Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6)

by Peter May

  ‘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.

  ‘I have other riddles to solve today, Mei Yuan. Why don’t you try yours on Margaret?’

  ‘Hah!’ Mei Yuan grunted. ‘She is always too quick. She is smarter than you.’

  Li tossed his paper wrapping in the bin. ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’ He mounted his bike.

  ‘You are welcome. Maybe I will ask her, when I see her at the park.’

  Li wheeled down off the sidewalk on to the road. ‘She won’t be there for tai chi today, Mei Yuan. She has to go to the visa office to get her extension application in.’

  ‘She still has to do that?’ Mei Yuan raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you have any influence?’

  Li snorted. ‘You know the authorities frown on our relationship, Mei Yuan. Pin-up policeman living in sin with foreign devil. Doesn’t exactly fit the image of the poster campaign It’s only tolerated because everyone pretends it doesn’t exist. Besides, the Entry-Exit Police are a law unto themselves.’ He pushed off into the road to the accompaniment of a symphony of horns and called back over his shoulder, ‘See you tonight.’

  IV

  The new visa office was opposite the Dongzhimen Bridge on the Second Ring Road. It was too far for Margaret to cycle with Li Jon strapped into the baby seat in front of her handlebars. Life had been simpler when the visa office was located in its original crumbling grey brick building on the east side of the Forbidden City, five minutes from the apartment. Now its replacement, in a twin-towered monstrosity of stone, glass and steel, was a twenty-five-minute taxi ride on a good traffic day.

  Her taxi parked up beneath the flyover, and the driver settled down, meter still running, to read his Beijing Youth Daily while Margaret struggled to get the baby buggy out of the trunk. She was not in the best of humours by the time she had negotiated four lanes of traffic and a revolving glass door that wouldn’t revolve. And since the counters were on the first floor, there was also the escalator to contend with, which was never easy with the buggy.

  The concourse was busy this morning, queues forming at all the counters, raised voices echoing off marble floors and walls. Margaret queued for ten minutes to get her application form, and then made her way to the line of desks to sit down and fill it in. Li Jon was not being co-operative. He had been fed and changed before she left, but something was troubling him, and he had been fractious and prone to complaining all morning. Much as she loved him, she found his periods of unaccountable bad temper difficult to cope with. She was sure that one day she would be able to have an intelligent conversation with him and ask him what was wrong. But until then it was a guessing game. Colic, teething, stomach-ache, hunger, dirty diaper. Any one of any number of things. She gritted her teeth and filled out her form.

  There was an unusually large number of people queuing at the foreign counter today and she had to wait nearly twenty minutes before she was seen, acutely aware of the meter in her taxi clocking up every second of it. A frosty young woman in a neatly pressed black police uniform, hair scraped back severely from a pockmarked face, demanded Margaret’s passport. She gave it lengthy scrutiny, before turning her attention to Margaret’s application for a six-month visa extension. Margaret waited impatiently, Li Jon still griping in the buggy beside her. Finally the girl turned the form back towards Margaret and stabbed it with her pen. ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘You fill in address here.’

  Margaret scowled. ‘I filled in my address.’ But her heart was pounding. The address she had given was her official address in the staff apartment block at the University of Public Security – an apartment she had not occupied for nearly a year.

  ‘No,’ the visa cop barked again. ‘You fill in wrong place.’

  Margaret looked at the form again and saw that in her hurry she had accidentally filled in the space allocated for a previous address. ‘Shit,’ she muttered under her breath. She started to score it out and write it in the correct space. But the visa cop pulled the form out from under her pen and started to tear it up.

  ‘No, no, no. You fill out new form.’

  Margaret glared at her, barely able to contain her anger or the caustic comment fighting for expression on the tip of her tongue. New China was still bedevilled by the bureaucracy of Old China, and its bureaucrats were just as intransigent. ‘Could you give me another form, then, please?’ she said through clenched teeth.

  ‘Forms at that counter,’ the visa cop said, pointing to the far end of the concourse where Margaret had queued earlier. ‘Next.’ And the next in line tried to push past. A tall, fat, balding American in a business suit.

  But Margaret stood her ground. ‘No, wait a minute! I queued for a form. I filled it out. You tore it up. I want you to give me another form and I’ll fill it out right here.’ She looked at the line of unsympathetic faces behind her. ‘And these people can wait.’

