Mo Du (默读) - Silent Reading

Humbert Humbert XXIII

In the dim room, the places sprayed with luminol solution glowed with a faint fluorescence. The floor, the ceiling, the cracks around the doors… Vast swaths linked together, all over, like a dizzying wallpaper.

Where the couch had been moved away there were age-old bloodstains that hadn’t been cleaned up. On the otherwise spotless pale floor, they were especially startling, an injustice from who knew how many years past finally coming to light.

The walls were covered in soundproofing. In the living room, there was one wall hung with photographs. Exquisite fields and natural scenery were displayed there, giving off a tasteful atmosphere of culture—if not for the fact that they were also coated with fluorescence.

In the bedroom, meanwhile, hung a sheep-herding picture. The meter-high frame was very solid. A crime scene technician stared at it for a while, thinking there was something not right. He took it down to investigate and found a stealth camera installed inside. The lens peered out from the shepherdess’s eye, giving the young girl’s quiet smile an unwarranted hint of furtiveness.

In the locked storage room next to the bedroom were hidden all the cutting tools and bindings the medical examiners needed…

But not one of them was as horrifying as the enlarged photograph on the window.

“Look, Deputy Tao, this window is one of the old-style ones split into an inner and outer layer. Between them there’s a blackout curtain like you usually get in hotels, and the photograph is stuck onto the outside of the glass,” said the crime scene technician to Tao Ran. “This way, even if there was a solar storm outside, the UV-blocking curtain would still shield it. No strong light would pass through to the photo paper… Tsk, this photograph really has been arranged here with skill!”

The photograph had been carefully enlarged to accurate proportions. In the realistic darkness of the surroundings, standing in that room, a person would really be unable to tell the difference between dawn and dusk, day and night. At a glance, you might think that outside of the window glass was this night scene—the narrow street, the old thinly-spread buildings arranged in rows, the distant streetlamp as before more than a hundred meters away, the flowerbeds left to grow on their own, delicate flowers and tangled weeds living together. A small part had withered somehow, and from this lofty point of view, you could see a faint light among the dried branches. The light reflected from somewhere onto the half-hidden basement past the flowerbeds, and the basement revealed a corner of a small window, with a girl’s blurred face.

This was important evidence. Two crime scene technicians carefully came up and took the photograph down along with the glass.

Tao Ran pulled open the light-blocking curtain and opened the outer window. At that moment, his pupils contracted slightly, the hot sweat worked up rushing around under the sun receding like the tide—

Tao Ran suddenly saw that outside of the window, the locations of the staff levels and the stones used to represent Wu Guangchuan’s house dovetailed perfectly with the photograph when the window was closed.

“Deputy Tao! Deputy Tao!” A trainee from the Criminal Investigation Team who’d been left behind by the others to interrogate the property management came running over, starting to clamor while still in the corridor. “The property management admitted it! They say this apartment really is illegally rented, but the tenants don’t seem to live here normally, maybe they’re just office workers who work nearby and come here to have a nap in the afternoon or something. The property management people say that they don’t use the stove, and the water and electricity go slowly, so they think there’s no safety hazard, so… Fuck!”

“Careful, this is a crime scene!”

“Don’t blunder around in here, stay back!”

Seeing the “magnificent” room from the door, the youngster had been dumbstrucked, earning a scolding from his colleagues.