Margaret knew that this was painful for Li, too. It almost replicated his sister’s story. She supposed that it was a universal story in China, a tragedy that got played out in nearly every family.
Li said, ‘He reckoned their relationship was never quite the same after that. They’d had a furious row once and she had called him a murderer, the killer of their unborn child.’ Li shook his head. ‘I think that’s left a scar on him that will never heal. Poor bastard.’ He looked at Margaret, but he knew immediately that she was somewhere else. There was a strange burning quality in her eyes, and the colour had risen high on her cheeks. ‘What is it?’
She looked at him now, with something like pain in her expression. ‘I fucked up, Li,’ she said. ‘It’s been there in front of me the whole time and I never saw it.’
He was perplexed. ‘What do you mean?’
Her hands were shaking as she clutched his arm. ‘I want to get the bodies out of the refrigerator and back on to the table – now,’ she said.
‘What?’ Li was incredulous. ‘At this time of night!’
‘Right now,’ she said.
III
The sweat beaded across her forehead and was instantly chilled by the low working temperature of the autopsy room. It felt cold and clammy on her hot skin. Her eyes were burning with fatigue, dry and gritty. She wondered what time it was. She had been in here, it seemed, for hours, ignoring the simmering resentment of tired mortuary assistants called from their beds to move the bodies around. On the table in front of her lay the uterus and pelvic organs of the last of the victims, the remaining body parts still in their bag laid out on a gurney. The womb was the same familiar pink-tan in colour. At the bottom end, where it opened into the vagina, Margaret saw the tell-tale scarring of the endometrium. Something made her look up, and she caught Li leaning against the door watching her.
‘What’s the time?’ she asked.
‘Four a.m.’
‘Jesus.’ She had been in there for almost five hours.
‘Are you nearly done?’
She nodded. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Having a stand-up row with Dr Lan. He takes exception to me opening up
his
mortuary and calling out
his
staff in the middle of the night without reference to
him
. I do not know who called him, but someone did. He does not like getting out of his bed at four in the morning. He is pretty pissed.’
‘I’m pretty pissed, too,’ Margaret said. ‘And I haven’t even been to bed.’
Li smiled weakly. He was also tired. ‘Who are you pissed at this time?’
‘Myself,’ she said bitterly. ‘For not seeing this before, for not even thinking of it.’ She looked at him. ‘You know, it’s that thing of too much information obscuring the obvious.’ She laughed, but it was an empty laugh. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I wasn’t even looking in the right place.’
He crossed to the table, eaten up by curiosity. ‘Are you going to tell me now what it is you have found?’
She smiled. ‘The answer to a riddle.’
He frowned. ‘What riddle?’
‘A riddle that Mei Yuan asked me to pass on to you. Only I didn’t, because she said not to tell you until I had worked it out for myself. Then I would realise the importance of how the question is framed.’
‘So when did you figure it out?’
‘In the atrium outside the theatre. I could have kicked myself for being stupid enough not to see it before.’
‘I thought it was this case you were having some revelation about.’
‘It was both. They’re one and the same thing, really.’
Li scowled. He could not get his mind around this, especially at four in the morning. ‘Do you want to tell me what the riddle was?’
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘imagine you’re a bus driver in Beijing …’ And she took him through the whole trip from the Friendship Store, past Wangfujing Street and Tiananmen Square to Xidan, picking up and dropping off passengers en route. She changed the numbers, made them up as she went along. She knew it didn’t matter. But she watched him doing the mental arithmetic. ‘All right? You follow all that?’ He nodded. ‘Okay, so what height was the bus driver?’
She could see that his reaction had been the same as hers, and for the life of her could not imagine how she had been so easily fooled. He shook his head. ‘You cannot know the height of the driver.’
She laughed. Of course you can. And she repeated the question. ‘Imagine
you’re
a bus driver in Beijing …’
He groaned. ‘I always fall for these. It is typical of Mei Yuan.’
‘But the point is,’ Margaret said, ‘the answer was there all along, staring you in the face.’ She laughed. ‘But you’re too busy doing the arithmetic, getting distracted by all the numbers, and the names of the stops. So you don’t see what’s obvious.’
