The Killing Room

by Peter May

  Margaret sat alone in Li’s office. She had showered off all the blood, scrubbed and scrubbed, and watched it wash away down the drainer. But like Lady Macbeth, she still felt its taint. Only, this was no dream. Her face was pale and without even a trace of make-up, her hair still damp and scraped back. She had on the khaki cargoes she had worn the day she lost Xinxin, and another pair of trainers. Her black tee-shirt contrasted sharply with the whiteness of her skin. She looked at her hands and saw the first lines of age there, a prominence of the knuckles as the full flesh of youth thinned and became sinewy and tough. There was a thickening of her neatly trimmed nails, and the half-moons beneath her cuticles appeared paler than usual. Even as she looked at them, her hands started to shake, and she pressed them palm down on the table to make them stop.

  But she could no longer focus on her hands, or the shadows on the wall where once posters and papers had been pinned, or the sound of the rain as it fell again from the heavens and battered on the window. Pictures that she had fought so hard to displace kept forcing their way into her mind. Pictures of Jack in his final moments as he lay in his own blood on the floor. Pictures of Xinxin laughing with joy as she manoeuvred her little red car around the miniature roads in the park. Pictures of a dark-skinned Mongolian face with an ugly hare-lip stretched across protruding brown teeth. An endless procession of half-decayed faces on autopsy tables. And closing her eyes could not shut these pictures out.

  She was startled when the door burst open and Li strode in. His expression told her immediately that something had happened. Mei-Ling followed closely in his wake. Margaret stood up quickly. “What is it?”

  But all Li’s attention was focused on the telephone, and as he reached his hand towards it, it began to ring, almost as though he had willed it to do so. He snatched it from its cradle. He listened intently for several seconds, then there was a brief, staccato exchange before he hung up. Margaret could see that he was drawing quick, shallow breaths. “Jiang Baofu,” he said.

  “The medical student?”

  Li nodded grimly. “A bracelet belonging to one of the dead girls was found in his apartment.” He turned to Mei-Ling. “The parents just identified her,” he said in Chinese. And to Margaret, “He also spent two summer vacations working at a clinic belonging to Cui Feng.”

  Margaret was still attempting to take all this in. “An abortion clinic?”

  Li shook his head. “No. Cui has a clinic that deals exclusively in the treatment of foreigners. Insurance work.”

  Margaret’s confusion deepened. “I don’t understand. What’s the connection?”

  “That’s what we’re about to ask him,” Li said.

  Jiang Baofu’s hair was gelled and spiky. Li could smell the perfume of the gel. He was wearing his long coat, shoulders peppered with dark spots of rain. He had on the same high leather boots he had been wearing the night they first interviewed him in the hut on the building site, his jeans tucked into them at calf height. Li imagined that Jiang thought he looked pretty cool, modelled on one of those Hong Kong rock singers he watched on Channel “V.” He did not appear quite as composed as he had during previous interviews. He was leaning back in his chair, trying to convey the same careless attitude of relaxed indifference. But there were lights in his eyes, and they were wide and cautious.

  Mei-Ling sat down opposite him, and Li took his time closing the door before approaching the table and pulling up a chair. He made no attempt to switch on the recorder. Instead, he held the boy in a gaze of icy intensity. Jiang shifted uncomfortably. Li said, “My niece was kidnapped yesterday. She is six years old.”

  There was a long silence before Jiang decided to respond. “Why are you telling me?”

  “I want you to know,” Li said slowly, “so that you will understand that I mean it when I say if one hair on her head has been harmed, I will tear out your heart and stuff it down your throat.” His almost conversational tone gave his words a chilling, believable edge.

  Jiang’s eyes widened and he sat himself more upright. “I don’t know what you mean?”

  Li nodded to Mei-Ling and she switched on the cassette recorder. “November twenty-sixth,” she said. “Eleven-fifty a.m. Interview with suspect Jiang Baofu. Present Deputy Section Chief Nien Mei-Ling, Section Two, Shanghai Municipal Police, and Deputy Section Chief Li Yan, Section One, Beijing Municipal Police, Criminal Investigation Department.”

