"A warm bath," Tang Fan says, "is one of life's pleasures almost as good as decent food, so of course you can have it here. And Dong-er is a very clever teenage girl who lives with us; she used to be a servant at the place I used to rent, but the mistress who kicked me to the curb didn't want her any more, either, so I bought her contract and tore it up."

No need to rehash the unpleasant bits in the middle.

"She has a perfect memory and needs to see something only once for it to stick. She's a great help if we have a case that we need to go through files for. And she can beat Wang Zhi at weiqi, which is no mean feat."