The Killing Room

I

Lights blazed from the windows of 803 into a black Shanghai night. And still the rain fell. Li and Margaret ran the twenty metres from the gate to the main entrance, but got soaked all over again. On the eighth floor, the detectives’ room in Section Two was in chaos. Phones rang, keyboards chattered, cigarettes burned in ashtrays creating the impression that the place was on fire. Condensation misted the windows. Shirt-sleeved detectives talked into phones, shouted to one another across the room. Uniformed secretaries hurried in and out with faxes and files. Margaret headed on down the corridor to Li’s office, and Li pushed his way through the chaos looking for Mei-Ling. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned. It was Detective Qian. He was clutching a sheaf of papers.

‘We’ve got that list you were after, Chief. All the employees at the Shanghai World Clinic. We’re trying to get the warrants processed now to bring them in.’

He nodded, but Li was distracted. ‘Where’s Deputy Section Chief Nien?’

‘Don’t know, Chief. Around somewhere.’ Li was about to move off, but Qian snatched at his sleeve again. ‘You’ll like this bit, though.’ Li stopped. ‘For the last five years Cui has been employing the services of an ex-pat American surgeon who’s been in Shanghai since the early nineties.’ Qian looked triumphant. ‘One Daniel F. Stein. He’s fifty-eight, married to a Chinese girl half his age, and he’s not at home.’

‘Have we checked the airport and the docks?’

‘Doing that right now.’

‘Good.’ Li paused. ‘Do we know where Cui is?’

Qian looked at his watch. ‘He’s due to attend one of Director Hu’s banquets at the Xiaoshaoxing Hotel in about an hour and a half.’

A spike of anger stabbed at Li’s chest at the thought of Cui eating and drinking with the wealthy and powerful, breathing in the rarefied air of Director Hu’s banquet, untouched and untouchable, while Xinxin was held captive somewhere or, even worse, lay dead in some cold, dark place. He wondered what the celebration was. Escape from justice? ‘Let me know if there are any developments,’ he said.

Qian nodded and Li pushed off through the hubbub in search of the night duty officer. He found him sitting in his small, cluttered office two along from Li’s. The duty officer was wearing a pair of half-moon reading glasses and was wading through copies of the warrant requests that had been sent to the procurator’s office for processing. He looked up as Li came in and nodded acknowledgment. ‘Deputy Section Chief,’ he said.

Li said, ‘Have you seen Mei-Ling?’

‘Sure,’ the duty officer nodded. ‘About half an hour ago.’ He glanced beyond Li to the corridor and got up to close the door. He lowered his voice, as if he thought they might be overheard. ‘I spoke to her about a rather …’ he searched for the right word, ‘… delicate matter.’ He offered Li a cigarette, and when he accepted lit it, then lit one for himself and returned to his desk to sit down again. ‘Section Chief Huang signed out four firearms to the detectives who accompanied you to the American’s apartment this morning. Only three have been returned.’

Li frowned. This was totally unexpected. Almost a distraction. ‘Well, you must know which officer it was that didn’t return theirs.’

‘That’s just the trouble,’ the duty officer said, and he did indeed look troubled. He peered up at Li over his glasses. ‘They all claim to have returned their weapons to the Section Chief.’

‘What does Section Chief Huang say?’

The older man shook his head. ‘I haven’t been able to contact him.’

‘And you told all this to Mei-Ling?’ The duty officer nodded. ‘And what did she say?’

‘She was very agitated, Deputy Section Chief. She looked like shit when she came in, and she looked even worse after I’d spoken to her. She said to leave it with her.’

‘And you don’t know where she is now?’

The duty officer held out his hands, palms up. ‘I haven’t seen her since I spoke to her.’

Li was tempted for a moment simply to dismiss the whole thing. An irksome oversight by the Chief, or by one of his detectives. But there was something in the duty officer’s description of Mei-Ling’s reaction that gave him pause for thought. ‘Well, have you tried Huang at home?’ he asked. ‘He left to go there this afternoon. Apparently his wife was fading fast.’

The duty officer nodded. ‘I know. I’ve telephoned several times, but there’s no reply.’

