Peter May - The Firemaker

Li opened his eyes and realised he had broken out in a sweat. He had never encountered such brutal and unfettered evil, and he wanted to catch it and stamp it out of existence. He turned towards the door and saw Yongli hurrying into the detectives’ office. There was a strange, forlorn look about his friend, almost haunted. Li was surprised to see him. He had never come to the office before. Li went through. ‘Hey, pal, what are you doing here?’ He saw now that Yongli’s face was a dreadful pasty colour, and there were deep, dark rings below his eyes.

‘I need your help, Big Li.’ He sounded pathetic. Like a small boy who knows that the favour he’s about to ask of a parent will be denied.

‘What is it? Are you in some kind of trouble?’ Li had never seen Yongli like this before.

‘It’s Lotus.’

And Li’s heart sank. He should have guessed. Yongli, he knew, could cope with just about anything life threw at him. But Lotus… ‘What’s she done?’

‘She’s been arrested.’

Qian appeared at the door, a little breathless. He made a face and nodded down the corridor. ‘The Chief’s decided to sit in on this one, boss. I think he’s getting a bit impatient.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Li said. He turned to Yongli. ‘Listen, it’ll have to wait. I’ve got a meeting.’

But Yongli behaved as if he hadn’t heard. He said, ‘When we left your apartment this morning we went back to the Xanadu. The cops raided the place just before five. Some kind of vice sweep. We all got taken downtown.’

‘Ma Yongli, I don’t have time just now.’ Li started for the door and Yongli followed him.

‘They found drugs in her bag. Heroin. She says she has no idea how it got there.’

‘They always do,’ Li said, losing patience. It bore out all his worst fears about Lotus. He turned down the corridor, Yongli trailing in his wake.

‘I believe her, Li Yan. She’s not into drugs. Never has been. But they’ve arrested her. She could get sent down for years. Hell, they shoot people for less!’

Li stopped outside the door of the meeting room and turned on his friend. ‘Look, I told you she was trouble. Right from the start. I mean, what do you expect me to do? I’ve got a triple murder on my hands, a room full of detectives waiting on me. And you want me to drop everything and bale out some whore with a bagful of smack?’ He regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth.

Colour rose on Yongli’s pale cheeks and his eyes turned cold. ‘Whatever you think of Lotus, it’s me who’s asking for help. I thought we were friends, Li Yan. Or was that just some silly delusion I had?’

‘Look, don’t do this to me,’ Li pleaded. ‘You know as well as I do that she’ll have been pulled in by another section. I wouldn’t have any influence…’

‘So you won’t do anything?’

The door of the meeting room opened and Chen stood there looking at them. ‘Deputy Section Chief Li,’ he said very deliberately. ‘I have a meeting in thirty minutes.’

‘On my way in, Chief,’ Li said. ‘Two seconds.’

‘Will that be earth seconds?’ Chen asked, and he let the door swing shut without waiting for an answer.

Li drew a deep breath and turned back to Yongli. ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do, okay?’

Yongli looked at him sceptically. ‘Yeah, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Anything to get me off your back.’

‘Aw, come on,’ Li snapped. ‘Give me a break. I said I’d do what I could.’

There was contempt mixed with the hurt now in Yongli’s eyes. ‘I won’t be holding my breath.’ He turned and walked briskly away down the corridor. Li felt like a complete shit. He screwed up his eyes and exhaled through his teeth. Yongli deserved better than that. And he thought about how good Lotus had been last night with Margaret. He would make some enquiries. First chance he got. He wheeled around and walked into the meeting room.

A dozen detectives and Section Chief Chen sat around the table waiting for him. A veil of smoke hung over the group like a cloud, reflecting Chen’s mood. ‘Sorry to keep you,’ Li said. He sat down and lit up. ‘You’ve all got copies of the stuff from Hong Kong.’ He pulled out the facsimile image of Johnny Ren. ‘Take a good look at this face,’ he said. ‘He’s our killer. I expect to have full forensic confirmation by lunch-time. But I have no doubts that he is our man. He’s very good, and he’s very dangerous. And he’s still here in Beijing. Or, at least, he was last night.’ He rubbed his bruising ruefully. ‘I want this face on the front page of every newspaper in China by tomorrow morning. I want it on every news bulletin on every TV station. I want his face faxed to every police station, railway station, border post. This man is armed and dangerous. I want us to brief the armed police, the border police, the transport police, and the army. I don’t want him to be able to move from A to B without someone recognising him. I want us to check every hotel and hostel and guest-house in the city. He’s got to be sleeping somewhere. Someone’s seen him. Someone knows where he is. It can only be a matter of time. Detective Qian, I want you to co-ordinate this.’

Wu leaned back in his seat, cigarette hand dangling from the arm of his chair. His sunglasses were pushed up on his forehead and he was chewing reflectively on a ubiquitous piece of gum. ‘We still haven’t established motive on this one, boss, have we?’

‘Money,’ Li said. ‘He’s a professional. Probably thinks of himself as a poor boy made good. The truth is, he’s a bad boy made worse. What we don’t know is who hired him, or why. And when we get him I doubt if he’s going to tell us.’

‘So meantime we carry on trying to find the connection between our three victims?’ Wu asked.

‘Unless you’ve got a better idea.’ Wu hadn’t. ‘So, anything new on that front?’ Heads were shaken around the table. ‘Okay, we carry on interviewing. But there is one new piece of potentially important evidence. Chao may have had AIDS. I expect the result of a blood test to confirm that today. We know he had a penchant for teenage boys. Until yesterday afternoon we’d been concentrating on trying to make a drugs connection between Chao and Mao Mao. Thanks to our good friend, The Needle, we’ve been able to eliminate that possibility from our inquiry.’ Detectives around the table glanced at Chen, but he remained impassive. ‘Maybe there’s a gay link somewhere in all this. Someone with AIDS looking for revenge. I know there’s been no suggestion of homosexuality with either our drug dealer or the itinerant. But then, we haven’t been looking for it. So, I’m going to have AIDS tests done on blood samples taken from both of them. Zhao’ — he turned towards the young detective — ‘we need to start digging up the boys who were making regular visits to Chao’s apartment. And if someone was supplying them, then we need to know who, and we want to talk to him pretty damn quick.’

‘I’m on it straight away, boss.’ Zhao scribbled quickly in his notebook.

‘Okay.’ Li sat back. ‘Any thoughts, questions, ideas?’

Wu blew a jet of smoke lazily at the overhead fan and watched it scatter in the breeze. ‘Yeah, I got a question,’ he said. ‘Is that attractive American pathologist still working on the case with us?’ His colleagues choked back laughs of disbelief. ‘Because, I mean, you know, boss, it’s not fair you keeping her all to yourself. Some of us feel we could also benefit from her experience.’ He remained deadpan, for all the world as if it had been a serious question.

Chen had a face like sour milk. Li said, ‘Actually, Detective, I think you would probably benefit more from a couple of years’ experience on traffic duty in Tiananmen Square.’ Which allowed the others to release their pent-up laughter. ‘You and I can take shift about.’ More laughter. Li glanced at Chen, on whose face had appeared the faintest glimmer of a smile. ‘And in answer to your question, Wu, Dr Campbell will no longer be assisting us with the inquiry.’ He closed his folder. ‘That’s all just now, unless there’s anything else?’ There wasn’t. ‘Okay, let’s go catch Johnny Ren.’