Peter May - The Killing Room

There was a long silence. Li glanced towards the officers standing in the doorway. He was not sure how much they had understood, but they knew for sure that something dramatic was unfolding here. Mei-Ling sat down in the seat vacated by Margaret. She was a dreadful colour, and Li saw that her hands were trembling. He looked at Margaret again. ‘So why did Cui need to sell organs through the Internet if he had ready-made customers in Japan?’

Margaret looked up from the desk. She had been focusing very hard on the grain of the wood, trying not to think about what it was she knew. If she had been unhappy to know about her father’s predilection for pornography, she would never have wished to know this, could never have imagined it. She said, ‘Waste not, want not. Once Cui had fulfilled his contract to his Japanese customer, there was still a lot of money to be made by selling on the other organs.’ And having said it out loud, she realised just what a cold-blooded and mercenary operation Cui had been running here. If it was possible to conjure up an image of hell, this would be it. They might never know just how many poor women had been butchered in operating theatre number one, while some wealthy Japanese recipient lay anaesthetised on the table in the operating theatre through the wall waiting for one of their organs. A life for a life.

There was a loud beep from the computer and Margaret looked at the screen to see a message informing them that the connection had been terminated due to lack of network activity.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There is no proof of any of this. Unless you can find the back-up copies of whatever files they kept on the computer.’

‘Or retrieve them from the hard disk,’ Li said.

Margaret nodded distractedly. She was thinking of Chai Rui and how she had died so completely in vain, and how that had led, ultimately, to Jack Geller’s murder. And she let her mind drift to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who were dying needlessly because organs for transplant were so difficult to obtain, and how the fears and superstitions of potential donors had led to the appalling trade that had been conducted from this clinic. It all seemed like such a waste. She looked sadly at Li. ‘And it doesn’t bring us any closer to finding Xinxin,’ she said, and the pain in the pit of her stomach intensified with the thought.

Mei-Ling spoke for the first time in a long while. She still looked unwell, and stood up shakily as she spoke. ‘You said you thought the surgeon might be an American,’ she said to Margaret.

‘It’s a guess,’ Margaret said. ‘He might be Chinese, trained in America.’

Mei-Ling said to Li, ‘We should put checks on all points of departure. As soon as we get a list of employees we should know who we are looking for.’ Li nodded, and she said, ‘I’ll go back now and put things in motion.’

She hurried out, past the bemused officers standing in the corridor who had only the vaguest idea of what had gone on inside. In the silence of the administration office, all that could be heard were the hum of the fluorescent lights and the computer, and the rain on the window. Margaret looked into Li’s eyes and saw in them his fear for Xinxin, bleak and full of hopelessness.

Painted on three of the white panels of the high blue wall were toucans in flight, each one balancing two pint glasses of Guinness on its yellow beak. A haphazard jumble of bicycles was parked along the wall under the dripping trees. By the gate, a painted ship in a bottle stood over a sign for O’Malley’s . Margaret and Li huddled together under their umbrella, splashing through the gutters. They had left the investigating team to de-construct the clinic piece by piece. Dai had offered to drive them back to 803, but Li had said they would get a taxi. In Shanghai it was not possible to walk ten paces along any street without a taxi cruising by. But they were well off the beaten track, and on this wet Sunday night they had walked the length of two streets and seen only one sodden cyclist shrouded in a glistening cape. Li cursed himself for not having telephoned a taxi from the clinic.

Margaret said, ‘Let’s go in here.’

Li looked at the bizarre sight of the Guinness-balancing toucans and asked, ‘What is it?’

‘It says it’s an Irish pub,’ Margaret said. ‘Improbable though that might be. But they’re bound to have a phone.’

As Li pushed open the high blue gate, Margaret felt like Alice stepping through the looking glass into Wonderland. What greeted them on the other side of the wall could not have been imagined from the street. Here lay a beautifully kept garden, with manicured lawns and a crazy-paved path lined by trees. White-painted wrought-iron garden furniture stood dripping in the rain. Concealed lighting led them down the path past an old-fashioned road sign mounted on a black and white striped pole. In Gaelic and English, signs pointed in three different directions to Cork, Galway and Dublin. Apparently they were only nine miles from Dublin. Under a pitched roof raised on pale blue pillars there were more tables and chairs sheltering beneath redundant sun umbrellas splashed with the Irish harp of the Guinness logo. Above the entrance to a large, whitewashed house, a painted blue and gold sign incongruously announced O’MALLEY’S IRISH PUB. The covered courtyard was lit by coach lamps.

Margaret almost whispered, ‘What the hell is this place? Are we still in China?’

Li shook his head in amazement. He had never seen anything like it. ‘You would not think so,’ he said. After the revelations of the last hour, neither of them was prepared for dealing with this.

They walked inside to a gloomy interior hung with fishing nets and glass buoys. There was an open stone fireplace, old sea trunks, ancient glassed bookshelves lined with antiquarian books leaning at crazy angles. Above the bar a musket and a pair of ancient pistols flanked a sign that read: IRISH GOODS SOLD HERE. Around the central bar area, a railed gallery looked down upon them. Margaret felt as though she had either strayed through some kind of time warp, or walked on to a film set. The place was empty. It was still early. Not yet six o’clock. ‘Hello,’ Margaret called out.

A tall girl with long red hair and green eyes stepped out from a back room to greet them from behind the bar. To Margaret, after a week of blue-black hair and Asian faces, the girl seemed absurdly out of place. She smiled at them. ‘Hello there, folks, yer early tonight,’ she said in a lilting Southern Irish brogue.

‘Is there a telephone I can use?’ Li asked.

‘Sure. Just through the back there,’ she said, pointing. Li went off to phone, and the girl turned back to Margaret. ‘I’m Siobhan,’ she said. ‘You look like you might have a bit of Celtic blood in you.’

‘On my father’s side,’ Margaret said, and she thought how bizarre it was that the part of her father that she carried in her genes should somehow connect with an Irish girl in Shanghai.

‘American,’ the girl said. ‘You been here long?’ Margaret shook her head. She didn’t feel like indulging in idle conversation. The girl said, ‘I been here a month. It’s great. This is where all the ex-pats hang out, you know? Three hours from now the place’ll be jumpin’. It’s great crack.’ She paused, perhaps realising that Margaret was not interested in small talk. ‘You want a drink? Sure, yer man there looks like he could do with one.’

It wasn’t the girl’s fault. She was just trying to be friendly. She had no idea that just a couple of streets away dozens of women had been slaughtered for their organs, hacked to pieces and stuffed in a freezer. She was just here for a good time, a six-month adventure in exotic Shanghai, serving drinks to wealthy ex-pats in a quasi-Irish bar. Home from home. Just don’t ever get an abortion, Margaret wanted to tell her. Instead, she said, ‘No, thanks. He’s just calling a taxi.’