Chapter 1

A group of schoolboys lured a young girl with an intellectual disability into the mountains, intending to assault her. A middle-aged bachelor happened upon them and intervened.

The boys fled in panic. Back in the village, they decided to accuse him first, claiming that he was the one who had assaulted her.

The adults chose to believe the children.

The little girl could not speak.

The real monsters went unpunished. The man who had saved her was branded a villain and beaten to death with clubs at the village entrance.

No one even called the police.

He had no family to arrange a funeral. The villagers simply buried him in a desolate patch of open land.

But the story did not end there.

Those devilish boys began to meet their retribution.

And the killer…

was someone we would never have imagined.

It happened in the summer of 1996, in a small village in the south.

At first, we knew none of this.

All we had was a report that a ten-year-old boy from the village was missing.

More than ten hours had passed before the police were called.

His family had searched the entire village without finding a single lead.

There had been no ransom call or message. None of the villagers were wealthy, so kidnapping for ransom seemed almost out of the question.

Our first suspicion was child trafficking.

Villages had very few security cameras back then. We could only use the traffic camera on a national highway by the village entrance to get a rough idea of who had come and gone.

Before we found anyone suspicious, the case took a stranger turn.

The missing boy was found.

More precisely…

his body was found.

Early on the second morning after he disappeared, following a light summer rain, a cattle herder came upon him in a patch of wasteland east of the village.

There were severe ligature marks around his neck, identified as the fatal injury.

But the most striking—and most horrifying—feature was that both his eyes had been gouged out.

From the bleeding patterns, the forensic examiner judged that this had not been done while he was alive. It happened after he had been strangled.

In other words, it had been entirely “unnecessary,” even “superfluous” to the killing.

To the killer, however, it must have meant something.

Otherwise, why take the extra time?

That clue was crucial.

In the end, it even helped us identify the killer.

The boy’s name was Wu Wenqiang. He was only ten.

His parents were farmers in the village, an entirely ordinary rural family.

The earlier rain had badly damaged the scene, leaving us few initial clues.

We could not even immediately determine whether the killer was a villager or an outsider.

We had to rely on experience.

Given the brutality, we thought the killer was most likely someone he knew. Revenge also seemed likely.

Gouging out his eyes had not been necessary to kill him.

More importantly, apart from the missing eyes, Wu Wenqiang had no other injuries.

That made it less likely the killer had simply been venting rage.

This looked more like a mark of vengeance.

If so, we needed to examine the family’s connections for suspects.

When we spoke with Wu Wenqiang’s parents, we learned that they did indeed have an “enemy.”

His mother sobbed out an accusation.

“Wu Huihui! It must be her family! Oh, it must be that retarded girl! Her family, her family…”

At first, I assumed the other family had wronged them somehow.

Then his father took a puff on his tobacco pipe and said:

“Officers, you have to investigate them. Because… because our Qiang caused someone’s death on account of their girl!”

It made very little sense.

For a moment, I could not understand how the boy who had died, Wu Wenqiang, had killed someone else because of another family’s daughter.

I could only ask him to take his time and explain.

That was when I heard the appalling truth about a bachelor falsely accused and killed.

It had happened six months before this case.

As I said earlier, the sequence of events was simple.

The villagers chose to believe the children rather than an unmarried man of almost forty.

A middle-aged man who lived alone, with no family around him.

His name was Wu Guohua.

The girl with an intellectual disability was Wu Huihui. She was only seven.

When he carried her down from the mountains, a crowd had already gathered at the village entrance.

At its head were, of course, the families of the five boys who had actually intended to assault her.

Huihui’s parents were there too, along with village elders, furious young men and even the village chief, who was supposed to be a reasonable man.

Wu Guohua was restrained at once.

The crowd was enraged and would not listen to a word he said.

He never fought back. He only kept protesting his innocence, kept trying to explain.

No one believed him.

Huihui’s parents took her away.

She could not speak. All she could do was cry out over and over, trying to express her distress.

Even her parents could not understand what she meant.

Everyone was certain that Wu Guohua was an animal, a criminal.

But in those days, villages in the south placed great weight on clans and family ties. People preferred to settle their own affairs.

Besides, they considered it a scandal.

Having such a monster in their village was a disgrace.

Family shame was not to be aired outside.

So no one called the police.

With the village chief presiding, Wu Guohua was beaten until his body was covered in wounds and he was barely alive.

No one helped him.

He lay in his own blood and slowly closed his eyes.

Wu Wenqiang’s parents learned what had happened because they knew their son too well.

Parents could recognize the tiny changes of expression, the awkward little movements that gave a child’s lies away.

Back home, they beat him severely and forced the truth out of him.

Only then did they learn that Wu Guohua had been innocent.

The real wrongdoers were the five boys, including their son.

But by then, word had come that Wu Guohua was dead. The chief had ordered his body dragged out to the fields and buried.

It could not be undone.

And, wanting to protect their son, they had no intention of telling anyone the truth.

That same night, they contacted the other four families. After talking it over, all reached the same conclusion.

Keep it quiet.

Huihui was an idiot, after all. She could not even speak properly. As long as they said nothing, no one would ever know.

And so they kept the secret for months.

Apart from Huihui’s family moving away, everyone’s life continued as usual.

I still could not understand Wu Wenqiang’s parents’ accusation.

Huihui was the victim, wasn’t she?

“Why do you think her family killed your son?” I asked.

His father grew agitated, his face contorted with grief and anger.

“Because they moved away! If they weren’t guilty… why would they leave? Wu Guohua’s dead. They’re the only ones left. It can only be them…”

In reality, the most likely reason Huihui’s family had moved was that they did not want their daughter living in the place that had traumatized her.

Not the guilty conscience Wu Wenqiang’s parents claimed.

But I did not argue further.

They were grieving their child and might be unable to hear anything that contradicted them.

Their accusation sounded rather like the wrongdoers rushing to accuse someone else first. Yet on reflection, it was not entirely unreasonable.

If Huihui’s parents knew those five boys had hurt their daughter, might they want revenge?

After speaking with them, our unit split the investigation in two.

Zhao Jun took colleagues to find Huihui’s family. I stayed in the village to learn more about Wu Guohua.

The poor man had been kind, yet branded a monster. The injustice he had suffered might run deeper than we knew.

Yes, I wondered whether relatives or friends had uncovered the truth and were avenging him.

What happened proved stranger than I imagined.

The revenge had indeed begun with Wu Guohua.

But the avenger was not a relative or a friend.

To learn more about his connections, I went to see Village Chief Wu, a man in his sixties.

At first, he refused to admit that they had beaten Wu Guohua to death. He said only that there had been a minor incident, after which they had buried him.

When he realized I knew more than he did, his expression darkened.

He had not known that the entire village had wrongfully condemned Wu Guohua.

Perhaps he did not think it mattered.

When I mentioned it, he merely shook his head, showing no regret or remorse.

But when I suggested that the brutal murder of ten-year-old Wu Wenqiang might be connected to Wu Guohua, he repeatedly shook his head.

“Impossible! I watched that boy grow up. His parents are dead. Both his brothers left and started families elsewhere. They haven’t come back to see him in years. Nobody cares about him…”

A pitifully lonely man.

But then something changed.

The chief suddenly fell silent. His face drained of color.

As though something terrible had just occurred to him.

I quickly asked what was wrong.