Peter May - The Killing Room

‘Is she dead?’ he asked quietly, rising to his feet.

‘We don’t know yet,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We have a body. We are trying to make an identification.’

‘Tell me about her,’ Li said. ‘Did she leave you? Is that why she disappeared?’ And he thought how bald, almost cruel, his question was.

The young man sat again, slowly, his eyes clouded by unhappy memories. ‘I don’t know. We have a five-year-old son. Each morning we took it in turns to take him to the kindergarten before coming to work …’ Some memory bubbled to the surface and he had to stop, to hold back involuntary tears. He took a moment or two to collect himself. ‘It was my turn that day. She left before me to come to the shop. I took our son to the nursery school, but when I got here there was no sign of her. She just never turned up. And I have not seen her since.’

‘You hadn’t had a fight, or …?’ Mei-Ling started to say, but he cut her off.

‘We never fought,’ he said fiercely. And he glanced angrily up the alley towards the street. ‘Whatever that woman might have told you, we loved one another, me and Yawen. We loved our child. Sure, she was a good-looking woman. There were always men sniffing around after her. They would come to the shop to get something made, just so she would have to measure them and put her hands on them when they had the fitting. But it never turned her head. Not once. That ugly old cow was just jealous.’ He put a shaking hand on the table to steady himself. ‘Our little boy cannot understand where she has gone. He still asks every day when she is coming home. And sometimes he wakes crying for her in the night.’ He shook his head. ‘He was his Mommy’s boy. I am no substitute.’

For a moment neither Li nor Mei-Ling knew what to say. Then Mei-Ling asked softly, ‘Did Yawen have any distinguishing marks or features that might help us identify her?’ He shook his head blankly.

‘Doesn’t matter how small,’ Li said. ‘The smallest, most insignificant thing could help us to rule her in or out. An accident, maybe. Something that left a scar …’

The young man slumped on to his stool and sat trying to wade his way through a morass of painful memories, searching to pick out something that might help. Then, suddenly, he remembered, ‘She broke a finger once, a couple of years ago. Her right index finger. She caught it in a door, and she wasn’t able to work the needle for several weeks.’ He looked up, his face eager and anxious. It was his dead wife he was trying to help them identify, and Li felt overwhelmingly sorry for him.

*

Li and Mei-Ling walked back to the car in silence. When they got there, they slipped into the front seats and Mei-Ling said, ‘There’s never an easy way, is there?’

Li shook his head. Someone’s lost their Mom , Margaret had said, and she had known because she was cutting up the mother’s womb on an autopsy table. And he knew that if the x-rays showed a break in the right index finger, the young man who spent his days huddled over a sewing machine in a draughty alleyway, and his nights trying to reassure a young boy who’d lost his mother, would have to try to identify her remains. And Li would not have wished that upon his worst enemy.

Mei-Ling’s mobile started ringing, and she fumbled in her purse to find it. Li didn’t pay much attention as she answered the call and talked for about a minute. He couldn’t rid himself of the image of a small boy constantly asking about his mother, and a young man with no answers who could provide no comfort. And he couldn’t help making the comparison with Xinxin, those emotional months after her mother had abandoned her and her father had refused to take her back. What a big change in a small life, what huge adjustments she had had to make. And how inadequate to the task of helping her through it he had been. Living with an unmarried uncle, constantly in the care of a string of babysitters … it was no life for a little girl. She needed a family, some stability.

‘I think we might have found our singer.’ Mei-Ling’s words crashed into his consciousness. She was putting the phone back in her bag.

‘What?’

‘Dai found a girl in the missing persons file. A twenty-eight-year-old teacher and singer at the Shanghai School of Music and Opera.’ She consulted a note she had hastily scribbled. ‘Xiao Fengzhen. She went missing just under a year ago.’

The Yi Fu Theatre sat in the corner of Fuzhou Road and Yunnan Road, a stone’s throw from People’s Square. It was a white stone building with a semi-circular façade decorated by dozens of small coloured flags and a giant representation of a Peking Opera mask in vivid red, pink, yellow and black. Staff were just raising shutters and opening glass doors to the entrance lobby and booking office when Li and Mei-Ling arrived. A sour-faced woman behind the illuminated window of the booking office glowered at them. ‘We’re not open yet. Another half-hour.’

Mei-Ling flashed her ID, and the woman looked as if an electric current had just passed through her seat and up her rectum. ‘We’re looking for somebody from the music school,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We understand the students are putting on a performance here sometime today.’

‘This afternoon,’ the woman said, suddenly anxious to help. ‘An extract from one of the Peking Operas — Romance of the Western Chamber . They are just beginning the dress rehearsal. You can go around the back to the stage door.’

In the entrance to the stage door in Shantou Road, an attendant sat on a stool smoking and sipping from a glass jar of tepid green tea. A pile of cigarette ends was gathered on the floor around him, and he watched as labourers heaved great wicker baskets filled with the elaborate costumes of the Peking Opera from a large blue truck. A cage elevator slid slowly up the side of the building, carrying the hampers to an opening in the wall which led to the wardrobe department. Hundreds of bicycles lined a wall bordering waste ground on the other side of the street. The attendant hawked a gob of phlegm from his throat and spat it out on to the pavement as Li and Mei-Ling approached. Li reached for his ID, but the man just pointed up above his head. ‘Second floor,’ he said. ‘They phoned through from the front.’

A maze of corridors on the second floor led to several dressing rooms and the make-up and wardrobe departments. From the auditorium, they could hear the ten-piece orchestra and some of the singers rehearsing. It was a bizarre cacophony, even to Chinese ears, which were becoming increasingly attuned to the sounds of Western music. The screeching falsetto of the female vocalists, the loud clacking of the clappers, the strident shriek of the hu-gin violin and the seemingly random clatter of drums and cymbals. Li’s Uncle Yifu had taken him once to the Peking Opera in the Stalinesque Beijing Exhibition Centre which contained a vast theatre built by the Russians in the middle of the last century. Hard wooden seats rose in curved tiers. They were not designed for comfort, and the audience had fidgeted all the way through the performance, eating noisily from picnic hampers, drinking and smoking, taking and making calls on mobile telephones. The music and the story were almost less important than the spectacle — extravagant costumes and startling masks placed against a sweep of bold sets on a vast, imaginatively lit stage. The costumes, his uncle had told him, were such a garish collection of contrasting colours because the stages upon which the original operas were performed had been lit only by oil lamps.

Li opened a door, and a young woman, who was bent over a costume hamper, turned guiltily. Vividly coloured costumes were draped over chairs and desks, rows of them hanging from rails along one wall. Empty hampers were piled up in one corner, another was appearing in the elevator as it drew level with the hole in the wall. Beyond the waste ground opposite, a cream and brown building had a huge neon billboard mounted on its roof advertising Mitsubishi. Where the Japanese had failed to hold on to Shanghai by force, they were conquering it now with commerce. ‘In the name of heaven,’ the girl said, ‘you gave me a fright! I thought you were the director for a minute.’