The Killing Room

I

Li sat in the dark and contemplated the mess that his life was in. He could hear the distant roar of traffic on the elevated ring road. People on their way home from work. People with a home to go to. People, he thought, who probably had just as many problems as he did. Probably worse. Death was worse, wasn’t it? And he thought of Huang, and of his poor wife being sent home from the hospital to die. But Huang had never shown him any warmth, and it was difficult to sympathise with people you did not know. And however great other people’s problems might be, knowing that did nothing to diminish your own. And so Li sat and brooded in the dark and felt sorry for himself.

A knock on the door, and the light that came in from the corridor as it opened, flooded into his thoughts. He blinked in the sudden light, and the figure in the doorway was just a silhouette. But he recognised Dai’s voice. ‘You really like the dark, huh, Chief?’

Li leaned forward and switched on his desk lamp. ‘What do you want?’

Dai stepped forward and dropped a large manila envelope triumphantly on Li’s desk. ‘Got an ID on that girl’s teeth, Chief. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.’ And he laughed at his own wit. Li quickly opened the envelope, slid out the large sheet of x-ray and found a report clipped to it in English. Dai said, ‘Sino-Canadian joint venture dental clinic at the World Medical Centre downtown. They did the gold foil work about eighteen months ago. Had her records on file. A twenty-two-year-old called Chai Rui, but she liked to be called Cherry. They even had that noted on her file.’

Li scanned the address. ‘Xujiahui,’ he said. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Big new futuristic development down the south-west of the city, Chief. Fancy apartment blocks and upscale shopping centres. Not a cheap place to live.’ He paused. ‘Just a spit away from the Medical University. I don’t know if that’s significant.’ Li glanced up at him. ‘Anyway, I had a long chat with the dental assistant. A young guy. He remembered her well. Said she was a real looker, flirted with him apparently. Boasted that she was a hostess at the Black Rain Club.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s off Huaihai Road, up in the old French Concession. Little more than a high-class brothel and strip joint.’

Li frowned. ‘So why haven’t you closed it down?’

Dai shrugged. ‘They say it’s owned by the Taiwanese Mafia. These guys have bought up a lot of property in this town. Got a lot of influence here.’

Li shook his head. It seemed incredible to him that people like that should be allowed to operate anywhere in China. It would not happen in Beijing.

‘Anyway,’ Dai continued, ‘she paid cash. No problem. And work like that didn’t come cheap.’

Li felt his spirits lifting. It was another step forward. Another victim identified. ‘You passed this on to Deputy Section Chief Nien?’

Dai shook his head. ‘I would have. But I don’t know where she is, Chief. Doesn’t seem to be in the building.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘So, anyway, now do you want the bad news?’

Li felt his newly uplifted spirits sink again. ‘What is it?’

‘Jiang’s family up in Yanqing confirm what he told you, Chief. He didn’t go into Beijing once when he was home for the holidays last Spring Festival. They say he never goes into the city.’ Again he paused. ‘But he did lie about one thing.’ Li waited patiently. ‘He didn’t see any friends when he was up there. He doesn’t have any.’ Dai grinned.

Li slipped the x-ray back into the envelope. In a way the news about Jiang was no more than he expected. He was more interested in the identification of the Beijing girl. ‘That’s good work, Detective,’ he said. ‘I take it there have been no developments in tracking down this Zhang girl that Jiang said he bought the bracelet for?’

‘Not that I’ve heard, Chief. Qiu’s been working on that.’ He headed for the door.

Li said, ‘Hang on a moment …’ He thought for a bit and then said, ‘You got the photograph and description of that bracelet?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘I know this is a pain in the ass, Dai, but how would you like to check it out with the families of all the missing girls we’ve pulled from the file so far?’ Dai groaned. ‘And if you can’t find a match in the first twelve months, go back another twelve.’

Dai stood glaring at him. ‘This is my reward for tracking down the owner of those teeth? Hey, Chief, you really know how to build team spirit.’ And he closed the door none too gently behind him.

Li stood up and lifted his jacket from the coat stand. Then he remembered that he had arranged to meet Margaret at the Peace Hotel at eight. He checked his watch. It was after seven already. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get him the reception desk at the Peace Hotel and left a message for Margaret that he would be late.

