The Chinese Nail Murders

Seventeenth Chapter

When they were back in the private office, Judge Dee said in a tired voice:

"Chu Ta-yuan had a double personality. Outwardly he was the jovial, athletic fellow whom you, Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, could not help liking. But the core was rotten, corrupted by his brood­ing over his one physical weakness."

He gave a sign to Tao Gan, who quickly filled his teacup. The judge drank it eagerly, then continued to Ma Joong and Chiao Tai:

"I had to have time to search his house, and I had to take him completely unawares, for the man is diabolically clever. Therefore I had to send you two with him on that faked errand to Five Rams Village. If the Sergeant had not been murdered, I would have told you all last night my theory about Chu's guilt. But after that I felt I could not ask you to try to behave in a natural manner to Sergeant Floong's murderer. I know that I myself couldn't have done it!"

"If I had known," Ma Joong said fiercely, "I would have strangled that dog with my own hands!"

Judge Dee nodded. There was a long pause.

Then Tao Gan asked:

"When did Your Honor discover that the headless body was not that of Mrs. Pan?"

"I should have suspected that immediately!" the judge said bit­terly. "For the body showed one striking inconsistency."

"What was that?" Tao Gan asked eagerly.

"The ring!" Judge Dee replied. "Yeh Pin stated during the autopsy that the ruby had been taken out of it. Since the murderer wanted that stone, why didn't he simply remove the ring as it was from the body?"

As Tao Gan clapped his hand to his forehead, the judge went on:

"That was the murderer's first mistake. But I not only failed to discover that inconsistency, I also overlooked another clue that suggested that the body wasn't that of Mrs. Pan; namely, that her shoes were missing."

Ma Joong nodded.

"It's hard to see," he said, "whether those loose robes and flimsy underthings the wenches wear on their bodies fit them or not, but with shoes it is a different matter!"

"Exactly," Judge Dee said. "The murderer knew that if he left Mrs. Pan's clothes without her shoes, we might start wondering about their absence. And if he left the shoes, we might discover that they didn't fit the body's feet. So he made the clever move of taking away everything, surmising that this would confuse us so much that we would overlook the significance of the missing shoes."

Heaving a sigh the judge continued:

"Unfortunately his surmise was quite correct. Then, however, he made his second mistake. That put me on the right track, and made me realize what I had overlooked before. He had a mania for rubies, and could not bear leaving them in Pan's house. There­fore he broke into the bedroom while Pan was in prison, and took them from the clothes box. He also foolishly acceded to Mrs. Pan's request to take some of her favorite robes. But this fact made me realize that Mrs. Pan must be alive. For if the murderer had known about the hiding place when he committed the crime, he would have taken the stones then. Someone must have told him afterward, and that could only have been Mrs. Pan.

"Then the significance of the ring without the stone dawned on me, and I also understood why the murderer had removed all the clothes. It was to prevent us from discovering that the body was not that of Mrs. Pan. The murderer knew that the only person who could have discovered that was her husband, and he surmised, again correctly, that by the time Pan Feng would have cleared himself, the body would have been encoffined already."

"When did Your Honor connect Chu Ta-yuan with the crime?" Chiao Tai asked.

"Only after my last talk with Pan Feng," Judge Dee answered. "I began by suspecting Yeh Tai. I asked myself who the murdered woman could be, and since Miss Liao was the only woman re­ported missing, I thought, of course, it must be she. The coroner stated that the body was not that of a virgin, but I knew from Yu Kang's confession that Miss Liao wasn't, either. Further, Yeh Tai had—as we then thought—abducted Miss Liao, and he was strong enough to have severed her head. I thought for a moment of the attractive theory that Yeh Tai had killed Miss Liao in a fit of rage, and that his sister had helped him to cover up the murder, and then disappeared voluntarily. However, I soon discarded that theory."

"Why?" Tao Gan asked quickly. "It seems to me very sound. We knew that Yeh Tai and his sister were very close, and this would give Mrs. Pan the opportunity to leave her husband, whom she didn't care for."

The judge shook his head.

"Don't forget," he said, "the clue of the lacquer poisoning. From Pan Feng's statement I knew that only the murderer could inadvertently have touched that table, covered with a coat of wet lacquer. Mrs. Pan knew all about it, she would have taken good care not to touch that table. Yeh Tai did not have lacquer poison­ing, and you can't do what the murderer did to his unfortunate victim with gloves on.

"The lacquer poisoning pointed at Chu Ta-yuan. For I remem­bered two occurrences, rather trivial in themselves, that now sud­denly acquired special significance. In the first place, the lacquer poisoning offered an explanation for Chu's sudden decision to have a hunting dinner outside instead of an ordinary meal inside, in the hall. He had to wear gloves all the time to conceal his poisoned hand. Second, it explained Chu's bungling the chance of shooting the wolf when Ma Joong and Chiao Tai went out' hunting with him on the morning after the murder. Chu Ta-yuan had a terrible night behind him, and his hand was hurting badly.

