The Killing Room (The China Thrillers 3)

by Peter May

  He had re-read her file during the flight, the autopsy report, the forensic evidence, the dozens of leads that had taken them nowhere. The only real clue to her identity had been distinctive gold foil dental restorations, expensive and unusual in China. But none of the Beijing clinics capable of such work had had any record of her. Found buried in a shallow grave on waste ground on a bleak February morning during Spring Festival, they knew no more about her now than they did then.

  A heavy jolt and the squeal of tyres brought him back to the present. He glanced out across wet tarmac to the low, old-fashioned terminal building. Twenty bodies in a single grave! It seemed inconceivable to him. The spectre of some grim room with decomposing bodies laid out side by side rose up before him, and he wondered what it was that had ever drawn him to join the police. And then Yifu was there again at his shoulder, and he had no need to answer his own question.

  The Arrivals concourse was crowded with travellers, mostly from internal destinations now that Hongqiao had become eclipsed by the new international airport at Pudong. Expectant faces were turned towards the exit gate as the passengers from Beijing flooded out. Some cards were raised with names scrawled in untidy characters. Li saw his name held above the head of an attractive young woman with long hair divided in a centre parting and tumbling over narrow shoulders. She was scanning the faces in the crowd and appeared to recognise him immediately. She smiled, a broad, open smile that dimpled her cheeks. And Li saw that she had very dark eyes, almost black, and that one of them turned in very slightly. But it didn’t spoil her looks so much as lend her a sense of quirky individuality. She was wearing jeans and a denim jacket over a white sweatshirt, and a pair of scruffy blue and white trainers.

  ‘Deputy Section Chief Li?’

  Li nodded. ‘That’s me.’ Physically he towered over her, but she had a presence, an innate sense of self-confidence that lent her stature, and she didn’t seem so small.

  ‘Hi.’ She held out her hand.

  He shook it and was surprised by the firmness of her grip. He said, ‘I was told I would be met by my opposite number here, Deputy Section Chief Nien.’

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Were you?’ And she reached out to take his holdall. ‘I’ll take your bag.’

  Her move caught him by surprise. ‘That’s okay,’ he said. But she had already snatched it and turned towards the sliding glass doors, swinging it up and over her shoulder.

  ‘I’ve got a car waiting outside,’ she said.

  Li hurried after her. ‘So what happened to Nien?’

  The girl never broke her stride. ‘The Deputy Section Chief’s got better things to do than provide a taxi service for some hotshot from Beijing.’ A dark blue Volkswagen Santana saloon sat idling at the kerb. The girl lifted the trunk and dropped Li’s bag in.

  Li felt his hackles rise. This was not the courtesy or respect an officer of his rank was entitled to expect. Hotshot! And he remembered Wu’s sarcasm in Beijing. You’re such a fucking superstar, boss. Is that how people saw him, just because of the publicity a couple of high profile cases had brought? ‘What’s your rank, officer?’ he said sharply.

  She shrugged. ‘I’m just the driver. Do you want to get in or do you want to walk?’

  There was a long moment of stand-off before Li finally decided this was not the place to deal with her. Silently fuming he walked around the car and climbed in the passenger side. The rain battered down on glistening asphalt, red and white flags hung limply in a row, a ghostly mist, like gauze, almost obscured the car park and the pink multi-storey buildings beyond.

  The girl slipped into the driver’s seat and set the wipers going to clear the windscreen. ‘Your name,’ Li said through clenched teeth.

  She looked at him, affecting confusion. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’d like to know your name, so that I can take the appropriate action when we get to headquarters.’

  ‘803.’

  He glared at her. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what it’s called – the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. 803. A cop show here on Shanghai TV called us that because of our address – 803 Zhongshan Beiyi Road. It stuck.’ Suddenly her face split into a grin and she started laughing, an odd braying laugh that was strangely beguiling.

  Li found a puzzled smile sneaking up on him, in spite of himself. ‘What? What’s so funny?’

