Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6)

by Peter May

  Just eight days later, the third murder shook the Section to its core. The victim, Lin Leman, was slightly older, nearly thirty, found in an alleyway behind stalls where Russian traders sold furs in Ritan Road. Like the others, she had been strangled and had her throat dissevered. But for the first time, the murderer had removed trophies. The entire abdomen had been laid open, the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments and placed by the victim’s shoulder. The uterus, the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been removed entirely, and no trace of them could be found in the vicinity of the crime scene. The only conclusion they could draw was that the killer had taken them away with him.

  To compound the bizarre nature of the killing, they had found items from her purse laid on the ground around her feet. A comb, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a torn envelope bearing a date stamp from just a few days before. Pathologist Wang had expressed the opinion that these items had not arrived there randomly or by chance. It was his belief that the murderer had gone through her purse and deliberately arranged the items he had found there at the feet of the corpse. But he could not offer up any explanation.

  Nor could any of them understand why the killer left the unsmoked end of a Russian cheroot close by each body. Clearly he had smoked the cheroots before committing the murders. To linger for a smoke afterwards would have been to invite discovery. But he must have known that the police would find the butts. And, if he was a man of any education, that DNA could be recovered from traces of saliva. It was like leaving a signature, an artist’s autograph on his work, so that there would be no room for doubt in identifying the author.

  The detectives had moved their discussion from motive to modus operandi. Wu was clear on their killer’s MO. ‘He chokes them until they are unconscious,’ he said. ‘Then he lays them on the ground, on their back, and kneels on their right side. He leans across the body and cuts the throat from left to right. Look at the pics …’ He waved his hand toward the gallery of horrors on the wall. ‘You can see the blood always pools around the left side of the head, never down the front of the body, which it would if they’d still been standing. In some cases the spatter pattern on the ground shows that the blood spurted out from the left carotid artery. The victim was still alive after strangulation, the blood still under pressure.’ He paused briefly to light a cigarette. ‘The point is, he makes sure he gets as little blood on himself as possible. Then, once they’re dead, he starts cutting them open.’

  Li spoke for the first time. ‘The trouble with all this is, we know what he does and how he does it. But we haven’t the first idea why, or who. We need some kind of picture in our minds of this man. A profile, some way of narrowing down who we’re looking for. Is he educated, is he a professional man? What age is he, is he married? Does he have sexual or psychological problems? He only kills at weekends. Does that mean his job, or a family commitment, makes it impossible for him to do it during the week?’ He remembered his Uncle Yifu’s counsel. The answer always lies in the detail. And Mei Yuan’s words came back to him from earlier that morning. It is in the detail that you will find the devil.

  ‘He’s clever,’ Li went on. ‘All these girls advertised in the personal columns of magazines. They all gave e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers. But he never e-mailed them. We would have found those e-mails on the girls’ computers, and that might have led us back to him. He knew that. And he knew we could check mobile phone records. That’s why the only calls we can’t account for were made from public phones. He’s one step ahead of us at every stage.’

  They did not have a single witness. Li was certain that the killer had not chosen Jianguomen by chance. It was an area of four- and five-star hotels, restaurants, bars. It had a transient population of embassy workers and tourists. The murderer most probably met his victims in hotel lobbies where people were coming and going all the time. The girls would feel safe meeting him in a public place, and no one would think twice about a couple making a rendezvous and heading out for the night. Afterwards, their faces were so disfigured, either because of being choked or, in the case of the latest victim, brutally slashed, that by the time police had obtained photographs and got them circulating round the hotels, the chances were that anyone who saw them together had already checked out and moved on.

  ‘We’re still running DNA checks on all known sex offenders,’ Zhao said. And he shrugged. ‘Nothing yet, though.’

  A slow, laborious, time-consuming process, that Li was certain would lead them nowhere. But it had to be done.

  ‘Can I read you something?’

  They all looked around in surprise. Qian sat selfconsciously clutching a book that he had taken from his bag. Li saw several coloured strips of paper marking various pages in it.

  ‘I swear by my ancestors I never knew you could read,’ Wu said, and the room erupted in laughter. ‘You been taking literacy lessons, boss?’

  But Qian did not smile. There was something odd in his manner, and he was pale, as if all the blood had been drained from his face. The laughter quickly subsided, and the faces of dead girls looked down on them reproachfully.

  ‘On you go, Qian,’ Li said.

  Qian started flipping through the pages to his first marker. ‘I just wondered if this might seem familiar,’ he said. He found his place and started reading. Smoke rose from cigarettes in absolute silence.

