The Firemaker (31 page)

Margaret was to play with the red pieces, Old Yifu with the black. Li, resigned to the game going ahead, sighed and leaned back against the trunk of the tree that shaded the board and folded his arms across his chest. ‘How is your office?’ Old Yifu asked him as Margaret made her first move.

‘It’s fine,’ Li said.

‘Fine? Just
fine
? The
feng shui
man showed me his plan. It looked excellent to me. You will work well in this office.’

‘Yes, of course. Thank you, Uncle.’

Old Yifu grinned wickedly at Margaret. ‘I detect a little scepticism. He thinks his uncle is a superstitious old fool.’

‘Then he is the fool,’ Margaret said. ‘
Feng shui
or not, I can see sound reasons for all the changes.’

‘Naturally. Superstition grows from the practice of truths. Not the other way around.’ He brought his Horse straight into play. ‘Your move.’ And as she contemplated her next move, he said, ‘I have always been a great admirer of the Americans. Like the Chinese, you are a very practical people. But you are also dreamers who try to make your dreams come true. And that is not at all practical.’ He shrugged. ‘But, then, you have succeeded in turning so many of your dreams into reality. I think it is a good thing to have a dream in life. It is something to aim for, to give you focus.’

‘Is that not a bit too much of an “individual” concept for a communist system?’ Margaret slid her Castle across the back line.

‘You must not give way to that bad American habit, Dr Campbell, of intolerance for other ideas. One must always be pragmatic. I was a committed Marxist myself as a young man. Now I am, I guess, a liberal. We all evolve.’

‘Didn’t someone once say if you are not a Marxist at twenty you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative at sixty you have no brain?’

He smiled with delight. ‘I had not heard that one. It is very clever.’

‘Very paraphrased, I think. I don’t know where it comes from.’

‘The words are unimportant if the meaning is plain. And a truth is a truth no matter who says it.’ One of his Soldiers ate one of her Soldiers.

Li sighed theatrically to signal his impatience, but they both ignored him. Margaret slid her Bishop across the diagonal, eating one of Old Yifu’s Soldiers and threatening his forward Horse. He was forced into a defensive move, conceding the initiative to her. ‘Li Yan told me you were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution,’ she said.

‘Did he?’

To her disappointment, Old Yifu seemed disinclined to talk about it. ‘For three years, Li Yan said.’

‘He says a lot, it seems.’

There was no eye contact during this. Both were focused on the board, contemplating the next move, sliding a piece here, jumping the river there.

‘You must have been very bitter.’

He ate her Bishop. ‘Why?’

‘You lost three years of your life.’ She swooped on the offending Horse and left his Castle wide open to attack. Again he was forced on to the defensive.

‘No. I learned much about human nature. I learned even more about myself. Sometimes learning can be a difficult, even painful, process. But one should never resent it.’ He thought carefully before blocking the line to his Castle with his King’s Guide. ‘Besides, I was only in prison for one and a half years.’

‘You always told me three,’ said Li, taken aback.

‘I was physically there for three years. But for half that time I slept, and when I slept I dreamed, and when I dreamed they could not keep me there. Because in my dreams I was free. Free to visit my childhood and speak again to my parents, free to go to the places I have loved in my life: the high mountains of Tibet, the Yellow Sea washing on the shores of Jiangsu, the Hong Kong of my boyhood, with the sun setting blood red across the South China Sea. They can never touch those things, or take them away. And as long as you have them, you have your freedom.’

Margaret’s eyes flickered up from the board to look at Old Yifu, his attention still focused, apparently, on the game. What horrors must he have endured? And yet he had chosen to take the positive view. Tales of torture and persecution would, perhaps, have been too painful, or too easy. Instead he chose to remember the escape he had made each day, sustaining hope and spirit.

‘My only regret,’ he said, ‘is that I was separated from my wife for that period. We had so little time together afterwards.’

And she saw a moistness in his eyes, and a colour rising on his cheeks.
My uncle has never really got over the loss of her
, Li had told her. She swooped quickly to eat another of his Soldiers with her Horse, changing the pace of the game and the mood of their conversation. ‘So you were brought up in Hong Kong?’ she said.