  But the visa cop just shook her head and pushed Mar
garet’s passport back at her. ‘No form here,’ she said.

  ‘Chrissake, lady, go get a form,’ the fat American said. ‘Face it. You’re in China.’

  As if sensing her tension, Li Jon started to cry. Margaret felt her blood pressure soar. She grabbed the handles of the buggy, spun it around and wheeled it off across the concourse. She hated having to admit defeat. It was another fifteen minutes before she found herself back at the application counter pushing her freshly filled-out form across it at the frozen-faced visa cop, who gave no indication that she had any recollection of their previous encounter.

  ‘Passport,’ she said, and Margaret almost threw it at her. Having examined it only fifteen minutes earlier, she proceeded to examine it again in great detail as if for the first time. Then she looked at the form, scrutinising it carefully, section by section. Margaret stood watching her impassively as she entered details into a computer terminal behind the counter. Then she stamped the form several times and pushed a receipt back across the counter, along with the passport. ‘Visa over there,’ she said, pointing to a young man in uniform sitting further down the same counter. All the people who had been in the line behind Margaret at the visa application desk, now stood in the line ahead of her at the visa issuing desk.

  Margaret leaned over the counter and said, ‘Chicken feet.’

  The visa cop looked at her in surprise. ‘I am sorry?’

  ‘Someone told me once they were good for the complexion. You should give them a try.’ And she wheeled the still wailing Li Jon down to the visa issuing desk. It was petty, childish even, but it made Margaret feel just a tiny bit better.

  But as she stood in the queue at the visa issuing desk, she saw Miss Chicken Feet with the bad complexion walk along behind the counter and whisper something in the ear of the issuing officer. The young man looked up and ran his eyes quickly down the line. They rested briefly on Margaret, and then he nodded and turned back to his computer terminal. The girl went back to her desk. Margaret began to worry. When she finally got to the head of the queue, the officer didn’t even look at her. He took her receipt and her passport, and his keyboard chattered as he entered data into his computer. He took a thin sheet of official paper from a tray, scribbled on it, and then stamped it with red ink and pushed it across the counter at Margaret. ‘Come back in two days for passport,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Margaret couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Two days,’ said the officer. ‘Next.’

  ‘I’ve never had to leave my passport before,’ Margaret said.

  The officer met her eye for the first time. He was coldly impassive. ‘You want visa, you come back in two days. Okay?’ And he was already taking the passport from the next in line.

  Margaret knew she was beaten. She glanced along the counter and caught Miss Chicken Feet smirking.

  V

  Smoke rose from cigarettes, and steam from thermos mugs of green tea. The detectives of Section One sat around the meeting room wrapped in coats and wearing hats. Some even wore gloves. The heating had broken down again.

  One wall was covered with photographs taken at four crime scenes. Four young women strangled and savagely mutilated. Each one worse than the last. Sunshine slanted across the wall, bringing cold light to a very dark place. The mood in the room was sombre as they listened to Detective Wu outlining the details of the latest killing. Li watched him pensively. Wu was one of the Section’s senior detectives now, but he was still in love with his image. He always had a piece of gum in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket that he would whip out one-handed and clamp on his face at the first blink of sunshine. Since the sun was shining today he was wearing them pushed back on his forehead. He had been proudly sporting a growth on his upper lip for years, and was considerably chastened when his daughter had brought home a school essay in which she had written of her father, ‘He is growing a moustache.’ To his credit, he told the story against himself. His own personal uniform consisted of baseball boots, faded denims and a short leather jacket, and he grew his hair just long enough to comb over the thinning patch on top. He had been divorced for nearly five years.

  He held up a photograph of the chewed-up remains of a brown Russian cheroot still in its evidence bag. ‘It’s like a calling card,’ he told the room. ‘He leaves one of these at every scene. It’s no accident. He knows we’ll find them. It’s like he’s saying, here’s my DNA. You got my code, but you’ll never get my number. The bastard’s playing games with us.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ The question came from one of the youngest detectives in the Section. Sang Chunlin was tall and wore dark trousers, black shoes and a black jacket. He, too, had a penchant for American-style shades. His thick black hair, cut short side and back, was long on top and swept back in a quiff. The other detectives called him Elvis.

  ‘If we knew why he did any of it, Elvis, we might be halfway to nailing him,’ Wu said.

