Chinese Whispers

Chapter Fourteen
I

In the darkness, something caught a fragment of light, deflecting it towards the door. There was someone there, concealed among the shadows. The creak of a floorboard, and then hot breath in the cold air. A knife arced through a shaft of light that slanted in through the window. No time to avoid it. No room to escape. Li screamed and opened his eyes, breath tearing at his lungs, his face a mask of perspiration. His three travelling companions were staring at him resentfully, all awakened from their slumbers. The thundering in his ears passed with a hiss as the train emerged from a long tunnel back into the starlit night. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, embarrassed, and turned towards the window. The crescent moon lay on its back, like a smile in the sky, amused by his embarrassment.

His dream had left him shaken. He checked the time. It was just after 2.15. They should be back in Beijing in a quarter of an hour. He took out a handkerchief to wipe the coating of fine sweat from his forehead, and fumbled for the cellphone in his pocket. He got it to repeat dial the Harts’ apartment. It rang, and rang. And no one was answering. And still Li let it ring, panic starting to seize him now in its debilitating grip.

* * *

Margaret heard the phone ringing from the hallway as soon as she left the elevator. She hurried along it to the Harts’ apartment, tempering haste with caution now. To her horror, she found that the door was not shut. It lay six inches ajar, a wedge of feeble light from the dimly lit hallway falling into the darkness beyond. Cautiously, Margaret pushed the door open and felt for the light switch inside. She flicked it down, but nothing happened. And fear washed over her like iced water. Still the phone was ringing. She pushed the door wide and waited a moment for her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom before stepping in and running through to the living room to pick up the phone. But all she got was a dialling tone. Whoever was calling had finally given up. She quickly replaced the receiver and spun around. There was no one there. She could see clearly enough now in the ambient light of the city reflecting on walls and ceilings through the apartment’s generous windows.

‘Lyang?’ she called out. And her own voice seemed deafening in the silence that followed it. Then another voice, like a muffled cry, sounded from somewhere up the stairs, and Margaret found herself shaking, almost uncontrollably.

She started towards the stairs, listening carefully, and almost fell over something soft lying on the floor. She crouched down to pick it up and saw that it was one of Li Jon’s cuddly toys that she normally kept in the buggy. Her hand flew to her mouth to stop herself from crying out. She stood up and pressed it to her breast, and realised that she had no means of protecting herself or her child. She threw the soft toy on to the settee and moved quickly into the kitchen. On a work surface by the hob, there was a knife block where Lyang kept all her kitchen knives for food preparation. Margaret drew out the biggest of them. A wooden-handled implement with a blade about eight inches long. The weight of it in her hand gave her the tiniest sense of security. Her own preference for autopsy was a French chef’s knife. She knew how to use a blade like this, and would not hesitate to do so if her baby had been harmed in any way.

She moved like a shadow back through the dining room into the hallway at the foot of the stairs and began climbing them very gingerly, one step at a time.

There was an odd smell on the top landing, like the sour stink of the autopsy room, and Margaret saw a trail of something dark on the floor leading to the master bedroom. She knelt down and touched it with the tips of her fingers. It was wet, slightly tacky. She raised her fingers to her nose and immediately knew the smell of blood. For a moment, fear almost robbed her of the strength to stand up straight. And shaking now like the leaves fibrillating among the branches of the autumn trees outside, she inched her way along the hall to the master bedroom in the dead silence of the apartment, trying to avoid stepping on the blood. When she got to the door she tentatively put out her hand and pushed it open wide.

There, on the bed, where Margaret had been so desperately seeking sleep just over an hour ago, was the outline of someone lying on their back, half-wrapped in what looked like black sheets. Margaret glanced back along the hall, then stepped into the bedroom, and almost fell as her foot skidded away from her on the blood pooling there. And in that moment she realised that the sheets were not black. They were soaked in blood. She steadied herself and took a step forward and nearly screamed. Lyang was lying naked in the middle of the bed, her shoulders flat, but the axis of her body inclined to the left side. Her head was turned on her left cheek, her left arm close to her body, the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across her abdomen. Her right arm rested on the mattress, bent at the elbow, her fingers clenched around a wad of blood-drenched sheet. Her legs were wide apart, and the whole surface of her abdomen and thighs had been removed, the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. Her breasts had been cut off, one of them carefully placed under her head along with the uterus and kidneys, the other by her right foot. Her liver was placed between her feet, the intestines on her right side, the spleen on her left.

Margaret knew without looking that the flaps of flesh removed from the abdomen and thighs had been placed on the bedside table. Doctor Thomas Bond’s description came flooding vividly back to her. Words she had read only two days earlier.

The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features, and the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.

She wheeled away, trying to hold down the vomit rising in her throat. The man was completely insane. He had attempted a full replication of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and most horribly mutilated of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Almost like some kind of game, he had carved her up according to his mentor’s blueprint, placing pieces of her around the body, just as they had been found one hundred and fifteen years before. It was a feast of savagery such as Margaret had never seen. He must surely have slipped now beyond the realms of this world into some dark abyss where the light of human goodness had never shone. Where only evil resided in its purest, blackest form. And if he had been capable of this, what in the name of God had he done to the children?