The Killing Room (26 page)

Professor Lu was a broad man with a wide, flat face and narrow slanted eyes. His thick accent betrayed origins in north-west China. He wore a white coat open over a dusty cardigan and baggy pants, and on the rare occasions when he removed the cigarette from between his lips, he waved it around with nicotine-stained fingers. ‘Jiang Baofu?’ He breathed smoke at Li and Mei-Ling. ‘A brilliant student.’ He shuffled papers absently on the desk in his small office. Sun slanted in between the slats of Venetian blinds and lit his smoke in blue wedges. ‘In all the years I have been teaching, I cannot recall a student with more natural ability. He handles a scalpel as if he was born with one in his hand. If he chose to he could become one of the top surgeons in the country.’ He paused and raised his eyes from his papers. ‘I hope he doesn’t.’

Li frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because that young man is more concerned with the dead than with the living.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean that he has an unhealthy obsession with death. Here, we try to instil in our students a sense of caring, a sense of obligation to the well-being of the patient.’ He flicked a cold glance at Mei-Ling. ‘Even if we do not always succeed.’

Li glanced at Mei-Ling, confused now by a subtext he did not understand. There had been a certain familiarity in the greeting between Mei-Ling and Professor Lu which, Li assumed, had been established in a telephone call to arrange the meeting. Now, it was clear, there was more to it. But Mei-Ling remained impassive.

‘In the case of Jiang Baofu,’ Professor Lu continued, ‘he has no interest whatsoever in the patient, only in the mechanics of the body and the techniques of surgery. He spends hours in pathology, cutting up bodies donated to research. We have tried to persuade him that his talents might best be suited to the field of forensic pathology.’ He gave Li a look that suggested little sympathy, and said with a tone, ‘I’m sure he would be an asset to you people.’ He lit another cigarette from the remains of his old one. ‘However, sadly he still remains undecided.’

‘Surely,’ Li said, ‘if he is so talented, his skills would be best used in the service of the living?’

The professor squinted at him through his smoke. ‘Tell me, Detective, would you rather have a doctor whose technique was impeccable, or one who actually cared about whether you lived or died?’ But he did not wait for Li’s response. ‘I know which I would choose.’

‘You don’t like him much, then?’ Mei-Ling said in a tone laced with sarcasm.

‘Actually, I can’t stand to be near the boy,’ the professor said bluntly. ‘He is …’ and he thought about it for a moment, ‘… uniquely and unremittingly unlikeable. I cannot think of anyone who likes him, staff or students. You never see him in the company of others. In the canteen he always sits alone.’ He shrugged. ‘What more can I tell you? I would describe him as abnormally brilliant, but I think abnormal would suffice.’ He pulled apart the Venetian blinds to let the sunlight fall upon his face. For a moment he closed his eyes, as if basking in its warmth. Then abruptly he let the blinds snap shut. ‘But don’t take my word for it. Ask his professor of pathology. Dr MacGowan is a visiting lecturer from the United States. Jiang idolises him. But I think the good American doctor could quite happily strangle him.’ Professor Lu grinned as some private thought flashed through his mind.

‘May we speak to Dr MacGowan?’ Li asked.

‘Of course. If you can speak English.’

*

‘I could see that goddamn kid far enough, you know what I mean?’ MacGowan dragged his attention away from the corpse that lay cut open on the table in front of him and looked up at Li and Mei-Ling. ‘This doesn’t bother you, does it? I mean, I guess you people have seen plenty of stuff like this. I’m sorry if this one’s a bit ripe.’

‘Sure,’ Li said. ‘It is not a problem’ But you never got used to the perfume of rotting human flesh. He glanced at Mei-Ling and saw that, if anything, she was paler than when she’d arrived at the hotel. You needed a strong stomach for this sort of thing at the best of times. And for Mei-Ling, this was not the best of times.

She caught Li’s look. ‘I am fine,’ she said.

There were five other bodies laid out on tables in this large, overlit room, each in various stages of decay and dissection. The doctor’s students, first-year novices, were due in five minutes to pick up from an earlier session.

‘Every time I turn around, there he is,’ MacGowan said. ‘Sitting at the back of a first-year lecture, hovering around pathology, hoping to pick up a spare corpse if one of the students doesn’t turn up. Jesus, I even saw him in the street once outside my apartment. The kid must have followed me home. Pretty goddamn creepy, if you ask me.’

