The Killing Room (The China Thrillers 3)

by Peter May

  No one had dared to look at Huang as Li briefed them on that morning’s autopsy, on the pathologist’s verdict that the victim had been drugged, and then been the subject of a ‘live’ autopsy, or ante-mortem, and that the most likely cause of death was surgical removal of the heart. It was a bizarre conclusion, and neither Li nor his pathologist had been able to suggest a motive.

  One detective had come up with Li’s idea of organ theft, and Mei-Ling had repeated Margaret’s assertion that if the victims had been murdered for their organs there would have been no need to keep them alive for the procedure. She also pointed out that the Beijing victim had been found with her organs in a bag beside the body.

  ‘So we are sure, then, that this murder in Beijing is tied in with the bodies here in Shanghai?’ the detective had persisted.

  ‘No, Detective Dai,’ Mei-Ling had told him. ‘We don’t know for sure. Not yet.’

  And Li said, ‘The body in Beijing has been kept in the freezer. I asked two days ago for it to be taken out and defrosted. In another couple of days it should be sufficiently thawed to allow for it to be re-autopsied. By then we will have sufficient evidence from Shanghai to make a definitive comparison. In the meantime I suggest we keep an open mind.’

  That had been half an hour earlier, since when there had been a long and animated discussion about the facts of the case, what they knew, what they didn’t know, what they thought, what they thought they ought to do. It was the classic collective Chinese detective meeting, where everyone had a voice, an opinion, and the right to express it. But as yet it had borne no fruit. There had been an argument about how far back they should go in extracting records of women from the missing persons file. Li had decided on twelve months, which had brought a groan from around the table. It meant there could be hundreds of files to process. With the growth of the floating population, which now ran to several millions in Shanghai, people were always being reported missing. Very often it transpired they were not missing at all but had gone off in search of work, or run away to be married, or simply dropped out. There was a high, and growing, drop-out rate among the younger generation. Many teenage girls were drawn to the bright lights of Canton and Shenzhen where they often fell prey to drugs and prostitution, both of which were on the increase. And sometimes women who got pregnant, when they had already had a child, simply ‘disappeared’ to have the baby somewhere else, away from the prying eyes of the local authorities.

  When Li steered the meeting on to the subject of Jiang Baofu, and the revelation that he had followed Margaret back to her hotel, it had created a considerable stir in the room.

  ‘You took his statement yesterday, Dai,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘What did you make of him?’

  Dai leaned back and chewed his pencil thoughtfully. He was a young man very conscious of his image, from his immaculate white roll-neck sweater and powder blue Italian jacket, to his beautifully cut dark pants with a crease he could almost sharpen his pencil on. His hair was short, but expensively styled, and swept back from his face with gel. He tucked the thumb of his free hand into the shiny silver belt buckle at his waist. ‘He gave me the creeps,’ Dai said, and Li remembered Mei-Ling’s words after they had talked to him at the site. That boy’s really creepy. Margaret had called him a creepy medical student, and there had been something else she’d said … He thought for a moment, then remembered. He freaked me, she’d told them.

  ‘I couldn’t get him to shut up,’ Dai was saying. ‘Hell, usually it’s the other way around with these people, like pulling teeth. But this guy had verbal diarrhoea. At a guess I’d say he was enjoying the whole process. He was asking more questions than I was. Unhealthy, you know. Morbid. Too helpful. In the end it was all I could do to get rid of him.’

  Another detective said, ‘But if this guy’s involved, isn’t he making himself a bit conspicuous? I mean, it’s like he’s deliberately trying to draw attention to himself.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mei-Ling said, ‘that’s exactly what he wants us to think. Maybe he believes that by making himself high-profile, we’ll dismiss him as being too obvious. And, well, being the night watchman at the site does make it all seem too easy. But, remember, if he did bury those bodies there, he never expected them to be found. He thought they’d be safely buried under tons of concrete by now, and he’d be home free.’

