A Calamitous Chinese Killing

by Shamini Flint

  “For your children,” suggested the man as Singh tried to beat a retreat.

  To his relief, Li Jun grabbed his sleeve and dragged him away. The vendors, disappointed that Singh was accompanied by a Chinese person who was inured to their aggressive sales tactics, transferred their attention to other foreigners.

  Spotting the pizzeria, both men hurried over. Susan Tan sat at a corner table where she could watch both entrances at the same time. The place was almost deserted – why eat when one could shop? Singh met her eye, received a brief shake of the head, found a table where he could keep her under surveillance, pointed at a picture of a coffee on the sticky, laminated menu and leaned back in his small wooden chair. Li Jun sat down across from him but shook his head at the waiter. He was careful not even to glance in Susan’s direction and Singh deduced that he’d spent time on surveillance in the past.

  Qing the witness was late, but this was China, it didn’t mean anything. Perhaps she was stuck in traffic too or had been violently dragged into a shop and forced to buy a belt.

  He noted that Susan Tan was not dealing well with the delay. Her knee was bouncing up and down under the table. She clutched a briefcase to her chest – the money to pay? – and her eyes darted from one entrance to the other as if she was watching a fast-paced tennis match.

  Li Jun poured himself a glass of water, gulped it down and then became engrossed in the menu.

  “You want something to eat?” asked Singh, deciding that he definitely couldn’t stomach a pizza. It was one thing to be deprived of a curry and quite another to replace it with fast food.

  “No,” said Li Jun.

  The men reverted to silence. Singh was beginning to suspect that the caller was going to be a ‘no show’. He saw that Susan was staring at him, a strained question in her eyes. He indicated another five minutes with a quick raised hand and ordered a second coffee to appease the waitress who looked annoyed that two men should be sitting with a single coffee between them.

  “Silk Market is very crowded,” he said to Li Jun.

  “Yes, very popular with tourists.”

  “Good place to meet, no one is interested in anything except shopping.”

  “Yes,” agreed Li Jun. His eyes narrowed and Singh turned to follow his gaze.

  A young woman had come in. She stood at the door, swaying a little on her feet as if uncertain which way to proceed. She was a slight thing, quite pretty, with her hair tucked under a baseball cap. She had a knapsack on her back that looked heavy from her listing posture. Despite the heat, she wore a dark jacket. Both her arms were folded tightly across it as if she was cold and she didn’t want the coat to fall open notwithstanding the reality of the hot and humid Beijing summer. As he watched, she spotted Susan and stumbled to her table.

  “Are you Qing?”

  The young woman nodded and for the first time Singh could see in the dusty light that she was perspiring heavily, her thick fringe plastered to her forehead.

  “You have some information for me?” Susan half rose in her chair and then sat back down again as if her knees would not support her.

  Again, the nod – a creature of few words? She would have to make a better witness than that to earn her reward, decided Singh.

  “I have brought what you asked,” said Susan, indicating the briefcase on her lap. “Please just tell me what you know.”

  Qing opened her mouth and closed it again.

  Singh’s spine stiffened. He rose to his feet, all his senses suddenly tingling. By his side, Li Jun too had risen. He was not imagining it, something was wrong. He had taken two steps forwards, arms outstretched when Qing held up a vicious-looking six-inch blade with a serrated edge.

  Nine

  “Qing!” Susans voice was high-pitched.

  Everything after that happened so quickly that Singh could not order events in his head, not even afterwards when he had the time and space to do so.

  The girl took a step forwards, holding the knife out before her. Again, she opened her mouth. Singh leaped forwards to intercept her attack.

  Susan pushed her chair back and tried to get to her feet, turning away as she did so.

  The policeman got his body between Susan and Qing and turned to fend off an attack, gritting his teeth in anticipation of her lunge with the weapon. He knew he was going to get hurt. That helped. The adrenalin coursed through his system. He probably wouldn’t feel a thing.