  She held out her hand. ‘Maybe we should start again, Deputy Section Chief. I’m Nien Mei-Ling.’

  He frowned. ‘Nien … Deputy Section Chief Nien?’

  She laughed again. ‘Is it really so hard to believe that a mere woman could achieve the same rank as the great Li Yan? Or is it only in Shanghai that women hold up half the sky?’

  Li shook the outstretched hand, startled and bemused. ‘I’m sorry, I thought––’

  ‘Yeah, I know … that I was just some junior officer sent to pick you up. Couldn’t possibly be Deputy Section Chief Nien.’ But there was no rancour in this, no chip on the shoulder. Just a wicked sense of mischief. And Li found her smile irresistible, and held on to her hand perhaps a little longer than necessary.

  *

  The expressway from the airport became Yan’an Viaduct Road, a six-lane highway raised on concrete pillars that ran through the heart of Shanghai, bisecting it from west to east. Li gazed out through the rain in amazement as all around tower blocks rose up in white and pink stone, a monolith made entirely, it seemed, out of green glass, rows of incongruous villas that owed more to the architecture of ancient Greece than ancient China, whole blocks of square three-storey buildings in cream stucco and red brick, strange silver cylindrical towers that disappeared into the cloud. Gigantic neon signs on every other rooftop advertised everything from Pepsi-Cola to Fujifilm. It was nearly fifteen years since he had last been in Shanghai, and it had changed beyond recognition. There were still the single-storey blocks of traditional Chinese shops and apartments crammed into crowded narrow lanes, still the bizarre pockets of European colonial architecture left by the British and the French from the days of the International Settlement. But from the seeds planted by Deng’s concept of a socialist market economy, a whole new city had grown up around them, a city filled with contradictions around every corner, bicycles and BMWs, a city of extremes and excesses, a future vision of China.

  Mei-Ling glanced at him. ‘Changed a bit since you were last here?’

  Li nodded. ‘You could say that.’

  She smiled. ‘Wait till you scratch beneath the surface. It’s changed more than you think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sex shops and massage parlours. All-night clubs and discos – hell, we even own a few.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Public Security.’ She took in Li’s astonishment. ‘People’s Liberation Army, too. Disco till dawn with the PLA.’ A small bell hanging from her rear-view mirror chinged as she swerved around a slow lorry and switched lanes. ‘And then there’s the dogs.’

  ‘Dogs?’ Li was puzzled.

  ‘Seems they’re off the menu and on to the accessory list. These days you’re no one if you don’t own a dog. The European purebreds are particularly popular. The Russian mafia’s making a fortune doping them up on vodka and smuggling them down on the Trans-Siberian express. We’ve got pet parlours and veterinarian surgeries springing up all over the city.’ She paused. ‘And, of course, there’s the Taiwanese Mafia. They’re moving in big-time, running protection rackets and prostitution. There’s only one China as far as they’re concerned. We’ve got a population of fourteen million in this city, a hundred and seventy-five thousand taxis, the highest rate of economic growth in China, the fastest growing crime rate and eighteen bodies in a building site in Pudong. Welcome to Shanghai, Mr Li.’

  ‘Eighteen? I thought it was twenty.’

  ‘Well, on a head count, literally, we’ve got sixteen. But there are eighteen torsos, and we’re still finding bits.’

  They swooped past the granite-blocks, c
olonnaded columns and spectacular golden spire of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, built in the fifties by the Russians in the excessive Stalinesque style of the time.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to tell me about the body you found in Beijing?’

  Li dragged himself away from the sights and sounds and revelations of Shanghai and focused his thoughts on the file he had read on the plane on the way down. ‘A young girl, we think early twenties. She was found by public utility workers on a piece of waste ground in Haidian district near the Summer Palace last February, during the New Year holiday. There had been heavy rain, and they were drawn to the spot by what looked like blood pooling in the mud. They started digging. She was just a couple of feet down in two black plastic bags. The pathologist reckoned she’d only been there about a week.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Uncertain. Her heart stopped. That’s the only thing we know for sure. She’d been opened up by someone with pretty sophisticated surgical skills. Heart, liver, pancreas and one kidney had all been removed.’

