The Capital Evaluation was Great Feng's appraisal system for its capital officials: once every three years, promotion and demotion hinged on the "Four Standards" and the "Eight Violations." A substandard official faced demotion, or even outright stripping of rank and banishment to the common folk.
Given what this meant for one's career, it was easy to see why the mood was so foul. And the dead merchant's family had a distant relative serving as a Scrutinizing Secretary — one memorial to the throne and the matter would turn very ugly indeed.
A backlog of unsolved homicide on Changle County's books was a cudgel waiting to be swung by political rivals.
"How did he die?" Xu Qian asked, offhand.
"Riding out to collect rent, coming home on the midnight shift. Walked into his own inner courtyard and ran smack into a gentleman of the beams. Snuffed out." One of the constables clicked his tongue.
"Any witnesses?" Xu Qian asked.
"The wife heard a commotion and came out to look—he was already dead in the courtyard. But we found footprints on the outer wall."
"Could it be an enemy disguised as a burglar?" Xu Qian poured himself a cup of tea and dropped a few candied fruit from his colleague's stash into the cup.
His tone was exactly how he used to discuss murders with his old colleagues back at the police station.
"We questioned the wife, the servants, the neighbors. The deceased hadn't made any enemies recently."
"Did you ask the night-patrol soldiers?"
"The Patrol Watch said no suspicious figures were out that night."
The capital was ringed by three walls: the Imperial City, the Inner City, and the Outer City. Though soldiers patrolled the Outer City at night, there was no curfew — the gates stayed open around the clock, and merchants who filed the proper paperwork and carried certificates could come and go as they pleased.
That system had enormously boosted commerce in the capital and driven economic growth.
Xu Qian nodded. "So if it was a burglar, he'd have to be someone familiar with Kangping Street, a regular who knew the place cold."
"How can you tell?" The runners stared, taken aback.
"A thief who can come and go from a house at night without being spotted by the patrols had to have scouted the ground first — he knew the Patrol Watch's rounds by heart." Xu Qian analyzed even as he instinctively reached into his pocket for a smoke.
He patted an empty pocket with a sigh of regret.
He couldn't help remembering his days at the station, when everyone would sit around in twos and threes, cigarettes lit, chewing over the casework. Which was how—morally stained by proximity to bad company—he'd picked up the addiction.
The colleagues were genuinely startled, sizing Xu Qian up.
"Well reasoned."
"Why didn't we think of that?"
"Ningyan, one stretch in prison and you've gone sharp."
In these times there was no formal curriculum. Constables solved cases entirely by experience, and the one with the best record got promoted to Warden.
"Maybe you lot didn't think of it, but surely Warden Wang did. Have you questioned the west side of town?" Xu Qian kept it modest, no showing-off.
His colleagues replied, "We asked around for two days. No suspect pinned down."
The west side was a slum, crawling with chicken-thieves and dog-swipers, a motley hive of rogues. Whenever trouble cropped up, the runners would fetch the civilian constables and head over—one catch after another, every time.
"How much silver was stolen?" Xu Qian's mind was already spinning into gear as he asked.
A colleague shot him a look, noting his tone had a whiff of the Magistrate about it, and answered: "Nothing. The deceased had just come back from collecting rent—the take was all loose silver, copper coins, and grain. How could a killer have carted away chests of silver and fled?"
Wrong!
Xu Qian narrowed his eyes. If I were the thief and I'd scouted the place, I'd pick a different night to strike, not tonight.
He kept the doubt to himself, cracking sunflower seeds and carrying on listening to his colleagues shoot the breeze.
"What a shame about that gorgeous wife, left to wither as a widow while she's still young. The figure on her, the chest—aye, even the pleasure houses couldn't offer a woman that fine. I'd pay a whole tael for a night with her, gladly."
"She's not that young either. Just twenty years younger than that Zhang fellow—thirty-something, is my guess. Women at that age are the hardest to keep chaste."
Hearing this, Xu Qian mused, "A woman of thirty's the real treasure. She understands the arts of the bedchamber, flavors without end."
His worldly wisdom earned nothing but raucous mockery. The others laughed at him: "You're a blushing virgin who's never even set foot in a pleasure house—what do you know?!"
On the martial path, a man could not lose his virginity without first breaching the Qi Refining stage. The moment his primal essence leaked, the Gate of Heaven would slam shut behind him.
So Xu Qian had carried his "pillar anchoring the sea" for nineteen years without yet taming a single demonic vixen.
...
In the inner hall where the County Magistrate resided.
