Peter May - Chinese Whispers

There was a ripple of uneasy laughter around the table.

‘Personally, I prefer Tony Roma’s,’ Margaret said. ‘Or the Hard Rock Café — they do good burgers. But I guess I’ll just have to make do with this instead.’

No one seemed certain whether she was being funny, or just rude, and her response was met with an uneasy silence. Li looked embarrassed.

‘It’s a joke,’ Margaret said. ‘I love Sichuan food.’ And she waved a hand in front of her mouth and blew. ‘Hot!’

‘You like spicy food, then?’ Deputy Cao said languidly.

‘Sure.’

‘Personally, I think Sichuan cuisine lack something in subtlety and sophistication. All that chilli only there to disguise poor quality of meat.’

‘What is your taste, then, Deputy Cao?’ the Minister asked him.

‘He likes hotpot,’ his wife said. She was a small, wiry woman, with short, bobbed hair the colour of steel. She looked uncomfortable in a black evening gown.

‘Ah, yes,’ Margaret said. ‘Invented by the Mongols, wasn’t it? Water boiled up in their helmets over an open fire to cook chunks of mutton hacked off the sheep.’

‘So?’ Deputy Cao said, a hint of defensiveness in his voice.

The Minister laughed. ‘I think Ms Campbell is implying that hotpot is not quite the height of sophisticated eating either.’

Cao shrugged dismissively. ‘Well, that is rich coming from American. Not a country exactly famous for its cuisine.’ He lit a cigarette.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Margaret said breezily. ‘There are a hell of a lot more McDonalds’ around the world than there are hotpot restaurants.’

Even Commissioner Zhu, silent until now, cracked a smile. ‘She might have a point there, Cao.’ Margaret looked at him carefully, and saw more clearly the weasel in him that Lao Dai had pointed out.

‘Only the young in China eat burger,’ Cao said. ‘With age come wisdom. People eat hotpot for thousands of year. In a hundred year they will still be eating hotpot. I wonder how many McDonald’s restaurants there will be.’

‘So you don’t approve of American culture, then?’ Margaret said.

‘It is short-lived and worthless,’ replied Cao.

‘Is that why you smoke American cigarettes?’ Margaret nodded towards his pack of Phillip Morris lying on the table. ‘So your life will be equally short-lived and worthless.’

There was a moment’s dangerous silence, before the Minister guffawed. ‘I think you’ve finally met your match, Cao,’ he said.

Margaret caught Li’s eye, and felt pierced by the cold steel of his silent disapproval. She turned her most charming smile on the Deputy Commissioner and said, ‘Actually, I’m only joking, Deputy Cao. I love hotpot, too.’ And she turned the same smile back on Li, as if to say, You see, you can take me places without getting a red face .

Through all the hubbub of voices in the Sichuan Room, above the sound of crockery as waiters brought food to tables, came the unmistakable warble of a cellphone. Deputy Minister Wei Peng tutted his disapproval. ‘Some people have no sense of propriety,’ he said. But within half a minute, the individual lacking that sense of propriety revealed himself to be Deputy Section Chief Qian. He was clearly embarrassed to interrupt proceedings at Li’s table, but determined nonetheless. His face was drained of colour.

‘Please accept my apologies for the interruption, Minister,’ he said, and then turned to Li. ‘I’m sorry, Chief, there’s been another murder.’

Qian’s words struck him with the force of a fist in the solar plexus. He almost physically winced. ‘There can’t have been,’ he said.

Qian shrugged. ‘Girl found dead. Strangled. Throat cut. Pathologist Wang seems to think it’s our man again.’

‘But that’s not how it’s supposed to be …’ Li had been so sure that the killer would stick to his mentor’s script. He felt sick. He had taken his eye off the case, relaxed for just a moment. And a girl had died. He stood up. ‘Gentlemen, ladies. I’m sorry, I have to go.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Li,’ Commissioner Zhu said sharply. ‘You have a whole section of detectives to handle something like this. You can’t walk out on your own banquet.’ He glanced with some embarrassment towards the Minister. But the Minister remained silent.

Deputy Cao said, ‘Oh, let him go. He hasn’t learned yet that the art of management is delegation. He thinks he’s so good that no one else can do it better. Isn’t that right, Li?’

Li calmly folded his napkin and laid it on the table. ‘Excuse me,’ was all he said, and he headed off through the tables with Qian to where Wu and several others were waiting for them at the door. Animated conversation became suddenly hushed at the sight of the guest of honour leaving the banquet.

‘Well,’ Margaret said brightly, breaking the tense silence around the table. ‘We’d better nominate someone else to toast or we’ll never get a drink tonight.’

The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and Changan Avenue as far as you could see east and west, was bathed in white and blue and green and pink light. The red tail lights of cars and buses and taxis shimmered off into the distance in long lines of sluggish traffic. Qian wound down the window and clamped a blue-flashing magnetic light on the roof of the Jeep, then dropped down a gear and accelerated across six lanes of vehicles to head west.

‘Where are you going?’ Li swivelled in surprise in the passenger seat.

‘She was found at the Millennium Monument, Chief.’ Qian glanced across at him. Wu and Detective Sang sat mute in the back seat.

Li felt something close to relief. ‘It can’t have been the Ripper, then.’ Tagging the Beijing killer as the ‘Ripper’ had been completely unconscious.

‘Why?’

‘Because all the other murders have been in the same area of Jianguomen. Just like Jack the Ripper killed all his victims in the same square mile of London.’ He knew it hadn’t felt right. ‘And today’s Monday. He’s only ever killed at the weekend. And, anyway, his next victim’s not due for another six weeks.’

Wu leaned forward and said, ‘Everything else fits, though, Chief. The strangulation, the cutting of the throat …’ He chewed furiously on his gum. ‘And I was really looking forward to that banquet, too.’

They turned off Fuxing Avenue after Sanlihi Road, heading north and then west again, drifting past the floodlit Ministry of Defence building in its restricted military zone, and next to it the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, the centrepiece of which rose in three tiers to a spire topped by a star in a circle. To their right, Yuyuantan Park lay brooding in darkness, west of the canal where only hours earlier Li and Lao Dai had discussed the murders in the last light of the day. They were less than a mile from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A Dali-esque melting clock above the gate to the Millennium Park told them that it was nearly nine-thirty. Towering above it, the Millennium monument was a huge rotating stone sundial at the top of a broad sweep of steps leading to a circular terrace. The dial was casting its shadows in several conflicting directions, confused by the floodlights now illuminating the crime scene at its base. Its arm was pointing due south, down the length of Yangfangdian Lu to the floodlit spectre of the Beijing West Railway station some two kilometres away. The lights of the multi-storey blocks which lined the avenue, reflected on the two-hundred-and-seventy-metre-long waterway, beneath which five thousand years of Chinese history was carved in bronze plates. It was an impressive vista. And for some poor girl, Li reflected as he pushed through the gate, her last sight on earth. Police and forensics vehicles were pulled into the kerbside at odd angles, and a group of uniformed officers stood stamping and smoking on the causeway just inside the gate. This was not an area dense in housing or nightlife, so only a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered. The uniforms saluted as Li and the other detectives from Section One arrived. There was a young, grey-uniformed security guard amongst them. Beneath a black-peaked cap, he had a fresh face reddened by the icy wind. He wore leather boots and a long grey greatcoat, its black collar pulled up around his cheeks, a red band with yellow characters wound around his left arm. Li stopped and asked him, ‘When does this place normally get locked up?’