The Killing Room

by Peter May

  Margaret took his hand. “We’ll find her, Li Yan. We will.”

  He looked at her, dry eyes all cried out, and they embraced, holding tight for comfort, for hope. Somehow everything was linked. There had to be an answer, and there had to be a way to find it.

  The door opened, and Mei-Ling stopped briefly in the doorway as Li and Margaret broke apart, then she stepped into the room. Her face gave no clue as to her feelings. She said in Chinese, “Forensics have found several hairs in the back of the van. We need some of Xinxin’s for comparison so that we can confirm it really was her we saw on the tape.”

  Li thought for a moment. “Her hair brush,” he said. “There’s bound to be some caught in it. It’s in her hotel room.” Mei-Ling nodded and went without another word.

  “What was that about?” Margaret asked.

  “Checking samples of Xinxin’s hair against hair found in the van.”

  It was routine. It was the kind of thing they had both been involved in many times as a matter of course. But this was Xinxin’s hair, and the picture it conjured up of her tiny prone body wrapped in a blanket and lying on the floor of a battered old van, was almost too painful to contemplate. Margaret wondered briefly how she had been sedated. Something quick. Chloroform on a handkerchief? Whatever it was, if the Mongolian had really snatched all these other women, he would be well practised in its use.

  Li lit a cigarette. Not because he had any desire for one—he had smoked till he was sick of smoking—but simply for something to do, a mechanical act, a routine to cling to. Margaret went to open a window. The air in the office was already sour with stale smoke. She turned back from the window and saw the box of Chai Rui’s possessions sitting on Li’s desk. The photograph which Li had dug out from the bottom of it was lying on top. For a moment it seemed to Margaret that her heart had stopped. In a very small voice she asked, “Who’s that in the photograph?”

  Li, distracted by other thoughts, glanced at the box. “Chai Rui,” he said. “She’s the one whose body you re-examined in Beijing. That’s the stuff that was left in her apartment in Shanghai.”

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and Li looked at her, suddenly alarmed.

  “What is it?”

  “The guy in the picture with her . . .”

  Li frowned. “You know him?”

  “His name’s Jack Geller.” Her thoughts were awash with confusion.

  “Who the hell is Jack Geller?” Li asked, incredulous that Margaret should know him.

  “He’s an American journalist,” she said. “He’s been haunting me since I arrived in Shanghai, looking for an inside line on this story.”

  “In the name of the sky, Margaret, why didn’t you tell me?” Li’s voice was filled with accusation.

  “It didn’t seem important,” she said. “I never told him anything.” And she gave Li a look. “And anyway, you were busy with Mei-Ling.” The words were barely out of her mouth before she was hit by a sudden realisation. “Oh, Jesus . . .” She looked at Li, horrified by the implications. “It was Jack who told me about the Tiantan Traffic Park.”

  Li glared at Margaret in disbelief for some seconds. “Then he’s got to be involved,” he said finally. “Have you any idea where we can find him?”

  “No, I . . .” She paused. She had been going to say she had no idea. He had always sought her out. But she remembered then that first meeting in the airport. It felt like a very long time ago. He had handed her a dog-eared business card. At first she had refused to take it, but he had insisted. You never know when you might want to give me a call, he had said. And Margaret had told him she couldn’t imagine a single circumstance when she would. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined this. She searched quickly in her purse, and there it was. JACK GELLER Freelance Journalist. It listed his address, and home and mobile numbers. Li snatched it from her.

  Geller’s apartment was on the eighteenth floor of a modern tower block in Xinzha Road, a few minutes north of the Shanghai Centre. Dozens of other blocks sprang out of the squat, two-storey workers’ housing that spread in every direction around them in narrow, treeless streets. The uniformed security officer in Geller’s block took a long time examining the search warrant Li handed him. The ink from the Municipal Procuratorate was barely dry on it. He glanced uneasily at Margaret, and then at Dai and Mei-Ling and the two detectives who accompanied them. Weapons, signed out from the armoury at 803 only fifteen minutes earlier by Section Chief Huang, bulged visibly in their holsters beneath loose-fitting jackets. Only Li and Margaret were unarmed. “Okay,” he said at length. “I’ll let you in.”

