Xiao Haiyang wanted to smile at him to ease the tense atmosphere, but when the corners of his mouth pulled up, it looked like an unsuccessful forced smile; the effect was unusual. Anyway, when Ma Xiaowei saw it, his face turned even greener.
Xiao Haiyang: "…"
He had to abandon the amiable route. In a businesslike manner, he flashed a frosty look like a shop sign. "Do you remember me?"
Ma Xiaowei nodded cautiously. "Hello, Officer Xiao."
"I've been transferred to the City Bureau," Xiao Haiyang said. "I came here today to ask you about a few things."
Ma Xiaowei laced his hands together. Sitting uneasily, he lowered his head, looking as though he'd been dragged in for interrogation again.
Xiao Haiyang watched him closely for a moment. "You've worked with us. We saved your life and helped clear you of suspicion of murder. I'm not saying you should be delighted to see me, but at least you shouldn't be so nervous.—Ma Xiaowei, you actually know what I want to ask, right?"
The veins on the backs of Ma Xiaowei's hands tensed.
Xiao Haiyang said, "On the night of May twentieth of this year, you took He Zhongyi's cell phone and sold it to drug dealers. Then He Zhongyi was murdered, and his body was dumped at the sight of the drug transaction. The next morning, a passerby discovered He Zhongyi's corpse. And while the police were making visits and investigating this case all over, you had a dispute with the local residents and were taken with them to the Flower Market District Sub-Bureau. You made a slip of the tongue that let us know that you were on the scene around when the murder was committed, and that something else had happened, which you couldn't talk about at the sub-bureau."
Ma Xiaowei said falteringly, "Yes…I told you all of that before."
"I know." Xiao Haiyang's gaze watched intently from behind lenses like the bottoms of bottles. "What I want to ask you is whether you made a slip of the tongue yourself, or did someone instruct you on what to say?"
Ma Xiaowei trembled.
"You're timid, cowardly, and a liar," Xiao Haiyang said, hitting the nail on the head. Seeing Ma Xiaowei open his mouth as though planning to defend himself, Xiao Haiyang interrupted him. "You don't need to deny it. Stealing and lying are typical characteristics of drug users.—Didn't you confess yourself at the time that you'd stolen He Zhongyi's phone and then lied to him?
"So here's what I don't understand." Xiao Haiyang leaned back lightly. "You aren't some kind of honest person who doesn't know how to lie. Why did you slip up when the police casually asked you a few questions? Is it very hard to say 'I don't know' to everything? You clearly knew that Wang Hongliang's people had been there that night. Deliberately being ambiguous like that, weren't you afraid they'd silence you?"
Ma Xiaowei had nothing to say.
"Did the person who instructed you give you a guarantee that Wang Hongliang and the rest would soon reap the consequences of their evil, so you didn't need to worry?"
Ma Xiaowei's eyes widened slightly. He was after all an underage child. His momentary astonished expression immediately gave him away.
When Xiao Haiyang had gotten home last night, he'd considered all night how he should ask. The hard-working are rewarded; seeing Ma Xiaowei's expression, he methodically said the weightiest words: "I'll tell you something. You remember when I took you to the City Bureau? In fact, that night, Wang Hongliang's people had sent a message to their co-conspirator on duty at the sub-bureau, telling him to get rid you, the eyewitness, as soon as possible. If I hadn't been keeping an eye on them and snatched you away before they could act, you'd be a pile of ashes by now."
All the blood drained out of Ma Xiaowei's face. "That, that can't…"
"In fact, you weren't useful anymore then." Xiao Haiyang pressed on step by step. "The police had already found definite leads and would soon find video evidence of Wang Hongliang's crimes. You dying in the sub-bureau wouldn't make any impact. At most it would be another criminal charge for Wang Hongliang. They didn't care about you at all. They just left you to run your course."
It was as if Ma Xiaowei had been struck by lightning. Xiao Haiyang quickly followed up, "So who instructed you?"
Ma Xiaowei's lips trembled. A good while later, he forced out a few words. "It…it was Zhao…Zhao-ge."
"Which Zhao-ge?" First Xiao Haiyang stared; then he quickly recalled. "You mean the Zhao-ge who lived in the same apartment as you and said he came from the same province as He Zhongyi? Called Zhao Yulong?"
Ma Xiaowei bit his lip and nodded.
Xiao Haiyang frowned.—He remembered how Wang Hongliang had been ready to let Ma Xiaowei carry the can, acting the part of the criminal suspect, hastily giving the City Bureau a solution to the extremely strange case of He Zhongyi. But he'd known there was something fishy about this, so he'd gone with Tao Ran, who'd also had doubts, to privately visit a few of He Zhongyi's acquaintances, Zhao Yulong among them.
He hadn't been a crucial figure at all, because at the time of the crime, he was supposed to have gone to his hometown to attend a funeral. He'd only learned of He Zhongyi's death when Xiao Haiyang had called him, then hastily returned to Yan City. Actually, he hadn't even counted as a witness; you could only say it had been an ordinary visit to understand something of the victim's background.
