The Willow Pattern

Ma Joong saw the puppeteer and his daughter out. He came back and exclaimed with a beaming smile:

'How ever did you discover what happened, sir?'

Judge Dee sat back in his chair.

'Your account of the meeting in the tavern,' he replied, 'told me that Yuan was emotionally involved in the bond­maid's killing. So deeply involved that he simply had to show that scene and speak about its horrors — even to a complete stranger like you. If he had known that you were one of my lieutenants, it would have been different. In that case I would have assumed that the crime had nothing to do with him, but that, having heard about it, he wanted to get Yee punished for his iniquities, and that he there­fore made the picture for his peepshow, hoping for an opportunity to bring the crime in this manner to the know­ledge of an official and thus arouse his interest in this old case. Such a roundabout method would have been just what one would expect from an ordinary man of the people.

'Second, when I discovered that Yee's maid Cassia had caught Hoo's fancy once, I realized that her testimony had been calculated to lead us astray by a clever mixture of truth and falsehood. After she had found Yee's body, she had evidently had a look around the gallery for possible clues to the murderer. She understood that he must have been a strong man, and when she saw the wet marks on the windowsill, she suspected at once that Hoo had done it, having entered the gallery by the balcony. Therefore she wiped the windowsill clean. In her hurry she overlooked the bloodstained piece of cloth lying behind the pillar. When she was telling her son about the murder, she remembered the dancing girl and the tout the boy had seen, and she decided to lead suspicion away from Hoo by suggesting that the tout was the murderer. She mentioned that possibility to her son, but he said that the tout was a small man. She persuaded the youngster that the darkness had deceived him, and that the tout was really a big bully, like most men of that profession: he was to describe the man as such when the constables questioned him. But the boy was not quite convinced that the shadows had indeed played him a trick, and he was also afraid to cause trouble to the girl he admired. Hence his nervousness when I questioned him about the girl and her companion. That Hoo described the tout as an elderly, high-shouldered man ought to have set me thinking at once.

'Thereafter, however, I combined a number of seemingly-unrelated and even contradictory facts, and suddenly every­thing fell into place. Our reptilian friend of the Special Service convinced me that Porphyry was a faked courtesan, who had evidently acted that part expressly to sow discord between Hoo and Yee. Yuan had a daughter named Coral who was a good singer — I heard her myself in the street below here — and Yee's doorman had been much impressed by Porphyry's sweet voice. Finally, porphyry and coral are similar stones. When adopting a faked name, people have a tendency to select one that resembles the real name: an intuitive, mystic fear of losing one's identity by using a wholly different name, I assume. Therefore I concluded that the murdered bondmaid must have been a near relative of Yuan, and that he, being a puppeteer, had wanted to stage a plot of private vengeance, using Coral as the main actress. The emergency was the ideal time for executing the scheme, for Yee had sent nearly all his servants away, and the prostitutes from the brothels refused to come. Yuan's mis­take was that he wanted to take over the responsibility of the Playwright.' The judge smiled wanly and added: 'I should be the last to blame him for that, though! Heaven knows that I make that mistake too, on occasion! Well, let's have a cup of tea. Then I must change, for it's get­ting time to go to the Mei residence for the funeral service.'