The Killing Room

I

They had their meeting in the room with the skulls. Sightless eyes watched them from glass shelves, and their eternal silence contributed to the hush that filled the room. Almost the entire department was squeezed in. Standing-room only. Huang stood by the door, his face the colour of the yellowed remains in the display cabinets. Mei-Ling had whispered to Li as they entered that his wife was not expected to see out the day. Smoke from dozens of cigarettes hung over the table like a shroud. All eyes were on Li. He saw in them curiosity, sympathy, pity, and it was all he could do to keep his voice from cracking.

In slow, measured sentences, he described the discovery of Jack Geller in the apartment in Jingan District, and Geller’s dying identification of Xinxin’s kidnapper as his killer. Eyes flickered down to the dozens of images of the Mongolian that were scattered around the table. The Mongolian, Li said, was also suspected of stalking, and perhaps abducting, one of the eighteen women found in the mass grave at Lujiazui. He had also been stalking the American pathologist, Margaret Campbell.

He took another moment to collect himself. ‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ he said, ‘that the murders of the eighteen women in Shanghai, the one in Beijing, and the abduction of my niece, are inextricably linked.’ The implications of Li’s simple statement went through the mind of every detective in the room, and their silence so filled it that it seemed to expel all oxygen. Someone at the back opened a window. ‘So,’ Li said, ‘does anyone have any ideas?’

Dai cleared his throat and everyone looked at him expectantly. He blushed. ‘I got a confession, Chief,’ he said. ‘Remember you asked me to check through all those files of missing girls to see if any of them had a nickname that matched the one on that bracelet we found at Jiang’s place?’

Li inclined his head slightly. ‘I remember.’

‘Well, I delegated. You know, we all had so much on our plates, I was still tracking down the Zhang family from Jiang’s home town … I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘What’s your point, Dai?’ Li asked impatiently.

Dai glanced at another, younger officer across the table. ‘You want to tell him, Qian?’

The young detective remained composed. He nodded and looked at Li. ‘I found a match this morning,’ he said. He opened up a file on the table in front of him. ‘A girl called Ji Li Rong. She was a second-year student at Jiaotong University. Disappeared about nine months ago. Everyone called her Moon. I spoke to her parents. It was her father who first called her that because when she was a baby her face was round like the moon.’

‘Did you show him the bracelet?’ Li asked.

Qian nodded. ‘It was hers all right.’

It was the smallest chink of light in a dark place, but to Li, after so long in that place, it was blinding. However, his face betrayed no emotion. He said, ‘Can we find out if this girl ever had an abortion?’

Dai said, ‘We thought of that. I got Qian to go back and check.’

‘She had an abortion halfway through her first year,’ Qian said. ‘Didn’t want an unwanted pregnancy to get in the way of her education.’ And yet in some way that Li still did not understand, that abortion had cost the girl her life.

He said, ‘We need to get them to look at the bodies. Identify her, if they can.’

Dai said, ‘They’re on their way to the mortuary right now.’

And Li felt his stomach lurch. He thought of the fourteen corpses still unidentified, the horrors that awaited these poor people as they tried to discern the features of their little girl from the pulp of decaying human flesh that would be wheeled out by men in white coats and rubber gloves. But if they were able to make that identification, the investigation would have come full circle, ending where it had begun, with a medical student working as a night watchman on a building site. Li shook his head at the irony.

Dai cleared his throat again. ‘There’s one other thing, Chief,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how important it is. And I guess I should have spotted it before now.’ He made a face. ‘But, then, probably we all should have.’ And in this there was a hint of accusation to deflect guilt. ‘It was right there all the time on the goddamn kid’s resumé.’

Li frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The medical student,’ Dai said. ‘Jiang Baofu. You know, all those vacation jobs he had, working in various hospitals and clinics?’ He paused. ‘One of them was the Shanghai World Clinic.’ Li glanced immediately at Huang standing by the door. The Section Chief was impassive. Dai said unnecessarily, ‘You know, Cui Feng’s place.’

Margaret sat alone in Li’s office. She had showered off all the blood, scrubbed and scrubbed, and watched it wash away down the drainer. But like Lady Macbeth, she still felt its taint. Only, this was no dream. Her face was pale and without even a trace of make-up, her hair still damp and scraped back. She had on the khaki cargoes she had worn the day she lost Xinxin, and another pair of trainers. Her black tee-shirt contrasted sharply with the whiteness of her skin. She looked at her hands and saw the first lines of age there, a prominence of the knuckles as the full flesh of youth thinned and became sinewy and tough. There was a thickening of her neatly trimmed nails, and the half-moons beneath her cuticles appeared paler than usual. Even as she looked at them, her hands started to shake, and she pressed them palm down on the table to make them stop.

But she could no longer focus on her hands, or the shadows on the wall where once posters and papers had been pinned, or the sound of the rain as it fell again from the heavens and battered on the window. Pictures that she had fought so hard to displace kept forcing their way into her mind. Pictures of Jack in his final moments as he lay in his own blood on the floor. Pictures of Xinxin laughing with joy as she manoeuvred her little red car around the miniature roads in the park. Pictures of a dark-skinned Mongolian face with an ugly hare-lip stretched across protruding brown teeth. An endless procession of half-decayed faces on autopsy tables. And closing her eyes could not shut these pictures out.

She was startled when the door burst open and Li strode in. His expression told her immediately that something had happened. Mei-Ling followed closely in his wake. Margaret stood up quickly. ‘What is it?’

But all Li’s attention was focused on the telephone, and as he reached his hand towards it, it began to ring, almost as though he had willed it to do so. He snatched it from its cradle. He listened intently for several seconds, then there was a brief, staccato exchange before he hung up. Margaret could see that he was drawing quick, shallow breaths. ‘Jiang Baofu,’ he said.

‘The medical student?’

Li nodded grimly. ‘A bracelet belonging to one of the dead girls was found in his apartment.’ He turned to Mei-Ling. ‘The parents just identified her,’ he said in Chinese. And to Margaret, ‘He also spent two summer vacations working at a clinic belonging to Cui Feng.’

Margaret was still attempting to take all this in. ‘An abortion clinic?’

Li shook his head. ‘No. Cui has a clinic that deals exclusively in the treatment of foreigners. Insurance work.’

Margaret’s confusion deepened. ‘I don’t understand. What’s the connection?’

‘That’s what we’re about to ask him,’ Li said.

Jiang Baofu’s hair was gelled and spiky. Li could smell the perfume of the gel. He was wearing his long coat, shoulders peppered with dark spots of rain. He had on the same high leather boots he had been wearing the night they first interviewed him in the hut on the building site, his jeans tucked into them at calf height. Li imagined that Jiang thought he looked pretty cool, modelled on one of those Hong Kong rock singers he watched on Channel ‘V’. He did not appear quite as composed as he had during previous interviews. He was leaning back in his chair, trying to convey the same careless attitude of relaxed indifference. But there were lights in his eyes, and they were wide and cautious.

Mei-Ling sat down opposite him, and Li took his time closing the door before approaching the table and pulling up a chair. He made no attempt to switch on the recorder. Instead, he held the boy in a gaze of icy intensity. Jiang shifted uncomfortably. Li said, ‘My niece was kidnapped yesterday. She is six years old.’

