Peter May - The Killing Room

‘Shit, no. There’s only us and the boss in our unit.’

‘What about keys?’

‘What about them?’

‘Well, was it locked?’

‘Naw, the keys was in the ignition,’ the man said. He shrugged again. ‘We didn’t figure there was any danger of the kids taking off in it.’

Li drew in a deep breath to steady himself as he tried to take in the implications of all this. A grim-faced Dai rapped sharply on the door and squeezed into the overcrowded office. ‘We’re getting reports of some foreign guy seen sprinting down Ziyun Road towards the Yan’an flyover a little over an hour ago, Chief. Several people saw him.’

‘Foreign?’ Li frowned. ‘What do you mean by foreign?’

Dai shrugged. ‘A Westerner. Dark-haired, wearing jeans and a pale-coloured jacket. That’s the best description we’ve got. He was running south down the middle of Ziyun Road. It was kind of unusual, you know, so people noticed. Apparently he was chasing after a light-grey van and actually caught up with it briefly at the junction, banging on the side of it, before it sped off up on to the overhead road. People said he stood for a long time in the middle of the street just breathing real hard. Then he stopped a taxi and got in, and it went off in the same direction as the van.’

Li put his hand to his forehead and pressed middle-finger and thumb into his pounding temples to try to alleviate the pain there so that he could think clearly. None of this was making much sense. If the van had been stolen at around the time Xinxin disappeared, did that mean someone had snatched her? And why? What possible reason could there be? He could barely address the thought for the fear it conjured in his mind. But what about the Westerner running down the middle of the road chasing the van? Was it connected? Was it even the same van? He turned to Dai. ‘See if we can match up the description of the van with the one that’s missing.’ He waved a hand at the workmen. ‘These guys might be able to tell us if there was something, anything, distinctive about it. And let’s see if we can find the taxi-driver who picked this guy up.’ He could see the despair etch itself on Dai’s face at the thought. There were more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand privately licensed taxis in Shanghai. He added, ‘Let’s get an appeal out on radio and television. Anyone who was in the area who might have seen anything, we want to talk to them.’

He found it no easier to breathe outside, and compounded his distress by lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. His legs were like jelly, his stomach had turned to water, and as the full realisation sank in that Xinxin had not just wandered off, that she might have been kidnapped, he felt fear, like bile, rising in his throat. The sign on the gate read: SPARETIME SCHOOL OF TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR CHILDREN. TRAFFIC OFFICE, SHANGHAI POLICE BUREAU. And even as he read it, the characters were blurred by his tears. He was not, he knew, the best person to lead this operation. Every thought, every judgement, was coloured by emotion.

He turned to see Margaret being led to a car by a policewoman. Her face was streaked black with mascara, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. She moved like an automaton, no emotion visible in her expression. Before she stooped to get into the car she turned and saw Li watching her. At that moment he felt something more than anger. It felt like hate. Somewhere, buried so deep inside him as not to make a difference, he knew perhaps that it wasn’t really her fault. But every conscious part of him blamed her. Every muscle and sinew strained to scream abuse and blame, to punch and slap and hurt her. She recoiled slightly, as if from a blow, almost as though his darkest thoughts had taken physical form. He made no move towards her, no sign. She got into the car with her misery, and he turned away as it drove off.

Japanese warlords in period costume strutted about a stylised set gesturing wildly at each other, eyes staring and burning with a kind of madness. Chinese subtitles flashed on and off the screen, lines of tiny characters that could not possibly be read in the allotted time. The sound on the television was switched to mute, and its flickering luminescence was the only light in the room.

Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, close to a phone which had resolutely refused to ring all evening. In her hand she clutched a tumbler of whisky. She had worked her way through all the miniatures in the mini-bar, and was now on to the Scotch. But it didn’t seem to matter how much she drank, she couldn’t get drunk. Oblivion was all she sought, and yet it remained elusive, despite her best efforts.

Her mouth was dry, and the pain thumped in her head with every beat of her heart, each pulse a reminder of her guilt, of her shame, of her failure. Responsibility for a young life had been placed in her hands today and she had not lived up to her obligations. She was not fit to be a mother. She was not fit to live. She remembered once, during her time as an intern, losing a patient in the emergency room. A young woman, the victim of a knife attack. Margaret had been incapable of stopping the internal bleeding. It wasn’t her fault, but it had been a turning point in her life, a moment when she realised that no matter how well trained, no matter how experienced, control of that moment which ultimately decided between life and death was never really in your hands.

But today, Xinxin’s life had been in her hands. She had had absolute control and failed to exercise it. As a young doctor she had turned from the futility of trying to save the living, to the predictability of dissecting the dead. Now all she wanted to do was to give up life completely, her own life, and find some escape in the final embrace of death, her own death. But she was, she knew, too big a coward for that. And, besides, death would be too lenient a punishment.

She emptied her glass and stood up, crossing unsteadily to the window and drawing back the curtains. Saturday night. Nanjing Road was filled with people and traffic. She looked down at the crowd below her and wished that she were one of them, freed from the burden of guilt and fear for a child she had failed. But, then, who knew what pain other people carried in their heads, what private grief, what personal hell. She would not be the only person suffering in the world tonight. But that knowledge did nothing to take away the pain.

She was haunted by the look in Li’s eyes as she got into the car outside the park. She had never felt such a searing look, so filled with hurt and darkness and hate. It had reached inside her and burned itself into her soul, and it was smouldering there still.

Now she turned away from the window and the thought, fumbling in the dark to the mini-bar. But she had finished all the little bottles, and they rattled emptily away from her clutching fingers. She wondered if maybe Jack would be in the bar looking for her. He must have heard the news by now. There had been appeals on radio and television all night. He was, perhaps, the only person in Shanghai who might not blame her for what had happened. But she was not sure she deserved that. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and thought for a moment she was looking at an apparition. There was a deathly pallor in her face, eyes sunken and ringed with dark smudges, and for the first time in her life she saw herself looking like her grandmother. Her father’s mother. She had never before seen the resemblance, and for one brief alcoholic moment she had actually believed she was her grandmother’s ghost. She let out a tiny, involuntary cry and looked quickly away. She lifted her key card and hurried out into the brightly lit hall.

Jack was not in the bar. As usual it was deserted. Margaret slipped stiffly on to a barstool and ordered a vodka tonic. And she knew there would be no sympathy or redemption for her tonight as Xinxin’s face swam up with the bubbles through the tonic to feed her worst fears of what had become of the child.