The Firemaker (7 page)

‘Come to get your stuff?’ Gao asked. ‘Can’t wait to move into your new office, eh?’

Strangely, Li realised, he hadn’t given that a thought. He had been heading instinctively for his old desk. He glanced, almost with regret, around the cluttered detectives’ office with its jumble of desks and filing cabinets, walls plastered with memos and posters and photographs of crime scenes past and present.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Qu said. ‘One of the girls’ll put your stuff in a box and take it through. Chief wants to see you.’

Section Chief Chen Anming rose from his desk as Li came into his office and shook his hand. ‘Well done, Li Yan. You deserve it.’

‘Thanks, Chief. That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.’

But Chen didn’t smile. He sat down again, distracted, and shuffled some papers on his desk. He was a lean, silver-headed man in his late fifties from Hunan province. A chain-smoker, years of cigarette smoke had streaked his hair yellow above his right temple. He wore a permanently dour expression, and the girls in the typing pool had been known to run a book on days of the month on which he might smile. ‘Busy start for you. Three suspicious deaths overnight. Two of them look pretty much like murder, the third could be a suicide. A charred body in Ritan Park. Still burning when it was discovered. Can of gasoline near by. Looks like he doused himself, squatted among the trees and lit a match. Bizarre stuff. Qian Yi’s already there. I’ve dispatched Wu and Zhao to the suspected murders. You’d better have a look at the suicide, just in case. Then debrief the other two and let me know what you think.’

*

Several hundred curious onlookers had gathered by the lakeside among the willows. Word had swept like wildfire through the nearby market streets, and rumours of death in the park held the promise of drama; a kind of street theatre, something to break the monotonous repetition of their daily lives. Nearly sixty uniformed officers had been assigned to crowd control. Several plainclothes policemen moved among the spectators, listening to gossip and speculation in the hope of picking up even the smallest piece of information that might prove useful. From across the water, where people were packed in under the shade of the pavilion, from above the babble of voices, came the mournful wail of a single-stringed violin, like a dirge for the dead. The rest of the park was deserted.

Li inched his way through the crowd in a dark blue Jeep, red light flashing on the roof, horn sounding. People were reluctant to get out of the way. Curious faces stared in at him as he squeezed past, but he was oblivious. Confidence had returned. He was back on home territory, doing what he was good at. Finally, at the north side of the lake, he drew into an area that had been cleared and taped off by the uniformed police. Several other vehicles, including an ambulance and a forensics van, were already there. As he got out of the Jeep, a uniformed officer pointed up a dusty slope to the trees beyond.

At the top of the rise, Li stepped over the line of powdered chalk that ringed the potential crime scene and caught his first scent of burnt human flesh. It would linger in his nostrils for hours to come. He curled his upper lip and clenched his teeth firmly to prevent his stomach from heaving. The dead man, or woman, was still squatting in the centre of the clearing, a stiff, blackened figure in the shape of a human. And yet there was something strangely unhuman about the corpse, as if it might have been the abstract creation of a sculptor chiselling roughly in ebony. The charred debris of the victim’s clothes was scattered around it. The leaves of nearby trees had been scorched by the intensity of the heat. Lights had been erected, and the corpse was being photographed from various angles. Two forensics officers wearing white gloves were combing the area for anything that might throw some illumination on the events of little over an hour before. A doctor from the pathology department at the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong, Dr Wang Xing, also in white gloves, stood talking to Detective Qian on the far side of the clearing. Qian saw Li arrive, detached himself from the doctor, and made his way carefully around the perimeter of the clearing. He shook Li’s hand. ‘Congratulations on the promotion, boss.’

Li acknowledged with the faintest nod. ‘What’s the verdict?’

Qian shrugged. ‘Well, all the doc can tell us at this stage is that it’s a male. If he was carrying ID then it’s been destroyed.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Burning’s the obvious choice, but until they get him on the slab they won’t know for sure. Doc says an autopsy on a body in this state’s a bit specialised. They’ll probably have to send it up to the pathology lab at the university. Identification could be a problem. All we’ve found so far are the remains of a Zippo cigarette lighter, a charred signet ring and a belt buckle. Nothing particularly distinguishing about any of them.’

