Chen Zheng kicked Ming Han in the shin. Ming Han immediately jumped aside. “Ow! Is this what being close is for, kicking me?”
Chen Zheng said, “Where did you go just now?”
Ming Han turned serious. “I looked through the teachers’ roster. I found a student from Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi’s class who came back to teach here after graduate school. Go talk to her in a bit.”
Chen Zheng asked, “You were free. Why didn’t you go yourself?”
“I was a Nanxi Middle School student.” Ming Han tapped his temple. “I’d have a very strong preconceived bias, so for this investigation I can only act as support.”
Chen Zheng understood and teased, “You’ve defined your role pretty clearly.”
The teacher Ming Han had mentioned was surnamed Quan and taught foreign languages. She had just finished her morning classes. Chen Zheng explained why he was there and showed her the permit issued by the administrative office. Teacher Quan’s face paled. “Wasn’t that case solved back then? I remember so many police officers came. We… we stopped classes for a long time.”
Chen Zheng nodded and gave a brief explanation, but Teacher Quan was still tense. Looking down, she said, “Didn’t you say Teacher Xue was the murderer back then? Everyone was furious and demanded that the school explain itself. If a teacher could kill students like that, who would ever dare send their children here again? I don’t know if you understand what I mean. Everyone was swept away by anger. We thought, Teacher Xue was actually the murderer? How horrible. He had to be executed, executed immediately! But later, after many years had passed, especially after I went to graduate school and talked about it with old classmates, we all started wondering whether there had been some misunderstanding. Someone like Teacher Xue… how could he hurt students?”
Chen Zheng understood. “When people are carried along by anger, they have no room left to make their own judgments. Only after time cools everything down do doubts begin to appear.”
Teacher Quan nodded earnestly. “Exactly. I’m a teacher myself now, and that makes me feel even more strongly that Teacher Xue was a good teacher. Actually, Teacher Xue used to tutor me too.”
More than ten years earlier, it had been common for teachers to privately tutor a small number of students after school for money. But the Xue Chenwen Vice Principal Gong had described neither lacked money nor treated students differently, so that did not seem to fit him. Chen Zheng asked, “Did he charge you and tutor you at home?”
Teacher Quan froze for a moment, then hurriedly shook her head. “No, no. I know the kind you mean, but Teacher Xue never charged us. He actually spent his own money.”
“His own money?”
“Yes. He’d take us to McDonald’s, KFC, places like that.”
Teacher Quan said that by the time she enrolled, Nanxi Middle School was already aiming to compete with elite schools such as No. 5 Middle School. Subjects that could create a big score gap, such as mathematics, English, and the three sciences, were all heavily emphasized. Chinese was difficult to improve quickly, and even a great deal of effort might raise a score only a few points, so neither the school nor the students cared much about it.
Xue Chenwen noticed. After one monthly exam, he smiled and encouraged everyone to study Chinese properly, saying its value was not limited to exam scores and that it would be useful later in life too. He said anyone who wanted extra help with Chinese could come to him. Very few responded. Only a few students who liked the subject asked how the tutoring would work and how much it would cost. Xue Chenwen said he would not charge anything. If they were willing to come, he was willing to teach.
Teacher Quan liked Chinese, so after class she approached Xue Chenwen and asked whether she could join. He welcomed her. After that, whenever she had time, she went to the tutoring sessions.
Xue Chenwen held the sessions neither at school nor at home, but at fast-food restaurants near Nanxi Middle School. He would first buy everyone drinks, and once they had covered enough material, they would have a proper meal.
After the incident, a rumor spread through the school that Xue Chenwen was a “pedophile,” that he had long had his eye on Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi, and when they refused him, he killed them out of rage. Taking students out for fast food became part of the supposed evidence. “What teacher is always taking students out to have fun?”
Teacher Quan said she had been terrified at the time and never said a word in Xue Chenwen’s defense. Neither did the other students he had tutored. Looking back later, she felt deeply guilty. The students who had actually attended those sessions knew better than anyone that Xue Chenwen had genuinely been tutoring them and had never done anything to them.
