The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1) Read online

  ‘It wasn’t next to the body. Forensics found it over there.’ He pointed to the west side of the clearing.

  Li was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Anyone see him arriving?’

  Qian made a moue with his lips and exhaled sharply through them. ‘Nobody’s come forward yet. We’re trying to get the names of everyone who was in the park from six this morning. A lot of them will be the same people who come every day. Someone might have seen a man carrying a can, but it isn’t much of a description to offer them. I’ve already spoken to the ticket clerk but she has no recollection. Until we know who he is and maybe get a photograph …’ He shrugged.

  ‘What about the people who found the body?’

  ‘A nanny – a peasant girl from Shanxi province – and a couple of kids. They’re down there in the ambulance. The nanny was in a worse state than the kids. I think the paramedics have given her a sedative.’

  When Li stepped into the ambulance, he was taken aback to see that the girls were twins. Pretty girls, unspoilt as yet by the approach of adulthood and the loss of innocence – unaware, perhaps, how lucky they were. Since the introduction of the One-Child Policy to control the population explosion, it was rare for any child to have a brother or sister. And a whole new generation would never know the joy of an extended family with uncles and aunts. There was no way of knowing the long-term effects on a society so orientated around the traditional family. But there was a reluctant acceptance by the Chinese that the alternative was worse – a spiralling population growth leading to inevitable starvation and economic chaos.

  The girls regarded him solemnly, a strange outward calm concealing the trauma of what they must have witnessed. Their baby-sitter, on the other hand, was still sobbing feebly, clutching a damp handkerchief to her mouth, sucking on a corner of it for comfort.

  ‘Hi.’ Li sat down opposite them and spoke directly to the twins. ‘Did you girls see the dancers earlier?’ They nodded eagerly. ‘And those guys that go swinging the swords about? They really scare me.’ The girls giggled. ‘Do you come to the park every day?’

  ‘No,’ one of them said.

  ‘Just sometimes,’ the other added. ‘Usually with Mommy.’

  Qian watched Li from the door, thinking what a good manner he had with the kids. Gentle, positive. And they responded to him.

  ‘But you were with your nanny today?’ They nodded again. ‘Did you see anyone near the path out there, before you went up to where the fire was?’ This time it was a solemn shaking of the heads. ‘No one moving away, maybe round the lake?’ Again the shaking of heads. ‘Good girls. You’ve done really well. But I don’t think you want to hang around here any longer, do you?’

  ‘No,’ they said in chorus.

  ‘So my friend here …’ He nodded towards Qian. ‘… is going to get a nice policeman to buy you some ice cream and then take you home to see your mom. Okay?’

  Their faces lit up. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can we have strawberry?’

  ‘You can have whatever flavour you like, sweetheart.’ He ruffled their heads and they scrambled out to be led off by Qian. He turned to the baby-sitter. ‘Okay … Just relax.’ He moved over and sat beside her and took her hand. It was a small, fleshy hand used to toil. He felt the line of calluses on the palm. She was probably no more than sixteen or seventeen. ‘This is hard for you, I know. Because you’ve never seen anything like this before.’ He spoke very softly and felt a sob shudder through her body. ‘But we really need your help here, and I know that you want to help us all you can.’ She nodded vigorously. ‘So just take your time and tell me what happened.’

  ‘It was the smoke,’ she said, breath catching the back of her throat. ‘The children were running to see what it was. I kept shouting at them to stop, but they were in such high spirits.’

  ‘So you followed them up the path.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the body was still on fire?’

  The tears filled her eyes again as she remembered. ‘He was still alive. Reaching out to me, like he was asking for help.’

  *

  Li found Pathologist Wang squatting down by the lakeside. Having divested himself of his white gloves, he was having a smoke. Li hunkered down beside him and was offered a cigarette. Without a word, he took one and the pathologist lit it. ‘So what do you think?’ Li asked. He drew deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nostrils, trying to get rid of the smell.

  ‘I think there are times I don’t much like my job.’ He glanced grimly at Li. ‘Looks like some kind of weird suicide ritual. On a cursory examination there’s no sign of blood or injury prior to the burning. So unless an autopsy tells us otherwise, you can probably assume he burned to death.’

