Loved by Mr. Night

Chapter 2

 The lights of his bicycle shine as smudged stars, the wintry mist cold upon his skin. As the journey passes, sunlight rouses more colours from their sleepy monochrome and, though the road still has the black look of night, the sky is already more bluish than charcoal. Under the fumes of the morning traffic a tincture of the dawn lingers, like dew upon leaves, a gift of freshness bequeathed anew each day.

The road was still empty when Adriel Pascal cycled up north in the dark beneath the trees, over the dry leaves making a steady crisp and crunching sound. Up ahead in the east was the brightly lit East Mariguan Avenue, the first traffic of the day was already cruising the boulevard, buses packed with pale sleepy faces, taking workers to factories across town; trucks on the first stretch of long journeys on new roads, carrying the industrial produce of the north to the rice fields near the south.

Adriel had a healthy disregard for edicts. If it was quicker then he would be always taking his bicycle just like he had done for the past fifteen years. It did not matter what his superiors said or what they wanted. He had a car at his disposal but with the pollution burgeoning like anything in the city, now he could not deal with this smoking s**t any longer. And no one was going to tell Scotland Yard’s Crime Squad Chief that he should ride his car rather than trudge in the bicycle. This morning however an icy wind blew through the east and cut clean through his fur-lined jacket. He might have preferred to sit behind the warm heat of the car, but that wasn’t he was going to admit to himself, not even to him. He never would.

As he tucked his head down and pedaled east, his thoughts went to Aria and if she was back to London. She had said that she would tell him everything and he said that it was her matter if she wanted to share or not and she had smiled. They had always shared a good relationship, working relationship, friendship and everything. But now suddenly in Bosnia they had made the mistake of crossing the line like everyone else did in those romantic comedies and now the question was. Would they be able to go over that and beyond it and regain back that same intensity and comfort which they had as friends?

He could see the floodlights illuminating the new City Hall building just to the south. The roar of the traffic and exhaust fumes arose to greet him from below. He quite consciously avoided the thought of the scene that awaited him. They had told him that she was the fourth. And with whatever previous experience that he had along with his imagination, it was never going to be enough for what he was going to see.

Half a dozen police vehicles were pulled up to the side walk at the entrance of the Silk Street Market. It was an old Chinese colony where almost you could find everything that you would want. There was a forensics van and Adriel recognized pathologist Cian Wang’s car parked up beside the body bus from the morgue. He must have broken all the speed limits there were in order to reach there before him from his house and office all the way out of the town.

The police activity had attracted a large crowd. The local residents who were mostly Chinese and curious commuters on their way to work. Numbers had already swelled to over a hundred and were still growing. Not even the sub zero temperatures of the atmosphere could diminish the ever growing and eternal curiosity of humans. Two dozen uniformed police officers made sure that they stayed behind the black and yellow scene tape which whipped and hummed in the wind.

Adriel saw the red digital display on the clock tower flash up a temperature of minus six degrees centigrade. He held up his ID card and pushed his bike through the throng of onlookers. A cold looking officer with a pinched red face saluted him and lifted the tape so that he could enter through. Two hundred metres up the alley, Adriel could see the photographer’s light illuminating the spot where the body had been found.

A bunch of detectives and forensic officers stood around it, stamping to keep warm. As he approached, someone spotted him coming and they moved aside to let him through, opening up like the curtain on a stage to reveal the scene that looked like as if it had been set for maximum theatrical effect.

Wang was crouched beside the body, making careful examination with his fingers sticky with blood. He turned his face towards Adriel, pale and bloodless, like a mask from the Peking Opera and for once in his life, the pathologist had nothing to say.

The girl lay on her back with her head turned towards the left shoulder revealing a seven inch long gash across her throat. Blood had pooled round her head like a ghastly halo. Her face had been so savagely slashed that it was impossible to make any kind of visual identification. Her black leather jacket lay open, revealing a white blood splattered blouse beneath it. The top few buttons of the blouse had been undone but it did not appear to have been other wise disturbed. The girl’s arms lay by her side palms up. Her left leg extended in line with her body, her right leg was bent at the hip and the knee. Her skirt had been cut open and had been pulled away to expose the abdomen which had been hacked open from the breastbone to the pubes. The intestines had been drawn out and dragged over the right shoulder, one or two foot piece completely detached and placed between the body and the left arm. What struck Adriel, apart from the extreme sense of shock was the impression that this body had been carefully laid out as if it was a grotesque horror show. There was something bizarre and unnatural about it.

