Peter May - Chinese Whispers

The whole surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features, and the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body.

The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.

The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, and on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about two feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.

His post-mortem notes were even more chilling in their detail of the Ripper’s bestiality.

The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin.

Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals between the 4th, 5th and 6th ribs were cut and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.

The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin including the external organs of generation and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia and muscles as far as the knee.

The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to five inches above the ankle.

Both arms and forearms had extensive and jagged wounds.

The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin, and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand and forearm showing the same condition.

On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken and torn away.

The left lung was intact; it was adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung were several nodules of consolidation.

The pericardium was open below and the heart absent.

Margaret could visualise it all, and oddly it affected her more than if she had carried out the autopsy herself. Something about the act of exercising your professional expertise removed you, somehow, from the human horror of it all.

The Ripper had taken Mary Jane’s heart. It was not found at the scene of the crime and never recovered. Margaret knew that at least two of the Beijing victims had been missing body parts. She was not sufficiently familiar with any of the cases to make direct comparisons with the victims of Jack the Ripper. But she did know that the Beijing equivalent of the Mary Jane Kelly killing had not yet been committed, and it chilled her to the bone to think that such a fate awaited some poor innocent Chinese girl out there. A living being with hopes and aspirations destined to flounder on the blade of a maniac. Unless Li could stop him. The thought brought home to her just how much pressure he must be under. And with the thought came her frustration that there was nothing she could do to help.

* * *

Li turned off Changan Avenue into Zhengyi Road and headed south, the high grey brick wall on his right concealing from public view the compound of the Ministries of State and Public Security, once the home of the British Embassy. Shop windows shone in the dark beneath the trees, uniforms and the paraphernalia of the police exhibited behind plate glass. Batons and baseball caps, tear-gas and truncheons. And books on every subject under the sun, from police procedure to pornography in art. He passed the Shanghainese restaurant where he and Margaret sometimes ate, just a short walk from their apartment, and turned into the compound past the armed officer on sentry duty. He drew up outside the apartment block reserved for senior officers and glanced up to see a light shining from their veranda on the seventh floor.

Inside the main door, he stopped to empty the contents of his mail box. Bills and circulars. He slipped them into his jacket pocket and walked into the empty elevator. The door slid noisily shut and the metal box rattled its way slowly up seven floors. He tried to empty his mind, as Old Dai had counselled, but found any number of things jostling to fill it again. The murders, the award ceremony and, strangely, Mei Yuan’s riddle. He tried to recall it. Something about deaf mutes in a rice paddy. But his concentration was shot, and already it seemed like an eternity since she had told him it that morning. Was it really only that morning he had been called out to the murder of Guo Huan?

The doors of the elevator slid open and he slipped his key in the lock of the apartment. He found Margaret with her legs curled up below her on an armchair, her face buried in a book. The apartment was in darkness, apart from the lamp by her chair. He switched on the overhead light, and she blinked in its sad yellow glare.

‘Hi,’ she said. And he stooped to kiss her on the cheek, like a husband returning home at the end of a day at the office. And she waiting for him, like some suburban housewife, reading crime stories to fill the hours.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

‘Your Jack the Ripper book.’

He frowned. ‘In English?’

She laughed. ‘In what else? I found it at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Wangfujing.’

He heard the sound of distant alarm bells ringing somewhere in the back of his mind. ‘When was it published?’

She flipped through the pages to the front of the book. ‘About eighteen months ago.’

‘So it’s been available here, in English, for some time.’

‘Must have been. There were still a couple of copies on the shelf.’ She could see that wheels behind his eyes were turning. ‘Why? Is there something significant in that?’

‘Could be,’ Li said. ‘The Chinese translation was only published a week ago. So if the killer is using this book as his blueprint he must be an English speaker.’

‘Or a foreigner,’ Margaret said. And Li recalled Elvis commenting on the Chinese content of the Ripper letter. Nobody would write Chinese like this . And Qian’s words, Unless maybe he was a foreigner . But it was clear that the strange Chinese was just a translation from arcane nineteenth-century English. The killer had lifted the translation from the book. Li’s mind froze on that thought. He couldn’t have. If he was working from the English original he would have had to make the translation himself. Then how did it come to be an exact match for the translation in the Chinese version of the book? No two translations would be exactly the same. He took out his cellphone and began dialling.

‘What is it?’ Margaret asked. But all he did was lift a finger to silence her.

‘Elvis, it’s the Chief. Get on to the Chinese publisher of the Ripper book and find out who translated it. As much background on him as you can.’

‘Chief,’ Elvis’s voice came back at him. ‘There’s a paragraph on the flyleaf about the translator. And he’s a she. Lives in Hong Kong.’ A pause. ‘You still want me to contact the publisher?’

‘No. No,’ Li said. ‘Forget it.’ And he flipped his phone shut. It was inconceivable that the killer was a woman. And Hong Kong was a little far to commute for murder.