‘Why do you say that?’ Li said.
Wu said, ‘Hey, Chief, you don’t break into a place like this just to empty the bins. They’ve got garbage men for that.’
According to professor Hu, both Pan’s desktop computer and her laptop were gone, along with all her disks. She said, ‘It’s as if the place had been packed up for a removal. All that’s left is the furniture.’
‘Why?’ The word which was finding its way most often to the front of Li’s mind, found expression now on his lips. He turned to the professor. ‘Can you think of any reason why someone would want to steal your files?’
She shook her head helplessly. ‘Not one,’ she said. ‘The work we were doing here was not unique. It wasn’t secret. It wasn’t even valuable. Not in financial terms.’
‘And can you think of a single reason why anyone would want to kill Miss Pan?’
The Professor drew in her lips to try to prevent the tears welling in her eyes. ‘Lynn was the most beautiful, kind and thoughtful human being I ever knew,’ she said, controlling her voice with difficulty. ‘She was goodness personified. Whoever took that life must have been consumed by pure evil.’
They re-emerged into the reception room just as Fu Qiwei, the senior forensics officer from Pau Jü Hutong, arrived with a team of three scenes of crime officers. These were the same officers who had attended the crime scene at the Millennium Monument the night before. Fu was a shrunken man with small, coal-dark eyes, thinning hair dyed black and scraped back across his pate. There was nothing he hadn’t seen in a long career. Nothing left that would shock him. He had developed an acerbic sense of humour, a kind of protective shield, like a turtle’s shell. But he wasn’t smiling today. ‘A connection?’ he asked Li.
Li inclined his head slightly. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ He turned to Wu. ‘You’d better hang on here. Start taking statements from staff and students. I’m going to take a look at her apartment.’ He was about to leave when he had a thought and turned back. ‘Professor?’ The professor was standing staring out of the window where Li had stood the previous day. She turned.
‘Yes, Section Chief?’
‘Can you tell me what time Miss Pan left the office last night?’
‘It was a little after five.’
Just time for her to walk to the Millennium Monument and purchase a ticket before it closed. He said, ‘We have this notion that she might have been going to meet someone at the monument. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea who that might have been?’
Professor Hu raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Well, of course I do.’
The room was suddenly very quiet, and all eyes were on the dead woman’s assistant. ‘Who?’ Li asked.
‘Well, I don’t know why you’re asking me. You should know better than anyone.’
Li frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘She was meeting you, Section Chief. I took the call from you myself.’
Li was barely aware of the change of focus in the room. All eyes were now on him. He felt like Alice in Wonderland, falling into the rabbit hole and tumbling through darkness. ‘And what did I say?’ he asked.
The professor looked at him oddly. ‘You said you needed to speak to Miss Pan urgently, and I put you through to her. She came out of her office a few minutes later with her coat on. She’d had a meeting scheduled for six last night. She asked me to call round everyone and postpone it. Something important had come up and she had to go and talk to you.’
‘I didn’t call,’ Li said, and the professor looked non-plussed. ‘What made you think it was me?’
‘Because you—’ She stopped to correct herself. ‘Because the caller said, This is Section Chief Li Yan. We met this afternoon. I need to speak to Professor Pan on a matter of some urgency.’
‘Someone who knew you were here yesterday afternoon, Chief,’ Wu said. ‘That must narrow it down.’
Li thought about it. There were any number of people who might have known he was here. It would be impossible to draw a ring and say only those inside knew. He felt sick. Pan had thought she was meeting him. She had gone to her death trusting in him. The caller must have been very persuasive. But what bizarre circumstance would have led her to accept such a strange rendezvous? He still found it hard to believe that someone had been able to pass themselves off as him. He turned to the professor. ‘Was there nothing about the call that struck you as…odd? I mean, did this person sound like me?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’d only met you for a few minutes yesterday afternoon. I thought it was you because he said he was. I had no reason to doubt it.’
And neither would Pan. Her Chinese was almost native, but it was American. Her experience of China was limited. Regional variations in accent would mean nothing to her. And once again, the words of Lao Dai came back to him. You have an enemy, Li Yan. Not only was this killer sending Li letters, fulfilling a promise to cut off a woman’s ears, but now he was passing himself off as Li himself. He had used Li to lure Pan to her death, innocent and trusting like a lamb to the slaughter. Li’s shock began turning to anger. He turned to Fu Qiwei. ‘Get a team out to Pan’s apartment. She wasn’t picked at random. She was killed for a reason. Maybe we’ll find it there.’
Sunlight filled the stairwell from the windows at the rear of the Academy as Li made his way down to the floor below. He was surprised to find Lyang in Hart’s office.
‘Didn’t Margaret tell you I worked here mornings?’ she said.
Li said, ‘We haven’t had much chance to talk in the last twenty-four hours.’
Lyang nodded gravely. ‘I saw the paper this morning. It’s awful about poor Lynn. She was just about the nicest person you could ever hope to meet.’
Li said, ‘Is Bill around?’
‘He’s doing a polygraph test this morning,’ she said. ‘A favour for some of your people. Some guy accused of sexually assaulting his thirteen-year-old daughter. He’s agreed to take the test to prove his innocence. I’ll take you along if you like.’
As they passed down a corridor on the south wing of the fourth floor, Lyang said, ‘Bill wasn’t too keen on doing this after we found out about Lynn. He was pretty cut up about it. You know it was Bill who brought her over here?’ Li nodded. ‘He feels really responsible.’ She sighed. ‘But he’d promised the people from Section Six. So…’ Her voice tailed off as she knocked gently on a door and opened it a crack. Two officers from the interrogation unit at Pau Jü Hutong turned in their chairs. ‘Alright if we come in?’ she whispered. Li knew both the faces and nodded his acknowledgement. They waved him in. The room itself was in darkness, the only light coming through what appeared to be a window into an adjoining room. It took Li a moment to realise it was a two-way mirror.
Two cameras mounted on tripods were recording proceedings in the next room. A middle-aged man sat in a chair beside a desk on which a polygraph machine stood idle, spidery needles hovering motionless above the paper conveyer belt on which they would record his responses to Hart’s questions. The man had long hair swept back from his forehead and growing down over his collar. His face was pockmarked from adolescent acne, and a feeble attempt at a moustache clung to his upper lip. He was sitting at right angles to the table, facing a chair in which Hart sat conducting his pretest interview. A monitor on the camera side of the mirror showed a full-screen view of the interviewee, his head cut off above the top frame of the picture, but inset in close-up in the lower left-hand quadrant, obliterating Hart from the recording.