The Killing Room (23 page)

And now he sat here on his own, with only the ghosts of eighteen murdered women for company, each one appealing to him to find their killer, requiring him to return order to a disordered world.

He thought of the viewing room at the mortuary where he had sat with the lights low watching the husband of the murdered seamstress identify her remains. A white body bag wheeled in on a gurney. The sound of the zip as it was opened to reveal the pitiful collection of body pieces that represented the remnants of the woman he had loved. His cry, as if struck by a blow. The sobs that came slowly at first as he stuffed a fist in his mouth to try to contain them, before he backed up against the wall and slid slowly to the floor, pulling his arms around his shins and rocking back and forth in his abject misery, weeping openly. For as long as there had been no word of her, there had always been hope. And now there was none.

Li thought of how much this contrasted with the boyfriend of the opera singer. His casual stroll into the autopsy room, hands in pockets. His complete lack of reaction when the body bag was unzipped, simply a curt nod of the head. No tears, no visible emotion. But Li suspected that somewhere, later, on his own, in the dark, An Wenjiang would be confronted by his grief.

On the desk in front of him was the file on the girl they had identified with fingerprints. Just twenty years old, a petty thief convicted of shop-lifting. Her baby girl, a little under two years old, had been placed in the custody of her grandparents while her mother served time. Reform through labour. But no one would ever know now whether she had reformed or not. Her parents had told the detectives who interviewed them that they thought she had gone to Canton or Hong Kong with one of the boys she hung around with. They had never reported her missing. Her little girl would never know her. But at least her parents would be spared the need to identify the remains. The body pieces had been DNA-matched, and the fingerprints were conclusive proof of identity.

Murder by surgical procedure
. That was how Margaret had described what had happened to these women. But for no apparent reason, and with no apparent logic.

Why
these
women? Was there a pattern? Was there something they all had in common that Li and everyone else was failing to see?
The answer always lies in the detail
, he could hear his uncle whisper in his ear. A petty thief, an opera singer, a seamstress. What was it that connected them, apart from the manner in which they died? It was something, he knew, they would probably not be able even to guess at until they had identified them all.

There was a knock at the door and detective Dai entered without waiting to be asked. ‘Hey, Chief,’ he said, and dropped a file on Li’s desk. Li had given up correcting him. ‘That’s all the stuff we could dig up on that medical student who was doing the night watch at the building site. Jiang Baofu.’ Dai was silhouetted against the light of the corridor behind him, and Li didn’t see the second folder until it dropped on top of the first. ‘And another possible ID.’

Li turned the top file towards him and opened it to see a photograph of a young woman, cut out from a group, attached to a missing person’s form that someone had filled out several months previously. Her hair was tied up in bunches, like a small girl, and she was wearing a tight-fitting, spangled costume of some sort. But Li could not determine what it was, because the photograph was cut off just below the collar bone. Someone had only been interested in her face. He glanced at the form. Name, age, occupation … Wu Liyao, aged thirty … He looked up at Dai, frowning. ‘An acrobat?’

‘A member of the Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre. Missing for three months.’

‘What makes you think she’s one of our girls?’

Dai pulled a face. ‘Don’t know for sure, Chief. A long shot, really. But your pathologist said one of the women had stress fractures in her feet? Suggested she might be an athlete, or a gymnast?’ He shrugged. ‘I figured an acrobat would fit under that heading, too.’

Li nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s a good thought, Dai. Well done,’ he said. ‘It’s worth following up.’ He couldn’t really see Dai’s face, but he could hear his grin. Dai turned to go. Li said, ‘Detective …’ Dai stopped in the open door.

‘Yeah, Chief?’

‘The other night …’ he hesitated, ‘… you seemed to be suggesting that Deputy Section Chief Nien was having a relationship with a senior officer in the department.’

‘Was I?’ Dai asked innocently.

‘Weren’t you?’

Dai shrugged. ‘Sorry, Chief, but I was told by a senior officer that I wasn’t to discuss that sort of thing.’ He closed the door behind him, and Li felt like his knuckles had just been rapped. He deserved it, he supposed.