The shrill whistles of the traffic wardens cut above the roar of the traffic in Huaihai Road, but no one paid them any attention. The street was choked with cars and trolley buses and cyclists jostling for space in the blaze of lights from shop fronts and neon hoardings. The reflections they cast in the rain were like daubs of wet paint. Cyclists peered out from beneath the hoods of dripping capes, cursing the spray thrown up from the road. The sidewalks were jammed with coloured umbrellas bumping and squeaking against each other like balloons above the heads of desperate citizens in search of a night life.

As Li’s taxi fought to reach the kerb, an irate cyclist banged on the roof with his fist, and the driver leapt from his cab to grab the other man in the rain, threatening him with physical abuse if he laid another finger on his vehicle. They jostled and shouted and pushed, and people gathered on the pavement to watch, traffic grinding to a standstill, other cyclists trying now to separate the two. Li sighed and dropped a note on the driver’s seat and slipped out on to the sidewalk. A young girl in a red qipao beneath a red and gold-braided jacket, stood under a canvas awning outside one of Shanghai’s two Beijing Duck restaurants, trying to attract customers. But all she was attracting were the leering taunts of a drunken old man who kept trying to paw her. Li grabbed him and pulled him away from her. He turned angrily, taking a wild swing at his assailant, but Li caught his fist and showed him his ID. ‘Go home,’ he said firmly and pushed him away. The girl flicked him a frightened look, unsure whether to be grateful or afraid. Li pulled the collar of his leather jacket up against the rain, and hurried on down the street, checking the numbers.

A young man clutched at his arm as he passed. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s the hurry? Where are you from?’

Li glared at him. ‘Beijing.’

The young man grinned. ‘I know a good Beijing bar in Shanghai,’ he said. ‘Plenty of girls who like Beijing men. You wanna massage?’

Li was shocked. Was this what China was becoming? Was this the future? He thrust his Ministry badge in the young man’s face and said, ‘You want to come with me to police headquarters and discuss the sentence for pimping?’

The young man shrank away immediately, his face a picture of fear. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake.’ And he disappeared into the crowds as quickly as he had appeared. Li felt the rain trickling down the back of his neck.

The entrance to the Black Rain Club was in a lane that ran north off Huaihai Road. A black canopy over the entrance dripped rainwater on to a red carpet. Glass doors were set in a polished brass frame, and a burly attendant wearing a dinner suit and bow-tie stood in the doorway. He looked Li up and down. ‘You a member?’

‘No.’

‘Piss off, then.’ Li felt his hackles rising. He opened his ID for the third time in as many minutes. But the man wasn’t impressed. He took a moment to scrutinise it and said, ‘From out of town, huh? So I guess you don’t know any better. We got protection here.’

‘Not from me,’ Li said.

‘Like I told you,’ the man said, ‘piss off.’ And he reached out to grab Li’s arm to turn him away. But Li had seized the hand before it even reached him, finding the nerve in the fleshy part between the thumb and forefinger, and pressing hard. The pain, he knew, was disabling. The big man gasped and immediately dropped to his knees, unable to offer resistance or even try to pull his hand from Li’s grip. Li turned him around and banged his face up against the glass of the door. He could hear the squeak of greasy flesh on shiny glass, and through the door he could see a staircase winding up to a first-floor landing. The banister was polished brass on wrought iron. The stairs were carpeted in thick-piled red wool. At intervals on the staircase, beautiful girls stood glittering in slinky evening dresses, sipping champagne and chattering like birds on mobile phones. There was a constant traffic on the stairs of what Li presumed to be ‘members’, dressed in designer suits and button-down shirts. They all turned now to look down at the fracas in the doorway.

Li had the doorman’s arm twisted up his back, and saw the glass bend as he pushed the man’s face harder into it. ‘Now listen,’ he said quietly. ‘It’ll take me all of five seconds to put scum like you behind bars. So you’d better show me the respect that an officer of the law deserves, and go and tell your boss that I’d like to speak to him.’

When Li let him go, the doorman got back to his feet, mustering as much dignity as he could, straightening his jacket and heading stiffly off up the stairs to find his boss. He left behind him his distorted faceprint on the glass of the door. Li heard one or two giggles from the girls on the stairs. Perhaps they didn’t like him very much.

