I really don’t want to talk about her any more than I have to, but I need to tell you the facts. At the time no one thought about the possibility that someone had killed Huang Yiyi; we all thought it was an accidental concatenation of events, so there was no proper investigation. So she got away with it, and got to live happily ever after. One year followed another, but somehow or other in the autumn of the third year rumours started to circulate that Huang Yiyi had been murdered by Zhang Guoqing’s wife; some people saying that she had taken advantage of her position at the hospital to administer a lethal injection, others that she had smothered her with bandages in the lavatory, or that she had beaten her to death with a stick. Anyway, there were lots of stories about the methods she was supposed to have used to kill her, but the whole thing seemed laughable to me. I was quite sure it was fantasy. Of course everyone knew about the situation between Huang Yiyi and Zhang Guoqing’s wife, and we quite understood that she hated her, so it seemed that these stories had sprung up from this slender basis.

But then one afternoon I bumped into Zhang Guoqing in the corridor, and he seemed unusually nervous, as if he had seen a ghost. That immediately made me suspicious. Later on, I got his boss to call Zhang Guoqing in, though I really wasn’t at all sure what I was going to say to him. But the minute he got to my office he was so scared that he started crying, and through his tears he said, ‘Deputy Director An, arrest her, she killed Huang Yiyi …’