‘So fire me,’ Li said, and he locked eyes with Huang and wouldn’t look away. His position as head of the investigation was an issue he was determined to force. Director Hu had appointed him over Huang’s head, and he was not about to let the Section Chief undermine his authority because of petty jealousy and internal politics.
Huang was spared having to respond by a knock at the door. It opened and Mei-Ling entered. She was immediately aware of the charged atmosphere that filled the room and closed the door quickly behind her. She looked at Huang. ‘What’s up, Chief?’
Huang still held Li’s gaze. ‘Not only does our friend from Beijing drag half the pathology department out of their beds in the middle of the night, but then he calls in the entire detective shift two hours early and embarks on an investigation of a personal friend of Director Hu.’
This was all news to Mei-Ling. She looked at Li in amazement. ‘What’s going on? Why didn’t you call me?’
‘I needed foot soldiers, not generals,’ Li said.
She was clearly not pleased. ‘Do you want to tell me what it was that was so important you had to get everyone else out of their beds but me?’
Li sighed. He did not need hostility on two fronts. ‘Margaret made a breakthrough last night. She found something that linked all the victims.’
Mei-Ling frowned. ‘What?’
‘Every single one of them had had an abortion.’
‘Oh, had they?’ she said. And she digested the information for a moment. Then, ‘So how come this “breakthrough” wasn’t made at autopsy?’
But Li was determined not to be deflected. ‘That’s not important right now. What matters is that these women could not have been picked at random. And if the thing they have in common is that they’ve all had abortions, then that puts the investigation on a whole different footing.’
Mei-Ling was still struggling to keep up. ‘How’s that?’
‘I had the guys check with the relatives of four of the five girls we’ve identified so far. All four had their abortions done at clinics belonging to Cui Feng. Remember him? We met him at Director Hu’s banquet.’
Huang cut in, ‘So now he wants to go harassing a personal friend of the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ He turned on Li again. ‘There is
nothing
unusual about these women having had abortions carried out at Cui’s clinics. His organisation performs most of the abortions in Shanghai.’
‘In the name of the sky!’ Li let his exasperation escape through clenched teeth. ‘I am not suggesting there is anything sinister in that. I want to ask Cui if he will give us access to his files. We can then check them against the missing persons files and find out which of them had had abortions. That way there’s a good chance we can narrow down the identities of the other dead girls.’
Mei-Ling drew a deep breath and looked at Huang. ‘It does make sense, Chief.’
But Li was wound up now and didn’t want to let it go. ‘I mean, what is this guy anyway, untouchable? Just because he’s a pal of Director Hu?’
Huang turned a very dangerous look on Li. His voice was low. ‘Cui Feng is a Party member and a very influential member of this community,’ he said. ‘I will not have his reputation impugned in any way by this department. Is that understood?’
There was a tense silence, broken finally by Mei-Ling. ‘But we can ask him to let us see his files, can’t we, Chief?’
Huang held Li’s eyes for several more seconds before tearing them away to focus on Mei-Ling. There was almost a sense of hurt in them, a feeling perhaps of betrayal that she had taken Li’s side rather than his. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘You can ask to see his files.’
*
The traffic was backing up along Fuxing Road from roadworks outside the Music Conservatory. Li and Mei-Ling had sat nursing their own thoughts in the car all the way south and west from 803. The tension between Li and Huang had transferred itself to Mei-Ling. She was brooding darkly behind the wheel of the car. She glanced at Li as they sat idling in the traffic, fumes rising all about them in the rain, only the sound of windscreen wipers scraping back and forth breaking their silence. ‘So where is she now?’ she said at last.
Li dragged himself from his private thoughts. ‘Who?’
‘Margaret.’
‘She’s gone back to her hotel to try and get some sleep. She was up most of the night.’
‘Oh, what a shame,’ Mei-Ling said in a tone that dripped with sarcasm. ‘Maybe if she’d spotted these abortions in the first place she wouldn’t have needed to go catching up on her beauty sleep.’
For Li it was the last straw. He turned his aggression full on Mei-Ling. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you and Margaret have got against each other, but I’m fed up being caught between two women eating vinegar. I want this jealousy to stop. And I want it to stop now! We’ve got nineteen women here hacked to death by some maniac with a blade, I think we owe it to them to keep ourselves focused on catching their killer. Don’t you?’
