Chinese Whispers

V

Smoke rose from cigarettes, and steam from thermos mugs of green tea. The detectives of Section One sat around the meeting room wrapped in coats and wearing hats. Some even wore gloves. The heating had broken down again.

One wall was covered with photographs taken at four crime scenes. Four young women strangled and savagely mutilated. Each one worse than the last. Sunshine slanted across the wall, bringing cold light to a very dark place. The mood in the room was sombre as they listened to Detective Wu outlining the details of the latest killing. Li watched him pensively. Wu was one of the Section’s senior detectives now, but he was still in love with his image. He always had a piece of gum in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket that he would whip out one-handed and clamp on his face at the first blink of sunshine. Since the sun was shining today he was wearing them pushed back on his forehead. He had been proudly sporting a growth on his upper lip for years, and was considerably chastened when his daughter had brought home a school essay in which she had written of her father, ‘He is growing a moustache.’ To his credit, he told the story against himself. His own personal uniform consisted of baseball boots, faded denims and a short leather jacket, and he grew his hair just long enough to comb over the thinning patch on top. He had been divorced for nearly five years.

He held up a photograph of the chewed-up remains of a brown Russian cheroot still in its evidence bag. ‘It’s like a calling card,’ he told the room. ‘He leaves one of these at every scene. It’s no accident. He knows we’ll find them. It’s like he’s saying, here’s my DNA. You got my code, but you’ll never get my number. The bastard’s playing games with us.’

‘Why would he do that?’ The question came from one of the youngest detectives in the Section. Sang Chunlin was tall and wore dark trousers, black shoes and a black jacket. He, too, had a penchant for American-style shades. His thick black hair, cut short side and back, was long on top and swept back in a quiff. The other detectives called him Elvis.

‘If we knew why he did any of it, Elvis, we might be halfway to nailing him,’ Wu said.

‘Well, whatever motivates him it’s not sexual.’ This from Detective Zhao. ‘He didn’t have sex with any of them, did he? There’s been no trace of semen found at any of the scenes.’

‘We don’t know that in this case,’ Wu said. ‘At least, not until we get the reports back from the autopsy and the lab. But, anyway, who knows how he gets his kicks? He takes bits of them away with him.’

Qian came quietly into the room at the back and slipped into a seat. It was unusual for him to be late. But Li knew there would be a good reason. He nodded a silent acknowledgement to his deputy. Qian was several years older than Li. Steady, reliable, the Section plodder. Li had persuaded his superiors at headquarters that Qian should be given the deputy’s job, so that Li could hand him most of the responsibility for running the Section. Qian would be good at that, he had told them. And it would free Li up to take a more active role in leading investigations. And he had been right. It was a partnership that worked well.

The rest of the detectives were now actively engaged in a debate about motivation, a topic of discussion which, until recently, would have been anathema. Traditional Chinese police work was based on the painfully meticulous collection of evidence, leading to culprit and conviction. Only then would motivation become apparent. Unlike the West, where detectives considered motive the starting point of an investigation. But like everything else in China, this too was changing. And Li had been personally instrumental in altering the working practices of Section One.

While he still believed there was value in large group meetings attended by all the detectives, talking through the evidence, discussing the case in the minutest detail, the time it took was no longer a luxury they could afford. The crime rate was soaring as unemployment grew, and it was impossible to keep track of the floating population of itinerant workers moving from city to city. They had to find ways of dealing with crime more quickly and efficiently. They had embraced technology, installing their own Chinese Automated Fingerprint Identification System, CAFIS, at the forensics headquarters at Pau Jü Hutong. Portable computers the size of a briefcase were available to take out on the job. Fingerprints could be taken at any remote location and sent back by landline or cellphone for computer comparison. They had developed software called AutoCAD which could produce scale 3-D computerised re-creations of crime scenes from photographs and a single measurement. They now had access to a computerised ballistics database for the whole of China. And some of the most sophisticated laboratory analysis equipment available had been installed at the new pathology centre in the north of the city. But it was at the sharp end — the working practices of investigating detectives — that reform was most required, and Li had instituted a system of spreading the workload by delegating only two detectives to each case.

It was working well. But this case was different. He needed more men on the job. Each pairing still had its own workload, but every detective in the Section had now been drafted in to work in some capacity on what was in danger of turning into the worst case of serial murder since the People’s Republic came into being in 1949.

