Peter May - The Firemaker

Qian shook his head. ‘Not yet. We’re still compiling the names of everyone who was there, but nothing so far.’

‘Anyone else got any thoughts?’ No one had. ‘All right. Let’s move on for the moment to the stabbing in Haidan District. Detective Wu’s been out there.’ He raised his eyebrows in Wu’s direction.

Wu leaned to one side in his chair and chewed reflectively on a piece of gum that had long since lost any flavour. He was a lean man in his forties, thinning hair brushed back, a wispy moustache on his upper lip designed to disguise over-prominent front teeth. His skin was unusually dark, and he liked to wear sunglasses, whatever the weather. Right now they were dangling from the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, a cigarette burning between the fingers of his right. He habitually wore blue jeans and white trainers and a short denim butt-freezer jacket. Image was important to Wu. He liked being a cop, and Li suspected that he modelled himself on the undercover cops he’d seen in American movies. ‘It’s a murder, all right,’ Wu said. ‘No doubt about that. His name was Mao Mao. Known to us. A petty drug dealer in his mid-twenties. Did time as a juvenile for theft and hooliganism. Reform through labour. Only whatever labour they put him through didn’t reform him.’

‘What was it, a fight?’ Li asked.

Wu cocked his head doubtfully. ‘Well, he was stabbed in the heart, up through the lower ribcage. But there were no signs of a struggle, no bruising or cuts on his hands or face. The pathologist thinks he may have been attacked from behind. Autopsy should confirm. Looks like it might have been some kind of gangland killing. He was lying face down in his own blood on a stretch of waste ground near Kunminghunan Road. A factory worker found him on his way to work this morning. The ground out there’s hard as concrete. No footprints in soil, or blood. In fact nothing for us to really go on at all. Forensics are doing fingernail and fibre tests, but I get a feeling about this, Li Yan. I don’t think they’re going to find anything. In fact, the only thing we picked up at all at the scene was a cigarette end, which is probably entirely unrelated.’

Li was suddenly interested, instincts aroused. ‘Just one? I mean, there weren’t any others lying around near by?’

‘Not that we found.’

‘What brand was it?’

‘American. Marlboro, I think. Why?’

Detective Zhao said, ‘That’s odd. We found a Marlboro cigarette end close to the body out at Di’anmen.’

Qian leaned into the table. ‘It was a Marlboro brand cigarette end we found out at Ritan, wasn’t it, boss?’

Li nodded slowly, his interest fully ignited now. It was a remarkable coincidence, if, indeed, that was what it was. But he knew better than to go jumping to premature conclusions. There was a speculative buzz around the table. He asked Zhao to give them a rundown on the body found at Di’anmen.

Zhao was the baby of the section, a good-looking young man of around twenty-five. What he lacked in flair he made up for in sheer hard work and attention to detail. He was always self-conscious at these meetings, finding it difficult to give coherent expression to his thoughts in the group situation. He was much better dealing with people one to one. Colour flushed high on his cheekbones as he spoke. ‘He was carrying an ID card, so we know he was a building worker from Shanghai. Probably an itinerant. He may well have just arrived in Beijing looking for work, but there’s no known address for him here, no known associates. I’ve already faxed Public Security in Shanghai asking for his details.’

‘How was he killed?’

‘A broken neck.’

‘He couldn’t just have fallen? An accident of some kind?’

‘No. There’s absolutely no sign of trauma. He was found in a condemned siheyuan in a hutong that was cleared about a month ago. But the crime scene is so clean I think he was killed somewhere else and dumped there.’

‘So what makes you think the cigarette end is connected to it?’

‘It was fresh. It was the only one there, and it was about three feet from the body.’

Li lit another cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and blew smoke thoughtfully at the blades of the overhead fan.

‘Do you believe there’s a connection?’ The section chief watched his new deputy carefully. But Li wasn’t being drawn into anything rash — not just yet. He stood by the window smoking one of his chief’s cigarettes. When he’d asked for it, Chen had raised a wry eyebrow and told him dryly, ‘You know, Li, someone in your elevated position really should start buying his own.’ Now he regarded Li with professional interest. While there was no denying his flair, and his record of success, there was an impetuous quality in him, an impatient streak that Chen had hoped would mellow with age. But until now there had been no sign of it. Perhaps responsibility would temper impulsiveness. As long as it didn’t dull a keen instinct.

‘The thing is,’ Li said seriously, ‘we have no reason to believe the man at Ritan Park was anything other than a suicide. If we can establish that the time of death of the two murders was prior to his, and that he smoked this brand of Marlboro cigarette, then it’s conceivable — just conceivable — that he killed the other two before doing away with himself.’ But he couldn’t keep his face straight any longer, and a mischievous smile crept across it.

Chen laughed. Not just a smile. A deep, throaty, smoker’s laugh. Li wished the girls in the typing pool could see it. ‘First day on the job,’ Chen said, still chuckling. ‘A suicide and two murders, and you’ve solved the lot already.’

Li’s smile turned rueful. ‘I wish it was that easy. But there’s something wrong here, Chief. These two murders. There’s not a shred of evidence at either scene. Except for the cigarette ends. Would somebody who obviously took so much care to leave no other evidence be careless enough to leave a cigarette end?’

‘Maybe the killer, or killers, weren’t that clever with the evidence, or lack of it. Maybe they just got lucky.’

‘Hmmm.’ Li wasn’t convinced. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. If there is a connection, it’s… well, very strange.’ He sighed and flicked his ash out of the open window. ‘The first thing we need to do is ID the guy in the park, but it could be some time before we can match the body with a missing person. And the municipal pathologist’s not interested in doing the autopsy. Burn victims aren’t his speciality, he says. Personally I think he’s just queasy about it.’

‘So who’s doing the autopsy?’

‘They’ve sent the body over to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the Public Security University.’

Chen looked thoughtful for a moment, then rummaged through some papers in an overflowing tray on his desk. Finally he drew out a sheet of paper, a circular from the Public Security Bureau visa section, and reread it with interest. He looked at Li. ‘The doctor of forensic pathology in Chicago who took my course on criminal investigation when I was at UIC last year? Just happens to be in Beijing at the moment — lecturing to students at the Public Security University.’

Li shrugged, not making a connection. ‘So?’

‘The good doctor’s speciality is burn victims.’

Margaret’s nightmare had begun early. It started with a hangover about 2 a.m. She had fallen into a dead sleep after the banquet, but slept for only around four hours. At two she was wide awake with a headache the size of Lake Michigan. Back in Chicago it was early afternoon. She swallowed a couple of Advil and tried to get back to sleep. But two hours later, visions of Michael’s face at their last meeting swimming relentlessly into her consciousness, she was sitting up, fully dressed, watching Hong Kong kung fu flicks on satellite Star Movies . She had already watched an hour of repeat bulletins on CNN and was ready to throw the television set out of the window. How was it possible, she wondered, to be so tired and yet incapable of sleep? If this was how it felt to be an insomniac, it was a condition to which she fervently hoped never to succumb. At five she had gone down to the twenty-four-hour café and washed down another couple of Advil with stewed black coffee, and by six felt woolly-headed and exhausted.