Peter May - The Killing Room

Mei-Ling said, ‘Dr Lan, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing.’

Dr Lan scrutinised Li carefully, then permitted himself a small smile. He held out his hand. ‘Of course. It is an honour to meet you, Mr Li.’

‘Dr Lan is our senior pathologist,’ Mei-Ling said. And she turned to him. ‘Any initial thoughts, Doctor.’

‘Very preliminary.’ He walked them past the bodies, lighting another cigarette from the remains of the previous one. ‘Of course, I received my training in the army, so I have seen much worse. What’s disturbing about this is that all the victims are women.’

Li was taken aback. ‘All of them?’

‘Every last one, Deputy Section Chief. Ranging in ages, I’d say, from late teens to early thirties.’

Mei-Ling glanced at Li. ‘A sexual motive?’

‘Too early to say, Miss Nien. We’re still trying to figure out which bits go with which.’ He stopped at one of the tables and waved his cigarette towards a partially decomposed head, black holes where the eyes should have been. Li noticed that a ‘Y’ incision had been made in the torso beneath it, and ribs cut open to expose the chest cavity. ‘As you can see, decomposition is well under way,’ Lan said. ‘Only somebody very close to this young lady might be able to make a visual identification. It’s also making visual matching of the pieces virtually impossible. We’re comparing the bone ends where the limbs have been hacked off — we x-rayed all the pieces as they came down in the bags. But the best bet is DNA comparison. I’ve had small sections of skeletal muscle cut away from each of the body parts and sent on ice to the lab. Once we’ve found and matched all the bits, I’ll have the assembled parts of each body sent over to the mortuary and put in separate drawers in the chiller.’

‘Can you say how long they’d been buried?’ Li asked.

‘Not with any degree of accuracy. But if you want to put your hand inside one of the body cavities, Detective, you’ll find that it’s pretty cold in there.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Li said. ‘What’s the significance?’

Lan grinned. ‘I’d say they’d been frozen. If you examine the bits closely you’ll find signs of freezer burn on the flesh. They were probably buried straight from the freezer. The most dense pieces, the torsos, are almost, but not quite, fully defrosted. Given that they were only two to three feet down, they were probably buried about four or five days ago.’

‘So it’s going to be impossible to determine time of death.’

Lan laughed. ‘I see you’ve inherited your uncle’s penchant for stating the obvious, Mr Li.’

Li stiffened. ‘You knew him?’

‘Of course.’

‘My uncle used to say, Doctor, that it is the obvious which is most often overlooked. It’s one of the things that made him such a good cop.’

The pathologist guffawed and began choking on the smoke from his cigarette. Noisily he hawked the loose phlegm from his lungs and spat it out on the floor. When he recovered his breath he looked at Li, dark eyes twinkling behind the slits. ‘I see you’ve inherited more than just his pedantry.’

‘So you’ll understand if I continue with the pedantic theme of time of death.’

But Lan was intent on taking his time. He lit another cigarette and threw away the old one before he said, ‘They could have been in the freezer for weeks, or months, Deputy Section Chief. In all likelihood they were killed at different times and put into cold storage. There’s no way to determine when any of them died.’

Mei-Ling said, ‘But you will be able to determine cause of death?’

‘Most likely, Miss Nien, once we’ve done the autopsies.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette and peeled it away from his lips. ‘The only trouble is, someone’s been there before us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.

Lan clamped his cigarette between his lips again. ‘Just what I say, Detective. At least partial autopsies were carried out on every one of these poor ladies before they were put in the freezer.’

*

Outside, night had fallen, and the bleak, dark concrete landscape of Lujiazui had been transformed into a multi-coloured light show. The Pearl TV Tower and a vast globe at its base were floodlit green. Those forlorn and empty office blocks Li had seen an hour before, now soared proudly into the night sky, glowing orange, yellow, green and blue. Upriver to the south, a permanently anchored cruise ship which was now a bar and night club, burned fluorescent turquoise, painted against the blackness of the night as if by a Disney animator. Across the river the Bund blazed in luminous splendour, architectural details picked out by carefully contrived lighting. And along the curve of the north bank, where cruise ships docked at the international passenger terminal, glass buildings fired up the night, competing with gigantic neon hoardings that burned ads for beer and cars and TVs into the sky. On the river, the lights of cruisers, ferries and barges cast broken reflections on choppy waters, while above them a brightly lit dirigible advertising cigarettes plied up and down between the coloured beams of powerful searchlights that raked randomly across the sky.

Li gaped at it in wonder. It did not seem quite real. Beijing had blazed with lights on the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, but it had been nothing like this. Mei-Ling smiled at him, as though he were some bumpkin up from the country. And in some ways he was. Beijing was the capital, the centre of art and culture in the north. But it was staid and conservative compared with the commercial excesses of the south. ‘It’s like this every night?’ he asked, wondering what the cost of it all must be.

She nodded. ‘Until ten. Then it’s lights out and the city comes to life in another way altogether.’ Which sounded ominous to Li, and for a moment he felt a fleeting insecurity. He missed the safe, comforting familiarity of Beijing. Shanghai was as alien to him as Hong Kong or Chicago had been.

Mei-Ling drove them back through the tunnel and up on to the Yan’an Viaduct, and they swept west through the city, turning then on to Nanbei Gaojia Road, another multi-lane viaduct that cut north to the long arc of the northern ring road. Li sat in silence, barely taking in the city lights or the long lines of commuter traffic. He thought of the eighteen women sliced up and laid out on trestle tables in the concrete tomb of an underground car park. Someone had murdered them, coldly and clinically, and then performed autopsies on the bodies before crudely dismembering them and freezing the parts. Then sometime within the past week, the frozen remains had been buried in a shallow grave on a building site where tons of concrete should have entombed them for eternity. There were similarities with the body they’d found in Beijing, although Li was not convinced yet that they had died by the same hand. But what he knew with absolute certainty was that when he went to bed tonight and closed his eyes, each and every one of them would be there, seared into his memory, sightless eyes appealing for him to find their killer. And the smell of their poor decaying bodies would be with him for days.

He had a thought and turned to Mei-Ling. ‘Whoever dumped the bodies knew that the site was about to be buried in concrete. That must narrow the numbers.’

She said, ‘The joint venture was big news here. Press and TV had been covering the story for days. Discounting children and old folk, that would narrow it down to about ten million people.’

The bell that dangled from the rear-view mirror chimed as Mei-Ling turned the Santana off the Zhongshan Beiyi expressway and then doubled back beneath the overhead road to turn right into the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. They stopped at a white-marble gatehouse opposite the large gold numerals, 803, mounted on an angled wall, and suspicious eyes peered out at them from behind brightly lit windows. Then a wave of recognition as Mei-Ling smiled out of the driver’s side, and the gate concertina-ed open to let them through stone columns into a paved courtyard bounded by well-kept flower beds and neatly trimmed trees. Raised on a plinth was an ebony bust of a famous Shanghai detective, Duanmu Hongyu, now deceased. Multi-storeyed pink-tiled buildings rose up on three sides.