by Peter May
‘We got off on the wrong foot.’
‘We didn’t get off on any kind of foot.’
‘No …’ Mei-Ling forced a sad smile. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say … I am sorry.’
Margaret was surprised by this, but determined not to show it. ‘What, sorry that I’m still here?’
Mei-Ling smiled. ‘Sorry that I ever came between you and Li Yan.’
Margaret shrugged. ‘Li Yan came between me and Li Yan. And so did I. We’ve never had the easiest of relationships.’
‘And I did not make things any easier.’
‘So why the change of heart?’
Mei-Ling said, ‘He is a nice man.’
‘Damned by faint praise.’
Mei-Ling laughed, that braying laugh that had irritated Margaret so much when they first met. A laugh that she had not heard for some days. ‘No,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘I mean he is too nice for me.’
Margaret frowned. ‘How’s that?’
Mei-Ling shrugged, a sense of resignation in her eyes. ‘I would never make him happy. Seeing him with Xinxin … with all the instincts and concerns of a father. Seeing what losing her is doing to him.’ And she looked very directly at Margaret. ‘Seeing your shared pain.’ She shook her head. ‘I could never give him that. Sure, I can amuse a kid for an hour or two, but then I would be bored. I do not think I have a maternal bone in my body.’
‘And you think I have?’ Margaret asked.
‘Xinxin adores you. You were all she talked about that night when I drove her and Li Yan back to the hotel. About how Magret came to get her at Tiananmen Square, about how great Magret was at flying a kite, about the hours Magret spends reading to her at bedtime.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I could never be those things to her. So I could never be those things for Li Yan.’ She looked down at her hands, and Margaret was almost shocked to see that her eyes were moist. ‘The men in my life always seem to have other priorities. I’m just getting to recognise it a bit earlier now.’
Margaret didn’t know what to say. She thought about Xinxin babbling on to Mei-Ling about Magret this and Magret that. She thought about all those hours spent reading and re-reading the big picture books, the jigsaws that they pieced together time and again. She thought about how Xinxin would slip into the big double bed with Li and Margaret on a Sunday morning when Margaret would stay over on a Saturday night, her warm, soft little body insinuating its way between them, snuggling in for comfort. And suddenly all her fears and anxieties spilled over in big salty tears that ran silently down her face. She wiped them quickly away with the back of her hand. ‘I just hope we find her before … before that bastard does anything to hurt her.’
Mei-Ling looked up and saw the wet streaks on Margaret’s face. She nodded grimly. ‘We have that in common at least.’
Neither of them had been aware of the door to the canteen opening, and they were not aware of Li until his shadow fell across the table. A momentary frown flitted across his face. Something, he knew, had passed between Margaret and Mei-Ling. But none of that mattered any more. ‘I have a warrant,’ he said, ‘to search Comrade Cui’s clinic.’
II
Darkness fell as the convoy of police and forensic vehicles headed west on Yan’an Viaduct Road. The last daylight glowed faintly under the pewter-coloured clouds that were gathered on the far horizon. The haloed lights of another Shanghai night pricked the darkness around them, dragged in liquid smears back and forth across rain-battered windscreens.
Margaret sat in the back of Mei-Ling’s Santana. She saw her own reflection in the side window switched off and on like a TV screen image as she reflected the light from the overhead street lamps at regular intervals. She looked haunted, like the ghost of her grandmother that she had seen in herself the night before.
Everything now was moving so quickly it was difficult to maintain a grasp of it all. The only constant was the fear that gnawed like a hungry animal trapped inside her. Fear of finding Xinxin and realising a nightmare. Fear of not finding her. Fear of never finding her, which would be worse, almost, than anything.
She caught Mei-Ling watching her in the rear-view mirror and wondered what had brought about her change of heart. Had it really been seeing Li with Xinxin, hearing Xinxin babble on about Margaret? The men in my life always seem to have other priorities, she had said, and her words had been laden with the bitterness of experience. A Yang Orphan was how her aunt had described her. And Margaret remembered Aunt Teng’s grave interpretation of Mei-Ling’s Heavenly Element of water — meaning danger, something hidden, anxiety.