Li looked at the bivalved womb on the autopsy table. ‘So what’s obvious here that you didn’t see?’
‘The thing that connects them, that ties them all together beyond any possible coincidence, that I never even thought to look for. Until now.’
‘Better late than never. Do you want to tell me?’
She folded the uterus over, as it would have been before bisection. ‘I have this little trick,’ she said, ‘when I’m doing an autopsy.’ She took a pair of forceps and demonstrated how she would slip them up through the cervix into the body of the womb. ‘I can then use the forceps as a guide for my knife so that I can draw it up through the womb and cut it easily in half. Of course, it only works if the subject is female.’ She grinned, but got no response from Li and shrugged. ‘Anyway, with these ladies, in a couple of cases I couldn’t get the forceps in, and when I finally got the uterus open I found that there were adhesions on the inner lining that scarred the uterus closed.’
‘I remember,’ Li said. ‘You thought maybe the damage had been done in childbirth.’
‘That’s right. But there’s something else that can cause this kind of scarring.’ And with her right index finger she traced the adhesions on the endometrium in front of her. ‘It was you telling me about the acrobat having the abortion that made me think of it. And then I remembered Dr Wang in Beijing commenting on similar scarring in the womb of the body found there. He said he’d seen it frequently as a result of careless abortion.’
‘And that’s what caused the scarring that you found?’
Margaret nodded. ‘Suction curettage is probably the commonest form of abortion. And that’s what’s been employed here. A kind of freshwater weed called
Laminaria
is usually inserted into the cervix to soften or ripen it, and allow passage of the suction tool.’ She glanced up and saw the look of disgust on Li’s face. She said, ‘You guys don’t know the half of what we women have to go through.’ And although her delivery was light, there was something deeper there that caused Li to look at her for a moment.
‘I’m not sure I want to,’ Li said.
‘Well, in this case you have no choice,’ Margaret said. ‘And neither did this poor girl. Whoever performed her abortion was too vigorous with the suction tool, and instead of sucking out just the foetus along with the placenta and the superficial lining, they removed a whole portion of the lining of the womb, causing it to scar closed. She probably couldn’t have had another baby even if she’d wanted.’
Li looked thoughtful. ‘How many of the victims had scars like this?’
Margaret looked sheepish. ‘Nearly half of them.’ She shrugged. ‘The only excuse I can offer is that I didn’t perform all the autopsies, and the womb was pretty far from the focus of attention. Also, it
would
have been possible for complications in childbirth to have resulted in scarring like this.’
Li brushed aside her guilty apologies. ‘Only half of them? You said you’d found something that connected them all.’
‘I have,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to come through to the other room.’
On the tables in the room next door, Margaret had laid out the wombs and the other pelvic organs – the urinary bladder, ovaries and Fallopian tubes – of another two victims. It looked to Li like a bizarre collection of human pieces. The bodies from which they had been taken were laid out inside their open body-bags on gurneys beside each table.
Margaret moved to the nearest table. She said, ‘Another abortion technique is called D & C. Dilation and curettage. The cervix is softened in the same way, but then the foetus and the uterus are literally scraped out using a long-handled sharp spoon, a little like an ice-cream scoop, but smaller than an old fancy sugar-cube spoon.’
She heard Li exhale through his teeth. ‘Do I really need this detail?’ he asked.
‘Yup. It’s important.’ She was not prepared to make any allowances. ‘The trouble with this procedure is that it has a much higher complication rate. There’s a greater danger of perforation and haemorrhage at the time it is carried out, and as a result, more infections afterwards.’ She held open one of the tubes leading from the womb. ‘This is one of the uterine, or fallopian tubes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes, if the womb is infected after the D & C, the infection can travel up the uterine tubes and scar them closed. That’s what’s happened here.’
Li leaned forward and saw the distinctive pattern of scarring in the bisected tube.
