Peter May - Chinese Whispers

Jiang nodded vigorously.

‘The thing is, is that as far as what Shimei is saying, it happened. And you’re remembering it. But you’re having a problem bringing it forward to talk with somebody. To try and understand why. And I can understand the fear and embarrassment for you. That’s the biggest thing, isn’t it?’

Jiang was nodding miserably now.

‘Because you can remember it happened, but if you come right out and tell somebody, how do you handle that picture you have of yourself, because you’re not like that normally.’

‘I’m not,’ Jiang whispered.

‘We all have a view of ourselves, Jiang. The way we believe that the rest of the world looks at us. We call that our ego. And when that is threatened, we have what we call an ego defence mechanism which, to protect that image we have of ourselves, will push things back into our subconscious and lead us to deny that they ever occurred — when, in fact, we ourselves know that, yes, it did happen. But because it is so out of character for us in normal situations, we really don’t know how to deal with it.’

Jiang was still nodding his agreement. You could see in him, as clear as day, the desire to confess. To tell this soft-spoken sympathetic American the truth, because after all he had already seen it in the chart.

Hart was still talking. ‘And so, we are left in a predicament where we feel so much pressure. It’s called anxiety. And our anxiety gets to be so great that our total thinking, our total being, is just taken up with trying to fight it.’ He leaned even closer, and put a comforting hand on Jiang’s knee. ‘The thing is that you know, and I know, that what happened was probably brought on by the booze.’

‘Yes …’ Jiang’s voice was a whisper.

‘And you were lonely. After all, your wife had left you. How long had it been? Two years? That’s a long time for a man to be on his own, Jiang.’

Jiang had tipped his head into his left hand, his palm hiding his eyes, but you could see the tears running down his pockmarked cheeks.

‘And that’s why you did it, wasn’t it, Jiang?’

‘Yes.’ Almost inaudible.

‘I need you to tell me, Jiang, that you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina. And all that anxiety is just going to lift right off your shoulders.’

Again, the bluntness of it seemed shocking, but Li knew that the form of words was important for legal purposes.

‘I did it,’ Jiang said.

‘You put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’

‘Yes.’

‘All the way?’

‘Yes.’ And he wept openly now.

Hart patted his knee gently. And he still hadn’t looked at the charts.

Lynn Pan’s apartment was in a new housing development at the south end of Haidian district, not far from Beijing University. The blocks were only four storeys, and had pitched, red-tiled roofs and white painted walls peppered with tiny balconies at every other window. The compound was gated, and guarded by a grey-uniformed Beijing Security officer. Inside there was parking for vehicles, and covered sheds for bicycles. But there were no bicycles parked there. Li flashed his Public Security ID for the guard to raise the gate and the guard said, ‘Your people are already here.’

Li nodded and drove through to park up in front of Pan’s block. He was puzzled by the black and white parked outside it. Forensics travelled in unmarked vans.

In the lobby, an elderly woman grinned at him toothlessly from behind a grilled window. ‘Second floor,’ she said, pointing upwards when he showed her his ID.

On the second-floor landing, the door to Pan’s apartment was standing wide open and he could hear voices from inside. As he went in, he saw that the lock on the door had been forced. The apartment was a shambles. The polished wooden floor in the square hall was strewn with colourful Xinjiang rugs. There were four doors off it. One to a bathroom. Beside it, one to a tiny kitchen. The door to the right led to a living-dining room, its window giving on to one of the small balconies and overlooking the car park below. The fourth door led to the back of the apartment and a double bedroom. The contents of drawers and cupboards had been tipped out on to floors. The doors to the wardrobe stood open. There were two uniformed officers in the bedroom. They turned, startled, as Li appeared in the doorway.

‘What the hell are you guys doing here?’ Li asked.

There was no need to show his ID. They knew immediately who he was. One of them said, ‘The caretaker called the station about the break-in half an hour ago. They radioed the car. It only took us about fifteen minutes to get here.’

‘A break-in,’ Li repeated stupidly.

They looked at him as if he had horns. ‘Sure, isn’t that why you’re here?’

Li said, ‘Haven’t you seen the morning papers? The lady who lives here was murdered last night?’

‘Shit.’ The one who had spoken first suddenly viewed the apartment in a new light.

‘It was in the papers?’ the other one said, incredulously.

‘I hope you haven’t disturbed anything.’

‘No, Chief.’

‘You’ve spoken to the caretaker?’ They nodded. ‘How come the break-in wasn’t reported until this morning?’

‘They didn’t know about it until this morning,’ the first one said. ‘It was a neighbour coming down the stairs who noticed the door lying slightly ajar. Then she saw that it had been forced and told the caretaker. She called us.’

‘And how did burglars get in and out past the security guard?’

‘Beats me, Chief. The guy out there wasn’t on duty last night. We’ll need to pull in the guy who was on the night shift.’

‘You guys won’t be doing anything. This crime scene is now part of a murder investigation and under the jurisdiction of Section One. You make out your reports and have them sent to my office.’

‘Yes, Chief.’ They stood looking at him.

‘You can go now,’ he said.

‘Yes, Chief.’ And reluctantly the two officers donned their hats and ducked out past him on to the landing. He heard their footsteps retreating down the stairs and the imprecations muttered under their breath.

When they had gone, Li stood and looked around him in the stillness of the apartment. It was full of her smell and her presence. Her personality was everywhere, in the choice of pictures she had hung on almost every available wall space — Chinese originals bought at the antiques market; signed prints of narrative pictures by an artist called Vetriano; framed photographs of some picturesque market town in southern France. Li wondered what their significance was. She was there, too, in the brightly coloured curtains on every window, in the dazzling Xinjiang rugs she had bought to cover nearly every square inch of floor, in the black bedcovers printed with white and red Chinese characters that had been ripped from the bed and lay crumpled now on the floor.

Her clothes had been pulled off the wardrobe rail and thrown on the bed. Suits, and jeans, leather jackets, sweatshirts, blouses. A rack of her shoes had been left undisturbed. Trainers and sandals, a pair of Doc Martens, a sturdy pair of brown hiking boots still caked with mud, plain black shoes with chunky low heels. Two Lynn Pans had been torn from the wardrobe. The work persona, the Lynn Pan who liked to wear masculine suits and plain black shoes — although Li knew from their brief encounter that this persona had never masked her essential femininity. And then there was the private persona, the relaxed, informal Lynn Pan who liked to wear jeans and sweatshirts and training shoes, and who enjoyed walking. Where? In the hills out at Badaling? In the Yanshan mountains? And who did she go walking with? Or was she a loner? Certainly, there was no evidence of anyone else sharing her bedroom.