Chapter 5

Ma Huc remembered her well.

When he and Chung Lien were first meeting through an arranged introduction, she had told him about this peculiar relative.

By then, Lau Dinh had long been estranged from her family. He treated it as idle conversation and paid her little attention.

But in their second year of marriage, she began visiting frequently, sometimes making a show of concern.

Her purpose was the same old one.

She wanted them to give her money to “invest.”

Naturally, she failed.

Chung Lien never hid her displeasure with her cousin. Ma Huc followed his wife’s wishes and refused every request.

Out of courtesy toward a relative, he phrased his refusals a little more gently.

Lau Dinh didn’t care.

She kept pestering them, shamelessly inventing one excuse after another to ask for money.

When Chung Lien called this time, he expected they would merely have to fend her off as usual.

But when he opened his front door, what he found was beyond imagining.

Blood covered the living room.

A body lay on the floor.

Beside it, Chung Lien sat with her face in her hands, sobbing.

His mind stopped.

He didn’t know how things had reached this point.

He knew only that something terrible had happened.

Seeing him, she stood and threw herself into his arms.

“Huc… Huc, I…”

Shaking, she pointed at the body but couldn’t speak.

The overpowering smell of blood on her finally brought him back to himself.

He patted her shoulder and gently tried to calm her.

Then she told him what had happened.

Realizing she couldn’t squeeze investment money from them, Lau Dinh had finally abandoned that approach.

Instead, she targeted another resource Chung Lien possessed.

Her position as a primary-school teacher.

That morning, she called to arrange a meeting.

Chung Lien initially refused.

Lau Dinh threatened her career. Unless they met, she would spread rumors about Chung Lien’s private life outside the school and online, calling her professional ethics into question.

There was nothing wrong with Chung Lien’s character.

But the idea that an innocent person had nothing to fear from slander had never worked very well in real life.

Plenty of parents would believe a rumor without checking. If enough made a fuss, the school might not defend her even knowing she was innocent.

The threat worked.

Reluctantly, she agreed.

To avoid being seen, she arranged to meet at home.

Lau Dinh arrived at 9:46 a.m.

She got straight to the point.

She wanted Chung Lien to use her teaching position to promote an investment scheme to the parents in her class: the Sunshine Elite Training Program.

It claimed partnerships with several leading Australian universities.

Parents who invested tens or hundreds of thousands of yuan would supposedly receive preferential, lower-score admission for their children to joint programs with Chinese middle and high schools, followed by admission to the associated universities without entrance examinations.

Their investment could allegedly cover tuition and interview fees.

Any unused money would be returned in full with high interest.

Chung Lien recognized a scam immediately and refused.

Lau Dinh persisted, threatening once again to spread rumors.

This time, Chung Lien didn’t give in. She ordered her cousin out.

Lau Dinh refused to leave.

They argued.

Eventually, her selfishness, malice, and spite pushed Chung Lien too far.

Overwhelmed by anger, she lost control, snatched up a fruit knife, and stabbed her.

That one thrust changed everything.

Lau Dinh lost blood rapidly and died.

Chung Lien had never imagined it would go so far. She stood beside the body, at a loss.

A few minutes later, she recovered her senses.

There was still so much she wanted to do.

She couldn’t bear—and didn’t want—to face criminal responsibility for someone like that.

She decided quickly.

She had to run.

She couldn’t let the police catch her.

But a body in her own home couldn’t remain hidden long.

Whether Lau Dinh’s friends and relatives reported her missing or neighbors noticed the smell, the killing would be discovered.

She had to dispose of the body.

That brought risks too. A mistake might lead police to it even sooner.

After thinking it over, she found an answer.

Make the police misidentify the body.

Let them believe Chung Lien was dead and Lau Dinh was the killer.

The police weren’t fools. The mistake couldn’t last forever.

It only had to last long enough for her to escape.

First, she put some of her own clothes on Lau Dinh’s body and stuffed the removed clothes into her cousin’s cloth bag.

Then, with trembling hands, she used the fruit knife to slash the dead woman’s face.

Finished, she collapsed onto the floor.

In those few minutes, countless thoughts went through her mind.

An hour earlier, she had been a primary-school teacher.

Her work was tiring, but her life still held hope.

Now everything had passed the point of return.

How had it come to this?

She couldn’t understand.

Her composure broke, and tears poured down her face.

