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He paused for a moment, then on an impulse he went into his uncle’s bedroom. He’d left it just as the old man kept it when he was alive. Personal things laid out neatly on the dresser, pictures on the wall; a photograph of Yifu as a young police officer setting off for Tibet in 1950; a picture of Yifu and his wife – the aunt Li had never met; a photograph of Yifu at his retirement banquet, his round face beaming broadly below a mop of curling black hair, a glaze over his normally bright eyes – he had drunk far too much beer. Li smiled and touched the picture, as if in touching the image of his uncle he could somehow reach him again in some other life. But it was just glass beneath his fingers, cold and lifeless. He turned quickly and switched out the light, and hurried from the apartment.
    The night-shift security guard nodded as Li wheeled his bike out into Zhengyi Road and headed north up to East Chang’an Avenue. There was very little traffic about at this time, the odd private car, the occasional convoy of great rumbling trucks hauling coal south from the pits north of the city. There were virtually no other cyclists, and Li had the cycle lane to himself. He pedalled hard through the dappled light of streetlamps shining through the trees. Most of the neon and coloured arc lights that illuminated so many of the new buildings at night were turned off at this time. It was the darkest hour of the night. And Li fought to keep the darkest thoughts from his mind.
    This was the fourth beheading in what were, as far as anyone knew, the first ever serial killings in Beijing. Four murders in as many weeks. Bloody, execution-style killings, each following the same bizarre ritual, chilling in their cold, calculated and entirely premeditated nature. He tried to shut out of his mind the scene that he knew would confront him. He had seen many murder victims in his time, and victims of all manner of accidental death, but never had he seen so much blood. It was hard to believe the body held so much. And when it was such a vibrant, freshly oxygenated red, the effect was shocking.
    Li passed under the flyover of the second ring road and continued east, past the CITIC building and the China World Trade Centre, before turning north again on the third ring road. In a couple of hours, the city would be waking, bleary-eyed cyclists jamming the cycle lanes heading for work. The traffic would start to build, so that by eight almost all the main arteries would have ground to a halt, and row upon row of frustrated motorists would peep their horns and rev their engines, belching filthy, unregulated fumes into the already toxic atmosphere. Cycling in Beijing had long since ceased to be a pleasure.
    But as yet the third ring road was still deserted, not a single vehicle or cyclist along its length as far as Li could see. He could almost believe he was alone in the city. Until he turned east into Tuan Jie Hu Dongli and saw, about two hundred yards along this normally secluded, tree-lined street, a crowd of several hundred people gathered around a phalanx of police and forensic vehicles drawn into the sidewalk at Building No. 7. These were people from up and down the street, woken from their sleep by the sirens of police and ambulance. Hastily dressed figures, some still in slippers, pressed around the official vehicles, puffy faces below tousled hair straining for a sight of what was going on. Several dozen uniformed officers assigned to crowd control were already erecting temporary barriers. More people were emerging all the time from tenement closes. Li had to force his way through to the barriers, and a po-faced young uniformed officer would not let him through until he had flashed his Ministry ID. Another officer, this time one Li recognised, stood sentry by the entrance to the close.
    ‘Where’s Detective Qian?’ Li asked.
    The officer jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Up the stairs. Fourth floor.’
    The walls of the close were