The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1) Read online

  She looked at him, surprised. ‘But you must have been at dozens.’

  ‘I have. And I want to throw up every time.’

  Which made her smile. ‘You poor soul.’

  ‘I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it. Cutting up dead bodies. Or living ones. In fact, that’s probably worse. Diseases and cancers. People dying all the time.’

  ‘That’s what got to me,’ she said. ‘People dying on me. It’s much easier dealing with the dead. You don’t get attached to them.’ She removed the lid from her cup and sipped at the tea. It was still very hot, and wonderfully refreshing. ‘I used to think medicine was vocational. You know, something you were born to. But I’m pretty cynical about it now. Most doctors I know are in it for the money. I’d wanted to be a doctor as long as I could remember. To help people, to save their lives, to ease their pain. But it’s not like that. There’s never enough money, there’s never enough time. When you graduate from medical school you think you know it all, then you find out you know nothing. Whatever you can do, it’s never enough.

  ‘When I worked in the emergency room at the UIC Medical Centre, I had people in my care dying nearly every day. Stabbings, muggings, poor bastards pulled from car wrecks, kids hit by automobiles, fires, suicides. You name it. They’d come in with arms and legs hanging off. People burned from head to toe, so bad they don’t feel a thing. They’ll sit talking to you, and you know what they don’t – in a couple of hours they’re going to die. They talk about patients in trauma. But half the time the doctors are in trauma, too. There’s a limit to how much of that you can take, Li Yan, before you start turning into some kind of automaton.

  ‘The dead? They’re gone. Where, I don’t know. But the body’s just a receptacle, and I can be cold and detached and clinical about cutting it up, because whoever that person was is not there now.’

  Her tea was cooling, and she took a longer draught of it and nibbled some sunflower seeds.

  ‘I think maybe doctors must be a little like cops,’ Li said. ‘No home life.’

  Margaret flicked him a glance and then looked away again quickly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No home life worth a damn.’

  He took his life in his hands and strayed into that unknown and potentially treacherous territory he had come close to twice before. ‘Is that why you and your husband divorced?’

  She met his eye head-on. ‘Oh, we didn’t get divorced,’ she said.

  He was taken by surprise, confused and disappointed. ‘But you said you were no longer …’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said simply, interrupting.

  ‘Oh.’ Li knew he’d just stood on a land-mine. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m not.’ But her voice was tight with emotion. She reined it in and kept it to herself for some moments, staring at her hands. Then she said, ‘Michael was a good-looking guy. All the girls thought he was gorgeous, and all my friends thought I was so lucky when we got engaged. So did I. But then, what do you know at twenty-four?’ She took a deep, trembling breath. ‘He was a few years older than me, so I guess I looked up to him. He was so smart, and so passionate about stuff. Especially genetics. And he was always bucking the Establishment, taking the unorthodox view, speaking his mind, even at the expense of his career. That’s why he ended up lecturing at the Roosevelt when he was capable of so much better. I admired him for his principles.’ There was a sad fondness in her smile as she remembered.

  ‘In the early days we used to sit up talking late into the night, smoking dope and drinking beer and putting the world to rights. Like teenagers. We were big kids, really.

  ‘But then, life started taking over. For me, anyway. You know how it is. You get your first job. You’re on the first rung of the ladder. They know it, so they work you every hour God gives. You know it, so you do it ’cos you want to climb the ladder. Michael wanted kids, I didn’t. Not then, anyway. There was a lot I still had to achieve in life. I wasn’t about to throw it all away for motherhood. There would be time for that, or so I thought.

  ‘So maybe it was my fault he started playing around. But I think maybe he’d always been doing it. I just never knew until it all came out at the trial.’ She stopped herself, wondering why she was telling him all this. It was coming so easy, pouring from her like blood from a wound, or maybe pus from an infected sore.

