Chinese Whispers tct-6

by Peter May

  He had expected implacable faces, a thousand reasons — legal and bureaucratic — for not being allowed to see his sister. But the duty officer had nodded unhesitatingly and told Li to follow him down to the cells. He could have fifteen minutes, he was told.

  Xiao Ling rose to her feet when Li walked into her cell, but the light of hope that burned briefly in her eyes died again when the door slammed shut behind him. They had given her white overalls and black canvas shoes to wear. She had no make-up on her face, and her complexion was pasty white, dark shadows smudging her eyes. She searched his face for some clue, some hope. And found neither.

  ‘Why am I here, Li Yan?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘I know that they found cocaine in my locker, and that’s what gave them their excuse. But that’s not why I’m here, is it?’ Li could not find the words to answer her. So she provided them herself. ‘I mean, you don’t frame up some nobody worker on the production line of a car plant unless you have a good reason.’ She paused. ‘Like she’s the sister of the top crime cop in Beijing.’ A pained expression fell across her face like a shadow as she tried to understand. ‘Why, Li Yan? What have you done? What have I done?’

  He said, ‘Did they search anyone’s locker other than yours?’

  ‘They didn’t need to. They said they had received a tip-off.’

  He nodded. ‘I know the answer, but I still have to ask you …’

  ‘No!’ She cut him off, and he saw the hurt in her eyes. ‘Of course not. Do you think I would waste money on shit like that at the expense of my little girl? I nearly lost her once. I won’t do it again.’ Her eyes shone in the harsh fluorescent light, and she blinked to squeeze the blur of the tears out of them. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Margaret has taken her to our apartment. Dad is staying with Lao Dai.’

  She wiped her wet cheeks with her sleeves, and he saw the resentment in her face. ‘You still haven’t told me why.’ She thrust her chin out defiantly, determined not to let her emotions get the better of her.

  ‘Because I’m close to discovering the identity of a killer high up in Public Security. And he’s trying to destroy me before I can get any closer.’

  She drew a deep, faltering breath. ‘It’s always about you, isn’t it? You have always put yourself ahead of us. Always.’

  ‘Xiao Ling, that’s not true.’ Li felt the sting of her accusation more acutely because perhaps there was a grain of truth in it.

  ‘You went off to Beijing to make your career and left me to look after Dad.’

  ‘And you got married and left him to go off and live with some brute farmer.’

  ‘It wasn’t my place to stay at home!’ Xiao Ling bridled with righteous indignation. ‘It was my duty to go and live with the parents of my husband.’

  Li bit his tongue. He could have accused her of deserting her daughter for the chance of a son. He could have charged her with running away from her husband, and abandoning her father. He could have denounced her as selfish and deceitful. All of which would have been true. None of which had led her to a cell in the detention centre in Pau Jü Hutong. He swallowed his anger. ‘I’m going to try to get you out of here,’ he said. ‘But it won’t be easy. They’ve suspended me from my job, and they’re trying to discredit me.’

  She looked at him in disbelief. ‘If they can do that to you, then what hope in hell do I have?’

  ‘Not much,’ he said, his anger finally getting the better of him. They were as different as two people can be who came from the same womb. They had always fought, and she had always infuriated him. ‘But I’m the only fucking hope you’ve got. So don’t fight me, Xiao Ling, don’t blame me. Help me!’

  She glared at him defiantly before the little girl in her bubbled to the surface and her lower lip quivered. ‘Just get me out of here, Li Yan. Just get me out.’