‘The family was originally from Canton. But we had been in Hong Kong for nearly two generations, a wealthy family by Chinese standards. Li Yan’s father and myself were in middle school when the Japanese invaded and we fled to China as refugees. We ended up in Sichuan, and I finished middle school there before going on to the American University in Beijing.’

He took the bait and made the mistake of eating her Horse. She slid her Castle two-thirds of the way down the board. ‘Check.’

‘Good God!’ Old Yifu seemed genuinely taken aback, then he looked up at her, smiling shrewdly. ‘Now I see,’ he said. ‘All these questions. You were hoping to distract me.’

‘Me?’ said Margaret innocently, and feigning shock.

Old Yifu brought his remaining Horse into play, blocking her route to the King. It was his only real option, but it left his other Castle exposed and unprotected. He shook his head sadly. ‘I can see my demise.’

Margaret ate his Castle quite ruthlessly. ‘You must have seen a lot of changes in your lifetime.’

But his concentration was on his move, and he did not reply until he had moved a Bishop to threaten a Soldier. ‘Everything has changed,’ he said, ‘except the character of the Chinese people. I think, maybe, that will remain the one great constant.’

‘So what do you think of China today?’

‘She is changing again. More rapidly this time. For better or worse I do not know. But people have more money in their pockets and food in their bellies and clothes on their backs. And everyone has a roof over his head. I remember when it was not so.’

Margaret smiled. It was clear to see where Li’s influences lay. She moved her Horse into a position that would threaten Old Yifu’s King if he took her Soldier, and lose him his Bishop if he didn’t. ‘I read somewhere that in fifty years, as the West declines and the East develops, China will become the richest and most powerful country on earth.’ He was still puzzling over his next move. ‘Do you think that’s true?’

He took her Soldier, effectively conceding defeat. ‘It is difficult to say. China has such a long history, and this period is such a small link in a chain that stretches back five thousand years. Only time will tell. Mao once said, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, “It is too early to say”. So who am I to predict the future for China?’ He smiled as she moved her Castle.

‘Checkmate,’ she said.

He conceded defeat with a small shrug and a nod of his head, and his smile seemed full of genuine pleasure. ‘Congratulations. It is the first time I have been beaten in many years. One grows complacent. I look forward to more games with you.’

‘It will be a pleasure.’

‘If only my nephew could be such a worthy opponent.’

‘Perhaps if I’d had a better teacher …’ Li responded, stung by his uncle’s rebuke.

‘You can teach anyone the rules,’ Old Yifu said. ‘But the intelligence to use them you must be born with.’ He started packing his chess pieces into their old cardboard box. ‘Anyway, I can’t afford to hang about here wasting time talking to you. I have a train to catch. And I’m going to be late.’ He winked at Margaret.

IV

The uniformed officer unlocked the door and let them into Chao Heng’s apartment. There was that same, strange antiseptic smell as before, Li noticed. They walked around the bloodstain on the carpet, now ringed off by strips of white tape, and into the living room. ‘What is it you are looking for?’ he asked Margaret.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t really know. Like you, I just get the feeling that this whole case is about Chao Heng. I don’t know where the other two tie in, but they seem … incidental, somehow. There’s got to be something we are missing. Something we already know, or should know about him. Something here in this apartment, maybe. Something in the weird nature of his killing.’

Li had offered to run Old Yifu back to their apartment, but he had had his bike with him and said he had already packed and only needed to collect his bag. He would get a taxi to the station, which was just around the corner anyway.

The two had embraced, a strangely touching moment after all the friction there had been between them. They hardly spoke. ‘Tell Xiao Ling I send my love,’ Li had said.

On the drive over to Chao’s apartment, Li hadn’t said a word, his thoughts, she assumed, filled with concern for his sister and the mission his uncle had undertaken at the behest of his father. Now, at Chao’s apartment, he seemed moody and unfocused. Margaret knew only too well how difficult it could be sometimes to concentrate on work when personal problems preyed on your mind. She knew she needed to shift his brain back into gear. ‘So you think he was sitting out there on the balcony,’ she said, ‘waiting for his late-night caller?’ Li nodded. The bottle of beer and the cigarette ends in the ashtray were still there. ‘And the CD is where?’

