The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 13 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Lahan and the Dangling Corpse (Part Three)

The three women Onsou brought were all new palace ladies who had just passed the examinations this year. They were of reasonably respectable backgrounds; two of them were officials’ daughters while the other came from a merchant family. Each of them, Lahan thought, was notably beautiful.

He’d also taken the liberty of summoning officials from the Board of Justice. They didn’t get along so well with Lakan’s Ministry of War, but there was no reason to go looking for a fight. Lahan wanted someone there to witness the entire affair.

“U-Um, may I ask why we’ve been called here?” Palace Lady No. 1’s eyebrows dropped by three millimeters. The brief report he’d gotten about her had said that she was the daughter of a rural official and that she was staying with relatives in the capital. She had lustrous black hair.

“I can’t believe you would bring us to the very room where something so awful took place. Surely you’re not going to tell us to clean up the corpse?” Palace Lady No. 2 said, quaking. She was the merchant’s daughter, raised in the capital, and also had lovely black hair.

“I— I w-w-want to go home!” said Palace Lady No. 3, shivering violently. She was the youngest daughter of a civil official, and like the others, was a raven-haired beauty. Each of their faces was quite distinct, but from behind they would all look very similar.

“This would make it hard to tell who was who even if we did have witnesses from the projected time of death.” Onsou crossed his arms. Dr. Liu and the other medical personnel had remained in the room. “So which of these women is the criminal?” Onsou looked to Lakan, but he was asleep. Even if he’d been awake to point out the killer, it would never stick without a clearly defined motive and manner of killing—and Lahan would have found it unbearably un-beautiful to try to squeeze some forced evidence out of the situation.

“I see you appear somewhat distraught over the fact that you’ve been brought here as suspects, ladies,” Lahan said. As he was speaking to beautiful women, he wished to be as polite as he could—while at the same time hoping, indeed wishing, that they would turn out to be as beautiful on the inside as they were on the outside.

“Of course we are. This is a suicide, isn’t it? Why in the world would you say we killed him?” asked Palace Lady No. 1.

“Me, a killer? Of such a great bear of a man?” asked Palace Lady No. 2.

“When did he die, anyway? If it happened yesterday, I can prove to you that I was at my house,” proposed Palace Lady No. 3.

“Completely understandable perspectives, all of you,” Lahan said. He looked at the three ladies, his smile never faltering. “However, there are several distinct problems with the suicide hypothesis, including the situation of the room and the injuries found on the corpse. Further, I think you all should know that alibis provided by your family or friends will not be considered compelling evidence.”

The three women frowned at that.

“More importantly, did all three of you not have a motive to kill this man?” He pointed at Wang Fang’s corpse, which now lay under a sheet. “This man was as greedy as he was ambitious, and I’m given to understand that he never saw a woman who caught his fancy without trying to talk his way into her bed. Quite a few officials saw Wang Fang speaking to all three of you.”

“True, he spoke to me, all right. And not just a couple of times,” Palace Lady No. 2 said with a sigh. “But he’s hardly the only man to have made advances on me. Embarrassing though it may be to say so, surely you understand that many of the palace ladies are here seeking good marriage prospects?” Lady No. 2 was the merchant’s daughter, and she had the force of personality to match—a type Lahan hardly disliked.

“I do indeed,” he said. “Still, choosing an absent superior’s office for a tryst is, let us say, in poor taste.”

All three women blushed. That said it all.

“Whatever are you talking about?” one of them asked.

“I have a family member with a nose as sensitive as a cat’s. She discovered a very particular scent on the couch that the owner of this office so loves.”

Lahan hadn’t been able to tell himself, but apparently those with better senses of smell knew right away. Maomao, having grown up in a brothel, was particularly sensitive to it.

In short, the very couch where Lakan was now sleeping had been used to do the deed during Wang Fang’s assignations. It must have been a pleasant place for it; Lakan was very particular about his couches.

“Only a minimum of cleaning was done in this office during its owner’s absence—yet the area around the couch was unaccountably cleaner than anywhere else. You may have thought you had tidied it up so as not to leave any evidence, but since we have someone here with an animal’s nose, we knew right away.”

Maomao was glowering at him, while beside her Tianyu was saying, “Shoot, and I sat on that!” As for Lakan, currently snoozing on the guilty couch, he showed no sign of waking up.