  ‘Organ theft?’

  Li shook his head. ‘No. The organs were all still there in one of the plastic bags.’

  ‘And the rest of her?’

  ‘In the other one. Hacked to bits by someone with a butcher’s saw by the look of it.’

  ‘Anything else of significance?’

  Li shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to know what’s significant. She had the most common blood group – O. But she’d had some pretty expensive dental work, though not done by anyone in Beijing. It’s possible she’d had treatment in the West.’

  ‘Any clothes?’

  ‘Not a stitch. And no jewellery. No distinguishing marks. And the AFIS came up with zip on her fingerprints.’

  Mei-Ling looked thoughtful. ‘And motive? Would you hazard a guess?’

  ‘Couldn’t even begin,’ Li said. ‘Not sexual, at least not in any conventional way. There was no sign of violation, no mutilation of the sexual organs or the breasts.’ He was aware of feeling slightly uncomfortable discussing these details with a woman. He shrugged. ‘We hit a brick wall.’

  They passed under a sweeping junction of crisscrossing flyovers, and through a maze of buildings to their left Li caught sight of the remodelled People’s Square with its circular museum and glass theatre and vast white municipal monolith. Ahead through a forest of skyscrapers he spotted a strange green spire punctuated twice in its upward sweep by red and silver globes, all supported on four gigantic splayed legs. It looked for all the world like a Martian rocket ship. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he asked.

  She followed his eyeline and grinned. ‘Oh, that? That’s the Pearl TV Tower, across the river in Pudong.’ She glanced at him. ‘You know that before the Second World War Shanghai was known in the West as the Paris of the East? Now the good citizens of the city like to think they have their very own Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘It’s certainly as ugly,’ Li said. But the tower sank out of sight as the road dipped down and ran underground to the tunnel that would take them under the Huangpu River. He said, ‘What about the bodies you found this morning? Anything I described sound familiar?’

  She nodded. ‘Very. But I’ll let you see for yourself first, then you’d better go meet my boss.’

  ‘What about the American? The guy who fell into the pit. They never told me what happened to him.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said casually, ‘they got him out alive okay. Then he just went to pieces.’

  She flicked him a glance, and there was a moment of uncertainty between them before air escaped from her lips in a series of small explosions and she burst out laughing, her strange, infectious braying laugh, and he found himself laughing, too. Humour, no matter how black, was the only defence they ever had against the sick world they moved in.

  *

  Their Santana glided through the wide empty streets of Pudong’s Lujiazui financial district. Street lights reflected on wet sidewalks in the gloom of the late afternoon. All around them thirty-storey buildings soared into the darkening sky, but lights shone in only a few solitary windows. Investment in construction had so far outstripped demand. Across the river, traffic had come to a standstill along the Bund, a broad, waterfront boulevard characterised by its sweep of grand, stone-built European-style buildings with domes and spires and clock towers. At a glance they might have been in Paris or London. From the river itself came the mournful call of vessels sounding foghorns in the haze.

  On their right, through open gates in salmon-coloured walls, floodlights raised on tall stands shone behind sheets of clear plastic that gave the appearance of breathing in time with the cold wind that blew in off the water. Beneath them, blurry figures in white moved about like ghosts, working in the freezing cold liquid mud in a painstaking search for more body bits. Armed guards stood by the gates, and more than two dozen police and forensic vehicles were drawn up haphazardly in the street outside.

  ‘That’s the building site,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We commandeered the basement car park of the office block over there.’ She nodded towards a tall dark tower block across the street. ‘It’s empty. The pathologists are laying the bodies out there until we’re sure we’ve found all the pieces.’ She turned left, through a break in the central reservation, crossed the opposite carriageway, and drove down a ramp into a subterranean car park where she drew in behind a phalanx of other vehicles. Li recognised the distinctive hu character, signifying Shanghai, followed by the letter ‘O’, that preceded the registrations on all unmarked police cars.

