Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Li turned at the top of the stairs and there was something in his smugness that infuriated her. ‘I wanted to deliver them personally into your hands, so no one can ever accuse me of failing to keep you fully informed.’ He started off down the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ A bunch of papers slipped from the folder and fluttered down the steps in his wake. But he didn’t turn.

‘We.’ His voice reverberated around the stairwell.

‘We what?’ she gasped in frustration as she tried to retrieve the dropped sheets.

‘Where are we going.’ His voice rose up to her as he started on the next flight down.

She picked up the last of the papers and ran after him. ‘OK, where are we going?’ She caught up with him at the foot of the stairs, the file clutched to her bosom, arms wrapped around it. She was breathing hard.

He stopped and tucked a copy of the computer print-out into the top of the folder. ‘To see Pauper,’ he said.

‘Who’s Pauper?’

But he seemed lost in thought for a moment before tentatively meeting her eye. ‘You might as well know, I did a check on Michael Zimmerman’s whereabouts during the first three murders.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Margaret exploded.

Li said, ‘Chinese police work requires meticulous attention to detail, Dr Campbell.’ He paused, but before she could tell him what she thought of his Chinese police work, he added, ‘You’ll be pleased to know he wasn’t even in the country when the first two murders took place.’

And he went out into the glare of afternoon sunshine. She caught up with him again at the Jeep. The few moments it took allowed her temper to cool just a little, enough at least for good sense to prevail. There was no point in pursuing it. It was over. ‘So, who’s Pauper?’ she asked again.

‘One of the Red Guards.’ He opened the driver’s door and got in behind the wheel, then watched as she struggled to keep her folder intact and open the passenger door at the same time.

‘Don’t help or anything,’ she said as she finally slipped into the passenger seat and unloaded the files on to the floor behind her. ‘So you think this Pauper person’s a potential suspect?’

He shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s blind.’

Pauper’s hutong meandered through a quiet maze of traditional siheyuan courtyard homes in a leafy area north of Behai Park. Li parked at the end of the lane, and they walked along the narrow alleyway between high crumbling brick walls, past a trishaw with a single bed strapped to the back of it. Stout wooden gates, left and right, opened on to secluded courtyards where as many as four families shared living space on each side of the square. Through the dark openings, Margaret could see bicycles and pot plants, brushes and buckets, and all manner of the accumulated junk of siheyuan life.

Ahead of them, a large crowd of tourists wearing silly baseball hats was gathered around a Chinese tour guide with a red flag and a battery-operated megaphone at his mouth. In a strange metallic monotone, the guide was pointing out the features associated with the siheyuan . ‘This traditional black tile roof,’ he said, then repeated for emphasis, ‘traditional black tile roof. In ancient times, black tiles for ordinary people, for ordinary people.’ And using his rolled up flag on a stick as a pointer, he jabbed at a square brown box mounted on the wall at the top right of the doorway. A thick black cable fed in and out of it. ‘Another traditional feature of siheyuan ,’ he said. ‘Traditional feature of siheyuan . This box for cable TV.’ And he giggled at his joke. ‘For cable TV. We have fifteen channel of cable TV going into traditional siheyuan .’

Li and Margaret drew a few curious glances from bored-looking tourists as they passed the group and Margaret heard a middle-aged American lady whisper to her companion, ‘Why does he have to repeat everything? I just don’t know why he has to repeat everything.’

After another twenty yards, beyond a small shop window displaying cigarettes and soft drinks, they turned into an open doorway, stepping over a wooden barrier and then down steps into Pauper’s courtyard. Round coal briquettes were stacked three deep and two metres high against one wall. An old broken chair lay at an odd angle on the stairs. Bicycles rested one against the other. Potted plants bloomed on every available space. Two canaries sang in a bamboo cage hung from a shady tree that seemed to grow out of a crack in the slabs. The atmosphere was curiously still and restful. The city seemed to have melted away into some unpleasant dream somewhere just beyond reach. Margaret saw inquisitive faces peering out of windows and doors at the far side of the courtyard. Li saw them, too. ‘I’m looking for Blind Pauper,’ he called. A woman pointed at a door to their left. It was lying open. Li turned to Margaret. ‘This way.’

They passed another door to a tiny cluttered kitchen with a two-ring gas stove and a charred extractor. A microwave sat incongruously on a melamine cabinet opposite an old white porcelain tub and an electric water heater.

Li paused at the door to the apartment and was about to knock when a woman’s voice called, ‘Who’s looking for Blind Pauper?’

‘Police,’ Li said, and Margaret followed him in.

Pauper was sitting knitting on a two-seater settee opposite a television set mounted on a white-painted wall unit. There was a small table with an ashtray on it, a bookcase, an electric fan. Through a glass-panelled door they could see into her tiny bedroom, bare and cell-like with a single bed. Everything was neatly arranged, fastidiously clean. There were, Margaret noticed, no pictures on the walls.

‘Who’s the woman?’ Pauper said. She was a shrunken old lady with silver hair tied back in a bun. She wore a traditional blue Mao suit and small black slippers on her tiny feet. Margaret would have taken her for seventy, before realising with a shock that she must be the same age as the others. Only fifty-one. Her round, black-lensed spectacles gave her a faintly sinister air.

‘How do you know there’s a woman with me?’ Li asked.

‘I can smell her.’ Pauper’s lips curled in an expression of distaste. ‘Wearing some cheap Western perfume.’

‘She’s an American.’

‘Ah! Yangguizi! ’ Pauper spat out the word like a gob of phlegm.

‘I take it you don’t speak English,’ Li said.

‘Why should you think that?’ Pauper said in perfect English, startling Margaret with the sudden change of language, and the vitriol in her tone. ‘You think I am stupid because I come from a poor family and didn’t do well at school?’

‘No,’ Li said evenly. ‘But I know that not many schools taught English in the sixties.’

‘I learned English to read braille. There is not enough of it in Chinese to feed a mind without eyes.’ She paused. ‘You have come about the murders?’

‘Yes,’ Li said. He slipped a book out of the bookcase and started leafing through it, running his fingers over the raised patterns of dots that could be ‘read’ like words. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Please do not touch my books.’ she said. ‘They are very precious to me.’ Li was startled, and peered at her closely, as if believing for a moment that she could actually see. ‘I can hear you,’ she said as if she could read what was in his mind. ‘You may be a policeman, but it doesn’t give you the right to touch my stuff. Who is the American?’

‘I’m a pathologist,’ Margaret said. ‘I am helping with the investigation.’