The Runner (The China Thrillers 5)

by Peter May

  Sun screwed his eyes against the setting sun and glanced in the direction of Li’s gaze. ‘That’s Beijing Snow World,’ he said.

  ‘Beijing what?’

  ‘Snow World. It’s an artificial ski slope. At least, it’s real snow artificially generated. Guaranteed not to melt till the spring.’ He glanced at Li. ‘Haven’t you heard of it?’

  Li shook his head. He felt like a stranger in his own country. A ski slope! ‘Who in the name of the sky goes skiing in China?’ he asked.

  Sun shrugged. ‘The new kids on the block out of Beijing. The sons and daughters of the rich and successful. It’s pretty neat.’

  Li was amazed. ‘You’ve been there?’

  ‘Some friends took me out when I first got here.’ He grinned. ‘I guess they thought I’d be impressed, a country bumpkin up from the provinces.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘You bet.’ They were approaching the turn-off. ‘You want to see it?’

  Li glanced at his watch. There was time. ‘Let’s do it.’

  A long, newly paved road took them down to an elaborate black and gold wrought-iron gate between two low, white buildings with steeply pitched red roofs. Hawkers were selling fruit and vegetables and tourist trinkets off the back of bicycle carts, stamping their feet in the cold, grim expressions set in the face of a meagre trade. Sun parked the Jeep among the hundred or so private vehicles outside the gate, and went into the right-hand building to buy them visitors’ passes. Li stood listening to western elevator music being piped through speakers mounted on every wall. He could see, through the gate, lampposts lining a long walkway up to the main building, speakers dangling from each one. The air was filled with their music, pervading every tree-lined slope, reaching perhaps into the very graves of the emperors themselves.

  He fished in his pocket to find his purse when Sun emerged with their tickets. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  But Sun waved him aside. ‘I think I can afford to stand you a ten yuan ticket, Chief.’

  Attendants in red ski suits let them through the gate. The walk up the cobbled walkway took them to a long, green-roofed building. It was warm inside, with large restaurants off to left and right, floor to ceiling windows giving on to views of the ski slope itself. The one to the left was still doing late business, groups of wealthy young men and women in fashionable ski gear gathered at round tables, picking over the debris of their meals, draining the last of their beer. The other restaurant was empty, and Sun led Li through it to a café at the far end. It, too, was deserted, apart from a young woman behind a polished wood counter. She wore the Snow World uniform of dark grey trousers and a dark waistcoat over a white blouse. They ordered tea from her and sat by the window.

  Li looked out in astonishment at the dozens of skiers gliding down the shallow slope, then queuing to be dragged back up again on a continuous pulley. At the far side, screaming children sitting in huge inflated tyres flew down a separate run, while a motorised skidoo plied a non-stop trade for goggle-eyed thrill seekers up and down a deserted slope off to the right. He watched as a novice, a young girl togged up in the most expensive of designer ski wear, tried to propel herself along the flat with her ski sticks. She looked clumsy in the great plastic boots that were clipped into her skis, and she ended up sitting down with a thump, severely denting her dignity. There was nothing very sophisticated about any of it, but it was a brand new China experience for Li. ‘Do these people actually have their own skis?’ he asked Sun.

  Sun laughed. ‘No, most of them hire everything here.’

  ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘About three hundred and sixty kwai for a day’s skiing.’ Half a month’s income for the average Chinese.

  Li looked at Sun in astonishment. ‘Three hundred and sixty … ?’ He shook his head. ‘What an incredible waste of money.’ He had only been in America for little over a year, but somehow China had changed hugely in that time, and he felt as if he had been left behind, in breathless pursuit now of changes he could never catch. He glanced at Sun and saw the envy in the young man’s face as he looked out at these privileged kids indulging in pursuits that would always be beyond his pocket. There were only ten years between them, but the gap was almost generational. While Li saw Beijing Snow World as something invasive and alien to his country’s culture, it was something that Sun clearly aspired to. On the other side of the glass, a young woman walked past with two tiny white pet dogs frolicking at her heels. One of them wore a pink waistcoat.

