“Let me write it for you,” she said.
He handed over his notebook, and she wrote: ‘Peri Carlton’.
Captain Li Lixia glanced out of the window of her office, and the dark sky and street lamps told her it was later than she had realised. She stood up and stretched, and walked around her tiny room. Almost time to head for home. Just one last thing to do: the evening mail bag would have arrived a couple of hours ago, so she walked to the mail point in the corridor outside to see if anything had come in for her.
There was her weekly beige envelope from the Public Security Bureau. Captain Li’s duties included liaising with the Shanghai civil authorities to ensure the security of her building and the staff working there. The building was one of several in the Pudong New Area and greater Shanghai used by the People’s Liberation Army. This one housed a secretive unit administered by the Third Department of the PLA Joint Staff Department. The sensitive nature of the work carried out here was of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, so naturally the presence of foreigners in the vicinity was of interest to Captain Li.
She opened the envelope and quickly scanned its contents. There were lists from the PSB’s Entry-Exit Department, of newly registered foreigners, departing ones, and re-registering ones. She put it aside for the morning. Then there were summaries of incidents – crimes, accidents or other occurrences that had come to the attention of the PSB. There were few of them this week. Some lost – probably stolen – passports; the usual pickpocket reports; a couple of hotel rooms ransacked; and a British student who had saved the life of a boy crossing a busy road.
“Well, good for you, Miss—” she said aloud. She read the name again and frowned in concentration as she worked on the pronunciation. The letters ‘R’ and ‘L’ were especially hard to render flawlessly. “Miss Peri Carlton.”
The summary was sloppy, and she shook her head in disgust. First the British woman was a ‘student’, but two sentences later she was an employee of the British Government. Li sat at her computer and tapped a few keys to get into the PSB database, logged in, and started browsing the reports.
Miss Carlton, it seemed, really was a student, attending the China Europe International Business School, but the courses she was enrolled in were being paid for by the British Department of Trade and Industry. She was a government employee, too. Li pondered that, and decided it was plausible.
Miss Carlton was a fluent Mandarin speaker, and had opted to take courses exclusively in Mandarin although there were English language options available.
“Why are you making life difficult for yourself, Miss Carlton?” she said aloud. But she guessed the answer. Miss Carlton wanted an immersive experience because her first objective was the language skill, not the business skill. “Are you—” she started, then switched to English. “Are you a spook Miss Carlton? I bet you are a spook.” She made a note to open a file on the girl.
She read some of the witness statements, enough to know that nobody had seen anything of the little boy’s rescue. Curious. She came to the grandmother’s superstitious ramblings about goddesses. Bizarre. There was a witness statement from the traffic division supervisor, describing what had been caught on the CCTV camera monitoring the road junction. Basically, it said little more than, there was a car, it blew through a red light, and we should prosecute the driver.
Her curiosity aroused, she started poking around the PSB’s traffic video archives. It was an unfamiliar system, but she managed to find what she was looking for, and played back the few minutes of video, before and after the incident, that the traffic division had archived as evidence for the prosecution of the taxi driver. She frowned, and played it back four more times before figuring out how to move through frame by frame.
She sat back in her chair, unwilling to believe what she had seen. There was a frame showing the boy running out ahead of his grandmother, and Miss Carlton back on the pavement, standing still. In the next frame, the British girl had an arm wrapped around the boy and was starting to pull him away. She had moved a good four, maybe five, metres between frames. She knew it was common for video to be recorded at 24 or 30 frames per second, meaning that the girl had covered the distance at well over one hundred metres per second.
Li turned back to the grandmother’s statement, and this time, she paid closer attention. Setting aside the nonsense about praying to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, and Peiyang Niangniang, the protector of children, it seemed that the woman knew it had been divine intervention because, she said, the girl had a blue aura, which only supernatural beings ever had.
Li shook her head, impatient with herself. Superstitious nonsense!
And yet… more than one hundred metres per second from a standing start? Ten times faster than the best Olympic athletes? She opened a file on Miss Peri Carlton.
Chapter 5
A woman sat alone in a corner of a wine bar near Carnaby Street with a large glass of chilled amber-coloured Samos Anthemis. She was attracting glances from the bar’s male customers, some admiring, some speculative, and some hungry. Her long blonde hair was too golden to be natural, and it fell straight down beyond bare shoulders to frame the deep vee shape of her dress and an amount of bronzed flesh that strayed just beyond the tantalising. Her skin tone, her generous breasts and her pouting lips were obviously all fake. She looked like a fine tribute to the cosmetic surgeons’ trade in that unsubtle way that suggests either ‘trophy wife’ or ‘porn star’. The absence of any rings on her fingers suggested the latter was more likely than the former. Naturally, at first glance she looked considerably younger than she really was. She took the tiniest of sips from her glass, and moistened her full lips with it, enjoying both the sweet flavour she remembered from her youth and the effect on her observers of her pink tongue swiping across her red lips. Men were complete idiots.
A mobile phone rang, playing the opening bars of Demis Roussos’ ‘Forever and Ever’. She looked surprised, and rummaged in her bag to find the handset. She turned away from the bar and seemed to fold in on herself, shrinking down, hunching her shoulders, abruptly ending her performance.
She put the phone to her ear and answered it in Greek. “Hi, this is Helene.”
“My little Lene, it has been such a long time,” was the reply, also in Greek, in a deep gravelly voice. “Why do I never see you? Where are you these days?”
“Uli! I am so happy to hear from you! You sound more like Orson Wells than ever! How are you?”
“Ah, Lene, Lene. Always evading the question. Seriously, I am not making small talk, my love. I ask because you may be able to do a small favour for me. If you have some free time, and you are not at the other end of the Earth, of course.”
“For you, Uli? I would fly right around the world for you, you know that.”
“Ah, Lene. You almost convince me that you are sincere.”
“Only almost? I must be slipping.”
“No, it’s that we know each other too well.” The man laughed. “So, are you receptive to an offer?”
“What is it, then? You want someone killed? Seduced? Robbed?” The woman laughed. “I am receptive, Uli, but I don’t know what you can offer that I might need. So, tell me all.”
He laughed in return. “I know what you need, Lene, you need excitement.”