Chapter 476: Didn't Ask

The door to the interview room at the end of the second-floor hallway stood open. A female police officer waited by the door, a pen in her hand.

"Shen Zhixia?" She lifted her chin. "Come in. Today won't take long. Just one more item."

A computer sat on the desk, the printer on the windowsill. The investigating officer sat at the far side, spreading out the pages printed last time in front of him. The edges had already gone soft from handling.

"What you told us last time—we're following up on it." He said. "Today we need to pin down who was standing where on February twenty-fourth. One by one."

"All right."

"What time did you get to the ditch?"

She took out her notebook, opened it, and pressed it flat on the table. "I don't know what time. What I wrote down was eleven fifty-two."

"You don't remember the time, but you remember that line clearly enough." He looked up at her.

"That line I only ever wrote once." She said. "Beside the car. The time was whatever it was when he asked."

The female officer typed briefly. The room held only the sound of keystrokes and the printer's faint standby hum.

"When you arrived, who was there?"

"The one doing the appraisal was setting things up. Two people from Hengyue were standing on the bank. Han Chongli was in front. Song Qiming half a step behind and to his side."

"Which side was Song Qiming on?"

"Left or right, I can't remember. I only remember he wasn't in front. He stayed half a step back. Their shoulders weren't even."

"Those two on the bank—who reached the ditch first?"

"Can't remember."

"How far apart?"

"Can't remember."

The officer tapped the pen tip on the paper. "Then I'll put down 'can't remember.'"

"Can't remember is can't remember." She said. "If I give you a sequence now, and it goes on paper, then it becomes my words."

He didn't respond to that. He pulled a blank sheet from the drawer, turned it sideways, drew a crooked line with his pen, then drew three circles at one end of it.

"Here." He pushed the paper over. "This line is the ditch. These circles—one's Han Chongli, one's Song Qiming, one's the appraiser. Show me where you stood."

She looked at it for a moment, then set her pen tip on the far side of the line, well away from the circles.

"That far?"

"I stood two or three steps from them."

"Whose two or three steps?"

"My two or three steps at the time." She said. "If I stand up and walk it for you now, it's still two or three steps. But that day's two or three steps aren't today's."

The female officer repeated the sentence aloud and asked, "Record it verbatim?"

"Verbatim."

The paper came back. The officer placed a dot on the far side of the crooked line, began writing a notation beside it, then stopped mid-stroke and looked up. "You can read and write. Write it yourself."

She took the pen and wrote a single character beside the dot: me. When she finished, she laid the pen across the paper.

"How many other people were there?"

"Quite a few. People setting up equipment, villagers who'd come to watch, others standing behind saying nothing. No one gave me their name."

"You wrote in the statement 'two more were crouching on the ground.'"

"I wrote it. Those I could count. The ones I couldn't count, I didn't count."

"Then we won't count." He slid the diagram into the case file. "The sketch stays as it is. If you remember something someday, let us know and we'll amend it. If you don't, it sits there."

"I won't remember." She said. "What I recorded that day was what I'd intended to record."

Only then did his tone ease. "When you heard that line by the ditch, what did you do?"

"I wrote it down."

"And after you wrote it down?"

"I closed the notebook."

"You didn't ask a single question."

"I asked, and he might not answer." She said. "If he answered, I couldn't hold onto it anyway. I wrote it down. Writing it down was my part."

The female officer stepped out once and came back with an extra page, still warm from the printer. She sat and continued:

"The day of the retrial, you wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to your defense counsel. What did it say?"

"What I asked was: on the morning of March twenty-first, had he spoken on the phone with the person from Qingyuan who received the samples?"

"What made you think to ask that?"

"On the handover form, in the sample-receipt column there was a 'Shi,' and the character after it was scrawled into one stroke, the last stroke flicking upward. If someone received samples at Qingyuan during those years, he either knew that person or he'd have a phone number." She pushed the notebook slightly forward. "Asking was my part. Whether he answered was his."

"He answered."

"He said 'no.' He also said he didn't know the person who received the samples."

"Do you believe him?"

"Believing is my own affair." She said. "What I wrote on that paper was only the question I wanted asked. I didn't write whether his answer was right or wrong."

The officer turned over the page in his hand, glanced at the back, and flipped it back. "Everything you've said today goes in. What comes out of the investigation—whether it lines up with what you've said—that's for our end to verify."

"I know."

"There's one thing I'll make clear to you first." He said. "You have four pages in your hand, and you've handed them in. What happens with this matter from here—which level it moves to, whether anyone is touched—is not in your hands, and it's not in mine."

"It's in the law's hands." She said.

"In the law's hands." He nodded.

The statement printed out to a little over two pages. She read it page by page. When she reached a line in the middle—the complainant believes Han Chongli gave false testimony in court—her pen stopped there.

"This line." She pointed.

"Wrong?"

"What I wrote was: 'What he said doesn't match the paper in the file.'" She said. "What he thinks, I don't know."

The female officer deleted the line and reprinted it, then had her press her fingerprint over the correction. On the final page she wrote a line in her own hand: I have reviewed the above statement; it matches what I said. Below it she signed her name, dated it November ninth, and pressed her fingerprint on every page.

"Anything else to add?"

"No."

"If you think of anything, call." The officer pushed the notebook back to her. "Keep it safe."

At three o'clock, she came out. The female officer saw her to the door, said "We'll be in touch if we need anything," and pulled the door shut behind her.

