Peter May - The Fourth Sacrifice

Margaret shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s amazing what most people will do with a gun pointed at their head.’ She nodded towards the blood-stained placard lying on the adjacent table. ‘I guess they hung that placard around his neck before they gave him the chop.’

‘That’s our assumption,’ Li confirmed.

She waited, but he volunteered nothing further. ‘So what does it mean?’ she asked.

He returned her gaze and spoke evenly. ‘The top character represents the number three.’

Margaret furrowed her brows. ‘But I thought Yuan Tao was the fourth victim?’

‘He is. The killer started at six and seems to be counting down.’

‘So there are another two victims on his list?’

‘That’s how it looks.’ Li paused for a moment, then carried on, ‘The character scored through is a nickname. They all had nicknames — Zero, Monkey, Pigsy. They were all at the same middle school together.’

Margaret raised an eyebrow and thought about it for a moment. ‘But not Yuan Tao?’

‘Until we get the file from your embassy, we don’t know anything about him. But given that he’s an American, that would seem unlikely. His nickname, apparently, was Digger. The name character for it, as with all the others, is upside down’

Margaret was intrigued. ‘Why? Does that have any special significance?’

‘During the Cultural Revolution,’ Li said, ‘people who were held up to ridicule as “revisionists” or “counter-revolutionaries” were sometimes publicly paraded with such nameplates hung around their necks, their names written upside down and crossed through. It was to signify that they were considered “non-people”.’

She wondered what it must have been like to be a “non-person”. During these last months she had learned enough about the Cultural Revolution to know that almost everyone in this room would have been a target for such persecution. The humiliation, degradation, and sometimes death inflicted on intellectuals, educated or professional people, during those dark years was unimaginable. And it was only just over twenty years since it had all come to an end. Still too close for comfort.

She switched on the mike and returned to the rest of the autopsy. Liver, spleen, pancreas, kidney, guts, bladder. The only problem arose when the assistants had difficulty preventing the head from slipping away across the table while cutting through the skull with the oscillating saw. Finally, they achieved their aim, one holding the head steady with two hands, the other cutting, and then delivering the brain into Margaret’s hands for weighing.

With sections taken from each of the organs, and the autopsy virtually over, the assistants sewed up the carcass and roughly stitched the head back on to the neck. It was a grotesque parody of a human being that they then hosed down. They scrubbed off the blood and blotted it dry with paper, before slipping it into a body bag and wheeling it away for return to the refrigerator.

Margaret peeled off her latex gloves, removing the steel-mesh glove from her non-cutting hand, and untied the gown and apron, letting them fall away. Despite the coldness of the autopsy room she was perspiring freely. She snapped off her goggles and mask and pulled away the shower cap to shake her hair out over her shoulders.

Li saw her properly for the first time — her pale, freckled skin, the slightly full lips, her well-defined brows, the ice-chip blue eyes — and his heart flipped over. All he wanted to do was take her face in his hands and kiss her. But he did not move. She turned to find him looking at her, and she had an overwhelming desire to slap his face as hard as she could. But instead, she moved to the adjoining table to look at the items that had been removed from the body, and the photographs taken at the crime scene.

Li, and Doctor Wang, and a very pale-looking Sophie gathered around. Margaret glanced at Sophie and saw that her hands were trembling. At least she had stuck it out. Not many people made it through their first autopsy without throwing up. Then she turned her attention to the photographs.

‘What’s this hole in the floor?’ she asked Li, picking up a print that clearly showed where the floorboards had been lifted.

‘We don’t know,’ Li said. ‘The linoleum had been pulled back and the boards removed. Most of the blood drained into the hole and dripped through the ceiling of the apartment below.’

‘Were the boards nailed down or loose?’

‘They had been nailed down at one time, but it appears that the nails had been removed some time ago. The boards must have fitted very loosely. They would have creaked or rattled underfoot.’

‘Some kind of hiding place?’

‘Possibly.’

Margaret examined the picture some more. ‘Had the linoleum been lifted, or was it torn?’

‘It appeared to have been torn.’

She nodded thoughtfully and dropped the picture back on the table. ‘Pathologist Wang says the other victims had red wine in their stomachs.’

This was a sudden leap that left Li more than a little puzzled. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I don’t see the connection.’

‘Of course not,’ she responded curtly, and clearly had no intention of explaining. ‘So we can assume that the killer was known to them. They’re having a drink with him.’

‘Yes, we have already made that assumption.’ Li’s response came with a tone. But she appeared not to notice.

‘And he endeavoured to disguise the fact that he was drugging them by dropping the Roofies in red wine,’ she said pensively. ‘So why did he hand Yuan Tao a bright blue vodka? And why, as you asked yourself, did Yuan drink it?’

‘Coercion,’ said Li. ‘You suggested as much.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘but it’s a change of pattern. Serial killers are usually very predictable. Once they have established a pattern, they normally stick to it. Religiously.’

She began scrutinising the other photographs taken at the death scene: the body taken from several different angles, the main pool of blood draining into the space left by the removal of the floorboards; the arterial blood spatter patterns from the two carotid arteries from which blood had spurted at approximately two and ten o’clock directions from the neck, travelling between one and two metres from the body. It was a bloody event. The main pool had formed once the body had collapsed and blood continued to drain from the carotids. Margaret became very interested in a less dramatic scatter of blood, following a line at right angles to the body on its right side. She put the photograph down and gazed at the white-tiled wall in front of her. ‘So our killer was left-handed,’ she said finally.

‘How can you possibly know that?’ It was the first time that Sophie had spoken and everyone looked up at her in surprise. She became suddenly self-conscious. ‘I mean, everything I’ve read says it’s almost impossible to tell the handedness of a killer in a blade attack.’ She felt she had to explain.

‘True,’ Margaret said. ‘But I’m not looking at the angle of a blade entering a body here. I’m looking at the cast-off pattern left by the sword. Look, see …’ She pointed out the line of tiny blood droplets that she had been studying. ‘When the blade goes through the neck in a downward slicing motion, it collects a certain amount of blood en route. And as the swordsman follows through with the downward arc of his sword, a certain amount of blood is cast off by the momentum. That’s what this line of droplets is here, on the right side of the body.’

‘How does that tell you the handedness of the killer?’ Sophie had forgotten, for the moment, about her squeamishness.

‘You ever heard of Tameshi Giri?’ She looked around the blank faces. No one had. ‘It’s a Japanese martial art,’ she explained. ‘The art of cutting things with swords. Its exponents practise on tightly bound bundles of straw. I believe it might even be Chinese in origin.’ Li and Wang still looked blank. Margaret smiled. ‘I did an autopsy on an assisted Hara Kiri suicide, where once the victim had disembowelled himself, his Tameshi Giri assistant beheaded him.’