The Killing Room

I

And still the rain fell. Li and Margaret stood on the step outside the mortuary door, under the cover of a red-tile canopy. She wanted air. He wanted a cigarette and the chance to talk to her. But for several minutes he said nothing, and she did not seem inclined to conversation. He sneaked a glance at her and saw that her pale skin was pink, the freckles dotted across her nose more pronounced, somehow, than usual. Her eyes appeared bluer than he remembered them, startling, like chips of ice set in rose gold. She caught him looking at her, and he glanced away guiltily. Finally he turned to look at her again and said, ‘Margaret, I am sorry about last night. I said things that—’

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It was my fault. I was tired and drunk, and stupid and thoughtless, as usual.’ She paused. ‘I hardly slept.’

‘Me neither.’

She wanted to reach up and touch his face, and kiss his lips, and tell him she loved him. ‘Li Yan, I …’

But from somewhere Mei-Ling’s voice came to them. The tail end of a conversation with Dr Lan. She laughed at something he said, that long, braying laugh that Li found so endearing. And Margaret thought how it sounded just like a donkey in heat. She knew it was a laugh which, if she heard it often enough, could tip her over the edge. Like chalk on a blackboard, it made her flesh crawl. She gritted her teeth, and Mei-Ling came smiling out on to the step to join them.

‘Hey,’ she said to Li. ‘We had better go. Detective meeting at 803 in fifteen minutes.’ And she headed for the car.

Li turned to Margaret, reluctant to go. ‘See you later.’

‘Sure,’ Margaret said, made sour again by Mei-Ling’s interruption, and as he hurried through the rain to the passenger door, she called after him, ‘Just tell your detectives to keep that creepy medical student away from me in future.’

Li froze, his fingers on the handle of the door. He half turned. ‘What medical student?’ Mei-Ling started the car and peeped the horn and he lifted his hand from the door to silence her.

‘I can’t remember his name,’ Margaret said, raising her voice above the roar of the engine. ‘He’s the night watchman at the place you found the bodies.’

Mei-Ling cut the motor and opened the door.

‘Jiang Baofu?’ Li said as she got out of the car.

‘Yeah, that sounds like it,’ Margaret said.

Mei-Ling looked from one to the other. ‘The medical student?’

Li ignored her. ‘When did you see him?’

‘He approached me at the Peace Hotel yesterday evening, not long before you came to pick me up.’

Li’s jaw slackened in amazement, and he exchanged looks with Mei-Ling. ‘And he knew who you were?’ Mei-Ling asked, quickly picking up the conversation

‘Sure. He said he’d seen my picture in the papers and wanted to help in the investigation.’

Li was very still, like an animal that smells danger and is waiting to see the direction from which it is coming. ‘What did you say?’

‘He freaked me,’ Margaret said. ‘Told me he’d followed me to the hotel from 803. I told him he shouldn’t be talking to me and I didn’t want him coming near me again.’

‘Why in the name of the sky did you not tell me this last night, Margaret?’

‘I’d forgotten about him,’ Margaret said, irritation in her voice now. ‘And, anyway, last night didn’t seem like an appropriate time to bring it up.’ Li stopped himself from saying that she had managed to raise much more inappropriate subjects. Margaret asked, ‘Should I be worried?’

‘Jiang Baofu,’ Mei-Ling said, ‘currently tops a suspect list of one.’

And Margaret remembered his grip on her arm, and a tiny shiver of fear ran through her.

‘I want to know everything about him,’ Li said. ‘Everything. Where he lives, who his friends are, where he’s worked. I want to know about his family, his girlfriends, his taste in clothes. I even want to know how often he takes a dump. And I want to know how a student struggling through medical school can afford to buy his own colour TV set.’

Several of the detectives around the table scribbled notes. There was a tension in the air today, most of it emanating from the cold, still presence of Section Chief Huang sitting in silence in the chair nearest the window. Most of the section were aware that at the previous day’s press briefing the media had been told that the eighteen bodies recovered from the site in Pudong were not murder victims. They also knew that their boss had briefed the Commissioner of Police prior to the press conference. And today they were being told by this Beijing cop, appointed by Director Hu, that the American pathologist he had brought in believed exactly the opposite.

No one had dared to look at Huang as Li briefed them on that morning’s autopsy, on the pathologist’s verdict that the victim had been drugged, and then been the subject of a ‘live’ autopsy, or ante-mortem, and that the most likely cause of death was surgical removal of the heart. It was a bizarre conclusion, and neither Li nor his pathologist had been able to suggest a motive.

One detective had come up with Li’s idea of organ theft, and Mei-Ling had repeated Margaret’s assertion that if the victims had been murdered for their organs there would have been no need to keep them alive for the procedure. She also pointed out that the Beijing victim had been found with her organs in a bag beside the body.

‘So we are sure, then, that this murder in Beijing is tied in with the bodies here in Shanghai?’ the detective had persisted.

‘No, Detective Dai,’ Mei-Ling had told him. ‘We don’t know for sure. Not yet.’

And Li said, ‘The body in Beijing has been kept in the freezer. I asked two days ago for it to be taken out and defrosted. In another couple of days it should be sufficiently thawed to allow for it to be re-autopsied. By then we will have sufficient evidence from Shanghai to make a definitive comparison. In the meantime I suggest we keep an open mind.’

