Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6)

by Peter May

  The Commissioner passed the book to Deputy Cao. ‘It is him,’ he said.

  Li frowned. ‘It is who?’

  ‘Thomas Dowman,’ said Deputy Cao. ‘The author of the book. We met him when he came to Beijing a couple of years ago.’

  ‘I heard he gave a lecture on the Ripper,’ Li said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Commissioner. ‘Deputy Cao and I were both there. Almost every senior officer at the Ministry was. A fascinating profile of an unfathomable murderer. Mister Dowman certainly knows his stuff.’

  ‘And so does someone else,’ said Li.

  The Commissioner leaned forward, grasping the back of Li’s seat. ‘Let’s keep this within the department for the moment, Li. We don’t want the press getting wind of it.’

  ‘That’s hardly likely,’ Li said.

  ‘There are journalists in this city who don’t know where to draw the line any more,’ Deputy Cao said ominously. ‘With the Olympics coming in 2008, the government has been …’ he hesitated, searching for the right words, ‘… overkeen, shall we say, to show the world what an open society we have become. There are those in the media who are taking advantage.’

  ‘And it’s not just a matter of creating public panic,’ Commissioner Zhu said. ‘That would be bad enough. You only have to look at how press coverage of the Washington sniper last year just about paralysed the US capital.’

  ‘It’s a political matter, Li,’ Cao said. ‘You can imagine the coverage such a story would generate around the world. Not exactly the image of Beijing that the government wants to promote ahead of the Olympics.’

  ‘So let’s keep it nice and quiet, Section Chief,’ the Commissioner said. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the front of the limo. ‘I want detailed progress reports on my desk. Daily. I am not going to preside over a police department which permits some lunatic to rerun the Ripper murders from first to last.’ He paused. ‘Get him, Section Chief Li, before he kills again.’ As if Li needed to be told.

  Chapter Four

  I

  The chatter of computer keyboards, like cicadas, filled the air as Li strode along the top floor corridor of Section One. Voices and cigarette smoke drifted out of the open door of the detectives’ room. ‘Wu! Qian!’ he shouted as he stalked past, but didn’t wait for a response. At the next door along he turned left into his own office and looked at the piles of paperwork gathering in drifts on his desk. A veritable paper blizzard. Reports from all the detectives working on the case, reports from forensics and pathology on each of the murders. Reports from headquarters on all manner of internal affairs in which he had absolutely no interest. The day’s mail, which he had not yet had an opportunity to open, was piled up in a wire tray. He hung his coat on the stand and slumped into his chair, letting his eyes close as it reclined. He could not bear an untidy desk. Somehow it cluttered his mind, fogged his thinking.

  ‘Chief?’ Qian’s voice from the door made him open his eyes. He sat up. Wu was hovering at Qian’s shoulder.

  ‘Qian, the Commissioner has asked for daily progress reports on the Ripper murders. I want you to take care of them.’ He could see Qian’s shoulders slump, but it wasn’t something he could afford to get bogged down with himself.

  ‘Yes, Chief.’

  Wu said, ‘I checked out the publication date of the Ripper book. It’s been on the shelves here for less than a week, Chief.’

  Li reached for the mail and started absently opening envelopes and consigning their contents either to the bin or to the pile on his desk. ‘So it wasn’t the appearance of the book which sparked off the killings,’ he said. ‘Given that the first killing was five weeks ago.’ He paused to think about it for a moment. ‘See if you can track down a telephone number, or even an e-mail address for the author. It might be useful if we could speak to him.’

  ‘Sure, Chief.’

  Li screwed up some departmental circular and threw it in the bin. ‘And something else.’ He fixed them both with a look they knew well. ‘Someone in this section is feeding information to headquarters. Specifically the Commissioner’s office.’

  Qian was shocked. ‘What, one of our people, Chief?’

  ‘One of our people, Qian. I don’t know who it is. I don’t want to know who it is. But it might be worth circulating the thought among the team, that if I ever find out, he can kiss his career goodbye, along with his testicles. I decide what information leaves this building, and what stays within its walls. Is that clear?’

