Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

He had been angered, on his return to Section One, to discover that the Americans had insisted on carrying out the autopsy at the Centre of Material Evidence Determination on the campus of the University of Public Security in south-west Beijing. Dr Campbell, apparently, had complained that facilities at Pao Jü Hutong were not good enough. He remembered just how much she had irritated him when they first met. She was having the same effect on him now.

He saw the limousine with its big red shi character, meaning envoy , followed by 224, identifying it as a US Embassy car. It was parked outside the Centre, and for a moment all his anger and irritation was displaced by a huge sense of apprehension. He felt his pulse quicken, and his mouth became dry.

Detective Qian was already there, and he glanced anxiously at Li as he entered the autopsy room. There was a very young-looking Asian woman with short, dark hair standing at the back of the room. Her face was very pale and she looked as if she wished she were somewhere else. Pathologist Wang had brought his two assistants from Pao Jü Hutong. With Margaret he had been examining photographs of the crime scene laid out on a white covered table, along with the placard that had been hung around the victim’s neck. The room almost crackled with an unspoken tension.

Li’s first sight of Margaret put him at a distinct disadvantage. Preparations for the autopsy were almost complete, and she was dressed ready to begin, almost unrecognisable beneath layers of professional clothing: surgeon’s green pyjamas, a plastic apron, a long-sleeved cotton gown. Her hair was piled beneath a shower cap, and her face hidden behind her surgeon’s mask and goggles. The soft, freckled skin of her forearms was concealed by plastic sleeve covers, and her long, elegant fingers, by latex gloves. All these layers were like a barrier between them, concealing and protecting her from his gaze. He, on the other hand, in jeans and open-necked shirt, felt exposed and vulnerable to the eyes he sensed piercing him from behind the anonymity of the goggles. She looked long and hard in his direction, then the voice he knew so well said, ‘Late as usual, Deputy Section Chief.’ And he felt himself blush.

‘For the record,’ he said. ‘I would like it to be known that I object to this autopsy being carried out by anyone other than our own pathologist, who has conducted the previous three autopsies in this case.’

‘Really?’ That familiar acid tone. ‘Perhaps if you had called in a professional sooner, there wouldn’t be the need for a fourth autopsy.’

Li heard the Asian girl gasp. It was like a slap in the face. A calculated insult. He glanced at Wang, uncertain as to whether his English had been good enough to follow this quick-fire exchange. But if the Chinese pathologist had understood, he gave no indication of it. His loss of mianzi , face, like Margaret’s hurt, was hidden behind mask and goggles.

Margaret nodded to the two assistants. ‘Now that the boss has finally arrived, I suppose we’d better begin.’

They glanced at Pathologist Wang, who made some imperceptible gesture of consent, and they went out and wheeled in the body, still fully clothed, on a gurney, and positioned it beneath a microphone hanging from the ceiling.

It was a bizarre sight, lying on its back, arched over the arms which were pulled behind to where they were still tied at the wrist. The head, propped on a blood-soaked towel, was placed approximately at the neck, but lying at a very odd angle and staring, open-eyed and open-mouthed, off to one side.

Margaret used the moment, when all attention was focused on the corpse, to sneak a proper look at Li. He was thinner than when she had seen him last, the strain showing in shadows beneath his eyes. She was shocked by how Chinese he looked. When she had been with him almost every waking hour, she had ceased completely to see him as Chinese. He was just Li Yan, who touched her with a gentleness she had not known before in a man, whose eyes were soft and dark and full of humour and life, drawing her unaccountably to him. Now all that familiarity was gone. He seemed almost like a stranger, and she succumbed to an odd sense of disappointment. All she really felt towards him now was anger.

She turned her attention quickly back to the body and switched on the overhead microphone, escaping into a professional world where death took precedence over life. But she paused for a moment, struck by the strange posture of the body, flexed against the hands behind its back, the odd position of the disembodied head. It somehow reinforced the sense of a man forced to his death, much more than a simple stabbing or shooting. There was something in his demeanour that hinted at the terror he had experienced in the anticipation of his own beheading. It was unimaginable. She quickly began the preliminary examination, recording for later transcription, what she saw as she went.

‘ The body is that of a well-nourished Asian man, appearing to be in his early fifties. The decedent is the victim of decapitation that will be described further below. The decedent is clothed in charcoal grey pants, white socks and black leather shoes, and is wearing a white shirt that is blood-soaked about the anterior and lateral aspects of the collar, and about the chest area. ’

The assistants turned the corpse over, creating the macabre illusion of the body rotating around a fixed head. The ensemble now resembled something far more difficult to see as human than as some unrelated waxwork body parts. Margaret examined the white silk cord binding the wrists, raised the ring-flash camera offered by one of the assistants, and took several photographs. The other assistant handed Margaret an eighteen-inch length of twine. She tied its two ends to the silk cord, a couple of inches apart, and about three inches from the knot, and then cut the cord between the two twine knots, preserving the cord knot intact. Pathologist Wang laid it out on the adjoining table. Margaret photographed the wrists again.

‘On removal of the cord, the wrists are seen to bear faint pink contusions that will be described further below. ’

*

Pathologist Wang’s assistants then carefully removed Yuan Tao’s clothes and laid them out on the table next to the silk cord. They checked and found nothing in the pockets of the trousers. They turned the body again to lie on its back, and Margaret began to examine it in detail.

‘ The body has been refrigerated and is cold to the touch. Rigor mortis is present in the jaw and extremities, but is not observed in the neck, due to the decapitation. Fixed post-mortem lividity is only faintly observed in the posterior dependent parts. ’

Li interrupted. ‘Can you give me any idea of the time of death?’

She sighed and switched off the microphone. ‘Why do policemen always insist on asking a question they know cannot be answered with any degree of accuracy?’

Li thought he could detect a smile somewhere beneath Pathologist Wang’s surgical mask. But Margaret pressed on. Her question had been rhetorical.

‘Since the body has been refrigerated, there is no point in my taking liver temperature. I’d say rigor mortis has been set for a few hours, so I would guess perhaps he died somewhere between twelve and sixteen hours ago.’

That would put time of death between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. the previous night, Li thought. A little later than Wang’s estimate, but it fitted better with the movements of the people in the apartment below.

‘May I proceed?’ Margaret asked. Li nodded.

She examined the head, turning it freely this way and that, at one stage lifting it up by its hair, leaving soft, currant-red clots of blood on the table. She described the dark, staring eyes that remained fixed as she turned the head, the mouth held open by rigor, as if frozen in the act of screaming.