  They rode up in the elevator to the eighteenth floor in tense silence. On the landing a curved panorama of windows gave out on to a spectacular view of the city below. A little sunshine was forcing its way through the mist, cutting sharp shadows down the sides of buildings. Cranes rising along the river bank were just visible in the far distance. At the door of Geller’s apartment, the detectives drew their pistols and stood either side of it ready to enter. Li and Margaret stood a little further down the hall. The security guard, now very nervous, quickly unlocked the door and stepped back. The detectives were also nervous. Mei-Ling nodded, and they burst in, the first two fanning off to the sides, the second two covering the middle. They yelled at the tops of their voices as they entered. Margaret had no idea what they were shouting. But the screaming didn’t stop as they moved from room to room in a rehearsed pattern. Doors banged and feet slammed down on polished wooden floors.

  Margaret followed Li into an entrance hall. They could hear the armed detectives in a room further along it. A door opened into an L-shaped living room. It was very spartan. Two patterned settees sat in the middle of the floor. A large coffee table strewn with papers and empty coffee mugs stood between them. A single dining chair was pushed against a naked white wall next to an electric point, a coffee maker sitting at an angle on the woven seat. Some framed pictures leaned against the far wall waiting to be hung. There was an antique dresser on the opposite wall, but its shelves were bare. Beige curtains hung from floor to ceiling on either side of sliding glass doors that led to a balcony. It felt like a house that someone was either moving out of or moving into.

  Margaret suddenly became aware that a silence had descended on the apartment. Then a single voice called out. It was Mei-Ling. Li grabbed Margaret’s arm. “Come on,” he said, and they hurried down the hall, past a door that lay open to reveal a study with a cluttered desk and a desktop computer on a tubular stand. A glass door gave on to a modern kitchen that looked pristine and unused, except for a bucket full of empty beer bottles in the middle of the floor. The detectives had left the bathroom door lying open. A damp towel hung over the shower cabinet, a pair of pyjamas hung from hooks on the tiled wall above the toilet. Dirty underwear lay strewn on the floor. Everywhere the white walls were naked, undressed. And although the air was warm, the apartment felt cold. It did not seem to fit with the Jack Geller that Margaret knew. And she realised that, of course, she really knew nothing about him at all. There was an impermanence about the place that made her think he had not so much been living here as camping out. She felt sick. It was beyond both imagination and comprehension to think that he might have had something to do either with the kidnapping of Xinxin or the murder of all those women. Or both.

  At the end of the hall they entered the bedroom. There was an outer dressing room with a settee and a television set on a table. In the main part of the bedroom the bed was unmade beneath a large wall tapestry. Mei-Ling and the other three detectives stood in the archway between the two rooms, blocking out the view of the window. Li and Margaret pushed through and stopped dead. Margaret gasped in horror. Geller was kneeling in front of the sliding glass doors that gave out on to the balcony, facing back into the room. His arms were raised above his head in grotesque parody of a crucified man, pulled to each side by cord tied to either end of the curtain rod. Although he was silhouetted against the city spread out below
, she saw immediately that he was naked. There was a ten-inch wound drawn horizontally across his belly from which his small intestine hung in a shiny mass of pale tan distended loops. There was a large pool of sticky blood on the floor at his knees. It was still dripping from his crotch and trickling slowly down his thighs. His head was tipped forward. Margaret knew he was alive because he was still bleeding, but he appeared to be unconscious.

