The Killing Room (40 page)

Li glanced quickly at the other uniforms in the office. ‘Anyone see it leave?’

One of them nodded. ‘The woman at the ticket desk said it went out not long before the alarm got raised about the kid.’ He pulled a face. ‘But she didn’t see who was driving it.’

Li turned back to the workers. ‘It couldn’t have been one of your people?’

‘Shit, no. There’s only us and the boss in our unit.’

‘What about keys?’

‘What about them?’

‘Well, was it locked?’

‘Naw, the keys was in the ignition,’ the man said. He shrugged again. ‘We didn’t figure there was any danger of the kids taking off in it.’

Li drew in a deep breath to steady himself as he tried to take in the implications of all this. A grim-faced Dai rapped sharply on the door and squeezed into the overcrowded office. ‘We’re getting reports of some foreign guy seen sprinting down Ziyun Road towards the Yan’an flyover a little over an hour ago, Chief. Several people saw him.’

‘Foreign?’ Li frowned. ‘What do you mean by foreign?’

Dai shrugged. ‘A Westerner. Dark-haired, wearing jeans and a pale-coloured jacket. That’s the best description we’ve got. He was running south down the middle of Ziyun Road. It was kind of unusual, you know, so people noticed. Apparently he was chasing after a light-grey van and actually caught up with it briefly at the junction, banging on the side of it, before it sped off up on to the overhead road. People said he stood for a long time in the middle of the street just breathing real hard. Then he stopped a taxi and got in, and it went off in the same direction as the van.’

Li put his hand to his forehead and pressed middle-finger and thumb into his pounding temples to try to alleviate the pain there so that he could think clearly. None of this was making much sense. If the van had been stolen at around the time Xinxin disappeared, did that mean someone had snatched her? And why? What possible reason could there be? He could barely address the thought for the fear it conjured in his mind. But what about the Westerner running down the middle of the road chasing the van? Was it connected? Was it even the same van? He turned to Dai. ‘See if we can match up the description of the van with the one that’s missing.’ He waved a hand at the workmen. ‘These guys might be able to tell us if there was something, anything, distinctive about it. And let’s see if we can find the taxi-driver who picked this guy up.’ He could see the despair etch itself on Dai’s face at the thought. There were more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand privately licensed taxis in Shanghai. He added, ‘Let’s get an appeal out on radio and television. Anyone who was in the area who might have seen anything, we want to talk to them.’

He found it no easier to breathe outside, and compounded his distress by lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. His legs were like jelly, his stomach had turned to water, and as the full realisation sank in that Xinxin had not just wandered off, that she might have been kidnapped, he felt fear, like bile, rising in his throat. The sign on the gate read: SPARETIME SCHOOL OF TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR CHILDREN. TRAFFIC OFFICE, SHANGHAI POLICE BUREAU. And even as he read it, the characters were blurred by his tears. He was not, he knew, the best person to lead this operation. Every thought, every judgement, was coloured by emotion.

He turned to see Margaret being led to a car by a policewoman. Her face was streaked black with mascara, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. She moved like an automaton, no emotion visible in her expression. Before she stooped to get into the car she turned and saw Li watching her. At that moment he felt something more than anger. It felt like hate. Somewhere, buried so deep inside him as not to make a difference, he knew perhaps that it wasn’t really her fault. But every conscious part of him blamed her. Every muscle and sinew strained to scream abuse and blame, to punch and slap and hurt her. She recoiled slightly, as if from a blow, almost as though his darkest thoughts had taken physical form. He made no move towards her, no sign. She got into the car with her misery, and he turned away as it drove off.

IV

Japanese warlords in period costume strutted about a stylised set gesturing wildly at each other, eyes staring and burning with a kind of madness. Chinese subtitles flashed on and off the screen, lines of tiny characters that could not possibly be read in the allotted time. The sound on the television was switched to mute, and its flickering luminescence was the only light in the room.

Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, close to a phone which had resolutely refused to ring all evening. In her hand she clutched a tumbler of whisky. She had worked her way through all the miniatures in the mini-bar, and was now on to the Scotch. But it didn’t seem to matter how much she drank, she couldn’t get drunk. Oblivion was all she sought, and yet it remained elusive, despite her best efforts.

