The Runner (The China Thrillers 5)

by Peter May

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Li said. ‘I’ve warned them of it. But their security’s pretty good, so I don’t see that there’s much else we can do.’

  Tao nodded. ‘I have a meeting with the administrator,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour.’ He got a further half a dozen steps down the stairs before he stopped and called back, ‘You have heard about the athlete who’s gone missing?’

  Li frowned. ‘No.’ And then he remembered Wu saying something about someone not turning up for a race.

  ‘Chinese three thousand metres indoor champion,’ Tao said. ‘Failed to show up for her race last night. Now, apparently nobody can find her.’

  A dozen detectives were gathered around the TV set in the detectives’ room. A few faces turned towards the door as Li and Qian came in. Sun waved him over. ‘Chief, this could be important.’

  There was a news bulletin on air, reporting on the aftermath of the China–USA indoor athletics meeting, and the failure of the Chinese distance runner, Dai Lili, to turn up for her race the previous evening. She had been favourite to win the three thousand metres, and if she had that would have been enough to tip the overall points balance in China’s favour. So there were a lot of unhappy people around this morning. And still no sign of Dai Lili. The American press had cottoned on to the fact that there was something strange going on, and given Beijing’s promise of free and open reporting during the Olympic Games, the authorities were reluctant to clamp down too hard on the foreign media. There was live coverage of a veritable media scrum outside the Capital Indoor Stadium, with both foreign and domestic journalists pressing for an official statement. In the background Li could hear an American reporter speaking to camera. ‘The failure of Chinese champion Dai Lili to turn up for the event, comes on top of a disastrous month for Chinese athletics in which up to six of the country’s top athletes have died in unusual circumstances … ’ So the genie was out of the bottle. And there would be no way now to get it back in.

  Wu was saying, ‘She lives on her own in an apartment on the north side, Chief, but apparently there’s nobody home. Her parents say they don’t know where she is either. And given our current investigation, I figured maybe it was worth following up.’

  Li nodded. ‘What do we know about her?’

  ‘Not much yet,’ Sun said. An image of her face flashing on to the screen caught his eye. ‘That’s her.’

  Li looked at the face and felt the skin prickling all over his head. He had seen her for only a few moments in poor lighting on the landing of Margaret’s apartment, but the birthmark was unmistakable. She had wanted to speak to Margaret. Margaret had given the girl her address, and she had already turned up there once. Given the fate met by six of her fellow athletes, it was all just too close to home for comfort.

  He said to Sun, ‘Get your coat. We’re going to the stadium.’

  * * *

  Li and Sun had to elbow their way through the crowds of reporters and cameramen gathered outside the official entrance to the stadium, bigger flakes of snow falling now with greater regularity. The mood of the media was more subdued than Li had seen earlier on television, the cold sapping energy and enthusiasm. Hostile eyes followed the two detectives to the door, where Li rapped on the glass and showed his ID to an armed guard inside.

  Supervisor of Coaching Cai Xin was not pleased to see them. ‘I have better things to do with my time, Section Chief, than to waste it on fruitless police interviews.’ His mood had hardly been improved by defeat.

  Li said evenly, ‘I can arrange, Supervisor Cai, to have you taken to Section Six for interrogation by professionals if you’d prefer.’

  Which stopped Cai in his tracks. He looked at Li appraisingly, wondering if this was a hollow threat. Cai was a man not without influence after all. ‘I don’t see what possible interest the police could have in any of this,’ he said.

  ‘We have six dead athletes,’ Li said. ‘And now a seventh has gone missing. So don’t fuck with me, Cai. Where can we talk?’

  Cai took a deep breath and led them to his private room, trackside, where he had spoken to Li and Margaret three nights earlier. The colour had drained from his face, a mix of anger and fear. ‘I could have you reported, Section Chief, for speaking to me like that,’ he hissed, and he glanced at Sun.

  Sun shrugged. ‘Seemed perfectly civil to me, Supervisor Cai,’ he said, and Cai saw that there would be little point in pursuing his indignation. Better just to get this over with.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he said curtly.