There was a long silence before Jiang decided to respond. ‘Why are you telling me?’

‘I want you to know,’ Li said slowly, ‘so that you will understand that I mean it when I say if one hair on her head has been harmed, I will tear out your heart and stuff it down your throat.’ His almost conversational tone gave his words a chilling, believable edge.

Jiang’s eyes widened and he sat himself more upright. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

Li nodded to Mei-Ling and she switched on the cassette recorder. ‘November twenty-sixth,’ she said. ‘Eleven-fifty a.m. Interview with suspect Jiang Baofu. Present Deputy Section Chief Nien Mei-Ling, Section Two, Shanghai Municipal Police, and Deputy Section Chief Li Yan, Section One, Beijing Municipal Police, Criminal Investigation Department.’

Jiang’s rabbit eyes flickered from one to the other. ‘Suspect?’ His face cracked into a frightened smile. ‘Hey, you don’t really think I did this shit?’

‘We have reason to believe,’ Li said calmly, ‘that you murdered at least nineteen young women by cutting them open while they were still alive, and then removing vital organs, thereby killing them.’

Jiang stared at him for a moment in patent disbelief. And then a sort of calm visibly descended on him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re trying it on.’ His confidence was returning. ‘Like I said before, you can’t think I did it. There’s no evidence.’

‘How can you know that?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Because I didn’t do it.’ This directed at Mei-Ling as if she were an idiot.

Li saw her bridle and stepped in quickly. ‘We traced the Zhang family from Yanqing,’ he said. And a hint of concern reappeared in Jiang’s eyes.

‘And?’

‘The daughter doesn’t remember you trying to give her a bracelet. In fact she doesn’t remember you at all.’

Jiang shrugged. ‘I didn’t have much confidence then. You know, it was kind of worship from afar. Not surprising really that she doesn’t remember me.’

Li placed his forearms very carefully on the table in front of him and leaned forward. ‘And her nickname isn’t Moon.’

Jiang said, ‘That’s just what I called her. Because she was beautiful, you know, like the moon. She had this lovely, round face …’

‘Bullshit!’ Li’s voice reverberated around the walls, and Jiang nearly jumped out of his seat. Li produced the bracelet from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘It belonged to a girl called Ji Li Rong. She was a student at Jiaotong University. Her father nicknamed her Moon when she was a baby. She was one of the girls we dug out of the mud at Lujiazui. Her parents just identified her at the mortuary.’

Jiang stared at the bracelet for a long time. He showed a distinct reluctance to meet Li’s eyes again. ‘It’s … it’s similar,’ he mumbled, almost to himself. ‘Maybe I … you know, it’s possible I picked it up at the site. I just confused it with the other one, you know, for the Zhang girl …’

Li said, ‘I’m going to bring this interview to a close now and have you formally charged with murder.’

Jiang’s eyes shot up from the bracelet. ‘No!’ he nearly shouted. ‘You can’t. I didn’t do it.’

‘I figure it’ll go to trial pretty quickly, given the high-profile nature of the case. That means it’ll only be a matter of weeks, Jiang, before they’re putting a bullet in the back of your head. Of course, I’ll be there to watch. But, really, execution’s too good for you. Personally, I’d rather see you rot in a stinking prison cell somewhere for the rest of your unnatural life.’ He turned to Mei-Ling. ‘You can switch the recorder off now.’

‘No,’ Jiang shouted again, and he quickly held out a hand to prevent her from reaching the recorder. She stopped and waited. There was a long moment of silence. Jiang screwed up his eyes and then, as if angry at having to admit defeat, hissed, ‘What do you want to know?’

Li said, ‘I want to know where you got the bracelet. I want to know where you got the money to buy all the fancy clothes and electrical goods and pay for an expensive apartment. I want to know exactly what work you were involved in during two summers at the Shanghai World Clinic.’

Jiang went limp, and slumped forward on the table, his head in his hands. Li could see his scalp between the clumped spikes of gelled hair. Then Jiang made himself sit upright. ‘As long as you understand,’ he said, ‘I had nothing to do with killing these women. They wouldn’t let me near the theatre. I was never in there once when they were … you know, when they had someone in.’ Finally he dragged his eyes up to meet Li’s, making some sort of appeal to be believed. ‘I didn’t even know anything about it until I found all the body parts in the freezer. I mean, hell, there were a lot of bits in there.’

‘When did you discover this?’

‘About a year-and-a-half ago. First summer I was there. I was just an orderly. I mean, I didn’t know what they were up to, didn’t want to know. Some kind of research or something. I just thought, you know, if they needed space in the freezer I could get rid of the bits for a little extra cash.’

‘You blackmailed them,’ Li said.

‘No.’ Jiang was quick to deny it. ‘It was a … business arrangement. I had a night job as a watchman on a building site out west. I knew it would be easy to dump the bodies, and in a few weeks a few thousand tons of concrete would bury them forever.’

‘How many?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘How many what?’ Some of Jiang’s cockiness was returning.

‘Bodies.’

He shrugged. ‘I think there were eleven that first time.’

Li felt his stomach turning over. That brought the body count to thirty. ‘How many times were there, Jiang?’

The boy shrugged vaguely. ‘Three … I guess, four, including the ones you found at Lujiazui.’

Both Li and Mei-Ling were shocked into a momentary silence. Finally Li asked in a husky voice, ‘And how many bodies were there the other two times?’

Now that Jiang had decided to talk, he actually appeared to be enjoying it. He was on a roll. ‘I think there were fifteen up at Zhabei, and either eight or nine at Zhou Jia Dou over in Pudong again.’ He scratched his head. ‘No, I think it was nine there.’

They were up to fifty-four now, and had ventured into territory that Li could never have imagined. He glanced at Mei-Ling. She was very pale. He turned back to Jiang. ‘And all women?’

‘Sure.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea. Like I said, they kept me at arm’s length, you know? Even though I was trained.’ He smiled ruefully. Then, ‘But they did let me cut them up afterwards. I offered, you know, for a bit of extra cash. And I was good at it. I would have jointed them, but they didn’t want that. Just cut them up, they said.’ He laughed. ‘With a goddamn cleaver! Can you imagine? Someone with my skills and they give me a cleaver. But I was good at it. Accurate. Third cervical vertebra. Upper third of the humerus. Mid femur. But your pathologist must know that. What’s her name … Margaret Campbell? She did all the autopsies, didn’t she?’

‘Who did you deal with at the clinic?’

‘A couple of people.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know their names. They weren’t exactly chatty, know what I mean? And there was this woman from upstairs who always gave me the money. You know, in a big white envelope. Big bucks.’ He grinned again. ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’

‘It’s not heaven you’ll be going to,’ Mei-Ling said grimly.

‘What about Cui Feng?’ Li asked. ‘Ever deal with him?’

Jiang looked blank. ‘Who is he?’

‘The boss.’

‘Oh, him. Naw. He never even spoke to me. He’d walk past you in the corridor, and it was like you weren’t even there.’

Li said, ‘Tell me about the bracelet?’