  As he raised his hands defensively, he saw a trickle of blood run down Qing’s chin from the corner of her mouth. For the first time, he realised that the knife and hand holding it were already covered in blood. The girl’s mouth opened and shut like a goldfish in a bowl. He realised the implications of the bloodied weapon in that instance and took a hasty step forwards, hands outstretched, palms out – half plea, half offer of help.

  Qing’s eyes glazed over and she fell forwards into the inspector’s arms. Singh caught her, she was not heavy, and lowered her gently to the ground. In the background, he could hear screaming and knew somehow, without looking around, that it was the waitress. Qing’s jacket fell open and he saw that her white T-shirt was red with blood. He didn’t need a second look to know it was a death wound. The serrated edge of the knife in her hand – she must have ripped her insides to shreds to remove it. Maybe in that first second when she realised what had happened, when the shock overwhelmed the pain. But who had done this to her – and why?

  “Call an ambulance,” he shouted and saw Li Jun reach for his phone.

  “Take her outside,” insisted a man, wringing his hands with despair. The apron suggested that he had come from the kitchen, perhaps the owner. “This is not good for my business.” Singh ignored him.

  Susan fell to her knees and cradled the girl. “Qing, what happened? Can you speak? Please tell me what happened to my son.”

  Singh, unable to understand what she had asked but able to guess, said, “She’s too far gone.”

  The eyelids fluttered open. Qing was trying to comply with the request. “I…I…saw…ask, ask…”

  Her eyes shut again and her body went slack. Singh put two fingers to her neck and he shook his head. She was gone. He looked up to where a crowd of onlookers had gathered at the entrance to the shop and met the steady eyes of a tall man with hair that looked like it had been darkened with boot polish. He was standing near the back – the only one who was not trying to get a vantage, the only one not screeching a reaction to events. All Singh’s instincts were screaming at him and the policeman obeyed without question. He lay the girl down, got to his feet and lumbered after the stranger. But even as he reached the door and shoved his way past the onlookers, he could see that pursuit was in vain. There was no sign of the tall man over the bobbing crowd of shoppers. Singh closed his eyes – he needed to fix the man’s face in his memory. For a second, he felt a cold chill down his spine, like a trickle of rain. The man had been waiting to see if Qing spoke before she died. When the girl had tried to utter those few words, he’d stepped forwards. What would he have done if she’d said more? Attacked her again? If she had managed a few words, a name, would he have tried to murder them all? A knife would not have been sufficient then. But perhaps he had the weaponry necessary to silence as many people as he needed to. He remembered the calculating eyes; Singh doubted there would have been any hesitation.

  The inspector returned to the room and saw that Li Jun had picked the girl off the filthy floor and laid her across two tables. It wasn’t best practice in a murder but Singh had some sympathy for his actions. Light shone in the greasy windows and created little rainbows against the glass. The dust in the air caught the light and looked like gold dust. Qing’s face was turned towards the brightness like a plant. She was a slight thing in death, eyes still open, lips red with blood where she must have bitten down in shock and pain. Her jacket was folded over her stomach so the wound was hidden. Susan Tan was sitting on a chair by the body, sobbing without restraint – for the girl or for her secrets, now taken t
o the grave? A bit of both, he supposed. The owner of the restaurant was slamming doors shut against the crowds and in the distance Singh could hear sirens. Just like the Singapore police, maybe like police all over the world, they’d arrive too late to do anything except escort a body to the mortuary.

  “What did she say?” asked Singh. “At the end, what did she say?”

  Li Jun translated as best as he could and Singh grimaced. She’d been so desperate to communicate, if only she’d opted for a name, a place – any word that might have led somewhere.

  “There is no doubt that she did have something to tell us. This was not a hoax,” he said, his voice thin and dry as if events had exhausted him.

  Singh reached down to retrieve the rucksack from where it had fallen. He opened it and removed a pair of new shoes, a handbag and a red holdall that he carefully placed on the table. Had the girl been shopping? He peered into the depths and then reached in with a hand. He brought out a thick stack of old notes, bound up with a rubber band.

