Chapter 4

17

Chen Yu rented a place in an old residential neighborhood.

It was run-down, but still considerably better than the shantytown next door.

I reached his apartment and was about to take out the key when I noticed something surprising.

The door was open.

I slipped quietly inside.

A woman had her back to me. She was cleaning.

I had just obtained a key from the landlord after showing my authorization agreement and documentation from the police.

This woman was clearly not the landlord.

Who was she?

Perhaps sensing something, she turned suddenly and stared at me in alarm.

“Who are you?”

I introduced myself, then asked her the same question.

She visibly relaxed.

“I'm Chen Yu's neighbor. Has something happened to him?”

Apparently she didn't know.

“Nothing serious,” I said vaguely. “Just a minor case. Are you close to him?”

Wiping away sweat, she answered:

“Not especially. But he's helpful. He fixes my lights and blocked pipes. After a few times, we got to know each other.”

I nodded.

“He must trust you. He even gave you his key.”

She smiled.

“Oh, we're neighbors. He doesn't like cleaning. Once he went away for a few days and left rubbish piled up inside. The whole corridor stank. I told him to give me a key so I could pop in and clean when I had time. Neighbors help each other out.”

Her explanation left me slightly suspicious.

Did people still have neighbors that kind?

They were only tenants, too.

Still, there was nothing inherently suspicious about her story.

She said she had moved in a year earlier.

Chen Yu had even helped carry her things.

I asked what she thought of him.

She considered.

“He's a good person. Just not very talkative. He answers whatever I ask, but sometimes he seems to switch off halfway through a conversation. Quite an introvert, really.”

“Has he ever told you about his family?”

She shook her head.

“No. He never talks about himself. Maybe we're not close enough.”

“Do you know if he has any friends?”

She lowered her head to think, then shook it again.

“I don't think so. He lives alone, hardly ever goes out. No one comes to see him.”

Then she remembered something.

“Oh! There was one middle-aged man. I only saw him visit once.”

I quickly asked what the man looked like.

“I only saw him that one time, so I don't remember well. Fairly short, I think. Unshaven. Not very tidy.”

That sounded very much like Chen Bing.

But why would he visit his son?

According to Chen Yu, his father didn't want to see him.

It was odd.

I asked a few more questions, but learned nothing else useful.

She did say that Chen Yu occasionally went out in the middle of the night.

About once a month.

Before leaving, I gave her my contact details.

Only then did I learn her name: Liang Shuang. She worked as a waitress.

18

Back home, I spent two days organizing everything I had found.

Broadly speaking, it still matched Chen Yu's story.

There really had been conflict between him and Chen Bing.

But some of the details differed.

The most important concerned his life over the previous year.

According to Liang Shuang, he had barely left his apartment.

That fitted perfectly with what Chen Bing's neighbor had told me.

Together with the police findings, it established that Chen Bing had spent most of that year elsewhere and rarely come home.

In other words, father and son had hardly seen each other.

Yet Chen Yu had told me their relationship had been wonderfully harmonious during that time.

When I considered that alongside his account of school eight years earlier, a startling possibility occurred to me.

Could he have schizophrenia?

Perhaps his account of his past and present was imagined. Perhaps none of those things had happened.

In other words—

He couldn't distinguish reality from delusion.

If so, did his supposed truth about the case eight years ago—

Even exist outside his mind?

And if he really was mentally ill, it could have a major bearing on the verdict in this case.

I immediately contacted the procuratorate.

The prosecutor handling the case was surnamed Zhang.

We compared what we had learned in our recent investigations.

Almost everything matched.

There was just one difference. The day after I visited Chen Yu's apartment, Prosecutor Zhang had gone there too.

By then, Liang Shuang had moved out.

I explained my suspicions and requested a psychiatric assessment of Chen Yu.

The results came back a few days later.

They were deeply disappointing.

He showed no signs of any mental illness.

More importantly, the account he had given the prosecution was completely at odds with the one he had given me.

He admitted he had been bullied at school eight years earlier.

Unable to endure it anymore, he had beaten Zheng Luohai, setting off the events that followed.

As for the past year, he said he had stayed in his room almost every day and rarely gone out.

He had occasionally visited Chen Bing, but never found him home.

His late-night outings were trips to internet cafés.

Checks at nearby cafés confirmed that.

More importantly—

He had never mentioned the diary.

Nor had he said anything about the supposed truth behind the old case.

His explanation for killing his father was simple.

Chen Bing wouldn't give him money. He became angry and killed him.

