The Killing Room (44 page)

Procurator General Yue glared at Li, a deep simmering anger smouldering in his eyes. Li returned the stare, unwavering. Finally Yue said, ‘Let me assure
you
, Deputy Section Chief Li, that if you fail to find any evidence against Comrade Cui, this is the last time you will ever threaten anyone.’

‘Does that mean I get the warrant?’ Li asked.

*

Margaret sat at a table in the corner of the canteen watching officers come and go. She had been there for over an hour, ever since Li had insisted on getting an officer to take her there. She knew very little about what was happening except that the medical student had confessed to burying the bodies, and that the women were suspected of being murdered at Cui Feng’s foreign residents’ clinic. But she was aware that there were politics involved here that she neither knew nor wanted to know anything about.

She was still in a state of shock after the discovery of Geller’s body, and as the day slipped away like sand through their fingers she was becoming increasingly despondent about finding Xinxin alive. She had seen first-hand what the Mongolian had done to poor Jack.

Only a handful of the thirty tables in the canteen were occupied, plain-clothed and uniformed officers glancing curiously in her direction, whispered conversations that she could not have understood, even if she had overheard them. The kitchens, behind sliding glass shutters at one end of the room, were no longer serving anything but tea. A bowl of noodles sat almost untouched on the table in front of her, faintly coloured by some indeterminate sauce. She had told Li that she had no appetite, but suspected that he had simply wanted her out of the way for a while.

She looked up as one of a line of glass-panelled doors leading out to the car park opened, and her heart sank as Mei-Ling walked in. The Deputy Section Chief responded vaguely to greetings from her fellow officers, but ran her eyes around the canteen until they alighted on Margaret. She headed for her table and sat down. ‘Hi,’ she said.

Margaret nodded cautiously.

Mei-Ling looked at the bowl of noodles. ‘Not hungry?’

‘Not much.’

And they sat without speaking for what seemed like a very long time before Mei-Ling said, ‘I guess you do not like me much.’

‘About as much as you like me.’ Margaret faced her down more boldly than she felt.

‘We got off on the wrong foot.’

‘We didn’t get off on any kind of foot.’

‘No …’ Mei-Ling forced a sad smile. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say … I am sorry.’

Margaret was surprised by this, but determined not to show it. ‘What, sorry that I’m still here?’

Mei-Ling smiled. ‘Sorry that I ever came between you and Li Yan.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Li Yan came between me and Li Yan. And so did I. We’ve never had the easiest of relationships.’

‘And I did not make things any easier.’

‘So why the change of heart?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘He is a nice man.’

‘Damned by faint praise.’

Mei-Ling laughed, that braying laugh that had irritated Margaret so much when they first met. A laugh that she had not heard for some days. ‘No,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘I mean he is too nice for me.’

Margaret frowned. ‘How’s that?’

Mei-Ling shrugged, a sense of resignation in her eyes. ‘I would never make him happy. Seeing him with Xinxin … with all the instincts and concerns of a father. Seeing what losing her is doing to him.’ And she looked very directly at Margaret. ‘Seeing your shared pain.’ She shook her head. ‘I could never give him that. Sure, I can amuse a kid for an hour or two, but then I would be bored. I do not think I have a maternal bone in my body.’

‘And you think I have?’ Margaret asked.

‘Xinxin adores you. You were all she talked about that night when I drove her and Li Yan back to the hotel. About how
Magret
came to get her at Tiananmen Square, about how great
Magret
was at flying a kite, about the hours
Magret
spends reading to her at bedtime.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I could never be those things to her. So I could never be those things for Li Yan.’ She looked down at her hands, and Margaret was almost shocked to see that her eyes were moist. ‘The men in my life always seem to have other priorities. I’m just getting to recognise it a bit earlier now.’

Margaret didn’t know what to say. She thought about Xinxin babbling on to Mei-Ling about
Magret
this and
Magret
that. She thought about all those hours spent reading and re-reading the big picture books, the jigsaws that they pieced together time and again. She thought about how Xinxin would slip into the big double bed with Li and Margaret on a Sunday morning when Margaret would stay over on a Saturday night, her warm, soft little body insinuating its way between them, snuggling in for comfort. And suddenly all her fears and anxieties spilled over in big salty tears that ran silently down her face. She wiped them quickly away with the back of her hand. ‘I just hope we find her before … before that bastard does anything to hurt her.’

