Read Novel Full Chapter 293: The Third Page
Chapter 293: The Third Page
"His nose is still crooked."
Qin Hao's mother pushed a film slide to the center of the table, two fingers pinning it down. It was black and white, the corners curled, as if it had been handled over and over.
"At night when he sleeps, one side won't clear. The doctor says it might still grow back, but how it turns out, nobody can say."
November 19, 10:00 a.m. The listening room at the far east end of the first floor of the District Procuratorate. The window faced north, two streaks of uncleaned water stains on the glass. On the table sat a voice recorder and an old printer, two blank sheets of paper lying on top of it.
Zhou Yu pushed the film slide back toward her. "I have a copy here. The reason you've been asked in today is to go over the evening of September 19, sentence by sentence, and get it into the record."
"I've already said it how many times."
"Say it to me."
The clerk bit the cap off her pen.
Qin Hao sat to her left, the collar of his school uniform visible under his jacket. The mark across the bridge of his nose was hard to see under the light; only when he turned his head could you tell it wasn't quite straight. Both hands rested on his knees. He stared at the tabletop the whole time.
"On the evening of September 19, what were you doing at the school's back gate?" Zhou Yu asked.
"I went to talk to Xu Qing."
"You had your phone in your hand."
"... Yes."
"Filming what?"
"Nothing."
"Not a single second of footage?"
"No." Qin Hao said. "I just... pulled at him a little."
Zhou Yu's pencil paused over the paper, then continued. "I'll write it exactly as you said: 'I just pulled at him a little.' Anything else."
"He punched me in the nose."
"That goes in too." Zhou Yu said. "I'm writing down what you said, word for word. One more question: did you ever kick him."
"No."
"No. Noted."
Qin Hao's mother's hand stretched across the table. "That's not what he's saying. My son was the one who got hit. Shen Zhi'an pushed him first, and Haohao stepped back two paces. After he broke free, he turned and punched our Haohao in the face. This wasn't two kids fighting. This was retaliation. Do you understand what retaliation means?"
Zhou Yu didn't look up. He finished writing, then raised his head. "On August 31, at the stairway on the east end of the third floor, you told someone to say something. What was it?"
"... I forgot."
"'I forgot' goes in too." Zhou Yu said.
Lawyer Zhao had been listening from the side. Now he set his briefcase on his lap and pulled out two sheets of paper. The paper was new, edges cut clean. He slid them to the middle of the table and pressed the corners flat with his index finger.
"Handling Prosecutor. Today, representing the victim's side, I'm submitting two pages of written opinion and saying three things." He said. "First: this case is not justifiable defense. The moment he let go, the infringement ended. Turning around and throwing a punch after letting go is retaliation after the fact, not stopping an infringement. Second: the injury is to the face. Both sides of the nasal bone plus one side of the frontal process. Minor injury, second grade. The appraisal opinion is in the file. This is not 'a little shove between kids.' Third: it's on a separate page."
From beneath the two sheets he drew out a third page. The paper was thinner than the other two, but the text was packed tighter.
"One page: Application for Recusal. Requesting that Handling Prosecutor Zhou Yu recuse himself."
Zhou Yu reached out and took it. He read from top to bottom. He saw the line about being "a university alumnus of Shen Zhi'an's older sister, Shen Zhixia, the legal guardian in this case." He saw the line about "August 31, more than ten days before the incident, Shen Zhixia sent a message to the Handling Prosecutor concerning this case, and the Handling Prosecutor replied with four words." He saw the signature block at the bottom: "Zhao, Jiangzhou Jiahong Law Firm." He finished reading and set the page to his left, pressing it flat with his palm.
"I'll accept this page." He said. "As per procedure, it goes to the Chief Procurator for a decision today. Once decided, you'll be notified in writing. Until the decision is made, the case proceeds as normal. Anything else you need to submit, it comes here."
Lawyer Zhao looked at him. "You're not going to ask a question."
"Ask what."
"Ask us on what grounds."
"The grounds are written on the paper." Zhou Yu said. "I report it according to procedure."
