Peter May - The Runner

When a disgruntled Wu headed off with the envelope, Li returned to his desk and pulled the telephone directory towards him. He found the number of the Jinglun Hotel and dialled it. The Jinglun was Japanese owned, he knew. Neutral territory. The receptionist answered the call. ‘ Jinglun Fandian .’

‘This is Section Chief Li of the Beijing Municipal Police. I need to book a double room for tonight.’

When he’d made the reservation, he dialled again. Margaret answered her phone almost immediately. ‘It’s me,’ he said. She was silent for a long time at the other end of the line. ‘Hello, are you still there?’

‘I love you,’ is all she said. And he heard the catch in her voice.

‘Is your mother there?’

‘She’s asleep.’

‘I’ve booked us a room at the Jinglun Hotel on Jianguomenwai. Take a taxi. I’ll meet you there in an hour.’

And he hung up. The deed was done, and there would be no going back. He opened the files on Tao.

Much of what was in them he knew already. Tao had been born in Hong Kong. His family had gone there from Canton at the turn of the twentieth century. He had joined the Royal Hong Kong Police, under the British, straight from school. It had been his life, and he had risen through the uniformed branch to the rank of Detective Sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department. The marriage he had entered into in his early twenties had gone wrong after their baby girl died from typhoid. He had never remarried.

The Hong Kong police had kept meticulous records of his investigations after he moved into the detective branch. He had been involved in several murder investigations, and a huge drugs bust which had netted more than five million dollars’ worth of heroin. He had also taken part in a major investigation into Triad gangs in the colony, including some undercover work. Li searched backwards and forwards through the records, but despite what appeared to have been a major police effort to crack down on the Triads, their success had been limited to a few minor arrests and a handful of prosecutions. Li remembered the campaign from his brief exchange period there in the middle-nineties. He remembered, too, the persistent rumours of a Triad insider within the force itself. Rumours that were never fully investigated, perhaps for fear of what such an investigation might turn up. Triads had been endemic in Hong Kong since the late nineteenth century, extending their tendrils of influence into nearly every corner of society. Dozens of apparently legitimate businesses were fronts for Triad organised crime. Bribery and corruption were rife among ethnic Chinese government officials and the police. All attempts by the British to stamp them out had failed. Originally it was the Communists who had driven the Triads out of mainland China, forcing them to concentrate their efforts in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now, as freedom of movement and economic reform took hold, the scourge of the Triads was returning to the mainland. Britain’s failure was becoming once again China’s problem.

Li closed each of the box files in turn and stacked them neatly on his desk, doing anything that might stop his mind from focusing on the suspicions that were forming there. He was afraid to examine them in case he found only his own prejudice. He did not like anything about Tao. His personality, his approach to police work, the way he treated his detectives. He knew that Tao was after his job. And Tao had told Margaret about police policy towards officers marrying foreigners.

That tipped the balance. Li sighed and let his head fill up with his worst thoughts. Someone close to their investigation had known enough to be one step ahead of them on the bottles of perfume and aftershave. Why not Tao? And someone had told the thieves who broke in to Macken’s studio to steal the film, that he had made contact prints. Only the investigating officers from the local bureau had known that. And in Section One, only Li and Qian. And Tao.

Li screwed up his eyes and pushed his knotted fist into his forehead. The trouble was, there was not one single reason for him to connect Tao with either breach. The fact that he disliked the man was no justification. Even for the suspicion.

He took the last subway train south on the loop line from Dongzhimen to Jianguomen. There he found himself an almost solitary figure trudging through the snow in the dark past the Friendship Store, and the bottom end of the deserted Silk Street. There were still some late diners in McDonald’s, and the in-crowd was clouding windows at Starbucks, sipping coffees and mochas and hot chocolates that cost more than the average Beijinger earned in a day. At the Dongdoqiao intersection, the lonely figure of a frozen traffic cop stood rigidly inside his long, fur-collared coat, cap pulled down as low over his face as it would go. The traffic was scant, and the pedestrians few and far between. He was ignoring both, and the snow was gathering in ledges on each of his shoulders. A red-faced beggar came scurrying through the snow towards Li, dragging a wailing child in his wake. He turned away, disappointed, when he saw that Li was Chinese, and not some soft-hearted yangguizi . If only he had known, Li never failed to give a beggar the change in his pocket.

Outside the floodlit entrance of the Jianguo Hotel, a group of well-fed foreigners tumbled out of a taxi and hurried, laughing, into the lobby. Water-skiing plastic Santas frolicked around a fountain in an ornamental pool in the forecourt, and fake snow hung from the roof of a Christmas log cabin. The soft strains of Jingle Bells drifted into the night sky. Li ploughed on past the rows of redundant taxis, drivers grouped together inside with engines running, the heating on, playing cards for money. A golden Christmas tree dotted with fairy lights twinkled opposite the revolving door of the Jinglun Hotel. In the lobby, beneath a giant polystyrene effigy of Santa Claus in his reindeer-drawn sleigh, Christmas party-goers fell out of the restaurant past staff in red and white Santa hats. In here the public address system was playing Silent Night .

Beneath the soaring gold pillars and the tall palm trees, Li saw Margaret sitting at a table on her own. Behind her, in the doorway of the twenty-four-hour café, a life-sized animated clown was dancing, and singing The Yellow Rose of Texas in a strange electronic voice which intermittently broke off to scream, ‘ Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho .’

She stood up as soon as she saw Li. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said. ‘Another five minutes and you’d have been investigating the death of a clown.’

‘ Ha, ha, ha. Ho, ho, ho ,’ said the clown, and she glared at it. He took her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs.’

Their room was on the fifth floor, at the far end of a long corridor. Li saw the security camera that pointed along it from the elevators and wondered just who was watching. Although he had asked for a double, they had given him a twin-bedded room. The beds were dressed with garishly patterned quilt covers. He switched out the lights and pulled back the quilt on the bed nearest the window. It was more than big enough for two. He did not draw the curtains, and once their eyes had adjusted there was sufficient ambient light from the avenue below by which to see.

A strange urgency overtook them as they undressed and slipped into bed. The warmth of her skin on his immediately stirred his sexual desire. He kissed her lips and her breasts and her belly, and smelled the sex in her soft, downy triangle of hair. He felt her grip his buttocks and try to pull him into her. But he wanted to wait, to take his time, to savour the moment. ‘Please,’ she whispered to him in the dark. ‘Please, Li Yan.’