Chinese Whispers

II

Li stood on the steps of the pathology department watching the headlights of vehicles probing the mist on the Badaling Expressway. Above it, the sky was inky dark, the stars clearer out here on the fringes of the city, away from the lights and the pollution. He cut a faintly absurd figure in his green smock and shower cap, but he was oblivious of his appearance, even if there had been anyone there to see him. There were only a few vehicles in the carpark, one or two lights in windows dotted about the dark frontage of the building. A minimum staff on night shift. He had needed air before he could face the autopsy. There had been too many familiar faces recently staring back at him with dead eyes from the autopsy table. It had been only yesterday morning that Lynn Pan had come under the pathologist’s knife. Now Bill Hart. Li remembered the soft, seductive voice teasing the confession from the child abuser. Hart himself had described the polygraph as a psychological rubber hose. But that was not how he had used it. He had found empathy with his subjects, made a connection between them with his simple humanity. He had not deserved to die like this.

Li took a last lungful of ice cold air, and turned back into the building.

Margaret looked up as he came through the door into the autopsy room. Their eyes met briefly in common bond. Pathologist Wang stood on the opposite side of Hart’s shattered body. Wu leaned against a wall watching from a distance. Margaret had performed autopsies before on people she knew. But somehow this was much more distressing. She had hardly known Bill Hart, but something about his sense of humour had chimed with her. And their history, although short, had been so recent. Just twenty-four hours ago he had been wiring her up for a polygraph test she never took. A battle of wits they had never fought. And she remembered with a jolt her wisecrack at lunch that first day they met. He had offered to prove the efficacy of the polygraph by giving her a test, and she had agreed, but only if he would let her give him an autopsy. Everyone around the table had roared with laughter. He had never given her that test, but she was about to perform the autopsy. It seemed now like a sick joke.

She closed her eyes for a moment to drag her professionalism back from the edge of despair. When she opened them again, she took in the broken body that lay on the table in front of her and wiped all memory of Bill Hart from her mind. His head was markedly misshapen, with open comminuted fractures of all the cranial bones, and wide lacerations over the scalp. Multiple blunt force injuries is how she would describe them in her report, but the words were insufficient to describe the devastation.

His teeth were in good repair and, remarkably, undamaged, but the maxilla and mandible bones of the jaw were both fractured. There was blood in his mouth and nostrils, and his lips were blue. She spoke up for the benefit of the microphone recording her external examination.

The neck has been rendered asymmetrical due to fractures. There are faint and poorly defined areas of acchymosis about the neck, and there is palpable bony crepitance on rotation of the base of the head.

‘He landed on his head by the looks of it,’ she said and glanced up to see the pain in Li’s eyes.

The chest is also markedly misshapen by fractures of all of the ribs and a wide laceration that crosses from the left shoulder area over to the right lower chest, through which there is avulsion of muscle and portions of rib and internal organs.

Somehow in the fall, there had been a traumatic amputation of the left forearm and hand. The autopsy assistant handed it to Margaret in a plastic bag.

The recovered distal left upper extremity is received separately in a red plastic bag, and comprises the distal forearm and hand. The medial aspect of the wrist bears abraded laceration, and the third and fourth nailbeds bear subungual hematoma. There is a pink, flaky material with the appearance, possibly, of skin under the left third and fourth fingernails.

Margaret turned to examine the right hand.

The nailbeds of the right first and fourth fingers show red-purple subungual hematoma, and the index fingernail is torn.

‘Is there significance in that?’ Li asked, detecting her concern.

‘It means that he put up a hell of a fight not to get thrown out that window. I think we’ll find his attacker’s DNA in the skin under his fingernails.’ She didn’t want to think about his panic in those last moments as he fought desperately to stay alive, and she moved quickly to the legs, only to find more evidence of his struggle. She fought a different battle, to control the emotion in her voice.

There is a patterned abraded contusion crossing the anterior right thigh. This 3 x 1-½ inch, horizontally oriented area bears vertically oriented striations within the abrasion, and contains what appears to be splinters of wood and varnish.

