“Perhaps she was too busy writing to make friends,” Yu said, stealing a glance at his watch. Old Liang resembled his father, Old Hunter, in one aspect: both of them were tireless talkers, and at times wandered from the point. “Did you have any direct contact with her?”

“Well, I did when she came to register her residence. She was rather unfriendly, even a little hostile, as if I were one of those who had beaten up Yang in those days.”

“Have you read her novel?”

“Not the whole book by any means, only some paragraphs quoted in the newspapers and magazines. You know what?” Old Liang went on without waiting for an answer. “Some readers were really pissed off by what she wrote about having been a Red Guard out of proletarian fervor, and doing what she referred to only as ‘some too passionate deeds’ in the name of the revolution.”

“Was that the reaction of her neighbors too?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think too many here have read her book. They may have heard of the book. What I know is from the research I have done.”

“You have done a lot of work, Old Liang,” Yu said. “Let’s go to her place now.”

Chapter 4

Detective Yu stood before the black-painted front door of solid oak and touched the shining brass knocker, which must have been there since the shikumen house had been built.

“There are two entrances to the house,” Old Liang explained. “The front door can be latched from inside. Normally, it is closed after nine o’clock. There is also a back door opening to the little back lane.”

The explanation was hardly necessary for Detective Yu, who had not mentioned the fact that he had lived in a similar building for many years, but he was willing to listen. Crossing the courtyard, he stepped into the common kitchen area. Squeezed into that space were the coal stoves of a dozen or more families, as well as their pots and pans, rows of coal briquettes, and pigeonhole cabinets hung on the wall. Yu counted fifteen stoves in all. At the end of the kitchen area was the staircase, which differed from the one in his own house, as an additional room had been partitioned off at the curve in the staircase. A tingzijian, at the landing above the kitchen, between the first and second floors, was commonly regarded as one of the worst rooms in a shikumen building.

“Let’s climb up to Yin’s room. Be careful, Detective Yu, the steps are very narrow here. Isn’t it a coincidence,” Old Liang continued, “that a number of writers lived in tingzijians in the thirties? ‘Tingzijian literature,’ I remember, referred to the writers working in poverty. There was a well-known ‘tingzijian writer’ in this area before 1949, but I cannot recall his name.”

Yu, too, failed to recall the name, although he believed he had heard the term. How could those writers have concentrated with people moving up and down all the time, he wondered.

“You have read quite a lot,” Yu said, convinced the elderly residence cop was not only an energetic talker, but also a digressive one.

There was a seal on the door. Old Liang was going to tear the paper off when one of the residents called in a wailing voice, “Comrade Old Liang, you have to come and help us. That heartless man has not given a single penny to his family for more than two months.”

It was a family squabble, Yu guessed. It would furnish him with a timely excuse. “You don’t have to accompany me, Old Liang,” Yu said. “You have so many things to deal with. It may take me some time here. Afterward, it will be important for us to have a meeting with the neighborhood committee. Can you arrange one?”

“What about twelve o’clock at the office?” Old Liang asked. “Before I leave you, Detective Yu, here is a more detailed report for you, about the crime scene. Three pages in all.”

Detective Yu started glancing through it as he stood on the landing, watching Old Liang disappear into the midst of the stoves in the common kitchen area.

In the earlier information he had reviewed on the bus, the crime scene was described in one sentence as “practically destroyed.” Hardly anything had been left untouched in Yin’s room, due to the way the body had been discovered. An assistant who worked with Doctor Xia had come to collect fingerprints, but he said not much could be isolated from the multiple prints and smears on every surface.

The report read:

On the morning of February 7, Lanlan, a resident at the end of the eastern wing on the second floor, returned from the food market at around six forty-five a.m. She went upstairs and passed by Yin’s door. Normally, the door was shut tight. It was known that Yin usually went out to practice tai chi early in the morning, in People’s Park, and she would not come back until after eight. The door was slightly ajar that morning. It was none of her business, but, as it was unusual, Lanlan noticed this. She bent to tie her shoelace, and peeping through the door, she saw something like an overturned chair. She knocked on the door, waited for a minute or two before pushing it open, and found Yin lying on the floor. A white pillow lay beside her face. Sick, passed out, fell from the bed-Lanlan guessed. She rushed in and pressed the indentation above Yin’s upper lip, [CPR in traditional Chinese medicine.] and started shouting for help. Immediately, seven or eight people ran in. One sprinkled cold water on Yin’s face, one felt her pulse, one dashed out to call for an ambulance, before they realized that Yin was not breathing, and noticed that several drawers had been pulled out, and their contents ransacked. Soon more people came crowding into the room. Before anyone suspected foul play, nothing in the room was left untouched.

Then Old Liang arrived with the neighborhood committee members, but this hardly contributed to the preservation of the scene. One member went so far as to put the pillow back on the bed and push in all the drawers.

One thing was not mentioned in the report. According to Party Secretary Li, shortly after Old Liang got there, Internal Security also arrived at the scene. They conducted a thorough search of the room. They should have observed the proper procedure and worn gloves, but Li had not asked about this. He knew nothing about the objective of their search. With a dissident writer like Yin, however, the involvement of Internal Security was not surprising. Internal Security had requested that the bureau keep them informed about the progress of the investigation.

Stroking his chin, Yu put the report back in the folder, tore the seal off the door, and entered the room. It was a barren, shabby cubicle. As indicated in the report, there was no sign of a struggle-or, more accurately, no sign of one remained. After a day, and in light of the description he had just read, Detective Yu did not really expect to find much.

The furniture appeared to be what she had bought when she had moved out of the dorm; it was typical of the eighties, plain, dark brown, utilitarian, but still in usable condition, consisting of a single bed, a desk, a chair, a wardrobe with a tall mirror over it, a sofa with a faded red cover, and a stool that might have served as a nightstand.

In an ashtray on the desk, he saw several cigarette butts. Brown cigarette butts. An American brand, More. There was also something like a typewriter on the desk. It was not a computer, Yu was sure. Perhaps it was an electric typewriter.

In a tiny cupboard fastened to the wall, there were several cans of tea leaves, a bottle of Nestlé’s instant coffee, a few rough bowls, a small bunch of bamboo chopsticks in a tree root container, one cup, and one glass. Apparently, she entertained few visitors here.

The bed had been made, probably by one of her neighbors. There was no mattress under the sheet; she’d slept on the plain hardboard. The faded cotton-padded quilt must have been four or five years old, and had plenty of patches. As he touched the quilt, he felt its stiffness. The pillow, without a cover, was relatively white in contrast to the quilt.