Peter May - The Runner

‘Like you said, Section Chief, a nasty accident.’ Hou flicked his head away from Li’s hand. There was something sullen and defiant in Hou’s tone, something like a warning. Li took another good, long look at Fan and saw that same defiance in his eyes, and felt a shiver of apprehension run through him, as if someone had stepped on his grave.

‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Mr. Fan, we’ll not disturb you any longer.’ And he walked back through the ornamental doorways to where his detectives stood waiting. ‘We’re through here,’ he said to Qian. Qian nodded, and called the rest of the team to go as they crossed the entrance hall to the tall glass doors.

‘What is it?’ Sun whispered. He could see the tension in his boss’ face.

‘Outside,’ Li said quietly, and they pushed out into the icy night, large snowflakes slapping cold on hot faces.

Once through the gates, they stopped on the sidewalk. ‘So what was going on in there, Chief?’ Sun asked. ‘The atmosphere was colder than the morgue on a winter’s night.’

‘What direction are we facing?’ Li looked up at the sky as if searching for the stars to guide him. But there were none.

Sun frowned. ‘Fuchengmenwai runs east to west on the grid. We’re on the north side, so we’re facing south.’

Li turned and looked at the building they had just left. ‘That means we entered the Event Hall from a door on its east side,’ he said.

Sun said, ‘I don’t understand.’

Li hobbled around to the passenger side of the Jeep. ‘Let’s get in out of this weather.’

The snow in their hair and on their shoulders quickly melted in the residual warmth of the Jeep. Condensation began forming on the windshield, and Sun started the motor to get the blower going. He turned to Li. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Chief?’

‘These people are Triads,’ Li said.

‘Triads?’

Li looked at him. ‘You know what Triads are, don’t you?’

‘Sure. Organised crime groups in Hong Kong, or Taiwan. But here? In Beijing?’

Li shook his head sadly. ‘There’s always a price to pay, isn’t there? It seems we haven’t only imported Hong Kong’s freedoms and economic reforms. We’ve imported their criminals as well.’ He turned to the young police officer. ‘Triads are like viruses, Sun. They infect everything they touch.’ He nodded towards the floodlit entrance of the club. ‘That wasn’t some ceremonial games hall in there. It was an initiation chamber. And trainer Hou, with the ponytail? He must have transgressed at some point, broken some rule. He didn’t lose his ear by accident. It was cut off. That’s how they punish members for misdemeanours.’

‘Shit, Chief,’ Sun said. ‘I had no idea.’ He lit a cigarette and Li grabbed the packet from him and took one. ‘Give me a light.’

‘Are you sure you want to do this, Chief? They’re dangerous to your health, you know.’

‘Just give me a light.’ Li leaned over to the flickering flame of Sun’s lighter and sucked smoke into his lungs for the first time in nearly a year. It tasted harsh, and burned his throat all the way down. He spluttered and nearly choked, but persevered, and after a few draws felt the nicotine hit his bloodstream and set his nerves on edge. ‘I spent six months in Hong Kong back in the nineties,’ he said. ‘I came across quite a number of Triads then. Mostly they were just groups of small-time gangsters who liked the names and the rituals. They call the leader the Dragon Head. All that shit in there, it’s a kind of recreation of a journey made by the five Shaolin monks who supposedly created the first Triad society, or Hung League as they called it, set up to try to restore the Ming Dynasty.’

‘Sounds like crap to me,’ Sun said.

‘It might be crap, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.’ Li drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘I never came across anything on this scale, though. I mean, these people have serious money. And serious influence.’ He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe they’re here in Beijing.’

‘Can’t we just shut them down?’ Sun said.

‘On what pretext? That they’re Triads? They’re never going to admit to that, are they? And we don’t have any proof. On the face of it, Fan and his people are running a legitimate business. We have no evidence to the contrary, and after tonight I figure we’ll be hard pushed to find any.’ He lowered his window an inch to flick the half-smoked remains of his cigarette out into the snowy night. ‘We’re going to have to tread very carefully from here on in, Sun. These people are likely to be a lot more dangerous to our health than any cigarette.’

Li limped quickly down the corridor on the top floor of Section One, supporting himself on his stick. Thirty hours after his beating outside Dai Lili’s apartment, every muscle in his body had stiffened up. His head was pounding. Concentration was difficult. But he was a man driven. Sun was struggling to keep up with him.

‘Go home,’ Li told him. ‘There’s nothing more you can do till tomorrow.’ He stopped in the doorway of the detectives’ room and looked for Qian.

‘You’re not sending anyone else home,’ Sun protested.

‘No one else has a pregnant wife waiting for them.’ He spotted Qian taking a call at someone else’s desk. ‘Qian!’

‘ You do, Chief,’ Sun persisted.

Li looked at him. ‘She’s not my wife,’ he said. And knew that if Margaret had her way now, she never would be.

‘Yes, Chief?’ Qian had hung up his call.

‘Get on to Immigration, Qian. I want everything they’ve got on Fleischer. Is he still in the country? How long has he been here? What address do they have for him?’ He scanned the desks until he saw the bleary face of Wu at his computer. ‘And Wu, run downstairs for me and ask the duty officer in Personnel for the file on Deputy Tao.’

Several heads around the room lifted in surprise. Wu seemed to wake up, and his jaw started chewing rapidly as if he just remembered he still had gum in his mouth. ‘They’ll not give it to me, Chief.’

‘What?’

‘Tao’s a senior ranking officer. They’ll only release his file to someone more senior.’

Li sighed. ‘I was hoping to avoid having to go up and down two flights of stairs. Can’t you use some of that legendary charm of yours?’

‘Sorry, Chief.’

Li turned and almost bumped into Sun. ‘Are you still here?’

‘I’ll ask Personnel if you want.’

‘Go home!’ Li barked at him, and he set off towards the stairs, his mood blackening with every step.

It was after ten by the time Li got back to his office with Tao’s police employment history, all the records from the Royal Hong Kong Police in six box files. He switched out the light and sat in the dark for nearly fifteen minutes, listening to the distant sound of voices and telephones in the detectives’ room. He didn’t really want to think about anything but the investigation, but he could not get Margaret out of his head. She was firmly lodged there, along with the pain that had developed over the past hour. His eyes had grown accustomed now to the faint light of the streetlamps that bled in through the window from the street below, and he opened the top drawer of his desk to take out the painkillers the hospital had given him. He swallowed a couple and closed his eyes. He couldn’t face going back to confront his father tonight, not after everything that had happened. And he needed to talk to Margaret, to lie with her and put his hand on her belly and feel their child kicking inside, to be reassured that they had, at least, some kind of a future.

He made a decision, switched on his desk light and took out a sheet of official Section One stationery. He lifted his pen from its holder and held it poised above the paper for nearly a minute before committing it to scrawl a handful of cryptic characters across the crisp, virgin emptiness of the page. When he had finished, he re-read it, and then signed it. He folded it quickly, slipped it into an envelope and wrote down an address. He got up and hobbled to the door and hollered down the hall for Wu. The detective hadn’t been prepared to run down two flights of stairs to fetch a personnel file for him, but could hardly refuse to take a letter down to the mail room. It was on the ground floor. A small satisfaction.