Peter May - The Killing Room

Li said, ‘So he told you just how he had acquired the liver that saved your wife’s life.’ The mechanics of Huang’s entrapment had become suddenly very clear to him.

Huang nodded. ‘What could I do? I was appalled. But it was done, and I couldn’t undo it. And the treatment didn’t stop there. My wife continued to need constant care and expensive medication against possible rejection of her new liver. If I took any action at all it would kill her.’ His anger and frustration raised the pitch of his voice now. ‘He had me. Held my very soul in his hand, and there was not one damned thing I could do about it.’

‘So you traded the life of a woman you had been about to leave for the lives of all those poor girls.’

Anger and guilt flashed at once in Huang’s eyes. ‘What would you have done?’

Li had no idea. He could not begin to imagine the circumstance. But he knew that what Huang had done was wrong. He said, ‘So what did he want you to do? Apart from turning a blind eye?’

Huang shrunk from the withering accusation in Li’s voice. It sparked his own guilt, and living with that was worse than anything anyone else could do or say to him. ‘I provided him with certification when he required it. Proof that the organs he was selling abroad had been legitimately acquired from the bodies of executed prisoners. They were little more than official letterheads, but that was enough to satisfy his clients. And, of course, everyone knows that the Chinese take organs from executed prisoners. The dissidents have been screaming about it in America for years. Only they claim it’s done without permission. Which is a nice scare story to feed the American fantasy of the Chinese bogey man.’ He shook his head. ‘As well as providing the perfect cover story for Cui Feng.’

‘And you never once thought about all those innocent women who were the real donors?’ There was bile now in Li’s voice. Angry and bitter.

‘No,’ Huang almost shouted at him. ‘I didn’t. I never knew the full extent of it until they found those bodies at Lujiazui. But I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t even contemplate it. How could I?’ His eyes burned with the fire of his own futile defence. ‘And do you know the ultimate irony? The ultimate fucking irony?’ His breath was coming in short gasps. He waved his hand helplessly towards the open door. ‘She died anyway. It was all for nothing.’ Tears, like acid, burned down his cheeks. ‘All the drugs, all the treatment, and in the end her body still rejected the damned thing. Three years on, and we were back where we started. She was slipping back into that same terminal decline, only this time there was nothing that could be done.’ He wept openly now, sobbing deeply, pressing his mouth into the palm of his hand to try to hold in the pain.

And as Huang descended into the hell of his own making, Li’s anger ebbed away, leaving him washed up and spent on a bleak and barren shoreline. There was only one thing left on his mind, and he was almost afraid to pursue it. ‘Where’s Xinxin?’ His voice was hoarse.

Huang took a moment or two to bring himself back under control. ‘Wasn’t my idea,’ he said eventually. ‘Cui thought if he had the kid snatched it would distract you from the investigation. At least long enough for him to cover his tracks.’

Li felt his heart beat like a fist punching his ribs from the inside. ‘Where is she?’ he asked again.

‘I don’t know.’ And there was something in Huang’s tone that suggested he didn’t much care. ‘If I was to guess,’ he said, ‘I’d figure they’d probably taken her to the safe house.’

‘What safe house?’

‘Where they took the women after they’d been snatched. They were held there until the “patient” had flown in and been prepared, then they were taken to the clinic for … well, for the operation.’

‘Where is it?’ There was an imperative, dangerous quality in Li’s voice now.

‘Li Yan?’ Margaret’s voice calling from the other end of the hall crashed into the moment like a gunshot. Huang stiffened, his eyes suddenly shining and alert.

Li cursed inwardly, but ignored Margaret’s call. ‘Where the fuck is it!’ He was hanging on to his hope by a thread.

Huang looked at him and seemed to relax again for a moment. ‘Cui has a clinic at Suzhou,’ he said. ‘It’s about sixty kilometres outside of Shanghai.’

Li knew of Suzhou. It was famous in China for its beauty. The Venice of the East. And almost as if she were speaking to him from beyond the grave, he remembered Mei-Ling telling him that her family had come originally from Hangzhou. We have a saying , she had told him that night at the Green Wave restaurant. Above there is Heaven, and on earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou . It was ironic, he thought, that all these women destined for death on the surgeon’s table should have spent their last days and nights in a place that the Chinese believed was like Heaven on earth.

Huang said, ‘They kept the women in the basement. You can only get to it by canal from the rear of the building. It meant that at night they could take the women in and out by boat, and nobody would be any the wiser.’

‘Li Yan?’ Margaret’s voice was closer now, and softer. He heard her footfall in the hall. But still he kept his focus on Xinxin.

‘Is she still alive?’ His own voice sounded detached to him, distant, like an echo. He held his breath.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Huang said. And it was like some last, petty revenge exacted on Li, as if somehow he were to be blamed for everything.

Li heard a gasp behind him, and he turned to see Margaret standing in the doorway. She was looking at Mei-Ling’s prone and bloody form on the floor. She looked up at Li, and then beyond him to where Huang still sat in his chair.

Li turned quickly and took a step towards Huang. The Section Chief raised his gun and pointed it at Li’s chest. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said quietly. Li stopped, and Huang turned the barrel of the gun and placed it in his mouth. The shot rang out before Li could even shout for him to stop. It had a strange, muffled quality, and Li felt Huang’s blood and brain tissue spatter hot across his face.

They had left the lights of Shanghai behind them some fifteen minutes earlier, and Li’s foot kept the accelerator pressed to the floor so that their car maintained a steady one hundred and thirty kilometres an hour. Shortly after they crossed the Wusong River, known in the days of the International Settlement as Suzhou Creek, they passed out of the Shanghai administrative area and into Jiangsu Province. There was very little traffic on the Shanghai-Nanjing expressway. The odd truck rumbling west, the occasional bus, a few private cars. The windscreen wipers beat against the thrashing of the rain, and beyond the ring of their headlights the night was black and impenetrable.

Margaret sat in the passenger seat in a state of shock. The picture of Mei-Ling lying in her own blood was etched indelibly in her mind’s eye and she could not rid herself of it. She saw, still, the small hand stretched out on the floor, delicate little fingers, crooked slightly as if attempting to grasp at something, perhaps a vain attempt to hold on to life. There was no way to give expression to the sadness Margaret felt, no way to take back all the things she had said and felt in anger and jealousy. The men in my life always seem to have other priorities , Mei-Ling had told her. Only a matter of hours later, the man in her life had killed her and then put a bullet in his own brain. Had she had some kind of premonition of what was to come? Her Heavenly Element signifying danger, her trigram, K’an , the colour of blood. Margaret glanced at Li. Huang’s blood was still smeared on his face. Poor Mei-Ling, she thought. And she wondered what you ever really knew about other people’s lives?