by Qiu Xiaolong
When he arrived home and opened the front door to the house before stepping into the courtyard, he was surprised to see Peiqin busily making coal briquettes there.
“You’ve come back early today.”
“You, too.”
There was not much coal dust left. Behind Peiqin, against the wall, stood a small mound of coal briquettes.
She had rented a briquette mold from the neighborhood coal store, an upper and lower half connected by a steel spring. The lower part was filled with coal dust, and water sprinkled over it; the upper part, which had hollow cylinders throughout, had to be pushed down hard to form each briquette. It was not yet spring, and rather windy for the time of the year. Her hands were covered with wet dust, and her wrists, chilled by the damp and the cold, were red.
In the first year of their marriage, he had occasionally made briquettes from coal dust to save money since the local coal store sold coal dust far more cheaply than ready-made briquettes. As he began to roll up his sleeves, he wondered why she had chosen that afternoon for the arduous chore.
“I’m almost finished, Yu. Don’t get your hands dirty,” she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “There is a pot of green bean soup in our room. Go in and help yourself.”
A light gray smudge from the back of her hand appeared on her forehead. He chose not to mention it. But he said, “Don’t do this again, Peiqin. It’s not worth it. “
“It’s not about the money. No ration coupons are needed to buy coal dust. And Geng’s business is too good.”
One problem Geng’s private restaurant had was an inadequate coal supply. Most rationing restrictions had disappeared from the city of Shanghai, but there was still a shortage of coal. Peiqin had been helping Geng with his accounting work. Now, it seemed, she was helping with his coal problem.
“We will use these at home,” she explained with a smile. “Then Geng can have our ration coupon.”
In their room, he helped himself to a bowl of green bean soup, which was supposed to keep the body’s elements in balance. Green beans were not in season; the soup must have come from her restaurant. It was already cool.
Peiqin entered their room, wiping her hands on a towel. She must have washed at the courtyard sink. There was no longer a faint smudge on her forehead. “How is it going?”
“Slow,” he said, “as usual.”
“Is Chief Inspector Chen still on vacation?”
“Yes, still busy with his translation.”
“It must be some project to keep him away from such a case.”
“Yes, it’s a very lucrative commission from Mr. Gu, a Mister Big Bucks of the New World Corporation.”
“Long sleeves are wonderful for dancing. Chief Inspector Chen has long connections. Because of the connections he has made in his position, those Misters Big Bucks come to him.”
“That may well be true,” Yu said somewhat somberly. “But he is a capable man.”
“No, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying anything against your boss. At least he works for his money, instead of taking it for doing nothing.”
“You should have had a rest today, Peiqin, instead of making those coal briquettes.”
“It was like a good workout for me. A health club recently opened on Huaihai Road. It beats me how people pay to go there.”
“The newly rich cannot find enough ways to waste their money.”
“Well, we may be worse off than the upper crust,” she said, “but we’re better off than the bottom layer.”
A cliché, meant to comfort, Yu thought, but it was a sort of cold comfort, like the out-of-season green bean soup. Nonetheless, it was quite true. As a cop, he did not have to worry about layoffs, and Peiqin worked in one of the few still-profitable state-run restaurants. They did not have too much to complain about as long as they did not compare themselves with those upstarts.
As he poured the green bean soup into a bowl for her, he could not help thinking of the shrimp woman again.
“Look, your hand got dirty,” she said. “I told you not to bother with the coal dust.”
“I did not touch anything,” he said, surprised at the sight of the traces of the dust on his hand, and on his bowl too.
Strange. How had the coal dust gotten onto his hand? He had not helped Peiqin at all. Perhaps it came from the pot. He had poured the soup from the pot.
“No, I poured the soup into the pot before I started with the coal briquettes. And then I stayed in the courtyard until you came home.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, changing the subject. “Have you discovered anything else in your reading?”
“A few interesting points, although I fail to see their relevance to the case. Chief Inspector Chen doesn’t either. I called him this afternoon,” she said. “Oh, I remember now. Old Hunter came in, carrying groceries in both hands. So I opened the door for him. My hands were wet then. That’s why the dust was on the pot and how it got on your hand. I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Peiqin, but you really do not have to make coal briquettes. Geng should be able to manage.”
“It’s just like making bricks in Yunnan, don’t you remember?”
He did, of course. How could he forget those years in Yunnan? They’d had to make bricks with their hands, in response to Chairman Mao’s urgent call “to prepare for the war.” The bricks were never used, and, after years of wind and rain, they dissolved back into soil.
“If there had been no coal dust on my hand, would you have remembered Old Hunter coming back home and your opening the door for him?”
