‘Qian? It’s Li. Tell the boys it’s official. Sui was murdered.’ He watched Sun drawing on his cigarette and envied him every mouthful. ‘And Qian, I want you to check with the various sports authorities when any of these athletes was last tested for drugs.’
‘You think it is drug-related, then?’ Qian asked.
‘No, I don’t think anything,’ Li said. ‘I just want every little piece of information we can get. The more pixels the clearer the picture.’ He couldn’t stand it any longer. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Sun, ‘Give me one of those.’ And he held his hand out for a cigarette.
Sun looked surprised, then took out a cigarette and handed it to him. Li stuck it in his mouth and said to Qian, ‘This indoor athletics competition with the Americans, it starts today, right?’
‘Yes, Chief.’
‘At the Capital Stadium?’
‘Yeh, the place where they have the speed skating.’
‘Okay, get me a couple of tickets for tonight.’
‘I didn’t know you were a sports fan, Chief.’
‘I’m not,’ Li said, and disconnected. He clipped the phone on his belt and starting searching his pockets for a light, before he remembered he didn’t have one. Sun flicked open his lighter, and a blue-yellow flame danced in the sunlight. Li leaned forward to light his cigarette and saw, over Sun’s shoulder, Margaret coming down the steps of the Centre for Material Evidence Determination behind him. He quickly coughed into his hand, snatching the cigarette from his mouth and crumpling it in his fist. Sun was left holding his lighter in mid-air. He looked perplexed. ‘Put that fucking thing away!’ Li hissed.
Sun recoiled as if he had been slapped, slipping the lighter quickly back in his pocket. Then he saw Margaret approaching and a slow smile of realisation crossed his face. Li met his eyes and blushed, then whispered threateningly, ‘Not a word!’ Sun’s smile just broadened.
As she joined them, Margaret said, ‘Where are you off to now?’
‘We’re going to have a look at the weightlifter’s place.’
‘I thought Wang said it was natural causes.’
‘He did,’ Li said. ‘I just don’t like coincidences.’
Margaret’s hair was held back by a band, and she had not a trace of make-up on her face. But she looked lovely, her skin clear and soft and brushed pink by pregnancy. ‘I’m going back to the apartment,’ she said, ‘to shower and change. Then I guess I’ll head off to my exercise class. Will I see you later?’
‘I’m getting a couple of tickets for the indoor athletics tonight. I thought you might like to come along and see the Americans being shown how to do it by the Chinese.’
Margaret cocked an eyebrow. ‘The other way around, don’t you mean? You people have come a long way in a short time, but you’ve still a long way to go.’
Li grinned. ‘We’ll see. You’ll come then?’
‘Sure.’
And then he remembered, ‘Oh, yeh, and I thought we might have lunch tomorrow, with Sun Xi and his wife, Wen. It would be a good time to meet her. And you could maybe take her up to the hospital tomorrow afternoon. Get her sorted out.’
There was murder in Margaret’s eyes, but she kept a smile fixed on her face. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be convenient for Detective Sun,’ she said through slightly clenched teeth.
Sun was oblivious. ‘No,’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tomorrow will be good. I very grateful to you Misses, eh…Miss…’
‘Doctor,’ Margaret said, flicking Li a look that might have dropped a lesser man. ‘But you can call me Margaret. And it’s my pleasure.’ She waved Sun’s cigarette smoke out of her face. ‘You know, you should have given that up long ago. Apart from the fact that it is not good for you, it is not good for your wife, or your baby.’
Sun looked dutifully ashamed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I should follow example of Chief. He has great will-power.’
Li looked as if he might kill him, and then he saw that Margaret was giving him another of her looks. Her eyes strayed down to his still clenched fist, where Sun’s scrunched up cigarette was beginning to turn to mush. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ And then she beamed beatifically. ‘I’ll see you guys later.’ And she turned and headed off into the early afternoon sunshine towards the white apartment block at the north end of the campus.
Sun grinned at Li. ‘Near thing, Chief.’
‘Let’s just go,’ Li said, with the weary resignation of a man who knows he’s been rumbled.
IV
Jia Jing lived in another of Beijing’s new luxury apartment complexes, this time beyond the China World Trade Centre at the east end of Jianguomenwai Avenue. As they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor, Li said, ‘There’s something wrong with the world, Sun, when you can live like this just because you can lift more weight than anyone else, or run further, or swim faster. I mean, what makes any of that more valuable than the guy who sweeps the streets?’
‘People aren’t going to pay to watch a guy sweeping the streets, Chief,’ Sun said. And, of course, Li knew that he was right.
They let themselves into the apartment with the key the security man on the desk had given them. If Sui’s apartment had been the height of luxury aspired to by the wealthy, Jia’s apartment was quite the opposite. It was large, with a long rectangular living and dining area with three bedrooms off it. But it was filled with cold, hard surfaces, unrelenting and austere. Jia Jing had not been a man to seek comfort, except perhaps between the legs of another man’s wife.
The floors were polished wood, reflecting cold, blue light from the windows. The furniture was antique, purchased for its value rather than its comfort. There were lacquered wooden chairs and an unforgiving settee, a magnificent mirrored darkwood cabinet inlaid with beech. An old-fashioned exterior Chinese door, restored and varnished and mounted on a heavy frame, stood in the centre of the room serving no apparent purpose. A dragon dog sat on either side of it. Beyond it, the sole comfort in the room — a luxuriously thick Chinese rug woven in pale pastel colours. The walls were hung with traditional Chinese scrolls. Candles in ornate holders sat on a dresser below a long antique mirror and a scene of ancient China carved in ivory and mounted in a case.
One of the bedrooms was empty. In another, a large rug on the wall above Jia’s antique bed was woven with a strange modern design of angles and circles. Facing the bed, a huge television sat on yet another antique dresser.
‘I’m surprised it’s not an antique television as well,’ Sun said.
There was a video player on the dresser beside it, and in the top drawer, a neatly stacked row of tapes in unmarked boxes. Li took one out, slipped it into the player, and turned on the television. After a moment they found themselves watching the flickering images of two black men and a Caucasian woman engaged in bizarre sex acts. Li swore softly and ejected the tape. He tried another. Two women writhed together in an apparently unsatisfied pursuit of sexual gratification. From their imprecations, and foul-mouthed mutual encouragement, it was clear that they were Americans. Li turned it off and glanced, embarrassed, at Sun. ‘He had a big appetite for a man with such small testicles.’
Sun frowned. ‘Small testicles?’
‘According to Wang, abnormally small.’
The third bedroom had been turned into a study. There were only three items of furniture in it. A desk, a chair and an antique roll-top dresser. The drawers and cupboards of the dresser were filled with personal papers — bills, receipts, letters. The death of Jia Jing was not a criminal investigation, so his personal effects would remain undisturbed. Li turned on the computer, and when Windows had loaded resorted to a trick Margaret had taught him. He clicked on the Internet Explorer web browser and opened up the document entitled HISTORY, where the last three hundred sites Jia had visited were stored. A quick scroll down them told Li that Jia’s use of the Internet had been primarily for accessing porn.