A matter of life and death | 16 March 2017

It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political and economic isolation. The discovery on 16 November 2011 of the dead body of the British businessman Neil Heywood in Room 1605 of the Lucky Holiday Hotel in the Chinese city of Chongqing was not in itself so shocking. Sordid maybe, as it was declared by the Chinese authorities that he had died of excessive alcohol consumption. But nothing more than that. The revelations that followed, though, transformed the case into an international cause célèbre, the inner workings of Chinese politics unravelling before the greedy eyes of the foreign media. Heywood, it has been suggested, was if not a spy then at least an ‘informer’ working for the British government. He did not die from natural causes but was poisoned by the wife of a leading Chinese politician who had been tipped for high office until her arrest and trial proved his undoing.

Carrie Grace’s five-part series for Radio 4, Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (produced by Neal Razzell and Maria Byrne), was almost as shocking as the story itself. Slick, efficient and professional, it was also shaped very definitely for the podcast market and was very different in tone from the usual Radio 4 documentary. It was very listenable and hugely engaging, but the catchy soundbites and multiple voices, though livening up the storytelling, did not make its complex trail any clearer to follow.

We were taken first of all not to Beijing but to Bournemouth and a short interview with a balloon-seller who back in 2000 was approached by Heywood’s killer, the elegant but ‘dangerous’ Gu Kailai. She was in Britain because her son was at an expensive public school here, and on a whim had decided to import hot-air balloons into China to satisfy a growing demand for them.