Peter May - The Killing Room

And Margaret remembered his grip on her arm, and a tiny shiver of fear ran through her.

*

‘I want to know everything about him,’ Li said. ‘Everything. Where he lives, who his friends are, where he’s worked. I want to know about his family, his girlfriends, his taste in clothes. I even want to know how often he takes a dump. And I want to know how a student struggling through medical school can afford to buy his own colour TV set.’

Several of the detectives around the table scribbled notes. There was a tension in the air today, most of it emanating from the cold, still presence of Section Chief Huang sitting in silence in the chair nearest the window. Most of the section were aware that at the previous day’s press briefing the media had been told that the eighteen bodies recovered from the site in Pudong were not murder victims. They also knew that their boss had briefed the Commissioner of Police prior to the press conference. And today they were being told by this Beijing cop, appointed by Director Hu, that the American pathologist he had brought in believed exactly the opposite.

No one had dared to look at Huang as Li briefed them on that morning’s autopsy, on the pathologist’s verdict that the victim had been drugged, and then been the subject of a ‘live’ autopsy, or ante-mortem, and that the most likely cause of death was surgical removal of the heart. It was a bizarre conclusion, and neither Li nor his pathologist had been able to suggest a motive.

One detective had come up with Li’s idea of organ theft, and Mei-Ling had repeated Margaret’s assertion that if the victims had been murdered for their organs there would have been no need to keep them alive for the procedure. She also pointed out that the Beijing victim had been found with her organs in a bag beside the body.

‘So we are sure, then, that this murder in Beijing is tied in with the bodies here in Shanghai?’ the detective had persisted.

‘No, Detective Dai,’ Mei-Ling had told him. ‘We don’t know for sure. Not yet.’

And Li said, ‘The body in Beijing has been kept in the freezer. I asked two days ago for it to be taken out and defrosted. In another couple of days it should be sufficiently thawed to allow for it to be re-autopsied. By then we will have sufficient evidence from Shanghai to make a definitive comparison. In the meantime I suggest we keep an open mind.’

That had been half an hour earlier, since when there had been a long and animated discussion about the facts of the case, what they knew, what they didn’t know, what they thought, what they thought they ought to do. It was the classic collective Chinese detective meeting, where everyone had a voice, an opinion, and the right to express it. But as yet it had borne no fruit. There had been an argument about how far back they should go in extracting records of women from the missing persons file. Li had decided on twelve months, which had brought a groan from around the table. It meant there could be hundreds of files to process. With the growth of the floating population, which now ran to several millions in Shanghai, people were always being reported missing. Very often it transpired they were not missing at all but had gone off in search of work, or run away to be married, or simply dropped out. There was a high, and growing, drop-out rate among the younger generation. Many teenage girls were drawn to the bright lights of Canton and Shenzhen where they often fell prey to drugs and prostitution, both of which were on the increase. And sometimes women who got pregnant, when they had already had a child, simply ‘disappeared’ to have the baby somewhere else, away from the prying eyes of the local authorities.

When Li steered the meeting on to the subject of Jiang Baofu, and the revelation that he had followed Margaret back to her hotel, it had created a considerable stir in the room.

‘You took his statement yesterday, Dai,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘What did you make of him?’

Dai leaned back and chewed his pencil thoughtfully. He was a young man very conscious of his image, from his immaculate white roll-neck sweater and powder blue Italian jacket, to his beautifully cut dark pants with a crease he could almost sharpen his pencil on. His hair was short, but expensively styled, and swept back from his face with gel. He tucked the thumb of his free hand into the shiny silver belt buckle at his waist. ‘He gave me the creeps,’ Dai said, and Li remembered Mei-Ling’s words after they had talked to him at the site. That boy’s really creepy . Margaret had called him a creepy medical student , and there had been something else she’d said … He thought for a moment, then remembered. He freaked me , she’d told them.

‘I couldn’t get him to shut up,’ Dai was saying. ‘Hell, usually it’s the other way around with these people, like pulling teeth. But this guy had verbal diarrhoea. At a guess I’d say he was enjoying the whole process. He was asking more questions than I was. Unhealthy, you know. Morbid. Too helpful. In the end it was all I could do to get rid of him.’

Another detective said, ‘But if this guy’s involved, isn’t he making himself a bit conspicuous? I mean, it’s like he’s deliberately trying to draw attention to himself.’

‘Perhaps,’ Mei-Ling said, ‘that’s exactly what he wants us to think. Maybe he believes that by making himself high-profile, we’ll dismiss him as being too obvious. And, well, being the night watchman at the site does make it all seem too easy. But, remember, if he did bury those bodies there, he never expected them to be found. He thought they’d be safely buried under tons of concrete by now, and he’d be home free.’

Li said, ‘And the other thing to consider is that maybe he’s just crazy.’ He remembered Margaret’s half-joking, half-serious allusion to a psycho surgeon . ‘I mean, performing live autopsies on eighteen women — and probably more that we don’t even know about yet — is not exactly the action of a sane person.’

Dai said, ‘But he couldn’t have been acting alone, could he? Someone else would have had to be administering the midazolam and pumping the ambu bag.’

Li paused. He had not considered this. Of course the killer could not have been acting alone. It had to have been a collaborative effort, in which case it could not have been the action of a solitary madman. Could there be two, or more, of them. How did people like that find each other? Was it possible for insane people to work efficiently in a team? ‘That’s a good point, Detective Dai,’ he said at length. ‘But we shouldn’t let speculation on this deflect us from our first priority — to identify these victims as quickly as we can.’

The scraping of a chair being pushed back abruptly turned all their heads towards the window, where Huang now stood silhouetted against the light behind him. Beyond the Section Chief, and beyond the east wing of the department, Li could see the traffic streaming by on the overhead road. But Huang said nothing. He simply turned towards the door and made his exit in silence. None of them knew whether it was a comment on Li’s handling of the case, or whether he simply had another appointment. But it left a tension in the room that did not dissipate until Li called the meeting to an uneasy close.

Margaret was exhausted. Her eyes were stinging. Every muscle in her body gave the impression of having seized up. Her limbs had, apparently, doubled in weight, and lifting her legs or arms in the simple act of walking or raising a drink to her lips was a colossal effort. She felt battered and bruised, and all she wanted to do was lie down. Jetlag and the emotions of the last few days had finally caught up with her.