There was an unusually large number of people queuing at the foreign counter today and she had to wait nearly twenty minutes before she was seen, acutely aware of the meter in her taxi clocking up every second of it. A frosty young woman in a neatly pressed black police uniform, hair scraped back severely from a pockmarked face, demanded Margaret’s passport. She gave it lengthy scrutiny, before turning her attention to Margaret’s application for a six-month visa extension. Margaret waited impatiently, Li Jon still griping in the buggy beside her. Finally the girl turned the form back towards Margaret and stabbed it with her pen. ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘You fill in address here.’
Margaret scowled. ‘I filled in my address.’ But her heart was pounding. The address she had given was her official address in the staff apartment block at the University of Public Security — an apartment she had not occupied for nearly a year.
‘No,’ the visa cop barked again. ‘You fill in wrong place.’
Margaret looked at the form again and saw that in her hurry she had accidentally filled in the space allocated for a previous address. ‘Shit,’ she muttered under her breath. She started to score it out and write it in the correct space. But the visa cop pulled the form out from under her pen and started to tear it up.
‘No, no, no. You fill out new form.’
Margaret glared at her, barely able to contain her anger or the caustic comment fighting for expression on the tip of her tongue. New China was still bedevilled by the bureaucracy of Old China, and its bureaucrats were just as intransigent. ‘Could you give me another form, then, please?’ she said through clenched teeth.
‘Forms at that counter,’ the visa cop said, pointing to the far end of the concourse where Margaret had queued earlier. ‘Next.’ And the next in line tried to push past. A tall, fat, balding American in a business suit.
But Margaret stood her ground. ‘No, wait a minute! I queued for a form. I filled it out. You tore it up. I want you to give me another form and I’ll fill it out right here.’ She looked at the line of unsympathetic faces behind her. ‘And these people can wait.’
But the visa cop just shook her head and pushed Margaret’s passport back at her. ‘No form here,’ she said.
‘Chrissake, lady, go get a form,’ the fat American said. ‘Face it. You’re in China.’
As if sensing her tension, Li Jon started to cry. Margaret felt her blood pressure soar. She grabbed the handles of the buggy, spun it around and wheeled it off across the concourse. She hated having to admit defeat. It was another fifteen minutes before she found herself back at the application counter pushing her freshly filled-out form across it at the frozen-faced visa cop, who gave no indication that she had any recollection of their previous encounter.
‘Passport,’ she said, and Margaret almost threw it at her. Having examined it only fifteen minutes earlier, she proceeded to examine it again in great detail as if for the first time. Then she looked at the form, scrutinising it carefully, section by section. Margaret stood watching her impassively as she entered details into a computer terminal behind the counter. Then she stamped the form several times and pushed a receipt back across the counter, along with the passport. ‘Visa over there,’ she said, pointing to a young man in uniform sitting further down the same counter. All the people who had been in the line behind Margaret at the visa application desk, now stood in the line ahead of her at the visa issuing desk.
Margaret leaned over the counter and said, ‘Chicken feet.’
The visa cop looked at her in surprise. ‘I am sorry?’
‘Someone told me once they were good for the complexion. You should give them a try.’ And she wheeled the still wailing Li Jon down to the visa issuing desk. It was petty, childish even, but it made Margaret feel just a tiny bit better.
But as she stood in the queue at the visa issuing desk, she saw Miss Chicken Feet with the bad complexion walk along behind the counter and whisper something in the ear of the issuing officer. The young man looked up and ran his eyes quickly down the line. They rested briefly on Margaret, and then he nodded and turned back to his computer terminal. The girl went back to her desk. Margaret began to worry. When she finally got to the head of the queue, the officer didn’t even look at her. He took her receipt and her passport, and his keyboard chattered as he entered data into his computer. He took a thin sheet of official paper from a tray, scribbled on it, and then stamped it with red ink and pushed it across the counter at Margaret. ‘Come back in two days for passport,’ he said.
‘What?’ Margaret couldn’t believe it.
‘Two days,’ said the officer. ‘Next.’
‘I’ve never had to leave my passport before,’ Margaret said.
The officer met her eye for the first time. He was coldly impassive. ‘You want visa, you come back in two days. Okay?’ And he was already taking the passport from the next in line.
Margaret knew she was beaten. She glanced along the counter and caught Miss Chicken Feet smirking.
V
Smoke rose from cigarettes, and steam from thermos mugs of green tea. The detectives of Section One sat around the meeting room wrapped in coats and wearing hats. Some even wore gloves. The heating had broken down again.
One wall was covered with photographs taken at four crime scenes. Four young women strangled and savagely mutilated. Each one worse than the last. Sunshine slanted across the wall, bringing cold light to a very dark place. The mood in the room was sombre as they listened to Detective Wu outlining the details of the latest killing. Li watched him pensively. Wu was one of the Section’s senior detectives now, but he was still in love with his image. He always had a piece of gum in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket that he would whip out one-handed and clamp on his face at the first blink of sunshine. Since the sun was shining today he was wearing them pushed back on his forehead. He had been proudly sporting a growth on his upper lip for years, and was considerably chastened when his daughter had brought home a school essay in which she had written of her father, ‘He is growing a moustache.’ To his credit, he told the story against himself. His own personal uniform consisted of baseball boots, faded denims and a short leather jacket, and he grew his hair just long enough to comb over the thinning patch on top. He had been divorced for nearly five years.
He held up a photograph of the chewed-up remains of a brown Russian cheroot still in its evidence bag. ‘It’s like a calling card,’ he told the room. ‘He leaves one of these at every scene. It’s no accident. He knows we’ll find them. It’s like he’s saying, here’s my DNA. You got my code, but you’ll never get my number. The bastard’s playing games with us.’
‘Why would he do that?’ The question came from one of the youngest detectives in the Section. Sang Chunlin was tall and wore dark trousers, black shoes and a black jacket. He, too, had a penchant for American-style shades. His thick black hair, cut short side and back, was long on top and swept back in a quiff. The other detectives called him Elvis.
‘If we knew why he did any of it, Elvis, we might be halfway to nailing him,’ Wu said.
‘Well, whatever motivates him it’s not sexual.’ This from Detective Zhao. ‘He didn’t have sex with any of them, did he? There’s been no trace of semen found at any of the scenes.’