Peter May - The Runner

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I wanna speak to you, lady. I must speak to you. Ve-err important. Don’t know who else to talk to.’ Her eyes darted to the left and down the corridor to the dressing rooms. Her face visibly paled, and her birthmark seemed to darken. ‘Not now. Later, okay?’

And she hurried away down the corridor, eyes to the floor, brushing past Supervising Coach Cai as he emerged into the foyer. He glanced after the girl and then looked over at Margaret, clearly wondering if there had been some kind of exchange. Against all her inclinations, Margaret smiled over at him. ‘Congratulations, Supervisor Cai,’ she said. ‘The Americans will have to do better tomorrow.’

He inclined his head in the minutest acknowledgement, but his face never cracked. He turned and strode through double doors leading on to the track.

Margaret was left disturbed by the encounter. The image of the girl’s face had imprinted itself on her mind. A plain girl, with shoulder-length black hair tied back in a loose ponytail. Tall and skinny, with dark, frightened rabbit’s eyes. The strange purple birthmark. Margaret repeated the name to herself so that she would remember it. Dai Lili. What could she possibly have wanted to speak to her about?

When Li emerged from the dressing rooms fifteen minutes later, his mood was black. ‘A complete waste of time,’ he told her. ‘I learned nothing that I didn’t already know.’ He led Margaret out into the cold night, and they headed for the ornamental bridge and the smell of the sewer.

‘Not very talkative, were they?’ Margaret asked.

‘It was like trying to get blood from a stone,’ Li growled.

‘Perhaps that’s because Supervisor Cai warned them all not to talk to you.’

He stopped and looked at her. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because a young female athlete told me. She’s running in the three thousand meters heats tomorrow. She said she needed to speak to me urgently about something very important, and that Supervisor Cai had told all the athletes not to talk to us.’

Li was seething. ‘What does that bastard think he’s playing at?’ And it was all Margaret could do to stop him from going back to pick a fight.

‘He’d only deny it, Li Yan,’ she said. ‘What’s more interesting is why that girl wanted to speak to me. What it was she had to say.’

‘She didn’t tell you?’

Margaret shook her head. ‘She saw Cai coming and scuttled off. But whatever it was, I didn’t get the feeling she was going to tell me there and then.’ She slipped her arm through his, and they hurried over the bridge together, holding their breath. When they got to the other side, she said, ‘So they didn’t tell you anything at all?’

Li shrugged. ‘Just confirmed what I already knew. That none of the three killed in the road crash had had their heads shaved the last time anyone saw them.’ He shook his own head. ‘And everyone thought it was really unlikely that Xing Da would have chosen to cut off his hair. It was his flag of independence, they said, his statement of individuality.’

‘So why would somebody else do it?’ Margaret asked.

Li was baffled. ‘I have no idea, Margaret. But it simply cannot be a coincidence. Four out of five athletes who have died in the last month, all with their heads shaved?’

‘And the weightlifter?’

Li sighed. ‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem any doubt that he died from natural causes. Maybe there’s no connection. Maybe he really is just a coincidence.’

‘But you don’t think so.’

He held up his arms in frustration. ‘I don’t know what to think. I really don’t.’ He checked his watch. ‘But right now I’d better get you home. I have an appointment with a dead runner.’

Margaret said quietly, ‘Will you come back to the apartment after?’

He shook his head. ‘I have an early start tomorrow. An appointment first thing.’

‘What appointment?’

But he looked away, and she knew that when he refused to meet her eyes he was being evasive. ‘Just an appointment,’ he said, and she was certain that he was hiding something from her.

The drive out to Dalingjiang was treacherous. There was black ice on the road where the frost had melted in the sun and then refrozen. Li drove carefully, with the heating up high, but still his feet grew cold. The temperature reading on the dash was minus nineteen centigrade.

He parked the Jeep at the top of the dirt track where Sun had parked it several hours before. Only now there was a phalanx of vehicles gathered there. Official cars and the meat wagon from Pao Jü Hutong, and there were nosy villagers gathered at the entrance of the alleyway leading to Lao Da’s house. Even at this hour, and in these temperatures, the curiosity of the Chinese prevailed.

Li heard the quickfire ratatat of a pneumatic drill as soon as he switched off the engine. And when he opened the door of his Jeep was shocked at just how loud it sounded in the still night air. It was little wonder that the villagers were curious. Overhead, stars shone in their firmament like the tips of white hot needles, incredibly vivid against the purest of black skies. Away from the lights of the city, such was their clarity you almost felt you could reach up and touch them, prick your fingers on their light. The moon, close now to its zenith, had risen over the mountains and washed the world with a silver light that you could only distinguish from daylight by its complete absence of colour. Li pushed his way through the crowd and made his way easily by the light of it to the gate of Lao Da’s courtyard, where a uniformed officer stood miserably on guard, wondering what he had done to deserve a job like that on a night like this. Li showed him his ID, and the officer raised his gloved hand stiffly to his frozen face in a brittle salute.

Through the moongate in the courtyard, Li could see black sheets stretched between the trees in the orchard to screen the activity around the grave from Xing Da’s family. Arc lights beyond them cast their light into the sky above, obliterating the stars. The drill stopped, and Li heard the hacking of several pickaxes trying to break through the frozen earth.

Through the windows Li could see, in the lit interior of the house, Lao Da sitting on his own at a table, a bottle and a glass in front of him. He looked up as Li stepped inside. From the bedroom Li could hear the faint, hoarse sobbing of Xing Da’s mother. There was no sign of the grandparents. Perhaps they had gone to a neighbour’s house. Lao Da waved him into the seat opposite, and filled another glass with clear liquor from a bulbous bottle with a label that read, Mongolian King . In the bottom of the bottle was a large, white twisted root of ginseng. The alcohol had the pungent, slightly perfumed smell of mao tai , distilled from the bitter-tasting sorghum wheat.

‘ Gan bei ,’ the runner’s father said, without enthusiasm, and they chinked their glasses and then drained them. Li tried to catch his breath as he watched Lao Da fill them up again. A photograph in a frame lay on the table, and Li turned it around to look at it. It was Xing Da breaking the tape in first place at some major event, his hair flying out behind him, unmistakable, the flag of independence his fellow athletes had described.

Outside, the pneumatic drill started up once more.

‘The saddest thing,’ Lao Da said, ‘was that he was supposed to come and see us at the end of October, for his mother’s birthday. But he phoned to say he couldn’t come, because he and some other members of the team had picked up the flu at a meeting in Shanghai. He sounded terrible. We were all very disappointed because, you know, we hardly ever saw him.’ He paused to drain half of his glass. ‘That was about three weeks before the accident. We never did see him again.’