Jiang’s smile faded, and for the first time he looked genuinely sad. ‘She was beautiful,’ he said. ‘Of all of them, she was really the most beautiful. Perfect. I don’t know how they missed the bracelet. I mean, usually there wasn’t as much as a stud earring. But there it was dangling from her wrist when they brought her out.’ He shook his head. ‘Broke my heart to see her like that, all cut open. She was so beautiful.’ He looked from one to the other, appealing for their understanding. ‘I fell in love with her, you know? Hardest thing I ever had to do was cut her up. But she was dead. Nothing I could do. So I kept the bracelet.’ He picked it up now and ran it lovingly between his thumb and forefinger, recalling with sadness some scene of unimaginable horror. A young girl murdered, cut open, hacked up. And he had somehow found love in it.

Li looked at him with undisguised disgust. The kid was sick. Crazy. Beyond redemption. He slipped a copy of the graphic of the Mongolian from his folder and pushed it across the table. Jiang drew his attention away from the bracelet to look at it.

‘Ugly bastard, isn’t he?’

‘Do you know him?’

‘Never set eyes on him.’

And much as he hated to admit it, Li thought the boy was probably telling the truth.

Li’s anger at Procurator General Yue hummed across Huang’s office. He was exhausted. After more than three hours of detailed interrogation, emotional stress and lack of sleep were crushing down on him, and his patience was at its end. ‘I don’t care who Cui’s pals are,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘or how long he’s been in the Party, or whether he dresses to the left or to the right. I want that search warrant.’

Yue remained calm. He exchanged looks with Section Chief Huang and said, ‘I understand that the kidnapping of your niece has placed you under extreme stress, Deputy Section Chief Li, and so I am prepared to overlook your behaviour on this occasion.’

Li gasped his exasperation. ‘Don’t bloody patronise me!’

Yue continued, unruffled. ‘You have absolutely no evidence against Comrade Cui, or any of his employees. I can’t justify issuing a warrant to search his premises. All you have are the ramblings of a demented medical student who admits to hacking up the bodies and burying them at Lujiazui.’ He stood up, animated for the first time, and gestured to the heavens. ‘I mean, even if we are to believe him, in an organisation the size of Cui’s it is perfectly conceivable that these procedures could have been conducted without Cui’s knowledge.’

Li would have laughed were it not so tragic. ‘Have you been to the Shanghai World Clinic?’ he asked. And without waiting for an answer, ‘It is a converted villa from the days of the Concession. There are two small operating theatres and a handful of special care beds. It is where Cui has his office.’ And, echoing Yue’s choice of words, ‘It is inconceivable that more than forty women could have been surgically murdered right under his nose without him knowing about it.’

Yue waved a hand dismissively. ‘If we are to believe your … medical student,’ he said. ‘And I see no reason why we should.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know what more you need, Li. You have your man right there. It doesn’t take much of a leap in imagination to conclude that this young man abducted these women and cut them open for his own perverse pleasures. Probably in the operating room at the Medical University when everyone else had gone for the day.’

Li knew that, by addressing Cui as ‘Comrade’, Yue was letting him know that he, too, was a Party member. But it made no difference to Li. He shook his head. ‘The sample of twine we took from the university didn’t match the twine that was used to sew up the women from Lujiazui.’

‘So?’ Yue said. ‘It was a different ball of twine. The point is, there is nothing to connect Cui to any of this except for the extravagant claims of this lunatic you have in the cells downstairs.’

‘What about the abortions?’

‘We’ve been over this before,’ Yue sighed wearily.

‘And the Mongolian?’

‘Who knows?’ The Procurator General shrugged theatrically. ‘A friend of Jiang’s. An accomplice.’

‘We have nothing that connects the Mongolian to Jiang.’

‘Or to Cui!’

There was a tense stand-off between the two, and a long silence broken only, in the end, by the ringing of Huang’s phone. The Section Chief, who had been sitting listening impassively, answered it quickly. After a short exchange, he hung up and got to his feet. He looked like a man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He said, ‘I have to go. My wife is dying.’

That simple statement of fact was shocking somehow in the context of what had preceded it. Both Li and Yue were chastened by it. ‘Of course,’ Yue said. ‘I’m sorry, Huang.’

Huang nodded, lifted his coat from the stand, and hurried out. But somehow he left behind him the ghost of his not yet dead wife, a presence in the room that stood between Li and Yue. For fully a minute neither man spoke. Li crossed to the window and stood staring out at the rain, hands plunged deep in his pockets. For Li, Huang’s dying wife was not an issue. For reasons beyond him, but somehow connected to this case, Xinxin had been kidnapped. His first, and most pressing, loyalty had to be to her, and the hope that he could find her kidnappers before they harmed her — if they had not already done so. He turned to face the Procurator General, grimly determined.

He said, ‘I am taking a team of detectives and forensics officers to the Shanghai World Clinic. I can go either with or without a warrant. If I have to go without, then you will leave me no choice but to charge you with attempting to pervert the course of justice, and I will begin corruption investigations against you.’

The Procurator General visibly paled. He was not used to being threatened by a junior law officer. But he was in no doubt that the threat was a real one. He opened his mouth to respond, but Li held up a finger to stop him.

‘Don’t,’ Li said, ‘interrupt me until I am finished.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘If I have to, I will take this to the highest authorities in Beijing, and let me assure you that your friendship with some adviser to the Mayor of Shanghai will not afford you the least protection. You may recall that in the last few years a Deputy Mayor of the city of Beijing, a Minister of Agriculture and a Deputy Procurator General have all been executed after being found guilty of corruption charges. I can’t claim credit for all three, but I brought the charges against two of them.’

Procurator General Yue glared at Li, a deep simmering anger smouldering in his eyes. Li returned the stare, unwavering. Finally Yue said, ‘Let me assure you, Deputy Section Chief Li, that if you fail to find any evidence against Comrade Cui, this is the last time you will ever threaten anyone.’

‘Does that mean I get the warrant?’ Li asked.

Margaret sat at a table in the corner of the canteen watching officers come and go. She had been there for over an hour, ever since Li had insisted on getting an officer to take her there. She knew very little about what was happening except that the medical student had confessed to burying the bodies, and that the women were suspected of being murdered at Cui Feng’s foreign residents’ clinic. But she was aware that there were politics involved here that she neither knew nor wanted to know anything about.

She was still in a state of shock after the discovery of Geller’s body, and as the day slipped away like sand through their fingers she was becoming increasingly despondent about finding Xinxin alive. She had seen first-hand what the Mongolian had done to poor Jack.

Only a handful of the thirty tables in the canteen were occupied, plain-clothed and uniformed officers glancing curiously in her direction, whispered conversations that she could not have understood, even if she had overheard them. The kitchens, behind sliding glass shutters at one end of the room, were no longer serving anything but tea. A bowl of noodles sat almost untouched on the table in front of her, faintly coloured by some indeterminate sauce. She had told Li that she had no appetite, but suspected that he had simply wanted her out of the way for a while.

She looked up as one of a line of glass-panelled doors leading out to the car park opened, and her heart sank as Mei-Ling walked in. The Deputy Section Chief responded vaguely to greetings from her fellow officers, but ran her eyes around the canteen until they alighted on Margaret. She headed for her table and sat down. ‘Hi,’ she said.

Margaret nodded cautiously.

Mei-Ling looked at the bowl of noodles. ‘Not hungry?’

