The door opened in the observation room and Hart came in. He seemed surprised to see Li. ‘Li Yan? What are you doing here?’
Li stood to shake Hart’s hand. ‘I stopped by to talk to you about Lynn Pan.’
Hart’s face clouded. ‘I feel like it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t recommended her for the post…Jesus!’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath, trying to control his emotions. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to believe she’s gone.’ He looked at Li. ‘Did you…? Were you called to the crime scene?’ Li nodded. ‘Shit. That must have been tough.’
It was what Margaret had said. And Li wondered if it was really any harder dealing with a murder when it was someone you knew. Of course, you brought a lot of emotional baggage to that circumstance. But he had always found it hard to see the living person in the dead one. It wasn’t dealing with the dead that was difficult, it was the loss of the living. In this case, he had hardly known Lynn Pan. And yet the sense of her loss had been powerful. Perhaps because she had been so brim-full of life.
Li shrugged. ‘Sure. It was hard.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose you would have the first idea why anyone would want to kill her?’
Hart shook his head. ‘It’s inconceivable to me,’ he said.
‘Or why anyone would want to steal her computers, all her files?’
Hart said, ‘I heard there’d been a break-in up there. It’s all gone?’
‘Everything.’
‘Jees…’ He held up his hands. ‘I can’t help you. I wish to God I could.’
Li said, ‘I might as well tell you, because you’ll probably hear it anyway…’ He glanced at Lyang. ‘Apparently she thought she was going to meet me last night at the Millennium Monument.’
Hart’s consternation was plain on his face. ‘Why would she think that?’
‘Because someone phoned up after we’d left yesterday afternoon, saying they were me, and arranging a clandestine meeting?’
‘Why? What for?’ It was Lyang this time.
‘I don’t know.’
Hart said, ‘Man, that’s spooky.’
‘What about her private life?’ Li said. ‘What do you know about that?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘She came round for dinner a couple of times,’ Lyang said.
‘Yeah, but all we ever talked about were people we knew back in the States. Work. You know, stuff we had in common.’
‘And we never got an invite back to her place.’
‘The thing is,’ Hart said, ‘her private life was just that. Private, wasn’t it, Lyang? You know, for such an outgoing girl, she really was a very private person. You got so far with her, and then zap. Down came some kind of shutter. So far and no further. I don’t know anything about her relationships, what she did in her spare time. Hell, I don’t even know if she lived on her own. It’s hard to know if there was anything much at all outside of her work.’ He sighed and then glanced through the two-way mirror. ‘How’s our boy doing?’
‘Feeling pretty sorry for himself,’ said the female interrogator.
Hart glanced at his watch. ‘He’s had long enough to stew. Time to go get a confession.’ He looked at Li. ‘Unless there’s anything else you want to ask.’
Li said, ‘I can’t think of anything right now.’
‘We’ll be seeing you tonight, anyway,’ Lyang said. ‘You and Margaret are still coming to dinner, aren’t you?’
Li had forgotten all about it. ‘Sure,’ he said.
Hart squeezed his arm. ‘Catch you later.’ And he went out still clutching his charts. He hadn’t looked at them once.
Li was anxious to be away, but he also wanted to see how Hart’s interview with Jiang would turn out. ‘Will this take long?’ he asked Lyang.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
So he sat down again and watched as Hart entered the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. Jiang sat upright, almost startled, and you could see his tension in the rigid way he held himself. Hart sat down facing Jiang and put the charts on his knee. He still wasn’t consulting them. ‘On these tests, Jiang,’ he said, those hypnotic tones again, ‘I can make one of three decisions. I can say a person’s telling the truth. I can say a test’s inconclusive, that I just don’t know. Or I can say a person’s not telling the truth.’
Jiang drew in a deep breath, very focused on Hart and what he was saying. He kept nodding, as if he could gain approval by agreeing.
‘Now here’s the thing,’ Hart said. ‘We’re not dealing with a criminal case here. You’re just an ordinary guy, working hard to raise his family, making his contribution to society. Now, some of the criminals I deal with, that they bring down here from the cells uptown, they don’t contribute to anything. They’re just kind of leeches on society.’ He leaned forward, creating a sense of confidentiality between them. ‘When I look at the charts, and from talking with you here today, I know you’re no criminal, that’s for darn sure. In fact, I’m inclined to think you’re kind of a nice guy. And life’s dealt you a pretty bum hand.’
Jiang nodded vigorously.
‘The thing is, is that as far as what Shimei is saying, it happened. And you’re remembering it. But you’re having a problem bringing it forward to talk with somebody. To try and understand why. And I can understand the fear and embarrassment for you. That’s the biggest thing, isn’t it?’
Jiang was nodding miserably now.
‘Because you can remember it happened, but if you come right out and tell somebody, how do you handle that picture you have of yourself, because you’re not like that normally.’
‘I’m not,’ Jiang whispered.
‘We all have a view of ourselves, Jiang. The way we believe that the rest of the world looks at us. We call that our ego. And when that is threatened, we have what we call an ego defence mechanism which, to protect that image we have of ourselves, will push things back into our subconscious and lead us to deny that they ever occurred — when, in fact, we ourselves know that, yes, it did happen. But because it is so out of character for us in normal situations, we really don’t know how to deal with it.’
Jiang was still nodding his agreement. You could see in him, as clear as day, the desire to confess. To tell this soft-spoken sympathetic American the truth, because after all he had already seen it in the chart.
Hart was still talking. ‘And so, we are left in a predicament where we feel so much pressure. It’s called anxiety. And our anxiety gets to be so great that our total thinking, our total being, is just taken up with trying to fight it.’ He leaned even closer, and put a comforting hand on Jiang’s knee. ‘The thing is that you know, and I know, that what happened was probably brought on by the booze.’
‘Yes…’ Jiang’s voice was a whisper.
‘And you were lonely. After all, your wife had left you. How long had it been? Two years? That’s a long time for a man to be on his own, Jiang.’
Jiang had tipped his head into his left hand, his palm hiding his eyes, but you could see the tears running down his pockmarked cheeks.
‘And that’s why you did it, wasn’t it, Jiang?’
‘Yes.’ Almost inaudible.
‘I need you to tell me, Jiang, that you did put your penis into Shimei’s vagina. And all that anxiety is just going to lift right off your shoulders.’
Again, the bluntness of it seemed shocking, but Li knew that the form of words was important for legal purposes.
‘I did it,’ Jiang said.
‘You put your penis in Shimei’s vagina?’
‘Yes.’
‘All the way?’