Peter May - The Firemaker

‘I think there are times I don’t much like my job.’ He glanced grimly at Li. ‘Looks like some kind of weird suicide ritual. On a cursory examination there’s no sign of blood or injury prior to the burning. So unless an autopsy tells us otherwise, you can probably assume he burned to death.’

‘One of the witnesses says he was still alive when they found him.’ Reaching out, like he was asking for help . The nanny’s interpretation of what she saw had formed a gruesomely indelible image in Li’s mind.

‘Which pretty much fixes time of death, and rules out foul play prior to burning,’ Wang concluded. ‘We get him back to Pao Jü Hutong and I’ll do a preliminary. Should be able to tell a little more about him then. But if you want a full autopsy…’

‘I do.’

‘Then you’re going to have to send him up to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the university.’ He stood up. ‘But first we want to get him into the fridge fast — to stop him cooking.’

After the body had been removed, and the ambulance and various police vehicles had gone, the crowd started to break up, reluctantly drawn back to the relentless humdrum of their everyday lives. Li, however, lingered a little longer. He circled the lake and climbed the rocky outcrop at the far side to find himself looking down on the pavilion, now deserted apart from an old man scratching away on his violin, and a woman who might have been his wife, singing a jagged, haunting melody. To his left was the path that climbed through the trees to the clearing where the body had been found. He was still troubled by the image the peasant girl from Shanxi had conjured in his mind, of the hand reaching out from the flaming mass. Like he was asking for help . What an appalling way to die. Li tried to picture the man walking slowly through the park (for if he had had time to smoke a last cigarette he was surely in no hurry), past the early morning dancers, the practitioners of t’ai chi , the old ladies gossiping on park benches, carrying his can of gasoline in his hand, and intent in his heart. What possible horrors could drive a man to such a desperate act? Li imagined him lighting his last cigarette, standing smoking it, almost down to the tip. He lit a cigarette himself and stared down at the still, green water of the lake reflecting the willow trees beyond, and wondered why no one had seen him on that slow walk through the park. Were people so engrossed in their spiritual and physical activities that he had been invisible to them?

Deep in the bowels of the multistorey building of the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination that backs on to Pao Jü Hutong, Pathologist Wang made a preliminary, superficial examination of the body. The charred corpse lay on its side on a metal table, like a toppled Buddha, fixed in its squatting position. Muscle shrinkage had forced the arms up, with fists clenched like those of a bare-knuckled pugilist. Li watched from a distance, the squeak of Wang’s rubber sneakers echoing off white-tiled walls as he moved around the table. And still there was the awful smell. Wang wore a face mask, and worked his way quickly and carefully around the body, taking measurements, making notes. He spent some time opening and examining the mouth that had been pulled shut by contracted muscle, the tip of a charred tongue poking from between blackened lips. Then he nodded to his assistant, who wrapped the body in heavy plastic, securing it with a nylon cord, and wheeled it away on a gurney to be bagged and taken across the city to the pathology labs of the Centre of Material Evidence Determination on the campus of the People’s University of Public Security. Li followed Wang into his office and they both lit cigarettes. Wang slumped in his chair and took a deep breath.

‘I’ll give you a written preliminary as soon as possible. But the victim was male, aged around fifty. From what’s left to be seen externally, there’s nothing physically distinguishing about him. Apart from his teeth. He’d had some pretty expensive professional work done there.’

Li frowned. This was unusual. General dentistry in China was still very basic and high-quality professional work did not come cheap.

As if reading his mind, Wang said, ‘This guy wasn’t any common labourer. He wasn’t short of a yuan or two. A man of some position, I’d guess. Almost certainly a Party member. If you get any idea of who he is, you’ll have no trouble confirming his identity from dental records.’

It was still only 10 a.m., but the heat was already stultifying. A hot wind blew the dust about the streets, coating leaves, grass, cars, buildings. And people. It got in their eyes and their mouths and their lungs and made them hack and spit.

Li’s new office was airless and stifling, and the window would not open properly. His personal belongings had been left on his desk, in two cardboard boxes. The room itself had been stripped of any vestige of its previous occupant, scarred walls divested of their paper history. All that remained of Li’s predecessor were the cigarette burns along the edge of his desk. Even his memory had faded in Li’s mind; a colourless and pedantic man who had always remained tight, like a closed fist, enigmatic. For all the years his colleagues had worked with him they knew very little of his private life. A wife, a daughter at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, a heart condition. In the last months his face had been putty grey. Li fished an ashtray out from one of the boxes and lit his last cigarette. He looked out of the window through the trees at the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, gold characters on pale brown marble, and wondered what private thoughts had passed through the mind of this man who had preceded him as he looked down through the same trees at the same buildings. Had he once had the same hopes and aspirations for the future as Li? What cruel spins of fate had spawned his disillusion, reducing him to the grey and secretive man who had sweated out his last weeks in this office when he should have been at home with his family? A knock at the door disturbed his thoughts. Wu poked his head into the office. ‘They’re ready for you, boss.’ And Li felt a flutter of fear. They’re ready for you . Now that he was their boss, his colleagues would have expectations of him. It was possible to be ambitious beyond your ability. Now that this particular ambition had been realised, he would have to prove his ability, not just to those with expectations, but to himself. He slipped a pen into his breast pocket and took a fresh notebook from one of the boxes on his desk.

There were nearly a dozen officers sitting around the big table in the meeting room on the top floor. And nearly all of them were smoking cigarettes, smoke wallowing about in the downdraught from the ceiling fan that swung lazily overhead. Papers and notebooks and rapidly filling ashtrays cluttered the table. There was a brief, spontaneous round of applause as Li walked into the room. He flushed and grinned, waved his hand dismissively and told them to shut up. He pulled up a chair and looked around the expectant faces. ‘Anyone got a smoke?’ he asked. Nearly a dozen cigarettes got tossed across the table. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Crawlers.’ He lit one and took a deep draw. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been out to Ritan Park. I’ve already had initial reports from Detective Qian and Pathologist Wang. It’s almost certainly a suicide, but the body’s so badly burned we might have a problem identifying it. And it could take some time. We’re going to have to match incoming missing-persons reports with what we know here. Pathologist Wang tells me the victim’s male, aged around fifty, with some pretty expensive dental work. Detective Qian will co-ordinate attempts to identify him ASAP. We can’t consider this case cleared until we know who he is and, if possible, why he killed himself. And we need witnesses, anyone who might have seen him making his way through the park. Any joy on that front, Qian Yi?’