The Fourth Sacrifice (18 page)

He became aware that he was gripping her arm and let go immediately. ‘I’m sorry.’ He smiled. ‘I get carried away sometimes.’

Margaret looked at the light in his eyes. His enthusiasm was boyish, verging on the immature. But it was also infectious, and quite compelling. She rubbed her arm, smiling ruefully. ‘I’ll be all bruised tonight.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, suddenly self-conscious.

They walked in silence for a few moments. Behind them, the mountains shimmered in a blue haze, and the double roof of the stele pavilion rose above the blue-green needles of the spruce trees. Ahead of them the parking lot was crowded, and crew and cast and extras clustered around the catering wagon. Out of the blue he said, ‘Have you been to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Warriors?’

She laughed. ‘I’ve hardly been out of Beijing.’

He said, ‘But you must see them. You can’t come to China and not see the Eighth Wonder of the World.’

‘A bunch of ceramic figures?’

He gasped in frustration. ‘Margaret, they are awe-inspiring! Thousands of ancient warriors, my height and bigger. Each one individually cast and hand finished. Every face unique. Made by craftsmen two thousand, two hundred years ago. Just to stand among them, to feel their presence, to touch them, is to be touched by history in a way I can’t even begin to describe.’

That infectious enthusiasm again. She smiled and shook her head. ‘Michael, you’re wasting your time with me. I’m a cultural cretin.’

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I have to be in Xi’an tomorrow. We’re arranging for the shipment of more than five dozen warriors to the United States as part of an exhibition I’ve organised to coincide with the broadcast of my latest documentary series. It’s called
The Art of War
, and it’s going to be the biggest exhibition of Terracotta Warriors ever seen outside of China.’ He paused. ‘Come with me.’

‘What?’ She was completely taken aback.

But there was no restraining his alacrity. ‘I’m travelling down on the sleeper tonight. I’m there all day tomorrow and tomorrow night, then fly back first thing the next morning. I can’t afford to be away from the production for any longer.’

‘I couldn’t possibly,’ Margaret laughed. ‘I’m involved in a murder investigation here.’

‘One day, that’s all you’d be away.’ He stopped and took both her hands in his. ‘My production office will book your travel and accommodation. And I can get you right down there among the warriors, touching them, brushing away the earth of two thousand years. Something only a handful of people will ever experience.’ He stopped for breath. ‘Say yes. Don’t even think about it. Life’s too short for that. Just say yes.’

For a moment she looked into his eyes, felt his hands, big and strong, enveloping hers, and was aware of something both painful and pleasurable stirring deep inside her.

II

Blood, and headless bodies, and disembodied heads, and hands tied with silk cord, swam in front of his eyes. Photographs were spread across his desk like the pieces of a jigsaw that were all the same size and gave no clue as to where or how to begin piecing them together. Li had spent the morning sifting through reports and pictures, interviews and statements, all the while distracted by unrelated thoughts that crowded his mind and blurred his focus.
You’re just going to have to learn how to separate your personal from your professional life
, Chen had told him last night. But Li was finding it impossible.

During his early morning
jian bing
stop at the Dongzhimennei corner, he had told Mei Yuan about his sister and her intentions. Mei Yuan had listened with grave intensity, making no comment, offering no advice. She understood that all he needed to do was talk. She expressed her sympathy for his troubles with no more than a slight squeeze of his arm. Somehow, even that had been reassuring, and he had remembered her words of the previous evening.
Anytime you need me
. It was not until he had reached his office that he realised she had forgotten to ask him about the thirty yuan riddle. It was just as well, for he had given it little thought and had no answer.

He had left Xiao Ling, first thing, preparing for her appointment later that morning at the clinic where they would perform the ultra-sound scan. Xinxin, still sleepy and puffy-eyed as she woke from her slumbers, had forgotten that she was being strange with her uncle, and had given Li a hug and a kiss before he left. His sister, huffy and alienated by his disapproval, had not. Neither of them had slept as Xinxin had. And now Li found himself almost afraid to return home tonight, for whatever the result of the scan, his sister’s response to it would be unthinkable.

He screwed up his eyes to try to banish the thought from his mind, and found a picture of Margaret there, staring at him with that knowing, challenging look of hers. How was he going to be able to deal with her in a professional capacity without being affected by his personal feelings?
You’re just going to have to learn how to separate your personal from your professional life.
How? How is it done? he wanted to ask Chen. And who, he wanted to ask Margaret, was the man she’d been with at the Sanwei the night before?

