The phone rang, and Li nearly snatched the receiver from its cradle. It was Wang. He listened for almost two minutes without comment, and then thanked the doctor and hung up. He said, ‘Jia also had marked thickening of the microvasculature. But Wang says it was still the narrowing of the main coronary artery that killed him.’
Margaret said, ‘Yes, but the thickening of the arterioles would have done the job eventually, even if his artery hadn’t burst on him.’
Li nodded. ‘That’s pretty much what Wang said. Oh, and toxicology also confirmed, no steroids.’
Sun had again been concentrating on following the English. And now he turned to Li and said, ‘So if Jia Jing hadn’t died of a heart attack, he would probably have turned up dead in an accident somewhere, or “committed suicide”.’
Li nodded thoughtfully. ‘Probably. And he’d probably have had that long pony tail of his shaved off.’ He paused, frowning in consternation. ‘But why?’
III
The briefing was short and to the point. The meeting room was filled with detectives and smoke. Nearly every officer in the section was there, and there were not enough chairs for them all. Some leaned against the wall sipping their green tea. Deputy Section Chief Tao Heng sat listening resentfully, nursing his grudges to keep them warm in this cold, crowded room.
Delivering the preliminary autopsy reports to the section helped Li clarify things in his own head, assembling facts in some kind of relevant order, creating that order out of what still felt like chaos.
‘What is clear,’ he told them, ‘is that we have one murder, and at least three suspicious deaths. There is little doubt from the findings of the autopsy, that the swimmer Sui Mingshan did not commit suicide. He was murdered. Xing Da, who was driving the car in which the three athletes died, was dead before the car crashed. So the accident was staged. And although we don’t have their bodies for confirmation, I think we have to assume that the other two were also dead prior to the crash. But what’s bizarre is that Xing seems to have died from natural causes. Possibly a virus which attacked the microscopic arteries of the heart.’
He looked around the faces in the room, all clutching their preliminary reports and listening, rapt, as Li laid out the facts before them like the strange and incomprehensible pieces of a gruesome riddle. ‘Stranger still is the fact that the swimmer Sui Mingshan, and the weightlifter Jia Jing, were suffering from exactly the same thing as Xing. Hypertrophy — thickening — of the microvasculature. Both would have died from it sooner or later if murder and fate had not intervened.’
He watched Wu pulling on a cigarette and he ached to suck a mouthful of smoke into his own lungs. He imagined how it would relieve his ache immediately and draw a veil of calm over his troubled mind. He forced the thought out of his head. ‘But perhaps the strangest thing of all, is that each of them had had his head shaved. With the exception, of course, of Jia.’
Wu cut in. ‘Could that be because he was the only one who really did die a natural death? I mean, sure, this clogging of the tiny arteries would have killed him in the end, but he died before anyone could mess with him.’
One of the other detectives said, ‘But why was anybody messing with any of them anyway, if it was some virus that was killing them?’
‘I’d have thought that was pretty fucking obvious,’ Wu said. And immediately he caught Deputy Section Chief Tao’s disapproving eye. He raised a hand. ‘Sorry, boss. I know. Ten yuan. It’s already in the box.’
‘What’s fucking obvious, Wu?’ Li said. It was a deliberate slap in the face of his deputy. There was some stifled laughter around the room.
Wu grinned. ‘Well, all these people had some kind of virus, right?’
‘Maybe,’ Li qualified.
‘And obviously someone else didn’t want anyone to know about it.’
‘A conspiracy,’ Li said.
‘Sure.’
‘And the shaven heads?’
Wu shrugged. ‘Jia’s head wasn’t shaved.’
‘You said yourself his death probably took your conspirators by surprise.’
Wu said, ‘There’s also the cyclist. We don’t know that his head was shaved.’
‘We don’t know that he’s involved at all,’ Li said.
‘Actually, I think we do, Chief.’ This from Qian. All heads turned in his direction.
‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.
Qian said, ‘I spoke to the doctor who signed the death certificate. He remembered quite distinctly that the deceased’s head had been shaved. Recently, he thought. There were several nick marks on the scalp.’ There was an extended period of silence around the room, before he added. ‘And there’s something else.’ He waited.
‘Well?’ Deputy Tao said impatiently.
‘The three “friends” who were with him when he fell into the pool? They’ve all gone back to Taiwan. So none of them are available for further questioning.’
‘And that’s it?’ The deputy section chief was not impressed.
Qian glanced uncertainly at Li. ‘Well, no…I’ve got a friend in the Taipei police…I flew the names by him.’ And he added quickly, ‘Quite unofficially.’ Relations between Beijing and Taipei were particularly strained at the moment. There was no official co-operation between the respective police forces.
‘Go on,’ Li said.
‘The three of them are known to the police there.’ He paused. ‘All suspected members, apparently, of a Hong Kong-based gang of Triads.’
More silence around the room. And then Li said, ‘So somebody brought them over here to be witnesses to an “accident”.’
‘And got them out again pretty fucking fast,’ Wu said. He screwed up his eyes as he realised what he had said, and his hand shot up. ‘Sorry, boss. Another ten yuan.’
There was laughter around the room. But Li was not smiling. The more they knew, it seemed, the more dense the mist of obfuscation that surrounded this case became.
Deputy Section Chief Tao pursued Li down the corridor after the meeting. ‘We need to talk, Chief,’ he said.
‘Not now.’
‘It’s important.’
Li stopped and turned and found the older man regarding him with a mixture of frustration and dislike. ‘What is it?’
‘Not something I think we should discuss in the corridor,’ Tao said pointedly.
Li waved his hand dismissively. ‘I don’t have time just now. I have a lunch appointment.’ And he turned and headed towards the stairs where Sun was waiting for him.
Tao stood and watched him go with a deep resentment burning in his heart.
IV
The Old Beijing Zhajiang Noodle King restaurant was on the south-west corner of Chongwenmenwai Dajie, above Tiantan Park and opposite the new Hong Zhou shopping mall, where you could buy just about any size of pearl you could imagine, and the smell of the sea was almost overpowering. Which was strange for a city so far from the ocean. The Zhajiang Noodle King was a traditional restaurant, serving traditional Beijing food, of which the noodle was indisputably king. Hence the name.