  Sun laughed. ‘That’ll be to keep it warm. She must be going to eat the other one first.’

  The setting sun had become a huge red globe and was starting to dip below the line of the hills. Li drained his tea and stood up. ‘Better go,’ he said.

  * * *

  It was twilight as they drove into Dalingjiang. The village square was a dusty, open piece of broken ground where the men of the village sat on well-worn logs lined up against the wall of the now crumbling production team headquarters of the old commune. Several village elders were gathered in the dying light, smoking pipes and indulging in desultory conversation. A rusty old notice board raised on two poles had nothing to announce. Nothing much happened any more in Dalingjiang. They watched in curious silence as the Jeep rumbled past. Along another side of the square, were the logs laid out for the women. But they were empty.

  Sun pulled up at the village shop, a single-storey brick building with a dilapidated roof and ill-fitting windows. Corncobs were spread out to dry over the concrete stoop. The door jarred and rattled and complained as Li pushed it open. A middle-aged woman behind two glass counters smiled at him. He flicked his eyes over the half-empty shelves behind her. Jars of preserves, Chinese spices, soy sauce, cigarettes, chewing gum. Under the glass were packets of dried beans, cooking utensils, coloured crayons. Crates of beer were stacked under the window.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I’m looking for the home of Lao Da,’ he said. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘But you won’t be able to drive there. You’ll have to park at the end of the road and walk.’

  She gave him instructions and they parked the Jeep further up the dirt road and turned off through a maze of frozen rutted tracks that led them between the high brick walls of the villagers’ courtyard homes. There were piles of refuse gathered at the side of the larger alleys, stacks of red bricks, sheaves of corn stalks for feeding the donkeys. Dogs barked and bayed in the growing darkness, a scrawny mongrel beneath a piece of corrugated iron growling and whining at them as they passed. A donkey looked up with interest from its evening meal, and a cackle of hens ran off screaming from behind their chicken wire. The air was filled with the sweet scent of wood smoke, and they saw smoke drifting gently from tubes extending horizontally from holes in the side walls of houses. There were no chimneys on the roofs.

  They found Xing Da’s parents’ house next to a derelict cottage, long abandoned and left to rot. The children of the village no longer stayed to work the land as their ancestors had done for centuries before them. They left for the city at the first available opportunity, and when their parents died, their houses were allowed to fall down – or else be purchased by entrepreneurs and developed as country cottage retreats for the wealthy.

  Li pushed open a rusted green gate and Sun followed him into the courtyard of Lao Da’s cottage. In the light from the windows they could see firewood and coal stacked along the wall. Frozen persimmons were laid out along the window ledges. Li knocked on the door, and a wizened old man opened it, too old to be Xing Da’s father. Li told him who he was and who he was looking for, and the old man beckoned them in. He was Xing’s grandfather, it turned out. His wife, who looked even older, sat on a large bed pushed up below the window by the door to the kitchen. She glanced at the strangers without showing the slightest interest. Her eyes were vacant. In the light, Li saw that the old man’s face was like parchment, dried and creased. His hands, the c
olour of ash, were like claws. But his eyes were lively enough, dark and darting. He called through to the bedroom, and Lao Da emerged, peering at Li and Sun with suspicious eyes. Although lao meant old, Lao Da was only in his forties, half the age of his old father. He glanced beyond the policemen to the kitchen doorway where his wife had appeared, holding aside the ragged curtain that hung from it.

  ‘It’s the police,’ he said to her. And then to Li, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘It’s about your son,’ Li said.

  ‘He’s dead,’ his father said, his voice laden with everything that meant to him.

  ‘I know,’ Li said. ‘We have reason to believe that the crash he was involved in might not have been an accident.’ He saw the frown of confusion spreading over Lao Da’s face, like blood soaking into a carpet. ‘We’d like to perform an autopsy.’

