The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “Every time I turn around, there he is,” MacGowan said. “Sitting at the back of a first-year lecture, hovering around pathology, hoping to pick up a spare corpse if one of the students doesn’t turn up. Jesus, I even saw him in the street once outside my apartment. The kid must have followed me home. Pretty goddamn creepy, if you ask me.”

  There it was again, Li thought. Creepy. How many people had described him that way? He gave me the creeps, Dai had said, and really creepy, Mei-Ling had called him. A creepy medical student, were the words Margaret had used.

  MacGowan was about forty-five, and losing his hair. He was lean, and very white—perhaps a consequence, Li thought, of all the hours spent under artificial light in rooms like this. Both Li and Mei-Ling found their eyes drawn to the black hair that grew thickly on his forearms. MacGowan seemed to notice and he became suddenly self-conscious. “So what more can I tell you?” he asked, moving away to a stainless steel sink to peel off his gloves and wash his hands.

  “When you have finished with the bodies in here, what do you do with them?” Li asked, and he wondered if it was possible that the women they had found in the mud in Pudong had been hacked up in this very room.

  “We burn ’em,” MacGowan said. “But only after we get our money’s worth out of them.” He grinned.

  But Li did not share his amusement. “Do you sew the bodies closed at the end of the process?”

  “Sure. We dump all the crap back inside and then stitch them up, though not with the kind of embroidery they get taught to use on live patients.” He grinned again.

  “What kind of thread do you use?”

  MacGowan appeared surprised by the question. He shrugged. “Oh, just some rough twine.” He looked along the cluttered worktop beside the sink and grabbed a ball of coarse black twine. He tossed it to Li. “Stuff like that.”

  Li examined it. It looked very much like the twine that had been used to suture the women whose mutilated bodies filled nearly half the cooler space at the mortuary. “You always use this twine?”

  Again MacGowan shrugged. “I guess. It’s just standard supply. You’ll probably find the same stuff used in all the hospitals and mortuaries.”

  “May I take a piece?”

  “Sure.” MacGowan lifted a pair of scissors and handed them to Li so that he could cut off a six-inch length. Li then dropped the twine into a plastic evidence bag and slipped it back in his pocket. “So, has this got anything to do with those bodies they found across the river?” MacGowan asked.

  “What do you know about that?” Li asked.

  “Only what they’re saying on CNN.” He paused. “They’re reporting that you’ve got some American pathologist from Chicago working on it with you. That right?”

  Li nodded. “That is correct.” He was not going to elucidate. He glanced at Mei-Ling. But she did not appear to be listening. “One other thing, Doctor,” he said. “When you are instructing your students on the entry cut to make during autopsy, what do you teach them?”

  MacGowan frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you teach them to make a straight incision or a ‘Y’ cut?”

  “Oh, I see what you’re getting at.” He smiled. “I know it’s normal practice to make a straight entry cut in China, but I prefer to make the ‘Y.’ I figure it gives you better access, so that’s what I teach my students.” He waved a hand towards the nearest table. “Take a look.” And they crossed to the gaping corpse of a middle-aged man, cut open from shoulders to pubis in a neat Y. The rancid smell of the sewer rose from the body. “Aw, Jesus,” MacGowan said. “Some kid’s made a real mess of opening the intestine. Shit everywhere.”

  “Oh, my God!” Mei-Ling’s involuntary exclamation startled them. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she ran from the room.

  MacGowan smiled at Li apologetically. “Sorry about that. I didn’t figure that she of all people would be affected that way.”

  Li was confused. “She’s . . . not very well,” he said.

  “That explains it, then.” MacGowan nodded. “Usually by your fourth year in med school you’re over all that kind of stuff.”

  Li frowned, perplexed now. “What?”

  “Or maybe it was fifth year.” MacGowan raised his eyebrows to crinkle his receding forehead. “Pity. When the professor said you were coming today, he told me she’d been a really promising student. But, then, you know, sometimes people just ain’t cut out for it. So to speak.”

