Judge Dee at Work

The Commander, who had been shifting impatiently on his chair, now burst out: 'Couldn't you skip all these details? What is all that nonsense about three war junks?'

'The criminal,' Judge Dee replied calmly, 'was in collusion with the merchants Pak and Yee. Having received in the capital the money for this imaginary purchase, they were going to share it with the criminal. Since it would be many weeks before the routine checks in the Board of Military Affairs revealed the dis­crepancy with your reports on supplies received, the criminal had plenty of time to prepare his abscondence with the money.

'It was a clever scheme, but he had bad luck. On the night pre­ceding the murder, Colonel Meng and my two assistants met the two Korean merchants in the city and they got drunk together. The merchants thought the three men were highway robbers, and said something about the junks and the money they were going to get for them in the capital. My assistants reported that to me, and I put two and two together. I may add that when Meng came back to the fort he boasted to the captain of the guard about the munificence of Pak and Yee, and that there was more to come. The murderer overheard this and concluded — wrongly — that Meng knew too much, which fortified him in his plan to make Meng the scapegoat. When the criminal learned the next morning that Meng had a hangover and had decided not to go up to the armoury, he sent him a faked message, sealing it with Soo's seal which he still had in his possession.'

'I don't follow all this!' the Commander exclaimed crossly. 'What I want to know is: who shot Soo, and how?'

'Fair enough!' the judge said. 'Colonel Shih Lang murdered Soo.'

It was very still. Then the Commander spoke angrily:

'Utterly impossible! Lieutenant Kao saw Colonel Shih Lang enter and leave Soo's room; Shih Lang didn't even go near Soo's couch!’

Judge Dee continued calmly, 'Colonel Shih Lang went up to Soo's room a little before two, directly after wall-scaling drill. That means that he was clad only in an undergarment, and was bare­foot. He couldn't take any weapon, and he didn't need to. For he knew that Soo was in the habit of throwing his quiver into the window recess, and his plan was to grab an arrow and stab Soo to death in his sleep.

'However, when Shih Lang came in he saw that Soo had got up. He had stepped into his boots and was standing in front of his couch, wearing his mail jacket. Thus Shih Lang couldn't stab him as planned. But then the murderer saw that one arrow had dropped out of the quiver and lay on the floor pointing at Soo. Shih Lang stepped on it, put his big toe and the next around the shaft directly behind the point, and with a powerful kick sent it flying into Soo's unprotected abdomen. At the same time he put on an act for Meng, in case he was looking out of the armoury window: he waved his arms and started to shout — drowning the cries of his victim as he fell backwards on the couch. When he had made sure his victim was dead, he went outside and called the guards. Then, having come back to the room together with the Commander and Colonel Mao, he slipped Soo's seal into the drawer of the desk during the general confusion. It was neatly done; he overlooked only one fact, namely that the dead man would be found with his boots on. That suggested to me that Soo had not been killed in his sleep. It was understandable that Soo should have kept his mail jacket on while taking a brief nap, for it's quite a job to get it off. But he had thrown his helmet on the desk, and one would have expected him also to have stepped out of his boots before lying down.'