“S-Suppose this room was that man’s little love nest. That hardly means we were the ones he was here with,” Palace Lady No. 1 said, her voice trembling.

“Much as I might like to agree with you, I can’t,” said Onsou, stepping forward. “This is Master Lakan’s personal office. No lady in the entire court dared approach it before he left for the western capital—they knew Master Lakan too well.”

Lakan was unpredictable; you never knew what he would do next. So other officials resolutely kept their distance from him, and even the court ladies made it a point not to get too close, in the same way that nobody would willingly walk into a warehouse full of gunpowder.

Many had once made light of Lakan, seeing as he was the oldest son of a famed household yet was branded a failure. The criticism had rolled right off Lakan’s back, though; as long as he could play his board games, he was happy.

Once Lakan saw that he needed privilege and power, however, he’d taken everyone he viewed as an impediment and had torn them up by the roots. Now there was an unwritten rule when it came to “the army’s fox”: Leave him alone. Don’t even go near him.

“However, Master Lakan has been away for the past year. It was because you’re all new here that none of you thought anything of using this room to meet a man.”

Onsou was right. All three of these women had become court ladies within the past year, and they didn’t know Lakan. Even if they had picked up on the unwritten imperative to steer clear of him, it must not have meant much to them. Otherwise they would never have joined the gawking crowd in his office.

And there had been no other new court ladies in the last year except for these three.

“So your opinion is that one of us killed him because of a little jealousy? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but how would I or any of us ladies with our skinny arms have killed this man and somehow made it look like a suicide?” Palace Lady No. 2 said. Nos. 1 and 3 immediately nodded their support.

“I’m glad you asked that. I’d like to consider that very question right now.” Lahan beckoned Maomao over. She gave him the world’s most disgusted look, so he was obliged to go to her instead. “Could you give me some help?” he asked.

“I am here strictly as an assistant to the medical personnel. What help would you have me give you?” Maomao replied as if reading off a script.

“Since she brought up a woman’s skinny arms, I thought this might be most credible if you did it.”

“Surely not, Master Lahan. I’m certain your own arms, so pale that they appear never to have seen the sun, and so willowy that they don’t look like they could hold anything heavier than a brush, would provide an ample demonstration.”

Maomao and Lahan set to glaring at each other.

“Aw, help the guy out, Niangniang.”

“If you don’t help him, this will never be over. Just do it already.”

Maomao shot Tianyu a dirty look, but she couldn’t refuse an instruction from Dr. Liu. She clicked her tongue. “Very well.”

“Toss the rope around the ceiling beam, if you would. Like you did earlier.”

“Uh-huh.” Maomao had dropped the pretense of politeness; she answered quietly enough that those around wouldn’t hear.

“Here. Rope.”

“Yep.”

Maomao tossed the rope around the beam so it dangled down, then knotted it. At the end, she made a noose.

“You think that rope is enough to hold such a big man?” Palace Lady No. 2 said with a sigh.

“Yes—but it would be difficult to dangle him with that alone. I have another rope here.” Lahan passed a second rope to Maomao, who looped it around the rafter like she had the first one. This one, however, she didn’t knot, but allowed it to hang freely. Lahan began to explain: “You make a loop in the end of this rope as well, then place it around the neck of the person you wish to ki— Maomao! Don’t put that around my honored father’s neck!”

Maomao had been making to place the rope around the sleeping Lakan’s neck. If she hated her father, there was nothing Lahan could do about that, but he didn’t want this to turn into another murder right while he was standing there.

“Niangniang, we’ve got the perfect thing right here!” Tianyu looked like he was about to pull the sheet right off the body, but thankfully Dr. Liu stopped him with another rap on the head.

Lahan was becoming very grateful indeed for Dr. Liu’s presence.

Onsou brought a sandbag. “Here, use this.” The tied-off part would make a nice analogy for a neck, the perfect place to put their rope.

The beams of the ceiling were just logs, used as is, which meant they acted like a pulley, making it easy to heave the rope up. Except...

“It’s not moving at all, is it?” Palace Lady No. 2 laughed.

Lahan’s adopted younger sister Maomao was not very strong. The sandbag, measured out to be as heavy as the murder victim, was at least twice her weight. With a moveable pulley, which would have lightened the load proportional to the number of pulleys involved, even Maomao might have been able to lift the sandbag. But the beam, secured in place, only acted like a fixed pulley, which didn’t change the weight of the object being lifted.

