Peter May: The Runner

He clipped his phone back on his belt. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Of course you do,’ she said in a flat tone, and she reached over to switch on the overhead light and turned to blink at him in the sudden brightness. ‘What is it this time? Another murder?’ Beijing appeared to be in the throes of a crime wave. Crime figures were sky-rocketing. And there had been some particularly gruesome killings. Li’s team had just arrested an ethnic Korean for murdering a twenty-nine-year-old woman for her hair. Consumed by some bizarre desire to posses her long, black locks, he had stabbed her to death and then beheaded her with an axe. After taking the head home with him he had peeled off the scalp and hair. When detectives from Section One burst into his apartment, they had found him stir-frying her facial skin with the apparent intention of eating it.

‘No,’ Li said. ‘Not a murder. At least, it doesn’t appear that way.’ Although he smiled, he was perplexed. ‘Death by sex, apparently.’ He stooped to kiss her softly on the lips. ‘Perhaps we had a narrow escape.’

Li’s bike rattled in the back of his Jeep. The Chrysler four-wheel drive, built in the city by a Chinese — American joint venture, was affectionately known as the Beijing Jeep, much beloved by the municipal police who had adopted it almost as their own. The vehicle allocated to Li as Section Chief was an unmarked dark green with smoked glass windows. The only indication that this was a police vehicle, to those who knew, was the jing character and the zero which followed it on the registration plate. Normally he left it at Section One and cycled home, which was often faster than trying to negotiate the capital’s increasingly frequent gridlocks, but it was a long way across the city in the bitter cold to Margaret’s apartment, so tonight he had bundled his bike in the back.

Many of the side streets, which had not been cleared of snow, were still treacherous with ice. But as he turned on to West Chang’an Avenue, this brightly lit arterial route which dissected the city east to west, was free of ice, and traffic was light. Hotels and ministry buildings, China Telecom, were all floodlit, and Li could see the lights of Christmas trees twinkling incongruously in hotel forecourts. Just two weeks away, Christmas in Beijing was primarily for the tourists. But the Chinese welcomed any excuse for a banquet.

He drove past the impressive front gates of Zhongnanhai on his left, and on his right the big black hole behind the Great Hall of the People where work had already begun on building China’s controversial new National Grand Theatre, at a cost of three hundred and twenty-five million dollars. Ahead was the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the portrait of Mao smiling benignly over Tiananmen Square where the blood of the democracy protesters of eighty-nine seemed to have been washed away by the sea of radical economic change that had since swept the country. Li wondered fleetingly what Mao would have made of the nation he had wrested from the Nationalist Kuomintang all those decades ago. He would not have recognised his country in this twenty-first century.

Li took a left, through the arch, into Nanchang Jie and saw the long, narrow, tree-lined street stretch ahead of him into the darkness. Beyond the Xihuamen intersection it became Beichang Jie — North Chang Street — and on his right, a high grey wall hid from sight the restored homes of mandarins and Party cadres that lined this ancient thoroughfare along the banks of the moat which surrounded the Forbidden City. Up ahead there were two patrol cars pulled up on to the ramp leading to tall electronic gates in the wall. Li saw a Section One Jeep drawn in at the kerb, and Doctor Wang’s Volkswagen pulled in behind it. There were a couple of unmarked vans from the forensics section in Pao Jü Hutong. A uniformed officer stood by the gate, huddled in his shiny black fur-collared coat, smoking a cigarette and stamping his feet. His black and silver peaked cap was pulled down low over his eyes trying to provide his face with some protection from the icy wind. Although it had been introduced shortly before his spell at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, Li still found it hard to get used to the new black uniform with its white and silver trim. The red-trimmed green army colours of the police in the first fifty years of the People’s Republic had been virtually indistinguishable from those of the PLA. Only the Armed Police still retained them now.

Detective Wu’s call to Li’s cellphone had been cryptic. He had no reason to believe this was a crime scene. It was a delicate matter, perhaps political, and he had no idea how to deal with it. Li was curious. Wu was a brash, self-confident detective of some fifteen years’ experience. Delicacy was not something one normally associated with him. Nor tact. All that he had felt able to tell Li on the phone was that there was a fatality, and that it was of a sexual nature. But as soon as he had given Li the address, the Section Chief had known this was no normal call-out. This was a street inhabited by the powerful and the privileged, people of influence. One would require to tread carefully.

The officer on the gate recognised Li immediately, hastily throwing away his cigarette in a shower of sparks and saluting as Li got out of the Jeep. The gate was lying open, and a couple of saloon cars, a BMW and a Mercedes, sat in the courtyard beyond, beneath a jumble of grey slate roofs.

‘Who lives here?’ Li asked the officer.

‘No idea, Section Chief.’

‘Where’s Detective Wu?’

‘Inside.’ He jerked a thumb towards the courtyard.

Li crossed the cobbled yard and entered the sprawling, single-storey house through double glass doors leading into a sun lounge. Three uniformed officers stood among expensive cane furnishings engaged in hushed conversation with Wu and several forensics officers. Wu’s butt-freezer leather jacket hung open, the collar still up, his cream silk scarf dangling from his neck. He wore jeans and sneakers, and was pulling nervously at his feeble attempt at a moustache with nicotine-stained fingers. His face lit up when he saw Li.

‘Hey, Chief. Glad you’re here. This one’s a real bummer.’ He steered Li quickly out into a narrow hallway with a polished parquet floor, walls lined with antique cabinets and ancient hangings. From somewhere in the house came the sound of a woman sobbing. From the sun lounge behind them Li could hear stifled laughter.

‘What the hell’s going on here, Wu?’

Wu’s voice was low and tense. ‘Local Public Security boys got a call an hour ago from the maid. She was hysterical. They couldn’t get much sense out of her, except that somebody was dead. So they sent out a car. The uniforms get here and think, “Shit, this is over our heads,” and the call goes out to us. I get here and I think pretty much the same damned thing. So I called in the Doc and his hounds and phoned you. I ain’t touched a thing.’

‘So who’s dead?’

‘Guy called Jia Jing.’ Li thought the name sounded faintly familiar. ‘Chinese weightlifting champion,’ Wu clarified for him.

‘How did he die?’

‘Doc thinks it’s natural causes.’ He nodded his head towards the end of the hall. ‘He’s still in there.’

Li was perplexed. ‘So what’s the deal?’

‘The deal is,’ Wu said, ‘we’re standing in the home of a high-ranking member of BOCOG.’ Li frowned. Wu elucidated. ‘The Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. He’s in Greece right now. His wife’s in their bedroom with a three-hundred-pound weightlifter lying dead on top of her. And he’s, how can I put it…’ he paused for effect, but Li guessed Wu had already worked out exactly how he was going to put it, ‘…locked in the missionary position and still in the act of penetration.’ He couldn’t resist a smirk. ‘Seems like his heart gave out just when things were getting interesting.’