The Killing Room (The China Thrillers 3)

by Peter May

  Li closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

  *

  He pushed through glass doors, brushing past a row of potted plants that lined the top of the steps, and started angrily down towards the car park. The procurator chased after him, clutching a thick folder of documents. Above them rose the five storeys of Central Beijing Middle Court, topped by a huge radio mast. Off to their left, where armed officers guarded the vehicle entrance to the holding cells, the red Chinese flag hung limply in the winter sun over the Ministry of Public Security badge of justice. Justice! Li thought not. He pulled on a greatcoat over his green uniform as he hurried down the stairs, and hauled a peaked cap down over his flat-top crew cut, his breath billowing before him like fire in the cold morning air.

  ‘I’m telling you, we never got them,’ the procurator called after him. He was a short, spindly man with thinning hair and thick glasses that magnified his unusually round eyes. His uniform appeared too large for him.

  Li wheeled around halfway down the steps and the procurator almost ran into him. ‘Bullshit!’ Even although the procurator was on the step above, Li towered over him, and the smaller man positively recoiled from Li’s aggression. ‘You would never have brought the case to court if we hadn’t provided the evidence.’

  ‘Paper evidence. That’s all you sent me,’ the procurator insisted. ‘I assumed the shoes had been lodged in the evidence depository.’

  ‘They were. Which makes them your responsibility, not ours.’ Li raised his arms with his voice, and people flooding out of the court behind them stopped to listen. ‘In the name of the sky, Zhang! My people work their butts off to bring criminals to justice …’ He was distracted momentarily by the sight of the Armani suit and his exultant client passing them on the steps. He had a powerful urge to take his fist and smash their gloating faces to a pulp. But then, he knew, justice and the law were not always compatible. He turned instead to the procurator to vent his anger. ‘And you fucking people go losing the evidence, and killers walk free. You can expect an official complaint.’ He turned and headed off down the steps jamming a cigarette in his mouth as he went, leaving Procurator Zhang fuming and only too aware of the curious faces regarding him. Policemen did not speak to procurators like that, certainly not in public. It was a humiliating loss of mianzi – face.

  Zhang shouted lamely at Li’s back, ‘I’m the one who’ll be making the complaint, Deputy Section Chief. To the Commissioner. You needn’t think you can live in the protective shadow of your uncle forever.’

  Li stopped dead and Zhang knew immediately he had gone too far. Li turned and fixed him with a silent stare filled with such intensity that Zhang could not maintain eye contact. He turned and ran up the steps, back into the safety of the courthouse.

  Li stared after him for a few seconds, then hurried through the parked vehicles to the street, struggling to control his rage. The urge to hit someone, anyone, was extremely powerful. A group of people standing at the notice board where the week’s trials were posted in advance looked at him curiously as he strode past. But he didn’t notice them. Neither did he see the vendor at the corner of the street offering him fruit from under a green and yellow striped awning, nor smell the smoke rising from lamb skewers cooking on open coals in the narrow confines of Xidamochang Street. He turned instead towards the roar of traffic on East Qianmen Avenue, not even hearing the honk of a car’s horn sounding behind him. Only when its engine revved and the horn sounded again did he half turn, and an unmarked Beijing Police Jeep drew up beside him. Detective Wu leaned over to push the passenger door open. Li was surprised to see him. ‘What d’you want, Wu?’ he growled.

  Wu raised his hands in mock defence against Li’s aggression. ‘Hey, Boss, I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour.’

  Li slipped into the passenger seat. ‘What for?’

  Wu grinned, jaws grinding as ever on a piece of leathery gum that had long since lost its flavour. He pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead. He was the bearer of interesting information, and he wanted to tease it out, make the most of the moment. ‘Remember that case during Spring Festival? The dismembered girl? We found her bits in a shallow grave out near the Summer Palace …’

  ‘Yeah, I remember the case,’ Li interrupted impatiently. ‘We never got anyone for it.’ He paused. ‘What about it?’

  ‘They found a whole bunch more just like her down in Shanghai. Some kind of mass grave. Maybe as many as twenty. Same MO.’

