The Runner (The China Thrillers 5)

by Peter May

  ‘Oh, good,’ Li said. ‘For a moment there I thought it was serious.’ Margaret’s hand felt cool on his skin as she laid it gently on his cheek. It had taken her half an hour to get a taxi, another hour to get to the hospital. The snow had turned to ice on the roads and the traffic had slithered into chaos. ‘Who did this to you, Li Yan?’

  ‘Some punk kids.’ He cursed his carelessness. They must have followed him up to the seventh floor and waited in the dark for him to come back out.

  ‘Not related to the case?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Just muggers. They threatened me outside and I scared them off.’ They had taken his wallet, his cellphone, the keys of the apartment, his Public Security ID.

  ‘Not far enough,’ Margaret said.

  He raised himself up on one elbow and groaned with the pain. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, concerned.

  He pointed to a chair across the room. ‘The plastic bag on that chair,’ he said with difficulty. ‘You’ll find my jacket inside.’ He found it hard to believe now that he had had the presence of mind to get the first officer on the scene to strip it off him and bag it. He had become conscious when Dai Lili’s neighbour from the end of the hallway had nearly fallen over him in the dark. Almost his first thought was the bottle of perfume in his pocket. His fingers had found broken glass as they felt for it in the dark, the strange musky-smelling liquid soaking into the fabric. ‘There’s a bottle of perfume in one of the pockets. Broken. Only, I don’t think it’s perfume that was inside it. I’m hoping there’s enough of it soaked into the fabric of the jacket for you still to be able to analyse it.’

  Margaret left him briefly to look inside the bag. She recoiled from the smell. ‘Jesus, who would wear perfume like that?’ And she knotted the bag tightly.

  ‘Athletes,’ Li said. ‘Dead athletes. I found it in the apartment of the girl who was so keen to talk to you.’

  Margaret was shocked. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Missing. But I’m not confident of finding her alive.’ Margaret returned to the bed, perching on the edge of it and taking his hand.

  ‘I don’t like what’s happened to you, Li Yan. I don’t like any of this.’

  Li ignored her concern. ‘In one of the other pockets you’ll find a small aerosol breath freshener. I’d like to know what’s in it.’

  ‘We’re not going to know any of that stuff till tomorrow,’ Margaret said, and she pushed him gently back down on to the bed. ‘So there’s no point in worrying about it till then. Okay?’

  His attempt at a smile turned into a wince. ‘I guess.’ He paused. ‘So what did you make of my father?’

  Margaret thought about how his father had barely even looked at her during their two-hour wait in the restaurant. ‘It’s difficult to know,’ she said tactfully, ‘when someone doesn’t speak your language.’

  Li frowned. ‘He speaks English as well as Yifu.’

  Margaret felt anger welling suddenly inside her. ‘Well, if he does, he didn’t speak a word of it to me.’

  Li closed his eyes. ‘He is an old bastard,’ he said. And he opened his eyes again to look at Margaret. ‘He disapproves of me marrying outside of my race.’

  ‘Snap,’ Margaret said. ‘My mother’s exactly the same. If only she’d known he spoke English they could have passed the time exchanging disapproval.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Oh, Li Yan, why did we bother with any of them? We should just have eloped.’

  ‘If only it was that easy.’

  She sighed. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The betrothal. We can’t get married if you don’t ask me.’

  ‘I’ll re-book the restaurant. We’ll do it tomorrow night.’

  ‘You’re in no fit state,’ she protested.

  ‘You said there was nothing broken.’

  ‘You’re concussed. They’ll not let you out if you’re still that way in the morning.’

  ‘I’m out of here first thing tomorrow,’ Li said. ‘Whether I’m concussed or not. That girl’s missing. If there’s the least chance that she’s still alive, then I’m not going to lie here feeling sorry for myself when somebody out there might be trying to kill her.’

