The Runner (The China Thrillers 5)

by Peter May

  The elevator climbed slowly through eleven floors, the thickly padded female attendant studiously ignoring her, squatting on a low wooden stool and flipping idly through the pages of some lurid magazine. The air was dense with the smell of stale smoke and squashed cigarette ends, and piles of ash lay around her feet. Margaret hated the ride in the elevator, but could no longer manage the stairs. She tried to hold her breath until she could step out into the hallway and with some relief slip the key in the door of number 1123.

  Inside, the communal heating made the chill of the uninsulated apartment almost bearable. The reflected lights of the city below crept in through her kitchen window, enough for her to see to put on a kettle without resorting to the harsh overhead bulb which was unshaded and cheerless. If she had thought this was anything other than a temporary address, she might have made an effort to nest. But she didn’t see the point.

  Neither did she see the shadow that crossed the hall behind her. The darting silhouette of a tall figure that moved silently through the doorway. His hand, slipping from behind to cover her mouth, prevented the scream from reaching her lips, and then immediately she relaxed as she felt his other hand slide gently across the swell of her belly, his lips breathing softly as they nuzzled her ear.

  ‘You bastard,’ she whispered when he took his hand from her mouth and turned her to face him. ‘You’re not supposed to give me frights like that.’

  He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Who else would be interested in molesting some ugly fat foreigner?’

  ‘Bastard!’ she hissed again, and then reached on tiptoe to take his lower lip between her front teeth and hold it there until he forced them apart with his tongue and she could feel him swelling against the tautness of her belly.

  When they broke apart she looked up into his coal dark eyes and asked, ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Margaret … ’ He sounded weary.

  ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘Forget I asked.’ Then, ‘But I do miss you, Li Yan. I’m scared of going through this alone.’ He drew her to him, and pressed her head into his chest, his large hand cradling her skull. Li was a big man for a Chinese, powerfully built, more than six feet tall below his flat-top crew cut, and when he held her like this it made her feel small like a child. But she hated feeling dependent. ‘When will you hear about the apartment?’

  She felt him tense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and he moved away from her as the kettle boiled. She stood for a moment, watching him in the dark. Lately she had sensed his reluctance to discuss the subject.

  ‘Well, have you asked?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  She sensed rather than saw him shrug. ‘They haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Haven’t decided what? What apartment we’re going to get? Or whether they’re going to give us one at all?’

  ‘Margaret, you know that it is a problem. A senior police officer having a relationship with a foreign national … there is no precedent.’

  Margaret glared at him, and although he could not see her eyes, he could feel them burning into him. ‘We’re not having a relationship, Li Yan. I’m having your baby. We’re getting married next week. And I’m sick and tired of spending lonely nights in this goddamn cold apartment.’ To her annoyance she felt tears welling in her eyes. It was only one of many unwanted ways in which pregnancy had affected her. An unaccountable propensity for sudden heights of emotion accompanied by embarrassing bouts of crying. She fought to control herself. Li, she knew, was as helpless in this situation as she was. The authorities frowned upon their relationship. Nights together in her apartment or his were stolen, furtive affairs, unsanctioned, and in the case of her staying over with him, illegal. She was obliged to report any change of address, even for one night, to her local Public Security Bureau. Although, in practice, no one much bothered about that these days, Li’s position as the head of Beijing’s serious crime squad made them very much subject to the rule from which nearly everyone else was excepted. It was hard to take, and they had both hoped that their decision to marry would change that. But as yet, they had not received the blessing from above.

  He moved closer to take her in his arms again. ‘I can stay over tonight.’

  ‘You’d better,’ she said, and turned away from him to pour hot water over green tea leaves in two glass mugs. What she really wanted was a vodka tonic with ice and lemon, but she hadn’t touched alcohol since falling pregnant and missed the escape route it sometimes offered from those things in life she really didn’t want to face up to.

