Qian slowly closed the book. ‘Detective Wu is right,’ he said. ‘They are extracts from police and pathology reports. From nearly one hundred and twenty years ago.’
Every eye in the room was on him, every detective struggling to make sense of what he was saying.
‘I read a review yesterday of a book published for the first time in China. Even from the review I was struck by certain similarities. So I went out first thing this morning and bought it. And it became clear to me very quickly that I was looking at something more than coincidence.’ He held the book up. ‘The Murders of Jack the Ripper,’ he said. ‘The world’s first documented serial killer. He may have murdered as many as seven women in the streets of London, England, in the fall of 1888. And someone is replicating those murders in exact detail, right here in Beijing, one hundred and fifteen years on.’
Li felt the hairs rise up on the back of his neck.
Chapter Two
I
The perfume of the postmortem was a haunting scent. Usually it took Li hours to get the smell of it from his nostrils. Blood and decay, the smell of rotting food from the stomach, the stink of faeces from an open intestine, the almost sweet whiff of burning bone as the oscillating saw cut through the skull. Today he barely noticed. The mutilated corpse of Guo Huan lay on the autopsy table, empty of all her vital organs, chest prised open, the last of her body fluids slowly trickling away along the drainage channels and into a collecting bucket. It was cold enough in the autopsy room for his breath to cloud in front of him, but the chill that reached into his bones had nothing to do with the temperature.
When he and Wu arrived, Pathologist Wang had finished with the body and was breadloafing the brain. It was routine stuff. He had already examined the organs the killer had left him. Shortly he would start dictating his notes, and his assistants would reassemble the body as best they could, stitch it up with coarse twine and deliver it to the morgue for cold storage. There was no doubt about the cause of death.
Li looked at the young girl’s horribly slashed features. Her nose was almost completely severed. ‘Can’t you do anything about the face?’ he asked.
Wang looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’
‘She’ll have to be formally identified.’ He could not imagine how it must feel for a parent to look upon their own child in such a state. He did not want to imagine it.
‘Not a lot,’ Wang said, and he turned to slice through another half-inch section of brain.
Li had discarded his quilted jacket, and since they had arrived late had not donned the regulation protective clothing. He wore, instead, a long, heavy coat that he kept in the office. It dropped well below his knee. He had left the collar turned up against the cold. It had big pockets. He lifted the flap of one and took out Qian’s book. ‘Before you dictate your notes,’ he said to Wang, ‘I’d like to read you something.’
Wang glanced up, mildly curious. This was a departure, even for Li. ‘Something literary, perhaps?’ he asked. ‘Something from your uncle’s collection.’
‘Even older than that,’ Li said. He opened the book at a page he had folded over, and started to read.
‘The throat was cut across to the extent of about six or seven inches. A superficial cut commenced about an inch and a half below the lobe and about two-and-a-half inches below and behind the left ear and extended across the throat to about three inches below the lobe of the right ear. The big muscle of the throat was divided through on the left side. The large vessels on the left side of the neck were severed. The larynx was severed below the vocal cord. All the deep structures were severed to the bone, the knife marking intervertebral cartilages.’
He looked up and found Wang watching him, open mouthed.
Wu said, ‘You’ll catch flies.’
Wang snapped his mouth shut. ‘You had someone eavesdropping my autopsy,’ he said.
‘Wait,’ Li held up a finger and started reading again.
‘The skin was retracted through the whole of the cut in the abdomen, but the vessels were not clotted. Nor had there been any appreciable bleeding from the vessel. I draw the conclusion that the cut was made after death, and there would not be much blood on the murderer. The cut was made by someone on the right side of the body, kneeling below the middle of the body. The intestines had been detached to a large extent from the mesentery. About two feet of the colon was cut away. The sigmoid flexure was invaginated into the rectum very tightly.’
He looked up. ‘I’m going to skip a bit here.’ And then he continued,
‘The peritoneal lining was cut through on the left side and the left kidney carefully taken out and removed. The left renal artery was cut through. I should say that someone who knew the position of the kidney must have done it. The lining membrane over the uterus was cut through. The womb was cut through horizontally, leaving a stump of three-quarters of an inch. The rest of the womb had been taken away with some of the ligaments. The vagina and cervix of the womb was uninjured.’
He closed the book. ‘Is that about how it was? What you found during autopsy?’
‘What the fuck is this, Chief?’ Wang almost never swore. It made it all the more shocking when he did. ‘Did you have someone else look at the body before me?’
Li waggled the book. ‘This autopsy was carried out by an English physician called Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown. I just read you excerpts from a deposition he gave to an inquest into the murder of a forty-six-year-old prostitute called Catharine Eddowes in London in 1888.’
Wang shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Jack the Ripper,’ Wu said. ‘You probably never heard of him. But somebody has, and he’s copycatting his killings.’
Wang looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him,’ he said finally. ‘I attended a talk on the Ripper by an expert on the subject.’ He shook his head as if to try to clear it of some fog. ‘I never made the connection, though. It’s funny how detail escapes you.’ He looked at Li in wonder. ‘And yet I always had the strangest sense of déjà vu about these girls. Of course, he never went into quite that much detail.’
‘Who?’ Li asked.
‘I can’t remember his name,’ Wang said. ‘He was some retired English detective who’d written a book about it. He came over from England with a delegation of judges and lawyers for a week-long series of seminars which was supposed to foster an understanding of the English legal system.’
‘When was this?’
‘About two years ago?’
Li frowned. ‘I don’t remember that.’
Wu said, ‘I think maybe you were in the States then, Chief.’
Li looked down at the book he was holding in his hands. ‘Was his name Thomas Dowman, this retired English detective?’
Wang shrugged. ‘Could have been.’
‘Then this is his book.’ Li dropped it on the table. ‘Translated into Chinese.’ Wu picked it up and started riffling through the pages, hungry for more detail. Li said to Wang, ‘In it he describes the discovery of the third victim as having been found with the contents of her pockets arranged on the ground around her feet.’
Wang closed his eyes. There were thoughts occurring to him that were almost too awful to contemplate. He said, ‘Something I remember very vividly from that talk.’ Li waited for him to go on. But it was some moments before he could bring himself to speak. ‘It gets worse.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The mutilation,’ Wang said. ‘His next victim.’ He looked at the girl on the table. ‘After this one. You wouldn’t want to read about what he did to her, never mind see it.’ He looked very directly at Li. ‘You’ve got to catch this killer, Section Chief, before he does it again.’