Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

‘Too late for what?’

‘I screwed up. I don’t know why. We always played checkers on a Tuesday night, me and Birdie. And we did move it to a Monday night one week because I had a cousin coming in from the country on the Tuesday. Only for some reason, I thought it was the week before last. I was sure it was.’ He looked up, finally, at Li, his moist eyes appealing for understanding. ‘I don’t know … I forget things these days. It wasn’t until my cousin phoned yesterday that I realised. If I’d known it was so important …’ His voice trailed away and he looked down again at his roll-up to hide his tears.

‘What are you saying?’ Li asked.

Moon lit his cigarette. ‘It was last Monday we played, just like Birdie said. Down on the wall at Xidan. Till late. Then he came back to mine for a beer. Didn’t leave till the early hours. So whatever it was you thought he did, it couldn’t have been him. I swear on the grave of my ancestors.’

*

Qian chased after Li along the top corridor. ‘What do you mean you’re not going to do anything about it?’

‘Chen doesn’t want to know.’

‘And that makes it right?’

‘No it doesn’t!’ Li turned on Qian, annoyed that this cop, his senior by several years but his junior in rank, should think that Li was in any way happy about it. ‘All Moon’s alibi does is confirm what I already knew. Chen didn’t want to know before, he’s not going to want to know now.’

Qian looked at him and shook his head. ‘Meantime, whoever did it is still out there. And you’re going to let them get away with it?’

Li gasped in frustration. He knew Qian was right. ‘No,’ he said despondently. There was no way his sense of justice would allow him to do that. But it would mean a fight, and right now he did not know if he had the heart for it.

‘Li!’ Chen’s voice reached them down the corridor, and they turned to see the Section Chief hurrying towards them. ‘Take a couple of officers and get out to the airport.’

‘Chief,’ Li said wearily, ‘there’s been a development on the Yuan Tao case.’

‘Now, Li!’ Chen said, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘We’ve got an emergency out there.’

Li glanced at Qian. ‘I’m sorry, chief, I’m not going anywhere until we discuss the Yuan Tao case.’ Chen was stopped in his tracks. There was no way he could ignore this direct challenge to his authority. Li went on quickly, ‘There was a mix-up over Birdie’s alibi. The guy he said he was playing checkers with? The one who said he wasn’t? He got his weeks mixed up. He just came in to tell us he realised he was with Birdie that night after all. There’s no way Birdie could have killed Yuan.’

In the presence of Qian, it was impossible for Chen to ignore this. He paused for a moment, looking dangerously at Li. At length, he made a decision. ‘We’ll talk about it when you get back from the airport.’

Li’s frustration bubbled over. ‘What the hell are we going to the airport for? That’s the jurisdiction of the aviation police.’

Chen kept his temper in check. He said evenly, ‘A large shipment of Terracotta Warriors, destined for a touring exhibition in the United States was being loaded into the hold of a cargo plane at the Capital Airport this morning. There was an accident with one of the forklifts. A packing case containing a warrior fell twenty feet on to the tarmac, breaking open and smashing the contents.’

Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with us?’

‘There were two warriors in the packing case,’ Chen said.

‘So?’ The penny still had not dropped.

Chen sighed. ‘There was only supposed to be one.’

*

Li’s counterpart in the aviation police based at Capital Airport was a man of medium height, hair swept back and plastered to his skull with some kind of scented hair oil. Deputy Section Chief Wei was perhaps thirty-five years old. He wore a white shirt with jeans and sneakers, sported three rings on each hand, and wore a chunky chain bracelet on his right wrist. He reeked of aftershave. He gave Li an oily smile and shook his hand and introduced him to his subordinate officers, one of whom was in uniform. Li, in turn, introduced Wu and Qian. Formalities over, Wei slid open the door of a Toyota people carrier that would take them out on to the tarmac.

It was a long drive across the apron to where the cargo plane sat shimmering in the heat. Behind them, the old and new terminal buildings had receded into the hazy distance. Ahead of them, a truck and a forklift were parked by the open hold of the aircraft. There were several police vehicles and at least two dozen uniformed officers and several other individuals in civilian clothes. The airplane had been completely ringed off by yellow and black striped tape that fluttered and bowed in the hot breeze that blew unfettered across the runway. The people carrier pulled in beside the aircraft, and the investigating officers from Beijing stepped out into the breeze, negotiating the tape and moving towards the centre of interest — which was a large wooden crate split open by the impact of its fall. Thick protective wadding, which had failed to protect the contents, had sprung free. The shattered remains were spread all around it. Shards of pottery warriors that had survived more than two thousand years only to end up smashed to pieces on the apron of a Beijing airport. Two heads were clearly visible, one of them split completely in half.

‘Who’s in charge of this stuff? Li asked.

A middle-aged man in a suit and wearing sunglasses stepped forward to shake Li’s hand. ‘Jin Gang,’ he said. ‘Head of security at the Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xi’an.’

‘You supervise the packing?’

Jin nodded. ‘There are five of us accompanying the exhibition. My deputy, an archaeologist and two researchers, all from the museum. We were all present when the warriors were packed.’

‘And only one went into each case?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So how come there are two in this one?’

Jin crouched by the broken crate and pulled away several strips of side planking. ‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘There’s a false bottom. The second warrior was already inside when the crate was packed. We’ve checked the rest.’ He nodded towards the stacks of crates half unloaded from the truck. ‘They are all the same.’ He paused. ‘Two go out. Presumably just one comes back.’

Li squatted beside him, looking at the splintered packing case. He picked up a piece of broken pottery and frowned. ‘Are they genuine?’

Jin glanced up at an elderly man who was leaning over and watching every move. The man nodded to Li. ‘I am Yan Shu,’ he said, extending his arm to shake Li’s hand. ‘The senior archaeologist at the Museum. They are all genuine Terracotta Warriors, Deputy Section Chief. There is no doubt about that.’

Li looked up at the faces ranged around him and looking down at him expectantly. ‘Well, where the hell did they come from?’

No one said anything. The wind was increasing in strength, whistling around the undercarriage of the huge metal bird that loomed over them.

‘Well, who made the crates, then?’

‘A packing company in Beijing, in Haidan District,’ Jin said, getting stiffly to his feet. ‘But they were commissioned by the organisers of the exhibition, not by the museum.’

Li rose, too. ‘So who are the organisers?’

‘An American company. The Art of War, Inc. It’s a dedicated company, set up by the Americans to organise the exhibition to go with the documentary series.’

‘What documentary series?’ Li felt like he was wading through a sea of ignorance, the answers to which, apparently, seemed obvious to everyone but him. He glanced at Qian, but he just shrugged.