The Killing Room

I

Li sat lost in his own thoughts as Mei-Ling steered them west through the traffic on Huaihai Road. The rain had stayed off and the streets were almost dry. This had once been the heart of the old French Town, the former Avenue Joffre, as smart a shopping street as any to be found in Paris. But there was very little evidence left of the French settlement, only perhaps the art nouveau Printemps department store further west. They passed a bar called The Jurassic Pub, with a sign reading This Way to Dinosaurs, and Li wondered briefly what was happening to five thousand years of Chinese culture in this town. They turned south then into Songshan Road, and Mei-Ling pulled into the kerb. ‘We’re more likely to find it on foot from here,’ she said.

They got out of the car and Li looked down the length of the street. It was lined with trees on either side, leaves only now beginning to yellow. Cramped, narrow shop fronts fought for space along the edge of the sidewalk, beneath two storeys of crumbling apartments, rotting wooden balconies groaning with the detritus of overspill from tiny rooms. Vendors’ goods spilled out on to the pavements, bales of cloth and baskets filled with household goods, boxes of fruit and electrical equipment. Every few metres, narrow alleyways opened off left and right, whitewashed brick, poles slung overhead, bowed with the weight of fresh wet washing.

‘How was the Dragon and Phoenix?’ Mei-Ling asked.

He frowned his confusion. They had barely spoken since they left 803. ‘Last night … the restaurant at the Peace Hotel?’

He looked away, embarrassed to meet her eye. ‘Margaret never showed up,’ he said. ‘She fell asleep, apparently.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ Mei-Ling said, and Li glanced at her sharply to see if she was being sarcastic. But she seemed genuine enough. ‘The food’s not brilliant there, but the view is great.’ They walked in silence for a moment, checking the numbers above the shop fronts. ‘Listen,’ she said eventually, ‘why don’t you both come and eat at my family’s restaurant tonight. My father and my aunt would be happy to meet you. The view’s nothing special, but I can promise you the food is wonderful.’

Li’s spirits lifted momentarily. ‘I’d like that,’ he said. And then he wondered how Margaret would react. But he decided that he was not going to spend his life worrying about what Margaret was going to think or say or do next. She lived, he felt, in a very different world from him, even when they were sharing the same space at the time. If she was unhappy eating with Mei-Ling’s family, then she could eat on her own.

They crossed the street and found the tailor’s shop about halfway down. It was really just an opening in the wall. A tiny room, hung on all sides with finished clothes and lengths of material. In the back a young girl in a red jacket with a black-and-white checked collar worked a hot iron over yellow silk under the glare of a single fluorescent strip. On her left was a small table with an ancient hand-cranked sewing machine, a small striplight fixed to the wall above it. At the front, behind a short glass counter, an old woman in a beige jacket was sewing the seam of a black xiangyun silk suit on an equally ancient machine. Both women wore pink plastic sleeves to protect their jackets, and Li noticed that they both had sewing rings on their right hands.

Incongruously, a tall white mannequin, with blue eyes and short blonde hair, stood at the open entrance to the shop, modestly draped from the neck in patterned blue cotton. It was missing an arm. And next to it, the lower half of another dummy stood on one leg, a brown skirt hanging loosely from the waist. A bizarre coincidence, Li thought, that the woman they believed might have worked here had been found in pieces, and was also missing a foot.

The woman in the beige jacket turned and looked at them expectantly, and Li saw that she was about seventy, maybe older. But her hair was still black with just a few seams of silver, and it was drawn back in a loose bun. She ran her eyes over Li from top to bottom, perhaps mentally measuring him up for a suit. He showed her his maroon Public Security ID and she was immediately on her guard. ‘I don’t know what you want here,’ she said. ‘We’re honest people just trying to make a living. I’ve been in this city more than fifty years and I’ve never had trouble.’

Mei-Ling said, ‘Is this the place Fu Yawen used to work?’

‘Ye-es.’ She was even more guarded now. ‘Why? Have you found her? Has she shown up finally?’

‘Any idea where she went?’ Li asked her, ignoring her questions.

‘How would I know? She only worked here. You should ask her husband. I bet he’d like to know where she went. Off with some fancy man probably.’ The woman had lost her reserve and was warming to her subject.

‘How long had she worked here?’ Li said.

‘About three years. Mind you, I’d no complaint about her work. She was a good worker, knew what she was doing. Her own father trained her from when she was just a girl. Just like my father trained me.’ The woman shook a stray strand of her hair back from her face. ‘But she had an eye for the men, that one. Couldn’t keep her hands to herself.’

‘And you have no idea what happened to her?’ Li asked again. He glanced towards the girl in the red jacket who was trying to keep her eyes on her work, but who was clearly listening with interest.

The woman followed his eyes, and cast half a glance at the girl in red. ‘Get on with your work,’ she snapped. ‘This is none of your business.’ And to Li and Mei-Ling, ‘She’ll be no help to you. She never knew Fu Yawen. I brought her in as a replacement. She’ll be hoping that you haven’t found her. At least, not alive.’ She sighed exaggeratedly. ‘They have no idea, these young ones. They never saw the war, like I did.’ She puffed herself up proudly and spat beyond them on to the sidewalk. ‘In the forties I made the qipaos for all the young ladies who went to the bars and the balls. The young ones think they’re daring now, but the dresses were slit just as high in those days.’

‘You didn’t answer the question,’ Mei-Ling said impatiently.

‘How can I reply to a question when I don’t know the answer?’ the old woman said boldly. She had lost all her fear now, and Li thought this was not a person he would like to work for.

‘You can reply here, or at headquarters,’ he said, but the threat only served to harden her defiance.

‘And the answer would still be the same. You can’t frighten an old woman like me. And, anyway, I told you. Ask her husband.’

‘And where would we find him?’ Mei-Ling asked.

The woman flicked her head. ‘Down there,’ she said, indicating an alleyway running off from the side of the shop. ‘At the table on the corner.’

‘They both work for you?’ Li asked, surprised.

‘Only one of them works for me now,’ she replied. ‘And I wouldn’t have the other one back if she came to me on bended knee.’

The girl in red never lifted her eyes from the ironing board. But Li sensed her relief.

Fu Yawen’s husband sat on a stool working an electric sewing machine at a small table pressed against the wall under a corrugated plastic awning. A striplight hung at an angle from a makeshift hanger, throwing a cold light across a trestle table covered with white cloth and strewn with tools. At another table, beyond racks of threads and buttons, a woman was repairing shoes. Wet clothes dripped overhead. It must be cold, Li thought, working out here in the depths of winter.