  ‘But we buried him,’ his mother said from the doorway, in a small voice that betrayed her fear of what was coming next. ‘Out there, in the orchard.’

  ‘If you’d agree to it,’ Li said, ‘I’d like to have him exhumed.’

  ‘You mean you want to dig him up?’ his father said. Li nodded, and Lao Da glanced towards his wife. Then he looked again at Li. ‘You’ll have a job,’ he said. ‘The ground out there’s frozen harder than concrete.’

  Chapter Four

  I

  They drove west along Xizhimenwai Dajie past the towering floodlit neo-classical buildings that housed the Mint and the China Grain Reserves Corporation, the Paleozoological Museum guarded by a velociraptor, the French supermarket and department store, Carrefour, the latest in Beijing chic. Li was lost in silent thoughts Margaret did not want to interrupt. Burned still on his retinas was the image of the grave in the shadow of the mountains. Lao Da had led them by torchlight through a moongate from the courtyard into a small adjoining orchard. Trees that in summer would be laden with fruit and leaves, were winter stark, silent mourners for a young man who had played in this place as a child, guardians of a grave marked by a crude stone slab. A large pink wreath leaned still against the wall. Frozen fruit and vegetables, a bowl of rice, were laid by the stone. The charred remains of paper money, burned by poor people to provide their wealthy son with the means to survive in the afterworld, had been scattered by the breeze and were stuck now by frost to the ground all around. He had heard the mother sobbing, and seen her shadow moving in the courtyard. She had not wanted her son disturbed. But his father had said if there was the slightest doubt about how he had died, then they should know the truth. For they could not lay him properly to rest until they did.

  Li had waited until he and Sun were away from the house before he called in the exhumation team on his cellphone. They would need pickaxes to break the ground, he had told them, perhaps even a pneumatic drill. And he warned them to bring screens to place around the grave. He did not want to subject the parents to more grief than he was already causing them. And lights, for it would be dark.

  Margaret had agreed to do the autopsy. But he had deliberately refrained from telling her too much. He did not want in any way to influence her findings.

  He turned in at the entrance to the Chinese Skating Association, and showed his Public Security ID to the man on the gate, who ventured reluctantly from his glass cubicle wrapped in a thick coat, hood pulled tight around a face that was red with the cold. He waved them through. Li steered north past the competition hall and the training gym and parked in front of the Shouti Hotel where the American athletes were staying.

  They walked the rest of the way to the stadium, joining the streams of people heading in excited expectation to watch the athletics, and crossing an ornamental bridge over a narrow stream whose still water filled the air around it with the perfume of raw sewage.

  The stadium was a huge oval, with upper terraces leading to the eighteen thousand seats which ringed the interior track. At various times, the floor space was flooded and frozen to create an ice rink, and in front of the competitors’ entrance, there was a massive silver representation of a speed-skater. In the vast subterranean space beneath the stadium, thousands of shoppers still thronged a popular market selling clothes and fancy goods.

  ‘We’re not really just coming here to watch the athletics, are we?’ Margaret asked as they approached a large ornamental wall carved with the figures of ice-skaters and the five inter-linked rings of the Olympics.

  Li dragged himself away from his thoughts. ‘I want to talk to some of the athletes,’ he said. ‘And their coach.’ Qian had downloaded some biographical information for him on Chinese athletics’ recently appointed Supervisor of Coaching, a position created with new powers over even the national team coach. It had made interesting reading.

