The Killing Room (21 page)

She was laughing again and pointing to a stone carving of a reclining man with a huge penis. ‘Now, that’s what I call sophisticated!’ she said.

‘You were looking for me?’ a voice said, and they turned to find a small woman, perhaps fifty or fifty-five, standing holding the hand of a young girl who could have been no more than six or seven years old. The girl was gazing at them with great curiosity, and the woman had a frown of deep concern etched on her face. Li felt guilty and embarrassed, as if he had been caught looking at dirty pictures. And he was appalled that a child had been brought into this place.

‘We’ll talk outside,’ he said quickly. ‘Is there somewhere you can leave the child?’

‘We can talk in the office,’ the woman said. ‘The girls will look after Lijia.’

One of the women selling sex goods took Lijia by the hand and led her behind the counter. Li and Mei-Ling followed Xiao Fengzhen’s mother into an office through the back.

‘I don’t think you should be bringing a child into a place like this,’ Li said immediately she had shut the door.

The woman shrugged. ‘You tell me what else I can do with her. I have to work.’ Then she paused, hardly daring to ask. ‘You have news of Fengzhen?’

Li took a deep breath. ‘We have uncovered a number of bodies. We are trying to identify them. We do not know for sure if your daughter is among them. I am sorry to have to upset you like this.’

‘What makes you think Fengzhen might be one of them?’ she asked in a small voice.

Mei-Ling said softly, ‘We believe that one of the women we found was a singer.’

The woman let out a low, animal-like moan and closed her eyes. Li felt her pain almost physically. He took her hand and led her to a seat. He drew up a chair and sat beside her, holding her hand between both of his. It felt very small and cold. ‘Can you tell us,’ he said gently, ‘anything at all about the circumstances of Fengzhen’s disappearance?’ He could feel her trembling. But she made a great effort at composure.

‘She went to try and patch it up with him,’ she said.

‘Who?’ Mei-Ling asked. But Fengzhen’s mother wasn’t really listening.

‘He used to beat her up. He was a monster. I told her he was no good, even if he was the father of her child. I don’t know why, but she seemed to love him. I just couldn’t understand it.’

‘She had a meeting with him?’ Li asked.

‘She went to his apartment. For the weekend, she said. Told me she’d be back Sunday night. When she never showed up I guessed maybe there had been a reconciliation. But by Tuesday I was getting worried, so I went to the music school, and she hadn’t been there either.’ She turned and looked at Li with big, moist, dark eyes. ‘I always thought he had something to do with it. She threw her life away for that bastard!’ There was real venom in her voice now.

‘What did he have to say about it?’ Li asked.

‘Hah! He told the police she never came to his apartment. Told them he thought she’d just changed her mind. But he knew her better than that. He knew he had her in the palm of his hand. She was such a lovely, lovely girl.’ Her face betrayed the range of emotions that were going through her head, from love to anger to tears. Then she turned to Li, a bitterness in her voice now. ‘And what’s worse … every time I look at the child, it’s him I see, not her.’ Her mouth set in a line that conveyed something close to hatred. ‘It’s a curse!’

‘Do you know where we can find this boyfriend?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘An Wenjiang works on the boats. Or, at least, he did the last time I heard. Huangpu River cruises for tourists.’ She gazed off into space, an angry thought clearly forming. ‘He’s never once been to see his daughter. I pray at night that he will fall overboard and drown. With luck, perhaps, he already has.’

Outside, life ebbed and flowed along the length of Nanjing Road, people going about their lives, oblivious to the tragedies of others being played out all around them. But then, Li supposed, everyone had their own personal tragedies. Why should they be concerned about those of other people.

‘I hate this,’ he said to Mei-Ling. They were only stirring it all up again for these poor people. The memories, the hopes, the fears. And offering them nothing in return. Not hope, not even an end to it. Just more uncertainty.

She gave his arm a small squeeze. ‘Me, too.’ They walked back in silence to where they had parked the car, and Mei-Ling revved the engine and they dodged the bicycles in Guangdong Road to set a course for the river.