He was a good-looking young man, his hair cut short and neat. He wore a warm woollen jacket and an apron the colour of dried blood. Li saw in his eyes that he knew why they had come the moment he showed him his ID.

‘Is she dead?’ he asked quietly, rising to his feet.

‘We don’t know yet,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We have a body. We are trying to make an identification.’

‘Tell me about her,’ Li said. ‘Did she leave you? Is that why she disappeared?’ And he thought how bald, almost cruel, his question was.

The young man sat again, slowly, his eyes clouded by unhappy memories. ‘I don’t know. We have a five-year-old son. Each morning we took it in turns to take him to the kindergarten before coming to work …’ Some memory bubbled to the surface and he had to stop, to hold back involuntary tears. He took a moment or two to collect himself. ‘It was my turn that day. She left before me to come to the shop. I took our son to the nursery school, but when I got here there was no sign of her. She just never turned up. And I have not seen her since.’

‘You hadn’t had a fight, or …?’ Mei-Ling started to say, but he cut her off.

‘We never fought,’ he said fiercely. And he glanced angrily up the alley towards the street. ‘Whatever that woman might have told you, we loved one another, me and Yawen. We loved our child. Sure, she was a good-looking woman. There were always men sniffing around after her. They would come to the shop to get something made, just so she would have to measure them and put her hands on them when they had the fitting. But it never turned her head. Not once. That ugly old cow was just jealous.’ He put a shaking hand on the table to steady himself. ‘Our little boy cannot understand where she has gone. He still asks every day when she is coming home. And sometimes he wakes crying for her in the night.’ He shook his head. ‘He was his Mommy’s boy. I am no substitute.’

For a moment neither Li nor Mei-Ling knew what to say. Then Mei-Ling asked softly, ‘Did Yawen have any distinguishing marks or features that might help us identify her?’ He shook his head blankly.

‘Doesn’t matter how small,’ Li said. ‘The smallest, most insignificant thing could help us to rule her in or out. An accident, maybe. Something that left a scar …’

The young man slumped on to his stool and sat trying to wade his way through a morass of painful memories, searching to pick out something that might help. Then, suddenly, he remembered, ‘She broke a finger once, a couple of years ago. Her right index finger. She caught it in a door, and she wasn’t able to work the needle for several weeks.’ He looked up, his face eager and anxious. It was his dead wife he was trying to help them identify, and Li felt overwhelmingly sorry for him.

Li and Mei-Ling walked back to the car in silence. When they got there, they slipped into the front seats and Mei-Ling said, ‘There’s never an easy way, is there?’

Li shook his head. Someone’s lost their Mom, Margaret had said, and she had known because she was cutting up the mother’s womb on an autopsy table. And he knew that if the x-rays showed a break in the right index finger, the young man who spent his days huddled over a sewing machine in a draughty alleyway, and his nights trying to reassure a young boy who’d lost his mother, would have to try to identify her remains. And Li would not have wished that upon his worst enemy.

Mei-Ling’s mobile started ringing, and she fumbled in her purse to find it. Li didn’t pay much attention as she answered the call and talked for about a minute. He couldn’t rid himself of the image of a small boy constantly asking about his mother, and a young man with no answers who could provide no comfort. And he couldn’t help making the comparison with Xinxin, those emotional months after her mother had abandoned her and her father had refused to take her back. What a big change in a small life, what huge adjustments she had had to make. And how inadequate to the task of helping her through it he had been. Living with an unmarried uncle, constantly in the care of a string of babysitters … it was no life for a little girl. She needed a family, some stability.

‘I think we might have found our singer.’ Mei-Ling’s words crashed into his consciousness. She was putting the phone back in her bag.

‘What?’

‘Dai found a girl in the missing persons file. A twenty-eight-year-old teacher and singer at the Shanghai School of Music and Opera.’ She consulted a note she had hastily scribbled. ‘Xiao Fengzhen. She went missing just under a year ago.’

II

The Yi Fu Theatre sat in the corner of Fuzhou Road and Yunnan Road, a stone’s throw from People’s Square. It was a white stone building with a semi-circular façade decorated by dozens of small coloured flags and a giant representation of a Peking Opera mask in vivid red, pink, yellow and black. Staff were just raising shutters and opening glass doors to the entrance lobby and booking office when Li and Mei-Ling arrived. A sour-faced woman behind the illuminated window of the booking office glowered at them. ‘We’re not open yet. Another half-hour.’

Mei-Ling flashed her ID, and the woman looked as if an electric current had just passed through her seat and up her rectum. ‘We’re looking for somebody from the music school,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘We understand the students are putting on a performance here sometime today.’

‘This afternoon,’ the woman said, suddenly anxious to help. ‘An extract from one of the Peking Operas — Romance of the Western Chamber. They are just beginning the dress rehearsal. You can go around the back to the stage door.’

In the entrance to the stage door in Shantou Road, an attendant sat on a stool smoking and sipping from a glass jar of tepid green tea. A pile of cigarette ends was gathered on the floor around him, and he watched as labourers heaved great wicker baskets filled with the elaborate costumes of the Peking Opera from a large blue truck. A cage elevator slid slowly up the side of the building, carrying the hampers to an opening in the wall which led to the wardrobe department. Hundreds of bicycles lined a wall bordering waste ground on the other side of the street. The attendant hawked a gob of phlegm from his throat and spat it out on to the pavement as Li and Mei-Ling approached. Li reached for his ID, but the man just pointed up above his head. ‘Second floor,’ he said. ‘They phoned through from the front.’

A maze of corridors on the second floor led to several dressing rooms and the make-up and wardrobe departments. From the auditorium, they could hear the ten-piece orchestra and some of the singers rehearsing. It was a bizarre cacophony, even to Chinese ears, which were becoming increasingly attuned to the sounds of Western music. The screeching falsetto of the female vocalists, the loud clacking of the clappers, the strident shriek of the hu-gin violin and the seemingly random clatter of drums and cymbals. Li’s Uncle Yifu had taken him once to the Peking Opera in the Stalinesque Beijing Exhibition Centre which contained a vast theatre built by the Russians in the middle of the last century. Hard wooden seats rose in curved tiers. They were not designed for comfort, and the audience had fidgeted all the way through the performance, eating noisily from picnic hampers, drinking and smoking, taking and making calls on mobile telephones. The music and the story were almost less important than the spectacle — extravagant costumes and startling masks placed against a sweep of bold sets on a vast, imaginatively lit stage. The costumes, his uncle had told him, were such a garish collection of contrasting colours because the stages upon which the original operas were performed had been lit only by oil lamps.

