The Firemaker (26 page)

There was a catch in her throat, and she didn’t dare to speak, as she remembered how she had fought her instincts, committing to an act of faith in Michael that went beyond all reasonable expectation. She found it hard, now, to understand why. She should have known better. She dragged her eyes away from Li’s and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘And I didn’t follow it.’ Her hands were clasped in her lap, and Li saw her knuckles go white. ‘And I should have.’

They drove past the top of Wangfujing Street and into Wusi Street, which took them into Jingshanquan Street and past the rear gate of the Forbidden City. The car in front of them braked suddenly to avoid a child on the road, careening sideways into a trolley bus amidst a shower of sparks, before spinning across two lanes of oncoming traffic and ploughing into the cycle lane. Vehicles travelling nose to tail slithered into one another, locking fenders. All traffic ground to a halt, horns blaring, a trail of devastation across the road. The child who had caused the accident ran away, unharmed, down the far sidewalk. Several cyclists picked themselves off the dusty street, and started examining buckled wheels and twisted frames, shouting oaths at drivers, remonstrating with one another. Some were bleeding from grazes on arms and foreheads, others had torn trousers at the knee and shirts at the elbow. Above the noise of horns and raised voices and revving engines was a woman’s single, repeating scream.

Li had swung the Jeep side-on across the middle of the road and planted a flashing red lamp on the roof, and was now making an urgent call on the police radio. Margaret was shaken, but unhurt. She could hear the woman screaming, but couldn’t see her. She got out of the Jeep and started running between the vehicles and the people standing arguing in the road. There was a crowd gathering around the car that had slewed across the street in the first place. It had half mounted the sidewalk and buried its nose in the trunk of a locust tree. The dazed driver was staggering from the vehicle. Margaret grabbed him and looked at the wound on his forehead. He would live. The woman was still screaming, a babble of hysterical voices rising from the crowd around the front of the car. As she rounded the bonnet, Margaret saw the buckled remains of a bicycle under the front wheel and a woman trapped beneath the bicycle, gouts of blood spouting from a wound high on her left leg. She was screaming more in fear than pain as she saw the life flooding out of her. Li appeared at Margaret’s shoulder. ‘She’s going to die if we don’t stop that bleeding fast,’ Margaret said. ‘We’ve got to get her out of there.’

Li’s voice boomed out above the racket, insistent, commanding, and seven or eight men immediately detached themselves from the crowd. Li waved them to either side of the vehicle and they all found what handholds they could. As they lifted, there was a groan of metal, and a jet of steam escaped from the broken radiator. Margaret grabbed the woman under each armpit and pulled. She was aware of others beside her. The bicycle was torn away. The woman was drawn free. The intensity of her screams was fading along with her life. There was blood everywhere, still pumping from her leg as her heart fought vainly against the rapid drain of the wound.

Li said, ‘Emergency services are on their way.’

‘No time!’ Margaret shouted. ‘Hold her down.’ And to Li’s and everyone else’s amazement, this fair-haired, blue-eyed
yangguizi
kicked off her trainers and stood on top of the injured woman’s thigh, pressing her full body weight down on to the wound. She grabbed one of the men who had lifted the car, and held him for balance. He froze, like a rabbit caught in headlights. The woman lurched and screamed, and tried to buck Margaret off. ‘For Christ’s sake hold her still,’ Margaret said. ‘Her femoral artery’s been severed. This is the only way I can get enough pressure on it to stop the bleeding.’

Li sat in the road by the woman’s head, gently taking her flailing arms and folding them in, raising her head on to his lap, restraining her fight and her fear, talking rapidly, gently, reassuringly. Her resistance subsided and she relaxed and started weeping. There were several hundred people in the street now, pressing around them in silent amazement. Margaret looked down at the blood oozing slowly through her toes. She had staunched the bleeding for the moment, but the woman had lost a great deal of blood. She was in her mid-forties, stockily built, with the flattened features of a peasant Chinese. Her blue print dress was soaked in red. The ribbon that tied her hair back had come free, and long black strands of it sprayed out across Li’s legs. She gazed up at him as he continued softly speaking, stroking her face. Margaret had no idea what he was saying, but she found it almost impossible to equate this gentle, genuinely caring man with the cold, ruthless individual she had witnessed in the stadium just fifteen minutes earlier.

