Margaret said quietly, ‘Will you come back to the apartment after?’
He shook his head. ‘I have an early start tomorrow. An appointment first thing.’
‘What appointment?’
But he looked away, and she knew that when he refused to meet her eyes he was being evasive. ‘Just an appointment,’ he said, and she was certain that he was hiding something from her.
III
The drive out to Dalingjiang was treacherous. There was black ice on the road where the frost had melted in the sun and then refrozen. Li drove carefully, with the heating up high, but still his feet grew cold. The temperature reading on the dash was minus nineteen centigrade.
He parked the Jeep at the top of the dirt track where Sun had parked it several hours before. Only now there was a phalanx of vehicles gathered there. Official cars and the meat wagon from Pao Jü Hutong, and there were nosy villagers gathered at the entrance of the alleyway leading to Lao Da’s house. Even at this hour, and in these temperatures, the curiosity of the Chinese prevailed.
Li heard the quickfire ratatat of a pneumatic drill as soon as he switched off the engine. And when he opened the door of his Jeep was shocked at just how loud it sounded in the still night air. It was little wonder that the villagers were curious. Overhead, stars shone in their firmament like the tips of white hot needles, incredibly vivid against the purest of black skies. Away from the lights of the city, such was their clarity you almost felt you could reach up and touch them, prick your fingers on their light. The moon, close now to its zenith, had risen over the mountains and washed the world with a silver light that you could only distinguish from daylight by its complete absence of colour. Li pushed his way through the crowd and made his way easily by the light of it to the gate of Lao Da’s courtyard, where a uniformed officer stood miserably on guard, wondering what he had done to deserve a job like that on a night like this. Li showed him his ID, and the officer raised his gloved hand stiffly to his frozen face in a brittle salute.
Through the moongate in the courtyard, Li could see black sheets stretched between the trees in the orchard to screen the activity around the grave from Xing Da’s family. Arc lights beyond them cast their light into the sky above, obliterating the stars. The drill stopped, and Li heard the hacking of several pickaxes trying to break through the frozen earth.
Through the windows Li could see, in the lit interior of the house, Lao Da sitting on his own at a table, a bottle and a glass in front of him. He looked up as Li stepped inside. From the bedroom Li could hear the faint, hoarse sobbing of Xing Da’s mother. There was no sign of the grandparents. Perhaps they had gone to a neighbour’s house. Lao Da waved him into the seat opposite, and filled another glass with clear liquor from a bulbous bottle with a label that read, Mongolian King. In the bottom of the bottle was a large, white twisted root of ginseng. The alcohol had the pungent, slightly perfumed smell of mao tai, distilled from the bitter-tasting sorghum wheat.
‘Gan bei,’ the runner’s father said, without enthusiasm, and they chinked their glasses and then drained them. Li tried to catch his breath as he watched Lao Da fill them up again. A photograph in a frame lay on the table, and Li turned it around to look at it. It was Xing Da breaking the tape in first place at some major event, his hair flying out behind him, unmistakable, the flag of independence his fellow athletes had described.
Outside, the pneumatic drill started up once more.
‘The saddest thing,’ Lao Da said, ‘was that he was supposed to come and see us at the end of October, for his mother’s birthday. But he phoned to say he couldn’t come, because he and some other members of the team had picked up the flu at a meeting in Shanghai. He sounded terrible. We were all very disappointed because, you know, we hardly ever saw him.’ He paused to drain half of his glass. ‘That was about three weeks before the accident. We never did see him again.’
Li emptied his second glass and stood up. There was nothing for him to say. No comfort he could give. He felt the mao tai burning all the way down to his stomach. ‘I’ll go and check on progress,’ he said. He wanted this over as soon as possible.
Beyond the screens, half a dozen men with pickaxes were breaking up the last of the earth around the coffin. It had been buried in only about three feet of soil, and the ground was frozen most of the way down. Li was sure there must be regulations covering burials like this, but if there were, nobody knew them. And if they did, they ignored them. The coffin itself was a crude, home-made box with a heavy lid, well nailed down. It took the officers who had uncovered the coffin several minutes to prise all the nails loose and remove the lid. The body inside was wrapped in a white blanket. Li moved closer for a better look as the pathologist stepped down into the grave to remove the wrapping.
Xing Da lay naked, with his hands crossed over his chest. His skin was a bloodless blue-white in the light of the arc lamps, and apart from the horrific chest and head injuries received in the crash, he looked as if he had lain down there the day before and simply gone to sleep. There was little or no sign of decay. The temperatures had plummeted just a day or two after he was buried, and he was fresher than if he had been kept in the chiller at the morgue.
He was a big man, with a well-developed upper chest and arms, and thick, sturdy legs. A sprinter. Built for power. The shadow of his hair lay across his scalp where it had been shaved off, shocking in its absence, and there was something like the hint of a smile on his face. As if he were mocking them. They had so many questions. And he had all the answers. Only, he could never tell them. Not now. Not ever.
Chapter Five
I
Li sat in the large outer office, perched uncomfortably on the edge of a very low settee which had almost swallowed him when he first sat in it. A young secretary at a computer studiously ignored him, and a grey-uniformed security guard watched him with interest from the other side of a glass door. From the window, Li saw the sun, still low in the sky, reflecting on the side of a glass skyscraper and casting long shadows on the city streets twenty-three storeys below. He glanced at his watch for the umpteenth time. He had been kept waiting nearly half an hour.
It was another five minutes before the phone rang and the secretary waved him towards the door of the inner office. ‘You can go in now.’ Li stood up and tugged the wrinkles out of his best suit. He pulled uncomfortably at the knot of his tie. It felt as if it were strangling him. Li never wore a tie. He knocked tentatively on the door, and at the behest of a voice beyond it, stepped into the inner office.
It was a large office with a huge desk set in front of floor-to-ceiling windows which opened on to a spectacular view of the city looking west. Li could see, in sharp outline against the distant sky, the Tianshou mountains where, at midnight the night before, they had pulled the body of Xing Da from the ground. The walls were covered with photographs of security people in various uniforms and at various locations. To the right of the desk, male and female mannequins modelled the latest uniforms. The male wore a light-grey, short-sleeved shirt and trousers with a dark tie and beret. His epaulettes bore silver stars and bars. She wore a light-grey baseball cap, silver-braided and adorned with the badge of Beijing Security. Abnormally large breasts pushed out the folds of her short-sleeved blouse. She wore white gloves, a knee-length skirt and black boots.