Peter May - The Killing Room

He slid the window closed, undressed and slipped between the cool starched sheets and drifted quickly away into a dark, dreamless sleep, the only escape he ever had from life.

Margaret was too tired to be excited. She had already crossed at least two timezones and an international dateline, and was not sure if she was arriving tomorrow or yesterday.

She looked out of the window at the featureless mud flats below as her plane circled in from the ocean and descended rapidly to the new international airport at the south-west extreme of Pudong New Area. From the air, the curved roofs of the terminal building looked like the outstretched wings of some giant bird in flight.

Inside the cavernous terminal, a high ceiling studded with lights reflected off a polished marble floor into an unfocused distance. Solitary travellers were dotted about among vacant rows of white seats, while cream columns soared up from an endless line of airline desks. The passengers from Margaret’s flight, which had felt very crowded, were quickly dispersed and swallowed up in its vastness.

Margaret passed expeditiously through immigration. Her two heavy suitcases were already circling on the carousel when she reached it, and there was not a soul on duty at customs. On the sparsely populated concourse she looked around for signs in English, or a familiar face. She found neither. Only a group of elderly wide-eyed men and women in blue Mao suits, being shepherded around by a patient tour-guide wearing jeans and a tee-shirt emblazoned with the letters NYPD. Piped muzak somewhere in the background was playing, My Way .

‘You know, you can always spot an American. They never travel light.’ The American accent drawling at her right ear made Margaret spin around, and she found herself looking into the smiling face of a man of around forty, boyish good looks below an untidy mop of hair that was quickly going grey. He nodded towards the travel-scarred cases on her trolley. ‘Bet they weigh a ton, too. You need a hand?’

‘No, thank you,’ Margaret said curtly.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he said and held out his hand. ‘I’m Jack Geller.’ Very reluctantly she shook it. ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Campbell.’

Margaret was taken aback She couldn’t believe that Li had sent this man to pick her up. He certainly didn’t look like he had anything to do with the Chinese police. He wore baggy brown corduroys, a shapeless green jacket that had seen better days and a grey, open-necked shirt. ‘How do you know my name?’ she said.

He grinned and pulled a rolled up newspaper from his jacket pocket and held it up so that it unravelled to reveal the front page. It was all in Chinese. But there, in the top right corner, was a large photograph of Margaret with short hair, the same one they had used on the TV news. ‘See, you’re famous here already.’

She regarded him suspiciously. ‘You weren’t sent here to pick me up.’

‘No, that was my idea. But if you’re expecting someone else, you know, you could be in for a long wait. Traffic in town just grinds to a halt sometimes, and we’re a long way out. I, on the other hand, have a taxi waiting and would be happy to give you a ride.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. She paused. ‘Who exactly are you, Mr Geller?’

He fished in an inside pocket and produced a dog-eared business card and presented it to Margaret in the Chinese fashion, holding the top two corners between thumb and forefinger and offering it with both hands so that it can be read by the recipient. Only it was in Chinese. Margaret flipped it over. On the other side it read: JACK GELLERFreelance Journalist , and listed his address, and home and mobile numbers. She sighed and handed it back. But he held up a hand, refusing to take it. ‘No, keep it. You never know when you might want to give me a call.’

‘I can’t imagine a single circumstance,’ Margaret said with irritation, slipping it into her purse.

‘That’s a pity,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you might give me an interview, ahead of the pack.’

‘I won’t be giving any interviews to anyone,’ Margaret said, and started pushing her trolley away from him.

‘The taxi rank’s the other way,’ he said.

Gathering as much dignity as she could, Margaret turned her trolley around and headed past him in the other direction. He tagged along beside her. ‘The foreign press here are going to be on your tail for as long as this investigation’s on-going. You can make it easy on yourself, or hard.’ When she didn’t respond, he said, ‘A contact here at the airport checked the manifests for me. So I knew what flight you were coming in on. I always figured initiative deserved reward.’

‘And I always thought,’ she said, ‘that the individual had a right to privacy.’

‘Hey, you’re in China now,’ he said. ‘No such thing as the individual. And anyhow, in a kind of a way you’re representing your country here. Freedom of information and all that.’

‘Like you said, Mr Geller, we’re in China now.’

Glass doors slid open at their approach and Margaret pushed her trolley through them out on to a huge covered concourse, an empty four-lane highway running beyond it. Everywhere appeared deserted, apart from a short line of taxis at the far end. The lead driver looked hopefully in her direction, but she shook her head firmly.

‘Well,’ Geller said, ‘I’d have thought if they were picking you up they’d have been here by now.’

‘They’ll be here,’ Margaret said.

He shrugged. ‘I’ll catch up with you later, then. At the Peace Hotel.’

‘Where?’

‘The Peace Hotel. That’s where you’re staying, isn’t it?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, take my word for it.’ He raised two fingers to his temple in a small salute, gave a slight nod and moved off towards the taxi rank.

Margaret stood for a quarter of an hour watching the rain fall on the empty road, growing colder and more irritable with every passing minute. She raised her eyes hopefully each time she heard the sound of a car, but usually it was just another taxi dropping someone off and then joining the line. After twenty minutes she felt she knew every cold concrete surface in this bleak approach to International Arrivals and was contemplating going upstairs and getting the first flight back out. She had expected to see Li. It was what had sustained her across all the hours of the flight. And now she felt dashed, hurt mixed with anger. How her mother would have enjoyed the moment.

Then a car drew up in front of her and her heart immediately lifted. She stepped forward to see Jack Geller leaning across the rear seat to open the door and her heart sank again. ‘You might as well get in,’ he said through the open window. ‘Unless your Chinese is pretty good, you’re going to have a lot of trouble trying to tell a taxi-driver you want him to take you to the headquarters of the criminal investigation department.’ He paused. ‘How is your Chinese by the way?’

‘If it was good enough to tell you to go forth and multiply, I would.’ She sighed, acquiescing reluctantly. ‘But since it’s not, I guess I’d better just accept your offer gracefully.’

He grinned and rattled off something in Chinese to the driver, who hurried out of the car to take Margaret’s cases and put them in the trunk. A small, wiry man of indeterminate age, he heaved and strained to lift them.

*

An almost empty six-lane highway sped them north and east through the mist and rain of a flat, featureless landscape reclaimed from ancient mud flats. Huge billboards raised on polished chrome stalks flashed by on each side of the road, like enormous weeds. On one of them, what looked like four giant glasses of carrot juice prompted the slogan, in English, PROTECT THE VIRESCENCE, CHERISH THE LIFE. Another depicted a group of prosperous-looking children running across a green meadow towards a cluster of red-roofed villas, school satchels slung across their shoulders. It was an ad for the Shanghai Commercial Bank, a depiction of the new Chinese dream. Yet another, beneath a portrait of Deng Xiaoping, proclaimed, DEVELOPMENT IS TRUTH.