Peter May - The Runner

There was murder in Margaret’s eyes, but she kept a smile fixed on her face. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be convenient for Detective Sun,’ she said through slightly clenched teeth.

Sun was oblivious. ‘No,’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tomorrow will be good. I very grateful to you Misses, eh…Miss…’

‘Doctor,’ Margaret said, flicking Li a look that might have dropped a lesser man. ‘But you can call me Margaret. And it’s my pleasure.’ She waved Sun’s cigarette smoke out of her face. ‘You know, you should have given that up long ago. Apart from the fact that it is not good for you, it is not good for your wife, or your baby.’

Sun looked dutifully ashamed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I should follow example of Chief. He has great will-power.’

Li looked as if he might kill him, and then he saw that Margaret was giving him another of her looks. Her eyes strayed down to his still clenched fist, where Sun’s scrunched up cigarette was beginning to turn to mush. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ And then she beamed beatifically. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’ And she turned and headed off into the early afternoon sunshine towards the white apartment block at the north end of the campus.

Sun grinned at Li. ‘Near thing, Chief.’

‘Let’s just go,’ Li said, with the weary resignation of a man who knows he’s been rumbled.

Jia Jing lived in another of Beijing’s new luxury apartment complexes, this time beyond the China World Trade Centre at the east end of Jianguomenwai Avenue. As they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, Li said, ‘There’s something wrong with the world, Sun, when you can live like this just because you can lift more weight than anyone else, or run further, or swim faster. I mean, what makes any of that more valuable than the guy who sweeps the streets?’

‘People aren’t going to pay to watch a guy sweeping the streets, Chief,’ Sun said. And, of course, Li knew that he was right.

They let themselves into the apartment with the key the security man on the desk had given them. If Sui’s apartment had been the height of luxury aspired to by the wealthy, Jia’s apartment was quite the opposite. It was large, with a long rectangular living and dining area with three bedrooms off it. But it was filled with cold, hard surfaces, unrelenting and austere. Jia Jing had not been a man to seek comfort, except perhaps between the legs of another man’s wife.

The floors were polished wood, reflecting cold, blue light from the windows. The furniture was antique, purchased for its value rather than its comfort. There were lacquered wooden chairs and an unforgiving settee, a magnificent mirrored darkwood cabinet inlaid with beech. An old-fashioned exterior Chinese door, restored and varnished and mounted on a heavy frame, stood in the centre of the room serving no apparent purpose. A dragon dog sat on either side of it. Beyond it, the sole comfort in the room — a luxuriously thick Chinese rug woven in pale pastel colours. The walls were hung with traditional Chinese scrolls. Candles in ornate holders sat on a dresser below a long antique mirror and a scene of ancient China carved in ivory and mounted in a case.

One of the bedrooms was empty. In another, a large rug on the wall above Jia’s antique bed was woven with a strange modern design of angles and circles. Facing the bed, a huge television sat on yet another antique dresser.

‘I’m surprised it’s not an antique television as well,’ Sun said.

There was a video player on the dresser beside it, and in the top drawer, a neatly stacked row of tapes in unmarked boxes. Li took one out, slipped it into the player, and turned on the television. After a moment they found themselves watching the flickering images of two black men and a Caucasian woman engaged in bizarre sex acts. Li swore softly and ejected the tape. He tried another. Two women writhed together in an apparently unsatisfied pursuit of sexual gratification. From their imprecations, and foul-mouthed mutual encouragement, it was clear that they were Americans. Li turned it off and glanced, embarrassed, at Sun. ‘He had a big appetite for a man with such small testicles.’

Sun frowned. ‘Small testicles?’

‘According to Wang, abnormally small.’

The third bedroom had been turned into a study. There were only three items of furniture in it. A desk, a chair and an antique roll-top dresser. The drawers and cupboards of the dresser were filled with personal papers — bills, receipts, letters. The death of Jia Jing was not a criminal investigation, so his personal effects would remain undisturbed. Li turned on the computer, and when Windows had loaded resorted to a trick Margaret had taught him. He clicked on the Internet Explorer web browser and opened up the document entitled HISTORY, where the last three hundred sites Jia had visited were stored. A quick scroll down them told Li that Jia’s use of the Internet had been primarily for accessing porn.

‘Not so much an appetite as an obsession,’ Sun observed.

Li powered down the computer. There was something depressing about delving into the dark side of people’s secret lives once they were dead.

The bathroom was spartan and functional, cold white tiles on the floor, no mats or rugs to soften the shock for naked feet. In a wall cabinet above the sink, they found two bottles of aerosol aftershave, identical to those they had found in Sui Mingshan’s bathroom. The same brand. Chanel.

‘You think maybe the whole Chinese team got a job lot?’ Sun said, smiling. ‘Maybe Chanel is sponsoring our Olympic effort. We could be the best-smelling team at the Games.’

But Li wasn’t smiling. There were warning bells ringing in his head. He knew there was something wrong here. He picked up one of the bottles and fired a burst of aerosolised perfume into the air. They both sniffed and recoiled in unison. It was a strange, musky smell, like almonds and vanilla, with a bitter edge to it. Not sweet.

‘No wonder he had to resort to watching porn if he smelled like that,’ Sun said.

But Li could not recall any scent from Jia the night they found him in the bedroom in Beichang Street. He remembered only the sweet, heavy scents of incense and sex in the room.

He sprayed a tiny puff from the other bottle on to his wrist and smelled the same bitter orange scent of the one he had tried at Sui Mingshan’s apartment. He held his wrist out for Sun to sniff.

Sun wrinkled his nose. ‘Same as the one at Sui’s place.’

Li nodded. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ The smell seemed to have filled the bathroom. It was offending Li’s olfactory senses and making him feel a little queasy. ‘I don’t like breathing this stuff.’

They opened the door of the apartment to find an elderly couple standing in the hallway looking perplexed, a little dazed. ‘Is this number twelve-oh-five?’ the old man asked.

‘Yes,’ Li said cautiously. ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘It’s our son’s apartment,’ the woman said, and Li suddenly recognised them as the old couple flanking Jia in the photograph they had found among his things. His parents. Sun flicked him a look.

‘We’re police officers,’ Li said. He had no idea if they had been notified.

‘They told us this morning,’ Jia’s father said. ‘We’ve travelled up from Yufa by bus.’ Li knew Yufa. It was a small town on the road south to Gu’an. The bus would have taken several hours. He could imagine what a depressing journey it had been. ‘Did you know him?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘He was a lovely boy,’ his mother said. ‘Couldn’t do enough for us. He bought us a colour television, and a video recorder, and a new refrigerator…’

‘Sent us money every month,’ his father said. Money that would stop now. And Li wondered how much of what Jia owned they would inherit. The value of the antiques in the apartment alone was probably several thousand dollars. More than they could have hoped to earn in a lifetime. But the inheritance laws were still in a state of flux. It might be that everything went to the State. Had they any real idea how much their son had been earning?