‘Not much.’

And they sat without speaking for what seemed like a very long time before Mei-Ling said, ‘I guess you do not like me much.’

‘About as much as you like me.’ Margaret faced her down more boldly than she felt.

‘We got off on the wrong foot.’

‘We didn’t get off on any kind of foot.’

‘No …’ Mei-Ling forced a sad smile. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say … I am sorry.’

Margaret was surprised by this, but determined not to show it. ‘What, sorry that I’m still here?’

Mei-Ling smiled. ‘Sorry that I ever came between you and Li Yan.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Li Yan came between me and Li Yan. And so did I. We’ve never had the easiest of relationships.’

‘And I did not make things any easier.’

‘So why the change of heart?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘He is a nice man.’

‘Damned by faint praise.’

Mei-Ling laughed, that braying laugh that had irritated Margaret so much when they first met. A laugh that she had not heard for some days. ‘No,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘I mean he is too nice for me.’

Margaret frowned. ‘How’s that?’

Mei-Ling shrugged, a sense of resignation in her eyes. ‘I would never make him happy. Seeing him with Xinxin … with all the instincts and concerns of a father. Seeing what losing her is doing to him.’ And she looked very directly at Margaret. ‘Seeing your shared pain.’ She shook her head. ‘I could never give him that. Sure, I can amuse a kid for an hour or two, but then I would be bored. I do not think I have a maternal bone in my body.’

‘And you think I have?’ Margaret asked.

‘Xinxin adores you. You were all she talked about that night when I drove her and Li Yan back to the hotel. About how Magret came to get her at Tiananmen Square, about how great Magret was at flying a kite, about the hours Magret spends reading to her at bedtime.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I could never be those things to her. So I could never be those things for Li Yan.’ She looked down at her hands, and Margaret was almost shocked to see that her eyes were moist. ‘The men in my life always seem to have other priorities. I’m just getting to recognise it a bit earlier now.’

Margaret didn’t know what to say. She thought about Xinxin babbling on to Mei-Ling about Magret this and Magret that. She thought about all those hours spent reading and re-reading the big picture books, the jigsaws that they pieced together time and again. She thought about how Xinxin would slip into the big double bed with Li and Margaret on a Sunday morning when Margaret would stay over on a Saturday night, her warm, soft little body insinuating its way between them, snuggling in for comfort. And suddenly all her fears and anxieties spilled over in big salty tears that ran silently down her face. She wiped them quickly away with the back of her hand. ‘I just hope we find her before … before that bastard does anything to hurt her.’

Mei-Ling looked up and saw the wet streaks on Margaret’s face. She nodded grimly. ‘We have that in common at least.’

Neither of them had been aware of the door to the canteen opening, and they were not aware of Li until his shadow fell across the table. A momentary frown flitted across his face. Something, he knew, had passed between Margaret and Mei-Ling. But none of that mattered any more. ‘I have a warrant,’ he said, ‘to search Comrade Cui’s clinic.’

II

Darkness fell as the convoy of police and forensic vehicles headed west on Yan’an Viaduct Road. The last daylight glowed faintly under the pewter-coloured clouds that were gathered on the far horizon. The haloed lights of another Shanghai night pricked the darkness around them, dragged in liquid smears back and forth across rain-battered windscreens.

Margaret sat in the back of Mei-Ling’s Santana. She saw her own reflection in the side window switched off and on like a TV screen image as she reflected the light from the overhead street lamps at regular intervals. She looked haunted, like the ghost of her grandmother that she had seen in herself the night before.

Everything now was moving so quickly it was difficult to maintain a grasp of it all. The only constant was the fear that gnawed like a hungry animal trapped inside her. Fear of finding Xinxin and realising a nightmare. Fear of not finding her. Fear of never finding her, which would be worse, almost, than anything.

She caught Mei-Ling watching her in the rear-view mirror and wondered what had brought about her change of heart. Had it really been seeing Li with Xinxin, hearing Xinxin babble on about Margaret? The men in my life always seem to have other priorities, she had said, and her words had been laden with the bitterness of experience. A Yang Orphan was how her aunt had described her. And Margaret remembered Aunt Teng’s grave interpretation of Mei-Ling’s Heavenly Element of water — meaning danger, something hidden, anxiety.

The convoy, lights flashing, eased its way between the parked cars in the street leading to the clinic. Cyclists, huddled in dripping capes, swerved aside to let them by. But even from here Li could see that the clinic was in darkness. When they drew up outside it, he saw also that the gates were closed, and secured with a chain and padlock. His first reaction was anger. He jumped out of the car and ran to the gates, and stood impotently in the rain, clutching the black-painted wrought iron, peering between the spiked uprights for any sign of life beyond. There were no vehicles, no lights, just puddles forming in the pitted tarmac between clumps of weeds that had not been apparent when the car park was full. He rattled the gates in frustration and turned to find Mei-Ling and Margaret sheltering under a large black umbrella. Officers were gathering behind them on the sidewalk. The rain ran down Li’s face. ‘They knew we were coming,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Someone told them we were coming.’ And he felt as if he knew exactly who that someone was. ‘Somebody get some cutters and get this fucking gate open,’ he shouted.

It was nearly ten minutes before an officer arrived with a large pair of cutters that sliced through the metal chain like a hot knife through butter. He opened the gates and all the vehicles crowded into the forecourt. Under the shelter of the canopy over the main entrance, the detectives and forensic officers who were to enter the clinic stripped off wet outer clothing and pulled on white gloves and plastic shoe covers. Margaret did the same. She saw that Li’s white tee-shirt had been soaked, even through his jacket. It was almost translucent, and she could clearly see the firm, muscular shape of him underneath. Margaret looked round to find Mei-Ling watching her again. Mei-Ling drew her brows together, made a moue with her mouth and drew a short sharp breath in through her lips. In spite of everything, it made Margaret smile. In other circumstances, perhaps she and Mei-Ling might have found something more in common than a shared lust for Li.

Detective Dai forced the double doors into the clinic. A splintering of wood. Then silence, except for the crackle of a dozen or more police radios. And then a loud creaking as the doors swung open into the darkness beyond. Several flashlights snapped on, and a small group led by Li pushed open internal glass doors and entered the reception hall, beams of light criss-crossing in the dark. The floor here was tiled. A reception desk facing them was empty. The drawers of two large filing cabinets behind the desk stood open, picked out by several flashlights. Whatever records they might once have contained were gone. There was not so much as a single scrap of paper in the reception area. Only a half-drunk mug of tea on the desk gave any clue as to the hurried evacuation of people and files.

None of the light switches was working, and an officer was dispatched to find where the electricity supply came into the building and restore the power. Li said, ‘There must be some state record of who was employed here. I want names. And I want arrest warrants out on all of them.’

‘You got it, Chief,’ Dai said, and he unhooked the radio mike from his belt.

‘Including Cui Feng,’ Li added. Which silenced everyone. Dai glanced at Mei-Ling.

She said, ‘Be careful, Li Yan. We can’t go arresting someone like Cui Feng without evidence.’

‘Then let’s find some!’ Li’s raised voice startled everyone. ‘I want every employee brought in for questioning.’

‘Sure,’ Dai said, and he turned away into the dark to bark instructions into his radio.

