He took another sip of his whisky and looked around the room in the city’s reflected light at all the things Bill Hart and Lyang had chosen to turn an empty apartment into a home. Every picture, every rug, every item of furniture, a decision they had made. With most people there was a story behind nearly everything you found in their home. A personal story, a history of a life together, memories shared. But what did any of it mean when you were gone? When you took those memories with you, and all that was left were their material remains, meaning nothing, except perhaps to the partner with whom the memories were shared, and for whom they now brought only pain.
Li was almost overcome by a sense of melancholy. He felt an intense sadness for Bill and Lyang. For himself, and a life in tatters. For Margaret, and all the unfulfilled dreams that had led her finally to a one-bedroomed police apartment in Beijing, a partner who was never there, a baby who depended upon her and had stolen her independence. A life that was no longer her own.
And he thought of his sister lying awake on a hard bunk in a cell somewhere in the north of the city, shut away from her life, removed from her daughter. And Xinxin, stifling her tears to look after baby Ling and her tiny cousin, taking on a mantle of responsibility she had yet to grow into. Like life itself, there was no way to take back a lost childhood.
He wondered, too, if his father was asleep. In a strange house, with a man who didn’t like him much, his dead brother’s best friend. And he remembered that unexpected moment between them when they had hugged, Li scared to squeeze too hard in case he crushed him like a bird.
All these things somehow had Li at their centre. Like satellites orbiting a planet, held there by the force of its gravity, dependent upon it for their very existence. It felt like an enormous burden of responsibility. And he was tired and beaten down, and did not know if he could bear it much longer. He took a long, final drink of whisky from his glass and felt the heat of it snaking its way down inside him. He saw Lyang’s cigarettes lying on the table and took one out of the packet. He lit it with her lighter and this time resisted the urge to choke on his first drag. By the time he finished it, it was as if he had never given up. He stubbed it out viciously in the ashtray, angry at himself for his weakness, and lay back on the settee, staring up at the shadows lying across the ceiling above him. They were static, unchanging, but even as he watched they seemed to take shape and form. The shadow of a man, the head of an elephant, a face. He closed his eyes to shut them out and saw the tall, stooped computer image of Commissioner Zhu crossing the hall of the EMS post office. An outline image passing through three hundred and sixty degrees, showing everything but the face. How could he ever prove it? How could he put a face to that faceless figure? How would he ever know what lie he’d been caught in?
* * *
Li sat up with a start. He had been so certain he would not sleep, he was shocked to realise he had been dreaming. A strange dream full of frantic running down endless corridors, a ferry boat slipping from its berth, gangplank falling away as Li leapt across the gap only to miss the rail and fall. And fall. And wake, heart pounding, a cold sweat beading across his forehead. The fear of the fall, that endless tumbling sensation, is what had woken him. But there was something else, something hidden in an obscure, cobwebbed corner of his mind. Had he dreamed it? He couldn’t remember. Like the dream itself, the memory of it was fading even as he tried to recall it. Perhaps because he was trying to recall it. He swung his legs on to the floor and rubbed his face in his hands, trying instead to empty his mind, to free it from the constraints of imperfect memory. The Tao says be full by being empty, he heard Dai say. And suddenly the memory of what his subconscious had been trying to tell him, pierced his consciousness like a spear.
‘Shit!’ he heard himself say, and he was on his feet immediately. He found a light switch at the foot of the stairs and climbed them two at a time, his slippered feet sliding on the polished surface. He padded along to the end of the hall, hesitated a moment, then knocked softly on the door of the master bedroom. He opened it as Margaret sat upright in the bed. Lyang lay face down beside her, dead to the world. ‘What is it?’ Margaret whispered, alarmed. She had been as certain she would sleep as Li had been that he would not. She glanced at the digital bedside clock. 3.15 a.m. And she had not slept a wink.
‘I need to talk to Lyang,’ Li said, and he moved into the bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed beside the sleeping widow. He looked down at her face in profile, all muscles relaxed, her mouth slightly open, and heard her deep, slow breathing. And for a moment he almost decided it could wait until morning. But it couldn’t, and he shook her gently by the shoulder. It was fully half a minute before he could rouse her.
‘What’s so urgent that you have to wake her up in the middle of the night, for God’s sake?’ Margaret whispered.
‘Trust me,’ Li said. ‘It’s important.’
Lyang raised herself on to one elbow, blinking away the sleep in her eyes. Li could almost see the recollection of the previous day’s events returning to her, grief welling up inside, the pain of a hangover already tightening its grip around her head. ‘What…?’ But she was still barely conscious.
Li said, ‘Lyang, I need you to wake up. This is really important.’
He saw her make the effort. ‘What is it?’
‘Lynn Pan had her own private space on the academy website. What about Bill? He must have had his own space, too.’
Lyang was still trying to clear her head. But even through the fuzziness something connected. ‘Jesus,’ she said, a part of her husband left indelibly in her vocabulary. ‘He did.’ And as the implications of that sunk in, ‘So maybe he put his files in there to keep them safe.’
Li glanced at Margaret and saw the fire of hope light her eyes.
* * *
Lyang sat at the computer by the light of the single lamp on Hart’s desk. Her white satin night-dress hung loosely from her shoulders. Her hair was a mess, her face smeared and puffy. Margaret stood behind her, looking not much better, eyes burning and gritty. Li had pulled up the chair from Lyang’s desk, and sat beside her. ‘How can you access Bill’s private stuff from here? He had to go to the academy last night to get into Lynn’s folder.’
‘He brought a copy of the FTP software back with him last night.’ Lyang shuffled through the desk drawers to find the CD, then slipped it into the tray that the iMac had spat out to receive it. She double-clicked the icon and loaded the software on to the hard disk. ‘Okay.’ She squeezed her temples and let out a long breath. ‘Jees, I feel like shit. Can someone get me a glass of water?’
‘I’ll get it,’ Margaret said, and she disappeared out into the hall.
Lyang opened up the Fetch programme and entered the academy’s FTP address into the dialogue box.
‘You know his user name and password?’ Li asked.
‘Sure. It’s bill.hart.’ She tapped it in, then paused at the password, trembling fingers hovering over the keys. Li heard her breathing become shallower and saw tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. ‘He changed his password to Ling after she was born,’ she said, before finally she was able to bring herself to type it in and hit the return key.
Margaret returned from the bathroom with a glass of water and Lyang drank thirstily, emptying it in one draught. They were now looking at a screenful of icons, all of Hart’s personal and private files. Lyang pushed the arrow about the screen until it was hovering over a folder labelled Pan’s Files. She dragged it to the desktop and it copied on to Hart’s computer. She double-clicked to open it. Inside there were thirteen folders, and a computer-shaped icon with the MRM motif in blue within it. Twelve of the folders looked like copies of the ones they had found the previous night among Lynn Pan’s files. Graphs A to F and Pics A to F.