Fei Du paused rather ambiguously. "Wei?"
Xia Xiaonan, choked with sobs, nodded.
Perhaps it was Lang Qiao's mistake; she thought that in the instant when Fei Du looked up, a cold light flashed through his eyes. She therefore swallowed back the reminder that "covering a surveillance camera is against regulations." Anyway, there was more than one surveillance camera in the room; covering one didn't impact anything.
Fei Du rolled his sleeves up slightly and sat down. "What kind of person is this Wei Wenchuan?"
In a somewhat murky voice, Xia Xiaonan quietly said, "He's our class monitor."
Lang Qiao had been acting as notetaker; hearing this, the tip of her pen suddenly paused. "How many class monitors does your class have?"
"One… Just him."
This Wei Wenchuan had come to the City Bureau.
The day of Feng Bin's murder, when the City Bureau had taken over and sent people to seek out the runaway students, they'd called in Feng Bin's homeroom teacher Ge Ni for questioning, there had been an unusually eye-catching teenage boy by her side who'd introduced himself as the class monitor. When something happened to a student, a public security bureau would call in the teacher and school administrators, but they wouldn't call in an underaged student without notifying his parents. In other words, Wei Wenchuan had come himself!
So if this business really did have to do with him, when he'd seen the bustling police bureau, the grief-stricken parents, the group of shivering students, what had he felt?
Had he been afraid? Anxious?
Worried that the schoolyard bullying would come out and he would be implicated?
No… Lang Qiao thought back carefully. She remembered that the boy's bearing had been very easy, the ease of looking on from the sidelines at something that had nothing to do with him. He'd been poised and polite, smiling slightly whenever he saw anyone—if he'd been disturbed, they definitely would have noticed.
It seemed more like he'd come to inspect the outcome of his plans. No wonder the four students who'd been brought back hadn't dared to say a word in a public security bureau!
A chill went up Lang Qiao's back.
Next to her, in a hypnotically soft voice, Fei Du said to Xia Xiaonan, "Could you tell me concretely what happened?"
Xia Xiaonan had her head down, her tears falling one after another, quickly soaking the business card Fei Du had given her. She was clutching it tightly, as if the little piece of paper was her last hope.
"At the beginning of December, I was feeling unwell one day, so I asked to take off and didn't go to PE. I was reading alone in a classroom. Suddenly Feng Bin came back to class and told me that I was this year's…this year's…."
"Deer," Fei Du finished for her. "I heard you only transferred to Yufen for senior middle. It seems you already know what their so-called 'deer' is, right?"
Xia Xiaonan's shoulders drew in. "…I saw them messing with Wang Xiao."
Fei Du very gently took on a posture of listening attentively.
"They… The girls in Wang Xiao's dorm and the ones from the dorm next door, one day, for some reason, they threw her bedding out the window, and they pushed her, hit her, called her a lot of ugly-sounding words. I was just passing by the dormitory building then, and the quilt falling down startled me. I didn't know what was going on. A girl next to me told me that Wang Xiao was the 'deer,' that each year everyone chose the most loathsome person. She was dirty and cheap, and anyone who lived in the same dorm as her was unfortunate. Then someone came from the boys' dormitory across the way. He laughed and said, 'This is my slave, how come you're hitting her again?' And he gave the girls hitting her a few hundred yuan."
"…" Lang Qiao recalled how she had had to save up for a whole semester to go to one concert during her middle school days and felt that she was listening to a fantasy story. "A few hundred?"
"It must have been five-hundred." Xia Xiaonan thought she was asking for a definite amount and answered accordingly. "Because I remember that the girl who took the money counted it and said, 'Why is it five-hundred now? A hundred less. Wang Xiao's price goes down every day.' …That sort of thing.
"Wang Xiao didn't make a sound. She picked up her fallen stuff on her own. The girls wouldn't let her go into the dormitory building, saying that they'd 'sold' her and telling her to go with the buyer. Then the boy waved a hand at her, and she…she…went into the boys' dormitory…"
"What?" Hearing this, Lang Qiao nearly jumped to her feet. For a good while she was stupefied. Stammering somewhat, she said, "That's just… That's appalling. Aren't there teachers in your dormitories? Didn't they do something?"
"There are teachers," Xia Xiaonan said quietly. "But they don't do anything about it… They don't dare to do anything."
Fei Du poured two glasses of water and put one each in front of Lang Qiao and Xia Xiaonan. Then he said to Xia Xiaonan, "So you were very afraid of receiving the same treatment."
