It began drizzling, just a little, but they were sitting under the awning.

‘A great poem, Chief Inspector Chen,’ Bian said, without looking up from the page. ‘I wonder how you could have produced it. In the company of Yuan – oh, Shanshan, right?’

The chief inspector nodded without making an instant response.

Yes, it was in Wuxi, in the bedroom of a luxurious suite in the Cadre Recreation Center …

Afterward, it started to rain. He listened to it pattering against the windows as he sat up, placing the laptop on his drawn-up knees, imagining the lake furling around like a girdle in a poem he remembered.

To his surprise, she flung one arm over, her fingers brushing against the keyboard before grasping his leg, as if anxious to reassure herself of his still being beside her in sleep. An accidental touch that brought up some of the lines he had composed earlier by the lake.

Then he began working with a multitude of images surging up, thinking of the lone, hard battle she had been fighting for the lake.

Soon, the spring is departing again.

How much more of wind and rain

can it really endure? Only the cobweb

still cares, trying to catch

a touch of the fading memory.

Why is the door always covered

in the dust of doubts?

The lake cries, staring

at the silent splendid sun.

Who is the one walking beside you?

The lines were still disorganized, but it was imperative for him to put all of them down there without a break. He went on typing, juxtaposing one scene with another, jumping among the stanzas, worrying little about the structure or the syntax for the moment.

Realities, too, were disorganized.

He tried to visualize the hardships she had been going through, working against the odds at her environmental protection job, alone, day after day.

But what had he done? As a successful Party member cop enjoying all the privileges, and now even as a ‘high-ranking cadre’ at the center, he had paid little attention to the environmental issue. He was simply too busy being Chief Inspector Chen, someone rising in the system.

Pushing a strand of sweat-matted hair from her forehead, he wished he had met her earlier, and learned more about her work, albeit beyond his field. He was going to introduce an intimate touch to the next stanza, imagining a talk with her about the lake …

Finally, Bian was reaching the end of the long poem, forking up the last bit of Pavlova cake from the plate with a sigh of contented regret, when Inspector Chen turned his gaze back from afar and said to him in earnest, ‘To tell the truth, it was Shanshan that inspired me for the poem by the lake. But that’s something I have not told the magazine editor. Nor the leading comrade from Beijing, as you may understand.’

‘Really!’

‘Make no mistake about it, Bian. It was quite a few years ago that I met her on a vacation in Wuxi. I’ve since not seen or heard from her. That’s why anything you tell me about her may prove to be so helpful.’