19
I told the police everything about the origins of the videotape and what happened between Li Zitong and me. I don't know how much they believed me, but I guess they believed some of it. The proof is that late that night, they let me go home.
After my parents took me home, my mother looked worried and seemed to have many questions. But my father stopped her with a look. The two of them tacitly chatted about trivial matters. I was grateful for that, because I was truly exhausted and didn't want to say a word. After a quick wash, I fell asleep as soon as I touched the pillow.
I took a sick day the next day and didn't go to school until Tuesday. I was worried about being surrounded by classmates and asked all sorts of questions, but in the end, no one realized a murder had occurred. Only two or three close friends came to ask about my condition.
But the news media was pervasive, and that weekend's evening papers began to reveal news of the case. Initially, it was just a brief report, but the investigation grew more and more detailed. A month later, the connection to the previous "videotape murder case," the "secret room," and the missing daughter of the deceased were all revealed. It's hard to say how they managed to break through the police's intelligence blockade.
If they knew I was an eyewitness, some reporter might be so excited they'd have a mild heart attack and lie down at the school gate, refusing to leave. My father was deeply concerned and repeatedly urged me to come home after school. I agreed, but inwardly, I didn't take it seriously. My mother had been visiting relatives in Shanghai during this time, and my father was working late every night, so no one noticed my late arrival.
Today was the same. After school, I walked alone in the opposite direction of the school gate, heading towards the abandoned old teaching building.
This high school is said to have been built over sixty years ago as a Republican-era academy. The old teaching building is now dilapidated, its mottled exterior covered in creeping ivy. A year ago, the campus expanded, with new teaching buildings built on the east side, but the abandoned old building has yet to be demolished. Some students speculate that the school is short of funds, but a more popular and widely circulated theory is that the building is haunted, and no construction team in the city dares to take on the work.
Thanks to this rumor, no one dared to enter or leave the building at will, and after dark, no one dared even approach this area. The main door of the teaching building was locked long ago, and I climbed in through the broken side window.
The porch and stairs were dusty, the handrails rusted, and there was a musty smell. The fluorescent lights had naturally gone out. I turned on my flashlight and climbed the stairs.
As soon as I reached the third floor, I heard a regular, clattering sound from the end of the hallway. That was the former art room, and inside and outside the door were piled a number of broken plaster statues and picture frames. I shone my flashlight there, and beneath the shadows of the piled-up plaster heads, I could clearly see a complete human figure.
"Stop it, it's too bright!" Gao Yang shouted. "Didn't we agree to exchange signals first?"
"The Chamber of Secrets. You should have answered 'fishing line'."
"You've already given the answer, what's the point of the code?"
I didn't reply. I squatted down at the door of the art classroom like him, staring at the crack. "So, are you sure you can succeed today?"
"Who knows?" Gao Yang remained squatting, leaning against the door, two fishing lines wrapped around the fingers of each hand. "Anyway, I think I've made progress compared to the attempts I made in the past two weeks. I can feel the lock ring hooked into the first keyhole."
That is indeed a big step forward.
During the interrogation a month ago, Gao Yang and I both insisted that we did not pry the lock of the door and persisted to the end.
But after discussing it privately, we all felt the police might not believe our story. If someone really did break into the house, we'd have to find evidence on our own. Our first step was to conduct a simulation experiment to prove that Li Xueqiang's suicide scene was fake.
The abandoned art classroom in front of him was very similar to the bedroom in terms of both the door and the structure of the room, making it perfect for simulating the scene.
The fishing line experiment was Gao Yang's idea. Inspired by a recent popular TV mystery show about a character who appears childish but possesses extraordinary intelligence, he believed the murderer must have used some kind of mechanism to lock the door. The bedroom door's simple lock had an exposed keyhole, making it easy to pry open or relock. The key difficulty lay in the U-shaped lock attached to the inside of the door. Once the simple lock was opened, the door could be pushed open a tiny gap, impenetrable to any other tool, leaving only a thin thread.
Gao Yang selected four pieces of strong fishing line and tied or taped them to the four corners of the U-shaped lock. Once prepared, he left the lock inside and closed the door. Through the crack in the door, he manipulated the U-shaped lock's trajectory like a puppet. Theoretically, as long as he could get the U-shaped lock ring to pass through both keyholes in the door simultaneously and then close the lock, he'd be successful.