  * * *

  By the time he came back down the ramp into the hutong, it was dark. The temperature had dropped, and there was a mist rising from the land. Headlights caught it in their beams, and raked the treelined alley, catching icy cyclists and hunched pedestrians in their frozen light. Li slipped his cellphone from his pocket and flicked through its address list. The battery was low, and the light which illuminated the tiny screen flickered in the dark. He found the number he was looking for and pressed the dial button. He put the phone to his ear and listened to the musical sequence of digital numbers, and then the long, single rings. It was answered on the third, and he asked to speak to Pi Jiahong. The girl asked for his name and told him to hold. After a long wait he heard Pi’s voice. ‘Hey, Li Yan. Long time.’ They were old friends. But his voice did not carry an old friend’s warmth. He sounded strained and cautious. They had spent their first two years at the University of Public Security together before Pi dropped out to take a law degree at Beida. Now he was one of the most dynamic of Beijing’s new breed of criminal lawyer.

  ‘I need your help, Pi.’

  ‘What?’ Pi tried to sound jocular. ‘The chief of Section One needs my help?’

  ‘I’ve been suspended, Pi.’

  There was a brief silence. Then, ‘I heard,’ Pi said quietly.

  Li wondered why he was not surprised. He remembered Dai, in the park, saying, A word whispered in the ear can be heard for miles. ‘They’ve arrested my sister for possession of cocaine. They found it in her locker at work. It was a plant, Pi. They’re holding her at Pau Jü. She needs legal representation.’

  There was a longer silence at the other end. ‘I’m kind of busy right now, Li. A heavy case load.’

  ‘I need someone to bail her out,’ Li said.

  ‘I can recommend someone …’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  Another long silence. ‘Li, I’ll be honest with you. I’m hearing stuff about you. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. Probably isn’t. But you know how it is. Shit sticks.’ He paused. ‘And it rubs off.’

  Li felt a band of tension tighten around his forehead. His throat was dry and swollen. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, old friend,’ he said.

  ‘Aw, come on, Li, don’t be like that…’

  The cellphone battery gave out and cut him off, saving Li the trouble. Li thrust the phone in his pocket, wrapped his coat tightly around himself, and set off north towards the Yong Hegong Lamasery and East Andingmen Avenue, where he could get a taxi. It was a long walk in the cold and the dark. Long enough to reflect upon betrayal and lost friendships, upon tears and hopelessness. Long enough to think about Margaret’s deportation, about his son, his family, his own powerlessness to alter this course of events. It was far, far, too long a walk.

  * * *

  It took Li another half-hour to get back to the apartment. Conscious of his dwindling resources, he took the subway from Yong Hegong. Three yuan instead of thirty in a taxi. The underground train was jammed to capacity, and Li stood clutching the plastic overhead handle, pressed on all sides by fellow Beijingers on their way home from work, some reading papers or books, others listening to music on their iPods, a young couple holding hands. But he didn’t hear them or feel them or smell them. He was isolated and insulated, trapped in a bubble, removed from real life. And it was almost as if he was invisible to them. No one looked at him. No one thought twice about a tall Chinese in a black coat, swaying with the crowd in the Beijing metro. He was just one of more than a billion. What difference could he possibly make? He might as well not exist.

  He got off at Wangfujing and walked down to the Grand Hotel. The subway beneath Changan Avenue was deserted. Several of the lights were not working, and it was dark. He heard a sound behind him and turned quickly. But there was nobody there. Just an echo from the far stairway, and his own feeble shadow on the wall. But, still, it left his heart pounding, and he realised just how far he had fallen that he was scared now of his own shadow.

  When he turned into the ministry compound, just past the Chung Fung restaurant,
he thought that the guard cast him an odd look. Did they all know? Even down to the lowest ranking guard on night shift? Had he really become such a pariah? Or was he just being paranoid? He glanced up the street towards his apartment block and saw a familiar vehicle parked outside the main entrance. It was a Section One Jeep. A panic gripped him, and he started running. He stopped briefly as he reached the Jeep, but there was no one inside. He ran up the steps and into the lobby. The elevator was there, its door standing open, the floor littered with cigarette ends, the smell of stale cigarette smoking clinging to every porous surface. The ride to the fourth floor took an eternity. He fumbled to get his key in the lock, and when he got into the apartment found Margaret already halfway to the door.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’ he said.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘Qian is here. He just arrived.’

