Chinese Whispers

Book 6: China Thrillers

by Peter May

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

His victims are young, beautiful, and viciously mutilated. He calls himself the Beijing Ripper. The media and terror-stricken public are demanding the killer's arrest, and Li Yan, the head of Beijing’s serious crime squad, has been put in the spotlight. American pathologist Margaret Campbell is asked to perform an autopsy on one of the victims, and her results send shockwaves through the investigation. Then Li begins receiving personal letters from the killer, and his life and career start falling apart. The need to uncover the Ripper’s identity becomes paramount if he is to save himself and his family.

Peter May’s terrifying sixth China thriller pits Li Yan and Margaret Campbell against an unscrupulous foe who could prove to be their deadliest enemy yet.

Release date: November 14, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 340

Sample

She sits in the lobby watching the Western women drift by, heady strands of exotic scent lingering in their wake. They mask their age with dyed blonde hair and painted faces, drape themselves in haute couture and walk with style on heels that would kill. Skin as pale as ivory, eyes green or blue or hazel. Startling. Bizarre. They have everything she aspires to: money, men, carelessness with a freedom they take for granted. But it is an aspiration she will never realise. For she will never see tomorrow.

She catches a glimpse of her reflection. So much light and glass, polished steel and shining marble. She is everywhere she looks. And, by contrast, she is shocked by her plainness. It is only too apparent to her, even beneath the veil of make-up; the slash of red on her lips; the eyes she has tried to make seem a little less slanted; the curl she has attempted to tong into limp black hair. She feels dowdy, ugly.

She becomes aware, then, of a man leaning against the desk at Reception undressing her with his eyes, anxious to catch hers so that she knows what is in his mind. He is not ashamed of his lust and it makes her uncomfortable. She has good legs, long and slender. Her skirt is short to make the most of them. But she uncrosses them now, and presses her knees firmly together. She knows what it is he wants, and she knows it is not her.

A voice speaks her name. Close by. Soft, gentle. She turns, startled by its intimacy, and he is smiling down at her. He is older than she imagined, but his hair is full and dark and he is not unattractive. And there is something reassuring about his being Chinese, too. She jumps to her feet, drawing full lips back over white teeth in her brightest smile. He will be no ticket to a better life, but neither will he make false promises, and he will know the value of the money he puts in her hand when it is all over. So simple. The undulating melody of her cellphone bringing his response to her two-line ad in the Beijing paper. A price agreed, a rendezvous arranged. She glances over her shoulder as he sweeps her towards the revolving door, and sees the disappointment in the eyes of the Westerner at Reception. Unfulfilled fantasies. And she feels the power of denial.

She is shocked by the cold of this late fall night, lulled into a false sense of warmth by the extravagant heating of the foreigners’ hotel. The municipal government has only just turned on the city’s heating system, a week later than usual to save money. She pulls her leather jacket more tightly around herself and slips her arm through his, hoping it will be warmer in his car.

But if he has a car, it is nowhere nearby. They walk east on Jianguomenwai for a long time, late night traffic dwindling on the boulevard, the occasional bikers drifting past them like ghosts in the dark of the cycle lane. All the time he talks to her, like he has known her for years. About some new restaurant in Chongwen district, a hat he bought in Wangfujing. He is easy company, but she wishes they would reach his car soon. The digital display on the clock on the far corner of Dongdoqiao Road, above the Beijing Yan Bao Auto BMW franchise, shows a quarter past midnight. It flashes alternately a temperature reading of minus two. The lights go out in Sammie’s Café, which claims to be the place in Beijing where East eats West. The last burger-chomping patrons have long gone, probably on the last subway train at eleven-forty. The gates of the Beijing Subway are drawn now and padlocked, the ticket hall beyond brooding in silent darkness. The sidewalk is deserted here, shutters drawn on supermarket windows, a news-stand battened down for the night. Gold characters on red hoardings reflect light from distant street lamps. Xiushuimarket. Silk Street. A gaping black hole leading to a narrow alleyway where stallholders closed up for the night hours ago.

