The Fourth Sacrifice (40 page)

In the short taxi ride from Li’s apartment to her hotel, her distress had turned to anger. How dare Li play with her emotions like that? How could she ever hope to accept his rejection if he could not accept it himself, if he became jealous of any relationship she had with another man, if he was going to succumb to his own weakness every time they were together? And she was just as angry with herself for almost having given way to desires she had been trying to sublimate. Desires she had been
forced
to sublimate. What had seemed clear and easy and right with Michael just twenty-four hours before was suddenly thrown into confusion again. She needed time to think.

‘Margaret.’ She turned at the sound of Michael’s voice just as the elevator doors slid open.

‘Michael. What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting for you.’ He approached across the vast expanse of marble looking at his watch and smiling ruefully. ‘For the last two hours. You people work long days.’ His face clouded. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Margaret. About this morning.’

‘I wanted to talk to you, too, Michael.’ Margaret sighed. ‘I can’t apologise enough. It was just Li Yan being jealous. Trying to get back at me through you.’ The elevator doors slid shut again.

Michael frowned. ‘I thought you and he were history.’

‘So did I.’

He shuffled awkwardly. ‘Look, Margaret. The thing is, if it gets around that I’m some kind of suspect in a murder investigation, it could completely ruin my connections here in China.’

Margaret couldn’t stop herself laughing. ‘Oh, Michael,’ she said. ‘You’re not a suspect. Li was just playing silly games with the most tenuous of links. There’s no question of anyone thinking you had anything to do with this. You were with me the evening Yuan was killed, you weren’t even in the country when another two of the murders took place.’ She paused, gasping her frustration. ‘What can I say? Forget it. It’s not even an issue.’

He seemed to relax a little then, and smiled. ‘Have you eaten?’ She shook her head. He said, ‘Good, ’cos I booked us a table at a little place I know.’ He checked his watch again. ‘They should still be serving. Just.’

She glanced down at herself. ‘Michael, I’ll have to change first. Fifteen minutes. That’s all. I promise.’

He grinned. ‘OK. Starting from …’ he raised his wrist and began pushing buttons on his watch, ‘… now.’ He started the stopwatch function. She pressed the call button for the elevator.

He held open her hotel room door as she staggered in and dropped her files on the bed, papers spilling out across the bedspread and dropping on the floor. He stooped to start picking them up. ‘Just leave that stuff,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it later.’ She grabbed some fresh underwear from a drawer, and took a pair of jeans and a lemon tee shirt from hangers in the wardrobe. ‘A quick shower,’ she said. ‘I promise I won’t be long.’

He grinned and tapped his watch. ‘Still counting.’

She hurried into the bathroom and quickly stripped off and started the shower running. She caught a glimpse of herself naked in the mirror and remembered being with Michael the night before, his hands gentle on her breasts and buttocks, the great sense of his contained strength and control as he slipped inside her. The steam from the shower misted her reflection and she turned to step into the stream of deliciously hot water.

‘So if I’m no longer the prime suspect, who is?’ she heard Michael call through from the bedroom.

‘It’s a long story,’ she called back.

‘Better make it quick, then. You’ve only got another ten minutes.’

She laughed and started lathering herself with a big soft sponge drizzled with shower gel. ‘Yuan’s father was killed back in the sixties by a group of six Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.’ She spluttered briefly as she pushed her head back under the shower and let the water run down her face. ‘Yuan was at university in America and didn’t know about it till he got his mother’s diary thirty years later. Seems he came back to take his revenge.’

Michael said something but she couldn’t hear him.

‘What was that?’

He raised his voice. ‘So who killed Yuan?’

‘The best bet is some guy they call Birdie. Works at the bird market.’

‘Why would
he
want to kill Yuan?’

‘Because Birdie’s the last surviving member of the group of Red Guards that killed Yuan’s father. He was sure to have been on Yuan’s hit list.’ She rinsed the shampoo out of her hair. ‘Mind you, he might be the best bet, but he’s a pretty poor one. The guy’s a misfit. Lives on his own with a bunch of birds. Suffers from nerves and can’t do proper work … and a whole bunch of other reasons I wouldn’t even bore you with.’

