‘Not that much. But he did give me the file about the first three victims. It may be true that he himself has learned little about the fourth from Internal Security.’
‘But why Internal Security? There are too many journalists in the city for them. Has she written anything that politically sensitive?’
‘No, Qin did not say anything about that. But he said he had heard something about her husband, who’s the current head of Wenxin Group, or something like that, having recently retired from the position of first vice mayor – he’s more than thirty years older than Xiang. That’s her name, by the way.’
‘Vice Mayor Geng? So it was him that got rushed into the hospital. Internal Security must have seen that as an attack against a senior Party cadre. A political case indeed.’
‘But the file sent by Qin alerted them to the possibility of her being just another victim in the serial murder case. So they compared notes. The closer examination of her head wound indicates that the blow could have been afflicted with the same weapon – a hammer.’
‘That’s why our Party secretary called for the meeting this morning.’
‘There might have been something more. More in the murky background. Qin hemmed and hawed. At least that’s the impression I got.’
‘They have come to us under the pressure,’ Chen said. ‘Now I’m moving into the hotel. Zhao is waiting upstairs. I’ll call you later.’
Inspector Chen found himself sitting, literally on pins and needles, by the window of the grand river-view suite on the thirty-ninth floor of the Hyatt Hotel in Pudong, in the company of Comrade Secretary Zhao, the retired yet still powerful first secretary of the Party Central Discipline Committee from the Forbidden City.
The bird’s-eye view outside the hotel window should have been a breathtaking one, with colorful vessels sailing along the Huangpu River outlined by majestic high-rises on both sides, but for the moment there was hardly any view to speak about.
All around, the hotel seemed to be mantled with an immense pale shroud instead.
‘Like everywhere else, Shanghai has changed such a lot in China’s unprecedented economic reform,’ Zhao said, with a suggestion of pleasant nostalgia. ‘East of the river, it used to be nothing but farmland around here, I still remember so clearly. Now, with all these skyscrapers jostling against one another, it is truly the financial center of Asia, and soon, I believe, of the whole world too.’
For a man of his powerful position in the Party system, Zhao did not speak exactly in an official manner – at least not in front of Chen, who listened attentively, sitting stiffly, nodding respectfully, trying to focus on the talk, though his mind kept wandering back to the case he had been discussing in the bureau.
It was admittedly a true statement, that prelude delivered by Zhao. The dramatic transformation of the city landscape in recent years seemed so unbelievable, even to a native Shanghainese like Chen. Particularly for the area of Pudong east of the Huangpu River.