Chen Zheng put Teacher Quan’s account beside Vice Principal Gong’s. Deep down, both of them believed in Xue Chenwen and could not understand what he had done later. Even though Xue Chenwen’s confession seemed ironclad, they instinctively defended him and remembered the good in him.
“You were classmates with Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi, and you also attended Xue Chenwen’s tutoring sessions.” Chen Zheng asked, “Did anything happen during those sessions? For example, did Li Shuxing or Ping Yiyi ever suddenly show up? Did Xue Chenwen ever mention them?”
Teacher Quan looked uneasy. “I… I wasn’t close to Li Shuxing. I got along all right with Ping Yiyi. But as far as I remember, neither of them joined Teacher Xue’s tutoring sessions, and he never singled them out in conversation.”
Chen Zheng nodded. “Then tell me about Ping Yiyi. From the old investigation report, her family circumstances were fairly ordinary compared with the rest of your class?”
Teacher Quan sighed. “Our school isn’t really a rich-kid school anymore, but back then it absolutely was. Most of the students in our class had paid their way in. There were people like Li Shuxing, whose family lived in a villa, and there were people like Ping Yiyi and me, whose families were ordinary. Some parents were vain, others were desperate for their children to succeed, so they stretched themselves beyond their means to send us here. To be honest, I had a terrible inferiority complex. Everyone else was so rich, while I was thinking about how to get financial aid. I was afraid to talk to them and even ate alone. That’s why I became close to Ping Yiyi, whose situation was similar to mine.”
Chen Zheng listened patiently as Teacher Quan described the bitterness and helplessness of ordinary-family children attending a school for the wealthy. Ping Yiyi’s family was even worse off than hers. Both of Ping Yiyi’s parents were ordinary salaried employees, and she had mainly been admitted to Nanxi Middle School because she had talent in drawing. Ping Yiyi was cheerful and straightforward, and she did not fit in with the pampered girls in the class. Instead, she often played basketball with the boys.
Teacher Quan and Ping Yiyi had not interacted at first, but Ping Yiyi approached her and said she wanted to be friends. Teacher Quan was introverted, but she was still happy when another girl came to talk to her. The two gradually became close. Sometimes Teacher Quan helped Ping Yiyi with foreign languages and Chinese. She was not good enough at the other subjects to help.
Ping Yiyi’s grades ranked near the bottom even in a regular-track class like theirs. After every exam, she would be miserable, coming to Teacher Quan with eyes swollen red from crying and pouring out her frustrations.
“It’s not like I wanted to come to Nanxi. They spent all that money sending me here, but did they ever ask what I wanted? Was I the one who wanted them to spend their money? Our family is poor. Is that my fault? If you’re poor, then don’t have a child. Don’t expect me to become successful, okay? They never accomplished anything themselves!”
Ping Yiyi was talking about her parents. She had grown up during the era when extracurricular classes of every kind were booming. Her thoroughly ordinary parents pinned their hopes on her, dreaming that she would make a lot of money someday. Every month they squeezed money out of their tight salaries to send her to enrichment classes.
She was not particularly good at anything else, but she truly had talent for drawing and exceeded Nanxi Middle School’s specialty-admission cutoff. Her parents were overjoyed. This was Nanxi Middle School. If she could bring her academic scores up and add the bonus from the arts entrance track, getting into a top-tier university might not be impossible.
That was how Ping Yiyi’s nightmare began. She was not as ambitious as her parents. She liked drawing, but drawing had become a shackle binding her. She went to close classmates for help with schoolwork because she did not want to waste her parents’ “investment,” and she genuinely wanted to improve her grades. But she could not. All she received were repeated blows, her parents’ accusations, even slaps and tears.
Ping Yiyi had told Teacher Quan all of this. But back then Teacher Quan herself had only been a timid girl with average grades. Other than listening, there was nothing she could do.
Chen Zheng remembered that when the police investigated Ping Yiyi’s relationships, Teacher Quan had not been one of the students questioned in depth. “How did the two of you grow apart later? From what you’ve said, Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing weren’t from the same social class. How did they end up hanging around together?”
Teacher Quan’s gaze dimmed. Chen Zheng could see a trace of guilt in it.
