The Firemaker (The China Thrillers 1)

by Peter May

  ‘Qian,’ he called.

  Qian came on to the balcony. ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘Go downstairs and see if the light over the front door is working. And check if the stair gate is locked while you’re at it.’

  Qian hovered for a moment, awaiting an explanation, but when none was forthcoming, nodded and said, ‘Sure,’ and left the apartment.

  Li stood for a long time, thinking, visualising. Eventually he wandered back into the living room and his eyes fell upon the bookcase again. As they drifted back and forth across the rows of multicoloured jackets, he recalled Mei Yuan’s riddle: Two men. One of them is the keeper of every book in the world, giving him access to the source of all knowledge. Knowledge is power, so this makes him a very powerful man. The other possesses only two sticks. Yet this gives him more power than the other. Why? And suddenly Li knew why. He smiled. How apposite, he thought. How strange. Perhaps Mei Yuan had psychic powers.

  A tiny winking red light on the other side of the room caught his eye. He crossed to a small cabinet with an inset shelf. Set back on the shelf was a mini hi-fi stack with tuner, cassette and CD. Li crouched down to look at the array of pinpoint red and green lights, and a digital display of the numeral ‘9’. ‘Either of you guys touched the hi-fi?’ he called through to the forensics men.

  ‘No,’ one of them called back.

  ‘Me either,’ the other one shouted.

  Li looked up as Qian came back in, a touch out of breath. ‘Someone stole the lamp, boss. At any rate, there’s no lamp in the light fitting, and the old boy in the lift says it was working okay when he finished up last night. Oh, and the gate’s locked.’

  Li nodded. ‘Know anything about hi-fi systems?’

  ‘Got better things to spend my money on. In any case, I’d never have time to listen to one. Why?’

  ‘Chao left his on. In fact, he left the CD on pause. The light’s still blinking. You want to hear what he was listening to when his killer came calling?’

  ‘How do you know his killer came here?’ Qian was curious.

  ‘Educated guess,’ Li said, and he pressed the Play button. Immediately the room was filled with the sounds of strange and alien music. He stood up and lifted an empty CD case off the top of the cabinet. ‘Western opera,’ he said. And reading from the cover, ‘Samson and Delilah. Saint-Saëns.’ He took out the inner sleeve. ‘Track nine. “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix”.’ And he read, ‘“Samson, the champion of the Hebrews enslaved by the Philistines, knows that he should resist the approaches of the temptress Delilah. But his determination crumbles when she seduces him with this song of love. He yields completely, enabling Delilah to discover the secret of his strength and cut off his hair, rendering him powerless.”’

  Was it to the temptation of his drug habit, or his preference for young boys, that Chao Heng had yielded, leaving him powerless in the hands of his murderer? The voice of the female soprano rose in sensuous crescendos.

  ‘So?’ Qian was impatient. He had to raise his voice above the music. ‘What are you basing this educated guess on?’

  ‘On a number of things,’ Li said. ‘The first of them being that Chao Heng was almost certainly here last night.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The bath-towel hanging over the bath is still damp. He’d fed his fish, probably quite late on, because they’re still not that hungry. He’d left his cigarettes on the table on the balcony, and his needle kit in the bedroom. And smokers and junkies don’t leave those kinds of things behind. Not voluntarily. He didn’t leave by the elevator. There was no key among the effects found with his body, so how could he have locked the stair gate behind him?’

  Li wandered back across the room to the balcony. ‘I think he was sitting here, listening to Delilah seducing Samson, and having himself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. He had probably been here some time, judging by the number of cigarette ends in the ashtray and the progress of the CD. It was late, long after the lift had been shut down, maybe one or two in the morning, when the rest of the building was asleep. He was watching for a car below. A delivery of heroin, perhaps. The promise of a young boy. Who knows? When he saw the lights of the car, he got up, paused the CD, took his key and went down the stairs to unlock the gate. It would have been darker than usual, because the killer had just removed the lamp from the light over the front door. Maybe that’s why Chao didn’t recognise immediately that his visitor wasn’t who he was expecting.