  * * *

  Supervisor Cai Xin was a tall, lean man with short, grey hair and square, steel-rimmed glasses. Li had expected to find him in a tracksuit and trainers. Instead, he wore a dark business suit with polished black shoes, a white shirt and red tie. He seemed distracted, and less than pleased to see Li and Margaret. With field events under way, and the first track event in less than an hour he did not consider this a convenient time to conduct an interview with the police, and told them as much. Li apologised and introduced Margaret. Cai, although displeased, remained polite. His English was immaculate, and he spoke it, unbidden, in deference to the American doctor. He led them down a long, brightly lit corridor beneath the main stand, and into a private room with leather settees and a large television set, and panoramic windows with a view on to the track. The stadium was vast, rows of seats rising up on either side into a cavernous roof space criss-crossed with tubular supports. The pole vault, the men’s long-jump and the men’s shot-put were already in progress. Competitors and officials milled around the area inside the six-lane track. The bleachers were about two-thirds filled, and people were still streaming in. Occasional bursts of applause punctuated the hubbub of people and competition that filled the hall.

  Cai told them to sit, but remained standing himself, patrolling the window, keeping a constant, distracted eye on proceedings beyond it. ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to talk to some of your athletes,’ Li told him. ‘In particular, members of the men’s sprint relay team. But, in general, anyone who knew the three sprinters who died in last month’s car crash.’

  Cai looked at him sharply, his distraction suddenly gone, his focus very clear. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have reason to believe their deaths might not have been accidental.’ Li watched his reaction very carefully, and could have sworn that the colour rose very slightly on his cheeks.

  Cai was clearly searching for a response, but in the end nothing came.

  Li said, ‘And at some time I would like to speak to colleagues of Jia Jing, his coach, others in his weight class. I thought protocol demanded that I should speak to the Supervisor of Coaching first. You know Jia was found dead last night?’

  Cai remained silent for a moment or two longer. Then he said, quietly, ‘I understood it was a heart attack.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Then what’s the connection?’

  ‘I don’t know that there is one.’

  Cai regarded him thoughtfully. ‘We seem to be losing most of our best medal hopes,’ he said at length. ‘But, really, I don’t think I want you speaking to any of my athletes when they are just about to engage in competition with the United States. I don’t believe my superiors, or yours, would be particularly happy if we were to upset our competitors and lose to the Americans.’ He made a tiny nod of acknowledgement towards Margaret. ‘With all due respect.’

  ‘With all due respect,’ Li said, ‘I won’t speak to anyone until after they have competed. Do we have any of the sprint events tonight?’

  Cai said grudgingly, ‘The men’s and women’s sixty metres, the four hundred and the eight hundred.’

  ‘Then I’ll be able to speak to some of them later,’ Li said.

  Cai glanced at his watch. ‘Is that all?’


  ‘Actually, no,’ Li said. ‘I’d like you to tell me what you know about doping.’

  Cai’s face clouded, and a frown gathered around his eyes. His demeanour conveyed both defensiveness and suspicion. ‘Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Because as National Supervisor of Coaching, I would have thought you might have some expertise in the subject,’ Li said evenly. ‘Even if only to ensure that none of our athletes is taking drugs.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Cai said defiantly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we have so many competitors, in so many disciplines, and there are so many different drugs.’

  ‘So tell me about some of them.’

  Cai sighed deeply. ‘There are five main categories of drugs, Section Chief. Stimulants, narcotics, anabolic agents, diuretics, and peptide hormones.’ He appeared to think this was sufficient.

  Li said, ‘That doesn’t tell me much. What are the more commonly used substances?’

  Cai glanced at his watch again. ‘Anabolic steroids,’ he said. ‘Mostly testosterone and its derivatives, including clostebol and nandrolone. They increase muscle strength by encouraging new muscle growth.’

  Margaret spoke, almost for the first time. ‘And bone mass,’ she said. ‘They stimulate the muscle and bone cells to make new protein.’

  Cai nodded. ‘They help the athlete to train harder and longer. But usually an athlete stops taking them at least a month in advance of competition, because they are so easily detectable. They’re used mainly by swimmers and sprinters.’

  ‘And weightlifters?’ Li asked.

  Cai flicked him a look. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘Although generally human growth hormone would be the drug of choice for weightlifters. Being a naturally produced hormone, it is very difficult to detect. It is excellent for building muscle and muscle strength, and allows the user to take shorter breaks between workouts.’