Inside the main door, he stopped to empty the contents of his mail box. Bills and circulars. He slipped them into his jacket pocket and walked into the empty elevator. The door slid noisily shut and the metal box rattled its way slowly up seven floors. He tried to empty his mind, as Old Dai had counselled, but found any number of things jostling to fill it again. The murders, the award ceremony and, strangely, Mei Yuan’s riddle. He tried to recall it. Something about deaf mutes in a rice paddy. But his concentration was shot, and already it seemed like an eternity since she had told him it that morning. Was it really only that morning he had been called out to the murder of Guo Huan?
The doors of the elevator slid open and he slipped his key in the lock of the apartment. He found Margaret with her legs curled up below her on an armchair, her face buried in a book. The apartment was in darkness, apart from the lamp by her chair. He switched on the overhead light, and she blinked in its sad yellow glare.
‘Hi,’ she said. And he stooped to kiss her on the cheek, like a husband returning home at the end of a day at the office. And she waiting for him, like some suburban housewife, reading crime stories to fill the hours.
‘What are you reading?’ he asked.
‘Your Jack the Ripper book.’
He frowned. ‘In English?’
She laughed. ‘In what else? I found it at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Wangfujing.’
He heard the sound of distant alarm bells ringing somewhere in the back of his mind. ‘When was it published?’
She flipped through the pages to the front of the book. ‘About eighteen months ago.’
‘So it’s been available here, in English, for some time.’
‘Must have been. There were still a couple of copies on the shelf.’ She could see that wheels behind his eyes were turning. ‘Why? Is there something significant in that?’
‘Could be,’ Li said. ‘The Chinese translation was only published a week ago. So if the killer is using this book as his blueprint he must be an English speaker.’
‘Or a foreigner,’ Margaret said. And Li recalled Elvis commenting on the Chinese content of the Ripper letter. Nobody would write Chinese like this. And Qian’s words, Unless maybe he was a foreigner. But it was clear that the strange Chinese was just a translation from arcane nineteenth-century English. The killer had lifted the translation from the book. Li’s mind froze on that thought. He couldn’t have. If he was working from the English original he would have had to make the translation himself. Then how did it come to be an exact match for the translation in the Chinese version of the book? No two translations would be exactly the same. He took out his cellphone and began dialling.
‘What is it?’ Margaret asked. But all he did was lift a finger to silence her.
‘Elvis, it’s the Chief. Get on to the Chinese publisher of the Ripper book and find out who translated it. As much background on him as you can.’
‘Chief,’ Elvis’s voice came back at him. ‘There’s a paragraph on the flyleaf about the translator. And he’s a she. Lives in Hong Kong.’ A pause. ‘You still want me to contact the publisher?’
‘No. No,’ Li said. ‘Forget it.’ And he flipped his phone shut. It was inconceivable that the killer was a woman. And Hong Kong was a little far to commute for murder.
Margaret was still watching him. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ she asked.
He said, ‘I received a letter this afternoon from the killer. It was, word for word, the original Jack the Ripper letter. But, of course, it was in Chinese. Character for character the same as the translation in the Chinese version of the Ripper book.’
Margaret immediately saw his problem. ‘So you’re thinking, if he’s been working from the English version, how did he manage to produce the same translation as the Chinese one.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, that’s easy.’
‘Is it?’
‘Sure. He only sent the letter today, right? Or yesterday.’ Li nodded. ‘So if the Chinese version has been out for a week …’ She didn’t even have to finish.
Li sighed his frustration. ‘I’m not even thinking straight any more,’ he said. Why had he not seen that for himself? He was blinding himself with guilt and pressure, failing to find the logic in the detail. Old Dai was right. It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one, he had said. If you fill your mind with guilt for the actions of another, you will leave no room for the clear thinking you will need to catch him.
Margaret’s voice, laden with sympathy, tumbled softly into his thoughts and startled him. ‘Li Yan, you’ve got to be at the Great Hall in under an hour.’
‘Shit!’ He looked at his watch. ‘I have to shower and change.’ He hurried through to the bathroom, divesting himself of clothes as he went. Margaret followed behind picking them up. ‘When’s Mei Yuan coming?’ he called over his shoulder.
‘She’ll be here any time.’
He stepped into the shower and under a jet of hot steaming water. Margaret stood watching him through the misting glass. He was a fit, powerful man, tall for a Chinese, over six feet, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had a swimmer’s thighs and calves. The hot water ran in rivulets over firm, toned muscles, and she wanted just to step in beside him and make love to him there and then, with the thought of Mei Yuan due to arrive at any moment, and Li Jon asleep through the wall. A moment snatched. A sense of urgency, like there had once been always in their lovemaking. But she knew the moment would not have been right for him. So she stood, holding his discarded clothes and watching the shape of him blur in the steam as it condensed on the glass.
He called out, eyes shut against the foaming shampoo, ‘Are you still there?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘What did you learn from the book?’
‘That nineteenth-century London cops were either incompetent or stupid.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Li Yan, they let people sluice away blood and other evidence from crime scenes. Mortuary assistants washed down bodies before the pathologists carried out their autopsies. Vital evidence literally flushed down the drain.’ She had been horrified as she read. ‘After the night of the double murder, they found some graffiti chalked on the entrance to tenement dwellings, alongside a bloody scrap of skirt from one of the victims. Before they could even photograph it, the Police Commissioner insisted that it be washed off.’
‘What!’ Li couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Why?’
‘Good question,’ Margaret said. ‘One I’d have loved to have asked him.’
‘But he must have had a good reason.’
‘Oh, he gave a reason, but it wasn’t a good one. He said he was afraid that the graffiti would spark anti-semitic riots.’
‘Why?’
Apparently the Ripper had made some kind of allusion to the Jews, as if a Jew might be responsible for the killings. There was a large immigrant Jewish population in the east end of London at that time, and the Commissioner said he feared that the locals would turn against them.’
‘But that’s absurd! If it was a real concern, all they had to do was cover it up under police guard until it was properly examined and photographed.’
‘You might think that. And I might agree with you. But apparently that never occurred to him. And for a man who ultimately lost his job through his failure to catch the Ripper, destroying what might have been very crucial evidence was a very strange thing to do.’