The Firemaker tct-1 Read online

  ‘I’m on it straight away, boss.’ Zhao scribbled quickly in his notebook.

  ‘Okay.’ Li sat back. ‘Any thoughts, questions, ideas?’

  Wu blew a jet of smoke lazily at the overhead fan and watched it scatter in the breeze. ‘Yeah, I got a question,’ he said. ‘Is that attractive American pathologist still working on the case with us?’ His colleagues choked back laughs of disbelief. ‘Because, I mean, you know, boss, it’s not fair you keeping her all to yourself. Some of us feel we could also benefit from her experience.’ He remained deadpan, for all the world as if it had been a serious question.

  Chen had a face like sour milk. Li said, ‘Actually, Detective, I think you would probably benefit more from a couple of years’ experience on traffic duty in Tiananmen Square.’ Which allowed the others to release their pent-up laughter. ‘You and I can take shift about.’ More laughter. Li glanced at Chen, on whose face had appeared the faintest glimmer of a smile. ‘And in answer to your question, Wu, Dr Campbell will no longer be assisting us with the inquiry.’ He closed his folder. ‘That’s all just now, unless there’s anything else?’ There wasn’t. ‘Okay, let’s go catch Johnny Ren.’

  As chairs scraped on the floor, and cigarettes were stubbed out in ashtrays, Li said, ‘Just one more thing. Keep the paperwork coming into my office down to a bare minimum, guys. Essential stuff only, please. I’ve got enough already in there to keep me fully occupied for the next five years.’

  The detectives drifted out. Chen wandered up the table to Li and touched his shoulder lightly. ‘Keep me in touch with developments.’

  Li sat for a moment after they had all gone, and found himself filled with a strange, aching melancholy. He picked up his folder and forced himself to stand up. He seemed to have lost all energy. Perhaps, he told himself, it was simply his hangover. He walked slowly back down the corridor. Although he had made light of Wu’s reference to Margaret, it had forced him to face the truth — that without her involvement in the investigation he had no real reason for seeing her. At least, not professionally. And the demands of the job were such that he wasn’t likely to have much free time in the foreseeable future. In less than five weeks she would be gone and he would be unlikely ever to see her again. So it would be pointless trying to pursue any kind of relationship in the few hours they might have together between now and then. And without the case to discuss, what would they talk about? It wasn’t as if they had much in common. In fact, it was insane for him ever to have considered that there might be something between them that could form the basis of a relationship. It was as well that an end had been put to it now. But however convincingly he told himself this, he remained resolutely unconvinced. He was deeply depressed at the thought that she might already have slipped out of his life for ever.

  The corridor was buzzing with activity — detectives and secretaries and witnesses, phones ringing; somewhere the sound of a photocopier on a large print run, the whine of a fax machine spewing out images from the ether. As Li approached the door of the detectives’ office a man bumped into him, knocking the file from his hand. He walked quickly on without an apology. Li cursed and stooped to pick up the papers that had spilled from the folder. He had caught the briefest glimpse of the man’s face, pale and tense and intent on avoiding Li’s eye. From his crouching position, he turned and looked back down the corridor at the retreating figure, and a face swam into his consciousness: a face contorted with anger and intent; a face in black and white on the page of a fax; a face that was staring up at him now from a sheet of paper on the floor of the corridor; the face of the man who had just bumped into him.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Stop! Stop that man!’

  Several people turned to stare at him in amazement. But not the man at the end of the corridor. He started running and had reached the stairs even before Li stood up. Li took off like a sprinter from starting blocks, papers from his folder flying in his wake. Someone got in his way, and with a bone-crunching collision went spinning into the wall. ‘Get out of the way!’ Li shouted. ‘Get out of the fucking way!’ Bodies scattered left and right. Detectives appeared in office doorways.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ someone shouted.

