Fu opened one of the drawers and took out a glossy brochure on the Beijing New World Taihua Plaza apartments. A Perfect Metropolitan Residence it claimed on the front cover. Fu opened it up and read from inside. ‘Listen to this: Atop each apartment tower are the exclusive duplex penthouses for celebrities, featuring the extravagant vertical space of the floor lobby and parlours, generous natural light and open sunshine terraces to capture the magnificent views of the city — a lifestyle only the very rich and successful deserve.’ Fu looked at them, shaking his head in wonder. ‘I mean, have you ever heard any-fucking-thing like it? A lifestyle only the very rich and successful deserve! Did I fall asleep for twenty years or something? I mean is this still China? The Communist Party still runs things, yeh?’ He continued shaking his head. ‘How’s it possible? Only the rich and successful deserve shit like this? Is that how it is now?’ He tossed the brochure on the desk. ‘And I thought I’d seen it all.’
He turned to the two detectives. ‘You know, there’s a private gymnasium down the stairs, and a private pool. Every apartment has fibre optic broadband internet connection as well as international satellite and cable TV. Tell me, Li. This kid was a swimmer, right? Just a boy. How could he afford stuff like this?’
‘There’s a lot of money in international sport these days,’ Sun said. ‘Big prize money at the top events around the world, millions in sponsorship from commercial companies.’
‘Do we know if Sui had a sponsorship deal?’ Li asked.
Sun shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Then we’d better find out.’ Li pulled his gloves on and went through the top drawer of Sui’s desk. There were a few bills and receipts, neatly clipped, an HSBC chequebook, half a dozen bank statements. Li ran his eyes quickly over the figures and shook his head. ‘Well, his bank balance is healthy enough, but not enough to finance a lifestyle like this.’ He bagged the chequebook and handed it to Sun. ‘Better check out his bank. Maybe he had other accounts.’
They took some time, then, to wander around the apartment looking at everything in detail. Fu had been right. It was, indeed, as if a ghost lived here. There were virtually no personal belongings of any kind. No books — other than those placed for effect — no magazines, no family photographs. No loose change, no combs with hair stuck in the teeth, no subway tickets or taxi receipts.
The bathroom, like the rest of the apartment, was unnervingly immaculate. The bathroom cabinet revealed a spare box of toothpaste, two packs of soap, an unopened box of aspirin, a jar of cotton pads. Sun said, ‘Well, if he was taking steroids, or any other kind of performance enhancers, he didn’t keep them here.’
On the shelf above the sink there was a Gillette Mach3 razor and a box of four heads. There were also two bottles of Chanel aerosol aftershave. Li frowned, an unexpected character clue in an otherwise sterile environment. A young man who liked his scents. Li picked up one of the bottles. He sprayed it into the air and sniffed, his nose wrinkling at the bitter orange scent of it. ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing that,’ he said.
Sun said, ‘I’d be amazed if he did. Doesn’t look like he shaved.’ He lifted the box of razor heads. ‘None of them have been used.’ The Chinese were not a hairy race. Some men never had to shave. He picked up a small gold-coloured aerosol smaller than a lipstick. ‘What’s this?’
Li took it from him and frowned. ‘It’s a breath freshener.’ It was exactly the same as the one found among Jia Jing’s belongings. He sprayed a tiny puff of it into the air, as he had done a couple of hours earlier in the autopsy room. The same sharp menthol smell.
Sun sniffed and screwed up his face. ‘I think I’d rather have bad breath.’ He looked around. ‘Well, it doesn’t look like he shaved his own head either. At least, not here.’
‘We should find out if he had a regular barber,’ Li said. Sun nodded and made a note. ‘And get the local police in Guilin to talk to his family. Find out when he left home, how long he’s been living in Beijing, did he have any family here.’
In the living room, Li drew back the net curtains from the window and looked out on the sun slanting between the skyscrapers of the burgeoning Beijing skyline. Traffic jammed the street below, and in the distance he could see lines of vehicles crawling across a long sweep of ring road flyover. Factory chimneys belched their toxins into an unusually blue sky, ensuring that it would not stay that way for long. He wondered what kind of boy Sui had been, who could live his ascetic, dustless existence in this rich man’s bubble and leave not a trace of himself behind. What had he done here all on his own? What had he thought about when he sat in his show-house furniture looking out on a city a thousand miles from home? Or had everything revolved entirely around the pool, a life spent in chlorinated water? Had his existence in this apartment, in this city, been literally like that of a fish out of water? Is that why he had left no traces? Except for his own body, his temple, and a room full of medals and photographs, his shrine.
He turned to find Sun watching him. ‘I don’t think this boy had any kind of life outside of the pool, Sun. No reason for living except winning. If he killed himself it was because someone took that reason away.’
‘Do you think he did?’
Li checked his watch. ‘Margaret will be starting the autopsy shortly. Let’s find out.’
III
Students, future police officers, were playing basketball on the court opposite the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the south end of the campus. The University of Public Security played host to the most advanced facilities in the field of forensic pathology in China, and they were housed in a squat, inauspicious four-storey building along one end of the playing fields. The students were wrapped up warm in hooded sweatsuits and jogpants, shouting and breathing fire into the frozen midday. Through small windows high up in the cold white walls of the autopsy room, Margaret could hear them calling to each other. She, too, was wrapped up, but for protection rather than warmth. A long-sleeved cotton gown over a plastic apron over green surgeon’s pyjamas. She had plastic shoe covers on her feet, plastic covers on her arms, and a plastic shower cap on her head, loose strands of fair hair tucked neatly out of sight. She wore a steel mesh gauntlet on her left, non-cutting hand, and both hands were covered in latex. She wore goggles to protect her eyes, and had tied a white, synthetic, paper-like fibre mask over her mouth and nose. The masks that the Centre usually supplied for pathologists were cotton. But the spaces between the threads in the weave of the cotton masks were relatively large, and more liable to let through bacteria, or microscopic water droplets, or aerosolised bone dust. Acutely aware of the bulge beneath her apron, Margaret wasn’t taking any chances. She had dipped into her dwindling private supply of synthetic masks, affording herself and her baby far greater protection from unwanted and undesirable inhalations.
She had two assistants working with her, and she let them do the donkey work under her close scrutiny: cutting open the rib cage, removing and breadloafing the organs, slitting along the length of the intestine, cutting open the skull. They worked to her instructions, and she only moved in close to make a personal examination of the things that caught her attention. She recorded her comments through an overhead microphone.