Peter May - The Runner

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

‘Yeh, sure,’ Li said. ‘And I suppose you never asked her what it was she was speaking to Doctor Campbell about.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t she tell you? Was that the problem? Did you fall out over it? Is that why she failed to turn up?’

‘This is preposterous!’

‘Is it? She was very keen to speak to Doctor Campbell about something. Something she never got the chance to do, because she ran off scared when she saw you. I don’t suppose you’d know what it was she wanted so urgently to tell her?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. And I resent being questioned like this, Section Chief. I resent your tone and I resent your attitude.’

‘Well, you know what, Supervisor Cai? You probably don’t know it, but my investigation into your dead athletes has turned into a murder inquiry. And there’s a young girl out there somewhere who could be in very grave danger. For all I know, she might be dead already. So I don’t particularly care if you don’t like my tone. Because right now yours is the only name on a suspect list of one.’

Cai blanched. ‘You’re not serious.’

‘You’ll find out just how serious I am, Supervisor Cai, if I don’t get your full co-operation. I want her home address, her parents’ address, her telephone number, her cellphone number, her email address, and any other information that you have on her. And I want it now.’

As they crossed the bridge over the river beyond the stadium, Sun breathed in the lingering scent of the sewer and his face wrinkled in disgust. He blew out his cheeks and hurried to the other side. He turned as Li caught him up. ‘You were a bit hard on him, Chief,’ he said. ‘You don’t really consider him a suspect, do you?’

‘Right now,’ Li said, ‘he’s the best we’ve got. He’s the only common factor. He was known to all of the victims. He’s hostile and defensive, and he has a very dodgy track record on the subject of doping. He gave his athletes instructions not to talk to me the other night, and then saw Dai Lili speaking to Margaret. Suddenly Dai Lili goes missing. Big coincidence.’

‘What did she want to speak to Doctor Campbell about?’

Li shook his head in frustration. ‘I wish I knew.’

Dai Lili’s parents lived in a crumbling siheyuan courtyard in a quarter of the city just west of Qianmen and south of the old city wall which had protected the imperial family and their courtesans from the vulgar masses that thronged outside the gates of the ancient capital. In the days before the Communists, the streets here were full of clubs and restaurants and gambling dens. It was a dangerous place to venture alone in the dark. Now Qianmen was a vibrant shopping area, filled with boutiques and department stores, fast food shops and upscale restaurants.

Li inched his Jeep through the afternoon traffic on Qianmen’s southern loop, past sidewalks crowded with shoppers buying long johns and Afghan hats. A young woman dressed as Santa Claus stood in a doorway hailing passers-by with a loudspeaker, urging them to buy their loved ones jewellery this Christmas.

They took a left into Xidamochang Street, little more than an alleyway lined with barber shops and tiny restaurants where proprietors were already steaming dumplings for that night’s dinner, dumplings that were particularly delicious if allowed to go cold, and then deep fried in a wok and dipped in soy sauce. They narrowly missed knocking down a haughty girl in a full-length hooded white coat who refused to deviate from her path. Cyclists wobbled and criss-crossed around them, collars pulled up against the snow that was driving in hard now on the north wind.

About three hundred meters down, they parked up and went in search of number thirty-three. Bamboo bird cages hung on hooks outside narrow closes, birds shrilling and squawking, feathers fluffed up against the cold. Outside number thirty-three, a young man in a fawn anorak was throwing a ceramic bead into the air for a grey and black bird which would return to land on his outstretched left hand for a piece of corn as a reward for catching it.

The entrance to the home of Dai Lili’s parents was through a small red doorway in a grey brick wall. The carcasses of several bikes lay around outside, cannibalised for their parts. A narrow close led over uneven slabs into a shambolic courtyard stacked with the detritus of half a century of people’s lives, overspill from homes barely big enough for their occupants. Nothing, apparently, was ever thrown away. Li asked an old woman with bow legs and a purple body warmer over an old Mao suit where he could find the Dai family, and she pointed him to an open doorway with a curtain hanging in it. Li pulled the curtain aside and smelled the sour stench of stale cooking and body odour. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’ he called.

A young man emerged from the gloom, scowling and aggressive. ‘What do you want?’ His white tee-shirt was stretched over a well-sculptured body, and there was a tattoo of a snake wound around his right arm, its head and forked tongue etched into the back of his right hand.

‘Police,’ Li said. ‘We’re looking for the parents of Dai Lili.’

The young man regarded them sullenly for a moment then nodded for them to follow him in. He flicked aside another curtain and led them into a tiny room with a large bed, a two-seater settee and a huge television on an old dresser. A man in his fifties sat smoking, huddled in a padded jacket, watching the TV. A woman was squatting on the bed, dozens of photographs spread out on the quilt in front of her. ‘Police,’ the boy said, and then stood in the doorway with arms folded, as if to prevent further intruders or to block their escape.

Li inclined his head so that he could see the photographs that the woman was looking at. They were pictures, taken trackside, of Dai Lili bursting the tape, or sprinting the last hundred meters, or arms raised in victory salute. Dozens of them. ‘Do you know where she is?’ he said.

The woman looked at him with dull eyes. ‘I thought maybe you were coming to tell us.’

‘Why?’ Sun asked. ‘Do you think something has happened to her?’

The man turned to look at them for the first time, blowing smoke down his nostrils like an angry dragon. ‘If something had not happened to her, she would have been there to run the race.’ There was something like shame in his eyes where once, Li was sure, there would only have been pride.

‘Do you have any idea why she didn’t turn up?’

Dai Lili’s father shook his head and turned his resentful gaze back on the television. ‘She tells us nothing,’ he said.

‘We don’t see her much,’ said her mother. ‘She has her own apartment in Haidian District, near the Fourth Ring Road.’

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘About two weeks ago.’

‘How did she seem?’

Her father dragged his attention away from the screen again. ‘Difficult,’ he said. ‘Argumentative. Like she’s been for months.’ There was anger mixed now with the shame.

‘Things haven’t been easy for her,’ her mother said quickly in mitigation. ‘Her sister has been going downhill fast.’

‘Her sister?’ Sun asked.

‘Ten years ago she was the Chinese ten thousand meters champion,’ the old woman said, the pain of some unhappy recollection etching itself in the lines on her face. ‘Lili wanted so much to be like her. Now she is a cripple. Multiple sclerosis.’

‘Lili’s done everything for her!’ Li and Sun were startled by the voice of the young man in the doorway coming unexpectedly to his sister’s defence, as if there were some implicit criticism in his mother’s words. The two detectives turned to look at him. He said, ‘That’s all that ever drove her to win. To get money to pay for the care of her sister. She doesn’t live in some fancy flat like all the rest of them. Everything she’s ever earned has gone to Lijia.’