The Killing Room

I

‘You do not run this department, Deputy Section Chief. I do!’ Section Chief Huang’s anger showed itself in the tiny flecks of spittle that gathered around his lips. He stood glaring at Li from behind his desk.

Li closed the door and said quietly, ‘I was put in charge of this investigation.’

‘That does not give you the authority to go pulling my people out of their beds in the middle of the night and embarking on a course of investigation that has not even been discussed with me.’

Li felt his patience waning. He said, ‘I can’t win, can I? Yesterday the Procurator General tells me if I don’t speed up the investigation it’s my neck on the block. I make a breakthrough during the night and you want me to wait till you’ve had breakfast before I follow it up.’ He took out a cigarette.

‘Don’t light that in here,’ Huang said.

Reluctantly, Li slipped the cigarette back in its packet. His eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He glared back at Huang. ‘If you don’t get out of my face, Huang, I’m taking this to Director Hu, and I’m going to tell him I can’t pursue his investigation because you’re obstructing me.’

Huang snorted his derision. ‘You think the Mayor’s policy adviser will see you at your request? Director Hu sees you when he wants to see you. And in the meantime you’ll deal with me and Procurator General Yue, like it or not.’ He searched on his desk for a sheet of paper. He found it and waved it at Li. It had scribbed notes on it. ‘I had a call last night from the Chief of Section One. It seems you went and ruffled a few feathers at the Black Rain Club.’ He breathed stertorously through his nose. ‘That is not how we deal with these people here?’

‘Oh, really?’ Li said. ‘So what do you do, roll over and let them shit on you?’

Huang’s eyes burned with anger and dislike. ‘You are walking on seriously thin ice here, Li. In Shanghai, insubordination and abuse towards a senior officer are usually rewarded with instant demotion, if not dismissal.’

‘So fire me,’ Li said, and he locked eyes with Huang and wouldn’t look away. His position as head of the investigation was an issue he was determined to force. Director Hu had appointed him over Huang’s head, and he was not about to let the Section Chief undermine his authority because of petty jealousy and internal politics.

Huang was spared having to respond by a knock at the door. It opened and Mei-Ling entered. She was immediately aware of the charged atmosphere that filled the room and closed the door quickly behind her. She looked at Huang. ‘What’s up, Chief?’

Huang still held Li’s gaze. ‘Not only does our friend from Beijing drag half the pathology department out of their beds in the middle of the night, but then he calls in the entire detective shift two hours early and embarks on an investigation of a personal friend of Director Hu.’

This was all news to Mei-Ling. She looked at Li in amazement. ‘What’s going on? Why didn’t you call me?’

‘I needed foot soldiers, not generals,’ Li said.

She was clearly not pleased. ‘Do you want to tell me what it was that was so important you had to get everyone else out of their beds but me?’

Li sighed. He did not need hostility on two fronts. ‘Margaret made a breakthrough last night. She found something that linked all the victims.’

Mei-Ling frowned. ‘What?’

‘Every single one of them had had an abortion.’

‘Oh, had they?’ she said. And she digested the information for a moment. Then, ‘So how come this “breakthrough” wasn’t made at autopsy?’

But Li was determined not to be deflected. ‘That’s not important right now. What matters is that these women could not have been picked at random. And if the thing they have in common is that they’ve all had abortions, then that puts the investigation on a whole different footing.’

Mei-Ling was still struggling to keep up. ‘How’s that?’

‘I had the guys check with the relatives of four of the five girls we’ve identified so far. All four had their abortions done at clinics belonging to Cui Feng. Remember him? We met him at Director Hu’s banquet.’

Huang cut in, ‘So now he wants to go harassing a personal friend of the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ He turned on Li again. ‘There is nothing unusual about these women having had abortions carried out at Cui’s clinics. His organisation performs most of the abortions in Shanghai.’

‘In the name of the sky!’ Li let his exasperation escape through clenched teeth. ‘I am not suggesting there is anything sinister in that. I want to ask Cui if he will give us access to his files. We can then check them against the missing persons files and find out which of them had had abortions. That way there’s a good chance we can narrow down the identities of the other dead girls.’

Mei-Ling drew a deep breath and looked at Huang. ‘It does make sense, Chief.’

But Li was wound up now and didn’t want to let it go. ‘I mean, what is this guy anyway, untouchable? Just because he’s a pal of Director Hu?’

Huang turned a very dangerous look on Li. His voice was low. ‘Cui Feng is a Party member and a very influential member of this community,’ he said. ‘I will not have his reputation impugned in any way by this department. Is that understood?’

There was a tense silence, broken finally by Mei-Ling. ‘But we can ask him to let us see his files, can’t we, Chief?’

Huang held Li’s eyes for several more seconds before tearing them away to focus on Mei-Ling. There was almost a sense of hurt in them, a feeling perhaps of betrayal that she had taken Li’s side rather than his. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘You can ask to see his files.’

The traffic was backing up along Fuxing Road from roadworks outside the Music Conservatory. Li and Mei-Ling had sat nursing their own thoughts in the car all the way south and west from 803. The tension between Li and Huang had transferred itself to Mei-Ling. She was brooding darkly behind the wheel of the car. She glanced at Li as they sat idling in the traffic, fumes rising all about them in the rain, only the sound of windscreen wipers scraping back and forth breaking their silence. ‘So where is she now?’ she said at last.

Li dragged himself from his private thoughts. ‘Who?’

‘Margaret.’

‘She’s gone back to her hotel to try and get some sleep. She was up most of the night.’

‘Oh, what a shame,’ Mei-Ling said in a tone that dripped with sarcasm. ‘Maybe if she’d spotted these abortions in the first place she wouldn’t have needed to go catching up on her beauty sleep.’

For Li it was the last straw. He turned his aggression full on Mei-Ling. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you and Margaret have got against each other, but I’m fed up being caught between two women eating vinegar. I want this jealousy to stop. And I want it to stop now! We’ve got nineteen women here hacked to death by some maniac with a blade, I think we owe it to them to keep ourselves focused on catching their killer. Don’t you?’

Mei-Ling was shocked, both by his anger and by his more than implied criticism. She reacted coldly. ‘Of course,’ she said.

But Li was tired, his resistance low, and there were other things he wanted to get off his chest. ‘And that policewoman you sent to pick up Xinxin …? I don’t want her going near the kid again.’

Mei-Ling flashed him an angry look. ‘Why?’

‘Because she refused to let Margaret near her, and scared Xinxin half to death. In future I’ll make my own arrangements to have her collected. All right?’

Mei-Ling’s cheeks reddened. Anger was mixed now with hurt, and she retreated into herself like a wounded animal. She nodded and kept her eyes fixed firmly on the traffic in the road ahead. They did not speak again until she turned the car into the car park outside the red-roofed villa that housed Cui Feng’s central clinic.

The clinic was set behind a high gated wall and a profusion of densely leafed trees in a quiet residential street on the edge of the consular district. This had once been the heart of the old French Concession. Elegant villas sat brooding in discreet isolation behind walls and fences. Private cars were parked along secluded, tree-lined avenues, with only the odd cyclist whirring past on a rickety bicycle. What had once been the garden of the villa was paved, and half a dozen cars sat backed up against the wall. A small private ambulance was parked under a canopy supported by two pillars above the main entrance. The windows had all been double-glazed, and the view into their interior was obscured by cream-coloured vertical blinds. A brass plaque on the gate revealed in Chinese and English that this was the SHANGHAI WORLD CLINIC.

A nurse in a white, starched uniform led them up thickly carpeted stairs and along a passageway hung with original scroll paintings by famous Chinese artists. It felt more like an opulent private residence than a medical clinic. They passed an oriental gentleman in a wheelchair being pushed by a male nurse, and then were shown into a large study with a sofa and two armchairs gathered around an original fireplace. There was a huge, leather-tooled desk in the bay window, stripes of watery daylight falling in through the blinds and lying across the contours of the captain’s chair that sat behind it. Cui Feng came around the desk as they entered. He wore an expensively cut dark suit and had the same gentle bedside manner of the family doctor that Li remembered from their first meeting at Director Hu’s banquet. Soft spoken and smiling, he shook their hands warmly, inviting them each to take an armchair. ‘It is a great pleasure to meet you again, Deputy Section Chiefs.’ He gave a small laugh at his plural abbreviation. ‘It is a great relief that you share a rank,’ he said, ‘or we could be here all day just addressing each other.’ He sat down on the edge of the settee and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and placed his hands together almost as if in prayer. ‘Now what can I do for you?’ he asked. ‘I understand that some of those poor women you dug up had abortions done at some of my clinics.’ And Li realised that Huang had already been on the phone to Cui to smooth the way for their arrival.

