The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “She hasn’t done anything,” Li said. “Someone murdered her.”

  The manager went very pale. “Oh, no,” he said. “Poor Cherry.”

  “Do you know anything about her family?” Li asked.

  The manager shook his head. “She never said anything about family.”

  “What about her kid? Did she take the little girl to Beijing with her?”

  “I’ve no idea. She wasn’t in the habit of discussing her plans with me. Sadly.” He shook his head again. “Poor, poor Cherry.”

  Li took the box from under his arm. “I’ll take that now.”

  II

  It was nearly nine when Li walked into the Peace Hotel. Margaret was sitting on her own at the bar. She was on her second vodka tonic. The anger she had been nursing, first towards Mei-Ling over the Xinxin fiasco and then towards Li for standing her up, had begun to dissipate. Li had dropped off the box of Chai Rui’s possessions at 803 and taken a taxi straight there. He was still soaking wet. Margaret took one look at him and couldn’t resist a smile.

  “So now I know why you’re late,” she said. “You just had to have a shower before you came out. Pity you forgot to take your clothes off first.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “It stops them from shrinking.”

  She laughed. “You want a beer?” He nodded and she called the waitress over and ordered him one. “And I also know why they put you in that other hotel—you can’t afford the prices here on your salary.” She chuckled. “Trouble is, on what they pay me at the University of Public Security, neither can I. I’m having to take out a mortgage to pay my bar bill.”

  Their mood was easier and more relaxed than it had been for some time. In some strange way, accepting that their relationship might be at an end, albeit unspoken, had removed the tension between them. Li picked up the drinks menu and looked at the prices. He whistled softly. “In the name of the sky, a hundred kwai for a beer? Some people don’t earn that much in a week! I’ll have to be careful not to spill any.” He took a drink and rolled the beer around his mouth. “Funny,” he said, “it tastes just the same as it does out of a five kwai can.”

  Margaret looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then decided to broach the subject she had been brooding over for the last few hours. “Listen, I don’t want to spoil good relations or anything, but that little shit really screwed me over this afternoon.”

  Li frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Mei-Ling. When I went to pick up Xinxin, there was this uniformed female cop there. Wouldn’t let me near Xinxin and dragged the poor kid screaming down the stairs. Clearly on instructions from a higher authority.”

  “Oh, shit,” Li said, and his face flushed pink. “I am so sorry, Margaret. I forgot to tell Mei-Ling that you were going to collect Xinxin.”

  Margaret felt unaccountably disappointed. “Oh. So, I can’t blame her, then. Pity. It makes me feel better if I think everything around here is her fault.” She took a stiff draught of vodka. “Tell you what, though, you need to do something about that female cop. That is no way to treat poor little Xinxin. The kid was really distressed.”

  Li nodded grimly. “I’ll sort it.”

  She hesitated for a few moments, then, “I thought I might take her out tomorrow,” she said. “Seeing that it’s Saturday. I figured she wouldn’t have kindergarten.”

  “Sure,” Li said.

  Margaret smiled. “There won’t be any big, dikey policewoman there trying to stop me, will there?”

  Li laughed. “You have my word on that. Where are you going to take her?”

  “There’s this park I heard about over on the west side of the city where kids get to drive little electric cars around miniature streets. I figured she’d probably like that.”

  Li laughed. “You will probably not get her to leave.” He paused. “Where did you hear about it?”

  He did not notice the slight clouding of Margaret’s eyes, or how the brightness of her smile became a little too fixed. “I can’t remember. Read about it somewhere, I think.” She hated lying to Li, but she didn’t think this was the moment to discuss Jack Geller. Margaret looked at Li and thought how attractive he was for an ugly man. She decided to change the subject. “So,” she said, “are you going to tell me the real reason you kept me waiting for an hour?”

  “We identified the girl from Beijing. From those dental records that you brought down.”

  Reality returned, and Margaret felt her lighter mood slip away. “And?”

  “She was just a kid. Chai Rui was her name, but everyone called her Cherry. She was twenty-two. Probably making a living as a hooker. She had been working as a hostess at a club, but they fired her when they found out she was using.” He told her about the upscale apartment, about the little girl and how nobody knew what had become of her, about the box of belongings that were all that remained of a tragic life.

  Margaret thought of the putrefying remains she had examined on the autopsy table the day before. She shook her head sadly. “You know, it’s easier somehow if you don’t know anything about them. When they don’t have a name and you don’t know about their husband or their lover. Or their child.” She tried to blink away the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes. “Shit,” she said, “I’m getting soft in my old age.” But she couldn’t throw off the image of the body-bags lined up in the mortuary, all those women whose lives and loves, and hopes and fears, had been cut so brutally short, butchered without thought for the people they loved, or who loved them. And then a thought formed, coming out of nowhere, drawing on a hundred different subconscious sources, a revelation that had been secretly brewing somewhere deep in her mind without her even being aware of it. And suddenly all the emotional baggage of the last few days fell away and she was thinking with great clarity. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re telling me this girl had a kid.”