‘The gasoline can?’

‘Just an ordinary can. They’re dusting it for prints. No sign of a struggle, but then it would be hard to tell. The ground’s baked hard here. It hasn’t rained in weeks. Oh, and we found this …’ He removed a clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to let Li see the cigarette end inside. ‘Looks like he had a last cigarette before pouring gasoline all over himself and igniting his lighter.’

Li took the bag and examined the cigarette end closely. It had been stamped out before burning down to the tip, and the brand name was still clearly legible.
Marlboro
. ‘How come the cigarette end didn’t burn up in the fire?’

‘It wasn’t next to the body. Forensics found it over there.’ He pointed to the west side of the clearing.

Li was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Anyone see him arriving?’

Qian made a moue with his lips and exhaled sharply through them. ‘Nobody’s come forward yet. We’re trying to get the names of everyone who was in the park from six this morning. A lot of them will be the same people who come every day. Someone might have seen a man carrying a can, but it isn’t much of a description to offer them. I’ve already spoken to the ticket clerk but she has no recollection. Until we know who he is and maybe get a photograph …’ He shrugged.

‘What about the people who found the body?’

‘A nanny – a peasant girl from Shanxi province – and a couple of kids. They’re down there in the ambulance. The nanny was in a worse state than the kids. I think the paramedics have given her a sedative.’

When Li stepped into the ambulance, he was taken aback to see that the girls were twins. Pretty girls, unspoilt as yet by the approach of adulthood and the loss of innocence – unaware, perhaps, how lucky they were. Since the introduction of the One-Child Policy to control the population explosion, it was rare for any child to have a brother or sister. And a whole new generation would never know the joy of an extended family with uncles and aunts. There was no way of knowing the long-term effects on a society so orientated around the traditional family. But there was a reluctant acceptance by the Chinese that the alternative was worse – a spiralling population growth leading to inevitable starvation and economic chaos.

The girls regarded him solemnly, a strange outward calm concealing the trauma of what they must have witnessed. Their baby-sitter, on the other hand, was still sobbing feebly, clutching a damp handkerchief to her mouth, sucking on a corner of it for comfort.

‘Hi.’ Li sat down opposite them and spoke directly to the twins. ‘Did you girls see the dancers earlier?’ They nodded eagerly. ‘And those guys that go swinging the swords about? They really scare me.’ The girls giggled. ‘Do you come to the park every day?’

‘No,’ one of them said.

‘Just sometimes,’ the other added. ‘Usually with Mommy.’

Qian watched Li from the door, thinking what a good manner he had with the kids. Gentle, positive. And they responded to him.

‘But you were with your nanny today?’ They nodded again. ‘Did you see anyone near the path out there, before you went up to where the fire was?’ This time it was a solemn shaking of the heads. ‘No one moving away, maybe round the lake?’ Again the shaking of heads. ‘Good girls. You’ve done really well. But I don’t think you want to hang around here any longer, do you?’

‘No,’ they said in chorus.

‘So my friend here …’ He nodded towards Qian. ‘… is going to get a nice policeman to buy you some ice cream and then take you home to see your mom. Okay?’

Their faces lit up. ‘Yeah.’

‘Can we have strawberry?’

‘You can have whatever flavour you like, sweetheart.’ He ruffled their heads and they scrambled out to be led off by Qian. He turned to the baby-sitter. ‘Okay … Just relax.’ He moved over and sat beside her and took her hand. It was a small, fleshy hand used to toil. He felt the line of calluses on the palm. She was probably no more than sixteen or seventeen. ‘This is hard for you, I know. Because you’ve never seen anything like this before.’ He spoke very softly and felt a sob shudder through her body. ‘But we really need your help here, and I know that you want to help us all you can.’ She nodded vigorously. ‘So just take your time and tell me what happened.’

‘It was the smoke,’ she said, breath catching the back of her throat. ‘The children were running to see what it was. I kept shouting at them to stop, but they were in such high spirits.’

‘So you followed them up the path.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the body was still on fire?’

