Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Three months ago, Li had brought her here for the first time. It was a place, he had said, that he liked to come and think. Where he could be alone in a city of eleven million people and yet still be at its very heart.

She had come here to think now, to try to put her life into some kind of perspective, and make definitive decisions about her future. Less than a week ago she thought she had done just that. But the world had turned, and events since had changed her thinking and her life, possibly for ever. She had met Michael. Earnest, sensitive, intelligent Michael who had asked her to marry him. If he was here now, he would no doubt tell her how this very hill upon which she sat was artificially created with the earth dug out of the vast moat surrounding the Forbidden City below. She smiled at the thought, and then wondered what it was that she really felt about him.

It was not, she knew, the fiery and intense passion she had felt for Li. That had been born out of extraordinary circumstances: fear, hate, love, a cauldron of passions that had forged an extraordinary relationship. But it was Li himself who had extinguished its flame. Snuffed it out between finger and thumb, burning himself in the process, the pain of it a constant reminder of his own regret.

Michael was so different. For a start they spoke the same language, shared the same culture. There were no cross-cultural misunderstandings, no political gulfs to be bridged, no requirement to defend or criticise one country over another, capitalism over communism.

Margaret knew that however much she had grown to love this country and these people, her future could not be here. She could only go home. But home was just a word for a place where everything was familiar and you could be comfortable with the people you loved. And in reality she had no home. Home was a distant memory of a happy childhood, or of the years spent sharing the same space and bed with a man who was now dead. She was thirty-one years old. In ten years she would be into her forties. Forty-year-old Margaret Campbell, fifty-year-old Margaret Campbell. It all seemed too close and too real. Life could just pass you by.

Down there, in the world below the clouds, Li was confronting a shell of a man with the murder weapon that had been used to take the lives of four men. Other people were going about their everyday lives, returning home after work, preparing evening meals, making love, giving birth, growing old, dying. Red taillights stretched off into the distance like visible time. Sometimes it crawled by. Other times it whizzed past. Either way, the journey always ended too soon.

She felt the hopelessness of her life well up inside her.

As the sun slipped lower behind the mountains, it washed the city red, and she looked up, suddenly startled by a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder. Great crimson-edged purple clouds were rolling across the plains from the east. She smelled rain in the breath of it that reached her ahead of the storm, and she knew it was time to go.

The sword lay on the table between Li and Sang on one side, and Birdie on the other. He gazed at it uncomprehendingly.

‘It’s not mine,’ he said.

‘Oh, we know whose it is,’ Sang told him. ‘What we want to know is what it was doing in your apartment.’

Birdie shook his head. ‘No, not in my apartment.’

‘It was in your wardrobe. We went to your apartment this afternoon and found it there.’

Birdie dragged his eyes away from the blade and looked up at Li, and for a moment Li was shocked by the appeal he saw in them, as if somehow Birdie recognised in him the doubt, and the possibility of an ally. ‘No,’ Birdie said. And, very directly to Li, ‘I want to go home, please. My birds need to be fed. There is no one to feed my birds.’

And Li saw again the apartment filled with chattering birds in myriad cages, the stink of their shit, the sacks of seed that stood in the corner of the living room. He wondered what would happen to them if they detained Birdie further, if they sent him to Section Seven to be grilled by the professional inquisitors. Perhaps he should detail a couple of officers to clear the apartment and take all the birds down to the market at Guanyuan.

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ he told Birdie.

Sang was determined not to be sidetracked. He stood up and lifted the sword. ‘This is the weapon that Cat used to chop off the heads of Monkey and Zero and Pigsy. And then you used it to chop off the head of Cat.’

‘No!’

‘What’s the point in denying it, Birdie? We know it’s true. We know you went to his apartment and found this under the floorboards. We know that you drugged him and tied him up and then cut his head off. We know you did it because you hid the sword in your own bedroom. Why don’t you confess? Get it off your chest. We know you feel guilty about Teacher Yuan. You’ve carried that guilt with you for thirty-three years. You don’t want to have the guilt of Cat on your head for the rest of your life, do you? You want a clear conscience. It’s so much easier when you don’t have all that weight of guilt to carry around. And maybe you could tell the judge it was self-defence. After all, we know Yuan was going to kill you.’ He lay the sword back on the table and leaned across so that his face was inches from Birdie’s. He almost whispered, ‘Confess, Birdie. Just tell us all about it. You know you’ll feel better.’

Birdie’s tears came again. But they were silent this time. He gazed off into the middle distance, right through and beyond Sang, to some half-remembered past. It’s party policy to be lenient with those who confess their crimes, and severe with those who refuse , they had said to him, and when he refused to confess, kicked and punched and beat him until he was almost senseless. Do you really think all we know how to do is feed our faces? Speak up! ‘The revolutionary masses express their devotion to Chairman Mao in every imaginable way because of their profound feelings for their leader,’ he said to Sang, and the rookie detective looked back at him with astonishment.

‘What are you talking about, Birdie?’

‘You are treacherous and slippery, like the prick of an oily dog,’ Birdie shouted, and both Li and Sang were startled. And then he covered his face with his hands and began sobbing, and rocking backwards and forwards as he had done earlier.

Li stood up and drew Sang back from the table. ‘Enough, son,’ he said. He was not sure why, but he felt profoundly sad looking down on the weeping shambles of what had once been a man. He represented a whole generation who had lost their youth, in some cases their lives, in twelve, turbulent, horror-filled years of insanity. In Birdie’s case, he had lost his soul and was consumed by emptiness. He was both perpetrator and victim.

*

Xinxin sat on Li’s desk in the ring of light cast by the anglepoise lamp and sifted through the pieces of her jigsaw. In her left hand she clutched a half-empty carton of orange juice. The detectives had spoiled her, feeding her all sorts of sweet things and soft drinks, playing cards and helping her with her jigsaw. Now, as most of them drifted home in the early evening darkness, Li stood at the window and was only waiting for Margaret to return, so that they could take Xinxin back to Mei Yuan’s. He had no idea where she had gone. She had been silent and subdued for most of the day after their visit to Beijing university. He knew she had lost interest in the case. And after they had confirmed the sword as the murder weapon she had told him she had things to do, but would be back later.

He didn’t understand why, but somehow Xinxin had briefly built a bridge between them, a bridge that neither of them had had the chance to cross before he had smashed it down again by taking her to the university. He cursed the jealousy that had motivated his attempts to try to discredit Zimmerman. He had tried to justify it to himself as police procedure. But he knew that was just self-delusion. It was as if, in denying her to himself, he was determined to ensure than no other man could have her either. It was neither right nor fair. Was he really so weak? No wonder she had looked at him with such hatred this morning.