The Runner (The China Thrillers 5)

by Peter May

  Sun said, ‘I’d be amazed if he did. Doesn’t look like he shaved.’ He lifted the box of razor heads. ‘None of them have been used.’ The Chinese were not a hairy race. Some men never had to shave. He picked up a small gold-coloured aerosol smaller than a lipstick. ‘What’s this?’

  Li took it from him and frowned. ‘It’s a breath freshener.’ It was exactly the same as the one found among Jia Jing’s belongings. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, as he had done a couple of hours earlier in the autopsy room. The same sharp menthol smell.

  Sun sniffed and screwed up his face. ‘I think I’d rather have bad breath.’ He looked around. ‘Well, it doesn’t look like he shaved his own head either. At least, not here.’

  ‘We should find out if he had a regular barber,’ Li said. Sun nodded and made a note. ‘And get the local police in Guilin to talk to his family. Find out when he left home, how long he’s been living in Beijing, did he have any family here.’

  In the living room, Li drew back the net curtains from the window and looked out on the sun slanting between the skyscrapers of the burgeoning Beijing skyline. Traffic jammed the street below, and in the distance he could see lines of vehicles crawling across a long sweep of ring road flyover. Factory chimneys belched their toxins into an unusually blue sky, ensuring that it would not stay that way for long. He wondered what kind of boy Sui had been, who could live his ascetic, dustless existence in this rich man’s bubble and leave not a trace of himself behind. What had he done here all on his own? What had he thought about when he sat in his show-house furniture looking out on a city a thousand miles from home? Or had everything revolved entirely around the pool, a life spent in chlorinated water? Had his existence in this apartment, in this city, been literally like that of a fish out of water? Is that why he had left no traces? Except for his own body, his temple, and a room full of medals and photographs, his shrine.

  He turned to find Sun watching him. ‘I don’t think this boy had any kind of life outside of the pool, Sun. No reason for living except winning. If he killed himself it was because someone took that reason away.’

  ‘Do you think he did?’

  Li checked his watch. ‘Margaret will be starting the autopsy shortly. Let’s find out.’

  III

  Students, future police officers, were playing basketball on the court opposite the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the south end of the campus. The University of Public Security played host to the most advanced facilities in the field of forensic pathology in China, and they were housed in a squat, inauspicious four-storey building along one end of the playing fields. The students were wrapped up warm in hooded sweatsuits and jogpants, shouting and breathing fire into the frozen midday. Through small windows high up in the cold white walls of the autopsy room, Margaret could hear them calling to each other. She, too, was wrapped up, but for protection rather than warmth. A long-sleeved cotton gown over a plastic apron over green surgeon’s pyjamas. She had plastic shoe covers on her feet, plastic covers on her arms, and a plastic shower cap on her head, loose strands of fair hair tucked neatly out of sight. She wore a steel mesh gauntlet on her left, non-cutting hand, and both hands were covered in latex. She wore goggles to protect her eyes, and had tied a white, synthetic, paper-like fibre mask over her mouth and nose. The masks that the Centre usually supplied for pathologists were cotton. But the spaces between the threads in the weave of the cotton masks were relatively large, and more liable to let through bacteria, or microscopic water droplets, or aerosolised bone dust. Acutely aware of the bulge beneath her apron, Margaret wasn’t taking any chances. She had dipped into her dwindling private supply of synthetic masks, affording herself and her baby far greater protection from unwanted and undesirable inhalations.

  She had two assistants working with her, and she let them do the donkey work under her close scrutiny: cutting open the rib cage, removing and breadloafing the organs, slitting along the length of the intestine, cutting open the skull. They worked to her instructions, and she only moved in close to make a personal examination of the things that caught her attention. She recorded her comments through an overhead microphone.

