He shook his head. “We’ll be here all day at this rate.” He opened his window and placed the red light on the roof, flicked it on and activated his siren. “Hold on,” he said, and started nudging his way out of the gridlock and into the cycle lane, where they picked up speed, bicycles parting in panic ahead of them. He flicked her a glance. “Now that the window is down anyway, maybe you wouldn’t mind if I had a cigarette? After everything you have told me it can’t be as bad for me as eating.”

“Don’t count on it,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the genes they’ve been putting in tobacco plants.”

II

The great paved concourse in front of Beijing railway station was jammed with rush-hour commuters. Modern twin clock towers separated by a gigantic digital display rose above broad steps leading to the main entrance, where baggage was being run through X-ray machines under the watchful eye of armed policemen. Li nosed the Jeep over the sidewalk and on to the concourse, exchanging horn blasts with buses and taxis. By now he had cut the siren and brought the flashing red light back inside. So he was just another anonymous citizen in a Beijing Jeep. A couple of girls sweeping up litter with old-fashioned straw brooms, and clever shovels with mouths that opened and closed like hungry dogs, shouted imprecations at the Jeep for forcing them to move out of the way. They could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen, dressed in baggy blue overalls and white tee-shirts. They had large pale blue bandanas wrapped around their faces to protect them from dust billowing up from the concrete as they swept. Red motorised baggage trolleys weaved their way among the crowds. Groups of travellers sat patiently on the steps in the shade of black umbrellas, luggage piled high all around them. Margaret followed Li into the ticket hall in the station’s west wing.

Long queues snaked back across marble tiles from a row of hatches that ran the length of the back wall. Destinations were marked above each window in Chinese characters, and Margaret wondered how the casual foreign traveller would know which one to go to. A woman’s strangely disconnected nasal voice droned monotonously over the Tannoy, announcing departures and arrivals. Li joined the back of one of the queues and stood tapping his foot impatiently.

“Where is your uncle going?” she asked, more for something to say than out of any real interest.

“Sichuan,” he said distractedly.

“That’s where your family comes from, isn’t it?”

“He’s going to see my father in Wanxian, and then on to Zigong to talk to my sister.”

There was something in the stress he put on the word “talk” that aroused her curiosity. “Is there a problem?”

“She is pregnant.”

“That’s a problem?”

“You ask too many questions.”