Peter May - The Firemaker

Qian turned and passed Section Chief Chen on the way in. Chen shook Margaret’s hand warmly. ‘Dr Campbell, I am so very grateful to you for your help. It has been invaluable, Li Yan, has it not?’

Li nodded solemnly. ‘It has.’

‘And has my deputy looked after you well?’ Chen asked Margaret.

‘Oh, very well,’ said Margaret. ‘He took me to lunch at a Sichuan restaurant. My mouth is still burning.’

‘It was my pleasure,’ Li said.

Chen laughed heartily, to the amazement of the detectives who could hear him through the open door. He steered Margaret out and into the corridor, followed by a resentful Lily. ‘Come, I will see you to your car. And I will phone Professor Jiang this afternoon to thank him personally for letting us borrow you.’

Margaret flicked a backward glance over her shoulder to see Li already involved in discussions with his detectives. In all likelihood she would never see him again.

As she turned to be led down the corridor, Li looked over to the door to see her back for an instant before she disappeared. Apparently, he thought bitterly, he wasn’t even worth a backward glance.

Another couple of sullen hoodlums were bundled in to have details taken before being led away for interrogation. ‘We took more than fifteen statements this morning,’ Wu told Li. ‘Anyone and everyone who knew Mao Mao. The scum of the earth. Dope dealers, pimps, prostitutes.’ Li wandered through to his office and Wu followed. ‘He wasn’t a very nice guy, Li Yan. Nobody’s shedding any tears for him. Even his family. You’d think a mother would grieve for her son. When we told her, she just spat and said, “Good riddance”.’

From his window, Li could see into the street below. Through the foliage he watched as Margaret got into the BMW. Good riddance . Mao Mao’s mother’s words about her son found an echo in his present thoughts. Just before she closed the door, Margaret glanced up. Damn! She’d seen him watching. He took a quick step back, then felt foolish. This was absurd! He focused his mind again on Wu, who was still talking. ‘It was definitely drugs he was into, but he wasn’t one of the Golden Circle, just one of the flies attracted by the dung.’

The Golden Circle was what they called the ring of dealers at the centre of the Beijing drug trade, the ones whose hands were always clean, who always had an alibi, who never took the rap. They were the ones who made the money, trading death for gold.

‘Of course,’ Wu said, ‘no one knows a thing.’ He paused. ‘And you know what, boss? You get an instinct for these things. I don’t think they’re lying.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes they know more at the top about what’s going on at the bottom than the other way around. Take out the file on The Needle for me. Leave it on my desk. I’ll have a glance at it tonight.’ The Needle was the nickname they all used for the man everyone knew was behind most of the heroin on the streets. But what was known, and what could be proved, were two very different things. A conspiracy of silence surrounded him, a phenomenon almost unknown in Chinese society. The masses line was no competition for the aura of fear that surrounded him.

‘Sure, boss. And I’ll get those statements to you as soon as we can get them typed up.’ Wu headed back to his desk.

From the door Li called after him, ‘By the way… was he a smoker? Mao Mao.’

Wu looked sheepish. He knew he’d been caught out. ‘Don’t know, boss.’

‘Better find out, then.’ Li beckoned to Zhao to follow him into his office. It was stiflingly hot. He tried to open his window more fully, but the feng shui man had been right, it was well and truly jammed. Whether or not it restricted the view, it certainly stopped the flow of oxygen. ‘Any news on the intinerant?’ Li asked.

‘Yeah, we got confirmation back from Shanghai on his identity.’ Zhao consulted his notebook conscientiously. ‘Guo Jingbo, aged thirty-five, divorced. No criminal record. No known criminal associations. He was a builder’s labourer. Finished on a building site in Shanghai about six weeks ago and told friends he was going to Beijing in search of work. But he didn’t register with Public Security until four weeks ago, so there’s a missing two weeks in there.’

‘And did he find any?’

‘Any what?’ Zhao looked mystified.

‘Work,’ Li snapped irritably.

‘Couldn’t have looked too hard,’ Zhao said. ‘No record of him even applying for any job.’

‘Associates in Beijing?’

‘None that we know of. He was staying in a hostel in the north of the city. Not somewhere you’d want to spend any great length of time. So most people don’t. Nobody really knew who he was or what he did.’

‘Was he a smoker?’

Zhao nodded. ‘Nicotine stains on his fingers, matches and a half-empty pack of cigarettes in his pocket.’

‘Brand?’

‘Chinese.’

Li grunted. There wasn’t a single damned thing in any of this to give them even a start. He sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better start rounding up all the itinerants who’ve registered in the city in the last six weeks.’

Zhao looked pleased with himself. ‘It’s under way, boss.’ Then his face clouded. ‘Might take some time to do all the interviews, though.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s more than fifteen hundred of them.’

‘So what are you hanging around for?’ Li jerked his thumb towards the door. ‘Get started.’

As Zhao went out, Wu poked his head in. ‘Just spoke to a couple of Mao Mao’s pals. He didn’t smoke. So that cigarette end wasn’t his.’

Li nodded. ‘Thanks.’ He got up and closed the door and settled back in the tilting wooden chair he had inherited along with the office. It groaned as if objecting to being sat on, and the tilting mechanism squeaked. It had probably never been oiled since new. He put his hands together as if praying, placed the tips of his fingers beneath his nose, and leaned back with his eyes closed. The first image that floated into his consciousness was Margaret laughing across the table from him at the Sichuan snack-house. He blinked her away furiously and found himself standing on the edge of the clearing in Ritan Park looking at the smouldering cross-legged figure beneath the trees. He was able to visualise his thoughts in three dimensions, words and images co-existing. The first of those words, a question, drifted into his peripheral vision. ‘Why?’ It had all been so elaborate and high-profile. A murder in a public place staged to appear, at least superficially, like some form of ritual self-sacrifice. Li placed himself in the position of the murderer and faced the same difficulties the murderer must have faced. Somewhere, somewhere private, the victim’s home perhaps, the murderer had struck Chao Heng on the head, hard enough to induce unconsciousness, but not to kill him. He had then sedated him by injecting ketamine into his foot. If this had all taken place in Chao’s apartment, then the murderer faced the problem of transporting the body to the park, unseen, to stage the finale. It would have had to have been dark. And he would have had to have manoeuvred the body into the park before first light, long before it opened. He must then have sat with the semiconscious Chao in the privacy of the clearing until early morning activities in the park were well under way. The clearing was hidden from general view, but the risk of discovery must have been high. Another image drifted into the picture in his head. The cigarette end. If the murderer was a smoker, and he had sat for two or three hours waiting for the park to open, why was there only one cigarette end? Wouldn’t he have smoked at least four or five cigarettes, perhaps more in that stressful situation? He put the cigarette end to one side, next to the ‘Why?’. The killer had then arranged the still-dazed and compliant Chao into the lotus position, poured gasoline over him and set him alight. The danger of discovery at that moment must have been at its most intense. He must have retreated through the trees, away from the path that the children ran up just minutes later to make their awful discovery. So the killer was still in the park when the body was discovered. Someone must have seen him. A Witness. As if in some virtual-reality mind game, he placed the ‘Witness’ word next to the ‘Why?’ and the ‘Cigarette End’ and pulled the ‘Why?’ back to centre vision. Why? Why would anyone go to such elaborate and dangerous lengths to fake a suicide? And why would someone so meticulous be careless enough to leave a cigarette end at the scene of the crime. He placed the ‘Cigarette End’ centrally next to the ‘Why?’ and let his eye wander to the ‘Witness’ on the periphery. No matter how careful he was, someone must have seen him.