He turned away as he felt his stomach lurch and he wished that he still smoked. As if someone reading out his mind someone held out an open pack. He looked up to see Detective Mishra hold out the cigarettes to him with a grim face, jaw chewing maniacally on a ubiquitous gum. Adriel waved him aside and stepped out from the circle of light.

The image of the dead girl was burned by the photographer’s cameras flash on to his retinas and he could not get rid of it. She could only have been nineteen or twenty. Just a child.

He felt Trent’s presence at his shoulder, breathing smoke into the light.” Who found her?”

Mishra spoke softly, as if not to disturb the girl who was lying there already dead. He was surprised, Trent Mishra was not one of the guys who would show sensitivity.” Shift worker on his bike when he thought he was taking a short cut home.”

Adriel frowned.” Didn’t he know that they had fenced off the road at the other end?”

Trent shrugged,” Apparently not, Chief. He almost ran over her. You can see the tyre tracks in her blood. They have taken him to the hospital suffering from shock.”

“Did you get a statement yet?”

“Detective Lee has gone with him.” He took a drag from his cigarette.” We also spoke to the PLA guard at the embassy end. He said that he was on duty all night.”

Adriel looked back up and down the alley. It could have been a hundred metres. Maybe less.” And?”

“Heard nothing.”

Adriel shook his head. That guard hearing nothing did not do him any good at all. Still the girl was there. Every time he blinked. Every time he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.

“Do you know who she is?”

“Found her ID Card in her purse, along with a few pounds her name is Guo Huan. She is eighteen years old. And she does not live very far from here, not even from this area.”

He carefully removed an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light for Adriel to see.” We also found this….”

Trapped between the sheets of clear plastic was what looked like a cutting from newspaper or magazine. Adriel took it and held it to catch the spill off light from someone else’s cigarette and found that it was a two line ad from the personal columns on one of London’s black what’s on magazines.

Cute Chinese single girl looks for Mr. Right. I am slim, well educated and work in antiques. Please send me email or telephone.

Thinly veiled disguise code for prostitutes seeking customers. There was an email address and a telephone number, rather a mobile number. Mishra blew through his nostrils like dragon fire.

“He is making a fool of us, this guy, Chief. We have got to get him.”

“We have got to get him,” snapped Adriel,” Not because he is making a fool of us but because he is murdering young girls. He turned away from Mishra towards the body of the girl as he saw that Pathologist Wang stepped away from the body and was peeling off his bloodied gloves and dropping them in the plastic sack. As was his habit he had an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips. He bent towards the flame of Mishra’s offered lighter, and as he took the first drag Adriel saw that his hand was trembling.

Characteristically Wang would make some kind of smartass remark or even some quip or literary allusion after examining the body at the crime scene. It was his own way of coping with this remnants of violence but this morning, all that he could say this morning was,” Shit.”

Adriel braced himself.” You want to tell me anything about it?”

“I never saw anything like it,” said Wang and there was a tremor in his voice too,” And I have seen some s**t, Chief, you know that.”

“We have all seen some s**t,” replied Adriel.

Wang’s dark eyes burned with a curious intensity as he said,” This guy is insane. A twenty four carat maniac.” He stabbed at his mouth with his cigarette and then drew on it fiercely.” A similar pattern to the others. Strangled. I can’t tell till after autopsy to say if he cut her up when she was dead. Unconscious certainly and lying on the ground. He would have been kneeling on her right side, cutting from left to right so that the blood from the left carotid artery would flow away from him. The facial stuff….” He shook his head when he pulled the cigarette again.

“She was dead when he did that. She must have been. No one can tolerate a slice like that and not make a sound. And the internal stuff,” he looked at Adriel directly, very directly,” She is a mess down there. From what I can see, it is not just the womb that he has taken this time. There is a kidney missing as well.”

“Organ theft?” Mishra asked.

The pathologist shook his head,” Not a chance. Not in these conditions. And they were not surgically removed. Both the uterus and the kidney were hacked out like they were being ripped out by a mad man who is too far gone by blood lust. He may have some anatomical knowledge but he is certainly no doctor. He is a butcher.”

“Maybe literally,” said Adriel as he gritted his teeth.

“Maybe,” Wang agreed.” But even a butcher would use a knife with more care. This was uncontrolled. Frenzied.”

“How are you sure that it is the same killer?” asked Adriel.

“Completely sure,” said Wang, reversing his usual reticence to commit himself to anything. He fished out from his jacket pocket a clear evidence bag. Adriel saw that it contained the remains of a brown Russian cheroot.” If we get a good DNA sample out of this then we got off the others we will know for sure.”