Peter May - The Firemaker

‘Mei Yuan’s riddle,’ she said.

He looked at her blankly. ‘What about it?’

She shook her head in frustration. ‘It’s just a thought process. Bear with me.’ She fought for the words. ‘The man with the two sticks. If he was going to burn the books, he would do it for a reason, right?’

‘To destroy them.’

‘Exactly. So the keeper of the books couldn’t access them. He would have no way of knowing what was in them.’

Li shrugged. ‘So?’

‘So why set Chao Heng on fire?’

‘To make it look like suicide.’

‘No. That’s incidental. I did an autopsy once on the burned body of a woman pulled from a car wreck. Turned out she had a bullet in her. And that’s what killed her. The guy who’d shot her put her in the car, set it on fire and ran it off the road. He was trying to hide the fact that he’d shot her. He thought maybe the evidence would be destroyed in the fire.’ She ran her hands back through her hair. ‘You see what I’m saying?’

Li thought about it. ‘You think the killer was trying to destroy evidence?’ He paused. ‘Evidence of what? Chao hadn’t been shot, or stabbed, or had his neck broken. He had a bump on his head and sedative in his blood. If the object of the exercise was to try and hide that by burning him, it wasn’t very successful, was it?’

Margaret’s mind was racing. But it was racing in circles. ‘No,’ she had to concede. ‘No, it wasn’t.’ She felt as if she had held something precious and elusive in her grasp for just a moment, and then lost it again. And now it was like some half-remembered face that lurks in the memory somewhere just beyond recall. ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ she said, deflated. ‘There’s something there. Why don’t you take me on a guided tour of this place? In fact, why don’t we retrace events, just as you think they happened?’

‘What for?’

‘For another perspective. Something you’ve already seen that I might see differently. Something you might see differently second time around.’

He was not convinced, but he shrugged and said, ‘Okay.’

So they put on Samson and Delilah again and went on to the balcony. Margaret sat in Chao’s seat, from where she had a view of the compound below. She had been tossing and turning in her hotel bed trying to sleep when Chao had been sitting here, she realised. It had all been less than forty-eight hours ago. He had still been alive when she arrived in China.

‘He would have seen the lights of the car coming in,’ Li said. ‘The elevator was off, so he would have gone downstairs to let his visitor in.’

‘Let’s do it.’

They crossed the living room and Li put the CD on pause.

‘We’ll be back up in a few minutes,’ he told the officer in the hall.

They went into the stairwell and down five flights. The gate at the foot of the stairs was locked. ‘Don’t you have the key?’ Margaret asked, irritated.

‘No. The killer must have taken it to unlock the gate on the way out with Chao.’

‘And locked it behind him?’ It seemed unlikely, somehow.

‘Perhaps. It was locked when we got here yesterday. But it could have been locked by one of the other residents if they found it open in the morning.’

They craned to see round the wall of the lift shaft, but it effectively blocked off their view of the lobby and the main door. ‘So Chao wouldn’t have seen his visitor until he was right at the gate,’ Margaret said. ‘Wouldn’t have seen him crossing the lobby and got alarmed when it wasn’t who he was expecting.’

‘Hold on. I think I might have made a mistake there,’ Li said suddenly. ‘I assumed that Chao was expecting someone else and that his killer was unknown to him. But if it was someone he already knew, a new supplier maybe, or someone he believed might provide him with young boys, there would be no reason for the killer to tip his hand at that stage.’

‘And if Chao knew him he would probably have invited him up,’ Margaret said.

‘So he didn’t have to be forced up the stairs at gunpoint.’ Li began to think there might be virtue in this exercise after all. How often had his uncle told him that the answer almost always lay in the detail.

They went back up the stairs and into the apartment, stopping by the bloodstain on the hall carpet. ‘The killer wasn’t going to hang around making polite conversation,’ Margaret said. ‘It looks like he hit him on the head as soon as they got in. The size of the contusion and fracture would be consistent with your idea that he might have used the barrel of his gun. And he would have injected him with the ketamine straight away. He couldn’t know just how hard he had hit Chao, or how long he would be unconscious. He would have pulled off his left shoe, stripped back the sock and followed Chao’s well-worn needle path into the bloodstream. So either he knew him well, or had been very thorough in his research. He pulled the sock back up and replaced the shoe. Then what?’

‘He waited,’ Li said.

‘Why?’

‘He would have some time to kill before dawn. Safer to wait here than in the park.’

‘Okay. But he needed to be in the park with Chao by sun-up.’

‘Is it not true that the darkest hour is just before the dawn?’ Li asked.

‘I guess it is,’ Margaret conceded. ‘And I’ve had plenty of opportunity to put it to the test the last couple of nights.’ She thought for a moment. ‘So he left, with Chao, some time between three and four a.m. In time to get him into the park under cover of darkness and be there when it opened. How did he get him down the stairs?’

‘Probably over his shoulder.’

‘Down five flights? This guy must have been pretty fit. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. He could have spent up to two hours in the apartment, right? Would he not have left some trace? Had a coffee, gone for a pee, smoked a cigarette?’

Li shrugged. ‘My guess is he would wear gloves. He wouldn’t have a coffee or a cigarette, because he’s a professional. If he had a pee, it’s long gone.’

‘I’d still like to look around,’ Margaret said.

They spent nearly fifteen minutes going through the apartment room by room, finding nothing, before finally entering the bathroom. It was as dirty as Li remembered it. The creams and ointments in half-squeezed tubes, the bloodstained safety razor, the spattered mirror above the sink. The used towels still lay over the side of the bath, but were dry now. Margaret opened the bathroom cabinet. ‘Jesus,’ she said, and lifted out the plastic tubs and bottles of pills. She looked at Li. ‘Do you know what this stuff is?’

He shook his head. ‘The man was sick.’

‘He sure was.’ She rattled a bottle at him. ‘Epivir. Or 3TC as it’s known. A reverse transcriptase inhibitor. You know what that is?’

‘No idea.’

‘Reverse transcriptase is an enzyme that helps replicate DNA.’ She shook one of the plastic tubs and the pills inside rattled like dried beans. ‘Crixivan. A protease inhibitor, another enzyme involved in replication.’ She picked up another bottle. ‘And AZT. Well, there’s hardly anyone in the West who hasn’t heard of that.’

He was still in the dark.

‘Taken simultaneously, these three comprise the triple drug therapy that’s now being used to combat HIV. They act to prevent the virus from replicating.’ She paused. ‘Looks like our friend Mr Chao had AIDS.’

The elevator man watched them with the same intense curiosity on the way down as he had on the way up. He was irritated by the fact that they were speaking English and he had no idea what they were saying.

In his mind, Li was warming to Margaret’s idea that Chao had been burned to try to hide something. ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that Chao could have been set on fire to try and disguise the fact that he had AIDS?’