But Li was no longer interested in Napoleon. He was a long way from St Helena and arsenic poisoning. He was in an autopsy room looking at a young swimmer with a shaven head. To her surprise, he took Mei Yuan’s red smiling face in his hands and kissed her. ‘Thank you, Mei Yuan. Thank you.’
II
Margaret woke late, disorientated, panicked by unfamiliar surroundings. It was a full five seconds before she remembered where she was, and the blanks in her memory started filling themselves in like the component parts of a page on the internet. Li. Making love. Triads. His resignation. Fighting. His words coming back to her. I quit the force tonight. Like the cold steel of an autopsy knife slipping between her ribs. But she could feel no anger. Only his pain. And she wished that she could make it go away.
But nothing was going to go away. Not this hotel room, nor the bruised sky spitting snow at the window. Nor her mother waking alone in her tiny apartment, nor this baby that was growing and growing inside her.
Or the strange, nagging idea that had haunted her dreams, and was still there in her waking moments, not quite formed and not entirely within her grasp.
She slipped out of bed and took a shower, trying to wash away her depression with hot, running water. But like the scent of the soap, it lingered long after. She dressed and hurried downstairs, glancing furtively at the reception desk as she passed, hoping that Li had paid the bill and that she would not be stopped at the door like some common prostitute.
As the revolving door propelled her out on to the sidewalk, the cold hit her like a physical blow. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, and saw that the traffic in the avenue was still gridlocked in the snow. No chance of a taxi.
It took her an hour to get back to her apartment, trudging the last twenty minutes through snow from the subway station. One side of her was white where the wind had driven the thick, soft flakes against her coat and her jeans. Her face had frozen rigid by the time she stepped into the elevator. Even had she felt the desire to smile at the sullen operator, her facial muscles would not have obliged. She peeled off her red ski hat and shook out the hair she had flattened beneath it. At least her ears were still warm.
‘Mom,’ she called out as she let herself into the apartment. But there were no lights on, and it felt strangely empty. ‘Mom?’ She checked the bedroom, but the bed had been made and the room tidied. Her mother was not in the kitchen or the toilet, and the sitting room was empty. There was a note on the gate-leg table beside her laptop. It was written in Mei Yuan’s careful hand.
I have taken your mother to Zhongshan Park to teach her tai chi in the snow.
Margaret felt hugely relieved. Her mother was the last person she had felt like facing right now. She switched on the overhead light and saw her own reflection in the window, and realised that she did not much want to deal with herself either. She switched the light off again and sat down at the table, turning on her laptop. The idea that had germinated in her sleep, taken root and poked through into her waking world, was still there. She did not want to try to bring it too sharply into focus in case she lost it. At least, not just yet.
She connected to the Internet, searched through the list of sites she had visited most recently, and pulled up the Time article on Hans Fleischer. She read it all through again, very slowly, very carefully, and then returned to the top of the profile. He had graduated from Potsdam with a double degree in sports medicine and genetics. Genetics. She scrolled down through the article again and stopped near the foot of it. After his time in Berlin he had returned to Nitsche, where he was said to have been involved in — the development of a new method of stimulating natural hormone production. These things had lodged very consciously with her yesterday. But there had been so many other things competing for space in her thoughts. It was sleep which had found room for them there, and brought them fizzing to the surface. And now the idea they had sparked was taking tangible shape in her waking mind.
She grabbed her coat from where it was still dripping melting snow on to the kitchen floor, and pulled on her ski cap and gloves, a vision of the runner with the purple birthmark filling her mind with a bleak sense of urgency. She had only just stepped into the elevator and asked the girl to take her to the ground floor when the phone rang in her apartment. But the doors closed before she heard it.
Li tapped his desk impatiently, listening to the long, single ring of the phone go unanswered at the other end. He waited nearly a minute before he hung up. It was the third time he had called. He had phoned the hotel some time earlier, but she had already left. Reception did not know when. There was a knock at the door and Qian poked his head around it. ‘Got a moment, Chief?’
Li nodded. ‘Sure.’ He felt a pang of regret. After today nobody would call him ‘Chief’ any more.
‘I got that information you wanted from Immigration. About Doctor Fleischer.’ He hesitated, as if waiting to be invited to continue.
‘Well?’ Li said irritably.
Qian sat down opposite him and flipped through his notes. ‘He was first granted an entry visa into China in nineteen ninety-nine. It was a one-year business visa with a work permit allowing him to take up a position with a joint-venture Swiss-Chinese chemical company called the Peking Pharmaceutical Corporation. PPC.’ He looked up and chuckled. ‘Dragons and cuckoo clocks.’ But Li wasn’t smiling. Qian turned back to his notes. ‘The visa has been renewed annually and doesn’t come up for renewal again for another six months. He doesn’t seem to be with PPC any more, though.’ He looked up. ‘Which is odd. Because there isn’t any record of who’s employing him now.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, he has two addresses. He rents an apartment on the east side, near the China World Trade Center. And he also has a small country cottage just outside the village of Guanling near the Miyun Reservoir.’ Qian raised his eyebrows. ‘Apparently he owns it.’ Which was unusual in the Middle Kingdom, because land ownership was one of those grey areas which had not yet been sorted out in the new China.
Li knew the reservoir well. It supplied more than half the city’s water. A huge lake about sixty-five kilometers north-east of Beijing, it was scattered with islets and bays beneath a backdrop of towering mountains still traced with the remains of the Great Wall. He had spent many weekends there during his student days, fishing and swimming. He, along with a handful of close friends, had often taken the bus from Dongzhimen on a summer’s day, packed lunches in their backpacks, and wandered off into the foothills beyond the reservoir to find rock pools large enough to swim in, away from the crowds. On a clear day, from up in the mountains, you could see the capital shimmering in the distant plain. There was a holiday village on the shores of the lake now, and it had become a popular resort for both Chinese and foreign tourists.
He wondered what on earth Fleischer was doing with a house out there.
III
Margaret slipped into Zhongshan Park by the east gate. Through a huge, tiled moongate, she saw snow-laden conifers leaning over the long straight path leading west to the Maxim Pavilion. But she turned south, past ancient gnarled trees and heard the sound of 1930s band music drifting through the park with the snow. It seemed wholly incongruous in this most traditional of Chinese settings.
Mei Yuan and her mother were not amongst the handful of hardy tai chi practitioners in the forecourt of the Yu Yuan Pavilion. Margaret stood, perplexed for a moment, wondering where else they might be. One of the women recognised her and smiled and pointed in the direction of the Altar of the Five-Coloured Soil.