"When Red is Black" - читать интересную книгу автора (Xiaolong Qiu)

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.

He turned to the desk drawers. The top drawer contained receipts from various stores, blank envelopes, and a travel magazine. The second drawer held notebooks, a notepad, a pile of paper, and a bunch of letters, several of them bearing addresses in English. The contents of the third appeared more mixed: a small assortment of costume jewelry-perhaps souvenirs from her Hong Kong trip; a Shanghai watch with a leather strap; and a necklace of some exotic animal bone.

The contents of the wardrobe confirmed his expectation. The clothes were dull in color, conventional in design, and most of them inexpensive, out of fashion. There was a new wool dress, however, that might not have been expensive but was of quite decent quality.

On the bookshelf were Chinese and English dictionaries; a set of Han History; Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping; copies of Death of a Chinese Professor; and copies of Selected Poems of Yang Bing. In addition, he saw a pile of old magazines, some from the forties and fifties, with bookmarks sticking out of their pages.

He also found an old-fashioned album with black paper pages bearing tiny aluminum photo holders shaped like stars. On the first few pages, most of the pictures were black and white. A couple of them showed Yin as a little girl with a ponytail. Then color photos appeared showing Yin with a red scarf-a Young Pioneer saluting the five-starred flag on her school campus. In a hand-colored picture, she stood happily in People’s Square, between a white-haired man and a small thin woman: her parents, presumably.

He turned to a large picture, which must have been taken in 1967 or 1968, in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Wearing a red armband, Yin stood on a stage delivering a speech, with high-ranking government officials seated in a row behind her in front of a red velvet curtain. She was a Red Guard representative at a national conference of college students but, despite her political importance, she looked more like an inexperienced girl. Hers was not exactly a young face, though animated with youthful passion. She bore a striking resemblance to a Red Guard poster he had seen. The next few pages recorded the most glorious moments of her political career. One photo showed her sitting together with top Party leaders at a conference held within the Forbidden City.

Then there seemed to be a blank. It was not that pictures were missing from the pages, but that there was an abrupt change from a young Red Guard to a middle-aged woman framed in the doorway of a cadre school. It was as if she had aged twenty years with the turning of a single page.

Closing the album, Detective Yu realized that it was time for his appointment with the neighborhood committee.

That committee had once functioned as an extension of the district police office, responsible for everything outside people’s “work units”: arranging weekly political study, checking the number of the people living in a house, running day-care centers, allocating birth quotas, arbitrating disputes among neighbors and, most important, keeping close watch over the residents. The committee was authorized to report on each and every individual, and that report would be included with the confidential information in a police dossier, enabling the state to maintain effective background surveillance on every person.

In recent years, the neighborhood committee, like other institutions, had undergone dramatic changes, but neighborhood security remained one of its main concerns. The committee must have kept a close eye on someone like Yin. It might also have information about other suspicious people in the house.

To Detective Yu’s surprise, when he reached the office, he saw that a working lunch had been arranged by Old Liang. Six plastic lunch boxes containing three-yellow-chicken meals had been arranged down the center of the long desk; in addition to Yu and Old Liang, there were four committee members present, holding their chopsticks.

“The three-yellow-chicken is not bad-yellow feathers, yellow beak, yellow feet. Pudong-bred, home-raised, a world of difference from those in the modern chicken farms,” Old Liang said, raising his chopsticks.

Comrade Zhong Hanmin, the neighborhood security head, proposed a theory about the murder. It seemed to him that the ransacked drawers in her room pointed to one possibility. “The criminal must have intended to steal from her, but when Yin came back unexpectedly, he panicked,” Zhong said. “I don’t think he is a resident in the building, or even in the lane. Surely he was a stranger who picked her room to rob at random. As an old saying puts it, A rabbit does not browse too close to its den.”

Such a possibility was not without supporting circumstances. Provincial workers had been seen wandering about the area for months, but this was not uncommon in the city, as more and more laborers poured in from other provinces.

It was understandable that Zhong was trying to keep him from focusing on the lane, Detective Yu thought. If the criminal turned out to be one of the lane residents, the local committee would bear some responsibility.

Comrade Qiao Lianyun, the general director of the committee, was the second to speak. Qiao provided a piece of information that seemed to contradict Zhong’s theory. He based it on information obtained from Peng Ping, nicknamed the “shrimp woman,” as she made a living by peeling shrimp in front of her door, which faced the back door of Yin’s shikumen building and was only three or four feet away from it. The shrimp woman had an arrangement with the food market. The peeled shrimp had to be delivered before eight a.m. Shanghai wives preferred to visit the market early in the morning. As a rule, she started working around six fifteen. She did not remember seeing Yin return from tai chi practice that morning, but she had chatted with Lanlan at around six thirty. Peng insisted that she had never budged that morning until she heard the commotion in Yin’s building and went inside to take a look. Qiao considered her statement reliable because the shrimp woman was known to be honest. Besides, she could hardly have gone anywhere, with her hands covered in shrimp slime. Qiao concluded, “Anyone sneaking out of the back door, however quickly and stealthily, would have been noticed by Peng, especially if it was a stranger scurrying out at an early hour. As for the front door, there were several people in the courtyard that morning who would have seen anyone leaving.”

Qiao’s argument was backed up by Old Liang, who started by making an analysis of lane security as well as building security. Because of recent cases of theft in the area, the neighborhood committee had taken preventive measures. All lane entrances had been secured with wrought-iron gates, which were locked at eleven thirty at night and opened at five thirty in the morning. Lane residents had to carry their keys.

In addition, there were rules about the shikumen building doors. Both the front and back doors of Yin’s building were locked during the night. The front door, latched from inside, did not open until around seven, and then at around nine thirty in the evening it was closed again. As for the back door, people who went in and out through it, either early in the morning or late in the evening, were supposed to lock it behind them.

Yu listened, jotting down notes in his notebook, without making any comment. After an hour and a half, the events of the previous morning could be reconstructed as follows:

Yin was one of the early birds. She left the building on the morning of February 7, at around five fifteen, through the back door. She went to People’s Park to practice tai chi. No one saw her going out that morning, but there was no reason to suspect that she had changed her routine. She had practiced tai chi every morning since she had moved in, and she was known to be punctual.

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.