  ‘Well, whatever motivates him it’s not sexual.’ This from Detective Zhao. ‘He didn’t have sex with any of them, did he? There’s been no trace of semen found at any of the scenes.’

  ‘We don’t know that in this case,’ Wu said. ‘At least, not until we get the reports back from the autopsy and the lab. But, anyway, who knows how he gets his kicks? He takes bits of them away with him.’

  Qian came quietly into the room at the back and slipped into a seat. It was unusual for him to be late. But Li knew there would be a good reason. He nodded a silent acknowledgement to his deputy. Qian was several years older than Li. Steady, reliable, the Section plodder. Li had persuaded his superiors at headquarters that Qian should be given the deputy’s job, so that Li could hand him most of the responsibility for running the Section. Qian would be good at that, he had told them. And it would free Li up to take a more active role in leading investigations. And he had been right. It was a partnership that worked well.

  The rest of the detectives were now actively engaged in a debate about motivation, a topic of discussion which, until recently, would have been anathema. Traditional Chinese police work was based on the painfully meticulous collection of evidence, leading to culprit and conviction. Only then would motivation become apparent. Unlike the West, where detectives considered motive the starting point of an investigation. But like everything else in China, this too was changing. And Li had been personally instrumental in altering the working practices of Section One.

  While he still believed there was value in large group meetings attended by all the detectives, talking through the evidence, discussing the case in the minutest detail, the time it took was no longer a luxury they could afford. The crime rate was soaring as unemployment grew, and it was impossible to keep track of the floating population of itinerant workers moving from city to city. They had to find ways of dealing with crime more quickly and efficiently. They had embraced technology, installing their own Chinese Automated Fingerprint Identification System, CAFIS, at the forensics headquarters at Pau Jü Hutong. Portable computers the size of a briefcase were available to take out on the job. Fingerprints could be taken at any remote location and sent back by landline or cellphone for computer comparison. They had developed software called AutoCAD which could produce scale 3-D computerised re-creations of crime scenes from photographs and a single measurement. They now had access to a computerised ballistics database for the whole of China. And some of the most sophisticated laboratory analysis equipment available had been installed at the new pathology centre in the north of the city. But it was at the sharp end – the working practices of investigating detectives – that reform was most required, and Li had instituted a system of spreading the workload by delegating only two detectives to each case.

  It was working well. But this case was different. He needed more men on the job. Each pairing still had its own workload, but every detective in the Section had now been drafted in to work in some capacity on what was in danger of turning into the worst case of serial murder since the People’s Republic
came into being in 1949.

  Li looked again at the photographs on the wall. A grotesque catalogue of inhuman behaviour. And he couldn’t help but wonder about motivation. There was something very cold and controlled about all these killings. Pathologist Wang had described the latest attack as frenzied, and yet the killer had taken the time to arrange a piece of intestine beside the body, and carefully laid the remaining entrails across the girl’s shoulder. In the previous case, he had taken the contents of the girl’s purse and arranged them on the ground around her feet. It was bizarre behaviour.

  All the victims were prostitutes. They had all been murdered within the same square mile of the city’s Jianguomen district, an area where a large population of foreign embassy staff and five-star tourist hotels attracted a slightly higher class of call girl. All had been strangled, although this was not always the cause of death. All had been killed on a weekend. The first victim, twenty-three-year-old Shen Danhua, had been discovered in a quiet cul-de-sac behind the Friendship Store off Jianguomenwai Avenue. Her face and head were so swollen and distorted from strangulation that identification by relatives had been a problem. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times.

  There was a gap of three weeks between the first and second murders. The second was found on a building site behind the China World Trade Center by labourers arriving for the early shift. Li looked at the photographs on the wall. They had pinned up a portrait picture of each of the girls to remind them that these were people, not just victims. It was only too easy to become desensitised, to start seeing corpses as dead meat rather than human beings. The second victim, Wang Jia, had been an exceptionally pretty girl. In the photograph her parents had given them, she was smiling radiantly at the photographer. It was a smile that haunted them all, a reminder of their failure. She had been strangled, and then had her throat slashed twice, left to right, one cut severing both carotid arteries, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord. Her killer had cut open the abdomen from a centre point beneath the ribs, down the right side and under the pelvis to the left of the stomach, and then stabbed at her private parts with the tip of his knife. The pathologist concluded that the attack had been savage and violent.