Li went back down the corridor. Mei-Ling’s office was empty. He tried the detectives’ room again, and Huang’s office. But there was no sign of her. He went into his own office and found Margaret sitting brooding at the desk. She looked up hopefully as he entered. ‘Have you seen Mei-Ling?’ he asked. She shook her head and he went straight back out.

The duty officer looked up, eyes full of interest and caution, when Li returned. ‘Did you find her?’

Li said, ‘She’s not in the building.’ He hesitated for only a moment. ‘I want Huang’s address and a car.’

Huang’s apartment block was an older building in a quiet residential area in Ni Cheng Qiao District, north of People’s Square, a private rental paid for by the Municipal Police. The block was in a compound behind a high wall, affording it some privacy from the road. There were streetlamps and trees, a few cars parked near the entrance, and dozens of rickety bicycles jammed cheek by jowl under a corrugated plastic canopy that shed copious amounts of rainwater on to the forecourt below. Lights shining from uncurtained windows peppered the east face of the twelve-storey building like moth-holes in a lamp shade. Huang’s apartment was on the second floor.

Li drew his car at an angle into the sidewalk beside Mei-Ling’s Santana. He looked at it for a moment, saw the little bell that chimed so sweetly hanging motionless from the rear-view mirror. He had a bad feeling about all this. He started to get out of the car. ‘You stay here,’ he told Margaret.

‘I will not,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m not sitting out here on my own.’ And she got out the passenger side.

The door of the elevator stood open in the lobby, throwing a cold yellow light out into the dark. Inside, a middle-aged woman wrapped in a padded blue jacket sat on a stool, her face buried in a book, a jar of cold green tea at her feet. There was a smell of stale cigarette smoke and urine. She did not even look up as they entered. ‘Second floor,’ Li said.

The woman kept her eyes on her book, reached out and felt for the second button up on the tarnished steel panel and pressed it. The elevator jerked, as if it had made a little cough, and the doors juddered shut. The steel box started a slow ascent. At the second floor the doors jerked open again and Li and Margaret stepped out into a gloomy corridor. As the doors shut behind them they heard the woman pulling a crackle of phlegm into her mouth and spitting it out on the floor.

They found Huang’s apartment at the end of the passageway. The light bulb here had burned out and not been replaced, and it was even gloomier. The steel gate in front of the door stood ajar, half opened into the corridor. Beyond it, the main door stood wide open. Inside, the apartment appeared to be in complete darkness.

Li pulled the gate fully open. ‘Stay here,’ he said to Margaret. ‘And this time I mean it.’ She nodded mutely. She had no idea what was going on, but she sensed Li’s tension and it scared her.

Li felt almost smothered by the deep silence of the apartment. In the distant, reflected light from the landing, he felt his way gingerly along a narrow hallway. He passed an open door into a tiny kitchen. The next along was half-glazed, limp curtains providing a small measure of privacy for an equally small bathroom. As he got further down the passage, and his eyes became accustomed to the dark, he saw a faint glow falling out across the hallway from an open door at the end. The apartment seemed infused with an all-pervading smell of antiseptic and disinfectant, like a hospital. It reminded Li of Jiang Baofu’s place. His own tremulous breathing sounded inordinately loud. ‘Hello,’ he called, to make some louder sound, and his voice cracked feebly. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder. ‘Hello?’

He was greeted only by silence. He turned into the frame of the open door and was bathed in the soft warm glow of a nightlight on a bedside table. The smell of antiseptic was almost suffocating in the warm air of the room. The gaunt figure of a woman lay on the bed, a single sheet draped across her lifeless, wasted body. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, her jaw hanging slack, her mouth gaping. A tiny noise somewhere behind him made Li spin round. The door opposite was also open, the room unlit. But in the blackness, Li saw a small movement of light, and in a moment of choking fear realised that it was the reflected light in the movement of an eye.

A lamp snapped on and he was, for a moment, blinded and startled. He raised an arm, almost defensively, to shield his eyes, and saw Section Chief Huang sitting in a chair at the far side of the room across the hall. He was drawing one of his hands away from a small lamp on a table at the side of his chair. The other pointed a gun directly at Li. In that same moment, Huang realised who Li was, and he lowered the gun slowly into his lap. The two men stared at each other, unmoving for an immeasurable period of time, before gradually Li became aware that a shadow on the floor just inside the door opposite was cast by the leg and foot of someone lying just out of his line of vision. A sick feeling rose in his stomach. There was something horribly familiar about the faded denim and the scuffed white trainer. He stepped slowly forward, crossing the hall and entering the living room where Huang still sat motionless, watching Li with unblinking eyes.