*

The booking office for the Huangpu River cruises was in a triangular granite edifice at the ferry terminal at the south end of the Bund. Mei-Ling parked the car in the street opposite, and they negotiated a complex network of pedestrian overpasses that led them, eventually, down to the quay. The first cruise of the day left at ten forty-five and it was almost that now. The waiting room was deserted, apart from a bored-looking girl standing at a drinks counter and a couple of uniformed women behind the sales desk. Clocks on the wall behind them gave the time in New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney. Li wondered, distractedly, why anyone embarking on a two-hour river cruise in Shanghai would want to know the time in London.

Mei-Ling asked one of the women at the sales desk where they could find An Wenjiang. ‘He drives the boat,’ she said, pointing through glass doors towards the quay. ‘But they are just leaving.’

Neither Li nor Mei-Ling wanted to hang around for two hours waiting for him to come back. ‘Come on,’ Li said, and they sprinted for the door.

‘You haven’t bought your tickets!’ the woman called after them.

A sodden red carpet ran out across the landing stage beneath an arch of woven bamboo. The cruisers were berthed three-deep. The boat about to leave was on the outside. They could hear its engines gunning. Mei-Ling followed Li as he jumped aboard the first boat, ran across the bow and leapt on to the middle boat. He shouted to a couple of deckhands on the outside boat who were in the process of casting off. The cruiser was just beginning to ease away from its neighbour. ‘Open the gate!’ Li called, and he waved his Public Security ID at them. They opened the gate in the safety rail and he jumped across the two-foot gap without looking down, then turned to hold out a hand for Mei-Ling. The gap was widening all the time. She hesitated. He shouted at her to jump. She took a deep breath and leapt across. Several pairs of hands grabbed her and held her safely.

The elder of the deckhands slammed the gate shut and turned on Li. ‘I don’t care who the fuck you are,’ he said, ‘don’t you ever do that again. I’m responsible for the safety of people on this boat. It’s my neck as well as yours.’

Li held up his hands. ‘Sorry, friend,’ he said. ‘Urgent police business. We need to talk to An Wenjiang.’

The deckhand frowned. ‘Why, what’s he done?’

‘None of your business,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Where is he?’

The old man raised his eyes and flicked his head upwards. ‘On the upper deck, in the wheelhouse.’ And he gave them both a surly look.

There was no one at the bar in the downstairs cabin as they passed through to the stairs at the stern. All the tourists were packed on to the open upper deck as the cruiser nosed its way out into midstream and the broad sweep of slow-moving grey water. This was not a day to see Shanghai at its best. Although it was not raining, the cloud was low over the city and the air was heavy with humidity. The Bund stood on one side, representing the old world. Pudong, facing it directly, represented the new. Both had faded in the mist, losing substance and colour, dominated by the breadth and depth and timelessness of the river that separated them.

There was no wheel in the wheelhouse. The cruiser was guided by a joystick which apparently controlled both the rudder and the engine speed. The man with his hand on the joystick turned as Li opened the door. He looked to Li as if they were about the same age. But beneath his baseball cap his hair was long and greasy. He wore jeans and a denim jacket, his hands were black, engrained with oil, his fingernails broken and filthy. There was a cigarette burning in an overfull ashtray, and a jar of green tea slopped about on the dash. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing! You’re not allowed in here!’ His voice was coarse, and there was a sneer on his lips. Li thought of the opera singer and wondered what she could possibly have seen in this man, what they could possibly have had in common.

‘Watch your language,’ Li said, and he showed him his ID. ‘There’s a lady present.’

An Wenjiang looked at Mei-Ling as if the last thing he believed her to be was a lady. ‘She a cop, too?’ he asked.

‘Do you have a problem with that?’ Mei-Ling said.

‘I have a problem with cops.’ He glared at Li. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to keep your eyes on the river and to answer a few questions.’

Reluctantly An Wenjiang dragged his eyes away from Li and back to the river. He steered them around a line of barges heading upriver and set a course towards the Pudong side. ‘Questions about what?’ he said.

‘Xiao Fengzhen,’ Mei-Ling said, and his eyes immediately flicked back towards them.

‘What about her?’

Li said, ‘I want you to tell us about her.’

‘Why?’ He squinted at them suspiciously.

‘Do you know what happened to her?’ Mei-Ling asked.

‘How would I know that? The cow ran off and left me.’

‘You weren’t living together,’ Li said.

‘That was only because of her mother. We were going to patch it all up and she and the kid were going to move back in with me.’

