Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6)

by Peter May

  ‘So what troubles you?’

  Li said, ‘What makes you think I am troubled?’

  The old man shook his head. ‘To answer a question with a question is evasion. Your uncle could never hide his worries from me either. Which is why he would never meet my eye when we played chess. He would have made a lousy poker player.’ Lao Dai stopped and put his hand on Li’s arm. ‘I could never fill Yifu’s footsteps. Nor would I try. But I knew him well, and I know he would want you to come to me if you were in trouble.’

  Li was embarrassed and moved at the same time. He wanted to hug the old man, but it was not the Chinese way. Dai and Yifu had served together for many years in the criminal investigation department of the Beijing Municipal Police, Yifu rising to high office before his retirement. Although Dai had not reached the same dizzy heights, he had nevertheless been a Section Chief. He was a good man, clever and principled. Both had been widowers and were inseparable after retirement. Yifu’s death had left a huge hole in the old man’s life, and with no children to fill the void, Li was the closest thing to family that he had left.

  ‘I am responsible for the murders of young women,’ Li said finally.

  Lao Dai chuckled. ‘You are killing them yourself, I take it?’

  ‘I am failing to catch the man who is,’ Li said. ‘The longer I take, the more he will kill.’

  Lao Dai sighed. ‘It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one. If you fill your mind with guilt for the actions of another, you will leave no room for the clear thinking you will need to catch him.’ He set off again along the path, and Li followed. ‘You had better tell me all about it,’ he said. And Li did. Everything from the first victim to the last, from the discovery of the Ripper book to the letter from the killer himself. Dai listened without comment. A faraway look glazed his eyes, and concern clouded the smile that usually lit them. ‘You have an enemy, Li Yan,’ he said at length.

  Li was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families what else do all these murders have in common?’

  Li thought about it for a moment, and then saw the old man’s reasoning. ‘The police,’ he said.

  ‘More specifically …’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘It was you he wrote to, was it not?’ He regarded Li with some sympathy. ‘By making a hero of you they have made you a target, Li Yan. Where once you were known to only a few, now you are known to all.’ And Li remembered Elvis’s words at the meeting: You’ve been splashed all over the papers ahead of this award thing tonight. You’re a hero. Dai added, ‘Their ignorance was your strength, now their knowledge is your weakness. Yifu would have been proud of you tonight, but he would also have opposed this award with all his might.’

  ‘But what possible motive … ?’

  Old Dai raised a hand to stop him. ‘Jealousy, revenge, any one of many twisted things. But you cannot know this, Li Yan. You cannot know who or why, not yet. It is too big a leap. Remember Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which was in truth a great fall back. Your knowledge is your strength. Take small steps and keep your balance. He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady. He who takes long strides will not maintain the pace.’ And Li realised that it was a philosophy Lao Dai applied to his own life, not just in metaphor, but in fact. Dai smiled. ‘You know what Yifu would have said?’

  Li nodded. ‘The answer lies in the detail.’

  They had reached the steps of the Muxidi subway. Lao Dai stopped and poked a finger in Li’s chest. ‘One step at a time, Li Yan. One small step at a time.’ And then he patted his arm. ‘I will see you tonight. I will be Yifu’s eyes and ears. I will be his pride.’ And he turned and headed carefully towards the escalator, one small step at a time.

  III

  Li Jon was sleeping and Margaret switched on a lamp by her chair. She could no longer read by the dying light of the day, although she had barely noticed it going. She was absorbed in the book. Both fascinated and horrified. All the autopsies she had performed over many years had led her to believe that she had witnessed the fullest extent of man’s inhumanity to man, or woman. But as she read Doctor Thomas Bond’s medical notes on the post-mortem he had helped perform on the Ripper’s most mutilated victim, the unfortunate Mary Jane Kelly, she realised that there was perhaps no limit, and that there would always be horrors worse than she could imagine.

  Doctor Bond’s notes on what he found at the scene of the crime, and during the subsequent post-mortem, had only been discovered as recently as 1987. Margaret was fascinated by how close, procedurally, his descriptions were to the account she might have made herself more than a century after he had written them.

  He laid bare the crime scene in cold, unemotional terms:

  The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen, the right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress, the elbow bent and the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.

  The whole surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features, and the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body.

  The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.

  The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, and on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about two feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.

  His post-mortem notes were even more chilling in their detail of the Ripper’s bestiality.