  Li reached the stairs and could hear Johnny Ren’s footsteps on the flight below. He saw a flap of Versace suit, caught a glimpse of an expensive haircut, the flash of a face turned briefly upward. He took the stairs two at a time, screaming at people to get out of his way. Above him he heard a voice shouting, ‘What the hell’s going on, Li!’ It might have been Chen. But he wasn’t about to stop and explain. He reached the foot of the stairs gasping for breath, and the heat of the day punched through the doorway and struck him like a blow. The contrast between the dark interior of Section One and the white heat of the morning sun momentarily blinded him. He raised an arm to shield his eyes and glanced right and left.

  There was no sign of Johnny Ren. Somewhere off to the right came the clatter of a bin. Li followed the noise, past the red-roofed police garage, into a narrow lane behind the shops in Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie. At the far end he saw the running figure of the Marlboro man. A bin still rocked in the dirt where it had spilled its stinking contents into the sunlight. Li vaulted the bin and pounded down the lane after Johnny Ren, brushing the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve. At the end of the lane he saw Ren turn right. Left would have taken him out on to Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie. Right took him into a maze of hutongs that turned and twisted through a jumble of crumbling brick courtyards and even narrower alleyways. He was already gone from sight by the time Li reached the turn. But he could hear his footsteps echoing off the walls. His lungs tore at his chest in a frantic attempt to suck in more oxygen, and for the first time in his life he regretted being a smoker. His only consolation was that Johnny Ren was one too, and would be sharing in Li’s pain. He was running with less conviction now, the excesses of the night before beginning to tell. His head was pounding. He turned a corner and crashed into a meandering cyclist lost in a world of adolescent fantasy. Li’s legs became somehow inextricably tied up in the front wheel and he twisted and fell, landing on top of the young cyclist. Just a boy, no more than twelve or thirteen, he yelled with pain and wriggled frantically to get out from under this big, heavy man who seemed to have dropped on him from the sky. Li cursed and staggered to his feet. Blood was oozing from a graze on his elbow, and his pants were torn at the knee. The boy was still yelling. Li grabbed his shoulders. ‘Are you all right, son?’

  But the boy’s only concern was his bicycle. ‘Look at my bike! Look what you’ve done to my bike, you moron!’ The front wheel was badly buckled.

  Li breathed a sigh of relief. Wheels could be fixed or replaced. ‘I’m a police officer,’ he gasped. ‘Go to the police station round the corner and wait for me there.’ And he started running again.

  ‘A likely fucking story!’ the boy shouted at his back. ‘You’re a fucking moron!’

  Li reached a junction fifty yards further on. He stopped, fighting for breath, and looked right and left. Nothing. Trees stirring lightly in the breeze. All that he could hear, apart from his own rasping breath, was the distant rumble of traffic on Dongzhimennei Street. He went right, walking past arched gateways to decaying siheyuan on both sides, peering in as he went. In the entrance to one, an old woman was sweeping up with a straw broom. He held out his Public Security wallet. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘Did you see a man in a dark suit? He must have passed you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I saw no one,’ she said. ‘Except for some small boys about ten minutes ago.’

  He turned immediately and started jogging back the way he had come, passing the junction where he had taken the right turn, and carrying on down to Dongzhimennei. The street was thick with traffic, a blur of bicycles in the cycle lane, the sidewalk crowded with pedestrains, a couple of street cleaners, some vegetable sellers. No one even gave him a second glance as he stood breathing hard, his face shining with sweat, looking one way, then the other. Johnny Ren w
as gone.

  * * *

  ‘Are you people blind!’ he raged at his detectives when he got back. ‘You walk out of a meeting where this guy is the main topic of discussion. You all have a photograph of him in your folders. You come back in here and you don’t notice him walking out of my office?’

  They all stood in stunned silence. The whole building was buzzing with rumour and speculation. Li’s first stop had been Chen’s office, where he had demanded armed guards on all entrances to the building, and that everyone coming in and out have their IDs checked. ‘I can’t believe this man’s audacity, Chief. We’re in the meeting room talking about how we’re going to catch him, and he walks into the building, cool as you like, and has all the time in the world to go through anything he wants to in my office.’