  ‘One of the witnesses says he was still alive when they found him.’ Reaching out, like he was asking for help. The nanny’s interpretation of what she saw had formed a gruesomely indelible image in Li’s mind.

  ‘Which pretty much fixes time of death, and rules out foul play prior to burning,’ Wang concluded. ‘We get him back to Pao Jü Hutong and I’ll do a preliminary. Should be able to tell a little more about him then. But if you want a full autopsy …’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then you’re going to have to send him up to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the university.’ He stood up. ‘But first we want to get him into the fridge fast – to stop him cooking.’

  After the body had been removed, and the ambulance and various police vehicles had gone, the crowd started to break up, reluctantly drawn back to the relentless humdrum of their everyday lives. Li, however, lingered a little longer. He circled the lake and climbed the rocky outcrop at the far side to find himself looking down on the pavilion, now deserted apart from an old man scratching away on his violin, and a woman who might have been his wife, singing a jagged, haunting melody. To his left was the path that climbed through the trees to the clearing where the body had been found. He was still troubled by the image the peasant girl from Shanxi had conjured in his mind, of the hand reaching out from the flaming mass. Like he was asking for help. What an appalling way to die. Li tried to picture the man walking slowly through the park (for if he had had time to smoke a last cigarette he was surely in no hurry), past the early morning dancers, the practitioners of t’ai chi, the old ladies gossiping on park benches, carrying his can of gasoline in his hand, and intent in his heart. What possible horrors could drive a man to such a desperate act? Li imagined him lighting his last cigarette, standing smoking it, almost down to the tip. He lit a cigarette himself and stared down at the still, green water of the lake reflecting the willow trees beyond, and wondered why no one had seen him on that slow walk through the park. Were people so engrossed in their spiritual and physical activities that he had been invisible to them?

  *

  Deep in the bowels of the multistorey building of the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination that backs on to Pao Jü Hutong, Pathologist Wang made a preliminary, superficial examination of the body. The charred corpse lay on its side on a metal table, like a toppled Buddha, fixed in its squatting position. Muscle shrinkage had forced the arms up, with fists clenched like those of a bare-knuckled pugilist. Li watched from a distance, the squeak of Wang’s rubber sneakers echoing off white-tiled walls as he moved around the table. And still there was the awful smell. Wang wore a face mask, and worked his way quickly and carefully around the body, taking measurements, making notes. He spent some time opening and examining the mouth that had been pulled shut by contracted muscle, the tip of a charred tongue poking from between blackened lips. Then he nodded to his assistant, who wrapped the body in heavy plastic, securing it with a nylon cord, and wheeled it away on a gurney to be bagged and taken across the city to the pathology labs of the Centre of Material Evidence Determination on the campus of the People’s University of Public Security. Li followed Wang into his office and they both lit cigarettes. Wang slumped in his chair and took a deep breath.

/>   ‘I’ll give you a written preliminary as soon as possible. But the victim was male, aged around fifty. From what’s left to be seen externally, there’s nothing physically distinguishing about him. Apart from his teeth. He’d had some pretty expensive professional work done there.’

  Li frowned. This was unusual. General dentistry in China was still very basic and high-quality professional work did not come cheap.

  As if reading his mind, Wang said, ‘This guy wasn’t any common labourer. He wasn’t short of a yuan or two. A man of some position, I’d guess. Almost certainly a Party member. If you get any idea of who he is, you’ll have no trouble confirming his identity from dental records.’

  II

  It was still only 10 a.m., but the heat was already stultifying. A hot wind blew the dust about the streets, coating leaves, grass, cars, buildings. And people. It got in their eyes and their mouths and their lungs and made them hack and spit.

