There seemed to be a faint ghostly warble that echoed as it wafted through the village. Although everyone knew it was an illusion, they couldn’t help but harbor hallucinations that the soft singing was real in their head.
Su Yunkai sighed, turned to Zhu Changrong, and said, “Please arrange a small room as an autopsy room.”
Zhu Changrong agreed, but the villagers started to make trouble again. “He can’t enter the village. He’s not even from the village, so how can we let a dead person with a different surname into the village?”
Su Yunkai didn’t want to make the villagers angry again, otherwise there’d be a lot of trouble for the yamen. “Arranging a room outside the village would work as well.”
Since he already said so, Zhu Changrong didn’t roar anymore. After thinking about it, he took them outside the village.
*
The cold corpse was placed in a hut outside the village that used to be a cattle pen. The villagers gave in and allowed them to go to the banyan tree to take the person away, but they refused to allow the body into the village for fear that it was not auspicious.
Chang De’s fatal injury was on his neck. Perhaps because he was hung upside down on the tree shortly after his death, the blood flowed like countless interwoven blood streaks across the man’s face. By this time, the blood had coagulated, looking more like a spread-out blood network. Even the blood-stained hair had congealed into clumps.
It was the first time Ming Yue had seen such a tragic death. While she had seen the method of death—a cut to the throat—it was the first time she’d seen a corpse hung upside down.
The death of a familiar person was much more shocking and painful than the death of a stranger. Ming Yue wiped the bloodstain off of his face with clear water. The water basins had become dyed red and the smell of blood emanated throughout the hut.
She reported Chang De’s wounds one by one. After checking all over the body, she said, “The fingernail on Uncle Chang’s thumb is almost falling off. According to the direction, he likely grasped something hard at the time, which led to the nail flipping.”
Su Yunkai looked over. Chang De’s thumb’s fingernail had been ripped in half and flung back. “When people are in a life-and-death struggle, they will grab onto anything they can.”
“Then he must’ve grabbed the murderer.”
“Not the ground?”
“It’s not possible.” Ming Yue lifted up the hand so that Su Yunkai could see the nail more carefully. “From the clothes to his palm, his left hand is muddied, but his right hand is clean. Judging by the bruises around his mouth and nose, I think that at that time, the murderer suppressed him on the ground, covering his mouth and nose with one hand to prevent him from calling for help, and pressing his left arm on the ground with the other hand, so the left hand could not resist. Therefore, the left hand was only able to grab onto the ground, which is why his left hand is dirty and muddy. The situation of the right hand is totally different. Without being suppressed, he must have resisted.”
That nail gap was really clean. Not only the palm, but the whole right arm, including the clothes, was very clean. There is no trace of friction.
If this is so, Su Yunkai thought, then the murderer is likely just one person.
After finishing her careful examination, Ming Yue said, “The fatal injury is the one on his neck. Both of his hands have wounds and there are wounds on his body. He must have fought with the murderer before he died.” She went over the objects and clothes on Chang De and said, “Uncle Chang has a lot of injuries, but all of them are minor injuries. The only place that can bleed is the neck. The clothes around his neck are indeed stained with blood, but it’s strange why there is a splatter of blood on his knee. “
Su Yunkai also went to see. In the knee area of the pants, there were indeed blood stains. But there was no blood in the surrounding area, nor anywhere on the whole pair of trousers. He rubbed the bloodstain with his fingers. It was dry and purplish black. “When did Uncle Chang die?”
“Roughly around 8 PM. Judging from the blood coagulated on his face, the murderer hung Uncle Chang upside down on a tree shortly after his death.”
“But when the drunkard returned to the village and discovered Uncle Chang, it was already past 9 PM, which means that the murderer had left the banyan tree for at least an hour.”
“Right.”
Su Yunkai asked, “What was the weapon?”
“The wound is very uneven. It varies in depth. It wasn’t a sharp weapon. It also doesn’t look like it was caused by a dull knife.” Ming Yue opened the bloody wound to take a closer look, and in the middle of it, she found some tiny objects. She used the pads of her fingers to pick them up and ground them between two fingers. The objects were slightly rough. “It’s crushed stone. The weapon might’ve been a sharp piece of stone. But most people don’t carry stones around, so I think he died in a place where there are a substantial number of stones. “
Su Yunkai said, “The stone wall under the banyan tree we broke had been cleared away and there were no stones around, so Chang De didn’t die there, but somewhere else. The murderer deliberately moved him there. Judging by the wound on his hand, he was tied up by something, since it’s full of bruises. Didn’t he disappear in the evening? I think he was tied up by the murderer for a while but he was killed just two hours ago.”
“Why did the culprit put in all that extra effort to move him under the banyan tree and hang him upside down…?” Ming Yue suddenly realized; her shock was apparent. “Does the killer want to make the ghost sister’s nursery rhyme more real? But what is the purpose of doing so?”
Su Yunkai sighed. “Isn’t his purpose already half revealed?”
Ming Yue didn’t understand.
“The people in Banyan Village are in reverence of the ghost sister, but the government has repeatedly stated that the three people who died accidentally had nothing to do with the nursery rhyme, so the villagers were skeptical. Now that it’s true, the villagers are afraid and will stop us from investigating the case. You saw it just now. Didn’t the villagers stop us or even attempt to drive us away?”
With these words, Ming Yue thought it through. She couldn’t help clenching a fist and gritting her teeth. “In order to drive us away, the murderer killed a living person?”
