The Firemaker (44 page)

When they got inside, Li spoke for several minutes to a receptionist before they were led upstairs to a waiting room on the third floor and left there to kick their heels. It was a square room, with low, khaki-green settees around the walls and glass-topped tables with lace doilies – standard factory-issue furniture for reception rooms across China. After ten minutes a Reception Officer arrived to shake hands and exchange cards with Li and enquire politely about the purpose of their visit. Margaret watched the ritual exchange in Chinese and tried to exercise all three Ps simultaneously. The dialogue seemed interminable. The Reception Officer left and she asked Li what was happening. ‘He has gone to arrange a meeting with the Administration Officer,’ he said. ‘And to send in some tea.’

‘Tea?’

‘We might be some time.’

In fact it was several cups and another twenty minutes before the Administration Officer arrived with an entourage of assistants and the Reception Officer, who then made the introductions. More ritual handshaking and exchanging of cards. Then they all sat down, Li and Margaret on one side of the room, the reception committee on the other. They had all cast curious glances in her direction, but otherwise made no comment.

Margaret sat in frustrated ignorance during the subsequent exchange between Li and the Administration Officer. It was a short conversation. She saw Li visibly pale, then the Administration Officer stood up, signalling an end to their meeting. More ritual handshaking, and they were led back down to the ground floor. She was itching to ask Li what had been said, but the Reception Officer was determined to see them out of the door himself, and there was some paperwork to be completed at the reception desk. She contained her impatience.

*

Li retraced their steps down Dahua Lu in long, loping strides, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. Margaret was struggling to keep up with him, half running to do so. ‘But what did they say?’ She was almost beside herself with curiosity, and he was being infuriatingly uncommunicative, concentrating on unshared dark thoughts that swam through his head behind deeply furrowed brows. They reached the Jeep and he got in behind the wheel. She got into the passenger side. ‘For God’s sake, Li Yan!’

He turned towards her. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘What?’

‘I could really go a
jian bing
. I haven’t eaten all day.’

‘Neither have I, but I’d rather know what they told you in the hospital.’

‘Mei Yuan will still be selling
jian bing
at the corner of Dongzhimennei,’ he said. He started the Jeep and pulled away from the sidewalk. They had driven north, the length of Dahua Lu, and were turning east on to Jianguomennei Avenue when he said, ‘It seems they ran all sorts of tests on Chao.’ He replayed in his mind the short conversation he had conducted with the Administration Officer at the hospital. ‘But certain results never came back from the laboratory, and the next thing all his medical records were removed from the Beijing Hospital and he was transferred as an in-patient to Military Hospital Number 301.’

Margaret waited. But Li had finished, and the significance of what he had told her somehow escaped her. ‘So what’s Military Hospital Number 301?’ she asked.

‘It is a high-security VIP hospital. It treats the top people in government and the bureaucracy. Deng Xiaoping received treatment there during his final illness.’

Margaret frowned. ‘But Chao wasn’t in that category of VIP, was he?’

‘No, he was not.’

‘So how come he was being treated there?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’

Margaret thought for a moment. ‘I guess he could only have been admitted to Military Hospital Number 301 if someone very powerful had arranged it, right?’ Li nodded. ‘Someone high up in government, or the civil service?’ Li nodded again, and for the first time Margaret began to understand Li’s retreat into himself. ‘Are we getting into something here that’s starting to get a bit scary?’ she asked, a knot like a fist beginning to turn in her stomach.

‘I’ve had a bad feeling about this all day,’ Li said. He breathed deeply. ‘And it’s not going away.’

He sounded his horn more frequently than usual as they weaved through the bicycles and traffic in Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie Street. He was more used to manoeuvring his way along this street as a cyclist than as a motorist.

‘But you will still be able to access his medical records, won’t you?’

Li looked uncertain. ‘I don’t know. Dealing with a place like that is outside my experience, perhaps even my jurisdiction.’

‘In the States we’d subpoena the records.’

‘But this is China, not the United States.’

‘You told me no one in China refused to co-operate with the police.’

‘Of course, I will ask for the records,’ he said.

‘And if they won’t give you them?’

