He went out on to the landing to wait for the forensics guys to come up the stairs and ask them to give her a few minutes. And they stood around in silence, smoking and waiting. It was nearly ten minutes before the girl came out. ‘Her computer,’ she said. ‘She always kept a laptop on the coffee table beside the big armchair. It’s gone. And I can’t find any of her disks anywhere.’
Li was glad of the cold air in his face and his lungs as he stepped out with the girl into the yellow autumn sunshine. The wind tugged at their clothes and stung their skin.
She said, ‘Will you need someone to identify her?’
‘Yes.’ He thought about Bill Hart, or perhaps Professor Hu. ‘But you don’t have to worry about that.’
‘I’d like to do it,’ she said.
Li closed his eyes. He saw the gash in her neck, the gaping wounds on each side of her head where her ears had been hacked off. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’
‘I want to,’ the girl insisted. ‘One minute she’s there. My whole life. The next she’s gone. And I don’t even get the chance to say goodbye to her? I want to see her. I want that chance.’
‘Okay.’ Li nodded. There was no point in trying to dissuade her. He knew that people often needed to see the body. A confirmation of death. As if somehow they can’t believe unless they see. It was not a need he shared. He had seen enough bodies in his life to know that they were nothing but empty receptacles, that the person who had once animated them was long gone. And that it was better to remember them as they were. As it was, he knew that this girl’s last and lasting image of her lover would be one of horror, one that would taint every other memory she had of her for the rest of her days. And he grieved for them both.
Chapter Seven
I
Li arrived at the pathology centre off the Badaling Expressway shortly before eleven. He pulled in beside a Beijing Jeep from Section One, and saw Wu standing smoking in the doorway, waiting for him.
‘Hey, Chief.’ Wu pushed his shades back on his forehead, threw away his cigarette and followed him into the lobby and along the corridor to the changing rooms.
Li said, ‘Did you turn up anything at the Academy?’
‘Not a thing, Chief. I talked to all the students and staff who worked with her. No one had a bad word to say about her.’
I never knew anyone who wasn’t madly in love with her after five minutes.
‘And there just doesn’t seem any reason why anyone would want to steal those computers and files,’ Wu was saying. ‘The computer equipment wasn’t even new. You’d only get a handful of yuan for that stuff on the black market. And like the security guy said, it was a pro job. Why would they want to steal a lot of old junk?’
Li hung up his coat and slipped a green surgical gown over his shirt. ‘When we figure that out, we might know why she was killed.’ He pulled a shower cap over his head. ‘Someone broke into her apartment and took her laptop.’
Wu was sitting pulling elasticated covers over his shoes. He raised one eyebrow. ‘You still think she was killed by the Ripper? I mean, the same guy who killed those other women?’
‘I know it doesn’t make sense, Wu, but it’s hard to call it any other way. How else do we explain the letter promising to cut off the ears of the next victim, and then Pan turning up with her ears removed? And then there’s the trademark cutting of the throat. The Russian cheroot.’
He looked at Wu, who could only shrug an acknowledgement. ‘I don’t know, Chief. There’s so many inconsistencies. Maybe…maybe the other murders were just a smokescreen — to confuse us, to obscure the real reason for killing Professor Pan. Maybe she’s what it’s all really about.’
Li stopped to consider the idea. ‘It’s a hell of an elaborate smokescreen,’ he said. ‘But it’s a thought, Wu. It’s a thought.’
He pulled plastic covers over his shoes. Regulations in the new facility. Everyone attending an autopsy had to wear protective clothing. They took cotton masks from the locker and pocketed them for later use. It had been established that bone dust breathed in during the cutting of the skull with an oscillating saw, could carry viral particles, including AIDS. These days no one was taking any chances. Although Li thought it unlikely that a woman involved in a long-term relationship with another woman would have AIDS.
They went back out into the corridor and turned toward 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 toward 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.