Read Novel Full Chapter 120 : A Folded Corner of Paper
Chapter 120 : A Folded Corner of Paper
He Xiufen folded the report into thirds before slipping it into the outermost layer of the file envelope.
"The bank column—I'll hand it in today," she said. "Even a zero needs a paper trail."
"The number came from my calculations."
"Then let them see who did the calculating." She fastened the flap. "You stay here and finish the supplementary schedule. You've got other things this afternoon."
The schedule lay spread across the long table, one hundred and five rows, the horizontal lines drawn one by one by Tang Guo with a ruler. As of yesterday, one cell still sat empty: a girl in Building 3 on Minsheng Road. Her phone was out of service. They'd gone to the address and asked around; the landlord said she'd moved out ages ago. Last month's letter had bounced back, now pinned under the corner of the desk.
At eleven, He Xiufen returned, set the file envelope on the table first, and pulled out two receipts.
"They took it," she said. "The receipt says 'Received, retained for record.' He wants me to come back Monday and merge the bank column with the Qingyuan Testing section onto a single page."
"Qingyuan Testing has nothing to do with this enforcement case."
"Doesn't matter—I'll write it anyway." She tucked the receipts into the file. "He has to read it twice before those four characters stick in his head."
She then fished a transfer slip from the bottom of the bag. "The Enforcement Bureau moved two sums this morning. One from the bank's side, the portion the judgment assigned to their scope of fault: 3.1 million, now in the special account. The other from Hongkun's ledger, the part with clear title—Zhou Yu got the paperwork in. 1.36 million."
"The bank released that money," she said, "because that line was written into the operative part of the judgment."
"One missing line in the judgment, and that money would still be sitting in their account today." He Xiufen looked at her. "That day at the window, when you laid out the three documents—you were laying out exactly that line."
She paused, pen in hand. "What about the Hongyi account?"
"4.2 million, still frozen, waiting on the criminal side." He Xiufen traced the figures on the desk calendar row by row. "With these two sums in, about seventy percent of the people on the schedule can sign. Saturday, copy out two lists—arrived and not arrived—and give them to Tang Guo for sorting."
The phone rang. Shi Lei. The Chengxi batch had arrived this morning. Jiang Bo was going door to door in the group chat, showing people the arrival text on their phones, reading it out word by word. Whoever's name he read, that person replied with a voice message. Shi Lei said he'd stopped reading—too much of it hurt his throat.
She noted it in the bottom-right corner of her notebook, just two lines: Chengxi funds arrived; Jiang Bo reading on their behalf.
At two in the afternoon, she sat at the desk checking figures. Her Justice Points had crept from the sixty-percent range to the seventy-percent range, then stalled.
[Thud. Seventy percent is still just a number. Thirty percent is still in someone else's hands.]
In the top-right cell of the schedule, she tapped a pencil dot beside it but didn't cross it out—the person hadn't come, the money was held in the special account, so the cell stayed open.
[Thud. One empty cell, and the ledger isn't balanced.]
At ten to four, she locked the drawer and headed downstairs. The sky was overcast. Plane tree leaves piled at the mouth of the alley, where the street sweeper pushed them into a line—push a stretch, stop and rest a stretch.
At the gate of the Qingyuan Testing family compound, Master Cui waited outside the guardroom, a ring of keys hanging from a blue cloth strap at his waist. His left hand, wrapped in an old cotton glove, was missing two fingertips. His right hand was bare, the knuckles blue from the cold.
"Brought the notebook?"
"Brought it."
"Follow me." He pulled the iron gate open halfway. "Sign in first. For 'purpose of visit'—think carefully before you write."
The duty log lay open on the guardroom windowsill, row after row of old handwriting pressing against one another. She held the pen and thought for a moment, then wrote four characters in the purpose column: Inventory of personal effects.
Master Cui glanced down at her wrist as she wrote and gave a single nod.
Third floor of the old building. The door at the end of the corridor had a new lock, the latch still carrying half a scrap of plastic film that hadn't been peeled off clean. Master Cui went up to the second floor first and came back with a young man in a white shirt tucked into his trousers—surname Tan, a ring of keys swinging from his hand.
"Lawyer Shen." Xiao Tan spoke first. "Looking is fine, photographing is not. Nothing from the ledger leaves this room."
"I'll take notes."
"Your notes are yours. I've got to make a record of my own."
The lock opened. The room smelled of old paper and rust. Three rows of steel shelving ran to the ceiling, the last row against the window. Cen Shouye's cabinet stood under the east wall, two sheet-metal doors, the lock on it the same one Xiao Tan had put on back in August.
Xiao Tan opened it. After the August inventory, the contents had been sealed and placed in temporary storage—the cabinet itself sat empty, but the drawers were all still there.
She crouched and pulled out the bottom drawer. Empty inside, lined with a yellowed newspaper, four corners marked with the impressions of objects that had once pressed down. She slid the drawer all the way out and turned it over. In the gap between the bottom panel and the cabinet wall, her fingertips touched something hard.
A corner of paper. The tear was rough, and along one edge there had been a round hole, now only half an arc remaining. The grid lines were blue, the paper thin enough to see light through. There was writing on it—the tear cut diagonally through the characters. In the half that remained, the last stroke was still visible: an upward hook, fine, pulled back sharply.
Her fingers, holding the paper, went still.
She'd seen it in August. The sampling record on the top of the third shelf—the surname in the sample receipt column, its final stroke had just that kind of upward flick. He Xiufen had traced three brushstroke patterns onto a transparency sheet, and behind closed doors would only commit to the word "similar." This stroke on this corner of paper followed the same path.
