Read Novel Full Chapter 94 : The Same Hand
Chapter 94 : The Same Hand
On the morning of August 23rd, the downstairs stove lit up at six. Scallion oil hit the pan, and the smell climbed through the cracks in the stairwell, reaching the second floor before dissipating. Shen Zhixia sat at the long table, spreading out three photocopies, squaring them up, spreading them out again. She waited forty minutes.
When He Xiufen came upstairs, she was holding a strip of clear plastic.
"Where'd you get that?"
"Tore it off a pill box." She sat down, pressed the plastic over the approval record column, and traced it with a pencil. When she finished, she held it up against the window light, then put it back down and traced a second time. "Printed characters come out faint. Takes three passes to get it looking right."
After the third pass, only three features remained on the strip: the exact point where the hook of the radical broke downward, the downward slant of the middle horizontal stroke, and the upward flick of the final stroke.
She moved the strip over to the sampling record beside it. The middle column was printed with "Baixi Village," dated nine years ago; the bottom line had two handwritten characters, the first being "Shi."
Three features, checked one by one.
The first landed on the page and matched. The second slid over and matched. On the third, her hand paused. She nudged the strip half a millimeter left, then back, pressing it down over the flick.
"Come look." She handed over the magnifying glass.
Shen Zhixia leaned in. The lens had a small chip in it; she had to tilt her head to center the character. The flick on the approval column rose out of the last stroke of "Shi," upward, rightward, ending where the seal pressed against the edge, clean. She moved the strip to the sampling record page: same position, same angle, the tip ending just as cleanly, no dragging.
"I see it."
"What you see is the hand," He Xiufen said. "The person's behind it."
"Where's the person?"
"Starts with a surname."
"Yesterday you said you couldn't be sure."
"Yesterday I was talking about that piece of paper." He Xiufen pressed her palm flat on the table. "These eyes have read IOUs and contracts for thirty years. When something's written by the same pen, whether the hand was hurried or steady, each stroke tells it. I can say that much—but it doesn't leave this table."
She lifted the strip off the paper and listed two things she couldn't do: the test material needed to be the original; the comparison sample needed to be a sufficient quantity of that person's writing from somewhere else; and she needed a name first. The two pages on the table—one was a reproduced copy, the other a photocopy.
"So what can today's conclusion give us?"
"It tells us what's still missing." She set the magnifying glass down. "Nine years, a person's writing changes. The strength in the hand, the speed of the strokes—they all shift. This flick is still as high, the finish still as crisp. The characters have thinned, but the hand hasn't changed."
[Thud. Nine years later, still the same hand.]
"But one thing has to be put on the table first." She turned the magnifying glass sideways. "These two matching points only prove the same person wrote both characters. They don't prove who that person is. In the approval column he wrote only a surname; in the sample receipt column, the second character is scrawled into a single stroke. People surnamed Shi—this city has a book full of them. Maybe he signed for someone else; maybe there's another hand pressing down above his."
"Then what do we go after first?"
"The original. The bank holds it, and the bank is dragging its feet."
Shen Zhixia pulled over a blank sheet and wrote two columns from bottom to top.
The left column was money: Tang Guo's 24,000 yuan; the four characters "Youyu Apartments" on the loan contract; the ten characters "Jiangzhou Xinhe Trading Co., Ltd." on the payment transfer voucher; the fourteen-character account name on the last line of the asset inquiry statement; the bank's 128 self-inspected transactions. At the very top: one surname.
The right column had only three slots: Baixi Village. Qingyuan Testing. Sample receipt column. At the top: the same surname.
Across the two columns, she drew a horizontal line connecting the two "Shi"s.
He Xiufen leaned over and studied it for half a minute.
"Your two columns—one is money, one is dirt." Her finger rested on the connecting line. "The hand in the middle touched both."
She got up, walked to the stairwell, and made a call asking about handwriting examination rules: whether copies of test material were accepted; how many comparison samples were needed and of what type. The other end said a string of things; she answered "mm," "mm" twice, and came back to sit down.
"The original is the key," she said. "Without it, every character before it counts for nothing."
"Two legs, walking together," Shen Zhixia said. "The bank's original is in the application I already submitted; the stack of papers in the old building is still under the seal strip."
"Also, half a character is covered by a seal." He Xiufen pulled the red film from the hardcover notebook and tucked it back where it belonged. "Too many people named Shi. We need to know who comes after it."
"About Cen Hong—we don't tell her yet."
"She'll have to be told when we do the preservation," He Xiufen said. "But today's conclusion isn't for her ears yet."
She slid the notebook toward Shen Zhixia: "Keep it in here. Beyond this table, not a word."
* * *
Shen Zhixia flipped her case notes back to the page dated August 12th.
That page had two lines of quoted speech, copied more neatly than anything else in the notebook: "...the hand one level higher isn't in this building." "Don't ask the bank yet. Go ask Qingyuan Testing."
That day, coming out of the stairwell, she'd read those two lines as three layers: there was another hand above the bank; that hand wasn't inside the bank; to find it, go to Qingyuan Testing.
Today, with two "Shi"s lying side by side on the table, she reread the second line silently and suddenly read it in a different direction.
