The Runner

by Peter May

  The floors were polished wood, reflecting cold, blue light from the windows. The furniture was antique, purchased for its value rather than its comfort. There were lacquered wooden chairs and an unforgiving settee, a magnificent mirrored darkwood cabinet inlaid with beech. An old-fashioned exterior Chinese door, restored and varnished and mounted on a heavy frame, stood in the centre of the room serving no apparent purpose. A dragon dog sat on either side of it. Beyond it, the sole comfort in the room – a luxuriously thick Chinese rug woven in pale pastel colours. The walls were hung with traditional Chinese scrolls. Candles in ornate holders sat on a dresser below a long antique mirror and a scene of ancient China carved in ivory and mounted in a case.

  One of the bedrooms was empty. In another, a large rug on the wall above Jia’s antique bed was woven with a strange modern design of angles and circles. Facing the bed, a huge television sat on yet another antique dresser.

  ‘I’m surprised it’s not an antique television as well,’ Sun said.

  There was a video player on the dresser beside it, and in the top drawer, a neatly stacked row of tapes in unmarked boxes. Li took one out, slipped it into the player, and turned on the television. After a moment they found themselves watching the flickering images of two black men and a Caucasian woman engaged in bizarre sex acts. Li swore softly and ejected the tape. He tried another. Two women writhed together in an apparently unsatisfied pursuit of sexual gratification. From their imprecations, and foul-mouthed mutual encouragement, it was clear that they were Americans. Li turned it off and glanced, embarrassed, at Sun. ‘He had a big appetite for a man with such small testicles.’

  Sun frowned. ‘Small testicles?’

  ‘According to Wang, abnormally small.’

  The third bedroom had been turned into a study. There were only three items of furniture in it. A desk, a chair and an antique roll-top dresser. The drawers and cupboards of the dresser were filled with personal papers – bills, receipts, letters. The death of Jia Jing was not a criminal investigation, so his personal effects would remain undisturbed. Li turned on the computer, and when Windows had loaded resorted to a trick Margaret had taught him. He clicked on the Internet Explorer web browser and opened up the document entitled HISTORY, where the last three hundred sites Jia had visited were stored. A quick scroll down them told Li that Jia’s use of the Internet had been primarily for accessing porn.

  ‘Not so much an appetite as an obsession,’ Sun observed.

  Li powered down the computer. There was something depressing about delving into the dark side of people’s secret lives once they were dead.

  The bathroom was spartan and functional, cold white tiles on the floor, no mats or rugs to soften the shock for naked feet. In a wall cabinet above the sink, they found two bottles of aerosol aftershave, identical to those they had found in Sui Mingshan’s bathroom. The same brand. Chanel.

  ‘You think maybe the whole Chinese team got a job lot?’ Sun said, smiling. ‘Maybe Chanel is sponsoring our Olympic effort. We could be the best-smelling team at the Games.’

  But Li wasn’t smiling. There were warning bells ringing in his head. He knew there was something wrong here. He picked up one of the bottles and fired a burst of aerosolised perfume into the air. They both sniffed and recoiled in unison. It was a strange, musky smell, like almonds and vanilla, with a bitter edge to it. Not sweet.

  ‘No wonder he had to resort to watching porn if he smelled like that,’ Sun said.

  But Li could not recall any scent from Jia the night they found him in the bedroom in Beichang Street. He remembered only the sweet, heavy scents of incense and sex in the room.

  He sprayed a tiny puff from the other bottle on to his wrist and smelled the same bitter orange scent of the one he had tried at Sui Mingshan’s apartment. He held his wrist out for Sun to sniff.

  Sun wrinkled his nose. ‘Same as the one at Sui’s place.’

  Li nodded. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ The smell seemed to have filled the bathroom. It was offending Li’s olfactory senses and making him feel a little queasy. ‘I don’t like breathing this stuff.’

  They opened the door of the apartment to find an elderly couple standing in the hallway looking perplexed, a little dazed. ‘Is this number twelve-oh-five?’ the old man asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Li said cautiously. ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘It’s our son’s apartment,’ the woman said, and Li suddenly recognised them as the old couple flanking Jia in the photograph they had found among his things. His parents. Sun flicked him a look.