Mei-Ling was shocked, both by his anger and by his more than implied criticism. She reacted coldly. ‘Of course,’ she said.
But Li was tired, his resistance low, and there were other things he wanted to get off his chest. ‘And that policewoman you sent to pick up Xinxin … ? I don’t want her going near the kid again.’
Mei-Ling flashed him an angry look. ‘Why?’
‘Because she refused to let Margaret near her, and scared Xinxin half to death. In future I’ll make my own arrangements to have her collected. All right?’
Mei-Ling’s cheeks reddened. Anger was mixed now with hurt, and she retreated into herself like a wounded animal. She nodded and kept her eyes fixed firmly on the traffic in the road ahead. They did not speak again until she turned the car into the car park outside the red-roofed villa that housed Cui Feng’s central clinic.
The clinic was set behind a high gated wall and a profusion of densely leafed trees in a quiet residential street on the edge of the consular district. This had once been the heart of the old French Concession. Elegant villas sat brooding in discreet isolation behind walls and fences. Private cars were parked along secluded, tree-lined avenues, with only the odd cyclist whirring past on a rickety bicycle. What had once been the garden of the villa was paved, and half a dozen cars sat backed up against the wall. A small private ambulance was parked under a canopy supported by two pillars above the main entrance. The windows had all been double-glazed, and the view into their interior was obscured by cream-coloured vertical blinds. A brass plaque on the gate revealed in Chinese and English that this was the SHANGHAI WORLD CLINIC.
A nurse in a white, starched uniform led them up thickly carpeted stairs and along a passageway hung with original scroll paintings by famous Chinese artists. It felt more like an opulent private residence than a medical clinic. They passed an oriental gentleman in a wheelchair being pushed by a male nurse, and then were shown into a large study with a sofa and two armchairs gathered around an original fireplace. There was a huge, leather-tooled desk in the bay window, stripes of watery daylight falling in through the blinds and lying across the contours of the captain’s chair that sat behind it. Cui Feng came around the desk as they entered. He wore an expensively cut dark suit and had the same gentle bedside manner of the family doctor that Li remembered from their first meeting at Director Hu’s banquet. Soft spoken and smiling, he shook their hands warmly, inviting them each to take an armchair. ‘It is a great pleasure to meet you again, Deputy Section Chiefs.’ He gave a small laugh at his plural abbreviation. ‘It is a great relief that you share a rank,’ he said, ‘or we could be here all day just addressing each other.’ He sat down on the edge of the settee and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and placed his hands together almost as if in prayer. ‘Now what can I do for you?’ he asked. ‘I understand that some of those poor women you dug up had abortions done at some of my clinics.’ And Li realised that Huang had already been on the phone to Cui to smooth the way for their arrival.
‘That’s right,’ Li said. ‘In fact all the victims have had abortions performed on them.’ He hesitated for the briefest of moments before adding, ‘Not very expertly, according to our pathologist. Otherwise it would have been very difficult to tell.’
But Cui was not ruffled. He said, ‘In that case, perhaps they were not all performed at my clinics. We operate to very high procedural standards.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Li said. ‘But since you perform most of the abortions in Shanghai, this seemed like a good place to start.’
‘Start what, exactly?’ Cui appeared uncomfortable for the first time.
Mei-Ling stepped in quickly to prevent Li from discomfiting him any further. ‘We were wondering, Mr Cui, if you would allow us access to your files so that we could cross-check them with the women on our missing persons file.’
He frowned. ‘What good would that do?’
‘It might help us narrow down the identities of the remaining victims,’ Li said.
Cui pursed his lips and turned this over briefly in his mind. Then, ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I can see no harm in it. But since our files are normally confidential, perhaps I could appoint one of my staff to liaise with your people and do the actual comparisons. That way we could continue to maintain the confidentiality of our patients.’
Li was not happy with this proposal. He wanted direct access to the files and was about to say so. But he glanced at Mei-Ling and picked up her almost imperceptible shake of the head, Huang’s words of warning about Cui’s membership of the Party and his influential friends still ringing in his ears. So he forced a reluctant nod of agreement instead. ‘That would be acceptable,’ he said.
