The Killing Room

I

The cold, dry earth rattled across the lid of the coffin as it left her mother’s hand. Margaret, too, stooped to lift a handful and felt the frosted dirt stick to her skin. She let it fall from her fingers into her father’s grave, and lifted her eyes to a pewtery sky. The first snow of winter fluttered on the edge of an icy wind that blew in across the distant lake and she shivered, pulling her coat tight around herself to contain her grief.

She turned away from the handful of mourners at the graveside, a few relatives and friends, a representative from the university, some old students of her father. There was something primitive about the ritual of burial that seemed somehow absurd to Margaret. Placing a person in a wooden box in the ground and leaving them to rot. She had seen enough bodies in various states of decomposition to have decided long ago that when her turn came she would be cremated. It was simpler, cleaner. More final, somehow. She knew the stages of decay that the body they had buried would undergo, and she did not want to think of her father like that.

The wind rattled the branches of the empty trees, stark in their winter nakedness. The last leaves of fall lay rotting on the ground, silver edged by the previous night’s frost. Somewhere, away to their left among the rows of tombstones, she knew, lay the graves of famous gangsters from the city’s colourful past. Alphonse Capone, and his father and mother; the infamous John May and his wife Hattie; ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn; Antonio ‘The Scourge’ Lombardo; and dozens more Italian immigrants and their descendants who had helped sow the seeds of America’s organised crime in this windy place. Her father had kept better company in life.

But his family had all been buried here at Mount Carmel, to the west of Chicago, a ragtag bunch of undistinguished antecedents of Scots and Irish origin. Her mother’s family were of German descent, and she supposed that’s where she got her pale freckled skin and fair hair. Her father had had Celtic black hair in his youth, and incongruously blue eyes. It was a comfort to her that she had inherited at least some of his genes.

News of his death had reached her in Beijing in a short, cold phone call from her mother, and she had sat for a long time in the tiny apartment provided by the University of Public Security, aware of a peculiar sense of emptiness, disturbed by her lack of emotion. It was nearly two years since she had last seen him, and they had spoken a mere handful of times on the phone. It was only when she awoke to her own tears in the middle of the night that she discovered the grief she feared might not be there.

Now she was at a loss. The tragic circumstance of her father’s death had finally forced her to break her ties with China, fragile ties held in place only by a man she thought she loved. And now that she was ‘home’, she would have to make decisions she had been putting off for far too long. Decisions about where her future really lay. Decisions she did not want to face.

She had been back in Chicago for nearly three days, and not once had she ventured to the north side to check on her apartment in Lincoln Park. She had left neighbours collecting mail and watering house plants. But she had been gone for more than eighteen months, and she was afraid of what might greet her there. Afraid, too, of a past she did not wish to revisit, memories of a man she had lived with for seven years. The man she had married. Instead she had opted for the safety of her old bedroom in the redbrick house where she had grown up in the leafy suburbs of Oak Park. Everything there was familiar, comforting, filled with recollections of a time when she had no cares or responsibilities, and life had still held the promise of something magic. She was, she knew, just hiding.

‘Margaret.’ Her mother’s voice carried to her on the wind and had the same chill edge to it. Margaret stopped and waited for her to catch up. They had barely spoken in the last three days. They had embraced briefly, but without warmth. There had been the polite enquiries about their respective well-being, the mechanical exchanges of necessary information. It wasn’t that they had ever really fallen out, their relationship had simply been sterile for as long as Margaret could remember. Loveless. A strange relationship for mother and daughter. ‘You’ll help me serve up the food when we get back to the house?’

‘Of course.’ Margaret didn’t know why her mother was asking. They had been through all this earlier. Perhaps, she thought, it was just for the lack of something else to say.

They walked to the gate in silence then, side by side, a space between them that a husband and father might have filled. As they reached the cars her mother said with a tone, ‘So what now? Back to China?’

Margaret clenched her teeth. ‘I don’t think this is the time or place, Mom.’

Her mother raised an eyebrow. ‘I take it that’s Margaret code for “yes”.’

Margaret flashed her a look. ‘Well, if I do go back, it’ll probably just be to escape from you.’ She opened the rear door of the hired limousine and slipped into the cold leather of the back seat.

II

‘Deputy Section Chief Li.’ The defence lawyer spoke slowly, as if considering every syllable. ‘There is no doubt that if one compares these shoe prints with the photographs of the footprints taken at the scene of the murder, one would be led to the conclusion that they were made by the same pair of shoes.’ Photographs of the footprints and the corresponding shoe prints were laid out on the table in front of him.

Li Yan nodded cautiously, uncertain as to where this was leading, aware of the judge watching him closely from the bench opposite, a wily, white-haired veteran languishing thoughtfully in his winter blue uniform beneath the red, blue and gold crest of the Ministry of Public Security. The scribble of the clerk’s pen was clearly audible in the silence of the packed courtroom.

‘Which would further lead one to the conclusion that the owner of these shoes was, at the very least, present at the crime scene — particularly in light of the prosecution’s claim that traces of the victim’s blood were also found on the shoes.’ The lawyer looked up from his table and fixed Li with a cold stare. He was a young man, in his early thirties, about the same age as Li, one of a new breed of lawyers feeding off the recent raft of legislation regulating the burgeoning Chinese justice system. He was sleek, well groomed, prosperous. A dark Armani suit, a crisp, white, button-down designer shirt and silk tie. And he was brimming with a self-confidence that made Li uneasy. ‘Would you agree?’

Li nodded.

‘I’m sorry, did you speak?’

‘No, I nodded my agreement.’ Irritation in Li’s voice.

‘Then, please speak up, Deputy Section Chief, so that the clerk can note your comments for the record.’ The Armani suit’s tone was condescending, providing the court with the erroneous impression that the police officer in the witness stand was a rank novice.

Li bristled. This was a cut-and-dried case. The defendant, a young thug up from the country who had claimed to be looking for work in Beijing, had broken into the victim’s home in the north-east of the city. When the occupant, an elderly widow, had wakened and startled him in the act, he had stabbed her to death. There had been copious amounts of blood. The warden at a workers’ hostel had called the local public security bureau to report that one of the residents had returned in the middle of the night covered in what looked like blood. By the time the police got there the defendant had somehow managed to dispose of his bloody clothes and showered away all traces of blood from his person. No murder weapon was recovered, but a pair of his shoes matched footprints left in blood at the scene, and there were still traces of the victim’s blood in the treads. Li wondered what possible reason this supercilious defence lawyer could have for his apparent confidence. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

‘You would further agree, then, that the owner of these shoes was most probably the perpetrator of the crime.’

‘I would.’ Li spoke clearly, so that there could be no ambiguity.

‘So what leads you to believe that my client was the perpetrator?’

Li frowned. ‘They’re his shoes.’

‘Are they?’

‘They were found in his room at the hostel. Forensic examination found traces of the victim’s blood in the treads, and footwear impressions taken from them provided an exact match with the footprints found at the scene.’

‘So where are they?’ The lawyer’s eyes held Li in their unwavering gaze.

For the first time Li’s own confidence began to falter. ‘Where are what?’

‘The shoes, of course.’ This delivered with an affected weariness. ‘You can’t claim to have found a pair of shoes in my client’s room, tying him to a crime scene, and then fail to produce them as evidence.’

Li felt the blood pulsing at his temples, a hot flush rising on his cheeks. He glanced towards the procurator’s table, but the prosecutor’s eyes were firmly fixed on papers spread in front of him. ‘After forensics had finished with them they were logged and tagged and—’

‘I ask again,’ the lawyer interrupted, raising his voice, a voice of reason asking a not unreasonable question. ‘Where are they?’

‘They were sent down to the procurator’s office as exhibits for the court.’

‘Then why are they not here for us all to see?’

Li glanced at the procurator again, only this time it was anger colouring his face. Clearly the prosecution’s failure to produce the shoes had been well aired before Li had even been called to give evidence. He was being made to look like an idiot. ‘Why don’t you ask the procurator?’ he said grimly.

‘I already did,’ said the Armani suit. ‘He says that his office never received them from your office.’

A hubbub of excited speculation buzzed around the public benches. The clerk snapped a curt warning for members of the public to remain silent or be expelled from the court.

Li knew perfectly well that the shoes, along with all the other evidence, had been dispatched to the procurator’s office. But he also knew that there was nothing he could say or do here in the witness box that could prove it. His eyes flickered towards the table next to the procurator, and met the hate-filled glare of the victim’s son, and he knew that when the defence was done with him he would have to face the wrath that the victim’s representative would be entitled to vent. He felt every eye in the court upon him as the defence lawyer said, ‘Surely, Deputy Section Chief, it must be obvious even to you, that without the shoes my client has no case to answer?’

