Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Is this a real crime scene?’ Procurator Meng asked looking with distaste at the shirt. It was a long time since he had been actively involved in crime scene investigation. ‘I mean, is that real?’

‘Of course,’ said the assistant. ‘We wouldn’t have the resources to mock up something like this.’ She lifted another evidence bag on to the counter top. It contained a serrated hunting knife with a bone handle. ‘And this is the weapon you used to commit the murders. You can handle it if you like.’

Li lifted the bag and removed the weapon carefully from inside. He ran the blade lightly across the flats of his fingers. It was still sharp. It was heavy, but nicely balanced. Not a cheap knife. A professional hunter’s weapon. Two inches of the blade at the hilt was serrated. He looked up and found Commissioner Zhu watching him. ‘Don’t let it give you any ideas, Li,’ he said.

Li smiled, flipped the knife over, and held it out to the Commissioner, handle first. Beijing’s top cop took the proffered weapon and examined it carefully. Li watched him handle it with the confidence of one used to knives. ‘You look like you were born with one of those in your hands, Commissioner Zhu.’

The Commissioner looked at him, surprised. ‘Is it that obvious?’

Li shrugged. He wasn’t sure what the Commissioner meant. ‘You just seem comfortable with it, that’s all.’

The Commissioner smiled. A rare sight that Li had seldom seen. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said. ‘In Xinjiang Province, where I grew up, my father hunted deer in the forest. My earliest memories are of going hunting with him. Of course, we had no guns. We set traps, with salt as bait, and killed the animals by slitting their throats. My father taught me how to gut a deer in under ten minutes. We ate well.’ All the time he was turning the knife over in his hands, examining it with what seemed to Li almost like fondness.

‘I thought it was the antlers that deer were killed for in the north-east. Some superstition about their powers of healing.’

The older man looked up. ‘It’s Sichuan you come from, isn’t it?’ Li nodded. ‘Pandas,’ said the Commissioner. ‘A protected species. You probably didn’t do much hunting in Sichuan.’

‘I’ve never much liked killing anything,’ Li said. ‘Even for the table.’

The Commissioner did not miss what he took to be an implied criticism. ‘No doubt you’d rather other people did the dirty work,’ he said.

‘May I see it?’ The Procurator General broke in, impatient with their fencing. Unlike the Commissioner, he handled it very gingerly, at arm’s length, before laying it back on the bench.

The graduate placed some more photographs in front of them. ‘This is the vehicle you used to get to the victims’ house,’ she said. It was a battered old blue Japanese car. Photographs of the interior showed smears of dried blood on the seats, the dash and the steering wheel. Another gave a close-up of the licence plate, revealing that the vehicle came from Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province.

‘This is the town where you committed the murders,’ the student said, spreading out photographs of what Li took to be the main square in Nanchang, a place he had never visited. There was a photograph of the Gan River running through what looked like an industrial city, largely redeveloped. It did not seem like a town you would find in the tourist guides. ‘And these are the gloves you wore. They were found in the trunk of your car.’ She placed a bloodstained pair of white cotton gloves on the benchtop, still in their evidence bag. ‘You can take them out if you like.’ But none of them took up the offer.

Li looked again at the photographs of the crime scene. It seemed unreal. Blood and death frozen in the frame of a photographer’s camera, overlit by his floods, as if staged for investigation. There was nothing that resembled a living human being less than a corpse. He supposed it was that sense of unreality that protected you from the grim truth, that each of us was mortal and would one day pass this way, too.

The student had finished briefing them on their crime. She stood back. ‘You can go through the photographs again if you like,’ she said. ‘Re-examine any of the exhibits.’ But they had had enough of it. So she opened the blinds and the room flooded with afternoon sunshine. They blinked away the light, and their focus, and the spell was broken, returning them abruptly from Nanchang to Beijing.

The girl smiled nervously. She was not used to being in such exalted company and felt exposed now in the full blaze of sunlight. She said, ‘Professor Pan will show you some photographic images on a computer screen. Some of these images will mean something to you. Some will not. Some will be relevant to the crime you have “committed”, some will be irrelevant. Some will be familiar to you, although not relevant to the crime. Professor Pan will explain exactly what she requires of you when you go into the computer room.’ Her eyes fixed on Li. ‘You first, Section Chief.’

* * *

It was a square, featureless room without windows. A door led out into the hallway, and another through to a small lecture room. Cream-coloured walls looked as if they had not seen a paintbrush for some time. The floor was covered with grey carpet tiles. There were two large computer desks placed at right angles to each other in the centre of the room. The bigger of the desks had a large monitor attached to a computer mounted beneath it. A laptop was wired into both. They, in turn, were connected to another computer placed on the smaller desk. Cables spewed out of everything and were arranged in tidy coils on the floor. A single overhead lamp focused light on the two desks, leaving everything outside its circle of illumination sunk in gloom.

Lynn Pan carried her own inner light with her, and she seemed to glow as she showed Li into the room. He noticed the way that she was always touching him, a hand on his shoulder, or on his arm as she guided him to a seat at the smaller desk. She then sat on the edge of his desk looking directly down on him, her legs stretched out and crossed in front of her, her calf grazing his. It made Li feel slightly uncomfortable for the first time. But it was not a feeling that lasted long. She fixed him with her eyes and her smile, and he had that mush sensation in his stomach again.

‘I hear it’s a big day for you today,’ she said, and he frowned, uncertain what she meant. ‘The People’s Award for Crime Fighting.’ And his face immediately coloured with embarrassment. But if she noticed, she gave no indication of it. ‘I would have loved to go,’ she said. ‘If I’d been invited. I’ve never been in the Great Hall.’

‘Be my guest,’ Li said.

‘Wow! Invited by the recipient.’

Li searched her face and her tone for some hint of sarcasm, but found none. She had that openness and innocence about her that was common to almost every American he had ever met. Except for Margaret. Her cynicism and sense of irony marked her out as very different from most of her fellow countrymen.

‘Hey, listen, if I can get out of here on time I’ll be there.’ Pan’s smile was radiant. ‘But I gotta process you guys first. Convince you I’m worth backing. Yeah?’

She stood up, suddenly businesslike, and lifted a primitive-looking headset from the desk. Wires trailed out of the back of it like a Chinese queue. It consisted of a broad blue headband made from some kind of stretchy material that fitted across the forehead and around the back of the head. Another band ran from front to back across the scalp, attached by velcro strips at both ends. Electrodes, each with their own little sewn-in velcro pad, could be moved about on the inner surface of the bands. ‘To optimise the placing of the electrodes,’ Pan explained. ‘Everybody’s head is different.’ She spent some time fitting the headset to Li’s larger than average head, her small breasts stretching her blouse just above his eyeline. He tried not to let his eyes be drawn. But he could smell her perfume, feel her warmth, and there was something irresistibly intimate about her hands moving across his scalp, touching his face, his neck. Warm, soft skin against his.