  ‘We’re police officers,’ Li said. He had no idea if they had been notified.

  ‘They told us this morning,’ Jia’s father said. ‘We’ve travelled up from Yufa by bus.’ Li knew Yufa. It was a small town on the road south to Gu’an. The bus would have taken several hours. He could imagine what a depressing journey it had been. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘He was a lovely boy,’ his mother said. ‘Couldn’t do enough for us. He bought us a colour television, and a video recorder, and a new refrigerator … ’

  ‘Sent us money every month,’ his father said. Money that would stop now. And Li wondered how much of what Jia owned they would inherit. The value of the antiques in the apartment alone was probably several thousand dollars. More than they could have hoped to earn in a lifetime. But the inheritance laws were still in a state of flux. It might be that everything went to the State. Had they any real idea how much their son had been earning?

  ‘Do you know how he died?’ his mother asked, and Li again wondered at a creature so small producing a monster like Jia. In his mind he saw the weightlifter lying dead between the legs of his adulterous lover, lying cut open on the pathologist’s table. Either image would have been shocking to this old couple.

  ‘It was natural causes,’ Li said. ‘A heart attack.’ And he added unnecessarily, ‘He died at the home of a friend.’ He would see that they never learned the truth. They were much more worth protecting than those who concerned the Minister of Public Security.

  But as he and Sun left them to enter their son’s apartment, he knew that nothing could protect them from what they would find in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. His heart ached for the poor parents of a dead rich boy.

  In the street outside, a sweeper wearing a grubby white hat and a blue face mask rattled the twigs of his broom along the gutter, collecting trash in a long-handled can that opened and closed, like a mouth, to devour the garbage. He emptied it into a large trash can on wheels. His eyes above the mask were dead and empty, his skin dry, cracked, ingrained with the dust of the city. And Li wondered why he wasn’t just as deserving as a weightlifter or a swimmer. But the new creed, it seemed, was that only the rich and successful were worth rewarding. Although death, he figured, had probably never been part of that reckoning. And he recalled his Uncle Yifu quoting an old Chinese proverb. Though you amass ten thousand pieces of silver, at death you cannot take with you even a copper penny.

  V

  Someone had brought a portable television up from an office downstairs, and when Li and Sun got back to Section One, most of the officers in the detectives’ office were crowded around it. The excited voices of a couple of commentators soared above the roar of the crowd belting out of the set’s tiny speakers.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Li barked. And they all turned guiltily towards the door, like naughty children caught in an illicit act. Someone hurriedly turned the set off. Sun smirked happily at them. He wasn’t one of the bad boys.

  Wu said, ‘Professional interest, Chief. They’ve already had the four hundred metres freestyle and the hundred metres butterfly. They’ve got the breast stroke and the crawl to come. One hundred and two hundred metres. We figured we should take it in.’

  ‘Oh, did you? And what does Deputy Tao think?’

  ‘He told us to turn it off,’ Sang said.

  ‘And you ignored him?’ Li was incredulous.


  ‘Not while he was here,’ Wu said. ‘But he went out about half an hour ago. He didn’t say we had to keep it switched off when he wasn’t here.’

  Li cast a disapproving glare around the faces turned towards him. ‘You guys are fools,’ he said. ‘You didn’t even put a lookout on the stairs.’

  And they all burst out laughing.

  But Li’s face never cracked. ‘I suggest you get back to your work. We’ve got a murder inquiry in progress here.’ He turned towards the door as they started returning to their desks, but paused, turning back. ‘Just out of interest … how are we doing?’

  ‘Won the butterfly, first and second,’ Wu said. ‘Lost the freestyle, but took second and third. We’re ahead on points.’

  Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘Good,’ he said.

  He was halfway down the corridor when Qian caught up with him. He was clutching a sheaf of notes. ‘Couple of things, Chief.’ He followed Li into his office. ‘You asked about dope-testing.’

  Li was surprised. ‘You’ve got that already?’