  “For Chrissake, will someone call an ambulance,” she said. And she moved quickly to the window to try to untie the cord that held him. But it was knotted tight, his weight dragging against it. She heard one of the detectives talking rapidly on his mobile. “Someone got a knife? We’ve got to cut him down.” The desperation she felt was compounded by the knowledge that he was almost certainly going to die. He had lost a huge amount of blood, and his system was probably already fevered by bacterial infection from the intestine.

  She was almost shocked when he lifted his head, and she found herself looking into his glassy eyes. “No,” he whispered. “Leave me.”

  “Jack, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  An almost imperceptible shake of the head. “Too late.”

  She knelt on the floor in front of him and felt his blood soaking into her jeans. She put her arms around his chest and strained to lift him slightly to take the weight off his arms. Li cut the cord, and then helped her lay him on the floor. “Something for his head,” she said sharply. And Mei-Ling hurried to get a cushion from the settee in the dressing room. Margaret slipped it under his neck to support his head.

  “There’s an ambulance on the way,” Dai said.

  Geller was shivering now, a cold sweat gathering in the creases of a forehead furrowed by pain. “Who did this to you, Jack?” Margaret asked softly.

  He gazed up at her like a mournful dog desperate for forgiveness from an angry master. “I’ve been following you,” he said. He swallowed with difficulty. “I was there at the park . . . Other side of the fence.” He swallowed again. “I saw him grab her, but I couldn’t . . . couldn’t . . .” His breathing was becoming laboured. “Chased the van. Nearly got him.”

  Margaret held his hand. It was as cold as ice. “Did he do this to you?”

  Geller nodded. “Saw me.”

  And Margaret realised that if the Mongolian had been following her, he must have known who Jack was. She could have wept then. Jack had nothing to do with the kidnapping of Xinxin. He had tried to save her. But, still, none of it made sense. “Why were you following me, Jack?”

  He tried to smile. “You wouldn’t help me . . . Had to know.”

  “Know what?” She glanced at Li for some help in understanding this. But he just shook his head helplessly. She turned back to Geller and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of her hand. “We found a photograph of you with one of the dead girls.” And whatever agony he had suffered up until then intensified. He screwed up his eyes and let out a small cry of pain. After a moment he opened them again and she saw that they were wet with tears.

  “Chai Rui?” he said. Margaret nodded. He swallowed hard. “She was my little sister.” And he started sobbing. “Mom and my stepdad were in a . . . a road accident . . . He died straight off . . . she lasted a few days. That’s when I came back from the States . . .” He was fighting now for his breath. “Last thing she made me promise . . . was to look after Cherry.” He shook his head. “Really fucked up, didn’t I?”

  Li said, “Ask him what happened to her little girl.”

  Geller’s eyes flicked up towards him. “With friends,” he managed to say.

  “Oh, Jack,” Margaret said, “why didn’t you just tell me all this?”

  “Scared,” he said. “Thought she might be one of them . . . Missing all that time.” The tears ran from the corners of his eyes down each side of his head. “Didn’t want it to be true.” And his body was racked by sobbing. “Poor Cherry.” And he stopped suddenly and opened his eyes and stared straight into Margaret’s. “You get them,” he said. “Whoever it was . . . you get them.”

  Margaret’s own tears dragged like hot wires down her cheeks. “I’ll get them,” she said. And she looked up at Li. “We’ll get them.” Li nodded grimly, and by the time she looked back at Jack he was dead.

  And she knelt there in his blood and wept for him. Poor Jack. She remembered their first encounter at the airport, his story about the racecourse, his juvenile amusement at the LONG DONG GARDEN. She remembered their drinks at the bar in the Peace Hotel. He had been amusing, attractive. Did anyone ever tell you you’re very attractive for someone who cuts up people for a living? he had asked her. And now he lay dead on the floor, disembowelled because he had tried to save a little girl’s life, because he had wanted to know what had become of his little sister. And he had died with grief in his heart, and guilt for having failed his mother.

