Peter May - The Firemaker

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe he’d followed us. One thing’s for sure. When he saw us searching the undergrowth he worked out pretty damn quick what we were up to. And now he’s got at least one of the gloves, maybe both of them, and maybe the key as well, if it was ever there.’

‘Hell, boss, why didn’t you just call in a search when you thought of all this, instead of scratching about in the dark and the rain on your own?’ He glanced off towards Margaret. ‘Well, almost on your own.’ He turned back to Li and saw a warning look in his eyes, and decided to back off. ‘I’ll just get these guys started,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the uniforms. And he headed off shouting out instructions.

Li lit a cigarette and looked up as Margaret approached. ‘Don’t tell me it’s bad for my health,’ he said. ‘It can’t do me nearly as much damage as being around you.’ He smiled wryly and winced at the pain. ‘You should have a health warning stamped on your forehead.’

But his attempt at humour only served to deepen her sense of guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this is all my fault.’

Li said, ‘You didn’t murder three people, then come into a park and assault a police officer. How can it be your fault?’

‘Because you wouldn’t have been in the park in the first place. And you certainly wouldn’t have been stumbling about the bushes in the rain trying to find a needle in a haystack.’

‘But I found the needle,’ he said. ‘At least, one of them.’

‘And then lost it again.’

He glanced at her anxiously, hesitating for a moment. ‘What do you think he was doing here? The man who attacked me.’

‘Looking for the same thing as us.’

‘Why didn’t he do that last night?’

She stopped and thought about it, and then frowned and looked at him, concerned. ‘You think he followed us here?’ He inclined his head a little to one side and raised an eyebrow. He did not want to commit himself. ‘Because if he did, that means he’s been watching us.’ And a shiver raised goose bumps on her arms. ‘That’s creepy. Why would he do that?’

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s monitoring our progress. If we get too close to him, or to the truth, he’ll intervene. Like he did tonight.’

Margaret felt the hairs rise up on the back of her neck, and she glanced around the dark perimeter beyond the ring of light, wondering if somewhere out there he was still watching. ‘Did you see his face at all?’ she asked.

‘For a moment,’ Li said. ‘In the lightning flash.’ He could still see the face vividly in his mind’s eye, pale, tinged with blue like the face of a corpse, contorted with fear and… anger. Yes, that was what it had been, anger. But why, Li wondered, had he been angry? With himself, perhaps? For having made the mistake with the gloves in the first place?

‘Would you know him again?’

‘I don’t know. He had the face of a devil. It was like looking at death. He didn’t seem human, somehow.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

And Margaret realised in that moment that Li had thought he was going to die. He had been caught unawares and beaten to the ground with a fist like steel. Lying dazed and helpless in the mud, his attacker looming over him, he had believed that the man would kill him. What had stopped him? Had it really just been her voice calling through the rain? What could she have done? He could just as easily have killed her. But then, she realised, for a professional killer he was behaving uncharacteristically. On impulse. None of it had been planned. He had been responding to the moment, trying to correct or cover up an equally uncharacteristic mistake made nearly forty-eight hours earlier. Perhaps her voice had simply brought him to his senses and he had retreated into the night to lick his wounds. For that was what he was like, she thought. A wounded animal. A professional killer who had made one small mistake, and then compounded it. And that made him extremely dangerous.

A uniformed officer arrived in a police car and got out with a carrier bag of fresh clothes for Li — jeans and trainers and a white shirt, collected from his apartment. Li changed in the back of the Jeep. ‘I should take you back to the hotel,’ he called to Margaret.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘All dried off now.’ She ran her hands back through her hair to untangle the mass of curls. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t sleep, wondering if they’d found anything.’ She was beginning to doubt that she would ever sleep again. ‘How long do you think they will take?’

Li climbed out of the back of the Jeep and glanced up the slope to where police floodlights had turned night into day. Teams of officers were working their way through the bushes, inch by meticulous inch, calling to one another above the thrum of the generator and the screeching of the cicadas. ‘It’s not such a big space to cover. A couple of hours maybe. If they find nothing, we’ll leave armed guards and bring in fresh teams tomorrow to extend the search area.’ He was glad she wanted to stay, not just because he wanted to be with her, but because after the events of tonight he was afraid for her. Afraid of unseen eyes watching them, tracking them. The investigation had become dangerous, and he knew that from tomorrow he would have to sever her connection with it.

As he lit another cigarette, there was a shout from the top of the slope. He threw the cigarette away and ran up the path as a young officer emerged from the undergrowth holding up a single glove with a pair of plastic tongs. So the killer hadn’t got both gloves. Li derived a momentary satisfaction from that. Qian got the officer to drop the glove in a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. He handed it to Li. ‘Look familiar?’

‘I don’t know. I only saw the other one for a few seconds.’ He looked at it closely. It was a plain brown leather glove with a brushed cotton lining, still damp from the rain and stiffening as it dried.

Margaret appeared at his shoulder. ‘May I take a look?’ He handed it to her, and she examined it closely through the clear plastic. ‘There,’ she said, and teased out a maker’s label that had curled up at the seam just inside the open end. She squinted at it in the light. ‘ Made in Hong Kong ,’ she read. ‘And there, just inside the thumb…’ She folded out a small, dark stain for him to see. ‘Could be blood.’ She turned the glove over. ‘It hasn’t been worn much.’

‘How do you know?’ Li asked.

‘Leather stretches with wear, takes on the shape of your hand. This looks as if it’s not long off the peg. See, there’s barely been any pull at the stitching. They were probably custom-bought for the job.’

‘In Hong Kong?’

‘That’s where they were made. They’re expensive gloves. Probably not widely available in China. If at all. But you’d know more about that than me.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. He took the bag and handed it back to Qian, and they had a brief exchange. Margaret followed him back down the slope to the Jeep. ‘What now?’

‘The glove’ll go straight back to the lab for forensic examination. And we’ll wait until they find the key. Or not.’ He lit a cigarette and looked at her apprasingly. ‘You were right about the gloves. Let’s hope you were right about the key as well.’

It was nearly half past midnight when the shout came that they had been waiting for. The key had been nestling in among the roots of a small shrub, about thirty feet from where they had found the glove. Li looked at it excitedly in its small plastic bag, brought to him out of a glare of floodlights by a triumphant Detective Qian. If luck was on their side, it could turn out to be the key to a great deal more than Chao Heng’s stair gate. He turned to find Margaret, eyes gleaming, looking at the key as he held it up. He wanted to kiss her. He would never have had the thought that had led them to find it. She used the same thought processes he did. Visualised things, it seemed, in the same way. But she had made a leap of imagination that would not have occurred to him. A wild and unlikely leap in the dark. So unlikely that even if he’d had the thought he would probably have dismissed it. Perhaps she was less afraid of being wrong than he was.