Li opened a door, and a young woman, who was bent over a costume hamper, turned guiltily. Vividly coloured costumes were draped over chairs and desks, rows of them hanging from rails along one wall. Empty hampers were piled up in one corner, another was appearing in the elevator as it drew level with the hole in the wall. Beyond the waste ground opposite, a cream and brown building had a huge neon billboard mounted on its roof advertising Mitsubishi. Where the Japanese had failed to hold on to Shanghai by force, they were conquering it now with commerce. ‘In the name of heaven,’ the girl said, ‘you gave me a fright! I thought you were the director for a minute.’

‘We’re looking for somebody who knew Xiao Fengzhen,’ Mei-Ling said.

‘I really don’t have the time just now,’ the girl said. ‘I’m way behind schedule here, and if I don’t have all the singers dressed by noon, the director’s going to kick my ass all the way across People’s Square.’ Li showed her his Ministry ID and she went very still for a moment. ‘What about her?’ she said.

‘Did you know her?’

‘Sure. Everyone knew her. She was the star pupil at the school. She was only teaching till she could go professional. What a voice that girl had.’ She paused. ‘Whatever happened to her?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Mei-Ling said.

The girl frowned. ‘But she disappeared — what, about a year ago?’

‘We have a body,’ Li said. And all the colour drained out of the wardrobe mistress’s face. ‘We’re trying to identify it.’

‘Oh, no …’ The girl appeared genuinely distressed. She pulled up a stool and sat down. ‘Not Fengzhen. She was such a lovely girl. Everyone thought maybe she’d just gone off to Beijing or something. I figured she’d be a star by now.’

‘So you weren’t surprised when she just disappeared?’ Li said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl. ‘It wasn’t like her, you know, not to say anything. She just didn’t show up for a couple of days, and we thought maybe it was her throat again. She had a lot of trouble with her voice if she was singing too much. But, then, I remember her mother came to the school wondering where she was. That was the first time any of us knew she was missing. I never did hear what happened after that.’

‘Did she live with her mother?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Oh, sure. She had a kid, but no husband. Her mother looked after the kid. ’Cos, you know, we keep pretty strange hours in this business. And then we can be away touring.’

Li said, ‘Who was the father?’

The girl shrugged. ‘No idea. She was pretty tight, you know. Kept herself very much to herself. Left her personal life at the door when she came in. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she was so popular. She never got close enough to anyone to fall out with them.’ She stopped and thought for a moment, and her clear, bright face clouded. ‘Was she … you know … murdered?’

‘We don’t know,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Do you know where her mother lives?’

The girl shook her head. ‘Like I said, Fengzhen kept her private life to herself. But I do remember where her mom worked.’ She chuckled. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you forget.’

‘Where?’ Li asked.

The girl smiled, her face colouring a little from embarrassment. ‘The sex museum.’

The door burst open behind them, and a red-faced man with only a few grey strands of hair scraped back across a bald pate shouted at the girl, ‘Cheng, where the fuck are those costumes!’

The entrance to the Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture was tucked away in an alley between the Sofitel Hotel and an upmarket department store off a pedestrianised stretch of Nanjing Road. It was only ten minutes’ walk from the theatre.

Mei-Ling laughed when Li had expressed incredulity at the existence of a museum of sex in Shanghai. ‘You’re all so stuffy and stiff-lipped about sex in Beijing.’ She laughed again. ‘Come to think of it, that’s about all that would be stiff in Beijing. You’re just like the British. Sex is all right behind closed doors, just let’s pretend in public that it doesn’t really exist. We’re a little more sophisticated than that in Shanghai. We can acknowledge the existence of sex without sniggering behind our hands like schoolboys — or schoolgirls.’

Li found her superiority mildly irritating. ‘And just what sort of sophisticated exhibits are there in this museum?’ They climbed a couple of steps to the entrance hall and took the elevator to the eighth floor.

‘Oh …’ Mei-Ling said vaguely, ‘… I don’t know, dirty pictures, jade dildos, that sort of thing.’

‘What?’

She laughed again, that braying laugh. ‘How would I know? I’ve never been.’

‘So much for sophistication,’ Li said.

The lift doors opened and a woman’s recorded voice said, with an exaggerated English accent, ‘Eighth floah.’ They turned left, through glass doors, into a large and airy entrance lobby. A girl sitting in a booth told them that tickets were fifty yuan each.

Mei-Ling told her who they were and who they were looking for. The girl was flustered. ‘Ma Hanzhi is not here right now. She has gone to collect her granddaughter. The heating has broken down at the school and they have closed it for the day.’

‘Will she be long?’ Li asked.

The girl checked her watch and shook her head. ‘Not long. Ten minutes, maybe.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Mei-Ling said, and then under her breath to Li, ‘It’ll give us a chance to see the exhibition.’

Li was not sure that he wanted to see the exhibition. Across the lobby two women in white coats stood behind a counter selling all manner of seductive underwear and sexual apparatus, from transparent negligées and peek-a-boo bras to blow-up sex dolls with absurdly gaping mouths. He felt his face colouring, and he let Mei-Ling steer him away into the exhibition itself. Three bronze statues stood in the entrance, each with its own proclamation: It was the Source of Life; Welcome Guests from Afar; and No Shame for Nature.

The museum was centred around three main rooms with low, black-painted ceilings and concealed lighting. A video of the history of sex was running continuously, with a monotonous commentary in English. A plaque on the wall proclaimed, There are two instincts and basic needs of human life, one is food, and the other is sex. The exhibition proceeded to demonstrate this point in row upon row of glass display cases filled with sexual paraphernalia from across the centuries, mostly artificial penises in stone, or porcelain, and even iron. Mei-Ling could not contain her mirth when they actually came across a double-headed jade dildo used, apparently, by lesbians in the tenth to thirteenth centuries. There were photographs of copulating Japanese racehorses, a statistical chart of eighteenth-century prostitutes from Han Kou, an ivory horn carved into a series of figures engaged in every sexual act imaginable, from oral to rear entry. Li was shocked, and found himself blushing to the roots of his hair. To his intense private embarrassment he found that he was becoming sexually aroused, although that had more to do with the proximity of Mei-Ling than any graphic depiction of sex acts in erotic paintings from the Ming Dynasty. She was very close to him, and he could feel her heat through his clothes. When her hand touched his it was like receiving an electric shock. He was both confused and disturbed by his reaction.

