The Ghost Marriage

I

Gan Bo ran a computer-dating agency from an office on the twelfth floor of a new tower block in Sanlihe Lu, overlooking Yuyuantan Park. He didn’t appear to employ any staff, except for a bored-looking young secretary who was painting her fingernails when Li arrived. She seemed pleased by the interruption, and made a great show of calling her boss on the intercom to announce Li’s arrival, before conducting him into the inner sanctum.

Gan’s office was big and empty with an enormous desk placed before a glass wall with a panoramic view over the park below. Li could see the sun reflecting off the lake where he and Margaret often skated with Li Jon when it froze over in winter.

Gan himself was a broad man with the yellowish skin and Han features of a southerner. A thick head of hair was gelled back from an unlined face that Li guessed had seen maybe thirty summers. He wore immaculately pressed black trousers, a plain white Armani shirt, and shiny black Gucci shoes. A Havana cigar smouldered in an ashtray on his desk, and the room was filled with the rich, toasty smell of it. The desk, too, was almost empty, except for a computer screen and keyboard, a telephone, and a cellphone which lay within easy reach of Gan’s grasp.

Gan stood up and waved Li nervously towards the only guest seat in the office. ‘What can I do for you, Section Chief?’

Li remained standing. ‘You can tell me where you acquired the body of a young girl called Jiang Meilin.’

Gan frowned. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course you do. About ten days ago you were contacted by a man called Sheng Dai who had recently lost his son in a motorcycle accident. He asked if you could provide the body of a young girl to take part in a minghun, to ensure their son’s happiness in the afterlife.’

Gan eased himself back into his chair and lifted his cigar from the ashtray. He puffed on it thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I remember that. But I run a computer-dating agency, Section Chief. A legitimate business finding brides for single men.’ His smile was smooth, like silk. ‘I don’t know where he got the idea I could provide him with a dead one, but I sent him away.’

‘Oh?’ Li sauntered towards the window, his hands in his pockets. ‘That’s bizarre, Mr Gan. Because on the day of the funeral someone turned up with the body of a young girl and told the Sheng family that you had found her for them.’

Gan rotated his chair towards Li. He could not conceal the look of puzzlement in his eyes, but feigned nonchalance. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘He took twelve hundred dollars for it. But I guess you never saw a cent of that.’

Something like anger shadowed his face, but there was no trace of it in his voice. ‘Twelve hundred dollars, Section Chief? That’s a lot of money for some dead meat.’

Li could see the distant figures of barbers cutting the hair of clients at the entrance to the park below. Among the trees beyond, groups of old men gathered around to watch games of chess in progress.

‘That “dead meat”, Mr Gan, was a living, breathing human being just a few hours before.’ He turned around. ‘Someone murdered that girl to provide a corpse for a ghost wedding. And I think that someone was you.’

Gan paled. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Do you know how they execute murderers, Mr Gan? They take them into a public stadium and shoot them in the back of the head. It would make a hell of a mess of that expensive designer shirt of yours. All that blood and brain tissue.’

‘I run a legitimate business.’

‘You trade in human beings.’

‘Live ones. I never killed anyone in my life.’

‘I think you might have trouble convincing a court of that.’

‘In the name of the sky, I didn’t kill her!’

‘Then who did?’

‘I have no idea.’

Li leaned over and removed Gan’s cigar from his hand, stubbing it out in the ashtray, then put his own hands on the arms of the desk chair, and placed his face just inches away from Gan’s. ‘You and I both know that this computer-dating crap is just a front. You procure women for desperate men. God knows how. But no doubt that will come to light as we start taking your little empire apart. I don’t know if you murdered Jiang Meilin or not, but there’s enough circumstantial evidence, I think, to get a conviction. Especially when we can demonstrate to the court how you really make your living.’

He could smell Gan’s fear, even above the stink of rancid cigar smoke on his breath.

‘Alright, alright.’ Gan raised his hands in submission, and Li stood up slowly. ‘It’s happened, you know, from time to time, that someone has asked me to procure a body for one of these stupid damned ceremonies. I tell them it’s not what I do. But I’m a nice guy, you know? I like to help if I can.’

‘How exactly do you help?’

Gan drew a long breath. ‘I know this guy. A porter at a hospital.’

‘Which one?’

‘The Beijing Hospital in Chongwenmen.’

Li knew it. It was just north of the Temple of Heaven. ‘And?’

‘And, well, you know, if there just happens to be a recently deceased person of the right specifications available, then sometimes a deal can be done.’

‘How?’

Gan shrugged. ‘The porter has a friend at the crematorium.’ He paused. ‘Who’s to say whether or not a coffin has a body in it when it goes into the furnace?’ There was a long silence. Then, ‘I swear on the graves of my ancestors, Section Chief, I never killed that girl. And I don’t know who did.’

For some reason that Li couldn’t quite put his finger on, he believed him. ‘But you asked the porter if he could get you a body, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he said he couldn’t?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I want his name.’

II

Huan Da was as defiant as he was stupid. But in a detached sort of way, Li almost admired his unshakeable loyalty. He was going to be a tough nut to crack. Gan had collapsed like a house of cards, but Huan was an altogether different proposition.