  Jiang’s rabbit eyes flickered from one to the other. “Suspect?” His face cracked into a frightened smile. “Hey, you don’t really think I did this shit?”

  “We have reason to believe,” Li said calmly, “that you murdered at least nineteen young women by cutting them open while they were still alive, and then removing vital organs, thereby killing them.”

  Jiang stared at him for a moment in patent disbelief. And then a sort of calm visibly descended on him. “No,” he said. “You’re trying it on.” His confidence was returning. “Like I said before, you can’t think I did it. There’s no evidence.”

  “How can you know that?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “Because I didn’t do it.” This directed at Mei-Ling as if she were an idiot.

  Li saw her bridle and stepped in quickly. “We traced the Zhang family from Yanqing,” he said. And a hint of concern reappeared in Jiang’s eyes.

  “And?”

  “The daughter doesn’t remember you trying to give her a bracelet. In fact she doesn’t remember you at all.”

  Jiang shrugged. “I didn’t have much confidence then. You know, it was kind of worship from afar. Not surprising really that she doesn’t remember me.”

  Li placed his forearms very carefully on the table in front of him and leaned forward. “And her nickname isn’t Moon.”

  Jiang said, “That’s just what I called her. Because she was beautiful, you know, like the moon. She had this lovely, round face . . .”

  “Bullshit!” Li’s voice reverberated around the walls, and Jiang nearly jumped out of his seat. Li produced the bracelet from his pocket and laid it on the table. “It belonged to a girl called Ji Li Rong. She was a student at Jiaotong University. Her father nicknamed her Moon when she was a baby. She was one of the girls we dug out of the mud at Lujiazui. Her parents just identified her at the mortuary.”

  Jiang stared at the bracelet for a long time. He showed a distinct reluctance to meet Li’s eyes again. “It’s . . . it’s similar,” he mumbled, almost to himself. “Maybe I . . . you know, it’s possible I picked it up at the site. I just confused it with the other one, you know, for the Zhang girl . . .”

  Li said, “I’m going to bring this interview to a close now and have you formally charged with murder.”

  Jiang’s eyes shot up from the bracelet. “No!” he nearly shouted. “You can’t. I didn’t do it.”

  “I figure it’ll go to trial pretty quickly, given the high-profile nature of the case. That means it’ll only be a matter of weeks, Jiang, before they’re putting a bullet in the back of your head. Of course, I’ll be there to watch. But, really, execution’s too good for you. Personally, I’d rather see you rot in a stinking prison cell somewhere for the rest of your unnatural life.” He turned to Mei-Ling. “You can switch the recorder off now.”

  “No,” Jiang shouted again, and he quickly held out a hand to prevent her from reaching the recorder. She stopped and waited. There was a long moment of silence. Jiang screwed up his eyes and then, as if angry at having to admit defeat, hissed, “What do you want to know?”

  Li said, “I want to know where you got the bracelet. I want to know where you got the money to buy all the fancy clothes and electrical goods and pay for an expensive apartment. I want to know exactly what work you were involved in during two summers at the Shanghai World Clinic.”

  Jiang went limp, and slumped forward on the table, his head in his hands. Li could see his scalp between the clumped spikes of gelled hair. Then Jiang made himself sit upright. “As long as you understand,” he said, “I had nothing to do w
ith killing these women. They wouldn’t let me near the theatre. I was never in there once when they were . . . you know, when they had someone in.” Finally he dragged his eyes up to meet Li’s, making some sort of appeal to be believed. “I didn’t even know anything about it until I found all the body parts in the freezer. I mean, hell, there were a lot of bits in there.”

  “When did you discover this?”

  “About a year-and-a-half ago. First summer I was there. I was just an orderly. I mean, I didn’t know what they were up to, didn’t want to know. Some kind of research or something. I just thought, you know, if they needed space in the freezer I could get rid of the bits for a little extra cash.”

  “You blackmailed them,” Li said.