She was laughing again and pointing to a stone carving of a reclining man with a huge penis. ‘Now, that’s what I call sophisticated!’ she said.

‘You were looking for me?’ a voice said, and they turned to find a small woman, perhaps fifty or fifty-five, standing holding the hand of a young girl who could have been no more than six or seven years old. The girl was gazing at them with great curiosity, and the woman had a frown of deep concern etched on her face. Li felt guilty and embarrassed, as if he had been caught looking at dirty pictures. And he was appalled that a child had been brought into this place.

‘We’ll talk outside,’ he said quickly. ‘Is there somewhere you can leave the child?’

‘We can talk in the office,’ the woman said. ‘The girls will look after Lijia.’

One of the women selling sex goods took Lijia by the hand and led her behind the counter. Li and Mei-Ling followed Xiao Fengzhen’s mother into an office through the back.

‘I don’t think you should be bringing a child into a place like this,’ Li said immediately she had shut the door.

The woman shrugged. ‘You tell me what else I can do with her. I have to work.’ Then she paused, hardly daring to ask. ‘You have news of Fengzhen?’

Li took a deep breath. ‘We have uncovered a number of bodies. We are trying to identify them. We do not know for sure if your daughter is among them. I am sorry to have to upset you like this.’

‘What makes you think Fengzhen might be one of them?’ she asked in a small voice.

Mei-Ling said softly, ‘We believe that one of the women we found was a singer.’

The woman let out a low, animal-like moan and closed her eyes. Li felt her pain almost physically. He took her hand and led her to a seat. He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding her hand between both of his. It felt very small and cold. ‘Can you tell us,’ he said gently, ‘anything at all about the circumstances of Fengzhen’s disappearance?’ He could feel her trembling. But she made a great effort at composure.

‘She went to try and patch it up with him,’ she said.

‘Who?’ Mei-Ling asked. But Fengzhen’s mother wasn’t really listening.

‘He used to beat her up. He was a monster. I told her he was no good, even if he was the father of her child. I don’t know why, but she seemed to love him. I just couldn’t understand it.’

‘She had a meeting with him?’ Li asked.

‘She went to his apartment. For the weekend, she said. Told me she’d be back Sunday night. When she never showed up I guessed maybe there had been a reconciliation. But by Tuesday I was getting worried, so I went to the music school, and she hadn’t been there either.’ She turned and looked at Li with big, moist, dark eyes. ‘I always thought he had something to do with it. She threw her life away for that bastard!’ There was real venom in her voice now.

‘What did he have to say about it?’ Li asked.

‘Hah! He told the police she never came to his apartment. Told them he thought she’d just changed her mind. But he knew her better than that. He knew he had her in the palm of his hand. She was such a lovely, lovely girl.’ Her face betrayed the range of emotions that were going through her head, from love to anger to tears. Then she turned to Li, a bitterness in her voice now. ‘And what’s worse … every time I look at the child, it’s him I see, not her.’ Her mouth set in a line that conveyed something close to hatred. ‘It’s a curse!’

‘Do you know where we can find this boyfriend?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘An Wenjiang works on the boats. Or, at least, he did the last time I heard. Huangpu River cruises for tourists.’ She gazed off into space, an angry thought clearly forming. ‘He’s never once been to see his daughter. I pray at night that he will fall overboard and drown. With luck, perhaps, he already has.’

Outside, life ebbed and flowed along the length of Nanjing Road, people going about their lives, oblivious to the tragedies of others being played out all around them. But then, Li supposed, everyone had their own personal tragedies. Why should they be concerned about those of other people.

‘I hate this,’ he said to Mei-Ling. They were only stirring it all up again for these poor people. The memories, the hopes, the fears. And offering them nothing in return. Not hope, not even an end to it. Just more uncertainty.

She gave his arm a small squeeze. ‘Me, too.’ They walked back in silence to where they had parked the car, and Mei-Ling revved the engine and they dodged the bicycles in Guangdong Road to set a course for the river.

The booking office for the Huangpu River cruises was in a triangular granite edifice at the ferry terminal at the south end of the Bund. Mei-Ling parked the car in the street opposite, and they negotiated a complex network of pedestrian overpasses that led them, eventually, down to the quay. The first cruise of the day left at ten forty-five and it was almost that now. The waiting room was deserted, apart from a bored-looking girl standing at a drinks counter and a couple of uniformed women behind the sales desk. Clocks on the wall behind them gave the time in New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney. Li wondered, distractedly, why anyone embarking on a two-hour river cruise in Shanghai would want to know the time in London.

Mei-Ling asked one of the women at the sales desk where they could find An Wenjiang. ‘He drives the boat,’ she said, pointing through glass doors towards the quay. ‘But they are just leaving.’

Neither Li nor Mei-Ling wanted to hang around for two hours waiting for him to come back. ‘Come on,’ Li said, and they sprinted for the door.

‘You haven’t bought your tickets!’ the woman called after them.

A sodden red carpet ran out across the landing stage beneath an arch of woven bamboo. The cruisers were berthed three-deep. The boat about to leave was on the outside. They could hear its engines gunning. Mei-Ling followed Li as he jumped aboard the first boat, ran across the bow and leapt on to the middle boat. He shouted to a couple of deckhands on the outside boat who were in the process of casting off. The cruiser was just beginning to ease away from its neighbour. ‘Open the gate!’ Li called, and he waved his Public Security ID at them. They opened the gate in the safety rail and he jumped across the two-foot gap without looking down, then turned to hold out a hand for Mei-Ling. The gap was widening all the time. She hesitated. He shouted at her to jump. She took a deep breath and leapt across. Several pairs of hands grabbed her and held her safely.

The elder of the deckhands slammed the gate shut and turned on Li. ‘I don’t care who the fuck you are,’ he said, ‘don’t you ever do that again. I’m responsible for the safety of people on this boat. It’s my neck as well as yours.’

Li held up his hands. ‘Sorry, friend,’ he said. ‘Urgent police business. We need to talk to An Wenjiang.’

The deckhand frowned. ‘Why, what’s he done?’

‘None of your business,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Where is he?’

The old man raised his eyes and flicked his head upwards. ‘On the upper deck, in the wheelhouse.’ And he gave them both a surly look.

