Song of the Setting Sun (IV)

After finishing her cleaning, He Lingyu carried a large bag of trash downstairs and came face to face with two people marching up the stairs with heads held high. With nimble movements, He Lingyu sidestepped them, but Xu Yuanfang still made a show of brushing off his iron-gray trench coat, exclaiming, “Filthy! Be careful.”

Si Kai glanced at him and silently moved a little farther away.

He Lingyu sized up Xu Yuanfang with a mocking smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Second Senior Brother, that cobweb on your head wasn’t my doing.”

“What? Cobweb? Where? Where?” Xu Yuanfang immediately reached up to feel his hair.

He Lingyu pointed at him and asked Si Kai, “Wasn’t he supposed to go to J City? How come he’s here with you?”

Si Kai replied with disdain, “He went to J City for a case, but as soon as he got off the plane, his client told him to come here instead.”

He Lingyu was taken aback. “Come here? By ‘here,’ do you mean the town, this mountain, or the inn?”

While using his phone to check his hair with the selfie camera, Xu Yuanfang answered, “Of course I mean the inn. Why else would I be here?”

Xu Yuanfang was a private detective and Si Kai’s close friend. As for why He Lingyu called him “Second Senior Brother,” it wasn’t because they were true siblings in apprenticeship, but because Xu Yuanfang had once been such a drag on a case that He Lingyu jokingly granted him that title, which stuck ever since.

Hearing that Xu Yuanfang’s client had actually sent him to the inn, He Lingyu hesitated, then probed, “Your client wouldn’t happen to have the surname Shan, would she?”

“Oh? You can even divine that?” As soon as he spoke, even Xu Yuanfang felt that was a silly question. He Lingyu might have some spiritual abilities, but she wasn’t some iron-clad fortune teller.

He Lingyu gave a dry laugh. “You can’t get in touch with her, can you?”

“Exactly. Her phone’s off, so I thought I’d take a shower first, then ask Shuimei if there’s anyone by that name staying at the inn,” Xu Yuanfang replied.

He Lingyu burst out laughing. “She’s been taken to the police station, suspected of assaulting an officer. Now, whether the charge holds will depend on her mental state. By the way, Second Senior Brother, did you take a deposit for this case? How much did you get?”

Xu Yuanfang felt as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped over his head, chilling him to the bone.

He held up five fingers.

“Fifty thousand?” He Lingyu asked.

Xu Yuanfang gritted his teeth. “Five thousand!”

He Lingyu grinned wickedly. “Did Shan want you to investigate her mother’s extramarital affair?”

It wasn’t that He Lingyu could tell fortunes, but simply that most of Xu Yuanfang’s cases as a private detective involved infidelity.

Xu Yuanfang put away his phone and glared at her. “What else do you know?”

He Lingyu waved him off. “You go take your shower first, get cleaned up. I’ll tell you more later.”

Xu Yuanfang sniffed; he could already sense he’d been played.

Back in the lobby, He Lingyu thought for a moment, then told Shuimei about Shan’s mother, Wang Ruimei, and her illicit affair with Uncle Zhang Hongfa, as well as how they’d both suffered from the so-called “ghost barber” incident.

Shuimei was long used to He Lingyu’s unusual abilities and asked, “So what can we do now?” After all, neither of the two tour groups had settled their bills yet.

He Lingyu said, “Sister Shuimei, why don’t you call Officer Guo and ask if any of the mentally unstable tourists are named Zhang Hongfa or Wang Ruimei? If they are, just say we have a private detective here sent by Shan to investigate Wang Ruimei.”

Shuimei had perked up at the mention of Zhang Hongfa’s escapades and was now full of energy. Without a word, she dialed up Old Guo. Moments later, she hung up and told He Lingyu, “That’s right, Wang Ruimei was the first one to lose her mind, Zhang Hongfa the second. There are twelve in total; only Zhang Hongfa and another, Uncle Gao, are men—the rest are women. And I remember clearly, Zhang Hongfa and Uncle Gao were sharing a room.”

Suddenly, He Lingyu recalled that the ghostly old woman had said Uncle Gao had swapped rooms with Wang Ruimei. In the Little Red Riding Hood tour group, four rooms were occupied by couples, while the rest were arranged as either two men or two women per room.

He Lingyu quickly sat down at the computer and soon found that Wang Ruimei had originally shared a room with an older woman named Shen Chunhua. After swapping rooms with Uncle Gao, Wang Ruimei ended up sharing with Zhang Hongfa, and Shen Chunhua with Uncle Gao.

Shuimei called Old Guo again, and sure enough, Shen Chunhua had also lost her mind.

But there was one fact He Lingyu hadn’t anticipated: Uncle Gao and Shen Chunhua were actually husband and wife, though they were in the process of divorcing—Shen Chunhua had filed for divorce, but the paperwork wasn’t complete yet. That explained why they traveled together but hadn’t requested a shared room.

Just then, Xu Yuanfang, freshly showered and changed, came downstairs with Si Kai. Seeing He Lingyu and Shuimei deep in discussion, Xu Yuanfang could barely contain himself. “Come on, tell me—why did Shan assault a police officer?”

He Lingyu nodded toward the second floor. “Let’s go up to Si Kai’s room. It’s too busy down here.”

The four of them left the front desk to Spinach, who was on duty today, and went up to Si Kai’s room.

As the main owner and major shareholder of the inn, Si Kai’s room was not only spacious but fully equipped with every kind of appliance. Even the drinks and fruit in the fridge had been freshly stocked that very day.

He Lingyu popped open a can of cola and said to Xu Yuanfang, “You go first.”

Though eager to know about Shan, Xu Yuanfang had dealt with He Lingyu plenty of times before and knew that getting useful information out of her was like fishing—you had to provide bait.

“I took this job two days ago. The client’s name is Shan. She found me through Weibo and sent a private message saying she wanted to hire me for a case. After that, we communicated via WeChat.

She said she’s from J City. Her father, Shan Dagen, is sixty-five, a retired electrician from a factory, honest and hardworking, known as a good man. Her mother is Wang Ruimei, sixty-four, laid off more than twenty years ago, now running a small shop in their neighborhood.

Shan Dagen and Wang Ruimei met during the ‘Down to the Countryside’ movement, married for forty years with two children. Shan is the eldest; her younger brother, Shan Yao, was born in violation of the one-child policy, eight years her junior. When he was born, the family was fined heavily. Although Shan Dagen and Wang Ruimei weren’t fired by the factory, the housing allotted to them was taken back, so for years, the whole family rented and struggled.

Later, Shan went to college. Wang Ruimei pulled some strings and introduced her to a boyfriend—a man over twenty years her senior, divorced, with two kids. He owned an electronics factory and was quite wealthy at the time. Wang Ruimei asked him for three hundred thousand yuan, promising that Shan would marry him after graduation.

Shan said her father was against it, but Wang Ruimei insisted. She even bought their current home with the man’s money behind her husband’s back.

But before Shan could graduate, the man was kidnapped and murdered. I checked—eighteen years ago, there was indeed such a case. The factory owner’s name was Fan Cheng, in his forties when he died. He was kidnapped by several of his own workers, who were later brought to justice.”