The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “It’s a guess,” Margaret said. “He might be Chinese, trained in America.”

  Mei-Ling said to Li, “We should put checks on all points of departure. As soon as we get a list of employees we should know who we are looking for.” Li nodded, and she said, “I’ll go back now and put things in motion.”

  She hurried out, past the bemused officers standing in the corridor who had only the vaguest idea of what had gone on inside. In the silence of the administration office, all that could be heard were the hum of the fluorescent lights and the computer, and the rain on the window. Margaret looked into Li’s eyes and saw in them his fear for Xinxin, bleak and full of hopelessness.

  III

  Painted on three of the white panels of the high blue wall were toucans in flight, each one balancing two pint glasses of Guinness on its yellow beak. A haphazard jumble of bicycles was parked along the wall under the dripping trees. By the gate, a painted ship in a bottle stood over a sign for O’Malley’s. Margaret and Li huddled together under their umbrella, splashing through the gutters. They had left the investigating team to de-construct the clinic piece by piece. Dai had offered to drive them back to 803, but Li had said they would get a taxi. In Shanghai it was not possible to walk ten paces along any street without a taxi cruising by. But they were well off the beaten track, and on this wet Sunday night they had walked the length of two streets and seen only one sodden cyclist shrouded in a glistening cape. Li cursed himself for not having telephoned a taxi from the clinic.

  Margaret said, “Let’s go in here.”

  Li looked at the bizarre sight of the Guinness-balancing toucans and asked, “What is it?”

  “It says it’s an Irish pub,” Margaret said. “Improbable though that might be. But they’re bound to have a phone.”

  As Li pushed open the high blue gate, Margaret felt like Alice stepping through the looking glass into Wonderland. What greeted them on the other side of the wall could not have been imagined from the street. Here lay a beautifully kept garden, with manicured lawns and a crazy-paved path lined by trees. White-painted wrought-iron garden furniture stood dripping in the rain. Concealed lighting led them down the path past an old-fashioned road sign mounted on a black and white striped pole. In Gaelic and English, signs pointed in three different directions to Cork, Galway and Dublin. Apparently they were only nine miles from Dublin. Under a pitched roof raised on pale blue pillars there were more tables and chairs sheltering beneath redundant sun umbrellas splashed with the Irish harp of the Guinness logo. Above the entrance to a large, whitewashed house, a painted blue and gold sign incongruously announced O’MALLEY’S IRISH PUB. The covered courtyard was lit by coach lamps.

  Margaret almost whispered, “What the hell is this place? Are we still in China?”

  Li shook his head in amazement. He had never seen anything like it. “You would not think so,” he said. After the revelations of the last hour, neither of them was prepared for dealing with this.

  They walked inside to a gloomy interior hung with fishing nets and glass buoys. There was an open stone fireplace, old sea trunks, ancient glassed bookshelves lined with antiquarian books leaning at crazy angles. Above the bar a musket and a pair of ancient pistols flanked a sign that read: IRISH GOODS SOLD HERE. Around the central bar area, a railed gallery looked down upon them. Margaret felt as though she had either strayed through some kind of time warp, or walked on to a film set. The place was empty. It was still early. Not yet six o’clock. “Hello,” Margaret called out.

  A tall girl with long red hair and green eyes stepped out from a back room to greet them from behind the bar. To Margaret, after a week of blue-black hair and Asian faces, the girl seemed absurdly out of place. She smiled at them. “Hello there, folks, yer early tonight,” she said in a lilting Southern Irish brogue.

  “Is there a telephone I can use?” Li asked.

  “Sure. Just through the back there,” she said, pointing. Li went off to phone, and the girl turned back to Margaret. “I’m Siobhan,” she said. “You look like you might have a bit of Celtic blood in you.”

  “On my father’s side,” Margaret said, and she thought how bizarre it was that the part of her father that she carried in her genes should somehow connect with an Irish girl in Shanghai.

