The Fourth Sacrifice (50 page)

She heard the distant clang of the metal door and the scrape of it on the concrete floor. She eased herself back among the soldiers as if they might protect her. A soft footfall echoed along the corridor towards her. She strained in the mist and gloom to see who it was, fear almost robbing her of the ability to breathe. This is what she had wanted. This is what she had told herself would be preferable to dying of hypothermia alone in the cold and dark. Now she was not so sure.

The shadow of a man moved through a halo of light cast by the lamp in the tunnel just beyond the chamber, but it had no definition in the mist, insubstantial and wraithlike. She wanted to scream, but no sound would come. And then the figure stepped into the chamber and she saw Michael’s sad, smiling face, and her legs nearly buckled under her with relief.

‘Michael,’ she gasped. And his eyes flickered among the serried ranks of the warriors until he picked out her face, pale and frightened, among the bold, bearded faces of her protectors. But her relief was momentary, and quickly replaced by a deep chill that had nothing to do with the cold in this place. ‘Michael, what are you doing here?’ And she was almost surprised by the calm of her own voice.

He shook his head, and his smile was laden with regret. ‘I should be asking you that.’ He stepped towards her and she withdrew among the warriors.

‘Don’t come near me!’

‘Jesus, Margaret, you don’t think I’m going to harm you!’ And there was hurt in his voice that she could believe him capable of such a thing. ‘I love you.’

She looked at him and was shocked to see that he meant it. ‘So what are we doing here, Michael?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is where Professor Yue was killed, isn’t it? Right where you’re standing. Before you moved the body to his apartment.’

Michael looked down at the dried pool of blood at his feet. He nodded slowly.

‘For God’s sake, why?’

He looked up again, and there was a light in his eyes. ‘It’s the final part of the story,’ he said. ‘The only bit I can’t tell. At least, not yet.’

Margaret found herself breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. Her fear and panic was mixed in equal parts with disillusion, frustration, even anger. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Hu Bo’s greatest achievement.’ Michael sunk his hands in his pockets and moved across the chamber, head bowed as if deep in thought. Then he looked up and his face was alive and intense. ‘The building above us,’ he said. ‘The Arts building. It was the home of the archaeology department during the Cultural Revolution. It’s where Hu Bo and several of his colleagues sought refuge from the madness. Here, they could keep their heads down below the parapet and wait until it was all over. Then, in ’74, they got word of an extraordinary find in Xi’an. Life-sized warriors fired in clay and buried underground to protect the tomb of the First Emperor. Some of them had been dug up and restored by the local cultural centre. But the authorities in Beijing did not yet know.’ He drew his hands from his pockets and spread them out towards her, as if appealing to her imagination to picture what he was telling her. ‘Imagine, Margaret, how they felt. What could turn out to be one of the most extraordinary finds of the century, discovered at a time when Red Guards were still roaming China, ransacking museums, destroying the country’s relics and artefacts.’

And Margaret realised it was not really her he was addressing, but his audience. This was a story he had probably rehearsed in his mind a thousand times. She glanced up at the security camera and wondered if the performance was being recorded for posterity.

‘Hu and two of his colleagues slipped out of Beijing and travelled to Xi’an to see for themselves.’ Michael’s absorption in his story was complete. ‘It was true. They talked to the people at the cultural centre, the peasants who had dug the wells, and persuaded the head of department back in the capital that an exploratory dig was worthwhile. But they would make no big thing of it, for they did not want to attract unwelcome attention.

‘And no one paid them any. A bunch of old men, with the aid of a few enlisted peasants, digging holes in the middle of nowhere.’ His eyes sparkled and he clenched his fist in triumph. ‘But those holes took them right down into what the official team later called the fourth chamber. And, just like the archaeologists who came so soon after, they found that it was empty. Filled with sand and silt.’ He paused, eyes wide, breath billowing about him in haloes. ‘Except for one ante-chamber that was crammed with warriors. Nearly a hundred and thirty of them. Perhaps they had simply been stored there, awaiting later deployment. Perhaps they were flawed in some way and had been discarded. We’ll never know. But Hu and his colleagues understood the importance of their find. And they knew that it was only a matter of time before the authorities found out what they were up to.’

