Peter May - The Killing Room

Li would have laughed were it not so tragic. ‘Have you been to the Shanghai World Clinic?’ he asked. And without waiting for an answer, ‘It is a converted villa from the days of the Concession. There are two small operating theatres and a handful of special care beds. It is where Cui has his office.’ And, echoing Yue’s choice of words, ‘It is in conceivable that more than forty women could have been surgically murdered right under his nose without him knowing about it.’

Yue waved a hand dismissively. ‘ If we are to believe your … medical student,’ he said. ‘And I see no reason why we should.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know what more you need, Li. You have your man right there. It doesn’t take much of a leap in imagination to conclude that this young man abducted these women and cut them open for his own perverse pleasures. Probably in the operating room at the Medical University when everyone else had gone for the day.’

Li knew that, by addressing Cui as ‘Comrade’, Yue was letting him know that he, too, was a Party member. But it made no difference to Li. He shook his head. ‘The sample of twine we took from the university didn’t match the twine that was used to sew up the women from Lujiazui.’

‘So?’ Yue said. ‘It was a different ball of twine. The point is, there is nothing to connect Cui to any of this except for the extravagant claims of this lunatic you have in the cells downstairs.’

‘What about the abortions?’

‘We’ve been over this before,’ Yue sighed wearily.

‘And the Mongolian?’

‘Who knows?’ The Procurator General shrugged theatrically. ‘A friend of Jiang’s. An accomplice.’

‘We have nothing that connects the Mongolian to Jiang.’

‘Or to Cui!’

There was a tense stand-off between the two, and a long silence broken only, in the end, by the ringing of Huang’s phone. The Section Chief, who had been sitting listening impassively, answered it quickly. After a short exchange, he hung up and got to his feet. He looked like a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He said, ‘I have to go. My wife is dying.’

That simple statement of fact was shocking somehow in the context of what had preceded it. Both Li and Yue were chastened by it. ‘Of course,’ Yue said. ‘I’m sorry, Huang.’

Huang nodded, lifted his coat from the stand, and hurried out. But somehow he left behind him the ghost of his not yet dead wife, a presence in the room that stood between Li and Yue. For fully a minute neither man spoke. Li crossed to the window and stood staring out at the rain, hands plunged deep in his pockets. For Li, Huang’s dying wife was not an issue. For reasons beyond him, but somehow connected to this case, Xinxin had been kidnapped. His first, and most pressing, loyalty had to be to her, and the hope that he could find her kidnappers before they harmed her — if they had not already done so. He turned to face the Procurator General, grimly determined.

He said, ‘I am taking a team of detectives and forensics officers to the Shanghai World Clinic. I can go either with or without a warrant. If I have to go without, then you will leave me no choice but to charge you with attempting to pervert the course of justice, and I will begin corruption investigations against you.’

The Procurator General visibly paled. He was not used to being threatened by a junior law officer. But he was in no doubt that the threat was a real one. He opened his mouth to respond, but Li held up a finger to stop him.

‘Don’t,’ Li said, ‘interrupt me until I am finished.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘If I have to, I will take this to the highest authorities in Beijing, and let me assure you that your friendship with some adviser to the Mayor of Shanghai will not afford you the least protection. You may recall that in the last few years a Deputy Mayor of the city of Beijing, a Minister of Agriculture and a Deputy Procurator General have all been executed after being found guilty of corruption charges. I can’t claim credit for all three, but I brought the charges against two of them.’

Procurator General Yue glared at Li, a deep simmering anger smouldering in his eyes. Li returned the stare, unwavering. Finally Yue said, ‘Let me assure you , Deputy Section Chief Li, that if you fail to find any evidence against Comrade Cui, this is the last time you will ever threaten anyone.’

‘Does that mean I get the warrant?’ Li asked.

*

Margaret sat at a table in the corner of the canteen watching officers come and go. She had been there for over an hour, ever since Li had insisted on getting an officer to take her there. She knew very little about what was happening except that the medical student had confessed to burying the bodies, and that the women were suspected of being murdered at Cui Feng’s foreign residents’ clinic. But she was aware that there were politics involved here that she neither knew nor wanted to know anything about.

She was still in a state of shock after the discovery of Geller’s body, and as the day slipped away like sand through their fingers she was becoming increasingly despondent about finding Xinxin alive. She had seen first-hand what the Mongolian had done to poor Jack.

Only a handful of the thirty tables in the canteen were occupied, plain-clothed and uniformed officers glancing curiously in her direction, whispered conversations that she could not have understood, even if she had overheard them. The kitchens, behind sliding glass shutters at one end of the room, were no longer serving anything but tea. A bowl of noodles sat almost untouched on the table in front of her, faintly coloured by some indeterminate sauce. She had told Li that she had no appetite, but suspected that he had simply wanted her out of the way for a while.

She looked up as one of a line of glass-panelled doors leading out to the car park opened, and her heart sank as Mei-Ling walked in. The Deputy Section Chief responded vaguely to greetings from her fellow officers, but ran her eyes around the canteen until they alighted on Margaret. She headed for her table and sat down. ‘Hi,’ she said.

Margaret nodded cautiously.

Mei-Ling looked at the bowl of noodles. ‘Not hungry?’

‘Not much.’

And they sat without speaking for what seemed like a very long time before Mei-Ling said, ‘I guess you do not like me much.’

‘About as much as you like me.’ Margaret faced her down more boldly than she felt.

‘We got off on the wrong foot.’

‘We didn’t get off on any kind of foot.’

‘No …’ Mei-Ling forced a sad smile. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say … I am sorry.’

Margaret was surprised by this, but determined not to show it. ‘What, sorry that I’m still here?’

Mei-Ling smiled. ‘Sorry that I ever came between you and Li Yan.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Li Yan came between me and Li Yan. And so did I. We’ve never had the easiest of relationships.’

‘And I did not make things any easier.’

‘So why the change of heart?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘He is a nice man.’

‘Damned by faint praise.’

Mei-Ling laughed, that braying laugh that had irritated Margaret so much when they first met. A laugh that she had not heard for some days. ‘No,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘I mean he is too nice for me.’

Margaret frowned. ‘How’s that?’

Mei-Ling shrugged, a sense of resignation in her eyes. ‘I would never make him happy. Seeing him with Xinxin … with all the instincts and concerns of a father. Seeing what losing her is doing to him.’ And she looked very directly at Margaret. ‘Seeing your shared pain.’ She shook her head. ‘I could never give him that. Sure, I can amuse a kid for an hour or two, but then I would be bored. I do not think I have a maternal bone in my body.’