  Li’s new office was airless and stifling, and the window would not open properly. His personal belongings had been left on his desk, in two cardboard boxes. The room itself had been stripped of any vestige of its previous occupant, scarred walls divested of their paper history. All that remained of Li’s predecessor were the cigarette burns along the edge of his desk. Even his memory had faded in Li’s mind; a colourless and pedantic man who had always remained tight, like a closed fist, enigmatic. For all the years his colleagues had worked with him they knew very little of his private life. A wife, a daughter at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, a heart condition. In the last months his face had been putty grey. Li fished an ashtray out from one of the boxes and lit his last cigarette. He looked out of the window through the trees at the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, gold characters on pale brown marble, and wondered what private thoughts had passed through the mind of this man who had preceded him as he looked down through the same trees at the same buildings. Had he once had the same hopes and aspirations for the future as Li? What cruel spins of fate had spawned his disillusion, reducing him to the grey and secretive man who had sweated out his last weeks in this office when he should have been at home with his family? A knock at the door disturbed his thoughts. Wu poked his head into the office. ‘They’re ready for you, boss.’ And Li felt a flutter of fear. They’re ready for you. Now that he was their boss, his colleagues would have expectations of him. It was possible to be ambitious beyond your ability. Now that this particular ambition had been realised, he would have to prove his ability, not just to those with expectations, but to himself. He slipped a pen into his breast pocket and took a fresh notebook from one of the boxes on his desk.

  There were nearly a dozen officers sitting around the big table in the meeting room on the top floor. And nearly all of them were smoking cigarettes, smoke wallowing about in the downdraught from the ceiling fan that swung lazily overhead. Papers and notebooks and rapidly filling ashtrays cluttered the table. There was a brief, spontaneous round of applause as Li walked into the room. He flushed and grinned, waved his hand dismissively and told them to shut up. He pulled up a chair and looked around the expectant faces. ‘Anyone got a smoke?’ he asked. Nearly a dozen cigarettes got tossed across the table. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Crawlers.’ He lit one and took a deep draw. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been out to Ritan Park. I’ve already had initial reports from Detective Qian and Pathologist Wang. It’s almost certainly a suicide, but the body’s so badly burned we might have a problem identifying it. And it could take some time. We’re going to have to match incoming missing-persons reports with what we know here. Pathologist Wang tells me the victim’s male, aged around fifty, with some pretty expensive dental work. Detective Qian will co-ordinate attempts to identify him ASAP. We can’t consider this case cleared until we know who he is and, if possible, why he killed himself. And we need witnesses, anyone who might have seen him making his way through the park. Any joy on that front, Qian Yi?’

  Qian shook his head. ‘Not yet. We’re still compiling the names of everyone who was there, but nothing so far.’

  ‘Anyone else got any thoughts?’ No one had. ‘All right. Let’s move on for the moment to the stabbing in Haidan District. Detective Wu’s been out there.’ He raised his eyebrows in Wu’s direction.

  Wu leaned to one side in his chair and chewed reflectively on a piece of gum that had long since lost any flavour. He was a lean man in his forties, thinning hair brushed back, a wispy moustache on his upper lip designed to disguise over-prominent front teeth. His skin was unusually dark, and he liked to wear sunglasses, whatever the weather. Right now they were dangling from the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, a cigarette burning between the fingers of his right. He habitually wore blue jeans and white trainers and a short denim butt-freezer jacket. Image was important to Wu. He liked being a cop, and Li suspected that he modelled himself on the undercover cops he’d seen in American movies. ‘It’s a murder, all right,’ Wu said. ‘No doubt about that. His name was Mao Mao. Known to us. A petty drug dealer in his mid-twenties. Did time as a juvenile for theft and hooliganism. Reform through labour. Only whatever labour they put him through didn’t reform him.’

  ‘What was it, a fight?’ Li asked.

  Wu cocked his head doubtfully. ‘Well, he was stabbed in the heart, up through the lower ribcage. But there were no signs of a struggle, no bruising or cuts on his hands or face. The pathologist thinks he may have been attacked from behind. Autopsy should confirm. Looks like it might have been some kind of gangland killing. He was lying face down in his own blood on a stretch of waste ground near Kunminghunan Road. A factory worker found him on his way to work this morning. The ground out there’s hard as concrete. No footprints in soil, or blood. In fact nothing for us to really go on at all. Forensics are doing fingernail and fibre tests, but I get a feeling about this, Li Yan. I don’t think they’re going to find anything. In fact, the only thing we picked up at all at the scene was a cigarette end, which is probably entirely unrelated.’