‘That’s right,’ Li said. ‘In fact all the victims have had abortions performed on them.’ He hesitated for the briefest of moments before adding, ‘Not very expertly, according to our pathologist. Otherwise it would have been very difficult to tell.’

But Cui was not ruffled. He said, ‘In that case, perhaps they were not all performed at my clinics. We operate to very high procedural standards.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Li said. ‘But since you perform most of the abortions in Shanghai, this seemed like a good place to start.’

‘Start what, exactly?’ Cui appeared uncomfortable for the first time.

Mei-Ling stepped in quickly to prevent Li from discomfiting him any further. ‘We were wondering, Mr Cui, if you would allow us access to your files so that we could cross-check them with the women on our missing persons file.’

He frowned. ‘What good would that do?’

‘It might help us narrow down the identities of the remaining victims,’ Li said.

Cui pursed his lips and turned this over briefly in his mind. Then, ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I can see no harm in it. But since our files are normally confidential, perhaps I could appoint one of my staff to liaise with your people and do the actual comparisons. That way we could continue to maintain the confidentiality of our patients.’

Li was not happy with this proposal. He wanted direct access to the files and was about to say so. But he glanced at Mei-Ling and picked up her almost imperceptible shake of the head, Huang’s words of warning about Cui’s membership of the Party and his influential friends still ringing in his ears. So he forced a reluctant nod of agreement instead. ‘That would be acceptable,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Cui relaxed and sat back in the settee. ‘You will have some tea.’ It was not so much a question as a statement. Li and Mei-Ling had no time to respond before there was a knock at the door and a young woman carried in a tray with a pot of jasmine tea and three cups of the most delicate bone china. She set it on a low table in front of the fireplace and filled the cups before making a small bow and hurrying out.

‘So do you actually perform abortions here at this clinic?’ Li asked.

‘Good Heavens, no,’ Cui said smiling at Li’s apparent naïveté. ‘The Shanghai World Clinic is exclusively for the use of foreign residents living in Shanghai.’ He laughed. ‘Generally very wealthy people whose companies provide comprehensive medical insurance. We Chinese might as well make the most of any ill-health that befalls them while they’re here, don’t you think?’

Li did not think that anyone should profit from ill-health, but he knew better than to say so. Instead he said, ‘And what kind of medical care do you provide, exactly?’

‘Oh,’ Cui said airily, ‘we can deal with anything from a broken toe to open heart surgery. We have a highly qualified and very experienced international team of doctors and nurses here. And if we don’t have the expertise in-house, we bring in consultants on a freelance basis.’

‘So the bulk of your patients are American, or European,’ Mei-Ling said.

Cui smiled and shook his head. ‘Actually no, Miss Nien. There are a number of North American or European joint-venture clinics in Shanghai which the Westerners seem to prefer. Perhaps they think that Chinese medicine only deals in acupuncture and tiger’s blood.’ There was the merest hint of a bitter edge to his voice. ‘Surprisingly, perhaps, most of our customers are Japanese.’ Li noticed his use of the word ‘customers’ rather than ‘patients’. It was clear that to Cui medicine was a business and illness an opportunity to make money. Cui said, ‘Would you like to see our facilities?’

Li had no desire to inspect the facilities. He disliked all things medical and had a morbid fear of hospitals, which perhaps owed more than a little to all the autopsies he had attended. But before he had a chance to decline the offer, Mei-Ling said, ‘Yes, we’d like that very much.’ Li had forgotten that she had studied medicine for four years, but he was still a little surprised by her apparent interest.

The clinic was on four floors, including a suite of rooms built into the roof, and a large basement which housed two operating theatres, as well as preparation and recovery rooms. A large elevator had been installed to take patients from operation in the basement to recovery in the attic, and all stops in between. There was a four-bed intensive care ward on the ground floor, as well as several luxurious single-bed rooms that made Li think more of a four-star hotel than a hospital. Each room had en-suite toilet facilities and satellite TV. Office and administration was on the first floor, with another four single-bed rooms. There were a further six bedrooms in the attic. ‘At any one time,’ Cui said, ‘we can accommodate fourteen patients as well as our four intensive care beds.’ But on their tour, Li had seen only a handful of patients. The clinic was far from full.

‘You don’t appear to be very busy,’ he said. For some reason he had begun to take a singular dislike to Mr Cui. He was altogether too smooth, too possessed.

Cui laughed. ‘Good health is bad for business, I’m afraid.’

No doubt, Li thought, the hundreds of thousands of abortions Cui carried out each year would subsidise any slump in business at his Shanghai World Clinic. He stretched out a hand to shake Cui’s. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Cui, for your help. We’ll send an officer over to liaise with your staff.’

Cui smiled beneficently, shaking both their hands. ‘Not at all, not at all. Anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

In the car, Mei-Ling looked at Li and said, ‘You don’t like our Mr Cui very much, do you?’

Li looked at her, surprised, then conceded, ‘No, I don’t. Access to health care used to be everyone’s right in this country, not just a privilege afforded to the wealthy.’ He paused. ‘Was it that obvious?’

‘To me. But, then, I don’t like him that much either.’

‘Why’s that?’

She shrugged. ‘I hate to find myself agreeing with Margaret Campbell.’ She glanced at Li. ‘But much as I support the principle of the One Child Policy, it doesn’t feel right that someone should make money out of other people’s unhappiness.’

And Li remembered Margaret’s bold words to Cui’s face, accusing him of profiting from other people’s misery. He had been shocked at the time, and angry. Now he remembered her bluntness almost fondly. Margaret had no sense of tact or diplomacy, but at least whatever she presented to the world came from the heart.

Almost as if she had read his mind, Mei-Ling said, ‘If I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that at some time your Miss Campbell has had an abortion herself.’

II

Margaret was standing by the window in Li’s office when he and Mei-Ling got back to 803. Li stopped in the doorway, surprised for a moment to see her there. Her hair tumbled freely over her shoulders, catching the late morning sunshine that was squeezing in appearances between banks of dark, wallowing, low cloud. She was wearing khaki cargo pants over brown suede boots, and a yellow tee-shirt under a green waterproof jacket that was drawn in at the waist. There was a touch of red about her lips, and brown-pink around her eyes. She had a radiance about her that Li had not seen in a long time, and the sight of her kick-started a fluttering sensation in his stomach, and the faintest stirring in his loins. With the icy cold presence of Mei-Ling at his side he felt himself flush with embarrassment, as if she or Margaret could somehow read his feelings.

‘Hi,’ Margaret said brightly. And she cocked her head, frowning slightly and giving Li an odd look. ‘You look like shit,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t have had much sleep.’

‘I have not had any,’ he said.

‘Poor thing,’ Margaret smiled, although her tone suggested anything but sincerity. She rounded the desk. ‘Look, I know you two are busy …’ She let that hang for a moment. ‘So I’ll not get under your feet. I just dropped by on my way to pick up Xinxin. I thought you might be interested to see this.’ She lifted a sheet of paper off the desk and held it out to Li.

He took it. ‘What is it?’

‘A fax from Dr Wang in Beijing. He sent it to my hotel. I asked him to DNA-match the body parts of the girl in Beijing, just in case the pathologist who did the original autopsy got the visual matching wrong and we were really looking at pieces of two victims.’

Li looked up at her, horrified by the thought that they could have got it so wrong. ‘Are you telling me they do not match?’

‘No, they match perfectly.’

Li frowned. ‘So, what’s the problem?’

‘There’s no problem,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s the girl’s HLA type that the DNA-matching threw up …’

Mei-Ling took the sheet from Li and examined it. ‘DQ-alpha allele “1.3”?’ She shook her head, nonplussed. ‘What is special about that?’

‘Wait a minute,’ Li said. ‘What is DQ-alpha allele?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘The HLA DQ-alpha gene is one of the markers on the DNA panel used to match body parts. Right?’ She looked to Margaret for confirmation.

‘Something like that,’ Margaret conceded. And then to Li, ‘An allele is a variant of any particular gene on a chromosome in your DNA. Some of them show statistical differences between races.’

He said, ‘So what is significant about this “1.3” allele?’

‘I don’t know about its significance,’ Margaret said, ‘but it’s certainly unusual. In fact the HLA DQ-alpha allele “1.3” is never found in the DNA of a Chinese.’

Li was being very slow on the uptake. ‘I don’t understand. What does that mean?’

Mei-Ling had the answer. ‘It means that your little hostess at the Black Rain Club was, in the doctrine of American political correctness, of mixed parentage. Or, as people used to say, a half-caste.’ She looked at Margaret. ‘European? American?’

‘Impossible to say. But on the statistical balance of probability, it’s unlikely.’

