Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Read online

  They went back out into the corridor and turned towards the autopsy room at the end. ‘So has the American pathologist turned up yet?’ Li asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Li felt anger rising in him again, like mercury in a thermometer. ‘It’s madness, Wu. Absolutely fucking insane! Where’s Wang?’

  ‘In the autopsy suite, Chief. They’re doing the autopsy together.’

  ‘Well, that’s something at least.’ He pushed open the swing doors into the autopsy room. ‘I don’t suppose he speaks Chinese?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Chief.’ The two pathologists were standing with their backs to the door, examining photographs taken at the crime scene. Wu said in his halting English, ‘You don’ speak Chinese, Doctah, do you?’

  The pathologists turned, and Margaret smiled beatifically at Li. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t. Although after all this time, I should really, shouldn’t I?’ She took pleasure in Li’s shock at seeing her there, and even more from his immediate attempt to mask it. ‘I heard you weren’t too happy that some “goddamned American” was going to screw up your case.’

  ‘Where’s Li Jon?’ he asked.

  Which immediately set her on edge. The little wife and mother wasn’t to be trusted with the proper care of their child. ‘I parked him under the autopsy table,’ she said. ‘Next to the drainage bucket.’ Li’s eyes very nearly flickered towards the table, but he stopped them in time. And Margaret added, with more than a tone, ‘Mei Yuan has him. Until this afternoon, that is – when your father’s coming to see him.’ A pause. ‘Is there any chance you’ll be there?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Li said, his voice stiff with tension.

  ‘I’ll tell him you were asking for him, then, shall I?’ And she turned back to the photographs. ‘So … now that we have the domestic arrangements out of the way, I suppose we should really get on with the job in hand.’

  The photographs were laid out on a side table, a graphic, vividly coloured record of a woman’s murder. On another table her bloodstained clothes had been spread out for examination, carefully cut from the body to avoid damaging it during their removal. The spotlessly clean stainless steel autopsy table lay empty in the middle of the floor beneath lights that would focus on the corpse, and a microphone dangled from an outlet in the ceiling to record the pathologists’ every observation.

  Through windows in the swing doors at the far end of the room, Li could see the assistants retrieving the body from a two-tier storage facility beyond that could handle up to eighty bodies at any one time. He heard the sound of the drawer sliding open, and the rattle of the gurney as they transferred Lynn Pan’s dead weight on to it.

  Margaret said, ‘I’ve spent the last hour going through Doctor Wang’s autopsy reports with him, so I think I’m pretty much up to speed.’

  The double doors banged open and the assistants wheeled in the corpse in its white body bag. They manoeuvred the gurney alongside the autopsy table and carefully unzipped the bag, before transferring the oddly pale body on to the stainless steel. A wooden block with a curved indent was placed below the neck to support the head.

  Li was almost afraid to look at the body. He knew it was no longer the Lynn Pan he had met yesterday, but it was hard to separate it from the force of her personality. He made himself turn his head. Naked, she looked tiny, like a little girl, small breasts flattened out against her ribs, her legs slightly apart, feet splayed like a ballet dancer’s. In life he’d had the impression of someone much bigger, much stronger. She would have been no match for her killer. Fingers like rods of iron clamped around her delicate neck, choking the breath and the life from her.

  Margaret turned from the table. ‘My God, she’s like a child,’ she said. She had not known what to expect, and was taken by surprise. ‘What age was she?’

  Wang consulted his notes. ‘Thirty-three, Doctah.’

  Margaret crossed to the table and gazed down upon her flawless face, and saw that she had been very beautiful. ‘What a waste.’ She glanced up and found Li watching her.

  He saw the shock and the empathy in her eyes. Shock because it was difficult not to feel a sense of loss when something so beautiful is destroyed. Empathy because she was almost the same age as Margaret, and it is hard in that circumstance not to feel vulnerable yourself. I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes. Perhaps even in death Lynn Pan had that effect on people.

