Peter May - The Killing Room

*

The yellow light of the streetlamps on the overhead road fell into Li’s bedroom through nicotine-stained net curtains. The headlamps of vehicles on the road raked the window at irregular intervals, and a blue neon light flashed intermittently somewhere close by. He had placed the phone on the table next to his chair. It was nearly midnight. He had not slept for nearly forty hours. His eyes were on fire, and there was a dull ache behind them. The room was full of smoke, and his ashtray filled to overflowing. All the radio and television appeals had turned up nothing new, and he had finally left 803 an hour ago at the insistence of the detectives on night shift. They promised to call the moment they had anything fresh.

In the hours after Xinxin had vanished, he had played out every nightmare scenario in his mind until he had become so numbed that nothing seemed to affect him any more. He had been over and over every last detail, examined and re-examined the statements of everyone questioned at the park. None of it had brought him any closer to an understanding of what had happened or why. Someone, clearly, had grabbed the child and made off with her in the stolen workmen’s van. Minutes later, a Westerner had been seen chasing that same van down a nearby street, banging on its side. They had neither found the van nor made any progress in identifying the Westerner. And Li was simply no longer able to think clearly.

He sat in the silence smoking cigarette after cigarette, concentrating hard on trying to keep the nightmares at bay.

A knock at the door startled him. He jumped up and hurried across the room to open it. Mei-Ling was in the hall, holding a carrier bag with steam rising from it, the smell of food carried in the vapour. ‘My dad got them to prepare you some stuff at the restaurant.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’ve got to eat, Li Yan.’ She pushed gently past him and closed the door. She laid the bag on the table and started taking out dishes of food in cardboard cartons, and placed two cans of beer beside them. She paused then and looked at his swollen eyes as he stood, hangdog, in the middle of the room, like a man in a trance. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. His eyes were glazed and gazing off into some unimaginable middle-distance. But he acknowledged her with the slightest nod of his head. ‘The food’s there if you want it. You know where I am if you need to call me.’

She stopped to squeeze his hand, and then turned towards the door, but he grabbed her arm and held her fast. He was still unable to meet her eyes. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, and she turned back, and after only a moment’s hesitation slipped her arms about his waist and pushed her head into his chest so that he could rest his head on hers. His arms enveloped her, and she felt rather than heard his sobs.

*

They were standing in a building site, not unlike the one in Lujiazui where they had found the bodies of the eighteen women. The broken stumps of an abandoned concrete foundation stuck out of the ground like bad teeth. The whole site was awash with mud. Only, the mud was frozen solid. Every attempt to break it with shovel and pick had failed. Now a big man with a yellow hard hat was wielding a pneumatic drill, and freeing chunks of frozen mud from around a central post with a plank of wood strapped across it like a Christian cross. The letter had said she would be here, under the mud, a temporary grave beneath the sign of a foreign religion.

From between the splintering wedges of mud, a little arm flopped out, pink and cold, the hand open, palm up. And as the man in the hard hat began to drill afresh, Li screamed at him to stop. One of the fingers had moved. But the workman couldn’t hear him, and he drilled on. Long piercing bursts of vibrating metal on ice, right into the heart of the little girl beneath the mud.

Li woke, still yelling, and with the sound of the phone filling the room. He was lying on top of the bed, fully dressed, sunlight streaming in through the open window along with the roar of the traffic on Yan’an Viaduct Road. Mei-Ling was crossing the room to answer the phone. He was immediately aware of the warm impression she had left in the bed beside him. So she had stayed all night. He took a deep breath and felt the phlegm of too many cigarettes crackle in his chest. He could not believe he had slept. Last night it had felt possible that he might never sleep again.

He became aware of Mei-Ling’s voice. ‘When was this?’ she was saying into the phone. ‘And have they recovered the van?’ A moment as she listened, then, ‘Well, I hope the uniforms didn’t touch anything before forensics got there … Good. We’ll be straight over.’ She hung up and turned to Li, clearly energised. ‘They found the van.’ He sat up, rubbing his face and trying to clear the sleep from his mind. She said, ‘But even better … the guy who took it? They think they’ve got him on video tape.’

*

The flashing red light on the dash on Mei-Ling’s Santana created a strobing effect in the car. Her siren wailed through the early morning quiet of this Shanghai Sunday. The streets were almost deserted. The city was just waking up. Margaret sat dazed in the back of the car, her head thick and sore, a foul taste in her mouth after several bouts of vomiting during the night. She hoped she was not going to be sick again. The strobe effect of the red light was not helping.

She had been shocked by Li’s appearance when he turned up at her hotel. His eyes red and puffy, his cheeks pale and blotched. And he had been taken aback by her appearance, too. But she had not had the courage to look in a mirror. There had been developments, he had said. She was needed, in case she could make an identification. He had not told her anything further, except that they were going to the Police Command Centre to view video tapes. And now she sat in the silence of the car, afraid to ask what the developments were. Mei-Ling had not even acknowledged her, and Li had not spoken since they left the hotel.

The Command Centre was in a fourteen-storey tower block on the corner of Jianguo Road and Ruijin Road next to Ruijin Hospital. Mei-Ling showed her pass at the gatehouse, and the gates swung open to admit them to a car park bounded by palm trees and potted plants. They ran up steps to the main entrance and took the elevator to the third floor. The Deputy Commander was waiting to meet them in the hall. They shook hands and he led them through glass doors to the operations room. Rows of desks lined with computer terminals faced fifteen giant projection video screens on the far wall. They were flanked on each side by eight smaller television screens which flickered at regular intervals from street scene to street scene, fed by cameras mounted at key vantage points all over Shanghai. Beneath the screens, facing back into the room, were eight uniformed officers sitting at terminals taking one-one-oh police emergency calls. At another desk running the full width of the room, banks of coloured phones were linked to rows of fax machines that chattered and printed out screeds of information coming in from police stations around the city. At the back of the room sat the controllers, who evaluated all incoming information and determined what pictures were relayed on to the big screens.

The Deputy Commander introduced them to a grim-faced middle-aged man in a green uniform buttoned up to the neck who sat at the centre of the back row, a bank of knobs and switches and sliders in front of him, a microphone on a flexible gooseneck projecting towards him from his console. ‘Officer Su is the senior duty controller,’ he said. And to Su, ‘Do you want to take them through it?’

Su nodded and addressed himself to Li. ‘Mid-afternoon yesterday we had a serious road accident at the Zhongshan-Wuyi intersection, just where the slip road feeds down to the Hu Xi Stadium. A lorry swerved to avoid a cyclist, hit the kerb and overturned, spilling its load of timber all over the roadway. Several private vehicles were unable to stop and there was a multiple pile-up.’