into an adjoining room. It took Li a moment to realise it was a two-way mirror.