Careful not to make any sudden movement, Li raised a hand and pushed the door wide. Mei-Ling was lying face down on the floor, a large pool of blood soaking into the carpet around her. Li could see her face in profile, long black hair lying untidily across it, her mouth open a little, lips pursed where a small amount of blood had oozed out. ‘Oh, God,’ he whispered, without knowing which God he was appealing to. Any one would do. He knelt quickly at her side, and with trembling fingers felt for a pulse in her neck. But she was already quite cold, and he almost recoiled as the shock of it gripped him. He looked up at Huang, full of incomprehension and confusion. Huang looked back at him like a dead man from his grave. The lamp beside him cast an orange glow on one side of his bloodless face, the other was striped white by the light of the streetlamps that fell in narrow wedges through the Venetian blinds.

‘I swear on the graves of all my ancestors,’ Huang said, his voice barely a whisper, ‘I never intended to kill her.’

Slowly, with legs like jelly, Li got back to his feet. ‘Then why did you? In the name of the sky, Huang, why?’

‘She was going to arrest me. I couldn’t let her do that. I had paid enough. I had to be my own executioner.’

Li felt like a man sleepwalking through a nightmare. None of this seemed possible, none of it made sense. ‘Why would she want to arrest you?’

‘From the moment you found out what had been going on at Cui’s clinic, she knew that I was involved. I guess she probably suspected for a long time.’ He shook his head. There was pain for him in remembering. ‘She couldn’t understand why I was so hostile to the idea of bringing you in on the investigation. You never knew it, but she was fighting your battles for you behind closed doors. Why was I being so obstructive over approaching Cui Feng? Why wouldn’t I support your request for a search warrant?’

Li looked at the small, frail body of Mei-Ling lying on the floor. He remembered her smile, her twinkling eyes, that braying laugh of hers, her jealousy of Margaret. How easily all that life and vitality had been taken from her. He turned his tearful gaze back on Huang. For the first time, the Section Chief could not meet it. He looked away and took a long, deep breath.

‘It must have been so clear to her. She knew, of course, that it was only a liver transplant three years ago that saved the life of my wife.’ He shook his head and forced himself to meet Li’s eyes again. ‘She knew that only too well, because up until then she and I had been lovers.’ His eyes flickered to the body on the floor. ‘I don’t know now whether it was love, or lust. But it was full of passion. I was going to leave my wife.’ He paused. ‘Until she was diagnosed with terminal liver disease.’ And he looked quickly at Li, an appeal for understanding in his voice and his eyes. ‘I couldn’t leave her then. I couldn’t just abandon her. I don’t know whether it was guilt, or whether somewhere deep inside I still loved her, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I had to choose between them. But I had no choice.’ His appeal for understanding, even sympathy, fell on stony ground, and he retreated back into himself. ‘I don’t think Mei-Ling ever really got over it.’ His voice had retreated, too, almost to a whisper.

Li stood, unable to move, the silence singing in his ears, before he became aware of the slow tick, tick, of a clock somewhere in the room. Even as it invaded his consciousness it grew louder, until Huang’s voice suddenly snuffed it out again.

‘I don’t even know how Cui found out about my wife, but when he approached me with the offer of a transplant, how could I refuse? I could never have afforded it. But Cui waived all the fees. He told me I should regard it as a favour. A gift. A gift of life.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have known, of course, that he was simply investing in a little guanxi, in the knowledge that what was a small thing for him, was incalculable for me. That I would be forever in his debt. But I could never have known just how much. It was not the gift of life he promised it would be. It was a gift of death.’

Li said, ‘So he told you just how he had acquired the liver that saved your wife’s life.’ The mechanics of Huang’s entrapment had become suddenly very clear to him.

Huang nodded. ‘What could I do? I was appalled. But it was done, and I couldn’t undo it. And the treatment didn’t stop there. My wife continued to need constant care and expensive medication against possible rejection of her new liver. If I took any action at all it would kill her.’ His anger and frustration raised the pitch of his voice now. ‘He had me. Held my very soul in his hand, and there was not one damned thing I could do about it.’

