Chapter 1783 - The Headless Corpse
Having stumbled upon Advisor Gou's "good deed," Zhao Gui had been beaten soundly by the Zhong family servants. Worse, Master Zhong had laid down the word: he was never to return for work.
Losing the job at the Zhong manor made his life harder still. Soon after, his old mother passed away, and Zhao Gui, having lost his only kin, felt utterly alone in the world. Yet the image of Sister Qiao pinned beneath Advisor Gou lingered in his mind. He told himself: Sister Qiao must have been forced. One day, I will rescue her from the clutches of Master Zhong and Advisor Gou.
Now, when Li Ziyu asked about such matters, Zhao Gui didn't want to dredge up the past. He walked with his head down, his mind full of Sister Qiao's silhouette, silently scratching his crotch again.
The sky gradually darkened. Guangzhou's curfew remained in effect, and since this was a residential area, the streets became utterly deserted after dark. Only the monotonous clack-clack of their iron-studded shoes echoed against the stone pavement.
Li Ziyu instructed Zhao Gui to light a lantern, and they continued their patrol by its feeble glow.
Their route stretched about two and a half kilometers, threading through several streets. One complete circuit took just over an hour. At this hour, though the street gates were locked, patrolmen carried keys to every gate in their precinct, opening and closing them as needed. Each time Li Ziyu unlocked a gate, he recorded the time in his logbook—patrolmen were issued a "Zhong's No. 6 Pocket Watch," large as a horse's hoof, to track time precisely. Passing "check-in points" required particularly careful notation.
Night patrol was not only boring but stressful. Guangzhou had no streetlights; when the moon was dim, walking became treacherous, and the silent, dark environment weighed heavily on the nerves.
"Pitch black," Zhao Gui muttered, his voice tight. "Really scary." Walking down an empty street in such darkness made one's hair stand on end. "I'm scared... scared... scared..." He repeated the word several times but couldn't bring himself to say "ghost."
"What's there to be scared of? People are living in the houses on both sides." Though inwardly timid himself, Li Ziyu feigned nonchalance. "You haven't done anything guilty—no need to fear... that thing coming to knock on your door..."
A pair of green eyes suddenly darted past them. Caught off guard, Li Ziyu shuddered from head to toe. Straining his vision, he saw it was just a cat and exhaled with relief. To cover his composure, he raised his voice: "Besides, we are officials on public duty! The batons we carry bear the Senate's Imperial Standard—they can suppress a hundred evils..."
Just as he was spouting this nonsense, his foot caught on something. Li Ziyu tumbled headlong to the ground. Zhao Gui stumbled too, barely keeping his balance.
Li Ziyu crawled up dizzily, retrieved his hat, patted off the dust, and cursed: "What bad luck..." Before he could finish, he saw Zhao Gui trembling violently, the lantern in his hand shaking so wildly its light danced across the stones. Just as Li Ziyu prepared to scold him for not lighting their path properly, the wavering glow revealed a corpse lying across the street.
Now it was Li Ziyu's turn to feel his hair stand on end. The body was wrapped in coarse cloth, showing only a rough human outline—but it had no head. A large patch of black blood had seeped through the white fabric.
Li Ziyu came from a military household and had seen dangers on the West River—murder and arson were not unknown to him. But a headless corpse lying in the street on such a dark night... this was gruesome enough to shake anyone.
He forced himself to calm down. Taking the lantern from Zhao Gui, he carefully illuminated the surroundings. They had stopped at the mouth of a branch alley. Li Ziyu peered in; the side passage was dark and narrow, emitting a foul stench, but at the very end, he glimpsed shimmering light.
Li Ziyu steeled himself, drew his baton, and told Zhao Gui to carry the lantern ahead. He intended to investigate.
"Ah Yu, I think we shouldn't go in..." Zhao Gui suggested weakly.
"How can we report without inspecting the scene?" Li Ziyu replied. "Let's go."
Left with no choice, Zhao Gui raised the lantern and stepped into the alley. The ground was unpaved; each step landed in either soft mud or foot-stabbing broken bricks. The two picked their way forward, their progress uneven and halting.
"Oh mother, this place is terrifying..." Zhao Gui muttered, not daring to look back at the headless corpse behind them.
Few residents lived in this branch alley. By the lantern's faint light, the houses appeared to belong to poor families—low and simple, walls peeling to reveal the messy brickwork beneath. But after they had walked a bit further, the wall on one side suddenly became a continuous brick barrier, fully ten feet high. Li Ziyu started—this must be the back wall of some great household or temple. Walking further, he spotted a small door set into the wall. He pushed it; locked.
He hadn't been interning long. Though the baojia head and team leader had given him a general tour of the precinct, he remained unfamiliar with many details and couldn't recall whose back door this was.
