Peter May - The Firemaker

‘No. I learned much about human nature. I learned even more about myself. Sometimes learning can be a difficult, even painful, process. But one should never resent it.’ He thought carefully before blocking the line to his Castle with his King’s Guide. ‘Besides, I was only in prison for one and a half years.’

‘You always told me three,’ said Li, taken aback.

‘I was physically there for three years. But for half that time I slept, and when I slept I dreamed, and when I dreamed they could not keep me there. Because in my dreams I was free. Free to visit my childhood and speak again to my parents, free to go to the places I have loved in my life: the high mountains of Tibet, the Yellow Sea washing on the shores of Jiangsu, the Hong Kong of my boyhood, with the sun setting blood red across the South China Sea. They can never touch those things, or take them away. And as long as you have them, you have your freedom.’

Margaret’s eyes flickered up from the board to look at Old Yifu, his attention still focused, apparently, on the game. What horrors must he have endured? And yet he had chosen to take the positive view. Tales of torture and persecution would, perhaps, have been too painful, or too easy. Instead he chose to remember the escape he had made each day, sustaining hope and spirit.

‘My only regret,’ he said, ‘is that I was separated from my wife for that period. We had so little time together afterwards.’

And she saw a moistness in his eyes, and a colour rising on his cheeks. My uncle has never really got over the loss of her , Li had told her. She swooped quickly to eat another of his Soldiers with her Horse, changing the pace of the game and the mood of their conversation. ‘So you were brought up in Hong Kong?’ she said.

‘The family was originally from Canton. But we had been in Hong Kong for nearly two generations, a wealthy family by Chinese standards. Li Yan’s father and myself were in middle school when the Japanese invaded and we fled to China as refugees. We ended up in Sichuan, and I finished middle school there before going on to the American University in Beijing.’

He took the bait and made the mistake of eating her Horse. She slid her Castle two-thirds of the way down the board. ‘Check.’

‘Good God!’ Old Yifu seemed genuinely taken aback, then he looked up at her, smiling shrewdly. ‘Now I see,’ he said. ‘All these questions. You were hoping to distract me.’

‘Me?’ said Margaret innocently, and feigning shock.

Old Yifu brought his remaining Horse into play, blocking her route to the King. It was his only real option, but it left his other Castle exposed and unprotected. He shook his head sadly. ‘I can see my demise.’

Margaret ate his Castle quite ruthlessly. ‘You must have seen a lot of changes in your lifetime.’

But his concentration was on his move, and he did not reply until he had moved a Bishop to threaten a Soldier. ‘Everything has changed,’ he said, ‘except the character of the Chinese people. I think, maybe, that will remain the one great constant.’

‘So what do you think of China today?’

‘She is changing again. More rapidly this time. For better or worse I do not know. But people have more money in their pockets and food in their bellies and clothes on their backs. And everyone has a roof over his head. I remember when it was not so.’

Margaret smiled. It was clear to see where Li’s influences lay. She moved her Horse into a position that would threaten Old Yifu’s King if he took her Soldier, and lose him his Bishop if he didn’t. ‘I read somewhere that in fifty years, as the West declines and the East develops, China will become the richest and most powerful country on earth.’ He was still puzzling over his next move. ‘Do you think that’s true?’

He took her Soldier, effectively conceding defeat. ‘It is difficult to say. China has such a long history, and this period is such a small link in a chain that stretches back five thousand years. Only time will tell. Mao once said, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, “It is too early to say”. So who am I to predict the future for China?’ He smiled as she moved her Castle.

‘Checkmate,’ she said.

He conceded defeat with a small shrug and a nod of his head, and his smile seemed full of genuine pleasure. ‘Congratulations. It is the first time I have been beaten in many years. One grows complacent. I look forward to more games with you.’

‘It will be a pleasure.’

‘If only my nephew could be such a worthy opponent.’

‘Perhaps if I’d had a better teacher…’ Li responded, stung by his uncle’s rebuke.

‘You can teach anyone the rules,’ Old Yifu said. ‘But the intelligence to use them you must be born with.’ He started packing his chess pieces into their old cardboard box. ‘Anyway, I can’t afford to hang about here wasting time talking to you. I have a train to catch. And I’m going to be late.’ He winked at Margaret.

The uniformed officer unlocked the door and let them into Chao Heng’s apartment. There was that same, strange antiseptic smell as before, Li noticed. They walked around the bloodstain on the carpet, now ringed off by strips of white tape, and into the living room. ‘What is it you are looking for?’ he asked Margaret.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t really know. Like you, I just get the feeling that this whole case is about Chao Heng. I don’t know where the other two tie in, but they seem… incidental, somehow. There’s got to be something we are missing. Something we already know, or should know about him. Something here in this apartment, maybe. Something in the weird nature of his killing.’

Li had offered to run Old Yifu back to their apartment, but he had had his bike with him and said he had already packed and only needed to collect his bag. He would get a taxi to the station, which was just around the corner anyway.

The two had embraced, a strangely touching moment after all the friction there had been between them. They hardly spoke. ‘Tell Xiao Ling I send my love,’ Li had said.

On the drive over to Chao’s apartment, Li hadn’t said a word, his thoughts, she assumed, filled with concern for his sister and the mission his uncle had undertaken at the behest of his father. Now, at Chao’s apartment, he seemed moody and unfocused. Margaret knew only too well how difficult it could be sometimes to concentrate on work when personal problems preyed on your mind. She knew she needed to shift his brain back into gear. ‘So you think he was sitting out there on the balcony,’ she said, ‘waiting for his late-night caller?’ Li nodded. The bottle of beer and the cigarette ends in the ashtray were still there. ‘And the CD is where?’

He crossed the room to the mini hi-fi stack and saw that the forensics boys had forgotten to switch it off.

‘Do you want to put on the track that was playing?’

He shrugged and whizzed through the tracks to number nine and pressed Play. As the soprano’s voice soared through the apartment, Margaret wandered to the bookcase and ran her fingers along a line of books with familiar titles. Plant DNA Infectious Agents, Risk Assessment in Genetic Engineering, Plant Virology . Titles that had lined Michael’s bookshelves at home. The same titles that had seemed so alien to Li just twenty-four hours before. She slipped her hands into the neatly tailored pockets of her dress and moved out on to the balcony. She looked at the empty beer bottle, the pack of cigarettes, and wondered what he had lit them with. Then remembered the Zippo lighter among his effects. And something began happening in her mind, something spontaneous, a sequence of electrical sparks making connections that would never have occurred consciously. All that data that the brain holds in limbo, accessed by some pre-programmed instinct. She could taste the jian bing , the salty sweetness of the hoi sin , the burn of the chilli, the sharpness of the spring onion. And she saw Mei Yuan’s round, smiling face. She wheeled round to see where Li was. But he had left the room. She hurried into the hall and called his name. ‘In here,’ he said, and she went into the kitchen.