Peter May - The Killing Room

The girl shrugged. ‘Oh, well, if you need me for anything, just holler.’ And she disappeared into the back room again.

Li came back from the phone. ‘There’ll be one here in a few minutes.’

They stood in silence in this strange place, uncertain what to say, how to pass the time as they waited. Margaret perched on the edge of a bench seat, and Li stood with his hands thrust in his pockets staring into space.

After a very long minute he said, ‘I should never have brought her here.’

Margaret looked up, full of sympathy, sharing his pain. She wanted to hold him and tell him it would be all right. But it wasn’t. And she didn’t know that it would be. ‘You had no choice,’ she said.

‘I do now,’ he said. ‘At least, I will if … when … we find her. She deserves better than this.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I will quit the police.’

Margaret was shocked. ‘You can’t do that, Li Yan, it’s your life.’

He shook his head. ‘It is not my life that is important.’ He took a deep breath and tried to hold back the emotion that was building up inside him. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I am sick of this. Death, murder, brutality. If that is all we ever know, all we ever see, what does it turn us into, what does it make us?’

‘It grinds us down and makes us tired and cynical when our resistance is low. And that’s no time to be making decisions about anything.’ She paused. ‘You told me once, Li Yan, that you believed in fairness and justice. That’s why you joined the police.’

He snorted his derision. ‘Justice! I cannot even bring Cui Feng in for questioning.’

‘You will,’ Margaret said. ‘When you get the evidence, you’ll get the warrant. Don’t lose sight of that, Li Yan. That’s what’s important now. Getting the evidence.’

‘What is important now is getting little Xinxin back,’ Li said fiercely. ‘If he has hurt that little girl …’

Margaret stood up and took both his hands and squeezed them. ‘Li Yan,’ she said softly, with a confidence she did not feel, ‘we will get her back. We will.’ She felt the tension straining in him.

‘I am scared, Margaret. I am so scared for her.’

And they heard their taxi peeping its horn outside the gate.

Lights blazed from the windows of 803 into a black Shanghai night. And still the rain fell. Li and Margaret ran the twenty metres from the gate to the main entrance, but got soaked all over again. On the eighth floor, the detectives’ room in Section Two was in chaos. Phones rang, keyboards chattered, cigarettes burned in ashtrays creating the impression that the place was on fire. Condensation misted the windows. Shirt-sleeved detectives talked into phones, shouted to one another across the room. Uniformed secretaries hurried in and out with faxes and files. Margaret headed on down the corridor to Li’s office, and Li pushed his way through the chaos looking for Mei-Ling. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned. It was Detective Qian. He was clutching a sheaf of papers.

‘We’ve got that list you were after, Chief. All the employees at the Shanghai World Clinic. We’re trying to get the warrants processed now to bring them in.’

He nodded, but Li was distracted. ‘Where’s Deputy Section Chief Nien?’

‘Don’t know, Chief. Around somewhere.’ Li was about to move off, but Qian snatched at his sleeve again. ‘You’ll like this bit, though.’ Li stopped. ‘For the last five years Cui has been employing the services of an ex-pat American surgeon who’s been in Shanghai since the early nineties.’ Qian looked triumphant. ‘One Daniel F. Stein. He’s fifty-eight, married to a Chinese girl half his age, and he’s not at home.’

‘Have we checked the airport and the docks?’

‘Doing that right now.’

‘Good.’ Li paused. ‘Do we know where Cui is?’

Qian looked at his watch. ‘He’s due to attend one of Director Hu’s banquets at the Xiaoshaoxing Hotel in about an hour and a half.’

A spike of anger stabbed at Li’s chest at the thought of Cui eating and drinking with the wealthy and powerful, breathing in the rarefied air of Director Hu’s banquet, untouched and untouchable, while Xinxin was held captive somewhere or, even worse, lay dead in some cold, dark place. He wondered what the celebration was. Escape from justice? ‘Let me know if there are any developments,’ he said.

Qian nodded and Li pushed off through the hubbub in search of the night duty officer. He found him sitting in his small, cluttered office two along from Li’s. The duty officer was wearing a pair of half-moon reading glasses and was wading through copies of the warrant requests that had been sent to the procurator’s office for processing. He looked up as Li came in and nodded acknowledgment. ‘Deputy Section Chief,’ he said.

Li said, ‘Have you seen Mei-Ling?’

‘Sure,’ the duty officer nodded. ‘About half an hour ago.’ He glanced beyond Li to the corridor and got up to close the door. He lowered his voice, as if he thought they might be overheard. ‘I spoke to her about a rather …’ he searched for the right word, ‘… delicate matter.’ He offered Li a cigarette, and when he accepted lit it, then lit one for himself and returned to his desk to sit down again. ‘Section Chief Huang signed out four firearms to the detectives who accompanied you to the American’s apartment this morning. Only three have been returned.’

Li frowned. This was totally unexpected. Almost a distraction. ‘Well, you must know which officer it was that didn’t return theirs.’

‘That’s just the trouble,’ the duty officer said, and he did indeed look troubled. He peered up at Li over his glasses. ‘They all claim to have returned their weapons to the Section Chief.’

‘What does Section Chief Huang say?’

The older man shook his head. ‘I haven’t been able to contact him.’

‘And you told all this to Mei-Ling?’ The duty officer nodded. ‘And what did she say?’

‘She was very agitated, Deputy Section Chief. She looked like shit when she came in, and she looked even worse after I’d spoken to her. She said to leave it with her.’

‘And you don’t know where she is now?’

The duty officer held out his hands, palms up. ‘I haven’t seen her since I spoke to her.’

Li was tempted for a moment simply to dismiss the whole thing. An irksome oversight by the Chief, or by one of his detectives. But there was something in the duty officer’s description of Mei-Ling’s reaction that gave him pause for thought. ‘Well, have you tried Huang at home?’ he asked. ‘He left to go there this afternoon. Apparently his wife was fading fast.’

The duty officer nodded. ‘I know. I’ve telephoned several times, but there’s no reply.’

Li went back down the corridor. Mei-Ling’s office was empty. He tried the detectives’ room again, and Huang’s office. But there was no sign of her. He went into his own office and found Margaret sitting brooding at the desk. She looked up hopefully as he entered. ‘Have you seen Mei-Ling?’ he asked. She shook her head and he went straight back out.

The duty officer looked up, eyes full of interest and caution, when Li returned. ‘Did you find her?’

Li said, ‘She’s not in the building.’ He hesitated for only a moment. ‘I want Huang’s address and a car.’

*

Huang’s apartment block was an older building in a quiet residential area in Ni Cheng Qiao District, north of People’s Square, a private rental paid for by the Municipal Police. The block was in a compound behind a high wall, affording it some privacy from the road. There were streetlamps and trees, a few cars parked near the entrance, and dozens of rickety bicycles jammed cheek by jowl under a corrugated plastic canopy that shed copious amounts of rainwater on to the forecourt below. Lights shining from uncurtained windows peppered the east face of the twelve-storey building like moth-holes in a lamp shade. Huang’s apartment was on the second floor.