Peter May - The Killing Room

Li thought for a moment. ‘Her hair brush,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be some caught in it. It’s in her hotel room.’ Mei-Ling nodded and went without another word.

‘What was that about?’ Margaret asked.

‘Checking samples of Xinxin’s hair against hair found in the van.’

It was routine. It was the kind of thing they had both been involved in many times as a matter of course. But this was Xinxin’s hair, and the picture it conjured up of her tiny prone body wrapped in a blanket and lying on the floor of a battered old van, was almost too painful to contemplate. Margaret wondered briefly how she had been sedated. Something quick. Chloroform on a handkerchief? Whatever it was, if the Mongolian had really snatched all these other women, he would be well practised in its use.

Li lit a cigarette. Not because he had any desire for one — he had smoked till he was sick of smoking — but simply for something to do, a mechanical act, a routine to cling to. Margaret went to open a window. The air in the office was already sour with stale smoke. She turned back from the window and saw the box of Chai Rui’s possessions sitting on Li’s desk. The photograph which Li had dug out from the bottom of it was lying on top. For a moment it seemed to Margaret that her heart had stopped. In a very small voice she asked, ‘Who’s that in the photograph?’

Li, distracted by other thoughts, glanced at the box. ‘Chai Rui,’ he said. ‘She’s the one whose body you re-examined in Beijing. That’s the stuff that was left in her apartment in Shanghai.’

‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered, and Li looked at her, suddenly alarmed.

‘What is it?’

‘The guy in the picture with her …’

Li frowned. ‘You know him?’

‘His name’s Jack Geller.’ Her thoughts were awash with confusion.

‘Who the hell is Jack Geller?’ Li asked, incredulous that Margaret should know him.

‘He’s an American journalist,’ she said. ‘He’s been haunting me since I arrived in Shanghai, looking for an inside line on this story.’

‘In the name of the sky, Margaret, why didn’t you tell me?’ Li’s voice was filled with accusation.

‘It didn’t seem important,’ she said. ‘I never told him anything.’ And she gave Li a look. ‘And anyway, you were busy with Mei-Ling.’ The words were barely out of her mouth before she was hit by a sudden realisation. ‘Oh, Jesus …’ She looked at Li, horrified by the implications. ‘It was Jack who told me about the Tiantan Traffic Park.’

Li glared at Margaret in disbelief for some seconds. ‘Then he’s got to be involved,’ he said finally. ‘Have you any idea where we can find him?’

‘No, I …’ She paused. She had been going to say she had no idea. He had always sought her out. But she remembered then that first meeting in the airport. It felt like a very long time ago. He had handed her a dog-eared business card. At first she had refused to take it, but he had insisted. You never know when you might want to give me a call , he had said. And Margaret had told him she couldn’t imagine a single circumstance when she would. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined this. She searched quickly in her purse, and there it was. JACK GELLER Freelance Journalist . It listed his address, and home and mobile numbers. Li snatched it from her.

*

Geller’s apartment was on the eighteenth floor of a modern tower block in Xinzha Road, a few minutes north of the Shanghai Centre. Dozens of other blocks sprang out of the squat, two-storey workers’ housing that spread in every direction around them in narrow, treeless streets. The uniformed security officer in Geller’s block took a long time examining the search warrant Li handed him. The ink from the Municipal Procuratorate was barely dry on it. He glanced uneasily at Margaret, and then at Dai and Mei-Ling and the two detectives who accompanied them. Weapons, signed out from the armoury at 803 only fifteen minutes earlier by Section Chief Huang, bulged visibly in their holsters beneath loose-fitting jackets. Only Li and Margaret were unarmed. ‘Okay,’ he said at length. ‘I’ll let you in.’

They rode up in the elevator to the eighteenth floor in tense silence. On the landing a curved panorama of windows gave out on to a spectacular view of the city below. A little sunshine was forcing its way through the mist, cutting sharp shadows down the sides of buildings. Cranes rising along the river bank were just visible in the far distance. At the door of Geller’s apartment, the detectives drew their pistols and stood either side of it ready to enter. Li and Margaret stood a little further down the hall. The security guard, now very nervous, quickly unlocked the door and stepped back. The detectives were also nervous. Mei-Ling nodded, and they burst in, the first two fanning off to the sides, the second two covering the middle. They yelled at the tops of their voices as they entered. Margaret had no idea what they were shouting. But the screaming didn’t stop as they moved from room to room in a rehearsed pattern. Doors banged and feet slammed down on polished wooden floors.

Margaret followed Li into an entrance hall. They could hear the armed detectives in a room further along it. A door opened into an L-shaped living room. It was very spartan. Two patterned settees sat in the middle of the floor. A large coffee table strewn with papers and empty coffee mugs stood between them. A single dining chair was pushed against a naked white wall next to an electric point, a coffee maker sitting at an angle on the woven seat. Some framed pictures leaned against the far wall waiting to be hung. There was an antique dresser on the opposite wall, but its shelves were bare. Beige curtains hung from floor to ceiling on either side of sliding glass doors that led to a balcony. It felt like a house that someone was either moving out of or moving into.

Margaret suddenly became aware that a silence had descended on the apartment. Then a single voice called out. It was Mei-Ling. Li grabbed Margaret’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said, and they hurried down the hall, past a door that lay open to reveal a study with a cluttered desk and a desktop computer on a tubular stand. A glass door gave on to a modern kitchen that looked pristine and unused, except for a bucket full of empty beer bottles in the middle of the floor. The detectives had left the bathroom door lying open. A damp towel hung over the shower cabinet, a pair of pyjamas hung from hooks on the tiled wall above the toilet. Dirty underwear lay strewn on the floor. Everywhere the white walls were naked, undressed. And although the air was warm, the apartment felt cold. It did not seem to fit with the Jack Geller that Margaret knew. And she realised that, of course, she really knew nothing about him at all. There was an impermanence about the place that made her think he had not so much been living here as camping out. She felt sick. It was beyond both imagination and comprehension to think that he might have had something to do either with the kidnapping of Xinxin or the murder of all those women. Or both.

At the end of the hall they entered the bedroom. There was an outer dressing room with a settee and a television set on a table. In the main part of the bedroom the bed was unmade beneath a large wall tapestry. Mei-Ling and the other three detectives stood in the archway between the two rooms, blocking out the view of the window. Li and Margaret pushed through and stopped dead. Margaret gasped in horror. Geller was kneeling in front of the sliding glass doors that gave out on to the balcony, facing back into the room. His arms were raised above his head in grotesque parody of a crucified man, pulled to each side by cord tied to either end of the curtain rod. Although he was silhouetted against the city spread out below, she saw immediately that he was naked. There was a ten-inch wound drawn horizontally across his belly from which his small intestine hung in a shiny mass of pale tan distended loops. There was a large pool of sticky blood on the floor at his knees. It was still dripping from his crotch and trickling slowly down his thighs. His head was tipped forward. Margaret knew he was alive because he was still bleeding, but he appeared to be unconscious.