Peter May - The Killing Room

‘Hey, Margaret,’ he said, returning to his beer, ‘if I knew the answer to that one I wouldn’t be spending so much of my life picking up a bar-room tan.’ And Margaret knew immediately that this was more than just a smart line. There was a depth of feeling somewhere in there that hinted at an unhappy experience, perhaps not dissimilar to her own.

*

Li hurried through revolving doors from the street. The lights of arcade shops to the left and right reflected brilliantly off a polished marble floor. He hurried past the foreign exchange counter and into the sprawling lounge area opposite reception. The sound of a live jazz band drifted out from the entrance to a bar in the far corner. He walked briskly across the lobby to where a young Chinese attendant stood guarding double doors leading to the sound of Dixieland beyond. She wanted him to pay an entrance fee. He glanced into the room behind her and saw that the bar was huge, with long lines of neatly ordered and empty tables. The music was deafening. Margaret had said she would meet him in the bar, but this surely couldn’t be it. ‘Is there another bar?’ he asked.

The attendant clearly thought he was some kind of Chinese cheapskate and pointed condescendingly up the stairs.

The Art Deco bar on the first-floor mezzanine was empty also. He saw a waitress hovering behind the coffee maker hoping he wouldn’t notice her. He went back downstairs to the reception desk and asked what room Miss Margaret Campbell was in, then rode the elevator up to the sixth floor and wandered down a long, thickly carpeted corridor until he found room 605. There was a bell push on the wall beside the door. He pressed it and heard a doorbell chime distantly in the room. He waited, but there was no response. He rang again and when there was still no response, knocked on the door and called, ‘Margaret?’ Quietly at first, and then louder. A door opened further down the hall and an elderly Japanese gentleman glared at him.

He went back down to reception and asked them to call the room. The receptionist waited patiently as the phone rang out. Li asked if Margaret’s key had been returned. The receptionist checked and said no, the key was still out. Li was initially perplexed, and then annoyed, and somewhere in the background a little relieved. He waited around in the lobby for another fifteen minutes before writing a quick note which he left with the receptionist. And then he headed with righteous indignation back to the Da Hu Hotel to lie on his bed listening to the traffic rumble past his window on Yan’an Viaduct Road, and to try to make sense of the confusion of conflicting emotions in his head.

At first she had no idea what had wakened her. Some sound or smell or movement had entered her consciousness. Her eyelids were so heavy she could barely force them apart. She saw a thin line of light coming under the door from the corridor, and smelled the faintly pungent odour of some distantly familiar oriental perfume. Then she heard the slightest swish of silk on silk, like a whisper, and turned over on to her back to see a figure standing over her, dressed in a long, hand-embroidered gown. At first she could not see the face, but knew it was a woman from the small, slender build. She was standing motionless, just looking down at Margaret in the dark. Quickly, Margaret fumbled for the light switch, and blinking in the sudden glare of electric light, she saw that it was Mei-Ling, dark eyes burning like coals. Suddenly Mei-Ling’s clasped hands shot above her head and Margaret saw the glint of light on a long, slender blade as it came arcing down towards her.

She screamed and sat up suddenly in the dark, the sound of blood pulsing through her head, the echo of her own voice still reverberating around the room. She was alone in the room, fully dressed, sitting up on top of a bed that had not been slept in. The red numerals of the digital clock at the bedside glowed in the dark. They showed 3.12. Margaret blinked in confusion. She was disorientated. Had she been dreaming, or was this the dream? Where was she? A hotel room. She saw light flooding out from the open door of the bathroom. China. Shanghai. And, suddenly, she remembered her dinner with Li. She looked again at the clock and at first could make no sense of the time it was showing. Twelve minutes past three? How was that possible? Was it morning or afternoon. And, then, with a sickening sense of realisation she knew what had happened.

She had spent an hour in the bar with Jack, talking, and then she had told him she was meeting someone for dinner and was going to her room to freshen up. She had lain down on the bed for a moment, just so that she could close her eyes and stop the room spinning. She had only had one drink, but the effects of the alcohol combined with a serious shortage of sleep had been fatal. She must have slept for more than eight hours. She still found it hard to believe that it was the middle of the night, that she had missed her dinner with Li by seven hours. Seven hours! It did not seem possible.

She went into the bathroom to repair the make-up smudged around her eyes, and took the lift down to the ground floor. The girl at reception remembered Li quite clearly. He had gone up to Margaret’s room, she said, and when he couldn’t get a reply had come down and asked them to phone from there. He appeared sort of angry, she said.

‘Did he leave a note?’ Margaret asked.

‘One moment.’ The receptionist searched beneath the counter for a few seconds and then handed Margaret an envelope. She tore it open and found a folded sheet of hotel letter headed paper. Li had scrawled a telephone number and his room number, and a terse ‘Call me’ on it.

‘Can I use the phone?’ Margaret asked.

The receptionist gave her an odd look. ‘Now?’

‘Yes, of course, now,’ Margaret snapped.

The receptionist lifted a phone on to the counter and Margaret quickly dialled the number Li had left. Someone answered in Chinese, and Margaret, frustrated, could not get her to speak English. She thrust the phone at the receptionist. ‘Ask them to get me room 223,’ she said.

The receptionist spoke into the receiver, and after a lengthy conversation handed it back. It was ringing. After an eternity, Margaret heard a sleepy male voice saying. ‘ Wei? ’

‘Li Yan?’

A moment’s silence, then, ‘Margaret?’

‘Li Yan, I’m so sorry,’ she blurted.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ He must have checked his bedside clock and was clearly aggravated.

‘I fell asleep,’ she said lamely. ‘I just lay down for a minute and … I don’t know, the next thing it’s three in the morning. I was just so tired.’

‘Yeah, well, right now I’m pretty tired, too,’ he said, barely able to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘We can talk about this tomorrow.’ And he hung up.

Margaret was taken aback by his abruptness. She replaced the receiver in the cradle and hurried away before the receptionist saw her hurt and embarrassment. She went back up to her room, but she was wide awake now and she knew there was no point in even getting into bed. She turned on the television and tried to watch a film on HBO Asia, but it was halfway through, and she couldn’t concentrate for a thousand thoughts crowding her mind. She got up and went to the window, drawing the curtain half open so that she could peer down into the deserted Nanjing Road. It had stopped raining, for the first time, she thought, since she had arrived. And suddenly she had an overwhelming desire to breathe fresh, cold air, to feel the breeze on her face, to stretch her legs along the deserted waterfront of the Bund. She found a jacket and tied a scarf at her neck. In the corridor, an attendant in a white jacket lay asleep stretched across two chairs in the open doorway of a service cupboard. She guessed he must have been there when she went down to reception. But she hadn’t noticed. Now she tiptoed past him to the lift.