Peter May - The Runner

Li let the letter slip from his fingers and flutter to the desk. He wondered if Tao knew. If he had been summoned, or telephoned, or whether there was a letter from the commissioner waiting for him in his in tray, too.

Tao came in, then, with two mugs of steaming hot green tea and put one of them down in front of Li. His eye fell on the letter, and he glanced at his old boss. Li shrugged. ‘I guess you’re the chief now.’

Tao said, ‘Apparently the commissioner’s office has been trying to contact me all evening. My cellphone was bust.’ He grimaced. ‘There was a letter on my desk, too.’

A rap on the door broke the moment, and a flushed-looking Qian hurried in. ‘Chief, we just got a report from the Public Security Bureau out at Miyun that residents in the village of Guanling reported hearing gunfire. They seemed to think the shots came from a cottage just outside the village.’

Li could barely muster interest. ‘What’s that got to do with us?’

Qian was surprised. ‘Guanling, Chief? That’s where Fleischer has his holiday cottage.’

And hope and fear filled Li’s heart at the same moment, as the implications of Qian’s words hit home. He looked at Tao who sighed, resigned. ‘I could say I didn’t open the letter till tomorrow,’ he said.

Li was on his feet immediately. ‘I want every available detective,’ he said to Qian. ‘Armed. I’ll sign out the weapons.’

For most of the drive out to the reservoir, the snow had stopped falling. Brief blinks of moonlight illuminated a silver-white landscape, and in between the world was smothered with darkness, limiting vision to the range of their headlamps. As they drove through the village in careful convoy, a few shreds of light momentarily illuminated the snow-capped mountains beyond, with their peaks and clefts and shadows. There were lights in nearly every window, and dozens of villagers were out on the frozen tracks that intersected their homes. Through a clutch of dark evergreens, they saw the blue flashing lights of the local police who had surrounded the cottage, with strict instructions not to enter.

The local bureau chief shook Li’s hand. ‘There hasn’t been a sound or a movement from in there since we got here, Chief,’ he said in a low voice. He nodded towards a sleek, shiny black Mercedes parked at the gate. ‘Keys are still in the ignition.’ He took out a notebook and started flipping through the pages. ‘I got them to phone in the number. It’s registered to…’ he found the name, ‘…to some guy called Fan Zhilong.’

Li felt a tightness across his chest. He was not surprised, but that did nothing to diminish his sense of dread. He waved Wu and Sang to the far side of the gate. Wu took his pistol from its shoulder holster and flicked away his cigarette butt, still chewing feverishly. Li could have sworn he was enjoying this, living out for real something he might have watched in a movie, or on an American cop show. Tao and Qian followed him to the nearside gatepost, and they all took out their weapons.

The house was deathly quiet. They could not see anything through the windows, but there was a soft light burning somewhere inside. There were several sets of tracks leading to and from the house, partially covered over by a recent fall. And even as they watched, the first flakes of a fresh fall began to drift down from a black sky. Li started cautiously along the path, and waved the others to follow. They fanned out across the garden, snow creaking beneath their feet like old floor-boards. But even when they reached the house, their view of the interior was still obscured by condensation inside the glass.

Gingerly, Li tried the door handle. It turned easily and the door slipped soundlessly off the latch. He nodded to the others, and after the briefest hesitation, they burst in, shouting as they went, issuing instructions to whoever might be there to get down on the floor with their hands on view. Gun barrels panned left and right to cover the room. And almost immediately they fell silent, breath condensing in rapid bursts in ice cold air filled with the sticky scent of drying blood. There were four bodies on the floor, and a sickening amount of blood. Sun, Fan and Fleischer, and Dai Lili, still tied to the chair, tipped on her side. It was all Li could do to stop himself from being sick.

His eyes raked across the carnage in confusion, before coming to rest on a figure slumped in a chair. It was a moment before he realised that it was Margaret. Her face was ghostly pale, her head lying at a slight angle, mouth gaping. She was soaked in blood from the waist down, and with an awful sense of the inevitable, Li knew that she was dead.

Something out there was trying to get in. Something without shape or form, trying to penetrate the darkness. It was light, and it was pain, all at once. Confused sensations making no sense in a world without beginning or end. And then it was there, blinding her, coming from beyond the protective cover of her eyelids as they broke apart to allow the outside in. From somewhere a long way away, the pain which had forced them open, was suddenly very close. It was sharp and shocking. She coughed and nearly choked, and the cough sent the pain stabbing through her like the prongs of a fork. Still the world was a blur. Only her pain was focused. Somewhere down there. She made an effort and felt her hand move, soft cotton on her skin, and she shifted it towards her belly where she had carried her child for eight long months. And the swelling was gone. Her baby was no longer there. Only the pain remained. And it bubbled up through her to explode in her throat, a deep howl of anguish.

Immediately she felt a hand on her forehead. Cool and dry on her hot skin. She turned her head and a shadow fell across her eyes, blurred by her tears. The sound of a voice. Low and soothing. A hand took hers. She blinked hard and saw Li’s poor, bruised face swim into focus.

‘My baby…’ Her voice tailed away into sobbing. ‘I lost my baby…’

‘No,’ she heard him say, inexplicably, and she fought hard to make sense of this world that was crashing in on her. She was in a room. Pastel pink. An air-conditioning unit. A window. Grey light in the sky beyond it. And Li. ‘Our child is fine,’ he was saying, and she could not understand. How could their child be fine if it was no longer inside her. She tried to sit up, and the pain seared across her belly like fire. But it made everything sharper somehow. Li was smiling his reassurance.

‘How…?’

‘They cut you open. A Caesarian section. It was the only way to save the baby. They said it was…’ he searched to recall exactly what they had said, ‘…abruptio placenta. The placenta tore off a bit and the two of you were losing blood.’

Margaret managed a nod.

‘They said maybe you being tied to the chair like that saved both of you.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Not it.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘He.’ And there was no doubting the pride in his smile. ‘We have a baby boy, Margaret.’ And he squeezed her hand. She wanted to laugh, but all that came were tears. He said, ‘They put him in an incubator straight away, because he was four weeks premature. But he’s a strong boy. Like his daddy.’

And from outside the limits of her conscious reach came the tiny sound of a baby crying, and she forced herself to look beyond Li, and saw her mother there with a swaddle of soft wool and cotton in her arms. She leaned over and laid the bundle beside Margaret on the bed. And Margaret turned to see her son for the first time. A pink, wrinkled little face, crying hard to let them know he was alive.

She heard her mother’s voice. ‘He looks just like his father. But, then, all babies are ugly.’