“Probably not. Opening the door was an automatic response. It took only a second. Why?”
“Nothing.”
Yet it was something, Yu thought. The shrimp woman’s testimony about the morning of February 7, outside the back door of the shikumen building seemed airtight, but the shrimp woman could have stepped away for a second, like Peiqin, without being aware of it, and without remembering it afterwards. If so, the murderer could have left through the back door unseen.
But was it possible that the murderer had been lucky enough to sneak out at that very instant?
Many things might depend upon coincidences, a phone call at an unlikely hour, a knock at the door, an unexpected glance in the dark ... but wasn’t it a little too much, too strained, for the present case? It was hard to imagine that this sequence of events had occurred unless the murderer had been lying in wait somewhere for the shrimp woman to step away from her stool. Or was there something missing in his earlier reconstruction of events after the discovery of the crime? Yu flipped out his pocket notebook and turned to a dog-eared page. He had made a timetable of the residents’ entries into Yin’s room on the morning of February 7:
6:40 Lanlan rushed into room, and immediately started practicing
Chinese CPR and shouting for help;
6:43-6:45 Junhua ran in and her husband Wenlong followed her;
6:45-6:55 Lindi, Xiuzhen, Uncle Kang, Little Zhu, and Aunt Huang arrived;
6:55-7:10 More people entered the room, including Lei, Hong Zhenshan,
the shrimp woman, Mimi, Jiang Hexing;
7:10-7:30 Old Liang and members of the neighborhood committee
arrived at the crime scene.
The times might not be exact, but that was basically the order in which people had entered Yin’s room. Yu had checked and double-checked this with the help of Old Liang.
“What’s up?” Peiqin said. “All of a sudden, you seem to be lost in thought.”
He told her about the coincidence of the coal dust before pointing at the timetable in his notebook.
“What about the shrimp woman?” she asked.
“She’s an important witness, because she ruled out the possibility of anyone entering or exiting through the back door. The front door could not have been the murderer’s exit unless, as in those Agatha Christie novels Inspector Chen has spoken of, many people were involved in a conspiracy. So, unless the mu
rderer remained in the building—was a resident—he must have left through the back door. The shrimp woman said that she had it in view the whole time, but what if she didn’t? What if she stepped away and has forgotten about it? Or, even, what if she is the criminal?”
“You have a point.”
“She was the closest to the tingzijian room. She should have heard the moment Lanlan started screaming. The back door was wide open, and she should have seen the residents rushing upstairs.”
“So you mean—”
“She should have been one of the first into the room, but it took her fifteen minutes. Yes, at least fifteen minutes, according to my timetable.”
The shrimp woman was familiar with the shikumen building, and with the habits of the other residents. Obtaining a key would not have presented a problem to her, as she had mixed with her shikumen neighbors for many years.
“There’s no motive like poverty,” Peiqin said.
“It may be true,” Yu said. “The shrimp woman is desperate. She has been out of work for the last two years, and she is not even in the waiting-for-retirement program. I don’t think she went up to Yin’s room to murder her, but if she killed Yin in a moment of panic, she could have run back to her own room and put away whatever she had taken. That would account for her reaching Yin’s room fifteen minutes late.”
Yu stole a glance at his watch. He wondered whether he should hurry back to the neighborhood committee office. Then the phone rang.
Another coincidence. Chief Inspector Chen was calling about Yin’s passport renewal application.
“How could Internal Security have withheld such crucial information from us?” Yu said indignantly. “Party Secretary Li must have been aware of it. It’s outrageous!”
“Internal Security’s acts are often very strange, understandable only according to their own logic. Party Secretary Li may be in the dark too.”
“Politics aside, what relevance do you think her passport renewal application has to our case?”
“There are a number of possibilities. For example, if the murderer had knowledge of her application, he might have needed to act before her trip. But that involves a motive we have not yet discovered.”
“ think you’re right, Chief. There is something we do not know yet about Yin Lige.”
“But who might have had knowledge of her passport application? Apparently, Old Liang and the neighborhood committee were ignorant of it.”
“Apparently.”
“She applied through the Shanghai Writers’ Association because that office is directly attached to the city government, but I think that some people at her college may have been aware of it.”
“I’ve talked to her department head, but he did not mention it.”
“That’s understandable. With someone like Yin, a passport renewal could have been classified as ‘highly confidential,’ and it would not be easily accessible,” Chen said. “Still, some of her relatives might have heard of it. Or even Yang’s relatives. She may have talked to them about her plan.”
“I have discussed her possible relatives with Old Liang. He said that he had found no information about them when he did her background check. Yin had cut herself off from her own relatives years ago, let alone Yang’s.”
