Li unscrewed the cap of his flask and saw that the tea leaves had absorbed enough water to become fleshy and heavy and sink to the bottom. He took a sip and wondered when the man known as Cao Xu had stepped into those shoes. Sometime between the orphanage and the university, he figured. It had to have been at some point during the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, when almost every facet of a once civilised society had been broken down, and the bureaucracy that had been the glue holding China together for thousands of years had all but disintegrated. Li turned back to the printouts.
Cao had risen quickly through the ranks in the Criminal Investigation Department, before being assigned as a detective to the Section One serious crime squad. Li was struck, as he read, by how similar their career paths had been, Cao blazing a trail ahead of him. He was more than fifteen years Li’s senior, but then Li had been a teenager when he enrolled at the Public Security University. Cao had been well into his twenties. So Li had followed not too distantly in his wake.
Like Li, Cao had become Deputy Section Chief, before taking over as head of the department. He had achieved striking success in a rapidly changing city. The very nature of crime and criminals in the People’s Republic was morphing into something quite different then. As economic change swept in, unemployment grew, and crime festered among the increasingly large floating population of itinerant workers travelling around the country looking for work. Cao had introduced changes in policing, modernising the approach of investigators, leading the section to greater reliance on science and technology. He had been a great administrator, politically aware, and a Party member. It was only a matter of time before he climbed higher up the promotion ladder.
When he was appointed deputy commissioner, his passage to the very top seemed assured.
Then a case he had cracked nearly ten years earlier came back to haunt him. Li took another sip of tea and laid his folder on the table. He remembered it very well. A young man who had raped and murdered several women was finally arrested. The evidence against him was flimsy, but enough to convince the judges in a very high profile trial that he was guilty. The authorities had made a great public show of the trial at the time, to increase public esteem for the police which they were anxious to portray as a modern and effective force, protecting ordinary citizens from crime and criminals. The investigation had been led by the then Section Chief Cao Xu. The young man was convicted and executed.
Seven years later, a brash new deputy chief of Section One, led an investigation into a similar spate of killings, tracking down and catching the perpetrator — a mentally subnormal middle-aged man living with his elderly mother in a siheyuan in the north of the city. Evidence found in his home and a subsequent DNA test revealed that he had also been responsible for the killings seven years earlier. Cao Xu had sent an innocent man to his death. And such had been the change in media coverage of such matters during the intervening years that it had been impossible to sweep it under the carpet. Cao’s shining star had been tarnished and was no longer in the ascendancy. The deputy section chief who had led the investigation that discredited him was Li Yan.
Li turned to the window and watched the featureless agricultural plains of northern China drift past. A small cluster of crumbling brick dwellings on the banks of a murky-looking canal. Stubbly fields lying empty and fallow, the early morning sun casting its long shadows across the land. It had never before occurred to him that Cao Xu might hold that against him. He had not set out to discredit the deputy commissioner. Cao Xu’s mistake had come to light quite accidentally in the course of another investigation. But, as the authorities had blamed Cao, so he might well have seen Li as the cause of his ills. The full-stop on his progress to the very top. An ambitious man thwarted, like a woman jilted, could be dangerous and vengeful.
Li had had few dealing with him since then, having left the Beijing force soon after to take up a job as criminal liaison with the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. He had been there for more than a year before returning to take up the position of chief with his old section and had only been in that job for about eighteen months. He could count on one hand the number of encounters he’d had with Cao in that time. He could not recall any rancour between them. Was it really possible that beneath his relaxed and languid exterior, Cao had been festering quietly, blame feeding on jealousy and revenge to grow into something dark and sinister?
But to horribly butcher innocent women in the pursuit of that revenge seemed distorted out of all proportion. Surely there had to be more to it than that?
Li drank more green tea and topped up his flask. He gazed sightlessly from the window and saw Lynn Pan’s open, pretty face, the smile that lit it, the warmth of personality that radiated from her eyes and lips and touch. And then he recalled the pale, blood-streaked face on the autopsy table, the ugly gashes where her ears had been hacked off, the gaping wound across her throat. It had all been some horrible accident of fate. Pure chance that an image of Taiyuan had been chosen for that demo. That a ruthless and bloody killer should have been one of its subjects, and that she should have stumbled upon his lie. Not a lie, but a truth. That he could not recognise a place which was supposed to be his home town. If he had been caught in a deception, it was that his whole life was a lie. And she had died to keep it that way.
A solitary figure on a bicycle cycled slowly along the towpath, silhouetted against the rising sun. It was a little girl. Perhaps seven or eight years old, a school satchel slung across her back. She flashed across the frame of the carriage window in a second, an image trapped in the mind. A child. A life. Gone in a moment, like the lives of all those young women that Cao had murdered. Like the life of Lynn Pan. And Li remembered the old saying: the star that shines twice as bright burns half as long.
II
Taiyuan lay 620 kilometres southwest of Beijing. It was the provincial capital of Shanxi, in whose central plain the city nestled on the banks of the Feng river, surrounded by mountains on all sides. The change in the countryside had been gradual. It was lusher here, more temperate, and sheltered by the snowy peaks that rose up into the clearest of blue autumn skies. Every slope had been terraced to grow crops, the plain irrigated to grow rice, a slightly sweet, delicious snow-white rice.
It was early afternoon when Li arrived in the city. The station concourse was jammed with travellers, and hawkers selling everything from maps to tiny toffee apples on sticks. It was warmer here than it had been in Beijing. The sun felt soft on his face. He bought a street map of the city from one of the hawkers and turned east into Yingze Street, away from the old south gate of the ancient city wall, and kept walking. The provincial government administration buildings were somewhere along here before the bridge. He passed a street stall selling the local Yingze beer for three yuan, and crossed through Wuyi Square. Yingze Park, opposite the towering Telecom headquarters, was crowded with people enjoying the late fall sunshine, strolling at leisure around the lake, where three or four weeks from now they would probably be skating. The square was lined with hotels and government buildings. The Hubin Grand Hall, the history museum, the Taiyuan Customs House, and the headquarters of the local Public Security Bureau. Li was tempted to make himself known to them. Their help would have saved him a great deal of time. But he was suspended from duty. He no longer had his Public Security ID. He was just another citizen with no special rights or privileges.