‘Section Chief.’ The voice made them break apart, and Li turned to see the head of the pathology lab crossing the lobby toward them, double doors swinging in his wake. Professor Nie Rong was a tall, skinny man, with tiny lozenge-shaped spectacles perched always below the bridge of an unusually long nose. The few strands of hair that remained to him were carefully arranged across his great, bald dome. His white lab coat flapped open as he walked, and Li wondered what the head of the laboratory was doing here at this time of night. He seemed oddly reticent, reluctant to meet Li’s eye. He shook hands with Margaret, and then folded his arms across his chest, still clutching a well-thumbed folder in his left hand. Li speculated on whether he might be embarrassed by Li’s presence at the facility. He must have heard that he had been suspended. ‘I’m sorry,’ the professor said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this…’
‘If you’re going to ask me to leave,’ Li said, ‘we’re just going.’
‘No,’ the professor said hastily. ‘It’s not that. I…I’m afraid there’s been a fuck-up in the lab.’ It was so unusual to hear the normally mild-mannered and polite head of pathology use such language that Li was startled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, this time reverting to English and inclining his head toward Margaret. ‘You ask for DNA profile in big hurry yesterday.’
Margaret frowned, flicking the still wet curls from her face. ‘You mean the sample from the cigar butt found by Lynn Pan’s body?’
He nodded. ‘We tell you is different from DNA found at other murders.’
Margaret looked at him, mystified. ‘So what’s changed?’
‘Lab assistant mix up samples. DNA same as other murders.’
Margaret immediately looked at Li. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered, the implications of what the professor had just told them striking her like a slap in the face. She turned back to him. ‘You sure?’
‘Sure, I’m sure.’
Li was finding it hard to take on board. ‘But if that’s true, then Pan’s killer is the same person who killed the four prostitutes. The Beijing Ripper.’ All the distinctions he had drawn between the Ripper killings and the Pan murder came tumbling down around his head.
Professor Nie moved on quickly, perhaps hoping to distract and deflect from the appalling error committed by his lab. He waved the folder in his hand. ‘Also we have positive DNA match between kidney sent to you and victim number four. And comparison of notes? One with kidney, one with ears? Calligraphy expert believe written by same hand. But no matter. We make chemical analysis of red ink. Same in both. Paper same, too. Ve-ery distinctive watermark.’
On the steps, Margaret took Li’s arm, and noticed that the crescent of moon was almost imperceptibly bigger tonight. ‘So,’ she said. ‘The Beijing Ripper is a cop. Makes sense, I guess.’
A tidal wave of thoughts he had been diverting elsewhere as a result of the DNA test was flooding back into Li’s head. The Ripper had known Li’s name and the address of Section One, to be able to send him the half kidney. Just as Pan’s killer had known his home address and had access to the ministry compound. And he recalled Lao Dai’s words in the park when he first described to him the nature of the murders. You have an enemy, Li Yan, he had said. And in response to Li’s incredulity, This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families, what else do all these murders have in common? The police. That is what Old Dai had said. And Li. Someone with a grudge against him. Jealousy or revenge. What had never occurred to either of them was that the killer himself might also be a policeman. ‘Commissioner Zhu,’ Li said.
‘What?’ Margaret looked at him, startled.
‘He attended the lecture given in Beijing two years ago by Thomas Dowman, the Jack the Ripper author. He knew all about the original Ripper murders, and he personally asked for daily reports on our progress on the Beijing killings.’
Margaret pulled a face. ‘Probably half the ministry went to that lecture.’
‘He’s an expert with a knife. He told me himself his father taught him how to gut a deer. They poisoned the animals with salt and then slit their throats.’
Margaret cocked an eyebrow. ‘That’s a little more convincing,’ she conceded. And she recalled Dai’s comment on him the night he made the speech at Li’s award ceremony. He does not much like our young friend. He is full of praise. Noisy praise, like a drum with nothing inside it. He says only good things of Li Yan. His tone is honeyed, but there is vinegar on his tongue.
‘He’s the only one I told about Hart examining the graphs to try and establish the identity of Lynn Pan’s liar,’ Li said.
But Margaret was shaking her head. Still none of it really made sense. ‘But what was the lie she caught him in? I mean what could she possibly have found out about him in the course of those tests? That he was the Beijing Ripper? How?’
Li’s head hurt. He tried to shake it free of confusion. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ In spite of all his schooling in the traditions of Chinese detective work, Li still needed a motive. The killing of all those young prostitutes. There is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself, Dai had said. What purpose? To leave Li drowning in a sea of murders he could not solve? To undermine and discredit him? Did the commissioner really dislike him so much? Li knew, because Zhu had made it clear, that he did not approve of Li’s award, or the use of his image to spearhead the ministry’s poster campaign. But it hardly seemed a motive for murder.
And then the image returned to him of the figure in the CCTV video crossing the hall in the EMS post office. A tall figure, like Zhu. Slightly stooped. Like Zhu. He closed his eyes and let the air escape slowly from his lungs through slightly pursed lips. What a fool he had been to trust him.
III
The area around the window in the balcony had been taped off. Lyang had been told not to touch anything in that part of the living room. But forensics were long gone. So, too, the crowds in the gardens below. The management had sent someone out to clean the blood from the paving stones. A woman in a blue overall with bleach and a bucket of hot water. She had been at it for nearly an hour, but the stain was still visible, however faintly. Which would not do at all. Li had no doubt that a team of workmen would be there first thing in the morning to tear up the old pavings and lay new. It would not do to have the blood of one of its residents staining the reputation of the complex, a constant reminder to all the others of the tragedy that had taken place there. It was the kind of thing that could lower the value of property. And no one would want that.
Li moved away from the kitchen window, carrying with him the three glasses of Bill Hart’s scotch that he had brought in to dilute with water. It was how Bill said true scotch should always be drunk, Lyang had told them. A little water to release the flavour. No ice. That killed the taste. Lyang was sprawled at one end of the settee, her left leg folded up to her chest, an arm around it to hold it there, a cigarette burning in her free hand. It was her first cigarette, she confessed, since the day they told her she was pregnant. It had seemed so important, for the baby’s sake, to give up. Now that she was the only one affected by it, she didn’t give a damn. ‘Bill would have been horrified,’ she said, and then bit her knuckle to stop herself crying.