‘Heard nothing.’
Li shook his head. Still the girl was there. Every time he blinked. Every time he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. ‘Do we know who she is?’
‘Found her ID card in her purse, along with a couple of hundred yuan. Her name’s Guo Huan. She’s eighteen years old. Lives in Dongcheng District, not that far from Section One.’ He carefully removed an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light for Li to see. ‘We also found this …’ Trapped between the sheets of clear plastic was what looked like a cutting from a newspaper or magazine. Li took it and held it to catch the spill-off light from the photographer’s lamps, and saw that it was a two-line ad from the personal columns of one of Beijing’s what’s-on magazines. Cute Chinese Girl looks for Mr Right. I am slim, well-educated and work in antiques. Please send me e-mail. Or telephone. Thinly disguised code for a prostitute seeking customers. There was an e-mail address and a cellphone number. Wu blew smoke through his nostrils like dragonfire. ‘He’s making a fool of us, this guy, Chief. We’ve got to get him.’
‘We’ve got to get him,’ Li snapped, ‘not because he’s making a fool of us, but because he’s killing young girls.’ He turned back towards the body as Pathologist Wang stepped away from it, peeling off his bloody gloves and dropping them in a plastic sack. As was his habit, he had an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips. He bent towards the flame of Wu’s proffered lighter, and as he took the first drag Li saw that his hand was trembling.
Characteristically Wang would make some smart quip, or literary allusion, after examining a body at a crime scene. His way of coping. But this morning, ‘Shit,’ was all he said.
Li braced himself. ‘You want to tell me about it?’
‘I never saw anything like it,’ Wang said, and there was a tremor, too, in his voice. ‘And I’ve seen some shit, Chief, you know that.’
‘We all have.’
Wang’s dark eyes burned with a curious intensity. ‘This guy’s insane. A twenty-four-carat maniac.’ He stabbed at his mouth with his cigarette and drew on it fiercely. ‘A similar pattern to the others. Strangled. I can’t tell till autopsy if she was dead when he cut her throat. Unconscious certainly, and lying on the ground. He would have been kneeling on her right side, cutting from left to right so that the blood from the left carotid artery would flow away from him. The facial stuff …’ he shook his head and took another pull at his cigarette. ‘She was dead when he did that. And the internal stuff.’ He looked at Li very directly. ‘She’s a mess in there. From what I can see, it’s not just the womb he’s taken this time. There’s a kidney gone as well.’
‘Organ theft?’ Wu asked.
The pathologist shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Not in these conditions. And it wasn’t surgically removed. Both the uterus and the kidney were hacked out. He may have some anatomical knowledge, but he’s certainly no doctor. He’s a butcher.’
‘Maybe literally,’ Li said.
‘Maybe,’ Wang agreed. ‘But even a butcher would use a knife with more care. This was uncontrolled. Frenzied.’
‘How sure are you it is the same killer?’ Li asked.
‘Completely,’ Wang said, reversing his usual reticence to commit himself to anything. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. He held it up to the light, and Li saw the half-inch remains of a brown Russian cheroot. ‘If we get as good a DNA sample off this as we got off the others, we’ll know for certain.’
III
The sun sneaked and glanced and angled its way off windows in high rise apartments and office blocks as it lifted off the eastern horizon and beamed directly along the east-west boulevards of the Beijing grid system. As it rose, it coloured the sky blue. A painfully clear sky, free from pollution or mist, dipping to pale orange and yellow along its eastern fringe. A silvery sliver of moon was caught falling in the west behind the purple-hued mountains Li’s breath billowed and wreathed around his head as he pedalled slowly north, weaving through the traffic along Chaoyangmen Nanxiao Da Jie.
Everywhere the building work went on, rising up behind green-clad scaffolding from the rubble of the old city. Cranes stalked the skies overhead, the roar of diggers and pneumatic drills already filling the early morning air. Most of the street stalls he had cycled past for years were gone; the hawkers peddling hot buns and sweet potatoes from sparking braziers, the old lady feeding taxi drivers from her big tureen of soup, the jian bing sellers. New pavements had been laid, new trees planted. And all along Dongzhimen, east of Section One, new apartment blocks lined the street where just a year before squads of men equipped only with hammers had begun knocking down the walls of the old siheyuan courtyards which had characterised Beijing for centuries. It was cleaner, fresher, and there was no doubt that life for ordinary Beijingers was improving faster than it had done in five thousand years. But, still, Li missed the old city. He was unsettled by change.
So it was comforting for him to know that Mei Yuan was still at the corner of Dongzhimen where she had sold jian bing from her bicycle stall for years. During the demolition and construction work she had been forced to move to the opposite corner of the Dongzhimen-Chaoyangmen intersection. And then she had faced opposition to her return from the owners of a new restaurant built on her old corner. It was a lavish affair, with large picture windows and red-tiled canopies sweeping out over the sidewalk, brand-new red lanterns dancing in the breeze. Street hawkers, they told her, had no place here now. Besides, she was putting off their customers. She would have to find somewhere else to sell her peasant pancakes. Li had paid them a quiet visit. Over a beer, which the owner had been only too anxious to serve him, Li had pointed out that Mei Yuan had a licence to sell jian bing wherever she wanted. And since the officers of Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police, just across the road, liked to get their jian bing from Mei Yuan — on that particular corner — the restaurant might like to reconsider its attitude to the jian bing seller. It did.
Li saw steam rising from the tin-roofed glass cover that sat over the hotplate and the pancake mix and bowls of sauces and spices that surrounded it. An elderly couple were paying Mei Yuan for their pancakes as Li cycled up and leaned his bicycle against the wall of the restaurant. He watched them bite hungrily into their hot savoury packages as they headed off along Ghost Street, where thousands of lanterns swayed among the trees and the city’s new generation of rich kids would have spent the night eating and drinking in restaurants and cafés until just a few hours ago. Mei Yuan turned a round, red face in his direction and grinned. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. The traditional Beijing greeting.
‘Yes, I have eaten,’ he replied. The traditional response. If you had eaten and were not hungry, then all was well.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘A jian bing?’
‘Of course.’
She poured creamy mix on to the hotplate and scraped it round into a perfect pancake. ‘You’re early this morning.’
‘A call-out.’
She detected something in his voice and threw him a quick glance. But she said nothing. She knew that if he wanted to talk about it he would. She broke an egg and smeared it over the pancake, sprinkling it with seeds before flipping it over to paint it with savoury and spicy sauces. Her fingers were red raw with the cold.
Li watched her as she worked; hair tucked up in a bun beneath her white cap, quilted blue jacket over jogpants, sweatshirt and trainers. Her white cotton coat hung open, several sizes too small. She made a poor living from her pancakes, augmented only by the money Li and Margaret paid her to baby-sit for Li Jon. Both Li and Mei Yuan had lost people close to them during the Cultural Revolution. He, his mother. She, her son. Now one was a surrogate for the other. There wasn’t anything Li wouldn’t have done for the old lady. Or she for him.