Peter May - The Runner

‘You think somebody’s trying to tell us something, Chief?’ Wu asked.

‘I don’t know if it’s aimed at us,’ Li said. ‘But it’s as if her killers were making a statement of some kind. There’s something incredibly cold and calculated about her murder. Although she was naked, there’s no hint of any sexual motivation. I mean, if you’re going to take a girl to a park in the middle of the night, strip her, stab her to death and then leave her spread out on a stone slab for the world to see, you’d have to have a reason, wouldn’t you? And the fact that there were half a dozen or more of them involved, means there was collusion, planning.’ He shook his head. ‘Like some kind of ritual, or sacrifice, or both.’ Unknowingly he had touched on the same thought as Margaret, although for different reasons.

He was both horrified and intrigued, but also acutely aware that time was running out, at least for him. And this case was a distraction, a sideshow at the main event. His announcement that he was putting Sun in charge of it was met with silence. Most of the officers in the room were more senior than Sun, and any one of them might have cause to feel resentful, or jealous. But Li needed them focused on the dead athletes. He snatched a glance at Tao sitting at the other end of the table, and saw the animosity simmering silently in his eyes. The most natural thing would have been for him to delegate the JoJo murder to his deputy. But he was unwilling to place too much trust in Tao. He quickly looked away. There were bigger issues than office politics.

‘I don’t want us losing our focus on the athletics case,’ he said. ‘Because the events of the last twenty-four hours are starting to raise some serious issues, not least for our own investigation.’ He paused. ‘Someone with inside knowledge has been tampering with evidence.’

This time the silence around the table was positively tangible. Even the smoke from their cigarettes appeared to freeze in mid-air. Li explained himself, going through, step by step, the sequence of events which had led him the previous evening to Dai Lili’s apartment in Haidian District, and the discovery of the Chanel perfume and the gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. ‘It would stretch credibility beyond acceptable limits to believe that Jia, Sui and Dai all used the same scents, and all carried the same aerosol breath freshener.’ He laid his hands out flat on the table in front of him. ‘Now, I have no idea what the significance of perfumes and breath fresheners are. But that they have significance in this case is beyond doubt. After I took one of the Chanel bottles from Dai’s apartment last night, all the other bottles disappeared from the other apartments.’

Qian said, ‘How do you know they weren’t taken before that?’

‘I don’t,’ Li said. ‘Except that you yourself went this morning to get the bottle I left in Dai Lili’s apartment last night, and it was gone. I suspect now that my attack was not, after all, unrelated to the case, and that the bottle I took would have been taken by my attackers if it hadn’t broken in my pocket. But the very fact that I had taken it clearly alerted someone to the fact that I suspected a significance. And so, all those seemingly innocent bottles in the other apartments had to go.’

‘Are you suggesting that someone within the section is responsible for that?’ Tao asked, and there was no mistaking the hostility in his voice.

‘No,’ Li said. ‘I’m not. But somebody is watching us very carefully. Somebody seems to know enough about what we’re doing and where we’re at to stay one step ahead of us.’ He took a long, slow breath. ‘I thought, last night, that the breath freshener I took from Dai’s apartment was still in my jacket pocket. Now, I took a bit of a battering, and in all the confusion, I could have been wrong about this. But when I got back here from Jingshan this morning, I got a call from the lab at Pau Jü Hutong to tell me they couldn’t find any breath freshener.’ More silence. ‘Doctor Campbell took the jacket last night from the hospital to the lab, sealed in an evidence bag. It was locked in the repository overnight until the technicians came in this morning. No breath freshener. It may be that it wasn’t there in the first place, that my attackers took it last night. Or it may be that someone removed it from the repository during the night. Either way, apparently they didn’t know that we already had another one.’

‘That’s right,’ Wu said suddenly, remembering. ‘Jia Jing had one on him. We found it when we went through his stuff at the autopsy.’

Li nodded. ‘So we still have something to analyse. And what the stealers of the perfume didn’t realise either, is that there was enough of it soaked into my jacket for us to analyse that, too. With luck, we’ll have the results of both those tests later today.’

‘What about the girl?’ Sang said. ‘The runner, Dai Lili. What do you think has happened to her?’

‘I have no idea,’ Li said. ‘But I have no doubt that her disappearance is related to all the other cases. And I don’t expect to find her alive.’ He let that thought sink in for some moments. ‘But until we know she’s dead, we have to assume that she’s not. And that means we’ve got to move this case forward as fast as we possibly can.’ He sat back and looked around the faces in the room. ‘So who’s got anything fresh?’

Qian raised a finger. ‘I dug up some interesting financial facts and figures, Chief.’ He flipped through his notebook. ‘I’ve been going through bank statements, checking accounts, assets…Seems like all these athletes had pretty extravagant lifestyles. Expensive apartments, flashy cars, nice clothes. And, sure, they all had money in their bank accounts that any one of us would be happy to retire on. Prize money, sponsorship…But not nearly enough to cover their costs.’

Li leaned forward on his elbows. ‘How do you mean?’

‘They were all living way beyond their means. I mean, way beyond their officially declared earnings, or what was going through their bank accounts. They all had credit cards, but they didn’t use them much. Meals and air fares and stuff. Everything else was paid for in cash. Cars, computers, clothes. And the monthly rental on those expensive apartments? Cash again. They’d all show up at the letting office every month with big wads of notes.’

‘So somebody was paying them in cash,’ one of the detectives said.

‘What for?’ Wu asked.

Qian shrugged. ‘Who knows? It certainly wasn’t for throwing races. I mean, they were all winning big time. Real medal prospects.’ He chuckled. ‘And you can hardly pay someone to win. I mean, not in advance.’

The room fell silent yet again. So what were they being paid for?

Wu cleared his throat noisily and stuck a piece of gum in his mouth. ‘I came across something interesting,’ he said. ‘Don’t know if it means shit, but it’s a strange one.’

‘They don’t come much stranger than you, Wu,’ another detective said, and a brief ripple of laughter relieved a little of the tension.

‘What is it?’ Li asked.

Wu said, ‘Well, I noticed from a couple of the statements that some of the deceased had been suffering from the flu not long before they died.’ Li suddenly remembered Sui’s coach, Zhang, when they interviewed him at the poolside. He had a bout of flu about ten days ago , he had said of Sui. Knocked the stuffing out of him . And Xing Da’s father. He had told Li that Xing was supposed to have visited his parents at the end of October, for his mother’s birthday. But he phoned to say he couldn’t come, because he and some other members of the team had picked up the flu at a meeting in Shanghai .