  Right now she was examining the heart at another table. It was firm and normal in size. Carefully, she traced the coronary arteries from their origins at the aorta, around the outside of the heart, incising every five millimeters looking for blockage. She found none, and began breadloafing part way, examining the muscle for evidence of old or recent injury. When she reached the valves that separate the chambers of the heart she stopped sectioning and examined them. They were well formed and pliable. Although the left ventricle, which pumps the blood out of the heart through the aorta, was slightly thickened, she did not consider this abnormal. A little hypertrophy was to be expected in the left ventricle of an athlete. It was, after all, just another muscle, worked hard and developed by exercise. She was satisfied it was not his heart that had killed this young man.

  She then embarked on a process of taking small sections, about one by one-point-five centimeters, from each of the organs for future microscopic examination. Although she did not consider that this would be necessary. Carefully, she placed each one into the tiny cassettes in which they would be fixed in formalin, dehydrated in alcohol and infiltrated by paraffin, creating pieces of wax tissue firm enough to be cut so thin that a microscope could see right through them.

  Her concentration was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, and she looked up as Li and Sun came in, pulling on aprons and shower caps. ‘You’re a little late,’ she said caustically.

  ‘You’ve started?’ Li said.

  ‘I’ve finished.’

  Li looked crestfallen. She knew he liked to be there to go through each step with her, picking up on every little observation. ‘The services of the assistants were only available to me for a short time,’ she told him. ‘And I didn’t think I was in any condition to go heaving a body around on my own.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Li said quickly. He half turned towards Sun. ‘You’ve met Sun, haven’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. ‘But I feel as if I have, the amount of talking you’ve done about him.’ Sun blushed. ‘You didn’t tell me he was such a good-looking boy. Afraid I might make a pass at him?’

  Li grinned. ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ He looked at Sun. ‘Are you following any of this?’

  ‘A little,’ Sun said.

  ‘Ignore her. She loves to embarrass people.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Margaret said. ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re late. You’ve missed all the boring bits. We can get straight to the point.’

  ‘Which is?’ Li asked.

  She crossed to the table where Sui Mingshan lay opened up like his fellow competitor on the other side of the city, cold and inanimate, devoid of organs, brain removed. Even like this he was a splendid specimen. Broad shoulders, beautifully developed pectorals, lithe, powerful legs. His face was obscured by the top flap of skin above the Y-shaped incision which had begun at each shoulder blade. Margaret pulled it down to reveal a young, not very handsome face, innocent in its repose, frozen in death, cheeks peppered by acne. His shaven head had been very roughly cut and was still quite stubbly in places. Li tried to imagine this young man in the apartment they had examined just an hour earlier. Perhaps his spirit had returned there and was haunting it still.

  Margaret said, ‘You can see, there is no petechial haemorrhaging around the face, the eyes or the neck. He didn’t die of strangulation.’ She lifted up the flap again to expose the muscles of the neck, and the open area where she had transected the trachea and oesophagus, peeling them away from the backbones and down into the chest. ‘The hyoid bone, just above the Adam’s apple, is broken, and the neck dislocated between the second and third cervical vertebrae, as you can see, cleanly severing the spinal cord.’

  She turned the head each way to show them the deep red-purple abrasions where the rope had
burned his neck, high up under the jaw bone. ‘It’s all very unusual in a suicide.’

  ‘Why?’ Li asked.

  ‘Most suicidal hangings don’t involve such a drop, so the neck isn’t usually broken. Effectively they are strangled by the rope, and there would be evidence of pinpoint haemorrhages where tiny blood vessels had burst around the face, eyes, neck. Petechial haemorrhaging. As you saw, there is none.’

  She nodded to one of her assistants and got him to turn the body over. She said, ‘We know that he was alive when he made the drop, because the abrasions made by the rope on his neck are red and bloody. There is no doubt that death was caused by a dislocation of the vertebrae of the neck severing the spinal cord. A broken neck to you.’

  ‘So … you think he kill himself?’ Sun ventured in English.

  Margaret pursed her lips behind her mask. ‘Not a chance.’