  ‘It’s a matter of record, Chief. Same with all the sports authorities. Seems that nowadays they all do out-of-competition testing, to discourage athletes and other sportsmen from using drugs to enhance their training. They’re given twenty-four hours’ notice, and then it’s mandatory to provide the required urine samples.’

  ‘Couldn’t they just turn in clean samples?’ Li asked. ‘Someone else’s urine, even?’

  ‘Not these days, apparently,’ Qian said. ‘The guy I spoke to from the Chinese authority said the athlete being tested is assigned what they call a chaperone. Someone of the same sex. He or she stays with the athlete the whole time. Has to watch them pissing in the jar, and then the athlete has to pour the stuff into two small bottles they label as A and B samples. These are packed into small cases, locked with special seals and sent to a laboratory for analysis.’

  ‘So what about the people we’re interested in?’

  ‘Sui was tested two weeks ago. Clean. Two of the three killed in the car crash were tested a week before the accident. Also clean. The cyclist hasn’t been tested since he was last in competition. It’s normal to test first, second and third in any competition, and then they pick someone else at random. He came third in his last event and was clean then. Jia Jing was tested six weeks ago. Also clean.’

  Li sat down thoughtfully. ‘Almost too good to be true,’ he said. ‘There must be ways these people can cheat the tests.’

  ‘Seems like the international sports bodies have got wise to all the tricks, Chief. The stuff this guy told me! There was one female swimmer in Europe apparently laced her sample with whiskey, making it worse than useless. Pissing the Drink, they called it. She got banned. It’s easier for the women to cheat, though. I mean, you and I have got our dicks out there for the chaperone to see, there’s not much you can do about it. But this guy said they caught women hiding clean samples in condoms tucked up inside themselves. They were even buying one hundred percent drug-free urine on the Internet.’

  Li said, ‘You’re taking the piss, right?’

  Qian grinned. ‘Straight up, Chief. But there’s this World Anti-Doping Agency now, and they’ve got people supervising who know every trick in the book. It’s hard to put one by them. Really hard. And particularly in China, because the government here’s so keen for us to have this squeaky clean image for the Olympics.’

  Li nodded. ‘You said, a couple of things.’

  ‘That’s right, Chief. The officer who attended the car crash that killed those three athletes? He’s in an interview room downstairs, if you want to talk to him.’

  * * *

  The traffic cop sat smoking in an interview room on the second floor. His black, fur-collared coat hung open, and he had unbuttoned his jacket to reveal his neatly pressed blue shirt below. His white-topped peaked cap sat on the table beside his ashtray. He had broad, well-defined northern features, short hair brushed carefully back, and was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, when Li and Qian came in. He stood up immediately, stubbing out his cigarette and snatching his hat from the table. He was clearly ill at ease, finding himself on the wrong side of a Section One interrogation.

  ‘Sit down,’ Li told him, and he and Qian sat down to face him across the table. ‘We have the report you filed on the fatal car crash you attended in Xuanwu District on November tenth. Three athletes, members of the Chinese hundred-metres sprint relay team, were found dead inside the wreck of their car.’ Li dropped the report on the table. ‘I want you to tell me what you found when you got there.’

  The officer cleared his throat nervously. ‘I was on patrol with officer Xu Peng in the vicinity of Taoranting Park at eleven thirty-three on the night of November ten when we received a call that there had been a road accident in You’anmennei Dajie – ’

  Li cut him off. ‘Officer, I don’t want you to sit there and regurgitate your report. I can read, and I’ve read it. I want to know what’s not in the report. What you felt, what you smelled, what you thought.’ He nodded towards the ashtray. ‘You can smoke if you like.’

  The officer appeared to be relieved, and took out a pack of cigarettes. After he had lit one, it belatedly occurred to him that he should have offered one to his interrogators. He held out the pack. Qian took one. Li didn’t. The officer took a deep drag on his. ‘I hate car crashes,’ he said. ‘They can be God-awful messy things. Bits and pieces of people all over the place. Arms and legs. Blood everywhere. Stuff you don’t want to see.’ It was as if Li had opened a floodgate. Now that he had started, the traffic cop couldn’t seem to stop. ‘My wife keeps on at me to give it up. Get a job in security. Anything but traffic.’ He flicked nervous eyes at them. ‘There’s nights I’ve come home and just lain on the floor shaking.’

