“Get out,” Li said, shaking his head and restraining a smile, able finally, if reluctantly, to see a funny side to it. He called after them, “And if I get any more crap from you guys, I’m going to give that feng shui man every one of your addresses.” He pushed the door shut.

Margaret said, “It is much better like this. Or, at least, it would have been if you’d let him finish painting the walls.”

“Don’t you start.” He looked at the piles of transcripts under the window. They seemed to have doubled in size since the morning. His desk was covered again with folders and papers. “Would you look at this stuff. I’m going to go blind with paperwork before we’re through with this investigation.” There was a knock at the door. “What!” he shouted.

Qian poked his head in apologetically. “Sorry, boss. Thought you’d like to see the preliminary reports from forensics. They came in by fax about an hour ago.”

Li grabbed the sheets and ran his eyes over the fax-fuzzy rows of tiny Chinese characters that delivered verdicts on the DNA tests and the spectral analysis of the blood from Chao’s apartment. He looked up at Margaret. “It was Chao’s blood on the carpet. And as near as they can determine, it was spilled some time Monday night into Tuesday morning.”

“Which bears out your theory,” she said.

He nodded, and paused to re-examine the fax. Then he met her eye, and there was a muted excitement in his voice. “The DNA from saliva traces on all three cigarette ends matches.”

“Jesus,” Margaret said. “So they were all murdered by the same guy.”

She sat at his desk, swivelling the chair slowly from side to side. The detectives’ office outside was empty. They were all in the meeting room with Li, reviewing progress. She looked at the ragged line on the wall where the fresh yellow paint stopped and the old paint began, and she smiled. His Uncle Yifu was certainly nothing if not persistent. She wondered if he had any idea how much it embarrassed Li, and from all that she knew of him concluded that he probably did. Her eyes fell on the faxes that still lay on Li’s desk, and she marvelled at how it was possible for people to read these strange and complex pictograms. She had read somewhere that although different languages were spoken throughout China, the written language, the characters, remained the same. They just had different words for the same pictures. Of course, standard Beijing Mandarin was now taught in all the schools.

From somewhere deep in the building she could hear the distant sounds of phones ringing, voices raised, the chatter of keyboards. She closed her eyes and started tumbling backward through a dark abyss.