The Fourth Sacrifice (The China Thrillers 2)

by Peter May

  ‘No … no … !’ But Birdie’s denials were feeble now, his eyes filling again with tears.

  ‘What else did you find under the floorboards? A killing list, maybe. Silk cord to bind his wrists, the same silk cord he meant to use on you? What did he say when you confronted him? Did he admit it?’ Sang leaned forward again, speaking almost softly now. ‘Why did you kill him, Birdie? You could just have gone to the police. What happened? Was it anger? Did he spit in your face? Or was it guilt? The only way you could lay the ghost of the past? That dreadful day in the spring of ’67, remember it? When you humiliated and beat and hounded Cat’s father to his death in the schoolyard in front of everyone, in front of his wife? An old man with a heart condition. You must have felt very proud of yourself.’

  Birdie had stopped wringing his hands now. They hung loosely at his sides as he rocked to and fro, and sob after sob ruptured his breathing until Li thought he was going to choke. He stared at his inquisitors unseeingly, and tears ran in rivers of regret down his face.

  ‘Is that why you had to kill Cat, too? Is that why you forced to him to his knees and raised that sword above his head and cut it off with a single stroke?’

  Birdie howled like an animal, a deep throaty howl that rose from his diaphragm and sent a shiver through each of the detectives. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he shouted. And Li and Sang exchanged glances.

  ‘Didn’t mean to what?’ Li asked.

  ‘Kill Teacher Yuan.’ Birdie clawed at his face with his fingers, trying to wipe away the tears. ‘I never meant to do it. Please, please, please, I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘It’s Cat we’re talking about now, Birdie,’ Li said softly. He waited for a moment. ‘How did you know exactly what it was he had done to the other three?’

  But Birdie was shaking his head from side to side, still rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he kept repeating.

  ‘The placard around his neck. How did you know to do that? The name upside down and scored through.’

  Birdie stopped rocking and stared at Li through his tears. ‘It’s Teacher Yuan you’re talking about. That’s what we did to him in the Cultural Revolution.’ He suddenly banged his fist on the table in frustration. ‘How many times do I have to pay for that?’ he shouted. ‘How many deaths can you die in one lifetime? We were just children. We didn’t know what we were doing. Only what Chairman Mao told us. He was the red, red sun in our hearts.’

  No, Li thought. He was the blood-red hate in your souls.

  *

  They climbed the stairs to the top floor in silence. Sang glanced apprehensively at Li several times. ‘You don’t look too pleased, boss,’ he said. ‘For a man who’s just cracked a case.’

  ‘We haven’t cracked anything,’ Li growled. ‘Far from it.’

  Sang was astonished. ‘He as good as admitted it.’

  ‘No he didn’t. He was confused. He didn’t seem to me able to make a proper distinction between Yuan and his father.’

  ‘But, boss, he had both motive and opportunity. He admitted he knew about the other murders, he doesn’t have an alibi – in fact he lied about it.’ Sang had to walk quickly to keep up with Li along the top corridor.

  Li shook his head. ‘The answer’s always in the detail, Sang.’ His uncle’s words fell from his lips as if they were his own. ‘And the detail just doesn’t add up. Where did Birdie get the flunitrazepam from? How did he know about the placard round the neck, or tying the hands with silk cord?’

  Sang shrugged. ‘Coercion. He probably forced it out of Yuan. And maybe the flunitrazepam was under the floorboards along with everything else.’

  Li stopped suddenly and turned to look at Sang. ‘Let me ask you something, detective. Does Birdie look to you like someone who could threaten anyone?’ Sang looked uncertain. ‘And even if somehow he had managed to force all those details out of Yuan, why did he then write “Digger” on the card instead of “Cat”? How could he get that wrong?’

  Sang was at a loss.

  Li turned into the detectives’ office. Half a dozen detectives were gathered around Margaret and Xinxin, involved in some game with playing cards. They melted away to their desks when Li came in.

  ‘Qian,’ Li barked, and Qian jumped.

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Get a search warrant for Birdie’s apartment.’