Li closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

He pushed through glass doors, brushing past a row of potted plants that lined the top of the steps, and started angrily down towards the car park. The procurator chased after him, clutching a thick folder of documents. Above them rose the five storeys of Central Beijing Middle Court, topped by a huge radio mast. Off to their left, where armed officers guarded the vehicle entrance to the holding cells, the red Chinese flag hung limply in the winter sun over the Ministry of Public Security badge of justice. Justice! Li thought not. He pulled on a greatcoat over his green uniform as he hurried down the stairs, and hauled a peaked cap down over his flat-top crew cut, his breath billowing before him like fire in the cold morning air.

‘I’m telling you, we never got them,’ the procurator called after him. He was a short, spindly man with thinning hair and thick glasses that magnified his unusually round eyes. His uniform appeared too large for him.

Li wheeled around halfway down the steps and the procurator almost ran into him. ‘Bullshit!’ Even although the procurator was on the step above, Li towered over him, and the smaller man positively recoiled from Li’s aggression. ‘You would never have brought the case to court if we hadn’t provided the evidence.’

‘Paper evidence. That’s all you sent me,’ the procurator insisted. ‘I assumed the shoes had been lodged in the evidence depository.’

‘They were. Which makes them your responsibility, not ours.’ Li raised his arms with his voice, and people flooding out of the court behind them stopped to listen. ‘In the name of the sky, Zhang! My people work their butts off to bring criminals to justice …’ He was distracted momentarily by the sight of the Armani suit and his exultant client passing them on the steps. He had a powerful urge to take his fist and smash their gloating faces to a pulp. But then, he knew, justice and the law were not always compatible. He turned instead to the procurator to vent his anger. ‘And you fucking people go losing the evidence, and killers walk free. You can expect an official complaint.’ He turned and headed off down the steps jamming a cigarette in his mouth as he went, leaving Procurator Zhang fuming and only too aware of the curious faces regarding him. Policemen did not speak to procurators like that, certainly not in public. It was a humiliating loss of mianzi — face.

Zhang shouted lamely at Li’s back, ‘I’m the one who’ll be making the complaint, Deputy Section Chief. To the Commissioner. You needn’t think you can live in the protective shadow of your uncle forever.’

Li stopped dead and Zhang knew immediately he had gone too far. Li turned and fixed him with a silent stare filled with such intensity that Zhang could not maintain eye contact. He turned and ran up the steps, back into the safety of the courthouse.

Li stared after him for a few seconds, then hurried through the parked vehicles to the street, struggling to control his rage. The urge to hit someone, anyone, was extremely powerful. A group of people standing at the notice board where the week’s trials were posted in advance looked at him curiously as he strode past. But he didn’t notice them. Neither did he see the vendor at the corner of the street offering him fruit from under a green and yellow striped awning, nor smell the smoke rising from lamb skewers cooking on open coals in the narrow confines of Xidamochang Street. He turned instead towards the roar of traffic on East Qianmen Avenue, not even hearing the honk of a car’s horn sounding behind him. Only when its engine revved and the horn sounded again did he half turn, and an unmarked Beijing Police Jeep drew up beside him. Detective Wu leaned over to push the passenger door open. Li was surprised to see him. ‘What d’you want, Wu?’ he growled.

Wu raised his hands in mock defence against Li’s aggression. ‘Hey, Boss, I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour.’

Li slipped into the passenger seat. ‘What for?’

Wu grinned, jaws grinding as ever on a piece of leathery gum that had long since lost its flavour. He pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead. He was the bearer of interesting information, and he wanted to tease it out, make the most of the moment. ‘Remember that case during Spring Festival? The dismembered girl? We found her bits in a shallow grave out near the Summer Palace …’

‘Yeah, I remember the case,’ Li interrupted impatiently. ‘We never got anyone for it.’ He paused. ‘What about it?’

‘They found a whole bunch more just like her down in Shanghai. Some kind of mass grave. Maybe as many as twenty. Same MO.’

‘Twenty!’ Li was shocked.

Wu shrugged. ‘They don’t know how many exactly yet, but there are lots of bits.’ He relayed this with a relish Li found distasteful. ‘And they want you down there. Fast.’

Li was taken aback. ‘Me? Why?’

Wu grinned. ‘’Cos you’re such a fucking superstar, Boss.’ But his smile faded rapidly in the chill of Li’s glare. ‘They think there could be a link to the murder here in Beijing,’ he said quickly. ‘And there’s big pressure to get a result fast on this one.’

‘Why’s that?’ Li had forgotten his courtroom debacle already.

Wu lit a cigarette. ‘Seems there was this big ceremony down there this morning. Concrete getting poured into the foundations of some big joint venture bank they’re building across the river in Pudong. Anyway, the CEO of this New York bank comes to do the ceremonial bit on the building site. All the top brass are there. Place is bristling with American Press and TV. Only it’s pissing from the heavens. The building site turns into a swamp, and the platform they built for the VIPs tips this American exec right into the hole they’re going to fill with concrete. And he finds himself floundering around in the mud with bits of bodies coming out of the walls, like they just dug up some old burial site. Only the bodies are not so old.’

Li whistled softly. He could picture the scene. A media feeding frenzy. Not the Chinese press, they would only print what they were told. But there would be no restraining the Western media. ‘TV cameras?’ he asked.

‘Beaming right out of there, live on satellite,’ Wu confirmed, enjoying himself. ‘Apparently the powers that be are in a real state. Bodies in the bank vault are not good for business, and apparently the Americans are talking about pulling out of the whole deal.’

‘I’m sure the victims will be sorry to hear that,’ Li said.

Wu smirked and reaching over to the rear seat heaved a fat folder into Li’s lap. ‘That’s the file on the girl we found in Beijing. You’ll have time to refamiliarise yourself with it on the flight, which leaves …’ he checked his watch, ‘… in a little over two hours.’ He grinned. ‘Just enough time for you to pack an overnight bag.’

Li sat on the edge of the bed, watery sunlight slanting in from the street through the last dead leaves clinging to the trees that shaded Zhengyi Road in the summer. A kindly face smiled down at him from the wall, a tumble of curly black hair, streaked with silver, swept back from a remarkably unlined face — his Uncle Yifu, with whom he had lived for more than ten years on the second floor of this police apartment block in the Ministry compound. Li still missed him. Missed the mischief in his eyes as he endeavoured to trip Li up at every turn, imparting the experience of a lifetime, teaching him to think laterally. While the devil might be in the detail, therein also lies the truth, he used to say. Li still ached when he remembered the circumstances of the old man’s death. Woke frequently in the night with the bloody image skewered into his consciousness. This had been Yifu’s room, and now it was Xinxin’s. She often asked Li to tell her stories about the old man who smiled down at her from the wall. And he always made the time to tell her.

Now, reluctantly, he stood up and wandered back to his own room. He was destined, it seemed, to be forever haunted by Yifu. With every failure, his uncle was cast up to him as an example he should follow. While every success was attributed to the old man’s influence. Those who were jealous of his status and achievements put them down to his uncle’s connections. And those senior officers who had worked with his uncle made it clear that his footsteps were much too big for Li to walk in. And through every investigation he felt the old man’s presence at his shoulder, his voice whispering softly in his ear. No use, Li, in worrying over the might-have-beens. The answer’s in the detail, Li, always in the detail. It is a good thing to have a broken mirror reshaped. Where the tiller is tireless, the earth is fertile. He’d have given anything to hear that voice again for real.

Quickly he stripped out of his uniform and felt the freedom of release from its starched constraint. He pulled on a pair of jeans, a white tee-shirt and his favourite old brown leather jacket, and began packing some clothes into a holdall. One of Xinxin’s books lying on the chest of drawers caused him to pause. He would need to arrange for Mei Yuan to look after the child while he was gone. And there was no Margaret to step into the breach.

He sat for a moment lost in thought, then reached over and lifted Margaret’s hairbrush from the bedside table and teased out some of the hair trapped in its teeth. It was extra fine and golden in the pale sunlight. He put it to his nose and smelled her perfume, experiencing a moment of acute desire, and then emptiness. He ran his hand lightly across the unmade bed where they had so often made love, and realised that he missed her more than he knew.

III

Margaret had never quite understood the Irish concept of the wake — a celebration of the life, rather than a mourning of the death. How could you celebrate a life that was gone, something that once was vital and full of hope and warmth and giving, that now was cold and dead? Like the procession of bodies that had passed through her autopsy room, all animation extinct, just meat on a slab.

