The Killing Room (42 page)

Margaret suddenly became aware that a silence had descended on the apartment. Then a single voice called out. It was Mei-Ling. Li grabbed Margaret’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said, and they hurried down the hall, past a door that lay open to reveal a study with a cluttered desk and a desktop computer on a tubular stand. A glass door gave on to a modern kitchen that looked pristine and unused, except for a bucket full of empty beer bottles in the middle of the floor. The detectives had left the bathroom door lying open. A damp towel hung over the shower cabinet, a pair of pyjamas hung from hooks on the tiled wall above the toilet. Dirty underwear lay strewn on the floor. Everywhere the white walls were naked, undressed. And although the air was warm, the apartment felt cold. It did not seem to fit with the Jack Geller that Margaret knew. And she realised that, of course, she really knew nothing about him at all. There was an impermanence about the place that made her think he had not so much been living here as camping out. She felt sick. It was beyond both imagination and comprehension to think that he might have had something to do either with the kidnapping of Xinxin or the murder of all those women. Or both.

At the end of the hall they entered the bedroom. There was an outer dressing room with a settee and a television set on a table. In the main part of the bedroom the bed was unmade beneath a large wall tapestry. Mei-Ling and the other three detectives stood in the archway between the two rooms, blocking out the view of the window. Li and Margaret pushed through and stopped dead. Margaret gasped in horror. Geller was kneeling in front of the sliding glass doors that gave out on to the balcony, facing back into the room. His arms were raised above his head in grotesque parody of a crucified man, pulled to each side by cord tied to either end of the curtain rod. Although he was silhouetted against the city spread out below, she saw immediately that he was naked. There was a ten-inch wound drawn horizontally across his belly from which his small intestine hung in a shiny mass of pale tan distended loops. There was a large pool of sticky blood on the floor at his knees. It was still dripping from his crotch and trickling slowly down his thighs. His head was tipped forward. Margaret knew he was alive because he was still bleeding, but he appeared to be unconscious.

‘For Chrissake, will someone call an ambulance,’ she said. And she moved quickly to the window to try to untie the cord that held him. But it was knotted tight, his weight dragging against it. She heard one of the detectives talking rapidly on his mobile. ‘Someone got a knife? We’ve got to cut him down.’ The desperation she felt was compounded by the knowledge that he was almost certainly going to die. He had lost a huge amount of blood, and his system was probably already fevered by bacterial infection from the intestine.

She was almost shocked when he lifted his head, and she found herself looking into his glassy eyes. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Leave me.’

‘Jack, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.’

An almost imperceptible shake of the head. ‘Too late.’

She knelt on the floor in front of him and felt his blood soaking into her jeans. She put her arms around his chest and strained to lift him slightly to take the weight off his arms. Li cut the cord, and then helped her lay him on the floor. ‘Something for his head,’ she said sharply. And Mei-Ling hurried to get a cushion from the settee in the dressing room. Margaret slipped it under his neck to support his head.

‘There’s an ambulance on the way,’ Dai said.

Geller was shivering now, a cold sweat gathering in the creases of a forehead furrowed by pain. ‘Who did this to you, Jack?’ Margaret asked softly.

He gazed up at her like a mournful dog desperate for forgiveness from an angry master. ‘I’ve been following you,’ he said. He swallowed with difficulty. ‘I was there at the park … Other side of the fence.’ He swallowed again. ‘I saw him grab her, but I couldn’t … couldn’t …’ His breathing was becoming laboured. ‘Chased the van. Nearly got him.’

Margaret held his hand. It was as cold as ice. ‘Did he do this to you?’

Geller nodded. ‘Saw me.’

And Margaret realised that if the Mongolian had been following her, he must have known who Jack was. She could have wept then. Jack had nothing to do with the kidnapping of Xinxin. He had tried to save her. But, still, none of it made sense. ‘Why were you following me, Jack?’

He tried to smile. ‘You wouldn’t help me … Had to know.’

‘Know what?’ She glanced at Li for some help in understanding this. But he just shook his head helplessly. She turned back to Geller and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of her hand. ‘We found a photograph of you with one of the dead girls.’ And whatever agony he had suffered up until then intensified. He screwed up his eyes and let out a small cry of pain. After a moment he opened them again and she saw that they were wet with tears.