  ‘Why are we searching his apartment if you don’t believe he did it?’ Sang asked. He almost tripped on Li’s heels as Li stopped and turned on him.

  ‘Police procedure, Sang. I’m assuming you learned something at Public Security University. We follow a line of inquiry to its conclusion. I don’t expect to find anything incriminating there. I want to eliminate him from our inquiries.’

  IV

  Five police vehicles brought Li and Margaret, Qian, Wu, Zhao and Sang, along with six uniformed officers to the alleyway leading off Dengshikou Street, where Birdie had his apartment on the ninth floor of a decaying seventies apartment block. This was in the heart of Beijing’s shopping district, just off Wangfujing Street, where massive redevelopment was throwing up luxury international hotels and vast shopping plazas. Remnants of the past, however, still survived in little pockets like this.

  The lane was dirty and potholed. Women sat behind shabby stalls pedalling lukewarm noodles in a watery sauce. A spotty youth was selling cigarettes and soft drinks from a hole in the wall. The arrival of the police was creating a stir, and a crowd of Chinese, taking a break from the banality of their everyday lives, quickly gathered.

  From the lane, the officers entered a courtyard through a door in an iron gate. Bicycles stood in neat rows under canopies on three sides. Garbage was piled in a heap on steps leading inside where a teenage girl operating the lift viewed the arrival of the police with momentary alarm. She was sitting huddled on a seat, with a pile of cheap romance magazines on her knee, listening to scratchy pop music on a transistor radio. A jar of cold green tea stood on the floor beside her. A fur coat hung on the wall behind her, as if she were anticipating a cold winter. Li and Margaret and two of the detectives, Wu and Qian, squeezed in beside her. The others started up the stairs.

  ‘Do you know Mr Ge?’ Li asked the lift girl. She looked puzzled and shook her head. ‘He lives on the ninth floor. He keeps birds.’

  Her face screwed up in disgust. ‘Oh, the bird man,’ she said. ‘I hate him. He’s always bringing his smelly birds in here. It’s all right for him. He’s used to it, but I can smell them for hours after he’s gone.’

  ‘Take us up, please.’

  She shrugged and pressed the button for the ninth floor, and the lift jerked and whined and began its slow ascent.

  ‘Do you remember what time he came in on Monday night?’ Li asked.

  She laughed. ‘Are you kidding? Do you know how many people live in this building? Do you think I care when they come and when they go. I don’t even look at them.’

  ‘But you’d know the bird man, wouldn’t you? You’d smell his birds.’

  ‘He’s in and out all the time,’ the girl said dismissively. ‘And, anyway, I wouldn’t know one day from the next. They’re all the same to me. You want my job? You can have it.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t know if he had any visitors recently?’ Li asked hopelessly.

  ‘Gimme a break,’ said the girl.

  Margaret watched the exchange with an idle curiosity. Beyond her first flush of interest, the lift girl clearly couldn’t give a damn and was being less than helpful.

  Margaret was not quite sure why she had agreed to come along when Li asked her. After their visit to the university her interest in the investigation was all but dead. She was tired of the emotional roller coaster that sent her hurtling from Li to Michael and back again. It was going nowhere fast. And, if she was honest with herself, she no longer cared who had killed Yuan. What did it matter to her, anyway? Some thirty-year-old vendetta that belonged to another culture in another time. How could she ever hope to understand
any of it?

  The lift juddered to a standstill on the ninth floor and the door slid open. Li led the way down a corridor with white walls and pale green painted windows that looked down on to the courtyard below. Through a half-glazed door, they turned into a dark hallway, and Margaret saw the number 905 above a door that was shuttered and padlocked. Li stood aside and let Qian unlock it with the keys they had taken from Birdie. After several moments of apparent difficulty, Qian stepped back and shrugged. ‘The lock’s burst,’ he said. ‘We didn’t need the keys after all.’ He pulled back the shutter.

  ‘What do you expect to find here?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Li said, to her surprise.

  ‘If he did it,’ she said, ‘the chances are there will be some trace evidence here. A speck of blood, a hair. Maybe something more. White card, red ink.’

  ‘If he did it.’

