The Killing Room

by Peter May

  Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, close to a phone which had resolutely refused to ring all evening. In her hand she clutched a tumbler of whisky. She had worked her way through all the miniatures in the mini-bar, and was now on to the Scotch. But it didn’t seem to matter how much she drank, she couldn’t get drunk. Oblivion was all she sought, and yet it remained elusive, despite her best efforts.

  Her mouth was dry, and the pain thumped in her head with every beat of her heart, each pulse a reminder of her guilt, of her shame, of her failure. Responsibility for a young life had been placed in her hands today and she had not lived up to her obligations. She was not fit to be a mother. She was not fit to live. She remembered once, during her time as an intern, losing a patient in the emergency room. A young woman, the victim of a knife attack. Margaret had been incapable of stopping the internal bleeding. It wasn’t her fault, but it had been a turning point in her life, a moment when she realised that no matter how well trained, no matter how experienced, control of that moment which ultimately decided between life and death was never really in your hands.

  But today, Xinxin’s life had been in her hands. She had had absolute control and failed to exercise it. As a young doctor she had turned from the futility of trying to save the living, to the predictability of dissecting the dead. Now all she wanted to do was to give up life completely, her own life, and find some escape in the final embrace of death, her own death. But she was, she knew, too big a coward for that. And, besides, death would be too lenient a punishment.

  She emptied her glass and stood up, crossing unsteadily to the window and drawing back the curtains. Saturday night. Nanjing Road was filled with people and traffic. She looked down at the crowd below her and wished that she were one of them, freed from the burden of guilt and fear for a child she had failed. But, then, who knew what pain other people carried in their heads, what private grief, what personal hell. She would not be the only person suffering in the world tonight. But that knowledge did nothing to take away the pain.

  She was haunted by the look in Li’s eyes as she got into the car outside the park. She had never felt such a searing look, so filled with hurt and darkness and hate. It had reached inside her and burned itself into her soul, and it was smouldering there still.

  Now she turned away from the window and the thought, fumbling in the dark to the mini-bar. But she had finished all the little bottles, and they rattled emptily away from her clutching fingers. She wondered if maybe Jack would be in the bar looking for her. He must have heard the news by now. There had been appeals on radio and television all night. He was, perhaps, the only person in Shanghai who might not blame her for what had happened. But she was not sure she deserved that. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and thought for a moment she was looking at an apparition. There was a deathly pallor in her face, eyes sunken and ringed with dark smudges, and for the first time in her life she saw herself looking like her grandmother. Her father’s mother. She had never before seen the resemblance, and for one brief alcoholic moment she had actually believed she was her grandmother’s ghost. She let out a tiny, involuntary cry and looked quickly away. She lifted her key card and hurried out into the brightly lit hall.

  Jack was not in the bar. As usual it was deserted. Margaret slipped stiffly on to a barstool and ordered a vodka tonic. And she knew there would be no sympathy or redemption for her tonight as Xinxin’s face swam up with the bubbles through the tonic to feed her worst fears of what had become of the child.

  The yellow light of the streetlamps on the overhead road fell into Li’s bedroom through nicotine-stained net curtains. The headlamps of vehicles on the road raked the window at irregular intervals, and a blue neon light flashed intermittently somewhere close by. He had placed the phone on the table next to his chair. It was nearly midnight. He had not slept for nearly forty hours. His eyes were on fire, and there was a dull ache behind them. The room was full of smoke, and his ashtray filled to overflowing. All the radio and television appeals had turned up nothing new, and he had finally left 803 an hour ago at the insistence of the detectives on night shift. They promised to call the moment they had anything fresh.

  In the hours after Xinxin had vanished, he had played out every nightmare scenario in his mind until he had become so numbed that nothing seemed to affect him any more. He had been over and over every last detail, examined and re-examined the statements of everyone questioned at the park. None of it had brought him any closer to an understanding of what had happened or why. Someone, clearly, had grabbed the child and made off with her in the stolen workmen’s van. Minutes later, a Westerner had been seen chasing that same van down a nearby street, banging on its side. They had neither found the van nor made any progress in identifying the Westerner. And Li was simply no longer able to think clearly.

