Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Wu lifted his file from the desk, tipped his chair backwards and pushed his sunglasses further back on his head. With Wu image was everything, from his faded jeans to his denim jacket and sunglasses. Even the gum he chewed, which must have long since lost its flavour. He was putting on a show for the newcomers.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Number one. August twenty. Tian Jingfu, aged fifty-one, a projectionist in a movie theatre in Xicheng District. Fails to turn up for work. His wife’s away visiting relatives in the south, so his work unit connects with his street committee, who go to his door. No one answers, but they can hear the television going. So they call the census cop and he comes and bursts the door down. The place is filled with twenty million flies. The guy’s lying in the front room with his head cut off. Pathologist reckons he’s been there for two days. There’s no sign of forced entry. But the guy’s been drinking red wine. Unusual. And the autopsy shows its been spiked, a drug called flunitrazepam. His hands have been tied behind his back with a silk cord, and a white card hung around his neck. It’s got the name Pigsy written on it upside down in red ink and then scored through. Pigsy, I think we’re all agreed, is some kind of nickname. The card also has the number 6 written on it. From the position of the body, it looks like he’s been made to kneel, head bowed, and a bronze sword or similar bladed weapon used to decapitate him. Hell of a lot of blood. Other than that, the place is clean, no rogue footprints, fingerprints. Forensics came up with zip.’

He dropped his file on the desk, tipped his chair forward and held his hands out, palms up. ‘I talked to just about everyone who ever knew him. Workmates, neighbours, friends, family. Parents are dead, an aunt still living in Qianmen. Everyone says he was a nice guy, lived quietly. No one knew why anyone would want to kill him. No one saw anything unusual the day he was murdered.’ He shrugged. ‘Zip.’ And with finger and thumb he smoothed out the sparse growth on his upper lip that he liked to think of as a moustache.

Li turned towards Qian Yi. ‘Detective Qian.’

Qian took a breath. ‘OK. Number two. Bai Qiyu, fifty-one, same age as victim number one. Married, with two kids at college. He’s a businessman, manager of a small import-export company in Xuanwu District. August thirty-first, the staff arrive at work in the morning to find him lying in his office. Decapitated. Same thing. Silk cord tying his wrists behind his back — and forensics tell us it’s cut from the same length as the killer used on the first victim. An identical piece of white card round the neck, the same colour ink. Only this time the nickname is Zero and the number is 5. So now we assume we’re counting down the victims. A tape lift from the severed vertebra during autopsy tells us it is a similar, or the same, bronze-bladed weapon. Bai Qiyu has also been drinking red wine, also spiked with flunitrazepam. Like Tian Jingfu, his wife was away visiting relatives. His kids were still there, but not particularly concerned when he didn’t come home before they went to bed. The crime scene is clean, except for one smudged, but printable, bloody fingerprint found on the edge of the desk. But it doesn’t match with anything we’ve got in the AFIS computer.’

Qian took a deep breath and concluded, ‘I personally interviewed nearly fifty people. Same as victim number one. No one knows why anyone would want to kill him. He had no appointments marked down in his diary for that night. He was alone in his office when the last person left the building.’

The detectives from CID headquarters were scribbling furiously, making copious notes, and referring frequently to the files with which they had been supplied. The others watched them apprehensively and with mixed feelings. While each was keen to achieve a break in the case, none of them wanted some smart-ass from HQ to pick up something they’d missed.

Li was aware of the additional tension. He turned to Zhao, at twenty-five the youngest in the section, still lacking a little in self-confidence, but sharp and diligent and shaping up as a prospect for future promotion. ‘Tell us about number three, Detective Zhao.’

Zhao flushed a little as he spoke. ‘September fifteen. Yue Shi, a professor of archaeology at Beijing University, has an arrangement to play chess and drink a few beers with his uncle. His uncle arrives at his apartment in Haidan District near the university campus and finds his nephew lying dead in the sitting room. He has been beheaded, hands tied behind his back, again with the same silk cord. A placard, half-soaked with blood, is lying beside the body. It bears the number 4 and the nickname Monkey. It’s written in red ink, upside down and crossed through.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’ll stick with the parallels first. He has red wine with flunitrazepam in his stomach and blood specimens, just like the others. Tape lift again shows that the weapon used was bronze, suggesting it is probably the same one. But this is where it starts to get a bit different. There is hardly any blood at the scene, but the body is virtually drained of it.’

‘So he was killed somewhere else, then taken to his apartment.’ This from one of the newcomers.

‘Yeah, very clever,’ said Wu. ‘Like we never spotted that one.’

The detective blushed.

‘On you go, Zhao,’ Li said.

Zhao glanced nervously around his listeners. ‘Like the man said, the body had been moved. Fibres recovered from it show that it had been wrapped in a grey woollen blanket of some sort. He had a fine, blue-black, powdery dust in the treads of his shoes and on his trousers. Forensics tell us they are particles of fired clay, some kind of ceramic. But the clay’s not of a type found around Beijing. Apparently it’s a soil type found more commonly in Shaanxi Province.’ He shrugged. ‘We don’t know what that tells us.’ Then he went on, ‘There were smudges and traces of blood in the hall, but no readable footprints or fingerprints anywhere. And the pathologist thinks he’d been killed about twenty-four hours before the body was discovered.’

‘What about the university?’ one of the other detectives from HQ asked.

‘We were all over the place,’ Zhao said. ‘His office, his classrooms, the laboratories. If he’d been murdered in any of these places we’d have found traces. You just can’t clean up that much blood without leaving something behind. His colleagues in the department were stunned. Again, no one could think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill him. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have many friends. He lived for his work, and spent ninety per cent of his waking day absorbed in it.’

‘What age was he?’ The same detective from HQ again.

‘Fifty-two — just a few months older than the others.’

The detective turned to Li. ‘What about the latest victim? What age was he?’

‘Date of birth on his passport was March 1949, which makes him fifty-one. I’m sorry, detective, I don’t know your name.’

‘Sang,’ the detective said. ‘Sang Chunlin.’

‘OK, Sang,’ Li said, ‘it’s a thought worth holding on to. But let’s look at the fourth victim first.’ And he glanced around all the expectant faces. ‘Yuan Tao,’ he said, ‘was a Chinese-American working in the visa department of the US Embassy.’ And he took them through the murder scene, step by step, as he and Qian had done in reality five hours earlier. He told them that Yuan had been illegally renting the apartment at No. 7 Tuan Jie Hu Dongli where the body was found, but not necessarily living there, at least not full time. ‘Apparently,’ Li said, ‘the US Embassy had no idea. They had provided him with accommodation in an embassy compound behind the Friendship Store.’ He paused. ‘They have kindly allowed our forensics people access to the apartment.’ There was just the hint of a tone in this. ‘They have also promised us full access to their file on him — just as soon as Washington can find it and fax it to us.’ There were a few laughs around the table. ‘So until we get that, and until we have the results of the autopsy later this morning, there’s not a lot more I can tell you at this stage.’