The Killing Room

by Peter May

  Mei-Ling was looking at her sceptically. “But you do not believe that is what is happening here?”

  “It would certainly be the easy answer,” Margaret said.

  “So why is it not?” Li asked.

  “Well, for a start,” Margaret said, “while there have been plenty of rumours of children being killed for their organs in the streets of South America, or orphanages in Egypt being turned into organ farms, there is not, to my knowledge, a single certified case of someone being murdered for their organs. I mean, think about it. You’d need trained medical staff, sterile operating conditions, proper medical aftercare. These are not the kinds of things that criminals have easy access to.”

  “And heaven forbid there should be any crooked doctors in the world,” Mei-Ling said. Which did not go down well in a roomful of pathologists. She shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed. Then she said, “So there is a first time for everything. Why else do you not believe it?”

  “The victims are all female,” said Lan. “Why only choose females? In China it is men who are in more plentiful supply. It does not make sense.”

  Margaret added, “Then there’s your body in Beijing. The organs were removed, certainly, but not taken. And, of course, the most compelling reason of all that we discussed yesterday. There is no medical or any other reason for keeping the victims alive during the procedure. You’d have to be insane to even contemplate it.”

  “Which brings us back to your psycho surgeon,” Li said, “and a point raised at the detectives’ meeting last night.”

  “Oh, yes?” As Margaret’s energy was fading, so was her interest.

  “Your surgeon, or whatever he is, could not have been acting alone, could he? There must have been at least one, possibly two others, assisting in the procedure.”

  Margaret nodded, and Mei-Ling said, “So immediately we have the scenario you have just been discounting—a team of medically trained people collaborating in a crime.”

  Margaret shrugged and got to her feet. “I never said doctors were saints.” She looked at Li. “Did you manage to identify any of our victims today?”

  Li said, “The boyfriend of an opera singer who went missing about a year ago is coming in to look at your girl with the singer’s nodules.”

  “And we need you to look at an x-ray,” said Mei-Ling. And Margaret thought how like a team they were already. “The seamstress. The husband of the woman who we think she might be says she broke her right index finger a couple of years ago. You can tell that from the x-rays, right?”

  “Right,” Margaret said.

  They went downstairs, leaving Dr. Lan and the others to finish their tea, and found the x-ray of the seamstress’s right hand. Margaret put it on the light box and traced the luminous image of the dead woman’s index finger with her own.

  “There it is,” she said. She lightly tapped the callus formed on the bone by the healed fracture. “I guess that seals it.”

  Li turned to Mei-Ling. “We had better get the husband in for a visual identification.”

  She nodded grimly. “I will go and fix it.”

  Li and Margaret found themselves alone for the first time since she had failed to meet him for dinner the previous night. They stood in an awkward silence, Margaret not sure how to apologise, Li again guiltily aware of the feelings that Mei-Ling had aroused in him just a few hours earlier.

  Margaret scuffed her foot at a cracked tile on the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “About last night. I guess I was just out of it.” And she thought how often it was she seemed to be apologising for the night before. Perhaps tonight she could make up for it.

  To Li she looked suddenly very small and tired and vulnerable, and he was immediately overcome by familiar feelings of love and affection, and a desire to comfort her. He took her in his arms and drew her close, and she yielded so completely that her legs nearly buckled under her. They stood for several moments, just holding on.

  “It won’t happen again,” she said. “I promise. Tonight we’ll forget about dinner and go straight to my room. Then if I fall asleep you can think of interesting ways to wake me up.” Almost before the words had left her mouth she felt him tense, and she drew back to look at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I told Mei-Ling we would have dinner with her tonight at her family restaurant.”

  Her expression hardened, and she felt her weariness giving way to anger. “Li Yan, we’ve hardly had five minutes alone together since I got here.”

  “That’s hardly my fault.” He felt his hackles rising.

  She said, “Well, maybe you’d better just go on your own. It’s you she wants to have for dinner anyway, not me.”

  Li sighed. “Actually, she made a point of asking you. It is only a small restaurant. It is going to be a family meal with her father and her aunt . . . I think she was very generous to ask you at all, considering how you have been treating her.”

  “Why?” said Margaret. “Is the contempt showing?”

  Li threw his hands up in despair. “Oh, well, maybe you should not come, then. Because if this is how you are going to be, you will only spoil it.”

  “And we wouldn’t want to do that, would we? Seeing as how generous sweet little Mei-Ling’s being.” They stood glaring at each other before finally she said, “You’d better pick me up at the hotel. I’ll make a determined effort not to fall asleep this time.”

  “You sure you want to bother?” Li said. By now he was almost hoping she wouldn’t.

  “Oh, yes,” Margaret said. She wasn’t going to let Mei-Ling get him that easily. “If her family’s gone to the trouble of preparing a meal for us, then we really shouldn’t let them down, should we?” She paused. “Six o’clock?” He nodded and she hurried out.

