Chapter 3

“Then that couple lied to me!”

Zhao Jun was the first to speak when our colleague finished.

I thought so too.

Huihui had gone to a grave in the middle of the night to cry. How could her parents not have looked into it?

If they had made the effort, adults could easily outthink children. They would have uncovered the truth.

That Wu Guohua was innocent.

And that the five boys led by Wu Wenqiang had been the ones who hurt their daughter.

That meant Wu Delong and Zhang Li had both lied to Zhao Jun.

One lie proved nothing on its own. But we all knew that where there was one, more might follow.

We decided to go and see them immediately.

It was past ten at night, but finding the truth was too important to wait.

We still did not know whether the parents were suspects. At the very least, though, their lie had concealed a motive for revenge and lowered Zhao Jun’s guard.

That was deeply suspicious.

Zhao Jun and I took two colleagues and drove into the city.

The journey alone took an hour. Though the lights were out in their rented home, we knocked.

We waited so long we were almost considering forcing entry. At last, the door opened.

The woman who answered was Huihui’s mother, Zhang Li.

She frowned at Zhao Jun.

“You again? What is it now?”

Zhao Jun pushed the door open and stepped inside, replying politely:

“There are a few more things we need your help with. Please let us in so we can discuss them.”

She was clearly nervous.

We had the initiative now.

Perhaps we would soon make progress.

Inside, I found extremely bare accommodation.

One bedroom, one sitting room, almost no furniture and very few everyday necessities.

Despite her nerves, Zhang Li made tea and invited us to sit.

“Where’s your husband, Wu Delong?”

I looked around, feeling something was wrong.

“He has to stay at the hospital to look after a patient tonight…”

She immediately asked:

“This is your second visit today. What exactly is going on?”

Zhao Jun got straight to it, describing the cases we were investigating, including Wu Wenqiang’s and Wu Zhijun’s deaths.

We had agreed on this beforehand.

There was no need to talk around the subject now.

She might well be a suspect. Showing her how much we knew could put pressure on her to tell the truth.

But as she listened, Zhang Li looked frightened and repeatedly insisted that she knew nothing.

Finally, she asked:

“What… what do these murders have to do with us?”

Zhao Jun explained that someone might be avenging Wu Guohua, or perhaps Huihui. After all, those five boys had behaved like animals.

In a sense, Huihui and Wu Guohua were on the same side.

Zhao Jun continued, telling her that our colleague had found Huihui crying at Wu Guohua’s grave in the middle of the night.

He even produced the acknowledgment of the missing-person report her husband had signed that day, proving that the incident was real.

In other words…

“You and your husband have known for a long time that Wu Guohua wasn’t the one who assaulted Huihui, haven’t you?”

Only then did Zhang Li quietly ask us a question.

“You think those little animals deserve retribution too, don’t you?”

Her voice was still soft, but something in her manner had changed.

Before we could reply, she went on.

“Then why can’t you punish them? Because they’re minors, right… Then why can’t you punish the adults who protected them? You can’t do that either, can you?”

All four of us fell silent.

We had no answer.

But what caught my attention was the change in her attitude.

Was she blaming us?

No.

She was blaming every injustice.

Because neither we nor any other officers had been able to help her and her daughter.

That change in her words convinced me that she knew who had really hurt Huihui.

Then something else struck me.

There was nothing belonging to a child in this home.

No clothes, no bowl or chopsticks, no everyday things, school supplies or toys.

Nothing.

Huihui had never lived here.

An even more terrible thought rose in me.

I blurted out:

“Ms. Zhang, your daughter, Huihui… is she all right?”

Zhang Li stared at me for several seconds.

She understood that we knew too much. She could not keep hiding it.

Her eyes slowly reddened.

She shook her head.

“She’s dead.”

As I had feared.

But the cause of Huihui’s death was even more devastating.

Zhang Li told us everything.

There was another part of the story we knew nothing about. It had happened much earlier.

After the five boys led by Wu Wenqiang framed Wu Guohua, none of them felt they had done anything seriously wrong.

With their parents fiercely protecting them, they were all the more certain it was nothing.

Wu Delong and Zhang Li had not learned the truth by investigating Huihui’s strange visit to the grave.

Something far worse had happened.

The five boys had targeted her again.

To them, Wu Guohua interrupting them had spoiled their “fun.” They had been left unsatisfied.

Not long after his death, they went after Huihui once more.

Using almost the same pretext of playing with her, they lured her somewhere secluded and subjected her to unspeakable violence.

This time, there was no rescuer like Wu Guohua passing by.

The boys abused and brutalized Huihui until she was barely alive.

When her parents found her, she was dying. They rushed her to a hospital in the city, but she could not be saved.

From then on, they never returned to the village.

They stayed here, quietly working out how to avenge their daughter.

They learned that Wu Zhijun’s family had moved away. Perhaps his parents knew he had committed another atrocity and thought leaving would solve it.

But Wu Delong and Zhang Li kept track of him.

They were farmers, not unusually clever people. For a long time, they held back, searching for a plan that could not go wrong.

Then, months later, tragedy struck.

Wu Zhijun was killed. His eyes were gouged out.