  ‘Who told the media about the dead athletes?’ Li asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea. But when six of your best Olympic prospects fail to turn up for a major international event, then questions are going to be asked. And some of those deaths are hardly secret. The car crash which all but wiped out my relay team was reported in the China Daily last month.’

  ‘Why didn’t Dai Lili turn up last night?’

  ‘You tell me? She seemed very cosy with your American friend.’

  Li sensed Sun turning to look at him. But he kept his focus on Cai. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I saw them talking out there in the lobby the other night.’

  ‘After you’d given your athletes strict instructions not to speak to either of us,’ Li said, and Cai immediately flushed.

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

  ‘Yeh, sure,’ Li said. ‘And I suppose you never asked her what it was she was speaking to Doctor Campbell about.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she tell you? Was that the problem? Did you fall out over it? Is that why she failed to turn up?’

  ‘This is preposterous!’

  ‘Is it? She was very keen to speak to Doctor Campbell about something. Something she never got the chance to do, because she ran off scared when she saw you. I don’t suppose you’d know what it was she wanted so urgently to tell her?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. And I resent being questioned like this, Section Chief. I resent your tone and I resent your attitude.’

  ‘Well, you know what, Supervisor Cai? You probably don’t know it, but my investigation into your dead athletes has turned into a murder inquiry. And there’s a young girl out there somewhere who could be in very grave danger. For all I know, she might be dead already. So I don’t particularly care if you don’t like my tone. Because right now yours is the only name on a suspect list of one.’

  Cai blanched. ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘You’ll find out just how serious I am, Supervisor Cai, if I don’t get your full co-operation. I want her home address, her parents’ address, her telephone number, her cellphone number, her email address, and any other information that you have on her. And I want it now.’

  As they crossed the bridge over the river beyond the stadium, Sun breathed in the lingering scent of the sewer and his face wrinkled in disgust. He blew out his cheeks and hurried to the other side. He turned as Li caught him up. ‘You were a bit hard on him, Chief,’ he said. ‘You don’t really consider him a suspect, do you?’

  ‘Right now,’ Li said, ‘he’s the best we’ve got. He’s the only common factor. He was known to all of the victims. He’s hostile and defensive, and he has a very dodgy track record on the subject of doping. He gave his athletes instructions not to talk to me the other night, and then saw Dai Lili speaking to Margaret. Suddenly Dai Lili goes missing. Big coincidence.’

  ‘What did she want to speak to Doctor Campbell about?’

  Li shook his head in frustration. ‘I wish I knew.’

  IV

  Dai Lili’s parents lived in a crumbling siheyuan courtyard in a quarter of the city just west of Qianmen and south of the old city wall which had protected the imperial family and their courtesans from the vulgar masses that thronged outside the gates of the ancient capital. In the days before the Communists, the streets here were full of clubs and restaurants and gambling dens. It was a dangerous place to venture alone
in the dark. Now Qianmen was a vibrant shopping area, filled with boutiques and department stores, fast food shops and upscale restaurants.

  Li inched his Jeep through the afternoon traffic on Qianmen’s southern loop, past sidewalks crowded with shoppers buying long johns and Afghan hats. A young woman dressed as Santa Claus stood in a doorway hailing passers-by with a loudspeaker, urging them to buy their loved ones jewellery this Christmas.

  They took a left into Xidamochang Street, little more than an alleyway lined with barber shops and tiny restaurants where proprietors were already steaming dumplings for that night’s dinner, dumplings that were particularly delicious if allowed to go cold, and then deep fried in a wok and dipped in soy sauce. They narrowly missed knocking down a haughty girl in a full-length hooded white coat who refused to deviate from her path. Cyclists wobbled and criss-crossed around them, collars pulled up against the snow that was driving in hard now on the north wind.

  About three hundred metres down, they parked up and went in search of number thirty-three. Bamboo bird cages hung on hooks outside narrow closes, birds shrilling and squawking, feathers fluffed up against the cold. Outside number thirty-three, a young man in a fawn anorak was throwing a ceramic bead into the air for a grey and black bird which would return to land on his outstretched left hand for a piece of corn as a reward for catching it.

