Most of the tables were occupied, and there was a babble of voices and music playing when Li and Qian walked in. But almost immediately animated conversations dried up and heads turned in their direction. The music played to silence, music that didn’t stand up to such scrutiny. A cheap pop singer from Taiwan. Li had forgotten that he and Qian were both still in their dress uniforms, long coats hanging open to reveal flashes of silver on black. The two men took off their caps, as if that would somehow make them less conspicuous, and slipped on to high stools at the bar. The barman wore dark slacks with sharp creases and a white shirt open at the neck, sleeves neatly folded halfway up his forearms. His hair was beautifully cut and gelled back from his face. He looked beyond them as several tables emptied, and half a dozen clients slipped out into the night. Then he refocused on the newcomers and smiled nervously.
‘Two beers,’ Li said.
‘You’re joking, right?’ The barman seemed perplexed, and his smile continued to flutter about his lips like a butterfly on a summer’s day.
Li glared at him. ‘Do you see me laughing?’
The barman shrugged. ‘Cops don’t drink in places like this.’
‘Where do they drink?’ Qian asked.
‘I don’t know. Just not here.’ He leaned confidentially across the bar towards them. ‘Look, I have no problem serving you guys. It’s just … you know, you’re bad for business.’ He nodded towards another couple heading out the door.
Li was running out of patience. ‘Sonny, if there are not two beers on the bar within the next thirty seconds you’ll find out just how bad for business we could really be.’
‘Coming right up, boss,’ the barman said, as if the issue had never been in doubt.
Li and Qian took their beers to a recently vacated table by the window, to the barman’s further chagrin. Two cops sitting in the window would guarantee no further custom until they left. But he held his peace.
The two detectives drank in silence for some time. Li took a long first pull at his beer, till he felt the alcohol hit his bloodstream, then he nursed his glass on the table in front of him, lost in gloomy thoughts.
‘Such a fucking waste!’ he said eventually and Qian looked at him carefully.
‘She made an impression on you, then, Chief?’
‘She was beautiful, Qian. I don’t just mean physically. She had something about her. Something inside. It just radiated from her.’ He found Qian looking at him quizzically and he smiled wryly. ‘Sure, if I hadn’t already found the woman I want to spend my life with, I could have fallen for her. Big time.’ And then he saw her blood-splashed profile and the wound where her ear had been removed, and frustration and anger rose in him like bile. You have an enemy, Li Yan, Lao Dai had told him, and Li knew that he was right. That somehow, for some reason, all this was about him. He thumped his fist on the table and both their beers jumped. Heads turned towards them. ‘I’m going to put a stop to it, Qian. I’m not going to let him do this again.’
Qian nodded reassuringly. ‘We’ll get him, Chief.’
‘What I can’t figure,’ Li said, ‘is how the hell he got her to go up there in the first place. In the dark, after it was closed. I mean, he could never have forced her to do it.’
Qian said, ‘Suppose he arranged to meet her there. Suppose she went there before it closed, and then hid up at the top when the lights went out and the guards locked up. He could easily have climbed over the railing when they’d gone.’
‘But why? Why would she meet someone in those circumstances?’
Qian shrugged. ‘Fear, maybe.’
‘Of what? Not of him. She wouldn’t have gone there if she’d thought there was anything to fear from him.’ But he couldn’t rid himself of that look in her eyes the last time he had seen her. He had not understood, then, what it really was. But now he wondered if perhaps she had been afraid, and he had failed to recognise it. But afraid of what?
Qian said, ‘He took an enormous risk killing her in the early evening rather than the early hours of the morning. I know it wasn’t exactly in full view, but there were security people around. And a goddamned TV station across the road!’ He took another mouthful of beer. ‘And, of course, it’s something else he did differently this time. I mean, what’s weird is why he would set out to copy Jack the Ripper and then not.’
Li said, ‘Chinese cops have the idea that serial killers never change their MO, probably because we don’t get that many here.’ He shook his head. ‘But it’s a mistake. When I was in the States I read up on some of the most famous serial killers from around the world, and a lot of them changed lots of things from murder to murder. From gun to knife, from knife to rope, from rope to hammer. From men to women, or the other way round. And for all sorts of reasons. Some quite deliberately to mislead the police, others just on a whim. Some because it was their MO to change their MO. A serial killer can’t be relied on to stick to the script.’ And he realised with a shock, that’s exactly what he’d been doing — relying on the Beijing Ripper to be faithful to the original. But it wasn’t a script. It was history. And you can’t rewrite history. So why had the killer done just that?
His cellphone began playing Beethoven in his pocket. He took it out and flipped it open. ‘Wei?’
‘It’s me, I’m home. How did it go?’ Margaret sounded weary.
‘Not good,’ Li said. ‘He’s broken his pattern.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You remember at lunch today, Bill Hart talked about Lynn Pan, the Chinese-American who’s running the MERMER program?’
‘Sure.’
‘That’s who the victim was.’
There was a moment’s silent incredulity at the other end of the line, then, ‘Jesus Christ,’ Margaret whispered. ‘You met her this afternoon.’
‘Yeah.’ Li felt a fleeting pang of guilt at the feelings Pan had aroused in him.
‘That must have been tough.’
‘It was.’
There was a long silence, and then, ‘Is that music I hear?’
‘I’m in a bar with Qian, up in Sanlitun.’
‘Is there a connection?’
‘No, we’re having a drink.’
Another silence. Then, ‘I had a great time tonight, too,’ she said with a tone. ‘With your friends from the Ministry. They spoke Chinese all night and left me to my own devices, smiling like an idiot every time one of them looked at me. I’ve got cramp in my cheek muscles.’ In the background Li heard the baby start to cry. Margaret said, ‘When will you be home?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’ And she hung up.
Li felt rebuked, and resented it. He flipped the phone shut and stuffed it in his pocket. He finished his beer and stood up. ‘We’d better go.’
And the barman breathed a sigh of relief as the two cops slipped out into the street. The cold air brought the blood rushing immediately to their cheeks and burned their lungs. Qian said, ‘I didn’t know she was American.’