  Li Jun looked at the money and then the dead girl. He pointed at her work-roughened hands. “She’s just a factory girl, probably from the provinces. Where would she get that kind of money?”

  “My guess? Blackmail,” said Singh.

  Susan Tan had regained control of her emotions. “She really knew something about Justin’s death, something valuable.”

  “It seems so,” agreed Singh. “She was trying to sell the information to anyone with an interest. Madam First Secretary here, as well as…someone else…someone who preferred to make sure the information remained secret and was prepared to act to ensure it.”

  “Greedy like a snake trying to swallow an elephant,” was the response from Li Jun.

  It was a harsh assessment, decided Singh, looking at the silver moccasins the girl had bought a short while before her death. Maybe she was just poor and tired of it.

  He rummaged further, convinced there was more. “She had a rendezvous with her killer,” he muttered, “or she’d just demanded a money drop. More likely the latter.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Li Jun.

  “She took precautions – the change of clothes, for instance. She didn’t want whoever it was to know who she was.”

  “They took a very dangerous risk,” said Li Jun. “If they had lost her trail in this crowded market, she would have got away with it.”

  Singh shook his head. “I doubt it.” He rummaged further, both hands in Qing’s bag as if he was a child grabbing sweets at Halloween.

  “Well, we’re not dealing with amateurs,” he continued. He turned the holdall inside out so that they could all see the small device pinned to the base. “A radio transmitter,” he explained. “This must have been the bag that the money was delivered in. Whoever did this did not intend to risk losing her in a crowd.”

  “But she shifted the cash to her own rucksack,” pointed out Susan.

  “Yes, and decided to keep the bag anyway. I guess it’s quite a nice one.” He stared at the bag – unable to decide whether it was worth squirreling away rather than discarding.

  “These people, they come from such poverty, it is difficult for them to waste anything,” explained Susan, looking at the corpse with an expression of great sadness. It was the second time in less than a month she was witness to a body laid out. The last time had been her flesh and blood, and this time a woman who might have been able to help explain that crime.

  “So what does this mean for the investigation?” asked Li Jun.

  “It means we look for other routes to the truth,” grunted Singh, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that he wouldn’t be getting home anytime soon.

  ♦

  Jemima sat on her bed cross-legged and ran through the dossier for the hundredth time since she’d recovered it that morning. The door to her bedroom was locked so she knew she was safe from prying eyes. Besides, her mother had gone out – she’d dashed away a couple of hours ago, looking worried and yet hopeful. The latter expression had surprised her daughter. She hadn’t seen it since Justin had been killed. She’d tried to guess what might have cheered her mother and then given up. There might be an opportunity to find out when she returned. Not directly, of course. She’d tried the direct approach soon after Justin’s death. She ran through that conversation in her mind.

  “Mum, do you think it was just an accident?”

  “What do you mean? Justin was murdered.”

  “Yes, but that he just got unlucky. It was a robbery gone wrong and all that.”

  “I’m not sure – that’s what the Chinese police think.”

  “What if they’re wrong?”

  “We have to trust the authorities.”

  Such a Singaporean response, Jemima had thought at the time. Her mother had managed a wan smile, a half-hug and walked away, immersed in her own thoughts. If it hadn’t been for the sudden appearance of Singh, Jemima would never have guessed that they shared the same doubts.

  Jemima wasn’t sure why her mother treated her like a child in contrast to the way she’d always treated Justin. Probably because she was younger, quieter, less successful in school, less ambitious – in fact, not ambitious at all. The opposite of her mother, a mouse compared to the lioness, which meant they’d never seen eye to eye, always had a difficult relationship. And now, when tragedy had provided an opportunity for them to draw together, they had drifted further apart. Broken-hearted from the loss of the same boy, but unable to reach out for comfort, riven with the same doubts but unable to share them.