  Margaret took a deep breath. It was her first autopsy for some considerable time. She had long ago stopped seeing the victims who had passed across her table as anything more than evidence to be examined in the minutest detail, a receptacle for vital clues that might lead to the capture of their killer. It was harder coming back to it than she had imagined. Defences were down. She had been softened by motherhood and domesticity, she had allowed herself to become human again, in a way that you cannot afford when your job is cutting open other human beings.

  Li knew it would be hard for her. He watched as she summoned all her professionalism and began her external examination. There was not much of her to be seen under the shower cap and goggles and mask. Her smock and plastic arm cuffs covered every inch of her white skin, latex gloves and the mesh gauntlet on her non-cutting hand hid the beauty of her long, delicate fingers. It was something in the way she held herself that betrayed her tension. If only to Li.

  There were several red-purple bruises on Lynn Pan’s arms and legs, where perhaps she had fought briefly against her killer. ‘No defence wounds on the hands or forearms,’ Margaret said. ‘No cuts or slashes, which would suggest she was at least unconscious before he cut her throat.’

  Around her neck and jawbone there was similar coloured bruising consistent with having been caused by thumb and fingertips where she had been pinned against the base of the sundial arm and choked. A cluster of three round bruises about one and a half centimetres in diameter on the left side, a larger bruise on the right, probably made by the thumb – suggesting that the murderer might have been right-handed. Margaret was confident that where the head had been banged up against the foot of the monument, she would find an area of subgaleal haemorrhage when she examined the scalp.

  ‘This guy needs to cut his fingernails,’ Margaret said. There were marks on Pan’s throat, consistent in relation to the bruising with having been left by the killer’s fingernails. Tiny crescent-shaped abrasions between half and one centimetre long, flakes of skin heaped up at their concave side. Margaret cocked her head, frowning slightly. ‘Usually someone defending themselves against strangulation would leave vertically orientated scratches near the top of their own neck, at the base or sides of the mandible, as they tried to pry themselves free.’

  ‘She was wearing gloves, Doctah,’ Wang said.

  ‘Ahh.’ Margaret had missed that in the photographs. She was rusty.

  The slashing of the throat was ugly and vicious. It began five centimetres below the point where the left earlobe had been severed. It made a jagged crescent around the throat, following the line of the jaw, severing the windpipe, both carotid arteries and the internal jugular, and cutting through all the muscle and soft tissue right down to the vertebrae, marking the intervertebral cartilages. The blood vessels contained clot. Margaret thought that the wound had probably been inflicted by a sharp, pointed, long-bladed knife, about six to seven inches long. And it was her view that from the angle of the cut and the tearing of the skin, the knife had been drawn across the throat from left to right.

  She examined the face next, pulling back the eyelids and peering at the eyes. ‘There is florid petechial haemorrhaging of the conjunctiva and the face,’ she said. ‘Tiny burst blood vessels,’ she added by way of explanation. ‘Caused by the pressure created when the blood draining from the head is cut off, but blood is still pumping into it through the arteries.’ She turned the head to the right to examine what remained of the left ear. ‘He’s been in a hurry with this. It’s a very crude amputation. He must have pulled the ear away fro
m the side of the head with his free hand and cut down along the shape of the skull with a single stroke of his knife. The wound is not very accurate.’ A part of the ear still remained attached to its stump. On the right side, half the lobe remained clinging stubbornly to the side of the head by the smallest flap of skin.

  As she examined the hair and the external scalp, Margaret could smell the faint lingering traces of Lynn Pan’s shampoo. A soft, sweet, peachy smell that made her seem altogether too human, too recently alive. She stepped back and nodded to Doctor Wang who drew blood for toxicology from the femoral vein at the top of her right leg.

  Li could not look as Wang handed the blood to an assistant and then held open Pan’s right eyelid to pierce the eyeball with a syringe and draw off a quantity of clear, vitreous fluid. They would turn her over now and examine the back of her, before replacing her front-side-up and carving her open, cutting through delicate ribs with steel shears, removing the heart and lungs and the rest of the organs, cutting round the top of her skull and removing the brain. A monotonous, routine, dehumanising process that would reduce this once vibrant young woman to a dissevered pile of flesh and bones to be stored in a deep freeze for anything up to five years, depending upon how long it took to catch and execute her killer.

