Peter May - Chinese Whispers

Li thought about it. There were any number of people who might have known he was here. It would be impossible to draw a ring and say only those inside knew. He felt sick. Pan had thought she was meeting him. She had gone to her death trusting in him. The caller must have been very persuasive. But what bizarre circumstance would have led her to accept such a strange rendezvous? He still found it hard to believe that someone had been able to pass themselves off as him. He turned to the professor. ‘Was there nothing about the call that struck you as … odd? I mean, did this person sound like me?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’d only met you for a few minutes yesterday afternoon. I thought it was you because he said he was. I had no reason to doubt it.’

And neither would Pan. Her Chinese was almost native, but it was American. Her experience of China was limited. Regional variations in accent would mean nothing to her. And once again, the words of Lao Dai came back to him. You have an enemy, Li Yan . Not only was this killer sending Li letters, fulfilling a promise to cut off a woman’s ears, but now he was passing himself off as Li himself. He had used Li to lure Pan to her death, innocent and trusting like a lamb to the slaughter. Li’s shock began turning to anger. He turned to Fu Qiwei. ‘Get a team out to Pan’s apartment. She wasn’t picked at random. She was killed for a reason. Maybe we’ll find it there.’

* * *

Sunlight filled the stairwell from the windows at the rear of the Academy as Li made his way down to the floor below. He was surprised to find Lyang in Hart’s office.

‘Didn’t Margaret tell you I worked here mornings?’ she said.

Li said, ‘We haven’t had much chance to talk in the last twenty-four hours.’

Lyang nodded gravely. ‘I saw the paper this morning. It’s awful about poor Lynn. She was just about the nicest person you could ever hope to meet.’

Li said, ‘Is Bill around?’

‘He’s doing a polygraph test this morning,’ she said. ‘A favour for some of your people. Some guy accused of sexually assaulting his thirteen-year-old daughter. He’s agreed to take the test to prove his innocence. I’ll take you along if you like.’

As they passed down a corridor on the south wing of the fourth floor, Lyang said, ‘Bill wasn’t too keen on doing this after we found out about Lynn. He was pretty cut up about it. You know it was Bill who brought her over here?’ Li nodded. ‘He feels really responsible.’ She sighed. ‘But he’d promised the people from Section Six. So …’ Her voice tailed off as she knocked gently on a door and opened it a crack. Two officers from the interrogation unit at Pau Jü Hutong turned in their chairs. ‘Alright if we come in?’ she whispered. Li knew both the faces and nodded his acknowledgement. They waved him in. The room itself was in darkness, the only light coming through what appeared to be a window into an adjoining room. It took Li a moment to realise it was a two-way mirror.

Two cameras mounted on tripods were recording proceedings in the next room. A middle-aged man sat in a chair beside a desk on which a polygraph machine stood idle, spidery needles hovering motionless above the paper conveyer belt on which they would record his responses to Hart’s questions. The man had long hair swept back from his forehead and growing down over his collar. His face was pockmarked from adolescent acne, and a feeble attempt at a moustache clung to his upper lip. He was sitting at right-angles to the table, facing a chair in which Hart sat conducting his pre-test interview. A monitor on the camera side of the mirror showed a full-screen view of the interviewee, his head cut off above the top frame of the picture, but inset in close-up in the lower left-hand quadrant, obliterating Hart from the recording.

The Section Six interrogators motioned Li silently to a seat. One of them was a woman of about fifty with a round, friendly face, whom Li knew to be a formidable and aggressive interrogator. The other was an older man with a face chiselled out of granite, who had an uncanny talent for gaining the trust of the people he questioned. They were the antithesis of the stereotypical good-cop-bad-cop double act.

The woman leaned towards Li and whispered so quietly he could barely hear her. ‘He’s a smooth operator,’ she said of Hart. ‘That guy was so nervous when he came in he could hardly speak. Now he’s eating out of Hart’s hand. Can’t hardly get the guy to shut up.’

‘He’ll get to the test itself in a couple of minutes,’ Lyang said.

And they heard Hart’s voice across the monitor, soft, soothing, persuasive. His Chinese was almost perfect, his American accent lending it a nearly soporific quality. ‘Now, Jiang,’ he was saying, ‘I’m going to make you a promise right at the start. I’m not going to ask you any questions on the test that I’m not going to ask you right now. There’ll be no surprises, no trick questions. I need a yes, or a no.’

Jiang nodded, and you could see the tension in his face. He laid his forearms flat along the arms of his chair and stretched his palms wide. He swallowed a couple of times, and opened and closed his mouth as if unsticking his tongue from the roof of it. Li remembered the rice test that Hart and Lyang had talked about yesterday.

Hart went on, ‘I’ll begin with what are called known truth questions. They’re questions, the answers to which you know are true and I know are true. What they do is create a picture for me.’ He paused just for a moment. ‘Is your name Jiang?’

‘Yes,’ Jiang said.

‘Are you now in Beijing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I have the questions about why we’re here today.’ Another brief pause. ‘Have you ever put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

Li was startled by the bluntness of the question.

‘No,’ Jiang said.

‘He damn well did!’ the female interrogator hissed. ‘He might have been drunk at the time, but he did it alright. And he remembers he did it.’

Hart continued in the same hypnotic tone, ‘Do you remember if you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina?’

‘No.’

‘Are you telling the truth about not putting your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

‘Yes.’

He shuffled his papers. ‘Then I have those questions we discussed about the past. Do you ever remember doing anything about which you were ashamed?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever remember performing an unusual sex act?’

Jiang seemed embarrassed by this question. ‘No,’ he said. Then added, ‘Only with my wife.’ And a sad smile flitted briefly across his face.

Lyang whispered, ‘She ran off with his sister’s husband and left him to bring up the kid on his own.’

Hart pressed on. ‘Do you remember ever committing a crime for which you were not caught?’

‘No.’

‘Then I have a question which just kind of covers the entire test. Do you intend to answer truthfully each question on this test?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then the last question, just for me. Are you afraid I will ask you a question we have not reviewed?’

‘No.’

Hart stood up. ‘Okay, that’s all there is.’ And he began wiring Jiang up for the test itself — two bands of sensors strapped around the chest and midriff to monitor heart rate, a cuff on the left arm to measure blood pressure, and sensors on the tips of two fingers on the right hand to detect perspiration. He talked as he worked. ‘Now, for each chart, Jiang, I need you to keep both feet on the ground. No moving. No unnecessary talking. Look straight ahead and close your eyes. Think about the questions, think about the answers and try to answer truthfully.’

When he had finished wiring Jiang to the polygraph, he rounded his desk so that he was looking at the subject in profile. ‘Now sometimes,’ he said, ‘I have people come in who just naturally think, I have to beat this sucker. When they do that, generally they have heard that when they get asked a question they should squeeze their toes or bite their tongue or press down on a tack they’ve hidden in their shoe. They make a big mistake when they do that, Jiang. The reason for that is that the equipment is so sensitive that if you have a heart murmur I’ll see that right there on your chart. And when people try doing these things, all they do is cause those pens to go crazy.’ He waved his hand at the needles poised above the chart, ready to go. ‘And when I see that, I have to ask why, when I already told them how best for me to see the truth, why are they trying to change what I’m looking at.’ He looked at Jiang. ‘And what’s the only logical reason you can think of?’