Chinese Whispers tct-6

by Peter May

  ‘What was what?’ Margaret said.

  ‘He didn’t even have to take the test,’ Li said. ‘The guy broke down there and then and confessed.’

  ‘Was that before or after you held him under the water?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘I’m never going to convince you, am I?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  Li said, ‘So you think you could beat the number test?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But we’re never likely to find out, are we?’

  ‘I’ve got a machine upstairs,’ Hart said. ‘In the study. It would only take a few minutes.’

  ‘No chance,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Go on,’ Li said. ‘You can’t sit there and pour scorn on the man’s work and then refuse to let him prove himself.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work on me,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d feel guilty even when I was telling the truth.’

  Hart smiled. ‘Let me be the one to judge that.’ He called through to the kitchen. ‘Honey? How long till grub’s up?’

  ‘Another ten minutes,’ Lyang called back.

  ‘Plenty of time,’ Hart said.

  There were two desks in the study, each pushed against facing walls. A third wall was floor to ceiling window, and facing it a futon was set against the fourth. There were matching iMac computers on each desk, cosmic screen savers mixing through sequential photographs of deep space: planets and moons, gas clouds, comets and galaxies. There was a solitary lamp on Hart’s desk illuminating his private polygraph machine, pens poised to point the finger at whomsoever should dare to prevaricate.

  ‘Nervous?’ Hart asked.

  ‘You bet,’ Margaret said, and she was beginning to wish she’d just kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Sit down.’ Hart pulled a chair on castors out from below his desk and beckoned her into it. He opened a drawer and started to take out the wires and cuffs and bands that he would attach to her before starting his little demonstration.

  They heard Lyang on the stairs. ‘Don’t start without me,’ she called, and she ran along the hall and hurried in. ‘This I’ve got to see. Dinner can wait.’ She sat down by her desk, bumping against it and causing the screen saver on her computer to vanish. She glanced at the on-screen desktop which it revealed. ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘I’ve got mail. I never have mail.’ She smiled at Margaret. ‘We have broadband internet and no one ever writes to me.’ She clicked on the icon of a postage stamp at the foot of her screen. It had a red circle with a white ‘1’ inside it, indicating there was a message. The e-mail browser appeared on the screen, and the message was highlighted in the inbox. Lyang sat for a long time staring at it.

  Hart was attaching a blood pressure cuff to Margaret’s left arm. He glanced across. ‘Who’s writing to you, honey?’

  In a very small voice, Lyang said, ‘A dead woman.’

  There was an extraordinary moment when time seemed simply to stand still, and they were frozen motionless by her words. It was a moment that seemed to Li to last a lifetime. He had been gazing out over the city, watching cars and trucks and buses etch lines of coloured light into the night, and even they seemed to come to a halt. He turned finally. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s from Lynn Pan,’ Lyang whispered, and Li felt all the hairs on his arms and shoulders stand up.

  They gathered around her computer. The highlighted e-mail was titled For Bill, and was timed and dated at 5.03 p.m. the previous day, less than two hours before her murder.

  ‘Well, open it, for God’s sake,’ Hart said, and Lyang double-clicked on the highlighted bar. The e-mail opened up full-screen.

  From: ‘Lynn Pan’ ‹lpan2323@sina.com›

  Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2003 17:03:00

  To: ‘Lyang Hart’ ‹lhart@earthmother.com›

  Subject: For Bill

  Bill,

  No time to explain. Couldn’t e-mail you at work in case of intercept. Only have Lyang’s home e-mail. Scared something might happen to me. If so visit my private folder on academy website. User name ‘lynn.pan’. Password ‘scribble’. If I’m okay when you get this, drop it in the trash. I’ll explain later.

  Lynn

  There was something disturbing about reading the last words set down by a person who had been murdered so soon afterwards. Someone who had known they were in danger, someone who feared the worst. Lyang turned towards Li. ‘Why would she be scared something might happen to her when she thought it was you she was going to meet?’

