Qiu Xiaolong - The Mao Case

“That’s something.”

“Zhong says Xie’s behind the change in Jiao’s life.”

“Really!”

“With the help of Zhong, I’m going to check into it.”

“No, don’t do anything, Old Hunter. I’ll be back early in the morning. Let’s discuss this first.”

Chen had never thought about the possibility of Xie being the one behind the change in Jiao’s life. Financially, it wasn’t possible. Xie could hardly make his own ends met.

Still, there was something between Xie and Jiao, something now beyond doubt, given the new information from both Yu and Old Hunter.

Then why all the concealment on the part of Jiao and Xie? Neither of them had said anything about it, keeping it a secret from him – and not just from him. No one at the parties seemed to have known anything. If Xie had visited Jiao, a small child in her orphanage, he did it out of friendship with Tan. Nothing wrong or improper that would require a cover-up. If anything was surprising at all, it was Internal Security’s failure to learn the history between Xie and Qian.

The case seemed to be getting more and more mystifying.

The girl next to him began snoring, though ever so lightly, a thin trace of saliva visible at the corner of her mouth.

Around three, sitting stiff and straight like a bamboo stick, his head bumped against the hard seat, his mind worn out with thinking in the dark, he managed to doze off.

His last thought was about that wooden-board mattress in the Central South Sea. Not a comfortable bed, by any means.

FINALLY, THE TRAIN ARRIVED at the Shanghai Railway Station.

The new station was larger and more modern. It was another attempt to upgrade the image of the “most desirable metropolitan city internationally,” as advocated in the Shanghai newspapers.

Chen got off after the couple, who hugged and kissed, stepping out onto the ground in Shanghai for possibly the first time, before they merged into the throng, oblivious to the crowd milling around. The young girl came down after him, waving at him before disappearing in another direction.

He remained standing on the platform, next to the train door, waiting for five or six minutes before he spotted a middle-aged man hurrying over, raising his hands in a gesture of recognition. He could have seen Chen before – or his picture. The man was of medium build, yet heavy-jawed and broad-shouldered, inclined toward stoutness.

“Comrade Chief Inspector Chen?”

It was Liu, the officer who succeeded Song as head of the special Internal Security team.

They walked out into the hall swarming with people, where, in the midst of escalators running up and down, Chen saw the young girl again, studying an electronic information display.

“Someone you know?” Liu asked.

“No,” he said, moving down the escalator after Liu.

The square outside appeared no less crowded, with people standing in lines for tickets, peddlers showing their products, and scalpers shouting with tickets in their hands. The restaurants and cafés nearby appeared noisy and cramped. It was out of the question for them to find a quiet place to talk.

Liu led Chen across the square, into a parking lot tucked in behind the station tower. Liu pressed a remote control, unlocking the doors to a silver Lexus in the corner. As soon as they got into the car, Liu started the engine and turned on the air conditioning before handing Chen a folder about Song’s murder, all without saying a word.

Chen started reading immediately. He understood Liu’s accusatory silence. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Song had been killed because of the investigation he had been pursuing – in the company of Chen, until the chief inspector’s unannounced, and so far unexplained vacation.

It was no coincidence that Chen had been attacked in similar circumstances. Only Chen had been luckier.

Lighting a cigarette, waving his hand over the document, Chen couldn’t shake the feeling that he was responsible, at least partially, for Song’s death. Fragmented memories of their unpleasant collaboration spiraled up with the smoke. Had he let Song have his way, the situation could have developed differently; had he informed Song of the attack on him, Song might have acted with more caution; had he stayed in Shanghai, he himself might have been the target.

In spite of the air conditioning in the car, Chen began to sweat profusely. Liu remained silent, puffing hard at his cigarette – his third one. Chen wiped at his brow with his hand, like a mole smoked in a tunnel.

There wasn’t much in the folder. Song had been plodding along in another direction, different from Chen’s. There must have been some point of overlap that bundled the two of them together in this investigation, a something known neither to Song, nor to Chen, but to the murderer alone. Chen failed to find anything helpful in the file.

Now, who would have been desperate enough to murder Song as a way to force a stop to the investigation? It had been focused on Jiao and Xie, and after Yang’s murder, on Xie in particular.

“We have to shake them up,” Liu said at the end of his third cigarette. “We tried to get hold of you, but no one knew your whereabouts.”

“You mean -” Chen didn’t finish the sentence. What Liu wanted to do, Chen could guess, but he wasn’t in any position to argue against it. Nor to give a satisfactory account of his “vacation.” Instead, he said slowly, closing the folder, “Can you give me a more detailed account of what Song had been doing for the last few days?”

“I have a mental list,” Liu said readily. “While you were away on vacation, Song did a lot of work – visiting Xie’s place, talking to him, and to Jiao, interviewing people related to Yang, meeting Hua, the boss of the company where Jiao worked, and Shang’s old maid, checking into Jiao’s phone record -”

“Yes, he left no stone unturned,” Chen said. Some of the stones he had also tried to turn – through the help of Old Hunter and Detective Yu. It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Song, too, had approached Shang’s maid. “Anything or anybody seem suspicious?”

“No. But our net was closing. Someone struck out in desperation.”

“Someone” referred to Xie, Chen had no doubt about it. “Can I have a medical report about Song’s death?”

“It’ll be delivered to you today, but since the murder happened in broad daylight, I don’t think there will be much for you to learn from the medical report.”

“Let me go over the material one more time, and I’ll make a report to Beijing. We shouldn’t wait too long, but I don’t think we should rush to action.”

“How long shall we wait, Chief Inspector Chen?”

For Internal Security, it had been a harsh slap to the face. While Xie Mansion was under their close surveillance, the dead body of a young girl was discovered in its garden, and then the dead body of Song, the officer in charge of the investigation, was found in a side street nearby. They might consider themselves above the police, but with their comrade fallen in the line of duty, they were beside themselves, just like cops, crying for revenge. They couldn’t put it off anymore.

“When you called me from the train,” Liu went on without getting a response from Chen, “we were dealing with a target.”

“A new target?”

As it turned out, one of Liu’s colleagues had seen Jiao meeting with Peng. They lost no time getting hold of Peng, and obtaining from him a full confession, which strengthened their determination to use “tough measures.”

“Here is a tape of the interrogation,” Liu said, handing Chen a cassette tape. “We had no time for transcription.”

Chen put the tape into the car tape player and listened. During the interrogation, Liu and his colleagues more or less fed him the answers, but they were probably also what Peng himself believed.