  Li looked at her. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘The amount of alcohol in his stomach,’ she said. ‘Can’t you smell it?’ Li found it hard to pick out any one odour from the melange of faeces, blood and decaying meat that perfumed the air. ‘I nearly sent the boys out for some soda so we could have a party.’

  ‘Half bottle brandy,’ Sun said.

  ‘Oh, much more than that,’ Margaret said brightly. ‘I nearly had to ask for bread and milk to be brought in. There was so much alcohol in the air I thought I was getting drunk. Not a good idea in my condition.’

  ‘But he didn’t drink,’ Li said. ‘His team-mates were quite definite about that.’

  ‘Well, then, I’m surprised it wasn’t the alcohol that killed him. From the smell alone, I’d say we were looking at something around zero-point-four percent. Enough to seriously disable, or even kill, the untrained drinker. Maybe somebody encouraged him to drink the first few. Perhaps with a gun at his head. And if he wasn’t used to alcohol, then it probably wasn’t long before they were able to pour it down his throat.’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t drink it himself?’ Li persisted.

  ‘Well, maybe he did.’ Margaret removed her mask and goggles, and Li saw the perspiration beaded across her brow. ‘But with that much alcohol coursing through his veins, he wouldn’t have been able to stand up, let alone climb ten metres to the top ramp of a diving pool, tie one end of the rope around the rail, the other around his neck and then jump off. Someone got him very drunk, took him up there, placed the noose around his neck and pushed him over.’

  They heard the hum of the air-conditioning in the silence that followed, and the guys with the basketball were still pounding the court outside.

  Eventually, Li said stupidly, ‘So somebody killed him.’

  She said trenchantly, ‘When you push someone off a thirty-foot ramp with a rope around their neck, Li Yan, they usually call it murder.’

  She returned her attention immediately to the body and asked, ‘Has the question of drug-taking arisen?’

  Li frowned. ‘Why? Was he taking drugs?’

  ‘I have no idea. I’ve sent several samples down to toxicology and asked for priority analysis.’

  ‘You think he was, then?’

  She shrugged non-committally and ran her fingers across the tops of his shoulder and upper back. The whole area was covered with acne spots and scars. ‘Acne is quite a common side-effect of steroids. On the other hand boys of his age can suffer like this.’

  ‘Toxicology should tell us, though?’

  She peeled off her latex gloves. ‘Actually, probably not. He was due to swim in competition today, right?’ Li nodded. ‘So there would be a high risk of testing. If he was taking steroids he’d have stopped long enough ago that it wouldn’t show up.’ She shrugged again. ‘So who the hell knows?’

  * * *

  Outside, the basketball players were taking a cigarette break, steam rising from them with the smoke as they stood around chatting idly, one of them squatting on the ball. It put Sun in the mood, and he lit up, too, as Li dialled Section One on his cellphone. He got put through to the detectives’ room.

  ‘Qian? It’s Li. Tell the boys it’s official. Sui was murdered.’ He watched Sun drawing on his cigarette and envied him every mouthful. ‘And Qian, I want you to check with the various sports authorities when any of these athletes was last tested for drugs.’

  ‘You think it is drug-related, then?’ Qian asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think anything,’ Li said. ‘I just want every little piece of information we can get. The more pixels the clearer the picture.’ He couldn’t stand it any longer. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Sun, ‘Give me one of those.’ And he held his hand out for a cigarette.

  Sun looked surprised, then took out a cigarette and handed it to him. Li stuck it in his mouth and said to Qian, ‘This indoor athletics competition with the Americans, it starts today, right?’

  ‘Yes, Chief.’

  ‘At the Capital Stadium?’

  ‘Yeh, the place where they have the speed skating.’