Xia Xiaonan almost inaudibly squeezed words out of her throat. "I was standing there that day, watching her picking up her things. She'd pick them up but couldn't hold them. She'd pick up one and drop another. I…really wanted to help her…but…"
Probably only someone who'd fallen on the ground and had no one to help them up would regret that they hadn't helped another from the first.
Fei Du smiled faintly, not taking up her words. He only asked, "Feng Bin told you that he had a way, right? Did he tell you in detail what he was planning to do after running away from school?"
Xia Xiaonan said, "He said he had a friend outside of school who had a lot of connections. He'd already contacted this person and was going to reveal this business. He'd had enough of the school."
Fei Du said, "Who was this friend?"
"I don't know his real name, only his pen name or maybe his online handle… I think it was 'go ask shatov'. He promised us he'd make all the hideous things at school public."
Fei Du silently looked towards a corner—there was another unobtrusive surveillance camera in the corner; he seemed to be exchanging a look with the person watching. "Have you seen this friend?"
Xia Xiaonan shook her head numbly. "No, Feng Bin said this person was out of town for a little while, though he'd arranged to come back for Christmas. We'd stay at the hotel and wait for him for a few days… But…but we…didn't have time."
"Since you'd already determined to leave with Feng Bin, why did you repent later?"
"Because…the day before we were going to leave, Wei Wenchuan came to see me. He said he knew everything, including how and when we were planning to leave, where we were going, everyone who was going… He told me to think carefully, because no one would care about these trifles going on at school, at most a few students would issue apologies, and afterwards it would get even worse… And as for the media, the school… They all have family connections… Outside society is the same as school, divided by social position, with people who can have the final say. He had means of finding out our plans ahead of time, and he also had means of making it so we couldn't attend school again… If I didn't believe him… If I didn't believe him, I was welcome to try."
Fei Du sighed, because he knew that these words really weren't purely a threat—they were a threat of the truth as it was. "So you surrendered."
"I… Wei Wenchuan told me that actually it had been Liang Youjing's idea to chose me to be the deer, because I stole her thunder on the exams and made her lose face in front of her parents—her mother is one of the school trustees, even if she killed someone at school it could be settled. No one dared to offend her. Unless he personally went to speak to Liang Youjing…"
"What did he want you to do?"
"He gave me a phone with tracking and eavesdropping functions… And he promised me that after this one thing was over, I'd be able to calmly finish senior middle and graduate. No one would bother me."
"Did you know what he wanted to do, then?"
"I didn't know." Xia Xiaonan shook her head desperately. "I really didn't know… When we went to the Drum Tower and suddenly ran into…ran into that person, I was scared out of my wits. When Feng Bin pushed me and told me to run, I didn't even realize what was going on. It was so dark, I thought someone had just hit him from behind… I didn't know that person…that person…"
Didn't know that person was holding a knife, didn't know that when Feng Bin, voice full of terror, told her to run, his back had been cut up.
Because it had been too dark; the sudden surprise attack had left her with no time to react.
He must only have been hit from behind? Wei Wenchuan must have found a group of delinquents to teach Feng Bin a lesson?
She'd been comforting herself like this, and her senses had had to obligingly collaborate to trick her and themselves.
"So up to the last you didn't throw the phone away?" Lang Qiao at last couldn't resist saying this.
All the blood drained out of Xia Xiaonan's face.
No wonder the killer had been in no hurry and known exactly what to do.
Fei Du said, "In the end, you accidentally ran into a dead end alley… Child, relax a bit, all right? The more detailed the information you give us, the better we'll be able to catch the person who killed Feng Bin."
Xia Xiaonan curled up into a ball, her eyes looking in panic at Fei Du, like a fawn's.
Fei Du tried softening his voice and slowly leading her on. "The circumstances were very urgent then. Feng Bin saw that there was a dead end ahead, but it was already too late to turn back, so he had you hide in the garbage bin. It was very late in the day. The person-high garbage bin was full of a pungent, reeking sour smell. There was a lid over your head. It was black all around. You couldn't see anything. You could only hear the sounds coming from outside… What did you hear?"
"…cries for help," Xia Xiaonan whispered after a long silence. "At first he cried for help, and no one answered. Then he babbled, trying to talk to the killer, asking who he was, promising to give him all his money. The killer…didn't say anything. Not long after, I heard frantic steps, some noise… and a scream…then…then there wasn't any sound.
"Then after a while, I heard a laugh, and also…also the sound of heavy objects falling on the ground one after another…"
It hadn't been heavy objects falling; it had been the thudding of Feng Bin's limbs hitting the ground as Lu Guosheng chopped them off.
