Peter May - The Firemaker

The girl, a timid nineteen-year-old, was fazed and looked around helplessly. ‘Where’ll I put them, then?’

Li glanced round the room. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘On the floor under the window. Separate the cases and keep three separate piles. I want only stuff I’ve asked for on my desk, all right?’

She nodded, flustered, and crouched down to start arranging the files on the floor as requested. Another huge pile thumped down beside her. She looked up, startled, as Li said, ‘And you can sort that lot out while you’re at it.’

Now that he could see his desktop again, Li began sorting out the files he wanted to hand. He glanced at the autopsy report and, quite involuntarily, found himself thinking about Dr Margaret Campbell. They were fragmentary thoughts, bits and pieces of conversation: ‘ no man is an island ’, ‘ must have broken a mirror ’, ‘ you don’t want to know about my sordid private life ’. Visual moments: the wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand, the freckles on her arm, the soft thrust of her breasts against the thin white cotton of her tee-shirt.

Annoyed with himself, he put the autopsy report to one side and forced himself to concentrate on the forensics reports. But they told him nothing he didn’t already know. The spectral analysis on the blood found in Chao’s apartment would, however, be telling. As would the result of the request he had put to Dr Wang. But neither of those would be available until tomorrow. He felt a twinge of irritation at having to wait. Which was unusual, for he was normally a patient man. But there was some instinct at work telling him that somehow speed was important in this, that the usual pedantic sifting of information, the slow building of layer upon layer of carefully gathered evidence, was not the required approach. And yet that was what all his training and experience demanded.

His eyes wandered thoughtfully across the text of the three forensics reports. Still the only real evidence gathered at each scene had been the Marlboro cigarette ends. The fact that Chao smoked, and that Marlboro was his brand, had been troubling Li since he found the cigarette ends and the pack in Chao’s apartment. It raised the possibility that the cigarette end found near the body in the park had been smoked by Chao himself, a final wish granted by his killer. In which case there was nothing to connect Chao’s murder with the other two, except coincidence. But Li didn’t like coincidence. And, in any case, Chao had been sedated, his cigarettes had been left in the apartment, and if he had been capable of smoking, the cigarette would have had to have been provided by his killer, who must also have smoked Marlboro. Another coincidence. Altogether too many. Li drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk. And tomorrow, he thought, seemed far too long to have to wait for answers.

Another batch of statements was carried in and distributed on the piles beneath the window. Through the open door he saw that the detectives’ room was still a hive of activity. He lifted the file on Chao and flipped it open. There was precious little detail here. Born 1948, in the town of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, the year before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. His father was a professor of English and his mother a Party cadre. He came to Beijing in 1966, the year Li was born, and enrolled at Beijing Agricultural University just as the Cultural Revolution was sweeping the country. Two years into a degree course in agronomy and crop sciences he was denounced by fellow students turned Red Guards and forced to drop out. The phrase denounced by Red Guards conjured for Li images of repeated beatings, hours of enforced self-criticism, endless essays confessing to reactionary weaknesses and imperial tendencies. Often it was simply an opportunity for adolescents, freed from the constraints and disciplines of an organised and civilised society, to explore the dark and cruel side of their human nature. Bullies and brutes given the freedom to express themselves in torture and murder without fear of retribution. They were, after all, only cleansing their country of its class enemies, those upholders of the Four Olds. Children were freed to taunt and torment their teachers, forcing them to wear dunce caps and grovel before them in class. Li had witnessed it first hand in his own primary school. Fortunately, by the time he reached middle school, the madness had just about run its course. He imagined that Chao’s fellow students had probably picked on him because he was soft, perhaps overtly homosexual, perhaps simply still confused about his sexuality. He was sent to the countryside for re-education.

Here there was a gap in the record of nearly a year. There was no indication of where he had been sent. Either through extraordinary good fortune, or through some influence that his mother had been able to bring to bear, he suddenly turned up in the United States enrolled as a student at the University of Wisconsin. Graduating in 1972 in microbial genetics, he stayed on a further year to complete a postgraduate doctorate in biotechnology. And then he won a research fellowship to the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University, where he remained until 1980, when he returned to China to teach at the very university he had been forced to abandon twelve years earlier.

He had married very quickly then, but was divorced again within three years, during which time he had managed to father a daughter. Li wondered why he had felt the need to marry. Clearly it was always going to be a relationship doomed to sexual failure. Was there really a need to create a veneer of heterosexual respectability? Might he not just have been discreet in his lifestyle?

Whether or not his particular predilections were known, they had not affected his career. He had been influential in the setting up of Beijing Agricultural University’s National Key Laboratory of Agricultural Biotechnology, under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, and spent the next ten years directing field projects in Beijing, at the Changping Experiment Station in Hui Long Guan District, Changping County, and then at the agro hi-technology development region in Zhuozhou. He had spent nearly four years working on some unspecified research project near Guilin, then in 1996 he had been brought back to Beijing and appointed senior technical adviser to the Minister of Agriculture before being forced to retire through ill health six months ago.

Li shut the folder. A life summed up in a few scant paragraphs. But it told him nothing about the man, what had driven his ambition, what had led him to heroin and the destruction of his health, what had motivated someone to kill him. Tomorrow, he hoped, he would glean much, much more when he paid a visit to Chao’s danwei at the Ministry of Agriculture. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Everything was tomorrow! He reached for the file Wu had left for him on The Needle. Somewhere in the drugs connection, he felt sure, he could establish the first concrete link between two of the murders at least.

There was a soft knock at the door and Section Chief Chen came in. He closed the door behind him. ‘Chaos out there.’ And he took in the piles of statements gathering under the window. ‘This could keep us busy for weeks.’

‘Or months,’ Li said gloomily.

‘How is it going?’

‘Slowly. I’ll be in a better position to brief you on progress tomorrow when we get some tests back from forensics. Until then, we are still sifting through the jigsaw for the first piece.’

Chen nodded. ‘Well, I have some good news. In view of the success of the autopsy carried out this morning by Dr Campbell, Professor Jiang has offered us her services for the duration of her stay in Beijing. Provided, of course, that it does not interfere with her lectures.’