Li looked again at the photographs on the wall. A grotesque catalogue of inhuman behaviour. And he couldn’t help but wonder about motivation. There was something very cold and controlled about all these killings. Pathologist Wang had described the latest attack as frenzied, and yet the killer had taken the time to arrange a piece of intestine beside the body, and carefully laid the remaining entrails across the girl’s shoulder. In the previous case, he had taken the contents of the girl’s purse and arranged them on the ground around her feet. It was bizarre behaviour.

All the victims were prostitutes. They had all been murdered within the same square mile of the city’s Jianguomen district, an area where a large population of foreign embassy staff and five-star tourist hotels attracted a slightly higher class of call girl. All had been strangled, although this was not always the cause of death. All had been killed on a weekend. The first victim, twenty-three-year-old Shen Danhua, had been discovered in a quiet cul-de-sac behind the Friendship Store off Jianguomenwai Avenue. Her face and head were so swollen and distorted from strangulation that identification by relatives had been a problem. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times.

There was a gap of three weeks between the first and second murders. The second was found on a building site behind the China World Trade Center by labourers arriving for the early shift. Li looked at the photographs on the wall. They had pinned up a portrait picture of each of the girls to remind them that these were people, not just victims. It was only too easy to become desensitised, to start seeing corpses as dead meat rather than human beings. The second victim, Wang Jia, had been an exceptionally pretty girl. In the photograph her parents had given them, she was smiling radiantly at the photographer. It was a smile that haunted them all, a reminder of their failure. She had been strangled, and then had her throat slashed twice, left to right, one cut severing both carotid arteries, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord. Her killer had cut open the abdomen from a centre point beneath the ribs, down the right side and under the pelvis to the left of the stomach, and then stabbed at her private parts with the tip of his knife. The pathologist concluded that the attack had been savage and violent.

Just eight days later, the third murder shook the Section to its core. The victim, Lin Leman, was slightly older, nearly thirty, found in an alleyway behind stalls where Russian traders sold furs in Ritan Road. Like the others, she had been strangled and had her throat dissevered. But for the first time, the murderer had removed trophies. The entire abdomen had been laid open, the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments and placed by the victim’s shoulder. The uterus, the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been removed entirely, and no trace of them could be found in the vicinity of the crime scene. The only conclusion they could draw was that the killer had taken them away with him.

To compound the bizarre nature of the killing, they had found items from her purse laid on the ground around her feet. A comb, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a torn envelope bearing a date stamp from just a few days before. Pathologist Wang had expressed the opinion that these items had not arrived there randomly or by chance. It was his belief that the murderer had gone through her purse and deliberately arranged the items he had found there at the feet of the corpse. But he could not offer up any explanation.

Nor could any of them understand why the killer left the unsmoked end of a Russian cheroot close by each body. Clearly he had smoked the cheroots before committing the murders. To linger for a smoke afterwards would have been to invite discovery. But he must have known that the police would find the butts. And, if he was a man of any education, that DNA could be recovered from traces of saliva. It was like leaving a signature, an artist’s autograph on his work, so that there would be no room for doubt in identifying the author.

The detectives had moved their discussion from motive to modus operandi. Wu was clear on their killer’s MO. ‘He chokes them until they are unconscious,’ he said. ‘Then he lays them on the ground, on their back, and kneels on their right side. He leans across the body and cuts the throat from left to right. Look at the pics …’ He waved his hand toward the gallery of horrors on the wall. ‘You can see the blood always pools around the left side of the head, never down the front of the body, which it would if they’d still been standing. In some cases the spatter pattern on the ground shows that the blood spurted out from the left carotid artery. The victim was still alive after strangulation, the blood still under pressure.’ He paused briefly to light a cigarette. ‘The point is, he makes sure he gets as little blood on himself as possible. Then, once they’re dead, he starts cutting them open.’

Li spoke for the first time. ‘The trouble with all this is, we know what he does and how he does it. But we haven’t the first idea why, or who. We need some kind of picture in our minds of this man. A profile, some way of narrowing down who we’re looking for. Is he educated, is he a professional man? What age is he, is he married? Does he have sexual or psychological problems? He only kills at weekends. Does that mean his job, or a family commitment, makes it impossible for him to do it during the week?’ He remembered his Uncle Yifu’s counsel. The answer always lies in the detail. And Mei Yuan’s words came back to him from earlier that morning. It is in the detail that you will find the devil.

