Peter May - The Runner

‘Someday,’ he said. And he watched her make his jian bing in silence. When finally she finished it and handed it to him, steaming and deliciously hot in his hands, he took a bite and said, ‘I figured out your riddle.’

‘You took your time,’ was all she said.

‘I had other things on my mind.’

She waited, but when he said nothing, grew impatient. ‘Well?’

He took another bite and spoke with his mouth full, savouring both the pancake and his solution. ‘Wei Chang was the I Ching practitioner, right?’ She nodded. ‘He was born on the second of February, nineteen twenty-five, and he was sixty-six on the day the young woman came to see him. That meant the date was February the second, nineteen ninety-one.’ She nodded again. ‘If you were to write that down it would be 2-2-1991. He wanted to add her age to that and then reverse the number to make a code specially for her. Of course, you didn’t tell me her age. But for this number to be so unusual, so auspicious, the woman had to be twenty-two. That way, the number he was making up for her would be 22199122, yes? Which makes it palindromic. The same backwards as forwards.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I was beginning to despair of you ever working it out.’

‘I was distracted.’

‘So I gather.’

But he did not want to get into that. ‘Where did you come across it?’

‘I didn’t. I made it up.’

He looked at her surprised. ‘Really? How in the name of your ancestors did you think of it?’

‘The English book I was reading on Napoleon Bonaparte,’ she said. ‘Not a very serious biography. The writer seemed more intent on making a fool of the Frenchman. He referred to an old joke about Bonaparte’s exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. He was alleged to have said on arriving there, Able was I ere I saw Elba . A perfect palindrome. Exactly the same forwards as backwards. Entirely apocryphal, of course. He was French! Why would he speak in English? But it gave me the idea, and since a palindrome wouldn’t work in Chinese, I made it with numbers instead.’

Li grinned at her, forgetting all his troubles for the moment. ‘You’re a smart lady, Mei Yuan. Did anyone ever tell you that?’

‘All the time.’ She smiled, and the tension between them melted like the snow on her hotplate. ‘It’s an interesting book. I’ll lend it to you if you like.’

‘I don’t have much time for reading just now.’

‘You should always make time for reading, Li Yan. And anyway, there’s an element of criminal investigation in it. That should interest you.’

And Li thought how very soon he would have no interest of any kind in criminal investigation. ‘Oh?’

Mei Yuan’s eyes grew distant, and Li knew that she had transported herself to some other place on this earth. It was why she loved to read. Her escape from the cold and the drudgery of making pancakes on a street corner. In this case, her destination was the island of St Helena — the place of Napoleon’s final exile — and a debate now nearly two centuries old. ‘When the British finally defeated Napoleon,’ she said, ‘he was banished to a tiny island in the South Atlantic where he died in 1821. It has long been rumoured and written that he was actually murdered there to prevent his escape and return to France. It was said that his food was laced with arsenic, and that he died from poisoning.’ She reached behind her saddle and pulled out the book, holding it with a kind of reverence. ‘But according to this, a medical archaeologist from Canada disproved the murder theory nearly one hundred and eighty years after Napoleon’s death.’

In spite of his mood and the cold and the snow, Li found his interest engaged. ‘How?’

‘Locks of his hair were taken at autopsy and kept for posterity. This medical archaeologist, Doctor Peter Lewin, got access to the hair and was able to conduct an analysis of it which disproved the theory of murder by poisoning.’

Li frowned. ‘How could he tell that from examining the hair?’

‘Apparently the hair is like a kind of log of chemicals and poisons that pass through our bodies. Doctor Lewin contended that if Napoleon had, indeed, been poisoned, there would still be traces of the arsenic that killed him in his hair. He found none.’

But Li was no longer interested in Napoleon. He was a long way from St Helena and arsenic poisoning. He was in an autopsy room looking at a young swimmer with a shaven head. To her surprise, he took Mei Yuan’s red smiling face in his hands and kissed her. ‘Thank you, Mei Yuan. Thank you.’

Margaret woke late, disorientated, panicked by unfamiliar surroundings. It was a full five seconds before she remembered where she was, and the blanks in her memory started filling themselves in like the component parts of a page on the internet. Li. Making love. Triads. His resignation. Fighting. His words coming back to her. I quit the force tonight . Like the cold steel of an autopsy knife slipping between her ribs. But she could feel no anger. Only his pain. And she wished that she could make it go away.

But nothing was going to go away. Not this hotel room, nor the bruised sky spitting snow at the window. Nor her mother waking alone in her tiny apartment, nor this baby that was growing and growing inside her.

Or the strange, nagging idea that had haunted her dreams, and was still there in her waking moments, not quite formed and not entirely within her grasp.

She slipped out of bed and took a shower, trying to wash away her depression with hot, running water. But like the scent of the soap, it lingered long after. She dressed and hurried downstairs, glancing furtively at the reception desk as she passed, hoping that Li had paid the bill and that she would not be stopped at the door like some common prostitute.

As the revolving door propelled her out on to the sidewalk, the cold hit her like a physical blow. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, and saw that the traffic in the avenue was still gridlocked in the snow. No chance of a taxi.

It took her an hour to get back to her apartment, trudging the last twenty minutes through snow from the subway station. One side of her was white where the wind had driven the thick, soft flakes against her coat and her jeans. Her face had frozen rigid by the time she stepped into the elevator. Even had she felt the desire to smile at the sullen operator, her facial muscles would not have obliged. She peeled off her red ski hat and shook out the hair she had flattened beneath it. At least her ears were still warm.

‘Mom,’ she called out as she let herself into the apartment. But there were no lights on, and it felt strangely empty. ‘Mom?’ She checked the bedroom, but the bed had been made and the room tidied. Her mother was not in the kitchen or the toilet, and the sitting room was empty. There was a note on the gate-leg table beside her laptop. It was written in Mei Yuan’s careful hand.

I have taken your mother to Zhongshan Park to teach her tai chi in the snow .

Margaret felt hugely relieved. Her mother was the last person she had felt like facing right now. She switched on the overhead light and saw her own reflection in the window, and realised that she did not much want to deal with herself either. She switched the light off again and sat down at the table, turning on her laptop. The idea that had germinated in her sleep, taken root and poked through into her waking world, was still there. She did not want to try to bring it too sharply into focus in case she lost it. At least, not just yet.

She connected to the Internet, searched through the list of sites she had visited most recently, and pulled up the Time article on Hans Fleischer. She read it all through again, very slowly, very carefully, and then returned to the top of the profile. He had graduated from Potsdam with a double degree in sports medicine and genetics. Genetics. She scrolled down through the article again and stopped near the foot of it. After his time in Berlin he had returned to Nitsche, where he was said to have been involved in — the development of a new method of stimulating natural hormone production . These things had lodged very consciously with her yesterday. But there had been so many other things competing for space in her thoughts. It was sleep which had found room for them there, and brought them fizzing to the surface. And now the idea they had sparked was taking tangible shape in her waking mind.