She could not bear to think of her father like that. She had not even had the courage to view his body, laid out in his coffin, colour carefully applied to his face by the mortician in an attempt to create the illusion of life. In any case, she knew, it was not her father who lay there. He had long vanished, existing now only in the memories of others, and in flickering, fading images on old home movies from the days before video tape. They had never bought a video camera.

There were always the family photo albums. But Margaret felt that these fixed, two-dimensional images rarely caught the person. They lacked the spirit that was life and character, a personality. They were just moments in time without any reference point.

She heard voices raised in laughter coming from the living room, the chink of glasses, and felt resentful that these people should come into her father’s home on the day he was buried and take his passing so lightly. She slipped out of the kitchen and moved down the hall to the room at the back of the house which had been his den. She shut the door on the sounds of the wake and listened to the silence. The room was laden with it, what little light remained of the late afternoon soaked up by the heavy net curtains. If there was anything left of him, it was here in this room where he had spent so much time. She breathed in the smell of him in the dry, academic atmosphere of his own private space. Everything had been left as it was from the day he dropped dead in his lecture room at the university from a massive coronary thrombosis. Quick, painless, completely unexpected. The best way to go, Margaret thought, except for those who remained, devastated by the suddenness of it, left to cope with the huge hole it made in all their lives.

She wandered around touching things. His books, hundreds of them gathering dust on the shelves. All the great modern American writers. It had been his subject, his speciality. Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and, of course, Hemingway, who had grown up just a few streets away in this quiet upscale Chicago suburb. All thumbed and marked and annotated. She picked one out. Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson. The pages were yellowing now around the edges, the paper dry, almost brittle. It fell open at a story called Hands. She remembered it. A sad story about a simple man whose love of children led to a tragic misunderstanding. There were copious notes down the margins in her father’s tight distinctive handwriting, the hallmark of a generation.

She moved to his desk. A piece of English reproduction furniture. Mahogany, with red leather inlay. It was chipped and scarred from years of use. Papers and books were piled untidily around his iMac desktop computer. A half-smoked pipe lay in an ashtray, the pale scrapings of his teeth around the mouthpiece of the black stem. As a child she had loved the sweet smell of his tobacco. She ran her fingers lovingly round the smoothly polished cherrywood bowl. He had no doubt intended to relight it. Now he never would.

In a frame to the left of the computer, partially obscured by a pile of unmarked exam papers, was a photograph of Margaret in her graduation gown. She moved the papers to get a better sight of it, and felt a strange ache as she saw the young face below the mortar board gazing back at her out of the picture, full of hope and youthful idealism. She wondered how often her father had looked at it in idle moments. Wondered what he had thought of her. Had he been proud or disappointed? As a little girl she had adored him. And he had given her so much of his time, so much of his love. But since her teens they had not been particularly close, and now she regretted it. It had been her fault. She had been too busy making a life for herself that had nothing to do with her parents. A life that had turned to failure and disappointment. And now there was no going back. No way to say, Sorry, Dad, I loved you really. She quickly turned the frame face down on the desk and turned on the computer, just for something to do. It whirred and hummed as it booted up its operating system, before presenting her with its desktop screen. From here she could access all his files. Mainly they were word-processing documents. Lectures, notes for students, a critical analysis of some new American classic. There were letters, too. Hundreds of them. But she had no interest in violating his privacy.

He had only recently gone on-line, discovering that he could stay easily in touch by e-mail with his daughter in China. All it took was a click of the mouse. But, then, beyond his initial enthusiasm for the Internet, he had not had much to say to her, and his e-mails had tailed off. She wondered what use he had made of the Net, and booted up his browser, a piece of software that connected him to the worldwide web, allowing him to visit any one of millions of Internet sites around the globe. The default page that it took her to was the HomePage of his Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Down the left side of the screen were four tabs, like name tabs on folders in a filing cabinet, which is what they were — or, at least, their electronic equivalent. While she waited for the UIC HomePage to load, she pointed the on-screen arrow to the HISTORY tab and a file opened up as if she had drawn it out of a cabinet. This showed the last five hundred Internet sites her father had visited. She went to the top of the list, the last site he had gone to on the day before he died. It was something called Aphrodite Home Page. She clicked on the Internet Explorer icon beside it and within seconds the screen was wiped black, and photographs of naked women began downloading under headings like SAMANTHA — Click me to watch live, and JULI–I like women.

Margaret’s face flushed red. A mixture of shock, embarrassment, revulsion. She went back to HISTORY and downloaded the next address on the list. More pornography. ASIAN BABES DO IT FOR YOU. Skinny Asian women with silicon boosted breasts revealed parts of their anatomy that Margaret had only ever seen on the autopsy table. She felt sick. Her dad was accessing pornography on the Internet. Her dad! She could not reconcile this with the sweet, gentle man she knew as her father, the most scrupulously fair and honest man she had ever known. But, then, she thought, had she ever really known him at all? Why would he want to look at filth like this? Men, she knew, had needs that women simply didn’t understand. But her dad?

She didn’t hear the door of the den opening and was startled by the sound of her mother’s voice. ‘What are you doing, Margaret? Everyone’s asking where you are.’

Margaret was flustered, as if caught in some illicit act. She quickly moved the arrow to shut down the computer before her mother could see what was on the screen. ‘Nothing,’ she said guiltily. ‘Just going through some of dad’s stuff.’

‘Well, there’ll be plenty of time for that,’ her mother said. ‘You have guests to see to.’

Margaret bridled. ‘They’re not my guests,’ she said. ‘You invited them. And, anyway, they seem to be having a pretty good time through there, drinking dad’s Scotch. They won’t want me spoiling their fun.’

Her mother sighed theatrically. ‘I don’t know why you bother affecting the grieving daughter. You had no time for him when he was alive. Why start pretending now?’

Margaret was stung, both by the unfairness and by the truth of her mother’s words. ‘I’m not pretending,’ she said, fighting back the tears. She hated her mother to see any sign of weakness in her. ‘I loved my dad.’ She hadn’t realised just how much until she had received the phone call in Beijing. ‘But don’t worry. I won’t cause any posthumous embarrassment at your funeral by pretending I ever felt anything about you.’

She saw the colour rise on her mother’s cheeks and experienced an immediate stab of regret at her cruelty. Her mother had always had the knack of bringing out the worst in her. ‘In that case,’ her mother said coldly, ‘perhaps you’d be better not going.’ She turned back to the door.

‘You never loved me, did you?’ The words were out before Margaret could stop them, and they halted her mother in her tracks. ‘That day my brother drowned. You wished it had been me and not him.’ Her mother turned and flashed her a look. Things that had never been said, feelings long suppressed, were bubbling to the surface. ‘You spent your life wishing failure on me because I could never live up to the expectations you had of him. Your boy. Your darling.’

Her mother’s jaw was trembling. Her eyes filling. But like her daughter, she would show no sign of weakness. ‘I didn’t have to wish failure on you, Margaret. You brought all the failure you could ever need on yourself. A failed marriage, a failed career. And now an affair with some … Chinaman.’ She said the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. ‘And don’t talk to me about love. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You were always so self-contained. So cold. All those people you cut open. Just so much dead flesh to you. You never needed anything from anyone, did you? And never gave a thing of yourself.’

Margaret’s eyes were burning. Her throat felt swollen. She wished she had never come home. Was it true? Was she really so cold, so ungiving? Her mother had always been squeamish about her decision to become a pathologist, but she had never realised just how much it disgusted her. The words hurt. She wanted to hurt back. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘that’s because I took after you. You were always the Queen of Frost.’ She paused. ‘And maybe that’s why dad had to go looking for his sexual pleasures on the Internet.’ As soon as the words were out she regretted saying them. But there was no way to take them back, and she remembered the lines from one of her father’s favourite poems — The moving finger writes: and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

All the colour that their argument had raised on her mother’s face drained out of it. The carefully controlled façade slipped, and she looked suddenly haggard and old. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked quietly.

Margaret found she couldn’t meet her eye. ‘Nothing, Mom. We’re just being stupid here. Trying to hurt one another, ’cos dad’s gone and left us and who else are we going to take it out on?’

Her mother nodded towards the computer. Her voice had become very small. ‘He spent hours in here on that damned thing.’ She looked at Margaret. ‘Your father and I hadn’t made love for years.’ She became hesitant. ‘But I had no idea …’

Margaret closed her eyes. There were things about your parents you’d rather you never knew.

‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’

Margaret opened her eyes and saw a young man standing in the doorway. For a moment, in the semi-dark, she had no idea who he was. It was his voice which sparked off the memories of those pre-graduation years. ‘David?’