Li walked into the lobby and saw, through enormous double doors away to his left, a large dance floor surrounded by tables. There was a bar at the far side, and as he wandered in he saw that there was a small stage at one end and a tiny orchestra pit. Coloured lights danced and sparkled in the affected subterranean gloom. The tables were busy, but no one was dancing. The nine-piece orchestra finished some jazzy Western dance number, to be replaced immediately by a deep, hammering disco beat that thundered out from speakers around the room. Spotlights snapped on, and bikini-clad dancers with high white boots rose up on small round podia, contorting themselves in some bizarre parody of nineteen-sixties America.

He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find himself facing the doorman and a clone flanking a smaller man wearing a white dinner jacket. ‘What do you want?’ the Dinner Jacket shouted above the noise.

Li nodded towards the lobby. ‘Outside,’ he shouted back, and they moved through into the comparative quiet of the entrance hall.

‘Well?’ The Dinner Jacket was impatient.

Li said, ‘You employed a girl here called Chai Rui.’

The Dinner Jacket frowned and shook his head. ‘Don’t know her.’

‘About eighteen months ago,’ Li said.

Still the Dinner Jacket shook his head. ‘Girls come and go. So, if that’s all …’ He started to turn away and Li caught his shoulder. The man pulled free and turned, eyes blazing. ‘Don’t fucking touch me! Do you know who I am?’

Li said quietly, ‘I don’t care who you are. And I don’t care what friends you think you have in this town. The only thing that matters here is who I am. I represent the law of the People’s Republic of China, and I am investigating a murder. And if you fuck with me you could end up in a football stadium somewhere picking lead out of your brains. And that’s after I’ve closed down your club, put your whores in prison and confiscated your assets.’

Conversation on the stairs had come to a halt, mobile phones slipped back into purses. The Dinner Jacket stared long and hard at Li. This was a supreme loss of face in front of his employees and his customers, but there was no doubting that Li was serious. It was not how the owner of the Black Rain was used to being dealt with by the authorities. His two henchmen shifted uncomfortably on either side of him.

‘Her nickname was Cherry,’ Li said, helping him out.

Now the Dinner Jacket nodded slowly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember her. Good-looking girl. She didn’t work here long. Couple of months at the most. I fired her.’

‘Why?’

‘She was a user. Heroin.’ He shook his head. ‘No good. I like my girls clean.’

‘How very fastidious of you,’ Li said. ‘Where did she go after you fired her?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t care. If I sack a girl I don’t expect to see her again. This is not a social club.’ He took a beat. ‘Is that it?’

Li was reluctant to let it go at that. But there was no point in pursuing it. If the girl had only worked at the Black Rain for a couple of months and left sixteen months before, it was unlikely he would learn much here. He gave a small nod, and the Dinner Jacket immediately turned and hurried up the stairs with the second henchman in his wake. The doorman who’d left his faceprint on the glass resumed his position at the door. Li pulled up his collar again and hurried out into the rain.

He had only got a couple of hundred metres down Huaihai Road when he felt a tugging on his sleeve. He turned to find himself looking into the upturned face of a very pretty girl under a bright green umbrella. She had a white trench coat gathered around a sequined dress, and Li could see tiny flashes of light from beneath it as she brushed the hair out of her eyes. She glanced behind her nervously. ‘What happened to Cherry?’ she asked.

‘Someone took a surgeon’s knife and cut her open,’ Li said, and he immediately regretted the brutality of his words when he saw the girl’s face go pale, and the anguish in her eyes. She nearly buckled at the knees, and he held her elbow to steady her. ‘You knew her?’

‘She was a friend. Only one I ever made at the club. She was really beautiful.’

‘Where did she go after she was fired?’

‘She couldn’t get any work. You know, in this game word gets around pretty fast if you’re a user. The only way is down. She tried to kick it, she really did. But she still couldn’t get any work. She heard of an opening in Beijing about a year ago and went up there to try her luck. I never saw her again.’

The rain from her umbrella was dripping on to Li’s shirt. But it didn’t matter. He was soaked to the skin anyway. He said, ‘Do you know anything about her? Her family, any other friends?’

She flicked another nervous glance behind her then shook her head. ‘She was pretty tight about all that kind of stuff. A very private person, you know? She lived in a really expensive apartment on Zhaojiabang Road. I don’t know how she could afford it, or the girl she had in to look after the kid.’

‘She had a kid?’ Li was surprised.

‘Yeah, it was just a couple of years old. A little girl. She paid some peasant girl to babysit while she was working.’

