by Peter May
‘In what way?’ Margaret asked.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I just thought it was too much of a coincidence.’ He flung his arms out in frustration. ‘And, I mean, somebody went into those apartments and stole those other bottles. Took the other breath fresheners.’
‘Maybe they were just trying to put you off the scent,’ Margaret said. Then she made a tiny shrug of apology. ‘Sorry, no pun intended.’
But he was still hanging on to one last hope. ‘Fu said there was something else they discovered. He said it would be easier to show me than tell me.’
Margaret came round the desk. ‘Well, let’s go see.’
* * *
The Pau Jü laboratories of forensic pathology at the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination were bunkered in the bowels of a multi-storey white building tucked unobtrusively away in a narrow hutong behind the Yong Hegong Lamasery. Just about ten minutes from Section One. Li parked in the snow outside, and took Margaret’s arm as they went up the ramp, past armed guards, into the basement of the centre. He still needed his stick for support.
Fu greeted them enthusiastically. ‘We got some good footprints frozen under the snow at Jingshan,’ he told Li. ‘We’ve now got seven quite distinctly different treads. So there were a minimum of seven of them involved in the actual murder. And this…’ he held up a glass vial with a blob of white, frothy liquid at the bottom of it, ‘…was careless. Someone gobbed. We found it frozen solid in the snow. So now we’ve got DNA. You catch the guy, we can put him at the scene.’ He turned and smiled at Margaret and switched to English. ‘Sorry, Doctah. English no verr good.’
Li said impatiently, ‘You were going to show me something to do with the perfume.’
‘Not the perfume,’ Fu said. ‘The bottle.’ He took them through glass doors into a lab. Everything was white and sterile and filled with flickering fluorescent light and the hum of air-conditioning. On a table sat the Chanel bottle partially reconstructed from the pieces found in Li’s pocket. Beside it, drying on a white sheet, was the label. Distinctive cream lettering on black. Chanel № 23. It was torn and creased, and the black ink had turned brown where it had soaked in the perfume. It had also streaked and run through the cream lettering.
‘Cheap crap,’ Fu said in English.
‘Chanel is hardly cheap, or crap,’ Margaret said.
‘Chanel, no,’ Fu said grinning. ‘But this no Chanel.’
‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.
Fu reverted to Chinese. ‘I went to the expense of buying a bottle of Chanel from the Friendship Store,’ he said. And he lifted the bottle out of a drawer, placing it on the table beside the broken one and its damaged label. ‘It was the cheap ink that made me wonder,’ he said. ‘So I thought I would compare it to the real thing.’
Margaret lifted the bottle from the Friendship store and looked very carefully at the lettering. There were subtle, but distinct differences, and the black was deeper, sharper. She looked at the label recovered from Li’s bottle. ‘It’s a fake,’ she said.
‘Yeh, it fake,’ Fu confirmed. ‘And you know how I know for sure?’ He looked at them both expectantly. But, of course, they didn’t know. ‘We phone Chanel,’ he said. ‘They don’t make number twenty-three.’
III
‘It just doesn’t make any sense.’ Li’s mood had not been improved by their visit to Pau Jü Hutong. They had made the short trip back to Section One in silence. These were almost the first words he had spoken, standing on the third-floor landing one floor down from his office, trying to catch his breath. His beating the previous night had taken more out of him than he would care to admit.
Margaret said, ‘Just about every label on every market stall in China is a fake.’
‘Yes, I know, but these athletes were all earning incredible amounts of money. Apart from the fact that they could afford the real thing, why would they all go out and buy the same fake Chanel?’ And almost as an absurd afterthought, ‘And why were they all using breath freshener?’
‘There’s a lot of garlic in Chinese food,’ Margaret said. Her flippancy turned his glare in her direction. She gave a small, apologetic smile. ‘Sorry.’
They carried on up to the top floor. Li said, ‘I’ve got to go and talk to some people about this. If you wait in my office I’ll be along in a few minutes and call you a taxi.’
