Peter May - The Killing Room

Margaret had no idea what he was saying, and Li seemed none the wiser. He said, ‘What’s this got to do with the little girl being snatched at the traffic park?’

Su said, ‘We have a camera on that intersection. Normally we only record from these cameras in the event of an incident. So in this case we have more than an hour of recorded tape of the intersection following the accident.’ He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the desk and offered them around. When no one took him up on his offer, he lit up himself. ‘One of my people was monitoring all incoming information following events at the Tiantan Traffic Park yesterday. In the early hours of this morning he had an idea. It was quiet, and he had nothing much else to do. So he ran the tape of the Zhongshan-Wuyi intersection. It’s less than half a mile from the park, and eyewitnesses had reported seeing the grey van heading north, in the direction of the stadium. That was about half an hour after the accident. He figured there was a good chance we might have caught the van on tape.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Turned out we caught a lot more than that.’

He leaned forward and threw some switches. Nine of the fifteen projection screens, which had been displaying a map detail of a northern city suburb, switched to one giant black-and-white projection of the tape of the Zhongshan-Wuyi intersection which Su had set to play. The lorry was lying at an angle on one side. Timber was still strewn all over the road. Four private cars with varying degrees of damage had been abandoned in the middle of the carriageway while their owners shouted and gesticulated, clearly attempting to deflect or apportion blame. Traffic cops were already coning off the slip road and a couple of recovery vehicles were parked half on the hard shoulder, hazard lights flashing.

The little group at the back of the control room stood watching the screen expectantly. The picture, blown up to that size, was blurred. Su leaned forward and said, ‘Watch the screen at the top right.’ The portion of the picture it carried showed the Wuyi Road intersection, with the stadium rising in the background, almost in the shadow of the overhead road. There were vehicles parked all along one side of it, and traffic was backing up from the slip road. ‘There,’ Su said suddenly, pointing. ‘You see it?’ And they saw a light-coloured workmen’s van pull out of the stream of traffic going in the opposite direction, and draw into the side of the road. Su stopped the tape then, flicked another couple of switches, and the picture from the top right screen filled the others. The definition was very poor, but they could clearly see the figure of a man jump down from the driver’s seat and slide open the side door. He leaned in quickly and lifted out a small limp bundle wrapped in some kind of blanket or tarpaulin. As he carried it to the car parked behind, a little arm fell free, momentarily hanging in the air, just as in Li’s nightmare. The man quickly covered it, and dumped the bundle into the trunk of the car.

A slight moan escaped Li’s lips in a breath. ‘It’s Xinxin,’ he whispered.

Until that moment, the man had always had his back to camera. Now, as he turned to get into the driver’s door, they saw his face for the first time. The picture was indistinct and very grainy, but it was still possible to make out his flat, high-cheekboned Mongolian features, his long, straggly hair, and the distortion about his mouth that might have been a scar.

Margaret let out a cry that sounded like pain, and they all turned to look at her. Her face was a mask of fear. Her breathing was so rapid and shallow that she could hardly speak.

‘What is it?’ Li said urgently. ‘Do you recognise him? Was he in the park?’

‘I know him,’ she gasped. ‘But not from the park. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, if only I’d known.’

Li grabbed her shoulders and almost shook her. ‘Where have you seen him, Margaret?’

She forced herself to meet his eyes. ‘The night we were going to have dinner and I fell asleep in my room … After I phoned you, it must have been three in the morning or later, I went out to get some air. I went for a walk along the promenade on the Bund.’ She pointed towards the screen. The controller had frozen the picture on the face. ‘He was following me. He was close enough to touch me at one point, near the underpass. I saw his face clearly in the light. I got such a fright, I just ran.’

‘You never said anything? Why didn’t you tell me?’

She shrugged hopelessly. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think it was important. A stupid woman getting freaked because she saw a man with a hare-lip in the middle of the night.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head in despair. ‘But I saw him again. At the time I thought it wasn’t possible, that I must have imagined it. It was only a fleeting glimpse.’

‘Where, Margaret? Where did you see him?’ Li’s voice was insistent and commanding.

‘In Beijing,’ she said. ‘At the airport. When I was coming back with Xinxin.’

There was a moment of stunned disbelief, and then Mei-Ling said, ‘Did you say he had a hare-lip?’ Margaret nodded. Mei-Ling turned to Li. ‘Li Yan, you remember the description Sun Jie gave us of the man his wife said was following her?’ And Li remembered every detail of that moment, from the sadness on Sun Jie’s face to the very words he had used to recall his wife’s description. She said he looked like a Mongolian, and he had a real ugly scar on his upper lip , he had said. She thought it could have been a hare-lip .

Margaret had spent more than an hour with the police artist at 803. A computer-enhanced print of the Mongolian’s face had been taken from the video. But it was still blurred and lacking definition. Margaret had provided the detail for the artist to give it the definition required to make it recognisable. She looked now at the finished graphic on the sheet of paper that trembled in her hand. It was eerily like the face that had confronted her that night on the Bund. There was something in the eyes that was as chilling now as it had been then. The fact that this was the man who had snatched Xinxin did not even bear thinking about.

‘Is it okay?’ Mei-Ling asked. Margaret looked up at her and nodded. Mei-Ling took the sheet from her. ‘I’ll get it copied and circulated.’ She left the office, and Li and Margaret were alone for the first time since Xinxin had been kidnapped.

Li could hardly bring himself to look at her. He remembered, with a sense of shame now, the hatred and blame that had consumed him yesterday afternoon and through the night. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at length.

She looked surprised. ‘What for?’

‘For blaming you.’

She shook her head. ‘It was my fault.’

‘No.’ He moved around the desk towards her. ‘I don’t understand it all,’ he said, ‘but this was no random kidnapping. The hare-lip guy was following you. All the way to Beijing. Just like he followed the acrobat, just like he probably followed all the others. If he hadn’t got Xinxin in the park, he would have got her some other place, some other time.’ He clenched his fists and let out a howl of frustration. ‘Why? Why Xinxin? What could they possibly want with her?’ And he immediately flinched from the answer that came to him.

Margaret took his hand. ‘We’ll find her, Li Yan. We will.’

He looked at her, dry eyes all cried out, and they embraced, holding tight for comfort, for hope. Somehow everything was linked. There had to be an answer, and there had to be a way to find it.

The door opened, and Mei-Ling stopped briefly in the doorway as Li and Margaret broke apart, then she stepped into the room. Her face gave no clue as to her feelings. She said in Chinese, ‘Forensics have found several hairs in the back of the van. We need some of Xinxin’s for comparison so that we can confirm it really was her we saw on the tape.’