At 10:50, one page of the record was printed. Qin Hao's mother signed under the column for "Victim and Legal Guardian's Statement," signing one line too low. The clerk pointed it out, and she traced over it again. She didn't apologize. She just said, "You should've said sooner," and set the pen down on the table.
A man sat on the bench in the hallway. Dark gray shirt, buttons done up to the top one, a black leather bag on his knees. When he saw Lawyer Zhao come out, he stood and asked only one thing: "Submitted?"
"Submitted."
"The third page."
"The third page too."
Chen Maolin nodded and took the red copper ink pad case from his bag, unscrewed it for a look, then screwed it back. "What did he say."
"He said, according to procedure."
"Then let it be according to procedure." He put the ink pad back in his bag. "That's the truth."
At 6:40 in the evening, the exhaust fan on the first floor of the noodle house was still running, the smell of scallion oil wafting over from the stove in waves. Shen Zhi'an sat at the small table by the wall eating noodles, lifting his chopsticks high, a layer of red oil floating on the broth.
Shen Zhixia came down from upstairs, set a stack of filed papers on the counter, and sat across from him, peeling a head of garlic.
Her phone rang just as she reached the third clove.
"Lawyer Shen."
"Speaking."
"This morning at ten, I accompanied Qin Hao's mother to the District Procuratorate. We said everything we needed to say. Submitted three pages."
"Submitting pages isn't news." She said.
"The first two are opinions." Chen Maolin's end was quiet, so quiet you could hear him turning paper. "The third page concerns Prosecutor Zhou. And it concerns you."
She set the garlic down.
"Those two lines you sent him on August 31, and the four words he replied—they're all written into the grounds. 'Turn it over to the school first.'" He said. "This time, it's not about money. In your brother's case, starting today, the person handling it has to explain himself first."
The call ended.
She flipped her phone face-down on the table.
He Xiufen asked from two tables away: "Who was that."
"Chen Maolin."
"What did he say."
"He said they submitted three pages this morning. The first two are opinions. The third is a recusal application. The grounds are that Zhou Yu and I were classmates in university, and on August 31 I sent him a message and he replied with four words." She recited it line by line, only realizing after she'd finished that she'd spoken too slowly.
He Xiufen draped the rag over the edge of the water bucket. "He picked this exact hour on purpose. He timed it so your brother would be sitting there eating noodles."
Shen Zhi'an looked up. "Who has to recuse?"
"Eat." He Xiufen said.
"Did I say something wrong." He set down his chopsticks.
"You didn't say anything wrong." Shen Zhixia pushed the bowl closer to him. "Finish."
Someone came down the stairs—Lu Jibai, a case file under his arm. He stopped at the table and glanced at the phone lying face-down.
"Chen Maolin called." She said. "Submitted a recusal application. It names me."
"It names you and him." He set the file on a chair and sat down. "What grounds are they using."
"Alumni, and those four words."
"On August 31, you sent him: 'Someone is cornered in the hallway being filmed. His name is Qin Hao, from Zhi'an's school.'" He said it evenly. "What you sent wasn't a single word of legal representation for him."
"But I wrote his name."
"The name is in their application because they wrote it there." Lu Jibai said. "A recusal is aimed at the case handler. The case handler only has to answer one question: has he had any dealings with this family. He has. Anyone who knows the rules would have included it in his own report on the first day—whether he wrote it or not, we can't see."
He Xiufen brought over a glass of plain water and set it at the corner of the table. "Tomorrow you do nothing. Don't go to the Procuratorate, don't ask, don't call. He reports it; the Chief Procurator rejects it. If you go running over to that building now, those pages become real."
Shen Zhixia stood and walked to the sink to wash her hands. The water ran; both hands stayed under it.
"It's not a replacement I'm afraid of." She said.
"I know."
"I'm afraid that once this name is put in, for the rest of his life there'll be a line following him: 'His sister is that lawyer.'"
Lu Jibai didn't answer right away. He turned the cover of the file over, then back, before speaking. "From the night of September 19, when you signed the legal guardian line at the police station, you've been in these pages. They picked you because they could."
