‘This is the Foreign Office. Currently all our lines are busy. You will be put through to the next free line. This is the Foreign Office. Currently—’ Then a woman’s voice, gentle, melodious: ‘Foreign Office, good afternoon, my name is Regina Schilling.’
‘Institute of Forensic Pathology, Charité. Could you put me through please to – erm—’ The woman on the line paused, probably looking at her notes. ‘Mr Helge Malchow.’
‘One moment,’ said Diane.
Jericho grinned. He had picked a first name and family name quite at random out of the Berlin telephone book, and had programmed a few sentences into Diane. The whole little show would certainly dispel any doubts the caller might have that she was speaking to the Foreign Office – and not, for instance, to a computer in a hotel room. Diane’s German was perfect, of course.
‘Mr Malchow’s line is busy at the moment,’ Diane told the trainee. ‘Would you like to hold?’
‘Will it take long?’
Jericho pointed to the right answer.
‘Just a moment,’ Diane said, and then cheerfully, ‘Ah, I see that he’s just hung up. I’ll put you through. Have a pleasant day.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Helge Malchow,’ Jericho said.
‘Charité Hospital. You called about the Chinese police delegation.’
‘That’s right.’ His own German wasn’t bad at all. Maybe a bit rusty. ‘Have they arrived yet?’
‘No, but they’re quite welcome. They should drive to Building O.’
‘Splendid.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me their names?’
‘Superintendent Tu Tian is leading the investigation, Inspector Chen Yuyun will be with him. The two of them are working undercover, so perhaps you could be so good as to let them see what they need as quickly as you can, not too much red tape.’ It was a ludicrous claim, but it sounded halfway plausible. ‘By the way, you’ll find that they only speak English.’
‘That’s fine. We’ll keep the red tape to a mini—’
‘Thank you very much indeed.’ Jericho hung up, and dialled Tu’s number.
‘All systems go,’ he said.
Tu put his phone down and looked at Yoyo. She could see it in his eyes that he absolutely loathed what they were about to do.
‘I never wanted to see another corpse in my life,’ he said. ‘Corpses in tiled rooms. Never again.’
‘Sometime or other we’ll all be corpses in tiled rooms.’
‘At least I won’t have to see that for myself, when it’s me.’
‘You don’t know that. They say that you see yourself when you die. See yourself lying there, and you couldn’t care less.’
‘I could care.’
Yoyo hesitated, then reached out and squeezed Tu’s hand. Her slim white fingers against his soft, liver-spotted flesh. A child seeking to reassure a giant. She thought of the evening before and the story Tu had told her during the course of the night, of people locked away in prison for so long that in the end the prison was in them. For years now she had been carrying around her own burden of self-reproach, certain that in some obscure way she was responsible for the grown-ups’ pain; and now that burden was taken from her shoulders and replaced instead with the truth, which was so much worse, so much more depressing. She had smoked, boozed, cried, and felt helpless, useless, the way children feel when they see their parents’ moods, so complex, so painful, moods that they can’t understand and think must be something to do with them. Every argument Tu used to make her feel better about it just deepened the pain. His story freed her from the accumulated years of self-pity, but now she felt a vast pity for Hongbing instead, and wondered if she wanted a father she had to pity. Now she was ashamed of even having had the thought, and again she felt guilty.
‘Nobody wants to pity his parents,’ Tu had said. ‘We want them to protect us for a while, and then at some point we want to leave them alone. The most we can achieve is to understand what they do, and forgive the child we used to be.’
For all that, Tu deserved pity as well, but he seemed not to need it, unlike her father. She suspected that it had been far worse for him than it had been for Tu. But unlike the bitterness that Hongbing had eaten, Tu’s fate seemed to her—
‘Not so bad?’ Tu had laughed. ‘Of course. I’m not even your uncle. I’m an old fart with a young wife. When you look at me, you see who I am, not who I was. There’s no history to chain us together.’
‘But we’re – friends?’
‘Yes, we’re friends, and if you were a bit more interested in my bank balance and had fewer scruples, we could be lovers. But you can only see Hongbing in one particular way, that’s genetics for you. No place for pity there. It just doesn’t feature. We each have our own genetic destiny, and when we’ve played that role to the full, then perhaps we can see our parents for what they really are, understand them, accept them, respect them, maybe even love them. For what they always were: just people.’
Oh God, and then dropping in on Jericho late at night. What an embarrassment! She’d been carried away by the intoxicating notion of storming his room, and then she’d crept out without achieving anything, like a silly drunk. It had been a whim, of course, and like all such whims it only made her feel stupidly ashamed. In retrospect, she didn’t even know what she had wanted there.
Or did she?
‘Let’s get this over with,’ said Tu.
They’d fetched the Audi a quarter of an hour ago from the street by the Spree, and now they were parked across from the Institute of Forensic Pathology, Charité Hospital. Tu started the engine and drove up to the barrier at the front gate. He waved his ID out of the window at the guard, told him that the Foreign Office had approved their visit and asked the way to Building O. They drove along past grand red-brick façades. Splendid green lawns beneath spreading leafy boughs called out to them to stop and linger with a loaf of bread, some cheese, a bottle of Chianti, to make the most of every minute before the die was cast and they had to enter Building O. They felt that same yearning for peace and quiet that even the liveliest extrovert feels in a graveyard.
After driving straight ahead for a long while, then turning twice, they stopped in front of a light, airy, somewhat sterile building with all the charm of a provincial clinic. There were only three police cars parked in the forecourt, with the green Berlin livery and marked Forensics. All this understated modesty unsettled Yoyo, gave her the odd feeling that they weren’t where they needed to be, that the corpses must be somewhere else. She had imagined that in a megalopolis like Berlin, where people died every minute of every day, the Institute of Forensic Pathology had to be a vast hangar-like edifice, but this little low building hardly suggested doctors arguing, inspectors, profilers, all the scenes she knew from the movies. They went up three steps, rang the bell by a glass door and were let through by two women in white coats, one tall, young and rather pretty, the other short and wiry, in her late forties, apple-cheeked and with a no-nonsense haircut. The older woman introduced herself as Dr Marika Voss, and her young companion as Svenja Maas. Tu and Yoyo held out their IDs. Dr Voss glanced at the characters and nodded as though she dealt with Chinese documentation every working day.
‘Yes, you have been announced to us,’ she said, in stiffly formal English. ‘Miss Chen Yuyun?’
Yoyo shook her hand. The doctor looked thoughtful for a moment. Clearly she was doing her best to reconcile Yoyo’s appearance with what she imagined an undercover homicide squad must look like. She glanced across to Svenja Maas and then back again, as though remembering with an effort that there were good-looking people in all walks of life.