Peter May - The Firemaker

A tiny winking red light on the other side of the room caught his eye. He crossed to a small cabinet with an inset shelf. Set back on the shelf was a mini hi-fi stack with tuner, cassette and CD. Li crouched down to look at the array of pinpoint red and green lights, and a digital display of the numeral ‘9’. ‘Either of you guys touched the hi-fi?’ he called through to the forensics men.

‘No,’ one of them called back.

‘Me either,’ the other one shouted.

Li looked up as Qian came back in, a touch out of breath. ‘Someone stole the lamp, boss. At any rate, there’s no lamp in the light fitting, and the old boy in the lift says it was working okay when he finished up last night. Oh, and the gate’s locked.’

Li nodded. ‘Know anything about hi-fi systems?’

‘Got better things to spend my money on. In any case, I’d never have time to listen to one. Why?’

‘Chao left his on. In fact, he left the CD on pause. The light’s still blinking. You want to hear what he was listening to when his killer came calling?’

‘How do you know his killer came here?’ Qian was curious.

‘Educated guess,’ Li said, and he pressed the Play button. Immediately the room was filled with the sounds of strange and alien music. He stood up and lifted an empty CD case off the top of the cabinet. ‘Western opera,’ he said. And reading from the cover, ‘ Samson and Delilah . Saint-Saëns.’ He took out the inner sleeve. ‘Track nine. “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix”.’ And he read, ‘“Samson, the champion of the Hebrews enslaved by the Philistines, knows that he should resist the approaches of the temptress Delilah. But his determination crumbles when she seduces him with this song of love. He yields completely, enabling Delilah to discover the secret of his strength and cut off his hair, rendering him powerless.”’

Was it to the temptation of his drug habit, or his preference for young boys, that Chao Heng had yielded, leaving him powerless in the hands of his murderer? The voice of the female soprano rose in sensuous crescendos.

‘So?’ Qian was impatient. He had to raise his voice above the music. ‘What are you basing this educated guess on?’

‘On a number of things,’ Li said. ‘The first of them being that Chao Heng was almost certainly here last night.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The bath-towel hanging over the bath is still damp. He’d fed his fish, probably quite late on, because they’re still not that hungry. He’d left his cigarettes on the table on the balcony, and his needle kit in the bedroom. And smokers and junkies don’t leave those kinds of things behind. Not voluntarily. He didn’t leave by the elevator. There was no key among the effects found with his body, so how could he have locked the stair gate behind him?’

Li wandered back across the room to the balcony. ‘I think he was sitting here, listening to Delilah seducing Samson, and having himself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. He had probably been here some time, judging by the number of cigarette ends in the ashtray and the progress of the CD. It was late, long after the lift had been shut down, maybe one or two in the morning, when the rest of the building was asleep. He was watching for a car below. A delivery of heroin, perhaps. The promise of a young boy. Who knows? When he saw the lights of the car, he got up, paused the CD, took his key and went down the stairs to unlock the gate. It would have been darker than usual, because the killer had just removed the lamp from the light over the front door. Maybe that’s why Chao didn’t recognise immediately that his visitor wasn’t who he was expecting.

‘Whoever it was probably had a gun and forced him back up to the apartment. Once here, he struck him on the head with a blunt object, maybe even with the gun, and injected him with ketamine. He waited, maybe as long as an hour, to be sure he hadn’t been seen, then carried or dragged Chao down the stairs and locked the gate behind them at the bottom. Under cover of the darkness created by the removal of the lamp, he carried him the fifteen feet to where he’d parked the car. Then it was off to Ritan Park, and you can pretty much put the rest together yourself.’

By now Samson had well and truly succumbed to the charms of Delilah. Qian blew air through pursed lips. ‘That must be some education you had, boss.’ He paused and thought about it. ‘How do you know the killer was acting alone?’

‘I don’t.’

‘I mean, it would have been easier with two.’

Li nodded. ‘Yes, but there’s something very…’ He struggled to find the right word. ‘… individual, almost eccentric, about this. It just feels to me like a single twisted mind at work.’

One of the forensics team called them through to the hall. He was crouched outside the kitchen door, scraping carefully at the carpet. ‘Patch of blood,’ he said. ‘Looks quite fresh, too. Spectral analysis will tell us just how fresh.’

Qian looked at Li with renewed respect. ‘If that’s Chao’s blood, it looks like you could be right, boss.’ Then he grimaced. ‘Trouble is, it doesn’t really get us any closer to the killer.’

‘Everything we know gets us closer to the killer,’ Li said evenly. ‘Time we talked to the street committee.’

Liu Xinxin, chairwoman of the street committee, was a small, nervous, skinny woman of around sixty. She lived in a ground-floor apartment in Chao Heng’s block. Her greying hair was drawn back in a tight bun from a delicately featured face, she wore an apron over a grey smock and a pair of black baggy trousers that stopped six inches above her ankles. Her hands were white with flour. ‘Come in,’ she said when she answered the door. She brushed a rogue strand of hair away from her face and left a smudge of flour on her forehead. She led them into the kitchen where she was preparing dumplings for the family meal. ‘You’ve come at a bad time. My husband will be home soon, and then my son and his wife.’

Li nodded. ‘There is never a good time to come about death.’

There was a loud crash from another room, a skitter of giggles, and two boys of pre-school age chased one another, shouting and screaming, through the hall. ‘My grandchildren,’ Liu Xinxin said. And then she added, quickly, as if they might suspect her family of being politically incorrect, ‘The elder boy is my daughter’s.’ A shadow passed across her face. ‘She died in labour and they had to cut the child out of her. My son-in-law couldn’t deal with her death, or with the child, so my son and his wife adopted him.’

She wiped her hands on her apron and took it off. ‘So… Mr Chao,’ she said. ‘Nobody liked him much. Come through.’ And she led them into a cluttered living room, birdcages arrayed along one wall. Pale lemon-and-white birds filled the room with a constant chirruping chorus. The balcony was chock full of plants and drying clothes hanging from a line. Condensation was forming on the glass. Against the opposite wall stood an old upright piano covered with the remains of big character posters which had, at one time, been pasted all over it. ‘It’s not mine,’ Liu Xinxin said, following their eyes to the piano. ‘It belongs to the state. I’m a musician really. I don’t know how I got mixed up in street politics, except I’ve been a good member of the Communist Party for nearly forty years. I was only sent for reform two times. Maybe you’ve heard some of my songs?’ She addressed this to Qian, who was nonplussed. He looked to Li for help.

Li said, ‘Perhaps if you told us what you’d written…’

‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, ‘hundreds. More than I can remember. I’ve lost more than I’ve written. In the sixties a collection of my songs was put together in Shanghai. They were all typeset and ready for publication. And then came the Cultural Revolution and my music was condemned as “reactionary”. I never did like the official formula for composition — “High, Fast, Hard and Loud”.’ She parodied stiff marching movements to each word as she said it. ‘So they were lost. About fifteen years ago I tried to trace them. But the typesetter was dead, and the publisher knew nothing about the proofs.’ She gave a tiny philosophical smile. ‘But other songs survived… “Let’s Build Our World Together” and “That Was Me Then And This Is Me Now” and “Our Country”.’