Warden Wang, his skin dark as a field-worn farmer's, hung his head and listened listlessly to the Magistrate's scolding.
The Magistrate's surname was Zhu—plump, pale, and prosperous, a man of Yanzhou origin, a third-rank graduate of the twentieth year of the Yuanjing era. Adept at currying favor, inept at actual governance. He was a scholar who knew precisely how to be an official while being lamentably short on official competence.
His one virtue was a modicum of conscience—he stole small but not large, and though useless, at least he did not harass the common folk.
His chief flaw was a foul temper toward his underlings, with a mouth quick to swear.
"Incompetent. Utterly incompetent."
Learning that Warden Wang had once again returned empty-handed the day before, Magistrate Zhu was furious.
"A man of your years and experience, a veteran, and a mere murder case has you stumped for days on end."
Sweat beaded on Warden Wang's forehead. He felt thorns pricking his back.
With the Capital Evaluation looming, Magistrate Zhu had grown ever more irascible... Assistant Warden Li did not dare to cut in, though he and Warden Wang had been friends for well over a decade.
Li knew that the Magistrate yearned to climb another rung, and promotion demanded two things: a patron, and achievements.
A patron without achievements invited censure and left the seat unstable.
Achievements and a patron together—that was how one rose smoothly.
Where did achievements come from?
The Capital Evaluation was the crucial yardstick.
A quarter of an hour later, Magistrate Zhu drew his gaze away and raised his teacup to sip.
Official etiquette: raising the teacup meant the audience was over!
Seeing this, Assistant Warden Li tugged at the silent, head-hung Warden Wang, and the two beat a hasty, awkward retreat.
...
Warden Wang trudged back to the rest room, face dark as thunder. The chaotic room fell silent at once; everyone eyed him warily.
"Boss, did Magistrate Zhu lay into you again?"
Warden Wang rolled his eyes, snatched up a teacup, and gulped. "Damn it all. The man's dead and the thief's flown—where the hell am I supposed to find him? And I'm having the foulest luck today. I even lost a qian of silver."
That qian was your doing, you know... Xu Qian shrank his neck and sipped tea to mask his guilty conscience.
Silver clearly has no fate with you.
When Wang finished his tirade, a young runner proffered a rotten idea: "How about we... fish for a scapegoat?"
Xu Qian's eyebrows twitched.
Scapegoat-fishing—professional jargon from the low stratus of officialdom!
The meaning: find a patsy.
Bound by the limits of old technology and equipment, most cases in antiquity became unsolved headless affairs, and the clearance rate was pitifully low. Sometimes, to build achievements, or under pressure from superiors, an official would grab a scapegoat to close the case and be done with it.
The process went like this: a local clerk would first pick out a batch of habitual rogues—repeat offenders with rap sheets as long as one's arm—write their names on slips of paper, fold them up, and the official would draw one at random.
Whoever he drew was the scapegoat.
Hence the name: fishing for a scapegoat.
Once the unlucky mark was locked in, the clerk would haul him in, run him through a production line called "beating a confession out of him." No matter how hard a man's bones, he would crack.
The superiors were satisfied, the middling officials earned recognition, the clerks collected their rewards—you're happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy.
And the scapegoat wasn't exactly blameless—after all, he was a rotten apple, and packing him off into reincarnation early was doing the neighbors a public service.
There were plenty more sneaky tricks like this jostling about the corridors of officialdom.
Warden Wang nodded. "It'll have to do. Xiao Li, you handle it. Pick out a few with the dirtiest records, on the older side."
Xiao Li was about to nod when Xu Qian frowned. "Wait! Boss, this case has plenty of loose threads. It's not a dead end."
Xu Qian could not accept that logic.
He hadn't worn the police badge for years, but the values forged back then still stood tall.
Sure, the man was a rogue and a repeat offender, but he didn't deserve death. And even if he'd earned execution a hundred times over, one crime was one thing, another crime another.
If you dragged an innocent into the frame here, wouldn't you be letting the true murderer walk free?
Warden Wang's face clouded. He said nothing, staring at Xu Qian with displeasure.
The rest hurried to cajole him:
"Ningyan, don't stir up trouble."
"Boss gets bawled out every day. There's no help for it. Anyway, it's just a habitual lowlife."
Those on closer terms added: "Boss, Ningyan's family just weathered a great disaster—he's bound to be sensitive about this sort of thing."
Warden Wang paid them no mind, fixing his gaze on Xu Qian. He was not happy, and his face was set in stone. "Then you tell me—how do we investigate?!"
"Give me the case file!" Xu Qian said bluntly.