The Killing Room (22 page)

Mei-Ling shivered and moved closer to him, hugging her arms around herself. ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘I’m not dressed for this.’ He put an arm around her so that she could share his warmth, and she looked at him, surprise in her expression, and he immediately felt self-conscious. He took his arm away.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No it’s all right. It helps.’ She moved a little closer, and he put his arm tentatively around her again. ‘What sign are you?’ she asked.

He frowned, not understanding. ‘Sign?’

‘Birth sign.’

He smiled. ‘Oh. That. I was born in the year of the horse.’

She did a quick mental calculation. ‘So you’re
two
years younger than me.’

He acknowledged with a tilt of his head. Now it was his turn to do the calculation. ‘You’re a tiger,’ he said.

She grinned mischievously, ‘Men are always telling me that.’

‘So there have been a lot of men in your life,’ he said.

Her grin turned rueful. ‘I wish.’

Li shrugged. ‘A good-looking woman like you … there must have been someone special, at some time.’

She clouded. ‘Not really.’ And he knew she was keeping something from him.

‘You never get involved with another cop?’ He tried to make it sound innocent, but she looked at him sharply and moved away, breaking free of his arm around her shoulders.

‘You’ve been listening to departmental gossip,’ she said coldly.

‘I never listen to gossip,’ Li said. ‘But sometimes I can’t help hearing it.’

‘I swear to my ancestors, they’re nothing but a lot of old women in that detectives’ office.’ Mei-Ling seemed unaccountably agitated. ‘They think they’re a bunch of hard men, but they’re worse than schoolgirls. Men!’ She glared at Li. ‘You’re all the same. Only ever think of one thing, and think that women do, too. Well, they don’t!’ The tiger was showing her claws.

‘Hey,’ Li said defensively, ‘don’t lump me in with all the rest. I don’t think anything. I was just asking, that’s all. You asked about me and Margaret. I told you.’

There was a moment of tension between them, then Mei-Ling dropped her shoulders and relented. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not just about being the only woman in an office full of men. It’s also about being their boss. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, there’s always a sexual tension there. There’s always guys who think they can make you. And when they can’t, they make things up about you.’

The sky above them suddenly opened up, and there was an unexpected wash of sunshine across the water. And there, lit against the black sky beyond it, was the impressive span of the Yangpu Suspension Bridge. The cruiser started to make its turn, and Li saw An Wenjiang watching them from the window of the wheelhouse.

‘Forget I asked,’ he said. ‘It’s not important.’

III

Margaret sat in the viewing room with Dr Lan and the other pathologists on the team. They were drinking mugs of hot green tea in silence when Li and Mei-Ling walked in. Margaret glanced up wearily at Li. She had been wide awake at four in the morning, now she was barely able to keep her eyes open. And she had no desire to have to fend off recriminations about last night. It had been a very long day.

‘Finished the autopsies?’ Li asked.

She nodded.

‘And?’

‘I can confirm,’ Margaret said, ‘that they are all quite dead.’ When this was met with a cold silence, she added, ‘We had one other positive ID. From fingerprints.’

‘We know about that,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘There is someone working on it already.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘But there’s nothing much else to go on. The MO’s the same in every case. While it wouldn’t stand up in court, I’d pretty much stake my reputation that all the operations were carried out by the same surgeon.’

‘Operations?’ Li asked. It seemed like an odd way to describe what had been done to these women.

But Margaret was in no mood for semantics. ‘Operations, procedures, whatever you want to call them. The victims were all alive at the beginning and they were all dead at the end.’

Dr Lan intervened. ‘I think what Margaret is trying to say is that they were all killed at the hand of a skilled surgeon.’ Li noticed that Lan referred to Margaret by her first name. There had obviously been some sort of reconciliation, even bonding, during the course of the day. And he remembered Margaret once telling him that to share the experience of an autopsy was to share in a heightened sense of mortality. Margaret and Lan had worked together on eighteen bodies. That was a lot of sharing, a lot of mortality.

‘Are we any nearer to determining why they were killed?’ Mei-Ling asked impatiently.

Margaret shook her head. ‘Dr Lan and I have discussed this at length. In other circumstances I think we would probably have reached the conclusion that this was some kind of organ harvesting on the grand scale.’