‘That’s me,’ he grinned. ‘Thought I’d show my face. You know, for old time’s sake. But, hey, you know, if this is a bad moment …’

‘Of course not, David.’ Margaret’s mother had immediately recovered herself, slipping back into the role of the bravely grieving widow. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, I really should be seeing to my guests. I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted. It must be quite some time.’

David nodded. ‘Almost ten years.’

‘I’ll speak to you later, then.’ The widow smiled and was gone, leaving Margaret and this ghost from her past standing in the silence of her dead father’s den.

‘Ten years?’ Margaret said, for something to say. ‘You sound like you’ve been counting.’

‘Maybe I have.’ He stepped into the room and she saw him a little more clearly. Sandy hair, thinning now, a lean good-looking face, strong jaw, well-defined lips. David Webber was tall and powerfully built. She remembered those arms holding her, his lips on her neck. And unaccountably she burst into tears. ‘Hey,’ he said, and immediately he was there, those same arms drawing her to him, and she surrendered to the comfort of his warmth and strength and made no effort to stop the sobs that broke in her chest.

For a long time he just held her and said nothing, until gradually the sobs began to subside. Then he drew the hair back from the streaky wetness of her face and smiled gently down at her. ‘What you need is to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take you to dinner tonight. And if I don’t have you laughing by the end of the evening, I’ll pick up the tab.’

Which made her smile, in spite of everything. She remembered how she had always insisted they went Dutch, and how he had always made her laugh.

IV

Her life flashed before her eyes, like that moment people experience just before they believe they are going to die. All the familiar places she had haunted as a student, and then later during her residency at UIC Medical Centre. She had been more of a hermit during her time at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

The cab took them along Armitage, lights blazing in the early evening dark. On Halsted they had passed familiar-looking restaurants, a bar where she had once spent an hour drinking with a boyfriend, waiting for a table in a nearby eatery. By the time it was ready they were too drunk to eat.

Now she saw the used CD store where she used to browse when she was low on funds, only in those days they still sold vinyl, too. And the little speciality tea and coffee shop where she had got her favourite blend of roasted beans and Earl Grey tea by the pound. And all the chi-chi shops and boutiques where she would happily spend hours picking out what she would buy if only she could afford it.

They passed under the El, and Margaret suddenly began to get a bad feeling. ‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.

David smiled knowingly. ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’

But when the cab took a right into Sheffield and drew up outside Sai Café, she was. ‘Sushi! Jesus, David,’ she said, trying to make light of it, ‘I just spent the last eighteen months eating Asian, I was kind of hoping you might take me somewhere different. Somewhere American, you know, even a burger joint.’

‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen. ‘You always liked sushi. I just thought …’ His voice trailed off. He shrugged. ‘But, hey, doesn’t matter. We can always go somewhere else.’

His disappointment was palpable. Margaret relented. ‘But you made a reservation, right?’ It helped to make a reservation for Sai Café if you wanted to be sure of getting in.

‘Sure. But somebody else’ll be happy to get our table.’

‘No, it’s okay, let’s eat here.’ She started to get out of the cab. She knew he wanted to bring her here because it was where they had eaten together as students, when they could afford it. Only, David could always afford it. It was Margaret who had trouble scraping her share together. She watched him pay the cab driver. No tip. Nothing had changed. ‘Listen,’ she said when the cab pulled away, ‘don’t mind me. It’s just today, you know? I’m a bit cranky.’

David guffawed. ‘Hey, Mags, you always were.’

She felt a little chill run through her. Mags is what Michael had called her. That was something David had obviously forgotten about Sai Café.

The place was packed. People stood around the bar and sat drinking at tables in the window waiting for seats in the restaurant proper. Ahead and to the right, in the main eating area, customers perched on low stools along the sushi bar, chatting to Japanese chefs as they wielded sharp blades to carve up delicate pieces of raw fish. The girl at the lectern checked their reservation, and they followed her between crowded tables to one at the far wall. Candles flickered in the smoky atmosphere, and Margaret remembered that David, like Li, was a smoker. After all these months in China it didn’t bother her as much as it used to.

Steaming hot towels were brought to the table, and they ordered miso soup and moriawase — mixed sashimi platters. David lit up as soon as they had placed their order. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how long are you planning on staying?’

‘Don’t,’ Margaret said. ‘You sound like my mother.’

‘Jesus, I hope not.’ David laughed and gazed at her fondly. ‘You two never did get along, did you?’

‘Nope.’

‘I always reckoned you were more like your dad.’

And Margaret remembered how David had never really known her. He had been attracted to her, physically, and that had been more important to him than anything else. She had thought he was good-looking, and the physical side of their relationship had always been rewarding — until she got pregnant. And then there had only been one course of action as far as he was concerned, and she had allowed herself to be talked into it. She had never forgiven herself. Or him. ‘You still in medicine?’ He had made the youngest ever cardiac consultant at Chicago Hope.

‘Sure.’ He laughed, although a little uneasily, she thought. ‘Still single, too.’

Margaret hoped he had developed more subtlety in telling patients they were terminally ill. ‘I’m sure you had lots of girls after we split up.’

‘Lots.’ He drew on his cigarette and blew a jet of smoke over her head. ‘But, then, you were a hard act to follow.’

She grinned. ‘Oh, come on, David, it’s me you’re talking to. I never did fall for your bullshit.’

He returned the grin ruefully. ‘No, and neither has anyone else.’ He patted the top of his head. ‘And now I’m losing my hair I’m not such a catch any more. Women just pull out the hook and throw me back.’

‘Oh, sure. Like there aren’t a million women out there who wouldn’t die for a good-looking thirty-something cardiac consultant.’

‘Maybe I’ve just set myself too high standards. That’s what my mother thinks.’

‘She never thought too much of me.’

‘Yeah, but she never knew you like I did.’

‘Thank God.’ She grinned and he grinned back. And then there was an awkward silence that neither of them knew how to fill.

But they were rescued from their embarrassment by the arrival of the soup. The taste of it was familiar and comforting, pieces of wakame and tofu cubes in hot dashi stock thickened by red miso. They slurped in silence for minute or two.

Then, ‘Good food, weird people,’ David said.

Margaret looked confused. ‘What?’

‘The Japanese.’ He grinned stupidly. ‘Don’t think I’d much like to be practising over there. Neither would you.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know, they got this weird religion in Japan. Shinto. It’s peculiarly Japanese, but it’s kind of soaked up bits of Buddhism and other stuff as well. They’ve got a pretty strange view of the sanctity of the dead body. And, you know, they only got around to defining brain death as a legal condition a few years back.’ He laughed. ‘Last time a doctor over there performed a heart transplant was in nineteen sixty-eight, and he got charged with murder.’

Margaret said, ‘I can think of a few doctors who should be charged with that.’ And she remembered her fear in the moments before she lost consciousness in the operating theatre, and then coming to and knowing that they had killed her child. She looked at David and wondered if he even remembered.

‘I read all about you when that business was in the news about the rice,’ he said suddenly. ‘Jesus, Margaret, that was scary stuff.’

She just nodded.

‘Nearly put me off sushi for life.’

She managed a pale smile.

He tried again. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

She shook her head. ‘Nope.’

‘Okay.’ He raised his hand. ‘Margaret says subject off limits.’ He hesitated, then, ‘So what have you been doing in China all this time?’

‘Lecturing mostly. At the University of Public Security. It’s where they train their cops. Kind of like the Chinese equivalent of West Point.’

‘Does it pay well?’

‘Nope. The money’s lousy. But they give me an apartment I can just about swing a cat in, and as much rice as I can eat. So you can see why I was tempted to stay on.’

He chuckled. ‘So why do you?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve got my reasons.’

‘Which you don’t want to share with me.’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Jeez, Mags,’ he leaned across the table and put his hand over hers, ‘what the hell are you thinking? You had a great job here. You could have ended up Medical Examiner in a few years.’

She said very quietly, ‘Don’t do that, David.’

He withdrew his hand like he’d had an electric shock. ‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head. ‘I mean, don’t call me Mags. It’s what Michael called me.’

‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Margaret. I never thought …’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She wasn’t going to remind him that this is where she’d met Michael, that it was David who’d introduced them. A fact that had clearly not loomed large in his recollection, along with the termination of her pregnancy.

‘But, hey, you know, the question’s still relevant. I mean, why China? It’s a communist state for Christ’s sake.’

‘Oh, right.’ Margaret felt her hackles rise. ‘And you want to turn it overnight into a democracy? Like Russia?’

‘Hey, come on, Margaret, I’m just saying …’

‘Saying what? That you want to see people dying in the streets of cold and hunger, watch organised crime take the money out of honest people’s pockets, see a breakdown of government, a descent into civil war?’

