Peter May: The Runner

Li sat forward. This was a new piece of information. ‘He’d shaved his head?’

‘Yeh. He could only have done it a couple of hours before. There were fresh nick marks on his scalp, dried blood, and he had a full head of hair the last time anyone saw him.’

Li puzzled over this for several moments. ‘Was there a pathologist in attendance?’

‘Doc Zhu, one of Wang’s deputies from Pao Jü Hutong.’

Li knew him. He was young, not very experienced. ‘What did Zhu say?’

‘Not a lot, Chief. Just that there were no external signs of a struggle, and that death appeared to have been caused by a broken neck due to hanging. Of course, he couldn’t commit to that until after the autopsy.’

‘Who’s doing the autopsy?’

‘He is.’

Li shook his head. ‘Put a stop on that. I don’t want anyone with his lack of experience touching the body.’

Sun was taken aback, and for a moment didn’t know how to respond. Was this vindication? ‘You mean you think I might be right? That this isn’t just a straightforward suicide?’

Li pondered his response briefly. ‘While accepting that your assumptions are speculative, Sun, I think they are not unreasonable. For two reasons.’ He held up a thumb to signify the first. ‘One. We’ve got to look at this in the context of six top athletes dead in a month. It stretches the theory of coincidence just a little far.’ He added his forefinger to signify the second. ‘And two. There’s the hair thing. That just doesn’t make sense.’

Sun looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You asked why Sui would have shaved his head. My understanding is that it’s not unusual for swimmers to shave off their hair in order to create less resistance in the water.’

Sun nodded. ‘And…?’

Li said, ‘Well, if you were planning to kill yourself, why would you shave your head to make yourself faster for a race in which you had no intention of taking part?’ He saw the light of realisation dawning in Sun’s eyes, and added, ‘But that leaves us with an even more implausible question. Why would somebody else do it?’

Margaret was finding it difficult to sleep. She liked to keep her curtains open, safe in the knowledge that there were no other tower blocks sufficiently close to allow anyone to see in, even if she put the lights on. She enjoyed moving around the apartment, able to see by the light of her small television set, and the ambient city lights that surrounded her. For some reason she had become more sensitive to bright light since becoming pregnant, and there was a sense of security in the darkness. She felt safer. She also liked to look out over the city on a clear night like this. You could see the tail lights of cars and buses for miles as they negotiated the gridiron road network of the capital, queuing in long tailbacks at rush hour, speeding along deserted ring roads late at night, like now.

But tonight, the nearly full moon was bathing her bedroom in a bright silver light, falling through the window and lying across her bed in distortions of bisected rectangles, keeping her awake. And Li’s departure had left her frustrated and lonely, and still with the aching regret of unfulfilled sex.

In just over a week she would be married. And yet the thought filled her with dread. Of the ordeals she would have to endure in the next few days. A belated betrothal meeting. The reunion with her mother. The first meeting with Li’s father. And then what? What would be different? Until Li was allocated an apartment for married officers they would still be forced to spend much of their lives apart. And when the baby came…She closed her eyes. It was a thought she did not want to face. She had attended enough births during her time as an intern at the UIC Medical Centre in Chicago to know that it was an experience she would have preferred not to live through in person. She found pain hard enough to cope with when it was other people’s. Her own scared her to death.

She turned on to her side, pulling the covers up over her head, determined to try to sleep, and heard a key scraping in the latch. She sat bolt upright and glanced at the red digital display on the bedside clock. It was 1:14 am. Surely he hadn’t come back at this time of night? ‘Li Yan?’ she called, and her bedroom door swung open and she saw him standing there in the moonlight. He still had on his uniform and cap, his coat slung over his shoulder.

‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he said.

She tutted her disbelief. ‘Of course you did. You’re sex obsessed. Why else are you here?’

But he didn’t smile. ‘I’ve got a couple of favours to ask.’

‘Oh, yes?’ But she didn’t ask what. ‘Are you going to stand out there in the hall all night, or are you coming to bed?’ She grinned. ‘I do like a man in uniform.’

He moved into the room, pushing the door shut behind him, and started to undress. She watched the way the light cut obliquely across his pectorals and made shadows of the six-pack that ribbed his belly as he opened his shirt. He moved with an easy, powerful grace, and she felt the rekindling of her earlier frustrated desires as he slipped out of his pants and stood three-quarters silhouetted against the window. But he made no attempt to get into bed. He said, ‘There’s a young guy in the section. I’ve talked to you about him. Sun.’ She waited in silence, wondering what on earth he could be going to say. ‘He came up from Canton three months ago, and they’ve only now allocated him married quarters.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, stung. ‘So the junior detective gets an apartment, but his boss has to wait.’

‘That’s just an administrative thing,’ Li said quickly, not wanting to get involved in a discussion about apartments. ‘The point is, his wife’s just arrived from the south. She doesn’t know anybody here, she doesn’t know Beijing. And she’s due about the same time as you are. I thought…well, I wondered, if maybe you could show her the ropes, so to speak.’

Margaret snorted. ‘Hah! Like I’ve not got enough to think about with my mother arriving, a betrothal meeting, a wedding…’ She stopped and looked at him hard. ‘You didn’t come here at one o’clock in the morning just to ask me to nanny some country-girl wife of one of your detectives.’

‘Well,’ Li said. ‘There was something else.’

‘And what was that?’

‘I want you to do an autopsy.’

She was silent for a very long time. ‘I thought I was banned,’ she said quietly. ‘You thought there could be health risks for the baby, and I didn’t argue with that. What’s changed?’

‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.’ He paused. ‘And I won’t ask if you think there is the slightest risk.’

She knew that in reality if there was no risk to her there was no risk to the baby. And she had never been inclined to put herself at risk. ‘What’s the case?’ She could barely keep the excitement out of her voice. It was a chance to take her life back, be herself again, put all these other personas — wife, mother, daughter — on the back burner, at least for a time.

He sat on the edge of the bed and took her through the events of the evening. She lay thinking about it for a long time. ‘Who’s doing the autopsy on the weightlifter?’

‘Wang.’

She nodded. Wang was okay. She had worked with him before. ‘What about the others? The road accident victims, the guy who drowned. Can I see their autopsy reports?’

Li shook his head. ‘We don’t autopsy every accidental death, Margaret. Only if there are suspicious circumstances, or cause of death is not apparent. We don’t have enough pathologists.’

‘That’s inconvenient,’ she said, unimpressed. ‘I don’t suppose we can dig them up?’