The Firemaker (36 page)

‘For Christ’s sake, Li Yan, where are you!’ He pulled himself to his knees, and then dragged himself to his feet. Margaret’s pencil-beam of light flashed in his face. He heard her gasp. ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’

III

The lake and the pavilion were thrown into sharp relief by floodlights raised on stands among the trees. The random cycle of flashing lights on police vehicles and ambulance reflected in rippling patterns on the water. The crackle of police radios filled the night air, competing with the cicadas that had started up again as soon as the rain stopped. Li sat side-on in the driver’s seat of the Jeep, the door open wide, as a medic patched up his face: a split lip, a bloody nose – broken, Margaret thought – a bruised and swelling cheek, and an inch-long split on his left brow that required two stitches.

Margaret watched from the lakeside as Detective Qian organised uniformed officers into groups, dividing and subdividing the immediate territory into quadrants for searching on hands and knees, inch by inch. She checked the time. It was twenty-five to midnight. It was cooler after the rain, a slight breeze stirring the leaves. Her hair and clothes were virtually dry. The ground, parched after weeks of drought, had soaked up all the rainwater, and it was hard to believe now that there had been a deluge less than an hour before. Margaret glanced at Li and felt another pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for her, if he hadn’t indulged her insistence on searching for the gloves by themselves in the pouring rain.

Qian detached himself from the search groups and crossed to Li as the medic finished up. He looked at his boss’s battered face in awe. ‘He made some mess of you, boss.’

‘You want to see the mess I made of his hand,’ Li said grimly.

Qian chuckled. ‘Good to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.’ Li glared at him and his smiled faded. ‘So why do you think he attacked you?’

‘Because I’d found one of the gloves,’ Li growled.

‘And you think that’s what he was doing here? He’d come back to look for them?’

Li shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe he’d followed us. One thing’s for sure. When he saw us searching the undergrowth he worked out pretty damn quick what we were up to. And now he’s got at least one of the gloves, maybe both of them, and maybe the key as well, if it was ever there.’

‘Hell, boss, why didn’t you just call in a search when you thought of all this, instead of scratching about in the dark and the rain on your own?’ He glanced off towards Margaret. ‘Well, almost on your own.’ He turned back to Li and saw a warning look in his eyes, and decided to back off. ‘I’ll just get these guys started,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the uniforms. And he headed off shouting out instructions.

Li lit a cigarette and looked up as Margaret approached. ‘Don’t tell me it’s bad for my health,’ he said. ‘It can’t do me nearly as much damage as being around you.’ He smiled wryly and winced at the pain. ‘You should have a health warning stamped on your forehead.’

But his attempt at humour only served to deepen her sense of guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this is all my fault.’

Li said, ‘You didn’t murder three people, then come into a park and assault a police officer. How can it be your fault?’

‘Because you wouldn’t have been in the park in the first place. And you certainly wouldn’t have been stumbling about the bushes in the rain trying to find a needle in a haystack.’

‘But I found the needle,’ he said. ‘At least, one of them.’

‘And then lost it again.’

He glanced at her anxiously, hesitating for a moment. ‘What do you think he was doing here? The man who attacked me.’

‘Looking for the same thing as us.’

‘Why didn’t he do that last night?’

She stopped and thought about it, and then frowned and looked at him, concerned. ‘You think he followed us here?’ He inclined his head a little to one side and raised an eyebrow. He did not want to commit himself. ‘Because if he did, that means he’s been watching us.’ And a shiver raised goose bumps on her arms. ‘That’s creepy. Why would he do that?’

Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s monitoring our progress. If we get too close to him, or to the truth, he’ll intervene. Like he did tonight.’

Margaret felt the hairs rise up on the back of her neck, and she glanced around the dark perimeter beyond the ring of light, wondering if somewhere out there he was still watching. ‘Did you see his face at all?’ she asked.

‘For a moment,’ Li said. ‘In the lightning flash.’ He could still see the face vividly in his mind’s eye, pale, tinged with blue like the face of a corpse, contorted with fear and … anger. Yes, that was what it had been, anger. But why, Li wondered, had he been angry? With himself, perhaps? For having made the mistake with the gloves in the first place?

