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 the suspected murders. You’d better have a look at the suicide, just in case. Then debrief the other two and let me know what you think.”

Several hundred curious onlookers had gathered by the lakeside among the willows. Word had swept like wildfire through the nearby market streets, and rumours of death in the park held the promise of drama; a kind of street theatre, something to break the monotonous repetition of their daily lives. Nearly sixty uniformed officers had been assigned to crowd control. Several plainclothes policemen moved among the spectators, listening to gossip and speculation in the hope of picking up even the smallest piece of information that might prove useful. From across the water, where people were packed in under the shade of the pavilion, from above the babble of voices, came the mournful wail of a single-stringed violin, like a dirge for the dead. The rest of the park was deserted.

Li inched his way through the crowd in a dark blue Jeep, red light flashing on the roof, horn sounding. People were reluctant to get out of the way. Curious faces stared in at him as he squeezed past, but he was oblivious. Confidence had returned. He was back on home territory, doing what he was good at. Finally, at the north side of the lake, he drew into an area that had been cleared and taped off by the uniformed police. Several other vehicles, including an ambulance and a forensics van, were already there. As he got out of the Jeep, a uniformed officer pointed up a dusty slope to the trees beyond.