‘He’s clever,’ Li went on. ‘All these girls advertised in the personal columns of magazines. They all gave e-mail addresses and cellphone numbers. But he never e-mailed them. We would have found those e-mails on the girls’ computers, and that might have led us back to him. He knew that. And he knew we could check mobile phone records. That’s why the only calls we can’t account for were made from public phones. He’s one step ahead of us at every stage.’

They did not have a single witness. Li was certain that the killer had not chosen Jianguomen by chance. It was an area of four- and five-star hotels, restaurants, bars. It had a transient population of embassy workers and tourists. The murderer most probably met his victims in hotel lobbies where people were coming and going all the time. The girls would feel safe meeting him in a public place, and no one would think twice about a couple making a rendezvous and heading out for the night. Afterwards, their faces were so disfigured, either because of being choked or, in the case of the latest victim, brutally slashed, that by the time police had obtained photographs and got them circulating round the hotels, the chances were that anyone who saw them together had already checked out and moved on.

‘We’re still running DNA checks on all known sex offenders,’ Zhao said. And he shrugged. ‘Nothing yet, though.’

A slow, laborious, time-consuming process, that Li was certain would lead them nowhere. But it had to be done.

‘Can I read you something?’

They all looked around in surprise. Qian sat selfconsciously clutching a book that he had taken from his bag. Li saw several coloured strips of paper marking various pages in it.

‘I swear by my ancestors I never knew you could read,’ Wu said, and the room erupted in laughter. ‘You been taking literacy lessons, boss?’

But Qian did not smile. There was something odd in his manner, and he was pale, as if all the blood had been drained from his face. The laughter quickly subsided, and the faces of dead girls looked down on them reproachfully.

‘On you go, Qian,’ Li said.

Qian started flipping through the pages to his first marker. ‘I just wondered if this might seem familiar,’ he said. He found his place and started reading. Smoke rose from cigarettes in absolute silence.

‘There were twenty-two stab wounds to the trunk. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung in two places, but the lungs were otherwise perfectly healthy. The heart was rather fatty, and was penetrated in one place, but there was otherwise nothing in the heart to cause death, although there was some blood in the pericardium. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was perfectly healthy, and was penetrated in two places; both the kidneys were perfectly healthy; the stomach was also perfectly healthy, but was penetrated in six places; the intestines were healthy, and so were all the other organs. The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being three inches in length and one in depth. There was a deal of blood between the legs, which were separated. Death was due to haemorrhage and loss of blood.’

In silence, Qian flicked through the pages to his next marker and began reading again.

‘Her throat had been cut from left to right, two distinct cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through; a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw, also one on left cheek; the abdomen had been cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of the stomach, there the wound was jagged; the omentum or coating of the stomach, was also cut in several places, and two small stabs on private parts; apparently done with a strong bladed knife; supposed to have been done by some left-handed person; death being almost instantaneous.’

Someone muttered ‘shit’ under his breath, like the sound of a pin dropping. And they all heard it. Pages rustled, and Qian moved on to a third passage.

‘Examination of the body showed that the throat was severed deeply, incision jagged. Removed from, but attached to body, and placed above right shoulder, were a flap of the wall of belly, the whole of the small intestines and attachments. Two other portions of wall of belly and ‘Pubes’ were placed above left shoulder in a large quantity of blood. The following parts were missing: — part of belly wall including navel; the womb, the upper part of vagina and greater part of bladder.’

‘In the name of the sky,’ Wu said. ‘These sound like pathology reports on the first three murders.’

Li was on his feet. ‘What the hell are you reading from?’

Qian slowly closed the book. ‘Detective Wu is right,’ he said. ‘They are extracts from police and pathology reports. From nearly one hundred and twenty years ago.’

Every eye in the room was on him, every detective struggling to make sense of what he was saying.

‘I read a review yesterday of a book published for the first time in China. Even from the review I was struck by certain similarities. So I went out first thing this morning and bought it. And it became clear to me very quickly that I was looking at something more than coincidence.’ He held the book up. ‘The Murders of Jack the Ripper,’ he said. ‘The world’s first documented serial killer. He may have murdered as many as seven women in the streets of London, England, in the fall of 1888. And someone is replicating those murders in exact detail, right here in Beijing, one hundred and fifteen years on.’

Li felt the hairs rise up on the back of his neck.