Li shivered as he gazed upon the vast cadaver of a man who had once had the power to lift more than three times his own body weight, an achievement put into context by the fact that it had taken eight officers to prise him free of his lover, and four sturdy autopsy assistants to get him from the gurney on to the table. But all his strength was gone now, stolen by death, and all that remained was the mountain of bulging muscle he had worked so hard to cultivate, limp and useless.
Doctor Wang was swaddled in layers of protective clothing, eyes darting behind his goggles, sweat gathering, in spite of the cold, along the elasticated line of his plastic head cover. He had peeled the dead man’s scalp down over his face and was preparing the oscillating saw to cut through the top of the skull and remove the brain.
‘Never seen muscles like them,’ he was saying. ‘In all my years. A man of this size, you’d expect a lot of fat. There’s hardly an ounce of it.’
‘Is that abnormal in a weightlifter?’ Wu asked.
‘If I’d cut one open before, I might be able to tell you,’ Wang said with a faintly withering tone. ‘But I can tell you that all the weight he was carrying, and all the weight he was lifting, will have contributed in no small way to his death. The heart is just another muscle, after all. You put too much strain on it, you’ll damage it.’ He put down his saw and crossed to the table where the sections of Jia Jang’s heart lay at an angle, piled one on top of the other, like thick slices of bread. ‘In this case…’ he picked up a slice of heart, ‘…the left anterior descending coronary artery was clogged, causing it simply to erupt. Probably congenital.’ Holding up the cross section of the artery, he added, ‘There was also an acute rupture of the atherosclerotic plaque. You see this kind of yellow, cheesy stuff? In older people that gets rock hard and calcified. It blocks the lumen of the artery, like sludge build-up in an old pipe, narrowing the available space for the blood to flow through. You can see here that the artery is about zero-point-four of a centimeter in diameter, and it’s about seventy-five percent blocked. And if you look closely under this cheesy stuff…’ Li made a face, but moved closer to see, ‘…there’s a thin layer of red. Blood. Under pressure from the artery it has dissected into and under the plaque, expanding it to further block the lumen, occluding it and stopping blood flow to that portion of the heart which the artery serves.’ Wang sucked air through his teeth. ‘Effectively, he had a massive heart attack.’ He looked at Li. ‘The fact that he was in the act of sexual intercourse at the time may have been what brought it on. A lot of men die on the job…so to speak.’
‘Way to go,’ Wu said.
Wang cast a critical eye over him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were in much danger, Wu.’ The detective pulled a face. ‘I’m amazed, however, that our friend here had the where-withal.’ He crossed back to the body and they followed him, watching as he lifted the penis up and weighed the testicles appraisingly in his hand. ‘Tiny,’ he said.
‘Is there some significance in that?’ Li asked.
Wang shrugged. ‘The muscle mass, the reduced size of the testes. Could be consistent with steroid abuse.’ He paused. ‘Or not. He may just have had small testicles, and built his muscle mass by training very hard.’
‘Yeh,’ Wu cut in, ‘but if his nuts were that small, it would have reduced his testosterone production, and therefore his sex drive, wouldn’t it? Hardly consistent with a man having an affair.’
Wang said, ‘Testosterone is often the steroid of choice when it comes to building muscle. In the short term that can actually increase the sex drive, although a side-effect can be the shrinking of the testes, and ultimately severely impaired sexual performance.’
‘Is there any way you can tell for sure if he’d been taking steroids?’ Li asked. He smelled a scandal. Some high profile Chinese weightlifters and swimmers had tested positive for drug-taking in the nineties and been banned from national and international sport. The authorities were very anxious to clean up the country’s image.
‘I’ve asked specifically for hormone screening. If he took any during the last month it’ll show up in tox. If it’s been longer than that, no.’ He took his oscillating saw around the top of the skull and eased the brain out into a stainless steel bowl. ‘Of course, there can often be behavioural changes with steroid abuse. Users can become moody, aggressive. Talk to people who knew him.’
Li walked over to a side table against the wall, where Jia Jing’s clothes were laid out along with the contents of his pockets and a small shoulder bag he had had with him. The clothes were huge. Vast, elasticated cotton pants, an enormous singlet, a shirt like a tent, a hand-knitted cardigan and a quilted jacket which he must have had specially made. He wore an odd little blue cap with a toggle on the top, and must have looked very odd with his pleated queue hanging down below it to his shoulder blades. Li glanced back at the autopsy table as Wang pulled back the scalp which had been covering his face. Jia’s features were almost as gross as the rest of him, thick pale lips and a flattened nose, eyes like slits in tumescent swellings beneath his brows. He made Li think of a Japanese sumo wrestler. He was an ugly man, and heaven only knew what the woman he died on top of had seen in him.
His pockets had turned out very little. There was a leather purse with some coins; a wallet with several one hundred yuan notes, a couple of international credit cards and membership cards for three different gymnasia; some taxi receipts and a bill from a restaurant; a small gold-coloured aerosol breath freshener. Li wondered if steroids gave you bad breath. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, sniffed and recoiled from its pungent menthol sharpness. There was a length of white silk cord tassled at each end. ‘What’s the rope for?’ Li asked.
Wang laughed. ‘That was his belt. Infinitely flexible when it comes to keeping trousers in place over a belly like his.’
Li picked up a dog-eared photograph, its glaze cracked in several places where it had been folded. The colour was too strong and the picture was a little fuzzy, but Li recognised Jia immediately. He was wearing his lifting singlet and a white leather back brace, black boots laced up to his calves. There was a gold medal on a blue ribbon around his neck, and he was holding it up for emphasis. He was flanked on one side by a small elderly man with thinning grey hair, and on the other by an even smaller woman with a round face and deep wrinkles radiating outwards from smiling eyes. Both were beaming for the camera. Li turned the picture over. Jia had scrawled on the back With Mum and Dad, June 2000. Li looked at Mum and Dad again and saw the pride in their smiles, and for a moment he felt their pain. The people they brought in here to butcher did not live or die in isolation. They had mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children. He put the photograph back with Jia’s belongings and wondered how it was possible that such a small woman could have carried such a giant inside her.
He turned briskly to Wang. ‘You’ll let me have your report as soon as you have the results in from tox?’
‘Of course.’
Li said to Wu, ‘You might as well stay with it. I’m heading out to Qinghua University with Sun to talk to Sui Mingshan’s team-mates. Keep me up to date with any developments.’
And he hurried out, feeling oddly squeamish. Death was never easy, but with such a big, powerful man, it seemed particularly cruel somehow. He had been only twenty-three years old.