  The entrance to the home of Dai Lili’s parents was through a small red doorway in a grey brick wall. The carcasses of several bikes lay around outside, cannibalised for their parts. A narrow close led over uneven slabs into a shambolic courtyard stacked with the detritus of half a century of people’s lives, overspill from homes barely big enough for their occupants. Nothing, apparently, was ever thrown away. Li asked an old woman with bow legs and a purple body warmer over an old Mao suit where he could find the Dai family, and she pointed him to an open doorway with a curtain hanging in it. Li pulled the curtain aside and smelled the sour stench of stale cooking and body odour. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’ he called.

  A young man emerged from the gloom, scowling and aggressive. ‘What do you want?’ His white tee-shirt was stretched over a well-sculptured body, and there was a tattoo of a snake wound around his right arm, its head and forked tongue etched into the back of his right hand.

  ‘Police,’ Li said. ‘We’re looking for the parents of Dai Lili.’

  The young man regarded them sullenly for a moment then nodded for them to follow him in. He flicked aside another curtain and led them into a tiny room with a large bed, a two-seater settee and a huge television on an old dresser. A man in his fifties sat smoking, huddled in a padded jacket, watching the TV. A woman was squatting on the bed, dozens of photographs spread out on the quilt in front of her. ‘Police,’ the boy said, and then stood in the doorway with arms folded, as if to prevent further intruders or to block their escape.

  Li inclined his head so that he could see the photographs that the woman was looking at. They were pictures, taken trackside, of Dai Lili bursting the tape, or sprinting the last hundred metres, or arms raised in victory salute. Dozens of them. ‘Do you know where she is?’ he said.

  The woman looked at him with dull eyes. ‘I thought maybe you were coming to tell us.’

  ‘Why?’ Sun asked. ‘Do you think something has happened to her?’

  The man turned to look at them for the first time, blowing smoke down his nostrils like an angry dragon. ‘If something had not happened to her, she would have been there to run the race.’ There was something like shame in his eyes where once, Li was sure, there would only have been pride.

  ‘Do you have any idea why she didn’t turn up?’

  Dai Lili’s father shook his head and turned his resentful gaze back on the television. ‘She tells us nothing,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t see her much,’ said her mother. ‘She has her own apartment in Haidian District, near the Fourth Ring Road.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘About two weeks ago.’

  ‘How did she seem?’

  Her father dragged his attention away from the screen again. ‘Difficult,’ he said. ‘Argumentative. Like she’s been for months.’ There was anger mixed now with the shame.

  ‘Things haven’t been easy for her,’ her mother said quickly in mitigation. ‘Her sister has been going downhill fast.’

  ‘Her sister?’ Sun asked.

  ‘Ten years ago she was the Chinese ten thousand metres champion,’ the old woman said, the pain of some unhappy recollection etching itself in the lines on her face. ‘Lili wanted so much to be like her. Now she is a cripple. Multiple sclerosis.’

  ‘Lili’s done everything for her!’ Li and Sun were startled by the voice of the young man in the doorway coming unexpectedly to his sister’s defence, as if there were some implicit criticism in his mother’s words. The two detectives turned to look at him. He said, ‘That’s all that ever drove her to win. To get money to pay for the care of her sister. She doesn’t live in some fancy flat like all the rest of them. Everything she’s ever earned has gone to Lijia.’

  Sun said, ‘Where is Lijia?’

  ‘She is in a clinic in Hong Kong,’ her father said. ‘We have not seen her for nearly two years.’

  ‘They say she is dying now,’ the mother said.

  ‘Could Lili have gone to see her?’ Li asked.

  The mother shook her head. ‘She never goes to see her. She couldn’t bear to look at her, to see her wasting like that.’

  Li said to her father, ‘You said Lili was argumentative.’

  ‘She never used to be,’ her mother said quickly. ‘She used to be such a lovely girl.’

  ‘Until she started winning all those big races,’ her father said, ‘and making all that money. It was like she felt guilty for being able to run like that while her sister was withering to a shadow.’

