"Specs! Haiyang! Do you have a car right now?… Come with me to the airport, right now, immediately!"
Lang Qiao hurriedly summoned Xiao Haiyang—it wasn't so easy to find a student who'd graduated over a decade ago. The director of teaching affairs, wearing reading glasses, had spent ages going through the student roster. The teachers who had taught this student had either retired or left; he'd spent a full hour calling around everywhere asking. When he'd finally contacted the former art student himself, it was nearly midnight.
The art student was at the airport, preparing to go traveling with his family; apparently it was an overnight flight.
Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang sped over, charging into the McDonald's they'd arranged to meet at ahead of time.
After midnight, the fast food restaurant was full of exhausted travelers. It was very quiet. Some people were resting their eyes, using their bags as pillows. Those who were still awake weren't communicating with each other; all of them had set up their phones and computers. At a glance, this seemed like a still, empty space. Xiao Haiyang had been dragged the whole way by Lang Qiao and was gasping for breath like a sick dog. Each of his steps rammed into the ground, disturbing quite a few lightly-sleeping backpackers. Escorted by angry looks the whole way, they finally found Yu Bin's student in a corner.
The senior middle school student from over a decade ago was now an adult, over thirty. There was a small beard around his lips. Given the expense of his apparel, you could see that his economic situation was pretty good.
"Could I see your credentials?" The man's bearing was genteel and polite but very cautious. First he asked for Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang's credentials; he carefully checked the forgery-proofing marks against the light, then slightly apologetically returned their two work IDs. "Sorry."
"No problem, it's a citizen's right." Lang Qiao got the painting certificate and the strip of paper she'd taken from the school out of her bag. "Are these two items yours?"
"The winning painting was painted by me." The man looked down at it a little longingly, examining the reproduction on the certificate for a moment. Smiling wryly, he said, "This is an immature work from my school days, but it's really full of inspiration… Binhai is a very special place. The sea is so wide, but for some reason, it makes you feel wild and empty, especially when the wind rises around dusk. When it pours through the cracks in the reefs, it sounds like someone's crying. It's grim and lonesome."
The two materialists Xiao Haiyang and Lang Qiao knew all the details about Binhai. Having heard this very artistic description, they shuddered simultaneously.
"I was nearly in my third year of senior middle then. Reasonably speaking, I ought to have been fully focused on specialized classes for preparing for the university entrance exam. When I went to Binhai, it was actually to spend some time with my schoolmates and scribble something for practice. I hadn't planned on entering any contests. But when the painting was finished, the outcome was unexpectedly good. Teacher Yu loved it and strongly recommended that I submit my name. I didn't even think of placing. I didn't expect that by good fortune… I put the paper in there when I sent the certificate back." At this point, the man was silent for a while, shaking his head somewhat bleakly. "In fact, I've sometimes thought over these years, could Binhai be…an evil place, like in folklore? I'm not superstitious, but sometimes when I see that painting, I feel like there's an inauspicious atmosphere in it."
Lang Qiao got out her notebook. "Could you tell me whether you still remember how many of you went together? How long did you stay in Binhai?"
"Oh…four or five people. Me, our teacher, and some kids from senior middle year one, all special arts students," the man said. "It would have been the weekend. School was pretty tense then, there was no time apart from the weekends. I remember we stayed there two nights… We must have gone on Friday and returned on Sunday."
"Did you stay in Binhai?"
"No, there weren't even any people there at the time. There was nowhere to stay the night. We stayed in an agritourism village nearby—you could call it nearby, but actually you still had to drive over half an hour. We rented a car there. We'd find a view during the day, then go back to the village to rest in the evening."
Lang Qiao quickly followed up, "When you were painting at Binhai, did you encounter any unusual people or events?"
The man looked up at her and opened his mouth, but his answer was evasive. "Actually, Officer Lang, the reason I agreed to wait here to see you today is that someone asked me that same question before."
Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang froze simultaneously.
"Sorry, that's also why I carefully checked your credentials before," the man said. "After Teacher Yu died, more than a year later, around when I was in my first year of university, a person came to find me. Male, very tall, middle-aged, said he was a police officer handling Teacher Yu's case.—I don't know how to describe it, I just inexplicably felt a little afraid of him. You may have noticed that I'm kind of sensitive. Anyway, I didn't quite dare to look him in the eye."
"What did he talk to you about?"
"He said he wanted to ask me about a few things connected to Teacher Yu's murder. I thought it was very strange. The killer who murdered Teacher Yu had been arrested, hadn't he? What was there to ask? But this person said that there were some things that weren't as simple as they seemed on the surface. He suspected that there was some plot behind Teacher Yu's murder, and that it had to do with our trip to Binhai."
