The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “Having the heart available wouldn’t help,” Margaret corrected her. “It would take about twelve hours for the heart tissue to show a visible reaction—and none of these women lived that long. It’s the tox that’s important here.”

  She returned to the table to complete the final elements of the autopsy. “With four of us taking three autopsies each, we should be through the rest of them by tomorrow night. Although it will be a day or two before all the results are back from toxicology.” She peeled the woman’s scalp back from the skull. “By the way, I’ve got dinner reservations for us tonight at the Dragon and Phoenix restaurant on the eighth floor of the Peace Hotel. Apparently it has wonderful views of the Bund.” She glanced up at Li and said, pointedly, “A table for two, that is. We haven’t had a chance to talk since I got back from the States.”

  Li glanced at Mei-Ling uncomfortably. But she smiled sweetly. “Yes,” she said to Margaret, “it is a wonderful view. You should make the best of the limited time you have. After all, you will be leaving for Beijing the day after tomorrow.”

  “Will I?” Margaret looked at Li.

  “Had you not told her?” Mei-Ling said.

  Li said quickly, “I need you to look at the body we found in Beijing, Margaret. I have asked them to translate the original autopsy report, and the body has been out of the freezer for two days now. So another couple of days and it will be thawed.”

  “I see.” Margaret turned back to the severed head. She could not meet Mei-Ling’s eyes. Although Margaret knew Mei-Ling could not have arranged it this way, it still felt like she had somehow won a battle of wills.

  Li said, “And I need to ask you a favour.” When Margaret did not look up he elucidated. “I would like you to collect Xinxin and bring her back down with you.”

  Margaret’s face immediately lit up at the prospect, and she looked at Li with shining eyes. “Of course,” she said. “Is she with Mei Yuan?”

  He nodded. “You will need to pick her up at nursery school. One of the kindergartens here in Shanghai has agreed to take her temporarily. My hotel has been able to give her an adjoining room, and I am paying a babysitter to look after her in the evenings, and weekends if I am working.”

  “That’s great,” Margaret said. “We’ll be able to spend some time with her.”

  “Yes,” Li said enthusiastically. “Mei-Ling managed to fix everything up for me here in Shanghai. She loves kids, too. So Xinxin won’t be short of people to play with her.”

  And Margaret’s face clouded again. It felt like Mei-Ling was invading every part of her space. “That’ll be nice,” she said with a tone, and switched on the oscillating saw to cut through the skull.

  III

  The room was small and square with plain, white-painted walls. The paint had come away in patches where papers or posters taped to the walls had been removed, leaving their outlines clearly visible, like ghosts. There was one square window on the back wall, giving out on to seedy-looking police apartment blocks, lights shining from hundreds of windows in the dark, wet night. There was a desk charred with cigarette burns, an uncomfortable-looking chair, and a single strip light hanging from the ceiling and casting a harsh glow around the room. This was to be Li’s home for the duration of the investigation. Like Section Chief Huang, it did not exactly feel welcoming. Next door was the audio-video room, and the sound of tapes being run and re-run boomed through the wall. The detectives’ room was at the far end of the corridor, and Mei-Ling’s office was beyond that.

  “It’s not much,” she said. “But someone loved it. He didn’t want to leave it.”

  “Should I know who it was?” Li asked.

  She shook her head. “Better not.”

  There was a sharp rap on the open door, and they turned to find Detective Dai standing there clutching an armful of files. “There’s a call for you, boss,” he said to Mei-Ling.

  She nodded and said to Li, “Talk to you later.”

  When she was gone, Dai put the files on to Li’s desk where there were already several dozen piling up. He glanced at Li, somewhat uncertainly. “I read up about those serial killings you solved in Beijing,” he said, and Li realised that Dai was a little in awe of him. “Pretty smart bit of detective work.”

  “I got lucky,” Li said. “And even luckier still to be alive.”