  ‘Whoever it was probably had a gun and forced him back up to the apartment. Once here, he struck him on the head with a blunt object, maybe even with the gun, and injected him with ketamine. He waited, maybe as long as an hour, to be sure he hadn’t been seen, then carried or dragged Chao down the stairs and locked the gate behind them at the bottom. Under cover of the darkness created by the removal of the lamp, he carried him the fifteen feet to where he’d parked the car. Then it was off to Ritan Park, and you can pretty much put the rest together yourself.’

  By now Samson had well and truly succumbed to the charms of Delilah. Qian blew air through pursed lips. ‘That must be some education you had, boss.’ He paused and thought about it. ‘How do you know the killer was acting alone?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I mean, it would have been easier with two.’

  Li nodded. ‘Yes, but there’s something very …’ He struggled to find the right word. ‘… individual, almost eccentric, about this. It just feels to me like a single twisted mind at work.’

  One of the forensics team called them through to the hall. He was crouched outside the kitchen door, scraping carefully at the carpet. ‘Patch of blood,’ he said. ‘Looks quite fresh, too. Spectral analysis will tell us just how fresh.’

  Qian looked at Li with renewed respect. ‘If that’s Chao’s blood, it looks like you could be right, boss.’ Then he grimaced. ‘Trouble is, it doesn’t really get us any closer to the killer.’

  ‘Everything we know gets us closer to the killer,’ Li said evenly. ‘Time we talked to the street committee.’

  V

  Liu Xinxin, chairwoman of the street committee, was a small, nervous, skinny woman of around sixty. She lived in a ground-floor apartment in Chao Heng’s block. Her greying hair was drawn back in a tight bun from a delicately featured face, she wore an apron over a grey smock and a pair of black baggy trousers that stopped six inches above her ankles. Her hands were white with flour. ‘Come in,’ she said when she answered the door. She brushed a rogue strand of hair away from her face and left a smudge of flour on her forehead. She led them into the kitchen where she was preparing dumplings for the family meal. ‘You’ve come at a bad time. My husband will be home soon, and then my son and his wife.’

  Li nodded. ‘There is never a good time to come about death.’

  There was a loud crash from another room, a skitter of giggles, and two boys of pre-school age chased one another, shouting and screaming, through the hall. ‘My grandchildren,’ Liu Xinxin said. And then she added, quickly, as if they might suspect her family of being politically incorrect, ‘The elder boy is my daughter’s.’ A shadow passed across her face. ‘She died in labour and they had to cut the child out of her. My son-in-law couldn’t deal with her death, or with the child, so my son and his wife adopted him.’

  She wiped her hands on her apron and took it off. ‘So … Mr Chao,’ she said. ‘Nobody liked him much. Come through.’ And she led them into a cluttered living room, birdcages arrayed along one wall. Pale lemon-and-white birds filled the room with a constant chirruping chorus. The balcony was chock full of plants and drying clothes hanging from a line. Condensation was forming on the glass. Against the opposite wall stood an old upright piano covered with the remains of big character posters which had, at one time, been pasted all over it. ‘It’s not mine,’ Liu Xinxin said, following their eyes to the piano. ‘It belongs to the state. I’m a musician really. I don’t know how I got mixed up in street politics, except I’ve been a good member of
the Communist Party for nearly forty years. I was only sent for reform two times. Maybe you’ve heard some of my songs?’ She addressed this to Qian, who was nonplussed. He looked to Li for help.

  Li said, ‘Perhaps if you told us what you’d written …’

  ‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, ‘hundreds. More than I can remember. I’ve lost more than I’ve written. In the sixties a collection of my songs was put together in Shanghai. They were all typeset and ready for publication. And then came the Cultural Revolution and my music was condemned as “reactionary”. I never did like the official formula for composition – “High, Fast, Hard and Loud”.’ She parodied stiff marching movements to each word as she said it. ‘So they were lost. About fifteen years ago I tried to trace them. But the typesetter was dead, and the publisher knew nothing about the proofs.’ She gave a tiny philosophical smile. ‘But other songs survived … “Let’s Build Our World Together” and “That Was Me Then And This Is Me Now” and “Our Country”.’

