Margaret looked up, full of sympathy, sharing his pain. She wanted to hold him and tell him it would be all right. But it wasn’t. And she didn’t know that it would be. ‘You had no choice,’ she said.
‘I do now,’ he said. ‘At least, I will if …
when
… we find her. She deserves better than this.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I will quit the police.’
Margaret was shocked. ‘You can’t do that, Li Yan, it’s your life.’
He shook his head. ‘It is not
my
life that is important.’ He took a deep breath and tried to hold back the emotion that was building up inside him. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I am sick of this. Death, murder, brutality. If that is all we ever know, all we ever see, what does it turn us into, what does it make us?’
‘It grinds us down and makes us tired and cynical when our resistance is low. And that’s no time to be making decisions about anything.’ She paused. ‘You told me once, Li Yan, that you believed in fairness and justice. That’s why you joined the police.’
He snorted his derision. ‘Justice! I cannot even bring Cui Feng in for questioning.’
‘You will,’ Margaret said. ‘When you get the evidence, you’ll get the warrant. Don’t lose sight of that, Li Yan. That’s what’s important now. Getting the evidence.’
‘What is important now is getting little Xinxin back,’ Li said fiercely. ‘If he has hurt that little girl …’
Margaret stood up and took both his hands and squeezed them. ‘Li Yan,’ she said softly, with a confidence she did not feel, ‘we will get her back. We will.’ She felt the tension straining in him.
‘I am scared, Margaret. I am so scared for her.’
And they heard their taxi peeping its horn outside the gate.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I
Lights blazed from the windows of 803 into a black Shanghai night. And still the rain fell. Li and Margaret ran the twenty metres from the gate to the main entrance, but got soaked all over again. On the eighth floor, the detectives’ room in Section Two was in chaos. Phones rang, keyboards chattered, cigarettes burned in ashtrays creating the impression that the place was on fire. Condensation misted the windows. Shirt-sleeved detectives talked into phones, shouted to one another across the room. Uniformed secretaries hurried in and out with faxes and files. Margaret headed on down the corridor to Li’s office, and Li pushed his way through the chaos looking for Mei-Ling. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned. It was Detective Qian. He was clutching a sheaf of papers.
‘We’ve got that list you were after, Chief. All the employees at the Shanghai World Clinic. We’re trying to get the warrants processed now to bring them in.’
He nodded, but Li was distracted. ‘Where’s Deputy Section Chief Nien?’
‘Don’t know, Chief. Around somewhere.’ Li was about to move off, but Qian snatched at his sleeve again. ‘You’ll like this bit, though.’ Li stopped. ‘For the last five years Cui has been employing the services of an ex-pat American surgeon who’s been in Shanghai since the early nineties.’ Qian looked triumphant. ‘One Daniel F. Stein. He’s fifty-eight, married to a Chinese girl half his age, and he’s not at home.’
‘Have we checked the airport and the docks?’
‘Doing that right now.’
‘Good.’ Li paused. ‘Do we know where Cui is?’
Qian looked at his watch. ‘He’s due to attend one of Director Hu’s banquets at the Xiaoshaoxing Hotel in about an hour and a half.’
A spike of anger stabbed at Li’s chest at the thought of Cui eating and drinking with the wealthy and powerful, breathing in the rarefied air of Director Hu’s banquet, untouched and untouchable, while Xinxin was held captive somewhere or, even worse, lay dead in some cold, dark place. He wondered what the celebration was. Escape from justice? ‘Let me know if there are any developments,’ he said.
Qian nodded and Li pushed off through the hubbub in search of the night duty officer. He found him sitting in his small, cluttered office two along from Li’s. The duty officer was wearing a pair of half-moon reading glasses and was wading through copies of the warrant requests that had been sent to the procurator’s office for processing. He looked up as Li came in and nodded acknowledgment. ‘Deputy Section Chief,’ he said.
Li said, ‘Have you seen Mei-Ling?’
‘Sure,’ the duty officer nodded. ‘About half an hour ago.’ He glanced beyond Li to the corridor and got up to close the door. He lowered his voice, as if he thought they might be overheard. ‘I spoke to her about a rather …’ he searched for the right word, ‘… delicate matter.’ He offered Li a cigarette, and when he accepted lit it, then lit one for himself and returned to his desk to sit down again. ‘Section Chief Huang signed out four firearms to the detectives who accompanied you to the American’s apartment this morning. Only three have been returned.’