That had been half an hour earlier, since when there had been a long and animated discussion about the facts of the case, what they knew, what they didn’t know, what they thought, what they thought they ought to do. It was the classic collective Chinese detective meeting, where everyone had a voice, an opinion, and the right to express it. But as yet it had borne no fruit. There had been an argument about how far back they should go in extracting records of women from the missing persons file. Li had decided on twelve months, which had brought a groan from around the table. It meant there could be hundreds of files to process. With the growth of the floating population, which now ran to several millions in Shanghai, people were always being reported missing. Very often it transpired they were not missing at all but had gone off in search of work, or run away to be married, or simply dropped out. There was a high, and growing, drop-out rate among the younger generation. Many teenage girls were drawn to the bright lights of Canton and Shenzhen where they often fell prey to drugs and prostitution, both of which were on the increase. And sometimes women who got pregnant, when they had already had a child, simply ‘disappeared’ to have the baby somewhere else, away from the prying eyes of the local authorities.

When Li steered the meeting on to the subject of Jiang Baofu, and the revelation that he had followed Margaret back to her hotel, it had created a considerable stir in the room.

‘You took his statement yesterday, Dai,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘What did you make of him?’

Dai leaned back and chewed his pencil thoughtfully. He was a young man very conscious of his image, from his immaculate white roll-neck sweater and powder blue Italian jacket, to his beautifully cut dark pants with a crease he could almost sharpen his pencil on. His hair was short, but expensively styled, and swept back from his face with gel. He tucked the thumb of his free hand into the shiny silver belt buckle at his waist. ‘He gave me the creeps,’ Dai said, and Li remembered Mei-Ling’s words after they had talked to him at the site. That boy’s really creepy. Margaret had called him a creepy medical student, and there had been something else she’d said … He thought for a moment, then remembered. He freaked me, she’d told them.

‘I couldn’t get him to shut up,’ Dai was saying. ‘Hell, usually it’s the other way around with these people, like pulling teeth. But this guy had verbal diarrhoea. At a guess I’d say he was enjoying the whole process. He was asking more questions than I was. Unhealthy, you know. Morbid. Too helpful. In the end it was all I could do to get rid of him.’

Another detective said, ‘But if this guy’s involved, isn’t he making himself a bit conspicuous? I mean, it’s like he’s deliberately trying to draw attention to himself.’

‘Perhaps,’ Mei-Ling said, ‘that’s exactly what he wants us to think. Maybe he believes that by making himself high-profile, we’ll dismiss him as being too obvious. And, well, being the night watchman at the site does make it all seem too easy. But, remember, if he did bury those bodies there, he never expected them to be found. He thought they’d be safely buried under tons of concrete by now, and he’d be home free.’

Li said, ‘And the other thing to consider is that maybe he’s just crazy.’ He remembered Margaret’s half-joking, half-serious allusion to a psycho surgeon. ‘I mean, performing live autopsies on eighteen women — and probably more that we don’t even know about yet — is not exactly the action of a sane person.’

Dai said, ‘But he couldn’t have been acting alone, could he? Someone else would have had to be administering the midazolam and pumping the ambu bag.’

Li paused. He had not considered this. Of course the killer could not have been acting alone. It had to have been a collaborative effort, in which case it could not have been the action of a solitary madman. Could there be two, or more, of them. How did people like that find each other? Was it possible for insane people to work efficiently in a team? ‘That’s a good point, Detective Dai,’ he said at length. ‘But we shouldn’t let speculation on this deflect us from our first priority — to identify these victims as quickly as we can.’

The scraping of a chair being pushed back abruptly turned all their heads towards the window, where Huang now stood silhouetted against the light behind him. Beyond the Section Chief, and beyond the east wing of the department, Li could see the traffic streaming by on the overhead road. But Huang said nothing. He simply turned towards the door and made his exit in silence. None of them knew whether it was a comment on Li’s handling of the case, or whether he simply had another appointment. But it left a tension in the room that did not dissipate until Li called the meeting to an uneasy close.

II

Margaret was exhausted. Her eyes were stinging. Every muscle in her body gave the impression of having seized up. Her limbs had, apparently, doubled in weight, and lifting her legs or arms in the simple act of walking or raising a drink to her lips was a colossal effort. She felt battered and bruised, and all she wanted to do was lie down. Jetlag and the emotions of the last few days had finally caught up with her.

The hands of all the remaining bodies had been examined and fingerprinted. Then together with Dr Lan, she had carried out repeat autopsies on the first two bodies and found the same betadine colouring around the entry wounds after cleaning away the dirt that still clung to the decaying flesh. They had also found several small sutures, tying off arteries where organs had been removed. Dr Lan made no comment on the fact that these had not appeared on his initial reports. It was clear to Margaret that the autopsies had been cursory and careless, and yet Dr Lan did not strike her as a careless man. His professional and personal embarrassment was patent. His integrity had been compromised, and Margaret suspected that he had been a reluctant instrument of political convenience. No doubt he had not envisaged having his work scrutinised by another professional. In order to keep him on side, she decided not to say or do anything that would draw attention to the obvious shortcomings of the initial autopsies.

She had concentrated, instead, on going over all the toxicology reports, with Dr Lan translating, and together they had discussed another possible cause of death. She had then studied all the x-rays taken of the body pieces as they had been found, and then the whole body x-rays.

