The trees that overhung the lane were still thick with leaves, and the leaves were thick with the dust of construction. The roadway was closed to traffic, and workmen crowded the sidewalks, wheeling barrows and shovelling sand into cement mixers. The Supreme Court had been stripped back to its bones and was being given a new face. Ministry apartment blocks beyond were draped in green netting, behind which yet more workmen put in twenty-four-hour shifts in this relentless process of rebuilding and remodelling the new China.
Li walked briskly through the gates into the rear compound, the sound of pneumatic drills hammering in his ears, drowning the sound of the beating of his heart which, until then, was all he had been able to hear.
The Commissioner’s office was on the fifth floor, and Li stood uncomfortably in the elevator with half a dozen other people who, he was sure, could hear his heart beating, too. No pneumatic drills here to drown it out. But if they did, they gave no indication of it. He stepped out into a carpeted corridor and followed it along to the large reception area outside the Commissioner’s office. A poster-sized photograph of the face of an armed policewoman, her gun pointing to the ceiling and pressed against her cheek, dominated one wall. The rest of the room was dominated by the Commissioner’s secretary, a formidable woman in her fifties who, Li had often surmised, probably bought her clothes mail-order from an outsize store in the US. She was not of typical Chinese dimensions. But in a country where a large proportion of domestic crime involved husband battering, she was not untypical of the older Chinese woman. For all his height and rank, Li always found her intimidating. She was, after all, only a secretary. But like many secretaries, she took her status and power from her boss. And since her boss was Beijing’s top cop, that gave her quite a bit of clout.
She glared at Li. ‘You’re late.’ It was not long after seven, and Li figured she must have been called in early. She certainly looked, and sounded, like a woman who had not had her full complement of sleep.
‘I came straight away.’
‘He’s had to go. Deputy Cao will see you.’
Li breathed an inner sigh of relief. Cao was less likely to be riding his high horse. But if he thought he was in for an easier time, he was mistaken.
Cao turned from the window where he had been staring morosely out at the traffic below, and didn’t even give Li time to draw breath. His arms were folded across his chest, and in one hand he held a folded and much thumbed copy of the Beijing Youth Daily. He almost threw it on to his desk. ‘You’ve done it this time, Section Chief.’
‘That had nothing to do with me, Deputy Cao,’ Li said.
‘It has everything to do with you, Li!’ Cao almost shouted at him. ‘It’s your case. And it’s your face on the front page of the paper. And the Commissioner himself told you only yesterday how important it was that this didn’t get into the press.’
Li held his peace. There was nothing he could say.
Cao waved his arm theatrically in the air. ‘The Minister was apoplectic. That’s why it’s me giving you the bollocking and not the Commissioner himself. He’s been summoned to the Minister’s office to furnish him with some persuasive explanation for this …’ he picked up the paper and then dropped it on the desk again, ‘… this piece of shit.’
‘Someone leaked it,’ Li said lamely.
‘Of course someone leaked it!’ Cao roared. ‘And it could only have been somebody on the inside. A police officer. Somebody under your command.’
‘Or above it,’ Li ventured.
Cao wheeled on him and inclined his head dangerously. He lowered his voice, ‘If I was you, Li, I wouldn’t go suggesting that too loudly around here. It won’t win you many friends. And believe me, right now you need all the friends you can get.’ He snatched a pack of cigarettes from his desk and lit one. ‘Someone in your section has been a naughty boy. I suggest you find out who it is.’
‘Maybe it’s the same officer who leaks inside information from my office to yours.’
Cao dropped into his chair and regarded Li speculatively. He shook his head slightly. ‘You’re treading very thin ice here, Li.’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘You run a slack ship up there. You may have admirers in high places because of a couple of high profile cases, but those of us in the know understand that police work is not about the handful of glamorous cases that might come your way in the course of a career. It’s about the daily slog, cracking every crappy case that gets thrown at you. And that means running a tight ship. Administration, organisation, attention to detail, no matter how dull or how unglamorous. It requires a disciplined approach to the running of your section, it requires your junior officers to respect and, if necessary, to fear you.
‘But not you. You like to be one of the boys. You flit around from case to case like some kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes. You think you can bypass all the usual procedures and solve the crime with nothing more than flair and imagination.’ He took an angry puff at his cigarette, perhaps in frustration that all his years as a predecessor of Li’s at Section One had led to this dead-end deputy’s job. ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that, Li. We have evolved an approach to criminal investigation that gets results by sheer bloody hard work and attention to detail.’ He slapped a hand on top of the Beijing Youth Daily. ‘And splashing the details of the worst serial killings in this city’s history across the front pages of trash like this, is not going to help. So I suggest you batten down the hatches up there and find out who’s responsible. Because if you don’t, rest assured that I shall. And there will be hell to pay!’
III
The sun was rising now above the tops of all the new apartment blocks along Dongzhimen, fingers of cold yellow light extending themselves west along the grid. The icy wind carried the breath of winter from the frozen northern plains, laden with the promise of subzero temperatures in the weeks ahead.
Li watched Mei Yuan’s cold red fingers as they worked nimbly about the hotplate to produce his jian bing. Her face, too, was red with the cold, skin dried by the wind. Her eyes watered constantly, as if weeping for the lost summer, or for her lost life. She caught him watching her, and she smiled. Her face lit up, radiant in the morning light, no trace in it of the pain she had endured. She wore her fate with dignity, and always came out smiling.
Li, on the other hand, was sunk in gloom. As if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Cao’s words had stung him, and he wondered if others saw him as Cao did. Cavalier, glory-seeking, too much one of the boys for his subordinates to fully respect him. There were times he took shortcuts, yes, but he never neglected that mind-numbing, painfully slow process of putting a case together piece by piece by piece. He knew the importance of the detail. His uncle had dinned that into him often enough. But sometimes you could get bogged down in it. Sometimes there was so much detail you couldn’t see the bigger picture. Sometimes you just had to trust your instincts and make that leap of faith.
‘A fen for them,’ Mei Yuan said.
‘What?’
‘Your thoughts.’
‘They’re not even worth a fen, Mei Yuan.’
She slipped his jian bing into brown paper and handed it to him. ‘I read about the murders in the paper this morning.’
‘You and the rest of Beijing,’ Li muttered gloomily.