To her surprise, they turn into the tiny market street, and are swallowed up immediately by its darkness. She hesitates, but his grip on her arm only tightens, and her surprise turns to alarm. She wants to know where they are going. Where is his car? He has no car, he tells her, and he cannot take her home. Here they will not be disturbed. She protests. It is too cold. He promises to keep her warm. And perhaps another hundred yuan …

She is slightly mollified, and reluctantly allows him to lead her deeper into the alley. Here, in the day, thousands of people clamour and haggle for bargains, stallholders shouting and spitting and throwing the dregs of cold green tea across the flagstones. She has been here many times, but never seen it like this. Cold, deserted, shuttered up. Above the stalls, on the east side, the lights of apartment buildings seem to plunge the alley into even deeper gloom. On the west side, three-storey luxury apartment blocks lie empty, as yet unsold. She glances back. The lights of the boulevard seem a long way away. Up ahead, the street lamps lining the road outside the US Embassy Visa Office seem feeble, devoured by the night.

Her eyes are adapting now. She can make out signs for silk carpets, fresh water pearls, ‘cloisonné’, seal carving. She wishes she were somewhere else, fulfilling the fantasies of the man at the reception desk, perhaps. In some warm hotel room.

They are almost at the far end of the alley when he propels her into an opening, and she feels the freezing cold of metal gates pressing up against her back. She feels his breath on her neck, lips grazing her skin, and she tenses for the inevitable. It never gets any easier. But he steps back and says she should relax. He takes a pack of Russian cheroots from his coat pocket and his lighter flares briefly in the dark. She fumbles in her purse for her cigarettes and he lights one for her. She is still shivering from the cold, but less scared now. He leans against the wall, talking about the demolition in the north of the city and the new apartment blocks they are building there. He blows smoke into the air and watches it drift past a banner forbidding smoking. He asks her where she lives, and if she has a day-job. And she tells him about the antiques stall at Panjiayuan, and about her mother, and has no inkling of the contempt he has for her. She thinks his smile reflects his interest. She thinks his eyes are kind.

She finishes her cigarette and he tosses his cheroot into the darkness. Embers scatter as it hits the ground. He steps closer, a hand slipping into the warmth beneath her jacket, his hand searching for small breasts pushed up into fullness by the Wonderbra sent by God for Chinese women. Hot breath on her face. She can smell the bitter smoke of his cheroot. His hand lingers only briefly at her breast before gliding up to her neck, fingers softly encircling it as he finds her lips with his and she chokes back her repugnance. Only, she has no breath. And she cannot speak. And for a moment she wonders what has happened to her, before realising that his fingers have turned to steel and are crushing her windpipe. She struggles to free herself, but he is far too strong. His face is still close to hers, watching as she fights for a life that is fading so quickly. His eyes are wide and full of something she has never seen before. She cannot believe she will die like this. Not here. Not now. Lights flash in her eyes, and the fight in her starts to ebb. Too fast. Too easy. All too easy. Then darkness descends like a warm cloud. And she is gone. To a place she has never dreamed of.

Her slight frame has become a dead weight in his arms, surprisingly heavy in lifelessness, as he lowers her to the ground, arranging her carefully on the paving stones. He glances quickly each way down the alley, and can hear the guard stamping his feet just beyond the far end of the market street, where embassyland stretches off into silent darkness. There is a frisson for him, knowing that there is someone so close. So oblivious. It somehow emphasises his superiority. Crouching beside her, he looks at the dead girl on the ground and runs fingertips lightly over the features of her face. She is still warm. Blood still oxygenated. There is a tiny smile on his lips as he draws the knife from beneath his coat.



She woke with a start, heart pounding, consciousness holding on to the distant echo of the cry which had invaded her dreams. Dreams which hardly ever took her far from the surface, lingering always in the shallows where light and hearing were only a breath away. She sat upright, drawing that breath now, eyes quickly forming shapes from shadows, broken light from the street cut in small pieces by the branches of trees. She never drew the curtains. That way she could see fast, without blinding herself with sudden light.

There it was again, tiny and muffled, and unaccountably devastating in its effect. Nature had surprised her with this sensitivity, tuned to detect the smallest sound, even in sleep, triggering the fight or flight response that had her awake and alert in seconds. There was a third cry, and then a fourth, followed by a long grizzle and a series of sobs, and her alarm subsided into a weary acceptance that she would have to get out of bed. She glanced at the clock display on the bedside cabinet and saw that it was a little after five. Chances were she would not get back to sleep.

