Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘That had nothing to do with me, Deputy Cao,’ Li said.

‘It has everything to do with you, Li!’ Cao almost shouted at him. ‘It’s your case. And it’s your face on the front page of the paper. And the Commissioner himself told you only yesterday how important it was that this didn’t get into the press.’

Li held his peace. There was nothing he could say.

Cao waved his arm theatrically in the air. ‘The Minister was apoplectic. That’s why it’s me giving you the bollocking and not the Commissioner himself. He’s been summoned to the Minister’s office to furnish him with some persuasive explanation for this …’ he picked up the paper and then dropped it on the desk again, ‘… this piece of shit.’

‘Someone leaked it,’ Li said lamely.

‘Of course someone leaked it!’ Cao roared. ‘And it could only have been somebody on the inside. A police officer. Somebody under your command.’

‘Or above it,’ Li ventured.

Cao wheeled on him and inclined his head dangerously. He lowered his voice, ‘If I was you, Li, I wouldn’t go suggesting that too loudly around here. It won’t win you many friends. And believe me, right now you need all the friends you can get.’ He snatched a pack of cigarettes from his desk and lit one. ‘Someone in your section has been a naughty boy. I suggest you find out who it is.’

‘Maybe it’s the same officer who leaks inside information from my office to yours.’

Cao dropped into his chair and regarded Li speculatively. He shook his head slightly. ‘You’re treading very thin ice here, Li.’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘You run a slack ship up there. You may have admirers in high places because of a couple of high profile cases, but those of us in the know understand that police work is not about the handful of glamorous cases that might come your way in the course of a career. It’s about the daily slog, cracking every crappy case that gets thrown at you. And that means running a tight ship. Administration, organisation, attention to detail, no matter how dull or how unglamorous. It requires a disciplined approach to the running of your section, it requires your junior officers to respect and, if necessary, to fear you.

‘But not you. You like to be one of the boys. You flit around from case to case like some kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes. You think you can bypass all the usual procedures and solve the crime with nothing more than flair and imagination.’ He took an angry puff at his cigarette, perhaps in frustration that all his years as a predecessor of Li’s at Section One had led to this dead-end deputy’s job. ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that, Li. We have evolved an approach to criminal investigation that gets results by sheer bloody hard work and attention to detail.’ He slapped a hand on top of the Beijing Youth Daily . ‘And splashing the details of the worst serial killings in this city’s history across the front pages of trash like this, is not going to help. So I suggest you batten down the hatches up there and find out who’s responsible. Because if you don’t, rest assured that I shall. And there will be hell to pay!’

The sun was rising now above the tops of all the new apartment blocks along Dongzhimen, fingers of cold yellow light extending themselves west along the grid. The icy wind carried the breath of winter from the frozen northern plains, laden with the promise of subzero temperatures in the weeks ahead.

Li watched Mei Yuan’s cold red fingers as they worked nimbly about the hotplate to produce his jian bing . Her face, too, was red with the cold, skin dried by the wind. Her eyes watered constantly, as if weeping for the lost summer, or for her lost life. She caught him watching her, and she smiled. Her face lit up, radiant in the morning light, no trace in it of the pain she had endured. She wore her fate with dignity, and always came out smiling.

Li, on the other hand, was sunk in gloom. As if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Cao’s words had stung him, and he wondered if others saw him as Cao did. Cavalier, glory-seeking, too much one of the boys for his subordinates to fully respect him. There were times he took shortcuts, yes, but he never neglected that mind-numbing, painfully slow process of putting a case together piece by piece by piece. He knew the importance of the detail. His uncle had dinned that into him often enough. But sometimes you could get bogged down in it. Sometimes there was so much detail you couldn’t see the bigger picture. Sometimes you just had to trust your instincts and make that leap of faith.

‘A fen for them,’ Mei Yuan said.

‘What?’

‘Your thoughts.’

‘They’re not even worth a fen , Mei Yuan.’

She slipped his jian bing into brown paper and handed it to him. ‘I read about the murders in the paper this morning.’

‘You and the rest of Beijing,’ Li muttered gloomily.

Mei Yuan looked at him perceptively. ‘Should we not?’

‘No,’ Li said emphatically. ‘You should not. The story was leaked, and the paper should have known better than to print it.’

‘Who leaked it?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Then why don’t you ask the editor of the paper.’

‘Oh, I think he’ll be facing that question, and many more, from people much higher up than me, Mei Yuan.’

She nodded mutely. ‘They are terrible killings, Li Yan. Do you not think, perhaps, that people have a right to know?’

‘Why?’ Li asked simply, and he took a bite of his jian bing . ‘Knowing will not protect them, because they do not know who he is. But it won’t stop people being afraid, panicking even. And we will be inundated with cranks claiming to be the Ripper, and with calls from people claiming they know who he is. And we will spend hours and days, maybe weeks, sifting through cranks and crap, wasting valuable time going up blind alleys while the killer remains free to kill again. Our efforts to catch him will be hopelessly diluted.’

‘Yes,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘I can see how that could be.’ There was sympathy in her eyes when she smiled at him. ‘I do not envy you, Li Yan. Trying to catch this man. First you must try to work out who he is. Like a riddle. Only, if you don’t come up with the answer someone will die.’

Li said, ‘And you know how bad I am at solving riddles.’

‘Maybe because there is no life at stake,’ she said. ‘For me it is easy, because it is a game. But to catch a killer is not a game. If you fail, he will kill again. For me, the very fear of failure, and the consequences of that, would numb my mind.’

‘Join the club,’ Li said.

‘But you will catch him.’

‘I have to.’ And just focusing on that thought freed Li’s mind from the clutter which had filled it that morning. What did it matter who had leaked the story? It was another issue, something to be settled another day. A diversion. And he could not afford be diverted. The genie was out of the bottle. There was no way to put it back in. Perhaps, he thought, Mei Yuan was right. He had trouble solving her riddles because it did not matter whether he solved them or not. But the thought that someone might die if he did not catch a killer concentrated his mind in an entirely different way.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘you will have had much time to consider my last riddle.’

Li smiled ruefully. ‘Mei Yuan, I can’t even remember it in detail. Two guys planting rice, wasn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘If you can’t remember in detail there is no point in even thinking about it. I told you, the devil is in the detail.’

There it was again. Detail. The answer to everything was always in the detail. ‘I just can’t give it the time right now, Mei Yuan. Not with this killer still out there.’