‘Of course not!’ David was annoyed now. ‘I wouldn’t wish Russia on anyone, even the Russians. It’s this country, the USA, that sets the standard. People here have got rights.’

‘Yeah, the right to get shot because their democratically elected government isn’t strong enough to stand up to the vested interests of the gun lobby. The right to justice if they can afford to pay for a sharp lawyer.’

David looked at her, uncomprehending. ‘Jeez, Margaret. What have they done to you over there?’

‘Nothing, David. Not a thing. I’ve just got a perspective now on the world that I never had before. I mean, what do you know about China? Have you ever been there?’

‘No, but—’

‘No, but what? That doesn’t make any difference? Is that what you were going to say?’

‘I was going to say,’ David said levelly, ‘that I read the papers and I watch the news. I know all about their record on human rights, what they do to dissidents. Like the clampdown on that religious sect … what is it? … Falun Gong.’

‘Oh, right,’ Margaret said. ‘Falun Gong. They’re the ones whose leader claims to be an alien … someone from outer space. That sounds like someone worth following.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is that people should be allowed to follow whatever religion they want.’

‘Like here.’

‘Like here.’ He nodded, satisfied that he’d finally made his point.

‘Like the Branch Davidians?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Margaret!’

But she wasn’t going to be deflected. ‘You remember the Branch Davidians, don’t you? They’re the ones the FBI massacred down at Waco. Women and children burned alive. I mean, I should know, I assisted on a fair number of the autopsies.’

David breathed his irritation. ‘That’s not a fair comparison.’

‘That’s just the trouble.’ Margaret slapped the table, and heads turned in their direction. ‘Comparisons never are. The Chinese have no history of democracy in five thousand years of civilisation. So how can you compare it to the United States? And whatever hell that society’s been through in the last hundred years, it is changing, David. Slowly but surely. And regardless of what people here might like to think, the man in the street doesn’t harbour dreams of democracy. He doesn’t even think about politics. He thinks about how much he earns, about putting a roof over his head, about feeding his family, educating his kids. And you know what? Right now he’s better off than he’s ever been at any time in history.’

David looked at her in astonishment for several moments. Eventually he said, ‘I suppose there are lots of ways you can be brainwashed without even knowing it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about your … Chinaman.’

It wasn’t just the word, or even the fact that he had used it at all, but the way he said it, that started alarm bells ringing in her head. It was a very accurate parody of her mother’s use of the derogatory term. ‘What do you know about my “Chinaman”?’

But it wasn’t a question he was going to answer. He was intent on pressing home what he saw as his advantage. ‘That’s the real reason you never came back, isn’t it? The same reason you can sit there and bad-mouth your own country.’

‘I love my country,’ Margaret said fiercely. ‘Whatever I think or feel about China won’t ever change that.’ She paused to control herself. ‘But you didn’t answer my question.’

‘What question?’ He had realised his gaffe now and was being evasive.

‘She told you, didn’t she?’

‘Who?’

‘My mother. That’s why you were at the house this afternoon. I bet you’d made reservations for this place long before you even asked me to dinner.’ He blushed and she knew she’d hit the mark. ‘So what did she want you to do? Try and persuade me to stay? I mean, why would she even care?’

‘This has got nothing to do with your mother, Margaret. I care. I always have. You know that. You were the one. You were always the one.’

Margaret shook her head in disbelief. ‘David …’ She let out a sigh of exasperation. ‘You and I never had a future. Not then, not now.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘I won’t be a pawn in my mother’s little game of matchmaking. And in case you didn’t know, it’s not you she’s impressed by, it’s your family’s money.’ She remembered how impressed her mother had been by David. He’d gone to the University of Chicago because his parents could afford it. Margaret had only been there because she’d won a scholarship. After a moment she added, ‘And if you want to know the truth about my “Chinaman” … I’m head over heels in love with him.’

The waitress brought two wooden platters of neatly sliced pieces of raw bream, bass, salmon and tuna beautifully displayed with squid rolls, thread-cut daikon radish and a single quail’s egg. The sushi rice came in separate bowls. Margaret and David sat in silence surveying the food for half a minute, maybe more, before Margaret stood up and lifted her purse. ‘I think I should go,’ she said. ‘You can pick up the check if you like.’

He smiled sadly. ‘I didn’t even make you laugh.’

‘I think maybe I’ve forgotten how.’

And she turned and pushed off through the tables.

V

The airplane turned low beneath the clouds, wheeling over the slow-moving flow of the Yangtse River delta, dragon-tongues of water that had travelled four thousand miles from the high mountains of Tibet, snaking out into the slow grey swell of the East China Sea. Li turned from the window and closed his eyes as the plane began its descent into Hongqiao Airport. But the same images remained, projected on to the back of his retina by his mind’s eye. Dreadful images of a poor dead girl, clinically dissected and then brutally butchered.

He had re-read her file during the flight, the autopsy report, the forensic evidence, the dozens of leads that had taken them nowhere. The only real clue to her identity had been distinctive gold foil dental restorations, expensive and unusual in China. But none of the Beijing clinics capable of such work had had any record of her. Found buried in a shallow grave on waste ground on a bleak February morning during Spring Festival, they knew no more about her now than they did then.

A heavy jolt and the squeal of tyres brought him back to the present. He glanced out across wet tarmac to the low, old-fashioned terminal building. Twenty bodies in a single grave! It seemed inconceivable to him. The spectre of some grim room with decomposing bodies laid out side by side rose up before him, and he wondered what it was that had ever drawn him to join the police. And then Yifu was there again at his shoulder, and he had no need to answer his own question.

The Arrivals concourse was crowded with travellers, mostly from internal destinations now that Hongqiao had become eclipsed by the new international airport at Pudong. Expectant faces were turned towards the exit gate as the passengers from Beijing flooded out. Some cards were raised with names scrawled in untidy characters. Li saw his name held above the head of an attractive young woman with long hair divided in a centre parting and tumbling over narrow shoulders. She was scanning the faces in the crowd and appeared to recognise him immediately. She smiled, a broad, open smile that dimpled her cheeks. And Li saw that she had very dark eyes, almost black, and that one of them turned in very slightly. But it didn’t spoil her looks so much as lend her a sense of quirky individuality. She was wearing jeans and a denim jacket over a white sweatshirt, and a pair of scruffy blue and white trainers.

‘Deputy Section Chief Li?’

Li nodded. ‘That’s me.’ Physically he towered over her, but she had a presence, an innate sense of self-confidence that lent her stature, and she didn’t seem so small.

‘Hi.’ She held out her hand.

He shook it and was surprised by the firmness of her grip. He said, ‘I was told I would be met by my opposite number here, Deputy Section Chief Nien.’

She cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Were you?’ And she reached out to take his holdall. ‘I’ll take your bag.’

Her move caught him by surprise. ‘That’s okay,’ he said. But she had already snatched it and turned towards the sliding glass doors, swinging it up and over her shoulder.

‘I’ve got a car waiting outside,’ she said.

Li hurried after her. ‘So what happened to Nien?’

The girl never broke her stride. ‘The Deputy Section Chief’s got better things to do than provide a taxi service for some hotshot from Beijing.’ A dark blue Volkswagen Santana saloon sat idling at the kerb. The girl lifted the trunk and dropped Li’s bag in.

Li felt his hackles rise. This was not the courtesy or respect an officer of his rank was entitled to expect. Hotshot! And he remembered Wu’s sarcasm in Beijing. You’re such a fucking superstar, boss. Is that how people saw him, just because of the publicity a couple of high profile cases had brought? ‘What’s your rank, officer?’ he said sharply.

She shrugged. ‘I’m just the driver. Do you want to get in or do you want to walk?’

There was a long moment of stand-off before Li finally decided this was not the place to deal with her. Silently fuming he walked around the car and climbed in the passenger side. The rain battered down on glistening asphalt, red and white flags hung limply in a row, a ghostly mist, like gauze, almost obscured the car park and the pink multi-storey buildings beyond.

The girl slipped into the driver’s seat and set the wipers going to clear the windscreen. ‘Your name,’ Li said through clenched teeth.

She looked at him, affecting confusion. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’d like to know your name, so that I can take the appropriate action when we get to headquarters.’

‘803.’

He glared at her. ‘What?’

‘That’s what it’s called — the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. 803. A cop show here on Shanghai TV called us that because of our address — 803 Zhongshan Beiyi Road. It stuck.’ Suddenly her face split into a grin and she started laughing, an odd braying laugh that was strangely beguiling.

Li found a puzzled smile sneaking up on him, in spite of himself. ‘What? What’s so funny?’

She held out her hand. ‘Maybe we should start again, Deputy Section Chief. I’m Nien Mei-Ling.’

