The Killing Room (The China Thrillers 3)

by Peter May

  ‘So it’s going to be impossible to determine time of death.’

  Lan laughed. ‘I see you’ve inherited your uncle’s penchant for stating the obvious, Mr Li.’

  Li stiffened. ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My uncle used to say, Doctor, that it is the obvious which is most often overlooked. It’s one of the things that made him such a good cop.’

  The pathologist guffawed and began choking on the smoke from his cigarette. Noisily he hawked the loose phlegm from his lungs and spat it out on the floor. When he recovered his breath he looked at Li, dark eyes twinkling behind the slits. ‘I see you’ve inherited more than just his pedantry.’

  ‘So you’ll understand if I continue with the pedantic theme of time of death.’

  But Lan was intent on taking his time. He lit another cigarette and threw away the old one before he said, ‘They could have been in the freezer for weeks, or months, Deputy Section Chief. In all likelihood they were killed at different times and put into cold storage. There’s no way to determine when any of them died.’

  Mei-Ling said, ‘But you will be able to determine cause of death?’

  ‘Most likely, Miss Nien, once we’ve done the autopsies.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette and peeled it away from his lips. ‘The only trouble is, someone’s been there before us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.

  Lan clamped his cigarette between his lips again. ‘Just what I say, Detective. At least partial autopsies were carried out on every one of these poor ladies before they were put in the freezer.’

  *

  Outside, night had fallen, and the bleak, dark concrete landscape of Lujiazui had been transformed into a multi-coloured light show. The Pearl TV Tower and a vast globe at its base were floodlit green. Those forlorn and empty office blocks Li had seen an hour before, now soared proudly into the night sky, glowing orange, yellow, green and blue. Upriver to the south, a permanently anchored cruise ship which was now a bar and night club, burned fluorescent turquoise, painted against the blackness of the night as if by a Disney animator. Across the river the Bund blazed in luminous splendour, architectural details picked out by carefully contrived lighting. And along the curve of the north bank, where cruise ships docked at the international passenger terminal, glass buildings fired up the night, competing with gigantic neon hoardings that burned ads for beer and cars and TVs into the sky. On the river, the lights of cruisers, ferries and barges cast broken reflections on choppy waters, while above them a brightly lit dirigible advertising cigarettes plied up and down between the coloured beams of powerful searchlights that raked randomly across the sky.

  Li gaped at it in wonder. It did not seem quite real. Beijing had blazed with lights on the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, but it had been nothing like this. Mei-Ling smiled at him, as though he were some bumpkin up from the country. And in some ways he was. Beijing was the capital, the centre of art and culture in the north. But it was staid and conservative compared with the commercial excesses of the south. ‘It’s like this every night?’ he asked, wondering what the cost of it all must be.

  She nodded. ‘Until ten. Then it’s lights out and the city comes to life in another way altogether.’ Which sounded ominous to Li, and for a moment he felt a fleeting insecurity. He missed the safe, comforting familiarity of Beijing. Shanghai was as alien to him as Hong Kong or Chicago had been.

  Mei-Ling drove them back through the tunnel and up on to the Yan’an Viaduct, and they swept west through the city, turning then on to Nanbei Gaojia Road, another multi-lane viaduct that cut north to the long arc of the northern ring road. Li sat in silence, barely taking in the city lights or the long lines of commuter traffic. He thought of the eighteen women sliced up and laid out on trestle tables in the concrete tomb of an underground car park. Someone had murdered them, coldly and clinically, and then performed autopsies on the bodies before crudely dismembering them and freezing the parts. Then sometime within the past week, the frozen remains had been buried in a shallow grave on a building site where tons of concrete should have entombed them for eternity. There were similarities with the body they’d found in Beijing, although Li was not convinced yet that they had died by the same hand. But what he knew with absolute certainty was that when he went to bed tonight and closed his eyes, each and every one of them would be there, seared into his memory, sightless eyes appealing for him to find their killer. And the smell of their poor decaying bodies would be with him for days.

