‘Well, things may not have been that dramatic. According to his next-door neighbor, once or twice, he has been seen jogging early in the morning. So he’s trying to recover from it.’

‘But he’s not his normal self. I went to his apartment to express the condolence on behalf of our neighborhood committee, but he hardly talked to me, murmuring something inexplicable with such a vacant look in his eyes.’

‘A walking corpse, he’s finished together with her.’

The Zabei Park neighborhood committee basically confirmed what Yu had learned about Lou in the hospital. A heartbroken man, but nothing really suspicious or strange for a husband who had just lost his beloved wife.

If anything, it backed up the part of the scenario that for such a grief-wrecked man, Lou could have been pushed over the edge.

As Inspector Chen labored up to the second floor of that red-lantern-decked Small River restaurant, Chang hurried over to him with a broad grin and pointed toward the same private room.

Melong was already waiting in there, standing up on Chen’s entrance. There was no plastic bag visible on the floor, just a pot of tea with two cups beside a laptop on the table.

‘Absolutely no disturbance today. I’ve told Chang about it. Don’t worry,’ Melong said, turning to lock the private room door. ‘But I have to make it quick.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your hunch is right, Chief Inspector Chen. Someone has been hacking your friend Shanshan, and in fact, doing much more than that.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘The number of people doing reputable business in our line is not that large. As a rule, we do not talk much among ourselves, and it’s understandable, you know, for the confidentiality of our clients. For these deals, the less said the better. If one of us asks for some specific help in the inside circle, however, one usually gets the responses needed. After all, each of us may be limited to his or her own expertise, and we have to help each other from time to time.

‘Last night, I made no more than five or six phone calls before I learned something from a guy named Rong. I helped him with a project about two months ago, so he did not hesitate to tell me that he had been recently given a job – not from the government, but from someone in Zhonghua Petroleum Company, one of the largest government-run companies in the country – to make a video about your friend Shanshan. An incredibly lucrative job, for which the client offered two hundred thousand yuan, but Zhonghua Petroleum Company is so obscenely rich, no worry about the expense.’

‘Wow, Zhonghua Petroleum Company. Go on.’

‘It’s a video about her personal life. With scenes and pictures from surveillance cameras or computers provided by the client. Rong had to hack into her computers for more, and into those of the people related to her too, as you have suspected. Some of her hacked email content may be used as part of the video – more authentic in her own words, as specially requested by the client. Rong has already edited quite a large number of the images from the surveillance cameras, but he’s still working on the hacked material. It may take a couple of days before he will be able to turn in the finished product to his client.’