Peter May - The Killing Room

‘Eighteen? I thought it was twenty.’

‘Well, on a head count, literally, we’ve got sixteen. But there are eighteen torsos, and we’re still finding bits.’

They swooped past the granite-blocks, colonnaded columns and spectacular golden spire of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, built in the fifties by the Russians in the excessive Stalinesque style of the time.

‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to tell me about the body you found in Beijing?’

Li dragged himself away from the sights and sounds and revelations of Shanghai and focused his thoughts on the file he had read on the plane on the way down. ‘A young girl, we think early twenties. She was found by public utility workers on a piece of waste ground in Haidian district near the Summer Palace last February, during the New Year holiday. There had been heavy rain, and they were drawn to the spot by what looked like blood pooling in the mud. They started digging. She was just a couple of feet down in two black plastic bags. The pathologist reckoned she’d only been there about a week.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Uncertain. Her heart stopped. That’s the only thing we know for sure. She’d been opened up by someone with pretty sophisticated surgical skills. Heart, liver, pancreas and one kidney had all been removed.’

‘Organ theft?’

Li shook his head. ‘No. The organs were all still there in one of the plastic bags.’

‘And the rest of her?’

‘In the other one. Hacked to bits by someone with a butcher’s saw by the look of it.’

‘Anything else of significance?’

Li shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to know what’s significant. She had the most common blood group — O. But she’d had some pretty expensive dental work, though not done by anyone in Beijing. It’s possible she’d had treatment in the West.’

‘Any clothes?’

‘Not a stitch. And no jewellery. No distinguishing marks. And the AFIS came up with zip on her fingerprints.’

Mei-Ling looked thoughtful. ‘And motive? Would you hazard a guess?’

‘Couldn’t even begin,’ Li said. ‘Not sexual, at least not in any conventional way. There was no sign of violation, no mutilation of the sexual organs or the breasts.’ He was aware of feeling slightly uncomfortable discussing these details with a woman. He shrugged. ‘We hit a brick wall.’

They passed under a sweeping junction of crisscrossing flyovers, and through a maze of buildings to their left Li caught sight of the remodelled People’s Square with its circular museum and glass theatre and vast white municipal monolith. Ahead through a forest of skyscrapers he spotted a strange green spire punctuated twice in its upward sweep by red and silver globes, all supported on four gigantic splayed legs. It looked for all the world like a Martian rocket ship. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he asked.

She followed his eyeline and grinned. ‘Oh, that? That’s the Pearl TV Tower, across the river in Pudong.’ She glanced at him. ‘You know that before the Second World War Shanghai was known in the West as the Paris of the East? Now the good citizens of the city like to think they have their very own Eiffel Tower.’

‘It’s certainly as ugly,’ Li said. But the tower sank out of sight as the road dipped down and ran underground to the tunnel that would take them under the Huangpu River. He said, ‘What about the bodies you found this morning? Anything I described sound familiar?’

She nodded. ‘Very. But I’ll let you see for yourself first, then you’d better go meet my boss.’

‘What about the American? The guy who fell into the pit. They never told me what happened to him.’

‘Oh,’ she said casually, ‘they got him out alive okay. Then he just went to pieces.’

She flicked him a glance, and there was a moment of uncertainty between them before air escaped from her lips in a series of small explosions and she burst out laughing, her strange, infectious braying laugh, and he found himself laughing, too. Humour, no matter how black, was the only defence they ever had against the sick world they moved in.

*

Their Santana glided through the wide empty streets of Pudong’s Lujiazui financial district. Street lights reflected on wet sidewalks in the gloom of the late afternoon. All around them thirty-storey buildings soared into the darkening sky, but lights shone in only a few solitary windows. Investment in construction had so far outstripped demand. Across the river, traffic had come to a standstill along the Bund, a broad, waterfront boulevard characterised by its sweep of grand, stone-built European-style buildings with domes and spires and clock towers. At a glance they might have been in Paris or London. From the river itself came the mournful call of vessels sounding foghorns in the haze.

On their right, through open gates in salmon-coloured walls, floodlights raised on tall stands shone behind sheets of clear plastic that gave the appearance of breathing in time with the cold wind that blew in off the water. Beneath them, blurry figures in white moved about like ghosts, working in the freezing cold liquid mud in a painstaking search for more body bits. Armed guards stood by the gates, and more than two dozen police and forensic vehicles were drawn up haphazardly in the street outside.

‘That’s the building site,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We commandeered the basement car park of the office block over there.’ She nodded towards a tall dark tower block across the street. ‘It’s empty. The pathologists are laying the bodies out there until we’re sure we’ve found all the pieces.’ She turned left, through a break in the central reservation, crossed the opposite carriageway, and drove down a ramp into a subterranean car park where she drew in behind a phalanx of other vehicles. Li recognised the distinctive hu character, signifying Shanghai, followed by the letter ‘O’, that preceded the registrations on all unmarked police cars.

Mei-Ling flashed her maroon Public Security ID at the uniformed officer who challenged them, and Li followed her between pillars into an area brightly lit by improvised lamps. The intensity of the light created a sense of unreality about the scene that greeted them. More than twenty trestle tables covered in white paper ranged against a bleak grey concrete wall, lined up side by side and with just a couple of feet separating them. On some, bits of body lay wrapped in the plastic bags they had been brought down in. Others had been removed and arranged in bizarre parodies of the human bodies they had once been, legs and arms laid next to torsos and heads, a gruesome jigsaw of human pieces. Most of the bits were still unrecognisable, except where assistants in white plastic suits were gently hosing them down to reveal the decaying dimpled flesh of hands and feet, knees and elbows, breasts and bellies. Only the smell brought home the reality. The sweet, heavy smell of decomposing human flesh that filled this underground chamber of horrors and almost made Li gag. He made a determined effort to breathe through his mouth. He glanced at Mei-Ling, but she did not appear to be affected.

On the wall, behind each table, crude paper charts had been pasted up itemising the parts laid out on each, and listing the bits still missing. There were roughly drawn diagrams of each of the bodies.

‘Ah, Miss Nien. At last you honour us with your presence.’ A tall man in his late fifties, thin black hair scraped back across his scalp, crossed the concrete floor to greet them, his breath billowing before him in the cold air. His eyes were little more than bloodshot slits through which he peered myopically. His skin was mottled and brown, and his teeth stained from years of smoking. He was smoking now, a cigarette between his lips, dropping ash down his stained white coat. The illusion of myopia, Li decided, was created by his need to screw up his eyes against the smoke that seemed to seep from his face as if from cracks in a flue.