Hanging Waters by Keith West

PO FENG HSI, Chief of the City Police, sat at his office desk, tapping gently on the blotting-pad with a pencil. Opposite to him, on an uncomfortable, hard chair, sat the wife of Tung Lai Luk. The fact that the Chief's eye twinkled, while the not ungenerous lines of his build recalled the Chinese proverb that a fat man is a happy man, availed nothing to comfort Tung's wife, for she realised that, whatever might be the outcome of this enquiry into the death at her husband's establishment of a prominent official of the Central Government, there was bound to be unpleasantness. These modern officials, she reflected as she sat uncomfortably on the hard chair, did not understand the old customs of China--they had been bought up in the atmosphere of the Revolution of 1911, and judged things by very different standards.

-"Ah Loo, or, to give him his full name, Loo Ching, you say, came to your house to see the girl Lien Fa, who has since disappeared?" The Chief of Police eyed her severely.