But reality was far more challenging than ideal. For two weeks, he hadn't even managed to hook the locking ring through the first keyhole. The reason was that the gap in the door was too narrow. He could only pull the fishing line horizontally or forward and backward, not left or right. To put it in terms of high school geometry, it could only move along the x- and z-axes, not the y-axis. And the key to hooking the keyhole lies in the y-axis—left-right movement.
"Just move it a little more to the left." Gao Yang muttered to himself while carefully manipulating the fishing line, but then there was a heavy "clang" sound and the U-shaped lock fell to the ground.
He leaned back and lay on the ground, groaning in frustration, "Failed again."
"It's best to abandon this conjecture," I advised. "This method clearly requires extensive practice and preparation. With the current astronomical probability of success, even the dumbest killer wouldn't risk it."
"Well, you have a point." He untangled the fishing line from his fingers. "How's your research going?"
"I still haven't found any other reasonable method."
While Gao Yang was fiddling with my fishing line, I was also working on my own. Since even the police couldn't find a flaw, the killer's methods were incredibly sophisticated, perhaps inspired by the mysteries of detective fiction. With this in mind, I searched the mystery shelves of libraries and bookstores, but couldn't find a single book that matched the methods of the crime I was witnessing.
The other day, I found a book called "The Complete Collection of Locked Rooms." The blurb on the cover boasted that it contained every type of locked-room puzzle found in mystery fiction. Highly anticipated, I splurged on it and took it home, only to be bitterly disappointed. Like other works, the locked rooms in this book all employed complex, mystical mechanisms, most of which were based on specific scenarios and coincidences.
A simple yet real problem like the padlock on the inside of the door may be the real no-code room.
"Oh, really," Gao Yang complained. "Why did they go through such a thorough renovation to seal off the house, installing window guards and U-shaped locks? I've never heard of anyone putting two locks on their own bedroom."
"Li Xueqiang recently had them installed shortly after he learned of Xu Lan's death. It's speculated that his unstable mental state is to blame. He believes someone is out to harm his family, and he's told this to others many times. He even quit his job at the coal mine because he couldn't stand the confinement anymore—I learned this from eavesdropping on my dad's phone calls."
"Hmm, that's strange." Gao Yang pondered for a moment and then spoke again, "Let's think about it from a different angle. Do you have any guesses about the murderer's identity?"
The flashlight couldn't clearly illuminate his face, but I knew his expression was quite gloomy at the moment, because I had already anticipated his doubts.
It's hard to imagine such an intricate and impenetrable chamber being hastily arranged by a spur-of-the-moment killer. Aside from the fact that he had recently been in and out of Li Xueqiang's home and had made advance preparations, it's hard to imagine any other explanation. This essentially pins the suspect on an acquaintance. And Li Zitong, who happened to be missing during this time, has a very suspicious reason for her disappearance.
There was another thing Gao Yang didn't know: the details of the previous case I'd heard from Besi. If the "videotape murder" was indeed carried out by someone else, they must have the key to the video store's attic; otherwise, they would have had nowhere to hide under the circumstances. And as someone who had once intended to steal the key, I knew that since the attic theft, Li Xueqiang had replaced the locks and always kept the new key hanging from his belt. Apart from Li Zitong and her brother Li Tianci, no one else could have stolen it.
No, she is not that kind of person.
After much deliberation, I still didn't voice my doubts. Gao Yang also tacitly agreed and didn't ask any further questions.
We fiddled with the door lock for a while, and he suddenly slapped his thigh. "I almost forgot. I met a strange man on my way home last night. He handed me a letter and asked me to pass it on to you."
"Give me?"
"Yeah, I'm baffled too." He pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. I shone my flashlight into it, examining both sides. There was no sign of a stamp, no writing or seal, nothing personal or businesslike. It was just a brown envelope, sealed with glue.
"What does the person who gave you this letter look like?"
"Well, a man, a few years older than us. He has a horse face and is so thin that he's almost out of shape. Otherwise, there's nothing special about him."
Sounds like Zheng Kun. Is he healed? My heart skipped a beat. I hastily tore open the envelope, and a photo fell out. I glanced at it with the flashlight, startled, and immediately put the photo back into the envelope.
"What's inside?" Gao Yang asked curiously.
"Nothing."
"Hey, your attitude is suspicious."
"Anyway, don't ask me now. We'll talk about it tomorrow. I have something to do, so I'll go back first."
