The Killing Room (17 page)

Flipping them over, she then took a pair of scissors and cut open the oesophagus, like opening up a soft hose, which she then cut free from the trachea. Now that the trachea, held open by incomplete rings of cartilage, was revealed, she was able to run the scissors up the back of it, taking advantage of the break in the cartilage. She checked the laryngeal cartilage, or Adam’s apple, for fractures, then finding none pried it apart to reveal the smooth pink-grey mucosa of the vocal folds. Immediately she spotted the whiter patches of several polypoid nodules.

‘How is it going?’

She looked up, her concentration broken for the moment, to see Li standing in the doorway. He looked tired, too, but she immediately felt her own fatigue lifting. ‘Hi,’ she said. And then almost straight away her lassitude returned as she saw Mei-Ling appearing behind him. Apparently it was impossible for Li to go anywhere without her.

He walked in and glanced at the woman on the table. She looked unreal somehow, waxen yellow and lifeless, like pieces of a wax corpse used for instruction in a professor’s teaching lab. There was something about the expression fixed on her face, barely discernible now because of decomposition, that was odd. As if it had been frozen in a moment of pain or fear or both. Her hair was smeared across it, and there was something terribly sad conveyed by her expression, an insight into the last moments of her life, made almost eerie by the absence of her eyes.

‘Were the eyes gouged out in some kind of attempt to disguise the face, do you think?’ he asked.

‘They weren’t gouged, they were surgically removed,’ Margaret said, and Li had an immediate picture in his mind of a large glass jar filled with eyes staring out at him.

‘Why would someone want to do that?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Why would someone want to do any of this?’ Margaret said.

Li was looking at the dead woman’s face again. ‘Was she in pain, do you think, when she died?’

Margaret looked at her expression. ‘Trying to reach a high note, maybe.’ She smiled wanly and Li frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

She indicated the neck she had just sectioned, running a finger down each of the pink-grey folds she had uncovered. ‘The vocal cords,’ she said. ‘If you look closely you’ll see small patches of white, and if you look more closely still, you’ll see that they are caused by tiny reactive pedunculated polyps. Effectively small, non-cancerous tumours, known in the trade as “singer’s nodules”.’

‘You mean this woman was a singer?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘Can’t say for sure,’ Margaret said. ‘But she was someone who used her voice a lot. And if you look at her teeth you’ll see she was a heavy smoker. Which always makes the condition worse. Now, maybe she was one of those conductresses you hear screaming through the loudspeaker system at passengers on passing buses, but if you look at her fingernails you’ll see she’d had a manicure not long before her death. I know you don’t like to talk about “class” in China, but I don’t think your average bus conductress gets her nails manicured. Wrong class. So my guess would be that this lady was a classical singer of some sort. Aged maybe around thirty.’

Li nodded appreciatively. ‘Well, that at least gives us something to go on.’

‘And something else,’ Margaret said. She crossed to the long, polished stainless steel worktop and shuffled through the envelopes of x-rays lying there until she found what she was looking for. She removed two x-rays from one of the envelopes and laid one on a lightbox and switched it on. Immediately they saw that it was the x-ray of a foot. ‘This is one of the ladies being autopsied next door right now.’ She lifted the sheet off and replaced it with the other. ‘This one shows it better.’ She leaned over it, and with her finger traced the line of the second and third metatarsals. ‘These bones that run between the toes and the rest of the structure that makes up the ankle and the heel …’

‘Metatarsals,’ Mei-Ling said.

Margaret flicked her a thoughtful glance. ‘That’s right.’ She turned back to the x-ray. ‘You can see scarring there on these middle two. Small calluses where stress fractures have failed to heal. Difficult to tell from these whether they are incomplete fissures or actual breaks.’

‘What does that tell us?’ Li asked.

‘Regardless of what caused the fractures, continued and unprotected weight bearing has almost certainly caused them to heal poorly. And if you want to take a look at the girl on the table next door, you’ll see how well developed the muscles are in her legs, and in her shoulders and arms and neck. My guess is that she was an athlete of some sort, possibly a gymnast.’

Li looked at Margaret afresh, with the admiration and respect he always had for her when she was doing her job. Her observation of detail, her insightful interpretation, the breadth and range of her knowledge and experience. He had never worked with anyone quite like her. It reminded him of why he felt about her the way he did, when by any other measure she was a very difficult person to love. That, and the acute vulnerability that lay beneath her well-polished veneer of cynicism and acid wit.

