Chinese Whispers tct-6

by Peter May

  He tucked his head down and pedalled east into the heart of the upmarket Jianguomen district of the city, a flyover carrying him across the Second Ring Road, past a towering blue-lit section of restored city wall. He could see the floodlights illuminating the new City Hall building just to the south. The roar of traffic and exhaust fumes rose up to greet him from below. He quite consciously avoided the thought of the scene that awaited him. They had told him she was the fourth. And with the previous three, whatever his experience and imagination had prepared him for, it had not been enough.

  Half a dozen police vehicles were pulled up on the sidewalk at the entrance to the Silk Street Market, engines idling, exhaust fumes rising into the cold morning air. There was a forensics van from Pau Jü Hutong, and Li recognised Pathologist Wang’s car parked up beside the body bus from the morgue. It must have broken all speed limits on empty roads to get there before Li, all the way from the new pathology facility out on the northwest perimeter, near the Badaling Expressway. Another planning coup by the municipal government. By the time a detective got there and back, it could take him the best part of a day to attend an autopsy.

  The police activity had attracted a large crowd: local residents, curious commuters on their way to work. Numbers had already swelled to over a hundred and were still growing. Not even subzero temperatures could diminish the eternal curiosity of the Chinese. Two dozen uniformed police officers made sure they stayed behind the black and yellow crime scene tape that whipped and hummed in the wind. Li saw the red digital display on the clock tower flash up a temperature of minus six centigrade. He held up his maroon Public Security ID and pushed his bike through the onlookers. A cold-looking officer with a pinched red face saluted and lifted the tape to let him through. Two hundred metres up the alley, Li could see the photographer’s lights illuminating the spot where the body had been found. A bunch of detectives and forensics officers stood around it, stamping to keep warm. As Li approached, someone spotted him coming, and they moved aside to let him through, opening up like the curtain on a stage to reveal a scene that looked as if it had been set for maximum theatrical effect.

  Wang Xing was crouched beside the body, making a careful examination, latexed fingers already sticky with blood. He turned his face towards Li, pale and bloodless, like a mask from a Peking Opera, and for once had nothing to say.

  The girl lay on her back, head turned towards her left shoulder, revealing a seven-inch gash across her throat. Blood had pooled around her head like a ghastly halo. Her face had been so savagely slashed it would be almost impossible to make a visual identification. Her black leather jacket lay open, revealing a white, blood-spattered blouse beneath it. The top few buttons of the blouse had been undone, but it did not otherwise appear to have been disturbed. The girl’s arms lay by her side, palms up. Her left leg extended in a line with her body, her right leg was bent at the hip and the knee. Her skirt had been cut open and pulled away to expose the abdomen which had been hacked open from the breastbone to the pubes. The intestines had been drawn out and dragged over the right shoulder, one two-foot piece completely detached and placed between the body and the left arm. What struck Li, apart from an extreme sense of shock, was the impression that this body had been very carefully laid out, as if by some grotesque design. There was something bizarrely unnatural about it. He turned away as he felt his stomach lurch and wished that he still smoked. As if reading his mind, someone held out an open pack. He looked up to see Detective Wu’s grim face, jaw chewing manically on the ubiquitous gum. Li waved him aside and stepped out of the circle of light. The image of the dead girl was burned by the photographer’s lights on to his retinas and he could not get rid of it. She could only have been nineteen or twenty. Just a child. He felt Wu’s presence at his shoulder, breathing smoke into the light. ‘Who found her?’

  Wu spoke softly, as if to speak normally might disturb the dead. Li was surprised. Wu did not usually show such sensitivity. ‘Shift worker on his bike, taking what he thought was a short cut home.’

  Li frowned. ‘He didn’t know they’d fenced off the road at the other end?’

  Wu shrugged. ‘Apparently not, Chief. He almost ran over her. You can see his tyre tracks in the blood. They’ve taken him to hospital suffering from shock.’

