Peter May - The Runner

‘Come back in, Margaret.’ Li’s voice was soft warm breath on her cheek. She felt him slip his jacket around her shoulders and steer her towards the steps.

The girls with the tall black hats and the red pompoms stared at her in wide-eyed wonder as Li led her back into the restaurant. ‘Is there somewhere private we can go?’ he asked. One of the girls nodded towards a room beyond the main restaurant, and Li hurried Margaret past the gaze of curious diners and into a large, semi-darkened room filled with empty banqueting tables. Lights from the square outside fell in through a tall window draped with gossamer-thin nets. While the emperor and empress dined in the room where Li and Margaret had intended to make their betrothal, the emperor’s ministers would have dined here. Now, though, it was deserted. Li and Margaret faced one another beneath a large gilded screen of carved serpents. The silence between them was broken only by the distant chatter of diners and the drone of engines revving in the snow outside.

He wiped the tears from her eyes, but she wouldn’t look at him. He wrapped his arms around her to warm her and stop her from shivering. And they stood like that for a long time, his chin resting lightly on the top of her head.

‘What is it, Margaret? What have I done?’ he asked eventually. He felt her take a deep, quivering breath.

‘It’s what you didn’t do,’ she said.

‘What? What didn’t I do?’

‘You didn’t tell me you would lose your job if we got married.’

And the bottom fell out of a fragile world he had only just been managing to hold together. She felt him go limp.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She broke free of him and looked into his eyes for the first time, seeing all the pain that was there, and knowing the answer to her question before he even opened his mouth.

He hung his head. ‘You know why.’ He paused. ‘I want to marry you, Margaret.’

‘I want to marry you, too, Li Yan. But not if it’s going to make you unhappy.’

‘It won’t.’

‘Of course it will! For God’s sake, being a cop is all you’ve ever wanted. And you’re good at it. I can’t take that away from you.’

They stood for a long time in silence before he said, ‘What would we do?’

She gave a tiny shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ And she put her arms around him and pushed her cheek into his chest. He grunted involuntarily from the pain of it. She immediately pulled away. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot.’

‘How did you know?’ he said.

‘Does it matter?’

‘It does to me.’

‘Your deputy told me. Tao Heng.’

Anger bubbled up inside him. ‘That bastard!’

‘Li Yan, he didn’t know that you hadn’t told me.’

‘I’ll kill him!’

‘No you won’t. It’s the message that matters. Not the messenger.’

‘And the message is what?’

‘That it’s over, Li Yan. The dream. Whatever it is we were stupid enough to think the future might hold for us. It’s out of our hands.’

He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that their destiny was their own to make. But the words would have rung hollow, even to him. And if he could not convince himself, how would he ever persuade her? His life, his career, his future, were all spiralling out of control. And he seemed helpless to do anything about it.

He felt the weight of the world descend on him. ‘Will I tell them, or will you?’

It was half an hour before he got them all into taxis. Mei Yuan promised to see Mrs. Campbell back to Margaret’s apartment. None of them asked why the wedding was being called off, and Li made no attempt to explain, except to say that he and Margaret had ‘stuff’ to sort out. Xinxin was in tears.

When they had gone, he returned to the dining room of the emperor’s ministers and found Margaret sitting where he had left her. Her tears had long since dried up, and she sat bleakly staring out across the square. Her mood had changed, and he knew immediately that the ‘stuff’ he had spoken of was not going to be sorted tonight. He drew up a seat and leaned on the back of it, staring down at the floor, listening to the chatter of diners in the restaurant. He could smell their cigarette smoke and wished to God he could have one himself.

After a very long silence, he said finally, ‘Margaret—’ and she cut him off immediately.

‘By the way, I forgot to tell you earlier…’ And he knew from her tone that this was her way of saying she wasn’t going to discuss it further.

‘Forgot to tell me what?’ he said wearily.

‘I found a photograph on your desk this morning. One of the ones taken by Jon Macken at the club where that murdered girl worked.’

Li frowned. ‘Which photograph?’

‘A Westerner, with white hair and a beard. He was with some Chinese.’

Li said, ‘What about him?’

‘I recognised him. Not right away. But I knew I’d seen the face before. Then it came to me this afternoon, and I checked him out on the net.’

‘Who is he?’

She turned to look at him. ‘Doctor Hans Fleischer. Known as Father Fleischer to all the East German athletes he was responsible for doping over nearly twenty years.’

As they drove, in careful convoy, past the high walls of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on the eastern flank of Yuyuantan Park, Li dragged his thoughts away from Margaret. It was nearly an hour since he had taken her home and he wondered now what he would accomplish by his search of the club. There was, after all, nothing to link Fleischer with the deaths of the athletes. And Margaret herself had conceded that there was nothing in the pathology or toxicology to suggest that any of them had been taking drugs. But the coincidence was just too much to ignore. And, anyway, he needed something else to think about.

The Deputy Procurator General had been having dinner at the home of a friend and been annoyed by Li’s interruption. His irritation, however, had probably served Li’s cause. Had he examined in more detail the flimsy nature of the grounds with which he had been presented, he might not have signed the warrant.

As if reading Li’s thoughts, Sun took his eyes momentarily from the road, and tossed a glance towards his passenger. ‘What do you think we’re going to find here, Chief?’

Li shrugged. ‘I doubt if this will prove to be anything more than an exercise in harassment, detective. Letting CEO Fan know that we’re watching him. After all, if it’s true that Fan really doesn’t know who Fleischer is, then the link to the club is extremely tenuous.’ He slipped the photograph of Fan and Fleischer and the others out of the folder on his knee and squinted at it by the intermittent glow of the streetlights. ‘But there are other factors we have to take into consideration,’ he said. ‘The break-in at Macken’s studio to steal the film that he took at the club. JoJo’s murder. She was a friend of Macken’s, after all, and it was her who got him the job there in the first place.’

‘You think there’s a connection?’

‘I think there could be a connection between the break-in and the fact that Fleischer features prominently in one of Macken’s pictures.’ He glanced at Sun and waggled the photograph. ‘Think about it. Fleischer is internationally reviled, an outcast. If he went back to Germany he would end up in jail. Not the sort of person an apparently respectable businessman like Fan would want people to know he was connected to. So you’re coming out of a room in your private club. You’re with Fleischer. You think you’re perfectly safe. And flash. There’s a guy with a camera and he’s just caught the two of you together on film. Maybe you’d want that picture back.’