  Chapter Eight

  I

  Bicycle repair men sat huddled around a brazier, wind fanning the coals and sending occasional showers of sparks off to chase after the snow at its leading edge. About three inches had fallen overnight and Beijing had ground to a halt. There were no ploughs or gritters or low-traction vehicles for spreading salt on the roads. Just a slow-motion ballet of vehicles gliding gently into each other and bicycles dumping their riders unceremoniously in the middle of the road. Even the siren and flashing blue light on Li’s Jeep was unable to speed their progress, and only its four-wheel drive had kept them on the road.

  Sun pulled into the kerb outside the Beijing New World Taihua Plaza at number 5 Chongwenmenwai Street and slithered around to the passenger side to help Li out. Li pushed him aside irritably, and eased himself down to the street. The strapping on his chest, beneath his shirt, helped support him, but if he bent or twisted, it still hurt like hell. His face was swollen, black under each eye, and it was still painful to eat or smile. Not that he was much inclined to smile today. Sun reached in beyond him to retrieve the walking stick that Wu had brought into the section that morning. It had belonged to his father and had a large rubber stopper at the end of it. What irked Li more than being given it was that he found it very nearly impossible to get around without it. Especially in the snow. He snatched it from Sun and hobbled over the frozen pavement to the entrance.

  The security guard remembered them. He couldn’t take his eyes off Li as he rode up with them in the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Li growled.

  ‘Fall in the snow?’ the security man ventured.

  ‘No, I got the shit kicked out of me by a gang of muggers. Hazards of the job. Still want to be a cop?’

  The security man opened the door to Sui’s apartment and Li tore off the crime scene tape rather than try to duck under it. They went straight to the bathroom. The Gillette Mach3 razor and the box of four heads was still on the shelf above the sink. But the two bottles of Chanel aerosol aftershave and the gold-coloured breath freshener were gone.

  ‘Shit!’ Sun said. He opened the bathroom cabinet. ‘They’re not here.’

  Li pushed him out of the way. ‘They must be.’ But the cabinet contained only the spare box of toothpaste, the packs of soap, the unopened box of aspirin and the jar of cotton pads. He turned angrily towards the security guard. ‘Who the hell’s been in here?’

  ‘No one,’ the security man said, shaken. He saw his hopes of joining the force flushing away down the toilet. ‘Just cops and forensics. You people.’

  ‘And you’d know if there had been anyone else?’ Sun said.

  ‘No one gets into the building who’s not supposed to be here.’ The security man was very anxious to please. ‘The only other people with access to the apartment would be staff.’

  Sun’s cellphone rang. Li reflexively went for the phone that he normally kept clipped to his belt, before remembering that the muggers had taken it. Sun answered, then held the phone out to Li. ‘Wu,’ he said. Li had sent Wu over to Jia Jing’s apartment to get the aftershave from the bathroom there.

  ‘Chief,’ Wu’s voice crackled in his ear. ‘I can’t find any aftershave. Are you sure it was in the bathroom cabinet?’

  Li had also sent Qian over to Dai Lili’s apartment to get the bottle of perfume he had left behind, but he knew now that, too, would be gone. And he began to wonder if his attackers had, after all, been the muggers he had taken them for. He told Wu to go back to the section and handed the phone back to Sun.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Sun asked.

  Li shook his head. ‘The aftershave’s gone there, too.’ Sun’s cellphone rang again. ‘That’ll be Qian, no doubt with the same story.’ Sun answered the pho
ne. ‘Wei?’ And he listened intently for a few moments. Then he snapped his phone shut and turned thoughtful eyes on Li.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They found a body in Jingshan Park,’ Sun said. ‘A young woman.’

  * * *

  Jingshan Park was situated at the north end of the Forbidden City, on an artificial hill constructed with earth excavated from the moat around the Imperial Palace. Five pavilions sited around the hill represented the five directions of Buddha – north, south, east, west and centre. Each had commanding views of the city, and in more clement weather, Li often climbed up to the central Wanchunting Pavilion – the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring – at the very top of the hill, to look down upon the capital city of the Middle Kingdom and try to unravel the endless complications of his life. Today, in the snow, and following his battering of the night before, he did not relish the climb. Or the complications that awaited him.