Michael moved about upon his stage, as if addressing himself to an audience of the very warriors he was talking about. But his eyes were fixed on Margaret, appealing to her to share his excitement, desperate to draw her into his story, to know how it was he felt, how this had all come about.

‘The warriors they found had been badly damaged by the collapse of the roof and the walls,’ he said. ‘But Hu’s greatest fear was that the Red Guards would come and destroy them for ever, denounce them as “old culture”, proof of the crimes of the “imperialist royalists” of China’s past. So they brought in a mechanical digger and simply dug out the whole ante-chamber, filling crate after crate with earth and pieces of the broken warriors. The crates were shipped back to Beijing by road and stored in a warehouse belonging to the university in Haidan. Then one by one they were transferred to the university itself and secreted down here in the bomb shelter that their predecessors had dug in the sixties.’

Michael let out a deep breath and smiled at Margaret. ‘You see, they thought they were saving them for posterity. But, then, to everyone’s surprise, the authorities sanctioned an official excavation, and within a year the thousands of warriors in Pit No. 1 were being uncovered. Hu Bo and the others were trapped by their own good intentions. To admit that they had removed the warriors from the fourth chamber could leave them open to accusations of theft, or worse.

‘So they made a pact. They spent the next twenty-five years restoring the warriors they had recovered from Xi’an, piece by tiny piece, down here in what they came to call their own fourth chamber, and upstairs in the conservation lab. Their existence, in fact the very existence of the bomb shelter, was known to only a few. The university authorities who had been here in the sixties had long since been purged. Officially, this place didn’t exist. Still doesn’t. It was the perfect hiding place for the warriors.’

In spite of herself, in spite of her situation and her fear and her anger, Margaret had been drawn into Michael’s story. ‘What was the pact?’ she asked.

Michael knew now that he had her back again. ‘They agreed that whichever of them outlived the others, would reveal the existence of the warriors before he died, so that they could be returned to the nation and their rightful place in the fourth chamber that they had been taken from.

‘In 1998, Hu Bo, who by then was the last surviving member, was diagnosed with cancer. He had only weeks to live, and he confided the secret of the fourth chamber to his protégé here at the university.’

‘Professor Yue,’ Margaret said. Michael nodded. She said, ‘Don’t tell me, I can guess the rest. He got greedy, right? I mean, down here there’s all these Terracotta Warriors that no one else knows about. If he can get them out of the country, boy, is he going to make a lot of money. How much would just one of these fetch in the West?’

Michael spread his hands. ‘They’re priceless, Margaret. We’re talking millions. For the lot, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions. And not too many to flood the market and bring down the price. There are dozens of tycoons out there, men who have everything, men who will pay extraordinary amounts just to know that they have a genuine Terracotta Warrior standing in their library or in their study.’

‘And so all that stuff about the wonders of history and the science of archaeology goes out the window because you see the chance to make a fast buck.’ Margaret had moved now, out from the safety of her towering warriors. She remembered the night she had first met Michael at the ambassador’s residence.
The truth is never dull
, he had told her.
That extraordinary mix of human passion and frailty, maybe darkness, that leads to the commission of the crime
. No, she thought now, it wasn’t dull. Just sordid.

Michael seemed shocked by the sudden contempt in her voice. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t like that. Yue Shi had no way to get them out of the country. When he confided in me I knew I was uniquely placed to do it. I’d organised exhibitions before, my high media profile gave me a lot of clout. But, I mean, it’s not as if we were stealing them. No one knew about them anyway. And they’d be just as safe, if not safer, in the hands of private collectors. And the things I could do with the money, Margaret. The projects I could fund without having to go cap in hand to universities and charitable organisations and broadcasters back home. There are excavations all around the world that are just waiting for funding.’

‘How noble,’ Margaret said. ‘And this money, these excavations … they’re worth killing for, are they? Worth the lives of men?’

Michael shook his head and moved towards her, appealing for her understanding. ‘For God’s sake, Margaret, that’s really not how it was.’

