Peter May - The Runner

Li was unaccountably disappointed. This didn’t sound like much of a revelation. ‘And that’s what Xing had?’ Margaret nodded. ‘So what clogged them?’

‘The thing is,’ she said, frustrated in her attempt to describe what she had seen, ‘they’re not really clogged with anything. It’s like the smooth muscle that lines those tiny arterioles got hypertrophied, thickened somehow. Effectively they closed themselves up and caused him to have a massive coronary.’

‘What would make them do that?’

She shrugged, at a loss. ‘I’ve no idea.’

Li was impatient. ‘Come on, Margaret, you must have some thought about it.’

She tutted. ‘Well, if you were to ask me to guess, and that’s all it would be, I’d say it looked like they could — maybe — been attacked by some kind of virus.’

‘If it was a virus, you’d be able to find it in his blood, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe.’ She prevaricated again. ‘The thing is, knowing what you’re looking for. And if you don’t know that there’s even something there…’

Sun had followed Li over to the table, listening intently, concentrating hard on trying to understand everything. But the technical vocabulary had been beyond him. ‘So how he die?’ he asked Margaret.

‘At this stage it’s just a theory,’ Margaret said. ‘And if you quote me I’ll deny it. But in layman’s terms, it looks like he had a heart attack brought on — maybe — by a virus.’

Li’s abortive interview at Beijing Security seemed a lifetime away now, of little importance, and no relevance. Instead his head was filled with a single, perplexing question. He gave it voice. ‘Why would you take someone who had died of natural causes and try to make it appear they had been killed in a car crash?’

Margaret waggled a finger. ‘I can’t answer that one for you, Li Yan. But I have another question that we can answer very quickly.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Were our suicide-murder and our weightlifter also suffering from a thickening of the microvasculature?’

Li looked nonplussed. ‘Were they?’

Margaret laughed. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to look, won’t we?’ She pushed her goggles back on her forehead. ‘I prepared permanent paraffin sections of Sui Mingshan’s heart for storage. I assume Doctor Wang will have done the same with Jia Jing’s. Why don’t you phone him and ask him to look at sections of Jia’s heart under the microscope while I dig out the ones I prepared yesterday?’

When Li returned from telephoning Pau Jü Hutong, Margaret had dug out the slides the lab had prepared with the tissue reserved from the previous day’s autopsy, and she was slipping the first one under the microscope. She set her eyes to the lens and adjusted the focus. After a moment she inclined her head and looked up at Li. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘If someone hadn’t taken our boy out and strung him up from a diving platform at Qinghua his heart would have seized up on him. Sooner rather than later. Same as our friend on the table. He had pronounced thickening of the microvasculature.’

There was nothing to discuss. The facts spoke for themselves, but made absolutely no sense. And Li was reluctant to start jumping to conclusions before they had heard from Doctor Wang. So Margaret had the results of the toxicology on Sui’s samples sent up from the lab. By now they were used to preparing copies for her in English as well as Chinese. She had stripped off her gown and her apron, her gloves and her mask and had scrubbed her hands, although she would not feel clean until she had taken a shower. She sat on a desk in the pathologists’ office and read through the results while Li and Sun watched in expectant silence. She shrugged. ‘As I predicted, I think. Blood alcohol level almost zero-point-four percent. Apart from that, nothing unusual. And nothing that would suggest he had been taking steroids. At least, not in the last month. But I’ll need to ask them to screen his blood again for viruses. Though, like I said, you really need to know what you’re looking for.’

The phone rang, and Li nearly snatched the receiver from its cradle. It was Wang. He listened for almost two minutes without comment, and then thanked the doctor and hung up. He said, ‘Jia also had marked thickening of the microvasculature. But Wang says it was still the narrowing of the main coronary artery that killed him.’

Margaret said, ‘Yes, but the thickening of the arterioles would have done the job eventually, even if his artery hadn’t burst on him.’

Li nodded. ‘That’s pretty much what Wang said. Oh, and toxicology also confirmed, no steroids.’

Sun had again been concentrating on following the English. And now he turned to Li and said, ‘So if Jia Jing hadn’t died of a heart attack, he would probably have turned up dead in an accident somewhere, or “committed suicide”.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Probably. And he’d probably have had that long pony tail of his shaved off.’ He paused, frowning in consternation. ‘But why?’

The briefing was short and to the point. The meeting room was filled with detectives and smoke. Nearly every officer in the section was there, and there were not enough chairs for them all. Some leaned against the wall sipping their green tea. Deputy Section Chief Tao Heng sat listening resentfully, nursing his grudges to keep them warm in this cold, crowded room.

Delivering the preliminary autopsy reports to the section helped Li clarify things in his own head, assembling facts in some kind of relevant order, creating that order out of what still felt like chaos.

‘What is clear,’ he told them, ‘is that we have one murder, and at least three suspicious deaths. There is little doubt from the findings of the autopsy, that the swimmer Sui Mingshan did not commit suicide. He was murdered. Xing Da, who was driving the car in which the three athletes died, was dead before the car crashed. So the accident was staged. And although we don’t have their bodies for confirmation, I think we have to assume that the other two were also dead prior to the crash. But what’s bizarre is that Xing seems to have died from natural causes. Possibly a virus which attacked the microscopic arteries of the heart.’

He looked around the faces in the room, all clutching their preliminary reports and listening, rapt, as Li laid out the facts before them like the strange and incomprehensible pieces of a gruesome riddle. ‘Stranger still is the fact that the swimmer Sui Mingshan, and the weightlifter Jia Jing, were suffering from exactly the same thing as Xing. Hypertrophy — thickening — of the microvasculature. Both would have died from it sooner or later if murder and fate had not intervened.’

He watched Wu pulling on a cigarette and he ached to suck a mouthful of smoke into his own lungs. He imagined how it would relieve his ache immediately and draw a veil of calm over his troubled mind. He forced the thought out of his head. ‘But perhaps the strangest thing of all, is that each of them had had his head shaved. With the exception, of course, of Jia.’

Wu cut in. ‘Could that be because he was the only one who really did die a natural death? I mean, sure, this clogging of the tiny arteries would have killed him in the end, but he died before anyone could mess with him.’

One of the other detectives said, ‘But why was anybody messing with any of them anyway, if it was some virus that was killing them?’

‘I’d have thought that was pretty fucking obvious,’ Wu said. And immediately he caught Deputy Section Chief Tao’s disapproving eye. He raised a hand. ‘Sorry, boss. I know. Ten yuan. It’s already in the box.’

‘ What’s fucking obvious, Wu?’ Li said. It was a deliberate slap in the face of his deputy. There was some stifled laughter around the room.