The Killing Room

by Peter May

  She went into the bathroom to repair the make-up smudged around her eyes, and took the lift down to the ground floor. The girl at reception remembered Li quite clearly. He had gone up to Margaret’s room, she said, and when he couldn’t get a reply had come down and asked them to phone from there. He appeared sort of angry, she said.

  “Did he leave a note?” Margaret asked.

  “One moment.” The receptionist searched beneath the counter for a few seconds and then handed Margaret an envelope. She tore it open and found a folded sheet of hotel letter headed paper. Li had scrawled a telephone number and his room number, and a terse “Call me” on it.

  “Can I use the phone?” Margaret asked.

  The receptionist gave her an odd look. “Now?”

  “Yes, of course, now,” Margaret snapped.

  The receptionist lifted a phone on to the counter and Margaret quickly dialled the number Li had left. Someone answered in Chinese, and Margaret, frustrated, could not get her to speak English. She thrust the phone at the receptionist. “Ask them to get me room 223,” she said.

  The receptionist spoke into the receiver, and after a lengthy conversation handed it back. It was ringing. After an eternity, Margaret heard a sleepy male voice saying. “Wei?”

  “Li Yan?”

  A moment’s silence, then, “Margaret?”

  “Li Yan, I’m so sorry,” she blurted.

  “Do you know what time it is?” He must have checked his bedside clock and was clearly aggravated.

  “I fell asleep,” she said lamely. “I just lay down for a minute and . . . I don’t know, the next thing it’s three in the morning. I was just so tired.”

  “Yeah, well, right now I’m pretty tired, too,” he said, barely able to keep the irritation out of his voice. “We can talk about this tomorrow.” And he hung up.

  Margaret was taken aback by his abruptness. She replaced the receiver in the cradle and hurried away before the receptionist saw her hurt and embarrassment. She went back up to her room, but she was wide awake now and she knew there was no point in even getting into bed. She turned on the television and tried to watch a film on HBO Asia, but it was halfway through, and she couldn’t concentrate for a thousand thoughts crowding her mind. She got up and went to the window, drawing the curtain half open so that she could peer down into the deserted Nanjing Road. It had stopped raining, for the first time, she thought, since she had arrived. And suddenly she had an overwhelming desire to breathe fresh, cold air, to feel the breeze on her face, to stretch her legs along the deserted waterfront of the Bund. She found a jacket and tied a scarf at her neck. In the corridor, an attendant in a white jacket lay asleep stretched across two chairs in the open doorway of a service cupboard. She guessed he must have been there when she went down to reception. But she hadn’t noticed. Now she tiptoed past him to the lift.

  The Bund was deserted, and without its light show as dull as any city street anywhere in the world, all colour bled out of it by the pervasive yellow of the sodium street lights. Gone were the green, yellow and blue floodlights, the giant neon ads that just a few hours ago had shone brilliantly against the night sky. Maxell, L’Oréal Paris, Sharp, Nescafé. Gone were the teeming crowds of tourists and Shanghainese that constantly ebbed and flowed along the length of the promenade. Across the river, only the red winking navigation lights on the tops of buildings betrayed the existence of the financial miracle that was Pudong. The six lanes of the Bund were eerily empty. The clock face on the tower halfway along glowed like a pale moon rising over the deserted city. It was nearly a quarter to four.

  An occasional cyclist drifted past, heading perhaps for an early shift at some factory. The odd taxi cruised by, slowing down as it passed Margaret on the sidewalk, its driver leaning over expecting her to signal that she wanted a lift. It was inconceivable that some yangguizi would wander the empty streets at four in the morning without requiring a taxi. She waved them all on.

  Half a dozen cabs were pulled into the kerb opposite the end of Nanjing Road, on the river side of the Bund. A woman in a white jacket and round white hat squatted on a stool by a brazier. A large pot of soup bubbled and steamed on top of the coals, and she filled mugs from it with a ladle for the drivers who stood around talking and smoking and stamping their feet in the early morning chill.

