Peter May - The Runner

Margaret’s heart was pounding. ‘Did she have a large purple birthmark on her face?’

Li was surprised. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know her?’ He couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice.

Margaret had forgotten all about her. But in any case, could never have imagined that she would come at this time of night. ‘Her name is Dai Lili. She is the athlete who said she wanted to speak to me last night at the stadium.’

Now Li was astonished. ‘How in the name of the sky did she find out where you live?’

‘I gave her my card.’

Now he was angry. ‘Are you mad? When? Last night?’

‘She tracked me down to the maternity hospital this afternoon. She was scared, Li Yan. She said she had to speak to me and asked if she could come here. What else could I say?’

Li cursed softly under his breath with the realisation that he had just been face to face with the only person in this case who was prepared to talk — if not to him. ‘I could still catch her.’

Margaret watched anxiously as he pulled on his shoes and ran to the door. ‘You need a coat,’ she called after him. ‘It’s freezing out there.’ The only response was the sound of the apartment door slamming shut behind him.

The cold in the stairwell was brutal. He stopped on the landing and listened. He could hear her footfall on the stairs several floors down. For a moment he considered calling, but feared that she might be spooked. So he started after her. Two steps at a time, until a sweat broke out cold on his forehead, and the tar from years of smoking kept the oxygen from reaching his blood. Five floors down he stopped, and above the rasping of his breath could hear the rapid, panicked patter of her steps floating up to him on the cold, dank air. She had heard him, and was putting even more space between them.

By the time he got to the ground floor and pushed out through the glass doors he knew she was gone. In the wash of moonlight all he could see was the security guard huddled in his hut, cigarette smoke rising into the night. Even if he knew which way she had gone, he realised he could never catch her. She was a runner, after all, young, at the peak of her fitness. And he had too many years behind him of cigarettes and alcohol.

He stood gasping for a moment, perspiration turning to ice on his skin, before he turned, shivering, to face the long climb back to the eleventh floor.

Margaret was up and waiting for him, huddled in her dressing-gown, a kettle boiling to make green tea to warm him. She didn’t need to ask. His face said it all. He took the mug of tea she offered and cupped it in his hands, and let her slip a blanket around his shoulders.

‘What did she want to speak to you about?’ he asked, finally.

Margaret shrugged. ‘I don’t know. And since it’s unlikely she’ll come back again, we probably never will.’

‘I don’t like you giving out your address like that to strangers,’ Li said firmly.

But Margaret wasn’t listening. She had a picture in her head of the girl’s frightened rabbit’s eyes at the stadium the night before, and the anxiety in her face when she spoke to her that afternoon. And she felt afraid for her.

Li pulled up on the stretch of waste ground opposite the food market and walked back along Dongzhimen Beixiao Jie to Mei Yuan’s stall on the corner.

He had slept like a log in Margaret’s arms, but a wakened early, enveloped still by the fog of depression his father had brought with him from Sichuan. And he had known he would have to return to his apartment before his father woke, to prepare him breakfast, and to shower and change for work. The night before, Li had taken him a carry-out meal from the restaurant below, but he had eaten hardly anything and gone to bed shortly after ten. As soon as Li had thought the old man was asleep, he had crept out and driven across the city to spend his last night with Margaret.

But when he returned this morning, the old man did not eat his breakfast either. He had accepted a mug of green tea and said simply to Li, ‘You did not come home last night.’

Li had seen no reason to lie. ‘No. I stayed over at Margaret’s,’ he had said, and before his father could reply, cut him off with, ‘And don’t tell me it’s not traditional, or that you disapprove. Because, you know, I really don’t care.’

The old man had been expressionless. ‘I was going to say it is a pity I will not meet her before the betrothal.’ He had waited for a response, but when Li could find nothing to say, added, ‘Is it unreasonable for a man to want to meet the mother of his grandchild?’

It did not matter, apparently, what Li said or did, his father had a way of making him feel guilty. He had left him with a spare key and fled to the safety of his work.

Now, as he approached Mei Yuan’s stall, to break his own fast with a jian bing , he thought for the first time of the riddle she had posed two days before. He had given it neither time nor consideration and felt guilty about that, too. He ran it quickly through in his mind. The woman had come to see the I Ching expert on his sixty-sixth birthday. He was born on the second of February nineteen twenty-five. So that would mean she came to see him on the second of February, nineteen ninety-one. He was going to create a number from that date, put her age at the end of it, and then reverse it. And that would be the special number he would remember her by. Okay, so the date would be 2-2-91. But what age was the woman? He ran back over in his mind what Mei Yuan had told him, but could not remember if she had said what age the girl was.

‘I missed you yesterday.’ Mei Yuan had seen him coming and had already poured the pancake mix on to the hotplate.

‘I had a…’ he hesitated. ‘A meeting.’

‘Ah,’ she said. And Li knew immediately that she knew he was hiding something. He gave her a hug and quickly changed the subject.

‘I am in the middle of a murder investigation.’

‘Ah,’ she said again.

‘And my father arrived from Sichuan.’ He was aware of her eyes flickering briefly away from her hotplate in his direction and then back again. She knew that relations between them were difficult.

‘And how is he?’

‘Oh,’ Li said airily, ‘much the same as usual. Nothing wrong with him that a touch of murder wouldn’t cure.’

Mei Yuan smiled. ‘I hope that’s not the investigation you are conducting.’

‘I wish,’ Li said. ‘It would be an easy one to break. Only one suspect, with both motive and opportunity.’ Flippancy was an easy way to hide your emotions, but he knew she wasn’t fooled.

She finished his jian bing and handed it to him wrapped in brown paper. She said, ‘When the dark seeks to equal the light there is certain to be conflict.’

He met her eyes and felt as if she were looking right into his soul. And he was discomfited by it. Because he knew that all she could have seen there would be dark thoughts, resentment and guilt.

‘You have read the teachings of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching ,’ she said. It was not a question. She knew this because she had given him the book, the Taoist Bible — although Taoism was a philosophy rather than a religion. He nodded. ‘Then you know that the Tao teaches, be good to people who are good. To those who are not good be also good. Thus goodness is achieved.’

Li bit into his jian bing and felt its soft, savoury hotness suffuse his mouth with its flavour. He said, ‘You certainly achieved goodness with this, Mei Yuan.’ He was not about to swap Taoist philosophy with her at eight o’clock in the morning.

She smiled at him with the indulgence of a mother. ‘And did you achieve a solution to my riddle?’