Qiu Xiaolong - When Red is Black

On that morning, Lanlan went out at around five thirty. She found the back door locked. She opened and locked it again, and headed for the food market earlier than usual for some fresh seafood because she was expecting a guest from Suzhou that afternoon.

Shortly afterward, two other shikumen residents went out the back door. One was Mr. Ren, who went to a restaurant for an early breakfast. The other was Wan, who went to perform tai chi on the Bund. Each of them was positive that his departure was between five forty-five and six.

Around six fifteen, Xiong, a milkwoman who was sitting with her milk bottles by the front entrance, saw Yin coming back. The milkwoman looked at her watch, as Yin usually did not return that early.

Lanlan arrived with her purchases at around six thirty. This time she left the back door unlocked, as she chatted for a few minutes with the shrimp woman sitting on the corner, and went across the courtyard to unlatch the front door, which was her habit. Around that time, other shikumen residents got up. Some of them came out to wash up in the courtyard sink. There were at least three or four people there that morning, Lanlan remembered.

The times fit. According to Doctor Xia, Yin had been suffocated to death by some soft object between six fifteen and six thirty. In other words, she had been killed shortly before Lanlan’s discovery of the body.

Yu started putting some thoughts together in his notebook. There seemed to be two possibilities. In the first scenario, in accordance with Zhong’s theory that the murderer was an outsider, the criminal had followed Yin into her room and committed the crime. But that left several points unaccounted for. The milkwoman saw Yin walking back into the lane by herself. Of course, the criminal might have approached her somewhere in the shadows of the lane unobserved. But then, the murderer had to get out of the building. A stranger would have been noticed by those in the courtyard if he left through the front door, and, if he went out through the back door, someone happening to look in that direction from the courtyard might have seen him, and the shrimp woman sitting outside the back door could not have missed him. But no one had reported having seen a stranger during that period of time.

Alternatively, Yin might have been murdered by one of the shikumen residents. If so, the doors, as well as the lane gates, presented no problem. Afterward, the murderer simply sneaked back to his own room. As long as he was not seen in the act of entering or leaving Yin’s room, no one would suspect him. This narrowed down the range of possibilities. It seemed Yu need only focus on the building’s residents.

“I have made a list of possible suspects within the building,” Old Liang whispered in his ear. “And I have also started collecting their fingerprints.”

“I’m going to study the list,” Yu said, glancing at his watch at the end of the meeting. “Thank you, Old Liang. We’ll start doing interviews tomorrow.”

If the villain lived in the shikumen, Yu had to find a motive for the crime. Old Liang had hinted at the poor relationship between Yin and her neighbors, but that would not have been enough reason to commit murder. What could have caused a woman to be killed by one of her next-door neighbors?

When the neighborhood committee meeting was over, Detective Yu decided to walk back to the bureau. It was a long walk. It would take him about forty-five minutes, and he wanted to do some solid thinking on the way. He was not in a hurry to decide on a course of action. He wanted to exclude other possibilities before focusing on the building’s residents.

He came to a stop at the sight of a public phone near the foreign language bookstore. Stepping into the booth, he made a phone call to the Shanghai Literature Publishing House. He wanted to find how much Yin had earned from publication of her novel. After spending ten minutes searching for the editor responsible for Yin’s book, and almost emptying his pockets of change, he finally located Wei, the editor of Death of a Chinese Professor.

“I took a huge risk in accepting the manuscript; we might have lost money by publishing it. At the time, no one expected that the book would turn out to be so controversial. Yin made about three thousand Yuan,” Wei said.

That was not a large sum, even several years ago. Nowadays an eggroll peddler could have earned that much in a couple of months.

Wei did not know the exact amount of money Yin had received for the English translation, but according to the information he had, it was not a large sum. The novel had been of interest to sinologists, but it was not a popular seller.

“Besides,” Wei explained, “in the early eighties, China had not entered the international copyright agreement. The American publisher only paid a small one-time fee.”

But Yu remembered those letters with English addresses, whose dates were much more recent.

He dialed Chief Inspector Chen’s number.

Chen looked out of the window at the dull gray apartment complex in the morning light, and then down at the file on his desk, the New World proposal, and started typing on his electric typewriter. The project was ambitious. The document was not easy to translate, as it contained many architectural terms interspersed throughout the text. He had done a few technical translations for money, although none had been as lucrative as this one. Normally it took him hours to become familiar with the relevant technical terms before the translation could even begin.

Chen had obtained two weeks’ leave from the Shanghai Police Bureau. Party Secretary Li had agreed, although reluctantly. The Party boss had been promising Chen a vacation for quite a long time, but, for one reason or another, his vacation had never come through. Li was hardly in a position to say no to Chen’s request now, in spite of the urgency of the Yin case.

Chen had not mentioned the translation when he requested leave. There had been other reasons for him to seek time off. He had been quite upset with the way a recent case had been concluded. He had done what he could as a cop, but all his efforts, while “in the interests of the Party,” seemed to have plunged a poor woman further into misery. Public Security Minister Huang had made a long-distance phone call to him, praising his “excellent work under the leadership of the ministry,” and encouraging him to “make larger strides as an emerging cadre of the new Chinese police force.” Party Secretary Li had not been pleased at this praise for his protégé. Minister Huang’s call to Chen, rather than to Li, might have signified something. Li was quick to read the possible message. The too-swift rise of Chen-at Li’s expense-was unacceptable. Tension rose between the two men.

There were other things in the bureau that were irritants to Chen. Mountains of political meetings and seas of Party documents. Several cops, including one in his special case squad, had been suspended because of their involvement in a smuggling case. An old Party cadre had raised issues about Chen’s poetry writing once again. It was ironic, as his literary inspiration had almost run dry over the last few months. He’d had neither the time nor the energy. All he had produced were some fragmentary lines. He did not know when he would ever be able to put them together.

On top of all that, after a long process of meetings and negotiations, had come the withdrawal of the offer to Yu of a modern apartment. Chen took the blow personally. He, too, suspected that the reneging on what had been agreed might have been more complicated than it appeared on the surface. Everybody knew that Detective Yu was Chief Inspector Chen’s man. This was a terrible loss of face for Chen. As the proverb said, You have to think about its master’s face before you kick a dog. It was Chen who had handed the apartment key over to Yu. Party Secretary Li might have been at work behind the scenes, to get back at Chen. Whatever the correct interpretation of these events might be, Chen had concluded that he did not have sufficient authority at the Shanghai Police Bureau yet.