  Li said, ‘And the other thing to consider is that maybe he’s just crazy.’ He remembered Margaret’s half-joking, half-serious allusion to a psycho surgeon. ‘I mean, performing live autopsies on eighteen women – and probably more that we don’t even know about yet – is not exactly the action of a sane person.’

  Dai said, ‘But he couldn’t have been acting alone, could he? Someone else would have had to be administering the midazolam and pumping the ambu bag.’

  Li paused. He had not considered this. Of course the killer could not have been acting alone. It had to have been a collaborative effort, in which case it could not have been the action of a solitary madman. Could there be two, or more, of them. How did people like that find each other? Was it possible for insane people to work efficiently in a team? ‘That’s a good point, Detective Dai,’ he said at length. ‘But we shouldn’t let speculation on this deflect us from our first priority – to identify these victims as quickly as we can.’

  The scraping of a chair being pushed back abruptly turned all their heads towards the window, where Huang now stood silhouetted against the light behind him. Beyond the Section Chief, and beyond the east wing of the department, Li could see the traffic streaming by on the overhead road. But Huang said nothing. He simply turned towards the door and made his exit in silence. None of them knew whether it was a comment on Li’s handling of the case, or whether he simply had another appointment. But it left a tension in the room that did not dissipate until Li called the meeting to an uneasy close.

  II

  Margaret was exhausted. Her eyes were stinging. Every muscle in her body gave the impression of having seized up. Her limbs had, apparently, doubled in weight, and lifting her legs or arms in the simple act of walking or raising a drink to her lips was a colossal effort. She felt battered and bruised, and all she wanted to do was lie down. Jetlag and the emotions of the last few days had finally caught up with her.

  The hands of all the remaining bodies had been examined and fingerprinted. Then together with Dr Lan, she had carried out repeat autopsies on the first two bodies and found the same betadine colouring around the entry wounds after cleaning away the dirt that still clung to the decaying flesh. They had also found several small sutures, tying off arteries where organs had been removed. Dr Lan made no comment on the fact that these had not appeared on his initial reports. It was clear to Margaret that the autopsies had been cursory and careless, and yet Dr Lan did not strike her as a careless man. His professional and personal embarrassment was patent. His integrity had been compromised, and Margaret suspected that he had been a reluctant instrument of political convenience. No doubt he had not envisaged having his work scrutinised by another professional. In order to keep him on side, she decided not to say or do anything that would draw attention to the obvious shortcomings of the initial autopsies.

  She had concentrated, instead, on going over all the toxicology reports, with Dr Lan translating, and together they had discussed another possible cause of death. She had then studied all the x-rays taken of the body pieces as they had been found, and then the whole body x-rays.

  Although she had not felt like it, she had agreed to Lan’s suggestion that they begin three fresh autopsies, Dr Lan and one of his team working in the twin-tabled room, Margaret in here on her own. The Chinese pathologists had made a point of asking her through to consult on every new or unusual finding, wishing to have her corroborate an opinion or make an alternative suggestion. Her concentration was now wavering.

  She had almost completed her autopsy, having dealt fully with the torso and limbs and moving now to the head. Because the head had been severed so far down the neck
, she had decided to leave the dissection of the neck until she dealt with the head. The larynx, trachea and mainstem bronchi were normally the most boring and routine of the autopsy procedures, only occasionally enlivened if the victim had been unfortunate enough to have choked to death on a piece of food that was still lodged in the throat. She had already noted that the distal portions of the trachea and the oesophagus were absent because of the removal of the lungs. Now, working on that portion of the neck still attached to the head, she lifted the skin of the front of the neck, using her fingers to bluntly dissect it from the underlying tissue, while pulling it up towards the chin. Then she freed the remaining trachea and oesophagus together from the surrounding muscles and blood vessels, running her scalpel along each side and pulling. At this stage, they would only come partially free, because they were still attached by the tongue at the top end.

