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.
It was a similar version to what Peng had told Yu, a scenario of Jiao having gotten the valuable antique left by Shang through her affair with Mao, but Peng was careful enough not to mention Mao by name. Nor did he say anything about Yu, which suggested that Peng must have continued blackmailing Jiao.
“It’s so unfair,” Peng concluded in a wailing tone. “She got it all from Shang – from the Forbidden City. I should have my share…”
His testimony was enough however, to get Jiao into trouble. “Selling state treasures” was a serious crime. Internal Security didn’t need another excuse.
“With his testimony, we’re expecting a search warrant from Beijing,” Liu concluded. “We believe that whatever it is is at Xie’s place. Yang could have been killed because she saw something there. So could have Song.”
Chen, too, had come to believe that Jiao had something, though it wasn’t likely to be the “palace treasure,” as Peng called it. But Chen had nothing with which to prevent Internal Security from taking action.
Xie would crumble under their pressure. But would Jiao cooperate? If not, would what had happened to Shang happen to Jiao today? To obtain their goal, Internal Security would stop at nothing. Chen saw no point, however, in asking for more time from Liu, and said instead, “When do you think you can get the warrant?”
“We’re reporting to Beijing this morning.”
“Let me know when you get it.”
“You don’t have to worry, Chief Inspector Chen,” Liu said, glancing at his watch. “Now I have to rush back to the office.”
So that signified the end of their talk. Internal Security was going on ahead, regardless of Chen’s opposition. Liu didn’t even offer to give him a lift.
“I have to make some phone calls too.” Chen pulled open the door and stepped out. “You know my number.”
“I’ll call you.” Liu started driving out, rolling down the window for the first time, watching Chen head in another direction.