He frowned. ‘Nien … Deputy Section Chief Nien?’

She laughed again. ‘Is it really so hard to believe that a mere woman could achieve the same rank as the great Li Yan? Or is it only in Shanghai that women hold up half the sky?’

Li shook the outstretched hand, startled and bemused. ‘I’m sorry, I thought—’

‘Yeah, I know … that I was just some junior officer sent to pick you up. Couldn’t possibly be Deputy Section Chief Nien.’ But there was no rancour in this, no chip on the shoulder. Just a wicked sense of mischief. And Li found her smile irresistible, and held on to her hand perhaps a little longer than necessary.

The expressway from the airport became Yan’an Viaduct Road, a six-lane highway raised on concrete pillars that ran through the heart of Shanghai, bisecting it from west to east. Li gazed out through the rain in amazement as all around tower blocks rose up in white and pink stone, a monolith made entirely, it seemed, out of green glass, rows of incongruous villas that owed more to the architecture of ancient Greece than ancient China, whole blocks of square three-storey buildings in cream stucco and red brick, strange silver cylindrical towers that disappeared into the cloud. Gigantic neon signs on every other rooftop advertised everything from Pepsi-Cola to Fujifilm. It was nearly fifteen years since he had last been in Shanghai, and it had changed beyond recognition. There were still the single-storey blocks of traditional Chinese shops and apartments crammed into crowded narrow lanes, still the bizarre pockets of European colonial architecture left by the British and the French from the days of the International Settlement. But from the seeds planted by Deng’s concept of a socialist market economy, a whole new city had grown up around them, a city filled with contradictions around every corner, bicycles and BMWs, a city of extremes and excesses, a future vision of China.

Mei-Ling glanced at him. ‘Changed a bit since you were last here?’

Li nodded. ‘You could say that.’

She smiled. ‘Wait till you scratch beneath the surface. It’s changed more than you think.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sex shops and massage parlours. All-night clubs and discos — hell, we even own a few.’

‘We?’

‘Public Security.’ She took in Li’s astonishment. ‘People’s Liberation Army, too. Disco till dawn with the PLA.’ A small bell hanging from her rear-view mirror chinged as she swerved around a slow lorry and switched lanes. ‘And then there’s the dogs.’

‘Dogs?’ Li was puzzled.

‘Seems they’re off the menu and on to the accessory list. These days you’re no one if you don’t own a dog. The European purebreds are particularly popular. The Russian mafia’s making a fortune doping them up on vodka and smuggling them down on the Trans-Siberian express. We’ve got pet parlours and veterinarian surgeries springing up all over the city.’ She paused. ‘And, of course, there’s the Taiwanese Mafia. They’re moving in big-time, running protection rackets and prostitution. There’s only one China as far as they’re concerned. We’ve got a population of fourteen million in this city, a hundred and seventy-five thousand taxis, the highest rate of economic growth in China, the fastest growing crime rate and eighteen bodies in a building site in Pudong. Welcome to Shanghai, Mr Li.’

‘Eighteen? I thought it was twenty.’

‘Well, on a head count, literally, we’ve got sixteen. But there are eighteen torsos, and we’re still finding bits.’

They swooped past the granite-blocks, colonnaded columns and spectacular golden spire of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, built in the fifties by the Russians in the excessive Stalinesque style of the time.

‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to tell me about the body you found in Beijing?’

Li dragged himself away from the sights and sounds and revelations of Shanghai and focused his thoughts on the file he had read on the plane on the way down. ‘A young girl, we think early twenties. She was found by public utility workers on a piece of waste ground in Haidian district near the Summer Palace last February, during the New Year holiday. There had been heavy rain, and they were drawn to the spot by what looked like blood pooling in the mud. They started digging. She was just a couple of feet down in two black plastic bags. The pathologist reckoned she’d only been there about a week.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Uncertain. Her heart stopped. That’s the only thing we know for sure. She’d been opened up by someone with pretty sophisticated surgical skills. Heart, liver, pancreas and one kidney had all been removed.’

‘Organ theft?’

Li shook his head. ‘No. The organs were all still there in one of the plastic bags.’

‘And the rest of her?’

‘In the other one. Hacked to bits by someone with a butcher’s saw by the look of it.’

‘Anything else of significance?’

Li shrugged. ‘It’s difficult to know what’s significant. She had the most common blood group — O. But she’d had some pretty expensive dental work, though not done by anyone in Beijing. It’s possible she’d had treatment in the West.’

‘Any clothes?’

‘Not a stitch. And no jewellery. No distinguishing marks. And the AFIS came up with zip on her fingerprints.’

Mei-Ling looked thoughtful. ‘And motive? Would you hazard a guess?’

‘Couldn’t even begin,’ Li said. ‘Not sexual, at least not in any conventional way. There was no sign of violation, no mutilation of the sexual organs or the breasts.’ He was aware of feeling slightly uncomfortable discussing these details with a woman. He shrugged. ‘We hit a brick wall.’

They passed under a sweeping junction of crisscrossing flyovers, and through a maze of buildings to their left Li caught sight of the remodelled People’s Square with its circular museum and glass theatre and vast white municipal monolith. Ahead through a forest of skyscrapers he spotted a strange green spire punctuated twice in its upward sweep by red and silver globes, all supported on four gigantic splayed legs. It looked for all the world like a Martian rocket ship. ‘What the hell’s that?’ he asked.

She followed his eyeline and grinned. ‘Oh, that? That’s the Pearl TV Tower, across the river in Pudong.’ She glanced at him. ‘You know that before the Second World War Shanghai was known in the West as the Paris of the East? Now the good citizens of the city like to think they have their very own Eiffel Tower.’

‘It’s certainly as ugly,’ Li said. But the tower sank out of sight as the road dipped down and ran underground to the tunnel that would take them under the Huangpu River. He said, ‘What about the bodies you found this morning? Anything I described sound familiar?’

She nodded. ‘Very. But I’ll let you see for yourself first, then you’d better go meet my boss.’

‘What about the American? The guy who fell into the pit. They never told me what happened to him.’

‘Oh,’ she said casually, ‘they got him out alive okay. Then he just went to pieces.’

She flicked him a glance, and there was a moment of uncertainty between them before air escaped from her lips in a series of small explosions and she burst out laughing, her strange, infectious braying laugh, and he found himself laughing, too. Humour, no matter how black, was the only defence they ever had against the sick world they moved in.

Their Santana glided through the wide empty streets of Pudong’s Lujiazui financial district. Street lights reflected on wet sidewalks in the gloom of the late afternoon. All around them thirty-storey buildings soared into the darkening sky, but lights shone in only a few solitary windows. Investment in construction had so far outstripped demand. Across the river, traffic had come to a standstill along the Bund, a broad, waterfront boulevard characterised by its sweep of grand, stone-built European-style buildings with domes and spires and clock towers. At a glance they might have been in Paris or London. From the river itself came the mournful call of vessels sounding foghorns in the haze.

On their right, through open gates in salmon-coloured walls, floodlights raised on tall stands shone behind sheets of clear plastic that gave the appearance of breathing in time with the cold wind that blew in off the water. Beneath them, blurry figures in white moved about like ghosts, working in the freezing cold liquid mud in a painstaking search for more body bits. Armed guards stood by the gates, and more than two dozen police and forensic vehicles were drawn up haphazardly in the street outside.

‘That’s the building site,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We commandeered the basement car park of the office block over there.’ She nodded towards a tall dark tower block across the street. ‘It’s empty. The pathologists are laying the bodies out there until we’re sure we’ve found all the pieces.’ She turned left, through a break in the central reservation, crossed the opposite carriageway, and drove down a ramp into a subterranean car park where she drew in behind a phalanx of other vehicles. Li recognised the distinctive hu character, signifying Shanghai, followed by the letter ‘O’, that preceded the registrations on all unmarked police cars.

Mei-Ling flashed her maroon Public Security ID at the uniformed officer who challenged them, and Li followed her between pillars into an area brightly lit by improvised lamps. The intensity of the light created a sense of unreality about the scene that greeted them. More than twenty trestle tables covered in white paper ranged against a bleak grey concrete wall, lined up side by side and with just a couple of feet separating them. On some, bits of body lay wrapped in the plastic bags they had been brought down in. Others had been removed and arranged in bizarre parodies of the human bodies they had once been, legs and arms laid next to torsos and heads, a gruesome jigsaw of human pieces. Most of the bits were still unrecognisable, except where assistants in white plastic suits were gently hosing them down to reveal the decaying dimpled flesh of hands and feet, knees and elbows, breasts and bellies. Only the smell brought home the reality. The sweet, heavy smell of decomposing human flesh that filled this underground chamber of horrors and almost made Li gag. He made a determined effort to breathe through his mouth. He glanced at Mei-Ling, but she did not appear to be affected.