Her mouth was dry, and the pain thumped in her head with every beat of her heart, each pulse a reminder of her guilt, of her shame, of her failure. Responsibility for a young life had been placed in her hands today and she had not lived up to her obligations. She was not fit to be a mother. She was not fit to live. She remembered once, during her time as an intern, losing a patient in the emergency room. A young woman, the victim of a knife attack. Margaret had been incapable of stopping the internal bleeding. It wasn’t her fault, but it had been a turning point in her life, a moment when she realised that no matter how well trained, no matter how experienced, control of that moment which ultimately decided between life and death was never really in your hands.

But today, Xinxin’s life had been in her hands. She had had absolute control and failed to exercise it. As a young doctor she had turned from the futility of trying to save the living, to the predictability of dissecting the dead. Now all she wanted to do was to give up life completely, her own life, and find some escape in the final embrace of death, her own death. But she was, she knew, too big a coward for that. And, besides, death would be too lenient a punishment.

She emptied her glass and stood up, crossing unsteadily to the window and drawing back the curtains. Saturday night. Nanjing Road was filled with people and traffic. She looked down at the crowd below her and wished that she were one of them, freed from the burden of guilt and fear for a child she had failed. But, then, who knew what pain other people carried in their heads, what private grief, what personal hell. She would not be the only person suffering in the world tonight. But that knowledge did nothing to take away the pain.

She was haunted by the look in Li’s eyes as she got into the car outside the park. She had never felt such a searing look, so filled with hurt and darkness and hate. It had reached inside her and burned itself into her soul, and it was smouldering there still.

Now she turned away from the window and the thought, fumbling in the dark to the mini-bar. But she had finished all the little bottles, and they rattled emptily away from her clutching fingers. She wondered if maybe Jack would be in the bar looking for her. He must have heard the news by now. There had been appeals on radio and television all night. He was, perhaps, the only person in Shanghai who might not blame her for what had happened. But she was not sure she deserved that. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and thought for a moment she was looking at an apparition. There was a deathly pallor in her face, eyes sunken and ringed with dark smudges, and for the first time in her life she saw herself looking like her grandmother. Her father’s mother. She had never before seen the resemblance, and for one brief alcoholic moment she had actually believed she was her grandmother’s ghost. She let out a tiny, involuntary cry and looked quickly away. She lifted her key card and hurried out into the brightly lit hall.

Jack was not in the bar. As usual it was deserted. Margaret slipped stiffly on to a barstool and ordered a vodka tonic. And she knew there would be no sympathy or redemption for her tonight as Xinxin’s face swam up with the bubbles through the tonic to feed her worst fears of what had become of the child.

*

The yellow light of the streetlamps on the overhead road fell into Li’s bedroom through nicotine-stained net curtains. The headlamps of vehicles on the road raked the window at irregular intervals, and a blue neon light flashed intermittently somewhere close by. He had placed the phone on the table next to his chair. It was nearly midnight. He had not slept for nearly forty hours. His eyes were on fire, and there was a dull ache behind them. The room was full of smoke, and his ashtray filled to overflowing. All the radio and television appeals had turned up nothing new, and he had finally left 803 an hour ago at the insistence of the detectives on night shift. They promised to call the moment they had anything fresh.

In the hours after Xinxin had vanished, he had played out every nightmare scenario in his mind until he had become so numbed that nothing seemed to affect him any more. He had been over and over every last detail, examined and re-examined the statements of everyone questioned at the park. None of it had brought him any closer to an understanding of what had happened or why. Someone, clearly, had grabbed the child and made off with her in the stolen workmen’s van. Minutes later, a Westerner had been seen chasing that same van down a nearby street, banging on its side. They had neither found the van nor made any progress in identifying the Westerner. And Li was simply no longer able to think clearly.

He sat in the silence smoking cigarette after cigarette, concentrating hard on trying to keep the nightmares at bay.

A knock at the door startled him. He jumped up and hurried across the room to open it. Mei-Ling was in the hall, holding a carrier bag with steam rising from it, the smell of food carried in the vapour. ‘My dad got them to prepare you some stuff at the restaurant.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’ve got to eat, Li Yan.’ She pushed gently past him and closed the door. She laid the bag on the table and started taking out dishes of food in cardboard cartons, and placed two cans of beer beside them. She paused then and looked at his swollen eyes as he stood, hangdog, in the middle of the room, like a man in a trance. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. His eyes were glazed and gazing off into some unimaginable middle-distance. But he acknowledged her with the slightest nod of his head. ‘The food’s there if you want it. You know where I am if you need to call me.’