‘They’ll have to have a very good reason.’ His words sounded braver than he felt. He felt like a weak swimmer who has strayed further from shore than he intended and is a long way out of his depth.

‘Okay,’ Margaret said. ‘Let’s think about this. We’re dealing here with someone who has a great deal of power and influence. Someone with enough clout to have Chao admitted to a high-security hospital. Perhaps the same person who hired Johnny Ren to murder him and is now trying to stop you from finding out why. But this is not some all-powerful, or even infallible, individual. He’s made mistakes. Like making a mess of getting rid of the evidence, if that’s what Chao was. He clearly thought that burning the body would destroy whatever it was in his blood they wanted to hide. It didn’t. Then they made a real clumsy job of stopping us doing the AIDS test. Incinerating the body, for Christ’s sake, and all the samples! An administrative error? That’s not going to hold up for five minutes if you pursue it hard enough.’

‘But he didn’t have AIDS. We know that. So why were they trying to stop us from testing for it?’

‘In case we found something else. Something they didn’t want us to find.’

‘What?’

Margaret shook her head in frustration. ‘I don’t know.’

‘And what about the other two murders? DNA tests prove that all three were killed by Ren. What’s the connection?’ Li felt the beginnings of a headache. The deeper they got into this, the muddier the waters were becoming.

‘I don’t know,’ Margaret said again. She was beginning to realise how little they really knew about any of it. ‘All I know is that someone must have been watching your investigation every step of the way. Someone with detailed access to your every move, and an understanding of the implications of everything you’ve done.’

Li frowned. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘How else would Johnny Ren have known who was leading the case? How would he have known who to follow? How else would anyone know the autopsy results, or that you had asked for an AIDS test? I mean, who else knew about any of it outside the department?’

‘No one,’ Li said aggressively. He couldn’t believe she was suggesting that someone in Section One was implicated. Then he was struck by a thought that turned his blood to ice. ‘Except …’ He didn’t even dare to voice the thought.

‘Except who?’ When he didn’t respond, Margaret asked again, ‘Except who, Li Yan?’

‘Deputy Procurator General Zeng.’

Her brows furrowed in consternation. ‘Who?’

‘Procurators are a bit like district attorneys. They decide whether to prosecute a case in court. Zeng asked me to provide him with detailed daily reports on the progress of the case. He seemed to know a lot about it already.’ He looked at Margaret. ‘I mean, it was unusual, but he is a DPG. I never really thought anything about it.’

Margaret whistled softly. ‘Well, that tells us something anyway.’

‘What?’

‘Our man’s powerful enough to have the equivalent of a district attorney in his pocket.’ She glanced apprehensively at Li. ‘That makes him pretty formidable opposition.’

‘Thank you for those words of encouragement,’ Li said dryly.

She smiled, and thought at least they could still smile. But the smile faded as she remembered that in the morning she would be boarding a plane and Li would be left to face this on his own. She didn’t want to leave him. She wished he could get on the plane with her and they could both leave all this behind. The game was no longer a game. It had turned dark and frightening.

Li turned right into Dongzhimennei and drew in at the kerb beside Mei Yuan’s
jian bing
house. Mei Yuan rose from her stool as soon as she saw who it was. She gave Margaret a wide smile and said to Li, ‘You are a little late for breakfast today.’

Li shook his head. ‘No, we are early for breakfast tomorrow.’ Margaret checked the time. It was nearly 6 p.m. ‘Two
jian bing
,’ Li said. ‘It has been a long day.’

‘It has,’ Mei Yuan said, beginning her preparations for the cooking. ‘I have been waiting for you for hours. I have a solution for your riddle.’

Li and Margaret exchanged glances. ‘The one about the three murders and the cigarette ends?’ Margaret asked.

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘You said he deliberately left the cigarette ends beside each of the bodies because he knew that you would find them and match the DNA.’

‘That’s right,’ Li said. ‘Why?’

‘I think it is so obvious,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘that maybe I have not understood the question properly.’

Margaret was intrigued. ‘So why do you think he did it?’

Mei Yuan shrugged. ‘To make you believe these murders are connected – when there is no connection.’