After saying that, I hurried away without looking back. Gao Yang's voice behind me was getting farther and farther away.
I didn't dare to open the envelope and read it on the way home. I rode my bike at lightning speed. Because my mind was distracted, I forgot to look up and see if the lights were on when I parked downstairs.
As a result, when I opened the door, I was greeted by my mother's face distorted with anger.
"Didn't I tell you to go home as soon as school was over?" Her voice was so sharp that it pierced her ears.
I desperately searched my brain for an excuse, but unfortunately, I couldn't think of any in my haste.
"You've been through so many dangerous things recently, and you still..."
It’s over. I’m going to be scolded all night long, and maybe even suffer some physical pain.
But surprisingly, the mother didn't continue to scold me. She sighed and said, "Forget it, go wash your hands first. You haven't eaten yet, right? There's fried chicken and hamburgers on the table. If you don't eat now, they will get cold."
I looked at the dining table in disbelief, and there was actually a takeout bag with a bust of Colonel Sanders printed on it.
In the 1990s, Western fast food chains like KFC and McDonald's were just entering the Chinese market. It might be hard to imagine today, but back then, these fast food chains represented trendy Western culture. For kids in big cities, a KFC meal was the equivalent of a high-end Western meal today. Some young people even held their weddings there. Kids like us from smaller cities didn't even have the chance to try them, as no stores opened in second-tier and lower-tier cities. I used to stare at the chunky Big Macs on the news, drooling over them, imagining what they tasted like.
I tore open the wrapper, revealing the tip of a tender, juicy burger. After a moment's hesitation, unsure where to start, I decided to start with the outermost slice of bread, savoring each layer carefully. I don't know if I was just hungry, or if the real thing about Western burgers is that even the cold, shrunken bread tasted incredibly delicious, leaving a lasting impression.
"Isn't it delicious? I brought it back from Shanghai specially. There was a long line."
I nodded and stuffed the vegetable and chicken sandwich into my mouth desperately.
"Look at the way you eat," the mother smiled. "Don't worry, you'll be transferring to a school in Shanghai soon, and you'll be able to eat this often."
I stopped chewing and stared at my mother, thinking I had misheard.
"Why, are you unhappy?"
I shook my head in confusion. The news came so suddenly that I didn't know how to face it. "Why do you want to transfer? Isn't it good here?"
"Not at all." Mother's smile faded, like a restaurant closing. "The security situation is terrible. Think about how much you've suffered these past two months. How can you study and get into university if things continue like this? Shanghai is an international metropolis, safe to live in, and the schools are excellent. I've been working on your transfer procedures all this time."
"But I don't want to go."
Although I usually dislike this tiny city, I really can't bear to leave. Besides, all my family and friends are here.
"Don't worry, I'll quit my job and go to Shanghai with you. We'll live together at my grandparents' house then."
"What about my dad?"
"We're divorced." my mother blurted out.
I felt my whole body stiffen. Although I had known this day would come, when it actually came to me, I found it difficult to accept.
"I'm doing this for your own good," the mother explained hastily. "We've been holding off on getting a divorce because of your studies. But now I see you can't even study properly..."
Finally, I put down the half-eaten burger and retreated to my room. At a time and place unknown to me, my future destiny was quietly decided.
After being in a daze for a long time, I accidentally touched the envelope in my pocket and took it out.
Under the light, I once again examined the photo in the envelope. The focus was a little blurry, as if it had been taken from a distance. It showed a noodle shop operating at a brisk pace, packed with diners, about a dozen or so. But my gaze instantly locked onto the corner of the frame. A girl in an apron was serving dishes. The pinprick-sized pixel distribution pattern indicated she was young, had short hair, and bore a striking resemblance to Li Zitong. Her expression was consistent with my memory: her lips strained to form a smile, her eyes resisting any hint of intimacy.
There was a line of words written on the back of the photo. The words were small and twisted, not like the handwriting of an adult. They were like a nest of newly hatched reptiles, wriggling around, making people feel slightly uncomfortable.
I could just barely make out the words "Ma Xin Noodle House, 12 Renmin Road, Shengang City." There was a red oval in the upper right corner, which, upon closer inspection, looked like a mouse, with dots representing eyes and a curved line representing a tail. I felt like I'd seen it somewhere before.
After much deliberation, I made up my mind and went to buy a train ticket the next day. Before my mother could drag me to Shanghai, there was something else I had to do.
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