The Killing Room

by Peter May

  “I’m not sure I want to,” Li said.

  “Well, in this case you have no choice,” Margaret said. “And neither did this poor girl. Whoever performed her abortion was too vigorous with the suction tool, and instead of sucking out just the foetus along with the placenta and the superficial lining, they removed a whole portion of the lining of the womb, causing it to scar closed. She probably couldn’t have had another baby even if she’d wanted.”

  Li looked thoughtful. “How many of the victims had scars like this?”

  Margaret looked sheepish. “Nearly half of them.” She shrugged. “The only excuse I can offer is that I didn’t perform all the autopsies, and the womb was pretty far from the focus of attention. Also, it would have been possible for complications in childbirth to have resulted in scarring like this.”

  Li brushed aside her guilty apologies. “Only half of them? You said you’d found something that connected them all.”

  “I have,” she said. “You’ll have to come through to the other room.”

  On the tables in the room next door, Margaret had laid out the wombs and the other pelvic organs—the urinary bladder, ovaries and Fallopian tubes—of another two victims. It looked to Li like a bizarre collection of human pieces. The bodies from which they had been taken were laid out inside their open body-bags on gurneys beside each table.

  Margaret moved to the nearest table. She said, “Another abortion technique is called D & C. Dilation and curettage. The cervix is softened in the same way, but then the foetus and the uterus are literally scraped out using a long-handled sharp spoon, a little like an ice-cream scoop, but smaller than an old fancy sugar-cube spoon.”

  She heard Li exhale through his teeth. “Do I really need this detail?” he asked.

  “Yup. It’s important.” She was not prepared to make any allowances. “The trouble with this procedure is that it has a much higher complication rate. There’s a greater danger of perforation and haemorrhage at the time it is carried out, and as a result, more infections afterwards.” She held open one of the tubes leading from the womb. “This is one of the uterine, or fallopian tubes,” she said. “Sometimes, if the womb is infected after the D & C, the infection can travel up the uterine tubes and scar them closed. That’s what’s happened here.”

  Li leaned forward and saw the distinctive pattern of scarring in the bisected tube.

  Margaret said, “The pathologist who did the autopsy on this woman would have had no reason to consider it significant. And, anyway, this kind of scarring is more commonly caused by a number of venereal diseases.” She moved away to the other table. “Now this poor woman,” she said, “suffered at the hands of the Japanese.” Li’s frown caused her to smile. “They invented the process,” she said. “Yet another crude, and quite brutal, way of ending a life. You’d think in this high-tech age we’d have evolved more sophisticated techniques. But then, since it’s usually men who invent these things, it’s probably not very high on their list of priorities.” She flattened out the bivalved uterus and ran her finger along an irregularly healed scar on the cervix. “One of the tell-tale signs,” she said. “And you can see up here on the inside of the uterine wall this thinned, tough, pale area. That’s another.” She sighed. “What’s happened here is that the fluid has been drawn out of the bag of water around the foetus and replaced by a concentrated salt solution. That has caused the foetus and placenta to spontaneously deliver about forty-eight hours after the infusion.”

  “What’s caused the scarring?”

  Margaret shrugged. “There are various complications that can cause the cervix to be scarred like this, but this pale area inside the body of the uterus . . . that’s a result of some of the salt solution escaping into the muscular uterine wall, effectively killing it. Myometrial necrosis, it’s called.”

  She pushed her head back and then stretched it left and right to try to take some of the tension out of her neck. She slipped off her mask and shower cap and moved away to the sink, removing her gown and her gloves. Li followed her and leaned back against the stainless steel worktop. “So how many of our victims showed scarring like this?”

  Margaret said flatly, “All the remaining women had either one or other of these procedures performed on them.”

  Li thought about it for a long time. “A lot of women have abortions in China, Margaret,” he said.

  She turned to look at him. “About three hundred thousand a year in Shanghai,” she said. “That’s the figure that guy at Director Hu’s banquet came up with the other night, wasn’t it?”

  “Cui Feng.” Li nodded. “That’s right.”

  “And there are what, maybe six million women in Shanghai?”

  Li shrugged. “About that, I guess.”

  “So on a very crude calculation, over a ten-year period, fifty per cent of the women in this city will have had abortions. So out of, say, twenty women picked at random you’d expect half of them to have had an abortion. Of course, that’s just an average. In some groups there would be seven or eight. In others there might be thirteen, even fourteen.” She paused to let her arithmetic sink in. “Here we have nineteen women, if we include the girl in Beijing, and every single one of them has had an abortion. Li Yan, that’s statistically impossible.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I

  “You do not run this department, Deputy Section Chief. I do!” Section Chief Huang’s anger showed itself in the tiny flecks of spittle that gathered around his lips. He stood glaring at Li from behind his desk.

  Li closed the door and said quietly, “I was put in charge of this investigation.”

  “That does not give you the authority to go pulling my people out of their beds in the middle of the night and embarking on a course of investigation that has not even been discussed with me.”

  Li felt his patience waning. He said, “I can’t win, can I? Yesterday the Procurator General tells me if I don’t speed up the investigation it’s my neck on the block. I make a breakthrough during the night and you want me to wait till you’ve had breakfast before I follow it up.” He took out a cigarette.

