‘Good morning.’
Ma looked up. The enlarged eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses studied the visitor with a mixture of suspicion and interest. No one he knew.
‘I heard you had something for every occasion,’ Jericho explained.
Ma hesitated. He set aside the jewellery, cheap, tarnished stuff, and smiled shyly.
‘Who, if I might ask, says that?’
‘An acquaintance. It must have been here, yesterday. He needed a birthday present.’
‘Yesterday—’ Ma mused.
‘He bought a make-up set. Art Deco. Green, gold and black. A mirror, a powder compact.’
‘Oh, yes!’ His suspicion vanished, replaced by eagerness. ‘A lovely piece of work, I remember. Was the lady pleased?’
‘The lady who received the present was my wife,’ said Jericho. ‘And yes, she was very pleased.’
‘How wonderful. What can I do for you?’
‘You remember the design?’
‘Of course.’
‘She would like more from the same series. If there are any more.’
Ma widened his smile, glad to be of service since, as Jericho knew from the investigator, there were still a matching brush and a comb to buy. With his curious rolling gait he came out from behind the counter, pushed a little stepladder against one of the shelved walls and climbed up it. Comb and brush shared a drawer quite high up, so that Ma was occupied for a few seconds while Jericho scanned his surroundings. The sales room was probably just what it looked like. The counter had a kitschy fake Art Nouveau front, behind which ivory-coloured pearl necklaces dangled. Beyond it, barely visible, lay the second room, perhaps an office. In the midst of all the junk a surprisingly expensive-looking computer adorned the counter, its screen turned towards the wall.
Ma Liping reached up and clumsily brought down the goods. Jericho didn’t risk going behind the counter. The danger was too great that the man might turn towards him at that very moment. Instead he walked a little way along the counter until the screen display appeared reflected in a glass case. The glowing surface was divided into three, one part covered with characters, the other half divided into pictures showing two rooms from the perspective of surveillance cameras. Although he couldn’t make out any details, Jericho knew that one of the cameras was directed at the sales room, because he saw himself walking around in the window. The other room looked gloomy and it clearly didn’t contain very much furniture.
Was it the back room?
‘Two very beautiful pieces,’ said Ma, as he came down from the ladder and set the comb and brush down in front of him. Jericho lifted both up, one by one, ran his fingers expertly through the bristles and inspected the teeth. Why did Ma need a camera to monitor his back room? Checking the area towards the courtyard made sense, but did he want to watch himself at work? Unlikely. Was there another means of access from outside leading to that room?
‘One tooth is broken,’ he observed.
‘Antiques,’ Ma lied. ‘The charm of imperfection.’
‘What do you want for it?’
Ma quoted a ridiculously high price. Jericho made a no less ridiculous counteroffer, as the situation demanded. At last they agreed upon a sum that allowed both of them to save face.
‘While I’m here,’ Jericho said, ‘there’s something else that occurs to me.’
Antennae of alertness grew from Ma’s temples.
‘She has a necklace,’ he went on. ‘If only I knew something about jewellery. But I’d like to give her a suitable pair of earrings and, well, I thought—’ He pointed rather helplessly to the displays in the counter case.
Ma relaxed. ‘I have some things I could show you,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I’m afraid it won’t be much use without the chain.’ Jericho pretended he needed to have a think. ‘The thing is, I’ve got some meetings to get to, but this evening would be the ideal time to surprise her with them.’
‘If you brought me the chain—’
‘Impossible, I have no time. That is, wait a moment. Do you get email?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then it’s all fine!’ Jericho acted relieved. ‘I’ll send you a photograph, and you look for something suitable. Then I’d just have to collect it later. You’d be doing me a big favour.’
‘Hmm.’ Ma bit his lower lip. ‘When would you be coming, round about?’
‘Yeah, if only I knew. Late afternoon? Early evening?’
‘I’ve got to go out for a while too. Shall we say from six? I’d be here for another good hour after that.’
Faking gratitude, Jericho left the shop, walked to his hire car two streets away and drove to a better area in search of a jewellery shop. After a short time he found one, had them show him necklaces in the lower price range and asked to be allowed to take a photograph of one with his mobile phone, so that he could send the picture, he said, to his wife for inspection. Back in the car he wrote Ma a brief email and attached the photograph, but not before he had attached a Trojan. As soon as Ma Liping opened the attachment, he would unwittingly load the spy program onto his hard drive, from where it would transmit the drive’s contents. Jericho couldn’t assume that Ma was stupid enough to store incriminating content on a publicly accessible computer, but that wasn’t what he was concerned with in any case.
He drove back to a place near the factory and waited.
Ma had opened the attachment shortly after one o’clock, and the Trojan had started transmitting straight away. Jericho connected his mobile to a roll-out screen and received, sharp and in detail, the impressions from the two surveillance cameras. They captured their surroundings in wide-screen mode, unfortunately without sound. On the other hand, a few moments later he received confirmation that camera two actually was monitoring the back room separated off with beads, when Ma disappeared from one window and appeared again immediately in the other one, shuffled over to a sideboard and fiddled with a tea-maker.
Jericho appraised the furniture. A massive desk with a swivel chair and worn-looking stools in front of it, obliging visitors to assume a petitioner’s crouch, some ramshackle shelves, with stacks of paper on the worn plywood, files, wood-carvings and all kinds of horrors like silk flowers and industrially manufactured statues of the Buddha. Nothing to suggest that Ma placed any value on the personal note. No painting interrupted the whitewashed monotony of the walls; there were no discernible signs of that symbiotic connection produced by spouses looking at each other from little frames at work.
Ma Liping, happily married? Ludicrous idea.
Jericho’s eye fell on a narrow, closed door opposite the desk. Interesting, but when Ma set down his tea and opened it, he merely revealed a view of tiles, a wash-basin and a piece of mirror. Less than half a minute later the man appeared again with his hands on his flies, and Jericho had to acknowledge that the supposed entrance was probably a toilet.
In that case why was Ma monitoring the damned room? Whom did he hope or fear to see there?
Jericho sighed. He waited patiently for an hour. He watched as Ma, with the photograph of the chain in front of his eyes, assembled an assortment of more or less matching earrings and seized the unexpected appearance of a customer as the opportunity to fob off on her a remarkably ugly set of tableware. He watched Ma polishing glass jugs and ate dried chillies from a bag until his tongue burned. At about three o’clock the so-called wife entered the shop. Supposedly unobserved, in a state of married familiarity, as they both were, one might have expected to see them exchange a kiss, a tiny act of intimacy. But they met as strangers, talked to one another for a few minutes, then Ma closed the front door, turned the open/closed sign around, and they went together into the back room.