"Further, the murderer had to live near Pan, and possessed pre­sumably a very large mansion. I knew that he must have left Pan's house together with a woman no one should see, and with a large bundle. He could not risk meeting the night watch or a military-police patrol, for those people have the laudable habit of halting and questioning persons walking about in the night with large bundles. Now we know that Pan lives in a deserted street, and from there one can reach the rear of Chu's mansion by walking along the inside of the city wall, where there are only old go-downs."

"But just before reaching his mansion," Tao Gan remarked, "he would have to cross the main road near the east city gate."

"That was but a small risk," the judge said, "because the guards at the gate scrutinize only the people who pass through the gate, not those who pass by it inside the city.

"When I had thus hit on Chu Ta-yuan as the most likely sus­pect, I asked myself, of course, at once what could have been his motive. Then it suddenly dawned on me what must be wrong with Chu. A healthy, vigorous man who has no offspring although he has eight wives, suggests that he has a physical defect; and one that may sometimes have dangerous effects on a man's character. The mania for rubies proved by the removal of the stone from the ring, and the burgling of Pan's house to get the bracelets, added a significant touch to my picture of Chu: that of a man with a distorted mind. And it was a maniacal hatred for Miss Liao that made him murder her."

"How could you know that at the time, sir?" Tao Gan asked again.

"I first thought of jealousy," Judge Dee replied, "the jealousy of an elderly man for a young couple. But I discarded that at once, for Yu Kang and Miss Liao had been engaged to be married three years already, and Chu's violent hatred was very recent. Then I remembered a curious coincidence. Yu Kang reported to us that Yeh Tai told him he had learned Yu's secret from the old maid­servant, when Yeh Tai stood talking with her in the corridor in front of Chu Ta-yuan's library. Then, Yu Kang also told us that thereafter he had tackled the maidservant about this affair, again in the corridor in front of Chu's library. It occurred to me that Chu might well have overheard both conversations. The first, dur­ing which the maid told Yeh Tai about the meeting in Yu Kang's bedroom, supplied the reason for Chu's hatred for Miss Liao: she had, under Chu's own roof, given a man the happiness that nature had denied Chu himself. I could imagine that Miss Liao became to Chu the symbol of his frustration, and that he felt that pos­sessing her was the only means by which he could ever restore his manhood. The second conversation he overheard, the one between Yu Kang and the maidservant, revealed to him that Yeh Tai was a blackmailer. Chu knew how intimate Yeh Tai was with his sis­ter; he feared that Mrs. Pan might have told her brother about . their meetings, possibly even about the girl in the covered market. He decided he could not afford the risk of Yeh Tai finding out and blackmailing him for the rest of his life, and therefore he resolved that Yeh Tai must go. That fitted the facts nicely, for Yeh Tai disappeared on the very afternoon of the day Yu Kang spoke with the old maidservant.

"When I had thus established that Chu Ta-yuan had both the motive and the opportunity for committing the crime, also an­other thought struck me. All of you know that I am not a super­stitious man, but that doesn't mean that I deny the possibility of supernatural phenomena. When on the night of the feast in Chu Ta-yuan's house I saw a snowman sitting in a back garden, I clearly felt the sinister, evil atmosphere of violent death. I now remembered that, during the dinner, Chu had given me to un­derstand that it was the children of his servants who made those snowmen. However, Ma Joong and Chiao Tai had told me that Chu also used to make those himself, to use as targets in his archery practice. It suddenly occurred to me that if one had to conceal quickly a severed human head in this freezing weather, it wouldn't be a bad solution to cover it with snow and use it as the head of · a snowman. A solution that would especially appeal to Chu, be­cause it further helped to assuage his abnormal hatred for Miss Liao. For it would have reminded him of his target practice, shoot­ing arrow after arrow into the heads of the snowmen."

The judge fell silent, he shivered. He hastily pulled his fur mantle closer to his body. His three lieutenants stared at him with pale, haggard faces. The sinister atmosphere of that insane crime seemed to hover in the room.

After a long pause Judge Dee resumed:

"I was now convinced that Chu Ta-yuan was the murderer; I only lacked concrete proof. I had planned to explain to you my theory about Chu last night, after the session, and to discuss with you how to organize a surprise search of his mansion. If we did indeed find Mrs. Pan there, Chu was lost. However, Chu then murdered the Sergeant. If I had talked with Pan Feng half a day earlier, we would have proceeded against Chu before he could have killed Hoong. But Fate had decided otherwise."

A mournful silence fell in the room.

