She finishes her cigarette, and he tosses his cheroot into the darkness. Embers scatter as it hits the ground. He steps closer, a hand slipping into the warmth beneath her jacket, his hand searching for small breasts pushed up into fullness by the Wonderbra sent by God for Chinese women. Hot breath on her face. She can smell the bitter smoke of his cheroot. His hand lingers only briefly at her breast before gliding up to her neck, fingers softly encircling it as he finds her lips with his and she chokes back her repugnance. Only, she has no breath. And she cannot speak. And for a moment she wonders what has happened to her, before realising that his fingers have turned to steel and are crushing her windpipe. She struggles to free herself, but he is far too strong. His face is still close to hers, watching as she fights for a life that is fading so quickly. His eyes are wide and full of something she has never seen before. She cannot believe she will die like this. Not here. Not now. Lights flash in her eyes, and the fight in her starts to ebb. Too fast. Too easy. All too easy. Then darkness descends like a warm cloud. And she is gone. To a place she has never dreamed of.
Her slight frame has become a dead weight in his arms, surprisingly heavy in lifelessness, as he lowers her to the ground, arranging her carefully on the paving stones. He glances quickly each way down the alley and can hear the guard stamping his feet just beyond the far end of the market street, where embassyland stretches off into silent darkness. There is a frisson for him, knowing that there is someone so close. So oblivious. It somehow emphasises his superiority. Crouching beside her, he looks at the dead girl on the ground and runs fingertips lightly over the features of her face. She is still warm. Blood still oxygenated. There is a tiny smile on his lips as he draws the knife from beneath his coat.
Monday
Chapter One
I
She woke with a start, heart pounding, consciousness holding on to the distant echo of the cry which had invaded her dreams. Dreams that hardly ever took her far from the surface, lingering always in the shallows where light and hearing were only a breath away. She sat upright, drawing that breath now, eyes quickly forming shapes from shadows, broken light from the street cut in small pieces by the branches of trees. She never drew the curtains. That way she could see fast, without blinding herself with sudden light.
There it was again, tiny and muffled, and unaccountably devastating in its effect. Nature had surprised her with this sensitivity, tuned to detect the smallest sound, even in sleep, triggering the fight or flight response that had her awake and alert in seconds. There was a third cry, and then a fourth, followed by a long grizzle and a series of sobs, and her alarm subsided into a weary acceptance that she would have to get out of bed. She glanced at the clock display on the bedside cabinet and saw that it was a little after five. Chances were she would not get back to sleep.
She slipped quickly from the bed and lifted her dressing gown from the back of a chair, shivering as she pulled it on and hugged it around herself. The heating would not come on again for another hour, and she still could not get used to the fact that she had no control over it. As she opened the door, she glanced back at the bed and the shape of Li Yan curled up in the foetal position, sheets and blankets pulled tightly around him, the soft, regular purr of his breathing filling the room. And she wondered why Nature did not endow fathers with the same sensitivity.
Li Jon Campbell lay on his back. Somehow he had managed to kick himself free of the quilt and had been wakened by the cold. And now that he was awake, he would discover that he was hungry. Margaret lowered the side of the crib and lifted her son into her arms, scooping up the quilt and wrapping it around him. In another month they would celebrate his first birthday. He was already a big boy. Ugly, Margaret told Li, like his father. Thick, black hair and beautiful slanting almond eyes, he looked like any other Chinese baby. And Margaret might have doubted that there was anything of her in him except for the strangest, startling blue pupils that met hers every time he looked at her. It was odd that it should have been her eyes that she had most obviously given him. She had read that the blue-eye gene was the weakest, and that within a few hundred years would be bred out of the human race entirely. Li Jon was doing his best to redress the balance.
She cuddled and whispered to him as she carried him through to the kitchen to prepare a bottle. She had been too weak after the Caesarian to breastfeed. His crying subsided, and he contented himself with grabbing her nose and holding on to it as if his life depended on it. She pulled herself free as she took him into the sitting room and dropped into a soft chair where she could cradle him and push the rubber teat between his lips. He chewed and sucked hungrily, and Margaret took the moment, as she always did, to find a small island of peace in the shifting sea of her unsettled world.
Not that she ever consciously analysed her position these days. She had long ago stopped doing that. It was not a deliberate decision. More a process of elimination. Her whole life was focused now on her baby, to the exclusion of almost everything else. She could not afford to dwell on her semilegal status, living unauthorised in the official apartment provided by the Beijing Municipal Police for the father of her child. She survived from visa extension to visa extension without daring to think what she would do if ever her application was refused. She had no real income of her own, except for the money they gave her for occasional lectures at the University of Public Security. She had not wielded her pathologist’s knife in almost a year. She was, in fact, no one she would recognise. She would pass herself in the street without noticing. She was less than a shadow of her former self. She was a ghost.
Li Jon was asleep by the time she laid him back in his cot, making sure he was well wrapped and warm. But now she had lost all her own heat and hurried back to bed, dropping her gown on the chair and slipping between sheets which had also grown cold. She shivered and slid across the bed to the heat radiating from Li Yan’s back and buttocks and thighs, and felt his skin burning against hers. He grunted, and she felt the reflex of his muscles as he tried to move away from this source of cold. She tucked in tight and held on.
‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled sleepily.
‘Oh, so you’re not dead,’ she whispered, and her voice seemed inordinately loud in the dark. ‘Or deaf. Or completely insensitive.’
‘What?’ And he half-turned toward her, still drowsy and heavy-eyed, clinging to the last vestiges of what had been a deep, dark slumber.
She slid a cold hand across his thigh and found, to her surprise, a full erection. ‘What the hell were you dreaming?’ she demanded.
He became aware of her cold, and his heat, and felt a warm flood of arousal fill his belly. ‘I dreamt I was making love to you,’ he said.
‘Yeah, right.’
He flipped over so that he was facing her. ‘It’s been a while.’
‘It has,’ she acknowledged. She squeezed him and smiled. ‘But I see that everything’s still in good working order.’