Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Li hurried after her. ‘But how would they have known about the other three being murdered?’

Margaret breathed her exasperation. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t give me that stuff about murders not appearing in the papers. You and I both know just how efficient the Chinese grapevine is. There’s no way those three didn’t know about their old Red Guard pals getting whacked. And it wouldn’t take too much intelligence to work out who was next.’

Margaret sat staring at the computer screen, aware of the eyes that flickered in her direction in constant curiosity. Most of the girls in the computer room had probably never seen a yangguizi this close up before. And here was a particularly good example of the species. Fair, curling hair, startling blue eyes, pale freckled skin. There was a strange hush in the room, broken only by the soft chatter of keyboards and the occasional giggle.

Li was upstairs somewhere taking a meeting of his detectives. Full co-operation, it seemed, stopped short of admitting her to the holy sanctum of the inner circle. But since virtually none of the detectives spoke any English, Margaret was not inclined to push the point. She had asked instead for the use of a computer with access to the Internet.

Li’s attitude towards her since their return from Ding Ling had been cool and formal. But there had been the faintest tinge of a smile in his expression when he took her to the computer room and asked one of the girls to vacate a computer for her use. It had not taken her long to find out why. Every pull-down menu was in Chinese, an incomprehensible collection of character pictograms that left her struggling to find her way about a computer screen that was otherwise very familiar. Finally she had found the Internet Explorer icon, clicked on it with her mouse, and found herself dumped on to the home page of an equally impenetrable Chinese server. She clicked on the Stop symbol to prevent the computer downloading more Chinese, and typed in www.altavista.com , and was quickly transported to the comfortingly familiar territory of the main page of the Alta Vista search engine. She typed in tameshi giri . Less than half a minute later, the search for references on the Internet to Tameshi Giri threw up more than twenty thousand Web pages, links to the first ten of which came up on the screen.

She shook her head. It would take her hours to sift through. She thought for a moment, and then clicked in the New Search box and typed in Yuan Tao . Her request was fired off across the ether, through a mind-boggling inter-connection of telephone lines and computers around the world, returning a few seconds later with a response. To her astonishment and dismay there were links to nearly one hundred and sixty thousand Web pages. She scanned the first ten which came up on the screen. The yuan and tao all seemed to be reversed. There was a link to a place called Tao Yuan in Taiwan, another to a Web page at an American university, several more to pages on an ancient Chinese poet called Tao Yuan-ming. But, then, at the head of the list, the best and only exact match for her query: Yuan Tao . It was a link through to a news-sheet on Japanese martial sword arts.

‘Yes!’ she said out loud, as her mood swung immediately from despair to elation. And she was aware of half a dozen heads turning towards her. She smiled, embarrassed, around the quizzical and astonished faces, then turned her concentration quickly back to the screen. She clicked on the link, and her computer whirred and chattered as it downloaded the contents of the North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts . Somewhere in here was a reference to Yuan Tao. She scrolled down the pages, through adverts for genuine Japanese cutting swords, an account of a Tameshi Giri competition in Kyoto, Japan, during Shogatsu in 1997, the list of winners at the 34th Annual Vancouver Kendo Taikai … Margaret stopped scrolling and backed up. There it was. Yuan Tao . Joint second place in the category Forty-one Years and Over. At the foot of the list were brief biographies of the winners.

Yuan Tao, according to his notes, had joined a San Francisco-based Kendo club affiliated to the Pacific North West Kendo Federation in 1995, later switching membership to a club in Washington DC. He had taken part in several competitions, achieving extraordinary results in a very short period. One judge at a competition had described him as ‘the most focused competitor I have seen in a very long time’.

Margaret sat back and wondered what Yuan had been focused on. Had it been his role as executioner of the Red Guards who had driven his father to a premature death? And what images had he held in his mind as he practised his Tameshi Giri on those rolled up bundles of straw? She shook her head in wonder at the extraordinary lengths he had gone to in order to exact revenge for his father’s murder — for that’s clearly how he saw it. He had planned it coldly, meticulously, practising the means of execution until he had achieved a high degree of expertise, changing the course of his life, following a new career plan that would bring him back, in anonymity, to the Old Country and his old home town. Revenge, she had always heard it said, was a dish best served cold. Yuan Tao had placed his carefully in the freezer and brought it halfway around the world to dish it out with chilling effect.

But that revenge had been cut suddenly, and unexpectedly, short. Someone had done to Yuan as he had been intent on doing to others. Someone who knew in exact detail how Yuan had dispatched his first three victims. Could it really have been one of the remaining three Red Guards? Certainly, they would have had the motive. But how could any of them possibly have known the details of Yuan’s modus operandi well enough to have replicated the murders so precisely? She had glibly thrown at Li the idea of Yuan being murdered by one of his intended victims, but wondered now just how well it would stand up to detailed scrutiny.

‘Are you finished?’ Li’s voice startled her out of her reverie.

She turned to find him standing in the doorway. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, and she selected Print, and crossed the room to the printer as it spewed out two copies of the half-dozen pages of the North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts .

Li appeared beside her. ‘What’s this?’

‘Report on a sword arts competition in Vancouver two years ago. Yuan Tao came second in his category. Apparently he took up the practice of the Japanese sword art of Kendo shortly after he got his mother’s diary in 1995. Seems he was pretty good at it by the time he got here.’ She handed the copies to Li. ‘Not much doubt now about Yuan being our man.’

‘None,’ Li said. ‘That bloody fingerprint in Bai Qiyu’s office? It was Yuan’s.’

Margaret clicked her tongue. ‘That’s it, then. We’ve got motive, opportunity, a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence — the blue dust, the wine, the sword expertise — and now evidence that puts him at one of the crime scenes. Enough to get a conviction in any court.’

‘Except that someone beat us to it and took the law into their own hands. Here,’ he handed her a loose and weighty folder and turned towards the door.

She headed after him, struggling not to spill its paper content all over the floor. ‘What’s this?’

He strode off down the corridor. ‘All the latest updates for your records,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Transcripts of all the interviews we conducted with teachers and former pupils of Yuan’s old school, a translation of the diary, profiles on the remaining Red Guards …’

‘Could you not just have had these sent over to the embassy?’