‘Don’t come near me!’ she shouted. And he stopped in his tracks, startled by the fear in her voice and the hate in her eyes. He had lost her again.

He sighed. ‘We’d installed a video security system,’ he said, almost hopelessly. ‘So that none of us who knew what was down here could cheat the others.’

‘Whatever happened to honour among thieves?’

He shook his head, ignoring her barb. ‘I got a phone call from the lab assistant upstairs. He and the professor had been organising the removal of the warriors, one by one, to a workshop we were renting in Haidan. He was in a hell of a state. Professor Yue had been murdered down here in the underground chamber. The whole thing was on tape. I hurried over and we found the body lying there, decapitated.’ He looked down at the huge pool of dried, crusted blood. ‘We knew we had to move it or risk the warriors being discovered. We wrapped him in blankets and polythene sheets and took the body to his apartment. It was a bloody affair. I’ve never seen so much blood.’ He blanched at the thought, remembering the detached head, the strange form of the headless body. ‘And then I looked at the tape and recognised Yuan Tao straight away. God knows why the professor brought him down here. Maybe he was trying to buy him off, buy his life back. Who knows? The thing was, Yuan had seen the warriors. He knew they were here. We were no longer safe.’

‘So you used the tape to replicate his murder of Professor Yue, to try to make it look as if they had both been killed by the same person.’

Michael nodded grimly. ‘We didn’t know about the other murders until we confronted him at the apartment at Tuan Jie Hu Dongli. That’s when we discovered that he’d already killed two other people.’

Margaret shook her head in disbelief. She had thought that she knew Michael. Never in her worst nightmare could she have dreamed him capable of this. ‘And you had no qualms about any of it?’

‘Of course I had qualms,’ he protested. ‘But you’ve got to understand, we had no choice. The smuggling of artefacts out of China is a capital offence. If the authorities caught us we would be executed. And we weren’t about to start having a whole lot of sympathy for Yuan Tao. After all, he was a murderer. He’d just killed three people. When the cops eventually caught up with him, it’d be a bullet in the head in a football stadium somewhere.’

His logic was impeccable, but Margaret still found it impossible to empathise. She sublimated her fear beneath a strange professional detachment. ‘How did you know that the fourth victim should be numbered with a three?’

He shook his head. ‘We almost didn’t. But in the apartment, along with the sword, we also found three lengths of silk cord, and three placards already numbered – one, two, three. We realised that he must have been counting down from six.’

‘And the drugs?’

‘They were there under the floorboards with the rest of the stash.’

‘And how did you force him to take them?’

Michael shrugged. ‘It was strange. I think he realised that there was not going to be any way out for him, and he almost seemed happy, as if we were relieving him of the responsibility of having to kill again. He suggested the vodka. He said the drug was more effective with alcohol.’

‘And it didn’t strike you as odd that it turned bright blue?’

Michael frowned at her. ‘How did you know that?’

‘It’s my job, Michael,’ Margaret said contemptuously. ‘Didn’t you think anyone would notice when they cut him open? Did you think he had duped his victims with a bright blue drink?’ She almost laughed. ‘He was leaving a message for us. A clue. And we had no idea.’ She thought for a moment. ‘And the nickname. Where did that come from?’

Michael looked perplexed. ‘We’d seen the nickname around Yue’s neck, and figured we should put one on Yuan’s.’

‘And you believed him when he told you it was Digger?’

‘We had no reason not to.’

Margaret shook her head in frustration. ‘We’ve been so fucking blind!’ she gasped. What was it Li was forever quoting his Uncle Yifu as saying?
The answer is always in the detail
. ‘Digger,’ she said. ‘That’s you. The archaeologist. Another clue we were too damned stupid to see.’ She looked at him. ‘So who was it who did the dirty deed? Who was it who actually brought the sword down on that man’s neck and cut his head off?’

‘It wasn’t me, Margaret. I could never have brought myself to do something like that.’

‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘You’d take the money, but you wouldn’t spill the blood.’ She paused, her thoughts racing, then turned on him. ‘And how did the murder weapon find its way into Birdie’s apartment?’