‘Would you know him again?’

‘I don’t know. He had the face of a devil. It was like looking at death. He didn’t seem human, somehow.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

And Margaret realised in that moment that Li had thought he was going to die. He had been caught unawares and beaten to the ground with a fist like steel. Lying dazed and helpless in the mud, his attacker looming over him, he had believed that the man would kill him. What had stopped him? Had it really just been her voice calling through the rain? What could
she
have done? He could just as easily have killed her. But then, she realised, for a professional killer he was behaving uncharacteristically. On impulse. None of it had been planned. He had been responding to the moment, trying to correct or cover up an equally uncharacteristic mistake made nearly forty-eight hours earlier. Perhaps her voice had simply brought him to his senses and he had retreated into the night to lick his wounds. For that was what he was like, she thought. A wounded animal. A professional killer who had made one small mistake, and then compounded it. And that made him extremely dangerous.

A uniformed officer arrived in a police car and got out with a carrier bag of fresh clothes for Li – jeans and trainers and a white shirt, collected from his apartment. Li changed in the back of the Jeep. ‘I should take you back to the hotel,’ he called to Margaret.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘All dried off now.’ She ran her hands back through her hair to untangle the mass of curls. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t sleep, wondering if they’d found anything.’ She was beginning to doubt that she would ever sleep again. ‘How long do you think they will take?’

Li climbed out of the back of the Jeep and glanced up the slope to where police floodlights had turned night into day. Teams of officers were working their way through the bushes, inch by meticulous inch, calling to one another above the thrum of the generator and the screeching of the cicadas. ‘It’s not such a big space to cover. A couple of hours maybe. If they find nothing, we’ll leave armed guards and bring in fresh teams tomorrow to extend the search area.’ He was glad she wanted to stay, not just because he wanted to be with her, but because after the events of tonight he was afraid for her. Afraid of unseen eyes watching them, tracking them. The investigation had become dangerous, and he knew that from tomorrow he would have to sever her connection with it.

As he lit another cigarette, there was a shout from the top of the slope. He threw the cigarette away and ran up the path as a young officer emerged from the undergrowth holding up a single glove with a pair of plastic tongs. So the killer hadn’t got both gloves. Li derived a momentary satisfaction from that. Qian got the officer to drop the glove in a plastic evidence bag and sealed it. He handed it to Li. ‘Look familiar?’

‘I don’t know. I only saw the other one for a few seconds.’ He looked at it closely. It was a plain brown leather glove with a brushed cotton lining, still damp from the rain and stiffening as it dried.

Margaret appeared at his shoulder. ‘May I take a look?’ He handed it to her, and she examined it closely through the clear plastic. ‘There,’ she said, and teased out a maker’s label that had curled up at the seam just inside the open end. She squinted at it in the light. ‘
Made in Hong Kong
,’ she read. ‘And there, just inside the thumb …’ She folded out a small, dark stain for him to see. ‘Could be blood.’ She turned the glove over. ‘It hasn’t been worn much.’

‘How do you know?’ Li asked.

‘Leather stretches with wear, takes on the shape of your hand. This looks as if it’s not long off the peg. See, there’s barely been any pull at the stitching. They were probably custom-bought for the job.’

‘In Hong Kong?’

‘That’s where they were made. They’re expensive gloves. Probably not widely available in China. If at all. But you’d know more about that than me.’

Li nodded thoughtfully. He took the bag and handed it back to Qian, and they had a brief exchange. Margaret followed him back down the slope to the Jeep. ‘What now?’

‘The glove’ll go straight back to the lab for forensic examination. And we’ll wait until they find the key. Or not.’ He lit a cigarette and looked at her apprasingly. ‘You were right about the gloves. Let’s hope you were right about the key as well.’

It was nearly half past midnight when the shout came that they had been waiting for. The key had been nestling in among the roots of a small shrub, about thirty feet from where they had found the glove. Li looked at it excitedly in its small plastic bag, brought to him out of a glare of floodlights by a triumphant Detective Qian. If luck was on their side, it could turn out to be the key to a great deal more than Chao Heng’s stair gate. He turned to find Margaret, eyes gleaming, looking at the key as he held it up. He wanted to kiss her. He would never have had the thought that had led them to find it. She used the same thought processes he did. Visualised things, it seemed, in the same way. But she had made a leap of imagination that would not have occurred to him. A wild and unlikely leap in the dark. So unlikely that even if he’d had the thought he would probably have dismissed it. Perhaps she was less afraid of being wrong than he was.

