We went to a small restaurant near the college and Ye Shiwen ordered a table full of food. Ye Shiwen and Zhang Yan couldn’t keep their hands off each other the whole time and it made me feel incredibly awkward.
“Why don’t we invite Dali here too?” I suggested.
“Sure, why not?” nodded Ye Shiwen. “We can’t possibly finish all the food here anyway.”
I called Dali and told him Ye Shiwen was going to treat us to a meal. He quickly responded, “Will Mengmeng be there too?”
I wanted to do anything I could to help him as a friend, so I asked Zhang Yan, “Can you invite Xia Mengmeng too?”
“Sure, I’ll call her! She should be in the dorm right now.”
Zhang Yan picked up her phone and spoke a few words before hanging up. She then turned to me and snorted, “The first thing she asked was whether Song Yang is here.”
The second she told her that I was already here, she agreed to come right away.
I sighed. I must find a chance to clarify this misunderstanding!
After a while, both Dali and Xia Mengmeng arrived. The evening passed quite awkwardly after that, with Xia Mengmeng staring at me most of the time, while Dali’s eyes were mostly glued on Xia Mengmeng, and Ye Shiwen and Zhang Yan had their eyes and hands on each other the whole time. Zhang Yan was the only one speaking. She talked about my supposed girlfriend who was a policewoman, and how I was a special detective hired by the police force. She even bragged about how I was able to solve countless murder cases, but I quickly denied the claim, saying that I had only worked on a few cases so far.
“Oh, come on, Great Detective Song,” she patted my hand and said, “Don’t be so modest! Here, let us drink to your success in solving the last case!”
I told her I didn’t drink alcohol, so I picked up my glass filled with juice and clinked it with hers.
Zhang Yan smiled. “Why don’t you tell us more about your love life, Great Detective Song?”
“Yeah, Detective Song!” Ye Shiwen butted in. “How did you and the policewoman first meet?”
I scratched my head and said, “Will you stop calling me Great Detective? It’s embarrassing!”
“Geez, we’re only trying to show you some respect!” Zhang Yan answered. “By the way, a drama club was recently created in our college, and I am currently its president. Why don’t you join us? It would be a great honor to have Master Detective Song among our members!”
“Nah, I’ll pass.” I shook my head repeatedly.
Zhang Yan kept pestering me about it for the next few minutes. Just when I was successful in turning her down, Xia Mengmeng shot a series of questions at me. How long had I been together with the policewoman? Was the relationship serious? Wouldn’t police officers be too busy to go out on dates?
No matter how poor my emotional intelligence was, I was thankfully not too stupid to know what I should say. I told Xia Mengmeng that I’d been in a relationship with Xiaotao for a long time, that we were getting along with each other very well, and that we often went out on dates. I then quite desperately changed the subject to Dali, talking about how nice a guy he was and what a great friend he had always been.
Fortunately, Xia Mengmeng lost interest in me after that evening. She would still send me text messages occasionally, but I was too busy solving a case to reply.
I thought that Dali would have a chance with her since she’d given up on me, but to my surprise, a few weeks after that, Xia Mengmeng started dating a tall, muscular hunk. The heartbroken Dali drowned his sorrow with alcohol when he found out about it.
After the closing of the haunted mansion murder case, my life returned to its dull and mundane routine. One day, my academic counselor asked me to see him in his office. He told me that I had been skipping too many classes this semester that I didn’t have enough credits to graduate!
This wasn’t an ideal situation for me at all. How would I ever face my family if that happened? My counselor then warned me firmly that I now had roughly half a semester to accumulate my credits, so I’d better start racking up my brains to find ways to do it.
According to the rules of our college, a student could accumulate credits in various ways. Donating your blood would give you two points. Doing charity work gave you five points. Publishing an article in an academic journal would give you five points. The problem was, each of these activities only counted once, so I couldn’t just keep donating blood every day to accumulate more credits. Right now, I needed more than a dozen points just to graduate!
