Peter May - The Firemaker

After a while she made a little sigh and withdrew her hand from his, searching again for another tissue in her purse. But she couldn’t find one. ‘Do I look awful?’ she said.

‘No more than usual.’ He smiled.

She returned the smile, but it was watery and wounded. ‘I think I could do with a drink,’ she said. ‘Something a little stronger than tea.’

Outside, the dark night was filled with a sense of anticipation. The rain was so close you could almost touch it. Families still filled the spaces on the sidewalk and under the trees, but were subdued now, children curled up on mothers’ knees, card games in suspended animation. The men sat and smoked in silence; the hot wind of earlier had stilled, and their cigarette smoke rose in undisturbed columns. Dust and humidity hung in the air, turned blue by floodlights on a building site across the avenue. Great yellow cranes stood silently overhead, waiting for the first drops to come. The road was thick with traffic moving in long, slow columns. Cicadas were screaming in the trees. Everyone and everything, it seemed, was waiting for the rain.

Li and Margaret walked slowly east along the sidewalk past brightly lit barber shops, small stores selling shoes and underwear and throwing great rectangular slabs of light out into the darkness. The sounds of washing-up in restaurant kitchens came from open windows up narrow alleys. Li’s hand engulfed hers and she was happy to leave it there, comforted by its warmth and strength. He knew a bar, he said, at Xidan. They could get a drink there. They walked in silence, his mind full of what she had emptied from hers. And she was happy not to think of anything, to have her mind filled by nothing; no regrets, no sadness, no pain. They passed a small shop whose speciality was shoe repair and key-cutting, its window giving on to a workshop where an old man in greasy overalls sweated over a last. Rows of key blanks hung on rods beside the cutting machine.

Margaret stopped, her hand slipping from his. He turned to see her face etched in concentration as she stared in the window. He looked to see what she saw, and saw nothing but the old man at the last and the key blanks on rods. ‘What is it?’

The clouds had rolled back from her eyes and they shone brightly in the light from the shop. ‘The key,’ she said. ‘The key to the stair gate. The killer must have used it to unlock the gate, right? Whether he locked it behind him or not is unimportant. What’s important is he didn’t leave it in the lock or drop it on the floor. He must have put it in his pocket.’

For Li, this had come straight out of left-field, catching him on the blind-side. ‘Hey, wait. Slow down,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Can we go to the park?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s pitch dark. And it’ll be locked up.’

‘That didn’t stop the killer getting in.’ Her eyes were burning now with a strange intensity. ‘Please, Li Yan. This could be important.’

She wouldn’t discuss it further as they took a taxi back to Section One to pick up a car and a flashlight. She might be wrong, she said. She wanted to walk him through it at the scene. There, it would either make sense or not. He didn’t press her.

They drove through the deserted streets of the Ritan legation area, streetlamps smothered by trees, embassy lights twinkling behind high walls and shut gates. In Guanghua Road, alive in the day with street traders and hawkers of every description, the gates to the park were also closed, locked and forbidding. The park lay brooding in the darkness beyond.

‘This is crazy,’ Li said. ‘Can’t it wait till the morning?’

‘No.’ Margaret jumped out of the Jeep and started climbing the gate. ‘Come on,’ she called. ‘It’s not difficult. And bring the flashlight.’

Li sighed and did as he was told. He wondered if he would have indulged her in this behaviour had it not been for her confession of just an hour before, or if she had not aroused in him such intense feelings of… of what? He had no idea. He had never felt like this before.

He climbed the gate easily and dropped down on the other side to join her. A long, straight avenue lined by trees and park benches cut north into the darkness. As they moved further into the park, away from the streetlights, he switched on his flashlight to lead her through the maze of paths that would take them to the lake.

The park, so open and friendly during the day, dappled by sunlight, and filled with the peace of people seeking solitude or relaxation, seemed oddly menacing in the dark — the rustle of night animals in the undergrowth, the eerie call of an owl, the splash of something landing in water as they neared the lake. The sweet scent of pine filled the hot night air, and the willows hung limp and lifeless, trailing their leaves along the edges of the still water. Li’s flashlight picked out the bridge to the pavilion, reflected white in the black water. ‘This way.’ He took her hand and led her round the east side of the lake to the dusty path that led up to the clearing where the twins and their baby-sitter had stumbled upon the blazing body of Chao Heng less than forty-eight hours before. A length of yellow tape was stretched between two stakes to keep the public out. Li stepped over it, and Margaret followed him up to the clearing. A line of chalk still ringed the crime scene, glowing white in the glare of the flashlight. A charred area remained in the centre of the clearing, but the smell of burning had long ago been replaced by the pungent spice of spruce and locust. But there was a desolate and haunted feel about the place, bled of all colour, monochrome in the harsh electric light. There was a sudden and unexpected flash in the sky, followed a few moments later by the not very distant rumble of thunder. The first fat drops of rain started falling, forming tiny craters in the dust.

‘Better make it quick,’ Li said. ‘We’re going to get soaked.’

But Margaret was oblivious. She walked carefully around the clearing, pulling at the shrubs around its perimeter, stopping finally, facing the path they had come up on the other side. Li had tracked her round with the beam of the flashlight. ‘He was wearing gloves, right?’ she said.

Li nodded acquiescence. ‘He didn’t leave any prints — in the apartment or on the gasoline can. He must have been.’

‘Okay. So he got Chao here in the dark. He sat and smoked a single cigarette, and waited for daylight. The kids found the blazing body when…?’

‘Around six thirty.’

‘So the park had been open for about half an hour?’ Li nodded. ‘He poured gasoline all over Chao and struck a match. He wanted the body to be found still ablaze. Why? A macabre sense of theatre, perhaps; or maybe to create a diversion in which he could walk away unnoticed.’ She turned around. ‘He retreats this way, through the undergrowth, right? Because nobody saw him leave by the path the twins came up.’ She plunged through the shrubs and bushes, away from the clearing. Li hurried after her. ‘He’s going to come out on a path somewhere away over there,’ she called back, waving her hand vaguely into the darkness. The rain was still falling in single fat drops that they could have counted had they so desired. Another flash, the thunder nearer this time. ‘But he’s not going to walk away unnoticed wearing a pair of gloves, is he? Not on a sticky hot summer morning. He could have put them in his pockets, but suppose something went wrong and he got stopped.’ She pushed on through the undergrowth. Li followed. ‘Some quirk of fate. The alarm gets raised sooner than he thought. There’s a cop at the gate who stops anyone leaving. The killer doesn’t want to be found with a pair of gloves in his pocket, a pair of gloves stained with gasoline, maybe blood. So he throws them away, somewhere far away into the undergrowth.’ She mimicked the action. ‘What does it matter if they get found. There’s no way to trace them back to him. Then he remembers something. Damn! He’s still got the key to the stair gate at Chao’s apartment in his pocket. Now, that could tie him to his victim if he got stopped. It’s a long shot, but this guy doesn’t take any chances. He’ll have left his gun hidden in his vehicle. He’s meticulous. He’s a professional. And here’s a loose end. So he hurls the key away into the undergrowth after the gloves. Nobody’s ever going to find it. Hell, nobody’s even going to look. And nobody would know what it was anyway. Just a key. So he doesn’t worry about the fact that he’s not wearing gloves, and that his fingerprints are going to be on it.’