  Li was suddenly interested, instincts aroused. ‘Just one? I mean, there weren’t any others lying around near by?’

  ‘Not that we found.’

  ‘What brand was it?’

  ‘American. Marlboro, I think. Why?’

  Detective Zhao said, ‘That’s odd. We found a Marlboro cigarette end close to the body out at Di’anmen.’

  Qian leaned into the table. ‘It was a Marlboro brand cigarette end we found out at Ritan, wasn’t it, boss?’

  Li nodded slowly, his interest fully ignited now. It was a remarkable coincidence, if, indeed, that was what it was. But he knew better than to go jumping to premature conclusions. There was a speculative buzz around the table. He asked Zhao to give them a rundown on the body found at Di’anmen.

  Zhao was the baby of the section, a good-looking young man of around twenty-five. What he lacked in flair he made up for in sheer hard work and attention to detail. He was always self-conscious at these meetings, finding it difficult to give coherent expression to his thoughts in the group situation. He was much better dealing with people one to one. Colour flushed high on his cheekbones as he spoke. ‘He was carrying an ID card, so we know he was a building worker from Shanghai. Probably an itinerant. He may well have just arrived in Beijing looking for work, but there’s no known address for him here, no known associates. I’ve already faxed Public Security in Shanghai asking for his details.’

  ‘How was he killed?’

  ‘A broken neck.’

  ‘He couldn’t just have fallen? An accident of some kind?’

  ‘No. There’s absolutely no sign of trauma. He was found in a condemned siheyuan in a hutong that was cleared about a month ago. But the crime scene is so clean I think he was killed somewhere else and dumped there.’

  ‘So what makes you think the cigarette end is connected to it?’

  ‘It was fresh. It was the only one there, and it was about three feet from the body.’

  Li lit another c
igarette, leaned back in his chair, and blew smoke thoughtfully at the blades of the overhead fan.

  *

  ‘Do you believe there’s a connection?’ The section chief watched his new deputy carefully. But Li wasn’t being drawn into anything rash – not just yet. He stood by the window smoking one of his chief’s cigarettes. When he’d asked for it, Chen had raised a wry eyebrow and told him dryly, ‘You know, Li, someone in your elevated position really should start buying his own.’ Now he regarded Li with professional interest. While there was no denying his flair, and his record of success, there was an impetuous quality in him, an impatient streak that Chen had hoped would mellow with age. But until now there had been no sign of it. Perhaps responsibility would temper impulsiveness. As long as it didn’t dull a keen instinct.

  ‘The thing is,’ Li said seriously, ‘we have no reason to believe the man at Ritan Park was anything other than a suicide. If we can establish that the time of death of the two murders was prior to his, and that he smoked this brand of Marlboro cigarette, then it’s conceivable – just conceivable – that he killed the other two before doing away with himself.’ But he couldn’t keep his face straight any longer, and a mischievous smile crept across it.

  Chen laughed. Not just a smile. A deep, throaty, smoker’s laugh. Li wished the girls in the typing pool could see it. ‘First day on the job,’ Chen said, still chuckling. ‘A suicide and two murders, and you’ve solved the lot already.’

  Li’s smile turned rueful. ‘I wish it was that easy. But there’s something wrong here, Chief. These two murders. There’s not a shred of evidence at either scene. Except for the cigarette ends. Would somebody who obviously took so much care to leave no other evidence be careless enough to leave a cigarette end?’

  ‘Maybe the killer, or killers, weren’t that clever with the evidence, or lack of it. Maybe they just got lucky.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Li wasn’t convinced. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. If there is a connection, it’s … well, very strange.’ He sighed and flicked his ash out of the open window. ‘The first thing we need to do is ID the guy in the park, but it could be some time before we can match the body with a missing person. And the municipal pathologist’s not interested in doing the autopsy. Burn victims aren’t his speciality, he says. Personally I think he’s just queasy about it.’