Yin Ping's eyes were full of blood, but his face was white. His dry lips trembled incessantly, and his cheeks twitched unnaturally.
Tao Ran suddenly interrupted Yin Ping's dispute with the civil policeman. His eyes sweeping over Yin Ping's gloved hands, he asked, "Why are you wearing gloves at home?"
Yin Ping seemed to be in a condition of psychological stress. Hearing this, he immediately looked vigilantly towards Tao Ran, and quickly said in a quiet voice, "I scalded them while tending the boiler."
Saying this, as though he was afraid Tao Ran wouldn't believe him, he carefully pulled off his gloves a bit, laying the twisted burn scars on his palms bare in front of the police. Then he quickly withdrew his hands and lowered his head, seeming to feel a sense of inferiority about his hideous hands. He said haltingly, "Anyway…he was no good. I don't feel guilty."
Tao Ran frowned faintly. Then his gaze calmly swept around the shabby rental apartment—the family was poor, but the home didn't lack living energy. There was a full set of cookware, and crochet covers spread over the table and the old TV, light-colored and very clean. It was clear that the mistress of the house had exhausted all her capabilities to make life a little better for her family.
Quite a few old photographs were hanging on the living room wall directly across from the front door. There were individual shots, and there were family portraits. All of them were clustered around an old-style certificate. On the certificate was written: "Student Yin Xiaolong has been chosen as a triple A student in the first semester of sixth grade." In one corner was a photograph of a little boy who looked about seven or eight years old, holding a toy machine gun, smiling widely towards the camera. This must have been Student Yin Xiaolong himself.
"Is that your son?" Tao Ran asked, pointing to the certificate and the photograph on the wall.
Yin Ping hadn't expected him to ask this. He stared, then nodded dully. "Yes."
Tao Ran approached and looked over the elementary school certificate. Judging from the date that the certificate's recipient had attended sixth grade, the boy Yin Xiaolong must have been around thirty now.
"He got a certificate. His grades must have been pretty good?"
"No, they weren't, that's the only certificate he's ever received. We couldn't bear to throw it away when we moved." Yin Ping's wife, who'd seemed to be only set dressing, spoke. Seeing everyone's gazes fall on her, she very uncomfortably lowered her head, picking at the chilblains on her fingers.
"He's called Yin Xiaolong, I see? Is he married?" Tao Ran asked idly. "What does he do now?"
"Oh, he doesn't have a significant other yet. His educational record is bad, we don't have any resources, and he's clumsy and bad at talking. The girls don't like him," the woman said quietly. "He works at a 4S store doing manual work…"
"He was just being polite," Yin Ping roughly interrupted her, "why are you talking so much?"
The woman cowered and faltered, not daring to speak.
Tao Ran smiled at her. When he smiled, it was like a cleansing spring breeze sweeping over you, bringing its own endless supply of approachability. "And what work do you do?"
"We work for the same employer." Indeed, the woman relaxed slightly in front of him, saying quietly, "He tends the boiler, and I wash up a bit in the dining hall."
"Oh, you're colleagues." Tao Ran thought about it, then said, "Did the two of you meet at work? How many years have you been married?"
"Over thirty years… Nearly thirty-two." The woman smiled somewhat awkwardly. "It was our boss who introduced us.—A few years back we were a 'working couple,' which sounds pretty prosperous, but these last few years our employer hasn't been doing very well, and we've had to make do… So…Comrade Police Officer, my brother-in-law isn't coming back. When the old lady was alive, she said herself that she wanted to break off relations with him. So if the relationship is broken off, and you can't find him, then the house…the house has nothing to do with him, so you couldn't say we broke the law, right?"
"Enough," Yin Ping scolded her. "Stupid womenfolk who don't understand anything shouldn't interrupt. Go boil some water!"
The woman agreed meekly, shut her mouth, wiped her hands on her apron, picked up the teapot, and went into the kitchen. Clearly she was accustomed to submitting to mistreatment and taking orders.
A poor and lowly husband and wife, one ready to beat, the other ready to be beaten, living and working together for over thirty years, with a son already grown up and living with them. Even though their employer was declining rapidly, the old couple still had no intention of resigning.
Conservative, steady, weak, content with the status quo—it was a typical, rather old-fashioned household, simply living on another planet from Old Cinder, an informer who wandered in the gray areas. It seemed that no matter what there could be no connection between them.
Tao Ran exhaled silently. When he'd first come through the door and suddenly encountered Yin Ping, who looked too similar to Old Cinder, a pile of vague doubts had arisen in his mind. He'd nearly suspected that Old Cinder Yin Chao's flight had failed, and he had blended in under his brother's name.
