Peter May - The Firemaker

‘Is there anything missing?’ Chen asked.

‘I don’t know. I’m going to have to go through everything on my desk.’

None of his detectives could say whether Ren had been carrying anything when he left Li’s office. ‘We just thought he was someone from downstairs in Administration,’ Wu said. ‘No one paid him any attention.’

Li slammed the door of his office shut and stood seething. He looked around the room and felt sick. It was tainted somehow, dirty, violated. Johnny Ren was either supremely confident, or he was insane. Probably both. He clearly had complete contempt for the police.

Li sat down and searched through the papers on his desk. As far as he could see nothing was missing, but so much had been dumped on it during the last two days he wasn’t sure himself exactly what was there. He looked around. Everything in the room seemed in its usual place. The dozens of transcripts piled under the window looked just as they had earlier. He went through the drawers. Pens, notepads, an address book, paper-clips, a stapler, old reports from his predecessor which he had meant to clear out, a pack of chewing gum, some letters. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. What on earth had Johnny Ren been after? And why would he risk walking into the lion’s den? What possible motive could he have had?

There was a tentative knock on the door and Zhao appeared nervously. ‘Sorry to disturb you, boss. While you were out there was a call from the Deputy Procurator General’s office. Apparently the DPG is concerned that the report he received this morning didn’t include the events of last night — in Ritan Park.’

Li closed his eyes. ‘Shit!’ How the hell had Deputy Procurator General Zeng got to hear about that already? Li hadn’t felt inclined to revise his report of yesterday’s developments at one in the morning. Now he was paying for it. He strode to the door. Zhao backed out of his way. ‘Qian,’ he barked. ‘You written up last night’s report?’

Qian said, ‘Just finished, boss.’

‘All right, get it copied and have a courier standing by to get it down to the Municipal Procuratorate. I’ll do a cover piece for it now.’

He cursed to himself, banged the door shut and dropped into his chair. He reached for his notebook, then hesitated. If he called the Centre of Material Evidence Determination now he might get the results of the AIDS test. If that went with the report it might mollify Zeng a little to be in receipt of the day’s most recent developments. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get him Professor Xie. As he waited he ran through in his mind a summary of where they were at, for his report to Zeng: they had ruled out a drugs connection between the three murders, but with the possibility that Chao had AIDS they were running the rule over a possible homosexual link; they had, almost certainly, identified the killer, a freelance Triad hit-man from Hong Kong known as Johnny Ren, who was still at large in Beijing and, apparently, anxious to establish just how close the police were getting to him. ‘This is Professor Xie.’ The voice in his ear tore him away from his thoughts.

‘Professor, it’s Deputy Section Chief Li. Can you give me any idea when we might expect the result of the AIDS test?’

‘What AIDS test is that, Deputy Section Chief?’

Li frowned. ‘On Chao’s blood. Dr Campbell requested it yesterday.’

‘Not from me.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Li was caught off balance. ‘She told me she spoke to you some time after seven yesterday evening.’

‘I’m afraid not. And, unfortunately, such a test is no longer possible. Chao’s remains were incinerated this morning, along with all the samples.’

‘What?’ Li could not believe what he was hearing. ‘That body was evidence. You don’t go around destroying evidence in a murder investigation.’

There was a long hesitation on the other end of the line. When he eventually spoke, there was a strange quality to the professor’s voice. ‘I understand his family did not wish to be in receipt of the remains.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it. Chao’s body was the property of the Chinese people until we decided otherwise.’

‘My department had authorisation to release the body for disposal.’

‘From who?’

‘I’m sorry, Deputy Section Chief, I’ll have to go. I’m in the middle of an autopsy.’ The professor hung up.

Li sat holding the receiver for fully half a minute before eventually replacing it. Something was very, very wrong here. His hand went instinctively to his belt, searching for the leather pouch that held his watch. It wasn’t there. ‘Damn.’ He remembered breaking the chain yesterday. Where had he put it? Top right-hand drawer. He opened it. There was no sign of the watch. He reached right into the back of the drawer. It definitely wasn’t there. He ran quickly through the other drawers. Still no watch. He hadn’t noticed its absence when he was searching the drawers earlier, because he hadn’t remembered it was there. Now he felt all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. For some unfathomable reason Johnny Ren must have taken it.

Margaret cycled without thinking, grim and determined, letting the city wash over her as she headed north through meandering, chaotic streets. She was hot and tired and angry and hurt, and thinking was a painful process. If she kept her mind empty, her feelings remained at bay, and she was able to effect a temporary escape from the world. But she could not escape China. At least, not yet. Her flight did not leave until the morning.

As she had crossed campus to get a taxi back to her hotel after her face-down with Bob, she had spotted Lily and taken a minor diversion. Lily had seen her coming, her face reddening, in spite of herself. Margaret kept it short and sweet, an exotic blend of profanities which would have made her mother blush. Even her father, an expert in the use of colourful language, would have been shocked. But whatever satisfaction Margaret had gained from her verbal castigation of the self-important former Red Guard, it was short-lived. She had lain down on the bed when she got back to her hotel and wept for nearly an hour. A hot shower had failed to ease her tension headache. A phone call to the airline office had achieved a rescheduled return flight for the following morning. There would be a considerable additional charge, the girl had told her. She didn’t care, Margaret had told her back.

Now, with a map and a guidebook in the basket of her bicycle, she was seeking an escape from the city, the opportunity for some solitude, time to sort out her feelings away from the chance of interruption. She passed the Beijing offices of Apple Computers, choking on the fumes that belched from the back of a diesel truck. She had been cycling for almost three-quarters of an hour, and didn’t appear to have made much impression on the route she had planned on the map. The streets always seemed so much longer in reality than they did on paper.

After another twenty minutes, negotiating busy street markets and crowds of lunch-time cyclists, she came to a major north— south — east — west intersection and saw, diagonally across the street, the gates of Yuanmingyuan Park, the Park of Perfection and Brightness. But there was nothing very perfect about the park. It was dusty and neglected, a shabby shadow of the royal playground it had once been during the middle years of the Qing Dynasty. Then, its rolling parkland had been filled with gilded halls, towers and pavilions, its centrepiece a collection of European-style marble palaces modelled on the French Sun King’s Palace of Versailles — an early experiment in the art of the joint venture. Sacked twice within forty years by British and French troops at the end of the nineteenth century, all that remained of it now were a few white marble skeletons and some weed-choked lily ponds.