The Firemaker by Peter May Page B

powerful man. The other possesses only two sticks. Yet this gives him more power than the other. Why?’
    Li turned it over quickly in his head, but no solution came immediately to mind. ‘It’ll have to wait till tomorrow.’
    She nodded. ‘Of course.’
    He winked and glanced at the fob watch he kept in a leather pouch on his belt. ‘Got to go. Zai jian .’ And he flicked his bike stand up with his foot. She watched with affection as the tall figure in short-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers dodged the traffic to cross Dongzhimennei Street. Somewhere in this vast country, she liked to believe, lived the son she had been separated from almost thirty years ago, when Red Guards had dragged her off to the labour camp. He would be about Li’s age now. And it was her fervent hope that he might have turned out something like him.
    Li cycled up the gentle slope to the corner of Beixinqiao Santiao, where the square, flat-roofed, four-storey brick building that housed Section One sat discreetly behind a screen of trees. Past the traditional revolving sign of a barber shop, the musty smell of damp hair and the snip of scissors as he passed its door, he was still turning over Mei Yuan’s riddle in his head. Two sticks. Were they chopsticks? No, why would that give the man power? Were they big sticks with which he could beat the other man to death? If so, why would he require two? Focusing his mind on the problem calmed the butterflies in his stomach reflecting the self-doubts that dogged the start of his first day as Deputy Section Chief. He turned in past the red-roofed garage and parked his bicycle. A uniformed officer came down the steps from the door of Section One. He gave Li a wave. ‘Heard the good news, Li Yan. Congratulations.’
    Li grinned. ‘My ancestors must have been watching over me.’ Important to seem confident, not to be taking it too seriously.
    He went inside, turned right, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Everyone he met in the corridor – a secretary, another uniformed officer, a rookie detective – offered their congratulations. It was becoming embarrassing. There were only two officers in the detectives’ room when he went in, Qu and Gao. Both had been with Section One longer than he, and were now a rank below him. Qu winked. ‘Morning, boss.’ There was a heavy ironical stress on the word ‘boss’, but it was fond rather than rancorous. Li was popular with the other detectives.
    ‘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