Peter May - The Killing Room

She laughed. Of course you can. And she repeated the question. ‘Imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing …’

He groaned. ‘I always fall for these. It is typical of Mei Yuan.’

‘But the point is,’ Margaret said, ‘the answer was there all along, staring you in the face.’ She laughed. ‘But you’re too busy doing the arithmetic, getting distracted by all the numbers, and the names of the stops. So you don’t see what’s obvious.’

Li looked at the bivalved womb on the autopsy table. ‘So what’s obvious here that you didn’t see?’

‘The thing that connects them, that ties them all together beyond any possible coincidence, that I never even thought to look for. Until now.’

‘Better late than never. Do you want to tell me?’

She folded the uterus over, as it would have been before bisection. ‘I have this little trick,’ she said, ‘when I’m doing an autopsy.’ She took a pair of forceps and demonstrated how she would slip them up through the cervix into the body of the womb. ‘I can then use the forceps as a guide for my knife so that I can draw it up through the womb and cut it easily in half. Of course, it only works if the subject is female.’ She grinned, but got no response from Li and shrugged. ‘Anyway, with these ladies, in a couple of cases I couldn’t get the forceps in, and when I finally got the uterus open I found that there were adhesions on the inner lining that scarred the uterus closed.’

‘I remember,’ Li said. ‘You thought maybe the damage had been done in childbirth.’

‘That’s right. But there’s something else that can cause this kind of scarring.’ And with her right index finger she traced the adhesions on the endometrium in front of her. ‘It was you telling me about the acrobat having the abortion that made me think of it. And then I remembered Dr Wang in Beijing commenting on similar scarring in the womb of the body found there. He said he’d seen it frequently as a result of careless abortion.’

‘And that’s what caused the scarring that you found?’

Margaret nodded. ‘Suction curettage is probably the commonest form of abortion. And that’s what’s been employed here. A kind of freshwater weed called Laminaria is usually inserted into the cervix to soften or ripen it, and allow passage of the suction tool.’ She glanced up and saw the look of disgust on Li’s face. She said, ‘You guys don’t know the half of what we women have to go through.’ And although her delivery was light, there was something deeper there that caused Li to look at her for a moment.

‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Li said.

‘Well, in this case you have no choice,’ Margaret said. ‘And neither did this poor girl. Whoever performed her abortion was too vigorous with the suction tool, and instead of sucking out just the foetus along with the placenta and the superficial lining, they removed a whole portion of the lining of the womb, causing it to scar closed. She probably couldn’t have had another baby even if she’d wanted.’

Li looked thoughtful. ‘How many of the victims had scars like this?’

Margaret looked sheepish. ‘Nearly half of them.’ She shrugged. ‘The only excuse I can offer is that I didn’t perform all the autopsies, and the womb was pretty far from the focus of attention. Also, it would have been possible for complications in childbirth to have resulted in scarring like this.’

Li brushed aside her guilty apologies. ‘Only half of them? You said you’d found something that connected them all.’

‘I have,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to come through to the other room.’

On the tables in the room next door, Margaret had laid out the wombs and the other pelvic organs — the urinary bladder, ovaries and Fallopian tubes — of another two victims. It looked to Li like a bizarre collection of human pieces. The bodies from which they had been taken were laid out inside their open body-bags on gurneys beside each table.

Margaret moved to the nearest table. She said, ‘Another abortion technique is called D amp; C. Dilation and curettage. The cervix is softened in the same way, but then the foetus and the uterus are literally scraped out using a long-handled sharp spoon, a little like an ice-cream scoop, but smaller than an old fancy sugar-cube spoon.’

She heard Li exhale through his teeth. ‘Do I really need this detail?’ he asked.

‘Yup. It’s important.’ She was not prepared to make any allowances. ‘The trouble with this procedure is that it has a much higher complication rate. There’s a greater danger of perforation and haemorrhage at the time it is carried out, and as a result, more infections afterwards.’ She held open one of the tubes leading from the womb. ‘This is one of the uterine, or fallopian tubes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, if the womb is infected after the D amp; C, the infection can travel up the uterine tubes and scar them closed. That’s what’s happened here.’

Li leaned forward and saw the distinctive pattern of scarring in the bisected tube.

Margaret said, ‘The pathologist who did the autopsy on this woman would have had no reason to consider it significant. And, anyway, this kind of scarring is more commonly caused by a number of venereal diseases.’ She moved away to the other table. ‘Now this poor woman,’ she said, ‘suffered at the hands of the Japanese.’ Li’s frown caused her to smile. ‘They invented the process,’ she said. ‘Yet another crude, and quite brutal, way of ending a life. You’d think in this high-tech age we’d have evolved more sophisticated techniques. But then, since it’s usually men who invent these things, it’s probably not very high on their list of priorities.’ She flattened out the bivalved uterus and ran her finger along an irregularly healed scar on the cervix. ‘One of the tell-tale signs,’ she said. ‘And you can see up here on the inside of the uterine wall this thinned, tough, pale area. That’s another.’ She sighed. ‘What’s happened here is that the fluid has been drawn out of the bag of water around the foetus and replaced by a concentrated salt solution. That has caused the foetus and placenta to spontaneously deliver about forty-eight hours after the infusion.’

‘What’s caused the scarring?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘There are various complications that can cause the cervix to be scarred like this, but this pale area inside the body of the uterus … that’s a result of some of the salt solution escaping into the muscular uterine wall, effectively killing it. Myometrial necrosis , it’s called.’

She pushed her head back and then stretched it left and right to try to take some of the tension out of her neck. She slipped off her mask and shower cap and moved away to the sink, removing her gown and her gloves. Li followed her and leaned back against the stainless steel worktop. ‘So how many of our victims showed scarring like this?’

Margaret said flatly, ‘All the remaining women had either one or other of these procedures performed on them.’

Li thought about it for a long time. ‘A lot of women have abortions in China, Margaret,’ he said.

She turned to look at him. ‘About three hundred thousand a year in Shanghai,’ she said. ‘That’s the figure that guy at Director Hu’s banquet came up with the other night, wasn’t it?’

‘Cui Feng.’ Li nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘And there are what, maybe six million women in Shanghai?’

Li shrugged. ‘About that, I guess.’

‘So on a very crude calculation, over a ten-year period, fifty per cent of the women in this city will have had abortions. So out of, say, twenty women picked at random you’d expect half of them to have had an abortion. Of course, that’s just an average. In some groups there would be seven or eight. In others there might be thirteen, even fourteen.’ She paused to let her arithmetic sink in. ‘Here we have nineteen women, if we include the girl in Beijing, and every single one of them has had an abortion. Li Yan, that’s statistically impossible.’