Xiao Haiyang asked, "What was this police officer's name?"
"He was called Gu Zhao."
Xiao Haiyang's elbow shook, knocking over a cup of coke on the table. Ice cubes spilled over the table. His expression was disbelieving. "What did you say?"
"Gu Zhao—the 'Zhao' that's golden knife12. If I recall correctly, that was his name. What's wrong?"
Xiao Haiyang's fingers shook unconsciously. "Can you…can you describe his appearance? What did he look like? Around thirty-five, thin, about a meter seventy-five…"
"I couldn't really tell his age, but I think he would have been a little older. He was over a meter seventy-five tall." The man recalled carefully for a moment. "When I started university, my physical measured me as a meter seventy-nine, and he was taller than me. And when he was standing in front of me, he gave me a very oppressive feeling. A square face, pretty distinguished-looking. What, do you know him? So was he a fake police officer or not?"
As he gave the description, Xiao Haiyang's expression changed a few times. First it was lost; then a faint anger rose—that wasn't Gu Zhao. Over a year after Yu Bin was murdered, Gu Zhao had already died suffering an injustice, and someone had dared to use his identity to go around deceiving people!
He instantly felt as though the cleanest place in his heart had been sullied. If Xiao Haiyang had had fur, perhaps he would have bristled up into a ball. He clenched his fists with a crack and coldly said, "No, he was fake. What did he ask you?"
"Like you, he asked very carefully who'd gone to Binhai, how the trip had been arranged, whether we met anyone on the way, whether anything particular happened. I said I didn't remember, and that man thought about it, then asked me, 'Did your Teacher Yu ever go out alone?'"
Xiao Haiyang and Lang Qiao exchanged a look—yes, if Yu Bin's killing really was connected to his trip to Binhai, why had none of the students who'd gone with him been harmed? The criminals didn't have the bottom-line principle of not killing minors, so it was likely he'd encountered something while acting alone.
"As soon as he said that, I did remember. There was such a time. The night before we left, because we'd talked it over and agreed to set out first thing the next morning, Teacher Yu told everyone to make sure to pack up our things. Then a female student suddenly couldn't find her camera. We helped her remember, and we thought it was likely she'd left it at the painting spot we'd picked out. For a student, a camera is a valuable object. As soon as Teacher Yu heard, he went to find it for her. Because it was already late, he didn't take the student. He drove over by himself and scraped someone's car on the way. I only found out when I saw him settle the account for the rental car. That person calling himself Gu Zhao…"
Xiao Haiyang suddenly interrupted him. "Don't call him by that name."
The man and Lang Qiao both stared. Xiao Haiyang came back to himself and lowered his head slightly. "I'm sorry, but he wasn't Gu Zhao. Please don't call him by that name."
Though he was being as polite as possible, his speech was still very stiff. Lang Qiao wanted to mediate, but the man was very understanding. He said, "Oh, I see. So he was using the name of a police officer of good moral standing and reputation? So I'll just say 'the fake police officer.'"
Hearing the expression "good moral standing and reputation," Xiao Haiyang didn't know what he felt.
"The fake police officer asked me to tell him who my teacher ran into. But I didn't know. I wasn't there. I only heard him say that it was dark, and his mind was wandering a little. When he was passing over a seaside cliff, a car suddenly came out of the woods. He didn't react at once and accidentally ran into their door. Though they must have been nice people. They didn't say anything, but my teacher felt very sorry. He insisted on going after them and giving them his contact information, telling them to send him the receipts for the repair work and the paint job. It was just a little matter. The accident came to a peaceful resolution. Teacher Yu was a sensible person."
Xiao Haiyang and Lang Qiao exchanged a look.
Xiao Haiyang said, "Do you remember their license plate number?"
"Teacher Yu may have remembered, but he wouldn't have gone out of his way to tell me." The man spread his hands.
That was fair. In spite of himself, Xiao Haiyang was somewhat disappointed. But Lang Qiao said, "How did you know the person who questioned you before was a fake police officer?"
"But…"
"Before leaving, I remembered something and wanted to tell him, but when I looked back, I saw that that man's face was frighteningly grim, completely different from his genial expression before. There was an anti-fraud campaign going on at school at the time, and I suddenly felt uneasy and asked him for his ID—though I didn't have any common sense at the time and couldn't tell whether the credentials were real or fake. I furtively went through the anti-fraud tips the political teacher had sent out on my phone, and I saw that the first thing was 'police officers normally act in pairs when gathering evidence, so be careful if you meet one acting alone.'"