‘Why?’ Li asked.

Margaret said, ‘I did a little checking on the Internet. That’s where I discovered that the “1.3” is never found in Chinese — or South-East Asians for that matter. Hispanics have a pretty low incidence of it. Only about four-and-a-half per cent of blacks have it. Caucasians have the second highest frequency. But that’s still only eight-and-a-half per cent. So it’s pretty rare in any racial group. Strangely, the highest incidence — about twenty-two per cent — is found in Japanese. So the chances are her mom or her dad came from the Land of the Rising Sun.’

Li started searching through the untidy piles of papers that were strewn across his desk.

‘What are you looking for?’ Mei-Ling asked.

Li said, ‘I asked Dai to dig out as much background on the Chai Rui girl as we had available from public records.’ Fatigue was fraying his temper and his patience now. ‘Where the hell is it?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘You’ve kept the guys pretty busy all morning, Li Yan.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll speak to him.’ And she picked up the phone.

Margaret smiled at Li and put a hand lightly on his arm. ‘Try and get a break if you can,’ she said, and this time he saw she meant it. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Li had a very powerful desire, then, to kiss her and close his eyes and just hold her there. But all he said was, ‘Sure.’

Margaret hesitated briefly, as if perhaps she had felt the same impulse, but then she turned and went out. He lit a cigarette and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, but only succeeded in making them burn. He blinked at Mei-Ling as she hung up the phone. ‘Well?’

‘Dai’s got the stuff on his desk. But you’ve got an appointment first.’ He scowled, and she said, ‘The Commissioner of Police wants to see you in his office straight away.’

The Commissioner of Police sat behind his desk, the crossed flags of the Republic on the wall behind him. There was nothing on the desk except for a telephone and a lamp. Not a pen or a pencil, not even so much as a scrap of paper. Its surface was polished to such a high shine that the Commissioner was almost perfectly reflected in it. He wore his official dark green uniform with two gold stripes at the bottom of each sleeve, and the gold, red and blue badge of the Ministry of Public Security on his left arm. His carefully trimmed receding hair, was brushed back from a round, heavy-jowled face. His hands were folded in front of him on the desk. He did not ask Li to sit, and Li stood uncomfortably to attention in the middle of the room. The Procurator General stood by the window, peering at Li over his round steel-rimmed reading glasses. He held a swatch of papers in his hand, but never once referred to them. He remained a mute witness to the proceedings.

Even before the Commissioner opened his mouth, Li knew that he was going to talk about his Uncle Yifu. ‘I met your uncle on several occasions,’ the Commissioner said, and Li sighed inwardly. ‘He was a very unusual man.’

‘Unusual?’ This was unexpected.

‘He possessed the twin virtues of great intelligence and great humility.’ He paused. ‘I understand that you were abusive to Section Chief Huang this morning and that you threatened to resign from this investigation.’

Li said stiffly, ‘That is a matter of interpretation, Commissioner.’

‘And no doubt your interpretation is superior to that of Section Chief Huang?’ There could be no doubting the sarcasm in the Commissioner’s tone.

Li stayed cool. ‘No, Commissioner. Not superior, just different.’

The Commissioner bristled. ‘The use of semantics as a means of deception is self-deluding,’ he said sharply.

‘Should I pass that on to the Section Chief?’ Li asked. In the silence that followed, the tension was thick enough to cut with a cleaver.

Eventually the Commissioner, the tremble of anger in his voice, said, ‘It is a pity you did not inherit your uncle’s gift for humility.’

‘My uncle always said that the cock who hides his feathers will not win the hen,’ Li said. And before the Commissioner could respond he looked at him very directly and said, ‘People are always telling me, Commissioner, what my uncle was and wasn’t. People who had met him “on several occasions”. I lived with him for ten years. I think I know what my uncle was.’

The Commissioner glowered at him. It was a defining moment. Li knew he had overstepped the mark, but he was determined to stand his ground. Then the Commissioner smiled. But it was a condescending smile, his way of saving face in the presence of the Procurator General. ‘At least, I see, you have inherited his native cunning.’ Perhaps a truer insight into the Commissioner’s real view of Yifu’s humble origins. Li made no comment and waited patiently for the Commissioner to get to the point. Eventually he said, ‘Section Chief Huang advised you against the harassment of citizen Cui Feng. And yet you chose to ignore that advice.’

‘No, Commissioner. I sought Mr Cui’s co-operation in gaining access to medical files that might help us throw light on the identity of the remaining victims.’

‘Not according to Mr Cui.’

This was a turn for which Li was caught entirely unprepared. ‘I … I don’t understand, Commissioner. Mr Cui was very co-operative.’

The Commissioner lifted his hands from the desk, and Li saw the patch of damp they had left on its polished surface. ‘Mr Cui is a very influential figure in this city, Deputy Section Chief. Take your investigation along another track.’

Li glanced from the Commissioner to the Procurator General and back again in disbelief. ‘Access to Cui’s files is vital to identifying those girls,’ he said.

‘Find another way,’ the Commissioner said. And before Li could reply, added, ‘That is not a request, Deputy Section Chief. That is an order.’

Li dropped heavily into his chair and lit a cigarette. He breathed smoke like fire through his nostrils and looked at Mei-Ling, anger burning in his eyes. ‘I don’t fucking believe it? Do you believe it? We were as nice as nine kwai to Mr I-have-powerful-friends Cui. And he goes accusing us of harassment!’

‘Not necessarily,’ Mei-Ling said.

Li frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean there is a very thin dividing line between police, politics and power in this city. It might just be that someone up there’s worried that you go ruffling the wrong feathers.’

‘Huang?’

‘Well, you certainly ruffled his, and that won’t have helped. But I think it probably goes higher than that.’ She put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath. ‘What you’re forgetting, Li Yan, is that this is a highly sensitive case. Money, politics, international investment, high-powered reputations. We have to steer a very careful course through them all. But you’re charging around taking on people you can’t hope to beat. People we need on side if we’re going to get through this.’ She shook her head. ‘And when you first arrived, I thought you were smart. Don’t you know you should never fight a war you’re not sure of winning? Sunzi knew it two-and-a-half thousand years ago. You’ve still got a lot to learn.’ She dropped a file on his desk. ‘That’s the stuff Dai dug up on the Black Rain girl. I’d better go and see if I can achieve a little damage limitation here so that we can get this investigation back on track.’ Her superiority made Li feel like he had been petulant and immature.

She left him sitting pulling contemplatively on his cigarette and feeling homesick for the icy winds from the Gobi Desert that would be blowing now through the streets of Beijing. Outside, the rain had started again. He hated this city, he decided. He did not feel like he was in China. It was some strange hybrid that owed more to the influence of the West than the East. He was uncertain of his footsteps here, for he did not know where it was safe to walk. And he hated the rain. He missed the bright, sharp, cold winter days in Beijing. He missed the sun, even when you couldn’t feel its warmth.

Slowly a sense of defeat began to descend upon him. Gentle at first, but increasing in weight, until it was crushing. All the conflicting facts and contradictory evidence filled his thoughts. Nineteen women, cut open by a skilled surgeon who had gone to great lengths to keep them alive, only to kill them by cutting out their still-beating hearts. Nineteen women who had all had the beginnings of life scraped from their wombs. Was that why they had been selected? Was it some kind of twisted revenge exacted by an avenging surgeon on women who had killed their unborn children? And what had he done with their organs? Sold them as recompense, as an atonement for their sins?

He thought of the creepy medical student who cut people up for fun, who had worked part-time on the building site and had more than ample opportunity to bury the bodies there.

He thought of Cui Feng in whose clinics most of the victims had probably had their abortions. He thought about the man’s mercenary views on health care, of his status and influence in the upper echelons of power, of the fact that he had been put ‘off-limits’ by Li’s own bosses.

He thought of Director Hu and his concern for the impact of the murders on inward investment to the city.

And he wondered how many people really cared about all those poor women whose lives had been so clinically taken. And, of course, he knew exactly who cared. He remembered the thin-faced tailor at his table in a back alley, and his anguish in identifying his dead wife. He remembered the sullen boyfriend of the opera singer, and his silent, surprising tears. He remembered Sun Jie seeking solace in the arms of Buddha in a smoky temple, and the tears he had spilled in a dressing room, remembering the fight he had had with his wife over the decision to abort their second child. And all those others out there who did not yet know that their lover, or their daughter, or their mother, had been butchered and dumped in a hole in the ground.

Worse than all that, Li felt the force of his own ineffectiveness. For all the evidence accumulated, there had not been a single step forward. In almost a week he had discovered nothing that gave him a clue as to the identity of the killer, or the motive for the slaughter. He had made enemies of his superiors, and had singularly failed to achieve the one thing Director Hu had asked him to do — bring the investigation to a quick conclusion. And there was nothing on the horizon that led him to believe that the end was anywhere in sight.