  He sat in the silence smoking cigarette after cigarette, concentrating hard on trying to keep the nightmares at bay.

  A knock at the door startled him. He jumped up and hurried across the room to open it. Mei-Ling was in the hall, holding a carrier bag with steam rising from it, the smell of food carried in the vapour. “My dad got them to prepare you some stuff at the restaurant.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ve got to eat, Li Yan.” She pushed gently past him and closed the door. She laid the bag on the table and started taking out dishes of food in cardboard cartons, and placed two cans of beer beside them. She paused then and looked at his swollen eyes as he stood, hangdog, in the middle of the room, like a man in a trance. “I’m so sorry,” she said. His eyes were glazed and gazing off into some unimaginable middle-distance. But he acknowledged her with the slightest nod of his head. “The food’s there if you want it. You know where I am if you need to call me.”

  She stopped to squeeze his hand, and then turned towards the door, but he grabbed her arm and held her fast. He was still unable to meet her eyes. “Don’t go,” he said, and she turned back, and after only a moment’s hesitation slipped her arms about his waist and pushed her head into his chest so that he could rest his head on hers. His arms enveloped her, and she felt rather than heard his sobs.

  They were standing in a building site, not unlike the one in Lujiazui where they had found the bodies of the eighteen women. The broken stumps of an abandoned concrete foundation stuck out of the ground like bad teeth. The whole site was awash with mud. Only, the mud was frozen solid. Every attempt to break it with shovel and pick had failed. Now a big man with a yellow hard hat was wielding a pneumatic drill, and freeing chunks of frozen mud from around a central post with a plank of wood strapped across it like a Christian cross. The letter had said she would be here, under the mud, a temporary grave beneath the sign of a foreign religion.

  From between the splintering wedges of mud, a little arm flopped out, pink and cold, the hand open, palm up. And as the man in the hard hat began to drill afresh, Li screamed at him to stop. One of the fingers had moved. But the workman couldn’t hear him, and he drilled on. Long piercing bursts of vibrating metal on ice, right into the heart of the little girl beneath the mud.

  Li woke, still yelling, and with the sound of the phone filling the room. He was lying on top of the bed, fully dressed, sunlight streaming in through the open window along with the roar of the traffic on Yan’an Viaduct Road. Mei-Ling was crossing the room to answer the phone. He was immediately aware of the warm impression she had left in the bed beside him. So she had stayed all night. He took a deep breath and felt the phlegm of too many cigarettes crackle in his chest. He could not believe he had slept. Last night it had felt possible that he might never sleep again.

  He became aware of Mei-Ling’s voice. “When was this?” she was saying into the phone. “And have they recovered the van?” A moment as she listened, then, “Well, I hope the uniforms didn’t touch anything before forensics got there . . . Good. We’ll be straight over.” She hung up and turned to Li, clearly energised. “They found the van.” He sat up, rubbing his face and try
ing to clear the sleep from his mind. She said, “But even better . . . the guy who took it? They think they’ve got him on video tape.”

  The flashing red light on the dash on Mei-Ling’s Santana created a strobing effect in the car. Her siren wailed through the early morning quiet of this Shanghai Sunday. The streets were almost deserted. The city was just waking up. Margaret sat dazed in the back of the car, her head thick and sore, a foul taste in her mouth after several bouts of vomiting during the night. She hoped she was not going to be sick again. The strobe effect of the red light was not helping.

  She had been shocked by Li’s appearance when he turned up at her hotel. His eyes red and puffy, his cheeks pale and blotched. And he had been taken aback by her appearance, too. But she had not had the courage to look in a mirror. There had been developments, he had said. She was needed, in case she could make an identification. He had not told her anything further, except that they were going to the Police Command Centre to view video tapes. And now she sat in the silence of the car, afraid to ask what the developments were. Mei-Ling had not even acknowledged her, and Li had not spoken since they left the hotel.

