Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Sometimes, Li Yan, it is good therapy to take your mind off one problem to work on another. Then when you return to the original it might not seem quite so intractable.’

Li finished his jian bing and grinned. Mei Yuan was usually right about most things. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Give me it again.’

‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field in Hunan, a long way from their village,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to go from one end of the paddy to the other …’ She went through the whole riddle once more. The fact that the two men had just finished lunch, sharing their food and drink, agreeing to meet and share again when they each finished planting their remaining ten rows. Li listened carefully, and it started coming back to him. When the man with the food had finished his work he couldn’t see his friend anywhere, and thinking he had gone back to the village, had eaten the food himself.

‘So he wakes up the next morning,’ Li cut in, ‘and the other guy’s shaking him and accusing him of being greedy, leaving him there on his own to go off and eat the food by himself.’

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and left him. The man with the drink insists he was there all the time! They are both telling the truth.’

Li thought about it. They have just finished lunch and have another ten rows to plant. They are both deaf mutes and can only communicate by sign language. They both claim to still be there when they finish their work, but for some reason they don’t see one another. ‘They’re not blind?’ he said.

‘If they were blind, how could they communicate by sign language?’

‘Of course.’ Li felt foolish. But they couldn’t hear or speak to each other. If they were both there at the end of the day why didn’t they see each other? Why did the man with the food think his friend had already gone? And then it dawned on him, and he felt even more foolish. ‘Oh, Mei Yuan, that’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’

‘They’d just had lunch, so it must have been about midday. They still had ten rows each to plant. But it took them an hour to get from one end of the paddy to the other, then it was ten o’clock at night when they finished. And it was dark. That’s why they couldn’t see each other.’

Mei Yuan grinned. ‘Simple, really. And, of course, they couldn’t call out because they were deaf mutes.’

‘But what if there was a full moon that night?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s the rainy season, Li Yan. The sky is cloudy.’

He gave her a look. ‘You always have an answer.’

‘Because there always is one.’

A shadow fell across his face as he remembered just how few answers he’d come up with on the Ripper murders. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s always an answer. But we don’t always know what it is.’

* * *

Qian spotted Li passing the open door to the detectives’ room and hurried into the corridor after him. He caught up with him in Li’s office. Li was surveying the shambles that was his desk. The night before he had lifted most of the piles of paper off it to stack against the wall below the window. This morning they had been replaced by fresh ones.

‘Chief.’

He turned at the sound of Qian’s voice. ‘Unless it’s important, Qian, I don’t have time. I’ve got to get across town for the autopsy.’ He flicked his head towards the wall. ‘Is Wu next door?’

‘Chief, the autopsy’s been postponed.’

Which stopped Li in his tracks. ‘Postponed by whom?’

‘An order from headquarters. Just came in a few minutes ago.’

Li scowled. ‘What in the name of the sky do they think they are playing at?’

Qian seemed almost afraid to tell him. ‘Lynn Pan was an American citizen.’

‘So?’

‘So the American Embassy have requested that one of their people carry out the autopsy. Or at least assist on it.’

‘Well, the answer’s no,’ Li snapped. ‘This is an ongoing murder inquiry. I’m not going to have some goddamned American pathologist who knows nothing of the background to the other murders coming in and fucking up our corpse.’

Qian braced himself. ‘I don’t know that it matters much what we think, Chief. Apparently the Ministry has already agreed. It’s been authorised at the highest level, and the autopsy’s been postponed till eleven.’

‘The hell it has!’ Li snatched the phone and started punching in numbers.

‘Chief…’ There was something in Qian’s tone that cut through Li’s anger.

‘What is it, Qian?’

‘There have been other developments. Putting off the autopsy for a couple of hours might not be such a bad idea.’

Li slowly replaced the receiver. ‘Tell me.’

‘There was a break-in last night at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Lynn Pan’s office was ransacked.’

The head of security met them in the lobby. He was agitated, an ex-cop who saw the break-in on his turf as a potential one-way ticket to unemployment. He was a tall man, nearly Li’s height, and wore a grey uniform with clusters of stars and stripes that meant nothing at all. They just looked impressive. It was still early, and staff and students were only now beginning to show up for the day. He steered Li and Wu along a corridor to his office on the ground floor. ‘Look guys,’ he said, appealing to the old boys’ network, ‘I’d really appreciate it if we can keep this low profile.’

‘A woman has been murdered,’ Li said sharply. ‘It’s hard to lower a profile like that. What happened here?’

The security man shrugged his eyebrows. ‘That’s just it. I’ve no idea. None of the alarms was tripped. I can’t find signs of forced entry anywhere.’

Wu was chewing manically, and swinging the left-hand leg of his shades around the little finger of his right hand. ‘So how do you know there’s been a break-in?’

‘Because somebody jemmied their way into Lynn Pan’s offices and cleaned out the lot. Computers, files, just about everything that wasn’t nailed down. A real pro job.’

‘Not an inside one?’ Li said.

The security man pulled a face. ‘I don’t think so. If they had keys to turn off alarms and get in and out the building, wouldn’t they have had keys for her offices, too?’

Wu said, ‘If they were smart enough to break in without leaving a trace why would they have to force an internal door?’

‘Because once you’re in, you don’t have to worry about setting off alarms,’ the security man said. ‘You’ve done the smart bit. You’re not going to be able to hide the fact that you’ve ransacked a whole department, so why worry about breaking down a door?’

Li wasn’t convinced either way. ‘Let’s take a look.’

Some of Pan’s staff and students were gathered in the corridor outside the department. Most of them had just heard the news of her death and were still in shock. Their babble of hushed chatter died away as Li, Wu and the security man stepped out of the elevator. Li said to the security man, ‘I don’t want anybody touching anything until forensics have been over the place.’

He recognised some of the faces in the corridor. Lynn Pan’s assistant, an older woman, who had brought them all tea the previous day and escorted them to the computer room. The student who had briefed them on the ‘crime’ for the MERMER test. He nodded acknowledgement as he passed them and the security man showed the detectives the double doors which had been forced at the end of the corridor. The wood was splintered and broken around the lock. Crude but effective. Beyond the doors, the reception room where Li had sat with Commissioner Zhu and Deputy Minister Wei and the others appeared to have been left undisturbed. Li glanced from the window and saw the minaret-like TV tower catching the light, sharp against the blue of the sky. He could scarcely believe it had been only yesterday afternoon he had stood at that very window looking out at the tower. Then, Lynn Pan had still been very much alive, a beautiful, vibrant living being, demonstrating her extraordinary expertise. Why would anyone want to kill her?