‘Where’s the operating theatre?’ Margaret asked.

‘In the basement,’ Mei-Ling told her.

Margaret looked at Li. ‘Can I take a look at it?’

He nodded. Mei-Ling said, ‘I’ll take you.’

The two women followed the beams of their flashlights through double doors and down a narrow staircase to the suite of rooms in the basement where all the clinic’s operations took place. Upstairs they heard other officers moving around, systematically working their way through the building, calling to each other in the dark. Down here it was deathly quiet. Across the hall, through double swing doors, were the preparation and recovery rooms. Facing them were the doors to the theatre suite. Above the door, Margaret’s flashlight picked out the normally illuminated box sign in Chinese and English warning that they were about to enter the surgical area. On the wall to the left was a square push-button about the size of a postcard, that could be punched or hit with the elbow to let in any one of the surgical team, or the patient’s gurney. Only in this case, Margaret thought, if Jiang Baofu was to be believed, it was not a patient on the gurney, but a victim.

Suddenly the overhead lights came on, startling them both. The boxlight over the door buzzed and flickered and then illuminated its warning. Margaret glanced at Mei-Ling before hitting the square button with the flat of her hand. The doors opened electronically into a small reception area with a desk. A white board on the wall was smeared blue and red and green where the names of patients and operating schedules, written up with coloured marker pens, had been wiped off. To their right, the doors to the changing rooms stood open, and doors at the far end, beyond the lockers, opened on to walk-in cupboards lined with shelves piled with hair- and shoe-covers and neatly folded smocks. Ahead of them were the doors to two operating rooms. Floors and walls were tiled, and stainless-steel washbasins were mounted on the wall outside each theatre. In normal circumstances no one would be allowed beyond this area without wearing scrubs, and the hair- and shoe-covers they would have donned in the locker rooms.

Margaret had been through the procedure many times early in her career, when the living rather than the dead were her concern. She would have tied on her surgical mask before scrubbing her hands and forearms in the stainless-steel basin for at least ten minutes, a prescribed number of scrubs per finger and hand, scraping under the fingernails with little plastic sticks. Then, hands held up above her elbows, pushing through the door to the theatre with her backside so as not to contaminate the freshly scrubbed hands. Inside, a nurse would pass her a sterile towel to dry her hands and then help her into a surgical gown before holding open latex surgical gloves into which she would plunge her hands.

Now, the concern was not bacterial contamination so much as the danger of disturbing evidence. With her gloved hands, Margaret pushed open the door to operating room number one, and Mei-Ling followed her in.

A strange chill fell upon Margaret as she entered the theatre. The air was warm, but still the hair rose up on her neck and her forearms, goose bumps on her back and shoulders. And she saw in her mind’s eye a succession of women wheeled in here to be butchered. A conveyor belt of them. Fifty-four at least, since Jiang had become involved. She almost felt their presence, and knew instinctively that this was the place. That this was the killing room.

It was only dimly lit by pale yellow lamps set in the ceiling, casting deep shadows beneath the sheets that were draped over all the equipment like shrouds. Two walls were lined with glass and stainless-steel storage cupboards filled with various sizes of gloves and types of suture. Carefully Margaret and Mei-Ling lifted the sheets, uncovering the lamps that hung on jointed arms from the ceiling and would so brightly illuminate the surgeon’s table when lit; the large, wheeled, steel table where the surgical nurse would set out all the sterilised tools on a sterile sheet; an electrocautery machine, light blue, with a couple of knobs on the front for adjusting the temperature of the cautery, and a couple of indicator lights. A power cable led from the box to a wall socket, and a wire connected it to the cautery pen that the surgeon would use to cauterise the small bleeding veins along the edge of the wound he would make with his scalpel. Margaret remembered the black gritty material she had found in the areas of haemorrhage along the incision edges of the entry wounds in the women from Lujiazui — charring made by the cauterisation.

Set on the surgical nurse’s table alongside the toolbox were a stainless-steel bowl, a couple of empty litre jugs and several plastic ‘turkey basters’, like giant eye-droppers. On a shelf stood two blue and white plastic cool boxes, the kind you might pack with ice to keep beer cold on a picnic. Margaret looked at them for a very long time and became aware that her breathing was starting to become rapid and shallow.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Mei-Ling crossing to where a CD player sat on the shelf of one of the cabinets against the far wall. It was wired into speakers hanging from all four corners of the operating room. The surgeon whose theatre this was, liked to listen to music while he worked. Mei-Ling switched it on and hit the play button. The room was immediately filled by the deep, sonorous tones of a church organ, stepping down in time to a slow, rhythmic descending bass note that was suddenly given relief by a surge of violins. Every hair on Margaret’s body stood on end. She knew this music. It was one of her favourite pieces. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. But the pictures it conjured for her now were almost too horrific to contemplate. Of a surgeon delicately wielding his scalpel to murder and butcher a succession of young women to the strains of one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

She reached back and switched on the big surgical lamps, and suddenly the room was thrown into an almost blinding blaze of light burning out on white tiles. A solo violin swooped and screeched to a pitch, like the scream of every dead girl who had passed through this hellish place. Margaret’s legs nearly gave way under her, and she reached for the surgical nurse’s trolley to steady herself. One of the litre jugs toppled over.

‘Are you all right,’ Mei-Ling said, and she switched off the music. The silence that replaced it was almost worse.

‘I’m okay,’ Margaret said, and she looked at Mei-Ling. ‘You know this is where it was done,’ she said. There could be no equivocation. There was nothing scientific about it, but she knew it with an absolute certainty.

Mei-Ling nodded grimly. She felt it, too. Margaret could see from her pallor that the blood had drained from her face. ‘Do you know this music?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Attributed by some to an Italian called Albinoni,’ Margaret said. ‘Probably composed in the early eighteenth century.’ She paused. ‘I used to love it.’ And now she shook her head. ‘But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to it again. It sounds to me now like music straight from hell.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It would make me think that the surgeon was not Chinese. And if we take the “Y” cut into consideration, probably not European either. I’d say there was a good chance this monster is an American.’

The radio on Mei-Ling’s belt crackled, and Margaret made out Li’s voice talking rapidly in Chinese. Mei-Ling responded, and then said to Margaret, ‘He wants us up in the administration office.’

Now that the power had been restored, they were able to ride up to the second floor in the elevator. A number of detectives and forensics people were standing in the corridor outside the main office. Inside, Li was going through the files on the hard disk of the office computer. It was a Macintosh PowerPC G4 with a twenty-one-inch flatscreen monitor. Nothing but the best and latest in technology for Cui Feng, Margaret thought. Li looked up as they came in.

‘Anything down there?’ he asked.

Margaret said, ‘That’s where they did it.’

Li froze. His eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’

‘I just know,’ Margaret said. ‘Everything about it. And more. But I doubt if you’ll find much in the way of forensic evidence. It’s a sterile environment.’

‘We found the freezer,’ Li said. ‘Big walk-in cabinet. Could probably hold anything up to twenty bodies in there. In bits.’ He shrugged. ‘It was empty. We will defrost it, and see what forensics find in the melt water.’

