Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

‘My God!’ Margaret shouted above the noise. ‘This is unnatural! The man must be insane.’

Li nodded grimly. Somewhere, somehow, Birdie had lost his grip on reality, his ability to relate to the world, to people. His love of birds had become an obsession, a substitute for life. What was it about these creatures that so fascinated him? Was it the illusion of freedom created by their ability to fly? And yet, what freedom was there for a bird in a cage? Perhaps in robbing them of their freedom, he took some for himself. Freedom from the past. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from reality.

Officers began piling clothing and footwear in large plastic bags, checking through drawers and cupboards, peeling back brittle grey lino to check the floorboards below.

‘I’m going out to the landing,’ Margaret said, and with her hand over her nose she pushed her way back up the hall towards the door. As she reached it she heard a shout of excitement, and several officers hurried into the bedroom. Curiosity got the better of her, and she made her way back down the hall. Li pushed past the uniforms, and she saw Detective Wu standing holding a bronze sword in his gloved hands, like a trophy.

‘It was hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe, boss,’ he told Li. Margaret pressed into the room and looked at it. It was about a metre long, with a glazed wooden handle inlaid with mother of pearl. There were no obvious traces of blood. It was clean and sharp.

Sang looked triumphantly at Li. ‘That looks like a pretty impressive detail to me, boss.’ And Li thought he detected just a hint of smugness in his tone.

*

It was very bright in here, fluorescent light reflecting off white tiles. On the walk down a long, cool corridor, they could see through windows into labs on either side. They looked, Margaret thought, much like forensic science labs anywhere, the trophies of difficult or gruesome court cases lining the walls. On the back wall of the electron microscope lab there were photo-enlargements of a monstrous hairy-looking insect. Another showed the tip of a screwdriver next to a close-up of the wound it had caused. Through another window, they saw pasted to the wall a series of white linen sheets, about a foot square, each with a small bullet hole surrounded by rims of black soot. In another room, a table was laden with the hardware of death — handguns, rifles, shotguns, each labelled with an evidence tag. In yet another, the paraphernalia of illicit drug use; small metal spoons, bent and blackened; syringes; bottles of pills.

Like many forensic lab technicians, Mr Qi, took positive pleasure in the macabre. He was a small man with thinning hair and a cheery face. His white lab coat was several sizes too large for him and in urgent need of laundering. A colourful abundance of pens, pencils and rulers grew out of his breast pocket. He pointed through a window to their left. ‘That was domestic in Chongwen District.’ He was enjoying the chance to exercise his English. They saw a blouse stretched out on a paper-covered workbench. It was peppered with linear stab holes and tears, and stained with blood that was now dry and grey-brown. ‘Husband come home and find her lying on floor of bedroom. Thirty-seven stab wound. At first we think she interrupt burglary. Turns out it is husband. He has other woman and wants rid of wife.’ He grinned. ‘I like this new Chinese crimewave. It make life ve-ery interesting.’

He swung his rear end at the security sensor on the door of his lab. The magnetic identification card in the billfold in his back pocket activated the lock, and with a whirr and a dull clunk the door opened. He grinned again. ‘Make life easy when hands full. Welcome to my lab.’ Margaret, Li, Qian and Sang followed him in, all garbed in the white lab coats they had donned in the ante-chamber at the entrance to the suite. Feet had been scraped on grilles and wiped on mats, to prevent dirt and dust from the outside world tracking in on the spotlessly clean and shiny floors.

The comparison microscope sat on a table on its own. Its base was between two and three feet square. It supported two stages, each about six inches square, where the objects to be magnified and compared were placed beneath bright lamps that would illuminate them for the lenses. Above them, a maze of mirrors and lenses arranged on two turrets, fed the magnified images up to a couple of eyepieces where the examiner could scrutinise the images side by side. From a port beneath the eyepieces, a video signal was fed to a large colour monitor on a stand.

The sections of vertebrae cut from the necks of each of the victims stood in four formalin-filled jars on the lab table. Mr Qi’s assistant removed each of them in turn and washed off the formalin so that the fumes would not make Mr Qi’s nose burn and eyes water as he examined them under the microscope.

Mr Qi, meantime, clamped the bronze sword they had found in Birdie’s apartment to a rolling stand that would hold it steady as the blade was placed on its stage for examination, a few centimetres at a time. It had already been subjected to minute forensic examination, revealing no fingerprints, no blood. All traces of its owner had been carefully and meticulously excised. But its blade had been sharpened on only one side, and so only one edge had been used for cutting.

Mr Qi dropped the blinds on the window to the corridor with a clatter and turned out the lights. The room was plunged into darkness except for the glow of the monitor and the lamps in the comparison microscope that illuminated the white coats of the little group of investigators that was gathered around it.

The assistant trimmed the first section of vertebrae with a jeweller’s saw, and placed it on the left-hand stage. Mr Qi arranged the blade of the sword so that a section about two-thirds of the way along its length rested on the right-hand stage, approximately in the area of the ‘sweet spot’ that Margaret had spoken about at the autopsy. He peered down into the eyepieces and began adjusting his focus. For the moment the image on the monitor was blurred, and the detectives shuffled impatiently. Margaret knew that the process would take time.

Centimetre by centimetre, Mr Qi moved the stage upon which the blade rested, by means of a series of small cranks and gears, focusing on the tiny nicks and striations shown up under magnification, and comparing them with the microscopic scores left on the cartilage of the first piece of neck.

‘Aha!’ he said suddenly, and they all jumped. ‘We have a match.’ And he refocused the lenses so that the image on the monitor slipped into sharp focus. Side by side, the hugely magnified images of the neck cartilage and the blade revealed an identical and matching pattern of vertical scores of varying heights and widths. Mr Qi grinned at them triumphantly. ‘This sword cut off this head.’ And he took a red, felt-tipped pen from his pocket and carefully marked the section of blade that matched the piece of neck and annotated it with the specimen number. ‘Next,’ he said happily.

One by one, Mr Qi matched up sections of the blade to the other three neck specimens. The first three sections overlapped at either the left or right margins. The fourth was about an inch away, nearer the handle end. Mr Qi marked each match with a different coloured pen.

With practised expertise, Yuan Tao had hit the sweet spot of his blade with unnerving accuracy. His own killer had not achieved the same degree of precision. But beyond any shadow of a doubt, this was the murder weapon. Li stared at the red, yellow, green and blue markings on its blade with a brooding intensity.

Sang was gleeful. ‘Still think Birdie isn’t our man, boss?’

Up here felt like that magical world beyond the clouds. Nothing down there could touch you. You could see it all, but were above it all. On the steps up, Margaret had passed the last straggling tourists on the way down as the light began to fade in Jingshan Park. Now she sat all alone on the warm marble steps of the pavilion on the top of Prospect Hill, with Beijing spread out at her feet, the vast empty spaces of the Gobi Desert stretching away to the north, the huge crimson orb of the sun sinking slowly beyond the purple mountains in the west. The scent of pine rose on the warm air with the evensong of birds before sleep.