  ‘Twenty!’ Li was shocked.

  Wu shrugged. ‘They don’t know how many exactly yet, but there are lots of bits.’ He relayed this with a relish Li found distasteful. ‘And they want you down there. Fast.’

  Li was taken aback. ‘Me? Why?’

  Wu grinned. ‘’Cos you’re such a fucking superstar, Boss.’ But his smile faded rapidly in the chill of Li’s glare. ‘They think there could be a link to the murder here in Beijing,’ he said quickly. ‘And there’s big pressure to get a result fast on this one.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Li had forgotten his courtroom debacle already.

  Wu lit a cigarette. ‘Seems there was this big ceremony down there this morning. Concrete getting poured into the foundations of some big joint venture bank they’re building across the river in Pudong. Anyway, the CEO of this New York bank comes to do the ceremonial bit on the building site. All the top brass are there. Place is bristling with American Press and TV. Only it’s pissing from the heavens. The building site turns into a swamp, and the platform they built for the VIPs tips this American exec right into the hole they’re going to fill with concrete. And he finds himself floundering around in the mud with bits of bodies coming out of the walls, like they just dug up some old burial site. Only the bodies are not so old.’

  Li whistled softly. He could picture the scene. A media feeding frenzy. Not the Chinese press, they would only print what they were told. But there would be no restraining the Western media. ‘TV cameras?’ he asked.

  ‘Beaming right out of there, live on satellite,’ Wu confirmed, enjoying himself. ‘Apparently the powers that be are in a real state. Bodies in the bank vault are not good for business, and apparently the Americans are talking about pulling out of the whole deal.’

  ‘I’m sure the victims will be sorry to hear that,’ Li said.

  Wu smirked and reaching over to the rear seat heaved a fat folder into Li’s lap. ‘That’s the file on the girl we found in Beijing. You’ll have time to refamiliarise yourself with it on the flight, which leaves …’ he checked his watch, ‘… in a little over two hours.’ He grinned. ‘Just enough time for you to pack an overnight bag.’

  *

  Li sat on the edge of the bed, watery sunlight slanting in from the street through the last dead leaves clinging to the trees that shaded Zhengyi Road in the summer. A kindly face smiled down at him from the wall, a tumble of curly black hair, streaked with silver, swept back from a remarkably unlined face – his Uncle Yifu, with whom he had lived for more than ten years on the second floor of this police apartment block in the Ministry compound. Li still missed him. Missed the mischief in his eyes as he endeavoured to trip Li up at every turn, imparting the experience of a lifetime, teaching him to think laterally. While the devil might be in the detail, therein also lies the truth, he used to say. Li still ached when he remembered the circumstances of the old man’s death. Woke frequently in the night with the bloody image skewered into his consciousness. This had been Yifu’s room, and now it was Xinxin’s. She often asked Li to tell her stories about the old man who smiled down at her from the wall. And he always made the time to tell her.

  Now, reluctantly, he stood up and wandered back to his own room. He was destined, it seemed, to be forever haunted by Yifu. With every failure, his uncle was cast up to him as an example he should follow. While every success was attributed to the old man’s influence. Those who were jealous of his status and achievements put them down to his uncle’s connections. And those senior officers who had worked with his
uncle made it clear that his footsteps were much too big for Li to walk in. And through every investigation he felt the old man’s presence at his shoulder, his voice whispering softly in his ear. No use, Li, in worrying over the might-have-beens. The answer’s in the detail, Li, always in the detail. It is a good thing to have a broken mirror reshaped. Where the tiller is tireless, the earth is fertile. He’d have given anything to hear that voice again for real.

  Quickly he stripped out of his uniform and felt the freedom of release from its starched constraint. He pulled on a pair of jeans, a white tee-shirt and his favourite old brown leather jacket, and began packing some clothes into a holdall. One of Xinxin’s books lying on the chest of drawers caused him to pause. He would need to arrange for Mei Yuan to look after the child while he was gone. And there was no Margaret to step into the breach.

