The Firemaker (8 page)

II

It was still only 10 a.m., but the heat was already stultifying. A hot wind blew the dust about the streets, coating leaves, grass, cars, buildings. And people. It got in their eyes and their mouths and their lungs and made them hack and spit.

Li’s new office was airless and stifling, and the window would not open properly. His personal belongings had been left on his desk, in two cardboard boxes. The room itself had been stripped of any vestige of its previous occupant, scarred walls divested of their paper history. All that remained of Li’s predecessor were the cigarette burns along the edge of his desk. Even his memory had faded in Li’s mind; a colourless and pedantic man who had always remained tight, like a closed fist, enigmatic. For all the years his colleagues had worked with him they knew very little of his private life. A wife, a daughter at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, a heart condition. In the last months his face had been putty grey. Li fished an ashtray out from one of the boxes and lit his last cigarette. He looked out of the window through the trees at the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, gold characters on pale brown marble, and wondered what private thoughts had passed through the mind of this man who had preceded him as he looked down through the same trees at the same buildings. Had he once had the same hopes and aspirations for the future as Li? What cruel spins of fate had spawned his disillusion, reducing him to the grey and secretive man who had sweated out his last weeks in this office when he should have been at home with his family? A knock at the door disturbed his thoughts. Wu poked his head into the office. ‘They’re ready for you, boss.’ And Li felt a flutter of fear.
They’re ready for you
. Now that he was their boss, his colleagues would have expectations of him. It was possible to be ambitious beyond your ability. Now that this particular ambition had been realised, he would have to prove his ability, not just to those with expectations, but to himself. He slipped a pen into his breast pocket and took a fresh notebook from one of the boxes on his desk.

There were nearly a dozen officers sitting around the big table in the meeting room on the top floor. And nearly all of them were smoking cigarettes, smoke wallowing about in the downdraught from the ceiling fan that swung lazily overhead. Papers and notebooks and rapidly filling ashtrays cluttered the table. There was a brief, spontaneous round of applause as Li walked into the room. He flushed and grinned, waved his hand dismissively and told them to shut up. He pulled up a chair and looked around the expectant faces. ‘Anyone got a smoke?’ he asked. Nearly a dozen cigarettes got tossed across the table. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Crawlers.’ He lit one and took a deep draw. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been out to Ritan Park. I’ve already had initial reports from Detective Qian and Pathologist Wang. It’s almost certainly a suicide, but the body’s so badly burned we might have a problem identifying it. And it could take some time. We’re going to have to match incoming missing-persons reports with what we know here. Pathologist Wang tells me the victim’s male, aged around fifty, with some pretty expensive dental work. Detective Qian will co-ordinate attempts to identify him ASAP. We can’t consider this case cleared until we know who he is and, if possible, why he killed himself. And we need witnesses, anyone who might have seen him making his way through the park. Any joy on that front, Qian Yi?’

Qian shook his head. ‘Not yet. We’re still compiling the names of everyone who was there, but nothing so far.’

‘Anyone else got any thoughts?’ No one had. ‘All right. Let’s move on for the moment to the stabbing in Haidan District. Detective Wu’s been out there.’ He raised his eyebrows in Wu’s direction.

Wu leaned to one side in his chair and chewed reflectively on a piece of gum that had long since lost any flavour. He was a lean man in his forties, thinning hair brushed back, a wispy moustache on his upper lip designed to disguise over-prominent front teeth. His skin was unusually dark, and he liked to wear sunglasses, whatever the weather. Right now they were dangling from the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, a cigarette burning between the fingers of his right. He habitually wore blue jeans and white trainers and a short denim butt-freezer jacket. Image was important to Wu. He liked being a cop, and Li suspected that he modelled himself on the undercover cops he’d seen in American movies. ‘It’s a murder, all right,’ Wu said. ‘No doubt about that. His name was Mao Mao. Known to us. A petty drug dealer in his mid-twenties. Did time as a juvenile for theft and hooliganism. Reform through labour. Only whatever labour they put him through didn’t reform him.’

‘What was it, a fight?’ Li asked.