That was when the door opened.

Ma Huc had come home.

After hearing her account, he quickly made his decision.

To him, there was no serious flaw in her plan.

He wanted to help her carry it out.

He told her to pack and leave immediately. He would deal with the body.

Like her, he understood disposal alone wasn’t enough. They also had to make police think Chung Lien was dead. Even if the body was discovered, that would buy time.

But he knew we had many ways to identify a victim.

Facial bone comparison. Fingerprints.

If we found an intact body, a ruined face and different clothes wouldn’t be sufficient.

He had to block as many avenues of identification as possible.

Two parts needed separate disposal to reduce the chance of discovery.

The head.

And the hands.

Facial structure and fingerprints both had to be taken out of play.

So he cut them off, intending to bury them separately in the mountains.

He actually owned a car.

A friend had borrowed it a few days earlier to travel to another province.

That left ride-hailing or the bus.

His destination was so remote that no ride-hailing car would take the trip. Growing impatient, he chose the bus.

He hadn’t expected what happened aboard.

And so this unplanned killing was exposed.

Ma Huc was arrested.

He remained tight-lipped, unwilling to implicate his wife.

But there was something he hadn’t known.

The woman who had really died was Chung Lien.

The woman who told him to dispose of the body was Lau Dinh.

To understand this bizarre case, one fact must first be established.

Ma Huc had prosopagnosia.

In simpler terms, severe face blindness.

It wasn’t merely difficulty remembering people. A problem in his brain’s fusiform hippocampal region left him unable to recognize faces at all.

That was why Chung Lien’s parents and his colleagues described him as solitary, rarely greeting acquaintances or talking to coworkers.

Not knowing who people were naturally had a profound effect on his social life.

It also explained his response to the grocer.

He hadn’t threatened or attacked him.

He hadn’t even offered a greeting to pretend everything was normal.

He simply didn’t recognize the man.

Initially, when he said during my interview, “I told you when you arrested me,” I assumed he was talking nonsense.

Now I realized he might have confused me with the arresting officer because we shared some other characteristic.

His face blindness was the key to the tragedy’s peculiar shape.

The account of the crime scene above was merely a story the survivor had invented to deceive him.

What actually happened was entirely different.

When Chung Lien flatly refused to help, Lau Dinh grew suspicious.

She couldn’t believe her threat had failed. Chung Lien must have prepared a way out.

She seized an opportunity to snatch her phone.

Sure enough, Chung Lien had secretly begun recording before her cousin entered. Every threat had been captured.

With the recording discovered, she dropped all pretense and tried to take the phone back.

Afraid she would go to the police, Lau Dinh refused.

They struggled for it.

In the confusion, acting on emotion, Lau Dinh stabbed Chung Lien, gravely wounding her.

She quickly bled to death.

Lau Dinh panicked, unsure what to do.

Then she checked the time and became even more frightened.

Ma Huc would be home soon.

Chung Lien had called him back in front of her. From previous visits, she also knew roughly how long their journeys from work took.

There was no time to clean the scene.

Running straight away wouldn’t help.

The moment he found his wife dead, he would call the police. As the prime suspect, Lau Dinh might be caught before she even left Yinhai.

Within seconds, she conceived a bold but effective plan.

Impersonate Chung Lien.

Deceive Ma Huc into not calling the police, conceal the crime, and use the time gained to escape abroad.

Even if the crime came out eventually, getting police to mistake the dead woman for her would buy still more time.

She acted without hesitation.

Her earlier visits had taught her that Ma Huc was severely face-blind.

Everything in her plan revolved around it.

What did someone with face blindness use to identify people?

Scent. Hair. Clothes. Accessories. Facial outline. Voice. The circumstances in which they met.

Any could become an identifying key.

Scent was easily dealt with.

Chung Lien had lost so much blood that its strong smell would make distinguishing the women that way difficult.

For hair, Lau Dinh first let hers down to match Chung Lien’s.

Then she tied Chung Lien’s in a ponytail.

She herself had worn a bun that morning.

She gave the body a ponytail because that was how she had worn her hair the last time she met Ma Huc. She wanted to reinforce his belief that the dead woman was Lau Dinh.

Clothes were simpler still.

She took items from Chung Lien’s wardrobe and changed, stuffing her own outfit into the cloth bag.