The tears filled her eyes again as she remembered. ‘He was still alive. Reaching out to me, like he was asking for help.’

*

Li found Pathologist Wang squatting down by the lakeside. Having divested himself of his white gloves, he was having a smoke. Li hunkered down beside him and was offered a cigarette. Without a word, he took one and the pathologist lit it. ‘So what do you think?’ Li asked. He drew deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nostrils, trying to get rid of the smell.

‘I think there are times I don’t much like my job.’ He glanced grimly at Li. ‘Looks like some kind of weird suicide ritual. On a cursory examination there’s no sign of blood or injury prior to the burning. So unless an autopsy tells us otherwise, you can probably assume he burned to death.’

‘One of the witnesses says he was still alive when they found him.’
Reaching out, like he was asking for help
. The nanny’s interpretation of what she saw had formed a gruesomely indelible image in Li’s mind.

‘Which pretty much fixes time of death, and rules out foul play prior to burning,’ Wang concluded. ‘We get him back to Pao Jü Hutong and I’ll do a preliminary. Should be able to tell a little more about him then. But if you want a full autopsy …’

‘I do.’

‘Then you’re going to have to send him up to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the university.’ He stood up. ‘But first we want to get him into the fridge fast – to stop him cooking.’

After the body had been removed, and the ambulance and various police vehicles had gone, the crowd started to break up, reluctantly drawn back to the relentless humdrum of their everyday lives. Li, however, lingered a little longer. He circled the lake and climbed the rocky outcrop at the far side to find himself looking down on the pavilion, now deserted apart from an old man scratching away on his violin, and a woman who might have been his wife, singing a jagged, haunting melody. To his left was the path that climbed through the trees to the clearing where the body had been found. He was still troubled by the image the peasant girl from Shanxi had conjured in his mind, of the hand reaching out from the flaming mass.
Like he was asking for help
. What an appalling way to die. Li tried to picture the man walking slowly through the park (for if he had had time to smoke a last cigarette he was surely in no hurry), past the early morning dancers, the practitioners of
t’ai chi
, the old ladies gossiping on park benches, carrying his can of gasoline in his hand, and intent in his heart. What possible horrors could drive a man to such a desperate act? Li imagined him lighting his last cigarette, standing smoking it, almost down to the tip. He lit a cigarette himself and stared down at the still, green water of the lake reflecting the willow trees beyond, and wondered why no one had seen him on that slow walk through the park. Were people so engrossed in their spiritual and physical activities that he had been invisible to them?

*

Deep in the bowels of the multistorey building of the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination that backs on to Pao Jü Hutong, Pathologist Wang made a preliminary, superficial examination of the body. The charred corpse lay on its side on a metal table, like a toppled Buddha, fixed in its squatting position. Muscle shrinkage had forced the arms up, with fists clenched like those of a bare-knuckled pugilist. Li watched from a distance, the squeak of Wang’s rubber sneakers echoing off white-tiled walls as he moved around the table. And still there was the awful smell. Wang wore a face mask, and worked his way quickly and carefully around the body, taking measurements, making notes. He spent some time opening and examining the mouth that had been pulled shut by contracted muscle, the tip of a charred tongue poking from between blackened lips. Then he nodded to his assistant, who wrapped the body in heavy plastic, securing it with a nylon cord, and wheeled it away on a gurney to be bagged and taken across the city to the pathology labs of the Centre of Material Evidence Determination on the campus of the People’s University of Public Security. Li followed Wang into his office and they both lit cigarettes. Wang slumped in his chair and took a deep breath.

‘I’ll give you a written preliminary as soon as possible. But the victim was male, aged around fifty. From what’s left to be seen externally, there’s nothing physically distinguishing about him. Apart from his teeth. He’d had some pretty expensive professional work done there.’

Li frowned. This was unusual. General dentistry in China was still very basic and high-quality professional work did not come cheap.

As if reading his mind, Wang said, ‘This guy wasn’t any common labourer. He wasn’t short of a yuan or two. A man of some position, I’d guess. Almost certainly a Party member. If you get any idea of who he is, you’ll have no trouble confirming his identity from dental records.’