  ‘Is that how it was the night you attended the accident in You’anmennei Dajie?’

  The cop nodded. ‘Pretty much. The car must have been doing over a hundred KPH. It was a hell of a mess. So were the guys inside. Three of them. Two in the front, one in the back – at least, that’s where they started off. They weren’t wearing seat belts.’ He grimaced, recalling the scene, pulling images back into his mind that he had probably hoped were gone forever. ‘It’s bad enough when you don’t know them, but when it’s people you’ve seen on television, you know, big-time sports stars … well, you always figure stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like that.’

  ‘You recognised them, then?’

  ‘Not straight off. Well, two of them, yeh. I mean, they always wore their hair short anyway, so they didn’t look that different with their heads shaved.’

  Li felt as if the room around them had faded to black. He focused his entire attention on the officer in front of him. ‘Their heads were shaved?’ he said slowly.

  The cop seemed surprised by Li’s interest. He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a fashion these days, isn’t it? All these sports stars in the West have been shaving their heads last couple of years. It’s catching on here now.’

  ‘So you didn’t think it was odd?’

  ‘Not in those two, no. It was the other one that kind of shocked me. Xing Da. That’s why I didn’t recognise him at first. He always wore his hair shoulder length. It was kind of like his trademark. You always knew it was him on the track, all that hair flying out behind him.’

  ‘And his head was shaved, too?’ Li asked.

  ‘All gone,’ the traffic cop said. ‘It looked really weird on him.’

  * * *

  As they climbed the stairs back to the top floor Li said, ‘What about the doctor’s report?’ Pieces of this bizarre puzzle appeared suddenly to be dropping into place, but Li could still make no sense of the picture it was forming. It had, however, got his adrenaline pumping.

  Qian said, ‘Got it upstairs, chief. But all he did was sign off the death certificates. Death caused by multiple injuries suffered in a car accident.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Li cursed roundly. A staged suicid
e in which the victim’s head had been shaved. Three deaths in what appeared at the time to have been an accident. All with their heads shaved. And all four, members of the Chinese Olympic team. The trouble was, the evidence from the crash – the vehicle and the bodies – was long gone.

  Wu intercepted them on the top corridor. ‘Those tickets you got Qian to order for tonight, chief? They arrived by courier. I put them on your desk.’

  ‘Fine.’ Li brushed past, his mind on other things, but Wu called after him. ‘Something else, Chief … ’

  Li turned and barked, ‘What!’

  ‘Those three athletes in the car crash?’

  He had Li’s attention now. ‘What about them?’

  ‘Only two of them were cremated, Chief. The parents of the other one live out in a village near the Ming tombs. Seems they buried him in their orchard.’

  Li wanted to punch the air. But all he said was, ‘Which one?’

  ‘Xing Da.’

  VI

  The village of Dalingjiang lay fifty kilometres north-west of Beijing in the shadow of the Tianshou mountains, a stone’s throw from the last resting place of thirteen of the sixteen Ming emperors. A rambling collection of brick-built cottages with slate roofs and walled courtyards, Dalingjiang was believed to have the best feng shui in the whole of China. After all, its inhabitants reasoned, thirteen dead emperors couldn’t be wrong.

  Li took Sun with him to drive the Jeep. They had headed out of the city on the Badaling Expressway, past countless developments of pastel-painted luxury apartments with security-gated compounds and private pools. Built to meet the demands of the new bourgeoisie.

  The sun was dipping lower now as they neared the tombs. The mountains had lost their definition, and looked as if they had been cut from paper and laid one over the other, in decreasing shades of dark blue, against a pale orange sky. The road was long and straight, lined with tall, naked trees with white-painted trunks. The roadside was piled high with bricks and stacks of golden corn stalks. They passed a peasant on a bicycle, a large parcel in his basket, his daughter on a makeshift seat over the rear wheel. Perhaps he had spent his hard-earned cash on a Christmas present for his Little Empress.