‘Sure. We got facilities here that would let me do a pretty sophisticated radioimmunassay.’
‘What kind of sample, exactly, would you need?’ Margaret asked.
‘I’d need forty to fifty strands of hair from the vertex of the scalp, cut at scalp level with surgical scissors.’
Margaret said, ‘You’d need alignment maintained?’
‘Sure. You’ll have to rig up a little collection kit to pack it in, so that you maintain hair alignment and root-tip orientation for me. About two and a half centimeters would provide an average sixty-day growth length.’
Margaret said to Li, ‘Is the weightlifter still at Pau Jü Hutong?’
‘In the chiller.’
‘Then we’d better get straight over there and give him a haircut.’
Pi sipped his tea. ‘It would help,’ he said, ‘to know what I was looking for.’
‘Hormones,’ Margaret said.
‘What, you mean like anabolic steroids? Testosterone derivatives, synthetic EPO, that kind of thing?’
‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘I mean the real thing. No substitutes or derivatives or synthetics. Testosterone, human growth hormone, endogenous EPO. You can measure the endogenous molecule, can’t you?’
Pi shrugged. ‘Not easy. Interpretation is difficult because physiological levels are unknown. But we can look at the esters of molecules like testosterone enanthate, testosterone cypionate and nandrolone, and determine whether they are exogenous or not. So I should be able to identify what is endogenous.’
Li looked confused. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
Professor Yang said, ‘I think it means, yes, Section Chief.’
IV
The light was fading by the time Margaret got back to the apartment. The snow had stopped falling, but it still lay thick across the city, masking its beauty and its imperfections. She had cut a lock of Jia Jing’s silken black hair according to Doctor Pi’s instructions, and delivered it in its proper orientation back to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination.
Her mother had not yet returned, and there was something cheerless about the place. More so than usual. She felt the radiator in the sitting room and it was barely lukewarm. The communal heating was acting up again. The overhead electric light leeched the colour out of everything in the apartment, and Margaret shivered at the bleak prospect of life here on her own with a baby. There was no question of Li being allowed to share the apartment with her officially. She would not even be allocated a married couple’s apartment — because she was not married to him. And they could not afford to rent privately if Li was unemployed.
She arched her spine backwards, pressing her palms into her lower back. It had started to ache again. Her antenatal class was due to begin in just over an hour. She had not felt like going out again into the cold and dark, but the apartment was so depressing she could not face the prospect of sitting alone in it waiting for her mother to return. A wave of despair washed over her, and she bit her lip to stop herself crying. Self-pity was only ever self-defeating.
She went through to the bedroom and opened the closet. Hanging amongst her clothes was the traditional Chinese qipao which she had bought to wear on her wedding day. She had sat up night after night unpicking the seams and recutting it to accommodate the bulge of her child. Still, it would have looked absurd. She had intended wearing a loose-fitting embroidered silk smock over it, to at least partially disguise her condition. She lifted the qipao and the smock from the rail and laid them out on the bed beside the red headscarf that Mei Yuan had given her, and gazed upon the bright, embroidered colours. Reds and yellows and blues, golds and greens. Dragons and snakes. In the bottom of the closet were the tiny silk slippers she had bought to go with them. Black and gold. She lifted them out and ran the tips of her fingers over their silky smoothness. She threw them on the bed suddenly, knowing she would never wear them, and the tears came at last. Hot and silent. She didn’t know whether she was crying for herself, or for Li. Maybe for them both. Theirs had been a difficult, stormy relationship. They had not made things easy for themselves. Now fate was making them even harder. She had been born in the Year of the Monkey, and Li in the Year of the Horse. She remembered being told once that horses and monkeys were fated never to get on. That they were incompatible, and that any relationship between them was doomed to failure. She felt her baby kick inside her, as if to remind her that not everything she and Li had created between them was a failure. Perhaps their child could bridge the gulf between horse and monkey, between China and America. Between happiness and unhappiness.
A hammering at the door crashed into her thoughts and startled her. It was a loud, persistent knocking. Not her mother or Mei Yuan. Not Li, who had a key. Hastily, she wiped her face and hurried through the hall to answer the door. Before she did, she put it on its chain. The moment it opened, the knocking stopped, and a young man stepped back into the light of the landing, squinting at her between door and jamb. He was a rough-looking boy, with a thick thatch of dull black hair, and callused hands. She saw the tattooed head of a serpent emerging from the arm of his jacket on to the back of his hand. He smelled of cigarettes and alcohol.
‘You Doctah Cambo?’
Margaret felt a shiver of apprehension. She had no idea who this young man was. He was wearing heavy, workman’s boots, and could easily have kicked in her door. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘You come with me.’
‘I don’t think so.’ She tried to close the door, but he was there in an instant, his foot preventing her from shutting it. ‘I’ll scream!’ she said shrilly.
‘My sister wanna talk t’you,’ he said gruffly, and pushed the door back to the extent of its chain.
‘Who the hell’s your sister?’
‘Dai Lili.’
Margaret stepped back from the door as if she had received an electric shock. The hammering of her heart was making her feel sick. ‘How do I know she’s your sister? What does she look like?’
He touched his left cheek. ‘She got mark on face.’
And Margaret realised what a stupid question she had asked. Millions of people had seen Dai Lili running on television. Her birthmark was her trademark. ‘No. I need more.’
He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a dog-eared business card. ‘She gimme this to give you.’ And he thrust it through the gap towards her. It was the card she had given Dai Lili that day outside the hospital. She knew it was the same card because it had the scored-through phone number of her friend scrawled on it.
Margaret took a deep, tremulous breath. The boy was clearly agitated. He kept glancing nervously towards the elevators. It was a big decision for her. She knew she probably should not go, but the picture in her mind of the young runner’s face, the fear in her eyes, was still very vivid. ‘Give me a minute,’ she said, and she closed the door before he could stop her. She shut her eyes, her breath shallow now and rapid. ‘Shit!’ she whispered to herself. And then she went into the kitchen and lifted her coat and hat.
When she opened the door again, the young man seemed startled to see her, as if he had already decided she was not going to reappear. ‘Where is she?’ Margaret asked.
‘You got bike?’
‘Yes.’
‘You follow me.’
In the detectives’ room a crowd was gathered around the television set to watch the ad going out on air. Li had taken the very nearly unprecedented step of asking Beijing TV to put Dai Lili’s photograph out on all of its channels, appealing for any information from the public on her whereabouts. They had set up six lines, with a bank of operators to take calls. Li was certain that she was involved. Somehow. She had been desperate to talk to Margaret, and now she was missing. He was convinced that if they could find her she would be the key to everything. But only if she was still alive. And his hopes of that were not high.