Things were changing so fast, so unpredictably, like in the two lines written by the poet Du Fu in the Tang dynasty:

The cloud looks now like a white blouse,

but the next moment, like a black retriever.

Shanshan, a young, idealistic but helpless environmental engineer at the time of their meeting in Wuxi, was now a celebrated activist or ‘public intellectual’ with millions of followers online.

And at the same time, a Big Buck’s wife, too.

But that was something puzzling him as well. If a politically incorrect troublemaker – the way Huang saw her – was unsuitable for the chief inspector, she would have made an equally unacceptable match for a Big Buck, who had to make money by maintaining good relationships with the government. And possibly even worse, for she was now considered as one potentially threatening to the Party regime.

Is that how Zhao came to request Chen’s service?

‘Are you still there, Chief Inspector Chen?’

Huang’s anxious voice pulled him back to the present moment, which was increasingly suffocating in the public phone booth.

‘Yes, I’m here. Sorry, I’ve just thought of something else in the case. Please find out as much as possible about Shanshan, both in the past and the present. And about the people related to her, too. I don’t know what info concerning her is truly relevant at this stage. Call me at this number,’ Chen said, reading out the number of the new SIM card purchased at the convenience store. ‘Make sure that you contact me at this number only. And you should have a special number too.’

‘No problem, when I call you again, you’ll have my new number.’

Inspector Chen must have spent quite a long time in the booth. It was perhaps not a common sight in today’s Shanghai. He thought he’d better leave.

Walking out, he moved along the bank again, looking around like a traveler lost in thought.

There was a tiny, ungainly sampan moving on the river, a rare scene against the background of the increasingly metropolitan city.

It was several years earlier – or just yesterday, as it seemed to him at the moment – that he had learned about the seriousness of the environmental crisis, and much more, particularly about what was behind the crisis, in Shanshan’s company in a boat drifting on the lake.

And it was also in her company that he had composed the poem, which Zhao had read without knowing that those lines had come to Chen in the sleepless night, with her nestling against him in the shabby dorm room, her bare shoulder rippling like the lake water under the clear Wuxi stars. It was such a passionate, creative impulse as he had not since experienced.

For the moment, what kept pushing back to his mind was, however, an indelible image of her debunking his naïve imagination on the lake.

That afternoon, the two of them had huddled together in a sampan on the dirty green algae-covered water expanse where he was so intoxicated with her closeness that he began mumbling exaggerated lines about the ‘poetic moment’, with her bare feet on his lap …