  He had a thought and turned to Mei-Ling. ‘Whoever dumped the bodies knew that the site was about to be buried in concrete. That must narrow the numbers.’

  She said, ‘The joint venture was big news here. Press and TV had been covering the story for days. Discounting children and old folk, that would narrow it down to about ten million people.’

  The bell that dangled from the rear-view mirror chimed as Mei-Ling turned the Santana off the Zhongshan Beiyi expressway and then doubled back beneath the overhead road to turn right into the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. They stopped at a white-marble gatehouse opposite the large gold numerals, 803, mounted on an angled wall, and suspicious eyes peered out at them from behind brightly lit windows. Then a wave of recognition as Mei-Ling smiled out of the driver’s side, and the gate concertina-ed open to let them through stone columns into a paved courtyard bounded by well-kept flower beds and neatly trimmed trees. Raised on a plinth was an ebony bust of a famous Shanghai detective, Duanmu Hongyu, now deceased. Multi-storeyed pink-tiled buildings rose up on three sides.

  Mei-Ling glanced hesitantly at Li, then said, ‘Don’t expect a very warm welcome in here.’

  Li was not entirely surprised. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’ She seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Just that some people figure we don’t need help from Beijing to solve crimes in Shanghai.’

  ‘And your boss?’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t take it personally. He’s a little distracted these days.’

  She pulled up outside a covered entrance opposite a wall on which large gold characters urged officers to extremes of courage and dedication in their pursuit of justice. They took the lift up to the third floor where pale-faced detectives wilted under fluorescent lights in the pursuit of the killer or killers of eighteen women.

  The detectives’ room was crowded, a buzz of telephones and conversations, the clack of keyboards, the hum of computer terminals. Officers looked up curiously from their desks as Mei-Ling led Li through to the office of the Section Chief. The door stood ajar. She knocked and Li followed her in. The room was in darkness except for the bright ring of light cast on the desk by an Anglepoise lamp. A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the desk speaking on the telephone. The reflected light from the desk cast a slightly sinister uplight on his shadowed face. He flicked nervous watery eyes towards Li and Mei-Ling as they entered.

  ‘So what’s the prognosis?’ he asked his caller, turning his back on the two deputy section chiefs. ‘Well, when will you know?’ The response clearly did not please him and he said curtly, ‘Well, call me when you’ve talked to him.’ He hung up abruptly and turned back to Li and Mei-Ling, and Li saw that he was a good-looking man of about forty-five, with thick hair swept back from a square face. But he looked drawn and tired.

  ‘How is she?’ Mei-Ling asked softly.

  He shook his head. ‘Not good.’

  Mei-Ling nodded and said, ‘Tsuo, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing. Mr Li, this is my boss, Huang Tsuo, Chief of Section Two.’ As the two men shook hands she added, ‘We’re roughly the equivalent of your Section One, investigating serious crime, murder and robbery.’

  Huang’s handshake was cold and cursory. He barely met Li’s eyes before he turned to his deputy. ‘Mei-Ling, I want a full briefing meeting when Mr Li and I get back.’ He lifted a briefcase from his desk and took his coat from a stand by the door.r />
  Mei-Ling was caught off-balance. ‘Get back? Where are you going?’

  ‘We have an appointment with the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ And he ushered Li out of the door.

  *

  People’s Square, which once formed part of the old Shanghai racecourse, was ablaze with lights reflecting from every wet surface, as if it had just been freshly painted. The drum-shaped museum on the south side glowed orange. Directly opposite, and dominating the square, was the huge floodlit home of the Shanghai Municipal Government, a monumental white building studded by row upon rising row of featureless windows. It was flanked on each side by bizarrely shaped glass buildings lit from within and capped by fantastical sweeping roofs. Vast skyscrapers, washed in coloured light, crowded all around the square. Li and Huang stepped out of their car at the foot of steps leading up to the marbled entrance of the government building, and Li was immediately assaulted by a cacophony of sound: the roar of traffic and honking of horns; pop music blasting out of shops along the east side; the soundtrack of a movie playing on a giant TV screen that filled the whole of one side of an office block on the south-east corner; a foxtrot playing from a ghetto-blaster on the steps of the museum, a gathering of elderly couples dancing incongruously across the concourse below it. They didn’t appear to mind the rain which wept still out of the night sky. The metallic voice of a conductress rang out from the loudspeaker of a passing bus. A taxi pulled up across the road, and as the driver reset his flag a soft electronic female voice said in English, Dear passenger, thank you for using our taxi. Please come again.

