Peter May - The Firemaker

He kept his eyes ahead of him as he circumnavigated the station, turning east at the junction into Chongwenmen Dong Street. He wanted to tell her it was because he needed to be close to her, that he didn’t want to leave her, that just her presence, her scent, in his apartment was worth all the wrath that he knew would pour down on him from above. He said, ‘With Johnny Ren on the loose I was concerned for your safety.’

‘Oh,’ she said, somehow disappointed that there wasn’t more to it. ‘And is that what you told your boss?’

Li nodded. ‘He wasn’t impressed.’

Margaret bridled. ‘You know, that’s what gets me about this whole disapproval thing. I spent the night in your apartment, entirely innocently. But they don’t believe it. There’s something prurient about the whole lot of them.’

Li smiled. ‘And when people think you are guilty, you might as well have had the pleasure of committing the crime.’

Margaret turned and looked at him curiously. ‘Pleasure?’

But still he kept his eyes on the road. ‘It’s a pity we’ll never know.’ After a moment he glanced across, but she had turned away again and he could not gauge her reaction. In fact, her heart was pounding. Was he really expressing regret that they had not slept together? Certainly, it was characteristically oblique, although paradoxically it was also uncharacteristically direct. She wanted to grab his face and tell him to say what he meant, express what he felt. But she realised that she had done neither herself. Why was it so difficult? But, of course, she knew. It was fear. Her fear of involving herself in a relationship with no future, especially when she was still so raw from the last one. His fear of involving himself in any kind of relationship. She suspected that his career had predominated for so long he had forgotten how to be with a woman.

They turned off Xihuashi Street and into the compound overlooked by the apartment block where Chao had lived. Li parked the Jeep in the shade of the trees and Margaret followed him to the door of Chairwoman Liu Xinxin’s ground-floor apartment. Liu Xinxin answered the door cautiously, glaring at Li for a moment until recognition dawned.

‘Detective Li,’ she said. And then she stared inquisitively at Margaret.

‘Chairwoman Liu, this is Dr Campbell, an American pathologist who is helping with our inquiry. Do you speak English?’

Liu Xinxin’s face lit up. ‘Oh, yes. But I am slow now. I no get much practice.’ She held out a hand to Margaret. ‘Am very please meet you, Doctah Cambo.’

Margaret shook her hand. ‘It is my pleasure.’

‘Please to come in.’ She led Li and Margaret into her living room. Her two grandsons were squatting on the carpet playing with a toy steam locomotive crudely carved in wood and painted by hand. They gawped at Margaret in awe. ‘Tea?’ Liu Xinxin asked.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Li said. ‘Unfortunately we have very little time today.’ He was anxious not to be drawn into another rousing chorus of ‘Our Country’ around the piano. ‘I wondered if you could tell us which doctor Mr Chao attended.’

‘Hah!’ Liu Xinxin waved her hand dismissively. ‘Very strange man, Mr Chao. He is scientist, educated in West.’ She nodded towards Margaret as if to say, ‘You should know, you come from the West’. ‘Everything modern, modern. Expensive hi-fi. CD player. Mobile telephone. But he no like modern medicine. He like traditional, Chinese herbal medicine. He go Tongrentan.’

Margaret glanced at Li. ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a traditional Chinese medicine store. The kind of place where you pay a year’s wages for a piece of fifty-year-old ginseng root.’ He turned back to Liu Xinxin. ‘What branch?’

‘Dazhalan.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Margaret said. ‘He went to a medicine store instead of a doctor?’

Li shook his head. ‘They have consulting doctors there. Usually retired. It’s a way to augment their pensions.’

‘And they prescribe herbal medicine?’

‘Traditional Chinese medicine,’ Liu Xinxin said. ‘Very good medicine. Make you well very fast.’

‘Well, he certainly didn’t get reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors in a herbal medicine shop,’ Margaret said.

Dazhalan was a jumble of street markets and curiosity shops in narrow, medieval hutongs just south of Qianmen. Li and Margaret pushed their way through frenetic crowds of shoppers. Tinny music blasted from loudspeakers hanging at every corner. Red and yellow character banners zigzagged above their heads. Shopfronts were fantastic creations of tiled and curling eaves supported on intricate and colourfully painted beams and pillars. ‘During the Ming Dynasty,’ Li told her, ‘there were great wicket gates here that closed off the inner city at night. Dazhalan means, literally, “big stockades”. In imperial Beijing, shops and theatres were not permitted in the centre of the city. So they opened up here, just outside the gates. It was the place to come on a dull Beijing night.’

They passed a four-hundred-year-old emporium selling pickle and sauce, a restaurant offering imperial snacks, a shop which had been dealing in silks and wool and furs for more than a hundred years. ‘This used to be the red-light district,’ Li said. ‘Until the communists shut all the brothels down in 1949 and sent the girls to work in factories.’ And suddenly he remembered Lotus, and his promise to Yongli. He cursed inwardly, but he was in no position to do anything about it now.

Beneath a colourful and beautifully ornate canopy, white marble lions in wrought-iron cages guarded the entrance to the Tongrentan Traditional Medicine Shop, purveyor of herbal concoctions since 1669. But they had not prevented several young men from slipping into the shade of the canopy and curling up on the cool marble slabs to sleep away the afternoon. Li and Margaret stepped over an older man who was snoring aggressively and pushed through glass doors into the deliciously cool air-conditioned interior.

It was not what Margaret had been expecting. Somehow the notion of traditional Chinese herbal medicine had conjured in her mind a dark and dingy shop, with daylight slanting in through old wooden shutters, and an old man with a long, wispy white beard serving behind a counter piled high with jars and bottles of exotic pills and lotions. Instead it was large and bright and modern. A gallery on the second floor was supported on red-and-gold pillars and overlooked the first-floor shop where the pills and lotions were displayed in very ordinary cardboard boxes in fluorescently lit glass display cabinets. High above them, huge glass lampshades were painted with scenes of imperial China and hung with long yellow tassels. The medicines themselves, however, surpassed even her wildest expectations: dried seahorses and sea slugs, tiger bone, rhino horn and snake wine, cures for everything from fright to encephalitis — or so they claimed.

Just inside the doors, a long and patiently waiting queue of people snaked across the breadth of the shop. The object of their vigilance was a consultation with an old, pinched-faced man perched in a booth off to the left. This retired doctor of medicine was, apparently, slow in dispensing his sagacity, and Li had no intention of waiting his turn. He pushed his way to the head of the queue, displaying his Ministry ID. Margaret hurried after him, eliciting odd and occasionally resentful stares. But no one voiced any objection. Li and Margaret entered the booth as a girl in her early twenties emerged, pasty-faced and spotty-cheeked, clutching a prescription and looking distinctly worried. The old doctor looked at Li’s ID for a long time before examining his face carefully and then inviting them both to sit. He barely gave Margaret a second glance. ‘What can I do for you, Detective?’ he asked.