The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “You bet,” Margaret said.

  “What you want?”

  “I’m here to pick up Xinxin. She’s the niece of my colleague, Deputy Section Chief Li Yan of the Beijing Municipal Police.”

  The teacher looked uncertain for a moment. There was a further exchange between her and the policewoman, and then she spoke to Xinxin who responded rapidly and eagerly, glancing up several times at Margaret.

  “Well?” Margaret said. “Did she tell you who I am?”

  The policewoman spoke again, still full of aggression, and the teacher translated. “She say it no matter. You are foreigner. You need special permission for visit kindergarten. This policewoman say she have instruction to collect girl. You go away now.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Margaret’s frustrations bubbled over. There was no doubt in her mind that this was Mei-Ling’s doing. Li had said he would tell her that she was going to collect Xinxin. She stabbed a finger at the policewoman. “You’re in big fucking trouble, lady,” she shouted, and turned to the teacher. “Tell her that. Tell her she’s in big fucking trouble.”

  The policewoman pushed Margaret’s hand aside, took Xinxin firmly by the arm and headed for the stairs, Xinxin pulling against her the whole way and calling back for Margaret. Margaret stood rooted to the spot, anger welling up inside. She knew there was nothing she could do. She had neither the language nor the power to make a difference here, and all she could do was listen to Xinxin’s cries all the way down the stairs. It was breaking her heart.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I

  Li sat in the dark and contemplated the mess that his life was in. He could hear the distant roar of traffic on the elevated ring road. People on their way home from work. People with a home to go to. People, he thought, who probably had just as many problems as he did. Probably worse. Death was worse, wasn’t it? And he thought of Huang, and of his poor wife being sent home from the hospital to die. But Huang had never shown him any warmth, and it was difficult to sympathise with people you did not know. And however great other people’s problems might be, knowing that did nothing to diminish your own. And so Li sat and brooded in the dark and felt sorry for himself.

  A knock on the door, and the light that came in from the corridor as it opened, flooded into his thoughts. He blinked in the sudden light, and the figure in the doorway was just a silhouette. But he recognised Dai’s voice. “You really like the dark, huh, Chief?”

  Li leaned forward and switched on his desk lamp. “What do you want?”

  Dai stepped forward and dropped a large manila envelope triumphantly on Li’s desk. “Got an ID on that girl’s teeth, Chief. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.” And he laughed at his own wit. Li quickly opened the envelope, slid out the large sheet of x-ray and found a report clipped to it in English. Dai said, “Sino-Canadian joint venture dental clinic at the World Medical Centre downtown. They did the gold foil work about eighteen months ago. Had her records on file. A twenty-two-year-old called Chai Rui, but she liked to be called Cherry. They even had that noted on her file.”

  Li scanned the address. “Xujiahui,” he said. “Where’s that?”

  “Big new futuristic development down the south-west of the city, Chief. Fancy apartment blocks and upscale shopping centres. Not a cheap place to live.” He paused. “Just a spit away from the Medical University. I don’t know if that’s significant.” Li glanced up at him. “Anyway, I had a long chat with the dental assistant. A young guy. He remembered her well. Said she was a real looker, flirted with him apparently. Boasted that she was a hostess at the Black Rain Club.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s off Huaihai Road, up in the old French Concession. Little more than a high-class brothel and strip joint.”

  Li frowned. “So why haven’t you closed it down?”

  Dai shrugged. “They say it’s owned by the Taiwanese Mafia. These guys have bought up a lot of property in this town. Got a lot of influence here.”

  Li shook his head. It seemed incredible to him that people like that should be allowed to operate anywhere in China. It would not happen in Beijing.

  “Anyway,” Dai continued, “she paid cash. No problem. And work like that didn’t come cheap.”

  Li felt his spirits lifting. It was another step forward. Another victim identified. “You passed this on to Deputy Section Chief Nien?”

  Dai shook his head. “I would have. But I don’t know where she is, Chief. Doesn’t seem to be in the building.” He hesitated for a moment. “So, anyway, now do you want the bad news?”

