The death of businessman Neil Heywood - an event key to the downfall of princeling-politician Bo Xilai - remains shrouded in mystery five months after the 41-year-old Briton was found dead in a Chongqing hotel room.
Although the British government finally broke its silence this week with a lengthy statement on Heywood's November death, key questions remain unanswered. Those include why it took the London so long to weigh in and whether Heywood, who occasionally worked for a secretive business intelligence firm with links to MI6, ever really worked for Britain's overseas spy agency.
Neither question was fully addressed on Tuesday by British Foreign Secretary William Hague's statement, which gave the first detailed, chronological account of the British government's response to a death that Beijing says may have involved Bo's wife, Gu Kailai .
Speculation about Heywood's work has been rife because little is known, with British media quoting people who knew him as saying he had intentionally kept a 'mysterious' profile in China.
Despite a denial by the British foreign office, rumours abound linking the death of Heywood in Chongqing to MI6 with many saying that British intelligence circles routinely use expatriate businesspeople abroad to collect information.
Although much remains unknown about Heywood's links to British intelligence, Dr Kerry Brown, a senior fellow with London-based Chatham House, said it would have been understandable if he had tried to give that impression because 'sometimes people trade off this'.
The fact that Heywood once worked for London-based Hakluyt, a secretive strategic-intelligence firm set up and staffed by former MI6 officers, has fuelled speculation that he was a spy for the intelligence agency.