  In the distance Margaret heard the siren of the ambulance, and Li helped her gently to her feet.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I

  They had their meeting in the room with the skulls. Sightless eyes watched them from glass shelves, and their eternal silence contributed to the hush that filled the room. Almost the entire department was squeezed in. Standing-room only. Huang stood by the door, his face the colour of the yellowed remains in the display cabinets. Mei-Ling had whispered to Li as they entered that his wife was not expected to see out the day. Smoke from dozens of cigarettes hung over the table like a shroud. All eyes were on Li. He saw in them curiosity, sympathy, pity, and it was all he could do to keep his voice from cracking.

  In slow, measured sentences, he described the discovery of Jack Geller in the apartment in Jingan District, and Geller’s dying identification of Xinxin’s kidnapper as his killer. Eyes flickered down to the dozens of images of the Mongolian that were scattered around the table. The Mongolian, Li said, was also suspected of stalking, and perhaps abducting, one of the eighteen women found in the mass grave at Lujiazui. He had also been stalking the American pathologist, Margaret Campbell.

  He took another moment to collect himself. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that the murders of the eighteen women in Shanghai, the one in Beijing, and the abduction of my niece, are inextricably linked.” The implications of Li’s simple statement went through the mind of every detective in the room, and their silence so filled it that it seemed to expel all oxygen. Someone at the back opened a window. “So,” Li said, “does anyone have any ideas?”

  Dai cleared his throat and everyone looked at him expectantly. He blushed. “I got a confession, Chief,” he said. “Remember you asked me to check through all those files of missing girls to see if any of them had a nickname that matched the one on that bracelet we found at Jiang’s place?”

  Li inclined his head slightly. “I remember.”

  “Well, I delegated. You know, we all had so much on our plates, I was still tracking down the Zhang family from Jiang’s home town . . . I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “What’s your point, Dai?” Li asked impatiently.

  Dai glanced at another, younger officer across the table. “You want to tell him, Qian?”

  The young detective remained composed. He nodded and looked at Li. “I found a match this morning,” he said. He opened up a file on the table in front of him. “A girl called Ji Li Rong. She was a second-year student at Jiaotong University. Disappeared about nine months ago. Everyone called her Moon. I spoke to her parents. It was her father who first called her that because when she was a baby her face was round like the moon.”

  “Did you show him the bracelet?” Li asked.

  Qian nodded. “It was hers all right.”

  It was the smallest chink of light in a dark place, but to Li, after so long in that place, it was blinding. However, his face betrayed no emotion. He said, “Can we find out if this girl ever had an abortion?”

  Dai said, “We thought of that. I got Qian to go back and check.”

  “She had an abortion half
way through her first year,” Qian said. “Didn’t want an unwanted pregnancy to get in the way of her education.” And yet in some way that Li still did not understand, that abortion had cost the girl her life.

  He said, “We need to get them to look at the bodies. Identify her, if they can.”

  Dai said, “They’re on their way to the mortuary right now.”

  And Li felt his stomach lurch. He thought of the fourteen corpses still unidentified, the horrors that awaited these poor people as they tried to discern the features of their little girl from the pulp of decaying human flesh that would be wheeled out by men in white coats and rubber gloves. But if they were able to make that identification, the investigation would have come full circle, ending where it had begun, with a medical student working as a night watchman on a building site. Li shook his head at the irony.

  Dai cleared his throat again. “There’s one other thing, Chief,” he said. “I’m not sure how important it is. And I guess I should have spotted it before now.” He made a face. “But, then, probably we all should have.” And in this there was a hint of accusation to deflect guilt. “It was right there all the time on the goddamn kid’s résumé.”

  Li frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “The medical student,” Dai said. “Jiang Baofu. You know, all those vacation jobs he had, working in various hospitals and clinics?” He paused. “One of them was the Shanghai World Clinic.” Li glanced immediately at Huang standing by the door. The Section Chief was impassive. Dai said unnecessarily, “You know, Cui Feng’s place.”