  “Sure. So what? You’d have been able to tell that from autopsy, wouldn’t you? What was it you said, the cervix got stretched in childbirth and ended up looking like fish lips?”

  “It’s a good indication,” Margaret said, “but it’s not a guarantee.” She held a hand up. “Just . . . just give me a minute.” She tried to think. How many of the women that she had autopsied had given the appearance of having had kids? But then, hadn’t she just told Li that you couldn’t tell for sure? And she didn’t know about the others, the ones she hadn’t autopsied herself, and it wasn’t an area to which she had paid much attention. She switched tack. “Of the five women we’ve identified, how many had kids?”

  Li frowned. He couldn’t see where this was going. “All of them, I think.” Then, “No, wait a minute . . .” He ran through them all in his mind. The seamstress who took it in turns with her husband to take their son to kindergarten; the opera singer whose mother looked after her little girl; the fingerprint girl whose parents had been given custody of her baby; the night club hostess whose baby girl had disappeared when she did. That left the acrobat and her husband, Sun Jie. Li could not remember him making any reference to a child. “Four of them,” he said. “I don’t think the acrobat had a kid.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not. I mean, we can find out, but what difference does it make? It’s not unusual for women of that age to have kids, is it?”

  Margaret said, “I don’t know.” She was still in a state of excitement. Something was trying to work its way through from subconscious fog to conscious clarity. “But if all these women had borne children—I mean, all of them—then it would be something they had in common, wouldn’t it? Something to link them.”

  Li shrugged. “I guess.” He still couldn’t see any great relevance.

  “Could we find out now?” she asked.

  “Find out what?”

  “If the acrobat had a kid. Is there any way we can find out right now?”

  Li looked at his watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. The evening performance at the Shanghai Centre Theatre would just be coming to a
close. “If we’re quick we could probably catch the husband after the show.”

  Margaret abandoned her vodka and jumped down off her stool. “Let’s do it.”

  Escalators ran them up into the atrium from the Long Bar above the car park in the Shanghai Centre. The acrobatic show was over and most of the audience had dispersed. Li wondered if the girls with the nine chairs had managed to perform their stunt without falling. Half a dozen tiny clusters of people stood smoking and talking in the vastness of the atrium, their smoke and voices rising into the huge void that lifted over their heads and glassed out the night. Backstage, young acrobats were running back and forth gathering props and costumes, shouting and laughing and tangling playfully half-naked in open-doored dressing rooms. Nobody gave Li a second glance, but Margaret was an object of considerable interest. The manageress limped into the corridor on her sticks. She took one look at Li and then nodded to a room further down.

  Sun Jie was pulling his coat on, ready to leave, when Li knocked and he and Margaret entered. His expression hardened when he saw Li. He appeared not even to notice Margaret. “What do you want?” he said wearily. “She’s dead, I need to put this behind me now.”

  “I’ll not bother you again,” Li promised. “I just wanted to know if you and Liyao ever had any children.”

  Sun Jie’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Li almost accusingly. “Why do you want to know that?”

  Margaret watched, feeling very excluded, as the two men spoke in Chinese. And yet, not understanding the words seemed to give her a greater insight. Sun Jie, initially hostile and laconic, started pouring out his heart. Margaret could see the pain in his eyes, and then the tears that formed there. Finally he sat down and began talking, apparently to no one in particular. Big silent tears rolled down his cheeks as he shook his head at some unbearable memory. He and Li spoke for several minutes before Li turned and took Margaret’s arm. “Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s go.” And they left Sun Jie sitting weeping on his own in the dressing room. Tears he had not spilled at the mortuary when he identified his wife ran freely now. Li pulled the door shut behind them.

  In the atrium Margaret could contain her curiosity no longer. “What did he say? Why was he in tears?”

  Li looked tired, weighed down by the other man’s grief. “He has an eight-year-old daughter. His mother used to look after her when he and Liyao were performing or away on tour. Now she looks after her full-time.” I hardly know her, Sun Jie had told him. And she hardly knows she has a father.

  “Why the tears?”

  “Apparently she got pregnant again a couple of years ago. He suspects she was trying to. She was desperate to have a boy. He flew into a rage and told her they would be heavily penalised under the One Child Policy if she had it. They had terrible fights about it. In the end he won and she agreed to have an abortion. He says he bullied her into it.”

  Margaret knew that this was painful for Li, too. It almost replicated his sister’s story. She supposed that it was a universal story in China, a tragedy that got played out in nearly every family.

  Li said, “He reckoned their relationship was never quite the same after that. They’d had a furious row once and she had called him a murderer, the killer of their unborn child.” Li shook his head. “I think that’s left a scar on him that will never heal. Poor bastard.” He looked at Margaret, but he knew immediately that she was somewhere else. There was a strange burning quality in her eyes, and the colour had risen high on her cheeks. “What is it?”

  She looked at him now, with something like pain in her expression. “I fucked up, Li,” she said. “It’s been there in front of me the whole time and I never saw it.”

  He was perplexed. “What do you mean?”