  The drivers watched curiously as Margaret looked both ways along the Bund before running across the six lanes, pausing only briefly at the central reservation. There was no traffic, only the distant lights of a truck approaching from the direction of the Nanpu Bridge. All conversation around the brazier had come to a halt. For a moment, perhaps, they thought she was going to ask for some soup. But she hurried past, running quickly up the steps to the long, deserted promenade. It was darker here, away from the street lights. Umbrellas still stood open at stands where earlier vendors had sold drinks and snacks and Fuji film. Now there was not a soul in sight. An elaborate fountain, usually illuminated by green lights, had been switched off. She crossed to lean on the wall and look out over the black waters of the river. A heavily laden barge chugged by, so low in the water it was hard to believe it would not sink. There was one small lamp burning in the pilot’s cabin, but no navigation lights. From somewhere a long way upriver came the blast of a ship’s foghorn.

  She breathed deeply and was sure she could smell the sea, which was not so far away in the Yangtse River estuary. She walked slowly north along the promenade, arms crossed, hugging herself to keep warm. A deep depression had settled on her. Li was the only reason she had ever stayed in China. The only reason she had come back. Without him there was no reason to be here. Ever. She didn’t even want to contemplate the possibility of what she would do if she lost him. “Home” had seemed so alien to her during the few days she had been back there. And yet she could not bring herself to think of China as home. She felt displaced and, although her mother was still alive, orphaned by the death of her father, as if her anchor chains had been severed and she had been cast adrift on an uncharted sea. God knew what shore she would wash up on. All she could do, she thought, was go with the flow, let the currents take her where they would. There was no point in fighting against them. It was futile and exhausting. She would complete her work on the Shanghai murders, re-autopsy the body in Beijing, bring Xinxin back south and then see what happened. If Li was really drawn to Mei-Ling, then she knew she couldn’t compete. As she had told Jack, they both swam in very different pools.

  She reached the gates of Huangpu Park. They were locked. And beyond them, in the dark, she could just see the Shanghai People’s Hero Memorial Pagoda in the reflected light of the streetlamps. There were trees and shrubs here that screened the promenade from the road. The occasional passing vehicle seemed very distant. And on the other side of the wall, the river slapped dully, erratically, against the stone. The sound of movement in the darkness of the bushes startled Margaret. She stood stock still. Had it been an animal? But she wasn’t going to stay to find out. She turned and started walking quickly, back the way she had come. The moonface on the clock tower was a very long way away. She had come further than she thought. She didn’t look back for a long time, concentrating on controlling an urge to run. It had probably been a dog, or maybe even a rat. She glanced over her shoulder for reassurance, and saw, about a hundred metres back, the shadowy figure of a man hurrying in her wake. She almost screamed, and now had no difficulty giving in to her impulse to run. She ran until she reached the dry bed of the fountain and looked back again. But there was no one there. No sound or sign of movement. She stopped to regain her breath, momentarily relieved. Had she just imagined it? She decided to get down on to the sidewalk and the lit, wide open space of the road. In the distance she could see, still gathered around the soup pot, about half a dozen drivers. They were almost within shouting distance. She ran down a flight of steps, passing the entrance to an underpass, walls lined with illuminated posters that threw out a strong, bright light. A movement in her peripheral vision cause
d her to turn, catching her breath, and for a moment she saw a man’s face, caught full in the light of the underpass. He was short and thick-set, with long, straggling hair and a broad, flat, Mongolian face. His eyes were like black slits. She could see no light in them, and the upper half of his mouth was stretched over brown, protruding teeth, turned up and horribly distorted by the ugly scarring of a hare-lip. He froze, like a rabbit caught in headlights. She would have screamed, but she couldn’t seem to find a breath. For what felt like an incredibly long moment, their eyes met. She could almost have reached out and touched him. And then she turned and ran down the rest of the steps to the sidewalk and sprinted towards the little gathering of taxi drivers drinking soup.