  Dai nodded. “I knew Duanmu Hongyu,” he said. Li frowned, trying to remember where he’d seen the name. Then it came back to him. The ebony bust in the courtyard. Duanmu Hongyu had been a famous Shanghai detective working out of 803. Dai was trying to impress him. “He kind of took a fatherly interest in me, you know. A kind of mentor. He was a great guy.”

  Li nodded and rounded his desk to pull up his chair and sit down. He fumbled in his pockets for his cigarettes, but Dai had a pack out before he could find them. Li took one and Dai lit it. As Dai lit his own, Li asked him, “What age are you, detective?”

  “Twenty-eight, Chief,” Dai said.

  “I’m not a chief,” Li told him. “Just a deputy.”

  Dai nodded. “So, have they got many women in the department in Beijing?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, high-ranking. You know, like Deputy Section Chief Nien.”

  “Not right now,” Li said.

  Dai nodded sagely and drew on his cigarette. “Women are okay, I guess. They can hold up as much sky as they want, but they’re a bastard to work for.”

  “Oh?” Li was not going to comment, but he was interested to hear what Dai wanted to say.

  Dai rested one butt cheek on the edge of Li’s desk. “Yeah, you know, sex always comes into it. You can’t get away from it. I mean, Mei-Ling, she’s all right. But she’s got this thing for senior officers. You know, like rank or something turns her on. Like she looks down on the rest of us, ’cos we’re not good enough for her.”

  Li had heard enough. “It’s Deputy Section Chief Nien to you, Dai,” he said. “And I don’t approve of detectives referring to senior ranking officers in that way.”

  “Oh.” Dai seemed surprised, but not unduly put out. He shrugged. “Sorry, Chief.” He stood up. “Oh, by the way, top of that pile there’s a file on a lady called Fu Yawen. Comes from Luwan District in the old French Town.”

  “What about her?”

  “She and her old man worked in a small tailor’s shop on Songshan Road. She went missing about five months ago.”

  When Dai had gone, Li pulled the file on Fu Yawen in front of him, but he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wondered what Dai had meant when he said Mei-Ling had a “thing” for senior officers. What senior officers had he been talking about? Or was it just jealousy and gossip? He was aware that Mei-Ling was attracted to him. It was clear in her eyes, in the way she would touch him from time to time, in brief unguarded moments of intimacy. And yet, he had always had the strangest sensation that this familiarity she had displayed towards him, almost from the moment they met, was habitual, a transfer of feelings from another relationship.

  He was reluctant to admit to himself that he found her attractive, too, that he enjoyed those fleeting moments of unguarded intimacy, the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand setting butterflies fluttering in his belly and a strange, distant stirring in his loins. For if he were to allow himself to acknowledge these emotions, they would surely be accompanied by a haunting sense of guilt, and raise questions he did not want to face right now about his feelings for Margaret.

  And then he thought about Margaret, and her odd, paranoid behaviour, her antipathy towards Mei-Ling, the directness of her question about what was going on between them. Two attractive people thrown together on a stressful job in a strange city—it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened, she had said. And he remembered his guilt. Why had he felt guilty? And what instinct was it that had led Margaret, within hours of arriving in Shanghai, to suspect the existence of feelings he had not even admitted to himself? The instant hostility between Margaret and Mei-Ling had been immediately ap
parent to him, but still remained a mystery. Not for the first time in his life, he found himself being confounded by his own emotions, and thrashing his way clumsily through the uncharted waters of an uncertain relationship. He checked the time. He was due to meet Margaret for dinner in two hours, and somewhere deep inside he found himself dreading it.

  He forced himself to focus on the file in front of him. Here, he thought, he would find himself on safer, more familiar ground.

  IV

  Margaret found the note from Geller pushed under her door. I’m in the bar if you feel like a drink. She felt very much like a drink. But first she needed to shower, to wash away the olfactory residue of the autopsy room, to change her clothes and become that other person she was when she wasn’t being Margaret Campbell the pathologist. That other Margaret Campbell who always let her down, always said the wrong thing, always fell in love with the wrong people.