  ‘There were twenty-two stab wounds to the trunk. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung in two places, but the lungs were otherwise perfectly healthy. The heart was rather fatty, and was penetrated in one place, but there was otherwise nothing in the heart to cause death, although there was some blood in the pericardium. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was perfectly healthy, and was penetrated in two places; both the kidneys were perfectly healthy; the stomach was also perfectly healthy, but was penetrated in six places; the intestines were healthy, and so were all the other organs. The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth. There was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated. Death was due to haemorrhage and loss of blood.’

  In silence, Qian flicked through the pages to his next marker and began reading again.

  ‘Her throat had been cut from left to right, two distinct cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through; a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw, also one on left cheek; the abdomen had been cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of the stomach, there the wound was jagged; the omentum or coating of the stomach, was also cut in several places, and two small stabs on private parts; apparently done with a strong bladed knife; supposed to have been done by some left-handed person; death being almost instantaneous.’

  Someone muttered ‘shit’ under his breath, like the sound of a pin dropping. And they all heard it. Pages rustled, and Qian moved on to a third passage.

  ‘Examination of the body showed that the throat was severed deeply, incision jagged. Removed from, but attached to body, and placed above right shoulder, were a flap of the wall of belly, the whole of the small intestines and attachments. Two other portions of wall of belly and ‘Pubes’ were placed above left shoulder in a large quantity of blood. The following parts were missing: – part of belly wall including navel; the womb, the upper part of vagina and greater part of bladder.’

  ‘In the name of the sky,’ Wu said. ‘These sound like pathology reports on the first three murders.’

  Li was on his feet. ‘What the hell are you reading from?’

  Qian slowly closed the book. ‘Detective Wu is right,’ he said. ‘They are extracts from police and pathology reports. From nearly one hundred and twenty years ago.’

  Every eye in the room was on him, every detective struggling to make sense of what he was saying.

  ‘I read a review yesterday of a book published for the first
time in China. Even from the review I was struck by certain similarities. So I went out first thing this morning and bought it. And it became clear to me very quickly that I was looking at something more than coincidence.’ He held the book up. ‘The Murders of Jack the Ripper,’ he said. ‘The world’s first documented serial killer. He may have murdered as many as seven women in the streets of London, England, in the fall of 1888. And someone is replicating those murders in exact detail, right here in Beijing, one hundred and fifteen years on.’

  Li felt the hairs rise up on the back of his neck.

  Chapter Two

  I

  The perfume of the postmortem was a haunting scent. Usually it took Li hours to get the smell of it from his nostrils. Blood and decay, the smell of rotting food from the stomach, the stink of faeces from an open intestine, the almost sweet whiff of burning bone as the oscillating saw cut through the skull. Today he barely noticed. The mutilated corpse of Guo Huan lay on the autopsy table, empty of all her vital organs, chest prised open, the last of her body fluids slowly trickling away along the drainage channels and into a collecting bucket. It was cold enough in the autopsy room for his breath to cloud in front of him, but the chill that reached into his bones had nothing to do with the temperature.

  When he and Wu arrived, Pathologist Wang had finished with the body and was breadloafing the brain. It was routine stuff. He had already examined the organs the killer had left him. Shortly he would start dictating his notes, and his assistants would reassemble the body as best they could, stitch it up with coarse twine and deliver it to the morgue for cold storage. There was no doubt about the cause of death.

  Li looked at the young girl’s horribly slashed features. Her nose was almost completely severed. ‘Can’t you do anything about the face?’ he asked.

  Wang looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’

  ‘She’ll have to be formally identified.’ He could not imagine how it must feel for a parent to look upon their own child in such a state. He did not want to imagine it.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Wang said, and he turned to slice through another half-inch section of brain.

  Li had discarded his quilted jacket, and since they had arrived late had not donned the regulation protective clothing. He wore, instead, a long, heavy coat that he kept in the office. It dropped well below his knee. He had left the collar turned up against the cold. It had big pockets. He lifted the flap of one and took out Qian’s book. ‘Before you dictate your notes,’ he said to Wang, ‘I’d like to read you something.’

  Wang glanced up, mildly curious. This was a departure, even for Li. ‘Something literary, perhaps?’ he asked. ‘Something from your uncle’s collection.’

  ‘Even older than that,’ Li said. He opened the book at a page he had folded over, and started to read.

  ‘The throat was cut across to the extent of about six or seven inches. A superficial cut commenced about an inch and a half below the lobe and about two-and-a-half inches below and behind the left ear and extended across the throat to about three inches below the lobe of the right ear. The big muscle of the throat was divided through on the left side. The large vessels on the left side of the neck were severed. The larynx was severed below the vocal cord. All the deep structures were severed to the bone, the knife marking intervertebral cartilages.’

  He looked up and found Wang watching him, open mouthed.

  Wu said, ‘You’ll catch flies.’

  Wang snapped his mouth shut. ‘You had someone eavesdropping my autopsy,’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ Li held up a finger and started reading again.

