‘But that’s absurd,’ Jin chipped in with unconcealed indignation in her voice. ‘How could a patient have foretold, for instance, a preterm labor, or a heart problem, or an acute asthma attack? How could they have scheduled to have a Covid test taken within the past twenty-four hours?’

  ‘We are aware of the problem and have consulted the higher authorities about it. They’re adamant that we continue with the policy, maintaining that the fight against Covid is the number-one priority for China. It demonstrates our system’s superiority over the Western world. It’s a political priority, you know.’

  ‘It’s politicizing the pandemic,’ Chen said drily.

  Beside them, Hou appeared tongue-tied. It was logical that the hospital was in no position to make those rules by itself, Chen thought. As for the higher authorities, the city government of Shanghai could not be criticized for following the command of the stupid supreme Party boss in Beijing.

  ‘What happened to the pregnant woman then?’ Chen pressed on.

  ‘Well, it’s said that she was driven to two or three other hospitals without success. The same rules and regulations from high above, you see. And then – I don’t really know. It’s beyond our control. We have to carry out the Party policy; there’s no exception for any of the hospitals in Shanghai.’

  ‘I don’t believe you know nothing about what really happened to her. Netizens have already posted it online. Here it is,’ Jin said, holding a cell phone in her hand. ‘The pregnant wife died that night without being admitted into any hospital. She suffered a massive hemorrhage lying on a rusty tricycle, while her husband was pedaling frantically on their way to a fourth hospital. But it was too late.’

  ‘No medical dispute?’ Chen raised the question.

  ‘Medical dispute?’ Jin retorted. ‘Anyone involved in a medical dispute at this moment could be considered suicidal. It is condemned and punished as sabotage against the great and glorious zero-Covid campaign led by the Party authorities.’

  ‘The damned collateral damage!’ Hou cursed in a subdued voice. ‘For the moment, though, how could all this be related to the serial murder case, Director Chen—’

  A young secretary came into the room, produced a manila folder, and whispered to Tang, ‘All the inside information for you.’

  Tang looked up. ‘Confidential?’

  ‘Confidential, of course,’ Chen said.

  ‘All the inside information is here for you. I know nothing about your investigation, and I have another emergency meeting,’ Tang said, rising abruptly and pointing at his secretary. ‘But I’ll leave my secretary outside the room for any help you may want.’

  Tang’s secretary bowed respectfully to them and then closed the door quietly after her.

  The three of them were left alone in the meeting room, which seemed to be holding its breath in silence.

  Hou squeezed out a bitter smile before knitting his brows tightly again. Hou might have seen the light regarding some aspects of the serial murder case, Chen thought, but as for some other aspects, he remained in the dark.

  Probably the same was true for Jin, who made no comment, crossing and uncrossing her shapely legs in nervous agitation before she sat up straight again.

  Chen made a theatrical gesture as he started in a deliberate voice, ‘This is the most complex serial murder case I’ve encountered in my cop career. There are several overlapping factors – the epidemical, the political, the social, and the twisted ways people are thinking and acting under this unprecedented pressure. The list could go on much longer, needless to say. When all these factors converge in an unanticipated manner, complicating and concealing each other—’ He came to an abrupt stop, coughing two or three times with his hand pressed to his mouth.

  Jin poured out a cup of hot water for him, stricken with a feeling of déjà vu. Since her appointment as a secretary in the Shanghai Judicial System Reform Office, she had been reading books and watching movies in the related field, in an effort to make herself a qualified assistant to Chen.

  She thought she had seen similar scenes at the end of Agatha Christie movies, with the celebrated Belgian detective Poirot delivering a speech to his bamboozled audience at the conclusion of a case. Though she was not sure that the great detective in the movies coughed before the magic moment.

  ‘Thanks to Hou’s detailed introduction to the case at the very beginning, I came to notice things so weird that they were practically inscrutable,’ Chen resumed. ‘For one thing, in the first and the second cases, the victims were not doctors, but a Party official and a nurse. Neither of them was in a position to give a wrong diagnosis or a wrong prescription. It ruled out the possibility of a medical dispute as the motive for murder. But where was the hidden connection?

  ‘In the meantime, with the enhanced surveillance around the hospital, the murderer must have had an extremely passionate, strong motive – born of a “not sharing the same sky” hatred, as in our old saying – to commit the murders there in spite of the high risk to himself. I mean the first and the second murder, so we may also rule out the scenario of muggings on the street gone wrong as well.

  ‘And from the very beginning, I also had a feeling that something was missing from the information about the victims – with the three of them being put into the same serial murder scenario. There was little likelihood of them having crossed paths. A senior heart surgeon, a Party propaganda official, and a young nurse new to the hospital. Things did not add up.

  ‘So a tentative theory began to evolve in my mind. With Doctor Wu’s murder case proven to be unrelated to the first and second murders, the murderer still could have been driven by something that happened at the hospital. But that’s the something we did not know—’

  Providentially, a phone call burst into their discussion, like the deranged siren of an ambulance.

  Glancing at the phone, Chen rose hastily, knocking over the hot water cup, not at all like the great Belgian detective with his humor and composure.

