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‘The skin was retracted through the whole of the cut in the abdomen, but the vessels were not clotted.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 Doctor 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.’
Li felt the almost unbearable burden of responsibility pressing down on him. Where did they begin? He had not one single concrete lead to go on.
Wang said, ‘Your English pathologist was only partially right, though.’
Li looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What was it he said? There would not be much blood on the murderer? Okay, so most of the mutilation took place after death. But you can’t hack someone about like that, remove a kidney and a uterus and not get blood on yourself. Quite a lot of it.’
Li said, ‘So unless he lives alone, someone must know who he is. Because he’s coming home covered in blood.’
Wang inclined his head in acknowledgement.
II
In the carpark, Li sat behind the wheel of his Santana and opened up the laptop on his knees. He plugged in his cellphone and got it to dial him into the police database from its memory. On the passenger side, Wu was still flicking backwards and forwards through Dowman’s book on the Ripper. He stopped suddenly and looked at Li. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why anyone would cover up for someone doing stuff like this.’
Li shrugged and tapped the relevant details into vacant fields. ‘The history of serial killers is full of loved ones turning a blind eye. Wives, lovers, mothers. More denial than cover-up. Even when confronted with all the evidence, they don’t want to admit it, even to themselves.’ He hit the return key, and several moments later a screen flashed up with Guo Huan’s particulars. A file and a photograph of every resident in Beijing was accessible from the database. Guo Huan had lived with her mother and grandfather. Her father was dead. Her photograph was on the top right corner of the screen. A black and white picture, of not particularly good quality. Li could not tell how good a likeness it might be. But it was better than nothing. He took a note of the address, then shut down the computer and called Qian. When he got through he asked, ‘Has Guo’s family been told yet?’
‘The community police sent someone out to break the news a short time ago,’ Qian told him.
‘Okay. Wu and I are going to visit the mother. Meantime, pull the kid’s photograph from the database and get it circulating in the lobbies of every hotel in Jianguomen. I’ll see if we can’t get something better from the family. Someone, somewhere saw her with the killer. We need to find that someone. We need a witness.’ He hung up and turned the key in the ignition.
Traffic was unusually light, and they cruised east on the Third Ring Road past row after row of new multistorey apartment blocks, shopping malls, and official buildings clad in stone, aping the classical style of traditional European architecture. The sun was low in the sky and blinded Li as he turned south on Andingmenwei Da Jie. Wu still had his head buried in the book. ‘It’s amazing, chief. It’s like he’s making a carbon copy. The Ripper only killed on weekends, and all the murders were within the same square mile of the Whitechapel district of London. All the victims were prostitutes. They were all strangled and then had their throats cut. And then the mutilation.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s strange, though …’