‘Well,’ Margaret said brightly, breaking the tense silence around the table. ‘We’d better nominate someone else to toast or we’ll never get a drink tonight.’
Chapter Five
I
The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and Changan Avenue as far as you could see east and west, was bathed in white and blue and green and pink light. The red tail lights of cars and buses and taxis shimmered off into the distance in long lines of sluggish traffic. Qian wound down the window and clamped a blue-flashing magnetic light on the roof of the Jeep, then dropped down a gear and accelerated across six lanes of vehicles to head west.
‘Where are you going?’ Li swivelled in surprise in the passenger seat.
‘She was found at the Millennium Monument, Chief.’ Qian glanced across at him. Wu and Detective Sang sat mute in the back seat.
Li felt something close to relief. ‘It can’t have been the Ripper, then.’ Tagging the Beijing killer as the ‘Ripper’ had been completely unconscious.
‘Why?’
‘Because all the other murders have been in the same area of Jianguomen. Just like Jack the Ripper killed all his victims in the same square mile of London.’ He knew it hadn’t felt right. ‘And today’s Monday. He’s only ever killed at the weekend. And, anyway, his next victim’s not due for another six weeks.’
Wu leaned forward and said, ‘Everything else fits, though, Chief. The strangulation, the cutting of the throat …’ He chewed furiously on his gum. ‘And I was really looking forward to that banquet, too.’
They turned off Fuxing Avenue after Sanlihi Road, heading north and then west again, drifting past the floodlit Ministry of Defence building in its restricted military zone, and next to it the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, the centrepiece of which rose in three tiers to a spire topped by a star in a circle. To their right, Yuyuantan Park lay brooding in darkness, west of the canal where only hours earlier Li and Lao Dai had discussed the murders in the last light of the day. They were less than a mile from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A Dali-esque melting clock above the gate to the Millennium Park told them that it was nearly nine-thirty. Towering above it, the Millennium monument was a huge rotating stone sundial at the top of a broad sweep of steps leading to a circular terrace. The dial was casting its shadows in several conflicting directions, confused by the floodlights now illuminating the crime scene at its base. Its arm was pointing due south, down the length of Yangfangdian Lu to the floodlit spectre of the Beijing West Railway station some two kilometres away. The lights of the multi-storey blocks which lined the avenue, reflected on the two-hundred-and-seventy-metre-long waterway, beneath which five thousand years of Chinese history was carved in bronze plates. It was an impressive vista. And for some poor girl, Li reflected as he pushed through the gate, her last sight on earth. Police and forensics vehicles were pulled into the kerbside at odd angles, and a group of uniformed officers stood stamping and smoking on the causeway just inside the gate. This was not an area dense in housing or nightlife, so only a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered. The uniforms saluted as Li and the other detectives from Section One arrived. There was a young, grey-uniformed security guard amongst them. Beneath a black-peaked cap, he had a fresh face reddened by the icy wind. He wore leather boots and a long grey greatcoat, its black collar pulled up around his cheeks, a red band with yellow characters wound around his left arm. Li stopped and asked him, ‘When does this place normally get locked up?’
‘By six o’clock, Chief,’ the security guard said. ‘Or whenever it gets dark. Whichever comes first. We always clear people out when the light starts to go.’ He shuffled his feet and slapped leather-clad gloves together to keep his hands warm.
‘What time did you close the gates tonight?’
‘It was about half past five.’
‘Did you check to see if there was anyone still inside?’
‘No, Chief. People are always in a big hurry to get out when we start closing up. No one would want to get locked in.’
Li looked at the railing. It was only about a metre high. Easy enough for anyone to get in or out, whether the gate was locked or not. He nodded. ‘Where’s the body?’
One of the uniforms pointed. ‘Right up the top, Chief, behind the arm of the dial.’
‘How on earth did anyone find it up there after the place was closed up?’
‘It was me, Chief.’ It was the young security guard again. His lips were almost blue with the cold. ‘We do shifts here. Check round the perimeter once every hour or so.’
‘Why?’ Li couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to guard an empty park.
‘There’s a lot of valuable stuff in the museum, Chief.’
‘Okay. Go on.’
‘Well, I checked back here about eight o’clock this evening. That’s when I saw the blood.’ He waved his hand towards where a section of the concourse and the railing had been taped off. Li walked towards it and the security guard followed, stamping his feet. ‘I wasn’t sure what it was at first. I thought maybe it was paint. I don’t know, some kind of vandalism. But I quickly figured out it was blood.’ He fumbled with his gloves to take out and light a cigarette. As an afterthought, he offered one to Li. Li shook his head.
A trail of blood led from the foot of the steps to the railing, where it was smeared all over the chrome. Someone covered in quite a lot of it had clearly clambered over the railing and on to the sidewalk. Li followed the trail with his eyes, but it stopped at the side of the road after four or five metres. Perhaps the killer had got into a car parked there. After all, he could hardly have wandered the streets covered in blood without attracting some attention.
Li said, ‘You say you check the perimeter every hour. So you didn’t see any blood here at seven?’
There was a moment’s hesitation before the security guard said, ‘No, Chief.’
Li fixed him with a steady gaze. ‘I don’t want any bullshit, son. It’s important for establishing time of death.’ He paused. ‘You didn’t check the perimeter at seven, did you?’
Li could almost see the blood draining from the boy’s face.
‘No, Chief.’ He shrugged, trying to dismiss his confession as if it were nothing. ‘When it’s cold like this … well, sometimes it’s more than an hour.’
Li said, ‘I don’t care why, I just want the facts. You weren’t here between locking up at five-thirty and checking the perimeter at eight, is that right.’
The boy nodded and couldn’t meet Li’s eye. ‘Yes, Chief.’
So the girl had been killed sometime in that two-and-a-half-hour window. ‘And you followed the blood up the steps?’
The guard nodded, anxious to make up for his shortcomings. ‘Yes, Chief. There’s a lot more of it up there. It led me right to her. She’s lying at the base of the arm, behind it, about three steps down from the top.’
‘You didn’t touch her?’
‘I did not.’ The boy seemed to shudder at the thought. ‘You could see her throat had been cut. There was a big pool of blood under her head. I could see in the beam of my flashlight that it was already drying. There’s no way she was still alive.’
Li flicked his head at Wu. ‘Get a statement off him. Anything he can remember out of the ordinary before he locked up. Anyone unusual. Just anyone he can remember at all.’ He nodded to Qian and Sang and they started the long climb up the steps. Off to their left, lights blazed in the windows of the China Central TV Media Centre, and Li thought that it probably wouldn’t be long before they woke up to the fact that there was a murder on their doorstep. If this had been the United States, he knew, the street would already be jammed with TV trucks and satellite dishes and newsmen clamouring for information. He wondered how long it would be before China went that way, too. It was not a prospect he relished, and he had to wonder at the apparently limitless appetite of the media and the public for the gory details of man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Perhaps if they had witnessed some of what he had seen, that appetite might be somewhat diminished.