  When she’d gone he stood for a moment, a cocktail of conflicting emotions stirring inside him. Then he looked up and saw the video camera on the wall and realised that the whole scene had been played out for the watching pathologists upstairs. If the sound was up they’d have caught the whole gory episode. He felt sick. They would never have witnessed anything quite like it in an autopsy room before, like some cheap TV hospital drama, and in his head he could hear their laughter echoing around the mortuary.

  IV

  They had acquired a desk lamp for him, and he was able to sit in the darkened office with only a pool of light focusing his attention on the files that littered his desk. If he swivelled in his chair he could look out at the rising columns of lit windows in the police apartments opposite, wives preparing meals for husbands coming in from work, or sending them out on the night shift. Children watching television or surfing the Internet or doing homework from school. Li wondered what it must be like to have a family, an ordered life, someone waiting to welcome you home. Things he had never really known. A mother killed in the Cultural Revolution, a father who had never been the same after repeated beatings at the hands of the Red Guards who were his keepers. A sister who had run off and left him with her child, an uncle who had taught him everything and then been murdered in his own apartment.

  And now he sat here on his own, with only the ghosts of eighteen murdered women for company, each one appealing to him to find their killer, requiring him to return order to a disordered world.

  He thought of the viewing room at the mortuary where he had sat with the lights low watching the husband of the murdered seamstress identify her remains. A white body bag wheeled in on a gurney. The sound of the zip as it was opened to reveal the pitiful collection of body pieces that represented the remnants of the woman he had loved. His cry, as if struck by a blow. The sobs that came slowly at first as he stuffed a fist in his mouth to try to contain them, before he backed up against the wall and slid slowly to the floor, pulling his arms around his shins and rocking back and forth in his abject misery, weeping openly. For as long as there had been no word of her, there had always been hope. And now there was none.

  Li thought of how much this contrasted with
the boyfriend of the opera singer. His casual stroll into the autopsy room, hands in pockets. His complete lack of reaction when the body bag was unzipped, simply a curt nod of the head. No tears, no visible emotion. But Li suspected that somewhere, later, on his own, in the dark, An Wenjiang would be confronted by his grief.

  On the desk in front of him was the file on the girl they had identified with fingerprints. Just twenty years old, a petty thief convicted of shop-lifting. Her baby girl, a little under two years old, had been placed in the custody of her grandparents while her mother served time. Reform through labour. But no one would ever know now whether she had reformed or not. Her parents had told the detectives who interviewed them that they thought she had gone to Canton or Hong Kong with one of the boys she hung around with. They had never reported her missing. Her little girl would never know her. But at least her parents would be spared the need to identify the remains. The body pieces had been DNA-matched, and the fingerprints were conclusive proof of identity.

  Murder by surgical procedure. That was how Margaret had described what had happened to these women. But for no apparent reason, and with no apparent logic.

  Why these women? Was there a pattern? Was there something they all had in common that Li and everyone else was failing to see? The answer always lies in the detail, he could hear his uncle whisper in his ear. A petty thief, an opera singer, a seamstress. What was it that connected them, apart from the manner in which they died? It was something, he knew, they would probably not be able even to guess at until they had identified them all.

  There was a knock at the door and detective Dai entered without waiting to be asked. “Hey, Chief,” he said, and dropped a file on Li’s desk. Li had given up correcting him. “That’s all the stuff we could dig up on that medical student who was doing the night watch at the building site. Jiang Baofu.” Dai was silhouetted against the light of the corridor behind him, and Li didn’t see the second folder until it dropped on top of the first. “And another possible ID.”

  Li turned the top file towards him and opened it to see a photograph of a young woman, cut out from a group, attached to a missing person’s form that someone had filled out several months previously. Her hair was tied up in bunches, like a small girl, and she was wearing a tight-fitting, spangled costume of some sort. But Li could not determine what it was, because the photograph was cut off just below the collar bone. Someone had only been interested in her face. He glanced at the form. Name, age, occupation . . . Wu Liyao, aged thirty . . . He looked up at Dai, frowning. “An acrobat?”

  “A member of the Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre. Missing for three months.”

  “What makes you think she’s one of our girls?”

  Dai pulled a face. “Don’t know for sure, Chief. A long shot, really. But your pathologist said one of the women had stress fractures in her feet? Suggested she might be an athlete, or a gymnast?” He shrugged. “I figured an acrobat would fit under that heading, too.”

  Li nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good thought, Dai. Well done,” he said. “It’s worth following up.” He couldn’t really see Dai’s face, but he could hear his grin. Dai turned to go. Li said, “Detective . . .” Dai stopped in the open door.

  “Yeah, Chief?”

  “The other night . . .” he hesitated, “you seemed to be suggesting that Deputy Section Chief Nien was having a relationship with a senior officer in the department.”

  “Was I?” Dai asked innocently.

  “Weren’t you?”

  Dai shrugged. “Sorry, Chief, but I was told by a senior officer that I wasn’t to discuss that sort of thing.” He closed the door behind him, and Li felt like his knuckles had just been rapped. He deserved it, he supposed.