Although she had not felt like it, she had agreed to Lan’s suggestion that they begin three fresh autopsies, Dr Lan and one of his team working in the twin-tabled room, Margaret in here on her own. The Chinese pathologists had made a point of asking her through to consult on every new or unusual finding, wishing to have her corroborate an opinion or make an alternative suggestion. Her concentration was now wavering.

She had almost completed her autopsy, having dealt fully with the torso and limbs and moving now to the head. Because the head had been severed so far down the neck, she had decided to leave the dissection of the neck until she dealt with the head. The larynx, trachea and mainstem bronchi were normally the most boring and routine of the autopsy procedures, only occasionally enlivened if the victim had been unfortunate enough to have choked to death on a piece of food that was still lodged in the throat. She had already noted that the distal portions of the trachea and the oesophagus were absent because of the removal of the lungs. Now, working on that portion of the neck still attached to the head, she lifted the skin of the front of the neck, using her fingers to bluntly dissect it from the underlying tissue, while pulling it up towards the chin. Then she freed the remaining trachea and oesophagus together from the surrounding muscles and blood vessels, running her scalpel along each side and pulling. At this stage, they would only come partially free, because they were still attached by the tongue at the top end.

Carefully, so as not to break through the skin of the neck from the inside, she took a long blade like a six-inch fillet knife and cut the tongue free from the jawbone by blindly drawing the blade gingerly along the inside of it. She then stuffed the tip of the tongue backwards, as if down the throat, and pulled it free, in the same movement completely removing the neck organs — tongue, portions of oesophagus and trachea, larynx and thyroid gland.

Flipping them over, she then took a pair of scissors and cut open the oesophagus, like opening up a soft hose, which she then cut free from the trachea. Now that the trachea, held open by incomplete rings of cartilage, was revealed, she was able to run the scissors up the back of it, taking advantage of the break in the cartilage. She checked the laryngeal cartilage, or Adam’s apple, for fractures, then finding none pried it apart to reveal the smooth pink-grey mucosa of the vocal folds. Immediately she spotted the whiter patches of several polypoid nodules.

‘How is it going?’

She looked up, her concentration broken for the moment, to see Li standing in the doorway. He looked tired, too, but she immediately felt her own fatigue lifting. ‘Hi,’ she said. And then almost straight away her lassitude returned as she saw Mei-Ling appearing behind him. Apparently it was impossible for Li to go anywhere without her.

He walked in and glanced at the woman on the table. She looked unreal somehow, waxen yellow and lifeless, like pieces of a wax corpse used for instruction in a professor’s teaching lab. There was something about the expression fixed on her face, barely discernible now because of decomposition, that was odd. As if it had been frozen in a moment of pain or fear or both. Her hair was smeared across it, and there was something terribly sad conveyed by her expression, an insight into the last moments of her life, made almost eerie by the absence of her eyes.

‘Were the eyes gouged out in some kind of attempt to disguise the face, do you think?’ he asked.

‘They weren’t gouged, they were surgically removed,’ Margaret said, and Li had an immediate picture in his mind of a large glass jar filled with eyes staring out at him.

‘Why would someone want to do that?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Why would someone want to do any of this?’ Margaret said.

Li was looking at the dead woman’s face again. ‘Was she in pain, do you think, when she died?’

Margaret looked at her expression. ‘Trying to reach a high note, maybe.’ She smiled wanly and Li frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

She indicated the neck she had just sectioned, running a finger down each of the pink-grey folds she had uncovered. ‘The vocal cords,’ she said. ‘If you look closely you’ll see small patches of white, and if you look more closely still, you’ll see that they are caused by tiny reactive pedunculated polyps. Effectively small, non-cancerous tumours, known in the trade as “singer’s nodules”.’

‘You mean this woman was a singer?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Can’t say for sure,’ Margaret said. ‘But she was someone who used her voice a lot. And if you look at her teeth you’ll see she was a heavy smoker. Which always makes the condition worse. Now, maybe she was one of those conductresses you hear screaming through the loudspeaker system at passengers on passing buses, but if you look at her fingernails you’ll see she’d had a manicure not long before her death. I know you don’t like to talk about “class” in China, but I don’t think your average bus conductress gets her nails manicured. Wrong class. So my guess would be that this lady was a classical singer of some sort. Aged maybe around thirty.’

Li nodded appreciatively. ‘Well, that at least gives us something to go on.’

‘And something else,’ Margaret said. She crossed to the long, polished stainless steel worktop and shuffled through the envelopes of x-rays lying there until she found what she was looking for. She removed two x-rays from one of the envelopes and laid one on a lightbox and switched it on. Immediately they saw that it was the x-ray of a foot. ‘This is one of the ladies being autopsied next door right now.’ She lifted the sheet off and replaced it with the other. ‘This one shows it better.’ She leaned over it, and with her finger traced the line of the second and third metatarsals. ‘These bones that run between the toes and the rest of the structure that makes up the ankle and the heel …’

‘Metatarsals,’ Mei-Ling said.

Margaret flicked her a thoughtful glance. ‘That’s right.’ She turned back to the x-ray. ‘You can see scarring there on these middle two. Small calluses where stress fractures have failed to heal. Difficult to tell from these whether they are incomplete fissures or actual breaks.’

‘What does that tell us?’ Li asked.

‘Regardless of what caused the fractures, continued and unprotected weight bearing has almost certainly caused them to heal poorly. And if you want to take a look at the girl on the table next door, you’ll see how well developed the muscles are in her legs, and in her shoulders and arms and neck. My guess is that she was an athlete of some sort, possibly a gymnast.’

