Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

The gardens and lakes and pathways of the campus were virtually deserted. Willows drooped along the water’s edge in the breathless heat of the morning. The occasional student meandered by on his bicycle. She crossed a stone bridge over still water and saw the white-painted pavilion of the archaeology department shimmering beyond its lawns, partially obscured by trees. She was certain that the lab assistant had led them east to the Arts building, past the administration centre, around the edge of Lake Nameless, but there were so many paths she was not sure which one to take.

It was a full fifteen minutes before finally, close to despair, she found what she was looking for. All the paths and pavilions looked alike. But she had recognised the two dusty greybrick blocks immediately. The plaque by the door of the west building revealed it to be the College of Life Sciences, confirming that the building opposite was the Arts building, housing the archaeology labs. The courtyard, filled yesterday with bicycles and students, was quite empty and eerily quiet. The air was heavy with the hum of insects and she could hear birds singing in the trees beyond. Somewhere away in the distance she heard a girl call out a greeting, and even more distantly a boy returning it. The Life Sciences building seemed to be locked up. The Arts building, too, appeared deserted, its rust-red doors closed and forbidding.

Margaret climbed the three shallow steps to the entrance and pushed the right half of the door. It was firmly bolted. She pushed the other half and it swung in to a dark interior. Tentatively she stepped inside, moving slowly across the tiles until her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The corridor, which ran up the centre of the building, had no windows and was very dark. The distant sunlight that bled into it from the glass around the main door barely lit its length. But halfway up, a single slash of bright light fell across it from an open door, and as she approached it, Margaret saw that it was the door to the conservation lab where she and Li had interviewed Professor Chang.

‘Hello,’ she called out, and her voice seemed inordinately loud as it reverberated back at her along the corridor. But there was no response. She reached the conservation lab and pushed the door wider. It creaked open. Sunlight sliced through Venetian blinds in narrow strips that distorted uniformly across the contours of the room. ‘Hello,’ she called again. But there was no one here. The sword that Professor Chang had been restoring was still held tightly in the jaws of a vice on the big central workbench. The room was as dirty and cluttered as she remembered it. She took a small, clear plastic bag from her purse, then laid her purse on the table and crouched down to examine the dust on the floor. Here, there were wood shavings and a kind of sandy grime. She moved around the room to an open area of floor and saw that it was thick with the blue powdery dust. She crouched down again and ran a pinch of it through her fingers. It looked and felt like the same residue that had gathered in the treads of her shoes in Xi’an. She scooped as much as she could into the plastic bag and stood up again.

She had come round the far side of the central workbench, and saw now that it had been moved forward, towards the door, sliding on some kind of mechanism that was bolted to the floor. Beneath it, the lid of a large hatch in the floor stood open, and wooden stairs disappeared down into the lit interior of some kind of basement. For the first time, Margaret began to feel apprehensive. She edged closer to the opening and peered down. ‘Hello,’ she called. But there was no reply, just the smell of cold, damp air rising to greet her, like the musty, fetid stink of the tunnels of the Underground City.

She hesitated for a long moment before her curiosity got the better of her, and she slipped the plastic bag into her pocket and carefully tested her weight on the wooden stairs. They seemed pretty robust, and she tentatively went down into the large, square chamber below. The walls here were stippled with roughcast and stained with damp. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, and a cable fed off along the curved roof of a tunnel that was illuminated by a lamp every fifteen or twenty yards. A metal gate at the opening of the tunnel stood ajar. Again she called, and again there was no reply.

She was tempted simply to turn and climb the stairs back to the conservation lab and hurry out into the warmth and safety of the sunshine outside, when she noticed the brown, crusted smear on the floor. She crouched to look at it more closely. It was blood. Old blood, turning grey-brown. Several weeks old. She looked up and saw that there was a trail of it leading from the tunnel, as if a bleeding body had been dragged into or out of it. Now her apprehension was turning to fear. She felt the chill of the air in her bones. But she was drawn, inexorably, both by her fear and her curiosity, into the tunnel, to follow the trail of dried blood. She made her way carefully along it, keeping a hand always on the wall. It grew colder, her breath billowing in clouds around her. She could see no more than ten or fifteen feet ahead in the mist of dampness. She felt, for all the world, as if she were back in the tunnels of the Underground City, making her way towards the old Beijing Railway Station. As she went further, she saw that the blood had spilled more freely on the rough concrete floor, and she realised she was getting closer to the point of trauma.

Then, out of the mist, she saw that the tunnel opened out into a large, vaulted chamber. Her eyes were drawn to the blood on the floor. There was a huge pool of it there as she entered the chamber, and she recognised the distinctive cast-off patterns that had been flung from the sword delivering the fatal stroke. She looked up and let out a tiny cry of fright as she saw rows of figures standing watching her silently in the gloom. And then the lights went out and she was plunged into total darkness.

Li stood smoking by the window. His mind was numb, disabled, it seemed, by some kind of mental inertia. There was a part of him that simply did not want to think about any of it: Birdie’s ‘confession’, the inconsistent evidence, the intruder who had attacked him at Birdie’s apartment, Chen’s instruction to close the case. Most of all, he did not want to think about Margaret: that she was leaving tomorrow for good, that she would even consider marrying Zimmerman. So he filled his head instead with smoke, and gazed emptily at the trees below obscuring the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese.

Qian knocked and poked his head around the door. ‘Boss, I’ve got someone downstairs in the interview room I think you should see.’

Li did not even bother turning to look. ‘I’m not seeing anyone right now,’ he said.

‘I think you’ll want to see this guy,’ Qian persisted. ‘It’s Birdie’s friend, Moon. The one who couldn’t give him an alibi for Monday night.’

Moon was a shrunken little man with a completely bald head and a small round face. He wore a shabby grey suit over an open-necked white shirt with a collar frayed and ringed with grime. He sat, legs crossed, on the chair where Birdie had sat only yesterday pleading his innocence. A hand-rolled cigarette had burned down to nicotine-stained fingers. He was pale, and agitated.

‘Well?’ Li barked at him as he came into the interview room.

Moon glanced nervously at Qian who nodded and said, ‘Just tell him what you told me.’

Moon looked apprehensive. He took a final draw on the stump of his cigarette, stood on it, and then started rolling another. It gave him something to look at rather than meet Li’s eye. ‘I heard what happened,’ he said. ‘I just wish I had come last night. Now it’s too late.’