‘You’ve called me a lot worse,’ Margaret said. But her attempts to lighten his mood with a little humour fell on unreceptive ears. He went into the detectives’ room, and she shrugged and headed on down the corridor to his office. When the taxi came, she would pick up her mother from Mei Yuan’s stall and retreat to that tiny oasis of calm that was her apartment. Except, now that she had to share it with her mother, there was very little calm left in it.
There was a man standing staring out of the window in Li’s office when she walked in. He turned expectantly at the sound of the door opening, and she recognised him immediately as Li’s deputy, Tao Heng. A man, she knew, whom Li detested. He seemed startled, behind his thick, square glasses, to see her.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I was waiting for the Section Chief.’ He looked embarrassed. His face was flushed, and she saw that he was perspiring. As if he had read her mind, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.
‘He’ll be along in a moment,’ Margaret said.
‘I’ll not wait,’ Tao said, and he walked briskly to the door, avoiding her eye. She moved aside to let him past, and he dodged awkwardly around her. He stopped in the doorway, still holding the handle, and turned back. For a moment he hesitated, and then he said, ‘I suppose it’ll be a relief to you, not to have him coming home every night railing about his “pedantic” deputy.’
The bitterness in his voice was shocking. In fact, Li hardly ever talked about Tao, although his deputy clearly thought he did. Some giant chip on his shoulder. Margaret was startled, confused. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Tao appeared to regret immediately that he had said anything, but he seemed unable to control himself. It was as if he could no longer contain the flood of vitriol that he had been holding back to release against Li, and it was starting to leak out anyway. ‘What are you going to do? Take him back to America? I suppose there are any number of agencies over there who would consider it a feather in their cap to have an ex-Chinese cop of Li’s standing on their books.’
Bizarrely, Margaret wondered for a moment at the quality of Tao’s English, before remembering that he had worked for years with the British in Hong Kong. And then she replayed his words for their meaning and felt the cold chill of a dreadful misgiving creep across her skin. ‘Ex-Chinese cop?’
Tao looked at her blankly, and then a mist cleared from his eyes. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ A smile that Margaret could have sworn was almost gleeful spread across his face. ‘He hasn’t told you.’
Margaret’s shock and disbelief reduced her voice nearly to a whisper. ‘Told me what?’
And just as quickly, the glee slipped from Tao’s face, as if he were having second thoughts about whether or not this was something to be pleased about. He became suddenly reticent, shaking his head. ‘It’s not for me to say.’
‘You’ve started,’ Margaret said, shock and fear now fighting for space with anger. ‘You’d better finish.’
Tao was no longer able to meet her eye. ‘It’s policy,’ he said. ‘Just policy. I can’t believe you don’t know.’
‘What policy?’ Margaret demanded.
He took a deep breath, as if indicating that he had also taken a decision. He looked her straight in the eye, and she felt suddenly disconcerted by him, afraid. ‘It is impossible for a Chinese police officer to marry a foreign national and remain in the force. When Li marries you, his career will be over.’
* * *
Li had seen Tao come into the detectives’ room and thought he looked oddly flushed. His deputy had avoided making eye contac
t with anyone in the room and hurried into his office, shutting the door firmly behind him. Li had thought no more of it. When he got back to his office he was surprised not to find Margaret there. He called the switchboard and asked if anyone had ordered a taxi for her. But no one had. He looked out the window at the brown marble facade of the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, snow clinging to the branches of the evergreens that shaded its windows, and saw Margaret on the street below, walking quickly towards the red lanterns of the restaurant on the corner and then turning south towards Ghost Street. He was puzzled only for a moment, before turning his mind to other things.