  ‘Crystal, Chief,’ Qian said.

  Li sliced open the envelope he was holding and pulled out a handwritten letter. Almost immediately he dropped both on the desk and sat staring at them.

  ‘What is it, Chief?’ Wu asked.

  ‘Get someone up here from forensics,’ Li said quietly. ‘Now!’ There was something imperative in his tone, and Wu turned immediately and headed back for the detectives’ room and a phone. Qian crossed to his boss’s desk.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A letter from our killer.’

  The single sheet of stationery was folded once – large, untidy characters scrawled in red ink.

  Dear Chief,

  I am downward on whores and I will not stop the tear of them until I am caught. Good work the last was. I gave to the lady no time for squealing. I like my work and want to start again. You will hear more of me with my small funny plays. I saved a part of the red substance kept in a bottle from the last work to write with, but it disappeared thick as the adhesive and I cannot employ it. Red ink is good enough, I hope ha ha. Next work that I do I will cut off the ears of the lady to send to the senior police officers just for fun. My knife is so nice and sharp, I want to get to work immediately if I get a chance. Good luck.

  Sincerely yours,

  The Beijing Ripper

  (Don’t mind me giving my trade name.)

  Apart from the red ink and the strange, stilted language of it, what struck Li most forcibly about the letter was its signature. The Beijing Ripper. It was what the Commissioner had called him only half an hour earlier.

  * * *

  ‘It feels like a translation from another language,’ Elvis was saying. He had a photocopy of the Ripper letter in his hands, scowling at its odd phraseology. ‘Nobody would write Chinese like this.’

  ‘Unless maybe he was a foreigner,’ Qian said, which brought a murmur of speculation from around the table. The meeting room was packed. Every detective on duty was crammed in, every one with a colour photocopy of the letter. This was new. No one in the section could ever remember a murderer sending a letter to the investigating officer. Since such cases did not normally receive widespread, if any, coverage in the media, the murderer would not know who the investigating officers were until they caught him. But in this case, the envelope was addressed to Section Chief Li personally.

  Li turned the photocopy over and over in his fingers, considerably disturbed by it. Forensics had been quick to confirm that his were the only fingerprints on the original. It was written on commonplace stationery. The postmark on the envelope was Central Beijing. It had been posted that morning and arrived with the afternoon delivery. It could only have been a matter of hours after his last murder that the killer had written it. It made his killings seem even colder, more calculated – in direct contrast to Pathologist Wang’s verdict of frenzy. Of course, they knew now that there was nothing at all frenzied about the murders. They were meticulous replications of another man’s madness. But what kind of man was it who could map out his murders with such careful precision, who could cold-bloodedly murder a girl, then set about carving her up according to a one-hundred-and-fifteen-year-old blueprint?

  ‘Is there any significance to the red ink, do you think?’ Elvis asked. ‘I mean, I know he says it’s a substitute for his victim’s blood, but …’

  He left his question hanging. In Chinese culture, red ink in a letter symbolised the end of a relationship. It was one reason why Li had asked for it to be copied in colour, so
that if there was significance in the colour of the ink, no one would miss it. But no one in the room had any idea what significance it might have. The end of a relationship with whom? The victim? Did that mean he knew her, or she him?

  Li glanced at Wu. He had picked up the Ripper book from the table some minutes earlier, and still had his nose buried in it. ‘I hope we’re not distracting you from your reading, Wu,’ Li said.

  Wu looked up. Normally Li would have expected a smart retort. But instead Wu looked wan. Shocked. ‘I don’t think the red ink has any significance at all,’ he told the room. ‘Not in any Chinese sense, anyway.’ He flattened the book open on the table where he had been reading. ‘I think I should read you this.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and began: Dear Boss, I am downward on whores and I will not stop the tearing of them until I am caught… He looked up, sensing that he did not have to read any further. ‘Police investigating the Whitechapel murders in London were given the letter by a news agency which received it on the 27th of September, 1888. It’s almost exactly the same as the letter you received today, Chief. Except that it’s addressed to Dear Boss, and signed Jack the Ripper. It seems that’s where the name first came from.’

