Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

‘Who’s the bimbo?’ Margaret asked, nodding towards the scantily clad statue.

Michael smiled. ‘Yang Guifei,’ he said. ‘One of the Four Beauties of Chinese history. She was one of three thousand, six hundred concubines of the Tang emperor Gao Zong. He fell in love with her. Passionately. Blindly. They spent all their winter months here, warming their love in the hot springs. He became obsessive, began ignoring the affairs of state. All he wanted to do was spend every waking and every sleeping hour with the woman he loved. Then when her adopted son led an uprising against him, his ministers told him that his army would not fight unless she were put to death.’

Margaret said, ‘He didn’t, did he?’ Michael shook his head and she grinned. ‘You had me worried there for a minute.’

‘She saved him from having to do it by taking her own life,’ he said.

She gasped in frustration. ‘Do you have to spoil every story?’

He laughed. ‘I don’t make them up. It must be the way I tell them.’

She wondered if it was a true story and decided it probably was, although romanticised by time, and by storytellers like Michael. All the same, it cast a slight cloud of sadness over the place. Even the privileged lives of emperors could be touched by tragedy. They were, after all, only human.

‘But there’s another story associated with this place,’ he said, ‘that is not quite so tragic. Although I’m sure Chiang Kai-Shek probably wouldn’t agree.’ He took her hand, without any apparent self-consciousness, and led her away from the lake over a hump-backed bridge, through scholar trees and up steps to a paved terrace. His hand felt warm and strong, and Margaret found herself responding to his touch. ‘You do know who Chiang Kai-Shek is?’

She shook her head apologetically, and she felt the overwhelming scale of her ignorance. It made her feel small, and insignificant. ‘Any relation to Barry?’ she asked.

He drew her a look. ‘When the Qing Dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911,’ he said, ‘the first Republic of China was born. But its founder, Dr Sun Yat-Sen, did not live long, and the country was torn apart by factional warlords. His successor was Chiang Kai-Shek, a brilliant and ruthless leader who crushed the warlords in 1928, and then spent the next two decades engaged in a civil war with the Communists.’ They stopped and leaned on a stone balustrade, looking down on the jumble of stairways and terraces below, and watched the first amber leaves of fall float down on to the water. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll let you know.’

‘Good.’ He turned her round, taking her hand again, and led her across the terrace to a shady villa on the far side. ‘Because in December of 1936 Chiang Kai-Shek lived here, in this house. The Japanese had invaded and were occupying large tracts of the country. But some of Chiang Kai-Shek’s generals thought he was spending too much time fighting the Communists when the real enemy was the invading foreign devils. They wanted him to join forces with the Communists to fight off the Japs. So, with a small band of soldiers, they came here to kidnap him. There was an exchange of fire.’ They were now on the covered terrace that ran the length of the villa. ‘See,’ he said. ‘They have covered the windows here with plastic to protect the bullet holes in the glass.’

Margaret peered beyond the perspex and saw the round bullet holes in the fractured windows. ‘Yeah,’ she said sceptically. ‘Like these are the original bullet holes.’

Michael said, ‘You’re such a cynic, Margaret.’ She grinned and he smiled and shook his head. ‘Anyway, they didn’t get him without a chase. He had been in his bed when they attacked, and when they finally caught up with him in a tiny pavilion up on the hillside there, he was still in his pyjamas, wearing one shoe, and without his false teeth.’

Margaret laughed. ‘So much for his dignity. And did he join forces with the Communists?’

‘Reluctantly, yes. Then after the Japs were finally defeated in ’46, the two sides went at it again until the Communists won in ’49, and Chiang Kai-Shek fled to Taiwan where he set up the Republic of China.’

‘As opposed to the People’s Republic of China.’

‘Exactly.’

‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m learning something. Three months in this goddamn country and I’m finally learning something about it.’ She smiled up at Michael and found a curious intensity in his eyes and immediately felt a churning sensation in her stomach. He cupped her face in his hands and tilted it towards his. For a moment he hesitated, almost as if giving her the chance to draw back before he either made a fool of himself, or committed them both to a course of action that would take them deep into unknown territory. But she did not draw back, and he kissed her. A long, tender, lingering kiss, and she felt her body drawing into his, felt its hardness and its warmth against her.

They broke apart and for a moment she closed her eyes, breathing hard, feeling his breath on her face. When she opened them again, she found him looking at her very intently. Then she grinned, and then laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ he said, almost a sense of hurt in his bewilderment.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Some girls get romanced under starlit skies and told how beautiful they look. Me? I get seduced with tales of Chiang Kai-Shek and his missing dentures.’

He laughed, too, then, and as gradually his smiled faded he said, ‘OK, so tonight we’ll find a starlit sky somewhere, and I’ll tell you just how beautiful you are, and just how much I want to make love to you.’

She was a little shocked, a little pleased, a little scared. ‘Better be careful,’ she said. ‘I might just take you up on it.’

*

The faces of dead men looked up at her from the bed. Four men who had all been separated from their heads by a single sword. They had all been sedated with the same drug, but only three of them had swallowed it with red wine. The same three had been executed by a swordsman standing on their left, and had their hands bound by a length of silk secured with a conventional reef knot. The fourth had been killed by an assassin standing on his right, and tied with a reverse reef knot. He had drunk vodka turned blue by a drug he could not have failed to notice. In every other detail the killings were identical.

Margaret shook her head. Her initial conclusion, she remained certain, was correct. Yuan Tao had been murdered by someone who had attempted to make it look as if he had been a victim of the same person who had killed the other three. And yet, they had all attended the same school, so there was clearly a link. So what was she missing? What were they all missing?

She ran the other evidence through her mind. The three bottles of wine found in Yuan Tao’s apartment. Three bottles, three more victims. But what were they doing in his apartment? The dark blue dust there too, that matched the substance found on the shoes and trousers of one of the other victims. Another link. But what was the connection? And what had been hidden beneath the floorboards in the illegally rented rooms? She looked again at the photograph of Yuan Tao’s body, the blood draining into the hole in the floor where the linoleum had been ripped back and the floorboards removed. Li had said the linoleum was torn. That suggested a search. Someone looking for something.

Margaret had spent an hour or more reading the autopsy reports, looking at the photographs. She had felt a sense of guilt when she and Michael arrived back at their hotel in the late afternoon. Four men had been murdered, the fate of perhaps another three depending on their killer being found quickly. And here she was in Xi’an, hundreds of miles away, flirting with a man who found her attractive and wasn’t afraid to say so, but who had nothing whatsoever to do with the investigation. She had told herself that this was not her investigation. She had been drawn into the whole thing quite against her will. But still she felt guilty.