He had also failed himself. He had allowed personal feelings, conflicting emotions about Mei-Ling and Margaret, to distract him from his professional obligations. And he had failed to do the only thing he had ever sought to do — to make a difference. It was why he had wanted to join the police all those years ago. He had seen it as a means of reinforcing his own very powerful sense of right and wrong, of fairness and justice. He knew he could never bring fairness to the lives of those poor dead women, but now he was failing to deliver them justice as well.

He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another, feeling himself sliding into the slough of despond. He let his eyes wander across the mess of papers on his desk, until they came to rest on a cardboard box sitting on the floor against the wall. It was the box the caretaker at the Xujiahui apartments had given him of Chai Rui’s belongings. He had dumped it in his office the night before and not yet had a chance to go through it. He leaned over and lifted it on to the desk, sifting idly through its meagre contents. Some cheap jewellery, a diary without a single entry, bottles of perfume and nail varnish remover, the miscellaneous contents of a bathroom cabinet, a hairbrush with strands of her hair still caught in it. He teased the hair out through his fingers and smelled her perfume on it. For family, friends, perhaps lovers, that scent would spark memories, half-remembered moments from a life cut so short. Twenty-two years old. Li looked at the contents of the box and thought how little they were to show for a life.

Face down at the bottom of the box was a dog-eared photograph. He lifted it out. Chai Rui was grinning gauchely at the camera. It was a cheap print, and the colours were too strong. He remembered the body parts laid out on the autopsy table ten months earlier. All life and animation long gone. Standing beside her, an arm around her shoulder, was a Western man, considerably older. He had a head of thick dark hair starting to go grey, and there was a warmth in his smile. Li wondered briefly if he might have been a customer. But there was something more intimate in the body language. Had he been a lover? He stared at the picture for a long time, held by the eyes that gazed out at him from the cracked glaze of the print, and felt terribly sad. If he could not make a difference, what was the point?

He dropped the photograph back in the box and pushed it away. He wondered what had happened to Chai Rui’s little girl. If she hadn’t taken her with her to Beijing, then someone, somewhere, must surely still be looking after her. He remembered the file on her that Mei-Ling had retrieved from Dai, and he lifted it towards him and opened it up. Immediately he was disappointed. There was very little in here. Some official records, copies of birth certificates, death certificates, school documents, a medical report. Chai Rui had been the only child of Chau Ye and Elizabeth Rawley, an American who had lived in Shanghai since the early eighties. So Margaret had been wrong about the Japanese genetic heritage. Statistics did not always lead you to the right conclusion. He shuffled through the remaining documents. Just about the time she had left school her parents had been killed in a car crash, and she had simply vanished off the official record, swallowed up into the anonymity of what the authorities called the ‘floating population’. This ever-expanding section of Chinese society, created by growing unemployment and the collapse of the state-owned enterprises, was a breeding ground for crime and corruption, where drug abuse and prostitution flourished and festered. It was, inevitably, where Chai Rui had slipped into addiction and sexual abuse.

And yet here was another contradiction. She had lived in an expensive apartment, paid cash for costly dental work, been able to afford a babysitter for her child. It did not fit with everything else they knew about her. Li wondered again what had happened to the child, and the thought led him to his own problem of Xinxin and her future. It was no life for her, stuck in a hotel room with a babysitter, moved around from one kindergarten to another, never knowing where to call home or who would come through the door at night. It was a problem he knew he would have to deal with as soon as this case was over. If this case would ever be over.

III

Xinxin’s shrieks of pleasure split the air and echoed around the park. Her knuckles glowed white as she gripped the tiny steering wheel on the little red, plastic car and pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The car sailed through a red light at a cross junction, narrowly missing a small boy on a blue motorbike and sidecar. Margaret, almost helpless with laughter, tried to explain to Xinxin that running red lights was not the object of the exercise. But communication that sophisticated was not possible. And, anyway, there was no real danger. Margaret could have climbed out of the car and walked faster. Xinxin was in seventh heaven, her bunches bouncing around on either side of her head, her face a picture of concentration and happiness. She flew round a roundabout the wrong way and her laughter pealed out again in the misty afternoon. She stole a glance at Margaret, and something about the mischief in those dark eyes led Margaret to believe that Xinxin knew only too well which way she was supposed to go round the roundabout, and that you were meant to stop at red lights.

They passed under a bridge, and an elderly couple sitting on a bench at the side of the miniature road waved, laughing at the sight of the little Chinese girl shrieking like a banshee and the blue-eyed foreign devil with the blonde hair squeezed into the tiny car beside her. They passed a yellow car coming in the opposite direction, a proud father smiling fondly as his son took evasive action to avoid a head-on collision with Xinxin.

The streets were bordered by narrow, paved sidewalks, and cut through large grassy areas planted with trees and neatly manicured shrubs and hedges. At intervals, there were five- and six-foot replicas of landmark buildings in Shanghai including, Margaret noticed as they whizzed past it, a model of the Peace Hotel, with its distinctive green copper roof rising to a point. In one corner of the park children played on chutes and swings under the watchful eyes of adoring parents. In another, dads and sons, and moms and daughters, pedalled tiny carriages around an overhead monorail. Beyond the fence that marked the boundary of the Tiantan Traffic Park, skyscrapers and tower blocks rose pale and colourless into a burned out sky. Somewhere above the mist, the sun was trying to push its way through, and it was sticky warm.

They swung around again past the entrance gate, where three-foot models of Goofy and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Pinocchio caused Xinxin no end of amusement. She gazed at them in delight as they passed, and Margaret had to grab the wheel to prevent them from mounting the sidewalk. They passed stone statues of a boy reclining and a girl dancing, and Xinxin swung them back into the main drag that bisected the park. She showed remarkable control of the tiny vehicle, and Margaret thought she would have no trouble getting a job as a taxi-driver in Beijing. They took a left, heading towards the open shed where the toy cars and motorbikes were collected and returned, then right again, past an area under construction. A workmen’s grey van was parked there beside a mechanical digger. Xinxin made another round of the park, and Margaret just sat back and enjoyed the ride. She had not felt this relaxed or this happy in a long time. She felt nothing but warmth and affection for little Xinxin. The only cloud on her happiness was a distant ache somewhere inside for a child of her own, and a sense of loss over the child she might once have borne.

They went around for a fourth time, and as they turned right at the gate and along the top end, Margaret made Xinxin stop outside the toilet block. She made it clear to the child that she was to wait there with the car. Margaret would only be a moment. Xinxin nodded vigorously and watched as Margaret hurried up the path and into the ladies’ washroom. She could have been no more than two minutes, but when she came out Xinxin was gone. Margaret cursed. She was sure the child had understood that she was not to move. She looked left and right and saw a green car and a yellow one, and a blue three-wheeled motorbike negotiating the roundabout at the far end of the main street. Several of the green benches along the sidewalks were occupied by elderly people, or students with their heads buried in books. She could hear the shriek and laughter of children and a babble of adult voices from the play area at the far side of the park. Margaret could not have said what it was exactly, but there was something in the absolute normality of everything that started pushing panic buttons in her head. Everything was normal, except for the fact that Xinxin was nowhere to be seen.

Margaret called out her name. Once, twice. And then she positively yelled it. Heads turned in her direction, and she started running along the main street, looking left and right for the little red car and Xinxin with her familiar pink dress and hair in bunches. She stopped at the first roundabout as the workers’ grey van she had seen earlier cruised slowly past her towards the exit. And then she saw the car. It was sitting at an angle in the middle of a parallel street about fifty metres away, next to the area under development Margaret sprinted towards it, calling Xinxin’s name again. The car was empty. It had about it a sense of abandonment, the wheels turned hard left to full lock. The elderly couple she had noticed before were still sitting on their bench about twenty metres further down the road. She ran towards them. ‘What happened to the little girl? Did you see where the little girl went?’ she called breathlessly. They looked at her, a little alarmed, as if they thought she might be insane. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you speak English!’ The panic was rising now in her throat, constricting her breathing. The couple looked at her blankly. Margaret pointed back along the street to the abandoned car. They looked and then shook their heads, uncomprehending.

She gave up and ran back towards the collect and return point where they had picked up the car half an hour before. There was a small group of parents and children gathered around the office window paying for cars. And then Margaret saw Xinxin at the far side of the lot sitting on a yellow motor-bike. Her knees nearly folded under her with relief. ‘Xinxin!’ she shouted and ran towards the child. But Xinxin wasn’t paying her any attention, and as Margaret got close and called again the child turned, startled, and Margaret saw that it was not Xinxin after all. She had the same high-gathered bunches, but her dress was pale green. The little girl looked alarmed and began crying. The adults at the office window turned and glared in Margaret’s direction, and in her heart Margaret knew then that Xinxin was gone. ‘Oh, God,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, God, help me, please. Someone please help me.’