  She glanced up and found his eyes fixed on her, deep and dark and sympathetic. Then for a moment she became aware of the girl who had served them shuffling idly between the tables, adjusting a chair she might have adjusted a dozen times before, wiping a speck of dust from a table, her mind lost in thoughts of a life they would never know.

  ‘I should have known from my student days,’ Margaret said. ‘There was always one lecturer, maybe younger than the rest though not always, that the girls would all find attractive. And for a semester, or maybe even a whole year, one of them would have a passionate affair with him. They had so much in common, she would tell the others. He was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced. By the end of the year she would grow up and move on, and he would have another passionate affair with some kid the next year, some starry-eyed young girl who would think he was so intelligent, so mature, so experienced.’ Margaret’s smile was bitter and sad. ‘Michael was one of those. Every year another student, or maybe two. And he would sit up with them into the small hours, smoking dope and drinking beer, putting the world to rights. While I was working ninety-five-hour weeks as an intern, busting a gut to build a career.’ Her eyes started to fill, and for a moment she panicked, thinking she might start to cry. She blinked furiously, and a couple of salty drops splashed on the lacquered surface of the table. She drained her tea, down to the thick green leaves that had sunk to the bottom of the cup. Without a word Li refilled her cup, and then she felt his hand slip over hers, warm and dry and comforting. She blinked at him and smiled bravely. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …’ She sighed. ‘I should never have started this.’

  ‘It is all right,’ he said softly. ‘Go on if you want to. Stop if you don’t.’

  She withdrew her hand from his and took a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. ‘The first I knew anything about it,’ she said, ‘was when the police came to arrest him.’ She remembered vividly how it had been. ‘I was with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office by that time. I’d been working late. Michael was still up when I got home. He’d been smoking a lot of dope and was acting pretty strange. There’d been a murder on campus, in the student residence. One of his students, a nineteen-year-old girl, raped and battered to death. We’d been talking about it the day before. He seemed pretty shocked. I’d fallen asleep on the settee, and the next I knew the police were at the door. Six in the morning. I was still half asleep. I didn’t really know what was happening. They read him his Miranda rights, cuffed him and took him away. He just kept saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags, I didn’t do it”.’ She glanced up at Li, a hint of what he took to be something close to shame in her eyes. ‘And I believed him. Or, at least, I wanted to.’

  She shook her head. ‘The trial was a nightmare. He pled not guilty, of course. But there was overwhelming forensic and DNA evidence against him. The prosecution said he’d been drinking and that he couldn’t take the rejection when the girl said no. They said he was used to getting his way with young girls, attractive, impressionable students falling at his feet year after year. A procession of them came to the witness stand and went through their affairs with him in graphic detail.’ She took a moment to control herself. ‘The thing is, I knew it was true. Everything they said. It was just Michael. I was so angry – with myself, for not having seen it. I could believe it of him so easily. I just couldn’t believe he was a murderer. My family, my friends, everyone thought the same. He’d been a rat. Sure. But kill someone? Michael? No, not Michael. Not dear, sweet, intelligent Michael with all his great liberal ideas and his concern for humankind.

  ‘So I did everyt
hing in my power to try to undermine the scientific evidence against him. The blood, the semen, the fibres collected at the scene. Contaminated. All contaminated. Sloppy police work, I said. His legal team did a good job. But not good enough. He was no O. J. Simpson. He couldn’t afford the best. The trial lasted three weeks and it took every penny we had. We lost the apartment, the automobile. I moved in with a friend.’ She paused, lost for a long time in private thought. ‘The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to life. And still he was saying, “I didn’t do it, Mags. You gotta believe me, I didn’t do it”. So I started borrowing money to kick off the appeals procedure. But it wasn’t going well, and he was more and more depressed every time I went to see him. And then one night I got a phone call. He’d hanged himself in his cell. He was dead. It was over, and I could always believe he was innocent. The victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. That’s what my folks said, and my friends. They were really supportive. I cried for about twelve hours, till I got that I was aching so much I couldn’t feel a thing.