  ‘Is there anything missing?’ Chen asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have to go through everything on my desk.’

  None of his detectives could say whether Ren had been carrying anything when he left Li’s office. ‘We just thought he was someone from downstairs in Administration,’ Wu said. ‘No one paid him any attention.’

  Li slammed the door of his office shut and stood seething. He looked around the room and felt sick. It was tainted somehow, dirty, violated. Johnny Ren was either supremely confident, or he was insane. Probably both. He clearly had complete contempt for the police.

  Li sat down and searched through the papers on his desk. As far as he could see nothing was missing, but so much had been dumped on it during the last two days he wasn’t sure himself exactly what was there. He looked around. Everything in the room seemed in its usual place. The dozens of transcripts piled under the window looked just as they had earlier. He went through the drawers. Pens, notepads, an address book, paper-clips, a stapler, old reports from his predecessor which he had meant to clear out, a pack of chewing gum, some letters. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. What on earth had Johnny Ren been after? And why would he risk walking into the lion’s den? What possible motive could he have had?

  There was a tentative knock on the door and Zhao appeared nervously. ‘Sorry to disturb you, boss. While you were out there was a call from the Deputy Procurator General’s office. Apparently the DPG is concerned that the report he received this morning didn’t include the events of last night — in Ritan Park.’

  Li closed his eyes. ‘Shit!’ How the hell had Deputy Procurator General Zeng got to hear about that already? Li hadn’t felt inclined to revise his report of yesterday’s developments at one in the morning. Now he was paying for it. He strode to the door. Zhao backed out of his way. ‘Qian,’ he barked. ‘You written up last night’s report?’

  Qian said, ‘Just finished, boss.’

  ‘All right, get it copied and have a courier standing by to get it down to the Municipal Procuratorate. I’ll do a cover piece for it now.’

  He cursed to himself, banged the door shut and dropped into his chair. He reached for his notebook, then hesitated. If he called the Centre of Material Evidence Determination now he might get the results of the AIDS test. If that went with the report it might mollify Zeng a little to be in receipt of the day’s most recent developments. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get him Professor Xie. As he waited he ran through in his mind a summary of where they were at, for his report to Zeng: they had ruled out a drugs connection between the three murders, but with the possibility that Chao had AIDS they were running the rule over a possible homosexual link; they had, almost certainly, identified the killer, a freelance Triad hit-man from Hong Kong known as Johnny Ren, who was still at large in Beijing and, apparently, anxious to establish just how close the police were getting to him. ‘This is Professor Xie.’ The voice in his ear tore him away from his thoughts.

  ‘Professor, it’s Deputy Section Chief Li. Can you give me any idea when we might expect the result of the AIDS test?’

  ‘What AIDS test is that, Deputy Section Chief?’

  Li frowned. ‘On Chao’s blood. Dr Campbell requested it yesterday.’

  ‘Not from me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Li was caught off balance. ‘She told me she spoke to you some time after seven yesterday evening.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. And, unfortunately, such a test is no longer possible. Chao’s remains were incinerated this morning, along with all the samples.’

  ‘What?’ Li could not believe what he was hearing. ‘That body was evidence. You don’t go around destroying evidence in a murder investigation.’

  There was a long hesitation on the other end of the line. When he eventually spoke, there was a strange quality to the professor’s voice. ‘I understand his family did not wish to be in receipt of the remains.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. Chao’s body was the property of the Chinese people until we decided otherwise.’

  ‘My department had authorisation to release the body for disposal.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Deputy Section Chief, I’ll have to go. I’m in the middle of an autopsy.’ The professor hung up.

  Li sat holding the receiver for fully half a minute before eventually replacing it. Something was very, very wrong here. His hand went instinctively to his belt, searching for the leather pouch that held his watch. It wasn’t there. ‘Damn.’ He remembered breaking the chain yesterday. Where had he put it? Top right-hand drawer. He opened it. There was no sign of the watch. He reached right into the back of the drawer. It definitely wasn’t there. He ran quickly through the other drawers. Still no watch. He hadn’t noticed its absence when he was searching the drawers earlier, because he hadn’t remembered it was there. Now he felt all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. For some unfathomable reason Johnny Ren must have taken it.