Rain wept from the sky like the tears that ran down Margaret’s cheeks. She sat stock still, staring into an abyss, a black hole that was her own personal hell. She was numb from the shock of it, choked still by disbelief. In two short minutes a child had vanished and her world had come to an end.

Police radios crackled somewhere nearby. Uniformed officers combed the park for clues. A line of mothers and fathers and children stood outside the gatehouse waiting to be interviewed. Shock and fear stole among the adults who knew that a child had gone and that it could so easily have been one of theirs. The comfort and security of their lives had been shattered. The Disney characters that stood clustered on the grassy bank just inside the gate seemed only to mock them now. In the street outside, a huge crowd was gathering as news spread through the shops and apartments in the surrounding streets. More than a dozen police vehicles were drawn up at the sidewalk, and already the traffic cops were arriving to take over crowd control. A fast food store on the other side of the tree-lined Zunyi Road, which advertised ‘Metro Sandwiches New York Style’, was doing brisk business.

There was a slightly hysterical pitch to Li’s voice as he barked commands at uniformed officers. He had been on the scene within twenty minutes of Margaret’s call. It was now an hour since Xinxin had gone missing. With the exception of a few terse questions, he had barely spoken to Margaret. She knew he blamed her. She blamed herself. You cannot leave a six-year-old child on its own anywhere, at any time.

And yet it had felt so safe here.

She reflected on how, finally, in near hysterics, she had found a middle-aged man who spoke a little English. The alarm had been raised, the police called, and word spread through the park that a child had vanished. Everyone, then, had started to search for Xinxin. The women at the gate had not seen her leave. They would have seen her for sure, they said. And yet she was nowhere to be found within the park.

A red-faced uniformed officer approached Li at a run. ‘There’s been a development, Boss, you’d better come to the gatehouse.’ Li followed him quickly to the small concrete building at the gate, green canopies shading door and windows. They passed the line of parents and kids, and ducked inside. Three undernourished-looking men stood smoking in the tiny office, engaged in animated discussion with another two uniformed officers. They were dressed in blue workmen’s overalls. They had dirty faces and big, callused workers’ hands. One of them was older, with thinning hair. The other two had thick untidy mops speckled with plaster dust. The older man spoke for them.

‘We just got here, Chief,’ he said nervously. ‘We didn’t know.’

‘Didn’t know what?’ The dark fear that lurked in Li’s heart was making him aggressive.

‘That the van was missing. The boss just sent us to get it.’

‘Hold on.’ Li put up a hand to stop him. ‘Start from the beginning. Who are you?’

‘We work for the parks department. On contract from the street committee. You know, sometimes they got work for us, sometimes they don’t. Anyway, we was here this morning, demolishing that old building on the far side of the park. We loaded up the lorry with the debris and drove it down to an in-fill site way over in Pudong. Two of us had come in the van, but we had to leave it here when we took the crap away. The boss just told us half an hour ago that we better go get it.’ He hawked a gob of phlegm into his throat and was about to spit it on the floor when he thought better of it and reluctantly swallowed instead. He dragged his sleeve across his brow to wipe away the sweat. ‘Anyway, we get here and the place is crawling with cops. Takes us ages to persuade that bossy big bastard out there to let us in to get the van. Eventually they let Mao Jun here in to fetch it.’ He nodded towards one of the younger men. ‘Only it’s not there.’

‘You mean someone’s taken it?’ Li asked.

The man shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘Well, I don’t figure it drove off all by itself.’

Li glanced quickly at the other uniforms in the office. ‘Anyone see it leave?’

One of them nodded. ‘The woman at the ticket desk said it went out not long before the alarm got raised about the kid.’ He pulled a face. ‘But she didn’t see who was driving it.’

Li turned back to the workers. ‘It couldn’t have been one of your people?’

‘Shit, no. There’s only us and the boss in our unit.’

‘What about keys?’

‘What about them?’

‘Well, was it locked?’

‘Naw, the keys was in the ignition,’ the man said. He shrugged again. ‘We didn’t figure there was any danger of the kids taking off in it.’

Li drew in a deep breath to steady himself as he tried to take in the implications of all this. A grim-faced Dai rapped sharply on the door and squeezed into the overcrowded office. ‘We’re getting reports of some foreign guy seen sprinting down Ziyun Road towards the Yan’an flyover a little over an hour ago, Chief. Several people saw him.’

‘Foreign?’ Li frowned. ‘What do you mean by foreign?’

Dai shrugged. ‘A Westerner. Dark-haired, wearing jeans and a pale-coloured jacket. That’s the best description we’ve got. He was running south down the middle of Ziyun Road. It was kind of unusual, you know, so people noticed. Apparently he was chasing after a light-grey van and actually caught up with it briefly at the junction, banging on the side of it, before it sped off up on to the overhead road. People said he stood for a long time in the middle of the street just breathing real hard. Then he stopped a taxi and got in, and it went off in the same direction as the van.’

Li put his hand to his forehead and pressed middle-finger and thumb into his pounding temples to try to alleviate the pain there so that he could think clearly. None of this was making much sense. If the van had been stolen at around the time Xinxin disappeared, did that mean someone had snatched her? And why? What possible reason could there be? He could barely address the thought for the fear it conjured in his mind. But what about the Westerner running down the middle of the road chasing the van? Was it connected? Was it even the same van? He turned to Dai. ‘See if we can match up the description of the van with the one that’s missing.’ He waved a hand at the workmen. ‘These guys might be able to tell us if there was something, anything, distinctive about it. And let’s see if we can find the taxi-driver who picked this guy up.’ He could see the despair etch itself on Dai’s face at the thought. There were more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand privately licensed taxis in Shanghai. He added, ‘Let’s get an appeal out on radio and television. Anyone who was in the area who might have seen anything, we want to talk to them.’

He found it no easier to breathe outside, and compounded his distress by lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. His legs were like jelly, his stomach had turned to water, and as the full realisation sank in that Xinxin had not just wandered off, that she might have been kidnapped, he felt fear, like bile, rising in his throat. The sign on the gate read: SPARETIME SCHOOL OF TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR CHILDREN. TRAFFIC OFFICE, SHANGHAI POLICE BUREAU. And even as he read it, the characters were blurred by his tears. He was not, he knew, the best person to lead this operation. Every thought, every judgement, was coloured by emotion.

He turned to see Margaret being led to a car by a policewoman. Her face was streaked black with mascara, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. She moved like an automaton, no emotion visible in her expression. Before she stooped to get into the car she turned and saw Li watching her. At that moment he felt something more than anger. It felt like hate. Somewhere, buried so deep inside him as not to make a difference, he knew perhaps that it wasn’t really her fault. But every conscious part of him blamed her. Every muscle and sinew strained to scream abuse and blame, to punch and slap and hurt her. She recoiled slightly, as if from a blow, almost as though his darkest thoughts had taken physical form. He made no move towards her, no sign. She got into the car with her misery, and he turned away as it drove off.

IV

Japanese warlords in period costume strutted about a stylised set gesturing wildly at each other, eyes staring and burning with a kind of madness. Chinese subtitles flashed on and off the screen, lines of tiny characters that could not possibly be read in the allotted time. The sound on the television was switched to mute, and its flickering luminescence was the only light in the room.

Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, close to a phone which had resolutely refused to ring all evening. In her hand she clutched a tumbler of whisky. She had worked her way through all the miniatures in the mini-bar, and was now on to the Scotch. But it didn’t seem to matter how much she drank, she couldn’t get drunk. Oblivion was all she sought, and yet it remained elusive, despite her best efforts.

Her mouth was dry, and the pain thumped in her head with every beat of her heart, each pulse a reminder of her guilt, of her shame, of her failure. Responsibility for a young life had been placed in her hands today and she had not lived up to her obligations. She was not fit to be a mother. She was not fit to live. She remembered once, during her time as an intern, losing a patient in the emergency room. A young woman, the victim of a knife attack. Margaret had been incapable of stopping the internal bleeding. It wasn’t her fault, but it had been a turning point in her life, a moment when she realised that no matter how well trained, no matter how experienced, control of that moment which ultimately decided between life and death was never really in your hands.

But today, Xinxin’s life had been in her hands. She had had absolute control and failed to exercise it. As a young doctor she had turned from the futility of trying to save the living, to the predictability of dissecting the dead. Now all she wanted to do was to give up life completely, her own life, and find some escape in the final embrace of death, her own death. But she was, she knew, too big a coward for that. And, besides, death would be too lenient a punishment.