  Mei-Ling flashed her maroon Public Security ID at the uniformed officer who challenged them, and Li followed her between pillars into an area brightly lit by improvised lamps. The intensity of the light created a sense of unreality about the scene that greeted them. More than twenty trestle tables covered in white paper ranged against a bleak grey concrete wall, lined up side by side and with just a couple of feet separating them. On some, bits of body lay wrapped in the plastic bags they had been brought down in. Others had been removed and arranged in bizarre parodies of the human bodies they had once been, legs and arms laid next to torsos and heads, a gruesome jigsaw of human pieces. Most of the bits were still unrecognisable, except where assistants in white plastic suits were gently hosing them down to reveal the decaying dimpled flesh of hands and feet, knees and elbows, breasts and bellies. Only the smell brought home the reality. The sweet, heavy smell of decomposing human flesh that filled this underground chamber of horrors and almost made Li gag. He made a determined effort to breathe through his mouth. He glanced at Mei-Ling, but she did not appear to be affected.

  On the wall, behind each table, crude paper charts had been pasted up itemising the parts laid out on each, and listing the bits still missing. There were roughly drawn diagrams of each of the bodies.

  ‘Ah, Miss Nien. At last you honour us with your presence.’ A tall man in his late fifties, thin black hair scraped back across his scalp, crossed the concrete floor to greet them, his breath billowing before him in the cold air. His eyes were little more than bloodshot slits through which he peered myopically. His skin was mottled and brown, and his teeth stained from years of smoking. He was smoking now, a cigarette between his lips, dropping ash down his stained white coat. The illusion of myopia, Li decided, was created by his need to screw up his eyes against the smoke that seemed to seep from his face as if from cracks in a flue.

  Mei-Ling said, ‘Dr Lan, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing.’

  Dr Lan scrutinised Li carefully, then permitted himself a small smile. He held out his hand. ‘Of course. It is an honour to meet you, Mr Li.’

  ‘Dr Lan is our senior pathologist,’ Mei-Ling said. And she turned to him. ‘Any initial thoughts, Doctor.’

  ‘Very preliminary.’ He walked them past the bodies, lighting another cigarette from the remains of the previous one. ‘Of course, I received my training in the army, so I have seen much worse. What’s disturbing about this is that all the victims are wo
men.’

  Li was taken aback. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Every last one, Deputy Section Chief. Ranging in ages, I’d say, from late teens to early thirties.’

  Mei-Ling glanced at Li. ‘A sexual motive?’

  ‘Too early to say, Miss Nien. We’re still trying to figure out which bits go with which.’ He stopped at one of the tables and waved his cigarette towards a partially decomposed head, black holes where the eyes should have been. Li noticed that a ‘Y’ incision had been made in the torso beneath it, and ribs cut open to expose the chest cavity. ‘As you can see, decomposition is well under way,’ Lan said. ‘Only somebody very close to this young lady might be able to make a visual identification. It’s also making visual matching of the pieces virtually impossible. We’re comparing the bone ends where the limbs have been hacked off – we x-rayed all the pieces as they came down in the bags. But the best bet is DNA comparison. I’ve had small sections of skeletal muscle cut away from each of the body parts and sent on ice to the lab. Once we’ve found and matched all the bits, I’ll have the assembled parts of each body sent over to the mortuary and put in separate drawers in the chiller.’

  ‘Can you say how long they’d been buried?’ Li asked.

  ‘Not with any degree of accuracy. But if you want to put your hand inside one of the body cavities, Detective, you’ll find that it’s pretty cold in there.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Li said. ‘What’s the significance?’

  Lan grinned. ‘I’d say they’d been frozen. If you examine the bits closely you’ll find signs of freezer burn on the flesh. They were probably buried straight from the freezer. The most dense pieces, the torsos, are almost, but not quite, fully defrosted. Given that they were only two to three feet down, they were probably buried about four or five days ago.’