  Li felt his newly uplifted spirits sink again. “What is it?”

  “Jiang’s family up in Yanqing confirm what he told you, Chief. He didn’t go into Beijing once when he was home for the holidays last Spring Festival. They say he never goes into the city.” Again he paused. “But he did lie about one thing.” Li waited patiently. “He didn’t see any friends when he was up there. He doesn’t have any.” Dai grinned.

  Li slipped the x-ray back into the envelope. In a way the news about Jiang was no more than he expected. He was more interested in the identification of the Beijing girl. “That’s good work, Detective,” he said. “I take it there have been no developments in tracking down this Zhang girl that Jiang said he bought the bracelet for?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, Chief. Qiu’s been working on that.” He headed for the door.

  Li said, “Hang on a moment . . .” He thought for a bit and then said, “You got the photograph and description of that bracelet?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “I know this is a pain in the ass, Dai, but how would you like to check it out with the families of all the missing girls we’ve pulled from the file so far?” Dai groaned. “And if you can’t find a match in the first twelve months, go back another twelve.”

  Dai stood glaring at him. “This is my reward for tracking down the owner of those teeth? Hey, Chief, you really know how to build team spirit.” And he closed the door none too gently behind him.

  Li stood up and lifted his jacket from the coat stand. Then he remembered that he had arranged to meet Margaret at the Peace Hotel at eight. He checked his watch. It was after seven already. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get him the reception desk at the Peace Hotel and left a message for Margaret that he would be late.

  The shrill whistles of the traffic wardens cut above the roar of the traffic in Huaihai Road, but no one paid them any attention. The street was choked with cars and trolley buses and cyclists jostling for space in the blaze of lights from shop fronts and neon hoardings. The reflections they cast in the rain were like daubs of wet paint. Cyclists peered out from beneath the hoods of dripping capes, cursing the spray thrown up from the road. The sidewalks were jammed with coloured umbrellas bumping and squeaking against each other like balloons above the heads of desperate citizens in search of a night life.

  As Li’s taxi fought to reach the kerb, an irate cyclist banged on the roof with his fist, and the driver leapt from his cab to grab the other man in the rain, threatening him with physical abuse if he laid another finger on his vehicle. They jostled and shouted and pushed, and people gathered on the pavement to watch, traffic grinding to a standstill, other cyclists trying now to separate the two. Li sighed and dropped a note on the driver’s seat and slipped out on to the sidewalk. A young girl in a red qipao beneath a red and gold-braided jacket, stood under a canvas awning outside one of Shanghai’s two Beijing Duck restaurants, trying to attract customers. But all she was attracting were the leering taunts of a drunken old man who kept trying to paw her. Li grabbed him and pulled him away from her. He turned angrily, taking a wild swing at his assailant, but Li caught his fist and showed him his ID. “Go home,” he said firmly and pushed him away. The girl flicked him a frightened look, unsure whether to be grateful or afraid. Li pulled the collar of his leather jacket up against the rain, and hurried on down the street, checking the numbers.

  A young man clut
ched at his arm as he passed. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the hurry? Where are you from?”

  Li glared at him. “Beijing.”

  The young man grinned. “I know a good Beijing bar in Shanghai,” he said. “Plenty of girls who like Beijing men. You wanna massage?”

  Li was shocked. Was this what China was becoming? Was this the future? He thrust his Ministry badge in the young man’s face and said, “You want to come with me to police headquarters and discuss the sentence for pimping?”

  The young man shrank away immediately, his face a picture of fear. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I made a mistake.” And he disappeared into the crowds as quickly as he had appeared. Li felt the rain trickling down the back of his neck.

  The entrance to the Black Rain Club was in a lane that ran north off Huaihai Road. A black canopy over the entrance dripped rainwater on to a red carpet. Glass doors were set in a polished brass frame, and a burly attendant wearing a dinner suit and bow-tie stood in the doorway. He looked Li up and down. “You a member?”

  “No.”