There it was again, Li thought.
Creepy
. How many people had described him that way?
He gave me the creeps
, Dai had said, and
really creepy
, Mei-Ling had called him. A
creepy medical student
, were the words Margaret had used.

MacGowan was about forty-five, and losing his hair. He was lean, and very white – perhaps a consequence, Li thought, of all the hours spent under artificial light in rooms like this. Both Li and Mei-Ling found their eyes drawn to the black hair that grew thickly on his forearms. MacGowan seemed to notice and he became suddenly self-conscious. ‘So what more can I tell you?’ he asked, moving away to a stainless steel sink to peel off his gloves and wash his hands.

‘When you have finished with the bodies in here, what do you do with them?’ Li asked, and he wondered if it was possible that the women they had found in the mud in Pudong had been hacked up in this very room.

‘We burn ’em,’ MacGowan said. ‘But only after we get our money’s worth out of them.’ He grinned.

But Li did not share his amusement. ‘Do you sew the bodies closed at the end of the process?’

‘Sure. We dump all the crap back inside and then stitch them up, though not with the kind of embroidery they get taught to use on live patients.’ He grinned again.

‘What kind of thread do you use?’

MacGowan appeared surprised by the question. He shrugged. ‘Oh, just some rough twine.’ He looked along the cluttered worktop beside the sink and grabbed a ball of coarse black twine. He tossed it to Li. ‘Stuff like that.’

Li examined it. It looked very much like the twine that had been used to suture the women whose mutilated bodies filled nearly half the cooler space at the mortuary. ‘You always use
this
twine?’

Again MacGowan shrugged. ‘I guess. It’s just standard supply. You’ll probably find the same stuff used in all the hospitals and mortuaries.’

‘May I take a piece?’

‘Sure.’ MacGowan lifted a pair of scissors and handed them to Li so that he could cut off a six-inch length. Li then dropped the twine into a plastic evidence bag and slipped it back in his pocket. ‘So, has this got anything to do with those bodies they found across the river?’ MacGowan asked.

‘What do you know about that?’ Li asked.

‘Only what they’re saying on CNN.’ He paused. ‘They’re reporting that you’ve got some American pathologist from Chicago working on it with you. That right?’

Li nodded. ‘That is correct.’ He was not going to elucidate. He glanced at Mei-Ling. But she did not appear to be listening. ‘One other thing, Doctor,’ he said. ‘When you are instructing your students on the entry cut to make during autopsy, what do you teach them?’

MacGowan frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, do you teach them to make a straight incision or a “Y” cut?’

‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at.’ He smiled. ‘I know it’s normal practice to make a straight entry cut in China, but I prefer to make the “Y”. I figure it gives you better access, so that’s what I teach my students.’ He waved a hand towards the nearest table. ‘Take a look.’ And they crossed to the gaping corpse of a middle-aged man, cut open from shoulders to pubis in a neat Y. The rancid smell of the sewer rose from the body. ‘Aw, Jesus,’ MacGowan said. ‘Some kid’s made a real mess of opening the intestine. Shit everywhere.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Mei-Ling’s involuntary exclamation startled them. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she ran from the room.

MacGowan smiled at Li apologetically. ‘Sorry about that. I didn’t figure that she of all people would be affected that way.’

Li was confused. ‘She’s … not very well,’ he said.

‘That explains it, then.’ MacGowan nodded. ‘Usually by your fourth year in med school you’re over all that kind of stuff.’

Li frowned, perplexed now. ‘What?’

‘Or maybe it was fifth year.’ MacGowan raised his eyebrows to crinkle his receding forehead. ‘Pity. When the professor said you were coming today, he told me she’d been a really promising student. But, then, you know, sometimes people just ain’t cut out for it. So to speak.’

*

Mei-Ling glanced accusingly at Li in the passenger seat. ‘There are lots of things about me you don’t know,’ she said. They were heading west on Zhaojiabang Road, a six-lane arterial route clogged with traffic. ‘I mean, it’s not a secret. Everyone in the department knows I flunked out of medical school.’ She was clearly touchy about it, and now Li felt guilty for having made her confront again some failure from her past.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not prying. Just interested. But if you don’t want to talk about it …’ He was learning that Mei-Ling was sensitive about more than one area of her life. It was making him a little wary around her now.