“Because I couldn’t help her. I was basically a generator of negative emotions myself. If I were her, I’d have wanted to be friends with someone more cheerful too.”
In Teacher Quan’s memory, Ping Yiyi was a fairly decisive girl and also quite pragmatic. For example, she had approached Teacher Quan because their circumstances were similar and because Teacher Quan could help with her schoolwork. After they had spent some time together, Ping Yiyi realized Teacher Quan’s “value” was limited and turned her attention elsewhere.
Ping Yiyi had never been very popular among the girls, perhaps because of her personality and the way she dressed. The school required uniforms, but it was lenient with specialty-admission students, perhaps because it believed students in the arts and athletics should be allowed more creativity. Ping Yiyi did not wear anything truly bizarre, yet even that was enough to annoy some of the girls.
Teacher Quan did not know how Ping Yiyi became close to Li Shuxing. But after becoming a teacher herself and meeting all kinds of students, she had formed a few theories of her own.
Chen Zheng said, “You mean they were dating? But they were too young.”
Teacher Quan shook her head. “Kids mature early. Otherwise why would elementary schools already have people voting for school beauties and school heartthrobs? But I don’t think they were exactly dating. It was more like something between classmates and a romantic relationship. Li Shuxing’s family had money and connections. Ping Yiyi knew she could rely on him and gain access to more opportunities.”
Teacher Quan remembered that from the second semester of seventh grade onward, Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing were almost always linked together. Ping Yiyi did not attend the class study period in the afternoons because she went to draw in the studio the school provided. Li Shuxing, an ordinary student without any specialty, also frequently left the classroom.
Chen Zheng asked, “Was he going to see Ping Yiyi?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but he was actually going to play soccer. He loved soccer, but he wasn’t very good.” Teacher Quan explained that although Nanxi Middle School’s athletic-specialty students and arts-specialty students were on different tracks, they received the same benefits. There had once even been a bizarre rule that if middle-school athletic-specialty and arts-specialty students wanted direct admission into Nanxi’s high-school division, they were assessed together. In other words, a dancer might end up competing against a basketball player. The rule had since been changed, and the athletic and arts assessments were now completely separate.
At the time, Li Shuxing may have been influenced by Ping Yiyi, or perhaps he simply thought soccer looked cool and would attract girls. In any case, he tried to make the school team and secure an athletic-specialty slot, but he was rejected.
Hearing this, Lou Xiaoguo flashed through Chen Zheng’s mind. Lou Xiaoguo had not been in the same class as Ping Yiyi or Li Shuxing and had no known connection to either of them, but he had apparently been an excellent runner, enough to qualify for the athletic-specialty track.
Teacher Quan continued. By the time Ping Yiyi was killed, she and Teacher Quan had not spoken in a long while. She did not know what had happened between Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing during those final months. The entire campus had been in chaos at the time. What she remembered most clearly was that both the Li and Ping families had come to the school demanding answers.
Ping Yiyi’s parents were the sort of ordinary people Teacher Quan knew well. After losing the only daughter they had poured everything into raising, they collapsed emotionally and made ugly scenes in their grief. The Li family was much more restrained, maintaining its composure even while devastated. Rumors flew everywhere. Some people said Li Shuxing’s family had not really grieved his death at all because they were rich and he was not the family’s only child. Others said the Li family was in the middle of dividing its assets, and with Li Shuxing gone, the other descendants would receive larger shares.
Chen Zheng frowned as he listened. Back then, it was not that police had never suspected the families of Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi. But because the two families had no relationship with each other, suspicion concentrated more heavily on the school. Then Xue Chenwen confessed soon afterward, so the family investigations had gone no further than the surface.
It seemed the families were another area that needed serious investigation.
Teacher Quan fell silent, apparently unable to remember anything more. Chen Zheng checked the time and decided to stop there for now. Teacher Quan stood to see him out, then suddenly said, “Earlier you asked whether anything happened during Teacher Xue’s tutoring sessions. I just remembered something. I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for.”
Chen Zheng immediately said, “Tell me.”
