Peter May: The Runner

There was nobody in the room who did.

‘So let’s kick it around,’ Li said. ‘Anyone got any thoughts?’

Wu had the report on the cyclist open in front of him. ‘These three witnesses,’ he said. ‘They all have addresses in Taiwan. Are they still going to be around for further questioning?’

‘Why don’t you make it your personal responsibility to find out?’ Li said. Wu pulled a face, and there was a sprinkling of laughter around the table. ‘Talk to the attending officers. Get them to go over it all again, in the smallest detail. There might be stuff that never made it into the report.’ He turned to the detective next to him. ‘And Qian, why don’t you talk to the officers who attended the car crash? Same thing.’ Qian was about ten years older than Li. He would never be management material, but he was steady and reliable and Li had a lot of time for him.

‘Sure, chief.’

‘Shouldn’t we talk to the relatives, too?’ This came from Zhao, the youngest detective in the section, a sharp and intelligent investigator destined, in Li’s view, to be a future deputy chief. But the arrival of Sun had somewhat eclipsed him, and he had spent the last few months sulking in the shadows.

‘Absolutely,’ Li said, ‘and the coaches, and other athletes, as many friends as we can track down. We need to look at financial records, any remaining personal belongings…’ He glanced around the table. ‘I’m sure that Deputy Tao will be able to organise you all to ensure you make the best use of your time.’

There were several stifled sniggers. Tao was fond of charts and worksheets and rotas.

‘What about drugs?’ asked Sang. He was another of the section’s younger detectives. In his early thirties, Sang had distinguished himself, while still downtown, during an investigation into a particularly bloody serial killing, and had transferred to Section One soon after.

‘What about drugs?’ Li asked.

‘Well,’ Sang said. ‘If we’re looking for a motive…’

‘We’re not looking for a motive, Detective,’ Tao cut him off sharply, and the earlier tension immediately returned to the room. ‘We’re looking for evidence. As much as we can accumulate. No matter how painful, or how slow. Only then will we see the bigger picture. There are no shortcuts.’

It was the old argument, the traditional Chinese approach to criminal investigation. Accumulate enough evidence and you will solve the crime. Unlike the approach of criminal investigators in the West, motive was regarded as being of secondary importance, something which would become self-apparent when enough evidence had been gathered.

Li said, ‘Deputy Tao clearly thinks you’ve been reading too many American detective novels, Sang.’ Which provoked some laughter and softened the tension. ‘But I agree with him. It’s too early to be looking at motive. We don’t even know if there has been a crime.’

As the meeting broke up and Li gathered together his papers, he became aware of Tao hanging back to speak to him, and he sighed inwardly. Tao kept his peace until they were on their own. Then he closed the door so that they would not be overheard, and crossed the room to drop his copy of Wu’s report on the death of Jia Jing in front of Li. ‘Why was I not consulted about this?’

‘You weren’t here last night, Tao.’

‘And this morning? Before the meeting? Did it not occur to you, Section Chief, that I should have been briefed before the detectives? Have you any idea how it feels to be told by a junior officer that an autopsy has been cancelled when you know nothing about it?’

‘I’m sorry, Tao, if you feel slighted. Protocol has its time and its place. Unfortunately, this morning there was no time.’ Li picked up his folder to go, but Tao was not finished. He stood his ground.

‘I want to put on record my strongest objections to the fact that this report has been doctored.’ He tapped his forefinger on the file as he spoke.

Li was losing patience. Tao’s pedantry was tiresome at the best of times. But in this instance, he was also touching a raw nerve. ‘Are you objecting to the doctoring of the report or the fact that you weren’t consulted about it?’ They each knew it was the latter.

‘Both,’ Tao said defiantly. ‘As far as I am aware it is not the practice of this section to file inaccurate reports.’

‘You’re right,’ Li said. ‘It’s not. But for reasons I am not prepared to discuss, this case is an exception. And if you have a problem with that then I suggest you take it up with the Minister.’

Tao frowned. ‘The Minister?’

