Peter May - The Killing Room

Suddenly the overhead lights came on, startling them both. The boxlight over the door buzzed and flickered and then illuminated its warning. Margaret glanced at Mei-Ling before hitting the square button with the flat of her hand. The doors opened electronically into a small reception area with a desk. A white board on the wall was smeared blue and red and green where the names of patients and operating schedules, written up with coloured marker pens, had been wiped off. To their right, the doors to the changing rooms stood open, and doors at the far end, beyond the lockers, opened on to walk-in cupboards lined with shelves piled with hair- and shoe-covers and neatly folded smocks. Ahead of them were the doors to two operating rooms. Floors and walls were tiled, and stainless-steel washbasins were mounted on the wall outside each theatre. In normal circumstances no one would be allowed beyond this area without wearing scrubs, and the hair- and shoe-covers they would have donned in the locker rooms.

Margaret had been through the procedure many times early in her career, when the living rather than the dead were her concern. She would have tied on her surgical mask before scrubbing her hands and forearms in the stainless-steel basin for at least ten minutes, a prescribed number of scrubs per finger and hand, scraping under the fingernails with little plastic sticks. Then, hands held up above her elbows, pushing through the door to the theatre with her backside so as not to contaminate the freshly scrubbed hands. Inside, a nurse would pass her a sterile towel to dry her hands and then help her into a surgical gown before holding open latex surgical gloves into which she would plunge her hands.

Now, the concern was not bacterial contamination so much as the danger of disturbing evidence. With her gloved hands, Margaret pushed open the door to operating room number one, and Mei-Ling followed her in.

A strange chill fell upon Margaret as she entered the theatre. The air was warm, but still the hair rose up on her neck and her forearms, goose bumps on her back and shoulders. And she saw in her mind’s eye a succession of women wheeled in here to be butchered. A conveyor belt of them. Fifty-four at least, since Jiang had become involved. She almost felt their presence, and knew instinctively that this was the place. That this was the killing room.

It was only dimly lit by pale yellow lamps set in the ceiling, casting deep shadows beneath the sheets that were draped over all the equipment like shrouds. Two walls were lined with glass and stainless-steel storage cupboards filled with various sizes of gloves and types of suture. Carefully Margaret and Mei-Ling lifted the sheets, uncovering the lamps that hung on jointed arms from the ceiling and would so brightly illuminate the surgeon’s table when lit; the large, wheeled, steel table where the surgical nurse would set out all the sterilised tools on a sterile sheet; an electrocautery machine, light blue, with a couple of knobs on the front for adjusting the temperature of the cautery, and a couple of indicator lights. A power cable led from the box to a wall socket, and a wire connected it to the cautery pen that the surgeon would use to cauterise the small bleeding veins along the edge of the wound he would make with his scalpel. Margaret remembered the black gritty material she had found in the areas of haemorrhage along the incision edges of the entry wounds in the women from Lujiazui — charring made by the cauterisation.

Set on the surgical nurse’s table alongside the toolbox were a stainless-steel bowl, a couple of empty litre jugs and several plastic ‘turkey basters’, like giant eye-droppers. On a shelf stood two blue and white plastic cool boxes, the kind you might pack with ice to keep beer cold on a picnic. Margaret looked at them for a very long time and became aware that her breathing was starting to become rapid and shallow.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Mei-Ling crossing to where a CD player sat on the shelf of one of the cabinets against the far wall. It was wired into speakers hanging from all four corners of the operating room. The surgeon whose theatre this was, liked to listen to music while he worked. Mei-Ling switched it on and hit the play button. The room was immediately filled by the deep, sonorous tones of a church organ, stepping down in time to a slow, rhythmic descending bass note that was suddenly given relief by a surge of violins. Every hair on Margaret’s body stood on end. She knew this music. It was one of her favourite pieces. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. But the pictures it conjured for her now were almost too horrific to contemplate. Of a surgeon delicately wielding his scalpel to murder and butcher a succession of young women to the strains of one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

She reached back and switched on the big surgical lamps, and suddenly the room was thrown into an almost blinding blaze of light burning out on white tiles. A solo violin swooped and screeched to a pitch, like the scream of every dead girl who had passed through this hellish place. Margaret’s legs nearly gave way under her, and she reached for the surgical nurse’s trolley to steady herself. One of the litre jugs toppled over.

‘Are you all right,’ Mei-Ling said, and she switched off the music. The silence that replaced it was almost worse.

‘I’m okay,’ Margaret said, and she looked at Mei-Ling. ‘You know this is where it was done,’ she said. There could be no equivocation. There was nothing scientific about it, but she knew it with an absolute certainty.

Mei-Ling nodded grimly. She felt it, too. Margaret could see from her pallor that the blood had drained from her face. ‘Do you know this music?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Attributed by some to an Italian called Albinoni,’ Margaret said. ‘Probably composed in the early eighteenth century.’ She paused. ‘I used to love it.’ And now she shook her head. ‘But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to it again. It sounds to me now like music straight from hell.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It would make me think that the surgeon was not Chinese. And if we take the “Y” cut into consideration, probably not European either. I’d say there was a good chance this monster is an American.’

The radio on Mei-Ling’s belt crackled, and Margaret made out Li’s voice talking rapidly in Chinese. Mei-Ling responded, and then said to Margaret, ‘He wants us up in the administration office.’

Now that the power had been restored, they were able to ride up to the second floor in the elevator. A number of detectives and forensics people were standing in the corridor outside the main office. Inside, Li was going through the files on the hard disk of the office computer. It was a Macintosh PowerPC G4 with a twenty-one-inch flatscreen monitor. Nothing but the best and latest in technology for Cui Feng, Margaret thought. Li looked up as they came in.

‘Anything down there?’ he asked.

Margaret said, ‘That’s where they did it.’

Li froze. His eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’

‘I just know,’ Margaret said. ‘Everything about it. And more. But I doubt if you’ll find much in the way of forensic evidence. It’s a sterile environment.’

‘We found the freezer,’ Li said. ‘Big walk-in cabinet. Could probably hold anything up to twenty bodies in there. In bits.’ He shrugged. ‘It was empty. We will defrost it, and see what forensics find in the melt water.’

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ Margaret said. ‘These people have been very careful.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Li said. ‘Everything’s gone. All the files, patient records … All the bedrooms are empty, the beds all made up with clean sheets. They did not just do this in a couple of hours. Cui must have figured we would be back after our visit yesterday.’ He stood up. ‘I wanted you to have a look at this thing, Margaret. You probably know more about computers than most of our people.’