‘All the transplantable material has been removed from the bodies,’ Dr Lan said. ‘Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas …’

‘Even the eyes,’ Margaret said.

‘Eyes?’ Li frowned. ‘You cannot transplant eyes, can you?’

‘Corneal tissue can be used in eye surgery,’ Mei-Ling said.

‘But they did not take the spleen,’ said Lan, ‘which is not transplantable.’

‘Or anything else,’ Margaret said. ‘In fact, nothing else was even touched – apart from the subsequent hacking up of the bodies.’

Li accepted a mug of green tea from a white-coated assistant and sat down. Mei-Ling waved the assistant aside and remained standing. Li said, ‘Would the returns really be worth the risk? I mean, who is going to buy an organ? How much could it possibly be worth?’

Margaret leaned forward. ‘In the United States alone there are more than sixty thousand people waiting for life-saving organ transplants. I read somewhere that about twelve Americans die every day waiting for one, and that about every fifteen minutes another name is added to the waiting list.’

‘So what you have worldwide,’ said Lan, ‘is a huge demand.’

‘And a very limited supply,’ Margaret said.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Li. ‘Supply and demand. The life-blood of capitalism. The American Way.’

‘A simple fact of life,’ Margaret said. ‘And people with money will pay anything to buy themselves a few more years. I’ve heard that the going rate for a single kidney transplant is more than a hundred thousand dollars. There are clinics in India making millions from the procedure. Of course, there the donors are alive and willing to give a kidney or an eye in return for what they see as a passport out of poverty.’

Li was astonished. He had heard rumours of organ theft, but had never actually encountered it, or ever really considered the economics. ‘But how would it work? I mean, you could not keep the organs fresh for very long, could you?’

Dr Lan shrugged. ‘The heart, no. Four hours, maybe. The recipient would need to be on hand.’

Margaret said, ‘I’d have to check, but most of the other organs could probably be kept fresh for anything up to two or three days, the liver certainly for up to thirty-six hours. They would just flush the organs through with iced water, or with a solution of high molecular weight sugars, plop them in a cold box on wet ice, and they could be flown out to almost anywhere in the world as hand luggage.’

Mei-Ling was looking at her sceptically. ‘But you do not believe that is what is happening here?’

‘It would certainly be the easy answer,’ Margaret said.

‘So why is it not?’ Li asked.

‘Well, for a start,’ Margaret said, ‘while there have been plenty of rumours of children being killed for their organs in the streets of South America, or orphanages in Egypt being turned into organ farms, there is not, to my knowledge, a single certified case of someone being murdered for their organs. I mean, think about it. You’d need trained medical staff, sterile operating conditions, proper medical aftercare. These are not the kinds of things that criminals have easy access to.’

‘And heaven forbid there should be any crooked doctors in the world,’ Mei-Ling said. Which did not go down well in a roomful of pathologists. She shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed. Then she said, ‘So there is a first time for everything. Why else do you not believe it?’

‘The victims are all female,’ said Lan. ‘Why only choose females? In China it is men who are in more plentiful supply. It does not make sense.’

Margaret added, ‘Then there’s your body in Beijing. The organs were removed, certainly, but not taken. And, of course, the most compelling reason of all that we discussed yesterday. There is no medical or any other reason for keeping the victims alive during the procedure. You’d have to be insane to even contemplate it.’

‘Which brings us back to your psycho surgeon,’ Li said, ‘and a point raised at the detectives’ meeting last night.’

‘Oh, yes?’ As Margaret’s energy was fading, so was her interest.

‘Your surgeon, or whatever he is, could not have been acting alone, could he? There must have been at least one, possibly two others, assisting in the procedure.’

Margaret nodded, and Mei-Ling said, ‘So immediately we have the scenario you have just been discounting – a team of medically trained people collaborating in a crime.’

Margaret shrugged and got to her feet. ‘I never said doctors were saints.’ She looked at Li. ‘Did you manage to identify any of our victims today?’

Li said, ‘The boyfriend of an opera singer who went missing about a year ago is coming in to look at your girl with the singer’s nodules.’