Wu Wenqiang lost his eyes too.

Zhang Li said this was an ancient punishment handed down in their village for those guilty of terrible crimes.

“Those who bear grave guilt yet keep lying must have their eyes taken. They will never be reincarnated.”

She said it calmly, without a trace of her earlier nervousness.

We listened with chills running over our skin. Even the hot-blooded Zhao Jun demanded:

“Why didn’t you call the police? How does this make you any different from those criminals?”

Zhang Li had no wish to answer.

She merely watched us quietly, almost gently.

I understood.

She had answered already.

Even if she had called, we might not have been able to do anything about those little animals, would we?

She had challenged us.

And we had had no answer.

Then I realized something very serious.

“If Huihui has been dead all this time, where is your husband now?”

Her apparent candor had made me assume Wu Delong had simply fled.

I did not imagine that events had taken a far more extreme turn.

At my question, Zhang Li looked up at the clock on the wall.

Then she smiled with satisfaction.

The smile sent a chill down my spine.

It was one in the morning.

We had been away from the village too long.

A terrible foreboding seized me.

“Come on. Back to the village. Now!”

On the way, we split up.

Zhao Jun and one colleague escorted Zhang Li to the unit. Another officer and I headed straight to the village.

She had said nothing more, but that smile left me deeply uneasy.

We reached the village offices as quickly as we could.

From a distance, we saw the entire compound lit up, though it was past two in the morning.

An old man sat smoking at the gate.

Chief Wu.

I ran over.

“Why are you still up? Why are all the lights on? Has something happened?”

He did not look up.

He took a long drag, slowly breathed out the smoke and spoke.

“You’ve found it all out, haven’t you?”

It hardly sounded like a question.

I remembered that he had been the one to suggest gathering the three mothers and their sons here.

“Watch him!”

I gave the order to my colleague, pushed through the gate and rushed inside.

The moment I entered the courtyard, I smelled blood.

A terrible thing had indeed happened.

I went into the sitting room.

The bright lights made the scene seem unreal.

The room was hell on earth.

In the middle of that bloody hell sat a man with his head lowered.

Wu Delong.

He was pinning one of the mothers to the floor and using something to gouge out her eyes.

I drew my gun.

“Stop! Drop the weapon. Now!”

He turned.

His face was covered in blood, but utterly expressionless.

He obediently threw the weapon aside.

An iron spoon.

He raised both hands, slowly stood and said:

“It’s all right. I won’t resist. Over the past few hours, I’ve done everything I wanted to do.”

Only then did I have time to take in the room.

Six people.

No.

Six bodies.

Most had been bound, unable to move, at someone else’s mercy.

Apart from the blood spattered everywhere, weapons lay scattered across the floor.

Perhaps he had spent those hours pouring out all his hatred.

It was a dreadful tragedy.

I handcuffed Wu Delong, phoned in a report, then hurried out of the building and the compound.

Chief Wu was still smoking.

In the dim light by the gate, his face looked much older.

I understood why the parents had not called the police.

Chief Wu had most likely been involved too.

He had stopped them from reporting it.

He had overseen the entire revenge plot.

Furious, I hauled him to his feet.

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

His expression remained cold.

He shoved my hand away.

“Of course I do. I’m clearing the filth out of this village.”

He had helped bring about a horrific tragedy, yet still looked so self-righteous. It was almost impossible to believe.

I knew then that I could not persuade him.

Just as I would never accept this kind of private justice.

However much they deserved death, no individual could be allowed to take it upon himself to kill them.

I sighed.

“Wu Guohua’s body never disappeared, did it?”

Chief Wu nodded.

“I watched that boy grow up. I knew he had some shortcomings. So when I heard he’d done such a monstrous thing, I… I only wanted to put justice before personal ties… I never imagined… We’d wronged him! It was me. My fault…”

His eyes reddened as he spoke.

“Once I learned the truth, I moved him to the communal burial ground at the ancestral hall. I failed him… All this was a way to atone.”

I should have known from the beginning that this was no ordinary village.

How frighteningly united did people have to be to beat Wu Guohua to death without ever alerting the police?

Just like tonight.

There must have been screams of every kind inside that compound.

Yet no one in the village had called.

I knew I could not convince him, but I still said what I thought.

“You still can’t do this. Even if you don’t care about punishment under the law, can you escape your own conscience?”

Chief Wu raised his head.

He looked at me with blazing eyes and spoke firmly.

“Beyond morality and the law, there is another supreme judgment. The judgment of the human heart.”

For a moment, he did not seem old at all.

He looked more like a soldier on a battlefield, carrying a fearless conviction and an unbreakable will.

I could say nothing.

In that strange atmosphere, we remained silent for a long time.

At last, he shook his head, gritted his teeth and muttered:

“In my village… there can be no such thing.”

As soon as he said it, he seemed to become an old man again.

He slowly sat down and went back to smoking.

Conflicting feelings churned inside me, but in the end I had nothing more to say.

In the distance, police lights flashed.

Reinforcements had arrived.

The case was nearing its end.

Nearby, the village was as peaceful as ever.

As though, through hundreds and thousands of years, through every storm…

it had always been this peaceful.