  ‘You don’t think he did?’

  ‘I am certain he didn’t.’

  Sang and Zhao and the uniformed officers arrived breathless and perspiring after their nine-flight hike. Li pulled on a pair of white gloves and the others followed suit. ‘Bag all the clothes,’ Li said, ‘clean or dirty. And I want all his shoes. Don’t disturb anything unnecessarily, but I want to go through every single little thing in the apartment.’ He nodded to Qian who pushed the door open.

  They were hit immediately by the smell and the noise. ‘In the name of the sky!’ Qian took out a handkerchief to cover his nose and went inside, fumbling for a light switch. When he found it, a fluorescent strip hanging from the hall ceiling flickered and hummed and threw a cold light back off walls that had not been painted in twenty years.

  ‘Jesus!’ Margaret said.

  She looked in amazement at the bamboo cages that hung in profusion from the ceiling. Dozens of them, hooked on to a pulley-type contraption that allowed Birdie to lower and raise them all at the same time. Each of the cages was filled with birds, frantic with the intrusion of light and strangers, squawking and flapping their wings in panic. The noise was deafening. Immediately to the left, a scullery kitchen was caked in grease, old bottles of sticky cooking sauce fighting for space with dirty dishes on the top of an old wooden cabinet. A blackened wok and a couple of filthy pans stood on a two-ring gas stove. Further down the hall, on the left, laundry hung on lines strung across a stinking toilet. Dirty linen lay all over the floor. A fridge-freezer and a top-loading washing machine made it difficult to squeeze past to the far end of the passage where Wu pushed open the bedroom door. More cages hung from the ceiling and stood on every available space: a desk, a wardrobe, a dresser. The din was unnerving. Margaret almost gagged from the stench. It was practically impossible to believe that someone actually lived here.

  On their right, a door led into a tiny living room. More cages, more birds. Some of them in here were flying free, and the detectives ducked as frantic wings beat the air about their heads. There was bird shit all over the floor. Through a screen door, the air of a glassed balcony was almost black with flying birds. Birdie had rigged up old branches, and bits and pieces of furniture to try to recreate some kind of natural habitat in there.

  ‘My God!’ Margaret shouted above the noise. ‘This is unnatural! The man must be insane.’

  Li nodded grimly. Somewhere, somehow, Birdie had lost his grip on reality, his ability to relate to the world, to people. His love of birds had become an obsession, a substitute for life. What was it about these creatures that so fascinated him? Was it the illusion of freedom created by their ability to fly? And yet, what freedom was there for a bird in a cage? Perhaps in robbing them of their freedom, he took some for himself. Freedom from the past. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from reality.

  Officers began piling clothing and footwear in large plastic bags, checking through drawers and cupboards, peeling back brittle grey lino to check the floorboards below.

  ‘I’m going out to the landing,’ Margaret said, and with her hand over her nose she pushed her way back up the hall towards the door. As she reached it she heard a shout of excitement, and several officers hurried into the bedroom. Curiosity got the better of her, and she made her way back down the hall. Li pushed past the uniforms, and she saw Detective Wu standing holding a bronze sword in his gloved hands, like a trophy.

  ‘It was hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe, boss,’ he told Li. Margaret pressed into the room and looked at it. It was about a metre long, with a glazed wooden handle inlaid with mother of pearl. There were no obvious traces of blood. It was clean and sharp.

  Sang looked triumphantly at Li. ‘That looks like a pretty impressive detail to me, boss.’ And Li thought he detected just a hint of smugness in his tone.

  *

  It was very bright in here, fluorescent light reflecting off white tiles. On the walk down a long, cool corridor, they could see through windows into labs on either side. They looked, Margaret thought, much like forensic science labs anywhere, the trophies of difficult or gruesome court cases lining the walls. On the back wall of the electron microscope lab there were photo-enlargements of a monstrous hairy-looking insect. Another showed the tip of a screwdriver next to a close-up of the wound it had caused. Through another window, they saw pasted to the wall a series of white linen sheets, about a foot square, each with a small bullet hole surrounded by rims of black soot. In another room, a table was laden with the hardware of death – handguns, rifles, shotguns, each labelled with an evidence tag. In yet another, the paraphernalia of illicit drug use; small metal spoons, bent and blackened; syringes; bottles of pills.

