Li Wei had once heard a saying.
The more people schemed, the more likely they were to fall into an unexpected predicament.
That saying was particularly apt for certain exceptionally stupid criminals.
In fact, battles of wits usually weren't all that complicated. They were complicated in fiction because of artistic embellishment and the demands of the story. In reality, whatever you were doing, if you tried to make it complicated, something you hadn't anticipated was guaranteed to go wrong. The reason was simple: people were the ones executing the plan.
A steam engine had hundreds or thousands of components, but each performed its own function. Unless external forces damaged them, or problems such as corrosion or metal fatigue arose, they could keep working according to their prescribed routines, without complaining or making mistakes.
People couldn't do that.
The more complicated a plan was, and the more people it involved, the more likely something was to go wrong. People weren't machine parts. They couldn't carry out their tasks consistently without a single slipup. Besides, the more complicated the plan, the more holes it had.
If Mr. Harry had simply left the gun where it was after shooting Justice Buckley, things might actually have been a little more troublesome.
Instead, he had done a great many stupid things in his attempt to disguise the death as a suicide.
For example, he had deliberately written on bloodstained paper. In Mr. Harry's view, this would prove to the police that Justice Buckley had left the note before dying. A sheet without blood on it might well raise suspicions that someone had deliberately forged the suicide note.
That created two problems. First, he had written on stationery that already had blood on it. Second, although he had imitated Justice Buckley's handwriting, he had still left