On the wall, behind each table, crude paper charts had been pasted up itemising the parts laid out on each, and listing the bits still missing. There were roughly drawn diagrams of each of the bodies.

‘Ah, Miss Nien. At last you honour us with your presence.’ A tall man in his late fifties, thin black hair scraped back across his scalp, crossed the concrete floor to greet them, his breath billowing before him in the cold air. His eyes were little more than bloodshot slits through which he peered myopically. His skin was mottled and brown, and his teeth stained from years of smoking. He was smoking now, a cigarette between his lips, dropping ash down his stained white coat. The illusion of myopia, Li decided, was created by his need to screw up his eyes against the smoke that seemed to seep from his face as if from cracks in a flue.

Mei-Ling said, ‘Dr Lan, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing.’

Dr Lan scrutinised Li carefully, then permitted himself a small smile. He held out his hand. ‘Of course. It is an honour to meet you, Mr Li.’

‘Dr Lan is our senior pathologist,’ Mei-Ling said. And she turned to him. ‘Any initial thoughts, Doctor.’

‘Very preliminary.’ He walked them past the bodies, lighting another cigarette from the remains of the previous one. ‘Of course, I received my training in the army, so I have seen much worse. What’s disturbing about this is that all the victims are women.’

Li was taken aback. ‘All of them?’

‘Every last one, Deputy Section Chief. Ranging in ages, I’d say, from late teens to early thirties.’

Mei-Ling glanced at Li. ‘A sexual motive?’

‘Too early to say, Miss Nien. We’re still trying to figure out which bits go with which.’ He stopped at one of the tables and waved his cigarette towards a partially decomposed head, black holes where the eyes should have been. Li noticed that a ‘Y’ incision had been made in the torso beneath it, and ribs cut open to expose the chest cavity. ‘As you can see, decomposition is well under way,’ Lan said. ‘Only somebody very close to this young lady might be able to make a visual identification. It’s also making visual matching of the pieces virtually impossible. We’re comparing the bone ends where the limbs have been hacked off — we x-rayed all the pieces as they came down in the bags. But the best bet is DNA comparison. I’ve had small sections of skeletal muscle cut away from each of the body parts and sent on ice to the lab. Once we’ve found and matched all the bits, I’ll have the assembled parts of each body sent over to the mortuary and put in separate drawers in the chiller.’

‘Can you say how long they’d been buried?’ Li asked.

‘Not with any degree of accuracy. But if you want to put your hand inside one of the body cavities, Detective, you’ll find that it’s pretty cold in there.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Li said. ‘What’s the significance?’

Lan grinned. ‘I’d say they’d been frozen. If you examine the bits closely you’ll find signs of freezer burn on the flesh. They were probably buried straight from the freezer. The most dense pieces, the torsos, are almost, but not quite, fully defrosted. Given that they were only two to three feet down, they were probably buried about four or five days ago.’

‘So it’s going to be impossible to determine time of death.’

Lan laughed. ‘I see you’ve inherited your uncle’s penchant for stating the obvious, Mr Li.’

Li stiffened. ‘You knew him?’

‘Of course.’

‘My uncle used to say, Doctor, that it is the obvious which is most often overlooked. It’s one of the things that made him such a good cop.’

The pathologist guffawed and began choking on the smoke from his cigarette. Noisily he hawked the loose phlegm from his lungs and spat it out on the floor. When he recovered his breath he looked at Li, dark eyes twinkling behind the slits. ‘I see you’ve inherited more than just his pedantry.’

‘So you’ll understand if I continue with the pedantic theme of time of death.’

But Lan was intent on taking his time. He lit another cigarette and threw away the old one before he said, ‘They could have been in the freezer for weeks, or months, Deputy Section Chief. In all likelihood they were killed at different times and put into cold storage. There’s no way to determine when any of them died.’

Mei-Ling said, ‘But you will be able to determine cause of death?’

‘Most likely, Miss Nien, once we’ve done the autopsies.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette and peeled it away from his lips. ‘The only trouble is, someone’s been there before us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Li asked.

Lan clamped his cigarette between his lips again. ‘Just what I say, Detective. At least partial autopsies were carried out on every one of these poor ladies before they were put in the freezer.’

Outside, night had fallen, and the bleak, dark concrete landscape of Lujiazui had been transformed into a multi-coloured light show. The Pearl TV Tower and a vast globe at its base were floodlit green. Those forlorn and empty office blocks Li had seen an hour before, now soared proudly into the night sky, glowing orange, yellow, green and blue. Upriver to the south, a permanently anchored cruise ship which was now a bar and night club, burned fluorescent turquoise, painted against the blackness of the night as if by a Disney animator. Across the river the Bund blazed in luminous splendour, architectural details picked out by carefully contrived lighting. And along the curve of the north bank, where cruise ships docked at the international passenger terminal, glass buildings fired up the night, competing with gigantic neon hoardings that burned ads for beer and cars and TVs into the sky. On the river, the lights of cruisers, ferries and barges cast broken reflections on choppy waters, while above them a brightly lit dirigible advertising cigarettes plied up and down between the coloured beams of powerful searchlights that raked randomly across the sky.

Li gaped at it in wonder. It did not seem quite real. Beijing had blazed with lights on the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, but it had been nothing like this. Mei-Ling smiled at him, as though he were some bumpkin up from the country. And in some ways he was. Beijing was the capital, the centre of art and culture in the north. But it was staid and conservative compared with the commercial excesses of the south. ‘It’s like this every night?’ he asked, wondering what the cost of it all must be.

She nodded. ‘Until ten. Then it’s lights out and the city comes to life in another way altogether.’ Which sounded ominous to Li, and for a moment he felt a fleeting insecurity. He missed the safe, comforting familiarity of Beijing. Shanghai was as alien to him as Hong Kong or Chicago had been.

Mei-Ling drove them back through the tunnel and up on to the Yan’an Viaduct, and they swept west through the city, turning then on to Nanbei Gaojia Road, another multi-lane viaduct that cut north to the long arc of the northern ring road. Li sat in silence, barely taking in the city lights or the long lines of commuter traffic. He thought of the eighteen women sliced up and laid out on trestle tables in the concrete tomb of an underground car park. Someone had murdered them, coldly and clinically, and then performed autopsies on the bodies before crudely dismembering them and freezing the parts. Then sometime within the past week, the frozen remains had been buried in a shallow grave on a building site where tons of concrete should have entombed them for eternity. There were similarities with the body they’d found in Beijing, although Li was not convinced yet that they had died by the same hand. But what he knew with absolute certainty was that when he went to bed tonight and closed his eyes, each and every one of them would be there, seared into his memory, sightless eyes appealing for him to find their killer. And the smell of their poor decaying bodies would be with him for days.

He had a thought and turned to Mei-Ling. ‘Whoever dumped the bodies knew that the site was about to be buried in concrete. That must narrow the numbers.’

She said, ‘The joint venture was big news here. Press and TV had been covering the story for days. Discounting children and old folk, that would narrow it down to about ten million people.’

The bell that dangled from the rear-view mirror chimed as Mei-Ling turned the Santana off the Zhongshan Beiyi expressway and then doubled back beneath the overhead road to turn right into the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. They stopped at a white-marble gatehouse opposite the large gold numerals, 803, mounted on an angled wall, and suspicious eyes peered out at them from behind brightly lit windows. Then a wave of recognition as Mei-Ling smiled out of the driver’s side, and the gate concertina-ed open to let them through stone columns into a paved courtyard bounded by well-kept flower beds and neatly trimmed trees. Raised on a plinth was an ebony bust of a famous Shanghai detective, Duanmu Hongyu, now deceased. Multi-storeyed pink-tiled buildings rose up on three sides.

Mei-Ling glanced hesitantly at Li, then said, ‘Don’t expect a very warm welcome in here.’

Li was not entirely surprised. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly.’ She seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Just that some people figure we don’t need help from Beijing to solve crimes in Shanghai.’

‘And your boss?’

She shrugged. ‘Don’t take it personally. He’s a little distracted these days.’

She pulled up outside a covered entrance opposite a wall on which large gold characters urged officers to extremes of courage and dedication in their pursuit of justice. They took the lift up to the third floor where pale-faced detectives wilted under fluorescent lights in the pursuit of the killer or killers of eighteen women.