I felt I had been played for a fool.

In his current statement, the facts of his crime were clear. He showed no interest in overturning the earlier case or seeking a lighter sentence.

What, then, had all those things he told me been for?

I immediately applied to visit him at the detention center.

19

At our second meeting, Chen Yu was cold and indifferent.

He seemed to have lost all desire to live.

I asked about the contradictions.

He gave no response.

After a long silence, he said flatly:

“Just think of it as a story I told you.”

I was angry.

“So you admit you lied to me?”

He said nothing.

I took that as a yes.

I almost laughed in fury.

“And serving time in Chen Bing's place? Was that made up too?”

Still nothing.

I couldn't fathom him.

“Then why ask me to defend you? Just to entertain me with a story? If you won't tell me the truth, we might as well end our agreement here.”

He remained silent.

What did he want?

I sighed.

“You weren't like this when I defended you eight years ago. What happened to turn you into the person you are now?”

A long time passed before he spoke.

“Mr. Wu, do you think I'm a bad person now?”

I drew a deep breath.

“I don't know. Eight years ago, I thought you were hot-tempered and impulsive, but fundamentally rather innocent. Now, I'm afraid I have to reconsider. Still, I met your neighbor, Liang Shuang. She says you're a good person. Perhaps in your everyday life, you still are…”

“You met Liang Shuang?”

At her name, his dull eyes suddenly lit up.

Then anxiety crossed his face.

I nodded.

“She was cleaning your apartment.”

“Did you tell her about me?”

I shook my head.

“No. I only said you'd got into a little trouble. I didn't explain, and she didn't ask.”

He visibly exhaled.

Then the cold expression returned.

He watched me for a long time.

“You said we should end our agreement, didn't you? All right. I agree. From now on, you're no longer my defense lawyer.”

“What?”

I stared at him.

He had asked for me by name.

Then he had told me an extraordinary story.

I had spent almost a month running around on his behalf.

And now this?

More and more, I felt he was deliberately toying with me.

Mocking me.

Mocking the effort I had made all those years ago to win him a few more years of freedom.

What a ridiculous thing to have done.

He glanced at me and said coldly:

“Don't worry. I've still got a little money saved. The court will use it to pay your fees first. It may not cover everything. You'll get whatever there is.”

I laughed bitterly.

“Do you think I did this for money?”

He ignored me.

He called for a guard, got up, and left.

20

I spent the whole night trying to understand what he wanted.

I went over every conversation, searching for a clue I had missed.

Nothing came to me.

At the firm the next day, my boss sympathized.

“Eight years ago, Chen Yu left you exhausted and miserable. Now he's done it again. You shouldn't have taken his case a second time. Why not stick to your civil work?”

I rubbed my temples.

“Believe me, I regret it. He's given me a real dread of criminal defense.”

Then something struck me.

Chen Yu must have known I no longer practiced criminal defense.

I wasn't even at the same firm I had worked for eight years earlier.

Yet he had specifically asked the detention center to find Wu Zheng at my current firm.

Which meant—

He had looked me up beforehand.

I went straight to a former colleague.

Yes, he told me, someone had come asking about me two months earlier.

He had given the man my current firm's name and mentioned that I now handled civil cases.

His description matched Chen Yu exactly.

My heart began to race.

That detail told me two things.

First, Chen Yu had prepared in advance.

He had tracked me down before any of this happened.

Second, and more importantly—

He had insisted on me despite knowing I no longer handled criminal cases.

Everything still had to be connected to the case eight years ago.

There was another important detail I had missed.

His final remark.

His entire savings weren't enough to cover my fees.

After dismissing me, he would have nothing left to hire another lawyer.

He could only seek legal aid.

Which meant—

With the evidence against him so clear, his chances of a reduced sentence were vanishingly small.

In other words—

He was prepared to die.

If he no longer wanted to live, why come to me?

If he wanted leniency, why dismiss me?

A bold possibility occurred to me.

He knew an important secret about the old case.

Perhaps it had no direct bearing on the present one.

That was why he didn't want me to seek a lighter sentence for him.

What he wanted was—

For me to uncover the truth.

If so, everything he had done made sense.

From the beginning, he had deliberately led me back toward the case eight years ago.

Then, at the crucial moment, he terminated our agreement.

He wanted to free me from the current case so I could devote my time and energy to investigating the old one.

It might take a very long time.

By the time he was prosecuted, tried, perhaps even executed, the truth might still be buried.

As for why he hadn't told me his purpose directly…