‘So where’s the kid now? Did she take her with her to Beijing?’

‘I don’t know.’ Another nervous glance behind her. ‘Look, I got to go. They’ll dump me for sure if they know I talked to you. They think I ran out for cigarettes.’ She turned and hurried back through the crowds, tiny steps in quick succession, heels clicking on the sidewalk. Li watched her go, and still the rain fell.

At the end of Hengshan Road, Li wiped away the condensation on the window of the taxi and smeared the lights of Xujiahui junction across the glass. Floodlit towers and giant globes, and flashing neon; Toto, Hitachi, American Standard; a bronze statue of a young woman clinging to the arm of a young man speaking animatedly into a cell phone. The rain that still drummed on the roof of the Volkswagen appeared to be having no deterrent effect on the night life of the city. The streets were still congested with people and traffic. The taxi took a left and dropped him at steps leading up to a pedestrian footbridge that spanned the six lanes of Zhaojiabang Road. Li dashed across the bridge, getting soaked all over again. Steps on the other side took him down to the bright lights of a multiplex cinema beneath a cluster of six tower blocks of private apartments. The main movie house was showing the latest Bond film.

The manager of Chai Rui’s apartment block remembered her well. He had had a crush on her, he confided in Li, and then begged him not to tell his wife. She had paid for the apartment monthly with a direct debit from her bank account, he said. It had continued to pay out for a couple of months after she went to Beijing, and then suddenly stopped. When the next payment came due and was not forthcoming, he had emptied the apartment and re-let it. He led Li down a long corridor to a locked room at the end. ‘The majority of the apartments are furnished,’ he said, ‘and she’d taken most of her clothes with her, so there wasn’t much to clear out.’ He unlocked the door and switched on the light in a small storeroom with metal racked shelves around the walls. He lifted down a cardboard box. ‘This is all there was. Just a few personal things. I kept them in case she ever came back.’ He grinned. ‘You can live in hope.’ He paused. ‘What’s she done?’

‘She hasn’t done anything,’ Li said. ‘Someone murdered her.’

The manager went very pale. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Poor Cherry.’

‘Do you know anything about her family?’ Li asked.

The manager shook his head. ‘She never said anything about family.’

‘What about her kid? Did she take the little girl to Beijing with her?’

‘I’ve no idea. She wasn’t in the habit of discussing her plans with me. Sadly.’ He shook his head again. ‘Poor, poor Cherry.’

Li took the box from under his arm. ‘I’ll take that now.’

II

It was nearly nine when Li walked into the Peace Hotel. Margaret was sitting on her own at the bar. She was on her second vodka tonic. The anger she had been nursing, first towards Mei-Ling over the Xinxin fiasco and then towards Li for standing her up, had begun to dissipate. Li had dropped off the box of Chai Rui’s possessions at 803 and taken a taxi straight there. He was still soaking wet. Margaret took one look at him and couldn’t resist a smile.

‘So now I know why you’re late,’ she said. ‘You just had to have a shower before you came out. Pity you forgot to take your clothes off first.’

He grinned sheepishly. ‘It stops them from shrinking.’

She laughed. ‘You want a beer?’ He nodded and she called the waitress over and ordered him one. ‘And I also know why they put you in that other hotel — you can’t afford the prices here on your salary.’ She chuckled. ‘Trouble is, on what they pay me at the University of Public Security, neither can I. I’m having to take out a mortgage to pay my bar bill.’

Their mood was easier and more relaxed than it had been for some time. In some strange way, accepting that their relationship might be at an end, albeit unspoken, had removed the tension between them. Li picked up the drinks menu and looked at the prices. He whistled softly. ‘In the name of the sky, a hundred kwai for a beer? Some people don’t earn that much in a week! I’ll have to be careful not to spill any.’ He took a drink and rolled the beer around his mouth. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘it tastes just the same as it does out of a five kwai can.’

Margaret looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then decided to broach the subject she had been brooding over for the last few hours. ‘Listen, I don’t want to spoil good relations or anything, but that little shit really screwed me over this afternoon.’

Li frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Mei-Ling. When I went to pick up Xinxin, there was this uniformed female cop there. Wouldn’t let me near Xinxin and dragged the poor kid screaming down the stairs. Clearly on instructions from a higher authority.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Li said, and his face flushed pink. ‘I am so sorry, Margaret. I forgot to tell Mei-Ling that you were going to collect Xinxin.’

