“So my friend here . . .” He nodded towards Qian. “. . . is going to get a nice policeman to buy you some ice cream and then take you home to see your mom. Okay?”

Their faces lit up. “Yeah.”

“Can we have strawberry?”

“You can have whatever flavour you like, sweetheart.” He ruffled their heads and they scrambled out to be led off by Qian. He turned to the baby-sitter. “Okay . . . Just relax.” He moved over and sat beside her and took her hand. It was a small, fleshy hand used to toil. He felt the line of calluses on the palm. She was probably no more than sixteen or seventeen. “This is hard for you, I know. Because you’ve never seen anything like this before.” He spoke very softly and felt a sob shudder through her body. “But we really need your help here, and I know that you want to help us all you can.” She nodded vigorously. “So just take your time and tell me what happened.”

“It was the smoke,” she said, breath catching the back of her throat. “The children were running to see what it was. I kept shouting at them to stop, but they were in such high spirits.”

“So you followed them up the path.”

“Yes.”

“And the body was still on fire?”

The tears filled her eyes again as she remembered. “He was still alive. Reaching out to me, like he was asking for help.”

Li found Pathologist Wang squatting down by the lakeside. Having divested himself of his white gloves, he was having a smoke. Li hunkered down beside him and was offered a cigarette. Without a word, he took one and the pathologist lit it. “So what do you think?” Li asked. He drew deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nostrils, trying to get rid of the smell.

“I think there are times I don’t much like my job.” He glanced grimly at Li. “Looks like some kind of weird suicide ritual. On a cursory examination there’s no sign of blood or injury prior to the burning. So unless an autopsy tells us otherwise, you can probably assume he burned to death.”

“One of the witnesses says he was still alive when they found him.” Reaching out, like he was asking for help. The nanny’s interpretation of what she saw had formed a gruesomely indelible image in Li’s mind.

“Which pretty much fixes time of death, and rules out foul play prior to burning,” Wang concluded. “We get him back to Pao Jü Hutong and I’ll do a preliminary. Should be able to tell a little more about him then. But if you want a full autopsy . . .”

“I do.”

“Then you’re going to have to send him up to the Centre of Material Evidence Determination at the university.” He stood up. “But first we want to get him into the fridge fast—to stop him cooking.”