Peter May - The Killing Room

*

‘Jesus!’ Margaret said. ‘I can’t believe you got me all the way over here for this.’ She strode across the lobby of the Peace Palace Hotel after the press conference. Li hurried after her. ‘A bunch of bodies that have been hacked up by medical students!’

‘That is only a theory, an initial thought,’ Li said.

‘Then why are you telling the press? You’re only going to look fucking stupid if it turns out not to be true.’ She pushed through the revolving door and out into the street. The pavements were choked with affluent shoppers and people hurrying home from work, umbrellas fighting for ascendancy in the airspace above their heads. Someone got into a taxi at the kerbside, and an electronic voice said, Dear passenger, you are welcome in our taxi .

‘That was not my idea,’ Li said. ‘The Commissioner thought it would take the heat out of the situation.’

‘Which shows how many press conferences he ’s taken.’ Margaret was scathing. ‘First rule of public relations: you never tell the press anything you don’t know for certain. Let them do the speculating, not you.’

Mei-Ling appeared on the steps above them. ‘Is there a problem?’

Margaret said, ‘If your people have already started carrying out autopsies, then I’m wasting my time.’

‘Well, why do we not go and look at the bodies right now, and you can make that judgement for yourself.’ Mei-Ling was the voice of perfect reason.

Margaret glared at her and turned her anger on Li. ‘I busted my butt to get here. The least you could have done was wait.’

*

The city mortuary was out in the north-west of Shanghai, beyond Fudan University, in a quiet street off the residential Zhengli Road. They turned in a gate and passed the administration building, a cream painted house with a steeply pitched red-tile roof that looked like a Swiss guest house. There was an area of green lawn dominated by a large conifer tree. Flower beds bloomed with red and yellow roses, even in November. There was a large parking area, at the far end of which stood the mortuary itself, an elegant two-storey building in the same style of cream and red-tile. Shrubs and small trees had been planted around it. Nothing about the place would have indicated its purpose.

There were several cars parked out front. Mei-Ling drew the Santana in beside them and led Li and Margaret inside, turning right out of a small entrance hall into a long cold room. One wall was lined with two tiers of metal doors opening on to refrigerators where the bodies were kept on roll-out shelves. Each door had a gold number on it. There were forty doors.

‘There are two roll-out shelves in each,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We have a capacity for storing eighty bodies in total here.’

There were two autopsy rooms off, one table in the first, two in the other. Everything was clinically clean, white-tiled floors and walls, scrubbed stainless steel autopsy tables with proper drainers, water fed from below and controlled by levers and buttons at knee height. Margaret noticed closed-circuit TV cameras mounted high on the walls. A stainless-steel work top ran the length of one wall in each room, and above, taped to the tiles, were the charts originally assembled in the underground car park as the bodies were brought in. These included lists of the body parts, photographs of each piece as it had been found, envelopes containing all the initial x-rays and the crudely drawn diagrams of each body, indicating which bits were present and which were missing.

Margaret walked along the wall in the second room, looking at the charts. Dr Lan entered quietly behind them. He was wearing a dark blue jacket over light-coloured pants and a blue, grey and white striped roll-neck. He stood in the doorway watching Margaret in silence for a few moments before clearing his throat. The others turned, startled, and after a moment of hiatus Li made the introductions in Chinese and English. Lan bowed slightly, a tiny smile playing around his mouth that did not reach his eyes, as he shook Margaret’s hand. ‘I speak a little English,’ he said, in what sounded to Margaret like very good English. He waved his hand around the room. ‘You like our facility here?’

Margaret nodded solemnly, aware of how Lan’s position had been undermined by her arrival. But he was, at least on the surface, coping well with the loss of face. ‘It’s excellent, Doctor,’ she said. ‘As good as I’ve seen anywhere.’

His smile widened a little, but still did not make it past his upper lip. He ran a hand down the side of the door and looked at his fingers. ‘Cleaner than most hospitals,’ he said. ‘We have fifteen pathologists here, Dr Campbell, and among us we perform a thousand autopsies each year. We are equally qualified in forensic science, and have, in addition, seven lab technicians at our disposal. We matched all the body bits by DNA comparison.’

Margaret thought that Dr Lan had more than a little English. And she understood that he was using it to lay out his credentials in case she thought she was dealing with someone of inferior qualification or experience. She looked at the diagrams on the walls. ‘How many of these women have you already autopsied?’

‘Two. Although I have made a preliminary examination of them all.’

‘Did you establish cause of death?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘But on the basis of what you’ve seen, you have concluded that these women were simply corpses used for practice by medical students, or for some kind of medical research?’

‘It is not a conclusion, Doctor. Just an early thought.’

‘May I see one of the other bodies?’

Lan nodded, and they followed him through to the refrigeration room. He opened one of the lower doors and rolled out the upper shelf. He made a small movement of his hand towards the far end of the room, and two white-coated assistants wearing thick rubber gloves stepped forward and unzipped the white body bag that lay on the shelf. Inside were the roughly assembled pieces of a young woman. The smell of decaying flesh was powerful, even in the refrigerator. Arms, legs and one hand were severed, as was her head. Cold, dried mud still clung to the bleached yellow flesh. A ‘Y’-shaped incision that cut in from each shoulder to the breast bone, and then down to the pubis, had opened up the torso, revealing a chest cavity which had been stripped of its organs and then sewn up with rough twine. Margaret looked quickly at Lan. ‘I wanted to see one that you hadn’t autopsied.’

Lan said, ‘She is as we found her.’

Margaret frowned, and bent down to examine the cut more closely. ‘May I have some gloves and a piece of cotton?’ she said. Lan spoke to one of the assistants, who hurried off. Margaret asked, ‘Have all the bodies been cleaned off to this extent.’

‘They were very carefully washed down,’ Lan said. ‘By pathologists. There is no loss of evidence.’

Margaret said nothing. When the gloves came she pulled them on and then took the cotton and rubbed very gently along one edge of the incision. She peered at it very closely for a long time. Finally, she straightened up and peeled off the gloves. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘this one certainly wasn’t a corpse used for practice.’

Lan stiffened, colour rising high on his pallid cheeks. He frowned, and glanced down at the contents of the bag. ‘How can you know that?’

‘I’m not prepared to commit myself, Doctor, until I’ve done the autopsy.’

‘Which will be when?’ Lan asked.

‘When I’ve had some sleep,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I don’t want any more autopsies carried out.’

Lan said stiffly, ‘I am instructed to proceed as quickly as possible.’

Margaret turned to Li. ‘Who is the lead pathologist on this case?’ He had called her in, he was going to have to take responsibility. If he didn’t back her now, she was out of there.