Peter May - The Killing Room

‘You do not run this department, Deputy Section Chief. I do!’ Section Chief Huang’s anger showed itself in the tiny flecks of spittle that gathered around his lips. He stood glaring at Li from behind his desk.

Li closed the door and said quietly, ‘I was put in charge of this investigation.’

‘That does not give you the authority to go pulling my people out of their beds in the middle of the night and embarking on a course of investigation that has not even been discussed with me.’

Li felt his patience waning. He said, ‘I can’t win, can I? Yesterday the Procurator General tells me if I don’t speed up the investigation it’s my neck on the block. I make a breakthrough during the night and you want me to wait till you’ve had breakfast before I follow it up.’ He took out a cigarette.

‘Don’t light that in here,’ Huang said.

Reluctantly, Li slipped the cigarette back in its packet. His eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He glared back at Huang. ‘If you don’t get out of my face, Huang, I’m taking this to Director Hu, and I’m going to tell him I can’t pursue his investigation because you’re obstructing me.’

Huang snorted his derision. ‘You think the Mayor’s policy adviser will see you at your request? Director Hu sees you when he wants to see you. And in the meantime you’ll deal with me and Procurator General Yue, like it or not.’ He searched on his desk for a sheet of paper. He found it and waved it at Li. It had scribbed notes on it. ‘I had a call last night from the Chief of Section One. It seems you went and ruffled a few feathers at the Black Rain Club.’ He breathed stertorously through his nose. ‘That is not how we deal with these people here?’

‘Oh, really?’ Li said. ‘So what do you do, roll over and let them shit on you?’

Huang’s eyes burned with anger and dislike. ‘You are walking on seriously thin ice here, Li. In Shanghai, insubordination and abuse towards a senior officer are usually rewarded with instant demotion, if not dismissal.’

‘So fire me,’ Li said, and he locked eyes with Huang and wouldn’t look away. His position as head of the investigation was an issue he was determined to force. Director Hu had appointed him over Huang’s head, and he was not about to let the Section Chief undermine his authority because of petty jealousy and internal politics.

Huang was spared having to respond by a knock at the door. It opened and Mei-Ling entered. She was immediately aware of the charged atmosphere that filled the room and closed the door quickly behind her. She looked at Huang. ‘What’s up, Chief?’

Huang still held Li’s gaze. ‘Not only does our friend from Beijing drag half the pathology department out of their beds in the middle of the night, but then he calls in the entire detective shift two hours early and embarks on an investigation of a personal friend of Director Hu.’

This was all news to Mei-Ling. She looked at Li in amazement. ‘What’s going on? Why didn’t you call me?’

‘I needed foot soldiers, not generals,’ Li said.

She was clearly not pleased. ‘Do you want to tell me what it was that was so important you had to get everyone else out of their beds but me?’

Li sighed. He did not need hostility on two fronts. ‘Margaret made a breakthrough last night. She found something that linked all the victims.’

Mei-Ling frowned. ‘What?’

‘Every single one of them had had an abortion.’

‘Oh, had they?’ she said. And she digested the information for a moment. Then, ‘So how come this “breakthrough” wasn’t made at autopsy?’

But Li was determined not to be deflected. ‘That’s not important right now. What matters is that these women could not have been picked at random. And if the thing they have in common is that they’ve all had abortions, then that puts the investigation on a whole different footing.’

Mei-Ling was still struggling to keep up. ‘How’s that?’

‘I had the guys check with the relatives of four of the five girls we’ve identified so far. All four had their abortions done at clinics belonging to Cui Feng. Remember him? We met him at Director Hu’s banquet.’

Huang cut in, ‘So now he wants to go harassing a personal friend of the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ He turned on Li again. ‘There is nothing unusual about these women having had abortions carried out at Cui’s clinics. His organisation performs most of the abortions in Shanghai.’

‘In the name of the sky!’ Li let his exasperation escape through clenched teeth. ‘I am not suggesting there is anything sinister in that. I want to ask Cui if he will give us access to his files. We can then check them against the missing persons files and find out which of them had had abortions. That way there’s a good chance we can narrow down the identities of the other dead girls.’

Mei-Ling drew a deep breath and looked at Huang. ‘It does make sense, Chief.’

But Li was wound up now and didn’t want to let it go. ‘I mean, what is this guy anyway, untouchable? Just because he’s a pal of Director Hu?’

Huang turned a very dangerous look on Li. His voice was low. ‘Cui Feng is a Party member and a very influential member of this community,’ he said. ‘I will not have his reputation impugned in any way by this department. Is that understood?’

There was a tense silence, broken finally by Mei-Ling. ‘But we can ask him to let us see his files, can’t we, Chief?’

Huang held Li’s eyes for several more seconds before tearing them away to focus on Mei-Ling. There was almost a sense of hurt in them, a feeling perhaps of betrayal that she had taken Li’s side rather than his. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘You can ask to see his files.’

*

The traffic was backing up along Fuxing Road from roadworks outside the Music Conservatory. Li and Mei-Ling had sat nursing their own thoughts in the car all the way south and west from 803. The tension between Li and Huang had transferred itself to Mei-Ling. She was brooding darkly behind the wheel of the car. She glanced at Li as they sat idling in the traffic, fumes rising all about them in the rain, only the sound of windscreen wipers scraping back and forth breaking their silence. ‘So where is she now?’ she said at last.

Li dragged himself from his private thoughts. ‘Who?’

‘Margaret.’

‘She’s gone back to her hotel to try and get some sleep. She was up most of the night.’

‘Oh, what a shame,’ Mei-Ling said in a tone that dripped with sarcasm. ‘Maybe if she’d spotted these abortions in the first place she wouldn’t have needed to go catching up on her beauty sleep.’

For Li it was the last straw. He turned his aggression full on Mei-Ling. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you and Margaret have got against each other, but I’m fed up being caught between two women eating vinegar. I want this jealousy to stop. And I want it to stop now! We’ve got nineteen women here hacked to death by some maniac with a blade, I think we owe it to them to keep ourselves focused on catching their killer. Don’t you?’

Mei-Ling was shocked, both by his anger and by his more than implied criticism. She reacted coldly. ‘Of course,’ she said.

But Li was tired, his resistance low, and there were other things he wanted to get off his chest. ‘And that policewoman you sent to pick up Xinxin …? I don’t want her going near the kid again.’

Mei-Ling flashed him an angry look. ‘Why?’

‘Because she refused to let Margaret near her, and scared Xinxin half to death. In future I’ll make my own arrangements to have her collected. All right?’