  It was all in stark contrast to the tense silence that had filled the car on the twenty-minute drive from 803. Li had made several attempts to engage Huang in conversation only to be rewarded with grudging, monosyllabic responses and the odd grunt. He was no nearer now to discovering why the Mayor’s policy adviser wanted to see them than when they had left.

  He followed Huang up the steps, past armed guards and through glass doors into an expansive lobby. A group of around a dozen men in suits and wearing heavy dark coats was advancing towards them. At the head of the group was a man Li recognised. He had seen him on television and in newspaper photographs, a short, bull-headed man with close-cropped steel grey hair. There was a sense of power and energy in every confident step he took. A taller, slightly older man in the uniform of a Procurator General, was stooping to speak quietly in his ear as they approached. Neither missed a stride, and as the group reached Li and Huang the short man said, ‘You’re late, Huang.’

  ‘My apologies, Director Hu. We were held up in traffic.’ Li had to admire the way Huang could lie to one of the most powerful men in Shanghai without batting an eyelid.

  ‘Well, I can’t wait. I have another engagement. You’ll have to come with us.’ And he sailed past them and out on to the steps. The Procurator General flicked his head to indicate Li and Huang should follow, and they fell in with the rest of the entourage.

  As they descended the steps, a line of official cars drew in at the sidewalk, headed by a black stretch limo flanked by two police cars. And as Director Hu slipped into the limo, the rest of the group divided as if in well-rehearsed syncopation and jumped into the other vehicles. Li and Huang found themselves ushered into the Director’s car by the Procurator General, who got in after them. The line of cars pulled away accompanied by the sound of police sirens, muffled by the soundproofing in the limo. Li barely had time to draw breath, and realise that he was sitting facing Director Hu, before the chief adviser to the head of the Shanghai government reached out his hand. ‘Deputy Section Chief Li Yan,’ he said, ‘it is a privilege to meet you.’ Li shook his hand and reminded himself that this man was the confidant and adviser to a possible future leader of China. The immediate predecessors of his boss as Mayor of Shanghai were now the country’s President and Premier respectively.

  ‘I am honoured that you should even know who I am, Director Hu,’ Li said, and he remembered the Chinese proverb, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

  ‘You cast a large shadow, Detective Li. Big enough, perhaps, to eclipse that of your uncle.’

  ‘I have always lived in my uncle’s shadow, Director Hu. I expect always to do so.’

  The adviser nodded, satisfied. Modesty was a virtue. He waved a hand in the direction of the taller man beside him. ‘This is Procurator General Yue.’ The Procurator General inclined his head in a curt, cold nod. ‘You have visited the site where the bodies were found?’

  ‘I have seen the bodies, or the bits of them that have been recovered.’

  ‘And what are your thoughts?’

  Li hesitated. He felt as if he were being tested somehow. ‘It is too early to reach any conclusions, Director Hu.’

  The adviser nodded again, apparently satisfied by this response. ‘A single word is worth a thousand pieces of gold,’ he said. He glanced momentarily at Huang who sat mute diagonally opposite, a black hole of disapproval in the corner of the car. ‘This … incident …’ the adviser was picking his words very carefully, ‘… is not only a severe embarrassment to our country, Li, captured as it was on live television across the world, but it could also seriously damage Shanghai’s inward investment – the lifeblood of this city.’ Li wondered if anyone cared about the serious damage done to the health of the victims, but he knew better than to ask as much. The adviser continued, ‘What we have here is a high profile crime of appalling magnitude, uncovered in the full glare of world publicity. What the Mayor wants is a high profile solution in the shortest possible time, and in the full glare of the same publicity.’ He drew in a short breath. ‘Which is why he wants you to take charge of the investigation.’