  Both Li and Qian had sung ‘Our Country’ as children, and ‘Let’s Build Our World Together’ had been popular when Li was a teenager in the eighties, and had won a national award. Both were struck by a sense of awe and amazement that this insignificantly tiny and ageing lady should have written such songs.

  She saw their surprise and smiled ruefully. ‘Today, if I was thirty years younger and writing the same songs, I would have been gloriously rich, and very glamorous, and poor Mr Deng, had he still been alive, would have been very pleased with me.’

  Liu Xinxin smiled, and her smile was infectious, and Li found himself being drawn to her. ‘It could not have been easy for you,’ he said. ‘A woman writing music in a man’s world. My uncle used to often quote an old proverb which he said was still part of the male Chinese mindset, even in communist China: “A woman’s virtue is that she has no talent”.’

  The old lady grinned. ‘Ah, yes, but Mao said, “Women hold up half the sky”.’ And her words brought Margaret sharply, and unexpectedly, back into Li’s thoughts.

  Qian had wandered over to the piano and lifted the lid to stare at the keys in wonder. Music was a mystery to him. ‘Did you write all your songs on this?’ he asked.

  A sadness clouded her eyes. ‘Only the recent ones. The best I wrote on my first piano. It was the love of my life. My passion … Long gone.’ She paused. ‘But you came to ask about Mr Chao.’ She grinned bravely. ‘So … I’ll make us some tea and you ask.’

  Li and Qian sat on the edge of low chairs as she bustled back and forth from the kitchen, boiling a kettle and making them cups of green tea. The children were somewhere else in the house, drumming incessantly on what sounded like an old tin, competing with the racket of the birds. ‘You said nobody liked him much,’ Li prompted her above the noise as she poured the tea.

  ‘That was mostly because no one knew him,’ Liu Xinxin said. ‘The Ministry of Agriculture owns several apartments in this block, but Mr Chao never mixed with those families. And with the rest of us he was … how can I explain it? … standoffish. Like he was better than us. You would recognise him in the street and say “hi” and he would look the other way. He never smiled or acknowledged anyone. I think he was a very sad man.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Li slurped his tea. It was good.

  ‘A man who never smiles must be sad,’ she said. ‘And his eyes, if you ever got a chance to look into his eyes, they were so full of pain, as if he were carrying some unbearable burden. Of course, Mr Dai, the elevator man, knew him best. He is on my committee, so we would often discuss Mr Chao.’ She paused to reflect, and then corrected herself. ‘When I say Mr Dai “knew” him, what I mean is that Mr Dai saw him most often. Like I said, no one knew him.’

  Li asked, ‘And his family? Do you know anything about his background?’

  She shook her head. ‘Only the information given when he first came.’

  ‘Which was how long ago?’

  ‘About two years. He had been working near Guilin in Guangxi province in the south for some years before they transferred him back north to Beijing and an apartment here. But he has not worked much in the last six months. He has not been well, I think.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘They said he had been married and divorced, and that he had a young family somewhere in the south.’ She dropped her voice. ‘He liked young boys, you know.’

  Li stifled a smile. He could imagine the conversations that must have taken place between Liu Xinxin and Mr Dai and other members of the committee, about the comings and goings at Chao’s flat in the night. But they would have been afraid of his privileged position in Party and state. Perhaps they had reported him to the Public Security Bureau and been told to mind their own business. The scientific adviser to a minister of state would have been a powerful and influential man, a modern-day mandarin. One would have had to have trodden carefully. Li finished his tea and stood up. ‘Well, thank you very much, Old Liu. You have been very helpful.’ Qian took his boss’s cue and got to his feet.

  ‘Won’t you stay and have another cup?’ She seemed reluctant now to let them go.

  ‘We don’t want to keep you back, with your family due home soon.’