* * *
The road was rutted with snow and ice. Bicycles and carts bumped and slithered across it. Snow, like a dusting of icing sugar, covered the rubble in the ugly gap sites the demolishers had created, if it was possible to create anything by destruction. Margaret was in danger of turning her ankle, even falling, as she hurried, oblivious, through the crowds of late morning shoppers and cyclists that choked the main approach to the large covered food market. Through tears blurring vision, she was unaware of the looks she was drawing from curious Chinese. She cut an odd figure here in north-west Beijing as she strode towards Ghost Street, her long coat pushed out by her bulging belly, golden curls flying out behind her, tears staining pale skin.
How could he not have told her? But as soon as the question formed in her mind she knew the answer. Because she would not have married him if he had. His work was his life. How could she have asked him to give it all up? Of course, he knew that, which is why he had decided to deceive her.
But you can’t build a relationship on lies, she thought. You can’t build a relationship on deception. He had been stalling her for weeks on the issue of the apartment for married officers. And how stupid was she that she hadn’t suspected? That it had never even occurred to her that there would be a price to pay for getting married? And how had he been going to tell her after the deed had been done? What did he imagine she would think, or say, or do?
The thoughts were flashing through her mind with dizzying speed. She stumbled and nearly fell, and a young man in a green padded jacket and blue baseball cap grabbed her arm to steady her. It had been an instinctive reaction, but when he saw that the woman he had helped was a wild-eyed, tear-stained yangguizi, he let her go immediately as if she might be electrically charged. He backed off, embarrassed. Margaret leaned against a concrete telegraph post and tried to clear her brain. This was crazy. She was being a danger to her baby. She wiped her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to steady herself. What in God’s name was she going to do?
The snow, which had earlier retreated into its leaden sky, started to fall again with renewed vigour. Big, soft, slow-falling flakes. Suddenly Beijing no longer felt like home. It was big and cold and alien, and she felt lost in it, wondering how it was possible to feel like a stranger in a place so familiar. And yet she did. The irony was, that a hundred meters down the road, Mei Yuan would be turning out jian bing in the lunchtime rush, and Margaret’s mother would be with her. There was no chance for her to be alone, to find some way of coming to terms with all this before she had to face Li again. Her mother would be expecting her, and there was no way she could abandon her ten thousand miles from home in a city of seventeen million Chinese.
She dried her remaining tears and thanked God that the ice-cold wind would explain her red-rimmed watering eyes and blotchy cheeks. She sucked in a lungful of air and headed off, more carefully this time, towards the corner where Mei Yuan plied her trade. As she approached it, she saw that there was a large crowd gathered around the stall. She eased herself through the figures grouped on the sidewalk and realised that it was a queue. Mei Yuan hardly ever did this kind of business. And then Margaret saw why. Mei Yuan was standing a pace or two back from the hotplate, supervising, as Mrs. Campbell made the jian bing with an expertise Margaret found hard to believe. Even harder to believe was the sight of her mother in a blue jacket and trousers beneath a large chequered apron, with a scarf tied around her head. The Chinese were jostling to be first in line, eager to be served by this foreign devil making their favourite Beijing pancake.
Mrs. Campbell glanced up as she handed a jian bing to a smiling Chinese and accepted a five yuan note. She caught sight of Margaret as she handed over the change. ‘You’ll have to take your place in the line,’ she said. ‘You’ll get no favours here just because you’re another da bidze.’ And her face broke into a wide grin. Margaret was struck by just now natural and unselfconscious the smile was. She was not used to seeing her mother this happy. It was inexplicable.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
‘Yes, but why?’
‘Look at the line. That’s why. Mei Yuan says we’re doing ten times her normal business. And anyway, it’s easy, and it’s fun.’ The queue, meantime, had grown bigger as more Chinese gathered around to watch this exchange between the two foreign women. Mrs. Campbell looked at the first in line. She was a middle-aged woman warmly wrapped in her winter woollies, eyes wide in wonder. ‘Ni hau,’ Mrs. Campbell said. ‘Yi? Er?’
‘Yi,’ the woman said timidly, holding up one finger, and the crowd laughed and clapped.
