‘Shanghai Number One Noodles …’ That was the joke between Inspector Chen and Peiqin. She would not have called into his new phone about it, whether a chef’s special had been added to the list or not. ‘But I’m in the middle of something here. Bring it home tonight.’

‘You won’t regret it for your trip. Lianping too likes it so much.’

‘Lianping?’

‘She also brought me a new video. A very exciting one.’

‘Very well then, I’m on my way.’

Now Detective Yu knew why Peiqin called.

When Inspector Chen finally got back to his apartment he collapsed into the chair close to the computer, too drained to reach out to click the mouse.

It might not have been such an eventful day for him as a cop – he had had worse ones – but there was still a lot for him to do before he could call it a day, and a lot for him to worry about in terms of what might come the next day.

But in the midst of all these wandering thoughts, he took out the pictures from Huang and dismissed the fear of whatever might happen next.

He began to spread them out one by one on the table, like at the Wuxi hotel room in the morning.

Then one picture seemed to be jumping out to him, which showed her lying on her back with her crossed arms covering her bare breasts, nestling against Yao who was holding up her bare foot, caressing the red-painted toes like petals …

It was far from a pleasant experience for him to go through those pictures of Shanshan lying beside another man.

The dusk was quickly sinking into darkness, as if on the wings of an ominous black bird.

There’s no blaming Shanshan for her earlier decision to not leave Jiang for him, Chen told himself. She did not know Jiang’s marital status at the time. Nor for her subsequent decision to leave Jiang for Yao in the changed circumstances.

The inspector had stayed far away, long out of touch, too busy with his own work in the system.

Since their parting in Wuxi, he had tried only once to contact her – to have the magazine office send her a copy of Shanghai Literature with the poem in it – without giving away his own mailing address.

Was it done out of magnanimity, as Huang called it? No, he did not think so. It was nothing but a pathetic pose dictated by the wounded ego.

Under the lamplight, Shanshan looked slightly tanned in those pictures. In one of them, she was stretching out gracefully on the beach, showing sand stuck on her feet and toes. Again, there was something strangely familiar, reminiscent of her stepping out barefoot from the sampan to the lake shore.

It was not a night for him to indulge in romantic nostalgia, he knew, but he succumbed to the temptation of pulling out the magazine again, and came upon the ending of ‘Don’t Cry, Tai Lake’.