Питер Мэй - The Ghost Marriage

Sheng Nuwa said, ‘We had no idea until we saw the Missing posters. She was only delivered to us on the day of the wedding. We thought she had come from the crematorium. That’s what the man who brought her said.’

‘I’ll need his name.’

‘We don’t know it.’ It was the husband who spoke this time, and when Li blew his disbelief through pursed lips, he added quickly, ‘They told us they weren’t able to get us a body, so we had resigned ourselves to proceeding with just the paper dummy. Then this guy arrives at the last minute.’

‘Who did you go to originally to ask for a body?’

Sheng Dai glanced darkly at his wife. Their reluctance to speak was clear.

But Li was losing patience. ‘Come on! Spit it out! You’re in trouble enough as it is. Don’t make it worse.’

The dead boy’s mother said, ‘We were given a name. A certain Gan Bo. He could find wives, we were told, for the living. It’s hard these days for a single man to find himself a woman.’

It was, Li knew, a demographic time bomb for the future of his country. A legacy of the one-child policy, and the traditional preference for boys over girls. With only 100 women for every 130 men, there was a growing demand for mail-order brides. And a criminal element had appeared to satisfy that demand, trading women for money.

Sheng Nuwa brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes. ‘But we were told that sometimes Gan Bo could supply dead ones, too.’

Li could barely conceal his disgust. ‘So you put in an order for one.’

Her eyes dropped away from his. ‘We were only trying to do the best for our son.’

‘And what did Gan Bo say?’

Sheng Dai said, ‘He told us he would see what he could do. But he came back a couple of days later and said he couldn’t get one in time. And with the summer heat, we couldn’t wait.’

‘So then some guy just appeared from nowhere?’

‘Yes. On the morning of the minghun . He brought the girl in the back of a van. Said that Gan Bo had been able to find a body for us after all. We’d already acquired a second coffin.’

‘And you paid him.’

‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘He wanted dollars.’

‘How much?’

‘Twelve hundred.’

Li clenched his jaw involuntarily. So that was what a young girl’s life was worth these days. Twelve hundred dollars. The price of a plasma TV. ‘Tell me what the man who brought the body looked like.’

But the dead boy’s father just shrugged. ‘I didn’t pay him much attention. I was kind of in shock. He was just some guy. Forty, maybe. A little older. He didn’t stay long.’

Li found himself strangely disappointed that this description, however brief, in no way resembled the tall, skinny boy who had been Meilin’s lover. ‘And the bodies? I suppose you had them cremated.’ All evidence destroyed in the furnace.

‘That was the original plan,’ Sheng Nuwa said. ‘But then a cousin with a little land out near Donghulinmen offered to let us bury them there, and we jumped at the chance.’

Li and Margaret drove in silence, south-west out of Beijing on the G109. Meilin’s parents sat in the back of the Jeep, Jiang Jin with his arm around his wife. But there was no consoling her. Li had broken the news to them that afternoon, and Jiang Ning had barely stopped crying since. Her eyes were red raw. There was only one final act now to be played out in the life and death of their daughter. And that was the identification of her body.

It was dark by the time they reached the cluster of houses among the trees at the end of a rough dirt track leading from the road. Li parked in a dusty square. These were poor rural houses with thin brick walls and low roofs, huddled around a badly equipped village store. Goats tied to a stand of willow trees raised their heads and bah-ed into the night. They heard the snuffling of pigs, and smelled them before they saw them.

Li guided the little group up a narrow track between crumbling walls towards a halo of light that broke the darkness ahead. Several Public Security vehicles and a white forensics van were assembled around the entrance to a long, low house beside a rectangular wall that enclosed a hundred square metres of wildly overgrown garden.

They passed through a moongate, and the officer standing guard nodded solemnly. Beyond, they could see where the vegetation had been beaten down and the earth freshly disturbed. The area was enclosed by white canvas stretched between wooden posts, and lit by arc lamps. Four men in white Tyvek suits stood around leaning on the spades they had used to uncover the shallow graves. All chatter ceased as Li led the girl’s parents to the graveside. Margaret stayed behind, leaving a respectful distance.

Li nodded to the nearest white suit, and the man stepped down into the hole where two coffins lay side by side. His shadow fell across the first of them as he prised open the top. Li heard Jiang Ning gasp as the decaying corpse of a young man was exposed to the full glare of the lamps. The maggots had already started to eat his face, which had taken on a ghoulish look, the flesh of his eyes, nose, and mouth receding, a ghastly grimace revealing long yellow teeth.

As the second lid was levered free, Jiang Ning howled: a piercing, desolate sound that came from deep in her throat and sent a glacial chill through them all, in spite of the heat.

Meilin’s body had not achieved the same degree of decomposition. She had been alive, it seemed, at least until the day before the minghun , several days longer than her ghost husband. But there was a strange lividity about her face. It seemed, if anything, slightly more distended than his. But there was no doubting who she was. Her mother turned away, burying her face in her husband’s chest to suppress her tears. He put comforting arms around her and closed his eyes.

Li became aware of Margaret at his side and half-turned. She was looking down into the dead girl’s coffin, and he saw that for once the professional detachment of the pathologist was missing. Moonlight flashed in tear-filled eyes.

‘I want to do the autopsy,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.

The naked body of Jiang Meilin was wheeled into the autopsy room by two assistants, and transferred to a steel autopsy table. The air was chill and suffused with the slightly perfumed odour of decay, like meat that has been left in the refrigerator two weeks past its sell-by date.

Margaret stood at the table preparing for the initial examination. Beneath a long-sleeved cotton gown, she wore green surgeon’s pyjamas covered by a plastic apron. Plastic covers protected white tennis shoes, and her long blonde hair was secured beneath a plastic shower cap. Now she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, followed by plastic covers, then a steel-mesh glove over her non-cutting hand, before finally pulling on a further latex pair.

She was being assisted by Pathologist Wang, with whom she had conducted autopsies on many occasions. When she had first arrived in China, young and arrogant, and skilled in the latest Western techniques, he had resented the shadow she cast over him and his department. But such resentments were history now, and they had long ago arrived at something approaching mutual respect. Their working relationship was comfortable, and she enjoyed his irreverent sense of humour. But even Wang could find nothing amusing to say today. He cast his eyes over the slim teenager and shook his head.

‘Pity. Pretty girl.’

Margaret looked at the body on the table before her. Meilin was taller than the average Chinese, much of her height concentrated in the long femurs which had given her the power to run fast. But she did not possess the muscle mass that would have made her a sprinter. Instead her legs were slender and elegant. Margaret began with the feet and worked her way up the body looking for any unusual markings. She found some slight bruising on the forearms, noting them on a body chart she held in a clipboard, but did not consider them significant.