The smoke of many cigarettes hung thick in the air of the interrogation room. Years of wheeling cancer patients from the ward to the morgue had not diminished Huan’s enthusiasm for smoking. He had consumed nearly half a pack in the hour since Wu had brought him in from the hospital.

Confronted with what Li already knew, Huan quickly realized that there was no point in denying his part in the business of supplying corpses for cash. He had taken Li through the whole sordid procedure. There was, he said, not much demand, perhaps one or two a year. But he made more from the sale of a single corpse than he earned in twelve months as a porter.

An uneducated and stupid farm labourer from Sichuan, he had come to Beijing nearly twenty years ago and found the job at the Beijing Hospital almost immediately. He had been introduced to Gan by a mutual acquaintance nearly three years previously, and had supplied perhaps five bodies in that time. He had not kept count, he said.

Shrugging his shoulders implacably, he had told Li, ‘I didn’t see the harm in it. After all, they were dead already.’

When a request was received from Gan, Huan would scrutinise mortalities at the hospital for the previous few days. If he couldn’t find a match, he had colleagues in other hospitals who were always eager for a percentage and would check their own death lists. If a corpse was found that corresponded to the request, then arrangements were made with a contact at the central crematorium to remove the body before the coffin went to the flames. Sometimes, Huan said, the crematorium worker himself would come up with a suitable match, since he had bodies coming in from all over the city.

But where Gan had shown no scruples about betraying a colleague to save his own skin, Huan remained resolutely silent about the identity of his contact at the crematorium, the only other link in the chain who could have known in detail the requirements of the Sheng family.

‘That,’ Huan said yet again, ‘would be a betrayal of trust.’ And he lit another cigarette.

Li breathed his frustration through his teeth and lit a cigarette himself.

The door swung open and the duty officer leaned in. ‘Doctor Campbell is here, Chief. I put her in your office.’

Li hastily stubbed out the cigarette before searching for the peppermints he kept in his pocket. He was supposed to have quit smoking months ago. Of course, Margaret would smell the smoke on his clothes, but since almost everyone around him still smoked, that was easily explained.

‘You can tell her I’m on my way.’

When the duty officer had gone, he popped a peppermint into his mouth and stood up. He looked down at Huan, who seemed calmly unconcerned. Li leaned over him, supporting himself with fists on the table. ‘You said you saw no harm in what you were doing, because the souls you sold were already dead. Well think on this, Huan. That girl wasn’t dead. She was alive and well, with her whole life ahead of her. The chances are, the person whose identity you are refusing to reveal is her killer. There is no honour in that.’ He walked to the door, and held it open for a moment before turning back. ‘Besides which, it makes you an accessory to murder, and just as eligible for execution as he is.’

Huan remained expressionless. He sucked in more smoke and blew it at the ceiling.

Margaret had cleared a space on Li’s desk and laid out some photographs, and a preliminary autopsy report. The full report would follow tomorrow. She wrinkled her nose the moment Li entered the room, and sniffed the air. ‘Peppermints,’ she said. ‘I hear they can be almost as addictive as cigarettes.’

He raised an eyebrow in feigned innocence. ‘Really?’

Margaret smiled ironically. ‘Yes. I believe some people take up smoking to disguise the smell of them.’

Li blushed involuntarily. ‘What do you have for me?’

She sighed and indicated the photographs on his desk. ‘She was strangled. Sedated first, so she didn’t put up a fight. We’ll know what he used when the blood tests come back from toxicology.’

Li rounded the desk to look at the photographs — sharp, clear colour prints that left nothing to the imagination. He picked up the picture that showed the bruising on her neck.

‘Left by the fingers,’ Margaret said. ‘Four on that side, a thumb on the other, and several abrasions caused by the fingernails.’ She picked up another print. ‘The purple colouring around her face is caused by vascular congestion, and the petechial haemorrhaging of tiny blood vessels close to the surface. But...’ She cleared more space and laid out the final two photographs — one of each eye, taken under the ultraviolet light of the Wood’s lamp. ‘For some reason her killer placed coins over her eyes, whose weight had the effect of leaving their impression in the purple colouring caused by the congestion. Treated with a chemical spray and photographed under ultraviolet, you can clearly see the markings left by each coin.’

Li lifted one of the pictures and studied it without comment.

‘We’ve recovered traces of the metal they left on her skin. So if you were ever able to obtain the coins, we could match them up.’ She canted her head to one side to look at the photograph that Li was still holding. ‘Although, I have to say, I’ve never seen coins quite like these before. They might not be easy to identify, never mind find.’ When he didn’t respond, she turned to look at him and saw that he had gone quite pale. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I know exactly what these are,’ he said. ‘And I know exactly where to find them.’

An unexpected knock at the door surprised them both. Wu entered, clutching a beige dossier. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Chief. But I thought you ought to take a look at this.’ He joined them at the desk and laid down the dossier to open it. ‘Those background investigations you asked me to do...’ He flipped over a page, and pointed his finger at a paragraph halfway down the one beneath it. ‘Can’t be a coincidence, can it?’

Li read in silence.

‘What is it?’ Margaret’s growing ability with the spoken word did not extend to the mystifying number of characters that made up written Chinese.

Li’s eyes burned with a dark intensity. ‘I know who killed her,’ he said. He met her eye. ‘And you’ve just provided me with the means of proving it.’