  The Command Centre was in a fourteen-storey tower block on the corner of Jianguo Road and Ruijin Road next to Ruijin Hospital. Mei-Ling showed her pass at the gatehouse, and the gates swung open to admit them to a car park bounded by palm trees and potted plants. They ran up steps to the main entrance and took the elevator to the third floor. The Deputy Commander was waiting to meet them in the hall. They shook hands and he led them through glass doors to the operations room. Rows of desks lined with computer terminals faced fifteen giant projection video screens on the far wall. They were flanked on each side by eight smaller television screens which flickered at regular intervals from street scene to street scene, fed by cameras mounted at key vantage points all over Shanghai. Beneath the screens, facing back into the room, were eight uniformed officers sitting at terminals taking one-one-oh police emergency calls. At another desk running the full width of the room, banks of coloured phones were linked to rows of fax machines that chattered and printed out screeds of information coming in from police stations around the city. At the back of the room sat the controllers, who evaluated all incoming information and determined what pictures were relayed on to the big screens.

  The Deputy Commander introduced them to a grim-faced middle-aged man in a green uniform buttoned up to the neck who sat at the centre of the back row, a bank of knobs and switches and sliders in front of him, a microphone on a flexible gooseneck projecting towards him from his console. “Officer Su is the senior duty controller,” he said. And to Su, “Do you want to take them through it?”

  Su nodded and addressed himself to Li. “Mid-afternoon yesterday we had a serious road accident at the Zhongshan-Wuyi intersection, just where the slip road feeds down to the Hu Xi Stadium. A lorry swerved to avoid a cyclist, hit the kerb and overturned, spilling its load of timber all over the roadway. Several private vehicles were unable to stop and there was a multiple pile-up.”

  Margaret had no idea what he was saying, and Li seemed none the wiser. He said, “What’s this got to do with the little girl being snatched at the traffic park?”

  Su said, “We have a camera on that intersection. Normally we only record from these cameras in the event of an incident. So in this case we have more than an hour of recorded tape of the intersection following the accident.” He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the desk and offered them around. When no one took him up on his offer, he lit up himself. “One of my people was monitoring all incoming information following events at the Tiantan Traffic Park yesterday. In the early hours of this morning he had an idea. It was quiet, and he had nothing much else to do. So he ran the tape of the Zhongshan–Wuyi intersection. It’s less than half a mile from the park, and eyewitnesses had reported seeing the grey van heading north, in the direction of the stadium. That was about half an hour after the accident. He figured there was a good chance we might have caught the van on tape.” He took a long pull on his cigarette. “Turned out we caught a lot more than that.”

  He leaned forward and threw some switches. Nine of the fifteen projection screens, which had been displaying a map detail of a northern city suburb, switched to one giant black-and-white projection of the tape of the Zhongshan–Wuyi intersection which Su had set to play. The lorry was lying at an angle on one side. Timber was still strewn all over the road. Four private cars with varying degrees of damage had been abandoned in the middle of the carriageway while their owners shouted and gesticulated, clearly attempting to deflect or apportion blame. Traffic cops were already coning off the slip road and a couple of recovery vehicles were parked half on the hard shoulder, hazard lights flashing.

  The little group at the back of the control room stood watching the screen expectantly. The picture, blown up to that size, was blurred. Su leaned forward and said, “Watch the screen at the top right.” The portion of the picture it carried showed the Wuyi Road intersection, with the stadium rising in the background, almost in the shadow of the overhead road. There were vehicles parked all along one side of it, and traffic was backing up from the slip road. “There,” Su said suddenly, pointing. “You see it?” And they saw a light-coloured workmen’s van pull out of the stream of traffic going in the opposite direction, and draw into the side of the road. Su stopped the tape then, flicked another couple of switches, and the picture from the top right screen filled the others. The definition was very poor, but they could clearly see the figure of a man jump down from the driver’s seat and slide open the side door. He leaned in quickly and lifted out a small limp bundle wrapped in some kind of blanket or tarpaulin. As he carried it to the car parked behind, a little arm fell free, momentarily hanging in the air, just as in Li’s nightmare. The man quickly covered it, and dumped the bundle into the trunk of the car.