  The police had closed off the park, and a large crowd was gathered in the road outside the south gate. Li and Sun had to push their way through. Inside, a dozen or more uniformed officers milled around on the cobbled concourse, watching a teenage girl dressed in the red embroidered costume of an empress sweeping a path through the snow with a long-handled broom. It was falling almost as fast as she cleared it. But with the tourists ejected, and no one to pose with her for photographs, it was the only way she had of keeping warm. Mournful vendors stood beneath the pillars of their empty stores, ruing the loss of a day’s income and cursing the killers of the girl on the hill for making their lives just that little bit harder.

  Detective Sang hurried across the concourse from the path that led up the hill. ‘Got to be careful on these steps, Chief. They’re lethal in the snow. We’ve already had several accidents on the marble stairs at the top.’

  Through the evergreen cypresses that climbed the steep slopes of the hill, Li could just see, blurred by the falling snow, the four upturned corners of the Wanchunting Pavilion with its three eaves and its golden glazed-tile roof. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

  ‘The Jifangting Pavilion, Chief.’

  Li knew it, and his eyes panned west to see if he could spot the green-glazed tiles of its octagonal two-tiered roof. But it was obscured by the trees. They began the long climb.

  ‘One of the park attendants found her about an hour after they opened up this morning, Chief,’ Sang told them on the way up. ‘The weather meant there weren’t too many people in the park first thing, or she’d probably have been found earlier. Poor guy’s been treated for shock.’

  ‘The attendant?’

  ‘Yeh. It’s pretty messy up there, Chief. Blood everywhere. She must have been brought here during the night and butchered. She was left lying on this kind of stone dais thing under the roof. Looks like there might have been a statue on it or something at one time.’

  ‘A bronze Buddha,’ Li said. ‘It was stolen by British and French troops in 1900.’ He had a clear picture in his mind of the tiny pavilion, open on all sides, its roof supported on ten blood red pillars, the carved stone dais at its centre protected by a wrought iron fence.

  It took nearly fifteen minutes to climb the serpentining path up the side of the hill, stepping gingerly on the last few steps to where the track divided, heading east up to the summit and the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring, and west down to Jifangting, the Fragrance Pavilion. Through the trees below them, Li saw its snow-covered roof, and the crowd of uniformed and plainclothes officers around it. Harassed forensics officers were attempting to keep everyone at bay in order to try and make sense of the tracks in the snow. But it was way too late now, Li knew. And in all likelihood the original tracks of the killer would have been covered by several more inches of snowfall.

  He and Sun made their way carefully down the path in Sang’s wake.

  ‘In the name of the sky, Li, can you not keep these goddamn moron detectives off my snow!’ Li turned to find himself looking into the tiny coal black eyes of senior forensics officer Fu Qiwei. But it was anger that burned in them today, not mischief. They opened wide when he saw Li’s face. ‘Fuck me, Chief! What happened to you?’

  ‘Collision with a fist and a foot. Surely you can’t make any sense of these tracks now, Fu?’

  ‘Weather centre says it stopped snowing sometime during the night. Sky cleared for about an hour and temperatures dropped before the cloud rolled back in and there was more snow.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Killers’ tracks could be frozen under the second fall. We already got some good prints from the blood on the floor inside. If you can keep your flatfoots from trampling all over it, we might be able to brush the snow back down to the frozen stuff.’

  ‘Alright,’ Li shouted. ‘Anyone who is not essential get back up the hill now!’

  Detectives and uniformed officers moved away in quiet acquiescence, leaving Fu’s team nearly invisible in their white Tivek suits. Doctor Wang and his photographer from pathology stood shivering under the roof, sucking on cigarettes held between latex fingers. The body had been covered with a white sheet. Normally, by now, blood would have soaked through it, stark against the white. But the blood, like the body beneath it, was frozen solid. And it was everywhere all around the pavilion, caught in its vivid crimson freshness by the freezing temperatures. Li had rarely seen so much blood. It lay in icy pools and frozen spurts all around the central dais, rivulets of it turned to ice as it ran down the carved stonework.