  ‘Did you get a statement?’

  ‘Detective Zhao’s gone with him.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘We also spoke to the PLA guard at the embassy end. He was on duty all night.’

  Li looked back up the alley. It could only have been a hundred metres. Maybe less. ‘And?’

  ‘Heard nothing.’

  Li shook his head. Still the girl was there. Every time he blinked. Every time he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. ‘Do we know who she is?’

  ‘Found her ID card in her purse, along with a couple of hundred yuan. Her name’s Guo Huan. She’s eighteen years old. Lives in Dongcheng District, not that far from Section One.’ He carefully removed an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light for Li to see. ‘We also found this …’ Trapped between the sheets of clear plastic was what looked like a cutting from a newspaper or magazine. Li took it and held it to catch the spill-off light from the photographer’s lamps, and saw that it was a two-line ad from the personal columns of one of Beijing’s what’s-on magazines. Cute Chinese Girl looks for Mr Right. I am slim, well-educated and work in antiques. Please send me e-mail. Or telephone. Thinly disguised code for a prostitute seeking customers. There was an e-mail address and a cellphone number. Wu blew smoke through his nostrils like dragonfire. ‘He’s making a fool of us, this guy, Chief. We’ve got to get him.’

  ‘We’ve got to get him,’ Li snapped, ‘not because he’s making a fool of us, but because he’s killing young girls.’ He turned back towards the body as Pathologist Wang stepped away from it, peeling off his bloody gloves and dropping them in a plastic sack. As was his habit, he had an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips. He bent towards the flame of Wu’s proffered lighter, and as he took the first drag Li saw that his hand was trembling.

  Characteristically Wang would make some smart quip, or literary allusion, after examining a body at a crime scene. His way of coping. But this morning, ‘Shit,’ was all he said.

  Li braced himself. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

  ‘I never saw anything like it,’ Wang said, and there was a tremor, too, in his voice. ‘And I’ve seen some shit, Chief, you know that.’

  ‘We all have.’

  Wang’s dark eyes burned with a curious intensity. ‘This guy’s insane. A twenty-four-carat maniac.’ He stabbed at his mouth with his cigarette and drew on it fiercely. ‘A similar pattern to the others. Strangled. I can’t tell till autopsy if she was dead when he cut her throat. Unconscious certainly, and lying on the ground. He would have been kneeling on her right side, cutting from left to right so that the blood from the left carotid artery would flow away from him. The facial stuff …’ he shook his head and took another pull at his cigarette. ‘She was dead when he did that. And the internal stuff.’ He looked at Li very directly. ‘She’s a mess in there. From what I can see, it’s not just the womb he’s taken this time. There’s a kidney gone as well.’

  ‘Organ theft?’ Wu asked.

  The pathologist shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Not in these conditions. And it wasn’t surgically removed. Both the uterus and the kidney were hacked out. He may have some anatomical knowledge, but he’s certainly no doctor. He’s a butcher.’

  ‘Maybe literally,’ Li said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Wang agreed. ‘But even a butcher would use a knife with more care. This was uncontrolled. Frenzied.’

  ‘How sure are you it is the same killer?’ Li asked.

  ‘Completely,’ Wang said, reversing his usual reticence to commit himself to anything. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. He held it up to the light, and Li saw the half-inch remains of a brown Russian cheroot. ‘If we get as good a DNA sample
off this as we got off the others, we’ll know for certain.’

  III

  The sun sneaked and glanced and angled its way off windows in high rise apartments and office blocks as it lifted off the eastern horizon and beamed directly along the east-west boulevards of the Beijing grid system. As it rose, it coloured the sky blue. A painfully clear sky, free from pollution or mist, dipping to pale orange and yellow along its eastern fringe. A silvery sliver of moon was caught falling in the west behind the purple-hued mountains Li’s breath billowed and wreathed around his head as he pedalled slowly north, weaving through the traffic along Chaoyangmen Nanxiao Da Jie.