  ‘Then the next day I get this letter through the door. It’s his handwriting. I knew it right away. It was like he’d come back from the dead, and I still wasn’t used to him not being alive. It didn’t say much.’ She bit her lip as she remembered. ‘“Dear Mags, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. But I just can’t go on living with this. I never meant to kill her. I hope you’ll believe that. I’ll always love you. Mikey.”’ Big, silent tears ran down Margaret’s cheeks. ‘He couldn’t live with it. But he made damn sure I had to. Like he was passing on all the guilt. He killed that girl. He raped her and then he hit her again and again and again until he had smashed her skull. He had lied to me about everything. Why couldn’t he have lied to me one last time?’ She put her fist to her mouth and bit down hard on the knuckles. Li stretched over and pulled it gently away and held her hand as she sobbed, and the tears splashed in great heavy drops on the table, glistening in the flickering candlelight.

  It was several minutes before she could speak again. Her tissue was sodden, her eyes red and swollen, her cheeks blotched. ‘I never told anyone before,’ she said. ‘About the letter. It was easier to let everyone else go on believing the lie, or at least hold back from giving them a reason not to.’

  ‘Does it help?’ he asked gently. ‘Having told me?’

  ‘It may not look like it.’ She half laughed through the tears. ‘But I haven’t felt this good in months.’

  She didn’t know why she had told him. Perhaps because he was a stranger, a long way from her life back home, from her friends and her family; because in a few weeks she would be getting on a plane and flying back across the Pacific and would never see him again; because she felt close to him, drawn by his deep, dark eyes and the sensitivity she knew they reflected. But maybe simply because she had needed to tell someone. Anyone. The burden of guilt and hurt and confusion had just become too much to bear. And already she felt the weight of it lifted from her. But she was glad it was Li, and in those moments she felt as close to him as she had felt to anyone in years.

  Li, too, was wondering why she had told him. It was almost scary to be the recipient of something so personal, to share in so much of someone else’s pain. He felt privileged, too. She had made herself supremely vulnerable, demonstrating an enormous trust in him, even if she was getting on a plane in five weeks’ time to fly out of his life for ever. He had never, in his thirty-three years, felt so drawn to someone as he was to Margaret now. He was frightened to speak, to do anything that would spoil the moment or bring it to an end. Her hand felt very small in his. He ran his thumb lightly over the Mekong delta of blue veins that ran down the back of it, and felt the pulsing of her blood. He wanted to hold her whole body to him, and feel its life and its warmth and keep it safe. But he did nothing. Said nothing.

  After a while she made a little sigh and withdrew her hand from his, searching again for another tissue in her purse. But she couldn’t find one. ‘Do I look awful?’ she said.

  ‘No more than usual.’ He smiled.

  She returned the smile, but it was watery and wounded. ‘I think I could do with a drink,’ she said. ‘Something a little stronger than tea.’

  II

  Outside, the dark night was filled with a sense of anticipation. The rain was so close you could almost touch it. Families still filled the spaces on the sidewalk and under the trees, but were subdued now, children curled up on mothers’ knees, card games in suspended animation. The men sat and smoked in silence; the hot wind of earlier had stilled, and their cigarette smoke rose in undisturbed columns. Dust and humidity hung in the air, turned blue by floodlights on a building site across the avenue. Great yellow cranes stood silently overhead, waiting for the first drops to come. The road was thick with traffic moving in long, slow columns. Cicadas were screaming in the trees. Everyone and everything, it seemed, was waiting for the rain.

  Li and Margaret walked slowly east along the sidewalk past brightly lit barber shops, small stores selling shoes and underwear and throwing great rectangular slabs of light out into the darkness. The sounds of washing-up in restaurant kitchens came from open windows up narrow alleys. Li’s hand engulfed hers and she was happy to leave it there, comforted by its warmth and strength. He knew a bar, he said, at Xidan. They could get a drink there. They walked in silence, his mind full of what she had emptied from hers. And she was happy not to think of anything, to have her mind filled by nothing; no regrets, no sadness, no pain. They passed a small shop whose speciality was shoe repair and key-cutting, its window giving on to a workshop where an old man in greasy overalls sweated over a last. Rows of key blanks hung on rods beside the cutting machine.

