‘But it’s not that smoggy every morning,’ Qin grumbled. ‘We’ve checked the weather record.’

‘Whatever air quality, what made the two connected?’ Li said, putting down the tea mug on the desk with a thump.

‘No connection. For the social status, no comparison imaginable between an anchorman and a night caregiver. But each of the crimes was committed in the early morning, and at a central location of the city. Similar in the cause of death, too. Some heavy object hit against the back of the head, but the wound size appeared to be much smaller for the second victim, more like from a hammer.’

‘What about the possibility of copycat?’ Li commented again, possibly more out of the need to say something as the Party boss.

Yu could not shake the feeling that the Party secretary could have discussed – or rehearsed – all that with Qin.

Then why such a show in the meeting room? Perhaps Li was worried that Chen would not be willing to cooperate after the case had been taken away from the Special Squad. No one would have been pleased with the bureau politics, but Yu did not think Chen would refuse to help when a serial murderer remained at large.

‘What about the third victim?’ Li raised the question again.

‘She’s a girl named Yan, in her mid-twenties, working as a sales manager of a real estate agency. Again, murder in the early morning. Before six. Near Lujiazui. One single blow, possibly from the same hammer.’

‘Another victim going back home from a night shift?’

‘No, she was jogging.’

‘Jogging in the horrible morning air like this?’ Yu asked.

‘The air in Pudong is said to be slightly better. Not too many joggers, to be sure, but she was one of them. She usually jogged early in the morning before going to the office in Zabei at eight thirty. Again, we cannot find any connection among the three of them.’

‘For a young, athletic girl,’ Chen commented for the first time, ‘it’s not that easy for the murderer to pounce on her without getting noticed. Did she put up any struggle?’

‘No. We’ve thought about that too, but he could have pretended to be another jogger, for instance, and overtaken her at a moment with no people in sight. Anyway, with three murders in three weeks …’

It was then that Dong Jieyuan, Qin’s assistant, sneaked into the room with hurried steps. He greeted Li and Chen before moving to whisper to Qin.

‘Internal Security has just called. It’s more than a serial murder case. They confirmed it. The old vice mayor was rushed into the hospital.’

In spite of Dong’s abated voice, Inspector Chen thought he overheard the words ‘Internal Security’, and for the last sentence, while not catching every word from Dong, something like the ‘old vice mayor’, which could be politically alarming.

That it was something more than a serial murder Chen had suspected at the beginning of the meeting.