Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Read online

  ‘Well, think about it. Someone out there is producing carbon copy killings of the Jack the Ripper murders. Always the same MO. Strangulation, and then the cutting of the throat. Half-smoked Russian cheroot left by the body. We get a letter from him threatening to cut off the ears of the next victim. It’s word for word the same as the first of the Jack the Ripper letters. The next victim is Pan. She is strangled, has her throat cut. A Russian cheroot is found by the body. Her ears are cut off. It has to be the same killer.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Think about the things that don’t match. The fact that Pan wasn’t a prostitute. The fact that she was murdered in another part of the city from all the other victims. The fact that she wasn’t mutilated – apart from the cutting off of the ears.’

  Li shook his head vigorously, heaving himself out of his chair. ‘It doesn’t matter. The things that don’t match don’t matter.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because only the killer of the first four victims would be able to replicate the things that do match in the fifth.’ He opened out both palms and cocked his head, as if challenging her to contradict him. And he waited.

  She looked at him speculatively for a moment, then said, ‘You’re overlooking something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The killer is not the only person who knows his MO.’

  He stared at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Well, who else?’

  ‘Every police officer on the investigation.’

  He was about to dismiss the notion out of hand. But something stopped him. A memory that wormed its way to the head of the queue of thoughts fighting for space in his mind. A conversation he’d had with Bill Hart after the MERMER demonstration at the Academy. Of course, it has to be used very carefully, Hart had said. I mean, think about it. You’re the investigating officer. You make a detailed examination of the crime scene, so now you carry the same information in your brain as the killer. Can we always be sure we’ll know which is which, who is who? But he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting that someone on my team murdered Lynn Pan?’

  Margaret shrugged. ‘Someone who used the other murders as a convenient cover. Someone who knew enough detail to make it convincing and throw your investigation into confusion. Who else but a cop would have access to that information?’

  Thoughts tumbled through Li’s brain like balls in a lottery drum. He didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t find a convincing counter argument. If the DNA didn’t match, it was the only possible answer. Which meant they were now looking for two killers. And one of them was someone he knew.

  In his search for some alternative, his eyes fell upon a pile of envelopes and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper sitting on the table. At first he wasn’t even looking at them, they were just a convenient focus for the eye. He was running through all the people on his team, the officers from forensics, the pathology lab, everyone who would have access to the kind of information which would allow them to stage Lynn Pan’s killing in such a way that Li would think it was another Ripper murder. And then another ugly little thought sneaked up out of left field and he found himself staring at the parcel on the table and listening to the blood pulsing in his head. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he said.

  Margaret looked towards the table. ‘Just the mail. I picked it up when I came back from the autopsy.’ And then she realised what was in his head. ‘Oh, God …’ It was barely a whisper.

  The parcel was about twelve centimetres square, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with sticky tape. Li’s name and address was written on it, in what seemed to Li like a familiar hand. But there were no stamps. No postmark. It had been hand-delivered. ‘Do we have any gloves in the house?’ he said, not taking his eyes off it.

  Margaret nodded and ran off to the kitchen. She returned a few moments later with a pair of clear plastic disposable food-handling gloves. She kept a box of them in the cupboard above the food preparation area. Li took them and pulled them on, and very carefully began picking at the sticky tape until he had raised a corner of it. Then he eased it free of the paper, a centimetre at a time until he was able to open one end of the parcel. He slid out a plain, white cardboard box tied with a red ribbon. He undid the ribbon and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled in cotton wool stained with blood that had dried and turned brown, were Lynn Pan’s ears. Margaret’s gasp was quite involuntary. Li felt nausea turning to anger. Tucked down the side of the box was a folded note. He gently eased it out and open it up. Red ink. And what appeared to be the same, spidery handwriting as before.

  Dear Chief,

  A couple of ears for you. As promised.

  Sincerely,

  Jack.

