Peter May - The Killing Room

‘She hasn’t done anything,’ Li said. ‘Someone murdered her.’

The manager went very pale. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Poor Cherry.’

‘Do you know anything about her family?’ Li asked.

The manager shook his head. ‘She never said anything about family.’

‘What about her kid? Did she take the little girl to Beijing with her?’

‘I’ve no idea. She wasn’t in the habit of discussing her plans with me. Sadly.’ He shook his head again. ‘Poor, poor Cherry.’

Li took the box from under his arm. ‘I’ll take that now.’

It was nearly nine when Li walked into the Peace Hotel. Margaret was sitting on her own at the bar. She was on her second vodka tonic. The anger she had been nursing, first towards Mei-Ling over the Xinxin fiasco and then towards Li for standing her up, had begun to dissipate. Li had dropped off the box of Chai Rui’s possessions at 803 and taken a taxi straight there. He was still soaking wet. Margaret took one look at him and couldn’t resist a smile.

‘So now I know why you’re late,’ she said. ‘You just had to have a shower before you came out. Pity you forgot to take your clothes off first.’

He grinned sheepishly. ‘It stops them from shrinking.’

She laughed. ‘You want a beer?’ He nodded and she called the waitress over and ordered him one. ‘And I also know why they put you in that other hotel — you can’t afford the prices here on your salary.’ She chuckled. ‘Trouble is, on what they pay me at the University of Public Security, neither can I. I’m having to take out a mortgage to pay my bar bill.’

Their mood was easier and more relaxed than it had been for some time. In some strange way, accepting that their relationship might be at an end, albeit unspoken, had removed the tension between them. Li picked up the drinks menu and looked at the prices. He whistled softly. ‘In the name of the sky, a hundred kwai for a beer? Some people don’t earn that much in a week! I’ll have to be careful not to spill any.’ He took a drink and rolled the beer around his mouth. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘it tastes just the same as it does out of a five kwai can.’

Margaret looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then decided to broach the subject she had been brooding over for the last few hours. ‘Listen, I don’t want to spoil good relations or anything, but that little shit really screwed me over this afternoon.’

Li frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Mei-Ling. When I went to pick up Xinxin, there was this uniformed female cop there. Wouldn’t let me near Xinxin and dragged the poor kid screaming down the stairs. Clearly on instructions from a higher authority.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Li said, and his face flushed pink. ‘I am so sorry, Margaret. I forgot to tell Mei-Ling that you were going to collect Xinxin.’

Margaret felt unaccountably disappointed. ‘Oh. So, I can’t blame her , then. Pity. It makes me feel better if I think everything around here is her fault.’ She took a stiff draught of vodka. ‘Tell you what, though, you need to do something about that female cop. That is no way to treat poor little Xinxin. The kid was really distressed.’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I’ll sort it.’

She hesitated for a few moments, then, ‘I thought I might take her out tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Seeing that it’s Saturday. I figured she wouldn’t have kindergarten.’

‘Sure,’ Li said.

Margaret smiled. ‘There won’t be any big, dikey policewoman there trying to stop me, will there?’

Li laughed. ‘You have my word on that. Where are you going to take her?’

‘There’s this park I heard about over on the west side of the city where kids get to drive little electric cars around miniature streets. I figured she’d probably like that.’

Li laughed. ‘You will probably not get her to leave.’ He paused. ‘Where did you hear about it?’

He did not notice the slight clouding of Margaret’s eyes, or how the brightness of her smile became a little too fixed. ‘I can’t remember. Read about it somewhere, I think.’ She hated lying to Li, but she didn’t think this was the moment to discuss Jack Geller. Margaret looked at Li and thought how attractive he was for an ugly man. She decided to change the subject. ‘So,’ she said, ‘are you going to tell me the real reason you kept me waiting for an hour?’

‘We identified the girl from Beijing. From those dental records that you brought down.’

Reality returned, and Margaret felt her lighter mood slip away. ‘And?’

‘She was just a kid. Chai Rui was her name, but everyone called her Cherry. She was twenty-two. Probably making a living as a hooker. She had been working as a hostess at a club, but they fired her when they found out she was using.’ He told her about the upscale apartment, about the little girl and how nobody knew what had become of her, about the box of belongings that were all that remained of a tragic life.

Margaret thought of the putrefying remains she had examined on the autopsy table the day before. She shook her head sadly. ‘You know, it’s easier somehow if you don’t know anything about them. When they don’t have a name and you don’t know about their husband or their lover. Or their child.’ She tried to blink away the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes. ‘Shit,’ she said, ‘I’m getting soft in my old age.’ But she couldn’t throw off the image of the body-bags lined up in the mortuary, all those women whose lives and loves, and hopes and fears, had been cut so brutally short, butchered without thought for the people they loved, or who loved them. And then a thought formed, coming out of nowhere, drawing on a hundred different subconscious sources, a revelation that had been secretly brewing somewhere deep in her mind without her even being aware of it. And suddenly all the emotional baggage of the last few days fell away and she was thinking with great clarity. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘You’re telling me this girl had a kid.’

‘Sure. So what? You’d have been able to tell that from autopsy, wouldn’t you? What was it you said, the cervix got stretched in childbirth and ended up looking like fish lips?’

‘It’s a good indication,’ Margaret said, ‘but it’s not a guarantee.’ She held a hand up. ‘Just … just give me a minute.’ She tried to think. How many of the women that she had autopsied had given the appearance of having had kids? But then, hadn’t she just told Li that you couldn’t tell for sure? And she didn’t know about the others, the ones she hadn’t autopsied herself, and it wasn’t an area to which she had paid much attention. She switched tack. ‘Of the five women we’ve identified, how many had kids?’

Li frowned. He couldn’t see where this was going. ‘All of them, I think.’ Then, ‘No, wait a minute …’ He ran through them all in his mind. The seamstress who took it in turns with her husband to take their son to kindergarten; the opera singer whose mother looked after her little girl; the fingerprint girl whose parents had been given custody of her baby; the night club hostess whose baby girl had disappeared when she did. That left the acrobat and her husband, Sun Jie. Li could not remember him making any reference to a child. ‘Four of them,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the acrobat had a kid.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, I’m not. I mean, we can find out, but what difference does it make? It’s not unusual for women of that age to have kids, is it?’

Margaret said, ‘I don’t know.’ She was still in a state of excitement. Something was trying to work its way through from subconscious fog to conscious clarity. ‘But if all these women had borne children — I mean, all of them — then it would be something they had in common, wouldn’t it? Something to link them.’