Margaret felt unaccountably disappointed. ‘Oh. So, I can’t blame her, then. Pity. It makes me feel better if I think everything around here is her fault.’ She took a stiff draught of vodka. ‘Tell you what, though, you need to do something about that female cop. That is no way to treat poor little Xinxin. The kid was really distressed.’

Li nodded grimly. ‘I’ll sort it.’

She hesitated for a few moments, then, ‘I thought I might take her out tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Seeing that it’s Saturday. I figured she wouldn’t have kindergarten.’

‘Sure,’ Li said.

Margaret smiled. ‘There won’t be any big, dikey policewoman there trying to stop me, will there?’

Li laughed. ‘You have my word on that. Where are you going to take her?’

‘There’s this park I heard about over on the west side of the city where kids get to drive little electric cars around miniature streets. I figured she’d probably like that.’

Li laughed. ‘You will probably not get her to leave.’ He paused. ‘Where did you hear about it?’

He did not notice the slight clouding of Margaret’s eyes, or how the brightness of her smile became a little too fixed. ‘I can’t remember. Read about it somewhere, I think.’ She hated lying to Li, but she didn’t think this was the moment to discuss Jack Geller. Margaret looked at Li and thought how attractive he was for an ugly man. She decided to change the subject. ‘So,’ she said, ‘are you going to tell me the real reason you kept me waiting for an hour?’

‘We identified the girl from Beijing. From those dental records that you brought down.’

Reality returned, and Margaret felt her lighter mood slip away. ‘And?’

‘She was just a kid. Chai Rui was her name, but everyone called her Cherry. She was twenty-two. Probably making a living as a hooker. She had been working as a hostess at a club, but they fired her when they found out she was using.’ He told her about the upscale apartment, about the little girl and how nobody knew what had become of her, about the box of belongings that were all that remained of a tragic life.

Margaret thought of the putrefying remains she had examined on the autopsy table the day before. She shook her head sadly. ‘You know, it’s easier somehow if you don’t know anything about them. When they don’t have a name and you don’t know about their husband or their lover. Or their child.’ She tried to blink away the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes. ‘Shit,’ she said, ‘I’m getting soft in my old age.’ But she couldn’t throw off the image of the body-bags lined up in the mortuary, all those women whose lives and loves, and hopes and fears, had been cut so brutally short, butchered without thought for the people they loved, or who loved them. And then a thought formed, coming out of nowhere, drawing on a hundred different subconscious sources, a revelation that had been secretly brewing somewhere deep in her mind without her even being aware of it. And suddenly all the emotional baggage of the last few days fell away and she was thinking with great clarity. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘You’re telling me this girl had a kid.’

‘Sure. So what? You’d have been able to tell that from autopsy, wouldn’t you? What was it you said, the cervix got stretched in childbirth and ended up looking like fish lips?’

‘It’s a good indication,’ Margaret said, ‘but it’s not a guarantee.’ She held a hand up. ‘Just … just give me a minute.’ She tried to think. How many of the women that she had autopsied had given the appearance of having had kids? But then, hadn’t she just told Li that you couldn’t tell for sure? And she didn’t know about the others, the ones she hadn’t autopsied herself, and it wasn’t an area to which she had paid much attention. She switched tack. ‘Of the five women we’ve identified, how many had kids?’

Li frowned. He couldn’t see where this was going. ‘All of them, I think.’ Then, ‘No, wait a minute …’ He ran through them all in his mind. The seamstress who took it in turns with her husband to take their son to kindergarten; the opera singer whose mother looked after her little girl; the fingerprint girl whose parents had been given custody of her baby; the night club hostess whose baby girl had disappeared when she did. That left the acrobat and her husband, Sun Jie. Li could not remember him making any reference to a child. ‘Four of them,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the acrobat had a kid.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, I’m not. I mean, we can find out, but what difference does it make? It’s not unusual for women of that age to have kids, is it?’

Margaret said, ‘I don’t know.’ She was still in a state of excitement. Something was trying to work its way through from subconscious fog to conscious clarity. ‘But if all these women had borne children — I mean, all of them — then it would be something they had in common, wouldn’t it? Something to link them.’

Li shrugged. ‘I guess.’ He still couldn’t see any great relevance.

‘Could we find out now?’ she asked.

‘Find out what?’