Wu cocked his head doubtfully. ‘Well, he was stabbed in the heart, up through the lower ribcage. But there were no signs of a struggle, no bruising or cuts on his hands or face. The pathologist thinks he may have been attacked from behind. Autopsy should confirm. Looks like it might have been some kind of gangland killing. He was lying face down in his own blood on a stretch of waste ground near Kunminghunan Road. A factory worker found him on his way to work this morning. The ground out there’s hard as concrete. No footprints in soil, or blood. In fact nothing for us to really go on at all. Forensics are doing fingernail and fibre tests, but I get a feeling about this, Li Yan. I don’t think they’re going to find anything. In fact, the only thing we picked up at all at the scene was a cigarette end, which is probably entirely unrelated.’

Li was suddenly interested, instincts aroused. ‘Just one? I mean, there weren’t any others lying around near by?’

‘Not that we found.’

‘What brand was it?’

‘American. Marlboro, I think. Why?’

Detective Zhao said, ‘That’s odd. We found a Marlboro cigarette end close to the body out at Di’anmen.’

Qian leaned into the table. ‘It was a Marlboro brand cigarette end we found out at Ritan, wasn’t it, boss?’

Li nodded slowly, his interest fully ignited now. It was a remarkable coincidence, if, indeed, that was what it was. But he knew better than to go jumping to premature conclusions. There was a speculative buzz around the table. He asked Zhao to give them a rundown on the body found at Di’anmen.

Zhao was the baby of the section, a good-looking young man of around twenty-five. What he lacked in flair he made up for in sheer hard work and attention to detail. He was always self-conscious at these meetings, finding it difficult to give coherent expression to his thoughts in the group situation. He was much better dealing with people one to one. Colour flushed high on his cheekbones as he spoke. ‘He was carrying an ID card, so we know he was a building worker from Shanghai. Probably an itinerant. He may well have just arrived in Beijing looking for work, but there’s no known address for him here, no known associates. I’ve already faxed Public Security in Shanghai asking for his details.’

‘How was he killed?’

‘A broken neck.’

‘He couldn’t just have fallen? An accident of some kind?’

‘No. There’s absolutely no sign of trauma. He was found in a condemned
siheyuan
in a
hutong
that was cleared about a month ago. But the crime scene is so clean I think he was killed somewhere else and dumped there.’

‘So what makes you think the cigarette end is connected to it?’

‘It was fresh. It was the only one there, and it was about three feet from the body.’

Li lit another cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and blew smoke thoughtfully at the blades of the overhead fan.

*

‘Do
you
believe there’s a connection?’ The section chief watched his new deputy carefully. But Li wasn’t being drawn into anything rash – not just yet. He stood by the window smoking one of his chief’s cigarettes. When he’d asked for it, Chen had raised a wry eyebrow and told him dryly, ‘You know, Li, someone in your elevated position really should start buying his own.’ Now he regarded Li with professional interest. While there was no denying his flair, and his record of success, there was an impetuous quality in him, an impatient streak that Chen had hoped would mellow with age. But until now there had been no sign of it. Perhaps responsibility would temper impulsiveness. As long as it didn’t dull a keen instinct.

‘The thing is,’ Li said seriously, ‘we have no reason to believe the man at Ritan Park was anything other than a suicide. If we can establish that the time of death of the two murders was prior to his, and that he smoked this brand of Marlboro cigarette, then it’s conceivable – just conceivable – that he killed the other two before doing away with himself.’ But he couldn’t keep his face straight any longer, and a mischievous smile crept across it.

Chen laughed. Not just a smile. A deep, throaty, smoker’s laugh. Li wished the girls in the typing pool could see it. ‘First day on the job,’ Chen said, still chuckling. ‘A suicide and two murders, and you’ve solved the lot already.’

Li’s smile turned rueful. ‘I wish it was that easy. But there’s something wrong here, Chief. These two murders. There’s not a shred of evidence at either scene. Except for the cigarette ends. Would somebody who obviously took so much care to leave no other evidence be careless enough to leave a cigarette end?’

‘Maybe the killer, or killers, weren’t that clever with the evidence, or lack of it. Maybe they just got lucky.’