The detectives’ room was crowded, a buzz of telephones and conversations, the clack of keyboards, the hum of computer terminals. Officers looked up curiously from their desks as Mei-Ling led Li through to the office of the Section Chief. The door stood ajar. She knocked and Li followed her in. The room was in darkness except for the bright ring of light cast on the desk by an Anglepoise lamp. A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the desk speaking on the telephone. The reflected light from the desk cast a slightly sinister uplight on his shadowed face. He flicked nervous watery eyes towards Li and Mei-Ling as they entered.

‘So what’s the prognosis?’ he asked his caller, turning his back on the two deputy section chiefs. ‘Well, when will you know?’ The response clearly did not please him and he said curtly, ‘Well, call me when you’ve talked to him.’ He hung up abruptly and turned back to Li and Mei-Ling, and Li saw that he was a good-looking man of about forty-five, with thick hair swept back from a square face. But he looked drawn and tired.

‘How is she?’ Mei-Ling asked softly.

He shook his head. ‘Not good.’

Mei-Ling nodded and said, ‘Tsuo, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing. Mr Li, this is my boss, Huang Tsuo, Chief of Section Two.’ As the two men shook hands she added, ‘We’re roughly the equivalent of your Section One, investigating serious crime, murder and robbery.’

Huang’s handshake was cold and cursory. He barely met Li’s eyes before he turned to his deputy. ‘Mei-Ling, I want a full briefing meeting when Mr Li and I get back.’ He lifted a briefcase from his desk and took his coat from a stand by the door.

Mei-Ling was caught off-balance. ‘Get back? Where are you going?’

‘We have an appointment with the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ And he ushered Li out of the door.

People’s Square, which once formed part of the old Shanghai racecourse, was ablaze with lights reflecting from every wet surface, as if it had just been freshly painted. The drum-shaped museum on the south side glowed orange. Directly opposite, and dominating the square, was the huge floodlit home of the Shanghai Municipal Government, a monumental white building studded by row upon rising row of featureless windows. It was flanked on each side by bizarrely shaped glass buildings lit from within and capped by fantastical sweeping roofs. Vast skyscrapers, washed in coloured light, crowded all around the square. Li and Huang stepped out of their car at the foot of steps leading up to the marbled entrance of the government building, and Li was immediately assaulted by a cacophony of sound: the roar of traffic and honking of horns; pop music blasting out of shops along the east side; the soundtrack of a movie playing on a giant TV screen that filled the whole of one side of an office block on the south-east corner; a foxtrot playing from a ghetto-blaster on the steps of the museum, a gathering of elderly couples dancing incongruously across the concourse below it. They didn’t appear to mind the rain which wept still out of the night sky. The metallic voice of a conductress rang out from the loudspeaker of a passing bus. A taxi pulled up across the road, and as the driver reset his flag a soft electronic female voice said in English, Dear passenger, thank you for using our taxi. Please come again.

It was all in stark contrast to the tense silence that had filled the car on the twenty-minute drive from 803. Li had made several attempts to engage Huang in conversation only to be rewarded with grudging, monosyllabic responses and the odd grunt. He was no nearer now to discovering why the Mayor’s policy adviser wanted to see them than when they had left.

He followed Huang up the steps, past armed guards and through glass doors into an expansive lobby. A group of around a dozen men in suits and wearing heavy dark coats was advancing towards them. At the head of the group was a man Li recognised. He had seen him on television and in newspaper photographs, a short, bull-headed man with close-cropped steel grey hair. There was a sense of power and energy in every confident step he took. A taller, slightly older man in the uniform of a Procurator General, was stooping to speak quietly in his ear as they approached. Neither missed a stride, and as the group reached Li and Huang the short man said, ‘You’re late, Huang.’

‘My apologies, Director Hu. We were held up in traffic.’ Li had to admire the way Huang could lie to one of the most powerful men in Shanghai without batting an eyelid.

‘Well, I can’t wait. I have another engagement. You’ll have to come with us.’ And he sailed past them and out on to the steps. The Procurator General flicked his head to indicate Li and Huang should follow, and they fell in with the rest of the entourage.

As they descended the steps, a line of official cars drew in at the sidewalk, headed by a black stretch limo flanked by two police cars. And as Director Hu slipped into the limo, the rest of the group divided as if in well-rehearsed syncopation and jumped into the other vehicles. Li and Huang found themselves ushered into the Director’s car by the Procurator General, who got in after them. The line of cars pulled away accompanied by the sound of police sirens, muffled by the soundproofing in the limo. Li barely had time to draw breath, and realise that he was sitting facing Director Hu, before the chief adviser to the head of the Shanghai government reached out his hand. ‘Deputy Section Chief Li Yan,’ he said, ‘it is a privilege to meet you.’ Li shook his hand and reminded himself that this man was the confidant and adviser to a possible future leader of China. The immediate predecessors of his boss as Mayor of Shanghai were now the country’s President and Premier respectively.

‘I am honoured that you should even know who I am, Director Hu,’ Li said, and he remembered the Chinese proverb, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

‘You cast a large shadow, Detective Li. Big enough, perhaps, to eclipse that of your uncle.’

‘I have always lived in my uncle’s shadow, Director Hu. I expect always to do so.’

The adviser nodded, satisfied. Modesty was a virtue. He waved a hand in the direction of the taller man beside him. ‘This is Procurator General Yue.’ The Procurator General inclined his head in a curt, cold nod. ‘You have visited the site where the bodies were found?’

‘I have seen the bodies, or the bits of them that have been recovered.’

‘And what are your thoughts?’

Li hesitated. He felt as if he were being tested somehow. ‘It is too early to reach any conclusions, Director Hu.’

The adviser nodded again, apparently satisfied by this response. ‘A single word is worth a thousand pieces of gold,’ he said. He glanced momentarily at Huang who sat mute diagonally opposite, a black hole of disapproval in the corner of the car. ‘This … incident …’ the adviser was picking his words very carefully, ‘… is not only a severe embarrassment to our country, Li, captured as it was on live television across the world, but it could also seriously damage Shanghai’s inward investment — the lifeblood of this city.’ Li wondered if anyone cared about the serious damage done to the health of the victims, but he knew better than to ask as much. The adviser continued, ‘What we have here is a high profile crime of appalling magnitude, uncovered in the full glare of world publicity. What the Mayor wants is a high profile solution in the shortest possible time, and in the full glare of the same publicity.’ He drew in a short breath. ‘Which is why he wants you to take charge of the investigation.’

And Li understood immediately why Huang was so resentful of his presence, and why Procurator General Yue was being equally cool.

‘Of course, Director Hu,’ he said cautiously, ‘I would be only too happy to assist in the investigation. But, naturally, I will have to seek permission from my superiors in Beijing.’

The Director waved his hand dismissively. ‘It’s already done, Li,’ he said. ‘The Commissioner of Police in Beijing is happy to lend you to us for the duration of the investigation.’ He leaned forward. ‘But we don’t want you assisting. The Mayor wants you to lead the inquiry. Which means he will hold you personally responsible for any failure to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.’

Li knew now that he was that nail that sticks up, and it felt like a very lonely thing to be. He said, ‘In that case, I have one request, Director Hu.’

‘Speak,’ the Director said.

‘I have had only the briefest opportunity to make an assessment of this case, but it seems to me that because of its nature, the pathology will be of paramount importance. I would therefore ask that I am allowed to employ the services of the American pathologist, Margaret Campbell.’

Huang immediately started to voice his protest, becoming animated for the first time, but the Director raised a hand to silence him. ‘Why?’ he asked Li.

Li said, ‘While I have every confidence in Dr Lan, Miss Campbell is infinitely more experienced. The Americans, after all, are more practised in the art of murder.’ Which raised a smile from the Director for the first time. Li pressed on, ‘She has worked in China, so she knows how we operate.’ He paused. ‘And if you want a high-profile solution, then a high-profile collaboration between the Chinese and the Americans would be good public relations.’

The Director sat back and smiled. ‘I’m glad to see we’re on the same wavelength, Li. Huang and Yue will facilitate all your requirements.’

Huang and Yue looked as if they would like to facilitate Li’s speedy demise.

The Director pressed a button and told his driver to pull over. The driver informed the police escort by radio, then pulled the car in at the side of the road. The entourage followed suit. ‘Good luck,’ the Director said to Li as the door sprang open, and Li realised he was expected to get out.

He stepped out into the rain, followed by Huang. The pavement was crowded with curious on-lookers, the deafening blare of police sirens filling the night air. Director Hu’s entourage of cars moved off again and Li looked at Huang. ‘What now?’

‘We get a taxi back to my car,’ Huang said through clenched teeth, and he pulled up his collar against the rain. ‘And I don’t give a shit what Director Hu says. You report to me. Understood?’