  He sat for a moment lost in thought, then reached over and lifted Margaret’s hairbrush from the bedside table and teased out some of the hair trapped in its teeth. It was extra fine and golden in the pale sunlight. He put it to his nose and smelled her perfume, experiencing a moment of acute desire, and then emptiness. He ran his hand lightly across the unmade bed where they had so often made love, and realised that he missed her more than he knew.

  III

  Margaret had never quite understood the Irish concept of the wake – a celebration of the life, rather than a mourning of the death. How could you celebrate a life that was gone, something that once was vital and full of hope and warmth and giving, that now was cold and dead? Like the procession of bodies that had passed through her autopsy room, all animation extinct, just meat on a slab.

  She could not bear to think of her father like that. She had not even had the courage to view his body, laid out in his coffin, colour carefully applied to his face by the mortician in an attempt to create the illusion of life. In any case, she knew, it was not her father who lay there. He had long vanished, existing now only in the memories of others, and in flickering, fading images on old home movies from the days before video tape. They had never bought a video camera.

  There were always the family photo albums. But Margaret felt that these fixed, two-dimensional images rarely caught the person. They lacked the spirit that was life and character, a personality. They were just moments in time without any reference point.

  She heard voices raised in laughter coming from the living room, the chink of glasses, and felt resentful that these people should come into her father’s home on the day he was buried and take his passing so lightly. She slipped out of the kitchen and moved down the hall to the room at the back of the house which had been his den. She shut the door on the sounds of the wake and listened to the silence. The room was laden with it, what little light remained of the late afternoon soaked up by the heavy net curtains. If there was anything left of him, it was here in this room where he had spent so much time. She breathed in the smell of him in the dry, academic atmosphere of his own private space. Everything had been left as it was from the day he dropped dead in his lecture room at the university from a massive coronary thrombosis. Quick, painless, completely unexpected. The best way to go, Margaret thought, except for those who remained, devastated by the suddenness of it, left to cope with the huge hole it made in all their lives.

  She wandered around touching things. His books, hundreds of them gathering dust on the shelves. All the great modern American writers. It had been his subject, his speciality. Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and, of course, Hemingway, who had grown up just a few streets away in this quiet upscale Chicago suburb. All thumbed and marked and annotated. She picked one out. Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson. The pages were yellowing now around the edges, the paper dry, almost brittle. It fell open at a story called Hands. She remembered it. A sad story about a simple man whose love of children led to a tragic misunderstanding. There were copious notes down the margins in her father’s tight distinctive handwriting, the hallmark of a generation.

  She moved to his desk. A piece of English reproduction furniture. Mahogany, with red leather inlay. It was chipped and scarred from years of use. Papers and books were piled untidily around his iMac desktop computer. A half-smoked pipe lay in an ashtray, the pale scrapings of his teeth around the mouthpiece of the black stem. As a child she had loved the sweet smell of his tobacco. She ran her fingers lovingly round the smoothly polished cherrywood bowl. He had no doubt intended to relight it. Now he never would.

  In a frame to the left of the computer, partially obscured by a pile of unmarked exam papers, was a photograph of Margaret in her graduation gown. She moved the papers to get a better sight of it, and felt a strange ache as she saw the young face below the mortar board gazing back at her out of the picture, full of hope and youthful idealism. She wondered how often her father had looked at it in idle moments. Wondered what he had thought of her. Had he been proud or disappointed? As a little girl she had adored him. And he had given her so much of his time, so much of his love. But since her teens they had not been particularly close, and now she regretted it. It had been her fault. She had been too busy making a life for herself that had nothing to do with her parents. A life that had turned to failure and disappointment. And now there was no going back. No way to say, Sorry, Dad, I loved you really. She quickly turned the frame face down on the desk and turned on the computer, just for something to do. It whirred and hummed as it booted up its operating system, before presenting her with its desktop screen. From here she could access all his files. Mainly they were word-processing documents. Lectures, notes for students, a critical analysis of some new American classic. There were letters, too. Hundreds of them. But she had no interest in violating his privacy.