  He took a deep breath. No matter how often you came face to face with it, you never got used to death. It took him by surprise every time, a chill, depressing reminder of his own mortality, that he, too, was just flesh and blood and would one day lie cold and lifeless on a slab.

  Off down to their left he saw the sweeping eaves of the north gate of the Forbidden City, and the russet roofs beyond, laid out in perfect symmetry. Through the pillars of the pavilion he could see, on its island in the middle of Beihai Lake, the White Dagoba Temple, turned into a factory during the Cultural Revolution. Immediately below, the factories of today belched smoke out into the haze of snow and pollution that filled the Beijing sky. Somewhere, below them and to the east, near the south gate, was the locust tree from which the last Ming emperor, Chong Zhen, had hanged himself to escape the marauding Manchu hordes. This was a place not unused to change, or to death.

  A grim-faced Wang approached him. ‘It’s a messy one, Section Chief,’ he said. ‘I never really understood what blood lust meant until today. These bastards must have gorged themselves on it, must have been covered in it from head to toe.’

  ‘More than one?’

  ‘At least half a dozen, judging by the footprints in the blood.’ He sighed. ‘I counted more than eighty stab wounds, Chief. These guys brought her up here, stripped her naked, and just kept stabbing her and stabbing her. Long bladed knives. I’ll be able to tell more accurately when I get her on the table, but I’d say nine to twelve inches long.’ He shook his head. ‘Never seen anything like it. You want to take a look? We’ve still got to do the pics.’

  Li had no real desire to see what lay beneath the sheet. Wang’s description of how she died had been graphic and sickening enough. He pictured her as he had seen her for those few moments in the hallway outside Margaret’s apartment. She had been so young and timid, her small face marred by its purple birthmark. And he saw her in the photographs her mother had been looking at on the bed, breaking the tape, smiling, exultant. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

  They stepped carefully up to the dais and Wang pulled back the sheet. She looked as if she were covered in large black insects, but Li quickly saw that they were the wounds left in her flesh by the knives. She was covered in blood, and it was pooled all around her where once a statue of Buddha had smiled benignly on the world. Her flesh was blue-tinged and stark in its contrast with the blood which had leaked out from every hole made in her by the knives. Her black hair was fanned out on the stone, stuck to the frozen blood. Longer than Li remembered it. He
frowned. The birthmark was gone. He stood staring at her in confusion before the mist cleared and he realised it was not who he had expected to see. It was not the runner, Dai Lili. It was Jon Macken’s missing friend, JoJo. Only, now she wasn’t missing any more.

  II

  Their taxi crawled slowly over the humpbacked Qianhai Bridge that marked the intersection between Qianhai and Houhai Lakes. It had stopped snowing but the roads were still treacherous, and a sky the colour of pewter promised more to come. Out on Houhai, two men had cut a hole in the snow-covered ice, and sat on boxes fishing and smoking. The taxi took a left and followed the lake down a tree-lined street, grey brick courtyards on either side of narrow hutongs running off to their right.

  ‘This is ridiculous, Margaret,’ Mrs. Campbell was saying for the umpteenth time. ‘I would have been perfectly all right staying in the apartment on my own.’

  ‘You don’t come all the way to China, Mom, and spend your entire time on your own in a room ten feet square.’

  ‘You live in one,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And I seem to recall spending more time than I care to remember sitting in a restaurant without eating, with people who couldn’t speak my language.’

  Margaret sighed. She had asked Mei Yuan to look after her mother today so that she could check out the lab results on Li’s perfume and breath freshener. But Mrs. Campbell wasn’t pleased. ‘I don’t need a babysitter,’ she had said.

  The taxi drew up outside Mei Yuan’s siheyuan, and Margaret asked the driver to wait. She helped her mother out of the car and supported her left arm as she hobbled through the red gateway into the courtyard beyond. Mrs. Campbell looked around with some distaste. ‘She lives here?’ Margaret had thought it one of the tidier siheyuan she had seen.

  Mei Yuan greeted them at the door. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Campbell.’

  And Mrs. Campbell put on her brave face. ‘Mei Yuan,’ she said, her pronunciation still less than perfect.