The Killing Room by Peter May Page A

here.’
    Li was not entirely surprised. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.
    ‘Not exactly.’ She seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Just that some people figure we don’t need help from Beijing to solve crimes in Shanghai.’
    ‘And your boss?’
    She shrugged. ‘Don’t take it personally. He’s a little distracted these days.’
    She pulled up outside a covered entrance opposite a wall on which large gold characters urged officers to extremes of courage and dedication in their pursuit of justice. They took the lift up to the third floor where pale-faced detectives wilted under fluorescent lights in the pursuit of the killer or killers of eighteen women.
    The detectives’ room was crowded, a buzz of telephones and conversations, the clack of keyboards, the hum of computer terminals. Officers looked up curiously from their desks as Mei-Ling led Li through to the office of the Section Chief. The door stood ajar. She knocked and Li followed her in. The room was in darkness except for the bright ring of light cast on the desk by an Anglepoise lamp. A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the desk speaking on the telephone. The reflected light from the desk cast a slightly sinister uplight on his shadowed face. He flicked nervous watery eyes towards Li and Mei-Ling as they entered.
    ‘So what’s the prognosis?’ he asked his caller, turning his back on the two deputy section chiefs. ‘Well, when will you know?’ The response clearly did not please him and he said curtly, ‘Well, call me when you’ve talked to him.’ He hung up abruptly and turned back to Li and Mei-Ling, and Li saw that he was a good-looking man of about forty-five, with thick hair swept back from a square face. But he looked drawn and tired.
    ‘How is she?’ Mei-Ling asked softly.
    He shook his head. ‘Not good.’
    Mei-Ling nodded and said, ‘Tsuo, this is Deputy Section Chief Li from Beijing. Mr Li, this is my boss, Huang Tsuo, Chief of Section Two.’ As the two men shook hands she added, ‘We’re roughly the equivalent of your Section One, investigating serious crime, murder and robbery.’
    Huang’s handshake was cold and cursory. He barely met Li’s eyes before he turned to his deputy. ‘Mei-Ling, I want a full briefing meeting when Mr Li and I get back.’ He lifted a briefcase from his desk and took his coat from a stand by the door.
    Mei-Ling was caught off-balance. ‘Get back? Where are you going?’
    ‘We have an appointment with the Mayor’s policy adviser.’ And he ushered Li out of the door.
    *
    People’s Square, which once formed part of the old Shanghai racecourse, was ablaze with lights reflecting from every wet surface, as if it had just been freshly painted. The drum-shaped museum on the south side glowed orange. Directly opposite, and dominating the square, was the huge floodlit home of the Shanghai Municipal Government, a monumental white building studded by row upon rising row of featureless windows. It was flanked on each side by bizarrely shaped glass buildings lit from within and capped by fantastical sweeping roofs. Vast skyscrapers, washed in coloured light, crowded all around the square. Li and Huang stepped out of their car at the foot of steps leading up to the marbled entrance of the government building, and Li was immediately assaulted by a cacophony of sound: the roar of traffic and honking of horns; pop music blasting out of shops along the east side; the soundtrack of a movie playing on a giant TV screen that filled the whole of one side of an office block on the south-east corner; a foxtrot playing from a ghetto-blaster on the steps of the museum, a gathering of elderly couples dancing incongruously across the concourse below it. They didn’t appear to mind the rain which wept still out of the night sky. The metallic voice of a conductress rang out from the loudspeaker of a passing bus. A taxi pulled up across the road, and as the driver reset his flag a soft electronic female voice said in