  “No.” Jiang was quick to deny it. “It was a . . . business arrangement. I had a night job as a watchman on a building site out west. I knew it would be easy to dump the bodies, and in a few weeks a few thousand tons of concrete would bury them forever.”

  “How many?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “How many what?” Some of Jiang’s cockiness was returning.

  “Bodies.”

  He shrugged. “I think there were eleven that first time.”

  Li felt his stomach turning over. That brought the body count to thirty. “How many times were there, Jiang?”

  The boy shrugged vaguely. “Three . . . I guess, four, including the ones you found at Lujiazui.”

  Both Li and Mei-Ling were shocked into a momentary silence. Finally Li asked in a husky voice, “And how many bodies were there the other two times?”

  Now that Jiang had decided to talk, he actually appeared to be enjoying it. He was on a roll. “I think there were fifteen up at Zhabei, and either eight or nine at Zhou Jia Dou over in Pudong again.” He scratched his head. “No, I think it was nine there.”

  They were up to fifty-four now, and had ventured into territory that Li could never have imagined. He glanced at Mei-Ling. She was very pale. He turned back to Jiang. “And all women?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve no idea. Like I said, they kept me at arm’s length, you know? Even though I was trained.” He smiled ruefully. Then, “But they did let me cut them up afterwards. I offered, you know, for a bit of extra cash. And I was good at it. I would have jointed them, but they didn’t want that. Just cut them up, they said.” He laughed. “With a goddamn cleaver! Can you imagine? Someone with my skills and they give me a cleaver. But I was good at it. Accurate. Third cervical vertebra. Upper third of the humerus. Mid femur. But your pathologist must know that. What’s her name . . . Margaret Campbell? She did all the autopsies, didn’t she?”

  “Who did you deal with at the clinic?”

  “A couple of people.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know their names. They weren’t exactly chatty, know what I mean? And there was this woman from upstairs who always gave me the money. You know, in a big white envelope. Big bucks.” He grinned again. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “It’s not heaven you’ll be going to,” Mei-Ling said grimly.

  “What about Cui Feng?” Li asked. “Ever deal with him?”

  Jiang looked blank. “Who is he?”

  “The boss.”

  “Oh, him. Naw. He never even spoke to me. He’d walk past you in the corridor, and it was like you weren’t even there.”

  Li said, “Tell me about the bracelet?”

  Jiang’s smile faded, and for the first time he looked genuinely sad. “She was beautiful,” he said. “Of all of them, she was really the most beautiful. Perfect. I don’t know how they missed the bracelet. I mean, usually there wasn’t as much as a stud earring. But there it was dangling from her wrist when they brought her out.” He shook his head. “Broke my heart to see her like that, all cut open. She was so beautiful.” He looked from one to the other, appealing for their understanding. “I fell in love with her, you know? Hardest thing I ever had to do was cut her up. But she was dead. Nothing I could do. So I kept the bracelet.” He picked it up now and ran it lovingly between his thumb and forefinger, recalling with sadness some scene of unimaginable horror. A young girl murdered, cut open, hacked up. And he had somehow found love in it.

  Li looked at him with undisguised disgust. The kid was sick. Crazy. Beyond redemption. He slipped a copy of the graphic of the Mongolian from his folder and pushed it across the table. Jiang drew his attention away from the bracelet to look at it.

  “Ugly bastard, isn’t he?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Never set eyes on him.”

  And much as he hated to admit it, Li thought the boy was probably telling the truth.

  Li’s anger at Procurator General Yue hummed across Huang’s office. He was exhausted. After more than three hours of detailed interrogation, emotional stress and lack of sleep were crushing down on him, and his patience was at its end. “I don’t care who Cui’s pals are,” he said through clenched teeth, “or how long he’s been in the Party, or whether he dresses to the left or to the right. I want that search warrant.”

  Yue remained calm. He exchanged looks with Section Chief Huang and said, “I understand that the kidnapping of your niece has placed you under extreme stress, Deputy Section Chief Li, and so I am prepared to overlook your behaviour on this occasion.”

  Li gasped his exasperation. “Don’t bloody patronise me!”