Now it seemed that he'd been overthinking things.
If it had been like that, it wouldn't have been enough for these twins to look alike; there would also have had to be a telepathic link and transplanted memories between them for one to be able to seamlessly take the other's place at a position he'd worked at for over thirty years.
Yin Ping kept glancing at him. "What else do you want to ask?"
"All right, it's like this, could I trouble you to help me out?—Do you have anything left over from when Yin Chao sent the money? If there's an envelope with an address, that's enough. Please let me refer to it." Tao Ran thought about it, then very tactfully said, "Also, he may have contacted you, but you were at work or busy and didn't pick up his phone call or something. Just in case, as a formality, we'd like to screen your most recent e-mails and communications records…"
Wooden-faced, Yin Ping said stiffly, "He hasn't contacted us."
Tao Ran didn't get angry at being interrupted, only looked at him with a faint smile.
Yin Ping sat stiffly for a moment. Then, seeming to have finally accumulated enough force to stand up and walk, he went wordlessly into the bedroom and searched through something. After a moment, he brought a plastic-covered little notebook out of the bedroom, probably used for keeping accounts, written full of all the necessities life demanded. There were many things crammed into the covers of the notebook—IC call cards, souvenir postcards…and a train ticket stub.
"This is all I have." Yin Ping gave Tao Ran the train ticket and said, "This is the stub left over from when I took the slow train to T Province to find him. The things he sent back… I didn't keep any of them. He doesn't belong to our family anymore, what's the use of his hypocrisy?"
A brother who'd cut off relations long ago, unwilling even to come back to attend his mother's funeral when she passed away—it did sound like any mutual affection was out of the question. If Yin Ping had kept stubs from the bribe money Old Cinder had sent, that would have been a little suspicious; but now…
Tao Ran and the civil police officer interrogated Yin Ping concerning his brother Old Cinder's whereabouts out of town. Yin Ping talked as he remembered; there was no knowing whether he was accurate. It sounded as though this Old Cinder had wandered around over half of China, never having a permanent residence. Getting no results here was within expectations. While Tao Ran was disappointed, he could still accept this outcome. Seeing there really was nothing he could get, they could only say goodbye to Yin Ping and leave to carefully investigate all the Yin family's communications records. If there really was nothing there, they'd go to T Province and try their luck.
Before leaving, Tao Ran waved a hand to indicate there was no need for the couple to show them out. "If you remember anything concerning Yin Chao, please contact us any time."
Yin Ping said coldly, "I don't usually think about him."
Before Tao Ran could speak, he continued, "He didn't live like a normal person. He wasn't a normal person. Him being born into this family was a burden from a past life. He only brought us misfortune, never good luck. At his age, he didn't have a wife or child. He only went out to fool around, terrifying everyone around him. He's been…been gone so many years, and he's still bringing us trouble."
Tao Ran stared. As Yin Ping spoke, hatred sparked uncontrollably, like a ghost fire, in his clouded, expressionless eyes. The tone of his voice changed when he pronounced the word "gone."
Right in front of him, Yin Ping shut the door and coldly said, "Don't come again!"
The bad-tempered civil policeman from the South Bend police station leapt up and began to curse, but Tao Ran frowned slightly.
It was only a household dispute. Not coming home when his mother died really would make people nurse a grievance; anyone who had such a relative likely wouldn't have anything good to say about him. But why was Yin Ping's hatred for Old Cinder so deep? It was almost overflowing.
Tao Ran even felt that if Old Cinder had been standing in front of him, Yin Ping may have simply attacked him.
He drove the civil policeman back to the South Bend police station, listening to his continuing moral indignation. "Did you see that? That's the sort.—Let me tell you, that was the expression of someone with a guilty conscience!"
Tao Ran froze, looking in the rearview mirror at the civil policeman full to bursting with a sense of justice.
The civil policeman said, "I've seen lots of that type of person. He's clearly done some things to wrong the other person, so he has to jump higher than anyone else, make more noise than anyone else—but actually there's a mirror in his heart. He knows he's no good. The guiltier he feels, the more he acts like that, as though he can crush his conscience by shouting. Heh, in the end, wasn't it all for the sake of hogging the family property?"
Tao Ran's heart moved.
Just then, the colleague he'd brought with him to go pay a visit to Yin Ping said, "It's finally arrived. The internet is too slow.—Deputy Tao, they've consulted Old Cinder's statement from back then. It's scanned, the signal was poor, so I just opened it… Ah, this person encountered quite a bit of crime. Who'd have expected him to break faith and commit perjury? The City Bureau and the elders treated him so well."