  A slight moan escaped Li’s lips in a breath. “It’s Xinxin,” he whispered.

  Until that moment, the man had always had his back to camera. Now, as he turned to get into the driver’s door, they saw his face for the first time. The picture was indistinct and very grainy, but it was still possible to make out his flat, high-cheekboned Mongolian features, his long, straggly hair, and the distortion about his mouth that might have been a scar.

  Margaret let out a cry that sounded like pain, and they all turned to look at her. Her face was a mask of fear. Her breathing was so rapid and shallow that she could hardly speak.

  “What is it?” Li said urgently. “Do you recognise him? Was he in the park?”

  “I know him,” she gasped. “But not from the park. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, if only I’d known.”

  Li grabbed her shoulders and almost shook her. “Where have you seen him, Margaret?”

  She forced herself to meet his eyes. “The night we were going to have dinner and I fell asleep in my room . . . After I phoned you, it must have been three in the morning or later, I went out to get some air. I went for a walk along the promenade on the Bund.” She pointed towards the screen. The controller had frozen the picture on the face. “He was following me. He was close enough to touch me at one point, near the underpass. I saw his face clearly in the light. I got such a fright, I just ran.”

  “You never said anything? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t know. I didn’t think it was important. A stupid woman getting freaked because she saw a man with a hare-lip in the middle of the night.” She closed her eyes and shook her head in despair. “But I saw him again. At the time I thought it wasn’t possible, that I must have imagined it. It was only a fleeting glimpse.”

  “Where, Margaret? Where did you see him?” Li’s voice was insistent and commanding.

  “In Beijing,” she said. “At the airport. When I was coming back with Xinxin.”

  There was a moment of stunned disbelief, and then Mei-Ling said, “Did you say he had a hare-lip?” Margaret nodded. Mei-Ling turned to Li. “Li Yan, you remember
the description Sun Jie gave us of the man his wife said was following her?” And Li remembered every detail of that moment, from the sadness on Sun Jie’s face to the very words he had used to recall his wife’s description. She said he looked like a Mongolian, and he had a real ugly scar on his upper lip, he had said. She thought it could have been a hare-lip.

  V

  Margaret had spent more than an hour with the police artist at 803. A computer-enhanced print of the Mongolian’s face had been taken from the video. But it was still blurred and lacking definition. Margaret had provided the detail for the artist to give it the definition required to make it recognisable. She looked now at the finished graphic on the sheet of paper that trembled in her hand. It was eerily like the face that had confronted her that night on the Bund. There was something in the eyes that was as chilling now as it had been then. The fact that this was the man who had snatched Xinxin did not even bear thinking about.

  “Is it okay?” Mei-Ling asked. Margaret looked up at her and nodded. Mei-Ling took the sheet from her. “I’ll get it copied and circulated.” She left the office, and Li and Margaret were alone for the first time since Xinxin had been kidnapped.

  Li could hardly bring himself to look at her. He remembered, with a sense of shame now, the hatred and blame that had consumed him yesterday afternoon and through the night. “I’m sorry,” he said at length.

  She looked surprised. “What for?”

  “For blaming you.”

  She shook her head. “It was my fault.”

  “No.” He moved around the desk towards her. “I don’t understand it all,” he said, “but this was no random kidnapping. The hare-lip guy was following you. All the way to Beijing. Just like he followed the acrobat, just like he probably followed all the others. If he hadn’t got Xinxin in the park, he would have got her some other place, some other time.” He clenched his fists and let out a howl of frustration. “Why? Why Xinxin? What could they possibly want with her?” And he immediately flinched from the answer that came to him.