She slipped quickly from the bed and lifted her dressing gown from the back of a chair, shivering as she pulled it on and hugged it around herself. The heating would not come on again for another hour, and she still could not get used to the fact that she had no control over it. As she opened the door, she glanced back at the bed and the shape of Li Yan curled up in the foetal position, sheets and blankets pulled tightly around him, the soft, regular purr of his breathing filling the room. And she wondered why Nature did not endow fathers with the same sensitivity.

Li Jon Campbell lay on his back. Somehow he had managed to kick himself free of the quilt and had been wakened by the cold. And now that he was awake, he would discover that he was hungry. Margaret lowered the side of the cot and lifted her son into her arms, scooping up the quilt and wrapping it around him. In another month they would celebrate his first birthday. He was already a big boy. Ugly, Margaret told Li, like his father. Thick, black hair and beautiful slanting almond eyes, he looked like any other Chinese baby. And Margaret might have doubted that there was anything of her in him except for the strangest, startling blue pupils that met hers every time he looked at her. It was odd that it should have been her eyes that she had most obviously given him. She had read that the blue-eye gene was the weakest, and that within a few hundred years would be bred out of the human race entirely. Li Jon was doing his best to redress the balance.

She cuddled and whispered to him as she carried him through to the kitchen to prepare a bottle. She had been too weak after the Caesarian to breastfeed. His crying subsided, and he contented himself with grabbing her nose and holding on to it as if his life depended on it. She pulled herself free as she took him into the sitting room and dropped into a soft chair where she could cradle him and push the rubber teat between his lips. He chewed and sucked hungrily, and Margaret took the moment, as she always did, to find a small island of peace in the shifting sea of her unsettled world.

Not that she ever consciously analysed her position these days. She had long ago stopped doing that. It was not a deliberate decision. More a process of elimination. Her whole life was focused now on her baby, to the exclusion of almost everything else. She could not afford to dwell on her semi-legal status, living unauthorised in the official apartment provided by the Beijing Municipal Police for the father of her child. She survived from visa extension to visa extension without daring to think what she would do if ever her application was refused. She had no real income of her own, except for the money they gave her for occasional lectures at the University of Public Security. She had not wielded her pathologist’s knife in almost a year. She was, in fact, no one she would recognise. She would pass herself in the street without noticing. She was less than a shadow of her former self. She was a ghost.

Li Jon was asleep by the time she laid him back in his cot, making sure he was well wrapped and warm. But now she had lost all her own heat, and hurried back to bed, dropping her gown on the chair and slipping between sheets which had also grown cold. She shivered and slid across the bed to the heat radiating from Li Yan’s back and buttocks and thighs, and felt his skin burning against hers. He grunted, and she felt the reflex of his muscles as he tried to move away from this source of cold. She tucked in tight and held on.

‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled sleepily.

‘Oh, so you’re not dead,’ she whispered, and her voice seemed inordinately loud in the dark. ‘Or deaf. Or completely insensitive.’

‘What?’ And he half-turned towards her, still drowsy and heavy-eyed, clinging to the last vestiges of what had been a deep, dark slumber.

She slid a cold hand across his thigh and found, to her surprise, a full erection. ‘What the hell were you dreaming?’ she demanded.

He became aware of her cold, and his heat, and felt a warm flood of arousal fill his belly. ‘I dreamt I was making love to you,’ he said.

‘Yeah, right.’

He flipped over so that he was facing her. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘It has,’ she acknowledged. She squeezed him and smiled. ‘But I see that everything’s still in good working order.’

‘Maybe we should give it a run out, just to be sure.’

‘Maybe we should. It might generate a little more warmth than the central heating.’

‘Just a little more …’ He nuzzled against the cold skin of her neck and felt her shiver as he breathed on her. She felt him grow harder as he dragged his lips across her breast to find a nipple, puckered and hard with cold and arousal. He flicked at it with his tongue and then bit until she moaned, and he ran a hand over her belly in search of the soft blonde hair between her legs. He felt the long, vertical weal of her scar, still ugly and livid. No cosmetic bikini-cut, this. And he knew that she was still self-conscious about it. He moved up to find her lips and the warmth of her mouth, flipping over again to lie between her open legs, and then, half crouching, let her guide him inside her. He felt a shudder running through her whole body, like the deepest sigh, and his cellphone began playing Beethoven’s Ode To Joy.