  Yue continued, unruffled. “You have absolutely no evidence against Comrade Cui, or any of his employees. I can’t justify issuing a warrant to search his premises. All you have are the ramblings of a demented medical student who admits to hacking up the bodies and burying them at Lujiazui.” He stood up, animated for the first time, and gestured to the heavens. “I mean, even if we are to believe him, in an organisation the size of Cui’s it is perfectly conceivable that these procedures could have been conducted without Cui’s knowledge.”

  Li would have laughed were it not so tragic. “Have you been to the Shanghai World Clinic?” he asked. And without waiting for an answer, “It is a converted villa from the days of the Concession. There are two small operating theatres and a handful of special care beds. It is where Cui has his office.” And, echoing Yue’s choice of words, “It is inconceivable that more than forty women could have been surgically murdered right under his nose without him knowing about it.”

  Yue waved a hand dismissively. “If we are to believe your . . . medical student,” he said. “And I see no reason why we should.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know what more you need, Li. You have your man right there. It doesn’t take much of a leap in imagination to conclude that this young man abducted these women and cut them open for his own perverse pleasures. Probably in the operating room at the Medical University when everyone else had gone for the day.”

  Li knew that, by addressing Cui as “Comrade,” Yue was letting him know that he, too, was a Party member. But it made no difference to Li. He shook his head. “The sample of twine we took from the university didn’t match the twine that was used to sew up the women from Lujiazui.”

  “So?” Yue said. “It was a different ball of twine. The point is, there is nothing to connect Cui to any of this except for the extravagant claims of this lunatic you have in the cells downstairs.”

  “What about the abortions?”

  “We’ve been over this before,” Yue sighed wearily.

  “And the Mongolian?”

  “Who knows?” The Procurator General shrugged theatrically. “A friend of Jiang’s. An accomplice.”

  “We have nothing that connects the Mongolian to Jiang.”

  “Or to Cui!”

  There was a tense stand-off between the two, and a long silence broken only, in the end, by the ringing of Huang’s phone. The Section Chief, who had been sitting listening impassively, answered it quickly. After a short exchange, he hung up and got to his feet. He looked like a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He said, “I hav
e to go. My wife is dying.”

  That simple statement of fact was shocking somehow in the context of what had preceded it. Both Li and Yue were chastened by it. “Of course,” Yue said. “I’m sorry, Huang.”

  Huang nodded, lifted his coat from the stand, and hurried out. But somehow he left behind him the ghost of his not yet dead wife, a presence in the room that stood between Li and Yue. For fully a minute neither man spoke. Li crossed to the window and stood staring out at the rain, hands plunged deep in his pockets. For Li, Huang’s dying wife was not an issue. For reasons beyond him, but somehow connected to this case, Xinxin had been kidnapped. His first, and most pressing, loyalty had to be to her, and the hope that he could find her kidnappers before they harmed her—if they had not already done so. He turned to face the Procurator General, grimly determined.

  He said, “I am taking a team of detectives and forensics officers to the Shanghai World Clinic. I can go either with or without a warrant. If I have to go without, then you will leave me no choice but to charge you with attempting to pervert the course of justice, and I will begin corruption investigations against you.”

  The Procurator General visibly paled. He was not used to being threatened by a junior law officer. But he was in no doubt that the threat was a real one. He opened his mouth to respond, but Li held up a finger to stop him.

  “Don’t,” Li said, “interrupt me until I am finished.” He drew a deep breath. “If I have to, I will take this to the highest authorities in Beijing, and let me assure you that your friendship with some adviser to the Mayor of Shanghai will not afford you the least protection. You may recall that in the last few years a Deputy Mayor of the city of Beijing, a Minister of Agriculture and a Deputy Procurator General have all been executed after being found guilty of corruption charges. I can’t claim credit for all three, but I brought the charges against two of them.”

  Procurator General Yue glared at Li, a deep simmering anger smouldering in his eyes. Li returned the stare, unwavering. Finally Yue said, “Let me assure you, Deputy Section Chief Li, that if you fail to find any evidence against Comrade Cui, this is the last time you will ever threaten anyone.”