Li looked at Margaret afresh, with the admiration and respect he always had for her when she was doing her job. Her observation of detail, her insightful interpretation, the breadth and range of her knowledge and experience. He had never worked with anyone quite like her. It reminded him of why he felt about her the way he did, when by any other measure she was a very difficult person to love. That, and the acute vulnerability that lay beneath her well-polished veneer of cynicism and acid wit.

Mei-Ling was also clearly impressed, although endeavouring not to show it. ‘Could be worse,’ she said. ‘Three possible clues to identity out of … how many autopsies?’

‘Six,’ Margaret said. ‘And you’re right. It could be worse. You could still be labouring under the illusion that the victims had all died a natural death.’ She switched off the lightbox and slipped the x-rays back in the envelope. ‘In fact, we are now looking at yet another possible cause of death.’

‘Oh?’ Mei-Ling was still stinging from the force of Margaret’s rebuke. She glanced at Li, but he appeared to be oblivious.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘The midazolam,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s quite commonly used in minor surgical procedures as a sedative to produce amnesia of the procedure … if you were having a tooth pulled, or a burn scrubbed out, a scope put down your throat, or even …’ she glanced at Mei-Ling, ‘… if you were having an abortion.’ She paused for a moment, but Mei-Ling was not rising to the bait. ‘Like I said, it would be used in small, frequent doses. In a high dose, though, it can cause cardiac arrest. So that might well have been a quick and easy way of finishing the victims off at some point during the procedure.’

‘But since we don’t have the hearts to hand, you can’t say for sure,’ Mei-Ling said.

‘Having the heart available wouldn’t help,’ Margaret corrected her. ‘It would take about twelve hours for the heart tissue to show a visible reaction — and none of these women lived that long. It’s the tox that’s important here.’

She returned to the table to complete the final elements of the autopsy. ‘With four of us taking three autopsies each, we should be through the rest of them by tomorrow night. Although it will be a day or two before all the results are back from toxicology.’ She peeled the woman’s scalp back from the skull. ‘By the way, I’ve got dinner reservations for us tonight at the Dragon and Phoenix restaurant on the eighth floor of the Peace Hotel. Apparently it has wonderful views of the Bund.’ She glanced up at Li and said, pointedly, ‘A table for two, that is. We haven’t had a chance to talk since I got back from the States.’

Li glanced at Mei-Ling uncomfortably. But she smiled sweetly. ‘Yes,’ she said to Margaret, ‘it is a wonderful view. You should make the best of the limited time you have. After all, you will be leaving for Beijing the day after tomorrow.’

‘Will I?’ Margaret looked at Li.

‘Had you not told her?’ Mei-Ling said.

Li said quickly, ‘I need you to look at the body we found in Beijing, Margaret. I have asked them to translate the original autopsy report, and the body has been out of the freezer for two days now. So another couple of days and it will be thawed.’

‘I see.’ Margaret turned back to the severed head. She could not meet Mei-Ling’s eyes. Although Margaret knew Mei-Ling could not have arranged it this way, it still felt like she had somehow won a battle of wills.

Li said, ‘And I need to ask you a favour.’ When Margaret did not look up he elucidated. ‘I would like you to collect Xinxin and bring her back down with you.’

Margaret’s face immediately lit up at the prospect, and she looked at Li with shining eyes. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Is she with Mei Yuan?’

He nodded. ‘You will need to pick her up at nursery school. One of the kindergartens here in Shanghai has agreed to take her temporarily. My hotel has been able to give her an adjoining room, and I am paying a babysitter to look after her in the evenings, and weekends if I am working.’

‘That’s great,’ Margaret said. ‘We’ll be able to spend some time with her.’

‘Yes,’ Li said enthusiastically. ‘Mei-Ling managed to fix everything up for me here in Shanghai. She loves kids, too. So Xinxin won’t be short of people to play with her.’

And Margaret’s face clouded again. It felt like Mei-Ling was invading every part of her space. ‘That’ll be nice,’ she said with a tone, and switched on the oscillating saw to cut through the skull.

III

The room was small and square with plain, white-painted walls. The paint had come away in patches where papers or posters taped to the walls had been removed, leaving their outlines clearly visible, like ghosts. There was one square window on the back wall, giving out on to seedy-looking police apartment blocks, lights shining from hundreds of windows in the dark, wet night. There was a desk charred with cigarette burns, an uncomfortable-looking chair, and a single strip light hanging from the ceiling and casting a harsh glow around the room. This was to be Li’s home for the duration of the investigation. Like Section Chief Huang, it did not exactly feel welcoming. Next door was the audio-video room, and the sound of tapes being run and re-run boomed through the wall. The detectives’ room was at the far end of the corridor, and Mei-Ling’s office was beyond that.

‘It’s not much,’ she said. ‘But someone loved it. He didn’t want to leave it.’

‘Should I know who it was?’ Li asked.

She shook her head. ‘Better not.’

There was a sharp rap on the open door, and they turned to find Detective Dai standing there clutching an armful of files. ‘There’s a call for you, boss,’ he said to Mei-Ling.

She nodded and said to Li, ‘Talk to you later.’

When she was gone, Dai put the files on to Li’s desk where there were already several dozen piling up. He glanced at Li, somewhat uncertainly. ‘I read up about those serial killings you solved in Beijing,’ he said, and Li realised that Dai was a little in awe of him. ‘Pretty smart bit of detective work.’