‘Chai Rui?’ he said. Margaret nodded. He swallowed hard. ‘She was my little sister.’ And he started sobbing. ‘Mom and my stepdad were in a … a road accident … He died straight off … she lasted a few days. That’s when I came back from the States …’ He was fighting now for his breath. ‘Last thing she made me promise … was to look after Cherry.’ He shook his head. ‘Really fucked up, didn’t I?’

Li said, ‘Ask him what happened to her little girl.’

Geller’s eyes flicked up towards him. ‘With friends,’ he managed to say.

‘Oh, Jack,’ Margaret said, ‘why didn’t you just tell me all this?’

‘Scared,’ he said. ‘Thought she might be one of them … Missing all that time.’ The tears ran from the corners of his eyes down each side of his head. ‘Didn’t want it to be true.’ And his body was racked by sobbing. ‘Poor Cherry.’ And he stopped suddenly and opened his eyes and stared straight into Margaret’s. ‘You get them,’ he said. ‘Whoever it was … you get them.’

Margaret’s own tears dragged like hot wires down her cheeks. ‘I’ll get them,’ she said. And she looked up at Li. ‘We’ll get them.’ Li nodded grimly, and by the time she looked back at Jack he was dead.

And she knelt there in his blood and wept for him. Poor Jack. She remembered their first encounter at the airport, his story about the racecourse, his juvenile amusement at the LONG DONG GARDEN. She remembered their drinks at the bar in the Peace Hotel. He had been amusing, attractive.
Did anyone ever tell you you’re very attractive for someone who cuts up people for a living?
he had asked her. And now he lay dead on the floor, disembowelled because he had tried to save a little girl’s life, because he had wanted to know what had become of his little sister. And he had died with grief in his heart, and guilt for having failed his mother.

In the distance Margaret heard the siren of the ambulance, and Li helped her gently to her feet.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I

They had their meeting in the room with the skulls. Sightless eyes watched them from glass shelves, and their eternal silence contributed to the hush that filled the room. Almost the entire department was squeezed in. Standing-room only. Huang stood by the door, his face the colour of the yellowed remains in the display cabinets. Mei-Ling had whispered to Li as they entered that his wife was not expected to see out the day. Smoke from dozens of cigarettes hung over the table like a shroud. All eyes were on Li. He saw in them curiosity, sympathy, pity, and it was all he could do to keep his voice from cracking.

In slow, measured sentences, he described the discovery of Jack Geller in the apartment in Jingan District, and Geller’s dying identification of Xinxin’s kidnapper as his killer. Eyes flickered down to the dozens of images of the Mongolian that were scattered around the table. The Mongolian, Li said, was also suspected of stalking, and perhaps abducting, one of the eighteen women found in the mass grave at Lujiazui. He had also been stalking the American pathologist, Margaret Campbell.

He took another moment to collect himself. ‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ he said, ‘that the murders of the eighteen women in Shanghai, the one in Beijing, and the abduction of my niece, are inextricably linked.’ The implications of Li’s simple statement went through the mind of every detective in the room, and their silence so filled it that it seemed to expel all oxygen. Someone at the back opened a window. ‘So,’ Li said, ‘does anyone have any ideas?’

Dai cleared his throat and everyone looked at him expectantly. He blushed. ‘I got a confession, Chief,’ he said. ‘Remember you asked me to check through all those files of missing girls to see if any of them had a nickname that matched the one on that bracelet we found at Jiang’s place?’

Li inclined his head slightly. ‘I remember.’

‘Well, I delegated. You know, we all had so much on our plates, I was still tracking down the Zhang family from Jiang’s home town … I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘What’s your point, Dai?’ Li asked impatiently.

Dai glanced at another, younger officer across the table. ‘You want to tell him, Qian?’

The young detective remained composed. He nodded and looked at Li. ‘I found a match this morning,’ he said. He opened up a file on the table in front of him. ‘A girl called Ji Li Rong. She was a second-year student at Jiaotong University. Disappeared about nine months ago. Everyone called her
Moon
. I spoke to her parents. It was her father who first called her that because when she was a baby her face was round like the moon.’

‘Did you show him the bracelet?’ Li asked.

Qian nodded. ‘It was hers all right.’

It was the smallest chink of light in a dark place, but to Li, after so long in that place, it was blinding. However, his face betrayed no emotion. He said, ‘Can we find out if this girl ever had an abortion?’

Dai said, ‘We thought of that. I got Qian to go back and check.’