  The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin.

  Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals between the 4th, 5th and 6th ribs were cut and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.

  The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin including the external organs of generation and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia and muscles as far as the knee.

  The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to five inches above the ankle.

  Both arms and forearms had extensive and jagged wounds.

  The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin, and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand and forearm showing the same condition.

  On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken and torn away.

  The left lung was intact; it was adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung were several nodules of consolidation.

  The pericardium was open below and the heart absent.

  Margaret could visualise it all, and oddly it affe
cted her more than if she had carried out the autopsy herself. Something about the act of exercising your professional expertise removed you, somehow, from the human horror of it all.

  The Ripper had taken Mary Jane’s heart. It was not found at the scene of the crime and never recovered. Margaret knew that at least two of the Beijing victims had been missing body parts. She was not sufficiently familiar with any of the cases to make direct comparisons with the victims of Jack the Ripper. But she did know that the Beijing equivalent of the Mary Jane Kelly killing had not yet been committed, and it chilled her to the bone to think that such a fate awaited some poor innocent Chinese girl out there. A living being with hopes and aspirations destined to flounder on the blade of a maniac. Unless Li could stop him. The thought brought home to her just how much pressure he must be under. And with the thought came her frustration that there was nothing she could do to help.

  * * *

  Li turned off Changan Avenue into Zhengyi Road and headed south, the high grey brick wall on his right concealing from public view the compound of the Ministries of State and Public Security, once the home of the British Embassy. Shop windows shone in the dark beneath the trees, uniforms and the paraphernalia of the police exhibited behind plate glass. Batons and baseball caps, tear-gas and truncheons. And books on every subject under the sun, from police procedure to pornography in art. He passed the Shanghainese restaurant where he and Margaret sometimes ate, just a short walk from their apartment, and turned into the compound past the armed officer on sentry duty. He drew up outside the apartment block reserved for senior officers and glanced up to see a light shining from their veranda on the seventh floor.

  Inside the main door, he stopped to empty the contents of his mail box. Bills and circulars. He slipped them into his jacket pocket and walked into the empty elevator. The door slid noisily shut and the metal box rattled its way slowly up seven floors. He tried to empty his mind, as Old Dai had counselled, but found any number of things jostling to fill it again. The murders, the award ceremony and, strangely, Mei Yuan’s riddle. He tried to recall it. Something about deaf mutes in a rice paddy. But his concentration was shot, and already it seemed like an eternity since she had told him it that morning. Was it really only that morning he had been called out to the murder of Guo Huan?

  The doors of the elevator slid open and he slipped his key in the lock of the apartment. He found Margaret with her legs curled up below her on an armchair, her face buried in a book. The apartment was in darkness, apart from the lamp by her chair. He switched on the overhead light, and she blinked in its sad yellow glare.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. And he stooped to kiss her on the cheek, like a husband returning home at the end of a day at the office. And she waiting for him, like some suburban housewife, reading crime stories to fill the hours.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

  ‘Your Jack the Ripper book.’

  He frowned. ‘In English?’

  She laughed. ‘In what else? I found it at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Wangfujing.’

  He heard the sound of distant alarm bells ringing somewhere in the back of his mind. ‘When was it published?’

  She flipped through the pages to the front of the book. ‘About eighteen months ago.’

  ‘So it’s been available here, in English, for some time.’

  ‘Must have been. There were still a couple of copies on the shelf.’ She could see that wheels behind his eyes were turning. ‘Why? Is there something significant in that?’

  ‘Could be,’ Li said. ‘The Chinese translation was only published a week ago. So if the killer is using this book as his blueprint he must be an English speaker.’

  ‘Or a foreigner,’ Margaret said. And Li recalled Elvis commenting on the Chinese content of the Ripper letter. Nobody would write Chinese like this. And Qian’s words, Unless maybe he was a foreigner. But it was clear that the strange Chinese was just a translation from arcane nineteenth-century English. The killer had lifted the translation from the book. Li’s mind froze on that thought. He couldn’t have. If he was working from the English original he would have had to make the translation himself. Then how did it come to be an exact match for the translation in the Chinese version of the book? No two translations would be exactly the same. He took out his cellphone and began dialling.

  ‘What is it?’ Margaret asked. But all he did was lift a finger to silence her.

  ‘Elvis, it’s the Chief. Get on to the Chinese publisher of the Ripper book and find out who translated it. As much background on him as you can.’