  Her hands were shaking as she clutched his arm. “I want to get the bodies out of the refrigerator and back on to the table—now,” she said.

  “What?” Li was incredulous. “At this time of night!”

  “Right now,” she said.

  III

  The sweat beaded across her forehead and was instantly chilled by the low working temperature of the autopsy room. It felt cold and clammy on her hot skin. Her eyes were burning with fatigue, dry and gritty. She wondered what time it was. She had been in here, it seemed, for hours, ignoring the simmering resentment of tired mortuary assistants called from their beds to move the bodies around. On the table in front of her lay the uterus and pelvic organs of the last of the victims, the remaining body parts still in their bag laid out on a gurney. The womb was the same familiar pink-tan in colour. At the bottom end, where it opened into the vagina, Margaret saw the tell-tale scarring of the endometrium. Something made her look up, and she caught Li leaning against the door watching her.

  “What’s the time?” she asked.

  “Four a.m.”

  “Jesus.” She had been in there for almost five hours.

  “Are you nearly done?”

  She nodded. “Where have you been?”

  “Having a stand-up row with Dr. Lan. He takes exception to me opening up his mortuary and calling out his staff in the middle of the night without reference to him. I do not know who called him, but someone did. He does not like getting out of his bed at four in the morning. He is pretty pissed.”

  “I’m pretty pissed, too,” Margaret said. “And I haven’t even been to bed.”

  Li smiled weakly. He was also tired. “Who are you pissed at this time?”

  “Myself,” she said bitterly. “For not seeing this before, for not even thinking of it.” She looked at him. “You know, it’s that thing of too much information obscuring the obvious.” She laughed, but it was an empty laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I wasn’t even looking in the right place.”

  He crossed to the table, eaten up by curiosity. “Are you going to tell me now what it is you have found?”

  She smiled. “The answer to a riddle.”

  He frowned. “What riddle?”

  “A riddle that Mei Yuan asked me to pass on to you. Only I didn’t, because she said not to tell you until I had worked it out for myself. Then I would realise the importance of how the question is framed.”

  “So when did you figure it out?”

  “In the atrium outside the theatre. I could have kicked myself for being stupid enough not to see it before.”

  “I thought it was this case you were having some revelation about.”

  “It was both. They’re one and the same thing, really.”

  Li scowled. He could not get his mind around this, especially at four in the morning. “Do you want to tell me what the riddle was?”

  “Okay,” she said, “imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing . . .” And she took him through the whole trip from the Friendship Store, past Wangfujing Street and Tiananmen Square to Xidan, picking up and dropping off passengers en route. She changed the numbers, made them up as she went along. She knew it didn’t matter. But she watched him doing the mental arithmetic. “All right? You follow all that?” He nodded. “Okay, so what height was the bus driver?”

  She could see that his reaction had been the same as hers, and for the life of her could not imagine how she had been so easily fooled. He shook his head. “You cannot know the height of the driver.”

  She laughed. Of course you can. And she repeated the question. “Imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing . . .”

  He groaned. “I always fall for these. It is typical of Mei Yuan.”

  “But the point is,” Margaret said, “the answer was there all along, staring you in the face.” She laughed. “But you’re too busy doing the arithmetic, getting distracted by all the numbers, and the names of the stops. So you don’t see what’s obvious.”

  Li looked at the bivalved womb on the autopsy table. “So what’s obvious here that you didn’t see?”

  “The thing that connects them, that ties them all together beyond any possible coincidence, that I never even thought to look for. Until now.”

  “Better la
te than never. Do you want to tell me?”

  She folded the uterus over, as it would have been before bisection. “I have this little trick,” she said, “when I’m doing an autopsy.” She took a pair of forceps and demonstrated how she would slip them up through the cervix into the body of the womb. “I can then use the forceps as a guide for my knife so that I can draw it up through the womb and cut it easily in half. Of course, it only works if the subject is female.” She grinned, but got no response from Li and shrugged. “Anyway, with these ladies, in a couple of cases I couldn’t get the forceps in, and when I finally got the uterus open I found that there were adhesions on the inner lining that scarred the uterus closed.”

  “I remember,” Li said. “You thought maybe the damage had been done in childbirth.”

  “That’s right. But there’s something else that can cause this kind of scarring.” And with her right index finger she traced the adhesions on the endometrium in front of her. “It was you telling me about the acrobat having the abortion that made me think of it. And then I remembered Dr. Wang in Beijing commenting on similar scarring in the womb of the body found there. He said he’d seen it frequently as a result of careless abortion.”

  “And that’s what caused the scarring that you found?”

  Margaret nodded. “Suction curettage is probably the commonest form of abortion. And that’s what’s been employed here. A kind of freshwater weed called Laminaria is usually inserted into the cervix to soften or ripen it, and allow passage of the suction tool.” She glanced up and saw the look of disgust on Li’s face. She said, “You guys don’t know the half of what we women have to go through.” And although her delivery was light, there was something deeper there that caused Li to look at her for a moment.