  Chapter Eight

  I

  A red flag flapped in the wind outside the white-tiled police station on the corner of Fanggu Lu and Fangxing Lu. As the sun went down, the wind was doing its best to detach stubborn leaves from the scholar trees that lined the street. A couple of bicycle repair men on the corner wore gloves to protect oily fingers from the cold as they worked on the skeleton of an upturned cycle, the last job of the day. Li drove past the sports centre on his left, basketball courts and soccer pitches, a domed stadium with indoor tennis courts. Beyond it, traffic buzzed like flies dying in the autumn cold around the multi-storey Feng Chung shopping centre. At the end of the street he parked and crossed to the apartment block on the corner. A jian bing lady was selling pancakes from a stand in the gardens, while a warden swaddled in blue coat and red armband wore a white face mask as she patrolled the perimeter, casting a long shadow across the grass.

  At the entrance to Lao Dai’s apartment, a couple of tricycle goods carriers were parked under a tin roof, and another Chinese flag snapped and cracked like a whip in the breeze. Li climbed the couple of steps to the door and went in. A short flight of stairs led to a lobby and the elevator. A stairgate stood ajar at the entrance to the stairwell. Off to the left, a corridor led to a door with a plaque which read, Veteran Senior Officers Activity Centre. For some reason it was also labelled in English, Old Cadres. Li knocked and walked in. An old man with a very large pair of glasses sat reading the Beijing Youth Daily next to a dispenser of bottled water. He looked up at Li, his face expressionless, then he looked at the front page of his paper and then back at Li.

  ‘Ni hau,’ Li said, and the old man nodded silent acknowledgement.

  A big screen television stood on a wooden cabinet next to a tall refrigerator which had seen better days. In an alcove at the far end of the room the last sunshine of the day slanted in through windows on two sides. Two old men sat playing chess among the pot plants. From a room in a corridor leading off, Li heard the sound of men’s voices raised in an argument.

  The apartment was provided by the Ministry of Public Security for retired senior police officers. Li wondered if he, too, would end up in a place like this one day. He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table with the chess players. For some reason, Old Dai never went to the park on a Tuesday.

  ‘You just cannot keep your face off the front pages of the newspapers these days, can you?’ Dai said, without looking up.

  ‘So it seems,’ Li replied. He paused. ‘Dai, I need your advice.’

  Dai’s chess partner immediately rose to his feet. He had a long, lugubrious face, and a cardigan that hung open to reveal an egg-stained shirt. ‘No cheating,’ he said, and he headed out into the stairwell.

  Old Dai grinned. ‘As if I needed to.’ And then his smile faded. ‘You are in trouble?’

  Li sighed. ‘Maybe.’

  Dai returned to his examination of the chessboard. ‘You had better tell me.’

  ‘I think the woman killed last night might have been murdered by a police officer.’

  Dai lifted his eyes from the chessboard, all thoughts of the game banished from his mind. ‘Why do you think this?’

  Li told him, and Dai sat listening in silence a
nd gazing pensively from the window. When he had finished, Li added, ‘Margaret has taken the ears to the pathology department to confirm that they are Lynn Pan’s. Not that I think there is any doubt. A visual match will do for now. A DNA match will seal it for the record.’

  ‘And the handwriting?’

  ‘I have requested a calligrapher to compare the characters on the note that came with the ears, to the characters on the one that came with the kidney. Forensics are comparing the inks.’

  ‘But you don’t expect a match?’

  ‘No.’

  Dai sat in silence for some time. At length he said, ‘The parcel with the ears had no stamp or postmark?’

  ‘It was hand-delivered.’

  ‘So whoever left it in your post-box had access to the Ministry compound.’

  ‘A cop,’ Li said flatly.

  Dai nodded. But it was not a nod of agreement. Only an acknowledgement. ‘I am puzzled,’ he said.

  ‘Why? What’s puzzling you?’

  ‘If this police officer had knowledge of the previous murders, and wished you to believe that Miss Pan died by the same hand, why would he leave his saliva on the cigar? For he would know, surely, that when you tested the DNA it would not match.’ He looked Li in the eye. ‘That was careless of him, don’t you think?’