  Mei-Ling glanced accusingly at Li in the passenger seat. “There are lots of things about me you don’t know,” she said. They were heading west on Zhaojiabang Road, a six-lane arterial route clogged with traffic. “I mean, it’s not a secret. Everyone in the department knows I flunked out of medical school.” She was clearly touchy about it, and now Li felt guilty for having made her confront again some failure from her past.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not prying. Just interested. But if you don’t want to talk about it . . .” He was learning that Mei-Ling was sensitive about more than one area of her life. It was making him a little wary around her now.

  She sighed, her eyes fixed on the traffic ahead. “It’s no big deal. I wanted to be a doctor since I was a little girl and watched my grandmother dying of cancer. It was during the Cultural Revolution. Medical resources were scarce, and there was nothing our doctor could do for her. I just felt so useless, watching her waste away, unable to do anything to stop the pain or ease the suffering. I used to sit in her room holding her hand. You could smell death coming. It was just a breath away, and yet you knew there was nothing you could do to stop it.” Mei-Ling paused for a long time, lost in some distant childhood memory. “She was so brave, my grandmother. Never complained, never wanted to put us out. But there was one time, I remember, near the end. She was little more than a shadow. She sat up, suddenly, in the bed, her eyes wide. They were so big in her shrunken face. She let out a little groan, and the tears fell from her cheeks. It was the first time I had seen her crying, and I didn’t know what to do. It only lasted a moment, then she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and forced herself to smile and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mei-Ling.’ And she lay back down.” Li saw that Mei-Ling’s eyes had moistened at the memory. “It was as if a crack had somehow opened up in that brave front she put on, and she’d seen death peeking through at her, and for a moment she’d lost all her resolve, all her courage.” Mei-Ling wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a mirrored moment from a long time ago. “And all she could think to do was apologise to me.” She took a deep breath. “So I was always going to be a doctor.”

  “Why did you drop out?” Li was genuinely curious.

  She flashed him a sad smile. “Because doctors can’t beat death any more than the rest of us, Li Yan, and I’ve never been good at handling failure. I was in my fourth year when my mother died of breast cancer, and I couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. I felt just the same then as I had when my grandmother died, and I thought, what’s the point? So I quit.”

  “And joined the police?”

  She grinned. “I know. It doesn’t seem like the obvious leap. And it didn’t happen straight away. But that’s a whole other story.”

  And Li wondered if that was another area of her life through which he would have to tread carefully in the future. There was a complexity about Mei-Ling that had not been immediately apparent. She leaned over and flipped open the glove box. “You’ll find a search warrant in there,” she said. “For Jiang Baofu’s place. It’ll take us about twenty minutes to get there.”

  II

  Ming-Xin village was a development built at the end of the twentieth century in the far north-west suburbs of Shanghai, near Giangwan Stadium. It comprised low and high rise apartment blocks in pale pink, green and cream, set among landscaped gardens with roads and pathways threaded through them like a maze of crazy stitching. Ornamental evergreen trees marked the boundaries of tiny gardens, large grassy areas were bounded by lush green sub-tropical shrubbe
ry and fleshy leafed trees. Li had seen nothing like it in Beijing. Mei-Ling parked in Nuan-Jiang Road, outside building No. 39, opposite a white three-storey block with terraces and arched windows.

  The path to the main door was choked with parked bicycles and motor-scooters. Inside a dark entrance hall, post boxes lined one wall facing the windows of the caretaker’s office. The caretaker was a sparrow-like middle-aged woman wearing a yellow cardigan over a black tee-shirt. She had a mean, thin face below a thatch of short-cropped hair. On the wall behind her was a clock, a calendar and a large coloured map of China. On her desk was a pile of cheap magazines. She was warming her hands on a jar of green tea and looked at Li and Mei-Ling suspiciously with darting dark eyes. “Can I help you?” she asked. Li showed her his ID and handed her the search warrant to scrutinise. Which she did, taking time and great care to read every character. She was not going to be intimidated by authority. Finally she handed the warrant back through the sliding glass window. “What’s he done?”

