Delivery Accident - 4
"Have you found out who the culprit is?"
To think she'd pulled a clue out of that chaotic jumble of information. Had Lady Jegal been a master detective all along?
A detective who stumbles into locked-room murders everywhere she goes, an irreverent brat who swears on her grandfather's name at the drop of a hat, and one who doesn't even need to fire a single tranquilizer dart — now that would be an extraordinary rarity.
I approached Jegal Hyang, who was seated at the desk.
"Ah, um, that is..."
She looked up at me with a troubled expression. She'd said clue, so perhaps she hadn't narrowed it down to the culprit yet?
"Could it be that you've found decisive evidence?"
She was a young lady whose conversational skills left much to be desired — for all I knew, she'd have the whole thing neatly typed up in crisp 15-point serif font.
I planted myself right in front of the desk and leaned my head toward the paper she was studying.
"N-no, it's not that — you're too cloooose!"
Jegal Hyang shielded her face with both arms.
"My apologies. I got ahead of myself for a moment."
The cargo had made me impatient. Leaning in like that must have been rather overwhelming.
"Hff. It's okayyy. It's just that among the materials you gave me, there's something that should be there... but isn't."
"Would you care to explain?"
I stepped back a pace and made my request.
Jegal Hyang rested a hand on the curve of her chest — unmistakable even through her baggy clothes — drew a long, deep breath, and then began to speak with a seriousness unlike her usual self.
"If heavy cargo like books was hauled away by cart, then something that ought to be at the scene is missing."
What appears when heavy cargo is moved by cart? After a brief moment of thought, I opened my mouth.
"Do you mean something like cart wheel tracks?"
"Yeees."
"As I understand it, wheel tracks are the sort of evidence that can be easily wiped away."
You could rig a rake or a broom behind the cart, or have someone trailing behind erase the tracks by hand.
When I regarded her, puzzled, Jegal Hyang turned her head to gaze out the window.
What clue on earth was she getting at?
Her answer was simple.
"They can't erase them — it's raining today."
Beyond the window she was gazing at, the rain had yet to let up.
"Ah?! It certainly rained, so the tracks couldn't have been easily wiped away. But there was no information about anything like that anywhere?"
It had rained, so there was no way the wheel tracks could have been destroyed. And yet the tracks that should have existed were nowhere to be found.
Had Jegal Hyang discovered what Lim Hayeon and I had both overlooked?
"Th-that's why I needed the maaap."
"Let me spread it out, then."
What clue could she possibly be about to reveal? I hurriedly unrolled the map I'd had brought to my desk.
"Yes. One moment, pleeease. We'll take out this one, and this one, and this one too."
Fifteen suspect locations gathered from Haomen. Jegal Hyang first placed fifteen pebbles across the map.
Each time she handed me a sheet of paper, she removed a single stone.
"Hohh..."
Seven locations remained.
The papers she handed over spelled out, in careful detail, the reason each place had been excluded.
"You've cut the list down to less than half?"
When I looked at her in admiration, Jegal Hyang hid her face behind the paper and answered in a small voice, as if embarrassed.
"There's stiiiill more."
"You mean this isn't the end?"
At my words, she nodded and continued calmly.
"For wheel tracks dragged through the mud to vanish, the cart would have to travel by paved road. Cross-checking the materials you gave me for credibility narrows it down to seven places. And of those, the ones linked from the port to every suspected location entirely by paved roads are..."
Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei.
As befitted a provincial capital, its roads were well maintained — but not every road in Wuhan was paved.
To travel on a rainy day without leaving wheel tracks, one had no choice but to keep to paved roads. And of the seven locations, the ones connected by paved roads were...
"Ilga Trading Company, Nokcheong Escort Agency, and Jang Seonbang. Just three places."
"Yeees. That's right."
Jegal Hyang nodded shyly at my astonished face.
And the sun hadn't even begun to set.
She had collated and analyzed the intelligence from Haomen and the Mutual Aid Association, narrowing fifteen locations down to seven.
Then, seizing on the blind spot in that very intelligence, she had pared it to a mere three. What a talent.
"..."
It was little wonder Lim Hayeon was watching the whole scene as if she couldn't believe her eyes.
Truly worthy of the title of the Zhuge Clan's youngest daughter.
"Ilga Trading Company, Nokcheong Escort Agency, and Jang Seonbang. I'll have someone gather information on those three shortly."
"Ilga Trading Company is the merchant house that just moved its contracts over to Seocheon Escort Agency."
Lim Hayeon began reciting the information Seocheon Escort had passed along.
"A victim, then."
Crossing one off the list right out of the gate. This case might break open easily after all.
"They're an old house with deep roots in Wuhan, but business has been on shaky ground since the grandson recently inherited it. And yet there's something rather strange about them."
"What do you mean?"