  “American,” the girl said. “You been here long?” Margaret shook her head. She didn’t feel like indulging in idle conversation. The girl said, “I been here a month. It’s great. This is where all the ex-pats hang out, you know? Three hours from now the place’ll be jumpin’. It’s great crack.” She paused, perhaps realising that Margaret was not interested in small talk. “You want a drink? Sure, yer man there looks like he could do with one.”

  It wasn’t the girl’s fault. She was just trying to be friendly. She had no idea that just a couple of streets away dozens of women had been slaughtered for their organs, hacked to pieces and stuffed in a freezer. She was just here for a good time, a six-month adventure in exotic Shanghai, serving drinks to wealthy ex-pats in a quasi-Irish bar. Home from home. Just don’t ever get an abortion, Margaret wanted to tell her. Instead, she said, “No, thanks. He’s just calling a taxi.”

  The girl shrugged. “Oh, well, if you need me for anything, just holler.” And she disappeared into the back room again.

  Li came back from the phone. “There’ll be one here in a few minutes.”

  They stood in silence in this strange place, uncertain what to say, how to pass the time as they waited. Margaret perched on the edge of a bench seat, and Li stood with his hands thrust in his pockets staring into space.

  After a very long minute he said, “I should never have brought her here.”

  Margaret looked up, full of sympathy, sharing his pain. She wanted to hold him and tell him it would be all right. But it wasn’t. And she didn’t know that it would be. “You had no choice,” she said.

  “I do now,” he said. “At least, I will if . . . when . . . we find her. She deserves better than this.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will quit the police.”

  Margaret was shocked. “You can’t do that, Li Yan, it’s your life.”

  He shook his head. “It is not my life that is important.” He took a deep breath and tried to hold back the emotion that was building up inside him. “Besides,” he said, “I am sick of this. Death, murder, brutality. If that is all we ever know, all we ever see, what does it turn us into, what does it make us?”

  “It grinds us down and makes us tired and cynical when our resistance is low. And that’s no time to be making decisions about anything.” She paused. “You told me once, Li Yan, that you believed in fairness and justice. That’s why you joined the police.”

  He snorted his derision. “Justice! I cannot even bring Cui Feng in for questioning.”

  “You will,” Margaret said. “When you get the evidence, you’ll get the warrant. Don’t lose sight of that, Li Yan. That’s what’s important now. Getting the evidence.”

  “What is important now is getting little Xinxin back,” Li said fiercely. “If he has hurt that little girl . . .”

  Margaret stood up and took both his hands and squeezed them. “Li Yan,” she said softly, with a confidence she did not feel, “we will get her back. We will.” She felt the tension straining in him.

  “I am scared, Margaret. I am so scared for her.”

  And they heard their taxi peeping its horn outside the gate.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I

  Lights blazed from the windows of 803 into a black Shanghai night. And still the rain fell. Li and Margaret ran the twenty metres from the gate to the main entrance, but got soaked all over again. On the eighth floor, the detectives’ room in Section Two was in chaos. Phones rang, keyboards chattered, cigarettes burned in ashtrays creating the impression that the place was on fire. Condensation misted the windows. Shirt-sleeved detectives talked into phones, shouted to one another across the room. Uniformed secretaries hurried in and out with f
axes and files. Margaret headed on down the corridor to Li’s office, and Li pushed his way through the chaos looking for Mei-Ling. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned. It was Detective Qian. He was clutching a sheaf of papers.

  “We’ve got that list you were after, Chief. All the employees at the Shanghai World Clinic. We’re trying to get the warrants processed now to bring them in.”

  He nodded, but Li was distracted. “Where’s Deputy Section Chief Nien?”

  “Don’t know, Chief. Around somewhere.” Li was about to move off, but Qian snatched at his sleeve again. “You’ll like this bit, though.” Li stopped. “For the last five years Cui has been employing the services of an ex-pat American surgeon who’s been in Shanghai since the early nineties.” Qian looked triumphant. “One Daniel F. Stein. He’s fifty-eight, married to a Chinese girl half his age, and he’s not at home.”

  “Have we checked the airport and the docks?”

