It dawned on Chen. The only other customer in La Maison was taking pictures or shooting a video of the French girl in secret. Possibly a hapless lover, but more likely a third-or-fourth class paparazzi planning to sell the video of a French dancer offstage – juxtaposed with those images of her onstage – for some small amount of money.

Or perhaps not a small sum. Just about a month earlier, he had read about the scandal of a Sichuan city mayor falling out of office because of his intimate pictures with a naked girl posted online – the pictures for which his political rival paid quite a sum to a private investigator.

Was the French waitress aware of it?

Chen was not sure. For those pictures, she might not have to worry about a political scandal. On the contrary, she could be enjoying the moment of being filmed by someone’s camera – not merely enamored with her glamorous role in the limelight, but with her less glamorous moment as a tired waitress in the café.

It was none of his business, though. Chen found himself almost being the one too many there, but there seemed to be something vaguely fascinating yet at the same time disturbing about the scene, bugging illusively at the back of his mind.

Stirring the black coffee with a silver spoon, he had another thought rippling far away in his mind. Those pictures of Shanshan that Detective Huang had shown him in the Wuxi hotel.

And it was another previously missing piece that threw him into panic. All of a sudden, he began sweating profusely. It was not that an implausible scenario, which made sense in the context of other pieces.

He forgot about his stomach upset and took another large gulp from the mug.

Detective Yu was not exactly surprised at the sight of Inspector Chen enjoying a cup of coffee in the New World. Nothing could be too surprising when it came to the inspector.

‘Anything new?’ Chen said as soon as Yu took a seat opposite him at the outside table.

Yu went into a fairly detailed account of what he had thought and done about the mask, took a sip at the bitter coffee, before he went on with a question.

‘What’s the point of planting the masks at the scene? However reckless or desperate, the criminal knew it would be easier for others to trace a mask in that particular color.’

‘There must have been an irresistible urge for him to leave that signature at the crime scene, an urge to make a statement, which is of supreme importance, at least to himself, and that overwhelms the safety consideration.’

‘But even with such a mask as a potential clue, we still haven’t got the faintest idea pointing at the possible identity of the murderer. In Lianping’s latest text to Peiqin, Zhou’s already been announced as a suspect inside the newspaper.’

‘Peiqin and Lianping have really been texting each other a lot.’