Peter May - Chinese Whispers

Lyang spoke unprompted, softly, her voice hoarse. ‘He called me about two hours ago on my cellphone,’ she said, and Li found it hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of guilt when he met her eyes, even although there was no hint of accusation in them. ‘He said he thought he had cracked the graphs. That’s exactly what he said. I didn’t know what he meant, but he didn’t want to say any more on the phone. He said he would tell me when we met back here. I was at the supermarket with Ling. I finished the shopping and came straight back.’ Her voice tailed off and she pressed her lips together, eyes closed, regaining composure. ‘I missed him by about fifteen minutes. The police were already here, along with just about every nosey goddamned neighbour in the complex.’

Li reached across the table and put his hand over both of hers. It was fully a minute before she could bring herself to continue. ‘I wish … I wish I’d been able to see him one last time. You know, just to appreciate him for the lovely man he was. To let him know that I loved him.’ She caught her breath, and closed her eyes to stop herself from weeping. ‘Last time I saw him was this morning when he left the apartment. You know how it is. You don’t pay any attention. You don’t expect to not ever see someone again. I can’t even remember how he looked, if I said goodbye, if he was smiling, or if I was. All I can remember is … is how he was down there.’ She tilted her head almost imperceptibly towards the window.

‘You don’t have to talk right now,’ Li said.

‘I want to,’ she insisted. A sudden flame of anger burned in her eyes. ‘I came back up here and cried like I’ve never cried in my life. I cried so hard it was physically painful.’ She put her hand to her chest. ‘I can still feel it, like cracked ribs.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And there comes a point when you just can’t cry any more. Not straight off, anyway. And I got to thinking how I could do something positive. Something Bill would have wanted me to do. So I searched the apartment to see what he had brought home with him. There was nothing here. Nothing in his study. Not even his briefcase. And he always had his briefcase with him. So then I phoned the academy, and they said he had taken everything away with him.’ She clutched Li’s hand with both of hers. ‘They killed him, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘They came in here and threw him off the balcony and stole all his stuff. And we’ll never know what it was he found. What he meant when he said he’d cracked the graphs.’

And Li knew she was right. That his last chance of identifying Lynn Pan’s killer and understanding why she had to die had gone out of the window with Bill Hart. The killer was going to get away with it. Two people dead. Li’s career in ruins, his future and his family torn apart. And not one way that Li could think of to strike back.

For the first time, he let the suspicions he had been suppressing for most of the day fizz to the forefront of his mind. There was only one person who knew everything Li knew. Only one person he had told. Commissioner Zhu, that morning in the Commissioner’s apartment. The Commissioner had subsequently spoken to the Director General of the Political Department, Yan Bo, but how much had he told him? Enough to prompt him to warn Li off. But how much had Yan Bo known about Hart? When the Commissioner had asked Li how he intended to find out who the liar was, he’d told him, I’ve asked Bill Hart to gather together all the various pieces of information necessary to make that apparent . Li felt ill at the thought that those words might have sealed Hart’s fate.

And then there was the empty pack of Russian cheroots in the trash in the office of the Commissioner’s secretary. The same brand as those found beside the Ripper victims, the same brand that forensics had retrieved from the crime scene at the Millennium Monument. Zhu would have had full access to the files on the Ripper murders. Hadn’t the Commissioner himself asked Li for daily reports? He would have known what brand of cheroot had been found at the Ripper crime scenes. Easy enough to buy a pack at any tobacconist’s, leave one at the scene of Pan’s murder, dispose of the rest. But it was careless of him to throw the empty pack in the trash. Was it a sign of his arrogance, his supreme confidence that he was untouchable? Or did he simply just never envisage a circumstance in which it might have been seen there?

And who else would have had the power to engineer Li’s suspension, to take his life apart the way it had been? There wasn’t anything about Li he wouldn’t know. He had his mole in Li’s section, his informant, someone who would keep him in touch with everything going on in that office. Li realised he would probably never even know who that was.

There was something else which had been troubling him. A memory from that afternoon at the academy when he and the Commissioner had been briefed together on the murder for the MERMER test. A picture in Li’s head of the ease with which the Commissioner had handled the murder weapon, a large hunting knife serrated at the hilt. You look like you were born with one of those in your hands , he had said to him. And the Commissioner had told him about his hunting trips with his father in the forests of Xinjiang Province. We killed the animals by slitting their throats , he had said. My father taught me how to gut a deer in under ten minutes . He knew how to use a knife. How easy would it have been for him draw a blade across Lynn Pan’s throat?

All of which brought him back to the single, most troubling question of all. Why?

Lyang’s voice dragged him away from his darkest thoughts. ‘Li Yan …’ He looked at her. ‘Don’t leave me alone. Please. I don’t think I could face a night here on my own.’

‘Lyang …’ Li squeezed her hands. ‘We need to establish … we need to know that Bill was pushed.’

‘You mean an autopsy?’ She seemed almost matter-of-fact about it. And Li remembered that she had been a cop. She knew the procedure.

He nodded. ‘I’m going to ask Margaret to do it.’

And something about that thought made the tears fill her eyes again. It was some moments before she could speak. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. Then even through her pain and tears she found something to make her smile. A memory of the character that her husband had been. ‘He’d have enjoyed the irony.’ But the smile was short-lived, and she bit her lip.

‘We’ll come over here afterwards, with Li Jon and my niece, Xinxin. Spend the night if you want.’

‘I’d like that.’

And from the bedroom they heard the sound of baby Ling crying. Tears, perhaps, for the father she would never know.

Li stood on the steps of the pathology department watching the headlights of vehicles probing the mist on the Badaling Expressway. Above it, the sky was inky dark, the stars clearer out here on the fringes of the city, away from the lights and the pollution. He cut a faintly absurd figure in his green smock and shower cap, but he was oblivious of his appearance, even if there had been anyone there to see him. There were only a few vehicles in the carpark, one or two lights in windows dotted about the dark frontage of the building. A minimum staff on night shift. He had needed air before he could face the autopsy. There had been too many familiar faces recently staring back at him with dead eyes from the autopsy table. It had been only yesterday morning that Lynn Pan had come under the pathologist’s knife. Now Bill Hart. Li remembered the soft, seductive voice teasing the confession from the child abuser. Hart himself had described the polygraph as a psychological rubber hose. But that was not how he had used it. He had found empathy with his subjects, made a connection between them with his simple humanity. He had not deserved to die like this.