Read Novel Full Chapter 165 : Three Different Page Eights
Chapter 165 : Three Different Page Eights
"His exact words were that a few items had been moved to different places." Shen Zhixia slid the paper from the left slot into the center of the long table.
He Xiufen didn't pick it up. She took off her reading glasses and tapped the earpiece against the table corner twice. "Who wrote this?"
"I copied it. Didn't change a word."
"Then your copy doesn't count as paper." She hooked the glasses over her collar. "Words come out of his mouth, land on your paper, and become your memory. What you want is for them to land in someone else's hands."
Shen Zhixia had heard that line before. She kept the page anyway—six lines on the front: four lines of timestamps, one receipt serial number, one court date. On that copied Receipt Register page, next to the circle marking "Page-Number Correspondence," was a single character she'd added late on the night of March 5th: "Swap." A horizontal line below it, and below that, three characters: "Who went upstairs?"
"Swapped places." He Xiufen muttered it twice, then suddenly pulled open a drawer, took out a pair of chopsticks, and laid them down one at a time on the table. "Things changed places, and words changed phrasings—those are two different things."
"How do you tell them apart?"
"Look at whether the place has a name on it." The chopstick tapped out three imaginary slots, one at a time. "The first-floor window has a name. Ding Yuan's notebook has one. Does the hand upstairs have a name? Does the cabinet have a name? Does the Reference Slot have a name? Whichever slot is empty—that's the one you need to ask about."
Shen Zhixia jotted three items along the edge of the paper: the hand, the cabinet, the Reference Slot.
"Line up the dates too." He Xiufen said. "On the 19th he reported five characters at the window. On the 27th the Case Filing Number was added. On March 3rd the court's letter arrived, and the cabinet was opened once. Which day, which hour, which slot was touched—and was anyone else standing there when it happened—you've now got space for two pens."
"Ningchuan's side promised their opinion before the 17th."
"What's due before the 17th is an opinion." He Xiufen put the chopsticks back in the drawer. "The day that opinion comes out, you need to have something in your hands. Not 'a good argument.'"
"What kind of something?"
"Page numbers. Two sets of them." He Xiufen said. "The set on file—thirty-four pages—you've already got: the sealing inventory, the photocopies, the index you verified page by page. The set he sent over—how many pages, which page follows which, what's missing in between, what was added—go through it line by line and lay it all out on a single sheet."
"That set is sitting in Qiushi's Reference Slot right now."
"Then let it walk out of that cabinet once." He Xiufen stood and pushed her chair back under the table. "Things sitting in someone else's cabinet only come back two ways. I've said this before."
"Either the court retrieves it, or I go myself."
"Do both." He Xiufen put her glasses back on and looked at her over the rims. "When you're done, add the third column."
"What's the third column?"
"Wait for his opinion to come down, then add the page numbers his opinion cites." She said. "Once all three columns line up, you won't have to say a word."
The phone rang. It was Tang Guo.
"The three videos are cut and scheduled for the 5th." The wind was loud on her end, like she was walking and filming on the street. "Good to release?"
"Release them." Shen Zhixia said. "Procedure only. How the random draw works, how a hearing is conducted, what a Transfer Letter is, how materials pass from whose hands to whose hands. No judgment calls on who's right or wrong. No pointing at individuals. No filming the child."
"Then I'll film a notebook."
"Don't film the notebook. Film the hands."
Tang Guo laughed, then stopped herself. "Your voice sounds different from last week."
"What's different about it?"
"Like someone wound your clock faster." She said. "Alright, editing today."
After hanging up, Shen Zhixia went downstairs. The ground floor was a noodle shop, and it was just past eleven. The smell of scallion oil drifted from the back kitchen out to the doorway. Sitting on the small stool by the door was an old man in a blue cloth work uniform, a bowl of noodles half-finished in front of him—Old Wei from Hengzheng's mailroom.
"Lawyer Shen." Old Wei pointed his chopsticks toward the ceiling. "Lawyer Lu came by yesterday afternoon."
Her hand paused at the edge of her pocket. "To submit materials?"
"To drop things off. Two kraft paper envelopes. One thick, one thin. One for the director, one for HR." Old Wei said. "He stood in front of the mailroom for a bit. Didn't sit down."
