After Yang went back to his room, Dee lit another candle, sat up straight with his back stiff like a bamboo stick, and took out the case report along with a new authorization note signed by Minister Wu earlier in the day.

It is stated that the bearer of this document hereby has the full authorization of the Internal Ministry to investigate the Xuanji case.

But Judge Dee did not think he had promised the minister anything. It would have been a different story if it had been an imperial order from the empress. As it was, in spite of Wu’s assurance and the authorization note, Judge Dee could not help seeing something suspicious in the request.

He started reading the case report in earnest. For the moment, sleep was the furthest thing from his mind. Rubbing his eyes, he glimpsed a moth-like insect whirling around like crazy, circling and circling the candle flame.

The case report hardly offered anything new, however, to add to what Judge Dee had already learned from other sources.

He had read quite a number of Xuanji’s poems, so he thought he might have a better understanding of the complicated poetess than the author of the case report.

Still, it was a puzzling case. The lack of a convincing motive on her part was something much discussed by people. But that was probably only one of the main reasons why the murder case remained unclosed.

In the case report, some of her neighbors actually attributed the murder to the evil influence of a bewitching black fox spirit that haunted the neighborhood of the nunnery, and in a paradoxical variation of that theory, she was the black fox spirit incarnate, revealing her true nature when she was dead drunk.

How such a superstitious assumption could have been woven into the official case report puzzled him.

A cricket started chirping eerily outside the window, from the backyard of the hostel – or from the very beginning of a poem by Xuanji.

The crickets chirruping in confusion

by the stone steps, the crystal-clear

dewdrops glistening on the tree leaves

in the mist-enveloped courtyard …

That was a poem composed for one of her lovers named Wen Tingyun, also one of the most prominent poets of the contemporary Tang Empire, but Judge Dee was unable to recall the title of the poem or the lines that followed.

He had read her work piece by piece, but in a far from systematic way. It took time and money to have a poetry collection published these days, and it was almost out of the question for a poetess to do so, he supposed, in the days when the Confucianist orthodoxy claimed that a woman’s virtue comes in the absence of any intellectual talent.

It was then that an idea came flashing through his mind. There was something for him to do, it dawned on him. Something meaningful in itself.