Peter May - The Runner

‘This is ridiculous, Margaret,’ Mrs. Campbell was saying for the umpteenth time. ‘I would have been perfectly all right staying in the apartment on my own.’

‘You don’t come all the way to China, Mom, and spend your entire time on your own in a room ten feet square.’

‘You live in one,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And I seem to recall spending more time than I care to remember sitting in a restaurant without eating, with people who couldn’t speak my language.’

Margaret sighed. She had asked Mei Yuan to look after her mother today so that she could check out the lab results on Li’s perfume and breath freshener. But Mrs. Campbell wasn’t pleased. ‘I don’t need a babysitter,’ she had said.

The taxi drew up outside Mei Yuan’s siheyuan , and Margaret asked the driver to wait. She helped her mother out of the car and supported her left arm as she hobbled through the red gateway into the courtyard beyond. Mrs. Campbell looked around with some distaste. ‘She lives here ?’ Margaret had thought it one of the tidier siheyuan she had seen.

Mei Yuan greeted them at the door. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Campbell.’

And Mrs. Campbell put on her brave face. ‘Mei Yuan,’ she said, her pronunciation still less than perfect.

‘I thought today I might teach you how to make jian bing .’ Mei Yuan smiled mischievously.

‘Jan beeng?’ Mrs. Campbell frowned.

‘Yes, you remember, Mom, I told you. That’s the Beijing pancakes that Mei Yuan makes at her stall.’

Her mother looked horrified. But Mei Yuan took her hand to lead her into the house. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure I can find you some heavy clothes to keep you warm.’

Margaret said quickly, ‘Got to go. Have a good day. I’ll catch up with you later.’ And before her mother could object she was gone, and the taxi went slithering off down the lakeside road.

The corridor on the top floor of Section One was deserted. Margaret looked into the detectives’ room, but it was empty. She heard the distant hum of the central heating boiler, and the muted tapping of fingers on keyboards coming from another floor. She walked on down the corridor and heard voices coming from the big meeting room at the end. Lots of voices, some of them raised. She heard coughing and the clearing of throats, a brief ripple of nervous laughter. She smelled the cigarette smoke out here. And then one voice silencing the others, grave and authoritative. She recognised it immediately. Li. When she had phoned the hospital earlier he had already gone. She was glad to hear that there was nothing wrong with his voice at least. She smiled to herself and went into his office and closed the door to wait for him.

His desk was piled high with folders and strewn with all manner of papers. There were binders piled along the wall beneath the window and on top of the filing cabinet. She could not imagine what was in them all, or how Li ever found time to read them. The Chinese police, it seemed to her, were obsessed by paperwork, by the minutest collection of every shred of evidence, no matter how small, no matter how remotely connected. There were rarely any sudden leaps forward in an investigation. It was always pedantic and painstaking, and took for ever. Li, alone among the policemen she knew here, had developed an unnervingly accurate instinct for the cases he worked, would follow an intuition, make a leap of faith. He cracked more cases, more quickly, than anyone else. But he went against tradition, rubbed his superiors up the wrong way, stepped on toes, made enemies. By comparison, the cutting up of dead bodies was child’s play.

She smiled to herself and sat in his seat and saw Macken’s prints strewn across the desk beneath an open folder. She moved the folder aside and began idling through the photographs. She had no idea what they were. Grainy colour prints of some very upmarket sort of establishment. A swimming pool, sauna, restaurants, conference rooms. She stopped for a moment and looked at a picture of a girl standing by a desk looking at the camera. An attractive girl with her hair pulled back rather severely. She dropped it and moved on, stopping again at the only other picture with people in it. Three young men in dark suits, a fourth, bigger man, in a tracksuit, and a Westerner. A man perhaps in his middle sixties, with a head of well-groomed white hair and a close-cropped silver beard. He was tall. Taller than the Chinese, and good-looking in a rugged, sunbed sort of way. While the men in suits looked stiff and formal, the Westerner appeared relaxed, his open-necked shirt worn like a badge of informality. The odd thing was that he seemed vaguely familiar. Margaret was puzzled, because she knew that she didn’t know him, and anyway China was somehow the wrong setting. And yet the grainy quality of the picture was strangely apposite. And then she knew she had seen his picture in a newspaper, or a newsreel. Where, or when, she had no idea. But the familiarity of his face made it likely that she had seen it more than once. She struggled to try to find a context for it, but infuriatingly nothing would come. She put the picture down. If she forced her conscious attention elsewhere, perhaps her subconscious would do the hard work for her.

It was then that she noticed the pile of photographs lying on the top folder on the desk. From her oblique angle she could see that they were taken at a crime scene. A body lying in blood. She pulled them down to take a look and was shocked by the number of stab wounds puncturing the young woman’s naked body. She could see, even from the photograph, that a knife, or knives, had rained down on her in repeated slashing strokes. Although, oddly, they did not appear to be frenzied strokes like you might expect when so many wounds had been inflicted. There was something almost regular, controlled, about them. It smacked of ritual. And then she looked at the face and realised it was the attractive girl standing by the desk in the photograph she had been looking at just moments earlier.

Li had been caught off-balance by the death of JoJo. His whole mindset had been elsewhere, focused on another case, and he had been so certain that the girl under the sheet would be Dai Lili. Although in retrospect, searching through the rationale which had led him to that expectation, he had found none. There were dozens of young women murdered every year.

But not like this.

The detectives in the room who had been at the scene were still shocked by the image of the girl in the pavilion, blood frozen on the stone. Men who had seen things they cared to remember only in their worst nightmares. But something about the sheer brutality of JoJo’s murder, the extraordinary number of stab wounds, had left each and every one of them shaken. Yet one more image to file away in the darkest recesses of their minds.

The detectives who had not been there were shocked by the photographs strewn across the desk.

Everyone listened in silence now as Li took them through the events of the preceding day when he and Qian had followed up what had initially seemed like a minor break-in at a photographer’s studio. A sequence of events which had led them to an instant recognition of the girl in the park, and the thought that perhaps in some way the break-in and the murder might be connected.

They kicked around the idea that the photographs had been stolen in preparation for a burglary, that JoJo was in some way involved. It was she who had got Macken the job of taking the pics, after all. But if she was involved, why would they need Macken’s photographs? Surely her inside knowledge would have been far more useful? And as the club’s CEO had pointed out, the pictures were going to be published anyway, in a glossy brochure, and on the Internet. And why would any of this have led to her murder, particularly in such a brutal and bloody way? Li was specifically concerned that she had been taken someplace so public, where she was bound to be discovered, laid out on the stone dais as if on a sacrificial altar.