‘I got lucky,’ Li said. ‘And even luckier still to be alive.’

Dai nodded. ‘I knew Duanmu Hongyu,’ he said. Li frowned, trying to remember where he’d seen the name. Then it came back to him. The ebony bust in the courtyard. Duanmu Hongyu had been a famous Shanghai detective working out of 803. Dai was trying to impress him. ‘He kind of took a fatherly interest in me, you know. A kind of mentor. He was a great guy.’

Li nodded and rounded his desk to pull up his chair and sit down. He fumbled in his pockets for his cigarettes, but Dai had a pack out before he could find them. Li took one and Dai lit it. As Dai lit his own, Li asked him, ‘What age are you, detective?’

‘Twenty-eight, Chief,’ Dai said.

‘I’m not a chief,’ Li told him. ‘Just a deputy.’

Dai nodded. ‘So, have they got many women in the department in Beijing?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

‘I mean, high-ranking. You know, like Deputy Section Chief Nien.’

‘Not right now,’ Li said.

Dai nodded sagely and drew on his cigarette. ‘Women are okay, I guess. They can hold up as much sky as they want, but they’re a bastard to work for.’

‘Oh?’ Li was not going to comment, but he was interested to hear what Dai wanted to say.

Dai rested one butt cheek on the edge of Li’s desk. ‘Yeah, you know, sex always comes into it. You can’t get away from it. I mean, Mei-Ling, she’s all right. But she’s got this thing for senior officers. You know, like rank or something turns her on. Like she looks down on the rest of us, ’cos we’re not good enough for her.’

Li had heard enough. ‘It’s Deputy Section Chief Nien to you, Dai,’ he said. ‘And I don’t approve of detectives referring to senior ranking officers in that way.’

‘Oh.’ Dai seemed surprised, but not unduly put out. He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Chief.’ He stood up. ‘Oh, by the way, top of that pile there’s a file on a lady called Fu Yawen. Comes from Luwan District in the old French Town.’

‘What about her?’

‘She and her old man worked in a small tailor’s shop on Songshan Road. She went missing about five months ago.’

When Dai had gone, Li pulled the file on Fu Yawen in front of him, but he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wondered what Dai had meant when he said Mei-Ling had a ‘thing’ for senior officers. What senior officers had he been talking about? Or was it just jealousy and gossip? He was aware that Mei-Ling was attracted to him. It was clear in her eyes, in the way she would touch him from time to time, in brief unguarded moments of intimacy. And yet, he had always had the strangest sensation that this familiarity she had displayed towards him, almost from the moment they met, was habitual, a transfer of feelings from another relationship.

He was reluctant to admit to himself that he found her attractive, too, that he enjoyed those fleeting moments of unguarded intimacy, the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand setting butterflies fluttering in his belly and a strange, distant stirring in his loins. For if he were to allow himself to acknowledge these emotions, they would surely be accompanied by a haunting sense of guilt, and raise questions he did not want to face right now about his feelings for Margaret.

And then he thought about Margaret, and her odd, paranoid behaviour, her antipathy towards Mei-Ling, the directness of her question about what was going on between them. Two attractive people thrown together on a stressful job in a strange city — it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened, she had said. And he remembered his guilt. Why had he felt guilty? And what instinct was it that had led Margaret, within hours of arriving in Shanghai, to suspect the existence of feelings he had not even admitted to himself? The instant hostility between Margaret and Mei-Ling had been immediately apparent to him, but still remained a mystery. Not for the first time in his life, he found himself being confounded by his own emotions, and thrashing his way clumsily through the uncharted waters of an uncertain relationship. He checked the time. He was due to meet Margaret for dinner in two hours, and somewhere deep inside he found himself dreading it.

He forced himself to focus on the file in front of him. Here, he thought, he would find himself on safer, more familiar ground.

IV

Margaret found the note from Geller pushed under her door. I’m in the bar if you feel like a drink. She felt very much like a drink. But first she needed to shower, to wash away the olfactory residue of the autopsy room, to change her clothes and become that other person she was when she wasn’t being Margaret Campbell the pathologist. That other Margaret Campbell who always let her down, always said the wrong thing, always fell in love with the wrong people.

By the time she found her way to the bar she had relaxed a little. The hot water of the shower had taken some of the tension out of her muscles, and an overwhelming sense of fatigue had caused her to lower her customary defences. She didn’t really want to think too much about anything, just let a little alcohol course through her veins and forget for the moment all life’s little unhappinesses.

Geller was sitting on his own at the bar nursing what Margaret guessed was not his first beer. He glanced at her as she hoisted herself on to the stool next to him. ‘Vodka tonic?’

‘You learn quickly.’

‘I come from a long line of circus animals. We’re easily trained.’ He waved his hand at a girl who was hiding behind the coffee maker and she was forced to come out into the open. He ordered a vodka and another beer. ‘Good day?’ he asked Margaret.

‘As days go.’

‘You want to tell me about it?’

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, that’s pretty unequivocal.’

She grinned. ‘That’s what they call me. Unequivocal Campbell.’

‘Hey, sounds like the title of a movie from the nineteen fifties.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Jeez, was that really last century? Makes me feel so old.’

The drinks came, and Margaret took a long, appreciative pull at hers. The alcohol immediately relaxed her even further. She looked at Geller, then glanced around the empty bar. ‘Not exactly busy, is it?’