The convoy, lights flashing, eased its way between the parked cars in the street leading to the clinic. Cyclists, huddled in dripping capes, swerved aside to let them by. But even from here Li could see that the clinic was in darkness. When they drew up outside it, he saw also that the gates were closed, and secured with a chain and padlock. His first reaction was anger. He jumped out of the car and ran to the gates, and stood impotently in the rain, clutching the black-painted wrought iron, peering between the spiked uprights for any sign of life beyond. There were no vehicles, no lights, just puddles forming in the pitted tarmac between clumps of weeds that had not been apparent when the car park was full. He rattled the gates in frustration and turned to find Mei-Ling and Margaret sheltering under a large black umbrella. Officers were gathering behind them on the sidewalk. The rain ran down Li’s face. ‘They knew we were coming,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Someone told them we were coming.’ And he felt as if he knew exactly who that someone was. ‘Somebody get some cutters and get this fucking gate open,’ he shouted.
It was nearly ten minutes before an officer arrived with a large pair of cutters that sliced through the metal chain like a hot knife through butter. He opened the gates and all the vehicles crowded into the forecourt. Under the shelter of the canopy over the main entrance, the detectives and forensic officers who were to enter the clinic stripped off wet outer clothing and pulled on white gloves and plastic shoe covers. Margaret did the same. She saw that Li’s white tee-shirt had been soaked, even through his jacket. It was almost translucent, and she could clearly see the firm, muscular shape of him underneath. Margaret looked round to find Mei-Ling watching her again. Mei-Ling drew her brows together, made a moue with her mouth and drew a short sharp breath in through her lips. In spite of everything, it made Margaret smile. In other circumstances, perhaps she and Mei-Ling might have found something more in common than a shared lust for Li.
Detective Dai forced the double doors into the clinic. A splintering of wood. Then silence, except for the crackle of a dozen or more police radios. And then a loud creaking as the doors swung open into the darkness beyond. Several flashlights snapped on, and a small group led by Li pushed open internal glass doors and entered the reception hall, beams of light criss-crossing in the dark. The floor here was tiled. A reception desk facing them was empty. The drawers of two large filing cabinets behind the desk stood open, picked out by several flashlights. Whatever records they might once have contained were gone. There was not so much as a single scrap of paper in the reception area. Only a half-drunk mug of tea on the desk gave any clue as to the hurried evacuation of people and files.
None of the light switches was working, and an officer was dispatched to find where the electricity supply came into the building and restore the power. Li said, ‘There must be some state record of who was employed here. I want names. And I want arrest warrants out on all of them.’
‘You got it, Chief,’ Dai said, and he unhooked the radio mike from his belt.
‘Including Cui Feng,’ Li added. Which silenced everyone. Dai glanced at Mei-Ling.
She said, ‘Be careful, Li Yan. We can’t go arresting someone like Cui Feng without evidence.’
‘Then let’s find some!’ Li’s raised voice startled everyone. ‘I want every employee brought in for questioning.’
‘Sure,’ Dai said, and he turned away into the dark to bark instructions into his ra
dio.
‘Where’s the operating theatre?’ Margaret asked.
‘In the basement,’ Mei-Ling told her.
Margaret looked at Li. ‘Can I take a look at it?’
He nodded. Mei-Ling said, ‘I’ll take you.’
The two women followed the beams of their flashlights through double doors and down a narrow staircase to the suite of rooms in the basement where all the clinic’s operations took place. Upstairs they heard other officers moving around, systematically working their way through the building, calling to each other in the dark. Down here it was deathly quiet. Across the hall, through double swing doors, were the preparation and recovery rooms. Facing them were the doors to the theatre suite. Above the door, Margaret’s flashlight picked out the normally illuminated box sign in Chinese and English warning that they were about to enter the surgical area. On the wall to the left was a square push-button about the size of a postcard, that could be punched or hit with the elbow to let in any one of the surgical team, or the patient’s gurney. Only in this case, Margaret thought, if Jiang Baofu was to be believed, it was not a patient on the gurney, but a victim.
