When I emerged from the interrogation room, I noticed that Li Sa was waiting along the corridor in the police station and Shao Xiangyu was next to her.

Li Sa was the head of the Department of Intellectual Property, while Shao Xiangyu was another colleague of ours in the same department. They were probably both in the police station now because they were also colleagues with Guo Jiangyin and had been hauled in for questioning.

The department head’s eyes were sharp and Li Sa noticed me first. She put away the authoritativeness she usually had as the head of the department and stood up to walk towards me. “Ma Ke! No wonder you weren’t picking up my calls! So, the police had already called you in for questioning! I heard something’s happened to Little Guo. What on earth happened?”

I replied simply, “Guo Jiangyin has been murdered.”

Li Sa instantly gasped when she heard that someone had been murdered and quickly tried to distance herself. “We were merely colleagues with her and weren’t particularly close to her either. Shouldn’t the police start by talking to her friends and family?”

Shao Xiangyu piped up, “Guo Jiangyin isn’t from this city, so she doesn’t have any relatives or friends here either.” In other words, the police’s first group of suspects would be her colleagues.

Li Sa became frustrated that her attempts to distance herself had failed. So her mind moved on to blaming HR for not checking properly before hiring.

But Shao Xiangyu seemed to have seen through Li Sa’s thought process and whispered, “The company hired her precisely because she doesn’t have any ties here and would be able to put in her heart and soul into her work.”

Li Sa finally sighed and didn’t know what else to say. Shao Xiangyu glanced at me and asked, “What did the police ask you?”

I scratched my head. “Nothing much.”

That answer riled up Shao Xiangyu. “You were called in by the police first, so if you tell us what the police asked you, we could prepare ourselves in advance to answer them. We’re all colleagues after all, so why are you being so secretive about it?”

Li Sa agreed with Shao Xiangyu, but she tried to approach it in a gentler manner, “Even though it’s true that we’re not guilty of anything and we don’t have to be afraid of any questions they ask, Little Shao isn’t being unreasonable either. We were all colleagues with Little Guo and the questions the police ask us could very well help to solve the case. If you tell us what they asked you, our collective answers could contribute to getting to the bottom of this case!”

I said to them, “The police asked me a lot of questions, I don’t know where to even start.”

Li Sa had grown up watching detective dramas and films, so she quickly thought of the first logical question the police would ask. “They would ask about our alibi, I’m sure. Did the police say when Little Guo was murdered?”

I replied, “I think they said yesterday. So Saturday afternoon.”

“Yesterday afternoon! What was I doing?” Li Sa tried to think of what she was doing in hope of erasing any possible suspicion around herself, but things didn’t go as she had hoped. “Crap! I was sleeping all afternoon yesterday!”

“Is there anybody who can prove that you were sleeping all afternoon?”

Unfortunately, the Duke of Zhou* could not suddenly come alive and be her witness. After thinking about it for a while, she shook her head sadly. “I was the only one at home yesterday. I slept all the way till night time.”

Shao Xiangyu wasn’t much better off either. He was single and liked to stay at home whenever he could, and he had spent the afternoon catching up on Empresses in the Palace*. But clearly, Consort Xi was too busy fighting all the other women in the harem to find time to clear Shao Xiangyu of any suspicion.

Seeing that someone else was in a similar predicament, Li Sa felt pretty relieved. In consoling Shao Xiangyu, she was also consoling herself, “You know, we’re in the intellectual property side of the business and we work such long hours on weekdays. So once the weekend rolls around, it’s only normal for us to want to take a good rest by taking a nice long afternoon nap or watch TV all day, right? It’s not as if we knew Guo Jiangyin was going to get murdered. Not having an alibi isn’t anything unusual. In fact, some of those who actually have an alibi might be even more suspicious. Don’t you think so, Little Ma?”

I quickly nodded and agreed. I didn’t dare to say that I had an alibi because I didn’t want to anger my superior, so I just briefly mentioned, “I’ve been listed as a suspect and the police are investigating my case.”

Li Sa didn’t feel so worried anymore once she realized that everybody could be seen as a suspect. She started to think beyond herself and sounded like she had now come to the next possible problem, “I wonder how Han Shaoqing is doing.”

When I heard her mention this name, I suddenly realized that I had completely forgotten about this very important person to the case. I quickly tried to sound her out, “Where’s Han Shaoqing? Didn’t the police call her down?”

Shao Xiangyu said, “She went into an interrogation room before you came out.” He glanced at his watch and said, “Hmm. She should be out by now, right?”

Li Sa was more than happy to hear that Han Shaoqing was still inside and wished she wouldn’t come out again as she made a baseless conclusion, “The police must have some important questions for Han Shaoqing to confirm. We’re not involved at all, so how would we know anything?”

Shao Xiangyu immediately picked up on the part where Li Sa said that we weren’t involved at all. He knew that the longer Han Shaoqing stayed inside the interrogation room, the more suspicious she probably was, which would lighten any suspicions on the rest of us. So he added, “Yeah, the police work very hard and long hours, so I hope they’ll be able to get to the bottom of this soon and not have to call us in one by one.”

But their words ended up jinxing themselves. Han Shaoqing emerged from the interrogation room immediately after Shao Xiangyu finished speaking. Everyone clearly looked disappointed, but since we were all colleagues, we had to pretend to be concerned about her. Li Sa displayed her best acting chops as she grabbed hold of Han Shaoqing’s hands once she approached us and said, “ How did it go? Little Han, are you alright?”

Han Shaoqing was so touched that her superior was so concerned for her even though it was actually just an act and sighed. “It seems like the police found some poisoned mineral water at the crime scene and the brand of water is the same one that I usually buy. The police kept questioning me because of this.”

Li Sa was so excited and really wanted to say something to make things worse for her in order to get herself off the hook, but she didn’t show any of it on her face and even sounded like a loyal friend as she said earnestly, “Don’t worry! If the police ask about the mineral water, I’ll help you to explain things to them!”

Immediately after Li Sa made this declaration, the police officer called her in for questioning.

Shao Xiangyu knew that he was going to be called in after Li Sa, so he sat down and closed his eyes to calm himself down and get himself mentally prepared for the upcoming interrogation.

At this juncture, Han Shaoqing quietly walked towards me and whispered, “I know your relationship with Guo Jiangyin. If you want to keep it a secret, wait for my phone call.”

TL notes:

*Duke of Zhou: He was a real man from the Zhou Dynasty. Wiki: Duke of Zhou is also known as the “God of Dreams”. The Analects record Confucius saying, “How I have gone downhill! It has been such a long time since I dreamt of the Duke of Zhou.” This was meant as a lamentation of how the governmental ideals of the Duke of Zhou had faded, but was later taken literally. In Chinese legends, if an important thing is going to happen to someone, the Duke of Zhou will let the person know through dreams: hence the Chinese expression “Dreaming of Zhou Gong”.

*Empresses in the Palace: A hit Chinese drama based on an online novel, mostly revolving around Consort Xi and her rise to power.