  II

  Li drove north on the East Third Ring Road. It was dark now and the tail lights of the traffic stretched ahead of him into a hazy distance. The city basked in its own light, buildings illuminated against the black of the night sky, a million windows lit like stars in a firmament. When he went to see Dai he had been certain that he was looking for two killers. Both of them somewhere out there. One of them tangible. Li had seen him, been mocked by him, without ever knowing who he was. The other a phantom, an idea born of an unexpected DNA result and a host of inconsistencies. A policeman, someone he knew. One of his team. But, as usual, Dai had made him question everything. In my day we had no DNA testing, he had said. It is possible to pick up a sesame seed but lose sight of a watermelon. But when it came to Pan’s murder, no matter how much he wanted not to believe it, he could not question Margaret’s logic in pointing the finger of accusation at a cop. It was the only explanation that brought consistency to inconsistency. And if it was true, then he was even further from solving this puzzle than he had thought.

  And yet, Dai had sown a seed of doubt somewhere in the back of his mind, and it had taken root there and was growing. For an experienced cop to have left DNA traces that would blow apart his subterfuge, seemed unthinkable. But, then again, to make a mistake in the heat of the moment, while committing the presumably unaccustomed act of murder, was not. And, still, the biggest question of all was, why?

  Li felt his eyes closing as confusion and uncertainty washed over him in a wave of fatigue, and the vehicle in front – a taxi – seemed suddenly no more than inches away. He jammed on his brakes, and the car behind blared its horn. He swerved, almost losing control, then pulled himself back on track, tiredness swept away by a moment of fear and the heart it had left pounding fiercely in his chest. This was crazy!

  He had arranged to meet Margaret outside the Harts’ apartment block on the edge of the Central Business District. She would take a taxi back from the pathology lab, she had told him. On the way she would drop off Li Jon to spend the night at Mei Yuan’s tiny siheyuan home on the shores of Qianhai Lake.

  A dinner party, an evening of social chit-chat, was the last thing Li felt like. All he wanted to do was sleep, to close his stinging eyes, rest his aching head on a pillow and drift off into some dreamworld where whatever happened, he was always assured of waking up. But it was too late to back out now. And what was it the Americans said: a change is as good as a rest?

  He turned off the ring road at Jinsong Bridge and swept from the exit ramp on to Lianguang Road. The Music Home apartments were a blaze of lights, green glass and grey cladding. The shopping mall on the ground floor of the main block was still doing business. Li parked in the street and found Margaret waiting for him outside the entrance lobby. He raised his eyebrows in an unasked question and she nodded. ‘They match,’ she said. ‘We’ll get the DNA results tomorrow. But, really, we don’t need them.’ There was nothing more to be said. She took his arm and they went through glass doors into a huge lobby with inlaid floors and an arched gold ceiling. A security man at the desk asked politely if he could help. They told him who they were and he telephoned the Harts’ apartment before letting them through to the gardens.

  ‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘Lyang said this was Bill’s one concession to western comfort, but this isn’t comfort, it’s goddamned opulence.’

  Contained within the complex of apartment blocks, and the two landmark towers with their grand piano lids, was nine thousand square metres of landscaped garden on the theme of the four seasons. There was a beach around a kidney-shaped pool, paths and walkways through clusters of trees representing everything from summer through fall to winter and spring. There was a stream spanned by tiny bridges at several points along its length, and a garden cafeteria. On the east side, a sports complex contained an indoor swimming pool with tennis courts above it. At each end, ramps led down to an underground carpark beneath the gardens. Now, however, as the cold November winds blew down from the north, heralding the arrival of winter, the gardens were sad and empty.

  Li felt uncomfortable here. As if he had stepped through the looking glass into another world on the far side. This was not the Beijing he knew. There was nothing Chinese about any of it. This, and places like it, were built for the business community, the three hundred thousand foreigners at the heart of the city’s new commercial engine, and the Chinese nouveau riche who bought up all the new apartments and rented for profits of thirty and forty per cent. It was a bubble, double-glazed and insulated from the real world that he knew outside. A world where Chinese people worked hard, died hard and earned little, living and dying in tiny apartments with communal toilets and inadequate heating. A world where prostitutes were being murdered by a maniac living out some twisted fantasy.