‘And we need you to look at an x-ray,’ said Mei-Ling. And Margaret thought how like a team they were already. ‘The seamstress. The husband of the woman who we think she might be says she broke her right index finger a couple of years ago. You can tell that from the x-rays, right?’

‘Right,’ Margaret said.

They went downstairs, leaving Dr Lan and the others to finish their tea, and found the x-ray of the seamstress’s right hand. Margaret put it on the light box and traced the luminous image of the dead woman’s index finger with her own.

‘There it is,’ she said. She lightly tapped the callus formed on the bone by the healed fracture. ‘I guess that seals it.’

Li turned to Mei-Ling. ‘We had better get the husband in for a visual identification.’

She nodded grimly. ‘I will go and fix it.’

Li and Margaret found themselves alone for the first time since she had failed to meet him for dinner the previous night. They stood in an awkward silence, Margaret not sure how to apologise, Li again guiltily aware of the feelings that Mei-Ling had aroused in him just a few hours earlier.

Margaret scuffed her foot at a cracked tile on the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small voice. ‘About last night. I guess I was just out of it.’ And she thought how often it was she seemed to be apologising for the night before. Perhaps tonight she could make up for it.

To Li she looked suddenly very small and tired and vulnerable, and he was immediately overcome by familiar feelings of love and affection, and a desire to comfort her. He took her in his arms and drew her close, and she yielded so completely that her legs nearly buckled under her. They stood for several moments, just holding on.

‘It won’t happen again,’ she said. ‘I promise. Tonight we’ll forget about dinner and go straight to my room. Then if I fall asleep you can think of interesting ways to wake me up.’ Almost before the words had left her mouth she felt him tense, and she drew back to look at him. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I told Mei-Ling we would have dinner with her tonight at her family restaurant.’

Her expression hardened, and she felt her weariness giving way to anger. ‘Li Yan, we’ve hardly had five minutes alone together since I got here.’

‘That’s hardly my fault.’ He felt his hackles rising.

She said, ‘Well, maybe you’d better just go on your own. It’s you she wants to have for dinner anyway, not me.’

Li sighed. ‘Actually, she made a point of asking you. It is only a small restaurant. It is going to be a family meal with her father and her aunt … I think she was very generous to ask you at all, considering how you have been treating her.’

‘Why?’ said Margaret. ‘Is the contempt showing?’

Li threw his hands up in despair. ‘Oh, well, maybe you should not come, then. Because if this is how you are going to be, you will only spoil it.’

‘And we wouldn’t want to do that, would we? Seeing as how
generous
sweet little Mei-Ling’s being.’ They stood glaring at each other before finally she said, ‘You’d better pick me up at the hotel. I’ll make a determined effort not to fall asleep this time.’

‘You sure you want to bother?’ Li said. By now he was almost hoping she wouldn’t.

‘Oh, yes,’ Margaret said. She wasn’t going to let Mei-Ling get him that easily. ‘If her family’s gone to the trouble of preparing a meal for us, then we really shouldn’t let them down, should we?’ She paused. ‘Six o’clock?’ He nodded and she hurried out.

When she’d gone he stood for a moment, a cocktail of conflicting emotions stirring inside him. Then he looked up and saw the video camera on the wall and realised that the whole scene had been played out for the watching pathologists upstairs. If the sound was up they’d have caught the whole gory episode. He felt sick. They would never have witnessed anything quite like it in an autopsy room before, like some cheap TV hospital drama, and in his head he could hear their laughter echoing around the mortuary.

IV

They had acquired a desk lamp for him, and he was able to sit in the darkened office with only a pool of light focusing his attention on the files that littered his desk. If he swivelled in his chair he could look out at the rising columns of lit windows in the police apartments opposite, wives preparing meals for husbands coming in from work, or sending them out on the night shift. Children watching television or surfing the Internet or doing homework from school. Li wondered what it must be like to have a family, an ordered life, someone waiting to welcome you home. Things he had never really known. A mother killed in the Cultural Revolution, a father who had never been the same after repeated beatings at the hands of the Red Guards who were his keepers. A sister who had run off and left him with her child, an uncle who had taught him everything and then been murdered in his own apartment.