  Li looked beyond her into the sitting room and saw Qian standing awkwardly by the window. Xinxin was sitting on the floor with baby Li Jon propped between her legs watching television.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Margaret said. ‘You’ve been away for ages.’

  Li nodded. ‘I’m okay. My father’s with Lao Dai.’ He did not want to get into the whole credit card thing right now. He looked again at Qian and stepped into the room. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

  Qian looked grim. ‘William Hart has been found dead in the gardens of his apartment building. Apparently he fell from a window on the twenty-third floor.’

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  Steam rose from sewers through gratings in the road at the China World Trade Center, dispersing in the traffic, lost in their exhaust fumes. Lines of cars moved steadily on to the southbound lanes of the East Third Ring Road, and their tail lights arced off into the night. Li sat numbed in the passenger seat next to Qian.

  ‘You could be in big trouble for this, Qian,’ he said.

  Qian shrugged. ‘I’ve known you for how long, Chief? Fifteen years? More? I think that qualifies us as old friends. Strictly speaking, I’m off duty right now. So I’m giving an old friend a lift to the apartment of an acquaintance who has been killed.’

  Li stared off into the night. He was deeply shocked by the death of Hart. Not just because he was someone he had known and liked, but because he was the last hope for identifying Lynn Pan’s killer. Which was no doubt why he was dead. Li felt responsible. He should have warned him. But, then, his day had simply collapsed around him, fallen in with the rest of his world. Hart had been the last thing on his mind.

  They turned off at the Jinsong bridge, and Qian was waved through by uniformed officers at the entrance to the Music Home Apartments complex. The gardens which Li and Margaret had walked through just twenty-four hours earlier, were jammed with people. Police and forensic vehicles were pulled up at the north-west tower. The whole area was floodlit, and people from the other apartments and the shopping plaza were pressing up against a cordon of officers determined to keep them back. Li and Qian abandoned the Jeep and pressed through the crowds to be let under the tape by the officer in charge of crowd control. They hurried along the path and through a curve of covered walkway that spanned the stream. Hart had fallen on to an area of white tiled concourse around a rocky pond. There was a lot of blood, stark and red against the white of the tiles. His torso was unnaturally twisted, and his arms and legs lay flung out from it at odd angles. His left forearm and hand were missing. The skull was split open. Li could hardly bring himself to look. Instead, he tilted his head up to see the lights of the apartment twenty-three floors above. It was a hell of a fall. No chance of survival.

  He tilted his head down again and found that the eyes of every officer at the scene were on him. His arrival had caused a spontaneous hiatus in the proceedings. The photographer’s flash had stopped flashing. Pathologist Wang was crouched over the body, but twisted around so that he could catch a sight of Li. Officers from his own section stood gawping at him. Forensics officers in their white tyvek suits squatted motionless around the body where they had been searching for the tiniest pieces of evidence.

  The only movement came from the head of forensics, Fu Qiwei, who was walking towards him through a scene frozen in time, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a VCR. He was grinning, his black eyes shining. And he held out his hand to shake Li’s. ‘Hey, Chief,’ he said. ‘Got some fucking memo today saying you’d been suspended and that I wasn’t to consort with you. Who uses a fucking word like consort?’ He scratched his head as if trying to puzzle it out. ‘Anyway. Never got the chance to read the goddamned thing. Catch up on it tomorrow. More important things to do right now.’ Li nodded and shook his hand firmly.

  ‘Memo? What memo?’ Wang said. ‘I haven’t even had the chance to look at my mail today.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Wu said, stepping out of the bunch of detectives. He looked around. ‘I guess we’ve all been too busy, haven’t we?’ Heads nodded their agreement, and as if the pause button had been pressed again, the crime scene came back to life. Only Hart remained dead.

  Qian whispered in Li’s ear, ‘Everybody’s with you, Chief.’

  Li did not trust himself to speak for a moment, then he turned to Wu. ‘What’s the story, Detective?’