There was no one at the bar in the downstairs cabin as they passed through to the stairs at the stern. All the tourists were packed on to the open upper deck as the cruiser nosed its way out into midstream and the broad sweep of slow-moving grey water. This was not a day to see Shanghai at its best. Although it was not raining, the cloud was low over the city and the air was heavy with humidity. The Bund stood on one side, representing the old world. Pudong, facing it directly, represented the new. Both had faded in the mist, losing substance and colour, dominated by the breadth and depth and timelessness of the river that separated them.

There was no wheel in the wheelhouse. The cruiser was guided by a joystick which apparently controlled both the rudder and the engine speed. The man with his hand on the joystick turned as Li opened the door. He looked to Li as if they were about the same age. But beneath his baseball cap his hair was long and greasy. He wore jeans and a denim jacket, his hands were black, engrained with oil, his fingernails broken and filthy. There was a cigarette burning in an overfull ashtray, and a jar of green tea slopped about on the dash. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing! You’re not allowed in here!’ His voice was coarse, and there was a sneer on his lips. Li thought of the opera singer and wondered what she could possibly have seen in this man, what they could possibly have had in common.

‘Watch your language,’ Li said, and he showed him his ID. ‘There’s a lady present.’

An Wenjiang looked at Mei-Ling as if the last thing he believed her to be was a lady. ‘She a cop, too?’ he asked.

‘Do you have a problem with that?’ Mei-Ling said.

‘I have a problem with cops.’ He glared at Li. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to keep your eyes on the river and to answer a few questions.’

Reluctantly An Wenjiang dragged his eyes away from Li and back to the river. He steered them around a line of barges heading upriver and set a course towards the Pudong side. ‘Questions about what?’ he said.

‘Xiao Fengzhen,’ Mei-Ling said, and his eyes immediately flicked back towards them.

‘What about her?’

Li said, ‘I want you to tell us about her.’

‘Why?’ He squinted at them suspiciously.

‘Do you know what happened to her?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘How would I know that? The cow ran off and left me.’

‘You weren’t living together,’ Li said.

‘That was only because of her mother. We were going to patch it all up and she and the kid were going to move back in with me.’

‘So what happened that weekend she was going to stay over and you were going to sort things out?’

‘She never showed up. I told you people at the time. I think her mother thought I killed her or something.’

Mei-Ling said, ‘You used to beat her up.’

‘Once!’ he almost spat at her. ‘And she was asking for it. Wanted to get pregnant again without telling me. Stopped taking precautions. A little girl wasn’t good enough for her. Oh, no. She wanted a little boy. And what kind of shit would we have been in then? Huge fines from the family planning people. I soon knocked that idea out of her.’ He glared out across the water. ‘You want to know what I think? I think she ran off, and I think her mother put her up to it. She didn’t think I was good enough for her precious daughter. And, hey, you know, Fengzhen didn’t either. Never took me to any of her fancy dos at the opera with all her hoity-toity pals. Didn’t want them asking her why she was fucking some lowlife like me.’

‘And why was she?’ Mei-Ling asked, and it was clear from her tone that it was beyond her comprehension, too.

An Wenjiang turned and leered at her, a sick grin on his face. ‘Because she liked a bit of rough trade, darling. And I knew how to pull her trigger.’ Mei-Ling shuddered visibly, which appeared to please him. His grin widened to reveal nicotine-stained teeth. ‘And all that stuff about wanting kids … it was just about sex. I mean, at the end of the day she ran off and left the kid the same as she left me. She didn’t give a shit about the kid.’

‘Oh, and you do,’ Li said. ‘How many times have you been to see her?’

‘Never.’ An Wenjiang wore his indifference like a badge. ‘I never wanted a kid in the first place. That was her idea. I don’t like kids. Never have. That’s not a crime, is it?’

‘No,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘But murder is.’

An Wenjiang’s reaction was strangely mute. He stared dead ahead for some moments before he said quietly, ‘You telling me she’s dead?’

‘We’re trying to identify a body,’ Li said.

An Wenjiang looked at him sharply. ‘She one of those bodies they pulled out of the mud over there in Pudong the other day?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘What do you know about that?’

‘Only what I read in the papers. I thought they’d been cut up by medical students or something.’

Li said, ‘Did you ever have any medical training? Work in a hospital, someplace like that?’

Now An Wenjiang just laughed. ‘Me? Are you serious?’ Then his smile faded. ‘You want me to identify her? Is that what you’re asking? Because if it is, I’ll do it.’ He saw that his cigarette had burned away and he lit another with trembling fingers. ‘Was she murdered?’ It was what the girl at the theatre had asked.

Li nodded, and to his surprise saw what looked like tears gathering in the other man’s eyes. An Wenjiang looked away quickly. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘You find out who did it, you let me know.’ And Li realised that whatever they thought of him, An Wenjiang had felt something for his opera singer that went deeper than just the sex that he boasted about.

They left him then and went out on to the top deck and felt the breeze whip cold, damp air into their faces. They had navigated the bend in the river, past the international passenger terminal. On their left the city disappeared into a haze of factories and apartment blocks, and on their right they cruised past the Shanghai No. 1 °Cotton Textile Mill and the Li Hua papermill. The great rusting hulks of what had once been ocean-going liners were berthed forlornly at the Shanghai Shipyard among cranes that rose above them like dinosaurs picking over dead meat.

‘What do you think?’ Mei-Ling asked.

Li shook his head. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that I will never understand what makes people tick.’

They sat and watched the river pass by. They still had more than an hour to kill before the cruiser would return them to the terminal. Li looked back and saw the city crowding either bank, a city of irreconcilable contradictions, of past, present and future, of enormous wealth and terrible poverty. A long barge passed them, its hold laden with bricks, water slapping dangerously at its sides. In a cabin at the rear, a man sat barefoot in the open doorway wearing only a singlet and a pair of dark-blue cotton trousers. He was bent over a bowl of water, washing his hair. Behind him a small boy peered out at the tourist cruiser and waved. The barge was probably their home, Li realised. It was possible that such people never set foot on dry land.

They passed row upon row of similar barges, each tied to the other, berthed along the south bank. Lines extended front to rear, clothes put optimistically out to dry in the cold and humid air. Fishing boats and cargo tramps hung anchor chains from huge rusting buoys in the middle of the river, rising and falling gently in the slow swell that rolled up from the estuary.

Mei-Ling shivered and moved closer to him, hugging her arms around herself. ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘I’m not dressed for this.’ He put an arm around her so that she could share his warmth, and she looked at him, surprise in her expression, and he immediately felt self-conscious. He took his arm away.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘No it’s all right. It helps.’ She moved a little closer, and he put his arm tentatively around her again. ‘What sign are you?’ she asked.