Li frowned. ‘But why would he do that?’

‘Wait a minute,’ Margaret said. ‘You once told me that you conducted thousands of interviews to track down a man who murdered a whole family during a burglary. And it took you how long?’

‘Two years.’

‘So how long was it going to take you to track down all those migrant workers from Shanghai, and all the petty drug dealers and gay boys?’

It dawned on Li. ‘Long enough to keep me looking in all the wrong places for months on end, trying to make a connection that doesn’t exist. God!’ It was so simple. But anyone who understood the
modus operandi
of the Chinese police would know that they would follow a painstaking and pedantic process of information-gathering that could take months, even years. ‘The only connection is that there is no connection,’ he said. It was a revelation. He gave Mei Yuan a big hug, and Margaret felt a twinge of jealousy. ‘How on earth did you think of it, Mei Yuan?’

She glowed with the praise and Li’s attention. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘because I did not have to.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I

Thursday Night

Red light refracting in hot humid air hung over the city like a veil as the sun dipped in the west, and darkness drew like a curtain from the east across the Middle Kingdom. Below them the lights of the city twinkled in the dusk. Red tail-lights of traffic in long lines snaked east and west, north and south, the growling of their engines a distant rumble. Somewhere down there, Margaret thought, people were crowding the stalls at the Dong’anmen night market, taking pleasure in eating, happy and free at the end of a working day. She wished she were among them.

They had entered Jingshan Park by the south gate, almost opposite the place where the woman in the blue print dress had been knocked off her bike and Margaret had stopped the bleeding from her severed femoral artery by standing on her leg. They were entering the park as most people were leaving. It would close in an hour. They had followed a winding path up through the trees to the pavilion that stood on the top of Prospect Hill. Halfway up, they had stopped briefly to join a crowd of people watching a very old lady in black pyjamas perform incredible contortions. She had laid a mat on the earth and, lying on her back, had wedged both her feet beneath a pole placed behind her neck, effectively folding herself in two. The crowd gasped in amazement, and there was a little burst of applause. The old lady remained impassive, but she was clearly enjoying showing off the suppleness of her joints and muscles. Margaret had guessed she must be in her eighties.

The pavilion was deserted when they got there, orange-tiled curling eaves supported on maroon-and-gold pillars, late evening sunshine throwing warm light on cold marble. Walking round, beneath the eaves, provided a 360-degree panorama of the city below. It took Margaret’s breath away.

Li squatted on the steps, looking south, over the symmetrical patchwork of roofs that was the Forbidden City, to the vast open expanse of Tiananmen Square. He liked to come here, he told her, in the late evening, when it was quiet and he could watch the city come to life as darkness fell around him. It was the most peaceful place in Beijing, he said, and it released him to think freely and clearly. She sat down beside him, their arms touching, and she felt the heat of his body and breathed in the musky, earthy smell of him.

For a long time neither of them spoke. Swallows darted and dived around them in the dying light, and below, among the trees, the screech of cicadas rose, pulsing, into the night air.

Eventually he said, ‘I’m scared, Margaret.’

She inclined her head towards him and examined his profile, bold and strongly defined. ‘Scared of what?’ she asked softly.

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be scared,’ he said. ‘I have a sick feeling in my stomach. I think we are both in danger.’

‘In danger of what?’

‘Of knowing too much.’

Margaret released a tiny gasp of frustration. ‘But we know hardly anything. What do we know?’

‘We know that someone with power and privilege and something to hide had Chao Heng killed. We know that a professional hit-man was employed to do it, and that he killed two other, perfectly innocent, people for no other reason than to confuse the investigation. We know, or think we know, that there is a conspiracy to pervert the course of that investigation, involving one of the highest law officers in the land. And we know that the killer is out there, somewhere, watching us getting closer and closer.’ He paused. ‘We know far too much.’

She shivered, in spite of the heat. For the first time she tasted his fear, and she knew it was real. ‘What do you think they will do? Will they try to kill us?’ It seemed shocking, somehow, that she was even suggesting such a thing. It had not occurred to her before that they could be in any real danger.