Peter May - The Runner

He said, ‘I know why they shaved the athletes’ heads. At least, I think I do. But I need you to prove it.’

Yang said, ‘Well, let’s not stand here discussing it in the snow, shall we? You had better come along to my office and we’ll have some tea.’

Li could barely contain himself on the walk along the hall to Yang’s office. Well over half the day had gone already, and his revelation was burning a hole in his brain. Yang told his secretary to make them tea, and swept into his office. Li and Sun and Margaret followed. Yang hung his coat on the stand and said, ‘Well? Are you going to put us out of our misery, Section Chief? Or are you going to stand there dithering until the tea arrives?’

Li said, ‘It’s the hair. If they were taking drugs there would be a record of it right there on their heads. Even if they managed somehow to get the stuff out of their systems there would still be traces of it in their hair.’

‘Jesus,’ Margaret whispered. ‘Of course.’ And now that it was out there in front of her, she wondered why it had not occurred to her before.

Li said, ‘I’ve already done some research on the Internet.’ And Margaret knew that the hours she had spent schooling him on how to get the best out of a search engine had been worthwhile. He said, ‘I found an article in a forensic medical publication. It seems some French scientists recently published a paper on hair analysis in a test group of bodybuilders. They found that…’ he fumbled in his pocket for the printout he had taken from the computer. He opened it up, searching for the relevant paragraph. ‘Here it is…that, quote, long-term histories of an individual’s drug use are accessible through hair analysis, whereas urinalysis provides only short-term information. End quote.’ He looked up triumphantly.

Yang said, ‘But if they all had their heads shaved, how will we ever know?’

Margaret said, ‘But they didn’t, did they?’ She turned to Li. ‘The weightlifter who died from the heart attack. He still had his hair.’

‘And plenty of it,’ Li said. ‘A ponytail halfway down his back.’

Margaret looked troubled. ‘The only problem is,’ she said, ‘I have absolutely no expertise in this area.’ She looked to Professor Yang. ‘And I’m not sure if anyone here does.’

Yang’s secretary knocked and came in with a tray of tall glasses and a flask of hot tea. ‘Ah, good, thank you, my dear,’ said Yang. ‘Ask Doctor Pi to step into my office for a few moments, would you?’ She nodded, set the tray down on his desk and left. The professor started pouring. ‘You know Doctor Pi, don’t you, Margaret?’ he said.

‘Head of the forensics laboratory, isn’t he?’

Yang nodded. ‘Spent some time last year on an exchange trip to the US.’ He smiled. ‘One of my little hobby-horses, exchange trips.’ He started handing full glasses of tea around. ‘I believe Doctor Pi took part in a study in South Florida to ascertain cocaine abuse in pregnant women by performing hair assays.’ He grinned now. ‘You never know when such skills might come in handy.’

Doctor Pi was a tall, good-looking young man with a slow, laconic manner, and impeccable American English. Yes, he confirmed when he came in, he had taken part in such a study. He sipped his tea and waited expectantly.

‘It was successful?’ Margaret asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We found we could reliably look at drug exposure months after it had passed out of the urine or the blood. Anything up to ninety days after. A kind of retrospective window of detection.’

Li said, ‘If we could provide you with a hair sample would you be able to analyse it for us, open up that retrospective window.’

‘Sure. We got facilities here that would let me do a pretty sophisticated radioimmunassay.’

‘What kind of sample, exactly, would you need?’ Margaret asked.

‘I’d need forty to fifty strands of hair from the vertex of the scalp, cut at scalp level with surgical scissors.’

Margaret said, ‘You’d need alignment maintained?’

‘Sure. You’ll have to rig up a little collection kit to pack it in, so that you maintain hair alignment and root-tip orientation for me. About two and a half centimeters would provide an average sixty-day growth length.’

Margaret said to Li, ‘Is the weightlifter still at Pau Jü Hutong?’

‘In the chiller.’

‘Then we’d better get straight over there and give him a haircut.’

Pi sipped his tea. ‘It would help,’ he said, ‘to know what I was looking for.’

‘Hormones,’ Margaret said.

‘What, you mean like anabolic steroids? Testosterone derivatives, synthetic EPO, that kind of thing?’

‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘I mean the real thing. No substitutes or derivatives or synthetics. Testosterone, human growth hormone, endogenous EPO. You can measure the endogenous molecule, can’t you?’

Pi shrugged. ‘Not easy. Interpretation is difficult because physiological levels are unknown. But we can look at the esters of molecules like testosterone enanthate, testosterone cypionate and nandrolone, and determine whether they are ex ogenous or not. So I should be able to identify what is en dogenous.’

Li looked confused. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

Professor Yang said, ‘I think it means, yes, Section Chief.’

The light was fading by the time Margaret got back to the apartment. The snow had stopped falling, but it still lay thick across the city, masking its beauty and its imperfections. She had cut a lock of Jia Jing’s silken black hair according to Doctor Pi’s instructions, and delivered it in its proper orientation back to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination.

Her mother had not yet returned, and there was something cheerless about the place. More so than usual. She felt the radiator in the sitting room and it was barely lukewarm. The communal heating was acting up again. The overhead electric light leeched the colour out of everything in the apartment, and Margaret shivered at the bleak prospect of life here on her own with a baby. There was no question of Li being allowed to share the apartment with her officially. She would not even be allocated a married couple’s apartment — because she was not married to him. And they could not afford to rent privately if Li was unemployed.

She arched her spine backwards, pressing her palms into her lower back. It had started to ache again. Her antenatal class was due to begin in just over an hour. She had not felt like going out again into the cold and dark, but the apartment was so depressing she could not face the prospect of sitting alone in it waiting for her mother to return. A wave of despair washed over her, and she bit her lip to stop herself crying. Self-pity was only ever self-defeating.

She went through to the bedroom and opened the closet. Hanging amongst her clothes was the traditional Chinese qipao which she had bought to wear on her wedding day. She had sat up night after night unpicking the seams and recutting it to accommodate the bulge of her child. Still, it would have looked absurd. She had intended wearing a loose-fitting embroidered silk smock over it, to at least partially disguise her condition. She lifted the qipao and the smock from the rail and laid them out on the bed beside the red headscarf that Mei Yuan had given her, and gazed upon the bright, embroidered colours. Reds and yellows and blues, golds and greens. Dragons and snakes. In the bottom of the closet were the tiny silk slippers she had bought to go with them. Black and gold. She lifted them out and ran the tips of her fingers over their silky smoothness. She threw them on the bed suddenly, knowing she would never wear them, and the tears came at last. Hot and silent. She didn’t know whether she was crying for herself, or for Li. Maybe for them both. Theirs had been a difficult, stormy relationship. They had not made things easy for themselves. Now fate was making them even harder. She had been born in the Year of the Monkey, and Li in the Year of the Horse. She remembered being told once that horses and monkeys were fated never to get on. That they were incompatible, and that any relationship between them was doomed to failure. She felt her baby kick inside her, as if to remind her that not everything she and Li had created between them was a failure. Perhaps their child could bridge the gulf between horse and monkey, between China and America. Between happiness and unhappiness.