“But I think it’s worth looking into,” Chen said after a pause. “Yes, I think so.”
Then it was Yu’s turn to tell his boss about his hypothesis regarding the shrimp woman.
“That’s very perceptive,” Chen said.
“I’ll talk to the shrimp woman.”
“Yes, talk to her.”
* * * *
Chapter 14
Y
u arrived at the neighborhood committee office quite early in the morning. It was not difficult for him to make a detailed list of Yin’s and Yang’s relatives, based on the information already gathered by Old Liang, even though Old Liang did not himself see any point in contacting them.
Yin’s parents had both passed away. She was their only daughter. She had two aunts on her mother’s side, much younger than her mother, but they had been out of contact since the early sixties. The Cultural Revolution had complicated a lot of things, including relationships among relatives. In her personal dossier, these relatives were not mentioned at all. According to several phone calls Old Liang had made, they had neither written nor spoken to her after the Cultural Revolution.
As for people close to Yang, in addition to a distant aunt in her nineties, there was only one sister, Jie, who had passed away three or four years ago. Even in the years before the Cultural Revolution, a Rightist was to be avoided like the plague. Jie had had her own family to worry about. Partially because of him, she also had been put on the “control and use” list. Jie had given birth to a daughter, Hong, in the late fifties, shortly after the commencement of the Anti-Rightist movement. When Hong was born, Yang had mailed a money order of fifty Yuan to Hong, but the money was returned to him. And that was that. Jie also got into trouble during the Cultural Revolution, and Hong went to the countryside as an educated youth, married a local peasant, had a son, and seemed to have settled down there.
When Yu had finished making the list, Old Liang, who lived only about five minutes away from the lane and spent more time in the office than at home, had still not shown up. Zhong, the security director of the neighborhood committee, was devouring a hot, oily green-onion cake. He poured a cup of wulong tea for Yu.
“Comrade Old Liang is investigating somewhere else this morning,” Zhong said, taking a seat opposite Yu at the desk. “Do you need any help from us, Comrade Detective Yu?”
“Are you familiar with the background of the shrimp woman? Her surname is Peng.”
“Oh, the shrimp woman! You have come to the right man,” Zhong said. “She’s been my next-door neighbor for years. A good, honest, timid woman, without even the nerve to kill a fly. She worked in a silk factory for more than twenty years, never having the guts to say no to her boss, never once. And then what? She was among the first laid off, and she ended up peeling shrimp in the lane early every morning.”
“She has an arrangement with the food market, I’ve heard.”
“Yes, it’s part of a government effort to help those sinking beneath the poverty line. Some of the shrimp in the market do not look fresh. In order to sell them for a better price, the market has the shrimp peeled early in the morning. A lot of Shanghai wives shop there before they go to work. So the market makes a point of having the peeled shrimp on sale before seven thirty.”
“So she has to start working at around six every morning?”
“She has no choice. Her family depends on what she earns from the food market,” Zhong said. “Is she in any trouble?”
“No. I just have a few questions for her.”
“I’ll send for her.”
“No, thanks. I am going to the shikumen house. She is probably sitting in the lane.”
Sure enough, the shrimp woman was there, sitting on her bamboo stool, opposite the back door of the shikumen house, busy working, with a basket of frozen shrimp at her feet. She was in her late forties or early fifties, her face as thin as one of the brown sugar cakes of his childhood. She wore a pair of old-fashioned glasses smeared with broken pieces of shrimp shells.
Peng smiled nervously as Yu stopped beside her. He squatted down and lit a cigarette without speaking. It was cold; he kept one of his hands in his pants pocket.
“Comrade—Comrade Detective,” she stuttered.
“You surely know why I’ve come to you today, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, Comrade Detective,” she said. “Well, I suppose it’s about Yin Lige. Poor woman. Old Heaven is blind, truly. She did not deserve it.”
“Poor woman?” He was rather surprised by her sympathetic tone. The shrimp peeler was wrapped in an ancient imitation army overcoat, its collar raised against the cold wind, and her fingers were swollen, cracked, covered with the shrimp slime. Surely she, not Yin, was to be pitied.<
br />
“She was good-hearted. Life is not fair. She suffered such a lot during the Cultural Revolution,” she explained.
“Can you tell me something more about her?” Yu asked. It was strange, he reflected: her attitude toward Yin was quite different from that of her other neighbors. “About what you call her good-heartedness. Give me one or two examples.”
“A lot of people in the lane treat me like trash, complaining about the smell of the shrimp. I understand. But I have no choice. I cannot prepare them in the courtyard, or the other residents would have kicked me out of the house.