Peter May - The Killing Room

Li had the doorman’s arm twisted up his back, and saw the glass bend as he pushed the man’s face harder into it. ‘Now listen,’ he said quietly. ‘It’ll take me all of five seconds to put scum like you behind bars. So you’d better show me the respect that an officer of the law deserves, and go and tell your boss that I’d like to speak to him.’

When Li let him go, the doorman got back to his feet, mustering as much dignity as he could, straightening his jacket and heading stiffly off up the stairs to find his boss. He left behind him his distorted faceprint on the glass of the door. Li heard one or two giggles from the girls on the stairs. Perhaps they didn’t like him very much.

Li walked into the lobby and saw, through enormous double doors away to his left, a large dance floor surrounded by tables. There was a bar at the far side, and as he wandered in he saw that there was a small stage at one end and a tiny orchestra pit. Coloured lights danced and sparkled in the affected subterranean gloom. The tables were busy, but no one was dancing. The nine-piece orchestra finished some jazzy Western dance number, to be replaced immediately by a deep, hammering disco beat that thundered out from speakers around the room. Spotlights snapped on, and bikini-clad dancers with high white boots rose up on small round podia, contorting themselves in some bizarre parody of nineteen-sixties America.

He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find himself facing the doorman and a clone flanking a smaller man wearing a white dinner jacket. ‘What do you want?’ the Dinner Jacket shouted above the noise.

Li nodded towards the lobby. ‘Outside,’ he shouted back, and they moved through into the comparative quiet of the entrance hall.

‘Well?’ The Dinner Jacket was impatient.

Li said, ‘You employed a girl here called Chai Rui.’

The Dinner Jacket frowned and shook his head. ‘Don’t know her.’

‘About eighteen months ago,’ Li said.

Still the Dinner Jacket shook his head. ‘Girls come and go. So, if that’s all …’ He started to turn away and Li caught his shoulder. The man pulled free and turned, eyes blazing. ‘Don’t fucking touch me! Do you know who I am?’

Li said quietly, ‘I don’t care who you are. And I don’t care what friends you think you have in this town. The only thing that matters here is who I am. I represent the law of the People’s Republic of China, and I am investigating a murder. And if you fuck with me you could end up in a football stadium somewhere picking lead out of your brains. And that’s after I’ve closed down your club, put your whores in prison and confiscated your assets.’

Conversation on the stairs had come to a halt, mobile phones slipped back into purses. The Dinner Jacket stared long and hard at Li. This was a supreme loss of face in front of his employees and his customers, but there was no doubting that Li was serious. It was not how the owner of the Black Rain was used to being dealt with by the authorities. His two henchmen shifted uncomfortably on either side of him.

‘Her nickname was Cherry,’ Li said, helping him out.

Now the Dinner Jacket nodded slowly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember her. Good-looking girl. She didn’t work here long. Couple of months at the most. I fired her.’

‘Why?’

‘She was a user. Heroin.’ He shook his head. ‘No good. I like my girls clean.’

‘How very fastidious of you,’ Li said. ‘Where did she go after you fired her?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t care. If I sack a girl I don’t expect to see her again. This is not a social club.’ He took a beat. ‘Is that it?’

Li was reluctant to let it go at that. But there was no point in pursuing it. If the girl had only worked at the Black Rain for a couple of months and left sixteen months before, it was unlikely he would learn much here. He gave a small nod, and the Dinner Jacket immediately turned and hurried up the stairs with the second henchman in his wake. The doorman who’d left his faceprint on the glass resumed his position at the door. Li pulled up his collar again and hurried out into the rain.

He had only got a couple of hundred metres down Huaihai Road when he felt a tugging on his sleeve. He turned to find himself looking into the upturned face of a very pretty girl under a bright green umbrella. She had a white trench coat gathered around a sequined dress, and Li could see tiny flashes of light from beneath it as she brushed the hair out of her eyes. She glanced behind her nervously. ‘What happened to Cherry?’ she asked.

‘Someone took a surgeon’s knife and cut her open,’ Li said, and he immediately regretted the brutality of his words when he saw the girl’s face go pale, and the anguish in her eyes. She nearly buckled at the knees, and he held her elbow to steady her. ‘You knew her?’

‘She was a friend. Only one I ever made at the club. She was really beautiful.’

‘Where did she go after she was fired?’

‘She couldn’t get any work. You know, in this game word gets around pretty fast if you’re a user. The only way is down. She tried to kick it, she really did. But she still couldn’t get any work. She heard of an opening in Beijing about a year ago and went up there to try her luck. I never saw her again.’

The rain from her umbrella was dripping on to Li’s shirt. But it didn’t matter. He was soaked to the skin anyway. He said, ‘Do you know anything about her? Her family, any other friends?’

She flicked another nervous glance behind her then shook her head. ‘She was pretty tight about all that kind of stuff. A very private person, you know? She lived in a really expensive apartment on Zhaojiabang Road. I don’t know how she could afford it, or the girl she had in to look after the kid.’

‘She had a kid?’ Li was surprised.

‘Yeah, it was just a couple of years old. A little girl. She paid some peasant girl to babysit while she was working.’

‘So where’s the kid now? Did she take her with her to Beijing?’

‘I don’t know.’ Another nervous glance behind her. ‘Look, I got to go. They’ll dump me for sure if they know I talked to you. They think I ran out for cigarettes.’ She turned and hurried back through the crowds, tiny steps in quick succession, heels clicking on the sidewalk. Li watched her go, and still the rain fell.

*

At the end of Hengshan Road, Li wiped away the condensation on the window of the taxi and smeared the lights of Xujiahui junction across the glass. Floodlit towers and giant globes, and flashing neon; Toto, Hitachi, American Standard; a bronze statue of a young woman clinging to the arm of a young man speaking animatedly into a cell phone. The rain that still drummed on the roof of the Volkswagen appeared to be having no deterrent effect on the night life of the city. The streets were still congested with people and traffic. The taxi took a left and dropped him at steps leading up to a pedestrian footbridge that spanned the six lanes of Zhaojiabang Road. Li dashed across the bridge, getting soaked all over again. Steps on the other side took him down to the bright lights of a multiplex cinema beneath a cluster of six tower blocks of private apartments. The main movie house was showing the latest Bond film.

The manager of Chai Rui’s apartment block remembered her well. He had had a crush on her, he confided in Li, and then begged him not to tell his wife. She had paid for the apartment monthly with a direct debit from her bank account, he said. It had continued to pay out for a couple of months after she went to Beijing, and then suddenly stopped. When the next payment came due and was not forthcoming, he had emptied the apartment and re-let it. He led Li down a long corridor to a locked room at the end. ‘The majority of the apartments are furnished,’ he said, ‘and she’d taken most of her clothes with her, so there wasn’t much to clear out.’ He unlocked the door and switched on the light in a small storeroom with metal racked shelves around the walls. He lifted down a cardboard box. ‘This is all there was. Just a few personal things. I kept them in case she ever came back.’ He grinned. ‘You can live in hope.’ He paused. ‘What’s she done?’