Peter May - The Killing Room

‘Bullshit!’ Li’s voice reverberated around the walls, and Jiang nearly jumped out of his seat. Li produced the bracelet from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘It belonged to a girl called Ji Li Rong. She was a student at Jiaotong University. Her father nicknamed her Moon when she was a baby. She was one of the girls we dug out of the mud at Lujiazui. Her parents just identified her at the mortuary.’

Jiang stared at the bracelet for a long time. He showed a distinct reluctance to meet Li’s eyes again. ‘It’s … it’s similar,’ he mumbled, almost to himself. ‘Maybe I … you know, it’s possible I picked it up at the site. I just confused it with the other one, you know, for the Zhang girl …’

Li said, ‘I’m going to bring this interview to a close now and have you formally charged with murder.’

Jiang’s eyes shot up from the bracelet. ‘No!’ he nearly shouted. ‘You can’t. I didn’t do it.’

‘I figure it’ll go to trial pretty quickly, given the high-profile nature of the case. That means it’ll only be a matter of weeks, Jiang, before they’re putting a bullet in the back of your head. Of course, I’ll be there to watch. But, really, execution’s too good for you. Personally, I’d rather see you rot in a stinking prison cell somewhere for the rest of your unnatural life.’ He turned to Mei-Ling. ‘You can switch the recorder off now.’

‘No,’ Jiang shouted again, and he quickly held out a hand to prevent her from reaching the recorder. She stopped and waited. There was a long moment of silence. Jiang screwed up his eyes and then, as if angry at having to admit defeat, hissed, ‘What do you want to know?’

Li said, ‘I want to know where you got the bracelet. I want to know where you got the money to buy all the fancy clothes and electrical goods and pay for an expensive apartment. I want to know exactly what work you were involved in during two summers at the Shanghai World Clinic.’

Jiang went limp, and slumped forward on the table, his head in his hands. Li could see his scalp between the clumped spikes of gelled hair. Then Jiang made himself sit upright. ‘As long as you understand,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to do with killing these women. They wouldn’t let me near the theatre. I was never in there once when they were … you know, when they had someone in.’ Finally he dragged his eyes up to meet Li’s, making some sort of appeal to be believed. ‘I didn’t even know anything about it until I found all the body parts in the freezer. I mean, hell, there were a lot of bits in there.’

‘When did you discover this?’

‘About a year-and-a-half ago. First summer I was there. I was just an orderly. I mean, I didn’t know what they were up to, didn’t want to know. Some kind of research or something. I just thought, you know, if they needed space in the freezer I could get rid of the bits for a little extra cash.’

‘You blackmailed them,’ Li said.

‘No.’ Jiang was quick to deny it. ‘It was a … business arrangement. I had a night job as a watchman on a building site out west. I knew it would be easy to dump the bodies, and in a few weeks a few thousand tons of concrete would bury them forever.’

‘How many?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘How many what?’ Some of Jiang’s cockiness was returning.

‘Bodies.’

He shrugged. ‘I think there were eleven that first time.’

Li felt his stomach turning over. That brought the body count to thirty. ‘How many times were there, Jiang?’

The boy shrugged vaguely. ‘Three … I guess, four, including the ones you found at Lujiazui.’

Both Li and Mei-Ling were shocked into a momentary silence. Finally Li asked in a husky voice, ‘And how many bodies were there the other two times?’

Now that Jiang had decided to talk, he actually appeared to be enjoying it. He was on a roll. ‘I think there were fifteen up at Zhabei, and either eight or nine at Zhou Jia Dou over in Pudong again.’ He scratched his head. ‘No, I think it was nine there.’

They were up to fifty-four now, and had ventured into territory that Li could never have imagined. He glanced at Mei-Ling. She was very pale. He turned back to Jiang. ‘And all women?’

‘Sure.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea. Like I said, they kept me at arm’s length, you know? Even though I was trained.’ He smiled ruefully. Then, ‘But they did let me cut them up afterwards. I offered, you know, for a bit of extra cash. And I was good at it. I would have jointed them, but they didn’t want that. Just cut them up, they said.’ He laughed. ‘With a goddamn cleaver! Can you imagine? Someone with my skills and they give me a cleaver. But I was good at it. Accurate. Third cervical vertebra. Upper third of the humerus. Mid femur. But your pathologist must know that. What’s her name … Margaret Campbell? She did all the autopsies, didn’t she?’

‘Who did you deal with at the clinic?’

‘A couple of people.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know their names. They weren’t exactly chatty, know what I mean? And there was this woman from upstairs who always gave me the money. You know, in a big white envelope. Big bucks.’ He grinned again. ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’

‘It’s not heaven you’ll be going to,’ Mei-Ling said grimly.

‘What about Cui Feng?’ Li asked. ‘Ever deal with him?’

Jiang looked blank. ‘Who is he?’

‘The boss.’

‘Oh, him. Naw. He never even spoke to me. He’d walk past you in the corridor, and it was like you weren’t even there.’

Li said, ‘Tell me about the bracelet?’

Jiang’s smile faded, and for the first time he looked genuinely sad. ‘She was beautiful,’ he said. ‘Of all of them, she was really the most beautiful. Perfect. I don’t know how they missed the bracelet. I mean, usually there wasn’t as much as a stud earring. But there it was dangling from her wrist when they brought her out.’ He shook his head. ‘Broke my heart to see her like that, all cut open. She was so beautiful.’ He looked from one to the other, appealing for their understanding. ‘I fell in love with her, you know? Hardest thing I ever had to do was cut her up. But she was dead. Nothing I could do. So I kept the bracelet.’ He picked it up now and ran it lovingly between his thumb and forefinger, recalling with sadness some scene of unimaginable horror. A young girl murdered, cut open, hacked up. And he had somehow found love in it.

Li looked at him with undisguised disgust. The kid was sick. Crazy. Beyond redemption. He slipped a copy of the graphic of the Mongolian from his folder and pushed it across the table. Jiang drew his attention away from the bracelet to look at it.

‘Ugly bastard, isn’t he?’

‘Do you know him?’

‘Never set eyes on him.’

And much as he hated to admit it, Li thought the boy was probably telling the truth.

*

Li’s anger at Procurator General Yue hummed across Huang’s office. He was exhausted. After more than three hours of detailed interrogation, emotional stress and lack of sleep were crushing down on him, and his patience was at its end. ‘I don’t care who Cui’s pals are,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘or how long he’s been in the Party, or whether he dresses to the left or to the right. I want that search warrant.’

Yue remained calm. He exchanged looks with Section Chief Huang and said, ‘I understand that the kidnapping of your niece has placed you under extreme stress, Deputy Section Chief Li, and so I am prepared to overlook your behaviour on this occasion.’

Li gasped his exasperation. ‘Don’t bloody patronise me!’

Yue continued, unruffled. ‘You have absolutely no evidence against Comrade Cui, or any of his employees. I can’t justify issuing a warrant to search his premises. All you have are the ramblings of a demented medical student who admits to hacking up the bodies and burying them at Lujiazui.’ He stood up, animated for the first time, and gestured to the heavens. ‘I mean, even if we are to believe him, in an organisation the size of Cui’s it is perfectly conceivable that these procedures could have been conducted without Cui’s knowledge.’