‘So you traded the life of a woman you had been about to leave for the lives of all those poor girls.’

Anger and guilt flashed at once in Huang’s eyes. ‘What would you have done?’

Li had no idea. He could not begin to imagine the circumstance. But he knew that what Huang had done was wrong. He said, ‘So what did he want you to do? Apart from turning a blind eye?’

Huang shrunk from the withering accusation in Li’s voice. It sparked his own guilt, and living with that was worse than anything anyone else could do or say to him. ‘I provided him with certification when he required it. Proof that the organs he was selling abroad had been legitimately acquired from the bodies of executed prisoners. They were little more than official letterheads, but that was enough to satisfy his clients. And, of course, everyone knows that the Chinese take organs from executed prisoners. The dissidents have been screaming about it in America for years. Only they claim it’s done without permission. Which is a nice scare story to feed the American fantasy of the Chinese bogey man.’ He shook his head. ‘As well as providing the perfect cover story for Cui Feng.’

‘And you never once thought about all those innocent women who were the real donors?’ There was bile now in Li’s voice. Angry and bitter.

‘No,’ Huang almost shouted at him. ‘I didn’t. I never knew the full extent of it until they found those bodies at Lujiazui. But I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t even contemplate it. How could I?’ His eyes burned with the fire of his own futile defence. ‘And do you know the ultimate irony? The ultimate fucking irony?’ His breath was coming in short gasps. He waved his hand helplessly towards the open door. ‘She died anyway. It was all for nothing.’ Tears, like acid, burned down his cheeks. ‘All the drugs, all the treatment, and in the end her body still rejected the damned thing. Three years on, and we were back where we started. She was slipping back into that same terminal decline, only this time there was nothing that could be done.’ He wept openly now, sobbing deeply, pressing his mouth into the palm of his hand to try to hold in the pain.

And as Huang descended into the hell of his own making, Li’s anger ebbed away, leaving him washed up and spent on a bleak and barren shoreline. There was only one thing left on his mind, and he was almost afraid to pursue it. ‘Where’s Xinxin?’ His voice was hoarse.

Huang took a moment or two to bring himself back under control. ‘Wasn’t my idea,’ he said eventually. ‘Cui thought if he had the kid snatched it would distract you from the investigation. At least long enough for him to cover his tracks.’

Li felt his heart beat like a fist punching his ribs from the inside. ‘Where is she?’ he asked again.

‘I don’t know.’ And there was something in Huang’s tone that suggested he didn’t much care. ‘If I was to guess,’ he said, ‘I’d figure they’d probably taken her to the safe house.’

‘What safe house?’

‘Where they took the women after they’d been snatched. They were held there until the “patient” had flown in and been prepared, then they were taken to the clinic for … well, for the operation.’

‘Where is it?’ There was an imperative, dangerous quality in Li’s voice now.

‘Li Yan?’ Margaret’s voice calling from the other end of the hall crashed into the moment like a gunshot. Huang stiffened, his eyes suddenly shining and alert.

Li cursed inwardly, but ignored Margaret’s call. ‘Where the fuck is it!’ He was hanging on to his hope by a thread.

Huang looked at him and seemed to relax again for a moment. ‘Cui has a clinic at Suzhou,’ he said. ‘It’s about sixty kilometres outside of Shanghai.’

Li knew of Suzhou. It was famous in China for its beauty. The Venice of the East. And almost as if she were speaking to him from beyond the grave, he remembered Mei-Ling telling him that her family had come originally from Hangzhou. We have a saying, she had told him that night at the Green Wave restaurant. Above there is Heaven, and on earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou. It was ironic, he thought, that all these women destined for death on the surgeon’s table should have spent their last days and nights in a place that the Chinese believed was like Heaven on earth.

Huang said, ‘They kept the women in the basement. You can only get to it by canal from the rear of the building. It meant that at night they could take the women in and out by boat, and nobody would be any the wiser.’

‘Li Yan?’ Margaret’s voice was closer now, and softer. He heard her footfall in the hall. But still he kept his focus on Xinxin.

‘Is she still alive?’ His own voice sounded detached to him, distant, like an echo. He held his breath.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Huang said. And it was like some last, petty revenge exacted on Li, as if somehow he were to be blamed for everything.