‘In the name of the sky,’ he hissed into the darkness, and immediately felt her go limp beneath him. It was a long time since she had asked him not to answer a call, a final acceptance of the way the dice had fallen. For both of them. And for the briefest of moments, he was tempted himself to let his answering service pick it up. But Margaret was already turning away, the spell broken, the moment lost. He snatched the phone from the bedside cabinet.

‘Wei?’

Margaret listened bleakly as he had a quickfire exchange in putonghua Chinese. A bizarre four-toned cadence that she had never made any real attempt to learn. And yet she knew it was a language her son would speak, and she did not want there to be any part of him she could not understand. Of course, she would teach him English. She would speak to him always in English. But she also knew from her years with Li that there would always be that something Chinese about him that would remain just out of reach.

Li hung up and dropped the phone on the table, rolling on to his back and staring silently at the ceiling. There was a lengthy silence. Their passion had not been spent, but it was gone. Finally he said, ‘There’s been another one.’

She felt her stomach flip over. ‘Another mutilation?’ He nodded and she ached for him. She knew how much they troubled him, these killings. It was always worse with a serial killer. The longer you took to catch him, the more people died. In this case young women. Young, fresh-faced prostitutes trying to eke a living in this new, money-driven China. Every new killing was like an accusation of failure. Li’s failure. And eventually the guilt would get to him, and he would start to feel responsible for every death. Like he had killed them himself. Like now.

Zhengyi Road was empty as he cycled north in the dark beneath the trees, dry leaves crunching under his tyres. Up ahead, in the brightly lit East Changan Avenue, the first traffic of the day was already cruising the boulevard: buses packed with pale, sleepy faces, taking workers to factories across town; trucks on the first stretch of long journeys on new roads, carrying the industrial produce of the north to the rice fields of the south; office workers in private cars getting in ahead of the rush hour. Where once the cycle lanes would have been choked with early morning commuters, only a few hardy souls now braved the cold on their bicycles. Car ownership was soaring. Public transport had improved beyond recognition – new buses, a new underground line, a light rail system. The bicycle, once the most common mode of transport in Beijing, was rapidly disappearing. An outmoded transport.

At least, that was what the municipal government thought. They had issued an edict to every police station demanding a response time to all incidents of just twelve minutes, an edict well nigh impossible to achieve given the gridlock that seized up the city’s road system for most of the day. Some stations had brought in motor scooters, but the municipal authority had refused to license them. And, almost as an afterthought, had also denied officers permission to attend incidents on bicycles. A return to the bike would be a retrograde step, they said. This was the new China. And so police cars sat in traffic jams, and average response times remained thirty minutes or longer.

Li had a healthy disregard for edicts. If it was quicker by bike, he took his bike, as he had done for nearly twenty years. As section chief he always had a vehicle at his disposal, but he still preferred to cycle to and from work and get motorised only when required. And no one was about to tell the head of Beijing’s serious crime squad that he could not ride his bike if he wanted to. This morning, however, as an icy wind blew down Changan Avenue from the west and cut clean through his quilted jacket, he might have preferred to have been sitting behind the wheel of a warm Santana. But that wasn’t something he would ever have admitted. Even to himself.

He tucked his head down and pedalled east into the heart of the upmarket Jianguomen district of the city, a flyover carrying him across the Second Ring Road, past a towering blue-lit section of restored city wall. He could see the floodlights illuminating the new City Hall building just to the south. The roar of traffic and exhaust fumes rose up to greet him from below. He quite consciously avoided the thought of the scene that awaited him. They had told him she was the fourth. And with the previous three, whatever his experience and imagination had prepared him for, it had not been enough.

Half a dozen police vehicles were pulled up on the sidewalk at the entrance to the Silk Street Market, engines idling, exhaust fumes rising into the cold morning air. There was a forensics van from Pau Jü Hutong, and Li recognised Pathologist Wang’s car parked up beside the body bus from the morgue. It must have broken all speed limits on empty roads to get there before Li, all the way from the new pathology facility out on the northwest perimeter, near the Badaling Expressway. Another planning coup by the municipal government. By the time a detective got there and back, it could take him the best part of a day to attend an autopsy.