He frowned, not understanding. ‘Sign?’

‘Birth sign.’

He smiled. ‘Oh. That. I was born in the year of the horse.’

She did a quick mental calculation. ‘So you’re two years younger than me.’

He acknowledged with a tilt of his head. Now it was his turn to do the calculation. ‘You’re a tiger,’ he said.

She grinned mischievously, ‘Men are always telling me that.’

‘So there have been a lot of men in your life,’ he said.

Her grin turned rueful. ‘I wish.’

Li shrugged. ‘A good-looking woman like you … there must have been someone special, at some time.’

She clouded. ‘Not really.’ And he knew she was keeping something from him.

‘You never get involved with another cop?’ He tried to make it sound innocent, but she looked at him sharply and moved away, breaking free of his arm around her shoulders.

‘You’ve been listening to departmental gossip,’ she said coldly.

‘I never listen to gossip,’ Li said. ‘But sometimes I can’t help hearing it.’

‘I swear to my ancestors, they’re nothing but a lot of old women in that detectives’ office.’ Mei-Ling seemed unaccountably agitated. ‘They think they’re a bunch of hard men, but they’re worse than schoolgirls. Men!’ She glared at Li. ‘You’re all the same. Only ever think of one thing, and think that women do, too. Well, they don’t!’ The tiger was showing her claws.

‘Hey,’ Li said defensively, ‘don’t lump me in with all the rest. I don’t think anything. I was just asking, that’s all. You asked about me and Margaret. I told you.’

There was a moment of tension between them, then Mei-Ling dropped her shoulders and relented. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not just about being the only woman in an office full of men. It’s also about being their boss. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, there’s always a sexual tension there. There’s always guys who think they can make you. And when they can’t, they make things up about you.’

The sky above them suddenly opened up, and there was an unexpected wash of sunshine across the water. And there, lit against the black sky beyond it, was the impressive span of the Yangpu Suspension Bridge. The cruiser started to make its turn, and Li saw An Wenjiang watching them from the window of the wheelhouse.

‘Forget I asked,’ he said. ‘It’s not important.’

III

Margaret sat in the viewing room with Dr Lan and the other pathologists on the team. They were drinking mugs of hot green tea in silence when Li and Mei-Ling walked in. Margaret glanced up wearily at Li. She had been wide awake at four in the morning, now she was barely able to keep her eyes open. And she had no desire to have to fend off recriminations about last night. It had been a very long day.

‘Finished the autopsies?’ Li asked.

She nodded.

‘And?’

‘I can confirm,’ Margaret said, ‘that they are all quite dead.’ When this was met with a cold silence, she added, ‘We had one other positive ID. From fingerprints.’

‘We know about that,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘There is someone working on it already.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘But there’s nothing much else to go on. The MO’s the same in every case. While it wouldn’t stand up in court, I’d pretty much stake my reputation that all the operations were carried out by the same surgeon.’

‘Operations?’ Li asked. It seemed like an odd way to describe what had been done to these women.

But Margaret was in no mood for semantics. ‘Operations, procedures, whatever you want to call them. The victims were all alive at the beginning and they were all dead at the end.’

Dr Lan intervened. ‘I think what Margaret is trying to say is that they were all killed at the hand of a skilled surgeon.’ Li noticed that Lan referred to Margaret by her first name. There had obviously been some sort of reconciliation, even bonding, during the course of the day. And he remembered Margaret once telling him that to share the experience of an autopsy was to share in a heightened sense of mortality. Margaret and Lan had worked together on eighteen bodies. That was a lot of sharing, a lot of mortality.

‘Are we any nearer to determining why they were killed?’ Mei-Ling asked impatiently.

Margaret shook her head. ‘Dr Lan and I have discussed this at length. In other circumstances I think we would probably have reached the conclusion that this was some kind of organ harvesting on the grand scale.’

‘All the transplantable material has been removed from the bodies,’ Dr Lan said. ‘Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas …’

‘Even the eyes,’ Margaret said.

‘Eyes?’ Li frowned. ‘You cannot transplant eyes, can you?’

‘Corneal tissue can be used in eye surgery,’ Mei-Ling said.

‘But they did not take the spleen,’ said Lan, ‘which is not transplantable.’

‘Or anything else,’ Margaret said. ‘In fact, nothing else was even touched — apart from the subsequent hacking up of the bodies.’

Li accepted a mug of green tea from a white-coated assistant and sat down. Mei-Ling waved the assistant aside and remained standing. Li said, ‘Would the returns really be worth the risk? I mean, who is going to buy an organ? How much could it possibly be worth?’

Margaret leaned forward. ‘In the United States alone there are more than sixty thousand people waiting for life-saving organ transplants. I read somewhere that about twelve Americans die every day waiting for one, and that about every fifteen minutes another name is added to the waiting list.’

‘So what you have worldwide,’ said Lan, ‘is a huge demand.’

‘And a very limited supply,’ Margaret said.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Li. ‘Supply and demand. The life-blood of capitalism. The American Way.’

‘A simple fact of life,’ Margaret said. ‘And people with money will pay anything to buy themselves a few more years. I’ve heard that the going rate for a single kidney transplant is more than a hundred thousand dollars. There are clinics in India making millions from the procedure. Of course, there the donors are alive and willing to give a kidney or an eye in return for what they see as a passport out of poverty.’

Li was astonished. He had heard rumours of organ theft, but had never actually encountered it, or ever really considered the economics. ‘But how would it work? I mean, you could not keep the organs fresh for very long, could you?’

Dr Lan shrugged. ‘The heart, no. Four hours, maybe. The recipient would need to be on hand.’

Margaret said, ‘I’d have to check, but most of the other organs could probably be kept fresh for anything up to two or three days, the liver certainly for up to thirty-six hours. They would just flush the organs through with iced water, or with a solution of high molecular weight sugars, plop them in a cold box on wet ice, and they could be flown out to almost anywhere in the world as hand luggage.’

Mei-Ling was looking at her sceptically. ‘But you do not believe that is what is happening here?’

‘It would certainly be the easy answer,’ Margaret said.

‘So why is it not?’ Li asked.

‘Well, for a start,’ Margaret said, ‘while there have been plenty of rumours of children being killed for their organs in the streets of South America, or orphanages in Egypt being turned into organ farms, there is not, to my knowledge, a single certified case of someone being murdered for their organs. I mean, think about it. You’d need trained medical staff, sterile operating conditions, proper medical aftercare. These are not the kinds of things that criminals have easy access to.’