"What did he say?"
"He asked how much a bowl of noodles costs." Old Wei chuckled. "I said twelve. He said last time it was eleven."
"Last time was before Chinese New Year."
"He remembered it clearly." Old Wei pushed his bowl aside. "The way his hands handled those envelopes was the same as the way my hands wrap packages—rubber band, two loops."
Shen Zhixia didn't answer. The kitchen called out that the noodles were ready, and Old Wei called back, carrying his bowl to a table inside.
At three that afternoon, the court clerk called: Ningchuan Qiushi's reply letter to the court's correspondence had arrived. She could come in tomorrow morning to review it.
[Thud. Heard words have a due date. Words on paper don't expire.]
March 7th, nine in the morning, the third-floor case file reading room at the courthouse. She set her hard-shell folder on the corner of the table, two pens in her pocket exactly as He Xiufen had instructed.
The reply letter was two pages, with three pages of attached copies behind it.
The first page was the main text. She read line by line—
"1. This office received two items of material from Chengbei Hospital at 16:20 on February 18 and 9:40 on February 19 respectively, neither accompanied by a Transfer Letter. Under this office's case intake regulations, materials without a Transfer Letter shall not be accepted into the case file; the two items were not incorporated into the appraisal materials of this case."
"2. The three-page 'Explanatory Note on Versions of Appraisal Materials' submitted on February 19 was passed by first-floor staff of this office to the Medical Malpractice Appraisal Office for review. After review, during the March 3 inventory of cabinet materials, it was returned to the Reference Slot and was not incorporated into the appraisal materials of this case."
"3. The Case Filing Number for this case was back-filled on February 27."
"4. The above reference materials remain in this office and may be retrieved by the court in accordance with law."
She stopped at the phrase "passed to... for review."
Just then the clerk in the hallway said something about "this letter still needs another copy made," and that one character rose up out of the middle of the sentence, stood there for a second, then fell back. She pressed at her left ear and uncapped both pens.
The hand downstairs—Ding Yuan's notebook recorded the date, the hour, which hospital sent it. The hand upstairs didn't even have a date—it said "first-floor staff," no surname; it said "Medical Malpractice Appraisal Office," no person named. And the line about the March 3 cabinet inventory only said "this office returned the material to the Reference Slot during the cabinet inventory." Who ordered the inventory? Still unnamed.
The first page of the attached copies was the "Explanatory Note on Versions of Appraisal Materials." Four lines of text, with the red seal of the Medical Affairs Office stamped below the last line. She counted line by line: the person who spoke wasn't named. The person who wrote it wasn't named. The person who stamped it wasn't named. Only a seal.
The second and third pages were the page correspondence table. Two columns: left column "Original On File," right column "Appraisal Materials." Page matched to page. At the bottom of the table were three small-print notes:
"Page 8: Original page damaged, writing illegible. Incorporated using reorganized same-sequence page.
Pages 12 and 13: Order adjusted.
After page 34, one page of attached material, unnumbered."
In the upper right corner of the first page were four faint pencil characters: "Reference 19."
She copied every detail from the three attached pages into her notebook, then went to the window and submitted a half-page request: permission to photocopy the reply letter and its attachments for the court record, with a Verification Seal stamped on the copies. The clerk said the photocopy request needed a stated purpose, so she added the six characters "for cross-examination in this case," then casually asked where the originals were.
"What came with the letter are already copies." The clerk said, stamping as she spoke. "The originals are in their cabinet. If you want those, the court has to send a letter."
The seal landed on the corner of each page, rectangular, with a signature below and a date stamped on top.
Leaving the reading room, Song Qiming was waiting in the hallway. He was holding his own photocopy, shirt collar buttoned to the top as usual.
"'Reviewed.'" He said those two characters first. "I think those are the two characters that matter."
"Then are you going to include them?"
"I include what's in the record." He took half a step forward. "Those two characters are in the reply letter, so I'll include them. What's not in the record, I won't add."
"The record doesn't name the hand."
"It doesn't." He glanced at the papers in her hand. "Neither do you."
"I will."
"Then show me when you do." He said, and walked off. His leather shoes hit the floor with a flat, even sound.
