Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Chief, are you okay?’ The concern in his deputy’s voice was clear, even although he was having to shout.

She had been so full of life, and charm and charisma. A smile that would have broken most men’s hearts. Doe-eyes that looked so deeply into yours you felt almost naked.

‘He’s broken the pattern in more ways than one,’ Li said, but too quietly for Qian to hear.

‘What’s that?’

Li turned towards him. ‘She’s no prostitute, Qian.’

Qian was amazed. ‘You know her?’

Li nodded. ‘I met her this afternoon. She’s a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.’

He looked back at her fine features spattered with blood. Open eyes staring into oblivion, lips slightly parted, the delicate line of her jaw tracing a shadow to the bloody hole in the side of her head. Short hair gelled into spikes, and he remembered with a dreadful sense of guilt that last look she had given him. What had seemed, unaccountably, like an appeal for help. To which he had failed to respond.

He turned away, filled with confusion and guilt. Lynn Pan lay dead beneath the Millennium Monument, and he knew that somehow it was his fault.

‘Hey, Chief …’ It was one of the forensic ghosts. He was holding up a clear plastic evidence bag, and had to grab the bottom end of it to stop it flapping about in the wind. ‘It’s him, okay.’ And Li saw, in the bag, the unsmoked end of a brown Russian cheroot.

Li looked at the footprints in the blood, and the trail of it leading away down the steps. The force of it spurting from the severed arteries must have taken the killer by surprise. Maybe he thought she was already dead. He must have been covered in the stuff. It looked, too, as if he had lost his footing, stumbling through the blood pooling around the head. Perhaps removing the ears had been more difficult than he had anticipated. And yet it was all so uncharacteristic of the cold, calculated butchery practised upon the other victims. Then he had worked to a plan and a pattern, paying homage to his nineteenth-century English hero.

This just didn’t fit. The victim was not a prostitute, nor did she correspond to any of the Ripper murders. She had been killed on the other side of town. It was a weekday. The execution had been clumsy, almost slapdash. And yet, there was the note. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off . And the telltale Russian cheroot.

Li gazed down on the dead girl’s face and ached for her. He remembered her touch, her fingers on his scalp as she adjusted the headset for the MERMER test, her small breasts pressing against her blouse, just inches from his face. The smell of her, sweet and musky. And here she lay, icy cold, all animation gone forever, rigor mortis already setting in.

He couldn’t bear it any longer and turned away, climbing the three steps to the chrome rail, the city spreading out below him, thirteen million people going about their lives, unaware that one of the herd lay dead at the foot of this monument to the new millennium. Unaware that some monster lived among them, to all intents and purposes one of them. And how would they know him? For he had no horns, no forked tail. He would look just like them. Perhaps he had a family. A wife, children. And Li remembered thinking that someone knew who he was. That you could not return home after an orgy of killing without taking some of the blood of it with you. Someone knew who that monster was. Someone had looked into his eyes and been privy to their own private view of hell.

The crescent moon had risen higher in the sky now, and in what little light it cast, Li could see, on the distant horizon, the faint shadow of the mountains across whose contours the Great Wall followed its tortuous route. It might once have kept the marauding hordes from the north at bay, but in this twenty-first century, it had failed to keep out the evil that stalked their streets at night. The wind battered his face, stinging cold and taking his breath away, and it was to the wind he attributed the tears that filled his eyes. He pushed himself away from the rail, wiping his face with the back of his hand and found his deputy standing nearby, watching him. ‘I need a drink, Qian,’ he said. And they started off down the steps together. Five thousand years of history carved in bronze stretched away below them. How many lives had come and gone in all that time? What did one more, or less, matter?

But it did.

* * *

They left Wu and Sang and Elvis at the scene to take statements and put the investigation in motion. Qian drove Li to Sanlitun Lu, more commonly known as Bar Street. It was where Guo Huan’s mother had believed her daughter was working as a barmaid. A fifteen-foot plastic beer tankard overflowing with foam stood on the corner of Sanlitun and Gongren Tiyuchang Dong Lu. A bored-looking girl sat behind a window in it selling time on a public phone. They turned north, and the street ahead was ablaze with neon and fairylights. Touts in suits wandered the pavements trying to persuade passers-by that the bar which paid their wages was the best. Qian parked by the kerbside railing about halfway up, and they crossed the road to the Lan Kwai Fang Bar at number sixty-six. Signs in the window advertised Budweiser, and Carlsberg, Dedicated to the Art of Making Beer . Gnarled trees grew out of the sidewalk alongside picture windows which gave on to a dark interior of tables draped with red cloth. Many of the bars and restaurants in Bar Street were haunted by staff from the embassies at the top end of the street. A European crowd. French, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Spanish. But the Lan Kwai Fang was predominantly Chinese.

Most of the tables were occupied, and there was a babble of voices and music playing when Li and Qian walked in. But almost immediately animated conversations dried up and heads turned in their direction. The music played to silence, music that didn’t stand up to such scrutiny. A cheap pop singer from Taiwan. Li had forgotten that he and Qian were both still in their dress uniforms, long coats hanging open to reveal flashes of silver on black. The two men took off their caps, as if that would somehow make them less conspicuous, and slipped on to high stools at the bar. The barman wore dark slacks with sharp creases and a white shirt open at the neck, sleeves neatly folded halfway up his forearms. His hair was beautifully cut and gelled back from his face. He looked beyond them as several tables emptied, and half a dozen clients slipped out into the night. Then he refocused on the newcomers and smiled nervously.

‘Two beers,’ Li said.

‘You’re joking, right?’ The barman seemed perplexed, and his smile continued to flutter about his lips like a butterfly on a summer’s day.

Li glared at him. ‘Do you see me laughing?’

The barman shrugged. ‘Cops don’t drink in places like this.’

‘Where do they drink?’ Qian asked.

‘I don’t know. Just not here.’ He leaned confidentially across the bar towards them. ‘Look, I have no problem serving you guys. It’s just … you know, you’re bad for business.’ He nodded towards another couple heading out the door.

Li was running out of patience. ‘Sonny, if there are not two beers on the bar within the next thirty seconds you’ll find out just how bad for business we could really be.’

‘Coming right up, boss,’ the barman said, as if the issue had never been in doubt.

Li and Qian took their beers to a recently vacated table by the window, to the barman’s further chagrin. Two cops sitting in the window would guarantee no further custom until they left. But he held his peace.

The two detectives drank in silence for some time. Li took a long first pull at his beer, till he felt the alcohol hit his bloodstream, then he nursed his glass on the table in front of him, lost in gloomy thoughts.