  She felt the heat of his body as he pressed himself into her back and his hands slipped under her arms to gently cup her swollen breasts. She shivered as a sexual sensitivity forked through her. Sex had always been a wonderful experience with Li. Like with no other. So she had been surprised by the extraordinarily heightened sense of sexuality that had come with her approaching motherhood. It had hardly seemed possible. She had feared that pregnancy would spoil their relationship in bed; that she, or he, would lose interest. To the surprise of them both, the opposite had been true. At first, fear of a second miscarriage had made them wary, but after medical reassurance, Li had found ways of being gentle with her, exploiting her increased sensitivity, taking pleasure from driving her nearly to the edge of distraction. And he had found the swelling of her breasts and her belly intensely arousing. She felt that arousal now, pushing into the small of her back and she abandoned the green tea and turned to seek his mouth with hers, wanting to devour him, consume him whole.

  The depressingly familiar ring tone of Li’s cellphone fibrillated in the dark. ‘Don’t answer,’ she whispered. And for a moment she actually thought he wouldn’t. He responded hungrily to her probing tongue, hands slipping over her buttocks and drawing her against him. But the shrill warble of the phone was relentless and finally he gave in, breaking away, flushed and breathless.

  ‘I’ve got to,’ he said, and he unclipped the phone from his belt, heavy with disappointment, and lifted it to his ear. ‘Wei?’

  Margaret turned back to her green tea, still shaking and aroused, desperately wanting to have sex with him, but knowing that the moment had passed. Angry with him, but knowing that it was not his fault. His work intruded on their lives all the time. She had always known it would. And there was even a time when she could have shared in it. But it was months since she had last worked on a case, performed an autopsy. Li had forbidden it, fearing that there could be health risks for the baby, and she had not resisted. Just one more erosion, one more piece of herself falling back into the sea she had tried so hard to build defences against. It was easier now just to give in, and she was no longer interested in his cases.

  He clipped his phone back on his belt. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ she said in a flat tone, and she reached over to switch on the overhead light and turned to blink at him in the sudden brightness. ‘What is it this time? Another murder?’ Beijing appeared to be in the throes of a crime wave. Crime figures were sky-rocketing. And there had been some particularly gruesome killings. Li’s team had just arrested an ethnic Korean for murdering a twenty-nine-year-old woman for her hair. Consumed by some bizarre desire to posses her long, black locks, he had stabbed her to death and then beheaded her with an axe. After taking the head home with him he had peeled off the scalp and hair. When detectives from Section One burst into his apartment, they had found him stir-frying her facial skin with the apparent intention of eating it.

  ‘No,’ Li said. ‘Not a murder. At least, it doesn’t appear that way.’ Although he smiled, he was perplexed. ‘Death by sex, apparently.’ He stooped to kiss her softly on the lips. ‘Perhaps we had a narrow escape.’

  II

  Li’s bike rattled in the back of his Jeep. The Chrysler four-wheel drive, built in the city by a Chinese–American joint venture, was affectionately known as the Beijing Jeep, much beloved by the municipal police who had adopted it almost as their own. The vehicle a
llocated to Li as Section Chief was an unmarked dark green with smoked glass windows. The only indication that this was a police vehicle, to those who knew, was the jing character and the zero which followed it on the registration plate. Normally he left it at Section One and cycled home, which was often faster than trying to negotiate the capital’s increasingly frequent gridlocks, but it was a long way across the city in the bitter cold to Margaret’s apartment, so tonight he had bundled his bike in the back.

  Many of the side streets, which had not been cleared of snow, were still treacherous with ice. But as he turned on to West Chang’an Avenue, this brightly lit arterial route which dissected the city east to west, was free of ice, and traffic was light. Hotels and ministry buildings, China Telecom, were all floodlit, and Li could see the lights of Christmas trees twinkling incongruously in hotel forecourts. Just two weeks away, Christmas in Beijing was primarily for the tourists. But the Chinese welcomed any excuse for a banquet.