Li heard a gasp behind him, and he turned to see Margaret standing in the doorway. She was looking at Mei-Ling’s prone and bloody form on the floor. She looked up at Li, and then beyond him to where Huang still sat in his chair.

Li turned quickly and took a step towards Huang. The Section Chief raised his gun and pointed it at Li’s chest. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said quietly. Li stopped, and Huang turned the barrel of the gun and placed it in his mouth. The shot rang out before Li could even shout for him to stop. It had a strange, muffled quality, and Li felt Huang’s blood and brain tissue spatter hot across his face.

II

They had left the lights of Shanghai behind them some fifteen minutes earlier, and Li’s foot kept the accelerator pressed to the floor so that their car maintained a steady one hundred and thirty kilometres an hour. Shortly after they crossed the Wusong River, known in the days of the International Settlement as Suzhou Creek, they passed out of the Shanghai administrative area and into Jiangsu Province. There was very little traffic on the Shanghai — Nanjing expressway. The odd truck rumbling west, the occasional bus, a few private cars. The windscreen wipers beat against the thrashing of the rain, and beyond the ring of their headlights the night was black and impenetrable.

Margaret sat in the passenger seat in a state of shock. The picture of Mei-Ling lying in her own blood was etched indelibly in her mind’s eye and she could not rid herself of it. She saw, still, the small hand stretched out on the floor, delicate little fingers, crooked slightly as if attempting to grasp at something, perhaps a vain attempt to hold on to life. There was no way to give expression to the sadness Margaret felt, no way to take back all the things she had said and felt in anger and jealousy. The men in my life always seem to have other priorities, Mei-Ling had told her. Only a matter of hours later, the man in her life had killed her and then put a bullet in his own brain. Had she had some kind of premonition of what was to come? Her Heavenly Element signifying danger, her trigram, K’an, the colour of blood. Margaret glanced at Li. Huang’s blood was still smeared on his face. Poor Mei-Ling, she thought. And she wondered what you ever really knew about other people’s lives?

Occasionally the police radio crackled and interrupted her thoughts. Earlier, Li had spoken briefly to someone at headquarters as he had turned the car up a ramp on to the Zhongshan Xilu ring road. A few minutes later he had relayed to her the contents of a cryptic return call. They would be met in Suzhou by officers of the local public security bureau. And his request for an arrest warrant for Cui Feng had been turned down by the Procurator General, on grounds of lack of evidence. Neither had passed comment on this, and there had been no exchange between them since.

The journey felt interminable although, in truth, less than an hour had passed since they had left Huang’s apartment building. An endless succession of broken white lines, illuminated by their headlamps, threw themselves at the windscreen and vanished into history. But in spite of their hypnotic effect, the image of Mei-Ling still lingered. Closing her eyes, Margaret could not erase it. Only the dreadful spectre of what they might find when they reached Suzhou could compete for space in her burned-out imagination.

Shortly before they saw the lights of Suzhou in the distance, the rain stopped. Somewhere away to their right, the waters of Yang Cheng Lake lay brooding in the darkness. Li took a spur off the expressway and they turned south towards Loumen Gate at the north-east corner of the old city wall. Beyond the gate, a convoy of five police vehicles was pulled in at the side of the road, red lights flashing. Li pulled up beside them and got out. Margaret remained in the car and watched as he walked forward to be met by the senior officer. There were about a dozen men in total, all in uniform. They spoke for several minutes before Li returned to the car. He said, ‘They have a small sampan waiting to take us to the basement at the rear of Cui’s clinic. It is only approachable by river.’ He took several deep breaths. ‘There will be three officers with us. The officer in charge was afraid that a motor boat would alert anyone who might be on guard. Some of the others will remain at the landing stage and the rest will cover the building from the road at the front. Apparently there are no lights on there at the moment. The place appears to be locked and empty.’ His words had a focused professionalism. He was trying to be a police officer doing a job, rather than a man afraid of what he might find in Cui’s basement.

They followed the convoy of police vehicles through the brightly lit modern streets of the new town, catching only glimpses to their right of the narrow streets that ran off into the old city, where hundreds of steeply arched bridges traversed the dozens of natural waterways on which the town had been built two-and-a-half thousand years before.

