Again, it took a while before Judge Dee carried a pot of fresh hot tea back into the cell. She was sitting still with her back against the sordid wall, her head hung low, her face even paler than before, half covered by the long black hair.

‘Have a cup of fresh hot tea, Xuanji.’

She took the cup of tea he had poured out for her, but she placed it on the floor, and without taking a sip, she sat up straight and said, ‘Why people call you Judge Dee, I think I now can really understand. So ingenious, so honest, and so infallible. What you have said about Wei is vividly true, as if you yourself had witnessed everything from the very beginning.’

He waited for her to go on, without trying to make any comment in response as she lightly touched the black fox costume again.

‘About Wei, I think I can guess why he had the black fox costume made for himself in secret. From time to time, he came to my place at night – you know that. In fact, I might have said something to him about the neighbors pointing fingers at his back, and cursing like a bunch of self-righteous moralists. It was unpleasant, to say the least, to both me and Wei. He wanted to scare them away. He had said to me more than once that he did not want those prying neighbors to cause me any trouble.

‘Wei’s a good-for-nothing man – I knew that long ago – but it was not that easy for him to stay on with my fiery temperament. And to give the devil his due, he cared for me in his way. His wearing the black fox spirit costume proved it. I’m an ill-starred woman, and I’m finished. I knew that only too well in the courtroom. I did not mention him in the statement because, after all, it was he – not the other people – who helped me with the burial job in the backyard despite the fact that I killed Ning, a younger slut who had just slept with him. So why should I have dragged him into the mire because of me?

‘Now he’s dead, I don’t think I have to worry about it anymore, and I will make a truthful confession, however hard and humiliating for me, to admit my relationship with an unworthy man like Wei, and to admit killing my maidservant Ning out of a fit of insane jealousy.’

She was literally taking over the first scenario Judge Dee had represented to her without saying one single word about the validity of the second, though she mentioned that ‘he – not the other people’ helped with the burial job in an implied negation of the presence of the special guest in the yellow silk underrobe. She was a clever one.