  He sat for a long time in the darkness wondering why he had even asked. Did it matter to him? Was he really interested in the possibility of entering into a relationship with her? And, if so, where did that leave his feelings for Margaret? He knew what he felt about Margaret. At least, he thought he did. He loved her. But, somehow, it had never been quite enough. There was something missing, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Was it cultural, linguistic? He had always felt he could not make his home in the United States, and yet he had expected Margaret to make her home here. There was an unhappiness in her that was like a barrier between them, and he had no idea how to break it down.

  He forced himself to refocus his thoughts on more important things. Eighteen women whose murderer or murderers were still at large, possibly adding more victims to a list that might already include others they did not know about. He opened the file on Jiang Baofu. He was twenty-three years old, born in the town of Yanqing in Hebei Province near Beijing. His grandfather had been a farm labourer, his grandmother a teacher at the local kindergarten. He had an older sister who was married to an office worker in the capital. They lived near the university, in Haidian Road.

  Jiang was in his final year at Shanghai Medical University. He was specialising in surgery, and had expressed an interest in going on to study forensic pathology. He rented an apartment in a tower block in Ming-Xin Village, a new suburb on the opposite side of the city. He had moved out of student accommodation the previous year.

  Li paused and thought about this. It was yet another anomaly. How could a student from a poor family afford to move out of student accommodation to rent his own apartment? A student who, apparently, had had to take all kinds of vacation work to pay his way through medical school. He checked through the list of jobs Jiang had taken over the past five years. He had worked as an orderly and as a porter at various Shanghai hospitals and private clinics. He had spent one summer break manning a market stall at the old Chinatown bird market. He had taken a number of term jobs working nights: as a hotel porter in a seedy joint near the river; as a labourer on a building site; as a night watchman in various places—presumably so he could earn some cash and still snatch a few hours’ sleep.

  Li lit a cigarette and blew smoke thoughtfully into the light of his desk lamp, watching it billow and eddy before dispersing and rising into the darkness. There was another knock at the door, and this time it was Mei-Ling who entered.

  “Wow, it’s dark in here,” she said.

  “I like to think in the dark.”

  She closed the door and drew up a seat and sat opposite him, leaning back so that he could see her face in the reflected light from the desktop. “I prefer to think in the light,” she said, “and save the dark for making love.”

  Li felt something flip over in his stomach, and for a fleeting moment he saw a picture of himself making love to her, her slender frame arched beneath him, small hard breasts pressed into his chest, fingers digging into his back, her breath hot on his face. He quickly banished the vision, alarmed by an apparently increasing loss of control. “Have you seen the file on Jiang Baofu?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I think we’ve got to bring him in.”

  Li said, “I’d like to talk to his tutors at med school first, see what kind of light they can throw on him. And take a look around his apartment, too, when he’s not there. Can we get a warrant?”

  “Sure. I’ll fix it. We can go out to the Medical University first thing tomorrow. I know some people there.”

  “Good.” He paused. “And what about the acrobat?”

  “They knocked the old Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre down. The troupe are based in a theatre out at the Shanghai Centre now. We should go and see them tomorrow also. Apparently she was married to one of the other acrobats.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m going to head off now. We’ll see you about seven?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “And Margaret?”

  “I’m picking her up at her hotel.”

  She smiled. “Better take a sledgehammer then. In case you have to break down her door.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  The underside of the Yan’an Viaduct Road glowed an incongruous fluorescent blue, lit by concealed striplights. Their taxi headed west, under the v
iaduct, their driver a surly, older man with thinning hair whose ambition in life appeared to be a desire to get in front of every other car on the road. He drifted from one lane to the other at high speed, punctuating his progress with a series of short, sharp blasts on the horn. Other drivers apparently appreciated that there was a lunatic in their midst and gave him a wide berth. Li leaned forward, tapping the driver on the shoulder through the cage. “Take it easy, pal,” he said. The driver nodded and paid no attention.

  Margaret wondered if being ignored by a taxi-driver amounted to a significant loss of face. If so, Li wasn’t showing it, and Margaret wasn’t about to ask. They had barely spoken since they left the Peace Hotel.

  They turned south into Huashan Road and saw, ahead of them, the towering presence of the Hilton Hotel. On their right was the Hotel Equatorial, on the left a row of Spanish-styled two-storey brick apartment buildings, profiles traced in neon against the night sky. The driver made a suicidal U-turn in the face of on-coming traffic, to the accompaniment of a symphony of horns, and drew up outside a cheap-looking coffee shop which appeared to be empty behind thin veils of net curtain.

  Margaret peered out of the window, unimpressed, as Li paid the driver. “Is this it?”

  Li got out and held the door open for her. “In the alley, the driver says.”

  Margaret saw, beyond the coffee shop, a narrow opening between two lines of apartment buildings. Overflowing bins and empty crates were stacked up against one wall. The alleyway looked dark and uninviting. “Jeez,” she said. “It’s worse than I thought.” This was the old French quarter, and behind the veneer of affluence which lined the main streets, lay a maze of seedy back streets and narrow alleyways where people scraped through life in less than salubrious conditions.