His "one level higher"—she'd always followed it upward, to the top. The bank's superior was the branch; above the branch, something higher still. But that hand didn't reach upward. It reached backward, back to the page from nine years ago.
"He was the same as last time," she said.
"The half-sentence he gave us then is useful today," He Xiufen said. "He never gives whole things. But the half he gives—that half is real."
"I've been thinking about something the last couple days."
"What?"
"If this hand really is the same one from nine years ago, then this case of 1,042 households grew out of my father's case."
He Xiufen closed the notebook and looked at her for two seconds.
"Right now you're holding two cases," she said. "One is money, one is dirt. The dirt one's been buried for nine years—another ten days won't matter. The money one—twenty-seven households are expecting keys by the end of the month."
"I know."
"Good you know. I won't stop you looking backward." He Xiufen paused. "I'll stop you from dropping the thousand households in front of you."
Shen Zhixia flipped forward two pages to the inventory record from the 14th and read a line: "Removed from cabinet bottom: one iron case, with original lock intact, unopened."
"Cen Shouye went upstairs trip after trip for half a year, moving that batch of samples from nine years ago from the third row into his own cabinet," she said. "If he didn't recognize that surname, he couldn't have moved anything."
"He recognized it," He Xiufen said. "That's why he moved it."
"Then what's on that drive is what he moved out."
He Xiufen rolled the red film between her fingers twice and said nothing.
"The old craftsman on Zhongshan West Road mentioned," Shen Zhixia said, "that last month someone came asking with a phone photo that showed the scratched spot on the label. On the 13th, at three in the afternoon, someone else called the gatehouse at the old building asking when the third-floor archive room would be cleared out."
"One person chasing it, another asking about the room."
"It's no longer just personal effects."
"Right," He Xiufen said. "From today on, it belongs to this case. Who has the right to open it, when it gets opened, in front of whom—that has to be written into the procedure. Once it's written down clearly, no one's hand reaches in after midnight."
[Thud. Someone asked about the shop with a photo, someone asked about the room by phone.]
[Thud. Physical Evidence Preservation: you can apply to the court for on-site inspection, sealing, and appraisal, or you can notarize it. Do it while it's still in your hands.]
"Tomorrow morning, go see Cen Hong." He Xiufen wrote a line on a new page. "The preservation procedure has to start with her."
* * *
At six-thirty, the long table downstairs was set up. Tang Guo set up her livestream light at the mouth of the alley, the light trained on the photocopy. She squatted on a low stool reading comments, then looked up halfway through.
"Sis, someone's asking what the character after that surname is."
"Tell them we haven't made it out yet."
"I did." Tang Guo set her phone on her lap. "He replied: 'Then take your time with it.'"
He Xiufen and Shen Zhixia exchanged a glance. Neither picked up on it.
Shi Lei popped up in the group chat again: "Sis, did you get back those other 105 transactions yet?" He Xiufen took the phone and replied: "Working on it."
"What do we bring tomorrow?" she asked, setting the phone down.
"The custody statement, the witness record, the opening record, four photos." Shen Zhixia counted them off. "And the two Cen family documents—the household register and her brother's written agreement."
"Add one more thing," He Xiufen said. "Make two copies of the inventory record from the 14th. Let the notary see for themselves: however we took it out on the 14th is exactly how we hand it over to the procedure."
"We're not leaving it in the safe upstairs?"
"Put it in the cabinet, and it's just three families' personal effects." He Xiufen pushed her bowl away. "Once it's in a sealed evidence bag, anyone who touches it leaves their name on the seal."
After the noodles, Shen Zhixia went downstairs with her phone. Half the streetlamp at the alley mouth was dead; light fell from only one side. She pulled up a number, saved under three characters: Lu Jibai.
The phone rang four times before connecting. The other end was very quiet, and in that quiet came the sound of a page turning over.
"It's me."
"I can tell."
"You're at the firm."
"I am."
A pleasantry. Neither of them moved it forward.
She didn't circle around it.
"The hand at Qingyuan Testing," she said. "You knew all along."
Silence on the other end. She counted the small sounds in the earpiece: a page finished turning, a pen cap snapped on, released.
"That thing in your possession," he said. "Don't open it inside that building."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what you're asking."
"Then answer."
The line went quiet for a while. She waited for him to say "I don't know," or "no."
He said neither.
"Lu Jibai." She said his name.
"Mm."
"You always give only half a sentence."
"This isn't a phone conversation." He paused. "Seal it first. Until it's sealed, don't make a sound."
"Are you telling me to seal it, or telling me to stop asking?"
"Take it whichever way you want."
"Then I'll take it as 'seal it first.'"
A beat of silence. She heard him let out a breath, very quietly.
"Tomorrow, wherever you go," he said, "don't go alone."
The call ended.
She stood under the streetlamp, lowering the phone from her ear. The screen was still lit; the call duration sat at fifty-eight seconds.
He hadn't said he knew. He hadn't said he didn't.
A head poked out from the second-floor window: "Zhixia—your noodles are getting soggy."
She answered, stuffed the phone back in her pocket. It lit up once more in her pocket—not him, but Shi Lei reporting in the group: three more households signed today.
She went upstairs. The stairwell lights came on floor by floor.