  Margaret stopped, her hand slipping from his. He turned to see her face etched in concentration as she stared in the window. He looked to see what she saw, and saw nothing but the old man at the last and the key blanks on rods. ‘What is it?’

  The clouds had rolled back from her eyes and they shone brightly in the light from the shop. ‘The key,’ she said. ‘The key to the stair gate. The killer must have used it to unlock the gate, right? Whether he locked it behind him or not is unimportant. What’s important is he didn’t leave it in the lock or drop it on the floor. He must have put it in his pocket.’

  For Li, this had come straight out of left-field, catching him on the blind-side. ‘Hey, wait. Slow down,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Can we go to the park?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s pitch dark. And it’ll be locked up.’

  ‘That didn’t stop the killer getting in.’ Her eyes were burning now with a strange intensity. ‘Please, Li Yan. This could be important.’

  She wouldn’t discuss it further as they took a taxi back to Section One to pick up a car and a flashlight. She might be wrong, she said. She wanted to walk him through it at the scene. There, it would either make sense or not. He didn’t press her.

  They drove through the deserted streets of the Ritan legation area, streetlamps smothered by trees, embassy lights twinkling behind high walls and shut gates. In Guanghua Road, alive in the day with street traders and hawkers of every description, the gates to the park were also closed, locked and forbidding. The park lay brooding in the darkness beyond.

  ‘This is crazy,’ Li said. ‘Can’t it wait till the morning?’

  ‘No.’ Margaret jumped out of the Jeep and started climbing the gate. ‘Come on,’ she called. ‘It’s not difficult. And bring the flashlight.’

  Li sighed and did as he was told. He wondered if he would have indulged her in this behaviour had it not been for her confession of just an hour before, or if she had not aroused in him such intense feelings of … of what? He had no idea. He had never felt like this before.

  He climbed the gate easily and dropped down on the other side to join her. A long, straight avenue lined by trees and park benches cut north into the darkness. As they moved further into the park, a
way from the streetlights, he switched on his flashlight to lead her through the maze of paths that would take them to the lake.

  The park, so open and friendly during the day, dappled by sunlight, and filled with the peace of people seeking solitude or relaxation, seemed oddly menacing in the dark – the rustle of night animals in the undergrowth, the eerie call of an owl, the splash of something landing in water as they neared the lake. The sweet scent of pine filled the hot night air, and the willows hung limp and lifeless, trailing their leaves along the edges of the still water. Li’s flashlight picked out the bridge to the pavilion, reflected white in the black water. ‘This way.’ He took her hand and led her round the east side of the lake to the dusty path that led up to the clearing where the twins and their baby-sitter had stumbled upon the blazing body of Chao Heng less than forty-eight hours before. A length of yellow tape was stretched between two stakes to keep the public out. Li stepped over it, and Margaret followed him up to the clearing. A line of chalk still ringed the crime scene, glowing white in the glare of the flashlight. A charred area remained in the centre of the clearing, but the smell of burning had long ago been replaced by the pungent spice of spruce and locust. But there was a desolate and haunted feel about the place, bled of all colour, monochrome in the harsh electric light. There was a sudden and unexpected flash in the sky, followed a few moments later by the not very distant rumble of thunder. The first fat drops of rain started falling, forming tiny craters in the dust.

  ‘Better make it quick,’ Li said. ‘We’re going to get soaked.’

  But Margaret was oblivious. She walked carefully around the clearing, pulling at the shrubs around its perimeter, stopping finally, facing the path they had come up on the other side. Li had tracked her round with the beam of the flashlight. ‘He was wearing gloves, right?’ she said.

  Li nodded acquiescence. ‘He didn’t leave any prints – in the apartment or on the gasoline can. He must have been.’