  Everywhere the building work went on, rising up behind green-clad scaffolding from the rubble of the old city. Cranes stalked the skies overhead, the roar of diggers and pneumatic drills already filling the early morning air. Most of the street stalls he had cycled past for years were gone; the hawkers peddling hot buns and sweet potatoes from sparking braziers, the old lady feeding taxi drivers from her big tureen of soup, the jian bing sellers. New pavements had been laid, new trees planted. And all along Dongzhimen, east of Section One, new apartment blocks lined the street where just a year before squads of men equipped only with hammers had begun knocking down the walls of the old siheyuan courtyards which had characterised Beijing for centuries. It was cleaner, fresher, and there was no doubt that life for ordinary Beijingers was improving faster than it had done in five thousand years. But, still, Li missed the old city. He was unsettled by change.

  So it was comforting for him to know that Mei Yuan was still at the corner of Dongzhimen where she had sold jian bing from her bicycle stall for years. During the demolition and construction work she had been forced to move to the opposite corner of the Dongzhimen-Chaoyangmen intersection. And then she had faced opposition to her return from the owners of a new restaurant built on her old corner. It was a lavish affair, with large picture windows and red-tiled canopies sweeping out over the sidewalk, brand-new red lanterns dancing in the breeze. Street hawkers, they told her, had no place here now. Besides, she was putting off their customers. She would have to find somewhere else to sell her peasant pancakes. Li had paid them a quiet visit. Over a beer, which the owner had been only too anxious to serve him, Li had pointed out that Mei Yuan had a licence to sell jian bing wherever she wanted. And since the officers of Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police, just across the road, liked to get their jian bing from Mei Yuan — on that particular corner — the restaurant might like to reconsider its attitude to the jian bing seller. It did.

  Li saw steam rising from the tin-roofed glass cover that sat over the hotplate and the pancake mix and bowls of sauces and spices that surrounded it. An elderly couple were paying Mei Yuan for their pancakes as Li cycled up and leaned his bicycle against the wall of the restaurant. He watched them bite hungrily into their hot savoury packages as they headed off along Ghost Street, where thousands of lanterns swayed among the trees and the city’s new generation of rich kids would have spent the night eating and drinking in restaurants and cafés until just a few hours ago. Mei Yuan turned a round, red face in his direction and grinned. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. The traditional Beijing greeting.

  ‘Yes, I have eaten,’ he replied. The traditional response. If you had eaten and were not hungry, then all was well.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘A jian bing?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She poured creamy mix on to the hotplate and scraped it round into a perfect pancake. ‘You’re early this morning.’

  ‘A call-out.’

  She detected something in his voice and threw him a quick glance. But she said nothing. She knew that if he wanted to talk about it he would. She broke an egg and smeared it over the pancake, sprinkling it with seeds before flipping it over to paint it with savoury and spicy sauces. Her fingers were red raw with the cold.

  Li watched her as she worked; hair tucked up in a bun beneath her white cap, quilted blue jacket over jogpants, sweatshirt and trainers. Her white cotton coat hung open, several sizes too small. She made a poor living from her pancakes, augmented only by the money Li and Margaret paid her to baby-sit for Li Jon. Both Li and Mei Yuan had lost people close to them during the Cultural Revolution. He, his mother. She, her son. Now one was a surrogate for the other. There wasn’t anything Li wouldn’t have done for the old lady. Or she for him.

  Her demeanour never changed. Her smooth round face was remarkably unlined, crinkling only when she smiled, which was often. Whatever misery she had suffered in her life she kept to herself. And there had been plenty. Wrenched from a university education and forced to work like a peasant in the fields. A baby lost. A husband long gone.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he asked, and he pulled out the book she had tucked down behind her saddle.

  ‘A wonderful story,’ she said. ‘A triumph of humanity over ignorance.’

  ‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ he read from the title in English.

  ‘The writer is completely inside the little girl’s head,’ Mei Yuan said, and Li could see from her face that she was transported to some place on the other side of the world she would never see. Her escape from a life that offered little else. ‘She must have been in that place herself, to write it like that.’

  She put a square of deep-fried whipped eggwhite on top of the pancake, broke it in four and deftly folded it into a brown paper bag which she handed to Li. He dropped some notes in her tin and took a bite. It tasted wonderful. Spicy, savoury, hot. He could not imagine a life that did not start each day with a jian bing. ‘I have a riddle for you,’ he said.

  ‘I hope it’s harder than the last one.’

  He threw her a look. ‘Two coal miners,’ he said. ‘One is the father of the other’s son. How is this possible?’ She tossed her head back and laughed. A deliciously infectious laugh that had him smiling too, albeit ruefully. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’ A group of passing cyclists turned to stare at them, wondering what was so amusing.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Is it really so easy? I mean, I spent ages trying to work out if maybe one was the father, and the other the stepfather …’

  ‘Oh, Li Yan, you didn’t!’ Her smile was full of mock pity. ‘It’s obvious that they’re husband and wife.’

  ‘Well, yes it is,’ Li said. ‘I just didn’t see it immediately, that’s all.’ He had found a website on the internet which specialised in riddles. But none of them were in the same class as the ones Mei Yuan dreamed up for him.

  ‘I have one for you,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you might.’ He wolfed down another mouthful of steaming pancake and waited in trepidation.

  She watched him chewing for a moment, reflecting on the problem she was about to set him. ‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field, far from their village in Hunan Province,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to make their way from one end of the paddy to the other. They have just finished lunch. One has the food, the other the drink. By sign language, they agree to meet again and share their food and drink when they have finished planting the field. They each have to plant another ten rows. When he has finished his work, the man with the food can’t see his friend anywhere, he waits for a while, and then, thinking his friend has gone back to the village, he eats the food himself. The next morning, he wakes up to find the other man shaking him, signing furiously, and accusing him of abandoning him and keeping his food to himself. But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and abandoned him. The man with the drink insists he was there all along! They are both telling the truth. How can this be?’

  Li groaned. ‘Mei Yuan, I give you two lines. You give me a novel. Too much detail.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mei Yuan grinned. ‘It is in the detail that you will find the devil.’

  Li waved his hand dismissively. ‘I’m not even going to think about it right now.’

  ‘You have
more important things to think about?’

  His face darkened, as if a cloud had cast its shadow on him. He closed his eyes, and still the image of the girl was there. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have.’

  And she knew she had crossed a line into dangerous territory. She made light of it. ‘Maybe by tonight you will have had time to think.’

  ‘Tonight?’ Li frowned.

  ‘Before you go to the Great Hall of the People. I have never been in the Great Hall of the People. If I were not baby-sitting, I would have gone to see you there myself.’

  ‘The Great Hall of the People,’ Li muttered. He had forgotten that it was tonight. How could he have forgotten? He would, after all, be centre stage. He cringed again with embarrassment at the thought of it. The Public Security Ministry was anxious to improve the image of the police, and with increasing coverage of crime by the media, Li had become one of the most high profile senior officers in the public eye. He was still young — under forty — tall, powerfully built and, if not exactly handsome, then striking in his looks. He had been considered perfect for the propaganda posters. And some PR person in the Minister’s office had dreamed up the idea of a People’s Award for Crime Fighting, to be presented in the full glare of publicity at the Great Hall of the People. Li’s objections had been dismissed out of hand. Summoned to the office of the city’s Police Commissioner, it had been made clear to him that this was not a matter in which he had any choice. When news of it leaked out, it had led to some good-humoured mickey-taking by some of his junior officers at Section One. But he had also become aware of jealousy among more senior officers at police headquarters downtown where he knew he had enemies. His spirits dipped.