  He had only recently gone on-line, discovering that he could stay easily in touch by e-mail with his daughter in China. All it took was a click of the mouse. But, then, beyond his initial enthusiasm for the Internet, he had not had much to say to her, and his e-mails had tailed off. She wondered what use he had made of the Net, and booted up his browser, a piece of software that connected him to the worldwide web, allowing him to visit any one of millions of Internet sites around the globe. The default page that it took her to was the HomePage of his Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Down the left side of the screen were four tabs, like name tabs on folders in a filing cabinet, which is what they were – or, at least, their electronic equivalent. While she waited for the UIC HomePage to load, she pointed the on-screen arrow to the HISTORY tab and a file opened up as if she had drawn it out of a cabinet. This showed the last five hundred Internet sites her father had visited. She went to the top of the list, the last site he had gone to on the day before he died. It was something called Aphrodite Home Page. She clicked on the Internet Explorer icon beside it and within seconds the screen was wiped black, and photographs of naked women began downloading under headings like SAMANTHA – Click me to watch live, and JULI – I like women.

  Margaret’s face flushed red. A mixture of shock, embarrassment, revulsion. She went back to HISTORY and downloaded the next address on the list. More pornography. ASIAN BABES DO IT FOR YOU. Skinny Asian women with silicon boosted breasts revealed parts of their anatomy that Margaret had only ever seen on the autopsy table. She felt sick. Her dad was accessing pornography on the Internet. Her dad! She could not reconcile this with the sweet, gentle man she knew as her father, the most scrupulously fair and honest man she had ever known. But, then, she thought, had she ever really known him at all? Why would he want to look at filth like this? Men, she knew, had needs that women simply didn’t understand. But her dad?

  She didn’t hear the door of the den opening and was startled by the sound of her mother’s voice. ‘What are you doing, Margaret? Everyone’s asking where you are.’

  Margaret was flustered, as if caught in some illicit act. She quickly moved the arrow to shut down the computer before her mother could see what was on the screen. ‘Nothing,’ she said guiltily. ‘Just going t
hrough some of dad’s stuff.’

  ‘Well, there’ll be plenty of time for that,’ her mother said. ‘You have guests to see to.’

  Margaret bridled. ‘They’re not my guests,’ she said. ‘You invited them. And, anyway, they seem to be having a pretty good time through there, drinking dad’s Scotch. They won’t want me spoiling their fun.’

  Her mother sighed theatrically. ‘I don’t know why you bother affecting the grieving daughter. You had no time for him when he was alive. Why start pretending now?’

  Margaret was stung, both by the unfairness and by the truth of her mother’s words. ‘I’m not pretending,’ she said, fighting back the tears. She hated her mother to see any sign of weakness in her. ‘I loved my dad.’ She hadn’t realised just how much until she had received the phone call in Beijing. ‘But don’t worry. I won’t cause any posthumous embarrassment at your funeral by pretending I ever felt anything about you.’

  She saw the colour rise on her mother’s cheeks and experienced an immediate stab of regret at her cruelty. Her mother had always had the knack of bringing out the worst in her. ‘In that case,’ her mother said coldly, ‘perhaps you’d be better not going.’ She turned back to the door.

  ‘You never loved me, did you?’ The words were out before Margaret could stop them, and they halted her mother in her tracks. ‘That day my brother drowned. You wished it had been me and not him.’ Her mother turned and flashed her a look. Things that had never been said, feelings long suppressed, were bubbling to the surface. ‘You spent your life wishing failure on me because I could never live up to the expectations you had of him. Your boy. Your darling.’

  Her mother’s jaw was trembling. Her eyes filling. But like her daughter, she would show no sign of weakness. ‘I didn’t have to wish failure on you, Margaret. You brought all the failure you could ever need on yourself. A failed marriage, a failed career. And now an affair with some … Chinaman.’ She said the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. ‘And don’t talk to me about love. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You were always so self-contained. So cold. All those people you cut open. Just so much dead flesh to you. You never needed anything from anyone, did you? And never gave a thing of yourself.’