Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Birdie said. ‘Old Moon, he’ll remember for sure.’ And then his excitement subsided, and he stared dejectedly again at the cobbled floor of the pavilion. ‘Poor Cat,’ he said.

It was dark as they drove east on West Chang’an Avenue. Up ahead the lights erected in Tiananmen Square for National Day reflected hazy colour in the misty night air. A long line of red taillights snaked off into the distance. Li and Margaret had not spoken much since they left the park. He had asked her where she wanted to go, and she had said back to her hotel. And then they’d lapsed into silence.

Suddenly she said, ‘So what do you suppose it was that Yuan Tao had hidden under the floorboards in that apartment?’

He glanced at her, surprised that her mind was still turning around the investigation. ‘The sword, I guess,’ he said. ‘It is not the sort of thing he would have wanted to carry in and out of the foreign residents’ compound.’

Margaret fell again into silence. In spite of her question, she was rapidly losing interest in the investigation. As they passed Tiananmen Square her thoughts turned to Michael. She wanted to find him and tell him she was sorry. To try to make him believe that it had not been her idea to question him over his knowledge of the murder victims, or his whereabouts on the night of Yuan’s death. She tried to analyse the feelings that had swept over her in the moments after they discovered that Michael had recommended Yuan Tao to the dealer at the Underground City. Shock. And, momentarily, fear. Why had she been afraid? Surely she could not, in her wildest dreams, have imagined that Michael was in any way involved in these murders? And yet that is what Li had thought — or wanted to think. Or wanted her to think. He had leaped so eagerly on her revelation that Michael had known Professor Yue. She knew it was only his jealousy, but still she had felt relief when Michael had reminded her that the night of Yuan’s murder was the night she had met him at the Ambassador’s residence. It was impossible for him to have been involved.

She remembered the hurt in his eyes when he realised why Li and Margaret had driven out to the Ming Tombs that morning, and she felt sick. A traitor.

Li sneaked a look at Margaret. But she seemed preoccupied. A long way away. And he was overcome by a sudden depression. He had loved her so much, it had been painful to be with her. And then it had been painful to be without her. And now he was condemned to some state of limbo where he could neither possess her nor escape her. It was as if, somehow, she had died but her body kept coming back to haunt him. And this spectre that was his constant companion, cast a deep shadow over his memories of how good they had once been together, how sweet it had once felt.

His thoughts were interrupted by his call sign on the police radio. He unhooked the receiver and responded. A radio operator’s voice from Section One crackled across the airwaves, and Margaret heard Li’s voice flare briefly in annoyance, and then subside to a reluctant acceptance of the response that followed. He rehooked the receiver and drove on in silence. But she could see the tension in his grip on the steering wheel.

‘Bad news?’ she asked at length.

He glanced at her and hesitated for a long moment before deciding that it didn’t really matter whether he told her or not. ‘You met my sister the other night,’ he said. ‘At the Sanwei tearoom.’ She nodded. ‘You remember I told you before that she was pregnant?’ She nodded again, and he told her how Xiao Ling had abandoned Xinxin at his apartment and gone south to have the baby at the home of a friend, and how Xinxin’s father didn’t want to know about any of it.

‘Jesus!’ Margaret said. ‘How on earth are you coping?’

He looked grim. ‘I’m not.’ He sighed. ‘You remember Mei Yuan? The jian bing seller?’

‘Of course.’

‘She was going to keep Xinxin for a few days until I got something else arranged. She phoned the office this afternoon to say that her cousin’s husband has had to go into hospital for an operation.’

Margaret shook her head, perplexed. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Her cousin was looking after the jian bing while Mei Yuan looked after Xinxin. But with the cousin’s husband in hospital she can’t do the jian bing because she has to take him his meals.’

Margaret was astonished. ‘Doesn’t the hospital feed its patients?’

‘In China,’ Li said, ‘many people prefer family meals to hospital food. So tomorrow Mei Yuan will have to take over the jian bing again from her cousin because she cannot afford to lose the income. Which means she cannot look after Xinxin. When I have dropped you at the hotel I will have to go and pick her up and take her back to the apartment.’

The huge, red neon CITIC sign rose out of the mist ahead of them above the lights of the teatime traffic. ‘I’d like to meet her,’ Margaret said, taking both Li and herself by surprise. She had no idea why, but just the thought of Li’s niece, and that he was responsible for her, made him somehow more human again, more vulnerable, more like the man she had known. It was meeting his uncle that day in Jade Lake Park that had first changed her view of him, from a surly, xenophobic Chinese policeman, to a man who blushed easily, who got embarrassed and was sensitive to the feelings of others.

He looked at her and frowned. ‘Why?’

She just shrugged.

Without another word, Li did a U-turn at the next junction and headed east again, and then north towards the northern lakes and Mei Yuan’s hutong .

*

Yingdingqiao, or Silver Ingot Bridge, was a tiny hump-backed marble bridge, spanning the narrow waterway linking Houhai Lake in the north and Qianhai Lake in the south. It was an ancient commercial crossroads in the comparative backwaters of Beijing’s Northern Lakes district. The lights of a mini-market in an elegant five-sided traditional building blazed out across the water. In brick hovels with tin roofs, old women clattered woks over fiery stoves, sending steam and smoke and wonderful cooking smells issuing into the night air. Li nosed the Jeep carefully over the bridge. Further along the lake to their right, a children’s playground stood silent and deserted in the darkness. And as they turned south along the southern shore of Qianhai Lake, they saw the dazzling spectacle of the 140-year-old Kaorouji restaurant that had been the favourite eating place of Manchu princes in the nineteenth century, serving up roast mutton hotpot and other Muslim delicacies. Its lights twinkled and danced on the other side of the water behind the swaying fronds of weeping willows.

Mei Yuan’s siheyuan was unusually fronted by a small strip of garden with cut grass, shrubs and trees behind a low fence. She and Xinxin were sitting at a table making dumplings when Li and Margaret came in. She was delighted to see Margaret, and hugged her like a mother might hug a daughter she has not seen in months. It was a very un-Chinese show of affection. She beamed and told them both to sit, and apologised profusely to Li for the inconvenience. Her cousin’s husband would only be in hospital for a couple of days, and she could take Xinxin again the day after tomorrow anyway, since it was Sunday and she always took Sundays off. She stopped to draw breath, and they all noticed Xinxin sitting in wide-eyed amazement, her jaw slack, mouth open, as she gazed in wonder at Margaret. This was possibly the first non-Chinese person she had ever seen, or certainly the first she had seen in the flesh.

‘Xinxin, this is Margaret,’ Li told her. ‘She is an American.’ He was not sure if she would even know what an American was. Zigong, in Sichuan Province, where she had grown up, was deep in the heart of rural China. Not many, if any, foreigners would ever have ventured there. And Li had no idea how well acquainted, if at all, she was with Western television programmes. If she had heard Li, she gave no sign of it, but kept staring at Margaret as if unable to believe her eyes.