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ Margaret said. ‘These people have been very careful.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Li said. ‘Everything’s gone. All the files, patient records … All the bedrooms are empty, the beds all made up with clean sheets. They did not just do this in a couple of hours. Cui must have figured we would be back after our visit yesterday.’ He stood up. ‘I wanted you to have a look at this thing, Margaret. You probably know more about computers than most of our people.’

‘I’m no expert,’ Margaret said.

‘We will get experts in,’ Li said. ‘But I need you to have a look at it now. From what I can tell, all the files have been erased.’

Margaret slipped behind the desk and took in the computer screen. It was empty, apart from a few system pull-down menus along the top, the time display, and the hard disk and trash icons. She opened up the hard disk. There were only two folders in it. The system folder and an applications folder. Inside the applications folder were coloured icons representing various programs. Accounting, database, word processing, an internet browser. She looked up. ‘You’re right. They’ve erased all the files. Probably backed them up on Zip disk and taken them where we’ll never find them, or even destroyed them.’

Li said, ‘Shit!’

Margaret forced a smiled. ‘It might not be as bad as you think. The operating system and all the software have been left untouched. Which means they didn’t erase the hard disk. Just the files. And when you erase files, they’re usually still there until they’ve been written over. You just can’t see them. But with the right kind of software you can pull them back on-screen.’

‘Can you do that?’ Li asked, suddenly re-energised.

She shook her head. ‘You’ll need one of those experts,’ she said.

Li turned immediately to discuss with Dai and Mei-Ling how soon they could get a computer expert on site. Margaret turned back to the computer. She stared at the screen for several moments, remembering that dark afternoon in Chicago after her father’s funeral when she started up his computer and in a moment of idle curiosity discovered things about him she wished she hadn’t. Using the mouse, she guided the on-screen arrow to the Internet Explorer icon and double-clicked on it. The internet browser immediately opened up on-screen, and she heard the familiar series of beeps in rapid succession which indicated that the internal modem was dialling up to connect her to the Internet. It was followed by a short burst of white noise and a sequence of chirruping as her computer talked to another computer, extending some kind of digital handshake across the ether.

Li and the others turned around. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

‘I’m going on-line,’ Margaret said. ‘I discovered recently that people leave trails and traces on their computers that they sometimes forget are there.’ She remembered the Aphrodite Home Page, and SAMANTHA — Click me to watch live, and JULI–I like women. And she remembered, too, the shock of discovering that her father was paying for pornography on the Internet.

It was one of the wonders of the new global technology, Margaret reflected, that she could sit here in China and open up the same computer software that was on her father’s computer thousands of miles away in Chicago. This was a Chinese version, and so in Chinese characters rather than English. But the graphics were the same, and Margaret had no difficulty finding her way around. The modem had connected the computer to the Internet and downloaded the home page of some Chinese medical institute. Down the left side of the screen were the same four tabs as those on her father’s computer, name tabs on folders in an electronic filing cabinet. Margaret pointed the arrow to the HISTORY tab and the file slid out across the screen. And there they were. The last five hundred Internet sites visited by this computer, all neatly packaged in dated folders. Margaret opened up the top folder, which was dated two days before. The address of the last Internet site visited was www.tol.com. It meant nothing to Margaret. She clicked on it and waited while the computer delivered the address into cyberspace and received the website in return. It came back in fragments, strips of colour, little logos indicating that graphics or photographs would fill their spaces. And then the screen wiped blank and the tol home page appeared in full.

Margaret sat staring at it, the skin tightening all across her scalp. She heard the murmur of voices as Li and the group of officers standing in the doorway engaged in some muted discussion. She heard the rain pattering on the glass of the window and dripping on the ledge. She could hear her own heart pumping blood through ventricles and arteries and tiny capillary veins. She heard the silent scream inside her head.

And then the voices had stopped, and Li was saying, ‘Margaret? Are you all right?’

She forced herself to look up and meet his eye. Everything she did and said felt as if it were in slow motion. ‘I was wrong,’ she said. ‘When I saw those cool boxes in the operating theatre, I think I knew it then. I just didn’t want to believe it.’

Li frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’ He moved round the desk to look at the screen. A logo was blazed in red across the top of it. TRANSPLANTS ONLINE. Underneath it, on the left, was a photograph of a serious-looking man with grey hair and a white coat. He had a stethoscope around his neck. The caption beneath it revealed him to be Dr Al Gardner. Li’s heart felt as if it were beating in his throat as he quickly scanned the short biography below it. Dr Gardner was the Chief Executive of the New York Transplant Co-ordination Clinic. He described himself as a ‘transplant co-ordinator’, working, it said, to bring donors and recipients together across the globe in a miraculous fusion of life. Down the right-hand side of the page was a long list of organs: kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers … each underlined, a small blue ‘GO’ button beside each one. Li said, ‘I do not understand.’

‘We’ve got access straight into the site because the computer’s pulled this page up out of its memory,’ Margaret said trying to stay controlled, to think clearly. ‘I guess normally they would have to enter a password of some kind.’ She moved the mouse to the right side of the screen and clicked the ‘GO’ button beside Kidneys. Almost immediately another page appeared on screen. There was a column of code numbers beside a list of recipient requirements: age, sex, blood type, HLA … Mei-Ling had squeezed in beside Li and was looking at the screen.

‘What is all this stuff?’ Li asked.

‘All the information you need to know to match a kidney to a potential recipient,’ Mei-Ling said. Margaret glanced up at her and saw that she was ghostly pale.

Li said, ‘Are you saying that is what they have been doing here? Killing these girls for their organs?’

Margaret nodded reluctantly. ‘I guess.’

‘But you ruled it out. You and Dr Lan.’

Margaret said, ‘Because it never made sense that they would keep them alive during the procedure. It still doesn’t. I mean, it takes several minutes for the heart to stop after you kill someone. If you removed the organs immediately, they would still be perfectly fresh and undamaged. But these bastards went to a lot of trouble keeping these poor women alive, riding on the very edge of consciousness.’

‘But now you’re saying it was the organs they were after?’

Margaret looked back at the screen. ‘I don’t know how else to explain it.’ She glanced at Mei-Ling. ‘And everything we saw downstairs would be in keeping with the removal of organs. The stainless-steel bowl that they would probably have kept filled with crushed ice for packing around the organs in the cool boxes. The litre jugs that would have been filled, probably with a saline solution, for flushing and irrigating the organs to cool them first — using those big turkey basters we saw …’ She turned back to the screen. ‘And this.’ She shook her head. ‘I mean, I’ve heard of this guy.’

Li looked incredulous. ‘Really?’

‘He was in the news in the States a couple of years ago when he was investigated by the FBI on suspicion of trading in organs. He insisted he was just an honest broker, taking a small commission for bringing together needy US recipients and legally available organs around the world. They couldn’t find any evidence to the contrary.’

Mei-Ling said, ‘But you think he has been trading with Cui Feng?’

Margaret said bleakly, ‘If we accept that Cui Feng’s people have been murdering girls here for their organs, the only reason they would have a direct link to Al Gardner’s website would be to sell them.’

‘How would that work?’ Li asked.

Margaret shrugged. ‘They’d have organs from a girl with a specific blood type and HLA tissue type, they’d go on to Gardner’s website and look for specific matches on the recipient list. Once they’d found the matches, presumably they’d contact Gardner and he’d bring organ and recipient together.’

