Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

He jumped up suddenly, lifting his jacket from the back of his chair, and headed for the door. In the detectives’ office he called to Qian to give him the mobile phone. Qian threw it across the desk and he caught it deftly and clipped it on to his belt. ‘Keep me in touch with any developments,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to find Dr Campbell. I think she could be in danger.’

*

The playpark was almost deserted. A handful of toddlers played in a sandpit watched by their mothers, who sat nearby on toy cars, smoking and talking. A breeze that stirred the leaves of the surrounding trees rattled the empty climbing frames. A giant Donald Duck, facing a slightly smaller dinosaur, presided over motionless swings and roundabouts. Out on Lake Houhai, the warm wind sent tiny ripples racing across the surface of the water. Li looked around with an increasing sense of anxiety. Margaret and Xinxin should have been here by now. But there was no sign of them. There was a shop in a tiny pavilion on the waterfront selling soft drinks and cigarettes. The proprietress sat reading a magazine. She shook her head when Li asked if she had seen a yangguizi with a little Chinese girl. No, she said. She had been here all morning and would have noticed something so unusual.

Li hurried back through a small park, past a garden where a woman in a white coat administered a massage to a fat, middle-aged man lying face down on a table. A few old men sat on benches around a circular flowerbed, staring into space. There was barely a flicker of interest in their eyes as Li ran past them to the hutong where he had parked the Jeep. He backed up and drove to Mei Yuan’s siheyuan .

She was surprised to see him, and he was relieved to see Xinxin. He looked around. ‘Where’s Margaret?’ he asked, expecting that she would come through the door from the other room any moment.

‘She wouldn’t take me to the park,’ Xinxin said petulantly. ‘She promised.’

‘She said she’d be back later,’ Mei Yuan said to her. ‘You know that.’

Xinxin folded her arms crossly. ‘Fed up waiting,’ she said.

‘Well, do you know where she went?’ Li asked impatiently.

Mei Yuan nodded towards Xinxin’s trainers by the door. ‘She got very excited when she found some dark blue powdery stuff on Xinxin’s shoes.’

Li stooped immediately to look at them, and recognised the blue-black ceramic dust he had found on Professor Yue and in his killer’s apartment. He frowned his confusion. This didn’t make any sense. He looked up at Mei Yuan, but she just shrugged.

‘She said she had to go to the university.’

Margaret felt her fingers and joints stiffening. She had started to shiver uncontrollably, her lower lip trembling with every breath. It was, she recognised, the early stages of hypothermia. She had lost all sense of time now, and realised that soon she would start to become drowsy, comatose. If she allowed herself to drift off into sleep she knew it was a sleep from which she would never awaken.

Stiffly she got to her feet again and stamped them on the concrete floor. She swung her arms in circles around her body to try to get her circulation going and generate the heat that would keep her alive. For a long time she had been afraid of someone coming. But now she would have welcomed it. Anything would be better than dying down here in the cold and dark, simply slipping away without so much as a fight. They were insidious, intangible enemies, the cold and dark. You could not fight them. Their patience was endless, and would far outlast her will to survive. It seemed ironic that just a few feet above her the sun was shining, warm and bright and full of life. But there was no way she could reach it, or it reach her. And not for the first time did she feel the urge to cry, but fought it back. Tears would be futile.

She had long ago stopped trying to make sense of anything. Her thoughts and her senses had been focused on the need to stay alive. Twice she had made her way back to the gate hoping that she might find some way to break it down or force the lock. But it was solid and unyielding.

She had carefully picked her way through the ranks of the warriors to the back of the chamber. There it narrowed, and two steps led down to the opening of another tunnel. Hope had flared briefly, only to be extinguished by the discovery of another gate, which was also locked.

One by one she had counted the warriors. There were sixty-seven of them, including eighteen kneeling archers. She had felt their features, as if she might find in their faces some expression of comfort. But their cold, hard bodies were icier to the touch than the dead she had dissected on her autopsy table. And now she felt physical and mental control slipping away from her. Fear of death was slowly giving way to acceptance of it. How long could you remain afraid? Fear, like pain, could not sustain itself indefinitely.

But it was fear that returned, like a knife plunged into the heart, as suddenly she found herself dazzled by light. They were the same feeble lamps as before, but their light now seemed blinding after the dark. She screwed up her eyes against the glare until her pupils shrank to bring the light into perspective, painfully restoring her sight. The chamber appeared smaller somehow than it had in the darkness of her imagination. The warriors stood mute and expressionless, unblinking in the sudden light, unmoved by her plight.

She heard the distant clang of the metal door and the scrape of it on the concrete floor. She eased herself back among the soldiers as if they might protect her. A soft footfall echoed along the corridor towards her. She strained in the mist and gloom to see who it was, fear almost robbing her of the ability to breathe. This is what she had wanted. This is what she had told herself would be preferable to dying of hypothermia alone in the cold and dark. Now she was not so sure.

The shadow of a man moved through a halo of light cast by the lamp in the tunnel just beyond the chamber, but it had no definition in the mist, insubstantial and wraithlike. She wanted to scream, but no sound would come. And then the figure stepped into the chamber and she saw Michael’s sad, smiling face, and her legs nearly buckled under her with relief.

‘Michael,’ she gasped. And his eyes flickered among the serried ranks of the warriors until he picked out her face, pale and frightened, among the bold, bearded faces of her protectors. But her relief was momentary, and quickly replaced by a deep chill that had nothing to do with the cold in this place. ‘Michael, what are you doing here?’ And she was almost surprised by the calm of her own voice.

He shook his head, and his smile was laden with regret. ‘I should be asking you that.’ He stepped towards her and she withdrew among the warriors.

‘Don’t come near me!’

‘Jesus, Margaret, you don’t think I’m going to harm you!’ And there was hurt in his voice that she could believe him capable of such a thing. ‘I love you.’

She looked at him and was shocked to see that he meant it. ‘So what are we doing here, Michael?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is where Professor Yue was killed, isn’t it? Right where you’re standing. Before you moved the body to his apartment.’

Michael looked down at the dried pool of blood at his feet. He nodded slowly.

‘For God’s sake, why?’

He looked up again, and there was a light in his eyes. ‘It’s the final part of the story,’ he said. ‘The only bit I can’t tell. At least, not yet.’

Margaret found herself breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. Her fear and panic was mixed in equal parts with disillusion, frustration, even anger. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Hu Bo’s greatest achievement.’ Michael sunk his hands in his pockets and moved across the chamber, head bowed as if deep in thought. Then he looked up and his face was alive and intense. ‘The building above us,’ he said. ‘The Arts building. It was the home of the archaeology department during the Cultural Revolution. It’s where Hu Bo and several of his colleagues sought refuge from the madness. Here, they could keep their heads down below the parapet and wait until it was all over. Then, in ’74, they got word of an extraordinary find in Xi’an. Life-sized warriors fired in clay and buried underground to protect the tomb of the First Emperor. Some of them had been dug up and restored by the local cultural centre. But the authorities in Beijing did not yet know.’ He drew his hands from his pockets and spread them out towards her, as if appealing to her imagination to picture what he was telling her. ‘Imagine, Margaret, how they felt. What could turn out to be one of the most extraordinary finds of the century, discovered at a time when Red Guards were still roaming China, ransacking museums, destroying the country’s relics and artefacts.’