The police activity had attracted a large crowd: local residents, curious commuters on their way to work. Numbers had already swelled to over a hundred and were still growing. Not even subzero temperatures could diminish the eternal curiosity of the Chinese. Two dozen uniformed police officers made sure they stayed behind the black and yellow crime scene tape that whipped and hummed in the wind. Li saw the red digital display on the clock tower flash up a temperature of minus six centigrade. He held up his maroon Public Security ID and pushed his bike through the onlookers. A cold-looking officer with a pinched red face saluted and lifted the tape to let him through. Two hundred metres up the alley, Li could see the photographer’s lights illuminating the spot where the body had been found. A bunch of detectives and forensics officers stood around it, stamping to keep warm. As Li approached, someone spotted him coming, and they moved aside to let him through, opening up like the curtain on a stage to reveal a scene that looked as if it had been set for maximum theatrical effect.

Wang Xing was crouched beside the body, making a careful examination, latexed fingers already sticky with blood. He turned his face towards Li, pale and bloodless, like a mask from a Peking Opera, and for once had nothing to say.

The girl lay on her back, head turned towards her left shoulder, revealing a seven-inch gash across her throat. Blood had pooled around her head like a ghastly halo. Her face had been so savagely slashed it would be almost impossible to make a visual identification. Her black leather jacket lay open, revealing a white, blood-spattered blouse beneath it. The top few buttons of the blouse had been undone, but it did not otherwise appear to have been disturbed. The girl’s arms lay by her side, palms up. Her left leg extended in a line with her body, her right leg was bent at the hip and the knee. Her skirt had been cut open and pulled away to expose the abdomen which had been hacked open from the breastbone to the pubes. The intestines had been drawn out and dragged over the right shoulder, one two-foot piece completely detached and placed between the body and the left arm. What struck Li, apart from an extreme sense of shock, was the impression that this body had been very carefully laid out, as if by some grotesque design. There was something bizarrely unnatural about it. He turned away as he felt his stomach lurch and wished that he still smoked. As if reading his mind, someone held out an open pack. He looked up to see Detective Wu’s grim face, jaw chewing manically on the ubiquitous gum. Li waved him aside and stepped out of the circle of light. The image of the dead girl was burned by the photographer’s lights on to his retinas and he could not get rid of it. She could only have been nineteen or twenty. Just a child. He felt Wu’s presence at his shoulder, breathing smoke into the light. ‘Who found her?’

Wu spoke softly, as if to speak normally might disturb the dead. Li was surprised. Wu did not usually show such sensitivity. ‘Shift worker on his bike, taking what he thought was a short cut home.’

Li frowned. ‘He didn’t know they’d fenced off the road at the other end?’

Wu shrugged. ‘Apparently not, Chief. He almost ran over her. You can see his tyre tracks in the blood. They’ve taken him to hospital suffering from shock.’

‘Did you get a statement?’

‘Detective Zhao’s gone with him.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘We also spoke to the PLA guard at the embassy end. He was on duty all night.’

Li looked back up the alley. It could only have been a hundred metres. Maybe less. ‘And?’

‘Heard nothing.’

Li shook his head. Still the girl was there. Every time he blinked. Every time he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. ‘Do we know who she is?’

‘Found her ID card in her purse, along with a couple of hundred yuan. Her name’s Guo Huan. She’s eighteen years old. Lives in Dongcheng District, not that far from Section One.’ He carefully removed an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light for Li to see. ‘We also found this …’ Trapped between the sheets of clear plastic was what looked like a cutting from a newspaper or magazine. Li took it and held it to catch the spill-off light from the photographer’s lamps, and saw that it was a two-line ad from the personal columns of one of Beijing’s what’s-on magazines. Cute Chinese Girl looks for Mr Right. I am slim, well-educated and work in antiques. Please send me e-mail. Or telephone. Thinly disguised code for a prostitute seeking customers. There was an e-mail address and a cellphone number. Wu blew smoke through his nostrils like dragonfire. ‘He’s making a fool of us, this guy, Chief. We’ve got to get him.’

