When Red is Black

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