Margaret looked at a smiling Mei Yuan. ‘When did my mother learn to speak Chinese?’ she asked.
‘Oh, we had a small lesson this morning,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘She can say hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome, and count from one to ten. She also makes very good jian bing.’ Then a slight frown of concern clouded her happiness. She inclined her head a little and peered at Margaret. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Margaret said quickly, remembering that she wasn’t. ‘I was just coming to collect my mother to take her home.’
‘I’ll get a taxi back later,’ Mrs. Campbell said without looking up from her jian bing. ‘Must make hay while the sun shines.’
Mei Yuan was still looking oddly at Margaret. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Of course,’ Margaret said, self-consciously. She knew her face was a mess, and she knew that Mei Yuan knew there was something wrong. ‘Look, I have to go. I’ll see you later, Mom.’
She knew she should be happy at this unexpected change in her mother, a woman who had stood on her dignity all her life, who never ventured out with a hair out of place or her make-up incomplete. And here she was, dressed like a Chinese peasant selling hot pancakes from a street stall. Freed somehow from the constraints of her own self-image. Free, for the first time that Margaret could remember, to be unreservedly happy. Perhaps playing at being someone else allowed her to be truly herself for the first time in her life. Mei Yuan was having a profound effect on her.
But Margaret was unable to break free from the constraints of her own unhappiness, and as she slipped into the back seat of a taxi on Ghost Street, she was overwhelmed again by a sense of self-pity.
IV
The apartment was strangely empty without her mother. It was amazing how quickly you could get used to another presence in your home. Even one that was unwelcome. Margaret shrugged off her coat, kicked off her boots and eased herself onto the sofa. She felt her baby kicking inside her, and it set her heart fluttering with both fear and anticipation of a future which had been thrown into complete confusion in the space of a couple of hours. She didn’t want to think about it. And so she stretched out on the sofa and found herself looking out of an upside down window at the snow falling thick and fast. She closed her eyes, and saw the face of the bearded westerner in the photograph on Li’s desk, almost immediately followed by a certain knowledge of who he was. She sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Fleischer. Hans. John of the Flesh. The mental translation she had done of his name at the time. Doctor. Shit!
Immediately she crossed to her little gate-leg table and lifted one of the leaves. She set her laptop on it and plugged it in, and while it booted up got down on her hands and knees to unplug the telephon
e and replace it with the modern cable from her computer. She drew in a chair and dialled up her Internet server. This was good, she thought. Something else to fill her mind. Something, anything to think about, rather than what she was going to do at the betrothal meeting tonight.
She had first heard of Doctor Hans Fleischer during her trip to Germany in the late nineties to give evidence on behalf of her dead client, Gertrude Klimt. The prosecutors had brought charges against many of the doctors in the former East German state who had been responsible for feeding drugs to young athletes. But the one they most wanted, the biggest fish of all, had somehow swum through their net. Doctor Fleischer had simply disappeared. His photograph had been in all the German papers; old newsreel of him at the trackside during Olympic competition in the eighties had played endlessly on German newscasts. There were various rumours. He had gone to South America. South Africa. Australia. China. But no one knew for certain, and the good doctor had successfully avoided his day in court, and a certain prison term.
Margaret had set Google as both her home page and her search engine. She tapped in ‘Dr. Hans Fleischer’ and hit the return key. After a few seconds her screen was filled with links to dozens of pieces of information on Fleischer harvested from around the Internet. Mostly newspaper and magazine articles, transcripts of television documentaries, official documents copied on to the net by activists. Almost all in German. Margaret scrolled through the list until she hit a link to a piece on him carried by Time magazine in 1998. She clicked on the link and up came the text of the original story. Half a dozen photographs that went with it confirmed Margaret’s identification. He had sported a beard then, too. Close-cropped, unlike his hair, not quite as silver in those days, shot through with a few streaks of darker colour. He had not even bothered to try to disguise himself. Perhaps he had assumed that he would be safe in China, anonymous.