  “We don’t know. Maybe nothing,” Mei-Ling said. “Do you know him?”

  The caretaker shrugged and pulled a face. “He’s a weirdo. Comes and goes at all hours. Sometimes he’ll talk to you, sometimes he just looks right through you.”

  “Does he have many visitors?” Li asked.

  “In the year since he moved in I don’t know of one,” she said. “Of course, you’ll have to ask my relief, but she’s never mentioned any.”

  “And she would?”

  “Well, not normally. But we have discussed the fact that no one ever comes to see him. So if she’d seen someone, I think she’d have mentioned it.” She took a sip of her tea. “He’s a medical student, isn’t he?”

  “He told you that?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “On one of the rare occasions he opened his mouth. Of course, that was early on. I can’t remember the last time he even acknowledged my existence. But you can smell it off him, you know?”

  Li said, “Smell what?”

  “You know . . .” Her face curled up in disgust. “Medical things. Dead people. They cut them up for practice down in that place, don’t they? There’s a smell. Like sickness, or hospitals. I don’t know how to describe it. But it gives me the shivers.”

  She rode up in the elevator with them to the ninth floor and along a narrow corridor with windows down one side. On the other side, metal grilles and iron gates covered windows and doors to apartments. Sunshine slanted in through the outside windows, illuminating the passage, and Li saw in its light that the cream and green paintwork on the walls was immaculate. This was no cheap housing thrown up quickly to accommodate the masses. “Who lives in these apartments?” Li asked.

  The caretaker said, “Mostly company people, a lot of retired folk, a few private individuals.”

  “Who does Jiang rent from?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve no idea. Since the housing market went private it’s impossible to keep track of who owns what.” She stopped outside number 2001 and began to unlock the iron gate that guarded the door to Jiang’s apartment.

  “You wouldn’t know how much he pays, then?”

  “A lot, I can tell you that. None of these places are cheap.” She swung the gate out into the corridor and unlocked the door, pushing it open into a small entrance lobby leading to a kitchen. “You see what I mean about the smell?” she said, and she wrinkled her nose. “The whole place stinks of it.”

  Li was immediately aware of a high-pitched antiseptic odour that suffused the atmosphere of the apartment. It made him think of hospitals and mortuaries, disinfectant and formaldehyde. He stepped in front of the caretaker to stop her from entering. “Thank you,” he said. “We’ll let you know when we’re leaving so that you can lock up.”

  She was clearly disappointed not to be allowed in, peering past Li as he spoke, trying to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. “So am I supposed not to tell him you were here?” she said, a distinct pique in her voice.

  “I think we might be speaking to him before you do,” Li said.

  “So you know where he’s gone, then?”

  Li and Mei-Ling exchanged glances. “Gone?” Li said. “What do you mean?” Jiang Baofu had not been at the Medical University when they had. Professor Lu had consulted his timetables and told them the student had no lectures until the afternoon. Li had half-expected to find him at home.

  “He’s gone away for a few days.” There was a hint of triumph now in the caretaker’s tone. She knew something they did not. “He told my relief he was going to visit a cousin somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the police. You should know that sort of thing.”

  “Did he say when he’d be back?”

  “The weekend, I think. But I couldn’t swear to it. You’ll have to ask her.”

  “We will. Thank you,” Li said, and he pulled the iron gate closed, and then shut the door on her. They heard her annoyance in the sharp click, click of her heels as she hurried off down the corridor. Li looked grimly at Mei-Ling. “You read his file?” She nodded. “He doesn’t have a cousin, does he?”

  She shook her head. “And Dai’s pretty thorough,” she said. “But we’ll need to check.”