‘She had an abortion halfway through her first year,’ Qian said. ‘Didn’t want an unwanted pregnancy to get in the way of her education.’ And yet in some way that Li still did not understand, that abortion had cost the girl her life.

He said, ‘We need to get them to look at the bodies. Identify her, if they can.’

Dai said, ‘They’re on their way to the mortuary right now.’

And Li felt his stomach lurch. He thought of the fourteen corpses still unidentified, the horrors that awaited these poor people as they tried to discern the features of their little girl from the pulp of decaying human flesh that would be wheeled out by men in white coats and rubber gloves. But if they were able to make that identification, the investigation would have come full circle, ending where it had begun, with a medical student working as a night watchman on a building site. Li shook his head at the irony.

Dai cleared his throat again. ‘There’s one other thing, Chief,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how important it is. And I guess I should have spotted it before now.’ He made a face. ‘But, then, probably we all should have.’ And in this there was a hint of accusation to deflect guilt. ‘It was right there all the time on the goddamn kid’s resumé.’

Li frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The medical student,’ Dai said. ‘Jiang Baofu. You know, all those vacation jobs he had, working in various hospitals and clinics?’ He paused. ‘One of them was the Shanghai World Clinic.’ Li glanced immediately at Huang standing by the door. The Section Chief was impassive. Dai said unnecessarily, ‘You know, Cui Feng’s place.’

*

Margaret sat alone in Li’s office. She had showered off all the blood, scrubbed and scrubbed, and watched it wash away down the drainer. But like Lady Macbeth, she still felt its taint. Only, this was no dream. Her face was pale and without even a trace of make-up, her hair still damp and scraped back. She had on the khaki cargoes she had worn the day she lost Xinxin, and another pair of trainers. Her black tee-shirt contrasted sharply with the whiteness of her skin. She looked at her hands and saw the first lines of age there, a prominence of the knuckles as the full flesh of youth thinned and became sinewy and tough. There was a thickening of her neatly trimmed nails, and the half-moons beneath her cuticles appeared paler than usual. Even as she looked at them, her hands started to shake, and she pressed them palm down on the table to make them stop.

But she could no longer focus on her hands, or the shadows on the wall where once posters and papers had been pinned, or the sound of the rain as it fell again from the heavens and battered on the window. Pictures that she had fought so hard to displace kept forcing their way into her mind. Pictures of Jack in his final moments as he lay in his own blood on the floor. Pictures of Xinxin laughing with joy as she manoeuvred her little red car around the miniature roads in the park. Pictures of a dark-skinned Mongolian face with an ugly hare-lip stretched across protruding brown teeth. An endless procession of half-decayed faces on autopsy tables. And closing her eyes could not shut these pictures out.

She was startled when the door burst open and Li strode in. His expression told her immediately that something had happened. Mei-Ling followed closely in his wake. Margaret stood up quickly. ‘What is it?’

But all Li’s attention was focused on the telephone, and as he reached his hand towards it, it began to ring, almost as though he had willed it to do so. He snatched it from its cradle. He listened intently for several seconds, then there was a brief, staccato exchange before he hung up. Margaret could see that he was drawing quick, shallow breaths. ‘Jiang Baofu,’ he said.

‘The medical student?’

Li nodded grimly. ‘A bracelet belonging to one of the dead girls was found in his apartment.’ He turned to Mei-Ling. ‘The parents just identified her,’ he said in Chinese. And to Margaret, ‘He also spent two summer vacations working at a clinic belonging to Cui Feng.’

Margaret was still attempting to take all this in. ‘An abortion clinic?’

Li shook his head. ‘No. Cui has a clinic that deals exclusively in the treatment of foreigners. Insurance work.’

Margaret’s confusion deepened. ‘I don’t understand. What’s the connection?’

‘That’s what we’re about to ask him,’ Li said.

*

Jiang Baofu’s hair was gelled and spiky. Li could smell the perfume of the gel. He was wearing his long coat, shoulders peppered with dark spots of rain. He had on the same high leather boots he had been wearing the night they first interviewed him in the hut on the building site, his jeans tucked into them at calf height. Li imagined that Jiang thought he looked pretty cool, modelled on one of those Hong Kong rock singers he watched on Channel ‘V’. He did not appear quite as composed as he had during previous interviews. He was leaning back in his chair, trying to convey the same careless attitude of relaxed indifference. But there were lights in his eyes, and they were wide and cautious.