Beijing

Beijing matters to the investigation not simply as the place where an earlier victim was found, but as the site where evidence from that case is reconsidered and linked to the murders in Shanghai. The city also becomes a point of return for Margaret Campbell, whose forensic work and later recognition of a suspected kidnapper help bring the separate strands of the case together.

Setting and the Earlier Murder

During Spring Festival, public utility workers found the remains of a young woman on waste ground in Haidian district, near the Summer Palace. Heavy rain had drawn their attention to what appeared to be blood in the mud; digging revealed the victim buried in two black plastic bags. Investigators could establish little about her identity. Gold foil dental restorations offered a distinctive potential lead, but clinics in Beijing capable of such work had no record of her. The discovery remained unresolved, and the victim’s identity unknown.

The case acquired new significance when Li Yan travelled from Beijing to Shanghai after learning that numerous women had been found buried together there. He carried the Beijing file with him: its account of a young woman whose body had undergone surgery and dismemberment appeared strikingly similar to the Shanghai victims. At first, Li had discounted organ theft as a motive because the removed organs had been recovered separately with the Beijing victim. As the Shanghai investigation developed, that difference no longer settled the question of whether the cases were connected; instead, the Beijing remains became a crucial subject for comparison.

The city’s forensic pathology department, located in an unassuming building in Pau Jü Hutong, provided the setting for that renewed examination. Margaret returned there to re-examine the victim after the remains had been taken from frozen storage and allowed to thaw. The body’s condition had changed through burial, autopsy, months in a freezer, and several days of defrosting, making careful interpretation of the evidence essential. The location thus anchors an investigation that moves between Beijing and Shanghai: what had once seemed an isolated, unsolved murder becomes part of a wider pattern.

Forensic Comparison Across Cities

At the Beijing forensic pathology department, Margaret’s second examination produced a comparison more revealing than simple resemblance. She found that the victim had been alive when the procedure began, as the Shanghai victims had been, but several organs remained, including both eyes, the lungs, and one kidney. The Beijing victim’s bones had also been sawn through rather than chopped. Margaret treated these differences as evidence of differing circumstances, not proof of a different perpetrator, and concluded that the same person had likely killed her. Her reassessment gave Beijing’s earlier case a specific place in the emerging pattern while keeping the evidence distinct from the Shanghai findings.

The examination also made Beijing a source of leads about how the victims might have been selected. Margaret noted that the woman’s blood type was O and that her HLA DQ-alpha gene was unusually rare in China, raising the possibility that she could have been a close match for a particular transplant recipient. She questioned whether the victim might have come from Shanghai and asked whether anyone had DNA-matched the body parts. These were investigative possibilities rather than settled conclusions, but they redirected attention from a seemingly isolated killing toward links among victims, medical records, and the two cities.

A Return That Reconnects the Cases

Beijing becomes more than the setting of the old murder when Margaret returns with Xinxin and, at the airport, catches sight of the scar-lipped Mongolian man she had previously seen on the Bund. The glimpse is brief: a tour group passes between them, and when it moves on, the man has vanished. Margaret leaves the queue to search the concourse, then doubts her own perception. At the time, she does not understand the sighting’s importance.

Later, as investigators discuss Jack Geller’s death and the abduction of Xinxin, Margaret recalls seeing the man at the Beijing airport. Mei-Ling connects her description to the one Sun Jie had reported from his wife: a Mongolian-looking man with a conspicuous scar on his upper lip. Margaret’s delayed recollection turns an uncertain encounter into a lead linking the suspected kidnapper to the investigation. The airport, first a place of departure and return, becomes a point where separate observations converge.

At a briefing, Li Yan states that the murders of eighteen women in Shanghai, the Beijing victim, and Xinxin’s abduction are inextricably linked. The claim recasts the Beijing case within a larger pattern rather than treating it as an isolated crime. Margaret’s later reasoning further suggests that the Beijing victim may have been selected as a rare tissue match for a Japanese recipient; she connects this possibility to the medical records of women who had undergone abortions at Cui Feng’s clinics. Those links emerge as investigative conclusions, not as facts established by the city itself, but they give the Beijing murder a place in the suspected organ-trading scheme.

The City as an Investigative Link

The novel makes Beijing function as both an archival site and a place of renewed evidence: the earlier victim’s file travels with Li Yan to Shanghai, while Margaret’s return to the Beijing pathology department allows her to test the resemblance against the physical differences. Later, the airport sighting adds a human observation to that forensic record. These strands do not make every connection certain, but together they shift the Beijing murder from an unresolved case toward a case bound to the Shanghai killings and Xinxin’s abduction.

The Beijing Case in Court

The Beijing murder also enters the novel through a courtroom challenge to the physical evidence. The defence lawyer places photographs of the crime-scene footprints beside the corresponding shoe prints and argues that their apparent match, combined with traces of the victim’s blood on the shoes, points to their owner’s presence at the scene. He presses Li Yan to agree, while the judge watches from the bench and the packed courtroom falls quiet. The exchange shows how a forensic resemblance can become a legal argument—and how Li, whose investigation had depended on interpreting the traces, is made to defend what those traces can and cannot establish.