Apart from him and Tao Ran, it was possible the others didn't know such a person existed.
But thinking about it carefully, the clues this Passerby A-like Zhao Yulong had supplied had been rather key—the origin of He Zhongyi's white cell phone and He Zhongyi's altercation with Zhang Donglai had both come into the police force's line of sight only after talking to him. Most importantly, He Zhongyi had dressed rather formally to go to the Chengguang Mansion to meet Zhao Haochang, and the shoes he'd been wearing had been borrowed from Zhao Yulong, so it was likely that he had grasped what He Zhongyi was doing.
Actually, the first person whose investigation had reached the Chengguang Mansion at the time had been Fei Du, because he'd chanced to encounter He Zhongyi asking the way. But thinking about it, given Zhao Yulong's statement, even without Fei Du's chance encounter the police would very naturally have turned their line of sight towards the Chengguang Mansion, then realized that the "scene of the crime" Ma Xiaowei had been unwilling to talk about in his babbling hadn't in fact been the "scene of the crime," and other secrets were involved.
In an instant, countless thoughts flashed through Xiao Haiyang's mind. He pursed his dry lips slightly. "Didn't you say that this Zhao Yulong had gone to his hometown to attend a funeral on the night of the crime?"
"He said he was going back to his hometown, but the next morning, before it got light, he suddenly came back. Zhongyi hadn't come back, the others weren't there, so I was alone in the apartment," Ma Xiaowei said in a sobbing tone. "He suddenly shook me awake and showed me the photos online that you guys hadn't had time to delete yet, asked me what was going on… As soon as I opened my eyes I saw…saw Zhongyi-ge… I…I…"
As soon as he remembered this, Ma Xiaowei couldn't quite get his words out. He talked babbled for a while, then simply covered his face and began to cry dully.
Xiao Haiyang: "…"
He sat stiffly for a while, maintaining the indifference of an objective onlooker. Then, thinking of something, he suddenly furtively reached out and cautiously patted Ma Xiaowei's shoulder with his fingertips. After a light touch, he drew back again, as though Ma Xiaowei were a human hedgehog and would prick his hand.
"Zhao-ge asked me what was going on, and he said that Zhongyi-ge was downstairs and there were police all over outside. I didn't dare to believe it, pulled open the window and looked out, then I knew that it was true. My mind buzzed, and then I heard Zhao-ge next to me saying, 'It looks like they found Zhongyi in that triangular piece of land.' When I heard that, I was scared to death—that was the place I'd bought the stuff the night before, why would Zhongyi-ge have anything to do with them? He never touched that stuff, I knew that… My first reaction was, Oh no, this definitely happened because I sold that phone."
"You thought that He Zhongyi had seen you sell his precious new phone and had gone up to argue with the drug dealers, trying to take his phone back, and so had gotten killed by them?" Xiao Haiyang asked. "Did you think so yourself, or did someone mislead you?"
Ma Xiaowei looked at him blankly.
"All right," Xiao Haiyang said helplessly. This silly child had no idea he'd been used. "And then what?"
"Zhongyi-ge was nice to me, if I wasn't so… I wouldn't have stolen his stuff! I was scared, so I told Zhao-ge everything and asked him what to do, but Zhao-ge said, 'If Wang Hongliang and the others killed him, then Zhongyi-ge died for nothing.'"
Xiao Haiyang noticed something and said grimly, "You mean that Zhao Yulong also knew about Wang Hongliang and the others.—Did he take drugs?"
Ma Xiaowei shook his head. "He wasn't like us. But Zhao-ge had been there a long time, longer than anyone else. He knew everything."
Xiao Haiyang frowned again—because when they'd spoken to Zhao Yulong, they hadn't noticed that he was the sort of great person of vast resources who "knew everything." Not only that, he'd pretended he'd just come from out of town and knew nothing about the cause of He Zhongyi's death!
Xiao Haiyang's spine suddenly felt cold. "What did he make you do?"
"Zhao-ge snuck a look outside and said there was a police car he hadn't seen before and some grunts looking around, and he said he'd seen the head of the police bureau bowing and scraping to someone," Ma Xiaowei said quietly. "Zhao-ge said this thing had definitely made a big noise and someone had come from above to investigate, and maybe we had a chance to get justice for Zhongyi-ge."
"You're saying Zhao-ge could even tell which police car didn't come from the sub-bureau?" Xiao Haiyang asked in disbelief. "And he recognized Wang Hongliang?"
Ma Xiaowei nodded matter-of-factly. "Zhao-ge knew lots of people. He could find out all about anything."
Xiao Haiyang had nothing to say to this. These little boys who came into chaotic contact with the teeming world before they'd grown up had a cult-like superstitious faith in "connections." For them, there was nothing that couldn't be explained with "having people above," and if it couldn't, then all it took was adding "having brothers on the inside."
