The Fourth Sacrifice (36 page)

She clearly was not going to share her thoughts with him, and he realised that he had not given it any serious consideration. The discovery of the diary, tracing the vendor of the weapon, the connection with Zimmerman, had all distracted him from focusing on the question that the diary itself had thrown into sharp focus by revealing Yuan as the killer of the other three. Who had a motive for killing Yuan? And even as the thought formed, the answer seemed obvious. ‘The remaining members of the Revolt-to-the-End Brigade.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Margaret. ‘You have just won a sunshine holiday for two in Florida.’ And she marched off down the paved and cobbled walkway.

Li hurried after her. ‘But how would they have known about the other three being murdered?’

Margaret breathed her exasperation. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t give me that stuff about murders not appearing in the papers. You and I both know just how efficient the Chinese grapevine is. There’s no way those three didn’t know about their old Red Guard pals getting whacked. And it wouldn’t take too much intelligence to work out who was next.’

V

Margaret sat staring at the computer screen, aware of the eyes that flickered in her direction in constant curiosity. Most of the girls in the computer room had probably never seen a
yangguizi
this close up before. And here was a particularly good example of the species. Fair, curling hair, startling blue eyes, pale freckled skin. There was a strange hush in the room, broken only by the soft chatter of keyboards and the occasional giggle.

Li was upstairs somewhere taking a meeting of his detectives. Full co-operation, it seemed, stopped short of admitting her to the holy sanctum of the inner circle. But since virtually none of the detectives spoke any English, Margaret was not inclined to push the point. She had asked instead for the use of a computer with access to the Internet.

Li’s attitude towards her since their return from Ding Ling had been cool and formal. But there had been the faintest tinge of a smile in his expression when he took her to the computer room and asked one of the girls to vacate a computer for her use. It had not taken her long to find out why. Every pull-down menu was in Chinese, an incomprehensible collection of character pictograms that left her struggling to find her way about a computer screen that was otherwise very familiar. Finally she had found the Internet Explorer icon, clicked on it with her mouse, and found herself dumped on to the home page of an equally impenetrable Chinese server. She clicked on the Stop symbol to prevent the computer downloading more Chinese, and typed in
www.altavista.com
, and was quickly transported to the comfortingly familiar territory of the main page of the Alta Vista search engine. She typed in
tameshi giri
. Less than half a minute later, the search for references on the Internet to Tameshi Giri threw up more than twenty thousand Web pages, links to the first ten of which came up on the screen.

She shook her head. It would take her hours to sift through. She thought for a moment, and then clicked in the
New Search
box and typed in
Yuan Tao
. Her request was fired off across the ether, through a mind-boggling inter-connection of telephone lines and computers around the world, returning a few seconds later with a response. To her astonishment and dismay there were links to nearly one hundred and sixty thousand Web pages. She scanned the first ten which came up on the screen. The
yuan
and
tao
all seemed to be reversed. There was a link to a place called Tao Yuan in Taiwan, another to a Web page at an American university, several more to pages on an ancient Chinese poet called Tao Yuan-ming. But, then, at the head of the list, the best and only exact match for her query:
Yuan Tao
. It was a link through to a news-sheet on Japanese martial sword arts.

‘Yes!’ she said out loud, as her mood swung immediately from despair to elation. And she was aware of half a dozen heads turning towards her. She smiled, embarrassed, around the quizzical and astonished faces, then turned her concentration quickly back to the screen. She clicked on the link, and her computer whirred and chattered as it downloaded the contents of the
North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts
. Somewhere in here was a reference to Yuan Tao. She scrolled down the pages, through adverts for genuine Japanese cutting swords, an account of a Tameshi Giri competition in Kyoto, Japan, during Shogatsu in 1997, the list of winners at the 34th Annual Vancouver Kendo Taikai … Margaret stopped scrolling and backed up. There it was.
Yuan Tao
. Joint second place in the category Forty-one Years and Over. At the foot of the list were brief biographies of the winners.

