Dragon's Eye by Andy Oakes

Author:Andy Oakes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907650840
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2012-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Piao rubbed the chalk from his fingers. The biggest murder case that the kung an chu had handled in twenty years and he’d been given an incident room the size of a toilet.

A line of thick chalk dividing the blackboard into what was known and what was not known. Into two distinct groups. Bobby, Ye Yang, Heywood, Qingde and Yongshe, Feng, Decai, Ziyang, having only two things in common: the blackboard that their names were written upon and the death that had them all in its sharp fold. Only one word breaching the dividing chalk line … Qingde. A carrier of parcels for the Americans. A guest of Virtue Forest with three other Chinese. Qingde.

Piao sat staring through the window and into the major incident room next door. A month ago it had been his, heading an investigation into the murder of a Friendship Store manager. Thirty telephone lines. Ten computer terminals. Four faxes. Even a stove for tea. Now he was investigating twelve murders with four telephone lines, one computer terminal, a fax that jammed … and no stove for making tea. He felt himself shake his head, warm his hands, even though they weren’t cold. His eyes returned to the board …

And no motive. Where the fuck was the motive in all of this?

The room had a smell of unwashed bodies that had now gone home to flats with unmade beds. Again he felt himself shake his head. If he’d have had a cigarette left in his pocket, he would have lit it.

*

Liping had not needed any nudging. A walnut-eyed courier had delivered the box of tapes … streams of uncurling reel to reel. Questioning him had proven useless; he had returned their stares with eyes that permanently watered. A job as a motorcycle courier in Shanghai’s traffic polluted midday, was not to be envied. The anonymous office in the anonymous Security Bureau that the tapes had come from, would remain anonymous.

*

Ye Yang … her voice had surprised Piao. An all American girl. Cherry Pie and Southern Fried Chicken Wings. Nothing of the Chinese ancestry left in her. The almond eyes. The bisque complexion. The petal kiss of lips. The hair, bobbed, shiny and raven … all that remained. A shell, nothing that the Senior Investigator recognised as Chinese, filling it.

Along with four other officers he had listened to tape after tape. Family conversations. Business conversations. Friendship conversations. The spools in a slow carousel of tape slipping around steel posts. Building up a picture of her with each bronze loop. What she laughed at. What made her angry. How she said ‘hello’. What she meant with the ‘ah-huhhs’ that littered her speech. Odd snippets of information about her, but none that helped him. No word that leapt out, that spoke of reasons, motives. Her voice only at the Shanghai end of the calls. Never Bobby’s. No voice that could have been Heywood’s or Qingde’s. Just simple conversation following on from simple conversation, filled to the brim with tedium; no secrets, no plot, no agenda.

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