Peter May: The Runner

Li sighed, realising himself just how little they were going to have to go on. ‘Burials are forbidden in the city. I’ll check, but I’m pretty sure they’ll all have been cremated.’

‘You’re not making this very easy for us, are you?’

Li said, ‘The more I think about it, the more it seems to me like someone else has been trying to make it that way.’

Margaret snorted her derision. ‘In the event that you ever got around to actually investigating.’

Li said evenly, ‘Will you do the autopsy on the swimmer?’

Her face was in shadow but he heard her grin. ‘Try stopping me.’ And after a pause she grabbed his arm. ‘Although, right now I’m hoping we can get to the third reason you came back.’

‘There was a third reason?’ he asked innocently.

‘There had better be.’ And she pulled him into her bed.

She was late, but knew that to hurry could be dangerous. And so she pumped her pedals at a slow, even rate, keeping pace with the flow of cyclists heading east along the reduced cycle lane in Chang’an Avenue. As the number of motorists had increased and the number of cyclists diminished, so the authorities had allowed the traffic to encroach on the generous cycle lanes originally laid out by the twentieth-century city fathers. Dividers now cut their width by half and streams of taxis jammed the tarmac which had once been the domain of the bicycle.

When she had wakened Li was gone, but his warmth and the smell of him lingered on the sheets and pillow beside her. She had rolled over and breathed him in, remembering how good it had been just a few hours before when he had made slow and careful love to her, and she had felt a desire simply to be absorbed by him completely, to lose herself in all his soft, gentle goodness. To be a better person. And then she had seen the clock, and knew that Mei Yuan would be waiting for her.

The sky was light in the east, pale gold rising to the deepest blue, but the sun had not yet found its way between the sky-scrapers to throw its long shadows westward. And it was so cold her muscles had nearly seized solid.

Up ahead, the traffic had been halted at Tiananmen to allow the dawn ritual of the raising of the flag. She saw the soldiers, in their slow-motion goose-step, march in impressive formation from the Gate of Heavenly Peace to the flagpole in the square, and she dismounted quickly to guide her bike between the stationary vehicles to the other side of the avenue. Below the high red walls of Zhongshan Park, an old man wearing a beret sat huddled on a bench watching the soldiers. A street sweeper in a surplus army greatcoat scraped his broom over the frozen pavings beneath the trees. Margaret cycled to the arched gate and parked her bike, before hurrying into the entrance hall with its crimson pillars and hanging lanterns, and paying her two yuan entrance fee at the ticket window.

Beyond Zhongshan Hall and the Altar of the Five-Coloured Soil, she found Mei Yuan in a courtyard in front of the Yu Yuan pavilion. A row of windows gave on to tanks containing thirty different breeds of goldfish which swam, oblivious to the cold, in water heated to tropical temperatures. Along with half a dozen others, Mei Yuan moved in slow, controlled exercises to traditional Chinese music playing gently from someone’s ghetto blaster. Tai chi looked easy to the non-practitioner, but its leisurely control demanded something of nearly every muscle. It was a wonderful way of maintaining fitness without exertion, particularly for the elderly. Or the pregnant.

When she saw her coming, Mei Yuan broke off to give Margaret a hug. ‘I thought perhaps you were not coming today.’ She looked forty, but was nearer sixty. Her smooth moon face beneath its soft white ski hat creased in a smile around her beautifully slanted almond eyes. She was shorter than Margaret, stocky, and wrapped in layers of clothes below a quilted green jacket. She wore blue cotton trousers and chunky white trainers. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked in putonghua Chinese. It was the traditional Beijing greeting, born of a time when food was scarce and hunger a way of life.

‘Yes, I have eaten,’ Margaret replied. Also in putonghua . She fell in beside the older woman, and after a moment they joined the others in the slow sweep of the tai chi , following the intuitive methodical rhythms evolved over five thousand years of practice. ‘I can’t stay long this morning. Li Yan has asked me to do an autopsy.’ She glanced at Mei Yuan and knew that she would not approve.

‘Of course, you said yes.’

Margaret nodded. Mei Yuan said nothing. She knew better than to question Margaret’s decision. But Margaret saw her disapproval clearly in her face. Pregnancy in the Middle Kingdom was treated with almost spiritual reverence, and the mother-to-be handled like the most delicate and precious Ming china. Even after delivery, the mother would often be confined by relatives and friends to a month of inactivity in a darkened room. They even had a phrase to describe the phenomenon: zuo yuezi . Literally a woman’s ‘month of confinement’ after giving birth to a child. Margaret, however, was not inclined to submit to constraint at any time — before birth or after.

Half an hour later the gathering broke up when the woman with the ghetto blaster apologised and said she had to go. Mei Yuan and Margaret walked back through the park together, past a large group following their wu shu master in the art of slow-motion sword play. The red tassles that hung from the grips of their ceremonial weapons arcing in the sunlight that slanted now through the naked branches of the park’s ancient scholar trees.

Mei Yuan said, ‘I have reserved a room for the wedding ceremony.’ She was the closest thing to a mother-figure in Li’s life. His own mother had died in the Cultural Revolution. Margaret, too, had become very fond of her. She thought of her as her ‘Chinese’ mother. And she wondered how her real mother would get on with her Chinese counterpart when she arrived. Li had asked Mei Yuan to make the arrangements for a traditional Chinese wedding, and Margaret had been happy to leave everything to someone else. She was only half listening to Mei Yuan now. The wedding still seemed distant and remote, as if it were all happening to another person.

‘And I have ordered the flowers for the altars,’ Mei Yuan was saying. She had already explained to Margaret that there were no formal wedding vows in Chinese culture. The couple simply interlinked arms and drank from cups joined by red string, a symbol of their binding commitment. This was performed in front of two altars to honour the ancestors of each family. It had already been decided that this would not take place at Li’s home, as was traditional, since the apartment was too small. ‘Now, it is usual to place a rice bowl and chopsticks on one of the altars if there has been a recent bereavement in either of the families.’ She left this hanging. It was not so much a statement as a question. Margaret immediately thought of her father. But she did not know how her mother would respond.

‘Perhaps Li will want to make the gesture in memory of his uncle,’ she said.

Mei Yuan said, ‘It is some years since Yifu died.’

‘Yes, but his death still casts a shadow over the family. I know that there isn’t a day goes by when Li doesn’t think about him.’ Li’s description of his uncle’s death was as vivid in Margaret’s mind as if she had witnessed it herself. ‘I’ll ask him.’

Mei Yuan nodded. ‘I have spoken to Ma Yun,’ she said, ‘and she will be happy to cater for the wedding banquet. Of course, her price is far too high, but we can negotiate her down. However, there are certain items which must appear on the menu, and they will be expensive.’