  ‘If anything made her feel guilty it was you.’ There was unexpected bitterness in the voice of Dai Lili’s brother. ‘Nothing she could ever do would make her as good as her sister. Not in your eyes. And you resented it, didn’t you? That she was the only one who could do anything to help Lijia. While all you could ever do was sit on your fat ass and watch TV and collect your invalidity from the state.’

  And Li noticed for the first time that Dai Lili’s father had only one leg. The left trouser leg was empty and folded under him on the settee. Li’s eyes strayed to a crude-looking prosthetic limb propped in the corner of the room, straps hanging loose and unused. When he looked up again, the boy had left the room. ‘Do you have a key for her apartment?’ he asked.

  * * *

  The snow was lying now in the street, the merest covering, pretty in the lights from the windows and streetlamps, but treacherous underfoot. There was very little light left in the sky, helping to deepen the depression that Li carried with him from the house. He checked his watch and handed Sun the keys of the Jeep.

  ‘You’d better take it,’ he said. ‘You’ll be late for your antenatal class.’

  ‘I don’t care about the class, Chief,’ Sun said. ‘It’s Wen having the baby, not me. I’ll go to the girl’s apartment with you.’

  Li shook his head. ‘I’ll get a taxi. And then I’m going straight on to the betrothal meeting.’ He summoned a smile from somewhere. ‘Go on. Go to the hospital. It’s your baby, too. Wen’ll appreciate it.’

  V

  The Tian An Men Fang Shen Imperial Banquet Restaurant stood on the east side of Tiananmen Square behind stark winter trees hung with coloured Christmas lights. Margaret’s taxi dropped them on the corner, at the foot of stairs leading to twin marble dragons guarding the doors to the restaurant. Mrs. Campbell’s knee, bandaged and heavily strapped, had stiffened up so that she could hardly bend it. To her mother’s indignation, Margaret had borrowed a walking cane from an elderly neighbour. ‘I am not an old lady!’ she had protested, but found that she was unable to walk without it. An affront to her self-image and her dignity.

  Margare
t helped her up the steps, and they were greeted inside the door by two girls dressed in imperial costume – elaborately embroidered silk gowns and tall, winged black hats with red pompoms. The entrance to the restaurant was filled with screens and hanging glass lanterns, its ornamental crossbeams colourfully painted with traditional Chinese designs. A manageress, all in black, led them past the main restaurant and into the royal corridor. It was long and narrow, lanterns reflecting off a highly polished floor. The walls were decorated with lacquered panels and red drapes. There were private banqueting rooms off to left and right. Li had booked them the Emperor’s Room, and Margaret’s mother’s jaw dropped in astonishment as she hobbled in ahead of her daughter. A four-lamp lantern hanging with dozens of red tassels was suspended over a huge circular banqueting table. Each of seven place settings had three gold goblets, a rice bowl, spoon, knife and chopstick rest, also in gold, and lacquered chopsticks tipped with gold at the holding end. Each serviette was arranged in the shape of an imperial fan. At one end of the room, on a raised dais, were two replica thrones for the emperor and empress. At the other, through an elaborately carved wooden archway, cushioned benches and seats were gathered around a low table on which all the presents from each family were carefully arranged. Soft Chinese classical music plinged gently through hidden speakers.

  Mei Yuan had been sitting on the long bench waiting for them. Earlier in the day Margaret had taken the gifts from the Campbell family to Mei Yuan’s siheyuan home on Qianhai Lake. Mei Yuan, acting as Li’s proxy, had selected the gifts from the Li family and arrived early at the restaurant to set out the offerings from both families and await the guests. She stood up, tense, smiling. Margaret looked at her in wonder. Mei Yuan’s hair was held in a bun on the top of her head by a silver clasp. She wore a turquoise blue embroidered silk jacket over a cream blouse and a full-length black dress. There was a touch of brown around her eyes, and red on her lips. Margaret had never seen her dressed up, or wearing make-up. She had only ever been a small peasant woman in well-worn jackets and trousers and aprons, with her hair pulled back in an elastic band. She was transformed, dignified, almost beautiful. And Margaret felt tears prick her eyes at the sight of her.