  He stared hard at the text message for a minute or two before turning to Jin. ‘We have to move right now, Jin. It’s the last piece of the puzzle coming in. No, there’s not a moment to lose! We have to arrest the murderer—’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Hou insisted, without bothering to ask how and why.

  ‘No, you have something else to do, Hou. Something even more important. Hurry back to the hotel. Double-check the address of the man – the husband Zhou who tried so hard to have his pregnant wife An admitted into the emergency room, but to no avail. Or you may try to do so in the surveillance room here. Anyway, if you go back to the hotel, you will find some related information in a folder marked “emergency room” on my desk. Not just the info about that night, but also about the earliest “false positive” cases reported in the hospital, and then in official media. Revealing his movements when he was suspected positive caused quite a stir on social media.’

  ‘Zhou Guoqiang, Director Chen?’

  ‘I’ll explain later, Hou, but we cannot afford to waste time now. Unlike Big-headed Wu, this serial murderer could strike again at any time.’

  ‘Got you, Chen,’ Hou said and stood up unsteadily, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  ‘Send a car from the hotel and call me the moment you get the folder.’

  Later that afternoon, an interview was arranged between Chen Cao and Zhou Guoqiang at Hou’s suite in the hotel.

  Everything had been done in great haste, but the two were finally seated on a green leather section sofa with a marble coffee table in front, as if this was a casual chat. Nothing else was there except a black lacquered screen, behind which Hou and Jin stood, holding their breath, and readying their phones for recording. It could turn out to be the most critical interrogation for the conclusion of the serial murder case in the time of Covid.

  The interrogation was conducted by Chen Cao with Zhou Guoqiang in the Wu Palace Hotel (with Hou and Jin standing behind a black lacquered screen in the hotel room).

  Chen: I’m Chen Cao, the former chief inspector of the Shanghai Police Bureau; you may have heard of me. So let’s talk, Zhou.

  Zhou: The two were killed, and they deserved the punishment, but I’ll never sign any so-called confession put in front of me. The CCP is entirely corrupt, discredited. Whatever they may choose to say, people no longer believe them. The uproar will continue with a vengeance on the Internet. To hell with political stability! I won’t utter a single word of what you and your colleagues want to hear. Indeed, I should have died that night by her side, my two hands covered in her blood.

  Chen: Laozi says, ‘When people are not afraid of dying, how can you threaten them with capital punishment?’ I understand why you’re unwilling to talk. I understand your tragedy. You have my deepest condolences and sympathy. Still, we could at least have a rational talk.

  Zhou: I’ve heard about you, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. People say you’re a man of integrity, one of the few honest cops left in today’s China. That’s exactly why you are an ex-cop.

  Chen: Yes, I’m not a cop, not as before.

  Zhou: That’s some news indeed. You were fired because of your integrity, I think I heard. But you’re also a published writer, right?

  Chen: Right. And as a writer, I know my responsibility; that much you can trust.

  A long spell of silence in the room.

  Zhou: Talk or no talk, I’m dead. I’m like a piece of broken china; there’s no difference if you hurl it to the ground again and again. It’s irreparable. However, we may have a talk – on the condition you give me a promise first.

  Chen: What kind of a promise?

  Zhou: Write about what happened to me and my family – and to the Chinese people, too – in the time of Covid. Particularly about the insane zero-Covid policy that has been carried out in this state surveillance society. What horrible collateral damage it has caused!

  Chen: The tragedy of your family will be heard by people one way or another, I believe. It’s just a matter of time. And your story should be told. What you and your wife have suffered, I’ll look into it – conscientiously, as an ex-cop. And I promise to write a detailed, truthful report of it to the higher authorities. That’s what I think I can promise you at this present moment.

  Zhou: But will they listen to you?

  Chen: Honestly, I don’t know, but I will definitely try. And as a writer, I will also do my utmost, holding on to the pen in my way. I give you my word.

  Zhou: Well, I believe you if you say so, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen. Then, where shall I begin?

  Chen: From the very beginning.

  Zhou: As you may already know, in the early days, when Covid first broke out in Shanghai, I was one of the few who tested positive – falsely positive. I was quarantined in Renji Hospital, subjected to repeated tests. But little did I think that they would reveal all of my movements during the previous two weeks in Liberation Daily, including my visits to a foot massage salon and a mahjong house. Those places operate with the state-issued business license, and are helpful to people under a lot of stress!

  Chen: That’s true, but some of them are not that law-abiding. That’s also common knowledge.

  Zhou: Anyway, it made a world of difference to me when these details were published in the official newspapers with my real name tagged. In the practice of foot massage, body contact is not unheard of, though most customers would not accept such services as the happy ending. Once portrayed in the newspaper as a frequent visitor to these places, however, a man would be practically doomed beyond redemption in the public eye. It was a crushing blow to An, my poor pregnant wife. She was devastated.

  Chen: Yes, I can imagine that. Some people like stirring muddied water online and trampling other people’s privacy underfoot. Please go on, Zhou.

  Zhou: So I placed a Weibo post online, protesting that the practice of the hospital propaganda totally disregarded people’s privacy. After all, I was not a criminal, but a victim of a faulty test kit.

