‘Not so much an appetite as an obsession,’ Sun observed.
Li powered down the computer. There was something depressing about delving into the dark side of people’s secret lives once they were dead.
The bathroom was spartan and functional, cold white tiles on the floor, no mats or rugs to soften the shock for naked feet. In a wall cabinet above the sink, they found two bottles of aerosol aftershave, identical to those they had found in Sui Mingshan’s bathroom. The same brand. Chanel.
‘You think maybe the whole Chinese team got a job lot?’ Sun said, smiling. ‘Maybe Chanel is sponsoring our Olympic effort. We could be the best-smelling team at the Games.’
But Li wasn’t smiling. There were warning bells ringing in his head. He knew there was something wrong here. He picked up one of the bottles and fired a burst of aerosolised perfume into the air. They both sniffed and recoiled in unison. It was a strange, musky smell, like almonds and vanilla, with a bitter edge to it. Not sweet.
‘No wonder he had to resort to watching porn if he smelled like that,’ Sun said.
But Li could not recall any scent from Jia the night they found him in the bedroom in Beichang Street. He remembered only the sweet, heavy scents of incense and sex in the room.
He sprayed a tiny puff from the other bottle on to his wrist and smelled the same bitter orange scent of the one he had tried at Sui Mingshan’s apartment. He held his wrist out for Sun to sniff.
Sun wrinkled his nose. ‘Same as the one at Sui’s place.’
Li nodded. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ The smell seemed to have filled the bathroom. It was offending Li’s olfactory senses and making him feel a little queasy. ‘I don’t like breathing this stuff.’
They opened the door of the apartment to find an elderly couple standing in the hallway looking perplexed, a little dazed. ‘Is this number twelve-oh-five?’ the old man asked.
‘Yes,’ Li said cautiously. ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘It’s our son’s apartment,’ the woman said, and Li suddenly recognised them as the old couple flanking Jia in the photograph they had found among his things. His parents. Sun flicked him a look.
‘We’re police officers,’ Li said. He had no idea if they had been notified.
‘They told us this morning,’ Jia’s father said. ‘We’ve travelled up from Yufa by bus.’ Li knew Yufa. It was a small town on the road south to Gu’an. The bus would have taken several hours. He could imagine what a depressing journey it had been. ‘Did you know him?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘He was a lovely boy,’ his mother said. ‘Couldn’t do enough for us. He bought us a colour television, and a video recorder, and a new refrigerator…’
‘Sent us money every month,’ his father said. Money that would stop now. And Li wondered how much of what Jia owned they would inherit. The value of the antiques in the apartment alone was probably several thousand dollars. More than they could have hoped to earn in a lifetime. But the inheritance laws were still in a state of flux. It might be that everything went to the State. Had they any real idea how much their son had been earning?
‘Do you know how he died?’ his mother asked, and Li again wondered at a creature so small producing a monster like Jia. In his mind he saw the weightlifter lying dead between the legs of his adulterous lover, lying cut open on the pathologist’s table. Either image would have been shocking to this old couple.
‘It was natural causes,’ Li said. ‘A heart attack.’ And he added unnecessarily, ‘He died at the home of a friend.’ He would see that they never learned the truth. They were much more worth protecting than those who concerned the Minister of Public Security.
But as he and Sun left them to enter their son’s apartment, he knew that nothing could protect them from what they would find in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. His heart ached for the poor parents of a dead rich boy.
In the street outside, a sweeper wearing a grubby white hat and a blue face mask rattled the twigs of his broom along the gutter, collecting trash in a long-handled can that opened and closed, like a mouth, to devour the garbage. He emptied it into a large trash can on wheels. His eyes above the mask were dead and empty, his skin dry, cracked, ingrained with the dust of the city. And Li wondered why he wasn’t just as deserving as a weightlifter or a swimmer. But the new creed, it seemed, was that only the rich and successful were worth rewarding. Although death, he figured, had probably never been part of that reckoning. And he recalled his Uncle Yifu quoting an old Chinese proverb. Though you amass ten thousand pieces of silver, at death you cannot take with you even a copper penny.
V
Someone had brought a portable television up from an office downstairs, and when Li and Sun got back to Section One, most of the officers in the detectives’ office were crowded around it. The excited voices of a couple of commentators soared above the roar of the crowd belting out of the set’s tiny speakers.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Li barked. And they all turned guiltily towards the door, like naughty children caught in an illicit act. Someone hurriedly turned the set off. Sun smirked happily at them. He wasn’t one of the bad boys.
Wu said, ‘Professional interest, Chief. They’ve already had the four hundred meters freestyle and the hundred meters butterfly. They’ve got the breast stroke and the crawl to come. One hundred and two hundred meters. We figured we should take it in.’
‘Oh, did you? And what does Deputy Tao think?’
‘He told us to turn it off,’ Sang said.
‘And you ignored him?’ Li was incredulous.
‘Not while he was here,’ Wu said. ‘But he went out about half an hour ago. He didn’t say we had to keep it switched off when he wasn’t here.’
Li cast a disapproving glare around the faces turned towards him. ‘You guys are fools,’ he said. ‘You didn’t even put a lookout on the stairs.’
And they all burst out laughing.
But Li’s face never cracked. ‘I suggest you get back to your work. We’ve got a murder inquiry in progress here.’ He turned towards the door as they started returning to their desks, but paused, turning back. ‘Just out of interest…how are we doing?’
‘Won the butterfly, first and second,’ Wu said. ‘Lost the freestyle, but took second and third. We’re ahead on points.’
Li allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘Good,’ he said.
He was halfway down the corridor when Qian caught up with him. He was clutching a sheaf of notes. ‘Couple of things, Chief.’ He followed Li into his office. ‘You asked about dope-testing.’
Li was surprised. ‘You’ve got that already?’
‘It’s a matter of record, Chief. Same with all the sports authorities. Seems that nowadays they all do out-of-competition testing, to discourage athletes and other sportsmen from using drugs to enhance their training. They’re given twenty-four hours’ notice, and then it’s mandatory to provide the required urine samples.’
‘Couldn’t they just turn in clean samples?’ Li asked. ‘Someone else’s urine, even?’
‘Not these days, apparently,’ Qian said. ‘The guy I spoke to from the Chinese authority said the athlete being tested is assigned what they call a chaperone. Someone of the same sex. He or she stays with the athlete the whole time. Has to watch them pissing in the jar, and then the athlete has to pour the stuff into two small bottles they label as A and B samples. These are packed into small cases, locked with special seals and sent to a laboratory for analysis.’