‘That’s because the prices are so outrageous,’ he said. ‘Of course, you wouldn’t know, since you always leave me to pick up the tab.’

She laughed. ‘Well, why don’t we just put this one on my room?’

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘I can claim it on expenses.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I keep forgetting. I’m just work to you.’

‘Pretty goddamned hard work, too,’ he drawled, and then grinned.

‘I’m surprised to find you on your own,’ Margaret said. ‘Didn’t you tell me that the press pack would be pursuing me relentlessly while I was here?’

‘Yep.’

‘So where are they?’

‘Probably camped out at the Westin Tai Pin Yang Hotel on the road out to Hongqiao Airport.’

Margaret was taken aback. ‘What are they doing out there?’

‘Could be that’s where they think you’re staying.’ He took a long draught of beer.

She looked at him with amusement. ‘And where would they get an idea like that, Mr Geller?’

He shrugged very casually. ‘Beats me. And, hey, it’s Jack. Okay? Nobody calls me Mister Geller except my landlord when the rent’s a week overdue.’

‘That’s very polite of him.’

‘You should hear what he calls me after a month.’

‘You don’t make a very good living, then?’

He rubbed thoughtfully at a jawline that needed a shave. ‘Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on whether the news is good or bad. If it’s good I can go hungry. See, Margaret … you don’t mind if I call you Margaret?’

‘It’s a lot nicer than what a lot of people call me.’

He chuckled, and she knew from the warmth in his eyes that he liked her. It was good to have someone liking her for a change. Too often it was hostility she saw in people’s eyes. ‘See, trying to sell a story idea to a paper or a newsmag is a lot like being pregnant — a heavy burden and lots of labour. Cynic that I am, I can also tell you that you are more likely to get screwed at the end of the project rather than the beginning.’

Margaret laughed. She liked Geller, too. He was easy company. Spoke the same language, shared a sense of humour. Nuance was no problem.

‘So I guess you’re still not going to tell me anything about progress on the inquiry?’ he said.

‘I’d say that was a pretty fair guess.’

Then he threw one out of left field and caught her completely off-guard. ‘So are you and Deputy Section Chief Li still an item then?’

For a moment she didn’t know what to say. There didn’t seem any point in denying it. He had obviously done his research. So she said, ‘For the moment.’

Something in her tone caused him to look at her more closely. ‘Trouble in paradise?’

She shrugged, trying not to show concern. ‘Oh, you know how it is: American girl meets Chinese guy, falls in love. Chinese guy meets Chinese girl, American girl can’t compete.’

‘Why?’

‘Language, culture, politics, you name it. How do you bridge a culture gap that’s five thousand years wide? She’s a fish out of water here, he’s a fish out of water there. What other pool can they swim in?’

‘Hey, Margaret,’ he said, returning to his beer, ‘if I knew the answer to that one I wouldn’t be spending so much of my life picking up a bar-room tan.’ And Margaret knew immediately that this was more than just a smart line. There was a depth of feeling somewhere in there that hinted at an unhappy experience, perhaps not dissimilar to her own.

Li hurried through revolving doors from the street. The lights of arcade shops to the left and right reflected brilliantly off a polished marble floor. He hurried past the foreign exchange counter and into the sprawling lounge area opposite reception. The sound of a live jazz band drifted out from the entrance to a bar in the far corner. He walked briskly across the lobby to where a young Chinese attendant stood guarding double doors leading to the sound of Dixieland beyond. She wanted him to pay an entrance fee. He glanced into the room behind her and saw that the bar was huge, with long lines of neatly ordered and empty tables. The music was deafening. Margaret had said she would meet him in the bar, but this surely couldn’t be it. ‘Is there another bar?’ he asked.

The attendant clearly thought he was some kind of Chinese cheapskate and pointed condescendingly up the stairs.

The Art Deco bar on the first-floor mezzanine was empty also. He saw a waitress hovering behind the coffee maker hoping he wouldn’t notice her. He went back downstairs to the reception desk and asked what room Miss Margaret Campbell was in, then rode the elevator up to the sixth floor and wandered down a long, thickly carpeted corridor until he found room 605. There was a bell push on the wall beside the door. He pressed it and heard a doorbell chime distantly in the room. He waited, but there was no response. He rang again and when there was still no response, knocked on the door and called, ‘Margaret?’ Quietly at first, and then louder. A door opened further down the hall and an elderly Japanese gentleman glared at him.

He went back down to reception and asked them to call the room. The receptionist waited patiently as the phone rang out. Li asked if Margaret’s key had been returned. The receptionist checked and said no, the key was still out. Li was initially perplexed, and then annoyed, and somewhere in the background a little relieved. He waited around in the lobby for another fifteen minutes before writing a quick note which he left with the receptionist. And then he headed with righteous indignation back to the Da Hu Hotel to lie on his bed listening to the traffic rumble past his window on Yan’an Viaduct Road, and to try to make sense of the confusion of conflicting emotions in his head.