  Li had no idea. ‘Maybe she thought she couldn’t trust me. Maybe she thought someone would get to her first.’

  ‘But why? What was she scared of?’

  Li tipped his head toward the computer. ‘Maybe we’ll find the answer in the private folder she mentions in the e-mail.’ He looked at Hart. ‘Do you know what she’s talking about?’

  Hart nodded. ‘Websites are just space on a computer somewhere that’s linked to the worldwide web. Usually there are public folders, which anyone on the internet can access, and there are private folders, which only you can access. Private storage space, really. Most educational institutions allocate private folder space to staff and students on their websites.’

  ‘So now that you’ve got her user name and password you could access her private folder from here?’

  ‘Afraid not. You need special software. An FTP client. I don’t have that at home.’

  ‘But you do at the academy?’ Hart nodded. ‘We’d better go there, then.’

  Lyang said, ‘What about dinner?’

  ‘I just lost my appetite,’ Li said.

  And as they headed downstairs to get their coats, Margaret said, ‘I guess this means we’re never going to find out how good a liar I am.’ But no one was listening.

  III

  They drove in silence through the canyon of light that was Changan Avenue, floodlit buildings rising like cliffs on either side. Past the Forbidden City where the ancient rulers of China once held court. Past the closed world of Zhongnanhai, where the present rulers of China lived in private villas around a glittering lake. Past the telegraph office, the Ministry of Commerce, the Minzu Palace. To the intersection at Muxidi where they turned off on to Sanlihi Road and into the shady side street where they parked in front of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There were still lights on in most of the windows, night classes in progress, staff and students working late on research projects and theses.

  Hart led them up the steps two at a time, and waved his ID card at the security man in the lobby, although it was hardly necessary. They took the elevator to the fourth floor and followed him down a long corridor to his office. He blinked in the harsh glare of the fluorescent strip lights as they flickered and hummed and spilled their ugly light into every dark corner. He rounded his cluttered desk and sat in front of his computer and switched it on. It whirred and creaked and hissed and started to load its operating system.

  He sat back. ‘It’ll take a minute or two.’

  They had barely spoken a word in the twenty minutes it had taken them to drive to the academy. Li felt almost brittle with tension. He had no idea what would be in Lynn Pan’s private internet folder, but he knew it would be key. He felt Margaret at his shoulder, and she gave his arm a gentle squeeze.

  She said, ‘So what do people normally keep in their private web space?’

  ‘Mostly stuff you want to save for your eyes only,’ Hart said. ‘A lot of people are involved in confidential research. Most of the computers here are on a network. So much computing space is shared, it’s difficult to keep things private.’

  His desktop screen had loaded now. He pulled down a menu and selected Connect, then went into a folder labelled Applications and double-clicked on something called Fetch. More screens unfolded and Hart opened up a Dialogue Box which prompted him to enter an FTP address, a user name and a password. He entered the FTP address for the academy’s website, then tapped in lynn.pan and scribble. Almost immediately they were looking at a screenful of icons representing folders that P
an had stored in her private space. ‘Jesus,’ Hart said. ‘What are we looking for here?’

  ‘There,’ Li pointed. It was a folder labelled MPS Demo, Mon. 10th. ‘Those must be the files from the MERMER demo she gave us yesterday afternoon.’

  Hart clicked his mouse on the icon and held it down. The image turned into a silhouette, and he dragged it across the screen, out of the website window, and on to his desktop where he released it. The file immediately began copying from the Academy’s computer on to Hart’s desktop PC. It took less than a minute, after which he disconnected from the website and double-clicked on the folder he had downloaded. It opened up a window filled with more folders. Twelve in total. Six were labelled Graphs A, Graphs B, Graphs C, through to Graphs F. The remainder were classified Pics A through to Pics F.

  ‘What are they?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘At a guess,’ Hart said, ‘I’d say that the Graphs folders contain the graphs showing the brainwave activity of each of the Ministry people during their demo test yesterday. And the Pics folders probably contain the pictures each of them was shown to stimulate that activity.’

