The Firemaker (17 page)

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 arrived 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?’

She nodded, flustered, and crouched down to start arranging the files on the floor as requested. Another huge pile thumped down beside her. She looked up, startled, as Li said, ‘And you can sort that lot out while you’re at it.’

Now that he could see his desktop again, Li began sorting out the files he wanted to hand. He glanced at the autopsy report and, quite involuntarily, found himself thinking about Dr Margaret Campbell. They were fragmentary thoughts, bits and pieces of conversation: ‘
no man is an island
’, ‘
must have broken a mirror
’, ‘
you don’t want to know about my sordid private life
’. Visual moments: the wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand, the freckles on her arm, the soft thrust of her breasts against the thin white cotton of her tee-shirt.

Annoyed with himself, he put the autopsy report to one side and forced himself to concentrate on the forensics reports. But they told him nothing he didn’t already know. The spectral analysis on the blood found in Chao’s apartment would, however, be telling. As would the result of the request he had put to Dr Wang. But neither of those would be available until tomorrow. He felt a twinge of irritation at having to wait. Which was unusual, for he was normally a patient man. But there was some instinct at work telling him that somehow speed was important in this, that the usual pedantic sifting of information, the slow building of layer upon layer of carefully gathered evidence, was not the required approach. And yet that was what all his training and experience demanded.

His eyes wandered thoughtfully across the text of the three forensics reports. Still the only real evidence gathered at each scene had been the Marlboro cigarette ends. The fact that Chao smoked, and that Marlboro was his brand, had been troubling Li since he found the cigarette ends and the pack in Chao’s apartment. It raised the possibility that the cigarette end found near the body in the park had been smoked by Chao himself, a final wish granted by his killer. In which case there was nothing to connect Chao’s murder with the other two, except coincidence. But Li didn’t like coincidence. And, in any case, Chao had been sedated, his cigarettes had been left in the apartment, and if he had been capable of smoking, the cigarette would have had to have been provided by his killer, who must also have smoked Marlboro. Another coincidence. Altogether too many. Li drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk. And tomorrow, he thought, seemed far too long to have to wait for answers.

Another batch of statements was carried in and distributed on the piles beneath the window. Through the open door he saw that the detectives’ room was still a hive of activity. He lifted the file on Chao and flipped it open. There was precious little detail here. Born 1948, in the town of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, the year before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. His father was a professor of English and his mother a Party cadre. He came to Beijing in 1966, the year Li was born, and enrolled at Beijing Agricultural University just as the Cultural Revolution was sweeping the country. Two years into a degree course in agronomy and crop sciences he was denounced by fellow students turned Red Guards and forced to drop out. The phrase
denounced by Red Guards
conjured for Li images of repeated beatings, hours of enforced self-criticism, endless essays confessing to reactionary weaknesses and imperial tendencies. Often it was simply an opportunity for adolescents, freed from the constraints and disciplines of an organised and civilised society, to explore the dark and cruel side of their human nature. Bullies and brutes given the freedom to express themselves in torture and murder without fear of retribution. They were, after all, only cleansing their country of its class enemies, those upholders of the Four Olds. Children were freed to taunt and torment their teachers, forcing them to wear dunce caps and grovel before them in class. Li had witnessed it first hand in his own primary school. Fortunately, by the time he reached middle school, the madness had just about run its course. He imagined that Chao’s fellow students had probably picked on him because he was soft, perhaps overtly homosexual, perhaps simply still confused about his sexuality. He was sent to the countryside for re-education.

Here there was a gap in the record of nearly a year. There was no indication of where he had been sent. Either through extraordinary good fortune, or through some influence that his mother had been able to bring to bear, he suddenly turned up in the United States enrolled as a student at the University of Wisconsin. Graduating in 1972 in microbial genetics, he stayed on a further year to complete a postgraduate doctorate in biotechnology. And then he won a research fellowship to the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University, where he remained until 1980, when he returned to China to teach at the very university he had been forced to abandon twelve years earlier.

He had married very quickly then, but was divorced again within three years, during which time he had managed to father a daughter. Li wondered why he had felt the need to marry. Clearly it was always going to be a relationship doomed to sexual failure. Was there really a need to create a veneer of heterosexual respectability? Might he not just have been discreet in his lifestyle?