  By the time she found her way to the bar she had relaxed a little. The hot water of the shower had taken some of the tension out of her muscles, and an overwhelming sense of fatigue had caused her to lower her customary defences. She didn’t really want to think too much about anything, just let a little alcohol course through her veins and forget for the moment all life’s little unhappinesses.

  Geller was sitting on his own at the bar nursing what Margaret guessed was not his first beer. He glanced at her as she hoisted herself on to the stool next to him. “Vodka tonic?”

  “You learn quickly.”

  “I come from a long line of circus animals. We’re easily trained.” He waved his hand at a girl who was hiding behind the coffee maker and she was forced to come out into the open. He ordered a vodka and another beer. “Good day?” he asked Margaret.

  “As days go.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Well, that’s pretty unequivocal.”

  She grinned. “That’s what they call me. Unequivocal Campbell.”

  “Hey, sounds like the title of a movie from the nineteen fifties.” He paused for a moment. “Jeez, was that really last century? Makes me feel so old.”

  The drinks came, and Margaret took a long, appreciative pull at hers. The alcohol immediately relaxed her even further. She looked at Geller, then glanced around the empty bar. “Not exactly busy, is it?”

  “That’s because the prices are so outrageous,” he said. “Of course, you wouldn’t know, since you always leave me to pick up the tab.”

  She laughed. “Well, why don’t we just put this one on my room?”

  “Naw,” he said. “I can claim it on expenses.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I keep forgetting. I’m just work to you.”

  “Pretty goddamned hard work, too,” he drawled, and then grinned.

  “I’m surprised to find you on your own,” Margaret said. “Didn’t you tell me that the press pack would be pursuing me relentlessly while I was here?”

  “Yep.”

  “So where are they?”

  “Probably camped out at the Westin Tai Pin Yang Hotel on the road out to Hongqiao Airport.”

  Margaret was taken aback. “What are they doing out there?”

  “Could be that’s where they think you’re staying.” He took a long draught of beer.

  She looked at him with amusement. “And where would they get an idea like that, Mr. Geller?”

  He shrugged very casually. “Beats me. And, hey, it’s Jack. Okay? Nobody calls me Mister Geller except my landlord when the rent’s a week overdue.”

  “That’s very polite of him.”

  “You should hear what he calls me after a month.”

  “You don’t make a very good living, then?”

  He rubbed thoughtfully at a jawline that needed a shave. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on whether the news is good or bad. If it’s good I can go hungry. See, Margaret . . . you don’t mind if I call you Margaret?”

  “It’s a lot nicer than what a lot of people call me.”

  He chuckled, and she knew from the warmth in his eyes that he liked her. It was good to have someone liking her for a change. Too often it was hostility she saw in people’s eyes. “See, trying to sell a story idea to a paper or a newsmag is a lot like being pregnant—a heavy burden and lots of labour. Cynic that I am, I can also tell you that you are more likely to get screwed at the end of the project rather than the beginning.”

  Margaret laughed. She liked Geller, too. He was easy company. Spoke the same language, shared a sense of humour. Nuance was no problem.

  “So I guess you’re still not going to tell me anything about progress on the inquiry?” he said.

  “I’d say that was a pretty fair guess.”

  Then he threw one out of left field and caught her completely off-guard. “So are you and Deputy Section Chief Li still an item then?”

  For a moment she didn’t know what to say. There didn’t seem any point in denying it. He had obviously done his research. So she said, “For the moment.”

  Something in her tone caused him to look at her more closely. “Trouble in paradise?”

  She shrugged, trying not to show concern. “Oh, you know how it is: American girl meets Chinese guy, falls in love. Chinese guy meets Chinese girl, American girl can’t compete.”

  “Why?”

  “Language, culture, politics, you name it. How do you bridge a culture gap that’s five thousand years wide? She’s a fish out of water here, he’s a fish out of water there. What other pool can they swim in?”

  “Hey, Margaret,” he said, returning to his beer, “if I knew the answer to that one I wouldn’t be spending so much of my life picking up a bar-room tan.” And Margaret knew immediately that this was more than just a smart line. There was a depth of feeling somewhere in there that hinted at an unhappy experience, perhaps not dissimilar to her own.