Li frowned. This was totally unexpected. Almost a distraction. ‘Well, you must know which officer it was that didn’t return theirs.’
‘That’s just the trouble,’ the duty officer said, and he did indeed look troubled. He peered up at Li over his glasses. ‘They all claim to have returned their weapons to the Section Chief.’
‘What does Section Chief Huang say?’
The older man shook his head. ‘I haven’t been able to contact him.’
‘And you told all this to Mei-Ling?’ The duty officer nodded. ‘And what did she say?’
‘She was very agitated, Deputy Section Chief. She looked like shit when she came in, and she looked even worse after I’d spoken to her. She said to leave it with her.’
‘And you don’t know where she is now?’
The duty officer held out his hands, palms up. ‘I haven’t seen her since I spoke to her.’
Li was tempted for a moment simply to dismiss the whole thing. An irksome oversight by the Chief, or by one of his detectives. But there was something in the duty officer’s description of Mei-Ling’s reaction that gave him pause for thought. ‘Well, have you tried Huang at home?’ he asked. ‘He left to go there this afternoon. Apparently his wife was fading fast.’
The duty officer nodded. ‘I know. I’ve telephoned several times, but there’s no reply.’
Li went back down the corridor. Mei-Ling’s office was empty. He tried the detectives’ room again, and Huang’s office. But there was no sign of her. He went into his own office and found Margaret sitting brooding at the desk. She looked up hopefully as he entered. ‘Have you seen Mei-Ling?’ he asked. She shook her head and he went straight back out.
The duty officer looked up, eyes full of interest and caution, when Li returned. ‘Did you find her?’
Li said, ‘She’s not in the building.’ He hesitated for only a moment. ‘I want Huang’s address and a car.’
*
Huang’s apartment block was an older building in a quiet residential area in Ni Cheng Qiao District, north of People’s Square, a private rental paid for by the Municipal Police. The block was in a compound behind a high wall, affording it some privacy from the road. There were streetlamps and trees, a few cars parked near the entrance, and dozens of rickety bicycles jammed cheek by jowl under a corrugated plastic canopy that shed copious amounts of rainwater on to the forecourt below. Lights shining from uncurtained windows peppered the east face of the twelve-storey building like moth-holes in a lamp shade. Huang’s apartment was on the second floor.
Li drew his car at an angle into the sidewalk beside Mei-Ling’s Santana. He looked at it for a moment, saw the little bell that chimed so sweetly hanging motionless from the rear-view mirror. He had a bad feeling about all this. He started to get out of the car. ‘You stay here,’ he told Margaret.
‘I will not,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m not sitting out here on my own.’ And she got out the passenger side.
The door of the elevator stood open in the lobby, throwing a cold yellow light out into the dark. Inside, a middle-aged woman wrapped in a padded blue jacket sat on a stool, her face buried in a book, a jar of cold green tea at her feet. There was a smell of stale cigarette smoke and urine. She did not even look up as they entered. ‘Second floor,’ Li said.
The woman kept her eyes on her book, reached out and felt for the second button up on the tarnished steel panel and pressed it. The elevator jerked, as if it had made a little cough, and the doors juddered shut. The steel box started a slow ascent. At the second floor the doors jerked open again and Li and Margaret stepped out into a gloomy corridor. As the doors shut behind them they heard the woman pulling a crackle of phlegm into her mouth and spitting it out on the floor.
They found Huang’s apartment at the end of the passageway. The light bulb here had burned out and not been replaced, and it was even gloomier. The steel gate in front of the door stood ajar, half opened into the corridor. Beyond it, the main door stood wide open. Inside, the apartment appeared to be in complete darkness.
Li pulled the gate fully open. ‘Stay here,’ he said to Margaret. ‘And this time I mean it.’ She nodded mutely. She had no idea what was going on, but she sensed Li’s tension and it scared her.
Li felt almost smothered by the deep silence of the apartment. In the distant, reflected light from the landing, he felt his way gingerly along a narrow hallway. He passed an open door into a tiny kitchen. The next along was half-glazed, limp curtains providing a small measure of privacy for an equally small bathroom. As he got further down the passage, and his eyes became accustomed to the dark, he saw a faint glow falling out across the hallway from an open door at the end. The apartment seemed infused with an all-pervading smell of antiseptic and disinfectant, like a hospital. It reminded Li of Jiang Baofu’s place. His own tremulous breathing sounded inordinately loud. ‘Hello,’ he called, to make some louder sound, and his voice cracked feebly. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder. ‘Hello?’