  “Piss off, then.” Li felt his hackles rising. He opened his ID for the third time in as many minutes. But the man wasn’t impressed. He took a moment to scrutinise it and said, “From out of town, huh? So I guess you don’t know any better. We got protection here.”

  “Not from me,” Li said.

  “Like I told you,” the man said, “piss off.” And he reached out to grab Li’s arm to turn him away. But Li had seized the hand before it even reached him, finding the nerve in the fleshy part between the thumb and forefinger, and pressing hard. The pain, he knew, was disabling. The big man gasped and immediately dropped to his knees, unable to offer resistance or even try to pull his hand from Li’s grip. Li turned him around and banged his face up against the glass of the door. He could hear the squeak of greasy flesh on shiny glass, and through the door he could see a staircase winding up to a first-floor landing. The banister was polished brass on wrought iron. The stairs were carpeted in thick-piled red wool. At intervals on the staircase, beautiful girls stood glittering in slinky evening dresses, sipping champagne and chattering like birds on mobile phones. There was a constant traffic on the stairs of what Li presumed to be “members,” dressed in designer suits and button-down shirts. They all turned now to look down at the fracas in the doorway.

  Li had the doorman’s arm twisted up his back, and saw the glass bend as he pushed the man’s face harder into it. “Now listen,” he said quietly. “It’ll take me all of five seconds to put scum like you behind bars. So you’d better show me the respect that an officer of the law deserves, and go and tell your boss that I’d like to speak to him.”

  When Li let him go, the doorman got back to his feet, mustering as much dignity as he could, straightening his jacket and heading stiffly off up the stairs to find his boss. He left behind him his distorted faceprint on the glass of the door. Li heard one or two giggles from the girls on the stairs. Perhaps they didn’t like him very much.

  Li walked into the lobby and saw, through enormous double doors away to his left, a large dance floor surrounded by tables. There was a bar at the far side, and as he wandered in he saw that there was a small stage at one end and a tiny orchestra pit. Coloured lights danced and sparkled in the affected subterranean gloom. The tables were busy, but no one was dancing. The nine-piece orchestra finished some jazzy Western dance number, to be replaced immediately by a deep, hammering disco beat that thundered out from speakers around the room. Spotlights snapped on, and bikini-clad dancers with high white boots rose up on small round podia, contorting themselves in some bizarre parody of nineteen-sixties America.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find himself facing the doorman and a clone flanking a smaller man wearing a white dinner jacket. “What do you want?” the Dinner Jacket shouted above the noise.

  Li nodded towards the lobby. “Outside,” he shouted back, and they moved through into the comparative quiet of the entrance hall.

  “Well?” The Dinner Jacket was impatient.

  Li said, “You employed a girl here called Chai Rui.”

  The Dinner Jacket frowned and shook his head. “Don’t know her.”

  “About eighteen months ago,” Li said.

  Still the Dinner Jacket shook his head. “Girls come and go. So, if that’s all . . .” He started to turn away and Li caught his shoulder. The man pulled free and turned, eyes blazing. “Don’t fucking touch me! Do you know who I am?”

  Li said quietly, “I don’t care who you are. And I don’t care what friends you think you have in this town. The only thing that matters here is who I am. I represent the law of the People’s Republic of China, and I am investigating a murder. And if you fuck with me you could end up in a football stadium somewhere picking lead out of your brains. And that’s after I’ve closed down your club, put your whores in prison and confiscated your assets.”

  Conversation on the stairs had come to a halt, mobile phones slipped back into purses. The Dinner Jacket stared long and hard at Li. This was a supreme loss of face in front of his employees and his customers, but there was no doubting that Li was serious. It was not how the owner of the Black Rain was used to being dealt with by the authorities. His two henchmen shifted uncomfortably on either side of him.

  “Her nickname was Cherry,” Li said, helping him out.

  Now the Dinner Jacket nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I remember her. Good-looking girl. She didn’t work here long. Couple of months at the most. I fired her.”

  “Why?”

  “She was a user. Heroin.” He shook his head. “No good. I like my girls clean.”