She emptied her glass and stood up, crossing unsteadily to the window and drawing back the curtains. Saturday night. Nanjing Road was filled with people and traffic. She looked down at the crowd below her and wished that she were one of them, freed from the burden of guilt and fear for a child she had failed. But, then, who knew what pain other people carried in their heads, what private grief, what personal hell. She would not be the only person suffering in the world tonight. But that knowledge did nothing to take away the pain.

She was haunted by the look in Li’s eyes as she got into the car outside the park. She had never felt such a searing look, so filled with hurt and darkness and hate. It had reached inside her and burned itself into her soul, and it was smouldering there still.

Now she turned away from the window and the thought, fumbling in the dark to the mini-bar. But she had finished all the little bottles, and they rattled emptily away from her clutching fingers. She wondered if maybe Jack would be in the bar looking for her. He must have heard the news by now. There had been appeals on radio and television all night. He was, perhaps, the only person in Shanghai who might not blame her for what had happened. But she was not sure she deserved that. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and thought for a moment she was looking at an apparition. There was a deathly pallor in her face, eyes sunken and ringed with dark smudges, and for the first time in her life she saw herself looking like her grandmother. Her father’s mother. She had never before seen the resemblance, and for one brief alcoholic moment she had actually believed she was her grandmother’s ghost. She let out a tiny, involuntary cry and looked quickly away. She lifted her key card and hurried out into the brightly lit hall.

Jack was not in the bar. As usual it was deserted. Margaret slipped stiffly on to a barstool and ordered a vodka tonic. And she knew there would be no sympathy or redemption for her tonight as Xinxin’s face swam up with the bubbles through the tonic to feed her worst fears of what had become of the child.

The yellow light of the streetlamps on the overhead road fell into Li’s bedroom through nicotine-stained net curtains. The headlamps of vehicles on the road raked the window at irregular intervals, and a blue neon light flashed intermittently somewhere close by. He had placed the phone on the table next to his chair. It was nearly midnight. He had not slept for nearly forty hours. His eyes were on fire, and there was a dull ache behind them. The room was full of smoke, and his ashtray filled to overflowing. All the radio and television appeals had turned up nothing new, and he had finally left 803 an hour ago at the insistence of the detectives on night shift. They promised to call the moment they had anything fresh.

In the hours after Xinxin had vanished, he had played out every nightmare scenario in his mind until he had become so numbed that nothing seemed to affect him any more. He had been over and over every last detail, examined and re-examined the statements of everyone questioned at the park. None of it had brought him any closer to an understanding of what had happened or why. Someone, clearly, had grabbed the child and made off with her in the stolen workmen’s van. Minutes later, a Westerner had been seen chasing that same van down a nearby street, banging on its side. They had neither found the van nor made any progress in identifying the Westerner. And Li was simply no longer able to think clearly.

He sat in the silence smoking cigarette after cigarette, concentrating hard on trying to keep the nightmares at bay.

A knock at the door startled him. He jumped up and hurried across the room to open it. Mei-Ling was in the hall, holding a carrier bag with steam rising from it, the smell of food carried in the vapour. ‘My dad got them to prepare you some stuff at the restaurant.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’ve got to eat, Li Yan.’ She pushed gently past him and closed the door. She laid the bag on the table and started taking out dishes of food in cardboard cartons, and placed two cans of beer beside them. She paused then and looked at his swollen eyes as he stood, hangdog, in the middle of the room, like a man in a trance. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. His eyes were glazed and gazing off into some unimaginable middle-distance. But he acknowledged her with the slightest nod of his head. ‘The food’s there if you want it. You know where I am if you need to call me.’

She stopped to squeeze his hand, and then turned towards the door, but he grabbed her arm and held her fast. He was still unable to meet her eyes. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, and she turned back, and after only a moment’s hesitation slipped her arms about his waist and pushed her head into his chest so that he could rest his head on hers. His arms enveloped her, and she felt rather than heard his sobs.

They were standing in a building site, not unlike the one in Lujiazui where they had found the bodies of the eighteen women. The broken stumps of an abandoned concrete foundation stuck out of the ground like bad teeth. The whole site was awash with mud. Only, the mud was frozen solid. Every attempt to break it with shovel and pick had failed. Now a big man with a yellow hard hat was wielding a pneumatic drill, and freeing chunks of frozen mud from around a central post with a plank of wood strapped across it like a Christian cross. The letter had said she would be here, under the mud, a temporary grave beneath the sign of a foreign religion.

From between the splintering wedges of mud, a little arm flopped out, pink and cold, the hand open, palm up. And as the man in the hard hat began to drill afresh, Li screamed at him to stop. One of the fingers had moved. But the workman couldn’t hear him, and he drilled on. Long piercing bursts of vibrating metal on ice, right into the heart of the little girl beneath the mud.

Li woke, still yelling, and with the sound of the phone filling the room. He was lying on top of the bed, fully dressed, sunlight streaming in through the open window along with the roar of the traffic on Yan’an Viaduct Road. Mei-Ling was crossing the room to answer the phone. He was immediately aware of the warm impression she had left in the bed beside him. So she had stayed all night. He took a deep breath and felt the phlegm of too many cigarettes crackle in his chest. He could not believe he had slept. Last night it had felt possible that he might never sleep again.

He became aware of Mei-Ling’s voice. ‘When was this?’ she was saying into the phone. ‘And have they recovered the van?’ A moment as she listened, then, ‘Well, I hope the uniforms didn’t touch anything before forensics got there … Good. We’ll be straight over.’ She hung up and turned to Li, clearly energised. ‘They found the van.’ He sat up, rubbing his face and trying to clear the sleep from his mind. She said, ‘But even better … the guy who took it? They think they’ve got him on video tape.’

The flashing red light on the dash on Mei-Ling’s Santana created a strobing effect in the car. Her siren wailed through the early morning quiet of this Shanghai Sunday. The streets were almost deserted. The city was just waking up. Margaret sat dazed in the back of the car, her head thick and sore, a foul taste in her mouth after several bouts of vomiting during the night. She hoped she was not going to be sick again. The strobe effect of the red light was not helping.

She had been shocked by Li’s appearance when he turned up at her hotel. His eyes red and puffy, his cheeks pale and blotched. And he had been taken aback by her appearance, too. But she had not had the courage to look in a mirror. There had been developments, he had said. She was needed, in case she could make an identification. He had not told her anything further, except that they were going to the Police Command Centre to view video tapes. And now she sat in the silence of the car, afraid to ask what the developments were. Mei-Ling had not even acknowledged her, and Li had not spoken since they left the hotel.

The Command Centre was in a fourteen-storey tower block on the corner of Jianguo Road and Ruijin Road next to Ruijin Hospital. Mei-Ling showed her pass at the gatehouse, and the gates swung open to admit them to a car park bounded by palm trees and potted plants. They ran up steps to the main entrance and took the elevator to the third floor. The Deputy Commander was waiting to meet them in the hall. They shook hands and he led them through glass doors to the operations room. Rows of desks lined with computer terminals faced fifteen giant projection video screens on the far wall. They were flanked on each side by eight smaller television screens which flickered at regular intervals from street scene to street scene, fed by cameras mounted at key vantage points all over Shanghai. Beneath the screens, facing back into the room, were eight uniformed officers sitting at terminals taking one-one-oh police emergency calls. At another desk running the full width of the room, banks of coloured phones were linked to rows of fax machines that chattered and printed out screeds of information coming in from police stations around the city. At the back of the room sat the controllers, who evaluated all incoming information and determined what pictures were relayed on to the big screens.

The Deputy Commander introduced them to a grim-faced middle-aged man in a green uniform buttoned up to the neck who sat at the centre of the back row, a bank of knobs and switches and sliders in front of him, a microphone on a flexible gooseneck projecting towards him from his console. ‘Officer Su is the senior duty controller,’ he said. And to Su, ‘Do you want to take them through it?’

Su nodded and addressed himself to Li. ‘Mid-afternoon yesterday we had a serious road accident at the Zhongshan-Wuyi intersection, just where the slip road feeds down to the Hu Xi Stadium. A lorry swerved to avoid a cyclist, hit the kerb and overturned, spilling its load of timber all over the roadway. Several private vehicles were unable to stop and there was a multiple pile-up.’

Margaret had no idea what he was saying, and Li seemed none the wiser. He said, ‘What’s this got to do with the little girl being snatched at the traffic park?’