‘And heaven forbid there should be any crooked doctors in the world,’ Mei-Ling said. Which did not go down well in a roomful of pathologists. She shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed. Then she said, ‘So there is a first time for everything. Why else do you not believe it?’

‘The victims are all female,’ said Lan. ‘Why only choose females? In China it is men who are in more plentiful supply. It does not make sense.’

Margaret added, ‘Then there’s your body in Beijing. The organs were removed, certainly, but not taken. And, of course, the most compelling reason of all that we discussed yesterday. There is no medical or any other reason for keeping the victims alive during the procedure. You’d have to be insane to even contemplate it.’

‘Which brings us back to your psycho surgeon,’ Li said, ‘and a point raised at the detectives’ meeting last night.’

‘Oh, yes?’ As Margaret’s energy was fading, so was her interest.

‘Your surgeon, or whatever he is, could not have been acting alone, could he? There must have been at least one, possibly two others, assisting in the procedure.’

Margaret nodded, and Mei-Ling said, ‘So immediately we have the scenario you have just been discounting — a team of medically trained people collaborating in a crime.’

Margaret shrugged and got to her feet. ‘I never said doctors were saints.’ She looked at Li. ‘Did you manage to identify any of our victims today?’

Li said, ‘The boyfriend of an opera singer who went missing about a year ago is coming in to look at your girl with the singer’s nodules.’

‘And we need you to look at an x-ray,’ said Mei-Ling. And Margaret thought how like a team they were already. ‘The seamstress. The husband of the woman who we think she might be says she broke her right index finger a couple of years ago. You can tell that from the x-rays, right?’

‘Right,’ Margaret said.

They went downstairs, leaving Dr Lan and the others to finish their tea, and found the x-ray of the seamstress’s right hand. Margaret put it on the light box and traced the luminous image of the dead woman’s index finger with her own.

‘There it is,’ she said. She lightly tapped the callus formed on the bone by the healed fracture. ‘I guess that seals it.’

Li turned to Mei-Ling. ‘We had better get the husband in for a visual identification.’

She nodded grimly. ‘I will go and fix it.’

Li and Margaret found themselves alone for the first time since she had failed to meet him for dinner the previous night. They stood in an awkward silence, Margaret not sure how to apologise, Li again guiltily aware of the feelings that Mei-Ling had aroused in him just a few hours earlier.

Margaret scuffed her foot at a cracked tile on the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a small voice. ‘About last night. I guess I was just out of it.’ And she thought how often it was she seemed to be apologising for the night before. Perhaps tonight she could make up for it.

To Li she looked suddenly very small and tired and vulnerable, and he was immediately overcome by familiar feelings of love and affection, and a desire to comfort her. He took her in his arms and drew her close, and she yielded so completely that her legs nearly buckled under her. They stood for several moments, just holding on.

‘It won’t happen again,’ she said. ‘I promise. Tonight we’ll forget about dinner and go straight to my room. Then if I fall asleep you can think of interesting ways to wake me up.’ Almost before the words had left her mouth she felt him tense, and she drew back to look at him. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I told Mei-Ling we would have dinner with her tonight at her family restaurant.’

Her expression hardened, and she felt her weariness giving way to anger. ‘Li Yan, we’ve hardly had five minutes alone together since I got here.’

‘That’s hardly my fault.’ He felt his hackles rising.

She said, ‘Well, maybe you’d better just go on your own. It’s you she wants to have for dinner anyway, not me.’

Li sighed. ‘Actually, she made a point of asking you. It is only a small restaurant. It is going to be a family meal with her father and her aunt … I think she was very generous to ask you at all, considering how you have been treating her.’

‘Why?’ said Margaret. ‘Is the contempt showing?’

Li threw his hands up in despair. ‘Oh, well, maybe you should not come, then. Because if this is how you are going to be, you will only spoil it.’

‘And we wouldn’t want to do that, would we? Seeing as how generous sweet little Mei-Ling’s being.’ They stood glaring at each other before finally she said, ‘You’d better pick me up at the hotel. I’ll make a determined effort not to fall asleep this time.’

‘You sure you want to bother?’ Li said. By now he was almost hoping she wouldn’t.

‘Oh, yes,’ Margaret said. She wasn’t going to let Mei-Ling get him that easily. ‘If her family’s gone to the trouble of preparing a meal for us, then we really shouldn’t let them down, should we?’ She paused. ‘Six o’clock?’ He nodded and she hurried out.

When she’d gone he stood for a moment, a cocktail of conflicting emotions stirring inside him. Then he looked up and saw the video camera on the wall and realised that the whole scene had been played out for the watching pathologists upstairs. If the sound was up they’d have caught the whole gory episode. He felt sick. They would never have witnessed anything quite like it in an autopsy room before, like some cheap TV hospital drama, and in his head he could hear their laughter echoing around the mortuary.

IV

They had acquired a desk lamp for him, and he was able to sit in the darkened office with only a pool of light focusing his attention on the files that littered his desk. If he swivelled in his chair he could look out at the rising columns of lit windows in the police apartments opposite, wives preparing meals for husbands coming in from work, or sending them out on the night shift. Children watching television or surfing the Internet or doing homework from school. Li wondered what it must be like to have a family, an ordered life, someone waiting to welcome you home. Things he had never really known. A mother killed in the Cultural Revolution, a father who had never been the same after repeated beatings at the hands of the Red Guards who were his keepers. A sister who had run off and left him with her child, an uncle who had taught him everything and then been murdered in his own apartment.

And now he sat here on his own, with only the ghosts of eighteen murdered women for company, each one appealing to him to find their killer, requiring him to return order to a disordered world.

He thought of the viewing room at the mortuary where he had sat with the lights low watching the husband of the murdered seamstress identify her remains. A white body bag wheeled in on a gurney. The sound of the zip as it was opened to reveal the pitiful collection of body pieces that represented the remnants of the woman he had loved. His cry, as if struck by a blow. The sobs that came slowly at first as he stuffed a fist in his mouth to try to contain them, before he backed up against the wall and slid slowly to the floor, pulling his arms around his shins and rocking back and forth in his abject misery, weeping openly. For as long as there had been no word of her, there had always been hope. And now there was none.

Li thought of how much this contrasted with the boyfriend of the opera singer. His casual stroll into the autopsy room, hands in pockets. His complete lack of reaction when the body bag was unzipped, simply a curt nod of the head. No tears, no visible emotion. But Li suspected that somewhere, later, on his own, in the dark, An Wenjiang would be confronted by his grief.

