‘With her husband Yao in the United States.’

Following Huang’s glance, Chen saw her in a white two-piece bikini in several pictures, and in two or three of them topless, lying on her stomach on a large florid beach towel, drawing her slender legs up backward, with Yao busy rubbing oil on her bare back.

There was almost a suggestion of them being from a tabloid magazine’s exposé.

‘Where did you get these pictures, Little Huang?’

‘From Bei, the net cop I told you about in the phone call yesterday.’ Huang added with a sheepish smile, ‘I made fun of Bei about his monotonous work. Since Shanshan spends a lot of time in Shanghai and posts most of her blogs on big websites there, what’s the point in your staring at her Internet posts all the time in Wuxi? You can hardly tell what she really looks like!’

‘So you goaded him into telling things about her. A brilliant gambit.’

‘Thank you, Chief Inspector Chen. I learned so much from you the last time you were in Wuxi. Anyway, Bei told me that he’s busy communicating with cops in Shanghai and elsewhere. Even in Wuxi, he’s responsible not just for her online writings. He can follow her everywhere in the Internet age. To prove his point, last night he sent me a large electronic file of pictures.’

‘Unbelievable! How could she have shown these pictures to others?’

‘I asked Bei the same question. He made no direct answer, but he added that you never know. No one can tell whether the pictures may come to appear online one of these days.’

‘No, I don’t think …’ he said, leaving the sentence unfinished. Their appearance online might not give rise to a political scandal, like in a number of corruption cases, with the pictures provided by the enraged mistress or ernai dumped by the officials, but some controversy could be guaranteed. For these glamorous pictures of an attractive woman, an Internet celebrity barebacked and barelegged, in the company of a billionaire husband, touching and kissing each other, there would be far more voracious viewers than for her Weibo posts about the environmental crisis – they would be downloaded, forwarded and reforwarded, and most likely attract filthy comments, too.

‘But some of these pictures could have been taken by her husband – in the United States or somewhere else out of China.’

‘That I don’t know. But if not, possibly by somebody else, without their knowledge,’ Huang said, frowning. ‘And according to Bei, that’s just the latest bunch.’

‘She’s a celebrity with paparazzi following her around in the United States?’

‘Or the pictures could have been taken by a surveillance camera—’

‘On the beach?’

‘That’s a good point. It’s hard to put a surveillance camera there. Not at a close range. But we don’t have to worry too much about those pictures, Chief. They have nothing to do with us.’

‘There is more than meets the eye, I’m afraid.’

‘At least no hidden camera for this hotel room, I’ve made sure of that.’