The hallway faced north. A window at the far end stood half open, and the wind lifted one corner of a notice taped to the wall, then let it fall back. The terrazzo floor had just been mopped; her soles stuck slightly with each step.

She walked toward the stairwell.

Someone came up the stairs.

The man was half a head taller than her, in a dark gray coat, shirt collar fastened, hair cut short. On his face sat a pair of thin black-framed glasses, the frames so fine they were nearly invisible; only the two lenses caught the hallway light. In his left hand he carried a black bag, hard-sided, the corners reinforced, one edge scuffed white in a small patch.

He passed her at an unhurried pace. When he was two strides past, she caught a faint smell of soap.

He stopped at the door of the interview room.

Voices sounded inside, muffled by the door, the words indistinct. He raised his right hand and nudged the bridge of his glasses upward with his index finger. The lenses slid back and settled into place. Then he pushed the door open and went in. The door closed behind him, caught halfway, and sprang back a little, leaving a crack.

She stood where she was.

Her feet didn't move.

—In 2025, at the registration table outside the noodle shop, Shi Lei told her: That guy, thin black-framed glasses, carries a hard black bag, doesn't smoke. He doesn't push his glasses up with two fingers—he does it with his index finger, straight up.

The winter before, Shi Lei had seen him talking with Zhou Keming at the bottom of that building on Wenchang Road, too far away to catch more than the words "this batch." Later, on delivery runs past the Chengdong Branch bank entrance, he'd run into the man coming and going three times—same bag, same glasses. When Shi Lei told her, he even raised a hand to his own nose and mimed pushing it up with one finger.

She hadn't had her practice certificate back then. She wrote "this batch" on the back of a registration form and drew a box around it.

The hallway went quiet. The murmur inside paused, then picked up again.

She didn't look toward the door again.

That door—minutes ago she'd been sitting inside it. Her statement had just taken her fingerprints; the pages were still spread on that table.

Why he went into that room, she didn't know. Whether he'd been called in to talk, she didn't know either. She didn't even know his surname. If he'd been called in to talk, then somewhere in this matter there was a thread that pulled at him. If he'd come on other business, then it was other business.

At the far end of the hall, a woman with a folder waited on a bench, head down, looking at her phone. Footsteps sounded on the stairs, going up, then down.

She hitched her bag strap higher on her shoulder and walked past his back, down the stairs.

In the lobby on the first floor, a man stood at a window, head lowered, counting a stack of papers in his hand. She went out the side door. The steps were in sunlight, the wind gentler than upstairs.

She stood on the steps for a moment, slid her hand into her coat pocket, and pulled out her phone. She scrolled through the contacts down to Shi Lei's entry.

She typed a line: That man you mentioned two years ago, the one who pushes his glasses up—have you seen him since?

She looked at the line for a few seconds. Deleted it.

If she sent it, he'd reply. A "yes, seen him" or a "no, haven't." Then he'd drive that minibus over to the Chengdong Branch entrance and wait, or he'd take the question to the group chat and ask around. The group would pass it on, and before long a whole crew of people would be out hunting for a man with a black bag. Last time he'd left his car keys on the noodle shop table, and she'd turned them down; he'd pocketed them again himself. This time, she'd put herself in front of it first.

She put the phone back in her pocket and came down the steps.

She walked north along the street, not fast. She passed a small watch-repair stall where the owner had a magnifying loupe clamped over one eye, nudging the frame up with one finger as he bent back over a watch. She stood there a moment, then moved on.

There was a small shop on the street, narrow storefront, selling congee and flatbread. She ordered a bowl of congee and sat until nearly five. By the time she came out, the sunlight had gone from the road and the sky was a gray-yellow.

At five, she boarded a bus at the stop up ahead. There were seats; she sat by the rear door, her bag on her lap.

Two stops later, a crowd got on and filled the aisle. Someone carried groceries; two scallions poked out of a plastic bag.

She took out her phone again, scrolled back to that entry, and retyped the line, tapping it out character by character: That man you mentioned two years ago, the one who pushes his glasses up—have you seen him since?

She read it over.

The line sat there on the screen. She thought of Shi Lei's temperament: he'd pull the car to the side of the road first, answer her with a "seen him or not," then ask "where did you see him," and by the fourth question he'd go look on his own.

She deleted it.

After deleting, she flipped the phone over onto her knee and looked out the window. The bus crossed an intersection at a red light. An electric scooter cut across in front; the car behind braked hard, its nose dipping.

At her stop she got off, walked seven minutes to her building entrance, and went upstairs.

No one was home. Zhi'an was still out at this hour. She set her bag down, turned on the light, boiled a kettle of water, sat at the desk, and opened the notebook to the November page.

The page header read November first, with lines below: The two lines on the fourth. November eighth, ten a.m., the branch called. Case filed. Paper arrived that afternoon.

She wrote beneath it: November ninth, branch office, hallway.

After writing, she didn't lift the pen. She wanted to go on writing the gesture—the thin black frames, the hard bag, the index finger pushing up. But those three things written down were still just three objects, not a person. On paper, read by someone else, they'd yield no name.

The pen tip bled a small dot into the paper. She crossed it out.

She wrote: Didn't ask.

The water boiled and the kettle lid jumped, clattering. She got up to turn off the stove, came back, and closed the notebook.

Before closing it, she opened it once more and looked at that line.

Shi Lei hadn't mentioned the corner of the bag back then. Today, this one had a scuffed-white edge.