Peter May - Chinese Whispers

The detectives had moved their discussion from motive to modus operandi. Wu was clear on their killer’s MO. ‘He chokes them until they are unconscious,’ he said. ‘Then he lays them on the ground, on their back, and kneels on their right side. He leans across the body and cuts the throat from left to right. Look at the pics …’ He waved his hand toward the gallery of horrors on the wall. ‘You can see the blood always pools around the left side of the head, never down the front of the body, which it would if they’d still been standing. In some cases the spatter pattern on the ground shows that the blood spurted out from the left carotid artery. The victim was still alive after strangulation, the blood still under pressure.’ He paused briefly to light a cigarette. ‘The point is, he makes sure he gets as little blood on himself as possible. Then, once they’re dead, he starts cutting them open.’

Li spoke for the first time. ‘The trouble with all this is, we know what he does and how he does it. But we haven’t the first idea why, or who. We need some kind of picture in our minds of this man. A profile, some way of narrowing down who we’re looking for. Is he educated, is he a professional man? What age is he, is he married? Does he have sexual or psychological problems? He only kills at weekends. Does that mean his job, or a family commitment, makes it impossible for him to do it during the week?’ He remembered his Uncle Yifu’s counsel. The answer always lies in the detail . And Mei Yuan’s words came back to him from earlier that morning. It is in the detail that you will find the devil .

‘He’s clever,’ Li went on. ‘All these girls advertised in the personal columns of magazines. They all gave e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers. But he never e-mailed them. We would have found those e-mails on the girls’ computers, and that might have led us back to him. He knew that. And he knew we could check mobile phone records. That’s why the only calls we can’t account for were made from public phones. He’s one step ahead of us at every stage.’

They did not have a single witness. Li was certain that the killer had not chosen Jianguomen by chance. It was an area of four- and five-star hotels, restaurants, bars. It had a transient population of embassy workers and tourists. The murderer most probably met his victims in hotel lobbies where people were coming and going all the time. The girls would feel safe meeting him in a public place, and no one would think twice about a couple making a rendezvous and heading out for the night. Afterwards, their faces were so disfigured, either because of being choked or, in the case of the latest victim, brutally slashed, that by the time police had obtained photographs and got them circulating round the hotels, the chances were that anyone who saw them together had already checked out and moved on.

‘We’re still running DNA checks on all known sex offenders,’ Zhao said. And he shrugged. ‘Nothing yet, though.’

A slow, laborious, time-consuming process, that Li was certain would lead them nowhere. But it had to be done.

‘Can I read you something?’

They all looked around in surprise. Qian sat selfconsciously clutching a book that he had taken from his bag. Li saw several coloured strips of paper marking various pages in it.

‘I swear by my ancestors I never knew you could read,’ Wu said, and the room erupted in laughter. ‘You been taking literacy lessons, boss?’

But Qian did not smile. There was something odd in his manner, and he was pale, as if all the blood had been drained from his face. The laughter quickly subsided, and the faces of dead girls looked down on them reproachfully.

‘On you go, Qian,’ Li said.

Qian started flipping through the pages to his first marker. ‘I just wondered if this might seem familiar,’ he said. He found his place and started reading. Smoke rose from cigarettes in absolute silence.

‘There were twenty-two stab wounds to the trunk. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung in two places, but the lungs were otherwise perfectly healthy. The heart was rather fatty, and was penetrated in one place, but there was otherwise nothing in the heart to cause death, although there was some blood in the pericardium. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was perfectly healthy, and was penetrated in two places; both the kidneys were perfectly healthy; the stomach was also perfectly healthy, but was penetrated in six places; the intestines were healthy, and so were all the other organs. The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth. There was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated. Death was due to haemorrhage and loss of blood.’

In silence, Qian flicked through the pages to his next marker and began reading again.

‘Her throat had been cut from left to right, two distinct cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through; a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw, also one on left cheek; the abdomen had been cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of the stomach, there the wound was jagged; the omentum or coating of the stomach, was also cut in several places, and two small stabs on private parts; apparently done with a strong bladed knife; supposed to have been done by some left-handed person; death being almost instantaneous.’

Someone muttered ‘shit’ under his breath, like the sound of a pin dropping. And they all heard it. Pages rustled, and Qian moved on to a third passage.

‘Examination of the body showed that the throat was severed deeply, incision jagged. Removed from, but attached to body, and placed above right shoulder, were a flap of the wall of belly, the whole of the small intestines and attachments. Two other portions of wall of belly and ‘Pubes’ were placed above left shoulder in a large quantity of blood. The following parts were missing: — part of belly wall including navel; the womb, the upper part of vagina and greater part of bladder.’

‘In the name of the sky,’ Wu said. ‘These sound like pathology reports on the first three murders.’

Li was on his feet. ‘What the hell are you reading from?’

Qian slowly closed the book. ‘Detective Wu is right,’ he said. ‘They are extracts from police and pathology reports. From nearly one hundred and twenty years ago.’

Every eye in the room was on him, every detective struggling to make sense of what he was saying.

‘I read a review yesterday of a book published for the first time in China. Even from the review I was struck by certain similarities. So I went out first thing this morning and bought it. And it became clear to me very quickly that I was looking at something more than coincidence.’ He held the book up. ‘ The Murders of Jack the Ripper ,’ he said. ‘The world’s first documented serial killer. He may have murdered as many as seven women in the streets of London, England, in the fall of 1888. And someone is replicating those murders in exact detail, right here in Beijing, one hundred and fifteen years on.’

Li felt the hairs rise up on the back of his neck.

The perfume of the postmortem was a haunting scent. Usually it took Li hours to get the smell of it from his nostrils. Blood and decay, the smell of rotting food from the stomach, the stink of faeces from an open intestine, the almost sweet whiff of burning bone as the oscillating saw cut through the skull. Today he barely noticed. The mutilated corpse of Guo Huan lay on the autopsy table, empty of all her vital organs, chest prised open, the last of her body fluids slowly trickling away along the drainage channels and into a collecting bucket. It was cold enough in the autopsy room for his breath to cloud in front of him, but the chill that reached into his bones had nothing to do with the temperature.