Peter May - The Firemaker

Her face was gleaming with excitement in the beam of the flashlight. Li’s mind was racing, assimilating what she had said. For a moment he closed his eyes to try to visualise what she had described. He saw very vividly the figure of a man retreating through the undergrowth. He was peeling the gloves from his hands as he went. He threw them as far as he could, then stopped suddenly, remembering the key. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then turned and threw it in the opposite direction, before hurrying off, away from the crackle of flame and smoke behind him. Li opened his eyes, and for a moment night turned to day, thunder crashed overhead, and the rain came down like rods, crashing through the leaves, turning dust to mud beneath their feet as they stood. Margaret’s face had been caught as if by a photographic flash, and the image of it was burned on to his eyes and remained there as he blinked to regain his night sight.

‘I mean, maybe it didn’t happen like that at all,’ Margaret said. ‘But it’s possible. Isn’t it? And if it did, then those gloves and that key are still here somewhere.’ She was having to shout now above the crashing of the rain. ‘Worth looking?’

‘Was he left- or right-handed?’

She frowned. ‘What?’

‘The killer. Can you tell? Maybe from the angle of the blow to Chao’s head?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not for certain. But if you wanted to go by the laws of probability, he would be right-handed. Why?’

‘It could affect the direction he threw the gloves and the key.’

‘So you think it’s possible?’

He nodded. ‘I think it’s possible.’

She grinned, and he wanted to kiss her right there and then, cup her face in his hands and press his lips to hers. The rain was streaming down her face now, her hair slicked back by the wet. The silk of her blouse clung to the contours of her breasts, nipples puckered and erect, pushing hard against the soft, wet material. She was still not wearing a bra. ‘You want to look now?’ she asked.

‘It’s raining!’ he laughed, incredulous. ‘And I should organise an official search.’

‘We’re wet already. And before you go calling out half the Beijing police force, it would help to justify it if you’d at least found a glove.’ She fumbled in her purse. ‘I’ve got a key-light in here somewhere.’ And she laughed. ‘Now that’s ironic, isn’t it? A key-light!’ She found it. ‘You take the right side, I’ll take the left. If we don’t find something in ten minutes you can call in the cavalry.’

And before he had time to object, she was off, pushing through the shrubbery, pointing a pencil-beam of light ahead of her. He shook his head. She was in her element. It was as if telling him her story in the tearoom had lifted an enormous burden from her. She hadn’t needed alcohol. She was as high as a kite. And he wondered what on earth he was doing there, soaked to the skin, scrabbling about in the bushes in the dark, in pursuit of something that was probably illusory, the creation of two overactive imaginations on an emotionally charged night.

He scrambled through the bushes to his right, scanning the ground with the flashlight. It had been dry for so long and the ground was baked so hard that the rain wasn’t draining away immediately. It lay in great pools, filling every dip and hollow. Another flash of sheet lightning lit up the park, reflected off every glistening branch and leaf. For a moment he thought he saw a figure darting through the trees, the briefest flickering movement, like half a dozen frames of an old black-and-white movie. He had lost his bearings. It must have been Margaret. He called out, but the rain was still deafening, and he couldn’t hear whether she had replied. He shook his head and wiped the rain from his eyes, and pushed on, swinging the beam of his flashlight from side to side. He went to check the time on his watch, but it wasn’t there, and he remembered breaking the chain earlier in the day. He must have been blundering around in the dark and wet for at least ten minutes by now, he thought. He turned, wondering which way it was back to the clearing. As he did, the beam of his flashlight caught the dark shape of something hanging in the branches of a bush. He swung the light back. It looked like a dead bird. He pushed through the undergrowth towards it, and as he reached out it fell to the ground. He crouched down and shone the lamp on it. It was a sodden leather glove. ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Margaret! I’ve found one.’ He heard her footsteps approaching from behind and turned as a fist smashed down into his face. The shock of it robbed him of his senses and he keeled over, blinking blood and rain out of his eyes. His flashlight clattered away into the bushes. He saw a dark shadow looming over him. And the fist smashed into his face again. And again. Hard. Brutally hard. His attacker was strong and very fast. He saw the fist draw back again and knew he could do nothing to stop it.

‘Li Yan?’ He heard Margaret’s voice above the drumming of the rain. ‘Li Yan, where are you?’

The fist paused and hung uncertainly for a moment, then unravelled into fingers and thumb, flying past him to the ground like some hawk diving on its prey. It retreated again, clutching the glove. Lightning and thunder were almost simultaneous this time, a deafening roar from directly overhead. And for the briefest of moments, Li and his attacker were frozen in the hard blue light, looking straight into each other’s eyes. And then darkness, and the man was gone, crashing off through the bushes, his image still burned into Li’s eyes, as Margaret’s had been earlier.

‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, where are you!’ He pulled himself to his knees, and then dragged himself to his feet. Margaret’s pencil-beam of light flashed in his face. He heard her gasp. ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’

The lake and the pavilion were thrown into sharp relief by floodlights raised on stands among the trees. The random cycle of flashing lights on police vehicles and ambulance reflected in rippling patterns on the water. The crackle of police radios filled the night air, competing with the cicadas that had started up again as soon as the rain stopped. Li sat side-on in the driver’s seat of the Jeep, the door open wide, as a medic patched up his face: a split lip, a bloody nose — broken, Margaret thought — a bruised and swelling cheek, and an inch-long split on his left brow that required two stitches.

Margaret watched from the lakeside as Detective Qian organised uniformed officers into groups, dividing and subdividing the immediate territory into quadrants for searching on hands and knees, inch by inch. She checked the time. It was twenty-five to midnight. It was cooler after the rain, a slight breeze stirring the leaves. Her hair and clothes were virtually dry. The ground, parched after weeks of drought, had soaked up all the rainwater, and it was hard to believe now that there had been a deluge less than an hour before. Margaret glanced at Li and felt another pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for her, if he hadn’t indulged her insistence on searching for the gloves by themselves in the pouring rain.

Qian detached himself from the search groups and crossed to Li as the medic finished up. He looked at his boss’s battered face in awe. ‘He made some mess of you, boss.’

‘You want to see the mess I made of his hand,’ Li said grimly.

Qian chuckled. ‘Good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’ Li glared at him and his smiled faded. ‘So why do you think he attacked you?’

‘Because I’d found one of the gloves,’ Li growled.

‘And you think that’s what he was doing here? He’d come back to look for them?’