  ‘Oh …’ She waved her hand dismissively. ‘They won’t be back for ages yet. Would you like me to play you one of my songs?’

  Not wanting to hurt her feelings, Li said, ‘We really don’t have the time.’

  ‘Just one, then,’ she said, and she headed for the piano and drew up a stool. ‘You must know “Our Country”. They sang it in all the schools.’

  Li and Qian exchanged looks. There was no escaping it. ‘Just the one, then,’ Li said.

  She beamed. ‘And you must sing it with me.’ And as she played a brief introduction, ‘I’ll sing the verses and you join in the choruses.’

  As they stood round the piano singing the words and melody written by this old lady more than thirty years before, Li was glad that there were no witnesses to his embarrassment. He could imagine what comments would be passed in the office. At least he could rely on Qian, who seemed equally ill at ease, to keep silence. Then he noticed Liu Xinxin’s two small grandsons standing in the doorway looking at them in astonishment, and, a moment later, their equally astonished parents fresh home from work. Li closed his eyes.

  *

  They left the apartment, colour high on their cheeks, thoughts held close, and got into the Jeep. They sat for a long minute in silence before the first sign of a crack appeared in Li’s façade. A small explosion of air escaped his nostrils. Qian looked at him in time to see the façade crumble. It was infectious. His face cracked, too. Within moments, both were laughing almost uncontrollably, tears streaming, stomachs aching, like a couple of small boys hearing their first dirty joke. All embarrassment was dissipated. As Li gasped to catch his breath, he wondered for a moment what they were laughing at, before realising it was themselves.

  A sharp rap at the driver’s window made them turn. It was a young uniformed constable. Qian rolled down the window. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Census Constable Wang,’ the officer said, peering in disapprovingly at the two grinning faces. ‘This is my patch. You should have come to me before interviewing members of this street committee.’

  Li leaned over, still with a smile creasing his face. ‘Don’t worry about it, Wang. We were only here for a singing lesson.’ And he and Qian burst into fresh roars of laughter. Wang jumped back, pink-faced and angry, as Qian revved the engine and backed out into the compound with a squeal of tyres. He watched them go with the self-righteous anger of a thwarted petty bureaucrat, the sounds of their laughter still ringing in his ears.

  *

  When Li and Qian returned to Section One, there was a constant procession of people arriving to make statements. The street outside was jammed with bicycles and taxis, groups of men and women standing discussing the reason for their summons, children waiting in the care of patient grandparents. These were people from all walks of life: itinerant workers recently arri
ved in Beijing, small-time crooks, early morning habitués of Ritan Park – civil servants, factory workers, housewives, an army of pensioners. Additional officers had been drafted in from CID headquarters downtown to help with the interviews.

  Qian could barely find space to park the Jeep, and he and Deputy Section Chief Li had to push their way through the bodies to reach the door. Inside was no better. There were queues trailing back down the stairs. Extra interview rooms had been set up on every floor to try to cope. Interviews were being recorded and transcribed, and the girls in the typing pool had been put on shifts to keep the flow of paperwork moving. And as far as Li could see when he entered his office, all that paperwork was moving on to his desk. There was a mountain of it accumulating there. Hundreds of statements had already been taken in all three murder cases – hundreds, maybe thousands, more were still to come. Also on his desk were the pathologist’s report from the autopsy on Chao, along with a résumé of his education and career at the Ministry of Agriculture, and various forensics reports from the different crime scenes. And beneath a pile of photocopied statements, he found the file he had asked Wu to take out on The Needle. He scratched his stubbled head and felt crushed already by the weight of it all. It could take weeks just to go through what was already there. A young female administration officer entering with another armful of statements was the final straw. He stood up and raised his hands to stop her. ‘Enough! I don’t want any more of these statements on my desk.’

  The girl, a timid nineteen-year-old, was fazed and looked around helplessly. ‘Where’ll I put them, then?’

  Li glanced round the room. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘On the floor under the window. Separate the cases and keep three separate piles. I want only stuff I’ve asked for on my desk, all right?’