‘Here?’

‘I guess. Though possibly also in some third, neutral country. India, maybe, or somewhere in the Middle East.’

Li was frowning. ‘There is something I am missing here,’ he said. ‘These recipients … who would they be?’

‘I guess, people who’re going to die without a transplant and have the money to pay for an organ, no questions asked.’

‘Americans?’ Li said.

Margaret was puzzled by the question. ‘I suppose most of them would be. If not all.’

Li glanced at Mei-Ling. ‘But Cui’s clinic was full of Japanese.’

‘Japanese?’ Margaret was caught completely off balance.

‘That is what Cui told us,’ Mei-Ling said.

Tiny electrical charges went sparking off between nerve endings in Margaret’s brain. She could almost feel them, seeking to build bridges between deeply buried memory and conscious recollection. Fragments emerging from the deep started locking together in partially assembled pieces of a subconscious puzzle. And as she began to recognise and catalogue some of these pieces, her brain told her heart that it needed more oxygen, and her heart started beating faster. Finally, it all found expression in a whispered oath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she said under her breath.

Li was startled. ‘What!’

She remembered reading something a couple of years ago. Some report on international traffic in organs. A task force who had found no proof of anything. And then there was David. That night in the sushi restaurant in Chicago. What was it he’d said? They got this weird religion in Japan. Shinto. They have a pretty strange view of the sanctity of the dead body. And something else … She fought to remember, and then suddenly it came to her. Because, of course, he was a cardiac consultant. Last time a doctor over there performed a heart transplant was in nineteen sixty-eight, and he got charged with murder. Then the name she’d been searching for came to her. ‘The Bellagio Task Force,’ she said. ‘That’s what they were called.’

‘Margaret, what are you talking about?’ The frustration in Li’s voice was clear.

‘Bear with me,’ she said, and she turned back to the computer and called up an Internet search engine to try to find what it was she was looking for. It only took a couple of minutes before she had the report up on the screen. THE BELLAGIO TASK FORCE REPORT ON TRANSPLANTATION, BODILY INTEGRITY, AND THE INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ORGANS. She scrolled quickly through the pages, and then stopped suddenly. There it was. ‘Listen to this.’ And she read, ‘Asian concepts of bodily integrity, the respect due elders, and objections to a standard of brain death, practically eliminate cadaveric organ donation in such countries as Japan. Despite an embrace of most medical technologies and deeply ingrained habits of gift-giving, transplantation from cadaveric sources is rare. Heart transplantation is not performed at all and the limited number of kidneys donated come from living related persons.’ She turned to Li and Mei-Ling, wide-eyed, almost exultant. ‘You see? If you’re Japanese and you need a heart transplant or a new liver, or a kidney, the chances are you’re not going to get it in Japan. Even if you have all the money in the world. And you’re not going to get it in the States either, because there’s more than sixty thousand people in the queue ahead of you.’ She paused, considering for herself the implications of what she was saying. ‘So you’re going to die.’

Li was still toiling to take all this on board. ‘But why can they not get organs in Japan?’ he said. ‘Are they not one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world?’

‘And one of the most religious and superstitious,’ Margaret said. David’s words came back to her again. ‘Shinto,’ she said, and she turned and entered the words Shinto plus Transplants into the search engine. Within twenty seconds she was spoiled for choice. Dozens of documents came up. She picked one at random. In Shinto, the dead body is considered to be impure and dangerous, and thus quite powerful. She clicked on another. In folk belief context, injuring a dead body is a serious crime. And another. It is difficult to obtain consent from bereaved families for organ donation, or dissection for medical education, or pathological anatomy … the Japanese regard them all in the sense of injuring a dead body.

And in a moment of absolute clarity, she knew exactly what had happened, and why these women had become unwitting donors.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘The man is a monster.’ She turned to Li. ‘These women weren’t picked at random to have their organs stolen. They were exact matches for specific Japanese recipients with the money to pay for them.’

‘How would he know these women were exact matches?’ Li asked, puzzled by this sudden leap.

‘Because they’d all had abortions at his clinics,’ Margaret said. ‘Three hundred thousand women a year pass through his clinics. That’s one-and-a-half million since he started. And nothing would be easier than to tissue-type them when they came in for the procedure. He must have the most comprehensive list of organ donor matches in the world. Only, these women were never donors, they had their organs taken without consent. As soon as Cui had a client, some wealthy Japanese facing certain death, he could consult his files and find an exact match. They’d snatch the girl and take the organ.’ She stopped, as another revelation struck her. ‘That’s why they went after the girl in Beijing. Jack’s sister. Because her HLA DQ-alpha gene was almost unique in China. She must have been a rare, but perfect match for some Japanese. Only, she turned out to be a junkie and they killed her for nothing.’

She stood up and walked towards the window, hands clutching her head. Every nerve-end was tingling, every fibre of her straining to come to terms with her revelation. She saw her reflection in the window and thought she was staring at a mad woman. She spun round to face the others.

‘And do you know what’s really sick? The thing that I could never understand? They were keeping them alive to meet the needs of some Japanese religious or superstitious fear of violating the integrity of a dead body. It didn’t matter that they were killing a living person in the process.’ She threw back her head and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Jesus, life’s always so much cheaper, isn’t it?’ She lowered her head again and stared wild-eyed at Li and Mei-Ling. ‘Cui Feng was offering a unique service. Life-saving organs from a living body. Maybe one could be charitable and suggest that perhaps the recipients didn’t know that the donors were ultimately paying with their lives. But, then, you don’t take someone’s heart and expect that they’ll still be alive. Do you? Jesus …’ She leaned forward on the desk and shook her head, blinking back tears of shock.

There was a long silence. Li glanced towards the officers standing in the doorway. He was not sure how much they had understood, but they knew for sure that something dramatic was unfolding here. Mei-Ling sat down in the seat vacated by Margaret. She was a dreadful colour, and Li saw that her hands were trembling. He looked at Margaret again. ‘So why did Cui need to sell organs through the Internet if he had ready-made customers in Japan?’

Margaret looked up from the desk. She had been focusing very hard on the grain of the wood, trying not to think about what it was she knew. If she had been unhappy to know about her father’s predilection for pornography, she would never have wished to know this, could never have imagined it. She said, ‘Waste not, want not. Once Cui had fulfilled his contract to his Japanese customer, there was still a lot of money to be made by selling on the other organs.’ And having said it out loud, she realised just what a cold-blooded and mercenary operation Cui had been running here. If it was possible to conjure up an image of hell, this would be it. They might never know just how many poor women had been butchered in operating theatre number one, while some wealthy Japanese recipient lay anaesthetised on the table in the operating theatre through the wall waiting for one of their organs. A life for a life.

There was a loud beep from the computer and Margaret looked at the screen to see a message informing them that the connection had been terminated due to lack of network activity.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There is no proof of any of this. Unless you can find the back-up copies of whatever files they kept on the computer.’

‘Or retrieve them from the hard disk,’ Li said.

