The Death Tattoo

Ma Dahua was murdered in the classroom of Class 4, Grade 4, in a manner identical to that of Gu Qing's earlier hanging in the same room.

That night the police came in force, cordoning off the school. Lao Qiao was taken home by relatives. Uncle Du, who had come from the countryside and had no one in this city, spent the whole night sitting on the front steps. Police with notebooks and pens came by at intervals to take his statement, but the questions were always the same few repeated in different orders.

By morning, Principal Chen Daipeng and several teachers had arrived, but no one thought to check on the old gatekeeper who had sat through the night in temperatures well below freezing. The principal and the teachers were busy managing the parents — hundreds of them had gathered outside the school gate, mostly from the fourth grade, whose children were approaching the high school entrance exam. These parents were demanding the school be unsealed and classes resumed as quickly as possible. To them, this murder investigation mattered far less than their children's exam results. But the principal was helpless; when he asked the police at the scene when they could reopen, all they would say was that they were waiting for orders from above.

It was past ten in the morning when the "above" finally arrived. Uncle Du had been dozing against the wall in a half-sleep when the heavy slam of a car door jolted him awake. A police officer in a leather jacket stepped out. He looked to be in his mid-forties — small eyes, wide mouth, eyebrows that arched high on the outer ends and dipped in the middle, connected by two deep nasolabial folds to form the shape of a large X across his face. He was clearly different from the note-taking officers who had been asking questions: he carried no notebook, asked questions directly, and let an assistant beside him do all the recording. The officer with the X on his face was named Wu Xian — detective chief at the district bureau, and leader of the task force assigned to the Ma Dahua case.

Wu Xian first went into the building to examine the scene, then came out to interview a few teachers. The prime suspect was Chang Di, who had left the classroom before the blackout and had time to set up the wreaths and portraits. But the algebra teacher Suo Xin could confirm that Chang Di had attended her after-school tutoring session that evening and didn't leave until ten, while the victim's estimated time of death was nine o'clock.

At nine in the evening, the only person at the school was the gatekeeper, Uncle Du. Wu Xian pulled up a folding chair, sat down facing him, and offered him a cigarette. He lit one for himself. "Between eight-thirty and nine last night, did you see the victim, Ma Dahua?"

Uncle Du drew on the cigarette, his lips blue and trembling from the cold. "No… no, I didn't. That was right when I wasn't at the gatehouse."

"Where were you?"

"Last night… around eight, the power went out. All the kids came rushing out. After most of them had gone… a girl with a mask came up to me. Said the lock on the boiler room was broken. Afterward I thought it was strange — why would a young girl, late at night, notice the boiler room lock was broken? But I didn't think about it much at the time — I was worried about equipment going missing — so I went right over to fix it. Took about… nearly an hour. Finished around nine, maybe past. Then I locked up the school and went to bed."

The timing worked out: when Uncle Du was off fixing the lock, that was the window when Ma Dahua was killed. And the one person who might have been a witness had conveniently been drawn away.

"If you saw the girl with the mask again, could you identify her?"

"Should be fine. When I shone the torch on her face, I noticed she had what looked like a tattoo on her neck."

"What was it?"

"A character. The character 亡 — death, or ending. There might have been more characters below it, but her collar covered them."

Wu Xian held his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, squinting toward the crowd of parents at the school gate, and told his assistant: "Tell them to calm down. Let their precious students come back for afternoon classes. Get Uncle Du to walk through every class and have a look. And on the tattoo — notify all the teachers. Get them to help look. We need to find the girl who told Uncle Du the boiler room lock was broken last night."

The teachers received the notice: find a female student with a tattoo reading "亡-something" on her neck. What could follow 亡? 亡命 — desperate? 亡灵 — ghost? 亡魂 — departed soul? Whatever the word, combined with the murder of Ma Dahua, every combination seemed to conjure something dark and chilling.

That afternoon, school resumed. Class 4, Grade 4's classroom was still sealed, and the students were temporarily relocated to the assembly hall. Not long into the first period, two police officers brought Uncle Du through each classroom to have a look. He was exhausted, but he pushed himself to peer at every student. Wu Xian, meanwhile, was reclined on the sofa in the principal's office, waiting. The result: Uncle Du found no one. He came into the principal's office dejected and empty-handed. The officer who had been with him during the search reported to Wu Xian: every class at No. 4 had been checked, including photos of absent students. The girl from the night before had not been found. The teachers confirmed they had never seen a female student with a tattoo on her neck.

Wu Xian frowned and looked at Uncle Du. "Was anyone else there who might have seen the girl you mentioned?"

Uncle Du shook his head. "The students were all rushing to leave. Nobody would've noticed."

"Think carefully — besides the tattoo, was there anything else distinctive about her?"

Uncle Du tried to remember. "Her accent — she didn't sound local, not from Tiecheng. She was wearing a mask, her face was slim, and her eyes… I felt like I'd seen them somewhere. Like she looked a bit like…"

He stopped mid-sentence. His body went rigid, his pupils contracting, his face draining of color — as if a thought had seized him that was too terrible to complete. Then, suddenly: "It can't be her — she's already been buried…"

He stopped again, breathing hard, saying nothing more.

Wu Xian held out a cigarette. "Who's buried? Who are you talking about?"

Uncle Du took the cigarette and smoked several long drags before the color slowly returned to him. "She probably just looks like her. When I was young, back in my village, I once attended a funeral at a neighboring village. The girl last night looked like the person being buried that day."

"You can still remember the face from that long ago?"

"I may not be able to, really. The one being buried — I never saw her alive anyway. I don't know why that just came to me. I just looked at those eyes and felt like they were the same person."

Wu Xian shook his head with resignation. "Well, thank you for your cooperation. You go rest." He stood, and with nothing to show for the day, he called off the search.

In truth, the police had overlooked a critical piece of evidence: a staff directory with several names enclosed in small boxes, sitting crumpled at the bottom of the biology office's wastepaper bin.