  They made their way through the gardens to the far side and into the tower on the north-west corner. An elevator sped them soundlessly up to the twenty-third floor and they stepped out into a carpeted hallway. Lyang was waiting for them at the far end, at the open door of the Harts’ apartment.

  ‘Hey, guys. Welcome to our humble home.’ She grinned and kissed them both on each cheek. In the entrance hall, slippers awaited them on a mat, and they kicked off their shoes to slip them on. The floors were dark polished mahogany. A staircase led off to an upper floor, and they walked through lush Chinese rugs into an open living room whose balcony gave on to a stunning view across the city and the gardens below. Concealed lighting along the perimeter of the ceiling was augmented by Chinese lanterns. Antique cabinets, and bookcases groaning with collectors’ items, lined walls that were hung with original scroll paintings by famous Chinese artists. Through open sliding doors leading off an open-plan dining room, they could see into a fitted kitchen which issued smells that were, finally, stimulating Li’s digestive juices. There was a cinema ratio plasma TV screen on one wall, and beside a state of the art stereo system playing muted jazz, Bill Hart was pouring cocktails at a drinks cabinet.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘No arguments. You guys have got to taste my patent Beijing margaritas with crushed ice.’

  ‘No arguments from me,’ Margaret said.

  He kissed her on both cheeks and handed her a drink and then shook Li’s hand. ‘Good to see you, Li Yan. You look whacked.’

  ‘You’re looking pretty good yourself,’ Li said wryly, and accepted his drink from the American.

  Margaret waved a hand around the room. ‘Obviously, I’m in the wrong business. Witchcraft clearly pays better than medicine.’

  Hart laughed. ‘I thought it was voodoo.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  He passed a drink to Lyang. ‘Actually, the money’s pretty crap. Well, h
ere in China anyway.’ His smiled faded. ‘Lyang probably told you, I inherited the house in Boston when my wife died.’ He shrugged as if embarrassed. ‘I also picked up a fat insurance cheque that I’d happily have torn in a thousand pieces in return for a chance to turn back the clock. But I couldn’t. So I figured, spend it. I never expected to have it, I wouldn’t miss it when it was gone.’ He let his eyes wander around the room. ‘So we live well. And if we ever have to go back to the States …’ his eyes flickered towards Li and then away again,’… we can rent this place out to give ourselves a nice little income.’

  ‘You want to see around?’ Lyang said. She was dying to show them.

  ‘Sure,’ Margaret said.

  Li would happily have sunk into one of the comfortable-looking armchairs arranged around a central coffee table, but good manners dictated that he look enthusiastic, and he nodded and forced a smile of false interest across his face.

  They put their drinks on the table, and Lyang led them back out into the entrance hall and up polished stairs that turned back on themselves at a halfway landing, leading up then to a long central hallway. At one end was the guest bedroom, which doubled as a study, at the other the master bedroom and the baby’s room. There was also a large storeroom which Lyang said the sales people had told them was a maid’s room. No windows, no ventilation. ‘Foreign architects,’ she said. ‘They probably imagined that would be luxury to us poor Chinese.’

  They peeked quietly into the baby’s room and heard the slow, rhythmic breathing of a sleeping child. There were expensive Chinese rugs everywhere, thick-piled and soft underfoot, and from somewhere they had managed to acquire a four-poster bed for the master bedroom. The view from here faced north, towards the lights of the China World Trade Center. In the street a long way below, a traditional Beijing restaurant was doing good business.

  Li figured Mao must be turning in his mausoleum.

  When they got back downstairs, Lyang excused herself and hurried into the kitchen. Li sank gratefully into the armchair that had been beckoning ever since they arrived and took a long drink of his margarita over a salted rim. He felt the alcohol rushing straight to his brain and immediately began to relax. Perhaps this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least he could escape for a few hours from the horrors of the Beijing Ripper and his victims, and the thought that Lynn Pan had been murdered by someone he knew.