Li was startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This man is not killing these girls only for the pleasure of it. He is constraining himself by following a prescribed course of action. Therefore there is a purpose in it for him beyond the act itself. You must ask yourself what possible purpose he could have. If he does not know these girls or their families what else do all these murders have in common?’
Li thought about it for a moment, and then saw the old man’s reasoning. ‘The police,’ he said.
‘More specifically …’
‘Me?’
‘It was you he wrote to, was it not?’ He regarded Li with some sympathy. ‘By making a hero of you they have made you a target, Li Yan. Where once you were known to only a few, now you are known to all.’ And Li remembered Elvis’s words at the meeting: You’ve been splashed all over the papers ahead of this award thing tonight. You’re a hero. Dai added, ‘Their ignorance was your strength, now their knowledge is your weakness. Yifu would have been proud of you tonight, but he would also have opposed this award with all his might.’
‘But what possible motive …?’
Old Dai raised a hand to stop him. ‘Jealousy, revenge, any one of many twisted things. But you cannot know this, Li Yan. You cannot know who or why, not yet. It is too big a leap. Remember Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which was in truth a great fall back. Your knowledge is your strength. Take small steps and keep your balance. He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady. He who takes long strides will not maintain the pace.’ And Li realised that it was a philosophy Lao Dai applied to his own life, not just in metaphor, but in fact. Dai smiled. ‘You know what Yifu would have said?’
Li nodded. ‘The answer lies in the detail.’
They had reached the steps of the Muxidi subway. Lao Dai stopped and poked a finger in Li’s chest. ‘One step at a time, Li Yan. One small step at a time.’ And then he patted his arm. ‘I will see you tonight. I will be Yifu’s eyes and ears. I will be his pride.’ And he turned and headed carefully towards the escalator, one small step at a time.
III
Li Jon was sleeping and Margaret switched on a lamp by her chair. She could no longer read by the dying light of the day, although she had barely noticed it going. She was absorbed in the book. Both fascinated and horrified. All the autopsies she had performed over many years had led her to believe that she had witnessed the fullest extent of man’s inhumanity to man, or woman. But as she read Doctor Thomas Bond’s medical notes on the post-mortem he had helped perform on the Ripper’s most mutilated victim, the unfortunate Mary Jane Kelly, she realised that there was perhaps no limit, and that there would always be horrors worse than she could imagine.
Doctor Bond’s notes on what he found at the scene of the crime, and during the subsequent post-mortem, had only been discovered as recently as 1987. Margaret was fascinated by how close, procedurally, his descriptions were to the account she might have made herself more than a century after he had written them.
He laid bare the crime scene in cold, unemotional terms:
The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen, the right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress, the elbow bent and the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.
The whole surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features, and the tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone. The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body.
The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.
The bed clothing at the right corner was saturated with blood, and on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about two feet square. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.
His post-mortem notes were even more chilling in their detail of the Ripper’s bestiality.
The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin.
Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached to the breasts. The intercostals between the 4th, 5th and 6th ribs were cut and the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.
The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin including the external organs of generation and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia and muscles as far as the knee.
The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reaching from the knee to five inches above the ankle.
Both arms and forearms had extensive and jagged wounds.
The right thumb showed a small superficial incision about one inch long, with extravasation of blood in the skin, and there were several abrasions on the back of the hand and forearm showing the same condition.
On opening the thorax it was found that the right lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken and torn away.
The left lung was intact; it was adherent at the apex and there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung were several nodules of consolidation.
The pericardium was open below and the heart absent.
Margaret could visualise it all, and oddly it affected her more than if she had carried out the autopsy herself. Something about the act of exercising your professional expertise removed you, somehow, from the human horror of it all.
The Ripper had taken Mary Jane’s heart. It was not found at the scene of the crime and never recovered. Margaret knew that at least two of the Beijing victims had been missing body parts. She was not sufficiently familiar with any of the cases to make direct comparisons with the victims of Jack the Ripper. But she did know that the Beijing equivalent of the Mary Jane Kelly killing had not yet been committed, and it chilled her to the bone to think that such a fate awaited some poor innocent Chinese girl out there. A living being with hopes and aspirations destined to flounder on the blade of a maniac. Unless Li could stop him. The thought brought home to her just how much pressure he must be under. And with the thought came her frustration that there was nothing she could do to help.
* * *
Li turned off Changan Avenue into Zhengyi Road and headed south, the high grey brick wall on his right concealing from public view the compound of the Ministries of State and Public Security, once the home of the British Embassy. Shop windows shone in the dark beneath the trees, uniforms and the paraphernalia of the police exhibited behind plate glass. Batons and baseball caps, tear-gas and truncheons. And books on every subject under the sun, from police procedure to pornography in art. He passed the Shanghainese restaurant where he and Margaret sometimes ate, just a short walk from their apartment, and turned into the compound past the armed officer on sentry duty. He drew up outside the apartment block reserved for senior officers and glanced up to see a light shining from their veranda on the seventh floor.