  Li reached out for the book, and Wu pushed it across the table. He said, ‘Seems like they don’t reckon it was sent by the killer, though. They figure it was some smart-ass journalist trying to stir up interest in the story.’

  Qian said, ‘But ours must have come from the killer. I mean, nobody except the police would know about the murders?’

  ‘Whoever he was, he knew my name,’ Li said. ‘He knew the address of this section.’ Which ruled out most of the population of Beijing. Section One was tucked away in an obscure hutong in the north-east of the city. An anonymous brick building opposite the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese. It did not advertise itself in any way. Outside of a hardcore criminal element, few people even knew of its existence.

  ‘Hey, come on, Chief,’ Elvis was chewing absently on a matchstick, and toying with his redundant sunglasses. ‘Most of China knows who you are these days. You’ve been splashed all over the papers ahead of this award thing tonight. You’re a hero.’

  Which brought some laughter from around the room. But Li was not amused. He said to Qian, ‘Get someone to go through the book and make an abstract of all the salient details. Get that copied and circulating. And since Elvis isn’t invited to the ceremony tonight, maybe he could do it.’

  ‘Aw Chief …’

  Qian grinned. ‘You got it, Chief.’

  ‘And let’s get a few more copies of the book itself. Get a dozen. Everyone on the case should read it.’

  ‘Hey,’ Wu cut in, ‘I just figured out who the killer is. It’s the author. He’s hoping to turn it into a best-seller by getting the cops to buy up all the copies.’

  Which brought a smile even to Li’s lips. When the laughter subsided, he said, ‘The thing is, if the murderer sticks to his mentor’s script, then we should know what his next move is.’ He consulted the book again. ‘According to the original Ripper’s timetable, he didn’t strike again for another six weeks, which might just give us a bit of breathing space. That’s the good news.’ He flipped through a few pages then stopped. ‘The bad news is that Jack’s next victim was a woman called Mary Jane Kelly, and he cut her up so badly she was hardly recognisable as human.’ The silence in the meeting room was very nearly tangible. Li’s eyes strayed to the photographs of the dead girls on the wall. Guo Huan had joined them now, a blow-up of one of the photographs from the strip given him by her mother. Her crime scene was set out below her in not so glorious technicolor. There was too much red. ‘I don’t want another girl up there on the wall,’ he said. ‘Whatever we do, we’ve got to stop that from happening.’

  II

  The sun was dipping fast in the west now, pink light catching the particles of pollution along the horizon, turning them orange beneath the darkening blue above. Li pulled up on to the sidewalk in front of the main gate of Yuyuantan Park. Red lanterns spun lazily in the dying breeze. A shady character wearing a dark suit and smoking a cigarette cupped in his hand was doing his best to impress a pretty girl leaning against the railings. She was dressed all in white – white coat, white bootees, white handbag clutched demurely in front of her in both hands. Seemingly he was succeeding, because she was staring up at him adoringly, apparently oblivious to the fact that his eyes were constantly on the move, above and beyond her, left and right. He spotted Li’s car the moment he parked it by the gate. And he watched suspiciously as Li got out of the driver’s side. His eyes flickered towards the registration plate, and Li could see that he recognised the jing character followed by O as the trademark police registration it was – something only someone with previous experience of the police was likely to know. Li wanted to tell the girl to go home, to have nothing to do with this wide boy. He was bad news. But it was none of Li’s business.

  He circumnavigated the barrier at the gate of the gardens outside the park. It was here that all the old men came to play cards and chess and chequers and dominoes. In the summer, there was shade from the trees. In the winter there was the warmth of companionship. And it saved them the two yuan payable for entry to the park itself. A path overhung by the naked branches of gnarled trees, and lined by bicycles parked three deep, led into the main garden where a statue carved from white stone watched the men in dark clothes huddled around their games. Beyond the trees, the roar of the traffic had become a distant rumble. A woman with short hair and a red jacket sang Peking Opera to the accompaniment of a wizened old man drawing his bow across the two strings of an ancient erhu. The evening sky reflected a cold blue off the canal which ran south out of Yuyuan Lake, a body of water which would be frozen solid in under a month, attracting skaters from all over the city. The last golden beams of sunlight warmed a silver-haired old man practising his tai chi as he gazed out over the water.

