Peter May - The Killing Room

They went around for a fourth time, and as they turned right at the gate and along the top end, Margaret made Xinxin stop outside the toilet block. She made it clear to the child that she was to wait there with the car. Margaret would only be a moment. Xinxin nodded vigorously and watched as Margaret hurried up the path and into the ladies’ washroom. She could have been no more than two minutes, but when she came out Xinxin was gone. Margaret cursed. She was sure the child had understood that she was not to move. She looked left and right and saw a green car and a yellow one, and a blue three-wheeled motorbike negotiating the roundabout at the far end of the main street. Several of the green benches along the sidewalks were occupied by elderly people, or students with their heads buried in books. She could hear the shriek and laughter of children and a babble of adult voices from the play area at the far side of the park. Margaret could not have said what it was exactly, but there was something in the absolute normality of everything that started pushing panic buttons in her head. Everything was normal, except for the fact that Xinxin was nowhere to be seen.

Margaret called out her name. Once, twice. And then she positively yelled it. Heads turned in her direction, and she started running along the main street, looking left and right for the little red car and Xinxin with her familiar pink dress and hair in bunches. She stopped at the first roundabout as the workers’ grey van she had seen earlier cruised slowly past her towards the exit. And then she saw the car. It was sitting at an angle in the middle of a parallel street about fifty metres away, next to the area under development Margaret sprinted towards it, calling Xinxin’s name again. The car was empty. It had about it a sense of abandonment, the wheels turned hard left to full lock. The elderly couple she had noticed before were still sitting on their bench about twenty metres further down the road. She ran towards them. ‘What happened to the little girl? Did you see where the little girl went?’ she called breathlessly. They looked at her, a little alarmed, as if they thought she might be insane. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you speak English!’ The panic was rising now in her throat, constricting her breathing. The couple looked at her blankly. Margaret pointed back along the street to the abandoned car. They looked and then shook their heads, uncomprehending.

She gave up and ran back towards the collect and return point where they had picked up the car half an hour before. There was a small group of parents and children gathered around the office window paying for cars. And then Margaret saw Xinxin at the far side of the lot sitting on a yellow motor-bike. Her knees nearly folded under her with relief. ‘Xinxin!’ she shouted and ran towards the child. But Xinxin wasn’t paying her any attention, and as Margaret got close and called again the child turned, startled, and Margaret saw that it was not Xinxin after all. She had the same high-gathered bunches, but her dress was pale green. The little girl looked alarmed and began crying. The adults at the office window turned and glared in Margaret’s direction, and in her heart Margaret knew then that Xinxin was gone. ‘Oh, God,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, God, help me, please. Someone please help me.’

*

Rain wept from the sky like the tears that ran down Margaret’s cheeks. She sat stock still, staring into an abyss, a black hole that was her own personal hell. She was numb from the shock of it, choked still by disbelief. In two short minutes a child had vanished and her world had come to an end.

Police radios crackled somewhere nearby. Uniformed officers combed the park for clues. A line of mothers and fathers and children stood outside the gatehouse waiting to be interviewed. Shock and fear stole among the adults who knew that a child had gone and that it could so easily have been one of theirs. The comfort and security of their lives had been shattered. The Disney characters that stood clustered on the grassy bank just inside the gate seemed only to mock them now. In the street outside, a huge crowd was gathering as news spread through the shops and apartments in the surrounding streets. More than a dozen police vehicles were drawn up at the sidewalk, and already the traffic cops were arriving to take over crowd control. A fast food store on the other side of the tree-lined Zunyi Road, which advertised ‘Metro Sandwiches New York Style’, was doing brisk business.

There was a slightly hysterical pitch to Li’s voice as he barked commands at uniformed officers. He had been on the scene within twenty minutes of Margaret’s call. It was now an hour since Xinxin had gone missing. With the exception of a few terse questions, he had barely spoken to Margaret. She knew he blamed her. She blamed herself. You cannot leave a six-year-old child on its own anywhere, at any time.

And yet it had felt so safe here.

She reflected on how, finally, in near hysterics, she had found a middle-aged man who spoke a little English. The alarm had been raised, the police called, and word spread through the park that a child had vanished. Everyone, then, had started to search for Xinxin. The women at the gate had not seen her leave. They would have seen her for sure, they said. And yet she was nowhere to be found within the park.

A red-faced uniformed officer approached Li at a run. ‘There’s been a development, Boss, you’d better come to the gatehouse.’ Li followed him quickly to the small concrete building at the gate, green canopies shading door and windows. They passed the line of parents and kids, and ducked inside. Three undernourished-looking men stood smoking in the tiny office, engaged in animated discussion with another two uniformed officers. They were dressed in blue workmen’s overalls. They had dirty faces and big, callused workers’ hands. One of them was older, with thinning hair. The other two had thick untidy mops speckled with plaster dust. The older man spoke for them.

‘We just got here, Chief,’ he said nervously. ‘We didn’t know.’

‘Didn’t know what?’ The dark fear that lurked in Li’s heart was making him aggressive.

‘That the van was missing. The boss just sent us to get it.’

‘Hold on.’ Li put up a hand to stop him. ‘Start from the beginning. Who are you?’

‘We work for the parks department. On contract from the street committee. You know, sometimes they got work for us, sometimes they don’t. Anyway, we was here this morning, demolishing that old building on the far side of the park. We loaded up the lorry with the debris and drove it down to an in-fill site way over in Pudong. Two of us had come in the van, but we had to leave it here when we took the crap away. The boss just told us half an hour ago that we better go get it.’ He hawked a gob of phlegm into his throat and was about to spit it on the floor when he thought better of it and reluctantly swallowed instead. He dragged his sleeve across his brow to wipe away the sweat. ‘Anyway, we get here and the place is crawling with cops. Takes us ages to persuade that bossy big bastard out there to let us in to get the van. Eventually they let Mao Jun here in to fetch it.’ He nodded towards one of the younger men. ‘Only it’s not there.’

‘You mean someone’s taken it?’ Li asked.

The man shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘Well, I don’t figure it drove off all by itself.’

Li glanced quickly at the other uniforms in the office. ‘Anyone see it leave?’

One of them nodded. ‘The woman at the ticket desk said it went out not long before the alarm got raised about the kid.’ He pulled a face. ‘But she didn’t see who was driving it.’

Li turned back to the workers. ‘It couldn’t have been one of your people?’