"Xiao Tan," she said. "I want to take this corner of paper with me."
Xiao Tan took it, held it up to the window light, flipped it over to study the back, and rubbed it twice between his fingers.
"It's not from any ledger," he said. "Everything in the ledgers is numbered. This corner has no number. But it's not yours either."
"It's Director Cen's. This cabinet was inventoried in August with the family's signature. I'm the custodian."
Xiao Tan didn't answer. He pulled out his phone, dialed, said three or four sentences, and hung up.
"The section chief says loose items can be logged, but nothing from the ledgers moves." He fished a small notebook from his trouser pocket and flipped it open. "Time, location, persons present—you speak, I write."
She dictated: November 26, 4:40 p.m., third-floor archive room, east wall metal cabinet, bottom drawer, beneath the bottom panel, one loose corner of paper, no number.
Xiao Tan wrote it down, turned the notebook around for her to check, then produced a blank envelope, placed the paper corner inside, and wrote the date and his name across the seal.
"You can take it. But what you've described, I need on record." He looked at her. "Tell the family yourself. If anything else turns up in this cabinet, they'll need to come in again—I want a fingerprint on file here."
"I'll call Cen Hong tomorrow and have her stop by."
Xiao Tan headed downstairs. Master Cui had been standing by the door the whole time without moving. He waited until the footsteps faded before speaking.
"This cabinet's lock—who locked it in August?"
"Xiao Tan did. The key's kept with the section."
"Then who slipped this corner in today?" he said. "That gap—you'd have to pull the drawer all the way out and insert it from the back. You can't just drop it in by hand."
She didn't answer. The smell of old paper in the room thickened for a moment.
"Someone came by last week too," Master Cui said, "asking when the things in this building would be cleared out. I said I didn't know and didn't open the gate."
"Was he asking about clearing the building, or about something specific inside it?"
"About the things," Master Cui said. "Clearing the building was just his way of continuing the conversation."
On the way down, she filled in her exit time in the duty log, box by box. Master Cui pulled a blue-covered register from the guardroom cabinet, opened it, and copied the visit in line by line: one loose corner of paper, one entry and exit, witness. The lines above were old; the most recent one read August 14. He finished, pressed the pen cap on tight, and looked at her.
"That notebook of yours—write it down yourself too," he said. "It only counts if it's recorded in three places."
[Thud. The paper can leave. The words need witnesses.]
Back above the noodle shop at 5:45. He Xiufen sat at the far end of the long table picking chives, pinching off the yellow leaves into a small pile at her hand.
She tipped the paper corner out of the envelope and laid it on the glass desktop. He Xiufen set down the chives, took the transparency from the drawer—the three brushstroke patterns traced in August, still pressed between two sheets of old newspaper.
She laid the transparency over it. He Xiufen shifted the paper corner twice, lining it up with the final stroke, and her hand stopped moving.
"Similar," she said after a moment.
"Similar, or is?"
"I won't write 'is.'" He Xiufen lifted the transparency and tucked it back into the newspaper. "I didn't write 'is' in August, and I'm not writing it today. If you're going to write anything, write 'same origin' and leave me a blank space after it."
She pulled out her notebook and flipped to the page headed "Why does he keep bringing up my father" and "That year—where was he." Below those lines she added: November 26, third floor of Qingyuan Testing, Cen Shouye's cabinet, beneath the bottom drawer, one loose corner of paper, half a character, final stroke hooks upward. She left a space after it. She didn't write the word.
"In the duty log I wrote 'inventory of personal effects,'" she said.
"You wrote the right thing," He Xiufen said. "Write 'viewing archives' and that corner of paper never leaves the building today."
She laid the new line beside the four lines from the previous page. On one side: the name she'd sat across from in the file reading room on the afternoon of September 30. On the other: half a character, wedged under a cabinet panel for nine years.
Last time, he'd said: wait until its name stands on the paper on its own.
The name had stood up. Only half of it.
She pressed the paper corner, envelope and all, flat under the glass, beside the two paper strips and the handwritten page, smoothing the edges.
"The Bar Association called today," He Xiufen said, settling back to her chives. "Vice Chairman Han is heading up a donation drive for a few legal aid offices in the city. Our office is on the list."
"Under what heading?"
"Didn't say." He Xiufen dropped a chive into the dish. "They did ask one thing on the phone—how many legal aid cases we've taken this year."
"What did you tell them?"
"I said I was still counting." She lifted her hand and let a yellow leaf fall from her fingers. "Money's money. But if the money doesn't say what it's for, I need to see clearly who's handing it over first."
"I've met him before," she said. "First week at Hengzheng, I carried a tray into the meeting room and served him water twice. On the day I was fired, he stopped me in the corridor and opened by saying I was Shen Qian's daughter. I asked him which side he'd stood on back then. He said he stood on the side of the law."
"Then you've met him," He Xiufen said. "When a man you've met comes bringing money, all the more reason to ask what it's for."
Past eight, the upstairs had gone quiet. She took out her phone. The last message was still the single "Okay" he'd replied yesterday. Below it, nothing. She typed a few characters, deleted them, retyped, and sent.
"I can wait for you to be willing to give the testimony you owe my father. But the hard drive—I'm opening it first."
The message went through. She set the phone face-down on the corner of the desk and didn't wait for a reply. She flipped to the desk calendar and added another mark after Thursday's block.
A gavel sounded once.
[Thud. Attachment—one page, missing.]
Still the same line, a shade darker than yesterday, as if someone's fingernail had pressed along it. After it, a long stretch still empty.
She switched off the desk lamp. Beneath the glass, the corner of paper lay crease-side up, half a character facing outward.