At an intersection, the convoy split up, and now they were following only two vehicles into the narrow streets of the ancient city, a jumble of whitewashed houses built one on top of the other. Beyond the steeply pitched grey-tiled roofs, Margaret saw the tiers of a pagoda rising into the night sky. They passed a tearoom perched on the edge of a narrow creek where old men would sit through the day, listening to the chirrup of their caged birds, and gaze on the tranquillity of life that drifted by.

In a dark, quiet square, they pulled into the kerb and got out of their vehicles. Several of the Suzhou officers stared curiously at Margaret. Their senior officer barked a command and Li steered Margaret gently by the elbow to follow him through an elaborate brick-carved arch, into a narrow lane that weaved its way between the crumbling whitewashed walls of ancient private dwellings. They crossed a number of humpbacked bridges over impossibly narrow waterways. Margaret saw covered corridors linking one house with another across deep, dark water. Finally, they reached a much wider river, and climbed down steep, uneven steps to where a sampan was bobbing gently on the swell, and the smell of raw sewage filled the damp air.

A fisherman in blue cotton pants and a white shirt held the boat steady as Li, Margaret and three uniformed officers climbed aboard. It was very dark. The houses on either side of the river rose straight out of the water, stones jutting out from the walls to form an arrangement of steps leading up to shadowed doorways. There were lights in only a few windows, and they cast pale, flickering reflections on the water. Margaret heard the steady slap, slap, of river water on the side of the boat and the breathing of the men who gathered around her in the belly of the small craft. The fisherman cast off and stood at the stern of the boat, grasping a long oar in both hands, working it easily backwards and forwards to propel them with surprising speed downriver. The old wooden vessel creaked and groaned against the resistance of the water, but the fisherman barely broke sweat. Margaret was wondering how on earth he managed to see in the dark, when suddenly, overhead, the clouds parted and an almost full moon poured a bright silvery light down upon them. It was a transformation. The whitewashed houses glowed like ghosts on either side of a river of mercury. Trees that overhung the water from between buildings, rustled gently in a breeze that had sprung from nowhere. It was immediately cooler, and Margaret shivered.

They passed under two bridges, before gradually slowing and drawing in towards the right bank. The helmsman looked back along the riverbank and appeared to be counting. Then, finally satisfied, he pulled up at a flight of stone steps that looked much like any other. At the top of them a stout, studded, wooden door stood firmly shut. The windows on the lower level were all barred. There were another two levels above that, accessible, Margaret assumed, from the street on the other side. A cloud scudded across the moon and they were plunged briefly into darkness before, in a moment, being flooded again with light.

Li jumped on to the bottom step and drew out the gun he had removed from Huang’s dead hand. The blood had dried rust red on it. There was a brief, whispered exchange between him and the senior uniformed officer who was unarmed, before they proceeded up the steps. The fisherman helped Margaret out of the boat and she followed them. The other two officers climbed out after her, but remained on the bottom step.

At the top of the steps, Li tried the door. But it was securely locked. He put his shoulder to it twice, but could not move it. After another whispered exchange one of the other officers hurried up the steps with a long metal crowbar. Slowly, working it backwards and forwards, he managed to insinuate it between the door and the jamb until he achieved sufficient leverage to force it open. There was a splintering and cracking of wood that was deafening in the stillness of the night. The door swung open and they were met by a rush of damp, fetid air. Everyone stood stock still, but there was nothing to be heard. Li felt inside the wall for a light switch, but found nothing. The darkness beyond was inky black. The third officer climbed back aboard the boat and grabbed two flash lights. He jumped out again and ran up the steps to pass them to Li and his senior officer.

Li snapped on his light, and its strong beam penetrated the blackness to reveal a long, narrow corridor with a flagstone floor. Stone walls ran damp with condensation. Somewhere up ahead a small creature, probably a rat, scurried away from the light. Li froze for a moment, then began moving cautiously inside. The senior officer switched on his flashlight and followed. Margaret stepped gingerly after them, her hand recoiling from the cold, slimy touch of the wall.

There were half a dozen doors at regular intervals, on left and right. The first two they passed stood open. The doors had small, barred, unglazed openings in them. In the rooms beyond, there were cot beds freshly made up with sheets and blankets, small bedside cabinets, rush matting on the floor.