V

At first she had no idea what had wakened her. Some sound or smell or movement had entered her consciousness. Her eyelids were so heavy she could barely force them apart. She saw a thin line of light coming under the door from the corridor, and smelled the faintly pungent odour of some distantly familiar oriental perfume. Then she heard the slightest swish of silk on silk, like a whisper, and turned over on to her back to see a figure standing over her, dressed in a long, hand-embroidered gown. At first she could not see the face, but knew it was a woman from the small, slender build. She was standing motionless, just looking down at Margaret in the dark. Quickly, Margaret fumbled for the light switch, and blinking in the sudden glare of electric light, she saw that it was Mei-Ling, dark eyes burning like coals. Suddenly Mei-Ling’s clasped hands shot above her head and Margaret saw the glint of light on a long, slender blade as it came arcing down towards her.

She screamed and sat up suddenly in the dark, the sound of blood pulsing through her head, the echo of her own voice still reverberating around the room. She was alone in the room, fully dressed, sitting up on top of a bed that had not been slept in. The red numerals of the digital clock at the bedside glowed in the dark. They showed 3.12. Margaret blinked in confusion. She was disorientated. Had she been dreaming, or was this the dream? Where was she? A hotel room. She saw light flooding out from the open door of the bathroom. China. Shanghai. And, suddenly, she remembered her dinner with Li. She looked again at the clock and at first could make no sense of the time it was showing. Twelve minutes past three? How was that possible? Was it morning or afternoon. And, then, with a sickening sense of realisation she knew what had happened.

She had spent an hour in the bar with Jack, talking, and then she had told him she was meeting someone for dinner and was going to her room to freshen up. She had lain down on the bed for a moment, just so that she could close her eyes and stop the room spinning. She had only had one drink, but the effects of the alcohol combined with a serious shortage of sleep had been fatal. She must have slept for more than eight hours. She still found it hard to believe that it was the middle of the night, that she had missed her dinner with Li by seven hours. Seven hours! It did not seem possible.

She went into the bathroom to repair the make-up smudged around her eyes, and took the lift down to the ground floor. The girl at reception remembered Li quite clearly. He had gone up to Margaret’s room, she said, and when he couldn’t get a reply had come down and asked them to phone from there. He appeared sort of angry, she said.

‘Did he leave a note?’ Margaret asked.

‘One moment.’ The receptionist searched beneath the counter for a few seconds and then handed Margaret an envelope. She tore it open and found a folded sheet of hotel letter headed paper. Li had scrawled a telephone number and his room number, and a terse ‘Call me’ on it.

‘Can I use the phone?’ Margaret asked.

The receptionist gave her an odd look. ‘Now?’

‘Yes, of course, now,’ Margaret snapped.

The receptionist lifted a phone on to the counter and Margaret quickly dialled the number Li had left. Someone answered in Chinese, and Margaret, frustrated, could not get her to speak English. She thrust the phone at the receptionist. ‘Ask them to get me room 223,’ she said.

The receptionist spoke into the receiver, and after a lengthy conversation handed it back. It was ringing. After an eternity, Margaret heard a sleepy male voice saying. ‘Wei?’

‘Li Yan?’

A moment’s silence, then, ‘Margaret?’

‘Li Yan, I’m so sorry,’ she blurted.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ He must have checked his bedside clock and was clearly aggravated.

‘I fell asleep,’ she said lamely. ‘I just lay down for a minute and … I don’t know, the next thing it’s three in the morning. I was just so tired.’

‘Yeah, well, right now I’m pretty tired, too,’ he said, barely able to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘We can talk about this tomorrow.’ And he hung up.

Margaret was taken aback by his abruptness. She replaced the receiver in the cradle and hurried away before the receptionist saw her hurt and embarrassment. She went back up to her room, but she was wide awake now and she knew there was no point in even getting into bed. She turned on the television and tried to watch a film on HBO Asia, but it was halfway through, and she couldn’t concentrate for a thousand thoughts crowding her mind. She got up and went to the window, drawing the curtain half open so that she could peer down into the deserted Nanjing Road. It had stopped raining, for the first time, she thought, since she had arrived. And suddenly she had an overwhelming desire to breathe fresh, cold air, to feel the breeze on her face, to stretch her legs along the deserted waterfront of the Bund. She found a jacket and tied a scarf at her neck. In the corridor, an attendant in a white jacket lay asleep stretched across two chairs in the open doorway of a service cupboard. She guessed he must have been there when she went down to reception. But she hadn’t noticed. Now she tiptoed past him to the lift.

The Bund was deserted, and without its light show as dull as any city street anywhere in the world, all colour bled out of it by the pervasive yellow of the sodium street lights. Gone were the green, yellow and blue floodlights, the giant neon ads that just a few hours ago had shone brilliantly against the night sky. Maxell, L’Oréal Paris, Sharp, Nescafé. Gone were the teeming crowds of tourists and Shanghainese that constantly ebbed and flowed along the length of the promenade. Across the river, only the red winking navigation lights on the tops of buildings betrayed the existence of the financial miracle that was Pudong. The six lanes of the Bund were eerily empty. The clock face on the tower halfway along glowed like a pale moon rising over the deserted city. It was nearly a quarter to four.

An occasional cyclist drifted past, heading perhaps for an early shift at some factory. The odd taxi cruised by, slowing down as it passed Margaret on the sidewalk, its driver leaning over expecting her to signal that she wanted a lift. It was inconceivable that some yangguizzi would wander the empty streets at four in the morning without requiring a taxi. She waved them all on.

Half a dozen cabs were pulled into the kerb opposite the end of Nanjing Road, on the river side of the Bund. A woman in a white jacket and round white hat squatted on a stool by a brazier. A large pot of soup bubbled and steamed on top of the coals, and she filled mugs from it with a ladle for the drivers who stood around talking and smoking and stamping their feet in the early morning chill.