He sat for a long time in the darkness wondering why he had even asked. Did it matter to him? Was he really interested in the possibility of entering into a relationship with her? And, if so, where did that leave his feelings for Margaret? He knew what he felt about Margaret. At least, he thought he did. He loved her. But, somehow, it had never been quite enough. There was something missing, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Was it cultural, linguistic? He had always felt he could not make his home in the United States, and yet he had expected Margaret to make her home here. There was an unhappiness in her that was like a barrier between them, and he had no idea how to break it down.

He forced himself to refocus his thoughts on more important things. Eighteen women whose murderer or murderers were still at large, possibly adding more victims to a list that might already include others they did not know about. He opened the file on Jiang Baofu. He was twenty-three years old, born in the town of Yanqing in Hebei Province near Beijing. His grandfather had been a farm labourer, his grandmother a teacher at the local kindergarten. He had an older sister who was married to an office worker in the capital. They lived near the university, in Haidian Road.

Jiang was in his final year at Shanghai Medical University. He was specialising in surgery, and had expressed an interest in going on to study forensic pathology. He rented an apartment in a tower block in Ming-Xin Village, a new suburb on the opposite side of the city. He had moved out of student accommodation the previous year.

Li paused and thought about this. It was yet another anomaly. How could a student from a poor family afford to move out of student accommodation to rent his own apartment? A student who, apparently, had had to take all kinds of vacation work to pay his way through medical school. He checked through the list of jobs Jiang had taken over the past five years. He had worked as an orderly and as a porter at various Shanghai hospitals and private clinics. He had spent one summer break manning a market stall at the old Chinatown bird market. He had taken a number of term jobs working nights: as a hotel porter in a seedy joint near the river; as a labourer on a building site; as a night watchman in various places – presumably so he could earn some cash and still snatch a few hours’ sleep.

Li lit a cigarette and blew smoke thoughtfully into the light of his desk lamp, watching it billow and eddy before dispersing and rising into the darkness. There was another knock at the door, and this time it was Mei-Ling who entered.

‘Wow, it’s dark in here,’ she said.

‘I like to think in the dark.’

She closed the door and drew up a seat and sat opposite him, leaning back so that he could see her face in the reflected light from the desktop. ‘I prefer to think in the light,’ she said, ‘and save the dark for making love.’

Li felt something flip over in his stomach, and for a fleeting moment he saw a picture of himself making love to her, her slender frame arched beneath him, small hard breasts pressed into his chest, fingers digging into his back, her breath hot on his face. He quickly banished the vision, alarmed by an apparently increasing loss of control. ‘Have you seen the file on Jiang Baofu?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I think we’ve got to bring him in.’

Li said, ‘I’d like to talk to his tutors at med school first, see what kind of light they can throw on him. And take a look around his apartment, too, when he’s not there. Can we get a warrant?’

‘Sure. I’ll fix it. We can go out to the Medical University first thing tomorrow. I know some people there.’

‘Good.’ He paused. ‘And what about the acrobat?’

‘They knocked the old Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre down. The troupe are based in a theatre out at the Shanghai Centre now. We should go and see them tomorrow also. Apparently she was married to one of the other acrobats.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going to head off now. We’ll see you about seven?’

‘That’s fine.’

‘And Margaret?’

‘I’m picking her up at her hotel.’

She smiled. ‘Better take a sledgehammer then. In case you have to break down her door.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

I

The underside of the Yan’an Viaduct Road glowed an incongruous fluorescent blue, lit by concealed striplights. Their taxi headed west, under the viaduct, their driver a surly, older man with thinning hair whose ambition in life appeared to be a desire to get in front of every other car on the road. He drifted from one lane to the other at high speed, punctuating his progress with a series of short, sharp blasts on the horn. Other drivers apparently appreciated that there was a lunatic in their midst and gave him a wide berth. Li leaned forward, tapping the driver on the shoulder through the cage. ‘Take it easy, pal,’ he said. The driver nodded and paid no attention.

Margaret wondered if being ignored by a taxi-driver amounted to a significant loss of face. If so, Li wasn’t showing it, and Margaret wasn’t about to ask. They had barely spoken since they left the Peace Hotel.

They turned south into Huashan Road and saw, ahead of them, the towering presence of the Hilton Hotel. On their right was the Hotel Equatorial, on the left a row of Spanish styled two-storey brick apartment buildings, profiles traced in neon against the night sky. The driver made a suicidal U-turn in the face of on-coming traffic, to the accompaniment of a symphony of horns, and drew up outside a cheap-looking coffee shop which appeared to be empty behind thin veils of net curtain.