  Groups of men were dotted about all over the central concourse, gathered around the benches where the games were being played. Dai Yi was playing chess in the centre of one of the huddles. Li’s Uncle Yifu had always called him Lao Dai – old Dai – even though he was several months younger. He was a short man, stocky, with a round, smiling face. His head was completely bald and he always wore a black baseball cap with an unusually long peak. He had very round eyes that always smiled, even when the rest of his face bore a grave expression. He was absorbed in his game, as were the spectators – about half a dozen of them. His opponent wore a battered fawn hat with a short brim above a lugubrious face with deep lines chiselled out of folded lava rock. He was rigid with tension, the knuckles on his left hand glowing white as it tightened around his pack of cigarettes. The remains of a cigarette between his lips bled smoke into streaming eyes. But he seemed oblivious. It was obvious to Li as he eased through the group and took in the board, that Lao Dai was one move away from checkmate. The man with the cigarettes was desperately seeking a way out. Finally he slid a wooden disc with a red character, marking it out as his Horse, on a zigzag move and shouted, ‘Jiang!’ It was a last act of pure defiance. For Lao Dai ‘ate’ it with his Cannon and pronounced, ‘Jiang si li’ Checkmate. There was a collective sigh as Lao Dai sat back, and the two opponents traded a cursory handshake. The man with the cigarettes threw away the one that was in his mouth and lit another. There was a brief exchange of goodbyes and the gathering began to disperse. The sun was sinking fast now and it was getting colder. Time for something to drink, and something hot to eat.

  ‘Life is no fun any more, Li Yan,’ Lao Dai said without looking up, his attention focused on gathering up the discs and putting them in their box along with their embroidered cloth board. Li was surprised that the old man had even seen him arriving. ‘It is boring when you win all the time.’

  ‘As boring as it was when you lost all the time to my uncle?’

  The old man grinned and looked up at him finally. ‘Ah, but when you always lose, you can still lo
ok forward to the day when you will win. But when you always win, you can only ever look forward to defeat. It is better to win some, and to lose some. Your uncle always used to say, ten thousand things find harmony by combining the forces of positive and negative.’ The old man examined his face. ‘I see him in you tonight. I have never seen him there before.’

  ‘I wish there was more of him in me,’ Li said. ‘Then I might know better what to do.’

  ‘Ah, but you are young still. How can you always know what to do? Wisdom only comes with age.’

  And Li remembered another of his uncle’s sayings. ‘The oldest ginger is the best.’

  Lao Dai’s smile widened, but was touched by sadness. ‘It’s hard to believe he’s been gone five years. There is not a day goes past that I do not think about him.’

  Li nodded. He did not want to get into a discussion about his uncle. The memories that would resurrect would be too painful. ‘I came to see if you needed a taxi to take you to the Great Hall tonight.’

  The old man waved his hand dismissively. ‘No, no, of course not. I will take my bicycle, as always. The day I stop cycling is the day I will die.’ He stood up and lifted his precious box of chessmen. ‘Walk with me to the subway.’ It was too far now for Lao Dai to cycle from his home in the south-east of the city, to the garden outside the park. And the traffic was too dangerous. So he took the subway and the bus, and would be home in just under an hour. It never occurred to him not to come.

  They walked past the bristle-headed old man still performing his tai chi and on to the path that followed the canal. Lao Dai took small, shuffling steps, and seemed always on the point of overbalancing. The sky above them soared from pale lemon to the deepest, darkest blue. A splinter of moon was visible rising on the far horizon, and the last of the sun, even though they could not see it, glanced its light off countless windows in dozens of high-rises.