Su said, ‘We have a camera on that intersection. Normally we only record from these cameras in the event of an incident. So in this case we have more than an hour of recorded tape of the intersection following the accident.’ He reached for a pack of cigarettes on the desk and offered them around. When no one took him up on his offer, he lit up himself. ‘One of my people was monitoring all incoming information following events at the Tiantan Traffic Park yesterday. In the early hours of this morning he had an idea. It was quiet, and he had nothing much else to do. So he ran the tape of the Zhongshan — Wuyi intersection. It’s less than half a mile from the park, and eyewitnesses had reported seeing the grey van heading north, in the direction of the stadium. That was about half an hour after the accident. He figured there was a good chance we might have caught the van on tape.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘Turned out we caught a lot more than that.’

He leaned forward and threw some switches. Nine of the fifteen projection screens, which had been displaying a map detail of a northern city suburb, switched to one giant black-and-white projection of the tape of the Zhongshan — Wuyi intersection which Su had set to play. The lorry was lying at an angle on one side. Timber was still strewn all over the road. Four private cars with varying degrees of damage had been abandoned in the middle of the carriageway while their owners shouted and gesticulated, clearly attempting to deflect or apportion blame. Traffic cops were already coning off the slip road and a couple of recovery vehicles were parked half on the hard shoulder, hazard lights flashing.

The little group at the back of the control room stood watching the screen expectantly. The picture, blown up to that size, was blurred. Su leaned forward and said, ‘Watch the screen at the top right.’ The portion of the picture it carried showed the Wuyi Road intersection, with the stadium rising in the background, almost in the shadow of the overhead road. There were vehicles parked all along one side of it, and traffic was backing up from the slip road. ‘There,’ Su said suddenly, pointing. ‘You see it?’ And they saw a light-coloured workmen’s van pull out of the stream of traffic going in the opposite direction, and draw into the side of the road. Su stopped the tape then, flicked another couple of switches, and the picture from the top right screen filled the others. The definition was very poor, but they could clearly see the figure of a man jump down from the driver’s seat and slide open the side door. He leaned in quickly and lifted out a small limp bundle wrapped in some kind of blanket or tarpaulin. As he carried it to the car parked behind, a little arm fell free, momentarily hanging in the air, just as in Li’s nightmare. The man quickly covered it, and dumped the bundle into the trunk of the car.

A slight moan escaped Li’s lips in a breath. ‘It’s Xinxin,’ he whispered.

Until that moment, the man had always had his back to camera. Now, as he turned to get into the driver’s door, they saw his face for the first time. The picture was indistinct and very grainy, but it was still possible to make out his flat, high-cheekboned Mongolian features, his long, straggly hair, and the distortion about his mouth that might have been a scar.

Margaret let out a cry that sounded like pain, and they all turned to look at her. Her face was a mask of fear. Her breathing was so rapid and shallow that she could hardly speak.

‘What is it?’ Li said urgently. ‘Do you recognise him? Was he in the park?’

‘I know him,’ she gasped. ‘But not from the park. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, if only I’d known.’

Li grabbed her shoulders and almost shook her. ‘Where have you seen him, Margaret?’

She forced herself to meet his eyes. ‘The night we were going to have dinner and I fell asleep in my room … After I phoned you, it must have been three in the morning or later, I went out to get some air. I went for a walk along the promenade on the Bund.’ She pointed towards the screen. The controller had frozen the picture on the face. ‘He was following me. He was close enough to touch me at one point, near the underpass. I saw his face clearly in the light. I got such a fright, I just ran.’

‘You never said anything? Why didn’t you tell me?’

She shrugged hopelessly. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think it was important. A stupid woman getting freaked because she saw a man with a hare-lip in the middle of the night.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head in despair. ‘But I saw him again. At the time I thought it wasn’t possible, that I must have imagined it. It was only a fleeting glimpse.’

‘Where, Margaret? Where did you see him?’ Li’s voice was insistent and commanding.

‘In Beijing,’ she said. ‘At the airport. When I was coming back with Xinxin.’

There was a moment of stunned disbelief, and then Mei-Ling said, ‘Did you say he had a hare-lip?’ Margaret nodded. Mei-Ling turned to Li. ‘Li Yan, you remember the description Sun Jie gave us of the man his wife said was following her?’ And Li remembered every detail of that moment, from the sadness on Sun Jie’s face to the very words he had used to recall his wife’s description. She said he looked like a Mongolian, and he had a real ugly scar on his upper lip, he had said. She thought it could have been a hare-lip.

V

Margaret had spent more than an hour with the police artist at 803. A computer-enhanced print of the Mongolian’s face had been taken from the video. But it was still blurred and lacking definition. Margaret had provided the detail for the artist to give it the definition required to make it recognisable. She looked now at the finished graphic on the sheet of paper that trembled in her hand. It was eerily like the face that had confronted her that night on the Bund. There was something in the eyes that was as chilling now as it had been then. The fact that this was the man who had snatched Xinxin did not even bear thinking about.

‘Is it okay?’ Mei-Ling asked. Margaret looked up at her and nodded. Mei-Ling took the sheet from her. ‘I’ll get it copied and circulated.’ She left the office, and Li and Margaret were alone for the first time since Xinxin had been kidnapped.

Li could hardly bring himself to look at her. He remembered, with a sense of shame now, the hatred and blame that had consumed him yesterday afternoon and through the night. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at length.

She looked surprised. ‘What for?’

‘For blaming you.’

She shook her head. ‘It was my fault.’

‘No.’ He moved around the desk towards her. ‘I don’t understand it all,’ he said, ‘but this was no random kidnapping. The hare-lip guy was following you. All the way to Beijing. Just like he followed the acrobat, just like he probably followed all the others. If he hadn’t got Xinxin in the park, he would have got her some other place, some other time.’ He clenched his fists and let out a howl of frustration. ‘Why? Why Xinxin? What could they possibly want with her?’ And he immediately flinched from the answer that came to him.

Margaret took his hand. ‘We’ll find her, Li Yan. We will.’

He looked at her, dry eyes all cried out, and they embraced, holding tight for comfort, for hope. Somehow everything was linked. There had to be an answer, and there had to be a way to find it.

The door opened, and Mei-Ling stopped briefly in the doorway as Li and Margaret broke apart, then she stepped into the room. Her face gave no clue as to her feelings. She said in Chinese, ‘Forensics have found several hairs in the back of the van. We need some of Xinxin’s for comparison so that we can confirm it really was her we saw on the tape.’

Li thought for a moment. ‘Her hair brush,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be some caught in it. It’s in her hotel room.’ Mei-Ling nodded and went without another word.

‘What was that about?’ Margaret asked.

‘Checking samples of Xinxin’s hair against hair found in the van.’

It was routine. It was the kind of thing they had both been involved in many times as a matter of course. But this was Xinxin’s hair, and the picture it conjured up of her tiny prone body wrapped in a blanket and lying on the floor of a battered old van, was almost too painful to contemplate. Margaret wondered briefly how she had been sedated. Something quick. Chloroform on a handkerchief? Whatever it was, if the Mongolian had really snatched all these other women, he would be well practised in its use.

Li lit a cigarette. Not because he had any desire for one — he had smoked till he was sick of smoking — but simply for something to do, a mechanical act, a routine to cling to. Margaret went to open a window. The air in the office was already sour with stale smoke. She turned back from the window and saw the box of Chai Rui’s possessions sitting on Li’s desk. The photograph which Li had dug out from the bottom of it was lying on top. For a moment it seemed to Margaret that her heart had stopped. In a very small voice she asked, ‘Who’s that in the photograph?’

Li, distracted by other thoughts, glanced at the box. ‘Chai Rui,’ he said. ‘She’s the one whose body you re-examined in Beijing. That’s the stuff that was left in her apartment in Shanghai.’

‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered, and Li looked at her, suddenly alarmed.

‘What is it?’

‘The guy in the picture with her …’

Li frowned. ‘You know him?’

‘His name’s Jack Geller.’ Her thoughts were awash with confusion.

‘Who the hell is Jack Geller?’ Li asked, incredulous that Margaret should know him.

‘He’s an American journalist,’ she said. ‘He’s been haunting me since I arrived in Shanghai, looking for an inside line on this story.’

‘In the name of the sky, Margaret, why didn’t you tell me?’ Li’s voice was filled with accusation.

‘It didn’t seem important,’ she said. ‘I never told him anything.’ And she gave Li a look. ‘And anyway, you were busy with Mei-Ling.’ The words were barely out of her mouth before she was hit by a sudden realisation. ‘Oh, Jesus …’ She looked at Li, horrified by the implications. ‘It was Jack who told me about the Tiantan Traffic Park.’

Li glared at Margaret in disbelief for some seconds. ‘Then he’s got to be involved,’ he said finally. ‘Have you any idea where we can find him?’

