Peter May - The Killing Room

Mei-Ling glanced hesitantly at Li, then said, ‘Don’t expect a very warm welcome in here.’

Li was not entirely surprised. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly.’ She seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Just that some people figure we don’t need help from Beijing to solve crimes in Shanghai.’

‘And your boss?’

She shrugged. ‘Don’t take it personally. He’s a little distracted these days.’

She pulled up outside a covered entrance opposite a wall on which large gold characters urged officers to extremes of courage and dedication in their pursuit of justice. They took the lift up to the third floor where pale-faced detectives wilted under fluorescent lights in the pursuit of the killer or killers of eighteen women.

The detectives’ room was crowded, a buzz of telephones and conversations, the clack of keyboards, the hum of computer terminals. Officers looked up curiously from their desks as Mei-Ling led Li through to the office of the Section Chief. The door stood ajar. She knocked and Li followed her in. The room was in darkness except for the bright ring of light cast on the desk by an Anglepoise lamp. A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the desk speaking on the telephone. The reflected light from the desk cast a slightly sinister uplight on his shadowed face. He flicked nervous watery eyes towards Li and Mei-Ling as they entered.

‘So what’s the prognosis?’ he asked his caller, turning his back on the two deputy section chiefs. ‘Well, when will you know?’ The response clearly did not please him and he said curtly, ‘Well, call me when you’ve talked to him.’ He hung up abruptly and turned back to Li and Mei-Ling, and Li saw that he was a good-looking man of about forty-five, with thick hair swept back from a square face. But he looked drawn and tired.

‘How is she?’ Mei-Ling asked softly.

He shook his head. ‘Not good.’

Mei-Ling nodded and said, ‘Tsuo, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing. Mr Li, this is my boss, Huang Tsuo, Chief of Section Two.’ As the two men shook hands she added, ‘We’re roughly the equivalent of your Section One, investigating serious crime, murder and robbery.’

Huang’s handshake was cold and cursory. He barely met Li’s eyes before he turned to his deputy. ‘Mei-Ling, I want a full briefing meeting when Mr Li and I get back.’ He lifted a briefcase from his desk and took his coat from a stand by the door.

Mei-Ling was caught off-balance. ‘Get back? Where are you going?’

‘We have an appointment with the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ And he ushered Li out of the door.

*

People’s Square, which once formed part of the old Shanghai racecourse, was ablaze with lights reflecting from every wet surface, as if it had just been freshly painted. The drum-shaped museum on the south side glowed orange. Directly opposite, and dominating the square, was the huge floodlit home of the Shanghai Municipal Government, a monumental white building studded by row upon rising row of featureless windows. It was flanked on each side by bizarrely shaped glass buildings lit from within and capped by fantastical sweeping roofs. Vast skyscrapers, washed in coloured light, crowded all around the square. Li and Huang stepped out of their car at the foot of steps leading up to the marbled entrance of the government building, and Li was immediately assaulted by a cacophony of sound: the roar of traffic and honking of horns; pop music blasting out of shops along the east side; the soundtrack of a movie playing on a giant TV screen that filled the whole of one side of an office block on the south-east corner; a foxtrot playing from a ghetto-blaster on the steps of the museum, a gathering of elderly couples dancing incongruously across the concourse below it. They didn’t appear to mind the rain which wept still out of the night sky. The metallic voice of a conductress rang out from the loudspeaker of a passing bus. A taxi pulled up across the road, and as the driver reset his flag a soft electronic female voice said in English, Dear passenger, thank you for using our taxi. Please come again .

It was all in stark contrast to the tense silence that had filled the car on the twenty-minute drive from 803. Li had made several attempts to engage Huang in conversation only to be rewarded with grudging, monosyllabic responses and the odd grunt. He was no nearer now to discovering why the Mayor’s policy adviser wanted to see them than when they had left.

He followed Huang up the steps, past armed guards and through glass doors into an expansive lobby. A group of around a dozen men in suits and wearing heavy dark coats was advancing towards them. At the head of the group was a man Li recognised. He had seen him on television and in newspaper photographs, a short, bull-headed man with close-cropped steel grey hair. There was a sense of power and energy in every confident step he took. A taller, slightly older man in the uniform of a Procurator General, was stooping to speak quietly in his ear as they approached. Neither missed a stride, and as the group reached Li and Huang the short man said, ‘You’re late, Huang.’

‘My apologies, Director Hu. We were held up in traffic.’ Li had to admire the way Huang could lie to one of the most powerful men in Shanghai without batting an eyelid.

‘Well, I can’t wait. I have another engagement. You’ll have to come with us.’ And he sailed past them and out on to the steps. The Procurator General flicked his head to indicate Li and Huang should follow, and they fell in with the rest of the entourage.

As they descended the steps, a line of official cars drew in at the sidewalk, headed by a black stretch limo flanked by two police cars. And as Director Hu slipped into the limo, the rest of the group divided as if in well-rehearsed syncopation and jumped into the other vehicles. Li and Huang found themselves ushered into the Director’s car by the Procurator General, who got in after them. The line of cars pulled away accompanied by the sound of police sirens, muffled by the soundproofing in the limo. Li barely had time to draw breath, and realise that he was sitting facing Director Hu, before the chief adviser to the head of the Shanghai government reached out his hand. ‘Deputy Section Chief Li Yan,’ he said, ‘it is a privilege to meet you.’ Li shook his hand and reminded himself that this man was the confidant and adviser to a possible future leader of China. The immediate predecessors of his boss as Mayor of Shanghai were now the country’s President and Premier respectively.

‘I am honoured that you should even know who I am, Director Hu,’ Li said, and he remembered the Chinese proverb, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down .

‘You cast a large shadow, Detective Li. Big enough, perhaps, to eclipse that of your uncle.’

‘I have always lived in my uncle’s shadow, Director Hu. I expect always to do so.’

The adviser nodded, satisfied. Modesty was a virtue. He waved a hand in the direction of the taller man beside him. ‘This is Procurator General Yue.’ The Procurator General inclined his head in a curt, cold nod. ‘You have visited the site where the bodies were found?’

‘I have seen the bodies, or the bits of them that have been recovered.’

‘And what are your thoughts?’

Li hesitated. He felt as if he were being tested somehow. ‘It is too early to reach any conclusions, Director Hu.’

The adviser nodded again, apparently satisfied by this response. ‘A single word is worth a thousand pieces of gold,’ he said. He glanced momentarily at Huang who sat mute diagonally opposite, a black hole of disapproval in the corner of the car. ‘This … incident …’ the adviser was picking his words very carefully, ‘… is not only a severe embarrassment to our country, Li, captured as it was on live television across the world, but it could also seriously damage Shanghai’s inward investment — the lifeblood of this city.’ Li wondered if anyone cared about the serious damage done to the health of the victims, but he knew better than to ask as much. The adviser continued, ‘What we have here is a high profile crime of appalling magnitude, uncovered in the full glare of world publicity. What the Mayor wants is a high profile solution in the shortest possible time, and in the full glare of the same publicity.’ He drew in a short breath. ‘Which is why he wants you to take charge of the investigation.’