She turned off the shower and stepped out of the bath reaching, eyes closed, for the bath towel on the rail. She felt a hand touching her and screamed with fright, opening her eyes with a shock. Michael stood grinning in the steam-filled room, holding out the bath towel. ‘Jesus, Michael!’ she said. ‘You gave me a fright.’ She snatched the towel and wrapped it around herself.

He cocked an eyebrow and said, ‘That’s not what you said last night.’ And he slipped his arms around her waist and drew her towards him.

‘You’ll get all wet,’ she protested.

‘Tough.’ And he leaned in to her and dropped his head to kiss the softness of her neck. She felt a wave of pleasure and desire weaken her knees, and smelled the heady scent of his patchouli lacing the perfume of her bath gel. She took his face in both her hands, feeling the scratch of his whiskers, and raised it to meet hers. They kissed. A long, passionate kiss, and she felt his erection press against her belly. And suddenly she thought of Li, stooping as he bent to kiss her. The touch of his lips. Her sudden fear, and flight from the apartment. She broke away from Michael, breathing hard, and her smile was a little strained. ‘Better hurry if I’m going to beat that clock,’ she said.

*

The Ya Mei Wei restaurant was tucked away down the unpromising Dong Wang
hutong
off Kuan Street, opposite the AVICS space technology building. As Margaret stepped from the taxi she had to dodge a phalanx of cyclists without lights, jostling for space in the strip of road left to them by manic night drivers freed from the constraints of daytime and rush-hour traffic. With bicycle bells still ringing in her ears she made it to the sidewalk and peered down the dark, misty
hutong
. ‘We’re eating down there?’ she asked. And when Michael just nodded, she said, ‘This isn’t another place like the one you took me to in Xi’an?’

‘No,’ he said confidently. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

Fifty yards down, crumbling brick walls rising above them on either side, two forlorn red lanterns hung outside a maroon-painted wooden doorway that was firmly shut. Michael rapped on the door.

‘This is it?’ Margaret said.

Michael smiled. ‘You should never judge a book by its cover.’

A handsome woman of about forty, wearing a pink silk suit, opened the door. Her face lit up in a smile when she saw Michael and she stretched out her hand to shake his. ‘Mr Zimmerman,’ she said. ‘I am so pleased to see you again.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘You are a little late.’

Michael raised his hands in abject apology. ‘I am so sorry, Zhao Yi. Are we
too
late?’

‘Of course not,’ Zhao Yi said, her smile broadening. ‘Never too late for good friend.’

Michael made the introductions and Zhao Yi ushered them inside. The contrast with the
hutong
outside could not have been more startling. This was another world. The centrepiece was a reproduction of a traditional Beijing-style courtyard with sloping green tile roofs and a tiny bridge over a small stream. Along one side, doors led off to a huge dining lounge. Along the other, more doors led off a narrow corridor to private rooms behind screen windows. Zhao Yi led them across the courtyard and into their own private room where a table was set for two, candles burning, soft classical Chinese music playing from discreetly hidden speakers. It seemed they had the whole restaurant to themselves. It was nearly ten o’clock, long past Beijing evening meal time.

Immediately several girls in matching silk buzzed around them like bees, bringing hot and cold starter dishes to the centre of the table. ‘Just help yourself,’ Michael said. ‘As little or as much as you want. They’re only appetisers.’ He nodded towards the stainless-steel pots that stood beside each place on circular racks above big purple candles. ‘Have you had Mongolian hotpot before?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a real treat here.’ He said to Zhao Yi, ‘We’ll have a bottle of that Rioja you have. The ’93.’

She nodded and melted away, leaving Michael and Margaret to pick at the selection of starters: spicy lamb, roasted peanuts in chilli, fish in sweet and sour sauce. The wine came and Michael raised his glass to touch Margaret’s. The light from the candles flickered and refracted red in the wine, and danced in Michael’s eyes. ‘To us,’ he said.

‘To us.’ And Margaret found that irritating sense of guilt returning. She took a big swallow of wine and determined not to let Li ruin her evening in the way he had spoiled her day.

Michael said, ‘There’s one thing puzzling me.’ He paused. ‘No, two actually.’ He thought for a moment. ‘This Birdie character … If there were six Red Guards, and only three murders, how is he the last surviving member?’