Halfway down, Li came to the first door that was shut. He tried the handle. It was locked. He shone his flashlight through the opening in the door and saw, huddled against the wall at the far side of a rumpled cot bed, a pale young woman in her early twenties. She was wearing only a thin cotton smock, and her legs were pulled up under her chin, arms folded around her shins, trying to make herself as small as possible. There was no colour in her face, and she cowered from the light like a trapped animal. She was making tiny whimpering noises.

‘It’s all right,’ Li said softly. ‘We’re the police.’ He handed his flashlight to Margaret, braced himself against the opposite wall, and kicked the door several times with the flat of his foot. On the fourth kick the lock tore free and the door flew open. The girl screamed, curling herself into an even smaller ball. Li snatched his flashlight and hurried into the room. The girl pressed herself into the wall as if hoping somehow she might be absorbed into it. Li put his light on the bed and with warm, tender hands gently took her shoulders and pulled her into his chest. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ he said softly. ‘You’re safe. You’re absolutely safe. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.’

Her response was immediate, as she uncurled herself and then clamped herself on to Li, sobbing uncontrollably. Margaret stood watching from the doorway. There was nothing that she could do or say; the girl would not understand her. Vaguely, she was aware of the officer who had come in with them making his way further down the corridor, his shadow growing long behind him from the reflected light of his electric torch.

The girl was icy to the touch, and Li held her tightly to him, rocking her slowly back and forth on the bed, whispering softly all the time. But nothing would stop her shivering. Eventually he said to her, ‘Is there another girl here? A little girl? Do you know? Have you seen her? Have you heard her?’ But if the girl understood she was incapable of answering.

Suddenly there was a cry from the far end of the corridor. A man’s voice, the sound of a struggle. Margaret turned back into the corridor in time to see a flashlight tumbling across the floor. Before it smashed against the wall, she saw the figure of the uniformed police officer on his knees. A flash of blood, an expression of pain fixed on his face. And then darkness, and a sound like the wind, and Margaret felt, more than saw, the shape that flew at her. She screamed, and from somewhere a light flashed across a face made hideous by fear and anger. A face she knew from a moment of panic on a dark night on the Bund, a face with high, wide cheekbones and a hare-lip. She smelled his foul breath, felt it hot on her face, and saw his blade flashing in the light as it rose to plunge into her chest. A single, deafening sound roared in her head. And she wondered, momentarily, if this is what death felt like, a revelation, an explosion of light and sound. She fell backwards to the floor, with his weight on top of her, and immediately she was aware of her blood running warm across her chest and neck. There was no pain, but the chill of the stone flags beneath her felt like death, and she heard the screaming of the girl in the cell like a distant call from hell.

And then the weight, miraculously, was lifted from her and she was blinded by a light in her face. ‘Jesus …’ She heard Li’s voice, and for a moment was struck by the incongruity of a Christian oath in a Chinese mouth. ‘Margaret, are you all right.’

She sat up, breathing hard, and looked at the blood that soaked her tee-shirt, realising for the first time that it was not her own. And then, in the reflected light, she saw the Mongolian lying on the floor, half his head blown away by the shot from Li’s gun. ‘I’m fine,’ she heard herself saying, and then thought, no I’m not. The girl was still screaming.

She heard the calls of the other officers as they ran in from the steps. Li helped her to her feet. ‘She’s got to be here,’ he said.

Margaret nodded, unable to speak. Li took her hand, and ran with her down to where the wounded policeman lay in a pool of his own blood. Margaret knelt at his side and turned him over. But the blade had severed the carotid artery on the left side of his neck, and the life that had pulsed through his veins only minutes earlier had already ebbed away. She heard Li shouting, and looked up to see him at the bottom end of the corridor kicking furiously at another locked door. She scrambled to her feet and ran after him as the door finally tore free of its lock and crashed open. She arrived in time to see Li falling to his knees at the side of a cot bed. On top of it lay the tiny, prone figure of little Xinxin. Her hands and feet were bound, and she was gagged and blindfolded. Margaret felt a surge of anger and fear robbing her of strength, and she staggered forward.

Li turned the child over, fingers working feverishly to untie the gag and tear away the blindfold. Her eyes were closed, her mouth gaping. He leaned over her, and Margaret heard the moan that escaped his lips involuntarily. He looked up at her. ‘She’s not breathing,’ he said.