Richard and I went for a run in a park near the hotel as soon as he came back from the airport. I’d had my eye on the mountains all along and had seen several villages in the scrubland that separated the city from the hills. I wanted Richard to help me cover some miles and hand out a bunch of posters among the locals up there.
Richard had other plans. I didn’t know it at the time, but Lucja had been in touch with him already, asking him to look after me because she knew I was stressed and not eating properly.
After the run, we met up with the team. Lu Xin looked anxious as Lil told me about a few phone calls she’d taken. That was nothing new. The more posters we’d hand out, the more calls we’d get. Mostly they were false alarms, but sometimes they were from people asking if we would increase the reward if they brought Gobi in. They were time wasters, and after the first few, Lu Xin stopped telling me about them.
These calls were different. I could tell she was hiding something. I pressed her to tell me what was going on.
“Just someone being bad,” she said. But I wasn’t satisfied.
“Tell me. I want to know.”
“Lu Xin took a call this afternoon. They said that Gobi is going to be killed.”
At first I didn’t get it, but as the news sank in, I felt sick. If this was a joke, it was despicable. If it was real, I was terrified.
I’d calmed down a bit by the time I returned to the hotel, but the interview with BBC Radio later that evening was a bit of a disaster. I was feeling particularly hopeless and depressed about the search, and even though I knew how important it was to sound upbeat and positive, to make it clear that this was not a hopeless case, I failed. I was exhausted, worried, and unable to see how we could ever hope to find Gobi. It was not my finest media hour.
Even though I’d been feeling so flat, I’d wanted to do the interview because of a piece that had appeared in the Huffington Post two days earlier. Under the headline “Missing Marathon Dog Gobi May Have Been Snatched by Dog Meat Thieves”, the piece quoted someone from Humane Society International who said that it was “very worrying that Gobi has gone missing in China, where between 10 and 20 million dogs are killed each year for the dog meat trade”.1 From everything that Lu Xin had told me, the dog meat trade was not common in the region we were in, especially given the large number of Muslim Uighur who lived there. There was no way they would ever eat a dog, which they considered to be as unfit for human consumption as a pig.
Not only was the piece inaccurate, but it was also not helpful. We had our small band of dog lovers joining in the search, but we needed the local and national Chinese media to cover the story and help convince the wider population in the city to care about a little dog. Chris and Kiki had already advised me to stay positive and never say anything critical of the state while I was being interviewed, and I knew that if the authorities felt that the story was being used by the Western media to paint the Chinese as dog-eating barbarians, I’d lose all hope of ever getting their help again.
The truth was that the local search team had been great. I wanted to tell the BBC and all the supporters back home what amazing support we’d received from the general public as well as the authorities. I wanted to make it perfectly clear that everyone I’d met had been helpful, kind, and generous. I couldn’t have asked for more from the team, the Chinese media, and Kiki back in Beijing. Even if we never found Gobi, their support had been phenomenal.
That’s what I wanted to tell the BBC that night. Instead, I sounded as though I was ready to end it all.
Richard rescued the situation with a few beers and a good meal. We talked about things that had nothing to do with Gobi or the search, and Richard told me he was a former US marine. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that, although when the conversation did return to Gobi, he had some interesting theories on what had happened to her.
“None of this adds up,” he said. “Even without those calls, it still looks wrong to me. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Nurali being in the US or her father-in-law accidentally letting her escape. I think that the moment Gobi’s story went viral and the fund-raising kicked in, someone spotted a chance to make some money. That’s all this is about, Dion—money. This is a shakedown. The call will come.”
I wasn’t so sure. Part of me didn’t believe him because I couldn’t imagine anyone would go to such lengths for just a few thousand pounds. Then there was a part of me that didn’t believe him because I just didn’t want to. I couldn’t stand the thought that Richard might be right and that Gobi’s survival depended on whether some idiot thought he could get enough money out of us to make it worthwhile. What if Gobi’s captor changed his mind? What if he got cold feet? Would he return her carefully to Nurali, or would he treat her like any other failed business experiment and dispose of her as quickly as possible?
My phone buzzed with a message from Lu Xin.
Look at this photo. Gobi?
I wasn’t convinced. The quality of the image was poor, but what I could see of the eyes didn’t look right at all. Plus, there was a deep scar on the dog’s head that Gobi didn’t have during the race.
I sent a quick reply saying that it wasn’t Gobi, but Richard wasn’t so sure.
“Don’t you think we should go and have a look?” he said.
I was tired and tried to brush him off. “Mate, we’ve had almost thirty of these, and they’re always the same. It’ll take an hour and a half to get up there, see the dog, have a chat, and then get back. It’s getting late, and we’ve got to be up early tomorrow.”
Richard looked at the photo again. “Looks a bit like Gobi to me.”
Lu Xin sent another message thirty minutes later. This time it was a better-quality image, and someone had enlarged the eyes and pasted them next to the photo of Gobi from the reward poster. Maybe she and Richard did have a point.
Richard was convinced when I slid the phone over to him. “We’ve got to go,” he said.
We drove into the gated community and parked in between a shiny Lexus and a couple of BMWs. A whole bunch of the cars had foot-long red ribbons tied to one of their wing mirrors—a sign that the cars hadn’t long left the dealership. The neatly tended gardens and wide apartments themselves spoke of wealth. This was clearly one part of Urumqi that I’d not seen.
As we followed Lu Xin, I told Richard that we were wasting our time. And as the front door of the residence opened to reveal every single person in the search team, plus another ten or more strangers I’d never laid eyes on, I couldn’t help but sigh. Any hope I had of being out of here quickly and back to bed was blown out of the water.