Li, too, seemed preoccupied. Smoking, she saw with distaste. Lily was babbling away to him, but it was obvious he wasn’t listening. Margaret took a good look at him, but saw no reason to reappraise yesterday’s assessment. He was ugly, bad-tempered and moody. And he was a smoker. The ringing in her ear was suddenly interrupted as someone answered at the other end.

“Twenty-third Precinct,” said a woman’s voice.

“Detective Hersh, please.”

Li looked past his reflection in the window and saw Margaret in its shadow. She had been talking animatedly for some time, laughing easily. Someone she knew well at the other end. And now she seemed to be waiting, tapping a pencil on the polished surface of Professor Xie’s immaculately tidy desk. He could not imagine the purpose of the phone call, or what she had seen in the ring. She still had it with her, and as she waited on the phone, she kept examining and re-examining it, a girlish excitement apparent in her inability to sit still. He noticed the ring on her wedding finger, and in spite of himself felt curious about the man who had married her.

It was Li’s firm belief that he would never marry. The few relationships he’d had at university had gone nowhere, and since joining Section One there just hadn’t been the time. He was still embarrassed by the recollection of half-remembered adolescent fumblings with teenage girls in his home town of Wanxian in Sichuan province. He had been an ugly boy, always tall for his age, and clumsy. The more experienced girls had made fun of him, teasing and taunting.

But there had been one girl, shy, not like the others. Like him she was no beauty, but also like him she was gentle, in body and spirit, strong in character. They had walked by the canal together during long, dusky summer evenings before he left for Beijing and the Public Security University. She had not wanted him to be a policeman. He was made for better things, she had told him. He was a sensitive soul, he had no place among brutish criminals in the big city. His family was pushing him into it, she said, because his uncle was a famous policeman in the capital. But Li knew that wasn’t why, at least not entirely. There was an anger in him that seemed to burn on a constant simmer. An anger at all the unfairnesses in life, the inequalities, the triumphs of evil over good.