She turned off the water and dried her hands.
"What if he really does get replaced."
"Replaced, these pages stay these pages." He said. "The fourteenth second stays the fourteenth second. Swap in someone new, they'll have to count from page one to the twentieth second, and when they get there, what they'll see is the same: the grabbing first, the kicking."
[Thud. Her name had entered someone else's column.]
At nine that night, he was the only one left in the fourth-floor office.
Zhou Yu arranged the things on his desk into four stacks. On the left: the three pages of interview records from his questioning of Shen Zhi'an on the 18th. In the middle: an electronic data examination report, the disc in a clear sleeve. On the right: Wei Changlin's three pages of investigation records and a twelve-second copy. On top: Qin Hao's diagnosis and a photocopy of the emergency room medical record. The recusal application sat at his left hand, beneath it the draft of the one-page report he'd written on the 15th.
He looked at the punch first. The report was clear: filmed September 19 at 18:45. One recovered video, twenty-six seconds in length. He'd played it on his computer several times and noted it down second by second on a sheet of paper: at fourteen seconds, the blue work uniform grabs from behind, lifting him up, his shoes leaving the ground; at seventeen seconds, Qin Hao raises his right foot and kicks; at nineteen seconds, he breaks free; at twenty seconds, one punch, landing on the side of the nose; at twenty-four seconds, he steps back in front of Xu Qing, both arms hanging loose, no further movement.
He turned to page five of the indictment opinion: "Due to a dispute between classmates, got into an altercation with Qin Hao and swung a punch at Qin Hao's face." He flipped through all six pages from start to finish. "Grabbed from behind," "lifted up," "feet off the ground," "kicked"—not one of them appeared anywhere. The defense counsel's three pages in the file pointed exactly at this, and today he'd verified it himself.
On a blank sheet of paper he drew three horizontal lines.
Line one: this morning, Qin Hao said, "I just pulled at him a little," and also said, "I didn't kick." In the twenty-six-second video, the kick at second seventeen, right foot, landing near the stomach. On the 18th, Zhi'an had told the interrogation room, "right side of the stomach."
Line two: Qin Hao's mother said, "Shen Zhi'an pushed him first." In the file, Xu Qing's statement reads, "He grabbed him from behind and lifted him up." Du Qiang's statement contains the two words "I kicked." First grabbed, then kicked, then broke free. The twenty-six-second video follows the same order.
Line three: on the photocopy of the emergency room medical record, under "Chief Complaint," it says "injured by another person." Under "Medical History," it says "fell accidentally." Same pen, two lines apart. These two lines appear on a photocopy; the original page is not in the file, and the person who wrote those two lines is not in the file either.
Beneath the three lines he wrote: Return for supplementary investigation. One page, three items.
1. Retrieve a reproduced copy of the original page of Municipal No. 2 Hospital's September 19 emergency department registration log, stamped with the hospital seal; interview the on-duty triage staff.
2. Retrieve the WeChat transfer records between Qin Hao and Du Qiang from September 19.
3. Lawfully seize Qin Hao's phone.
Under item two he added half a line: Du Qiang's statement says "he gave me two hundred yuan, transferred over WeChat." No transfer record exists in the file. Under item three he added another half line: On September 29, the Qin family said "it broke, we threw it away." No seizure record exists in the file.
When he finished, he took out another page and wrote the transmittal statement for the recusal application: received at 10:00 on the 19th; the grounds partially overlap with the facts stated in my report of the 15th; reported immediately upon receipt; no action taken.
He placed this page together with the recusal application and set them on top of the case file cover.
Then he pulled out the one-page outline with the three items and read it through again from the top. When he reached the third line, he stopped.
From September 29 to today: fifty-one days. A phone. They said it broke, they threw it away. Who broke it, who threw it, where it was thrown—not one word in the file.
He pressed the page back down on top of the indictment opinion and switched off the desk lamp. In the dark, one corner of the paper still tilted up slightly.