Peter May - Chinese Whispers

Hart laughed. ‘I thought it was voodoo.’

‘Whatever.’

He passed a drink to Lyang. ‘Actually, the money’s pretty crap. Well, here in China anyway.’ His smiled faded. ‘Lyang probably told you, I inherited the house in Boston when my wife died.’ He shrugged as if embarrassed. ‘I also picked up a fat insurance cheque that I’d happily have torn in a thousand pieces in return for a chance to turn back the clock. But I couldn’t. So I figured, spend it. I never expected to have it, I wouldn’t miss it when it was gone.’ He let his eyes wander around the room. ‘So we live well. And if we ever have to go back to the States …’ his eyes flickered towards Li and then away again,’… we can rent this place out to give ourselves a nice little income.’

‘You want to see around?’ Lyang said. She was dying to show them.

‘Sure,’ Margaret said.

Li would happily have sunk into one of the comfortable-looking armchairs arranged around a central coffee table, but good manners dictated that he look enthusiastic, and he nodded and forced a smile of false interest across his face.

They put their drinks on the table, and Lyang led them back out into the entrance hall and up polished stairs that turned back on themselves at a halfway landing, leading up then to a long central hallway. At one end was the guest bedroom, which doubled as a study, at the other the master bedroom and the baby’s room. There was also a large storeroom which Lyang said the sales people had told them was a maid’s room. No windows, no ventilation. ‘Foreign architects,’ she said. ‘They probably imagined that would be luxury to us poor Chinese.’

They peeked quietly into the baby’s room and heard the slow, rhythmic breathing of a sleeping child. There were expensive Chinese rugs everywhere, thick-piled and soft underfoot, and from somewhere they had managed to acquire a four-poster bed for the master bedroom. The view from here faced north, towards the lights of the China World Trade Center. In the street a long way below, a traditional Beijing restaurant was doing good business.

Li figured Mao must be turning in his mausoleum.

When they got back downstairs, Lyang excused herself and hurried into the kitchen. Li sank gratefully into the armchair that had been beckoning ever since they arrived and took a long drink of his margarita over a salted rim. He felt the alcohol rushing straight to his brain and immediately began to relax. Perhaps this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least he could escape for a few hours from the horrors of the Beijing Ripper and his victims, and the thought that Lynn Pan had been murdered by someone he knew.

‘Any developments on the Lynn Pan killing?’ Hart asked.

Li groaned inwardly. He wanted to tell Hart it was none of his damned business, but he knew he couldn’t do that. ‘Afraid not,’ he said quickly, before Margaret could say anything. He flashed her a warning look. From now on he was going to share information on the murder with as few people as possible. That included Bill Hart — and most of Section One.

‘It’s a crying shame,’ Hart said. ‘I still feel like shit every time I think about it. I wish I’d never put her name up for that job.’

‘You wouldn’t think of moving over into MERMER yourself?’ Li said. ‘They’re going to need someone to take over the project. And if you’re going to lose your polygraph funding …’

Hart put a finger quickly to his lips and nodded towards the kitchen. ‘No,’ he said in a quite normal voice that belied the warning he had just given. ‘It’s not an area in which I have any real expertise. Sure, I understand the principles, I can read the graphs, but the science and the software are a mystery to me.’

Margaret said, ‘Li Yan never told me how you two met. It wasn’t at a séance, was it?’

‘Bill did a polygraph for us a couple of years ago,’ Li said. ‘A guy who murdered his wife and children and parents in their apartment out in Xuanwu District. We were pretty certain he’d done it, but we just couldn’t prove it. I think that must have been when you were back in the States.’

‘So what did you do?’ Margaret asked Hart. ‘Hang him out the window by his feet and threaten to drop him if he didn’t confess?’

Hart laughed. ‘Didn’t have to. And, anyway, he’d volunteered for the polygraph. Figured he was too smart for us and could beat the test and prove his innocence.’

‘Isn’t there a polygraph expert at the Public Security University who normally does tests for the cops?’ Margaret said.

‘Yes,’ Li said, ‘but the good professor is in big demand all over the country. Not always available.’

‘So you called in the American witch doctor.’

‘Careful,’ Hart said. ‘I’ll start sticking pins in that doll of you I keep upstairs.’

Margaret grinned. ‘So what happened?’

Hart said, ‘I did one of my little parlour tricks. Got him to pick a number and then lie about it. Then I showed him the result on the chart and that was that.’

‘What was what?’ Margaret said.

‘He didn’t even have to take the test,’ Li said. ‘The guy broke down there and then and confessed.’

‘Was that before or after you held him under the water?’

Hart shook his head. ‘I’m never going to convince you, am I?’

‘Probably not.’

Li said, ‘So you think you could beat the number test?’

‘I’ve no idea. But we’re never likely to find out, are we?’

‘I’ve got a machine upstairs,’ Hart said. ‘In the study. It would only take a few minutes.’

‘No chance,’ Margaret said.

‘Go on,’ Li said. ‘You can’t sit there and pour scorn on the man’s work and then refuse to let him prove himself.’

‘It wouldn’t work on me,’ Margaret said. ‘I’d feel guilty even when I was telling the truth.’

Hart smiled. ‘Let me be the one to judge that.’ He called through to the kitchen. ‘Honey? How long till grub’s up?’

‘Another ten minutes,’ Lyang called back.

‘Plenty of time,’ Hart said.

There were two desks in the study, each pushed against facing walls. A third wall was floor to ceiling window, and facing it a futon was set against the fourth. There were matching iMac computers on each desk, cosmic screen savers mixing through sequential photographs of deep space: planets and moons, gas clouds, comets and galaxies. There was a solitary lamp on Hart’s desk illuminating his private polygraph machine, pens poised to point the finger at whomsoever should dare to prevaricate.

‘Nervous?’ Hart asked.

‘You bet,’ Margaret said, and she was beginning to wish she’d just kept her mouth shut.

‘Sit down.’ Hart pulled a chair on castors out from below his desk and beckoned her into it. He opened a drawer and started to take out the wires and cuffs and bands that he would attach to her before starting his little demonstration.

They heard Lyang on the stairs. ‘Don’t start without me,’ she called, and she ran along the hall and hurried in. ‘This I’ve got to see. Dinner can wait.’ She sat down by her desk, bumping against it and causing the screen saver on her computer to vanish. She glanced at the on-screen desktop which it revealed. ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘I’ve got mail. I never have mail.’ She smiled at Margaret. ‘We have broadband internet and no one ever writes to me.’ She clicked on the icon of a postage stamp at the foot of her screen. It had a red circle with a white ‘1’ inside it, indicating there was a message. The e-mail browser appeared on the screen, and the message was highlighted in the inbox. Lyang sat for a long time staring at it.

Hart was attaching a blood pressure cuff to Margaret’s left arm. He glanced across. ‘Who’s writing to you, honey?’