  And Li understood immediately why Huang was so resentful of his presence, and why Procurator General Yue was being equally cool.

  ‘Of course, Director Hu,’ he said cautiously, ‘I would be only too happy to assist in the investigation. But, naturally, I will have to seek permission from my superiors in Beijing.’

  The Director waved his hand dismissively. ‘It’s already done, Li,’ he said. ‘The Commissioner of Police in Beijing is happy to lend you to us for the duration of the investigation.’ He leaned forward. ‘But we don’t want you assisting. The Mayor wants you to lead the inquiry. Which means he will hold you personally responsible for any failure to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.’

  Li knew now that he was that nail that sticks up, and it felt like a very lonely thing to be. He said, ‘In that case, I have one request, Director Hu.’

  ‘Speak,’ the Director said.

  ‘I have had only the briefest opportunity to make an assessment of this case, but it seems to me that because of its nature, the pathology will be of paramount importance. I would therefore ask that I am allowed to employ the services of the American pathologist, Margaret Campbell.’

  Huang immediately started to voice his protest, becoming animated for the first time, but the Director raised a hand to silence him. ‘Why?’ he asked Li.

  Li said, ‘While I have every confidence in Dr Lan, Miss Campbell is infinitely more experienced. The Americans, after all, are more practised in the art of murder.’ Which raised a smile from the Director for the first time. Li pressed on, ‘She has worked in China, so she knows how we operate.’ He paused. ‘And if you want a high-profile solution, then a high-profile collaboration between the Chinese and the Americans would be good public relations.’

  The Director sat back and smiled. ‘I’m glad to see we’re on the same wavelength, Li. Huang and Yue will facilitate all your requirements.’

  Huang and Yue looked as if they would like to facilitate Li’s speedy demise.

  The Director pressed a button and told his driver to pull over. The driver informed the police escort by radio, then pulled the car in at the side of the road. The entourage followed suit. ‘Good luck,’ the Director said to Li as the door sprang open, and Li realised he was expected to get out.

  He stepped out into the rain, followed
by Huang. The pavement was crowded with curious on-lookers, the deafening blare of police sirens filling the night air. Director Hu’s entourage of cars moved off again and Li looked at Huang. ‘What now?’

  ‘We get a taxi back to my car,’ Huang said through clenched teeth, and he pulled up his collar against the rain. ‘And I don’t give a shit what Director Hu says. You report to me. Understood?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  The briefing meeting lasted less than half an hour. Before it, Li had had a fifteen minute meeting with Huang and the Shanghai Deputy Commissioner of Police, finalising details of Margaret’s inclusion in the investigating team. He had then requested the use of a computer with Internet access and filed a lengthy e-mail to an aol.com address.

  There were nearly twenty detectives in the meeting room, ranged around a group of tables pushed together to make a large rectangle. Most of the officers were smoking, and their smoke filled the room like fog. Mei-Ling glanced curiously at Li and Huang as they made their entrance. She had not been made privy to their discussions with the Deputy Commissioner. But she showed no surprise when Huang announced that he was putting Li in charge of the investigation, in collaboration with his deputy. All eyes around the table flickered towards Li, eyes that harboured both interest and hostility. There was no love lost between Shanghai and Beijing.

  The briefing consisted of an update on what little they already knew. Statements were quickly accumulating, taken from everybody who had been at the ceremony at Lujiazui that morning. One of the detectives had discovered that there was a night watchman at the site. They had made every attempt to locate him during the day, without success, but he was due back on-site at seven. A number of detectives consulted their watches and realised it was already past that. Mei-Ling brought the meeting up to date on the body count, and Dr Lan’s initial thoughts. The fact that partial autopsies had already been carried out on the victims created quite a stir around the table. But there were no constructive suggestions.