Peter May - The Runner

The officer appeared to be relieved, and took out a pack of cigarettes. After he had lit one, it belatedly occurred to him that he should have offered one to his interrogators. He held out the pack. Qian took one. Li didn’t. The officer took a deep drag on his. ‘I hate car crashes,’ he said. ‘They can be God-awful messy things. Bits and pieces of people all over the place. Arms and legs. Blood everywhere. Stuff you don’t want to see.’ It was as if Li had opened a floodgate. Now that he had started, the traffic cop couldn’t seem to stop. ‘My wife keeps on at me to give it up. Get a job in security. Anything but traffic.’ He flicked nervous eyes at them. ‘There’s nights I’ve come home and just lain on the floor shaking.’

‘Is that how it was the night you attended the accident in You’anmennei Dajie?’

The cop nodded. ‘Pretty much. The car must have been doing over a hundred KPH. It was a hell of a mess. So were the guys inside. Three of them. Two in the front, one in the back — at least, that’s where they started off. They weren’t wearing seat belts.’ He grimaced, recalling the scene, pulling images back into his mind that he had probably hoped were gone forever. ‘It’s bad enough when you don’t know them, but when it’s people you’ve seen on television, you know, big-time sports stars…well, you always figure stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like that.’

‘You recognised them, then?’

‘Not straight off. Well, two of them, yeh. I mean, they always wore their hair short anyway, so they didn’t look that different with their heads shaved.’

Li felt as if the room around them had faded to black. He focused his entire attention on the officer in front of him. ‘Their heads were shaved?’ he said slowly.

The cop seemed surprised by Li’s interest. He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a fashion these days, isn’t it? All these sports stars in the West have been shaving their heads last couple of years. It’s catching on here now.’

‘So you didn’t think it was odd?’

‘Not in those two, no. It was the other one that kind of shocked me. Xing Da. That’s why I didn’t recognise him at first. He always wore his hair shoulder length. It was kind of like his trademark. You always knew it was him on the track, all that hair flying out behind him.’

‘And his head was shaved, too?’ Li asked.

‘All gone,’ the traffic cop said. ‘It looked really weird on him.’

As they climbed the stairs back to the top floor Li said, ‘What about the doctor’s report?’ Pieces of this bizarre puzzle appeared suddenly to be dropping into place, but Li could still make no sense of the picture it was forming. It had, however, got his adrenaline pumping.

Qian said, ‘Got it upstairs, chief. But all he did was sign off the death certificates. Death caused by multiple injuries suffered in a car accident.’

‘Fuck!’ Li cursed roundly. A staged suicide in which the victim’s head had been shaved. Three deaths in what appeared at the time to have been an accident. All with their heads shaved. And all four, members of the Chinese Olympic team. The trouble was, the evidence from the crash — the vehicle and the bodies — was long gone.

Wu intercepted them on the top corridor. ‘Those tickets you got Qian to order for tonight, chief? They arrived by courier. I put them on your desk.’

‘Fine.’ Li brushed past, his mind on other things, but Wu called after him. ‘Something else, Chief…’

Li turned and barked, ‘What!’

‘Those three athletes in the car crash?’

He had Li’s attention now. ‘What about them?’

‘Only two of them were cremated, Chief. The parents of the other one live out in a village near the Ming tombs. Seems they buried him in their orchard.’

Li wanted to punch the air. But all he said was, ‘Which one?’

‘Xing Da.’

The village of Dalingjiang lay fifty kilometers north-west of Beijing in the shadow of the Tianshou mountains, a stone’s throw from the last resting place of thirteen of the sixteen Ming emperors. A rambling collection of brick-built cottages with slate roofs and walled courtyards, Dalingjiang was believed to have the best feng shui in the whole of China. After all, its inhabitants reasoned, thirteen dead emperors couldn’t be wrong.

Li took Sun with him to drive the Jeep. They had headed out of the city on the Badaling Expressway, past countless developments of pastel-painted luxury apartments with security-gated compounds and private pools. Built to meet the demands of the new bourgeoisie.

The sun was dipping lower now as they neared the tombs. The mountains had lost their definition, and looked as if they had been cut from paper and laid one over the other, in decreasing shades of dark blue, against a pale orange sky. The road was long and straight, lined with tall, naked trees with white-painted trunks. The roadside was piled high with bricks and stacks of golden corn stalks. They passed a peasant on a bicycle, a large parcel in his basket, his daughter on a makeshift seat over the rear wheel. Perhaps he had spent his hard-earned cash on a Christmas present for his Little Empress.

Off to their left, Li saw a large white scar cut into the shadow of the hills. It interrupted his silent thoughts. ‘What the hell is that?’ he asked Sun.

Sun screwed his eyes against the setting sun and glanced in the direction of Li’s gaze. ‘That’s Beijing Snow World,’ he said.

‘Beijing what?’

‘Snow World. It’s an artificial ski slope. At least, it’s real snow artificially generated. Guaranteed not to melt till the spring.’ He glanced at Li. ‘Haven’t you heard of it?’

Li shook his head. He felt like a stranger in his own country. A ski slope! ‘Who in the name of the sky goes skiing in China?’ he asked.

Sun shrugged. ‘The new kids on the block out of Beijing. The sons and daughters of the rich and successful. It’s pretty neat.’

Li was amazed. ‘You’ve been there?’

‘Some friends took me out when I first got here.’ He grinned. ‘I guess they thought I’d be impressed, a country bumpkin up from the provinces.’

‘And were you?’

‘You bet.’ They were approaching the turn-off. ‘You want to see it?’

Li glanced at his watch. There was time. ‘Let’s do it.’

A long, newly paved road took them down to an elaborate black and gold wrought-iron gate between two low, white buildings with steeply pitched red roofs. Hawkers were selling fruit and vegetables and tourist trinkets off the back of bicycle carts, stamping their feet in the cold, grim expressions set in the face of a meagre trade. Sun parked the Jeep among the hundred or so private vehicles outside the gate, and went into the right-hand building to buy them visitors’ passes. Li stood listening to western elevator music being piped through speakers mounted on every wall. He could see, through the gate, lampposts lining a long walkway up to the main building, speakers dangling from each one. The air was filled with their music, pervading every tree-lined slope, reaching perhaps into the very graves of the emperors themselves.

He fished in his pocket to find his purse when Sun emerged with their tickets. ‘How much do I owe you?’

But Sun waved him aside. ‘I think I can afford to stand you a ten yuan ticket, Chief.’

Attendants in red ski suits let them through the gate. The walk up the cobbled walkway took them to a long, green-roofed building. It was warm inside, with large restaurants off to left and right, floor to ceiling windows giving on to views of the ski slope itself. The one to the left was still doing late business, groups of wealthy young men and women in fashionable ski gear gathered at round tables, picking over the debris of their meals, draining the last of their beer. The other restaurant was empty, and Sun led Li through it to a café at the far end. It, too, was deserted, apart from a young woman behind a polished wood counter. She wore the Snow World uniform of dark grey trousers and a dark waistcoat over a white blouse. They ordered tea from her and sat by the window.