  Carefully, so as not to break through the skin of the neck from the inside, she took a long blade like a six-inch fillet knife and cut the tongue free from the jawbone by blindly drawing the blade gingerly along the inside of it. She then stuffed the tip of the tongue backwards, as if down the throat, and pulled it free, in the same movement completely removing the neck organs – tongue, portions of oesophagus and trachea, larynx and thyroid gland.

  Flipping them over, she then took a pair of scissors and cut open the oesophagus, like opening up a soft hose, which she then cut free from the trachea. Now that the trachea, held open by incomplete rings of cartilage, was revealed, she was able to run the scissors up the back of it, taking advantage of the break in the cartilage. She checked the laryngeal cartilage, or Adam’s apple, for fractures, then finding none pried it apart to reveal the smooth pink-grey mucosa of the vocal folds. Immediately she spotted the whiter patches of several polypoid nodules.

  ‘How is it going?’

  She looked up, her concentration broken for the moment, to see Li standing in the doorway. He looked tired, too, but she immediately felt her own fatigue lifting. ‘Hi,’ she said. And then almost straight away her lassitude returned as she saw Mei-Ling appearing behind him. Apparently it was impossible for Li to go anywhere without her.

  He walked in and glanced at the woman on the table. She looked unreal somehow, waxen yellow and lifeless, like pieces of a wax corpse used for instruction in a professor’s teaching lab. There was something about the expression fixed on her face, barely discernible now because of decomposition, that was odd. As if it had been frozen in a moment of pain or fear or both. Her hair was smeared across it, and there was something terribly sad conveyed by her expression, an insight into the last moments of her life, made almost eerie by the absence of her eyes.

  ‘Were the eyes gouged out in some kind of attempt to disguise the face, do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘They weren’t gouged, they were surgically removed,’ Margaret said, and Li had an immediate picture in his mind of a large glass jar filled with eyes staring out at him.

  ‘Why would someone want to do that?’ Mei-Ling asked.

  ‘Why would someone want to do any of this?’ Margaret said.

  Li was looking at the dead woman’s face again. ‘Was she in pain, do you think, when she died?’

  Margaret looked at her expression. ‘Trying to reach a high note, maybe.’ She smiled wanly and Li frowned.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She indicated the neck she had just sectioned, running a finger down each of the pink-grey folds she had uncovered. ‘The vocal cords,’ she said. ‘If you look closely you’ll see small patches of white, and if you look more closely still, you’ll see that they are caused by tiny reactive pedunculated polyps. Effectively small, non-cancerous tumours, known in the trade as “singer’s nodules”.’

  ‘You mean this woman was a singer?’ Mei-Ling asked.

  ‘Can’t say for sure,’ Margaret said. ‘But she was someone who used her voice a lot. And if you look at her teeth you’ll see she was a heavy smoker. Which always makes the condition worse. Now, maybe she was one of those conductresses you hear screaming through the loudspeaker system at passengers on passing buses, but if you look at her fingernails you’ll see she’d had a manicure not long before her death. I know you don’t like to talk about “class” in China, but I don’t think your average bus conductress gets her nails manicured. Wrong class. So my guess would be that this lady was a classical singer of some sort. Aged maybe around thirty.’

  Li nodded appreciatively. ‘Well, that at least gives us something to go on.’

  ‘And something else,’ Margaret said. She crossed to the long, polished stainless steel worktop and shuffled through the envelopes of x-rays lying there until she found what she was looking for. She removed two x-rays from one of the envelopes and laid one on a lightbox and switched it on. Immediately they saw that it was the x-ray of a foot. ‘This is one of the ladies being autopsied next door right now.’ She lifted the sheet off and replaced it with the other. ‘This one shows it better.’ She leaned over it, and with her finger traced the line of the second and third metatarsals. ‘These bones that run between the toes and the rest of the structure that makes up the ankle and the heel …’

  ‘Metatarsals,’ Mei-Ling said.

