Peter May - Chinese Whispers

The kitchen was small, but tidy. Although the thieves had opened every cupboard, they had not disturbed the contents. Shelves were neatly lined with dried and tinned foods. The refrigerator was well-stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables. In the freezer there were chicken breasts and fish, and whole-wheat bread that she must have bought in one of the foreign supermarkets. She liked to eat healthily, and she liked to eat at home.

The bathroom shelves were lined with soaps and shampoos and skin cleansers. There was very little in the way of make-up, either here or in the bedroom, and he remembered how little she had worn the afternoon that he met her. A touch of brown on the eyelids, a hint of blusher on her cheeks, the merest smudge of colour on her lips. She’d had a beautiful complexion and fine bone structure. Make-up would have been superfluous.

A small dining table with two chairs sat by the window in the front room. There were potted plants everywhere: green, leafy spider plants, a yucca tree, a beautiful winter-flowering azalea. The air was filled with their fragrance. Bookshelves lined one complete wall. Books on China and Chinese dialects; rows of cookery books with recipes and cuisines from all over the world; a twenty-six-volume encyclopaedia; Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary; a dictionary of quotations; reams of fiction — Steinbeck, Hemingway, Greene, Rushdie, Wolfe, and dozens more that Li had never heard of. Clearly, she had been a reader.

There was a two-seater settee covered in silk throws, and one armchair set to get the best light from the window. Obviously where she sat to read. A TV and video had not been touched, but cables lay around a coffee table beside the armchair, and the table itself seemed oddly bare.

A dresser opposite the window had been ransacked. Much of its content lay strewn across the floor. CDs, photo albums, personal papers. Li could read some of the CD titles without stooping to pick them up. Jean Michel Jarre’s The China Concerts . A large collection of Bach fugues. Handel’s Water Music . The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . On a stereo cabinet beside the dresser, the CD drawer of a neat little Sony stack lay open. There was a CD in it. The second disk of The China Concerts . Li took a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and slipped them on. He switched on the stereo and the CD drawer slid shut. He pressed play and was immediately assaulted by loud synthesiser music, not much to his taste. He picked up the CD box and looked at the titles. Orient Express, Magnetic Fields, Laser Harp … The final track was called Souvenir of China . He flipped through the previous tracks until he got to it, and suddenly the room was filled with the sound of children’s voices. Chinese children. The noise of a camera shutter, the sound of synthesiser strings stepping down through a slow, sad melody. More Chinese voices. The punctuation of a monotonous, steady drumbeat.

Li found himself oddly affected by the music, the hair rising on his neck and across his scalp. It was strangely apposite to his mood, the sense of sadness and desolation in this dead woman’s apartment, his memory of her forever stained by the bloody corpse lying at the base of the Millennium Monument.

He sat down and picked out a print-sized photo album from the mess on the floor. It had clear plastic sleeves, two photographs in each. They were mostly pictures of Pan and a friend in backpacks and boots, posing on a hillside somewhere, spectacular backdrops behind them. Pan’s face was red with the cold, and radiant in its smile. The two girls were clearly on their own, the remote on the camera snapping pictures of them together. Both were laughing hysterically. There were more sombre pictures of each of them individually, and several panoramas of the plains of northern China laid out below them. In one, Li could detect the plume of pollution hanging over a distant Beijing.

The other girl seemed strangely familiar. And then Li placed her. She had been in the graduation photograph with Pan on the wall in Pan’s office. An old friend from back in the States. A plain girl, with an attractive smile.

He heard a sharp intake of breath, and a muted, throaty exclamation of fear. A woman’s voice. He turned his head to find himself looking at the plain girl with the attractive smile. She was standing in the open doorway to the hall, but she wasn’t smiling. Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God, what’s happened here? Who are you?’

Li stood up immediately and switched off the stereo. The silence seemed deafening in its absence. ‘Didn’t the caretaker tell you?’

‘She never said a thing.’ It was a Californian accent.

‘There’s been a break-in.’

‘I can see that. Who are you?’

‘Section Chief Li Yan, Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police.’

‘Where’s Lynn? Does she know about it, yet?’

Li felt sick. Of course, he realised, an American in Beijing was hardly likely to buy the Beijing Youth Daily . He didn’t even know if she spoke or read Chinese.

‘What’s your relationship to Miss Pan?’ he asked.

‘We’re friends. We were at university together. Where is she?’ There was a hint of panic, now, in her voice.

Li said, ‘I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but Miss Pan was murdered last night.’

He had not known what reaction to expect, but the feral howl that escaped the girl’s mouth punctured him like a cold, steel blade, nearly bringing tears to his eyes. He quickly crossed to the door and led her to the settee. She slumped into it like a woman falling. A dead weight. But apart from that single howl, not another sound issued from her lips. Big, silent tears rolled down her cheeks, and she clutched her hands in front of her, wringing them so hard her knuckles were turning white. Li sat down beside her and gently prised her hands apart, holding one of them in both of his. ‘Can I get you water or something?’

She shook her head. She spotted the photo album Li had been looking at and pulled her hand free of his to pick it up. As she flicked through it, Li could see the pain every image inflicted on her, each one with its own special memory. She snapped it shut again and sat silently shaking. Li allowed her some time to regain control. Finally, she said, without looking at him, ‘Of course, you didn’t know her.’

Li said, ‘I met her yesterday afternoon for the first time. Just a few hours before she was killed.’

The girl turned to look at him. Through her tears she examined his face, and he saw a sad smile in her eyes. ‘And, naturally, you fell for her.’ Li felt the colour rise on his cheeks. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Everybody does.’ She corrected herself. ‘Did. Everybody fell for Lynn. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes.’

‘Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why someone would want to kill her,’ Li said.

‘How …?’ The girl hardly dared to ask. ‘How did it happen?’

Li sighed heavily. ‘I don’t think …’

‘I want to know!’ the girl insisted.

Li said, ‘She was strangled, and had her throat cut.’

‘Oh, my God!’

For a moment Li thought the girl was going to be sick. But she controlled herself. He said, ‘Do you know if she had any special relationship? I mean, do you know if there was someone she was seeing?’

The girl nodded. She was wringing her hands again and staring at the floor. After a long silence she said in a voice that was almost a whisper, ‘Me.’

Li frowned in consternation. ‘I don’t understand.’

The girl said, ‘We were lovers. Ever since we met at university. There hadn’t ever been anyone else.’