Peter May - The Killing Room

Li shrugged. ‘I guess.’ He still couldn’t see any great relevance.

‘Could we find out now?’ she asked.

‘Find out what?’

‘If the acrobat had a kid. Is there any way we can find out right now?’

Li looked at his watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. The evening performance at the Shanghai Centre Theatre would just be coming to a close. ‘If we’re quick we could probably catch the husband after the show.’

Margaret abandoned her vodka and jumped down off her stool. ‘Let’s do it.’

*

Escalators ran them up into the atrium from the Long Bar above the car park in the Shanghai Centre. The acrobatic show was over and most of the audience had dispersed. Li wondered if the girls with the nine chairs had managed to perform their stunt without falling. Half a dozen tiny clusters of people stood smoking and talking in the vastness of the atrium, their smoke and voices rising into the huge void that lifted over their heads and glassed out the night. Backstage, young acrobats were running back and forth gathering props and costumes, shouting and laughing and tangling playfully half-naked in open-doored dressing rooms. Nobody gave Li a second glance, but Margaret was an object of considerable interest. The manageress limped into the corridor on her sticks. She took one look at Li and then nodded to a room further down.

Sun Jie was pulling his coat on, ready to leave, when Li knocked and he and Margaret entered. His expression hardened when he saw Li. He appeared not even to notice Margaret. ‘What do you want?’ he said wearily. ‘She’s dead, I need to put this behind me now.’

‘I’ll not bother you again,’ Li promised. ‘I just wanted to know if you and Liyao ever had any children.’

Sun Jie’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Li almost accusingly. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

Margaret watched, feeling very excluded, as the two men spoke in Chinese. And yet, not understanding the words seemed to give her a greater insight. Sun Jie, initially hostile and laconic, started pouring out his heart. Margaret could see the pain in his eyes, and then the tears that formed there. Finally he sat down and began talking, apparently to no one in particular. Big silent tears rolled down his cheeks as he shook his head at some unbearable memory. He and Li spoke for several minutes before Li turned and took Margaret’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go.’ And they left Sun Jie sitting weeping on his own in the dressing room. Tears he had not spilled at the mortuary when he identified his wife ran freely now. Li pulled the door shut behind them.

In the atrium Margaret could contain her curiosity no longer. ‘What did he say? Why was he in tears?’

Li looked tired, weighed down by the other man’s grief. ‘He has an eight-year-old daughter. His mother used to look after her when he and Liyao were performing or away on tour. Now she looks after her full-time.’ I hardly know her , Sun Jie had told him. And she hardly knows she has a father .

‘Why the tears?’

‘Apparently she got pregnant again a couple of years ago. He suspects she was trying to. She was desperate to have a boy. He flew into a rage and told her they would be heavily penalised under the One Child Policy if she had it. They had terrible fights about it. In the end he won and she agreed to have an abortion. He says he bullied her into it.’

Margaret knew that this was painful for Li, too. It almost replicated his sister’s story. She supposed that it was a universal story in China, a tragedy that got played out in nearly every family.

Li said, ‘He reckoned their relationship was never quite the same after that. They’d had a furious row once and she had called him a murderer, the killer of their unborn child.’ Li shook his head. ‘I think that’s left a scar on him that will never heal. Poor bastard.’ He looked at Margaret, but he knew immediately that she was somewhere else. There was a strange burning quality in her eyes, and the colour had risen high on her cheeks. ‘What is it?’

She looked at him now, with something like pain in her expression. ‘I fucked up, Li,’ she said. ‘It’s been there in front of me the whole time and I never saw it.’

He was perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’

Her hands were shaking as she clutched his arm. ‘I want to get the bodies out of the refrigerator and back on to the table — now,’ she said.

‘What?’ Li was incredulous. ‘At this time of night!’

‘Right now,’ she said.

The sweat beaded across her forehead and was instantly chilled by the low working temperature of the autopsy room. It felt cold and clammy on her hot skin. Her eyes were burning with fatigue, dry and gritty. She wondered what time it was. She had been in here, it seemed, for hours, ignoring the simmering resentment of tired mortuary assistants called from their beds to move the bodies around. On the table in front of her lay the uterus and pelvic organs of the last of the victims, the remaining body parts still in their bag laid out on a gurney. The womb was the same familiar pink-tan in colour. At the bottom end, where it opened into the vagina, Margaret saw the tell-tale scarring of the endometrium. Something made her look up, and she caught Li leaning against the door watching her.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked.

‘Four a.m.’

‘Jesus.’ She had been in there for almost five hours.

‘Are you nearly done?’

She nodded. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Having a stand-up row with Dr Lan. He takes exception to me opening up his mortuary and calling out his staff in the middle of the night without reference to him . I do not know who called him, but someone did. He does not like getting out of his bed at four in the morning. He is pretty pissed.’

‘I’m pretty pissed, too,’ Margaret said. ‘And I haven’t even been to bed.’

Li smiled weakly. He was also tired. ‘Who are you pissed at this time?’

‘Myself,’ she said bitterly. ‘For not seeing this before, for not even thinking of it.’ She looked at him. ‘You know, it’s that thing of too much information obscuring the obvious.’ She laughed, but it was an empty laugh. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I wasn’t even looking in the right place.’

He crossed to the table, eaten up by curiosity. ‘Are you going to tell me now what it is you have found?’

She smiled. ‘The answer to a riddle.’

He frowned. ‘What riddle?’

‘A riddle that Mei Yuan asked me to pass on to you. Only I didn’t, because she said not to tell you until I had worked it out for myself. Then I would realise the importance of how the question is framed.’

‘So when did you figure it out?’

‘In the atrium outside the theatre. I could have kicked myself for being stupid enough not to see it before.’

‘I thought it was this case you were having some revelation about.’

‘It was both. They’re one and the same thing, really.’

Li scowled. He could not get his mind around this, especially at four in the morning. ‘Do you want to tell me what the riddle was?’

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing …’ And she took him through the whole trip from the Friendship Store, past Wangfujing Street and Tiananmen Square to Xidan, picking up and dropping off passengers en route. She changed the numbers, made them up as she went along. She knew it didn’t matter. But she watched him doing the mental arithmetic. ‘All right? You follow all that?’ He nodded. ‘Okay, so what height was the bus driver?’

She could see that his reaction had been the same as hers, and for the life of her could not imagine how she had been so easily fooled. He shook his head. ‘You cannot know the height of the driver.’