‘Fuck me,’ Wu said in awe, then glanced immediately at Tao, wondering if he would be fined another ten yuan for the swear box. But Tao hadn’t heard him.
‘Then there was a chase,’ Fu said. They followed him along the gallery and out into the narrow street at the end of which a mêlée of feet had emerged to leave their prints in the snow. ‘You can see these prints are quite different from the ones that arrived. Only half-prints, mainly left by the ball of the foot. They were running. The three bigger sets of feet after the two smaller ones, I’d say.’
With a heart like lead, Li followed the forensics man along the street, past palaces and pavilions, alleyways and galleries, illuminated now by floodlights, and up steps on to the wide concourse in front of the Qianqing Gate. Tao and Wu walked silently in their wake.
‘I guess that the two on the run were probably the women, from the size of their prints. They must have had a bit of a head start, because you can clearly see they went first to one of these copper pots, with one set of tracks leading to the other. They must have hidden inside them.’
Li closed his eyes, conjuring a dreadful image of Margaret crouched inside one of these pots in fear and panic. It was almost more than he could bear.
Fu said, ‘With all these lights, we can see their tracks quite clearly. Although it was dark then, I figure their pursuers must have been able to see them, too. The pots were no hiding place at all. You can pick out the other prints that followed them, straight to the pots, and then the scuffles around them where they must have dragged the women out. There’s some blood in the snow here.’
And they looked at a smear of vivid red in the frozen white. Li looked away quickly. What were the chances that he was looking at Margaret’s blood in the snow? He could not deal with the thought, and tried to keep his mind focused on the facts. Facts which gave him, at least, a little hope. There was only one body, after all. ‘What happened then?’ he asked, nearly in a whisper.
‘They dragged them off,’ Fu said. No one had told him that the blonde woman was almost certainly Li’s lover. ‘Back out to the Donghua Gate. Probably bundled them into a vehicle of some kind, then away.’
Away to where? And why? Li tried hard to think, but his concentration was shot. He felt a hand on his arm, and turned to find Tao looking at him, concerned. Li wondered if it was really sympathy he saw in those dark eyes magnified behind thick lenses. ‘You okay, Chief?’ he asked. Li nodded. ‘We’ll find her.’ And there was an unexpected steel and determination in his voice.
They left Fu and walked back to the Donghua Gate in silence, Li trying to piece together in his mind what must have happened. Dai Lili’s brother had come to Margaret’s apartment and convinced her to go with him to see his sister. Anger flared briefly in his chest. Why in the name of heaven did she go?
The boy must have been hiding his sister in the Forbidden City, but it was hardly a secret that Dai Lili had wanted to talk to Margaret. He had, himself, told Supervising Coach Cai as much. Could Cai be involved as he had first suspected? Li cursed himself now for his indiscretion. They must have been watching Margaret, or the boy. Or both. Whichever, they had followed them to the Forbidden City. There, they had killed the brother and snatched the two women. Why had they not just killed the women as well? Why did they want them alive? Information, perhaps? To know how much was known and by whom? If only they realised how little Li really knew or understood any of it. But until they did, maybe there was still the faintest chance of finding Margaret before they killed her. As they surely would.
They emerged into the floodlights in Donghuamen. Outside the gate the crowd of spectators had swelled. There were more than a hundred of them now, straining to catch a glimpse of whatever might be going on, ignoring the barking of the uniformed officers trying to keep them behind the tape.
Li turned to Wu. ‘I want arrest warrants for Fleischer, and Fan Zhilong, the CEO of the OneChina Recreation Club. And also for Coaching Supervisor Cai Xin. Soon as we can get them, I want them held at Section One for questioning. Nobody gets to talk to them before me. Understood?’
‘You got it, Chief.’ Wu shoved a fresh stick of gum in his mouth and hurried off.
Tao walked with Li to his Jeep. He took out a cigarette and offered him one. Li took it without thinking, and Tao lit them both. They stood for nearly a minute, smoking in silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tao said eventually.
‘About what?’
‘About everything.’
A car pulled in behind Li’s Jeep, and the tall, bespectacled figure of Professor Yang stepped out, wrapped tightly in his warm winter coat. ‘Section Chief,’ he called, and as Li and Tao turned, he hurried carefully through the snow towards them. ‘I’ve been trying to reach Margaret for hours. They told me at Section One that you were here.’ He glanced around. ‘I thought she might be, also.’ Fastidiously, he waggled each foot to flick off the accumulated snow from the shiny black leather of his polished shoes.
Li shook his head.
‘Well, then, I should pass the information on to you.’
‘I don’t really have time just now, Professor.’
‘I think it could be important, Section Chief. I know Margaret thought it was.’
It was enough to catch Li’s attention. ‘What?’
The Professor removed his rimless glasses to polish them with a clean handkerchief as he spoke. ‘Margaret asked me this morning if I knew anyone who could perform a genetic analysis on a sample of blood that she had taken from the swimmer she autopsied.’
‘Sui Mingshan?’
‘That’s him. Well, I took her up to see my friend at Beida. Professor Xu. He’s head of the College of Biogenic Science there. Margaret wanted him to analyse the sample to see if he could find any evidence of genetic disorder.’ He shrugged and placed his glasses carefully back on the bridge of his nose, smoothing back the hair behind his ears. ‘She didn’t really confide in me. In either of us. But I know she was hoping for more than that.’
‘And what did Professor Xu find?’ Li asked.
‘Oh, he did indeed find much more than that,’ Yang said. ‘But not a genetic disorder. Genetically modified HERV.’ He waited for Li to be impressed.
But Li only scowled. ‘HERV? What the hell’s that?’
Yang’s face fell as he realised he was going to have to explain. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s not a particularly easy concept for the layman.’
‘Try me,’ Li said.
Yang cleared his throat. ‘HERV. It’s an acronym, I suppose. From the English. Human endogenous retrovirus.’
‘Retrovirus.’ Li remembered Margaret talking about retroviruses the previous night. ‘Margaret told me something about that. It’s in our DNA or something.’
‘So you’re not a complete beginner,’ Yang said.
‘Maybe not,’ Li said. ‘But I don’t have much time. Get on with it, Professor.’
Yang glanced at Tao. ‘Endogenous,’ he said. ‘Means it’s something produced from within us. These HERV, they’re in all of us. The viral remnants of primeval diseases that afflicted the species during the earliest stages of evolution. No longer harmful to us, but there nonetheless, subsumed into our germline DNA and passed on from father to son, mother to daughter. An integral part of the human genome.’ He looked around him. ‘A bit like footprints frozen in the winter snow. But footprints which cross the borderland between genes and infection. Because, really, they are not genes, they are retroviruses, or bits of retroviruses, to be found in every human cell.’ His face was a study of concentration in trying to distil the complexities into bite-sized chunks that his audience might understand. ‘The thing is, although they are dormant, some scientists believe that occasionally they can be activated…’