III
Li limped quickly down the corridor on the top floor of Section One, supporting himself on his stick. Thirty hours after his beating outside Dai Lili’s apartment, every muscle in his body had stiffened up. His head was pounding. Concentration was difficult. But he was a man driven. Sun was struggling to keep up with him.
‘Go home,’ Li told him. ‘There’s nothing more you can do till tomorrow.’ He stopped in the doorway of the detectives’ room and looked for Qian.
‘You’re not sending anyone else home,’ Sun protested.
‘No one else has a pregnant wife waiting for them.’ He spotted Qian taking a call at someone else’s desk. ‘Qian!’
‘You do, Chief,’ Sun persisted.
Li looked at him. ‘She’s not my wife,’ he said. And knew that if Margaret had her way now, she never would be.
‘Yes, Chief?’ Qian had hung up his call.
‘Get on to Immigration, Qian. I want everything they’ve got on Fleischer. Is he still in the country? How long has he been here? What address do they have for him?’ He scanned the desks until he saw the bleary face of Wu at his computer. ‘And Wu, run downstairs for me and ask the duty officer in Personnel for the file on Deputy Tao.’
Several heads around the room lifted in surprise. Wu seemed to wake up, and his jaw started chewing rapidly as if he just remembered he still had gum in his mouth. ‘They’ll not give it to me, Chief.’
‘What?’
‘Tao’s a senior ranking officer. They’ll only release his file to someone more senior.’
Li sighed. ‘I was hoping to avoid having to go up and down two flights of stairs. Can’t you use some of that legendary charm of yours?’
‘Sorry, Chief.’
Li turned and almost bumped into Sun. ‘Are you still here?’
‘I’ll ask Personnel if you want.’
‘Go home!’ Li barked at him, and he set off towards the stairs, his mood blackening with every step.
It was after ten by the time Li got back to his office with Tao’s police employment history, all the records from the Royal Hong Kong Police in six box files. He switched out the light and sat in the dark for nearly fifteen minutes, listening to the distant sound of voices and telephones in the detectives’ room. He didn’t really want to think about anything but the investigation, but he could not get Margaret out of his head. She was firmly lodged there, along with the pain that had developed over the past hour. His eyes had grown accustomed now to the faint light of the streetlamps that bled in through the window from the street below, and he opened the top drawer of his desk to take out the painkillers the hospital had given him. He swallowed a couple and closed his eyes. He couldn’t face going back to confront his father tonight, not after everything that had happened. And he needed to talk to Margaret, to lie with her and put his hand on her belly and feel their child kicking inside, to be reassured that they had, at least, some kind of a future.
He made a decision, switched on his desk light and took out a sheet of official Section One stationery. He lifted his pen from its holder and held it poised above the paper for nearly a minute before committing it to scrawl a handful of cryptic characters across the crisp, virgin emptiness of the page. When he had finished, he re-read it, and then signed it. He folded it quickly, slipped it into an envelope and wrote down an address. He got up and hobbled to the door and hollered down the hall for Wu. The detective hadn’t been prepared to run down two flights of stairs to fetch a personnel file for him, but could hardly refuse to take a letter down to the mail room. It was on the ground floor. A small satisfaction.
When a disgruntled Wu headed off with the envelope, Li returned to his desk and pulled the telephone directory towards him. He found the number of the Jinglun Hotel and dialled it. The Jinglun was Japanese owned, he knew. Neutral territory. The receptionist answered the call. ‘Jinglun Fandian.’
‘This is Section Chief Li of the Beijing Municipal Police. I need to book a double room for tonight.’
When he’d made the reservation, he dialled again. Margaret answered her phone almost immediately. ‘It’s me,’ he said. She was silent for a long time at the other end of the line. ‘Hello, are you still there?’
‘I love you,’ is all she said. And he heard the catch in her voice.
‘Is your mother there?’
‘She’s asleep.’
‘I’ve booked us a room at the Jinglun Hotel on Jianguomenwai. Take a taxi. I’ll meet you there in an hour.’
And he hung up. The deed was done, and there would be no going back. He opened the files on Tao.
Much of what was in them he knew already. Tao had been born in Hong Kong. His family had gone there from Canton at the turn of the twentieth century. He had joined the Royal Hong Kong Police, under the British, straight from school. It had been his life, and he had risen through the uniformed branch to the rank of Detective Sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department. The marriage he had entered into in his early twenties had gone wrong after their baby girl died from typhoid. He had never remarried.
The Hong Kong police had kept meticulous records of his investigations after he moved into the detective branch. He had been involved in several murder investigations, and a huge drugs bust which had netted more than five million dollars’ worth of heroin. He had also taken part in a major investigation into Triad gangs in the colony, including some undercover work. Li searched backwards and forwards through the records, but despite what appeared to have been a major police effort to crack down on the Triads, their success had been limited to a few minor arrests and a handful of prosecutions. Li remembered the campaign from his brief exchange period there in the middle-nineties. He remembered, too, the persistent rumours of a Triad insider within the force itself. Rumours that were never fully investigated, perhaps for fear of what such an investigation might turn up. Triads had been endemic in Hong Kong since the late nineteenth century, extending their tendrils of influence into nearly every corner of society. Dozens of apparently legitimate businesses were fronts for Triad organised crime. Bribery and corruption were rife among ethnic Chinese government officials and the police. All attempts by the British to stamp them out had failed. Originally it was the Communists who had driven the Triads out of mainland China, forcing them to concentrate their efforts in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Now, as freedom of movement and economic reform took hold, the scourge of the Triads was returning to the mainland. Britain’s failure was becoming once again China’s problem.
Li closed each of the box files in turn and stacked them neatly on his desk, doing anything that might stop his mind from focusing on the suspicions that were forming there. He was afraid to examine them in case he found only his own prejudice. He did not like anything about Tao. His personality, his approach to police work, the way he treated his detectives. He knew that Tao was after his job. And Tao had told Margaret about police policy towards officers marrying foreigners.
That tipped the balance. Li sighed and let his head fill up with his worst thoughts. Someone close to their investigation had known enough to be one step ahead of them on the bottles of perfume and aftershave. Why not Tao? And someone had told the thieves who broke in to Macken’s studio to steal the film, that he had made contact prints. Only the investigating officers from the local bureau had known that. And in Section One, only Li and Qian. And Tao.
Li screwed up his eyes and pushed his knotted fist into his forehead. The trouble was, there was not one single reason for him to connect Tao with either breach. The fact that he disliked the man was no justification. Even for the suspicion.