Margaret said, ‘The pathologist who did the autopsy on this woman would have had no reason to consider it significant. And, anyway, this kind of scarring is more commonly caused by a number of venereal diseases.’ She moved away to the other table. ‘Now this poor woman,’ she said, ‘suffered at the hands of the Japanese.’ Li’s frown caused her to smile. ‘They invented the process,’ she said. ‘Yet another crude, and quite brutal, way of ending a life. You’d think in this high-tech age we’d have evolved more sophisticated techniques. But then, since it’s usually men who invent these things, it’s probably not very high on their list of priorities.’ She flattened out the bivalved uterus and ran her finger along an irregularly healed scar on the cervix. ‘One of the tell-tale signs,’ she said. ‘And you can see up here on the inside of the uterine wall this thinned, tough, pale area. That’s another.’ She sighed. ‘What’s happened here is that the fluid has been drawn out of the bag of water around the foetus and replaced by a concentrated salt solution. That has caused the foetus and placenta to spontaneously deliver about forty-eight hours after the infusion.’
‘What’s caused the scarring?’
Margaret shrugged. ‘There are various complications that can cause the cervix to be scarred like this, but this pale area inside the body of the uterus … that’s a result of some of the salt solution escaping into the muscular uterine wall, effectively killing it.
Myometrial necrosis
, it’s called.’
She pushed her head back and then stretched it left and right to try to take some of the tension out of her neck. She slipped off her mask and shower cap and moved away to the sink, removing her gown and her gloves. Li followed her and leaned back against the stainless steel worktop. ‘So how many of our victims showed scarring like this?’
Margaret said flatly, ‘All the remaining women had either one or other of these procedures performed on them.’
Li thought about it for a long time. ‘A lot of women have abortions in China, Margaret,’ he said.
She turned to look at him. ‘About three hundred thousand a year in Shanghai,’ she said. ‘That’s the figure that guy at Director Hu’s banquet came up with the other night, wasn’t it?’
‘Cui Feng.’ Li nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘And there are what, maybe six million women in Shanghai?’
Li shrugged. ‘About that, I guess.’
‘So on a very crude calculation, over a ten-year period, fifty per cent of the women in this city will have had abortions. So out of, say, twenty women picked at random you’d expect half of them to have had an abortion. Of course, that’s just an average. In some groups there would be seven or eight. In others there might be thirteen, even fourteen.’ She paused to let her arithmetic sink in. ‘Here we have nineteen women, if we include the girl in Beijing, and every single one of them has had an abortion. Li Yan, that’s statistically impossible.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
‘You do
not
run this department, Deputy Section Chief.
I
do!’ Section Chief Huang’s anger showed itself in the tiny flecks of spittle that gathered around his lips. He stood glaring at Li from behind his desk.
Li closed the door and said quietly, ‘I was put in charge of this investigation.’
‘That does not give you the authority to go pulling
my
people out of their beds in the middle of the night and embarking on a course of investigation that has not even been discussed with me.’
Li felt his patience waning. He said, ‘I can’t win, can I? Yesterday the Procurator General tells me if I don’t speed up the investigation it’s my neck on the block. I make a breakthrough during the night and you want me to wait till you’ve had breakfast before I follow it up.’ He took out a cigarette.
‘Don’t light that in here,’ Huang said.
Reluctantly, Li slipped the cigarette back in its packet. His eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He glared back at Huang. ‘If you don’t get out of my face, Huang, I’m taking this to Director Hu, and I’m going to tell him I can’t pursue his investigation because you’re obstructing me.’
Huang snorted his derision. ‘You think the Mayor’s policy adviser will see you at
your
request? Director Hu sees you when
he
wants to see you. And in the meantime you’ll deal with me and Procurator General Yue, like it or not.’ He searched on his desk for a sheet of paper. He found it and waved it at Li. It had scribbed notes on it. ‘I had a call last night from the Chief of Section One. It seems you went and ruffled a few feathers at the Black Rain Club.’ He breathed stertorously through his nose. ‘That is not how we deal with these people here?’
‘Oh, really?’ Li said. ‘So what do you do, roll over and let them shit on you?’
Huang’s eyes burned with anger and dislike. ‘You are walking on seriously thin ice here, Li. In Shanghai, insubordination and abuse towards a senior officer are usually rewarded with instant demotion, if not dismissal.’