‘If the acrobat had a kid. Is there any way we can find out right now?’

Li looked at his watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. The evening performance at the Shanghai Centre Theatre would just be coming to a close. ‘If we’re quick we could probably catch the husband after the show.’

Margaret abandoned her vodka and jumped down off her stool. ‘Let’s do it.’

Escalators ran them up into the atrium from the Long Bar above the car park in the Shanghai Centre. The acrobatic show was over and most of the audience had dispersed. Li wondered if the girls with the nine chairs had managed to perform their stunt without falling. Half a dozen tiny clusters of people stood smoking and talking in the vastness of the atrium, their smoke and voices rising into the huge void that lifted over their heads and glassed out the night. Backstage, young acrobats were running back and forth gathering props and costumes, shouting and laughing and tangling playfully half-naked in open-doored dressing rooms. Nobody gave Li a second glance, but Margaret was an object of considerable interest. The manageress limped into the corridor on her sticks. She took one look at Li and then nodded to a room further down.

Sun Jie was pulling his coat on, ready to leave, when Li knocked and he and Margaret entered. His expression hardened when he saw Li. He appeared not even to notice Margaret. ‘What do you want?’ he said wearily. ‘She’s dead, I need to put this behind me now.’

‘I’ll not bother you again,’ Li promised. ‘I just wanted to know if you and Liyao ever had any children.’

Sun Jie’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Li almost accusingly. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

Margaret watched, feeling very excluded, as the two men spoke in Chinese. And yet, not understanding the words seemed to give her a greater insight. Sun Jie, initially hostile and laconic, started pouring out his heart. Margaret could see the pain in his eyes, and then the tears that formed there. Finally he sat down and began talking, apparently to no one in particular. Big silent tears rolled down his cheeks as he shook his head at some unbearable memory. He and Li spoke for several minutes before Li turned and took Margaret’s arm. ‘Come on,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go.’ And they left Sun Jie sitting weeping on his own in the dressing room. Tears he had not spilled at the mortuary when he identified his wife ran freely now. Li pulled the door shut behind them.

In the atrium Margaret could contain her curiosity no longer. ‘What did he say? Why was he in tears?’

Li looked tired, weighed down by the other man’s grief. ‘He has an eight-year-old daughter. His mother used to look after her when he and Liyao were performing or away on tour. Now she looks after her full-time.’ I hardly know her, Sun Jie had told him. And she hardly knows she has a father.

‘Why the tears?’

‘Apparently she got pregnant again a couple of years ago. He suspects she was trying to. She was desperate to have a boy. He flew into a rage and told her they would be heavily penalised under the One Child Policy if she had it. They had terrible fights about it. In the end he won and she agreed to have an abortion. He says he bullied her into it.’

Margaret knew that this was painful for Li, too. It almost replicated his sister’s story. She supposed that it was a universal story in China, a tragedy that got played out in nearly every family.

Li said, ‘He reckoned their relationship was never quite the same after that. They’d had a furious row once and she had called him a murderer, the killer of their unborn child.’ Li shook his head. ‘I think that’s left a scar on him that will never heal. Poor bastard.’ He looked at Margaret, but he knew immediately that she was somewhere else. There was a strange burning quality in her eyes, and the colour had risen high on her cheeks. ‘What is it?’

She looked at him now, with something like pain in her expression. ‘I fucked up, Li,’ she said. ‘It’s been there in front of me the whole time and I never saw it.’

He was perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’

Her hands were shaking as she clutched his arm. ‘I want to get the bodies out of the refrigerator and back on to the table — now,’ she said.

‘What?’ Li was incredulous. ‘At this time of night!’

‘Right now,’ she said.

III

The sweat beaded across her forehead and was instantly chilled by the low working temperature of the autopsy room. It felt cold and clammy on her hot skin. Her eyes were burning with fatigue, dry and gritty. She wondered what time it was. She had been in here, it seemed, for hours, ignoring the simmering resentment of tired mortuary assistants called from their beds to move the bodies around. On the table in front of her lay the uterus and pelvic organs of the last of the victims, the remaining body parts still in their bag laid out on a gurney. The womb was the same familiar pink-tan in colour. At the bottom end, where it opened into the vagina, Margaret saw the tell-tale scarring of the endometrium. Something made her look up, and she caught Li leaning against the door watching her.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked.

‘Four a.m.’