*

The drive to the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong was a revelation to Margaret, an insight into the street life of the real Beijing tucked away behind the façades and advertising hoardings of the new China. Even at this late hour, the streets teemed with night life, the population emerging again from steamy-hot homes into the relative cool of the
hutongs
after the rain. Li’s Jeep followed in the wake of a forensics van, two sets of headlights raking the narrow alleyways and
siheyuan
, capturing for brief moments families eating at tables on the sidewalk, a man sprawled in an armchair gazing at the flickering blue light of a television set, food served to card players through open windows whose light spilled across the tarmac, people on bicycles that wobbled in the headlights as the vehicles raced past. Margaret peered from the window on the passenger side, faces flashing past, staring back at her. Some blankly, some with hostility, others with curiosity. Beijingers, Margaret thought, had a preoccupation with getting their hair cut. Barbers everywhere were still doing business. She checked the time. It was almost 1 a.m.

There was an urgency now about Li. His face had swollen around his left eye. It was bruised a deep blue. But the eyes themselves were sharp and alive and burning with a fierce intensity. He was in a hurry to get his man.

They abandoned the Jeep in the street and ran up the ramp through large open gates, past armed guards, into the bowels of the Pao Jü laboratories of forensic pathology. ‘A few minutes, Li, that’s all,’ the lead forensics officer told him. They waited in an office on the ground floor, Li sitting on the edge of a desk swinging his legs impatiently. Margaret recalled Bob’s tale about the Three Ps – Patience, Patience and Patience.
The three things you must have to survive in this country
, he had said. Li seemed to have run out of all of them. She examined his face. ‘They must have some witch-hazel here.’

‘Some what?’ he said.

‘It’ll bring down the swelling and stop your face from going completely black and blue by the morning.’

She spent some time in conversation with a lab assistant before he went off, returning a few minutes later with some clear fluid in a bottle and some large wads of cotton wool. She soaked a wad and told Li to hold it to his face. He didn’t argue with her, but with his free hand shook a cigarette from its packet and lit it. He had only taken one pull at it when the lead forensics officer hurried in, pink with exertion and breathing hard. He, it seemed, had also been infected by Li’s sense of urgency.

‘A single index finger. Smudged. No use.’

‘Shit!’ Li looked sick.

‘Hang on,’ the forensics man admonished him. ‘We also got a thumb.’ He held up a sheet of paper with a blow-up of the print. ‘It’s not Chao’s, and it’s just about perfect.’

IV

It was after two when Li and Margaret stepped back out into Pao Jü Hutong. It was cool now, the air fresh and breathable. For the first time since she had arrived, Margaret could see stars in the sky. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy. She felt an odd sense of exhilaration. The glove and the key had been a major breakthrough. An officer had been sent to Chao’s apartment building to check that the key fitted the stair gate. It did. Close forensic examination of the glove had revealed a speck of blood at the top of the interior lining of the middle finger. It might have come from a paper cut, or a damaged cuticle. But there was enough there to enable a DNA comparison with the saliva on the cigarette ends. That test would be done at the Centre of Material Evidence Determination in the morning – along with a comparison of the bloodstain on the outer glove with blood samples taken from Chao Heng. If both tests proved positive, it would conclusively tie the wearer of the glove to the murder of Chao and both the other victims. The thumbprint from the key had been faxed to Hong Kong. It was possible, just possible, that by morning they would know the identity of the killer.

In spite of being on the wrong end of a beating, Li was euphoric. He was still pressing the wad soaked with witch-hazel to his face. ‘Let me see,’ Margaret said as they reached the Jeep. She took his hand away from his face and stood on tiptoe to look closely at the bruising. Her face was only inches from his. He could feel her breath warm on his cheek. He flicked a glance at her, but she was focused on his injuries. ‘The swelling’s gone down already,’ she said. ‘You won’t be such a mess in the morning.’