Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Finally the Commissioner said, ‘I was sorry to hear about your uncle.’ And his words carried with them the weight of an accusation, as if Li had been personally responsible. His uncle was still casting a shadow over him, even from the grave. The Commissioner walked round behind his desk and sat down, leaving Li standing. ‘He wouldn’t have been very proud of the way you’re conducting this investigation, would he?’

‘I think he would have offered me good advice, Commissioner Hu,’ Li said.

Hu bridled at the implication. ‘Well, I’ll give you my advice, Li,’ he said. ‘You’d better break this case. And quickly. And let’s stick to conventional Chinese police methods, shall we? “Where the tiller is tireless, the earth is fertile,” your uncle used to say.’

‘Yes, he did, Commissioner,’ Li said. ‘But he also used to say, “The ox is slow, but the earth is patient.”’

Hu frowned. ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘Oh, I think my uncle meant that if you use an ox to plough a field you must expect it to take a long time.’

The Commissioner glared at him. ‘You’ve always been an advocate of assigning cases to individual officers, haven’t you?’

‘As the crime rate rises we have to find more efficient ways of fighting it,’ Li said.

‘Well, I’m not going to get into that argument here,’ the Commissioner responded tetchily. ‘Decisions on that will be taken well above our heads.’ He paused. ‘Like the decision to let the Americans carry out the autopsy on the latest victim.’

‘What?’ Li was stunned.

‘It has been agreed to let one of their pathologists assist. Which means, in practice, that they will conduct it.’

‘But that’s ridiculous, Commissioner,’ Li said. ‘Their pathologist hasn’t been involved in any of the previous autopsies. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘You want to tell that to the Minister?’

Li pressed his lips firmly together and refrained from responding.

Hu put his elbows on the desk in front of him and placed his palms together, regarding Li speculatively. ‘So,’ he said. ‘I understand you have taken on board your section chief’s admonitions regarding the American, Margaret Campbell?’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I have.’

‘Good.’ Hu sat back and took a deep breath. ‘Because she will be conducting the autopsy.’

Li looked at him in disbelief.

*

He emerged into the glare of the compound in a trance. He took off his hat, turning his face up to the sky, and let the warm sunshine cascade over him like rain. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind of its confusion, hoping beyond hope that when he opened them again the world might have turned in a different direction and all his troubles would be washed away. But he knew it would not be so. He had tried so hard to banish her from his thoughts, from his very soul. How could he face her again now? What could she believe but that he had somehow betrayed her? And in a way, he knew, he had.

He opened his eyes and they fell upon the place he had parked his bicycle. It was not there. He frowned, momentarily confused, and glanced along the row of bicycles parked up against the redbrick building. His was not among them. He glanced in the direction of the armed officer at the gate who was staring steadfastly into the street. Then he looked again for his bicycle. He must have put it somewhere else, or someone had moved it. The parked bicycles stretched all the way round the building to a long line beneath a row of trees. His bicycle was not anywhere to be seen. He could not believe this was happening, and he approached the armed officer angrily.

‘I parked my bicycle just there,’ he said, and he pointed along the inside wall. ‘Just there. Half an hour ago. You saw me come in.’

The officer shrugged. ‘People come and go all the time. I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember me parking my bike there, and someone else taking it?’ Li snapped.

‘No, I don’t,’ the officer snapped back. ‘I’m not a parking attendant.’

Li cursed. It was unbelievable. Someone had had the audacity to steal his bicycle from inside the municipal police compound. And who would think to question someone taking a bicycle from outside CID headquarters? He shook his head and could not resist the tiniest of ironic smiles at the barefaced cheek. There was not even any point in reporting it. Bike theft in Beijing was endemic. And with twenty million bicycles out there, he knew he would never see his again.

He pulled his hat firmly down on his head and walked the three hundred yards around the corner to his apartment block in Zhengyi Road. He picked up his mail and climbed the stairs to the second floor two at a time, and stormed into the apartment, throwing his mail on the table and his hat across the room into an armchair. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted at the walls, and the release of tension made him feel a little better. He went into the bedroom and stripped off his uniform and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He was tall. A little over six feet, with a good frame and a lean, fit body. He looked at his face and tried to see himself as Margaret would see him a few hours from now. He looked into his own eyes and saw nothing there but guilt. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to see the accusation he knew would be there in her eyes. The anger, the hurt. He had thought he had put the worst of that behind him. And now fate had conspired to contrive this unhappy reunion.

To his annoyance, he found himself choosing his clothes with a little more care than usual, and ended up throwing on his old jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt, angry with himself for even thinking about it. He stuffed his wallet and ID into his back pocket, his cigarettes and lighter into the breast pocket of his shirt, and grabbed Old Yifu’s bike from the hall and carried it down the stairs on his shoulder. He did not notice the letter with the Sichuan postcode that he had dropped on the table, delivered an hour earlier, only three days late.

He cycled east along East Chang’an Avenue, and then turned north, moving with a furious concentration, ringing his bell at errant pedestrians and growling at motorists who seemed to think they had the right of way. The sweat was beading across his brow and sticking his shirt to his back. He still felt like shouting, or throwing something, or kicking someone. Here he was being made to face the two demons he had been trying to exorcise from his life — forced to ride his dead uncle’s bicycle to a meeting with the woman he had been ordered to give up. If he could have brought his uncle back, and fallen into the arms of the woman he loved, he would. But neither of these things was possible, and there was nothing for it but to move forward and face the demons head-on.

Great woks of broth steamed and bubbled on braziers as preparations all along the sidewalk began for lunch. Li smelled dumplings frying in oil and saw women rolling out noodles on flat boards. Charcoal burned and smoked in metal troughs as skewers of spicy lamb and chicken were prepared for barbecue. People ate early on the streets, and for an hour beforehand there was a frenzied activity both by those preparing the food, and those preparing to eat it. Children spilled out of schoolyards in blue tracksuits and yellow baseball caps, and factories spewed their workers out into the sunshine. For a time, Li had been stuck behind a tousled youth toiling over the pedals of his tricycle cart, hauling a huge load of the round coal briquettes that fuelled the winter fires of Beijing. Finally he got past him, squeezing between the cart and an on-coming bus at the Dongsi Shitiao junction. Then he left the sights and smells of food behind as he free-wheeled along the final shaded stretch of road before the corner of Dongzhimennei Street, where he hoped his own lunch would await him in the form of a jian bing .