Yuan Tao, according to his notes, had joined a San Francisco-based Kendo club affiliated to the Pacific North West Kendo Federation in 1995, later switching membership to a club in Washington DC. He had taken part in several competitions, achieving extraordinary results in a very short period. One judge at a competition had described him as ‘the most focused competitor I have seen in a very long time’.

Margaret sat back and wondered what Yuan had been focused on. Had it been his role as executioner of the Red Guards who had driven his father to a premature death? And what images had he held in his mind as he practised his Tameshi Giri on those rolled up bundles of straw? She shook her head in wonder at the extraordinary lengths he had gone to in order to exact revenge for his father’s murder – for that’s clearly how he saw it. He had planned it coldly, meticulously, practising the means of execution until he had achieved a high degree of expertise, changing the course of his life, following a new career plan that would bring him back, in anonymity, to the Old Country and his old home town. Revenge, she had always heard it said, was a dish best served cold. Yuan Tao had placed his carefully in the freezer and brought it halfway around the world to dish it out with chilling effect.

But that revenge had been cut suddenly, and unexpectedly, short. Someone had done to Yuan as he had been intent on doing to others. Someone who knew in exact detail how Yuan had dispatched his first three victims. Could it really have been one of the remaining three Red Guards? Certainly, they would have had the motive. But how could any of them possibly have known the details of Yuan’s
modus operandi
well enough to have replicated the murders so precisely? She had glibly thrown at Li the idea of Yuan being murdered by one of his intended victims, but wondered now just how well it would stand up to detailed scrutiny.

‘Are you finished?’ Li’s voice startled her out of her reverie.

She turned to find him standing in the doorway. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, and she selected Print, and crossed the room to the printer as it spewed out two copies of the half-dozen pages of the
North California Review of Japanese Sword Arts
.

Li appeared beside her. ‘What’s this?’

‘Report on a sword arts competition in Vancouver two years ago. Yuan Tao came second in his category. Apparently he took up the practice of the Japanese sword art of Kendo shortly after he got his mother’s diary in 1995. Seems he was pretty good at it by the time he got here.’ She handed the copies to Li. ‘Not much doubt now about Yuan being our man.’

‘None,’ Li said. ‘That bloody fingerprint in Bai Qiyu’s office? It was Yuan’s.’

Margaret clicked her tongue. ‘That’s it, then. We’ve got motive, opportunity, a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence – the blue dust, the wine, the sword expertise – and now evidence that puts him at one of the crime scenes. Enough to get a conviction in any court.’

‘Except that someone beat us to it and took the law into their own hands. Here,’ he handed her a loose and weighty folder and turned towards the door.

She headed after him, struggling not to spill its paper content all over the floor. ‘What’s this?’

He strode off down the corridor. ‘All the latest updates for your records,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Transcripts of all the interviews we conducted with teachers and former pupils of Yuan’s old school, a translation of the diary, profiles on the remaining Red Guards …’

‘Could you not just have had these sent over to the embassy?’

Li turned at the top of the stairs and there was something in his smugness that infuriated her. ‘I wanted to deliver them personally into your hands, so no one can ever accuse me of failing to keep you fully informed.’ He started off down the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ A bunch of papers slipped from the folder and fluttered down the steps in his wake. But he didn’t turn.

‘We.’ His voice reverberated around the stairwell.

‘We what?’ she gasped in frustration as she tried to retrieve the dropped sheets.

‘Where are
we
going.’ His voice rose up to her as he started on the next flight down.

She picked up the last of the papers and ran after him. ‘OK, where are
we
going?’ She caught up with him at the foot of the stairs, the file clutched to her bosom, arms wrapped around it. She was breathing hard.

He stopped and tucked a copy of the computer print-out into the top of the folder. ‘To see Pauper,’ he said.

‘Who’s Pauper?’

But he seemed lost in thought for a moment before tentatively meeting her eye. ‘You might as well know, I did a check on Michael Zimmerman’s whereabouts during the first three murders.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Margaret exploded.

