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."