  ‘Who’s who?’ Li said.

  ‘No idea.’ Hart turned to look up at Li. ‘She must just have labelled you A through F instead of using names.’

  ‘But we could each be identified by the pictures we were shown,’ Li said. ‘There was personal stuff among them. I was shown photographs of my apartment building, my home town. I guess everyone else was shown theirs, too.’

  ‘Then you would know which graph belonged to which person,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Might take a while,’ Hart said. ‘You know, getting hold of that kind of information. The students who did the research might remember, but I’m guessing their notes were probably among the casualties of that burglary last night.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at some of the pics,’ Li said, and he leaned in as Hart double-clicked on one of the Pics folders

  Its window opened up and Hart cursed. ‘Shit!’ The folder was empty. He went systematically through the other five. Empty. ‘What the hell …’

  Lyang said, ‘Why would she upload six empty folders?’

  ‘Christ knows,’ Hart said. ‘She was probably in a hurry. Maybe the MERMER software puts the pics somewhere else when it’s running a demo and she never retrieved them. I just don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better check the Graphs folders,’ Margaret suggested.

  Hart opened up Graphs A. Its window contained three files, small icons representing single sheets of paper with folded corners. There was a design within each icon which seemed to be made up from the letters MRM, and each file was labelled with a title in a coloured strip beneath it. Graph 1, Graph 2, Graph 3. ‘She must have done three run-throughs,’ Hart said.

  ‘She did,’ Li confirmed. ‘Can you open those up?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘I don’t have the MERMER software.’ And to prove his point he double-clicked on a file icon and a message in a box appeared mid-screen. File cannot be opened because the application software that created it cannot be found.

  ‘So what use is any of this stuff?’ Lyang said. ‘We don’t have any of the pics. We don’t know which graph relates to who …’

  And Margaret added. ‘We don’t know how any of it relates to her murder, or even if it does.’

  Li was staring grimly at the screen. His disappointment was nearly choking him. ‘Open up each of the folders,’ he said.

  Hart shrugged. ‘What’s the point? We can’t open up any of the files.’

  ‘Humour me.’

  Hart started going through each of the folders as Li had asked. They were all the same. Until he got to Graphs D, and his hand froze on the mouse. For instead of the files being labelled, Graph 1, Graph 2, Graph 3. They were labelled, LIAR, LIAR, LIAR.

  Wednesday

  Chapter Nine

  I

  It was dark when Li left his apartment. Margaret was still asleep, her first undisturbed night for months. The apartment had seemed strangely empty when they got in the night before, with Li Jon spending the night at Mei Yuan’s. It was odd how a presence you took for granted was never more apparent than when it was no longer there. Margaret had fallen asleep almost immediately. Li had drifted once or twice, but for most of the long hours of the night had lain awake staring at the ceiling in the reflected light from the streetlamps outside. He knew he was in trouble, and had been playing a mind game his uncle had taught him. Take sequential facts that led to a conclusion and rearrange them in any order. Then look at them again with a fresh eye. It was amazing just how often you could reach a different conclusion. But no matter how many times Li rearranged the events of the last forty-eight hours, the conclusion always remained the same. And it scared him.

  As he drove west on Changan, retracing his journey of the previous night, the first splinters of sunlight shot like arrows down the length of the city’s east-west artery, blinding him when he glanced in the rear-view mirror. It heralded the break of a day that filled him with dread. It brought no illumination. Merely contrast with the darkness he carried in his heart.

  He turned north again at the Muxidi intersection and drove past the academy on his right, and Yuyuantan Park on his left. There was little traffic on the road yet, but even as he looked, the cycle lanes were filling up with huddled figures braving the subzero temperature to cross this city of thirteen million inhabitants to factories and offices on its far-flung outskirts. When he reached the traffic lights at the Yuetan Footbridge, he turned right into Yuetan Nan Jie, and there ahead of him were the rows of pink and white four-storey apartment blocks that housed the most senior police officers in China.

