by Peter May
‘Wei?’
Margaret listened bleakly as he had a quickfire exchange in putonghua Chinese. A bizarre four-toned cadence that she had never made any real attempt to learn. And yet she knew it was a language her son would speak, and she did not want there to be any part of him she could not understand. Of course, she would teach him English. She would speak to him always in English. But she also knew from her years with Li that there would always be that something Chinese about him that would remain just out of reach.
Li hung up and dropped the phone on the table, rolling on to his back and staring silently at the ceiling. There was a lengthy silence. Their passion had not been spent, but it was gone. Finally he said, ‘There’s been another one.’
She felt her stomach flip over. ‘Another mutilation?’ He nodded and she ached for him. She knew how much they troubled him, these killings. It was always worse with a serial killer. The longer you took to catch him, the more people died. In this case young women. Young, fresh-faced prostitutes trying to eke a living in this new, money-driven China. Every new killing was like an accusation of failure. Li’s failure. And eventually the guilt would get to him, and he would start to feel responsible for every death. Like he had killed them himself. Like now.
II
Zhengyi Road was empty as he cycled north in the dark beneath the trees, dry leaves crunching under his tyres. Up ahead, in the brightly lit East Changan Avenue, the first traffic of the day was already cruising the boulevard: buses packed with pale, sleepy faces, taking workers to factories across town; trucks on the first stretch of long journeys on new roads, carrying the industrial produce of the north to the rice fields of the south; office workers in private cars getting in ahead of the rush hour. Where once the cycle lanes would have been choked with early morning commuters, only a few hardy souls now braved the cold on their bicycles. Car ownership was soaring. Public transport had improved beyond recognition – new buses, a new underground line, a light rail system. The bicycle, once the most common mode of transport in Beijing, was rapidly disappearing. An outmoded transport.
At least, that was what the municipal government thought. They had issued an edict to every police station demanding a response time to all incidents of just twelve minutes, an edict well nigh impossible to achieve given the gridlock that seized up the city’s road system for most of the day. Some stations had brought in motor scooters, but the municipal authority had refused to license them. And, almost as an afterthought, had also denied officers permission to attend incidents on bicycles. A return to the bike would be a retrograde step, they said. This was the new China. And so police cars sat in traffic jams, and average response times remained thirty minutes or longer.
Li had a healthy disregard for edicts. If it was quicker by bike, he took his bike, as he had done for nearly twenty years. As section chief he always had a vehicle at his disposal, but he still preferred to cycle to and from work and get motorised only when required. And no one was about to tell the head of Beijing’s serious crime squad that he could not ride his bike if he wanted to. This morning, however, as an icy wind blew down Changan Avenue from the west and cut clean through his quilted jacket, he might have preferred to have been sitting behind the wheel of a warm Santana. But that wasn’t something he would ever have admitted. Even to himself.
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 b
linked. 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 p
easant 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.
