Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Sang shrugged. ‘Coercion. He probably forced it out of Yuan. And maybe the flunitrazepam was under the floorboards along with everything else.’

Li stopped suddenly and turned to look at Sang. ‘Let me ask you something, detective. Does Birdie look to you like someone who could threaten anyone?’ Sang looked uncertain. ‘And even if somehow he had managed to force all those details out of Yuan, why did he then write “Digger” on the card instead of “Cat”? How could he get that wrong?’

Sang was at a loss.

Li turned into the detectives’ office. Half a dozen detectives were gathered around Margaret and Xinxin, involved in some game with playing cards. They melted away to their desks when Li came in.

‘Qian,’ Li barked, and Qian jumped.

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Get a search warrant for Birdie’s apartment.’

‘Why are we searching his apartment if you don’t believe he did it?’ Sang asked. He almost tripped on Li’s heels as Li stopped and turned on him.

‘Police procedure, Sang. I’m assuming you learned something at Public Security University. We follow a line of inquiry to its conclusion. I don’t expect to find anything incriminating there. I want to eliminate him from our inquiries.’

Five police vehicles brought Li and Margaret, Qian, Wu, Zhao and Sang, along with six uniformed officers to the alleyway leading off Dengshikou Street, where Birdie had his apartment on the ninth floor of a decaying seventies apartment block. This was in the heart of Beijing’s shopping district, just off Wangfujing Street, where massive redevelopment was throwing up luxury international hotels and vast shopping plazas. Remnants of the past, however, still survived in little pockets like this.

The lane was dirty and potholed. Women sat behind shabby stalls pedalling lukewarm noodles in a watery sauce. A spotty youth was selling cigarettes and soft drinks from a hole in the wall. The arrival of the police was creating a stir, and a crowd of Chinese, taking a break from the banality of their everyday lives, quickly gathered.

From the lane, the officers entered a courtyard through a door in an iron gate. Bicycles stood in neat rows under canopies on three sides. Garbage was piled in a heap on steps leading inside where a teenage girl operating the lift viewed the arrival of the police with momentary alarm. She was sitting huddled on a seat, with a pile of cheap romance magazines on her knee, listening to scratchy pop music on a transistor radio. A jar of cold green tea stood on the floor beside her. A fur coat hung on the wall behind her, as if she were anticipating a cold winter. Li and Margaret and two of the detectives, Wu and Qian, squeezed in beside her. The others started up the stairs.

‘Do you know Mr Ge?’ Li asked the lift girl. She looked puzzled and shook her head. ‘He lives on the ninth floor. He keeps birds.’

Her face screwed up in disgust. ‘Oh, the bird man,’ she said. ‘I hate him. He’s always bringing his smelly birds in here. It’s all right for him. He’s used to it, but I can smell them for hours after he’s gone.’

‘Take us up, please.’

She shrugged and pressed the button for the ninth floor, and the lift jerked and whined and began its slow ascent.

‘Do you remember what time he came in on Monday night?’ Li asked.

She laughed. ‘Are you kidding? Do you know how many people live in this building? Do you think I care when they come and when they go. I don’t even look at them.’

‘But you’d know the bird man, wouldn’t you? You’d smell his birds.’

‘He’s in and out all the time,’ the girl said dismissively. ‘And, anyway, I wouldn’t know one day from the next. They’re all the same to me. You want my job? You can have it.’

‘So you wouldn’t know if he had any visitors recently?’ Li asked hopelessly.

‘Gimme a break,’ said the girl.

Margaret watched the exchange with an idle curiosity. Beyond her first flush of interest, the lift girl clearly couldn’t give a damn and was being less than helpful.

Margaret was not quite sure why she had agreed to come along when Li asked her. After their visit to the university her interest in the investigation was all but dead. She was tired of the emotional roller coaster that sent her hurtling from Li to Michael and back again. It was going nowhere fast. And, if she was honest with herself, she no longer cared who had killed Yuan. What did it matter to her, anyway? Some thirty-year-old vendetta that belonged to another culture in another time. How could she ever hope to understand any of it?

The lift juddered to a standstill on the ninth floor and the door slid open. Li led the way down a corridor with white walls and pale green painted windows that looked down on to the courtyard below. Through a half-glazed door, they turned into a dark hallway, and Margaret saw the number 905 above a door that was shuttered and padlocked. Li stood aside and let Qian unlock it with the keys they had taken from Birdie. After several moments of apparent difficulty, Qian stepped back and shrugged. ‘The lock’s burst,’ he said. ‘We didn’t need the keys after all.’ He pulled back the shutter.

‘What do you expect to find here?’ Margaret asked.

‘Nothing,’ Li said, to her surprise.

‘If he did it,’ she said, ‘the chances are there will be some trace evidence here. A speck of blood, a hair. Maybe something more. White card, red ink.’

‘ If he did it.’

‘You don’t think he did?’

‘I am certain he didn’t.’

Sang and Zhao and the uniformed officers arrived breathless and perspiring after their nine-flight hike. Li pulled on a pair of white gloves and the others followed suit. ‘Bag all the clothes,’ Li said, ‘clean or dirty. And I want all his shoes. Don’t disturb anything unnecessarily, but I want to go through every single little thing in the apartment.’ He nodded to Qian who pushed the door open.

They were hit immediately by the smell and the noise. ‘In the name of the sky!’ Qian took out a handkerchief to cover his nose and went inside, fumbling for a light switch. When he found it, a fluorescent strip hanging from the hall ceiling flickered and hummed and threw a cold light back off walls that had not been painted in twenty years.

‘Jesus!’ Margaret said.

She looked in amazement at the bamboo cages that hung in profusion from the ceiling. Dozens of them, hooked on to a pulley-type contraption that allowed Birdie to lower and raise them all at the same time. Each of the cages was filled with birds, frantic with the intrusion of light and strangers, squawking and flapping their wings in panic. The noise was deafening. Immediately to the left, a scullery kitchen was caked in grease, old bottles of sticky cooking sauce fighting for space with dirty dishes on the top of an old wooden cabinet. A blackened wok and a couple of filthy pans stood on a two-ring gas stove. Further down the hall, on the left, laundry hung on lines strung across a stinking toilet. Dirty linen lay all over the floor. A fridge-freezer and a top-loading washing machine made it difficult to squeeze past to the far end of the passage where Wu pushed open the bedroom door. More cages hung from the ceiling and stood on every available space: a desk, a wardrobe, a dresser. The din was unnerving. Margaret almost gagged from the stench. It was practically impossible to believe that someone actually lived here.

On their right, a door led into a tiny living room. More cages, more birds. Some of them in here were flying free, and the detectives ducked as frantic wings beat the air about their heads. There was bird shit all over the floor. Through a screen door, the air of a glassed balcony was almost black with flying birds. Birdie had rigged up old branches, and bits and pieces of furniture to try to recreate some kind of natural habitat in there.