When Red is Black

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.