  Margaret worked her way through the rest of the autopsy with dispassionate detachment. Like riding a bicycle, you never forgot how. She had simply wobbled a little at the beginning. Everything about Lynn Pan was normal and healthy. Her heart, lungs, liver, both kidneys. She had been a model of fitness and good health

  Li stood watching, determinedly unemotional, trying to focus his feelings in a positive way. He closed his eyes as Margaret sliced down the length of the intestine and tried not to let the smell affect him. She had been killed for a reason – a reason that had nothing to do with the other murders, although it appeared she had been killed by the same hand. Her computers and files had all been stolen, from her workplace and her home. She knew, or had in her possession, something … information, perhaps, that someone did not wish anyone else to know. So the motive for killing her was different from the others. She did not relate in any way to any of the Jack the Ripper slayings or their Beijing copies. And yet they had so much else in common. The method of killing, the Russian cheroot. And the letter which had promised to cut the ears off the next victim, a promise fulfilled in the killing of Lynn Pan. An incontrovertible link.

  ‘Did we manage to recover saliva from the cheroot found at the Guo Huan crime scene?’ he asked Wang.

  ‘English, please,’ Margaret said without looking up.

  Li repeated the question in English.

  ‘Sure,’ Wang said. ‘The lab confirm this morning. We have DNA match with other killings.’

  ‘How long will it take to DNA-test the cigar end found by Pan’s body?’

  ‘I gave it to lab last night,’ Wang said.

  And Margaret added, ‘I have requested that they fast-track the testing process. We should hear later today.’

  Li said, ‘What are you going to put in your report to the Americans?’

  Margaret said, ‘For God’s sake, I haven’t finished the autopsy yet!’

  ‘But you already know the cause of death.’

  She sighed, reluctant to commit herself too early. ‘Subject to toxicology, I’ll be telling the embassy that she died from rapid blood loss caused by the severing of the main arteries of the neck. She had been strangled and was probably unconscious when her throat was cut.’

  ‘Do you think she was killed by the same person who murdered the others?’

  She glanced at Wang. ‘What do you think, Doctor? You did the other autopsies.’

  Wang pulled a face. ‘Inconclusive,’ he said. ‘She was strangled like others, yes. Throat cut, left to right, like others. Yes. But no other injury. This is not like others. Also, she no prostitute, like others. She no killed in Jianguomen, like others.’ He looked at Margaret. ‘How ‘bout you, Doctah?’

  ‘I agree,’ Margaret said. ‘As things stand, the evidence is inconclusive.’

  ‘What about the letter?’ Li said. ‘The ears.’

  ‘Circumstantial,’ Margaret said. ‘It doesn’t prove anything. You have to make your own judgement on that one.’ She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘The unsmoked end of that Russian cheroot is the crucial piece of the jigsaw that we don’t yet have. If they can recover saliva and we get a DNA match, then I think you’d have to say that it was the same killer. If not …’ she blew a jet of air through pursed lips, ‘… I’d say you were heading for confusion freefall.’

  II

  Li and Wu were stepping out into the carpark when Li’s cellphone rang. Qian’s voice sounded oddly strained. ‘Chief, where are you?’

  ‘We’ve just come out of the autopsy.’

  ‘Can you come straight back here?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And bring Wang?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve got something here he’s going to have to check out, Chief. It’s not something I really want to tell you about on the phone.’

  Li sent Wu back inside to get Wang, and he stood on the steps staring gloomily towards the traffic which sped by on the expressway beyond a vast area of what had once been housing, flattened now for redevelopment. He didn’t really want to think about what it was that Qian needed Wang to check out. Everything about this case seemed to be slipping away from him. Margaret’s confusion freefall. Each time, it seemed, he turned around there was a new development – before he’d even had time to assimilate the last one.

  ‘What’s happened?’ He turned around to find Margaret, showered and changed, on the steps beside him.