Mei-Ling was also clearly impressed, although endeavouring not to show it. ‘Could be worse,’ she said. ‘Three possible clues to identity out of … how many autopsies?’

‘Six,’ Margaret said. ‘And you’re right. It could be worse. You could still be labouring under the illusion that the victims had all died a natural death.’ She switched off the lightbox and slipped the x-rays back in the envelope. ‘In fact, we are now looking at yet another possible cause of death.’

‘Oh?’ Mei-Ling was still stinging from the force of Margaret’s rebuke. She glanced at Li, but he appeared to be oblivious.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘The midazolam,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s quite commonly used in minor surgical procedures as a sedative to produce amnesia of the procedure … if you were having a tooth pulled, or a burn scrubbed out, a scope put down your throat, or even …’ she glanced at Mei-Ling, ‘… if you were having an abortion.’ She paused for a moment, but Mei-Ling was not rising to the bait. ‘Like I said, it would be used in small, frequent doses. In a high dose, though, it can cause cardiac arrest. So that might well have been a quick and easy way of finishing the victims off at some point during the procedure.’

‘But since we don’t have the hearts to hand, you can’t say for sure,’ Mei-Ling said.

‘Having the heart available wouldn’t help,’ Margaret corrected her. ‘It would take about twelve hours for the heart tissue to show a visible reaction – and none of these women lived that long. It’s the tox that’s important here.’

She returned to the table to complete the final elements of the autopsy. ‘With four of us taking three autopsies each, we should be through the rest of them by tomorrow night. Although it will be a day or two before all the results are back from toxicology.’ She peeled the woman’s scalp back from the skull. ‘By the way, I’ve got dinner reservations for us tonight at the Dragon and Phoenix restaurant on the eighth floor of the Peace Hotel. Apparently it has wonderful views of the Bund.’ She glanced up at Li and said, pointedly, ‘A table for two, that is. We haven’t had a chance to talk since I got back from the States.’

Li glanced at Mei-Ling uncomfortably. But she smiled sweetly. ‘Yes,’ she said to Margaret, ‘it is a wonderful view. You should make the best of the limited time you have. After all, you will be leaving for Beijing the day after tomorrow.’

‘Will I?’ Margaret looked at Li.

‘Had you not told her?’ Mei-Ling said.

Li said quickly, ‘I need you to look at the body we found in Beijing, Margaret. I have asked them to translate the original autopsy report, and the body has been out of the freezer for two days now. So another couple of days and it will be thawed.’

‘I see.’ Margaret turned back to the severed head. She could not meet Mei-Ling’s eyes. Although Margaret knew Mei-Ling could not have arranged it this way, it still felt like she had somehow won a battle of wills.

Li said, ‘And I need to ask you a favour.’ When Margaret did not look up he elucidated. ‘I would like you to collect Xinxin and bring her back down with you.’

Margaret’s face immediately lit up at the prospect, and she looked at Li with shining eyes. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Is she with Mei Yuan?’

He nodded. ‘You will need to pick her up at nursery school. One of the kindergartens here in Shanghai has agreed to take her temporarily. My hotel has been able to give her an adjoining room, and I am paying a babysitter to look after her in the evenings, and weekends if I am working.’

‘That’s great,’ Margaret said. ‘We’ll be able to spend some time with her.’

‘Yes,’ Li said enthusiastically. ‘Mei-Ling managed to fix everything up for me here in Shanghai. She loves kids, too. So Xinxin won’t be short of people to play with her.’

And Margaret’s face clouded again. It felt like Mei-Ling was invading every part of her space. ‘That’ll be nice,’ she said with a tone, and switched on the oscillating saw to cut through the skull.

III

The room was small and square with plain, white-painted walls. The paint had come away in patches where papers or posters taped to the walls had been removed, leaving their outlines clearly visible, like ghosts. There was one square window on the back wall, giving out on to seedy-looking police apartment blocks, lights shining from hundreds of windows in the dark, wet night. There was a desk charred with cigarette burns, an uncomfortable-looking chair, and a single strip light hanging from the ceiling and casting a harsh glow around the room. This was to be Li’s home for the duration of the investigation. Like Section Chief Huang, it did not exactly feel welcoming. Next door was the audio-video room, and the sound of tapes being run and re-run boomed through the wall. The detectives’ room was at the far end of the corridor, and Mei-Ling’s office was beyond that.

