From its angle, the hidden surveillance camera caught him looking around, groping in semi-darkness, until a shaft of light penetrating in from a cracked corridor window showed him stopping in front of a door, knocking at it uncertainly with his back to the camera.

The door opened, a young woman standing in a white terrycloth robe, barefoot and bare-legged, her hair still wet, hanging loose over her shoulders, and a soft ring of light on her face. ‘Come in,’ she said to the nocturnal visitor.

Recognition hit home. It was none other than Shanshan’s dorm room on that long-ago night. And it was Shanshan herself reaching out her hand to the inspector, then incognito, before the door closed.

Then there was nothing else visible on the video except the deserted corridor again. The camera must have been installed somewhere opposite her door on a slight angle. It was no surprise that, for an environmental activist like Shanshan, the local government had placed a hidden camera there, as surveillance for people coming in and out of it.

So what was happening inside her dorm room was invisible to the camera. But there was no need for him to see. The scenes inside were all in his memory, like a movie he had reviewed time and again.

He pressed stop.

Remembrance was somehow self-selective on occasions. As if unwilling to be juxtaposed with the earlier scenes in the tape, he found himself focusing on what happened after their passionate moment, on his writing the poem beside her …

Afterward, he awoke at midnight.

She was sleeping beside him, her head nestling against his shoulder, her legs entangled with his.

Through the curtain slightly pulled aside, a shaft of moonlight peeped in, and her naked body presented a porcelain glow, a small pool of sweat beginning to dry in the hollow between her breasts, barely covered by a rumpled blanket.

So it had happened. He still found it hard to believe. It seemed as though he had been another man earlier, and was now reviewing in amazement what had happened to somebody else. He looked at her again, her black hair spilled over the white pillow, her pale face peaceful yet passion-worn, after the consummating moment of the cloud coming and the rain falling.

Again, he turned to her curled up beside him, the serene radiance of her clear features, vivid in a flood of moonlight. He was awash with gratitude.

All this was perhaps too much for him to think about for the present moment. But he had to, he told himself. To think of a plan to protect her, and then, if possible, a plan for their future.

She stirred, her shapely leg sprawling out. He could not help reaching out and tracing his fingers along her bare back, which seemed to be rippling smoothly under his touch, like the waves that begin, and ease, and then begin again, with slow, tremulous cadence.

Once again, he found himself too distracted to concentrate on the case. Nor did he want to think along that line.