I couldn’t hope to make it up with my grades, so I knew that I had to rely on extracurricular activities to get more credits. Dali suggested joining the drama club. Seeing as Zhang Yan was practically worshipping me, she’d probably let me get away with barely showing up for the club activities.
I pondered about it and realized that it could be feasible. I could join a charity event, donate my blood, and write an article about ancient Chinese forensic science. Coupled with the credits that I might gain from the drama club, I could have just enough to graduate!
Dali had skipped quite a number of classes too, so we both swallowed our pride and went to Zhang Yan to beg her to let us join the drama club. She was delighted and agreed immediately. She even appointed us as board members straight away.
“You can just give us some fake tasks,” I suggested. “We’re only here for the credits anyway.”
“Yeah,” echoed Dali. “Maybe we could be the mascots or something.”
“That’s absolutely out of the question!” replied Zhang Yan. “I take pride in my role as the club president. You’re members of my club, so you must obey the club rules. You must be present whenever there’s a club activity!”
“Oh, come on!” I pleaded. “I can’t act, nor can I write screenplays! I’ll just be in the way here!”
“That’s not true!” Zhang Yan interjected. “I often brag about you being a great detective to the other club members. If you could be here and tell your own stories yourself, everyone would be so excited and our club activities would be that much more fun and livelier!”
“Goddammit! Could you please not reveal too many details about the murder case to everyone, madam president? Most of it is still considered confidential!”
Zhang Yan snorted, “You never told me any of the juicy details anyway. Besides, I’m only doing it because I want everyone to know that we have such a talented detective in our college!”
“Now I know why so many pretty girls have been asking me about you these past few days!” remarked Dali.
I was so embarrassed I wish I were dead. I reluctantly promised Zhang Yan to come here whenever there was a club activity, but as a condition, she was not allowed to spread stories about me ever again.
“Okay, okay,” she replied. “Mum’s the word. Since you’ll be here anyway, you can tell everyone about your thrilling career yourself!”
I would rather die!
I was careless twice in the haunted mansion case. It was all due to my lack of experience. To make up for this shortcoming, I decided to use my spare time to read past criminal files from the Public Security Department. Xiaotao had agreed to procure permission for me to read them. These files were confidential, so I was only allowed to read them in the archive room in the police station. Xiaotao was very supportive of my decision, but she warned that these files wouldn’t make for an exciting read due to the dry language used in writing them.
In truth, once I started to read them, I couldn’t stop at all. I was more engrossed in them than I would’ve been reading most thriller novels. On the first day alone, I finished reading half of the files on a shelf. Even Xiaotao was shocked, and she asked me if I should consider working here in the archive room.
And that was how I spent every day for a few weeks—running from my college to the police station to read criminal files and only go back when I needed to sleep. In that period of time, I ended up reading about a thousand case files.
Apart from that, I also managed to find a mistake in one of the cases when I looked through the files and brought a criminal who had been at large for a whole year finally to justice!
On the surface, it was a seemingly ordinary case of a car accident that led to the death of one of the victims. The accident involved a married couple. The husband had survived, but the wife perished. As a result, the husband received a huge amount of life insurance money.
The case was investigated as a possible murder case in the beginning, which was why it was kept in this archive. However, the evidence the investigating officers found led them to conclude that it was just a simple car accident with no foul play involved.
This was how the incident transpired: one night, about a year ago, a married couple was driving out of a parking lot when the brakes suddenly failed. The husband tried to control the car as best he could, but it hit a roadblock at a high speed and the whole car rolled over. A piece of glass from the windshield pierced the wife’s neck, killing her. The husband suffered multiple fractures and had to spend several months in the hospital to recuperate.
I read the case over and over again and finally took it to Xiaotao.
“There are anomalies in this case!” I stated.
She glanced over the case file and replied, “I remember this case. It happened last year. Captain Zhang led the investigation team and they found that the evidence pointed towards a normal accident.”
“No,” I argued. “Read the case file carefully! There are two suspicious anomalies here!”