One day after her one-day trial, the murder case against Gu Kailai is making its way into the public domain, and it is proving to be a showcase of political engineering. Rarely has someone admitting to murder looked so sympathetic in doing so. The mitigating factors, the narrative, and the details have been carefully sculpted to ensure as little damage as possible to Gu and her husband, Bo Xilai, while shifting blame to those with less political clout—namely the deceased and the police officer who ratted them out. The trial was theatre—closed to everyone but hand-picked attendees, carefully planned and executed in a single day—so we are left to piece together accounts from someone purportedly in the courtroom (translated by law professor Don Clarke), the state news service, and other bits and pieces. Given all those various incentives to steer the narrative in one direction or another, it’s best to see this less as a simple story of what happened than as a narrative constructed out of facts, accusations, and political imperatives.

I won’t rehash the details here, but I’ll mention just a few of the most interesting prospects about where this goes:

—Will the British government object to this version of events? Gu has confessed to murdering British businessman Neil Heywood, but she is blaming the deceased for blackmailing her with threats to her son, Bo Guagua. According to an account publicly posted by courtroom observer Zhao Xiangcha, her son “telephoned his mother to report his having been detained and kidnapped. Gu was afraid of her son being kidnapped and killed [or] suffering bodily harm. First, she reported the case to the Chongqing police, and the then police chief, Wang Lijun, took the case. But because the case took place in England, and there was not any solid proof, it was impossible to take coercive measures. This then gave her the motive for getting rid of Heywood in order to protect her son.” She has depicted herself—and was helped in the depiction by prosecutors—as a protective mother driven to a frantic defense. According to Xinhua, she said: “To me, that was more than a threat. It was real action that was taking place. I must fight to my death to stop the craziness of Neil Heywood.”

—Will Wang Lijun get a tougher sentence than Gu Kailai? One of the interesting details in this has been the question of what will happen to Wang—the police chief who fled to the U.S. consulate, claiming his life was in danger. He revealed the murder of Heywood—violating the omerta that governs the senior ranks of the Communist Party—and then he vanished into Chinese custody. Will he be treated as a whistleblower or a traitor? Count on the latter. In court, Gu repeatedly emphasized that Wang was “insidious,” and the Xinhua account of the case noted that “Wang Lijun entered the United States Consulate General in Chengdu without authorization.”

—Will Heywood’s family or attorney come to his defense? Since the beginning, the Heywood family has been largely silent, but the official version of events has heaped accusations upon him. There have been rumors for months that Heywood gave documents to a lawyer in the United Kingdom that would tell his side of the story if anything were to befall him. Something did. If those documents exist, expect to see them begin to come to light.

—How much of the rap will Bo beat? Bo will be punished in some way, but, above all, the trial conspicuously limited any connections between him and the murder case. In the end, it seems, the Party leaders decided it was too damaging to let one of their own go down so hard. Bo now faces “discipline violations,” to be clarified later. Were there an Olympic event for vaulting over political hazards, he would have cleared the first hurdle with room to spare.