Li said, ‘Chinese police work requires meticulous attention to detail, Dr Campbell.’ He paused, but before she could tell him what she thought of his Chinese police work, he added, ‘You’ll be pleased to know he wasn’t even in the country when the first two murders took place.’

And he went out into the glare of afternoon sunshine. She caught up with him again at the Jeep. The few moments it took allowed her temper to cool just a little, enough at least for good sense to prevail. There was no point in pursuing it. It was over. ‘So, who’s Pauper?’ she asked again.

‘One of the Red Guards.’ He opened the driver’s door and got in behind the wheel, then watched as she struggled to keep her folder intact and open the passenger door at the same time.

‘Don’t help or anything,’ she said as she finally slipped into the passenger seat and unloaded the files on to the floor behind her. ‘So you think this Pauper person’s a potential suspect?’

He shook his head. ‘Not a chance.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s blind.’

CHAPTER NINE

I

Pauper’s
hutong
meandered through a quiet maze of traditional
siheyuan
courtyard homes in a leafy area north of Behai Park. Li parked at the end of the lane, and they walked along the narrow alleyway between high crumbling brick walls, past a trishaw with a single bed strapped to the back of it. Stout wooden gates, left and right, opened on to secluded courtyards where as many as four families shared living space on each side of the square. Through the dark openings, Margaret could see bicycles and pot plants, brushes and buckets, and all manner of the accumulated junk of
siheyuan
life.

Ahead of them, a large crowd of tourists wearing silly baseball hats was gathered around a Chinese tour guide with a red flag and a battery-operated megaphone at his mouth. In a strange metallic monotone, the guide was pointing out the features associated with the
siheyuan
. ‘This
traditional
black tile roof,’ he said, then repeated for emphasis,
‘traditional
black tile roof. In ancient times, black tiles for
ordinary
people, for
ordinary
people.’ And using his rolled up flag on a stick as a pointer, he jabbed at a square brown box mounted on the wall at the top right of the doorway. A thick black cable fed in and out of it. ‘Another traditional feature of
siheyuan
,’ he said. ‘Traditional feature of
siheyuan
. This box for cable TV.’ And he giggled at his joke. ‘For cable TV. We have fifteen channel of cable TV going into traditional
siheyuan
.’

Li and Margaret drew a few curious glances from bored-looking tourists as they passed the group and Margaret heard a middle-aged American lady whisper to her companion, ‘Why does he have to repeat everything? I just don’t know why he has to repeat everything.’

After another twenty yards, beyond a small shop window displaying cigarettes and soft drinks, they turned into an open doorway, stepping over a wooden barrier and then down steps into Pauper’s courtyard. Round coal briquettes were stacked three deep and two metres high against one wall. An old broken chair lay at an odd angle on the stairs. Bicycles rested one against the other. Potted plants bloomed on every available space. Two canaries sang in a bamboo cage hung from a shady tree that seemed to grow out of a crack in the slabs. The atmosphere was curiously still and restful. The city seemed to have melted away into some unpleasant dream somewhere just beyond reach. Margaret saw inquisitive faces peering out of windows and doors at the far side of the courtyard. Li saw them, too. ‘I’m looking for Blind Pauper,’ he called. A woman pointed at a door to their left. It was lying open. Li turned to Margaret. ‘This way.’

They passed another door to a tiny cluttered kitchen with a two-ring gas stove and a charred extractor. A microwave sat incongruously on a melamine cabinet opposite an old white porcelain tub and an electric water heater.

Li paused at the door to the apartment and was about to knock when a woman’s voice called, ‘Who’s looking for Blind Pauper?’

‘Police,’ Li said, and Margaret followed him in.

Pauper was sitting knitting on a two-seater settee opposite a television set mounted on a white-painted wall unit. There was a small table with an ashtray on it, a bookcase, an electric fan. Through a glass-panelled door they could see into her tiny bedroom, bare and cell-like with a single bed. Everything was neatly arranged, fastidiously clean. There were, Margaret noticed, no pictures on the walls.