"One of the conditions of transferring the contract was that if the cargo ran into trouble during this escort run, Seocheon would pay tenfold compensation."
Lim Hayeon informed me that thanks to this incident, Ilga Trading Company now stood to collect an astronomical payout.
"Using the payout to dig themselves out of financial ruin. That's reason enough to manufacture a disaster."
Had the Seocheon branch chief overreached in his rush to grow the Wuhan branch?
It smelled like textbook insurance fraud.
Lim Hayeon nodded and moved on to the next piece of information.
"Nokcheong Escort Agency is run by a chief from the unorthodox factions, and Seocheon's Wuhan branch has poached the lion's share of its clients."
Seocheon Escort had expanded aggressively across Wuhan, and by all accounts Nokcheong had taken the worst of it.
"Losing the commercial battle, they reached for the blade. That tracks as well."
When words failed, out came the sword — the time-honored Murim solution. And hailing from the unorthodox factions, they'd have had even fewer qualms about it.
"Jang Seonbang specializes in water transport — a shipping house that leases out boats and sailors. They used to supply Seocheon Escort with both, until Seocheon found better partners and cut the contract."
"A group that could slaughter the escorts on the Yangtze waterways — and if something went wrong with the boats, the contract might well swing back their way. How convenient."
For this one, the disappearance of every last sailor made perfect sense. They'd either absorbed the crews into their own ranks or carved out a monopoly at swordpoint.
"Every one of them has reason to stand against Seocheon Escort Agency."
"So this is what they mean when they say a single step into the Murim carves out a river of grudges."
Now I understood in one stroke what the Simun Branch Master had meant — Seocheon's enemy was all of Wuhan.
"Shall I have our people keep a close watch on these three?"
In just half a day, the list of suspect organizations had shrunk from all of Wuhan to three names.
If we waited a little longer for intelligence to come in, could we smoke out the culprit? The danger was if they liquidated the cargo into cash too quickly.
"With what we have, this is about as far as we can go. It's only been half a day, so the moment more information arrives..."
Just then, I felt a tug at my sleeve.
"Um..."
"Lady Jegal. Have you perhaps found some clue?"
Jegal Hyang was peering up at me with a cautious face, as though she had something to say.
"Ah... F-Father always said that in times like these, I shouldn't think about what I want, but about what the enemy waaaants."
There's a line in Sun Tzu's Art of War: know yourself, but not the enemy, and for every victory you will suffer a defeat. It's the poor cousin of the more famous maxim — know the enemy and know yourself, and you need never fear the outcome of a hundred battles.
Jegal Hyang was telling me that right now, we didn't truly understand our enemy.
"What the enemy wants... not what I want, but what the enemy wants."
For a while, I paged between the information Jegal Hyang had organized and the map.
What had I missed?
Jegal Hyang had spun new information out of information that didn't exist. So what was I supposed to be looking for?
'Once again — in moments like these, you look for the examiner's intent.'
Where had the cargo been stolen? I'd been staring at that question all day.
The Zhuge Clan's youngest daughter had even dragged in information that wasn't there. Stop fixating on the question and the answer choices — find the examiner's intent.
Which left three narrowed suspects.
Ilga Trading Company, Nokcheong Escort Agency, Jang Seonbang. Three answer choices — child's play for a man tempered by the Korean SAT and its treacherous five-option questions.
And in moments like these, there's a tried-and-true method...
Aha!
"Found it."
"What?"
"Reeeally?"
The two women stared at me in astonishment.
"I was thinking about this all wrong."
"About what?"
"Our own position. I'd assumed the culprit wanted exactly what we wanted. I saw the trees and missed the forest."
"The forest?"
"We lost the books, so our eyes were glued to the cargo. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was looking somewhere else entirely."
"Somewhere else? Don't tell me—?!"
I could see a thought flash across Lim Hayeon's face. She'd reached the same conclusion, hadn't she?
"The strangest thing about this case isn't that the cargo vanished, or that the escorts died. The strangest thing is..."
"The ghost ship anchoring at the port."
That's my partner for you — the one I trust with everything. Lim Hayeon and I nodded at the same time.
"The disaster struck aboard a ship that had left Yichang. There were countless places it could have dropped anchor. So why, of all places, did it dock at its destination?"
"There must have been a reason it had to put in at Wuhan."
"Exactly. By anchoring at Wuhan, within half a day there wasn't a soul left in the city who hadn't heard of Seocheon Escort's catastrophe. Look at it that way, and only one answer remains."
"A group that needed Seocheon Escort Agency to bleed."
"A group that profits the more Seocheon's Wuhan branch earns its infamy. Of our three suspects, only one stands to gain."
"Ah!"
I slowly picked up a pebble and slid it from the port to one of the suspect locations.
The place closest to the port.
The place that possessed both the force and the grudge.
"That's right. The culprit is Nokcheong Escort Agency."