  Li hurried through revolving doors from the street. The lights of arcade shops to the left and right reflected brilliantly off a polished marble floor. He hurried past the foreign exchange counter and into the sprawling lounge area opposite reception. The sound of a live jazz band drifted out from the entrance to a bar in the far corner. He walked briskly across the lobby to where a young Chinese attendant stood guarding double doors leading to the sound of Dixieland beyond. She wanted him to pay an entrance fee. He glanced into the room behind her and saw that the bar was huge, with long lines of neatly ordered and empty tables. The music was deafening. Margaret had said she would meet him in the bar, but this surely couldn’t be it. “Is there another bar?” he asked.

  The attendant clearly thought he was some kind of Chinese cheapskate and pointed condescendingly up the stairs.

  The Art Deco bar on the first-floor mezzanine was empty also. He saw a waitress hovering behind the coffee maker hoping he wouldn’t notice her. He went back downstairs to the reception desk and asked what room Miss Margaret Campbell was in, then rode the elevator up to the sixth floor and wandered down a long, thickly carpeted corridor until he found room 605. There was a bell push on the wall beside the door. He pressed it and heard a doorbell chime distantly in the room. He waited, but there was no response. He rang again and when there was still no response, knocked on the door and called, “Margaret?” Quietly at first, and then louder. A door opened further down the hall and an elderly Japanese gentleman glared at him.

  He went back down to reception and asked them to call the room. The receptionist waited patiently as the phone rang out. Li asked if Margaret’s key had been returned. The receptionist checked and said no, the key was still out. Li was initially perplexed, and then annoyed, and somewhere in the background a little relieved. He waited around in the lobby for another fifteen minutes before writing a quick note which he left with the receptionist. And then he headed with righteous indignation back to the Da Hu Hotel to lie on his bed listening to the traffic rumble past his window on Yan’an Viaduct Road, and to try to make sense of the confusion of conflicting emotions
in his head.

  V

  At first she had no idea what had wakened her. Some sound or smell or movement had entered her consciousness. Her eyelids were so heavy she could barely force them apart. She saw a thin line of light coming under the door from the corridor, and smelled the faintly pungent odour of some distantly familiar oriental perfume. Then she heard the slightest swish of silk on silk, like a whisper, and turned over on to her back to see a figure standing over her, dressed in a long, hand-embroidered gown. At first she could not see the face, but knew it was a woman from the small, slender build. She was standing motionless, just looking down at Margaret in the dark. Quickly, Margaret fumbled for the light switch, and blinking in the sudden glare of electric light, she saw that it was Mei-Ling, dark eyes burning like coals. Suddenly Mei-Ling’s clasped hands shot above her head and Margaret saw the glint of light on a long, slender blade as it came arcing down towards her.

  She screamed and sat up suddenly in the dark, the sound of blood pulsing through her head, the echo of her own voice still reverberating around the room. She was alone in the room, fully dressed, sitting up on top of a bed that had not been slept in. The red numerals of the digital clock at the bedside glowed in the dark. They showed 3:12. Margaret blinked in confusion. She was disorientated. Had she been dreaming, or was this the dream? Where was she? A hotel room. She saw light flooding out from the open door of the bathroom. China. Shanghai. And, suddenly, she remembered her dinner with Li. She looked again at the clock and at first could make no sense of the time it was showing. Twelve minutes past three? How was that possible? Was it morning or afternoon. And, then, with a sickening sense of realisation she knew what had happened.

  She had spent an hour in the bar with Jack, talking, and then she had told him she was meeting someone for dinner and was going to her room to freshen up. She had lain down on the bed for a moment, just so that she could close her eyes and stop the room spinning. She had only had one drink, but the effects of the alcohol combined with a serious shortage of sleep had been fatal. She must have slept for more than eight hours. She still found it hard to believe that it was the middle of the night, that she had missed her dinner with Li by seven hours. Seven hours! It did not seem possible.