Margaret laughed. ‘That’s your training, isn’t it? You don’t miss thing. Every tiny detail’s important.’

‘I told you. Archaeology is just like police work. A slow, painstaking process of digging into the past, uncovering and recreating an event, or a place.’

‘You should have been a Chinese policeman. They like their detail, too.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘I was just talking shorthand, Michael. He’s not the last surviving member. There’s another one. A woman, but she’s blind. The third one was killed at Tiananmen Square.’ She took some more fish. ‘This stuff’s fantastic.’ She washed it down with more wine and said, ‘So what was the other thing?’

Michael put both elbows on the table and leaned towards her, maintaining a very steady eye contact. ‘If it’s over between you and Detective Li, why is he jealous of me?’

Margaret wished with all her heart that Michael had not raised the spectre of Li again. It was hard enough for her to keep him from her thoughts without Michael constantly reminding her. She sighed. Honesty was the best policy. ‘The reason we broke up was because his bosses told him our relationship was …’ she searched for the right words, ‘… inappropriate for a high-ranking Chinese police officer.’

‘You or his career, in other words.’ She nodded. ‘And he chose his career.’

Margaret felt a stab of annoyance. ‘It’s not that simple, Michael.’

He held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry. Things never are.’

‘I guess,’ said Margaret, ‘he’s just finding it very hard to live with his decision.’

‘And what about you?’

‘It was hard, I’ll admit. It wasn’t what I wanted. But it’s history now. I’m only looking forward.’

He smiled at her fondly and reached out to squeeze her hand. ‘I’m glad,’ he said.

The girls came then and lit the paraffin candles, and filled the pots above them with boiling spicy stock that bubbled and steamed at the table. Plates of raw meat – marinated lamb, wafer-thin sliced pork, strips of beef, marinated prawns still in their shells – were placed before them along with plates piled high with crispy lettuce. They cooked everything themselves, a piece at a time, in the boiling stock, and then dipped it in hot soy dips before letting the flavours explode in their mouths.

‘This is
wonderful
,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve never tasted meat or prawns so tender.’ And she copied Michael, cooking the lettuce in the stock as well. It cleansed the palate between meat or fish.

They finished the wine and Michael ordered another bottle. Margaret felt warm, and sensuous and sated, and Michael was making her laugh a lot with a story about a misunderstanding of French farce proportions during a dig in Egypt. Then, after a while, she realised she had got a little drunk, and that Michael had stopped talking and was leaning his chin on his hands and gazing at her across the table.

‘I know it’s too soon to tell you I love you,’ he said suddenly. ‘But I don’t care.’

And just as suddenly, Margaret felt very sober and her heart was pounding. ‘What?’

He produced a small red jewellery box from his pocket and opened it to reveal a rose-gold ring set with a diamond solitaire. ‘If someone had asked me a week ago I’d have told them I never expected to marry. But I hadn’t met you then.’ He paused and she saw that his eyes were moist. ‘That’s why I wanted to know about Detective Li. I’m crazy about you, Margaret. I want you to marry me.’

She sat and looked at him in stunned silence for what seemed like an eternity. Then she laughed in disbelief and shook her head. ‘Is that a proposal?’

‘It sounded like one to me.’

‘Well, then, the answer’s no.’

His face coloured. ‘Why?’

She laughed again. ‘Because I hardly know you, Michael. We only met a few days ago.’

He held her gaze for a long time, then smiled and snapped the box shut. ‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

‘Because you know it’s true.’

‘Well, if that’s the only problem, it’s easily remedied. With a little time and a lot of exposure.’ His smile faded and he looked at her very seriously. ‘I mean it, Margaret. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before.’ Then he shook his head, laughing at himself. ‘And you’re making me feel like a clumsy schoolboy getting his first refusal.’

‘Oh, Michael.’ She reached out to put her hand over his. ‘This is all just too soon for me. I need time. To get over Li. To sort out my feelings about you.’ She paused. ‘Last night was wonderful. But I’ve got to know there’s more to it than that. I threw away seven years of my life married to the wrong man. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.’

He nodded. ‘I understand. I do. So I’ll put the ring on ice, as well as your answer. Because I’m not going to give up on you, Margaret. I’m just not letting you get away that easily. So if you really want to close the door on the past, I’m going to be right there helping you do it.’