The Fourth Sacrifice by Peter May Read Free Book Online

mortician,’ he said proudly. ‘It’s a long time since I went round with the wagon fetching corpses from their homes. I dress up the bodies now – for the benefit of the living, of course. Taught myself from books on cosmetics and barbering. Mind you, it’s not so easy with some of these accident victims. You know, when the face is all smashed up and you’ve got to use cotton wool, and paper pulp, and plaster and the like to re-make it––.’
    ‘Yes, well right now,’ Li interrupted him, ‘we’re all dealing with the dead.’
    Old Hua jerked his head toward the ceiling. ‘Him up there?’
    ‘How well did you know him?’
    ‘I didn’t. I passed him on the stairs, maybe twice. Didn’t look like he had that much blood in him. A washed-out sort of face he had, pasty and pale. What did they do to him to make him bleed like that?’
    ‘They?’
    ‘Well, whoever did it.’
    ‘So you didn’t see anyone coming or going last night?’
    ‘Not a soul.’
    ‘And you didn’t hear anything?’
    ‘Not a thing. The wife’s half deaf, you know. We have to have the television up at a terrible volume. We never hear anything from above or below.’
    ‘When did you go to bed?’
    ‘That would be about nine o’clock. I’m normally at my work by six.’ He scratched his belly and stubbed out his cigarette.
    So there was no sign of the blood at nine. Li guessed that beneath the floorboards there wouldn’t be much of substance between floor and ceiling. That amount of blood would have soaked through fairly quickly. Which would put the killing perhaps a couple of hours later than the doctor’s estimate.
    ‘When did you wake up?’
    Old Hua started rolling another cigarette. ‘I don’t know for sure. About three, half-three maybe.’ Which narrowed the time of the murder to a six-hour window.
    Li said, ‘How long do you think the blood had been dripping on you?’
    Hua shrugged. ‘Who knows. Usually I sleep like a baby. And the wife takes pills, so it takes a bomb to wake her. But it was pretty sticky, so it couldn’t have been that fresh.’
    Maybe around midnight, then, Li thought. When the street would be deserted and most people in their beds. He jerked his thumb towards the bedroom. ‘Do you mind if we take a look?’
    ‘Go ahead.’ Hua finished rolling and lit his cigarette.
    Li and Qian went to the bedroom door and surveyed the dark stain on the ceiling, the blood drying brown on the crumpled bed sheet below.
    ‘Just who’s going to clean up all that mess?’ the old man shouted through. ‘That’s what I want to know.’
    Li turned back into the hall and was startled by the apparition of old Hua’s wife, stark naked, emerging from the bathroom clutching a towel. She let out a tiny scream of fright and with a judder of old and sagging breasts, hurried back into the bathroom and slammed the door.
    Old Hua just laughed. ‘Not a pretty sight, eh?’
    Li and Qian exchanged glances and suppressed smiles.
    ‘Thank you, Mr Hua,’ Li said. ‘We’ll take full statements from you and your wife later.’ He paused at the door. ‘One more thing. Do you have any idea who owns the apartment upstairs?’
    ‘Nope. The guy who had it died about a year ago and left it to some relative who’s been renting it out. Just like the old landlords, eh? We had a revolution to get rid of these types. Seems like we’ve just come full circle.’
    As Li and Qian re-entered the victim’s apartment on the fourth floor, two assistants were manoeuvring the corpse into a body bag for removal to Pao Jü Hutong, where the autopsy would be carried out in a few hours’ time.
    ‘Once forensics are finished, I want the apartment sealed off,’ Li said. ‘No one gets in here without referring to me first. And I want to know who the hell owns this place. If anyone knows who our John Doe is, it’s got to be the guy who rented him the apartment.’
    A sudden commotion in the back room distracted him. One of the assistants called