  “Doing that right now.”

  “Good.” Li paused. “Do we know where Cui is?”

  Qian looked at his watch. “He’s due to attend one of Director Hu’s banquets at the Xiaoshaoxing Hotel in about an hour and a half.”

  A spike of anger stabbed at Li’s chest at the thought of Cui eating and drinking with the wealthy and powerful, breathing in the rarefied air of Director Hu’s banquet, untouched and untouchable, while Xinxin was held captive somewhere or, even worse, lay dead in some cold, dark place. He wondered what the celebration was. Escape from justice? “Let me know if there are any developments,” he said.

  Qian nodded and Li pushed off through the hubbub in search of the night duty officer. He found him sitting in his small, cluttered office two along from Li’s. The duty officer was wearing a pair of half-moon reading glasses and was wading through copies of the warrant requests that had been sent to the procurator’s office for processing. He looked up as Li came in and nodded acknowledgment. “Deputy Section Chief,” he said.

  Li said, “Have you seen Mei-Ling?”

  “Sure,” the duty officer nodded. “About half an hour ago.” He glanced beyond Li to the corridor and got up to close the door. He lowered his voice, as if he thought they might be overheard. “I spoke to her about a rather . . .” he searched for the right word, “delicate matter.” He offered Li a cigarette, and when he accepted lit it, then lit one for himself and returned to his desk to sit down again. “Section Chief Huang signed out four firearms to the detectives who accompanied you to the American’s apartment this morning. Only three have been returned.”

  Li frowned. This was totally unexpected. Almost a distraction. “Well, you must know which officer it was that didn’t return theirs.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” the duty officer said, and he did indeed look troubled. He peered up at Li over his glasses. “They all claim to have returned their weapons to the Section Chief.”

  “What does Section Chief Huang say?”

  The older man shook his head. “I haven’t been able to contact him.”

  “And you told all this to Mei-Ling?” The duty officer nodded. “And what did she say?”

  “She was very agitated, Deputy Section Chief. She looked like shit when she came in, and she looked even worse after I’d spoken to her. She said to leave it with her.”

  “And you don’t know where she is now?”

  The duty officer held out his hands, palms up. “I haven’t seen her since I spoke to her.”

  Li was tempted for a moment simply to dismiss the whole thing. An irksome oversight by the Chief, or by one of his detectives. But there was something in the duty officer’s description of Mei-Ling’s reaction that gave him pause for thought. “Well, have you tried Huang at home?” he asked. “He left to go there this afternoon. Apparently his wife was fading fast.”

  The duty officer nodded. “I know. I’ve telephoned several times, but there’s no reply.”

  Li went back down the corridor. Mei-Ling’s office was empty. He tried the detectives’ room again, and Huang’s office. But there was no sign of her. He went into his own office and found Margaret sitting brooding at the desk. She looked up hopefully as he entered. “Have you seen Mei-Ling?” he asked. She shook her head and he went straight back out.

  The duty officer looked up, eyes full of interest and caution, when Li returned. “Did you find her?”

  Li said, “She’s not in the building.” He hesitated for only a moment. “I want Huang’s address and a car.”

  Huang’s apartment block was an older building in a quiet residential area in Ni Cheng Qiao District, north of People’s Square, a private rental paid for by the Municipal Police. The block was in a compound behind a high wall, affording it some privacy from the road. There were streetlamps and trees, a few cars parked near the entrance, and dozens of rickety bicycles jammed cheek by jowl under a corrugated plastic canopy that shed copious amounts of rainwater on to the forecourt below. Lights shining from uncurtained windows peppered the east face of the twelve-storey building like moth-holes in a lamp shade. Huang’s apartment was on the second floor.

  Li drew his car at an angle into the sidewalk beside Mei-Ling’s Santana. He looked at it for a moment, saw the little bell that chimed so sweetly hanging motionless from the rear-view mirror. He had a bad feeling about all this. He started to get out of the car. “You stay here,” he told Margaret.

