The Commissioner did not miss what he took to be an implied criticism. ‘No doubt you’d rather other people did the dirty work,’ he said.
‘May I see it?’ The Procurator General broke in, impatient with their fencing. Unlike the Commissioner, he handled it very gingerly, at arm’s length, before laying it back on the bench.
The graduate placed some more photographs in front of them. ‘This is the vehicle you used to get to the victims’ house,’ she said. It was a battered old blue Japanese car. Photographs of the interior showed smears of dried blood on the seats, the dash and the steering wheel. Another gave a close-up of the licence plate, revealing that the vehicle came from Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province.
‘This is the town where you committed the murders,’ the student said, spreading out photographs of what Li took to be the main square in Nanchang, a place he had never visited. There was a photograph of the Gan River running through what looked like an industrial city, largely redeveloped. It did not seem like a town you would find in the tourist guides. ‘And these are the gloves you wore. They were found in the trunk of your car.’ She placed a bloodstained pair of white cotton gloves on the benchtop, still in their evidence bag. ‘You can take them out if you like.’ But none of them took up the offer.
Li looked again at the photographs of the crime scene. It seemed unreal. Blood and death frozen in the frame of a photographer’s camera, overlit by his floods, as if staged for investigation. There was nothing that resembled a living human being less than a corpse. He supposed it was that sense of unreality that protected you from the grim truth, that each of us was mortal and would one day pass this way, too.
The student had finished briefing them on their crime. She stood back. ‘You can go through the photographs again if you like,’ she said. ‘Re-examine any of the exhibits.’ But they had had enough of it. So she opened the blinds and the room flooded with afternoon sunshine. They blinked away the light, and their focus, and the spell was broken, returning them abruptly from Nanchang to Beijing.
The girl smiled nervously. She was not used to being in such exalted company and felt exposed now in the full blaze of sunlight. She said, ‘Professor Pan will show you some photographic images on a computer screen. Some of these images will mean something to you. Some will not. Some will be relevant to the crime you have “committed”, some will be irrelevant. Some will be familiar to you, although not relevant to the crime. Professor Pan will explain exactly what she requires of you when you go into the computer room.’ Her eyes fixed on Li. ‘You first, Section Chief.’
* * *
It was a square, featureless room without windows. A door led out into the hallway, and another through to a small lecture room. Cream-coloured walls looked as if they had not seen a paintbrush for some time. The floor was covered with grey carpet tiles. There were two large computer desks placed at right angles to each other in the centre of the room. The bigger of the desks had a large monitor attached to a computer mounted beneath it. A laptop was wired into both. They, in turn, were connected to another computer placed on the smaller desk. Cables spewed out of everything and were arranged in tidy coils on the floor. A single overhead lamp focused light on the two desks, leaving everything outside its circle of illumination sunk in gloom.
Lynn Pan carried her own inner light with her, and she seemed to glow as she showed Li into the room. He noticed the way that she was always touching him, a hand on his shoulder, or on his arm as she guided him to a seat at the smaller desk. She then sat on the edge of his desk looking directly down on him, her legs stretched out and crossed in front of her, her calf grazing his. It made Li feel slightly uncomfortable for the first time. But it was not a feeling that lasted long. She fixed him with her eyes and her smile, and he had that mush sensation in his stomach again.
‘I hear it’s a big day for you today,’ she said, and he frowned, uncertain what she meant. ‘The People’s Award for Crime Fighting.’ And his face immediately coloured with embarrassment. But if she noticed, she gave no indication of it. ‘I would have loved to go,’ she said. ‘If I’d been invited. I’ve never been in the Great Hall.’
‘Be my guest,’ Li said.
‘Wow! Invited by the recipient.’
Li searched her face and her tone for some hint of sarcasm, but found none. She had that openness and innocence about her that was common to almost every American he had ever met. Except for Margaret. Her cynicism and sense of irony marked her out as very different from most of her fellow countrymen.
‘Hey, listen, if I can get out of here on time I’ll be there.’ Pan’s smile was radiant. ‘But I gotta process you guys first. Convince you I’m worth backing. Yeah?’
She stood up, suddenly businesslike, and lifted a primitive-looking headset from the desk. Wires trailed out of the back of it like a Chinese queue. It consisted of a broad blue headband made from some kind of stretchy material that fitted across the forehead and around the back of the head. Another band ran from front to back across the scalp, attached by velcro strips at both ends. Electrodes, each with their own little sewn-in velcro pad, could be moved about on the inner surface of the bands. ‘To optimise the placing of the electrodes,’ Pan explained. ‘Everybody’s head is different.’ She spent some time fitting the headset to Li’s larger than average head, her small breasts stretching her blouse just above his eyeline. He tried not to let his eyes be drawn. But he could smell her perfume, feel her warmth, and there was something irresistibly intimate about her hands moving across his scalp, touching his face, his neck. Warm, soft skin against his.
She talked as she worked. ‘When I’ve fixed this, I’m going to give you a list of nine items. We call them targets, but that won’t mean anything to you right now. I’ll explain in more detail afterwards. Anyway, the list will describe things like a knife, a landmark in your home town, your apartment block. Afterwards, I’m going to show you a sequence of photographs on your computer screen, and when you see a picture of any one of those items on the target list, I want you to click the left-hand button on the computer mouse.’ She leaned across him towards the desk to pull the mouse towards them. ‘Take a look at it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with computers or not.’
‘Sure,’ Li said. He placed his hand over the mouse. It was divided in two at the finger-end, and each half could be clicked down separately. ‘The left-hand side for anything on the target list.’
‘And the right-hand side for everything else. So you click once for every image you see.’
Li shrugged. ‘Seems simple enough.’ He smiled. ‘So how do you know what apartment building I live in?’
She grinned. ‘We’ve done our homework, Mr Li.’
‘If you’d wanted my address you only had to ask.’
‘Perhaps, but I’m not sure your partner would have been too happy. She’s an American, isn’t she?’
Li raised an eyebrow. ‘You have done your homework.’
‘On all of you.’ She stood back and smiled at him ruefully. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
She finished arranging his headgear, and then skipped around to the other desk and opened a beige folder with Li’s name marked on the front of it. She leaned over to hand him his target list and sat down at her computer to prime it for the first test. Li looked at the list. As Pan had said it would, it described nine items: a knife with a jewelled handle; the body of a man washed up on a beach; a woman’s dress with blood on it; a pair of leather gloves; a red car with a missing front fender; your apartment building; the statue of Mao Zedong in front of the provincial government building in your home town; a photograph of a crime scene in which two bodies are charred beyond recognition; the licence plate on your official car.