Lang Qiao said, "What did you want to tell him?"
"It was the drawing," the man said. "Teacher Yu was very diligent. He always had his sketchbook on him. When he saw something touching, he'd draw it. When we went to Binhai, he'd just used up his sketchbook, and there were a few drawings on loose paper… Contour drawings of the courtyard in the agritourism village, things like that. I asked for them before we left, and I found there was a sketch of a man and a woman. I'd never seen those two people before. I guessed they were the people he'd run into when he went out that night."
Xiao Haiyang said, "Do you still have the drawing?"
"It's a relic of Teacher Yu. Of course I've preserved it."
When Luo Wenzhou took Xiao Haiyang's phone call, Little Glasses was simply babbling.
"We're outside his house, going to collect the evidence now!"
Luo Wenzhou sighed. "Have you two thanked the man?"
Xiao Haiyang only now remembered that Yu Bin's student had planned to leave Yan City on an overnight flight. He quickly turned to the man draped with luggage. "This…isn't making you miss your flight, is it?"
"The plane's already taken off." The man shrugged. "My spouse went on ahead with both our parents."
"Then…"
"It's all right, I'll see whether I can transfer to another flight. If I can't get a ticket, then I'll forget about it. It's only a vacation. It won't kill me to miss going once. But if there really is some hidden plot in Teacher Yu's murder, can you call me when you finish the case and tell me?" The former art student said, "Teacher Yu was very good to me. If I can do something for him, whether it's useful or not, my conscience will be easy. I think he should have enjoyed a long life."
Luo Wenzhou turned his head to look at the surveillance feed from the interrogation room. A criminal police officer was interrogating Zhu Feng about the case at Yufen Middle School.
"You dressed up as a school janitor and used a recording to mislead Wang Xiao. Who instigated you? Did you know what you were doing?"
Zhu Feng didn't answer. She only sneered.
"You say that your aim was to uncover Lu Guosheng and the place where he was hiding. Fine," the criminal police officer said, "but did you know that this would lead a boy's death? He not only died, he died without an intact corpse!"
Zhu Feng looked at him expressionlessly, the lines from her nose to her chin pulling the corners of her mouth down.
"Since you were shadowing Wang Xiao, didn't you know about the schoolyard violence that child was experiencing? And you not only looked on unconcerned, you also used her?"
Zhu Feng flattened her lips and coldly said, "She didn't die, did she?"
"What did you say?"
"A dozen wounds. Da-Bin was stabbed a dozen times… He didn't even look human. Didn't you all look on unconcerned?" Zhu Feng's voice was hoarse. "She didn't die. What does she have to complain about?"
For some reason, Luo Wenzhou felt these words stick like a fishbone in his throat. He sighed heavily, put a cigarette in his mouth, and walked out of the observation room. He searched all over himself and found that he'd forgotten to put his lighter in his pocket.
Just then, there was a click next to him, and a tiny flame appeared in front of him.
Luo Wenzhou turned his head. Fei Du had found a lighter somewhere. He asked him, "Need a light?"
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
He choked for a moment, then silently waved a hand, putting the cigarette away. Just then, his phone vibrated. Xiao Haiyang had sent him a picture. Luo Wenzhou opened it and had a look, finding that it was a pencil sketch. The paper was yellowed. The drawing was in a plastic folder, preserved pretty well. There were a man and a woman drawn in it, with the date and Yu Bin's signature in the corner.
It was drawn very vividly. When he'd seen it, Luo Wenzhou sighed. "Su Hui, and…"
Fei Du looked over. "The head of the Chunlai Conglomerate."
Over a decade ago, when Zhang Chunling and Su Hui had been traveling to Binhai through the night, they had been hit by the art teacher Yu Bin, returning to find something for his student.
What had they been going to do?
Had there been a girl's corpse in the trunk?
Had Su Hui acted as Zheng Kaifeng's contact with Zhang Chunling, so when Yu Bin had run into her with Zhang Chunling, for the sake of security, Zheng Kaifeng's contact been changed to Yang Bo's mother Zhuo Yingchun?
Luo Wenzhou knocked on the wall with his fist. "A drawing… It's preposterous, and we can't even verify whether this was drawn by Yu Bin himself, or on what occasion it was drawn. Even if my own dad ran the courts and the procuratorate, he still couldn't give me an arrest warrant based on this… Master Fei, what have you got to smile about?"
"I may have something you can use here," Fei Du said.
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Author's note:
(12) 钊 - made up of the characters 金 and 刀.