  The apartment was small and compact, just two rooms with a tiny kitchen and dining area. But by Chinese standards it was huge for a single occupancy. Li looked around with a sense of awe. The place was spotless, freshly painted walls of cream and pale lime, polished wooden floors gleaming in the sunlight that flooded in through large windows in the living room and bedroom. There was a spartan quality to the apartment. Everything, apparently, had a place and was in it. Cooking implements hung shining side by side from hooks on the wall. Jars stood in ordered rows on open shelves. Worktops on either side of the cooker were immaculate, food containers and an electric blender arranged carefully along the wall behind them. A microwave oven sat on top of a tall green refrigerator. Li looked inside the fridge. It was as ordered as the kitchen, and all but empty. Crockery was neatly stacked in a glass-doored cabinet, and Li recognised the portable television from the night watchman’s hut at Pudong sitting on top of it. A small, square table with a single chair was covered in a lilac-patterned plastic cloth.

  Net curtains hung from the window in the small living room. There was an uncomfortable two-seater settee, a desk below the window with a wooden stool pulled up to it. A bookcase next to it was crammed with volumes on medicine and surgery. In the opposite corner another television with a VCR on top of it sat on a stereo cabinet with a CD player and a rack of CDs. Two speaker cabinets, standing nearly three feet high, stood at either end of the wall. The walls themselves were neatly pinned with charts and diagrams: a representation of the human skeleton with all of its two hundred and six bones labelled; a large photograph of the underside of the brain and brainstem, with labels on each of the twelve pairs of cranial nerves; a poster-sized diagram of the blood vessels of the chest and abdomen with all of the arteries showing in red, the veins in blue, and the organs depicted as see-through shadows; a representation of the eye with its muscles and nerves attached, half of it cut through longitudinally to show its layers and chambers, including the retina, lens, cornea and sclera.

  The bedroom walls were naked. Perhaps, Li thought, Jiang was afraid that body parts pasted on the walls here might invade his dreams. There was very little in the bedroom apart from a small wardrobe, a double bed, a chest of drawers with a television on top of it, a single bedside cabinet and one chair.

  Li and Mei-Ling had not spoken as they wandered slowly through the apartment drinking in its ordered sterility. Now they stood in the living room looking around at all the hard, cold surfaces unbroken by a plant or an ornament, or anything personal. “This guy is very weird,” Li said eventually, and the echo of his voice sounded odd in the chill silence of the place. “There is nothing of him here, not a single clue to his personality. Except for the place itself.”

  Mei-Ling nodded. “Filled with order, but no
warmth.” She let her eyes wander around the room. “How does he spend his time, do you think?”

  “Watching television, apparently,” Li said. “When he’s not reading his medical books or examining his medical posters.” He shook his head. “I have never seen so many televisions in one house. And did you notice the microwave, and the refrigerator, the blender, the stereo . . . ? How can this guy afford these things?”

  “And where does he get the money to pay for the apartment?” Mei-Ling said. She stooped to open the glass door of the stereo cabinet and switched on the CD. There was a disk in it, and she hit the play button. The room was immediately filled with the cold string sounds of German chamber music. They listened to the strange, alien scrape of it for nearly a minute while Mei-Ling examined the other CDs in the collection. Bach and Beethoven, some traditional Chinese stringed music. She switched the chamber music off, and in the silence that followed turned her attention to a shelf of videos. She took one out at random, slipped it into the VCR and turned on the television. It was a recording, made live, during a heart-transplant operation. The surgical team were speaking in English and sounded American. As it played, Mei-Ling worked her way through the other tapes. “They’re all the same,” she said, examining the labels. “Edited recordings of operations, commercially produced for instruction in US medical schools.” They watched, fascinated for a moment, as the bloody hands of the lead surgeon gently massaged the pumping muscle of a new heart.

  Li said, “He’s obsessed.” He let his eyes drift again around the posters on the wall—see-through organs, cranial nerves, corneal sections. “I think we should get forensics to go through this place with a fine-toothed comb.” But he wasn’t sure that they would find anything. It was as if the place had been sterilised. It was not the environment of a normal human being. “And we need to find Jiang Baofu as soon as possible and bring him in for questioning.” He wasn’t quite sure why, but he felt a sudden sense of urgency, as if perhaps he sensed that further lives were now at risk.