‘Hmmm.’ Li wasn’t convinced. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. If there
is
a connection, it’s … well, very strange.’ He sighed and flicked his ash out of the open window. ‘The first thing we need to do is ID the guy in the park, but it could be some time before we can match the body with a missing person. And the municipal pathologist’s not interested in doing the autopsy. Burn victims aren’t his speciality, he says. Personally I think he’s just queasy about it.’

‘So who’s doing the autopsy?’

‘They’ve sent the body over to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the Public Security University.’

Chen looked thoughtful for a moment, then rummaged through some papers in an overflowing tray on his desk. Finally he drew out a sheet of paper, a circular from the Public Security Bureau visa section, and reread it with interest. He looked at Li. ‘The doctor of forensic pathology in Chicago who took my course on criminal investigation when I was at UIC last year? Just happens to be in Beijing at the moment – lecturing to students at the Public Security University.’

Li shrugged, not making a connection. ‘So?’

‘The good doctor’s speciality is burn victims.’

III

Margaret’s nightmare had begun early. It started with a hangover about 2 a.m. She had fallen into a dead sleep after the banquet, but slept for only around four hours. At two she was wide awake with a headache the size of Lake Michigan. Back in Chicago it was early afternoon. She swallowed a couple of Advil and tried to get back to sleep. But two hours later, visions of Michael’s face at their last meeting swimming relentlessly into her consciousness, she was sitting up, fully dressed, watching Hong Kong kung fu flicks on satellite
Star Movies
. She had already watched an hour of repeat bulletins on CNN and was ready to throw the television set out of the window. How was it possible, she wondered, to be so tired and yet incapable of sleep? If this was how it felt to be an insomniac, it was a condition to which she fervently hoped never to succumb. At five she had gone down to the twenty-four-hour café and washed down another couple of Advil with stewed black coffee, and by six felt woolly-headed and exhausted.

By then it was time to pick up her hire bike and attempt the long and difficult journey to the University of Public Security. Whatever fears her observation of Beijing traffic the previous day had conjured up were as nothing compared to the reality. The roads were sheer and utter chaos. And if she had hoped an early start would avoid the worst of the traffic, then she was wrong again. The whole of Beijing, it seemed, was on the move. And no one, apparently, had priority – at junctions, at traffic lights, between lanes. It was survival of the boldest. Just go, and hope that the bus bearing down on you would give way rather than kill you. Strangely enough, it worked. And in the sticky hour it took Margaret to cycle to the university, she learned the golden rule of biking in Beijing – that there were no rules. Expect the unexpected and you would never be surprised. And for all the honking of horns (she soon realised their purpose was to alert you to a vehicle’s presence, or its impending manoeuvre), and the cutting between lanes, everyone on the road seemed remarkably even-tempered. Road rage had not reached China. It occurred to Margaret that all these drivers were so recently cyclists themselves, used to jockeying patiently for position in overcrowded cycle lanes, they did not automatically assume that they had priority simply because they were behind the wheel of a car, or bus, or lorry. These were Chinese exercising that most enduring of Chinese qualities – patience.

When finally she reached the university at around 7 a.m., there had been loud martial music blaring from speakers all around campus. Bob had found her in her office, window closed, elbows on the desk, fingers pressed to her temples.

‘Got a bit of a hangover?’ he asked. His tone made her glance up at him sharply, but there was no hint in his expression of the sarcasm she had detected in his voice.

‘What is that goddamned music?’

‘I wouldn’t go around calling it “that goddamned music” if I were you,’ he said. ‘It’s the Chinese national anthem. They play it every morning.’

‘Then thank God I didn’t take an apartment here,’ she said.

‘Tried Advil?’ he asked.

She glared at him. ‘I just bought shares in the company.’ She leaned over to lift her rucksack on to the desk. ‘Listen, you said yesterday that after two years you still hadn’t managed to photocopy your lecture notes. I take it that was a joke?’

He shrugged. ‘Well … sort of. It was a kind of metaphor to illustrate that things here don’t always work like you would want them to. I did actually get my notes photocopied. Eventually.’