  ‘The skin was retracted through the whole of the cut in the abdomen, but the vessels were not clotted. Nor had there been any appreciable bleeding from the vessel. I draw the conclusion that the cut was made after death, and there would not be much blood on the murderer. The cut was made by someone on the right side of the body, kneeling below the middle of the body. The intestines had been detached to a large extent from the mesentery. About two feet of the colon was cut away. The sigmoid flexure was invaginated into the rectum very tightly.’

  He looked up. ‘I’m going to skip a bit here.’ And then he continued,

  ‘The peritoneal lining was cut through on the left side and the left kidney carefully taken out and removed. The left renal artery was cut through. I should say that someone who knew the position of the kidney must have done it. The lining membrane over the uterus was cut through. The womb was cut through horizontally, leaving a stump of three-quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb had been taken away with some of the ligaments. The vagina and cervix of the womb was uninjured.’

  He closed the book. ‘Is that about how it was? What you found during autopsy?’

  ‘What the fuck is this, Chief?’ Wang almost never swore. It made it all the more shocking when he did. ‘Did you have someone else look at the body before me?’

  Li waggled the book. ‘This autopsy was carried out by an English physician called Doctor Frederick Gordon Brown. I just read you excerpts from a deposition he gave to an inquest into the murder of a forty-six-year-old prostitute called Catharine Eddowes in London in 1888.’

  Wang shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Jack the Ripper,’ Wu said. ‘You probably never heard of him. But somebody has, and he’s copycatting his killings.’

  Wang looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him,’ he said finally. ‘I attended a talk on the Ripper by an expert on the subject.’ He shook his head as if to try to clear it of some fog. ‘I never made the connection, though. It’s funny how detail escapes you.’ He looked at Li in wonder. ‘And yet I always had the strangest sense of déjà vu about these girls. Of course, he never went into quite that much detail.’

  ‘Who?’ Li asked.

  ‘I can’t remember his name,’ Wang said. ‘He was some retired English detective who’d written a book about it. He came over from England with a delegation of judges and lawyers for a week-long series of seminars which was supposed to foster an understanding of the English legal system.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About two years ago?’

  Li frowned. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  Wu said, ‘I think maybe you were in the States then, Chief.’

  Li looked down at the book he was holding in his hands. ‘Was his name Thomas Dowman, this retired English detective?’

  Wang shrugged. ‘Could have been.’

  ‘Then this is his book.’ Li dropped it on the table. ‘Translated into Chinese.’ Wu picked it up and started riffling through the pages, hungry for more detail. Li said to Wang, ‘In it he describes the discovery of the third victim as having been found with the contents of her pockets arranged on the ground around her feet.’

  Wang closed his eyes. There were thoughts occurring to him that were almost too awful to contemplate. He said, ‘Something I remember very vividly from that talk.’ Li waited for him to go on. But it was some moments before he could bring himself to speak. ‘It gets worse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The mutilation,’ Wang said. ‘His next victim.’ He looked at the girl on the table. ‘After this one. You wouldn’t want to read about what he did to her, never mind see it.’ He looked very directly at Li. ‘You’ve got to catch this killer, Section Chief, before he does it again.’

  Li felt the almost unbearable burden of responsibility pressing down on him. Where did they begin? He had not one single concrete lead to go on.

  Wang said, ‘Your English pathologist was only partially right, though.’

  Li looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What was it he said? There would not be much blood on the murderer? Okay, so most of the mutilation took place after death. But you can’t hack someone about like that, remove a kidney and a uterus and not get blood on yourself. Quite a lot of it.’

  Li said, ‘So unless he lives alone, someone must know who he is. Beca
use he’s coming home covered in blood.’

  Wang inclined his head in acknowledgement.

  II

  In the carpark, Li sat behind the wheel of his Santana and opened up the laptop on his knees. He plugged in his cellphone and got it to dial him into the police database from its memory. On the passenger side, Wu was still flicking backwards and forwards through Dowman’s book on the Ripper. He stopped suddenly and looked at Li. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why anyone would cover up for someone doing stuff like this.’

  Li shrugged and tapped the relevant details into vacant fields. ‘The history of serial killers is full of loved ones turning a blind eye. Wives, lovers, mothers. More denial than cover-up. Even when confronted with all the evidence, they don’t want to admit it, even to themselves.’ He hit the return key, and several moments later a screen flashed up with Guo Huan’s particulars. A file and a photograph of every resident in Beijing was accessible from the database. Guo Huan had lived with her mother and grandfather. Her father was dead. Her photograph was on the top right corner of the screen. A black and white picture, of not particularly good quality. Li could not tell how good a likeness it might be. But it was better than nothing. He took a note of the address, then shut down the computer and called Qian. When he got through he asked, ‘Has Guo’s family been told yet?’

  ‘The community police sent someone out to break the news a short time ago,’ Qian told him.