He opened his eyes and found four victims staring up at him from his desk, almost accusingly. Why had he not found their killer?

A secretary from downstairs knocked on his door and came in with a large brown envelope. ‘That’s the translations of the autopsy reports you requested,’ she said. ‘And copy prints of the crime scene pics.’ She set it down on his desk.

‘Don’t put it there,’ he barked uncharacteristically, and she jumped. ‘They’re for Dr Margaret Campbell at the American Embassy. Get them sent over straight away by dispatch rider.’

‘Yes,’ she said timidly, her face flushing. And she backed out as Zhao came in.

‘What is it, Zhao?’ Li was terse and impatient.

Zhao said, ‘I’ve only been able to track down one teacher who was at No. 29 Middle School back in the early sixties, boss. He’s nearly eighty.’

‘What about the others?’

Zhao shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Some of them are probably dead by now. A lot of the school records were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so getting information of any kind hasn’t been easy. It’s the same thing trying to get anything on Yuan’s family.’

‘What about Qian? Is he making any progress?’

Zhao said, ‘He’s having the same problem, boss. We’re having to go by word of mouth. But he’s got the names of some of the victims’ classmates, so it should only be a matter of time before we manage to track down the rest.’

‘Time,’ Li said, ‘is something we don’t necessarily have a lot of, Zhao. The timescale between each of these killings is anywhere between three and fifteen days. And if there are another two victims out there, then we want to find them before the killer does.’

‘You want me to set up interviews?’

Li thought for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But let’s do them at the school. Tomorrow morning. Ask the headmaster to give us a couple of rooms. I’d like to get a feel for the place.’

Wu’s voice called from the detectives’ office. ‘Boss? You got a moment?’

Zhao stepped aside as Li went to the door. ‘What is it, Wu?’

Wu was at his desk, holding his hand over the telephone receiver. ‘That’s the forensics boys out at Yuan Tao’s embassy apartment. There’s some stuff they think you should have a look at.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You want to go?’

Li nodded. ‘You’d better sign out a car.’

Wu said into the telephone, ‘We’ll be right there.’

Li went back to his desk. At least
something
was moving.

Qian came in, almost at his back. He had a sheet of paper in his hand, and his eyes were alive with anticipation. ‘Just in, boss. Fax from the Evidence Determination Centre. The result of those tests that Dr Campbell suggested we do on the signature of the murder weapon …’

Li snatched the sheet and ran his eyes over the tightly printed characters of the report. He felt the skin tighten across his scalp.

*

The diplomatic compound where Yuan Tao had been allocated an apartment was set just behind the Friendship Store on Jianguomenwei Avenue. Wu parked their dark blue Beijing Jeep in the cycle lane at the front, and he and Li got out on to the sidewalk and looked up at the relatively new apartments. A long-haired beggar with no legs sat on the pavement, leaning against the wall of the compound. A straggling beard grew on his dark, gaunt face and he looked up at them appealingly and rattled a tin cup he held in his hand. Beside him, his tricycle had been fitted with an elaborate mechanism that allowed him to drive the wheels by hand-turning a crank handle. His skin was streaked and dirty, his clothes and hair matted. His face was a mask of disappointment when he saw that they, too, were Chinese.

A few yards further along, propped against a tree, a blind woman with a withered hand called out to them for money. There were others spread out along the length of the sidewalk. Li felt sick to see poor souls like this on the streets.

Wu looked at them with undisguised disgust. ‘What are they doing here?’ he asked, looking along the sidewalk. ‘There must be half a dozen of them.’

Li took out a ten-yuan note and stuffed it in the cup of the beggar with no legs. ‘Foreigners,’ he said, nodding towards the diplomatic compound. ‘Embassy staff and tourists. The guilt of the “haves” when faced with the “have-nots”. It’s fertile ground.’

Wu looked in horror at the note Li had given the beggar. ‘In the name of the sky, boss, what did you do that for?’

‘Because life has no guarantees, Wu,’ he said. ‘One day that could be me. Or you. And that’s not guilt. Just fear.’ He headed off towards the entrance to the compound.

At the gate a po-faced guard of the armed police stood sentinel. ‘Who are you looking for?’ he asked unceremoniously.

‘CID. Section One,’ Wu said, and pushed his ID in the guard’s face.

‘You know this guy?’ Li showed him the picture of Yuan Tao that had come with his file.