  By the time she reached them they had all turned and were staring at her in astonishment. She slowed to a stop, gasping, her lungs burning. She turned around and the street behind her was empty. Not a soul nor a vehicle in sight. She turned back to meet the curious faces of the drivers and the soup lady who gaped in wonder at this blonde-haired blue-eyed woman out running in the middle of the night. For an absurd moment she wondered if they had thought she was jogging. It was clear from their expressions they thought she was insane. She glanced back, but there was still no sign of the man with the hare-lip. She fought to bring her breathing back under control and tried a half smile that she knew was probably more like a grimace. Still they stared at her in mute amazement, some of them holding mugs in suspended animation, halfway to their mouths. She felt compelled to say something and muttered, absurdly, “Ni hau.”

  Compelled, out of habit, to respond to a foreigner saying hello in Chinese, they mumbled ni hau in return. She looked either way along the road, and then forced herself to walk calmly across it. She could almost feel their eyes on her back.

  She passed the lights of a twenty-four-hour Citibank, with a row of glowing ATMs behind sliding glass doors. Inside, a night watchman was reading a book and playing loud music. She turned up Nanjing Road and took one final look back. There was no one there except for the taxi drivers and the soup lady. She pushed, relieved, through the revolving doors of the Peace Hotel and realised that in all the months she had spent in China, this was the first time she had felt any sense of threat in the streets.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I

  Li sat lost in his own thoughts as Mei-Ling steered them west through the traffic on Huaihai Road. The rain had stayed off and the streets were almost dry. This had once been the heart of the old French Town, the former Avenue Joffre, as smart a shopping street as any to be found in Paris. But there was very little evidence left of the French settlement, only perhaps the art nouveau Printemps department store further west. They passed a bar called The Jurassic Pub, with a sign reading This Way to Dinosaurs, and Li wondered briefly what was happening to five thousand years of Chinese culture in this town. They turned south then into Songshan Road, and Mei-Ling pulled into the kerb. “We’re more likely to find it on foot from here,” she said.

  They got out of the car and Li looked down the length of the street. It was lined with trees on either side, leaves only now beginning to yellow. Cramped, narrow shop fronts fought for space along the edge of the sidewalk, beneath two storeys of crumbling apartments, rotting wooden balconies groaning with the detritus of overspill from tiny rooms. Vendors’ goods spilled out on to the pavements, bales of cloth and baskets filled with household goods, boxes of fruit and electrical equipment. Every few metres, narrow alleyways opened off left and right, whitewashed brick, poles slung overhead, bowed with the weight of fresh, wet washing.

  “How was the Dragon and Phoenix?” Mei-Ling asked.

  He frowned his confusion. They had barely spoken since they left 803. “Last night . . . the restaurant at the Peace Hotel?”

  He looked away, embarrassed to meet her eye. “Margaret never showed up,” he said. “She fell asleep, apparently.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” Mei-Ling said, and Li glanced at her sharply to see if she was being sarcastic. But she seemed genuine enough. “The food’s not brilliant there, but the view is great.” They walked in silence for a moment, checking the numbers above the shop fronts. “Listen,” she said eventually, “why don’t you both come and eat at my family’s restaurant tonight. My father and my aunt would be happy to meet you. The view’s nothing special, but I can promise you the food is wonderful.”

  Li’s spirits lifted momentarily. “I’d like that,” he said. And then he wondered how Margaret would react. But he decided that he was not going to spend his life worrying about what Margaret was going to think or say or do next. She lived, he felt, in a very different world from him, even when they were sharing the same space at the time. If she was unhappy eating with Mei-Ling’s family, then she could eat on her own.

  They crossed the street and found the tailor’s shop about halfway down. It was really just an opening in the wall. A tiny room, hung on all sides with finished clothes and lengths of material. In the back a young girl in a red jacket with a black-and-white checked collar worked a hot iron over yellow silk under the glare of a single fluorescent strip. On her left was a small table with an ancient hand-cranked sewing machine, a small striplight fixed to the wall above it. At the front, behind a short glass counter, an old woman in a beige jacket was sewing the seam of a black xiangyun silk suit on an equally ancient machine. Both women wore pink plastic sleeves to protect their jackets, and Li noticed that they both had sewing rings on their right hands.

