Peter May - Chinese Whispers

‘Are you alright?’ Margaret said. ‘You’ve been away for ages.’

Li nodded. ‘I’m okay. My father’s with Lao Dai.’ He did not want to get into the whole credit card thing right now. He looked again at Qian and stepped into the room. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

Qian looked grim. ‘William Hart has been found dead in the gardens of his apartment building. Apparently he fell from a window on the twenty-third floor.’

Steam rose from sewers through gratings in the road at the China World Trade Center, dispersing in the traffic, lost in their exhaust fumes. Lines of cars moved steadily on to the southbound lanes of the East Third Ring Road, and their tail lights arced off into the night. Li sat numbed in the passenger seat next to Qian.

‘You could be in big trouble for this, Qian,’ he said.

Qian shrugged. ‘I’ve known you for how long, Chief? Fifteen years? More? I think that qualifies us as old friends. Strictly speaking, I’m off duty right now. So I’m giving an old friend a lift to the apartment of an acquaintance who has been killed.’

Li stared off into the night. He was deeply shocked by the death of Hart. Not just because he was someone he had known and liked, but because he was the last hope for identifying Lynn Pan’s killer. Which was no doubt why he was dead. Li felt responsible. He should have warned him. But, then, his day had simply collapsed around him, fallen in with the rest of his world. Hart had been the last thing on his mind.

They turned off at the Jinsong bridge, and Qian was waved through by uniformed officers at the entrance to the Music Home Apartments complex. The gardens which Li and Margaret had walked through just twenty-four hours earlier, were jammed with people. Police and forensic vehicles were pulled up at the north-west tower. The whole area was floodlit, and people from the other apartments and the shopping plaza were pressing up against a cordon of officers determined to keep them back. Li and Qian abandoned the Jeep and pressed through the crowds to be let under the tape by the officer in charge of crowd control. They hurried along the path and through a curve of covered walkway that spanned the stream. Hart had fallen on to an area of white tiled concourse around a rocky pond. There was a lot of blood, stark and red against the white of the tiles. His torso was unnaturally twisted, and his arms and legs lay flung out from it at odd angles. His left forearm and hand were missing. The skull was split open. Li could hardly bring himself to look. Instead, he tilted his head up to see the lights of the apartment twenty-three floors above. It was a hell of a fall. No chance of survival.

He tilted his head down again and found that the eyes of every officer at the scene were on him. His arrival had caused a spontaneous hiatus in the proceedings. The photographer’s flash had stopped flashing. Pathologist Wang was crouched over the body, but twisted around so that he could catch a sight of Li. Officers from his own section stood gawping at him. Forensics officers in their white tyvek suits squatted motionless around the body where they had been searching for the tiniest pieces of evidence.

The only movement came from the head of forensics, Fu Qiwei, who was walking towards him through a scene frozen in time, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a VCR. He was grinning, his black eyes shining. And he held out his hand to shake Li’s. ‘Hey, Chief,’ he said. ‘Got some fucking memo today saying you’d been suspended and that I wasn’t to consort with you. Who uses a fucking word like consort? ’ He scratched his head as if trying to puzzle it out. ‘Anyway. Never got the chance to read the goddamned thing. Catch up on it tomorrow. More important things to do right now.’ Li nodded and shook his hand firmly.

‘Memo? What memo?’ Wang said. ‘I haven’t even had the chance to look at my mail today.’

‘Me neither,’ Wu said, stepping out of the bunch of detectives. He looked around. ‘I guess we’ve all been too busy, haven’t we?’ Heads nodded their agreement, and as if the pause button had been pressed again, the crime scene came back to life. Only Hart remained dead.

Qian whispered in Li’s ear, ‘Everybody’s with you, Chief.’

Li did not trust himself to speak for a moment, then he turned to Wu. ‘What’s the story, Detective?’

Wu said, ‘Everything points to an accident, or suicide, Chief. Hart was in the apartment on his own. Window on the balcony’s wide open. His wife was out shopping somewhere with the baby and wasn’t home yet. It was a neighbour returning from work who heard the scream. Looked up and there was Hart dropping like a stone.’

‘The neighbour heard a scream?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Was that before or after he came out the window?’

Wu shook his head. ‘He can’t tell. He heard the scream before he saw Hart. One thing’s for sure, though, he was alive during the fall. The neighbour says his arms were windmilling like crazy.’

Li closed his eyes, and could only imagine what thoughts must have being going through Hart’s mind as he fell to his death, knowing its inevitability. Did those few seconds it took to fall seem like a lifetime, or were they over in a flash? He opened his eyes again. ‘There’s no way it was suicide or an accident, Wu. Hart was working all day trying to decipher Lynn Pan’s graphs. Either he found out who the liar was, or he was getting close to it.’

Qian said, ‘So if you were here in your capacity as Section Chief, Chief, how would you want things handled?’

Li said, ‘I’d have officers take statements from every resident in the complex. Find out who was in the garden coffee shop at the time, what staff were on duty. I’d talk to the security officer in the lobby — how did the killer get in without coming through security? Check for closed-circuit TV. Check the taxi companies in case the killer came by taxi, or got away in one. Someone, somewhere, saw something, whether they know it or not. Maybe a stranger in an elevator, someone behaving oddly. We need forensics to go through the apartment with a fine-toothed comb. My feeling is that the killer is a real pro, so we probably won’t find anything. But people make mistakes.’

Wu looked at Qian, who nodded. ‘I’ll get on with it,’ he said.

‘Wu.’ Li put a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘Where’s his wife?’

‘In the apartment. There’s a female officer with her. She’s pretty upset.’

‘Maybe I should identify the body for the record,’ Li said. ‘Save her the trauma.’

Wu shrugged. ‘She’s already done it, Chief. Insisted on seeing him.’

Li nodded and Wu went off to issue instructions to the other detectives. He turned to Qian. ‘I’d like Margaret to do the autopsy.’

Qian raised an eyebrow. ‘That might be a bit difficult, Chief.’

Li said, ‘The Americans are probably going to request that one of their people do it anyway. And if we move fast, do it tonight, then it’ll be a fait accompli.’

‘Okay,’ Qian said. ‘I’ll set it up.’

‘One other thing, Qian,’ Li said. ‘I don’t want my son and my niece left alone in the apartment. Is there any way we can get an officer to stay with them until after the autopsy?’

Qian shook his head. ‘Not officially. I’d never get away with it.’ He hesitated. ‘But like I said, officially I’m off duty. I’ll stay with them. No one’ll lay a finger on them while I’m there, Chief. You can count on it.’

Li looked into the eyes of the older man and saw in them only devotion and trust. He wanted to hug him, but all he said was, ‘I know.’

* * *

Lyang was like a shadow, insubstantial, almost transparent. She sat in a trance at the dining table where they should have eaten the previous night, her hands in front of her, fingers interlocked. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut. She turned them on Li as he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. The female officer got up and moved away. Forensics were through in the living room, examining the balcony in the minutest detail. It was from one of its windows that Hart had fallen. They had already found damage to the sill, and scuff marks on the polished mahogany floor that Hart and Lyang had been so careful to protect with slippers laid out at the door for guests. Nothing else seemed out of place, Chinese rugs and wall hangings, the stereo switched on, but the music on pause. There was a drink sitting on the drinks cabinet. Untouched. It was one of Hart’s faux margaritas. The ice was all melted now. He must have mixed it when he came in. Hardly the actions of a man about to throw himself off a balcony. Perhaps he had put on the music, mixed himself a drink, and then there had been a knock at the door. He’d put the music on pause, put down his drink and let in his killer.