Suddenly the overhead lights came on, startling them both. The boxlight over the door buzzed and flickered and then illuminated its warning. Margaret glanced at Mei-Ling before hitting the square button with the flat of her hand. The doors opened electronically into a small reception area with a desk. A white board on the wall was smeared blue and red and green where the names of patients and operating schedules, written up with coloured marker pens, had been wiped off. To their right, the doors to the changing rooms stood open, and doors at the far end, beyond the lockers, opened on to walk-in cupboards lined with shelves piled with hair- and shoe-covers and neatly folded smocks. Ahead of them were the doors to two operating rooms. Floors and walls were tiled, and stainless-steel washbasins were mounted on the wall outside each theatre. In normal circumstances no one would be allowed beyond this area without wearing scrubs, and the hair- and shoe-covers they would have donned in the locker rooms.
Margaret had been through the procedure many times early in her career, when the living rather than the dead were her concern. She would have tied on her surgical mask before scrubbing her hands and forearms in the stainless-steel basin for at least ten minutes, a prescribed number of scrubs per finger and hand, scraping under the fingernails with little plastic sticks. Then, hands held up above her elbows, pushing through the door to the theatre with her backside so as not to contaminate the freshly scrubbed hands. Inside, a nurse would pass her a sterile towel to dry her hands and then help her into a surgical gown before holding open latex surgical gloves into which she would plunge her hands.
Now, the concern was not bacterial contamination so much as the danger of disturbing evidence. With her gloved hands, Margaret pushed open the door to operating room number one, and Mei-Ling followed her in.
A strange chill fell upon Margaret as she entered the theatre. The air was warm, but still the hair rose up on her neck and her forearms, goose bumps on her back and shoulders. And she saw in her mind’s eye a succession of women wheeled in here to be butchered. A conveyor belt of them. Fifty-four at least, since Jiang had become involved. She almost felt their presence, and knew instinctively that this was the place. That this was the killing room.
It was only dimly lit by pale yellow lamps set in the ceiling, casting deep shadows beneath the sheets that were draped over all the equipment like shrouds. Two walls were lined with glass and stainless-steel storage cupboards filled with various sizes of gloves and types of suture. Carefully Margaret and Mei-Ling lifted the sheets, uncovering the lamps that hung on jointed arms from the ceiling and would so brightly illuminate the surgeon’s table when lit; the large, wheeled, steel table where the surgical nurse would set out all the sterilised tools on a sterile sheet; an electrocautery machine, light blue, with a couple of knobs on the front for adjusting the temperature of the cautery, and a couple of indicator lights. A power cable led from the box to a wall socket, and a wire connected it to the cautery pen that the surgeon would use to cauterise the small bleeding veins along the edge of the wound he would make with his scalpel. Margaret remembered the black gritty material she had found in the areas of haemorrhage along the incision edges of the entry wounds in the women from Lujiazui — charring made by the cauterisation.
Set on the surgical nurse’s table alongside the toolbox were a stainless-steel bowl, a couple of empty litre jugs and several plastic ‘turkey basters’, like giant eye-droppers. On a shelf stood two blue and white plastic cool boxes, the kind you might pack with ice to keep beer cold on a picnic. Margaret looked at them for a very long time and became aware that her breathing was starting to become rapid and shallow.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Mei-Ling crossing to where a CD player sat on the shelf of one of the cabinets against the far wall. It was wired into speakers hanging from all four corners of the operating room. The surgeon whose theatre this was, liked to listen to music while he worked. Mei-Ling switched it on and hit the play button. The room was immediately filled by the deep, sonorous tones of a church organ, stepping down in time to a slow, rhythmic descending bass note that was suddenly given relief by a surge of violins. Every hair on Margaret’s body stood on end. She knew this music. It was one of her favourite pieces. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. But the pictures it conjured for her now were almost too horrific to contemplate. Of a surgeon delicately wielding his scalpel to murder and butcher a succession of young women to the strains of one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.