‘Sure,’ the guard said, and he pulled a gob of phlegm into his mouth and spat it out. ‘Yuan Tao. Second floor. He’s the guy that got himself murdered.’ He jerked his head towards the building. ‘Some of your people are in there just now.’ A grey forensics van was parked in the forecourt.

‘How well did you know him?’ Wu asked.

‘As well as I know any of them,’ the guard said. ‘Which is not at all. They don’t like us very much.’

‘Why’s that?’ Li asked.

‘They think we’re spying on them.’

‘And are you?’

The guard flicked a look at Li to see if he was joking and decided he wasn’t. ‘We’re told to keep an eye on who goes in and out. If they get Chinese visitors they got to come down and pick them up here at the gate. And they got to see them out again when they leave.’

‘And they don’t like that?’ Wu said.

‘No, they do not.’

‘But you knew Yuan Tao by sight?’ Li asked.

‘Sure. He was unusual. He was Chinese.’

‘And was there anything else you thought was unusual about him? Anything that made him stand out from the others?’

The guard shook his head slowly. ‘Nope. Can’t say there was.’ He hesitated. ‘If anything, I’d say I saw him less than the rest. Don’t remember him ever having any visitors.’

‘Ever?’ Wu was astonished.

‘Not that I can remember. Course, you’d have to ask the guys on the other shifts.’

‘Would you know,’ Li asked ‘if he didn’t stay in his apartment for a night, or even two?’

‘Not necessarily. He might already be in when you came on shift. And he might not.’

‘You don’t keep records?’

‘Nope.’

Li produced photographs of the other victims. ‘Ever seen any of these guys?’

The guard took a long look, then shook his head. ‘Nope.’

They climbed the stairs to the apartment on the second floor and found the door lying open. The place was tiny: one central room for living, eating and cooking, a stove and a sink set on a worktop over cheap units against the far wall. Through a half-glazed door was a tiny toilet with a shower that drained into an outlet set into the concrete floor. The bedroom was just large enough for a bed, a bedside cabinet and a single, mirrored wardrobe. Apart from the fact that it was smaller, the contrast with the apartment Yuan Tao had rented in Tuan Jie Hu Dongli was stark. Books were stuffed into sagging bookshelves, and piled up on the linoleum beneath the window. Piles of Chinese newspapers were stacked under a gateleg table folded against one wall. There was food decaying on dirty plates on the table, and dirty dishes were soaking in the sink. There was a smell of body odour and cooking and old clothes, a faint, distant hint of some exotic scent that seemed vaguely familiar. The kitchen cupboards were groaning with tinned and packet food. Dirty washing was spilling out of a laundry basket in the bedroom, washing hanging up to dry on a line in the toilet. Unlike the apartment at Tuan Jie Hu Dongli, Yuan Tao had lived here. He had left his smell, his personality and all his traces in this place, and perhaps, too, a clue as to why someone should want to kill him.

There were two officers there from the forensics department at Pao Jü Hutong. They were dusting for prints. The senior officer, a small, wizened man called Fu Qiwei, said, ‘Be with you in two minutes, Deputy Section Chief.’

Li ran his eye along the shelves of books. They were mostly academic volumes, some fiction, almost all of them in English, well-thumbed pages and broken spines.

‘He must have had them shipped over,’ Wu said. And Li wondered, not for the first time, why a professor of political science at a prestigious American university would give up his career to work on the visa line at the US Embassy in Beijing. Was there more to all this than met the eye? More to it than he was being told? Had Yuan Tao been a spy for the Americans, or even the Chinese? But he quickly dismissed the thought. If there were the slightest suspicion of that, he thought, the investigation would have been taken very quickly out of his hands.

All along the tops of the bookcases was an accumulated clutter of miscellaneous personal items and dust: a paperweight, pens and pencils, a dried-up eraser, a couple of unused notebooks, an antique dominoes set picked up at a market somewhere, a chipped and cracked but otherwise clean ashtray filled with fen coins on top of what appeared to be a picture frame lying face down. Li took out a handkerchief and shifted the ashtray so that he could turn over the frame. It contained a haphazard montage of old black-and-white family snaps – a couple in their early thirties with a young boy standing awkwardly between them grinning shyly at the camera; a passport-sized photograph of a teenage boy; a portrait picture of each of the adults, a little older, wearing Mao caps and staring earnestly out from the mists of history.