‘Good.’ Cui relaxed and sat back in the settee. ‘You will have some tea.’ It was not so much a question as a statement. Li and Mei-Ling had no time to respond before there was a knock at the door and a young woman carried in a tray with a pot of jasmine tea and three cups of the most delicate bone china. She set it on a low table in front of the fireplace and filled the cups before making a small bow and hurrying out.
‘So do you actually perform abortions here at this clinic?’ Li asked.
‘Good Heavens, no,’ Cui said smiling at Li’s apparent naïveté. ‘The Shanghai World Clinic is exclusively for the use of foreign residents living in Shanghai.’ He laughed. ‘Generally very wealthy people whose companies provide comprehensive medical insurance. We Chinese might as well make the most of any ill-health that befalls them while they’re here, don’t you think?’
Li did not think that anyone should profit from ill-health, but he knew better than to say so. Instead he said, ‘And what kind of medical care do you provide, exactly?’
‘Oh,’ Cui said airily, ‘we can deal with anything from a broken toe to open heart surgery. We have a highly qualified and very experienced international team of doctors and nurses here. And if we don’t have the expertise in-house, we bring in consultants on a freelance basis.’
‘So the bulk of your patients are American, or European,’ Mei-Ling said.
Cui smiled and shook his head. ‘Actually no, Miss Nien. There are a number of North American or European joint-venture clinics in Shanghai which the Westerners seem to prefer. Perhaps they think that Chinese medicine only deals in acupuncture and tiger’s blood.’ There was the merest hint of a bitter edge to his voice. ‘Surprisingly, perhaps, most of our customers are Japanese.’ Li noticed his use of the word ‘customers’ rather than ‘patients’. It was clear that to Cui medicine was a business and illness an opportunity to make money. Cui said, ‘Would you like to see our facilities?’
Li had no desire to inspect the facilities. He disliked all things medical and had a morbid fear of hospitals, which perhaps owed more than a little to all the autopsies he had attended. But before he had a chance to decline the offer, Mei-Ling said, ‘Yes, we’d like that very much.’ Li had forgotten that she had studied medicine for four years, but he was still a little surprised by her apparent interest.
The clinic was on four floors, including a suite of rooms built into the roof, and a large basement which housed two operating theatres, as well as preparation and recovery rooms. A large elevator had been installed to take patients from operation in the basement to recovery in the attic, and all stops in between. There was a four-bed intensive care ward on the ground floor, as well as several luxurious single-bed rooms that made Li think more of a four-star hotel than a hospital. Each room had en-suite toilet facilities and satellite TV. Office and administration was on the first floor, with another four single-bed rooms. There were a further six bedrooms in the attic. ‘At any one time,’ Cui said, ‘we can accommodate fourteen patients as well as our four intensive care beds.’ But on their tour, Li had seen only a handful of patients. The clinic was far from full.
‘You don’t appear to be very busy,’ he said. For some reason he had begun to take a singular dislike to Mr Cui. He was altogether too smooth, too possessed.
Cui laughed. ‘Good health is bad for business, I’m afraid.’
No doubt, Li thought, the hundreds of thousands of abortions Cui carried out each year would subsidise any slump in business at his Shanghai World Clinic. He stretched out a hand to shake Cui’s. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Cui, for your help. We’ll send an officer over to liaise with your staff.’
Cui smiled beneficently, shaking both their hands. ‘Not at all, not at all. Anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask.’
In the car, Mei-Ling looked at Li and said, ‘You don’t like our Mr Cui very much, do you?’
Li looked at her, surprised, then conceded, ‘No, I don’t. Access to health care used to be everyone’s right in this country, not just a privilege afforded to the wealthy.’ He paused. ‘Was it that obvious?’
‘To me. But, then, I don’t like him that much either.’
‘Why’s that?’
She shrugged. ‘I hate to find myself agreeing with Margaret Campbell.’ She glanced at Li. ‘But much as I support the principle of the One Child Policy, it doesn’t feel right that someone should make money out of other people’s unhappiness.’
And Li remembered Margaret’s bold words to Cui’s face, accusing him of profiting from other people’s misery. He had been shocked at the time, and angry. Now he remembered her bluntness almost fondly. Margaret had no sense of tact or diplomacy, but at least whatever she presented to the world came from the heart.