‘Yes.’ And he wept openly now.
Hart patted his knee gently. And he still hadn’t looked at the charts.
V
Lynn Pan’s apartment was in a new housing development at the south end of Haidian district, not far from Beijing University. The blocks were only four storeys, and had pitched, red-tiled roofs and white painted walls peppered with tiny balconies at every other window. The compound was gated, and guarded by a grey-uniformed Beijing Security officer. Inside there was parking for vehicles and covered sheds for bicycles. But there were no bicycles parked there. Li flashed his Public Security ID for the guard to raise the gate and the guard said, ‘Your people are already here.’
Li nodded and drove through to park up in front of Pan’s block. He was puzzled by the black-and-white parked outside it. Forensics travelled in unmarked vans.
In the lobby, an elderly woman grinned at him toothlessly from behind a grilled window. ‘Second floor,’ she said, pointing upwards when he showed her his ID.
On the second-floor landing, the door to Pan’s apartment was standing wide open and he could hear voices from inside. As he went in, he saw that the lock on the door had been forced. The apartment was a shambles. The polished wooden floor in the square hall was strewn with colourful Xinjiang rugs. There were four doors off the hall. One to a bathroom. Beside it, one to a tiny kitchen. The door to the right led to a living-dining room, its window giving on to one of the small balconies and overlooking the car park below. The fourth door led to the back of the apartment and a double bedroom. The contents of drawers and cupboards had been tipped out onto floors. The doors to the wardrobe stood open. There were two uniformed officers in the bedroom. They turned, startled, as Li appeared in the doorway.
‘What the hell are you guys doing here?’ Li asked.
There was no need to show his ID. They knew immediately who he was. One of them said, ‘The caretaker called the station about the break-in half an hour ago. They radioed the car. It only took us about fifteen minutes to get here.’
‘A break-in,’ Li repeated stupidly.
They looked at him as if he had horns. ‘Sure, isn’t that why you’re here?’
Li said, ‘Haven’t you seen the morning papers? The lady who lives here was murdered last night?’
‘Shit.’ The one who had spoken first suddenly viewed the apartment in a new light.
‘It was in the papers?’ the other one said, incredulously.
‘I hope you haven’t disturbed anything.’
‘No, Chief.’
‘You’ve spoken to the caretaker?’ They nodded. ‘How come the break-in wasn’t reported until this morning?’
‘They didn’t know about it until this morning,’ the first one said. ‘It was a neighbour coming down the stairs who noticed the door lying slightly ajar. Then she saw that it had been forced and told the caretaker. She called us.’
‘And how did burglars get in and out past the security guard?’
‘Beats me, Chief. The guy out there wasn’t on duty last night. We’ll need to pull in the guy who was on the night shift.’
‘You guys won’t be doing anything. This crime scene is now part of a murder investigation and under the jurisdiction of Section One. You make out your reports and have them sent to my office.’
‘Yes, Chief.’ They stood looking at him.
‘You can go now,’ he said.
‘Yes, Chief.’ And reluctantly the two officers donned their hats and ducked out past him on to the landing. He heard their footsteps retreating down the stairs and the imprecations muttered under their breath.
When they had gone, Li stood and looked around him in the stillness of the apartment. It was full of her smell and her presence. Her personality was everywhere, in the choice of pictures she had hung on almost every available wall space — Chinese originals bought at the antiques market; signed prints of narrative pictures by an artist called Vetriano; framed photographs of some picturesque market town in southern France. Li wondered what their significance was. She was there, too, in the brightly coloured curtains on every window, in the dazzling Xinjiang rugs she had bought to cover nearly every square inch of floor, in the black bedcovers printed with white and red Chinese characters that had been ripped from the bed and lay crumpled now on the floor.
Her clothes had been pulled off the wardrobe rail and thrown on the bed. Suits, and jeans, leather jackets, sweatshirts, blouses. A rack of her shoes had been left undisturbed. Trainers and sandals, a pair of Doc Martens, a sturdy pair of brown hiking boots still caked with mud, plain black shoes with chunky low heels. Two Lynn Pans had been torn from the wardrobe. The work persona, the Lynn Pan who liked to wear masculine suits and plain black shoes — although Li knew from their brief encounter that this persona had never masked her essential femininity. And then there was the private persona, the relaxed, informal Lynn Pan who liked to wear jeans and sweatshirts and training shoes, and who enjoyed walking. Where? In the hills out at Badaling? In the Yanshan mountains? And who did she go walking with? Or was she a loner? Certainly, there was no evidence of anyone else sharing her bedroom.
The kitchen was small, but tidy. Although the thieves had opened every cupboard, they had not disturbed the contents. Shelves were neatly lined with dried and tinned foods. The refrigerator was well-stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables. In the freezer there were chicken breasts and fish, and whole-wheat bread that she must have bought in one of the foreign supermarkets. She liked to eat healthily, and she liked to eat at home.
The bathroom shelves were lined with soaps and shampoos and skin cleansers. There was very little in the way of make-up, either here or in the bedroom, and he remembered how little she had worn the afternoon that he met her. A touch of brown on the eyelids, a hint of blusher on her cheeks, the merest smudge of colour on her lips. She’d had a beautiful complexion and fine bone structure. Make-up would have been superfluous.
A small dining table with two chairs sat by the window in the front room. There were potted plants everywhere: green, leafy spider plants, a yucca tree, a beautiful winter-flowering azalea. The air was filled with their fragrance. Bookshelves lined one complete wall. Books on China and Chinese dialects; rows of cookery books with recipes and cuisines from all over the world; a twenty-six-volume encyclopaedia; Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary; a dictionary of quotations; reams of fiction — Steinbeck, Hemingway, Greene, Rushdie, Wolfe, and dozens more that Li had never heard of. Clearly, she had been a reader.
There was a two-seater settee covered in silk throws, and one armchair set to get the best light from the window. Obviously where she sat to read. A TV and video had not been touched, but cables lay around a coffee table beside the armchair, and the table itself seemed oddly bare.
A dresser opposite the window had been ransacked. Much of its content lay strewn across the floor. CDs, photo albums, personal papers. Li could read some of the CD titles without stooping to pick them up. Jean Michel Jarre’s The China Concerts. A large collection of Bach fugues. Handel’s Water Music. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On a stereo cabinet beside the dresser, the CD drawer of a neat little Sony stack lay open. There was a CD in it. The second disk of The China Concerts. Li took a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and slipped them on. He switched on the stereo and the CD drawer slid shut. He pressed play and was immediately assaulted by loud synthesiser music, not much to his taste. He picked up the CD box and looked at the titles. Orient Express, Magnetic Fields, Laser Harp…The final track was called Souvenir of China. He flipped through the previous tracks until he got to it, and suddenly the room was filled with the sound of children’s voices. Chinese children. The noise of a camera shutter, the sound of synthesiser strings stepping down through a slow, sad melody. More Chinese voices. The punctuation of a monotonous, steady drumbeat.