‘We’ve got to get him,’ Li snapped, ‘not because he’s making a fool of us, but because he’s killing young girls.’ He turned back towards the body as Pathologist Wang stepped away from it, peeling off his bloody gloves and dropping them in a plastic sack. As was his habit, he had an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips. He bent towards the flame of Wu’s proffered lighter, and as he took the first drag Li saw that his hand was trembling.

Characteristically Wang would make some smart quip, or literary allusion, after examining a body at a crime scene. His way of coping. But this morning, ‘Shit,’ was all he said.

Li braced himself. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

‘I never saw anything like it,’ Wang said, and there was a tremor, too, in his voice. ‘And I’ve seen some shit, Chief, you know that.’

‘We all have.’

Wang’s dark eyes burned with a curious intensity. ‘This guy’s insane. A twenty-four-carat maniac.’ He stabbed at his mouth with his cigarette and drew on it fiercely. ‘A similar pattern to the others. Strangled. I can’t tell till autopsy if she was dead when he cut her throat. Unconscious certainly, and lying on the ground. He would have been kneeling on her right side, cutting from left to right so that the blood from the left carotid artery would flow away from him. The facial stuff …’ he shook his head and took another pull at his cigarette. ‘She was dead when he did that. And the internal stuff.’ He looked at Li very directly. ‘She’s a mess in there. From what I can see, it’s not just the womb he’s taken this time. There’s a kidney gone as well.’

‘Organ theft?’ Wu asked.

The pathologist shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Not in these conditions. And it wasn’t surgically removed. Both the uterus and the kidney were hacked out. He may have some anatomical knowledge, but he’s certainly no doctor. He’s a butcher.’

‘Maybe literally,’ Li said.

‘Maybe,’ Wang agreed. ‘But even a butcher would use a knife with more care. This was uncontrolled. Frenzied.’

‘How sure are you it is the same killer?’ Li asked.

‘Completely,’ Wang said, reversing his usual reticence to commit himself to anything. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. He held it up to the light, and Li saw the half-inch remains of a brown Russian cheroot. ‘If we get as good a DNA sample off this as we got off the others, we’ll know for certain.’

The sun sneaked and glanced and angled its way off windows in high rise apartments and office blocks as it lifted off the eastern horizon and beamed directly along the east-west boulevards of the Beijing grid system. As it rose, it coloured the sky blue. A painfully clear sky, free from pollution or mist, dipping to pale orange and yellow along its eastern fringe. A silvery sliver of moon was caught falling in the west behind the purple-hued mountains Li’s breath billowed and wreathed around his head as he pedalled slowly north, weaving through the traffic along Chaoyangmen Nanxiao Da Jie.

Everywhere the building work went on, rising up behind green-clad scaffolding from the rubble of the old city. Cranes stalked the skies overhead, the roar of diggers and pneumatic drills already filling the early morning air. Most of the street stalls he had cycled past for years were gone; the hawkers peddling hot buns and sweet potatoes from sparking braziers, the old lady feeding taxi drivers from her big tureen of soup, the jian bing sellers. New pavements had been laid, new trees planted. And all along Dongzhimen, east of Section One, new apartment blocks lined the street where just a year before squads of men equipped only with hammers had begun knocking down the walls of the old siheyuan courtyards which had characterised Beijing for centuries. It was cleaner, fresher, and there was no doubt that life for ordinary Beijingers was improving faster than it had done in five thousand years. But, still, Li missed the old city. He was unsettled by change.

So it was comforting for him to know that Mei Yuan was still at the corner of Dongzhimen where she had sold jian bing from her bicycle stall for years. During the demolition and construction work she had been forced to move to the opposite corner of the Dongzhimen-Chaoyangmen intersection. And then she had faced opposition to her return from the owners of a new restaurant built on her old corner. It was a lavish affair, with large picture windows and red-tiled canopies sweeping out over the sidewalk, brand-new red lanterns dancing in the breeze. Street hawkers, they told her, had no place here now. Besides, she was putting off their customers. She would have to find somewhere else to sell her peasant pancakes. Li had paid them a quiet visit. Over a beer, which the owner had been only too anxious to serve him, Li had pointed out that Mei Yuan had a licence to sell jian bing wherever she wanted. And since the officers of Section One of the Criminal Invest