Thoughts tumbled through Li’s brain like balls in a lottery drum. He didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t find a convincing counterargument. If the DNA didn’t match, it was the only possible answer. Which meant they were now looking for two killers. And one of them was someone he knew.
In his search for some alternative, his eyes fell upon a pile of envelopes and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper sitting on the table. At first he wasn’t even looking at them, they were just a convenient focus for the eye. He was running through all the people on his team, the officers from forensics, the pathology lab, everyone who would have access to the kind of information which would allow them to stage Lynn Pan’s killing in such a way that Li would think it was another Ripper murder. And then another ugly little thought sneaked up out of left field and he found himself staring at the parcel on the table and listening to the blood pulsing in his head. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he said.
Margaret looked toward the table. ‘Just the mail. I picked it up when I came back from the autopsy.’ And then she realised what was in his head. ‘Oh, God…’ It was barely a whisper.
The parcel was about twelve centimetres square, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with sticky tape. Li’s name and address were written on it, in what seemed to Li like a familiar hand. But there were no stamps. No postmark. It had been hand-delivered. ‘Do we have any gloves in the house?’ he said, not taking his eyes off it.
Margaret nodded and ran off to the kitchen. She returned a few moments later with a pair of clear plastic disposable food-handling gloves. She kept a box of them in the cupboard above the food preparation area. Li took them and pulled them on, and very carefully began picking at the sticky tape until he had raised a corner of it. Then he eased it free of the paper, a centimetre at a time until he was able to open one end of the parcel. He slid out a plain, white cardboard box tied with a red ribbon. He undid the ribbon and lifted the lid. Inside, nestled in cotton wool stained with blood that had dried and turned brown, were Lynn Pan’s ears. Margaret’s gasp was quite involuntary. Li felt nausea turning to anger. Tucked down the side of the box was a folded note. He gently eased it out and open it up. Red ink. And what appeared to be the same, spidery handwriting as before.
Dear Chief,
A couple of ears for you. As promised.
Sincerely,
Jack.
Chapter Eight
I
A red flag flapped in the wind outside the white-tiled police station on the corner of Fanggu Lu and Fangxing Lu. As the sun went down, the wind was doing its best to detach stubborn leaves from the scholar trees that lined the street. A couple of bicycle repair men on the corner wore gloves to protect oily fingers from the cold as they worked on the skeleton of an upturned cycle, the last job of the day. Li drove past the sports centre on his left, basketball courts and soccer pitches, a domed stadium with indoor tennis courts. Beyond it, traffic buzzed like flies dying in the autumn cold around the multistorey Feng Chung shopping centre. At the end of the street he parked and crossed to the apartment block on the corner. A jian bing lady was selling pancakes from a stand in the gardens, while a warden swaddled in blue coat and red armband wore a white face mask as she patrolled the perimeter, casting a long shadow across the grass.
At the entrance to Lao Dai’s apartment, a couple of tricycle goods carriers were parked under a tin roof, and another Chinese flag snapped and cracked like a whip in the breeze. Li climbed the couple of steps to the door and went in. A short flight of stairs led to a lobby and the elevator. A stairgate stood ajar at the entrance to the stairwell. Off to the left, a corridor led to a door with a plaque that read, Veteran Senior Officers Activity Centre. For some reason it was also labelled in English, Old Cadres. Li knocked and walked in. An old man with a very large pair of glasses sat reading the Beijing Youth Daily next to a dispenser of bottled water. He looked up at Li, his face expressionless, then he looked at the front page of his paper and then back at Li.
‘Ni hau,’ Li said, and the old man nodded silent acknowledgement.
A big screen television stood on a wooden cabinet next to a tall refrigerator which had seen better days. In an alcove at the far end of the room, the last sunshine of the day slanted in through windows on two sides. Two old men sat playing chess among the potted plants. From a room in a corridor leading off, Li heard the sound of men’s voices raised in an argument.
The apartment was provided by the Ministry of Public Security for retired senior police officers. Li wondered if he, too, would end up in a place like this one day. He pulled up a chair and sat down at the table with the chess players. For some reason, Old Dai never went to the park on a Tuesday.
‘You just cannot keep your face off the front pages of the newspapers these days, can you?’ Dai said, without looking up.
‘So it seems,’ Li replied. He paused. ‘Dai, I need your advice.’
Dai’s chess partner immediately rose to his feet. He had a long, lugubrious face, and a cardigan that hung open to reveal an egg-stained shirt. ‘No cheating,’ he said, and he headed out into the stairwell.
Old Dai grinned. ‘As if I needed to.’ And then his smile faded. ‘You are in trouble?’
Li sighed. ‘Maybe.’
Dai returned to his examination of the chessboard. ‘You had better tell me.’
‘I think the woman killed last night might have been murdered by a police officer.’
Dai lifted his eyes from the chessboard, all thoughts of the game banished from his mind. ‘Why do you think this?’
Li told him, and Dai sat listening in silence and gazing pensively from the window. When he had finished, Li added, ‘Margaret has taken the ears to the pathology department to confirm that they are Lynn Pan’s. Not that I think there is any doubt. A visual match will do for now. A DNA match will seal it for the record.’
‘And the handwriting?’
‘I have requested a calligrapher to compare the characters on the note that came with the ears, to the characters on the one that came with the kidney. Forensics are comparing the inks.’
‘But you don’t expect a match?’
‘No.’
Dai sat in silence for some time. At length he said, ‘The parcel with the ears had no stamp or postmark?’
‘It was hand-delivered.’
‘So whoever left it in your post-box had access to the Ministry compound.’
‘A cop,’ Li said flatly.
Dai nodded. But it was not a nod of agreement. Only an acknowledgement. ‘I am puzzled,’ he said.
‘Why? What’s puzzling you?’
‘If this police officer had knowledge of the previous murders and wished you to believe that Miss Pan died by the same hand, why would he leave his saliva on the cigar? For he would know, surely, that when you tested the DNA it would not match.’ He looked Li in the eye. ‘That was careless of him, don’t you think?’
II
Li drove north on the East Third Ring Road. It was dark now and the tail lights of the traffic stretched ahead of him into a hazy distance. The city basked in its own light, buildings illuminated against the black of the night sky, a million windows lit like stars in a firmament. When he went to see Dai he had been certain that he was looking for two killers. Both of them somewhere out there. One of them tangible. Li had seen him, been mocked by him, without ever knowing who he was. The other a phantom, an idea born of an unexpected DNA result and a host of inconsistencies. A policeman, someone he knew. One of his team. But, as usual, Dai had made him question everything. In my day we had no DNA testing, he had said. It is possible to pick up a sesame seed but lose sight of a watermelon. But when it came to Pan’s murder, no matter how much he wanted not to believe it, he could not question Margaret’s logic in pointing the finger of accusation at a cop. It was the only explanation that brought consistency to inconsistency. And if it was true, then he was even further from solving this puzzle than he had thought.