Mei-Ling looked up and saw the wet streaks on Margaret’s face. She nodded grimly. ‘We have that in common at least.’

Neither of them had been aware of the door to the canteen opening, and they were not aware of Li until his shadow fell across the table. A momentary frown flitted across his face. Something, he knew, had passed between Margaret and Mei-Ling. But none of that mattered any more. ‘I have a warrant,’ he said, ‘to search
Comrade
Cui’s clinic.’

II

Darkness fell as the convoy of police and forensic vehicles headed west on Yan’an Viaduct Road. The last daylight glowed faintly under the pewter-coloured clouds that were gathered on the far horizon. The haloed lights of another Shanghai night pricked the darkness around them, dragged in liquid smears back and forth across rain-battered windscreens.

Margaret sat in the back of Mei-Ling’s Santana. She saw her own reflection in the side window switched off and on like a TV screen image as she reflected the light from the overhead street lamps at regular intervals. She looked haunted, like the ghost of her grandmother that she had seen in herself the night before.

Everything now was moving so quickly it was difficult to maintain a grasp of it all. The only constant was the fear that gnawed like a hungry animal trapped inside her. Fear of finding Xinxin and realising a nightmare. Fear of not finding her. Fear of
never
finding her, which would be worse, almost, than anything.

She caught Mei-Ling watching her in the rear-view mirror and wondered what had brought about her change of heart. Had it really been seeing Li with Xinxin, hearing Xinxin babble on about Margaret?
The men in my life always seem to have other priorities
, she had said, and her words had been laden with the bitterness of experience. A
Yang Orphan
was how her aunt had described her. And Margaret remembered Aunt Teng’s grave interpretation of Mei-Ling’s Heavenly Element of water – meaning danger, something hidden, anxiety.

The convoy, lights flashing, eased its way between the parked cars in the street leading to the clinic. Cyclists, huddled in dripping capes, swerved aside to let them by. But even from here Li could see that the clinic was in darkness. When they drew up outside it, he saw also that the gates were closed, and secured with a chain and padlock. His first reaction was anger. He jumped out of the car and ran to the gates, and stood impotently in the rain, clutching the black-painted wrought iron, peering between the spiked uprights for any sign of life beyond. There were no vehicles, no lights, just puddles forming in the pitted tarmac between clumps of weeds that had not been apparent when the car park was full. He rattled the gates in frustration and turned to find Mei-Ling and Margaret sheltering under a large black umbrella. Officers were gathering behind them on the sidewalk. The rain ran down Li’s face. ‘They knew we were coming,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Someone told them we were coming.’ And he felt as if he knew exactly who that someone was. ‘Somebody get some cutters and get this fucking gate open,’ he shouted.

It was nearly ten minutes before an officer arrived with a large pair of cutters that sliced through the metal chain like a hot knife through butter. He opened the gates and all the vehicles crowded into the forecourt. Under the shelter of the canopy over the main entrance, the detectives and forensic officers who were to enter the clinic stripped off wet outer clothing and pulled on white gloves and plastic shoe covers. Margaret did the same. She saw that Li’s white tee-shirt had been soaked, even through his jacket. It was almost translucent, and she could clearly see the firm, muscular shape of him underneath. Margaret looked round to find Mei-Ling watching her again. Mei-Ling drew her brows together, made a moue with her mouth and drew a short sharp breath in through her lips. In spite of everything, it made Margaret smile. In other circumstances, perhaps she and Mei-Ling might have found something more in common than a shared lust for Li.

Detective Dai forced the double doors into the clinic. A splintering of wood. Then silence, except for the crackle of a dozen or more police radios. And then a loud creaking as the doors swung open into the darkness beyond. Several flashlights snapped on, and a small group led by Li pushed open internal glass doors and entered the reception hall, beams of light criss-crossing in the dark. The floor here was tiled. A reception desk facing them was empty. The drawers of two large filing cabinets behind the desk stood open, picked out by several flashlights. Whatever records they might once have contained were gone. There was not so much as a single scrap of paper in the reception area. Only a half-drunk mug of tea on the desk gave any clue as to the hurried evacuation of people and files.

None of the light switches was working, and an officer was dispatched to find where the electricity supply came into the building and restore the power. Li said, ‘There must be some state record of who was employed here. I want names. And I want arrest warrants out on all of them.’