  He drove past the impressive front gates of Zhongnanhai on his left, and on his right the big black hole behind the Great Hall of the People where work had already begun on building China’s controversial new National Grand Theatre, at a cost of three hundred and twenty-five million dollars. Ahead was the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the portrait of Mao smiling benignly over Tiananmen Square where the blood of the democracy protesters of eighty-nine seemed to have been washed away by the sea of radical economic change that had since swept the country. Li wondered fleetingly what Mao would have made of the nation he had wrested from the Nationalist Kuomintang all those decades ago. He would not have recognised his country in this twenty-first century.

  Li took a left, through the arch, into Nanchang Jie and saw the long, narrow, tree-lined street stretch ahead of him into the darkness. Beyond the Xihuamen intersection it became Beichang Jie – North Chang Street – and on his right, a high grey wall hid from sight the restored homes of mandarins and Party cadres that lined this ancient thoroughfare along the banks of the moat which surrounded the Forbidden City. Up ahead there were two patrol cars pulled up on to the ramp leading to tall electronic gates in the wall. Li saw a Section One Jeep drawn in at the kerb, and Doctor Wang’s Volkswagen pulled in behind it. There were a couple of unmarked vans from the forensics section in Pao Jü Hutong. A uniformed officer stood by the gate, huddled in his shiny black fur-collared coat, smoking a cigarette and stamping his feet. His black and silver peaked cap was pulled down low over his eyes trying to provide his face with some protection from the icy wind. Although it had been introduced shortly before his spell at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, Li still found it hard to get used to the new black uniform with its white and silver trim. The red-trimmed green army colours of the police in the first fifty years of the People’s Republic had been virtually indistinguishable from those of the PLA. Only the Armed Police still retained them now.

  Detective Wu’s call to Li’s cellphone had been cryptic. He had no reason to believe this was a crime scene. It was a delicate matter, perhaps political, and he had no idea how to deal with it. Li was curious. Wu was a brash, self-confident detective of some fifteen years’ experience. Delicacy was not something one normally associated with him. Nor tact. All that he had felt able to tell Li on the phone was that there was a fatality, and that it was of a sexual nature. But as soon as he had given Li the address, the Section Chief had known this was no normal call-out. This was a street inhabited by the powerful and the privileged, people of influence. One would need to tread carefully.

  The officer on the gate recognised Li immediately, hastily throwing away his cigarette in a shower of sparks and saluting as Li got out of the Jeep. The gate was lying open, and a couple of saloon cars, a BMW and a Mercedes, sat in the courtyard beyond, beneath a jumble of grey slate roofs.

  ‘Who lives here?’ Li asked the officer.

  ‘No idea, Section Chief.’

  ‘Where’s Detective Wu?’

  ‘Inside.’ He jerked a thumb towards the courtyard.

  Li crossed the cobbled yard and entered the sprawling, single-storey house through double glass doors leading into a sun lounge. Three uniformed officers stood among expensive cane furnishings engaged in hushed conversation with Wu and several forensics officers. Wu’s butt-freezer leather jacket hung open, the collar still up, his cream silk scarf dangling from his neck. He wore jeans and sneakers, and was pulling nervously at his feeble attempt at a moustache with nicotine-stained fingers. His face lit up when he saw Li.

  ‘Hey, Chief. Glad you’re here. This one’s a real bummer.’ He steered Li quickly out into a narrow hallway with a polished parquet floor, walls lined with antique cabinets and ancient hangings. From somewhere in the house came the sound of a woman sobbing. From the sun lounge behind them Li could hear stifled laughter.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here, Wu?’

  Wu’s voice was low and tense. ‘Local Public Security boys got a call an hour ago from the maid. She was hysterical. They couldn’t get much sense out of her, except that somebody was dead. So they sent out a car. The uniforms get here and think, “Shit, this is over our heads,” and the call goes out to us. I get here and I think pretty much the same damned thing. So I called in the Doc and his hounds and phoned you. I ain’t touched a thing.’

  ‘So who’s dead?’