She stopped to squeeze his hand, and then turned towards the door, but he grabbed her arm and held her fast. He was still unable to meet her eyes. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, and she turned back, and after only a moment’s hesitation slipped her arms about his waist and pushed her head into his chest so that he could rest his head on hers. His arms enveloped her, and she felt rather than heard his sobs.

*

They were standing in a building site, not unlike the one in Lujiazui where they had found the bodies of the eighteen women. The broken stumps of an abandoned concrete foundation stuck out of the ground like bad teeth. The whole site was awash with mud. Only, the mud was frozen solid. Every attempt to break it with shovel and pick had failed. Now a big man with a yellow hard hat was wielding a pneumatic drill, and freeing chunks of frozen mud from around a central post with a plank of wood strapped across it like a Christian cross. The letter had said she would be here, under the mud, a temporary grave beneath the sign of a foreign religion.

From between the splintering wedges of mud, a little arm flopped out, pink and cold, the hand open, palm up. And as the man in the hard hat began to drill afresh, Li screamed at him to stop. One of the fingers had moved. But the workman couldn’t hear him, and he drilled on. Long piercing bursts of vibrating metal on ice, right into the heart of the little girl beneath the mud.

Li woke, still yelling, and with the sound of the phone filling the room. He was lying on top of the bed, fully dressed, sunlight streaming in through the open window along with the roar of the traffic on Yan’an Viaduct Road. Mei-Ling was crossing the room to answer the phone. He was immediately aware of the warm impression she had left in the bed beside him. So she had stayed all night. He took a deep breath and felt the phlegm of too many cigarettes crackle in his chest. He could not believe he had slept. Last night it had felt possible that he might never sleep again.

He became aware of Mei-Ling’s voice. ‘When was this?’ she was saying into the phone. ‘And have they recovered the van?’ A moment as she listened, then, ‘Well, I hope the uniforms didn’t touch anything before forensics got there … Good. We’ll be straight over.’ She hung up and turned to Li, clearly energised. ‘They found the van.’ He sat up, rubbing his face and trying to clear the sleep from his mind. She said, ‘But even better … the guy who took it? They think they’ve got him on video tape.’

*

The flashing red light on the dash on Mei-Ling’s Santana created a strobing effect in the car. Her siren wailed through the early morning quiet of this Shanghai Sunday. The streets were almost deserted. The city was just waking up. Margaret sat dazed in the back of the car, her head thick and sore, a foul taste in her mouth after several bouts of vomiting during the night. She hoped she was not going to be sick again. The strobe effect of the red light was not helping.

She had been shocked by Li’s appearance when he turned up at her hotel. His eyes red and puffy, his cheeks pale and blotched. And he had been taken aback by her appearance, too. But she had not had the courage to look in a mirror. There had been developments, he had said. She was needed, in case she could make an identification. He had not told her anything further, except that they were going to the Police Command Centre to view video tapes. And now she sat in the silence of the car, afraid to ask what the developments were. Mei-Ling had not even acknowledged her, and Li had not spoken since they left the hotel.

The Command Centre was in a fourteen-storey tower block on the corner of Jianguo Road and Ruijin Road next to Ruijin Hospital. Mei-Ling showed her pass at the gatehouse, and the gates swung open to admit them to a car park bounded by palm trees and potted plants. They ran up steps to the main entrance and took the elevator to the third floor. The Deputy Commander was waiting to meet them in the hall. They shook hands and he led them through glass doors to the operations room. Rows of desks lined with computer terminals faced fifteen giant projection video screens on the far wall. They were flanked on each side by eight smaller television screens which flickered at regular intervals from street scene to street scene, fed by cameras mounted at key vantage points all over Shanghai. Beneath the screens, facing back into the room, were eight uniformed officers sitting at terminals taking one-one-oh police emergency calls. At another desk running the full width of the room, banks of coloured phones were linked to rows of fax machines that chattered and printed out screeds of information coming in from police stations around the city. At the back of the room sat the controllers, who evaluated all incoming information and determined what pictures were relayed on to the big screens.