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scarred and dirty. They had probably never been painted since the apartments were first built in the seventies. There was a damp, airless smell in the stairwell, a faint whiff of urine. Rusted old bicycles jostled for space on each landing, doors to apartments shuttered behind steel grilles. Li climbed the stairs two at a time. A number of uniformed officers stood smoking on the fourth landing, a couple of forensics men, wearing tell-tale white gloves, leaned on the rail and watched him come up. Bright light spilled out from the apartment.
    Li nodded grimly and squeezed in the door, past a tiny kitchen on his left, a toilet on the right. There were a couple of flimsy flip-flop sandals by a cabinet just past the kitchen door – a change of footwear for the interior in more fastidious times. Beyond was a narrow room with built-in cupboards at the far end, and a table littered with the detritus of everyday life: newspapers, cigarettes, an overflowing ashtray, dirty dinner plates waiting to be cleared away. To the left, interior windows gave on to a bedroom filled with light from the streetlamps outside. To the right, a tiny living room with a sofa and TV, and a screen door opening on to a glassed balcony. There was a smell of stale cigarettes and cooking, and the merest hint of something strangely sharp, almost sweet, that Li could not identify.
    The body was in the living room. Li smelled the blood before he saw the crouched shape of the fallen decapitated figure, the head two feet further away, lying on its side, eyes staring back towards him. The flash of the police photographer’s camera unexpectedly burned the image into Li’s brain, the great pool of red made more vivid in the sudden blinding light.
    Detective Qian’s gaunt face swam into view. He nodded grimly. ‘Just the same as the others, boss.’
    Qian was nearly ten years older than Li, considerably more experienced. But he didn’t have Li’s flair or imagination, which is why Li, at the age of thirty-three, had been promoted ahead of him. But Qian had had no ill feelings. He knew what his limitations were, and he was a good judge of others’ abilities. He was absolutely dependable, and Li leaned on him heavily. Besides which, he was as straight as they come. There was no side to Qian. What you saw was what you got, and Li knew there was never any danger of their misunderstanding each other.
    ‘When the photographer’s finished let’s clear this place,’ Li said. ‘There’s too many people in here.’
    ‘Sure. I think he’s just about done. The doc’s looking at the body now.’ Qian immediately started moving people out.
    Dr Wang Xing, the duty pathologist from the Centre of Criminal Technological Determination in Pao Jü Hutong, was crouched over the body. He had an unlit cigarette clamped between pursed lips and blood on his white gloves. He stood up and slowly peeled them off, stepping carefully over an area of floor where the linoleum had been pulled back and floorboards lifted. Avoiding the great pool of blood that had drained into the hole, and the characteristic spatter patterns left by the jets of blood that had shot from the carotid arteries, he picked his way out into the hall. The cigarette had stuck to his lips and he peeled it carefully away and grinned. ‘“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you” …’
    ‘Rudyard Kipling,’ Li said.
    ‘Ah,’ said Pathologist Wang. ‘A man of letters.’
    ‘My uncle had a book of his poetry.’
    ‘Well, of course … He would, wouldn’t he?’ The pathologist dropped his soiled gloves into a plastic bag and almost sang, ‘You’re going to have to catch this guy, Li. Or it’ll be your head.’ He pulled a lighter from his pocket.
    ‘Don’t light that in here,’ Li said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any need to ask you about the cause of death?’
    Pathologist Wang shrugged and put his lighter away. ‘Well, it’s pretty obvious that