Almost identical abrasions were evident on the left thigh, above multiple fractures of the femur, tibia and fibula. She turned to Wang. ‘Not sustained in the fall. Do you agree, Doctor?’

Wang nodded. ‘Bruising too defined,’ he said. ‘Dark purple, compared with other bruising, which is not so dark, not so defined.’

‘And almost symmetrical. Pretty much consistent with him being forced out of the window,’ Margaret said. ‘Bracing himself against the sill, but being manhandled over it.’

They moved on to the internal examination, where the injuries were even more horrific. There was not much left of the lungs or the heart, the pleural and pericardial cavities having been lacerated by the multiple fractured rib ends, as had the diaphragm and the peritoneal cavity. The spinal column was completely severed. It was a catalogue of fractures — cranial, facial, spinal, the pelvis, the arms, the legs. Most of the organs had been lacerated or torn apart by the force of the impact.

‘There’s no doubt, then?’ Li said finally.

‘You know pathologists never like to commit themselves,’ Margaret said. She looked into Bill Hart’s clear, open, undamaged eyes, and remembered the life and mischief with which they had once shone. She raised her eyes to meet Li’s. ‘But if you’re asking me, he didn’t jump.’

She moved away from the table, pulling down her mask to suck in air. She had had enough, and was content to let Wang finish up. ‘I need to shower,’ she said to Li. ‘I’ll meet you in the lobby.’

She stood under the jets of hot water, letting them run freely over her upturned face and streaming down her body, soaking away a little of the tension that held her in its grip. It was probably the last autopsy she would ever perform in China. She had no idea if she would be on an airplane back to the States on Saturday, or cooped up at the US Embassy with her baby son. Neither scenario was one that she wanted to entertain. Nor could she face the thought of another autopsy back home. If that was where she ended up. She had seen more than enough death to last her a lifetime. Perhaps it was giving birth that had changed her. The creation of life, as opposed to picking over the remains of it. Whatever it was, right now she no longer had the stomach for it.

She let her fingers trace the scar of her Caesarian. It was still hard to believe that by cutting her open they had brought life into the world. Her son. And her thoughts turned to his father. Only now, faced with the prospect of losing him, did she realise how unthinkable it was. However unsatisfactory their life here might have been, at least they had been together. And in the end it was that having, that belonging, which mattered most. She wished she could do more to help him, but other than her job she had no idea what. She was as helpless in the face of his faceless enemy as he was.

She dried herself vigorously with the towel and slipped back into jeans and sweatshirt, pulling on her trainers, and drowning herself in the warmth of a large, quilted anorak. Li was waiting for her in the lobby and took her in his arms in a long, silent hug, cradling her head against his chest. She felt small like that, all wrapped up in him, safe from the world and everything out there that was trying to harm them. But she knew it was an illusion. No one was keeping Li safe from harm.

‘Section Chief.’ The voice made them break apart, and Li turned to see the head of the pathology lab crossing the lobby towards them, double doors swinging in his wake. Professor Nie Rong was a tall, skinny man, with tiny lozenge-shaped spectacles perched always below the bridge of an unusually long nose. The few strands of hair that remained to him were carefully arranged across his great, bald dome. His white lab coat flapped open as he walked, and Li wondered what the head of the laboratory was doing here at this time of night. He seemed oddly reticent, reluctant to meet Li’s eye. He shook hands with Margaret, and then folded his arms across his chest, still clutching a well-thumbed folder in his left hand. Li speculated on whether he might be embarrassed by Li’s presence at the facility. He must have heard that he had been suspended. ‘I’m sorry,’ the professor said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this …’

‘If you’re going to ask me to leave,’ Li said, ‘we’re just going.’

‘No,’ the professor said hastily. ‘It’s not that. I … I’m afraid there’s been a fuck-up in the lab.’ It was so unusual to hear the normally mild-mannered and polite head of pathology use such language that Li was startled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, this time reverting to English and inclining his head towards Margaret. ‘You ask for DNA profile in big hurry yesterday.’