On the morning of March 8th, she walked past the ground floor and heard three separate people use words related to "swap." Not a single one jumped out. That word had expired. She found herself thinking of He Xiufen's words instead—heard words expire. Words on paper don't.
All day on March 9th, she stood in front of the white wall upstairs. Three large sheets of paper taped together into one long strip, three columns running left to right. The left column was the on-file sealed original set—thirty-four pages of sequence and page names. Which page held which record, which page number had been scraped, which page had suspiciously white paper and uneven cut edges—she had verified all of it page by page back in January, in her own handwriting. The middle column was the correspondence table. The right column was empty.
She worked through page by page: the first seven pages matched. Page eight diverged—the on-file page eight had scrape marks, recorded on the sealing inventory as "Erasure Marks." The correspondence table said this page had been incorporated using the reorganized same-sequence page. Pages twelve and thirteen: order swapped. After page thirty-four: the reorganized version had one extra page.
Three discrepancies. She drew a circle on the page-eight row and wrote beside it: Scraped.
[Thud. The three discrepancies you count must all be able to land in someone else's hands.]
At noon Peng Weidong called, his voice louder than usual. "Lawyer Shen, Nianman's out of the incubator. The doctors say three jin, eight liang."
"He can come home?"
"Two more days for observation." He paused. "Any news on that side?"
"Still waiting on an opinion." She said. "I'll let you know when it comes."
"No rush." He hung up.
He Xiufen came up in the afternoon and stood before the wall for a long time. She didn't wear her reading glasses, stepping back half a pace to view the three columns.
"Three discrepancies." She said. "One broken, one moved, one added. Three different methods of tampering. One person can't do all of it alone—someone has to hand it over, someone has to receive it."
"Qiushi says those two items weren't incorporated into the materials."
"Not into the materials. Into the Reference Slot." He Xiufen put her glasses on and pointed at the corner of the copied page. "Those four characters you copied back yourself are bigger than the main text."
On the evening of March 10th, Tang Guo's video went live, titled "One Line in a Notebook." She didn't name the case. She talked about how the random draw worked, how a hearing was conducted, what a Transfer Letter was, how materials passed from whose hands to whose hands. Ma Jianjun shared the link in the Jiangzhou Courier Mutual Aid Group. Someone below asked, "How does something without a Transfer Letter end up on someone else's desk?" Tang Guo sent a screenshot asking whether to pin the comment.
"Don't pin it." Shen Zhixia replied. "Let it sit there on its own."
On the afternoon of March 11th, a court representative delivered a Judicial Appraisal Opinion. A photocopy, one for each party. She flipped to the footer first to check the date—March 11th. The promise was before the 17th. Six days early.
She took the opinion to the wall and read from the first page. When she reached the conclusion paragraph, her hand stopped:
"...The appraised party, Chengbei Hospital, exhibited irregularities in the writing and management of medical records. The degree of causal relationship between these irregularities and the death of Chen Xiaoman is assessed as minor."
Three pages further on, one sentence stopped her, and she pressed her nail into the paper:
"Upon review of page 8 of the medical records, said page is continuous and shows no evidence of alteration or supplementation."
In the left column on the wall, page eight read: "Erasure Marks." In the middle column, page eight read: "Incorporated using reorganized same-sequence page." This sentence in the opinion—this was the third page eight.
[Thud. When someone reads a document, watch which page numbers they cite.]
She copied that sentence into the last row of the right column, then added two characters beside the page-eight row: "Three versions."
He Xiufen came through the door, glanced at the wall clock, then at the opinion in her hands.
"Six days early." He Xiufen said. "It's not that he's in a hurry. Someone told him to move fast."
"The page he cites isn't the on-file page eight."
"You know that. He can also say he didn't know." He Xiufen took the opinion, flipped through two pages, and handed it back. "You need to make him read it out loud himself."
Shen Zhixia opened the hard-shell folder and pulled out a blank interview sheet. Across the top she wrote:
"Application to summon the Forensic Appraiser to appear in court. Grounds: the page he cites is not the page on file."
"Will this work?"
"It'll work." He Xiufen said. "Whose paper he's reading from—let him say it himself."