Chapter 1

A village in our jurisdiction once became the scene of a horrifying murder.

Three young men were hacked to death with a hoe in a widow’s home. Blood flooded the courtyard; severed limbs lay scattered through the main room.

Afterward, the widow sat on the doorstep and quietly waited to be arrested.

But her arrest was not the end of the case.

It was only the beginning.

We received the report on an otherwise peaceful afternoon.

Our captain, Old Xu, took five of us from Criminal Investigation and headed straight to the scene. In the car, he read us the basic details from the file a colleague had pulled up.

The suspect was Lương Nguyệt Nga, forty years old.

Her husband, Chu Kiến Vĩ, had died of an illness years earlier. Their daughter, Chu Oánh Oánh, attended one of the county’s top high schools. Lương Nguyệt Nga had been living alone in the village for years.

She had no criminal record.

The murders had taken place at her old house, a mud-brick building with a tiled roof.

By the time we arrived, villagers had gathered around it, but none dared go inside.

Lương Nguyệt Nga sat quietly on the doorstep, drenched in blood, her face blank.

She made no attempt to escape.

We approached cautiously and spoke to her in calm voices. She gave no response.

Old Xu signaled for two officers to restrain her. The other three of us pushed open the old wooden door.

The stench of blood hit us at once.

In houses of that design, the front door opened directly onto an inner courtyard.

That courtyard was a river of blood.

Much of it was water. Someone had left the tap running, diluting the blood and carrying it across the ground.

The weapon lay in the courtyard: a hoe with a blade honed to a razor edge.

So did the bodies.

There were three. Only the one beneath the covered hall was relatively intact.

Relatively.

The victim’s head was almost severed, held to his neck by a thin strip of skin.

The other two were worse.

One had lost half his head to the hoe. His face was shattered, brain matter scattered around him. Both arms had been severed, though at different points.

Our preliminary assessment was that he had raised his arms to defend himself. They had been hacked off before the fatal blow to his head.

The third man lay facedown, both legs severed.

He had clearly tried to crawl away, only to be caught. Lương Nguyệt Nga appeared to have cut off his legs first to stop him escaping, then driven the hoe into his back, killing him.

None of the three had any chance of survival.

We immediately sealed off the scene and began collecting evidence.

A clear, bloody handprint marked the weapon’s wooden handle.

Inside the main room stood a teapot and three cups, suggesting that the victims had come as visitors.

Scattered footprints and marks where knees had scraped the floor indicated that they had panicked and fled when Lương Nguyệt Nga attacked.

A hose was attached to the courtyard tap. Water was still pouring from its end, showing that she had used clean water after the killings.

Her hands had indeed been washed clean.

As for how one woman had reduced three fit young men to such panic, we suspected the answer lay in the teapot.

The forensic team arrived shortly afterward and took the bodies away for examination.

We brought Lương Nguyệt Nga back to the division.

Questioning her proved extremely difficult.

She seemed not to have recovered from the shock. She sat expressionless and silent, unresponsive to every question.

We could hardly force her mouth open and make her speak. We had to investigate elsewhere.

It did not take long to identify the three victims.

Trịnh Minh Hạo, twenty-five, was from the county. A school dropout with no job, he lived alone in the family’s county-town house while his parents ran a business elsewhere.

Lâm Phong, twenty-one, was also a local dropout with no job. His parents were divorced. His father worked away from home, while he lived with his mother, a vegetable seller at a county-town market.

Trương Tuấn Kiệt, twenty-two, was another unemployed local dropout. Both parents were dead; he lived with his grandparents.

We soon learned about their reputations, too.

The villagers would have called them street thugs.

They had no interest in school or work. They spent their days hanging around bars, drinking and occasionally getting into fights.

All three had criminal records. These were habitual troublemakers.

We also looked into Lương Nguyệt Nga.

As the initial file said, she had no record.

But that file was already out of date.

When we contacted her relatives, we discovered that her daughter, Chu Oánh Oánh, had died by suicide the day before.

Just the day before.

Lương Nguyệt Nga had not yet had time to obtain a death certificate. Officially, her daughter’s name was still on the household register.

Nor had her body been cremated.

At that point, we knew there was more to this case.

Old Xu frowned.

“She hadn’t even arranged her daughter’s funeral, and she was already in such a hurry to commit murder?”

“To her, it may not have been murder,” I said. “It may have been revenge.

“Yesterday was Tuesday. Chu Oánh Oánh should have been at her boarding school in the county town. Instead, she deliberately went home to take her own life. That suggests planning, rather than an impulsive act.

“Something may have left her feeling she had no way out.”

We sighed.

Had those three thugs had contact with her?

Had they done something that drove her to that point?

I could already guess at part of the answer.

Animals like them only ever seemed to have one thing on their minds.

But there was something I did not understand.

If they had done something so terrible, how could they have walked into Lương Nguyệt Nga’s house so casually and drunk her drugged tea?

Yes, drugged.

The laboratory results came back quickly.

The tea contained a sedative.

The bloody handprint on the hoe also matched Lương Nguyệt Nga’s fingerprints.

Even if she remained silent, we could establish the murder charge.

A confession would still be preferable, of course.

And we needed to know the whole story.

With that information in hand, Old Xu and I returned to the interview room.

Lương Nguyệt Nga was fully lucid by then.

As soon as she spoke, she admitted killing all three men.

She could hardly have been more cooperative.

But that would do little for her.

The circumstances were grave. Barring an unforeseen development, she had almost no prospect of a reduced sentence. A death sentence was very likely.

What we needed was her motive.

She gave us a plausible explanation.

The killings were indeed connected to her daughter.

We had guessed correctly.

The three animals had sexually assaulted Chu Oánh Oánh together.

Lương Nguyệt Nga had learned about it only after her daughter’s death, when she checked the girl’s phone.

Through WeChat, they had sent Chu Oánh Oánh photographs taken during the assault. They threatened to circulate them unless she regularly came to “play” with them.

There was another option, they said.

She could pay eighty thousand yuan to “buy back” the photographs.

It was an obscene demand.

Chu Oánh Oánh could never have found that money. Even with her mother’s help, a widow and her daughter in their circumstances had no hope of raising it.

Yet that money was precisely why the three men had walked so calmly into Lương Nguyệt Nga’s house.

After her daughter died, she used the girl’s phone to message Trịnh Minh Hạo on WeChat, pretending to be her.

She said she had spoken to her mother, who had agreed to pay. They could come to the house and collect the money directly from her mother.

The three animals had no idea Chu Oánh Oánh was dead.

With not a thought for the consequences, they simply turned up at Lương Nguyệt Nga’s door.

I could not understand where they got that confidence.