  Wu said, ‘Everything points to an accident, or suicide, Chief. Hart was in the apartment on his own. Window on the balcony’s wide open. His wife was out shopping somewhere with the baby and wasn’t home yet. It was a neighbour returning from work who heard the scream. Looked up and there was Hart dropping like a stone.’

  ‘The neighbour heard a scream?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Was that before or after he came out the window?’

  Wu shook his head. ‘He can’t tell. He heard the scream before he saw Hart. One thing’s for sure, though, he was alive during the fall. The neighbour says his arms were windmilling like crazy.’

  Li closed his eyes, and could only imagine what thoughts must have being going through Hart’s mind as he fell to his death, knowing its inevitability. Did those few seconds it took to fall seem like a lifetime, or were they over in a flash? He opened his eyes again. ‘There’s no way it was suicide or an accident, Wu. Hart was working all day trying to decipher Lynn Pan’s graphs. Either he found out who the liar was, or he was getting close to it.’

  Qian said, ‘So if you were here in your capacity as Section Chief, Chief, how would you want things handled?’

  Li said, ‘I’d have officers take statements from every resident in the complex. Find out who was in the garden coffee shop at the time, what staff were on duty. I’d talk to the security officer in the lobby — how did the killer get in without coming through security? Check for closed-circuit TV. Check the taxi companies in case the killer came by taxi, or got away in one. Someone, somewhere, saw something, whether they know it or not. Maybe a stranger in an elevator, someone behaving oddly. We need forensics to go through the apartment with a fine-toothed comb. My feeling is that the killer is a real pro, so we probably won’t find anything. But people make mistakes.’

  Wu looked at Qian, who nodded. ‘I’ll get on with it,’ he said.

  ‘Wu.’ Li put a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘Where’s his wife?’

  ‘In the apartment. There’s a female officer with her. She’s pretty upset.’

  ‘Maybe I should identify the body for the record,’ Li said. ‘Save her the trauma.’

  Wu shrugged. ‘She’s already done it, Chief. Insisted on seeing him.’

  Li nodded and Wu went off to issue instructions to the other detectives. He turned to Qian. ‘I’d like Margaret to do the autopsy.’

  Qian raised an eyebrow. ‘That might be a bit difficult, Chief.’

  Li said, ‘The Americans are probably going to request that one of their people do it anyway. And if we move fast, do it tonight, then it’ll be a fait accompli.’

  ‘Okay,’ Qian said. ‘I’ll set it up.’

  ‘One other thing, Qian,’ Li said. ‘I d
on’t want my son and my niece left alone in the apartment. Is there any way we can get an officer to stay with them until after the autopsy?’

  Qian shook his head. ‘Not officially. I’d never get away with it.’ He hesitated. ‘But like I said, officially I’m off duty. I’ll stay with them. No one’ll lay a finger on them while I’m there, Chief. You can count on it.’

  Li looked into the eyes of the older man and saw in them only devotion and trust. He wanted to hug him, but all he said was, ‘I know.’

  * * *

  Lyang was like a shadow, insubstantial, almost transparent. She sat in a trance at the dining table where they should have eaten the previous night, her hands in front of her, fingers interlocked. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut. She turned them on Li as he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. The female officer got up and moved away. Forensics were through in the living room, examining the balcony in the minutest detail. It was from one of its windows that Hart had fallen. They had already found damage to the sill, and scuff marks on the polished mahogany floor that Hart and Lyang had been so careful to protect with slippers laid out at the door for guests. Nothing else seemed out of place, Chinese rugs and wall hangings, the stereo switched on, but the music on pause. There was a drink sitting on the drinks cabinet. Untouched. It was one of Hart’s faux margaritas. The ice was all melted now. He must have mixed it when he came in. Hardly the actions of a man about to throw himself off a balcony. Perhaps he had put on the music, mixed himself a drink, and then there had been a knock at the door. He’d put the music on pause, put down his drink and let in his killer.