The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (30 page)

“Very well,” said Inspector Zhang. “There were two things I immediately noticed about the stereo,” he said to Dr. Mayang. He pointed at the headphones that were still on Dr. Kwan's head. “The headphones were unplugged.”

“The plug could have come out during the struggle,” said Dr. Mayang.

“Except there was no struggle,” said Inspector Zhang. “Dr. Kwan died where he sat, killed with one blow to the heart. There were no defensive wounds, so there was no struggle.”

Dr. Mayang frowned as she stared at the headphone cable on the wooden floor.

“The second thing I noticed was that the volume dial was turned full on.” He pointed at the dial. “That seemed unusual as it would have been deafening through the headphones. Until of course I realised that Dr. Kwan wasn't in fact listening to music when he was killed.” He pressed the eject button on the CD player and there was a click and a whirr before the CD was ejected. Inspector Zhang took it out and held it up for them all to see. “This is not a commercial music CD,” he said. “It is a data storage CD. And I am certain that it contains no music at all.” He re-inserted the CD and pressed play. “I am also certain that most of the CD is blank. The first forty-five minutes or so, at least.” He used the fast-forward function to skip through the early section of the CD, then pressed the play button. “If I am correct, there are only two things on this CD. Let us see.” He folded his arms and waited. Everyone in the room was now staring at the CD player.

The seconds ticked by and Inspector Zhang began to worry that he had been mistaken. But suddenly there was a loud crash through the speakers that made them all flinch. Three seconds later there was a blood-curdling scream. Inspector Zhang smiled and pressed the stop button.

Mrs. Kwan slumped to the floor and Dr. Mayang hurried over to her. The doctor helped Mrs. Kwan over to a sofa and she sat there, sobbing.

“I don't understand,” said Dr. Mayang.

“It is simple enough,” said Inspector Zhang. “When you and Mrs. Kwan were in the sitting room drinking wine and eating snacks, you did not hear the window break or Dr. Kwan scream. You heard a recording, played at full volume over the stereo.”

“But what was Dr. Kwan doing?” asked Dr. Mayang.

“He was asleep,” said Inspector Zhang.

“Asleep?”

“Mrs. Kwan had drugged her husband,” said Inspector Zhang. “Probably using the sleeping tablets that you had prescribed for her. I am assuming she put them into the tea that the maid took to Mr. Kwan. Then, when she was sure that he was drugged, she went around to the garden and broke the window. To make sure that she wasn't heard, I believe she used some sticky plastic to stick on the glass before she broke it. The only sound would be a dull crack, She then pulled the glass pieces off the plastic and placed them on the floor. I believe that she then pulled the headphones out of the stereo, turned the volume to maximum and placed the CD that she had made earlier into the CD player.”

“How did she make the CD?” asked Dr. Mayang.

“It is not difficult,” said Inspector Zhang. “The sound files can be downloaded from the internet and then burned onto a CD. The important thing was the timing. She had to time the sound effects so that they would be heard at the exact moment you and she were in the sitting room.”

Dr. Mayang stared at Mrs. Kwan in horror. “Elsie, is this true?”

“You don't understand,” sobbed Mrs. Kwan. “I had no choice. He was killing me. My nerves, you know the state my nerves are in. I couldn't go on. I couldn't. I had to do something.”

“So you killed him,” said Inspector Zhang. “You came around to the French windows and went inside while Dr. Mayang and the maid remained on the terrace. You hurried over to Dr. Kwan, bent over him, and you plunged the knife into his heart. You concealed the knife in one of the pockets of your suit, and you held it with your handkerchief so that your fingerprints would not be on the handle. You were a nurse, you knew exactly how to inflict a fatal wound. Then Dr. Mayang came over in time to see Dr. Kwan take his last breath. Dr. Mayang was able to confirm that Dr. Kwan had been only recently stabbed. Of course Dr. Mayang assumed that the killer had only just fled, little did she know that the murderer was Mrs. Kwan herself.”

He nodded at the uniformed officer. He went over to Mrs. Kwan, took her arm, and led her out of the study. Dr. Mayang followed.

“What made you first suspect that the break-in was staged?” asked Sergeant Lee. “Everything suggested that someone had broken in from the outside.”

“Indeed,” said the Inspector. “The glass was inside the house, as it should have been. But when I touched it, I noticed that some pieces stuck to my fingers.”

Sergeant Lee nodded. “Yes, I remember that.”

“That made me think, how could the glass have become sticky? Then I realised that there was something on the glass that had made it sticky. Some sort of adhesive. Perhaps from some sort of plastic sheeting that had been applied to the window before it had been broken.”

“But why would anyone do that?”

“So that the glass could be broken silently,” said Inspector Zhang. “Then the pieces of glass could be picked off the plastic and placed on the floor. But the question then was how could she do that with Dr. Kwan in the room. That's when I realised that Dr. Kwan must have been drugged. And of course Mrs. Kwan used to be a nurse so she would have known exactly how much medication to give him.”

Sergeant Lee frowned. “But why didn't Mrs. Kwan kill her husband then? She could have simply discovered the body later.”

“Because it was important that the doctor was there to testify that the body has only just been killed, that Mr. Kwan had been stabbed while Mrs. Kwan was drinking wine with Dr. Mayang. And that brings me on to the rain. I asked you to check the time that the rain started and finished today. Do you recall?”

“Of course,” said the sergeant. She flicked through her notepad. “The second rain shower started at five-fifteen this evening and finished at five-forty-two.” She looked up from her notepad. “It was a brief shower.”

“Indeed it was,” said Inspector Zhang. “Just twenty-seven minutes in fact. And you remember that the wooden floor was wet from the rain that had come in from the broken window?”

Sergeant Lee nodded.

“And what time was the body discovered?”

Sergeant Lee studied her notebook carefully before answering. “Twenty past six,” she said. Her eyes widened. “Of course,” she said.

Inspector Zhang beamed, pleased that she had worked it out for herself. He waited for her to continue.

“The rain had stopped before Dr. Mayang heard the sound of breaking glass.”

“Exactly,” said Inspector Zhang.

“The body was discovered at twenty minutes past six, so they heard the window breaking shortly before that,” said Sergeant Lee. “A minute or two at most. But it wasn't raining then. The rain had stopped. So it would have been impossible for rain to have blown into the room.” She was speaking so quickly in her excitement that the words were almost running into each other. “But there were raindrops on the wooden floor which meant that the window had to have been broken sometime before the rain had stopped at five forty-two.” She snapped her notebook shut. She smiled over at the inspector. “Well one thing is for sure, Inspector Zhang. I shall never complain about the monsoon season again.”

“Indeed,” said the inspector. “It really is the case that every cloud has a silver lining.”

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About the Author

Stephen Leather is one of the UK's most successful thriller writers with numerous bestsellers in print and ebook form, translated into more than ten languages. Before becoming a fulltime author, Leather was a journalist on newspapers such as
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Copyright

First published in print form in 2014 by Monsoon Books

ISBN (paperback): 978-981-4625-00-5
ISBN (ebook): 978-981-4625-01-2

Copyright©Stephen Leather, 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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