  He showed his ID to the guard on duty at the gate and drove into the forecourt parking lot of the first block. He got out of the car and stretched stiff and tired limbs, breathing in the cold, harsh air, and trying to blink away the grit in his eyes. He pulled his long, black coat tightly around himself and looked up at the picture windows with their views of the parkland below, the open balconies where the privileged could dine in the shady cool of a summer’s evening, and knew he would never reach those dizzy heights. Not that he wasn’t good enough. He was a better cop than most of the residents of these luxury apartments. But he had a big mouth, which he was about to open again. And this time, even he was frightened of the consequences.

  Commissioner Zhu was still in his dressing gown — black silk embroidered with red and gold dragons — when he opened his door to Li. He had been unable to disguise his surprise when Li announced himself on the intercom. A moment’s silence, then a curt, ‘You’d better come up.’

  He ushered Li into the spacious living room at the front of the apartment. Net curtains as fine as gossamer hung over sliding glass doors that led out on to the balcony. In the distance, above the tops of the autumn trees, you could just see the roof of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Li could hear the Commissioner’s wife in the kitchen, where she had clearly been sent and told to stay. The Commissioner stood with his back to the glass doors, his legs apart, arms folded. Against the light Li could not see his face, only the reflected light from his rimless glasses. Beyond him the sky was a deep orange. ‘This had better be good, Li. I’m not accustomed to being dragged from my bed by junior officers.’

  Li took a deep breath. ‘I believe that one of the six of us who took the MERMER test on Monday afternoon murdered Lynn Pan,’ he said.

  Zhu remained motionless, and Li could not see in his face what impact his statement had made. The Commissioner said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually he cleared his throat and said in a quiet voice, ‘Which one of us?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then what makes you think it was any of us?’

  And Li told him. About the DNA mismatch, about how only someone with inside knowledge of the police investigation could have so accurately mimicked the Beijing Ripper. About the caller pretending to be him, luring Pan to a rendezvous with
death at the Millennium Monument. About Pan’s fears, expressed in her e-mail to Hart, and her private folders on the academy website, with the three graphs marked, Liar, Liar, Liar.

  ‘But you don’t know whose graphs they were?’

  ‘No, Commissioner.’

  ‘And how do you propose to find out?’

  ‘I’ve asked Bill Hart to gather together all the various pieces of information necessary to make that apparent. Miss Pan’s assistant, and the students who took part in the demonstration should be able to provide most of what he needs.’

  For the first time, the Commissioner unfolded his arms and leaned forward to take a cigarette from a wooden box on a lacquered table. He lit it and blew smoke towards the ceiling. It hung in the still air of the apartment, backlit by the dawn.

  ‘And supposing you do identify this liar. What then? How does that in any way prove that he murdered Lynn Pan?’

  ‘It doesn’t. But it would tell us where to look.’

  ‘And his motive?’

  ‘The lie, presumably.’

  The Commissioner snorted his derision. ‘What sort of a lie told during an innocent demonstration could possibly motivate murder? And anyway, how could he lie? We weren’t asked any questions.’

  Li nodded. It was one of the many things which had plagued him during all the sleepless hours of the night. How could you lie, if you had not been asked any questions and had given no answers? And yet Pan had marked the files, Liar, Liar, Liar. Somehow, in some way, one of them had been caught in a falsehood. ‘I don’t have the answer to that yet, Commissioner.’

  For the first time, the Commissioner moved away from the window, and Li saw that his face had turned quite pale. He started circling Li like a hunter stalking his prey, and Li remembered their conversation about the Commissioner’s boyhood spent hunting in the forests of the remote Xinjiang province. ‘It seems to me, Section Chief, that you are raising a great many questions to which you do not have any answers. You are indulging in the worst kind of unsubstantiated speculation. It goes against every tenet of Chinese police investigation — tried and tested techniques developed over decades by better men than you. Men like your uncle. I am sure he would be turning in his grave if he could hear this conversation.’