  Chen: ‘Privacy’ was also a word with so-called negative energy in my younger days, meaning the things people have to keep from the knowledge of the neighborhood committee and the government authorities, even though surveillance was not omnipresent and omniscient during those years.

  Zhou: Anyway, the concept of privacy has long been thrown out of the window in China. You are simply meant to be a naked rat running around in a glass cage under the ultra-powerful CCP’s surveillance lenses.

  Chen: They might have just wanted people to know where you had been, so those possibly in close contact with you would come for a Covid test, I think.

  Zhou: Whatever the excuses, the CCP wants to strengthen its authoritarian rule, with the convenient excuse of curbing the spreading of the virus.

  Chen: But curbing the spread of the virus is important and reasonable. Having said that, I still want to say that your protest was understandable, and justifiable, too.

  Zhou: But what did the city government do? They increased the pressure by fabricating a bunch of incriminating pictures. Not that clear, but suggestive enough. With those edited pictures in circulation, An and I had another fierce argument. From her perspective, with our first baby on the way, I had betrayed her by landing myself in such a shameful scandal.

  Chen: Alas, it’s just like an old Chinese saying: With the whole nest crashed down to the ground, how can you hope to have one egg unbroken? Still, we have to take the bigger picture into consideration, especially in the time of Covid.

  Zhou: Everything and anything can be justified in the so-called ‘bigger picture.’ But what about the real, individual picture of people suffering or dying under the CCP’s zero-Covid policy?

  Chen: It’s such a chaotic mess, and we have to analyze things case by case.

  Zhou: Exactly, that’s my late wife’s case. Her waters broke two weeks earlier than expected. When she was rushed to the hospital, she was not admitted because of the zero-Covid policy.

  Chen: I know. I’ve read several posts about it. It’s absolutely horrible.

  Zhou: But that was done in the name of the ‘bigger picture,’ wasn’t it? She was rejected from one emergency room after another just because she did not have a green Covid code. But who would have taken a Covid test every day in anticipation of an emergency?

  Chen: No one would. I totally agree with you. And I’m so sorry about what happened to your wife.

  Zhou: I knelt down in front of the nurse who was seated at the entrance of the emergency room, begging, kowtowing, weeping, but to no avail. No green code, no admission. Period. She was zero-Covid policy personified. I even suspected that the hospital wanted to punish me because of my protest online. The list in the nurse’s hand could have included An’s name.

  Chen: No, I do not think so. It’s out of the question for them to anticipate that you would bring your wife to the same hospital.

  Zhou: For us, it’s the closest hospital, though. Anyway, I then drove her away in my tricycle, running around like a headless chicken, trying one hospital after another. The same rejection from them all, based on the same ‘bigger picture.’ On the way to the fourth hospital, An suffered a massive hemorrhage and died before she ever reached it.

  Chen: The regulation is cruel, simply insane, I have to say. And I will definitely say that in the report to the higher authorities.

  Zhou: An had been terribly upset with me, which could have led to her preterm labor. Before that night, I had hoped that as time went by, in one or two years, she would eventually see that I had been wronged. So I hoped I might be able to redeem myself in the eyes of An and our child. Alas, there’s nothing left for me in this empty world now.

  Chen: In my report to the higher authorities, I’ll argue that we should definitely try to prevent such collateral damage in the future. Now, can you give some details about how you took your revenge?

  Zhou: After An’s death, I did not have to worry anymore, and I got ready to carry out my revenge plan. My first target was Ouyang, the Party secretary of the hospital propaganda department. After all, it was he that I held responsible for revealing my whereabouts to the public. That eventually led to An’s tragic death. I knew him because he talked to me in person in the hospital, threatening to throw me into jail if I did not cooperate. It took me a couple of days to have the opportunity to strike out at him. As for the second target, it took me longer to find her name and her routine at work. Huang was not even a nurse for the emergency room, but she nonetheless pushed out my wife in spite of her condition.

  Chen: Nurse Huang’s not exactly to blame for this. It’s the policy set up by the people above. But let me ask you a different question. What about the murder weapon? To me, it looked like a steel rod connected to something like a heavy hammer head.

  Zhou: You’re very observant, Chief Inspector Chen. It’s something left by my father who was killed in the ‘armed struggle’ during the Cultural Revolution.

  Chen: You mean in the days of the different factions of Red Guards or Rebels fighting one another to prove themselves as the most loyal to Mao?

  Zhou: Yes. It’s so ironic. My father was a skilled worker. In his insane passion for Mao, he made for himself a weapon – a steel rod with a heavy hammer head, which was called a jean in ancient China. Handy in the armed struggle during the Cultural Revolution. And that was one of the few things he left behind for me.

  Chen: But how could you have carried it around the hospital without being detected?

  Zhou: Tragic karma again. He also left an imitation padded army overcoat, his favorite. My mother kept it all these years. I simply carried the jean inside that long overcoat. Whether he had killed Red Guards or other factions with the steel rod in the armed struggle, I never knew, but he himself was killed in one of those armed struggles. The long-reaching arm of karma of the Cultural Revolution.