Su Yunkai was silent, knowing that she was angry. Then, he said, “Only by finding out the real purpose of the murderer can we allow Uncle Chang to rest in peace in the underworld.”
At this point, the only thing to do was indeed to solve this mystery. Ming Yue slowly loosened her fist, sighed heavily, and said, “What exactly was in the tree hole that was so important?”
Su Yunkai shook his head. “I think the person who hid the chest is the one who made the nursery rhyme, but not necessarily the one who killed Uncle Chang.”
“Huh?”
“The nursery rhyme has been around for half a month, but they only poisoned people. In fact, the poison’s only purpose was to scare people. If they really wanted to murder, they would’ve done so long ago. Moreover, the chest has already been moved away, so they didn’t have any need to continue provoking terror. Therefore, I think that there might be two different groups at work here. One group is a group of thieves and the other is a group of murderers.” Su Yunkai added, “Uncle Chang is neither short nor weak, but he doesn’t have too many scars on his body, which shows that the murderer quickly tied him up and gave him no chance to call for help. It can be seen that the murderer is very strong. Otherwise, they couldn’t have moved Uncle Chang here and hung him to a tree. “
“Well, if there were three thieves, it would be easy for three to suppress one.”
Su Yunkai looked outside and leaned over to speak in a low voice. “I sent three yamen officers to follow Zhu Ankang, An Dexing, and Sun He this afternoon. I asked just now—when Uncle Chang was killed, the three of them were at home.”
“Could they have used some trick? Could they have actually already left?”
Su Yunkai was surprised to hear her guess. It was good, though, that she thought more about the case. “Solid guess, but I specifically asked the yamen officers to confirm that they did not go anywhere. It’s certain that they didn’t leave.”
Ming Yue covered Chang De with a white cloth and said, “One wave after another, it’s no wonder that people in Banyan Village are in a panic. If someone wants to use nursery rhymes to kill people, I’m afraid Uncle Chang won’t be the last one. We either have to leave or find the killer immediately. We must find the killer immediately.”
Su Yunkai also felt that the matter was a dilemma. If another person was killed or injured, the villagers would likely become violent. Only by finding the murderer as soon as possible could the unknown danger be prevented. He called for Butou Bai.
Bai Shui, who was standing guard outside, pushed the door open and came inside. When she saw the man under the white cloth, she freaked out internally while trying to remain calm. She stepped forward and asked, “What can I do for you, my lord?”
“Go and tell both Lord Xu and the village head to remind the yamen officers and the villagers to set out in groups. If the nursery rhyme is still sung, it should be stopped as soon as possible, so as not to be used by the murderer to disturb people’s hearts.”
“Yes, sir.” Bai Shui was about to leave, but she thought of another thing. Bai Shui turned around and said, “My lord, when I asked Lord Xu to come to the village before, I heard him mention something and kept on wanting to tell you, but I kept on forgetting to because of something.”
That “something” was her situation with Qin Fang, which had twisted her heart into a mess.
Su Yunkai looked at her, “What was it?”
“Lord Xu said that when he came to Banyan Village before, he recognized the nursery rhyme. He said that the tune of the nursery rhyme came from his hometown, Yuanzhou, but the lyrics were remade to become the Ghost Sister song.”
Su Yunkai frowned slightly. “Yuanzhou… It’s at least seven or eight hundred miles from Banyan Village.”
“Right. Lord Xu said that he hadn’t even heard this tune in the city, but he heard it in the Banyan Village.” Bai Shui added, “I think . . . could it be that someone heard this in tune in Yuanzhou and edited the lyrics? In this way, if we figure out who went to Yuanzhou, wouldn’t we know who wrote the lyrics?”
Su Yunkai thought carefully for a moment. Although the difficulty would be great, this tactic could be tried. “You may investigate in secret. Don’t let people know what you are doing. In addition, ask Lord Xu to come to me. I have questions about the song.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bai Shui left and the autopsy room became colder. Ming Yue and Su Yunkai left as well.
Ming Yue thought in silence for a little bit and then said, “I don’t know if the officers found the crime scene of his murder. I want to go and have a look.”
“Let’s go together.”
Ming Yue guessed that the place where Chang De was killed was not too far away from the banyan tree. Outside the banyan tree, the plants ran wild. There were many weeds, trees and thorns. It was not difficult to hide a person there. As she walked along, she thought of a question. “Say, Uncle Chang might have been tied up in the evening, but he was killed two hours ago. Why did the murderer wait so long before he killed him? Isn’t it possible to do so as soon as it’s dark?”
“There might be two reasons. One is that although it is dark, there are still people going in and out of the village. The murderer is afraid of being exposed. The other is that it might’ve been inconvenient for the murderer to kill him at the time.”
“Inconvenient?”
“Since the murderer knows where to hide people in Banyan Village and where to kill people without being noticed, he must be familiar with the village and is likely to be a villager. In this case, if a person suddenly disappeared for an hour, wouldn’t he be suspected?”
Ming Yue understood.“So he had to wait until bedtime, when we all retired. Thus, even if he secretly left his house, he wouldn’t be discovered. Moreover, quite a number of people live alone. If we investigate people one by one, not only will we not have witnesses, we also won’t be able to be sure the other party is the murderer. After all, everyone was sleeping.”
Su Yunkai nodded gently. This was why he did not ask the villagers. Since the murderer was able to hide a person for an hour or two without being found, the murderer must be a careful person. It is almost impossible to find out who had not been in their own room.
“Do you have any suspects in mind?”
.
A Hint of Spring 