Five years ago, China's most charismatic politician was toppled from power. His disgrace allowed his great rival to dominate the political stage in a way unseen in China since the days of Chairman Mao.
All this was made possible by a murder.
And the story of that murder begins not in China but in a British seaside town.
It's the summer of 2000 in a resort on the south coast of England, and a well-dressed Chinese woman in her early 40s is trying to buy a balloon. Not a party balloon for the kids - a giant helium balloon like the one right in front of her, carrying holidaymakers 400ft up into the air.
“It was right in the middle of Bournemouth, by the end of the pier in the lower garden, and Gu Kailai just turned up one day and asked to see whoever was in charge,” says Giles Hall, the balloon's owner.
She said, 'I want one of these things in my town in China.' We thought it was a joke. She was draped in jewellery and expensive clothes so we knew she was wealthy but we didn't quite understand what the situation was.”
It wasn't a joke. For Hall, this pier-end conversation was the beginning of a two-year effort to satisfy Gu, and he quickly discovered his client was hot-tempered and suspicious.
“We'd have these huge arguments on the phone and she'd say, 'You're threatening me, you're threatening me!' And I'd say, 'I'm not threatening you I'm just telling you the facts!' And one got the distinct impression that if one pushed her too far she could really be dangerous,” he says.
To help with this bizarre business deal, Gu brought in a British middleman who spoke Chinese - Neil Heywood.
One of his tasks, Hall says, was to get the balloon through customs without paying import duties.
“He'd pick us up in a car with a shoebox in the back seat that would have £50,000 ($62,000), which he called his funny money - his bunga bunga money he used to call it for getting things he wanted. It was all very dubious behaviour!
“I used to ask him, 'Where did this come from?' And he just used to tap the side of his nose.”
The balloon was bound for a city called Dalian, which is where Gu and Heywood had first met, several years earlier.
Dalian's stony beach is peopled by hunched figures with steel claw hammers. Through rocks and slime, they dig for worms and sell them, wriggling in plastic cups, to fishermen.
In the 1990s, few people outside China had heard of this gritty port city - next stop North Korea. It was an unlikely destination for a young British expat with an expensive education. Tall and elegant - white linen suits in summer and tweeds in winter - Neil Heywood must have stood out amid the rusting factories and crumbling Soviet-style tower blocks. He started as an English teacher, learned Chinese, found a local wife, and re-invented himself as a business consultant.
I spent weeks interviewing people and no-one could tell me exactly why he was there.
Former British diplomat Kerry Brown, who met Heywood once on a trip to the city, describes it as “puzzling”. There weren't many British business people in provincial China back then, he says, and all of them seemed to have a strange back story.
Neil Heywood's back story may have included a relationship with British intelligence - several sources have told me, off the record, that he worked as an informant. However it's not clear when that relationship began, and British officials refuse to comment. But more on this later.
Here I'm going to come clean. Despite months of trying and hundreds of interview requests all over the world, there are many things we don't know about this story.
There are no heroes in it, only villains and victims. And it's a descent into the dark heart of Chinese elite politics... which is dangerous. Most people who know the story from the inside are dead, in jail or unwilling to talk.
There is a good source, though, when it comes to Gu Kailai's back story - her friend and former colleague, Larry Cheng.
The expensively dressed woman buying a helium balloon in Bournemouth hadn't always been able to count on wealth and comfort, he says. She started life privileged, for sure - her father had been an army general - but then came the chaos and terror of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution and, like so many of the Chinese elite, her parents were thrown into jail.
“She was reduced to being a beggar. When her parents were in prison, she was begging outside,” says Cheng. “She did manual labour, she worked as a butcher. She didn't have much schooling but she taught herself and then used her connections to get into Peking University.”
Peking University is the Oxford of China, so Gu was not just a survivor, she was a striver. And after Mao's death her family was back in favour. She'd got the education. She started her own law firm. Also on the checklist - the husband.
At the top level Chinese politics and business are a man's game, so an ambitious woman needs a powerful husband.
When they fell in love he was already married. But the wife was no match for Gu - remembered by Cheng as petite, elegant and very persuasive, a woman who drew a lot of attention wherever she went. The lovers pushed through the divorce, against the wife's protests, and got married.
Back then they lived in a small room without a toilet, Cheng remembers, with a curtain to separate the bed from the table and chairs.
Even the Chinese elite lived humbly in the 1980s. But China was about to hit the big time and so were the newlyweds.
By the 1990s, Gu's husband was China's most up-and-coming politician and serving as mayor in Dalian, the city where Heywood was trying to carve out a career as a business consultant. The mayor's name? Bo Xilai.
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