Peter May - Chinese Whispers

Margaret was still watching him. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ she asked.

He said, ‘I received a letter this afternoon from the killer. It was, word for word, the original Jack the Ripper letter. But, of course, it was in Chinese. Character for character the same as the translation in the Chinese version of the Ripper book.’

Margaret immediately saw his problem. ‘So you’re thinking, if he’s been working from the English version, how did he manage to produce the same translation as the Chinese one.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, that’s easy.’

‘Is it?’

‘Sure. He only sent the letter today, right? Or yesterday.’ Li nodded. ‘So if the Chinese version has been out for a week …’ She didn’t even have to finish.

Li sighed his frustration. ‘I’m not even thinking straight any more,’ he said. Why had he not seen that for himself? He was blinding himself with guilt and pressure, failing to find the logic in the detail. Old Dai was right. It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one , he had said. 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 .

Margaret’s voice, laden with sympathy, tumbled softly into his thoughts and startled him. ‘Li Yan, you’ve got to be at the Great Hall in under an hour.’

‘Shit!’ He looked at his watch. ‘I have to shower and change.’ He hurried through to the bathroom, divesting himself of clothes as he went. Margaret followed behind picking them up. ‘When’s Mei Yuan coming?’ he called over his shoulder.

‘She’ll be here any time.’

He stepped into the shower and under a jet of hot steaming water. Margaret stood watching him through the misting glass. He was a fit, powerful man, tall for a Chinese, over six feet, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had a swimmer’s thighs and calves. The hot water ran in rivulets over firm, toned muscles, and she wanted just to step in beside him and make love to him there and then, with the thought of Mei Yuan due to arrive at any moment, and Li Jon asleep through the wall. A moment snatched. A sense of urgency, like there had once been always in their lovemaking. But she knew the moment would not have been right for him. So she stood, holding his discarded clothes and watching the shape of him blur in the steam as it condensed on the glass.

He called out, eyes shut against the foaming shampoo, ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘What did you learn from the book?’

‘That nineteenth-century London cops were either incompetent or stupid.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Li Yan, they let people sluice away blood and other evidence from crime scenes. Mortuary assistants washed down bodies before the pathologists carried out their autopsies. Vital evidence literally flushed down the drain.’ She had been horrified as she read. ‘After the night of the double murder, they found some graffiti chalked on the entrance to tenement dwellings, alongside a bloody scrap of skirt from one of the victims. Before they could even photograph it, the Police Commissioner insisted that it be washed off.’

‘What!’ Li couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Why?’

‘Good question,’ Margaret said. ‘One I’d have loved to have asked him.’

‘But he must have had a good reason.’

‘Oh, he gave a reason, but it wasn’t a good one. He said he was afraid that the graffiti would spark anti-semitic riots.’

‘Why?’

Apparently the Ripper had made some kind of allusion to the Jews, as if a Jew might be responsible for the killings. There was a large immigrant Jewish population in the east end of London at that time, and the Commissioner said he feared that the locals would turn against them.’

‘But that’s absurd! If it was a real concern, all they had to do was cover it up under police guard until it was properly examined and photographed.’

‘You might think that. And I might agree with you. But apparently that never occurred to him. And for a man who ultimately lost his job through his failure to catch the Ripper, destroying what might have been very crucial evidence was a very strange thing to do.’

Li turned off the water and pushed open the shower door. He stood dripping wet and naked, quite unselfconscious. ‘And he was the Police Commissioner?’

‘Sir Charles Warren. Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’ She eyed him lustfully and took hold of him with her free hand, feeling him swelling in her grasp from an immediate rush of blood. ‘If we didn’t have to be out of here in the next twenty minutes …’

He grinned. ‘Twenty minutes, huh? I suppose I could always try to speed things up.’

She squeezed him hard, making him flinch. ‘I should be so lucky.’

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her softly, and then parted her lips with his tongue and sought hers. Li Jon started crying in the next room. He dropped his forehead on to her shoulder.

‘Shit,’ she hissed. And the buzzer sounded at the door. She pushed his clothes into his wet arms and said, ‘You’d better get dressed fast. I’ll let Mei Yuan in.’ As he danced naked through the hall towards their bedroom she shouted after him, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re having dinner tomorrow night with the Harts — if you can tear yourself away from the office for once.’

The Great Hall of the People had played host to some of the fiercest political struggles in modern Chinese history. Built by Mao in the nineteen-fifties after the creation of the Republic, it stood along the west side of Tiananmen Square, facing east towards the Museum of Chinese History, and had been witness to the bloody events of 1989 when students demanding democracy were crushed under the wheels of army tanks. An event which had catapulted the Middle Kingdom headlong into such radical change it had produced not democracy, but instead the fastest growing economy in the world.

It was an impressive building, three hundred metres long, its three-storey facade supported by tall marble columns. Along with all the other buildings around the square, it was floodlit. The whole of central Beijing, it seemed, was floodlit, obliterating the stars that shone beyond the light in a clear, black sky overhead.

It took Li and Margaret just fifteen minutes to walk in the cold to the Great Hall from their apartment, along Qianmen Dong Da Jie, and up through Tiananmen from the south end, past Mao’s mausoleum. Margaret had queued once to see the great man lying preserved in his coffin beneath a glass dome, and came away convinced that all she had witnessed was a wax effigy.

She held Li’s arm, and felt his warmth and strength even through the thickness of his coat. Beneath it he wore his dress uniform, and he cut an impressive figure as he strode across the pavings of the huge square. She was proud of him, even though she knew he was opposed to this award and dreading the ceremony.

There were streams of cars dropping people off on the corner of Renminda Hutong Xilu where they were entering the gardens in front of the hall through turnstile gates. Guests of honour strolled across the vast, paved concourse and stood chatting in groups on the steps beneath the pillars. Margaret felt a small frisson of excitement. The Great Hall of the People was a piece of history and she was about to enter it with the man who would be centre stage in its auditorium. ‘How many people are going to be here?’ she asked. She had not expected so many cars.

‘It will be full,’ Li said.

‘How many is that?’

‘Ten thousand.’

‘Ten thousand!’ It seemed inconceivable. ‘Who are they all?’

‘Invited guests,’ Li said with a tone, and Margaret felt his tension.