Peter May: The Runner

‘Oh?’ Margaret was not too concerned. Her definition of expensive , and Mei Yuan’s were rather different. Mei Yuan earned her living from a mobile stall selling fast-food Beijing pancakes called jian bing . She was lucky if she made seventy dollars a month.

‘There must be fish, roast suckling pig, pigeon, chicken cooked in red oil, lobster, dessert bun stuffed with lotus seeds…’

‘Sounds good,’ Margaret said. ‘But why?’

‘Ah,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘because every item of food has a symbolic meaning. We must have fish, because in Chinese the word for fish is pronounced the same as abundance , which means the newly-weds will have plentiful wealth.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Margaret said, and then added quickly, ‘not with alcohol, of course.’

Mei Yuan smiled indulgently. ‘Lobster is literally called dragon shrimp in Chinese,’ she said, ‘and having lobster and chicken together at the wedding banquet indicates that the dragon and phoenix are in harmony and that the Yin and Yang elements of the union are balanced.’

‘And one just has to have one’s Yin and Yang in balance,’ Margaret said.

Mei Yuan ignored her. ‘The roast suckling pig is usually served whole as a symbol of the bride’s virginity.’ She stopped suddenly, realising what she’d said, and the colour rose on her cheeks as her eyes strayed to Margaret’s bump.

Margaret grinned. ‘Maybe we’d better skip the suckling pig, Mei Yuan.’

They hurried on towards the bronze statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen and passed on their left the red, studded gates of the Beijing Centre of Communication and Education for Family Planning. And Margaret was reminded that in a country where birth had been controlled for decades by the One Child Policy, a baby was a precious thing. Her hands strayed to the swelling beneath her woollen cape and she experienced a sense of anticipation that was both thrilling and scary.

At the gate, she retrieved her bicycle and said, ‘Say hi to Li for me. You’ll probably see him before I do.’ Mei Yuan’s stall was on a street corner not far from Section One. It was where Li had first met her. He still had a jian bing for breakfast most mornings.

Mei Yuan opened her satchel and brought out a small, square parcel and handed it to Margaret. ‘A gift,’ she said, ‘for your wedding day.’

Margaret took it, embarrassed. ‘Oh, Mei Yuan, you shouldn’t go buying me things.’ But she knew she could not turn it down. ‘What is it?’

‘Open it and see.’

Margaret carefully opened the soft parcel to reveal, folded within, a large, red, silk and lace square. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. It was real silk, and she realised it had probably cost Mei Yuan half a week’s earnings.

‘It’s a veil,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘To be draped over the head during the ceremony. Red, because that is the symbolic colour of happiness.’

Margaret’s eyes filled. She hugged the smiling Mei Yuan. ‘Then, of course, I will wear it,’ she said. ‘And wish for all the happiness in the world.’ For there had been precious little of it these last turbulent years.

Smoke made it nearly impossible to see from one side of the meeting room to the other. The ceiling fan was on, but only succeeded in moving the smoke around. It was too cold to open a window, and almost the only person in the room without a cigarette was Li. He wondered why he had bothered giving up. At this rate he’d be back on thirty a day without ever putting one to his lips.

There were more than twenty detectives in the room, some arranged around a large rectangular meeting table, others sitting in low chairs lined up along the walls. Flasks of piping hot green tea sat on the table, and every detective had his own mug or insulated tankard. The central heating was toiling to cope with an outside temperature which had so far failed to rise above minus five centigrade, and most of the detectives were wearing coats or jackets. One or two even wore gloves. Everyone knew now why they were there, that this was a priority investigation.

The tone of the meeting was set from the start by a clash between Li and his deputy, Tao Heng. Tao was a man in his fifties with thinning dark hair scraped back across a mottled scalp, his bulging eyes magnified behind thick-rimmed glasses. Nobody liked him.

‘I’d appreciate,’ Tao said, ‘being told why the autopsy of last night’s suicide victim was cancelled.’ He looked around the room. ‘Since I seem to be the only one here who doesn’t know.’

‘The autopsy has not been cancelled, Deputy Section Chief,’ Li said. ‘Merely re-assigned.’

‘Oh? And who is going to do it?’ Tao asked.

‘The American pathologist, Margaret Campbell,’ Li told him evenly.

‘Ah,’ Tao said. ‘Keeping it in the family, then?’

There was a collective intake of breath around the table. Nepotism was considered a form of corruption, and in the present political climate, police corruption was very much under the microscope. No one had any illusions about the subtext of Tao’s comment.

Li said coldly, ‘Doctor Campbell is the most experienced forensic pathologist available to us. If you have a problem with that, Tao, you can raise it with me after the meeting.’

Relations between Li and his deputy were strained at best. When Li left the section to take up his position as Criminal Liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, Tao had succeeded him as Deputy Section Chief, coming from the criminal investigation department in Hong Kong. He had known that there was no way he could try to follow in the footsteps of the most popular deputy anyone in Section One could remember. So from the start he had been his own man and done things his own way. Which was remote and superior. He believed in a dress code. Which was unpopular. He always wore his uniform, and he fined detectives for the use of foul language in the office. If anyone crossed him he could expect to get every shit assignment on the section for the next six months.

When Section Chief Chen Anming had retired earlier that year Tao was expected to succeed him. But Chen’s retirement had coincided with Li’s return from America and Li was appointed over Tao’s head. The appointment had coloured their relationship from the start. And with two such diametrically different personalities, it was a relationship that was doomed to failure.

Tao resumed his silent sulking, and they listened as Wu gave his account of Jia Jing’s adulterous misadventure with the wife of the BOCOG member the previous evening. Some muted laughter was immediately cut short by Li’s admonition to them that he would remove from his job anyone who revealed details of the case outside the section. The official report, for reasons they did not need to know, reflected less than the full story, he told them. And none of them had any doubt what that meant.

They sat, then, with their files open in front of them listening to Sun going over his report on the ‘suicide’ of the swimmer, Sui Mingshan. He had altered it to take account of Li’s thoughts on the shaven head, which he repeated now as if they were his own.

Li took over. He said, ‘I want the swimming pool and Sui’s home treated as potential crime scenes. We won’t know the cause of death for certain until we have the autopsy report, so unless or until we have reason to believe otherwise we’ll treat it as suspicious.’

He flipped through the folder in front of him. ‘You all have the report on the accident which killed three members of the sprint relay team last month.’ There had been no reason then for anyone to think it was anything other than an accident. Three young men travelling too fast in a car late at night, losing control on black ice and wrapping their vehicle around a lamppost. Li said, ‘And the cyclist who was killed in a freak accident in a private pool.’ They all shuffled their papers to bring that report to the top. ‘Three witnesses saw him slip on the diving board and crack his skull as he fell in. Dead by the time they got him out.’ He took a deep breath. ‘We have no autopsy reports. No bodies. But in light of last night’s fatalities, we have no choice but to go back over all these deaths in the minutest detail. I have no idea what we’re looking for, or even if there is anything to be found, but I doubt if there’s anyone in this room who would think the deaths of six athletes in little over four weeks worthy of anything other than our undivided attention.’