He was greeted only by silence. He turned into the frame of the open door and was bathed in the soft warm glow of a nightlight on a bedside table. The smell of antiseptic was almost suffocating in the warm air of the room. The gaunt figure of a woman lay on the bed, a single sheet draped across her lifeless, wasted body. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, her jaw hanging slack, her mouth gaping. A tiny noise somewhere behind him made Li spin round. The door opposite was also open, the room unlit. But in the blackness, Li saw a small movement of light, and in a moment of choking fear realised that it was the reflected light in the movement of an eye.
A lamp snapped on and he was, for a moment, blinded and startled. He raised an arm, almost defensively, to shield his eyes, and saw Section Chief Huang sitting in a chair at the far side of the room across the hall. He was drawing one of his hands away from a small lamp on a table at the side of his chair. The other pointed a gun directly at Li. In that same moment, Huang realised who Li was, and he lowered the gun slowly into his lap. The two men stared at each other, unmoving for an immeasurable period of time, before gradually Li became aware that a shadow on the floor just inside the door opposite was cast by the leg and foot of someone lying just out of his line of vision. A sick feeling rose in his stomach. There was something horribly familiar about the faded denim and the scuffed white trainer. He stepped slowly forward, crossing the hall and entering the living room where Huang still sat motionless, watching Li with unblinking eyes.
Careful not to make any sudden movement, Li raised a hand and pushed the door wide. Mei-Ling was lying face down on the floor, a large pool of blood soaking into the carpet around her. Li could see her face in profile, long black hair lying untidily across it, her mouth open a little, lips pursed where a small amount of blood had oozed out. ‘Oh, God,’ he whispered, without knowing which God he was appealing to. Any one would do. He knelt quickly at her side, and with trembling fingers felt for a pulse in her neck. But she was already quite cold, and he almost recoiled as the shock of it gripped him. He looked up at Huang, full of incomprehension and confusion. Huang looked back at him like a dead man from his grave. The lamp beside him cast an orange glow on one side of his bloodless face, the other was striped white by the light of the streetlamps that fell in narrow wedges through the Venetian blinds.
‘I swear on the graves of all my ancestors,’ Huang said, his voice barely a whisper, ‘I never intended to kill her.’
Slowly, with legs like jelly, Li got back to his feet. ‘Then why did you? In the name of the sky, Huang, why?’
‘She was going to arrest me. I couldn’t let her do that. I had paid enough. I had to be my own executioner.’
Li felt like a man sleepwalking through a nightmare. None of this seemed possible, none of it made sense. ‘Why would she want to arrest you?’
‘From the moment you found out what had been going on at Cui’s clinic, she knew that I was involved. I guess she probably suspected for a long time.’ He shook his head. There was pain for him in remembering. ‘She couldn’t understand why I was so hostile to the idea of bringing you in on the investigation. You never knew it, but she was fighting your battles for you behind closed doors. Why was I being so obstructive over approaching Cui Feng? Why wouldn’t I support your request for a search warrant?’
Li looked at the small, frail body of Mei-Ling lying on the floor. He remembered her smile, her twinkling eyes, that braying laugh of hers, her jealousy of Margaret. How easily all that life and vitality had been taken from her. He turned his tearful gaze back on Huang. For the first time, the Section Chief could not meet it. He looked away and took a long, deep breath.
‘It must have been so clear to her. She knew, of course, that it was only a liver transplant three years ago that saved the life of my wife.’ He shook his head and forced himself to meet Li’s eyes again. ‘She knew that only too well, because up until then she and I had been lovers.’ His eyes flickered to the body on the floor. ‘I don’t know now whether it was love, or lust. But it was full of passion. I was going to leave my wife.’ He paused. ‘Until she was diagnosed with terminal liver disease.’ And he looked quickly at Li, an appeal for understanding in his voice and his eyes. ‘I couldn’t leave her then. I couldn’t just abandon her. I don’t know whether it was guilt, or whether somewhere deep inside I still loved her, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I had to choose between them. But I
had
no choice.’ His appeal for understanding, even sympathy, fell on stony ground, and he retreated back into himself. ‘I don’t think Mei-Ling ever really got over it.’ His voice had retreated, too, almost to a whisper.