"Zhao-ge said that reasonably speaking the police would come to the place Zhongyi-ge lived to ask questions, but since the people who'd killed him were the same as the ones investigating, their questioning would only be walking past so their bosses would see. If we wanted to redress the injustice, we had to make the people above hear it, had to go to the sub-bureau and make a stink. But the sub-bureau was their territory, it would be the same as informing on them right in front of their faces. Zhao-ge asked whether I dared. If I did, then I'd do what he instructed. He guaranteed it would be all right, at most I'd be locked up for a couple days and then let go, there would definitely be someone above protecting me. And if I didn't dare, that was all right, after all, Zhongyi-ge wasn't a relative or a friend, and I hadn't hurt him on purpose.
"Zhao-ge said a lot of other heartfelt things to me, said he'd seen lots of young people like me, and all of them ended up rotting in the dirt, getting rolled up in a mat and taken out of the city to be burnt. For the luckier ones, their families were notified. Some were handled like vagrants, their parents and relatives didn't know anything. He said that if I did what he said, if I could make it count as meritorious service, all the petty pilfering and 'doing snow' could be written off. I wouldn't be arrested, and I could go to rehab for free and be like a normal person when I got out. No one would know I'd gone the wrong way."
Ma Xiaowei wiped his tears, looking aggrieved. Xiao Haiyang developed some unpracticed compassion, for once biting back the true and unfeeling words, "He just wanted to trick you into being cannon fodder."
Xiao Haiyang spent over an hour going back and forth with Ma Xiaowei before he felt he understood things, then said goodbye and left. Upon leaving, he suddenly remembered something. Pushing at his glasses, Xiao Haiyang asked, "Though Zhao Yulong told you a pack of lies, he didn't instruct you to break the law in any way. Why did you seem kind of afraid when I first came in?"
Ma Xiaowei looked up, white-faced—
"Ma Xiaowei said that on the way from the City Bureau to the rehab center, a car was following him, then showed him a message that said he'd done well. The person in the car was wearing dark glasses, and it definitely wasn't Zhao-ge. This scared him. Ma Xiaowei thought the words were ironic, sort of like, 'Well, haven't you done a fine job.' He thought someone had found out about what he and Zhao Yulong had talked over privately, and that someone from Wang Hongliang's party had slipped through the net and was threatening him." Xiao Haiyang was sitting upright on Luo Wenzhou's couch, formally reporting.
The couch in Luo Wenzhou's house was very soft. You sank in as soon as you sat down. But Xiao Haiyang was unwilling to go with the flow; it seemed as though he had three hundred more vertebrae than other people, sitting on the couch as though it were a cold bench, making a stark contrast with Fei Du next to him.
Fei Du had his hand propped on the arm of the couch and his head down, sprawling bonelessly, with Luo Yiguo next to him doing the same, leaning on his leg with its neck askew, sleeping like a cat cake, having rubbed fur all over President Fei's fashionable pants.
Fei Du, Xiao Haiyang, Lang Qiao, and Luo Wenzhou were sitting around a little coffee table, temporarily using Luo Wenzhou's living room as their stronghold. The phone on the table was connected to Tao Ran, who was still in the hospital.
"I remember Zhao Yulong," Tao Ran said over the phone. "Never mind Xiao Xiao, even I didn't notice there was anything wrong with him. If it's true, then that's too frightful… Hello? Is the signal bad? Why is there so much static?"
Luo Wenzhou stood up and wordlessly picked up Luo Yiguo, snoring as it leaned against Fei Du, and put it into the cat bed.
"I investigated the identity information the two of us recorded at the time," Xiao Haiyang continued. "A person called Zhao Yulong does exist, and he did come to Yan City, but he went back to his hometown five years ago. His Mandarin is very bad. He's completely different from the person we met. And apparently he lost an ID once."
"The people who live in the little houses there are all poor young workers, newcomers, empty-handed. Though this Zhao Yulong wouldn't stand out in a crowd, looked at on his own, he was actually pretty different from those youngsters. How to put it… He had a sort of tidy dignity," Tao Ran said over the phone. "This is my fault. I didn't inquire deeply at the time because he may have been having a hard time at home."
"So what was this fake Zhao Yulong doing here?" Lang Qiao asked. "Secretly gathering evidence of Wang Hongliang and the others taking part in drug trafficking, volunteering to rid the people of an evil?"
Fei Du said, "From what Ma Xiaowei says, it sounds like this person had already been lying low a long time. If he'd really wanted to rid the people of an evil, then he'd have done something other than…"
"Just being an unused chess piece, watching others' mortal peril and doing nothing," Luo Wenzhou picked up, glaring at Fei Du. "Don't talk when your throat aches, it hurts me to listen to you."
Lang Qiao: "…"
She felt she'd asked a very wrong question and that there was nowhere for her gaze to rest. She could only turn towards Xiao Haiyang, who was as extraneous as she was. "So who was this fake Zhao Yulong?"