Teacher Quan said that once, after a tutoring session, the other students ate their burgers and fries and went home, but she had arranged to meet a friend to buy celebrity photo cards, so she stayed behind. Xue Chenwen saw her sitting quietly with a book and paused while packing up. He smiled. “Still studying?”
She explained that she was waiting for someone. She thought Xue Chenwen would leave once he knew, but he smiled and said, “I’m waiting for someone too. Mind if I wait with you?”
She liked Teacher Xue very much and happily said, “Of course not. I still have a few questions…”
That day, she stayed until her friend arrived. She packed her schoolbag, waved goodbye to Xue Chenwen, and as she reached the door she saw a young man walking inside. She instinctively looked back and saw him stop beside Xue Chenwen’s table.
Chen Zheng asked, “Do you remember who he was or what he looked like?”
Teacher Quan shook her head. “I can’t remember. I never thought anything of it. I assumed he was just one of Teacher Xue’s friends. If you hadn’t asked me about all this today, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it at all.”
Chen Zheng stood for a while in the teaching-building corridor. It was lunchtime, and many students were away from the classrooms.
A web of clues spread through his mind, catching things that had been overlooked back then for practical reasons: Xue Chenwen’s family relationships, his decision to abandon Luocheng for Nanshan City, the complete absence of any girlfriend around him, the young man he had waited for after tutoring students, the respective families of Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing, and the warped expectations Ping Yiyi’s parents had placed on her.
If the deaths of the two students had not caused such enormous public pressure, if frontline investigators had not been carrying such crushing responsibility, and if Xue Chenwen had not confessed so quickly, all of these would have become major investigative points. Chen Zheng had to consider the possibility that even if Xue Chenwen had not been the real killer, he might still have played an extremely ugly role in what happened.
Vice Principal Gong and Teacher Quan still could not understand why he would commit the crime and instinctively wanted to clear his name. But perhaps the real Xue Chenwen had been completely different from the man in their memories.
A group of students rushed into the teaching building carrying a soccer ball and began playing wall passes in the corridor. The ball came flying toward Chen Zheng at high speed. He stepped back and stopped it cleanly underfoot. Students at an elite school were relatively polite, at least. They immediately apologized. “Sorry, sorry! We didn’t hit you, did we? Could you kick the ball back?”
Chen Zheng juggled the ball twice and sent it back. One boy knew exactly how to flatter an adult. “Bro, nice footwork!”
Chen Zheng had been about to warn them not to play soccer in the corridor because they could hurt someone, but seeing that the boys actually had a decent sense of limits, he let it go. Too much lecturing from adults only annoyed kids.
The boys dribbled away. Chen Zheng opened the staff list Ming Han had sent him, scanned down it quickly, and found Teacher You, who was responsible for the athletic-specialty program.
Whether Lou Xiaoguo truly counted as an athletic-specialty student still needed to be established. More than ten years had passed, and there was no guarantee the teacher who had coached that program back then was still at Nanxi Middle School. Chen Zheng went to the athletic field to try his luck. A group of track-and-field students were using their lunch break to practice hurdles, while a gray-haired male teacher blew his whistle constantly and shouted at them with impressive severity.
Chen Zheng watched for a while. The lunchtime practice did not last long, and soon the students dispersed, passing him with enough body heat to make it feel for a moment as though this were not winter. He walked over to the teacher putting away equipment. “Teacher You.”
Teacher You straightened up, looking fierce. “Who are you?”
Chen Zheng explained why he was there. Teacher You shook his head and said, “If there’s such a thing as another life, those two children would probably be middle-school students again by now.”
Chen Zheng asked, “How long have you been responsible for the athletic-specialty students?”
“That’s been forever. Twenty years, maybe?” Teacher You could not resist boasting. “I’ve trained plenty of students who got score bonuses and went on to elite schools. Some even won awards internationally!”
Chen Zheng asked again, “I heard Li Shuxing once wanted to pursue athletics. Do you remember that?”
Teacher You frowned and thought for a moment. “Yes, there was something like that. His family even tried to pull strings for him. I blocked it.”
“Hm?”
