“I don’t aim to condemn anyone. I just want answers.” Wu walked over to the desk next, to the last place on this earth Mingyu wanted to go. “There is one more thing I need you to see.”
Laid across the desk were Deng’s personal items—a chop carved from soapstone and a stack of letters. He must have been reading correspondences that morning.
But Wu’s gaze was directed, not onto the desk, but beneath it. A scroll had fallen to the floor where it remained open, partially hidden.
“Is this you, Lady Mingyu?”
She ventured closer, avoiding the bloodstains on the floor and chair. At the first sight of the scroll, she gasped. It was a brush painting of a courtesan rendered in graceful, elegant strokes. A line of poetry had been inscribed down the right-hand side, comparing the lady to an orchid. There were hundreds like this floating around the pleasure quarter, but this one was unmistakably her.
“I didn’t even know the general owned this.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I didn’t even know such a painting existed.”
She looked so heartbreakingly young! The painting showed her seated in a meadow with tall grass around her. There was a faint hint of a breeze in the sway of the grass and the way her hair flew about her face. Blood had spilled onto the paper, forming a ghastly frame around her.
“Your face was the last thing Deng Zhi saw in this life,” Wu remarked. “He sent his guards away to be with you. He was anticipating your arrival the moment he was killed.”
She shook her head, wanting to deny everything, but it was impossible to ignore. “I don’t know how that came to be here. I meant nothing to Deng. He wanted me the way a soldier procures a horse. As property.”
“Do not lie to me, for if I find that you have tried to trick me, there will be consequences,” Wu warned. “Were you involved in Deng’s death?”
At that moment, she was convinced his relentless gaze could pierce straight into her soul.
“No.”
Mingyu said nothing else, letting that one word stand. Wu had never been lured or swayed by any of her artfulness. She expected another rainstorm of questions from him, but he remained silent.
Finally the constable stepped back from the desk. The nod he gave her was a begrudging one, hard-earned, but Mingyu still wasn’t certain whether he believed her or not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MOMENT MINGYU was free of the house, she fled to the side of one her courtesan-sisters who was waiting in the street. They ducked beneath the shade of a parasol, heads held close in conversation like a pair of sparrows on a branch. Once more, Kaifeng was left to watch as Mingyu walked away, hanging on to the last sight of her until she was nothing more than a shape in the distance.
Mingyu was frightened and desperate and she was certainly hiding something, but his gut told him she wasn’t guilty. Unfortunately his gut and every other part of him were susceptible to Mingyu. He couldn’t trust his instincts around her.
Kaifeng returned inside to gather Deng’s belongings as evidence. It was striking that among the few personal items in the study, one of them should be a painting of Mingyu.
Had Deng been captivated by her? Had he gazed affectionately at the painting, so smitten that he’d missed the warning signs of an imminent attack? Lust and longing might have made him careless enough to dismiss his servants for some privacy, but he was an accomplished soldier. Why was there no struggle?
As Kaifeng packed the items into a wooden crate, he noted one more glaring detail. There was no sword among them.
Mingyu claimed that the general always feared for his safety. Yet there was no weapon on his person or at the scene of the crime. Whoever had killed him must have taken his sword along with the head. But was it the murder weapon?
The next course of action was clear. At the magistrate’s yamen, Kaifeng instructed the other constables to seek out Deng’s bodyguards. Those men had either failed miserably in their duties or they had been part of the conspiracy. As to identifying the general’s political enemies, that was a task Magistrate Li was more suited for. He would speak to Li as soon as the tribunal had adjourned for the day.
With that plan in place, Kaifeng proceeded to the records room with the evidence crate only to find a stranger riffling through the papers at his worktable. His initial urge to grab the interloper by the throat was thwarted when Kaifeng saw his red robe and official’s cap.
Kaifeng set the crate by the door before approaching. “Sir?”
It galled him to have to address the man with such respect. The color of his uniform denoted that the stranger was higher in rank than even Magistrate Li.
The official appeared to be thirty years of age. He had a scroll in hand and continued to read from it by the light from the window. He didn’t look up as Kaifeng approached.
“The body was found seated at a desk in an open chamber. The door was unlocked. Only a single person was found in the house. One Lady Sun Mingyu. She claimed to not have witnessed the death. Records indicate the property was owned by General Deng Zhi.” The stranger finally glanced up from the report. “Are you this—” He made a show of squinting at the inscription. “Wu Kaifeng?”
“Yes.” And after some deliberation, “Sir.”
Kaifeng knew the visitor held some elevated rank and was apparently arrogant because of it, but there was little else he could discern.
“Constable Wu Kaifeng, is it? The magistrate must be quite overburdened to task his constables with record keeping.”
“It seemed fitting for me to make the report given that I was the first to inspect the crime scene,” he replied.
The official looked over his writing with a look of disdain. “This isn’t a common occurrence, I hope. Such tiny characters. Closed off, hard to decipher. Your calligraphy leaves something to be desired, Constable.”
Kaifeng raised an eyebrow. They were investigating a murder and the official was berating his writing skills?
With some effort, Kaifeng constructed his next request. “May this humble servant ask to whom he is speaking?”
“Inspector Xi Lun, attendant censor of the Palace Bureau,” the stranger replied crisply.
Though Kaifeng wasn’t one to be impressed with titles, this one made him pause. Imperial censors reported directly to the Emperor and were tasked with investigating corruption among appointed officials.
The censor continued with his diatribe, “As any scholar knows, the quality of writing conveys many things. These brushstrokes are crude, hasty. The observations and descriptions are abrupt as if no thought was given to them. What does this say about the care given to this investigation? Is it similarly hasty and untended? This report is practically unreadable.”
Kaifeng didn’t answer. To his ears, the conversation was as nonsensical as the babbling of an infant. He had work to do and he wanted this official with his expensively dyed robe to go somewhere else.
“Magistrate Li should consider that a case this important be assigned to someone more appropriate,” the censor continued. “Someone with the proper training.”
Kaifeng had training, but it was questionable whether hunting outlaws in Suzhou or observing his foster father carry out the duties of a county physician were considered proper.
This official was apparently one of the scholar-gentry that crowded the administrative bureaus of the capital. In his eyes, if an individual could not quote lines of poetry at odd times in conversation, he was nothing more than a half-wit.
“Are not all cases equally important?” Kaifeng posed mildly. “In the end, a life is a life. A wrong is a wrong.”
Inspector