Melong took out of his jacket pocket a flash memory stick and inserted it into the laptop. But the moment he did this, he stood up abruptly, stealing a look at Chen before he pressed the play key, saying with a touch of unease in his voice, ‘I have to make several phone calls in my business circles, sorry about that, but I’ll be back in about forty-five minutes. You can lock the door. I’ll knock when I come back.’

Chen had a strong foreboding about the reason why, all of a sudden, Melong had to make those business phone calls.

With the private room door locked, the video started on the laptop screen – for Inspector Chen alone.

Apparently, the video had not yet been properly edited. Its contents seemed to cover quite a long period of time, which started about five or six years ago, judging by the dates printed on some of the images in the beginning section.

It began with scenes evidently captured by a hidden camera, which represented fragmented scenes of Shanshan staying with a man in his bedroom. Some of the scenes turned out to be quite explicit. Chen took in a deep breath, watching their intimate moments, but he recognized neither the man nor the room. The date was earlier than the inspector’s vacation in Wuxi.

It was hard for him to be sitting there as a detached viewer. He was confounded by the identity of the man who was holding her tight, but then he saw the light as the caption appeared underneath the scene:

‘What a shameless slut who’s sleeping around, even with a married criminal!’

So the man in the scene must have been Jiang, another environmental activist who had been sentenced to years, a prey to a government set-up.

What the video drove at, however, was not fair to Shanshan. At the time, she’d had no idea that Jiang had not been divorced yet. Huang, the young cop in Wuxi, had confirmed that.

In those clippings from Zhao’s folder, Shanshan was generally seen by her online followers as a courageous public intellectual fighting for an idealistic cause, so the video could go a long way to destroying such an image. In China, a sensational story about the extramarital affair of a public figure, once put on the Internet, could instantly attract millions of viewers in the age of WeChat and Weibo. The viewers would be without the knowledge that Shanshan was not aware of Jiang’s marital status at the time. Thanks to the time-honored tradition of moral criticism still going strong in China, the video could cause irreparable damage before she was able to provide any explanation, which most people, more likely than not, would ignore while so absorbed in those graphic images.

And the reason why Zhonghua Petroleum Company wanted to produce such a video could not be clearer. It was intended as a devastating preemptive strike against Shanshan.

A political murder, just as the government had done with Jiang by interpreting the consultation fee as an ‘environmental ransom’ for the local companies. Jiang was innocent, a victim in the set-up orchestrated from above, Chen was quite sure. Still, he could not forgive Jiang for all the trouble brought to Shanshan.