Peter May - The Runner

Wu went on, ‘So I checked. Turns out that every one of them, including our weightlifter, who we know died of natural causes, suffered from the flu within six weeks of their death.’ And he looked at the detective who had made the smart quip earlier. ‘Which seems pretty fucking strange to me.’

Tao’s eyes were ablaze with anger. ‘He’s a puppy!’ he spluttered. ‘The newest kid on the block, still wet behind the ears. You can’t put him in charge of a serious investigation like this.’

There was just Li and Tao and a lot of smoke left in the room after the meeting. Li had known he would have to face the storm. ‘He may be the newest kid on the block, but he’s also one of the brightest,’ he said. ‘And, anyway, I need everyone else on the other case.’

Tao squinted at him. ‘Do you really think you’re going to crack this one before they kick your ass into touch next week? I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ The gloves were off now.

‘Well, if I don’t, at least you’ll know I’ve been keeping the hot seat well warmed for you. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? My seat. So that you can bury the work of this section under goddamn drifts of paperwork, like the bureaucrat and pedant that you are.’

‘I believe in good, disciplined police work.’

‘That would tie this whole section up for so long the entire Olympic team would probably be dead by the time you cracked the case.’

‘And you’re making such great strides forward, Section Chief.’ Tao’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. He was no longer making any attempt to disguise his contempt for his boss, or to even pay lip service to the respect due a senior ranking officer. ‘Do you know how humiliating it is for me to have the most junior officer in the section assigned to a case over my head?’

‘If you were less fixated on rank and position, Tao, and more concerned with getting the job done, you wouldn’t see it that way. And then you wouldn’t need to feel so humiliated. But if you think that making detectives wear suits, and fining them for saying fuck , constitutes “good disciplined police work”, then God help this section when I’m gone.’ And he turned to march out and leave Tao festering on his own.

Margaret looked up from his desk as Li banged into his office and he almost dropped his files, so startled was he to see her there. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.

‘I came along to see if I could help make sense of the tests they’re doing for you at the pathology centre.’ She stood up. ‘But if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just go home again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘It hasn’t been a good morning.’

She took in his battered face. ‘You look awful.’

‘Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.’ He dumped his files on the desk.

‘What’s happened?’

And he told her. About the other bottles of perfume and aftershave going missing. The breath freshener disappearing from his pocket, although through the blood red mist of his beating, he could not be certain it had still been there. ‘You didn’t look in the pockets, did you?’ She shook her head.

And then he told her about the girl in the park.

She lifted up the photographs from the desk. ‘This her?’ He nodded. ‘Who is she?’ And she was shocked to learn that JoJo was a friend of Macken and Yixuan. ‘What happened about the break-in at his studio?’

He shrugged. ‘We don’t know.’

‘Are they connected?’

‘Don’t know that either.’

The phone rang and he snatched the receiver. Margaret watched a deep frown furrow his brow as he conducted several quickfire exchanges. He listened for a long while then, and finally he hung up to gaze thoughtfully past her into some unseen place. She waved a hand in his line of vision. ‘Hello? Are we still here?’

He re-focused on her. ‘That was Chief Forensics Officer Fu at Pau Jü Hutong. He had the results of the analysis from the lab.’

‘And?’

‘The perfume’s alcohol-based. The scent is a mix of almond and vanilla. Just like it smelled. Not very pleasant, but not very sinister either.’

‘And the breath freshener?’

Li shrugged. ‘Apparently it’s just breath freshener. Active ingredient Xylitol.’ He ran his hands back over his finely stubbled head. ‘I don’t understand. I really thought this was going to be a breakthrough.’

‘In what way?’ Margaret asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I just thought it was too much of a coincidence.’ He flung his arms out in frustration. ‘And, I mean, somebody went into those apartments and stole those other bottles. Took the other breath fresheners.’

‘Maybe they were just trying to put you off the scent,’ Margaret said. Then she made a tiny shrug of apology. ‘Sorry, no pun intended.’

But he was still hanging on to one last hope. ‘Fu said there was something else they discovered. He said it would be easier to show me than tell me.’

Margaret came round the desk. ‘Well, let’s go see.’

The Pau Jü laboratories of forensic pathology at the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination were bunkered in the bowels of a multi-storey white building tucked unobtrusively away in a narrow hutong behind the Yong Hegong Lamasery. Just about ten minutes from Section One. Li parked in the snow outside, and took Margaret’s arm as they went up the ramp, past armed guards, into the basement of the centre. He still needed his stick for support.

Fu greeted them enthusiastically. ‘We got some good footprints frozen under the snow at Jingshan,’ he told Li. ‘We’ve now got seven quite distinctly different treads. So there were a minimum of seven of them involved in the actual murder. And this…’ he held up a glass vial with a blob of white, frothy liquid at the bottom of it, ‘…was careless. Someone gobbed. We found it frozen solid in the snow. So now we’ve got DNA. You catch the guy, we can put him at the scene.’ He turned and smiled at Margaret and switched to English. ‘Sorry, Doctah. English no verr good.’

Li said impatiently, ‘You were going to show me something to do with the perfume.’

‘Not the perfume,’ Fu said. ‘The bottle.’ He took them through glass doors into a lab. Everything was white and sterile and filled with flickering fluorescent light and the hum of air-conditioning. On a table sat the Chanel bottle partially reconstructed from the pieces found in Li’s pocket. Beside it, drying on a white sheet, was the label. Distinctive cream lettering on black. Chanel № 23. It was torn and creased, and the black ink had turned brown where it had soaked in the perfume. It had also streaked and run through the cream lettering.

‘Cheap crap,’ Fu said in English.

‘Chanel is hardly cheap, or crap,’ Margaret said.

‘Chanel, no,’ Fu said grinning. ‘But this no Chanel.’

‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.

Fu reverted to Chinese. ‘I went to the expense of buying a bottle of Chanel from the Friendship Store,’ he said. And he lifted the bottle out of a drawer, placing it on the table beside the broken one and its damaged label. ‘It was the cheap ink that made me wonder,’ he said. ‘So I thought I would compare it to the real thing.’

Margaret lifted the bottle from the Friendship store and looked very carefully at the lettering. There were subtle, but distinct differences, and the black was deeper, sharper. She looked at the label recovered from Li’s bottle. ‘It’s a fake,’ she said.

‘Yeh, it fake,’ Fu confirmed. ‘And you know how I know for sure?’ He looked at them both expectantly. But, of course, they didn’t know. ‘We phone Chanel,’ he said. ‘They don’t make number twenty-three.’