‘You got it, Chief,’ Dai said, and he unhooked the radio mike from his belt.

‘Including Cui Feng,’ Li added. Which silenced everyone. Dai glanced at Mei-Ling.

She said, ‘Be careful, Li Yan. We can’t go arresting someone like Cui Feng without evidence.’

‘Then let’s find some!’ Li’s raised voice startled everyone. ‘I want every employee brought in for questioning.’

‘Sure,’ Dai said, and he turned away into the dark to bark instructions into his radio.

‘Where’s the operating theatre?’ Margaret asked.

‘In the basement,’ Mei-Ling told her.

Margaret looked at Li. ‘Can I take a look at it?’

He nodded. Mei-Ling said, ‘I’ll take you.’

The two women followed the beams of their flashlights through double doors and down a narrow staircase to the suite of rooms in the basement where all the clinic’s operations took place. Upstairs they heard other officers moving around, systematically working their way through the building, calling to each other in the dark. Down here it was deathly quiet. Across the hall, through double swing doors, were the preparation and recovery rooms. Facing them were the doors to the theatre suite. Above the door, Margaret’s flashlight picked out the normally illuminated box sign in Chinese and English warning that they were about to enter the surgical area. On the wall to the left was a square push-button about the size of a postcard, that could be punched or hit with the elbow to let in any one of the surgical team, or the patient’s gurney. Only in this case, Margaret thought, if Jiang Baofu was to be believed, it was not a patient on the gurney, but a victim.

Suddenly the overhead lights came on, startling them both. The boxlight over the door buzzed and flickered and then illuminated its warning. Margaret glanced at Mei-Ling before hitting the square button with the flat of her hand. The doors opened electronically into a small reception area with a desk. A white board on the wall was smeared blue and red and green where the names of patients and operating schedules, written up with coloured marker pens, had been wiped off. To their right, the doors to the changing rooms stood open, and doors at the far end, beyond the lockers, opened on to walk-in cupboards lined with shelves piled with hair- and shoe-covers and neatly folded smocks. Ahead of them were the doors to two operating rooms. Floors and walls were tiled, and stainless-steel washbasins were mounted on the wall outside each theatre. In normal circumstances no one would be allowed beyond this area without wearing scrubs, and the hair- and shoe-covers they would have donned in the locker rooms.

Margaret had been through the procedure many times early in her career, when the living rather than the dead were her concern. She would have tied on her surgical mask before scrubbing her hands and forearms in the stainless-steel basin for at least ten minutes, a prescribed number of scrubs per finger and hand, scraping under the fingernails with little plastic sticks. Then, hands held up above her elbows, pushing through the door to the theatre with her backside so as not to contaminate the freshly scrubbed hands. Inside, a nurse would pass her a sterile towel to dry her hands and then help her into a surgical gown before holding open latex surgical gloves into which she would plunge her hands.

Now, the concern was not bacterial contamination so much as the danger of disturbing evidence. With her gloved hands, Margaret pushed open the door to operating room number one, and Mei-Ling followed her in.

A strange chill fell upon Margaret as she entered the theatre. The air was warm, but still the hair rose up on her neck and her forearms, goose bumps on her back and shoulders. And she saw in her mind’s eye a succession of women wheeled in here to be butchered. A conveyor belt of them. Fifty-four at least, since Jiang had become involved. She almost felt their presence, and knew instinctively that this was the place. That this was the killing room.

It was only dimly lit by pale yellow lamps set in the ceiling, casting deep shadows beneath the sheets that were draped over all the equipment like shrouds. Two walls were lined with glass and stainless-steel storage cupboards filled with various sizes of gloves and types of suture. Carefully Margaret and Mei-Ling lifted the sheets, uncovering the lamps that hung on jointed arms from the ceiling and would so brightly illuminate the surgeon’s table when lit; the large, wheeled, steel table where the surgical nurse would set out all the sterilised tools on a sterile sheet; an electrocautery machine, light blue, with a couple of knobs on the front for adjusting the temperature of the cautery, and a couple of indicator lights. A power cable led from the box to a wall socket, and a wire connected it to the cautery pen that the surgeon would use to cauterise the small bleeding veins along the edge of the wound he would make with his scalpel. Margaret remembered the black gritty material she had found in the areas of haemorrhage along the incision edges of the entry wounds in the women from Lujiazui – charring made by the cauterisation.