  IV

  Margaret cycled without thinking, grim and determined, letting the city wash over her as she headed north through meandering, chaotic streets. She was hot and tired and angry and hurt, and thinking was a painful process. If she kept her mind empty, her feelings remained at bay, and she was able to effect a temporary escape from the world. But she could not escape China. At least, not yet. Her flight did not leave until the morning.

  As she had crossed campus to get a taxi back to her hotel after her face-down with Bob, she had spotted Lily and taken a minor diversion. Lily had seen her coming, her face reddening, in spite of herself. Margaret kept it short and sweet, an exotic blend of profanities which would have made her mother blush. Even her father, an expert in the use of colourful language, would have been shocked. But whatever satisfaction Margaret had gained from her verbal castigation of the self-important former Red Guard, it was short-lived. She had lain down on the bed when she got back to her hotel and wept for nearly an hour. A hot shower had failed to ease her tension headache. A phone call to the airline office had achieved a rescheduled return flight for the following morning. There would be a considerable additional charge, the girl had told her. She didn’t care, Margaret had told her back.

  Now, with a map and a guidebook in the basket of her bicycle, she was seeking an escape from the city, the opportunity for some solitude, time to sort out her feelings away from the chance of interruption. She passed the Beijing offices of Apple Computers, choking on the fumes that belched from the back of a diesel truck. She had been cycling for almost three-quarters of an hour, and didn’t appear to have made much impression on the route she had planned on the map. The streets always seemed so much longer in reality than they did on paper.

  After another twenty minutes, negotiating busy street markets and crowds of lunch-time cyclists, she came to a major north— south — east — west intersection and saw, diagonally across the street, the gates of Yuanmingyuan Park, the Park of Perfection and Brightness. But there was nothing very perfect about the park. It was dusty and neglected, a shabby shadow of the royal playground it had once been during the middle years of the Qing Dynasty. Then, its rolling parkland had been filled with gilded halls, tow
ers and pavilions, its centrepiece a collection of European-style marble palaces modelled on the French Sun King’s Palace of Versailles — an early experiment in the art of the joint venture. Sacked twice within forty years by British and French troops at the end of the nineteenth century, all that remained of it now were a few white marble skeletons and some weed-choked lily ponds.

  Margaret left her bike at the gates and followed the paths that the municipal authorities had carved through the parkland. Past a boating lake, where forlorn red-dragon pedaloes bobbed at the water’s edge. Past stalls where painted girls chatted idly behind high counters of cheap mementos. Battered loudspeakers hung from lampposts and wooden poles at every turn, scratching out sad Chinese dirges performed on plucked stringed instruments. The historic sites were crowded, and with the aid of the map on the back of her admission ticket, Margaret navigated herself away from the beaten tourist track along a narrow tree-lined lane that cut into the farmland heart of the park. Away, at last, from people, the sound of sad music drifting distantly on the breeze, she finally slowed and lingered in the shade of some spindly birches, squatting at the edge of a brackish pond that was alive with frogs. Paddy fields, shimmering in the haze, stretched into the distance on either side. Green shoots of rice pushed up through the still brown water. It made her think of McCord and his super-rice feeding the hungry millions. She snorted her derision. What did people like McCord really care about those hungry millions? Perhaps she was just cynical, but she couldn’t help believing that the diseased, the dying and the hungry were simply convenient meal tickets for scientists anxious to grab as big a slice of the research cake as they could get their hands on. She thought of Chao and his association with McCord going back to their time together at the Boyce Thompson Institute. How that chance meeting had brought McCord to China, leading to the development of the super-rice and Chao’s elevation to adviser to the Minister of Agriculture. And Chao’s death had led her here, to the Park of Perfection and Brightness, to gaze sadly upon their genetically modified rice pushing its green shoots up through the still brown water.