She reached back and switched on the big surgical lamps, and suddenly the room was thrown into an almost blinding blaze of light burning out on white tiles. A solo violin swooped and screeched to a pitch, like the scream of every dead girl who had passed through this hellish place. Margaret’s legs nearly gave way under her, and she reached for the surgical nurse’s trolley to steady herself. One of the litre jugs toppled over.
‘Are you all right,’ Mei-Ling said, and she switched off the music. The silence that replaced it was almost worse.
‘I’m okay,’ Margaret said, and she looked at Mei-Ling. ‘You know this is where it was done,’ she said. There could be no equivocation. There was nothing scientific about it, but she knew it with an absolute certainty.
Mei-Ling nodded grimly. She felt it, too. Margaret could see from her pallor that the blood had drained from her face. ‘Do you know this music?’ Mei-Ling asked.
‘Attributed by some to an Italian called Albinoni,’ Margaret said. ‘Probably composed in the early eighteenth century.’ She paused. ‘I used to love it.’ And now she shook her head. ‘But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to it again. It sounds to me now like music straight from hell.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It would make me think that the surgeon was not Chinese. And if we take the “Y” cut into consideration, probably not European either. I’d say there was a good chance this monster is an American.’
The radio on Mei-Ling’s belt crackled, and Margaret made out Li’s voice talking rapidly in Chinese. Mei-Ling responded, and then said to Margaret, ‘He wants us up in the administration office.’
Now that the power had been restored, they were able to ride up to the second floor in the elevator. A number of detectives and forensics people were standing in the corridor outside the main office. Inside, Li was going through the files on the hard disk of the office computer. It was a Macintosh PowerPC G4 with a twenty-one-inch flatscreen monitor. Nothing but the best and latest in technology for Cui Feng, Margaret thought. Li looked up as they came in.
‘Anything down there?’ he asked.
Margaret said, ‘That’s where they did it.’
Li froze. His eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’
‘I just know,’ Margaret said. ‘Everything about it. And more. But I doubt if you’ll find much in the way of forensic evidence. It’s a sterile environment.’
‘We found the freezer
,’ Li said. ‘Big walk-in cabinet. Could probably hold anything up to twenty bodies in there. In bits.’ He shrugged. ‘It was empty. We will defrost it, and see what forensics find in the melt water.’
‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ Margaret said. ‘These people have been very careful.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Li said. ‘Everything’s gone. All the files, patient records … All the bedrooms are empty, the beds all made up with clean sheets. They did not just do this in a couple of hours. Cui must have figured we would be back after our visit yesterday.’ He stood up. ‘I wanted you to have a look at this thing, Margaret. You probably know more about computers than most of our people.’
‘I’m no expert,’ Margaret said.
‘We will get experts in,’ Li said. ‘But I need you to have a look at it now. From what I can tell, all the files have been erased.’
Margaret slipped behind the desk and took in the computer screen. It was empty, apart from a few system pull-down menus along the top, the time display, and the hard disk and trash icons. She opened up the hard disk. There were only two folders in it. The system folder and an applications folder. Inside the applications folder were coloured icons representing various programs. Accounting, database, word processing, an internet browser. She looked up. ‘You’re right. They’ve erased all the files. Probably backed them up on Zip disk and taken them where we’ll never find them, or even destroyed them.’
Li said, ‘Shit!’
Margaret forced a smiled. ‘It might not be as bad as you think. The operating system and all the software have been left untouched. Which means they didn’t erase the hard disk. Just the files. And when you erase files, they’re usually still there until they’ve been written over. You just can’t see them. But with the right kind of software you can pull them back on-screen.’
‘Can you do that?’ Li asked, suddenly re-energised.