  “How very fastidious of you,” Li said. “Where did she go after you fired her?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. If I sack a girl I don’t expect to see her again. This is not a social club.” He took a beat. “Is that it?”

  Li was reluctant to let it go at that. But there was no point in pursuing it. If the girl had only worked at the Black Rain for a couple of months and left sixteen months before, it was unlikely he would learn much here. He gave a small nod, and the Dinner Jacket immediately turned and hurried up the stairs with the second henchman in his wake. The doorman who’d left his faceprint on the glass resumed his position at the door. Li pulled up his collar again and hurried out into the rain.

  He had only got a couple of hundred metres down Huaihai Road when he felt a tugging on his sleeve. He turned to find himself looking into the upturned face of a very pretty girl under a bright green umbrella. She had a white trench coat gathered around a sequined dress, and Li could see tiny flashes of light from beneath it as she brushed the hair out of her eyes. She glanced behind her nervously. “What happened to Cherry?” she asked.

  “Someone took a surgeon’s knife and cut her open,” Li said, and he immediately regretted the brutality of his words when he saw the girl’s face go pale, and the anguish in her eyes. She nearly buckled at the knees, and he held her elbow to steady her. “You knew her?”

  “She was a friend. Only one I ever made at the club. She was really beautiful.”

  “Where did she go after she was fired?”

  “She couldn’t get any work. You know, in this game word gets around pretty fast if you’re a user. The only way is down. She tried to kick it, she really did. But she still couldn’t get any work. She heard of an opening in Beijing about a year ago and went up there to try her luck. I never saw her again.”

  The rain from her umbrella was dripping on to Li’s shirt. But it didn’t matter. He was soaked to the skin anyway. He said, “Do you know anything about her? Her family, any other friends?”

  She flicked another nervous glance behind her then shook her head. “She was pretty tight about all that kind of stuff. A very private person, you know? She lived in a really expensive apartment on Zhaojiabang Road. I don’t know how she could afford it, or the girl she had in to look after the kid.”

  “She had a kid?” Li was surprised.


  “Yeah, it was just a couple of years old. A little girl. She paid some peasant girl to babysit while she was working.”

  “So where’s the kid now? Did she take her with her to Beijing?”

  “I don’t know.” Another nervous glance behind her. “Look, I got to go. They’ll dump me for sure if they know I talked to you. They think I ran out for cigarettes.” She turned and hurried back through the crowds, tiny steps in quick succession, heels clicking on the sidewalk. Li watched her go, and still the rain fell.

  At the end of Hengshan Road, Li wiped away the condensation on the window of the taxi and smeared the lights of Xujiahui junction across the glass. Floodlit towers and giant globes, and flashing neon; Toto, Hitachi, American Standard; a bronze statue of a young woman clinging to the arm of a young man speaking animatedly into a cell phone. The rain that still drummed on the roof of the Volkswagen appeared to be having no deterrent effect on the night life of the city. The streets were still congested with people and traffic. The taxi took a left and dropped him at steps leading up to a pedestrian footbridge that spanned the six lanes of Zhaojiabang Road. Li dashed across the bridge, getting soaked all over again. Steps on the other side took him down to the bright lights of a multiplex cinema beneath a cluster of six tower blocks of private apartments. The main movie house was showing the latest Bond film.

  The manager of Chai Rui’s apartment block remembered her well. He had had a crush on her, he confided in Li, and then begged him not to tell his wife. She had paid for the apartment monthly with a direct debit from her bank account, he said. It had continued to pay out for a couple of months after she went to Beijing, and then suddenly stopped. When the next payment came due and was not forthcoming, he had emptied the apartment and re-let it. He led Li down a long corridor to a locked room at the end. “The majority of the apartments are furnished,” he said, “and she’d taken most of her clothes with her, so there wasn’t much to clear out.” He unlocked the door and switched on the light in a small storeroom with metal racked shelves around the walls. He lifted down a cardboard box. “This is all there was. Just a few personal things. I kept them in case she ever came back.” He grinned. “You can live in hope.” He paused. “What’s she done?”