  ‘Chief,’ Elvis’s voice came back at him. ‘There’s a paragraph on the flyleaf about the translator. And he’s a she. Lives in Hong Kong.’ A pause. ‘You still want me to contact the publisher?’

  ‘No. No,’ Li said. ‘Forget it.’ And he flipped his phone shut. It was inconceivable that the killer was a woman. And Hong Kong was a little far to commute for murder.

  Margaret was still watching him. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ she asked.

  He said, ‘I received a letter this afternoon from the killer. It was, word for word, the original Jack the Ripper letter. But, of course, it was in Chinese. Character for character the same as the translation in the Chinese version of the Ripper book.’

  Margaret immediately saw his problem. ‘So you’re thinking, if he’s been working from the English version, how did he manage to produce the same translation as the Chinese one.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, that’s easy.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Sure. He only sent the letter today, right? Or yesterday.’ Li nodded. ‘So if the Chinese version has been out for a week …’ She didn’t even have to finish.

  Li sighed his frustration. ‘I’m not even thinking straight any more,’ he said. Why had he not seen that for himself? He was blinding himself with guilt and pressure, failing to find the logic in the detail. Old Dai was right. It is easier to carry an empty vessel than a full one, he had said. If you fill your mind with guilt for the actions of another, you will leave no room for the clear thinking you will need to catch him.

  Margaret’s voice, laden with sympathy, tumbled softly into his thoughts and startled him. ‘Li Yan, you’ve got to be at the Great Hall in under an hour.’

  ‘Shit!’ He looked at his watch. ‘I have to shower and change.’ He hurried through to the bathroom, divesting himself of clothes as he went. Margaret followed behind picking them up. ‘When’s Mei Yuan coming?’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘She’ll be here any time.’

  He stepped into the shower and under a jet of hot steaming water. Margaret stood watching him through the misting glass. He was a fit, powerful man, tall for a Chinese, over six feet, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had a swimmer’s thighs and calves. The hot water ran in rivulets over firm, toned muscles, and she wanted just to step in beside him and make love to him there and then, with the thought of Mei Yuan due to arrive at any moment, and Li Jon asleep through the wall. A moment snatched. A sense of urgency, like there had once been always in their lovemaking. But she knew the moment would not have been right for him. So she stood, holding his discarded clothes and watching the shape of him blur in the steam as it condensed on the glass.

  He called out, eyes shut against the foaming shampoo, ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘What did you learn from the book?’

  ‘That nineteenth-century London cops were either incompetent or stupid.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Li Yan, they let people sluice away blood and other evidence from crime scenes. Mortuary assistants washed down bodies before the pathologists carried out their autopsies. Vital evidence literally flushed down the drain.’ She had been horrified as she read. ‘After the night of the double murder, they found some graffiti chalked on the entrance to tenement dwellings, alongside a bloody scrap of skirt from one of the victims. Before they could even pho
tograph it, the Police Commissioner insisted that it be washed off.’

  ‘What!’ Li couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Why?’

  ‘Good question,’ Margaret said. ‘One I’d have loved to have asked him.’

  ‘But he must have had a good reason.’

  ‘Oh, he gave a reason, but it wasn’t a good one. He said he was afraid that the graffiti would spark anti-semitic riots.’

  ‘Why?’

  Apparently the Ripper had made some kind of allusion to the Jews, as if a Jew might be responsible for the killings. There was a large immigrant Jewish population in the east end of London at that time, and the Commissioner said he feared that the locals would turn against them.’

  ‘But that’s absurd! If it was a real concern, all they had to do was cover it up under police guard until it was properly examined and photographed.’

  ‘You might think that. And I might agree with you. But apparently that never occurred to him. And for a man who ultimately lost his job through his failure to catch the Ripper, destroying what might have been very crucial evidence was a very strange thing to do.’

  Li turned off the water and pushed open the shower door. He stood dripping wet and naked, quite unselfconscious. ‘And he was the Police Commissioner?’

  ‘Sir Charles Warren. Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’ She eyed him lustfully and took hold of him with her free hand, feeling him swelling in her grasp from an immediate rush of blood. ‘If we didn’t have to be out of here in the next twenty minutes …’

  He grinned. ‘Twenty minutes, huh? I suppose I could always try to speed things up.’

  She squeezed him hard, making him flinch. ‘I should be so lucky.’