  “Don’t light that in here,” Huang said.

  Reluctantly, Li slipped the cigarette back in its packet. His eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He glared back at Huang. “If you don’t get out of my face, Huang, I’m taking this to Director Hu, and I’m going to tell him I can’t pursue his investigation because you’re obstructing me.”

  Huang snorted his derision. “You think the Mayor’s policy adviser will see you at your request? Director Hu sees you when he wants to see you. And in the meantime you’ll deal with me and Procurator General Yue, like it or not.” He searched on his desk for a sheet of paper. He found it and waved it at Li. It had scribbled notes on it. “I had a call last night from the Chief of Section One. It seems you went and ruffled a few feathers at the Black Rain Club.” He breathed stertorously through his nose. “That is not how we deal with these people here?”

  “Oh, really?” Li said. “So what do you do, roll over and let them shit on you?”

  Huang’s eyes burned with anger and dislike. “You are walking on seriously thin ice here, Li. In Shanghai, insubordination and abuse towards a senior officer are usually rewarded with instant demotion, if not dismissal.”

  “So fire me,” Li said, and he locked eyes with Huang and wouldn’t look away. His position as head of the investigation was an issue he was determined to force. Director Hu had appointed him over Huang’s head, and he was not about to let the Section Chief undermine his authority because of petty jealousy and internal politics.

  Huang was spared having to respond by a knock at the door. It opened and Mei-Ling entered. She was immediately aware of the charged atmosphere that filled the room and closed the door quickly behind her. She looked at Huang. “What’s up, Chief?”

  Huang still held Li’s gaze. “Not only does our friend from Beijing drag half the pathology department out of their
beds in the middle of the night, but then he calls in the entire detective shift two hours early and embarks on an investigation of a personal friend of Director Hu.”

  This was all news to Mei-Ling. She looked at Li in amazement. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I needed foot soldiers, not generals,” Li said.

  She was clearly not pleased. “Do you want to tell me what it was that was so important you had to get everyone else out of their beds but me?”

  Li sighed. He did not need hostility on two fronts. “Margaret made a breakthrough last night. She found something that linked all the victims.”

  Mei-Ling frowned. “What?”

  “Every single one of them had had an abortion.”

  “Oh, had they?” she said. And she digested the information for a moment. Then, “So how come this ‘breakthrough’ wasn’t made at autopsy?”

  But Li was determined not to be deflected. “That’s not important right now. What matters is that these women could not have been picked at random. And if the thing they have in common is that they’ve all had abortions, then that puts the investigation on a whole different footing.”

  Mei-Ling was still struggling to keep up. “How’s that?”

  “I had the guys check with the relatives of four of the five girls we’ve identified so far. All four had their abortions done at clinics belonging to Cui Feng. Remember him? We met him at Director Hu’s banquet.”

  Huang cut in, “So now he wants to go harassing a personal friend of the Mayor’s policy adviser.” He turned on Li again. “There is nothing unusual about these women having had abortions carried out at Cui’s clinics. His organisation performs most of the abortions in Shanghai.”

  “In the name of the sky!” Li let his exasperation escape through clenched teeth. “I am not suggesting there is anything sinister in that. I want to ask Cui if he will give us access to his files. We can then check them against the missing persons files and find out which of them had had abortions. That way there’s a good chance we can narrow down the identities of the other dead girls.”

  Mei-Ling drew a deep breath and looked at Huang. “It does make sense, Chief.”

  But Li was wound up now and didn’t want to let it go. “I mean, what is this guy anyway, untouchable? Just because he’s a pal of Director Hu?”

  Huang turned a very dangerous look on Li. His voice was low. “Cui Feng is a Party member and a very influential member of this community,” he said. “I will not have his reputation impugned in any way by this department. Is that understood?”

  There was a tense silence, broken finally by Mei-Ling. “But we can ask him to let us see his files, can’t we, Chief?”

  Huang held Li’s eyes for several more seconds before tearing them away to focus on Mei-Ling. There was almost a sense of hurt in them, a feeling perhaps of betrayal that she had taken Li’s side rather than his. “Yes,” he said finally. “You can ask to see his files.”

  The traffic was backing up along Fuxing Road from roadworks outside the Music Conservatory. Li and Mei-Ling had sat nursing their own thoughts in the car all the way south and west from 803. The tension between Li and Huang had transferred itself to Mei-Ling. She was brooding darkly behind the wheel of the car. She glanced at Li as they sat idling in the traffic, fumes rising all about them in the rain, only the sound of windscreen wipers scraping back and forth breaking their silence. “So where is she now?” she said at last.

  Li dragged himself from his private thoughts. “Who?”

  “Margaret.”

  “She’s gone back to her hotel to try and get some sleep. She was up most of the night.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” Mei-Ling said in a tone that dripped with sarcasm. “Maybe if she’d spotted these abortions in the first place she wouldn’t have needed to go catching up on her beauty sleep.”

