Peter May - The Firemaker

‘Can I get her anything?’ she heard Lotus say, but it was in Chinese, and she couldn’t understand why the sounds formed no words.

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. We’ve got plenty of water. You’d better go.’

Yongli pulled her gently away. ‘Come on.’

‘I hate to leave her like this.’

‘She’s in capable hands,’ Yongli said. And to Li, ‘We’ll be back at first light. If not, you’ll know we’ve been picked up.’

Li nodded grimly. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He turned and the two men made a brief eye contact that forestalled the need for more words.

‘I’ll bring her some clean clothes,’ Lotus said, and let Yongli lead her by the hand away through the outer room and out into the courtyard.

When he heard the door close behind them, Li turned back to Margaret, but her eyes were shut and she was sleeping.

When she emerged from the strange, dark, dreamless chasm into which she had drifted, she was curled up on the cot bed and Li was sitting on the end of it smoking another cigarette. A candle still burned in the corner. He turned as she raised herself on to one elbow. ‘How long was I sleeping?’

He shrugged. ‘An hour maybe. I don’t know what time it is.’

She peered at her watch in the dancing half-light. ‘It’s just after one.’ She swung her legs off the bed and sat up, rubbing her eyes. He moved alongside her and put an arm around her, and she let her head fall against his shoulder. The familiar musky-sweet smell of him was reassuring. ‘Why are we here?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’

She felt him tense and he drew a deep, tremulous breath. ‘They stitched me up, Margaret,’ he said. ‘I walked right into it. Never even saw it coming.’ She lifted her head and pulled away so she could look at him. His eyes were moist and wouldn’t meet hers. ‘They killed Lily and murdered my uncle…’

Margaret uttered a tiny, involuntary cry. ‘Oh God, no…!’ Not that lovely, harmless old man. ‘Why? Why would they kill him?’

Silent tears rolled down Li’s cheeks. ‘To make it look like I had done it.’ He gasped in frustration. ‘As if I ever would.’ He turned towards her, the futility of it etched in the pain on his face. ‘I don’t know why, Margaret. But I feel like it’s my fault, that I got something wrong, that if I’d done something differently my uncle would still be alive. I don’t know what it is that would make them want to kill an old man, just to discredit me and stop my investigation. If only I knew what it was we’d got too close to, maybe I’d understand.’ His despair was heartbreaking.

She lowered her head and looked at the floor. She no longer wanted to share her secret, for the pain and the horror and the hopelessness it would bring. She wished she could keep it to herself, close and hidden, so that maybe she would just wake up one morning and it would be gone. But she knew it wouldn’t. And she knew she had to tell him. She looked up again and wiped the tears from his face. He should save them, she thought, for there were many more to spill. ‘ I know,’ she said. ‘Both why, and who.’

Friday

Li sat gazing into inky blackness. The candles had all burned out long ago. Just the acrid, waxy smell of them remained. He remembered being afraid of the dark as a small boy, of all the ghosts and monsters that lurked there in his childish imagination. As he grew older, he stopped being afraid, for he knew that the real monsters lurked within; fear and conceit, greed and evil. Only now, someone had let them out, and they were stalking the world, like latter-day dinosaurs, devouring and destroying everything they touched. They were out there somewhere now, looking for him. But they didn’t live in the dark, like the monsters of his childhood. They worked in offices and lived in houses. They had wives and husbands, brothers, sisters, children. They controlled and manipulated the lives of those around them, exploited the weak, starved the hungry, reaped rewards from the work of others. And they thought they were gods. Li’s hatred of them was tempered only by his sorrow for those he loved. Old Yifu; dead. His father, his sister, her little girl, her unborn child; their death warrants already signed. Margaret. He could hear her gentle, regular breathing. She slept now, but she, too, was under sentence of death. He thought of his country. All those people, their hopes and aspirations, their lives and their loves. He could see their faces in the dark. The children, happy and innocent, unaware that their future was already lost. Five thousand years of history had brought them to this dead end. He wanted to scream, to pull the house down around them with his bare hands. He wanted to tear those monsters limb from limb. But he did not move. He did not make a sound. Dead men don’t fight back. He might have thought that true once. But this dead man was going to fight, with every ounce of strength, every last breath, every final second that he had.

He and Margaret had talked for nearly two hours before she had finally succumbed to utter exhaustion, leaving him to come to terms with the things she had told him. Fear, anger, self-pity, more anger had surged through him in wave after wave, before leaving him, eventually, washed out and despairing. She had convinced him that their only option was to reach the sanctuary of the American Embassy. From there they could tell their story to the world. It was the only way to put an end to it, the only way to stop Grogan Industries and Pang Xiaosheng and all those they had corrupted in their pursuit of silence.

It seemed a hollow victory, somehow, to Li. That he should have to hide away from his fellow countrymen, skulk in the protection of a foreign power, in order to reveal the truth. It made him feel like a traitor. But he could see no other way. He was discredited and disgraced, on the run from his own police, and from a professional killer intent on killing the woman he loved.

The thought stopped him dead. The woman he loved? He struck a match and looked at Margaret as she lay sleeping beside him. She seemed utterly at peace. How could he love her? How could he love a woman he had only known for five days, a woman of another race, another culture? The match burned down to his fingers and he let it fall to the floor. But the image of her face remained imprinted on his retina. He reached out to touch her and saw his own hand in his mind’s eye, fingers running lightly over her full lips. He had never been in love before, so he was not sure how it felt, or was supposed to feel. He only knew that he had never felt like this about anyone in his life. He lay down beside her, tucking his knees in behind hers, drawing her back into his chest, gently so as not to wake her, wrapping himself around her like a protective shell. He buried his face in her hair and breathed in the smell of her. He had no idea what it was he felt for her, but love seemed as good a name for it as any. And for the first time in many long hours he felt released from torment. He would happily have died there and then, holding her in his arms. But sleep intervened. Death would have been too easy.

Margaret woke with a start and pushed herself quickly up on one elbow. There was a fine dust suspended in stripes of pale yellow light lying brokenly across the room. Li stood by the window, squinting through the gaps between the boards nailed across it. The blue smoke of his cigarette drifted lazily upwards, turning pale grey in the sunlight that fell through the slats. She felt strangely rested. Bizarrely, it was the best sleep she had had since her arrival in China.

He turned on hearing her stir. She had no idea, he knew, that he had spent the night, or what was left of it, curled around her. He thought how beautiful she looked, sleepy and blurred, not fully awake. She was all he had left now. He must not fail her as he had failed his uncle. He must keep her safe at all costs.