Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

‘Do you normally speak to visitors like that?’

‘No, detective.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. So maybe now you’ll tell me where I can find Professor Chang.’

‘He’s in the conservation lab.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the Art building. All the labs are over there.’ He tried to make up for his earlier gaffe. ‘I’ll take you if you like.’

The Art building, opposite the College of Life Sciences, was older and less glamorous, dusty grey brick and ill-painted windows. Dozens of student bicycles stood in the square outside. Inside it was drab and dingy, and Margaret smelled the perfume of stale urine wafting from open toilet doors. A room full of students at the end of the corridor was listening intently to a lady lecturer.

Wang Jiahong opened a nondescript door and led them into the conservation lab and then backed out, leaving them in the company of Professor Chang. It was a big cluttered room with old bookcases and wooden cabinets around the walls, and a huge wooden workbench that stood in the middle of the floor. The table was strewn with bits and pieces of pottery, a vast array of carelessly discarded tools and cleaning materials, and several weapons — two daggers, and a bronze sword held firmly in the jaws of a clamp. The floor was littered with wood shavings and dust and shards of broken pottery. The green-painted walls were scarred and stuck with posters and charts and ancient memos that went back fifty years. Daylight squeezed in through slatted blinds.

Professor Chang was working on the bronze sword, patiently removing layers of verdigris that had accumulated over centuries. He wore a dirty white apron and rubber gloves, and waved his hand vaguely around the room.

‘Sorry for the mess,’ he said in English when Li had made the introductions. He peered at Margaret over half-moon spectacles. ‘We’ve been restoring the ancient treasures of China in here for decades. I guess it just never seemed all that important to clean up behind us.’

Xinxin went exploring. Li said, ‘Do you have many staff in the department?’

‘Two hundred students, sixty-seven teachers, twelve professors and nineteen associate professors,’ Professor Chang said.

‘And how many of them would have known the circumstances of Professor Yue’s death?’

The Professor scraped away at the verdigris with a focused concentration. ‘Oh, probably all of them,’ he said.

From the corner of his eye, Li caught Margaret’s head swinging in his direction. He could almost hear her saying, Satisfied? He said, ‘I understood only a few senior members of the department were privy to those details.’

Chang glanced up at him. ‘Well, they were. But you know what people are like. It was a scandal, a gruesome tale. People feed off stuff like that. Archaeologists are no different. It was round the whole department in a matter of hours. Probably the whole of the university.’

Li picked up and examined one of the daggers, still avoiding Margaret’s eye. ‘Do you know the American archaeologist, Michael Zimmerman?’ he asked.

Professor Chang laid down his tools and removed his half-moons. ‘What’s he got to do with this?’

‘Nothing,’ Li said. ‘I just wondered if you knew him.’

‘Oh, yes, I know him,’ said the professor. He took the dagger from Li and laid it back on the table. ‘He came here when he was researching the background for his documentary on Hu Bo. Professor Yue had been a protégé of Hu’s. Yue and Zimmerman became very friendly.’ There was something in his tone that gave Li cause for thought.

‘You sound as if you don’t approve.’

‘I don’t like Michael Zimmerman,’ Professor Chang said bluntly, and Margaret felt the colour rising on her cheeks, stinging as if from a slap.

Li glanced at her. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because under all that superficial charm, Deputy Section Chief, he’s a driven man. I don’t know what it is that drives him. Ambition. Greed. But he uses people, manipulates them for his own ends.’

‘Is that what he did to Professor Yue?’

‘I don’t know.’ The professor thought about it for a moment. ‘But Yue seemed to fall under his spell. They became very close. Too close. I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was healthy.’

*

The sidewalks in Haidian Road were piled high with multicoloured boxes filled with computers and printers, scanners and modems, monitors and hard drives. Every shop blazed out names like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Pentium. This was the silicon sales valley of Beijing, awash with computing power: microchips, software, every peripheral imaginable. Unlike the Russian fur trade, business was good. People jammed the stores, and traffic had ground to a halt.

They had left the university in silence and were now gridlocked in the Haidian Road log jam.

Li glanced across at Margaret. The colour was still high on her cheeks and she was sitting staring straight ahead. In the back, Xinxin was mercifully engaged in a complex game of make-believe with her panda.

Finally, Li said, ‘I thought no one had a bad word to say about him. They’ll all tell you he’s a really good guy, you said.’

Margaret’s words came back to haunt her. She turned and looked at Li with something close to loathing in her eyes. ‘One person’s opinion, that’s all.’ She would never admit to Li how shocked she had been to hear it. Professor Chang had not been describing the Michael she knew. It was as if he had been talking about someone else. But it had hurt.

‘Everyone loves him, that’s what you said. Talk to anyone who knows him. Well, we did.’

She shook her head. ‘You’re pathetic, you know that? What did you go to the university for? To find out if people there knew the details of Professor Yue’s death. And what did you find out? That they all knew. So, naturally, Michael would have heard, too. But does that satisfy you? Oh, no. Someone doesn’t like him. So fucking what? The only thing we’ve learned here today is that you’re a sad, jealous fool.’

Xinxin had abandoned her panda and was staring at Margaret in wide-eyed alarm. ‘Fuck,’ she said, aping Margaret. ‘Fuck, fuck!’

Li glared at Margaret. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve just taught my niece her first English word.’

The police radio crackled and Li heard his call sign. He unhooked the receiver angrily.

She turned and stared out the window at nothing, biting back the tears. She was determined not to spill them. At least, not in front of Li. It was incomprehensible to her that someone could think so badly of Michael. Was she blind? Were all his other friends and colleagues blind, too? Of course not. It was just the view of one twisted individual, she told herself. Who knew what history there was to it? She heard Li finish his call.

‘That was Detective Sang,’ he said quietly, and she turned to look at him defiantly. ‘Apparently Birdie’s alibi doesn’t hold up. He wasn’t playing checkers at Xidan the night Yuan was killed. We’re asking the procurator’s office to issue a warrant for his arrest.’

Birdie was lost without the creatures which had given him his nickname. He looked naked and vulnerable without his birds around him. It was hard to define, but the man who sat before them was like a human shell, empty and vacant. Almost, Li thought, like a man who had lost his soul. He sat on the edge of his chair, shoulders slumped, hands lying limp together in his lap, staring back at them from behind dark, frightened eyes. His face was streaked by the tears he had spilled when they refused to let him bring his birds. His blue Mao suit was crumpled and dirty, and hung loosely on his gaunt frame. The room was warm and airless, a place devoid of human comfort; naked cream walls scarred and chipped, and scored with the names and thoughts of the thousands of people, both innocent and guilty, who had faced interrogation here during many long hours. Sunlight slanted in through a slit of a window high up on the back wall, slashing the side wall with burned-out yellow. Cigarette smoke, in slowly evolving strands, was suspended in its light. The cassette recorder on the table hummed and whirred in the still of the room. From outside they could hear the distant rumble of traffic from Dongzhimennei Street and, closer, the incongruously innocent sounds of children playing in the hutong .