Margaret frowned, flicking the still wet curls from her face. ‘You mean the sample from the cigar butt found by Lynn Pan’s body?’

He nodded. ‘We tell you is different from DNA found at other murders.’

Margaret looked at him, mystified. ‘So what’s changed?’

‘Lab assistant mix up samples. DNA same as other murders.’

Margaret immediately looked at Li. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered, the implications of what the professor had just told them striking her like a slap in the face. She turned back to him. ‘You sure?’

‘Sure, I’m sure.’

Li was finding it hard to take on board. ‘But if that’s true, then Pan’s killer is the same person who killed the four prostitutes. The Beijing Ripper.’ All the distinctions he had drawn between the Ripper killings and the Pan murder came tumbling down around his head.

Professor Nie moved on quickly, perhaps hoping to distract and deflect from the appalling error committed by his lab. He waved the folder in his hand. ‘Also we have positive DNA match between kidney sent to you and victim number four. And comparison of notes? One with kidney, one with ears? Calligraphy expert believe written by same hand. But no matter. We make chemical analysis of red ink. Same in both. Paper same, too. Ve-ery distinctive watermark.’

* * *

On the steps, Margaret took Li’s arm, and noticed that the crescent of moon was almost imperceptibly bigger tonight. ‘So,’ she said. ‘The Beijing Ripper is a cop. Makes sense, I guess.’

A tidal wave of thoughts he had been diverting elsewhere as a result of the DNA test, were flooding back into Li’s head. The Ripper had known Li’s name, and the address of Section One, to be able to send him the half kidney. Just as Pan’s killer had known his home address and had access to the ministry compound. And he recalled Lao Dai’s words in the park when he first described to him the nature of the murders. You have an enemy, Li Yan, he had said. And in response to Li’s incredulity, This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families what else do all these murders have in common? The police. That is what Old Dai had said. And Li. Someone with a grudge against him. Jealousy or revenge. What had never occurred to either of them was that the killer himself might also be a policeman. ‘Commissioner Zhu,’ Li said.

‘What?’ Margaret looked at him, startled.

‘He attended the lecture given in Beijing two years ago by Thomas Dowman, the Jack the Ripper author. He knew all about the original Ripper murders, and he personally asked for daily reports on our progress on the Beijing killings.’

Margaret pulled a face. ‘Probably half the ministry went to that lecture.’

‘He’s an expert with a knife. He told me himself his father taught him how to gut a deer. They poisoned the animals with salt and then slit their throats.’

Margaret cocked an eyebrow. ‘That’s a little more convincing,’ she conceded. And she recalled Dai’s comment on him the night he made the speech at Li’s award ceremony. He does not much like our young friend. He is full of praise. Noisy praise, like a drum with nothing inside it. He says only good things of Li Yan. His tone is honeyed, but there is vinegar on his tongue.

‘He’s the only one I told about Hart examining the graphs to try and establish the identity of Lynn Pan’s liar,’ Li said.

But Margaret was shaking her head. Still none of it really made sense. ‘But what was the lie she caught him in? I mean what could she possibly have found out about him in the course of those tests? That he was the Beijing Ripper? How?’

Li’s head hurt. He tried to shake it free of confusion. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ In spite of all his schooling in the traditions of Chinese detective work, Li still needed a motive. The killing of all those young prostitutes. There is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself, Dai had said. What purpose? To leave Li drowning in a sea of murders he could not solve? To undermine and discredit him? Did the Commissioner really dislike him so much? Li knew, because Zhu had made it clear, that he did not approve of Li’s award, or the use of his image to spearhead the ministry’s poster campaign. But it hardly seemed a motive for murder.

And then the image returned to him of the figure in the CCTV video crossing the hall in the EMS post office. A tall figure, like Zhu. Slightly stooped. Like Zhu. He closed his eyes and let the air escape slowly from his lungs through slightly pursed lips. What a fool he had been to trust him.