  ‘Guy called Jia Jing.’ Li thought the name sounded faintly familiar. ‘Chinese weightlifting champion,’ Wu clarified for him.

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Doc thinks it’s natural causes.’ He nodded his head towards the end of the hall. ‘He’s still in there.’

  Li was perplexed. ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘The deal is,’ Wu said, ‘we’re standing in the home of a high-ranking member of BOCOG.’ Li frowned. Wu elucidated. ‘The Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. He’s in Greece right now. His wife’s in their bedroom with a three-hundred-pound weightlifter lying dead on top of her. And he’s, how can I put it … ’ he paused for effect, but Li guessed Wu had already worked out exactly how he was going to put it, ‘ … locked in the missionary position and still in the act of penetration.’ He couldn’t resist a smirk. ‘Seems like his heart gave out just when things were getting interesting.’

  ‘In the name of the sky, Wu!’ Li felt the first flush of anger. ‘You mean you just left him like that? For more than an hour?’

  ‘Hey, Chief,’ Wu held his hands up. ‘We didn’t have any choice. Doc says she’s had some kind of involuntary muscular spasm and she’s holding him in there. We can’t uncouple them, even if we wanted to. And, hey, have you ever tried moving three hundred pounds of dead meat? It’s going to take everyone here to lift him off.’

  Li raised his eyes to the heavens and took a deep breath. Whatever he might have imagined, it could never have been this. But the implications were scandalous, not criminal, and his immediate inclination was to wash the section’s hands of it as quickly as possible. ‘What’s the Doc’s prognosis?’

  ‘He’s given her a sedative. Says when it takes effect the spasm should relax and we can prise him free.’ Again, the hint of a smirk, and Li knew that Wu was choosing his words carefully for their colour, enjoying the moment, and enjoying passing the buck.

  ‘Wipe that fucking smile off your face!’ Li said quietly, and the smirk vanished instantly. ‘A man’s dead here, and a woman’s seriously distressed.’ He took another deep breath. ‘You’d better show me.’

  Wu led him through into a bedroom of extraordinary opulence and bad taste. A thick-piled red carpet, walls lined with crimson silk. Black lacquer screens inlaid with mother of pearl set around a huge bed dressed in peach and cream satin. Pink silk tassles hung from several hand-painted lanterns whose light was instantly soaked up by the dark colours of the room. The air was sticky warm, and layered with the scents of incense and sex.

  The room’s incongruous focal point comprised the large, flaccid buttocks of the three-hundred-pound weightlifting champion of China.
His thighs and calves were enormous below a thick waist and deeply muscled back and shoulders. A pigtail, like an old-fashioned Chinese queue, curled around the nape of his neck. By contrast, the legs he lay between were absurdly fragile. The woman was pale and thin, with short, bobbed hair, her make-up smeared by sex and tears. It seemed incredible that she had not been crushed by this monster of a man who lay prone on top of her, literally a dead weight. Li thought she looked as if she were in her forties, perhaps twice the age of her late lover.

  She was still sobbing quietly, but her eyes were clouded like cataracts and staring off into some unseen distance. Doctor Wang Xing, the duty pathologist from the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong, was sitting in a chair by the bedside holding her hand. He cocked an eyebrow in Li’s direction. ‘Administering sedatives and holding hands is not my usual domain,’ he said. ‘But it’s one for my memoirs, if ever they let me publish them.’ He flicked his head towards the lady of the house. ‘I think it might be worth trying to get him off her now.’

  It took eight of them to lift Jia Jing clear of his lover long enough for Doctor Wang to pull her free. She was liquid and limp from the sedative, and he had difficulty getting her into a chair. Li tossed a silk dressing-gown over her nakedness and cleared the room.

  ‘So you think it was a heart attack?’ Li said.

  Wang shrugged. ‘That’s how it looks. But I won’t know for sure until I get him on the slab.’

  ‘Well, I’d appreciate it if you could have your boys get him out of here just as soon as possible.’