  Margaret flicked her a thoughtful glance. ‘That’s right.’ She turned back to the x-ray. ‘You can see scarring there on these middle two. Small calluses where stress fractures have failed to heal. Difficult to tell from these whether they are incomplete fissures or actual breaks.’

  ‘What does that tell us?’ Li asked.

  ‘Regardless of what caused the fractures, continued and unprotected weight bearing has almost certainly caused them to heal poorly. And if you want to take a look at the girl on the table next door, you’ll see how well developed the muscles are in her legs, and in her shoulders and arms and neck. My guess is that she was an athlete of some sort, possibly a gymnast.’

  Li looked at Margaret afresh, with the admiration and respect he always had for her when she was doing her job. Her observation of detail, her insightful interpretation, the breadth and range of her knowledge and experience. He had never worked with anyone quite like her. It reminded him of why he felt about her the way he did, when by any other measure she was a very difficult person to love. That, and the acute vulnerability that lay beneath her well-polished veneer of cynicism and acid wit.

  Mei-Ling was also clearly impressed, although endeavouring not to show it. ‘Could be worse,’ she said. ‘Three possible clues to identity out of … how many autopsies?’

  ‘Six,’ Margaret said. ‘And you’re right. It could be worse. You could still be labouring under the illusion that the victims had all died a natural death.’ She switched off the lightbox and slipped the x-rays back in the envelope. ‘In fact, we are now looking at yet another possible cause of death.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mei-Ling was still stinging from the force of Margaret’s rebuke. She glanced at Li, but he appeared to be oblivious.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked.

  ‘The midazolam,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s quite commonly used in minor surgical procedures as a sedative to produce amnesia of the procedure … if you were having a tooth pulled, or a burn scrubbed out, a scope put down your throat, or even …’ she glanced at Mei-Ling, ‘… if you were having an abortion.’ She paused for a moment, but Mei-Ling was not rising to the bait. ‘Like I said, it would be used in small, frequent doses. In a high dose, though, it can cause cardiac arrest. So that might well have been a quick and easy way of finishing the victims off at some point during the procedure.’

  ‘But since we don’t have the hearts to hand, you can’t say for sure,’ Mei-Ling said.

  ‘Having the heart available wouldn’t help,’ Margaret corrected her. ‘It would take about twelve hours for the heart tissue to show a visible reaction – and none of these women lived that long. It’s the tox that’s important here.’

  She returned to the table to complete the final elements of the autopsy. ‘With four of us taking th
ree autopsies each, we should be through the rest of them by tomorrow night. Although it will be a day or two before all the results are back from toxicology.’ She peeled the woman’s scalp back from the skull. ‘By the way, I’ve got dinner reservations for us tonight at the Dragon and Phoenix restaurant on the eighth floor of the Peace Hotel. Apparently it has wonderful views of the Bund.’ She glanced up at Li and said, pointedly, ‘A table for two, that is. We haven’t had a chance to talk since I got back from the States.’

  Li glanced at Mei-Ling uncomfortably. But she smiled sweetly. ‘Yes,’ she said to Margaret, ‘it is a wonderful view. You should make the best of the limited time you have. After all, you will be leaving for Beijing the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Will I?’ Margaret looked at Li.

  ‘Had you not told her?’ Mei-Ling said.

  Li said quickly, ‘I need you to look at the body we found in Beijing, Margaret. I have asked them to translate the original autopsy report, and the body has been out of the freezer for two days now. So another couple of days and it will be thawed.’

  ‘I see.’ Margaret turned back to the severed head. She could not meet Mei-Ling’s eyes. Although Margaret knew Mei-Ling could not have arranged it this way, it still felt like she had somehow won a battle of wills.

  Li said, ‘And I need to ask you a favour.’ When Margaret did not look up he elucidated. ‘I would like you to collect Xinxin and bring her back down with you.’

  Margaret’s face immediately lit up at the prospect, and she looked at Li with shining eyes. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Is she with Mei Yuan?’