He crossed the room to the mini hi-fi stack and saw that the forensics boys had forgotten to switch it off.

‘Do you want to put on the track that was playing?’

He shrugged and whizzed through the tracks to number nine and pressed Play. As the soprano’s voice soared through the apartment, Margaret wandered to the bookcase and ran her fingers along a line of books with familiar titles.
Plant DNA Infectious Agents
,
Risk Assessment in Genetic Engineering
,
Plant Virology
. Titles that had lined Michael’s bookshelves at home. The same titles that had seemed so alien to Li just twenty-four hours before. She slipped her hands into the neatly tailored pockets of her dress and moved out on to the balcony. She looked at the empty beer bottle, the pack of cigarettes, and wondered what he had lit them with. Then remembered the Zippo lighter among his effects. And something began happening in her mind, something spontaneous, a sequence of electrical sparks making connections that would never have occurred consciously. All that data that the brain holds in limbo, accessed by some pre-programmed instinct. She could taste the
jian bing
, the salty sweetness of the
hoi sin
, the burn of the chilli, the sharpness of the spring onion. And she saw Mei Yuan’s round, smiling face. She wheeled round to see where Li was. But he had left the room. She hurried into the hall and called his name. ‘In here,’ he said, and she went into the kitchen.

‘Mei Yuan’s riddle,’ she said.

He looked at her blankly. ‘What about it?’

She shook her head in frustration. ‘It’s just a thought process. Bear with me.’ She fought for the words. ‘The man with the two sticks. If he was going to burn the books, he would do it for a reason, right?’

‘To destroy them.’

‘Exactly. So the keeper of the books couldn’t access them. He would have no way of knowing what was in them.’

Li shrugged. ‘So?’

‘So why set Chao Heng on fire?’

‘To make it look like suicide.’

‘No. That’s incidental. I did an autopsy once on the burned body of a woman pulled from a car wreck. Turned out she had a bullet in her. And that’s what killed her. The guy who’d shot her put her in the car, set it on fire and ran it off the road. He was trying to hide the fact that he’d shot her. He thought maybe the evidence would be destroyed in the fire.’ She ran her hands back through her hair. ‘You see what I’m saying?’

Li thought about it. ‘You think the killer was trying to destroy evidence?’ He paused. ‘Evidence of what? Chao hadn’t been shot, or stabbed, or had his neck broken. He had a bump on his head and sedative in his blood. If the object of the exercise was to try and hide that by burning him, it wasn’t very successful, was it?’

Margaret’s mind was racing. But it was racing in circles. ‘No,’ she had to concede. ‘No, it wasn’t.’ She felt as if she had held something precious and elusive in her grasp for just a moment, and then lost it again. And now it was like some half-remembered face that lurks in the memory somewhere just beyond recall. ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ she said, deflated. ‘There’s something there. Why don’t you take me on a guided tour of this place? In fact, why don’t we retrace events, just as you think they happened?’

‘What for?’

‘For another perspective. Something you’ve already seen that I might see differently. Something you might see differently second time around.’

He was not convinced, but he shrugged and said, ‘Okay.’

So they put on
Samson and Delilah
again and went on to the balcony. Margaret sat in Chao’s seat, from where she had a view of the compound below. She had been tossing and turning in her hotel bed trying to sleep when Chao had been sitting here, she realised. It had all been less than forty-eight hours ago. He had still been alive when she arrived in China.

‘He would have seen the lights of the car coming in,’ Li said. ‘The elevator was off, so he would have gone downstairs to let his visitor in.’

‘Let’s do it.’

They crossed the living room and Li put the CD on pause.

‘We’ll be back up in a few minutes,’ he told the officer in the hall.

They went into the stairwell and down five flights. The gate at the foot of the stairs was locked. ‘Don’t you have the key?’ Margaret asked, irritated.

‘No. The killer must have taken it to unlock the gate on the way out with Chao.’

‘And locked it behind him?’ It seemed unlikely, somehow.

‘Perhaps. It was locked when we got here yesterday. But it could have been locked by one of the other residents if they found it open in the morning.’