  For Li it was the last straw. He turned his aggression full on Mei-Ling. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell you and Margaret have got against each other, but I’m fed up being caught between two women eating vinegar. I want this jealousy to stop. And I want it to stop now! We’ve got nineteen women here hacked to death by some maniac with a blade, I think we owe it to them to keep ourselves focused on catching their killer. Don’t you?”

  Mei-Ling was shocked, both by his anger and by his more than implied criticism. She reacted coldly. “Of course,” she said.

  But Li was tired, his resistance low, and there were other things he wanted to get off his chest. “And that policewoman you sent to pick up Xinxin . . . ? I don’t want her going near the kid again.”

  Mei-Ling flashed him an angry look. “Why?”

  “Because she refused to let Margaret near her, and scared Xinxin half to death. In future I’ll make my own arrangements to have her collected. All right?”

  Mei-Ling’s cheeks reddened. Anger was mixed now with hurt, and she retreated into herself like a wounded animal. She nodded and kept her eyes fixed firmly on the traffic in the road ahead. They did not speak again until she turned the car into the car park outside the red-roofed villa that housed Cui Feng’s central clinic.

  The clinic was set behind a high gated wall and a profusion of densely leafed trees in a quiet residential street on the edge of the consular district. This had once been the heart of the old French Concession. Elegant villas sat brooding in discreet isolation behind walls and fences. Private cars were parked along secluded, tree-lined avenues, with only the odd cyclist whirring past on a rickety bicycle. What had once been the garden of the villa was paved, and half a dozen cars sat backed up against the wall. A small private ambulance was parked under a canopy supported by two pillars above the main entrance. The windows had all been double-glazed, and the view into their interior was obscured by cream-coloured vertical blinds. A brass plaque on the gate revealed in Chinese and English that this was the SHANGHAI WORLD CLINIC.

  A nurse in a white, starched uniform led them up thickly carpeted stairs and along a passageway hung with original scroll paintings by famous Chinese artists. It felt more like an opulent private residence than a medical clinic. They passed an oriental gentleman in a wheelchair being pushed by a male nurse, and then were shown into a large study with a sofa and two armchairs gathered around an original fireplace. There was a huge, leather-tooled desk in the bay window, stripes of watery daylight falling in through the blinds and lying across the contours of the captain’s chair that sat behind it. Cui Feng came around the desk as they entered. He wore an expensively cut dark suit and had the same gentle bedside manner of the family doctor that Li remembered from their first meeting at Director Hu’s banquet. Soft spoken and smiling, he shook their hands warmly, inviting them each to take an armchair. “It is a great pleasure to meet you again, Deputy Section Chiefs.” He gave a small laugh at his plural abbreviation. “It is a great relief that you share a rank,” he said, “or we could be here all day just addressing each other.” He sat down on the edge of the settee and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and placed his hands together almost as if in prayer. “Now what can I do for you?” he asked. “I understand that some of those poor women you dug up had abortions done at some of my clinics.” And Li realised that Huang had already been on the phone to Cui to smooth the way for their arrival.

  “That’s right,” Li said. “In fact all the victims have had abortions performed on them.” He hesitated for the briefest of moments before adding, “Not very expertly, according to our pathologist. Otherwise it would have been very difficult to tell.”

  But Cui was not ruffled. He said, “In that case, perhaps they were not all performed at my clinics. We operate to very high procedural standards.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Li said. “But since you perform most of the abortions in Shanghai, this seemed like a good place to start.”

  “Start what, exactly?” Cui appeared uncomfortable for the first time.

  Mei-Ling stepped in quickly to prevent Li from discomfiting him any further
. “We were wondering, Mr. Cui, if you would allow us access to your files so that we could cross-check them with the women on our missing persons file.”

  He frowned. “What good would that do?”

  “It might help us narrow down the identities of the remaining victims,” Li said.

  Cui pursed his lips and turned this over briefly in his mind. Then, “All right,” he said. “I can see no harm in it. But since our files are normally confidential, perhaps I could appoint one of my staff to liaise with your people and do the actual comparisons. That way we could continue to maintain the confidentiality of our patients.”

  Li was not happy with this proposal. He wanted direct access to the files and was about to say so. But he glanced at Mei-Ling and picked up her almost imperceptible shake of the head, Huang’s words of warning about Cui’s membership of the Party and his influential friends still ringing in his ears. So he forced a reluctant nod of agreement instead. “That would be acceptable,” he said.

  “Good.” Cui relaxed and sat back in the settee. “You will have some tea.” It was not so much a question as a statement. Li and Mei-Ling had no time to respond before there was a knock at the door and a young woman carried in a tray with a pot of jasmine tea and three cups of the most delicate bone china. She set it on a low table in front of the fireplace and filled the cups before making a small bow and hurrying out.

  “So do you actually perform abortions here at this clinic?” Li asked.

  “Good Heavens, no,” Cui said smiling at Li’s apparent naïvety. “The Shanghai World Clinic is exclusively for the use of foreign residents living in Shanghai.” He laughed. “Generally very wealthy people whose companies provide comprehensive medical insurance. We Chinese might as well make the most of any ill-health that befalls them while they’re here, don’t you think?”