‘Of Public Security,’ Li said wearily. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sure he’ll be at his desk by now if you want to give him a call and express your disapproval in person.’

Tao drew his lips into a thin, tight line. ‘And is the Minister also responsible for re-assigning the autopsy on Sui Mingshan?’

‘I’ve already told you the reason for that.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Tao said. ‘Doctor Campbell is the “best available”. You seem to be of the opinion, Section Chief, that anything American is better than everything Chinese.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps you should have stayed there.’

Li glared back at him. ‘Your trouble, Tao, is that you spent too long under the British in Hong Kong learning how to be arrogant and superior. Perhaps you should have stayed there.’

He brushed past his deputy, but paused at the door long enough to tell him, ‘By the way, I’m taking personal charge of this investigation, and I’ll expect officers released from other duties as and when I require them.’

He went out leaving Tao silently fuming in the cold, empty meeting room.

Li and Wu arrived at Pao Jü Hutong as the autopsy was nearing its completion. Jia Jing lay on the stainless steel autopsy table, his chest cavity cut open and prised wide like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. Li had downloaded essential information on Jia Jing from the Internet. He was five feet, eight inches tall, and weighed three hundred and thirty-three pounds. Three threes. These should have been lucky numbers, but somewhere it had all gone wrong for Jia. He held the current Chinese weightlifting record with an extraordinary squat lift of one thousand and eight pounds.

His heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, had already been removed. Extraneous body fluids trickled along the side channels, dripping into the drain below. The body was fresh, so the smell was not overpowering, and the temperature in the autopsy room was so low their breath condensed through their masks and clouded around their faces. Chill white light reflecting harshly off scrubbed white tiles made it seem even colder.

Li shivered as he gazed upon the vast cadaver of a man who had once had the power to lift more than three times his own body weight, an achievement put into context by the fact that it had taken eight officers to prise him free of his lover, and four sturdy autopsy assistants to get him from the gurney on to the table. But all his strength was gone now, stolen by death, and all that remained was the mountain of bulging muscle he had worked so hard to cultivate, limp and useless.

Doctor Wang was swaddled in layers of protective clothing, eyes darting behind his goggles, sweat gathering, in spite of the cold, along the elasticated line of his plastic head cover. He had peeled the dead man’s scalp down over his face and was preparing the oscillating saw to cut through the top of the skull and remove the brain.

‘Never seen muscles like them,’ he was saying. ‘In all my years. A man of this size, you’d expect a lot of fat. There’s hardly an ounce of it.’

‘Is that abnormal in a weightlifter?’ Wu asked.

‘If I’d cut one open before, I might be able to tell you,’ Wang said with a faintly withering tone. ‘But I can tell you that all the weight he was carrying, and all the weight he was lifting, will have contributed in no small way to his death. The heart is just another muscle, after all. You put too much strain on it, you’ll damage it.’ He put down his saw and crossed to the table where the sections of Jia Jang’s heart lay at an angle, piled one on top of the other, like thick slices of bread. ‘In this case…’ he picked up a slice of heart, ‘…the left anterior descending coronary artery was clogged, causing it simply to erupt. Probably congenital.’ Holding up the cross section of the artery, he added, ‘There was also an acute rupture of the atherosclerotic plaque. You see this kind of yellow, cheesy stuff? In older people that gets rock hard and calcified. It blocks the lumen of the artery, like sludge build-up in an old pipe, narrowing the available space for the blood to flow through. You can see here that the artery is about zero-point-four of a centimeter in diameter, and it’s about seventy-five percent blocked. And if you look closely under this cheesy stuff…’ Li made a face, but moved closer to see, ‘…there’s a thin layer of red. Blood. Under pressure from the artery it has dissected into and under the plaque, expanding it to further block the lumen, occluding it and stopping blood flow to that portion of the heart which the artery serves.’ Wang sucked air through his teeth. ‘Effectively, he had a massive heart attack.’ He looked at Li. ‘The fact that he was in the act of sexual intercourse at the time may have been what brought it on. A lot of men die on the job…so to speak.’