  “I will not,” she said fiercely. “I’m not sitting out here on my own.” And she got out the passenger side.

  The door of the elevator stood open in the lobby, throwing a cold yellow light out into the dark. Inside, a middle-aged woman wrapped in a padded blue jacket sat on a stool, her face buried in a book, a jar of cold green tea at her feet. There was a smell of stale cigarette smoke and urine. She did not even look up as they entered. “Second floor,” Li said.

  The woman kept her eyes on her book, reached out and felt for the second button up on the tarnished steel panel and pressed it. The elevator jerked, as if it had made a little cough, and the doors juddered shut. The steel box started a slow ascent. At the second floor the doors jerked open again and Li and Margaret stepped out into a gloomy corridor. As the doors shut behind them they heard the woman pulling a crackle of phlegm into her mouth and spitting it out on the floor.

  They found Huang’s apartment at the end of the passageway. The light bulb here had burned out and not been replaced, and it was even gloomier. The steel gate in front of the door stood ajar, half opened into the corridor. Beyond it, the main door stood wide open. Inside, the apartment appeared to be in complete darkness.

  Li pulled the gate fully open. “Stay here,” he said to Margaret. “And this time I mean it.” She nodded mutely. She had no idea what was going on, but she sensed Li’s tension and it scared her.

  Li felt almost smothered by the deep silence of the apartment. In the distant, reflected light from the landing, he felt his way gingerly along a narrow hallway. He passed an open door into a tiny kitchen. The next along was half-glazed, limp curtains providing a small measure of privacy for an equally small bathroom. As he got further down the passage, and his eyes became accustomed to the dark, he saw a faint glow falling out across the hallway from an open door at the end. The apartment seemed infused with an all-pervading smell of antiseptic and disinfectant, like a hospital. It reminded Li of Jiang Baofu’s place. His own tremulous breathing sounded inordinately loud. “Hello,” he called, to make some louder sound, and his voice cracked feebly. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder. “Hello?”

  He was greeted only by silence. He turned into the frame of the open door and was bathed in the soft warm glow of a nightlight on a bedside table. The smell of antiseptic was almost suffocating in the warm air of the room. The gaunt figure of a woman lay on the bed, a single sheet draped across her lifeless, wasted body. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, her jaw hanging slack, her mouth gaping. A tiny noise somewhere behind him made Li spin round. The door opposite was also open, the room unlit. But in the
blackness, Li saw a small movement of light, and in a moment of choking fear realised that it was the reflected light in the movement of an eye.

  A lamp snapped on and he was, for a moment, blinded and startled. He raised an arm, almost defensively, to shield his eyes, and saw Section Chief Huang sitting in a chair at the far side of the room across the hall. He was drawing one of his hands away from a small lamp on a table at the side of his chair. The other pointed a gun directly at Li. In that same moment, Huang realised who Li was, and he lowered the gun slowly into his lap. The two men stared at each other, unmoving for an immeasurable period of time, before gradually Li became aware that a shadow on the floor just inside the door opposite was cast by the leg and foot of someone lying just out of his line of vision. A sick feeling rose in his stomach. There was something horribly familiar about the faded denim and the scuffed white trainer. He stepped slowly forward, crossing the hall and entering the living room where Huang still sat motionless, watching Li with unblinking eyes.

  Careful not to make any sudden movement, Li raised a hand and pushed the door wide. Mei-Ling was lying face down on the floor, a large pool of blood soaking into the carpet around her. Li could see her face in profile, long black hair lying untidily across it, her mouth open a little, lips pursed where a small amount of blood had oozed out. “Oh, God,” he whispered, without knowing which God he was appealing to. Any one would do. He knelt quickly at her side, and with trembling fingers felt for a pulse in her neck. But she was already quite cold, and he almost recoiled as the shock of it gripped him. He looked up at Huang, full of incomprehension and confusion. Huang looked back at him like a dead man from his grave. The lamp beside him cast an orange glow on one side of his bloodless face, the other was striped white by the light of the streetlamps that fell in narrow wedges through the Venetian blinds.