‘Jesus.’ She had been in there for almost five hours.

‘Are you nearly done?’

She nodded. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Having a stand-up row with Dr Lan. He takes exception to me opening up his mortuary and calling out his staff in the middle of the night without reference to him. I do not know who called him, but someone did. He does not like getting out of his bed at four in the morning. He is pretty pissed.’

‘I’m pretty pissed, too,’ Margaret said. ‘And I haven’t even been to bed.’

Li smiled weakly. He was also tired. ‘Who are you pissed at this time?’

‘Myself,’ she said bitterly. ‘For not seeing this before, for not even thinking of it.’ She looked at him. ‘You know, it’s that thing of too much information obscuring the obvious.’ She laughed, but it was an empty laugh. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I wasn’t even looking in the right place.’

He crossed to the table, eaten up by curiosity. ‘Are you going to tell me now what it is you have found?’

She smiled. ‘The answer to a riddle.’

He frowned. ‘What riddle?’

‘A riddle that Mei Yuan asked me to pass on to you. Only I didn’t, because she said not to tell you until I had worked it out for myself. Then I would realise the importance of how the question is framed.’

‘So when did you figure it out?’

‘In the atrium outside the theatre. I could have kicked myself for being stupid enough not to see it before.’

‘I thought it was this case you were having some revelation about.’

‘It was both. They’re one and the same thing, really.’

Li scowled. He could not get his mind around this, especially at four in the morning. ‘Do you want to tell me what the riddle was?’

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing …’ And she took him through the whole trip from the Friendship Store, past Wangfujing Street and Tiananmen Square to Xidan, picking up and dropping off passengers en route. She changed the numbers, made them up as she went along. She knew it didn’t matter. But she watched him doing the mental arithmetic. ‘All right? You follow all that?’ He nodded. ‘Okay, so what height was the bus driver?’

She could see that his reaction had been the same as hers, and for the life of her could not imagine how she had been so easily fooled. He shook his head. ‘You cannot know the height of the driver.’

She laughed. Of course you can. And she repeated the question. ‘Imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing …’

He groaned. ‘I always fall for these. It is typical of Mei Yuan.’

‘But the point is,’ Margaret said, ‘the answer was there all along, staring you in the face.’ She laughed. ‘But you’re too busy doing the arithmetic, getting distracted by all the numbers, and the names of the stops. So you don’t see what’s obvious.’

Li looked at the bivalved womb on the autopsy table. ‘So what’s obvious here that you didn’t see?’

‘The thing that connects them, that ties them all together beyond any possible coincidence, that I never even thought to look for. Until now.’

‘Better late than never. Do you want to tell me?’

She folded the uterus over, as it would have been before bisection. ‘I have this little trick,’ she said, ‘when I’m doing an autopsy.’ She took a pair of forceps and demonstrated how she would slip them up through the cervix into the body of the womb. ‘I can then use the forceps as a guide for my knife so that I can draw it up through the womb and cut it easily in half. Of course, it only works if the subject is female.’ She grinned, but got no response from Li and shrugged. ‘Anyway, with these ladies, in a couple of cases I couldn’t get the forceps in, and when I finally got the uterus open I found that there were adhesions on the inner lining that scarred the uterus closed.’

‘I remember,’ Li said. ‘You thought maybe the damage had been done in childbirth.’

‘That’s right. But there’s something else that can cause this kind of scarring.’ And with her right index finger she traced the adhesions on the endometrium in front of her. ‘It was you telling me about the acrobat having the abortion that made me think of it. And then I remembered Dr Wang in Beijing commenting on similar scarring in the womb of the body found there. He said he’d seen it frequently as a result of careless abortion.’

‘And that’s what caused the scarring that you found?’

Margaret nodded. ‘Suction curettage is probably the commonest form of abortion. And that’s what’s been employed here. A kind of freshwater weed called Laminaria is usually inserted into the cervix to soften or ripen it, and allow passage of the suction tool.’ She glanced up and saw the look of disgust on Li’s face. She said, ‘You guys don’t know the half of what we women have to go through.’ And although her delivery was light, there was something deeper there that caused Li to look at her for a moment.

‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Li said.

‘Well, in this case you have no choice,’ Margaret said. ‘And neither did this poor girl. Whoever performed her abortion was too vigorous with the suction tool, and instead of sucking out just the foetus along with the placenta and the superficial lining, they removed a whole portion of the lining of the womb, causing it to scar closed. She probably couldn’t have had another baby even if she’d wanted.’