‘It’s not much,’ she said. ‘But someone loved it. He didn’t want to leave it.’

‘Should I know who it was?’ Li asked.

She shook her head. ‘Better not.’

There was a sharp rap on the open door, and they turned to find Detective Dai standing there clutching an armful of files. ‘There’s a call for you, boss,’ he said to Mei-Ling.

She nodded and said to Li, ‘Talk to you later.’

When she was gone, Dai put the files on to Li’s desk where there were already several dozen piling up. He glanced at Li, somewhat uncertainly. ‘I read up about those serial killings you solved in Beijing,’ he said, and Li realised that Dai was a little in awe of him. ‘Pretty smart bit of detective work.’

‘I got lucky,’ Li said. ‘And even luckier still to be alive.’

Dai nodded. ‘I knew Duanmu Hongyu,’ he said. Li frowned, trying to remember where he’d seen the name. Then it came back to him. The ebony bust in the courtyard. Duanmu Hongyu had been a famous Shanghai detective working out of 803. Dai was trying to impress him. ‘He kind of took a fatherly interest in me, you know. A kind of mentor. He was a great guy.’

Li nodded and rounded his desk to pull up his chair and sit down. He fumbled in his pockets for his cigarettes, but Dai had a pack out before he could find them. Li took one and Dai lit it. As Dai lit his own, Li asked him, ‘What age are you, detective?’

‘Twenty-eight, Chief,’ Dai said.

‘I’m not a chief,’ Li told him. ‘Just a deputy.’

Dai nodded. ‘So, have they got many women in the department in Beijing?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

‘I mean, high-ranking. You know, like Deputy Section Chief Nien.’

‘Not right now,’ Li said.

Dai nodded sagely and drew on his cigarette. ‘Women are okay, I guess. They can hold up as much sky as they want, but they’re a bastard to work for.’

‘Oh?’ Li was not going to comment, but he was interested to hear what Dai wanted to say.

Dai rested one butt cheek on the edge of Li’s desk. ‘Yeah, you know, sex always comes into it. You can’t get away from it. I mean, Mei-Ling, she’s all right. But she’s got this thing for senior officers. You know, like rank or something turns her on. Like she looks down on the rest of us, ’cos we’re not good enough for her.’

Li had heard enough. ‘It’s Deputy Section Chief Nien to you, Dai,’ he said. ‘And I don’t approve of detectives referring to senior ranking officers in that way.’

‘Oh.’ Dai seemed surprised, but not unduly put out. He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Chief.’ He stood up. ‘Oh, by the way, top of that pile there’s a file on a lady called Fu Yawen. Comes from Luwan District in the old French Town.’

‘What about her?’

‘She and her old man worked in a small tailor’s shop on Songshan Road. She went missing about five months ago.’

When Dai had gone, Li pulled the file on Fu Yawen in front of him, but he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wondered what Dai had meant when he said Mei-Ling had a ‘thing’ for senior officers. What senior officers had he been talking about? Or was it just jealousy and gossip? He was aware that Mei-Ling was attracted to him. It was clear in her eyes, in the way she would touch him from time to time, in brief unguarded moments of intimacy. And yet, he had always had the strangest sensation that this familiarity she had displayed towards him, almost from the moment they met, was habitual, a transfer of feelings from another relationship.

He was reluctant to admit to himself that he found her attractive, too, that he enjoyed those fleeting moments of unguarded intimacy, the touch of her fingers on the back of his hand setting butterflies fluttering in his belly and a strange, distant stirring in his loins. For if he were to allow himself to acknowledge these emotions, they would surely be accompanied by a haunting sense of guilt, and raise questions he did not want to face right now about his feelings for Margaret.

And then he thought about Margaret, and her odd, paranoid behaviour, her antipathy towards Mei-Ling, the directness of her question about what was going on between them.
Two attractive people thrown together on a stressful job in a strange city – it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened
, she had said. And he remembered his guilt. Why had he felt guilty? And what instinct was it that had led Margaret, within hours of arriving in Shanghai, to suspect the existence of feelings he had not even admitted to himself? The instant hostility between Margaret and Mei-Ling had been immediately apparent to him, but still remained a mystery. Not for the first time in his life, he found himself being confounded by his own emotions, and thrashing his way clumsily through the uncharted waters of an uncertain relationship. He checked the time. He was due to meet Margaret for dinner in two hours, and somewhere deep inside he found himself dreading it.