The lights of a car raked across the front of the building, and she swivelled in time to see a taxi turning into Pufang Lu. She almost screamed at it to stop, running into the road waving her hands in the air. She saw the driver’s face caught in the light of a streetlamp. A moment of indecision in it as he saw the crazed yangguizi running across the street. But to Margaret’s relief he pulled up. Legs almost buckling under her, she yanked open the passenger door and dropped into the seat beside him. He looked at her, alarmed.
‘Oh, Jesus…,’ she whispered, realising that she had no idea how she was going to tell him where to take her. Lyang had not written down her own address. She tried to stop her brain from spiralling into further panic. Think, think, she told herself. Then, ‘Jinsong Bridge,’ she said, suddenly remembering the turn off the ring road. The driver stared at her, clearly not understanding. ‘Jin Song,’ she said, trying to make the tonal distinction between the syllables, as she had heard the Chinese doing. And what was the word for bridge? ‘Jin Song Qiao.’
The driver nodded. ‘Ha,’ he said, and to her relief slipped his taxi into gear. They sped off east and then swung north.
Margaret looked down and saw that her knuckles had turned white, her fingers intertwined in a knot of tension in her lap. She tried to relax, to think positive thoughts, to convince herself that she was blowing this out of all proportion. But she couldn’t. The fact that someone had telephoned her, pretending to be Dai, to get her out of the apartment, simply filled her with the most unthinkable dread. She remembered Li telling her that Lynn Pan had been lured to the Millennium Monument by someone on the telephone pretending to be him. That could only have been Cao. And tonight, it could have been no one else.
The journey back to the Music Home Apartments — frustratingly the name came back to her now — seemed interminable, the city floating past her in slow motion as they headed north on the East Third Ring Road. At last she saw the grand piano lids on top of the two towers. ‘There,’ she shouted at the driver, pointing through the windscreen. ‘I want to go there.’
He peered in the direction she was pointing and nodded, indicating first, and then turning off at the Jinsong Bridge into Jinsong Lu. He pulled up outside the main entrance to the complex and Margaret threw a bunch of notes at him. She slammed the door behind her and ran through the gates and into the glare of the entrance lobby with its arched gold ceiling. The desk where the security guard had been sitting when she left was vacant. The lurid magazine he had been reading was lying on top of it. The ashtray was full to overflowing, and beside it lay an open pack of cigarettes, half full. His lighter was lying on the floor. Margaret stooped to pick it up, and she knew that there was something terribly wrong.
Something like a moan came up from her throat, animal-like, involuntary, and she battered through the doors and out into the garden. She ran blindly through the foliage, crossing the artificial stream at the first bridge, and hammering across the pavings to the northwest tower. Past the spot where Bill Hart had fallen from twenty-three floors up. And all she could see were the photographs Pathologist Wang had shown her of the terrible mutilations inflicted on those poor prostitutes by the Beijing Ripper. By Deputy Police Commissioner Cao Xu. In the lobby, she repeatedly pressed the button for the elevator. Gasping for breath, she waited a lifetime for the numbers to descend to the ground floor. And to her complete and utter despair, it had to come all the way down from the twenty-third floor.
Chapter Fourteen
I
In the darkness, something caught a fragment of light, deflecting it toward the door. There was someone there, concealed among the shadows. The creak of a floorboard, and then hot breath in the cold air. A knife arced through a shaft of light that slanted in through the window. No time to avoid it. No room to escape. Li screamed and opened his eyes, breath tearing at his lungs, his face a mask of perspiration. His three travelling companions were staring at him resentfully, all awakened from their slumbers. The thundering in his ears passed with a hiss as the train emerged from a long tunnel back into the starlit night. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, embarrassed, and turned toward the window. The crescent moon lay on its back, like a smile in the sky, amused by his embarrassment.
His dream had left him shaken. He checked the time. It was just after 2.15. They should be back in Beijing in a quarter of an hour. He took out a handkerchief to wipe the coating of fine sweat from his forehead, and fumbled for the cellphone in his pocket. He got it to repeat dial the Harts’ apartment. It rang, and rang. And no one was answering. And still Li let it ring, panic starting to seize him now in its debilitating grip.
Margaret heard the phone ringing from the hallway as soon as she left the elevator. She hurried along it to the Harts’ apartment, tempering haste with caution now. To her horror, she found that the door was not shut. It lay six inches ajar, a wedge of feeble light from the dimly lit hallway falling into the darkness beyond. Cautiously, Margaret pushed the door open and felt for the light switch inside. She flicked it down, but nothing happened. And fear washed over her like iced water. Still the phone was ringing. She pushed the door wide and waited a moment for her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom before stepping in and running through to the living room to pick up the phone. But all she got was a dialling tone. Whoever was calling had finally given up. She quickly replaced the receiver and spun around. There was no one there. She could see clearly enough now in the ambient light of the city reflecting on walls and ceilings through the apartment’s generous windows.
‘Lyang?’ she called out. And her own voice seemed deafening in the silence that followed it. Then another voice, like a muffled cry, sounded from somewhere up the stairs, and Margaret found herself shaking, almost uncontrollably.
She started toward the stairs, listening carefully, and almost fell over something soft lying on the floor. She crouched down to pick it up and saw that it was one of Li Jon’s cuddly toys that she normally kept in the buggy. Her hand flew to her mouth to stop herself from crying out. She stood up and pressed it to her breast, and realised that she had no means of protecting herself or her child. She threw the soft toy on to the settee and moved quickly into the kitchen. On a work surface by the hob, there was a knife block where Lyang kept all her kitchen knives for food preparation. Margaret drew out the biggest of them. A wooden-handled implement with a blade about eight inches long. The weight of it in her hand gave her the tiniest sense of security. Her own preference for autopsy was a French chef’s knife. She knew how to use a blade like this and would not hesitate to do so if her baby had been harmed in any way.
She moved like a shadow back through the dining room into the hallway at the foot of the stairs and began climbing them very gingerly, one step at a time.
There was an odd smell on the top landing, like the sour stink of the autopsy room, and Margaret saw a trail of something dark on the floor leading to the master bedroom. She knelt down and touched it with the tips of her fingers. It was wet, slightly tacky. She raised her fingers to her nose and immediately knew the smell of blood. For a moment, fear almost robbed her of the strength to stand up straight. And shaking now like the leaves fibrillating among the branches of the autumn trees outside, she inched her way along the hall to the master bedroom in the dead silence of the apartment, trying to avoid stepping on the blood. When she got to the door she tentatively put out her hand and pushed it open wide.