Peter May - The Runner

The police had closed off the park, and a large crowd was gathered in the road outside the south gate. Li and Sun had to push their way through. Inside, a dozen or more uniformed officers milled around on the cobbled concourse, watching a teenage girl dressed in the red embroidered costume of an empress sweeping a path through the snow with a long-handled broom. It was falling almost as fast as she cleared it. But with the tourists ejected, and no one to pose with her for photographs, it was the only way she had of keeping warm. Mournful vendors stood beneath the pillars of their empty stores, ruing the loss of a day’s income and cursing the killers of the girl on the hill for making their lives just that little bit harder.

Detective Sang hurried across the concourse from the path that led up the hill. ‘Got to be careful on these steps, Chief. They’re lethal in the snow. We’ve already had several accidents on the marble stairs at the top.’

Through the evergreen cypresses that climbed the steep slopes of the hill, Li could just see, blurred by the falling snow, the four upturned corners of the Wanchunting Pavilion with its three eaves and its golden glazed-tile roof. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘The Jifangting Pavilion, Chief.’

Li knew it, and his eyes panned west to see if he could spot the green-glazed tiles of its octagonal two-tiered roof. But it was obscured by the trees. They began the long climb.

‘One of the park attendants found her about an hour after they opened up this morning, Chief,’ Sang told them on the way up. ‘The weather meant there weren’t too many people in the park first thing, or she’d probably have been found earlier. Poor guy’s been treated for shock.’

‘The attendant?’

‘Yeh. It’s pretty messy up there, Chief. Blood everywhere. She must have been brought here during the night and butchered. She was left lying on this kind of stone dais thing under the roof. Looks like there might have been a statue on it or something at one time.’

‘A bronze Buddha,’ Li said. ‘It was stolen by British and French troops in nineteen hundred.’ He had a clear picture in his mind of the tiny pavilion, open on all sides, its roof supported on ten blood red pillars, the carved stone dais at its centre protected by a wrought iron fence.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to climb the serpentining path up the side of the hill, stepping gingerly on the last few steps to where the track divided, heading east up to the summit and the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring, and west down to Jifangting, the Fragrance Pavilion. Through the trees below them, Li saw its snow-covered roof, and the crowd of uniformed and plain-clothes officers around it. Harassed forensics officers were attempting to keep everyone at bay in order to try and make sense of the tracks in the snow. But it was way too late now, Li knew. And in all likelihood the original tracks of the killer would have been covered by several more inches of snowfall.

He and Sun made their way carefully down the path in Sang’s wake.

‘In the name of the sky, Li, can you not keep these goddamn moron detectives off my snow!’ Li turned to find himself looking into the tiny coal black eyes of senior forensics officer Fu Qiwei. But it was anger that burned in them today, not mischief. They opened wide when he saw Li’s face. ‘Fuck me, Chief! What happened to you?’

‘Collision with a fist and a foot. Surely you can’t make any sense of these tracks now, Fu?’

‘Weather centre says it stopped snowing sometime during the night. Sky cleared for about an hour and temperatures dropped before the cloud rolled back in and there was more snow.’

‘So?’

‘Killers’ tracks could be frozen under the second fall. We already got some good prints from the blood on the floor inside. If you can keep your flatfoots from trampling all over it, we might be able to brush the snow back down to the frozen stuff.’

‘Alright,’ Li shouted. ‘Anyone who is not essential get back up the hill now!’

Detectives and uniformed officers moved away in quiet acquiescence, leaving Fu’s team nearly invisible in their white Tivek suits. Doctor Wang and his photographer from pathology stood shivering under the roof, sucking on cigarettes held between latex fingers. The body had been covered with a white sheet. Normally, by now, blood would have soaked through it, stark against the white. But the blood, like the body beneath it, was frozen solid. And it was everywhere all around the pavilion, caught in its vivid crimson freshness by the freezing temperatures. Li had rarely seen so much blood. It lay in icy pools and frozen spurts all around the central dais, rivulets of it turned to ice as it ran down the carved stonework.

He took a deep breath. No matter how often you came face to face with it, you never got used to death. It took him by surprise every time, a chill, depressing reminder of his own mortality, that he, too, was just flesh and blood and would one day lie cold and lifeless on a slab.

Off down to their left he saw the sweeping eaves of the north gate of the Forbidden City, and the russet roofs beyond, laid out in perfect symmetry. Through the pillars of the pavilion he could see, on its island in the middle of Beihai Lake, the White Dagoba Temple, turned into a factory during the Cultural Revolution. Immediately below, the factories of today belched smoke out into the haze of snow and pollution that filled the Beijing sky. Somewhere, below them and to the east, near the south gate, was the locust tree from which the last Ming emperor, Chong Zhen, had hanged himself to escape the marauding Manchu hordes. This was a place not unused to change, or to death.

A grim-faced Wang approached him. ‘It’s a messy one, Section Chief,’ he said. ‘I never really understood what blood lust meant until today. These bastards must have gorged themselves on it, must have been covered in it from head to toe.’

‘More than one?’

‘At least half a dozen, judging by the footprints in the blood.’ He sighed. ‘I counted more than eighty stab wounds, Chief. These guys brought her up here, stripped her naked, and just kept stabbing her and stabbing her. Long bladed knives. I’ll be able to tell more accurately when I get her on the table, but I’d say nine to twelve inches long.’ He shook his head. ‘Never seen anything like it. You want to take a look? We’ve still got to do the pics.’

Li had no real desire to see what lay beneath the sheet. Wang’s description of how she died had been graphic and sickening enough. He pictured her as he had seen her for those few moments in the hallway outside Margaret’s apartment. She had been so young and timid, her small face marred by its purple birthmark. And he saw her in the photographs her mother had been looking at on the bed, breaking the tape, smiling, exultant. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

They stepped carefully up to the dais and Wang pulled back the sheet. She looked as if she were covered in large black insects, but Li quickly saw that they were the wounds left in her flesh by the knives. She was covered in blood, and it was pooled all around her where once a statue of Buddha had smiled benignly on the world. Her flesh was blue-tinged and stark in its contrast with the blood which had leaked out from every hole made in her by the knives. Her black hair was fanned out on the stone, stuck to the frozen blood. Longer than Li remembered it. He frowned. The birthmark was gone. He stood staring at her in confusion before the mist cleared and he realised it was not who he had expected to see. It was not the runner, Dai Lili. It was Jon Macken’s missing friend, JoJo. Only, now she wasn’t missing any more.

Their taxi crawled slowly over the humpbacked Qianhai Bridge that marked the intersection between Qianhai and Houhai Lakes. It had stopped snowing but the roads were still treacherous, and a sky the colour of pewter promised more to come. Out on Houhai, two men had cut a hole in the snow-covered ice, and sat on boxes fishing and smoking. The taxi took a left and followed the lake down a tree-lined street, grey brick courtyards on either side of narrow hutongs running off to their right.