turquoise, painted against the blackness of the night as if by a Disney animator. Across the river the Bund blazed in luminous splendour, architectural details picked out by carefully contrived lighting. And along the curve of the north bank, where cruise ships docked at the international passenger terminal, glass buildings fired up the night, competing with gigantic neon hoardings that burned ads for beer and cars and TVs into the sky. On the river, the lights of cruisers, ferries and barges cast broken reflections on choppy waters, while above them a brightly lit dirigible advertising cigarettes plied up and down between the coloured beams of powerful searchlights that raked randomly across the sky.
Li gaped at it in wonder. It did not seem quite real. Beijing had blazed with lights on the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, but it had been nothing like this. Mei-Ling smiled at him, as though he were some bumpkin up from the country. And in some ways he was. Beijing was the capital, the centre of art and culture in the north. But it was staid and conservative compared with the commercial excesses of the south. ‘It’s like this every night?’ he asked, wondering what the cost of it all must be.
She nodded. ‘Until ten. Then it’s lights out and the city comes to life in another way altogether.’ Which sounded ominous to Li, and for a moment he felt a fleeting insecurity. He missed the safe, comforting familiarity of Beijing. Shanghai was as alien to him as Hong Kong or Chicago had been.
Mei-Ling drove them back through the tunnel and up on to the Yan’an Viaduct, and they swept west through the city, turning then on to Nanbei Gaojia Road, another multi-lane viaduct that cut north to the long arc of the northern ring road. Li sat in silence, barely taking in the city lights or the long lines of commuter traffic. He thought of the eighteen women sliced up and laid out on trestle tables in the concrete tomb of an underground car park. Someone had murdered them, coldly and clinically, and then performed autopsies on the bodies before crudely dismembering them and freezing the parts. Then sometime within the past week, the frozen remains had been buried in a shallow grave on a building site where tons of concrete should have entombed them for eternity. There were similarities with the body they’d found in Beijing, although Li was not convinced yet that they had died by the same hand. But what he knew with absolute certainty was that when he went to bed tonight and closed his eyes, each and every one of them would be there, seared into his memory, sightless eyes appealing for him to find their killer. And the smell of their poor decaying bodies would be with him for days.
He had a thought and turned to Mei-Ling. ‘Whoever dumped the bodies knew that the site was about to be buried in concrete. That must narrow the numbers.’
She said, ‘The joint venture was big news here. Press and TV had been covering the story for days. Discounting children and old folk, that would narrow it down to about ten million people.’
The bell that dangled from the rear-view mirror chimed as Mei-Ling turned the Santana off the Zhongshan Beiyi expressway and then doubled back beneath the overhead road to turn right into the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. They stopped at a white-marble gatehouse opposite the large gold numerals, 803, mounted on an angled wall, and suspicious eyes peered out at them from behind brightly lit windows. Then a wave of recognition as Mei-Ling smiled out of the driver’s side, and the gate concertina-ed open to let them through stone columns into a paved courtyard bounded by well-kept flower beds and neatly trimmed trees. Raised on a plinth was an ebony bust of a famous Shanghai detective, Duanmu Hongyu, now deceased. Multi-storeyed pink-tiled buildings rose up on three sides.
Mei-Ling glanced hesitantly at Li, then said, ‘Don’t expect a very warm welcome in
Li gaped at it in wonder. It did not seem quite real. Beijing had blazed with lights on the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, but it had been nothing like this. Mei-Ling smiled at him, as though he were some bumpkin up from the country. And in some ways he was. Beijing was the capital, the centre of art and culture in the north. But it was staid and conservative compared with the commercial excesses of the south. ‘It’s like this every night?’ he asked, wondering what the cost of it all must be.
She nodded. ‘Until ten. Then it’s lights out and the city comes to life in another way altogether.’ Which sounded ominous to Li, and for a moment he felt a fleeting insecurity. He missed the safe, comforting familiarity of Beijing. Shanghai was as alien to him as Hong Kong or Chicago had been.
Mei-Ling drove them back through the tunnel and up on to the Yan’an Viaduct, and they swept west through the city, turning then on to Nanbei Gaojia Road, another multi-lane viaduct that cut north to the long arc of the northern ring road. Li sat in silence, barely taking in the city lights or the long lines of commuter traffic. He thought of the eighteen women sliced up and laid out on trestle tables in the concrete tomb of an underground car park. Someone had murdered them, coldly and clinically, and then performed autopsies on the bodies before crudely dismembering them and freezing the parts. Then sometime within the past week, the frozen remains had been buried in a shallow grave on a building site where tons of concrete should have entombed them for eternity. There were similarities with the body they’d found in Beijing, although Li was not convinced yet that they had died by the same hand. But what he knew with absolute certainty was that when he went to bed tonight and closed his eyes, each and every one of them would be there, seared into his memory, sightless eyes appealing for him to find their killer. And the smell of their poor decaying bodies would be with him for days.
He had a thought and turned to Mei-Ling. ‘Whoever dumped the bodies knew that the site was about to be buried in concrete. That must narrow the numbers.’
She said, ‘The joint venture was big news here. Press and TV had been covering the story for days. Discounting children and old folk, that would narrow it down to about ten million people.’
The bell that dangled from the rear-view mirror chimed as Mei-Ling turned the Santana off the Zhongshan Beiyi expressway and then doubled back beneath the overhead road to turn right into the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department. They stopped at a white-marble gatehouse opposite the large gold numerals, 803, mounted on an angled wall, and suspicious eyes peered out at them from behind brightly lit windows. Then a wave of recognition as Mei-Ling smiled out of the driver’s side, and the gate concertina-ed open to let them through stone columns into a paved courtyard bounded by well-kept flower beds and neatly trimmed trees. Raised on a plinth was an ebony bust of a famous Shanghai detective, Duanmu Hongyu, now deceased. Multi-storeyed pink-tiled buildings rose up on three sides.
Mei-Ling glanced hesitantly at Li, then said, ‘Don’t expect a very warm welcome in
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