Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Life is no fun any more, Li Yan,’ Lao Dai said without looking up, his attention focused on gathering up the discs and putting them in their box along with their embroidered cloth board. Li was surprised that the old man had even seen him arriving. ‘It is boring when you win all the time.’

‘As boring as it was when you lost all the time to my uncle?’

The old man grinned and looked up at him finally. ‘Ah, but when you always lose, you can still look forward to the day when you will win. But when you always win, you can only ever look forward to defeat. It is better to win some, and to lose some. Your uncle always used to say, ten thousand things find harmony by combining the forces of positive and negative .’ The old man examined his face. ‘I see him in you tonight. I have never seen him there before.’

‘I wish there was more of him in me,’ Li said. ‘Then I might know better what to do.’

‘Ah, but you are young still. How can you always know what to do? Wisdom only comes with age.’

And Li remembered another of his uncle’s sayings. ‘ The oldest ginger is the best. ’

Lao Dai’s smile widened, but was touched by sadness. ‘It’s hard to believe he’s been gone five years. There is not a day goes past that I do not think about him.’

Li nodded. He did not want to get into a discussion about his uncle. The memories that would resurrect would be too painful. ‘I came to see if you needed a taxi to take you to the Great Hall tonight.’

The old man waved his hand dismissively. ‘No, no, of course not. I will take my bicycle, as always. The day I stop cycling is the day I will die.’ He stood up and lifted his precious box of chessmen. ‘Walk with me to the subway.’ It was too far now for Lao Dai to cycle from his home in the south-east of the city, to the garden outside the park. And the traffic was too dangerous. So he took the subway and the bus, and would be home in just under an hour. It never occurred to him not to come.

They walked past the bristle-headed old man still performing his tai chi and on to the path that followed the canal. Lao Dai took small, shuffling steps, and seemed always on the point of overbalancing. The sky above them soared from pale lemon to the deepest, darkest blue. A splinter of moon was visible rising on the far horizon, and the last of the sun, even though they could not see it, glanced its light off countless windows in dozens of high-rises.

‘So what troubles you?’

Li said, ‘What makes you think I am troubled?’

The old man shook his head. ‘To answer a question with a question is evasion. Your uncle could never hide his worries from me either. Which is why he would never meet my eye when we played chess. He would have made a lousy poker player.’ Lao Dai stopped and put his hand on Li’s arm. ‘I could never fill Yifu’s footsteps. Nor would I try. But I knew him well, and I know he would want you to come to me if you were in trouble.’

Li was embarrassed and moved at the same time. He wanted to hug the old man, but it was not the Chinese way. Dai and Yifu had served together for many years in the criminal investigation department of the Beijing Municipal Police, Yifu rising to high office before his retirement. Although Dai had not reached the same dizzy heights, he had nevertheless been a Section Chief. He was a good man, clever and principled. Both had been widowers and were inseparable after retirement. Yifu’s death had left a huge hole in the old man’s life, and with no children to fill the void, Li was the closest thing to family that he had left.

‘I am responsible for the murders of young women,’ Li said finally.

Lao Dai chuckled. ‘You are killing them yourself, I take it?’

‘I am failing to catch the man who is,’ Li said. ‘The longer I take, the more he will kill.’

Lao Dai sighed. ‘It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one. If you fill your mind with guilt for the actions of another, you will leave no room for the clear thinking you will need to catch him.’ He set off again along the path, and Li followed. ‘You had better tell me all about it,’ he said. And Li did. Everything from the first victim to the last, from the discovery of the Ripper book to the letter from the killer himself. Dai listened without comment. A faraway look glazed his eyes, and concern clouded the smile that usually lit them. ‘You have an enemy, Li Yan,’ he said at length.

Li was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families what else do all these murders have in common?’

Li thought about it for a moment, and then saw the old man’s reasoning. ‘The police,’ he said.

‘More specifically …’

‘Me?’

‘It was you he wrote to, was it not?’ He regarded Li with some sympathy. ‘By making a hero of you they have made you a target, Li Yan. Where once you were known to only a few, now you are known to all.’ And Li remembered Elvis’s words at the meeting: You’ve been splashed all over the papers ahead of this award thing tonight. You’re a hero . Dai added, ‘Their ignorance was your strength, now their knowledge is your weakness. Yifu would have been proud of you tonight, but he would also have opposed this award with all his might.’

‘But what possible motive …?’

Old Dai raised a hand to stop him. ‘Jealousy, revenge, any one of many twisted things. But you cannot know this, Li Yan. You cannot know who or why, not yet. It is too big a leap. Remember Mao’s Great Leap Forward , which was in truth a great fall back. Your knowledge is your strength. Take small steps and keep your balance. He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady. He who takes long strides will not maintain the pace.’ And Li realised that it was a philosophy Lao Dai applied to his own life, not just in metaphor, but in fact. Dai smiled. ‘You know what Yifu would have said?’

Li nodded. ‘The answer lies in the detail.’

They had reached the steps of the Muxidi subway. Lao Dai stopped and poked a finger in Li’s chest. ‘One step at a time, Li Yan. One small step at a time.’ And then he patted his arm. ‘I will see you tonight. I will be Yifu’s eyes and ears. I will be his pride.’ And he turned and headed carefully towards the escalator, one small step at a time.

Li Jon was sleeping and Margaret switched on a lamp by her chair. She could no longer read by the dying light of the day, although she had barely noticed it going. She was absorbed in the book. Both fascinated and horrified. All the autopsies she had performed over many years had led her to believe that she had witnessed the fullest extent of man’s inhumanity to man, or woman. But as she read Doctor Thomas Bond’s medical notes on the post-mortem he had helped perform on the Ripper’s most mutilated victim, the unfortunate Mary Jane Kelly, she realised that there was perhaps no limit, and that there would always be horrors worse than she could imagine.

Doctor Bond’s notes on what he found at the scene of the crime, and during the subsequent post-mortem, had only been discovered as recently as 1987. Margaret was fascinated by how close, procedurally, his descriptions were to the account she might have made herself more than a century after he had written them.

He laid bare the crime scene in cold, unemotional terms:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen, the right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress, the elbow bent and the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.