Li retraced their steps down Dahua Lu in long, loping strides, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. Margaret was struggling to keep up with him, half running to do so. “But what did they say?” She was almost beside herself with curiosity, and he was being infuriatingly uncommunicative, concentrating on unshared dark thoughts that swam through his head behind deeply furrowed brows. They reached the Jeep and he got in behind the wheel. She got into the passenger side. “For God’s sake, Li Yan!”

He turned towards her. “Are you hungry?”

“What?”

“I could really go a jian bing. I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Neither have I, but I’d rather know what they told you in the hospital.”

“Mei Yuan will still be selling jian bing at the corner of Dongzhimennei,” he said. He started the Jeep and pulled away from the sidewalk. They had driven north, the length of Dahua Lu, and were turning east on to Jianguomennei Avenue when he said, “It seems they ran all sorts of tests on Chao.” He replayed in his mind the short conversation he had conducted with the Administration Officer at the hospital. “But certain results never came back from the laboratory, and the next thing all his medical records were removed from the Beijing Hospital and he was transferred as an in-patient to Military Hospital Number 301.”

Margaret waited. But Li had finished, and the significance of what he had told her somehow escaped her. “So what’s Military Hospital Number 301?” she asked.

“It is a high-security VIP hospital. It treats the top people in government and the bureaucracy. Deng Xiaoping received treatment there during his final illness.”

Margaret frowned. “But Chao wasn’t in that category of VIP, was he?”

“No, he was not.”

“So how come he was being treated there?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Margaret thought for a moment. “I guess he could only have been admitted to Military Hospital Number 301 if someone very powerful had arranged it, right?” Li nodded. “Someone high up in government, or the civil service?” Li nodded again, and for the first time Margaret began to understand Li’s retreat into himself. “Are we getting into something here that’s starting to get a bit scary?” she asked, a knot like a fist beginning to turn in her stomach.

“I’ve had a bad feeling about this all day,” Li said. He breathed deeply. “And it’s not going away.”

He sounded his horn more frequently than usual as they weaved through the bicycles and traffic in Chaoyangmen Nanxiaojie Street. He was more used to manoeuvring his way along this street as a cyclist than as a motorist.

“But you will still be able to access his medical records, won’t you?”

Li looked uncertain. “I don’t know. Dealing with a place like that is outside my experience, perhaps even my jurisdiction.”

“In the States we’d subpoena the records.”