In the distance they heard the sound of sirens. Minutes later paramedics were pushing their way through the crowd with stretchers, and Margaret was relieved of the burden of standing on the wound. The injured woman held Li’s hand all the way to the ambulance. He returned to find Margaret retrieving her shoes, still an object of intense curiosity for the crowd. They were dispersing reluctantly on the orders of uniformed traffic cops who were trying to clear the road. Li’s hand slipped gently round Margaret’s upper arm and he led her back to the Jeep, her bare feet leaving a trail of bloody footprints in their wake. There was blood drying on her hands, on her tee-shirt, on the bottoms of her jeans. ‘I’m going to need to change,’ she said.

‘I’ll take you back to your hotel.’ Li started the Jeep, turned it around and headed back for the previous junction before swinging north.

III

‘I’ll wait for you here.’ Li had parked in the forecourt at the foot of the steps to the main entrance.

‘Don’t be silly. Come up. You need to wash. You’ve got blood on your hands and your face.’ She jumped out of the Jeep, forgetting, as it was so easy to do, that they had been cocooned in air-conditioned unreality. The heat bounced back at her from the white concrete, dusty and hot, almost violent in its intensity, and she felt her knees weaken.

Li looked and saw the crusty rust colour of dried blood on his hands, aware of it for the first time. In the rear-view mirror he saw a smear of it on his cheek. He could see the dark stains of it on his trousers and jacket, and vivid spatters on the white of his shirt. He got reluctantly out of the Jeep and followed Margaret up the steps, passing between pillars the same colour as the blood on his hands, and into the chilled atmosphere of the lobby. On the third floor, the attendants regarded them with amazement, watching open-mouthed as they walked the length of the corridor.

Her room was soft and luxurious, palely seductive, slashed by the blood-red silk of the headboard on her bed. He never ceased to be astonished by the degree of luxury demanded by foreigners. And yet it was without character or personality, like any hotel room in any city around the world.

She threw her bag on the bed. ‘I’ll take a quick shower and change, then you can get in and wash.’ She grabbed the remote control for the television and switched it on. ‘To stop you from getting bored.’ She smiled. It was tuned to CNN, a news report about freak flooding in northern California. He heard the rush of water in the shower and wandered to the dressing table. There were make-ups items and creams, a map and a guide book. He picked up and flipped through a small red Chinese phrase book, stopping at random. A page on dealing with money.
I’m completely broke. Can I use this credit card?
He shook his head in wonder at the things foreigners thought important. Another page on ‘entertainment’.
Do you want to come out with me tonight? Which is the best disco round here?
Li smiled. Somehow he didn’t think that either phrase would trip off Margaret’s tongue.

He lifted a hairbrush and teased some of the shiny golden hair free of its bristles. It was very soft and fine. He put it to his nose and smelled her scent. On an impulse he could not have explained if asked to, he wound the hair around his index finger to make a curl of it, and slipped it carefully into his breast pocket between the pages of a small notebook.

The rush of the shower stopped abruptly, and the bathroom door creaked slightly ajar. In the mirror above the dresser he could see, reflected through the crack in the door, the pale lemon of a towel draped across the shower screen. Suddenly it slid from view, and he saw Margaret’s naked form, still standing in the bath, legs apart, body glistening in the light; slim and white and tempting. Her breasts were firm and erect, juddering as she briskly towelled herself down. He glanced quickly away, reddening with shame, feeling guilt for having looked. But in a moment, his eyes were drawn back, and he saw her step out of the bath, water still clinging in droplets to the pale triangle of curled pubic hair between her legs. She swivelled on the ball of one foot and he caught a glimpse of the pink half-peach rounds of her buttocks and the firm muscle that tapered in from the tops of her thighs. He followed the arch of her back up to beautifully squared shoulders and saw that her head was turned, and that she was watching his reflection watching hers.