‘So what happened that weekend she was going to stay over and you were going to sort things out?’

‘She never showed up. I told you people at the time. I think her mother thought I killed her or something.’

Mei-Ling said, ‘You used to beat her up.’

‘Once!’ he almost spat at her. ‘And she was asking for it. Wanted to get pregnant again without telling me. Stopped taking precautions. A little girl wasn’t good enough for her. Oh, no. She wanted a little boy. And what kind of shit would we have been in then? Huge fines from the family planning people. I soon knocked that idea out of her.’ He glared out across the water. ‘You want to know what I think? I think she ran off, and I think her mother put her up to it. She didn’t think I was good enough for her precious daughter. And, hey, you know, Fengzhen didn’t either. Never took me to any of her fancy dos at the opera with all her hoity-toity pals. Didn’t want them asking her why she was fucking some lowlife like me.’

‘And why was she?’ Mei-Ling asked, and it was clear from her tone that it was beyond her comprehension, too.

An Wenjiang turned and leered at her, a sick grin on his face. ‘Because she liked a bit of rough trade, darling. And I knew how to pull her trigger.’ Mei-Ling shuddered visibly, which appeared to please him. His grin widened to reveal nicotine-stained teeth. ‘And all that stuff about wanting kids … it was just about sex. I mean, at the end of the day she ran off and left the kid the same as she left me. She didn’t give a shit about the kid.’

‘Oh, and you do,’ Li said. ‘How many times have you been to see her?’

‘Never.’ An Wenjiang wore his indifference like a badge. ‘I never wanted a kid in the first place. That was her idea. I don’t like kids. Never have. That’s not a crime, is it?’

‘No,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘But murder is.’

An Wenjiang’s reaction was strangely mute. He stared dead ahead for some moments before he said quietly, ‘You telling me she’s dead?’

‘We’re trying to identify a body,’ Li said.

An Wenjiang looked at him sharply. ‘She one of those bodies they pulled out of the mud over there in Pudong the other day?’

Mei-Ling said, ‘What do you know about that?’

‘Only what I read in the papers. I thought they’d been cut up by medical students or something.’

Li said, ‘Did you ever have any medical training? Work in a hospital, someplace like that?’

Now An Wenjiang just laughed. ‘Me? Are you serious?’ Then his smile faded. ‘You want me to identify her? Is that what you’re asking? Because if it is, I’ll do it.’ He saw that his cigarette had burned away and he lit another with trembling fingers. ‘Was she murdered?’ It was what the girl at the theatre had asked.

Li nodded, and to his surprise saw what looked like tears gathering in the other man’s eyes. An Wenjiang looked away quickly. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘You find out who did it, you let me know.’ And Li realised that whatever they thought of him, An Wenjiang had felt something for his opera singer that went deeper than just the sex that he boasted about.

They left him then and went out on to the top deck and felt the breeze whip cold, damp air into their faces. They had navigated the bend in the river, past the international passenger terminal. On their left the city disappeared into a haze of factories and apartment blocks, and on their right they cruised past the Shanghai No. 10 Cotton Textile Mill and the Li Hua papermill. The great rusting hulks of what had once been ocean-going liners were berthed forlornly at the Shanghai Shipyard among cranes that rose above them like dinosaurs picking over dead meat.

‘What do you think?’ Mei-Ling asked.

Li shook his head. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that I will never understand what makes people tick.’

They sat and watched the river pass by. They still had more than an hour to kill before the cruiser would return them to the terminal. Li looked back and saw the city crowding either bank, a city of irreconcilable contradictions, of past, present and future, of enormous wealth and terrible poverty. A long barge passed them, its hold laden with bricks, water slapping dangerously at its sides. In a cabin at the rear, a man sat barefoot in the open doorway wearing only a singlet and a pair of dark-blue cotton trousers. He was bent over a bowl of water, washing his hair. Behind him a small boy peered out at the tourist cruiser and waved. The barge was probably their home, Li realised. It was possible that such people never set foot on dry land.

They passed row upon row of similar barges, each tied to the other, berthed along the south bank. Lines extended front to rear, clothes put optimistically out to dry in the cold and humid air. Fishing boats and cargo tramps hung anchor chains from huge rusting buoys in the middle of the river, rising and falling gently in the slow swell that rolled up from the estuary.