  ‘Okay, get me a couple of tickets for tonight.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were a sports fan, Chief.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Li said, and disconnected. He clipped the phone on his belt and starting searching his pockets for a light, before he remembered he didn’t have one. Sun flicked open his lighter, and a blue-yellow flame danced in the sunlight. Li leaned forward to light his cigarette and saw, over Sun’s shoulder, Margaret coming down the steps of the Centre for Material Evidence Determination behind him. He quickly coughed into his hand, snatching the cigarette from his mouth and crumpling it in his fist. Sun was left holding his lighter in mid-air. He looked perplexed. ‘Put that fucking thing away!’ Li hissed.

  Sun recoiled as if he had been slapped, slipping the lighter quickly back in his pocket. Then he saw Margaret approaching and a slow smile of realisation crossed his face. Li met his eyes and blushed, then whispered threateningly, ‘Not a word!’ Sun’s smile just broadened.

  As she joined them, Margaret said, ‘Where are you off to now?’

  ‘We’re going to have a look at the weightlifter’s place.’

  ‘I thought Wang said it was natural causes.’

  ‘He did,’ Li said. ‘I just don’t like coincidences.’

  Margaret’s hair was held back by a band, and she had not a trace of make-up on her face. But she looked lovely, her skin clear and soft and brushed pink by pregnancy. ‘I’m going back to the apartment,’ she said, ‘to shower and change. Then I guess I’ll head off to my exercise class. Will I see you later?’

  ‘I’m getting a couple of tickets for the indoor athletics tonight. I thought you might like to come along and see the Americans being shown how to do it by the Chinese.’

  Margaret cocked an eyebrow. ‘The other way around, don’t you mean? You people have come a long way in a short time, but you’ve still a long way to go.’

  Li grinned. ‘We’ll see. You’ll come then?’

  ‘Sure.’

  And then he remembered, ‘Oh, yeh, and I thought we might have lunch tomorrow, with Sun Xi and his wife, Wen. It would be a good time to meet her. And you could maybe take her up to the hospital tomorrow afternoon. Get her sorted out.’

  There was murder in Margaret’s eyes, but she kept a smile fixed on her face. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be convenient for Detective Sun,’ she said through slightly clenched teeth.

  Sun was oblivious. ‘No,’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tomorrow will be good. I very grateful to you Misses, eh … Miss … ’

  ‘Doctor,’ Margaret said, flicking Li a look that might have dropped a lesser man. ‘But you can call me Margaret. And it’s my pleasure.’ She waved Sun’s cigarette smoke out of her face. ‘You know, you should have given that up long ago. Apart from the fact that it is not good for you, it is not good for your wife, or your baby.’

  Sun looked dutifully ashamed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I should follow example of Chief. He has great will-power.’

  Li looked as if he might kill
him, and then he saw that Margaret was giving him another of her looks. Her eyes strayed down to his still clenched fist, where Sun’s scrunched up cigarette was beginning to turn to mush. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ And then she beamed beatifically. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’ And she turned and headed off into the early afternoon sunshine towards the white apartment block at the north end of the campus.

  Sun grinned at Li. ‘Near thing, Chief.’

  ‘Let’s just go,’ Li said, with the weary resignation of a man who knows he’s been rumbled.

  IV

  Jia Jing lived in another of Beijing’s new luxury apartment complexes, this time beyond the China World Trade Centre at the east end of Jianguomenwai Avenue. As they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, Li said, ‘There’s something wrong with the world, Sun, when you can live like this just because you can lift more weight than anyone else, or run further, or swim faster. I mean, what makes any of that more valuable than the guy who sweeps the streets?’

  ‘People aren’t going to pay to watch a guy sweeping the streets, Chief,’ Sun said. And, of course, Li knew that he was right.

  They let themselves into the apartment with the key the security man on the desk had given them. If Sui’s apartment had been the height of luxury aspired to by the wealthy, Jia’s apartment was quite the opposite. It was large, with a long rectangular living and dining area with three bedrooms off it. But it was filled with cold, hard surfaces, unrelenting and austere. Jia Jing had not been a man to seek comfort, except perhaps between the legs of another man’s wife.

  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.