Maomao strained, clutching the rope close, but instead of lifting the sandbag, she was the one who started to float off the ground.

“You’re right, it’s not budging. Well, let me help,” Lahan said. He joined Maomao at the rope, pulling on it as hard as he could, leaning all his body weight back.

“I can’t do this...and you...know it!” Maomao grunted.

“Shut up and...pull...!” Lahan replied.

“You’re not...even...helping! It’s not...moving!”

“Shut up, I said!”

As they sniped back and forth, the sandbag slowly began to rise into the air.

“Huff, puff!”

“Puff, huff!”

After keeping it dangling for some ten or fifteen seconds, the two of them ran out of strength, and the sandbag fell back to the floor with a thud. Maomao and Lahan followed it, panting. Lahan was not a fan of physical labor, but his demonstration would be the most persuasive of anyone here.

“The b-body had scratches on the neck, indicating that the victim clawed at the rope,” Lahan said, catching his breath. “Which wouldn’t be present if he had jumped from the chair and been strangled in an instant.”

The faces of the three women stiffened at that.

“One of you couldn’t have managed alone, true enough. But two together, that would be possible, wouldn’t it?”

Lakan had said something about a white Go stone, but not which one. Meaning maybe it was more than one.

“Listen to the two of you gasp for breath. Perhaps two people could have killed him, but it doesn’t look to me like they could have hung him up,” Palace Lady No. 2 said, in spite of the strained look on her face.

“Indeed. Two people could only just barely lift him, so it would be difficult for them to stage the hanging. That would require a third person.”

The ladies’ expressions grew tenser still.

Lahan somehow managed to calm Maomao down and get her to help him heft the sandbag again. When they had it up to about the level of the noose they’d prepared earlier, Onsou got up on the chair and placed the other loop around the sandbag’s “neck.” Then they cut the second rope with which they had hung up the bag, and it dangled neatly from the rafters.

“Behold,” Lahan said. “You’ll note that I never once said there was only one killer. The three of you all did it together.”

With that, the three ladies broke down, weeping and kicking the floor in their frustration.

After a great deal of kicking and screaming, whatever had possessed the three women seemed to release them, and they quietly admitted their guilt.

They’d become friends because they had all joined the court ranks this year. None of them got along very well with the more experienced court ladies, which had only made their sense of solidarity stronger—so strong that they even used the same hair product, which might explain why all three of them had such lustrous black tresses.

Each woman had been sent to the palace with instructions from their families to find a good marriage prospect, and each woman had found Wang Fang. He’d approached each of the ladies separately, and you can imagine where it went from there.

Wang Fang had been under the impression that he had been juggling them quite capably, but a woman’s intuition is not a thing to be taken lightly, and the three-timer was soon found out.

They say that when a case of adultery is discovered, a woman’s hatred turns on the other woman—but in this case, the three women were already friends, and so their ire lighted on Wang Fang.

So it was that the trio conspired to kill him. Knowing that Lakan would soon be home, they invited Wang Fang to this office the day before the strategist was to return. Once one of them was laid out on the couch—the usual procedure in their trysts—and Wang Fang’s back was turned, the other two women jumped out of hiding and threw the ropes around his neck.

“Women are indeed terrifying,” Lahan said with a great sigh. If only Wang Fang had played the situation better. Maybe if he’d found some more-mature women who could have been more pragmatic about their games.

The only ones left in the office were Lahan, Onsou, and Lakan, who was still snoozing away. The folks from the medical office had gone back to work, and the ladies had been led away by the officials from the Board of Justice. The corpse was still there in a corner of the office, so Lahan continued to have Young Junjie busy himself with cleaning the adjacent room.

“I can’t believe it turns out Wang Fang was murdered because of a bit of jealousy. I thought for sure there must be some other reason,” said Onsou, sighing as he prepared a change of clothes for Lakan. The outfit was neatly ironed; no doubt he wanted to get his boss to put on fresh clothes before he met the Emperor.

“It might not have been just a bit of jealousy.” Lahan looked long and hard at the three ladies’ service records. In his mind, he began to see a number that united their histories.

“You think there might have been something else at work?”

“I would be very disturbed if there were, so I’m going to look into it.”

Even as he spoke, Lahan felt a pang of regret. There went the rest of his day. But then, he’d expected that something like this might happen. He would just have to carry on.