‘So what about the people we’re interested in?’
‘Sui was tested two weeks ago. Clean. Two of the three killed in the car crash were tested a week before the accident. Also clean. The cyclist hasn’t been tested since he was last in competition. It’s normal to test first, second and third in any competition, and then they pick someone else at random. He came third in his last event and was clean then. Jia Jing was tested six weeks ago. Also clean.’
Li sat down thoughtfully. ‘Almost too good to be true,’ he said. ‘There must be ways these people can cheat the tests.’
‘Seems like the international sports bodies have got wise to all the tricks, Chief. The stuff this guy told me! There was one female swimmer in Europe apparently laced her sample with whiskey, making it worse than useless. Pissing the Drink, they called it. She got banned. It’s easier for the women to cheat, though. I mean, you and I have got our dicks out there for the chaperone to see, there’s not much you can do about it. But this guy said they caught women hiding clean samples in condoms tucked up inside themselves. They were even buying one hundred percent drug-free urine on the Internet.’
Li said, ‘You’re taking the piss, right?’
Qian grinned. ‘Straight up, Chief. But there’s this World Anti-Doping Agency now, and they’ve got people supervising who know every trick in the book. It’s hard to put one by them. Really hard. And particularly in China, because the government here’s so keen for us to have this squeaky clean image for the Olympics.’
Li nodded. ‘You said, a couple of things.’
‘That’s right, Chief. The officer who attended the car crash that killed those three athletes? He’s in an interview room downstairs, if you want to talk to him.’
The traffic cop sat smoking in an interview room on the second floor. His black, fur-collared coat hung open, and he had unbuttoned his jacket to reveal his neatly pressed blue shirt below. His white-topped peaked cap sat on the table beside his ashtray. He had broad, well-defined northern features, short hair brushed carefully back, and was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, when Li and Qian came in. He stood up immediately, stubbing out his cigarette and snatching his hat from the table. He was clearly ill at ease, finding himself on the wrong side of a Section One interrogation.
‘Sit down,’ Li told him, and he and Qian sat down to face him across the table. ‘We have the report you filed on the fatal car crash you attended in Xuanwu District on November tenth. Three athletes, members of the Chinese hundred-meters sprint relay team, were found dead inside the wreck of their car.’ Li dropped the report on the table. ‘I want you to tell me what you found when you got there.’
The officer cleared his throat nervously. ‘I was on patrol with officer Xu Peng in the vicinity of Taoranting Park at eleven thirty-three on the night of November ten when we received a call that there had been a road accident in You’anmennei Dajie—’
Li cut him off. ‘Officer, I don’t want you to sit there and regurgitate your report. I can read, and I’ve read it. I want to know what’s not in the report. What you felt, what you smelled, what you thought.’ He nodded towards the ashtray. ‘You can smoke if you like.’
The officer appeared to be relieved, and took out a pack of cigarettes. After he had lit one, it belatedly occurred to him that he should have offered one to his interrogators. He held out the pack. Qian took one. Li didn’t. The officer took a deep drag on his. ‘I hate car crashes,’ he said. ‘They can be God-awful messy things. Bits and pieces of people all over the place. Arms and legs. Blood everywhere. Stuff you don’t want to see.’ It was as if Li had opened a floodgate. Now that he had started, the traffic cop couldn’t seem to stop. ‘My wife keeps on at me to give it up. Get a job in security. Anything but traffic.’ He flicked nervous eyes at them. ‘There’s nights I’ve come home and just lain on the floor shaking.’
‘Is that how it was the night you attended the accident in You’anmennei Dajie?’
The cop nodded. ‘Pretty much. The car must have been doing over a hundred KPH. It was a hell of a mess. So were the guys inside. Three of them. Two in the front, one in the back — at least, that’s where they started off. They weren’t wearing seat belts.’ He grimaced, recalling the scene, pulling images back into his mind that he had probably hoped were gone forever. ‘It’s bad enough when you don’t know them, but when it’s people you’ve seen on television, you know, big-time sports stars…well, you always figure stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like that.’
‘You recognised them, then?’
‘Not straight off. Well, two of them, yeh. I mean, they always wore their hair short anyway, so they didn’t look that different with their heads shaved.’
Li felt as if the room around them had faded to black. He focused his entire attention on the officer in front of him. ‘Their heads were shaved?’ he said slowly.
The cop seemed surprised by Li’s interest. He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a fashion these days, isn’t it? All these sports stars in the West have been shaving their heads last couple of years. It’s catching on here now.’
‘So you didn’t think it was odd?’
‘Not in those two, no. It was the other one that kind of shocked me. Xing Da. That’s why I didn’t recognise him at first. He always wore his hair shoulder length. It was kind of like his trademark. You always knew it was him on the track, all that hair flying out behind him.’
‘And his head was shaved, too?’ Li asked.
‘All gone,’ the traffic cop said. ‘It looked really weird on him.’
As they climbed the stairs back to the top floor Li said, ‘What about the doctor’s report?’ Pieces of this bizarre puzzle appeared suddenly to be dropping into place, but Li could still make no sense of the picture it was forming. It had, however, got his adrenaline pumping.
Qian said, ‘Got it upstairs, chief. But all he did was sign off the death certificates. Death caused by multiple injuries suffered in a car accident.’
‘Fuck!’ Li cursed roundly. A staged suicide in which the victim’s head had been shaved. Three deaths in what appeared at the time to have been an accident. All with their heads shaved. And all four, members of the Chinese Olympic team. The trouble was, the evidence from the crash — the vehicle and the bodies — was long gone.
Wu intercepted them on the top corridor. ‘Those tickets you got Qian to order for tonight, chief? They arrived by courier. I put them on your desk.’
‘Fine.’ Li brushed past, his mind on other things, but Wu called after him. ‘Something else, Chief…’
Li turned and barked, ‘What!’
‘Those three athletes in the car crash?’
He had Li’s attention now. ‘What about them?’
‘Only two of them were cremated, Chief. The parents of the other one live out in a village near the Ming tombs. Seems they buried him in their orchard.’
Li wanted to punch the air. But all he said was, ‘Which one?’
‘Xing Da.’
VI
The village of Dalingjiang lay fifty kilometers north-west of Beijing in the shadow of the Tianshou mountains, a stone’s throw from the last resting place of thirteen of the sixteen Ming emperors. A rambling collection of brick-built cottages with slate roofs and walled courtyards, Dalingjiang was believed to have the best feng shui in the whole of China. After all, its inhabitants reasoned, thirteen dead emperors couldn’t be wrong.