Peter May - The Runner

On the shelf above the sink there was a Gillette Mach3 razor and a box of four heads. There were also two bottles of Chanel aerosol aftershave. Li frowned, an unexpected character clue in an otherwise sterile environment. A young man who liked his scents. Li picked up one of the bottles. He sprayed it into the air and sniffed, his nose wrinkling at the bitter orange scent of it. ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing that,’ he said.

Sun said, ‘I’d be amazed if he did. Doesn’t look like he shaved.’ He lifted the box of razor heads. ‘None of them have been used.’ The Chinese were not a hairy race. Some men never had to shave. He picked up a small gold-coloured aerosol smaller than a lipstick. ‘What’s this?’

Li took it from him and frowned. ‘It’s a breath freshener.’ It was exactly the same as the one found among Jia Jing’s belongings. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, as he had done a couple of hours earlier in the autopsy room. The same sharp menthol smell.

Sun sniffed and screwed up his face. ‘I think I’d rather have bad breath.’ He looked around. ‘Well, it doesn’t look like he shaved his own head either. At least, not here.’

‘We should find out if he had a regular barber,’ Li said. Sun nodded and made a note. ‘And get the local police in Guilin to talk to his family. Find out when he left home, how long he’s been living in Beijing, did he have any family here.’

In the living room, Li drew back the net curtains from the window and looked out on the sun slanting between the skyscrapers of the burgeoning Beijing skyline. Traffic jammed the street below, and in the distance he could see lines of vehicles crawling across a long sweep of ring road flyover. Factory chimneys belched their toxins into an unusually blue sky, ensuring that it would not stay that way for long. He wondered what kind of boy Sui had been, who could live his ascetic, dustless existence in this rich man’s bubble and leave not a trace of himself behind. What had he done here all on his own? What had he thought about when he sat in his show-house furniture looking out on a city a thousand miles from home? Or had everything revolved entirely around the pool, a life spent in chlorinated water? Had his existence in this apartment, in this city, been literally like that of a fish out of water? Is that why he had left no traces? Except for his own body, his temple, and a room full of medals and photographs, his shrine.

He turned to find Sun watching him. ‘I don’t think this boy had any kind of life outside of the pool, Sun. No reason for living except winning. If he killed himself it was because someone took that reason away.’

‘Do you think he did?’

Li checked his watch. ‘Margaret will be starting the autopsy shortly. Let’s find out.’

Students, future police officers, were playing basketball on the court opposite the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the south end of the campus. The University of Public Security played host to the most advanced facilities in the field of forensic pathology in China, and they were housed in a squat, inauspicious four-storey building along one end of the playing fields. The students were wrapped up warm in hooded sweatsuits and jogpants, shouting and breathing fire into the frozen midday. Through small windows high up in the cold white walls of the autopsy room, Margaret could hear them calling to each other. She, too, was wrapped up, but for protection rather than warmth. A long-sleeved cotton gown over a plastic apron over green surgeon’s pyjamas. She had plastic shoe covers on her feet, plastic covers on her arms, and a plastic shower cap on her head, loose strands of fair hair tucked neatly out of sight. She wore a steel mesh gauntlet on her left, non-cutting hand, and both hands were covered in latex. She wore goggles to protect her eyes, and had tied a white, synthetic, paper-like fibre mask over her mouth and nose. The masks that the Centre usually supplied for pathologists were cotton. But the spaces between the threads in the weave of the cotton masks were relatively large, and more liable to let through bacteria, or microscopic water droplets, or aerosolised bone dust. Acutely aware of the bulge beneath her apron, Margaret wasn’t taking any chances. She had dipped into her dwindling private supply of synthetic masks, affording herself and her baby far greater protection from unwanted and undesirable inhalations.

She had two assistants working with her, and she let them do the donkey work under her close scrutiny: cutting open the rib cage, removing and breadloafing the organs, slitting along the length of the intestine, cutting open the skull. They worked to her instructions, and she only moved in close to make a personal examination of the things that caught her attention. She recorded her comments through an overhead microphone.

Right now she was examining the heart at another table. It was firm and normal in size. Carefully, she traced the coronary arteries from their origins at the aorta, around the outside of the heart, incising every five millimeters looking for blockage. She found none, and began breadloafing part way, examining the muscle for evidence of old or recent injury. When she reached the valves that separate the chambers of the heart she stopped sectioning and examined them. They were well formed and pliable. Although the left ventricle, which pumps the blood out of the heart through the aorta, was slightly thickened, she did not consider this abnormal. A little hypertrophy was to be expected in the left ventricle of an athlete. It was, after all, just another muscle, worked hard and developed by exercise. She was satisfied it was not his heart that had killed this young man.

She then embarked on a process of taking small sections, about one by one-point-five centimeters, from each of the organs for future microscopic examination. Although she did not consider that this would be necessary. Carefully, she placed each one into the tiny cassettes in which they would be fixed in formalin, dehydrated in alcohol and infiltrated by paraffin, creating pieces of wax tissue firm enough to be cut so thin that a microscope could see right through them.

Her concentration was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, and she looked up as Li and Sun came in, pulling on aprons and shower caps. ‘You’re a little late,’ she said caustically.

‘You’ve started?’ Li said.

‘I’ve finished.’

Li looked crestfallen. She knew he liked to be there to go through each step with her, picking up on every little observation. ‘The services of the assistants were only available to me for a short time,’ she told him. ‘And I didn’t think I was in any condition to go heaving a body around on my own.’

‘No, of course not,’ Li said quickly. He half turned towards Sun. ‘You’ve met Sun, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. ‘But I feel as if I have, the amount of talking you’ve done about him.’ Sun blushed. ‘You didn’t tell me he was such a good-looking boy. Afraid I might make a pass at him?’

Li grinned. ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ He looked at Sun. ‘Are you following any of this?’

‘A little,’ Sun said.

‘Ignore her. She loves to embarrass people.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Margaret said. ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re late. You’ve missed all the boring bits. We can get straight to the point.’

‘Which is?’ Li asked.

She crossed to the table where Sui Mingshan lay opened up like his fellow competitor on the other side of the city, cold and inanimate, devoid of organs, brain removed. Even like this he was a splendid specimen. Broad shoulders, beautifully developed pectorals, lithe, powerful legs. His face was obscured by the top flap of skin above the Y-shaped incision which had begun at each shoulder blade. Margaret pulled it down to reveal a young, not very handsome face, innocent in its repose, frozen in death, cheeks peppered by acne. His shaven head had been very roughly cut and was still quite stubbly in places. Li tried to imagine this young man in the apartment they had examined just an hour earlier. Perhaps his spirit had returned there and was haunting it still.