Peter May - The Killing Room

‘We’re looking for somebody who knew Xiao Fengzhen,’ Mei-Ling said.

‘I really don’t have the time just now,’ the girl said. ‘I’m way behind schedule here, and if I don’t have all the singers dressed by noon, the director’s going to kick my ass all the way across People’s Square.’ Li showed her his Ministry ID and she went very still for a moment. ‘What about her?’ she said.

‘Did you know her?’

‘Sure. Everyone knew her. She was the star pupil at the school. She was only teaching till she could go professional. What a voice that girl had.’ She paused. ‘Whatever happened to her?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Mei-Ling said.

The girl frowned. ‘But she disappeared — what, about a year ago?’

‘We have a body,’ Li said. And all the colour drained out of the wardrobe mistress’s face. ‘We’re trying to identify it.’

‘Oh, no …’ The girl appeared genuinely distressed. She pulled up a stool and sat down. ‘Not Fengzhen. She was such a lovely girl. Everyone thought maybe she’d just gone off to Beijing or something. I figured she’d be a star by now.’

‘So you weren’t surprised when she just disappeared?’ Li said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl. ‘It wasn’t like her, you know, not to say anything. She just didn’t show up for a couple of days, and we thought maybe it was her throat again. She had a lot of trouble with her voice if she was singing too much. But, then, I remember her mother came to the school wondering where she was. That was the first time any of us knew she was missing. I never did hear what happened after that.’

‘Did she live with her mother?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Oh, sure. She had a kid, but no husband. Her mother looked after the kid. ’Cos, you know, we keep pretty strange hours in this business. And then we can be away touring.’

Li said, ‘Who was the father?’

The girl shrugged. ‘No idea. She was pretty tight, you know. Kept herself very much to herself. Left her personal life at the door when she came in. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she was so popular. She never got close enough to anyone to fall out with them.’ She stopped and thought for a moment, and her clear, bright face clouded. ‘Was she … you know … murdered?’

‘We don’t know,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Do you know where her mother lives?’

The girl shook her head. ‘Like I said, Fengzhen kept her private life to herself. But I do remember where her mom worked.’ She chuckled. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you forget.’

‘Where?’ Li asked.

The girl smiled, her face colouring a little from embarrassment. ‘The sex museum.’

The door burst open behind them, and a red-faced man with only a few grey strands of hair scraped back across a bald pate shouted at the girl, ‘Cheng, where the fuck are those costumes!’

*

The entrance to the Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture was tucked away in an alley between the Sofitel Hotel and an upmarket department store off a pedestrianised stretch of Nanjing Road. It was only ten minutes’ walk from the theatre.

Mei-Ling laughed when Li had expressed incredulity at the existence of a museum of sex in Shanghai. ‘You’re all so stuffy and stiff-lipped about sex in Beijing.’ She laughed again. ‘Come to think of it, that’s about all that would be stiff in Beijing. You’re just like the British. Sex is all right behind closed doors, just let’s pretend in public that it doesn’t really exist. We’re a little more sophisticated than that in Shanghai. We can acknowledge the existence of sex without sniggering behind our hands like schoolboys — or schoolgirls.’

Li found her superiority mildly irritating. ‘And just what sort of sophisticated exhibits are there in this museum?’ They climbed a couple of steps to the entrance hall and took the elevator to the eighth floor.

‘Oh …’ Mei-Ling said vaguely, ‘… I don’t know, dirty pictures, jade dildos, that sort of thing.’

‘What?’

She laughed again, that braying laugh. ‘How would I know? I’ve never been.’

‘So much for sophistication,’ Li said.

The lift doors opened and a woman’s recorded voice said, with an exaggerated English accent, ‘Eighth floah.’ They turned left, through glass doors, into a large and airy entrance lobby. A girl sitting in a booth told them that tickets were fifty yuan each.

Mei-Ling told her who they were and who they were looking for. The girl was flustered. ‘Ma Hanzhi is not here right now. She has gone to collect her granddaughter. The heating has broken down at the school and they have closed it for the day.’

‘Will she be long?’ Li asked.

The girl checked her watch and shook her head. ‘Not long. Ten minutes, maybe.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Mei-Ling said, and then under her breath to Li, ‘It’ll give us a chance to see the exhibition.’

Li was not sure that he wanted to see the exhibition. Across the lobby two women in white coats stood behind a counter selling all manner of seductive underwear and sexual apparatus, from transparent negligées and peek-a-boo bras to blow-up sex dolls with absurdly gaping mouths. He felt his face colouring, and he let Mei-Ling steer him away into the exhibition itself. Three bronze statues stood in the entrance, each with its own proclamation: It was the Source of Life; Welcome Guests from Afar ; and No Shame for Nature .

The museum was centred around three main rooms with low, black-painted ceilings and concealed lighting. A video of the history of sex was running continuously, with a monotonous commentary in English. A plaque on the wall proclaimed, There are two instincts and basic needs of human life, one is food, and the other is sex . The exhibition proceeded to demonstrate this point in row upon row of glass display cases filled with sexual paraphernalia from across the centuries, mostly artificial penises in stone, or porcelain, and even iron. Mei-Ling could not contain her mirth when they actually came across a double-headed jade dildo used, apparently, by lesbians in the tenth to thirteenth centuries. There were photographs of copulating Japanese racehorses, a statistical chart of eighteenth-century prostitutes from Han Kou, an ivory horn carved into a series of figures engaged in every sexual act imaginable, from oral to rear entry. Li was shocked, and found himself blushing to the roots of his hair. To his intense private embarrassment he found that he was becoming sexually aroused, although that had more to do with the proximity of Mei-Ling than any graphic depiction of sex acts in erotic paintings from the Ming Dynasty. She was very close to him, and he could feel her heat through his clothes. When her hand touched his it was like receiving an electric shock. He was both confused and disturbed by his reaction.

She was laughing again and pointing to a stone carving of a reclining man with a huge penis. ‘Now, that’s what I call sophisticated!’ she said.

‘You were looking for me?’ a voice said, and they turned to find a small woman, perhaps fifty or fifty-five, standing holding the hand of a young girl who could have been no more than six or seven years old. The girl was gazing at them with great curiosity, and the woman had a frown of deep concern etched on her face. Li felt guilty and embarrassed, as if he had been caught looking at dirty pictures. And he was appalled that a child had been brought into this place.

‘We’ll talk outside,’ he said quickly. ‘Is there somewhere you can leave the child?’

‘We can talk in the office,’ the woman said. ‘The girls will look after Lijia.’

One of the women selling sex goods took Lijia by the hand and led her behind the counter. Li and Mei-Ling followed Xiao Fengzhen’s mother into an office through the back.