After passing it and walking another ten paces or so, the sound of gurgling water reached them from ahead. The branch alley ended at a river pier. The water shimmered faintly in the darkness—that explained the flickering light visible from the alley mouth.
Li Ziyu surveyed the pier. Only a few small Tanka household boats were moored on the channel, lightless and silent. No suspicious clues.
"Let's hurry back and report," Li Ziyu said.
Zhao Gui couldn't agree fast enough. "Good, good."
The two emerged from the branch alley. But reporting wasn't simple. Guangzhou police had no telephones. To report, they had to return to the station, which would then dispatch a messenger to the Criminal Investigation Division at the Municipal Bureau.
They did carry signal rockets, but those were reserved for riots or emergencies.
"Zhao Gui, you stay here. I'll go to the station—" Li Ziyu began, but Zhao Gui was already terrified, grabbing his arm. "Ah Yu, don't, don't, don't leave me... I'll go back with you."
"If we both go, who guards the scene?" Li Ziyu recalled the standard procedures from the Criminal Case Handling Regulations he had memorized; posting a guard to prevent evidence destruction was a basic requirement.
But Zhao Gui refused to stay alone with the corpse under any circumstances. Li Ziyu wasn't eager to remain either. Just as they reached an impasse, Li Ziyu remembered that the watchman's hut wasn't far away. He could summon the watchman to keep Zhao Gui company and bolster his courage.
So they turned back together. The watchman's hut lay only two or three hundred paces away. A fine rain began falling from the sky, thickening the darkness. Zhao Gui hurriedly produced oil-paper covers to shield them. Nervous and fumbling, they spent several minutes just getting the rain covers in place. The lantern's light dimmed further.
When they reached the street gate, the watchman wasn't in the hut—he was out making his rounds. They searched desperately and finally found him after considerable delay. Li Ziyu suddenly realized he hadn't even recorded the time of discovery. He pulled out his pocket watch. By lantern light, it read just past one in the morning—the beginning of the Zi hour. Accounting for all the confusion, he estimated the discovery must have occurred shortly after midnight.
The three hurried back. But when they arrived at the alley mouth, Li Ziyu and Zhao Gui froze: the corpse was gone.
When they had left, the body had been lying on the ground. Now, nothing remained. Li Ziyu snatched the lantern and brought it close to the paving stones. Nothing.
Zhao Gui's face went white as paper. "Heavenly Bodhisattva! This, this... but it was a headless corpse..."
The watchman grew frightened too. "Could it be... a zombie reanimating?"
Li Ziyu stood dumbfounded, his mind churning uselessly. A headless corpse had definitely lain here just moments ago—where had it gone in such a short time? He didn't believe in reanimating corpses. Obviously, someone had moved it. But they had walked all the way here without seeing even a ghost's shadow—where had the person come from?
The three searched the area randomly but found nothing. As the rain intensified, Li Ziyu was at a loss: if he went back to report, how could he explain having no corpse? But if he didn't report, the headless body was something he and Zhao Gui had witnessed with their own eyes—he had even tripped over it, and his knee still ached faintly.
The watchman, seeing no corpse found, actually sighed with relief and laughed: "Since there's no corpse, there's no case! Saved a piece of official business. Saved so much trouble."
Zhao Gui stammered: "But, but... just now it was truly a corpse. Without a head."
The watchman regarded Zhao Gui with unconcealed disdain. "Officer, human life cases require seeing the person alive or the corpse dead. No corpse means no case. Why meddle? Even if there were a plaintiff, without finding the body, what official would accept the complaint? Besides, with hundreds of thousands of people in Guangzhou, not a day passes without a hundred deaths. One more isn't too many; one less isn't too few." He smiled. "It's dark and raining. Perhaps the two officers saw wrong. This humble one will pretend I heard nothing and saw nothing." With that, he bowed and went off to continue his rounds, minding his own business.
The rain grew heavier. Only Li Ziyu and Zhao Gui remained on the street, neither knowing what to say. Li Ziyu clenched his fist. The watchman's words made a certain kind of sense. But during his studies at the Palace of Ten Thousand Longevities, the Australians had instilled a different set of concepts: they were police, responsible for maintaining social stability and "protecting the peace of the realm." Li Ziyu felt what "social stability" and "peace of the realm" truly meant in his bones.
Just now, there had truly been a corpse lying on the ground—headless. A person dying on the road wouldn't cut off their own head. This person must have been murdered. The rain beat against his face, and unbidden, the scene of his uncle's family being slaughtered by robbers on the West River floated into his heart. He suddenly made up his mind and said to Zhao Gui: "Let's go. We're going back to report immediately!"
(End of Chapter)