On the desk in front of him was the file on the girl they had identified with fingerprints. Just twenty years old, a petty thief convicted of shop-lifting. Her baby girl, a little under two years old, had been placed in the custody of her grandparents while her mother served time. Reform through labour. But no one would ever know now whether she had reformed or not. Her parents had told the detectives who interviewed them that they thought she had gone to Canton or Hong Kong with one of the boys she hung around with. They had never reported her missing. Her little girl would never know her. But at least her parents would be spared the need to identify the remains. The body pieces had been DNA-matched, and the fingerprints were conclusive proof of identity.

Murder by surgical procedure. That was how Margaret had described what had happened to these women. But for no apparent reason, and with no apparent logic.

Why these women? Was there a pattern? Was there something they all had in common that Li and everyone else was failing to see? The answer always lies in the detail, he could hear his uncle whisper in his ear. A petty thief, an opera singer, a seamstress. What was it that connected them, apart from the manner in which they died? It was something, he knew, they would probably not be able even to guess at until they had identified them all.

There was a knock at the door and detective Dai entered without waiting to be asked. ‘Hey, Chief,’ he said, and dropped a file on Li’s desk. Li had given up correcting him. ‘That’s all the stuff we could dig up on that medical student who was doing the night watch at the building site. Jiang Baofu.’ Dai was silhouetted against the light of the corridor behind him, and Li didn’t see the second folder until it dropped on top of the first. ‘And another possible ID.’

Li turned the top file towards him and opened it to see a photograph of a young woman, cut out from a group, attached to a missing person’s form that someone had filled out several months previously. Her hair was tied up in bunches, like a small girl, and she was wearing a tight-fitting, spangled costume of some sort. But Li could not determine what it was, because the photograph was cut off just below the collar bone. Someone had only been interested in her face. He glanced at the form. Name, age, occupation … Wu Liyao, aged thirty … He looked up at Dai, frowning. ‘An acrobat?’

‘A member of the Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre. Missing for three months.’

‘What makes you think she’s one of our girls?’

Dai pulled a face. ‘Don’t know for sure, Chief. A long shot, really. But your pathologist said one of the women had stress fractures in her feet? Suggested she might be an athlete, or a gymnast?’ He shrugged. ‘I figured an acrobat would fit under that heading, too.’

Li nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s a good thought, Dai. Well done,’ he said. ‘It’s worth following up.’ He couldn’t really see Dai’s face, but he could hear his grin. Dai turned to go. Li said, ‘Detective …’ Dai stopped in the open door.

‘Yeah, Chief?’

‘The other night …’ he hesitated, ‘… you seemed to be suggesting that Deputy Section Chief Nien was having a relationship with a senior officer in the department.’

‘Was I?’ Dai asked innocently.

‘Weren’t you?’

Dai shrugged. ‘Sorry, Chief, but I was told by a senior officer that I wasn’t to discuss that sort of thing.’ He closed the door behind him, and Li felt like his knuckles had just been rapped. He deserved it, he supposed.

He sat for a long time in the darkness wondering why he had even asked. Did it matter to him? Was he really interested in the possibility of entering into a relationship with her? And, if so, where did that leave his feelings for Margaret? He knew what he felt about Margaret. At least, he thought he did. He loved her. But, somehow, it had never been quite enough. There was something missing, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Was it cultural, linguistic? He had always felt he could not make his home in the United States, and yet he had expected Margaret to make her home here. There was an unhappiness in her that was like a barrier between them, and he had no idea how to break it down.

He forced himself to refocus his thoughts on more important things. Eighteen women whose murderer or murderers were still at large, possibly adding more victims to a list that might already include others they did not know about. He opened the file on Jiang Baofu. He was twenty-three years old, born in the town of Yanqing in Hebei Province near Beijing. His grandfather had been a farm labourer, his grandmother a teacher at the local kindergarten. He had an older sister who was married to an office worker in the capital. They lived near the university, in Haidian Road.

Jiang was in his final year at Shanghai Medical University. He was specialising in surgery, and had expressed an interest in going on to study forensic pathology. He rented an apartment in a tower block in Ming-Xin Village, a new suburb on the opposite side of the city. He had moved out of student accommodation the previous year.

Li paused and thought about this. It was yet another anomaly. How could a student from a poor family afford to move out of student accommodation to rent his own apartment? A student who, apparently, had had to take all kinds of vacation work to pay his way through medical school. He checked through the list of jobs Jiang had taken over the past five years. He had worked as an orderly and as a porter at various Shanghai hospitals and private clinics. He had spent one summer break manning a market stall at the old Chinatown bird market. He had taken a number of term jobs working nights: as a hotel porter in a seedy joint near the river; as a labourer on a building site; as a night watchman in various places — presumably so he could earn some cash and still snatch a few hours’ sleep.

Li lit a cigarette and blew smoke thoughtfully into the light of his desk lamp, watching it billow and eddy before dispersing and rising into the darkness. There was another knock at the door, and this time it was Mei-Ling who entered.

‘Wow, it’s dark in here,’ she said.

‘I like to think in the dark.’

She closed the door and drew up a seat and sat opposite him, leaning back so that he could see her face in the reflected light from the desktop. ‘I prefer to think in the light,’ she said, ‘and save the dark for making love.’

Li felt something flip over in his stomach, and for a fleeting moment he saw a picture of himself making love to her, her slender frame arched beneath him, small hard breasts pressed into his chest, fingers digging into his back, her breath hot on his face. He quickly banished the vision, alarmed by an apparently increasing loss of control. ‘Have you seen the file on Jiang Baofu?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘I think we’ve got to bring him in.’

Li said, ‘I’d like to talk to his tutors at med school first, see what kind of light they can throw on him. And take a look around his apartment, too, when he’s not there. Can we get a warrant?’

‘Sure. I’ll fix it. We can go out to the Medical University first thing tomorrow. I know some people there.’

‘Good.’ He paused. ‘And what about the acrobat?’

‘They knocked the old Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre down. The troupe are based in a theatre out at the Shanghai Centre now. We should go and see them tomorrow also. Apparently she was married to one of the other acrobats.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m going to head off now. We’ll see you about seven?’

‘That’s fine.’

‘And Margaret?’

‘I’m picking her up at her hotel.’

She smiled. ‘Better take a sledgehammer then. In case you have to break down her door.’