Margaret nodded distractedly. She was thinking of Chai Rui and how she had died so completely in vain, and how that had led, ultimately, to Jack Geller’s murder. And she let her mind drift to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who were dying needlessly because organs for transplant were so difficult to obtain, and how the fears and superstitions of potential donors had led to the appalling trade that had been conducted from this clinic. It all seemed like such a waste. She looked sadly at Li. ‘And it doesn’t bring us any closer to finding Xinxin,’ she said, and the pain in the pit of her stomach intensified with the thought.

Mei-Ling spoke for the first time in a long while. She still looked unwell, and stood up shakily as she spoke. ‘You said you thought the surgeon might be an American,’ she said to Margaret.

‘It’s a guess,’ Margaret said. ‘He might be Chinese, trained in America.’

Mei-Ling said to Li, ‘We should put checks on all points of departure. As soon as we get a list of employees we should know who we are looking for.’ Li nodded, and she said, ‘I’ll go back now and put things in motion.’

She hurried out, past the bemused officers standing in the corridor who had only the vaguest idea of what had gone on inside. In the silence of the administration office, all that could be heard were the hum of the fluorescent lights and the computer, and the rain on the window. Margaret looked into Li’s eyes and saw in them his fear for Xinxin, bleak and full of hopelessness.

III

Painted on three of the white panels of the high blue wall were toucans in flight, each one balancing two pint glasses of Guinness on its yellow beak. A haphazard jumble of bicycles was parked along the wall under the dripping trees. By the gate, a painted ship in a bottle stood over a sign for O’Malley’s. Margaret and Li huddled together under their umbrella, splashing through the gutters. They had left the investigating team to de-construct the clinic piece by piece. Dai had offered to drive them back to 803, but Li had said they would get a taxi. In Shanghai it was not possible to walk ten paces along any street without a taxi cruising by. But they were well off the beaten track, and on this wet Sunday night they had walked the length of two streets and seen only one sodden cyclist shrouded in a glistening cape. Li cursed himself for not having telephoned a taxi from the clinic.

Margaret said, ‘Let’s go in here.’

Li looked at the bizarre sight of the Guinness-balancing toucans and asked, ‘What is it?’

‘It says it’s an Irish pub,’ Margaret said. ‘Improbable though that might be. But they’re bound to have a phone.’

As Li pushed open the high blue gate, Margaret felt like Alice stepping through the looking glass into Wonderland. What greeted them on the other side of the wall could not have been imagined from the street. Here lay a beautifully kept garden, with manicured lawns and a crazy-paved path lined by trees. White-painted wrought-iron garden furniture stood dripping in the rain. Concealed lighting led them down the path past an old-fashioned road sign mounted on a black and white striped pole. In Gaelic and English, signs pointed in three different directions to Cork, Galway and Dublin. Apparently they were only nine miles from Dublin. Under a pitched roof raised on pale blue pillars there were more tables and chairs sheltering beneath redundant sun umbrellas splashed with the Irish harp of the Guinness logo. Above the entrance to a large, whitewashed house, a painted blue and gold sign incongruously announced O’MALLEY’S IRISH PUB. The covered courtyard was lit by coach lamps.

Margaret almost whispered, ‘What the hell is this place? Are we still in China?’

Li shook his head in amazement. He had never seen anything like it. ‘You would not think so,’ he said. After the revelations of the last hour, neither of them was prepared for dealing with this.

They walked inside to a gloomy interior hung with fishing nets and glass buoys. There was an open stone fireplace, old sea trunks, ancient glassed bookshelves lined with antiquarian books leaning at crazy angles. Above the bar a musket and a pair of ancient pistols flanked a sign that read: IRISH GOODS SOLD HERE. Around the central bar area, a railed gallery looked down upon them. Margaret felt as though she had either strayed through some kind of time warp, or walked on to a film set. The place was empty. It was still early. Not yet six o’clock. ‘Hello,’ Margaret called out.

A tall girl with long red hair and green eyes stepped out from a back room to greet them from behind the bar. To Margaret, after a week of blue-black hair and Asian faces, the girl seemed absurdly out of place. She smiled at them. ‘Hello there, folks, yer early tonight,’ she said in a lilting Southern Irish brogue.

‘Is there a telephone I can use?’ Li asked.

‘Sure. Just through the back there,’ she said, pointing. Li went off to phone, and the girl turned back to Margaret. ‘I’m Siobhan,’ she said. ‘You look like you might have a bit of Celtic blood in you.’

‘On my father’s side,’ Margaret said, and she thought how bizarre it was that the part of her father that she carried in her genes should somehow connect with an Irish girl in Shanghai.

‘American,’ the girl said. ‘You been here long?’ Margaret shook her head. She didn’t feel like indulging in idle conversation. The girl said, ‘I been here a month. It’s great. This is where all the ex-pats hang out, you know? Three hours from now the place’ll be jumpin’. It’s great crack.’ She paused, perhaps realising that Margaret was not interested in small talk. ‘You want a drink? Sure, yer man there looks like he could do with one.’

It wasn’t the girl’s fault. She was just trying to be friendly. She had no idea that just a couple of streets away dozens of women had been slaughtered for their organs, hacked to pieces and stuffed in a freezer. She was just here for a good time, a six-month adventure in exotic Shanghai, serving drinks to wealthy ex-pats in a quasi-Irish bar. Home from home. Just don’t ever get an abortion, Margaret wanted to tell her. Instead, she said, ‘No, thanks. He’s just calling a taxi.’

The girl shrugged. ‘Oh, well, if you need me for anything, just holler.’ And she disappeared into the back room again.

Li came back from the phone. ‘There’ll be one here in a few minutes.’

They stood in silence in this strange place, uncertain what to say, how to pass the time as they waited. Margaret perched on the edge of a bench seat, and Li stood with his hands thrust in his pockets staring into space.

After a very long minute he said, ‘I should never have brought her here.’

Margaret looked up, full of sympathy, sharing his pain. She wanted to hold him and tell him it would be all right. But it wasn’t. And she didn’t know that it would be. ‘You had no choice,’ she said.

‘I do now,’ he said. ‘At least, I will if … when … we find her. She deserves better than this.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I will quit the police.’

Margaret was shocked. ‘You can’t do that, Li Yan, it’s your life.’

He shook his head. ‘It is not my life that is important.’ He took a deep breath and tried to hold back the emotion that was building up inside him. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I am sick of this. Death, murder, brutality. If that is all we ever know, all we ever see, what does it turn us into, what does it make us?’

‘It grinds us down and makes us tired and cynical when our resistance is low. And that’s no time to be making decisions about anything.’ She paused. ‘You told me once, Li Yan, that you believed in fairness and justice. That’s why you joined the police.’

He snorted his derision. ‘Justice! I cannot even bring Cui Feng in for questioning.’

‘You will,’ Margaret said. ‘When you get the evidence, you’ll get the warrant. Don’t lose sight of that, Li Yan. That’s what’s important now. Getting the evidence.’

‘What is important now is getting little Xinxin back,’ Li said fiercely. ‘If he has hurt that little girl …’

Margaret stood up and took both his hands and squeezed them. ‘Li Yan,’ she said softly, with a confidence she did not feel, ‘we will get her back. We will.’ She felt the tension straining in him.

‘I am scared, Margaret. I am so scared for her.’

And they heard their taxi peeping its horn outside the gate.