"Then that person came towards me. He…he knew where I was hiding. I was terrified. He was singing a song…" Xia Xiaonan remembered a couple of lines. "'Little rabbit be good, open up as you should'…"
Gooseflesh instantly rose on Lang Qiao's arms.
"Then he pulled me out of the garbage bin! I was scared to death. I even forgot to breathe. And he…he reached out towards me, took my backpack, found my phone and my wallet… I thought I was dead meat, but…but he only smiled at me, waved my phone around, and left without saying anything. I…I finally saw Feng Bin…Feng Bin…"
Xia Xiaonan seemed to have returned to a nightmare. Her eyes lost focus, and she gasped for breath.
Fei Du leaned forward and took her hand. The trace of warmth on his palm scalded the girl's frozen hand, instantly pulling her back into the present. Staring, she hung onto Fei Du's hand as if it were a lifeline. "I'm sorry, I was scared…"
While a human lifetime might contain hundreds of thousands of regrets of all kinds, in the main, most of them came down to these words.
I'm sorry, I was scared.
Luo Wenzhou, watching this dialogue from the observation room, turned away, his face grave. He called Tao Ran. "Have you contacted the students involved in the case and their parents? What did they say?"
It was very noisy where Tao Ran was. "It's a bit of a mess, the school is giving me the runaround. In the last five minutes I've gotten calls from seven or eight lawyers. These children of wealthy families…"
"Bring them all back, including the teachers who watch the dormitories and the school's management," Luo Wenzhou said coldly. "Yufen Middle School's students are under suspicion of abuse and group sexual assault."
"What?" At first Tao Ran was shocked. After a pause, he said at once, "I'm on it!"
Luo Wenzhou hung up the phone and stood at the door of the observation room, letting out a long breath. Then he remembered something and opened the audiobook software he'd recently downloaded.
This week, the topic submitted by The Reciter was "Demons pace through the empty night—Demons, by Dostoevsky."
"Shatov" was a character in the book who'd been murdered for being a "whistleblower," delicately coinciding with Feng Bin's experience.
And the person who'd contacted Feng Bin and promised to expose the filthy events at Yufen Middle School… Why would he so coincidentally be called 'go ask shatov'?
Had a certain person…or a certain power, knowing beforehand about Feng Bin's decision to take Xia Xiaonan away, predicted this bloody incident?
Had they been plotters or promoters?
Why had they declared themselves so brazenly this time?
Luo Wenzhou stood in the long and narrow corridor and smoked two cigarettes in a row. He looked up at the murky sky outside the window; it was overcast and getting ready to snow. He remembered the mysterious patrolman he and Fei Du had bumped into that day at the Drum Tower, feeling that he'd put his hand into still waters and felt the surging undercurrent beneath.
The City Bureau's powerful intervention was like a sharp lever, prying open corners sheltering evil.
That afternoon, all classes at Yufen Middle School were suspended. The police simply commandeered the school's offices and interviewed all the students separately, and took all the implicated teachers and school staff back to the City Bureau. The students who had been kept under high pressure and were once more seeing the light of day at last couldn't contain themselves. They revealed the true state of affairs, and the situation became irretrievable—
That evening, pudgy little Zhang Yifan, like the superhero and the raised fist on his clothing, was the first to stand up and use his real name, writing a long, clumsily-written article and posting it online. After a brief silence, the silent lambs at last stopped their dazed steps and let out weak cries…that gradually gathered into a roar.
The shocked parents swarmed around, nearly coming to blows at the City Bureau's gates.
The chaotic work of investigating and gathering evidence continued until ten o'clock at night before stopping out of consideration for the health and mental well-being of the minors. The unfortunate Tao Ran's crow's mouth had uttered a prediction—they would indeed have to work overtime this weekend.
On the way home, Fei Du hardly said a word.
Luo Wenzhou turned his head to look at him and saw him sitting in the passenger's seat, actually sleeping while maintaining his upright posture. Luo Wenzhou turned the heating up as high as it would go and drove all the way home as evenly as he could. Only when they were entering the estate did he take Fei Du's hand and shake it gently. "Wake up, time to get out of the car. Don't get chilled."
Fei Du's back had gone somewhat stiff from sitting. He agreed reluctantly without entirely waking up. He stared blankly up ahead until Luo Wenzhou pulled into his parking spot and stopped the car.
"What are you looking at?" Luo Wenzhou touched his head, then felt his warm neck and tightened his scarf. "We're nearly home."
"Why…" Fei Du's voice was somewhat hoarse. He pointed. "Why are the lights on in your house?"