‘No, I …’ She paused. She had been going to say she had no idea. He had always sought her out. But she remembered then that first meeting in the airport. It felt like a very long time ago. He had handed her a dog-eared business card. At first she had refused to take it, but he had insisted. You never know when you might want to give me a call, he had said. And Margaret had told him she couldn’t imagine a single circumstance when she would. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined this. She searched quickly in her purse, and there it was. JACK GELLER Freelance Journalist. It listed his address, and home and mobile numbers. Li snatched it from her.

Geller’s apartment was on the eighteenth floor of a modern tower block in Xinzha Road, a few minutes north of the Shanghai Centre. Dozens of other blocks sprang out of the squat, two-storey workers’ housing that spread in every direction around them in narrow, treeless streets. The uniformed security officer in Geller’s block took a long time examining the search warrant Li handed him. The ink from the Municipal Procuratorate was barely dry on it. He glanced uneasily at Margaret, and then at Dai and Mei-Ling and the two detectives who accompanied them. Weapons, signed out from the armoury at 803 only fifteen minutes earlier by Section Chief Huang, bulged visibly in their holsters beneath loose-fitting jackets. Only Li and Margaret were unarmed. ‘Okay,’ he said at length. ‘I’ll let you in.’

They rode up in the elevator to the eighteenth floor in tense silence. On the landing a curved panorama of windows gave out on to a spectacular view of the city below. A little sunshine was forcing its way through the mist, cutting sharp shadows down the sides of buildings. Cranes rising along the river bank were just visible in the far distance. At the door of Geller’s apartment, the detectives drew their pistols and stood either side of it ready to enter. Li and Margaret stood a little further down the hall. The security guard, now very nervous, quickly unlocked the door and stepped back. The detectives were also nervous. Mei-Ling nodded, and they burst in, the first two fanning off to the sides, the second two covering the middle. They yelled at the tops of their voices as they entered. Margaret had no idea what they were shouting. But the screaming didn’t stop as they moved from room to room in a rehearsed pattern. Doors banged and feet slammed down on polished wooden floors.

Margaret followed Li into an entrance hall. They could hear the armed detectives in a room further along it. A door opened into an L-shaped living room. It was very spartan. Two patterned settees sat in the middle of the floor. A large coffee table strewn with papers and empty coffee mugs stood between them. A single dining chair was pushed against a naked white wall next to an electric point, a coffee maker sitting at an angle on the woven seat. Some framed pictures leaned against the far wall waiting to be hung. There was an antique dresser on the opposite wall, but its shelves were bare. Beige curtains hung from floor to ceiling on either side of sliding glass doors that led to a balcony. It felt like a house that someone was either moving out of or moving into.

Margaret suddenly became aware that a silence had descended on the apartment. Then a single voice called out. It was Mei-Ling. Li grabbed Margaret’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said, and they hurried down the hall, past a door that lay open to reveal a study with a cluttered desk and a desktop computer on a tubular stand. A glass door gave on to a modern kitchen that looked pristine and unused, except for a bucket full of empty beer bottles in the middle of the floor. The detectives had left the bathroom door lying open. A damp towel hung over the shower cabinet, a pair of pyjamas hung from hooks on the tiled wall above the toilet. Dirty underwear lay strewn on the floor. Everywhere the white walls were naked, undressed. And although the air was warm, the apartment felt cold. It did not seem to fit with the Jack Geller that Margaret knew. And she realised that, of course, she really knew nothing about him at all. There was an impermanence about the place that made her think he had not so much been living here as camping out. She felt sick. It was beyond both imagination and comprehension to think that he might have had something to do either with the kidnapping of Xinxin or the murder of all those women. Or both.

At the end of the hall they entered the bedroom. There was an outer dressing room with a settee and a television set on a table. In the main part of the bedroom the bed was unmade beneath a large wall tapestry. Mei-Ling and the other three detectives stood in the archway between the two rooms, blocking out the view of the window. Li and Margaret pushed through and stopped dead. Margaret gasped in horror. Geller was kneeling in front of the sliding glass doors that gave out on to the balcony, facing back into the room. His arms were raised above his head in grotesque parody of a crucified man, pulled to each side by cord tied to either end of the curtain rod. Although he was silhouetted against the city spread out below, she saw immediately that he was naked. There was a ten-inch wound drawn horizontally across his belly from which his small intestine hung in a shiny mass of pale tan distended loops. There was a large pool of sticky blood on the floor at his knees. It was still dripping from his crotch and trickling slowly down his thighs. His head was tipped forward. Margaret knew he was alive because he was still bleeding, but he appeared to be unconscious.

‘For Chrissake, will someone call an ambulance,’ she said. And she moved quickly to the window to try to untie the cord that held him. But it was knotted tight, his weight dragging against it. She heard one of the detectives talking rapidly on his mobile. ‘Someone got a knife? We’ve got to cut him down.’ The desperation she felt was compounded by the knowledge that he was almost certainly going to die. He had lost a huge amount of blood, and his system was probably already fevered by bacterial infection from the intestine.

She was almost shocked when he lifted his head, and she found herself looking into his glassy eyes. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Leave me.’

‘Jack, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.’

An almost imperceptible shake of the head. ‘Too late.’

She knelt on the floor in front of him and felt his blood soaking into her jeans. She put her arms around his chest and strained to lift him slightly to take the weight off his arms. Li cut the cord, and then helped her lay him on the floor. ‘Something for his head,’ she said sharply. And Mei-Ling hurried to get a cushion from the settee in the dressing room. Margaret slipped it under his neck to support his head.

‘There’s an ambulance on the way,’ Dai said.

Geller was shivering now, a cold sweat gathering in the creases of a forehead furrowed by pain. ‘Who did this to you, Jack?’ Margaret asked softly.

He gazed up at her like a mournful dog desperate for forgiveness from an angry master. ‘I’ve been following you,’ he said. He swallowed with difficulty. ‘I was there at the park … Other side of the fence.’ He swallowed again. ‘I saw him grab her, but I couldn’t … couldn’t …’ His breathing was becoming laboured. ‘Chased the van. Nearly got him.’

Margaret held his hand. It was as cold as ice. ‘Did he do this to you?’

Geller nodded. ‘Saw me.’

And Margaret realised that if the Mongolian had been following her, he must have known who Jack was. She could have wept then. Jack had nothing to do with the kidnapping of Xinxin. He had tried to save her. But, still, none of it made sense. ‘Why were you following me, Jack?’

He tried to smile. ‘You wouldn’t help me … Had to know.’

‘Know what?’ She glanced at Li for some help in understanding this. But he just shook his head helplessly. She turned back to Geller and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of her hand. ‘We found a photograph of you with one of the dead girls.’ And whatever agony he had suffered up until then intensified. He screwed up his eyes and let out a small cry of pain. After a moment he opened them again and she saw that they were wet with tears.

‘Chai Rui?’ he said. Margaret nodded. He swallowed hard. ‘She was my little sister.’ And he started sobbing. ‘Mom and my stepdad were in a … a road accident … He died straight off … she lasted a few days. That’s when I came back from the States …’ He was fighting now for his breath. ‘Last thing she made me promise … was to look after Cherry.’ He shook his head. ‘Really fucked up, didn’t I?’

Li said, ‘Ask him what happened to her little girl.’

Geller’s eyes flicked up towards him. ‘With friends,’ he managed to say.

‘Oh, Jack,’ Margaret said, ‘why didn’t you just tell me all this?’

‘Scared,’ he said. ‘Thought she might be one of them … Missing all that time.’ The tears ran from the corners of his eyes down each side of his head. ‘Didn’t want it to be true.’ And his body was racked by sobbing. ‘Poor Cherry.’ And he stopped suddenly and opened his eyes and stared straight into Margaret’s. ‘You get them,’ he said. ‘Whoever it was … you get them.’

Margaret’s own tears dragged like hot wires down her cheeks. ‘I’ll get them,’ she said. And she looked up at Li. ‘We’ll get them.’ Li nodded grimly, and by the time she looked back at Jack he was dead.

And she knelt there in his blood and wept for him. Poor Jack. She remembered their first encounter at the airport, his story about the racecourse, his juvenile amusement at the LONG DONG GARDEN. She remembered their drinks at the bar in the Peace Hotel. He had been amusing, attractive. Did anyone ever tell you you’re very attractive for someone who cuts up people for a living? he had asked her. And now he lay dead on the floor, disembowelled because he had tried to save a little girl’s life, because he had wanted to know what had become of his little sister. And he had died with grief in his heart, and guilt for having failed his mother.

In the distance Margaret heard the siren of the ambulance, and Li helped her gently to her feet.