The drivers watched curiously as Margaret looked both ways along the Bund before running across the six lanes, pausing only briefly at the central reservation. There was no traffic, only the distant lights of a truck approaching from the direction of the Nanpu Bridge. All conversation around the brazier had come to a halt. For a moment, perhaps, they thought she was going to ask for some soup. But she hurried past, running quickly up the steps to the long, deserted promenade. It was darker here, away from the street lights. Umbrellas still stood open at stands where earlier vendors had sold drinks and snacks and Fuji film. Now there was not a soul in sight. An elaborate fountain, usually illuminated by green lights, had been switched off. She crossed to lean on the wall and look out over the black waters of the river. A heavily laden barge chugged by, so low in the water it was hard to believe it would not sink. There was one small lamp burning in the pilot’s cabin, but no navigation lights. From somewhere a long way upriver came the blast of a ship’s foghorn.

She breathed deeply and was sure she could smell the sea, which was not so far away in the Yangtse River estuary. She walked slowly north along the promenade, arms crossed, hugging herself to keep warm. A deep depression had settled on her. Li was the only reason she had ever stayed in China. The only reason she had come back. Without him there was no reason to be here. Ever. She didn’t even want to contemplate the possibility of what she would do if she lost him. ‘Home’ had seemed so alien to her during the few days she had been back there. And yet she could not bring herself to think of China as home. She felt displaced and, although her mother was still alive, orphaned by the death of her father, as if her anchor chains had been severed and she had been cast adrift on an uncharted sea. God knew what shore she would wash up on. All she could do, she thought, was go with the flow, let the currents take her where they would. There was no point in fighting against them. It was futile and exhausting. She would complete her work on the Shanghai murders, re-autopsy the body in Beijing, bring Xinxin back south and then see what happened. If Li was really drawn to Mei-Ling, then she knew she couldn’t compete. As she had told Jack, they both swam in very different pools.

She reached the gates of Huangpu Park. They were locked. And beyond them, in the dark, she could just see the Shanghai People’s Hero Memorial Pagoda in the reflected light of the streetlamps. There were trees and shrubs here that screened the promenade from the road. The occasional passing vehicle seemed very distant. And on the other side of the wall, the river slapped dully, erratically, against the stone. The sound of movement in the darkness of the bushes startled Margaret. She stood stock still. Had it been an animal? But she wasn’t going to stay to find out. She turned and started walking quickly, back the way she had come. The moonface on the clock tower was a very long way away. She had come further than she thought. She didn’t look back for a long time, concentrating on controlling an urge to run. It had probably been a dog, or maybe even a rat. She glanced over her shoulder for reassurance, and saw, about a hundred metres back, the shadowy figure of a man hurrying in her wake. She almost screamed, and now had no difficulty giving in to her impulse to run. She ran until she reached the dry bed of the fountain and looked back again. But there was no one there. No sound or sign of movement. She stopped to regain her breath, momentarily relieved. Had she just imagined it? She decided to get down on to the sidewalk and the lit, wide open space of the road. In the distance she could see, still gathered around the soup pot, about half a dozen drivers. They were almost within shouting distance. She ran down a flight of steps, passing the entrance to an underpass, walls lined with illuminated posters that threw out a strong, bright light. A movement in her peripheral vision caused her to turn, catching her breath, and for a moment she saw a man’s face, caught full in the light of the underpass. He was short and thick-set, with long, straggling hair and a broad, flat, Mongolian face. His eyes were like black slits. She could see no light in them, and the upper half of his mouth was stretched over brown, protruding teeth, turned up and horribly distorted by the ugly scarring of a hare-lip. He froze, like a rabbit caught in headlights. She would have screamed, but she couldn’t seem to find a breath. For what felt like an incredibly long moment, their eyes met. She could almost have reached out and touched him. And then she turned and ran down the rest of the steps to the sidewalk and sprinted towards the little gathering of taxi drivers drinking soup.

By the time she reached them they had all turned and were staring at her in astonishment. She slowed to a stop, gasping, her lungs burning. She turned around and the street behind her was empty. Not a soul nor a vehicle in sight. She turned back to meet the curious faces of the drivers and the soup lady who gaped in wonder at this blonde-haired blue-eyed woman out running in the middle of the night. For an absurd moment she wondered if they had thought she was jogging. It was clear from their expressions they thought she was insane. She glanced back, but there was still no sign of the man with the hare-lip. She fought to bring her breathing back under control and tried a half smile that she knew was probably more like a grimace. Still they stared at her in mute amazement, some of them holding mugs in suspended animation, halfway to their mouths. She felt compelled to say something and muttered, absurdly, ‘Ni hau.’

Compelled, out of habit, to respond to a foreigner saying hello in Chinese, they mumbled ni hau in return. She looked either way along the road, and then forced herself to walk calmly across it. She could almost feel their eyes on her back.

She passed the lights of a twenty-four-hour Citibank, with a row of glowing ATMs behind sliding glass doors. Inside, a night watchman was reading a book and playing loud music. She turned up Nanjing Road and took one final look back. There was no one there except for the taxi drivers and the soup lady. She pushed, relieved, through the revolving doors of the Peace Hotel and realised that in all the months she had spent in China, this was the first time she had felt any sense of threat in the streets.