Margaret peered out of the window, unimpressed, as Li paid the driver. ‘Is this it?’

Li got out and held the door open for her. ‘In the alley, the driver says.’

Margaret saw, beyond the coffee shop, a narrow opening between two lines of apartment buildings. Overflowing bins and empty crates were stacked up against one wall. The alleyway looked dark and uninviting. ‘Jeez,’ she said. ‘It’s worse than I thought.’ This was the old French quarter, and behind the veneer of affluence which lined the main streets, lay a maze of seedy back streets and narrow alleyways where people scraped through life in less than salubrious conditions.

Li took her arm and led her into the alley. Further along its length, men were working by floodlight under a temporary tarpaulin covering. Through an open door, an old man stood staring off into space in the dim light of a yellow lamp by a table in a hallway. He held one hand in front him, clawlike and brown-spotted with age. It was trembling like a leaf trapped in a current of air.

Immediately on their right, the bright fluorescent lights of Mei-Ling’s family restaurant spilled out into the alley. Pots and pans were piled up on a metal rack, and two young girls in spotless white jackets stood washing vegetables at a big porcelain sink under a blue awning outside the door. Through a window immediately above the sink, a tall young man wearing a white chef’s hat was moving swiftly back and forth within the cramped confines of a tiny kitchen. One of the girls at the sink took a large cleaver and began finely chopping cabbage on a wooden board. She turned and smiled at Li and Margaret as they went in. ‘
Ni hau
,’ she said, reserving a wide-eyed stare of wonder for the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Western lady. It was distinctly possible, Margaret thought, that no Westerner had ever set foot in this restaurant.

They went down a couple of steps into a very small, brightly lit white-tiled room which made Margaret think of some places she had performed autopsies. There was one large round white plastic table, and another two smaller ones pushed against the far wall. Mei-Ling, her brother, father and aunt were seated at the large table, and they all rose expectantly as their guests arrived. Margaret knew that she was an object of attention for curious eyes. In China it was hard to escape that sense of being out of place, extrinsic. But Margaret could not remember ever having felt so completely alien. And with a sudden dawning, she realised why Mei-Ling had wanted her here. For that very reason. To make her feel like an outsider. To demonstrate, by contrast, all those racial, cultural and linguistic things that Mei-Ling and Li had in common that Margaret could never share. And, presumably, to make Li aware of them, too. But Margaret stopped herself from taking this conjecture any further. Perhaps, she thought, she was simply investing her insecurity in a huge dose of paranoia, as Li had so indelicately suggested two nights earlier. She composed a smile for her hosts.

Mei-Ling introduced Li first, providing Margaret with an opportunity to see how the land lay. Small bows and handshakes accompanied all the greetings, in Mandarin since Li could not speak the Shanghai dialect. What struck Margaret most forcibly was how small Mei-Ling’s family all were. Her father and aunt were like tiny, if perfectly proportioned, human beings. They made Margaret feel tall, and Li positively towered over them. Mei-Ling’s brother was the tallest of them, although he still looked a good five inches shorter than Li. Margaret put him at around forty. The father and aunt looked to be in their sixties, although it was always difficult to tell with the Chinese, for they did not seem to age in the same way as people in the West. Their skin retained a clarity and freshness, often unlined until well into the seventies or even eighties. And, while there were exceptions, they appeared to keep the colour of their hair for longer, and the men were less inclined to baldness.

Mei-Ling turned to Margaret with a sparkling smile and introduced her family. All three shook her hand warmly, and greeted her with open, friendly grins, tempered a touch by timidity. They had little experience of foreigners, or
lao wei
as Margaret knew they called them when being polite; or
yangguizzi
, foreign devils, when not. To Margaret’s surprise, she discovered that Mei-Ling’s brother, Jingjun, spoke English fluently, and that her Aunt Teng had a smattering. ‘I live in Hong Kong for little while,’ she said. ‘Everyone there speak English.’ Mei-Ling’s father held Margaret’s hand in both of his and spoke to her very earnestly. He held her eyes in a steady unblinking gaze. Margaret was both embarrassed and charmed.