At last Judge Dee said:

"Tao Gan can tell you all the rest. After you two had left the city together with Chu, I went with Tao Gan and the headman to Chu's mansion, where we found Mrs. Pan. She was conveyed to the tribunal in a closed palanquin, without anybody knowing about it. Tao Gan has discovered in all bedrooms secret peep­holes, and my questioning of the old maidservant proved that she knew nothing about Yu Kang's affair. Now we know, indeed, from Mrs. Pan's confession that it was Chu himself who spied on Yu Kang and his fiancee. I presume that once Chu made some careless remark to Yeh Tai, and that the astute rascal guessed the rest. But when Yu Kang asked Yeh how he had come to know his secret, Yeh made up the story of the old maidservant, because he didn't dare to involve Chu in his blackmail scheme. Whether later Yeh Tai yet made bold to blackmail Chu, or whether Chu overheard Yu's talk with the maid and only feared that Yeh would try to blackmail him — as I surmised — these are things we'll probably never know. For Chu is insane, and I am convinced that Yeh Tai's dead body is lying somewhere out in the snow fields.

"I also talked with Chu's eight wives; what they told me about their life with Chu I wish to forget. I have already issued the necessary orders for them to be sent back to their respective families, and after the case has been closed they will receive a sub­stantial portion of Chu's wealth.

"Chu Ta-yuan's madness places him beyond the pale of the law. A Higher Power shall judge him."

The judge took Hoong's old card case, that was lying on the desk before him. He softly rubbed his fingertips over the faded brocade, then he carefully put it away in the bosom of his robe.

He spread a sheet of paper out on the desk, and took up his writing brush. His three assistants hastily rose and took their leave.

Judge Dee first wrote a detailed report for the Prefect on the murder of Miss Liao Lien-fang, then he wrote two letters. One to Sergeant Hoong's eldest son, who was serving as steward in the house of Judge Dee's younger brother in Tai-yuan. The Sergeant had been a widower, his son was now the head of the family, and he would have to decide the place of burial.

The second letter was to his First Lady, at the address of her old mother, also in Tai-yuan. He began with a formal inquiry after the old lady's illness, then apprised his wife also of the Sergeant's demise. After the customary formal phrases he added a more personal note. "When someone who was very dear passes away," he wrote, "we lose not only him, but also a part of our­selves."

When he had handed the letters to the clerk for immediate dispatch, he ate his solitary noon meal, deep in melancholy thought.

The judge did not feel like thinking about Lan's murder or the case of Mrs. Loo; he felt utterly tired. He told the clerk to bring him the file with his notes on a plan for Government loans, to be issued without interest to farmers when the crops failed. This was his favorite project. He had worked on it with Sergeant Hoong many an evening, trying to formulate a proposal that would meet with the approval of the Board of Finance. Hoong had thought it could be done by economizing on other expenses of the district administration. When his lieutenants came in, they found the judge engrossed in calculations.

Pushing away the papers he said:

"We must have a consultation about the murder of Master Lan. I still think that it was a woman who poisoned him. But up to now the only indication we have of his knowing a woman well is the statement by that young boxer. He told you about a woman visiting Master Lan at night, but said that the words he overheard gave no clue to her identity."

Ma Joong and Chiao Tai nodded ruefully.

"It only struck us," the latter said, "that neither used the cus­tomary greetings. We may conclude therefrom that they knew each other very well. But as you remarked before, sir, we knew that already because Lan didn't make any attempt to cover his nakedness when she entered his bath room."

"What were the exact fragments of conversation the youngster overheard?" Judge Dee asked.

"Oh," Ma Joong replied, "nothing special. She seemed to be angry because he avoided her, and Master Lan answered that it did not matter, and added a word that sounded like 'kitten.' "

The judge sat up abruptly.

"Kitten?" he asked incredulously.

He suddenly remembered the question of Mrs. Loo's small daughter. She had asked him where the kitten was her mother's visitor had been talking to. This changed everything! He said quickly to Ma Joong:

"Go at once on horseback to Pan Feng's house. Pan knew Mrs. Loo when she was still a child. Ask him whether she had a nick­name!"

Ma Joong looked very astonished. But he was not in the habit of asking questions, and he immediately took his leave.

Judge Dee made no further comment. He told Tao Gan to prepare fresh tea, then discussed with Chiao Tai the solution of a difficulty that had arisen about the jurisdiction of the military police over the civilian population of the district.

Ma Joong came back in a remarkably short time.

"Well," he reported, "I found old Pan very depressed. The news about his wife's misconduct has hit him harder than the first tidings about her having been murdered. I asked him about Mrs. Loo, and he said that her schoolmates used to call her by the nickname 'Kitten.' "

Judge Dee crashed his fist on the table.

"That's the clue I was hoping for!" he exclaimed.