  ‘I don’t know. Qian didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.’ He looked at her, and she seemed suddenly very small and vulnerable, her hair still wet and combed back from her face. She seemed thinner. Perhaps she had lost weight and he simply hadn’t noticed. He ran a thumb along the line of her jaw and brushed her cheekbone. Her skin was so pale, dotted with tiny faded freckles across the nose. He remembered how Lynn Pan’s lover had described her loss. One minute she’s there. My whole life. The next she’s gone. And he felt how it would be if he ever lost Margaret. The thought struck him like a blow to the solar plexus. It was too easy to take the people you loved for granted, and too late to take it back when they were gone. He knew that Margaret was unhappy, chained to the home and the child, and he simply hadn’t been dealing with it. In the wake of Lynn Pan’s death, she seemed particularly fragile, and he felt the need to hold her and protect her.

  Margaret was taken by surprise when he enveloped her in his arms and squeezed all the breath from her lungs. ‘Hey,’ she protested, laughing, and pulled herself free. ‘Who do you think you are, the Beijing Ripper?’

  But he wasn’t smiling. He was gazing into the deep, dark blue of her eyes. ‘I love you, Margaret,’ he said.

  And she felt the intensity of it. ‘I love you, too,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know things aren’t satisfactory right now,’ he said. ‘I know it. I just … I just need to deal with this first. And then we’ll sort it.’

  She nodded seriously. ‘I don’t know how we do that.’

  ‘Neither do I. But we’ve got to try.’ He squeezed both her hands. ‘I can’t promise, but I’ll try and make it to see my father this afternoon.’

  She smiled ruefully. ‘I won’t hold my breath.’

  They broke apart as her taxi arrived. It was a Mercedes. Li cocked an eyebrow. ‘Can we afford this?’

  ‘We don’t have to. The good old US of A is picking up the tab.’ She kissed him lightly on the lips and jumped into the back seat. The taxi was pulling out of the gate when Wu came down the steps with Pathologist Wang.

  It took them forty minutes to get back to Section One through the lunchtime traffic, sitting in long, frustrating periods of gridlock on the Third Ring Road before turning south and picking their way through some of the less congest
ed back streets. The restaurant on the corner of Beixinqiao Santiao was packed when Li parked their Jeep outside it. The sounds of diners, the smells of lunch, of barbecue and wok, filled the air, making Li aware of a hunger gnawing at his stomach. But he had no appetite and no desire to eat. Beyond Section One, Noah’s Ark Food Room had fallen under the demolition men’s hammer, and behind a hoarding where it had once stood, a giant crane soared into the blue autumn sky, dominating the skyline.

  They went in the side entrance and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. There was an odd, faintly medical smell in the air as they walked along the top corridor. It was cold, and when they turned into the detectives’ room they saw why. All the windows stood wide open, and officers were sitting around in their coats and typing with their gloves on. Everyone was smoking. In spite of the cold wind blowing in through the open window, and the smoke that filled the room, the smell was stronger here, and carried more than a hint of something rotten.

  Qian was sitting on one of the desks talking on the telephone. He hung up when he saw Li and jumped down. ‘In here, Chief.’ Watched by everyone else in the room, Li and Wu and Wang followed Qian into his office. The windows here were also wide open. The desk had been cleared, and on it stood a cardboard box the size of a shoebox. It had been wrapped in brown paper and secured with clear, sticky tape. Someone had cut open the wrapping, and the paper was folded away from the box, its lid lying on the table beside it. The air was thick with the smell of alcohol, and a stink like meat which had been left in the refrigerator a month past its sell-by date.

  ‘In the name of the sky, Qian …’ Li screwed up his eyes and blew air out through his mouth. ‘What the hell …?’

  ‘It was addressed to you, Chief. Arrived in this morning’s mail. But it was stinking so bad the head of the mail room thought I should open it.’ Qian looked slightly green around the gills. ‘I wish to hell I hadn’t.’

  ‘What is it?’ Li and Wu and Pathologist Wang approached the open box with a caution which suggested they thought that something might jump out and bite them. Inside, laid out amongst crumpled paper packing was a smooth, faintly reddish-brown-coloured arc of something organic. It was wrapped in plastic and oozing a clear fluid. The stench was fierce. Wu put a handkerchief to his face and moved back, gagging. Li stood his ground with difficulty as Wang snapped on latex gloves and lifted it out of the box.