She didn’t know whether Ma Huc had seen what his wife wore that morning, but it was her only option.

Stripping Chung Lien and putting on her clothes would take too long. Being discovered halfway through would be disastrous.

It would be easier to make up an excuse.

Chung Lien wore neither glasses nor earrings, so Lau Dinh removed her own earrings.

The accessories were dealt with.

Ma Huc couldn’t distinguish their faces anyway.

Still, she took the time to slash Chung Lien’s.

At least that would delay police identification and keep suspicion from reaching her quite so quickly.

Their voices were the easiest part: they already sounded extremely similar.

That left the circumstances.

Ma Huc knew Lau Dinh had come over. Seeing either woman at home would be expected.

She understood she needed to play the role convincingly, guiding him to believe she was Chung Lien and the dead woman was her cousin.

She succeeded.

She made him believe she was his wife.

Then she persuaded him to treat Chung Lien’s body as “Lau Dinh.”

The chain of deception began to work.

Chung Lien was dead.

But Ma Huc believed the victim was Lau Dinh.

To fool police and save “Chung Lien,” however, he would present the body as Chung Lien’s.

The ideal outcome was that he confessed to killing his wife and police found no flaw.

That was quite possible.

From his perspective, if he didn’t take the blame or identify the body as Chung Lien, police might uncover a third person and discover someone else was the actual killer.

Only by shouldering everything and confessing to his wife’s murder could he have “Lau Dinh” mistaken for “Chung Lien,” leaving “Chung Lien” alive and free.

From our perspective, the dead woman really was Chung Lien.

If Ma Huc admitted killing her, the case might appear straightforward enough to accept.

Then Lau Dinh would only need to hide for a while.

Once the case was over, she could even return to the country and resume an ordinary life.

A slightly worse outcome was that we discovered the third person.

Once we did, Lau Dinh would soon be identified as the killer.

Even so, the delay caused by the misleading evidence might let her travel a long way.

She had calculated carefully.

Unfortunately for her, she was caught in the end.

The reason was deeply ironic.

She had contacted an online acquaintance who claimed that, for a fee, he could arrange her departure within twelve hours and get her safely to Indonesia.

She immediately transferred the money and went to the rented room in Lieu Trung to await further instructions.

Believing she would leave soon, she hadn’t been especially careful about hiding her movements there.

But once he had the money, the man kept putting her off without offering any real help.

By the time she realized he might simply have scammed her, it was too late.

We followed the trail to her door.

She never escaped the law.

In the interview room, Ma Huc sobbed so hard he could barely breathe.

“You suspected Lau Dinh early on, didn’t you?” I said. “You knew Chung Lien. You knew what kind of person she was.

“She wouldn’t kill in a fit of anger, still less try to evade responsibility afterward.

“Even if she did want to flee, she would never devise a plan that abandoned you to take the blame.”

Her parents and neighbors had all described a loving marriage.

People who genuinely loved each other wouldn’t leave the other to shoulder their crime.

He didn’t answer.

He remained trapped in grief.

A long time passed. I had stopped expecting any explanation when he finally spoke, his voice quiet, choked with remorse.

“Of course I suspected. How could I not? But I only began feeling something was wrong after she left…

“By then, I had no way to check.

“Call the police and accuse her? But what if… what if she really was my wife, not Lau Dinh?

“I couldn’t take that gamble.

“If I was right, Lien still wouldn’t come back to life. But if I was wrong… I’d be the one driving her into a dead end.

“I had no other choice.

“I could only keep going.

“Even if… even if there was only the smallest chance, I had to let Lien escape.

“But… but…

“In the end… I lost the gamble anyway.”

He lowered his head and said nothing more.

I didn’t know what to say.

Yes.

In that situation, what could he do except gamble?

He had no choice.

He could only assume the woman who fled was Chung Lien and clear a path for her.

But reality wouldn’t change to match his wishes.

He had lost the person he loved most forever.

Before he made a single decision, that ending had already been decided.

We had solved the case quickly enough, and the killer had harmed no one else afterward.

Chief Ho and city leaders were satisfied.

Once the official announcement of the arrest was released, the storm of public attention gradually subsided.

For us, the trouble this case had brought was finally over.

But I didn’t think I would ever forget it.

She had used his love.

Used his illness.

To do the one thing that would break his heart most completely.

Absurd.

Bizarre.

And desperately sad.

The End

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