He pressed stop on the video, tapping his fingers on the table.

The camera must have been installed with the governmental instruction then.

So was the government now ordering the making of the video from Rong?

According to Rong, however, it was a state-run company that had given the job to an outsider like him.

Whoever was behind the making of the video must have been able to secure some of the contents from the government, and for a mega state-run company like Zhonghua Petroleum Company, it made sense.

Still sitting on a bench in Zabei Park, Detective Yu found a text message from Peiqin on his phone. It could have come in while he was busy listening to the tape. It was about the message from Lianping to Peiqin.

Yu was not exactly surprised at Lianping’s going out of her way to help. He now saw clearly it was because of Inspector Chen, after what Peiqin had said to him the other night.

But for the moment, he had to focus on the development in the investigation. Internal Security and Detective Qin were moving fast to their conclusion. Once officially declared, there was no turning over the table.

What else could Yu possibly do?

With its door closed, the private room in Small River was getting hot as Chen moved to click the start button again for the video.

The next part consisted of scenes at different locations, in sharp contrast to the previous one.

In this new section, Shanshan was seen moving gracefully in upper-class society, with pictures of her stepping out of a brand new Mercedes, entering into a grand villa with an immense meadow surrounding it, carrying a Hermès purse at a private airport, lying immersed in the bubbles of a Jacuzzi tub and holding a glass of champagne in her slender hand, like a toast to an invisible man holding the camera.

In the midst of all these, the intimate scenes of her with Yao in the moments of ‘cloud and rain’ were interspersed.

In the second century BC, Song Yu, a celebrated poet of the Chu State, composed a rhapsody about the liaison of King Xiang of Chu and the Goddess of the Wu Mountains. Parting after a passionate night, the glamorous goddess promised she would come again and again to him in ‘clouds and rain’, which had since turned into a breathtaking metaphor for sexual love in classical Chinese literature.

Thousands of years later, the scenes of rolling cloud and pouring rain were sweeping over the laptop screen under Chen’s gaze, just like in the ancient rhapsody:

I live in the high mountains south of Wu, turning into colorful cloud in the morning, and into misting drizzle in the evening, day and night, turning into all the shapes and forms of your lord’s imagination …

Was it just happening in the ancient rhapsody, or through it, in his mind’s eye?

After the previous two sections, these scenes came as no real shock to the inspector, as if in sequence of the same theme, but at different locations.