He dropped his eyes immediately, crushingly embarrassed, like a small boy caught peeking at his sister undressing. His heart was hammering against his ribs and his hands were shaking. What could he say to her? How could he apologise? He glanced up and saw that she had moved out of his line of vision. But she had not closed the door. And it occurred to him that she had enjoyed him watching her. That she had known he could see her all along, perhaps wanted him to. He moved away to the window and tried to analyse his feelings towards her. They were completely ambiguous. She was irritating, arrogant … and unaccountably attractive. She both angered and challenged him. There were times when he had wanted to slap her face, and others when he had wanted to touch her and feel the softness of her porcelain-white skin, run his hands through her hair, feel her lips push against his. But more than anything, he was drawn by the provocation in those pale blue eyes, challenging him to a battle of intellect, of culture, of race. He decided to say nothing, behave as if he had never seen her, nor she him.

When she stepped out of the bathroom she was wearing a pale yellow sleeveless cotton dress, cut square across the neck and flaring out from a narrow waist to a line just above her knees. On her feet she wore cream open-toed sandals with a small heel that served to emphasise the gentle curve of her calf. Her skin glowed pink, and her freckles seemed darker somehow, more prominent. She was towel-drying her hair, head cocked at an angle so that it hung down in wet strands. In that moment, without a trace of make-up, her hair still wet from the shower, the simplicity of the pale lemon dress, he thought she looked quite beautiful. His throat was thick, and he could think of nothing to say.

‘All yours,’ she said, nodding towards the bathroom as if nothing had happened. ‘What are you going to do about your clothes?’

‘I’ll have to stop by the apartment and change.’ He brushed past her, smelling her perfume, and went in to wash his hands and face.

On the drive to his apartment he asked if she had a class that afternoon.

‘No,’ she said, ‘just prep for tomorrow. Although I don’t even need that. It’s a lecture I’ve done dozens of times.’ She hesitated. ‘Why?’

He seemed embarrassed. ‘I thought, perhaps, you might want to come back to the office. The results of the DNA tests on the cigarette ends should be in. And a spectral analysis of blood found on the carpet in Chao Heng’s apartment yesterday.’

‘
His
blood?’ she asked, curiosity aroused.

‘That’s what we’ll find out,’ he said.

She was silent for a moment, thoughtful, then said, ‘Yes. I’d like that.’ She paused. ‘Tell me about the blood in the apartment.’

And so he told her. About the CD on pause, the empty bottle on the table on the balcony, the cigarette ends in the ashtray, the lamp missing from the light over the front door. He painted for her his picture of what he believed happened that night: Chao Heng forced back to his apartment at gunpoint then knocked on the head and sedated; the patch of blood left on the carpet which, he felt sure, would be Chao’s, and which spectral analysis would show to be around twelve to fourteen hours old; the killer carrying the prostrate body of the agricultural adviser down the staircase, locking the stair gate behind them; the drive to the park, the long wait among the trees, and then the immolation and the killer’s escape to anonymity seconds before the blazing body was found.

She sat listening in silence. ‘I hadn’t thought through the planning that must have gone into it. Not in that kind of detail. In my job you are so preoccupied with the details of death that you don’t think much about motivation, or premeditation.’ She fell silent again, thinking about it some more. ‘It’s extraordinary, when you examine it. Why would somebody go to such lengths? I mean, it wasn’t even as though it was a particularly convincing suicide.’ She turned it over again in her mind. ‘Are you sure these three killings are connected?’

‘No, I am not sure.’

‘I mean, they were all professionally executed, but the other two were simple, uncomplicated, almost casual. Chao Heng’s killing was … bizarre and ritualistic and, if you are right in your assumptions, minutely plotted and planned.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You’ve eliminated a drugs connection, right?’ He nodded. ‘So all that’s left to connect them are the cigarette ends.’ He nodded again. ‘And, God knows, that’s pretty damned weird.’ She frowned. ‘Something not right. Something
really
not right.’ And for a fleeting moment she understood his obsession, was touched by a feeling both ephemeral and elusive, which he might have called instinct. A feeling that left her uneasy and uncertain, but intrigued. ‘Tell me about Chao Heng.’

As he drove along Chang’an Avenue, he recapped for her the details from the file he had been given on Chao Heng. ‘Retired due to ill health?’ she mused. ‘What was wrong with him?’