Tao Ran absently said, "Oh?"
"During the fire at The Louvre, Old Cinder was there and nearly didn't escape," his colleague said as he scrolled through the scan of the old file. "He was fairly clever. He didn't get a disfiguring burn scar, but he put his hands on a metal railing while he was escaping and burned off his skin. They couldn't even take his fingerprints then."
Tao Ran slammed the brakes.
Meanwhile, Luo Wenzhou and Fei Du had returned to the City Bureau.
"Captain Luo, we've found that woman you just sent over."
Luo Wenzhou was somewhat taken aback. "So fast?"
The middle-aged woman who'd followed Wang Xiao into the bathroom had been wearing a hat, her features not very discernible, and there had only been a screenshot from a video. She would have been hard to find even for the police, unless…
"She has a criminal record," his colleague said.
"Zhu Feng, female, forty-two years old. Fourteen years ago, her newly-wedded husband went out to buy groceries, had a dispute with someone, and that person suddenly pulled out a melon knife and stabbed him eight times in the chest and abdomen. He died at the hospital. It was later confirmed that the killer was mentally disabled. His family members said they took their eyes off him for a while and he got away. It says that when the case was being tried, the killer saw the deceased's relation Zhu Feng in court and cheekily pulled a face at her. Later the killer was taken to a mental hospital. Zhu Feng always thought that he was faking his mental disability. Half a year after the killing, she took a knife and tried to break into the mental hospital to get revenge, but she failed. The hospital caught her and called the police."
"Mental disability?" Hearing about this case, Luo Wenzhou felt that it sounded familiar.
"One of the cases transferred for research for the first Picture Album Project," Fei Du said. "Apart from this one, the rest were all unsolved, remember? The mentally disabled killer later died under unclear circumstances along with the other suspects whose crimes there wasn't evidence for."
Luo Wenzhou's pupils contracted.
Just then, his phone suddenly trembled.
Luo Wenzhou said, "Tao Ran, what is it?"
"I suspect something." Tao Ran was driving terribly. Passing over a large hole, he simply stepped on the gas and drove right over. The police car was nearly leaping and hopping along the rugged little county road. "Wenzhou, I suspect that the informer who sold out Gu Zhao wasn't Old Cinder!"
Luo Wenzhou said, "If it wasn't Old Cinder, who was it?"
"Yin Ping, Old Cinder's identical twin brother." As he spoke, Tao Ran had already hit the brakes, stopping by Yin Ping's house. "I don't have evidence. It's instinct, I can't clearly say.—Yin Ping seriously resents his brother's position as an informer. He's not afraid of the police, but when he saw my work ID, his manner was very fearful. My guess is that it's because he saw that I was from the City Bureau. While we spoke, he was very careful to prevent his wife from revealing their household circumstances. Also, his wife inadvertently said, 'My brother-in-law isn't coming back.' Yin Ping also said that his brother sent money home in the early years, but the places he described were too scattered, and they covered a few years—even if Old Cinder had been hiding from someone, could he really not have found anywhere to hide over the course of a few years? That's not how it normally goes…"
"A wily hare has three burrows," but he still needs "burrows." Changing to a completely strange place every few days couldn't have given the overcautious old informer a sense of security.
It sounded as though one person had been playing two characters, and he hadn't been doing it well at all. It had ceased abruptly when the old lady died—it seemed that it had just been to fool the old woman.
Old Cinder had lived on the edge; his relationships had been weak and shallow. If he'd disappeared, it wouldn't have impacted anyone. Likely the only person in the world who would sincerely worry about him was his own mother.
Tao Ran rushed up the stairs two steps at a time. "And there's the fingerprints—after coming out of The Louvre, Old Cinder went right to the hospital. His hands had been seriously burned, and his fingerprints weren't recorded. You know that identical twins share the same DNA. The only thing he couldn't fake would be the fingerprints. I just saw Yin Ping wearing gloves, and his hands have burn wounds on them!"
Luo Wenzhou said, "Then where's the real Old Cinder?"
Tao Ran raised his head.
"Police, open up!"
"Yin Ping, we'd like you to come back to the City Bureau with us to cooperate with our investigation!"
Yin Ping's wife timidly opened the dilapidated wooden door a little crack. "He…he just went out…"
"Went where?"
"He said there was something at work. He got on his bike and left…"
Tao Ran turned and ran. "Notify the police station, the district sub-bureau, and the traffic department to search for a red electric bike—"