“A lot of you look down on athletic-specialty students. You think sports kids are all brawn and no academics. I’m telling you, that’s prejudice! Sports take talent and brains too. Li Shuxing wanted to make the soccer team, but he genuinely didn’t have what it took. His footwork looked flashy, but he had no speed and no stamina. Fine for casual play, but an athletic-specialty slot? That would’ve been a waste of everyone’s time and a waste of the quota!”
Chen Zheng asked, “How did he react after being rejected? Did his family come back to you?”
“No. His family had money and he couldn’t tolerate hardship anyway. Why would he need to pursue sports? Look at those students just now. I yell at them all the time, but I know every one of them can endure hard training…” Teacher You paused, then belatedly realized something. “Wait, Officer Chen. Are you saying that case had something to do with Li Shuxing not getting an athletic-specialty slot?”
Teacher You’s face had gone pale, so Chen Zheng hurriedly said, “Don’t read too much into it. I’m just asking around. There’s someone else I want to ask you about too. Lou Xiaoguo.”
Teacher You visibly relaxed. “Lou Xiaoguo… I remember him a little. Let me think.”
Chen Zheng prompted him. “Same grade as Li Shuxing, different class. I heard he was extremely fast.”
“Guozi?” Teacher You blurted out. “That girlish-looking speedster?”
Teacher You attached two labels to Lou Xiaoguo: girlish-looking and exceptionally talented. Chen Zheng asked how talented. Teacher You said regretfully that if Lou had continued training under him, he might even have made it to major competitions. What was especially unusual was that Lou Xiaoguo had not been specially admitted as an athletic-specialty student. His talent had only been discovered by a PE teacher after he was already enrolled.
Lou Xiaoguo’s family was not particularly well-off by Nanxi Middle School standards. He had no father, and his mother ran an internet café near the school. At first, Lou himself did not care much about his talent and had no interest in athletic-specialty training. Teacher You, Lou’s PE teacher, and his homeroom teacher all tried to persuade him. They also spoke to his mother and explained the benefits of entering the athletic-specialty program. The generous incentives appealed to her, and Lou eventually agreed.
Lou Xiaoguo was not very sturdy, and boys that age were in the middle of shooting upward, so he looked weak and fragile. Teacher You even paid out of pocket to supplement his nutrition. Lou did not seem especially motivated, but once training started, he was willing to work very hard. Teacher You had been extremely confident in him and thought direct admission into Nanxi’s high-school division would be no problem at his level. With more training and improved physical conditioning, elite schools would have fought to recruit him.
But to Teacher You’s surprise, once Lou Xiaoguo entered ninth grade, he began frequently missing practice. Whenever anyone asked, he said something had come up at home. Teacher You scolded him, advised him, and even visited his home, but nothing worked. Lou Xiaoguo’s mother also looked troubled and said the boy found training too difficult and truly did not want to continue, so they might as well let him stop.
Teacher You was not his parent and could not force him, so in the end he had to give up on Lou Xiaoguo. Later, Lou, who should have been practically guaranteed a place in Nanxi Middle School’s high-school division, failed the high-school entrance exam and went elsewhere. Teacher You had been furious enough to beat his chest over it, though after so many years the feeling had faded.
“Was it really just because it was hard?” Chen Zheng asked. “Training had always been hard. Why did he suddenly stop wanting to do it after making it all the way to ninth grade?”
“I don’t understand it either!” Teacher You said irritably. “Forget it. Maybe he suddenly became rebellious. Kids at fourteen or fifteen change their minds every day.”
The bell for the first afternoon class rang, and students with PE lessons began arriving at the athletic field. Teacher You no longer had time to talk with Chen Zheng. Before leaving, he said, “I think that case may have affected him too and made him withdrawn. A lot of students were psychologically shaken back then. Forget the students, even we teachers, grown adults, couldn’t process it for a long time.”
Sitting in the car, Chen Zheng thought over Teacher You’s words. Lou Xiaoguo, the athletic-specialty student. Ping Yiyi, the arts-specialty student. Li Shuxing, who had failed to become an athletic-specialty student. A single line now connected all three names.
At that same moment, Ming Han arrived at an esports hotel not far from Nanxi Middle School. Lou Xiaoguo’s mother was the owner.