Li looked thoughtful. ‘How many of the victims had scars like this?’

Margaret looked sheepish. ‘Nearly half of them.’ She shrugged. ‘The only excuse I can offer is that I didn’t perform all the autopsies, and the womb was pretty far from the focus of attention. Also, it would have been possible for complications in childbirth to have resulted in scarring like this.’

Li brushed aside her guilty apologies. ‘Only half of them? You said you’d found something that connected them all.’

‘I have,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to come through to the other room.’

On the tables in the room next door, Margaret had laid out the wombs and the other pelvic organs — the urinary bladder, ovaries and Fallopian tubes — of another two victims. It looked to Li like a bizarre collection of human pieces. The bodies from which they had been taken were laid out inside their open body-bags on gurneys beside each table.

Margaret moved to the nearest table. She said, ‘Another abortion technique is called D & C. Dilation and curettage. The cervix is softened in the same way, but then the foetus and the uterus are literally scraped out using a long-handled sharp spoon, a little like an ice-cream scoop, but smaller than an old fancy sugar-cube spoon.’

She heard Li exhale through his teeth. ‘Do I really need this detail?’ he asked.

‘Yup. It’s important.’ She was not prepared to make any allowances. ‘The trouble with this procedure is that it has a much higher complication rate. There’s a greater danger of perforation and haemorrhage at the time it is carried out, and as a result, more infections afterwards.’ She held open one of the tubes leading from the womb. ‘This is one of the uterine, or fallopian tubes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, if the womb is infected after the D & C, the infection can travel up the uterine tubes and scar them closed. That’s what’s happened here.’

Li leaned forward and saw the distinctive pattern of scarring in the bisected tube.

Margaret said, ‘The pathologist who did the autopsy on this woman would have had no reason to consider it significant. And, anyway, this kind of scarring is more commonly caused by a number of venereal diseases.’ She moved away to the other table. ‘Now this poor woman,’ she said, ‘suffered at the hands of the Japanese.’ Li’s frown caused her to smile. ‘They invented the process,’ she said. ‘Yet another crude, and quite brutal, way of ending a life. You’d think in this high-tech age we’d have evolved more sophisticated techniques. But then, since it’s usually men who invent these things, it’s probably not very high on their list of priorities.’ She flattened out the bivalved uterus and ran her finger along an irregularly healed scar on the cervix. ‘One of the tell-tale signs,’ she said. ‘And you can see up here on the inside of the uterine wall this thinned, tough, pale area. That’s another.’ She sighed. ‘What’s happened here is that the fluid has been drawn out of the bag of water around the foetus and replaced by a concentrated salt solution. That has caused the foetus and placenta to spontaneously deliver about forty-eight hours after the infusion.’

‘What’s caused the scarring?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘There are various complications that can cause the cervix to be scarred like this, but this pale area inside the body of the uterus … that’s a result of some of the salt solution escaping into the muscular uterine wall, effectively killing it. Myometrial necrosis, it’s called.’

She pushed her head back and then stretched it left and right to try to take some of the tension out of her neck. She slipped off her mask and shower cap and moved away to the sink, removing her gown and her gloves. Li followed her and leaned back against the stainless steel worktop. ‘So how many of our victims showed scarring like this?’

Margaret said flatly, ‘All the remaining women had either one or other of these procedures performed on them.’

Li thought about it for a long time. ‘A lot of women have abortions in China, Margaret,’ he said.

She turned to look at him. ‘About three hundred thousand a year in Shanghai,’ she said. ‘That’s the figure that guy at Director Hu’s banquet came up with the other night, wasn’t it?’

‘Cui Feng.’ Li nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘And there are what, maybe six million women in Shanghai?’

Li shrugged. ‘About that, I guess.’

‘So on a very crude calculation, over a ten-year period, fifty per cent of the women in this city will have had abortions. So out of, say, twenty women picked at random you’d expect half of them to have had an abortion. Of course, that’s just an average. In some groups there would be seven or eight. In others there might be thirteen, even fourteen.’ She paused to let her arithmetic sink in. ‘Here we have nineteen women, if we include the girl in Beijing, and every single one of them has had an abortion. Li Yan, that’s statistically impossible.’