Peter May - The Runner

‘Way to go,’ Wu said.

Wang cast a critical eye over him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were in much danger, Wu.’ The detective pulled a face. ‘I’m amazed, however, that our friend here had the where-withal.’ He crossed back to the body and they followed him, watching as he lifted the penis up and weighed the testicles appraisingly in his hand. ‘Tiny,’ he said.

‘Is there some significance in that?’ Li asked.

Wang shrugged. ‘The muscle mass, the reduced size of the testes. Could be consistent with steroid abuse.’ He paused. ‘Or not. He may just have had small testicles, and built his muscle mass by training very hard.’

‘Yeh,’ Wu cut in, ‘but if his nuts were that small, it would have reduced his testosterone production, and therefore his sex drive, wouldn’t it? Hardly consistent with a man having an affair.’

Wang said, ‘Testosterone is often the steroid of choice when it comes to building muscle. In the short term that can actually increase the sex drive, although a side-effect can be the shrinking of the testes, and ultimately severely impaired sexual performance.’

‘Is there any way you can tell for sure if he’d been taking steroids?’ Li asked. He smelled a scandal. Some high profile Chinese weightlifters and swimmers had tested positive for drug-taking in the nineties and been banned from national and international sport. The authorities were very anxious to clean up the country’s image.

‘I’ve asked specifically for hormone screening. If he took any during the last month it’ll show up in tox. If it’s been longer than that, no.’ He took his oscillating saw around the top of the skull and eased the brain out into a stainless steel bowl. ‘Of course, there can often be behavioural changes with steroid abuse. Users can become moody, aggressive. Talk to people who knew him.’

Li walked over to a side table against the wall, where Jia Jing’s clothes were laid out along with the contents of his pockets and a small shoulder bag he had had with him. The clothes were huge. Vast, elasticated cotton pants, an enormous singlet, a shirt like a tent, a hand-knitted cardigan and a quilted jacket which he must have had specially made. He wore an odd little blue cap with a toggle on the top, and must have looked very odd with his pleated queue hanging down below it to his shoulder blades. Li glanced back at the autopsy table as Wang pulled back the scalp which had been covering his face. Jia’s features were almost as gross as the rest of him, thick pale lips and a flattened nose, eyes like slits in tumescent swellings beneath his brows. He made Li think of a Japanese sumo wrestler. He was an ugly man, and heaven only knew what the woman he died on top of had seen in him.

His pockets had turned out very little. There was a leather purse with some coins; a wallet with several one hundred yuan notes, a couple of international credit cards and membership cards for three different gymnasia; some taxi receipts and a bill from a restaurant; a small gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. Li wondered if steroids gave you bad breath. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, sniffed and recoiled from its pungent menthol sharpness. There was a length of white silk cord tassled at each end. ‘What’s the rope for?’ Li asked.

Wang laughed. ‘That was his belt. Infinitely flexible when it comes to keeping trousers in place over a belly like his.’

Li picked up a dog-eared photograph, its glaze cracked in several places where it had been folded. The colour was too strong and the picture was a little fuzzy, but Li recognised Jia immediately. He was wearing his lifting singlet and a white leather back brace, black boots laced up to his calves. There was a gold medal on a blue ribbon around his neck, and he was holding it up for emphasis. He was flanked on one side by a small elderly man with thinning grey hair, and on the other by an even smaller woman with a round face and deep wrinkles radiating outwards from smiling eyes. Both were beaming for the camera. Li turned the picture over. Jia had scrawled on the back With Mum and Dad, June 2000 . Li looked at Mum and Dad again and saw the pride in their smiles, and for a moment he felt their pain. The people they brought in here to butcher did not live or die in isolation. They had mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children. He put the photograph back with Jia’s belongings and wondered how it was possible that such a small woman could have carried such a giant inside her.

He turned briskly to Wang. ‘You’ll let me have your report as soon as you have the results in from tox?’

‘Of course.’

Li said to Wu, ‘You might as well stay with it. I’m heading out to Qinghua University with Sun to talk to Sui Mingshan’s team-mates. Keep me up to date with any developments.’

And he hurried out, feeling oddly squeamish. Death was never easy, but with such a big, powerful man, it seemed particularly cruel somehow. He had been only twenty-three years old.

Sun steered Li’s Jeep carefully through the bike and tricycle carts that thronged the narrow Dongzhimen Beixiao Street, taking them down from Section One on to Ghost Street. Li sat in the passenger seat, huddled in his dark grey three-quarter-length woollen coat, a red scarf tied at the neck, gloved hands resting in his lap. He gazed out at the wasteland on their left. The streets and courtyards, the jumble of roofs that had once stretched away to the distant trees of Nanguan Park and the Russian Embassy beyond, were all gone. They had been replaced by a flattened, featureless wasteland where tower blocks and shops would eventually replace the life that had once existed there. For the moment it provided temporary parking for hundreds of bikes and carts belonging to the traders and customers of the food market opposite. Li looked right, and on the other side of the street the old Beijing that he knew so well existed still, as it always had. Although, for how much longer he was not sure.

A boy stood in the doorway of a downmarket clothes store in his red slippers, slurping noodles from a bowl. Next door, a woman wrapped in a brown coat was arranging oranges in boxes along her shop front. A group of young men was delivering fresh cooked lotus buns from the back of a tricycle, hands blue with the cold. A woman with a jaunty hat and green scarf cycled slowly past them, talking animatedly into her cell-phone. An old man with matted hair, sporting army surplus jacket and trousers, strained at his pedals to move a tottering pile of coal briquettes at less than walking pace.

Li told Sun to pull in at the corner where a woman was cooking jian bing in a pitched roof glass shelter mounted on the back of an extended tricycle. She wore blue padded protective sleeves over a white jacket, and a long black and white chequered apron over that. A round white hat was pulled down over her hair, covering her eyebrows, and there was a long red and white silk scarf wrapped several times around her neck. For years Mei Yuan had occupied the space on the south-east corner of the intersection. But all the buildings had been demolished and hoardings erected. She had been forced to the opposite side of the road.

Li gave her a hug.

‘You missed breakfast this morning,’ she said.

‘I was too early for you,’ he smiled. ‘And my stomach has been grumbling all morning.’

‘Well, we can put that right straight away,’ she said, brown eyes shining with fondness. She glanced at Sun. ‘One? Two?’

Li turned to Sun. ‘Have you tried a jian bing yet?’

Sun shook his head. ‘I’ve driven past often enough,’ he said, ‘but I never stopped to try one.’ He did not sound very enthusiastic.

‘Well, now’s your chance,’ Li said. And he turned back to Mei Yuan. ‘Two.’