She sighed, her eyes fixed on the traffic ahead. ‘It’s no big deal. I wanted to be a doctor since I was a little girl and watched my grandmother dying of cancer. It was during the Cultural Revolution. Medical resources were scarce, and there was nothing our doctor could do for her. I just felt so useless, watching her waste away, unable to do anything to stop the pain or ease the suffering. I used to sit in her room holding her hand. You could smell death coming. It was just a breath away, and yet you knew there was nothing you could do to stop it.’ Mei-Ling paused for a long time, lost in some distant childhood memory. ‘She was so brave, my grandmother. Never complained, never wanted to put us out. But there was one time, I remember, near the end. She was little more than a shadow. She sat up, suddenly, in the bed, her eyes wide. They were so big in her shrunken face. She let out a little groan, and the tears fell from her cheeks. It was the first time I had seen her crying, and I didn’t know what to do. It only lasted a moment, then she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and forced herself to smile and said, “I’m sorry, Mei-Ling”. And she lay back down.’ Li saw that Mei-Ling’s eyes had moistened at the memory. ‘It was as if a crack had somehow opened up in that brave front she put on, and she’d seen death peeking through at her, and for a moment she’d lost all her resolve, all her courage.’ Mei-Ling wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a mirrored moment from a long time ago. ‘And all she could think to do was apologise to me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So I was always going to be a doctor.’

‘Why did you drop out?’ Li was genuinely curious.

She flashed him a sad smile. ‘Because doctors can’t beat death any more than the rest of us, Li Yan, and I’ve never been good at handling failure. I was in my fourth year when my mother died of breast cancer, and I couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. I felt just the same then as I had when my grandmother died, and I thought, what’s the point? So I quit.’

‘And joined the police?’

She grinned. ‘I know. It doesn’t seem like the obvious leap. And it didn’t happen straight away. But that’s a whole other story.’

And Li wondered if that was another area of her life through which he would have to tread carefully in the future. There was a complexity about Mei-Ling that had not been immediately apparent. She leaned over and flipped open the glove box. ‘You’ll find a search warrant in there,’ she said. ‘For Jiang Baofu’s place. It’ll take us about twenty minutes to get there.’

II

Ming-Xin village was a development built at the end of the twentieth century in the far north-west suburbs of Shanghai, near Giangwan Stadium. It comprised low and high rise apartment blocks in pale pink, green and cream, set among landscaped gardens with roads and pathways threaded through them like a maze of crazy stitching. Ornamental evergreen trees marked the boundaries of tiny gardens, large grassy areas were bounded by lush green sub-tropical shrubbery and fleshy leafed trees. Li had seen nothing like it in Beijing. Mei-Ling parked in Nuan-Jiang Road, outside building No. 39, opposite a white three-storey block with terraces and arched windows.

The path to the main door was choked with parked bicycles and motor-scooters. Inside a dark entrance hall, post boxes lined one wall facing the windows of the caretaker’s office. The caretaker was a sparrow-like middle-aged woman wearing a yellow cardigan over a black tee-shirt. She had a mean, thin face below a thatch of short-cropped hair. On the wall behind her was a clock, a calendar and a large coloured map of China. On her desk was a pile of cheap magazines. She was warming her hands on a jar of green tea and looked at Li and Mei-Ling suspiciously with darting dark eyes. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Li showed her his ID and handed her the search warrant to scrutinise. Which she did, taking time and great care to read every character. She was not going to be intimidated by authority. Finally she handed the warrant back through the sliding glass window. ‘What’s he done?’

‘We don’t know. Maybe nothing,’ Mei-Ling said. ‘Do you know him?’

The caretaker shrugged and pulled a face. ‘He’s a weirdo. Comes and goes at all hours. Sometimes he’ll talk to you, sometimes he just looks right through you.’

‘Does he have many visitors?’ Li asked.

‘In the year since he moved in I don’t know of one,’ she said. ‘Of course, you’ll have to ask my relief, but she’s never mentioned any.’

‘And she would?’

‘Well, not normally. But we have discussed the fact that no one ever comes to see him. So if she’d seen someone, I think she’d have mentioned it.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘He’s a medical student, isn’t he?’

‘
He
told you that?’ Mei-Ling asked.