Peter May - The Runner

‘Do you know how he died?’ his mother asked, and Li again wondered at a creature so small producing a monster like Jia. In his mind he saw the weightlifter lying dead between the legs of his adulterous lover, lying cut open on the pathologist’s table. Either image would have been shocking to this old couple.

‘It was natural causes,’ Li said. ‘A heart attack.’ And he added unnecessarily, ‘He died at the home of a friend.’ He would see that they never learned the truth. They were much more worth protecting than those who concerned the Minister of Public Security.

But as he and Sun left them to enter their son’s apartment, he knew that nothing could protect them from what they would find in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. His heart ached for the poor parents of a dead rich boy.

In the street outside, a sweeper wearing a grubby white hat and a blue face mask rattled the twigs of his broom along the gutter, collecting trash in a long-handled can that opened and closed, like a mouth, to devour the garbage. He emptied it into a large trash can on wheels. His eyes above the mask were dead and empty, his skin dry, cracked, ingrained with the dust of the city. And Li wondered why he wasn’t just as deserving as a weightlifter or a swimmer. But the new creed, it seemed, was that only the rich and successful were worth rewarding. Although death, he figured, had probably never been part of that reckoning. And he recalled his Uncle Yifu quoting an old Chinese proverb. Though you amass ten thousand pieces of silver, at death you cannot take with you even a copper penny.

Someone had brought a portable television up from an office downstairs, and when Li and Sun got back to Section One, most of the officers in the detectives’ office were crowded around it. The excited voices of a couple of commentators soared above the roar of the crowd belting out of the set’s tiny speakers.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Li barked. And they all turned guiltily towards the door, like naughty children caught in an illicit act. Someone hurriedly turned the set off. Sun smirked happily at them. He wasn’t one of the bad boys.

Wu said, ‘Professional interest, Chief. They’ve already had the four hundred meters freestyle and the hundred meters butterfly. They’ve got the breast stroke and the crawl to come. One hundred and two hundred meters. We figured we should take it in.’

‘Oh, did you? And what does Deputy Tao think?’

‘He told us to turn it off,’ Sang said.

‘And you ignored him?’ Li was incredulous.

‘Not while he was here,’ Wu said. ‘But he went out about half an hour ago. He didn’t say we had to keep it switched off when he wasn’t here.’

Li cast a disapproving glare around the faces turned towards him. ‘You guys are fools,’ he said. ‘You didn’t even put a lookout on the stairs.’

And they all burst out laughing.

But Li’s face never cracked. ‘I suggest you get back to your work. We’ve got a murder inquiry in progress here.’ He turned towards the door as they started returning to their desks, but paused, turning back. ‘Just out of interest…how are we doing?’

‘Won the butterfly, first and second,’ Wu said. ‘Lost the freestyle, but took second and third. We’re ahead on points.’

Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘Good,’ he said.

He was halfway down the corridor when Qian caught up with him. He was clutching a sheaf of notes. ‘Couple of things, Chief.’ He followed Li into his office. ‘You asked about dope-testing.’

Li was surprised. ‘You’ve got that already?’

‘It’s a matter of record, Chief. Same with all the sports authorities. Seems that nowadays they all do out-of-competition testing, to discourage athletes and other sportsmen from using drugs to enhance their training. They’re given twenty-four hours’ notice, and then it’s mandatory to provide the required urine samples.’

‘Couldn’t they just turn in clean samples?’ Li asked. ‘Someone else’s urine, even?’

‘Not these days, apparently,’ Qian said. ‘The guy I spoke to from the Chinese authority said the athlete being tested is assigned what they call a chaperone. Someone of the same sex. He or she stays with the athlete the whole time. Has to watch them pissing in the jar, and then the athlete has to pour the stuff into two small bottles they label as A and B samples. These are packed into small cases, locked with special seals and sent to a laboratory for analysis.’

‘So what about the people we’re interested in?’

‘Sui was tested two weeks ago. Clean. Two of the three killed in the car crash were tested a week before the accident. Also clean. The cyclist hasn’t been tested since he was last in competition. It’s normal to test first, second and third in any competition, and then they pick someone else at random. He came third in his last event and was clean then. Jia Jing was tested six weeks ago. Also clean.’

Li sat down thoughtfully. ‘Almost too good to be true,’ he said. ‘There must be ways these people can cheat the tests.’

‘Seems like the international sports bodies have got wise to all the tricks, Chief. The stuff this guy told me! There was one female swimmer in Europe apparently laced her sample with whiskey, making it worse than useless. Pissing the Drink, they called it. She got banned. It’s easier for the women to cheat, though. I mean, you and I have got our dicks out there for the chaperone to see, there’s not much you can do about it. But this guy said they caught women hiding clean samples in condoms tucked up inside themselves. They were even buying one hundred percent drug-free urine on the Internet.’

Li said, ‘You’re taking the piss, right?’

Qian grinned. ‘Straight up, Chief. But there’s this World Anti-Doping Agency now, and they’ve got people supervising who know every trick in the book. It’s hard to put one by them. Really hard. And particularly in China, because the government here’s so keen for us to have this squeaky clean image for the Olympics.’

Li nodded. ‘You said, a couple of things.’

‘That’s right, Chief. The officer who attended the car crash that killed those three athletes? He’s in an interview room downstairs, if you want to talk to him.’

The traffic cop sat smoking in an interview room on the second floor. His black, fur-collared coat hung open, and he had unbuttoned his jacket to reveal his neatly pressed blue shirt below. His white-topped peaked cap sat on the table beside his ashtray. He had broad, well-defined northern features, short hair brushed carefully back, and was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, when Li and Qian came in. He stood up immediately, stubbing out his cigarette and snatching his hat from the table. He was clearly ill at ease, finding himself on the wrong side of a Section One interrogation.

‘Sit down,’ Li told him, and he and Qian sat down to face him across the table. ‘We have the report you filed on the fatal car crash you attended in Xuanwu District on November tenth. Three athletes, members of the Chinese hundred-meters sprint relay team, were found dead inside the wreck of their car.’ Li dropped the report on the table. ‘I want you to tell me what you found when you got there.’

The officer cleared his throat nervously. ‘I was on patrol with officer Xu Peng in the vicinity of Taoranting Park at eleven thirty-three on the night of November ten when we received a call that there had been a road accident in You’anmennei Dajie—’

Li cut him off. ‘Officer, I don’t want you to sit there and regurgitate your report. I can read, and I’ve read it. I want to know what’s not in the report. What you felt, what you smelled, what you thought.’ He nodded towards the ashtray. ‘You can smoke if you like.’