Chapter 4

I learned later that the father and son had hidden my father in that chest freezer, piled bags of frozen food on top, and tied the lid shut with rope.

My father had been right there inside, curled up.

Meanwhile, Liu Detai had put on my father’s clothes, lived in my father’s house, and eaten my father’s food.

Then he’d pointed at me and called me heartless.

I covered my mouth, nausea twisting my stomach until it cramped.

By the time Uncle Zhang arrived, I couldn’t speak anymore.

He crouched beside me and tried to straighten the shoes he’d put on the wrong feet, but his hands kept shaking, and he couldn’t get them right.

“Ningning, I was blind. Just now, I mistook him for your father…”

I shook my head.

Those sleeve protectors kept appearing before my eyes.

Whenever my father went out to repair a watch, he was afraid of staining his cuffs. He took good care of even his old clothes.

And yet no one had protected him.

It was almost dawn when the police car carrying the sealed evidence drove away.

I sat inside, listening as the female officer told me they would still need to confirm my father’s identity through forensic testing.

I nodded and cooperated with the sample collection.

On the form, she paused at the field marked “Relationship to the deceased” and asked me.

I lowered my head and stared at it for a long time.

“Father and daughter.”

Once I’d written those two words, I didn’t look up again.

7

The identity test left no room for hope.

The man in the freezer was Xu Jianping.

The investigation also established who Liu Detai was. He wasn’t related to my father by blood. They were about the same age, had similar faces, and Liu usually liked to buy clothes in my father’s style.

I’d been busy and rarely lingered near the mahjong tables. People sometimes joked that the two of them looked like brothers. I’d only heard my father mention it in passing.

What he’d laughed off had become the starting point for someone else to covet his life.

I learned the details of the interrogations gradually, through police notices and the recordings shown at trial.

At first, Liu Detai stubbornly denied everything, calling it a misunderstanding.

“Old Xu lent my son money, then changed his mind. We tussled a little, and he fell.”

“Why didn’t you call an ambulance after he fell?”

“I panicked.”

“So you panicked and put him in a freezer?”

Liu Detai’s mouth twitched.

“Zhiyuan did that. I didn’t know.”

The police laid out the photographs. Beside the freezer was my father’s phone case, bearing Liu Detai’s fingerprints. The phone itself had been found on him. During the days he claimed to be back in his hometown, he’d been coming and going from my house.

His story changed.

“I was worried the kids might get into trouble. I was only helping him clean up the mess.”

In another interrogation room, Liu Zhiyuan gave a completely different account.

“My father was the one who strangled him. He told me to help, and I didn’t dare refuse.”

The footage reached the part where he twisted my father’s arm behind his back.

He lowered his head.

“I held him down.”

Three days before the murder, Liu Zhiyuan had paid a group of movers. He had deliberately bought that large chest freezer secondhand.

There was a line in the chat between father and son:

[Ningning won’t be back until Friday night. Don’t let it drag on past Friday.]

That day, my father had still been at the market, choosing tangerines for me. And someone had worked his daughter’s return date into a plan to kill him.

“Was it a crime of sudden passion?” Captain Chen asked.

Liu Zhiyuan clutched his head.

“He owed my father a debt of gratitude! My father once covered his gambling debt!”

That so-called debt of gratitude came to only three hundred yuan. It had been repaid long ago.

Three hundred yuan had become the reason he demanded the entire building from my father.

The bank statements were produced. My father’s savings—410,000 yuan—had been transferred into Liu Zhiyuan’s account. He used 260,000 to pay off his debts, and the two of them split the rest.

Liu Zhiyuan admitted that they had forced the password out of my father. When Dad said he was going to call the police, they couldn’t let him leave.

He said, “My father said Old Xu didn’t have a son. If he died, only one daughter would be left to cry. Our faces looked alike, so I could impersonate him for a few days, sell the building cheap, and then we’d run.”

Liu Detai sprang up from his chair.

“Lies! Who changed the lock? Who contacted the buyers? That was all him!”

“I did it to pay off your debts!”

Captain Chen asked only, “So you knew where the money came from, and you knew why Xu Jianping had to die?”

Liu Detai opened his mouth and didn’t close it for a long time.

As the father and son tried to pin the blame on each other, they pieced together the missing parts of the case.

The forensic examiner determined that my father had died from sustained pressure to his neck. The traces in the back room, their statements, and the courtyard security footage all matched.

Liu Zhiyuan held my father down so he couldn’t struggle. Liu Detai never let go.

Neither of them had learned about it only after the fact. Neither had tried to stop it, not even once.

By the time I heard all this, the glass of water in my hand had gone cold.

That day, Auntie Wang came to see me with a bag full of breakfast. She set it down in front of me, her eyes red as she apologized.

I opened it. Inside were the red-bean buns I liked. Whenever my father bought them for me, he saved the ones that had been squashed for himself.

I looked at the bun on top, one corner flattened, and tears fell one by one.