  Like many forensic lab technicians, Mr Qi, took positive pleasure in the macabre. He was a small man with thinning hair and a cheery face. His white lab coat was several sizes too large for him and in urgent need of laundering. A colourful abundance of pens, pencils and rulers grew out of his breast pocket. He pointed through a window to their left. ‘That was domestic in Chongwen District.’ He was enjoying the chance to exercise his English. They saw a blouse stretched out on a paper-covered workbench. It was peppered with linear stab holes and tears, and stained with blood that was now dry and grey-brown. ‘Husband come home and find her lying on floor of bedroom. Thirty-seven stab wound. At first we think she interrupt burglary. Turns out it is husband. He has other woman and wants rid of wife.’ He grinned. ‘I like this new Chinese crimewave. It make life ve-ery interesting.’

  He swung his rear end at the security sensor on the door of his lab. The magnetic identification card in the billfold in his back pocket activated the lock, and with a whirr and a dull clunk the door opened. He grinned again. ‘Make life easy when hands full. Welcome to my lab.’ Margaret, Li, Qian and Sang followed him in, all garbed in the white lab coats they had donned in the ante-chamber at the entrance to the suite. Feet had been scraped on grilles and wiped on mats, to prevent dirt and dust from the outside world tracking in on the spotlessly clean and shiny floors.

  The comparison microscope sat on a table on its own. Its base was between two and three feet square. It supported two stages, each about six inches square, where the objects to be magnified and compared were placed beneath bright lamps that would illuminate them for the lenses. Above them, a maze of mirrors and lenses arranged on two turrets, fed the magnified images up to a couple of eyepieces where the examiner could scrutinise the images side by side. From a port beneath the eyepieces, a video signal was fed to a large colour monitor on a stand.

  The sections of vertebrae cut from the necks of each of the victims stood in four formalin-filled jars on the lab table. Mr Qi’s assistant removed each of them in turn and washed off the formalin so that the fumes would not make Mr Qi’s nose burn and eyes water as he examined them under the microscope.

  Mr Qi, meantime, clamped the bronze sword they had found in Birdie’s apartment to a rolling stand that would hold it steady as the blade was placed on its stage for examination, a few centimetres at a time. It had already been subjected to minute forensic examination, revealing no fingerprints, no
blood. All traces of its owner had been carefully and meticulously excised. But its blade had been sharpened on only one side, and so only one edge had been used for cutting.

  Mr Qi dropped the blinds on the window to the corridor with a clatter and turned out the lights. The room was plunged into darkness except for the glow of the monitor and the lamps in the comparison microscope that illuminated the white coats of the little group of investigators that was gathered around it.

  The assistant trimmed the first section of vertebrae with a jeweller’s saw, and placed it on the left-hand stage. Mr Qi arranged the blade of the sword so that a section about two-thirds of the way along its length rested on the right-hand stage, approximately in the area of the ‘sweet spot’ that Margaret had spoken about at the autopsy. He peered down into the eyepieces and began adjusting his focus. For the moment the image on the monitor was blurred, and the detectives shuffled impatiently. Margaret knew that the process would take time.

  Centimetre by centimetre, Mr Qi moved the stage upon which the blade rested, by means of a series of small cranks and gears, focusing on the tiny nicks and striations shown up under magnification, and comparing them with the microscopic scores left on the cartilage of the first piece of neck.

  ‘Aha!’ he said suddenly, and they all jumped. ‘We have a match.’ And he refocused the lenses so that the image on the monitor slipped into sharp focus. Side by side, the hugely magnified images of the neck cartilage and the blade revealed an identical and matching pattern of vertical scores of varying heights and widths. Mr Qi grinned at them triumphantly. ‘This sword cut off this head.’ And he took a red, felt-tipped pen from his pocket and carefully marked the section of blade that matched the piece of neck and annotated it with the specimen number. ‘Next,’ he said happily.