  Incongruously, a tall white mannequin, with blue eyes and short blonde hair, stood at the open entrance to the shop, modestly draped from the neck in patterned blue cotton. It was missing an arm. And next to it, the lower half of another dummy stood on one leg, a brown skirt hanging loosely from the waist. A bizarre coincidence, Li thought, that the woman they believed might have worked here had been found in pieces, and was also missing a foot.

  The woman in the beige jacket turned and looked at them expectantly, and Li saw that she was about seventy, maybe older. But her hair was still black with just a few seams of silver, and it was drawn back in a loose bun. She ran her eyes over Li from top to bottom, perhaps mentally measuring him up for a suit. He showed her his maroon Public Security ID and she was immediately on her guard. “I don’t know what you want here,” she said. “We’re honest people just trying to make a living. I’ve been in this city more than fifty years and I’ve never had trouble.”

  Mei-Ling said, “Is this the place Fu Yawen used to work?”

  “Ye-es.” She was even more guarded now. “Why? Have you found her? Has she shown up finally?”

  “Any idea where she went?” Li asked her, ignoring her questions.

  “How would I know? She only worked here. You should ask her husband. I bet he’d like to know where she went. Off with some fancy man probably.” The woman had lost her reserve and was warming to her subject.

  “How long had she worked here?” Li said.

  “About three years. Mind you, I’d no complaint about her work. She was a good worker, knew what she was doing. Her own father trained her from when she was just a girl. Just like my father trained me.” The woman shook a stray strand of her hair back from her face. “But she had an eye for the men, that one. Couldn’t keep her hands to herself.”

  “And you have no idea what happened to her?” Li asked again. He glanced towards the girl in the red jacket who was trying to keep her eyes on her work, but who was clearly listening with interest.

  The woman followed his eyes, and cast half a glance at the girl in red. “Get on with your work,” she snapped. “This is none of your business.” And to Li and Mei-Ling, “She’ll be no help to you. She never knew Fu Yawen. I brought her in as a replacement. She’ll be hoping that you haven’t found her. At least, not alive.” She sighed exaggeratedly. “They have no idea, these young ones. They never saw the war, like I did.” She puffed herself up proudly and spat beyond them on to the sidewalk. “In the forties I made the qipaos for all the young ladies who we
nt to the bars and the balls. The young ones think they’re daring now, but the dresses were slit just as high in those days.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Mei-Ling said impatiently.

  “How can I reply to a question when I don’t know the answer?” the old woman said boldly. She had lost all her fear now, and Li thought this was not a person he would like to work for.

  “You can reply here, or at headquarters,” he said, but the threat only served to harden her defiance.

  “And the answer would still be the same. You can’t frighten an old woman like me. And, anyway, I told you. Ask her husband.”

  “And where would we find him?” Mei-Ling asked.

  The woman flicked her head. “Down there,” she said, indicating an alleyway running off from the side of the shop. “At the table on the corner.”

  “They both work for you?” Li asked, surprised.

  “Only one of them works for me now,” she replied. “And I wouldn’t have the other one back if she came to me on bended knee.”

  The girl in red never lifted her eyes from the ironing board. But Li sensed her relief.

  Fu Yawen’s husband sat on a stool working an electric sewing machine at a small table pressed against the wall under a corrugated plastic awning. A striplight hung at an angle from a makeshift hanger, throwing a cold light across a trestle table covered with white cloth and strewn with tools. At another table, beyond racks of threads and buttons, a woman was repairing shoes. Wet clothes dripped overhead. It must be cold, Li thought, working out here in the depths of winter.

  He was a good-looking young man, his hair cut short and neat. He wore a warm woollen jacket and an apron the colour of dried blood. Li saw in his eyes that he knew why they had come the moment he showed him his ID.