Ma Fuqing jerked his head up as though possessed. Only after a long while did he say, "So you already knew."
Hu Xing also looked at Qingmu in surprise.
Qingmu asked, "Who was that woman?"
Seeing that Ma Fuqing still did not want to talk, he said, "We're all locked up in here. We don't even know whether we'll get out alive. What is there left to hide? If we get out, you won't be able to cover this up anyway. If we don't, can't you at least let us die knowing the truth?"
Ma Fuqing sighed and asked, "Got a cigarette?"
Qingmu took out his cigarettes, gave Ma Fuqing one, and put one between his own lips. He lit Ma Fuqing's cigarette, then glanced at Hu Xing leaning against his shoulder and ultimately resisted lighting his own.
Ma Fuqing took two deep drags as it caught, then began coughing violently.
"Cough, cough... She was my wife... cough... cough..."
"Your wife?" Hu Xing exclaimed.
Ma Fuqing took several hard drags, as though he had made a momentous decision.
"My wife and I met while working away from home. We got our marriage certificate ages ago, but I didn't dare tell my mother. The year my brother went to college, I took advantage of my mother's good mood and held the wedding banquet. After my brother went missing, I searched everywhere for him. My wife looked after our shop in the city all by herself."
"After my brother disappeared, my mother kept saying her son was gone, her son was gone. I wanted to give her a grandson to cheer her up. But no matter how hard my wife and I tried, we couldn't have a baby. My mother kept finding fault with her daughter-in-law and telling me to divorce her and find someone else. I couldn't bear to back then. Thinking about it now, I'd have been better off divorcing her..."
Ma Fuqing held his cigarette in one hand and rubbed hard at his face and hair with the other, his eyes red.
"Later, we went to the hospital for tests and found out the problem was with me. When my mother heard, she nearly gave up all hope. She cried at my father's grave for three days, saying our family line was going to die out."
"Then my brother came back. He'd gone mad, but at least there was hope. My mother tried finding him a wife everywhere, but who would marry a mentally ill man with violent tendencies? I suggested surrogacy, but my mother wouldn't agree to in vitro fertilization. She said there'd be no telling whose child it was. So I had someone find a Vietnamese girl down south to be a surrogate. We agreed she'd get room and board, then take two hundred thousand and leave after giving birth. But she couldn't stand it after spending just one night with my brother. She slipped away without even taking the money."
"My mother said outsiders couldn't be trusted, that we could only rely on our own. Since I was the older brother and couldn't have children, why not let my younger brother help me have one? It would still be our family's flesh and blood."
"I refused at first, but my mother knelt before me. She cried and promised she'd handle everything properly and wouldn't let my wife find out. Seeing her kneel left me so stunned that I agreed to everything."
"Afterward, I thought, it was only letting my brother sleep with her once. As long as my wife didn't know at the time, she'd never know afterward either. Once she was pregnant, we could say traditional Chinese medicine had cured me."
"So I called my wife home and left it to my mother. I don't know what method my mother used, but she managed to knock my wife unconscious every time and send her into my brother's room. My wife was covered in bruises those days. I couldn't bear it, so I told my mother that giving her too much of the drug would cause problems with the baby. My mother said we'd stop for a while, and told me to buy her more nutritional supplements to build her strength back up. My wife rested at home. She even told me my mother had changed and wasn't as hostile toward her as before."
"I was careful all the time, afraid something might go wrong, but in the end it still did. My brother had gotten a taste for it and howled in his cage every day. Only my mother could soothe her. That day, my mother went out. My wife heard my brother crying out and thought he was hungry, so she took a bowl of rice down to him... and then... then..."
As Ma Fuqing spoke, he began sobbing, his face filled with endless anguish, remorse, and sorrow...
"By the time we got there, my brother had already strangled my wife to death."
Hu Xing was furious as she listened. She had never imagined there could still be people so ignorant in modern society, letting his own wife sleep with his brother for the sake of supposedly carrying on the family line and being a dutiful son to his mother. And the brother was mentally ill, no less.
To her, Ma Fuqing and his mother were a hundred times more detestable than his brother. They deserved death by a thousand cuts.
"Why did you dismember her?" Qingmu asked.
Ma Fuqing stopped crying. The cigarette in his hand had burned down to the filter, but he still took one last hard drag. The smell of burning foam filled the air.
"My brother killed her, but my mother counted as an accomplice too. I couldn't let my mother go to prison. I knew there was an abandoned fishpond over in Lu County. It used to be a mining pit, and hardly anyone went there. I wanted to sink the body there. My mother said that if we buried the head beneath the scholar tree, her ghost wouldn't come haunting us. I thought that would be good too. Even if someone found the body, they wouldn't be able to tell who it was. My wife and I had always worked away from home and rarely came back. Her household registration wasn't here either. They probably wouldn't trace it to her."
"That's not right!" Hu Xing suddenly remembered something. "The semen stains on the body weren't your brother's. How do you explain that?"
Ma Fuqing said, "I picked up a random used condom from a rubbish heap in Old Screen Wall Alley in Lu County and brought it back..."
Old Screen Wall Alley was a notorious red-light district not just in Lu County, but throughout Wuzhong. Repeated crackdowns over the years had never managed to clean it up. Hu Xing did not think Yang Baoguo had been all that wronged. This could count as a kind of retribution.
By this point, almost everything about the case had come to light, yet an inexplicable sadness suddenly rose in Hu Xing's heart.
The victim was Ma Fuqing's wife, and the killer was Ma Fuqing's brother. However horribly the victim had died, a mentally ill person would not be sentenced, while Ma Fuqing and his mother would, at most, be guilty of covering up a crime. Judges usually showed leniency in family tragedies like this. Murder would become manslaughter, the mentally ill would bear no criminal responsibility, and then there might well be no grounds for the cover-up charge either.
A deathly oppressive silence settled over the sealed room.
Time ticked by, and waves of putrid stench washed over them, nearly making Hu Xing vomit several times.
Although the basement was much cooler than aboveground, in this season, the stifling heat still became hard to bear after a while. Hu Xing was drenched in sweat, her thin blouse soaked and clammy.
She had been leaning against Qingmu all this time. Only now did she realize he was not sweating at all. No wonder he could parade around in a trench coat in such hot weather.
"I seriously doubt your body's built like a human's. Doesn't the heat bother you at all?" Hu Xing said.
Qingmu said, "You think not feeling the heat is a good thing? You need to sweat to flush out toxins. If you don't believe me, stand up and see whether you feel better."
Hu Xing got up from where she had been leaning against Qingmu and found that her dizziness had eased considerably.
Qingmu looked at her sweat-soaked trousers clinging tightly to her long, slender legs, tilted his head, and said, "Try taking a couple of steps."
Hu Xing took two steps and felt that she was more or less fine.
Qingmu said again, "Take another couple of steps."
Hu Xing took another two steps.
"Ah, that's it. Take a couple of steps, take a couple of steps. Nothing wrong with you? Take a couple of steps..."
Hu Xing kicked Qingmu. "Are you trying to sell me crutches?"
Qingmu said, "Who else would I con if not someone like you?"
Hu Xing burst out laughing. "Someone like me?" Then she suddenly felt something was wrong and raised a hand as if to hit Qingmu. "How dare you tease me!"
Just then, a gunshot rang out from above with a bang.