  And this dossier ensured that the gap between them remained as wide and deep as a canyon. There was no way she could go to her mother with the information contained within. Already, the relationship between her parents was angry and brittle. Jemima dashed away a hot tear and fingered the cover, feeling the texture of the rough paper. There was a very large part of her that wished she’d never retrieved it. She’d known that Justin kept a file under the mattress of his bed, deep under so that no one making the bed would run curious fingers over it while tucking in the sheets. Even before he died, she’d considered having a peek at the contents but decided against it. It would probably turn out to be pornography and she didn’t want to discover that her beloved brother had clay feet.

  But when he was dead, killed, she’d forgotten about it in the first hysteria of grief. Afterwards she’d avoided his bedroom, unable to bear the emptiness, the loneliness, to see the detritus of a life curtailed. But that morning she’d remembered and decided to investigate. Deep in her heart, Jemima had hoped to find something that would make her feel closer to Justin, a keepsake, like a diary perhaps, with a few kind words about the sister who had hero-worshipped him. So she’d gone looking, entered his room quietly, knowing it was untouched, unchanged from the morning that he’d left. Her mother had insisted upon that.

  She’d found his file. But the contents had not been what she’d expected, not a diary, not personal, nothing about her. Instead, papers – notes in his distinct hand with the long lines and firm strokes. And there’d been newspaper cuttings too. A few photos, developed from a camera phone she guessed, because the resolution wasn’t great. Various printouts from blogs, in Chinese and in English. And a series of interviews with people, they’d been identified only by numbers and alphabets, their identities preserved as a secret to any reader. It had taken her a while, but slowly she’d pieced the information together.

  Professor Luo, from the blog entries and lecture notes, was a strong defender of those who were evicted from their land by government decree to make way for large-scale construction projects. She’d known this already from the admiring remarks Justin had made at the dinner table. She’d also been aware that Justin was helping the professor in his investigations and the notes confirmed it. The stories Justin had recorded in the file were always the same: ‘They said we have to go’; ‘They promised us some money but what is the use of that? This is our home’; ‘They sent thugs – my husband was badly beaten when he refused
to leave’.

  Jemima read through the interviews with growing sadness. The photos were the most telling. The hordes of men, women and children, their mouths opened in protest, hands clasped in supplication. Seeking a generosity of spirit since they knew that the law and justice were not for them. In one photo, residents of a village stood with linked arms before the wrecking crew and their equipment. In another, an old man was lying directly in the path of a bulldozer.

  The most recent project appeared to be a plan to requisition land from a small neighbourhood in Beijing to make way for a massive shopping complex. “My family has lived here for generations.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “Are you willing to destroy history with a bulldozer?” Justin had scribbled a response ascribed to an unidentified official: “I’ve seen more than enough of this place. Don’t give me any more of this nonsense.”

  Jemima found a photo and recognised some of the individuals – that short, well-dressed man was surely Dai Wei, deputy mayor of Beijing? She knew that her mother despised him as being a politician scrambling up the greasy pole as quickly as possible, determined to leverage his popularity with the people into a promotion to the twenty-four man Politburo that effectively ruled China and then possibly the Standing Committee, the elite group of six who presided over the Politburo. Jemima guessed that the other officious-looking men in suits were probably from the developers. They stood in the narrow lane, lined with people’s ancient homes and envisioned concrete monoliths with neon lighting offering designer goods to the new rich. Justin had been spying on some very important people. Jemima could see, from an academic paper in the file, the financial implications of land grabs. Billions of yuan were at stake.

  Jemima wrapped her arms around her bent knees and stared at the papers spread across her bed. There was so much information here, so much evidence, even if she had no idea what it had to do with Justin’s death. Maybe nothing, of course. Maybe he’d been killed by that gang of thugs for no reason. On the other hand, she couldn’t help but feel that what she’d found, what she knew, was somehow relevant. There were powerful people and powerful intprests at work here. She should take it to her mother or the sleuth from Singapore and see what they had to say. Perhaps, Inspector Singh would figure out a link between the information and Justin’s death.