They found Xing Da’s parents’ house next to a derelict cottage, long abandoned and left to rot. The children of the village no longer stayed to work the land as their ancestors had done for centuries before them. They left for the city at the first available opportunity, and when their parents died, their houses were allowed to fall down — or else be purchased by entrepreneurs and developed as country cottage retreats for the wealthy.
Li pushed open a rusted green gate and Sun followed him into the courtyard of Lao Da’s cottage. In the light from the windows they could see firewood and coal stacked along the wall. Frozen persimmons were laid out along the window ledges. Li knocked on the door, and a wizened old man opened it, too old to be Xing Da’s father. Li told him who he was and who he was looking for, and the old man beckoned them in. He was Xing’s grandfather, it turned out. His wife, who looked even older, sat on a large bed pushed up below the window by the door to the kitchen. She glanced at the strangers without showing the slightest interest. Her eyes were vacant. In the light, Li saw that the old man’s face was like parchment, dried and creased. His hands, the colour of ash, were like claws. But his eyes were lively enough, dark and darting. He called through to the bedroom, and Lao Da emerged, peering at Li and Sun with suspicious eyes. Although lao meant old, Lao Da was only in his forties, half the age of his old father. He glanced beyond the policemen to the kitchen doorway where his wife had appeared, holding aside the ragged curtain that hung from it.
‘It’s the police,’ he said to her. And then to Li, ‘What do you want?’
‘It’s about your son,’ Li said.
‘He’s dead,’ his father said, his voice laden with everything that meant to him.
‘I know,’ Li said. ‘We have reason to believe that the crash he was involved in might not have been an accident.’ He saw the frown of confusion spreading over Lao Da’s face, like blood soaking into a carpet. ‘We’d like to perform an autopsy.’
‘But we buried him,’ his mother said from the doorway, in a small voice that betrayed her fear of what was coming next. ‘Out there, in the orchard.’
‘If you’d agree to it,’ Li said, ‘I’d like to have him exhumed.’
‘You mean you want to dig him up?’ his father said. Li nodded, and Lao Da glanced towards his wife. Then he looked again at Li. ‘You’ll have a job,’ he said. ‘The ground out there’s frozen harder than concrete.’
Chapter Four
I
They drove west along Xizhimenwai Dajie past the towering floodlit neo-classical buildings that housed the Mint and the China Grain Reserves Corporation, the Paleozoological Museum guarded by a velociraptor, the French supermarket and department store, Carrefour, the latest in Beijing chic. Li was lost in silent thoughts Margaret did not want to interrupt. Burned still on his retinas was the image of the grave in the shadow of the mountains. Lao Da had led them by torchlight through a moongate from the courtyard into a small adjoining orchard. Trees that in summer would be laden with fruit and leaves, were winter stark, silent mourners for a young man who had played in this place as a child, guardians of a grave marked by a crude stone slab. A large pink wreath leaned still against the wall. Frozen fruit and vegetables, a bowl of rice, were laid by the stone. The charred remains of paper money, burned by poor people to provide their wealthy son with the means to survive in the afterworld, had been scattered by the breeze and were stuck now by frost to the ground all around. He had heard the mother sobbing, and seen her shadow moving in the courtyard. She had not wanted her son disturbed. But his father had said if there was the slightest doubt about how he had died, then they should know the truth. For they could not lay him properly to rest until they did.
Li had waited until he and Sun were away from the house before he called in the exhumation team on his cellphone. They would need pickaxes to break the ground, he had told them, perhaps even a pneumatic drill. And he warned them to bring screens to place around the grave. He did not want to subject the parents to more grief than he was already causing them. And lights, for it would be dark.
Margaret had agreed to do the autopsy. But he had deliberately refrained from telling her too much. He did not want in any way to influence her findings.
He turned in at the entrance to the Chinese Skating Association, and showed his Public Security ID to the man on the gate, who ventured reluctantly from his glass cubicle wrapped in a thick coat, hood pulled tight around a face that was red with the cold. He waved them through. Li steered north past the competition hall and the training gym and parked in front of the Shouti Hotel where the American athletes were staying.
They walked the rest of the way to the stadium, joining the streams of people heading in excited expectation to watch the athletics, and crossing an ornamental bridge over a narrow stream whose still water filled the air around it with the perfume of raw sewage.
The stadium was a huge oval, with upper terraces leading to the eighteen thousand seats which ringed the interior track. At various times, the floor space was flooded and frozen to create an ice rink, and in front of the competitors’ entrance, there was a massive silver representation of a speed-skater. In the vast subterranean space beneath the stadium, thousands of shoppers still thronged a popular market selling clothes and fancy goods.
‘We’re not really just coming here to watch the athletics, are we?’ Margaret asked as they approached a large ornamental wall carved with the figures of ice-skaters and the five inter-linked rings of the Olympics.
Li dragged himself away from his thoughts. ‘I want to talk to some of the athletes,’ he said. ‘And their coach.’ Qian had downloaded some biographical information for him on Chinese athletics’ recently appointed Supervisor of Coaching, a position created with new powers over even the national team coach. It had made interesting reading.
Supervisor Cai Xin was a tall, lean man with short, grey hair and square, steel-rimmed glasses. Li had expected to find him in a tracksuit and trainers. Instead, he wore a dark business suit with polished black shoes, a white shirt and red tie. He seemed distracted, and less than pleased to see Li and Margaret. With field events under way, and the first track event in less than an hour he did not consider this a convenient time to conduct an interview with the police, and told them as much. Li apologised and introduced Margaret. Cai, although displeased, remained polite. His English was immaculate, and he spoke it, unbidden, in deference to the American doctor. He led them down a long, brightly lit corridor beneath the main stand, and into a private room with leather settees and a large television set, and panoramic windows with a view on to the track. The stadium was vast, rows of seats rising up on either side into a cavernous roof space criss-crossed with tubular supports. The pole vault, the men’s long-jump and the men’s shot-put were already in progress. Competitors and officials milled around the area inside the six-lane track. The bleachers were about two-thirds filled, and people were still streaming in. Occasional bursts of applause punctuated the hubbub of people and competition that filled the hall.